Prologue Through to the End of the Epilogue--Full Book Discussion.

[esvath]

Well, instead of thousands of pages of Andor sucession, Operation Faile Rescue, the Grand Menagerie, Mat-as-plaything etc (which are important stories but overdrawn), RJ should explore more about Shara.

[Cherubin]

We have, I think only one scene with a Thom POV, short, 1-2 pages, - but they are amazing. Thom only has his pipe and his knifes.

I liked the book, but was displeased with the very last Mat scene (the last we will ever read about him). The whole Perrin storyline was not exciting: (1) he could not heal turned channelers (which would have been cool), (2) he overcame forsaken compulsion with 'love' (cheesy)

[MauricXe]

I re-read some of the explanations about Nakomi and it sounds like she is a hero of the horn. That seems to confirm that Avi was in TAR during their meeting.  That seems to be a sufficient explanation. I am satisfied.

[Werthead]

Wait, so does that mean that channelers were not essential part of the war? I was under impression that hundreds of channelers together can destroy entire armies easily. On the other hand, they were not all used to using the One Power in warfare, other than the Ashaman.
 
Didn`t Demandred utilize the Aiel turned channelers and evil Ashaman in his strategy?

 

There is a massive inconsistency with Knife of Dreams here, and I get a very strong impression that it was something that came down from Team Jordan rather than Brandon. At one point a character says to Logain, "A few channellers cannot stop 100,000 Trollocs by themselves!", when in Knife of Dreams...a few channellers stopped 100,000 Trollocs by themselves. Given that this was to Logain, who was present at the earlier engagment, I can only conclude that it was lampshading of the fact that the effectiveness of channelling in massive battles had to be dialled down a notch (otherwise the battle would have lasted for 15 minutes).

 

Whilst the effectiveness of the channellers is dubious, they do play an absolutely massive, constant role in the battle, however.

 

Nothing about Nakomi is explained. There is something about her at the end. But it's pretty much meaningless so far as I can tell. You might as well wait until you read the book because it's not going to satisfy you anyway.

 

If Nakomi isn't the Creator taking a brief hand, I'll be very surprised.

 

 

1) Does the book mention Joline, Teslyn and Edesina?

 

Teslyn plays a very important role (but a very brief one) in transporting a character around. The other two are mentioned, IIRC, but do not play important parts.

 

2) Is there any new DF revealed, someone with close connection with Rand (one of the Wise Ones, Berelain, or other not-so-minor character)?

 

Yes. One of Faile's followers is revealed to be Darkfriend and there is a brief witch-hunt situation as people get confused about who it could be (with a couple of red herrings thrown in).

 

 

 3) Does the Seanchan attack the White Tower while Egwene is at FoM? How does the battle go? Any AS captured? Thank you guys!

 

No. Oddly, this isn't even mentioned in the book, but the inference is that Mat and Rand convince them to join them before any serious planning for the attack on the White Tower gets underway.

 

 

Legion of the Dragon?? are they put to use at all? does their sword and shield Roman type fighting help?

 

They are present and play important tactical/strategic roles in the battle. However, without multiple maps of the battle as it unfolds (as with Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes) it's quite difficult to keep track of where the Tairen/Illianer/Cairhienin/Androan/Tar Valon/Seanchan/Asha'man/whatever forces are at each step of the engagement. This isn't helped by units getting broken up and integrated with units from other factions.

 

he overcame forsaken compulsion with 'love'

 

He overcame it whilst in the wolf dream, though, and the book had just established that he's now as much a master of it as Slayer ever was (if not moreso). I took it that if he'd been in the real world at the time, he'd not have been able to defeat the Compulsion.

 

 

It sounds like the DO attempts to remake reality with no rules or morals, ie everyone is "evil". My question though is, haven't we been lead to believe the DO actually wants to destroy everything?

 

The Dark One apparently has a number of options available to him if he wins. Oblivion, total annihilation of everything, is one of these but is actually unsatisfying to him, as oblivion is also peace with no pain or suffering, which is not interesting to the DO. The oblivion option is actually presented as a 'neutral' option, a compromise between him and the Dragon Reborn. For the Dark One, a world without morals or a world of unrelenting evil is actually more interesting.

 

There's also a great moment when one character complains about something that has been mentioned throughout the series as fact - that if the Shadow blew the Horn of Valere the heroes would have to serve it - and Hawkwing turns round and effectively says, "No, that's nonsense." Quite a few things that people have taken as read are subverted or proven plain wrong in this book.

 

but the Dark One isn't destroyed. . . . i.e. he is re-Sealed

 

I've seen a few people now say this, but it is incorrect. He is re-imprisoned. The Dark One's prison bursts asunder when Logain shatters the Seals (note: this is instant, confirming that shattering the Seals earlier would have been utterly catastrophic), but Rand uses a mixture of the True Power and One Power to neutralise him (Rand coats the One Power in the True Power to prevent the Dark One from tainting either). He briefly considers destroying the Dark One - which is completely possible at this point - but instead regenerates the prison, completely flawlessly with no Bore, no patch and no Seals.

 

 

As for the GRRM moment, it was obviously Birgette. Beheaded in a swift stroke. What was glorious about that? Same with Siuan. She decides her life doesn't matter, compared to Mat's. Then she dies, and we don't even see how exactly it goes down.

 

Birgitte comes back five seconds later, kills her murderer and helps save humanity from annihilation. Which is fairly glorious ;)

 

Siuan dies fairly pointlessly, however. So do Bryne, Bashere and his wife etc. Rhuarc's death was the most depressing one for me, by far. He was Compelled by Graendal into being her bodyguard and was then killed offhand by Aviendha without realising who it was (she does later, and is mortified).

 

A really good writer could pull off a mighty scene with that concept of fighting on higher, metaphorical and philospohical level. How would you lucky people  who've read it already say it's written?

 

You get the concept quite well and it is an interesting move. The biggest problem is that after 13.5 books of saying the Dark One is Evil Incarnate, he's suddenly presented as more of a representation of Chaos, which is a different philosophical concept. Jordan/Sanderson go to some lengths to try to avoid saying this, but when the Dark One states that his existence is required for change/growth/evolution, that's clearly what they are getting at. And this is problematic because the Chaos/Order conflict has been done to death many, many times before. They try to mask it, but it ends up being a little too traditional.

 

That said, Rand overpowering the Dark One with its own strength (setting up a feedback loop that the Dark One cannot escape from) - rather cleverly avoiding the problem of how the hell does a human stand up to a primal force of creation - and basically saying, "That's all you've got?" is quite entertaining.

 

You wanna know what the worst thing about the book was?  Everything with Valan Luca was left unresolved.  I mean the character wasn't even mentioned!

 

That was the best thing about the book. Lucas and his tedious circus was a poisonous cancer on this series, sapping the enjoyability out of entire books that he appeared in. Frankly, unless we got a 70,000 word, 70-POV chapter of him being flayed alive in detail by Shadowspawn, I'm glad he wasn't in it.

 

Some of his circus members did show up, though. One of them had joined the Seanchan army in Ebou Dar.

 

 

In ToM, Rand does bizarre things such as growing the apples and channeling in a way that drives darkfriends in the vicinity mad.

 

This is explained by the fact that the random stuff around ta'veren used to be balanced between good and bad. With the Dark One's shadow lying on the pattern so heavily, this has shifted so that pretty much all of the ta'veren random stuff is good. This has become so prevalent that Rand can even guess how it's going to work and use that to his advantage.

 

 

The end really? so abrupt.This is the ending we waited for 20 years?

 

No ending can possibly live up to a 23-year build-up. It's just not physically possible. In a way, the ending will probably be enjoyed best by those fans who get to sit down and read all 14 books back-to-back in the coming decades. For those who've spent decades reading it release-by-release and debating theories here and elsewhere, it was always going to be divisive and anti-climactic.

 

Overall, I enjoyed it. Lots of discrepencies and things that weren't quite there, but also lots of moments that really worked. The ending was successful for me, and it could afford to be abrupt because we'd been shown (in both AMoL and the Aiel scenes in ToM) what will come after. We didn't need a Return of the King movie situation where characters said goodbye to one another for 400 pages straight or we got detailed descriptions about how the life of Minor Tairen Noble Lady Mentioned Briefly Six Books Ago panned out. That would have been much more awful.

 

Sanderson and Team Jordan pulled it off well. They did not pull it off flawlessly, and one or two things grated a bit, but given the circumstances (including the time/money one, mandated by Tor), this was probably a lot better than anything else we could have expected. And I really hope we don't get the Mat/Tuon outrigger trilogy. It's just not needed.

[Cherubin]

Where is Joline mentioned, must have overread it, could you give the page# or chapter/scene? I waited for a scene with her and Mat...

I hope for the outrigger trilogy... I found it a bit sad that no single Sharan character worked for Team Light even when it became obvious (for them) that they served the Dark One.

[Terez]

There's also a great moment when one character complains about something that has been mentioned throughout the series as fact - that if the Shadow blew the Horn of Valere the heroes would have to serve it - and Hawkwing turns round and effectively says, "No, that's nonsense." Quite a few things that people have taken as read are subverted or proven plain wrong in this book.

 

The reason that one was taken as fact is because RJ said at two different signings that the Heroes would have to follow whoever blew the Horn, and one of them (a dependable community member) reported he'd said there would be some sort of breach in the Pattern if the Dragon was on the other side of the battle. Not all of these subversions are very consistent or logical (and I was also underwhelmed by many of those things taken for granted by fans that turned out to be correct, because not all of those were consistent or logical either).

[Werthead]

Where is Joline mentioned, must have overread it, could you give the page# or chapter/scene? I waited for a scene with her and Mat...

 

That'd be like looking for a needle in a haystack (the book is 910 pages long in hardcover, and remember no e-edition for several months). She certainly doesn't appear (that I recall), so I may have misremembered that she was mentioned.

 

 

I hope for the outrigger trilogy... I found it a bit sad that no single Sharan character worked for Team Light even when it became obvious (for them) that they served the Dark One.

 

The Sharan thing could have been explained better. My take - given that Demanded had a different title and the Sharan leader was not identified as Sh'boan or Sh'botay - was that Demandred had effectively taken command of a Sharan army of Darkfriends, consisting of a few tens of thousands of troops and 400 Ayyad. With Shara in civil war/chaos, that would seem to be possible.

 

Clearly Demandred was not in command of the entirety of Shara and all its people, because if he was then the Sharans could have flooded the battlefield with millions of troops and thousands of channellers, and simply obliterated the Light. Without any further revelations (that say half of Shara was an uninhabitable desert, or the reports that Shara was one unified nation and always had been were false), as it stands Shara sending its full strength to the battle is simply totally unbelievable.

 

However, there are some major inconsistencies with army/channeller numbers in the books and this is something I definitely get the impression that Sanderson struggled with, to the point of refusing to give hard figures for any of the forces at the battle. I'm surprised he even specified there were 400 Ayyad.

[Lord Melkor]

 

Where is Joline mentioned, must have overread it, could you give the page# or chapter/scene? I waited for a scene with her and Mat...

 

That'd be like looking for a needle in a haystack (the book is 910 pages long in hardcover, and remember no e-edition for several months). She certainly doesn't appear (that I recall), so I may have misremembered that she was mentioned.

 

 

I hope for the outrigger trilogy... I found it a bit sad that no single Sharan character worked for Team Light even when it became obvious (for them) that they served the Dark One.

 

The Sharan thing could have been explained better. My take - given that Demanded had a different title and the Sharan leader was not identified as Sh'boan or Sh'botay - was that Demandred had effectively taken command of a Sharan army of Darkfriends, consisting of a few tens of thousands of troops and 400 Ayyad. With Shara in civil war/chaos, that would seem to be possible.

 

Clearly Demandred was not in command of the entirety of Shara and all its people, because if he was then the Sharans could have flooded the battlefield with millions of troops and thousands of channellers, and simply obliterated the Light. Without any further revelations (that say half of Shara was an uninhabitable desert, or the reports that Shara was one unified nation and always had been were false), as it stands Shara sending its full strength to the battle is simply totally unbelievable.

 

However, there are some major inconsistencies with army/channeller numbers in the books and this is something I definitely get the impression that Sanderson struggled with, to the point of refusing to give hard figures for any of the forces at the battle. I'm surprised he even specified there were 400 Ayyad.

 

Hmm, interesting, I thought that Demandred became a ruler of all Shara and threw all its armies at Randland. Were the Black Ajah and Taim's men fighting alongside the Ayyad? 

 

Was there any talks between, let's say Egwene and Loghain, about that bonding mess between Aes Sedai and Ashaman? 

[fyodor]

The Sharan thing could have been explained better. My take - given that Demanded had a different title and the Sharan leader was not identified as Sh'boan or Sh'botay - was that Demandred had effectively taken command of a Sharan army of Darkfriends, consisting of a few tens of thousands of troops and 400 Ayyad. With Shara in civil war/chaos, that would seem to be possible.

 

Clearly Demandred was not in command of the entirety of Shara and all its people, because if he was then the Sharans could have flooded the battlefield with millions of troops and thousands of channellers, and simply obliterated the Light. Without any further revelations (that say half of Shara was an uninhabitable desert, or the reports that Shara was one unified nation and always had been were false), as it stands Shara sending its full strength to the battle is simply totally unbelievable.

 

However, there are some major inconsistencies with army/channeller numbers in the books and this is something I definitely get the impression that Sanderson struggled with, to the point of refusing to give hard figures for any of the forces at the battle. I'm surprised he even specified there were 400 Ayyad.

 

I *really* didn't like the Sharans being dumped on us so abruptly. Other than a brief description from the Graendal POV we haven't heard anything about them before this point. Then suddenly Demandred shows up with their entire army and is the subject of prophecies that we'd never heard of before and has a girlfriend. In fact one of the main objections to Demandred-Shara speculation was exactly that it would be so lame to introduce this new major force so late in the game.

 

I also didn't like the idea of Demandred being this super-blademaster. Had we heard anything about this before? Doesn't Demandred freak out during the cleansing scene and specifically note that as a general he wasn't actually required to be in the middle of fights?

[fyodor]

Duplicate post.

[Werthead]

I thought that Demandred became a ruler of all Shara and threw all its armies at Randland

 

Only if Shara is minutely populated. 400 Ayyad are less channellers than the Shaido alone had at their disposal. Given that the Sharans use both men and women as channellers, the entire nation/subcontinent's total tally of channellers should have vastly outstripped that of the Westlands (and maybe the Westlands, Aiel and Seanchan combined).

 

 

Was there any talks between, let's say Egwene and Loghain, about that bonding mess between Aes Sedai and Ashaman?

 

No. Pevara and Androl touch on it and actually find a solution - bonding one another simultaneously to balance out with no one person in charge of the other - but Logain spends half the book being tortured by the Darkfriend Asha'aman and the rest suffering from severe PTSD, Aes Sedai paranoia and delusions of grandeur. Egwene is also way too busy with other stuff.

 

This is actually how a few issues are resolved: no scene of people sitting down and talking it over, but the issue being addressed, a possible solution being raised and then people moving on. Hell, we even get Rand musing on some EotWisms at one point and how they didn't make any sense (compared to the rest of the series, written later) but shrugging it off and moving on.

 

This goes for the ending. People are complaining that it's too abrupt and we don't find out what happens next. Why? We saw in ToM one possible vision of the future, we get another in AMoL and we are told bluntly that the former vision only came true because of one thing, which Rand fixes in AMoL, making the second vision altogether more possible. That vision - tha the Dragon's Peace holds, even between the Seanchan and Aiel, even a century after the series ends, and we start to see the possible beginnings of a new Age of Legends - is now by far the most likely to come true.

[Lord Melkor]

 

I thought that Demandred became a ruler of all Shara and threw all its armies at Randland

 

Only if Shara is minutely populated. 400 Ayyad are less channellers than the Shaido alone had at their disposal. Given that the Sharans use both men and women as channellers, the entire nation/subcontinent's total tally of channellers should have vastly outstripped that of the Westlands (and maybe the Westlands, Aiel and Seanchan combined).

 

 

>>Was there any talks between, let's say Egwene and Loghain, about that bonding mess between Aes Sedai and Ashaman?

 

No. Pevara and Androl touch on it and actually find a solution - bonding one another simultaneously to balance out with no one person in charge of the other - but Logain spends half the book being tortured by the Darkfriend Asha'aman and the rest suffering from severe PTSD, Aes Sedai paranoia and delusions of grandeur. Egwene is also way too busy with other stuff.

 

This is actually how a few issues are resolved: no scene of people sitting down and talking it over, but the issue being addressed, a possible solution being raised and then people moving on. Hell, we even get Rand musing on some EotWisms at one point and how they didn't make any sense (compared to the rest of the series, written later) but shrugging it off and moving on.

 

This goes for the ending. People are complaining that it's too abrupt and we don't find out what happens next. Why? We saw in ToM one possible vision of the future, we get another in AMoL and we are told bluntly that the former vision only came true because of one thing, which Rand fixes in AMoL, making the second vision altogether more possible. That vision - tha the Dragon's Peace holds, even between the Seanchan and Aiel, even a century after the series ends, and we start to see the possible beginnings of a new Age of Legends - is now by far the most likely to come true.

 

Hmm, but wasn`t it said in Graendal's earlier POV that male Ayyad are used only for reproduction and killed when they show signs of channeling? Demandred had to change it, I think.

 

Still, 400 channelers should be enough to destroy huge armies. I understand that non-channeling troops were only relevant because the channelers were cancelling each other and the commanders were hesitating to completely unleash hundreds of channelers that could cause uncontrollable chaos on the battlefield. 

[Werthead]

Hmm, but wasn`t it said in Graendal's earlier POV that male Ayyad are used only for reproduction and killed when they show signs of channeling? Demandred had to change it, I think.

 

True (and it's said in the Big White Book as well), but if they are a Darkfriend faction that's not a major obstacle, especially now that saidin is cleansed. That to me reinforces the idea that the AMoL Sharans are one faction, not the whole lot of them.

[Cherubin]

Did my book miss a couple of pages or was the meeting between Hawking and the Empress (might she live forever) happening off-screen? I thought this meeting might give Mat so much credit, that he gets a better status with the Empress.

Well, the Sharan channelers balanced out almost all the Aes Sedai, that is quite something. Especially since Demandreds Supercircus did not really participate, which removed probably some of the most skilled channelers. I thought Shara is slightly smaller than Seanchan, I had the impression that the Sharan army was bigger than the Seanchan army, so that would fit. But these are all minor issues. I had hopes that atleast one or two of the 400 (or more) channeleres might be joining the forces of Team Light, maybe at least after they get captured or something.

I do not remember Nakomi being mentioned once in the book. Like Fain, they played no role at all to the story. The Wise Ones also did not play an on-screen role. I was also displeased that Perrin and his living wolfes played almost no role at all. At the very very end the wolfes in the dreamworld did, but before they did very very minor things (guarding against Luc) that could have been completely left out.

Sorry to sound a bit negative. It is over, it was fun! Just somehow unsatisfying.

[XXX]

However, there are some major inconsistencies with army/channeller numbers in the books and this is something I definitely get the impression that Sanderson struggled with, to the point of refusing to give hard figures for any of the forces at the battle. I'm surprised he even specified there were 400 Ayyad.

 

Something which stuck out for me too.The nos of soldiers and channelers seems to be completely out of control with Sanderson.I kind of realized he was losing it in the previous books itself with Perrin's army

[Red2111]

 

 

Agreed, this was one of my major problems with the book. The Dark One does not equal free will. How can he, when there is still free will while he can't touch the Pattern? How does his existence outside the Pattern grant people free will? It's definitely borrowed from Christian philosophy, and I suspect this is a pure Brandon addition. Partly because the first time killing the Dark One was mentioned was in TGS, and partly because of Rand's comment about his third question, which gives the impression that RJ didn't leave notes for the third question and Brandon felt the need to make something up to explain why Rand didn't just ask how to seal the Bore. But I could be wrong. Either way, I don't like it.

 

It's interesting-I didn't like this ending when it was described in the threads but found it more or less acceptable the way it was written. I read it as being that the DO's destruction actually removed people's capacity for evil. They weren't slaves as such, but human nature was irrevocably altered and screwed up when the DO was destroyed as opposed to merely being sealed away.

 

While I didn't mind it so much on its own terms I do agree with you that it sounds suspiciously like something Sanderson* came up with. It seems like we get a lot of new cosmology dumped on us. 

 

* I like Brandon Sanderson's books a lot, but for reasons I will expound upon later I did not think he was a good fit for finishing up this series.

 

 

you both do recall Moriane explaining the questions touching the Shadow could not be asked tot he Aielfinn/Eilfinn right?  so Rand couldn't ask anything to do with the Bore.

 

 

have yet to read the book here, infact going to pick it up today.  i cried when i read the spoiler for Egwenes death, but i'm glad to hear that Rand ensures the future Avi saw wont happen (which totally broke my heart when i read it).

 

i'm glad that someone clarified how Rhurac dies *nods*  tbh death in that situation will have been better than the alternative given that when Greandal uses compulsion your a heaping mass of mash potatos mentally when she lifts it.

 

i think that i woudl have preferred to hear there was an epilouge that took place showing us the Bore being reopened in a future age.  only because it cements the "ages coem to pass and that which happens will happen again" aspect of the series that Jordan has always stressed.  i'm also disappointed ot hear how Super Fade ends up.

 

one thing i haven't seen addressed is Orideth.  i know that last we saw of him he was heading into Shayoul Ghoul.  did he actually join with Machin Shin and was there an epic fight between him and Shadar Haron?  (this is honestly the point i've been anticipating the most)

[XXX]

Logain was not much of a dissapointment.But there was just too many loose ends in this book.Ironic that in certain parts of this series Jordan spent hours blabbering about the scenery plus all sorts of assorted nonsense and in the end Sanderson could not even bring all the important points on screen because he ran out of space!!

[XXX]

one thing i haven't seen addressed is Orideth.  i know that last we saw of him he was heading into Shayoul Ghoul.  did he actually join with Machin Shin and was there an epic fight between him and Shadar Haron?  (this is honestly the point i've been anticipating the most)

 

Mat makes mince meat of him.Another dissapointing end to a character supposedly matching the Dark One.

[athrian]

 

 

The Dark One apparently has a number of options available to him if he wins. Oblivion, total annihilation of everything, is one of these but is actually unsatisfying to him, as oblivion is also peace with no pain or suffering, which is not interesting to the DO. The oblivion option is actually presented as a 'neutral' option, a compromise between him and the Dragon Reborn. For the Dark One, a world without morals or a world of unrelenting evil is actually more interesting.

 

Interesting. I guess that means Ishmael got duped about everything. Fitting, since the DO is the "Father of Lies" I suppose.

[athrian]

Also, if Rand re-imprisons the DO through use of the TP, I wonder what that means for future Ages. One would think the DO wouldn't be so dumb as to allow a situation again where his own power can be used against him like that. If things truly do repeat as the Wheel turns, and the Bore gets re-opened, either the DO repeatedly makes the same mistake or there are theoretically other ways to remake the prison without use of the TP.

[Alleluia_Cone]

The ending was successful for me, and it could afford to be abrupt because we'd been shown (in both AMoL and the Aiel scenes in ToM) what will come after. We didn't need a Return of the King movie situation where characters said goodbye to one another for 400 pages straight or we got detailed descriptions about how the life of Minor Tairen Noble Lady Mentioned Briefly Six Books Ago panned out. That would have been much more awful.

 

So a series defined by its meandering pace, repeated segues into a never-ending number of new storylines, and explicit decision to flesh out its immense cast of characters, ends in a few dozen pages, gives closure to only a small handful of those characters, flippantly suggests the answers to long awaited questions while ignoring many others, and this was the appropriate choice to make? Really?  

 

Strange that a series that story that took more than four million words to tell would feel the need to skimp on its ending, of all things.

[zanethanatos]

 

The ending was successful for me, and it could afford to be abrupt because we'd been shown (in both AMoL and the Aiel scenes in ToM) what will come after. We didn't need a Return of the King movie situation where characters said goodbye to one another for 400 pages straight or we got detailed descriptions about how the life of Minor Tairen Noble Lady Mentioned Briefly Six Books Ago panned out. That would have been much more awful.

 

So a series defined by its meandering pace, repeated segues into a never-ending number of new storylines, and explicit decision to flesh out its immense cast of characters, ends in a few dozen pages, gives closure to only a small handful of those characters, flippantly suggests the answers to long awaited questions while ignoring many others, and this was the appropriate choice to make? Really?  

 

Strange that a series that story that took more than four million words to tell would feel the need to skimp on its ending, of all things.

 

It wasn't supposed to be the ending though... just an ending.

 

But I rather liked most of the endings I was presented with - I had to assume a lot of the others were just dead at that point.

[Callandora]

 

The ending was successful for me, and it could afford to be abrupt because we'd been shown (in both AMoL and the Aiel scenes in ToM) what will come after. We didn't need a Return of the King movie situation where characters said goodbye to one another for 400 pages straight or we got detailed descriptions about how the life of Minor Tairen Noble Lady Mentioned Briefly Six Books Ago panned out. That would have been much more awful.

 

So a series defined by its meandering pace, repeated segues into a never-ending number of new storylines, and explicit decision to flesh out its immense cast of characters, ends in a few dozen pages, gives closure to only a small handful of those characters, flippantly suggests the answers to long awaited questions while ignoring many others, and this was the appropriate choice to make? Really?  

 

Strange that a series that story that took more than four million words to tell would feel the need to skimp on its ending, of all things.

You have to remember that the ending was skimped in part because RJ died before finishing the series. RJ left notes but i doubt that he left instructions on all the storylines that he had fleshed out.

[zanethanatos]

You have to remember that the ending was skimped in part because RJ died before finishing the series. RJ left notes but i doubt that he left instructions on all the storylines that he had fleshed out.

 

I thought that BS might have been hesitant with the ending because of how much was defined by RJ (so going beyond that might not seem right) but with Hariett and his assistants there, I have to assume it's intentional. As such, I really like the idea that it was not "the" ending, just "an" ending.

[Guest PiotrekS]

 

The ending was successful for me, and it could afford to be abrupt because we'd been shown (in both AMoL and the Aiel scenes in ToM) what will come after. We didn't need a Return of the King movie situation where characters said goodbye to one another for 400 pages straight or we got detailed descriptions about how the life of Minor Tairen Noble Lady Mentioned Briefly Six Books Ago panned out. That would have been much more awful.

 

So a series defined by its meandering pace, repeated segues into a never-ending number of new storylines, and explicit decision to flesh out its immense cast of characters, ends in a few dozen pages, gives closure to only a small handful of those characters, flippantly suggests the answers to long awaited questions while ignoring many others, and this was the appropriate choice to make? Really?  

 

Strange that a series that story that took more than four million words to tell would feel the need to skimp on its ending, of all things.

Hardly unusual for RJ though, to have very long build-ups and quick and often off-hand resolutions.