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I usually read 50 or 60 books a year. Not in 2019. In 2019, I read The Wheel of Time. I’ve started saying “burn me” and “light” in public. I think even “bloody ashes” slipped out once. I know how to get from Tear to Tar Valon without a map. I know how much toh I have with my parents. It’s a lot.
By August I was embarrassed to explain why I was still doing it. I was somewhere in book nine, and I was spite reading more than anything else. Between my endless complaints and groaning noises, when somebody asked me why I was wasting my life, I sheepishly mumbled, “Well there was a 600-word article about how this would be hard to adapt to an Amazon series because it was problematic but the article had spoilers so I wanted to have my own perspective before I finished reading.”
I didn’t even bookmark the article. I’m not sure I could find it again.
Wrapping up some mysteries from the last review:
Nynaeve
Becomes slightly less of a bitch. As far as I can tell, it’s because she got laid. Which brings us right to:
Men and Women in General
I’ve found myself having to dudesplain rudimentary sexism to a lot of men in the past year. Arguing with “Like, naw, man, women are totally like that” requires a lot of prep work. “Well, what about this woman?” “Well, sure, but she’s different.” “And her?” “Well that’s ANNIE man, Annie doesn’t count.” “What about every Chinese woman you’ve ever met?” “Dude, that’s different.” etc., etc., etc., until the exceptions pile up high enough to start making the case that women totally being like that is a social construction that exists in people’s minds and is more imposed on incomplete images of women than it is exhibited by any particular woman. And these are otherwise normal men who haven’t even heard the term feminazi. 2019 turned out to be both a good and bad time for this conversation depending on with whom I was speaking; anybody with a decent grasp of their identity and finances was pretty receptive. Anybody losing that grasp doubled down on whatever autobiographical structure made them the long-suffering hero, which usually requires whole categories of NPCs to be totally like that.
It’s especially hard with The Wheel of Time because there’s no denying there are powerful women in it, some bordering on godhood. To my pleasant surprise, the best villain did turn out to be Lanfear, who arguably outwitted the actual devil, though, notably, not the farm boy character who was just passing through.
However, Lanfear only survived the sixth book because, despite the fact that she’s a psychopathic binge-killer more than happy to condemn all living things to eternal torment in exchange for box seats in the murder garden, the hero won’t kill her because he doesn’t kill women. Unless he’s having a really bad day, which happens five books later, whereupon he erases an evil woman from existence along with about two hundred innocent people because gosh, he was just so darned upset.
Much of the plot and nearly all of the conversations are built on the bedrock assumption that men act a certain way and women act a certain way, and life is the way it is because of that. The magical powers in the world are divided along this line: the women get a joyous flow that fills them with light and love, the men get a raging torrent of fury. Man magic is stronger, but woman magic can link together up to a certain point at which point they need a man, who of course has to be in charge of the link.
After banging my head against a wall for decades arguing that biological differences do not directly extrapolate into a social order, it’s disheartening to realize how many of my fellow nerds grew up reading this. In The Wheel of Time, men and women are fundamentally different temperamentally and mystically, and that’s the reason things are the way things are. This is how you back arguments for why things should never change, no matter how bad things are for some people.
“But there are all these strong women in power! Things are good for them!” Okay, sure, everybody seems pretty happy with how things play out. But step back a moment and actually look at what Jordan decided to etch into his mirror for the human condition. In this world, no matter how powerful or wise the women are, three of them in a room will start bickering, unless they’re mooning over men or about to face certain death. Every single traditional ritual involving women involves them getting naked. In this world, the only way anybody will start to trust a powerful woman is if she takes an unbreakable magic oath that prevents her from saying anything technically false, and most people still don’t trust them.
I mentioned the descriptions in my first review, so I’ll just mention that I came across the line “She was too tall to be pretty” and had to put down my Kindle and read another whole book by someone else before I could continue.
Somewhere in shadow of the valley of books seven through eleven, one of the main male characters, Matt, is literally raped at knifepoint by a queen. This is played out as a joke on him for the rest of the series. Because even though most of us know it’s not okay to have sex with a woman who doesn’t want to have sex with us while holding a knife to her throat, he probably wanted it. Because men are totally like that.
Spanking
There is no argument lacking hard evidence that would convince me that Jordan didn’t have a serious spanking fetish, and this whole thing could have been avoided if Pornhub was around before he started writing it.
The Aiel
The Aiel are the best thing in the series. They are actually the best way to argue that Jordan was actually progressive, until he screws it up again by demonstrating that all you have to do cool an Aiel spearmaiden’s jets is give her a few nice dresses. That aside, they are unapologetically alien, contemptuous of the rest of the world’s issues, and the only people with any sort of interesting history. Jordan presents two hallucinogenic trips through the Aiel’s history and possible future, and even though the future never figures its way back into the plot, these two passages are the best in the whole series. I was gripped. I wish he’d done a lot more of the story in that style, instead of the incessant bickering he seemed so much happier writing. If someone wrote another book about the whole thing from the perspective of an Aiel blacksmith, I’d read it.
The Battle Scenes
Are insanely good. I can’t think of an author that writes better battle scenes, except maybe Ian M Banks at his best. The little fights are good. The big fights are good. I read all of the final battle chapter’s 80,000 words in one afternoon. All of the fights are breathtaking, highlighting the small parts that make them relatable, then moving effortlessly into the huge parts that make them epic. The fight scenes are what kept me reading. I don’t think they ultimately make the series good, but I understand why Amazon would drop a few million to take a crack at them. I want them to do it just so I can see the climax of the wolf dream fight.
The Overall Plot
Things happen. Things keep happening. Things stop happening. The end. It’s more like Star Trek than Star Wars. It all makes for a pretty bland stew without enough ahah moments to make the reader feel anything besides being dragged between battle scenes. The final confrontation between The Dragon Reborn and The Dark One is pretty great, but everything would have been better with more back story. I wanted more mythology, more reasons, more framework to tie together all the random dream junk. More about the old world. More about why this evil entity hates everybody and sucks at planning.
At the end, there was a creator who made a cyclical world, was hazy about what constituted reality, left a malevolent demon around because why not, then vanished. Cool story. For, you know, a book or two. Not fifteen. Got fifteen books in you? Dig into some why, don’t just keep shoveling on new layers of what.
Reading Guide
Books one through six are vaguely necessary to understand what’s happening. One and six are probably the best of the bunch.
Seven through eleven are awful. They are the most tedious reading I’ve ever subjected myself to, and I read the first third of The Silmarillion. Check a fan wiki to keep up with the plot points. As far as I remember, the weather gets hot, they find a bowl that fixes it, Egwene becomes the Amyrlin Seat, whatshername gets kidnapped then un-kidnapped. It’s hard to remember all the pointless things that happen and un-happen during this stretch. The protagonist becomes a huge jerk. New characters are introduced. The bard gets to star in the fridgiest fridging plot that ever fridged. They are relentlessly, achingly bad. There aren’t enough fight scenes. It feels like every decent part of the first six books is being slowly gutted with a dull knife wielded by Gilbert Godfrey on an overdose of Xanax.
But then…
Sanderson
I asked a lot of people what happened when Sanderson took over. Not one of them gave me a straight answer. The most useless was a friend who drunkenly repeated “It had to happen. It had to happen. It is what it is.” I want to take a moment to warn all my friends that when they say “It is what it is” they’re gradually eroding my ability to not punch them. Other friends gave me a weird look, some shook their heads, some said “It got finished.”
Most people stopped reading at this point, if they’d even made it that far. They were already worrying about whether Jordan would live to the end, and when he didn’t, they decided not poke the memory nest and have things ruined even more than books seven through eleven already had.
To all of these useless friends and all the future generations who will never read it: The books got immediately and noticeably better. The bickering went away. The pacing improved. The relentless descriptions of women’s bodies notched down a bit. The tone of the prose was unchanged but the structure was better, Matt turned into a real person, and the annoying, endless, distracting sidebars and side plots went away.
This makes perfect sense. An accomplished writer himself, Sanderson could cop the style and tone of a writer he admired, and didn’t add his own spanking fetishes because it would be awkward if they didn’t mesh with the spanking fans had come to expect. Jordan left notes and scenes to work with, so Sanderson could put together most of the book that Jordan wanted, as well as apply the perspective that a longtime fan has and an author can never get.
It was a jarring relief for me. Suddenly it wasn’t a relentlessly sexist bullshit political soap opera written by someone with no experience in politics and little in human contact. All the good parts were distilled, since the original ego was dead and the story was being serviced by someone who only wanted to serve the story. Every author should wish someone with talent and perspective will step in to polish their legacy. Writing is a lonely endeavor, full of myopia, and most of us have to hope our posthumous critics show mercy.
Conclusion
I don’t need to find the old article. The problems with doing a straight adaptation are obvious yet mostly surmountable. The ta’veren plot device is pretty weak, but it could be buried under the awesome fighting. All the main characters have superpowers, but Marvel has inured everyone to that issue. The treatment of gender is a teensy bit behind the times, but could be updated. The aimlessness of the plot makes it easy to cut out huge chunks of it.
But all these adjustments are exactly what would alienate the core audience. Bajillion-word fantasy series attract High Nerds, who keep journals and make maps and track the minutiae of their epics.1[1] Some parts of the internet are invested in The Wheel of Time as an accurate representation of “the battle of the sexes” which is the story’s fundamental narrative problem. God forbid the directors allow the actresses to wear clothes for one or two traditional rituals, and there will be a revolt.
For the diehard fans, the endless subplots, court intrigue, naked chanting, and gratuitous spanking is what The Wheel of Time is about. They are not wrong, but from a storytelling perspective, no matter how many episodes are ordered, the things that kept true fans reading will have to go.
Then again, the battle scenes are, as previously mentioned, amazing. If enough actresses are willing to strip down, well, sex and violence still make more money than they lose. I’m binging The Witcher right now, which is almost entirely composed of gratuitous sex and violence. If Amazon can make Jordan’s story clip along in a way the books definitely did not, they’ll get more than enough new fans to replace those whom they must betray.
However, I’m not sure it will keep any of them. To make it a palatable story, the heart will have to be removed, and if the heart is replaced, it won’t be the same story. If it’s not replaced, the whole thing is dead on arrival. If I had to do it to cash a few million-dollar checks, I’d double down on the Aiel.
1 Had I known ahead of time, I would have made a playoff bracket for who had the hardest gaze.
