[HoosierDaddy]

Notice that he isn't, as far as we can tell, scared by the threat of being cut off from the one power in the Hall of the Tower earlier. Now, whether his "access" to the True Power (DO's stuff) is the reason for this confidence or not could be debated, but given the latter statement it immediately brought to mind the Hall of the Tower situation to me.

Liked the foreshadowing of Rand with a new onyx hand right before the Borderlander meet-up (perhaps, or it could be a metaphor for the Dark One, red herring alert for me with Min's statement though).

This post has been edited by H.D.: 19 November 2010 - 05:43 AM

[Cause]

Rands powers have grown beyond simply the One power and I dont refer to the true power either. Before when he had a black aura around himself he told Cadsuane Sedai that if he willed it he could make the pattern stop her heart,I dont know how true such a statement was but given that food used to spoil faster around him and now that he has an aura of light, the clouds break around him and food grows when he is near, I think Rand Al'thor is now directly tied to the pattern. When he defended Maradon and defeated a few hundred thousand Shadowspawn single handedly I dont just think that was his memories of past lives having allowed him to learn better combat weaves. He was channeling on a scale that should not have been possible and he comments how it very nearly came to a confrontation between him and the dark one. There are metaphysics going on that we dont understand I think. I dont know how but had the Aes Sedai tried to prevent his leaving I am sure he could have stopped them and thats without touching the true power. Of course perhaps he was just relying on his Ta'veren nature to see him to safety. Its possible it would have not have allowed to them to even think of keeping hi trapped.

[Tattersail_]

amazing in my opinion. although i do feel there is so much left to go yet. does anyone think we will actually see the dark one versus rand?

[Cause]

Im sure of it. He will meet shadar hadan outside the entrance to shayol ghul and in a gollum like moment Padan Fains interference will save Rand by accident. You heard it here first!

[McLovin]

Well, think I'll check in with this thread again. Where's my coffee*? Ah...

D, on 19 November 2010 - 05:07 AM, said:

the reality is and always has been that MBotF is worse than Goodkind.

*spews coffee all over desk*

Say WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!!!!!!!!



*French-press of course. I wouldn't want to be accused of bad taste again

[Abyss]

H.D., on 19 November 2010 - 05:42 AM, said:

Notice that he isn't, as far as we can tell, scared by the threat of being cut off from the one power in the Hall of the Tower earlier. Now, whether his "access" to the True Power (DO's stuff) is the reason for this confidence or not could be debated, but given the latter statement it immediately brought to mind the Hall of the Tower situation to me.

Liked the foreshadowing of Rand with a new onyx hand right before the Borderlander meet-up (perhaps, or it could be a metaphor for the Dark One, red herring alert for me with Min's statement though).

Also interesting that even with Rand sorting out his brain last book, he retains access to the True Power. I have zero confirmation on this, but i'm pretty sure Lews back in the day never had that. of course, Lews never had the Dark One sacrifice one of his Foresaken just to put him in a situation where that was the only option.

Cause, on 19 November 2010 - 07:50 AM, said:

...when he had a black aura around himself he told Cadsuane Sedai that if he willed it he could make the pattern stop her heart,I dont know how true such a statement was but given that food used to spoil faster around him and now that he has an aura of light, the clouds break around him and food grows when he is near, I think Rand Al'thor is now directly tied to the pattern....

Interesting theory. I initially thought that was crazy talk but then, when Rand met with Tuon he seemed to be specifically weilding ta'averen mojo on her, even tho' it didn't work. So yeah, there's some heavy influence on reality going there, likely the opposite to the DO's 'bubbles of evil'.

Quote

When he defended Maradon and defeated a few hundred thousand Shadowspawn single handedly ...

Shift of topic but did anyone else have a chuckle at the two Maidens who were 'protecting' him thru all that... that's what you get for demanding bodyguard rights!

McLovin, on 19 November 2010 - 12:43 PM, said:

Well, think I'll check in with this thread again. Where's my coffee*? Ah...

D, on 19 November 2010 - 05:07 AM, said:

the reality is and always has been that MBotF is worse than Goodkind.

*spews coffee all over desk*

Say WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!!!!!!!!

...

This is like a running theme. How many times do you figure we can make you do that in one thread?

- Abyss, sad about the wasted coffee tho'...

[McLovin]

Abyss, on 19 November 2010 - 02:59 PM, said:

This is like a running theme. How many times do you figure we can make you do that in one thread?

You should stick with it at least till I'm siphoning gasoline with a rubber hose, if not go for the bonus round where I have to artificially inseminate a cow.

[Cobbles]

Cause, on 19 November 2010 - 10:04 AM, said:

... and in a gollum like moment Padan Fains interference will save Rand by accident. You heard it here first!

Uhm, yeah, about the 'first'...no, not really.

At least, it's entirely consistent within the world. As someone else put it so well, WoT is supposed to be the ubertrope, and as such, it incorporates legends and myths throughout times, which I suppose includes whatever Tolkien wrote. For instance, let's call book one an homage to 'Fellowship'. And yes, Perrin's charge reminded me of how Peter Jackson interpreted Helm's Deep. And the Fain/Gollum connection is probably as old as WoT itself.


Academic discussions? Please don't confuse internet discussion boards (such as this one) with academic discussions. Yes I realize the huge amount of work which went into plenty of quite excellent WoT sites. And there's much intelligent stuff written about the series, including how story elements of the series connect to myths of the real world. It's actually quite entertaining to read this and use it to extrapolate where the story might be going. But that's not academic discussion. It's just discussion. Maybe it will still be discussed 50 years from now, but I doubt it somehow. IMHO the writing is just too pedestrian and lacks artistic quality to become a true classic. YMMV.

Now with that out of the way, I enjoyed the book for what it is, a thrilling #12 installment of an entertaining fantasy series. The plot progresses towards the final conflict, stuff happens, characters advance, some having genuine moments of awesome, some others not so much. Perrin finally did something of consequence (w/o Faile standing in his way), Egwene brains a Forsaken with pure stubbornness but still has to take sh!t from Perrin, Nynaeve wills he way through life (although her braid is mostly gone by now), Mat gambles and wins (and loses some, but depth perception is so overrated), Rand leveled up and gets a +1 bonus on weather, sustenance, charm and charisma. Gawyn kills three ninja assassins, but still loses on being too emo, Elayne should go back taking baths (is she supposed to be the archetypical blond bimbo?) The two best parts of the book were (IMO) Avi's look into the future and Berelain's POV which I thought to be equally refreshing as the Tuon POV from a few books ago.

Yeah, I'm a sucker for epic fantasy. Great book. Recommended. I'm looking forward to MoL.

[Terez]

Spiridon_Deannis, on 17 November 2010 - 11:45 PM, said:

Honey, with all due respect, and I respect that you are THE WoT-fangirl and you are ab-so-lu-te-ly !!!! cozy with Sanderson...but...

This is not really true. Brandon knows who I am, and that I am more or less in the top rank of non-professional WoT experts, but that's about it. We've met a couple of times, but to him I am probably just another overexuberant fan, and a sometimes inconveniently controversial one at that.

Quote

...Jordan/WoT is just a Tolkien-rip-off...

I think Brandon said it best:

Brandon Sanderson said:

Brandon on Twitter - 30 March 2010 2:37 pm
Calling WoT derivative of Tolkien is like calling Tolkien derivative of Beowulf. True, but missing the point entirely.

Quote

Your so-called Ubertrope is simply the amplified trope of an existing trope. There is no Sebastian Bach here, because Bach was ORIGINAL (!!)

True, every bit as much as RJ was original. What Bach did essentially amounts to showing us exactly how predictable functional harmony can be, and how much room for expression remains even when you're following the rulebook. He clearly understood the rules better than those who came before him, even though they were often quite talented - Lassus, Josquin, Palestrina, etc. - to the point that some would say he wrote the rules, even though in many ways it's far from true.

amphibian, on 18 November 2010 - 06:38 PM, said:

Terez's criticism of Erikson's MBotF as an RPG campaign is somewhat true - as that is indeed the origin of the world and characters - yet I perceive Erikson as being much better at making the characters on the page real and meaningful to the reader.

There are certainly varied opinions on this sort of thing; a lot of people (perhaps especially WoT fans) feel that character development is one of the major weaknesses of Malazan. And with WoT, appreciating the character development in some ways requires a different approach; the characters are in many ways caricatures of basic personality types, with stereotypical characteristics in particular taken to extremes. Some people like it, some don't.

phib said:

Bach wasn't wholly original, but he was one of the very best exponents of his style of music ever. I'm not sure I can say WoT is similar in that fashion, which is why I think it will not remain alive in academic discussions for as long as Terez believes.

I think that the strength of WoT from an academic perspective comes in the art of foreshadowing. RJ made it clear in many ways that he had the depth of his plot mapped out from the beginning, and I haven't personally read anything that comes close in that aspect. I can't claim to be anything close to an expert when it comes to Malazan, but there was a time when I lurked a good bit on the book discussion forums hoping that the resident experts would bring this sort of thing to my attention, but I found very little in the way of discussion on structure, connectivity, continuity, etc. It seemed like most discussions amounted to who would kick whose ass in a fight and that sort of thing. And I recognize that I'm a bit prejudiced against that sort of thing because Theoryland has historically been hostile to it. Dragonmount is more like this forum because it's the closest thing to an 'official' forum in the WoT fandom.

phib said:

Off the top of my head, the few absolutely massive single story series that have actually survived in academic discussion for a very long time are truly works of genius and often associated with religion (Divine Comedy, Mahabharata etc.) Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is perhaps the most recent big one (other than the Tolkien fad) and I know nobody who has actually read the dang thing.

The assumption here is that the last decade or so really has been groundbreaking for literature, fantasy in particular; we learned that millions really will read a ten thousand page epic, multiple times, even. The classics of today are often pop culture phenomenons that survived because they have much to offer in the way of academic discussion. For a decade or two at least, it will probably be seen as beneath the academic radar for the most part, but that won't last. Modern epic fantasy is I think comparable to the days of the Dickens serials. I personally hate Dickens, but he was one of RJ's favorites, and in this I suppose I can sort of relate to the frustration that WoT fans had with the pace. I loved every bit of it, but with Dickens, the 'I get paid by the word' crap really got on my nerves. But the academia is often quick to point out that we should take Dickens' flaws in context.

phib said:

Editing yet again - According to Justice Breyer, "fewer than 2 percent of all copyrighted works retain any commercial value after seventy-five years."

Commercial value and academic value are two different things; most topics of literary academic discussion are in the public domain (as it should be, after a time).

amphibian, on 19 November 2010 - 03:03 AM, said:

I disagree with her statement, but not because the books are bad or because she has no clue what she's talking about. I believe that there's a lot there in terms of connections to make, but that vanishingly few people will care enough about this stuff - especially after the efforts of TheoryLand peeps have ceased - to keep going at it over the next few decades.

It's certainly possible, but not as foregone as you make it out to be, I think. Again, it comes back to the number of things in WoT that offer nearly unlimited potential for discussion. I mentioned the structure earlier as the highest point, but there is also a multitude of wealth in the small details that make up the world; Linda at 13th Depository has barely scratched the surface in her analysis of these things, particularly the derivative details.

Spiridon_Deannis, on 19 November 2010 - 04:32 AM, said:

Internet is a motherfucking cruel mistress, that´s all....

Also a great place for the soapboxing of random fuckheads. Just sayin.

D, on 19 November 2010 - 05:07 AM, said:

I was under the impression that academia pretty much ignored fantasy fiction as a whole...

Things change, fortunately.

Abyss, on 19 November 2010 - 05:30 AM, said:

Quote

And yeah, would be nice if MBotF sold more, but realistically ? What crowd would we be talking about ? The whiners over at Westeros ? How do you sell a +/- 6000 page story arc that started heating up with HoC to a mass market crowd ?

Good point. The RJ solution a la NEW SPRING would be to release dumbed down prequels to draw new readers in with easier material. I doubt he needed it because EYE is a pretty basic bring-in-the-naive-farmboys series opener, but there it is.

I honestly think RJ only published New Spring because the fans were asking for backstory. Later he decided that he would finish the main series books before doing any more prequels, and then he decided that he would do the outriggers - set about 5-10 years post-LB - before doing the other two prequels. He said he found them to be more interesting. Personally, I enjoyed New Spring, and I'm hoping that Brandon one day writes the other two planned prequels; I understand that RJ left detailed notes for them, as well as for the outriggers. I don't think New Spring was 'dumbed down'; it was certainly smaller in scope than the main series plot because the destination was already known. It was more about filling in some gaps, but it was still intricately connected to the rest of the series in the small details and foreshadowings; quotes from it are often important in theorizing.

Cobbles, on 22 November 2010 - 06:36 PM, said:

Cause, on 19 November 2010 - 10:04 AM, said:

... and in a gollum like moment Padan Fains interference will save Rand by accident. You heard it here first!

Uhm, yeah, about the 'first'...no, not really.

At least, it's entirely consistent within the world. As someone else put it so well, WoT is supposed to be the ubertrope, and as such, it incorporates legends and myths throughout times, which I suppose includes whatever Tolkien wrote. For instance, let's call book one an homage to 'Fellowship'. And yes, Perrin's charge reminded me of how Peter Jackson interpreted Helm's Deep. And the Fain/Gollum connection is probably as old as WoT itself.

There were some intentional Tolkien references in WoT - namely the setting and events of the first ten or so chapters, purposefully done as an homage, and also little details like The Nine Rings in TGH - but Brandon has promised that Fain is not headed in the Gollum direction, despite certain similarities:

Brandon Sanderson said:

Towers of Midnight book tour 8 November 2010 Lincoln Triangle Barnes and Noble NY, NY - WinespringBrother reporting
Q: (a takeoff on Leigh's review) I've seen this somewhere before : gollumgollumgollum
A: Fain will not end up like Gollum.

Towers of Midnight book tour 8 November 2010 Lincoln Triangle Barnes and Noble NY, NY - Sarayne reporting

Q: Is Padan Fain going to turn out like Gollum?
Brandon: No, he is not going to be like that. I am aware of the comparisons, and I am trying to distance him from that. The scene in Towers of Midnight with Padan Fain was originally written differently, and when I submitted it to Harriet she said, "Oh no he's much crazier than that!" So I changed it accordingly.

Cobbles said:

Academic discussions? Please don't confuse internet discussion boards (such as this one) with academic discussions.

Trust me, I'm not. Quite the opposite. I think that the general run of opinions on internet message boards - even relatively sophisticated book discussion forums - is not really representative of what the academia would find to be interesting at all. We are more representative of pop culture, which prefers the titillation, the shockers, the well-crafted action scene, etc. These things have value but are not often the focus of academic discussion.

[stone monkey]

The problem with LotR comparisons is (pace China Mieville and Michael Moorcock) that that book essentially spoiled a genre. A lot of authors decided on reading it that this was the mode wanted to tell stories in rather than seeking out their own voice and mode. And, as in most things, some of these resulting stories were interesting and some were not. Had the fantasy genre not, as a result, been dominated by cod-Tolkienesque tales, it may have been far more interesting.

WoT is just another example of the same; it's a very successful (and, in parts, quite compelling and occasionally interesting) example. But extending appreciation of it beyond that is a bit of a futile exercise because it doesn't necessarily warrant it. I don't think it's necessarily the Great Leap Forward that fantasy fiction might need, but neither is it entirely disposable.

Jordan's main gift was, I think, perhaps wrapping his syncretistic mindset in a story that wasn't quite difficult enough to follow to alienate the mass market and a writing style that was generally clear enough to get his point across. One of the rewards of WoT for an attentive, knowledgeable reader is spotting his influences. His writing isn't always good (in places he gets quite purple) and his characters are quite often sophomoric (infuriatingly so) but they can be engaging. Which is good enough. And better than most authors manage.

To some extent both WoT and MBotF are comparable in that they're both vaguely middlebrow generic fantasy. They both try to use the tropes of that genre to say a bit more than the usual run-of-the-mill potboilers say. My problem with them both is that their reach quite often exceeds their grasp. They'd be far less interesting and enjoyable had they only tried to be good stories, well told (which they both don't necessarily succeed at all the time) but they probably both fall short of being Something For The Ages. I'd argue, perhaps, that the only reason that LotR succeeds at being Something For The Ages is that it got there first.

[Terez]

stone monkey, on 23 November 2010 - 10:33 PM, said:

To some extent both WoT and MBotF are comparable in that they're both vaguely middlebrow generic fantasy. They both try to use the tropes of that genre to say a bit more than the usual run-of-the-mill potboilers say. My problem with them both is that their reach quite often exceeds their grasp. They'd be far less interesting and enjoyable had they only tried to be good stories, well told (which they both don't necessarily succeed at all the time) but they probably both fall short of being Something For The Ages. I'd argue, perhaps, that the only reason that LotR succeeds at being Something For The Ages is that it got there first.

In order to make a claim like this, you have to establish what the criteria are for Something For The Ages. A difficult thing to do, since criteria are always changing, but surely you could take a swipe at it.

[stone monkey]

I'll give it a go:

Influence is probably a start - it spawned a genre pretty much singlehanded. And yes, I'm extremely aware that examples of fantasy fiction existed previously, (James Branch Cabell's Poictesme series or ER Eddison's Zimiavian Quartet or Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter or even Robert E Howard's Conan the Barbarian come to mind just from the 20s and 30s) but they were niche and remain niche; that is, much more niche than most epic fantasy currently is. Love it or hate it, almost all epic fantasy novels will be compared to LotR at some stage.

Longevity - it's hard to judge, but 50-odd years down the line this is still one of those books that parents give children as some sort of rite of passage. That certainly bespeaks staying power.

After that we get a bit fuzzy; there are literally tens (and possibly hundreds) of millions of copies of LotR lying around and it's been continuously in print (and is likely to remain so) for decades. A fair number of physical copies of this text are likely to survive for a long time just based on the balance of probabilities...

Of course, for all I know it could be completely forgotten before the next decade is out, but I doubt it. I think it'll be around for the long run.

This post has been edited by stone monkey: 23 November 2010 - 11:57 PM

[Terez]

stone monkey, on 23 November 2010 - 11:53 PM, said:

I'll give it a go:

Influence is probably a start - it spawned a genre pretty much singlehanded. And yes, I'm extremely aware that examples of fantasy fiction existed previously, (James Branch Cabell's Poictesme series or ER Eddison's Zimiavian Quartet or Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter or even Robert E Howard's Conan the Barbarian come to mind just from the 20s and 30s) but they were niche and remain niche; that is, much more niche than most epic fantasy currently is. Love it or hate it, almost all epic fantasy novels will be compared to LotR at some stage.

I was going to say that I'm not so sure that WoT should necessarily be categorized as 'secondary world' fantasy fiction. And then I realized that you edited (I am subscribed to this thread, immediate notification). Good call, though.

Obviously, RJ was sort of going for the comparison to Tolkien deliberately. He was also obviously going for One Wheel To Bind All Stories, which is (as far as I am aware) a relatively new thing (though of course I'm not going to pretend that he covered everything beyond the major religions of past and present and some of the more prominent non-religious folk tales, like Arthur). Tolkien did it to an extent, as did many previous composers of epics, but it seems to me that RJ showed him up on an epic scale as far as that point was concerned, all the while managing to give a solid impression of 'secondary world fantasy'.

It also seems to me that RJ was also going for the modern era Arthurian lit spotlight. We will know just how Arthurian he decided to go when the last book comes out, but I'm expecting some rather blatant parallelism in that area like we haven't really seen so far, though I'm sure it will be twisted in RJ's usual 'this is what really happened' way. The fact that he happened to compose a ten thousand + page epic that nearly any book lover can read easily (especially those who didn't have to wait years between books 7-11) is really just a bonus. The continuity is not perfect - even for a creative genius, human error is inevitable - but I don't believe I have read anything so ambitious and successful in that respect.

I don't think that Tolkien is going to be forgotten any time soon, but I don't believe that he is a shadow looming over the success of modern day epic fantasy authors, either. In time he will probably become simply another milestone in the evolution of mythical literature. An important one, true, but not necessarily any more important than other milestones.

[Cobbles]

Wikipedia has a list of 20th century literature (although it kind of stops around 1990.) Anyway, Tolkien has both the Hobbit and LotR on the list (as genre fiction). But when you look at the list, it might be a hard sell to put series like WoT or Malazan etc. on there. If you're looking honestly at it without your 'epic fantasy goggles', you might agree.

(Of course they have Harry Potter as the last entry, but the 1990's entries aren't really settled it would seem).

There's actually several works of fantasy in the 'genre fiction' on the list.

[amphibian]

Terez, on 23 November 2010 - 09:50 PM, said:

I think that the strength of WoT from an academic perspective comes in the art of foreshadowing. RJ made it clear in many ways that he had the depth of his plot mapped out from the beginning, and I haven't personally read anything that comes close in that aspect. I can't claim to be anything close to an expert when it comes to Malazan, but there was a time when I lurked a good bit on the book discussion forums hoping that the resident experts would bring this sort of thing to my attention, but I found very little in the way of discussion on structure, connectivity, continuity, etc. It seemed like most discussions amounted to who would kick whose ass in a fight and that sort of thing. And I recognize that I'm a bit prejudiced against that sort of thing because Theoryland has historically been hostile to it. Dragonmount is more like this forum because it's the closest thing to an 'official' forum in the WoT fandom.

I think that's shortchanging these forums a bit. Granted, there hasn't been a true effort by one person or a small group to collect a massive amount of foreshadowing bits, but through the dozens of "Oh, Erikson hinted at Event X waaaaay back here in Poem N or in Line M on page 57" threads and posts, we've got a pretty good idea that Erikson and ICE pre-planned much of the MBotF. Furthermore, it's apparent that they used a good chunk of archeological analogues for the different species on Wu and the history presented to us comes often in fragments or not completely trustworthy oral testimony - which is a staple of those really trying to figure out what went down, when it did and who was involved.

The process of exegesis certainly hasn't been anywhere near as scholarly as the posts over at Theoryland, but I think it's perhaps been more organic in that the foreshadowing and connections are mostly staying within the series itself, rather than branching out to Arthurian legends or fantasy tropes. One can pay attention just to the Malazan books and get 80% of the foreshadowing and nifty little details.

[HoosierDaddy]

Most subtle little point that resonated with me the most:

Graendal's description of her defection to the Shadow. Second to turn away (after Ishamael and his relentless logic), her thoughts about how those first steps were so hard to make, and seemed for good reasons, really resonated with the plan to turn Rand dark by forcing him into terrible decisions that would wear away his morality bit by bit.

[Terez]

HoosierDaddy, on 24 November 2010 - 05:51 AM, said:

Most subtle little point that resonated with me the most:

Graendal's description of her defection to the Shadow. Second to turn away (after Ishamael and his relentless logic), her thoughts about how those first steps were so hard to make, and seemed for good reasons, really resonated with the plan to turn Rand dark by forcing him into terrible decisions that would wear away his morality bit by bit.

What I liked more about that scene was the implication that even Ishamael had a heart, once. It wasn't all about logic for him - Graendal makes it clear that the man has known pain. Of all the Forsaken, he seemed the least likely, excepting perhaps Semirhage.

Re: WoT foreshadowing - when I say 'foreshadowing', I'm talking about within the books, not anything to do with legends. The reference to legends go in the 'parallels' category.

[Terez]

Abyss, on 17 November 2010 - 06:42 PM, said:

WhiskeyJackDaniels, on 17 November 2010 - 05:43 PM, said:

@Abyss's microgate comment, Rand does use gateways to kill Trollocs en masse. The swirl around and the edges cut through anything while the Trollocs that go through them just instant die. They're called Deathgates or something.

Yep - now picture a dozen really tiny ones being thrown at, or opened in, Taim's headparts. THAT'S what i'm hoping for.

Illuyankas, on 17 November 2010 - 06:34 PM, said:

I do have one little quibble, though. Thirteen books and no balefiresaber?

A distinct fail. Tho Rand did have a power created fire sword or something back in TSR or thereabouts. I don't think we've seen it since then tho'.
(that's your cue Terez...)

Missed this. He used it in TFOH against the Darkhounds before they went all T2 (it was 2 right) and reformed. Then he balefired them. I don't think he's used the sword since, though he might have used it against the Shadowspawn in Jangai Pass later in the book (can't remember, but he probably did); probably because he always had Lanfear at the back of his mind making fun of him for it. Or really, because there hasn't been a good opportunity to use it since. Rahvin was more complicated than that...and Dumai's Wells...and he didn't get the chance with Sammael, or the renegade Asha'man (he fought them in Far Madding where he had to use a normal sword). He didn't do any fighting at the Cleansing, and the next major conflict for him was the attack at Algarin's where the sword would not have done him much good. Then Semirhage.

[Terez]

Really, I'm not spamming - just being absent-minded...

Cobbles, on 24 November 2010 - 03:14 AM, said:

Wikipedia has a list of 20th century literature (although it kind of stops around 1990.) Anyway, Tolkien has both the Hobbit and LotR on the list (as genre fiction). But when you look at the list, it might be a hard sell to put series like WoT or Malazan etc. on there. If you're looking honestly at it without your 'epic fantasy goggles', you might agree.

(Of course they have Harry Potter as the last entry, but the 1990's entries aren't really settled it would seem).

There's actually several works of fantasy in the 'genre fiction' on the list.

I'm not so sure that a present-day Wikipedia page has any relevance for what might be considered academically important in the future.

[HoosierDaddy]

Terez, on 24 November 2010 - 09:41 PM, said:

HoosierDaddy, on 24 November 2010 - 05:51 AM, said:

Most subtle little point that resonated with me the most:

Graendal's description of her defection to the Shadow. Second to turn away (after Ishamael and his relentless logic), her thoughts about how those first steps were so hard to make, and seemed for good reasons, really resonated with the plan to turn Rand dark by forcing him into terrible decisions that would wear away his morality bit by bit.

What I liked more about that scene was the implication that even Ishamael had a heart, once. It wasn't all about logic for him - Graendal makes it clear that the man has known pain. Of all the Forsaken, he seemed the least likely, excepting perhaps Semirhage.

Re: WoT foreshadowing - when I say 'foreshadowing', I'm talking about within the books, not anything to do with legends. The reference to legends go in the 'parallels' category.

I might make some mistakes here, as this is coming from memory of TWotWoT and discussion at a very old and now defunct WoT board, but Ishamael was the most renowned philosopher of his Age, right? Philosophy involves logic, but even more so, wasn't it his delving into history and the pattern that led him to believe, ultimately, the light would fall due to sheer weight of chances to either turn or kill the Dragon? Thus, he wasn't a monster, but his rationale for turning was bound up in his belief in the logic that this would eventually happen?