/lit/ - Literature

>>23363277
It's a long series that feels longer the further into it you get. New concepts become scarcer further on so it gets stale. And if you like to binge videos on other series like ASoIaF and LotR or even fucking Branderson, there's a drought of quality content on it (there's some out there, but not nearly as much and nothing done as well bc it doesn't get the views).

>>23363277
First 6 and prequel book are fine, check them out.

>>23363277

Worse.

>>23363277
I really like it, just pace yourself between books.

>>23363277
The first 3 are kino, 4-6 are pretty good. After that it gets pretty bloated and while book 11 is very very good, you have to judge for yourself whether you wanna invest the time to get there. Skim read whenever you feel you have to and don't feel any shame. Haven't read the prequel

Eeeehehh. You can't see it but I'm don't that sort of flat hand gesture to imply a inconsistent butt on average middle of the road level of quality.

I'm really worried about the so-called slog. It sounds brutal and I've especially heard bad things about Crossroads of Twilight.

>>23363277
Like Dune there are multiple stopping points, you don't have to read the whole thing.
I think you can read 1, 1-3, or 1-6 for a good experience. Maybe keep going if you want more?
Perrin's winter march is basically unbearable and really the worst part of the series (arguably Perrin himself as well).

>>23364112
>Perrin's winter march is basically unbearable and really the worst part of the series
Man, gotta disagree. I think Egwene and Elayne are close contenders to being the worst POVs ever. Perrin's boring but it was excruciating reading about Elayne. Maybe Egwene wins out because she at least had that arc in the White Tower near the end of the series but Elayne? holy shit...

>>23363277
It's probably fine but sometimes you gotta ask yourself
"I could be reading something that is higher quality and shorter than spending part of my life reading this."

>>23364173
Based Egwene enjoyer.

> Nynaeve pulled her braid

>>23363277
Yes
It is awful on so many levels it's actually impressive

I found it very uninspired and boring.

book 1 is basically paint by numbers generic 80's fantasy
books 2-4 the series really comes into its own
5-6 good
7-11 the slog. less sloglike at the start, but each book as varying degrees of slog
12-14 sanderson takes the helm, for better or worse
I'd recommend reading 1-6

>>23363277
>one
It's a decent Fellowship clone
>two and three
Story becomes its own thing, starts developing the characters more
>four
It's probably my favourite and it expands the setting well
>five and six
Still good but there's more boring povs
>seven
Seriously starts slowing down
>eighth to ten
This is where the series' main problem metastasizes. Jordan liked to have a lot of buildup to an explosive climax at the end of each book, only as the series progresses each book becomes more buildup than events. It gets so bad that ten basically doesn't have a climax, ending on a cliffhanger after nothing happened for the entire book.
>eleven
Speeds up again but it's never as fast paced as before.
>twelve to fourteen
It's Sanderson. I'm not a fan of his style or prose and he completely failed to write some characters.
The series has some great highs but it's so drawn out and long winded that it's hard to get there, especially later on. Jordan desperately needed an editor he didn't fuck.

>>23365733
I'll either be in my 80s or dead when it's public domain to where we can edit out all the shitfuckery. I think it could have been one of the greats with some serious editing (more needed after book 5 or 6, as that's when most of the problems arise). I hear his wife was the editor which is believable.

>>23365755
actually, some redditor tried their hand at this: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1A9-bZTSjEPw3fR2kLTKSQaOgcHJukREh

>>23363277
I didn't dislike it. For so long I kept thinking how everything could be fixed if people would just do whatever Mat told them to do without question, and then at the end they decide to do so and everything works out
Mat is best boy

>>23364074
Slog doesn't exist if you don't have to wait literal years between books. It's like the boat ride from Berserk, if you can read it all in one go you'll have no idea why people have PTSD about it

>>23363277
The events of the entire series could have been condensed down to 8-10 books and it would have been better for it. I wouldn't say that it's bad, but it feels long for the sake of being long and a lot of the early plot hooks don't have an adequate (or any) payoff in the end. If Jordan hadn't died, I'm not sure that the series would have ended even at 14 books, he would have just continued to add more and more subplots.

>>23363277
>While men fight pointless wars and destroy the world, it falls upon the women to avert climate change and save the world

comes down to whether you enjoy this kind of subplot re-occuring throughout the book.

Those books prepared me for the modern media because that was the first series that pulled this, now common, trick on me on getting my interested in the journey of the main male protagonist and than diverting to book after book about female characters where the more familiar I become with them, the more my indifference turns to hatred. I remember that by middle of the series I legit wanted most of the female cast to be hanged.

>>23365866
I think you missed the subtext, which is that women claim to everyone that will listen that they're the only ones who are rational and intelligent, and then fuck up literally everything they ever try to do on their own.

>>23365932
yes, that was there too. thing is, I never did manage to finish the series after he croaked so I don't know if that subtext actually came to the surface and was explored.

>>23365755
Faile, Elayne, Egwene and Gawyn could be near entirely removed and it would only take a bit of work to make up for the loss. Perrin's Shaido campaign needed to be heavily trimmed too.
>>23365866
I don't think that was a global warming thing. I think Jordan just wanted to give the girls an arc to solve and it worked with his themes to have the guys do cool things in the meantime.

>dogshit
Perrin's multi book long dark and brooding arc, starring Jordan's thinly veiled NTR fetish
Elayne's boring-ass muh queendom muh andor arc during the last 4 books of the series
Everything involving the Shaido tbqh, I couldn't name a single character from that group with a gun to my head
Gawyn sperging out about Rand for literally half the series
Gawyn's brother (I can't remember his name either)
>meh
The part's of Egwene's arc where she just goes on and on about muh white tower and muh aes sedai unity and whatever the fuck
Padan Fain's whole character arc
Mat's adventures with his band of murderhobos (got better at the end tho)
Lan's arc, the muh duty thing got old after a while
Min
>good
Murderhobo Rand and schizophrenic Mat
Mat's romance with the qt loli african kween
Darth Rand becoming Based Rand
Tsuntsun Nynaeve becoming Deredere Nynaeve

Imagine that would be the number of books need to actually get a full worthwhile experience of song of ice and fire, not 7, but sometime like 11 or 12 books, shame about the author.

>>23365866
I loudly said "YES." when Egwene bit it and it came out involuntarily. Goes to show how much I despised that hag

>>23364074
Crossroads was ass. I skimmed most of it and looked up the most important chapters online (which were like 2, funny enough)

>>23364074
Crossroads is just Jordan trying to progress the side-plots of the series for the whole book. You can pretty much skip it and will have missed nothing.

>>23364325
Yeah I always get that feeling when reading fantasy. Not a fan of the endless volumes that all series seem to believe they need.

>>23369045
as long as all the big name successful fantasy authors have long series with spinoffs and backstory books, everyone else will wanna follow