Fantasy Novels

"enjoyable series" is an extreme opinion on a series for you?

I read every book and enjoyed the hell out of them, even though I've read them all three times now I always hate reading from the women's point of views but that might be because they don't understand the bigger picture that's going on.
I actually enjoyed Eragon as a young teen and I haven't been back to it since. Still waiting for a follow up series that I know will never happen.

the other extreme is that it's the worst cancer on the face of literature so I'd say yeah

It suffers from toolongitis.

it waffles on a bit in the middle of the series but yeah still great

I got up to partway through book six. I feel like the overall setting and stuff is interesting, but the series as a whole has HUGE issues with pacing for me. Like, the first book would have these interminably long blocks of boring, slow ass shit that was terrible to slog through...punctuated by small sections of extremely interesting action where STUFF ACTUALLY MOVED FORWARD. The whole book did that back-and-forth dance and it was miserable. I only kept powering through because my ex insisted it was her All-Time-Favorite/Best-Series-Ever.

Also jfc Jordan's characterization of interaction between the sexes is annoying as hell.

Male Character A: Omfg women suck and are so confusing...I wish I was like Male Character B, he gets women!
Male Character B: Omfg women suck and are so confusing...I wish I was like Male Character A, he gets women!

EVERY. FUCKING. PERSON. Then the women all do the exact same shit back and forth. And then the women and men do it with each other bickering back and forth. And everyone nags and bickers and sulks and does everything BUT actually fucking communicate back and forth.

He has a good story in there but god does he tell it badly IMO.

are the books good?

yeah, its long and suffers from too slow pacing at times. But overall is a good fantasy read

Yeah I mean I keep thinking of how insufferable 90% of the female cast is but in hindsight it quite a story so far. I'm up to book 6 and I keep looking back at how far we've come

The pacing picks up and it gets really good from book 9 or 10 if memory serves.

Yeah the females annoyed me a lot as well, but not as far as making their bits skip-able.
IMO the most enjoyable characters side story to follow was Perrins.

Book 10 is a joke.

Book 11 things start to move, but it's book 12 where they move for real.

Also, fuck Perrin, Faile, and that whole story. Just bleh, terrible chapters that only dragged his character down.

this is a fair complaint I think. the first few times I saw
>Male Character A: Omfg women suck and are so confusing...I wish I was like Male Character B, he gets women!
>Male Character B: Omfg women suck and are so confusing...I wish I was like Male Character A, he gets women!
I thought it was pretty cute because it was young perrin/rand/mat all thinking it about each other, and I thought it was a little joke

but then it turns out that a slightly more detailed version of that is the basis of pretty much all male-female bickering, and that pretty much all male-female interaction is bickering
I don't know if jordan was trying to say something but it's kind of a weird device

Jordan himself admitted book 10 was a complete disaster, but honestly I think any series that needs FOURTEEN fucking entries to tell ONE story is bound to crash and burn eventually
What's even funnier is that in 14 books only about 3 years passed in the story

bumper

>you will never be the chosen one with your own harem of underage girls who you impregnate and have that treated as a good thing
Why even live?

Wait, what?

It's been a while admittedly but I definitely remember Rand knocking up his princess girlfriend, who I'm pretty sure was very young?

>What's even funnier is that in 14 books only about 3 years passed in the story
I dunno man. While I agree 14 books is really fucking long for a book series, a lot can happen in three years.

That's not exactly a harem, though.

Besides, doesn't he leave to become a god at the end?

Apparently he argued with his wife a lot.

The setting is better than any of the characters. Really i only enjoyed Rand going full edgelord .

Wasn't she like 16? With Rand not being much older?

Is this shit even worth reading since the last few books are by a completely different author? I read the first two years ago and enjoyed them quite a bit, but dropped the series when Jordan died. I've never read Sanderson stuff before but all I hear is how he fucked up the final books.

It taught me not to start reading books by authors who haven't finished their stories yet. It's why it's a stupid idea to start reading Game of Thrones, that shit will never be concluded before he dies.

Any news on the TV show?

a lot of stuff I've read says that Sanderson actually salvaged the mess Jordan created

>For better or worse?
Both, really. The first three books or so are really solid. The pacing gets progressively worse with each book though, and by book 8 things have become borderline repetitive.

>That's not exactly a harem, though

He has 3 wives how is it not a harem?

If he only knocks one up, though.

Meant to quote

This a dozen times over.

Jordan had good ideas but was a dribbling remtard with execution.
Sanderson is actually a halfway-competent author.

I read the prequel book to his series, not knowing that I should have waited. I liked it.
Then I tried to read his first book, and I couldn't even finish it. It was so dull.

I'm the only one than liked best Lan? Perhaps was the not-Aragon but hell I barely could stand Rand, Perry was too henpecked be his wife (than was fucking terrible) and Mad was okay, his shenaningans and the way he fucked upw ere at least entertaining.

Hrs fucking all three

It's a Harem mate, we're just lucky it's not been optioned as an anime series yet

God, that would be a nightmare. On the other hand, a lengthy animated series would probably be the best way to present everything in the books.

How did Brandon Sanderson do with the tail end of the series?

>How did Brandon Sanderson do with the tail end of the series?

Not him, but IMO, not great. He moved the plot along, but he threw out a lot of the characterization and all of the mythological resonance cleverness that Jordan went with.

He also completely removed Shaidar Haran, and turned what was very obviously led up to be the final confrontation with the DO to be some sort of Ta'veren thing with the three mains into just a one on one vision quest shit with Rand and his channeling, which was completely retarded. And don't even get me started on Demandred.

But take this with a grain of salt. I don't really like Sanderson, and this might have colored my perceptions.

>He also completely removed Shaidar Haran

But why?

I have no idea.

Who killed asmodean tho?

It's intuitively obvious who did it.

Just think in terms of motive, means, and opportunity.

I haven't read them, but I know a few people got really pissed at the switch-and-bait ending.

The entire book series felt to them like it was about a fantasy descending towards the end without respite, and then the good guys suddenly defeat the baddies and everything turns out fine.

Mind you, the people that said that were the kind of people that post on forums with a "I'm the MtG colour black, muhahahahah, call me Shadow the EDGEhog!"

So, so I got this idea. It's a bad idea.

Let's say that first of all you give everyone the power to create, not like build something, but visualize something and it become real. This comes from the soul and shit, and one's body is simply the soul creating a vessel for itself. Everyone can think and make things, like dolls/furniture/etc. Visualization is the key. Now, lets say that the ONLY things around are things people created like this. An endless void with little floating islands of communities of people making things.

No air our there, so you gotta have people create shits and air for themselves to travel between. navigation is hard because it is subjective spacing with no fixed reference points.

Now lets say people can't create life because their soul is already creating the life that is themselves, creating life kills the other life one has created. Creation of life and the economy of organics is what people really cling to.

Upon death what ever a person is current making sticks around. In sickness and old age people will create organic matter to commit ritual suicide and give back to their community.

So kid lives in a small community, many buildings attached together in the void, and dreams of travelings. So he wants to become one of the folks that make their own barges and travels around. Except it's more dangerous than just travel (also you gotta have multiple people because when you sleep everything but the soul's creation of its own body shuts off, so you need minimum 3 in 8 hour shifts). Material gods exist in the void. People who live alone, often madmen, who create their own words and mockeries of life. Puppets they control to mimmic the living.

Shit mang, this might be a dumb idea.

>I got up to partway through book six. I feel like the overall setting and stuff is interesting, but the series as a whole has HUGE issues with pacing

Fucking this. I also quite at book six, because at that point stuff happened in the first 100 pages and the last 100 pages and the middle was pure filler

Did you wander into the wrong thread?

Shit

Ditch WoT and read the Malazan universe instead.

I only got up through what I think was book six before I got bored and stopped reading. The Female characters were becoming less and less likable, Rand had just added that second chick to his harem, and I realized that the only two characters I still liked were Matt and Thom.

And judging from what I had read so far, it seemed that Matt's character progression would lead to him losing his best traits as more "Just as Planned"-tier, Destiny bullshit kept railroading him back into following his role as what had so far been Rand's unseen sidekick; And Thom practically had a piece of paper saying "Kill me tragically" taped to his back.

Can someone who got through the whole thing tell me how far off my predictions were?

Has anyone ever statted one of these out for DnD, 5th specifically? Would make for a hell of a unwinnable encounter/puzzle boss.

I dunno, I see The Wheel of Time more for a BRP game or GURPS.

Mat becomes the general for the last battle, keeps being "Just as Planned", and stays the best character. He ends up marring that empress chick and presumably ruling her nation by her side.
Thom continues being awesome, becomes a resurrected Moiraines warder and lover, happy end.

I love the setting, but was mostly interested in porting the monster.

I wasn't able to finish it, honestly. While I can certainly see why it has a lot of fans, I don't find that it aged well. The characters in particular get very, very annoying, but my biggest complaint is a more personal one. I've never really liked fate and prophecy in fantasy -- it comes across as cheap and overly convenient more often than not -- and the Wheel of Time series makes that sort of thing a core mechanic of its very universe.
It just wasn't for me.

Also, tug braid and smooth skirt.

>It's intuitively obvious who did it.

Grendal?

That's Veeky Forums's view on everything. Any unanimous opinion is a meme and will be shortly forgotten.

This

I believe it was Shaidar Haran

Jain Farstrider died clean.

>Still waiting on Scott Lynch

Man I know you gettin' married an' movin' across a continent an' all but come on son.

damn

Aside from katana and Zen-inspired mindstates, was there anything?

is anything else needed?

Harem

Books 7-9 are frustratingly slow. Shit starts to happen after that. Sanderson did a good job wrapping things up and it only took him 3 books to do so. The change in pace was noticeable and nice. Bringing in actual editors must have helped.

Plus the skirts had mostly been smoothed out by then so the story could get going.

In Sanderson's defense, there was no way anyone could have finished the series without ditching just a whole bunch of shit, not even the original author. And as someone tacked onto a project they had no control over the current state of, that's an incredibly difficult job.

You really do need to slash and burn. There is no way to run it otherwise.

lol are you fucking kidding that mormon robot is the worst excuse for an author, even a genre author in decades

complete and utter souless trash. the dudes a fucking robot in the worst possible sense.

Rand was 20 at the start of the series. Elayne was 17. Meaning they were married when she was 20 and he was 23.

I hope Martin's laziness hasn't gone on to infect other authors in the genre.

harems aren't a Japanese specfic thing.

I think the last few books are actually really good. The author change isn't a detriment at all, even though you can notice the shift. I might have enjoyed it more after Sanderson too kover.

I'd say the series has a sort of inverse bell curve of how good it is, leaning sort of towards the later books. So like the first half of the series is good, then it dips down a bit, then it comes up again.

Overall one of my favourite series, though. Once you've read it once you know what parts to skip over and it gets better to re-read. I'm a big sucker for interesting worldbuilding, though, and really, WoT is more about the world than it is about the characters. Like, the magic system for example is really solid and consistent compared to most fantasy. If that's not what you're into then maybe you'd be better off not reading, but give it a shot anyway.

The weird thing with Sanderson is, I liked how he wrote the end of WoT but I don't like any of his own books.

It's like he could do a lot of good with stuff that another author came up with, but he's not very good at coming up with stuff himself. Or like... not that he can't come up with good ideas, but he didn't seem able to put them together right? And he threw in other stuff that wasn't any good with the stuff that was?

It's like he's a man with ideas and some of them are great and some are fine but a lot are also bad, and he can't tell which is which or whether the good ideas remain good when they're put together with other ideas. So in WoT he was more restricted and as a result he was pretty good?

I think he's also bad at setting up his fantasy worlds, he throws a ton of weird shit at you right away and doesn't give you what you need to digest it all and get a solid idea of how things work. With WoT he had all that setup done for him already, and Jordan I think was way better than him at that sort of thing.

I think the ending might have suffered a bit from that. The way Rand was able to solve his problem had sort of been hinted at a little, but not nearly enough, and Sanderson just sprung it out like he expected everyone to get it and accept it right away.

I agree with that in part. The last 3 books are bretty good for all characters, even most of the bitchy gossip-mongrels that are the women become tolerable. The ending pieces aren't afraid to pull punches, and the unexpected occurs more then a couple times.

I think Sanderson went a bit overboard on plot-trimming, but I'm overall ok with the job he did. It ended a tad too abruptly, but not so much that it ruined it.

He may be a weeabo but The Wheel of Time is my favorite series hands down.

>tfw want to be Mat

Yes, those don't make you weeaboo.

it was graendal, shaidar haran even gave her shit for it

...

Elayne was two years younger than Rand. He was 20 years old when the books started, so Elayne would have been 18.

We don't know how old Aviendha was, but she was of similar age to Elayne.

Min was a year or two older than both, though her exact age wasn't mentioned - just that she was described as "a bit older".

Still young, though. Pic related, it's the three of them.

He doesn't have the One Power or True Power at the end. Theory is that he can shape the Pattern directly, because he's spent time outside it and could manipulate its threads.

There's actually a prophecy that one of the civilisations had that somebody would learn to "weave the pattern without weaves". If Rand can weave the Pattern without the One Power, then he'd be fulfilling the prophecy. Again.

That's more to do with him coming from a period where the contractual obligations to produce books are a lot more lenient, so he can do whatever he wants.

Most authors nowadays work a lot harder, even the successful ones, because a publisher isn't going to just sit on its hands while you fuck about and don't finish the book series they contracted you and paid you to write.

Graendal and Sammael, disguised as those two servants Rand runs into. Who else would be hanging around? Remember, it was their Big Plan to be there when Rahvin got attacked.

remote house/soundproofed van and basement
be aware of cct v, use fake plates on a disposable vehicle, wear a disguise *wig, 2nd hand clothes/shoes, nose/ear putty & gloves.
I may have spent a bit of time thinking about this..
you would need to break thim initially but it should go ok

harems like the mormons 'used' to have? Or the arabs, or muslims under the radar in the UK & France?

There's some guys in the Middle East that will 100% support you on that. And I heard they are hiring. Isn't the safest spot though, so I would think twice before making any commitment...

That was justified in crows and dragons, where he was making vast adjustments to the plot on the fly and needed it to mesh together properly, but given he's very open now about spending most his time blogging and leeching off conventions, that excuse doesn't sail any more.

>That was justified in crows and dragons, where he was making vast adjustments to the plot on the fly and needed it to mesh together proper
And writing about football.

I think he stopped giving a fuck when he realised that the HBO show was going to finish before him unless he put in more work than he wanted to.

>Wasn't she like 16?

Too old for love in the Xanth-universe.

This

It's a shame, because one would think he'd have the view that his fans deserve to have the ending first, not have it as sloppy seconds from whatever the show decides to do with it, but still having the basic outline ruined for them.

How could it possibly have a satisfactory ending?

The whole "appeal" is "LOL DEATH DEATH DESPAIR"

>Besides, doesn't he leave to become a god at the end?

He didn't leave the world, merely have everyone but his wives think he was dead and buried.

>He doesn't have the One Power or True Power at the end. Theory is that he can shape the Pattern directly, because he's spent time outside it and could manipulate its threads.

The Dark One was imprisoned by the Creator. A hole was then bored, and somewhat shoddily patched up until finally Rand fixed it properly.

But... time's cyclic here. In mending it properly, we're back to the pre-bore state, that of the creator-made prison. That Rand just made.

He couldn't reach out to the One Power any more, because it's no longer external to him. He has become the true source. And with that Bela retires...

> Lanfear

Mai waifu

Shit taste