My Story:
How I came to depise the Wheel of Time
(Dims lights, leans back in chair, and fires up a cigarette)
You know, I wasn't always like this. I used to love, well...like, the Wheel of Time series. How could a once a loyal fan turn into such a bitter opponet of these books? Well, that's my story, and you better watch out, 'cause the same thing could happen to YOU!
I got into the series late, sometime in 1995. I had stopped by the bookstore and saw that TOR was giving away free copies of the first half of "Eye of the World" (just like, as I would later reflect, A drug-dealer handing out free joints to school kids to hook 'em). Well, I bit. I took a copy and was drawn in. The next few months were spent reading these books. As I remember, Book 1 was excellent (though a little too much like the Lord of the Rings), Book 2 was good. Book 3: good. Book 4: Okay (At this point I began to wonder when the series was going to start winding down) Book 5: I scratched my head, pondering how there could be so many pages and yet so little happening. Anyway, at this point book six came out, and so I went out to buy it...in hardback.
I was reading LoC for about a day, when the moment came, and I reached THE SCENE. I can't find my copy of Lord of Chaos right now (hmmm...didn't I throw it away?) so I can't transcribe the scene exactly, but here is basically what happened:
Rand(y?) is in his court, fighting these guys, several of them at a time. He paid for the best, and he got the best. He wanted them to fight their hardest, and so they did. Anyway, he plows through these chumps easily, because he's the DRAGON, the toughest mutha in this particular 'hood. All through the scene, Robert "milk 'em, cowboy" Jordan is describing Rand as he goes into these different set "fighting stances" with names like "The Boar Rushes Down the Mountain", "Parting the Silk", "The Frenzied Bumblebee" (maybe that wasn't one...)anyway, I just pulled out of the scene right there and went, "what the hell is this fighting stance crap? What the hell kind of swordsman has set 'plays' he runs, like it's a waltz or dance or something?" In my mind, I had the image of some guy drawing his sword, and Rand shouts out "Mad Pussy Willow!!" like a power ranger or something, whipping out his blade and getting in this ridiculous stance, with his leg held up over his head. The guy then gives him a look like he's a queer boy or something, then punches him in the face with the hilt of his sword and makes Rand cry. It was so funny, this image in my head, that I just bust out laughing right there reading this book in the middle of my study hall (I was a sophmore in High School at the time). What was this crap? First of all, no one is going to take on five or more dudes at once like Rand did in this scene. I'm not a swordsman or anything, but I don't care who you are, how good you are: Five guys at once are going to bust you up, man. (like that dude in the "Terminator" would say) And Rand does get beat, by the last guy, after punking the first four losers.
But the whole scene was so artificial, so absolutely juvenile (Something a adolescent would imagine as cool, the hero beating up several chumps at once) so utterly fake, that it just turned me off from the series. It was the catalyst, the culmination of boring chapters with these torturously detailed descriptions, stale, immature characters, and a story that had no end in sight. I love long, well-told stories as much as the next chap, but this was not a well-told story. This was a self-indulging, bloated series that had a prime objective of raking in money for the publisher, while Robert "milk 'em cowboy" Jordan got the chance to indulge his fantasy of becoming the "king of fantasy".
I did manage to finish Book Six, however painful it was. It was tedious and boring, though the end picked up slightly. I got to know what the characters were wearing, how much Min loved Rand, how many times Nynaeve tugged on her braid, and how many timed the women "crossed their arms beneath their breasts". Looking back at the series, I can only shake my head at how bad the dialogue is, how badly the characters interact (the boys and girls, above all). I think because I was just a freshman/sophmore in High School, I didn't fully appreciate how complex male/female relationships could be, so I bought the juvenile dialogue easily. Now, I cringe at how fake it sounds (read it aloud, sometime). Anyway, that's another story, for another section of the page.
(rubs out cigarette in ash-tray and sits up)
Well, that's my story, kid. How I, once A WoT devotee, became an embittered foe of this never-ending series. After 70+ dollars and many hours wasted on these books, it's been a rough journey from those first days to now, but I'm glad I woke up and got out while I could. You can too, you know. It's not too late. Well, I'm off to bed. Come back some day and we'll talk again...
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