Alright. Well, as promised, I’m going to actually make an effort to talking about books instead of just video games and that nonsense. Way I figure, that’s more of where most of your interests lie in the first place. I’ve just struggled to find a good way to put my feelings towards this series because it is so special to me. Especially because some of how it’s special to me is hard to put into words. Not exactly like what I mentioned with Ys in my last one of these — that it’s something which feels like it’s always been with me and I just needed to discover it — but still a very experiential matter. To the point that I love this series more as an experience than the story itself. Or rather reading it felt like I was experiencing the story rather than just hearing about it, like I was immersed in the working of this world even if still only an observer. And since that’s enough dancing around the topic: the series is the Wheel of Time [Footnote 1]. Now the Wheel of Time is a monolithic thing that’s been around for decades. As such, there are a lot of people more qualified than me who’ve been invested in it for a lot longer than me. So if you really want to know about the series, really want in depth discussion and analysis, you should find them because they could do a better job than I ever could. I want to make clear from the beginning that this is only intended as a surface-level inspection largely revolving around my own experiences with the series.
So to begin with, a brief discussion of what the Wheel of Time is for those of you who haven’t heard of it. Put simply, it’s a series of fourteen [Footnote 2] books revolving around a group of… kids? Young adults? I think they’re supposed to be around eighteen if I remember correctly — from a town out in the (relative) middle of nowhere who get caught up in the (actually basically literal) spiral of fate as the setting equivalent end(ish) times come near. It tends to be the posterchild for the long, expansive fantasy series [Footnote 3]. It starts with the Eye of the World, which is a fairly straightforward fantasy story (comparatively) of ‘mysterious figure sweeps into town and drags farm-kid protagonists on a grand adventure’ and ends with A Memory of Light, effectively an entire book about the final battle and the direct lead up to it. And, one of the more fascinating things about the series that I’d love to discuss if I didn’t have something else in mind, the general feel of the books tends to shift and grow over the course of the series as the conflict spreads and grows. To put it more clearly, Eye of the World functions perfectly fine as a standalone adventure novel. Sure, it was obviously meant to be part of a series and the final conflict doesn’t have a feeling of finality to it because of this, but it is a satisfying story in its own right. Then looking at the first three books on their own, it feels as if they would function perfectly fine as a standalone fantasy trilogy in their own right. So I’d say that even if you are daunted by the length of the series, you don’t really have anything to lose by just trying the first book or few books and seeing if you like them.
Now, this is the part that I kinda struggled with putting into words because it feels like a kind of ‘not my place’ thing. And that’s how the series is special to me. I mean, I’m just some random guy, so why should my perspective really matter? But I don’t think I can bring up the Wheel of Time without talking about why it matters. So to start off with, like I said earlier, the series felt more like an experience to me than anything else and that’s how I would put it to anyone asking about the series. It’s an experience. If you’re going to read them, you need to be willing to just put yourself into the world and experience it. To the point that I have trouble really comparing it to other books or bandying about words like ‘favorite’. I can’t really say that the Wheel of Time is one of my favorite book series because what I like about it is so different from what I like about other books. And when I started to feel this way, started to realize how much these books meant to me in this odd way, I felt like I wanted to be able to do the same for someone else. I wanted to be able to write something that could affect other people in the same way the Wheel of Time had me. So I started working on the Ember Kings Inheritance. Now I wouldn’t precisely say that the Wheel of Time got me started writing — I had toyed around with minor projects through most of my childhood, but they were all crap [Footnote 4] — but it is what actually gave me the drive to take it seriously and see it through to the end [Footnote 5]. And of course, I also don’t have any pretentions about being anywhere near as good as the Wheel of Time, but… Well, this whole Ramblings thing is meant to discuss my inspiration and it doesn’t get much more ‘inspiration’ than that. Anyway, that drive is what led me to not just jump right in to the story like I had so many times before and actually start thinking about the world around it, trying to flesh out the setting and the conflict before putting things to paper [Footnote 6]. So yeah. The Wheel of Time is very important to me in that regard.
And with that out of the way, I can move on to discussing things I think the series did well. Or thing, in this case because I need to keep some sort of limit to how long this is and want to retain at least some semblance of coherency. I really, really want to talk about the ties to real-world mythology [Footnote 7], but think that would betray the whole ‘semblance of coherency’ thing. So instead, one of the things I think the Wheel of Time does best is present a world that feels like, well, a world. Now I know that sounds like an obvious thing and is in fact what world-building exists for, but I don’t really mean world-building in the same sense it’s usually used. I think. At least not directly. Put another way, it feels like a lot of stories — regardless of medium — have something of a tendency to feel like it’s the only thing that happens in that world. Or rather, that the story we hear about is the biggest event that ever happened in the world and everything after just kind of dissolves into the vague happily ever after of resolution [Footnote 8]. And… This is also a bit of a touchy subject because A) that kind of resolution isn’t necessarily a bad thing, B ) leaving things too open-ended can have the opposite effect of making the story feel unfinished, and C) you run the risk of making the story feel cheap if a potentially more interesting story is mentioned in the background, but never touched upon further [Footnote 9]. But the Wheel of Time doesn’t feel like it falls into any of these traps, in large part because of the core of the setting philosophy in ‘the Wheel turns as the Wheel wills’. Or maybe ‘memory fades to legend, legend to myth, and even myth is forgotten when the Age that spawned it comes again’. I’m not sure which is more applicable in this case. Put plainly, the whole setting is built upon a cyclical cosmology; that everything which is happening has happened before and will happen again [Footnote 10]. So to actually explain what I mean, let’s leap right into it.
To start with, as always, we should look to the past. Or rather, the book’s past. The foundational building blocks of the setting. Because this is in many ways how the Wheel of Time shines: its in world mythos. Even from the first book, the story manages to convey that this is an antique world [Footnote 11]. It’s lived in and countless other conflicts have come before, conflicts that shaped the world and primed it for the plot of the series to happen. The best example of this is in the previous age, in which the previous Dragon (basically chosen one, for those not in tune with the lore) Lews Therin Telamon sealed away the Dark One along with the Thirteen Forsaken. And then he broke the world and caused massive continental restructuring when he went insane from the corruption to Saidin caused by the method in which he sealed the Dark One away [Footnote 12]. From that information alone, we’re told that a similar conflict to the one we read about has happened before. That this world has effectively ended more than once before. And it casts the stakes for what could happen in even the worst best case scenario; that even if the protagonists win and the villains are defeated, the world could still end up all but destroyed as a result of their efforts to save it. But that’s about all we get. Sure, we’re told more about the previous age. We learn about the backstories of some of the characters relevant to it when they come up and more or less find out how the Dark One became a threat in the previous age [Footnote 13]. But the conflict itself is kept vague. We’re allowed to imagine it for ourselves as the series goes on, especially when we see Tarmon Gai’don ourselves in A Memory of Light. In that same way, the general feel of the previous age is kept largely up to the imagination too. We’re given a few details; like that they still had Channelers, they apparently developed a kind of camouflaging cloth in what would later be used for Warder’s cloaks, they apparently had anti-gravity technology which they used to make hovercar-like vehicles, sword-fighting was a lost art which Lews Therin rediscovered and implemented as a nonlethal sport, etc. All in all, details which give the impression of a kind of utopian, futuristic to us, society run by mages. So it has he same kind of legendary feeling that our own history can have to us. There are tidbits here and there, pieces of the story that allow us to put together a larger picture of what the past looked like to both the characters in the setting and to us on the outside. We get the sense that the time of Lews Therin is much like the ambiguous time of Greek myth would be for us; a time of unimaginable fantasy and impossibly powerful heroes struggling against demonic villains. So those demonic villains, the Forsaken, are effectively legendary bed-time story figures for most of the characters and it carries a unique impact when they show up as villains. And more impact when it turns out that they’re still only Human after all and not much more powerful than the strongest people of the present; they just have the advantage of knowledge.
Then there’s the other end of the spectrum: what Lews Therin’s time looks like to us. Because as I said earlier, it seems ostensibly futuristic, because it is. Within the cosmology [Footnote 14] of the Wheel of Time, our history, our current present, is merely one of the ages that happened before and will happen again. There are references to things like ‘Merk and Mosk’ which can be parsed out to ‘America’ and ‘Moscow’ [Footnote 15] and even further when taking into consideration the Horn of Valere. Several of the heroes summoned by it are rather obviously mythological figures in our own time like ‘Mikel of the Pure Heart’, ‘Amaresu’, and ‘Paedrig the Peacemaker’ translating fairly directly to Michael the Archangel, Amaterasu, and Saint Patrick respectively [Footnote 16]. All references that are kept brief, but enough to show our world’s influence on Randland in the same way the likes of Rand Al’Thor, Egwene Al’vere, and Thom Merrilin can be derived into Rand ‘Arthur’, E-‘Guinevere’, and Thom ‘Merlin’ to show how Randland influences our present. Thus the time of Lews Therin coming across as futuristic to us shows the way the world changes, the way perspectives change along with history and what we can justify as technology becomes outright magic when viewed from a people that have Channelers who can manipulate to fabric of reality living among them. And that’s precisely the kind of natural fabric to the world of the story that I like. It shows how people and perspectives change over time even if everything else stays the same. That as things start to draw to a close on the age of Rand and his friends, they start to crawl closer to our modern perspectives with things like the invention of ‘Dragons’ [Footnote 17] and a brief vision of the future showing things like trains and electrical lighting. I think. I’m pretty sure that happened?
And that’s not the only way that the breadth of the world is put across. Because there are other parts of the world that are barely touched upon that make it clear the world is bigger by far than we ever see. There’s the likes of Seanchan, an entire Empire that we never see [Footnote 18] and only hear about from its invasion force. There’s Shara, a truly massive land that you only learn about through a single short story and when they suddenly became a major problem very, very quickly. And of course, there’s Finnland [Footnote 19], the other-worldly home of the Aelfinn and Eelfinn. With Seanchan, we’re given enough information about their history and culture to piece together the knowledge that there is far more going on with them than depicted in the story. That their entire continent is consumed in a political conflict that simply isn’t relevant to the story we’re hearing about but could be an entire story of its own. With Shara, there’s an entire land to explore because of how little is known about it. And Finnland opens up so much of the world because it proves that ‘Earth’, the place where Humanity normally lives is not the only part of the world. But we only ever see as much of any of these places as is necessary for the story and the rest of it is left to our imagination. We don’t know what the power structure of the Finn is like or even really how the Aelfinn and Eelfinn feel about each other because it doesn’t really matter. Which leaves it as one of those mysteries of the world that we can ponder and consider and makes the story feel more real because there is so much to our own world that we as individuals do not know and likely will not ever know because it isn’t a part of our lives. That above all is something I feel that’s lost in a lot of stories: the sense of the open frontier. Of things that are simply never explained and remain a mystery. Much like I said above, the way that it can feel like the narrow scope of the story we read or experience is all there is to the world. And admittedly, it’s very difficult to manage since if the ‘mystery’ is too important than lacking an explanation will harm the main narrative and if the ‘mystery’ is too unimportant it can feel incredibly artificial. But, well, the world is a big place. And the worlds we write should be the same.
That, I reckon, is where I’ll leave things. I feel like this is a large disservice to a story that I love and doesn’t really capture much of what I wanted to say about it, but… At this point it’s fairly clear that this is only burdening me. It took two months to get this done, for pity’s sake. I’m better off continuing forward so that I can keep talking about other things to you guys. We’ll see what I decide on for the end of month. Maybe another series, maybe a worldbuilding page on metallurgy. We’ll see.
Footnote 1: Book series, not television series. Which leads into… Well, I’ve said that I don’t want to criticize things or speak down to works because it’s not my job nor my place. But I do feel like silence would be as telling in any case when the subject is already mentioned So simply put: I did not especially like the television series. Largely because of adaptational issues and particularly because it felt as though the tone of the show completely missed the tone of the books. To wit: it felt like they were trying to capture the feeling of a certain other fantasy series rather than Randland. But all of this is only my feelings on the show and hardly an objective review and or criticism. If you have interest in the show, by all means watch it. I was biased from the start.
Footnote 2: Fifteen if you count New Spring, which… I mean, it’s a prequel and so it does relate to the story, but it’s not exactly part of it. I can see an argument for either.
Footnote 3: Even as someone who liked the series from beginning to end, I can’t deny that some of the middle books were a little slow. It’s telling that over the year or so I read the entire series, about six months were spent on Winter’s Heart.
Footnote 4: And, fun fact, Nocturne of Fog is not actually my first published work. I had a kind of flash-story written for a class in high school published in a magazine. But that’s under my real name
(and still not very good), so I wouldn’t bother looking for it.
Footnote 5: The fact that it took a solid five or so years from the resolving moment to publishing is beside the point. I wasn’t really able to focus my full attention on writing for the first two years because of other commitments and the last year was really mostly administrative stuff anyway. I’m not making excuses. Hush, you.
Footnote 6: Then I decided to take a creative writing course and immediately leapt into the story with hardly any of the world-building I meant to do actually done. Whoops. Like, for the longest time Maripphi and Viemer were just kind of ‘those places in the northern part of the map the characters probably won’t ever go’. Ironically, I don’t think the latter half of that statement is true anymore.
Footnote 7: Especially since I consider this as technically falling under the purview of Arthurian mythos. Which, if I haven’t mentioned before, I am very, very fond of.
Footnote 8: Genre dependent, of course. Horror stories, for instance, may not take such a happy-go-lucky mood to their resolution. The point is more that things settle back in to a kind of timeless malaise.
Footnote 9: To be sure, that’s something to keep in mind when looking at any story: the reason we as the audience are seeing the story is because it is something exceptional in the story’s world. If it were just another year in the life, we as the audience wouldn’t care [Footnote 9A]. But there’s an important distinction be made between a story being the most relevant event, the thing worth having an audience hear about, and the only event.
Footnote 9A: With that being said, here are definitely compelling slice-of-life stories, it’s just a different matter entirely. When you get down to it, the fundamental driving force of such a story is different. And similarly, if the point of the story is that it isn’t this world-shaking, most relevant event in the setting, then that works too. It’s just a matter of considering why we as the audience are looking at what we’re looking at; if it’s an intentional affectation or just a failure to grasp at a more interesting thread.
Footnote 10: Kind of. I’m not really sure how we’re actually supposed to take the influence of Balefire on this whole cycle. Like, the next go around with Rand and Co, will there only be nine Forsaken? Were there originally way, way more Forsaken in the first cycle? These are the things that eat at my mind.
Footnote 11: Our own, in fact. Just very far in the future and or past. Arguably, that’s why there isn’t actually a name given to the setting; because it’s just Earth. Even still, the most common nickname for the setting is Randland, after the (primary) protagonist.
Footnote 12: I promise you, none of this is spoilers. This is all background information that’ you basically find out ‘s common knowledge in the setting proper.
Footnote 13: Put simply, the equivalent of scientists found him(?) sealed away and thought ‘alternative energy source’. Which actually, combined with the other general impression given of the previous age, reminds me a lot of Helck in retrospect. “It’s the perfect analogy, the Will of the World as Shai’tan.” Don’t worry (or do). I intend to talk about Helck later because I really love that series too.
Footnote 13A: “They are merely fictional characters, Neurotic Hermit.” – the Twisted Jerk.
Footnote 14: This doesn’t feel like the right word, but oh well. It’s the one I’m using.
Footnote 15: Specifically, Merk and Mosk are mentioned as ‘Giants who fought with spears of fire’, or something of the sort. A reference to the Cold War and nuclear weapons.
Footnote 16: And since his gets too close to delving into mythological ties and I need some self control, I’ll cut it off there.
Footnote 17: Cannons. They’re cannons. There are also some rudimentary grenades tossed about at some points, but they’re a little less dramatic.
Footnote 18: Shut up about that one time Rand and Aviendha went teleporting all over the world. That doesn’t count.
Footnote 19: Yes, yes. ‘Sindhol’. But you know why I’m calling it Finnland and I’m sticking to it.
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