Timewaster's Guide Archive

As someone who grew up in foster care and have been around a number of different kids who have been abused, I’ve come to the conclusion that those that are traumatized are typically the kids who were passive to begin with. Also, I would recommend you read On Killing by Lt. David Grossman. He has a whole section on the psychology of both the torturer and the one being tortured. More often than not it is the torturer who suffers from long term trauma. Plus, I think it should be added that most of the time in tWoT the hazing isn't done with malicious intent.

I'll give a partial retraction; Rand's experience in the box results in real trauma. In general, I'm not objecting to views about the reality of abuse; I disagree with the author, but I never expect to agree with all an author's opinions. What's extremist in WoT isn't some opinion, but bias in presentation. There is just so much hazing and abuse, and so much glory and strengthening of people thereby. It deserves notoriety, as an idiosyncracy in WoT that it makes such a theme of this. Old Aggie noticed this, as a new reader. I wonder how many other readers notice it, and how much the observation is lost, due to "gender" consuming more bandwidth.

That's really interesting; I never would've noticed that about King Nohaden on my own.

I'm not LDS so I could easily have missed things, but I've read a bit and I find it hard to see LDS parallels in the Shards. In the cosmere only 16 people can become divine, and it's not something their religions encourage, or even know about, whereas in LDS divinity is offered to all humans as part of God's plan. That to me is a pretty big difference. I see sufficient explanation in storytelling and world-building. Humans being able to take the place of a god is a fairly common idea in fantasy. We can guess that Brandon wants a Shard to be powerful enough to make magic systems for one planet, but not so powerful that it provides all the answers and removes the need for faith, and not so powerful that these worlds are utopias without conflict.

In some fiction, the existence and will of God or gods is so obvious that faith never happens anymore; people might have loyalty, but not faith. Characters' experience of religion then is nothing like ours, and frankly a bit boring. It's hardly religion at all if it doesn't require faith. Brandon avoids this so well that I think the Shards are reverse-engineered exactly to provide room for doubt and religious controversy, and to make the characters' religions more genuine.

These are popular complaints I've seen in the fandom since the books were first released, especially that Perrin and Elayne's plotlines were too far of a diversion from the real story. Brandon even analyzed this, and thinks it's due to an overabundance of characters, which leads to entire books where no one's plotline progresses very far (what WoT did), or entire books where some characters never appear (what ASoIaF did). There's no way anyone knows to solve the problem with writing style alone; it's unavoidable if there are this many characters.

I think it would've been a blessing to kill off Perrin and Elayne before the consumed so many pages.  Perrin was awesome up to book 4, and Elayne was fine as a supporting character to Nynaeve before she ran off on her own. The only shame is that they lived longer than that!

Someone managed to get an official comment on this after TGS, although I can't tell from the report whether it's from both Brandon and Harriet, or just from Harriet:

https://docs.google.com/View?docID=dcjspjqg_53c74tbncv&revision=_latest

Myrddraal are not Trollocs who can channel.  Their powers are totally independent from the One Power.  They really are just throwbacks to the human stock.  Harriet added that there are also animal throwbacks, but they just die.

It was a somewhat popular theory for a long time though, which is why it got asked.

Brandon's writeup was so awesome. The only Goodkind jibe it's missing is something about "not fantasy"!

An interesting difference between the front and back covers is that the "big two" in the middle have lines going to little circles in the front one, but not in the back one.

That changes my motive for seeing the middle two as Soulcasting. I thought of Soulcasting as being something connected to everything, instead of connected to 2 powers, which is sort of what's going on in the back cover. But by the front cover, the middle two aren't so special and are still connected to 2 powers each like everything else.

I see this as a parody of fans, not a parody of the GRRM-related blog. Or maybe both. But most of the fun-poking has to be at fans, because complaining about the speed at which Brandon writes books is so silly that someone could only do it jokingly.

I have difficulty deciding between Palah and Nah for Jasnah. She seems very proficient with smoke, and terrible with organic things, which suggests Nah. That would make her Just/Confident instead of Learned/Giving, but it still fits her character.

On the other hand, Vorin associates the double eye with the Almighty's creation of plants and animals. If Soulcasting is the two in the middle, that Pulp and Blood, or Palah and Shash, seems appropriate.