Wheel of Time movie trilogy

It’s true: the Liveship and Rain Wilds stuff is better in that regard.

The Fool’s gender is deliberately ambiguous, but Fitz definitely thinks of him as male, and he’s treated as male throughout the Fitz books.

The term I would use for the Fool these days is “nonbinary”.

Do you mean better at having female main characters? How is that related to how well female characters are written?

Y’all talkin’ about who writes the worst female characters, but I’m just over here wondering how they’ll capture the Dark One’s taint on film.

I assumed saidin wielders would squat over a mirror and look betwixt their testicles and anus for the mark of the Shadow. That’s always where I imagined the Dark One’s taint to be.

Damnit, you beat me to that one. But it was… ahem… low hanging fruit.

Well followed, sir.

Jon Stewart trying to hold it together during the episode in which the Daily Show exposes the taint in Washington is one of the greatest bits in TV history.

Incidentally, this is why saidar remained pure. Women don’t have a taint. Science!

That and Jordan clearly had a thing for, erm, powerful women. I have no other explanation for the godawful Seanchan thing that ground the narrative to a complete halt by book, er, 7-8.

It’s a bit more complex than that, I think. Magic powers a lot of the tech, it’s true (or, creates it in some manner, e.g. fancloth/warder cloaks). I believe the later written worldpedia (not the one that came out with all the dubious character renderings) or whatever gets a bit more detail. But I believe they had long distance communication, many forms of fast travel (both vehicular and things like gateways that didn’t require a channeler to maintain). There are a few hints of this in the book but it’s mostly expanded elsewhere.

And the world is about to undergo a technological revolution again, as the last books show (although it’s just the slightest of glimpses).

Oh hey, I remember the Wheel of Time books. I think they were one of the works that pretty much used up any remaining interest I had in the fantasy genre.

Same, 100%

Took so long for books to be released there in the '90s that by the time I was rereading the saggy middle again, I lost all interest and have been happily 100% sci-fi ever since.

These days during discussions of it I think, “oh that was a fun world”, and then think about how much crap I’d have to sift through to get to some of the fun parts and I’m totally fine with where things stand.

Somebody needs to produce an “editors” cut of the middle bulk of books (ie streamlined and abridged).

I tried to pick up Eye of the World again a year or three back. “I devour shitty pulpy fantasy adventures all the time, what’s to stop me from freshening up on WoT and finally getting around to reading the Sanderson novels. I love Sanderson!”

Made it maybe 100 pages.

Friends, it ain’t great.

I think I read the prologue / single page / single paragraph introduction, then closed the book forever.

EotW is a bit rough. I think people make too much hay out of the rest of it though. It smooths out after book 1 and stays pretty smooth. Yes, it’s very long, but that allows plenty of time for the story to breathe. I recommend listening to it via audiobook instead of trying to read it. That’s what I did; it took more than a year to get through the whole thing, but it was great that way–unhurried, so I had no complaints about pace. I even thought book 10 was ok.

The only major problem with it is that no one writes fantasy like this anymore. Not for adults at least. So it feels weird to read it.

There’s… there’s a lot of really great fantasy out there that’s not WoT…

I don’t doubt that for a moment, just as I’m certain Sony makes great video games and Marvel makes really cool superhero movies. But not being someone who suffers unduly from FOMO and has only so many free hours in a given day, I’m content not knowing.