View original postYeah Egwene's WT time was all kinds of weird. It's one of those occasions not too rare in books, but usually absent from RJ's, where a protagonist alleged master-strategy is basically proven wise because the author proclaimed it so, and made it so, rather than it actually making any sense.

View original postIt's got a distinct Men are from Mars Women from Venus take on things, which at times is irritating but then anything not this-minute modern tends to be. On of my other big favorites, and simultaneous to when I was first reading Eddings, was Anne McCaffrey and her take on feminism includes the heroine being slapped and shaken by the hero regularly. The 'women can't be understood' approach is fairly reasonable for a male author to use its just a queer one when your wife of many years is the co-author. So is the almost endless series of May-December romances which are younger gal to older guy except for two exceptions where the women never age, Sephrenia-Vanion and Polgara-Durnik. I can't help but feel the Brotherhood of Sorcerers suicides might have come off better if one of them fell in love with a mortal women who died of old age or something.

View original postI'll give Eddings some credit for having Garion blunder around in Guardians of the West for a while unrestrained by Prophecy or ancient relatives. Those are some of his better scenes, bringing a pair of Armies to heel then getting chewed out by Belgarath over his pyrotechnics.

View original postYeah I tend to forget about the Tamuli, even in Domes she's gets kicked around a bit and it's probably the biggest plot point of Shining Ones. The problem is that by then she's not the wise and mysterious keeper of dangerous arcana anymore but more of side note to a God-killer and his divine daughter, and the gods have been made rather mundane by that point. It's a habit of Eddings to overpower his main characters and keep writing them even afterwards till it loses it's mystery factor and becomes rather cheesy.