I don't have a problem with much of this. I understand that Rand was losing his mentors and thus, Asmo needed to be written out. Heck, I can even understand keeping Rand in the dark about what really happened, despite the fact that he didn't seem to care much about Asmo's whereabouts anyway. My problem, then, is the lazy way RJ went about writing the character out.

Let's say I'm writing a story, and have a secondary character named Jake. Jake isn't terribly prominent in the overall story, but does have a important role to play for part of it. Once his role is over though, and he's become redundant, I need to write him out of the story. I do this in the following way:

"And then Jake was murdered."

I then continue on with the story, never giving out any further information on Jake's murder, and none of the other characters seem to give a rat's ass what happened to him.

I think it would be fair to say that most of my readers are going to say "wtf just happened there??" especially if I've shown myself to be a fairly competent writer otherwise. They are either going to think "Jeez Amanda, that was the best you could do? I've read Mary-Sue fics on Fanfiction.net that wrote out characters more elegantly than that!" or "Amanda is a good writer. If she wrote something like that, there must be a reason for it. Maybe Jake's murder is supposed to be a big mystery that will be solved later in the story." Or even just "Hey, I liked Jake. Can't you at least tell us who killed the guy and why instead of tossing him aside like a used kleenex?"

These are valid reactions to lazy writing, and that's what this is. Lazy and half-assed writing in an otherwise good story.



Rand was obsessed with the notion that Asmo had fled? He thinks about it only a few times in all the remaining books. Yes, he thinks Asmo ran off, and yes, we the readers know that Asmo didn't, but that situation would not change if we the readers knew that, not only was he murdered, he was murdered when he bumped into Graendal sneaking around the palace and she wasted him. A quick scene of him surprising Graendal and being killed, or Graendal remembering/telling someone about the events in the following book, would have served the exact same purpose of getting rid of Asmo without Rand knowing what happened to him, while also giving him a proper sendoff to the readers, who had become invested in the character like they would any other semi-important character.



And again, if that's the case, that's lazy writing. Asmo was an important enough character that such a sendoff is unsatisfying to the readers. "And then Jake was murdered" just isn't good enough, especially for a writer like RJ. We expect better.




The readers turned it into a big deal because they gave RJ too much credit and assumed an instance of lazy writing must be a bigger deal than it was. They turned an extremely inelegant way of getting rid of a supporting character into a murder mystery that ultimately had no payoff, because they thought RJ was too good of a writer to do the former. I don't blame them, but I do blame RJ, both for writing Asmo's death that way, and for fanning the flames by being so secretive about it once he found out his readers actually did care about what happened, when he could have easily just written the answer into one of the (immediately) following books or just told us. What he did smacks of stubbornness and an unwillingness to admit that maybe he didn't handle a particular plot point very well.

You say I'm not being fair to RJ, but I think I'm being plenty fair. RJ was a good writer. He showed us that time and time again in his books. Therefore I expect good writing from him. If he doesn't deliver, I'm not going to bend over backward and pretend that he has. It doesn't mean that I think he's a bad writer overall, just that he screwed up in this case, and I'm very disappointed, because this was a polt point that I cared about. I liked Asmo. The character deserved better than to end up like Jake. A quick scene that basically said "lol, Asmo just bumped into Graendal and got his ass handed to him. Poor guy can't catch a break, can he? " would have sufficed. It would have also served the purposes you mentioned (getting rid of Asmo while having Rand not know what happened to him) while also giving him a proper sendoff in the readers' eyes.

Instead, we got "And then Jake was murdered."

Followed by 7 books of pretending that was a perfectly adequate way of wrapping up Jake's story.

Followed by "oh fine! If you REALLY want to know who killed Jake, it was...uh...Jim. Yes, that's it. Jim killed him. For his wallet. Moving on...."


And that sucks.