It's hard to come up with new things to talk about - Edit 1
Before modification by Marshall at 28/06/2012 09:43:59 PM
WoT has been around since 1990, wotmania sometime in the '90s, and RAFO a few years now.
The decrease is partly due to reduced membership after the wotmania->RAFO switch, where we lost quite a few members. News of RJ's death and the RJ->Brandon drastically increased the time gap between KoD and TGS.
On top of that, while Brandon's books progressed the plots quite a bit, they left little to discussion. RJ's books have a LOT of subtext and behind the scenes scheming that we could openly theorize and discuss. Brandon's style of writing is more to the point, and after we go over the major points of the story (i.e. "Rand had an epiphany and his restored faith in mankind was the turning point" ), the subtleties of plot involving the too-young Sitters, the Forsaken, Taim, etc...just aren't really there in the newer stories. There's not as much piecing together the mystery as there is waiting for what's next.
Waiting for what's next doesn't lend itself too well to discussion, and I think this is why the board has suffered. That, and we've had ample time to discuss relevant open mysteries. At this point, people are just...waiting, and occupying themselves otherwise.
The decrease is partly due to reduced membership after the wotmania->RAFO switch, where we lost quite a few members. News of RJ's death and the RJ->Brandon drastically increased the time gap between KoD and TGS.
On top of that, while Brandon's books progressed the plots quite a bit, they left little to discussion. RJ's books have a LOT of subtext and behind the scenes scheming that we could openly theorize and discuss. Brandon's style of writing is more to the point, and after we go over the major points of the story (i.e. "Rand had an epiphany and his restored faith in mankind was the turning point" ), the subtleties of plot involving the too-young Sitters, the Forsaken, Taim, etc...just aren't really there in the newer stories. There's not as much piecing together the mystery as there is waiting for what's next.
Waiting for what's next doesn't lend itself too well to discussion, and I think this is why the board has suffered. That, and we've had ample time to discuss relevant open mysteries. At this point, people are just...waiting, and occupying themselves otherwise.