It's very wooden.

He's better with some types of characters closer to him, and he's got a good grasp of some archetypes (the Lan/Perrin types for instance in WOT, the what's-his-name Lan-archetype in Mistborn), but there are types he really can't do that well. Mat was such in WOT. Vin was another in Mistborn. She was a cool action hero, but the execution of her whole background as a though street kid rang totally cartoonish, a middle-class, sheltered 14 y.o.'s vision of a rough childhood. The rest was basically modelled on WOT's Min, one of RJ's more succesful characters (his personal mix of Shaw's Eliza and some of the personality and "powers" of his muse the proto feminist actress F. Farr, who created the role on stage and was Aleister Crowley's Seer in her spare time).





He's one of the "world builders" with the least interesting backgrounds. Jordan lacked the depth of reflection of great writers (most Fantasy writers do. No one has yet created a true masterpiece in the genre, not even Tolkien) and some of his allegories are fairly shallow and in the end sticking very much to conventional mythological wisdom (though the scholars in the field would say it's trying to be "original" there that's foolish. Campbell however used to say that to have a purpose beyond entertainment, "creative mythology" of which epic fantasy is an a fairly literal/first degree incarnation, it should strive to mythologize modern issues. He saw two important ones, one was an emerging clash of the fundamentalist branches of the three Monotheist religions and he thought new mythology striving to present all humanity as one would become necessary, and another "cause" mythology oriented fiction would well serve is that of ecology, modern myths of Gaia. What he liked a lot about SW was that he believed it was a good merging of very ancient myths with American heroes and that he though it mass success contributed to bringing Americans out of the post-Vietnam cultural depression, reconnecting them with modern versions of old figures like the Gunslinger/trickster, for instanvce).

But still, Jordan's Fantasy was still extremely grounded in a rich life experience, a lot of the rest in his cultural experience (the Southern experience). The latter was cut short by his death. The Seanchan worldview vs. Two Rivers worldview is one that suffered most from his death. We'll never know for sure where he was exactly going with that or what he meant to say. Brandon was able to salvage most of Rand, but I suspect for the Seanchan he had little but outlined plot points and no clear idea where RJ drew the rest from, though some southern readers recognize many things, like traits and worldviews.

It's all the more hazy that it seems Jordan was inspired very late in the game to go much deeper into that stuff one day and write a whole trilogy about it. It seems he turned the ending of the series into a set up for this more than anything, and even then it seems likely Brandon wrote the events but with little understanding of where RJ really meant to go.

I tend to agree with you he threatens to become extremely formulaic. I'd wish he stopped a bit throwing out one "cool" idea after another and started deepening the ones he likes the most. He seems on a race to go down as the world builders who created the most universes, but so far they're more entertaining than deep, let's just say. Tons of ideas not pushed very far, with often careless execution. His readership seems very young, and he seems to see himself largely as an entertainer, so perhaps it's not terribly important and he's just one of those writers not really for me. Jordan would not have been, for that matter, if not for the fact I looked at WOT as a fairly entertaining giant puzzle. It also drew me to Malazan, though it's fairly different works, and there are aspects of Erikson that appeal to me much more intellectually. And somehow, Wolfe is also that, just the fancier, more refined version. But in your review you sort of nailed the type of reader I've been and in part I'm the same for Malazan. And to that part of me, Malazan and WOT are so fun in part because they're the 10,000 pieces real deal, not a 100-piece puzzle.



I'm terribly hesitant to pick that one up, though it's so cheap and as I've switched to ebooks for anything I don't care to let clutter my living space, I might try it (but I'm done killing trees to read Brandon Sanderson stories).

I doubt the execution will be very appealing - there's a whole badly assumed YA vibe to his stuff that grates me (while I've no problem with assumed YA books, go figure), though Brandon briefly outlined his plan for the series at a signing I attended, and it seemed fun enough.



That's as good a description as I've seen so far.

One the whole it's also terribly bloated, and the reason for this is simple and not. Brandon's best story arc was Perrin, but he took forever to get comfortable. The first part of his arc was "experimental" and circling around things. He wrote his version of several character development points. It was odd but a bit blatant. He made Perrin his own by repeating steps that already occurred, then he finally moved forward. That's fine practice - he probably should have done that for all characters and compared his result to RJ's old scenes, but he should have thrown the whole thing afterward where it belonged once he was comfortable to move on from there: to the trashcan. Instead he published his Perrin practice, which was good enough, and his Mat practice, which was atrocious.

A more simple explanation relates to his storytelling style. Brandon struggled a lot with character development, and tended to have it all happened onscreen, step by step. He was also obviously not very comfortable with the complex weaving of plot points RJ used. Looking back on previous examples in the series, it's obvious RJ would have needed one or two long-ish Gawyn POVs only to complete his pre-TOM arc. Those chapters would of course have been more static. Gawyn on a horse thinking. Brandon involved Gawyn in a series of more active scenes, the character development trickling slowly through as the scenes were not suited to reflection. With this step by step approach, we ended up with 25 Gawyn scenes in TGS/TOM, several of which were POVs.

He did a bit the same with Egwene. RJ meant to put her in a situation where nothing much happened action-wise, and her POVs would be centered on deep reflections she had plenty of time to do, and on some key encounters. You must remember the surprisingly compressed chapter summarizing her month of captivity in KOD? RJ had set the timeline in stone for the next step with Elaida's dinner. Brandon has revealed that RJ had planned one dinner. Brandon went and split that in two dinners, creating a whole more "active arc" in between. RJ meant Egwene to be constrained to a cell from the start, which forcibly would have massively reduced her pre-Merrilor arc. Brandon used outlines of the encounters with visitors to create her arc. Perrin's arc also feels like it got a similar expansion. RJ had already set things up so he wouldn't be able to travel for weeks. Brandon expanded the timelines a lot, which forced him in turn to to bring in something "new" (the whole dreamspike arc) to buy time. It's all a consequence of the book split. He started by adding a gap of several weeks between Rand's prologue scene and the opening chapter in Arad Doman (when RJ had calculated his stuff so Rand coincided with Elaida's dinner as AMOL opened, Perrin was a bit behind, Mat and Elayne weree ahead and could wait to appear later in the book), which in turn forced him to add a whole meaningless one month gap in Egwene's arc - then he extended things again to allow time for Tuon's forces to come to Tar Valon. He badly calculated his things, adding way more calendar days than necessary, which he had to account for with Perrin and Mat, which became in turn Verin's too long delay, the dreamspike stuff and finally the non-sensical 30 days between Rand's meeting with Egwene and Merrilor ("Time is running out, we must break the seals, but first let's take a month off!".

One might like or not RJ's style, it's a bit beyond the point. The fact remains is ending was conceived to be written in his usual style, using key scenes, a massive amount of ellipses, throwing in long static scenes where he'd bring in several background developments removing any need to show those on screen separately. To get back to my example, with RJ we would have had one Gawyn POV and typically in the prologue, one in which his final decision remains open. Then much later in the book we see the result as he showed up in rebel camp. The rest was Brandon's somewhat amateurish attempt to make sense of a character he didn't really understand (he admitted Gawyn baffled him. He probably should have taken a clue from his ending that Gawyn was meant to be confused and confusing, and we already knew that from previous books and had no need for him to go through it all step by step)



Very poor. It all gives the feeling of having been rushed too. Each arc started with attempts to mimic RJ's style. But as I pointed out, he did that a lot by going back and "erasing" character development already covered and rewritting it much the same way. Way too long set ups, extraneous descriptions that read more like Jordan parodies than anything, and most often terribly placed (spending pages on descriptions of locations already known like Tar Valon at the start of TGS, or inns. Sure, RJ gave us two-sentences descriptions of each one - and generic/repetitive ones at that, but paragraphs to describe the tables, the whole background of the innkeeper, the clientele etc. - all this for a location with no significance overall was bordering parody. The Winespring Inn didn't even get as many lines.) . A lot of pages got wasted on this and extraneous scenes, and the more each arc progressed, the more "Brandon-like" they became (AMOL just picked this up right away). Short scenes usually filling only one purpose, rushing through things, compressing the developments we'd have liked to see expanded more (Moiraine's return in one example), the secondary characters present in early scenes suddenly vanishing.

As for "lacks of pay-offs", yeah RJ did some of that, in way. He was never one to to indulge the readers with gratuitous battle scenes. Typically he gave us the build up and the start, then there were ellipses and he gave up key moments, and generally the ending. Dumai's Wells is like that, the battle of Cairhien is like that, the Seanchan battle is like that, and Malden is like that. To readers who complained, RJ used to point out he was writing a story not documenting battles in a military history book (I paraphrase him massively there...)

The way Brandon approached it all step by step was very un-RJ like. Part of it was good, part of it was terribly tedious. But RJ knew this stuff, was both a veteran quite able to bring us close in the chaos of some fighting while alluding, giving us enough of a sense of the global thing. Brandon doesn't have this background, and what he wrote felt like him following step by step the notes left him by Allan and the military historian he used as advisor. He had little personal instinct to pick what he needed to show, and it felt as if the whole thing overwhelmed him and he couldn't find his pace and didn't master/understand the events enough to craft them into proper drama. In KOD RJ explained us the strategy, briefly, showed us a little of it in play, then focused on Perrin's close and very chaotic encounters as the battle went on as planned in the background (he did much the same at Dumai's Wells). Some found that frustrating, others like me didn't. When I want to read the sort of stuff Brandon painfully described step by step in AMOL, I open a military history books - and at least those know their stuff! In fiction I want to be with the characters and up close, not remain behind watching the global battle in details with the general. These flanks those and whatnot. Who cares?




He did that. I know much of that is intentional, to create the feeling of patterns, but I agree he overdid the whole concept.




Which would have given us another story. It's mostly his more static approach that let him cram WOT with so many side events and such a big cast. Which some like, and some didn't. He could have written it as a simpler, more interactive story, I agree. It would probably not have been one I cared as much for, personally. It's more in the vein of his first three books, which aren't quite my favorites. one. They're more classic, epic fantasy. They're more generic, too.



It was that.

They do have individuality, but there's so many of them most readers lost track or stopped caring. Their parts are also so small, and the way RJ brought them to life not so interesting to readers who enjoy more psychological approaches, that to many they appear purely generic, and in that perspective they are. Only hardcore readers have memorized the subtle differences and can track them from scene to scene.. and we spotted all the little mistakes Brandon made. Most readers didn't notice Cadsuane's body language was off, or that Rand commenting on Nynaeve's clothing was incongruous, or that Egwene noticed and commented on the wrong things in a room that normally you'd rather have in, say, a Nynaeve POV but not in hers. But when it comes to tertiary players like Pevara, it's really just the maniacs who can list all the little differences in her thinking or the way she acted when Brandon or RJ wrote her.

Many of RJ's characters were somewhat cardboard, but they were well made cardboards, and terribly consistent through the series. In many cases, Brandon just brandished blank cardboards with a name of them, or made them parodies of their former selves.




Part of that is because Brandon didn't have the balls to do what it's fairly obvious RJ meant to do, which was to make the readers totally appalled by Mat's decisions, and turn the characters who depended on him against him. By KOD, RJ had seriously darkened Mat. He was a more thoughtful, more sober, but at the same time his usual paranoia, his prejudices were still there. RJ had made Mat evolve from a funny trickster à la Reynard the Fox into the much darker trickters, the ones you can't be sure you should rely on or accept help from, as they might well turn around... when their tricks don't turn on you and cause the "end of the world". Mat's tricks were no longer inoffensive, the trickster was killing thousands of her own soldiers merely to open a path for his wife. Very costly. The Merrilor battle should have been more frightening, with Mat sacrificing tens of thousands for victory.

Brandon seems to have misunderstood what sort of regression RJ meant to bring Mat through. He made him return to his EF self, goofy and rather idiotic, going for the big laughs. He didn't get at all that RJ meant Mat to be suddenly less and less funny, or rather to become more and more uncomfortably funny.

Mat was another of RJ's really quite succesful characters, full of layers. Brandon ruined him, though. We got a good Perrin, a more than decent Rand, and pretty good if someone annoying version of Egwene. Nynaeve wasn't that bad, and Min. But Mat is a complete fiasco from start to finish. Elayne is close to that too, IMO, if not as bad.

For all that, there are aspects Brandon was massively more succesful with than I ever expected he could be. He completely "got" that the series was made of patterns, and used them really well. Following RJ's outline he would have included many accidentally anyway, but he went much further than that as he got it. I rather liked his Perrin-Lanfear arc in AMOL, and his Faile one was also fairly good. His Rand in TGS was mostly great.

In that sense, he salvaged a lot more than I thought he could.