People "telegraphing" their thoughts wasn't technical enough for you?



I agree.

It was also annoying that Brandon seemed to have just one way to provide resolution: make the minor character a leader.

He didn't have enough, so he had scenes where characters who were already leaders were named leaders again.

Tam has been First Captain to all the armies with Perrin since KOD. His reluctance to lead is nonsense, so was a feeling of inadequacy in front of the nobles (KOD scenes made that very clear). He's one of those who showed Perrin by example in TSR that men like them had to step up when duty called... As for the commanders in Perrin's armies, they fell in line the second Tam showed up and they learned his name - they stopped all arguing about plans, trusted that man more than they did Perrin! He'd been Second Captain in an elite force after all.

Uno was another. He was an officer in Shienar, second to Lord Ingtar. Not only that, but the minute he showed up in Salidar, Bryne made him an officer in the Tower Guard, and a trainer too. We saw him lead the escort of the Amyrlin Seat in one scene. That didn't stop Brandon from repeating the whole "simple soldier is called to lead and doesn't like it" pattern with him.

To be fair, it probably wouldn't have been better if Brandon had tried to use RJ's usual POV devices, rather than simply write them in action as he did. The few POVs in which he made the effort were sometimes good, sometimes even worse then those without the usual thoughts/motivations, as Brandon had often weird notions about the motivations of characters.

Another of his weakness, which is also found in his books, he's that he's really not great at depicting social class clashes and interactions. It's all very naive, often parody. His nobles really suck.

Not that RJ was such a master at this, but he usually did well by the mid-series (his depictions of this in the first three books are really bad. Cairhien in TGH is a joke, the Seanchan in TGH are a joke. It's from TSR he found a good balance.), and his choice to give the TR folk an American attitude was kind of funny.

With Brandon it became very naive, back to books 1-3, and worse because it was inconsistent. People switch from over the top honorifics to being on a first name basis in the same scenes. The always easily impressed and too humble Hurin gives everyone Queen this, Lady-that one minute, but the man the Borderlands hold in awe and that even rulers ever call by his name is just "Lan", then later in the scene Queen Elayne is just Elayne. The whole three books are like that, with smaller mistakes like characters who can't seem to decide if the proper way of address is My Lord or just Lord one minute to the next.



I meant to put epic indeed, as I knew you'd bring up the New Weird and Urban fantasy etc., and I don't disagree with that.

I mostly meant the social palette Brandon can pull off convincingly isn't all that large, and doesn't include categories very present in epic fantasy.

Writers like RJ or Tolkien had at least some experience of larger gaps in social classes. RJ is from one of the few regions in the US where this used to be really marked (between his family and his wife's to begin with. His cousin pointed out a Rigney marrying a McDougall would have been socially problematic had they met in their youth, that it was not too unlike Faile and Perrin).



It's mostly interesting because it's pre-9/11 views (1983, IRRC). Not that this makes him a prophet or anything, those issues in their modern incarnations have been around since at least the creation of Israel.

More specifically, Campbell saw problems with the old mythologies that insisted a lot on the believers vs. non believers. He saw this aspect of religions as no longer very desirable, or well adapted to the modern times, a source of conflicts more than anything. He thought in the days of missiles, planes and bombs, humanity could ill afford religious conflicts anymore.



And from his own life, yeah. RJ'S cousin recognized a lot of the TR types in people they met in a village outside Charleston where they went for vacations as kids. He also said there was no lack of women to model Cadsuane on in RJ's life - he's had aunts and grandmothers like her. The village itself is largely based out of disparate elements from pre-civil wall Charleston - the Inn/Green for instance is inspired from a plantation house. The building isn't at all similar (RJ made it into a more classic if small English Inn), and RJ moved the location to the original town square where it stood in place of the first Church. Streets in EF are rather based off specific ones in Old Charleston where Harriet grew up in.

I mean the Seanchan too. Their slavery model was almost purely Eastern, Chinese and Japanese mostly, but readers from his area apparently see many southern references in there too. They suspect RJ probably meant to dig deeper into all that in the outriggers, that he might have been part of his motivation to write those.

There was a documentary in the making centered on RJ as a southern writer, but it seems to have been abandoned.

I'm not quite well-versed enough in southern lit. and history/culture to spot much of that myself.



Quite probable, as the "feel" was wrong in several scenes involving Tuon.




I like them both. Stuff like WOT appeal to a part of me that likes masses of details.



Oh my.

Jordan is a kind of heir to the classic "feuilletonistes" mixed with mid-20th century culture, and of course Tolkien. More Dumas than Dickens or Hugo, obviously.

Sanderson I see more as the child of epic fantasy, action movies and comic books. He's doesn't walk in the steps of the mid-90s writers like Jordan, Hobb etc. so much as he brings into that tradition post-Star Wars pop culture.

I cause a commotion among his fans every time I make that comment, but the writer he reminds me the most of is Kevin J. Anderson.

I think both tend to emulate the effect of movies and comics into their novels, perhaps unconsciously, and it's not that well integrated.

I've read writers who do this consciously and who do it well, and it's.. something else. Quite frankly, I'm not sure it's a style so well adapted to epic Fantasy, or a good avenue to "modernize it". So far it's unconvincing to me, but it seems to please a lot of the younger readers.




It's mostly that I've realized lately I'll end up buried in books like a character in a play by Ionesco if I don't find a way to limit their physical invasion of my living space.

And I start my attempt to change my habits by no longer buying hard copies of fiction books. I've even started giving away a few classics I can get as ebooks for free.




That made me think what my intuitive association of Brandon to YA lit. is all about. It's very close to your views, it turns out. My comparison was bad. It's more that Brandon's novels make me feel the writer is a gifted 16 y.o.. That and his very young characters are often good. His older characters really feel like a teenager's vision of older people. Cadsuane in his hands was a good examples.

The difference between Brandon and writers whose whole universe also originates in adolescent passions but who managed to revisit it later from much more adult perspective (Erikson, Bakker etc.) is great.

Brandon, well... it stills stuck very much in adolescence, emotionally notably.



Without the health issues, I think RJ would have opted for one book split in two volumes.

The major structural weakness of Brandon's three books remains for me to have gone around the sudden, abrupt spiral into darkness RJ obviously planned to have. The core of it was Rand. Perrin, Egwene, Mat all needed fairly short arcs pre-Merrilor suitably blocked/dark/frustrating to make Rand's arc even darker, and it's exactly what RJ had set up with KOD, and it would have worked better that way, giving the epiphany a much greater dramatic importance.

He repeated a big mistake RJ had made with Winter's Heart, were he had the Cleansing happen at the end, only to return to a few pre-Cleansing arcs in the next book.

He tought he could shape the rest into one book and get away with it, but he failed. He made compromises in KOD (compressing Egwene's and Rand's arcs, notably) to make sure this wouldn't happen to him again with the finale.

But Brandon made it all happen again.




Definitely. All we needed to see about Gawyn was him changing side again, which might even have had a better effect if he just suddenly showed up without warning - which is more the sort of things RJ tended to do with this sort of minor players. Gawyn had done more than enough by that point that we knew all too well he was a terrible choice for a warder, and his role in pushing to "rescue" an Egwene who didn't want to be rescued was enough for that.

Sometimes things gain to remain simple. RJ built Gawyn as a variation on some of Mat's themes - a kind of pathetic version of Mat, without the humor nor the intelligence and in opposition with Mat wanting way too much to shine and be the hero when he didn't have what it took for it - and the "rescue" was meant to recall Mat's rescue in the Stone in TDR... but be quite a bit the useless fiasco. Much like Gawyn-Elaida echoed Mat-Tuon, and is sudden flight for his duties to join Egwene after all was meant as a variant on Mat's flight to Ebou Dar, just like Gawyn's misguided hatred of Rand weas meant to be a pathetic variant of Mat's fear of Rand. Mat had defeated him in tournament and in Arthurian tradition symbolically inherited his job as Elayne's knight servant, in a fairly humorous way... messenger, freeing her from a kidnapping, from a monster, lending her his army etc. In the end, Gawyn took on himself to destroy Mat's foe, again abandoning his real duty to stay at Egwene's side, and he failed miserably and dramatically as expected (and that was hilarious). By expanding his arc, Brandon rather diluted all this, tried way too hard to rationalize Gawyn, whom Jordan presented as a confusing loose-cannon, a boar, like his sigil (another Arthurian joke... putting the flaws of players like Gawyn on their sigils rather than their qualities in the real Arthurian fashion).

Not that Jordan wasn't good at diluting too . But looking at the key events of AMOL, he seemed to have planned to bring it all together pretty well in the end.



It wasn't as bad, as in itself TGS works more or less, with its narrower focus. It's only when TOM came out that the full price of having shaped TGS that way became apparent.

AMOL was more typically out of control. It needed to focus more on the characters, and find better ways to report battle developments. It badly needed some bath scenes. Sort of. It was way too plot driven for WOT. For 11 books we'd been closely following perceptions of events by the characters, but the pay-off for this just wasn't there in AMOL. How do Moiraine, DF etc. feel about the LB? How did Siuan felt about Bryne's compulsion? We never really knew. Most of the POV of secondary players focused on battle action.




He was the best choice to move forward fast, as he was a big fan of the series.

That had its own pitfalls, he didn't spend nearly enough time outlining and planning.

The circumstances didn't help either. Brandon's method involves rushing through a first draft after working out an outline, and letting it stew sometimes for years, and rewriting it all after. Harriet really didn't help things when she decided to make him stop drafting a third into the work, and build a novel out of what was written. He would no doubt have caught a lot of the flaws/weaknesses when he was done drafting it all, and in the next rewrite optimize things.



There's that, and the fact for RJ it was mostly about characters. He showed us the details if they mattered to the characters. He often chose to limit his description of a battle to one or two characters. Brandon's version of the fight at the Stone (Sammael's attack) would have featured POVs of Mat, Perrin, Egwene, Elayne, Nynaeve, Aviendha, Loial, Moiraine or Lan. RJ told it all through Rand, we got a few reactions from other players later, in chapters already dealing with other stuff.



Pretty much my perception too. He didn't feel in control of the whole thing. It was battle descriptions rather than battle drama. He had drama peppered through it all, but it was really... diluted. In some parts of the books it was frustrating/hard to follow, with too many POVs and too long stretches between them.

Some people dislike the abruptness of death scenes etc., but I think it's not what didn't work so much as how impersonal/distant it was. Just a few of those scenes worked, Birgitte was one.



TSR is definitely the one I find the most achieved, and the one I prefer re reading. It's also RJ's best structured novel, possibily. The scope wasn't too big he wasn't able to nicely mirror themes and motifs between the story lines. Later he did that, but it was more diluted.

I also rather liked KOD.

LOC is another I rather like thematically, though it has its problems.



In many historical novels as well.



Actually, it might be more that he left more notes about Rand, or that Brandon had a better grasp of the character, as he did with Perrin.

RJ had written the key Mat episode (Ghenjei) and a few more scenes (like the one that I'm sure was meant to be his first in the book: the inn scene in Caemlyn. He never intended to show us what happened between KOD and there, just tell us in that POV).

Then he outlined several conversations between Egwene and visitors, and a few scenes were more advanced. He was working on shaping up her story line.

According to Brandon, he didn't have nearly as much advanced stuff for Rand (dialogue etc. RJ often wrote only the lines, shaping everything else only afterward), but many key scenes were outlined.

Similarly, Perrin was mostly just outlined.

But to give you some sense of how "stretched out" things have been, the Isam scene in the prologue of AMOL, where Lanfear order him to kill Rand, and that reveals the Red Veils, was originally from RJ's prologue). Brandon pretty much returned to the core of Perrin's last arc only in AMOL. He filled it up with a Graendal/Slayer interlude instead.



Apparently not. It was mostly Egwene in TGS, and it's not terribly apparent because Brandon expanded the arc and changed it a lot by not having it start with Elaida throwing her into a cell.



Close to one, in any case. It would have been a total disaster without an outline by RJ. For the "puzzle lovers" it salvaged much of that aspect, at least. The encyclopedia (largely made of reorganized/edited stuff from RJ's notes) will fill in a lot more stuff, in some way that might turn out better for many WOT fans than the three books.

In all fairness, Brandon managed to satisfy probably a majority of WOT fans, especially those who were its more casual readers, not invested in the details, and those who read it purely as entertainment.

Without RJ, the hardcore fans were always gonna be trouble.

And that's WOT, it was always gonna be trouble with most outside the fan base, who never liked it or who started having big problems with the series since the middle books or so (or whose tastes in literature just changed with the years.. a lot of water went under the bridge since the series started).

That said, I'm looking forward to that British fellow returning to finish his WOT read-through. There was a lot I found irritating/too mocking in his reviews of RJ, but what he says of Brandon's books could be funny. Cathartic, maybe.