Re: Sorry. But that is simply an escape clause for Sanderson to change whatever rules he wants... - Edit 1
Before modification by muppet at 31/01/2013 02:16:22 PM
God knows RJ never used any escape clauses.
What every fantasy reader has to accept is that their favorite series, however long, detailed, and well regarded, is not a historical record or a technical manual. It is a fantasy story. There will be inconsistencies. RJ wasn't 100% consistent. He allowed himself loopholes. His notes could have dictated precisely what Brandon did with the Last Battle. We don't know. We likely WON'T know.
The choice we have as readers is to accept the new canon and work it into the story, as it IS official canon, or we can get upset and worked up about it and treat the "pure" RJ-only volumes as some sort of Bible and angrily proselytize about it. I just don't see the utility in the latter. Brandon picked up a MAJOR corpus of work, unfinished, with notes of who knows what complexity or completeness, without RJ to interpret them, or to say of one page of notes or antoher "Oh yeah, I was banging something out there but it was a dead-end, you can toss that." Given the task, he did a great job.
We can sit around moaning that RJ had the audacity to die before finishing so that we could all sit around griping about HIS ending instead, or we can enjoy the series at face value as a fantasy tale and get over it.
What every fantasy reader has to accept is that their favorite series, however long, detailed, and well regarded, is not a historical record or a technical manual. It is a fantasy story. There will be inconsistencies. RJ wasn't 100% consistent. He allowed himself loopholes. His notes could have dictated precisely what Brandon did with the Last Battle. We don't know. We likely WON'T know.
The choice we have as readers is to accept the new canon and work it into the story, as it IS official canon, or we can get upset and worked up about it and treat the "pure" RJ-only volumes as some sort of Bible and angrily proselytize about it. I just don't see the utility in the latter. Brandon picked up a MAJOR corpus of work, unfinished, with notes of who knows what complexity or completeness, without RJ to interpret them, or to say of one page of notes or antoher "Oh yeah, I was banging something out there but it was a dead-end, you can toss that." Given the task, he did a great job.
We can sit around moaning that RJ had the audacity to die before finishing so that we could all sit around griping about HIS ending instead, or we can enjoy the series at face value as a fantasy tale and get over it.