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Re: Hey, looks like I finally read it. DomA Send a noteboard - 22/08/2013 12:46:54 AM

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Wow, I hadn't realised how many Wise Ones there would be. That's actually pretty ridiculous when comparing to the White Tower's numbers. Though I guess it serves to illustrate how much the Aes Sedai shot themselves in the foot with their recruiting practices. The numbers of Novices found by the Salidar Aes Sedai is well established as being massive.

But even the White Tower's numbers make Demandred's boast of four hundred Ayyad sound absurd.

Yeah, now that you guys mention it, I remember thinking "so what?" at that part. I had, in times past, questioned the importance of the White Tower unification storyline in the general scheme of things, since all they bring to the table are a small quantity of inferior channelers. I was thus very aware of the rough numbers of channelers united under the light. I was power-reading through it though, and filed under things to puzzle out later, but didn't pay much attention, because, again, the character stuff has always been more interesting.

AMoL avoided giving numbers for the armies so much, that I had managed to just ignore that this was even going on.....

Still, as I hang out on Vs debating sites so much, I'm well aware of how much BS nurfed the OP..... And most of it I, after a bit of time, have managed to just write off as "well it's a lot more complex magic system then the ones he tends to make(which he normally does well with), and he's not the one who made it, so he couldn't know it as well as one he did, so... While not "good", e really didn't do that bad a job, and likely to best we were going to get."..... Most of it.


The part I find truly "WTF!?!?" is every channeler just forgetting they can make physics raping solid, to barrow a DC Green Lantern term, "constructs" out of the different powers(though normally done with ether Air, or as in the case of Rand's trademark Fire), which not only makes makes up the basic channeler defensive weave "shield of Air" that used a thousand times in the books, but also, in a particularly "how the fuck could you of missed this?!" case, is how their "might as well be TK" weaves work, used every time a channel picked something up, or held someone in place......

But no, when BS-channelers think "what would be the best way to defend ourselves from arrows?" rather then just makes a hard as steel shield, that by WOG is completely unaffected by mundane things like arrows no matter how many get thrown at it, they think "Oh I know, I'll make a small whirlwind around myself!"..... When someone wants to knock someone around in AMoL, do they use the actual cubs of Air they've used for all the books? No, they just use gust of wind....

Like I said, I can just write it off when the mechanics of linking seem to change from book to book, never matching up with what RJ already showed them to be, but how, the, fuck, did, he, miss, every, single, time, a, channeler, caught, someone/thing, in, flows, of, Air, to, say, noting, about, all, the, cases, of, walls, and, shields, of, Air.............

I can get not catching that time Rand(briefly) sword fought a Fade with his fire-sword weave that showed "yes, it is in fact solid fire", but..... The cases of Air are all over the place, in all of the pre-BS books, hell, one of the first things Siuan showed the girls WAY back in that lesson on the way to TV in TGH, was her just up and making a perfectly useable dagger out of Air.

Missing all that That's just a "What the bloody fuck?!?!?!" to me.


Like any other hardcore fan, I'm quite sure Brandon could have managed it with the proper time and effort to do it.

It's much like his bad habit of replacing minor existing players by picket fences with fan names. It did save him a whole lot of time which, considering the pressure/deadline Harriet imposed, he probably didn't have.

A whole lot of the problems came from that. Brandon first drafted two story lines and a half thinking he would finish the whole thing and then step back and look at the whole before rewriting parts that didn't work so well, incorporating stuff he had completely missed etc., which is normally his own work method.

Instead he underestimated how much work remained, he ran late and, long story short, they ended up putting together a book out of his two story lines, with the rest still existing only in vague outline form. A whole lot of the efforts went to structure TGS, write the missing scenes from other story lines etc.

The time when Brandon should have stepped back to look closely at the OP mechanics he used by instinct while drafting (which is okay ... he doesn't want to kill his momentum and even with his own magic systems he makes mistakes or turn corners short in that phase of the process), validating or changing them by comparing what he did to the notes and past books never seemed to have happened in the end.

The two other books were similarly rushed, in the sense that there was so much stuff to revise in editing to make it work and avoid continuity errors etc. that it seems there was little to no time left to polish, beside the fact that a lot of things were not optimal because they had been published before Brandon got to the end of the drafting phase (resulting in stuff like the envoys of Egwene spending way, way too long a time at the BT to be credible etc. That one came from syncing Rand and Egwene, when RJ pretty much had set things up for most of the Arad Doman story line to take place before Egwene's first scene in AMOL. In his restructuring, Brandon decided to have an ellipse of a few weeks for Rand before his first AD scene, to catch up with Egwene, who was given a long story line in turn (He basically undid what RJ had carefully aligned in KOD, by having a whole month of Egwene's story in one chapter, and by jumping forward with an Elayne wrap up and Mat having left Tuon... in order not to return to Egwene or Mat at the beginning of AMOL... focusing on wrapping up Perrin and starting Rand's descent into madness for a while, before gradually re introducing Elayne, Mat and Egwene when the chronology caught up with them, and in the middle of the Rand mess and Perrin being stuck. RJ's outline planned for Egwene to end up jailed almost right away. Brandon decided he'd rather have two dinners with Elaida with RJ's planned outcome happening in the second. This way he had an Egwene story line to play out against Rand's. But it's no wonder he ended up needing three books to tell what RJ had set up to happen over one very long book.).

No doubt the book would have been better had Brandon spent the whole time it took for the three books to come out finishing the whole thing first, than revise and optimize it (as RJ himself would have done), spend all the time necessary in editing and as many drafts as necessary, before splitting the whole in two books for publishing purposes. Had Brandon done that, perhaps it would have become obvious why RJ had made some decisions (like the much shorter pre-TG arcs for Egwene and Mat) and his intent for the structure of the story would have become more evident.

But then, there was the impatient part of the fanbase already unhappy not to get the whole thing by the time TGS was released, so they had pressure and hard decisions to make. Quality has suffered though, there's little doubt about that.

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