Off-Topic General Discussion - Page 4285

I don't know, as I read more and more I get less and less annoyed by the characters, I feel like when I was younger I was seeing the rand/mat/perrin perspective of being perplexed and now im slightly wiser I can see a more top down perspective of these young idiots with a lot of power and influence botching things while the adults try to rein everything in (remember in book 2 Verin is trying to talk the way out of everything with whitecloaks and suddenly Elayne starts proclaiming her heiress status and egwene starts channeling at them LOL
probably before I was like YEAH YOU GO GIRL SHOW THOSE WHITECLOAK CUNTS and now im just like IDIOTS JUST WAIT FOR VERIN TO SORT IT)

I get what you mean about the characters. The evil guys are little too evil and the good guys are a little too good but then its a good vs evil story and it never claims to be anything else. GRRM has great characters but I don't really like most of them. I like pretty much all the characters in WoT even if they annoy me sometimes.

The gender dynamics are prevalent a lot which tends to be rare in a fantasy. It's usually handled by like having either only a few female characters (tolkien etc) or having them pretty much the same as male characters but they just have to experience the setting as a female so they have a lot of new challenges (thats what I see a lot inASOIAF, Brienne Arya basically do guy things as women, Cersei always complains about being a woman and Cersei/CAtelyn are just like male characters but with strong protectiveness toward their kids.)

But then its handled a bit awkwardly in WoT because its SUPER segregated and genders are paired way more than in our current setting which leads to cool dynamics but then you share a lot of similarities between characters of the same gender (women with all the hands on hips yelling at men to see sense and men with the overprotectiveness recklessness and stoicism)

I think you have to give some leeway to RJ since men are obviously going to have a harder time seeing into the mind of a woman and vice-versa. When I read fantasy by women the male main characters can tend to be a bit more bland in terms of the nuances of their thought processes, for example, while the female characters can be more interesting with strange nuances and dislikes/likes. Even if the characters themselves are well grounded and defined.

-Nynaeve is my favourite character nowadays, she shows incredible bravery and determination (rand level shit but with more intelligence and humour) but she has huge issues emotionally obviously and she develops that quite a bit.
the contradictions in nynaeves thought processes are constant and hilarious and she's aware of them in a way but emotionally she can't handle the truth.
-Egwene I dislike a bit more she's clearly really immature but strong willed and thats how she gets away with it most of the time. very childish but matures a lot with the Aiel.
-Elayne is clearly a spoilt rich kid with daddy issues but definitely a good egg hilariously brave also.
(Nynaeve and elayne constantly dick-measuring bravery against each other LOL
in tanchico when they didn't want to channel to avoid attracting attention when they didn't take escorts and were getting mugged elayne charged some dude with a cudgel screaming "FOR THE WHITE LION" LOOOL)
All the browbeating and bullying a lot of people thought was weird I thought it seemed like a standard exasperated country woman but it could be just me being biased because i like the books so much
also not many readers come from the country i suppose lol

-Perrin annoys me a lot too the whole point is that he's basically just really retarded ("i think slowly hurr") and
has trouble coming to some of the correct conclusions.
Faile is annoyed constantly because she takes his overprotectiveness as lack of respect and its a clash of cultures where perrin comes from the two rivers thing of your always put the woman first and if she's acting mad you just bear it and apologize while Faile wants to be treated as an equal and she's a lot cleverer and more competent than him but if she has to explain everything to him then its degrading to him so she's mad all the time.


I'm surprised you were overly annoyed about the ending. It's a good vs evil novel and a lot of bad shit happened anyway but you know good has to win in the end. I don't see why killing some main characters is necessarily a good thing. A ton of other guys died I don't think its too bad to have most of the main characters doing alright. It's difficult to feel good about an ending when the good guys won but you have nobody alive that would make you feel good about them winning.
I thought sandersons work was excellent honestly probably much better than jordan could have finished it at his age and health