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What is the worst experience you've had reading a book?
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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The Wheel of Time series.
Great story; bad books. Literally, the books fell apart while I was reading them. Cheap-ass paperbacks...
Twins! But I hated the protagonist more than the book's quality.
There are over a thousand named characters in the Wheel of Time. I think I actually liked less than ten, and only one of them was part of the Emon's Field crew (Matt, after he stops whining and becomes an actual competent person - due to magic, of course, because positive character development only happens via deus ex machina in this series).
Same! I loved Matt once he started becoming a master general and strategist. But the other 999 characters were not worth suffering through to get to his chapters.
Matt and his crew, Thom, Aviendha, Min, Verin... There are so few likeable characters, especially amongst the women (you could write an entire book about how WoT handles women - I should note two of the three I listed as likeable are tomboys and were therefore saved from Jordan's normal characterization). And due to the aforementioned thousand named characters, the good ones get almost no screen time.
But there's always time for Egwene and Faile, the two worst "good" characters. Don't you want to know what Salidar or the Shaido are(n't) up to for the billionth time?
It's funny. I actually liked the Wheel of Time, but any time I talk about it it's to rant about its flaws.
That's because the characters just serve as tour guides for the detailed and compelling world building. It's funny that I've read the books over and over and couldn't tell you much about the plot or what happens when or why but I can tell you about how Seanchan nobles wear their fingernails and the meaning of those knives Ebou Dari women wear around their necks or how seafolk political hierarchies work in a nomadic ocean based society. I think I read it over and over again just to spend more time in that world.
I loved the descriptions of the Carheinien Game of Houses, where everything was political theater and anything you did in public was scrutinized for multiple deeper meanings. It's a shame the actual politics shown in the series was mostly pampered and immature nobles complaining that preparing for the literal imminent apocalypse was too inconvenient.
It'd make a great RPG setting, but IIRC every attempt at a licensed adaptation (aside from a forgettable FPS like twenty years ago) has ended up in development hell or terrible. Or both, in the case of the show.
I think they would be good books if he took the whole plot and compressed it into 3, maybe 5 books. It’s just too long, too many pointless tangents, too many random characters to remember who may or may not reappear at some point in the next 10 books… as soon as you get to an interesting part it switches perspectives to the most boring events imaginable.
I liked how there was a multi-book background subplot of some Aes Sedai investigating the Black Ajah in secret, only for them to get killed off between books (and their deaths only mentioned in passing during the next book's prologue) and the Black Ajah plot thread put on hold, then for the solution to the Black Ajah to be handed to Egwene with a wrapped bow a few books later.
I get Jordan was trying to cut out extraneous subplots and actually finish the series, but it sucks that so many pages were wasted on something that went nowhere, and the eventual resolution didn't even need them in the first place.
I actually thought that subplot was one of the more interesting ones
It was, which is why it sucks that it got snuffed out instead of one of the dozens of less interesting subplots.