LogFAQs > #930251038

It's the world that makes reading Wheel of Time so engrossing, but I also do love the characters, even the ones I complained about earlier. The overarching story is simple (the main villain is literally named The Dark One), and so the intrigue mostly stems from the pressure that being the most influential people of an apocalyptic era puts on the main characters. There's far too many characters to talk about it one writeup, so I'll focus on two: main character Rand and best character Mat. Rand deals with the pressure by diving headfirst into his role while Mat runs away from it as much as possible, and both of them fail and succeed in ways that make for a highly entertaining contrast. Every scene with Mat is amazing and Rand's internal mental degradation over a long period of time is like watching a car crash in slow motion. If the series was just about these two, it would already be a great series. But you've also got Lan, Moiraine, Nynaeve, Min, Aviendha, Thom...I could go on. I'll remember some of those characters forever.

When it comes down to it, though, the most important thing will always be the emotional connection I have with a work. And while other works like Fata Morgana and Schindler's List have perhaps surpassed it in terms of eliciting a strong, intense emotional response, Wheel of Time is too near and dear to my heart to ever be overtaken. Let me set the stage: back in the late 2000s, we learned that Wheel of Time would be ending soon, and that the author Robert Jordan was having health problems but intended to finish the series before his condition got too severe. Hearts went out to him, but people weren't too worried about the series itself going unfinished. Robert Jordan's pace of writing has never slowed, and his passion for the series had never waned. It was unthinkable to imagine that when we finally crossed the finish line, Robert Jordan wouldn't be there waiting for us with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye.

He wasn't.

I was gutted when I learned that Robert Jordan had passed. I don't know if I realized how much I had invested myself in the world until that moment. Even worse then the story going unfinished was the notion that Robert Jordan wouldn't get to finish it, because everything I'd read about him painted him as an upstanding guy who loved to write and loved his fans. It didn't feel fair. Then, out of nowhere, his wife picked a replacement writer named Brandon Sanderson (a huge fan of the series and a very good fantasy writer, definitely recommend his original work) to help finish the saga, and somehow it turned out better than anyone could have expected. Robert Jordan had left a ton of notes and had pre-finished the biggest scenes once he realized he wasn't going to make it. Sanderson took all that and synthesized it with his own writing style while still staying true to the original style of the series, and the outcome is basically a miracle. The last three books are up there with the best of them all.

The gravity of what this all meant to me didn't 100% come to a head until I sat down with the final book in my hand, a book that by all rights shouldn't even exist. It felt like we, the fans, had made it, and that Robert Jordan had made it there with us too. I spent an entire day and night reading the book, and it blew me away completely on its own merits, then blew me away again because of what it represented to me. A Memory of Light is my favorite book and always will be. It completed a part of me that had been there since childhood. I got to see the end of the journey, and it was everything I'd hoped it would be.

That may sound dramatic - but as far as I'm concerned, the fantasy series deserves nothing less than the most dramatic writeup I've ever written. And oh look, they're making a high-budget TV series now! The new turn of the Wheel, and a new beginning. As it should be.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.