Reading the Wheel of Time is a bitter experience. The series at its core is a generic sword-and-sorcery fantasy epic, complete with an Ultimate Evil about to destroy the world for the sake of being evil, but the way Robert Jordan writes his characters is more than a little disturbing and distracting.
For one thing, there is the omnipresent and completely implausible theme of female dominance which is shoved constantly down the reader's throat for no apparent reason and leads me to suspect that author really wanted to share his BDSM fetishes with the world. Virtually every culture we are acquainted with has this yo a lesser or greater degree. Women are almost universally dismissive and biased against men, and the men, with exceptionally rare occasions, obediently allow themselves to be harassed all the while mumbling impotently about how they can't understand women. We have multiple occasions of female-on-male rape, endless insults and generally poor attitude, men being "married off" to women regardless of their wishes, and some really freaky stuff, like in some places in this world it is apparently legal for a woman to kill her husband is he displeases her. The main problem I have with this theme is that it is completely contrary to my knowledge of the real world, and isn't justified in the slightest within the novels. The flimsy excuse the author used is that ever since the Breaking of the World, male channelers were doomed to go violently insane and had to be put down/gentled to avoid bloodshed. Alright. How exactly do we make the step from "being wary of male channelers" to "putting the entire male gender under the women's heel in every country and organization in the world"? Seems to me like a glaring plothole. Men are displayed unfavorably even in the total absence of women, the only two male-only organizations here are heavily militarized, run with an iron fist, arrogant and unpopular to the extreme, basically composed of arrogant sons of bitches who do more harm than good in the long run (I mean the Ashaman, and Children of the Light)
Aside from female-on-male bondage weirdness, the characters seem unable to show any genuine feelings of sympathy, compassion, or trust to each other, except when the plot suddenly needs them to, in which case they recklessly throw themselves into danger to rescue someone they didn't feel like even talking to for a year. The plot is primarily driven by Deus Ex Machinas coming in all shapes of forms, from an
ancient artifact" that suddenly does something that happens to resolve a problem, or even a person suddenly walking out of the background and killing off the bad guy. The entire system of "channeling" here is a big Deus Ex Machina which allows the characters to display any magic ability the plot needs them to display. And the personal woes the main characters are going through feel completely contrived and artificial. The only real plotline that interested me here were Aes Sedai politics in a divided White Tower, and that one took no less than eight books to end to any satisfactory conclusion. Perrin and his crusade against… something… were completely arbitrary and irrelevant (not to mention Faile who exists solely to get captured by evil and give Perrin something to fret about), Mat's antics grew more and more tiresome with every chapter, and Rand going through unwarranted depression and making one idiotic decision after another wasn't exactly riveting either. And, of course, I will never forget that one chapter in the Crossroads of Twilight where Elaine does nothing but take a bubble bath and think about stuff we've already read before.
All in all, reading the Wheel of Time gave me the feeling that the author had a lot of interesting background information on the world he created, but didn't really feel like using most of it, and instead went for soap opera dramas and lifeless romance. And gratuitous descriptions of clothes, random towns/villages we will never see again, twitchings of the brows, and full bosoms. It doesn't help that the thirteen principal bad guys spend most of their time sipping wine and building networks of deception upon lies upon intrigues, only to get disposed of in an instant like goons.
The game was pretty good though.
