sarah @iridezcent - Tumblr Blog

it's always so fascinating and heartbreaking when a character in a story is simultaneously idolized and abused. a chosen prophet destined for martyrdom. a child prodigy forced to grow up too fast. a powerful warrior raised as nothing but a weapon. there's just something so uniquely messed up about singing someone's praises whilst destroying them.

rjolie

Visited Daunt Books today whilst back in London. Crying at how beautiful it is.

literaryfairyy

The last 200 pages in a SJM book be like:

#books

acomaflove

Rhysand after winning a ton of money for betting Feyre would survive fighting the worm:

#acotar #books

thewizardofozwel

Wheel of time is a silly little story about the world's worst chosen one fucking everything up so badly he needs a polycule to corral him towards being marginally less of a dumbass, while his two best friends become war hero wife guys, and also fuck everything up just as badly. Also there's a lot of hot women who I would thank if they punched me in the face.

#wheel of time

shitpostingkats

Wheel of Time book 3. Or, as I like to call it: Mattrim Cauthon's Funky Fresh Crime Spree

#wheel of time

quixoticanarchy

a californian but there’s something just a bit wrong and spooky about her. call that an uncanny valley girl

thecottageinthedark

@thejakeformerlyknownasprince

maureen2musings

The living spirit of the tundra frost

brookelittlebear

dailykafka

— Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

Mopesola

WoT Musing: Jordan’s talent for remembering the consequences

One of the things that sets Jordan a cut above other fantasy writers is his remarkable talent for writing consequences to the actions of characters.

Very often in fantasy writing (and also writing more generally) conflict is handled in a binary fashion: the character attempts to do something, and either succeeds or fails, usually based on where the character is in their arc, with them more likely to fail early on, and succeeded as the story progresses. The matter is then marked off as ‘resolved’ and then not revisited: arc villains are22 defeated and not heard from again, political conflicts are dealt with and then everyone is left to get along for the remainder of the story, even broad-scale problems like famine or disease are resolved once the characters have accrued sufficient power to tackle them, without much time spent on things like food rationing or actually distributing a cure.

Of course, war is the one that most often gets the shrift: battles are a matter of sufficiently clever tacticians on each side pushing around stone statues on a map, interspersed with cuts to the actual fighting and the Important Characters doing one-v-one duels with named villains. Soldiers stab each other until the evil empire’s army is defeated and said empire just collapses without a fuss, or in the more charitable cases gets conquered and subsumed by a ‘good guy empire’. All the enemy soldiers put down their weapons and surrender, (or are wiped out if their all some kind of non-human monster we don’t have to feel bad about mass killing). Sometimes a remnant will remain for a later rebel-faction subplot, but otherwise enemy soldiers just sort of….go away and bother the heroes no more once their army is defeated. Of course, no one ever has to deal with things like supply lines, camp fever, or digging latrine pits.

But Jordan man? Jordan never created a conflict, small or large scale, that he didn’t stop to think ‘what would this /actual/ mean?’. Our heroes often succeed at what they set out to do, but the fall out of those actions is often not what they expected. Defeated and scattered armies without clear leadership mean bandis plaguing the countryside, which in turn causes conquered lands to turn against Our Heroes who might see themselves as liberators, but our often viewed by the common folk as responsible for their suddenly deteriorating lives. Battles devastate the land, and send out ripple and twists in trade that are felt on the other side of the continent. The large-scale conflicts (such as the Endless Summer) that do have direct answers, (the Bowl of the Winds), still leave behind diplomatic and political strife for our heroes to contend with, as a great many groups attempt to use their new relative positions to maneuver for advantage and power. Slaying arc villains leaves behind followers that must be dealt with, when it dosen’t garner the attention of a more powerful one. Actually convincing people that their populist overlord is a evil sorcerer who took over the government through mind control turns out not to be very easy, and even when they do believe that dosen’t make them put down their self-serving political ambitions, in the name of the greater good.

And of course, all the way at the beginning, Moiraine sinks the Taren Ferry in order to prevent pursuit by Trollocs….and sparks a fear and distrust in her charges that will make the managing of them, and the guiding of Rand when his destiny does finally became apparently, a much much more difficult task. It was necessary, smart, and probably the right thing. And it still have consequences that Moiraine could never have foreseen, and maybe dosen’t even properly connect back to the incident when dealing with them.

#WoT