Before you get to the arc payoffs, I think it would be cool if you could illustrate your thoughts on the journeys the main characters have gone on to get to this point. Like, your thoughts on their consistency and what you think worked and didn't work, aside from Perrin's plotline temporarily dying and Mat disappearing for a book.
This is an excellent question and I could probably take several weeks to compile an answer but Iām going to answer it now because I am an adult who is entirely in control of her life and her choices especially regarding fiction, fictional characters, and the discussion thereof.
āMain charactersā is a rather flexible definition in WoT so Iāll start with the original set from EotW and go from there, and weāll see how far I get.
(Okay it turns out I only got through the Emondās Field group, becasue Iām me and I canāt just write a sentence or two for each one, but I might try later to do the same for some other characters)
Rand alāThor: Randās character arc, and the way itās executed, is fantastic. He definitely benefits from the sheer length of the series (well, his arc does; he just suffers), because it allows for a nuanced, complex, thorough character journey from farmboy to broken hero, from human viewpoint protagonist to distant focal point around which everything spirals, from determined trusting optimist to desperate half-mad fatalist. Any of those transitions can be and have been done in shorter wordcounts, but the length of the series, and the way everything about what Rand does and goes through escalates a little (or sometimes a lot) with each book, gives his arc this feeling of an inexorable pull, of compounding pain, of just a series of small steps, each only a little further than the next.Ā
When you have 12 books (so far) to do that with, you can end up a huge distance away from where you started, without it ever feeling like too great a jump. Each ālevelā (either of what he has to endure or what he himself does and becomes) is gradually normalised over time; he and the reader acclimate, so then itās time to step up to the next. Put The Last That Could Be Done after, say, Falme, and it would still hurt but it would feel almost like too much (and also not enough, because it would lack the weight and momentum of everything that came before). Instead, you get to watch the slow unravelling of a character even as his power grows, tension building, until (like his ancestors the Aiel) he becomes all but unrecognisable as who he was at the start, but every step along the way feels like just another step, until a single step is all it takes to push him off the cliff his narrative has spent the better part of twelve books building for him.
I also love the way Jordan has played with POV in this particular arc, with Rand going from the main viewpoint character to barely having a POV. It suits the way he goes from being a protagonist beginning his journey to becoming the centre of a whirlpool that expands to encompass the entire world, as well as how he goes from being very young and human and real toā¦ āI donāt know how human the Dragon Reborn can afford to be,ā to just dragging himself and the world to the Last Battle. He loses POV chapters because he no longer sees himself as a person with agency or even the right to his own mind ā which, too, is invaded and eroded as time goes on, again fitting well with the decrease in POV chapters: his mind is literally no longer his own, nor ā he believes ā is his life.
I expect his to be one of the arcs with the greatest catharsis in its payoff, just because thereās so much thatās built up over time; the potential energy, if you will, is huge, and at some point it has to be released, and while building it took 12 books and counting, thereāsā¦not all that much time left, so itās going to be released in a far shorter time than it was built, and if anyone remembers anything from physics class, that means itās going to hit with a hell of a lot of force.
Also okay in my head this was going to be maybe a paragraph or two per character so uhā¦.
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