Mat did tell Elayne what happened (after she accused him of forcing himself on the queen) and she laughed at first. After he selflessly gave her his medallion to protect her, she apologized. I hate her for laughing about it though

@@breezy3392 Yeah even when she apologized and took him seriously she said something like you are a good subject and I should show you respect. Umm no he's not your subject!

@@tadious9415 Technically he is. The Two Rivers is a part of her nation. But actually I think that's irrelevant. Elayne should have shown Matt some basic human respect from the start, especially given how many times he's raced into danger to save her and the other girls at the slightest hint that they were in trouble. Only after he gives her something, that she had been tormenting him for by the way, does she pull her head from her royal ass.

@@breezy3392 technically the two rivers has their own lord they declared. And andor hasn't shown up in like 5 generations. That's like me saying I'm the king of China despite never having been there and having no control over it. Not to mention he's a soldier in rand's army not hers. Definitely agree on the rest though! It's just annoying to me that even when she does recognize that he deserves respect it's only as a subject which he doesn't consider himself.

@@tadious9415 Fully agree with you on the annoyance with Elayne. And I do also agree with you that the Two Rivers isn't really a part of Andor in practice. That's why I said "technically". People who don't know the Two Rivers, other nations looking at a map would see it as being within the borders of Andor, and the royals see it that way. It does officially become it's own nation, Manetheren, later on in the series and I love that. But yeah, Elayne's insistence on Matt being a subject to her, I hate that.

Yeah, I don't want to spoil things but the series does do a good job with power creep. It isn't always perfect, but there are usually reasonable challenges that scale with the protagonists. One big one in the last book is poorly done though, which I won't comment on further here.

This. Also, I don't quite understand the position that every character needs an arc? As in, that a character's arc being flat is not ok. In principle, I think that is kind of like being biased by fiction in general, because in real life not every single person goes through monumental change over a relatively short period of time - too much of that breaks at least my suspension of disbelief a little, and seeing how WoT seems to be a lot about creating a believable world, which partly hinges on having believable characters... Like you said, Ogier changing is kind of an oxymoron, but a young sheepherder forced to take on the role of an actual messiah figure would be expected to change drastically. It depends! Another factor in the case of WoT is that the cast is so huge, that it would be 100% unfeasible to allow everyone growth to the extent that any reader who likes any one character will be pleased with how they turn out.

It happens after this book. Especially the heavy Perrin And Egwene Books.

Just finished Crown of Swords and god do I hate the female characters. Please lemme not reach the Egwene book, she's the only main female I have no problems with and I think thats cause she has been absent for the last 4 books. I hate Nyneave so much that am starting to hate Lan too. Hate by association. And lets not talk about Elayne

@@kamarassakka9922 Brandon Sanderson is great at writing Nynaeve's character. He gives her the much needed maturation the last 3 books, but I agree Jordan did an awful job writing the female characters. Egwene is just the worst, and I hate the way all of them treat Mat. Rafe Judkins is pretty awful at writing the characters as well.

Right ?! Just finished myself ! I’m about to pick up book 8 tomorrow! This story is just so fucking exciting

Well, the fact that you think the previous books are “action packed” is probably why you love books so much 😝

I heard that both Robert Jordan and Harriet McDougal (his wife/editor) both thought it was a funny send-up of the way men treat female rape victims. I don't know what on Earth possessed them to think that way, but here we are.

@@Limpshot_McGee imo if it causes people to cringe it is probably a good thing. I think we've gotten to a point where using irony is too easily condemned if you don't blatantly stick a "/s" everywhere.

@@Limpshot_McGee Honestly though, I've heard plenty of stories about real life male rape victims, and it's very common for them to get the same reaction that Mat did when they told someone. I don't think that Jorden really looked into this enough before he wrote it.

it was clearly meant to be a funny Karmic turnabout for Matt, to help him mature a bit. ultimately, after all, this is his last relationship before he meets his wife. So in a way, tylin helps break Mat of his Playboy Nature.

@@Jerome616 Hey stop that please. Could you take your spoilers to a video where they're welcome? Like a review of a future book in the series? So people like myself making their way through the series don't get spoiled on it like what you just did for me :(

@A Toaster In Cariehen(sp), he walks into the rebel camp, woos some with speech, and then sword fights the other. But a bubble of evil happens in the midst of the chaos he is stabbed by the shadar logoth dagger. Then Min becomes super protective.

That was how the Age of Legends was successful, because men and women worked together equally.

He's so hamfisted about it, though.

Steven Wrightson this is gold. I love it. 12, 13 and 14 are my favorites and I agree with your summary.

LOL it’s hilarious how you guys love 12, 13, and 14 the most because that’s where Brandon Sanderson took over...

@@AmeliaOak Not true. its because that is where the story needed to happen. KoD is the obvious example as RJs last book was really where the ever expanding plotlines and threads started to weave back together for a conclusion, and we all knew they would contract rapidly. Personally I am not that big of a fan of BS writing style compared to RJ, and remember it is not BS's story, it is RJ's he just wrote what RJ could not Due to his passing, not skill, we all knew RJ was good at endings and battles.

@@AmeliaOak I actually do like Brandon's writing a lot more, but I hadn't read any Sanderson books until Gathering Storm(and his other WOT books), so I was going in blind. But Wheel of Time as a whole is still my favorite series of all time, both the RJ and BS stuff.

Steven Wrightson Steven Wrightson I wasn’t trying to offer or say that RJ was a bad writer at all! I just noticed that y’all were saying the last books in the series were the best... I haven’t read WoT yet, but I want to. I have heard a lot of good things about it, except that some of the books are boring in the middle. And Brandon Sanderson is a very skilled author. He might take a more simplistic approach linguistically, but he’s great at characters, plot, magic systems, and twists too. There’s a reason he was entrusted with Robert Jordan’s masterwork.

That’s exactly what I thought

I hate Nyeave and this didnt convince me. The way they she interracts with Mat is so goddamn bad. Elayne laughed at the rape. Tell me Mat or Rand or Perrin would have laughed then I will consider that "men and women are equally written poorly"

@@kamarassakka9922 I just read those chapters. I hated Elayne for laughing about it too. But unfortunately, that's not so much badly written as true to life for male victims of rape who don't get taken seriously in real life because of gender bias

yeah I feel like Jordan does a really good job with irony and applying things that happen in real life to fantasy. it's so much more real and the imbalance of power is also so real to life. it's an interesting world and overall he's done a good job.

@@kamarassakka9922 the way mat interacts with the girls is also terrible. He constantly treats them like idiots and damsels who aren’t capable of doing anything, and never shows them any sort of respect for a huge portion of the book.

I was grudgingly only reading the books from 1-9, but had to mainly listen to the audiobook for 10. I'm on 12 now and happy to be on to greener pastures 😅

Nynaeve seems to be one of those characters that you either hyperfocus on and love every bit of her character growth over the series or you completely ignore her until the end of the series and then realize how amazing she is and pick everything up on re-reads. Nynaeve is possibly my favorite character of all time, period across mediums. It's really hard to see people not love her the way I do.

I know it wasn't until like my second or third read of the series (well, the first 7 or 8 books at least) that I actually took a liking to Nynaeve.

@@amaresuify i really dont think so, her character doesnt advance one bit up until she marries land and after that she changes a lot but her amount of povs get less and less. additionally she is also kind of a mary sue imo, in as she always figures out these new incredible healing techniques and she has no idea how and it is all justified by her "instinctive" abilities she got from her time as village wisdom...its really annoying imo

@@disres1337 As Pearl said, whenever I pick up the books to reread them, I can't help but follow her arc, and she goes through a lot of changes before marrying Lan (although... to be fair, Robert Jordan does seem to think marriage to a man solves a lot of problems for women, it happens several times in the series). Her growth is pretty steady throughout the books. But, if you happen to fall on the side of not liking Nynaeve, then it isn't noticed because a lot of her growth (in my opinion) is internal, and so it's her internal monologue you have to pay attention to.

openning i see what you are saying but i simply dont think so, i paid a lot of attention to her because of what people said about her arc, but i simply dont see it

Me too!

You guys won't regret it!

It is well worth it, no matter how much you hate "the slog" parts. Honestly, after my first time reading it, I remembered "a slog", and that it had a "slow start." When I re-read it, I didn't get that at all - I was gripped from beginning to end for the most part, but I enjoy political intrigue and world building.

DO IIIIIIITTTT

@@Redfield982 I regret it ;(

Her surrendering and overcoming her block was awesome and deserved more page time. Her growth has been slow and well earned and continues. I’m only on book 9 now and I love her more and more. I always loved her though because even when she is angry and snappy, she is usually hilarious. Her and Mat get me to laugh out loud the most. Even Lan laughs because of her.

I never thought the power-dynamics was Jordan trying to flip the script, I thought he was just drawing a logical conclusion of what would happen with Randland's history.

@@judeconnor-macintyre9874 I'm early in the series right now, and yeah the power dynamics just seem like a logical progression given the world history

I think it works well at times. Almost like a collection of individual stories against a larger backgrounds. Sometimes...

@@RichFreeman wasn't arguing for or against was saying why it happens in that series specifically

@@chrispilkington8662 no worries. Like I said, I think it works at times. There were a lot of things about the story/characters/etc that grated at me at times. I mean, for that one cart ride a few books ago with Nyneave and Elayne I felt the parent listening to the kids bickering in the back seat for six hours. In a lot of ways it was grating, but in other ways it really was character development. I mean, the world seems like it is about to end and we're bickering about how fast the cart is moving. But, when you think about it that is how people are often. It is less easy to forgive in the narration. Yup, saidin is tainted. I think I've heard that a few times. Yes, women wear divided skirts. And a bazillion things my brain has tuned out so well that I can't even think about them...

I’m now on book 9 and I honestly don’t understand why The Perrin/Faile arc is so hated in this book, it’s just 6 chapters in total and less than 100 pages long, I didn’t feel it like a slog but maybe it’s just me

@@1910mich The Perrin/Faile slog felt longer than TFoH & LoC together. As soon as I got to one of their POVs, I automatically let out a groan. Them and Rodel Ituralde.

i enjoyed book 7. its path of daggers thats beating me up. so apparently things get even worse in books 9 and 10?! when will it get better? please say its 11. please tell me its not that bad and its jus the faile chs. i already dislike faile to begin with

@@cdubbau135 lmaoooo i can 100% relate to that groan

@@vipset87 Honestly, no matter how hard the slog is hitting you, keep going. It's probably the most satisfying ending to a series I've ever read. After Remembrance of Earth's Past.

Yeah, imo faile > perrin.

Really? She didn't changed that much actually. I still cringed almost everytime she said something.

@@DankAlighieri I actually hated her more in this book. Nyneave was my second fave right after Perrin till book 4. And its been a downfall since then. She reached rock bottom here and I swear if she doesnt start acting her age am gonna just skip her parts.

I hope so!

I would skip Crossroads of Twilight. Im serious.

J Shroud I’d skip the first 85% or so. Everything before that is literally pointless, but the story does finally move forward at the end.

If you're actually thinking about skipping you can actually skip selective chapters (from two particular POVs) and miss the worst of that book. I think skimming is the better approach though. I cracked up my audiobook speed for that one.

My experience was exactly the opposite: I only found there to be a slog when the books were being published, but when I did my reread in the lead up to the publication and release of *A* *Memory* *of* *Light* it wasn't noticeable at all.

Don't Skip CoT! Atleast the M&T Pov's from it were EXCELLENT. The most organic relationship in WoT, at least up til this point.

Thought the elayne and perrin sections in book 9 can be hard to read but I didn't feel like book 7 and 8 were slog at all or at least 6-8 have a similar level of pacing with it slowing down in 9 then grinding to a painful halt in 10 where literally none of the stories progress forward.

Pratchett's books also make so many good points about how things work though! Vime's boots theory and Detritus the troll learning to count are both really important scenes to understand.

When the books were first being published, when we had long stretches between books, I thought as you do. But in the month or so before the release of *aMoL* when I was rereading the books one last time, I actually found Perrin's story engrossing, and to fly by quickly. And when you go back and count the number of chapters and pages it takes up, for that particular storyline, it really isn't that much, not as much as it seemed when we had a year or two to wait between each book. Of course, I think how much one likes this storyline is directly proportional to how much one likes the character Perrin is focused upon for it. Those who didn't like the character before this point in the story tend to not like this storyline at all, those who do like that character aren't bothered by it. At least, that's my experience.

I have only read the first book and this is a little disheartening because Perrin is far and away my favourite, followed by Rand, Moiraine and Nynaeve. Hope to finish the series this year though since i think it will be worth it in the end.

Glenn Myron this is a good point. Everyone who read ASOIAF in real time noticed the quality diminished in Books 4&5. I read them over a month or two and still got great enjoyment from both books, although I hated seeing both books follow the same timeline because it kept confusing me.

It _really_ _is_ worth reading and finishing in my opinion. Although I've only read the last few books once each (I just started having less and less time to read, and so many other books I wanted to get to), I've reread every book from book 1-8 at least twice, if not more (the closer to the beginning, the more I've read it, with *tEotW* being read by me something like 15 or 16 times now, and close to that thru book 4). The only series I've come anywhere near as many rereads (and in this case, more) is *The* *Lord* *of* *the* *Rings* which I used to reread at _least_ once a year from the age of 8 up until I was about 30. I really disagree with the vast majority of WoT fans on the whole Perrin-during-the-"Slog" thing, and have debated it endlessly over the phone with one of my best mates. I had actually kept notes (I wish I could find them) of how many chapters and pages (hard cover) that particular storyline (no spoilers!) takes and compared it to other storylines in the series that my friend _didn't_ tend to complain about taking too long, to show what I consider his mild hypocrisy, and I recall it being comparable in length. It all boils down, in my opinion, to the subject matter of Perrin's storyline, and not the storyline itself. My friend already disliked certain characters, and _that_ I think colored his feelings of Perrin's "Slog"-plotline. How much this holds true for other readers, I cannot say, but I would hazard a guess that it plays a significant role in how many of them view that storyline, as I know many people feel the same as my friend does about the same characters.

Perrin is definitely a BAMF, and is one of the great reasons to read this series. Of course, my personal favorite character in *_ALL_* *_OF_* *_FICTION_* (written or on film/telly) is Matrim Cauthon. The true greatness of this series comes not, in my opinion, from the main character of Rand al'Thor, but from all the characters who surround him, even down to the tertiary characters.

While I didn't like how the relationship dynamics worked, at the same time I can see the value of it. I think that the way the book really pushed some toxic gender issues actually made it possible to think about them in a different way. I'm not saying that the issues in the books happen in the same way as they do in the real world. However, I think they are things that do happen in the real world more subtly. By portraying this stuff in a way we aren't used to seeing it, I think it makes it easier to notice. In doing so, perhaps it will inspire is to look inward to how we might do the same things in a less noticable way. If all you get out of it is that a certain character is so unlikable because they're all disrespectful, and thank heavens I'm never disrespectful towards anybody, then you've missed the point. BTW, that "you" wasn't directed to anybody in particular.

​@@RichFreeman The gender-balanced which was heavily skewed in Women's favour was inevitable considering the fact that they could use The One Power while the men could not. Coupled with the propaganda put out by the Tower that the men were to blame for everything... It didn't help matters that the Tower kept raising up False Dragons to cause Chaos so that they could be the virtuous saviours. The narrative being that: "Men destroyed the world", conveniently leaving out the fact that the 1st attempt essentially failed due to lack of cooperation by female Aes Sedai. Oops. Even in the final confrontation, the Aes Sedai again tried to sabotage the Dragons attempt at sealing the bore. Here's the exhaustive list of useful Aes Seda in the current age: Nynaeve, Moiraine, Cadsuane, Verin, Siuan, Leane, Egwene, Elayne. The last 2 barely qualify. Elayne as a convenient figurehead for the War, surely you should keep an eye on a Waygate *inside* your city. Egwene almost stopped Rand. Which would have resulted in a confrontation where he'd have to kill innumerable Aes Sedai, wasting his strength and depleting theirs. Also while it's true that Nynaeve is a savant at healing, are you telling me that the Aes Sedai could accomplish nothing in the Millenniums after The War to help the male users? Nynaeve solution alone would have kept them sane with regular treatments. Imagine how useful they'd been in the Trolloc Wars. The *only* solution is to lobotomize them, deprive them of Joy and *force* them to continue suffering? Female users who were stilled got to leave to end their lives, but let's keep the mentally insane alive and suffering as puppets to demonstrate our power and our virtue.

@@Lorkisen nobody is saying that the story is inconsistent with how relationships are portrayed. The story could have been written differently, which might have satisfied some more. However, I do think the way it was written lets us explore these ideas in a way that a world more similar to our own would not. That is of course one of the benefits of fantasy.

Keep reading, Perrin's arc through the middle books is not an accident or mistake. You are supposed to feel this way.

@@TGT916 I'm intrigued

i like lanfear more than moiraine

I think the TV series will have some real opportunities with the pacing. The whole story and character arcs are all developed and ready to adapt. They can keep the good and trim down the skirt smoothing...

Ehm, I guess you stopped after Winter's Heart. Cause The Winds of Winter is the ASOIAF book that GRRM has been writing for 10 years and still hasn't released xD. The slog is not that bad if you read the books back-to-back, although Books 9 and 10 are reaaaally slow and boring. But from Book 11 to the end, it's an amazing ride.

@@tommy_svkyes, erg.. not sure how I confused those.