Emperor's Soul, Good or Amazing?

[Elegy]

On 3.6.2022 at 11:10 PM, Duxredux said:

I think after I read Emperor's Soul, it made me wonder more and more what it was like for Brandon to finish The Wheel of Time. Shai delving into Ashravan's past, figuring out why he did what he did, reading his personal notes, then trying to recreate Ashravan as best she could and then tweaking things here and there to make her work into a better whole... that seems pretty similar to what Brandon did by looking through Robert Jordan's notes and trying to recreate an entire cast and world to match how people remembered The Wheel of Time. He probably took character sketches or snippets to Jordan's associates to see if what he wrote was familiar to the original work. For me, that added layer made Emperor's Soul a remarkable book. It's also ironically a commentary for the writer attempting to create realistic characters, but we probably don't think about that because Shai and Gaotona feel real. There's so many layers to how you can look at the book, and even down to the way that Shai perceives the world and considers the ramifications of everything happening outside of her little room to genuine wisdom in how you treat people or think of people, all of those make it an amazing book in my opinion. 

Exactly! Brandon was told this exact thing in a livestream some time ago. It's not intentional, but it is what was happening:

Quote

Questioner

In a Google video you once made, you talked about how you never knew Robert Jordan. You knew his family, friends, world, and characters; but not him. You wrote the end of his life's work. That juggernaut that is and was The Wheel of Time.

In The Emperor's Soul, Shai had to build up something new from journal entries from the Emperor as well as pieces from her to make what she thought was a better man. Long question short, is this analogy baseless? Or do you in some way see The Wheel of Time as your Emperor's Soul?

Brandon Sanderson

You know, there's an interesting connection there that I'd never thought about before, reconstructing the person from the lore of their life, rather than themselves. Where that falls apart is, I still maintain (and I doubt there's much contention on this point) that Robert Jordan could have done a better job of his ending than I did. This is in the definition, right? I couldn't reconstruct...

The whole goal of The Emperor's Soul is that she's creating a work of art that replaces the original, but in many ways is superior to the original. I don't think I did that. But I did have that experience of trying to recreate, in some ways, Robert Jordan from all the pieces, all the lore, all the ephemera.

So I love that you've made that connection, and I certainly think there's something there. But I don't know that the metaphor sticks in the large scale.

YouTube Livestream 9 (May 28, 2020)