Why do people like the wheel of time so much?

[HOID WANTS INSTANT NOODLES he/him]

I have so far read the whole series. I found the brandon parts to be the best by far

here are my issues

1. The female characters are really flat. They spend every other sentence talking about necklines and are treated disgustingly by men

2.  Somehow Rand, who does nothing but complain gets not one but 3 girlfriends? while i am not nessicarily against polygamy in books, it comes of as jordan projecting his fantasies onto rand

3. Mat and tylin where they are all just act like what is going on is fine

4. The whole series is communication problems. that is fine at first but once they can teleport there is no excuse.

The only really likeable characters are perrin and loial and once loial is not as important the series kinda falls apart

Edited June 28, 2022 by HOID WANTS INSTANT NOODLES

[Quantus he/him]

Short Answer is it's the same reason people like Lord of the Rings:  It broke new ground and set a lot of the standards of the genre, even if it may not always hold up against things that have stood on its shoulders and come along since then. 

(PS. I do agree with basically all your points on Wheel of Time.  On #2 I recall it feeling less like an author insert fantasy and more like he'd written himself in a corner and couldn't decide which romantic interest to go with, so he tried to semi-magically dodge the problem.  But I was very young at the time, so I could easily have missed subtext.)

Edited June 28, 2022 by Quantus
grammar...

[StormingTexan he/him]

I liked WoT especially the first few and last few books (this may be sacrilegious but I kinda feel like Brandon saved the ending). I also agree with all of your criticisms. It is not perfect and I'd even say cringe worthy, repetitive and boring at times but it was also epic in scope with it's world building, characters and plot lines. For this specific genre of fantasy I am not sure anything really rivals it (that is complete). I feel like at some point SA will but as it is not a complete work it is not there yet. 

[Robin Sedai she/her]

5 hours ago, HOID WANTS INSTANT NOODLES said:

I have so far read the whole series. I found the brandon parts to be the best by far

here are my issues

1. The female characters are really flat. They spend every other sentence talking about necklines and are treated disgustingly by men

2.  Somehow Rand, who does nothing but complain gets not one but 3 girlfriends? while i am not nessicarily against polygamy in books, it comes of as jordan projecting his fantasies onto rand

3. Mat and tylin where they are all just act like what is going on is fine

4. The whole series is communication problems. that is fine at first but once they can teleport there is no excuse.

The only really likeable characters are perrin and loial and once loial is not as important the series kinda falls apart

I agree that the Wheel of Time is very flawed, although I disagree with you about the female characters. I find them very good, and it's just that the gender relations in this series are shot to hell.

Also, there are many and varied female characters. I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it's gender-equal, or near, in terms of viewpoint characters. This is incredible, especially for a series of its time. And it never felt shoehorned in, like he had to have a certain number of women. It's that he has characters, who are women. Each of them has their own personality, motivations, skills, flaws, backstory, et cetera.

 It's a well crafted series in some regards, such as the worldbuilding, the prose (which could be purple at times, I know) the incredible number of characters, all of who are well developed (YMMV on this point, though.) He's just a very good writer.

For the plot, I'm more of a character person, so I find it easier to ignore the convolutions (although I agree about the miscommunication issues. It is soo frustrating!

And as people above mention, it redefined its genre and people tend to make allowances for that.

TL;DR: I know it's very flawed (probably the most flawed book I love, I haven't mentioned all of its issues here) but I can forgive it that.

[Lego Mistborn he/him]

The only issues that annoy me is that everyone is constantly complaining about how stupid the opposite gender is male or female, and all of the women who get into relationships turn into hopeless wrecks because of "love", and also the frequency with which characters get too frisky, even if we never see the actual happenings on screen. I don't really see any more communication issues in the plot, just greedy people being unable to work together, and the 2 million organizations that think they can each save the world better than the prophesied savior of the world himself and all the others. Its actually not that hard to believe, because that's how politics work(kind of), but it can get tiring. In all, even though I don't love the series, it's not bad enough for me to stop, and I plan to finish the series, if just to get to the Brandon books.

[HOID WANTS INSTANT NOODLES he/him]

I mean in the first few books i find the female characters great. But later on it feels like they are powerful just to get cut down to their size. All the compotent female characters seem to fall in love and then stop being nearly as compotent(morgase, egwene, nynaeve(the spanking scene tho), and half of the aes sedai(the whole seanchan enslavement, all of the ashaman enslavment stuff with aes sedai is just fine i guess?) there are decent characters but none seem to be able to go any ammount without a man

I really was so creeped out by some of the mat/tylin rand/alanna lack of consent being fine

I also felt like the resolution to the weird love triangle was kinda clear as rand says that the only one he feels really comftorable arround is faile

About communication I was just saying that especially with relations between characters they never talk it out. And once they can always find eachother there is no excuse

Rand is a really bad person. He whines all the time, creates warcrimes++ ect. it feels like jordan realized he had made rand so OP that the only way he could return stakes was making him stupid

Also the worldbuilding isnt that good. It hardly rivals anything like Malazan, Any of Brandons works, Middle earth, Dune(i dont like dune that much but it does have some good worldbuilding) Name of the wind, heck the mountains form a square. also I get the whole future earth and stuff but it kinda makes other world building aspects weird

Thank you to everyone for responding so far. I legitimatley am curious why people like it so much. I found the point about when it was written to really explain some things

[Spren of Kindness she/her]

16 hours ago, HOID WANTS INSTANT NOODLES said:

I mean in the first few books i find the female characters great. But later on it feels like they are powerful just to get cut down to their size. All the compotent female characters seem to fall in love and then stop being nearly as compotent(morgase, egwene, nynaeve(the spanking scene tho), and half of the aes sedai(the whole seanchan enslavement, all of the ashaman enslavment stuff with aes sedai is just fine i guess?) there are decent characters but none seem to be able to go any ammount without a man

I really was so creeped out by some of the mat/tylin rand/alanna lack of consent being fine

I also felt like the resolution to the weird love triangle was kinda clear as rand says that the only one he feels really comftorable arround is faile

About communication I was just saying that especially with relations between characters they never talk it out. And once they can always find eachother there is no excuse

Rand is a really bad person. He whines all the time, creates warcrimes++ ect. it feels like jordan realized he had made rand so OP that the only way he could return stakes was making him stupid

Also the worldbuilding isnt that good. It hardly rivals anything like Malazan, Any of Brandons works, Middle earth, Dune(i dont like dune that much but it does have some good worldbuilding) Name of the wind, heck the mountains form a square. also I get the whole future earth and stuff but it kinda makes other world building aspects weird

Thank you to everyone for responding so far. I legitimatley am curious why people like it so much. I found the point about when it was written to really explain some things

I will say, one of the reasons I like the Wheel of Time is because I managed to finish it, since it looked rather insurmountable at the beginning.  I'm also pretty good at keeping things like publication date and authorial circumstances in my head while reading, to pull for explanation of something that doesn't go with modern standards (that's a whole 'nother talk that I won't get into).

I have essentially the same thoughts about Mat/Tylin and Rand/Alanna.  Those were not great.  I feel like Alanna's...deal was dealt with a little better, but yeah.  Neither of those were good sequences.

Rand, I get the frustration, but I understand him, especially as I get older.  In the grand scheme, he's pretty young and unprepared, with very little support, or he refuses to take support.  Plus he's got an ancient, traumatized wizard riding about in his head and the threat of insanity looming.  While I do not have either of those things, I can see where he's coming from.  The war crimes are still a problem.

The other reason I liked it that I can immediately think of is actually the clothing.  Jordan wrote a lot of variety into how different cultures dressed, often drawing from history, and I was a fan of that, as a historical dress nerd.

[Mat he/him]

On 6/28/2022 at 2:41 PM, StormingTexan said:

this may be sacrilegious but I kinda feel like Brandon saved the ending

I’m fairly certain Jordan wrote a large portion of the ending, actually  

On 6/28/2022 at 7:21 PM, HOID WANTS INSTANT NOODLES said:

All the compotent female characters seem to fall in love and then stop being nearly as compotent(morgase, egwene, 

Egwene being the most competent character in the series during tGS is why that was my favorite book— her manipulation of the White Tower and just that whole sequence of chapters was amazing. That point may be true for some but don’t throw shade on Egwene  

I’m easy to please as a reader, and can overlook plot holes and shallow characters pretty easy, but I think the reason I was so satisfied and happy with the series once I was done was because of how much time I’d spent with the characters through the thousands and thousands of pages— they felt more like real people to me than any other cast of characters I’ve read, and I liked that a lot.

[Lego Mistborn he/him]

As far as I've read in the series, Egwene is the only woman who hasn't become completely incapacitated after falling in love.

[HOID WANTS INSTANT NOODLES he/him]

fair enough on egwene u guys are right. 

[Thaidakar the Ghostblood he/him]

my biggest problem was that the third book was called the dragon reborn YET THE STORMING DRAGON REBORN HIMSELF WAS HARDLY IN THE BOOK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*groan* I also think he needed to go back and do more drafts on his books, they needed some work and could have been amazing in my opinion. I only made it to the first few chapters of book five before I gave up.

[HOID WANTS INSTANT NOODLES he/him]

Yeah I dont think it is all bad but I think 7 books should have been enough to wrap up the story. 

[StormingTexan he/him]

On 7/1/2022 at 4:07 PM, Matrim's Dice said:

I’m fairly certain Jordan wrote a large portion of the ending, actually  

Sorry I meant more of the pacing and moving the story along to the ending not the actual "ending" that Brandon used his notes to write. I do not want to speak badly about Jordan but the later books really really drug along and feel pretty bloated so Brandon's felt more like the early books to me. 

Edited July 6, 2022 by StormingTexan

[chongjasmine]

I like the wheel of time because of its characters. It is my all time favorite series.

[nyxvoid]

i have read the wheel of time . world building was nice . i did not find any major faults with any characters that i would point out except maybe with tuon  and two aes sadie that accompany them.

i don know why tuon cant see logic or test their claim when aes sadie tell her that she can also channel one power so she should not think of channelers as despiseed slaves. i mean it was so frustrating . and it isn't channelers fault that they can access one power. they are born wih it and no one is born accursed .

Yes i too find that after they managed to discover Tele porting , they should not have communication problems.

also i consider teleporting when you directly open space  between two points to be overpowered . this should not have been added to wheel of time . and then characters didn't utilized it as much as they should have .other travel technique in which channelers open space into a void and travel through void for like hour or half to reach destination was much batter .

when aviendha went to aiel waste to   pass through tar' angral to become a wise one and she discovered how whole aiel race will diminish over centuries and both white and black towers will fall and all channels would become slaves .it was so so heart ranching . i read that part many time .i couldn't believe it . aviendha did took measures to prevent this from happening when rand provides dragons peace between seachans and his people . he did include aiel in his peace and named them keepers of peace so i think that , that worst fate for every one we loved  ,was prevented . 

still i think tuon should have, at the end , decided to free channelers from slavery or at least agreed to learn to channel herself or give channelers slave a bit of freedom .

ending was excellent with all those battles and quest of Faile Bashere and rand's fight and roles of both asha'man and aes sadie , role of both white and black tower . e.t.c it was just good 

in the end except three points of frustrating lack of communications, over powering ability of teleporting and last one , less satisfying ending on Part of seanchans , other than that it was excellent series with nice characters and very good history and world building stuff. 

i wont say that brandon did batter job than what Robert Jordan would have done. that being said , i enjoyed ending by Brandon as well as most parts done by Robert Jordan . 

i just can't compare two legends .