DSC01

I really liked Live Ship, but I had trouble getting into The Rain Wild Chronicles. I gave up partway through Dragon Keeper. I've read all the other Elderlings books, though. Anyway, I just finished Winter's Heart, so it's on to the infamous Crossroads of Twilight. I still like it, myself. Besides, when it's done, Knife of Dreams picks up the pace, and The Gathering Storm through A Memory of Light is basically a 2,500-page avalanche.

Uh... Night Angel? Not sure where farm animals come into that, though...

Time to start Winter's Heart!

Keep in mind, Rand's character remains static for like 6 months of in-universe time (and he's not so much static as his character slowly gets worse and worse). Not much time elapses at all after the first couple of books--and part of the amount of time elapsed in those is a 3-month jump due to Portal Stone mishap--but we're following so many characters that it seems like a really long time. I am pretty despondent myself about the pace of SA releases. I hope that it picks up at some point because 4 years between books is way too long. Yes, I love the Cosmere as a whole, but Stormlight is my favorite series in the bunch, and reading a new Mistborn novel occasionally isn't the same thing as getting a new volume of SA. In other news, I'm now reading The Path of Daggers.

Following up with Dunkum and Briar King and everyone, I like A Crown of Swords just fine; although, I do agree that things do slow down a bit. It's hard for me to separate which book is which, though. I never read The Wheel of Time until the whole thing was out, and I then read it straight through. I reread twice, and I did the same things both times. On this, my fourth read, I am probably going to do the same thing. To me, every time I read it, the annoying parts get less annoying. I'll think, Aw, man! I don't want to read 100 pages about Egwene having headaches and being disrespected by the other Aes Sedai! But then I get into the section, and it's a lot more interesting than I remember. I remembered the beginning of A Crown of Swords backtracking and spending a long, boring time dwelling on the Shaido's perspective of Dumai's Wells. But when I read it again--lo and behold--it's not that much time, and it's actually pretty interesting. I was inspired to do this reread by the news that an adaptation may be forthcoming, so I have been paying particular attention to how things might be adapted to television this time. The infamous rambling descriptions of settings and clothing (which are nowhere near as bad as most people claim, in my opinion) would just provide great source material for designers. A lot of the narrative can't be directly adapted--not in a visual medium (or not easily)--because the basis of it is the POV character's thoughts and opinions. Maybe that is informing my patience with the book, as I imagine a lengthy passage on a character's opinion being communicated by an incensed glare or translated into one line of dialogue. Speaking of translating characters' thoughts into dialogue, they have to find a way to have Nynaeve actually speak this thought--about Uno and his Shienarans encountering Galad--from The Fires of Heaven: "Men always seemed to think violence could solve anything. If she had had a stout stick, she would have thumped all three of them about the shoulders until they saw reason."

On to A Crown of Swords.

Update: Peter Ahlstrom says, via Twitter, that Dynamite told them it would hit comics shops on 6/29. Diamond, the distributor, confirms that on their website, and it furthermore says that the date was originally 6/22 and was pushed to 6/29. Dynamite's info is probably outdated (and that would certainly fit with my assertion, above, that they can hardly be bothered with the book). The question is, is Comixology's date still correct? The one-week delay in getting to stores surely has to be a printing issue, so the digital version shouldn't be affected. Amazon is probably displaying 6/28 because new books come out on Tuesdays, not Wednesdays like comics.

I'm reading Lord of Chaos. This is my fourth read of The Wheel of Time. I just recently got to what I consider one of the neatest little things in the series, which is when one of the very minor characters has a Foretelling that exactly lays out the end of the series. Keep in mind, LoC came out in 1994 and A Memory of light was released in 2013, so it serves as a nice rebuttal to the argument that long fantasy series are always bloated, meandering works that the author began with no idea how to finish. This is the quote (not a spoiler because you really have to know the ending first before you can really decipher it): "The lion sword, the dedicated spear, she who sees beyond. Three on the boat, and he who is dead yet lives. The great battle done, but the world not yet done with battle. The land divided by the return, and the guardians balance the servants. The future teeters on the edge of a blade."

Yeah, even Dynamite hasn't done much with it. Their website is all Vampirella and The Spirit and stuff. You would think someone would be trying to get the word out. Now, their website says 6/22, so that seems likely. However, Amazon says 6/28. That's not necessarily a discrepancy, though. Dynamite might be offering the book early to people who buy it directly from them (for $5 more than what Amazon is selling it for).

To me, that's not the point of Jasnah at all. My impression of the little she's said about men or romance in general is that she is not interested in being defined by such relationships. The point of Jasnah is that she's a scholar, etc. I don't see much in the text to indicate anything at all about what her romantic and/or sexual inclinations might be. That's just not important to her. There are little tidbits here and there that imply something about it (the flashback to the night of Gavilar's assassination in WoR, for example, with her thinking about how nothing is ever going to happen with Amaram, or the way Shallan notices from her expression when she kills the thugs in Kharbranth that something is going on with her and men), but I don't think that it does more than suggest any number of things. One could interpret the text to imply that she is gay, straight, asexual--anything. My point, though, is that romance is not a defining attribute of her character at all.

Why not Jasnah? Because she's his daughter, and maybe you don't share your premonitions about the end of the world with your daughter. Because she's a heretic and an atheist, and, his theories being somewhat religious in nature, he doesn't fancy having her scoff at them. Because she's a woman, and the cultural segregation of duties means that he doesn't want to talk her about the fact that Amaram et al have been turning glyphs into a real alphabet as a part of their secret investigations into the Desolations and such. There could be more reasons, besides. Why not Dalinar? That's much more straightforward. The Dalinar we know from The Stormlight Archive so far is not the Dalinar that Gavilar knew. He wasn't terribly sophisticated, had little interest in honor and the Codes, etc. My personal suspicion is that we will eventually discover that, while Gavilar's last days inspired Dalinar to become the man we know, he was not so honorable as Dalinar believes. I suspect that Gavilar's motivation for adhering to the Codes was more like something that would motivate Amaram than something that would motivate Dalinar. Although we don't yet really know what exactly is going on, it seems like there are a number of secret societies on Roshar who are trying to prepare for a Desolation, doing so in completely the wrong ways, and I bet that Gavilar was in the same boat.

I hope that the Supergirl season starts out just picking up where the last season left off--still in a separate universe and everything--but when the crossover episode week comes along, they do a mini-Crisis on Infinite Earths that lasts four episodes (that is, Supergirl, then Flash, then Arrow, then Legends--all in the one week). After that, Supergirl is in the CWverse.

Yes, and he probably was one even before Warbreaker, since EDIT: Also, I don't think anyone knows why he's there. He doesn't seem like a member of the 17th Shard. It could well be 100% because he doesn't want to have to survive on Breath (and WoB suggests as much, as I recall; although, I don't have the WoB at hand).

The Black Panther's whole suit is laced with Vibranium, like Cap's shield. If Cap can block a blow from Thor's hammer with his shield and suffer no ill effects, T'Challa can jump a few stories.

That is part of the challenge of doing the adaptation: the characters' opinions on what is going is almost as important as what is actually going on. That's great for a book, but it needs to be done differently for a visual medium. A voice over to reveal characters' thoughts would not be a good way to do it. One way to work towards getting inside the characters' heads a little would be to put what characters are thinking into the scripts. WoT characters are generally quite expressive, to the point of almost being like caricatures--but not in a negative way. Any actor cast in the production would have to be very good at communicating a lot with just their face, and there's no reason not to provide them with the thoughts that are running through their characters' heads that cause them to make those expressions. Now, no amount of emoting is going to give viewers a clear idea of the literal words that the characters are thinking, but maybe that's a good thing. Really getting to know the characters is a major part of the WoT's charm, but it's also overly dependent on repetition. I say that as someone who is reading the series for the fourth time right now. I really do love the series, but I understand why a lot of people just can't deal with it. For a show to be popular among general audiences, it's going to be a whole lot better for them to get to know a character through her comical furious facial expressions, rather than her 300th recitation of Men! Always thinking with the hair on their chests!

I've been thinking about the challenges of doing an adaptation that does the WoT justice in particular while I do this reread. Even though I'm only just starting The Shadow Rising, it suddenly occurred to me what will make the later books so difficult to adapt. At a certain point, many chapters feature very little action. The POV character might walk down a hallway, and if anything else happens, it will be something relatively insignificant. However, as that character walks down the hallway, they'll pass by some minor character and remember a conversation that they had with them and several other side characters. Then they'll see a nervous servant and think of what is causing that nervousness--perhaps by way of recollecting another scene involving another gaggle of minor characters. It's really an ingenious way to check in with all of the dozens of minor characters running about in your epic series of lengthy books, but it sure is something that is difficult to adapt to a visual medium. The simple solution--if the showrunners aim for a very literal adaptation (and I hope they do)--is to excise those walking-down-the-hall chapters almost entirely and only dramatize the important memories from those chapters. They can use those scenes to lend variety to episodes that would otherwise be one long single POV.

Yeah, I really don't think Secret History needs to be read after Bands, myself. I even think that it would be cool if someone created a Mistborn anthology that cut Secret History into the main story. Having not read the first trilogy all that recently when I read M:SH, I think that some of the scenes didn't have quite the impact that they could have.

I really think that viewing Dalinar and Adolin as inherently dissimilar based on this passage completely ignores the vast difference in their upbringing. One key passage illustrates how much Alethi culture has changed, and it is perhaps not one that would immediately seem to be the obvious one: When Sadeas casually brings Ialai masculine food, and she begins eating it in front of everyone, with Dalinar offhandedly noting that she's one of the only women he knows who likes men's food. That is not something that could happen in Shattered Plains-era Alethi society. It would be at least a minor scandal for a woman of such a high rank to eat men's food--and at the men's table--at a formal dinner. The notion that Dalinar was an idiotic brute doesn't stand up to evidence in the text. That's not part of the legend of the Blackthorn at all. These flashbacks are doing much to fill in the recent history of Alethi society. Their sense of propriety and honor remains largely a facade for most Alethi, but that facade was a lot thinner in very recent memory. If the Dalinar of 20 or 30 years ago seems coarse--and he is--that is more a reflection on Alethi society than on his inherent personality traits.

The thing is, the Accords weren't even written to avoid an issue like Ultron. Sokovia is Tony's fault, but if you consider the incident separately from the creation of Ultron--and, remember, the Sokovia Accords are directly in reaction to the collateral damage caused by the operation in Sokovia involving all of the Avengers, not Tony creating Ultron--then it's really not. It doesn't seem like people are even aware that Ultron was created by Iron man (a good thing to keep on the down-low, if they want to avoid a whoooooole lot of negative PR). Think about how all of the situations in the MCU would have been different if the Sokovia Accords had already been in place: The Battle of New York would have ended with NYC getting nuked. The fiasco from The Winter Soldier, with helicarriers crashing in Washington DC, would have been waaaaaaaaaaay worse if Cap had needed to wait for approval before trying to stop Hydra from murdering millions of people. Of course, those major tragedies (together, surpassing anything that has ever happened in recorded history) would be as nothing compared to the complete extinction of the human race perpetrated by Ultron, while an international body debated about how and when to deploy the Avengers. Even Lagos, an operation that probably could have been handled by a group like SHIELD, would have gone a lot worse if Crossbone's suicide bomb went off in the market instead of in the air.

The "I could do this all day" line is also in the first Captain America movie. When he's still a skinny kid in Brooklyn, and he gets in a fight with that guy in the alley behind the movie theater, he staggers to his feet after getting pretty thoroughly pummeled and says that. It's really a very well-executed trilogy, which is pretty amazing, considering how much the third film is tied to other MCU entries. I mean, it's a sequel to not only The Winter Soldier, but also Iron Man 3 and Age of Ultron (with some ties to Ant-Man), and it sets up Spider-Man: Homecoming and Black Panther. It is no small feat for it to fulfill all of those roles well and be an effective final chapter in a trilogy. It's pretty impressive.

In real life, sure. But in real life, if people had super powers, they probably wouldn't use them to fight crime. If they did, pretty much every government would freak out and kill them IMMEDIATELY, and most people would think that they did the right thing. Superhero movies are all about the fantasy that people can have great power and act on their own to use it responsibly. You can play with that to varying degrees in superhero properties, but ultimately, you can't really be 100% true to life. The thing with breaking them out prison--I don't know. With most prisons in the world, once someone is stuck there, it is almost impossible to get them out. I don't want to turn this into a big political debate, as this isn't the forum for such discussions, but in a world where people do have the power to break someone out of prison by just punching some guys and not seriously hurting them (that's the conceit, anyway, even though it wouldn't happen like that in real life), I don't know--is that really so wrong? I know that may seem like a crazy question, but is it really okay to let an innocent person rot in prison for years on end, while you politely petition authorities to do the right thing and they ignore you? In a world where punching your way to justice is par for the course? Obviously, I don't think it's right to violently break people out of prison. However, in the world of superheroes, it just might be.That's a superhero's job, after all--acting independently to correct injustice, in a way that would be wildly illegal in real life.

Keep in mind that their supermax underwater prison is a secret facility that is intended to hold supers indefinitely and with no trial. That is a total violation of the law and a fairly immediate vindication of Cap's position. The whole basis of the Accords is really flimsy, anyway. "We need a governing body to decide when and how you go on missions." Uh... Okay, so how would that have helped matters in the examples given? Who else was supposed to fight aliens in New York? The only way Sokovia could have gone better is if they had stopped Ultron from being created in the first place. Who else could have stopped the killer robot planning to wipe out all life on earth? If the Sokovia Accords had been in place before, either things would have turned out almost exactly the same, or they would have been waaaaay worse. That's not a criticism of the movie, by the way. I loved the movie.

The snake has to be eating its own tail for the symbolism to make sense, but they could use an animated version of the symbol from the map. The snake can be writhing, the wheel and spear slowly rotating,the banner flapping in the breeze, and the chora leaves moving as if growing.

I got an idea for how they should do the opening to the show that I think would be awesome but probably won't ever happen. So, the opening credits or however they do it should be a voiceover, with pauses in between each line of 1-2 seconds. While the voiceover is playing, we see a closeup animation of the serpent and wheel (which we will see whole at the end of the intro). The voiceover is :"The Wheel of Time turns / and Ages come and pass, / leaving memories that become legend. / Legend fades to myth, / and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. [double-length pause; whole wheel-and-serpent crest shows onscreen with title]" The main part of the idea I have is for what plays during those pauses. So, they film a dramatization of the Strike at Shayol Ghul--several minutes of The Hundred Companions and their army fighting, some shots of the Forsaken in conference with the Dark One, a sequence portraying Lews Therin et al setting the weave to seal the Bore and the counterstroke, etc--and use a second or two for each pause. For the uninitiated, it wouldn't be clear what was going on, but it would be obvious that some epic battle that has something to do with the story was being portrayed. As the series went on, people would slowly realize that they were getting a slightly different scene each time, and they would also slowly begin to recognize the characters and gradually realize what they were seeing.