The Wheel of Time Crosstalk: Did we enjoy reading The Eye of the World?

COREY: There is certainly more moral ambiguity in Jordan’s novels, and even more so as they go on. People have made the point that while Tolkien’s views on war were shaped by his experiences in World War I, Jordan’s were shaded by his time in Vietnam, where a lot of soldiers didn’t know what they were actually fighting for. It’s an interesting lens to use to view the series.

Back to the characters, I think overall it’s too early to judge with a lot of them. As I’ve said, Eye is Jordan’s soft entry into the world; the characters don’t veer far very from their archetypes this early on. As the novels continue, they get more fleshed out, with intricacies that make them quite different from the generic roles they fill in Eye.

Early on, I do enjoy Perrin as you do, as well as Loial. Loial has a different way at looking at things, even among his own people, and provides a nice foil for our standard-issue heroes. But my favorite character has to be Lan. I’m a sucker for the brooding badass with a tragic backstory, and Lan fits that trope to a T. Sometimes tropes can be fun and enjoyable, and in Lan’s case, even though I’ve read his character before, Jordan writes him so well I don’t mind.

As for the female characters, I have mixed emotions. I applaud Jordan for not just including them in the story but having them drive the plot. On the other hand, holy hell are they hard to like sometimes. Egwene and Elayne are fairly likable in Eye, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a Nynaeve chapter I enjoyed. She comes off as boorish and overbearing, and five books in has yet to show any growth towards changing that. I won’t go so far as to say Jordan doesn’t know how to write female characters, because he does have some wonderful examples later on, but yeah, not a fan for the most part.

Ultimately though, heroes are only as good as their villains. What did you think about your initial taste of the Forsaken?

DAN: I’m glad you mentioned the Forsaken, because…who? Those are the two guys who turned up at the end to be the final bosses, right? Honestly, they felt pretty generic to me, like the book needed a couple of strong baddies for our heroes to overcome so it produced these two. Like, were they talked about earlier? Did I miss it?

I almost hate to go back to The Lord of the Rings, but evil in The Eye of the World definitely has a Mordor-ian feel to it. The Lord of the Rings is about fighting the Dark Lord. The Eye of the World is about resisting the Dark One, an ancient evil bent on domination and destruction. There’s some intriguing variety among the “good” characters in The Eye of the World, but the face of evil is as implacably horrific as it was in The Fellowship of the Ring. Like Sauron, the Dark One is a Bad Guy, with capital letters. He’s the lord of death and he wants his armies of Trollocs to overrun the world and swallow up everything kind and decent. We’re not dealing with Tywin or Cersei Lannister here, where you could argue that they’re sympathetic or good at their jobs or in some way redeemable.

And that’s fine; I’m completely cool with my bad guys being rotten to the core. And I love that Jordan gives us some very human villains, too. The Dark Friends are an interesting idea: humans seduced by the Dark One’s promise of power into doing his bidding. And the Children of the Light are very intriguing, since they earnestly think they’re fighting the Dark One and can’t see that they’ve become a private army of fanatical witch-hunters. I’m intrigued to see how these different kinds of bad interact with each other going forward.

Going back to characters for a moment, I’m gonna disagree with you about Nynaeve. She’s definitely assertive, but I looked forward to her chapters because I knew she was gonna push the plot forward. Nynaeve is a very active participant in her own story, which is great for fiction; you know she’s gonna do exactly what she wants regardless of what other people think, which means she can pull the story in any direction, and that’s exciting.

Would I want Nynaeve as a team member on a group project at school? Probably not, but I definitely like reading about her.

By the way, when I started the book, I had no idea we were even going to have point-of-view chapters for characters other than Rand. I think I started to get really invested in the story when the group split up after the incident at Shadar Logoth and we got to see how the characters behaved on their own. What do you make of how the story is structured?