Crossroads of Twilight was Wheel of Time at its Worst

 I had hoped that I would have done more of the review of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt by now, and while I do have a decent chunk of the second part finished, it’s not ready and that’s annoying. I was also hoping to bang out another sporking chapter. It’s Mother’s Day weekend though, so I don’t know if I’ll have the time to get to it.

There was a bit in which I considered making a Saturday Note about LEGO Star Wars: The Game (the one from 2005) and how it’s still one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, but I don’t know what I’d say other than… yeah, it’s one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, to this day.

Also, I think I’ve only got a couple more story arcs for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla left so that’s cool.

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Crossroads of Twilight was Wheel of Time at its Worst

Alright I’m gonna talk smack about a dead guy’s book for a bit.

Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, I am told, was in its time a pretty subversive series. We start with not one hero, but three, and none of them want to be heroes, they want to go home. And one of them is the Chosen One, and it turns out that being the Chosen One is not Awesome, it sucks, because he’s slowly going insane and causing suffering in all the people he cares about. And the aristocrats are not noble lords or obvious villains, they’re a bunch of petty feuding sycophants all trying to one-up each other in something called “the Game of Houses.” The wizards, the Aes Sedai, are all female, and instead of being organized, they’re basically all manipulative, and some of them are part of a Satanic cult trying to destroy the world.

Some of these things are not too surprising to fantasy enthusiasts today, especially in the wake of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and the television adaptation Game of Thrones. Subverting usual fantasy tropes is kind of normal these days, even if it happened long before Martin made it cool. But towards the end of its run, Wheel of Time was known not for being subversive epic fantasy, but for being seen as basically everything wrong with long-running high fantasy epics: an obscenely long, complex story with tons of characters hopping out the woodwork, convoluted plots that twisted into seemingly pointless detours, several viewpoint characters for every book, prologues that took up huge fractions of the books they’re featured in, and tons of foreshadowing to cover up that the author won’t get to the point.

For reference: when James Rigney (Robert  Jordan’s real name) pitched this series to his editor, he said it would be a trilogy. His editor knew that wouldn’t stick, so he made Rigney sell it to the publishing company as a six book series instead. When he died, Jordan had written eleven books in the series. And a prequel.

[He also left Brandon Sanderson instructions to wrap it all up in one final book, but Sanderson couldn’t make it fit so he shrugged and made it three, making it a fourteen book series.]

The problems are there much earlier, but I just read Book 10, The Crossroads of Midnight, and at this point I… look, I can’t say that I give up, because I’m really committed to finishing this series this time. In my last attempt to read the series, I gave up on the previous book, Winter’s Heart. But this was not a good addition to the series. It’s downright inexcusable that ten books into the series, the Plot is grinding to such a prominent halt and getting so bogged down.

So much of the Plot just doesn’t go anywhere in this book! There’s a lot of characters planning to do things that make the Plot move forward, but it doesn’t! In some ways, it regresses, because as the characters are talking about doing stuff, other stuff happens that hampers their ability to do that! So Perrin can’t rescue his wife and get about his business because the Seanchan invasion is interfering. So Egwene can’t just go and overthrow Elaida from being head of the Aes Sedai because she gets kidnapped. 

The past few books have been introducing characters out the wazoo and to someone like me who is terrible with names, it’s downright maddening. Look, I can get a few names, and I can figure out who is important and who isn’t. But since Jordan just keeps throwing names at me, and keeps giving viewpoints to minor characters, and I can’t really think of a system to group names--as far as I can tell, it isn’t as if names from one country or another are based off of any real world linguistics--I can’t work out who is who, what they’re doing, and whether I should be invested in what they’re doing.

It doesn’t help that there are important characters like Cadsuane who come right the FUDGE from nowhere and are apparently legendary in-universe and become major characters despite me having never seen this person in any of the books before.

And I’m baffled, guys. I’ve read on TV Tropes that Jordan considered The Crossroads of Twilight an experiment that failed, and I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m baffled that both he thought it was great fun to slowly grind his high fantasy epic to a standstill over the course of four books or so, and that his editors and publishing house let him do this. I’ve heard a lot of reader discontent, and that’s entirely justified because there’s no logic behind it! I can understand that maybe he got really caught up in the world and storylines, and thought it’d be cool to do a lot of things he hadn’t originally planned, or that things took longer than he originally intended, but this is not okay and he should have known that.

I’ve been told it picks up after this one. It better. Considering the next one is the last one published in Rigney’s lifetime, I think it’s possible he either realized, or someone cornered him and told him that he needed to get a move on with this series.

I want to be clear: the first few books in this series are good. They’re pretty darn good! And even the later books have some very good bits. Don’t make my criticisms make it sound like there was never any worth in this series. And when I get to the end, I’ll probably have a better assessment of how the series as a whole fares. But right now? The complete halt of the Plot, the cacophony of new characters, and being ten books into this makes me feel like I didn’t really make a mistake when I gave up the first time through.

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