What We're Gonna Talk About When We Talk About Wheel Of Time

Photo by Élisabeth Joly on Unsplash

While we still don't have a release date for the Wheel of Time TV show, we're getting closer (I mean, we must be), and I finished my preparatory reread, so this feels like as good a time as any to discuss in a little more detail what we're going to be doing with the reread series. Since this is going over a completed series, in which most of the mysteries are about as solved as they're going to get, and since we're talking about much longer books, with much longer chapters, in a world far more different from out own, it's gonna look a little different from what we're been doing with The Dresden Files. 

Let me start with a quick list of what we will not be doing

• Referencing the numerical power levels listed for various characters in the Wheel of Time Companion. They're nowhere in the actual fiction, and they kind of irritate me, so we're gonna be ignoring them. 
• Attempting to address the Big Unanswered Questions of the series, unless I really, really feel like it when I get to those bits. 
• Treating as definitive any information that exists solely in extratextual sources, no matter how official. 
• Making any assumptions based on the time in which the books were written, or the author's age and geographic origin, about the series's attitude towards gender, sex, and sexuality. (Or spirituality). 

What we will be doing

• Getting real in-depth about food, culture, economics, and ecology. 
• Looking for every instance of Gay, and probably talking about it in great detail.
• Covering New Spring either between Fires of Heaven and Lord of Chaos or between Crossroads of Twilight and Knife of Dreams. 
• Complaining about missed opportunities. 
• Discussing the textual morality of the series, as exemplified by what happens to whom, and what arguments those outcomes are making. 
• Trying out the literary agent hypothesis to see what things look like with and without it. 
• Wildly overextrapolating small clues about what things looked like in the Age of Legends, and in the time between there and the start of the series. 
• Splitting chapters longer than 30 minutes roughly in half, and chapter longer than an hour into roughly 30 minute chunks. 
• Having some fun with linguistics.
• Examining what the series does, and doesn't, have to say about gender. 
• Referring to extratextual sources when it suits me. 
• Assessing, non-comprehensively, the impact of Wheel of Time on the fiction that came after it and, to a lesser extent, how it was informed by what came before it. 
• Attempting to figure out what Robert Jordan thinks a blueberry is. 

There also exists the distinct possibility that I will say "fuck it" and start the rereads before we have a release date, because this is getting silly. New Dresden Files post should go up sometime between early tomorrow morning and late tomorrow night - I'm determined to get back in the Wednesday/Saturday schedule. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!