Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2278223" data-attributes="member: 4937">LOL.  No, literally, I had to get up and leave the lab when I read that to avoid causing a disturbance.  I really intended to just stay out of this thread, but gee, is that the best you can do?For the record, demonstrating that an author is often incoherent and that he raises themes for which he has no good answer or that he raises all sorts of mythic elements that he has no intention of exploring in an intellectual fashion is nothing like demonstrating that the work doesn't contain fantastic elements which embody abstract ideas such as good, evil, harmony, etc. Again, all you've demonstrated by claiming that this particular work doesn't fit my definition of a fantasy, is that you aren't very good at reading works critically.  The Wheel of Time is deeply steeped in Buddhist and Judeo-Christian mythic imagery and contains all sorts of fantastic elements which are in many cases explicitly stand-ins for abstract ideas.   Heck, Rand Al'Thor isn't just symbolically a Christ figure, Rand Al'Thor is EXPLICITLY WITHIN THE TEXT a Christ figure (and within the framework of the story, one must assume that he is literally the Messiah Returned).   Even if we where to argue that Robert Jordan had no higher aspirations than pulp fiction, which would be rather insulting IMO, this would be a really good example of why its impossible to write fantasy that doesn't end up getting tied into morality.  And in particular, I'd argue that alot of the reasons the WoT series is so compelling despite its flaws as a story is that it is so deeply tied into all this mythic imagery about good and evil, ying and yang, ad infinitum.</blockquote>

Verification