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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2297011" data-attributes="member: 2205">For some reason, I feel compelled to offer up my meaningless opinion on Dragonlance, Robert Jordan and Terry Brooks...   why can I not stop myself?   <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/nervous.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":heh:" title="Nervous Laugh    :heh:" data-shortname=":heh:" /> I think the original Dragonlance trilogy was OK.  The characters were horribly cliched, but a few of them were likeable.  Tanis's struggle with his identity was reasonably well described, and Laurana was exactly the kind of heroine I prefer; naive and cheeky with a nice (rather than beeyotchy) princess complex, yet even after facing the stark harshness of the world, and maturing because of it, her essential personality wasn't overwhelmed by grim and grittiness.The plot itself was kinda confused, especially near the end.  Certainly, they didn't inspire me to delve further into Dragonlanciana, but I still don't mind the first trilogy too much.  Possibly a cheesy yet moderately successful movie could be gleaned from here.Robert Jordan is perhaps the biggest disappointment of recent years.  He started off doing so much right; the setting is intrigueing, the backstory, history and societies, the way magic works, etc. the intrigue and hidden threats; is all really well done.  His characters start off likeable and relatable.  Then he unveils his monumental failings as a writer; he can't do action scenes at all, his characters numbskullness starts to get grating and tedious, he repeats himself over and over, he doesn't advance the plot at all and endlessly spins his wheels in ridiculous character studies that accomplish nothing.  He seems to have completely lost control of his own creation.  Either that, or he's not really a very good writer, and without a good editor he's just hopelessly lost.  I can't imagine how any movie could be made from this without taking just a few highlights from the series and stringing them together in an almost all-new plot.Terry Brooks is almost as astonishingly poor a writer as David Eddings; I read The Sword of Shannara in high school, marvelled at how blatantly it ripped off Lord of the Rings, read a few pages of the next book (whatever it was called) and then dropped him like a wet taco and never looked back.  Because Hollywood is also fairly derivative, this is probably movie minable, but I'd almost prefer that it wasn't.</blockquote>

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