So someone on my Tumblr asked me:

Hi, so I just saw a post where you talked about the Wheel of Time Saga. I’ve been trying to convince myself to start reading the books, but now that I saw your commentary, I’m curious and apprehensive. I wanted to read them bc I’ve been told they have a lot of wonderful fleshed out, complex female characters. Could you tell me if you would recommend the books and, if not, why?

You know, I’ve heard this before (the “wonderful fleshed out, complex female characters” part) and I…I have doubts.

My answer turned into a post that was simply too long to relegate to my Tumblr, where I knew it would swiftly be forgotten about. So here it is, on Medium, where you can read it.

First factor: I have never heard a woman say this about the female characters of Wheel of Time. I DO NOT MEAN by this that no women enjoy Wheel of Time. I’m sure many do. I’m sure some of them will jump on here and tell me they agree that there are wonderful fleshed-out female characters. That is fine. The ONLY THING I mean by this statement is that I HAVE NEVER PERSONALLY BEEN TOLD by a woman that they enjoy the female characters in Wheel of Time, and I usually hear the exact opposite of that.

Second factor: I gave up on the Wheel of Time series in the middle of book…five? Six? Somewhere around there. So it’s entirely possible the later books have excellent female characters. I have been told by several (dude) fans that I gave up too early and it gets really good later on and ends super well.

I still have my doubts.

Third factor: I have a long vendetta against Robert Jordan that is partially tied to his writing, but partially not. I was reading Wheel of Time and, at some point, I realized what he was doing. He was opening up storyline after storyline and closing no loops. And I suddenly said to myself, “Holy shit. He plans to write this series until he dies, and then it will be ‘the great unfinished work of Robert Jordan!!!’ and that’s how he wants to leave this life.”

And that is exactly what the fucker did. And not in a Stan Lee sort of way, where he knew the world would go on beyond the end of his life. He wanted to be the only one in control of the series, and to never finish it.

I think that’s a dick move and I have always been annoyed with him for this. And I guess it’s cool because it gave us Brandon Sanderson, but we could have had Sanderson regardless and then I wouldn’t have endless Jordan fanboys jizzing his praises every time I criticize him (which is whenever he’s brought up).

Fourth factor: Jordan was hopelessly derivative. As one example: right from the beginning, he introduces these creatures called Myrddraal. And they are just. They are Nazgul. That’s exactly what they are.

Except, like the worst kind of fanboy, he goes, “NO MINE ARE DIFFERENT BECAUSE THEIR CLOAKS DON’T MOVE AND ALSO THEY’RE NOT WRAITHS BOUND TO A RING AND ALSO THERE’S A LOT MORE OF THEM AND THEY’RE, LIKE, BETTER.”

But that’s bullshit. Because they’re Nazgul.

Fifth factor: Despite the entire previous entry about being so derivative of Tolkien and others, Jordan managed to miss out on what ACTUALLY makes fantasy awesome and worth reading.

He didn’t tell a story about hobbit-like characters — ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances — he told a story about a character like Aragorn, except if Aragorn was also a more powerful wizard than Gandalf, and if on Aragorn’s journey he fell in love with AND got to bone Arwen, Eowyn, and Galadriel, and all three of them were hopelessly devoted to him and would bone him any time he wanted, but were ridiculously catty and bitchy towards each other because of their jealousy over having to share what must have been the most epic penis in the history of Middle-earth.

Rand is the biggest Mary Sue I’ve ever heard of, and his only flaw is that he sometimes goes a little crazy because he’s JUST TOO POWERFUL FOR HIS OWN GOOD.

But maybe we’re supposed to pay attention to Rand’s best friends instead. Mat and Perrin. They’re our ordinary side characters we can relate to, right?

Yeah, except then they become gods in their own right. My memory of details is hazy, but basically Mat becomes so lucky that he literally can’t lose battles because everything works out in his favor, and Perrin (with NO POWERS WHATSOEVER) becomes such a mighty warrior from Blackmisthing Really Hard that he crushes the heads of THREE MYRDDRAAL — the Nazgul analogues who were so powerful they spent the ENTIRE FIRST BOOK fleeing from just ONE of them — in a single swipe of his hammer.

Also let’s not forget that Perrin gets a Perfect Girlfriend who comes out of nowhere so hard, even nineteen-year-old me was like, “Whoah, wait, WHY would this girl ever be interested in such a goddamn dweeb?”

Power creep, thy name is Wheel of Time.

Sixth factor: You know the ridiculous fantasy tropes for which the genre gets made fun of all the time? If most of them didn’t come from Jordan, they were popularized by him.

You know the whole thing where characters’ names have, like, twelve apostrophes for no reason?

That’s…not really a Lord of the Rings thing, is it?

Look at the characters. Gandalf. Frodo. Bilbo. Aragorn. Arwen. Even slightly longer character names are extremely phonetic — Galadriel, Tinuviel. You can pronounce these words at a glance. Even when characters’ names are open to different pronounciations — Eowyn, Celeborn — you usually pick one and stick with it. You don’t sit there going, “What the FUCK is that supposed to say?”

Now take a look at this major character from Wheel of Time:

(image description: entry from the Wheel of Time wiki of the character el’Nynaeve ti al’Meara Mandragoran)

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, JORDAN.

(I actually forgot, until I looked her up, how FUCKING RIDICULOUS her name was and now I’m enraged all over again.)

You know the whole thing about the prophecied Chosen One? Yeah, that’s not a Lord of the Rings thing either. There is a passing mention of some ancient verses referring to Aragorn — but he’s not the protagonist of the story, is he? Frodo is. And there is NO prophecy about Frodo at all.

The closest thing we get is Gandalf going, “Fuck it dude, I don’t know what’s going on. Bilbo was probably supposed to get the Ring because of fate or some shit, and if he was, you were, so that’s probably good, yeah? If you’re still freaking out, you should smoke some pipeweed about it.”

Meanwhile, in Wheel of Time…hoooly shit does it ever get tiring hearing about how Rand Is The One The Prophecies Have Foretold. I forget how early in the books we learn this, but we learn it EARLY. And from then on, it seems like there’s hardly a conversation that doesn’t bring it up, at least tangentially. Everyone knows Rand is the Chosen One. It becomes his driving force, his primary motivation, in a way it never did even for Harry Fucking Potter.

Maybe that’s why every woman in the world is so eager to bone him.

Seventh factor: The moment you’ve been waiting for.

So how about those women?

You’ve probably caught hints of it in this post so far, but: no, the women of Wheel of Time are not complex and awesome, insofar as I have read them.

I mean, from the very simple perspective of the Bechdel Test, I would be incredibly surprised to find a single conversation in the five or six books I read that passes. And that includes the book I gave up on, which had hundreds of pages of three female main characters off on their own “adventure” with no male main characters around.

Virtually every woman character I met in the series was absolutely obsessed with having sex with boys. Across the board. They usually wanted to bone Rand, and when they didn’t, it was only after strongly considering him.

The one character who seemed to avoid this trope was Moiraine, but even she eventually ran into a man who she quickly became preoccupied with, and I began to roll my eyes every time she’d have a conversation with another woman in the story and describe his “strong hands.”

It’s almost not worth mentioning how unfavorable this book is when it comes to the LGBT side of life. This was a different time, and Jordan was certainly no worse than Tolkien in this regard. But it does irk me in retrospect that it was specifically related that Moiraine had had a woman “pillow friend” in her early days learning magic, but that she DEFINITELY WASN’T INTO GIRLS, they were just boning to relieve their overblown libidos.

And no, you don’t even need to ask whether the male main characters, like Rand or Mat or Perrin, ever boned each other when there were no women around for long periods of time to relieve THEIR overblown libidos. Of course they didn’t — Jordan wouldn’t have found that hot.

But here’s my final word on the matter. The women of the Wheel of Time series are WHY I gave up the series in the first place. It was the middle of whichever book I was on — five or six — that three main female characters were off on a little “adventure” together far away from the main plot. And the three of them WOULD NOT STOP bitching at each other and being the most pointlessly catty, useless, tropey stock characters.

It was like reading about a Man’s Man’s interpretation of what Mean Girls must have been like if he’d only ever heard of the movie title.

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I wasn’t even “social justice woke” back then. It was just the most pointless page-after-page storyline I had ever witnessed in my life. It was what made me realize that Jordan was filling pages until he kicked the bucket. And he seemed to think I wouldn’t notice.

So I opted out of the game. It made me sad. The first book, Eye of the World, was legit one of my favorite fantasy books ever. But it was all downhill from there.

And even if the series has one of the BEST ENDINGS EVER, it’s not worth it to me to suffer through three or more thousand-page doorstoppers to get there. I’ll go through ONE mediocre book in a series, like the middle book of the Mistborn trilogy. I won’t suffer through multiple books that are as long as multiple regular books.

TL;DR: No, you shouldn’t read Wheel of Time if you’re looking for awesome female characters. Even if they’re buried in there somewhere, you’re going to have to go through too much shlock to find them. There are tons of other books that give you awesome women right from page one.

Want some recommendations along that line?

The Deed of Paksennarion by Elizabeth Moon.

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.

And if you want to read my own attempt at creating awesome women in a fantasy world, check out my book Nightblade for free.

(I give you the first one for free so you’ll pay for all the rest. Yes, it’s the drug dealer business model. No, I’m not ashamed.)

I’ll be very happy when Jordan’s works have sufficiently faded from the zeitgeist that they’re no longer brought up to me and I don’t have to talk about them again.

Until then…these are my thoughts on the matter.

DANIEL GREENE’S RESPONSE:

MY RESPONSE: