Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - The Wheel of Time: Dualism & Free Will

Episode Date: March 20, 2022

We dip our toes for the first time into Robert Jordan's extensive world.  Special guests Alex and Roberto join Darius to talk about a dualist world and Jordan's take on the existence of free will. (If you're a Ketho fan, too bad. He's not here.)Please consider supporting Alex's gay bakery/book shop here: https://humva.dev/2022/03/15/books-baking-and-queer-things/Or listening to Roberto's podcast here: https://historyofsaqartvelo.com/patreon.com/swordsandsocialismFollow the show @SwordsNSocPodEmail us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hey, welcome everyone to Swords of Sorcery and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes and topics hiding in our genre of fiction. As always, I am Darius, and today is a special episode because Kethel is not here because I fired him for having terrible opinions. Just kidding. He apparently has a lot of real life things going on that are important, so we've given him a little time off. Instead, today we have a special episode. It's me with two guests. My guests today are Alex, a bookshop keep inspiring baker and otherwise important person. Hello, Alex.

Hello. And also Roberto of the History of Sockhart Velo, Georgia podcast. Gamba de Zobba. Was that close enough? Yeah, that was actually perfect. God, so good at language. Today, we are going to be talking about a bit of a beast. Well, at least part of it.

We are going to be talking about the first three books of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. And by the first three books, meaning just called the eye of the world, the great hunt and the dragon reborn. Wasn't that the third one, right? Yeah.

We're going to talk about this first three because I was assured by people like Alex and others that the first three sort of make up roughly one big arc. And so we're going to talk about those three. And that's plenty because that's a lot of words for my small brain. First off, let's do a little sort of familiarity thing. Alex, you're the one that brought these up to me first. When did you first read these books?

Oh, God. up to me uh first when did you first read these books oh god that was probably 2007 ish okay i i was i was but a young young young child i mean you're you're not even that old though i mean then that's even younger. I mean, that's true. Okay, so you started using the early 2000s. Were you one of those people that read the first one just because it was fantasy and just sort of powered through the entire 37,000-book series? Or did you sort of accumulate this over time? So, fun story with that.

This was an era in my life. So like, for starters, I was homeschooled for the vast majority of my life. And when I say homeschooled, I mean, my mother worked all the time. And my father, a very intelligent man who has you know gone to university gotten his graduate degree done all this stuff just could not focus for the life of him on doing these things um so i was just sort of like given a pile of textbooks for for the appropriate grade and was like, do the assignments in this. And like, my parents weren't very good about checking that I had done the assignments,

but like, I was one of those fun ADHD kids that like could absorb information in 30 minutes before a test. So I always passed my standardized tests whenever i went to like the state stuff to ensure i was actually getting an education um but then like 10 minutes after the test is over you're like i don't even know what any of that was yeah um so yeah i had a lot of free time on my hands um and there are our little local library at the time was doing a summer reading program that they do for kids. And they had prizes for reading books. And I guess somebody in the

administration was like, you know, we used to do things by giving prizes per book but books can vary a lot in size and you have kids coming in here like reading these little itty bitty books and gaming i was gonna say if it was a if it was a per book prize you picked the wrong series to go yeah so instead they started doing it by pages oh well there you go and so i went i went and i found like one of the thickest fantasy books i could find on the shelf and sure enough it was eye of the world and i read that and it's like 700 and something pages and i just like blew through all these prizes the library had, but I also liked it enough that I decided to go read some more. And yes, that is how I then ended up reading. That was 2007.

So I think by that point there were nine of the books out. That sounds about right. And I ended up reading through millions of words worth at that time. And a few months. So. Yeah. I gotta be honest. When I first like download the, I knew they were like, you know,

pretty big books or whatever. I downloaded the audio book and it was like, this audio book is 32 hours long or whatever. I was like, that's a lot of work days. And so, Roberto, you also expressed a lot of interest, obviously, in being on this episode. When did you start reading these? So I can actually tell you the exact date because I use Goodreads when I read a book. Oh, wow. reads when i read a book oh wow um so i started apparently on september 30th 2020 when my ex

time recommended well my girlfriend time recommended it to me she was like i'm actually listening to these in audiobook because i'm also illiterate so you can read them with me and i'm like i don't know because like i had a friend recommend them to me once but then he ended up being a jerk so he kind of turned me away but i was like you know what because I had a friend recommend him to me once, but then he ended up being a jerk, so he kind of turned me away. But I was like, you know what? Because I'm dating you, I'll give him a chance. And next thing you know, I read the first three in a few months. The things we do for love, I tell you what.

Well, it wasn't for love. I just started liking them. To be fair, it took me like... I finished the second one in November, and I didn't start the third one up until like May of 2021. I was reading a bunch of other stuff in between. Yeah. But essentially I started reading it because of an ex and I ended up really enjoying it.

And as I kept reading, I'm like, oh, this is interesting. And then I started seeing how many books there were. And I'm like, this is really daunting. Let me read other books in the meantime. So until I can buy the next book. Because I have like three boxes full of books right now. Because I don't have any bookshelves. So I'm like, oh, yeah, let me do that.

And started reading it. And ended up liking it. And then I found out there was no making a show. And I got really excited for the show but we can talk a bit about that later yeah we'll talk about that later look i'm telling you i'm we will be dedicating at some point a whole episode it might be a mainline or a bonus i haven't decided yet simply about like the concept and execution of adaptions like specifically about fantasy adaptions because that seems to be more of a struggle than sci-fi and we're going to talk

once katha was back we're going to talk about that at length i think well but we'll talk about wheel of time specifically a little bit later so have you i didn't uh ask roberto have you then have you made it through all of them now? Have you finished all the way through? I am currently like a quarter through book six because I tend to do a lot of my like, I read both physical and like eBooks. So like I do a lot of my eBook reading while I'm at the gym. And since I've been like having injury after injury after injury,

because I'm a Southerner who moved up to Pennsylvania and decided, hey, you know, walking on ice is a great thing. So it's just been, and like shoveling is great. And so it's just been a lot of injuring my wrist, injuring my back, injuring my leg. And it just turns out like I don't like reading while i'm in pain so have you considered not falling down you should try that you know i i didn't consider that but apparently the floor just loves me a bit too much so look i just keep she keeps wanting to like make out and

like get me closer so like the floor is just like attracted to me i'm guessing because i've been but it's a it's a very toxic relationship there. It's good. So both of you have a bit of history. I started reading these books three weeks ago and was doing about one audiobook per week to read the three of these, which of course has

enabled me to have a very deep and thorough and picture perfect remembrance of everything that happened. So I definitely was never doing anything else while I was listening. And I remember, I remember everyone's name perfectly. So I wanted, before we get into the themes, I did want to just get out of the way. I said it before we started recording, but I'm going to just get it out there. my one minor criticism is that i don't think robert jordan ever thought of a sentence that he that he decided not to include in the book i think every time he was like yeah that sentence fits here he just put all of them in i did occasionally find myself in certain scenes being like, oh, okay, I get the point. Can we move on now?

You know what I mean? I occasionally felt like it drug just a little bit. But then again, like this is tainted by the fact that I was listening to it and you know what I mean? Like I think if I had been, you know, doing it somewhat at my more of a leisure time, I think that might not – or if I had been physically reading it, you know you know were i capable of that that would have been uh i wouldn't have bothered me so much but i've noticed i'm a bit pickier about certain things now that i listen to a lot of audiobooks there's certain like author tics that can sort of get to me i mean i stand to agree i

stand to agree with you on that yeah because it's like as someone like who essentially reads a lot it felt more like to me that he was trying to go with like the old classic 1800s writer where you get paid for every word you write all that dickens the dickens type stuff dickens and i read a lot of dostoevsky because if my podcast is eastern european so i'm very eastern european minded so i read a lot of Russian authors and Polish authors. They got paid for the word essentially. And I felt like he was doing that with his book and trying to be very Tolkien-like with detail.

Because I think that's also a valid criticism. He was trying to emulate Tolkien a bit too much. I mean, he's even said as much that he sort of changed the first few chapters of the first book to give off a very like, you know, Shire-like beginning of the adventure vibe, which obviously has been a criticism that's been leveled at him. I think there's been a few where it's like, this feels like something I've read before. Oh, no, this literally is.

I don't know, Alex, did you have a... Oh, sorry, Roberto, I didn't mean to cut you off. Go ahead. I was going to say, Alex, did you have any particular feelings about Robert Jordan's particular writing style? I do feel there is an up and a down to it because I know, like, so, you know, part of the show coming out again so you know

in ye olden times young alex was sitting down consuming these books voraciously and obviously now coming at it from an adult standpoint i have some different opinions than what I put up with as a child. And when the show came out, I was like, oh, this is as well because i had a audible subscription for the longest time and i just spent all my credits on things like real time expanse to just build up a catalog eventually um not a bad choice and cover the expanse at some point oh that should be good um i know like i'm not going to be i'm not going to sit here and be like robert jordan greatest prose writer of all time um the man's dialogue is a little little interesting in places i do feel like the benefit to jordan's very long exposition dumps and not even exposition in the traditional way that we think of where it's like oh let me tell you as the main character all the things going on in the world but more so just exposition dumps like you'll be fucking going

down a river and he'll just be like ah the ruins over there are from this lost civilization they'll spend like half the chapter talking about some random ruins and then they'll just finish and you'll be like, are those coming back? And maybe they are, maybe they aren't. Who knows? And it is both to his credit and his detriment, in my humble opinion, that it gives you the sense that this is a world where things happen, not just the main characters. And I think there are better ways of going about it. But it very much gives you that feeling of if we were to just stop interacting with these characters and go follow somebody else, their story would be just as interesting. somebody else their story would be just as interesting and very much keeps i do feel like that is a problem of some fantasy worlds that jordan does avoid by having his more lengthy text

is you know in aragon for instance uh fucking inheritance trilogy you god you can you very much get the impression that like and look you laugh I did I like the books as a kid I'm not sure I'd like them now I did too I re-read them three years ago and I'm like why did I enjoy this at all I haven't re-read them in a while

all I know is I think my favorite character was like his brother or whatever there's like the normal guy who's like i guess i could hit things with a hammer but you know you know the thing i'm talking about there i'm like if you like took the spotlight off of your main character then the rest of the world is just you know i i never get the impression from real time that it is an ocean wide and an inch deep yeah i think jordan really put in the effort to let you know it's an ocean wide and an inch deep. Yeah.

I think Jordan really put in the effort to let you know, it's an ocean wide and an ocean deep. I do think that even though you make a good point, Alex, even though that's my criticism now, I think if I had read these at like 13, like it wouldn't even have crossed my mind to be like, there's too many words here.

You know what I mean? Like at 13 13 i would have voraciously devoured like every little bit of world building he gives you because that's exactly like the frame of mind i would have been in now i'm like you know old and jaded and tired and so like it doesn't hit the same way it did when i was younger but i definitely see like you said sort of it adds a lot of i you know what you call it like verisimilitude to the world. Like it's real. Like these people are real. Things are happening, whether you're witnessing them or not. And I think that leads into what I, and I think Jordan also agree is almost the main theme of these stories which is the is storytelling and like sort of myth making so the idea that like things are happening whether we're watching

them or not one of the main themes he talked about and other people have pointed out is the fact that like because time is cyclical things happen that get reported by other people that witness them. They get reported to other people, and they get reported to other people. And so then over time, an actual event becomes somewhat like, oh yeah, that was a story that happened. Then it sort of becomes a legendary story, and then it sort of becomes myth. And then eventually you kind of forget about it. It sort of passes from cultural memory altogether, at least until it happens again, because that's the way his world is set up.

And so I think your point about the fact that like the world feels deep and like things are happening is reinforced by what he thought was this main theme. That things happen and then to get told to other people and told to other people and it's this sort of translation of information across time was is incredibly important to how like people and civilizations operate you know this sort of like game of this generational game of telephone where things pass from you know event to myth to legend and how that affects the present like this interpretation of what happened in the past and i think that's sort of even at the beginning that's where he kicks off with that at the beginning because you see at the beginning of the first book, the end of the dragon previous.

And then you immediately jump to the quote unquote present. And then you can watch Rand in like real time, sort of learning about that thing that we watched happen. It used to be a bit pedantic. It's the, in the, in the prologue of the first book, it's the actually the first person in that cyclical cycle. Well, that's just me being pedantic on that oh okay yeah so it's loose there and who's in the first person because apparently i know he's one of my favorite characters so far and he essentially is a person who starts his whole

set cyclical chain that kind of comes through and goes and it's one of those things that the dragon is essentially reborn through different cycles will come back to life and there was always a new one and it's the same thing where the main goal was to kind of break the dragon down make him evil and just keep that going

that's kind of like a broad view if Alex wants to kind of go deeper into that and the problem is and this is like where i'm you know still still have the restraining bolts on in a way because like i'm trying to keep the scope in my mind to the first three books and it becomes very i mean if it's if it's easier to explain by going forward and talking about later stuff, that's totally fine. I'm personally not worried about you spoiling it for me. So if you need to give further examples, that's totally fine.

I guess a warning for viewers who might have read the first few books but haven't gone all the way. I will attempt to avoid... I'll speak broadly in things but there is I do think I guess speaking as comparing those first free books to the Lestes series

in terms of things like the cyclical nature of the world Jordan starts playing with that a lot more as it goes on and without getting into massive spoilers there is a point in which rand confronts the fact that as dragon as this super powerful person who can you, channel these vast amounts of energy for these magical artifacts. He can channel so much power that he can just delete the universe and burn everything.

And he comes and grapples with that idea of I can make myself a God and, Oh, this is why the big bad is always after the dragon no matter what is because you know it is it is very much that it does get into that theme of everything repeats itself forever unless you just decide to destroy everything and grappling with is that are we trapped in this cycle and the only victory is to accept defeat and i will say for folks who want to like go for the series the last book pins that all very well together i feel like i i'm not going to say a memory of light is the perfect work of literature but it certainly had a profound effect on me and the ending is probably the very best you could have done with everything and usually that's said in a bad way but it is really i do feel like it

ties the themes together and to an extent i feel like especially in the dragon reborn you can see jordan almost having a short run of that of because you know originally jordan was contracted to do free books just a standard trilogy so the first three books are kind of wrapped up in their own thing and you can see at the end of dragon reborn that rand's saying okay i want to be different i want to change things i want to actually fix the world can i say that from you know the books i was more familiar with i was reading through here and i'm watching rand and like where he got to by the end of that third book and i know this is after looking it up i realize this is something other people have seen so i'm not the only one i'm not super bright but i in my mind i just kept calling him paul atreides yeah for sure

that is actually supposed to be like rand is essentially paul atreides yeah for sure that is actually supposed to be like rand is essentially paul atreides like that is because he's he's just paul because he's like he's like the small kind of wimpy guy he goes to this thing you find out that he's the only man who can control the female power so he can have the male power and the female power and eventually he gets to this point of essentially godhood in dune actually it kind of goes into then like his son where like you reach this point of godhood where you realize that the only way to like stop what's happening is just by ending everything you know what i mean and it so i'm not again i'm not doing this really as like a you know saying

like jordan's bad or anything but like in my mind those are the comparisons i kept making i mean you even have the isodai benny jeseret and the desert people who are super strong warriors no it is totally like essentially if you took dune and made it, like, a fantasy series with, like, more, like, with more creatures instead of just, like, with more intelligent creatures, unlike the Sandworms, you essentially have more Wheel of Time, basically. Because you still have that whole, like, pre-sentient knowledge and everything kind of flowing through the dragon dragon so uh the kvizit's heteroc is essentially the dragon and like you could reach back into your previous lives to know the memories that you've had before exactly that's actually something um which is going way past the purview of the three books but that is something that will show up again with multiple characters, not just with Rand. I will quibble there, though, in terms of the power that Rand has. Rand never, as far as I remember, and admittedly, you know, there's fucking four Bibles worth of words here.

But from my remembrance of rereading the books, Rand never controls Siddhar. He can control... Sidene. He can control Sidene as all Malthanelers can, but the bit where it gets weird of, oh, he's combining both powers, is he can tap into the true source like directly that's one of his his big dragon abilities is that the true source is divided male and female side in and side are and he can just like bypass that and go straight to the faucet basically. And so it's less, it's less,

ah, he's controlling the female half and more, he's skipping this half system altogether and just going straight for it. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Then thank you for that clarification. Like I said,

my knowledge is still very, you know, basic and cursory. Again, it was just something that was banging in my head as i was reading yeah and i think that shows up a bit later in the books and where i am currently so it's not something i show up really quick he's still trying to he's still trying to control these abilities he's just like trying to learn how to use them yeah so the story takes us intentionally by by jordan's admission takes this very like he called it a familiar opening path like it interviews he said he did this on purpose to make people feel more like comfortable with the world he was

building before he got into like the other stuff so you start with this like you know farm hand from a small town introduced to a wider world i mean this is pretty general like you know joseph journey yeah joseph campbell hero's journey like uh stuff before you start getting into like sort of these these like bigger and wider issues we've touched on it before but i want to focus it on it now a little bit this what the things that you know rand has to learn and that we as readers like learn about this this world is it's inherent like inherent sort of cyclical nature and like it's dualism i just want to you know get our thoughts for a little bit on this sort of like what i want so the setup of the cosmology i guess is that i don't know if that's

what you want to call it like the the way the world is constructed because these are clearly ideas that like not of a lot of other like sort of western fantasy authors typically focus on, if that makes sense. Like, I mean, I guess some of them have talked about cyclical worlds and like cyclical time, but not many of them focus on this sort of inherent dualism. And I don't know, you know, I wanted to sort of get either of your thoughts

on sort of him taking that as his foundation, as opposed to something more classically, I don't know, Christian based, I guess, or Abrahamic. Because, you know, me looking at it as someone who has studied a lot about, like research a lot into various, you know, religions, right? Various religious traditions. It seems that like, this sort of idea of the inherent dualism of the world is something that's pretty foreign to like you know europeans and sort of places heavily colonized by europeans like america um this sort of dualism doesn't start to show up until you at least get to you know sort of the middle east and going further east whether you're talking about,

even though it's not technically dualist, I guess, is like Zoroastrianism or Manichaeism or Taoism. Do you know what I mean? Like it's not until you move further East until you start to get these, this, this concept that the world is inherently split between like a good force and a bad force more or less. And that the the the struggle between these two things is an inherent part of existence and you're part of it really whether you want to be or not that these are going to be the forces that shape the world around you and it's sort of up to you to accept your place in that like struggle and do it you know what i mean and like specifically for your hero characters they need to accept their place in this struggle and do it you know what i mean and like specifically for your hero characters they need to accept their place in this struggle and accept the responsibility of acting in a way

that's in accordance with this inherent like good and bad fight where you know more of like a abrahamic or specifically christian background is more like good was first and good will always be evil is a thing that sprung up later and can be at the end completely defeated which doesn't seem to be a thing that uh jordan puts forth in this world at least at the beginning anyway maybe by the end it works okay so the way like i'm recalling it now um i've been i'm on my third cup of wine right now so my brain's going way slower now um essentially the way i see it is like more like a manichaean thing but mixed with like the hellfire and brimstone of like baptism essentially because you still have the duality of nature before like they know that that there's the light and there's, you know, you have the dark friends who are a big thing.

So basically those are your devil worshippers. And then you have, you know, the lords of the light who are essentially your big, you know, big Puritans or your big Teutonic Knights, whatever you want to call them. But who essentially you have these two extreme forces in the world you know one of them essentially trying to help out people for their own ends and then you have this force that fights for the light but is also this destructive force for their own needs but in what they still believe like the they only believe in the light essentially so you still have that whole dualistic nature where you have the uh what are they called again the white the white cloaks the white cloaks yeah the white cloaks where they're like they serve the light but they're also just shitty yeah they said we can curse on this show right yeah

oh yeah yeah they're essential assholes basically because they serve the light, but they're very much your... I don't want to diss anyone for being a Puritan, but they're a classic Puritan who essentially... They're your Southern Anabaptists, essentially. The White Cloaks are your Southern Anabaptists who are like, you do not follow the true path, we're going to picket your fences, we're going to destroy everything in your town, and we're going to interrogate you to death because you don't follow what we follow and then the dark friends are just you're kind of like they're your devil worshipers who want to bring about the end and they do kill people and everything so you have

these two like very dualistic like you have these two opposites who are essentially the same thing because they still they believe so strongly what they're doing they're kind of fighting against the people that you know they're trying to get to follow them because even though the dark ones are a lot more secretive they're at least like not as bad as the white cloaks so like there's times where i'm like why should i fall why should i listen to the white cloaks when and like yeah dark friends are bad but like they're not killing me for like saying one bad thing about the light or something see my quibble there is that it's like of of the white cloaks you get half of them are dark friends too exactly like half of them are dark friends isn't one one of them basically... Oh, wait, that might be later. But one of them is essentially

one of the main servants to your essential nine... You basically have this whole cast of characters who are like your 13, the Forsaken, who are basically... I don't know if you guys watch anime, but they're essentially the homunculi from Fullmetal alchemist um they're essentially like these are the evil guys they all

have different traits and like they will follow that trait to the end and they are essential like and then like everyone below them is kind of like the dark friends are just their allies who just do anything it's like oh my god i can be. And then they always get fucked over in the end. They're just like bad guy simps? Yeah, they're just bad guy simps for the Dark Lord on his dark throne.

In the land where Mordor lies. It is Dark Cage. It is Dark Cage, yeah. Rand just needs to go find the ring and toss it into the volcano. Wait, that's the wrong series. But essentially, it's like one of those things. It's like you have like – you do have like this whole structure.

It's still following like the Abrahamic structure because the world where Rand is essentially set is – I would call it Manichean because it still has a dualistic nature of Manicheanism but you still follow the one true religion Alex, as the resident Christian of the podcast opinions please see I feel like

this is like the first three Wheel of Time books I feel like are what happens if you take Tolkien and you, like, vacuum all of the Christian allegory out of Tolkien. Just vacuum the Catholicism out. And then you, like, take this mishmash of quotation marks, Far East quotation marks. quotation marks far east quotation marks because like this is the problem of like and and i do think one of the valid criticisms that you can make of jordan is that it is very obvious the man was very interested in these various philosophies and spiritualities

it is also very obvious like i don't think he ever like sat down and talked to an adherent like you didn't sit down and talk to a taoist or a manichaeist or like anything like that i do and this is the thing like you know the difference between doing something maliciously or what and like i do genuinely believe that robert jordan genuine, positive sort of curiosity and idea of, oh, I like these ideas. I want to know more about them. I want to write about them. and cyclical nature but you can very obviously tell that he is trying to you know espouse yes these buddhist and talisman ideas in his works and i think he read a lot of books about them but he never like went and talked to somebody and to his credit asterisk mark, as he progressed more as an author.

And as the series went on, it is clear that like he's begins to refine these ideas. He's talking to more people because now he's this big, successful, you know, writer and he's doing more, more of these things. So he's taking more time to go out and do proper research,

but it does very much feel like yes if you took ward of the rings just kind of shoveled out the catholicism and then sort of spackled so some generalist talus uh ideas over that that hole you've left that's kind of what you get with the first freebie old time books and that's not bad but it does like show the rough edges where you can tell he really wants to do just a very tolkien-esque adventure and sometimes that desire comes in conflict with the kind of world that he's trying to develop. And with this very cyclical natured thing where you have all of our main characters are in some way reincarnations of heroes of old. And that doesn't work so well in a Tolkien framework. Yeah.

I mean, because as, as the, the, the resident Tolkien obsessive, like that sort of, there are very specifics, like a lot of his world building,

like you can't really remove the Catholicism from it. It's like one of the main pillars that keeps it upright is the idea, you know, that the past was better. We're continually, slowly falling apart and that nothing in the present can ever be as good as the past. So it's hard to have, say, like we're as good now as we were then because it's just sort of antithetical to the way he designed the world. And sorry to interrupt, Alex. Absolutely. sort of antithetical to the way he designed the world and sorry to interrupt Alex absolutely like it's you know it's always the thing like I have so many different tiers of I like these books but also I see these things now but also I still like them but also there's these aspects that you can see that jordan was doing his best at the time and more than that like

he got a contract to write free books and i don't think at the time he was expecting for things to go the way they did so i certainly think as you know a package of these three books this initial trilogy you can tell okay this wants to be tolkien and it's doing some the charitable reading there is it's doing new ideas and it's expanding on what had at at that point and arguably you know well into the 2000s that i believe the original wheel of time was published in 1989 so he had for a while like as as folks here all know of the fantasy genre tolkien has dominated basically forever and it's only been in more recent years that mainstream series have begun to buck that trend and start to deviate away from that very Tolkien framework

that we got set up for most of the mainstream Thor era of fantasy. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I do want to get it out there that by the way i'm not i don't i didn't intend for this in any way to be like a you know let's hate on robert jordan for things that we think are a hack like you know what i mean like i guess occasionally i think what i i feel like i do that unintentionally sometimes when i'm trying to bring up like certain

points or ideas i feel like i occasionally might come across like a bit of a hater and that's not what I mean because I don't mean to say that the books are like bad you know what I mean like it's just I think like you said it's the fact that he's he tried to take this very familiar like framework and like you said put some new ideas across the top of it and early early on, like you said, in his earlier works, it just sort of, as opposed to making a new thing, just sort of highlighted those rough edges around it. He's definitely one of those writers, I think, that the longer he was writing, the much more comfortable in his own voice and his own creation he got. creation he got and you know what i mean a lot more fluid the work became as he like really like you said talk to more people and got into his his own world absolutely and yeah and i sorry for interrupting alex um but and i would say like i like it might come across like we are hating it robert jordan but at the same time it's like i feel fine to criticize his work as a fan because i can i

would still recommend these books to people and it's one of those things like yeah read wheel of time it's a great series but i could also nitpick and like criticize the things that i've enjoyed of things i enjoyed because i'm not one of those guys it's like yeah i'm gonna be a fan boy for this and like there's nothing wrong with robert jordan it's like no there's issues and like i'd like to address him with people and one of the things like that I like that he does is the fact that the longer you go into the series the more it expands the more world building there is and the more it moves away from like the Lord of the Rings-esque fantasy genre and one of the things that like but it also it's also to its detriment because you have to get further into the series

which most people if they do not like the series by the end of the first or second book, that's it for them. It's one of those books you either keep pushing through and hope it gets better, or you quit reading it. And that's kind of like

why the first three books kind of being that familiar Lord of the Rings-esque fantasy novel is very much to his advantage and to his detriment is because he's essentially trying to bring people into familiar territory, but he's not giving it his full own voice. Yeah, the double-edged sword of making it familiar is that like you want to draw

people in because it's familiar, but at the same time, it's not unique necessarily. Yeah. Well, I mean, I just, I just want to bring that up because I, as much as we may, you know, as we, you know, criticize and pick things apart, I do generally try to keep this podcast as more of a, like, you know, generally a positive note when we're talking about a lot of things. Cause I'm usually I'm reading books because I like them. Exactly. You know what I mean? I just? I just always have like a special ear out even for myself particularly about becoming, you know, like a hater where I'm just like talking about books and shitting on them. We're saving all of that for a very specific episode when we finally talk about a specific British author. Oh, no. Oh, God.

Who's entirely hateable for very purposeful reasons. Yeah, I'm sorry, no. Oh, God. Who's entirely hateable for very purposeful reasons. Yeah, I'm sorry, Alex. Do they have two initials in the first? No, no. Yeah, it's one that sort of goes by two initials. Wrote a popular series of young adult books. There may or may not be a, uh, a particularly planned episode to come out on a particular date where we just get to go off and be haters for a while. Excellent. I will pay for that episode.

I will say to be positive. Like, again, this is a book series I love. This is why I jumped at the chance to be on this podcast. To say something positive about the spirituality and cosmonology of The Wheel of Time, something I really appreciate about these books is the creator is referenced

and people will be like, I'll thank the creator or whatever. The creator never shows up. This omnipotent god that is referred to like technically later on in the series yes but like also that there's some there's some ambiguity about like whether or not god even exists in the first place um and there's a whole thing read the books they're good um but like in this in this context like the creator doesn't show up it's not like the dark one is locked in battle with the creator and the dark one's just fucking chilling out in a prison somewhere that was created maybe by the creator.

Like we assume as much that that seems to be the situation, but like nobody actually knows, like even the forsaken, like throughout the series will just kind of be like, this has been happening for so long. Nobody's actually sure. Like when this started, did it ever start?

Has this just been happening in ad infinitum? Like, is there no beginning there is no beginning there is no end the wheel of time continues to spin and and and then there's that i i'm about that i've fucking listened to that song so many times god um but but i do just love that idea of the universe itself is pushing things along that you have these taverin however i will butcher every pronunciation in this book i'm afraid um it even has a pronunciation guide in the end of it but well i mean those like look and that's why uh kethel and i before we've said would we when it'll be funny because he like only read it and i listened to the

audiobook so we'll have like different pronunciations of certain words or we listen to audiobooks by different narrators yeah and so we'll have different pronunciations of things that happened with uh watership down where we listen to different narrators who pronounce things differently, give characters wildly different accents and which made the experience quite a bit different at certain, at certain points. But yeah, don't worry about pronunciations. We're not gonna, we're not never, never getting there. As long as we understand each other. I think that's the point.

I do love this idea of, you know, there is obviously, you know, a higher power at work. But it's not necessarily a higher power that is self-aware or self-intelligent. It's just that the wheel and the tapestry of the world is almost like a self-correcting machine that that you know to to be a computer nerd for a bit like you have a server ram that you put into a big you know server rig and its whole deal is it can correct for errors. It can correct for bits that drop. And, you know, that happens a lot more than you might think. Like there was a famous instance of a Mario speed run where there was a bit flipped cause by just a random fucking neutron flying through space and smacking that bit that allowed somebody to jump extra high and blend the speed run. that allowed somebody to jump extra high and blend the speed run.

But, you know, I like that idea of the tapestry of this world being this sort of, it's trying to keep itself together. It's trying to keep the world continuing on, continuing this endless cycle. And so like the, the wheel warping around certain people,'t so much, you know, God kind of playing puppet strings on the world, as you might sometimes get with, again, Tolkien. We'll never leave the shadow of Tolkien. idea constantly of like oh the reason these miracles happen and these deus ex machinas happen is because god the god is from the machine and is working to fix these things

fucking alu avatar or however i mean like tolkien they're like literally is a concept that is elucidated like in the first book of the silmarillion where this this concept of you know shall be but might instrument meaning that like literally any bad thing that happens God is there making the bad things eventually be good things so you know what I mean so like that's literally built into the world that God is in subtle ways intervening constantly so I really appreciate that take of no there is no like higher power that's consciously doing things it's just the wheel wants to preserve itself and the wheel doesn't even want to preserve itself because the

wheel is self-aware but just because that is how the wheel is built that the tapestry must continue to be woven and in order to do that certain threads of life will be given more importance and will pull other threads towards them. And I like that idea in the sense of like, I feel like it's a better way to deal with the concept of free will. of free will because of course one of the things that that comes up in the wheel of time and in other fantasy works of this nature is if you have this greater power handling things well then what free will do you have if your actions are just the consequence of at no point is it said that the wheel can override somebody's will. Nobody's will is being trampled upon by the existence of Taviran and being gravitating towards somebody that is because of circumstance it is because of your environment that you know the wind blows in a particular way and you happen to be led to this person and not because you've been controlled and obviously the characters do still have

conversations about like is that still do we still have free will even though like no we're not being controlled or brainwashed or whatever but like do we still have the ability to make our own decisions and change and to the story's credit that is shown as something that can happen. Of some people. Can just outright resist. That pull. And break away. And then. That usually causes. Unintended side effects.

And that causes the tapestry. To start falling apart. And have to reweave itself. In another way. And it's a very interesting concept that I feel like is not done enough in fantasy. I mean, I kind of want to interject on the fact that the fact that the people can still break away from the pattern,

but it's also, it feels, I don't know, just to kind of bring it back to religion, it still feels a bit Calvinistic to me, with like the whole concept of don't know, just to kind of bring it back to religion, it still feels a bit Calvinistic to me. With like the whole concept of, you know, the wheel is ever turning and the pattern will just realign itself. But it's also, because it's a pattern, it's set in a set way that even if the thread is broken, it's also kind of not. Because it's still predestined to happen in that certain way. Because who knows what exactly that free will is. Yeah, sure, we we have free will but what's to say that that isn't free will or that that isn't just a predestined notion because the threat is already set and there's

been mentions quite a few times that things are meant to happen a certain way or it's just kind of or when they do happen it's just because they saw it and and they get a different outcome is that they only saw part of it and didn't get to see that extra outcome so like there is this like foreteller character named min um that kind of like does see like the shadows what could happen to people but like she doesn't she can't exactly tell what they are all the time she's gonna unless they're very clear which means like the pattern is very set in stone in that timeline but it's also like sometimes she's like things can keep changing which also implements the free will so it's kind of very like in that motion it's kind of very dualistic as well

because like things are set in stone but they're also not set in stone is it that like it's it's set in stone at sort of the cosmic level i would i would say like things are but things are still very fluid at like at the individual so like a person can choose to do what they want to do but the the the wheel and the the pattern are in such a way that no matter you can choose to do what you want to do personally but at the macro scale the pattern will still work its way out to the way it was meant to be yeah that's kind of how i see it it's a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff but um um and it's but i the way i've read it and how i see it which i might be wrong i admit that firsthand but how i've read it and how I see it, which I might be wrong, I admit that firsthand, but how I've seen it is essentially it's like things will still happen because even though

the Tavarian can't pull away, they still feel the pull back to Rand and everything. So they try to go away and then events will happen to pull them back. But even if they do pull away, they get this horrible urge to return and just kind of be like, I need to go help him now because yada, yada, yada, without giving them more spoilers. But essentially that pool is still there, which I still think it's still predestined

for them to be at that certain point because it's all culminating at that one end point that's you know the final battle that's still always referred to throughout the books so that is the end point that they're all supposed to be heading towards to so that is the predestination and everything else is kind of like they can still they still have free will up until that point but they're all meeting at the end essentially and i will say and you know this does get into spoilers not quite to the end of the series but as you approach the end of the series but i feel like it is a general enough concept to talk about rand one of the big things happens

to rand through the books and you can see the setup of this, and the Dune analogies come in here again. has got his special sword, and he's getting people to rally behind him, and now he's got a few Aes Sedai behind him, and he's starting to really pick himself up. And through the books, you see Rand rise in power, and then he gets humbled, and eventually he gets humbled in a real bad way, and that leads into one of my most favorite scenes

in all of the series. And like my specific thing here with, you know, if I only get one thought on the TV show, it is that the TV show needs to get us to Dumas Wells. And the moment we get to Dumas Wells and the moment we get that on screen, the moment we get to Duma's Wells, and the moment we get that on screen, the moment we get that fight on screen,

I don't care what happens to the show after that. It can get canceled for all I care. I just want that one scene. That's the only thing I'm here for. Wait, which book is that in? Oh, God, that's the end of Lord of Chaos, I think. Oh, that's the book I'm on right now. So, great. Excellent. the end of lord of chaos i think oh that's the book i'm on right now so great excellent that

has the best fight scene and all fucking i i just love it i love it so much it's it's great i also it's all done go from there okay got it i i just fucking love the concept of the black tower and all these things spoilers spoilers, but you know, they don't know what that is yet. Yeah. But, um, I mean, and let's be honest,

this podcast sort of has just a sort of general spoiler warning at the start of every episode. On your logo, like your new one, once you get enough money for that, it's like, you know, books are good.

And like, you just put a spoiler tag right on top. Yeah. Alex, I don't know if you saw that, uh, our first Patreon goals. If I get,

when you get enough patrons, our first goal is to pay an artist to make a real logo for the show. Um, but to, to quickly get to the actual point I was going for before I got derailed by cool fight scenes. After Rand has been humbled a few times, he starts to just go progressively more and more insane. And in the very literal definition of the word, he just completely loses his wits. And his memories start merging with Lothar can't he begins to have trouble telling the

past from the present and the future and you know the the world opens up before him and then eventually you know he he gets the he gets to his you know moment on the mountain he gets to his moment on the mountain and he gets to the point where he's like, what is the point of this all? I have the power. I can just delete us all. I can bring an end to the cycle. And it's a very powerful moment

where he's debating with himself of the only free will I have is to end it all. That that's the only choice I can make is to do, do a way of everything. And that is how I assert my free will. And then eventually like the other side of him is like, but if you choose to not do it all, then that's the same decision.

You're deciding whether or not to burn it all. If you choose to not do it all, then that's the same decision. You're deciding whether or not to burn it all. If you choose to not burn it and to create, that's the same decision. So if you have any free will at all, if you have any free will to destroy, then you have the free will to create. The wheel can't tell you which way to do, because obviously the wheel can't tell you which way to do because obviously the will wouldn't tell you to burn at all and so then he he comes to the realization of oh because i have this option because i can choose to destroy everything i can choose not to and that's still free will and this proves the existence of free will and he he gets he becomes this ascendant figure and it's like ah i understand things now he become he becomes later the second yeah so

basically i feel like that no i don't think he becomes later the second it's more so he he's he's essentially still like what if paul atreides couldn't deal with being a quiz as Hard Rock? Because essentially he becomes a possessed relatively throughout the books at that point. I will say, to Rand's credit, he never says, Hitler, ah, what a chump. I thought he was going to criticize me. Is that a thing in Dune?

Yeah, I'm not going to spoil for you what Paul at the end of his, near the end of his life and what later the second get into I mean they're not if this isn't Children of Dune I read it I mean they're not great people

they're not I don't mean i don't like i don't like monarchs to begin with until i like monarchs so um but you're right that alex that's sort of that point the fact that he has he can choose to destroy or choose not to destroy it does sort of presuppose the fact that that is a free choice then which it totally makes sense i'm connecting this now to sort of other other books because obviously it seems to be a running theme that there are certain topics that come up in each like of the two categories we cover right we've got sci-fi and fantasy and each one of them seems to have these sort of pat to see and each one of them seems to have these sort of pat like major themes that come up in all of them and fantasy just always always has the free will question and every author answers it

answers it slightly differently like tolkien has his cake and eats it too when it comes to free will versus fate um it i doubt you're pretty persuasive in the fact that like even though there's forces it does seem like jordan sort of comes down on the like you at least rand anyway can make a free choice when it comes down to it um sapkowski definitely was a a free will type guy. Uh, if, because I think we spoiled it in the episode, so I don't feel bad now,

but like the, the end, like the whole witcher series is about like Siri being the one to fulfill these prophecies. And the series ends by her just going, I don't wanna, and like plane shifting away to a different reality and just choosing not to. So like he clearly comes down to the fact that despite there being prophecy,

you definitely have a choice as to whether that's something you, you do or not. And I, I, you know, we'll probably have to dive into some point as to why fantasy always seems to come back to this pretty inevitable question, but I guess that's somehow tied up with like the hero's journey.

I suppose the fact that like, if you're the hero, do you have to be the hero or something like that? But I'm not, I don't know if that's just a theme that every fantasy book is required to touch on even briefly, but we should probably try and figure that at some point um so i don't know if either of you have a brief thought on whether you think is this a thing that fantasy just has to deal with as a nature of the genre or whether it's just a thing that all of our fantasy stories seem to touch on i i i see it like as a theme that is throughout genre because you still like in books and like as i was gonna i consider doing a fantasy novel with space sci-fi elements

which i'm referring to doing a lot um i mean that's fine i mean i our first bonus episode we just put that we just put out is me talking of most meals to me talking about why star wars is a fantasy story and not a sci-fi story yeah so like you you have these you do have them like in books like dune the witcher even in aragon uh like the inheritance cycle you you have this like question about free will and everything and it's something that like because it's human nature to kind of question like are we in a predestined cycle or do we have the ability to kind of like answer like to choose our own destination and it's one of those things like it's a question that we face every day and it's a question that people try to solve either through logic or through religion and it's one of those things it's like it's just hard to answer and if we could figure out a way to kind of if we could figure out like the bread and butter way of kind of what is the thing that goes along with it every time, we'd be great at it.

But it's also like we have different philosophies we can include into this question. And the fact that like that, as Alex mentioned, Rand kind of has his whole inner discourse with himself about is it free will? Is it not? And that's a thing that most people like to ask themselves. Are we in a predestined state where everything that we're doing is going to end up happening? Or is it

something that we're going to continue on? Or is it something that we have no choice in the matter and whatever we do doesn't matter because it's going to end up with the same result anyway so so it's like one of those things like it's going to show up a lot of fantasy because i feel like fantasy is like a safe way to kind of ask that question and not have to deal with the repercussions for asking it because you can then write your own way out based off of your opinion so like because for me it seems like

robert jordan is mostly thinking like yeah you know things some things are predestined but at the end of the day we still have control over the most important question in our lives as as to what we can control and it's also like and the same thing as as dune's like dune feels very much we have to do a certain action to get the to get the result we want because we can see so far into the future essentially um and the witcher is just saying is essentially saying yeah no fuck all of it i don't care goodbye which is very eastern european way of thinking about things that siri just ends the story by playing by just like going to a whole new world and being like i just don't want to deal with this anymore i mean i mean that's wouldn't wouldn't you as a teenager react that way i mean i think me through most of my 20s probably i mean i mean me through right now is

also reacting the same way he's like f it i don't want to deal with this right now so i guess i won't but essentially it's a different way to kind of answer different questions. And people and authors just like to give their own takes on it, depending on the world that they create. And since Robert Jordan is having this more Eastern-influenced philosophy going on throughout his novels, I feel like that is also a question that pops up a lot in Eastern philosophies is like, do we have this free will? You know, how much can we control in life? And for me, it kind of hits home pretty well because one of my big philosophies is we can control what we can directly control and why worry about the rest?

So that's just like, for me, that's just kind of like my big, long and unintelligible tangent about everything. And that's going to be the end of part one, where we decided as a group, whether free will existed or not. So good on us. Uh, uh,

this will be the end of part one. We will be back with part number two, where we're going to talk about the big G gender and why it's cool or not cool or whether it exists or not, or whether Robert Jordan has the final opinion on how it exists or whether some British lady does. I don't know. We'll talk about it. Thanks for listening.

And we'll see you next time. Goodbye. bro are you fucking real man come on