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The Wheel of Time is one of the most buzzed-about shows on television this holiday season, and it was created by Rafe Jenkins and starsRosamund pike. When the first three of eight episodes will be released at once, a lot of people are asking, "What is this thing?" and "Why are so many fantasy nerds losing their minds over it?"
I am here to give some insight into the series, which I have been reading, fangirling and writing about since the 1990s.
The Wheel of Time is a novel series that was published in the 1990s and was finished in the year of Brandon Sanderson's death. It has occupied an oddly contradictory space in the consciousness of the world prior to Amazon deciding to adapt it into a TV show. It is one of the best-selling novel series of all time, but unless you are a nerd like me who reads science fiction and fantasy as a regular thing, it is more than you can imagine. The novel series The Wheel of Time was well-known where it was, and pretty much unknown everywhere else.
The story is so great that more than 90 million people have read it, and each book is big enough to kill a guy. How is Amazon going to make a series that will wrap before all the actors retire and civilization collapses? The Wheel of Time has a lot of information.
The Wheel of Time books are about time.
The five young people from the remote village of Emond's Field are the focus of Wheel of Time. On the eve of Bel Tine, a holiday celebration, they meet a mysterious noblewoman who is interested in them. The village is attacked by monsters called trollocs, and one of the most feared women in the world is revealed as Aes Sedai, who can channel the One Power. In the aftermath of the attack, Moiraine tells the young villagers that it is one of them who the trollocs were looking for, and convinces them to leave and travel with her to the White Tower.
They discover that one of them is the Dragon Reborn, the reincarnation of Lews Therin Telamon, who lived thousands of years ago when both men and women could wield the One Power. He was the greatest warrior of the Light, but he made a fatal mistake in battling the forces of darkness that made the male half of the One Power insane. The land has not recovered from the destruction they wreaked, and all men who can channel are stripped of their ability to wield the One Power. The dragon reborn is prophesied to break the world again and save it, but without whom the world has no hope of survival.
Where does The Wheel of Time fit in the pantheon of fantasy classics?
The Wheel of Time is different from the other major epic fantasies that have been successfully brought to the screen. The Lord of the Rings and Game of Throne are both based on books by George R.R. Martin.
The O.G., the Granddaddy of Them All, is the Platonic ideal of epic fantasy, the one that informed every epic fantasy that came after it, whether their authors welcomed the comparison or not. Game of thrones is a deconstruction of high fantasy, a story that subverts nearly all the classic fantasy stories that they are based on. One way to look at it is to say that The Lord of the Rings is an elaborate construction of myth, while Game of Throne is a methodical dissection of myth.
The center position of the two series is held by the Wheel of Time. WOT is neither a pure fantasy nor a grim dismemberment. It pays homage to its progenitor Lord of the Rings but is not a slavish imitation. It doesn't test the tropes of epic fantasy in the same way that Game of thrones did. It gives its own satisfying answers to the questions of fantasy.
How T_he_ Wheel of Time uses fantasy.
The central theme of the series is the idea of the prophesied hero/heroine and the questions of what happens when one is chosen as a hero. What if you don't want to be a hero? What happens if that job is really bad? What are you going to do? What will your friends and family do?
The central story of WOT looks at the role of Fate in the lives of a group of young, untried, seemingly ordinary villagers. They are thrown into a bigger, scarier, and more dangerous world than they knew existed, to learn how they are not ordinary at all, but have extraordinary destinies that are tangled with each other and with the world they find themselves having to fight for. This is exactly what one would expect from an epic fantasy, but WOT puts a unique spin on the idea, which I hope comes through in the TV adaptation.
WOT is set apart by its scope and manner. The author of the series, Robert Jordan, drew on influences from many cultures, histories, religions, and folklore to inform his mythical world, and part of the fun of reading the series is seeing how he blends and shuffles everything together. Readers have long enjoyed tracking down the sources to different allusions, references and riffs in the series.
Roles of men, women and power are some of the themes of Jordan's story. On the other hand, the power is a representation of magic, which is divided into two parts, the male and the female. In the sense of a world in which women are the only ones left who can wield that magic safely, the effects it has on gender roles, and the effects it has when that state of matters begins to shift are all included.
Jordan offered a ground-breaking examination of gender roles in fantasy when he examined the implications of a world where men are generally not trusted to hold power. The TV series adaptation may look at gender roles with a more progressive understanding, according to rumor, as the gender divides in Jordan's world are somewhat outdated.
The TV adaptation of The Wheel of Time is a big deal, and whether it can do justice to the novel series is an exciting moment for fantasy fans around the world.
A critic and writer, Leigh Butler examines the impact of sociocultural issues on popular science fiction and fantasy works. She has been a regular columnist for the website since 20 09, with three series: The Wheel of Time Reread, A Read of Ice and Fire, and the Movie Rewatch of Great Nostalgia. She lives in New Orleans.
The Wheel of Time books are available on Amazon.
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