I love hearing what people are into and love the rare moments when queer storylines are so visceral and true to life that you can tell queer people were behind them. Even better when they're not relegated to subtext, though I'll take a visceral and real subtext plot over cheap tokenism any day.
What was the storyline? How did it fit into the overarching narrative of the piece? What did you like about it? Is there anything you'd change?
I like eotw as a travel story, and it fills that role well. That being said it is NOT a story made for a visual medium and I am glad they have made changes to make it more watchable while keeping the spirit of the narrative there.
I don't mean to be that person, but people gotta remember that the first book was published in 1990, so was probably being plotted and written for a few years before. In that context what is now read as sexism was pretty progressive. Now this isn't an excuse for it not being better, but it does kind of situate it in time over 30 years ago. Jordan may not have been a visionary but he sure as shit wasn't a Niven who was just an open fascist.
Oh, I agree. Compared to contemporary fantasy, Jordan even acknowledging gay people exist makes his works less sexist than the majority of fantasy at the time.
However, he unfortunatly chose to bake some gender and sex stuff into the core backbone of the books. The Saidin/Saidar tropes, and the men vs women stuff was chosen to be included. Compare to, say Lord of the Rings, where its certainly not progressive, but also it doesn't say much one way or the other about gender differences, other than in the passive way that general tropes of stories fit into a cultural impression of what what men and women 'ought' to be.
As a result, although RJ was progressive for his time, at least compared to mainstream, his choosing to focus so heavily on gender, not only as a plot device, but as a worldbuilding feature, means that we today read a pretty non-nuanced take on gender-relations and gender essentialism. He's kind of bitten in the ass because he chose to tackle these concepts, rather than not focus on them. Its hardly the worst, but add in the weird stuff, like how often powerful women get spanked to embarrass and punish, and some of his comment about sexuality that come off as bi-erasure today, and its pretty uncomfortable.
I do believe he had good intentions, and its absolutely something I myself am able to look past to enjoy the phenomenal story, but it also absolutely does make me uncomfortable.
A pretty fair and nuanced take. I just get tired of people reading the books in today's context and pin them as irredeemably sexist and not worth reading. Like shit has change dramatically in the 30 years since the original was published, hell shit has changed dramatically in the past decade. As static as the world seems on a day to day basis, it really does move quite fast; and I think people,and not just younger people, underestimate the pace of change that has happened in their lives and that which came before them. I think the sense of the world being static in spite of the rapid pace of change is exacerbated by the sterile replication of culture. We seem to get the same cultural crap cycle after cycle because capital is so desperate for returns that innovation seems to be entirely squeezed out of the equation.
I getcha. Online discourse seems to often dump things into either the good bin, or the bad bin. And it can be hard to criticize things you like without coming off as 'canceling' them or whatever, or conversely even just enjoying things you know are 'trash media'. But I'm a huge WoT fan, despite the fact I do think it's also flawed and sexist, and I'd still call them great books.
I generally think of the sexism as a sigh-and-eyeroll moment; same kind of response I'd have to a boomer co-worker saying some outdated shit. But its not irredeemable at all.