Here we have gathered meta-ideas about The Wheel of Time - ideas about the writing process itself, and what went through the minds of Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson as they wrote the books.
Now that Brandon Sanderson is writing WoT, it'll end in three books easily
Unfortunately, like the rest of his series, there'll still be a massive amount of questions left hanging, and we'll never actually find out the answers to any of them. Don't believe me? Read Elantris, Warbreaker, or the Mistborn Series. None of them had any meaningful resolution outside of the specific plot.- Very possible, since that's what RJ was planning anyway. Something about how it's unrealistic for every plotline to be resolved pretty much simultaneously.
- The difference is RJ has mentioned that even when the main story ended he'd continue writting (IE, New Spring Dawning) and attempt to wrap up those plotlines. Sanderson, on the other hand, has no qualms about simply ending without any sort of meaningful resolution at all.
- Sanderson leaves threads dangling for the same reason Jordan did- Sequel Hooks. Since he's not planning on revisiting the WOT-verse, he has no reason to do so here.
- Word of God says that all three of those books were written with sequels planned (Yes, even the Mistborn trilogy — he says there's going to be another trilogy in the same setting taking place hundreds of years later). So the questions there will be answered.
- Two more trilogies actually, the Mistborn series is conceived as a "trilogy of trilogies" as he put it. There's also a novel coming out in Novwember that wasn't originally planned but just kind of happened (it was originally a short story).
- AMOL Spoiler: There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was an ending. :)
Now that Sanderson is writing, The Dark One will turn out to be a fragment of Ruin or another, similar, Elritch Abomination.
Well, it's not like he doesn't use the 'Evil/good sealed at the beginning of the world trying to break free and destroying everything' trope in all his other books.- Or maybe there will turn out to be a man behind the Dark One. Who will be the REAL villain!
- No, no, no, you're messing up Sanderson's mythology. Ruin and Preservation were both fragments of something even greater, so even if you were right it wouldn't be an Eldritch Abomination anyway. Besides, he's outright stated that he will not be including the Wo T books in his cosmology.
- Ah. I missed that. Still, you've gotta admit, the two cosmologies are similar.
- In the case of Ruin and the Dark One, the similarities are pretty superficial- the DO is explicitly a God of Evil, while Ruin is explicitly not, being rather a natural force that got out of hand. Also, Word of God is that Ruin was once human, while the Dark One seems to have always been the Dark One.
- There are theories about that too: mainly the possibility of Fain/Mordeth becoming the new Dark One once Rand has offed the current one.
- Ruin was never human. You must be thinking of Ati.
- AMOL Spoilers: The Dark One turns out to be more a Sentient Cosmic Force than anything, and unlike Ruin, doesn't appear to have ever been human. He's also a lot crueller than Ruin- while Ruin just wanted to destroy the world because his nature was to destroy things, only one of the possible futures the Dark One shows for his victory is a void- the other two are dystopias. Basically, Ruin is just destruction, while the Dark One is destruction and lots of other negative things as well.
Robert Jordan was trying to break a world record
For longest book series. There are over twelve books which continue to grow in length and must be split into volumes. This can't be accidental.- There are many series out there that are much longer. The Xanth series, for example, is now well past 30 books. If Jordan had ever even thought about this he would have been writing much shorter books, much faster.
- But the Xanth series are episodic works, related loosely. They aren't bound together in a serial trilogy, quintology, or dodecatology.
- Except they don't grow in length. They vary widely. Books 2 and 3 are progressively shorter than the first, and then the fourth, fifth and sixth explode and are the longest in the series. Then the next two get very short, with Book 8, The Path of Daggers being the shortest of the entire series, barring the prequel novel. Then they gradually start getting bigger again, until finally the last three are almost the size of the fourth, fifth and sixth.
The series is actually a deconstruction of Mars and Venus Gender Contrast
Think about it. While men and women are both shown to not understand each other, they both seem to think along exactly the same lines. Think of Mat and Tuon. When complaining about how incomprehensible the other is, they both use almost the exact same metaphor (layers). Rand and his psychic harem? Same kind of thing. Perrin and Faile have shades of this, though their misunderstandings seem to stem more from the places their from and them expecting each other to conform to those standards (Perrin expecting Faile to want him to be humble, Faile wanting Perrin to express his anger as best he can).- Rereading the books, there's occasional lampshades that, say, the suggested solution for managing a husband/wife is identical when a man and woman are independently providing it. One example is Perrin hearing about how it's best for a man to let his wife have her head most of the time so he can reel her in when he needs to/a woman to let her husband have his head most of the time so she can reel him when she needs to, and noting inwardly that the advice is identical. The main problem throughout seems to be Poor Communication Kills - in fact, cultural misunderstandings run right through the series as a consistent problem, it just also runs down the gender line (with the added irony that they're really very similar).
The "murderer" who rules openly in Seandar would have been the Big Bad for the Mat/Tuon trilogy.
Jordan had originally planned several "outrigger" novels that would have taken place in the same world as WOT but not been part of the main sequence (New Spring being the only one of which to actually see the light of day) and this included a trilogy that was supposed to have focused on Mat and Tuon in Seanchan. Based on the current political situation, Tuon only controls the Seanchan holdings in "Randland" and not the core Seanchan Empire, which is ruled by a "murderer" mentioned briefly near the beginning of Towers of Midnight. It doesn't take much to put two and two together that Tuon would try to retake her empire, with Mat as her consort and best general, and that they would have to deal with this person. Of course, since Sanderson has pretty much confirmed Jordan didn't leave enough material for us to get the outriggers, we'll probably never know for sure.