Goodkind’s Sword of Truth is WAY more problematic. At first, it looked like it was similar, in that the author had constructed a world with loads of sexism just built right into the laws of physics and magic. He started writing his way out of it, but then seemed to do a 180 and embraced it instead. At least that’s what I got out of it, and read it all the way to the disappointing end hoping it would correct course in the last.
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If you’ve made it to book 5, I’d say you’ve met your literary obligations. Its OK, to put it down, and go find another book that has actual things happening in it. You won’t really be missing much.
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I can see that my tone was a bit harsh, but frankly, when someone takes an earnest, good-faith attempt at debate and accuses me of shitting all over people who enjoyed it, that pisses me off, and IMO entirely warrants a harsh response. Actions have consequences, and bad-faith, ad hominem laden straw man arguments need to be called out and countered, even if they aren’t necessarily intentional. These are at best terrible habits that internet debate conditions us into, and at worst techniques actively used to derail and stifle constructive debate. The only constructive and useful response to that is to call it out clearly and unambiguously. It likely won’t feel good, but it’s the only way to unlearn these habits.
I completely disagree with that take. I understand that I could have been a bit more clear, but IMO there’s a major difference between creating a problematic world and thematizing those problems, and creating a problematic world while not (or insufficiently) doing so. One possible interpretation of your argument here would be the classic “just showing people that sexism is bad is helping to solve the problem”, which … well, if that was the case, gender equality would have come much further than it has today. How something is presented is obviously extremely important wrt how it is received, and from what I can remember WoT’s treatment of sex and gender is problematic at best.
There’s another misunderstanding here, though: the core of my argument is that the WoT universe as created is fundamentally sexist in ways that cannot be meaningfully addressed. The magic system is probably the best illustration of this - it codifies sexist tropes into what is effectively laws of nature within this universe. Which makes them inassailable, unquestionable, not open for debate or discussion. That magic somehow knows your sex (and as pointed out above that your birth-assigned sex is apparently burned into your soul?), that magic has gendered preferences in which powers are accessible to whom, etc? All of this reiterates and reinforces existing sexist stereotypes in our world and in fantasy fiction. And there is no possible way within this universe for these things to be meaningfully discussed, addressed, or even engaged with. Instead, it’s written into the core workings of the universe in a way that forces us to take it for granted, or ask unanswerable questions that undermine the quality of the worldbuilding.
It would be equally problematic if you created a fantasy universe where magic was fundamentally unequally accessible to BIPOC, for example (and not as in “they are barred from magic school”, but as in “they just can’t do magic, or can do it less and worse, because that’s just how magic works”). When the problematic aspects are written into the laws of nature in the fictional universe, they become unassailable truths that, at the very best, can serve as some bland and useless argument for “oh, the world is so unfair”. This is not helpful. WoT’s take - creating a sexist universe, and then attempting to addres one concern within this; the barring of men from magic through historic evil - is putting lipstick on a pig. It cannot in any way address the fundamental issues at hand, because they exist on a level fundamental to the world and are thus unaddressable.
You’re not addressing me, but given that this part of the discussion stems from me I’ll address it anyway: I don’t see happy (or not) endings as relevant to this at all. How the plot plays out and who wins can be handled in so many different ways that a tragic or horrible end can obviously be equally enlightening or thought-provoking as a “good” one. If anything, typical happy endings tend to reinforce existing power structures in our world, which are generally pretty messed up.
I guess I was lucky I got into the Malazan Book of the Fallen after WoT, and since then I’ve started actively seeking out new, interesting SFF literature. I also don’t read that much - maybe 3-5 books a year across all genres? But I can still mention a few: Erikson and Pratchett are I guess less “new”, but there’s Ann Leckie, N.K. Jemisin, Hugh Howie, Martha Wells. Heaps more too, but those are the best ones I’ve read. And just to be clear, I’m not at all claiming these to be perfect in any way. As I mentioned above I dropped Sword of Truth after … two books, I think? back around when I read WoT (and my only real memory of it now is it leaving me with a weirdly icky feeling), and also read some Raymond E. Feist (can’t really remember it at all) and some others that I’ve also forgotten.
Wow, that makes me happy I stopped reading that as early as I did. Guess my vague and poorly thought out gut feelings in my mid-to-late teens were pretty accurate on this 
Here’s a novel thought: perhaps middle-aged (or older) middle-class white men aren’t necessarily the best people to usefully and insightfully address sexism or other societal injustices in high fantasy form? Just a thought.
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I thought the subject was WoT (Wheel of Time) not WoT (Wall of Text)?
You started off aggro and escalated from there. As soon as I responded to your post declaring WoT as inherently sexist, though your recollection was fuzzy due to your reading being a couple of decades in the rear-view mirror, you went on the offensive.
That’s a stretch that would seem difficult to back up from a casual reading a couple of decades removed. It also harnesses author intent, an approach you yourself criticized just a few posts ago.
Like Tolkien?
Virtue signal received! 
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Oh snap! Got me there! Zing!
(Btw, ad hominems generally don’t help your cause in a discussion.)
Also, given the length of WoT, and the slog … I’d say Wall of Text is pretty fitting.
I did? Please, show me some early quotes where I was ‘aggro’ - I would sincerely love to see what reads as that to you. Directed towards you or anyone. Was my use of italics and rhetorical questions slightly snarky? Sure, I can see that. But it was on-topic, addressed your reasoning and arguments and not you. Yes, I did kind of ridicule your “RJ was not Octavia Butler or Guy Gavriel Kay” argument, but that’s precisely where you started making ridiculous straw man arguments about me “shitting all over [WoT] and the people who enjoyed it.” And at that point, IMO that tone was entirely warranted by your post.
As I said before: nearly all media are problematic in some way, and acknowledging that is in no way the same as saying it can’t be enjoyed. We all enjoy media that has issues. That’s life. That really shouldn’t make it a bad thing to want to discuss those flaws. Quite the opposite, IMO.
I’m also basing this on what others in this thread (with, seemingly, a much more recent or better recollection than me). It’s entirely possible that this is inaccurate, though I haven’t seen any compelling arguments or facts presented against this thus far. Also, you’re entirely wrong in saying that sentence harnesses author intent. It doesn’t relate to that whatsoever. It doesn’t matter whatsoever why RJ created the WoT world as he did; that it enshrines sexist tropes and structures as unquestionable laws of nature (or magic) in that world still makes it fundamentally and unfixably sexist regardless of author intent. It would probably be possible to make an anti-sexist fantasy novel series set in such a universe, but WoT certainly doesn’t reach that bar.
I wasn’t aware that that was the case in Tolkien? Aren’t humans generally not able to do magic in that universe? There is undoubtedly a lot of racist (quasi-)undertones in LotR and the other related works, but thankfully it’s not particularly explicit from what I can remember, nor particularly bad given when it was written - at least to my recollection. (Though IIRC he does quite consistently use some problematic terms like describing orcs and/or “evil” people as ‘swarthy’ etc. I haven’t read LotR in at least a decade either, so it’s entirely possible I have an overly positive recollection here.) Not that that’s any excuse, but given its contemporaries I’d say it’s not that bad, but it’s also a decidedly white universe. If someone wrote something like that today, my take on it would undoubtedly be quite different, given the cultural context and what is reasonable to expect of an author today vs. 70+ years ago.
I hate to repeat myself, but: Oh snap! If you actually object to the contents of what I wrote, could you please try to formulate that into some sort of argument? If not, you’re really not helping yourself. Or are you more concerned with showing yourself positioning yourself against me than with engaging in actual discussion?
I really regret even responding to you in the first place, as this thread derail has gone too far already.
The best point in this topic was @anon72357663 ‘s read on Nynaeve’s behavior change.
I will not concede to your “created a sexist universe, thus sexist” point. Logically, then, almost all speculative fiction is sexist, racist, and bigoted. Our own universe, it would follow is sexist and racist. It’s an ouroboros of a contention, very far from literary mainstream. Insisting repeatedly that everyone else adopt it is asinine. Have fun with that.
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That was not an ad hominem. The “hominem” part refers to the person, and a wall of text (the target of mockery) is not a person.
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If that was your point it flew right over my head, and I’m still not seeing how it serves your point to misattribute Nynaeve’s attitude change (correlation is not causation) to hooking up with Lan instead of her breaking her block and ending her need to always be angry. As for “learning to submit” perhaps I’ve witnessed to many “reform vs. revolution” arguments to see that as anything but political - in the sense of how to get one’s policies implemented, that is. With Nynaeve specifically, it was one of her defining character traits that she didn’t know how to do anything but confront things head-on - she needed to learn how to be manipulative/guiding as well. Much like Rand had to learn that not everything could be solved by beating people over the head with the power of the Dragon Reborn…
OK, so that’s getting away from your point… So I look at the magic being innately sexist as fine. It becomes evidence for gender essentialism in-universe - interacting with magic in the manner of a classic stereotype is essential to harnessing it, and that trickles down and reinforces the gender differences - first amongst its practioners, then those leaders influenced by them, to the people they rule, etc… It’s hardly treated as a good thing though; notably the White Tower splits because the Aes Sedai that the stereotype to extremes in being secretive and manipulative, and if not for Egwene forcing the Salidar Aes Sedai to confront and remove Elaida, they would have returned to the Tower and accepted their punishment in the hope of guiding events again… which would have been a disaster.
It’s been a long time since I read the books, and I did get the order backward; Nynaeve broke her block and then got with Lan. In my defense, they happen in the same chapter. And now, having reread more of that chapter than I intended to, my position is reinforced: there’s a sometimes-interesting story and a sometimes-interesting setting buried under a lot of baggage in those books.
Oh, agreed, quite defensible. Though perhaps I have to reread that chapter, because the first thing that comes to mind that you could be referring to is the Sea Folk wedding vows, but that tidbit doesn’t come up 'til later. Hmmm, maybe the whole Lan-bonded-to-Myrelle-without-his-consent bit… Well, I don’t expect I’ll be able to reply again before the topic closes anyway.
It’s a huge mess! Nynaeve is chuckling about the fact that Myrelle will be forced to experience her and Lan’s lovemaking through the bond. I’d forgotten that Myrelle forcibly bonded Lan. Ugh…
Attempting to dismiss someone’s arguments by saying it’s a wall of text is an indirect personal attack, the point being the implication that the person either can’t present their arguments concisely or are just spamming. (It is also obviously a derailing tactic, shifting focus to the writing and the person doing so rather than the arguments.) This subtext is the main point of writing this in the first place, not saying “oh, that’s a lot of text”. If that was the point, there would be no point. Thus it is an ad hominem. It’s not about the text on its own, but about the person writing the text.
Again, I never said that. Please, please go back and actually look at what I said. I said created a universe that is fundamentally sexist in ways that cannot be meaningfully addressed within it and gave concrete examples of this. The way sexism is codified into the worldbuilding here, you might as well ask someone to meaningfully question gravity (and let’s please not get into semantics of whether it’s theoretically possible to modify gravitational waves in some way - at least gravity doesn’t know nor care about your sex!). If you can’t tell the difference between that and the much broader “created a sexist universe”, then that’s your reading comprehension at fault, not my writing. I’ve been entirely clear that there is plenty of leeway (in many different forms) for creating sexist, racist, ableist, [insert bigotry here] universes in ways that can be deeply impactful in exploring and addressing these issues. Doing so does not need to be comfortable either. I’ve also been quite clear on how the way the WoT universe is put together makes this impossible IMO. I’ve yet to see a single argument against this (beyond “no it doesn’t”). As I’ve said several times: I would love to see some actual on-topic debate on this. It would be interesting in many ways. Instead, you barge in accuse me of “shitting on people who enjoyed WoT” and spend your time attempting to derail anything resembling constructive debate. I get that my tone has at times been harsh, and this has no doubt put you firmly into trench warfare mode, but if you’re not able to get over a harsh resonse to presenting a ridiculous straw man argument, that fault is yours and not mine. You might have considered your words just a tad more if you didn’t want them taken seriously. And putting words into your opponent’s mouths is hardly a way of engaging in constructive debate.
That’s an interesting take, and certainly more nuanced than what’s been said above. One question: From what you say here, if I understand you correctly you’re presenting it (at least in some part) as if this fundamental part of nature/magic is … if not questioned (it doesn’t seem like it can be), then at least made into an issue. Yet it is still ultimately something the author has made a conscious choice of coding into the ground rules of the universe. Regardless of why this was done, do you think the in-universe raising of this issue is sufficient to overcome that the author/universe is on some level saying “the world is sexist and there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s just how things work”?
To give some background for my question: IMO this hews very close to well-worn biologist/gender-essentialist arguments in the real world (along the lines of “women are just naturally more caring, men are more tough” etc.), and thus has the potential to serve as a tacit reinforcement (or at least some form of support) for these arguments for readers. The main difference, and I think reason why my reading leans the way it does, is that in the real world this is really complex but ultimately nonsense (beyond physiological differences (which of course have certain consequences), there is no widely accepted evidence of sex/gender differences being coded into anything but our societies), while in this world these differences are laws of nature, and unassailably true. This might be an ungenerous reading on my part, and is no doubt influenced by my particular brand of feminism, but I still struggle to see how this kind of subtext could be ignored or written off as not impactful unless opposition to this was central to the overall themes and plots of the books. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Literary criticism (as an academic field) has only very recently begun to address these kinds of issues (to say nothing of society as a whole). I do not say that to dismiss your argument, but rather to say that it is on the vanguard of a field that is already decades removed from the works that it studies.
I believe that such discussions are necessary, but are more useful for gaining insight into the societal mores and general cultural background in which a work was produced than for insight into the mind of the author. For an author writing decades ago to have taken into consideration our modern understanding of gender would have been groundbreaking. What does that say about the times in which it was written?
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I completely agree with that in principle, though IMO the '90s wasn’t that long ago, and it was after all well into the third wave of feminism, more than two decades after the second wave where subjects such as this were first given major attention. Not that I have any basis for saying this beyond your post just now, but it sounds to me like your overall assessment of the state of literary criticism is a bit ill informed? Virginia Woolf wrote on these subjects in the 1920s; Germaine Greer and many others wrote important feminist literary criticism from the 1960s and onwards. Obviously not the same medium, but Laura Mulvey’s seminal Visual pleasure and narrative cinema was published in 1973. Feminist media criticism and analysis flourished in the 1970s. It was far from dominant, but it was certainly present. Of course, academic literary criticism and public literature discourse are often quite separate things, and it has taken a lot longer for these ideas to truly gain traction within the broader public. There’s also something to be said about third-wave feminism being partly reactionary with some subsets highlighting gender difference in essentialist or borderline essentialist ways. As such I guess it’s possible that Jordan might have been inspired by the times? Anyhow, I’m not really interested in authorial intent or purpose, as that’s really hard for a reader to know anything concrete about, I’m rather interested in which readings the text itself affords (and how, in what ways, to which degrees, etc.) when encountered by a reader, how these readings are negotiated and play out, and how these have the potential to reflect or speak to the context in which it is read.
Still, you’re entirely right that societal understandings of sexism and gender (in)equality have made massive strides since the 90s, and no doubt these books read quite differently now than then to the average reader. Though on the other hand, if I, an overall pretty clueless teenage boy in the mid-2000s could notice that something was a bit off, I sincerely doubt I was the only one. I guess that also raises the further question of how and where these books were discussed, analyzed, reviewed, and so on, and who had access to these spaces and were seen as authoritative. Is the main change that people are less sexist, that SFF forums, magazines and so on have become less sexist, that different writers/reviewers/editors have gained access to these platforms, or something else entirely? I mean, there are threads to follow in all kinds of directions if one really wants to, so it’s pretty easy to get sidetracked
I could have sworn that those books came out in the 80s, but it looks like the first one was 1990. I guess that a lot has changed since even then, though.
I am aware of the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 60s and 70s, but my (admittedly limited) understanding of the state of the art in literary criticism at the time is that it was focused on themes of agency and objectification, while still for the most part accepting the underlying premise that men and women are different in ways that go beyond physiology. If you can point me to any critical works from the time that go into the notion that gender is nothing more than a social construct, I would be happy to stand corrected. It has been so long since I got my BA, and most of my focus was late 19th and early 20th century.
Just as the work itself is, to a certain extent, a product of its time; so too is the reading a product of the times when it was read. I very much believe that, while each work provides insight into the time in which it was written, at the same time, the meanings (plural intentional) of the work shift over time as the society of readers changes. This is why it is easy for us to find things that make us uncomfortable (such as outdated ideas about race or gender) in books from the past; they stand out like a sore thumb to us because we now know things that readers in the past did not. Regardless of whether or not they should have known these things, the fact is that they did not. But this understanding needn’t detract from the works themselves, because the works are allowed to evolve through this whole process. Which is all just a very long-winded way of saying that it is okay to appreciate works that are written from a worldview that one detests, because the clash of worldviews is a necessary part of literature.
ETA: As for your concern about how works might shape the minds of readers, reinforcing objectively bad worldviews, I do think that we need to give the readers a bit more credit here. No single work of art in any medium can do that; and a plethora of works that do that is more a sign of the culture that produced the works than the works themselves, none of which individually set out to do any such thing.
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It looks good so far. They’re really trying to emphasize how different WoT is from most fantasy. I hope they keep some of the weirdness about the pre-cataclysm age (the flying cars and stuff) that was hinted at. It’s rare to see fantasy hint at a previous technological age some capacity.
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For the most part no. E.g. there’s no explicit Aesop. And the most obvious examples I can think of are mostly ones where characters learn to conform better to their gender, like Nynaeve becoming less easily angered, the tomboy Min making her men’s clothes more fashionable and sexy, and the something-of-a-doormat Perrin overcoming his fear of his own strength and learning to be more forceful and commanding. And of course Moraine literally taking inspiration from her training in saidar in her handling of Rand. In contrast that example of Rand learning to guide instead of force is the only one I can think of where the character learn to behave a little more like the other gender.
…All this is to say that I think that while it could be be made into an issue because that one kind of magic is gender-coded and I think is diegetically responsible for the gender stereotypes the characters adhere to and so one could write a story in the Wheel of Time’s setting about challenging the undue influence that magic’s means of control has had socially… the Wheel of Time itself is not that story. If there is a message there about gender, it’s rooted more in the idea of Balance.
I don’t even believe there’s anything to overcome there - fiction doesn’t need to be social commentary; it can just be entertainment. And entertainment is all the Wheel of Time is. It’s not the Sword of Truth with it’s grossly obvious anti-socialist screeds. Nor Star Trek with it’s thinly veiled allegories of contemporary events. It’s just an entertaining story in a setting so thoroughly fleshed-out that I feel like I’ve walked through the streets of Caemlyn or across the Aiel Waste.
In my opinion, that the primary magic system in the setting is gender-coded should simply not be taken so seriously. Just appreciate how having the world’s most powerful magic be split by sex trickles down to affect every aspect of society.
That is to say, while I understand and sympathize with what I think your point is, my mind is too compartmentalized to truly understand how a self-contained fantasy can influence or justify real-world behavior. I (perhaps obviously) love the Wheel of Time… but there’s no part of it that forms part of my identity in the same way as say a single philosophy course in college did, or a single primer on monetary realism, etc.
Edit: Hours later, it occurs to me there might be a better example of gender essentialism in WoT: people being reincarnated as the same sex as they were before, in particular the Heroes of the Horn…
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