Any of you read Wheel of Time? Started out awesome, then the author went crazy and bogged the story down with too many boring characters and irrelevant subplots, then the author up and died before finishing it. Is that where ASoFaI is headed?
Yes, some of the middle books were tedious ("She folded her arms beneath her breasts" must have appeared in the books 100 times), but I liked the ending which was finished by a different author....maybe GRRM dying would be the best thing of ASoFaI.
I agree that Sanderson did a remarkable job salvaging that series after RJ died. But it still read a bit like fan fiction at times. There was a lot of good stuff, and a lot of other things that just didn't seem to mesh with the overall body of work. In hindsight, it's easy to say that Wheel of Time would have been far better - maybe even the greatest fantasy series of all time - if RJ had kept the first four books exactly as is and then finished the series in another three. Instead he went batshit crazy.
Not to get too far off topic, but did you see the Wheel of Time "pilot" episode? It is one of the most gloriously campy, terrible things I've ever witnessed. Think Star Wars Christmas Special. Some company called Red Eagle Entertainment owns all the rights to WoT and had to get something produced and aired to keep the rights, so they slopped together a 30 minute "pilot" based on the prologue to Eye of the World and bought some infomercial time to air it. It's up on youtube.
Anyway, it's sad to see that ASoFaI may be listing the same way, but at least it spawned an amazing TV series.
