Wheel of Time for all its flaws really was just The Most Worldbuilding
Like it really showed that oh, that cool idea you have for a fantasy world? Yeah come back when you’ve got 200 more of those to layer on top of each other. Ok, you’re almost half way to the amount of batshit worldbuilding in just the first three books out of fifteen.
It’s post apocalyptic sci-fi
It’s ALSO Norse mythology
It’s ALSO a totally new elemental magic system a generation before Avatar the Last Airbender
It’s ALSO a reimagining of Tolkien’s “a wizard shows up to take some provincials on an adventure where they become Important People”
It’s ALSO a political epic
It’s ALSO a reimagining of Dune
It’s ALSO an exploration of war veteran trauma and a denunciation of pain as having moral value
It’s ALSO a total remix mishmash of all the world’s cultures
It’s ALSO a deconstruction of the Chosen One trope where the Chosen One is utterly ruined by all the “cool things” destined to happen to him
It’s ALSO an air-tight prophecy engine where one tiny lie buried in the middle of just ONE of the THOUSAND PAGE BOOKS that many took to be an error was actually a huge character reveal they got debated for LITERAL DECADES before it was confirmed
It’s also an interrogation of gender in a world where women with magic are essentially the Vatican because men with magic are doomed to go insane, such that they’re hunted down like dogs
(And before I have to deal with the whole “gendered magic makes it transphobic” no it FUCKING ISN’T. It’s not perfectly progressive ffs because it was written in the 90s, but a man reborn into a woman’s body channels male magic because he is MALE and I’m so sick of people saying that the book is gender essentialist. You just haven’t read far enough.)
Anyway. Wheel of Time is totally unhinged worldbuilding. It was my first most beloved fandom. It’s totally unlike so much other fantasy to this day. The showrunner loves the books enough to know they have to be broken and reformed, just like the world itself, to work in this new Age and he’s done a fabulous job. You don’t understand how abnormal I am about this series.
