I've only read the books he wrote to finish out WoT after Robert Jordan died and they were just incredibly mid. Someone here said he was the McDonalds of fantasy and that sounds about right.

[–] Sleve_McDichael@hexbear.net 19 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Mormonism keeps most of its adults in a permanent juvenile state, which bleeds into every word of his writing. He’s incapable of writing characters that behave like adults because he himself doesn’t know how to do it

[–] PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 44 minutes ago* (last edited 39 minutes ago)

Random sidenote, what's wild is this is true, but also a whole bunch of em get sent to other countries to recruit door to door, daily, for a full year, and so.

You get this very strange mix of person, pretty often, who is both way more sheltered and ignorant than your average USian (let that sink in) - but who also has way, way more direct experience with other cultures (well, generally precisely one other culture, per individual) than your average USian.

Makes for interesting conversations lol. The ones I've met came away with some pretty sincere love for the place they went, and real sympathy and understanding for the people there, a lot of times. And then, in the same conversation, are genuinely confused and asking me "why don't the homeless people here simply get a job and an apartment?". And they mean it with all the sweet naive sincerity of frickin Bambi lol.

So then that sounds like a promising opening but proceeds to go exactly (amazingly) nowhere. Like their understanding can't develop, here. They're locked into something pretty hard.

Had this experience enough times to wanna share lol, it's the strangest thing.

[–] Nacarbac@hexbear.net 4 points 9 hours ago

I liked Elantris at the time, I thought it was a neat little puzzle story. But then they were all the same after that, overconstructed magic systems used as a fill-in-the-blank kinda plot device where the main character just needs to read the instruction manual aaaaall the way to the end where the cheatcode is written in the credits pages.

Very dull stuff. Magic doesn't solve problems, people solve problems.