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Originally Posted by pwalker8
Not sure what pew-pew is...
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Traditional laser noise, used to denote armed conflict, particularly with unconventional weapons (lasers, magic attacks, even bows).
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Originally Posted by OverHaze
How did you find The Wheel of Time? I've thought about reading it many times but its a heck of a commitment!
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I tried starting it several times and found the prologue so melodramatic and the first chapter so cliche (young man from a farming village heading into town, where a mysterious stranger has arrived) that I couldn't get into it, but once I pushed past that stuff, the setting is actually pretty unique. The overall tone is more in line with the darker Brothers Grimm tales than Tolkien, the monsters fairly simple grotesques with a folk tale feel to them.
At the same time, postmodern influences are obvious. If you're into comparative mythology, Jordan draws on several existing and a few antiquated religions for his world building. He constantly undercuts his characters' perspective on events, giving all of them obvious biases. New book parts frequently start with a catalogue of wildly distorted rumors circulating about the events and political situations up to that point. Everyone is treated as an unreliable narrator, and a number of alternate realities come into play, and of course the refrain that starts every volume reminds us that all of this has happened before in endless repetition with the turning of the Wheel, subtly questioning whether there is any fixed set of events that actually happened.
The cosmological and ontological subtleties are undercut somewhat by Jordan's apparent arrested development: every character, whether 15 or 3000 years old, has the internal life of an adolescent. They're still decently defined, relatable characters, but the whole epic battle of good and evil sometimes feels like a high school lunchroom squabble. Much of the prose has a satirical quality that does lend it interest, but the depth of the satire seems to be, "Everyone is always theorizing about the opposite sex, and often both sides are leveling the same stereotypes at each other." The result is a sometimes tiresome repetition of "Boys be like..." "Girls be like..." in the dialogue and internal monologues. When Sanderson takes over the series, a lot of the subtleties are lost, but it is nice that several of the adult characters are allowed to grow up.
As for the common criticisms, people say the events and conflicts are repetitive, but I didn't find it so. As fantasy series go, I thought Jordan did a good job of maintaining an advancing narrative, events building on each other and political situations unfolding, characters and nations changing in response to events. People also say it bogs down in the middle, and I did hit a wall somewhere around book 5 or 6, but before and after that it kept pulling me along pretty consistently.
ETA: My perspective of the overall pace and narrative is probably quite different, going into the series knowing it's finished and in how many books, and having read a lot of post-WoT epic fantasy, compared to someone reading each volume as it came out.