Re: A Question About The Wheel Of Time
Yeah, the series starts out decent, turns into the middle of Dragonball Z only worse, then Crossroads of Twilight hints that Robert Jordan might have brought it back to decent but we'll never know because that's when Brandon Sanderson came in and gave us a pretty spectacular ending.
Spoiler-tinted rant follows.
It's kinda long.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
Having read all of Memory of Light, I still find the explanation to be ... unsatisfying. In retrospect, I can see some build-up from earlier, but it's not the sort that justifies it so much as foreshadows it in a symbolism sense. But that's probably because it screams "lazy theology 101", which I stopped taking seriously about the time I got to the Book of Isaiah[1]. In the WoT-verse, the Dark One is more like the Zoroastrian Demiurge, I guess, and I can see the series building up to the whole balance thing as early as the prologue to Eye of the World. Yet this wasn't really invoked in Rand's battle with the Dark One, and it became "BTW if there's no force of darkness constantly assaulting the world, there can be no free will or something, I dunno, this wasn't mentioned until the last minute and you couldn't have seen it coming unless you already believed it".
It seems kinda like the Dark One and the Creator weren't demonstrated to be equal and opposite forces necessary for turning the wheel, and more that the duality the series had been promoting was the male/female duality, rather than good/evil. You can see this even in the part where Rand seals the Dark One: the One Power has two distinct parts, and the Dark One's power is something completely different. So is it a metaduality? A trinity? If the light can be subdivided into Saidin/Saidar, and further into earth/fire/air/water/spirit, is that another part of the dueality--the Dark One's power is one amorphous miasma, and the Creator's is multifaceted? But if that's the case, why would the absence of the Dark One take away Free Will™. Is the One Power not diverse enough and balanced enough to stand on its own? Is this a case of "two are better than one--see, it takes two (Saidin and Saidar) to defeat the (Dark) One, but you gotta have both sets, instead of just letting Saidin and Saidar handle the whole Yinyang thing."
I dunno, I might have been more willing to buy it if it hadn't appeared to come out of a last-minute "BTW this is my solution to the problem of evil, and it turns out that the story ran on this solution the whole time" grab-bag. If the story had given more hints in earlier books (and their being a Dragon and a Neiblis is not quite hint enough). The best I can say for this being built up is Ishamael's monologue in the EotW prologue, and I suppose it should have more weight, since he was a theologian. (Also, that makes his reasoning for turning to the dark disturbingly hard to refute: if all it takes is one victory for the Dark One, and he gets infinite tries, and each try is slightly different from the previous, he will eventually win. Of course, since the Dark One is Elemental Evil and Decay, joining him and opposing him are equally likely to end in Hell, so I'd have to argue that opposing him is better on the grounds that the longer a not-quite-Hell world exists, the better.)
Oops, I did that thing where the parenthetical deserves its own paragraph, again.
Because, if we grant Ishamael's argument--given infinite tries with random variation, the Dark One eventually wins and plunges creation into eternal darkness--then we have an argument in favor of killing the Dark One! If we're going to lose all Free Will™ eventually no matter what, then the optimal strategy is to kill the Dark One so that it's at least a nice eternal slavery. When, though? One would need to determine exactly how many times the wheel has completed a full cycle, then come up with how many things would need to go wrong for the Dark One to escape and their likelyhoods. A few centuries of correcting the inevitable math errors later, you should be able to determine exactly which iteration of the Dragon should kill the Dark One and plunge humanity into an eternal loop of "It's a Small World". But knowing fiction, that's the iteration when the Dark One would win just ahead of schedule, because trying to kill him backfired or some such, or the dragon turned out less capable than Rand or Lews Theren.
Gah, this is but one of the many reasons I avoid discussing theology or the Wheel of Time outside of some very tiny corners of the universe. -_-
[1] It's probably better not to ask. If it helps, I've gotten the impression that the Quran supports a more WoT-esc interpretation?
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