I am very fond of the WoT series, but happily admit to Song being a superior series. But despite outwardly being similar, that’s actually a very shallow comparison and pretty much stops at ‘Fantasy epic’.
I think, WoT is almost a Young adult book, where as Song is very much pitched at Adults.
WoT is a much more ‘classic’ good vs evil, naive country people grow into epic superheroes, assisted by powerful people, to take on the big bad kind of deal. Parceled up with that of course is some well worn cliches and tropes seen throughout the genre. However, despite recognising that there remain some characters to cheer for, generally speaking it is crystal clear who has the white hats and who wears the black hats, and mainly the white hats are sparkling snowy white, and the black ones are purest pitch black.
I really enjoy the rich world Jordan created though, the history of the world, the wheel turning concept I enjoyed. I really like the whole one power thing, and how traditions are subverted and mis-interpreted over time. The sword fights between masters I particularly enjoyed, I can’t recall having come across that style of describing swordfights before, and the names of the forms rattled off, really evoked a hollywoodesque epic fight to me.
Mechanically though the writing and pacing varies between solid to diabolical. Personally I think books 1 though 7ish are OK, aside from some Jordan tropes (mentioned below) but 8-10 are just tripe, that could easily and should have been compressed into a single volume. The plot advancement is just so damn slow. But it’s funny even then I stuck with it. I’d invested the time to read 7 volumes, I was going to stick with it. :smack:
The other distracting and annoying thing, is what I suspect was Jordan’s excuse for character quirks or actual, you know, characterisation. That’s the endless smoothing of skirts, tugging of braids, tugging of the forelock, Matt the skirt chaser always thinking he’s bad with woman, etc, etc. The endless description of fashion and clothes, but on that specific point, I actually cut him some slack, because, call me a heretic but I found LOTR just as bad and harder to read in his descriptive passages, maybe it’s just more acceptable because he wasted pages on describing outdoorsy scenes, rather than Jordan spending a paragraph on describing the colour of a skirt
Song on the other hand is labeled a fantasy epic, and it has the trappings, but it is not the classic good v evil, journey type series. The white hats are mostly pretty muddy, the black hats are mostly far from darkest night. It is clear that the series borrows largely from real life, where ‘shit happens’. As someone has already mentioned, it is more gritty political drama than fantasy epic.
It has it’s own problems at times too. There are pacing issues at time, the whole Danerys plot has slowed to a crawl at times. And there are some GRRM tropes for certain characters that show up as well. Although on a whole GRRM is vastly superior at creating the illusion of an actual person, rather than a cardboard cut out.
I personally find it a little annoying when a major character dies ‘off screen’, I don’t mind them dying, that’s actually one thing I like about the series, but I’d like to ‘see’ how it happens, not just a reference to it later.
You can almost sum up the difference as LOTR-esque fantasy epic, versus grim and gritty drama.
