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Comment by bargl | Hacker News Reader

Wheel of Time the best book is around a 7/10. With some dropping as low as 3/10. There are much better examples of more immersive Fantasy out there. WoT, is a great example of a massive but mediocre series.

EDIT: The ratings are my opinion, but the downturn can be seen on goodreads ratings and is discussed in the WoT community. While not all agree there was a downturn, it being a point of contention in this series is an indicator there was one for most people.

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As a completionist, the WoT series is one of only two that I've ever intentionally decided I did not want to finish. After six or seven books of weird preteen level sexual politics and behavior, and stupid plot threads because of if, I decided I'd had enough.

For reference, the other series was Twilight, and I made it all the way through book three before I gave up in disgust at that waste of time. So maybe that means WoT is roughly twice as good as Twilight in my eyes? I'm not exactly sure that's high praise. Or praise at all...

Wheel of Time is my go to example of bad fantasy literature. But there is someone disagreeing in here. Maybe it's just sunk cost bias. But anyhow it goes to show how tastes vary.

To each their own. It's often brought up in discussions as people's favorite fantasy series, or an example of a good series. I don't fault anyone for thinking the former, but I think the latter requires a bit of justification if not presented in purely subjective manner.

There is a downturn. Most people agree that Lord of Chaos was the last good book until Brandon Sanderson took over. I like to thrown in book 7 as well but RJ really did waste a whole lot of books on Ajah politics

Don't throw around scores like they're facts. Those are your scores relative to the books you've read. For many WoT is a fantastic series better than many other fantasy series.

Goodreads puts WoT book 1 at around a 4.18 and a downturn around book 8 to 3.90. Which exemplifies my point. Also my opinion, but you have to scale goodreads ratings between 3.5 and 4.5. That's about the lowest and highest I've seen, but I'd love to see goodreads discuss this.

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