Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 22:41:21 GMT From: Leigh Butler Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan Subject: Re: Villain and Forsaken Characterizations in WoT (was Re: Lanfear's Strength/Forsaken Strength) On Mon, 13 Aug 2001 10:57:27 -0400, Richard Boye' wrote: >The portrayal of the Forsaken in the Guide made them out to be *idiots* >It robbed them of their macabre and mysterious motiviations. Y'know, the more I read in here about the Guide, the gladder I get that I have never read or even skimmed through the damn thing. I remember the first time I saw it in a Barnes and Noble. I was strolling along the SF aisle, innocent and carefree, never dreaming my sensibilities were about to take an aesthetic bludgeoning undreamed of outside of high school theater I see the book, tucked quietly in a top shelf, patiently awaiting its next prey like a big white trapdoor spider. I now imagine that one could feel the thing vibrating in anticipation as I came closer, head tilted in curiousity to read the spine. Pick me up, whispers the innocuous abstract icon illustration on the cover. I'm harmless! I'm good stuff! I won't make you want to gouge your own eyes out with white-hot tweezers and bury their desecrated remains in the dead of night under a rowan tree next to a cemetery decorated with bunches of funky stick figures and random scary piles of stones which you stumble over a lot cause you are after all eyeless now, lest they, the eyes, come back and haunt you for the visual abomination you visited upon them - promise! The more fool I. I heeded the thing's loathsome siren song and pulled it off the shelf. It quivered, and fell open. To the last page. You know, the one that claims to be an illustration of Rand. The horrah. The horrah. Never did I think that a mere picture could make me shriek aloud and actually throw a book away from me. In public, no less. I got a lot of weird looks in the bookstore that day. I pity them, the poor B&N patrons who know nothing of the monster lurking in the ghetto genre section of the store and are thus still susceptible to its lure. I pity the guy I accidentally smacked in the back of the head with the MonsterBook more, but only because he is another for whom The Big Book of Bad, Bad, Very Bad Art has been a source of pain. Also, he was very nice and agreed not to sue, so I prolly owe some compassion there. Let this be a lesson to the lot of ya! -- Leigh Butler leigh_butler@paramount.com ****************************************************** The opinions expressed above do not necessarily reflect those of Paramount Pictures or its affiliates.