Colm O'Regan: The Wheel of Time is back! Here's my guide to fantasy fiction
The Wheel of Time is back. A fantasy TV show based on about 100 books of 1000 pages each.
The Wheel of Time is back. A fantasy TV show based on about 100 books of 1000 pages each. It’s excellent but it’s on Amazon Prime so not everyone will see it. Don’t worry though. Even if you never see it, you will sort of have seen it already because fantasy fiction is nearly all the same.
There is a Chosen One To Do A Quest. Frequently a farm boy. He’s rarely someone who works in insurance or solar. Just a simple lad who likes whittling.
Parents are usually disposed of early. It takes too long to write about what THEY want out of life. I find this particularly annoying. I’m putting in the work now to mind my children in the hope I’ll get something back later in life.
It would be extremely annoying to find that just when I don’t have to look after them and would welcome a hand around the place, they go on a quest. AND it turns out they weren’t even my child, having been sired by the Lord Galad’deen.
The Chosen One won’t be alone. There’s usually a ragtag group of companions that have great fun on their quest for half an hour but are then broken apart by a surprise attack from Bad Guys, But Not The Most Evil Ones Yet. Hilariously, in Wheel of Time, the first bad guys are monsters called Trollocs. Writer Jordan Sanderson clearly never spent any time in Ireland. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made any Bad Guys -who we really need to takes seriously- rhyme with Bollox.
There is further evidence at the end of this when one character blows on a wind instrucment and calls forth, a group of warriors, back from the dead known as The Heroes of The Horn. Shur, we’ve all been there of a Saturday night. Or tried to.
The quest usually starts on foot. That’s my favourite bit. Just wandering about the empty landscapes. There are just so few people around. You get to wander from forest to bare mountain and no one has built any apartments or business parks.
No one from the council to stop you lighting a fire. Note, there incredibly quick transition in the ecology. You are running across a hellish karst landscape, scoured by winds and lightning, then you turn left, and there it is, The Sopping Wet Cloud-Forest of Mula-Shabeen.
It’s definitely easier to travel as a man because of trousers. Women don’t wear trousers unless they are specifically Sheruklar The Wise-cracking Ball-breaking Warrior Witch. She may die saving the Chosen One, right at the point she realisess her feelings for him. The weird thing is they’ve mastered magic in this world but no one has engineered it to make a zip.
Naming conventions in fantasy are complex but once you get the hang of it you can write your own characters quite easily. For naming all the ragtag companions, just take the normal name of someone you know and then spell it wrong. Colm would probably be Culloyne. But if I am from a mysterious silent warrior tribe, I would be Khulo’um The Silent.
For naming bad guys, unless they are named something accidentally rude like Trollox. Shmeebag or Ghob Shei’ T, it’s some jumble of Ks, Zs and Us. Try it. Now pay homage to the dark Count Khul-a-‘Dur Of Zh’a’uk.
I’d like to think that if the world were flipped and fantasy fiction originated in the central Asian deserts of Taklamakan or the Silk Road caravanserai like Bukhara, that the bad guys would be all be called Gary and Phil and Paula.
But despite all the tropes, I love this stuff. No one’s talking about tariffs or the Burkes. Sometimes you just need to get away.
