I was just taking a trip down memory lane this afternoon, going through a series of like 50 emails I exchanged with a friend while reading the last three Wheel of Time novels.

It occurs to me that I've never even considered the possibility of WoT fanfic, mainly because the series' length / development / worldbuilding kind of makes it seems like... well, what else is there to do? Unlike Harry Potter, where there are all kinds of tantalizing hints of unexplored possibilities, WoT is both intimidatingly complex and frustratingly complete.

Despite this, I wonder.

Has anyone run across anything - one-shot, 700K behemoth, anything in between - good in this fandom?

I'd kind of narrow my focus towards works that capture the character voices - although this is asking a lot. Look at how much Sanderson, who had the resources of a professional author as well as the original author's notes and staff, whiffed on Mat's voice in TGS. It's not an easy task.

I mean. I'd basically take anything anyone "enjoyed", for whatever personal definition of "enjoyed" you have.

 

Secret Smiles is pretty good. It follows Crossroads of Twilight and Knife of Dreams through Tuon's viewpoint. It's one of the very few well-written fanfics for Wheel of Time.

 

Ta'veren is the best piece of WoT fanfiction out there in my books hands down. If you haven't read it, do so. It updates sporadically, and is probably not abandoned despite the length of time since the last update.

Beyond Void and Solace is also awesome in its hilarity, but you'll need a TFF account to read it, since that's the only place you can find it. Most people know it as "The Name's Al'Thor" or some variation thereof because it features JamesBond!Rand. Which yes, is just as awesome as it sounds. Cursed by the nature of WoT fanfic to never be finished though.
The text doesn't show up properly int he thred for some reason. If you use the quote function, you can read them that way (or copy-paste the text into a notepad or something). I have no clue why the text doesn't show.

 

What little I remember about that fic is quite unpalatable.

It had the same vibe like all those fix-it HP fanfics where the protagonist knows how to solve/respond to everything, acts smug about it and gets everything right. Not really what I enjoy reading, even less so in WoT.

 

I remember reading one done by Shezza a while back that I enjoyed.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2726098/1/Altered-Destiny

AU: Rand al’Thor accompanies Tam to Baerlon when he is six, and runs into an Aes Sedai of the Red Ajah who discovers he could channel. He is taken to Tar Valon and gentled. What is to become of the Dragon Reborn?

 

Man...

That seems... thematically problematic.

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I mean, I'll obviously give it a shot, but I dislike fanfiction that doesn't pay proper respect to the overarching themes of the series it's taking place in.

 

Willow and the Luck of the Draw I recall enjoying this one.

 

I agree with everything Odran said. I mean, I read all that's there, but it's pretty meh. It's well written and if you squint you can see how it could transcend the ta'veren idiotic fuckery with just entertaining chaos, but man. Meh

Also that de-balling of Lan's abilities...

I almost virtually smacked a bitch

Especially since

Spoiler

The Warder bond and all of its benefits was an admitted unknown to this essentially transplanted Age of Legends society, not to mention, duh Lan himself. Thought I readily admit that we never saw any confrontation between Lan and the Manetheren soldiers/Mat

 

I can offer another decent Buffy crossover:

Caught in the Weavings of the Wheel by The Gramarye

BtVS x WoT. Shortly after the destruction of the Sunnydale catacombs, Buffy, Faith, and Willow find themselves sucked into a world in which they might be even more over their heads than ever before, struggling to survive and searching for a way home.


Starts very shortly after BtVS finale and a few weeks after Rand led the Aiels west of the Spine of the World. It was heading in some interesting directions, but in the end it didn't get very far from just 'setting all the pieces for the general story' phase. Still, it's a 76k words long...

 

The pipe-lighting thing wasn't Ta'veren, it was "something else" that Sanderson said we'd never find out the answer to. Kiiiiinda think we're supposed to assume it's a "new Power" that Rand made/unlocked by sealing the Dark One with both halves of the Source + the True Power, or something. Whatever, the end of AMOL is kind of iffy anyway.

And the closest Mat got to actually controlling his Ta'veren-ness was when he started covering his eyes and spinning around to pick which direction to go. Which is really more like "giving in to non-random randomness" than actually controlling it, I think? Plus, wasn't Mat's personal "luck" power less of a Ta'veren thing and more of a "weird interaction with the Shaidar Logath dagger thing"?

Anyway. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give that one a try.

Started this one. It's a little... dry? For a fic whose purpose is "getting in Tuon's head", it doesn't really... do that? At least over the first three chapters. It's not terrible, but there's precious little unique insight or interesting perspectives with Tuon, and since it's straight canon rehash, that leaves it wanting, IMO.

Just starting to give this one a try, but I have to say, the very first paragraph has a bit of a red flag...

Uh.

 

Weirdly, that's why I enjoyed it. I didn't really want any great revelations about Tuon - I liked that it was a simple tie-in to the novels that had a different viewpoint. I think it's well-written, but yes, it is not particularly amazing.

 

If I remember correctly, Rand was able to exhibit more direct influence over his Ta'veren abilities when he tried to force Tuon to submit to his will in their talk. There was mention of that from her PoV. I don't think he does so much after that, at least following his visit to Dragonmount.

 

Hm, yeah, reasonable point. I'm not sure how much control he had over that effect, though? Anyway, I probably spoke too soon with the negative reaction. Something about "control his Ta'veren-ness" just rubbed me the wrong way.

Speaking of stories, though, I did come across this one:

A New Beginning: A Different Ending to A Memory of Light and the WoT

Despite the cringeworthy name, this is pretty good. It's definitely a bit hit or miss at times. Some characters - like Lan and Elayne, to name two, come off as pretty flat/off.

But, it's actually fairly impressive insofar as it manages to capture some of the tone and structure - if not the "epic fantasy" feel - of the source material. The details, especially. The author has definitely read the series multiple times and internalized it.

Take the following passage:

A pretty good example of the fic. It does a lot of things right - Mat's internal voice seems remarkably spot-on, and he's a tough character to write. The beat with the silence + a few horses moving around is very WoT. And a little bit of awkward writing - "the brown mare she was riding" and "to where the Aes Sedai and Asha'man should be arriving" are particularly clumsy.

But... not bad, right?

Basically, if you've recently read AMOL and had that kind of wistful, "well, that was good, but I just wish there was a bit more closure in some places" feeling, this will quench that thirst.

 

Ta'veren always felt like a guilty pleasure to me. Full of them completely modernizing Edmond's Field, turning it into some industrial powerhouse, the Aes Sedai are portrayed as having no clue what they're doing, they completely outsmart Moraine, etc. It's sort of fun, but I'd hardly call it a quality fic.

Altered History is still my favourite, though don't know how it was aged (last reread it YEARS ago). I've always wanted to explore more of that concept of a male channeler in a world where that leads to them being gentled. In canon, that realization comes with him being revealed as the Dragon Reborn. So yeah, Shezza's story is interesting in how it could have gone instead.

I remember reading an interesting Taim centric one. But can't remember what it was called.

Will try some others that have been recced in this thread.

 

I'd feel so much better about AMOL if it wasn't revealed that Jordan had written 99% of the ending before he had died.

I don't want this to be a slight on Sanderson. He is a spectacular author, one of my absolute favorites, that volunteered to do the impossible and did it as well as could be hoped - especially when you realize how fucking little he had to go on, and he mess of books 7-10 that he had to reconcile.

But man.

 

I mean, Sanderson absolutely owned some of those moments. Like, Lan vs. Demandred. I might have actually cheered.

No, the problem was he quite simply didn't have enough pages. Despite splitting it into 3 books and despite each book being so huge it likely is classified as a deadly weapon, the size of the series itself was just too much. There were too many threads. Hence, you get things like Moiraine coming back to give a speech and then hang out at the Bore and do literally nothing else for the entire book.

Really, though. The alternative, if RJ had lived, was that we'd be on Book 16 right about now and he'd still be swearing up and down the street that this next one would be the last one. Would that have been better? Hm. Well, we'll never know.

 

That is one of my biggest cheering points re. Sanderson.

Were the last three novels perfect? Nope.

Did he do them better than Jordan could have? Most probably, given that if Jordan had lived, it would have been as you say. He couldn' get out of his own way.

Did he do the best with what he was given (read: the series to date, an outline, as well as maybe two dozen pages of text?) Oh yeah.

The other cheering point is Sanderson's absolute mastery of the literary climax.

 

I dunno, the last book always felt like a fanfic or shounen anime ending to me. That's not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but after all the epic build up, the whole thing felt cheesy and cheap somehow. I think his writing style just wasn't quite right for what Wheel of Time was.

Edit: Though thinking about it, some of that could've also been that I had just smashed through ASOIAF a month or two before reading the last book.

 

I remember liking this one shot about Mat and a potentially channeling daughter in the Seanchan empire: No Daughter of Mine