In a message dated 5/11/2004 11:43:16 AM Eastern Daylight Time, matthew at infodancer.org writes: > It is widely speculated that one of the reasons Jordan's series > degenerated so rapidly was because the online fan base engaged in > such extensive (one might even say "rabid") analysis of the > books. The author noticed this and seemed to become annoyed that > we were unravelling a substantial fraction of his mysteries > before the story did, and so he started obfuscating them even > more (some would argue that he even changed his plans to avoid > giving the "accepted wisdom on the net" answer to some). > > This resulted in a lot of wasted effort, not to mention a lot of > bad writing that could have been avoided. It does have a good side though: the cuendillar idiocy in book ten cured me of wanting to find out What Happens Next (and has saved me about $40 so far). --KG