“History repeats her tale unconsciously, and goes off into a mystic rhyme; ages are prototypes of other ages, and the winding course of time brings us round to the same spot again.”
—James Burns, The Christian Remembrancer Vol 10, 1845
“If what I get is what they did in Merlin, I’ll be perfectly satisfied.”
—Robert Jordan interview, 1999
Fans of The Wheel of Time are conditioned from its earliest moments to respect the power of prophecy and to analyze the tiniest minutiae of word choice. The story’s characters perceive their foretold Breaking of the World with a mix of fear and hope…and now we fans have mixed feelings about our own coming cataclysm. Long whispered in real-world prophesies, the Wheel of Time TV show will be upon us in a matter of days.
Rational viewers (which I admittedly am not) will anticipate an hour’s entertainment, one episode after the other. But for some of us, this is a moment of transition, a Breaking of what The Wheel of Time is, essentially, and a reforging of what it means to be a WoT fan. It is as though many of us are at a feast—we existing fans huddled around the table anxious to dig in, while curious but unfamiliar people peek through the windows, waiting for Amazon to let them in. A minority of fans already seated at the table are looking nervously at those people outside, and they are being noisy about them. Why? Their problem is not really the new guests. Their problem is with the feast itself.
