I grew up reading The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. When he passed away, it was a significant moment to me, partly because he was one of three authors I grew up wanting to meet (the other two were Michael Crichton and Stephen King, only one of which is still alive). For those of you not familiar with the series, here's a little background. The Wheel of Time is an epic fantasy series that began sometime in the early 1990's. The first 11 novels of the series have been significant bestsellers, with three of the most recent novels hitting the #1 spot in the New York Times Bestselling list. As a series, it's sold over 30 million copies, which means it beats out Twilight by about 1 million copies (last I checked). It's a bit short of Harry Potter's 400+ million copies, but it's a big series. Lots of people take it seriously.
Before he passed away, Robert Jordan promised that the next book, the 12th one, would be the last of the series, ending a story arch that I've been following since my early teens. Only problem is, he passed away before completing the novel, and Tor Publishing found another author, Brandon Sanderson, to write the final volume. I wanted to know how Brandon Sanderson's writing compared to Robert Jordan.
You see, there's a final bit of information that makes The Wheel of Time particularly interesting to me - they drift, a little. The books at the front end of the series are generally accepted as being better than the last few books. If you look at the Amazon.com user rating for the series, the average for the first few books is about 4.4 out of 5 stars. The average for the last three books is about 2.7 out of 5 stars, with the second to last falling as low as 1.7 stars.
What I wanted to know was whether Brandon Sanderson wrote more like Robert Jordan's earlier work, or his later work.
I'm not ready to draw any conclusions yet, though fans of the series will be happy to know that Sanderson's most recent non-WoT books fall closer to the early WoT books than the later. What I think is interesting, though, is character usage. If you look at the graph accompanying this post, you'll see something interesting. The first graph is the ratio of "Major" characters that are introduced in the first book, and how they're used in the books that follow. So, for those of you in the know, this would not include Elayne, because she's only briefly introduced in the first book. She's important to the series, but not really significant in the first book (she only appears in one scene or so). It would include Rand, Mat, and Perrin, plus some others (listed in the graph).
Notice anything? Early in the series, these seven characters represent over 74% of the focus of the book. But their presence falls dramatically over the course of the series, until they appear in less than 30% of the 11th title. Hmm, interesting. Does this have something to do with the book's falling user ratings? I can't say. I know I didn't like the last books as much because I spent noticeably more time reading about characters I didn't really care about than characters I did care about.
Hmmm...
But Robert Jordan also introduces other major characters in the second and third book, such as Elayne (one of my favorite characters). Maybe they're just replacing the early ones, and it balances out? The second graph shows the cumulative percentage of appearance for all the major characters across the entire series (meaning, we don't care where they were introduced). This equals out to Rand (appears in 41% of scenes in the series), Egwene (22%), Nynaeve (22%), Mat (21%), Elayne (21%), Perrin (17%), and Moiraine (15%). All the other characters appear in less than 10% of the scenes in the book.
Again, the graph of all these characters goes down over the course of the series. Not as dramatically as the original characters, but enough that the final book spends less than 50% of its time talking about one of these major characters. A line you don't see on here is what I call "bit players" - characters that appear and disappear in less than two books. They show up, but then disappear before you get to know them.
By the last book, you're reading more about these bit characters than you are reading about one of the significant characters that appear throughout the entire series.
I'm not ready to pull any statistical conclusions from that, but I tend to lean towards thinking that Mr. Jordan drifted in his focus in the final books. For me, at least, he spent less time writing about people I cared about, and more time writing about people that appeared on the corners of the story.
The Wheel of Time is an epic series, with hundreds of characters. After 11 books, maybe there were just too many to follow in the space available without losing some of the readers?
I don't really know, but I thought it was interesting.
Note: Sorry about the image quality. It's actually much prettier than that, but was scaled poorly by the upload script.
