Anything else you wish to share with your fans?
Well, for this entire interview, I’ve tiptoed around one issue: the fan reaction to Mat in The Gathering Storm .
You kindly didn’t ask directly, though I did sense that you were trying to get at it. And your own comments about The Gathering Storm are among those I did read. I know what you’ve said about Mat.
It’s curious. I’ve gotten around 1500 emails about The Gathering Storm so far. (Of those, by the way, only one person didn’t like the book. I’m not arrogant enough to assume that person is the only one—I’m guessing that most who didn’t like the book didn’t feel the need to email me and chew me out for it.)
Of those 1500, only a handful mention Mat. However, he IS the one brought up the most often. Oddly, it’s almost exactly divided between people saying, “I love how you did Mat, he’s my favorite part of the book,” and people saying, “I loved everything about the book, except Mat didn’t feel right.”
That has been very interesting to me. One thing this does for me is that it actually relieves a big burden off my back, because it means that I did everybody else right. It also means that Mat is noticeably different to a small number of people. Was this done intentionally? No, it was not. I worked on Mat like I worked on all the rest of the characters, and I feel as close to Mat as I feel to the rest of the characters. I asked Harriet, and she said, “You did Mat perfectly. Don’t change him.”
So…where does that leave us? I’m not sure. I do realize that my sense of humor is slightly different from Robert Jordan’s sense of humor. And perhaps if I had to do it again, I wouldn’t lead with the monologue from Mat that I used, because that’s where the difference is most obvious. A person’s sense of humor is like their thumbprint. And I’m not sure that I could ever replicate Robert Jordan’s thumbprint when it comes to that, and it never has been my goal to replicate him exactly.
I think that in the narrative, though—the places aside from the monologues—Mat is still Mat. Of course, Mat had some really big things happen to him in Knife of Dreams , things that have shaken him and the way he sees the world. But at his core, he’s still the same person.
However, if you were worried about him, it should help you to know that the large bulk of the Mat sequences Robert Jordan wrote are in Towers of Midnight . There is a lot more Robert Jordan Mat to come. So maybe it’s not really an issue at all.
Best,
Brandon
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