The Gathering Storm appears to be the most thematically-oriented book in the WoT series, with several readers rhapsodizing about the parallels between Rand, Egwene, and others and how they deal with issues of pain and responsibility. Is the upcoming Towers of Midnight shaping up to have some interesting thematic parallels similar to The Gathering Storm and if so, would they be extensions of what we saw in The Gathering Storm or something completely different?
The reason I divided the book the way I did was because of the way that I felt the themes would play well with one another. Towers of Midnight certainly has its own themes, and you will be able to notice them. There will be some carryover. But it’s going to be a different book. We need to expand and look wider about the world to catch up with other characters we haven’t seen for a while. And there are quite a number of them.
So, it’s a yes and a no. The themes will be there, but there will be a lot more going on around them, so they’ll be diluted in favor of scope. I’ve had to be careful not to make Towers of Midnight simply a “jump back in time and catch up” book. I don’t want to do that. It does move forward.
Rand and Egwene will be there. But the themes are going to be different because of the different mix. We are going to see a lot more of Perrin, and we are going to see a lot more of Mat. And what’s going on in their plotlines will influence theme in a different way.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.