Sim.
Ele abordou isso em seu site, que não existe mais (pelo menos não com a mesma URL), mas ainda pode ser visto usando a Wayback Machine aqui .
Um pôster do fórum chamado ChrisW fez uma longa lista de semelhanças entre Wheel of Time e Night Angel, às quais Brent Weeks respondeu da seguinte forma:
Chris,
I feel like there’s the question you’re asking--which has many parts, but is fairly simple--and then a raft of assumptions behind the question that you may or may not hold, but that I’m leery of.
So, first to take your questions at face value: are there similarities? Sure. Jordan was a favorite of mine. I didn’t love everything he did, and I haven’t read any of his books for eight (?) years, but those first books wowed me as much as Tolkien's books did. Jordan rocks.
Ele continua descrevendo quantos dos elementos comuns nas duas séries foram ambos baseados na mesma inspiração - seja da história do mundo real, mitos e lendas, ou outras obras de fantasia como o de Tolkien - em vez de NA ser uma imitação de WoT.
When you’re talking about elements of stories that get repeated, and whether they’re rip-offs, you have to decide how specific or general you’re going to be. In the Night Angel Trilogy, Kylar’s an orphan. Wait, not just an orphan, a poor orphan. (Oh, rip-off of Charles Dickens.) Wait, not just an orphan, an orphan who can use magic. (Oh, rip-off of Harry Potter.) Wait, not just an orphan, an orphan who’s smart. (Rip-off of Orson Card.) Wait, not just an orphan, an orphan whose master teaches him to fight. (Rip-off of Star Wars…or whatever.)
Or maybe there’s just something intriguing about orphans. Orphans face an amplified form of the same question that bothers all of us as we grow up: who am I? Where did I come from? Who are my people, and how much does that matter? Plus, orphans are underdogs, so it’s easier to care about them.
Ele admite que a parte sobre mulheres, homens e seu uso da magia é muito parecida:
I’m not going to go through them all your examples because of space. Some are really pretty different, or conversely quite common to the genre. The one that IS quite similar is that the women have a unified school and the men don’t. I’d do that differently if I had it to do again. It’s not essential to my world and it IS too similar. My bad.
E ele conclui dizendo que, independentemente de todas as ideias serem originais (dica: elas não são), ele pelo menos colocou sua própria opinião pessoal nelas:
Those guys each have a couple of decades of writing experience on me, so if you think they do it better than I do, that's fine. My work is definitely influenced by them, and it's influenced by Tolkien, and it's influenced by a bunch of other writers both famous and gifted and not-so-much. At the end of the day, I think if you tore off the cover and read any of my books without seeing who wrote it, you wouldn't say "Hmm, seems like a pale Robert Jordan. Maybe something from early in his career?" I think you'd say, "That's a Brent Weeks book. Definitely."
Seu post completo foi muito longo para citar aqui, mas foi uma leitura interessante e diz muito sobre fantasia.
Se Weeks estava dizendo a verdade aqui, ou simplesmente tentando dissimular o fato de que ele matou Jordan, está em debate. Mas a sua pergunta era se ele falou sobre isso, não se ele copiou do WoT.Eu encontrei isso pesquisando o Google por
brent weeks wheel of time , o que me levou a este tópico do fórum , com um link para esta página que não existe mais. Em seguida, demorei, mesmo usando a Wayback Machine, para encontrar uma cópia dessa página, mas finalmente consegui usando esta lista .