f13.net

tugs his non-existant braid

As some of you may know, after some uncertainty and back & forth, radio silence (as far as 2017), being overshadowed by the LOTR tv series, etc. , last october Amazon finally decided to order a series based on the popular Rober Jordan books.  

Showrunner is Rafe Judkins (Marvel's Agents of SHIELD).
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smooths his non existant skirt and blushes

Today, he announced who will play Moiraine Sedai: Rosamund Pike

(https://i0.wp.com/www.tor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/rosamund-pike-wheel-of-time-moiraine_1300.jpg)

Yep, she definitely has that "Witch of Tar Valon" look  :grin:

I still have to finish the books, anyway; you know,  yes, they  are exhausting, derivative, repetitive...But I still find myself drawn to them. No matter what you think about RJ talent as a writer, he definitely put his very soul on every single one he wrote.

sniffs

I'm surprised they got a semi big name for what should be a very long term role.

Billy Zane says "fuck you". (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUQE0-G_GeU)

Lol, i had completely forgotten about that and i was the one who posted it. (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=24702.0) I doubt he is still attached to this.

I'm not sure why anyone thinks that a book series as long and drawn out as the Wheel of Time is going to be able to be filmed. The GOT actors were ready to move on after 5 or so seasons. Do they really think anyone is going to want to play Rand Al'Thor for 24 goddamn years?

Here's the thing.  I think its legitimately possible to go through the entire long mess of work that is the Wheel of Time, and pull out the very best story threads, and weave them together in a 6'ish season long show.  There were plenty of good moments through the series, and you could cull 70% of it, keeping the best parts, and make a pretty fun show.  That is literally the only way forward when somebody thinks they can adapt this.  I doubt it will be done well, and the series will almost certainly be terrible, but that is a way forward with it.

RJ was not known for his exquisite plotting.  His characters just seemed to bumble around until something happened.  This WILL be terrible, UNLESS they unleash some very good TV writers to tighten stuff up.

Just what we need, soft-core Amish spanking porn.

This is a book series I couldn't finish. I read thousands of pages of braid tugging, women plotting to sex up Rand Al'Thor and the plot just spinning its wheels. Ironically. The last of the books I read I found myself skipping entire chapters because it was just so monotonous. I think there were 4, maybe 5 books after I stopped.

This can only work if they do what the first 5 seasons of GOT did. Look at the books. Keep the good, jettison the pointless bullshit. Which, sadly, Wheel of Time is about 80% pointless bullshit, 15% kind of cool world building and 5% plot movement.

Heh, surprised they got Pike although I guess actors are willing to chase that sweet GoT-ish payday.  Considering they tried Shannara and now this I await the inevitable Dragonlance adaption.

Sure, why not.  If they filter out the boring bits, this could work.

Shannara....I tried, but among other reasons, that show doesn't work for me because it clearly aimed at the Young Adult demo, which makes zero goddamn sense.  Sometimes I can get past that, but it was also pretty cheesy at the same time.

For me, the breaking point was when he brought back Mazrim Taim. The same book saw the return the the Red Ajah, and that was when I realized that he was just not capable of tying off a plot thread and FUCKING LEAVING IT TIED, GOD DAMN YOU WHY CAN'T YOU FUCKING RESOLVE ANYTHING, YOU MONEY CHASING CUM GUZZLER!

I dropped the book mid-reading, something I have literally never done on purpose for anything else. I'm told Sanderson did a decent job of untangling that shit, but I refuse to reward bullshit, even posthumously.

--Dave

This was originally going to be a trilogy  of books. At the end of writing the first book it was still supposed to be a trilogy.  They could do the entire meaningful core of the series in 3 6 hour seasons.

I read every book in WoT except for the very last book, and I seem to recall it had something to do with Jordan's widow insisting that the e-book version cost the same as the hard cover, like 40 bucks or whatever.  Which I would never, ever, ever, ever go.  Sanderson did indeed do a good job upon taking over, but I doubt I will ever bring myself to dig into the last one.  Probably still costs 40 bucks.

There is no way in hell they could do the entire series in the confines of anything approaching a modern TV series.   I mean, fuck, if they were going to do this for TV, doing it like some kind of Action / Fantasy Soap Opera instead of Game of thrones would be a more realistic approach.

I mean, sweet jesus, to do this "game of thrones" style would require so much editing and plot compression that you might as well just make a TV series based on the Coles Notes version of the books.  Also, not exactly sure how you would handle the cast in this thing, as if you were going to stay true to the books, you would need something like 40+ major character actors, let alone touching on the important minor characters.  Doing the ENTIRE 14 book series would make game of thrones look like a walk in the park....

Lets goooooo!

Not only is this substantially longer than GoT, it's much more fantastical which will require more SFX. The constant magic use, hordes of Trollocs, the numerous alternate dimensions, etc. I'm guessing we get a few mediocre seasons and then it gets cancelled.

I would have guessed - possibly totally off based - that those kinds of effects are relatively cheap today.  At least as opposed to some of the major production costs of GoT and the insane battle scenes.  And most of my memory of WoT is decidely not an action-packed affair.  Small groups roaming around, doing fuck-all most of the time.

Sanderson did do a good job finishing it up.  Except the rat bastard actually

If they hired Sanderson to adapt it for a TV he'd do a great job. He's already shown how good he is at telling the story and leaving out the filler with the last 2 books.

If you cut any reference to the other boys being so much better with girls, you'll trim 6 books right there.

Even the first book - which is by far the most compressed - spends paragraphs and paragraphs describing things that will just be on the screen without any need to spend pages describing the weave of the carpet, where it came from, how many people walked on it on Tuesday, etc.... /

The "sitting around doing fuckall" bits are the ones that get cut in favor of packaging this down into a reasonable amount of episodes. In my mind, here's what cutting book 1 down into a season looks like:
That feels like it would be a lot flashier and action-packed than, say, the first season of GoT and thus, I assume, cost more. Setting a pace of one book per season virtually guarantees it will never get finished, but I don't know how you could cut EotW down into fewer than 8-10 episodes. If they do ~20 episode seasons I could imagine them doing two or more books at once, particularly in the later books when there's more sitting around braid tugging.

They'll also have the same issue GoT had with minor characters: a lot of folks show up for a scene or two in the first few books before becoming important later (Elaida, Morgase, Elayne and Min all come to mind just from skimming Book 1's summary). How do you get decent actors/actresses to commit to multiple seasons when they'll only be doing cameos early on? Or do you just say fuck it, and recast like Beric, the Mountain, etc.?

You can cut out 2/3 of the material simply by cutting out the descriptive passages.

Exactly.  And something like Book 1 could fill up a season or two.  Books 5 through 10 can conversely be pressed into 1 or 2.  This is totally doable if they put competent people on it.

There are very few competent people though.

In spite of opinions of the later seasons, we have been fairly spoiled by GoT.  I would be okay with some decent, campy, fantasy schlock.  Like Shannara could have been if it wasn’t starring beautiful young people and to be watched by beautiful young people (I always felt like I was watching an extended commercial for Axe Body Spray or something).

One of the reasons I was able to appreciate Game of Thrones the show was that I had been avoiding George R.R. Martin as an author (as opposed to an editor) since the eighties. I tried a few chapters of Game of Thrones the book and tossed it, realizing that he had only gotten worse. So I could watch the show without even in the back of my mind going "that's not how it was in the books!"

What I am getting at here is that I tried to plow through The Wheel of Time series for long enough that I still feel the emotion scars. I don't think I could watch and enjoy any adaptation of it without having flashbacks, no matter how well they fixed the source material.

Well, I did like that Winter Dragon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUQE0-G_GeU) pilot......

 :awesome_for_real:

Now, I'm in a hurry and writing from a sucky tablet, but of you search a bit for articles regarding the latest news about the series, you'll notice that there's going to be a *strong* emphasis on Moiraine: It looks like the story, at least at the beginning, is going to be narrated from her point of view, probably in order to provide a more immediate overview of the overarching lore. That would also avoid a "Shire-like" vibe you would get if they were kicking off by presenting the Emond's Field gang

That’s a weird choice if true. Moiraine knows too much about what is going on.  Part of her function is to delay the plot so it’s not over in just one book.  It would be better to use Rand so the audience can absorb the lore along with everyone else.

She may be the narrator - allowing them to spend 35 minutes describing the weave of a rug, just like in the books.

That doesn't seem like a great choice, but I may be biased because I never liked her in the books. As Brolan said, you don't want a well-informed narrator for a story like this; you want someone who knows nothing, so that the powers that be explain things to them and thus, the audience.

Never finished the series, but I'd be interested in watching a "good parts version" TV adaptation that takes the best 30-40% of the material and tosses the repetitive and going nowhere bits.  Seems like an easier thing to deal with than ASOIAF where the back end is just missing entirely.  I've never seen even serious fans of WoT argue that it doesn't drag on and on in the middle, so I doubt you're going to see much outrage cutting it down to something that fits in 3-5 seasons of TV.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0reHLHGyQnM

You could literally cut 80% of what's in the books and lose nothing except all the hair that's in Nyaneve's braids that she tugs constantly.

The basic story arc is: hobbit farmboy discovers he must carry the One Ring the powerful spirit of a dead guy to fight the Dark Lord and brings his hobbit farmboy friends along for the ride, whereupon they also become powerful and famous. Plus there's a ranger and a Gandalf with tits and then there's some witch sorcerers.

The major unique schtick is the scheming/rivalry among the major antagonists, a smart TV writer could probably do some good stuff with that.

(https://media.giphy.com/media/xT0xeJpnrWC4XWblEk/giphy.gif)

Apparently it is terrible.

The problem is that, at least for probably half the books, cutting out the descriptive passages only reduces the page count.  It doesn't actually reduce the amount of shit that is "happening", in some books a LOT of shit happens (most of which is also either tangentially or DIRECTLY relevant to shit that will be important some time down the road.

It's sort of like saying "well, sure, you could shorten lord of the rings by like an entire movie if you removed a bunch of the traveling", except that you can't really do that, cause important shit happens while they are traveling.

Trying to shorten wheel of time by removing various side plots would also require a very talented re-write of almost the entire series.  I mean, it isn't like GoT where lit was pretty simple to completely remove the "Resurrected Caitlyn Stark and her Merry Vengeance Band" sidestory without impacting anything at all.  Doing the same thing with WoT would require removing like, at minimum, 2 or 3 decent sized side plots per book, half of which are probably related to something that happens in a later book.  Jordan was nothing if not fond of Foreshadowing shit like 8 books in advance that way.

Apparently that was dictated to him if I remember right.

I think scrubbing this down would probably be easy. The first book can be a single season. If it's successful then you can plot out the rest of the books. If it's mediocre but still decent, you can plot out a trilogy like the books originally did. If it's poor, you can still probably shoot an alternative ending like Stars Wars a New Hope and it just ends mercifully there.

I’ve watched some of these WoT fan videos and apparently they are doing the first two books in the first season.  That would be moving along fast.  Maybe too fast.

I sat down to think about how you could plot this whole thing out realistically.  Not going to put in spoilers, but hey, if you don't want plot points revealed, don't read what comes next:

Season 1:  Straight adaptation of book 1.

Season 2:  Book 3 with parts of book 2 meshed in.  Skip the entire Seanchan thing.  Rand and party runs south through Camelyn, but goal is Stone of Tear.  Borg in any minor journey events from book 3 or 2 you want into this.  Mesh in the most relevent parts of white tower stuff between the two books.  Ends just as book 3 ended.

Season 3:  Books 4 and 5 pushed together.  Rand goes to the waste, passes the test at Rhuidean, Aiel split, Rand bangs hot foreign girl, and ends with battle of Caemlyn.  Other two plot threads to follow are White Tower stuff and the girls playing with Dream Land/Moghedien.

Season 4:  Book 6 with some random other shit culled from the next few worthless books.

Book 6 is where I recall things started to bog down under the weight of a thousand plot threads (though the end of the book was badass and marked the series shark jumping point).  So it is at this point it should be easier to cut massive amounts of shit.  Having said that, this is where it would take more mental effort than I want to give on how to adapt/cut.

So I think the path from seasons 1-4 is pretty direct and easy.  If season 7 was just condensing all 3 of the Sanderson books, that gives you two (probably terrible) seasons to to condense books 7-11, which were by far the most pointless.  7 seasons is within the realm of possibility, so this could realistically be done.

But its going to be shit, so......

Combining Book 1 and 2 is a bad idea. Both books were really really good.

Book 1 is a perfect way of building a world and a setting with an actual definitive ending that sets up the rest of the series. Compressing the journey from Two Rivers -> Shadar Logath -> Camelyn -> The Wastes (did I get all those right?) into a few episodes seems crazy. Not only that, you then toss in The Great Hunt and a lot of the lore of the power etc. Then the Seechan and the fight between Rand and Ba'althazar in the sky ending with his branding?

The prophecy stuff is thick in this story, skipping some key elements seems dumb if people want to dive in to things. Books 4ish through 8-9 can be compressed into just 2-3 seasons at most.

Season 1: Book 1
Season 2: Book 2
Season 3: Book 3
Season 4: Books 4-7/8
Season 5: Books 8/9-11/12
Season 6: Wrap it up.

I've read maybe the first 8 books like 4-5 times in my life. I remember reading Eye of the World when I was in middle school for the first time. Every time a new book came out I re-read the series up until that point with the exception of a few books. All the books blend together now over the decades. I have to look a synopsis of what each book is about. but the about of bullshit in books 6ish? through Sanderson is crazy.

When you stop getting Rand point of view chapters from Jordan it really shit the bed. I just looked at the wiki, I didn't even remember there were fucking 14 of these fucking books. Holy shit. Like the story from book 9 or 10 through 14 is just one book in my brain. There's your last season.

I'd combine books 2 and 3 because I agree with Teleku about cutting the Seanchan; they are pointless and without them, you don't have a good climactic battle at the end of book 2.

Oh misread his post, it's book 2 and 3 not 1 and 2.

Yeah looking at the wiki, you could probably do that. End of book 2 is the mid-season culmination. You don't really need to edit anything out. Just some good ole GoT fast travel.

The biggest problem I see with WoT as a tv series is that it (even more than Game of Thrones) covers a pretty long period of time. It is very much a story about teenagers growing into people in their late 20s/early 30s where the journey is as much of the story as the destination. Sure you could hire teenaged actors and have them play the parts for a decade as in GoT but you then end up dragging the story out forever when as people said this really needs some condensing to make it palatable past the first book or three.

It might be better to do it more as a series of “flashbacks” narrated by someone like Loial. Though I suppose that would turn it even more into a Lord of the Rings “knockoff” cinematically.

You can easily keep this as 20 somethings and not teenagers. I mean Luke Skywalker was supposed to be some 18 year old hayseed or something and was by the end a "mature" character.

You can have some time dilation in the show with just the change of seasons. I don't see an issue.

The whole saga can play out in like 3-5 years. They would have to just do a good job showing how long the whole thing takes place over.

Ah, in case you don't know, there has been a resource for all things TV series for quite some time, called "The Daily Trolloc" (which I find quite funny as a website name :D):

http://www.thedailytrolloc.com/

Some of the weekly recaps also offer a summary of the currently known team behind the series:

http://www.thedailytrolloc.com/2019/06/rosamund-pike-cast-as-moiraine-sedai.html


We don't know how many episodes the first season is going to feature; As you can see by following the original link, episode titles hyperlink to the official source, for example:

https://twitter.com/rafejudkins/status/1103397483433025536

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D1AOKQqV4AAGthD.jpg)

The Dragon Reborn as Episode 4 seems an odd choice, unless that's when we're getting LTT's death and being introduced to the concept. I really doubt they could get to the Eye of the World in 4 episodes.

This, probably (maybe minus LTT's death, dunno). Looks like it's going to be a Big Lore Dump episode after some world/character building in the previous three episodes. It also might include the part when


By reading the books, we more or less immediately get who the Dragon Reborn is; in-fiction, at least in EOTW, Moiraine doesn't, Ba'alzamon neither; that's why we could get a different point of view (and narration) : beside the "meta" (readers, spectators getting spoiled online, actor(s) choice etc.), the Emond's Field guys might be treated equal as long as possible by the writers/showrunner.

(by the way, what do we do about spoilers? For example, I'm only at book 6 :P).

There really isn’t anything to spoil after book 6.   :awesome_for_real:

That is the title of chapter 8 in the Great Hunt (Book 2).

It's also the title of Book 3.

Moiraine figures it out at the end of Book 1; Rand admits it at the end of Book 2. Moiraine giving LTT's backstory and saying "One of you three is him, reincarnated" is the only thing that makes sense, unless they're on a rapidly accelerated pace.

I don't mind using spoiler tags if people are so inclined.

I know that it is the title of Book 3, I reminding people who were all "OMG THEY ARE RUSHING THROUGH THE FIRST BOOKS IN THREE EPISODES!!!11ONE" that the term was used for a chapter long before book 3 came around.

You better put spoiler tags on the whole thread.

No one suggested that they were rushing through three books. I implied that they were either going to be done with book in 4 episodes, or more likely going to be showing EOTW's prologue in episode 4.

Rushing the first book in 4 eps would kind of suck. Not much room. For character building. Do you immediately start running from trollocs in episode 1 out of two Rivers?

Hour long episodes.  First episode should easily get to the point of the Trolloc attack.

If we take into account the apparent show preference for Moiraine's point of view, we might actually see .

By the way, lots of people speculate that they will also cast a big/semi-big name for Lan; who would you like to see?

Do we really need to do spoilers?

Also episodes from a different perspective may be an  interesting way to condense the story but so much happens away from the characters that you'd think have major pov stories to tell.

You should do spoilers because once the show comes out, there will be at least a few folks who never read the books that start reading this thread and some of them may start from the beginning.

e: Unless this thread is marked for spoilers in the title and a new one is created when the show is live, like we did with Game of Thrones with separate threads for Book Readers and Non Book Readers.

Thde idea of spoilers for books that I read while I was still in school is rather hilarious to me.

That doesn't exactly help with people who haven't read the books T. And there are a lot more of them than us.

If I cared about the plot of the books enough to be upset by spoilers, I'd have read them.

The whole discussion is premature anyway. They could always just nuke this thread and start a new one if anything actually comes of it.

Re-reading; about book 3 ("The Dragon Reborn") ending:

It's one of those instances that show that RJ knew how to really give some rhythm to his narration: love how he brought all the characters to Tear and what happens there.

The tidbit about Perrin losing himself at the blacksmith forge was nice; also the description about Elayne and Egwene wounds was more "graphic" than usual for the author standards (and the last chapters dedicated to them were very good all around).

Not really a fan of the "boss battle" formula he went for at least in the initial books. Yeah, I get it but after a couple it almost becomes a parody: "Ah, not killed again! Gotcha!!!"

Ok, now it's time for book 4: finally a short one  :why_so_serious: . I mean, it's VERY good, but the Jenn Aiel part is TOO...DAMN....LONG.

BTW in case people didn't notice, the title of the thread now includes "visible spoilers," so let chaos reign.  If anyone cares about spoilers they can start their own thread and then pout about nobody wanting to post in it.   :awesome_for_real:

It's been ages since I've read the books, but couldn't that be:

1. The attack on Emond's Field and their flight.
2. Running into that crap that had them split the party. The waygate place?
3. Arriving at...whatever that big city was, everyone safe and all but scattered.
4. Rand seeing the False Dragon what-his-face, getting the whole infodump, everyone being reunited.
5. Then there's...waygate to the Blight? Eye of the World.
6. Recovery and meeting the Big Chief Magic Chick (which is technically the beginning of book two). Ends with Rand denying he's the Dragon, pan out over unknown horizons, etc.

Wait, those are just official and/or leaked episode titles, don't consider the number. We'll probably get an 8-10 hrs long season (more or less the standard, nowadays).

I assumed we were getting a ~10 episode season as well. 6 episodes per season makes it hard to cover more than one book per season, even with the later books that include a lot of skippable bullshit.

Fair point, I suppose.

I'll be honest though, I only read one of the books from start to finish, the third one, and I found that pretty bloated with certain scenes that were really good, but a lot of stuff I really didnt care about. (At the time I was going through a phase of reading the last book in a series and then reading the previous books) So I decided I would wait till the whole thing was finished, as I found the final battle with the Guy that was supposed to be the Dark One but wasnt to be a bit of an insulting bait and switch. Needless to say, I never actually read any more of the books.

I think a TV series could do what Jordan didnt - keep the focus on the original characters. That alone would care out a ton of utter BS, that Jordan used to avoid finishing his cash cow. From what I've been told, the later books added so many extra characters that it reduced the original bunch to effective side characters. Doing that in a TV show would turn the thing into Lost.

It was worse than just adding extra characters. The story just utterly stalls out. An entire book would be spent doing something that could've been covered in maybe a few chapters but we'd have to know the doings of characters we didn't care about at all. GRR Martin is going down the same path which is why I wasn't terribly upset at Season 8 of Game of Thrones. At least I know in broad strokes how it'll all end.

I really meant it when I said Brandon Sanderson should be the showrunner. Doubt they could talk him into it though. He's busy on his own stuff which all qualifies for TV series too.

It was more that an episode called "The Dragon Reborn" could be several places in the first book's timeline -- either as a flashback (the prologue), exposition (when they encounter the False Dragon) or at the end (After the Eye of the World).

Flame of Tar Valon, though....well, perhaps it just means Moraine being kick-ass at something. Or a flashback.

There are entire books where essentially NOTHING HAPPENS.  They could be omitted entirely and non-readers would not know.

The first few books are not those ones, though.

Honestly it would be fine for a TV series where you could show instead of spending chapter after chapter telling and go through the slog books at a good pace possibly even a couple in a season.

The biggest issue with the wheel of time is it probably would be super expensive to film more so than game of thrones if you were trying to do it right because it is a lot more high fantasy setting than GOT is so the CGI stuff likely would need to get used a lot more.

So, considering they will probably cast a known/semi-known actor for Lan, who should play him?  :grin:

Peter Dinkladge?  :drill:

CGI is really not that expensive anymore for a lot of stuff. Magical fire bolts and shit is cheap. There aren’t “dragons that need to be super lifelike.”

Honestly, if they can think of a way to visualize the internal stuff, they're golden on expenses, considering how much of what happens is about bad spirits from an earlier era possessing (or threatening to possess) people in the present.

There are some high-fantasy landscapes/cities that would require CGI: Tar Valon is the first that comes to mind (actually, it's almost sci-fi like), but they can often keep expenses down by not always panning out the camera (just give glimpses here and there). For the Ways, just put the actors in a dark small room and let them run in circles (with a cheap LARP prop popping up here and there); after a while, turn on a fan or some shit that generates and ominous sound and 'lo and behold, you have your Machin Shin  :grin:

Henry Cavill?  He can just run back and forth between this and the Witcher and he already has the sword training.

Yeah the CGI for this is barely above Star Wars lasers type stuff.

A gruff, older Nikolaj Coster-Waldau would be great for Lan, but obviously you have the "that guy from that other popular fantasy show" factor.

I had thought of Nikolaj as well, although I think "We got someone from GoT!" would be a selling point rather than a turn off.

It should be noted that the GoT books are *much* more high fantasy than the TV series portrayed (Iron Throne being a towering edifice that you would have needed a crane to mount, for instance).

They're still far less fantastic than WoT, because WoT has way more magic users and so many more supernatural creatures.

So, about film locations: Prague (production base), Slovenia and Croatia:

https://www.kftv.com/news/2019/06/25/amazons-wheel-of-time-to-film-prague-slovenia-and-croatia-

Like the article mentions, looks like we should expect a long shoot, from September 2019 to May 2020 (so, post-production, marketing and  all, we're talking minimum nov. - dec. 2020 for S1 release).

Daily Trolloc n.95:
http://www.thedailytrolloc.com/2019/06/the-daily-trolloc-95.html

Last, a generic Q&A showrunner Rafe Judkins held about Rosamund Pike casting:
http://www.thedailytrolloc.com/2019/07/rafes-rosamund-casting-q.html

I own a DVD copy of this. Was SO excited to see it...then I watched it. Holy shit is it bad. I mean Jeremy Irons Dungeons and Dragons movie bad. Such a disappointment.

As for WoT, the idea that the Dragon and Trollocs and the Dark One and Darkfriends and Aes Sedai and all the rest are complete fantasy absolutely HAS to be given some screen time, and long enough for it to really sink in to the audience. That was the one of the best recurring themes- how the Emond's Field crew slowly start to realize that all this shit is TRUE. It plays out a bit like a horror movie (vampires aren't real!), which I thought really gave the creeping horror of realization some impact.

Trollocs attacking Rand and Tam felt like a nightmare sequence. Fleeing from EF to Taren Ferry in the middle of the night was tense. Meeting their first couple of Darkfriends is terrifying. If you hurry through these things, the audience really loses out on why the first few books were so good. Setting the proper stage for the events to come makes or breaks the rest of the series, IMO.

Yeah, agreed.  They need to fully adapt the first book as well as they can without rushing, since its a great intro and build up to everything that comes next.  As I mentioned before, I think you could compact the 2nd and 3rd books by cutting out the ultimately pointless Seachen invasion (and just introducing them when the real invasion comes), but first book needs a full treatment by itself.

It looks like that's what they're going to do, although we're going to stay in speculation territory for a while. Judkins said that they feel free to pick elements from whatever books at least for an introduction of recurring themes through the series.

Unfortunately I can't find the link to the articles/quotes at the moment, but, for example, he also mentioned that he would like to expand Logain's role at the beginning (everything he does in Ghealdan happens "off screen" in the first book, 'til we get a first glimpse of him in Caemlyn), in order to show right off the bat what a man using Saidin does entail (beside, I imagine, a flashback scene that show us the Breaking).

Regarding the supposed title of Episode 6 ("Flame of Tar Valon") I imagine it simply means we'll get introduced to the lovely (:P) Siuan Sanche much earlier; some speculate that the group won't split at Shadar Logoth and head directly for Tar Valon, where, among others, they will meet Elayne, Gawyn and Galad (that would remove the whole Caemlyn part, which is a pity because I always like to re-read that). Morgase, Gareth Byrne and the whole lot might be introduced later to avoid further confusion and more names to remember.

true story: I once re-read WoT when book 10 came out and I accidentally skipped a whole volume (I think 8 or 9) without noticing at all.

Doing WoT now is a bad idea. If they're even just semi-faithful to the original all of the bathwater-drinking, basement dwelling, 'SJWs ruined everything' types will get several aneurysms. We'll get years of people shouting into the internet how liberal feminists in Hollywood have ruined yet another beloved franchise with identity politics.

WoT is full of what is either Robert Jordan's self-hate or complexes being projected into the protagonists or borderline misandry. The whole underlying theme is basically about women castrating men to keep them from completely destroying the world and that everything male is tainted with pure evil. Women are described as being better than men in every aspect, that they are better at running things, that men are all a bit stupid and boneheaded and potentially world-endingly dangerous. Rand al'Thor is the character Robert Jordan uses to work out his own inadequacies and complexes. Rand's mission is also more or less about removing the evilness and taint from the male essence to make it be equally wholesome to the female essence.

This will trigger the incel-crowd so hard that it would probably solve global warming if we could turn it into energy.

His books are also full of all kinds of -isms (both positive and negative) in addition to being a projection of his own inadequacies and sexual issues. From the Dragon liberating the desert folk and bringing them water and civilization to the evil jaoano-arab-chinese coffee-lovers who send an invasion force over and enslave everyone. You could probably write a whole thesis on Robert Jordan's psychological issues just from WoT.

At least it will keep Op-Ed writers employed for the forseeable future.

Then you get to the actual story issues.

• You'd need to completely re-write/re-edit all of the books and cut out vast amounts of fluff and RJ treading water to fit it into the usual 8 or 12 episode season Amazon seems to favor
  
• Rand al'Thor is a rather dull and bland character that is constantly doubting himself and is usually just being driven by the plot instead of driving it forward. You'd need to shift the focus away from him and more towards the other protagonists who are at least interesting and not just moping around all the time
  
• special effect work would probably be prohibitively expensive. GoT spent 10+ million dollars on single episodes and WoT would require much more effects work and a comparable amount of extras and scenery work

Also WoT is comprised of so much inner monologue that I have no idea how you'd translate that onto a television screen. There's probably entire chapters where nothing happens except people arguing with themselves in their own heads.

Going with 6 seasons you'd probably end up with something like this

• One season for book 1 and  parts of book 2
  
• One season for book 6 and parts of 5 probably
  
• One or two seasons for the Sanderson books
  
• One season for book 2-5 with the main focus on 3
  
• One or two seasons for the remaining 5 - 7 books

Fortunately you can cut out entire swaths of the books wholesale without losing much in terms of plot or character progression. You'd still end up with something that is just 'decent' but wouldn't have the appeal of e.g. GoT though.

The show has to actually be good for anyone to give a shit. The show won't be good, so no need to worry about all that.

Hard to say how good it will be.  On one hand Amazon would REALLY like to have their GoT AND they have a bunch of money to throw at it. 

On the other hand I never heard of the people attached to the project and the their experience seems so-so at best.

Amazon already chose what's going to be their GoT, no doubt:
 
https://deadline.com/2019/07/the-lord-of-the-rings-j-a-bayona-direct-amazon-series-juan-antonio-bayona-1202640048/

We'll see if WoT will just pick up some leftover crumble.

I was discussing casting with a friend on Facebook and got around to working up a list of who I'd like:

Rand - Dustin Clare
Mat - Colin Donnell
Perrin - Liam Hemsworth
Lan - Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
Thom - Sam Elliott
Elayne - Rose McIver
Egwene - Nina Dobrev
Min - Alexis Bledel

I couldn't think of anyone for Aviendha or Nynaeve, and since Moiraine is already cast I didn't bother.

The three main guys you picked are way too old. Specially Gannicus as Rand.

Rand is supposed to be like 18 when the series begins. It is unlikely any of the main “kid” characters will have anyone cast that people would have heard of.

I don't recall his age ever being explicitly stated. But he sure didn't seem 18 to me. He felt maybe 16 at best.

They mentioned at some point the amount of time since the Aiel war but I don’t know if that was in the first book or a later one. I do remember vaguely that Elayne is mentioned as being 16 early in her appearances in the books.

I went and looked at the timeline/dates.  At the start of the first book:

Rand/Matt/Perrin are all 20.

Aviendha is 18.

Elyane and Egwene are 17.


The three main characters all feel like young teenagers because they are all uneducated country bumpkins.

I don't expect them to use my cast list, but I highly doubt they're going to cast really young actors for the MCs. This isn't GoT where the characters are literal children at the start, they're all young adults who very quickly grow up.

Nynaeve is simple:

(https://www.proequinegrooms.com/application/files/6915/5023/9863/braided_horse_tail_2.jpg)

Bonus points:  get a drunk Peter Dinklage in a skirt to do the braid tugging, playing it in a Deadpool "Breaking the 4th Wall" style.

Let him ad-lib whatever the fuck he wants to say and just subtitle in whatever the character is supposed to be saying.

Alexis Bledel looks like she is 50 in The Handmaid's Tale. No chance she is passing for 18-25. Although I do agree her acting style would fit Min well.

You can have established actors for the older characters but all the kids should be complete unknowns at the start of the show. Just gotta hope they have someone good in charge of casting like they did in GOT.

Did I miss some part of the story here where we actually have reason to think this is going to be a high quality thing?  I still picture it on the level of Shannara, the cast consisting of teenage underpants models and the whole thing coming off as an extended advertisement for perfume and hair products.

It’ll be a bunch of young nobodies put together with one well known has-been B lister or something.  Introducing Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Moraine, or some shit like that.

Of all the various high fantasy series, I’ve always felt WoT was one of the best.  It has excellent world building and an overall fun narrative/story for the first half.  You could absolutly adapt it into a great TV show.

Now, as for the odds of that happening, yeah, very little hope.  It would require a lot more effort and passion than I expect the people being hired to make this have.  But since I loved the series in my youth, will be fun to follow along to see how it turns out.

Also, if you were actually paying attention, you’d see the very first post was about them announcing Rosamund Pike as Moraine.  :p

Hey, I never said I was paying attention.

And while familiar, I can’t say I can figure out where I have seen here before, so there is that.  B lister indeed.

Anyway, if they put quality people in charge and give it a big ass budget, it could work out.  Guessing they will do neither of those things. 

She was the evil “Bond Girl” in the one with Halle Berry as the not-evil one.

I knew her from Gone Girl and World's End. I'm not sure what constitutes A list or B list, but she's a fairly big name. Certainly far beyond anyone they got for Shannara.

Minor news: David Moxness will be the Director of Photography/Cinematographer:

http://www.thedailytrolloc.com/2019/07/david-moxy-moxness-wheel-of-time.html

(https://postperspective.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Moxy-624x416.jpg)

Some of his previous works (taken from the linked article):


Latest news from Randland (taken from Twitter's "Weekly Wheel News" (https://twitter.com/news_wheel). A must read  :why_so_serious:):

You were right to spoil that. I hope I never have to see that again.

I mean, Shannara had motherfucking Crixus.  Who is admittedly a B lister at best, but fairly recognizable?  I don’t know, I am just blowing shit out of my ass anyway and this is destined to suck.

Unless it doesn’t suck, in which case I want to also formally predict that it will be amazing.  That way my bases are covered.

The Two Rivers fellas has all been cast (official headshots from casting):

Marcus Rutherford is Perrin Aybara:

Barney Harris is Matrim Cauthon:

Josha Stradowski is Rand al'Thor:

--------------

But wait....There's more!

Zoe Robins is Nynaeve al'Meara:

Madeleine Madden is Egwene al'Vere:

(from the official twitter page of the show: https://twitter.com/WoTonPrime)

Those are very tuggable braids.  :why_so_serious:

The big three are nobodies, as expected, but they all look the part well enough. Nynaeve looks younger than I pictured her, but otherwise looks fine; Egwene doesn't match my mental picture, but she's closer than their pick for Moiraine.

They look ok.  Just hope they can act.

Wasn’t Egwene’s whole thing that she was the blondest blonde girl who was ever blonde?  That’s the picture I have of her in my head anyway.  Rest of them look okay.  Rand looks about right, and Mat looks almost just as I pictured him.  Can’t quite tell about Perrin....don’t care about the skin color, just wonder if he has the stocky frame.

That is Elayne; anyways, dunno why but I always pictured Moiraine blonde instead of "dark haired".

FYI: You cannot embed pbs.twimg images anymore. People who do not have them in their cache will not see the images.

I see them?

Boy they aimed full tilt to piss off the incel/nerd/right wing crowd with those picks.  Looks good though, I like!

Though on the one hand they'll get hate from the right for casting a black woman in the role of a white character.  On the other, they'll get hate from the left for pushing the Angry Black Woman stereotype.   :awesome_for_real:

Just need to cast a hot Asian for Min now.
Nynaeve's thing was that because of her natural ability in the power, she looked way younger than her age, and everybody thought she was just some young person who didn't look like the village wisdom (which was one of many things that pissed her off).  Also, I highly doubt anybody had the mental image of an Aboriginal Australian when reading about Egwene in the books, heh.

Moiraine was featured, I think, as jet black hair and blue eyes on the cover of one to the books and therefore became so in my memories.  And being that that is my favorite kind of human female, I am sorta bummed they didn't go there.

I will never have a hissy fit like the incel/nerd kiddos about race issues, but I generally do prefer that characters look how they are described if they ever are explicitly described at all.  That doesn't mean failing to do so makes something bad, and sometimes mixing it up works.  But I am reminded of Fellowship of the Ring when that came out.  Everything and almost everyone looked exactly like I pictured it in my head, and that scored some huge points with me.  These might be cheap points to score, but it works....just makes a stronger and more immediate connection.

Edit:  To add a fair counter-argument:  GoT got Tyrion Lannister waaaaaaay wrong.  But that turned out for the better to be certain.  So who knows.

I am curious about what they do with Mat's ultimate love interest....isn't she like a 4 foot tall pitch black 11 year-old with a bald head or something like that?  That must be a casting challenge.  Wonder what the neckbeards will do say about that one.  

She's the same age as Aviendha according to the WoT wiki.  And yes, this what the general fan art shows of her, though I doubt it would be hard at all to find somebody:

(https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/wot/images/3/39/Tuon_card_teaser_by_reddera-d6hd55j.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160605153911)

More news about how many seasons they're planning for the show. (https://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/amazons-the-wheel-of-time-series-to-be-328-seasons-long/)

Well, I'm in.

I'm not sure we can keep it together as a species long enough for all those seasons to happen but I applaud them for their plans to cover the source material with the thoroughness that it deserves.

I thought the nine moons chick was described as more Asian stereotype looking, and she is pictured on at least one of the book covers. The only “pitch black” people I remember were the people from the other side of the waste and people in the Age of Legends dream sequences.

I always thought that also, but heyo, just looked it up and somebody grabbed several references in the book to how she looks.

“With an oath, he spun on his heel and found himself facing Tuon, her dark face, stern behind the long transparent veil” -Winter’s Heart (page 584 eBook)

“Tuon raised a peremptory hand, a black porcelain doll, but every inch a queen despite the shabby, too large dress” – Crossroads of Twilight (page 761 eBook)

“Tuon’s face was as smooth as a stern mask of dark glass.” – Crossroads of Twilight (page 155 eBook)

There may be even more references out there, but she is supposed to be extremely small, extremely dark-skinned, extremely bald.  Looks like a pre-pubescent even though she might actually be of age.  The whole thing felt a little pervy to me when I read it, honestly.  I expect they will have to take some liberties.

I always thought nynaeve was like just out of college age where the younger fast was just out of high school age at the start.

Yeah, I thought she was just a year or two older than the others.

At one point in the books she actually mentions her age. I don't for the life of me remember the exact number or WHICH book it is in (which means it could be 2-3 years different than another time since the entire story covers like 4-5 years I think).

You guys know there's wikis for everything right? Nynaeve is seven years older than Egwene and four years older than Rand.

And yet Egwene's actress looks 5+ years older than Nynaeve's.

Yes, and we just managed to get you to look it up for us, so mission accomplished  :grin:

That matches my thinking in the books (I think they actually described the age difference?). Egwene was always a few years younger than Rand. Hey, now there is a wiki entry.

I'm tentatively excited for this. I both love and hate this story. It was one of the first adult books I read in like 4th grade and I read it every time a new book came out with my dad. I love it for the characters and growing up with the story.

I hate it because some of the writing in the majority of the later books is utter trash and the story sucked.

Just a small beef from me, but the guy they picked to play Perrin looks absolutely nothing like I would picture Perrin in my head.   The way I picture Perrin in my head, that guy would need to add about half again his own body weight in bulk and muscle to his frame to feel right.  Perrin is supposed to look like the kind of guy who would man handle that kind of guy without breaking a sweat.  Perrin is often described as being almost bear like in build, given that he is both tall and very heavily muscled.

Perrin is a blacksmith so I had the same thoughts. But in Game of Thrones Gendry was a blacksmith and he wasn't a big dude and watching it I didn't think twice about it.

Daniel Henney is al'Lan Mandragoran  (can you see the pic?)


Link to the official tweet:
https://twitter.com/WoTonPrime/status/1169279471712497664

Only in some browsers.

He looks young in that picture, but he's actually 39 so that's about right.

The only time age really matters is if the show turns into a teen high school drama like Shannara kind of did.

Lan's supposed to be twenty or more years older than the Two Rivers gang; this is an important part of his later character development, particularly

For Lan once you get him with a beard he will look older.  He should fit right in.

That pic looks like it has had some airbrishing. The actual guy probably looks a bit older. Anyway, pretty acceptable.

I agree. A little grey in his hair will go a long way as well.

That's actually what I am afraid this will be.  We'll see!

The books are pretty "safe" when it comes to controversial material (at least as far as I've been reading), it is known. Can't find the exact quote, but as it often happens in this cases, for example they aged up the Emond Fields gang because they plan to "show" a bit more. Judkins already hinted at some potential lesbian relationships in the Tower (Aes Sedai-Initiates/Novices), or some more explicit material involving Rand and Elayne (in Tear, for example)

Later books talk about “pillow friends” in the White Tower, so homosexuality is recognized.  I don’t recall any judgment of those relationships.

The last Jordan book goes places with the whole spanking thing, not in tone or judgement but in the way it lingers and describes. I missed it on my first read through, but it's certainly a thing and made me rethink earlier things.

I remember him throwing in little phrases like “a pinch and a tickle” or something like that to describe all of Mat’s favorite things, and always assumed it was a euphemism for....other things.

Also, the entire story is basically about how Rand is basically nailing three hot chicks and given the right circumstances they’d probably all go along for a bit of four-way action.

Like a lot of the "high fantasy" genre of the 80s to early 90s, the sexual stuff is always implied through innuendo. It wasn't until Game of Thrones that you really had a hugely popular series in the genre that was more explicit.

And, frankly, leaving things to the imagination is not necessarily a bad thing. Most fantasy authors would be writing bad letters to Penthouse if they were setting out to put graphic sex scenes on the page.

I remember Anne McCaffrey's sex scenes in the Pern books being like "wow". When you re-read them now, they're like "holy shit this is kind of rapey". And that's a woman writer. If you want real hilarity of a bad kind, re-read Asimov or Clarke etc trying to hint at sex. At least Howard and other pulp writers wrote in pulp terms, in ways that still read as being sort-of sexy if very male.

Most likely they will go tits fantasy as thats what worked in GOT and that's the audience they will aim for. Regardless of whats in the books.

I would prefer that, because then it would probably exclude the possibility of it being an angsty teen drama that plays out more like a commercial for perfume and underwear.  And also because I really like tits.  But wait, which service is even producing this thing?

It's Amazon so if they want tits, they can make it happen. I'm still not sure if I am going to watch this.  I kind of want to but on the other hand, I have a real love/hate relationship with the books and never finished because I wanted to find Jordan and smack him for dragging things out. If the show runners do what early GoT did and cut out extra shit and consolidate characters I think it could work.

I also wonder how Ran having 3 women swooning over him will play out with a modern audience. Even back in the 90s when I was reading these books it made me roll my eyes hard as it sort of came across like the author sticking his harem fantasies in his novels.

Yeah that shit was lame even back then. Specially Elaine and Aviendha.

I thought I read somewhere that they were cutting Rand's harem somehow.

Please.

But it's only the beginning if they want this to be even remotely watchable. The thing with LOTR or GOT is that you wanted to see the people involved use the good stuff in the best way. LOTR Jackson did well by (let's not talk about The Hobbit) and GOT well, B&B did well until they ran out of detailed good stuff from Martin.

With this, if someone isn't in charge of cleansing this out of the copious bad shit in the original material, it's going to blow so bad. They really need to give this a colossal hair cut for it to look even remotely decent.

Yes, they might "consolidate" and "unify" more characters into one.

Like I said, I haven't finished the saga, but examples that come to mind are Min (Elayne might have Min's "special ability" and discover it as we meet her), Gawyn/Galad (we'll probably only see one of them) Juilin/Bayle Domon; also, all those intricacies and variety about Aiel Clans belong to a book, not a series. Various named Aes Sedai...We'll see: Sheriam might get cut, together with others. Of course not having some characters might sound weird on paper, but that's adaptation for you, hopefully in some competent hands.

I think the Forsaken should be left alone, especially if they're not appearing that much (well, some of them at least) and they're considered as a season end boss :P.

There'll be holy hell to pay if they cut the harem!   :why_so_serious:

Though realistically I guess it could be possible to combine Min and Elayne's character together (though honestly in that case I just wish they'd replace Elayne with Min's whole character, and just say she's the princess of Andor also).  Cutting any of the three is going to piss lots of people off since all three of them were pretty major characters.

They can easily combine shit tons of Aes Sedai and other minors, so I'm not actually worried very much about character bloat.  It would be glorious if they recast the Sand Snakes actresses from GoT as Aiel Maidens.   :grin:

Character bloat isn't really a problem early on, it only gets there later as Jordan kept adding new factions with 100+ named members each (Aes Sedai, Seanchan, Seafolk, Aiel, Whitecloaks, etc.). If the first season or two do well, they can start figuring out who to cut/merge.

Regarding the wives, I agree that if they're cutting anyone they should keep Min and just also make her the princess; Elayne was obnoxious. Keeping Aviendha makes sense for an interesting love triangle, plus her character is far more interesting (and shows up later).

Elayne made a certain amount of sense to me when she fell for Rand (rebellious princess falling for exotic bad boy - it's a trope after all) but Min and Aviendha really didn't.  Min's falling for him was an even worse trope than Elayne's (independent female making her own way in man's world falls for the MC) and Aviendha was just.. I don't know.  There never seemed to be a reason other than harem.  Oh, and similar reasons to Min (female warrior must fall for man and turn girly-ish).

Aviendha's arc with him I actually thought was the best.  She is independent and rebellious in her society, as you say (so follows that trope in sense).  She had promised to watch over him to Elayne, who she considered a good friend, and interacted with him on their travels across the waste.  She was probably attracted to him at that time, but kept off because of duty.  Then when they went through the vision gateway she saw that she was fated to be with him, which would make her an oathbreaker to Elayne, which makes her a monster in her own society.  So she gets super pissed and tries to be as big of an asshole to Rand as possible, only to have the wise ones assign her to stay with him at all times to train him on Aiel customs.  This leads to funny moments of her and him together as she is trying to be angry at him, but they keep having goof ball culture clash interactions as they travel for a long time across the waste.  Eventually does fall for him after all these.

I mean, the book might not have handled that in any real deep way in terms of writing, but I always felt it was one of the more natural and organic arcs of the courtships in the series.  Other than this and Nynaeve/Lan (and I guess Perrin's but god I hated his character by half way through) most of the relationships were super fast and forced.  A decent writer can take that scenario I laid out above and easily make it a funny and believable arc for TV over a season.

Though I guess I've only been dating foreigners over the last 8 years, so I might be a bit biased.  The comedy/cute factor of interacting with somebody of a totally different culture, watching how they react differently to things, and daily interactions with them very successfully bumps up a girls attraction to me, heh.

That's where I fall. Min was really the only one I even liked that much. I liked her from the moment she was introduced and that never changed. Though Jordan may have made her into a braid pulling annoyance in the last few books after I gave up. Who knows.

Min always has short hair so no braid pulling.  :why_so_serious:

If the three, Elayne has by far the least depth. But it is not like many of the characters really have much depth to them anyway.

Or they could keep the characters and not have them have a Buffy attraction to the most perfect guy in existance.

Nah.

Elayne's whole character is "Princess in love with Rand." They could more easily cut her than make her not be in love with him. They could leave Min or Aviendha in without the romance angle, but it's a big part of both of their story. What I suspect they'll do is leave them all in, have them all in love with him, and eventually ship him with a single one (after he spends a season or two with each of them in turn). Or get cancelled before it matters.

You can't cut rand's harem but there are a ton of secondary characters scenes and chapters/books you can cut.


Shit you can cut out faille easily. The whole of the seanchan can be cut except for some in the distance news and battles. Rand can fight in the clouds so.ewhere else.

Anyway, first 3-5 books don't need to be trimmed too badly and that gives you three seasons probably. Then if the show is actually good just skip all the other books except a few chapters and skip to sandersons stuff.

Which is basically what I said earlier.  With some decent adaptation work, you can make a fun series for 4-5 seasons out of the first 6 books.  If you just cut out the vast majority of everything that came between book 6 and Sanderson, you could do the whole thing in 7-8 seasons with an actual good plot.  But again, this depends deeply on how good the writers are at adapting and picking the best moments to carve out of shit into a coherent narrative.

Eye of the World through Lord of Chaos is by and large its own story arc so you could theoretically use books 1 -6 as the basis for the whole series. With clever editing and transplanting the meaningfiul stuff from 7 - end in there it would be a goof basis. SO I tend to agree.

Looks like they're almost ready  :drill:

(https://i.imgur.com/ZllGhAs.png)

Seeing them together like that in color, I can totally see Two Rivers as ethnically darker skinned in general and Rand standing out like a sore thumb.  I'm guessing the blond is Moraine?  She and Lan's actor look older enough that it could work.

While Rand is supposed to stand out (so good job there), I think this is them very obviously taking a hard line making fantasy genre stuff open to actors of all races instead of the western European medieval theme its based off (again, pretty sure nobody reading those books originally envisioned Nynaeve as African or Egwene as Australian Aboriginal in appearance).  Which is great, and actually makes total sense within lore, as WoT is a post apocalyptic tale of humanity scattered and degraded across the planet.  I expect they wont adhear much to any of the racial descriptions of the various nations in the book.

At its heart though WoT is a formulaic coming of age book (adolescent sets out on adventure and becomes an adult) where GoT was not, unfortunately it is less of a stretch to angsty teen twilight ripoff than it is to adult melodrama with tits.

Does Robert Jordan's wife have any creative input in this project?

Does cashing a check count as creative input?

That would be creative output.

She's listed as "Consulting Producer" in the IMDB credits: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3146446/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cr8

Rosamund Pike is 40. She was a Bond girl almost 20 years ago.

I don't think you need to worry about her looking old enough to contrast with the tweenagers.

This is largely where I am as well. The fact that I don't revere the books means I'd be fine with it getting the GoT treatment, and this time the series is "finished," so there is little danger of the "where do we go now" problem that GoT fans feel plague the ending seasons.

I'm actually looking forward to this, now that I think about it.

"Where do we go now?" isn't the problem.

"Does this road consist of nothing but off-ramps and back roads that lead to dead ends? Will we ever get to the end?" that's the problem.

First wednesday of the month, that means another official update from the Writers Room!!

This time, it's a nice video sneak peek at the very first "table read" the entire cast did back on September 10th:

https://twitter.com/WoTonPrime/status/1179425813327798273  (you can also watch it on Instagram, look for the "wotonprime" account there).
----

We know the main cast members, of course, but it's everyone's guess about the rest of the fellas in there; some think they spot Michael McElhatton (GOT's Roose Bolton); others think the other one with white hair and glasses might be Thom's actor. Blond girl next to Marcus Rutherford (Perrin) : Elayne maybe? Doubt it, but hey...

One more actor has been revealed on this month's "WoT Wednesday" :

Michael McElhatton (of "Roose Bolton" fame) will play Tam al'Thor:

Finally, there is a rumor (totally unconfirmed of course) circulating about the possibility that, in the adaptation, instead of Thom Merrilin, Tam will actually depart Emond's Field with the rest of the gang; would that imply that our favourite gleeman has been cut? Or they'll simply find him as they travel (keeping all the subplots involving him untouched, bar any needed adaptation for the TV series) ?

I can see them starting off with Tam and sending him home when Thom shows up. Tam has to be around for when big stuff starts happening in Emond's Field.

Thom showed up at the very beginning of the book.  Would be sad if they cut him.  Also, would take away from the feeling of danger and unknown if Tam is well enough to escort his boy out of the village on their journey instead of what happened.

I could see them getting rid of Thom as they are cutting down so much of the story.  But it would be sad as he adds a lot of color.

Making Tam a major character is a big shift in tone from the books.  It was young people getting thrown into a much larger and complex world.  Tam providing guidance changes all that.

Maybe he's the new Sean Bean

I think I'm going to re-read the first book to see if I still like it, since the series became so awful after Book 5 or so.

First book is still pretty decent. Mostly tightly held together.

I am re-reading through the whole thing again and am up to book 7 I think. I am able to ignore a lot of the stuff because it is just annoying fluff between some decently interesting bits of story and I read fast. It is very much a S. Morgenstern-esque tale of high adventure after a few books. Hopefully the TV show will be the "Good Parts version." Too bad Goldman isn't around to adapt it  :why_so_serious:

Regarding Tam, yes, he might offer some more guidance earlier on, but he also might be the one that fights the Fade outside Whitebridge; Rand believes him dead, blames Moiraine for everything (supported by our favourite braid-tugger, of course :D). Then we find out that somehow he survived and gets back to Emond's Field 'til Perrin arrives; plot is somehow restored to the book version. Remember that he and Mat's father also dare to go to Tar Valon to find out where their boys are :P

Thom joins the gang between Whitebridge and Caemlyn, or perhaps even later on in Cairhien. Actually, Cairhien makes more sense if they were to deviate the plot that much: he's just not that welcomed in Caemlyn, no matters how bad he wants to keep an eye on Elayne and Morgase, and also he inevitably likes to get involved in Daes Dae'mar (ugh, can't wait for whole episodes with people all talking like GoT's Littlefinger :P)

It blows my mind how much of this shit you guys even remember.

I read the series up until the "Patch of Badgers" or some such book, and all I remember is endless tugging of braids.

I reread the series probably 8 times when I was younger. Every other time a new book came out I probably reread everything. Until maybe the last 4-5 books which I never read until it was all finished. I'm 39 and I read Eye of the World when I was in 5th grade I think?

Same here. I started EotW in 5th grade as well, and read up through Book 7, then reread them all twice when books 8 and 9 came out. After that I put them down until Sanderson finished them, then reread them again (but skipped book 8 because it was awful).

I don't remember all that much; I do remember quitting in disgust, which was the first time I think I'd bailed out on a fantasy series that I'd become invested in. Hell, I made it through the Shannara books.

Heh, I have read all of it (once) except for the very last book.  I did not read it out of some kind of protest, I think because his widow thought charging 40 bucks for an ebook was a good idea.

I believe I read the 1st 7 or 8 and then just couldn't fathom reading anymore in the series. It's been years so my memories are a bit foggy as I started the series way in late 90s when I ran a website devoted to Age of Empires Deathmatch mode & a poster there highly recommended the series as the greatest books ever.

#MeToo, including making it through the Shannara books.

Not knocking anybody else's reading interests at all, but it is interesting just how varied one's threshold of entertainment can be.

But as I said, the fact that I did not care much for the whole series means I'm a good target for the show. I liked the idea and world building, but I sure as heck don't care if they want to jazz up the presentation a bit, and even fix a load of the plot development.

I quit then came back when they got an actual ending from a writer i like. The middle books were a total slug, but knowing there was an end in sight instead of another multi year wait helped.

The WoT Wiki (https://wot.fandom.com) is pretty good.  If you search for a character's name you can get a history of what they did in the story.

I read all of the Shannarah books that were out when I got into them (the first two series IIRC) but never went back for more. The series I quit in disgust was Sword of Truth. The first few books were pretty interesting, but once I realized he was just beating us over the head with his ideology and fetishes I put them down and never went back.

You're all Darkfriends, obviously.

At the time of the Shannara books I was in college and was a huge LOTR fanboy. I got about half way through Sword of Shannara before I stopped reading in disgust at how derivative and childish it was compared to LOTR. I've been thinking about giving it another shot. I was a horrible fantasy snob back then and maybe I didn't give it a fair chance.
I made it all the way through WoT although it was an incredible relief when Sanderson took over the series.

And what the shit on the 200 page jaunt into BDSM around the 2/3 mark on that SoT book. I couldn’t take that series seriously after that. The guy was working through something in his life, for sure.

I've read the whole Sword of Truth series and watched the character get ever more powerful and ever more obnoxiously libertarian until at the end he was undisputed god emperor of the world. People had to swear fealty to him or they'd literally be eaten by monsters. :)

The dude has real issues.

I made it most (all?) of the way through SoT, and generally liked it, because the dude has writing talent and I was able to tune out the obvious political shit.  But that said, the dude’s fascination with things like torture and sexual assault were a bit too far beyond the pale.  Bit of a shame he couldn’t figure out how to cut out all the crap.

Shannarah was fine for the first few, but it even started to get derivative of itself in some strange way.  Ultimately pretty un-memerable.  I don’t think I can name one character off the top of my head.

This. Every single book eventually became Druid wakes up, puts together a crew to find the mcguffin, several of them die but they succeed, big battle in the end. They were still entertaining books, but that was the plot of every single one.

Which I guess was the point, but it didn’t manage to stay interesting beyond the first two or three.

I think what you consider writing talent and what I do are very far apart.

The sheer amount of ridiculous logical inconsistencies in the Goodkind books is nearly as bad as his Ayn Rand fetish. The events of the first 4 books somehow take place in the span of something like a year. Yet the characters somehow WALK across the entire world, engage in battles with "hundreds of thousands" of troops on each side. Rest for a few weeks here and there to be BDSM tortured or turned into a lizard man or whatever.

When you look at his picture on a bookjacket you can FEEL the "this guy is a colossal prick" just oozing off the page.

Undoubtedly, my tastes diverge from most people in that I tend to prefer character driven stories in books.  I usually put that above plot.

Why do you think he's named Richard? :grin:

I read most of SoT, I don't remember where I stopped.

I'm re-reading the Lightbringer series. Really good book and the last book just came out. I read these over a year ago.

Only fantasy series* I ever bailed on was Erikson's Malazan stuff. I just got tired of meeting an entirely new cast of characters every fucking book to the point that I quit caring if or how they would end up together. Pity, since there definitely was some cool stuff along the way.


* I read a couple of Drizz't books in my youth before I realized that Salvatore was perhaps the worst best selling author to ever set pen to paper.

Man those Malazan books were rough; I struggled through the first one and just when I was getting a handle on the world/characters/etc., Book 2 changed everything up and I said fuck it.

I gave up on them after four or five books, for probably the same reasons.  I also seem to remember it being needlessly pretentious in the prose, but that is more a matter of taste.

I will admit I quite liked Salvatore's stuff, if for no other reason than that guy can write a swordfight like nobody else can, and I am a sucker for that sort of thing.

Except the new cast of characters thing each book ended up with all the characters being brought together or interacting in some way.  Malazan books were fantastic and I'm thinking of using some work award to get a big enough B&N gift card so I can buy the ebook versions of them all.  I love the series but my physical copies are so mismatched (hardback, trade paperback, mass market paperback) and the books are so damn thick that it gets hard to read after a while.  I'm more than willing to drop $90+ on a full set of 10 books.  Want to finish picking up the Esslemont Malazan books, too. 

I also have a bunch of the Drizz't books and while they aren't high art literature, they are enjoyable to read and I don't come away feeling like my time was wasted, so that's a plus.  I also will not confirm or deny that my SB elf was a darkskinned bladedancer, either.  :grin:

I read like 6? 8? of the Malazan books when I just gave up. It got tiring. One day I might try again.

I think I read 2, there is a density to certain writing styles that I just can't handle in the I am exhausted reading them way.  I have such a low bar for what relaxes or amuses me that I think I have read the WoT 3 or 4 times (first book 8 or 9), this is basically my alternative to freecell/mindsweeper zombie mode escapism.  I don't read because I want to think deep and provoking thoughts I read to unwind, fuck I think I have read Bill the Galactic Hero 4 or 5 times and it doesn't get more low brow than that.  As far as the braid tugging type of crap I just skim past it. 

That's me as well.  And "density" is a good word to describe it.  I used "prententious", but I think your word is more accurate.

Funny, I started re-reading the first Malazan book last week on a lark.  It's interesting re-visiting the beginning, knowing how powerful everyone is by the end of the series.

I started using density after taking over 2 weeks to read Heart of Darkness, which at 144 pages  might be one of the the greatest books ever written on a page for page basis, I could barely finish it.  I gained a deeper appreciation for Hemingway after this ;)

This. Malazan is my favorite book series. Epic is the best word to describe them.

I read all the Malazan books. I remember him being obsessed with the word susurration, having never heard it before in my life. That's about the only thing I recall from that slog of books. That and Fiddler.

Is it time to mention the Black Company?  I feel like it is time.

What do Honeycrisps have anything to do with it?

A book that was obsessed with the word "menhir".

*tugs braid and sniffs*

BACK ON TOPIC!!! Here's the latest from Randland, courtesy of "Weekly Wheel News" (https://twitter.com/weeklywheelnews)  :drill: :drill: 

(you all deserved this)

(https://i.imgur.com/aBvOHTP.jpg)


Walk in the Light.

Ok that Gaendal line got me.

One month went by already? Geez....

But that means MOAR casting news!

Let's go:

1) Meet LOGAIN (Alvaro Morte; pictured the character completely different. Oh well)

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2) And what about our favourite resident Ogier, LOIAL SON of ARENDT? (Hammed Animashaun; big ears not included...yet):

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3) Like every year, again a peddler arrives in Emond's Field for Bel Tine festival, bringing goods and news from the outside world. His name is PADAN FAIN (Johann Myers) :



And this is it!





No, wait, looks like it's going to be a good festival with a gleeman amongst the visitors! THOM MERRILIN, ladies and gents! (Alexandre Willaume: umm, yeah, I'll wait for some intense moustache pulling by Elayne before judging :D)

Thom looks way too young, by more than a decade; he's only six years older than Rosamund Pike when he should be at least twenty. Logain looks pretty close to how I imagined him; Padan Fain too.

Dye his hair gray and he will look just fine.  I actually thought he was older than he was in that photo.

Logain looks very close to how my mental picture was.

Padan Fain:  Something Something make the black guy the evil villain something.    :awesome_for_real:

Honestly, having a blonde lady (Pike) who is not short playing someone who is described in detail as being short and having dark hair is the most glaring casting issue I see :P

I've often wondered if unionized actors (like part of SAG) were doing Netflix (and other streaming services like Amazon) given until recently they didn't have any agreements and arguably didn't fall under the normal 'TV and film' clauses.

I wonder if that played a part in the casting process?

It's Xmas, so it's a good time for a threesome, especially when the Green Ajah is involved.

Aes Sedai Alanna Mosvanni has been cast along with her two Warders, Ihvon and Maksim (Owein in the books):
https://deadline.com/2019/12/the-wheel-of-time-cast-series-fantasy-books-priyanka-bose-taylor-napier-emmanuel-imani-1202816315/

(https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/priyanka-bose-taylor-napier-emmanuel-imani.jpg)

From left to right: Priyanka Bose, Taylor Napier (Maksim) and Emmanuel Imani (Ihvon)

That's not a great picture of Priyanka, but further googling tells me she'll be good as Alanna. She's not actually in EotW, which tells me the first season is going to include at least some elements of tGH. Wonder why the renamed Owein.

They will definitely include some elements from TGH, but from previous reports it looks like they'll show Logain's capture and subsequent gentling as well. As you might remember, all of that happens in book 1 (but it's kept "off screen" by RJ).

Ahh true, I forgot about that. I'm assuming they'll introduce most of the Aes Sedai during those scenes then, if they aren't going past EotW.

Well if you want mi opinion on it, The first book is a childish LOTR ripoff, you are right about that. "The Elfstones of Shannara" was decent enough even though Brooks obsession with the "oh is it wrong to masturbate use magic" moral question got a bit tiresome, especially when they had demons chasing their asses. But there is some great action and Battle scenes in there, so all in all I think its a good book. A LOT better and more grown up than than "Sword. Great ending too.

I think the third book, "Wishsong of Shannara," is excellent. Kinda of a dark, edgy story that's a well rounded self contained tale. Kinda helps when Brooks was allowing major characters to die, so he had his grown up face on for that one.

The 4 books ("the Heritage of Shannara" series) after were a self contained tale. I've only read the last 2 of the books but I enjoyed them. They are not quite as good as Wishsong for me, but it's a enough  decent story. Brooks had his obsession with moral dilemma magic back on after letting it slide with "Wishsong" though.

So if you want to read the best of the Shannarra books then I highly recommend at least reading "Wishsong." And I just looked at the wikipedia article on the Shannara books as I couldn't remember the titles and BOY Brooks has wrong out the Shannara world for all its worth since I stopped paying attention.

Alright. I'll just read a synopsis of "Sword" and move onto the rest then.

Some members of the cast recently shared a pic of themselves on social media(s) with a copy of the current "table read" of the script for episode 6 (called "The Flame of Tar Valon").

For example, Madeleine Madden (Egwene):


Anyway, thanks to this little, intentional "leak", we know that Kate Fleetwood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Fleetwood) will play a beloved and likeable character: LIANDRIN SEDAI   :drill: :grin: :grin:

(https://i.imgur.com/0XBkNZ5.png)

Still no news about either Min or the "blondest blonde girl who was ever blonde" aka Elayne  :grin:

Anyone know who they are hiring as Braid Weaver?  :why_so_serious:

There's another character who doesn't appear until Book 2. The actress is a good deal older than Liandrin (47 IRL, Liandrin should be around 33 at the beginning of the series) and has both the wrong eye and hair color.

They obviously are planning on using a lot of wigs or they don’t give a shit about the book description of hair color since they cast Rosamund Pike as Moiraine.

Right now, the most common theory is that the first season will include storylines/characters/events from book 2, although it's not granted that the end of S1 will coincide with the last fight of Book 2.

Yes, episode 6 is called "The Flame of Tar Valon", which is also the title of the first chapter in book 2 and the one that introduces The Amyrlin Seat, but given the visual nature of the TV show, it might simply mean that we get to know Siuan Sanche through a flashback much earlier on (tidbits from the "New Spring" prequel so we get the backstory of both Moiraine and the Amyrlin?), together with the general dynamics of the White Tower.
---------

Anyway, MOAR cast members posted a picture with the script (mainly through IG, but also Twitter), but haven't announced who they're playing.

Here's a picture:
(https://i.imgur.com/NJ6b2rj.jpg)

McCormack - Gawyn?
Cheon Garcia - Anaiya or Leane? (she put a blue square nearby the "AesSedai" hashtag on IG)
Maria Doyle Kennedy - Now that's the look of a Siuan Sanche  :grin:

The way this casting has been going, I expect Jennifer Cheon Garcia to be playing Verin.

Aaand one more, Peter Franzén (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0291918/) (undisclosed role)

(https://i.imgur.com/9WXC0sV.jpg)

Hmm, I agree with Rendakor, he will probably play Lanfear.  Other, less likely choices: Ingtar, Child Byar, Gareth Byrne, Elyas Machera (with appropriate makeup).

This is a pretty large cast for the beginning of the story. For this show to not be utter garbage you need to slowly build the show and expand to the giant unnecessary cast of characters Jordan put in there.

I thought the first book was pretty good. It's your typical first book of a hero's journey. Backwater start, a journey, explore the world and it's history through the eyes of an ignorant bumpkin. Expand the book's horizons as the main characters learn more.

By expanding it too quickly, you'll have a problem I think of confusing the audience.

That's the route I thought they would take, but instead they're apparently making Moiraine the MC and introducing a million characters early on.

Seems like a bad idea.  This is going to suck, is my guess.

Yeah this is most definitely going to suck. Should be fun to watch burn.

They are going the GoT route and just dumping you into the world.  I agree it is a bad way to go.

You know, I would have been pretty confident if this was in the hands of HBO and some of their usual writers/showrunners. Here we have a case similar to the Witcher's one (first time as executive producer and main showrunner), but with a much, MUCH bigger cast at hand.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1988994/ (showrunner imdb profile)
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Also, there are rumors of the first season being just 8 episodes, and depending on the writing and how they want to structure the story, it might be a too low of a number.

I think some "groups" will only get a passing mention, like the Tinkers ("Tuatha'an") or even the Whitecloaks, no matter the fact they're quite important right from the beginning for the Perrin's storyline.

Still, they would need to get quite in-depth (they have to offer the audience a clear overview of these, at least) with:

1) Our merry fellowship that depart Emond's Field
2) The White Tower (even a bit of their internal dynamics, although not so much for S1)
3) The baddies (Dark One but the Forsaken as well, even if they're going to trickle them one by one).

With this in mind, it makes sense they already have a big cast, doesn't it? I think it will be more of HOW they're going to present them while spacing them so they don't create too much confusion.

Especially since the majority of 2nd tier characters aren't very interesting at all. And depending on the book, some of the Tier 1 guys aren't either.

I'm looking at you Perrin/Faile stories.

You really don't need to do the White Tower at all in S1. The only Aes Sedai that matters that early is Moiraine, and you can just have her giving bits of lore here and there about it. The decision to show Logain's gentling seems to be the worst one they've made, since it's going to add a whole bunch of characters for something that doesn't really matter much early.

They only encounter what, 3 forsaken in book 1? Ishamael in Rand's dreams, plus the two mooks who get killed at tEotW; Ishamael is important, but the latter two aren't so they can just be nobodies because they'll be in one scene then never heard from again. Beyond that you just need Padan Fain and some CGI monsters to cover the rest of the early villains.

Perrin and Egwene's sidestory en route to Caemlyn is the biggest character bloat; Elyas, the tinkers, the Whitecloaks, etc. The tinkers don't really matter for a long time, but the Elyas/wolves/Whitecloak dynamic is basically all of Perrin's character (aside from his awful wife) so cutting any of that leaves him rudderless.

I'd probably cut all of the Shienar stuff from book 1, too; I'd bring them out of The Ways outside Shienar and just show it in the distance with the CGI trollocs approaching. Rand can still save the day, and they can introduce the Shienarians in S2 when some of them start to matter.

They would be smart to really keep the scope of the whole story hidden until season 2. You want to pull an audience in with a simple story about a kid getting caught up in saving the world. You need to tell the story of Random from Two Rivers and him "defeating the dark one" in season 1. Cut a few wandering split ups of characters, make it 10 episodes.

Then if the show is well done and popular? Then you start bringing in everything else.

You need to basically do what A New Hope did.

Confirmed: Jennifer Garcia Cheon Warn will play Aes Sedai Leane Sharif, of the Blue Ajah (NSFW?):


I approve  :drill: :drill:

Speculation: she hasn't mentioned the most common "title" that goes along with Leane in the earlier books. Perhaps another confirmation that the show might cover  some of the material in the "New Spring" prequel novel.

So, a trailer for this has dropped.  Currently unimpressed.

Also:        
https://gizmodo.com/adapting-the-wheel-of-time-for-tv-is-an-epic-all-its-ow-1848026456

YIKES.

Like, what the everliving fuck.   This isn't a "small" change to the story.  This is literally changing a bedrock core element of the ENTIRE nature of the way the entire cosmology of his universe runs.   The dragon is male.  Period.  In every life, in every incarnation, in every turning of the wheel, the dragon is male.    The whole yin/yang male/female play and counterplay off eachother is 100% integral to the way the fabric of literally EVERYTHING in Wheel works.  If you throw that out, it pretty much alters the fundamental nature of the way everything works.   Gender is SUPER fucking important in the series right down to the literal way the fabric of the universe operates.  Throwing that out the window would be like tossing the force out of starwars and making Jedi and Sith psychic mutants or something.....

And then there's:
https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/wheel-of-time-new-worlds-every-few-episodes-1235108671/


The more I hear about this, the more I get the feeling that this is basically going to be "lets milk the NAME for all it's worth" and the result is going to be only loosely recognizable as the property it is based on.

Like, pissing off basically the ENTIRE fanbase of the books in some kind of misguided effort to attract a wider audience seems like a really fucking dumb idea, considering that the Fanbase is probably going to be the people driving most of the attention towards this product.

That's a bummer.  Sometimes politics can ruin this kind of stuff.  At least it's not going to be as bad as World War Z

Yikes. This is the last series of books you want to try to shoehorn gender politics in to. They whole damn series is divided between male and female relationships even beyond the stuff SurfD brought up. Woman's Circles vs. Men's Circle in Emmonds Field. Male and Female relationships like Rand loving three woman and the three woman being ok with that.

I mean the Aiel?

This was a long shot to be good in the first place, but it will most assuredly fail. It'll be Star Wars Sequels all over again where the execs/showrunners piss all over the fan base and have it blow up in their faces.

It'll be interesting to see it all blow up in their faces.

They should have gotten Sanderson to be the showrunner. There's a reason why he was chosen to finish the last 3 books.

I can imagine the meetings they had with Amazon execs.  "This dragon reborn character.  They seem to be important.  Does it have to be a man?  Why can't it be a women.  We can cast Jennifer Lawrence in the role!"

You can do a better job of imagining and describing gender than Jordan did--I have no beef with showrunners who want to drop the braid-tugging and other more consequentially bad envisionings of women in the books. But yeah, you don't want to drop the fundamental idea that women and men have access to different power and that the Dragon Reborn is a problem for gendered reasons.

I can see some room in WoT for some forms of gender fluidity, mind you, and there are if I remember right some Aes Sedai who are lesbians, so there's room for that too--WoT doesn't require everybody to be conventionally heterosexual or to embody a single version of being a woman or a man. But it would be idiotic to say "the Dragon Reborn could be a woman, has been a woman"--that just makes that character a conventional "prophesied hero" and pretty much blasts the entire underlying idea of the universe Jordan built out the showrunners' ass.

What I wouldn't mind seeing redone, frankly, is the Dark One. The Forsaken are actually vivid antagonists: they've got personalities, they've got hang-ups and obsessions of their own, they've got rivalries, they've got motivations. The Dark One is a fucking boring Morgoth/Satan clone who raises all the usual questions about why such a being exists, and who has no meaningful motivations. For once, I'd like the kinky, power-hungry, angry, weird servants of a Lord of All Evil to actually be able to explain why a universe ruled by the Lord of All Evil is a desirable outcome and have that Ultimate Bad Guy [tm] make some degree of coherent sense. Or if the Dark One really is just Generic Evil, make him a complete abstraction: an energy field, an essence, not a literal animate being with thoughts.

To be fair, this is somewhat addressed in the books, as I recall.  If the Dark One wins, he remakes all of reality in his image.  That includes whatever reality his Chosen Ones want.  Several of them describe the world they want to create when he wins (Asmodean I remember off hand wanting a world of endless music or something, but I know there were others who also brought it up).  Ishamael just wanted to break all of reality so he'd stop being reborn because he's tired of this shit.  And the way they describe the use of the True Power and interactions with the Dark One, it really is actually just a (sentient) super powerful energy field.  But I'll agree it would have been nice to explore that more in terms of what you are saying, instead of just leaving it at Generic Evil because RJ blew up the narrative into tiny bits.

As for what was written above... lol.  I understand things need to be adapted between book and film (and that goes triple in Wheel of Times case), and older books maybe need some things whitewashed over that are no longer ok in current society.  But Jesus Christ, that ignores a fundamental part of the entire story.  If you can't handle a story who's entire lore, physics, and world is built on a hard line divide between genders, then either leave the project or cancel the project.  There is no 'adapting' that.

Yea, this is really stupid. Defined gender roles are very important within WoT, and the story even includes a few subversions of them already. Rewriting the Dragon as "sometimes female" is fucking awful, and makes me wonder if they're going to change it from being Rand. :uhrr:

One of the other trailers had me thinking that it could just as well be any one of them, no reason to think it should be Rand.

Seriously, this whole series could as well be called Wheel of Time: Boy Magic vs Girl Magic.  Like, the whole fucking thing is about how they both compete with and compliment each other.  Changing any of that is telling a different story.

This.

I didn't have high hopes for this in the first place, and the trailers haven't really made me think it'll be any better. I've been somewhat skeptical of the seeming shift to making the Aes Sedai the main vehicle for the story that the last trailer hinted at, but this is just an entirely different story. The whole goddamn story is rife with gender politics and the consequences of male magic and female magic, and what those different forms of magic do to the wielder. Those effects are why the Dragon being exclusively male is such an integral part of the story. Granted, its gender roles are EXTREMELY "old-fashioned" which one would expect from the author, but goddamn, it really is something the entire fucking story is built around.

You might as well have had Peter Jackson saying "These hobbits are actually giant-sized and they know kung-fu."

They could really do this universe as "honestly a better more utopian world is possible; the only way to get there is to trust that Rand won't be corrupted, everything you don't like about our world as it stands is because the Dark Lord is still around, and Rand's your only bet for ending that status quo."

Rather than Gandalf laughing briefly over Frodo's bed and saying a great evil has departed the world but saying also in the most Catholic way sorry hobbits and humans you're fucked, evil will be back, not your problem but somebody in the future's problem.

It would be really radical if WoT was like "if you guys win, seriously, the world is forever a better place and kind of what the spirit that made it had in mind. If you lose it's crack whores and Donald Trump 24/7, sorry."

The story told through Morraine is probably a good way to do it. You get a little more exposition maybe and some additional detail. You also could probably limit a shit ton of side stories that don't make a difference.

Didn't some of the forsaken get born into different gender bodies? I feel like that happened but maybe the wielded the power from the true source or something.

I can't remember.

If I remember it correctly, the Forsaken do gender-swap sometimes but they continue to channel their originally assigned side of the One Power.

One of them was stuck in a woman's body but used the "male power". And it wasn't a "they just did what they wanted" kind of thing. It was described very much as a one-off gambit in the books and not by the choice of the one who was "reborn" that way.

Even the best showrunner for this property would have to edit out an asston of the books--not just the bloated prose but also just the endless series of additional elements in the world-building. Even before I just gave up because of the bloat, I found it nearly impossible to keep track of all the characters, the different peoples and kingdoms and histories, and so on.

It's really got to stay tight on the initial group for a long time. If I were going to fiddle with the whole thing as a showrunner, I might keep them together for much, much longer than in the books. I might also just pare off three or four of the Forsaken.

Also helps that he was an elite servant of a dark lord that has some power over death and resurrection.  Messing with the Wheel is sort of his whole thing.

It was literally just the case where it was revealed that when a Forsaken is killed (except with Balefire) the Dark One could bring them back because even death would not stop them from serving him.  One of them was jammed in a woman's body, and told that's all they had lying around and he shouldn't bitch about it or he'd be tortured for eternity instead.  None of the Forsaken had ever been killed up until before the books start, so this was a surprise to them all as well.  It was also an annoying surprise to the fans, as Robert Jordan found yet another way to keep from killing off any of his thousand characters, even ones he had actually killed off.

But it just reinforced the fact that 'souls' in this universe are hard gendered.  Even though that one guy was jammed in a woman's body, he could still only channel the male half of the one power (which he used to his advantage for infiltration).  Every version of 'the dragon' is the same male power wielding soul.  

I think it was the "except for balefire" part that I found hilarious. "The all-powerful spirit of evil in the universe can raise his servants from death UNLESS you've levelled up enough to use [cue the heavy metal theme] balefire!!!!"

Balefire erases people from existence, and can even undo recent things they've done if you're strong enough. Rand used it to bring someone back who had just died, by balefiring the guy who killed them.

Eh, I thought the concept was handled well.  It was basically a nuke.  They brought up how during the war of power, back in the age of legends, that weave was discovered and everybody went hog wild leveling everything.  However they quickly realized that using it too much (which burned peoples threads/souls out of the great weave, and with enough power, even undid things they had done previously) caused terrible temporal backlashes, and could eventually cause of all reality to collapse.  Which was why even in the worst war between dark and light, both sides just agreed they where not going to use that shit (I guess you could say this is sort of similar the the Nazi's and Allies both agreeing not to use chemical weapons against each other even though they both had developed devastating forms of it).  This continued on even with the Forsaken coming back thousands of years later, who instinctively didn't use such a dangerous weave.  Which our great child of light hero blatantly ignored as soon as he discovered it, much to the horror of the evil guys who freaked out that he dared use it.

If I'm going to read the books again, do I start with New Spring?  It looks like a prequel

This show has so many strikes against it well before you get into any of the gender politics stuff. It's an adaptation of an overlong fantasy series that meanders for several books being done by a company that rarely gets more than a couple seasons out of shows that likely cost way less to produce (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_Prime_Video_original_programming). They've already had to recast one of the main roles for season two, the trailers look just about SyFy channel quality, Rosamund Pike is the closest thing to a big name actor here (and if not for Gone Girl her biggest claim to fame would still be co-starring in worst James Bond movie), and trying to jump on the GoT bandwagon probably made a lot more sense before that series faceplanted on the dismount. "But the Dragon can't be female!" is the absolute least of the reasons this show is going to absolutely tank. This thing is doomed to join the dustbin with Legend of the Seeker, and The Shannara Chronicles.

Nice list.  Gary Busey: Pet Judge probably deserved a second season.

New Spring is fine whatever order you read it in. Its significance seems wholly derived from the books that came after it chronologically (in story, not publishing order).

This show will probably suck. The regendering of certain aspects is stupid and belies the fact that whoever's running this show is fucking clueless. If the Aiel aren't a bunch of gingers....

That was basically the Dark One intentionally warping the pattern to basically punish the two individuals in question for their failure + as a tactical gambit because it was something that LITERALLY nobody would see coming, because the very idea of it being possible runs inherently counter to literally the fabric of their universe.

It wasn't just "recent" things.  That was the problem.  It straight up burned their thread out of the "weave" of the fabric of reality, and the longer you targeted them, the farther back in time it burned them out.    Use too much of it on too many people at once, and you risk the fabric of reality unraveling.

It is a prequel. I never read it, because I don't particularly like Moiraine.

She is actually kinda just the character that everyone does stuff/has their character develop around in the book. It isn't that bad and is blessedly short. That being said, it is the only book in the entire series I have never re-read.

It gives some useful background on Lan and the past friendships alluded to between certain Aes Sedai in the main books.

It's a prequel written well after fact of the main story.  I'd say you should read the first 3 books or so, then read New Spring.  I don't think it will hurt anything reading it first, but I feel this way is a better path.

I think we are probably all on the same page on low expectations here.  However, it's a major fantasy series that a lot of our generation (and apparently F13) read in our youths, being giving the GoT chance, so pretty much all of us can't help but watch.  Even if all the signs in the world point to failure.    Or in other words, you're going to have to live with the fact a big hunk of what's left of the F13 community is going to be talking about what happened on Wheel of Time for the next year or two, no matter how bad.  And god help you, if they actually do it right, for the next decade.

The Eye of the World is a genuinely good read, if in a recognizable genre way. That's part of the problem, it hooks you onto "and then what happened" and before you know it you're trying to keep track of a cast of thousands and unbelievably baroque world-building and a whole ton of braid-tugging.

First two and a half books were decent. Then it went to shit.

I think it's probably safe to say that if you had any interest in "Fantasy" as a literary genre over the last 25 years, you have probably read at least one WoT book.   Maybe the first 3.

If you actually got "invested" in it, chances are you have read the first 4-6 books at least 4 or 5 times each over the years depending on when exactly you got into the series.

I mean, for me, I found it in my first year of highschool in the highschool library in the 90s, when the first 3 books were out.  Spent the next 10 years or so avidly waiting for the next book to publish, usually re-reading the entire series from start to finish half the time just to refresh myself if the gap between books was long enough.

I remember really quite loving it to The Dragon Reborn (Book 3) and thinking ok, this is still good until The Fires of Heaven (Book 5). At The Path of Daggers (Book 8) I was so irritated that I threw the book in the garbage, literally, and quit out.

Think that was where I noped out as well. I was already annoyed that after finally getting the Aes Sedai out of the way, he puts them right back in. When it turned out that Mazrim Taim was somehow not dead, I put it down and never went back. Jordan couldn't leave a plot thread tied.

--Dave

Path of Daggers is the one where I gave up as well. I finished it, but it felt like nothing happened the whole book so I was just done. I didn't go back to the series until Sanderson had finished it.

That's essentially what I did.

I powered through everything until the very last book.  Jordan's widow gave the middle finger to ebook pricing and wanted 45 bucks, so I gave the finger right back.  I still have no idea how it ends.  MAYBE I SHOULD RE-READ EVERYTHING.

That one is what did it for me as well. The 70+ page prologue chapter, of absolutely nothing getting done, was the last straw. I don't remember exactly when I came back to it, but I'm glad it finally got back on track. The ending wasn't super shit either.

7-10 are a rough stretch and can probably be condensed down to a single season. They can also pair things waaaaay back. 90% of Perin's stuff doesn't need to make it to screen. Same with most of Matt's.

I kind of hope they do something interested with The Ways....it was built up in the books as something that would play an important role in the mythology (I always thought it must be corrupted by the taint on Saidin, and would have recovered after Saidin was cleansed), but then it just disappeared from the books and was never mentioned again.

My theory back then was that the Ways were somehow connected to the Finns' realm, which also really didn't get developed much despite being a thing on the periphery of the whole series.

Mat, Perrin, and Egwene can all be shrunk to relatively minor characters. Nynaeve and Egwene could probably consolidated into a single character, actually--four friends (Egwene/Nynaeve, Perrin, Mat, Rand). Consolidate their potential romantic links. Simplify Perrin's werewolf whatever it is. Make Mat some kind of "I am a warrior". Nynaeve/Egwene are our entry point to the Aes Sedai and the way we understand the internal politics so Moiraine and Lan retain their mystery/distance.

Thom in the first book is important as a viewpoint character that makes us mistrust or worry about the Aes Sedai's hidden agenda. Keep him.

Dump 90% of the other characters. Keep the Forsaken: they're kinky, they have personal agendas, they've got personalities.

I don't think you can combine Nynaeve and Egwene, or any of the original Two Rivers characters.

Been ages since I read WOT, but:

- Rand is angsty and not fun for a good portion of series.  He is slowly going insane, and also keeps stepping up to the line of doing actual morally horrific stuff.  You need to have a break from him and leaven the show.  Mat gives you humor and Perrin gives you heart. 
- Nynaeve offsets Rand as being this super powerful source wielder who also isn't at all interested in him romantically and isn't afraid to voice her opinion.  If you roll together her and Egwene your sole female main character remaining from the books is also the romantic lead for the main male character (because they are going to cut down whatever the three women/Rand stuff, I'd imagine...  even if society doesn't mind a weird poly relationship, there is no way they do a messianic guy with three wives and not accidentally back into some really awful sexism).
- Moiraine has to die.  I mean, they could keep her around...  but some of the best parts of the books is Jordan killing her off and the characters dealing with everything that comes after.  If you don't kill her, you have to jettison and rewrite huge sections of the book to account for the wise teacher archetype still being there.  Rosamund Pike probably doesn't want to stick around either.... she has a full plate. 

Moiraine doesn't die in the books, though?

I mean, she comic book "dies" by jumping through the portal in book 5 or something but it is kind of hinted that she might still be alive/come back and I quit the series before I found out the resolution.  She is out of the books between 5 and (just checked) book 13, the second to last book?  This kickstarts a bunch of the character growth and whatnot from the other characters as Moiraine isn't there being mysterious and seeming to have a plan.

You can have morraine come back sooner by just deleting 3-4 books and shorten that gap.

Pretty sure you can delete Perrin's Whitecloak storyline among many others.

There's a bunch of dud storylines in there for sure...  alot of non-storylines too.  Too many POVs stuck in too many disparate locations, you had to have some characters in a holding pattern until they meet up again...  the great two or three book chase for Perrin's wife killed most of my interest in the series, and then Jordon wrote the prequel and I was out.  I respect the fact that he bit the bullet and wrote the books needed to get everyone back together and prepped for the series end, but they were not interesting reading.

I think narratively you need to sideline Moirraine for a while for the story to work. 

Yeah, true enough. You get a bit of that with them getting split up in the middle of Eye of the World, but if they're going to go more than a season or so, they'll have to take her out of the action for good or for a while in order to get the characters making decisions.

I'm just kind of realizing now that I have to remember the books that there wasn't any character that I actually really, really liked in the books. Moiraine and Lan seemed kind of cool if rather familiar, I guess. Thom was ok.

So what's the problem with a male-gendered soul born into a female-sexed body?  (I haven't read any of the books and am trying to understand the freakout.)

Because this does not happen "naturally".  Period.

The entire background cosmology of Wheel is built around a very firm eastern-ish style Yin/Yang mythology of Male Vs Female balance/counterbalance/conflict/harmony attached to a repeating millennia long cyclical battle between good and evil.   If your soul distinguishes itself during a cycle, you may end up "fixed" to the cycle: Destined to be reborn again and again as the cycle repeats.  But you are ALWAYS reborn as some similar yet slightly different version of the original you.    King Arthur would always be reborn as some young nobody who rises to power to eventually become a king or lord for example.   If you are male, you are ALWAYS reborn male.  Arthur would ALWAYS be reborn as some version of the "legend of the boy who found the magic sword and rose to rule/lead".  It's just the way it is.   In the books, there is a Female Archer who is famous because her legend is ALWAYS about her being a FEMALE archer with specific character traits that re-appears through legends.    

It's also important because of the way "magic" works:  Men and Women tap into different sides of the cosmic power of the universe.  They inherently can not cross that divide.  So when the Dragon in a previous cycle ended up getting the Male power source fucked up as a result of his final battle with the Dark One, the only person capable of fixing that problem is another Male power user:  In this case, because that's how legends work: The Dragon Reborn, his reincarnation in the next iteration of the cycle.   If the Dragon was actually reborn female, he literally would not be able to do what he is required to do to set things right.

One of the major themes of the series is gender.  Men and women have different sources of power in what is basically yin and yang, but the male side is poisoned by the Dark One.  Magic now drives men insane.  So in a fantasy world where history is a circle, and you have this gender setup, what does that do to your society?  Jordan tried to dive hard into this kind of thing.  I mean, not always successfully and some of his stuff is dated, but its one of the major themes of the series.

"The Dragon" is a guy who keeps reincarnating...  literally down to sometimes hearing prior incarnations/sharing memories.  In the prologue, the last incarnation of the dude has gone mad (poisoned source of male magic) and basically caused societal collapse.  Now this series, we hear that the Dragon is reincarnated.  The women with magic are rounding up men with magic.  Nations are restless. The Dark One starts kicking minions into action.  Etc.


So in a series that very much deals with sex, gender, and masculinity/femininity and what that poisoned source of male magic is doing to society, and what a society scared of male magic is to doing to men, and the bad guy is waiting for everything to fall apart to rewrite reality....  to suddenly go "well, listen up!  The Dragon can be a woman because sure!"   In a visual medium, we would just have a stereotypically Hollywood attractive actress as the main character supposedly dealing with something-something gender but from the masculine side?  Blah.

It would potentially work in a written medium.  You could try it with a trans man, but the narrative would overwhelmingly be about transness when there is potential for commentary on masculinity, gender roles, etc.

Okay, but Teleku just said that there was a case where a guy got put in a woman's body and he was still able to do dude-magic.  So clearly you don't need a dick to do dude-magic, just a male soul.  Right?

Or is the idea that when you get reincarnated you're always a perfect genetic clone of your previous incarnations, like the emperor in the Foundation series?

That wasn’t really a reincarnation. It was essentially Satan forcing a soul of his dead lackey into an existing person. More of a body snatch. A Dragon is reincarnated at birth.

Right, but it establishes that the rules of magic don't care about your physical bits, is all I'm getting at.  If there's no rule that says your gender needs to match your sex in any particular way, and there's no rule that says that reincarnations need to be genetically/physically identical across lifetimes, then the existence of transgender people (which is the easiest explanation for why the Dragon Dude would be cast as a woman or whatever is going on) doesn't conflict with anything anyone is talking about in terms of the cosmology.

It's kind of worse, implying that the only way transgender people can exist is by the direct intervention of the Dark One.

The point is that there's a built in metaphor for "toxic masculinity", and they're going straight for pansexual genderfluid Wokeness.

--Dave

The One Power tends to bend to the will of the plot. There's a number of areas that the Mormon writers didn't consider.

What about intersexed people? Dunno. Gender identity? Don't know. The Dark One did some shit, doesn't mean it works that way elsewhere.  :| It's interesting, I don't see why it couldn't have been the case in the past or in the future given that it's fantasy lit.

For this one though, could it just stick to the book? Pretty please.

The way the cosmology is presented, Transgender people basically wouldn't exist "naturally" in his world is what it somewhat comes down to.   If your soul is male, the natural order of things would ALWAYS have you reborn as male. You would basically never get a case of a "female" soul being born in a male body.  It's never explicitly stated as a "rule" in the series, but it is a pretty fundamental part of the way his universe is constructed.   Like, the very possibility of "male" channelers existing in female bodies or vice versa (not simply altering their appearance to LOOK female, but actually BEING female) would be utterly impossible for a person inside the world to imagine.  It just wouldn't happen.   Which is why it worked so well when the Dark One did it.

Homosexual relationships were something the series had no real issue with that I could tell, but modern Transgender stuff was never touched on.

Sexuality is mostly not a big thing period--there's a lot of romance but not very much sex.

Well that's just entirely deflated my hopes of this being a better-executed Game of Thrones series. 

I can see male/female wielding the other gender's magic in this world in some way. It would probably make an interesting story.

The Dragon has to be male, the whole story is based on Rand being Lews Therin reborn. They share the same mind space, the same memories etc. Rand's story is based off touching the tainted male side of the source and going crazy.

You can't do that with a woman just because of simple story telling, it would get too convoluted.

A) You have to explain the one power and how it works in the world male vs. female sides.
B) You have to explain the taint and the going crazy part
C) You have to "hide" who the dragon reborn is from the audience because it's an ah-ha moment when he is revealed.
D) Explain the wheel and the reincarnation lore

If you change the sex of the dragon reborn, you then have to explain a few additional things:

1) Without spoiling who the dragon reborn is early, why is this person different (female wielding power going crazy)
2) Why are there no other women who wield the male side of the power
3) Woman embrace the one power, Men fight it. - Assuming the will do some of the Aes Sedai training - why is this different.

THEN

You have to deal a whole new plot points that were never in the book:

Ok you have a woman that is weilding the one power. How is she not going to the Tower to be trained, but the other girls are? Who trains this woman? Do the captured Forsaken recognize her as the dragon? There is the whole thing in the story where there are no male channelers and Rand has to figure out everything on his own with some help from False Dragons and some help form captured Forsaken.

THEN I didn't even consider the possibility that not only would they make the Dragon a woman, but this person might also wield the female side of the power. If this is the case, then everything in the books just breaks down and doesn't work. Then you have a show that is just loosely connected to the WoT series and it becomes a generic heroes journey to defeat the big bad with magic and swords.

The book does have a lot of seduction (lots of it awkward) but there are a lot of naked people if they ever wanted to go that route.

Yeah, I vaguely remember some of the Forsaken being femme fatale types and Rand's got women chasing him but mostly the sex is super-awkward and fade-to-black.

The other thing I can remember being just fucking annoying was how some characters have some kind of silly or adolescent issue or problem, like Nyanaeve being blocked from channelling unless she's angry, that goes on and on and on and on for books and books. That's another thing they can drop--you compress those arcs into one season or so and you just cut about six books worth of material.

That block thing isn't really a big problem of the story. It's just in the background and since Nynaeve is the most powerful aes sedai since the breaking, it acts as a limiter.

And FWIW the Dark One put's the male channeler into a pre existing female body as a joke. The dude used to be a womanizer and a lecher way back when, and ole Satan puts him into a body of a super hot chick. Its pretty much played for laughs, as the guy is constantly remaking how stacked his is now, and how by being a total flirt he (in a she body) can get whatever he wants. If the series weren't so sexless, it would have shown the guy playing with his new equipment every night.

As for the cosmology of it, you can think of him as not really dying at all, functionally. Yeah, his body does, but the Dark One snags his soul before it gets reborn, complete with all it's memories, skillsets, etc.
Personally, I can't wait to see how they manage to reign in the insane power creep that happens in the series. It's fucking nutty.

I don't know why we're wasting so much time over the whole "it might be any of the five" thing, given it's been confirmed "No, it's Rand".

So they vague up the prophecy and keep the non-book folks in suspense a bit, maybe balance out the female roles a bit in the process? Rand is still going to be the Dragon, and all five are fairly pivotal characters anyways.

They're going to have to hack and slash the books anyways  to get anything filmable so I don't really have much of an issue with making massive adaptations to the novels anyways.

I mean shit, half of them should have been condensed down into one book anyways.... so if, to make something up, they decide all five are ta'veren (or however it's spelled) and there's much wonderment over which is the Dragon Reborn, that doesn't change much by the time it's clear it's Rand. Three of them are ta'veren in the books, and the two women are very pivotal characters given where they end up -- so they were already the next best thing.

There is that suspense in Eye of the World, after all, yeah--it's only at the end of the book that Moiraine and Lan are sure it's Rand and they don't tell anybody about it; up to that point, they've thought it might be Mat or Perrin as well.

It's going to be perfectly fine as a plot device to get Nynaeve and Egwene out of the Two Rivers without any more faffing about than there already is. The whole thing is moot anyways. I've already read one review where the guy had never read WoT, but easily guessed it was Rand based on the fact that he gets way more screen time than everyone else, and looks way too pretty compared to the others.

I mean, if they stayed any where near close to the book it was always very obviously Rand. The only one who thought it might be one of the three was Moiraine because she had zero context like the reader did.

Yeah, we get Rand's dreams directly and we only hear about Perrin and Mat's dreams.

I think she knew pretty fast it was him but she didn't want anyone else to know exactly who it was because when who was the actual one became more widely known it was more dangerous for him (and everyone around him).

Not that I care about how the TV show is going to portray it, since I am not going to bother watching it.  :why_so_serious:

Gotta love this Reddit chart btw:

Book        tugs   braids tugged   smooths   skirts smoothed
New Spring   5   1   41   5
The Eye of the World   39   1   53   1
The Great Hunt   18   0   80   1
The Dragon Reborn   45   20   69   3
The Shadow Rising   41   6   106   5
The Fires of Heaven   24   3   83   12
Lord of Chaos   30   11   101   16
A Crown of Swords   29   1   80   23
The Path of Daggers   19   2   85   13
Winter’s Heart   18   1   75   14
Crossroads of Twilight   36   1   107   16
Knife of Dreams   23   5   88   12
The Gathering Storm   19   6   37   1
Towers of Midnight   17   2   19   0
A Memory of Light   23   0   23   1

Rofl.

So because Amazon releases stuff based off GMT this is out now. Watched the first episode, and would have watched more but the baby picked tonight not to sleep. I don't know how to talk about this without spoilers so I won't.

It's aight. So far. Not bad, not great. I don't know why since the LotR movies every fantasy actor has to speak in some for of British Isles accent, but w/e. The trollocs look like shit, but we all knew that was coming.

This series makes Game of Thrones look like a couple of books with just a couple of guys. I stopped reading for much the same reason you did. I found myself skipping whole sections of the last one of the books I read because I just didn't care and couldn't remember who the people involved were anyway. Combine that with me being ready to go postal if one more god damned braid was pulled and I just stopped. One of my friends said the last few books were great but I couldn't be bothered.

I'm actually going to be fascinated in how this does. I see very little chance this makes it to the finish line unless it is a monster hit and I just don't see that happening.

This is why I thought it was odd for them to concentrate on making it 'more of a surprise'.  Like, their justification for redoing lore and characters is so that it will be more dramatic, keeping people guessing who the Dragon reborn is.  Which is just silly because there is no way they'll be able to shoot this without it becoming obvious, let alone the fact anybody can google the answer at any time and it's been known to geekdom for 30 years.  It's like trying not to ruin the surprise Vadar is Lukes dad in 2021.  So anyways, the fact they want to change things so much, and that's their reason, was just another red flag the people in charge maybe aren't the best, heh.

This has released here, I've never read the books and.. it's pretty generic fantasy nonsense so far. Not bad, but nothing particular about it either.

My biggest hesitation is actually that it looks like (from the trailers) a bunch of uninteresting people, wearing uninteresting costumes, doing and saying uninteresting things, with some uninteresting production values.  I would probably give it a try an be willing to have my mind changed if it wasn't on useless fucking Amazon.

It is pretty much this. I expect it will get cancelled before it gets close to touching in any depth on all the stuff people are talking about in here.

Episode 1 - 10:06
Egwene enters tavern.
Bran al'Vere: "My girl. You're back. I was worried that..."

Most wooden delivery of a line by an actor in 2021.

Hah. It's hard to believe they think they're making their viewers guess who the Dragon Reborn is when Rand is the only lily-white pretty boy in the entire village. To me, it looked like their pretense that the Dragon Reborn could be female was shoehorned in at the last minute. They spent a few minutes talking about how the Dragon Reborn was a man, and that men can't use the One Power anymore because of the disaster he caused. Then they casually add that the current Dragon could be a boy or a girl?  Give me a break. Hopefully, they'll just quietly let this drop from here on in.

With all of that, I didn't hate the first episode but I'm doubtful about whether they're going to get past their first season.

They've already begun work on a 2nd season fwiw, because this is clearly some executives baby project.


If you don't already like WoT, this is what is is. That spoiler isn't really spoilery anyways, just playing it safe.

Perrin's wife got 2 minutes of screen time and was already far better than Faile.

LOL (agreed)

But anyways, watched the first three episodes.  I give them props for re-imagining characters in a full grimdark way I didn't expect them to go, so that's fun.  But yeah, this is a mess.  I'm waiting until I'm in an extra special good mood before I venture into the WoT fan forums on Dragonmount and Reddit, because there is no way they aren't losing their shit over this.  It'll be gloriouis.

Dragonmount? Holy shit there is a name I haven't heard in a while. Haven't been there since the dial up AOL Canada days.

As a dude in my FB feed said, "I really cannot invest too much in a show where the ultimate bad guy's name is literally The Dark Lord".

It's not, though.  It's what they call him so they don't say his actual name which would attract his attention or some such.

Watched all 3 episodes. As someone who is a huge fan of the books, and can be pretty beck-beardy on specifics at times, I thought they did a good job.

Yeah, I thought they were fine and nothing they changed seemed like a big deal. the trollocs were REALLY well done.

Thom Merrilin needs a mustache!  :awesome_for_real:

Yah. It wasn’t terrible. Some shit acting but some surprisingly good as well.

This Thom is 394,2005,2850,366,110,997,384 times better than the book Thom, and the official art for Thom. The art makes him look like a fucking geezer, and

I knew you were a WOT megafan the first time I ever saw your nick here. :)

Well, Thom is supposed to be in his mid to late 50's at least, if you go by most of the in book descriptions of him.   I mean, his age is never explicitly stated, but I am pretty sure the queen mentioned that he was roughly twice her age when they had their thing going on, and she would have been in her mid to late 20s at the time.  Considering that it's nearly 18 or so years after that that the series started, that would put him at early to mid 50s at the youngest.  Also, I am pretty sure that given his talents, he could easily "look" damn near any age he wanted to within a 20 year range of that.   He probably gets visualized as a "geezer" most of the time because he is actively playing the role off "weatherbeaten traveling entertainer".

I've only watched the first episode, and stopped reading the books at I think 4 or 5. The episode was super inconsistent. It felt very much like a slightly bigger budget version of 90's syndicated fantasy TV. At any moment, I expected Bruce Campbell to come fading out of the woodwork or something. Effects were either really good (trollocs) or pretty weak (other trollocs). The acting was meh. It's pretty clear that the showrunners are intent on diversifying the cast even when that makes zero sense, based on how multi-ethnic the Two Rivers cast is - "the old blood" is ranging a pretty wide net of skin tones.  :why_so_serious:

Mat and Perrin's backstory changes were really the only ones that gave me pause. Matt's parents being pieces of shit was whatever and is likely to be forgotten as soon as they leave the Two Rivers - they could have stuck with "he just straight up steals a girl's jewelry" to show how much of a piece of shit he really is. Perrin being married though is a giant shift from the books, to the point he's not even remotely the same character. I liked Perrin in the books, but not so much that I really care that much about the change, just that it means a lot of the beats he faced when I read it won't make any sense in how he reacts to women.

It was good enough that I'll watch the rest of the season probably.

I haven't read the books and I watched all three episodes. To me, the first episode was poor and I expected a corny 6/10 level fantasy yarn.

Episode 2 was better. Episode 3 was very good. So now I'm on board.

Yeah, they screwed up the first episode pretty bad.  Which is dumb because it's sort of important to make the intro engaging, lol.  Not sure why they did it the way they did.

A ton different from the books in the first three episodes, but yeah, it improves as it goes.  I'll stick around for the first season to see how they work it out.
To be fair, the implication for Mat is that he steals to help feed his sisters that is alcoholic fucked up parents can't (mostly.  Obviously also has a gambling addiction).  The whole Perrin change up is wild, but I actually think that does set up his later interactions with certain women pretty well.  But again, lol at them going all grimdark on the origins for everybody.  Wasn't expecting that.

I think that's their way of saying "no, these are not hobbits and this is not the Shire". Though not all hobbits are nice, either...

Has there been any word on why the actor for Mat was recast?

With no exposure to the books it didn't feel grimdark at all to me, just pretty generic background stuff. I don't quite get why Mat and Rand are friends, the Mat characterisation hasn't really settled much. He's a shithead with a heart of gold? Friends with the goody two-shoes guy? It is thieving meant to be secret to Rand? I don't quite get it as yet.

In the books, the Two Rivers is basically the shire.  All three of the leads are upper teens who all come from happy homes.  Mat is the troublemaker, but trouble in that he likes to play pranks on people and make lots of jokes.  Perrin isn't married and is just the blacksmith's apprentice, Rand is awkwardly courting Egwene in a shy way (not banging in the basement of the inn).  Everybody in the Two Rivers are mostly stout sensible people.  Happy go lucky innocent country bumpkins.  Standard fantasy trope stuff, which is why they are all friends.  So yes, all the changes felt like they hilariously grimdarked it compared to source material (mind you the series gets a lot darker once they leave, but this is how the Two Rivers is setup).

Yeah, the change in character for Matt and Perrin both seem like needless attempts to make the series more "dark", "edgy" and "angsty" from the getgo, when it really doesn't need that at all since it BUILDS to that quite well over time.

Matt is supposed to be a scamp, not a scoundrel.  The lighthearted local troublemaker.
Perrin is the gentle giant, who appears "slow" to those who don't know him, but is basically just cautious and deliberate in everything he does because he is aware that his personal strength means that he could easily hurt someone if he isn't careful.   Turning him into someone with "rage issues" is fucking idiotic.  It's literally the opposite of what his character is as presented in the books.

So I understand why the show wanted to escort us out of the Two Rivers as fast as possible, but believe it or not there is a reason Robert Jordan spent 100 or so pages of build up there. It's because the 5 characters from there won't shut the fuck up about it for the whole 14 books. "Oh you wear grey wool?!?! We wear brown wool in the Two Rivers. Look at these shitty bows, they are no Two Rivers longbows. Wow, chicks in the Aiel Waste will suck your dick?* They sure don't do that in the Two Rivers" They are always comparing something where they are, to a specific from their home. It's not just a foible, or a character trait either, it's actually a major theme in the series. Like in any other fantasy title, the characters start out provincial, and become exposed to more and more of the outside world. However, aside from a few other core characters, everyone else in the whole fucking land is obsessed with how things have always been done this way, and they always will be done this way and it's crazy to suggest otherwise, whereas the initial cosmopolitan shock the Two Rivers crew receives is enough to open their eyes to seeing things a different way. It's the main driver for a lot of the plot as a matter of fact.

Also, in the opening chapters of the first book, we are exposed to several names of various townsfolk and quick blurbs about their personalities, which seem entirely superfluous at first, as they are quickly in the rearview mirror. But, as they characters acquire power in their own various ways, they then have to order around people they once knew, and often potentially send them to their deaths. How they each deal with these realities of their new stations is another critical theme of the series.

The show just kinda does away with that. We blast out of the Two Rivers before their has been any chance at all to establish exactly what makes it the Two Rivers, and not some town outside of Cairhien. At one point in the show Matt remarks to a character "You can tell I'm from the Two Rivers?" and the character says "It's all over you, in the way you speak, dress, etc" And I was like, you got me. He looks, sounds, and acts identical to everyone else in the little village that is not in the Two Rivers. If I didn't know who he was, I as a viewer wouldn't have been able to tell. And I know that particular character is supposed to be worldly, but this is a tv show. This is its chance to show me, instead of just telling me.  Again, I understand why they did all this, but I do think it will come at a cost.

As for the grimdark Perrin and Matt, ya the thing with Perrin's wife is dumb, but it actually makes sense with Matt. The show ages up these characters a critical couple years, and if they kept Matt the same ("hey guys, I just unleashed a badger in the yucky girls locker room!"), it would have looked like someone's kid brother was tagging along. It would have stuck out in a weird way. As readers of at least the first 4 books will know, Matt is going to be by far the hardest to pull off because of how much he changes.


Ayup. That's what happens when I make a name after my favourite scene (actual line: "Ashaman, kill!") while I was stoned.

*As if this sexless series would ever be that sexually open.

I think it gives the whole hammer vs. axe thing a whole different angle.  :awesome_for_real:

This is a good thing since his character is awful in the books (and basically useless). He's a walking remote control for wolves and someone to whine at Rand (before Rand stops being a character in the books and becomes a plot device).

My headcanon is that while the Rangers allow the hobbits to lead fat, happy lives -- there is an order of Hobbit assassins that ALSO  helps hobbits lead fat, happy lives.

On the border are a bunch of sneaky, cold, "for the shire" cutthroats that make sure the wrong sort don't wake up after their first night inside the borders.

Orcs and bandits don't hear about fat, rich, happy hobbits if no one untrustworthy ever manages to leave with their good news.

At the start. But the wolves stop being used seriously very early on as power creep passes them right by. His character is not at all useless, as he rounds out the trinity of the three. Rand is the destroyer, Matt the preserver, Perrin is the creator. Or, in Norse, Tyr, Odin, and Thor.

They seem to have missed a fair number of Sackville-Bagginses and Sandymen.

Well you can't kill your own kin, even if they're assholes. But they are excellent examples that hobbit's aren't all sweet and nice.

Which, you know, means a race of people who, if I remember bits of the Hobbit and LOTR carefully, can pretty much casually disappear from the view of most, at least when out in nature.

If untrained rando hobbits can casually wander into the nearest bush and then disappear from reality, unless you're a skilled ranger or elf, imagine what a decently trained one could do.

I mean ring or not, Bilbo still snuck around orcs, trolls, more orcs, elves, and a dragon. That's some pretty light footsteps, and he was a fat, lazy hobbit.

-Windo CurHill

Watched the first episode.  I can't see this lasting unless Amazon really wants to waste their money.  One of the reasons Game of Thrones worked so well (at least in the first few seasons) was that the world was believable, the people actually acted like people, and they took their time to setup the story.  The whole thing just felt so rushed and we never even got a chance to get to know any of the characters.

It gets a little better. But yeah, if you didn't know anything and heard this was based on a book series you'd assume it was a fairly average YA one.

TBF, the book series started as an A-Tier fantasy mash up of Dune and Tolkien, before descending into worse than YA-trash by the time I quit it in book 4 or 5.

Don't forget well trodden Norse and Arthurian Mythos! I can't comment on the YA thing, as I don't read YA, and I actually prefer the series as it gets going past books 4-5.

Hoo yeah, episode 4. I'm more on board now.

Yeah, that was some good shit.

I am getting pretty confused by these more than luke warm opinions.  Might have to hoist la bandera negra.

I mean, it's not incredible and they are rushing quite a bit through the story (which would be GREAT later on, but not so much now) but its good fun fantasy tv.

Yea, I'm enjoying it but only because my expectations were really low. They certainly seem to be rushing through things, which is a shame since EotW is a solid book. Thom and Aram seem really good castings. Liandrin, uh...does not look how I imagined her.

Lol, yeah Liandrin should be on Margot Robbie's level and not... well, what we got.

Well, the other thing we noticed is that most of the cast is not... very attractive, heh.  It's like they almost went out of their way to hire plain/ugly actors, which makes it feel a bit off because the books had a lot to say about the looks of a lot of the characters.

Game of Thrones, this is not.   :awesome_for_real:

Agreed. It makes Rand stand out even more. The Dragon could be anyone of you my ass.

Game of Thrones wouldn't have been as popular if it had been a bunch of fat inbred nobles, let's be honest. :D

Being nearly porn in the early seasons certainly helped its popularity.

After watching the 4th episode, I've decided to just not worry one whit about how much it leaves off or changes from the books. I'm not heavily invested in them anyway. I think you really need to look at this as its own thing, "inspired by Wheel of Time" more than "an adaptation of." If you like fantasy, it's a pretty good bit of TV fantasy with a slightly above TV budget. The performances get better after the first episode, the effects are mostly decent, and there are a lot worse things to watch on TV. If you don't like fantasy, you'll hate this, if you do, chances are good you'll like this unless you are the most anal retentive incel Jordan fanatic on the Internet.

I do think their insistence on "which one is the Dragon" might end up being a bit of a waste but again, it's going its own way.

Yeah, I think re-writing and removing a lot of scenes/plot just to keep the whole 'who is the Dragon' thing more mysterious was probably a wasted effort, but whatever.  With episode 4 they've really leaned into it.  First it was heavily hinted it was Egwene in the 2nd or 3rd episode, then Rand in the 3rd episode with his door smash, then Mat in Episode 4 (he's just like my nephew Owen, he's showing all the signs!), then Nynaeve at the very end (Burns like the sun!, or whatever the quote was).

I don't know if it was intentional, but I liked the sort of Easter egg in Liandrin asking Nynaeve if she's pronouncing her name correctly.  I know that was the biggest question about the book I had for a long time after I started reading.   :why_so_serious:

This is my favorite review so far. (https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsandculture/arid-40750227.html)


Valley of the Hipsters indeed.

Maybe they're all the Dragon. Together. Some bullshit about the power of friendship. Doesn't really matter, Amazon will cancel it after the second or third season, so it's not like the showrunners really need a longterm plan.

If it has a big enough cult following it could be saved by Netflix the same way Lucifer was.

It's entirely possible they are only planning to "adapt" Eye of the World and maybe one season for an ending and have just decided to light the rest of the books on fire for warmth in the writer's room.

Probably for the best.  :why_so_serious:

Hey! I may be an an anal retentive, incel, and a Jordan fanatic, but I'm not- what was the forth thing you said?

It's on Amazon. All that matters is whether bookseller Bezos (fan who saved The Expanse) likes it.

I'm enjoying this, and plan to keep watching it. I started reading the first book too, as I'm all out of other stuff at the moment.

But the last couple of episodes have prompted me to think of the things that a lot of SF shows don't do that (good) SF books do, which is be prepared to be a different. Not just humans with magic, or different landmasses, but commit to a fundamentally different cosmology. I like SF for escapism, but it overwhelms the genre, especially in film and TV. It would be fun if there were more shows that ran with things like Arrival did.

On the show itself: This whole "who is the Dragon" thing seems to interest some viewers a lot more than I expected, but I find it pretty boring. The show feels quite rushed but also very slow at the same time. I'd prefer something that was a bit more dense and didn't bother to try and explain or draw as much stuff out, but that's probably just me. It doesn't have the polish to make Perrin following some carts around worth the screen time it gave it.

My only beef with it is there's a ton of context in there that only makes sense if you've read the books, and someone who hasn't is left wondering WTF is going on and why the reference was in there.

Like: who is Logain, and why are the Aes Sedai hunting him?  Why are those women wearing red outfits, and why is Moiraine wearing a blue cloak? Even a 5 minute montage about the 7 ajah's and the white tower would have cleared up everyone's motivations.  Why are the wisps floating around channelers white for women but black for men?  What are these dream sequences about with a man with fire for eyes?  Moiraine said "There's 4 Ta'veren in that town" and never explained what that meant in context.  Even the background in the books for Shadar Logoth would have explained better about why Moiraine was so fearful about going there, and what the fog chasing them meant.

I find when watching with my wife that we have to keep pausing, I'll explain the relevant backstory, then she'll say, "Oh, I see, that makes sense now.", and then we'll resume.

I really don't think any of those things need explaining yet.

I thought they made it clear that Logain was a false Dragon, being driven mad by the tainted power. The dream sequences don't need to make sense, yet, I don't think. They do explain about Shadar Logoth, although I'm wondering now if you've seen all of the episodes that are available.

A bit about the Ajahs would help though, and that's part of my complaint about them focusing on Moiraine instead of the Two Rivers kid: she knows all about them, so they show just assumes we know all about them.

I imagine there's going to be a sit down with Nynaeve with Morraine or more likely the other Ajah's pulling her aside to make their sales pitch in the next episode. Outside of her block, she's like Aes Sedai version of Lebron James in high school. 

If they wanted to deviate from everything Jordan wrote they should have done this as a retelling of events, maybe bounce between Tom and Loial as the ones doing the retelling.  Also a 30 second snippet covering a different bit of lore prior to each episodes opening  credits might have been a good idea.  All said and done they have completely fucked everything and ruined any shot of anyone trying to get this IP done right  for at least the next 20 years.  Writers and director should be blacklisted.

There has never been a chance a 14 book series (where a bunch are shitty) was going to get "done right".

As long as it’s not offensively bad, I’m on board. This level of quality is acceptable.

If it veers into GoT post books territory, I’ll still probably hate watch it.

Production and acting quality are about as good as I could have hoped.  Doubling down on the braid pulling in the intro, what they did to perrin and making the dragon non gender specific, going all united colors of benetton on the small village when you have a whole world to represent races are the unforgivable sins so far.

I guess. No reason why the small village has to be pure white, though. It's not "the North" a la Tolkien--it's just some fucking village in a place that once upon a time fought the Dark Lord to a standstill etc., there's nothing vaguely Nordic or whatever about it. Why *not* make it black, brown, yellow and white?

I don't think the Two Rivers has to be pure white, but I think it should have mostly been of a single race. They keep talking about "the old blood runs deep" over and over, and how isolated they are, and so on. Rand can easily be a different race; Nynaeve too, since they're leaning more heavily on her being an orphan in the show. But Mat, Perrin, Egwene and the rest of the unimportant side characters in town should all have been the same race.

In the books the two riversEmonds Field for sure gives off a xenophobic island fever vibe where you can't trust those strange folk from 2 towns over.  

Edit - I'm fine with non white as a choice but make it homogeneous.   Also they butchered Mats family life as well, for no apparent reason.


I get what you are saying but when 1 page out of 6 deals with character development and plot while 5 out of 6 describe the surroundings it should be much easier to adapt to a movie.  Think of it as a 3k page story with 10k pages of instructions for directors,  set builders and costume designers.

Little towns can be a mix of people and still think that the people twenty miles away are a bunch of freaky foreigners.

I'm reading the first book for the first time right now. There is nothing in there that screams homogeneous skin type at all. The opposite in fact (a number of characters are pointed out explicitly as not being white, and most others aren't described in much depth). I love a nit pick more than the average person, but the casting so far seems almost slavish to the book I've read so far. You might need to check your assumptions with the actual book.


And this is also on point and matched to the book.


Unless you're talking about some flashbacks later on EotW gives Mat almost no family life to butcher. They've put in somewhere where basically nothing was there. Not the same as butchering.

Also, I now get the "who is the Dragon" bit a little more. The start of EotW does give scope for this to play out for a bit, if you put aside the "protagonist, duh" assumptions we all carry when reading these sorts of things.

For the record, I'm fine with the multi race thing because this series is actually post apocalyptical fantasy, so it makes sense.  Having said that, they probably should have stopped making references to 'the old blood' being strong as an explanation of power like the books do.  Because that very much implies race, and it just seems pretty weird thing to say in light of the cast.

I also just read the book recently, and there is a lot of implication that the two rivers is mostly racially homogenous.  Every character except Rand is described in some way as 'dark' or darker.  It's very vague, but they make a point of it.  This comes to a head later in the book when (spoiling for Lamaros since he's reading and I don't know where he is):

Seems fairly obvious they were meant to be mostly similar racially.  Though with those descriptions, actually more like some form of brown or at least Mediterranean, not pasty white.  But again, this is mostly academic.  If this show ends up totally terrible, not being racially accurate for the various nations will not be why. 

Lamaros, I know this sucks, but you are wrong. There is no way to properly rebutt what you are saying without heavy spoilers, which I am going to do anyways, but I assume you aren't going to read them because they are indeed spoilers, so you will have to just believe me. I know that isn't fair, but it also isn't fair to comment on the books doing it that way having only partially read the first one.

The skin colour thing is aback and forth issue for the series. I know this is a shitty American attitude, but Robert Jordan was a shitty American writer, writing in the shitty 1990s, and it becomes pretty obvious that if he doesn't mention skin colour, he means white. Otherwise he explicitly describes a person's skin colour where it 'differs'. The black skin in the sea folk, and the Royal blood of the Seanchan, . In Altara, specifically Ebou Dar, they are described as having very dark brown skin, with the architecture being very Indian inspired. In Arad Doman their skin is emphasized as being 'coppery' and their culture somewhat Arabic. At least two of the Borderlands nations are depicted as Japanese in all but saying their skin colour.

Then there is the Official WoT Compendium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Robert_Jordan%27s_The_Wheel_of_Time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Robert_Jordan%27s_The_Wheel_of_Time) It has some of the worst fantasy art ever created, but it was sanctioned by Robert Jordan. All of the Two Rivers people are depicted as White, as is everyone from Andor, their parent nation. To put it bluntly, if there was 6 men in a bar, 3 white, 1 Asian, 1 Black, and 1 Indian, it was Robert Jordan's writing style to not mention the skin colour of the first three, while brining it up for the following three.

Now, does race matter in the series. No, not really, except for . And even that, not so much. Race was never a major theme or part of the author's message. I really don't think he would be rolling in his grave over it. Culture, however, plays a huge part in his world, and it is common for say, a Andoran and a Cairheinien to not want to work together, but it is never because of skin colour. As Teleku says, it doesn't make sense anyways. The series establishes very quickly that this world is our world of a distant future, having passed through a utopian age. then at the Breaking, I guess someone blew a horn and said "All races to their respective corners of the world! Fair skinned people, to the desert!"

Does it matter in the show. Nah, not really, except for a few small things. 1. As I mentioned earlier, The Two Rivers folk are supposed to start out provincial and become more worldly. When they get to their first city, it blows their mind that all sorts of people are milling about together. So it takes the effect away when Nynaeve runs into a Tar Valon force, and they are just as diverse as her little shit hole village, when Tar Valon is supposed to be THE cosmopolitan place in that world, drawing people, and especially women, from all over to work together. 2.  3. It makes everywhere look the same. I couldnt tell the difference between the Edmonds Field and the town from Ep 3, and the Tar Valon army just looks like better dressed Two Rivers folk.


Yes they are butchering Matt's family life. Again, you will just have to trust us.

Curious how Tele posts a quote about them not having fair skin, and you go all in on them being white because some sanctioned art has them as such.

I get they might not be like they are in the show, maybe I was too strident there and obviously later books can make it a thing, but the way the first half of EotW is written, at least, the distinctions are cultural and etc rather than skin colour.

They make a fair bit about Rand's hair, but even more about his height.  It's also fairly open to interpretation, but Egwene and Nynaeve are described as having the "same dark colouring". Maybe this is just meant to mean hair and eyes... I guess.

Actually his qoute doesnt mention their skin, but their hair, and eyes. Egwene and Matt all have have brown hair, with only Nynaeve being actually dark.

Umm read the last line.

Also, when they get to their first city there's an extended bit where Rand just compares them to people he knows at home. Maybe later cities will make something else of it, but the first small city it's literally "oh they're just like us here, but gee it's busy".

That would be because Rand's skin, , is often mentioned as being exceptionally fair.

I don't doubt the book was written on basic "these people are like X, these like y". I'm just saying there's not a huge amount that makes much explicit significance of skin colour such that it's an issue for the TV series. And if they are meant to be one skin colour, it should be like southern Italian, not white white.

As I also mentioned up thread, in the core nations of Randland Robert Jordan very frequently tied people's appearances to the culture he was trying to evoke. Andor is very English, Cairhein French, Ghealdan German, Tear and Illian are depicted as much more Mediterranean, as they are coastal. The Two Rivers closest cultural relatives is Andor, but they are have and do break away from it in their own ways, with a heavy emphasis on their tobacco farming (thankfully without the slaves).

Maybe they're all Black Irish.   :awesome_for_real:

I always pictured them as a bunch of Scots/English with dark hair, and Rand being a bit of a blond haired freak.

I also thought a certain someone from the books entering into a relationship with an important character who (in my mind) was repeatedly being described as being unbelievably black skinned (and also possibly a 10 year-old and also bald?), as if a black person in this land was unheard of. 

It's not that they don't exist, it's just that they all come from certain specific nations in the books.

Edit:  But yeah, the cultural implication for two rivers and Andor in general is the UK, so whatever description of race the books put, that was that mental image I always got.

That certain someone is also from not from "Randland", as it has been dubbed.

My point being mainly that it seems to support the idea that localized cultures were pretty homogeneous.  Changing those things in casting, regardless of the reason, changes the story.  Which maybe is fine, the story has some problems.

In the part of West Africa that is now almost entirely inside the borders of Nigeria with a bit of western Cameroon, essentially the lower Niger River and its delta into the Atlantic Ocean, prior to 1500 or so, there were maybe 20 distinct societies, all of them "Black" by contemporary global reckoning, that had really distinct cultures/languages and were in that sense fairly 'homogenous'. Some of them were very small-scale, living within a very limited area (many of them what we now refer to as "Cross Rivers" peoples, for the river that marks the boundary between Nigeria and Cameroon). Some were spread out over a wider area but had a very distinct way of living and thinking, most notably the Igbo people, who were very active merchants trading across the whole region and lived in large towns but who were also very democratic in their basic outlook (they didn't have chiefs or heads of state as such). And then there was a big centralized imperial state with substantial cities and a large military, whose people were mostly Yoruba, but whose cities were somewhat cosmopolitan and had people from neighboring Hausa, Igbo, Cross Rivers and Aja communities.

The point being is that you can have localized cultures that are pretty homogenous without using race as the signifier of that. In fact, that's the way it's been for most of human history. It's fine to follow the fantasy trope of "these people over here, they live this way and wear these kinds of outfits and have these customs; the people over there on the map are different and do this and that" and yet not use modern racial markers to get that across. I grant that it's important to The Wheel of Time overall to have various peoples and communities have some distinctiveness (and for the starting characters to feel constantly amazed at how diverse and big the world really is) but I don't think you lose anything if you go with a racially diverse casting strategy.
 

No we don't. Especially since the casting choices are fairly well done, if a tad plain looking for my taste. Although I still think there are two of the actors who can't act for shit. We're just saying that's not how it was in the 1990s published book, good intentions or not. And believe me, that is far from the most problematic thing in it.

I went in to this with my only hope being "please be better than Shannara", I wasnt expecting GoT.  Mostly it is better than expected BUT the writing/direction choices really have the stank of some half talent a-hole changing shit just so they could point at the change and say I did that.  If Jordan were alive and had a modicum of control I would bet money there is no way he would let them do to Perrin and Matt what they did.  The racial make up is mildly jarring and not consistent with my view of the books but it doesn't completely ruin the story on its own.

Including women as potential dragon reborns is flat out fucking stupid and completely at odds with a major plot line of the story.

Making a women the actual Dragon reborn would indeed require a serious divergence from almost every major theme of the book (in short, and non spoiler, it would require that the current Aes Sedai be men), but having it be a potential one isn't that bad. Especially considering that the series is only telling us this through the imperfect knowledge of Moraine Sedai. It's a perfectly fine plot device for fresh fans of this series who also haven't seen the way any series ever frames its main character.

The Aes Sedai know for a fact the male half of the source is tainted, they have an entire Ajah dedicated to hunting men because of that taint.  Multiple times in the books it is brought up by different Aes Sedai in a wondering way "What are we going to do if the Red Ajah gentles the real Dragon Reborn".  There is no way Moraine is not aware of all of this since she has made the Dragon Reborn the primary focus of her life's work.

I can't even find a mentioning of a Dragon other than Lews Therin. They'd have no concept of Dragons previous to him, other than the necessity that they exisit due to their concept of time and reincarnation. The Dragon lived in a time frame that they know so little about it's technological advancements are basically magic.

It's just a dumb TV plot contrivance. The books never set it up as any sort of grand mystery and there's so much heavy foreshadowing even during the first attack in Two Rivers.

I can live with it as long as they don't try to run with one of the others as a dragon for any extended period of time. That would just be really fucking dumb.

There are supposed to be an infinite other amount of Dragons, as this universe is, well, a wheel (so, I guess there is no Big Bang, but instead the Big Price is Right Spin? And hey why is there mention of dinosaurs? that requires some sort of liner time), it gets mentioned by the big badzo., and also by Hawkwing. But yes, Lews Therin is the only important one who is in line for Screen Actors Guild representation.


In the books, yes. For the show, that is not mutually exclusive to Moraine not knowing the sex (and thus power source) of the new Dragon. There could easily be some flashback along the lines of: "Hey guys, ya we could luck out and it's a dragonette, but that's a 50/50 chance ya know."

To reiterate, the Aes Sedai, and the world, not knowing the sex of the new dragon is fine, that isn't really critical to the spirit of the book series. The new Dragon reborn actually being a male is.

Ultimately this comes back to what you think is interesting in the book series and want to focus on getting across in a necessarily abridged TV show.

I'm not quite sure what the show runners of the TV series think that is as yet. Im pretty sure they can't make a play for the grand scheme, as they won't get enough time. But they seem pretty content to rush through the first book and skip the world building and character growth of a fantasy adventure story too.

If they are series about this going on long term they are going to have to cut in a way that will put Edward Scissor hands to shame. But there are still core concepts, themes, and events that make the show The Wheel of Time, and not just a show set in this pretty generic fantasy world. Like it or not, the stuff involving the identity of the Dragon Reborn is just that.

I think they may have actually hit the sweet spot on production quality/cost but the writing and directing has not resulted in a followable story line so far, as a result counting on "new fans" to provide long term support is probably not going to happen.  For an easy win they could have not gone out of their way to piss off the fan base and probably provided enough runway to finish the series with the current quality level.  Probably too early to tell but it almost feels to me like someone based the script on a reading of the book in a version of a language they were not entirely fluent in and lost the plot as they got caught up in Jordan's unnecessarily verbose (and frequently less than stellar) prose.

I have a very low threshold when it comes to finding entertainment in a movie or show so I'll probably gladly watch this until the end but I feel like they have backed themselves into a self fulfilling prophesy of not making it past 1 or 2 seasons. (which is what I am probably most upset over)   Many people seem to be thinking GoT was the bar when the reality is GoT is the current ceiling, Shannarah is closer to the bar (well a bit below the bar but closer none the less),  if this had been done 80% as well as the Expanse it probably would have been successful enough to tell the whole story over as many seasons as they needed.

FWIW, the showrunner did an AMA recently https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/r19e96/im_rafe_judkins_showrunner_and_executive_producer/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/r19e96/im_rafe_judkins_showrunner_and_executive_producer/)  and that mother fucker was incredibly well versed in the plots and characters of the book. Take from that what you will, but it's why I'm not super concerned with this whole m/f Dragon thing, and I'm pretty sure it's a smoke screen.

It's obviously a smokescreen meant for non-book readers.

Yes, the question is why.

Does a mystery about who the dragon is drive something interesting? Is that more interesting than what is actually in the books, given that making this Dragon mystery means other stuff has to give room to it?

As someone who watched all 4 current episodes before starting to read the first book, my feeling is.. I get why the dragon uncertainty is there, it's in the book and it also drives the uncertainty of the male characters as they start their journey. It gives tension to the world through Logain maybe but probably not but maybe being the real Dragon.

It makes almost no sense to include the women in it though. It doesn't give women greater agency in the story in a meaningful way, they exist already and have their own journeys to go on.

I think a fair bit has been lost in establishing the characters distinctly by lumping them together under this, actually. They've not progressed any of them much in four episodes.

Yea, I'm not sure of the why either, other than to seem inclusive or woke somehow (and I really hate making that argument). I have noticed that whenever they talk about the Dragon being a man or a woman, the speaking character is offscreen, so it feels like a hasty reshoot to me. They really have not gone out of there way at any point to make Egwene a viable candidate, and despite showing how powerful Nynaeve is she is not the right age. In fact, Nynaeve's incredible power rules out Egwene, making the whole thing pointless. It's possible that in Ep. 5 they start wondering if they got the age wrong, but that will make the whole premise feel silly.

Yeah if it's for woke reasons it's especially dumb, as it undermines the female characters the most. It ties them as add-ons to the boys story, rather than their own more complicated motivations for being there. And it makes Moiraine less of a strong character too.

But it's done, so eh. Hopefully they drop it soon.

Edit: Going back to my earlier question about "why is this even interesting as a TV show", my pitch - based on reading this thread and the bits of book I have so far - is something like: High fantasy adventure in a post apocalyptic world in which human soul re-incarnation is real. Young heroes' journeys, but accelerated and accentuated by the impact of past souls and events to fun dramatic heights.

Is that fair, is the show going to hit that? I don't think they've nailed it so far, but maybe they're going to accelerate into it now they've given Nynaeve her moment, and everyone else is going to start to get in on the act. Or maybe they still want us to care about world building like GoT, for a series that should actually be character and event driven instead...

I'm assuming we find out who the Dragon is by the season finale, if not sooner.

Well then, if the guy who is coming in as fresh as you can isn't buying it, then that's about it for that. On to more important stuff.

Like how the women channeling the power at someone look like they are firing hadoukens.

FWIW in the books only a very small group of people is aware of how old the Dragon Reborn is and Morraine isn't really known for remediating peoples ignorance,  especially when that ignorance helps protect the dragon reborn.  

Ok, but generally, the idea of the Dragon BEING Reborn is roughly at the level of knowing who Julius Caesar is as if we knew he was inevitably going to be reincarnated but also bullshit artists would claim to be him. Everybody knows the Dragon could be (will be!) Reborn; only Moiraine and a few others know it's happening now. (well, a few others plus the Dark One and all of his forces...)

And not only bullshit artists. Because the whole male half of the power was tainted towards insanity, the chances were slanted toward male channelers actually believing they were the Dragon Reborn.

yeah, most False Dragons didn't go around trying to be "The" Dragon for kicks.  They usually did it because they were literally going nuts from the Taint on the male half of the power.   and the few who did try it as a legit attempt at tricking the gullible into thinking they were The Dragon as some kind of power play without being able to channel would have quickly found themselves either brutally murdered by an angry mob or made a very painful example of by a group of Reds.

Yeah, it's kind of silly to imply that there were "Female Dragons" in the past, when there has only ever been ONE Dragon: Lewis Therin Telamon.    He is destined to be reborn, but he hasn't been yet.    Nobody in previous cycles would have been "The Dragon", because that is a title that belongs exclusively to Lewis, and only Lewis.   Previous incarnations of his soul might have been called something else, but it wouldn't have been "The Dragon" and those names would be lost so far back they would have been dusty, forgotten myths even DURING the Age of Legends itself.

Sure, in the 3000 odd years since the breaking, there have been lots of "False" Dragons, but there has never been "The Dragon Reborn" until Rand, and the very idea that there could even BE Female False Dragons changes a metric shitload of things when you get into how that would change things historically and the way various power dynamics would evolve as the world pulls itself out of the aftermath of the Breaking.

I realized over Thanksgiving weekend that we actually have a Prime account so I could watch this.

Overall, I've enjoyed it but I've read the books so I have more than a vague idea of what's going on.  The diversity cast doesn't bother me at all, really.  Rand is different looking enough to tell he's not "native", everyone else looks like they more or less fit.  There really needed to be more world building from the beginning though, especially in Emond's Field.  Give us more of a feel for the small, rather isolated village life before having the trollocs invade and burn it all down. 

Also - what freaking time of the year is it?  Fall?  Early Winter?  Late Spring?  Asking because no one seems to have dressed appropriately for what seems to be cold/frost weather, especially not after Shador Logoth, which was rushed as all hell.

I actually didn't mind the age-up bits for the main chars.  If the three boys are all 20, then it makes sense in in the society they're supposedly in to be married or with someone, so Perrin being married didn't bother me.  Gave more of a reason to be axe adverse than hanging around and absorbing the Tinker nonsense.  Which reminds me - I thought Perrin was more the strong, silent type too aware of his own strength kind of character.  Not someone walking around looking and acting like he doesn't have two brain cells to rub together.  The scenes meeting up with the caravan just felt very 'hurp durrrr" to me.  I did not expect the Tinkers to be an urban hippy commune.  I did expect them to be more brightly colored with their clothing, although some of that may be from the artwork associated with the books (look, Darryl K Sweet was -not- the best illustrator out there.  Too bad they couldn't get a god-tier artist like Whelan for the whole series but at least it's wasn't Rowena).

I'm really curious why the actor for Mat was changed because the scenes of him being all strange and finding the fade in the Gill's house were really good, IMO.  So far he's done a good job of selling someone who's losing it but in a subtle way.  I don't mind Thom Merrilin either and whoever said he should look weathered but not like a geezer on his last legs was right. Rand and Mat meeting up with Thom felt too rushed and out-of-the-blue to me and the exposition about the Aiel was.. light on any details.  The whole "I can tell you're from the Two Rivers because of how you dress/talk" had no backing in the episode at all.  That's the first time we see them around non-TR folks and it all looks the same.  I mean, make it obvious their shirts are buttoned differently or they wear a scarf or something.  The "speaks differently" is harder to pull off without resorting to accents which can come off sounding dumb.

The ajahs - there needs to be something besides the opening (which is kind of neat) that shows what's going on with the different colors.  So far we've seen blue (Moraine), red (Liandrin and others), and green (Karene? and going by what I've read, Alanna as well with her two warders).  We see the colors in that opening sequence but have no context.  Maybe that's coming down the road because hand feeding the viewers every bit of information isn't ideal but you have to give something to help form a framework.  I like that the warders were shown to be pretty normal guys overall, even Lan.  Book Lan comes off as too mysterious and inscrutable in hindsight while TV Lan has a bit of personality.  I like the interactions between Lan and Nynaeve a lot better in the show.  They actually interact more than in the books and her reaction when Lan was injured foreshadows more between them, IMO.  I hope they don't use that reaction as a way to remove her block though, that needs to stay.

I really like the portrayal of Logain.  Him having an accept shows he's from a different part of Randland while not being obnoxious about it.  The actor is great (and sexy!). He's got the feel and the menace of the character.

Oh - clothing changes.  THANK YOU!  The idea that these Aes Sedai were riding around the countryside in silks and fine linens and dresses with embroidery and delicate skippers and such... nonsense.  That is pure fantasy tripe with doesn't take into account reality.  Having the women wearing pants or legging under half-skirts or or skort type of pant?  Perfect.  It makes sense.  It can still be finer fabric that usually seen but it makes total sense to me. Some of the clothing designs screamed modern a bit too much (Egwene's coat, Alanna's decorative chains on her coat) but overall it felt much more logical than the source books.

I'll definitely keep watching because it scratches an itch and the actors aren't hard on the eyes IMO.  Works for me.

Let me just say that for a bunch of peasants, that's some mighty nice and varied clothing they're all wearing when they 23-skidoo at the end of the first episode.

I didn't really think we needed more emond's field, might be because that was the worst episode. We definitely needed more Shadar Logoth though, and it needed to be way scarier and less actiony.

An episode of peaceful introduction would have gone a long way to making me care about the various dead mooks, including Perrin's new wife. I honestly don't remember who else died at all, which really says a lot for our heroes' supposed tragic backstory.

The pacing, and decisions, have also poorly explained the characters choices and motivations. They've just all gone along blindly and stupidly with it. They could have taken a moment for the boys to verify they were targeted, to explain Perrin has some idea of geography and where he's trying to get to, etc.

Instead they insert sex scenes which add almost nothing, have over the top dancing magic, etc.

It's a mediocre show, expect and embrace that, and just go with it for the next couple of seasons before the inevitable cancellation.

The scene where the Fade is chasing Rand and Tam would really have helped drive home that at least he was a specific target. I don't really remember if the others got similar moments, but they certainly could have given each of them a different, creepy dream if they wanted to go that route.

One thing that caught me by surprise is when Egwene goes through the ritual to become a women in a folksy traditional farm village way, and then 5 minutes later she's lying in bed with Rand acting like they get it on routinely.   

I actually didn't mind that--that's a good bit of updating of the sensibilities involved.

I rewatched episode 1, which I had seen as corny, after reaching episode 4 and starting to thoroughly enjoy things.

I haven't read the books (turns out I own book 1, but never finished it). Things I came to appreciate on the rewatch:

- The RPG-like spellcasting system (with particle effects lol). There's casting time, casting can be interrupted, and casters are squishy and benefit from a tank. No Gandalf-with-a-sword and no "shazam!" spellcasting.

- The RPG-like weapons system. Rand's dad gets out his Sword of Trollocing +3 and can fight better. Next episode, Mat finds a Cursed Dagger of Vomiting -1 or whatever it is (I'm probably underestimating the seriousness of that) but it's like D&D weapons.

- The visiting merchant who buys Mat's bracelet (so he can buy lanterns) is a Darkfriend spying on the village. On the first rewatch I didn't even notice him slinking away as the trollocs arrived.

- Things that initially seemed like direct copies of the LotR movies seemed more like tributes on the rewatch. The opening with Moiraine reciting history like Galadriel, the trollocs chasing the party through the woods like Uruk-hai, fording the river on horseback like in Fellowship of the Ring. Given the competence of the later episodes, I think they actually meant to echo those scenes.

The first book is an extra strength homage to LoTR. Lan is Aaragorn (we will learn more of that later), Moirane and Thom split the role of Gandalf. The setting of the Two Rivers is basically the shire, right down to their sweet tobacco. Shadar Logoth is Minas Morgul.  None of this is accidental, mind you. Robert Jordan was up front about this: it was important for a brand new IP at the time to put the reader in a familiar place before he could take the story where he wanted.

I've just started a full reread of the whole series. One thing I didn't remember is that in the books Thom Merrilin was actually in Emond's Field for the Trolloc attack. He was performing at the inn. If they'd left that in the series it would explain how he knows all about the Two Rivers.

I also recall people talking about Birgitte (who nerds will all remember) as if she'd been reborn dozens of times always ending up being a great hero along with her male partner. At least that's how it sounded to me. They definitely never talked about the Dragon as if they remembered the previous age he'd been around in. Maybe some people have shorter wheels and get reborn more frequently?

The reincarnation cosmology is inconsistent. Artur Hawkwing, does comment on fighting with the Dragon at the Last Battle, sometimes against him. And Ishamael frequently remarks on how many times him and the Dragon have fought.

It never felt to me like Jordan entirely bought into reincarnation as a central premise of his world-building; e.g., it's a surface-level thing that matters when it matters but not a fundamental root-level premise of the world really even though everybody in the world says it is.

edit: Also I really find Jordan's naming conventions annoying because they do not sound even slightly consistent or coherent; it's like the wretchedness of generic fantasy geography that says there must be a desert region with desert people, a jungle region with jungle people, a mountain region with mountain people, a plains region with plains people, etc. often right the fuck next to each other in a way that makes no geophysical sense at all and where the weather systems that ought to result appear absent.

My takeaway was that the title, Dragon, was exclusively Lews Therin's (until his rebirth) but that he had in fact been reborn many times before that and was still an important figure.

I'm pretty sure he hasn't been reborn since the Breaking. Or if he has, no mention is made of it at all, and would just be speculation.  My take away is, The Dragon soul is so pattern warpingly powerful, it only gets spun out when it is needed. Sorry sucker.

I don't disagree with that. In fact, I honestly thought most people were only reborn once per age.

The books almost hint that the dragon is only spun out at the ending/beginning of an age or even possibly at a full turn of the wheel.

I thought it must be twice;

is that wrong?

I think it's implied quite a few time when the Legends are talking along with some of the Forsaken that the cycle of advanced civilizations, the Dark One being broken out, collapse of society has happened time and time again.

You are not wrong, in that it there has to be at least Two Dragons, LTT and Rand. Is there more in different ages? I'm starting to think not, just these two repeated over and over ad infinitum, because as I mentioned, there is numerous allusions to this happening countless times, with different results*.

If we visualize the Wheel and the Ages laid out in our format, based off what we know, it would go something like:

1 Our age; No one power, no dark one (aside from John Smedly hue hue hue), no dragon.
2 Age of Legends; Yes one power, yes dark one (no John Smedly though), yes dragon.
3 Broadly speaking, the age of the books, even though it's also divided into 3, those ages are more academic; Yes one power, yes dark one, yes dragon.
4 Some of the characters visualize this age in various ways, and all the flavor bits and quotes are written from this age. I am not spoiling anything by saying, somehow it has to loop back around to our world. Sooooo, cave people again? No dragon, anyways. There might be more "ages", but this is what we have for certain.

Then
1b
2b
3b
4b

1c
2c
3c
4c

And just for the fuck of it I dusted off my Wheel of Time Companion**, which was an official encyclopedia they published, kinda like a big version you see at the end of the books (did anyone read those?). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time_Companion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time_Companion) Under the Dragon entry, it lists it as Lews Therin's title, and makes no mention of anyone or anything else.

There, dorky enough for ya?

*Incidentally, the Dark One's avowed goal to destroy the wheel and end time makes no sense, never did. It means time can not actually be a ever spinning wheel, as it has a end. But whatever.

**Not to be confused with the other companion book I linked early, because I guess Harriet McDougall needed another yacht.

Right, I think the title was first invented for LTT. But that does not by any means imply that LTT/Rand's shared soul was not around in previous ages, just that the title was new.

For sure. I'm just going off what there is actual evidence for. It's not like Frank from Scranton, savior of the great Twitter War, ever gets alluded to, or

This is what I mean about Jordan not really committing wholesale to reincarnation as the major driver of his world-building, because there's really only two ways to play that:

a) rigidly cyclical; everything that has happened before will happen again and the same souls will be doing it (which is a depressing and fatalistic thing, and were it completely rigorously true about the WoT universe, I'd sign on with the Dark One, because it means the Creator is a bastard; this is precisely what fuels the weariness and alienation of Moorcock's heroes)

b) souls can do better (or worse or just different) in the next cycle of the Wheel and that's the hope being held out there for everybody; which kind of *seems* like the basic takeaway of the tens of thousands of pages that Jordan dropped on us, only not always

If it's b) then LTT could well have been lots o' dudes with lots o' saidin under the hood before he was LTT, but he changed enough and became the Dragon, which marked that soul from that point on.

Short answer, it's b). At least when it matters most.

Even without spoiling, it is mentioned very early on by the baddest of the baddies that sometimes the Dragon turns to the Dark One. Boy did we have fun in those ages. Remember when we created Bobby Kotick from sludge and pure evil? So these souls aren't locked into thier choices at least. But yes, RJ fails to properly expound on that.

That's kind of a King Dark Tower sort of vibe there, although King's got it progressing towards "better" results each cycle and not just different.

B is rationally delusional in its aspiration, which is a fitting commentary on how we humans muddle through a meaningless universe, but I'm not sure if either option is more depressing (or even more fatalistic). Infinity fucks it all up either way you look at it.

In the setup of WoT, B is the only way to make it anything less than completely pointless; if it were A, just give me the story of LTT doing good then evil the first time and don't fuck around with telling me about the next turn which is no different. But Jordan wasn't a good enough world-builder to really grasp consistently that he was telling the story of when the most important B ever happened by surrounding us with other B (and C and D and E) stories from the goat-herder who has finally learned to stop fucking his goats to the low-ranking Aes Sedai whose soul got it right back in the Age of Legend but who is getting to be more of a monster with every turn of the Wheel. The Wheel feels like a more ad hoc, half-baked, adolescent DM with a lot of cool ideas but not a lot of deep thinking, sort of "this is my campaign setting" thing.

Ya, but with pillow friends.

I would argue at the macro level both are equally pointless, and all that matters is if the telling of the story works enough to be fun or interesting.

B can be a long multi stage cycle, which goes ABCD and each stage can only remember the previous 3 stages, so the players dont realise it's actually repeating. Provided you don't let the reader on to that until you get to the end you can have the novelty and feeling of agency in place for most of the telling.

Then at the end you say "all this has happened before and will happen again" and pay BSG some royalties.


Back to the tv series. The latest episode is pretty weak.

Ya, although I liked that one warder, you know who I mean. In one episode, he had more character and backstory than all the Emonds Fielders. Also, I liked the little forsaken dolls. I am glad that even though they were heavily stylized, they were able to show Graendal's 2 most important featuresb :drill:

Yeah. The show runner is going.. "hmm I only have 8 episodes, let's skip the background for all the main characters but devote a whole episodes worth of time to one random other guy instead. Yeah, this will really sell the series." I'm downgrading the series from mediocre to borderline shit at this point.

That's actually Ishmael in a nutshell in the series though.

Like, we know, through the discussions with Birgitte that souls "bound" the the Wheel are at least somewhat aware of the fact that they are while they are not currently in play.  When she is inbetween rebirths she knows about all her past lives and stuff like that.   It's just that when the Wheel spins them out in a new rebirth, they are reborn "pure" for that session, with no memory of their previous lives, and just sort of an "instinct" regarding what to do (why she always ends up as an Archer and always ends up in love with that other guy every time for example).

It's pretty heavily implied that due to being imprisoned super close to the Dark One when Lewis Therin sealed his prison at the end of the previous age that Ishmael's thread may have actually come slightly "unstuck" from the pattern, allowing him to actually be cognizant of the fact that he is basically just the Black King to Rands White King in a never ending, eternally resetting game of chess played by the forces of Light and Dark.   This realization drives him nuts, and is a prime element in his motivation in the series, where he literally wants to BREAK the Wheel and end everything so he can finally stop being forced to play the game.

I have no clue how you guys are tolerating this trash. After the fallen city of black mold ep I'm pretty sure I'd have more fun watching old eps of Xena or Beastmaster or even newer stuff like Legend of the Seeker or w/e that one was called.

The enemies are boring and look like shit, the only combat scene (town) so far was trash. I can't tell how much the women vs men thing is supposed to matter, like the vibe in there that this is a female dominated world except for the white cloak religious fanatic guys? The only hook at this point is I never read these shitty sounding books but I like being able to mock things from a position of authority and curiosity at wtf anyone sees in this show.

Also what the fuck is the costume design or lack thereof? Everything looks so odd and not purely in a budget way but like here's this huge world the most world buildiest world and everyone is just wearing train hopper hobo gear or something? I liked the religious fanatics single armored arm look + the white, that was cool and the skull horse face mask thing big bad has on his horse. Everything else has been drek bordering on immersion breaking.

I mean, a lot of us in this thread are doing the equivalent of debating what frequency the Enterprise's phasers are set at, so......

There was another fight in Episode 4, I'm guessing you didn't get that far? But yea, I'm only enjoying it because I read the books. I have no idea how it would come off to new viewers and frankly I don't give a damn.

Glad I'm not the only one who mentally autocorrected his name into this for 14 books.

Here's the thing. The books are trash too. I started reading them pretty early on. And for the first 2-3 books I really liked them. But as they continued the quality took a nosedive. And it's not even a slow and subtle nosedive. It's like they went straight from Season 1 GOT to Season 8 GOT.

The author would introduce dozens of characters. Who meant nothing and would go nowhere. Entire new nations would sometimes show up. And end up not mattering at all. It was like...Dorn in GOT. To the eleventh power.
Entire 1200 page books would pass with no development of the plot. I wish I was joking. The entire book would be Aes Sedai plotting and The Dragon Reborn moping. He might go out and kill a Forsaken or something but that would be it.
The main character became a wish fulfillment with every woman who meets him wanting to be his and not minding sharing him with the rest of the harem. (A slight exaggeration but not by much.)
Only one female character in the entire series is well written in my opinion.
So, the TV series being trash should be a surprise to no one. The source material is the Gold Standard for an author who badly, badly needed and editor and publisher to tell him "Stop that shit. Now. Tell the god damned story." GRR Martin has nothing on Robert Jordan for wasting time and introducing pointless side stories. And that's saying a lot.

The thing is, with Martin I know exactly why he wrote himself into a writer's block (and it's not 'he's enjoying his beer and fries') and why he was enamored of introducing viewpoint characters whose entire purpose was to get killed at the end of hundreds of pages of development in a trivial way with no impact on the story. I know what he thought he was doing.

Jordan? I'm not even sure it was as cynical as "I need to stretch the payday out as long as I can". I think the dude just was sitting at his keyboard going "and then she tugged her braids and then Rand flexed his muscles and then the taint of saidin smelled up the room like a really bad fart and then someone said 'oh man there's a Black Ajah here somewhere right' and then Rand said no that was just me magic-beefing and then she tugged her braids again" and then starting a new chapter.

Ya, but with pillow friends.

Its fun to talk about stuff sometimes. Especially if it could have been good, but they just keep fucking it up.

Yeah, pretty much.  I'm along for the nostalgia ride and seeing what elaborate ways they try to adapt this.  I can see this being pretty bad for anybody trying to watch this with no book background, as they've made some really dumb decisions about about pacing and character development.

The amazing adventures of Lewis and Ishmael.

Meanwhile is it just that I read the books a long time ago, or was there a whole excursion to Andor that got cut out of the tv show so far?

Proper travel timeline for the books should be:
- Flee Two Rivers              
- End up in Shadar Logoth                
- Get Separated              
- Team Rand pass through Whitebridge (where they get separated from Thom during the Fade attack) and end up at Caemlyn.
- First encounter with Loial / First appearance of Logain / Rand meets Elaida / Elayne / Morgaise, whole bunch of politics shit happens
- Perrin, Egwene, and the rest of the gang catch back up with them in Caemlyn            
- Escape from Caemlyn through the Ways to Tar-valon the borderlands and make for the Eye.

So yea.  They basically skipped the ENTIRETY of the Caemlyn stuff to fast Track the arrival at Tar-Valon, which isn't even supposed to happen untill AFTER they have discovered the Eye and retrieved the Horn / First Seal.   Which is changing a metric ton of shit and how it should develop.

Hey! You skipped Baerlon, and Min. With Moraine using the One Power to turn big and step over the town walls lol. That power got cut real quick.

Ahh right.  I had almost completely forgotten that their first meeting with Min was before the Shadar Logoth scene.  So yeah, there's another bit they have dropped entirely in the show.

Yeah, Min is supposed to be in this season, so was sort of surprised they didn't have her working at the inn in Tar Valon in place of the inn in Baerlon.  Or maybe they'll get to that next episode since they had to spend half this episode character building random_warder3.

But yeah, main issue again is that this really isn't an adaptation.  It's almost a full new story that just sort of vaguely follows the overall plot.  Game of Thrones felt like they adapted the books to film, as a lot of the scenes in that show were straight from the book.  That's how an adaptation is supposed to work, and it worked well for as long as they had material.  As soon as it was up to the writers to come up with everything themselves, it all fell to shit.  And this show is basically starting at that from the get go.

Instead, let's wildly speculate which actors matched our own personal mental images of the main characters.

For example, when I first saw Lost In Space, I realized that Mina Sundwall looked very close to how I always pictured Aviendha:

(https://i.pinimg.com/736x/71/48/7e/71487eab5d9e3a8b0eb733016ec97209.jpg)

Second one is Karen Gillian from the new Jumanji movies, since she already has the necessary badass credentials.

(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/eb/0d/be/eb0dbe886fe4a27bac43edfb980f80f1.jpg)

Yes this is just an excuse to post pictures of redheads.

Liandrin should be more like January Jones.

Liandrin is kind of white trash-fake respectable, right? Stacked short blonde who acts fancy but isn't? That's not January Jones, I don't think.

Another filler episode.

And by the by, if they are going to differ from the books, they could at least up the sex.

The show isn't even fun enough to write about any more. It's on par with the boring after school YA fantasy shows I remember from the 90s, or worse.

Don't think I'm going to be commenting much on it any more.

I've never seen a show that both feels like it is absolutely dragging ass and rushing through a plot more than this one. We were talking about it in Discord last night - I was fine with this episode, but it's pacing was just way off. It feels like we barely know any of the main characters and suddenly we are about to go into a 2-episode rush to the finale/climactic battle. They've waited way too much effort on trying to make the "Who's the Dragon" a mystery, and unless they change it from the books, I can't figure out why. The books actually did a decent job explaining why all 5 of them being ta'veren was so extraordinary, which gave them all some reason to be there. This "maybe they can all channel" thing isn't helping the story at all.

I'm enjoying it much more than I thought I would, and I'm fine with them not following the books since past the first book, they weren't what I'd call great anyway. But the choices they've made to be different from the books haven't really been that great, either in concept or execution. The big battle will be a make or break moment for the rest of the series going forward.

That kind of happens in the book though too--I always felt like the "quick quick let's get to the Eye of the World" happened out of nowhere.

I agree, from what I remember the whole time in the Blight is like super quick.

I just looked it up, Chapter 45 of 52 is where they exit the Ways.

Ok I'm just going to do this because... I like wasting time.

Chapters 1-4: Intro to TTR
Chapters 5-10: Trolloc Attack and fleeing TTR
Chapters 11-17: Crossing the Taren River - Meeting Min

Chapters 18-34 - Shadar Logoth and the road to Caemlyn

• Chapters 18-20: Shadar Logoth and the group splits
• Chapter 21,28: Nynaeve chapters
• Chapters 22-23, 25,27,29-30: Perrin chapters
• Chapters 24,26,31,32-34 : Rand chapters

Chapters 35-43: Everything in Caemlyn

• Chapter 37-38: Nynaeve and Perrin still working their way to Caemlyn
• Chapter 39: Logain arrives in Caemlyn
• Chapter 40: Gwain, Galad, Elaida and Elayne introduced
• Chapter 41 - Morraine, Nynaeve, Egwene, Perrin and Lan reunite with Rand and Mat

Chapters 44-46: The Ways
Chapters 47-50: The Blight ending with the Eye of the World
Chapters 51-52: The big fight
Chapter 53: Final Chapter

Some Metrics:
32% of the book is prior to Shadar Logath
32% of the book is the journey to Caemlyn
17% of the book takes place in Caemlyn
6% of the book takes place in the Ways
13% of the book takes place in the Blight

Using these metrics, assuming 8 episodes

2.5 episodes should be used to bring the party across the Taren River
2.5 episodes should be used to get the party from Shadar Logoth to Tar Valon
1.5 episodes should be used in Tar Valon prior to the Ways
0.5 episodes should be used to Travel the Ways
1.0 episodes should be used in the Blight

Episode breakdown:
Episode 1: Flee TTR
Episode 2: Cross Tarren Ferry, enter Shadar Logoth
Episode 3: Journey To Tar Valon
Episode 4: Logain Battle/Thom intro
Episode 5: Travel to Tar Valon/Lan Episode
Episode 6: Tar Valon Episode
Episode 7: The Ways
Episode 8: The Blight

They basically nailed it honestly.

Except for one very important fact. They have forgotten they are a TV show and not a book. In the book, by now, we have spent tons of time in the head of Rand, so we know him and by extension Matt, and in the head of Perrin, and so we get him and a little Egwene. That's 3 of the potential dragons, or 4 if you believe what the show is selling, that we have spent time with and learned about. We know Rand is grappling with Tam not being his father, a super critical plot point. Has he even brought it up in the show? We know that Rand looks up to Lan, another critical plot point with ramifications for how Rand deals with emotions later on. We know he has a Heron marked blade, which is a big deal, and that he doesn't sell it In the show they have maybe one line together? We know how Perrin thinks slowly but deliberately. We know he misses his forge and basically sees live through the eyes of a blacksmith. Kinda critical. In the show?

Instead, the show delves into tower politics in an attempt to be like GoT, before it has even finished establishing why the fuck we should care about 4 of our 5 potential dragons. So when Rand is revealed to be the DR (which was confirmed by Brandon Sanderson after he was hounded and harassed), it's gonna be just some pretty boy white dude that the show has spent the least time on of all the characters, in an ill conceived attempt to subvert expectations. And don't even mention Matt's dagger, a multi book arc that took the equivalent of Trauma Team 6 to cure. Moraine sees it, says "Whoa, that no good. Bippidy boppedt boo, that's all done. Who's hungry, cuz I could go for some Tairen heh heh heh."

Robert Jordan was a shitty writer. But even he didn't dump all of his characters on us at once. Dealing with the tower right now feels like if Game of Thrones starting going into the Sand snakes before they established who Arya and Sansa are.

Just saying they nailed breaking down the season to mimic the pacing of the book, as in how much time they are spending on each segment of the story. I didn't say they did it well. There are plenty of problems.

Not to mention all the little details that the books can take a few pages to explain that really help build up the world and the lore that the TV series has to put a bit more work into setting up.

There's other things as well.  Like, if they have to go full hamfisted "beat you over the head with it" style to get something across, it's a fairly good indicator of a shitty showrunner.  For example, having Perrin murder his wife with an axe just so they can brute force the Hammer vs Axe internal conflict, rather than just letting it build naturally as part of his character the way it did in the books.

Game of Thrones did a great job of 1) Getting the audience to fall in love with the main characters and then killing them and 2) Lots of boobs and sex HBO style. It's hard for the Wheel of Time to come of as anything other than Young Adult fiction on the big screen without those.

/eyeroll.

Martin's moves in those respects in Game of Thrones were HIS MOVES, I mean, that was what distinguished the books from everything that came before. You take an older series and you GoT it up in terms of "surprise! the main character is dead!" and you're just going to look completely stupid and unoriginal.

Sure, yes, there's writers since then that have been doing some similar "everything you know is wrong" moves--the way that the Gandalf-type character in The First Law turns out to be very different from what you expect (and the torturer character turns out to be the closest to a real hero that the series has). But you can't make GoT into a universal expectation in that respect.

Boobs and sex, you can probably do that. But even there, that was actually thematically important to GoT as well as a draw for audiences--the whole plot kicks into motion because a kid sees a brother and sister committing incest.

Right, but they forced a Rand x Egwene sex scene into WoT that never happened in the books, so that was an opportunity for some T&A. They could have injected some sexiness to the darkfriend at the inn. We just got another not-in-books sex scene this last episode, that again faded to black. But they showed some boobs in the bath scene, which honestly makes the whole thing confusing. Are they going for PG-13, or are we doing Tits and Dragons?

Egwene's had like four chances to show some titty, they are obviously not doing it. They got zero problems with showing you extreme close up of gruesome injuries though, they'll even go dr pimplepopper on that ass.

The end of EotW is the worst part of that book, so at least the tv show won't be able to miss that bar, comparatively.

(Yeah I got bored and read ahead and finished the first book)

This would only be true if they spent that time on the story, and not made up fan fic instead.

Look, if they want to move past Jordan's basically 16-year old incel perspective on things, that would be ok with me. There's plenty of chances to dial it up from the basic situations. Less braid-pulling, more pulling on dicks or whatever.

Weirdly enough, Robert Jordan's first draft he submitted to Tor was sexed up to the core. It sounded like the written form of a 80s metal album cover.  It was Tom Doherty who told him to tone it back, and I guess he decided to take that effort into 5th gear.

Trying to reread the series. Got to Path of Daggers (where I noped out the first time as they were being published) and am losing the will to go on. When does Jordon die and the other guy take over?

Book 11 is his last pure one. 12, 13, and 14 are Sanderson, although it's plain that 12 and 13 have a few RJ written chapters. Sanderson is a much better scene by scen writer than RJ. By like a country mile.

But it doesn't matter. You aren't going to make it past book 10. 800 plus pages of pure filler. It's the written equivalent of those little bags of chips 75 percent filled with air. Nah that's not true, those have more content than Book 10.

You can truly say that the WOT Wikipedia summaries are so much better than the books and are the best way to "read" them.

Path of Daggers is what initially kicked me off the series. That one is rough. Next two aren't much better.

I like Book 9, significant shit actually happens in that. But then I liked Book 8. Book 10 is used bong water though, even by the standards of the series. As in, no matter how much you like dig the IP, book 10 is a pitiful nadir. The author even admitted as such.


I don't know about that. RJ has a lot of writing flaws, but his world can get immersive if you let it. I'm not going to go around recommending it to adults, but it can be engaging.

Hey guys, happy to be back (nah, didn't go anywhere in particular, just the nature of the internet :D).

Since I'm the thread starter, I would like to share my opinion on the series so far:  I think it's...yeah, just a little above average, surely nothing special, so far.
IMO, most of the actors are good enough considering their inexperience ( talking about the Emond's Field fellas, of course) and they're trying their best with the lines they're given.

Now, my opinion is that, while bad writing is always bad, 8 episodes are just too few for WoT (in fact, dunno if you watched them, but they resorted to "extra" videos explaining the lore via the Prime Video X-ray function).

Yeah, there are istances where writing is barely above a D&D amateur module, with catchphrases put here and there just for the sake of it, but they're just blazing through everything without the possibility to care about the characters, especially for newcomers (see the Egwene and Nynaeve reunion at Tar Valon: it lacked any pathos, IMO).

Sure, it's the job of the executive producer and the writers to juggle with the source material and provide something of quality, but the need to rush through everything is obvious. I mean, even GOT S1 (and onwards) had 10 episodes; yeah, in that case the source material was definitely superior, and perhaps the show writers themselves were better, but 8 it's just too little.

So, for Amazon 8 episodes represent the perfect cost/benefit ratio at the moment? Good, go ahead but then enjoy your rushed product (Can't wait for S2 where we might get Falme in episode 4 and the Stone of Tear in episode 8  :why_so_serious:)

Path of Daggers is the last one I read originally as well. I can't remember if I actually read 9-10 on my reread once Sanderson finished them, or if I just read wiki summaries. I know I did not reread 8.

So the new episode isn't too too bad. Finally busts out some character development, even is some of it is ineptly done. I do have one severe problem though. What the fuck did they do to Min? Look, I know there is always going to be issues of 'thats not how they are in the book', and I am not talking about their ethnicity. For example, the dude that plays Perrin, while big, is not as built as Perrin is supposed to be. That mother fucker is supposed to look like Triple H or some shit. But all that pales in comparison to their portrayal of Min. Damn they did her dirty. She looks like a used up Thai hooker whos pushing 50 ffs. And the funny part is, in the actresses promo pictures, she looks like a perfectly fine Min. Maybe a tad on the old side. But damn.

This one bugged me more than most.  I felt the dialog took a big nose dive.  Just stupid daytime TV soap opera level tier dialog and acting.  That was basically the whole episode.

(https://c.tenor.com/APNWy6KBTYQAAAAC/telenovela-nbc.gif)

Though, I will say, the Blood Snow brought to screen was pretty awesome, so I do love it for that.

I had the same thought.  Like, I'm really trying not to be that guy, but they seem to be going out of there way to ugly up fucking everybody.  I saw the casting pic and was like "oh yeah, that could be min!"  Then they did this.  Again, this series is really suffering by not trying to directly adapt the books instead of just making their own story slightly based on the books.  You can shit on Jordan all you want (and he deserves it) but he wrote a lot of great character moments (on top of the endless world building) that were a lot of fun and kept us stringing along.  That's how he sold millions of books, unlike the writers of this show.  Rand's interactions with Min where some of my favorite.  This all just went wrong (yet again).  They should be picking and choosing the best interactions from the book and bringing them to screen instead of going their own way.

I think it's where I noped out and never finished the series. But I was getting exhausted with it before that even. The books were just endless at that point and I found it harder and harder to care. I think momentum got me to Path of Daggers and I didn't even finish that book. I finally checked it all on out the WoT wiki and my reaction was mostly "huh, so and so died and that happened. Ok. " and I moved on.

Don't know I'm going to watch the next one. This is real ehh territory.

Probably still will just to enjoy all the people losing their shit on both sides in the Reddit threads.

It's fine. The budget is being spent on a Syfy level, the changes they've made to the story from the book have made zero sense, the mystery of "WHO IS THE DRAGON?" was overdone and led to almost zero character development for the main protagonist, and their attempts to "mature" it up have been laughable, since nothing they've done to amp up the sexy couldn't have been done on cable TV.

But compared to what I expected, it's not that bad. Grade it on a curve, remove any expectations that it'll be like the books and you might be able to watch it. The hardcore fans? They should be ready to burn down Amazon at this point.

A look inside episode 7:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsFgCC-G7PU&ab_channel=AmazonPrimeVideo

Nice BTS about the awesome "cold opening" (I looked up Madja Sittova on IG and she's a totally badass stuntwoman. Don't particularly care about the "realism" of that fight...Give me that anytime in my high fantasy setting), the particular camera they used and  how they built the "Ways" set

I'm sorry if I am covering conversational territory already covered in this thread, but I am watching it so I don't wanna give myself spoilers.

I tried to read this series a while back and I just couldn't get over the writing 'style', to put it in a neutral way; so many people LOVED the series I feel it would be hubris to dismiss the series, so I've tried to keep quiet about my issues with the writing out of mere politeness. However, I never really understood the hype.

This series, after like, 4 episodes, finally effectively communicated to me the appeal of the show. Although I do consider the whole thing overly dramatic, it is as Haemish suggests, eminently watchable for me, since the show is forced into the writers' commandment of 'show don't tell', which the original author broke with whimsical impunity. Its nearly as if the television serial treatment of the story has cured it of its problematic nature in writing and I can finally digest it. Sorta like non-dairy ice cream for the lactose intolerant.

Nothing about the visible braid tugging in this one, eh?

Robert Jordan is an odd writer for me. He could be interesting but he had, at the risk of offense, super, awful ADHD when it came to plotting and characters. He'd just ramble aimlessly, then get super focused on important BS, then wander aimlessly some more. The man had talent, he just badly needed an editor and perhaps to meet some actual real life women.

The irony being, his editor was his wife. Case in point of why that should never happen.

Oh no, I spotted it immediately and laughed my ass off.

The thing about the Wheel of Time is very much rooted in when it was released. Epic/Tolkein-esque fantasy was in a pretty barren patch when these books were first released. You either had just blatant (and very bad) ripoffs like Terry Brooks' Shannara or you had bodice rippers that were Conan ripoffs (ironically some of which Jordan wrote). Eye of the World was a pretty AT THE TIME "fresh" take on the Tolkien-esque epic fantasy that took it to a different place. Unfortunately, what talent Jordan had was pissed away by not having a good editor (his wife) who could objectively prune some of this shit AND being so successful that the publisher had no reason to reign him in as well. I worked at a bookstore around the time of Lord of Chaos' release, and that shit just sold like gangbusters, better than just about anything else in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section. No publisher was going to tell him "You need to finish this now," even though by then it was clear he was just spinning his wheels.

When I started reading the series, Book 7 had just come out. I was 12 or 13 years old, and Wheel of Time (along with Dragonlance) were the first fantasy books I ever read. And really, other than some Jules Vern and Stephen King, they were the first books that I read that weren't meant specifically for kids (Goosebumps, Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys, etc.). So, a big driver of my affection for the series is simple nostalgia. That said, as I mentioned a few posts ago, I read book 8 and basically ragequit, and have never recommended the series to anyone without plenty of caveats (at least, not as an adult).

Robert Jordan was a fantastic world builder, though, and it really feels like Randland was alive for centuries before the story even started. And he very obviously got distracted while writing, spending chapters on little nonsense tangents that would not film well at all but brought the world to life. When we got whole books of that, I mostly lost interest. But even when I reread most of WoT whenever Sanderson finished it, I never had "wait a minute, that doesn't make any goddamn sense" moments because the world is very well fleshed out. (Compare to something like Harry Potter which is just a story about Potter and friends vs Voldemort, with subsequent books very obviously inventing new magic, then forgetting about it in the next book because whatever).

This was a big part of the appeal in the series for me.   I was the pretty stereotypical book nerd in grade school / highschool, and pretty much voraciously devoured fantasy stuff.  I started with Dragonlance/Forgotten realms stuff, but quickly moved into basically anything I could get my hands on after that: had read the complete lord of the rings while in like grade 6 or 7, had done Shannanara, Thomas Covenant, most of the stuff by David Eddings (Belgariad, etc), Feist (Riftwar Saga), and most of their contemporaries.   If it was decent (or even mediocre) fantasy from the 80s to 90s I had probably already read it before stumbling across Wheel in the highschool library.

I just loved the depth of detail Jordan put into his world, and it was also pretty damn crazy how deeply he must have been thinking about where he was going with the series.  Like, I can honestly recall being pretty damn impressed by the fact that you could be reading book 8 or 9, and stumble across threads for shit he had laid down the start of as far back as the first book:  like, plot details that you thought were just things he had tossed out and forgotten about 4 books ago suddenly tied in to a major thing that was happening as if intended all along.

Exactly. I enjoy reading about the world and lore and history more than i enjoyed reading most of the actual books.

Thomas Covenant was so much better than the Wheel of the Time to my memory though it's been a long, long time since I read it and I may have some severe rose colored glasses. I know it has some super problematic elements as well (seriously, what was it with fantasy authors in the 80s and 90s?) but it was still a very good series and actually told the story in a reasonable page count.

Ya, Covenant was my bag too. I also loved the third Shannarra book, by far the best of them.

Even though I read a lot of fantasy back then, I'm struggling to remember any of the rest. It just was sludge in my head

 I read Lord of Chaos as everyone I knew was talking about it how great it was, and I thought it was ok but meandering. I basically said "Eh, I'll read the set when the series is finished." Then it turned into the literal Never-ending story, and I was glad I never bothered.

Wait wait wait, I need a clarification here. As in, you read the series up to The Lord of Chaos, or you just picked up Book 6 and said "what the hey?"

Covenant was pretty neat because it was a fairly non standard, really rather dark story with a lot of fairly heavy themes about a guy dealing with a literal mountain of personal mental issues getting sucked off to act as the literal Jesus style saviour of an entire fantasy universe. Almost very OG "return to oz" style story, but with a much heavier fantasy bent.  I seem to remember a lot of the themes in it having to do with him having recently been through a pretty bad divorce or something like that + dealing with a potentially life threatening illness (might have been leprosy?) before he gets yoinked to the fantasy world, and you are never really sure if what is happening is really happening, or if he is just imagining it as his way of working through his problems.

It's probably been 20 years since I read it though, so the memories are pretty vague.  Might actually grab it from home when I am down for Christmas and give it another read.

What?  No.

1. Epic Fantasy was in the doldrums in the '70s when Brooks hit big with Shannara in like '77.  The '80s you had huge amounts of fantasy from Eddings, Feist, Dragonlance, Salvatore/Forgotten Realms, etc.  just from memory of what was big.  That's leaving aside anything I can't specifically date to the '80s or didn't get bigger until later or just disappeared.  If you dig into mid-listers, there are a huge amount of Epic Fantasy...  hell man, Black Company is 1984 and subverting tropes and that wasn't even Cooks first Epic Fantasy series.

Fantasy had a really shitty literary reputation, even in the genre, until the late 90s.  That's why you had things that were unabashedly fantasy being labeled as Science-fantasy.  Dying Earth stuff was popular in the '70s/'80s but it's Science-Fantasy not that nerdy Fantasy!! Pern?  Science Fantasy!  Dragons are genetically engineered and telepathy is science-y!  Epic Pooh/all fantasy is Conservative authoritarianism schlock opinions.

Jordan really helped Fantasy's literary rep in the genre, which ended up with the Big Book well regarded fantasy epics like Martin and Erikson and etc.  Look at the Hugo noms and winners '80s and '90s.  It's going to be a bunch of SF books you've vaguely heard of, a bunch of "round up the usual suspects" of famous SF authors (Bujold, Gibson, Wiliis), and the occasional true classic. (I do really, really like Bujold.  Bujold should not have been nominated for every slight work that left her pen, though.)

Jordan also had a huge effect on world building in the genre, which has had big knock on effects till today.

2.  Jordan wrote licensed Conan books.  It was "for hire" work that people thought well enough of to give him his chance for Eye of the World.

3.  Jordan's wife was Harriet McDougal, who had a long and illustrious career as an editor before they were married.  This included working with or supervising many of the big name editors/publishers now (Baen, Doherty).  She edited/worked on both The Black Company and Ender's Game....  before Jordan started Wheel of Time.  Reducing her to "haha get a gud editor not ur wife lolz" is shitty.
_____________________

Like.... I don't even like Jordan.  It was fine.  No interest in reading the last few books, or the show.  No interest in rereading it.  I just don't get how angry people get about it to the extent that it needs to be objectively bad.

I love the series. Those that have read up to the end of book six will realize that i literally put a part of it in my name here. It, and especially Tolkien, got me through my parents undergoing a vindictive scorched earth divorce when I was 16-17, trying to pull me to either side. But yo, starting about book 4 and increasing logarithmically as the series went on, it really fucking needed a proper editor. Proper, as in, not married to the guy who was over indulging himself in his world. I don't care how good Harriet McDougall's work was elsewhere, it is objectively bad editing in her husband's WoT series. There is constant misspelled shit, repeated parts, and just plain confusing laid out scenes, and that is not including the rambling incoherent story threads that amounted to nothing. Just read Jordan's work, then read Sanderson's work when he picked it up. One is just so much more tightly written and edited, and it's not the one with familial strings attached. There is literally a whole book that RJ admitted was shit and he never should have seen print (Book 10, Crossroads of Twilight), and it's obvious because no one told him, no, focus on what is important.

I was going though a phase of reading the last book of a series before reading the previous books. Basically I was so full of anxiety in general that I needed to know how a story ended before going trough the whole story as otherwise I could not relax into it. Yes, I was crippled with anxiety and more than a little crazy at the time.

Anyway I just checked which book I actually read. It was book 3, not 6. I read Book 3 as I rather naïvely assumed that Book 3 had to be the last book. When I found it wasn't actually the last book I basically said I would wait for the last book. 20 fucking years later I read the last page at a bookshop out of curiosity and out of a sense of completion.

Ya, it was Leprosy he was suffering from. The whole "is this real" thing was a big part of the story, as when he gets cured of the Leprosy he rapes the woman that healed him, and does some other pretty evil stuff as "why not, this is just my imagination!" Then holding onto the doubt of the reality of what he is experiencing becomes a shield in his head as the guilt over what he did threatens to drive him crazy.

He was truly "the Unbeliever" as he had to be to survive. The fact that the big Magic McGuffin was his wedding ring also helped in the symbolism.

Yes  and there is ZERO chance that a showrunner could make that work today. 

You know what? Thank you for sharing that. i had heard of people that did that, but I could never imagine why they would do that. Now I understand.

For what it is worth, the series was initially pitched as a 5 part saga, and it roughly sticks to that aim through the first 3 books. After that, the author just says fuck it, I'm going to do whatever I want. As Haemish said, there was no way his publishers were going to tell him no, every release was a trip down to the mint to print money. And as we discussed, for whatever reason, his editor and wife wasn't saying no either. So 14 Books and a new author later, it's done.

Roughly speaking, i would classify and group the books thusly:

Books 1-3 Are the foundation of the series, and all have a similar pacing style to one another. These are the tightest written.
Books 4-7, and 9 (in parts of it) Are RJ realizing he had lightning in a bottle and a captive audience, and expanding on his world, ideas, characters, etc. Important stuff still happens in these books, whether interpersonal or politically in the world.
Books 8, 9 (in other parts of it) 10, and 11 are completely lost meandering affairs, where little happens, whole main character PoVs are absent from entire books, replaced with the introductions of nobodies as characters. You could condense there 3 and a half to one book no problem at all, with only the climax of 9 (Winter's heart) standing out.
Books 12, 13, 14 Increasing written by Sanderson as RJ had passed away, with RJ working with and leaving extensive notes for Sanderson. Unlike that fat piece of shit George R R Martin, he wanted to see his life's work complete and in print. You can see the series tighten up in these 3, with plot threads tied up, or deemed not important enough and left to die on the vine.

That's a pretty fair assessment, though I can't really remember what the big thing that happens in Book 9 was.
The same thing that happened in Books 8-11 is what Martin's going through with ASoIaF in Book 4 and 5.

Yes to the Spoiler. You have to admit that is pretty big. Also, The rest is pure, uncut, RJ faffing. Hence why I divided it.

I don't agree. 

The first six books were published in a 4.5 year time frame (1/1990 to 10/1994).  Its really obvious that the broad story is outlined to that point, right down to Dumai Wells, which seems to be the last major high quality set piece until book 9?  Quality is great through book 6, aside from the first two books very obviously being a bit more derivative/weaker with outs to wrap up the series as a trilogy.  I think for the fact that they were pushing out a huge book every year, and then moving to every two years later in the series, things held together pretty well. 

I also don't think there is that much filler.  The problem was that Jordan fucked up his story threads/timeline, and he needed to then burn 2 or 3 books to set the table for the finale.  Its really uninteresting, but it makes solid progress towards setting the stage for the finale.  "Filler" for me is something like that middle stretch of the Aubrey/Maturin novels were it was "Jack's broke!"/Go to sea/Major victory & wealth/Jack loses money/is arrested restart.  There were a couple empty storyines to keep characters busy while the rest caught up, but largely the overarching story was advancing well. 

Crossroads was terribly uninteresting, but it was the last batch of everyone catching up.  Generally, the fandom seemed to think that Knife of Dreams was back up in quality and then Sanderson took over.



I actually give Jordan a shitload more credit then Martin....  Martin is sitting at the same crossroads.  He already fucked up by not taking the time jump he wanted to, and his last two novels were attempts to move all the pieces into place for the grand finale but still having big issues and probably two more books before he can even think about the finale.  He'd rather let the series die.  See also Patrick Rothfuss.

Famous author starts tight series and it goes to bloated shit with timing, "editing", etc as it gets popular and prints money for publisher...

Blaming this on the editor being his wife is naive. This happens time and again to other authors too. Harry Potter the biggest example that springs to mind.

Those who have limited idea of how publishing works really don't understand the role of an editor that well, and blame it as a magic cure all for problems they have. But most of that comes from the author and publishing house decisions. Editors have a different role, and unless you have editors changing mid series (very rare) a reader is in no place to judge what their influence is. (Source, worked in publishing industry).

I know we're talking different mediums here but compare her editing of the Wheel of Time series to Marsha Lucas's editing of Star Wars. There is some very real evidence that the first Star Wars movie wasn't a monstrous disaster solely because Marsha Lucas edited the hell out of the movie. You can find Youtube videos that go into detail about how she fixed that movie. Hell, the entire 3rd act of that movie is only good because of her skill as an editor.

And then we have Wheel of Time which just narratively spins its wheels for thousands of pages. She may be a good editor and if she did the Black Company and Ender's Game then it is likely she is. But for some reason her work on the Wheel of Time is not that good. Perhaps she was too close to the material. Perhaps Robert just was overbearing and didn't listen to her. I don't know. But when books are released with entire chapters that do nothing for the on-going story and arguably an entire novel is written that does nothing for the plot of the series then you have to wonder what happened.

Considering her other work, my money is on the publisher and Robert Jordan not giving her much room to edit. But the fact is, the man needed someone to truly edit that shit down. Hundreds of pages could have been trimmed from the Wheel of Time and it would have immensely improved the series. I think why people get angry about it as you contend is that the series is so close to greatness but RJ lost control of the plot and just spun his wheels. Someone needed to tell him no but since people snapped up the books, no one ever did.

So even disregarding editing the content of an author, let's not forget this:


There is, or was, entire sections of Wot fan pages dedicated to, essentially, shit that Harriet missed. In the first book there used to be a scene that straight up happened twice because Jordan forgot he had it already, and Harriet missed it. They removed it in new prints around like 1997. Like, even if you are taking the story of Street Fighter and stretching it out into a Magnum Opus, it is the editors job to catch that shit.

Maybe she was an average editor, maybe they had poor production processes and older manuscripts got sent to print by mistake, maybe she was dealing with really shit material and there was so much shit to correct and the publisher wanted the money train to continue she couldn't keep up and skipped over issues. Maybe also she was a bit close to RJ and didn't push as hard as a result.

Not saying books can't have bad editing, just saying that the reason a book has issues isn't necessarily "editor was too close to the writer".

"Editor" as a role is also something that varies by publisher and industry. I don't think talking about Star Wars scripts really makes the comparison. Large concept and structural issues, rewrites, etc often comes in with the publisher-author (publisher being a role, not the publishing house) relationship, or not at all if the author is really hard to deal with/not open, etc. There's also a blurred line between publisher and editor in a number of places, with one person doing both roles, especially for high profile authors.

The fact that her other books, written by other authors, would suggest that is the case.

Maybe. Maybe those authors put in tighter manuscripts. Maybe they didn't sell as much and the publisher said "push this out by 6 months and fix it" rather than go "eh, good enough and we need the revenue". It's all speculation unless you've got some source.

The source is the books themselves. They are poorly edited. What happened to make them so is indeed speculation, but the speculation that doesn't require an insane amount of also speculative scenarios is that she was too light a touch when it came to her husband.

But wait, there is also a control writer for this series: Brandon Sanderson. His portions are far more polished than RJ's, what ever other flaws they have, and he was very communicative about how diligently she worked with him. So, either she worked as hard as she did with Jordan as she did with Sanderson (who also got those 3 books out within a year of each other, so not taking his time as opposed to rushed Jordan), and she still let a whole bunch of shit through. This doesn't happen on her other books though. Or, for some reason she was a very light touch on her husband's work.

Again, the main variable here is the author, not the editor. (Sanderson also seems to be very polite about how this TV series has been handled too). You want it to be one way though so, sure, make that your canon.

That's my point. If Orson Scott Card and Brandon Sanderson are handing in polished works and she's not needed, great. But Robert Jordan wasn't, and a more thorough eye was needed, which she didn't take. The alternative is, she's just not a good editor I guess. Weird that it's her husband's  work where that sticks out.

I think a case can be made that Sanderson handed her more polished manuscripts and that after RJ's death she was deeply invested in making those final books the best that they could be. I don't necessarily think she is a bad editor. I think the editing work done on the Wheel of Time series was bad.

I don't really agree with the history of fantasy writing laid out here--there were a lot of Tolkien-esque ripoffs coming at a pretty steady pace and WoT was just one of the last of them. I think oddly WoT killed them because it was both a better pastiche than Shannara or the Belgarion etc etc. and because it went on for so so so long that even people who liked it said "I'm ready for something different, finally". I mean, the Shannara books or Eddings' awful fucking shit had people who were big fans too, despite how bad they were.

The Covenant books are a complicated exception. I don't think they're good but they were trying to do something different. For one, they were a portal story (e.g, Covenant isn't of the high-fantasy world) and second they were giving us a portal-protagonist who was absolutely not a nice person and who could not really afford to *believe* that the story was really happening. The problem really is that Donaldson didn't know entirely where to go with that, so he just kept looping back to the starting premise. You either have to have Covenant's self-loathing become morally real in the Land and start to have emotional weight there to the people he's meeting and relating to, or what happens in the Land has to start affecting who he is back in the world. That's basic to portal stories--one or both of those have to happen, or otherwise it's just a really really really fucking interminably long Twilight Zone episode about a dream a guy is having, or a really really fucking long version of Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", where it's a dying/suffering person hallucinating as they die/suffer. The characters in the Land don't even really reflect or comment on Covenant's life in the real world much, so it's hard to take the idea that it's all a delusion very seriously.

Anyway, at least he wasn't just doing the usual shit. Sort of.

So to clarify, when I worked at the bookstore in the '90's, there really wasn't much fantasy that was moving. Tolkien sold, mostly the Hobbit because it had become required reading at schools around here. Shannara still sold but not in great numbers. Terry Goodkind's first book, Wizard's First Rule, had come out and was getting good reviews. Literally nothing else was selling in any memorable quantity, and what was on the shelf beyond those was mostly either Eddings, or D&D tie-in novels, which all sold fairly well (Dragonlance and Salvatore were big sellers in that line). And just about all of those sales were paperbacks. We were a decent sized mall bookstore (B. Dalton's which wasn't like the Waldenbooks store, we were one of the bigger stores in the mall). This was Summer-Christmas of 1993 and then Christmas 1994 - September 1995.

Jordan was moving HARDBACKS. Giant, Bible-sized hardcovers. He was moving them in boatloads. I can't think of one fantasy release during that time I worked there where we got more than say 1 or 2 hardcovers in inventory. We got BOXES of Lord of Chaos. We had people asking about that book a year before it was released. There simply wasn't anything in that time period in either fantasy or sci-fi that moved paper like that. For like 3-6 months after release, we couldn't keep them in stock more than a few days. Hell, he even released a hardcover that was some revolutionary war historical novel and it sold (though obviously not as well as WOT).

I'm assuming a lot but I'd guess that the fact his books were moving that kind of quantity is the reason the publisher let him continue with his wife as editor, even though anyone could see the quality was going downhill. Some writers really need good editors, even things that are considered literary masterpieces. One of my most profound memories of reading and learning about the craft of writing was reading Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel. An absolute amazing epic book that needed an editor so bad it actually hurt to read it.

WOT was a gravy train in the '90's and no one wanted it to stop, which is why the series ended up as it did.

Heh, just stumbled upon the (leaked) image of a certain character that will appear in the season finale. And no, it's not from Battlestar Galactica :P

Under spoiler just in case (can you see the pic?)

Is that LTT?

It kinda fits the canonical description of Rahvin.

There is a place entirely devoted to the show leaks, so I'll just let you discover that (not that it is that difficult to find :D).

Just this once, while we wait for the season finale, two leaks: one about the beginning of the episode

and toward the end

Ohhhhhhh I can't wait to see how they do the Seanchan accent, which is supposed to be a Southern style drawl. Really looking forward to Dale Gribble, of the Blood.

I read a lot of crap. I'm currently reading an RPG-lit Kindle Library series of 18 novels that is just a bare inch from being furry porn (the protagonist and some of his harem are weres, and it doesn't dwell on what form they are in when they fuck). I put down Path of Daggers halfway through and I am resolutely refusing to read further. I have literally never stopped reading anything else halfway through a book.

WoT went to absolute shit, and Robert Jordon and his editor shit the bed. If the TV showrunner is shitting in his skull? Good.

--Dave

Don't stop there. Tell us more.

 :why_so_serious:

Lots of episode 8 promotional stills from Amazon press site. A couple stand out (spoilers if you prefer to wait for the broadcast):

He's definitely not Voldemort, ok:

WTF  :ye_gods:

Nice that the Guald from Stargate are getting work.

Who's the top guy? Ishamael? Or one of the mook Forsaken in the Eye?

Might be, but in this turning of the Wheel he's just a guy strolling in the Blight while he tries to sell one of his jackets to casual visitors; or some magician from "The Prestige", I don't know.

Looks like a James Bond thug, but not one of the generic ones. Like a mid tier boss thug.

Valen Legacy (not Heritage, which was an aborted version that stopped at the second book). The series of trilogies that launches with The Selfless Hero trilogy is good pulp (Warren D. Arrand and Randi Darren are the same person, the ones that headline Darren have much more explicit sex scenes).

--Dave

The Thomas Covenant books had two real problems from a reader's perspective.

First, most readers rejected the "is this real or not" thing outright. Portal fantasies aren't exactly uncommon, and readers seem to be "Yes, this magical place is REAL" and just reject the St. Elsewhere "it's all a dream" stuff. Which really cut against one of the two major themes of the book, which is that you will never be able to tell if it's real or delusion. He always leaves in the same exact shape he entered. Readers were supposed to treat it as real and delusion at the same time, mirroring Covenant's own inability to tell.

They didn't. Perhaps another author could have pulled it off and had more readers buy into the whole quantum "real and not real" setup but that's not how it worked.

Which goes right into the rape moment. Because here's the thing -- if it's all in his head, that means everything is in his head -- including the Satan allegory. Which ties into the second major theme -- Donaldson was trying for a King is the Land/Land is the King vibe. It's all through the books -- the leader shapes the land and the land reflects the leader. And this applies to Covenant, to keep the whole "real or not" vibe. He's potentially the creator of this place, all taking place in his head. Which means he's got to be capable of good and evil. Which means the Satan-guy (Lord Foul? Something really on the nose like that) comes from Covenant too. he's the good guys and the bad guys. All from his head. Otherwise, you...come to the realization he place is real.

Which Donaldson promptly shows.  Covenant rejects the reality of the place, promptly rage-rapes a girl in an epic act of fucked up denial, and then immediately regrets it and wonders if it's real.

Again, another author probably could have pulled it off in a far less jarring way, showing Covenant can be good or evil and has to actively choose to be one, because the world is good and evil and it's not sure whether it's real or not.

The better part of the series is the way each book basically shows things getting worse, because Covenant won't own up to his original sin. He raped the girl, and keeps trying to...make amends but not own up to it, self-flagellating and trying to "make up for it" but without really facing the fact that he did it. It's always excuses -- he doesn't think it's real, he was out of his mind because he was suddenly healed, whatever.

So each time he tries to "make it right" it just fucks it up more, because he's not basically accepting his own sin. He's still trying to at least partially excuse it.

I mean as a general concept, it's all really clever. But you can see it was a very early book for an author that was probably never, even at his best, able to pull it off. It's got an Arthurian Land/King thing, it's built around a central paradox he keeps tying into everything, he brings in basically original sin and makes the very unlikeable protagonist into this central figure who is both helpless and directly responsible for basically sin itself and the fucked up world, and to add into it -- he makes the world so detailed, so vivid, with such memorable loveable characters that it really highlights what a fucked up guy Covenant is. And you can see it in the characterization -- Covenant truly does love and admire people he doesn't believe are real, without ever realizing that by denying their reality he's also saying "These are facets of me, maybe I do have redeeming qualities".

I guess that's why I still think about it (I never read the last books). It's because he put together this fascinating, clever, great setting and conceit that holds up despite his myriad flaws as an author.

Ya it was "Lord Foul, the Despiser," who was the big bad in the novels.

And ya I read the first of the sequel novels, and it was a great book becasue of all the great characters he meets... apart from Covenant, who is STILL fucking around with his "is it real or not" bullshit, EVEN THOUGH THERE IS ANOTHER PERSON FROM OUR WORLD WITH HIM NOW.

Dude, for fuck sake, give it a goddam rest. And the thing is, even though he still has this guilt trip unbelief in his head when he is thinking to himself, he is acting like the world is real, so the reader is asked to believe in this stuff even when he is hurting himself to save other people. Covenant is not a believable character in the second story even if you stretch into believing him in the first story. He behaves like the world is real, end of, whatever he says. The writer should have just accepted that Covenant had come to accept what he had done in the years between the story and let that be an end of it.

So I didn't bother reading the rest of the second trilogy. You are pretty much spot on in everything you just said.

No, look, most readers completely got it. It just wasn't good.

If you want a portal fantasy that really messes around with the premise and is good, Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania is a good one to read.

It's been a long time since I read it but to my memory it's a rare case of a sequel trilogy being superior. Partially because that other character becomes more important and she is a much more likeable person than Thomas Covenant was.

Edit: And looking it up, I just found out there is a third trilogy in the series that just came out a few years ago. Wow. I had no idea.

Huh. Ya. In that case maybe I should chase down and finish the second Trilogy, because there really was a lot of good stuff in that first book.

TIL that there's a literary term for isekai anime.

Uuuh, ok so...I guess that season finale was a good enough piece of fan fiction  :why_so_serious:

It's out already?

Yep, at least here in central europe (went up at 1am CET, now it's 2.34am)
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I mean, the writers of this show are incredibly awful, everything is rushed because of the limited amount of episodes....But I'm in for the ride: I imagine the cold opening was quite intriguing for non-readers, same for the last scene.  

As a book reader, well....very controversial choices, and some of the events don't really make sense (Egwene and Nynaeve most of all).


But hey, I want to see Elayne and Aviendha having a bath together, so I don't care.

Wait, did I really say that?

Joking aside, there is a lot of interesting ground to cover in the following books: maybe the people involved in the show will somehow become competent at their job and give us more coherent and better written scenes.

It comes out 12am Friday GMT.

Ok I might be out after this season. Not only are we they diverging super duper hardcore from the books, but holy shit that cgi  was like 1990s Xena and Hercules tier bad.

Dude. WTF is this garbage.

It's fucking bad. Then, at the end, it gets worse.

Everything is rushed because they're dogshit writers and even worse at adapting.

Will they get better? Umm, no. Noting that I haven't seen this episode and probably won't.

Having not read the books, I don't know that it's fan fiction. I'm being put into a very fleshed-out fantasy world and an intriguing story keeps unfolding, so I want more.

Having read the books I am still loving it as apart from the worldbuilding the books are mostly ass and should be changed.

I didn't hate it (but again, bottom of the barrel expectations). They made a lot of weird changes though, that are going to fuck up where everything was going, going forward. Full on new-story-in-preexisting-world territory. It's not clear if Rand actually killed Ishamael there or not. I'm assuming that was one of the Dark One's prison seals that broke, even though I always imagined them much smaller. How Padan Fain got the Shadar Logoth dagger was probably my biggest "that doesn't make any fucking sense" moment; presumably Moiraine would have kept it on her, if she did not stash it somewhere in Tar Valon. There's no world where she would have left it in her room in Fal Dara. Loial being dead is a big change, unless he's just grievously wounded. Agelmar also did not die in the books.

All my previous little niggles are now like criticizing some sailor missing a spot on the floor of the HMS Hood, as it's magazines are about to explode. For those that don't read the books, it would be like if the GoT TV show decided not to kill of Ned Stark, and Khal Drogo never bought Daenerys because he didn't beleive in the sex trade. Whatever we might think of the changes, it is going to diverge from the source material rapidly. Which means I have to judge the show on it's own merits. It's absolute gob shiite. The effects are trash, I dont know any of the characters, and I absolutely HATE how the women channeling looks so video gamey. Like their spells all have little cast bars beneath them, while they do their ridiculous gestures. In the books, such gestures were minimal, and done for a quick reference. Here, they look like a 9th grade drama student was told to act like a wizard.

There are ways to do things like this right. In the LotR movies, they up jacked Arwen's character to be more involved in the action. Good change. They did not have her say "fuck these stupid Willow wannabes" and have her take the ring to Mordor, then have Aragorn turn to the shadow just because. This series is more in The Hobbit movie level of changes. And wait wait wait. They are changing shit from the books, but they aren't adding in sex and nudity?


Also Moraine being stilled. Even so her bond with Lan would have still worked, not that these writers give a shit about that. Oh, and if Egwene can up and heal Nynaeve of Little Boy just detonated above her level wounds, why the fuck does she need the White Tower? And why did the Seanchan tidal wave an empty beach and hillside, with just that one little girl on it? Forget that it's not what the Seanchan would do in the books, that just makes no sense.


Ah cmon man, you have to watch for this dogshit CGI!

I assume Nynaeve will fix the stilling much sooner than she discovers how in the books.

Also loved the actor they got to play Ishamael. He looks better than he did in my head. Don't love how he is dressed like he got caught in the bore halfway through dressing for his daughter's quinceanera.

You know, it's even not so much about the changes:

- I can accept Moiraine getting stilled, considering that in the following books she acts more like an advisor (a bad and desperate one at that) to Rand. Big deal: we'll have a Siuan/Moiraine dynamic (much earlier than in the books, Siuan will get stilled next season, IMO) instead of the book Siuan/Leane ;

- Getting rid of the last chapters at the Eye and changing them: ok, fine, also the actor portraying Ishamael is good, I don't care for those minor Forsaken ;

- Sanderson recently spoke about not being able to really give advice on episode 7 & 8 because of the COVID break; also, some changes had to be done because of Barney Harris sudden departure. Perrin with Uno & gang chasing Padan Fain? Not that earth-shattering change, considering the circumstances (hopefully Mat will eventually go to Rhuidean and start being Mat, you know) ;

Loial is alive, Judkins confirmed that in an interview published today ;

- Rand not being at Tarwin's Gap? Ok, fine, he will have his highlights if those fuckers will actually decide to take the books into consideration ;

- Prologue and last scene were fine with me.
----------

Total and utter dislike for the portrayal of Lan, Egwene and Nynaeve and also the decisions about Agelmar and Amalisa.

But the real problem, again, is dialogues and pace: fine, George Martin had TV experience and also wrote dialogues similar to a "theatrical" play, so they read and look elegant both on paper and are easily translated to TV. Jordan was a different writer.

But that doesn't mean dialogues and pace should look like an amateurish D&D module played by a 12 year old DM.

Without even resorting to the books, there is a scene in the episode where Nynaeve mentions she knows how to track Moirane, 'she has a tell'. This would have to be something that her companion of multiple decades, who shares a platonic bath with her when the situation calls for it,  and who's very job it is to know these things and account for them, is unaware of. Okay tv writers, what is? Don't just have Nynaeve teach Lan this offscreen (telling), have a quick scene where she mentions it (showing). Maybe it turns out that Moirane is a chain smoker and leaves butts everywhere, and Lan you self absorbed asshole, you never noticed, Maybe she has a super heavy bootprint, and you never looked down you dunce. But no, the show is either too insecure we will think thier reason is dumb, too lazy to actually come up with an explanation, too much in a rush to bother with a nice scene of specific character building, or all of the above. Taken by itself, these scene would have been whatever. But I think it is emblematic of how this show's creators are botching it, even after I remove any and all comparisons to the books from my thinking.

Kind of my reaction. Eye of the World was the best, most coherent book of the ones I read in the series. That they turned it into... whatever the fuck this was is not a good sign. The Rand bits were the only thing worth a shit right up until he channels, and then the whole thing went to utter shit. I'm still trying to figure out why you even bother to put the Wheel of Time name on it if you're just going to write whatever weird story you want.

EDIT: The "Moiraine has a tell thing" was both silly and completely unnecessary. Lan doesn't actually DO anything with the knowledge, he makes it there after everything is over and serves literally no function in any of the action. He should at least have been fighting at the gate, and after it's all over, Moiraine comes wandering disheveled out of the Blight and then she tells him she's stilled. This was just... why? Most of their story choices just serve no real purpose but they sure do eat up a lot of screen time that could have been used on more important things. Like maybe explaining why the Dark One is so hated.

And holy shit, Lews Therin Telamon lived in the Dune universe? Because that's what it looked like.

By dint of being in this universe, yes, yes he did. I don't know how far you read, but Dune was Jordan's largest influence on the series as a whole. To a bit of a rip offey degree. Right down to the in universe quotations to start the books sounding like they came straight from Princess Irulan.

I thought it was rather fun. I will watch more bc I'm intrigued.

Same, final episode didn't knock it out of the park or anything but it was good enough to keep watching. The only thing that annoyed me was calling Lews Therin dragon reborn instead of dragon.

Once the Aiel were introduced I remember thinking to myself. "Is he going to get sued by the Herbert estate? This isn't even subtle..."

I do like how the writers have carved out a lot of stuff from the books, because I think most of it wouldn't translate to TV.  Overall, I enjoyed it.  Looking forward to season 2.

Wut?

Like, seriously, I almost literally can not think of anything in the first book that wouldn't have translated almost perfectly to TV, and very little would have needed to be cut at all even for the sake of cramming it into a decent shorter season length.  You could have done almost the entire first book, without skipping or cutting anything, in a well written 12 episode series, and absolutely minimal changes would have been needed.

Instead we got this abomination of character butchery and frankenstein's monster of plot rewrites.

I enjoyed the first book, but stuff like Rand and Matt walking from town to town for a month as they made their way to Tar Valon isn't going to have enough action in it  for a new TV series that has to wow viewers to make it to season 2.  That's just the reality of the internet age.

You're remembering the book wrong. There's a bunch of stuff to cut there, but enough excitement still.

More than there is the stuff they made up, too.

It's true, but you also have to remember that the Showrunners don't get to do whatever they want.  Amazon reportedly upped the budget for Season 2, but I can imagine that they only had enough money for 8 episodes and needed a big ending.

You could do that in a couple minute montage scene and lose nothing, while still giving people a good impression of what the countryside looks like, how various people reacted to strangers and the like.   Show them sometimes being welcomed with friendly reception, sometimes being run off by armed family, etc, etc.   The books actually used that time to set up some of the political atmosphere and uncertainty that was starting to build in the area.

Also, just to clarify: they were walking to Caemlyn.  They don't even get to Tar Valon until the second book.

As a whole group they never made it to Tar Valon. Eg and Nynaeve go there in 2, Matt in 3. And thats about it.

They didn't even have a "big" ending though. That great battle looked like it was taking place in a hallway and even the CGIed monsters didn't look like there were more than 20 of them at a time. They really need to learn proper battle staging from GoT.

My wife and I were straight up laughing at the Trolloc 'army'. I've seen more people assault Stormwind than that.

This popped up in my feed today. Rafe is the showrunner, and it turns out the plan from the start was to diverge from the Books with the full understanding that the hardcore book fans wouldn't like it.

https://twitter.com/TheWheelOfTime/status/1474093697885220871/photo/1

So I guess the message is something like 'If you read the books and really know the lore, we didn't make the show for you intentionally because we are gambling on attracting a different audience."  I can respect that.

Ok I'll write a lot more about this later, but for now I'll start with this: before the first episode aired he did a very popular AMA with the fans bragging about how well he knew the books, declaring how much respect he had for the source material, and assuaged fears of, well, exactly what happened. Now, he is bragging about how next to no one on his writing staff has read so much as a summary blurb about the series, and about how much better he can do than RJ

If it was the plan all along to heavily diverge from the series, then he didn't have the mother fucking guts to say so when asked before things started. The more I look into the show runner the more I see what an entitled hack, and asshole to any fans of the material he claims to be adapting, including the woman he hired as a WoT consultant.

Dude is just reconning his own story to make himself seem less incompetent.

I kind of doubt they attracted some other audience.

Ya the bull and shit are swirling around those statements.

It's a great question.  The only thing I found in 20 seconds of googling is a Reddit post.  Assuming it's 100% accurate  :oh_i_see: , the show has vastly exceeded Amazon's expectation at 15 to 20 million viewers per week and we should get at least a season 3.

First episode did seem to have gotten a lot of viewers; I just find it hard to believe it retained them all the way to the end.

Especially without the generous amounts of T&A that graced the early seasons of Game of Thrones.

I am morally offended by a show that choses to show extreme closeups of gory injuries but will not show a single titty.

They probably blew their entire budget for Tits on season 2 and the Aiel.   I mean, it's going to be comical seeing how completely they butcher that entire culture given there is no way they can present them like they are in the books and keep the show at it's current tame rating.  The Aiel were gratuitous nudity everywhere.

They showed an extra's boob or two in the bath scene.

"There's 57 tits out there!"

There's at least 2 complete boobs in the writer's room.  :why_so_serious:

If this survives 3 seasons I'll pick it up or until I read the books and only one guy I know kinda sold me on the series but it didn't feel like a must read "right now".

My theory is this show gets supported until Jeffery's shiny new 500 million dollar toy LotR show gets rolling, then it gets quietly dropped.

I'm hoping for 4 seasons.  5 seasons would be ok, but anymore than that is usually synonymous with the show creators and actors wanting to move on to something else and the quality goes to hell.

*watches as this turns into the Simpsons and never ends*

The wheel of time turns and ages come and pass leaving mediocre books that turn into mediocre tv shows and even those are long forgotten when a new shiny tv show comes along.

Until the Bezos Reborn appears again, able to channel The One Budget, and remakes the world.

I think the Bezos is somebody else in this whole saga. Rhymes with "Fark Gun".

The show wouldn't exist without Bezos asking of his executives: "Where's my Game of Thrones?" (I'm not making that up either), so whatever else he is to us, he deserves a high place in this shows cosmology.

He's supposedly not running Amazon anymore.  Supposedly.

He saved the Expanse too.

Well at least we have identified the successor to Uwe Boll

I had a similar shower thought, the last episode felt like Uwe Boll's Wheel of Time. This last episode was a lay up. The timeline and activities layed out in the book would have still worked with all of the nonsense they had already baked in. Instead it just felt like they ad libbed the entire thing. You could have ended up with a lot of cool shit, but instead you have Egwene and Nynaeve the batteries, Perrin the useless, Morraine the useless and now even more useless, Shienar getting stomped, and Rand still being an ineffective and somewhat powerless, whiny moron. Seriously, him travelling and chunking the trollocs would have been awesone. Additionally, they fumbled the Forsaken introduction and the seals.

Plus the Seanchan are now dumb. Way to alpha strike an 8 year old.

To be slightly fair, the last two episodes apparently got messed up because of the covid gap.  Even ignoring losing Matt unexpectedly, I guess they weren't able to get locations and shit they originally wanted, so had to adjust.  But having said that, I'm sure it would still be shit on a shingle.

This whole thing is a mess.  Last episode killed any hope that I had.  Getting 82% on RT is just a damning indictment of the general critics they pick up considering how badly acted and edited this whole thing was.  Though it's telling if you switch it to Top Critic filter and it drops to a hard Rotten score.

The acting was above my minimum acceptance criteria (which ain't all that high).  I can forgive the casting and the sets/camera work is good enough to not flop this show by themselves but I seriously hope the director never gets hired for anything more serious than a commercial ever again and the writers can join him.  I could story board a better season 1 than this, whoever put these idiots in charge and gave them the green light should be fired.  If Jordan was alive I don't think he would have let this happen as such these guys just shit all over a dead man.

Seriously? Jordan himself had no fucking sense of how to control his own series, he would have just counted the money (or his wife would have) and said whatever, go ahead. Not saying that this season was in any way good, but let's not fool ourselves about the quality of the source material. Eye of the World is only narratively tight because it's the book that is most ripping-off other work.

Pushes up glasses, achktually, Jordan was ambivalent at best, and somewhat hostile to his work being adopted to film or TV.


While the first part of the sentence is true, I dont think the second part is even remotely fair. As you can see, I have several issues with the series, it's writing, and its author, but let's get one thing straight, he cared about WoT quite a bit. When he was diagnosed with amyloidosis in late 2005 he could have just brought the series with him to the grave. He could have let it gone fallow, and not given a shit who picked it up after his death. But he took a lot of time out between sucking down rads to write insanely detailed notes to make sure his successor finished his series how he intended. I really dont think he would have sat there while someone rewrote all his characters to suit their own agendas, right from the start.

Mid-to-late '90's Jordan, who was happily stretching out a 5-part series into this monstrosity would have had no problem cashing the check GRRM style. Once he got a look at what his legacy would be if he died without finishing the series, probably less so. Impending death has a way of focusing a motherfucker.

I disagree. It's right there in Khalduns statement.


The reason he couldn't control the length of his series is because he fell waaaaaaay too in love with his own characters and world, to the point where none of it could be pruned. See also: Our debate about Harriet as Editor. That's why he started adding in POVs from people that reasonable people didn't care the fuck less about. And for those that had the official compendium released after his death, he had an excruciating and very neck beardy ranking of every single One Power user, woman or man, to ever exist in the series. He would have flipped out at someone casting a 6'1" Perrin instead of a 6'2" Perrin louder than any fan.

Yea I'm with Ashaman; he would have micromanaged the project to death, and there's a decent chance it just would have been scrapped as no showrunner would want to put up with him.

Pretty sure that corresponded with him replacing his editor with his wife (or was that yet another doorstop fantasy writer?). Anyways definitely fell into the "Too big to edit" level of sucess.

A good editor is important, and one of their jobs is to take a ax to your book and chop out vast swathes of useless bloat. Characters, plots, plot threads, ideas, hooks, places, everything. Chop, chop, chop down to something more minimalist.

So either this asshole is retconning to try to make himself look slightly less incompetent, or the person who greenlit his take on the project should be sentenced to a death of re-reading book 10 over and over until they grow a braid long enough to tug around their own neck and hang themselves.

I did all my ranting in Discord while this debacle was playing out, but let's just say I am not a fan. And I am especially pissed since it made me start re-reading the books. I am near the end of Book 5 now and I can see the slog coming at me in slow motion. It is horrifying.

I am looking forward to re-reading the Sanderson bits though. I feel like I rushed through those the first time around just so I could get a resolution to the thing after all these years. Now I can take my time and noodle about all the stuff from 10 books back coming to fruition.

What I'm trying to say is that I can respect a showrunner's methods and goals, even if I think the product blows.  Chris Chibnall's disaster as the Dr Who showrunner for example.  It's been a disaster, but he set out to make Dr. Who a progressive show that reflects modern liberal values and he's owned that vision in every interview.

He's only saying this after the fact. It's great that you have so much respect for BS excuses though.

True, I really have no way to know if he's sincere or not. 

Sincere or not, the idea of buying a well known IP and then changing 90% of it is idiotic. Why piss away a pre-made audience? Why not just just create your own IP  (answer of course, is that you are a hack)?

Marketing.  It's hard to build an IP from scratch.  It's also easier to get backing from studios when it's an IP that the executives are familiar with.

It's kind of bad marketing when you end up making something that the people who know the IP you bought really dislike. "Let's buy a brand name that folks feel some affection for so they'll buy the new product, but let's make sure to turn it into something completely different", said no successful consumer products executive ever.

WOT is not some untouchable masterpiece, other than the world building a lot of it is complete trash. Changing significant parts of it was a given.

The goal of the marketing department is to get you to watch the first episode.   After that, it's not their problem anymore :) 

Exactly. This isn't like buying Lord of the Rings or Dune or some other masterpiece (depending on your tastes!) and changing it all up. This is WOT. It's a series that is a showcase for why authors need editors who aren't afraid to take a red pen to large chunks of books if needed.

This is exactly what happened with World War Z; the movie would have been fine, if they had called it Brad Pitt: Zombies or literally anything else.

This is the basic point: if you're going to make something so much better than the source material, then why buy the source material in the first place? Just make something better. If you're buying the source material because it draws in people who like the source material, presumably they don't care very much about the problems of the original.

I grant you there are wonderful works that just don't adapt well without some dramatic decision about how to make them move into another medium--the novel Under the Volcano, for example, is unfilmable if you don't think about a way to do it other than how the novel does it; but there's a film and it's pretty good because it did that. But it's also recognizable if you've read the novel and liked it.

They could have just called it "Blah Blah Blah: A Wheel of Time story", but once you name main characters Rand, Matrim, and Perrin and start the whole thing off like the actual books: you should probably try to follow the books narrative high points. Or you're just a dick and/or hack.

They could have ended up pretty close to getting it right, but then they just shit the bed with that last episode. I don't see how they can even finish the series without it just looking like some sort of cheap knock off and cutting a ton of corners due to how miniscule it looks like their budget is. I can't wait to see how scuffed the entire Aiel are going to be. It should be epic.

They could, at the very least, stop hiring ugly people to play attractive people. I've never seen this happen in any sort of media before. It's usually a "fucking hell this model can't act worth shit", but now it's the same but with a square jawed Liandrin. GAH.

I'm at book 12 in my reread. The Sanderson flow is palpable and much appreciated.

Why did you have to restart this after my blood pressure had simmered down?


Why even adapt the IP then? Now I know why a publisher would do it (money), but why would a writer, director, etc do it if they intend to change so much of it substantially. And the only thing I can think of is intellectual cowardice, or at least entitlement. Rather than make your work that you feel would tell this story better, and risk it being (according to its creators at least) under appreciated, why not have big daddy Amazon buy a popular IP with established fans and force the work to suit your view instead of its creators intent?

It's funny because Amazon's other giant fantasy purchase for adaption purposes, the Lord of the Rings one, does it so much better. Why? Because it's a spin off. It's an extrapolation of things that might have happened given the vague parameters set out by its creator. It has to, in some capacity, have Sauron, the multiple rings of power, and depending on where you set it, local inhabitants i.e. Numenoreans, Elves either Noldor remnants or Sindarin, Dwarves. What they did not do was buy the LoTR novels (or the Hobbit, fuck you very much Peter Jackson), with it's already existing characters, world politics, national forces, all complete with the motives and ideals that led them to make the decisions they did in the books, and change it whole hog to suit their new needs. Because that wouldn't be an adaption, that would be fan fiction.