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On "Wokeness" and the Wheel of Time - Be Thoughtful in Responding

Elder_Haman

By Elder_Haman
in Wheel of Time TV Show

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Katherine Enthusiast

Katherine

Posted
Posted
7 minutes ago, Flamen said:

As expected WOT tv show will be radical "Woke"

 

Judkins: I think—well, I can’t tell you all of them, but in the books, there’s an idea that if you’re born as a man in one life, you’d be born as a man in the next life in the show. We’re not doing that. We’re approaching it as you are a soul and you move through different bodies through whatever life that you’re in. So that’s one. It’s a very fundamental change actually to make to the book series, and it has a lot of ripple effects, and we’ll continue to do things like that I think are more reflective of what hopefully Robert Jordan would be writing if he was writing today.

No. No. NO .NO. NOOOOOOOO. 

 

I do not like it. 

At all. 

Nope. 

 

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BeTheBud
BeTheBud

I'd just like to hop in and say how much I appreciate the fact that I can find a thoughtful, ongoing discussion about this. I mostly used Reddit before discovering these forums, but this thread might

Tim
Tim

I guess the perspective I come to with this is:   1. From the moment I learned that WOT was being made into a TV show I assumed that it would be very different to the books, due to a variety of

MasterAblar
MasterAblar

Hey man Tam was dealing with Narg, that ain’t no joke. All Nyneave had to deal with was some chump.

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SinisterDeath Spam Master

SinisterDeath

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Posted
1 minute ago, MasterAblar said:

She checks his natural skin but she wouldn't have too if Two River people were so dark that its unlikely someone who tans would get that dark. So they're darker than his natural skin, but also not super dark. How dark? Who knows (and who cares honestly).

And yet every person of color cast isn't anywhere near the blackest person we've ever seen, right? When we see them all standing next to each other, they're all light skinned compared to say... Chadwick boseman or Jonathan Majors. 

Lurker_Fan Newbie

Lurker_Fan

Posted
Posted
Just now, DaddyFinn said:

I'm sure he has not read any of them. 

 

Amaresu.

Supposedly he was a huge fan of the books growing up. And Amaresu wasn't the Dragon. Rather, a separate savior.

Rose Community Regular

Rose

Posted
Posted (edited)
46 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

It's not pedantic. It's proof of how shallow the fixation on skin color is. It doesn't matter whether actors match the description in the books as long as they remain true to the other things that make the character tick.

 

Casting a dark skinned Egwene is fine. Casting a light skinned Tuon would be equally fine. 

 

The funniest thing to me in all this is that Madeleine Madden is really not that dark-skinned. She's actually light-skinned by many standards. It all boils down to what your default is and what you're comparing to.

 

And yes, most Egwene fanart depicts her as having lighter skin than the actress. Why? Because we have been conditioned by decades of Eurocentric fantasy to default to white when we picture characters. This isn't even an issue of "you naturally imagine book characters to look like you." It's "it doesn't even occur to me to picture a major protagonist in a fantasy novel as anything other than white." Even if I'm not white myself. It doesn't matter. When I pick up an American or European fantasy novel, I automatically expect most characters will be white, and I only picture them otherwise if explicitly and repeatedly directed to.

 

I'd argue this is one reason why it's so great that they cast non-white actors for a lot of the WoT main cast. Because our brains need exposure to diversity, and lots of it, to slowly decondition themselves and stop limiting their imagination to all-white fantasy stories.

Edited by Rose
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Elder_Haman Mentor

Elder_Haman

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18 minutes ago, Flamen said:

As expected WOT tv show will be radical "Woke"

 

Judkins: I think—well, I can’t tell you all of them, but in the books, there’s an idea that if you’re born as a man in one life, you’d be born as a man in the next life in the show. We’re not doing that. We’re approaching it as you are a soul and you move through different bodies through whatever life that you’re in. So that’s one. It’s a very fundamental change actually to make to the book series, and it has a lot of ripple effects, and we’ll continue to do things like that I think are more reflective of what hopefully Robert Jordan would be writing if he was writing today.

Yeah, I don't like this at all. Still gonna watch.

notpropaganda73 Enthusiast

notpropaganda73

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, swollymammoth said:

I again point to fan art for a representation of what most people thought Egwene looked like casting announcement. 

 

Then there's the gaslighting. Like, are people not allowed to have an opinion? Am I only allowed to have opinions on set design and costuming or casting so long as it's Rand or Perrin or Mat or one of the other white characters, but the second it comes to the non-white characters it's off limits? 

 

The obsession with Egwene's casting is rooted entirely in the rabid, defensive response to any suggestion that Madeline Madden doesn't look like Egwene. 

 

I don't like Lan's casting. He's leaner than I imagined. No one cares. But the second I'm like, "Egwene is way darker skinned than I imagined" people just fly off the handle. 

 

Honestly, I'm not trying to gaslight you in this discussion. Everything is up for a discussion, but what the casting *means* is where we disagree. I don't think skin colour has anything to do with the characters in the Wheel of Time, skin colour is not a major feature of the books, cultural differences and any sort of racism from our world as *we* know it is not transferrable to WoT - so casting a white actress as Tuon, or Egwene's casting, is not relevant to the *character's story or arc* because skin colour is not something they have to deal with in the confines of the WoT narrative. Do you see where I'm coming from? 

 

It seems to me that you are taking the casting as an indication that the entire production is pushing some sort of agenda (correct me if I'm wrong). I just think that's a massive leap to take, that's all. 

 

"The obsession with Egwene's casting is rooted entirely in the rabid, defensive response to any suggestion that Madeline Madden doesn't look like Egwene. "

 

I hope you're not characterising my responses as rabid because I've been anything but.  "Madeline Madden doesn't look like Egwene" is entirely subjective. Rosamund Pike looks *nothing* like how I have pictured Moiraine in my mind, but so what? Her looks had very little to do with her character. 

Katherine Enthusiast

Katherine

Posted
Posted

He basically says that HUGE changes to the ENTIRE SYSTEM are good things even though they have extensive ripple effects. 

 

This is TERRIBLE news to me. Changes for the tv sphere.... fine. 

 

This is change for changes sake. 

 

UGH. 

 

This changes the entire series in SUCH a jarring way. 

Beidomon Collaborator

Beidomon

Posted
Posted
Quote

io9: The fundamental premise of the Wheel of Time is based so much on binary genders, with the all-female Aes Sedai, the male Dragons, the gendered sides of the One Power. How are you updating that for 2021, when gender identity and gender equity are so important?

 

Judkins: I think what’s exciting about [the Wheel of Time TV series] and what was exciting about [the books] in the ‘90s is that they opened up a conversation about gender and how gender is represented in all of these different cultures within the world of Wheel of Time. Because it’s not just one way you see a lot of different representations of gender, you see things that are more binary and less binary. I think that we have to lean into that in the show and continue to explore what gender means for these characters in as fresh of a context today [what the hell does this even mean?!] as Robert Jordan was working in in the ‘90s. He was pushing the envelope a lot for the genre at the time and I think we need to do the same today.

 

io9: What are some ways that you’ll be doing that on the show?

 

Judkins: I think—well, I can’t tell you all of them, but in the books, there’s an idea that if you’re born as a man in one life, you’d be born as a man in the next life in the show. We’re not doing that. We’re approaching it as you are a soul and you move through different bodies through whatever life that you’re in. So that’s one. It’s a very fundamental change actually to make to the book series, and it has a lot of ripple effects [NO SH*T], and we’ll continue to do things like that I think are more reflective of what hopefully Robert Jordan would be writing if he was writing today.

 

io9: Speaking of, the show’s seemingly biggest change from the books is the revelation that a female character could be a potential Dragon Reborn, whereas in the books the Dragon is exclusively male.

 

Judkins: I think the idea that the Dragon Reborn doesn’t necessarily need to only be a male character, that’s really important {NO SH*T]. We see that play out in a number of different ways through the season. Also, as we learn, some of the Dragons of the past were women. How was that different? How did that affect the world? So that one change that we’ve made, it really does flutter through the whole series [NO SH*T]. I think it’s good to make changes like that and to put them in the show, even if it does have those effects [NO RAFE - EFF YOU].

 

Dammit dammit dammit. Dammit. Wheel of Woke. Hell with this.

Arthellion Apprentice

Arthellion

Posted
Posted

Just quoting myself from other thread here since this seems place to talk about it:

 

I don't like the change and think it really undermines some of the key tensions that exists in the story. Makes me worried that Rafe really doesn't underestand what I consider to be the heart of the tension in Wheel of Time.


Doesn't mean it won't be a good show, but hate that the gender essentialism is basically removed.

king of nowhere Community Regular

king of nowhere

Posted
Posted

if the bigger change is that there have been dragon women in the past, it's still a small change. doesn't make any difference in the actual story, and the change to worldbuilding is slight.

 

and really, while there are real reasons for concern about woke nonsense, and i don't like how everyone criticizing stuff is accused of being bigot and stuff....

when there are people who just start swearing about woke right and left at the sligthest mention of anything, it's kinda hard to not envision them as bigots.

king of nowhere Community Regular

king of nowhere

Posted
Posted (edited)
4 minutes ago, Beidomon said:

The irony (is that the right word) is that @Elder_Haman started a thread questioning our woke concerns, and those concerns have been verified in twenty foot tall letters less than 24hrs later. 

actually, that kind of stuff (that wot was feminist for its time, and he would be trying to update that) has already been stated in interviews years ago. it's really nothing new.

 

And if that's enough to disparage the show as a woke fest, then yes, you are bigots.

Edited by king of nowhere
Ralph Community Regular

Ralph

Posted
Posted

Or to put it differently, yes this changes a lot in the lore, and it is based on what the show runner and probably his team believe, or what they believe the potential audience will find palatable. 

 

However, it is what I assumed as soon as they said the Dragon could be a girl, and I really don't see why anyone sees that as a fundamental change to the story. 

 

Would I have preferred they had not changed this? Maybe

 

Do I believe that means the story will be a sermon? Absolutely not

 

Therefore I can swallow it and move on. 

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