Interviews and News Articles

[Skipp]

11 hours ago, expat said:

The whole Selene subplot is him acting childish.  She just magically appears in a location requiring channel to get there, appears and disappears at will, always pushing him against his better instincts etc.  Yet his POVs shows that he never even entertains that thought that anything might be wrong about the situation and that she might not be what she seems.  This is after he has multiple battles with darkfriends and knows that at least some of the Forsaken are loose.  There is a place for innocence, but completely turning your brain off when you are the DR? 

I personally found the way he pushed Mat and Perrin away to be his childish moment.  I understand wanting to protect them but Rands "What if I like being called a Lord..." response to Mat just didn't do it to me.

 

He could have told them the truth and just walked away but then again 90% of WoT is people being unable to communicate.

[EmreY]

2 hours ago, Pandemonium said:

Rand is a young man and Selene is the hottest woman on the planet.  People are expecting logical decisions?

 

At 16-20 my mind would inevitably have wandered off in a certain direction, but that does not mean I would necessarily have taken instruction from someone just because they were hot.  Especially if I had a greater-than-sneaking suspicion I was the frightening saviour of the world.

[Juan Farstrider]

17 minutes ago, EmreY said:

 

At 16-20 my mind would inevitably have wandered off in a certain direction, but that does not mean I would necessarily have taken instruction from someone just because they were hot.  Especially if I had a greater-than-sneaking suspicion I was the frightening saviour of the world.

Rand is under-suspicious of her, but I think there is more going on as time goes on than just Lanfear = evil forsaken vs Lanfear = "She's a brick house, she's mighty mighty just letting all hang out ... that lady's stacked and that's a fact she ain't holding nothin' back".  I really doubt many young men would have handled her as well as Rand did really. 
 

Also, her plan I think is one of the best evil plans in the whole series. She reminds me of George Foreman fighting Evander Holyfield. She used her looks to try to get Rand in the one place where she could win it all, the way Foreman used one punch (over and over) get Holyfield to set up in front of himself just a few inches over from where he usually would, where George's knockout power would take the fight in one shot. He almost got it too (brilliant fight, really) 

Edited February 11, 2022 by Juan Farstrider
for those who did not know the Commodores played funk

[expat]

Quote

Rand is a young man and Selene is the hottest woman on the planet.  People are expecting logical decisions?

Isn't this the very definition of acting childish?

[Juan Farstrider]

16 minutes ago, expat said:

Isn't this the very definition of acting childish?

I would associate temper tantrums, whining, expecting people to hand you things or complaining when they hand you things that are not 100% what was wanted, not doing a fair share of work and not even realizing it,  and all sorts of other behaviors as childish. I'd call Rand adolescent with how he acts around Selene, but he is adolescent. Guys act like that from puberty through their mid twenties very often if not later. Children do not have raging hormones so childish seems to be the wrong term. 

[king of nowhere]

i wouldn't call it childishness but naiveness. rand knows the forsaken are after him, he's in a strange magic land that can be accessed only by channeling, and in a completely empty world he stumbles on this woman. what are the odds that it's a coincidence? what are the odds that there's something fishy underneath?

 

on the other hand, rand is ta'veren (and he knows it), and strange things happen around him all the time. so maybe "what are the odds" is not a good question to ask for him, but "why did the pattern send me this way?". 

anyway, he definitely should have been suspicious of something.

[JeffTheWoodlandElf]

Rand is Rand. Whether he should have been suspicious of Selene is beside the point. Having just read the Selene stuff in TGH during  my re-read, I think it's all very in-character for Rand. Whether it's logical or smart is beside the point. 

 

People often forget that RJ just treats his characters differently than most modern authors. George R.R. Martin kicked off a sort of "realist" treatment of characterization which has extended even to the works of Brandon Sanderson. In modern fantasy, most characters act like "real" people. This is not the case with RJ. WoT is a "modernist take on the Arthurian myth" (Brandon Sanderson's words), and as such, the characters are more symbolic than real. In the words of the literary critic James Wood, they are "both real and unreal at the same time."  

 

What attaches us to the WoT characters is not how similarly their actions/thoughts resemble our own. It's how firmly RJ establishes their characters/personalities in relation to their world/situation. 

 

"No one would ever act like Rand!" Maybe true... but we don't need real world examples to justify Rand's decisions. Rand acts like Rand, and that should be enough. 

 

For anyone interested, this is a very interesting article about character. 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/26/3

 

My favorite quote: 

 

"A glance at the thousands of foolish 'reader reviews' on Amazon, with their complaints about 'dislikeable characters', confirms a contagion of moralising niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader 'couldn't find any characters to identify with', or 'didn't think that any of the characters 'grow''."

[Ralph]

 

 

 

[EmreY]

11 hours ago, JeffTheWoodlandElf said:

Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader 'couldn't find any characters to identify with', or 'didn't think that any of the characters 'grow''."

 

Can this be extrapolated to viewers complaining about lack of growth?  @GanoesParan and @Cranglevoid, you've upvoted this post, what do you think?

[Vambram]

13 hours ago, EmreY said:

 

Can this be extrapolated to viewers complaining about lack of growth?  @GanoesParan and @Cranglevoid, you've upvoted this post, what do you think?

I up voted that post because of what he wrote in the preceding paragraphs about Rand al'Thor. 

Not necessarily because of the very last paragraph in that post. 

[Ralph]

https://winteriscoming.net/2022/02/08/the-wheel-of-time-actor-shares-season-2-behind-the-scenes-video/

[ArrylT]

 

Mentioning this since it follows up / compares nicely to a point I made on a different thread, but felt this was more fit for this thread being a "news article" video.  

 

[ArrylT]

https://www.wotseries.com/2022/02/22/gary-beadles-role-revealed/

 

Elyas Machera role likely confirmed.

[king of nowhere]

So elyas was not cut entitely. Sweet!

[Andra]

On 2/15/2022 at 3:30 AM, Ralph said:

https://winteriscoming.net/2022/02/08/the-wheel-of-time-actor-shares-season-2-behind-the-scenes-video/

Do we know for sure that's from WoT?

Her Instagram post doesn't say, and the VFX person (Júlia Markó) she gives a shout out to isn't listed as WoT cast or crew on IMDB.  And Júlia's Instagram is private, so I can't see if she references the show at all.

 

Though her LinkedIn page does say she works for Amazon Studios.  Freelance.

Edited February 23, 2022 by Andra

[Katherine]

https://comicbook.com/tv-shows/news/wheel-of-time-beat-out-reacher-new-amazon-prime-series/   

 

Hard to do an apple to apples comparison since Reacher isn't a fantasy series. HOwever, Amazon took a drastically different approach to this series... the stuck to the source material.... and the speak for themselves. 

[WhiteVeils]

4 hours ago, Katherine said:

https://comicbook.com/tv-shows/news/wheel-of-time-beat-out-reacher-new-amazon-prime-series/   

 

Hard to do an apple to apples comparison since Reacher isn't a fantasy series. HOwever, Amazon took a drastically different approach to this series... the stuck to the source material.... and the speak for themselves. 

Reacher released all 8 episodes at once in its first week. WOT only released 3 episodes its first week.  It would be expected that Reacher should then have more that twice the total minutes streamed during its first week compared to Wheel of Time, if they were equally popular.  However, the point of this article is that Reacher had 1.84 billion minutes streamed compared to Wheel of Time's 1.16 billion minutes streamed.   WOT had 367 million minutes per episode streamed.  Reacher had 230 million minutes per episode streamed.  And that is only shown in the United States. WOT has good outside the US appeal. I don't know about Reacher.

Edited March 7, 2022 by WhiteVeils

[Revenant13]

On 2/23/2022 at 1:15 AM, king of nowhere said:

So elyas was not cut entitely. Sweet!

thank robert jordan!

[Katherine]

23 hours ago, WhiteVeils said:

Reacher released all 8 episodes at once in its first week. WOT only released 3 episodes its first week.  It would be expected that Reacher should then have more that twice the total minutes streamed during its first week compared to Wheel of Time, if they were equally popular.  However, the point of this article is that Reacher had 1.84 billion minutes streamed compared to Wheel of Time's 1.16 billion minutes streamed.   WOT had 367 million minutes per episode streamed.  Reacher had 230 million minutes per episode streamed.  And that is only shown in the United States. WOT has good outside the US appeal. I don't know about Reacher.

 

SO maybe I am reading wrong, but it didn't just beat out WOT week 1 numbers. It beat out the entire viewing numbers... in 3 days. 

[WhiteVeils]

55 minutes ago, Katherine said:

 

SO maybe I am reading wrong, but it didn't just beat out WOT week 1 numbers. It beat out the entire viewing numbers... in 3 days. 

You're reading it wrong.

Here's another article with the same information, but it clarifies that WOT's Week 1 numbers were 1.16 billion minutes for 3 episodes, while Reacher's Week 1 numbers were for 8 episodes during it's first week. You are correct, that only 3 days were collected, but these are both week 1 comparisons.

https://movieweb.com/reacher-viewing-figures-the-wheel-of-time-amazon-prime/ 

 

The WOT numbers were not for its whole run, only its first week.

[Ralph]

https://winteriscoming.net/2022/03/02/thom-merrilin-actor-talks-his-song-on-the-wheel-of-time/

[king of nowhere]

are we getting leaks or sneak peeks from production?

for S1, even in the lulls of activity, we'd still get something once per month. it's been one month since the last officially released snippet.

[Pandemonium]

On 3/8/2022 at 2:10 PM, WhiteVeils said:

You're reading it wrong.

Here's another article with the same information, but it clarifies that WOT's Week 1 numbers were 1.16 billion minutes for 3 episodes, while Reacher's Week 1 numbers were for 8 episodes during it's first week. You are correct, that only 3 days were collected, but these are both week 1 comparisons.

https://movieweb.com/reacher-viewing-figures-the-wheel-of-time-amazon-prime/ 

 

The WOT numbers were not for its whole run, only its first week.

I think this is just showing how popular Amazon streaming is becoming.  Over 200 million prime subscribers now.  Amazon doesn't have very many premiere shows like Netflix.  But everytime they have a big show it sets up the audience for the next big show, especially since most of these subscribers are annual.  Reacher is in the crime thriller genre which might even be more popular than fantasy on streaming.  

 

It will be interesting to see the final viewing numbers side by side after 2 months though.  I would think wheel of time will come out ahead there.  

[Humbugged2]

On 3/10/2022 at 2:10 PM, king of nowhere said:

are we getting leaks or sneak peeks from production?

for S1, even in the lulls of activity, we'd still get something once per month. it's been one month since the last officially released snippet.

We know they are in Morrocco

[Skipp]

Rafe posted a picture of a teaser location for season 2.  Him and Taylor Napier are sharing their anniversary there.

 

Spoiler

 

This has got to be the Aiel Waste right?