Interviews and News Articles

[Scarloc99]

2 hours ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

at this point they are just solidifying my distaste for what rafe has done. not having thom in season 2 during cairhein? what about his offing the king? and what leads up to it?

 

yep...we see how that went in season 1.

 

I also am going to call bullcrap on the whole "70% of people who finished the books thought the tv series was better".

but then again they did throw in the whole "taken from non online sources." which to me seems very biased.

In terms of the story of the final battle, which is the only story that has to be told Thoms killing of the king is irrelevant, a single line can simply say the king was killed. Thom doesn’t really do much of anything in books 2 or 3 at all, if season 2 is covering those 2 books and ending in tear then Thom simply has to reappear in Tear for the start of season 3 to go on what is his main storyline in the early books, travelling with elayne and nyn. I had hoped to see him and Mat escape tar valon but again Thom isn’t absolutely needed for those scenes to work. He was only put in Tar Valon as a way to get him paired up with mat, he is ill and takes no part in the taking of tar Valon. Mat can stumble on the girls multiple ways without Thom helping him. 

[DojoToad]

3 minutes ago, Sir_Charrid said:

I mean he didn’t write any of the tv episodes, he acted as an advisor but has since said the show runners went in directions that where different to where he told them the books where going. 

Yep, and while he was advising he didn't finish any more books.  So why waste time advising if the show runners were going where they wanted.  He could have spent that time writing more books - instead of blowing by deadline after self-imposed deadline.  The dangers of over-extending...

[DojoToad]

9 minutes ago, Sir_Charrid said:

In terms of the story of the final battle, which is the only story that has to be told Thoms killing of the king is irrelevant, a single line can simply say the king was killed. Thom doesn’t really do much of anything in books 2 or 3 at all, if season 2 is covering those 2 books and ending in tear then Thom simply has to reappear in Tear for the start of season 3 to go on what is his main storyline in the early books, travelling with elayne and nyn. I had hoped to see him and Mat escape tar valon but again Thom isn’t absolutely needed for those scenes to work. He was only put in Tar Valon as a way to get him paired up with mat, he is ill and takes no part in the taking of tar Valon. Mat can stumble on the girls multiple ways without Thom helping him. 

All true.  Thom was always one step above a minor character in the books.  Appears the show will push him back further.  An adaptation call - we'll see how it works out.

[WhiteVeils]

4 hours ago, DojoToad said:

Egwene or Nynaeve can handle a simple assassination.

 

Exactly

 

The easiest way to do the assassination...much easier than having Thom do it...is have /Lanfear/ kill Barthanes because he let Rand slip through his fingers and get away (She...or at least one of the Foresaken kill Barthanes in the books anyway, so this is not a change), then have Barthanes's followers blame Galladrin and kill Galladrin in revenge.  It never needed to be Thom...just making it Thom simply flips the orders of the two deaths.

[Scarloc99]

5 hours ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

at this point they are just solidifying my distaste for what rafe has done. not having thom in season 2 during cairhein? what about his offing the king? and what leads up to it?

 

yep...we see how that went in season 1.

 

I also am going to call bullcrap on the whole "70% of people who finished the books thought the tv series was better".

but then again they did throw in the whole "taken from non online sources." which to me seems very biased.

I imagine taken from non online sources means someone like Nielsen, who have been doing surveys like that for decades, ran the survey and so got a broad spectrum of viewers and not just the internet which by its nature does not give you a broad view. Having worked for companies that do this kind of survey there are many ways to do it which are far more accurate then looking at polls on forums. The people you want to reach are the ones who go nowhere near the forums, or never comment on them. 

[Scarloc99]

1 hour ago, WhiteVeils said:

 

The easiest way to do the assassination...much easier than having Thom do it...is have /Lanfear/ kill Barthanes because he let Rand slip through his fingers and get away (She...or at least one of the Foresaken kill Barthanes in the books anyway, so this is not a change), then have Barthanes's followers blame Galladrin and kill Galladrin in revenge.  It never needed to be Thom...just making it Thom simply flips the orders of the two deaths.

Why is the assasination even remotely important enough to give screen time to, it gets no book time, Thom sees that the body will be looked after and next you know he is drinking heavily in Tar Valon and it is heavily hinted at that he did it. By the end of book 3 it isn’t mentioned again and Thom never shows any long term affects of the whole saga, he is affected more by Morgase. 
 

Like I say, a simple line “Lord Rand Galladrin has died, supposedly killed in his chambers”. End of. 

Edited December 18, 2022 by Sir_Charrid

[WhiteVeils]

True!  It's a moment that, in the books, converts the 'cold-civil-war' to 'hot-civil-war' in Cahrien, and is the reason there is no ruler in place when Rand returns to take it over, which is fine.  Barthanes is a character in the show, we already know, so if they come back to Cahrien (which seems likely), he will need some reason not to be there (likely death).  Galladrin and his deaths can be easy one-line mentions, though, if mentioned at all.

[Scarloc99]

5 hours ago, DojoToad said:

Yep, and while he was advising he didn't finish any more books.  So why waste time advising if the show runners were going where they wanted.  He could have spent that time writing more books - instead of blowing by deadline after self-imposed deadline.  The dangers of over-extending...

No he didn’t finish the books because he doesn’t know how, he wrote during that time but not to continue GOT. I think we have a man who has suffered a terrible form of writers block, or has just lost interest in his story, probably a little from columns A and B. 

[king of nowhere]

8 hours ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

I also am going to call bullcrap on the whole "70% of people who finished the books thought the tv series was better".

but then again they did throw in the whole "taken from non online sources." which to me seems very biased.

really? nothing short of actual propaganda is more biased than a poll on an internet forum.
and I have no problems believing that somebody who reads the books after looking at the show will prefer the show.

just imagine somebody new to the series, watching the show, then reading the book and being exposed to all that bs gender dualism. to me, it feels like the social mores of my parents, elevated to universal constant.
and then they get hit by the ending of book 1, which is even worse than the one of the tv show. sure, the books have other highlights, plenty of them, but just in the same way book fans will say "yes, the tv show has highlights, but still it's worse".

as for people who read the books before the tv show, well, it depends. Is the poll limited to those who finished the books? or does it include also those that read the first half of book 1 and put it down because it felt too much like a lotr ripoff? Because in that second case, I can easily imagine plenty who would prefer the show.

remember, we are here because we read all 14 books; possibly multiple times. we would not have read those many pages unless we liked the books a lot. so we are not, in any way, unbiased on the matter.

 

Anyway, if rafe gets only 5 seasons.... that's rough. 8 seasons was already too little to do wot justice, but 5 seasons? take what was already going to be too short a time, and halve it. nobody can expect for rafe to keep up any sort of adherence to the books under such a limitation. with 5 seasons, you can at best cover the most important plot moments from all the books, in a very condensed form. and you have to chop down and rearrange pretty much every other plotline just to get to those important moments fast enough.

if 5 seasons are all we get, then the show is going to become far less faithful than even season 1 was. it can stll be a good show, but it will be "inspired by" rather than "based on".

and if that happens, rafe can't be blamed for it.

[Mailman]

10 hours ago, Sir_Charrid said:

I used to river swim when I was in the states, there were patches of river and rapids you could do this very thing in fairly safely. You lay on your back hands across your chest and let the rapids take you is loads of fun. 
 

If in a series about magic,  a dark lord locked away in a magical Prison and the same souls being reborn your issue is that swimming some rapids takes you out of the universe because “not realistic” maybe your focusing on the wrong things. 

Yep and star wars is a story about space wizards and laser swords so why worry about good story telling at all I guess.

[VooDooNut]

19 minutes ago, Mailman said:

Yep and star wars is a story about space wizards and laser swords so why worry about good story telling at all I guess.

Exactly.

[Scarloc99]

11 hours ago, Mailman said:

Yep and star wars is a story about space wizards and laser swords so why worry about good story telling at all I guess.

That is not equivalence, the point was about a scene where a person falls into a river and lets it carry her down stream, Egwene is told to trust the river and let it take her, keep her hands in. There where questions about the realism of this scene when it was possibly one of the most realistic scenes in the whole series. The fact that someone (I imagine a stunt double) actually did those takes, there is no CGI there, shows that it is possible and the womens circle would not do it if it wasn't. This is not a warrior culture where "the weak die" if someone had been hurt doing this ritual it would have been stopped. 

And again, like I said, it is an activity people do for real around the world relatively safely. 

[Scarloc99]

20 hours ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

unrelated but here's hoping Henry Cavill is allowed to do what he wants with WH 40k.

This, although I really hope they don't try and tell the Horus Heresy story in live action. If a 14 book series is hard to film just imagine the 61 books that make up that space opera lol. Henry has said he wants to play the emperor but I don't know if I want to see that story portrayed on the screen. 

What I would love to see is Cavill as an Inquisitor, possibly something based on Dan Abnett, I would also love to see Gaunts Ghosts as a movie series, I just love the idea of basicly normal humans fighting massive monsters, demons and other horrors wearng tin foil and shooting with a flashlight :). I would also love for the Alpha Legion to have a series, although we would probably never see it, or know it existed, or it would consist of the Alpha Legion paying another chapter :). 

Edited December 19, 2022 by Sir_Charrid

[mogi68]

The Rafe interview was kind of toothless. Too many "what's your favorite flavor of ice cream" questions imo

[DojoToad]

17 minutes ago, mogi68 said:

The Rafe interview was kind of toothless. Too many "what's your favorite flavor of ice cream" questions imo

Are you surprised?  We were specifically told not to ask certain questions.  Other questions he won't answer because he won't want to give show plot points away.  Other one's he might not answer because he believes the answer might be unpopular.

 

I think the one and only reason the interview was done was to maintain some semblance of interest in the show until S2 comes out.  So I really wasn't expecting much.

[Scarloc99]

41 minutes ago, DojoToad said:

Are you surprised?  We were specifically told not to ask certain questions.  Other questions he won't answer because he won't want to give show plot points away.  Other one's he might not answer because he believes the answer might be unpopular.

 

I think the one and only reason the interview was done was to maintain some semblance of interest in the show until S2 comes out.  So I really wasn't expecting much.

I agree there are many reasons he will never answer the difficult questions, a combination of his contract with Amazon and the fact that he obviously feels he is heading in the right direction creatively and we should wait and see the journey's end. A point I can understand. 

If you consider that Benioff and Weiss, when they did come out and defend certain decisions for GOT, where jumped on for it you can understand, not that their arguments made any sense, "I guess Dany just forgot about the Iron Fleet", has to go down as one of the weakest arguments for an awful decision ever lol, and since the last season they have never sat down and truly defended their big creative decisions. (or as some of us like to think, never explain why they never made season 5 onwards, such a shame that series never came to a close). In fact, what have they produced since they finished on GOT? 

But yes, this was a puff piece designed to keep the anticipation for the next season going and let us all know those important questions like what his favourite dinosaur is. I doubt Rafe will ever sit down and discuss any of the controversial creative decisions he has made throughout the series, he wont explain his thinking in detail for the hard calls. I doubt he will even ever say what he might have done differently if he could have another go other then to talk about very minor cosmetic things. It is not the way of creators to sit and objectively take apart their own work. While numerous actors (Ryan Reynolds, multiple GOT cast, Sandra Bullock and Halle berry cast to name a few examples) have derided things they have been in over the years I don't think a single Director or producer has ever sat down and said "yes, that was rubbish wasn't it" we really should not have made that, please never see it. 

 

Edited December 19, 2022 by Sir_Charrid

[DigificWriter]

One only has to take a look at The Dusty Wheel's coverage of Season 1 to recognize that it's entirely plausible for the stat that Rafe references to be accurate.

 

Matt Hatch and the community of supporters his show has amassed were, unlike other pockets of the WoT fandom, incredibly supportive, on the whole, of the TV show, with only a small handful going onto his review broadcasts to complain or diss Rafe and the writers' choices.

[Scarloc99]

6 hours ago, DigificWriter said:

One only has to take a look at The Dusty Wheel's coverage of Season 1 to recognize that it's entirely plausible for the stat that Rafe references to be accurate.

 

Matt Hatch and the community of supporters his show has amassed were, unlike other pockets of the WoT fandom, incredibly supportive, on the whole, of the TV show, with only a small handful going onto his review broadcasts to complain or diss Rafe and the writers' choices.

Exactly, this forum isn’t really an echo chamber but still the negative voices tend to be louder than the positive. Partially because it is always easier to identify and highlight negatives in detail as opposed to simply saying, well I liked it because I enjoyed it. Looking around on other forums and especially Reddit the e ho chamber of negativity about the show by a tiny tiny number gives an over inflated sense of the majority view. 
 

This is why Internet forums are never used by legitimate polling and survey companies to get accurate results. In reality as long as the sample is truly representative and broad it does not need to be large to give accurate results. It is why companies like Nielsen uses such small samples for its own tv review and stats buisiness and yet gets such good results.  

It is easy to be part of a small vocal group and think you all speak for an entire group, and the internet makes that echo chamber echo far more, that does not devalue individual opinions but means people need to consider that just because there is a vocal group all speaking the same that equals that vocal group are also a majority of the whole population being surveyed. 

[DigificWriter]

Even the Season 1 finale  didn't aggravate Matt or the majority of the The Dusty Wheel supporter community to the degree that it did other die-hard WoT book fans, which says a lot, I think, about how much true support there actually is for the TV show amongst the WoT fan community regardless of how loudly some pockets of it might try to decry it as a blasphemous perversion of the novels.

[Mailman]

20 hours ago, Sir_Charrid said:

That is not equivalence, the point was about a scene where a person falls into a river and lets it carry her down stream, Egwene is told to trust the river and let it take her, keep her hands in. There where questions about the realism of this scene when it was possibly one of the most realistic scenes in the whole series. The fact that someone (I imagine a stunt double) actually did those takes, there is no CGI there, shows that it is possible and the womens circle would not do it if it wasn't. This is not a warrior culture where "the weak die" if someone had been hurt doing this ritual it would have been stopped. 

And again, like I said, it is an activity people do for real around the world relatively safely. 

People still die in white water accidents and thats despite using buoyancy vests having experienced guides and ropes attached to boats. They are also not wearing ankle length dresses.

 

If there is zero danger the scene makes no sense as its not any type of surrender to the river scenario as there's no point to surrendering to the river as it's perfectly safe either way. You can't have it both ways.

Edited December 20, 2022 by Mailman

[nsmallw]

I wonder over the centuries how many Two Rivers girls died jumping off that damn cliff. 

In the real world, just one death would be sufficient to reconsider that particular silliness. 

[SinisterDeath]

24 minutes ago, nsmallw said:

I wonder over the centuries how many Two Rivers girls died jumping off that damn cliff. 

In the real world, just one death would be sufficient to reconsider that particular silliness. 

LOL.
People have literally been making cheese for hundreds of years that can kill you, and they still eat it.

People pay big money to eat the dangerous puffer fish...

I think you underestimate how many deaths it takes before people reconsider their actions.

[Scarloc99]

1 hour ago, nsmallw said:

I wonder over the centuries how many Two Rivers girls died jumping off that damn cliff. 

In the real world, just one death would be sufficient to reconsider that particular silliness. 

Probably none, watching the scene people jump into bodies of water like that all the time with no issues. The “rapids” are not that massive or major and the whole thing looks positively tame. 
 

Now there might be one or 2 accidents yes, but, if it was truly dangerous then it would have phased out of fashion, remember this is mothers getting there daughters to do this in a culture that values life. I think those of you questioning need to consider that the fact people do that in real life and it is not considered massively dangerous in certain stretches of water, as long as you do it the right time of year (which the womens circle would know) and when the water level is a safe hight. 
 

Yes White water swimming can be dangerous, if the stretch of water you are swimming is dangerous. It isn’t always based on speed or supposed roughness of the rapids either. Some rapids have carved in such a way that the water will just take you the safe route as long as you just float and let it. Others require more effort and reading of the water to know where to go but it is clear, from what Nyn says, that this stretch of rapids is the former, lie on your back, hands over your chest, cross your legs and enjoy the ride. 
 

And yes, modern times you would have a life jacket and helmet, but there are those who do it without and back in the day many did it without safety equipment. 

[DigificWriter]

43 minutes ago, SinisterDeath said:

In the real world, just one death would be sufficient to reconsider that particular silliness

 

Not really, because without the danger, there's no real point to a coming-of-age ritual  like "surrendering to the river".

[Elder_Haman]

On 12/18/2022 at 5:37 AM, king of nowhere said:

ancient societies had all kinds of dangerous rituals.

Exactly.