How did the show hold up for you?

[JeffTheWoodlandElf]

6 hours ago, notpropaganda73 said:

You may have been tongue in cheek here, but this definitely isn't true. Just have a look at Star Wars. WoT has been relatively tame. 

Yeah. There are certainly members of any fandom who are uniquely toxic, but the WoT fandom as a whole is pretty good. 

[Cauthonfan4]

5 minutes ago, AdamA said:

Wheel of Time fans are not uniquely toxic at all as far as I can tell, but we are in the bad position here of the show coming on with a very atypical fantasy world full of non-white people and women in charge at the height of US culture wars and we've got a lot of red pill types who are seeing something much different than me in the gender dynamics and racial makeup of the cast that drives them into a rage,

Nothing I saw in the books suggests the two rivers folk were white. 

Considering rand was considered pale compared to them I had him pegged as white and the rest pegged as more Mediterranean. 

 

That said I didn't like thd changes to the two rivers folk because it changes the fundamental nature of the EF5. they were supposed to be naive country hicks who didn't know anything about the outside world and who slowly grew up and had a learning curve. Same with their village and having to adapt to change as a bunch of refugees and outlanders slowly settled in

 

That transformation is utterly ripped out because of how the show starts and means that we lose out on character development as the series goes on. Which is sad because they have already done an incredibly bad job in that regard as is

[JeffTheWoodlandElf]

6 minutes ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

Nothing I saw in the books suggests the two rivers folk were white. 

Considering rand was considered pale compared to them I had him pegged as white and the rest pegged as more Mediterranean. 

Forget the books, how about RJ approved official artwork? How about the RJ approved graphic novels?

 

Regarding just the books, a Reddit commenter brought up a few points that I thought were relevant. 

 

" Andor and the Two Rivers are culturally based on England and more generally Great Britain, the typical fantasy "base" setting and the starting point. As you said the only thing that is explicitly mentioned about their ethnicity is the fact that dark hair and eyes are the norm, but we can infer something about the skin tone from the text as well. As you said, the skin tone of characters that are clearly non-white is usually referred to using explicit terms like coppery or olive and so on, with the Two Rivers folk we only get a general "swarthy" and an indication that it's somewhat darker than what Rand's untanned skin is like, so darker than the absolute palest Irish there is, but still most probably caucasian with a farmer's tan. Mediterranean or otherwise southern European is usually a common approximation.

 

People often refer to the scene where Elaida remarks about his pale skin, but as mentioned she has to pull down his sleeve to reveal untanned skin to point out the difference. If the skin tone was drastically different it would've been obvious from the first glance at his face.

 

Another hint we get is that even though Rand's hair and eyes were seen as odd, they were always just explained away by saying that he got them from his mother's side. However, it turns out Rand had no Two Rivers heritage at all, yet he was still "close enough" that this reveal was a total surprise to him." 

[ilovezam]

26 minutes ago, JeffTheWoodlandElf said:

People often refer to the scene where Elaida remarks about his pale skin, but as mentioned she has to pull down his sleeve to reveal untanned skin to point out the difference. If the skin tone was drastically different it would've been obvious from the first glance at his face." 

Yeah, remember this from reading too.

 

I would honestly have preferred they made all of EF5 black if they really wanted to do this. Making Emond's Field super multi-cultural just felt kinda off to me, though the cast also did a solid enough job with their characters that I quickly forgot about it.

 

50 minutes ago, AdamA said:

Rafe isn't doing a great job so far, in my opinion, but I think he's genuinely a fan of Robert Jordan and is at least doing this in good faith.

He did explicitly say he was going to make fundamental, controversial changes to the original stuff to update it for his modern feminist ideals. I'm neither white nor a red-pilled reader, and both my very Chinese self and my very Chinese partner (she's also a pretty outspoken feminist) think that Rafe really, really overdid it. I can believe Rafe honestly believes he's making the story better, but yeah...

 

So many female book reviewers hated the show too, and several cite similar reasons "why are the men suddenly assholes? Why is the Dragon Reborn useless?" I don't think it's fair to assume that the really upset fans come from a place of some crazy white superiority Trump supporter misogynist angle.

 

Bunch of sources on the female book reviewers:

Quote

 

I think a deftly written piece of fiction shouldn't too overtly reveal the political leanings of the writers. Like I'm atheist and never felt like Tolkien's devout Catholicism was bleeding into his novels in a preachy, heavy-handed, or otherwise alienating way, and I loved every bit of his work, even the creation myths. If I hated the Lord of the Rings movies, I could be yelling at Peter Jackson, and no one would be crying discrimination or bigotry. I wish WoT was a little more like that.

 

Edited January 14, 2022 by ilovezam
Formatting, yikes

[Lethira the second]

43 minutes ago, AdamA said:

Wheel of Time fans are not uniquely toxic at all as far as I can tell, but we are in the bad position here of the show coming on with a very atypical fantasy world full of non-white people and women in charge at the height of US culture wars and we've got a lot of red pill types who are seeing something much different than me in the gender dynamics and racial makeup of the cast that drives them into a rage, whereas I feel like those of us not so drenched in the red pill movement see a show that isn't tremendously well made right now, but nonetheless a world that looks basically the same as the world of the books, not some ideological diatribe of beta cuck white genocide or something. I think Kakita is right that reading it and actually seeing it are different experiences and some people are acutely feeling that.

 

Rafe isn't doing a great job so far, in my opinion, but I think he's genuinely a fan of Robert Jordan and is at least doing this in good faith.

 

Moving aside from the fact this is an adaptation, Wheel of Time is a sub par fantasy series.

 

There are a lot of issues with the writing.  You cannot afford to answer WAFO for every question with a new IP, you don't have that much goodwill with the viewers.  They wasted a lot of time in season one spreading the base too wide.  Maybe if they had 10 episodes then the time spent apart from the main characters would be justified.  We don't know anything about the DO or why he should be feared, there are no stakes in the world because death can be healed.

 

There are issues with the directing, the acting -main characters who can't keep an accent from one scene to the next, the lighting, -I could go on.  

 

There is potential to improve and I genuinely hope they will.  The job of season one was to establish a foundation from which they could tell the story and they just didn't.

[Elder_Haman]

16 hours ago, JeffTheWoodlandElf said:

It's 100% due to the nature and attitude of the changes made that WoT has been so divisive. 

It's also due to the fact that GoT is an order of magnitude easier to make a tv show out of than WoT. First, GRRM worked in screenwriting, so had a preexisting feel for the pacing. Second, the basic world building of Thrones is simple. Powerful families battling with swords and wits. Magic is secondary and mostly in the background. By contrast, WoT has a complicated world with in your face magic (that is a key plot point throughout) and its political rivalries aren't about easily understood rivalries between families, but complicated institutions with their own rules and history and lore that is important. Thrones has zombies. WoT has legions of dark creatures of various shapes and sizes and ability.

 

Stop pretending that taking WoT and putting it on tv is the same as adapting GoT. It's just not.

[Cauthonfan4]

13 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

Stop pretending that taking WoT and putting it on tv is the same as adapting GoT. It's just not

Definitely not. But they have also done an incredibly bad job at it. People are still confused as to whether magic has two sources or one. Not to mention the child's level of politics from the aes Sedai. 

[Katherine]

23 hours ago, notpropaganda73 said:

 

I do think 7 is acceptable for a first season? My favourite show of all time, the US Office, was probably a 4 or 5 in the first season.

 

It's not what I want or hope for the future, or what I wanted at the start (but I've said before on this forum, I actually worried/expected the show to be outright awful on every single level) but as a starting point, yeah I'm ok with it. 

 

I'm not comparing it to GoT (what Amazon say is up to them) and I'll talk about changes from the books and the problems with the show and theorise about ways the show could improve going forward. I don't see why we have to get into this territory every single time of "you defenders say this!" and "you haters say this!" 

 

Excellent point. I was not a fan of this season and not sure I will come back. 

 

However, you are totally right about The Office, and I would throw in Parks N Rec. I LOVE that show, but season 1 was dreadful and none of the actors had found their footing. 

 

So you are right, history tells us there is a ton of room for improvement. 

[Cauthonfan4]

1 minute ago, Katherine said:

So you are right, history tells us there is a ton of room for improvement

So far nothing I have seen shows that the showrunners care about the feedback they are being given. I'm honestly flabbergasted that the 4th Oath didn't receive universal outrage from book fans

[notpropaganda73]

8 minutes ago, Katherine said:

Excellent point. I was not a fan of this season and not sure I will come back. 

 

However, you are totally right about The Office, and I would throw in Parks N Rec. I LOVE that show, but season 1 was dreadful and none of the actors had found their footing. 

 

So you are right, history tells us there is a ton of room for improvement. 

 

Definitely! I do think comedy is a different beast in terms of television and those shows commonly take a little while to "find their voice" so to speak, where they are in the groove of jokes and characters etc. But I think every TV show deserves a bit of grace in terms of where they are going with the story. For every show that hits the ground running and is an absolute classic from the get go, there are others that are slow burners and then others that have stinkers of episodes sprinkled through top tier television.

 

But I totally get the disappointment and frustration. I just hope if S2 is a step up that you'll hear those reviews and give it a shot ? 

[Deviations]

6 minutes ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

So far nothing I have seen shows that the showrunners care about the feedback they are being given. I'm honestly flabbergasted that the 4th Oath didn't receive universal outrage from book fans

The fourth oath gave us insight into Moraine's character and Egwene's moral use of power when she requires further oaths in what will be season 6&7 that they didn't have time or budget to do because Barney left and Covid............

 

All that stuff about additional oaths Jordan wrote was inconsequential to the critical elements of the story anyhow.  Oh Yeah.  There were additional oaths later in the books so it's o.k. now.

[JeffTheWoodlandElf]

51 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

Stop pretending that taking WoT and putting it on tv is the same as adapting GoT. It's just not.

Taken from a 2013 Article on GoT.

-

A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series that Game of Thrones is based on, came about partly as a reaction to Martin’s time in Hollywood.

 

“Because it’s prose and I can have anything I describe,” Martin explains. “I don’t have to worry about what the budget is or what’s doable with the present art of special effects or how many extras we need or any of this stuff. And that’s what [A Song of Ice and Fire] came out of.”

 

No longer beholden to a strict budget, Martin let his imagination run wild and wrote door-stopper books packed with epic scenes and a cast of thousands. He wrote the series to be unfilmable. 

-

Retroactively, we look back on GoT and call it an easier job, but that's easy to say now that it's already been done. Dune was similarly unfilmable, and yet we got a great Dune movie just this year. 

 

WoT presents different challenges than GoT, but it's not like it was impossible from the beginning. If so, why even bother? Creatives with real talent have tackled "impossible" adaptations time and again in the past and succeeded. Similarly talented people could have made WoT work. 

[king of nowhere]

regardless of how we can try to interpret the various data on viewership and ratings, the people at amazon should by now have all the feedback they need. they are the ones who will look at all the numbers and decide accordingly if the show will go on.

I wonder what's taking them so long to announce formally whether season 3 is confirmed or canceled. I assume they could save money by filming back to back if they greenlight it. And if not, i don't see any gain in waiting to declare that the show is canceled.

 

is it normal that we don't seem to have any news on this?

[EmreY]

2 hours ago, JeffTheWoodlandElf said:

an indication that it's somewhat darker than what Rand's untanned skin is like, so darker than the absolute palest Irish there is, but still most probably caucasian with a farmer's tan. Mediterranean or otherwise southern European is usually a common approximation.

 

It is a common error amongst some that the majority of Mediterranean or Arab people have swarthy skin, an error developed from the fact that many visit the Med during the summer, assume people use sun protection, or watch American TV shows, which generally have pretty funny profiling.

 

In real life, you probably wouldn't be able to distinguish an Irish bum from a Tunisian. ? Now, Polish... that's a different matter.

 

 https://pmsol3.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/world-of-facial-averages-middle-eastern-and-central-asian/

 

 

Edited January 14, 2022 by EmreY

[EmreY]

2 hours ago, ilovezam said:

I think a deftly written piece of fiction shouldn't too overtly reveal the political leanings of the writers. Like I'm atheist and never felt like Tolkien's devout Catholicism was bleeding into his novels in a preachy, heavy-handed, or otherwise alienating way, and I loved every bit of his work, even the creation myths. If I hated the Lord of the Rings movies, I could be yelling at Peter Jackson, and no one would be crying discrimination or bigotry. I wish WoT was a little more like that.

 

That might indeed be best, but some of the greatest speculative fiction writers - I mentioned RJ's science fiction favourite Heinlein - do permit it.  And others like Modesitt, Huxley and Rand earn(/ed) their bread and butter from it.  It's not at all uncommon.

 

And since I've just commented on skin colour, I have spoken with many people in the Middle East and India who have read The Lord of the Rings.  None seemed to be in the least bit worried about being cast as swarthy Haradrim.

Edited January 14, 2022 by EmreY

[EmreY]

2 hours ago, Lethira the second said:

There are a lot of issues with the writing.  You cannot afford to answer WAFO for every question with a new IP, you don't have that much goodwill with the viewers. 

 

Applying that "no-WAFO" rule, people who have decided this TV series is beyond remedy should have stopped after reading the first book as well, though I freely grant TV viewers may be more fickle.

10 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

I wonder what's taking them so long to announce formally whether season 3 is confirmed or canceled. I assume they could save money by filming back to back if they greenlight it. And if not, i don't see any gain in waiting to declare that the show is canceled.

 

is it normal that we don't seem to have any news on this?

 

There is the slight matter of the 450-pound gorilla in the room, and how they're going to fit WOT around that.

 

10 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

regardless of how we can try to interpret the various data on viewership and ratings, the people at amazon should by now have all the feedback they need. they are the ones who will look at all the numbers and decide accordingly if the show will go on.

 

I agree.

 

 

[ashi]

20 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

I wonder what's taking them so long to announce formally whether season 3 is confirmed or canceled. I assume they could save money by filming back to back if they greenlight it. And if not, i don't see any gain in waiting to declare that the show is canceled.

Since season 2 is a go, surely they would wait until that airs before announcing a cancellation, to avoid driving viewership down, even if they had already decided?

[ilovezam]

  

15 minutes ago, EmreY said:

And since I've just commented on skin colour, I have spoken with many people in the Middle East and India who have read The Lord of the Rings.  None seemed to be in the least bit worried about being cast as swarthy Haradrim.

That reflects my experience as well. As another anecdotal data point, I'm Singaporean Chinese and every other Chinese person I know who enjoys LOTR was never bothered that there weren't any yellow-skinned people in it, and none of us are particularly thrilled that there are going to be Chinese Hobbits in the Amazon prequel. 

 

I think this whole thing about trying to put every kind of person on screen despite our infinitely variable existence seems to me like a baffling and uniquely Western (American?) phenomenon. I'm not saying there's anything necessarily wrong with it, but to many of us, I suspect that as much as it would be insulting to replace Shang-Chi with a white actor, it would be equally insulting to replace Tony Stark with a Chinese one. 

 

15 minutes ago, EmreY said:

I mentioned RJ's science fiction favourite Heinlein - do permit it.  And others like Modesitt, Huxley and Rand earn(/ed) their bread and butter from it.

I'm not familiar with those, but somehow I've got a feeling that they were from a time where if I hated/loved their books I wouldn't be automatically labeled as a bigot or <insert label that unfairly invalidates leftists> by "the other side". I wish that were true for discussing the WoT show. 

[Elder_Haman]

38 minutes ago, JeffTheWoodlandElf said:

Taken from a 2013 Article on GoT.

-

A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series that Game of Thrones is based on, came about partly as a reaction to Martin’s time in Hollywood.

 

“Because it’s prose and I can have anything I describe,” Martin explains. “I don’t have to worry about what the budget is or what’s doable with the present art of special effects or how many extras we need or any of this stuff. And that’s what [A Song of Ice and Fire] came out of.”

 

No longer beholden to a strict budget, Martin let his imagination run wild and wrote door-stopper books packed with epic scenes and a cast of thousands. He wrote the series to be unfilmable. 

-

Retroactively, we look back on GoT and call it an easier job, but that's easy to say now that it's already been done. Dune was similarly unfilmable, and yet we got a great Dune movie just this year. 

 

WoT presents different challenges than GoT, but it's not like it was impossible from the beginning. If so, why even bother? Creatives with real talent have tackled "impossible" adaptations time and again in the past and succeeded. Similarly talented people could have made WoT work. 

Way to take down an argument I never made. 

[EmreY]

16 minutes ago, ilovezam said:

I think this whole thing about trying to put every kind of person on screen despite our infinitely variable existence seems to me like a baffling and uniquely Western (American?) phenomenon. I'm not saying there's anything necessarily wrong with it, but to many of us, I suspect that as much as it would be insulting to replace Shang-Chi with a white actor, it would be equally insulting to replace Tony Stark with a Chinese one. 

 

I agree, a western phenomenon deriving from the US.  But Tolkien's works have been kicking around for a lot longer than WOT, and the films expanded the set of people who knew about it further.  I suspect you could be dropped off in the middle of the Kalahari desert and still encounter someone who knew of LoTR, Tolkien or the Avengers.   WOT has nowhere near the same universal reach or LoTR or Marvel.

 

16 minutes ago, ilovezam said:

That reflects my experience as well. As another anecdotal data point, I'm Singaporean Chinese and every other Chinese person I know who enjoys LOTR was never bothered that there weren't any yellow-skinned people in it, and none of us are particularly thrilled that there are going to be Chinese Hobbits in the Amazon prequel. 

 

There are?! ?  Well, I suppose they had been trekking westwards for ages, and their exact origins are not known, so who can say? ? 

 

16 minutes ago, ilovezam said:

I'm not familiar with those, but somehow I've got a feeling that they were from a time where if I hated/loved their books I wouldn't be automatically labeled as a bigot or <insert label that unfairly invalidates leftists> by "the other side". I wish that were true for discussing the WoT show.

 

You're right.  And it was also a time when it was quite possible to deny a woman a job because she was a woman...  Heinlein in particular can get super creepy.  Modesitt is merely political; though 80 next year, he's still churning out variations on a theme.

Edited January 14, 2022 by EmreY

[Deviations]

56 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

Way to take down an argument I never made. 

It was a pretty good take down but help me with the point your were making.  Asking honestly.

[Elder_Haman]

That GoT and WoT are not very comparable in terms of the degree of difficulty in adapting them. 

[Lethira the second]

1 hour ago, EmreY said:

 

Applying that "no-WAFO" rule, people who have decided this TV series is beyond remedy should have stopped after reading the first book as well, though I freely grant TV viewers may be more fickle.

 

TV viewers ARE fickle and the nature of business is that if a show does not perform (and sometimes even if it does) the people holding the purse strings are liable to pull the plug. To keep a show relevant, it needs a hook, something to keep people watching.  Which so far I believe they have failed to do.

 

Let's take Perrin and the "wolves".  If you hadn't read the books, what would you say was going on there?  Perrin cut his leg, a "wolf" licked it and when him and Egwene were fleeing the Whitecloaks there were "wolves" doing something that looked like an attack and a "wolf" growled at him.  With a little more development that's something that could have hooked the audience. What they did was drop a clue, and left it.  And which other fantasy shows spent a lot of time focusing on wolves?  -The net result is that it looks like they're trying to imitate GoT and failing miserably. 

 

As I say, I hope they they manage to turn things around.  

 

 

 

[fra85uk]

18 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

That GoT and WoT are not very comparable in terms of the degree of difficulty in adapting them. 

 

In the same way that they are not comparable in the quality of the outcomes.

 

And by the way, I believe that WoT is difficult to adapt, but not an almost-mission-impossible thing, as some argue.

 

In the end, it's quite straightforward if you want to do a faithful adaptation:

up to book 4, a season per book adaptation with a few surgical cuts.

 

Then, there is the most difficult part in streamlining the  rest of the series.

But, there are a LOT of subplots that, while I love as a reader, I known that can be easily cut to deliver  the final battle in S8.

[Spiritweaver1]

3 hours ago, ilovezam said:

Yeah, remember this from reading too.

 

I would honestly have preferred they made all of EF5 black if they really wanted to do this. Making Emond's Field super multi-cultural just felt kinda off to me, though the cast also did a solid enough job with their characters that I quickly forgot about it.

 

He did explicitly say he was going to make fundamental, controversial changes to the original stuff to update it for his modern feminist ideals. I'm neither white nor a red-pilled reader, and both my very Chinese self and my very Chinese partner (she's also a pretty outspoken feminist) think that Rafe really, really overdid it. I can believe Rafe honestly believes he's making the story better, but yeah...

 

So many female book reviewers hated the show too, and several cite similar reasons "why are the men suddenly assholes? Why is the Dragon Reborn useless?" I don't think it's fair to assume that the really upset fans come from a place of some crazy white superiority Trump supporter misogynist angle.

 

Bunch of sources on the female book reviewers:

 

I think a deftly written piece of fiction shouldn't too overtly reveal the political leanings of the writers. Like I'm atheist and never felt like Tolkien's devout Catholicism was bleeding into his novels in a preachy, heavy-handed, or otherwise alienating way, and I loved every bit of his work, even the creation myths. If I hated the Lord of the Rings movies, I could be yelling at Peter Jackson, and no one would be crying discrimination or bigotry. I wish WoT was a little more like that.

 

For me things are simple.  The world, characters and general story arc are the most important.  This means that the fantasy world being built has to be consistent.  I agree with the bolded statement above completely.   The Two Rivers folk are living in a forgotten part of the world and they are descendants of the survivors of Manetheren's fall.  The population isn't large and people don't go anywhere.   The population, regardless of how diverse it was when it became isolated will tend to homogenize in isolation.  Rand is genetically an outsider.  So the diverse nature of the village is also off to me.  It is just another detail like the lack of farms around Fal Dara that make Rafeland much less believable than Randland.    Excellence is in the details.   If Rafe wanted to tell a different story he should have sold this as a based on story.  No matter what he says he clearly doesn't like RJ's story and thinks he is doing better.  Sadly he is dooming himself to a mediocre show because excellence in any aspect is about making the details right.     I am not talking about  Ogier height in the show or any characters looks or race.  It is about consistency.  In a medieval setting people don't move around much, especially in the villages.  Seaports have more diversity as do the large cities.   Anyway I really appreciated this post.