Has Rings of Power proven that Fantasy Adaptations are really hard?

[SinisterDeath]

13 hours ago, swollymammoth said:

 

The point is that HBO actually showed some admirable restraint with their handling of Asriel. They sidelined the most marketable actor in the show because it was accurate to the books, better for the story, and allowed for the focus to be where it should be, on the main character. Rafe showed no such restraint. 

Comparing Lord Asriel to Moirain, is like apples and oranges, no?

In the books, we sporadically see Asriel, but it's apparent that his machinations are everywhere. (I read this series nearly 20 years ago, so my memory is a bit fuzzy)

In WoT, we see Moiraine quite a lot throughout books 1-5, and she had a lot of off-screen machinations.

I'd say the amount they need to have Moiraine in the show to match the books, is quite a bit different than Lord Asriel in His Dark Materials. 

To put it simply, even excusing Moiraine's disappearance in TGH, she's a pretty damn important character for books 3-5, and that presents a different problem than what His Dark Materials faced with McAvoy. 
 

 

13 hours ago, swollymammoth said:

This is actually baffling to me. Like, I'm all for combining tGH and tDR. It makes total sense. You could start in Shienar, have the horn get stolen, set off on the quest, go through the portal stone, see the alternate lives etc, and then just have everyone end up in Tear instead of Falme. Rand can appear in the sky when he fights Ba'alzamon with Callandor and Mat can blow the Horn to repel a Seanchan attack outside the city. In this scenario, the Seanchan would be occupying Tear or leading an assault on Tear during the climax. 

 

Why on earth would you choose to have the climax in Falme instead? I swear. These people can't get even the smallest thing right. 

Here's the thing. We don't know what they're actually going to do. We've been told they're combining book 2 & 3, that doesn't mean we're only getting the climax of Falme or the Climax of Tear. What little we know about Season 3, is that it'll contain parts of book 2, 3, and maybe 4. (Parts of 4 = twisted doorframe, going to the aiel wastes)

Consider book 3. 
Rand pulls a Moiraine and we basically don't see him for the majority of the book.
We have a ton of chapters with Moiraine and Perrin, Mat does mat stuff, and the Girls get kidnaped again... 


I've said it before, but it's entirely plausible that we could get Rand's "Climax in Falme" by episode 4 or as late as episode 6, leaving episodes 5-8 positioning everyone to converge upon Tear by the finale. 

The final scene of Season 2 could be Rand eyeing the Wall, with some carefully placed Aiel in the background.
 

The first Episode of Season 3 could have Rand breaching the wall with Mat and the Aiel.

 

[Skipp]

18 hours ago, Samt said:

Now I'm confused.  So you're saying that the writers haven't added anything?  Or just that you never said they have and you're not committing one way or the other?  

 

I apologize for the grammatical/spelling error.  I certainly meant to say that the the writers have cleary added events that were not in the book and they have reasons for adding said events.

 

As for the rest of your post I think SinisterDeath covered it quite well.

[Skipp]

3 hours ago, holger said:

Because both locations will be in the show. There is no reason why Falme would have to be cut. Falme will be in S2, and Tear will be added in a later season, probably S5, after Dumai's Wells. This makes sense because Rand does not need Callandor until much later. Moving the Seanchan invasion to Tear would have had a much bigger ripple effect on future seasons, because it would have resulted in a totally different political situation on the west coast (no refugees in the Two Rivers, different activities for the Whitecloaks etc). Also, from an in-story point of view it makes much more sense for an enemy force scouting in preparation of an invasion to first visit a close, small port with easy access, not one that is far away and protected by a labyrinth of small islands and a massive fortress. So, yes, they did get it right.

 

Jumping to Tear at the last moment, after Falme, as some have suggested, would have "burned" that location in a single episode, for very little benefit, and not allowed a full invasion of the Stone in a later season, so I am glad that is apparently not happening. Delaying the Tear events likely was the lowest-impact change possible that allows them to combine both books in S2 while following the structure of a typical TV season, and while still preserving most of the story over the course of multiple seasons. They are just reordering some of the events in time, and cutting some of the repetitive pieces.

 

It was always clear that adapting books 1-3 would be rough. They had an 8-episode 1-hour mandate for the show, and were dealing with a rigid, linear travel-heavy structure in the books, that is difficult to adapt to the structure that TV shows require. Also, books 2 and 3 are structurally repetitive and thus had to be combined, yet the conflicting travel patterns (all across the continent, in opposite directions) made that quite difficult. Things will get easier starting with book 4, when character arcs start to separate more permanently, with fewer synchronization points between them. Rafe has already indicated that S3 will follow book 4 much more closely.

 

Very well said.  I wish we could have seen what Rafe could have done with a 2 hour pilot/10 episode season.  The Last of Us show team made very good use of their 80 minute pilot but Amazon seems wildly strict about their run times and season lengths for some reason.  Probably relying to much on metrics but then again I think RoP broke their episode run time lengths a couple of times so who knows.

Edited January 20, 2023 by Skipp

[Skipp]

55 minutes ago, SinisterDeath said:

Here's the thing. We don't know what they're actually going to do. We've been told they're combining book 2 & 3, that doesn't mean we're only getting the climax of Falme or the Climax of Tear. What little we know about Season 3, is that it'll contain parts of book 2, 3, and maybe 4. (Parts of 4 = twisted doorframe, going to the aiel wastes)

Consider book 3. 
Rand pulls a Moiraine and we basically don't see him for the majority of the book.
We have a ton of chapters with Moiraine and Perrin, Mat does mat stuff, and the Girls get kidnaped again... 


I've said it before, but it's entirely plausible that we could get Rand's "Climax in Falme" by episode 4 or as late as episode 6, leaving episodes 5-8 positioning everyone to converge upon Tear by the finale. 

The final scene of Season 2 could be Rand eyeing the Wall, with some carefully placed Aiel in the background.
 

The first Episode of Season 3 could have Rand breaching the wall with Mat and the Aiel.

 

 

When the writing team says they are combining books 2 and 3 I think a fair amount of people are thinking they are going to do book 2 in the first half of the season and book 3 in the 2nd half.  I really don't think that is what they meaning at all.

 

And as so many people have mentioned Book 2 and 3 have a fair amount of repetitive plot points and I personally don't think would work well on TV.  I think they are taking some plot arcs from book 2, some plot arcs from book 3 and cutting the rest or delaying them till later.  I do think Tear is going to be one of those arcs that are going to get pushed to a later season.

 

While we really have no idea what we are going to see this season aside from some version of Falme I don't think they are going to rush tear into the last bit of the season.  For similar reasons as to why Caemlyn was not in season 1. 

 

On the topic of having no idea where the season is going.  Geeky Eri on twitter mentioned the other day that she has not been able to piece together this season's plot like she was able to do last season.  By tracking which directors/actors were when/where she was able to have a good idea where season 1 was going.  She mentioned her frustration about not being able to do the same as of yet.

[Scarloc99]

19 hours ago, SinisterDeath said:

What did Moiraine do in TGH?
She visited some old Aes Sedai to discuss the Dragon Reborn. We're probably getting exactly that. We're probably getting an exposition dump on the prophecy of the dragon.

Egwene healing - People bring this up, yet ignore that the Yellow Ajah actively pursued her to join the Yellow Ajah. She could heal. She wasn't bad at it. She just didn't have anywhere near Nyneave's talent.

 

Off screen she also saves several Aes Sedai from the Seanchan, and I imagine her and Lan get in some scraps around Falme, she tells Egwene I think, or maybe Rand that she regrets she couldn't save more of her sisters. 

It may be that this feeds into season 2 with her being involved in saving Egwene, which would get her to Falmes head to try and heal Rand. 

[Scarloc99]

1 hour ago, Skipp said:

 

When the writing team says they are combining books 2 and 3 I think a fair amount of people are thinking they are going to do book 2 in the first half of the season and book 3 in the 2nd half.  I really don't think that is what they meaning at all.

 

And as so many people have mentioned Book 2 and 3 have a fair amount of repetitive plot points and I personally don't think would work well on TV.  I think they are taking some plot arcs from book 2, some plot arcs from book 3 and cutting the rest or delaying them till later.  I do think Tear is going to be one of those arcs that are going to get pushed to a later season.

 

While we really have no idea what we are going to see this season aside from some version of Falme I don't think they are going to rush tear into the last bit of the season.  For similar reasons as to why Caemlyn was not in season 1. 

 

On the topic of having no idea where the season is going.  Geeky Eri on twitter mentioned the other day that she has not been able to piece together this season's plot like she was able to do last season.  By tracking which directors/actors were when/where she was able to have a good idea where season 1 was going.  She mentioned her frustration about not being able to do the same as of yet.

Tear itself is a tiny part of book 3, in fact you get more happening in tear at the start of book 4 then book 3. I also don't see Rand fighting Ishmael at Flame and at Tear, those 2 fights are effectively the same. But, it is important he "sheathes the sword" to get the first of his 2 wounds. 

Book 2 and 3 both involve a lot of just walking/riding a horse/taking a boat as far as Perrin, Rand, Moraine Lan etc. Books 2 and 3 also involve the girls travelling to then leaving tar valon twice, again I don't see any point in having all that happen as per the books. My guess is the girls go to Tar Valon, get raised to accepted, meet Elayne, then chase the gang of 13 to Falme where Egwene gets caught, then travel from Falme direct to Tear chasing the gang of 13 where they all then get caught. Min can still be sent to Tar Valon to let Siuan know whats going on, so getting her there to be the rescuer. 

The Siuan letter isnt important so we don't need to include it in the TV show, you can then have the civil war in the tower still happen and Mat can still "escape from" tar valon (could be sent there with Min following Falme to be properly healed). 

You still then have the opportunity to do things like have the Aiel save the girls from a Mydryll, have Mat appear in Tear with fireworks and blow a hole in the wall. Morraine, perrin and Lan can still escape a forsaken while chasing down Rand, and Perrin can still save Gaul. 

 

[Elder_Haman]

23 hours ago, Samt said:

I'm not sure why people keep repeating the notion that these are just things that happened or even might have happened off page.  Mo doesn't get shielded or stilled or whatever happened to her off page.  Perrin didn't accidentally kill his wife and then pretend she never existed.  Egwene didn't bring Nynaeve back from the dead.  I think those things would have come up.  There is an obvious and meaningful distinction between adding something that might have happened but wasn't explicitly shown and adding something that clearly didn't and couldn't have happened.  

You’re misinterpreting my argument. I was responding to your stated position that it was bad for the writers to give Rosamund more to do in S2. 
 

You made 2 specific comparisons: one to Hugo Weaving in LOTR and the other to Sean Bean in GOT. 
 

I’m simply pointing out that neither comparison is on point. In the case of LOTR, scenes that didn’t occur in the books were added for Weaving. So LOTR did the same thing WOT is doing. 
 

In the case of GOT, Ned Stark is killed in the source material. Bringing him back would be a massive change to the story. Moiraine does not die in EOTW. She is doing things off-page. So the choice to depict those things in S2 of WOT has no similarity to bringing Sean Bean back. 
 

This is an entirely different conversation from whether the changes the writers have already made will cause unintended ripples in the remaining story. It is likewise, an entirely different discussion from whether the changes the writers have already made were “good” or “bad”. 

[Scarloc99]

16 hours ago, swollymammoth said:

Yeah, and it was always going to follow that they would then cast an extremely recognizable actress in the role. Then, for marketing purposes, the story was retooled in order to keep said actress at the forefront even during seasons where her character would have little or nothing to do. 

 

This was always going to happen because, even if these decisions weren't made specifically with Rosamund Pike in mind, they were made knowing that someone like her, someone with her name recognition and star power, would occupy that place. So yes, Moiraine's was made the primary narrrator for marketing reasons. She was always going to be played by a bankable, recognizable star, and the decision to make her the narrator was made with that in mind.

 

And this was a good decision. They could have done this. Heck, I think it's safe to say that Rafe wouldn't have done this. Of course that's unfair speculation, and I'll admit it. 

 

The point is that HBO actually showed some admirable restraint with their handling of Asriel. They sidelined the most marketable actor in the show because it was accurate to the books, better for the story, and allowed for the focus to be where it should be, on the main character. Rafe showed no such restraint. 

Just a tiny point HBO had nothing to do with making HDM, it was a BBC production, led by Bad Wolf studios in Cardiff (best known for being the production company that make doctor who), and New Line Cinema HBO only got involved late on as the chosen partner to sell international rights for the BBC and as a co producer, I imagine to help reduce some of the cost to the BBC but it was very much a BBC led and driven project with HBO basically putting up some money, I imagine because they knew it would be a great TV show anyway. Which isn't surprising, I have spent 40 years watching the BBC make very good TV adaptations of well known books, I still rate the BBC's adaptation of the works of CS lewis among some of the best ever done of those books (ignoring what where at the time cutting edge special effects that now look a bit dated). 

 

[Scarloc99]

2 hours ago, SinisterDeath said:

Comparing Lord Asriel to Moirain, is like apples and oranges, no?

In the books, we sporadically see Asriel, but it's apparent that his machinations are everywhere. (I read this series nearly 20 years ago, so my memory is a bit fuzzy)

In WoT, we see Moiraine quite a lot throughout books 1-5, and she had a lot of off-screen machinations.

I'd say the amount they need to have Moiraine in the show to match the books, is quite a bit different than Lord Asriel in His Dark Materials. 

To put it simply, even excusing Moiraine's disappearance in TGH, she's a pretty damn important character for books 3-5, and that presents a different problem than what His Dark Materials faced with McAvoy. 
 

 

Here's the thing. We don't know what they're actually going to do. We've been told they're combining book 2 & 3, that doesn't mean we're only getting the climax of Falme or the Climax of Tear. What little we know about Season 3, is that it'll contain parts of book 2, 3, and maybe 4. (Parts of 4 = twisted doorframe, going to the aiel wastes)

Consider book 3. 
Rand pulls a Moiraine and we basically don't see him for the majority of the book.
We have a ton of chapters with Moiraine and Perrin, Mat does mat stuff, and the Girls get kidnaped again... 


I've said it before, but it's entirely plausible that we could get Rand's "Climax in Falme" by episode 4 or as late as episode 6, leaving episodes 5-8 positioning everyone to converge upon Tear by the finale. 

The final scene of Season 2 could be Rand eyeing the Wall, with some carefully placed Aiel in the background.
 

The first Episode of Season 3 could have Rand breaching the wall with Mat and the Aiel.

 

I considered going slightly further back, so season 2 ends with the girls being taken into the fortress of Tear by the 13, Mat hunting for them and Rand staring at the Tower broodily. 

[DigificWriter]

When Rafe says that Season 2 will be based on Books 2 and 3, he isn't really saying that the narrative arcs for the season are going to come directly from those books wholesale.

 

Instead, what he's saying - and what the approach to adapting Season 1 showed us - is that elements from those two novels were used most frequently in crafting the overall story that Season 2 is telling.

 

Regardless of how any one person or group of people feels about it, the approach that Rafe and his team have taken is to effectively use specific novels or combination of novels as a 'base layer' upon which they then build a story that matches the overall shape of the story from said novel or novels but is told just differently enough so as to give them creative flexibility and freedom.

 

His Dark Materials did the same thing, with Jack Thorne and the other writers he worked with making changes as necessitated by the way that they wanted to approach telling the overall story without changing the overall shape of that story.

 

Some people, though, want to criticize this approach and disparage and attack Rafe and his team for taking it as if, by doing so, they've committed some unforgivable sin.

Edited January 20, 2023 by DigificWriter

[WhiteVeils]

8 hours ago, DojoToad said:

Exactly. Changes already made in S1 begets more changes in S2 and beyond. Time constraints for the show will require even more changes. Will be interesting to see how recognizable the end product is to the source material. 

From my excercise, what surprised me was how many scenes and how true to the source material it could be with the changes from S1. The biggest change, really, was in Perrin's arc, since he is a strong character in both books.  Long term, the biggest change due to a change from S1, even for him, is really slowing down his relationship with Faile to give more time to get over Laila.  However, I think this will work pretty well because Perrin's story really goes off the rails after Shadow Rising and he is not left with much to do for many books. Making Faile show up a bit later means that the meat of the development of their relationship can fill some of that downtime.

[Scarloc99]

29 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

You’re misinterpreting my argument. I was responding to your stated position that it was bad for the writers to give Rosamund more to do in S2. 
 

You made 2 specific comparisons: one to Hugo Weaving in LOTR and the other to Sean Bean in GOT. 
 

I’m simply pointing out that neither comparison is on point. In the case of LOTR, scenes that didn’t occur in the books were added for Weaving. So LOTR did the same thing WOT is doing. 
 

In the case of GOT, Ned Stark is killed in the source material. Bringing him back would be a massive change to the story. Moiraine does not die in EOTW. She is doing things off-page. So the choice to depict those things in S2 of WOT has no similarity to bringing Sean Bean back. 
 

This is an entirely different conversation from whether the changes the writers have already made will cause unintended ripples in the remaining story. It is likewise, an entirely different discussion from whether the changes the writers have already made were “good” or “bad”. 

The Hugo Weaving scene is added because Narsil is not reforged at the start of the movie, mainly because Peter Jackson decided to have an Aragorn storyline where he rejected his heritage until film 3. In the Books Aragorn is the King, he knows it, doesn't shy from it and fully accepts his destiny to undo Isildurs folly. Aragorn in the movie is a far more "sensitive soul. 

[SinisterDeath]

6 minutes ago, DigificWriter said:

His Dark Materials did the same thing, with Jack Thorne and the other writers he worked with making changes as necessitated by the way that they wanted to approach telling the overall story without changing the overall shape of that story.

Kind of like how they introduced Will in season 1, and not in season 2 like with the books? How Mary got introduced in Season 2 instead of Season 3 like the books? 😉 

[DigificWriter]

17 minutes ago, SinisterDeath said:

Kind of like how they introduced Will in season 1, and not in season 2 like with the books? How Mary got introduced in Season 2 instead of Season 3 like the books? 😉 

 

In part.

 

They also changed the individual narrative paths for several characters, getting them to the same places, more or less, that they were by the end of the trilogy, but in ways that didn't match or were different from the books.

 

A good example of this is Mrs. Coulter; her story in the TV series still ends where it ends in the novels, but Thorne and his writing partners shifted the way in which she made it to the end of her personal story by choosing to emphasize and enhance her maternal feelings towards Lyra and the degree to which said feelings influenced her actions.

 

To bring things back to WoT, Rafe and his team did something similar with Rand in Season 1, making it less obvious from the beginning that he was the Dragon Reborn but still getting to that reveal in the end.

 

 

[WhiteVeils]

Relevant article:

 

 

From here: Parrot Perspective: Brandon Katz's Biggest Trends and Lessons from 2022 (and Predictions for 2023) | Parrot Analytics

 

Peak Wheel of Time outperformed Rings of Power.  And is still showing outstanding performance a year later.  I think that Amazon will feel they did something right with this show.

[Skipp]

30 minutes ago, WhiteVeils said:

Relevant article:

 

 

From here: Parrot Perspective: Brandon Katz's Biggest Trends and Lessons from 2022 (and Predictions for 2023) | Parrot Analytics

 

Peak Wheel of Time outperformed Rings of Power.  And is still showing outstanding performance a year later.  I think that Amazon will feel they did something right with this show.

Hopefully they will feel wrong about how much support they gave the show for season one.

 

I want to see an actual marketing budget and larger season budgets.

[WhiteVeils]

1 minute ago, Skipp said:

Hopefully they will feel wrong about how much support they gave the show for season one.

 

I want to see an actual marketing budget and larger season budgets.

They may!  I'll caveat and say: I suspect a good chunk of the strength of the series has to do with its showing in the Non-US Marketplace.  So we may not be the ones to get the most marketing.

[Samt]

22 hours ago, Elder_Haman said:

You’re misinterpreting my argument. I was responding to your stated position that it was bad for the writers to give Rosamund more to do in S2. 
 

You made 2 specific comparisons: one to Hugo Weaving in LOTR and the other to Sean Bean in GOT. 
 

I’m simply pointing out that neither comparison is on point. In the case of LOTR, scenes that didn’t occur in the books were added for Weaving. So LOTR did the same thing WOT is doing. 
 

In the case of GOT, Ned Stark is killed in the source material. Bringing him back would be a massive change to the story. Moiraine does not die in EOTW. She is doing things off-page. So the choice to depict those things in S2 of WOT has no similarity to bringing Sean Bean back. 
 

This is an entirely different conversation from whether the changes the writers have already made will cause unintended ripples in the remaining story. It is likewise, an entirely different discussion from whether the changes the writers have already made were “good” or “bad”. 

My overall point that I was trying to make is not that Moiraine shouldn’t have a bigger role or that you can’t make changes in the source material.  Rather, an important element of successful fantasy storytelling is having a good vision of what is happening overall in the story.  That means that story and arcs need to be paramount. Changes from the source material should be made with the big picture in mind.

 

Changing Moiraine because the vision is giving her a bigger part or because you need her to help build the world on screen or because she needs to bridge gaps in the story that came from taking out stuff that didn’t fit into the adaptation is all reasonable potentially.  I am specifically criticizing the notion that the story needs to be changed so that Moiraine “has something to do” or that changing Tarwin’s gap to give Egwene and Nynaeve “something to do” was a good idea.  The fact that the Tarwins gap sequence is pretty universally questioned and has raised weird questions among those who read the book and those who haven’t is already showing how making these changes without considering the bigger picture is dangerous.

 

Of course, this is fixable. But the fact that the mistakes were made in the first place raises the question of whether these same people can fix what they broke unnecessarily. It’s like someone burning a steak and then saying he can fix it by making the right sauce.  Maybe a good chef could do it. But a good chef wouldn’t have burned the steak. If he burned the steak, he probably isn’t a good chef, so I have my doubts about the sauce.

[WhiteVeils]

Having seen the series a few times, I feel like it's pretty certain that Rafe Judkins is taking a page from Peter Jackson's advice for creating adaptations of book series. Jackson suggested that, when you are outlining the book or series, you start with end, and then go backwards, filling out and bringing in the things absolutely required to get you there.  Then you can bring in other events from the books, as you have time and as they fill that purpose, but keep that end in sight.

That lesson was pushed home with Game of Thrones, where the show lost focus badly in its last season, because the writers never had that end to write to.

 

So many decisions about what they lost, added, or adapted, came from that idea, it's clear even in S1. In both what they added and what they didn't cut.  Why Stepin? Why Alanna and so much to do with the Warder Bond? To make that event hit more. Why do they take the time to have Perrin have a dream?  Because what he's doing at the end.  Weep for Manatheren?  The whole burnout thing prefigures Egwene, while, if Egwene used CPR, it would have set the stage for Nynaeve healing Alanna at the end (and as is, they may use it to set up the Flame of Tar Valon).  Every piece of the season seemed to be setting up the Last Battle. The only thing that hasn't been set up yet is Mat's role, though they did show his relationship to children so I have hopes for Olver.

[Skipp]

1 hour ago, WhiteVeils said:

Having seen the series a few times, I feel like it's pretty certain that Rafe Judkins is taking a page from Peter Jackson's advice for creating adaptations of book series. Jackson suggested that, when you are outlining the book or series, you start with end, and then go backwards, filling out and bringing in the things absolutely required to get you there.  Then you can bring in other events from the books, as you have time and as they fill that purpose, but keep that end in sight.

That lesson was pushed home with Game of Thrones, where the show lost focus badly in its last season, because the writers never had that end to write to.

 

So many decisions about what they lost, added, or adapted, came from that idea, it's clear even in S1. In both what they added and what they didn't cut.  Why Stepin? Why Alanna and so much to do with the Warder Bond? To make that event hit more. Why do they take the time to have Perrin have a dream?  Because what he's doing at the end.  Weep for Manatheren?  The whole burnout thing prefigures Egwene, while, if Egwene used CPR, it would have set the stage for Nynaeve healing Alanna at the end (and as is, they may use it to set up the Flame of Tar Valon).  Every piece of the season seemed to be setting up the Last Battle. The only thing that hasn't been set up yet is Mat's role, though they did show his relationship to children so I have hopes for Olver.

 

Wow, I hadn't thought of Egwene using cpr on Nynaeve would reflect to Nynaeve and Alanna.  Considering the other things you pointed out I can certainly believe this was the goal.

[DigificWriter]

7 hours ago, Samt said:

But the fact that the mistakes were made in the first place raises the question of whether these same people can fix what they broke unnecessarily

 

You continue to assert your opinions as if they're absolute  and universally held.

 

These decisions aren't mistakes just because you repeatedly declare them to be so.

[Samt]

1 hour ago, DigificWriter said:

 

You continue to assert your opinions as if they're absolute  and universally held.

 

These decisions aren't mistakes just because you repeatedly declare them to be so.

The things I write are my opinions. I’m not sure how I could have made that more clear. 

[Mailman]

On 1/19/2023 at 3:23 AM, Samt said:

Cutting Baerlon and Whitebridge in terms of set pieces is fair and unremarkable.  Cutting Caemlyn to add Tar Valon is a choice that was made explicitly.  The stuff that was added wasn't shorter or cheaper than a lot of the stuff that was cut.  I think those decisions need to be justified on their own and for the most part they just can't.

 

On 1/19/2023 at 3:50 AM, SinisterDeath said:

As much as cutting Caemlyn sucks, it makes sense. We don't really see it again until what.. book 5? 6? And even then we don't really start to see it until Rand takes out Rhavin, and Elayen's war for the crown.
 

One big issue for me in cutting these locations and moving Camelyn to Tar Valon is that it makes the world feel very small. The Two Rivers are supposed to be the arse end of nowhere yet just over one months' worth of travel on foot takes you all the way through and past the capitol of Andor and to another massive city in Tar Valon.

 

If you had a good horse that probably means 2 or 3 weeks to get there hardly feels like a massive world. And hardly makes the Two Rivers an isolated backwater village.

[DigificWriter]

15 hours ago, Samt said:

The things I write are my opinions. I’m not sure how I could have made that more clear. 

 

By not using absolutist language and phrasing.

 

The way you word the things you say indicates a belief that the sentiments being conveyed are absolute truth and should be universally recognized.

 

You're entitled to have the opinions you have, but you don't get to simultaneously try and force the absolute rightness of those opinions onto others, which is what the wording and phrasing of the comments you make does.

 

This is just going in circles, though, so it's time to move on.

 

 

[SinisterDeath]

17 hours ago, Mailman said:

If you had a good horse that probably means 2 or 3 weeks to get there hardly feels like a massive world. And hardly makes the Two Rivers an isolated backwater village.

Google says horses could travel around 35 miles a day. A fit horse could do 50.

 

So let's say they could go 50 with Moraine, and 35 without.

 

1 week with Moraine = 350 miles

2 weeks without Moraine = 490 miles

For a total of 840 Miles.

 

Thats similar to driving from Charleston, South Carolina to Lafayette, Louisiana. 

 

That's quite the distance.

 

Besides, you can be in the middle of nowhere, with civilization only a week away by horse.