Why not follow the books more closely?

[phanooglestixs]

Yes, I understand that it is difficult to translate something from novel format to television and movies.  That being said, if the adaptation is going to deviate significantly from the source material, then it should not be made at all.  If you want to tell your own story fine, tell your own story.  Don't chop a story into a bunch of pieces and then paste them together while using the name to entice an already dedicated fanbase.

[Lightfriendsocialmistress]

5 hours ago, phanooglestixs said:

Yes, I understand that it is difficult to translate something from novel format to television and movies.  That being said, if the adaptation is going to deviate significantly from the source material, then it should not be made at all.  If you want to tell your own story fine, tell your own story.  Don't chop a story into a bunch of pieces and then paste them together while using the name to entice an already dedicated fanbase.

I respect your viewpoint and thank you for sharing it! Let me be clear that I genuinely enjoy hearing what people think and sincerely appreciate and honor the opportunity to learn from every perspective and have no personal opinion/investment in terms of believing in one thing being more true or superior to another. That being said. Just curious, did you ever get into Star Wars and I suppose even the marvel universe? If so. How did you feel about those worlds being reimagined, handed over, and/or redefined/expanded upon in ways that weren’t originally intended?

[DojoToad]

8 hours ago, phanooglestixs said:

Yes, I understand that it is difficult to translate something from novel format to television and movies.  That being said, if the adaptation is going to deviate significantly from the source material, then it should not be made at all.  If you want to tell your own story fine, tell your own story.  Don't chop a story into a bunch of pieces and then paste them together while using the name to entice an already dedicated fanbase.

Unfortunately, the show was not made for the book-reading fanbase.  They are going on the premise that the show, as produced, will bring in a larger audience.  If the book audience is drawn in as well, that is just icing.

[DojoToad]

2 hours ago, Lightfriendsocialmistress said:

I respect your viewpoint and thank you for sharing it! Let me be clear that I genuinely enjoy hearing what people think and sincerely appreciate and honor the opportunity to learn from every perspective and have no personal opinion/investment in terms of believing in one thing being more true or superior to another. That being said. Just curious, did you ever get into Star Wars and I suppose even the marvel universe? If so. How did you feel about those worlds being reimagined, handed over, and/or redefined/expanded upon in ways that weren’t originally intended?

I'm not sure about @phanooglestixs but I'm not sure that your questions are apples to apples.  Star Wars started out as movies, the books came later.  The MCU I can't speak to as I'm not a comic book person.  That said, I enjoyed the movies but I'm not sure what a comic book 'purist' would say.

[SinisterDeath]

1 hour ago, DojoToad said:

Star Wars started out as movies, the books came later.

Books did come later, but they also came before the newest movies. 

 

1 hour ago, DojoToad said:

The MCU I can't speak to as I'm not a comic book person.  That said, I enjoyed the movies but I'm not sure what a comic book 'purist' would say.

A lot of comic book purists would say they're shallow, trashy, and nothing but a cash grab.

[DojoToad]

22 minutes ago, SinisterDeath said:

Books did come later, but they also came before the newest movies. 

 

A lot of comic book purists would say they're shallow, trashy, and nothing but a cash grab.

Of course it is a cash grab - cast, crew, and the money behind the production all need to get paid! 🤑

 

The difference for the viewer can be if they find it entertaining.  If 'I' enjoy it, make as much money as you want.

[WhiteVeils]

2 hours ago, DojoToad said:

I'm not sure about @phanooglestixs but I'm not sure that your questions are apples to apples.  Star Wars started out as movies, the books came later.  The MCU I can't speak to as I'm not a comic book person.  That said, I enjoyed the movies but I'm not sure what a comic book 'purist' would say.

If you liked the Marvel movies, or, say, the many, many versions of the Batman stories, then you like adaptations that are not faithful to their origin stories.   They can still be very good. One person's interpretation and memory of the books is not a sacred temple that is defiled when someone else reinterprets it.  The books are there. If you want a version that matches your own interpretation and memory, and values the things in the original you value most, make your own show.

[DojoToad]

40 minutes ago, WhiteVeils said:

If you liked the Marvel movies, or, say, the many, many versions of the Batman stories, then you like adaptations that are not faithful to their origin stories.   They can still be very good. One person's interpretation and memory of the books is not a sacred temple that is defiled when someone else reinterprets it.  The books are there. If you want a version that matches your own interpretation and memory, and values the things in the original you value most, make your own show.

True - in general, I love the Christian Bale Batman movies.  But that does not mean that I like all adaptations that are not faithful to their origin stories.  Case in point WoT.  S1 of the show was not for me - so that is an adaptation that I didn't like.

 

I finally kick started the book series again, and EotW  has made me fall in love with the books all over again - and I have only made it to the trolloc attack at the 'al Thor farm.  Not even the strongest book in the series and I'm loving it.

 

We'll see if the S2 adaptation is one I can enjoy.  If not, the original is there for the reading.

 

 

[WhiteVeils]

1 hour ago, DojoToad said:

True - in general, I love the Christian Bale Batman movies.  But that does not mean that I like all adaptations that are not faithful to their origin stories.  Case in point WoT.  S1 of the show was not for me - so that is an adaptation that I didn't like.

 

I finally kick started the book series again, and EotW  has made me fall in love with the books all over again - and I have only made it to the trolloc attack at the 'al Thor farm.  Not even the strongest book in the series and I'm loving it.

 

We'll see if the S2 adaptation is one I can enjoy.  If not, the original is there for the reading.

 

 

Yep. And that is a very reasonable place to get to.  Saying that no one should be allowed to make an adaptation that is not faithful to their own personal interpretation of a work is not a reasonable position to take, so I felt I needed to call it out.

[Samt]

I too, am somewhat puzzled by this type of adaptation.  As I see it, there are two chief business  reasons to create content related to an existing IP rather than creating something entirely new.  First, the creative process is generally going to be more streamlined since you already know your characters, major story arcs, and, in the case of fantasy and science fiction, the rules of your universe broadly speaking.  The narrative foundation already exists.  Second, you have an existing fanbase.  This not only means that you hopefully have a baseline of existing customers/viewers, but also that you have existing communities that will potentially help you advocate and advertise.  

 

But if you stray too far from the source material, you begin to lose both of these advantages.  Narratively, you are already making the story up on your own and being forced to work extra just to get back onto track with the existing story.  And while fanbases are generally diverse, they usually like the existing IP.  That means that large changes (particularly without compelling limitations of the adaptation format) are going to usually be less popular.  As a whole, I think that when books are adapted to the screen, book fans are mostly looking for an illustration of the story rather than a re-telling of the story.  

 

And I'd point out that when talking about faithfulness to the books, book readers are the only audience that really can have an opinion.  You can't care about book faithfulness if you didn't read it.  I think the argument that is often brought up to the effect that the adaptation is trying to appeal to a larger audience than the books, and thus must change, is rather hollow.  It's not as if there is a huge audience of people that didn't read the books but have strong opinions that they only want to watch the show if it isn't faithful to the books. How would they even know?  Of course, there are certainly book readers that would like to see some changes.  But generally they won't agree on exactly what they want to see change.  

I think that looking at successful adaptations bares this point out.  While all adaptations will vary from their source material somewhat, most that are widely liked and successful are fairly close to the source material.  Examples of successful, mostly faithful adaptations include LOTR, Harry Potter, and the recent Dune movie (pending part 2 not going completely off the rails).  And even in these examples, many of the complaints are around changes that were made and feel unnecessary.  

 

I haven't read comics, but I get the feeling that they are much more canonically flexible anyways.  Within the comics themselves, the characters often get re-booted and retold.  That leaves more room for the adaptation to do its own thing.  

 

In regards to Star Wars, there was much of the same confusion as with WoT.  It isn't an adaptation, of course.  But it is still the case of a company using an existing IP in order to leverage the narrative, universe, and fanbase.  The Disney sequels are widely criticized because they threw out lots of existing stories to make way for a story that was clearly made up on the fly and didn't feel internally consistent.  The existing characters were changed and undermined in order to make way for new characters that were less well liked and didn't make sense.  

[WhiteVeils]

LOTR, Harry Potter, and some of the Dunes (Haven't seen the most recent) vary /widely/ from the source material. There were huge complaints with all of them from fans of the books, back on the message boards of the day.  They were successful adaptations though, and so people forget how much of a change they were....many of the people doing the complaining about WOT now watched LOTR before reading the books, for example, so they don't care or even take note of the critical differences that the bookreaders experienced when the movies came out.
WOT is much, much more difficult to adapt than LOTR or Harry Potter.  So many of its important themes are based on people's thoughts as described through the POV chapters. In other works, thoughts aren't as essential to the character development of the story.   How do you convey thoughts in a TV media?

The mechanism for WOT allows for multiple turnings of the Wheel, so it's just as adaptable in its world setup as comic books.

But I think you miss the most essential reasons why they are doing this.  They're not doing it to 'get' the book reader audience....the audience is small, for starters. The part of the book reader audience whose vision of the books contrasts with the showrunner's vision of the books is smaller still.  The part of the book reader audience whose vision doesn't align with the showrunners AND can't handle the changes that are needed to make the books into a show is smaller.  The part of the book readers that handle the changes necessary to bring that story to a new audience is very very small indeed.   In exchange for that small number of book readers as an audience, this version opens the story up to new US and International audiences, including audiences in many, broader demographic groups than the original books' audience.  The themes of reincarnation, for example, are very appealing to an Asian audience, but would any Asian audience outside the US care about the show enough to reach those themes unless there are Asian leads in the show?  Unless they make the themes very apparent in the first episode in a way that makes it clear the show is honoring those themes not denigrating them?  How do you do that?  You add the Lantern scene. You make Lan the amazing Daniel Henney. You use Asian theme costuming.  That audience is many times the size of the US audience...of course Amazon will care about them more.

 The story for Wheel of Time has broader appeal when presented well, but that's not the reason Judkins is making it.  He /loves/ these books. He has since a child. They spoke to him, as a young gay boy growing up in Utah, in a different way than they might speak to another reader. But he loves them. He wanted to bring what he loves to the world, and he is.  You can choose not to like the show, you can decide you can't handle the changes.  That's your choice.

But was the adaptation financially successful for Amazon? Absolutely.  Does it convey what the showrunner wanted to convey? Mostly...there were Covid-driven problems in the last couple of episodes that he wants to fix, and he wanted 10 episodes with a 2 hour pilot and Amazon wouldn't let him.   Does it bring across the major themes of the series very well? In my opinion, yes, it does. It carries all the themes from EOTW across very well.  Does it give the essence of the EOTW plot, albeit with changes? Yes. It has 5 young men and women from a remote village who are dragged out of that village by a woman with great magical powers and her guardian to protect them, knowing that one of the five will have to face the Dark One who plans on destroying the world.  They travel with her, get separated, one gets corrupted with an evil dagger, one learns he can communicate with wolves, two learn that they have great magical power inside them, and one learns he is the Dragon Reborn, who will face the dark one.  He goes to do so at the end of the season, thinks he defeats him, but, we all suspect, he didn't really.  The rest of the series will show us all how much more will be involved.

That's literally the plot of Eye of the World.  

But...oh, Merry and Pippen met Sam and Frodo on the road in the show instead of meeting properly in Buckland. And Jackson made them /thieves/. Thier characters are ruined now. And it was important that they set up that Frodo was really moving to Buckland because otherwise the hobbits would have looked for them. And Sam didn't see the elves on the way to Buckland, so how does Frodo know they are leaving Middle Earth anyway? Would Sam do the same things if he didn't see them?  And then no Old Man Willow? Thom Bombadil was my favorite part....it's important to show not everything can be controlled by the ring.  And everyone knows Tomatoes are from South America and Middle Earth is supposed to be England so that's obviously wrong. And Aragorn just finds the magic swords lying around?  What is he? A graverobber? And that's not even getting to how they massacred Gimli's character and turned him into cheap comic relief!

 

Yeah, like that.

Edited May 31, 2023 by WhiteVeils

[Elder_Haman]

There are plenty of fair criticisms of the writing in S1. There are plenty of reasons to say that a particular scene in the book would have been superior to what was ultimately put on screen. 

 

But at the end of the day, that's picking nits. @WhiteVeils is absolutely correct: 

24 minutes ago, WhiteVeils said:

5 young men and women from a remote village ... are dragged out of that village by a woman with great magical powers and her guardian to protect them, knowing that one of the five will have to face the Dark One who plans on destroying the world.  They travel with her, get separated, one gets corrupted with an evil dagger, one learns he can communicate with wolves, two learn that they have great magical power inside them, and one learns he is the Dragon Reborn, who will face the dark one.  He goes to do so at the end of the season, thinks he defeats him, but, we all suspect, he didn't really ... That's literally the plot of Eye of the World.

Adapting a television show from a book is far more complicated than people seem to think. You have to think about the number of locations, number of sets, costumes, actors, filming schedules, time constraints, etc. -- all before you even get to which scenes from the books you are going to film, what you have to cut, and how to patch over the things you have to cut all while being able to get the exposition necessary for any fantasy series across without being ham-handed about it.

 

Season One wasn't great. But it wasn't horrible either. And nothing about the core story has changed so drastically that it can't be accounted for in later episodes. 

[DojoToad]

30 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

Season One wasn't great. But it wasn't horrible either. And nothing about the core story has changed so drastically that it can't be accounted for in later episodes. 

We shall see...

 

😈

[Cipher]

I feel like if LOTR were made today Gimli and Legolas would be made lovers.

 

To appeal to a wider audience. Which would be a ridiculous contention. Judkins loved WoT despite that it did not try to appeal to him specifically.  

 

I heard zero critcism of lanterns, Daniel Henney, or Asian influence in set or clothes design.  Is WoT even shown in China? I actually would be suprised if it is.

[SinisterDeath]

16 minutes ago, Cipher said:

I heard zero critcism of lanterns, Daniel Henney, or Asian influence in set or clothes design.  Is WoT even shown in China? I actually would be suprised if it is.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/01/amazon-prime-video-launches-localized-services-for-top-three-markets-in-southeast-asia/#:~:text=Amazon Prime Video launches localized services for top three markets in Southeast Asia,-Lauren Forristal%40laurenforristal&text=Amazon Prime Video today launched,Indonesia%2C Thailand and The Philippines.

China isn't the only country in Asia?

Indonesia: 273.8 million 
Thailand: 71.6 million
Philippines: 113.9 million
South Korea: 51.74 million
India: 1.408 billion

Those 5 countries all have access to Amazon Prime Video.
(Total population of Europe is ~746.4 million, and US is 331.9 million)

[Ralph]

2 hours ago, SinisterDeath said:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/01/amazon-prime-video-launches-localized-services-for-top-three-markets-in-southeast-asia/#:~:text=Amazon Prime Video launches localized services for top three markets in Southeast Asia,-Lauren Forristal%40laurenforristal&text=Amazon Prime Video today launched,Indonesia%2C Thailand and The Philippines.

China isn't the only country in Asia?

Indonesia: 273.8 million 
Thailand: 71.6 million
Philippines: 113.9 million
South Korea: 51.74 million
India: 1.408 billion

Those 5 countries all have access to Amazon Prime Video.
(Total population of Europe is ~746.4 million, and US is 331.9 million)

Prime Video is among the SVOD platforms that do not disclose viewership data but Salke revealed that “there were tens and tens of millions of streams” for The Wheel Of Time in the first three days of its release, with the US, India, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany as the top countries.

 

From https://deadline.com/2021/11/the-wheel-of-time-premiere-ratings-amazon-prime-video-mass-effect-lort-of-the-rings-jennifer-salke-qa-1234879517/

 

 

[Ralph]

There is also the opposite effect - apparently sales of the books went up significantly from end of 2020

[WhiteVeils]

2 hours ago, Cipher said:

I feel like if LOTR were made today Gimli and Legolas would be made lovers.

 

To appeal to a wider audience. Which would be a ridiculous contention. Judkins loved WoT despite that it did not try to appeal to him specifically.  

 

I heard zero critcism of lanterns, Daniel Henney, or Asian influence in set or clothes design.  Is WoT even shown in China? I actually would be suprised if it is.

Maybe Gimli and Legolas would be made lovers. Much more likely, Sam and Frodo would be made lovers.  And some viewers certainly could have that interpretation of the text. It's not mine. But it's not ridiculous if someone did take that interpretation and made a movie of that.  It's their interpretation. 

The Asian influence was an example of a change made to appeal to a different demographic...not a change you objected to. That said, the inclusion of Lan as an Asian guy and the Korean mourning ceremony were definitely heavily critiqued.  People complained tons about the costumes and sets...in particular the cleanliness of the costumes and the brightness of the colors. But clean costumes and bright sets are the expectations in Asian fantasy.  If you watch any Wuxia or Bollywood, that's obvious.

[Cipher]

37 minutes ago, Ralph said:

Prime Video is among the SVOD platforms that do not disclose viewership data but Salke revealed that “there were tens and tens of millions of streams” for The Wheel Of Time in the first three days of its release, with the US, India, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany as the top countries.

 

From https://deadline.com/2021/11/the-wheel-of-time-premiere-ratings-amazon-prime-video-mass-effect-lort-of-the-rings-jennifer-salke-qa-1234879517/

 

 

This actually proves my point a little bit.  In no way did the creators of Amazon's WoT try to cater to the population of Brazil, yet it was popular there. That still doesn't prove it is good, but rather that the audience of Brazil wanted to watch it.  Did the audience in Brazil fall off and not finish the show? We don't know.  May be a lot of Brazillians know the reputation of the books and were interested, but then tuned out on it because it didn't live up to the hype. It is possible this happened in many places.

 

Make something good and it will prove the test of time.  I feel that this show's creators had some boxes they wanted to check--while Jordan had a story he wanted to tell.  I am hoping for S2. The trailer gets me hyped (and it doesn't really look a lot like TGH in my imagination), but many trailers are way better than the shows they represent.

 

Idk if Squid Game tried to appeal to US audiences or did they make a good story and it lived on its own reputation.  I didn't watch it because of its premise though.

[Cipher]

21 minutes ago, WhiteVeils said:

Maybe Gimli and Legolas would be made lovers. Much more likely, Sam and Frodo would be made lovers.  And some viewers certainly could have that interpretation of the text. It's not mine. But it's not ridiculous if someone did take that interpretation and made a movie of that.  It's their interpretation. 

The Asian influence was an example of a change made to appeal to a different demographic...not a change you objected to. That said, the inclusion of Lan as an Asian guy and the Korean mourning ceremony were definitely heavily critiqued.  People complained tons about the costumes and sets...in particular the cleanliness of the costumes and the brightness of the colors. But clean costumes and bright sets are the expectations in Asian fantasy.  If you watch any Wuxia or Bollywood, that's obvious.

If one were to make a version of LOTR that included such romances it would definitely be a bastardization of the source material.  More akin to fan fiction.  It is not an "interpretation."

 

As far as being necessary to appeal to Asian audiences.  I feel superficial changes count very little and could be wasted effort.  Make an excellent show and it will thrive. See stories like The 7 Samurai, Harry Potter series, Legend of King Arthur, Game of Thrones, Gundam, Macross, etc.  Great stories don't need to pander to be enjoyed by everybody.

 

The "Korean mourning" scene was the biggest waste of time and nothing like it happened in the books and subverts Lan's character.  In fact Daniel Henney isn't Lan from Jordan's WoT--he is a different person.

[Samt]

5 hours ago, WhiteVeils said:

LOTR, Harry Potter, and some of the Dunes (Haven't seen the most recent) vary /widely/ from the source material. There were huge complaints with all of them from fans of the books, back on the message boards of the day.  They were successful adaptations though, and so people forget how much of a change they were....many of the people doing the complaining about WOT now watched LOTR before reading the books, for example, so they don't care or even take note of the critical differences that the bookreaders experienced when the movies came out.
WOT is much, much more difficult to adapt than LOTR or Harry Potter.  So many of its important themes are based on people's thoughts as described through the POV chapters. In other works, thoughts aren't as essential to the character development of the story.   How do you convey thoughts in a TV media?

The mechanism for WOT allows for multiple turnings of the Wheel, so it's just as adaptable in its world setup as comic books.

But I think you miss the most essential reasons why they are doing this.  They're not doing it to 'get' the book reader audience....the audience is small, for starters. The part of the book reader audience whose vision of the books contrasts with the showrunner's vision of the books is smaller still.  The part of the book reader audience whose vision doesn't align with the showrunners AND can't handle the changes that are needed to make the books into a show is smaller.  The part of the book readers that handle the changes necessary to bring that story to a new audience is very very small indeed.   In exchange for that small number of book readers as an audience, this version opens the story up to new US and International audiences, including audiences in many, broader demographic groups than the original books' audience.  The themes of reincarnation, for example, are very appealing to an Asian audience, but would any Asian audience outside the US care about the show enough to reach those themes unless there are Asian leads in the show?  Unless they make the themes very apparent in the first episode in a way that makes it clear the show is honoring those themes not denigrating them?  How do you do that?  You add the Lantern scene. You make Lan the amazing Daniel Henney. You use Asian theme costuming.  That audience is many times the size of the US audience...of course Amazon will care about them more.

 The story for Wheel of Time has broader appeal when presented well, but that's not the reason Judkins is making it.  He /loves/ these books. He has since a child. They spoke to him, as a young gay boy growing up in Utah, in a different way than they might speak to another reader. But he loves them. He wanted to bring what he loves to the world, and he is.  You can choose not to like the show, you can decide you can't handle the changes.  That's your choice.

But was the adaptation financially successful for Amazon? Absolutely.  Does it convey what the showrunner wanted to convey? Mostly...there were Covid-driven problems in the last couple of episodes that he wants to fix, and he wanted 10 episodes with a 2 hour pilot and Amazon wouldn't let him.   Does it bring across the major themes of the series very well? In my opinion, yes, it does. It carries all the themes from EOTW across very well.  Does it give the essence of the EOTW plot, albeit with changes? Yes. It has 5 young men and women from a remote village who are dragged out of that village by a woman with great magical powers and her guardian to protect them, knowing that one of the five will have to face the Dark One who plans on destroying the world.  They travel with her, get separated, one gets corrupted with an evil dagger, one learns he can communicate with wolves, two learn that they have great magical power inside them, and one learns he is the Dragon Reborn, who will face the dark one.  He goes to do so at the end of the season, thinks he defeats him, but, we all suspect, he didn't really.  The rest of the series will show us all how much more will be involved.

That's literally the plot of Eye of the World.  

But...oh, Merry and Pippen met Sam and Frodo on the road in the show instead of meeting properly in Buckland. And Jackson made them /thieves/. Thier characters are ruined now. And it was important that they set up that Frodo was really moving to Buckland because otherwise the hobbits would have looked for them. And Sam didn't see the elves on the way to Buckland, so how does Frodo know they are leaving Middle Earth anyway? Would Sam do the same things if he didn't see them?  And then no Old Man Willow? Thom Bombadil was my favorite part....it's important to show not everything can be controlled by the ring.  And everyone knows Tomatoes are from South America and Middle Earth is supposed to be England so that's obviously wrong. And Aragorn just finds the magic swords lying around?  What is he? A graverobber? And that's not even getting to how they massacred Gimli's character and turned him into cheap comic relief!

 

Yeah, like that.

It's obviously a bit subjective as to how big of a change something is from the source material, but I think you're exaggerating the changes to LOTR in order to excuse the WoT changes.  Most of your examples are things that were removed.  In the big picture, all of the LOTR characters follow their same arcs, go to the same places, and have the same relationships with other characters.  I'd agree that Gimli does get the short end of the stick, but tomatoes and swords are grasping at straws.  Not moving to Buckland and cutting the barrow downs and Thom Bombadil is straight up just cutting self contained plots.  Maybe you think they are important, but the story largely works without them.  Critically, cutting these scenes doesn't impact what happens to the characters or story in other parts of the plot.  

 

This isn't the case in the WoT.  The Thom Merrilin changes, for instance, are going to make various parts of Mat's story need a major overhaul.  At the end of season 1, Rand is going off on his own.  That doesn't happen in the book and now there needs to be further changes to bring it back together.  Moirraine is stilled (or maybe shielded).  That is a major addition that now needs to be addressed.  That isn't comparable to tomatoes.  

[expat]

Interesting topic, but somewhat mistakes the trees for the forest.  Pulling numbers out of the air, WoT is 50% POV, 10% description, and 40% things happening.  POV doesn't film, so you have eliminated 50% of the books before you every set pen to paper to start the adaption.  Easy solution, just film the 40% of the books with actions.  The problem with that is that the POV makes sense of the actions, provides the world building, and provide most of the character development. I submit that the books, with the POVs cut, would not be something worth reading and a series consisting of just the book actions would not be worth watching.

 

Therefore, you have to create a way to bring the plot clarity, world building, emotions, and character development out of the POV and into something filmable.  This is the heart of the adaption problem.  None of this is true to the book since none of these scenes exist in the books because you had the POV to do the heavy lifting.

 

There seems to be two ways of filming the POV.  First through dialogue where the characters talk about the POV parts or through inventing new scenes to try to capture the essences (as decided by the showrunners) of the POV. The second is a better approach for a TV series.  Did they do a good job, debatable.  Certainly, many decisions can be criticized, but the degree of "not in the book" criticism is really over the top.  With so much POV, liberties are needed to film it at all.  Again, without the non-book scenes trying to replicate the gestalt of the POVs, it would be a very disjointed series to watch with little character development.  Just not interesting (to me).

[RainHarlow]

I feel like it was worth a shot, but sometimes you miss the goal whatever your intentions. If other people like it, good for them, and I hope it led or leads them to the real juice inside the pages.

 

Why did they pick something established? Honestly, they have no clue what to do with the money. Someone comes in with a pitch and they sell it or they flub out. If they sell it and get greenlit, then everyone hopes the audience buys. Actual original stuff is a complete crap shoot. Meanwhile, I bet established stuff gets pitches and not greenlit all the time. One of the biggest differences is people 'inside' with an interest.

 

And passion. Belief. Corny as it sounds. LoTR, rejected by multiple studios, was considered a massive risk for Shaye and New Line, and Jackson's pitch might've been last ditch... for 2 movies... then Shaye was like 'make it a trilogy.' Ballsy. Then they went all out/all in for Cannes with 2 mil dropped like it was a premiere and Kablooey, the rest is history.

 

Meanwhile, I don't know about this show's nitty gritty of development... but, ah... Red Eagle sitting on rights for aeons... who sued Harriet... who Mr. Jordan had some er, colorful things to say about their character... yeah. How they were involved in pitching it and all I haven't a clue, but I doubt it would blow anyone's mind, shall we say.

[WhiteVeils]

4 hours ago, Cipher said:

 In no way did the creators of Amazon's WoT try to cater to the population of Brazil, yet it was popular there. 

Of course they tried to cater to the population of Brazil. They had a huge presence and Brazil's Comicon. Fantasy is incredibly popular in Brazil.  A fair bit of the Tar Valon architecture is similar to South American inspiration. The Tinker clothing was based on the cultural clothing of peasants in Peru. The show even had a Parrot!  
That said, it was good and it did appeal.  We don't have specific patterns for falloff for Brazil, but worldwide the falloff for Wheel of Time was much better than many other shows, including Rings of Power, so they succeeded at what they wanted to do.

[WhiteVeils]

3 hours ago, Samt said:

It's obviously a bit subjective as to how big of a change something is from the source material, but I think you're exaggerating the changes to LOTR in order to excuse the WoT changes.  Most of your examples are things that were removed. 

Those were complaints people made on the message boards when LOTR came out.  I just phrased the same changes with the same hyperbole that people are phrasing similar changes in WOT.    I didn't exaggerate the changes.  IE: People complaining that Mat is a thief when he was selling Fain a bracelet we don't know the specific provenance of, vs. Pippin and Merry literally stealing vegetables.  If you have an agenda to want to interpret a change as badly as possible, you will.