The writers WANT to change WoT and they didn't have to

[Jon Duran]

WoT has been a part of my life twice as long as my wife has, and 4x as long as my oldest kid. Just for some context. I made a dragonmount login after wotmania closed down and they encouraged everybody to register here. When I met RJ at a signing he thrilled me by going super deep into the implications of the Dark One breaking all the way free, and I wish I could have another conversation with him because I think my question poked at where he ended up going and he didn't give me a RAFO but he kind of fudged a bit 😄... anyways, I have thoughts.

 

When they announced an Amazon series, I like everybody was thrilled. Finally, we can see this come to life. RJ had passed and was obviously not involved, Harriet is happy to not dominate how others shepherd the story (I had a lot of problem with Sanderson's stewardship), but... so many scenes and moments we had in our heads would finally be brought to dramatic high quality light.

 

When they announced the cast I was disappointed. It was very clear, and the showrunner interviews confirmed, that they were going to use WoT as "inspiration" for the story THEY wanted to tell. To those of us who feel such ownership with these characters and story, that was very difficult to swallow.

 

But I made up some headcanon that really helped, and I think the showrunners made a HUGE mistake when they didn't formalize this. All they needed to do was to say at the very, very start that their show was ANOTHER TURNING OF THE WHEEL. The books we read & cherished happened, full stop. Every last detail of every character moment, every seemingly minor thing, it all happened. What this show was going to dramatize is ANOTHER turning of the wheel. Things will be similar. Ta'veren are ta'veren and will always be prominent, their themes will be their themes. But things don't always happen the same way. Smaller characters may or may not impact them and influence them the same in each Turning. The Dragon's journey ends the same, even if he (SHE!?) doesn't always get there the same way. Etc.

 

It would have been a PERFECT setup. We all could collectively exhale, cherish the story we knew, and get ***EXCITED*** to see what things would be different and what things would rhyme and what things would be the same. They could even weave in direct call-outs and ties to the stories, or emphasize parts that are different and use the differences as story points in and of themselves. Etc. It was a PERFECT in-universe way to adapt a book to a new medium, we know adapting books to TV/movies always involves compromise but that could become PART of the appeal.

 

There's a reason that's not what they did. It's because agenda-driven storytelling like you have with this show is not interested in living side-by-side with the content it is drawn from. The intent is to CHANGE or "improve" or "update" the story of the Wheel of Time. There were "problematic" issues of race, gender, sex, and power balances in Jordan's WoT. So this is an opportunity to re-tell and "correct" those things. They don't want a *different version* of Egwene for us to enjoy, they want an *updated* version of Egwene to replace the old one. Etc. This is not a harebrained theory, the writers talk about this very plainly.

 

It's sad. This isn't the only IP to have this happen to it (Rings of Power cough cough). In my experience, once you have a story that is explicitly agenda-driven, you encounter another serious drawback. The writing tends to privilege the agenda over character especially, and to a lesser degree plot. I won't go too much into this because it's been hashed out plenty of times already. But the point I wanted to make as I was browsing the forum is that it didn't have to be this way.