The Show Has Been Cancelled

[Raal Gurniss]

8 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

 all stories have massive plot convenience. things happen at just the right time, characters are in just the right place.

like, take star wars. there's a whole galaxy, and the droids carrying the schematics of the death star take an escape pod and just happen to fall close to the secret son of darth vader. what are the odds? 

In fairness the odds are fairly good given the ship was likely ordered to go to the planet, to find Kenobi who they knew lived in the region because he was ordered there to watch over Luke so whilst the odds are still pretty high(thousands to one), they aren't literally astronomical.

[Kaleb]

14 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

ta'veren is perfect to have all those kind of contrived coincidences that always happen, and have them being justified. characters are aware of this plot armor and plan around it. i loved the concept, a lot more than the whole reincarnation thing

 

which incidentally shows once more that adapting wot is so hard. what to you is a minor thing that you didn't care much for, for others it's the main selling point of the saga.

Jordan had so much fun with the ta'veren concept, all the extra details about people surviving terrible falls, flocks of birds colliding with each other and falling out of the sky for hungry people to eat, conversations that go Rand's way despite the express intent of who he's talking to. That scene where Tuon overcomes Darth Rand's will to squeak out disagreement is wild.

 

100% agreed on that last point, WOT is an amazing story and Jordan put so many ideas and perspectives into it that people can really take away many different messages from it.

[Goathill]

I liked the ta'veren concept, it fits the the theme of the books, time is a wheel and the wheel weaves as the wheel wills, but ta'veren are threads with a purpose that the wheel must weave around. 

[Ralph]

On 5/30/2025 at 7:29 PM, WoTwasThat said:

 

I agree with you that the show had many problems. Which you probably have now seen me acknowledge in a post I made after the one you quoted. But yeah, I think the departure from canon on gender of the Dragon was the biggest problem, and pretty closely related to your "who is the Dragon" mystery issue.

 

And I think the departure from canon on gender of the Dragon was a much bigger problem than you are acknowledging. Let me explain it this way... As I've mentioned previously, reincarnation and the gendered magic system where one gender has been tainted is the BACKBONE of the story. The Dragon will be reborn as a man doomed to madness because of a taint his actions contributed to, and he will be both destroyer and savior as a result. It is a highly original concept in fantasy, and it is AWESOME.

 

BUT, the Red Ajah continue to hunt male channelers, even though much of the Aes Sedai (certainly Moiraine, Siuan, the rest of the Blues, likely the Greens and many more) know full damn well that they could be gentling the Dragon Reborn! That's a kickass concept!!! Which the show immediately proceeds to piss all over by, at best, making Moiraine a bumbling moron who didn't know the prophecy. At worst, it makes the Reds much more justified in their actions because, hey, if the Dragon comes back as a gurl no big deal. It undercuts the CENTRAL CONFLICT of the story.

Why is this not identical if it is a 50% possibility? 

 

On 5/30/2025 at 7:29 PM, WoTwasThat said:

Oh, and sorry, I'm never gonna buy the Covid excuse for the botched ending to the Season 1. Not after everything else they botched along the way. The terrible ending had absolutely nothing to do with not depicting Tarwin's Gap as a massive fight scene. People forget, the book only depicts Tarwin's Gap for less than a page, and mostly in the past tense. Rand shows up and vaporizes the army. That's it. They could have spent 10 seconds of CGI on that in the show. Instead, the show completely changes the entire Eye sequence so as to render it unrecognizable. Covid didn't cause Rand and Moiraine to walk alone into the Blight for a little monologuing with Ishamael.

 

Strongly disagree. I hated the end of Book 1 and it didn't fit with the rest of the series at all. The ending the chose is taken from aMoL more or less, and was the only bit I liked in that episode. 

 

They messed up the battle good and proper, yes

[HeronMarkedBlade]

On 5/30/2025 at 2:49 PM, king of nowhere said:

on the other hand, elayne and aviendha had a pretty unique relationship.

on some level, they were closer than most married couples. they did everything together. they slept together hugging each other, they bathed together, they ate together, they lived together.

sex was the one thing they didn't do together, and that made their relationship different and more interesting. if they become lesbian loves, they are just that; another romantic relation, not very different from dozens of others.

 

i don't mind representation and diversity, but if there is one thing that turns me off (aside from when it's forced and poorly done) is how every relationship is turned romantical. how it seems you can't be close with someone without shtupping them.

I have three very good friends, and if I was a woman, or they were women, i'd try to date them. but i'm a straight man, and i have absolutely zero romantic inclination towards them. I call them honorary brothers, i am extremely close, but i have no romantic inclination.

but no, if my life was turned into a movie adaptation rafe would have me have gay sex with all three.

I don't like how in baldurs gate 3 you can date each and every companion, regardless of gender or species. you have a dozen of them, and not a single one will tell you "sorry, you are a great friend but i'm not into women/humans/tieflings/whatever".

i like how in mass effect 3 you have a bunch of romantic options that includes straight men, straight women, bisexual men, bisexual women, and even a straight gay and a straight lesbian. that's actual representation. everyone lusting over everyone else just isn't.

and so, I didn't like how elayne and aviendha's special bromance was turned into just another couple of lovers. I didn't like how it was suggested that lan join the alanna trio and start having sex with other men without any consideration for whether he'd be interested in it - especially because, as far as i know, doing a similar suggestion telling a straight lesbian to try men would be considered rude and insensitive, especially when worded like that. I didn't like how ishamael made suggestions over perrin.

each of the three elements, taken in isolation, i would accept without problems.

but all together? they point not towards diversity and representation, but to a world populated entirely by bisexual nymphomaniacs.

So, you are saying that the show failed not because of general first season weakness, pacing problems, the "who is the dragon" mystery resulting in poor characterization for the EF5, the bad ending they had to pull out because of covid and actor departure, poor special effects in S1, poor marketing, or any of the actual problems.

no, you are saying that the show failed because moiraine didn't know whether the dragon could be a woman or a man - which doesn't even imply any change to the mythology, just that aes sedai lost much knowledge. there's even siuan saying at some point, the prophecies are translations of translations, who knows what they meant originally.

not that people who didn't read the books would have much grasp over the whole mythology thing in the first place.

let's be realistic. the decision to keep the identity of the dragon a "secret" worked poorly because it impacted characterization. but the stuff about gender, it had absolutely zero impact on the success of the show. at most it turned away a few bookcloaks, which would have been turned away by all the other changes anyway.

 

the prophecy of the dragon is literally the most well known and most important prophecy in all of the books! Literally everyone in Randland knows the prophecy of the Dragon, and Moiraine’s WHOLE LIFE from the Prequel novel New Spring on to the current story, her WHOLE LIFES WORK is searching for the Dragon Reborn! She was literally right there for the foretelling of the birth of the dragon, a baby BOY born on the Mountain. 
 

you’re reaching so hard to pretend this is minor thing that you have pretty much unleashed a torrent of complete nonsense.

 

And yes, those other problems also contributed to this being one of the worst big dollar adaptations I’ve ever seen, but pretending that butchering the series most important lore is meaningless….. I can’t imagine a more ridiculous claim.

[HeronMarkedBlade]

19 hours ago, Ralph said:

Why is this not identical if it is a 50% possibility? 

 

 

Strongly disagree. I hated the end of Book 1 and it didn't fit with the rest of the series at all. The ending the chose is taken from aMoL more or less, and was the only bit I liked in that episode. 

 

They messed up the battle good and proper, yes

The end of book one was far better than anything done in season one of this show. 

[WoTwasThat]

27 minutes ago, HeronMarkedBlade said:

The end of book one was far better than anything done in season one of this show. 

I agree. The EotW is one of the top 5 best books in the series. The Eye is a terrific ending. You get all the lore of Malkier, the Green Man, two rotting forsaken emerge, Rand awakens, my God it’s a great ending.

 

But there are so many other great set pieces in EotW… Shadar Logoth. The Ways. Caemlyn. Somehow Season 1 mangled them all. I seriously watched in disbelief wondering “how does someone (Rafe) who supposedly loved the books eff this up so badly?!?!” EotW should have been a slam dunk adaptation. It’s a layup compared to the rest of the series!!

[Sabio]

7 hours ago, WoTwasThat said:

I agree. The EotW is one of the top 5 best books in the series. The Eye is a terrific ending. You get all the lore of Malkier, the Green Man, two rotting forsaken emerge, Rand awakens, my God it’s a great ending.

 

But there are so many other great set pieces in EotW… Shadar Logoth. The Ways. Caemlyn. Somehow Season 1 mangled them all. I seriously watched in disbelief wondering “how does someone (Rafe) who supposedly loved the books eff this up so badly?!?!” EotW should have been a slam dunk adaptation. It’s a layup compared to the rest of the series!!

8 episodes, so a lot had to be trimmed, that's not to say they didn't waste a lot of the time that they did have but things like the green man, 2 forsaken (who didn't do much of anything), Camelyn, white bridge etc had to get trimmed.  

[Elder_Haman]

8 hours ago, WoTwasThat said:

The Eye is a terrific ending.

The Eye as written would be awful television. No one would have any idea what was happening. 

[Samt]

On 5/31/2025 at 1:52 AM, Raal Gurniss said:

In fairness the odds are fairly good given the ship was likely ordered to go to the planet, to find Kenobi who they knew lived in the region because he was ordered there to watch over Luke so whilst the odds are still pretty high(thousands to one), they aren't literally astronomical.

That still only puts him on the right planet.  Tatooine may not be as heavily populated as some other planets, but it still has large cities.  The odds are definitely millions or billions to 1.  
 

Of course, it’s an oddity of Star Wars (and other similar science fiction) that planets are made to appear smaller and more homogenous.  Every biome that appears on a Star Wars planet is also present on Earth.  But in Star Wars, each planet is mostly allowed one biome.  The Star Wars galaxy has the same amount of biodiversity collectively as the Earth on its own.  This also leads to planets seeming relatively small where every place on the surface of a planet is within a short journey from every other place on that planet.  Even with the vehicles they have, there should be cities that are a days travel apart from each other.

Edited June 2 by Samt

[Vambram]

1 hour ago, Elder_Haman said:

The Eye as written would be awful television. No one would have any idea what was happening. 

 

Respectfully, I disagree. 

[WoTwasThat]

12 hours ago, Sabio said:

8 episodes, so a lot had to be trimmed, that's not to say they didn't waste a lot of the time that they did have but things like the green man, 2 forsaken (who didn't do much of anything), Camelyn, white bridge etc had to get trimmed.  

You do realize that Peter Jackson did a far more faithful adaptation of the entire LOTR series in about the same runtime? And Rafe couldn’t adapt one book in eight hours??? This “he didn’t have enough time” has never made a lick of sense to me. Mayyyybe don’t waste an entire episode on a totally made up warder / storyline, just for starters. 
 

Oh, and cutting Whitebridge, Bayle Domon, etc. from Season 1 was never the issue. I’m talking about the terrible disservice Rafe did to the major set pieces of EotW. 

Edited June 2 by WoTwasThat

[WoTwasThat]

11 hours ago, Elder_Haman said:

The Eye as written would be awful television. No one would have any idea what was happening. 

Yeah, I’ve never understood this excuse, either. You’ve given the same excuse for axing the prologue. You don’t seem to have much faith in the audience.

 

Can you explain why the Eye sequence wouldn’t have made sense? You don’t think somewhere in eight hours Moiraine couldn’t have squeezed in sixty seconds of exposition about the forsaken, the sealing of the bore, and the weakened seals? You don’t think he could have added a few dream sequences between Rand and Ishy? (Oh wait… that would have ruined the stupid non-mystery mystery). Had Rafe actually set out to tell the story, eight hours was plenty of time to do it.

[king of nowhere]

20 hours ago, HeronMarkedBlade said:

 

the prophecy of the dragon is literally the most well known and most important prophecy in all of the books! Literally everyone in Randland knows the prophecy of the Dragon, and Moiraine’s WHOLE LIFE from the Prequel novel New Spring on to the current story, her WHOLE LIFES WORK is searching for the Dragon Reborn! She was literally right there for the foretelling of the birth of the dragon, a baby BOY born on the Mountain. 
 

you’re reaching so hard to pretend this is minor thing that you have pretty much unleashed a torrent of complete nonsense.

 

And yes, those other problems also contributed to this being one of the worst big dollar adaptations I’ve ever seen, but pretending that butchering the series most important lore is meaningless….. I can’t imagine a more ridiculous claim.

first, i was answering several things simultaneously, it would have helped clarity to delete from the quoted section the things that you weren't replying to.

 

on to the point, you are failing to make your point in any meaningful way, and you are getting many details wrong anyway.

 

so everyone in randland knows the prophecies? not really. they know that the prophecies exhist. in the beginning of book 1 we see people in the two rivers mention the prophecies, and being very hazy on what they entail, some even claiming the dragon will serve the dark one and destroy the world iirc.

even noblemen and other learned people don't know much about the prophecies besides "the dragon will be reborn, he will save the world, but deal so much collateral damage in the process, you'll wish he didn't". 

Even Moiraine, who dedicated her WHOLE LIFE to searching the dragon, and made her WHOLE LIFES WORK to find him, and was literally right there for the foretelling of the birth of the dragon, is absolutely clueless about most details in the prophecies. 

the prophecies said that the dragon will be "of the ancient blood, and raised by the old blood". moiraine had absolutely no idea what it meant, to the point that it took her 20 years to go to the two river to look for someone with red hair. 

moiraine had no idea rand would be half aiel and half andoran prince, she had no idea he would have to go into rhuidean and lead the aiel, she didn't even knew what "born to a maiden wedded to no man" meant! which was actually pretty easy, if one had any superficial grasp of aiel culture. 

 

Let's face it, even moiraine, who was one of the world foremost experts on he dragon, knew little besides the basics. 

so, making the change that they would know even a bit less, and be unsure whether the dragon would be a boy or girl? a little thing, mostly. 

 

but the main reason i say your argument is irrelevant is that 90% of readers never grasp the lore. you are used to your internet forums with a few dozen equally hardcore fans discussing the minutiae as if they were the biggest thing, but in truth, the casual readers - that make up a majority of readership - never even notice those details. 

and in a tv adaptation, you always lose a lot of lore. lore is the kind that makes things complicated and requires a lot of exposition, and most people don't get anyway. besides, tv audience generally has a shorter attention span than book readers. 

so, while knowing that the dragon will be a male - doomed to go crazy from the taint - is a mildly important fact in the overall lore, very few people in randland know the full prophecies enough to know the difference between "the dragon will destroy because he will go crazy" and "the dragon will destroy because he will be naughty". adding a whole additional layer of uncertainty on the aes sedai themselves hoping the dragon could be a woman, therefore one they could better control, doesn't change the story much - in fact, it helps to show why the red ajah is still adamant on gentling every male channeler, and why the majority of aes sedai aren't hot on bending their knee to the forgotten sign.

and all this goes completely over the heads of the majority of people actually watching the show. the ones whose viewership numbers decide whether the show is successful or not. 

 

 

20 hours ago, HeronMarkedBlade said:

The end of book one was far better than anything done in season one of this show. 

I disagree. 

The end of book 1 felt like a long sequence of ass pulls. "and then a bunch of unexpected, unforshadowed things happen", over and over again. rand spends the whole book running from a forsaken, then he get angry and burns him? just like that? 

when you go outside of the "fantasy readers" social bubble, and see what others say about fantasy, you'll find that kind of stuff "the plot being inexplicably solved by a sudden burst of magic" to be the number one complaint against fantasy literature. 

[king of nowhere]

19 minutes ago, WoTwasThat said:

You do realize that Peter Jackson did a far more faithful adaptation of the entire LOTR series in about the same runtime? And Rafe couldn’t adapt one book in eight hours??? This “he didn’t have enough time” has never made a lick of sense to me. Mayyyybe don’t waste an entire episode on a totally made up warder / storyline, just for starters. 

you do realize the whole LOTR is roughly 1000 pages, and peter jackson had 9 hours (increased to 11 in the special extended edition), and running the numbers it means jackson had twice the ratio of screentime to book pages?

[Elder_Haman]

8 minutes ago, WoTwasThat said:

that would have ruined the stupid non-mystery mystery

First off, I have consistently argued that the mystery was dumb, so don't pretend that I'm defending that choice.

 

Second, the Eye is poorly set up in the books not to mention the constraints of the tv show. Moiraine just wanders off and decides that she'll be able to find it because she "needs" to. Two random Forsaken show up out of nowhere for some reason. Why are they there? Not really explained. How do they prevail? The Green Man - a character that isn't set up and just sort of appears. Why is he there? Not really explained.

 

But there's a pool there of uncorrupted Saidin. Why? Not sure, it's not particularly well explained. The Horn and the Banner are there. Why? Not sure, it's not particularly well explained. And suddenly Rand just knows how to use that power and kills all the Trollocs. The end.

 

Bad TV. 

That's not to say they couldn't have done something closer to the books. The actual ending of EotW is just not written for TV. (None of the books are.) 

 

So yes, they could have prioritized a story that hewed closer to the original text. But "just film the books as written" is not a good answer. It's reductive and ignores the difficulty of adapting the text.

 

[Elder_Haman]

25 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

you do realize the whole LOTR is roughly 1000 pages, and peter jackson had 9 hours (increased to 11 in the special extended edition), and running the numbers it means jackson had twice the ratio of screentime to book pages?

Also LOTR consists of an A plot and a B plot that are entirely linear. The only time it even needs a C plot is the brief period where Merry and Pippin are kidnapped. Wheel of Time's story is more complicated by several orders of magnitude.

[Sabio]

1 hour ago, WoTwasThat said:

You do realize that Peter Jackson did a far more faithful adaptation of the entire LOTR series in about the same runtime? And Rafe couldn’t adapt one book in eight hours??? This “he didn’t have enough time” has never made a lick of sense to me. Mayyyybe don’t waste an entire episode on a totally made up warder / storyline, just for starters. 
 

Oh, and cutting Whitebridge, Bayle Domon, etc. from Season 1 was never the issue. I’m talking about the terrible disservice Rafe did to the major set pieces of EotW. 

The Tolkien estate would disagree with your take on Peter Jackson doing a better job.  They hated what he did, thus their refusal to let ROP use anything from the movies.

 

As Elder has been pointed out to include the Green Man, untainted Saidin, etc would've been confusing.  Look at how bad they did with setting up the Horn and why it mattered.  When the horn was blown it was sort of confusing as to why this thing was important.

 

I thought they did a good job with Shadar Logoth and The Ways.

Edited June 2 by Sabio

[Jaccsen]

On 5/31/2025 at 4:52 AM, Raal Gurniss said:

In fairness the odds are fairly good given the ship was likely ordered to go to the planet, to find Kenobi who they knew lived in the region because he was ordered there to watch over Luke so whilst the odds are still pretty high(thousands to one), they aren't literally astronomical.

WE do not know the distances involved here. They were picked up by Jawas and sold. We have no on-screen time or distance reference. If the pods were programed to seek out inhabited zones, then there are not that many cities or regions on Tatooine.

[Jaccsen]

13 hours ago, Sabio said:

8 episodes, so a lot had to be trimmed, that's not to say they didn't waste a lot of the time that they did have but things like the green man, 2 forsaken (who didn't do much of anything), Camelyn, white bridge etc had to get trimmed.  

The Logain and Warder episodes could have been cut entirely to make room for more stuff that actually happened. There was so much wasted space in S1.

[WoTwasThat]

1 hour ago, Elder_Haman said:

First off, I have consistently argued that the mystery was dumb, so don't pretend that I'm defending that choice.

 

Second, the Eye is poorly set up in the books not to mention the constraints of the tv show. Moiraine just wanders off and decides that she'll be able to find it because she "needs" to. Two random Forsaken show up out of nowhere for some reason. Why are they there? Not really explained. How do they prevail? The Green Man - a character that isn't set up and just sort of appears. Why is he there? Not really explained.

 

But there's a pool there of uncorrupted Saidin. Why? Not sure, it's not particularly well explained. The Horn and the Banner are there. Why? Not sure, it's not particularly well explained. And suddenly Rand just knows how to use that power and kills all the Trollocs. The end.

 

Bad TV. 

That's not to say they couldn't have done something closer to the books. The actual ending of EotW is just not written for TV. (None of the books are.) 

 

So yes, they could have prioritized a story that hewed closer to the original text. But "just film the books as written" is not a good answer. It's reductive and ignores the difficulty of adapting the text.

 

I may be misremembering things, but I thought the book pretty clearly explained that the Eye was created by the Aes Sedai in the aftermath of the breaking in order to protect the Horn and one of the seals, and to help test/train the Dragon Reborn.

 

How did Rand know how to use it? He’s the Dragon Reborn. LTT reincarnated. And he gets flashes of LTT’s memories/knowledge throughout the series. That’s the premise of the series. Not exactly a stretch. 

[Elder_Haman]

42 minutes ago, Sabio said:

to include the Green Man, untainted Saidin, etc would've been confusing.

If it were me, I would have written the Eye to be a place known (to Moiraine at least) as a safe haven and home to an ancient power. I would have Mo learn during the journey that Tar Valon was not safe and divert there intentionally. 
 

I would have split the party in the Ways with Lan and the rest of the EFF landing in Fal Dara and start the tGH plot there, cutting Tarwin’s Gap and substituting it with Fain’s attack to steal the Horn. 

[WoTwasThat]

47 minutes ago, Sabio said:

The Tolkien estate would disagree with your take on Peter Jackson doing a better job.  They hated what he did, thus their refusal to let ROP use anything from the movies.

 

As Elder has been pointed out to include the Green Man, untainted Saidin, etc would've been confusing.  Look at how bad they did with setting up the Horn and why it mattered.  When the horn was blown it was sort of confusing as to why this thing was important.

 

I thought they did a good job with Shadar Logoth and The Ways.

Yeah… I’m not gonna get into a debate about whether LOTR was a more faithful adaptation of the books than WOT. It’s a waste of time to try to “prove” something that (1) is unprovable but (2) we all know damn well to be true.

 

Same goes for arguing that EOTW was harder to adapt in eight hours than the entire ring cycle. SMDH. 

[Elder_Haman]

4 minutes ago, WoTwasThat said:

the book pretty clearly explained

(a) “pretty clearly” is subjective and doing a lot of heavy lifting. (b) the book explained via exposition. Exposition makes for boring tv and is one of the biggest barriers to entry to the genre. 
 

As mentioned above, average people don’t care about the lore. They hate listening to characters talk about people and things that they don’t know about. They don’t want to feel like they have to do a bunch of homework to understand what people are talking about. 

Edited June 2 by Elder_Haman

[Jaccsen]

1 hour ago, Elder_Haman said:

Second, the Eye is poorly set up in the books not to mention the constraints of the tv show. Moiraine just wanders off and decides that she'll be able to find it because she "needs" to. Two random Forsaken show up out of nowhere for some reason. Why are they there? Not really explained. How do they prevail? The Green Man - a character that isn't set up and just sort of appears. Why is he there? Not really explained.

 

But there's a pool there of uncorrupted Saidin. Why? Not sure, it's not particularly well explained. The Horn and the Banner are there. Why? Not sure, it's not particularly well explained. And suddenly Rand just knows how to use that power and kills all the Trollocs. The end.

 

Bad TV. 

That's not to say they couldn't have done something closer to the books. The actual ending of EotW is just not written for TV. (None of the books are.) 

 

So yes, they could have prioritized a story that hewed closer to the original text. But "just film the books as written" is not a good answer. It's reductive and ignores the difficulty of adapting the text.

 

It is perfectly explained in the books.

 

The Eye is the pool of Saidin and it was created because of prophecy that it would be needed. The entire Eye was set aside after the taint to be ready and waiting for the reborn Dragon.

 

They talk about the Green Man multiple times in Eye. Morraine even tells the reader that she has been there and that need has always played a part in those who have found the Eye.

 

Regardless, the Eye was going to be found by Rand, regardless, because he is the Dragon and it is meant for him. Morraine does not say it around the boys because she does not want them to know that one of them is the Dragon Reborn. A quick aside to Lan in the TV show could have established that point to the audience.

 

The books explain it well. As for how Rand knows how to use it. It is because Lews Therin knew how to use it. The overwhelming source of pure Saidin was used at a subconscious level. Rand could not consciously control it but he was not.

 

As for the forsaken, they felt Saidin, they were drawn to it and the seals were weakening. Rand arriving at the Eye was a beacon.

 

All of this could have been easily handled in the show. It was not difficult. The writers just did there own thing.