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Adam Whitehead is Dragonmount's TV blogger. Adam has been writing about film and television, The Wheel of Time, and other genre fiction for over fifteen years, and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2020. Be sure to check out his websites, The Wertzone and Atlas of Ice and Fire (including The Wheel of Time Atlas!) as well as his Patreon.   It’s now been confirmed that Amazon’s Wheel of Time TV series is coming in 2021, which means the show should launch in well under six months from now. Excitement is building among the books’ immense global fanbase, but, as discussed previously, Amazon are going to need to get new viewers to watch the show as well. So far all of the teasers, logo reveals and casting information has been aimed at book fans and those already invested rather than complete newcomers to the franchise.   A big moment will come when the show unveils its first, proper trailer for the series. Some are hoping that will come at this year’s virtual Comic-Con event where Wheel of Time showrunner (or “shadowrunner”) Rafe Judkins will be appearing on a panel with several other writers and creatives. This is the only Wheel of Time-related event at Comic-Con currently scheduled. The panel takes place at 11am PT on 23 July.   However, it appears doubtful that this will actually be the case. The panel is a sequential series of relatively brief discussions, first with Judkins and then Evengelion 3.0 showrunner Hideaki Anno, followed by segments on Leverage: Redemption, S.O.Z. Soldiers or Zombies and the I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot. The event is relatively low-key. I think if Amazon were planning a launch for the TV show as soon as September or maybe early October, they’d go all-in with a full (virtual) Comic-Con panel with as much of the cast as possible, a trailer launch and so forth. The fact they are not doing that, in a year when the absence of big-hitters DC and Marvel means they’d get more publicity than normal, is telling.   There’s also been a change at Amazon in how they approach marketing, in contrast to competitors Netflix and HBO. Amazon used to tease shows very early in development, sometimes whilst filming was underway or even before it had begun. The earliest marketing teasers for Good Omens and The Boys aired almost a year before the shows aired, and The Man in the High Castle and The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel both benefited from having their first episodes shot and released separately as pilots before the rest of the season was filmed. However, from Carnival Row onwards, Amazon originals have switched to a much more focused campaigns, described by some in the business as “global saturation marketing campaigns,” or for those familiar with movie Aliens, “nuke the site from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.” The idea is to not get people to watch at trailer six or twelve months from release and then they forget about it until the week before the show airs, which they might miss (a common Netflix mistake), but instead to bombard audiences and viewers with trailers, teasers and information in a much more concentrated time period, lasting from six to twelve weeks before the release date.   Even with shows where they did show early teasers, Amazon adopted this policy in the lead-up to release with great success (especially for The Boys). Whether Amazon break from this for their vastly more expensive Lord of the Rings show (which appears to have between two and three times Wheel of Time’s already-generous budget, maybe even more), rumoured to launch in the first few months of 2022, is a bigger question.   What that means for The Wheel of Time is that a trailer during Comic-Con is highly unlikely unless they plan to release the show relatively quickly afterwards. We know the show is airing in 2021, so it will start in December at the latest (which Amazon might be trying to avoid, as it will end up going head-to-head with Season 2 of The Witcher), and the recent movements of the publishing dates for the tie-in novels suggest it might start in October or (as long has been rumoured) November. To me that makes a marketing blitz starting in late August or even September is more likely than July.   Hopefully we will get some more information from Rafe’s panel and it’d be great if he could confirm a release date there, but the feeling of myself and the rest of the Dragonmount team is that those hoping for a full-length trailer will likely be disappointed, unless Amazon decide to shift the marketing strategy they have been using for the last three years.   As usual, let us know your thoughts and keep checking our TV news and casting pages for updates.

Katy is a news contributor for Dragonmount. You can follow her as she shares her thoughts on The Wheel of Time TV Show on Instagram and Twitter @KatySedai   The news broke early this morning that Zack Stentz has begun working on the scripts for three The Wheel of Time movies set in the Age of Legends.  The Age of Legend movies are independent of Amazon Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time TV show currently in production.   Zack Stentz was a co-writer for Thor and X-Men First Class. He has also written for TV shows like The Flash, and Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous.     Rick Selvage and Larry Mondragon of iwot productions are producers on the new movies. Rick Selvage and Larry Mondragon also produced the Winter Dragon pilot and are producers for the Amazon TV show.   There’s currently no studio or distributor attached to the Age of Legends movies yet. Amazon and The Wheel of Time Showrunner, Rafe Judkins, are not involved in the movie adaptation of the book material.   If you are curious about the history of The Wheel of Time media rights, check out Adam’s deep dive.   The Wheel of Time fans will have plenty to talk about at JordanCon this weekend. We are also hoping for more TV show news from Showrunner Rafe Judkins at ComicCon next week.    Zack Stentz confirmed his involvement this morning on Twitter.  Dragonmount founder, Jason Denzel, provided a bit of context for today's announcement in a Twitter thread. Click through to the first tweet in the series: 

Showrunner Rafe Judkins of Amazon Prime's The Wheel of Time will be on a virtual panel at Comic-Con@Home 2021. The Amazon panel will take place on July 23rd at 11am PT and will stream to the San Diego Comic-Con's YouTube. Check back here for the link once we get closer.    TV presenter Tim Kash will have a conversation with each Showrunner on the panel, and we might even see some announcements or content drops! We are keeping our fingers crossed for some great photos or another teaser, but seems unlikely we will see a trailer quite yet.       

In 2019, a group project was put forward in the JordanCon Costumers Facebook group.  The idea--suggested by Christine Wessling--was to create a quilt.  Each block of the quilt would represent one of the books with The Wheel of Time, and each block would be created by a different crafter.  The idea was quickly embraced by many in the group and the books were snagged!   Here are the details from JordanCon:   I feel so fortunate that I was able to contribute to this project!  I knew I wanted to make my love of Lan and Nynaeve apparent, so I picked Knife of Dreams.  There are so many wonderful Lan and Nynaeve moments--when Nynaeve breaks her block, her first confession to him in The Eye of the World, Lan giving her his ring and her Accepted testing in The Great Hunt--but the ultimate has to be Nynaeve's trek through the borderlands gathering her husband an army.  "The Golden Crane flies for Tarmon Gai'don!" is the best line of the book.  I tried to capture that theme with a golden crane, crown, and lance on a field of blue.   I envy the lucky winner of this quilt!  It will be an amazing addition to any fan's collection!   You can read more from each of the contributors on JordanCon's website.

Adam Whitehead is Dragonmount's TV blogger. Adam has been writing about film and television, The Wheel of Time, and other genre fiction for over fifteen years, and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2020. Be sure to check out his websites, The Wertzone and Atlas of Ice and Fire (including The Wheel of Time Atlas!) as well as his Patreon.   It’s a sign that Wheel of Time news has been a bit thin on the ground recently when fans get incredibly excited about the reveal of the TV show’s official logo.     Up until now, Amazon has been using a derivation of the logo from the novels. However, it was clear that they’d want to create their own logo to easily differentiate the TV series from the books, the tabletop RPG and other takes on the same franchise, and they could put on their own merchandise.   Intriguingly, they’ve decided not to include a literal Wheel in the image. Although they might be an obvious choice, it might also feel a little too on-the-nose. Instead, the primary image in the logo is a variation on the ouroboros symbol, of a snake eating its own tail. In mythology, the ouroboros is a serpent eating its own tail, a symbol for eternity. It is also used to depict alchemy and the cycle of life, death and rebirth. The symbol is Egyptian in origin (one adorns the tomb of Tutankhamun, dating from c. 1323 BC) before being picked up on by the ancient Greeks, who massively popularised its use. It also later appears in Norse mythology as the World Serpent, Jörmungandr, and in the Bible as the Leviathan. Variations on the image also appear in Hinduism. All of these sources were used by Robert Jordan during research for the Wheel of Time novels.     In The Wheel of Time novels, the ouroboros is depicted as the Great Serpent, a symbol of eternity even older than the Wheel itself. Aes Sedai wear a Great Serpent ring to depict their rank and status, and the Great Serpent is sometimes used as a metaphor for time in lieu of the more familiar Wheel.   More careful examination of the logo and its animated opening shows the scales initially being contrasted between light and shadow, forming a representation of the Aes Sedai symbol. The Aes Sedai symbol is, of course, the yin and yang symbol of Chinese philosophy. The yin and yang represent dualism, the idea of how opposite and contrary forces may actually be complementary and even interdependent. This is a key theme of the series where the dualism of male and female, order and chaos, and good and evil are core ideas. At the start of the books the two are separated out, with the white symbol being presented as the Flame of Tar Valon, standing for order, female power and good, and the black symbol being presented as the Dragon’s Fang, standing for chaos, male unpredictability and evil (a result of the male half of the One Power being cursed, dooming male channellers to insanity and death even as the fate of the world hinges on the success of one of them, the Dragon Reborn). This is actually the inversion of the traditional Chinese use of the symbol, where yang is white and yin is black. The traditional Chinese version of the symbol also has a tiny dot of white in the black half and vice versa, to show that nothing is entirely one way or the other; Jordan omitted this possibly to make the symbol less immediately obviously the same thing as the yin and yang.   The ring itself is also interesting, as it is made up of a serpent that coils downwards to infinity. This hints at the other worlds/dimensions that come to play a major role in the story. The surface of the ring is also rippled and coils back in on itself in unusual ways, like a Möbius strip. Such a strip is unusual in having only one side and one boundary, meaning that though it appears to have two sides, it only has one, the result of an elaborate optical illusion. The Möbius strip is sometimes used in science fiction and fantasy to represent matters related to non-linear time; Avengers: Endgame visualises its time travel technology with a 3D holographic version of a strip (which gives Tony Stark the clue he needs to make time travel possible).   Eagle-eyed fans also caught that the logo has messages in the Old Tongue – the language of the Age of Legends – hidden in the corners. “Kodome calichniye ga ni athan’an aman hei” means “here is always a welcome for the People of the Dragon.”     Amazon also revealed variations of the logo in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, French and Japanese, as well as a scaled-down version of the logo using the major initials “WT” (rather than the more common fan-abbreviation “WoT”). The unveiling of the logo is possibly the start of a more concerted marketing push for the series, which as we speculated last time may launch in November (and the logo reveal does confirm a 2021 release date). In an intriguing development, the release of the TV tie-in editions for the Wheel of Time novels has moved up to 16 September in the UK, 28 September in the USA for the mass-market edition and 5 October for the trade paperback edition. Although these dates seem to be in flux and should be treated with caution, it may hint that Amazon is now considering an earlier launch for the show, in October or early November, rather than the previously-hinted late November/December launch date.     Hopefully in the next few weeks we’ll see a full trailer and start seeing things spooling up for the show’s long, long-delayed launch.   As usual, let us know your thoughts and keep checking our TV news and casting pages for updates.

Katy is a news contributor for Dragonmount. You can follow her as she shares her thoughts on The Wheel of Time TV Show on Instagram and Twitter @KatySedai   The Wheel of Time on Amazon Prime shared a short video to social media confirming the show will be released in 2021. The video also reveals a new logo for the television show.    This is the first confirmation from Amazon that we will see the TV show before the end of THIS year. The new logo is the serpent eating its tail, or the ouroboros, without the seven spoked wheel. Sharp eyed fans noticed a lot of small details inspired by the books in the new logo.    Light shines on a silvery scale of the great serpent, briefly creating the ancient symbol of the Aes Sedai. A circle, divided by a sinuous line. Half light and half dark. The serpent spirals around into a twisting Mobius strip like the dream ter’angreal and comes to rest eating its tail. A circling serpent like the rings worn by Aes Sedai. Then words appear: The Wheel of Time. 2021.   Cue excited cheering from us fans!   Find Dragonmount on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and then let us know what you think of the new logo in the comments below.   

We're implementing some changes to the way that you log into Dragonmount.     Apple ID Login Secure login to Dragonmount with your Apple ID is now available. Any visitor to the website may create a new account or associate their existing account with their Apple ID address. Simply select "Sign In With Apple" using the login page. This joins the other available options of using Facebook, Twitter, Google as secure methods of validation. You may also login directly using a Dragonmount account. As always, all communication with our site is entirely secure and encrypted.      Upcoming Login Changes    How It Currently Works Currently Dragonmount allows you to login using your username. That’s how it’s been done since we opened in 1998. But usernames are always public-facing, which means that people or groups with ill-intent could easily target s specific account and try to to that account using brute force.  For example, they could take the name “Jason Denzel” and try lots of popular password combinations, hoping to break in. Now, we have plenty of ways to detect these brute force attacks and block them.  But still, it’s a modern best practice to not use a username for a login anymore.    What's Changing   Beginning Thursday, June 24 July 8 all users will log onto Dragonmount using an email address instead of a username. Your existing password will continue to work like normal.  In addition, users will also be able to login using their Facebook, Twitter, or Google accounts.  (We have plans to implement AppleID login at a future date and to offer optional Two-Factor authentication.). We've extended the date to give people more time to validate their email. We'll make the change after we send out July newsletter.   Required Actions No action is required on your part except to please take a moment to verify that your email address on record is current.   (Click your user name in the upper right corner > Account Settings)    Also, while you're there, please consider checking your Notification settings to see if you're receiving our monthly newsletter. It's a great way to have a recap of the latest Wheel of time and community news sent to your Inbox.    Thank you for being part of this amazing community. If you have questions, please email webmaster@dragonmount.com

Katy is a news contributor for Dragonmount. You can follow her as she shares her thoughts on The Wheel of Time TV Show on Instagram and Twitter @KatySedai   The Dusty Wheel YouTube channel live streamed an interview with author Brandon Sanderson today. The ninety minute discussion was guided by submitted questions.  Brandon and Matt Hatch, the Innkeeper, covered topics including: general writing questions, Brandon’s new Podcast and YouTube success, a Mistborn/Fornite crossover, The Wheel of Time television production and adapting the series, The Wheel of Time book spoilers including regrets with finishing to the series, and finally many Cosmere questions answered with a RAFO (Read and Find Out).   In the general discussion, Brandon reaffirmed that he will be at JordanCon 2021 in Atlanta this July. He suggested we will see him on a two hour panel, with the exact topic to be determined.   In addition to his prolific and strict writing schedule and starting a new podcast, Brandon has found the time to become a YouTuber, with over 200,000 subscribers. His channel provides weekly updates and live streams where he answers questions while signing books. Brandon multitasked tonight; signing pages for the leather-bound copy of The Way of Kings while drinking bubble tea.   One piece of recent news for Cosmere and video game fans is the announcement that the character Kelsier from Mistborn will be in the popular video game Fornite.   After the spoiler free discussion, the conversation moved on to full spoilers for The Wheel of Time series and the upcoming television show. Brandon reinforced the idea that The Wheel of Time television series from Amazon Prime is in good hands. He is pleased with showrunner Rafe Judkins, who he says     Brandon also discussed how the changes in the TV show can be canon, and that the narrative of the Wheel of time allows for it, and even encourages the idea of changes.     This idea of a different version of events was discussed by Robert Jordan when describing the workings of the Wheel and the Pattern of Ages.   There’s much discussion online about the potential changes for the television show. Expectations are high, and maybe it helps to frame the changes this way - that the canon of the books allows for changes to the details. When we pull away and look at the big picture we still see the familiar characters and stories we love.   The Wheel of Time conversation moved to specific questions about the last three books in the Wheel of Time series. Brandon discussed regrets on a scene that was included that he wished wasn’t.  Definitely watch the full video to hear his full thoughts.   The innkeeper and Brandon ended the evening with a multitude of Cosmere questions with a quick succession of RAFO’s (read and find outs), and a few detailed answers Cosmere fans will want to take notes on.   What questions were you excited to hear about? What questions do you wish Brandon had answered? Let us know in the comments below. Be sure to check out the video from The Dusty Wheel on YouTube, and subscribe to their channel.  

Katy is a news contributor for Dragonmount. You can follow her as she shares her thoughts on The Wheel of Time TV Show on Instagram and Twitter @KatySedai.     Amazon Prime Video Australia and New Zealand released a promotional video for their shows coming to Australia in 2021  including Amazon Prime’s The Wheel of Time television show. The video features actor Madeleine Madden who plays Egwene al’Vere.   This is the first recorded promotional material that we’ve seen for the upcoming TV show, and just a hint of what to expect from Amazon in the months to come.   The clip also includes footage of the table read previously seen on The Wheel of Time’s Twitter account back in October 2019. There is no other new footage but it’s great to see her so excited!   With season one wrapping up filming in May, we are keeping our fingers crossed we get to see Madeleine as Egwene this year!      

In this story, Robert Endicott comes from a family gifted with heraldry—a sort of foretelling for people, places, and things.  This innate ability gets him noticed as a possible student for the Duchess’s New School, a program that teaches dynamics, a form of magic that derives from shifting probability and the physics of thermodynamics.    As Endicott and his classmates get further into their training, they learn that the New School’s not as safe as they thought.  The previous year’s trainees suffered fatalities in their studies and the courses this year aim to keep the students from the same mistakes.   To make matters worse, rumors of Nimrheal—a mythical figure who outlawed innovation and is credited with killing mathematicians and inventors in the past—begin to circulate and riots break out in his name.  The real threat of mishandling the magic and the perceived threat of Nimrheal push Endicott down a road he never intended to take.   Some reviews of Lee Hunt’s Dynamicist claim that mathematics is just as important as magic within the world of this trilogy.  This idea was so intriguing, and as a math teacher, I knew I had to read this book.  While Dynamicist only scratches the surface of this magic system, there is the promise of more to come as the series continues.  This view of magic is unique and I enjoyed the tie in to math and science.     Endicott is a likeable hero.  He struggles to learn the needed academic skills and form bonds with his new classmates.  Raised on a farm, Endicott is naïve about the city and his interactions with others.  Because of his humble upbringing, he approaches these relationships and situations with an honest sincerity that’s refreshing.  He wants to discuss poetry and his emotions.  He constantly analyses himself.  He realizes he has a weakness for protecting others, and this love drives his character forward.   This book was an enjoyable read and a great introduction to a new world and a new magic system. I’m very excited to finish the trilogy and see how fleshed out the math magic can get!   The second book in the series, Herald, was released on audiobook earlier this month!  I listened to the audiobook for Dynamicist and recommend it.  The narration by Craig A. Hart is well done.  His emotions come through for each character.   To read more on Lee Hunt and the rest of the Dynamicist trilogy, you can visit his website.