45 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

Tarwin’s Gap

Yeah, but we only see it in the books from a great distance. They could show more in the show, but the main cast is not personally involved.

50 minutes ago, DaddyFinn said:

Is Falme the first big one?

Whoops, I forgot Falme. That's bigger. Still, they could focus on Rand and the girls escaping and close up shots rather than have lots of battle stuff.

They could probably get away with that for the Stone, too, given its close quarters.

What I had in mind as a big battle that's on a large scale would be the siege of Cairhien. They could expand on things for the show, of course. But Cairhien is the first really detailed, huge battle that comes to my mind.

Am I missing something else?

At least most of WoT's big battles are in later books (that we see up close), meaning the show has time to establish itself and the studio may by then be willing to invest more into making battles look properly big.

I get the cheesy comments, but I'd like to see it all in the context of the larger episode.

6 minutes ago, DaddyFinn said:

Yes, but not much. 

I don't mean a military commander or anything. Just a persistent face to follow, maybe a more brutish/intelligent trolloc. Kind of like how in Fellowship of the Ring they gave some focus to one uruk'hai.

2 hours ago, DaddyFinn said:

More pics from twitter. This is Amazon Prime Netherlands poster

 

 

Edit. Didn't realise this was basically the same as the wide shot above

Is that Narg getting a poster spot? On the right of the Myrdraal.

I was kind of kidding, but now I'm  wondering if we will see a Trolloc "leader"/persistent antagonist, kind of like what we saw for some Orcs in LotR.

12 hours ago, AdamA said:

I really like that they dyed Rosamund Pike's eyebrows. That's nice attention to detail, and one of my few complaints about Game of Thrones costuming decisions was the actors whose character hair color didn't match their natural hair color looking unnatural because they didn't match the eyebrows.

That bugged my, too. But it's probably easier to darken eyebrows (even temporarily) than to bleach them. Or maybe the actress was okay with it. Emilia Clarke wore a wig, she didn't dye her actual hair.

15 hours ago, TheMountain said:

Wasn't excited either to be honest. I wonder though how much of my lack of interest is due to the dumpster fire that was the last season of GoT.

I hated the end result of GoT, but they're working from good, complete material and it's not D&D, and I blame D&D and not HBO for what happened.

4 hours ago, SingleMort said:

I never personally saw this as rape but it definitely seemed dodgey. The reason I didn't see it as rape was it didn't appear there was any trauma involved. Mat seemed uncomfortable and confused by the situation but he never seemed to be suffering or in any genuine distress. You could argue there was sexual harrassment but I don't think Mat was raped and it seemed clear he had geuine feelings for Tylin

Mat gets physically sick in his anxiety that Elayne is convinced he's about to throw up.

He's constantly looking over his shoulder for his abuser both in the palace and on the streets.

He locks his door, barricades his room, avoids dinner, and can't sleep much for fretting she might send men to break in and take him to her.

He takes to searching his room to make sure she's not there hiding.

He feels like weeping at times over it.

This old topic highlights a lot of it:

A lot of the actions indicative of trauma and stress are so couched in humor you almost miss them, but I don't think it's hyperbole in this case. Mat also doesn't seem to understand what's happening to him either.

Something to keep in mind is that the vast majority of book readers don't ever reread the books and certainly don't look for online communities to discuss them. 

Another consideration for streaming services is that they want ongoing subscriptions, so they plan their major releases in a spread out fashion sometimes so as to keep people sub'd.

The EotW is a bit of an avalanche at the end, and Rand himself doesn't understand exactly what's happening or what he's doing, so it's all very vague. It'll be easier to go back and explain after you read a few more books, which I know is not a small ask. I will say Jordan's writing steps up a notch for the second book, and he's still settling into this massive world he's constructing. Also, the first three books were originally envisioned as just being the first book of a trilogy. It expanded in the telling.

If you want a breakdown of what he's doing, we can provide it, but he's doing things intuitively that will get more explanation later. Let me know and I'll explain a few technical details.

Bad optics aside, I think the idea was that Aes Sedai formally viewed novices and accepted as children, perhaps in a way all other people as children, and so they would be punished like children.

Is it getting hot in here? *fans self*

I'm optimistic for the show. I thought the teaser trailer was kind of generic. I'm twiddling my thumbs waiting for a longer story trailer. I think we're overanalyzing likes/dislikes.

43 minutes ago, CaddySedai said:

 

Good for a minute it sounded you were an advocate to know the size shape and angle of Demandred's junk.

 Omigosh my autocorrect today I swear.

1 hour ago, AusLeviathan said:

For who else are the books if not adults?

 

To start with the violence in the series is intense, people are exploded, burnt, decapitated, limbs cut/burned off, drowned, stabbed in the eyes, have their eye ripped out, hung, eaten and skinned alive. There are a number of instances of presentations of dead bodies including one notable instance where people are dancing and celebrating around a severed head.

 

Then you have the sexual violence. Multiple people who are raped and it is not hidden that this is happening, we even have multiple instances of people in series making jokes to the victims about their assaults.  The entirety of Faile's group among the Shaido being forced to find protectors because of the rampant sexual assaults going on in the camp. Plus Galina ending up stuck in her new life as Therava's sex slave and Suroth being sent to "service" the Deathwatch Guard.

 

The overall themes in the story, that balance is necessary and that sometimes unity is needed with those that you find abhorrent. The heroes allow hundreds of women to be kept as slaves in order to get an agreement on peace. Domestic violence is presented as common and accepted in many cultures. The Chosen One is slowly going mad and is willing to slaughter thousands in order to send a message.

 

If this isn't adult then what is?

 

It was an underdeveloped genre 10 years ago, it is now a saturated genre so full of similar shows that one of the most common responses from non book readers when the trailer was released was how generic it looked, because they have seen much of the imagery shown in a dozen shows over the past few years.

 

If the shows were cheaper it would make more sense, throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks but the start up costs for LotR were so high that they can't really allow it to fail which puts WoT in the position as the easy Fantasy show to cut short if they need to free up money for a new project, an unfortunately rather common occurrence with streaming services recently.

 

None of the stuff shown in the trailer would cause changes down the line, is it very standard adaption expansion/combing of events. Showing Logain killing an Aes Sedai doesn't change his plot, he was already a dangerous False Dragon responsible for killing people. The characters taking different paths to get to Fal Dara doesn't change how things would go at Fal Dara.

 

There are definitely larger changes that we haven't been shown in the trailer and that's almost certainly what Sanderson is referring to.

I read the first nine books at 13 and 14. Much of the sex and more grotesque violence is implicit, not explicit. For all his descriptiveness, Jordan was very not descriptive about some things. Compare to Game of Thrones with Martin's very matter of fact descriptions of sex and sexual assault and body parts, or Outlander's multi-page erotica scenes. Jordan really does none of this. And I'm not saying that is a bad thing at all.

I also want to say that if I watch the show and feel it's genuinely bad, I'll say so. I think in principle the defenses of some changes I've given make sense and are good, but it'll come down to execution. As an anecdote referring to GOT, when it was first shown that Jamie was going to Dorne in Season 5, I defended the decision as an adaptation. One that could keep a familiar character around as they introduce new characters and plot threads, one that could still play into Jaime's character arc. When I saw how they actually handled it... honestly it was the first moment when the show really jumped the shark with me, and overall felt lazy and like bad writing, and I only feel the show went mostly downhill from there. It's not that they adapted and condensed, I still think the general idea of Jaime going to Dorne is fine, they just botched it. And not just did poorly, it just felt... really bad.

But ahead of the season, I'm all for giving the benefit of the doubt. In principle I understand the logic for differences we're seeing. We'll see if they pull it off or not. I think it's certainly possible they pull it off.

On 9/17/2021 at 12:41 AM, DaddyFinn said:

No. That would mean 10+ seasons as a whole and that's too much.

 

PS. We don't know how faithful the series will be. We have not seen one full episode, one full season let alone the complete series. Don't judge yet.

I'd watch twenty seasons of a scene for scene adaptation, but I'm a book fanatic. No network would accept that pitch, and it would almost certainly not broaden the appeal beyond those who've read the books multiple times.

My main concern with changes are not new scenes that flesh out dynamics or expand on the lore or characters we'll meet later. It is those that broadly misunderstand characters and their arcs, and those which are just bad/laughable writing in themselves.

I will say back in 2011 with GOT I was far stricter, and same with LotR ten year before that. I don't know if it was my experience with those that prepared me for something different here, or just understanding the WoT is probably far harder to adapt given it is 15 books of content with many dozens of characters and its depth of interior character exposition. Maybe both. But I'm definitely coming at WoT at this point in my life not expecting a strict scene for scene adaptation. Things will be condensed and reordered for the show. I just hope it keeps the main thrust and heart of the books.

As some have been stressing in other topics, "watchable for young adults" is not the same as the young adult genre. Keep in mind the books are definitely readable for young adults. But the young adult genre doesn't just mean watchable by teens, but includes certain themes. To use HP as an example, the early books are "mid-grade" where adults are often blind to problems or incompetent, whereas the later books are "young adult" and adults are the problem. That's a common YA motif. Another common motif in YA is an overfocus on a love triangle (usually FMM), and semi-soap opera dynamics. These aren't in WoT, and we've seen no indication it'll be in the show. It's current rating still allows nudity, swearing, violence, sex, to all happen on camera, if that floats your boat. You can have a show that has a broad audience which is not "YA" as a genre.

The show needs to show. It isn't a medium for lots of exposition. We also know that the books start with just a handful of POVs and then expand to many dozens of POVs. The simple truth is people other than Rand are not minor characters, and passing them off as such in the show for a few seasons just isn't going to work well with casting and everything. The books are about more than Rand, so we're going to probably get more focus on the ensemble early. We're also probably seeing some misdirection about who the Dragon Reborn is.

I'm not saying your concerns are entirely without merit, but I do think they are justified in showing Logain and the Aes Sedai and putting more focus on the other Emonds Fielders and Moiraine and Lan early.

The White Tower in the books would probably look very squat to everyone. It's 600 feet tall and 300 feet wide at the base, so the base is half as wide as the tower is tall. That's not counting the two wings. And the top, from what I'm reading, is 200 feet wide. As for shrinking the city, I think it's unfortunate. The logic is probably that they want the White Tower to visually dominate the island in all shots. Not to just be the tallest building, but to look dominating and imposing for us contemporary people who see much taller skyscrapers in real life all the time.

The book was about stopping the Dark One, not righting all the injustices in the world. Jordan intentionally left this unresolved. Real life, even apart from the "Dark One", is messy and imperfect and has lots of injustice. The world after the Dark One would still have a lot it needs to wrestle with, human conflicts. It's not like everything becomes hunky-dory.

22 minutes ago, dssharp said:

There have been some leaked set photos from like a year ago with white cloaks in funny looking armor. 

Oh cool!

I'm thinking we may not see Whitecloaks this season, and they'll be introduced in a later season and the antagonisms will be set up then. The show will probably want to limit the number of players in its first season. In their place, I expect to see Logain's followers and his "dragonsworn" turned bandits/rebels, who I don't think will be subdued yet, given Logain's increased prominence.

I'd be happy to be wrong, but the first book will be covered at quite a fast clip, and show watchers probably won't even be able to put names to faces that well for the the first season.

6 minutes ago, AusLeviathan said:

It would certainly allow for Perrin's storyline to become more complex.

With an atonement arc and a reacceptance arc.

I recognize I'm way ahead of myself here.