Not really. They had lawyers go over it and everything. Totally legal. As a prime member, you're seeing the "prime free shipping price". As a non prime member, you're seeing the price without the "free shipping" price already included in the total. Now when you go to add to cart instead of seeing "$132", you see "$75" then you see "+60 in shipping". Sometimes you come out ahead... sometimes you get hosed. You're also going to miss out on those "prime member exclusives".... Wait till you learn about the wonderful world of shopping around for travel. (Airline tickets/hotels.) That can get really sketchy. Here's a tip. check out the prices using Incognito or using different browsers on different devices.. signed into different user accounts...

Again. When you have to subtract a ton of locations to save time & money, that allows you to add or change minor things. You're acting like changing Abel to a drunk is the same as moving Episode 6 from Caemlyn to Tar Valon. You're confusing the spec for the log in your eye.

Because the postage isn't actually free. The Price you see is "bundled" with shipping built in. I believe there's a google extension that'll even show you the price you'd see if you weren't a prime member... which is sometimes lower then listed. All those "Amazon Choice" products, may not even be the "cheapest". They're often the ones that generate Amazon the greatest profit margin while showing you a price that looks relatively cheap. Then you have the products amazon "makes" and "sells", which is similar to what Walmart did, where they evaluate a product, figure it's profit margins and see how they can improve it before buying the manufacturers and build it cheaper and sell it for the same price. All this to say... They're constantly "generating" income from subscriptions, and they can attribute a portion of that by how well a show is "performing" by how many "hours" of content people "consume" on prime video.

Yes, and the keyword you're missing is that they subtracted a LOT of content. They subtracted Caemlyn They subtracted Baerlon. They subtracted White Bridge They subtracted Bayle Domon's boat. When you Subtract a large portion of the middle of the book, you can add/change things that allows future content to be more impactful. Abel Cauthon plays virtually no role in the first book. Why include him at all? Why cast him? Why show him? Why change him at all? There must be a reason right? Expat talks about how those changes impact Mat's character development due to the lack of internal monologue in a TV series. Other's have talked about how this one change, allows for Abel's return in a future season gives his character a redemption arc, something that will be far more impactful for TV audiences then what we strictly got from the books. I want you to actually think about it. RJ wrote this series at the seat of his pants. When RJ wrote tEotW, he planned it to be a Trilogy, maybe 4 books. He thought aMoL would be book 3 or 4. The "magic system" in the series didn't start to get fleshed out until books 4 & 5, before then, the "magic" system was a lot softer. Some food for thought. Rand didn't learn about "Gateways" until Book 5. Moiraine briefly talked about "Travelling" in the first book and that it was "lost". By book 5, Rand acts surprised at seeing a Gateway, even though he basically created the exact same thing just before he went "nuclear" on that Trolloc army. Those same "gateways" were also what Ishamael was using against Rand in the Stone... even though he didn't call them that. Later, much later we learn about "Dreamshards", and whether this was a creation of RJ or Brandon I have no idea, but their existence explains "what" was going on during Rand's fight with Ishy in the Stone. There are certain concepts like "inverting" weaves, and the True Power that would completely change how the forsaken could operate so openly for as long as they did before being discovered. Then we weaves like "Compulsion" that didn't "exist" in the Eye of the World. Something like that would have completely changed how someone like Ishy could have operated from the shadows throughout the years. People arguing about Moiraine being "stilled" in Episode 8, didn't pay attention to Ishy's words and compared those to what Mohedien did to Liandrin... I'm still working on my re-read so it's been awhile, but I will say the idea isn't without merit. Among the EF5, Mat is the most anti-Channeler of them all. It's almost as if a certain forsaken played a hand in that. Timeline's off. Manetheren fell after Aridhol fell and became Shadar Logoth. It was Manetheren's soldiers that discovered the city was abandoned of all life, sensing only evil... I'd say the wheel didn't care. RJ did though.

Here's a thought experiment. What weaves would Ishamael know in the Eye of the World, that Robert Jordan didn't know existed when he wrote the Eye of the World?

Yet, Abel and Tam are important character(s) in the Shadow Rising arc when Perrin returns to the two rivers, Correct? You can "add" story for a character who becomes important later, if you're trying to show character growth. While at the same time cutting other content, or moving/merging said content to later seasons.

Correct. But that doesn't eliminate his thread, does it?

You can't have every thread. There are only going to be 64 episodes to cover 4.4 Million words. So you have to choose.

Sure, but who determines which thread is important? Why is the "Theme" that the EF5 come from an isolated village with a "strong moral upbringing" where the entire village is effectively the Shire, and the main characters approach everything with a sense of "purity" the one "thread" that's important for you? For me, the "Theme(s)" that are most important in a WoT TV Show are that people in power are corruptible. That even when people are telling the truth, the truth they know is likely to be a Lie, or false. That people's ego's need to be shattered as paradigms shift to a new truth. That the Dragon needs to break the world in order to rebuild it.

Internally, some show are greenlit for a second season if it tests well with their screeners & their execs particularly like it. (Bezos being a fan of WoT might have helped) As King of Nowhere mentioned, Contracts can also come into play. Before streaming on broadcast TV when "showrunners" and "Writers" put "real money" behind their show, they'd often get greenlit to start shooting a second season before the first has finished... but even that could have the pug pulled if the first season performed extremely bad, or the execs could gamble and hope Season 2 performs better before green lighting a third season. To balance these two points... As a TV show, the Two Rivers didn'tt need to replicate the cartoonishy goody two shoes nature of "The Shire", but it also doesn't need to go full "Game of Thrones" dark and gritty" either. We'll just have to WAFO, to see what they do with the "Cauthon's" in later seasons, right? Matrim isn't well educated, he is a charming rogue. e gambles and does some morally questionable deeds along his journey's. He also Marries the Seanchan Empress, and it remains to be seen what if anything Mat would do about the Damane situation... (So to put it another way. He comes from this great moral upbringing. But he's totally fine with Slavery. Right?)

Or you've given their team to little?

What was the theme of the marketing for Season 1? "Who is the dragon reborn?" "Is it a woman that'll save us, or a man who'll destroy us all?" What we have, was a carefully crafted narrative that they fed to us, the book readers, that changed what the Aes Sedai believe about the world and how it works. How much of those changes are actually changes behind the scenes, remains to be seen. (One of the obvious changes is linking no longer being safe. That's massive, and implies that key characters may die, during the cleansing.) We the book readers, know how all the rules work. We as viewers, are going to see characters in the show act like they know how everything works, and then hopefully as book readers we will exclaim "Well duh!" when the character is shocked as they find out what they thought was true was a lie the entire time. We're going to see that there has been a millennia long misinformation campaign orchestrated by the father of lies throughout the worlds history. We're going to see doubt, and a lot of contradictory stories/prophecies... Because information is power. One benefit that the show runners have, is that they have the complete works to go through. They would know what weaves Ishamael would have access to in EotW that RJ hadn't really thought up yet. They would be able to go extrapolate. How could Ishy have used that weave throughout history to distort people's perceptions of reality? Sow seeds of chaos? Distrust? War? Famine? Discreetly alter prophecies that were written down and locked away in dusty vaults?

Correct, but again. Is Joshua female? Is Egwene Male? Is Thom Female? At this point in time, the major characters haven't been gender swapped, and nothing's really changed as far as who the dragon is, the Dragon's "power", or anything regarding which side of the power you can access when you're born a man or a woman.

Jordan was a bit "wishy washy" on the concept of Dragons in other ages. The best we got out of him is that there were other "Dragons" in other ages, and that there was possibly a "female dragon", except that it was a "different" soul then the one tied to Rand. Either way, whatever the creators of the show said, what changed? Is Joshua female?

It definitely turned a better profit then Rings of Power. But that's easy when you don't blow $250M on just the rights to use the IP.

S1 was clearly setting up the coup, which we'll possibly see as early as the end of S2 / or the Beginning of S3. Book wise, That all went down during Book 4 when Rand was in the Aiel Wastes. I can't recall if she escaped the tower in book 4 or 5, but she was definitely deposed in the 4th book. Part way into the 5th book, she's been aimlessness travelling the countryside with Min, Leane and Logain, before finally stumbling upon Salidar. Meanwhile the wonder girls were actively traveling with Luca basically to the same destination. A LOT of the traveling crap with Siuan and the Wonder Girls can be completely cut to save time. What's important is the politics of the Tower Schism, Salidar, and what the wonder girls actually find in their travels. (The Kin) What it boils down to; they need to set up the politics of the tower coup, how the wonder girls are going to be involved in showing that Aes Sedai aren't all knowing. This gives Elayne, Nynaeve, Siuan, Min, Leane and several other key characters something to do until Egwene comes back from the Wastes with Rand/Mat. Perrin's obviously off doing Perrin stuff, and somehow they have to incorporate the other political situations throughout the world, with the machinations of the Forsaken without overwhelming the audience by hopping around from one story to the next, confusing the viewer by not knowing what's going on at any given moment, while balancing a cohesive plot/story that's condensed within a 60ish minute window.... You never want the audience to ask "Who the hell is this guy and why do I care about them?"

I see what you did there. "cough GoT cough" I still think it would be interesting to hear certain modern music, using non-modern instruments using entirely different or no-lyrics.

I mean, sometimes you get Actors(es) like Maisie Williams that can pull off a young adult/teen for YEARS.

Depends on the bundle I guess? Sometimes you get something like the "LotR 3 book bundle" which includes that big sleeve for all 3 books, and that's a different print then buying the books individually. Honestly, Thrift Store are probably your best and last hope at finding Hard Covers at a decent price! And if you're looking for WoT books and don't want that atrocious "Amazon Prime" sticker printed on your cover, you're going to have to steer clear of places like Barnes and Nobles for awhile! Nah, I think you're good. Linking to a specific place to buy books isn't break the rules. Posting about it in 30 different topics unsolicited, is.

I mean, war paint is a thing. Plus, if heavy Makeup is unrealistic, what's that say about the White Cloaks riding into battle with... white cloaks? 😛

Yeah, those are still people lol. Even then, we mostly got small skirmishes at that point, with the largest stuff being Tarwins and the Stone...

The Main enemies are People. Forsaken, Black Ajah...

Don't quote me, but I think he's sitting out this season (he had another project?) but he'll be return in season 3. That or I'm mixing up the actor playing Tam.

*Sniffs*

I mean, that just goes back to what I mentioned about working in those memorable (one)line(er)s. People will love-or-hate them as good dialogue or fan-service easter-eggs. Remove all the internal monologue in the books, and we're left with a lot of grunting and whining.