On 5/25/2022 at 9:52 AM, Irvyne said:

It's not the details that are the problem, it's the fact that the whole thing was completely rewritten, and not in a good way! And I wouldn't really call things like Egwene healing death without even breaking a sweat as a "minor change." That changes the entire magic system of the story!

 

The frustration is that there was a brilliant story already there. Yes, it would need to be heavily edited down. But not changed completely. There is barely a single scene or conversation in season 1 that is actually in the book.

Was the whole thing rewritten? In the novel Moiraine arrives at the Two Rivers, recruits a bunch of youngsters to help her save the world and takes them to do that, via visits to Shadar Logoth, the Ways, Fal Dara and the Blight, where it is revealed that Rand is the Dragon Reborn. In the TV show the exact same thing happens. A lot of the details have changed for reasons understandable (cost, time) and unfathomable, but the broad strokes of the story are the same.

It doesn't help that the show does present things confusingly, though. Nynaeve was probably simply severely injured and Egwene was able to Heal her by drawing on Nynaeve's own strength (linking?), but Nynaeve's injuries did look severe enough so that people could confuse her with being dead.

On 12/21/2021 at 9:20 PM, Pandemonium said:

I still don't see where it says this is #1 premier ever at Amazon.  all I see is top 5 ever and #1 in 2021.  

Added a second link where it was confirmed by head of Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke.

On 12/15/2021 at 7:23 PM, MsDinosaur said:

I can understand the decision, but IMO it would have been better to to go back to the dagger scene and have Mat left so weak that he couldn't get out of bed and would need to recover in the White Tower.   He did have that lengthy recovery in the books and it would have been a better explanation for the drastic change in his appearance.       

I think this would have worked better, but they did not have the budget to reshoot the entry into the Ways scene, nor to digitally paint Harris out of all the shots there.

Tar Valon's island has a distinct "bulge" that extends eastwards with the Ogier grove located on it. Both the grove and the bulge can easily be seen in the first image "above" the tower and to the left of it, so we are either looking south, or the island has been flipped 180 degrees from the book. The different roofs of the wing then lead to the conclusion that Dragonmount is to the east, unless as said they've flipped the island, in which case it is due west.

In the books the mountain is more or less due south-west of the city.

On 4/25/2021 at 1:43 AM, H00J said:

It’s worth noting how much money Amazon has paid out for it’s LotR series to understand where their priorities are going to lie, unfortunately. For anyone who doesn’t know this number yet, it can only be described as astronomical. 
 

Be prepared to play a very, very distant second fiddle to it. 

Some of the numbers being quoted for LotR are wrong (Reuters have the correct figures, which is that the $460 million is for the first two seasons combined, not just the first). With the correct figures, LotR's budget is roughly twice what it is for WoT, maybe a bit more. That's still very impressive, but not quite as insane as some people were speculating.

WoT's budget is also still enormous: almost twice that of The Witcher, more than twice that of GoT's first three seasons, and six times the budget of a typical network procedural. It matches The Crown and is not far behind GoT's last two seasons. It's a very healthy budget.

It's also not a zero sum game. Amazon putting more money into LotR doesn't meant that WoT is not another priority for them. The two shows have different creative teams and different marketing people involved. Amazon's priority will be making both shows a huge success.

As I said, I think we are not going to be seeing a "faithful adaptation" in the sense of a linear blow-by-blow adaptation of the books. There simply isn't enough time and enough episodes. So I think we will see a more general adaptation of the main storyline from the books, but many, many subplots and minor characters are going to be cut, and they'll be blending together elements from across the entire series, combining characters (not the really big hitters, but certainly tertiary and less important ones) and leaving out elements that are not strongly tied into the main story or the main characters.

Maybe if, say, AMC had been adapting the project as 16-episode seasons and they could have adapted two books per season, 8 episodes per book, that would be a different situation, but then they'd have the problem of not having anywhere near enough money to do the show justice.

On 9/9/2020 at 12:52 AM, stoatmaster said:

Seems likely to me that episode 4 is the events in the blight at the end of the first book, Blood Calls Blood is the start of the Great Hunt, the Flame of Tar Valon is Egwene and Nynaeve reaching the Tower and the final two episodes having locations in Toman Head. 

This does not account for the Tinkers not appearing until Episode 5, or reportedly being in three episodes in total, or Padan Fain only being in the first episode and not appearing again until the second season.

20 hours ago, MahaRaj said:

There's a lot of content for ten episodes!

And even more for eight, which is how many episodes are in the first season.

On 7/12/2020 at 4:02 AM, Alisa said:

I don’t think Dana is Dena.  Dena is Cairheinin which have a distinctly

different description.

 

I think Dana looks like she could be young Siuan Sanche grown up.

 

Siuan and Moiraine are contemporaries, so the actress for the grown-up Siuan will likely be around the same age as Rosamund Pike. This actress is considerably younger. I think Dena is much more likely, or possibly a code-name for Min (as Steve is likely a code name for someone else, possibly Elyas, Ishamael or Lews Therin).

On 6/25/2020 at 8:36 PM, IBM said:

I hope the showrunners cast Jeremy Irons as Tam' al Thor. He'll portray Tam' al Thor perfectly!

Tam has already been cast, with Michael McElhatton (Roose Bolton from Game of Thrones) playing the role.

On 3/24/2020 at 2:47 AM, ashaman73 said:

1. There is no glossary in this book. Glossaries are in books 1-13, but is left out of book 14. Granted maybe some people don't read the glossaries, though I enjoy them. I was very upset when I found out there was not one in this book.

 

2. Note: some spoilers here. If you have not read the book, you might want to skip this part

With regard to the glossary, I think the thinking was that having the "very end of the Wheel of Time" followed by the glossary would feel a bit anticlimactic, and they knew the super-glossary was coming out in the form of the companion so they felt able to skip it in the final book.

So between November 2009 and November 2012 (let's assume the worst-case scenario at present), Sanderson will have published three 300,000+ word WHEEL OF TIME novels over a period of three years. That's more prolific than Robert Jordan was in the entire second half of the publication of the series. That's shorter than the gap between CROSSROADS OF TWILIGHT and KNIFE OF DREAMS by itself.

Sanderson is a very prolific author, one of the fastest fantasy authors in the business by any measure. Complaining about him 'going slow' for a couple of months when he's been working on the project since the end of 2007 seems to be somewhere between churlish and ungrateful.

A great write-up, though a couple of minor corrections:

THE SECOND APOCALYPSE contains three sub-series: THE PRINCE OF NOTHING TRILOGY, THE ASPECT-EMPEROR TRILOGY (Book 2 just came out) and a final duology which is not yet named. So 8 books in total are planned. The enemy faction is also called the 'Consult' rather than 'Consort'.