1 hour ago, Skipp said:

Wraith may be referring to the idea that Halima is the only direct trans representation we have in WoT.  And that removing her would lead to outrage etc etc. 

 

I don't believe this to be an issue because from what I understand Halima is not well thought of in the WoT Trans community as a whole. 

 

But this is just speculation on my part.

Yes, as far as I know trans WoT fans do not like Halima and wouldn't mind if that entire plot point got deleted altogether.

The most ambitious crossover event in history.

2 minutes ago, Deadsy said:

 

 

I've wondered that also.

He's been doing interviews with very short hair while filming season 2, so either Rand gets a massive haircut on season 2 or he uses a wig.

1 hour ago, Maximillion said:

Now that Rafe has confirmed that the DR is Rand, I wonder how that is going to play with the woke crowd who will want it to be Egwene?  Will they be disappointed?  Will they be upset that they were misled?

 

 

Nevermind I misread your post!

I think it depends to what extent they try to mislead people into thinking it's Egwene. A lot of non-book readers have already guessed it's Rand just from the promo materials because they're genre savvy and they picked up on the hints and tropes.

1 hour ago, DaddyFinn said:

Click the "translate" button. This was linked in the Dusty Wheel Discord

 

Edit. Added photo

With the caveat that this isn't a verified account, I'm cautiously optimistic.

I think it's just Moiraine. He might have said "a couple" as a vague number to throw people off.

Although there's always @NinjaPowers975's theory that Mat gets lost in the ways and only emerges in season 2 as Donal ?

8 minutes ago, Gothic Flame said:

Perhaps.

Luke was better written for the time the movie was presented.

The writing for Rey was fairly hamfisted. And her upbringing made no sense even after the big reveal.

I'm confused. Are you saying that you hold the portrayal of Luke to a lower standard than Rey's because it was written several decades earlier? Does this mean that you think the writing of the sequels should have been updated to conform to modern expectations? So it's okay, then, to change things sometimes to adapt to the times?

I just want to say, @Tim, I really appreciate your comments and perspectives on here. Thank you.

33 minutes ago, SinisterDeath said:

 As a final aside: Rand's kids were supposed to be weird. It's been said they channel the one power at all times. That they channel both Saidin and Saidar. For all we know, the 4th age spun out "trans" souls.

I had totally forgotten about this.

Wow, they've really opened the floodgates. We're in full marketing blitz mode.

37 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

Actually, this could be handled in a far less complicated and easier to swallow way:

 

Souls are ungendered until they are spun back into the pattern. A channeler's connection to saidin or saidar is made at the same time. So it is still true that only female souls link to saidar and only male souls link to saidin. 

 

In the past there have been both male and female Champions of the Light. As the show opens, we don't know who that Champion is. It soon becomes clear. The stakes are raised because of the Corruption and we are meant to be scared that the Dragon will side with the Dark One.

 

Rand is still LTT reborn. So no gender switching is happening. And the change does not have to impact the entire structure of the Wheel. (Though I'm not sure how that squares with the Heroes - that lore will have to be messed with) 

Yes this is what I was thinking too, but then it means there are only two genders. Which might be what they're going for. But I suspect they'll want to be nonbinary-inclusive as well. If a soul is spun back into the pattern as nonbinary, does it link with saidin or saidar?

33 minutes ago, Ralph said:

 

I meant body as opposed to soul. 

I'm going back and forth on whether they'll make channeling tied to the body, to the soul, or to gender as a third characteristic that is separate from both body and soul. I think I'm confusing myself ?

But if they want to allow for the existence of non-binary people, then they probably can't make channeling tied to gender because it would mean you can only have two genders. (This is the opposite of what I said before, I know. My thought process is ongoing)

So, if channeling isn't tied to gender, maybe it is tied to body. 

I honestly don't know at this point lol

3 minutes ago, Agitel said:

I'm growing tired of the term fridging. Stories are put together from tropes, and friding is one of them. I think it comes down to execution as to whether it's stale or lazy, or sometimes even in a way blind to culture issues. But I see nothing inherently wrong with having a character arc kicked off with the death of a loved one. 

I agree, there's nothing inherently wrong with it. It's just overused and often badly.

1 minute ago, MasterAblar said:

 

I fail to see what being transgender has to do with the soul. Especially in the WoT where souls are things that are verified to truly exist. Someone could be born in a man's body but end up being transgender no matter what their soul says. 

 

To me there just isn't a link between the soul and gender identity.

Yes I think this is what they're going for, though I admit to being confused, and I go back and forth on how they'll connect it to channeling.

I guess I'll have to watch and find out ?

22 minutes ago, Arthellion said:

My thought on this is that souls will be gendered...based on whether they touch saidin/saidar. Might get something where rather than Male/Female souls you get Saidin/Saidar souls. Saidin souls are more likely to be born male but not required to be? 

 

Not sure. But it does support the idea that your essence and who you are are more separate from your body. 

 

It ties more/less into gender fluidity than transgender theory...though I'm by no means an expert on that. 

Oh this is a really interesting take. I like it.

19 minutes ago, mogi68 said:

Don't gendered souls actually support the notion of transgenderism, though? IE even though I may be born into a male body, my essence is female. If the soul is not gendered, then there's no way to decide whether you channel saidar or saidin unless it's controlled by the body physiology. It seems like this is just going to muddy the waters.

 

I'm sure it's not going to really be a problem in the actual show, but theorycrafters may have a rough time with this.

 

Yes, this is what I thought too, but I've seen a trans WoT fan say that souls not being gendered actually makes more sense to her, so maybe there's something I'm not getting.

Maybe it also has to do with allowing for the existence of non-binary people. If your soul HAS to be male or female to be able to channel saidin or saidar, then non-binary people can't exist. So maybe they decided to remove gender from the soul and make it more of an intangible thing. (Not that souls are tangible... But you know what I mean. You don't need to believe in souls to know you're a man for example).

26 minutes ago, swollymammoth said:

To those people who keep defending massive changes like this, 

 

You like these changes because they align with your own worldview, and you'll accept any change so long as it serves to reinforce your preexisting beliefs. Your defense isn't rooted in any sort of principle or desire to see WoT done right but in loyalty to yourself. In essence, you've always viewed the original WoT as flawed, an inferior and outdated version which only needed to be remade in your image to achieve true perfection. 

I view all media as flawed. The books were flawed. The show will be too. I just want to enjoy it. Enjoyment is, of course, completely subjective, so it makes sense that some people find it impossible to enjoy the show with these changes while others don't mind. I just don't think changing things is by default objectively good or bad. Different people will appreciate different things.

30 minutes ago, Katherine said:

I totally get what you are saying, and agree 100%. But in this world that would cause issues.... Which is why this change is weird. 

 

So are female bodies going to channel saidin? 

 

Are there males channeling saidar and becoming Aes Sedai? 

 

 

Well we already have Halima in the books as a precedent for that. I would assume they're only taking that and saying "this can happen naturally without it being a punishment from the Dark One"

Just now, Arthellion said:

Honestly, best tactic now is to hope that they mostly ignore this deeper lore in the show and we get the same story play out with limited changes. Just...very few deep dives into the lore and the places where this was changed is only small mentions or off hand comments. 

I honestly think this is what will happen. We won't get detailed lore. Some things will not make sense to us book fans, but the non-reader audience won't even notice.

1 minute ago, Katherine said:

 

In the book it is the soul.... which makes more sense than the body I guess.  The thing is.. this is a gendered magic system, and degendering everything will make NO SENSE in the context of the book. 

 

Again... just unnecessary change that raises more questions.... why would magic care more about the body than the soul? 

Well. I personally don't think it's the body. I think you channel the half that matches your gender, and that's it. Are you a woman? Then you channel saidar. Are you a man? Then you channel saidin. Body parts don't need to be involved.

The 10 days of the week, which had me confused trying to figure out timelines for a really long time.

4 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

this is all true. but it is very tricky business. it's extremely easy to get carried away with this and end up with discrimination in the opposite way. an even worse discrimination, because it would be written in law, and good luck as a white male complaining you're being discriminated.

I am not familiar with the movie industry, but when i did my PhD, the call for young researchers mentioned explicitly that, all else being equal, women were to be preferred over men. I can see where this comes from, and how women are underrepresented and face additional obstacles, but as they say, two wrongs don't make one right.

Just like picking someone because he's white is an injustice, so is picking someone because he's not white.

And no, i don't have a magical solution for this. Nobody has one. I can only invite everyone to caution and moderation. the only way we can make this work is by trial and error. This requires that everyone is ready to learn from past mistakes and improve on what's not working. which can't happen if everyone is so ideologically stuck on their positions that they'll refuse to change

Well, if it makes you feel any better, there are still more white than non-white actors in the WoT TV show cast.

2 minutes ago, Katherine said:

It changes channeling. 

Is the "soul" connected to Saidin/Saidar or is the body? 

The way I interpret it (I could be wrong), they're de-gendering souls. So you could be a man in one life and a woman in another. I would imagine men still channel saidin and women saidar. This means the magic system remains gendered, but which half you can channel will depend on what gender you are in your current life.

41 minutes ago, swollymammoth said:

Exactly. Amazon's diversity playbook literally says that hirers should be wary of hiring based on experience because it might lead to too many white people working on set. 

 

For Amazon: Skin color > Experience 

 

Sorry for explaining the joke there, Beidomon. 

At the risk wading into hot waters unnecessarily, I would like to explore this for a minute.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually seen this document, so I'm only going off of what's being paraphrased here.

"hirers should be wary of hiring based on experience because it might lead to too many white people working on set."

Okay. Why would hiring based on experience lead to too many white people being hired? Is it because white people are inherently better at their jobs?

No, of course not. It's because white people tend to get hired more by default, which leads them to accumulating more experience than their non-white counterparts.

Why, then, do white people get hired more? Is it because they're inherently more deserving of being hired?

Again, no. It's because there's an imbalance in the industry to be begin with. There are disproportionately more roles, and especially major roles, available to white actors in Hollywood right now. White actors have an easier time finding work, and especially major roles, than non-white actors. Which leads them to accumulating more experience and recognition. Which means that when hiring based on experience only, they have the advantage, because everyone else has has a much harder time landing jobs. Which leads them to landing even more jobs. Which leads to... I'm sure you get the picture.

So. When these diversity handbooks say these kinds of things, this is typically the reasoning behind them. There's already an imbalance in the industry, one which disproportionately keeps non-white actors from landing big roles, and this imbalance will continue to be exacerbated by sheer virtue of the way the system works unless we actively counter it.

Luckily, it's not hard to counter the imbalance, because there are many many incredibly talented non-white actors to pick from who will do an amazing job if only they're given the chance, instead of being excluded for reasons that stem from a flawed system.

So it's not that skin color > experience.

It's that talent > skin color, but the system is set up so that experience is not a good indicator of talent.

46 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

It's not pedantic. It's proof of how shallow the fixation on skin color is. It doesn't matter whether actors match the description in the books as long as they remain true to the other things that make the character tick.

 

Casting a dark skinned Egwene is fine. Casting a light skinned Tuon would be equally fine. 

The funniest thing to me in all this is that Madeleine Madden is really not that dark-skinned. She's actually light-skinned by many standards. It all boils down to what your default is and what you're comparing to.

And yes, most Egwene fanart depicts her as having lighter skin than the actress. Why? Because we have been conditioned by decades of Eurocentric fantasy to default to white when we picture characters. This isn't even an issue of "you naturally imagine book characters to look like you." It's "it doesn't even occur to me to picture a major protagonist in a fantasy novel as anything other than white." Even if I'm not white myself. It doesn't matter. When I pick up an American or European fantasy novel, I automatically expect most characters will be white, and I only picture them otherwise if explicitly and repeatedly directed to.

I'd argue this is one reason why it's so great that they cast non-white actors for a lot of the WoT main cast. Because our brains need exposure to diversity, and lots of it, to slowly decondition themselves and stop limiting their imagination to all-white fantasy stories.