On 12/11/2023 at 3:13 PM, Samt said:

I think it depends on what you mean by "the next Game of Thrones."  To me, that's really just a reference to the fact that a fantasy epic made it into mainstream TV.  Ultimately, that's a goal, not a plan or direction.  If you're saying that they are making it too dark and lascivious, I would agree.

I guess I'm also putting some of the Rafe quotes I've heard into this--like the fact that they went for Warders/Aes Sedai politicking as an integral part of the plot from the start, the apparent hesitance of the network to have Perrin talk to wolves because it was too GoT-y, etc. To me, WoT's tone should be closer to LotR with moments of GoT-ishness, more as it goes along. You could definitely sell people on five seasons if you said: "We're starting at Tolkien and ending at Martin."

I don't really feel like I"m making a critique in bad faith here. I mentioned things that I thought they did right. To me, the show has a big tone problem that is pushing them away from material that would work better.

I've struggled to put into words why the show feels 'off' from the books. I really don't care about the heavier focus on Moiraine, writing out some of the gender-essentialism, and I'll even forgive them for floundering around and being unable to really explain the Forsaken or the Power in any way that makes sense.

After watching S2, it's not so much the changes as the direction they've pushed the show in. All the changes made it Grim N Gritty, like those bad early 90s comics where Spider-Man lurked in the shadows and said "I become the spider!" or Batman got his back broken and then appointed a psychopath to be his replacement.

I finally put my finger on it. It's Game of Thrones. Or the attempt to be another Game of Thrones.

Every change in S1 pushed out the more light-hearted stuff. Hopper was gone, Thom was so heavily rewritten he was unrecognizable, the Duopotamians weren't yokels, and the cool sword-forms, the juggling and songs and sequences like the Caemlyn palace were all replaced by Dark & Dour™ material. I wouldn't have minded the Stepin sequence if it had been shorter and less of a divergence, but it took up time that could have been given to Elyas, more Thom, the Play For Your Supper sequence and all the other stuff that got cut.

I tried to articulate this more here (non-paywalled link here) for anyone who's interested in hot takes.

S2 was better, but other than the Hornsounding and FINALLY seeing Hopper, they seemed more interested in keeping the darker plotlines. I knew that the damane would be faithfully adapted because it's so gut-wrenching, but of course the Selene/Lanfear plot was made Very Adult. Jordan shunted Lan & Moiraine off to the side in Book 2, so I don't blame them for struggling to find stuff for those two to do. But their plots were mostly moping around. I also can see why they struggled with Mat, given that the character was pushed in a darker direction when Barney Harris had to be written out. But if S2 was also meant to cover Book 3, they also cut the ridiculous lucky streak, the fireworks, and a lot of Mat's posturing about being tough. And did we have to cut all the swordfighting? Like every last second of it?

Curious whether anyone else felt like this was the main problem.

She's a fantastic actress, but she's not playing Verin as much of an absent-minded nerd as I pictured. Yasicca Sedai had pretty much all the mannerisms I imagined on Verin.

Season 2 was a lot better, but had a lot more material that fit with Amazon's edgy vibe that they could do well. The damane and the Accepted trials lent themselves well to the tone of the show, I thought, while the more Tolkienesque first book didn't.

1- Who is the Dragon - they really didn't commit to this in S1. There was some evidence, at least to me, that the 'girls could be the Dragon' twist came late in the writing process, like Alanna saying 'what if we let the Reds gentle him.' As if the AS wouldn't just assume that this round, the Dragon would be a woman. Or reference false Dragons who had literally come from AS ranks. S2 only referenced it when Siuan said 'we would have been so much better if you were a girl'

2- Ishamael - so crucial to S2 that it looks like a mistake, in retrospect, keeping him so cryptic in S1.

3- Mat & Perrin - agree that Mat's background has good follow-thru, especially since they were trying to fix the mess left when Barney Harris split. Perrin's background doesn't because he didn't have a chance to seem especially conflicted about bloodshed.

4- Thom (lack thereof), Moiraine & Lan - Jordan struggled to find stuff for them to do in TGH. In fact, Verin played the Moiraine role a lot in that book, but Jordan had the advantage of making her an unknown factor. The show cut Thom, which I still think is a bad idea (he actually has a reason to say fantasy lore) and Moiraine and Lan's plot was glacial. It would have been better to tone down some of the time spent on Moiraine & Lan in S1 given how slow their S2 plot was.

5- No notes for Nynaeve & Egwene. Mostly faithful to the book & the changes involving Liandrin were an improvement.

If you're interested in my other thoughts, I blabbered them here.

It was Shohreh, although now I'm interested to see her as a villain. Cadsuane would have pretty much been Chrisjen Avasarala 2.0, so I can see why she would go for something different.

I think they should tip their hat to DS9's women and use Nana Visitor or Terry Farrell. But I watched DS9 for the first time about the same time I read Eye of the World, so they're just merged in my head.

I liked the Stepin plot in a void--it just took up so much time for other things that should have been set up, like Rand's swordfighting, or giving Ishamael more character than wandering around making heavy metal feedback noises in dreams.

I suspect that non-readers liked the Stepin material because it didn't feel like it had been agonized over and trimmed down and collapsed from multiple other scenes.

I thought that the Shara twist had been nicely set up in the books. Because anytime anyone mentions Shara, it's "oh, that place? No one understands it and it doesn't matter anyway." 🤣

But I agree that it's too complex for a 6-season show, esp. when Rafe's already cut some crucial stuff. WhiteVeils' 'divided Seanchan' story, at least in broad strokes, is probably their best choice.

I suspect that a lot of problems arose from thinking it should be more like Game of Thrones. GoT is Aristotelian tragedy in which various noble and not-so-noble characters engineer their own downfall through their tragic flaws. WoT is a coming-of-age story about restoring balance to a world that has been chronically imbalanced. By nature, one ends unhappily and one ends happily.

They have trappings of the same sort of story, but they aren't thematically similar.

WoT is also way more traditional fantasy, with a magic system, a Chosen One, a Dark One and his Ugly Evil Henchmen, romances that are, uh, romantic, and various MacGuffins worth pursuing.

Lord of the Rings basically smacked you in the face with that prologue, yelling THIS IS FANTASY GET OUT NOW IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE ELVES, DWARVES & DARK LORDS. Game of Thrones, though, bar the prologue, was a lot more recognizable to fans of period dramas. A casual could be watching the first episode and think, 'This is basically The Tudors with made-up locations.'

I think the WoT show tried to split the difference and that hurt it. They introduced channeling and the Dragon Reborn in a way that made the show look like GoT with a bit more magic--but then a bunch of demon monsters attacked for the entire third act. We would have been better off just starting with a FotR-style prologue about the Age of Legends, because WoT is, especially in the early books, closer to LotR than A Song of Ice & Fire.

It also went too hard for the GoT 'adult' tone with the gratuitous violence and some of the sillier plot twists (for me, as usual YMMV) and they made it really dour. Fun stuff, like the Duopotamians being the biggest country yokels that ever yokeled, the 'Play For Your Supper' sequence, the 'Hopper is a good boi' bits of the wolf story, Rand's little sojourn in the Caemlyn palace and 90% of Thom's character were left out.

We got some great stuff among the Warders instead, Siuan and Moiraine's romance was good, and we got to actually see Nynaeve & Lan fall in love, which I liked. But overall a lot of the whole-cloth stuff was pretty dark. The Battle of Winternight goes on forever, Grinwells all get slaughtered, Eamon Valda has somehow managed to dismember a bunch of Aes Sedai (does Rafe think that channeling is bending?) channelers burn themselves to a literal crisp to kill Trollocs, and Thom Merrilin became Thom Waits.

It's a different kind of story and I wish they had just let it be that story. GoT might have been right for the sick-of-9/11 politics world, but I want hope and love for the very imbalanced 2020s.