maybe she does, but i doubt she can remember her servants all that well after 3000+ years. even if she did, a resemblance wouldn't be anything noteworthy.

faile gets captured in the last chapter of book 8. then book 9 has 6 chapters on perrin and faile, out of 35 total chapters plus prologue. book 10 has 7 chapters out of 30 devoted to perrin and faile. then 7 more chapters out of 37 in book 11, at the end of which faile is freed. thanks for wot-encyclopaedia for having that data neatly organized. in total, the whole kidnapping arc took half a book. people always remember that story arc as longer than it really was. me included. it has character development in that both perrin and faile grow into their leadership. i suppose, though, that they could start doing it in the two rivers and through dumai wells, and that arc could be excised completely. the fact that the show introduced sevanna, though, make me think they will keep part of it.

Faile kidnapping can and must be shortened, but it was 6-8 chapters in most books. Nothing big happened in book 10, but all those plots were advanced somewhat. Still, all those plots will need to be shortened

Not really. Books 5 to 11, rand goes from the aiel waste to taking cahirien and caemlin, fighting the seanchan around ebou dar, founding the black tower, having adventures in far madding. There are all the arcs with the shaido, the andoran succession, the bowl of winds, mat escaping ebou dar, the tower split... Some people like to pretend those books don't exhist, but all the main characters have major story lines and development. You can't cut them and start with book 12. Even if you wanted to condense, you'd have to invent new plots to justify the differences in the characters. I'm sure you guys would LOVE an entire season of made-up material to cover everything from books 5 to 11. As for all the arms folding and sniffing, it only takes 1 line of text to write that. Remove all such instances from the books, you cut maybe 5 pages. Remove flowery descriptions, you remove another 100 pages for each book, maybe 150. Stilll a lot of plot. If you dismiss half the books as "nothing really happens besides hair-pulling", you don't realize how big the story is

This must be stressed out. Time is a huge issue, and a lot of cool stuff has to be sacrificed for it. If we get 8 season for 14 books + new spring, that's almost 2 books per season. At 800 pages per book, an episode must adapt 200 pages. Rhuidean was what, 50 pages in the books? Something like that? And they had to spend a full episode on it. And they still had to cut half the visions.

Will be almost impossibile. We are approachimg the slog, and we have 5 seasons left for 10 books. The writers will have to cut more plots. And then they will have to invent new plots to give the main characters something to do and convey the same major plot points. It won't be possibile to follow the books closely. At best, they will be able to keep the occasional pivotal scene, like they did with rhuidean

is it just me seeing what i want to see, or is the show coming closer to the books? the rhuidean episode is taken very closely from the books, and the whole first half of the season bears a lot more similarity to the fourth book than the other season.

i don't see much room for confusion. many people die without children. whole families are erased. meanwhile, with growing number of generations everyone is related to everyone else if we move back far enough. so the idea that blood relation would be needed for reincarnation wouldn't work. it doesn't justify anything. any sane person would think nothing of an oath your ancestors made 3000 years ago. but those are aiel. they are the definition of honor before reason.

in the books, the lake is created when a subsequent fight cracks the ground. there's plenty of groundwater underneath the waste.

if the show gets deleted tomorrow, i will be happy i got this episode. it was everything i could hope for. well, i was hoping we'd see a bit more of the age of legends and the breaking of the world, but that will do. the hole in the sky was chilling. the wall of spears, with the "leave your weapons here, you will take them back if you return" gives a very strong sense of how much time has passed, and how many aiel died because they couldn't bear the secrets of rhuidean. the corpses littering the columns are also a deviation from the books that works perfectly.

i didn't notice at first, but on rewatching I'm seeing that every time someone new meets "gaebril", they pause for a few seconds... then they act again as if they've known him for years. those few seconds are the time for compulsion, of course. well done.

Outside of work hours, she is in the white tower majorette club

Which also make little sense. They are just standing there around siuan. Heal her, weave a shield, or get out of the way.

i don't know how i missed it previously, but i just noticed that alanna was one of the green sitters. she was there at the battle in the hall, when five black sisters won against a dozen others. then the surviving four blacks were joined by others, and then alanna faced them all alone. and she was more effective than all the others in the hall before. really. alanna alone can fight seven black sisters, but alanna plus a dozen others can't handle five. it's completely inconsistent. it's illogical. it's also completely unnecessary. there was no need for that scene.

i second this idea. occam's razor and all that; saying "a foresaken did it" is just a lot simpler than explaining bubbles of evil.