which hopefully will mean hope of getting more than 5 seasons. if season 3 has the second battle of the two rivers as one of its main points, I don't want to imagine how much they'd have to cut to wrap everything in 5 seasons. heck, if after season 3 they'd have to wrap up everything in two more seasons, they'd probably have to rewrite the plot entirely.

it will never release.
we died and we are now paying for our sin of impatience by being forced to wait forever for stuff that we want dearly

more dark? I agree with sanderson, they are pushing too hard on the "dark" stuff.

still no news on when it could come out? last we knew it was end of 2022-beginning of 2023, and obviously none of them materialized. so i'm now hoping we'll get a trailer any day

somebody is starting a hype train, does it mean season 2 will be announced shortly?

On 1/26/2023 at 8:50 AM, Sir_Charrid said:

An oak beam will be cut and shaped from a tree where the building is being built because there is a tree there. You seem to be ignoring the fact of history, in a pre industrial society such as Randland you build things using the materials close at hand, you don’t generally transport them hundreds of miles. 

Sorry, but wrong. There are plenty of counterexamples.

Venice has been a naval superpower through the late middle ages and renaissance, and its ships were made of wood coming from the alps, several hundred kilometers from Venice itself.

And this is not one single heavy object transported at great cost. Making a ship requires hundreds of trunks, including some that must be whole and very tall to use as masts.

Of course, they were cheating a bit: they would throw the chopped trunks into rivers, and collect them downstream. Still, they handled the logistics of tranporting heavy objects on a regular base. Venice itself is built on over 10 million tree trunks, all transported a fair distance because the land around the city didn't have many woods.

Also, the people of easter island managed to carry the moai with stone age technology, and they still did it dozens of times.

I think you are underestimating ancient societies. Sure, transport was much more expensive, and so they used local materials when possible. But when they had to, they were quite capable of transporting stuff a long distance.

1 hour ago, swollymammoth said:

Dude I take a yearlong break from this forum and you're still here trying to pretend like the deviations in GoT are in any way comparable to the liberties the WoT show took with its source material. Chill out broski. You're embarrassing yourself. 

got had 1 season per book. wot has 1 season per 2 books, possibly 1 season for 3 books.

the more time is compressed, the more you have to cut.

and since important stuff happens in those storylines, you have to move it somewhere else.

so, the more the executives compress the time, the more changes willl be necessarily included, regardless of what rafe wants.

the comparison with got, or even lotr, is not fair. those had to compress a lot less.

incidentally, is there going to be enough money in the market going forward? right now, economy is still suffering from the war in ukraine, which won't end soon. people have less money, and entertainment is one of the first things people can skip.

on the other hand, in the face of economic crysis people can skip going outside and buying stuff to get a cheap subscription to nearly unlimited digital entertainment...

anyway, there's also increased competition, so less money for each individual platform.

I'm not sure how long this business can keep growing and affording to make more and bigger stuff

I think it will stay the same because the level of fidelity is more or less a product of the compression for tv. in order to fit 14 books of material in 8 seasons, the writers have to cut a lot of storylines. this then requires them to alter the other storylines so that the story still make sense - because all those smaller side plots still impacted the main story, and you can't just cut them and pretend nothing else changed.

it also has nothing to do with quality. I do certainly hope they improve on show quality, taking some of the negative feedback they got into account. But I don't think they could make wot more faithful to the source material if they wanted, not unless they got more screen time. they could certainly make the show less faithful, but I don't see why they would. unlike some detractors, I don't think rafe is secretly trying to sabotage the show to insert into the wot canon his own poorly-written fanfiction; rafe clearly loves wot, and he's trying his best to bring the story adapted for the small screen.

if the show lenght is reduced to 5 seasons, then it will have to get less faithful, as more plots will have to be eliminated entirely, and the remaining plots will need to be changed even more to remain coherent. Hopefully it won't be the case. Practical limitation, mostly on filming and the actors, means the show can run 10 years or so if successful. if we keep the current 2 years per season then this will force 5 seasons, but if some of the delay caused by covid can be avoided, then we may be able to get one season per year. maybe. even having 6 seasons instead of 5 would be something.

8 hours ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

I also am going to call bullcrap on the whole "70% of people who finished the books thought the tv series was better".

but then again they did throw in the whole "taken from non online sources." which to me seems very biased.

really? nothing short of actual propaganda is more biased than a poll on an internet forum.
and I have no problems believing that somebody who reads the books after looking at the show will prefer the show.

just imagine somebody new to the series, watching the show, then reading the book and being exposed to all that bs gender dualism. to me, it feels like the social mores of my parents, elevated to universal constant.
and then they get hit by the ending of book 1, which is even worse than the one of the tv show. sure, the books have other highlights, plenty of them, but just in the same way book fans will say "yes, the tv show has highlights, but still it's worse".

as for people who read the books before the tv show, well, it depends. Is the poll limited to those who finished the books? or does it include also those that read the first half of book 1 and put it down because it felt too much like a lotr ripoff? Because in that second case, I can easily imagine plenty who would prefer the show.

remember, we are here because we read all 14 books; possibly multiple times. we would not have read those many pages unless we liked the books a lot. so we are not, in any way, unbiased on the matter.

Anyway, if rafe gets only 5 seasons.... that's rough. 8 seasons was already too little to do wot justice, but 5 seasons? take what was already going to be too short a time, and halve it. nobody can expect for rafe to keep up any sort of adherence to the books under such a limitation. with 5 seasons, you can at best cover the most important plot moments from all the books, in a very condensed form. and you have to chop down and rearrange pretty much every other plotline just to get to those important moments fast enough.

if 5 seasons are all we get, then the show is going to become far less faithful than even season 1 was. it can stll be a good show, but it will be "inspired by" rather than "based on".

and if that happens, rafe can't be blamed for it.

27 minutes ago, Sir_Charrid said:

If in a series about magic,  a dark lord locked away in a magical Prison and the same souls being reborn your issue is that swimming some rapids takes you out of the universe because “not realistic” maybe your focusing on the wrong things. 

actually he is focusing on the right kind of things. it's a fantasy, so we accept the magic and the dark lord and stuff. but people still behave rationally in their environment, so worrying that they would not risk their lives senslessly is the right thing to worry about.

anyway, the first part of the answer about it not really being all that dangerous is the good one.

also, ancient societies had all kinds of dangerous rituals. if i'm not mistaken, the masai require that a youth kill a lion before he's considered adult. that's a lot more dangerous than swimming through rapids, but in those societies death is commonplace; so one more dead youngster isn't really changing anything. but you do want to make sure that you can depend on your fellow adult if you need to face battle.

i understood that they merged the falme and tear plotlines into a single one, so that the end of s2 merges the end of boook 2 and 3 with rand and the aiel fighting the seanchan.

but, given that i already misunderstood the lack of cahirien, i may be totally wrong here. though if they do merge book 2 and 3 together, they certainly have a lot of storylines to cut. unless i'm wrong on that count too.

my bet is that they cut out the cahirien arc completely, for timing reasons.

not only they don't have thom, who appeared in that arc, but also in that teaser released some months ago there was plenty of seanchan and falme but nothing that looked like cahirien

14 hours ago, Mailman said:

 Also indicates that more time has passed with the company together rather than it feeling like a couple of nights before they get split up.

 

only wanting to comment on this little bit, but giving the impression of time passing is a big weakness of movies. the lotr movies themselves failed at that, watching them I got the impression the whole adventure lasted a few weeks rather than a couple years.

the reason of course is that screen time is limited, you can't be repetitive, and so there's really no way to show that the party really has been marching for three months straight, short of a character calling it - which actually wouldn't be a bad thing, thinking about it.

the forsaken are despicable people who only care for power. the dark one himself handpicked them for this.

everyone else should be more nuanced. darkfriends should run the whole range from "i want power and immortality" to "i want to make some easy money" to "my mom was darkfriend and she introduced me to this since i was a kid". whitecloaks range from stern but reasonable, to crazed fanatics.

the books mostly did this already. though the books did have some issues there. the congars and coplins are depicted as a family of miscreants. the red ajah is the more infiltrated by darkfriends and it has one single positive character in it. the shaido are aiel without the positive traits that separate aiel from rampaging barbarians. and while we know there must be darkfriends among the aiel, we only see one... and she's a shaido. and by the way, why are there so many black aes sedai, but apparently no black wise ones?

in general, when you take a large group of people - people that were not handpicked for a specific trait - you get a lot of variability within. in some cases, the books failed to depict that, and that representation can be improved.

you could say this problem goes all the way up to gender representation, with all men shown as displaying certain traits and all women shown as displaying certain other traits, virtually no exceptions. failing to represent human variability when appropriate is a minor failing of the books - I say minor because it doesn't prevent enjoyment.

later books by RJ already improved - with a congar being the wisdom and a good red aes sedai.

15 hours ago, DojoToad said:

Rafe didn't put in scenes he wanted because he prioritized other scenes.

well, of course. that's the problem. he has 6 hours of total run time, and he has to fit in one book and parts of two other books. he could afford to put other scenes, but he has to prioritize.

just in the same way that you [assuming you to be an average guy] could buy a luxury car if you really wanted, but you have to prioritize other things with your limited money. 

I get it, you didn't like the stepin sequence, and anything else in your argument basically boils down to you not liking that sequence.

but a lot of people* did like that sequence, and we've seen a ton of training montages or swordfights in other fantasy televisions. so I think putting something that was unique for wot was better.

do not disparage the stepin scene. it carried a strong emotional impact while deliveling important worldbuilding elements that will be needed later in the plot. a training or fighting sequence may have looked cooler, but it would have accomplished neither.

* by "a lot" i mean that I liked it, my brother's girlfriend - who did not read the books - liked it, and my brother didn't like it, but he didn't like mostly nothing of the changes from the books and he didn't dislike that specific change more than the others. I don't have access to a larger sample

perhaps brandon was misremembering. after all, he stopped working on those books 8 years ago

21 hours ago, WhiteVeils said:

Basically, the way they did that 1) Showed the amount of power possible for channelers to do (including Rand, later) 2) Showed exactly why Channelers /don't/ use that kind of power to do that sort of thing and 3) Specifically for Egwene and Nynaeve, created the blocks and reasons why they don't have access to their maximum power levels until late in the series.   So it kind of solves the problem you presented in itself.

 

Yeah, I agree that the scene does have those intentions and positive traits (though 3 is not at all certain will be used). however, there were several problems with the execution.

if they had shown amalisa fighting with the men, the soldiers holding a line protecting her while she hurled lightning at the trollocs, that would have already been a lot better.

But especially

3 hours ago, MasterAblar said:

Honestly they should have just had Amalisa first throw weaker lightning, that was insufficient to actually stop the trollocs, and then in desperation to save her city, intentionnally pull far more than she can safely handle and boom big lightning and so on.

This. So much this.

Because the way the scene was presented, amalisa killed all the trollocs. then she wanted to draw more power, and she got burned. watching the show, one would think that if amalisa had more willpower to resist the addictive effect of the power - or if one of the other women had the presence to hit her on the head and knock her out - then she would have killed all the trollocs and nothing bad would have happened. which creates wrong ideas on the power level of channelers and what problems can be solved by throwing fire and lightning at them.

if they had made clearer that her death was a direct and unavoidable result of channeling too much, the scene would have better worked at introducing the limitations of the power.

13 hours ago, Sir_Charrid said:

Anything else really doesn't matter for the TV show because every additional rule you add in then needs to be explained to the audience when they ask "but why". What do the audience care ...
 

Because magic has got to have rules and it's got to have limitations.

Sanderson discusses this very well in this "laws of magic" essays. basically, you can have soft or hard magic; soft magic has no rules, at least no rules that the reader know. hard magic, magic works under strict and well-understood rules. of course, there is a middle way too.

anyway, you can use magic to solve problems only if the reader understands it. otherwise it's a cheap deus ex machina. in stories with soft magic, magic creates problems that the protagonists have to solve without magic. look at lord of the rings, how many problems are solved by gandalf using magic? very little. if gandalf had snapped his fingers and destroied the orc army at helm's deep, the story would have sucked.

instead, in hard magic stories we can enjoy magic being used to solve problems because we know magic can be used like that. it's like a toolkit, and we enjoy seeing how it's used creatively. it's like in a james bond movie when he's presented with some gadgets at the beginning and he uses them creatively during the movie. If we were not shown that he had an exploding pen and then his pen suddenly exploded, it would be a terrible scene.

In the same line, limitations are more interesting than powers. ok, the hero is all powerful and stuff. so the hero snaps his fingers and solves the plot, all trollocs fall dead. congratulations, you have a boring invincible hero. the hero must have limitation, he must have stuff he cannot do, obstacles he must circumvent because he can't just brute force his way through them.

and to enjoy a story with hard magic, the capabilities and limitations of magic must be made clear.

Now, I don't expect to have the same level of details as the books. but some explanations on why some things can be done with the power and some cannot are fundamental to keep the story consistent.

13 hours ago, Mailman said:

Clearly not we have the Green Ajah who I would expect to train those and practice destructive weaves

actually, seeing how poorly the aes sedai fared agains the seanchan, I would expect that the greens didn't really practice all the much, if at all. which is part of the background, of course; aes sedai grew complacent and mostly resorted to politics, rarely using the power. when they do have to use the power, it's never against a prepared opponent; at most they lay waste at trollocs or they take on men who are by definition untrained wilders. So, when they faced an opponent who was on their same power level but did not grow complacent, that opponent got to mop the floor with arrogant aes sedai.

aes sedai failing at upholding their mission, being remarkably incompetent when push came to shove, is a common theme in the books. I mean, if I was the green ajah head I would send a hundred sisters in the borderlands to help the armies against trolloc attacks; and if they had done that, maybe malkier would not have fallen because instead of aes sedai coming by boat and being too late (and then pretending that they intentionally betrayed a stalwart ally because they figured that was better than admitting failure), they would have been already there.

If I was the head of the yellow ajah, I would send a few sisters in every major city to open a free hospital healing anyone for free. build up goodwill among the population, and look for girls with the spark while you're there.

Aes sedai sucked at being aes sedai.

if amalisa had been on the walls helping to repel trollocs regularly, then i'd expect her to be a lot more competent at combat channeling than most green ajahs.

3 hours ago, WhiteVeils said:

I know that nothing will be acceptable except the direct translation from EOTW.  But there are reasons they made the change. You can stay mad,

... what? Do I look mad? Don't go mistaking me for a bookcloak just because I want to discuss some of the finer points.

actually, now I got mad. I don't like being mistaken for a bookcloak, for someone who would take an extreme position out of ideological prejudice. And so I am compelled to explain in great detail my problems with that specific scene.

It is a general issue of mine with fantasy, having heroes - or people with superpowers in general - being too powerful. then nobody else matters, and the whole setting becomes moot; there are some superpowered people running around doing things, and there's some filler material that doesn't have any real impact on what the superpowered do.

I also worry about consistency; five women alone demolished the biggest trolloc invasion in generations. and yet a dozen aes sedai had problems against the remnants of logain's army.

furthermore, that whole scene is poorly plotted. So, amalisa could always have done that. so why not doing it before the men all go to die? then the trollocs are coming for the city, and she goes out in the open to face them. why? wouldn't it be better to channel at the trollocs from atop the city walls, where you have better protection against a stray arrow? I certainly do hope future fights will have more sensible tactics.

this has nothing to do with book consistency. I liked the way they changed the eye of the world; it's a lot better than the ending of the first book. I like tv!padan fain more than the book one. there's lots of stuff the tv show did that I liked better than the books.

Unfortunately, while tv makes good individual fights - seeing lan swing a sword is a lot better than reading a bunch of sword forms on a page - it also has a record of horribly botching large scale combat strategy. and not because they could not do it well, but because movies depicting a large battle consistently sacrifice what makes sense for someone with a bit of knowledge in military matters to favor what looks cool to a casual audience. that scene is just one in a very long list.

as for how that bodes to the future of the show, it doesn't tell much; the whole combat scene was heavily influenced by covid restrictions.

6 hours ago, Gypsum said:

Rand singlehandedly stopped an entire Trolloc army in A Memory of Light (I think...might have been Towers of Midnight). So the most powerful channeler in the world certainly can stop an army. It's just that most channelers aren't that powerful.

 

yes indeed, but rand was at the time

1) several times stronger than all the women making up the tv !circle (considering nynaeve and egwene are far from top power)

2) possessing all the knowledge of LTT, including some very effective ways to weaponize the power developed during a long war in a more advanced age

3) using an angreal

7 hours ago, WhiteVeils said:

 

 

Of Karene in the series, Moiraine said she can stop armies by herself.   So even outside that special circumstance, in the show Aes Sedai are considered able to stop armies. But there are the three oaths that stop the Aes Sedai from using the One Power in battle, so obviously nations would still want to use armies with spears. 

 

Stopping an army and destroying an army are not the same thing.

An army won't blindly charge to certain death. Too many casualties will push the soldiers to flee. Charging a channeler is suicide for the first dozens who do it. The others would break, even though they could reach the channeler eventually if they would keep pushing.

So you can be able to stop an army, i.e. deter it from advancing, without being able to destroy it

I would say another potentially big plot change is letting egwene heal nynaeve with the power. in the books egwene doesn't have any significant healing capability. that said, I can't remember a single scene from the book where egwene having healing skill would have changed anything. so, not a big deal after all.

oh, perhaps the biggest potential plot problem is that five half-trained channelers stopped a huge trolloc army. sure, channelers are powerful, but if they were that powerful armies would be pointless. the grunt in the spear wall is there because aes sedai alone can't do everything.

11 hours ago, DaddyFinn said:

Season 1 release date was announced just a few months prior to release, right? I expect news this year

exactly. we already knew it was 2023, and we already know that amazon doesn't announce stuff coming out until a few months before. so, no news so far is neither bad nor good; it's simply too early to get an official release date.

15 hours ago, SinisterDeath said:

Lets say this happens in Season 4.
Have every every cold opening, BE those visions.
Then on say, episode 5, have the cold opening being Rand stepping through the ring and we see those visions fast forward to the last vision.

I don't think it would work. so on the first episode you get this vision and it makes no sense. or else you know it's rand and you know he'll have some past visions, which will spoil the whole plot of "what's inside rhuidean".

or alternatively, you have rand go in rhuidean in episode 1, and then people have to wait until episode 8 for what was shown there, but all the while rand is reacting to what he's seen.

those visions are important for the plot. if you start showing them before rhuidean, you give up spoilers. if you show the end after rhuidean, then things in the story will make no sense until the visions are seen. whatever happens, they have to be seen in one go.

4 hours ago, expat said:

I also don't think that it would be as easy to set-up as a simple conversation prior to Rhuiden.  While book readers would understand it, non-book readers would be totally lost, especially if you mix Rand's and Matt's stories. Matt's story is easy since its one coherent interaction.  Imagine that you haven't read the books and Rand steps through the rings and suddenly you have a series of short scenes with unknown characters in unknown places, telling a set of unconnected stories with no foundation/background.   Maybe viewers will figure it out at some point, but some percentage won't.  Finally, since you don't discuss what happens at Rhuiden (so no dialogue explanations) and there are no inner monologues, what mechanism do the show runners use to help those viewers who didn't get it? 

 

Bottom line is that the "path to the spear" is much easier to pull off in a book than a TV series. As discussed in another thread, fantasy adaptation is hard.

I think they will have to drop most of the "you don't talk about X" taboos of aiel culture. book aiel don't work in tv because they never say anything. just like in the beginning of episode 7 they had to relax the veil taboo to show facial expressions.

as for the visions themselves, i think they may show them in cronological order, instead of in reverse. showing them in reverse works for a book, but it would be mightily confusing in movie format

not really a reveal. we aleady knew the age of legend was very advanced, even before rhuidean.