In addition to all the good comments above, television has a lot of other practiczl problems a book doesn't have. 

In book, you can put a main character on a bus, and bring her back five books later. With an actor, you have no guarantees to hire him back. You have all manners of schedule and budget constraints. 

And finally, a book writer has an editor and a bunch of alpha readers to get feedback, then change the lbooks accordingly. Books are better for the revision process. In a movie, if the premiere shows problems, they can't remake parts of it. 

So a book can enjoy a much more cohesive plotting. Books have an ingerent advantage there. Being able to enter in the minds of characters also gives deeper characterization.

Movies do better the visual part. Uses of the power were of mixed quality, but they certainly beat "she wove air just so". Swordfights are way cooler. The scenery looks better, or it would if i could quiet that voice in the back of my head screaming "a big city can't exhist in the middle of wilderness! There isn't a single farm anywhere in the show! Where does food come from???"

So, different medium have different pros and cons. And yes, i agree with the op that some of the main selling points of fantasy sagas just happen to hit television's weaker spots

1 hour ago, Mailman said:

Just watched it again and the advice "trust the river" is moronic from the overhead shot you can clearly see the river swirling into rocks and being churned into white water as it hits those rocks.

while I agree that it was not a good scene, in their favor it is likely that previous generations of emond fielders have experimented and found exactly the right stretch of river where the current will make you miss the rock and deposit you on an easy beach.

as for putting young people in mortal danger, while it's certainly moronic to us and our values, there's lots of ancient societies with potentially deadly rites of adulthood. so it's not completely out of place

seem less insectoid and more just evil, but the intended vibe - menacing and evil-looking - works.

23 hours ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

After everything else they have changed? Wouldn't put it past them

But all those changes have motivations, whether we agree with them or not. They are made to save time, or to externalize internal conflicts, or to introduce themes.

Having perrin sound the horn would do nothing of the sort; a paradox, it would actually change very little in the plot: perrin would take up some of mat role. It would not streamline anything. It would not change events. It would just swap perrin with mat in some scenes.

As it is, all the ta'verens have a similar share of plot material. Unless they want to eliminate one of them entirely, they have no reason to shift plots from one to the other

15 hours ago, SBroc said:

Question- If Matt isn't part of the hunt for the horn does that make it look like Perrin with be the one that uses it?  Is there a way in this current version that Matt still gets to the Aiel with Rand- gets his staff and gets to Falme and the horn?  If he's not involved with any of that where is the character going?

they can very easily stumble on mat during the hunt, and mat can take his place. i doubt they'll make such a change as to change the hornsounder

11 hours ago, Jake Sykwalker said:

It actually boils down to faithfulness to the original work. GOT was very faithful in the early seasons.  It was successful.  It wasn't in later seasons and it started to go downhill.  The mystery is why people still make unfaithful adaptations.  There is a difference from editing to 'save time' to changing characters and arcs entirely. 

 

Most fans will give writers slack when they understand the shortcut they have to take.  They are less thrilled when they make new stuff up out of whole cloth and change their favorite characters into something unrecognizable.  

I disagree. I am not an expert, but i am sure there are instances of successful undaithful adaptations, and unsuccessful faithful adaptations. As a partial example, movie!aragorn was by many acclaimed as better than book!aragorn.

Sure, there is a correlation between faithfulness and success, but it's not a sure thing.

Also, the border line between necessary streamlining and executive meddling is not clear. A lot of apparently needless changes have to do with actor issues, budget limitations, copyright.

as for how they can overpower aes sedai, it's just a matter of numbers you've seen that enough trollocs could overpower moiraine, and she's stronger than most.

either that, or take the aes sedai by surprise and knock them on the head before they realize they are in danger.

in the books, though, there was no burning at stake unless the aes sedai was already dead. while it's true that many of them rely on hand gesture and can't channel without them, they are not strictly required and you can never know which aes sedai has a few tricks. taking one alive for the sole purpose of killing her in a more formalized fashion is just too dangerous.

It's quite funny to read the back and forth between those that love the silmarillion and those who find it boring. it puts things in perspective of individual tastes. To further keep things into perspective, a lot of tolkien hardocore fans disliked the lotr movies.

I haven't watched rop and I have no idea how it is, but all this further reinforces my impression: nothing will ever be as successful as got because now there are too many competitors. got came out and it was the first tv show of its kind, and everyone who wanted that kind of content had to watch it. now we have lots to pick from, so the fans will be more dispersed

On 8/16/2022 at 3:06 PM, Nik said:

I mean he's not wrong about Egwene dying either. Just 13 books later 😄

i had to resist the urge to give him this spoiler, yes.

he hates egwene already

I have a friend who would have liked to watch WoT, but didn't have an amazon subscription, so he's waited until yesterday - when we spent an evening together and I suggested it.

We watched two episodes so far, and he liked it.

he immediately figured out rand was the protagonist, because they spent too much time on him at first. he was betting on egwene and tam dead immediately, as the fantasy hero usually loses anyone close to him. then after some more minutes he realized egwene was also a main character, so he was just fridging tam. he was quite surprised when tam survived - by the way, he thought tam was pretty badass in that fight.

he also didn't see the fridging of layla. the emotional scene worked quite well for him. for all that I myself am not fond of that plot development, we've gotta give credit, they pulled it out well. we know perrin has no wife in the book, so we know she's gonna die soon, but for someone new it has a different impact.

I told him mashadar was a traslucent mist in the book, and he thinks that the blackness spreading and engulfing stuff works better.

I pointedly avoided making any sort of comment on the quality of the show to get a fresh opinion. I answered several questions about lore.

we know rafe has an outline plot for 8 seasons of 8 episodes.

changing the number of episodes would be problematic, but making the episodes longer is possible and easy.

an early S3 renewal means S1 was successful enough to give them confidence.

They can keep 8 episodes, but make them 70 minutes long instead of 55. That would gain as much screen time as two additional episodes

4 hours ago, Skipp said:

WotSeries was kind enough to upload higher def stills of the entire BTS trailer.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pYpXGlTSOAR6rauOJyUbeBwgZCxmsT5i

omg! when you said they published still, I didn't think they actually posted stills! I mean, it's a frame-by-frame thing. thousands of pictures for a one-minute teaser.

those guys are insane

finally, some teasers!

what's shown looks genuinely good. hopefully they got over their problems and managed to improve on S2.

I'm happy that we'll get the darkfriends social. And bayle domon - but will we see his aged grandmother?

logain is not the main villain. he's a main villain of a single episode.

and it's one of the best changes they made. right up until the moment when nynaeve healed everyone, at least.

3 hours ago, Andra said:

Unfortunately, I'm not terribly confident in those long game financial decisions.

After all, they built an entire village from scratch, just to burn it down.  A village that - in the books, at least - features prominently later in the series.

 

So either they have to pay to build it all over again (not really a time or money saver) or they cut that entire part of the story entirely.

Again, I am not an expert, but as far as I understand it makes sense.

It will take years before they get to film that battle. in those years, they have to keep renting the land - or keep getting permission from the government to use it. Hard.

And they still need to burn down the village for the trolloc raid; so, by actually burning it down, they get to save a lot on special effects.

and the village was changed anyway by the refugees when perrin comes there, so they'd have to put in lots of work anyway. and they're not even sure they'll be greenlit to film that far ahead in the future.

all in all, tearing it down and then eventually rebuilding it several years into the future is the sensible decision.

On 7/5/2022 at 9:00 PM, DojoToad said:

It is a cool add for sure.  But I could do without a fleshed-out Old Tongue.  Don't know how much of the budget it sucked up on a per episode basis, but I could see the money being better spent

 

I don't think it was expensive.

I am not an expert, but as far as I understand, inventing a language is not too much work for a linguist expert. especially if you already have a dictionary. you need only one person working for a few months.

robert jordan didn't have tolkien's hobby of inventing new languages, so he never actually created the old tongue. though by the end of the story there was quite an extensive vocabulary, and it has some derivation from real languages, it wasn't a language.

but in the last episode cold open, we have two characters speaking fluently in the old tongue. some of the soundtrack is in the old tongue as well.

does it mean that somebody actually went and turned all that vocabulary into an actual language with full grammatical rules?

or it's all just gibberish using the same sounds of the established old language?

On 7/3/2022 at 5:34 AM, bringbackthomsmoustache said:

Except in this case the conclusion from the books and Rand's need for a new method is that if the women had participated in the sealing the result would have been that both sides of the source were tainted - the decision to refuse to help was the correct one (both as a lever to try to force Lews Therin to reconsider and as a lesser of two evils approach if he persisted).   

 

The plan to attempt to use the Chodin Cal (if carried out) would likely have been an error of similar magnitude, but that is not what the two were discussing at this point (the access keys already being lost).

if we are looking at the books, the women come across as dumbasses.

"we refuse your plan. Instead, we'll proceed with the choedan kal"

"the access key were stolen, the choedan kal is now unusable. we are losing the war, hard"

"well, whatever. let's just pretend all is fine"

given what they knew at the time, ltt did the right choice.

even knowing how it ended, and balancing it with the alternative... ltt still did the right thing.

If the tv show tweaks that so that the people involved don't look like dumbasses, but like rational people disagreeing - another weakness of rj writing, he tried to show the good guys divided but he always made them look like morons - that could be another improvement over the books.

I liked that opening. The only thing I didn't like was that nobody mentioned the war of power.

Furthermore, I didn't get the idea that the narrative was trying to push somebody to be guilty. I got the feeling that the two were good friends, deeply respected each other, but they could not be united, and that failure doomed the world. not specifically a mistake from him or from her, but the fact that they did two different things. as they say, bad leadership is better than no leadership.

and this can set up the theme of the middle seasons of wot, where the main characters fail to work together and mostly run in circles.

Actually, it's like most things in wottv: it has great potential, but it doesn't deliver very well.

well, they made mat's parents to be bad, maybe they'll do the same for morgase. they'll probably have some justification in terms of character arcs. and no, maybe gawin won't be as broken by her loss, and he won't have his whiny phase where he decided he had to kill rand and just be a pointless character. Maybe gawyn can be useful for a change.

and frankly, with all the great women spending so much time being great and overshadowing anyone else, a bad role model would be refreshing 😂

on a more general level, they already made so many changes in S1 that, even if they committed to changing nothing else, they'd still have to change a lot because parts of the book plot would not make sense anymore. and they have to invent some role for moiraine, if they injected her story into the royal house of andor - to which she is actually related, moiraine is elayne's aunt - they may have created some plot there.

well, the point is that a relationship is entered by mutual agreement of all parties involved.

anyway, some of those lines gave me a romantic vibe, so I wonder if maybe they merged gaul with faile, creating an aiel love interest for perrin that he rescues from whitecloaks.

i'd say all options are open at this point.

i also do like using the aiel ways to try and fix perrin's trauma. the aiel way is certainly very effective at dealing with trauma and loss.

On 5/15/2022 at 3:16 PM, DojoToad said:

Just wondering if he made you feel different about anything. He did me. I also didn’t agree with all he said. 

Speaking in general, the only review that got me to change my mind on stuff was the one by brandon sanderson, and that's because he gives some really deep reasons for why the show was made in a certain way. It also got my brother to partially change his mind.

But as far as writing a schating review, well, you can write one for every single piece of media. There are schating reviews utterly demolishing the wheel of time - the books, i mean. And same for game of thrones. and there are parodies of the lord of the rings, poking fun at it.

The thing is, if you watch with a critical enough eye, you can find reasons to dislike ANYTHING. I mean, take for example a beautiful girl; it doesn't matter how beautiful she is, if you want to find some flaw in her, you will.

So as a rule of thumb I'm not interested in negative reviews telling me to dislike something. If I listened to those, I would dislike everything. If nothing else, I prefer to read positive reviews, and if they don't make a strong enough case, if they don't convince me, then I am not interested. It's sort of a "damned by faint praise" scenario; "damned by unconvincing praise", more appropriately.

for example, there was a review for a videogame sequel saying "it changed completely the gameplay, evening the difference between noobs and veterans". As I really liked the gameplay of the previous installments, that praising review was most informative on why I should dislike the game. I still bought it because I was invested in the story; big mistake, I stopped playing immediately and just went reading how it ended on wikipedia.

I only read negative reviews when I already have a negative opinion of something, for the lulz. But then, I look for mockery, not honest negative reviews

16 hours ago, Rmp said:

 

 

I remember how comically obvious it was back when the show was airing - they kinda just threw some plants and a camel in their and went, “it’s an exotic city now!”

I didn't notice it, my brother didn't notice it, his girlfriend didn't notice it, and nobody of the people whom I asked about the show complained that they recycled the set, so it wasn't obvious.

Both cities being ogier-made can explain the similarities in-world

Speaking of location, do we know if they made another large setting like they did for emond field and shadar logoth in S1?

That could be tear, and could solve all the issues of where they are filming.

The stuff about aiel being at falme, is that domething confirmed, or speculated?