well, in book one moiraine fights aginor or balthamel, and holds one off for a bit. egwene is stronger than moiraine at this point, and possibly more trained in war channeling. i can easily accept the scene. in both scenes it is clear that the foresaken has the upper hand from the beginning.

just in the same way that if I got in a boxing match with a trained boxer, there's no way I can win, but if I focus on defence I may be able to hold off for half a minute or so.

I understand that fantasy cities in movies are meant to look good, to provide striking visuals, not to be particularly realistic.

still, would it really kill the production to show some farmland around? so far we had 3 cities shown: tar valon was placed in the middle of mountains, with no single sign of human presence outside of it. fal dara instead was in the desert. and now falme, also desert.

what is it about a nice green grassland that makes it so unsuitable to settling a major city? are fields of wheat or corn so ugly that the production must eschew them at all cost?

my poor suspension of disbelied is suffering.

13 minutes ago, Samt said:

I’m not sure that the 1.16 billion number is right. Someone wrote it in another thread.  My point was that 15 million reliable viewers is not some sort of drop in the bucket.  GoT had 10 million viewers at its height.  WoT definitely doesn’t have that level of viewership. 
 

I’m not suggesting that you don’t try to make a show that non-readers can still understand and enjoy.  But a big part of the success or failure of this show will come down to getting book readers to watch and keep watching the show.
 

I also don’t know how the economics of streaming works.  It’s hard to believe that Amazon is actually making money on this since it’s included in a subscription and there are no ads.  

netflix supposedly does earn a profit, though it doesn't have that much higher number. and people only pay the subscriptions.

and that's how it was discovered that the whole tv shows industry was actually a face for a giant money laundering scheme 😁

4 hours ago, grayavatar said:

Of course not. I would rather have protracted scenes of Lan taking a piss on a tree or Barthanes talking about making sandwiches. The heroes of the horn are not important, who cares about the Horn of Valere

sorry, i'm too busy spending half of a book as part of a circus to have time for that 😛

2 hours ago, TheMountain said:

Having lurked on here since the end of Season 1 without once logging in, I've seen A LOT of your posts @Elder_Haman. I felt compelled to finally log in and tell you... from one random internet user to another... in my non-expert internet armchair opinion... you do, in fact, have very low standards. But that's okay. Plenty of people love reality TV, for example. Hell, I enjoy it myself from time to time as well. It's nice to switch off my brain sometimes and be taken along for a wild, if undemanding, ride. I just expected so much more from the Wheel of Time, and try as I might, I just can't get over it. I expect that I'm not alone in that sentiment.

the problem with expectations here is that of different media. tv does some things better, books do other things better.

and one of the things books do better is plot. in a book, you can spend some pages detailing exactly why a certain character is in a certain place to do something. in a movie, there's no time for that. in general, a book can explain deeply, a movie cannot. so my expectations there are lower, and I can accept - if grudgingly - on a tv show plot holes and ass pulls that would have me throw a book at the wall.

on the other hand, tv shows do images. combats, scenery, costumes. I'm never going to complain that swordfights in the book are not as spectacular as they are in a tv show, because the book is more limited there, and i have lower expectations of what a good book fight is.

3 hours ago, Samt said:

And doing the math on Nielsen ratings from season 1, the equivalent of 2.5 million people watched the season all the way through (I say equivalent, because it’s probably a combination of a larger number of people, some of which didn’t watch the whole thing).  So if only half the people who read the books by your estimate, just watched the whole season 1, 3 times the people would have watched it that actually did.  The claim that simply getting people who read the books to watch the show wouldn’t be enough seems wrong.  

only 1 billion total minutes? well, I had no idea what are normal viewership numbers, but I find it very weird. how can they recoup their expences if they put 100 millions into a show and 2.5 million people watch it? they'd need to earn 40$ for each viewer to break even. you sure your math is right?

in any case, my point had nothing to do with getting book readers to watch the show. my point was that there aren't enough book readers to pick screenwriters among them, and the books are too long to ask them to read the books after they are hired

48 minutes ago, Vartija said:

I hope they take a critical look at the pacing for future seasons. I think both seasons suffered from a rush to the finish line type of approach. They take their time building some storylines early in the season like it was a 10+ episode season and then end up cramming too much into episodes 7 & 8. The internal logic suffers when they have to force a conclusion to every storyline in 60 minutes.  

 

Also they should do a better job landing the storylines they've developed during the season. We spent a fair bit of time with Elayne & Nyn coming up with a plan to save Egwene only to have her save herself from the a'dam. Ingtar was hinted at as a DF but then we didn't get the reveal which made much of the (admittedly) little buildup with him useless. Likewise we spend precious time with Rand finding wine for Logain but in the end he didn't learn anything from him, yet was still able to do two intricate weaves in the final episodes when the plot needed it.

yeah, those are actual issues.
though with all the times nynaeve just exploded and solved the plot in the first season, putting her down is good to advance her arc.
and rand+logain feels a waste, but maybe rand will come back and be trained in the next season.

ingtar... was a bit of a wasted arc

27 minutes ago, DaddyFinn said:

 

Good points in this thread also. Considering that Rand is still taking his first baby steps with channeling, he's doing well.

interesting. it's the kind of details, unfortunately, that most viewers miss. including myself.

by the way, by show lore rand and ishy should be evenly matched - though I doubt they ever fought with the power in the books. it seems show rand is a lot stronger than even his book counterpart.

9 minutes ago, Mirefox said:

Every single visual we have had of the Seanchan channeling is that it is highly choreographed and motion-based.  Even the Suldam make motions in concert with their Damane.  The line is just one amongst millions that was written for effect without concern of the actual lore they themselves have created.

it's highly coreographed because it's a tv show and must look good, no other reason.

even valda himself states that hand gestures are not necessary, so there is no lore issue unless one already decided he hates the show and wants to see the negative in everything.

well, if a damane resisted all the torture, and still won't channel in battle. if you cut her tongue, and still she resisted. what else could you do? last extreme, you can try to threaten an even bigger physical punishment, and chopping off hands is pretty much what's left. It will also make the damane less effective, because she can't ride unaided, but the alternative is losing the damane, so it's worth a try. finally, if the damane still resists, I suppose they'll kill her.

But I don't think it's actually relevant, because I don't think therre's ever much need for that punishment. Seanchan culture approves of damane, so most girls just go along and obey orders without need for cohercition. The recalcitrant ones can be tortured very effectively. Even aes sedai and wise ones are known to eventually give up. How often do you think it will be actually necessary to chop pieces off a damane? not enough to be a real issue to society. and the possibility of it happening is there as bogeyman; it's one of those cases where the threat is more effective than its execution.

8 hours ago, Mailman said:

But renna actually says this is not the case first infraction is removal of tongue second is removal of hands. Not sure how that is productive considering they use so much hand waving and i thought they showed in S1 with Valda that cutting off hands prevented some channeling.

huh... my comment wasn't entirely serious.

anyway, hand gestures are unnecessary, and people can be taught to go without them.

29 minutes ago, Irvyne said:

This is the thing that just completely frazzles my brain.

You're about to produce a MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR production, based on a BEST-SELLING and BELOVED series of books.

Firstly, howwwwwww do you employ writers that are not familiar with and do not understand the source material?? Why would you ever do that?? I would think that would be the FIRST QUESTION in any kind of interview! "Tell me how much you know about the Wheel of Time."

see, here's a bit of a misconception. Yes, the wheel of time is a bestselling series of books. It sold over 100 million copies worldwide. that's huge, right? everyone must have heard of it.

Then you consider it's 14 books. So divide 100 by 14, you get 7 million copies for the whole saga. already a lot less. You can even double that numer because people may share those books - me and my brother have a single copy, but we both read it - and you get 15 million readers maybe.

In the whole world. Now, we can assume most of those readers are in the western world, which has roughly one billion people, and we get that little more than 1% of your population has read the wheel of time. A few more % have heard of it from someone else, but a good 95% of people never heard about it.

So, while wot is a major bestselling series of books, it's not something like star wars, or james bond, which are major bestselling movies. a major bestselling movies is something everyone heard about - and even non-fans are at least vaguely familiary with the topic. a major bestselling book is something most people never heard.

Then you also get sample selection. we determined that 1 to 2% of the population has read the wheel of time. but that number is skewed towards book readers and fantasy nerds. most movie writers and directors, I'd surmise, are not book readers, else they would have become writers. they are instead movie watchers, hence they went to work with movies. So the percentage of movie directors who actually read the wheel of time could be even lower than in the global population.

You want a writer/director who's familiar with the content? good job, you already excluded 99% of all available creators. I don't think there are enough screenwriters familiar with the wheel of time in all the united states for your needs. And most of them already have other contracts.
 

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Secondly, if you are lucky enough to be an employed writer on said show and you AREN'T familiar with the story, characters and lore, how can you possibly not think it might be useful (or at least professional) to become as familiar as you can before you start writing??

I just... I cannot comprehend it!

 

And here's the second misconception. While the show has a big budget of 100 millions per season, that doesn't mean it's got money to throw away. Sure, they look like a lot of money. Then you have to pay the actors, some of whom are expensive. Even the extras are not cheap; a trolloc may appear one minute in the show, but it took days of work to prepare the prostetics and train the actor.

Then you have to pay the set. Emond field does not build itself, you know. how much did they spend to create a whole village, then burn it down? Then there is the cgi, a lot of it in a fantasy show with widespread magic. then there is marketing. consider it all, you don't have much money to spare.

with that in mind, can you put in the contract with a screenwriter the need to read the books? if it was a single book, then yes. I'm sure when they filmed the martian everyone majorly involved had read the book, because it was a relatively short book you can read in a couple afternoons. Not so the wheel of time. it takes months to read. And even after you read it once, you still miss most details.

So, do you think you can ask so many writers to stop all their work and spend months doing nothing but reading books, just to familiarize with the material? or to do it in their own time?

Hopefully you see it's not realistic.

what you can realistically do is hire a recognized book expert to sum up and explain to the writers what they need to know. which is exactly what they did, with sarah nakamura.

which is not even all that different from the books, because even in the books there are plenty of things I would have done differently, plenty of storylines that feel forced, stretched, overly contrieved, or just plain unnecessary. but the overall result is a net plus.

It's quite easy in 8 hours of show to make a list with a dozen questionable things in the season. it's also easy to make a similar list with a dozen good things.

if I may suggest, just mentally retcon - or skim - the things you didn't like and focus on those you like. this is how I appreciate the tv show. the books, too.

1 hour ago, kebo85 said:

Don’t know if this has been discussed previously but how are the damane who where Aes Sedai able to channel as a weapon. Should the 3 oaths not still take effect?

on the other hand, since they will be killed if they refuse, it can be argued that they are channeling in the last extreme to defend their life...

48 minutes ago, RitualM said:

It doesn't bother you that the writers took one of the best magic systems in the genre and relegated the opportunity of a proper battle between 2 powerful one power wielders it to a lame fireball fight on a rooftop and a lame walk up to him and stab him? Its almost as bad as the death of the night king in GOT.

 

The "climax" of a season was the big baddie standing there literally just throwing fireballs at a shield? The thousands year old forsaken with more knowledge in the one power than then entire white tower couldn't  think of anything else to do with the almost limitless possibilities of the power? Why not an actual battle befitting the rivalry ? It was so lame and anticlimactic. 

you know, in the books 2 powerful one power wielders had a fight sword against quartestaff instead, was that any better?

Quote

We haven't even spoken of ANY of the hero's other than Uno so they mean nothing to anyone but a reader

so, you propose that the show goes out of its way to characterize every individual hero of the horn?

19 hours ago, grayavatar said:

Many people were saying "Lol, these fans expect the story word for word". If anything I feel that we got too many words.

I truly feel that if you took most of the dialogue from the first two books you would end up with less dialogue than what we got in the show. The books are thick but it's mostly descriptive text.

 

You are selling the books short if you think they are little enough dialogue to fit into a tv show and everything else filler descriptive text. very, very short.

the books were also full of explanations of the finer points of the plot, long historical excursus, people in their heads thinking on their course of action and their internl struggles. even in conversations, there was plenty on how a character wiggled their finger in a suggestive way and how the other character read volumes in that wiggled finger.

no, you really can't take the dialogue of the books and get it equal in the tv show, and get the descriptions ofn the books to set up the environment, and think that will work.

1 hour ago, Samt said:

It's sort of the heart of the issue, though. Not only are they not willing to be faithful to the book lore.  They also aren't willing (or perhaps lack the vision) to create and communicate a coherent alternative.  I've said from the beginning that the real problem is that there doesn't seem to be someone (and it should be a single person) with a clear vision of what the story and lore is actually going to be in the show.  And the more the story and lore deviates from the books, the more you need this person.  

I get the feeling they do not want to give strict rules, because they want to still improvise if the plot needs it.

I also get the feeling that this is just normal tv policy. watch the scene without thinking; does it have an emotional impact? if yes, mission accomplished. when you think 10 seconds you see a continuity error? well, people who care about those things - or about getting detailed explanations for stuff - usually read books, and don't watch much tv.

it's called segmentation of the market. you give your customers what they want to see. it affects every adaptation.

1 minute ago, Mirefox said:

You’re literally trying to argue that it, in fact, makes complete sense we’ve seen Perrin sword fighting more than Rand.  In no universe, book or TV, does that make sense.

why does it make no sense? we do have, indeed, seen perrin fight with the sword a lot more than rand.
 

perrin also spent months with the shienarans, who will have taught him some. and he is big and strong, which is always an advantage.

what did rand do? practice some forms, maybe?

it makes complete sense for perrin to be competent with melee weapons at this point, and it makes absolute sense for him to be better than rand in the show

10 minutes ago, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

Episode 8 spoilers.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

No, no it doesn't, as long as Egwene thought of that a'dam as something to hurt Renna with she could not have touched it. And even if you say, collaring someone is not hurting them per se, that is exactly how she used it, so would have been forbidden. Plus I guess they use the idea that the two a'dam cancel each other out or something, or how could she do what she did with the Power? To get this self-freedom, they broke their own rules, and introduced new ones. Cheating is wrong, it most certainly does not make you right. The whole point of an a'dam is that there are no loopholes. Pretending there is one, undermines the horror and helplessness of the damane. Episode 8 proves I was right, there is no way to get out of it without totally contradicting your own lore. So there, nana nana na na. (And I have my thumbs in my ears and am wiggling my flingers as I say this. Oh yes, I went there.)

 

no, i wasn't referring to that of that.

I'm talking of the "wait until they allow you to use the power in battle, and then cause some "accidental" friendly fire" before your suldam realizes it.

3 minutes ago, EmreY said:

 

 

Yeah, that's a big problem.

 

On the other hand, what if Moiraine's mentally slightly off?  She's clearly obsessed with the Dragon in the conversational sense.  What if it goes a little beyond that?

 

I had this interesting back-and-forth with my current go-to guru, aka ChatGPT:

 

 

 

 

I think this might be something like what is happening here.

heh, but the oath specifies "last extreme".

otherwise it would be all too easy for an aes sedai to kill like lanfear did, and then justify it as "those packed up peasants were fertile ground for the covid pandemics that threatens everyone, so I dispersed them"

3 minutes ago, Mailman said:

Well okay just one that jumps out in the last 2 episodes for me is that Rand made a deal with Lanfear that directly caused the deaths of many people (at least a dozen in front of the gate)

did I miss something?

lanfear already killed the people in cahirien. rand made a deal with her partially to get her to stop, and partially because she's too powerful.

unless you are referring to rand killing turak? well, it was self defence. sort of. yeah, rand was still softer at this point of the books. but then, this also encompassed book 3, rand was like this at the end of book 3

4 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

She didn’t. She sunk 3. The rest retreated, as Lan observed. 

you get the point. she used the power as a weapon, despite it not being the last extreme to defend her life - she could have used it against the soldiers, but not the boats that hadn't even noticed her.

1 minute ago, The_Watcher_And_Wanderer said:

Whatever, dude. The point is that book Dain was jumping to conclusions and acting on assumptions while show Dain is an eyewitness to his father’s murder. This makes a huge difference in Dain’s characterization. 

on the other hand, it was a very emotional moment, and perhaps the whitecloaks now will come across as something more than closeminded morons. maybe the trial on perrin will have some actual weight behind it.

I, for one, am looking forward to perrin pleading guilty and declaring himself ready to face whatever punishment borhnald decides, with bornhald then deciding to give him another chance.

2 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

I agree with this. But just remember - it’s the characters that make the story. Consistent plots and tight world building will avail nothing if the characters aren’t engaging. 

yes, but it wouldn't kill to ask for both.

i can forgive minor things, but really, the thing with moiraine. it would have been so easy to have her cut the flows of the damane to free rand, and keep the same plot. this is just a major oversight, and I'm extremely surprised that nobody, from rafe to the other writers to sarah nakamura to the actors themselves who knew about the three oaths, picked up on it and suggested the simple change that would not alter the plot in any other way. It is not a "we don't have the time to explain it fully". it is not a "we had to simplify it". It's not a "we need it to advance the plot". and it's not even "one guy had an oversight and didn't notice".

I am dropping my rating of the whole season from 9 to 8 for that single accident.

it is very good television. with the unfortunate exception of a few plot holes and inconsistencies. well, i long since gave up on the notion that any movie could have the same level of consistency as a book. some of that, i accept as a limitation of the medium. in a book you can put in a page of explanation, in television you cannot.

but really, moiraine using the power as a weapon and sinking a whole fleet of boats? I could almost hope they'll reveal her for a darkfriend, it would at least justify that

13 minutes ago, Rhaze said:

 Rafe is 100% proof that someone can read the books, love them, be entertained by them, and not understand them at all.

9 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

Seems like he understands them just fine to me. All of the characters are exactly where they are supposed to be in their emotional journeys. 

both of you have a point.

i would say that it shows one can understand emotional character arcs very well, but still fail at worldbuilding and plot consistency.

it does feel rushed, indeed. well, i was wondering how they could tie all the remaining loose plots in one episode, i knew it would be rushed. same problem this show always had, really, not enough screen time for all the plot.

too bad for turak. looks like this incarnation of rand is not a sword expert. not yet, at least.

ingtar is not a darkfriend. or, we'll never know at least. it was a good choice at this point, he wasn't expanded enough as a character to keep his arc meaningful. only thing i don't like, you hold a choke point by staying in it and blocking the way, not by charging out. stupid hollywood tactics.

so, they said suldam are weak channelers, they don't have the distinction between those that can learn and those that will do it spontaneously. i suppose it's shorter.

oh, I totally said that damane could cause a friendly fire accident in battle, and so many people were tellling me no, that's not possible. despite well established book lore that suldam order you to bombard the enemy, but they leave the handling of the power to the damane herself. and yes, they can see weaves and stop them, but they have to be ready

On 9/23/2023 at 1:41 PM, king of nowhere said:

if I were in that situation, i would do all the suldam ask of me, until i am brought to battle. then in battle I would try to cause some "accidental" friendly fire accidents.

I suppose I am entitled to some gloating?

egwene killed renna. well, hopefully we won't have any cringeworthy stuff about making sure moghedien was comfortable.

nooooo! perrin killed bornhald! the one good guy among the whitecloaks. how could they do it? so sad scene. perrin and bornhald jr could be friends. i suppose that's why they concocted this scene. I really loved old bornhald for his speech of "the seanchan are murderers and slavers, someone has to stand up to them"

uno a hero of the horn? it fits. but is the woman amalisa? i like that much less. i don't see birgitte. hopefully because they don't want to cast her prematurely, and not because they cut her out entirely.

Oh, by the way, while mat saying "i remember everything" and just gaining a bunch of new powers didn't sit well with me initially, I have to admit it's actually a lot better than "I can defeat those two highly trained warriors because I was taught by a farmer that occasionally spars in his free time"

damn, ishy using the illusion to get mat to stab rand was brilliant. the books rarely used it in battle, but it was a wonderful ploy.

lan gets to be badass! yay! it was long overdue.

wait, wait, wait. moiraine cannot use the power as a weapon except as last resort to defend her life, that of lan, or that of other aes sedai. she ABSOLUTELY cannot use it to blow up ships in the distance that are not paying attention to her; most of those ships don't even have damane on board. That's a MAJOR plot hole. And it could easily be avoided by having moiraine cut the flows of the other damane. I'm dropping the rating of the whole show just for that. shame on everyone involved.

it was good, a real mark up over the previous season. I can enjoy it and just pretend that the last thing with moiraine never happened.