that's a possibility, but i don't find it very convincing. egwene punched her sul'dam, and while it was done in the heat of the action, it was deliberate, not an accident while flailing around. is it possible that the a'dam stops you if you are being thoughtful, not if you act in the heat of the moment? it certainly is, but since the original author died, we'll never know for sure one way or the other. for sure, egwene never thought to hit renna with her bare hands in the books, denying us useful information. but we are told damane have their food cut for them because they can't touch knives, it means the a'dam isn't as discriminating at reading your intent as you may assume. i'm not talking of the show. what the show did with the a'dam is bad and rafe should feel bad (the part with the reciprocal collaring, not the part with egwene blowing up her tower while renna was distracted; that's covered into scenario 2). i'm staying specifically into stuff that's confirmed by book canon. on ryma, they ended up accepting that she was unable to channel in battle. they stopped trying to get her to break the oaths long before. wait, this is scenario 5): have every aes sedai swear and oath that if captured and collared, they will never, ever cooperate with the seanchan. that will make them immune to being turned.

The books make it clear times and again that the a'dam is unescapable. and yet, just because you can't take it off, it doesn't mean you are completely helpless. premise: you are a prisoner. you will be tortured, abused and broken into killing your former friends. this is a fate worse than death. therefore, death counts as victory for you. if you die, it's a good outcome; you are not expecting to come out of this alive anyway. whatever damage you can deal to the seanchan before you die, that's just bonus. premise 2: an experienced channeler could just control your flows, like nynaeve did with moggy. however, the sul'dam are anything but experienced. they do not know they can do that, just like they don't know they can channel. you have that little advantage. with those premises, let's see a few things you could do to foil the empress 1) the martial artist You cannot use weapons while wearing an a'dam. egwene was unable to touch the brooch of water after she thought of hitting renna with it. But! Book canon establishes that you can still use your bare hands. when egwene was first collared, she punched her sul'dam, and nothing stopped the punch. sure, she was disabled by the pain afterwards, but she could deliver one good punch in the process. it's perfectly possible to kill a person with a single well-delivered punch, especially if they are helpless because they are not expecting it. i was thinking a solid blow on the occiput, it's the most frail part of the skull and a strong blow there often results in permanent damage. Sure, if you kill - or even seriously wound - your sul'dam you are going to die of feedback pain, but we established in the premise that's exactly what you wanted. you mercy-killed yourself, you denied the empire a powerful resource, and you managed to bring a hard-to-replace sul'dam with you. you can also try to kill other damane, they are very valuable resources - and whether they are tortured prisoners or willing soldiers, they are legitimate targets in both cases, if for different reasons. killing a damane should be easy, if you can still throw punches and you don't get pain feedback. main disadvantage is, for something like that they are likely to cut your hands, which would prevent you from further exploiting this technique and would make your life even more miserable than it already was. The main disadvantage is that killing someone with a single blow is hard, even if you can deliver a good surprise punch on the occiput, especially if you are a tiny woman. 2) friendly fire go along with enslavement. don't resist. play pretend. if the sul'dam sense that you are not truly tamed, just say "[name] doesn't want to be punished", which is pretty realistic anyway. try to get them with the guard down. eventually, you'll be used in combat. you are expected to channel letal blows in that case. when you form a deadly wave, instead of throwing, release it at your feet. the sul'dam can sense what you do, and can stop you. however, especially if you've been fighting normally for a while, they are extremely, extremely unlikely to be expecting something like that. people have limited concentration, and they tend to get distracted if involved in a monotonous routine. you only need your sul'dam to drop her guard for a second. the disadantage is that it's unreliable. it requires your sul'dam to not be expecting a suicide move, that she'll be too slow to react. and, if you try it first, it's more likely the sul'dam will be attentive; you will have to kill some of your former companions at first. But if it succeeds, you could take upwards to a dozen damane with you, dealing a major blow to the empire. 3) the stoic Just refuse to do anything. they will punish you; keep refusing. by tuon's accounting, ryma was about to die before she was broken by playing good cop. it means it's possible to just deny your captors, and ryma would most likely have died had she not found tuon. it requires a ludicrous amount of willpower, though, if even egwene couldn't manage it. 4) the least amount necessary to kill While it's normally accepted that you can't channel at all while wearing the a'dam, you actually can. during one of her chapters, egwene was doing just that. and she could channel only a tiny tiny trickle of power, and she was getting nauseated, and she could not open the a'dam. but she could still move small objects. and it doesn't really take all that much strenght to kill a person with a needle through the eye or ear canal. make a needle of air, you may just be able to kill a sul'dam that way. or at least to gouge out her eyes, which would still mark her a casualty for the empire. it's even possible you could puncture her eyes, then threaten to kill her if she doesn't release you. if she folds to your demands, you may even potentially survive and escape, but better to not get your hopes up. probably they will find you standing before a dead sul'dam. still, even if they mutilate you, they have no way to prevent you from doing the same again, so they will likely have to execute you anyway. and you may also manage to kill other damane, which are much more valuable resources than sul'dam. in the end, there are several ways to defeat the a'dam. sure, they all require a very strong willpower, and most are chancy. and they all will see you dead in the end. but really, you've been captured and collared, what do you have to lose at this point?

non sequitur. you are trying to bring some examples of bad changes as an argument that all changes are bad by principle. you are trying to bring some examples of unnecessary changes to argue that there is nothing whatsoever that needs changing. which would be like arguing that since a few blokes were hurt by wrong medicine prescribed mistakenly, then all medicine is bad and nobody would ever need any doctor under any circumstances. and you just keep bringing that up instead of bringing up actual arguments. "but if someone has a broken leg, he will need splinting" "then explain why joe was given talidomide". no, whether some changes were unnecessary and/or poorly done is completely irrelevant on whether some changes are necessary, and you are letting your frustration with some changes cloud your judgment on changes in general

I think it's because throwing stones uses air, and women are stronger with air than fire. In general, we see women fighting with air more often

fun fact, i agree on each of those likes and dislikes, but my overall opinion of the show is positive. it all comes down to the glass half full in the end

i wonder if they keep gawyn and galad or if they join them as a single character, as was speculated. the mat fight could work regardless - after all, gawyn went out cold immediately and it was just mat vs galad afterwards. and i wonder if thom merrilin has come back, or if they ended up cutting him from the story - hopefully not, but they could have been forced to do it for reasons outside of their control

so, you guys can't tell for sure if specific figures are male or female, but you can tell they are the main characters? i ask with genuine curiosity, because i have difficulties recognizing faces, and i'd like to understand the normal people perspective.

as a high school teacher, i met a lot of almost-20-years-old, and I can say that they have a lot of variety. some act like children all the time. some keep doing it even in their old age. some are basically adults already at 15. and of course you have all shades in between. so, the notion that a character is too immature or too mature for his age is moot. people are different. that said, people tend to mature faster in a society where they are expected to help their elders with work before age 10 and to marry before they are 20.

mat is not a scumbag, at least it's not his core. in S1E1, during the attack, he goes out of hiding to look for his sisters. the hero that complains a lot, swears he's no hero, then goes doing heroic things, is quintessential mat. rand being romantically innocent is not an important side of his character, and neither are perrin's issues with manhood - they are shadowed by his conflicts about leadership and his relation with the wolf inside.

i don't want to argue on the general merit, or lack thereof, of the tv show, nor on the general work of rafe &co, nor am i interested in whom to blame in the long list of people with power to write or dictate or in any way influence the plot. but i have to express disagreement on that paragraph. none of the things you mention is even remotely important in the large scale plot - except perhaps perrin having a wife that dies shortly after, which is mildly important at best. by "not important" i mean, if you were tasked to write a one-page summary of the wheel of time, it wouldn't mention any of that stuff.

i don't recognize any of the faces, i see them blurry even at top resolution. even knowing who they are supposed to be, i can't tell. i don't know how you guys manage. the guy crawling on the ground is rand then? yeah, in that case it's clearly a vision

moiraine mentions she has to die to save rand, so maybe they kept that part. perrin is kissing a girl, he finds faile? what's the scene in the ways? so far it looks goood, but teasers always do.

there have been several productive discussions. however, it's been over a year since the show premiered. we exhausted the meaningful discussions months ago.

i'm not going to debate the general point on "too different", on some levels it is. but mentioning elaine is actually a prime example of a justified change. namely, why would the tv show need to devote a lot of screen time - after already cutting a lot of important plots - to something that has no real consequence? you can cut away the early caemlyn sequence and it has absolutely 0 impact on the plot, everything that happens afterwards works the same. you recognize the importance of cutting something, that's one of the first things you can cut. besides, there are problems with hiring actors for an early cameo. you hire elaine for season 1, now you have an actress for her, which you'll need in season 2. except that maybe she'll be hired for other projects and she won't be available, so you have to pay her extra to gain the right to call her. and morgase, and gareth bryne, and elaida. you have to hire a bunch of actors, and pay them to turn off future contracts. it's a big cost, and a big hassle. those early cameos for characters that would be important later worked great in the books, where the characters wouldn't need to be paid. in tv format, it's terrible. add in the need to cut stuff, and how they were already short in characterization... that was a good change.

frankly, the more time passes without announcements, the more i expect the show will be canceled after season 3 or 4. they can't go on with a season every 2 years anyway. the protagonists will be 40 by the time it's done

yeah, it's not like you actually need rafe's assent to say "the books are canon"

thinking some more about it, though, i came to the conclusion that the original prologue may have worked better. a modified version of the original prologue. see, if the problem is that the prologue was confusing because of all those obscure names and references and flowery speech, just remove all of that and have ishy be a bit more direct, give the viewers a bit of an easier time picking what's important from what's meant to create an ominous atmosphere. of course, given that the show tried too hard to create a dark atmosphere, it may just have focused on the wrong stuff. I'm now picturing a black palace with walls painted black, with black burn marks, with dried blood (blood turns black after a while), which a black-clad ishy, because we must use lots of black to show we're serious. to show ltt is the champion of the light, they would put him in just a grey robe. dark grey, we don't want people to think this is a children show! really, i've seen some trailers that actually made my laugh by how much they abused the dark palette.

you are right, those were good scenes. probably what kept me hooked until i got to the later books. i liked perrin, once we got to know him better when he's separated. i liked tam and thom, and was sad to see them put on a bus. i had a strong dislike of early mat. pranksters like him tend to hurt people. as a teacher, i had to deal with several such people, and they're all like "but it was a joke, i didn't think people could actually get hurt". back when i first read wot I wasn't a teacher yet, but i still had the same dislike. i didn't feel strongly for rand either way, but he was always very antagonistic to moiraine, even when she wasn't doing anything wrong. i mean, there's this guy in your dreams, he could be the dark one, and you don't ask the aes sedai for help? i understand mistrust, but come on, it's like having an armed robber in the house and not calling the police because you heard they are all fascists. not to mention believing his lies and holding them against moiraine. in short, i have little patience for fools, and that includes most of the main cast. i liked them better later.

that's an important point. by now, i know that if there is a prologue to a long piece of epic fantasy set thousands of years in the past, my reaction should be "heh, don't worry about any of that. it will make sense later". on a tv show, with a public not accustomed to reading fantasy, it's less likely to work. incidentally, all my memories of the first part of the first book are bad ones. it starts with a huge wall of name-drops that left me confused. then the action moves to a bunch of rural characters doing nothing interesting whatsoever for several chapters. i don't think i liked any of the main characters at first? and i remember spending the first few hundred pages feeling like it was a lord of the ring ripoff. i'm not sure what made me want to continue reading until I got to the good parts. i said it many times: the whole beginning of the wheel of time is rather weak. changing it is generally good, though not all the changes were well executed.

how is that self-contained and not confusing? the prologue drops several dozen names out of context, and you have no way of knowing which will be relevant. the first time i read the prologue, i didn't got anything about any of that. my reaction was something like... so, there was this crazy guy... who clearly had been someone important, before going crazy... and there is this other guy... from the way he acts, he appears to be a villain... and here they are dropping a bunch of names that i have no idea what they are... tain? ilyena? shai'tan? betrayer of hope? dragon? ring of tamyrlin? nine rods of dominion? what is any of that? and now it seems it was the crazy guy who killed his wife? so he commits suicide with some kind of magic? who is this guy? who is the villain guy? and how is any of that relevant to a first chapter that starts thousands of years later? perhaps the prologue introduced those concept you say, but they were mixed with so many other stuff, it didn't stick with me. maybe now i'd be more experienced and i would be able to pick what's important in that prologue aside from what's fluff. but at the time i first read, i could not.

i remember a thread years ago on that point, and it was highly controversial. while some fans loved that, others - myself included - found themselves utterly confused by the name drop and lore drop, and had no idea what happened. now, after reading the whole book saga three or four times, i can appreciate the original start and all its subtle calls to the wide lore. but as a new reader? not at all. for every spectator that would have been hooked, there would have been another that would stop the view and review-bomb the show for being utterly uncomprehensible

the stepin story arc was extremely well received among non-book readers. at least, that's anedoctical, but i have a handful of friends who didn't read the books and agree on that. so, you'd have removed one of the most successful story arcs, and put in its place... I don't know, maybe 20 minutes of nynaeve pulling her brain and egwene sniffing instead? to be more faithful to the books? frankly, your answer is not an answer. it doesn't address any of the points i raised, and the one actual suggestion - removing stepin's arc - would likely have a negative impact.