there was a scene in the winespring inn where they were both topless, with the clear implication that they had sex. i would like that. from the beginning, even before she was revelaed as a foresaken, there was clearly somegthing wrong with her. she reeked of ambition, and not the good kind.

in the books, rand was attracted to "selene", and was only kept back by both his inexperience and his prudish upbringing. in the tv show, rand is more experienced and less prudish, so it would make little sense for him to do nothing at all. I'd pin it as a "change that had to be made as consequence of another change". on the other hand, tv rand is a lot more strongly attached to egwene than book rand, so I'd not like it if he was unfaithful - possibly they break up first? also, i'd rather they not go full sex. there's no reason to. some smooching would be the best compromise to accomodate book faithfulness and tv characterization

you may have heard of this thing called "europe". it's actually got twice the population of north america. and for us, 8 pm ET is 2 am. there's also other continents, but i think most primevideo subscribers are from europe or america.

is it me, or the audio on those is very low? even with maximum volume, i miss most of the dialogue.

There is a scene of the trailer of nynaeve coming out bloodied from the arches, but clothed in the same clothes she has going in, so they removed the gratuitous nudity. not surprising. in a book, you can write "character X disrobed" and no more description, and it's not sexual in any way. with actual images on a screen? not so much

Or 3) they filmed part of episode 7, then there was the covid break, then mat didn't return. so they had to remove it from the narrative somehow, and making him leave before the ways was the only point where he could escape. they could keep those scenes where mat wasn't in, though. Or 4) those scenes were filmed or re-filmed after the second covid break. or anyway, after a long real life time. I don't think there's enough to draw sure conclusions. Because liandrin is such a reliable source on anything, really. how about "that scene was meant to introduce there is some kind of taint that draws the men mad, and also how prejudiced red aes sedai are about it"? If you can channel heavily on the a'dam, chances are you can also hit the damane with a similar flow of power. in which case it's easier to just smoke the damane. unless you're specifically trying to take her alive. some book characters do it, unlatching the collar with flows of air

that happens later. i'm referring mostly to the fal dara meeting where rand goes all "i won't be your false dragon on a leash" stupidiy. but we're going offtopic. if more posts are made on the subject, perhaps a mod should move them to a new thread

those are actually the parts where the book characterization fell flat. I mean, on one hand, there's moiraine. there's stories about aes sedai, sure, but what you know is that she saved your life and your village and she healed people. on the other side, there's the dark one. you know, the one bound on shaiol gul with all the foresaken and all that stuff, it's your very cathecism. he sent trollocs after you, and those trollocs killed indiscriminately everywhere they go. who do you trust more? as for two river stubborness, seems more like a charicature. I think the tv show did right in having moiraine kill the boatman, even though the scene wasn't very well executed.

I'd say the books also did at best a fair job there. And the books had much more time to develop that mistrust. Here's another issue where the show must do better than the books.

the scene with liandrin and nynaeve, it looks like the scene from tgh with siuan and nynaever on the boat. so it seems they kept the scene, but put liandrin in place of siuan

could be as simple as needing to keep the contracts with the actors; maybe they started saying "either you give me the certainty that I will have a salary, or I will look for a new job elsewhere". S1 was delayed a long time for covid, and this probably also disrupted the schedules of some actors. else, I could not guess

the way I interpret it, "i didn't like it" means it's my opinion; "it sucks" has a harder edge, it implies a level of objective badness that at least a majority of viewers would agree with. "the execs should have canceled it" implies it to be objectively bad by agreement of almost everyone, and economically losing too. we have no hard data on viewership, but season 3 was greenlit after season 1 was aired, so the execs judge the data to be at least good enough to keep spending money on making new episodes. as for how to quantify revenue, I have no idea how they do it, but I am pretty sure they do have ways to at least make estimates. people do not throw around hundreds of millions without some cost/benefit analysis. I wasn't happy with the cauthons, but it makes a lot of sense. certainly the characterization of the two river people (with every bad one as coplin or congar) made me raise a few eyebrows.

I preemptively covered that point I may also add that I heard positive comments on stepin specifically. you are confusing your personal taste with objective truth. there is no objective way to rate art, but there is an objective parameter used by those in charge, which is basically "will people like this enough to keep paying subscriptions and cover the cost of this production?". This also illustrates exactly the level of commitment they have in making a good product. A good product sells more, but it also costs more, and they have to strike the right balance. Well, I don't have hard numbers there, but I am pretty sure wot was not an economic fiasco. otherwise, they would not have greenlit season 3 already. wot was successful on the one objective parameter that matters to the people who get to decide whether to greenlight it. as for improving, I'm sure Rafe would have loved to have the chance to, but it would have required reshooting scenes, redoing special effects, basically paying money. So, once more, the question was "will improving this get us enough extra customers to justify the cost?" and the answer was likely no. if your idea of "improving" was adding extra time to better flesh out the plot and characters, I'd be all for it, but it would have cost extra money, that the executives were probably unwilling to pay. if your idea of improving was changing the plot to bring it closer to the books with the screentime they had, well, you would have liked the show better, and I would have liked the show better, but a majority of people who did not read the book and who make up a majority of viewers may have liked it less. annyway, after the first season was successful enough, the executives decided it may be worth gambling more money into this, so we are - apparently - getting improvements here. at least, special effects on channeling are much improved. I heard voices that episodes will be a few minutes longer, but can't confirm. anyway, it shows that the people in charge at amazon are willing to bet some more money that improving quality may turn in more profit. that's all we can ask for; they are running a business, not a charity. long story short: you can absolutely say that you didn't like the show. You can go as far as claiming that the show insults book fans personally. but the moment you say that the show sucks, or that the execs should have done something drastic about it, that's objectively, factually false. we don't know all the facts, but every piece of hard data we have agrees that the show was generally liked and reasonably successful.

"we spent 100 millions on a project, involving some pretty famous actor too. the result is not great, not terrible. let's just not air the series then. [or, let's only air the first half and stop it there]. we'll tell the fans we canceled it because we didn't like it enough" best. management. ever! (sarcasm mode) reality check, please. I can understand shelving something if it is terrible, like asylum-level terrible. like, star wars christmas special terrible. the kind of stuff that the fans will try to forget and the actors will try to hide their involvment in. this is not the case. wot S1 is far from perfect, but I enjoyed it and a lot of book fans enjoied it, and every single non-book-fan I know who watched it liked it. is that bad enough to cancel a project in which you already invested lots of money? to tell the fans "sorry, we didn't like the product" after hyping them for two years? to tell the young actors for whom this was their first important role than they spent a lot of working time and now won't get any recognition or anything to put in their resumee? what actor would still want to work with you afterwards?

the major politics, ok. but all the dozens of minor sisters, all with their small plots that ultimately make a very little impact on the book? cut. the question is how much to cut and streamline.

totally. yes, there are a lot of things that could be improved and looks like they were improved. but if someone dislike the changes from the book, one will still dislike the tv show. in fact, S2 is bound to have even more changes, since they have to write a role for moiraine basically from scratch and they have to accomodate for the changes they already made. I'm cool with that, I knew this adaptation would come with major plot rewriting. but for those that didn't, S2 it's going to be worse. i remember there was a guy in this forum who was furious for the sword of Tam lacking a couple fine details from its canon description; I bet he'd not like S2 no matter how much they improve.

i wouldn't call it a "major plot point". it was just another detail of aes sedai politics. in general, if there is one thing we can be sure will be cut, is a lot of aes sedai politics. it would be incomprehensible to the viewer. it was hard even for dedicated readers. if they wanted to explain it in detail, they'd need several additional seasons just of aes sedai plotting. so, while some aes sedai politics was kept - a few scenes in S1E6 with various aes sedai blackmailing each other gave a good idea, I think - it will be hugely simplified for clarity. if they merge alviarin with liandrin or elaida, i would not cry a bit.

look, i'm all for "try to fix things with your loved ones before leaving them forever", but there is a vast gulf between "throwing out a relationship the first time something gets a little bit tough" and "your partner beats you on a regular base and you think it's your fault". and perhaps the most damning thing in wot relationships is that almost nobody tries to. faile never tries to fix anything. egwene never tries to communicate with her partner(s). nynaeve never communicates, but luckily for her lan is good at reading her. and let's not even get into what will happen with mat. there are very few instances where people sit down and talk things through like rational adults. I'd be willing to call perrin's relationship ok if faile made any attempt to communicate her problems to perrin. especially because perrin tryies to be the best husband all the time. she can't even claim culture clash, because unlike perrin, she was raised into a court, with the expectation of political marriage to some foreign prince; she should know about different cultures and expectations. instead, faile does all she can to make perrin feel miserable. jut because she hopes he will get angry and will "fight" with her. when all she had to do would be explain that fact to perrin. her scene with berelain is also pretty cringy. she pulled a knife on a woman who wanted to court her husband. we can find many similar instances in newspapers, and they never lead to anything good. I'm not touching any real life implications. too much of a potential flamebait

I have trouble thinking of a single healty relationship in the whole 14 books (maybe rand and elayne in the stone of tear), but perrin and faile take the cake. there was an interview from robert jordan saying something like men in his family having to be strong to avoid being dominated by the strong women around that makes me think he grew up in a fairly disfunctional environment where bullying was the norm, and that reflects in his characters. the wheel of time has a lot of issues like that. in the end, you can decide to keep reading or to stop there. but ultimately, I think the best way to take all that "gender relationship" garbage is for what it is: a projection from the culture of the time the book was written. isn't it funny how we write about people from different worlds, in different times, with all kinds of magic, but they all share our fundamental moral values? you never read a book with a protagonist thinking it's all right to burn someone as an heretic, or to stone someone for infidelity, or that it's ok to marry and have children at age 13, or to own slaves. probably we'll also find the books written 50 years in the future to be very strange. anyway, the point is, at the time wot was written, a lot of stuff was ok that is now definitely not ok. just roll with it. there are much bigger value dissonances when we consider works of the distant past, like those of shakespear or dante. but in that case we accept that because we know them for what they are. I guess wot is close enough to us that we don't activate the disconnection "this is written by people from a far past who had values very different from ours, i must not take this as a moral guide". we recognize the values in wot as our own, until something like domestic violence pops up. ah, but then it gets better. eventually.

simple bravado. "look how powerful I am. I'm not just a high ranking darkfriend. no, i'm also an aes sedai. i wield power in so many ways, I had to hire a secretary just to remind me of all the different ways I'm powerful" perhaps also "don't you think of trying a klingon promotion at my expence, i can incinerate you with a thought" similar considerations for the one wearing the markings of seanchan high blood. probably suroth and while "bors" called those showing symbols fools, it's not like it actually matters. ok, so you know one of the masked figures at the meeting was black ajah. so what? there are hundreds of aes sedai, you can't identify her. it doesn't really tell you anything.

It would be, and could be a great idea, but there are two practical problems. First, it will be several seasons before the gholam is killed. Several years. The child will age; for an adult, you can cover a few years of aging with make up, not for a child. They'd have to hire new actors every time? Maybe they could use deepfake technology like they did to rejuvenate harrison ford? Second, with the gholam in child form its eventual death may be hard to swallow for some of the audience. Even if the gholam is not an actual child

Which is why i said, if it's something all damane do it's part of the uniform. Yes, war paint as you call it. The thing is, uniforms and paints have some practical applications. Distinguish friend and foe. Give your side a sense of cohesion. Try to scare the opposite side. Makeup does none of that. But as i said, i can accept it as a sort of war paint if all damane wear it. And somebody in books mentioned beauty contests for damane. I can totally see a sul dam putting makeup on her damane just like some dog owners put accessories on their dogs. Incidentally, the smartest thing to do with damane would be to dress them like soldiers, give them armor like soldiers, and hide them amid soldiers. This way enemy archers would have a harder time picking them out. But people not always do what is practical

If all damane wear makeup like that, it's part of the ritual and it's fine. If a damane inexplicably wears heavy makeup in a potential war zone, it would stretch things a bit

wait a moment, I just realized a thing. So it seems the a'dam is replaced with that wird sort of golden collar/shoulder piece. And it doesn't come off ever until the damane is alive, according to this article. How do they change their dresses? it's really impossible with that thing. does that mean that alivia wore the same dress for 400 years? say what you want of the seanchan, they know how to make durable clothes. hygiene is also rather difficult.

don't forget the staring, sniffing, and pulling of braids