It seems highly unlikely that any strong objection to gay sex scenes wouldn't have been smoked out at the initial casting stage even if the showrunners were only keeping that open as a possibility for the character.

Conversely, if it was an idea that occurred to them only after they were well into making season 1, then I strongly doubt they would have replaced the actor for refusing to go along with it at that point.

But I guess we'll wait and see.

Yeah the two sides of the debate here are not equal in practice. You basically have one group saying “I’m already pretty positive this show will be an awful woke fest” and another group saying “there does not appear to be sufficient evidence to support that conclusion, let’s just wait and see and keep an open mind in the meantime”.

I haven’t seen a single post from someone saying something along the lines of “actually Egwene should be the DR and you are sexist if you suggest otherwise.”

I have seen some posts which suggest that certain other shrill and badly written posts (e.g. the complaints upthread that Egwene is now “Indian”) could be perceived as racist, sexist or homophobic.

But that is not the same thing. And anyone who thinks that it’s unfair or inappropriate to call out posts like that should perhaps engage in a bit of soul-searching. 

8 hours ago, swollymammoth said:

Tons of straight guys had no problem getting invested in Simoun, an anime where nearly all the main characters are lesbians. 

I’m struggling to interpret this statement in a way that isn’t really offensive? 
 

Help me out here.

I'm going to pretend that the complaints upthread about Egwene's skin colour were all part of some kind of performance art intervention after commenters complained that Elder Haman's opening post was too reductive.

57 minutes ago, swollymammoth said:

Honestly, where you see this the most is Christian movies. They're so bad! And most of the reason is that they're so limited in what they can portray and how they can portray it. A "woke" ideology is no different. Playing by those rules, you can only talk about race a certain way. Same with gender and a host of other topics. This often leads to predictable and boring storytelling which feels inauthentic to life (which is frequently problematic). 

 

That being said, certain individual decisions being made don't necessarily equate to the show being turned into an ideological vehicle. Some of these decisions can work. The Arwen example you used is awesome. However, the "I am no man" moment from RotK is cringe as heck. I'm also reminded of the girl power scene from Endgame. These moments are just distracting because they feel like they're happening directly to the audience. 

 

I think that, by nature, most woke stuff is poorly done because it's allowed to be poorly done. People who agree with that stuff don't really demand anything more than hearing their own opinions repeated back to them. Mediocrity is openly rewarded and praised. 

Again, though, I feel like what you're really saying is "this is a problem if it results in "predictable and boring storytelling which feels inauthentic to life"." Which, surely, is a case of "it depends"?

Leaving aside that "inauthentic to life" is a tricky thing to assess in the context of a fantasy show (I'm not saying the concept has no currency, just that the question of how to measure it is not as straightforward as for realist drama, say), it seems to me to be a question of approach and execution. At which point I think it's just really difficult to predict these things without actually seeing the execution first.

To use an example drawn from music but also your analogy above, the band Low are a mormon duo who make music which is heavily (but certainly not exclusively) invested in exploring Christian themes, but whose fanbase is predominantly secular, in part because (and this is not what makes their music good per se, but it might be a precondition to effectively reaching that broader audience) the actual execution is not perceived by that audience as requiring that the listener to accept the duo's faith before you can understand or enjoy the music (and it's possible a lot of observant christians would strongly dislike the band).

Archetypal "christian rock", by comparison, is pretty explicitly music by and for observant christians, and is not intended to be received let alone enjoyed by a broader audience. That intent is performed as much as felt: audiences can hear that intent and many will react to it (negatively or positively) - i.e. "I feel included/excluded by this art." And in between you have a whole host of artists where the religious or spiritual themes might or might not be a barrier to certain listeners depending on (a) the extent to which they are emphasised and (b) the listener's appetite. Whether a listener felt that a given piece of music was "too Christian" to work for them will, inevitably, say as much about the listener as about the music. I'm aware that there's at least some people (albeit a minority it seems) who take the view that even Low's christianity interferes with their enjoyment; they're not wrong, but obviously I and many others take a different view.
 

I described WOT the books to my partner once and he thought from my description that it sounded like a cultural feminist* lecture - and, arguably, it kind of is? But the execution to my mind is for the most part so good that I would never think of it in those terms - i.e. whatever point RJ may or may not have been trying to make, the work he produced speaks to me regardless of whether I agree with it - just as Low's music affects me despite me not identifying as christian, let alone mormon.
 

1 minute ago, MasterAblar said:

Its fiction... It can make sense if we want it to make sense. Who says gender identity in life must absolutely be analogous to what the soul is? To me you disassociate them and voilà, no issue at all to have transgender people. Why should you have to agree with the gender of you soul?

Oh look, I agree absolutely - I was really just teasing out the implications of strongly objecting to the decision to de-gender souls. Once you can disagree with your soul's gender identity, what does it even mean to have soul-based gender identity? At that point the whole notion becomes a dead letter.

As I said in my post, coming up with a solution to those questions doesn't really bother me, but I think people who are going to get up on their high horse about the awfulness of the show making such changes should probably spell out what they think is an acceptable solution (and if that solution is: "look, I just don't think there should be trans channeler characters at all" then they should probably just say that so that other people can understand what their position is and debate it).

19 minutes ago, swollymammoth said:

For the moment I'll satisfy myself by pushing back on the idea that these ideas being injected into WoT are new "economic imperatives." If anything, they are being treated as moral imperatives, as if to not include them would be some kind of heinous sin against mankind. (See: All the backlash which occurs when a show doesn't have enough "representation"/"diversity"). 

 

There is no evidence that these ideas lead to success in the entertainment marketplace or that they add any sort of economic value to the project at all. If anything, shows and movies which have made these ideas their focal points have seen their audiences shrink rather than grow. This is because writers aren't giving audiences what they want to see, they're imposing an idea on the audience of what they should want to see, if only they were more moral, upright human beings. 

I think you are kind of agreeing with (or exemplifying) what I was saying. Some people think that  a show which is more diverse, which has strong female characters and prominent queer characters and so on will attract a broader audience than a show which do not have those qualities. Some people disagree with that proposition. It's still an "economic imperative" - just one which is more contested than, say, not having four hour episodes in a TV show.

(And it's not just about literal sales performance: a fossil fuel company might want to progressively shift away from coal production not because it will make more money from renewables but because it will lose investor and financier support if it does not. There are a number of ways that a "moral imperative" can become an "economic imperative" as a result of a quite subtle shifts in complicated interacting social pressures.)
 

Of course obviously it's not straightforward.

You say "shows and movies which have made these ideas their focal points have seen their audiences shrink rather than grow" - would you say this is true for every film or show which has sought to show a more modern view of gender, ethnicity etc than its source material? For every decision intended to (for example) give female characters more agency (like in LOTR, Arwen taking Frodo over the river to Rivendell)?

Or would you confine your point to examples where you think the execution of that intention was poorly done, unrealistic, and so on?

2 minutes ago, MasterAblar said:

Doesn't seem very complicated to me. You're born into a male body with the ability to channel saidin. In life you turn out to be transgender, and become a woman channelling saidin. Where is the issue? With saidin tainted obviously that can't happen in the books. The other way around could happen it just wasn't shown in the books.

On one level, yes, that's the way I might have approached it.

The part that then doesn't really make sense* is that, if souls are gendered, and saidin/saidar is linked to the soul, then how could a channeler ever be born into the wrong-sexed body? Unless you can not agree with the gender of your soul? In which case why have gendered souls in the first place?

It would only work by having the person born channeling the opposite section of the one power to their sex (but aligned with their gender). Which I think would be a much bigger lore change than just de-gendering souls if suddenly biological-males who channel saidar and vice versa is a thing that happens.

As far as I can tell the only options that are "coherent" are to not allow for naturally occurring trans channelers at all or to change the lore by de-gendering souls.

*Asterixing the "doesn't really make sense" because in truth I don't really that care about whether this issue is resolved in a way that makes complete sense - but so many people seem to be very concerned about following through the implications and demanding some sort of scientific consistency. Just as people want to understand how a 2 Rivers of diverse ethnicity is biologically possible.

Never mind that this is a fantasy world where people can literally travel between possible worlds that don't really exist, or have their souls sucked out by dragkhar, or where heroes hang out in the world of dreams in between reincarnations but then can have physical bodies in the real world if they are ripped out of the world of dreams even though they were in between incarnations.

But sure, we can agree to obsess over whether the show's treatment of ethnicity and gender is scientifically consistent with RJ's book-world, if that makes the time pass.

9 minutes ago, MasterAblar said:

This simply isn't true though. Just because transgender people were not represented does not mean the WoT world as it is denies their existence. You can fit transgender people into the world without messing with souls dichotomy.

I said "effectively does not allow" because I concede that there are ways we can try really hard to fit trans people into the story without changing much. But the books themselves offer no guidance here and the only example they give is by operation of the DO.

Further, unless I've missed something, it seems to me no one has come up with an explanation for how trans people could exist in WOT (or, at least, trans channelers) that the self-professed anti-woke contributors in this thread would be comfortable with?

I guess the perspective I come to with this is:
 

1. From the moment I learned that WOT was being made into a TV show I assumed that it would be very different to the books, due to a variety of factors including the need to rationalise length, the need to rationalise characters, the need to simplify both plotting and background-lore, and then more practical issues like not having twenty elaborate city-sets per season. Obviously, all of those factors are still playing into the decisions being made, but if anything the show looks more faithful to the books than I would have expected.

2. The adjustments that really seem to really bother people are not those reflecting the above, but rather changes around issues of race (though as discussed exhaustively above whether these are "changes" from the books is contested), gender and sexuality. (And some of the adjustments cited seem really minor, like Nynaeve being able to sneak up on Lan rather than being able to sneak up to within a couple of metres of him.)

3. This is despite the fact that I would have said that the single most defining feature of WOT is not its "gender essentialism" (scare-quoting that because the phrase does not mean the same thing in a WOT context as it would IRL) or even background lore but rather the sheer complexity of plotting and interacting characters (much more so than for ASOIAF, let alone LOTR) - i.e. the one thing we know will need to be heavily sacrificed in order to make a TV version.

4. The common explanation for that distinction, including above, is "well, the changes in (1) above are necessary whereas the changes in (2) are unnecessary." Well, that's one way to look at it. But I don't think we can quite divide them that simply.

5. Perhaps, more accurately, we might say that the changes in (1) are driven by economic imperatives that "we" accept as being a precondition, whereas the changes in (2) are driven by motivations that have only recently become linked to economic imperatives,  such that there is disagreement as to whether they are or should be preconditions - and to the extent that they are, this is considered some failing - i.e. "necessary" versus "unnecessary" really just means "an imperative I accept and (at some level respect) versus one I do not".

6. Fact is, though, the changes in (1) and (2) are all changes, and I tend to think the changes in (1) are (all other things being equal) likely to produce greater deviations from the books overall. And once we accept that, it really becomes a question of whether we accept/respect the motivations for the changes. 

7. The suggestion that "the plot shouldn't change to accommodate what is maybe 1% of the population IRL" is precisely a view as to whether certain imperatives ought to be respected. These are things about which reasonable people can disagree (though how they express that disagreement may cast light on whether they are in fact a reasonable actor) - but I don't think there's any getting around the fact that saying "I think WOT should remain a world which effectively does not allow for transgendered people except by the intervention of the DO" is a statement of relative levels of respect - for the books versus the position of transgender people.

8. This is not a binary question, and it can be resolved in a variety of ways. Like pretty much everyone in this thread it seems, I can envision a number of ways in which the show could choose to deal with gender and sexuality which, while purportedly politically progressive and thoughtful, is in fact ham-fisted and shallow and unpersuasive and damaging to the show's quality. I'm hopeful that the show manages these issues well, but I won't know until I see it.

9. But it seems telling that a lot of people consider even the attempt to manage these issues to be highly offensive, and are using examples like Nynaeve killing a trolloc or the prospect of souls not being gendered as a sign of some monumental failing and/or callous disregard on the part of the showrunners. Look, maybe we will all conclude that the show disrespects its source material, but everything I've read from Rafe suggests rather that he is trying very hard to balance his respect for the books with his respect for other things - like the inherent dignity and self-worth of trans people. At least prima facie, that seems like a decent objective to me. 

Okay I just watched it again and understand why I couldn’t remember what scene this was - it is so brief I don’t know how any conclusions can be drawn as to how Tam actually fares in this fight? If we’re talking about the same scene then the trolloc tries to kill Tam and Tam stops him with his blade?
 

Moreover, we don’t know if he pushes the trolloc off him after they close with eachother, how the scene gets set up (it appears rand is on the other side of the trolloc so it’s possible that Tam basically went kamikaze to save his son), whether Tam is already injured etc. plus it looks like this trolloc is (lightly) armoured whereas the one nynaeve faces is not. 
 

the idea that we would draw from these snippets that the show runners want to present men as useless and women as powerful warriors kinda boggles my mind to be honest. 

5 hours ago, AusLeviathan said:

- Nynaeve taking on and killing a Trolloc after Tam struggles with and needs help taking out one Trolloc.

Where is the footage of Tam fighting a trolloc? I don't remember seeing that.

Sorry, it can be hard to remember what has been confirmed and what is just strong fan speculation...

1 hour ago, SinisterDeath said:

INTERESTING FIND
Season 2 Episode 1 has a title? 
"A Taste of Solitude"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7462410/episodes?season=2

Given we know that Lanfear has been cast, I could imagine this title referring to the stretch of TGH where Lanfear effectively kidnaps Rand (among other things). Though who knows if that plot development will actually make it into the show.

1 hour ago, WOTnerd said:

Would that I had your confidence. The argument may be tiring to you, but it is a cause of great concern for many of us who view fantasy as escapism, not lectures.

I’m interested in this dichotomy which has come up a few times here but rarely so clearly.

It presupposes that we can all agree on what is escapism and what is a lecture. That in turn implies a certain “we” who have a certain set of characteristics, life experiences and perspectives.

Implicitly, the “many of us” would feel like a show which features a diverse set of characters (not just ethnically but also in terms of gender and sexuality) would be a “lecture” -  but isn’t that a function of how those viewers react to the show and what they focus on? If that presentation is something that the viewer either is used to in their life or thinks is a broadly noble aspiration, why would it be received as a lecture at all? Why would it be any more jarring than any other feature of the WOT world?
 

Conversely, consider the position of a young fantasy enthusiast who happens to be trans, but basically never sees people going through what they’re going through in the books they read, who picks up the WOT books. In this world, the distinction between men and women is absolute, and although there is ultimately a character who is in the “wrong” gendered-body, (a) they are an evil character; (b) they were put in that body by the books’ elemental big baddy; and (c) they eventually seemingly learn to just accept and adapt to their body.

What should that reader take from WOT? Will it be escapist for them? Or will it be received as a lecture? A lecture from RJ that (a) they don’t exist; or perhaps (b) they shouldn’t exist; or perhaps (c) they are evil and perverted; or perhaps (d) they should just learn to accept and make peace with the sex and implied gender of the body they are in?

If that reader does manage to treat WOT as escapist and not a lecture, then I think they have managed a feat of internal dissociation rather more impressive than the purported “many of us” who are worried about Rafe saying he is a feminist. Would they not find it easier to “escape” into the books if they didn’t have to go through that process first?

I’m not advocating for a particular outcome with respect to these issues, or saying that books fans are not allowed to be dubious about the show changing aspects of the books. But I do think this apparently easy binary between politics and escapism is actually way more complicated than we often choose to acknowledge. Ultimately, every decision that is being made here could be received as being in the service of escapism or of a lecture - including the decision not to change something from the books. How we each choose to interpret those decisions says as much about us as it does about the show runners.

I agree that the LTT scene would make more sense to show at a point in time when viewers are better able to understand it - somewhat similar to the timing of the LOTR films showing us Smeagol’s full backstory. 
 

There’s also a general trend for shows to more confidently mess with perspectives, flashbacks etc more as time goes on, as they feel they have garnered enough viewer trust that they can be confident viewers will stay on the journey with them - RJ himself was kind of guilty of this, with his cold open prologues getting longer and longer and showing more and more scenes of characters other than the key protagonists. So I would not be surprised if seasons 2 and onwards progressively play with more flashbacks, whether to the breaking or the AOL or whatever.

I tend to think saidin and saidar as separate things will be kept - if only because if they junked it they'd need to concoct a replacement explanation for the taint - but it just won't be talked about much. Given the limitations on the amount of lore the writers will be able to get into in a TV show, I think all they really need to do is get across to viewers is that, as a result of the split:

(a) male channelers go mad due to the taint;

and

(b) female channelers cannot teach male channelers. 

The aspect of the saidin / saidar split that feels most old-fashioned is that men wrestle with saidin whereas women submit to saidar, but while that feeds into (b) above I think it's not necessary for it, and again without access to the characters' thoughts it just would not be something that comes up a lot.

I think they'll be focusing on how to effectively convey the feel of the taint for the male channelers.

The most straightforward adjustment would just be to make sa’angreal generally work with both saidin and saidar. Then all of these questions about Callandor fall away.

I agree with Deadsy - that just doesn’t make sense. As I said above, the reduction in the odds that any man who is gentled might have been the DR is not much less. I just don’t think the Red Ajah ever thought very much about the prospect that they might be gentling the DR. There was no sign in the books that any Red Ajah aes sedai was concerned about the prospect.

As to female false dragons, I don’t think that would be meaningfully more common even if it is notionally possible for a female to be the DR. Most of the prominent false dragons were channellers - why? Because if you are a man who can channel you are basically marked for death or close to it - unless you happen to be the DR, in which case you have a reason to exist. So declaring yourself the DR is basically the only way to turn a bug into a feature, which means male channellers are strongly incentivised to convince themselves that they are the DR.
 

For female channellers, there is an accepted pathway to social acceptance and power: become an Aes Sedai. It would be unusual for a female channeller to spurn that option and (on the basis of zero evidence) decide they were the DR instead. 

The odds of any particular male channeller being the DR are very low. The prospect of the DR being male or female probably halves those odds, but since they were so small to begin with that doesn’t count for much.

21 minutes ago, Rose said:

I really hope they lean into that, yes. I think it would give the show a lot of depth and also cast suspicion on Moiraine and her intentions with respect to the Dragon reborn.

Yeah I was thinking about Moiraine’s framing monologue and how it almost sounds more like something Elaida might say, combined with the actor saying that the audience isn’t supposed to know whether Moraine is a force for good or not. In the books her presence is soothing enough that it’s hard not to think of her as good, in particular during the first book. And obviously giving her more of a protagonist role would tend to exacerbate that. Having her say stuff - either to other characters or through the fourth wall - that suggests she very well might want to destroy the DR creates a countervailing dynamic, 

At first blush the opening monologue, if used in the show, feels a bit like it falls into the expository trap I mentioned, but I guess the level of subtlety that would be ideal for me is unlikely to be possible. 

13 minutes ago, Pandemonium said:

 

I think the thing that has kept my expectations tapered is the abundance of cliches in the ads.  Dark one and end of times, chosen one young hero, similar themes to Lord of the Rings, etc.

 

I feel the same, and have mostly been worried that a straightforward adaptation and compression of book 1 would end up looking very much like generic fantasy (much more so than the first book actually reads). So I am more inclined to sympathize with changes that downplay the “mystical battle with vaguely defined elemental evil” angle and lean into the morally grey, “I don’t know who I am supposed to be rooting for” aspects of the books. Though of course they could easily screw that up as well.

11 minutes ago, Rose said:

 

I had forgotten about this. Yes, this is also on my "not thrilled" list. I can understand why they need to be more in your face with things like this for the sake of the show's audience but I'll still mourn the lack of subtlety.

yeah when I see changes like introducing the idea of the dragon reborn straightaway, it’s not the deviation from the plot of the books that concerns me really, so much as whether it’s a sign that the show is just going to be this series of dramatic expository announcements because of the lack of time and space to actually develop plot lines more subtly. I’m not saying that will happen, but hamfisted, tell-don’t-show writing and acting is always a risk with a series of this nature.
 

More than “who is the dragon?”, the apparent plot emphasis that I quite like is the question “is the dragon reborn going to help us or harm us?” Aside from providing some framing consistency to Rand’s arc which is still drawn from the books, it suggests a desire not to make a show that is too pat, that answers things too simplistically. 

I hope we’re not just lambasting any superhero film featuring a superhero who is not a white dude as “woke” at this point.

I’ve made this point before, but I am far more worried that the show will just be badly written and acted and clunky and unpersuasive than I am that it will deviate too far from the books. The former seems the much greater risk to me, and the more grave. 

(To be clear, i’m not saying the show has to deviate from the books to be good)

The implication from a lot of posts here is that many people wouldn’t care if the show was awful so long as it was faithful to their head canon. Which is kind of depressing to be honest.

48 minutes ago, Arthellion said:

My concern is that by going that route, it lessens the the systemic and cultural fear/discrimination that men face in WOT. 

Men do not face systemic and cultural fear/discrimination in WOT.

Men who can channel do. That’s it.

4 minutes ago, swollymammoth said:

False! 

read the post you’re quoting again. No one in Rand’s time knew about the competing plans to combat the DO, the fateful concord, etc. I’m not even sure they knew about the two sa’angrael existing (though could be wrong on this point). They blamed the men.

I agree with the point that if this view is attributed to Moiraine (rather than just being promotional material narrated in her voice) it doesn’t suit her character as it is expressed in the books.