My favorite comedic scenes involve Mat. Him constantly trying to get away from the pull of the pattern, him clumsily presenting himself before the Wise Ones to ask permission to enter that special space of Ter'angerals and doing a poor imitation of Rand's request. But one of my favorites is when Zen Rand goes before the Seanchan court accompanied by Mat who is skittish and afraid shit is going to go down and Rand starts singing the Song to make plant life start growing around them and everyone is freaking out. But Mat is sitting there tapping his foot along to the beat and is like, "I know this song.. is that [insert random song title]" and Rand is whispers back, "you're not helping." 🤣

The problem may be with my understanding of the many-world's hypothesis or whatever that hypothesis is trying to explain. After thinking about it, if there are infinite possibilities then there will always be one hypothetical where the DO stays imprisoned. So the stakes were never really that high. If our Rand failed there'd always be another Rand who was still fighting.

While I won't pretend to have complete understanding I highly doubt I am as wrong as you suggest. The issue we have here is probably our respective understandings of how alternate timelines work. For example, in Rick and Morty the timeline we're watching Rick live in is actually a hypothetical (Rick refers to Beth and the kids as: hypothetical versions of his daughter and grandchildren). I still believe my interpretation of Rand's and Egwenes visions of alternate timelines being indicative of the DO having won in all other "hypothetical" timelines and the "hypothetical" timeline we're reading about in the books is the last one standing before the DO can break free, stop the wheel of time and recreate everything as it saw fit.

So, I had been celebrating (possibly unjustly) the cancellation of the TV series. Someone argued that the difference in the show can be chopped up to this being a new turning of the wheel, but I just think this is a cheap excuse for the creators to take creative liberties (possibly to the extent that they only read the cliff notes and never actually read the series). And the more I thought about this angle of approach I remembered a part in the book series when Rand is seeing alternate versions of himself and he ultimately dies or gets turned to the dark side and the Dark One wins. And as death takes Rand or as he falls into darkness he hears the Dark One saying, "I win again Lews Therin" and then that is repeated over and over and over and over again. Does this mean that every other alternative universe has fallen to the Dark One and our story (the books) is the last universe standing? I mean, it makes sense because it makes the stakes super high right? It wouldn't really make sense that our Rand fails, but there is still another chance in another universe cause then why care about Rand's challenge? If this is all true it just pisses me off even more. These people didn't bother to understand the source material the way the creators of The Expanse TV series did and they're trying to make excuse after excuse for screwing up. I'm convinced it was a cash grab from the start and there was no real earnest intention of making a good TV series. Just a cheap piece of crap they could crap out because they invested in the Ring's of Power and decided they could use those resources to ride on the coattails of another popular high-fantasy epic series.

Check out James Li's rundown of how private equity firms buy up successful business chains, cut corners until they run the franchise into the ground and walk away with a profit despite the initial cost of investment. I imagine the suits ran the numbers and said, "we have to maintain X amount of viewership for X amount of time in order to make a worthwhile profit and the data indicates X amount of book fans will watch, X amount of Game of Thrones fans will watch because they're still hungry for that type of content and X amount of people will randomly watch; so on and so forth. If the show succeeds we have a great product that can continue to make money; if not, we still reached achieved our baseline goal. The book fanbase? lol duck them! No one really reads these days anyways; we're mostly gaming off Game of Thrones hunger which is why we made Rings of Power." I'm basing this on the assumption that the investors wouldn't invest in something they didn't have a clear reason to believe would return in profits. Remember, these are investors, not lovers of the art of story telling. I doubt anyone who invested in the creation of this series had ever really read the books. I could be wrong. I'm just pissed they did this to one of my favorite stories. Also, after some consideration of the excuse that the TV series is exploring an "altnerate" timeline of events... I THINK the book series timeline is THE LAST TIMELINE STANDING AGAINST THE DARK ONE. So the TV series would have to end with Rand dying and the Dark One winning. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but if I am correct that is just hilariously poetic to me. When financially motivated suits have the final say in art the Dark One DOES INDEED WIN.

This is fair, but then it just makes their execution cowardly. They should have just reimagined a completely different story (ie: no Rand, Mat, etc; no Andor, Carihien, Aiel etc), and just used the rules of the universe (like a lot of Star Wars Fanfic). Doing it the way they did just alienated the book series fanbase and then they apparently failed to garner enough of a fanbase to keep the show going so it was an utter failure all together. I could be wrong on the last bit because I don't want to sully my established vision of the story by watching any of the TV show, but I'm just so annoyed at seeing my favorite stories get butchered by greedy suits who haphazardly try to revision OUR beloved stories. A Game of Thrones sullied the A Song of Ice and Fire series and possibly even derailed Martin and kept him from being able to complete the series (I think Martin wrote himself into a corner and he is having difficulty finding the solution). No, I'm convinced this was a lazily conceived project that was purely profit motivated and they had no intentions of actually writing a complete story; or rather, the suits had no intentions of funding this project beyond the point where they made enough money from it. I think it's basically the same strategy private equity uses on successful, well established chains.

While he probably isn't a purist this youtuber has some great videos talking about the differences between the MCU and comics: http://www.youtube.com/@comics_explained He largely enjoys the MCU and thinks it was well done. The difference between the Wheel of Time adaptation (as far as I can tell) and stuff like "Andor" or the MCU (up to "End Game" because that's all I saw) is that the creators of "Andor" and the "MCU" actually had a larger conceptional framework to operate in. They understood the larger vision of what they wanted to achieve and they wanted to tell a GOOD story. The creators of the Wheel of Time DID NOT CARE ABOUT TELLING A GOOD STORY. They just looked at the next most popular series (relative to A Song of Ice and Fire) and were like, "Oh yea, all that money we invested to create the resources of The Rings of Power? We can save some money and use those resources to make The Wheel of Time. We don't know this story, why it's so good, and we don't care. We'll just farm it for cool ideas and make up our own story along the way." I warned the members of this forum to NOT hype or or act as walking, talking advertisements for a bunch of exploitative, cheap, artless sons of ******** who were going to ruin the story we loved. Check out my tiktok for more videos me itching and groaning into the wind about this: bogusl0tus

That is really interesting. I wonder if it had anything to do with Zara boards or whatever they're called. Any other ideas on why RJ would have said this about Sammuel?-

I have nothing useful or constructive to add to this discussion. I just want to say I am thankful for my ignorance because I largely enjoyed Demandred. I'm not following the arguments because my memory of the course of events sucks. Will be keeping an eye out for these points as I make my way through on my second read.

I came here in ready to shut down this point, but there may be more to consider than I realized. Thanks for sharing.

Make the Aiel black. That is all.

Absolutely true on your first read through. The second, third etc, they are much more enjoyable.

exactly this. there are a lot of sub=plots and as the story grows there are more moving parts. As such the prologues get longer with each book until it gets to around 70% of the series.

Here is this sweet, innocent, small village girl promised to a tall, handsome, noble young man. Suddenly they're swooped away on some adventure leading to 3 gorgeous young women who immediately start sizing him up and portioning him out claiming, "oh the pattern, the pattern!" Mean while they pull the bait and switch on her. They flash Galad in front of her to make her head swim and bombard her psychologically considering the culture shock she must be through through. Plus... trollocs y'all... That's some scary stuff. And she ultimately ends up with Gawayn; who, it could be argued, was a significant handicap for her in the end. And then sacrificing herself to help save the world. Also she's enslaved, tortured, burdened with some of the most significant problems facing their world and who knows what else I'm forgetting. Egwene deserved so much better... ?