Sad. Several years of detailed discussion and nothing caused you to rethink your understanding of anything in the books. I am not so presumptuous to believe that nobody has anything to teach me and that my original interpretation was gospel. Sounds like you already had you mind made up and you weren't here to engage with the other posters but only to lecture to the other readers.

Since the show has been cancelled, this forum will inevitably shrink and go dormant. Before that happens, I would like to thank everyone who posted because the series, the discussion here. and thinking about the discussion has given me a deeper insight into my feelings of the books (both positively and negatively). I've read the series 3 times, but it was mostly superficially as an interesting fantasy, adventure series without delving too deeply into the specifics of the books. The series and the discussion raised many interesting questions that caused me to think much deeper than before. Did anyone else experience the series the same way? What insights (both good and bad) did you gain from watching and discussing the series?

No one is arguing (I think) that AI won't be able to do the art work required by an animated series. It's the 1001 creative decisions needed before the art work that I question. If you think a person or team is going to spend the thousands of hours needed to develop the creative part of the adaptation and then feed a massive program dump into the AI, then I agree the AI will be capable. I don't think that is what the people talking about the AI adaptation are imagining.

You maybe right, but it also could be like quantum computing. Quantum computers do exceptionally well at certain mathematical problems like public key cryptography, less well at other problems like symmetric encryption, and doesn't help against a third set of problems. Art doesn't follow mathematical principles, so how well AI will do on complex art projects like WoT is still unknown. What about AI is going to be good at answering the following types of questions that will come up in any WoT adaptations: 1. The adaptation will run x hours. What do I need to cut in order to tell the story in that time. If you think that there will be no time limit on any AI series, I think you are fooling yourself. There won't be a market for a 250 hour adaptation. 2. There are 3000 named characters, which ones are important and which ones should be cut or combined? 3. There is a significant amount of POV. How do I represent the content of the POV? 4. Given I have to cut material, what do I have to add to tie the remaining material into a coherent story? 5. Given x hours of programming, what can I expect humans to be able to remember and how much repetition do I need to add in order to remind the viewers of important material that appeared a large number of episodes before? 6. What is the proper ratio of dialogue (info dumps) and visual representation of the material? 7. How forceful do I need in representing important material? Can I get away with an off-the-cuff one line of dialogue or do I need a full scene? 8. What in the material is anachronistic or out of step with the viewers. What do I do with this material, eliminate it, put it in anyway, or rewrite it? 9. What are the main themes of the original work? Do these need to be modified in an adaptation? How do I prioritize the themes when they clash with each other? How much time should I give each theme? 10. And the only critical question is "Does this finished adaptation make good, interesting viewing". I think that I agree with Elder_Haman when he said that the most likely outcome of an AI generated WoT adaptation would soulless and paint by numbers.

I may be an outlier, but I don't think that the tone is darker. In the book, the cold open was the torture and suicide of LTT. The first couple of pages of book one described the dangers of the wolves coming down from the Misty Mountains and the Nazgul watching the Shire and the hobbits. It never got lighter in tone. In a book series as long as WoT, the sheer time it takes to read the books softened the feeling of the dark tone a little, but it remained dark throughout. One of my issues with the books was that it never established the joy and happiness in the world prior to the return of the Dark One. It also never grieved the loss of the old world as the final battle loomed. A TV series has to cram a lot of content into a very short amount of time, so it might seem darker because the same content is presented in rapid fire fashion with little filler material in=between. There is no time to dull the darkness. In contrast, the series spent the first half of the first episode on showing the joy of the world. There were a few other scenes sprinkled in showing what was being lost through the shadow war. Not much, but still better than the books. I did appreciate that the show symbolically grieved the loss of the old world through Steppin's funeral scene. I understand that I might be the only person who interpreted this scene that way.

Boy are you setting yourself for disappointment. Many of the same issues that caused changes in the series will still be present in an animated series and it can't and won't be as book accurate as you seem to want. There is so much characterization done via POV. Unless you want a ton of voiceover dialogue, all this will need to be rewritten to happen in other ways. There are too many characters. There will still be a lot of culling of the story. At the height of the book series, there were 8-10 different unrelated plot threads happening at any one time. This is impossible to follow in a series, animated or not. There will still be a lot of culling of the story. Once you cull paragraphs. pages, or chapters of the book, you need to write new material to bridge the gaps. An animated series might be "closer" in an abstract sense, but will still not be "close" to the books.

I make the following prediction: If this happens and the show is picked up with a new showrunner, the same people complaining about Rafe will make the same complaints about the new showrunner because whoever it is will also deviate from the books. They will have the same problems that Rafe has which required major changes. The books are unfilmable as written and require significant cutting and reimagining some of the material in order to make an interesting TV series. Whenever these discussions came up, I asked the question of what was more important, an interesting TV program or fidelity to the original work. The posters who believe fidelity is the highest virtue won't be satisfied with any adaptation. Before the haters descend, I understand that even those who thought that interesting TV was the highest priority might have disliked the choices Rafe made and concluded it wasn't good TV. However, the arguments were mostly about lack of fidelity.

As a TV series, you have to establish the level of sex and violence you plan to show very early in the run so people know what to expect. You don't want to get viewers invested and then 3 years in hit them with a level of sex/violence they can't accept. I think that is why the Mo/Lan bath scene and Rand/Eg scene was inserted in EP 1 S1. It indicated that the viewer should expect mild nudity and some non-explicit sex scenes. So far, they have stuck to this depiction of sex.

Ta'varen pull is the ultimate ex dues machina excuse for all inconsistencies and logical lapses by the three boys, so arguing that some specific action doesn't make sense is incoherent. Those three don't have to abide by the rules of logic because that was the set up by Jordan in the books. Perrin didn't go to EF directly from Falme because the Pattern didn't need him there at the point in time. There were preconditions requirements before his arrival in order to direct him into the path the pattern needed him to pursue. When those preconditions were met, he went back to EF. Is this ex dues machina, absolutely, but tough.

As stated before, the slippery slope argument about traveling only works if the mechanisms are easy and fast to use. Place enough restrictions on it use, as I tried to do with my proposed limitations, and it changes from an item of immense value to a magical toy. If you think my proposed limitations were too modest then invent more stringent ones. I don't know why you insist on taking the anti-show premise that it must be world breaking when it's just as easy to decide that its mechanics limit it to a magical toy and enjoy the scene as written. It's much more enjoyable to consider my glass half-full instead of half-empty, especially when both beliefs take that same amount of effort.

You have to demonstrate that they compromised the worldbuilding with this scene. The books had Ter'angreals which had similar physical effects, so that part was in line with the established book worldbuilding. You then introduced a slippery slope argument that this Ter'angreal could lead to unrestricted traveling. I pulled some limitations out of my ass to show that there could be a somewhat plausible explanation that the slippery slope argument doesn't hold water which is enough for me not to get too worked up about the logic of the concept. I agree with you that the showrunners didn't give the mechanics of the scene deep thought. They wanted something cool and theatrical. However, that doesn't mean that the scene is inherently wrong or worldview breaking. When I watch a TV series, it's because I want to like it. To achieve this, I'm usually willing to give the showrunners the benefit of the doubt and take the most generous plausible interpretation of their logic. Under these circumstances, I don't think this scene compromises the book's worldbuilding.

Why is the idea of traveling through a Ter"angreal so surprising? Such book Ter'angreals exist because the twisted redstone doorframes allow "travel" between Randland and the Eelfinn and Aelfinn worlds. If the idea of using existing book concepts in the show bothers you so much, others can justify the scene by reference to the redstone doorways and imagining constraints on the show Ter'angreals that prevent them from being used for general purpose travel*. I know that you disagree with this approach, but if I can come up with a (barely) plausible explanation for something the series does, I accept it and move on without overthinking it. *One possible set of constraints: 1. Someone must make a weave at both TV Ter'angreal 2. That person must go to the location they want to "travel' to and make another weave 3. Traveling must be initiated by using both the TV Ter'angreals within a short period of time 4. Traveling back to TV Ter'angreals is limited to a few hours (the return weave disappears within 8 hours) 5. The TV Ter'angreals can only be linked to one location, to go to another location, then the process must begin again with step 1. With these constraints, most of your problems go away since you must still physically go to the location at least once and return to TV and even then it only allows you to travel to the linked location for a few hours which isn't likely to be enough time to do anything except a specific task such as a FFH.

Ha Ha Ha. You, the master of hyperrealism for action sequences, are arguing that replacing a highly unrealistic fight scene with an appropriate scene of one power usage was bad. Notice the inconsistency? At least you are maintaining your record of 100% negative comments on the show, even if you have to accept an argument you just spent about 20 posts trashing.

There is liking Jordan and then there is putting him on a 100 ft tall pedestal. There is no way to write 12000 pages over 14 books (if we include the Sanderson material) and not have numerous faults, especially when examining the totality of the series in hindsight. Nobody is that good at their job. From the series perspective, there are several things they are going to do that you might consider correcting Jordan's errors: 1. Fix what they believe is weak writing in the books. They may not be correct in their assessment of the weaknesses in the writing or screw up the implementation of the fixes, but it is self-defeating filming things that you don't believe in just because they were in the books. You can agree or disagree with their individual decisions, but there are certainly missteps in the 12000 pages or areas just weaker than the rest. You can just cut some of these problems because of time limitations, but others are integral to the plot elements/characterization in the series and you have to do something with them. 2. Being able to take the entire series into account from the beginning allows a more concise/interesting way to deal with some of the subplots. Even though Jordan meticulously plotted the books, they still grow organically in the writing and some subplots meandered and were unfocused. Hindsight creates an opportunity for a tighter script. Do you not think that the Faile, Sea People, Elayne's succession, Tower politics subplots, among others, were often meandering and unfocused? 3. By their nature, the books were highly repetitive. You couldn't assume that all the readers were up-to-speed on things that happened thousands of pages and years (real-time) ago, so Jordan had to constantly remind readers of things that had happened in previous books and the nuances of the characters. The series will have the same problem if it makes it to later seasons because of the large real-time time-gap between the seasons. Can it find a way to keep the viewers up-to-speed without constant repetition? While the series might not have a better answer, striving for less repetition would be an improvement.

Someone up thread said that the access ter'angreal was there. If that's true, then isn't that the obvious target? Wouldn't the greatest sa'angreal in history usable by women the best possible item?. This might be the way to introduce the two large sa'angreals because the book's introuction wasn't filmed.