I'm leaning towards September-October. The fact that we don't have a proper trailer for S2 rules out May for me - though I wouldn't complain if we got it that early

26 minutes ago, templar7 said:

They did as far as I know. The appendices of LotR -all they have- still seem greatly underused or ignored. I love the Silmarillion. its my favorite book of all time...  Personally, I wouldnt have bothered at all without its rights.

It's a book I've tried to read a few times - I'm going to give it a proper go this time

7 hours ago, Jake Sykwalker said:

That is how the Silmarillion is written.  Basically each chapter is a different self contained part of the history.  Amazon really messed up when they didn't get the rights to the Silmarillion.  They could have done 1-3 episodes on each relevant era and made a good and entertaining tale.  

 

Instead they went mystery box generic fantasy approach with a vaguely Tolkien skin on it.  It comes across as more ignorant of lore than it does as trying to burn it down.  If any of the writers read the Silmarillion it doesn't show in their script.  Most of its shortcomings are from the terrible writing and making elves act like generic humans. 

 

 

 

 

I might be wrong here and correct me if I am, but didn't the Tolkien estate knock back any offer involving the First Age i.e. The Silmarillion? This might be something that we can't blame Amazon for.

On 8/22/2022 at 12:09 AM, VooDooNut said:

I'm getting Peter Jackson Hobbit-level vibes from the Rings of Power trailers (in other words, hot garbage), but hopefully it's much better than that. More quality Fantasy entertainment is always good! I think a successful Rings of Power will add to the success of WOT.

I get the same feeling as you. I'm going to give it a go - one of the most interesting, and relatively unexplored characters for me was Gil-Galad, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with that character. I also read that the show will likely end with the Last Alliance, another thing I really liked reading in the appendices. 

1 hour ago, DojoToad said:

Ha!  I was good after 3 episodes of S1.

 

Be interested to see if S2 can turn it around.

 

Are the number of episodes in S3 based in any way off the success (or lack thereof) of S2?  Or will S3 be filming before S2 premiers?  If it is already filming when S2 airs - can they adjust on the fly for more episodes if S2 takes off?  They didn't do so good with the Barney and COVID wrenches thrown at them for S1.

 

Good question!

I had assumed 3 would be filming before 2 airs (which I think will be Jan-March 23). You would think they would need to know how many episodes they are filming during the writing process? 

So I noticed that a thread hasn't been created for the specific announcement of Season 3.

What are people's thoughts and/or hopes? Characters people are looking forward to seeing? Locations?

I personally hope that if Amazon can't greenlight 10 episodes/season, hopefully the runtime goes up by 20mins/episode.

Really looking forward to the Rhuidean scene given that RJ2 has stated that season 3 is going to be TSR.

26 minutes ago, SinisterDeath said:

Note how you latched on only the one part of what I said was inaccurate about the GOT tv show? Glossed completely over the part where I said they removed several plot lines? Like Lady Stone Heart? Completely changed whatever the hell was going on with the guy claiming to be Daenerys's relative? Created New characters, New dialogue, merged characters, shifted events around, etc.
Changing Daenery's Hair & Eyes was just the tip of the iceberg....

GoT wasn't anymore faithful of an adaptation then the WoT TV show was.

Sure, lets whine about me nitpicking & splitting hairs over the GoT adaptation, while ignoring your own nitpicking and hair splitting over WoT.

 

 

Yes actually.

But you won't hear about that in an echo chamber.

 

 

Man I remember Westeros going OFF. A big one was after ep 5 when Ned held his own against Jaime. Book purists had a field day

Her hair is definitely red

17 hours ago, DojoToad said:

Coping just fine.  Reading Sci-fi and Fantasy.  Learning to paint miniatures and build dioramas.  All good.

What dioramas you building or hoping to build DT? I'm a big fan of diorama building myself.

2 hours ago, DojoToad said:

I didn't see that episode.  What do you all think are chances for the win?  Would probably help if you saw at least some of the competition.

6 was probably my least favourite episode. I was infuriated that we had an image of Loial looking at a map with Moiraine and Lan only for this to be cut! 

But...but... the 7.2 imdb rating... how is this possible /s ???

On 2/3/2022 at 2:59 AM, Cauthonfan4 said:

considering the fact that we literally had lots of EU material out there for Star Wars as is, this sounds like Disney made themselves a problem they didn't need to create, simply by throwing lots of source material out. Kind of like Rafe and Company.

 

On 2/3/2022 at 3:11 AM, notpropaganda73 said:

 

I didn't mind them saying they were going to make their own story, but when they decide to go down that route they should have planned it out properly, for the sequel trilogy at the very least. Doing it like they did, it just made all of us pretty wistful about losing out on seeing the EU on screen. Plus the fact they link into Rebels and Clone Wars etc., it seemed a pretty strange decision to throw it all out anyways. 

 

Hopefully we'll see Thrawn at some point. The Timothy Zahn books were my intro to the EU, love them

I know this is off topic but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to miss a chance to lament the loss of the SW EU! And I refuse to bow to the Mouse and refer to it as "Legends"

So many good books (with a smattering of terrible - I'm looking at you Fate of the Jedi series)!

Personally, I don't think Shadows of the Empire can be topped - absolutely loved it. I was also a massive fan of the New Jedi Order series. X-Wing series was awesome.

37 minutes ago, Andra said:

The Dark One is the Lord of the Grave.

If he's not able to bring someone back, it's because they can't be brought back.

 

It's clear, from multiple references within the books, that a soul that is killed with Balefire can't be resurrected.

This 100%

59 minutes ago, Chivalry said:

 

I couldn't get through 1/2 of this book, but I'll probably give it another try. I remember that Sanderson kept writing "he smiled" about the main character, and it drove me nuts. He smiled way too much for me. Not even clowns smile as much as that dude.

 

But I loved the first couple of Stormlight books, found them very enjoyable.

I'm going to have to give Way of Kings another go by the sounds of things

Sounds like we've got Caemlyn

https://www.cbr.com/wheel-of-time-set-tour-season-2-andor/

3 hours ago, DojoToad said:

I used to be that way.  Used to not matter how bad it was - I needed to complete it.  Be it a book, show, movie, or whatever.  But there is so much out there that I'll never get to already so I stopped wasting time on stuff that didn't do it for me.  There is too much good out there to discover.

 

The only exception I can think of was 'The Office'.  Heard the hype, watched the first 3 episodes to give it a 'fair' shot.  And gave up.  Many years later went back and it is one of my favorite shows - been through the entire series twice.  So guess I can miss some gems in the rough, but I have more time to discover as well.  You'll never see/read it all...

I did the exact same thing with both The Office and Parks and Rec - love both now

18 hours ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

I also think he gets part of the mark wrong - it's not that people didn't like it, it's just that it wasn't absolutely amazing. and I can agree with that. the first book was kind of slow, but did a good job of developing the world and laying the groundwork forward and doing enough to capture people going  forward. 

It didn't catch me as hard as Red Rising, Lies of Locke Lamora, and Stormlight Archive did, but it did enough to keep me engaged and promise more down the road.

Even still - I think the first book did a better job then the first season of the show did.

 

I love the Red Rising series. Impatiently waiting for book 6. I gave up on Way of Kings after about 200 pages but I’m thinking I’ll try it again.

EotW was a good read but I remember being a bit confused by the eye of the world scene. 

It seems to be something that is becoming much more common these days - even with established shows. It's Always Sunny was renewed up to season 17 after season 13 came out!

As for Amazon's motivations... only guessing but maybe cheaper to produce if they basically filmed back to back?

The issue now is at what stage do they either renew for season 3 (or multiple seasons), or announce a cancellation?

Just now, DaddyFinn said:

Didn't Ishy just want the DO to win and everything to end? Killing the DR would have made DO's win almost inevitable? Though that would contradict the "let the Lord of Chaos rule".

I seem to have a memory of Ishy not wanting the Forsaken to kill Rand - I'm starting my reread of the series as soon as I finish the last Book of Babel. But yeah you'd think the easiest way for the DO to win would be to remove his greatest threat before he becomes a threat

2 minutes ago, VooDooNut said:

I just have a feeling Ishy was very thoughtful with his words.

How good was that little smirk Faran gave us just as he "died"

6 minutes ago, VooDooNut said:

Ishy did tell Rand the opposite way to channel Saidin, but because Moiraine was not clear in the preceding scene, Rand doesn't think to question Ishy's advice. Again, I think this might hint towards Ishy trying to kill Rand by having him embrace Saidin, but if this doesn't pay off in a future season I'll be a little confused.

 

But I still expect we will have more exposition dumps for Saidin v Saidar in future seasons.

Yeah I really hope we get some exposition on the duality of the OP as well.

You raise an interesting point with Ishy telling him to embrace. I assumed that Ishy's end goal was to be freed from his prison. If Rand needed to channel in order to break the seal, why would Ishy try and kill him?

Maybe by misdirecting him Ishy thought there would be some kind of destructive OP explosion that would break the seal? It's been a while since I read the books but Ishy wasn't trying to kill Rand at this point in the books right?

I'm not being difficult I promise ? just something that I think will be WAFO as you suggest.

4 hours ago, Spiritweaver1 said:

Great post.  However, it is useless to speculate from a show perspective because I have yet seen no real evidence that they are going to do any substantive differentiation between saidin and saidar.  They have blown past a couple of opportunities.   Randland lore is pretty clear.  The taint is an oily, toxic film which can't be avoided when channeling saidin.  Another way to look at it is an cumulative energetic poison., Say X-rays.  Every time you are exposed it does damage.  Depending on the individuals physical and psychological make up they have more or less resistance.  Hooks in the brain indeed!! ? At some point it will destroy your brain.   

One of the many things I strongly disliked about Ep 8 (not going anywhere near Eggy's healing of near death ?) was they set it up perfectly in the journey through the Blight: Rand "teach me to channel" - Moiraine - "I can't - women touch one side of the power, men touch the other. It's apples and oranges". Instead they went with Moiraine being coy. This was such an easy set up to establish a key piece of lore and I'm sad they missed it.

1 hour ago, ilovezam said:

Yeah... I get that some people don't mind the change that much, but for all the mental gymnastics used to justify the change, I have not seen anyone put forth a good explanation to why they did it. It's also not a stunt team or COVID thing either because Rafe had him lose to one Trolloc from his original script from 2018.

 

It's such a cool thing that this universe features a concept like blademasters, and I think it would have been really cool if we get to see Tam do something, especially since they made it a whole point to really highlight the heron. We see him "know how to use the sword", but not any more than a regular soldier might be expected to. I've seen show only audiences speculate that the heron is a sigil to show that he was once a soldier or something. 

 

I still like Tam because he's got good lines and the actor's great, but it's such a wasted opportunity. 

 

 

There was a missed opportunity to have Tam decimate a couple of Trollocs but still get injured due to facing too many opponents. This would have resulted in a proper example of Blademaster badassery but still allow the fever dream sequence due to injury.

Michael McElhatton is such a good actor - loved him as Tam - hated him as Roose in GoT.

7 minutes ago, Raal Gurniss said:

Come now….How about the more honest balanced reviews that rate the show for what it is? Mediocre at best? With positives and negatives!

 

What is your stance there? 

A review that rates the show as “mediocre” doesn’t sound balanced to me. 
 

The majority I have come across speak of the good and bad. Some conclude the show was great others it was bad. Most seem to agree that it was a solid though not spectacular first season but missed the mark in a number of areas (sound is a big one, pacing and writing).

4 hours ago, ArrylT said:

 

I am always up for reading more WoT articles so please feel free to share all these articles you're talking about.  ?

I wouldn't hold your breath ? person sounds like the type that any praise = paid for by Amazon while obviously the negative reviews are the only legitimate articles ?