2 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

Curious, because it took me half a minute to find it, and i didn't think it was necessary to provide a link

 

(from 2:00 to 2:20 if you want actual climbing)

though i was specifically mentioning swimming, and general mobility

 

it didn't take some special search. those are literally the first four videos that popped in my youtube when typing "swimming in armor".

 

now, if you are asking for the very exact specific conditions of the trailer, the same exact kind of armor, the same exact kind of surface, then no, of course you won't find the very exact thing. but, call me gullible, I see plenty of evidence of people doing something similar enough - or similarly taxing - that I won't question the feasibility of the act just because one is wearing gauntlets instead of being free-handed.

 

I find it weird that people watch movies with wizards, magical beasts, artifacts of power, dragons, destiny, immortal warriors living for millennia, but they choose to suspend their disbelief over some mildly hard physical feat, just because they find it a lot harder than it actually is.

Zoom in and you see they are not wearing articulated gauntlets….

I really don’t understand the defensive position of maintaining that icy mountain climbing by fully armoured individuals wearing plate gauntlets isn’t absurd and utterly unbelievable even in a fantasy setting, moreover you seem to think it common occurrence throughout the real historical periods where people wore such armour.

1 hour ago, king of nowhere said:

 

 

actually, that's not irrealistic. it's a lot easier to move in armor than some people think. armor weight less than some climber's backpack, and it's more evenly distributed. there's videos of people swimming in armor. the idea of armor as this bulky, cumbersome stuff that left people unable to move properly is a myth.

Wearing 25-30kg chain and plate armour isn’t going to make climbing an icy sheer slope easy….And the gauntlets would make it next to impossible…..

But I will give it a quick gander online and see if I can find any video footage of it happening.

edit…Nope, seems it’s full steel armour mountain climbing is an extreme sport yet to get mainstream coverage for some reason.

2 hours ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

My interest just tanked after watching that.

Watched someone rock climbing in full armour all gauntleted up…..Thats where I stopped watching…

I mean its a fantasy genre full of magic and somehow they made things look even more far fetched than the genre can bare…

11 hours ago, Andra said:

No, I really think the Kerene/Stepin story was written in from the beginning as a priority.

If you watch the Behind The Scenes video for those two episodes, he is extremely proud of the work that was done building the details, and even with the difference between the voices in their two funerary rituals.  The high-pitched keening from Alanna during Kerene's burial, and both the Mongolian(?) throat-singing and Lan's yell during Stepin's ceremony.

 

It's certainly true that the nature of the battle with Logain's forces was altered due to Covid, but I think the Kerene/Stepin stuff was written before a single scene in the show was filmed, and was filmed exactly as written.

I don't believe it was extended due to Covid any more than any other scene was.

 

And please note - according to what we have been told, all of that was filmed before any staff left.

Well we seem to be at an impasse..

I believe in the possibility, you don’t.

Think I will end that there.

19 hours ago, Andra said:

Unfortunately, I think Rafe intended the Stepin arc to be included from the very beginning.  I don't think it was filler.

Well…Perhaps it was extended….As filler for covid related issues/cast leaving…Wouldn’t be the first time a show has done something like that and if as you say the arc was a Rafe pet project he would want to extend it further surely.

10 minutes ago, Juan Farstrider said:

Sean Bean has to die though, it's like his big type-casting thing. he dodged a bullet, for a change, instead. 

Could have been Stepin…

Just now, Cauthonfan4 said:

I've always said it would be hilarious to film a movie where Sean bean lives a happy fulfilled life where nothing goes wrong.

 

Bit of an ask! Closest you can currently get are the Sharpe TV movies, he just nearly dies most of the time in those and is occasionally happy….Well that and Snowpiercer(although I suspect a sticky end is coming for him).

11 minutes ago, Juan Farstrider said:

Razzies will definitely count (though I'm not predicting any at all. Those that win those are a breed apart)

I can’t see it winning any, it just doesn’t stand out enough in any field….

They should have got Sean Bean in for a few episodes….Perhaps as Fain….Or any of a dozen parts.

Give the show a bit of grit it’s sorely missing.

He was after all in both the things Bezos is trying to emulate.

2 hours ago, Juan Farstrider said:

Giving Amazon's biggest hit on Amazon is like an employee of the month award. That can't be a big deal to anyone who is not inside Amazon studios or Amazon Prime as employees. But you would have to compare the budgets. I do not think anyone comparing WoT to GoT is meaning to compare GoT to the Sopranos or what ever series may have run on HBO while GoT was the biggest thing they had. 

Bezos does not what Amazon Prime to be a small player in the streaming world. One would imagine what he wanted was a show that would not simply put them past Disney+. But he would then be finding ways to cut deals with providers the way Disney+ has where so many of their subscribers I THINK come from free subscriptions from providers (I have one, I've been told, I haven't watched it). Maybe he wanted a show that made people want that, so that people would sign up to specifically watch WoT and not because there might be something good on it (I'm currently watching the Beverly Hillbillies on Prime and imagining Miss Hathaway as Moraine, Rand in Andor as Jed /s ) 

What does it mean to be a hit for Amazon? This is analogous to comparing WoT to GoT. Are we talking about something that is like talking about minor league baseball teams? I doubt anyone thinks Amazon wants the best minor league streaming service show, or wants a "hit" among them,  so arguing that they gOt it is sort of silly. The goal is to get buzz going so that Amazon Prime grows because the buzz around WoT is similar to the buzz that grew around GoT.

The thing to measure is 2 years from now, that is what they are looking for. Will this bring significant people in to their service over that time by creating word of mouth and industry awards. It means they have to invest in all aspects of that plan. They have to lobby for awards the way Weinstein did for Oscars (if that's what he did), and they have to create the word of mouth that GoT created for HBO or that Stranger Things created for Netflix. Netflix may have been already on top but there were plenty of predictions and concern that they would be cut out as ntetworks were trying to force their own streaming services on everyone. To say Netflix is still on top, which I don't know if they are, would be a credit to their efforts. But that's what Amazon is hunting for, and Rafe is their big-game guide. or not. 

I concur, we will soon see by how many awards it wins..

43 minutes ago, Andra said:

 

Which is why I said this in the rest of the comment you responded to:

 

 

We don't ever see another, and she had this one from the beginning of the episode one opener.

It's possible that she had more, but why show us just this one (before she had any idea who the Dragon was) if she did?

Or did she know who the Dragon was and only behaved that way to be PC to avoid potentially offending the DR and anyone else?

1 hour ago, EmreY said:

 

It depends.  If the Rings series is good, people will have gone into withdrawal, and a grunting Witcher won't be enough to make up the difference.  If the Rings series is bad, people who like that sort of thing will be desperate for something, anything.

 

In addition, all those who voted 9-10/10 will turn up no matter what.  Those who voted 1-2/10 will also turn up because they'll likely have supressed the memories.

 

It's the middling scenarios and viewers I'm worried about. ? 

They will watch it….Just won’t subscribe to Prime to get it week by week fresh and view it months-years later when you have prime and watched everything you wanted to and there’s a dry patch of other programming …

Least that is what I will be doing and I rated the show low to middling….Still haven’t watched more than 5 minutes of the last episode and have no real will to watch it yet either.

15 minutes ago, notpropaganda73 said:

I find this interesting because I know of one poster on this board who was not a fan of the first season that sees Perrin's main conflict to be the Way of the Leaf vs. violence. I personally never saw it that way either, I always thought it was wolf vs man but I don't think we can just discount this view seeing as it's prevalent within the fandom, outside of the show? 

 

As a sidenote, I always thought the "the axe is only good for killing" idea to be a bit weak. I know what RJ was going for, but you can use an axe as a tool as well. 

I always thought it was more a battle between creation and destruction that resulted in a compromise end result.

1 hour ago, forte12 said:

Rafe has given Amazon it's biggest hit ever. If anyone thinks otherwise look at the Neilsen numbers for WoT vs. any other Amazon show. This is huge for them. 

 

Not IMDB ratings- those don't mean ANYTHING to ANYONE other than reddit nerds or what your friends at work think, but the actual numbers... against other Amazon shows.

 

It's important to remember that Amazon Prime is a small player in the streaming world, everything is compared to Netflix. Netflix owns almost 50% of the market share of the viewership compared to Disney + (9%) and Amazon (8%). WoT was so successful that it actually boosted Prime's share to above Disney+ for December/January. Basically you cannot compare the numbers, streaming wise, to anything on Netflix as you'll only see one or two shows a year crack the top 30 viewership wise that AREN'T Netflix shows. That's why a failure on Netflix is a REAL failure. 

 

Anyone who says WoT isn't a hit for Amazon needs to pull their head out of their ass. I know you may not like it ( I have my own problems with it) but to deny that it's done well for Amazon (and done well outside of just the online fandom) is absurd. 

 

Big fish, small pond.

1 hour ago, Andra said:

It's not about the conversation, it's about the sa'angreal she brought, and told him to use.  One that - if the magic system remains the same - would have been useless to a woman.

 

If she thought the DR could have won without it, why even bring it?

Perhaps she had a sackful of such oriented ones to cover all the bases? 

2 hours ago, expat said:

It was mentioned twice in 8 episodes, with the second mention an elaborate scene taking several minutes of screen time.  For it to count, how many episodes need to mention it and how much screen time should be devoted to repeating it? 

 

Criticizing the show for establishing the lore, but not beating it into the ground seems harsh, especially since this just a throwaway trope (Famous Ancestor - TV Tropes) that is as common and annoying as the fridging trope that many posters complain about.  The Romans conquering the known world 2000 years ago doesn't make today's Italians great warriors.

The Stepin episode was overdone though regardless…I suspect it was a filler episode due to Covid and a Cast member leaving…If they had a dozen more episodes or footage I wager that episode would have been a clip show of flashbacks.

22 minutes ago, MasterAblar said:

Wonder what he means by Rand acts childish in book 2. 
 

He doesn’t want to be used, and he doesn’t want to be treated by a Lord because he feels he isn’t one, and he definitely doesn’t want to acknowledge that’s he’s the Dragon Reborn.

 

None of that seems very childish to me. He’s a guy in his late teens he’s obviously not gonna be ready or accepting of what the world is throwing at him.

It’s a fantasy setting, it doesn’t have to make much sense after all.

I mean his acting rebellious would make sense in the book, but much less so in the TV show because they accelerated the characters to be more experienced and less innocent.

25 minutes ago, AdamA said:

Okay, I get what you're saying. Yeah, I don't think they're going to bother to try and go for consistent regionally distinct accents. At least from what I can see of other television and film projects that involve largely fictional cultures, this is hard to do. The Expanse kind of did it with Belter Creole, but not consistently. Battlestar Galactica was pretty terrible at it, claiming each colony had a specific accent, but I couldn't hear it listening to them speak. The Gaius code switching wasn't convincing.

It’s not an easy thing to do and requires specific regional casting or extensive coaching, Expanse gave it a good try but they only did the one…

WoT eradicated it pretty much completely and seem to go the route of a one perhaps two people to stereotype the entire regional factions fashion, accents and culture…The background extras might as well be the same dozen or so people in all the other factions with a very minor costume change if any…

WoT in my opinion struggles with verisimilitude, which shouldn’t really be much of a hurdle given the whole fantasy thing, but it doesn’t so much miss the mark as just not even bother with it at all…It’s utterly rife with things that make little sense unless you fictionalise 10x as much as they show to rationalise it.
 

I mean there is far fetched, then there is far fetched within a far fetched fictional fantasy setting.

And that is just detrimental to any story.

1 hour ago, Skipp said:

It also shows that yes Rafe and the production crew are accepting criticisms from the first season.  Any they even acknowledge some of their mistakes.  

 

It was very nice read and I am really looking forward to season 2.

Only admission I saw was that they didn’t make things clearer.

Didn’t see any acknowledgment of any criticism nor any real acknowledgment that mistakes were even made.

2 hours ago, wastingtime said:

I'm just at the beginning of teaching a middle school English unit about character archetypes and narrative schemas, and it's crystalised for me why WOT will never be GOT, and why it is a fundamentally unfair/imperfect comparison. In the novels at least

Looking at WOT, and despite the intricate world building, cast of thousands and plot twists and turns over 14 novels, it is still fundamentally a straightforward "Hero's Journey". Fair enough The Dragon Reborn has more superhero level sidekicks than most other heroes, and he couldn't achieve his destined goal without their contributions, but his character arc and the outline of the entire story is basically linear and traditional. A 'good' hero has saved the entire world from unremitting 'evil' countless times in stories across all human cultures, languages, genres and ages.

Look at GOT on the other hand and it's not straightforward at all. Who even is the 'hero'? why did that good person just do a dumb thing? Why did that previously immoral douchebag just show surprising tenderness and chivalry? Ned Stark has gotta be the hero of this story right? Oh shit!?!?!? Well at least his son Robb will save the day, right? Hmmn, I guess even courageous military geniuses can be politically naive after all? Throughout both the books and the show (even the last few seasons when the show runners had run out of source material) the audience was constantly kept guessing as to what was going to happen next. And because George RR Martin had no compulsions with developing charismatic characters with believable personalities, realistic motivations and real life flaws... then happily killing them off when it served the purpose of his envisioned story arc, a  huge number of otherwise non-fantasy consuming fans got hooked on the human element involved: while there may have been magic, dragons, giants and ice zombies, they were incidental to the cast of believably messed up humans all trying their best to navigate through the situations they were in, regardless of whether they caused them or not. Even the notion of 'good versus evil', while kind of there, took backstage to the personal and political dramas of the characters.

In WOT's case, for better or worse, that complexity is just not part of the story. Some fans like it in spite of that, some fans like it because of that, and Jordan obviously chose to write it like that for a deliberate reason. It is what it is.

The writers turning it into a screen series then face a monumental (if not impossible) task. Keep it as close to "as-is" to the books as possible, and while you'll appeal to fans of the books and fans of the genre in general, the unpredictability, edge-of-your-seat mystery and deeply conflicted characters (He'd rather be honourable than stay alive? Wait! Aren't those two siblings?!?) don't exist often enough to generate the "Water-cooler buzz" so called Event TV is measured by these days.

But then of course, if you change it too much it fails to gel at all, unless the writing team is truly world class. Aim for somewhere in the middle with an average-reasonable writing team and we end up with mostly what we've seen so far.  

And just imagine if/when the writers do try and "Ned Stark" a character? Given how many top tier characters DON'T die at all, even in the last battle, whatever they do the writers will be pilloried by a large percentage of the fan base. Kill a major character pre-emptively and there will be an outcry. Spend time focusing on many of the second & third tier characters who do actually die in the novels instead, so that when their time comes the audience suffers a genuinely emotional reaction, and the writers will be equally vehemently accused of ignoring the stories and achievements of the top characters.

But then if you tell a predictably linear story following mostly archetypal characters existing within a mostly binary moral universe, no matter how well you do it, while many existing fans will definitely appreciate it, many more unfamiliar fans tuning in to see the "next GOT" (well at least those that tuned in to that show for reasons beyond the frequent nudity & gratuitous sex) will be disappointed.

Makes me glad I'm not Rafe, that's for sure...? 

 

Not sure “next GoT” is in reference to the actual specific content though, rather it alludes to a fantasy TV series that achieves a blockbuster status…

Same as shows tried to replicate Lost or the Walking Dead…

Thats the goal, making a lot of money.

1 hour ago, Mailman said:

You would be wrong if you go back only 1000 years every person in Europe is related.

 

I would say it is safe to assume that there would be 2000 or less people in Emonds Field (probably half that).

 

When you have such a small amount of people that tend to remain in the same geographical location the rate of homogeny increases rapidly.

 

Within 12 generations if we allow the sample size to be 2000 everyone within the area would statistically be related to each other.

 

Tam leaving and bringing back a outside partner was considered extremely rare and would not even account for a rounding error over 60+ generations.

Whole point is it was a casting issue purely done for the purpose of diversity as the showmaker wanted make a point, it is however a Fantasy series based on a fantasy book, so it doesn’t have to make sense, so the casting doesn’t really matter to the point of anything…

So whoever plays the parts is not really an issue……. Although the forced agenda is still discriminatory the same as the discrimination they were making a point against…Which is rather ironic.

Better to have made a fresh story and had open casting for every part free from any bias….Nice and clean, free from bias on anything.

1 hour ago, EmreY said:

 

Too much argument about nothing.

 

 

Well….That’s an accurate description of posts by  critics and fans alike

32 minutes ago, AdamA said:

I'm not glossing over your point. I'm not responding to it at all. I'm responding to the actual thread prompt, about regional accents, not culture in general.

I meant that would be the showmakers glossing over, rather than you..

You did after all describe what they tried so far.

27 minutes ago, Jsbrads2 said:

There is this great line in another show, something like, “you sound a bit northern” to which the response was “Where I come from has a north too.”

I like all the different ideas, but RJ never really bothered to go out of his way for most of the cultures. These people sound a bit like their, those people sound a bit like their land. But when it came to particularly Illian and Seanchan, RJ went out of his way to stress their different speech.

looking forward to what they do, but understand practical and etc. 

Do you have any accents in your mind from when you read the books?

Well it’s comparative…RJ may not have gone into minute detail but when compared to Rafe….

Well you have to admit that a little is much more than none.

1 hour ago, Wassup said:

Seeing how big the seal was at the EotW, I do not think anyone could collect them. 
 

I think Turok specifically only has value as a blade master. Otherwise, it can just be a generic Seanchan leader. 
 

I wonder if they will have the lacquered fingernails and shaved heads?

Hmm…They could save on a casting and skip him for Tuon, Rand could then draw a sword fight with her(just the way the show goes) whilst she gets dragged away(saving face)  as her force retreats.

8 minutes ago, AdamA said:

I'm not convinced they're really worrying about it. Priyanka Bose and Álvaro Morte just aren't native English speakers and I don't think they can do an accent that isn't their natural accent. Maybe they'll try to cast all Indians as Arafellins and Spanish as Ghealdanin at least for recurring characters, but not for redshirts. Deal with it. Richard Madden and Sophie Turner didn't sound much like each other. Neither did Hugo Weaving and Liv Tyler, or Sean Bean and David Wenham. Actors have limits. They didn't look much like each other, either.

That would be the glossing over part I mentioned..

Regional diversity in WoT is largely costume only and even then its pretty much uniform throughout, only the Whitecloaks stand out…And they ARE in uniform.

In the books it was like Tar Valon was French, Caemlyn British, Cairhairn Spanish etc, they all had regional deviation from each other, accents, traditions, food, customs etc…

I saw precious little of any of that..There was a definite dearth of such things, even the the Ogier were bland.

26 minutes ago, zacz1987 said:

Yeah.

 

I just find it funny when you consider Ghealdan is probably the closest culture to Two Rivers considering they both were originally part of Manetheren  yet they are the one place with a distinct accent apparent cultural differences. 

Well that is also an issue that the show creators have burdened themselves with…They chose a path but can/will they stick to it or will they start type casting for the other factions…
 

I just find it humorous that they dug themselves a hole and I am interested on how they intend getting out…I suspect they will gloss over it and try to distract by having as few people in view or have speaking roles per faction as they can get away with.