Rand is Rand. Whether he should have been suspicious of Selene is beside the point. Having just read the Selene stuff in TGH during  my re-read, I think it's all very in-character for Rand. Whether it's logical or smart is beside the point. 

People often forget that RJ just treats his characters differently than most modern authors. George R.R. Martin kicked off a sort of "realist" treatment of characterization which has extended even to the works of Brandon Sanderson. In modern fantasy, most characters act like "real" people. This is not the case with RJ. WoT is a "modernist take on the Arthurian myth" (Brandon Sanderson's words), and as such, the characters are more symbolic than real. In the words of the literary critic James Wood, they are "both real and unreal at the same time."  

What attaches us to the WoT characters is not how similarly their actions/thoughts resemble our own. It's how firmly RJ establishes their characters/personalities in relation to their world/situation. 

"No one would ever act like Rand!" Maybe true... but we don't need real world examples to justify Rand's decisions. Rand acts like Rand, and that should be enough. 

For anyone interested, this is a very interesting article about character. 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/26/3

My favorite quote: 

"A glance at the thousands of foolish 'reader reviews' on Amazon, with their complaints about 'dislikeable characters', confirms a contagion of moralising niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader 'couldn't find any characters to identify with', or 'didn't think that any of the characters 'grow''."

6 minutes ago, Rmp said:

On a side note; there was a pretty huge and humorous thread on r/television regarding these stats, with the overwhelming majority of top responses being something along the lines of "how?" or "it was meh".

I posted about this thread the other day. For all that's been said about how toxic fans have tanked the imdb/metacritic score, one look at a more casual community and it's immediately clear that the show left almost no impression on anyone who watched it. If any score is underrepresented, it's all the 5/10 reviews that people were too apathetic to write. 

20 hours ago, Terry05 said:

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

I'd be more concerned with how the show is jumping off a cliff in popularity. Just in the last day, WoT has dropped 21 spots on imdb's list of popular TV (down to 70). And that's on the back of another 20+ point drop last week. Compare that to The Witcher which only saw an 11 spot drop and is still at 22.

https://www.imdb.com/chart/tvmeter/?ref_=tt_ov_pop

12 hours ago, TheMatCauthon said:

The vast majority of 1/10 reviews were left by book fans.

Yeah but the majority of the 10/10 reviews were also left by book fans... and Amazon bots. So we've reached an impasse. 

6 hours ago, DigificWriter said:

Outlets like Deadline, Variety, Entertainment Weekly, and The Hollywood Reporter meticulously source-check the information they publish and do not move forward on reporting something unless they are fully confident in its veracity

LOLOLOLOLOL

On 2/4/2022 at 3:40 PM, Skipp said:

If it was the only romance that was portrayed like that I could see it but nearly every romance in the books is the same.

Yeah but then all of these relationships are then explored in depth. WoT began as a RJ setting out to do a modernist take on the Arthurian myth. The Arthurian legends are literally where the word "romance" comes from (though in those days, a romance was an adventure). In those legends, romantic relationships are all portrayed the way that RJ does it with rapid beginnings followed by big trouble when it turns out that real life has other plans. 

I'm just saying that in the 80's, RJ wrote a trilogy of bodice ripper romances. He knows how to write a big build up in a romantic relationship, and his choice to avoid that in WoT seems super intentional. I for one am glad that we didn't have to slog through multiple books of trite romantic bullcrap and instead just got to use the characters' initial attraction as a springboard to delve into  much richer, more interesting parts of their characters. 

As I said before, all RJ has done is swap the "nothing after the wedding matters" approach to romance with a "nothing before the characters develop feelings matters" approach. 

With regards to Lan and Nynaeve's relationship in EotW, I've always thought it strange that people complain about it being rushed. It's not rushed. It's just backwards. 

Sure, RJ really cuts to the chase with regards to how quickly the two of them express their feelings for one another, but the only reason we say that this is rushed is because decades of pop-culture have lead us to set "characters declare their feelings" as the end-point for on-screen relationships. 

RJ is much less interested in what leads two people to fall in love and WAY more interested in what happens AFTER they fall in love. Yes, the initial burst of affection is abrupt, but its actually no more abrupt than a story which ends with a wedding and just leaves us to assume a "happily ever after." 

For the record, the obsession to actually SEE characters falling is love is a relatively new one. Read anything before Jane Austen (like Shakespeare) and the relationships are almost always treated just like Lan and Nynaeve's. Love is assumed, and then the drama proceeds rather than drama leading to love. 

IMO, Lan and Nynaeve's insta-love is very much a feature of WoT and not a bug which needed to be ironed out in adaptation. 

27 minutes ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

If it even manages to get a season 3. Season 1 ended badly and without changes I dont think season 2 will drive enough interest to keep it going.

WoT is down to 49 on imdb's TV popularity rankings. Witcher is still at 13. GoT is at 14. Breaking Bad is 24. Expanse is 27. How low will it sink in the next year before Season 2? Meanwhile, decade old shows are outpacing it left and right. 

This show is not sticking with people. People are watching it and totally forgetting that it exists. That "if" in "if it gets a season 3" is becoming larger and larger by the day. 

https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=tv_series

1 hour ago, Skipp said:

It not possible that places like reddit also bring out the most negative in people either?

See, this is a mindset that I've seen from lots of show-lovers. Almost like you think there's nowhere on the internet where people just watch a show and react positively to it en mass. A negative response to WoTtv was not inevitable. It was not always going to happen. The only reason it happened was that the show isn't very good, even on its own merits. 

Take this thread (also from today) about Euphoria and note how different the discussion is. It was posted on the same subreddit, and yet people seem to have no problem being positive about the show. How is this possible if reddit (or the internet at large) is a place which just brings out the most negative people? 

https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/skif09/euphoria_renewed_for_season_3_at_hbo/

Also see: Any thread about Arcane. 

Or this thread about Yellowstone. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/sjmqje/yellowstone_renewed_for_season_5_at_paramount/

The truth is that there are just as many people on the internet who are eager to throw praise at literally anything as there are people who show up just to hate. The scales are tipped by the normal people, a demographic that WoTtv did a less than stellar job at appealing to. Ironic, considering that that's the demographic that Amazon kicked us fans to the dust in favor for. 

This discussion on r/television provides a pretty accurate look at the response to the show on a wider level. Niche community sites like Dragonmount and r/WoT or r/wotshow present an image that the show's approval rating is way higher than it actually is. As soon as the discussion gets farther out into the public, the response skews overwhelmingly negative. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/sjx84r/amazons_the_wheel_of_time_was_the_biggest_new/

On 1/31/2022 at 8:20 AM, Deviations said:

I wear that badge with pride....

#BannedFromWoTShow

Not my original content, but I thought it worth a repost. 

On 11/19/2021 at 4:04 PM, DojoToad said:

Yep.  Just re-watched episode 1.  Certainly looks like she was about to wallop Perrin from behind.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Rafe come out and say that Laila wasn't a darkfriend? 

I found it: 

https://www.cbr.com/the-wheel-of-time-showrunner-debunks-laila-darkfriend-fan-theory/

I'm torn. On the one hand, the show seems to totally set up that Laila is a darkfriend. But I could also believe that Rafe literally did it on accident haha 

13 minutes ago, fra85uk said:

In the end, it's quite straightforward if you want to do a faithful adaptation:

up to book 4, a season per book adaptation with a few surgical cuts.

Right? After that, the books start taking place over the course of weeks, a massive percentage of the POV chapters get dedicated to side characters just for kicks and giggles, and there are several storylines which could be excised completely with minimal consequence to the overall narrative. 

All this stuff means that if you just kept the focus tight on the main characters, you could feasibly condense the final 9 books into 5 seasons without too much trouble. 

51 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

Stop pretending that taking WoT and putting it on tv is the same as adapting GoT. It's just not.

Taken from a 2013 Article on GoT.

-

A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series that Game of Thrones is based on, came about partly as a reaction to Martin’s time in Hollywood.

“Because it’s prose and I can have anything I describe,” Martin explains. “I don’t have to worry about what the budget is or what’s doable with the present art of special effects or how many extras we need or any of this stuff. And that’s what [A Song of Ice and Fire] came out of.”

No longer beholden to a strict budget, Martin let his imagination run wild and wrote door-stopper books packed with epic scenes and a cast of thousands. He wrote the series to be unfilmable. 

-

Retroactively, we look back on GoT and call it an easier job, but that's easy to say now that it's already been done. Dune was similarly unfilmable, and yet we got a great Dune movie just this year. 

WoT presents different challenges than GoT, but it's not like it was impossible from the beginning. If so, why even bother? Creatives with real talent have tackled "impossible" adaptations time and again in the past and succeeded. Similarly talented people could have made WoT work. 

6 minutes ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

Nothing I saw in the books suggests the two rivers folk were white. 

Considering rand was considered pale compared to them I had him pegged as white and the rest pegged as more Mediterranean. 

Forget the books, how about RJ approved official artwork? How about the RJ approved graphic novels?

Regarding just the books, a Reddit commenter brought up a few points that I thought were relevant. 

" Andor and the Two Rivers are culturally based on England and more generally Great Britain, the typical fantasy "base" setting and the starting point. As you said the only thing that is explicitly mentioned about their ethnicity is the fact that dark hair and eyes are the norm, but we can infer something about the skin tone from the text as well. As you said, the skin tone of characters that are clearly non-white is usually referred to using explicit terms like coppery or olive and so on, with the Two Rivers folk we only get a general "swarthy" and an indication that it's somewhat darker than what Rand's untanned skin is like, so darker than the absolute palest Irish there is, but still most probably caucasian with a farmer's tan. Mediterranean or otherwise southern European is usually a common approximation.

People often refer to the scene where Elaida remarks about his pale skin, but as mentioned she has to pull down his sleeve to reveal untanned skin to point out the difference. If the skin tone was drastically different it would've been obvious from the first glance at his face.

Another hint we get is that even though Rand's hair and eyes were seen as odd, they were always just explained away by saying that he got them from his mother's side. However, it turns out Rand had no Two Rivers heritage at all, yet he was still "close enough" that this reveal was a total surprise to him." 

6 hours ago, notpropaganda73 said:

You may have been tongue in cheek here, but this definitely isn't true. Just have a look at Star Wars. WoT has been relatively tame. 

Yeah. There are certainly members of any fandom who are uniquely toxic, but the WoT fandom as a whole is pretty good. 

7 hours ago, Elder_Haman said:

A 7.5 on such a system has no relationship to a 'D' grade. Instead, it suggests that the subject of the rating is better than average, but meaningfully less than perfect. Which seems to hit it pretty well on the nose for the series, IMO. 

Your breakdown of how 1-10 scores work is absolutely spot on. No one on the internet uses scores right. 

However, this is kind of why WoT being a 7/10 is a bad sign, IMO. I spend a lot of time on myanimelist.net where a score of 5 means that the show is absolute trash. Nothing there gets below a 4. In my experience, most of the internet works this way. Most people will give a 6 or a 7 to something which they enjoyed but left absolutely no impression on them, an 8 to something they liked, and a 9-10 for an absolute favorite. 

That being said, an average score of 7 can definitely mean anything between forgettable and better than decent, so in that regard, it's not like WoT is being dragged through the gutter by general audiences. 

24 minutes ago, Terry05 said:

Meh the people criticising are the same as GoT…

I outlined this in a previous post, but book readers were nowhere near as incensed by the early seasons of GoT as they are for WoT. An equally devoted fanbase (which was comparatively large), but none of the initial backlash. Detractors did exist, but not nearly on the scale as WoT. 

To me, this is a clear sign that the changes made in WoT are of a completely different animal than those made in GoT. Personally, having read and loved both series before experiencing the TV adaptations, there is a real difference between the approaches that both shows took. 

IT IS NOT AN ACCIDENT that GoT did not receive the same backlash that WoT has. WoT fans aren't uniquely toxic. It's 100% due to the nature and attitude of the changes made that WoT has been so divisive. 

21 minutes ago, ilovezam said:

the court of public opinion quickly turned against her when she started trying to justify changes like the fourth Oath and the Logain seeing Nynaeve channeling stuff on Twitter, and most of her explanations seem pretty hamfisted IIRC.

This is exactly what I observed as well. Makes sense. She's being paid to like the show. I'd like the show if I was paid too. 

But lots of people turned when it became clear that Sarah's role wasn't really to influence the scripts or protect the worldbuilding. Her real job was to defend the show's stupid writing decisions using pretzel logic on Twitter and then tout her megafan status to invalidate any criticism of the show.

That's where she started to lose support. 

25 minutes ago, Aimless said:

Sarah is just a consultant with no executive authority whatsoever—for her to be targeted like this is just absurdly disproportional, given her role.

Yes, but Sarah's public presence has also been absurdly disproportional given her role. The showrunners arguably made as big a deal about her involvement as they did Brandon Sanderson's. They definitely made a bigger deal of Sarah's involvement than Harriet's, that's for sure. The public faces of this show were indisputably Rafe and Sarah. 

Take into account that 1) Sanderson already had a bunch of goodwill from the fandom for finishing the books and 2) Sanderson has been much more realistic in his opinion of the show and 3) Sanderson's input was in post, commenting on stuff that had already been done. Sarah was there at the ground level, supposedly to keep things in line. Their jobs were totally different. Brandon's job was to offer notes on existing scripts and ideas. Sarah was billed as the safeguard against those scripts and ideas deviating too much. It's no wonder why more blame is being pushed her way than his. 

Sarah makes a big deal out of the fact that she isn't a producer. She doesn't make decisions. This is true. 

But this is not how her involvement was originally billed. This is 100% backtracking. Leading up to the show's release, she was billed as someone who would be in the writers room to shoot down any idea which fundamentally altered major aspects of the story (i.e. Perrin being a bear brother). Before the show aired, she WAS talked about as if she was going to be an authority with some degree of influence. 

It was only after the show aired and people began to notice a certain lack of attention to detail that Sarah began to backtrack and downplay her role. 

Is Sarah really the person to blame? No. But the reasons that people perceive her that way are entirely her and Rafe's doing. 

13 minutes ago, Gothic Flame said:

"Some people are so pressed about Episode 8 that they're coming for my throat - and I find it absolutely hysterical"

Whoa! Did Sarah Nakamura really just say the word "hysterical"??? 

Doesn't she KNOW that word has misogynist roots? Hysteria was a pejorative term used colloquially to mean ungovernable emotional excess which was long considered a diagnosable physical illness in women.

And yet here she uses the word "hysterical" to refer to something which she finds funny. Does Sarah Nakamura think the suffering of countless women who were misdiagnosed with hysteria is a joke? 

Honestly can't even rn. So problematic... So triggered rn

30 minutes ago, Ralph said:

And to whoever said she didn't mention physical threats, she did say so - death threats

Whoa! A DM death threat! I think my bunny slippers just ran for cover.  

6 minutes ago, Gothic Flame said:

2.) "Come at me bro!"

Not the best way but it does show chutzpah. But a bit unreliable when it comes to garnering the appropriate attention.

Like, even if she was like Sanderson, that would be something. Sanderson likes the show. He even liked episode 8! But when he talks about it, he brings up and acknowledges the show's flaws but owns that he just enjoys the show anyway. This is a strong position which basically anyone can respect. 

Sarah literally thinks the show is perfect.

It reminds me of when I was a newbie writer and people would say, "This didn't work for me "or "I don't get what's going on here" and my response was "well you see, I did this for X reason, and here, this is a hint at the MC's inner conflict and yada yada yada" totally missing the point that a creative's reasoning for their decisions doesn't matter a whiff if the audience isn't getting it. 

Sarah just blames the audience for not loving the show. Comes off as super immature. 

5 minutes ago, Ralph said:

She said they are attacking with more energy for that reason.

This is a 100% unproveable claim which does nothing but stoke the very same internet outrage that Sarah is criticizing. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Step 1: Get criticized 

Step 2: Make unfounded claim that the criticism is more intense because you are a woman. 

Step 3: Watch criticism intensify 

Step 4: Say, "See, I was right!" 

8 minutes ago, Ralph said:

Besides which I don't think Rafe uses social media much. 

This doesn't matter. Rafe is still receiving most of the criticism and it's just as targeted as what Sarah receives. Also, if Rafe isn't checking his DMs and reading his @s and comments, maybe Sarah could learn a thing or two from him.