1 hour ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

My problem is more this.

why spend so much time propping someone up as a book expert and be so public about it if you're not going to bloody use the book for anything more then  names, a very general plotline, and that's about it?

In this regard, I have some sympathy for Sarah. From beginning to end, Rafe used her as a marketing tool. He and the other people in charge of the show make such a big deal about her involvement, and all of it was smoke and mirrors. They knew this would happen. They knew they weren't sticking to the books and that Sarah was just a figurehead, and they threw her to the wolves anyway. 

1 hour ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

Because the implication i got during production was they were bringing these people (her, Sanderson, etc) in order to keep it true to the source. 

Rafe is not capable of touching the True Source. 

9 hours ago, Terry05 said:

I can think of a number of things they are saying to Sarah that they wouldn't say to a man... "they're coming after me like this only because I'm a woman" may be referring to the type of vitriol that is likely in her DMs,

I don't necessarily think that the nature of the DMs matter. Some douche may make a comment which ties back to Sarah being a woman, but that doesn't mean she's being criticized because she's a woman, which is what she's implying. 

If Sarah were a dude with glasses, those same people might make different comments. If she were a dude with a disability, the comments would be different. If she were a really short, fat guy, the comments would be different. Bullies will tailor the nature of their attacks to suit the one they are attacking. 

This does not mean that Sarah has been targeted because she is a woman. There are way more plausible and likely reasons that she has been singled out (even though she hasn't because Rafe is getting way more backlash). 

For example: 

1. Many of the directors are women, yet they get no backlash even though they are more responsible for the show's quality than Sarah

2. Same goes for the female writers who remain relatively unknown even among the fandom. 

3. Unlike those people, Sarah chose to use her involvement with the show as a way to catapult her into the public eye, drawing attention to herself. No one else in the show did this, and would you look at that, they aren't getting online hate. 

4. Sarah's defense of the show has been 100% unqualified. According to her, there is NOTHING subpar about it. Even episode 8 she calls "surgical" after other people involved with the show have come out and made all sorts of excuses for it being a mess. This makes her sound bought and paid for, which makes her more of a target. 

5. Sarah has been openly antagonistic towards anyone who doesn't like the show and has not hesitated to insinuate that these people are racists, sexists, and bigots. This makes her a target. 

But Sarah doesn't want to consider any of that. She just whines that it's because she's a lady. 

19 minutes ago, Gothic Flame said:

That said I have to wonder at Sarah's naivety. She had to know what she signed up for.

Right? Like, she put herself front and center on a show which everyone (including Rafe) knew was going to piss off a large number of a huge fanbase.  

And now, the reason that she's being singled out isn't that she singled herself out in an attempt to use her involvement with the show to build her own social profile, it's that she's a woman. 

No one else on the show is getting dragged except for those people who PUT THEMSELVES at the masthead: Rafe and Sarah. If Sarah had just kept her mouth shut like the other show consultants she mentions (who are probably male, given her claims), this wouldn't be happening. She'd be just another nobody. 

Nobodies don't get harassed, but Sarah didn't want to be a nobody.

On 12/26/2021 at 10:45 AM, Yojimbo said:

Jordan's Rules on how things work are only Suggestions to the writers of the show.  

HEY! Stop right there! I have it on good authority that Rafe did all the research he could to make sure he mastered The Jordan Rules before beginning work on the show. I remember him bursting into my office one day and shouting, "I've got it! It's so simple! Every time he drives to the paint, we put him on the ground! Wear him out! So what if he goes for 40 a game, there's no way he can keep that up for a 7 game series!" 

I said, "What does that have to do with Wheel of Time?" 

Rafe's eyes glazed over. "Wheel of what, now?" 

I never saw him again. 

7 minutes ago, AdamA said:

Joke or did you forget what year it is?

I 100% did. 

*googles Bridges Near Me*

Quote

"I guarantee you that if I were a man they would not be coming at me with that same energy because, guaranteed, they are not going after any of the other people that may have helped to provide support for this show, with that same energy."

Classic. 

Never mind that Rafe is getting waaaay more backlash than Sarah. 

Never mind that Sarah herself was using her involvement with the show to boost her personal profile and that Rafe/Amazon specifically propped her up in an attempt to reassure fans that the show would be respectful to the books. 

The reason that she's received so much flak is that she's a lady. 

You can't stand in front of the firing line and complain when you get shot. It was Sarah's choice not to just lay low like the other consultants did. She wanted to be the center of attention, and she got it. Merry Christmas. 

(It should be obvious that I don't condone threats of any kind, but it's 2021 so just in case I'm putting this here)

9 minutes ago, Tamal said:

I have just begun watching season 1 of GoT again, intending to watch the whole series. The difference in quality when it comes to pacing, writing, music, world building, character building, couloring, acting is absolutely staggering.

The scene in episode 1 where the boys are doing archery while their parents look on is better than WoTtv in its entirely. The amount of character information communicated by that simple sequence is mind-boggling. 

Compare that to Nynaeve chucking Egwene in a river, or Perrin with his wife, or the road scene with Tam and Rand all of which are completely without subtlety or nuance. Just the most hammer meets nail way of introducing characters that you could possibly imagine. 

12 minutes ago, Vartija said:

I've seen some of the original(?) covers of the later books and I have to admit I'm not a fan of those. Rand often looks really weird in them.  

Foreshadowing for Lord of Chaos lol

(Context: This is the bodice ripper series that RJ wrote back in the 80's under a different name.)

17 minutes ago, EmreY said:

While nowhere near as weird as the infamous Hobbit emu cover, I find the original cover artwork sadly unimpressive.

Reeeaaally? I'm always fascinated to find people like you in the wild haha I mean no offense by this, please believe me. I'm of the camp that thinks most fantasy cover art has kind of gone downhill over the last 15 years, and I really miss these old-school, painterly covers. These days, you have to be Tad Williams or Brandon Sanderson to get one of those. 

What are your favorite versions of the WoT covers? Favorite covers of all time? 

15 minutes ago, DaddyFinn said:

I wouldn't take this too far. Even GoT took a few seasons(Red Wedding) before it became huge.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110830121754/https://www.metacritic.com/tv/game-of-thrones/season-1/user-reviews

https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-wheel-of-time

The first of these links is from the Internet Archive. It's a page from August 2011 which shows the user reviews and score of GoT only a few months after its conclusion in June 2011. (The second link is self-explanatory). 

Notice that GoT Season 1 had as many positive ratings 2 months after airing as WoT has total ratings (good and bad), and it's user score is nearly double that of WoT. It's critic score was also significantly higher. 

There were fans of the GoT books in 2011. If GoT is comparable to WoTtv in the liberties it takes with its source material, where were the negative reviews? This show was nothing in 2011. People didn't yet feel obligated to like it, but its seems that most people loved it, book fans included. 

Ratings for Season 1 GoT began in the low 2 millions per episode but climbed to 3 million by the finale. In comparison, Amazon is touting 1.16 billion viewing minutes (whatever the heck that means). Estimates I've seen about the viewing numbers suggest WoT was pulling 10 million an episode (and that's on the low end). 

So why are the number of ratings equal? Why did GoT Season 1 pull in as many user reviews in 2011 (When the internet was a much smaller place) as WoT did in 2021 despite GoT having 1/5th the viewership? 

The sad truth is that no one cares about the WoT show. It was shoved in their faces, they ate it up, but they didn't go online to talk about it. They didn't leave reviews. They don't care. 

4 minutes ago, DojoToad said:

So a show you couldn't stand watching past 3 episodes ends up with an 8 out of 10?  Doesn't say much for the 8.5 you gave to WoT. What does it take to get a 5 out of 10?

Lol

I mean, the entire internet has been using scores all wrong for as long as its existed. For most people, 7 is average, 5 is bad, 3 is atrocious and 1 and 2 do not exist because, you know, at least they tried haha 

This is part of the reason why WoT's  44 metacritic score is so telling. People will literally say "I wasn't that into it" and then give a show a 6 haha But WoT can't even pull a 5 from the general consensus. 

Watching His Dark Materials rn with my wife and thinking how much better it would have been if HBO had hired a Catholic Cardinal to helm the adaptation. Who better to make the necessary alterations to Philip Pullman's problematic representation of organized religion and gives us the story he should have written in the first place? 

Copy/paste from a mod-deleted post on r/WoT which brought up something I hadn't noticed about the AoL flashback scene. 

"The show calls Latra Posae the Watcher of the Flame. This throwaway point really bugged me. It once more suggests the writers either don’t care, or don’t know about the lore. I’m not sure what would be worse. The Watcher of the Flame seems to be a mixture of the Amyrlin Seat’s titles in the Third Age (Watcher of the Seals, the Flame of Tar Valon). The Flame of Tar Valon didn’t exist in the Age of Legends as Tar Valon didn’t exist back then, and also the Flame refers to the flame shaped female half of the ancient symbol of the Aes Sedai. The symbol was whole during the Age of Legends so the Flame terminology would not have been used to describe its female half, in the same way the Dragon’s Fang terminology was not used to describe the male half of the yin/yang symbol. Besides, Latra Posae already had a great title in the books. Shadar Nor, Cutter of the Shadow. Why not keep it?"

3 minutes ago, Sir_Charrid said:

Personally Books 1 and 2 nearly put me off the series, the only reason I stuck with it was I had already bought the first 6 books (book six had just been released when I get the series in one hit). Book 1 has put off people I have leant it too because it is far too derivative, the good stuff that makes you stand up and go wow are delivered later on, the reveal about the age of legends, the reveal about Rand's parentage and the truth about the Aiel. 

Yeah this is exactly the point that I'm making. WoT was awesome before any of that stuff showed up. It was a somewhat derivative story executed masterfully. 

Now, if you're the type of reader who cares more about the "what" of a story than it's "how", the first few Wheel of Time books might not be for you. If you're the type of reader who thinks, "X is like Y but Y came first so therefore X is inferior for being less original," then the first few Wheel of Time books might not be for you. If you're the type of reader whose attention span is directly correlated to a story's "originality" (this does not exist btw), then the first few WoT books might not be fore you. 

This is lowest common denominator critique. The "how" matters more than the "what". Eye of the World and Eragon have a lot in common. The reason Wheel of Time is better is not that it came first, but that it was written by RJ. If the authors had been swapped and RJ had written Eragon in the 2000's after Christopher Paolini had done his take on EotW in the 90s, Eragon would be a better series than Wheel of Time. 

Rafe agrees with you. He thinks the first book is lame. That's why the first season has so much stuff from later books shoehorned in. But WoT was WoT before any of that stuff showed up on the scene. 

Rafe is a "what" person. WoTtv deserved a "how" person. 

27 minutes ago, Jaysen Gore said:

Except if Moiraine is shielded, and not stilled, the Stepin speculation and foreshadowing is still valid, and Moiraine spends a season unable to channel before having Rand or Siuan untie the knot and remove the shield. 

 

Kind of begs the question of why Ishamael didn't just still her though, doesn't it? He obviously could have. This whole situation just seems like a massive contrivance. 

1 hour ago, pavao13 said:

Has Rafe ever talked about Steppin in any interviews? I’d love to hear his thoughts on why so much time was dedicated to such a minor character. 

I've mentioned this before, but I'll do it again here since I never see it brought up. 

Originally, speculation was that the Stepin storyline was part of a Xanatos Gambit by Rafe in which 1.5 episodes would be dedicated to a minor character in order to set up the gravity of the Warder/Aes Sedai bond in preparation for that bond being severed when Moiraine "dies." 

Then Episode 8 happened. Moiraine has been stilled. In order to keep Rosamund Pike relevant, a new story has been created out of whole cloth for her and Lan in Season 2 during which Lan is likely to be struggling with the effects of a severed bond. 

So, if I'm right, then it seems that the Stepin stuff wasn't meant to set up a distant payoff, but to facilitate a totally show-original plotline for the purpose of retaining a prominent actress to keep the show marketable. 

To my above point, it's even more ironic that Rafe and co. chose to flesh out Egwene, Nynaeve, and Mat's roles in EotW at all considering the events of Episode 8. Obviously, the complaint they were addressing is that those characters don't really have much to do in EotW, which is true. However, as Sanderson noted on DW, none of those characters end up doing anything of importance in Season 1 anyway. 

So all Rafe did was syphon time away from Rand and give it to 4 other characters who all turned out to be total dead weight on the narrative. 

At least RJ had 1 consequential character in EotW. WoTtv doesn't have any. 

On 1/7/2022 at 1:22 PM, EmreY said:

TEOTW tries to do this too, except it's whittled down to three people, not two.  It honestly doesn't make much of a difference that this is expanded to two other people. 

I would like to push back on this a little bit. 

Rand gets 44 of the 60ish POV's from EotW. The book is almost entirely dedicated to establishing him as a character so that when we find out that he's the Dragon Reborn, we care and hurt for him. Factor in that 800 pages of prose is comes out to like 35 hrs of reading time, 80% of which is given to Rand. That's like 28 hours of the reader experience that EotW dedicates to Rand. 

Consider the show. 8 hrs. That's it. And what do they do? They decide to spend 30% that time developing Moiraine, and then they split the rest between 5 characters who they all gave the same job. 

In GoT, Jon is learning to be a soldier at the Wall. Ed is navegating politics. Every character is doing something different. In WoT, everyone is just a Potential Dragon. This makes all the viewpoints kind of bleed into one another because all the characters are dealing with the exact same things. In this way, I think it was especially wise for RJ to focus almost entirely on a single viewpoint in EotW. 

The show should have treated Rand as Frodo, Perrin and Mat as Sam, and Egwene and Nynaeve as Merry and Pippin (with regards to development). All those LotR characters I mentioned are well loved and enjoyable to watch in Fellowship, even if they don't really have anything to do. Then, later, they get more development once the narrative opens up. 

17 minutes ago, Jaysen Gore said:

Not directed at you personally, but I am getting really, really tired of people using the "PJ didn't change LOTR, so why are they changing WOT". From my PoV, the thematic changes made in LOTR as a whole were much bigger and more impactful that the changes that have been made so far in WoT. They both made cuts and changes to the plots and characters, but we're not far enough in to know if Rafe is going to drop major themes; we know that Jackson did.

True. Also not directed at you personally, but I do want to clarify something about my original post. 

I'm only referring to the fact that LotR leans into its core story despite the cliches (which were already old hat by 2001) whereas WoT seems afraid, almost ashamed of them. Rafe tries so hard to differentiate WoT by emphasizing ultimately superficial things when he should have just owned that EotW is somewhat derivative and that's okay. That's exactly what Robert Jordan did, after all. Focus on taking a well-worn but well-loved story archetype and just do it really, really, really, well. 

This approach brings in people who don't normally like fantasy as well as fans. Worked for Marvel. Worked for Star Wars. Worked for LotR. 

11 hours ago, Sir_Charrid said:

That is all well and good but by the end you have simply remade the fellowship which means you lose a ton of viewers who don't enjoy that kind of fantasy. 

A blogger I follow says it better than I could, and I don't want to parrot him like I came up with this stuff myself. 

"There is another good reason to hew to the books as closely as reasonable.  The books are really damn good.  Why do you think Amazon bought the rights?  The book series has sold tens of millions of copies and each new book hit #1.  It isn’t just that there is a large built-in audience of fans looking for a favorite story told in a different medium, it is that there is an even larger potential audience of future fans who would the story because it’s a great story."

"My biggest critique when I first picked up first book in middle school is that it tracks the plot of the first Lord of the Rings book too closely.  The additional focus on Aes Sedai and Aes Sedai politics and the early introduction of Tar Valon may be aimed at distinguishing the show from Lord of the Rings.  And it does, but it burns time that should have been spent on the main plot, and watering down the worldbuilding otherwise leads to a bigger problem—The Wheel of Time comes off as a very generic fantasy."

I add this: 

Remember that when Peter Jackson was adapting Fellowship in 2001, the story of a chosen one whisked away on a grand adventure by a wise wizard to face ultimate evil was already  tired. Jackson could have been totally justified in saying, "People have seen this before! Sure, it was good enough for the 50's, but this is 2001, and the people need to see something new and fresh!" 

But he didn't. He believed in the source material. 

So congrats, Rafe. You changed WoT to make it less generic and somehow only made it even more generic. Nice. 

5 minutes ago, Blackbyrd said:

See now I just want to make the Aiel Perrin frees up a midget- and that small mofo go savage- just to see the hate.

Likewise, I would love to see the next season hyper sexualize the domination that Egwene undergoes at the hands of the Seanchan, just to see the hate. 

5 minutes ago, Gothic Flame said:

A 10ft ogier going toe-to-toe with a similar sized trolloc...pity that only happens in the books.

Best we can hope for now it Loial fighting a midget Trolloc. 

5 minutes ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

Except if they are untrained and doing this, imagine how stupid strong you have to make them after training them up to an aes sedai level. and then you have to make the dragon just that much stronger on top of that. which goes back to power creep.

Furthermore Nynaeve has had all sorts of time to shine in the series and really didn't need more

Definitely. IMO, it's a question of impatience, insecurity, and inability to trust the audience's intelligence. 

1. Impatience: Level up the characters right from the get go/fast forward their character development to get to the "good" stuff from the books more quickly. 

2. Insecurity: "Oh no! We have to write an interesting, engaging character who is ostensibly just a normal, average person with untapped potential? What ever are we to do?!" 

3. Inability to trust audience intelligence: "Modern American audiences aren't going to sit through 7 episodes with characters who don't do magic! Up the magic! Up the action!"