8 minutes ago, KakitaOCU said:

That line is somewhat frieghtening and accurate.  Having a great breadth of knowledge of what people have done or might do actually allows for extra knowledge the common folk don't have as well as more knowledge on how to apply it. 

It's just extremely stupid that the Gleemen are portrayed as some kind of danger to the status quo. This isn't Soviet Russia. This is Randland. There isn't some ancient conspiracy about the past that's being covered up. The idea that they're called "glee-men" not because they bring glee and do party tricks and play songs at taverns but because they're hoarding forbidden knowledge and want to throw those in power off their scent is enormously stupid. 

It was just such an obvious attempt to be edgy and cool that it just made me roll my eyes. Same with his story about Owen slitting his own throat at the dinner table. It's just such try-hard writing. 

On 12/11/2021 at 10:10 AM, Skipp said:

Say it with me "THIS WAS NOT A JUDGEMENT ON ALL MEN "

Right. Absolutely correct. 

The man judging shows up everywhere else. 

• Change to the Tinker leadership. Totally pointless, but they made a woman the leader instead of a man like in the books. 
• Lan disobeying Moiraine and entering Shadar Logoth when in the books it was her idea. Show portrays it as Lan's mistake. 
• Egwene w/Valda compared to Rand w/Darkfriend girl. Egwene is strong and gets to stab Valda while Rand runs away from a short, stubby lady who isn't even paying attention to him. 
• Abell Cauthon's character
• No mention of Village Council. Women's Circle given spotlight 
• Nynaeve learns to track because all wisdoms track in the show as opposed to being taught by her father in the books. 
• Playing up the "Nynaeve snuck up on Lan" thing. The writers are just gloating at this point. 
• Egwene placed on equal power level to Logain, as if strength in the power were some kind of currency and Egwene had been wronged in the books for being weaker than any man. 
• Rand and Egwene's conversation about Moiraine in episode 2. In the books, it's framed as both parties being out for themselves. Egwene defends Moiraine because Moiraine tells her nice things about herself, Rand mistrusts her because he doesn't like her closeness with Moiraine. Show just portrays Rand as wrong and stupid and Egwene as right. 
• Tam, a heron marked blademaster, loses to a Trolloc while Nynaeve kills one with ease. 
• Master Luhan, Perrin's male role model, completely excised from his backstory. 
• In not explaining the Saidin/Saidar divide, the show has not shied away from implying that it's men who are tainted and not the male half of the One Power that they draw on which taints them. (This will likely be explained later, so I'm not too bothered by it.) 
• In the books, it takes 6 Aes Sedai to shield Logain. 2 in the show. 
• Mat given a vice to make him "interesting". Perrin kills his wife for the sake of "character development." Meanwhile, Egwene is now a member of the Women's Circle and Nynaeve is superwoman. 

Look closely at the show and you'll find that there's not a single male character in the show who has been leveled up from their book version. Meanwhile, most of the women have been given additional skills or abilities or just had their power levels inflated. 

2 hours ago, jonsnow84 said:

For me this felt a lot more like seeing MTV take a crack at Shannara than HBO taking on Game of Thrones. At least with GOT they had the excuse of running outnof source material. Not sure what Judkins excuse is ?

Lol Shannara Chronicles is one of the worst adaptations of a fantasy novel I've ever seen, and it doesn't get nearly enough credit for being as bad as it is. Not quite Eragon, but close. 

That being said, I think if you laid it out on a spectrum with Shannara on one end and GoT on the other, WoT would be right in the middle and maybe a tick or two towards Shannara's end. Shannara was a terrible adaptation and also a total disaster. WoT is just a bad adaptation and a decent but often cringy TV show. 

Thom having a guitar instead of a flute is, in my opinion, a much smaller deal than the fact that he seems the play the thing about as well as I did when I was 12 and just getting started with lessons. 

At some point, he's gonna have to really shred on that thing for me to believe that he ever stepped anywhere near a noble court. Unless they've totally excised that part of his character, which is entirely possible. 

Also, the line, "We call ourselves gleemen because it sounds less dangerous. Nothing more dangerous than a man who knows the past" is up there for the dumbest line in the series so far. 

Lol "masculine energy." This show's female characters have more masculine energy than the male characters. 

4 minutes ago, WheelofJuke said:

they could've gotten Thom a flute and harp just like in the books!

 

You know, I actually was so sure when I saw Episode 3 for the first time that this depiction of Thom was spot to to the books. It was only when I went back and realized that I was actually thinking of a Kurt Cobain biography I read once that I remembered Thom was supposed to be a court bard and not Bradley Cooper from A Star is Born. 

4 minutes ago, WheelofJuke said:

I have guitars that are worth thousands. 

 

THOUSANDS? *crunches numbers* that would mean allocating .01% of the show's budget on a guitar! They could have given darkfriend girl a dozen nose rings for that price! 

So, I'm a little behind. I just finished episode 4. 

Ranking: 

4 then 2 then 3 then 1. 

General thoughts are that the series is pretty meh. As an adaptation of WoT, it's a travesty, but as a completely unrelated TV show which just happens to bear the same name, it's fine. 

The worst parts of my viewing experience are always when I realize they've pointlessly changed something from the books for no other reason than to prove they could. 

The best parts are actually when they totally abandon the books. Favorite scene from Episode 1 was the lantern lighting (but that may just be the weeb in me talking) and Episode 4 (the most different yet) was on pace to be an 8/10 until a German U-boat spontaneously appeared in the last 10 minutes and sank it with a torpedo the hull. (5/10). 

Viewed on its own merits, the show delivers a cringeworthy bit of dialogue roughly every 10 minutes, but that could be ignored if it didn't suffer from such a bad case of "mediocre writers posing as good writers" syndrome. 

You can see the insecurity of the writers in how they seem incapable of just writing a scene. Everything is overwritten. Consider that the first season of Game of Thrones is mostly just people talking. Normal, well written scenes which are engaging because the characters are engaging. 

Egwene getting pushed off a cliff? Not subtle. Matt's parents being useless? Not subtle. Perrin killing his wife? Not subtle. There's a scene in Episode 4 where Rand is confronted by a farmer with a bow and says something about how the farmer doesn't mean to kill him because he's holding the bowstring in his fist instead of his fingers. This scene checks all the boxes of what makes "interesting" writing. There's conflict and a "clever" resolution which tells us something about Rand. However, at the same time it just feels so contrived and artificial. And this type of writing is all over the place. It's the kind of stuff that amateur writers crank out because they've heard all about how "details bring scene to life!" but they don't understand that the point of specific details is to make a scene feel real. In contrast, so many WoT scenes just seem so meticulously constructed that my attention is actually drawn to their artificiality. 

On 12/12/2021 at 7:24 AM, WheelofJuke said:

Secondly, I don't care what instrument they wished to equip Thom with, but with the budget they have AT LEAST USE A REAL INSTRUMENT.

To be fair, a real guitar can cost upwards of 250 dollars. That's a whole .0025% of the money they had allocated for that episode. Rafe was faced with a tough choice. Get Thom an instrument worthy of his character or give the darkfriend girl a nose ring, without which she would have had no memorable characteristics whatsoever. 

5 minutes ago, MaxZorin said:

What difference could that possibly make?   

They aren't using dialogue from the books for ANY characters, so why is Perrin noteworthy in this regard?

With Perrin specifically, it's a huge part of his character that he doesn't really talk much. Much of his character is developed via the reader eavesdropping on his thoughts. 

Thus, developing Perrin's character in the TV show is difficult because having him talk more would undermine this fundamental aspect of his character. 

That being said, the showrunners seemed to have no problem at all undermining all sorts of other things, so why they singled out this aspect of Perrin to try depicting accurately is a mystery to me.