RJ chose the Prologue to be the prologue for a reason. It is an awesome intro to the series and immediately sets up the concepts of reincarnation and the taint/madness associated with the male Saidin (not to mention traveling and a few other goodies) which are both essential to the series. It would have worked equally well in the TV series. The show's decision to depart from this, coupled with "we don't know if it is a boy or a girl," coupled with the "who is the dragon" non-mystery pretty much doomed the show from the start. EOTW was far and away the easiest book to adapt to screen - all they had to do was stick to the story - and they botched it horribly.

Thank you for locating this. This is what I was referring to. One particular mod went off and started banning people just for using a perfectly acceptable (and appropriate, in my opinion) word for a while. Thankfully, this practice no longer appears to be in effect. And I think critics of the “woke” adaptation have been largely vindicated at this point.

Um. For a while there was at least one mod on here banning accounts just for using the word “woke.”

Lol ok bub. You do you. It was a joke. But like all good humor premised in a kernel of truth. The “X is much better at talking to girls” is a running gag throughout the early books. I think I counted it at least 6 or 7 times in my recent reread of EOTW. As for the rest of your point, again, this is how books are adapted to screen. You replace inner narrative with dialogue. It isn’t that hard when you have an ensemble cast on a journey. And WOT - at least the early books - does not have an inordinate amount of internal dialogue. (The internal dialogue gets much worse when all the Aes Sedai skirt smoothing / politicking really picks up in the later books and, guess what, that should have been massively trimmed in the show). Pretending this was hard or unusual is just dumb. You’re making excuses for a bad adaptation.

Killing two whitecloaks was enough. It certainly was in the book. But… they cut it from the show. They omitted Elyas from season one. So: for those keeping score at home, Rafe devoted 1/8th of his screen time to a story in Tar Valon about a made up warder, and excised an actually interesting story from EOTW about an actual former warder who actually sets Perrin’s arc in motion. Why was this change necessary? Only Rafe knows. Gee, it almost seems like it would have been way easier to just tell the darned story. Change begets change begets change.

Again, a few lines of dialogue… to anyone but most likely Mat while they’re on the run (which was entirely excised from the show’s EIGHT HOURS of screen time) would have fixed this. This is how you properly adapt a book to screen. Internal thoughts - if they actually matter - are converted into dialogue with another character. It isn’t as hard as you guys are making it out to be.

Okaaayy… and all that internal dialogue could be replaced with two or three sentences spoken to Egwene. “Gee I’m really sad and upset about violence. Woe is me. Etc.” It’s not that hard. This is how you adapt a book to screen.

Obviously I was exaggerating for comedic effect. But there really isn’t any internal dialogue that’s all that important in EOTW. If so, name it.

Found this article describing what I saw: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2021/11/21/the-wheel-of-times-biggest-problem-seems-totally-avoidable/

The internal dialogue in EOTW is pretty limited and generally useless. It’s about 90% one boy wishing he could talk to girls as well as Matt/Rand/Perrin. The internal dialogue expands in later books when we start getting more female POVs… and it’s still pretty useless.

LOL dude that is a charitable take! But props for optimism.

K. I’ll just head down to the street corner… or I could use basic common sense. How about this: how about you set out, with citations, the stuff in EOTW you found to be a red herring or confusing? I’m not saying there won’t be any mysteries left - it’s BOOK ONE of a planned series - but I’d genuinely be interested to see your list of what you found so confusing.

Nah, it really is that easy. RJ didn’t toss a bunch of red herrings into EOTW - aside from some of the Isam/Malkier stuff toward the end which was of marginal importance. And I suppose you could also add the Ba’alzamon-was-actually-Ishy headfake if you want, although I’m not sure that’s really a problem. I keep saying it because that’s really all I can do when someone is misremembering. I’ll say it again. You really need to go back and read EOTW. RJ spends the vast majority of the book spoon feeding the core lore to the series. Give it a shot! I think you’ll agree with me.

You need to go back and read EOTW. I was surprised upon a recent re-read how easily all the basic pieces of lore and mechanics are explained through exposition of the characters. It should have been easy to faithfully adapt the vast majority of this book in eight hours of runtime. Contentions to the contrary simply make no sense. Much bigger changes /deletions were absolutely necessary to Books 7+, but the TV series never got there.

Somehow, other successful shows make this work. And funding was not the issue. The issue was that the end product and viewership didn’t justify the funding, in part because the production looked like cheap garbage. How they spent hundreds of millions on this is beyond me.