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.

  On 6/27/2025 at 3:22 PM, Raal Gurniss said:

Thread is Locked.

"W" Discussion is done, you've all had an opportunity to vent it out, and we lost a member because of it.

 

Starting Today, any posts that start talking about "W" will be removed/edited.

Don't like it, take it up with the other admins.".

 

.........

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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. 

  On 6/26/2025 at 6:24 PM, king of nowhere said:

this is a really bad thing to say.

this forum doesn't ban people on opinions, and there are posters on both sides of the argument. every discussion I've seen has been civil and respectful. nobody is banned for expressing opinions respectfully.

 

what kind of people are chased off by civil discussion?

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

  On 6/26/2025 at 9:49 AM, Mailman said:

I don't really think you did it for comedic effect and if so it was a total failure. It is still an absolutely insane overexaggeration.

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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. 

  On 6/25/2025 at 4:03 PM, Kaleb said:

I agree in part, and wish they would have done something like that. They could have done it with a scene where Perrin discusses killing Leila with Elyas. But if we skip the fridging, it would still fall short of the self-loathing that Perrin falls into based on the Ravens scene, so they would have to devote serious time to some other terrible thing Perrin did or contemplated doing.

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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.  

  On 6/25/2025 at 3:59 PM, Kaleb said:

That... is one reading, I guess?

 

Another massive internal dialogue theme in TEOTW is Rand's struggling over the Winternight revelation that Tam is not his biological father. I can't recall a single time he even mentions this to another character, but it's a huge part of the story for him. 

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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. 

  On 6/25/2025 at 3:28 PM, Kaleb said:

He just did. The Ravens chapter is foundational to Perrin's character in the books.

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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. 

  On 6/25/2025 at 3:39 AM, Mailman said:

Rubbish. 90% is an insanely epic over exaggeration. I would wager that just the internal dialogue for Perrin during the raven's pursuit completely outweighs the entire books wishing they could talk to the girls segments.

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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/

  Quote

The Wheel Of Time’s Biggest Problem Seems Totally Avoidable

I’ve already written a fairly long and detailed review of the first episodes of The Wheel Of Time on Amazon Prime. I’m also penning recaps for individual episodes (you can read the first one here).

 

But I wanted to address one big problem I have with the show that I’ve received some pushback over from some readers (while others wholeheartedly agree). In my review and in my YouTube review I note that everything feels very clean, as though it’s never been lived in. The village of Emond’s Field looks too much like a set.

Nothing feels real, it all feels sort of fake. My colleague Paul Tassi messaged me after starting the show: “Why does this show look so low budget?”

 

And that’s the thing. It’s not that everyone is too clean necessarily—it’s not any one thing I can pinpoint exactly. The whole thing just feels super low budget. And that’s crazy, right? Because Amazon is reportedly spending $10 million per episode, but this looks Legend of the Seeker, not at all on par with Game Of Thrones or The Witcher.

 

I think a lot of this comes down to cinematography and editing / post-production. It’s also, to some degree, the special effects. Magic looks fine, but things like the Trollocs (man-beast fill-ins for orcs) look like they’ve been plucked from another decade. The real culprit, though, I believe is the cinematography.

Maybe a different filter or choice of cameras would help. But right now everything is so vivid it makes costumes and sets look like costumes and sets. This is similar, if not identical, to the problem you get when your TV has the “true motion” setting (called different things on different sets I believe) which results in the “soap opera effect.”

 

That’s caused when a TV’s settings play back video at a refresh rate higher than the source material via something called motion interpolation. Even the best-looking show will suddenly look fake—ironically, the attempt to make it look more real removes all the camera trickery that makes sets and costumes not look like sets and costumes.

 

Weirdly, The Wheel of Time and its producers have managed to somehow give the show its own version of the soap opera effect, which makes everything just too vivid fake looking. I do think without this effect, the sets and costumes (which are very detailed!) would look much better.

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  On 6/25/2025 at 1:27 AM, Yamezt said:

But it also makes me wonder: Could Wheel of Time have been better adapted if it leaned more into internal dialogue rather than shying away from it?

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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. 

  On 6/24/2025 at 8:09 PM, RextheDog said:

 

I had a theory more based on hope than anything, which will never be proved either way, but my theory was the show started so clean and simple becuase that is how the early books were written, simplistic fantasy with characters with fairly basic stories......theres many theories as to why the books got so much better as they progressed and im not here to discuss them, but my theory was that as the show progressed, it would get deeper and darker as per the books doing the same....

 

it started to head in this direction in season three and i was secretly hoping it had found its feet around the same time Jordan did in the books.....

 

it was just a theory and im not trying to say Jordans books were as simple as the show, just a progression into a deeper told story...

 

hence why the sets looked so clean, to Mimic that 'simplistic' world view... 

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

  On 6/24/2025 at 3:07 PM, Samt said:

You’re missing the point.  Dedicated fans re-reading the book and understanding all of the lore drops is not the metric here.  You need to find people with no context or history with the series and have them casually read TEotW.  Then, see if they can explain the details of the lore after reading through it once.  

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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. 

  On 6/23/2025 at 9:38 PM, king of nowhere said:

you keep repeating that, but i do believe you suffer from donning kruger effect here. you already know the lore, you already know which bits of exposition are important and which are fluff, and you already know how each bit fits into each other bit. you also know very well the main plot, so you are not distracted by trying to follow up what happens to rand & others while also getting blasted by seemingly random pieces of unrelated exposition.

…

If you find it super easy, maybe it's because you already know it, and not because it's actually easy.

 

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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. 

  On 6/22/2025 at 4:40 AM, Sabio said:

Just not sure if WOT can ever be adapted properly to the screen.  To me it suffers from what a lot of books suffer from when someone tries to make a movie or series from it.  Books can go into so much more detail that a series can't.  I think there is simply too much explaining that needs to be done that there isn't time to do on the screen.  The dream world, Aiel war, the Horn, heroes of the Horn,  Aiel, AOL, the Dragon, wolf dreams, Forsaken, one power, male half, female half etc.   Even Perin is a lot of internal dialogue which doesn't work well on the screen.  Game of Thrones was made in mind with it finally going to a series on TV. WOT wasn't.  I'm just not sure with the time constraints of TV series that is could ever be done properly.  

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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. 

  On 6/21/2025 at 10:57 PM, king of nowhere said:

it's not much a matter of "possible", but of "economically convenient".

 

bringing wot to screen requires a lot of money. to do it properly, it also requires advanced planning - you have to make an outline for all the season and stick to it, you need to pay the actors in advance to avoid having to change the plot because an actor becomes unavailable, you need to film the seasons back to back to be able to make one season per year, because at the pace they were using the viewers had mostly forgotten that the show even exhisted, after two years since the previous season.

and this even reduces some costs - it's cheaper to gather all the actors and workers and film two seasons in a row than having to restart all over every time - but it involves considerable risk. it means pulling out 500 millions or more without any certainty that you will have a return on investment, and without having any way of recouping any of those if things go wrong. 

 

and then those costs have to be justified. the show must be successful enough to bring new viewers, enough to pay its cost. which is a problem of its own. there are hundreds upon hundreds of tv shows on amazon prime. how many people are going to pay the membership just for one of those? quite hard to establish, but with so much stuff being produced, it's kinda hard to justify a single project bringing in so many new viewers. 

GOT is often used as a benchmark, but GOT had it easy; at its time, there were no large fantasy projects, so people interested in those only had one choice. at the moment, how many fantasy shows are there? I don't know because i don't follow, but I know there are many. it's easier to attract new paying customers when you are making a big fantasy show where there are none, than when you are making a big fantasy show in addition to a dozen others. 

 

so, making a wot adaptation is possible; in fact, they were doing it.

But making a wot adaptation that is economically convenient? making a good wot adaptation with the restrictions placed by limited fundings, by a studio that is hedging its bets because it wants to be able to pull the plug on the project with minimal losses if things ever start going downhill? 

Finding a studio that is willing to bet the money on the production, knowing that most likely it won't be successful and will go at a loss?

Good luck with that.

And frankly, if someone pulled that kind of money and effort, I'd rather they adapt the mistborn trilogy or the stormlight archive - both of which probably would be a lot easier to adapt and work better on the screen, due to cinematic action sequences.

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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. 

Re-reading EOTW currently and… absolutely the story could have been told, with minimal changes, in EIGHT HOURS of a season.

There actually isn’t that much “internal dialogue” - much of the lore is plainly spelled out through exposition of the characters.

I think a lot of the “this was too hard to adapt” crowd have forgotten that EOTW was a pretty simple, and great, story. The more significant cuts and changes would have happened in the latter half of the series (i.e. much of the AS politicking, Bowl of the Winds subplot, Andor Succession subplot, Faile Rescue subplot, etc.)

None of this requires AI - although reducing the cost of special effects would never be a bad thing. All it really requires is a showrunner and producers who actually want to tell the story.

  On 6/16/2025 at 7:28 PM, Cipher said:

Actually when I read EOTW I didn’t read critically and didn’t realize Rand was the DR—in my novice high fantasy reading.  I knew he was the protagonist, but figured he and the Dragon were different people.  I need to read it again and see how blind I was. I would like to listen to Rosamund Pike’s reading.

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I wonder if Rosamund was like “WTF this is totally different than the show” when she was reading TEOTW? If I ever meet her I’ll ask LOL.

Another big problem - aside from the terrible adaptation - is the show just looked so cheaply produced and yet somehow cost a fortune to make. 
 

Here is a good example. Taken right from the show…

Good Lord. That is the fakest damned pyre I’ve ever seen. And everything looks too clean, too staged. The whole show looked like this. Why?

  On 6/13/2025 at 5:36 AM, Sabio said:

That is the big problem, 10 minutes of a 1-hour show setting up just what's going on?

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Prologue would have taken 5mins tops. Perfectly appropriate for a cold open to the title sequence. 

The foretelling is far too literal. That would have been a good flashback for some point later in the series.

The prologue is amazing for so many reasons because it shows the end of the Age of Legends and sets up the entire premise of the series: that Lews Therin, the Dragon, tried to imprison the Dark One, that he tainted his magic source in the process, that this drives every man who can channel insane, and, oh, by the way, the Dragon will be Reborn, doomed to the same madness, and will be both savior and destroyer. 
 

EFFING AWESOME. And if anyone is confused by that, guess what? It is all explained in the VERY FIRST EPISODE (had it been more faithful to the book) through the narratives of Moiraine and the crowd scene around Fain. And it will be explained AGAIN in the next episode from Ishy’s perspective in Rand’s first TAR dream sequence (had it been more faithful to the book).

If you don’t believe me, reread the first 100 pages of EOTW!! This was a LAYUP and they WHIFFED. 
 

Oh, and yes, you would do it exactly the way OP described, feeding the new Dragonmount into a way better title sequence with way better music. 

The whole “tone” thing is a valid criticism, but it could refer to several different things…

I agree that Rafe’s decision to “age up” the characters right out of the gate was a mistake. Rand and Egwene having sex in the first episode - or the allusion to it - didn’t sit well with me. Same for Perrin having a wife. Neither was a huge deal for me but just a few of the several “uh oh, they’re going a very different direction” moments early on. So in that sense the tone of the show was “darker” I guess. And keep in mind I’m only speaking to the first season because I dropped out a couple episodes into season 2.

And I actually hoped the show would go darker in terms of fleshing out the Forsaken and making them more nuanced and competent than the sometimes cartoon villains in the books. 

But I also thought the “tone” had a way more “Young Adult” vibe than GOT just in the way it was lit/shot/produced. GOT always looked dirty, lived in, and real. WOT looked too clean, pretty, and fake. I don’t work in film so I cannot tell you why it looked that way, but it just did. It looked like one of those cheaply produced YA shows you’d see on a budget network like the CW, etc.

So end of the day, there was a lot about this show which just seemed off. And this was before even getting to the massive changes to the story and lore which is a different but possibly related issue.

Put all this together, and it really isn’t a surprise to me that the show failed. The surprise was that it even got three seasons. I genuinely believe that if they had stuck closer to the books, really engaged with the lore the same way the EOTW book did, and filmed it in a “realer” grittier style, the show would have been a smashing success. 

  On 6/10/2025 at 12:58 PM, Elder_Haman said:

Something tv tries purposefully to avoid. If your tv show needs to explain a foundational concept multiple times from different perspectives, it’s failing. 

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“Needs”? Nah, I thought it was pretty clear from the start. But hearing it from the perspectives of the common folk to Moiraine to Ishy is fun and interesting.

  On 6/10/2025 at 12:51 PM, Elder_Haman said:

It’s neither of these things. What it is is simply a desire to dance on the shows’s grave and point and laugh at all the people who enjoyed it. 
 

There’s no point engaging. 

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Def not dancing on any graves or laughing at anyone. Just an interesting conversation. My hope is that someone else makes a run at a better adaptation when Sony eventually sells or gives up the rights.

I have my own major problems with the books… namely how horribly I thought the series bogged down after Book 6. I thought this show could actually fix a lot of the problems with the books by tightening up the latter half considerably. But for me it never got off the launch pad. 

  On 6/10/2025 at 12:47 PM, king of nowhere said:

Of course you don't get a scene-by-scene conversion. You know that. 

This feels like a bad faith argument. Moving the goalpost, too

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Not bad faith. Genuinely don’t remember. Been a couple years since I watched Season 1. I’m just enjoying my re-read of EotW and keep thinking “damn, why wasn’t this in the show?” “where was this?” and “this dialogue would have explained everything - where was this?” and “man, they could have even kept some of “the mystery” without trashing the lore if they’d just done this!”

But it really does put the lie to the argument that the prologue was confusing in the book and wouldn’t have worked in the show. I’m only 250 pages into EotW and the prologue has already been explained from multiple perspectives several times. 

  On 6/10/2025 at 11:54 AM, king of nowhere said:

That's simply not true. The first seaseon has at least a scene with "ba'alzamon" for rand and one for perrin, and i don't distinctly remember one for mat but i think he also had one

Three sequences, with the premium on screen time, is a pretty good investment

As for shadar logoth, it got more or less the same time that it got in the books

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I must have forgotten these from the first season. When Rand meets Ishy in the room with the crazy sky and he monologues about what happened in the Prologue… did that happen in the show? I don’t remember it if it did.