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.

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.

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?

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

I have discussed the books throughout this thread. Confusing. I first started reading the series when I was 16. I think the books 1-4 had been published at that time. And I knew nothing about them other than my dad said “try this - you’ll love it.” And all the “breadcrumbing” you mention happens in the first 50 pages. Even more in the first 100 and then 200. You are entitled to your opinions, but not your own facts. If you liked the show, fine. If you think it couldn’t have been better adapted, fine. If you thought the first book was confusing, that’s becoming a stretch. And to say that it wasn’t clear from early into the first book that this series was going to be about the Dragon Reborn… that is really stretching things. Seriously, spend a couple hours re-reading the first third of EOTW. I really think you may have forgotten.

First, the “slavish aping of LOTR” is pretty much over after leaving the Shire I mean the Two Rivers. And the lore, which is the thing that makes WOT so awesome, pretty much immediately sets it apart. Second, if you couldn’t tell the EOTW was about the Dragon Reborn within the first hundred pages or so… I don’t know what to tell you. I think you need to dust off the book. Because I think you’re seriously misremembering. I mean, the Prologue to all the talk about the Dragon Reborn, to Tam’s fever dream, to pretty much the whole book being written from Rand’s POV… what was unclear? And finally, my use isn’t consistent with a fan of the books?? I think I’ve pretty well established my bona fides by now. I LOVED Books 1-6, and the show would have had a much better chance at success if they had been more faithfully adapted. That doesn’t mean down to every single page. Of course not. Heck I supported moving Thom and Min to much later in the show. Certain changes made sense.

Agree. Can’t believe they left out the TAR dream sequences with the boys and Ishy in the first season. And then spent like 10 mins in Shadar Logoth. In the second episode. What a mess.