8 hours ago, WhiteVeils said:

I can't say for sure, to be honest, and this may be stepping out of bounds.  But I think you were primed, before the show, to watch the book Wheel of Time put on the screen. And I sympathize, I really do.  I think you went into it with a set of expectations about what it would be going into the first episode, and it wasn't that.   I don't know what expectation specifically it was that left you feeling you had crushed expectations.  Maybe it was a small lore change 'the Dragon could be a girl or a boy' or 'four ta'veran' or it being Marin instead of Bran in charge of the activities, or Perrin being married or Mat's family, or whatever...but that thing pushed the show into 'different' rather than 'same' for you.  And after that, you were disappointed, and maybe angry.  Anger as an emotion comes from having expectations not met.  And you couldn't see why the showrunners made that change. You felt focused on the differences, now, looking at every change from the books as a bad thing. They had to be; they obviously were.  Each change had ramifications down the line, and each change  would have ripple effects that meant the story was going to get further and further away from what you loved. So even if it was a minor change, it meant, for you, that the end story was never going to be what you remembered in the books.  You couldn't see that there could be good changes from the books, not really.  It was a focus on what you lost.  But you were beginning to look for those changes...look very closely.  And that is what was priming the pump to look for the bad.  If it was just like you imagined it would be, would you have hated the CGI?  Is the color saturation bad or just different enough from GOT that you are anxious about it?  I don't have those answers...I'm just trying to put myself in your shoes.  

Peter Jackson taught the school on how to do adaptations.  And his first lesson to anyone who wanted to adapt a work was 'start at the end and work forward'.  Think about what pieces you have to have in place to set up the big, epic conclusion for the story that you are adapting, and then work backwards, cutting, combining, retelling, and even adding new stuff, to get everything in place to tell the end of the story and have everyone understand it.   Then you go to the powerful scenes earlier and put the pieces in place for those until you've captured as much as possible.
They couldn't do this for GOT: The end hadn't been written...and they paid a price for it.

WOT has a much more cerebral, complicated ending already in place than LOTR. But you can tell they are adapting backwards the way Peter Jackson said. That's why the episode on the Warder Bond now...it's all about setting up Alanna. Just as an example. Episode 1 is packed with end game Memory of Light stuff. 

I went into the show with as few expectations as possible.  I was so happy to see all the main characters at all...expecting major cuts.  I expected it to be terrible.  Afraid of it, perhaps.  Every moment, or visual reference, or phrase or quote from the book I was totally happy for.  I was looking for them in a positive way.  And for everything that was different, I had a lot of fun trying to figure out what the payoff would be further down the line.  Huh...Perrin is married, and killed his wife.  How would that make visible his ax/hammer conflict, which is so internal, later on?  Would that impact his relationship with Faile...make it understandable why he is so overprotective and she so prickly and determined about that overprotection? That made sense to me.  I looked for how the changes might improve the story, or at least adapt it to a visual medium, and I felt a lot better about it. There are things I don't like. I wish they spent a lot more time with the boys. I'm 100% sure the ending was severely marred by the loss of Barney Harris, and I'm sure that he was meant to be stabbed by Fain, and Perrin was supposed to lead Lan to Moiraine. That would have been so much better.  But that was impossible, so it was changed, and I didn't like the change. But I think they can make up for that and make things better, and I'm keeping my 'pump' primed to accept it for what it is.

Sorry. Rambling.
 

I can see why you would think this, but it isn’t the case.  I told my son that adapting it would be hard, that events and characters would be cut,  that it might be disappointing.  We knew there was no Caemlyn, no Elayne, things like that but all of that was fine and to be at least somewhat expected.
 

Then we saw the first episode and it was, frankly, shocking.  Every single thing about EF was, and is, wrong.  
 

But we kept watching, I told my wife and daughter not to ask me for clarifications since everything was different, and settled in to see what would happen.  I went through something like the transformation you describe when I realized that this was a different story with different main characters.  But this other story doesn’t work either, and the reason it doesn’t work is that while the show changes everything important, it kept a lot of small things, which alienates us all over again from the new story they are telling.

The result is the worst of all possible worlds.  I went in with low expectations, but I never imagined the show could possibly be this wrong.  Not bad, not even a bizzaro world version, but wrong, a corruption.  
 

6 hours ago, WhiteVeils said:

I've heard the phrase 'Priming the pump' used before.  Titanic was a huge box office blockbuster. It made many people cry, was widely acclaimed and adored when it came out. The special effects were considered amazing, the lovestory heartbreaking, the end tragic. 

 

I was not interested in seeing it. Love stories were not my thing.  I didn't care for the actors. I had objections to some of the themes, and I thought the whole thing was just ...bleh.

 

I did see it, eventually, when it came out on video.  I thought much of it was hilariously stupid. The love stories were as cheesy as I expected. I could find a million plot holes that didn't make any sense at all to me.  I thought the characters acted ridiculously.  Watching the movie verified all my preconceptions. I thought it was ridiculous.

Because of course it did. I was not putting on my suspension of disbelief..I was making a choice to mock it and laugh at it and not let myself enjoy the love story for what it was, because that was what I thought it would be. 

But my reaction to the movie was not because it was badly done. It was no reflection on the show, the special effects, the writing, the acting, none of that. It was a reflection of me...of who I was and how I came into the show and chose to look at the show.    I chose, subconsciously, to ignore the setups for the tender moments, the actual meaning of certain scenes, to 'shorthand' them in a way that, then, to my mind, depicted them as ridiculous. That was my choice.

Lan's expression of grief, as a designated mourner where his stated duty was to express communal grief for a group of men who were not allowed culturally to express strong emotion except through such specific channel, can certainly be ridiculous of you ignore that whole cultural context and want to see it that way.

Digging up the horn of Valere 'just to give it to Padan Fain' seems ridiculous if you ignore the fact that Fal Dara was being overrun with trollocs and they had to retrieve it or it would fall into the hands of the Shadowspawn. 

There's tons of these examples...places you can choose to think it's ridiculous just like I thought Titanic was ridiculous.  Many would be WOT readers feel the same way about the books...they encounter scenes that they feel are so ridiculous they quit the series.  Maybe they decided before they started that this is too much like LOTR, and are waiting for the hobbits to come out. Or maybe fantasy worlds at all are ridiculous.  Or maybe Mat and his badger is stupid and childish and what are these grown men doing fussing like pre-teens about who knows more about girls?  It's a choice that's been made, conscious or not, that then feeds into how you perceive the books.  Or the show. The pump is primed.

You're welcome to watch WOT with your pump primed for ridicule. You'll find reasons.  But it doesn't say much more than my attitude towards Titanic actually said about Titanic.

It is just different views.  Sorry if this is too long...Just thinking aloud here I guess.

And yet I was primed to love the show, my son even more so, and yet we didn’t.  
 

This is what so many don’t seem to understand, they think the book lovers were predisposed to dislike the show that they, to use your words, have chosen to not like it.

In fact, the opposite is true, we desperately wanted to like it, choosing to see it as good as possible time after time.  That is how bad the show is, they could have made any other version of the show and we would have liked it.

Instead, they made the worst possible version of the show, a show so bad that the most captive audience, the one most willing to suspend its disbelief, still disliked it.

Don’t believe me, chew on this.  I think every single decision they made was bad.  We live hear in the worst of all possible worlds. And yet I will still watch season 2.  And not to hate watch the show, but because I am more than willing to make the choice you speak of.  

On 1/25/2022 at 9:43 AM, notpropaganda73 said:

 

Two great reads, thanks for sharing. The first I agree with practically everything in it, although I'm still not sure about keeping the Dragon a mystery. But definitely agreed with the Mat section and he is probably the character I'm most interested in for S2 in terms of what they do with him. 

 

The 2nd one is just a really great read. I love seeing the thought that goes in the background of what we're seeing on screen.

That is a shockingly bad review, the things he identifies as positive changes are amongst the worst things about the series, while the things he thinks are bad are all relatively minor.  
 

The change to Loail could not be less significant, it isn’t in the top 100 worse things about the show.  
 

On the other hand the show absolutely destroyed Mat’s character and in trying to make Moiraine more human, completely undermined Moiraine’s competence, making her a different, and far less interesting, person.  
 

A weasel review that attempted to hide its agenda behind the false balance of equal number of reasons.  

7 hours ago, AdamA said:

It's exactly what I mean about downstream impacts. From the perspective of historical lore, the existence of the Eye of the World at all only makes sense because the Aes Sedai of the time knew for sure the dragon had to be reborn as a man. They wouldn't need to create a pool of untainted saidar because saidar isn't tainted. So changing lore to allow for a female dragon now means the storyline no longer matches the world logic, but they feel the need to include the Eye anyway because they want to hit the same plot points, so they shoehorn it in without ever coming up with any satisfying explanation of why the Eye even exists, let alone how it works. Apparently, the Horn of Valere isn't even there any more, so the Eye is just a seal. But there are many seals. So why does the fight even need to take place there? As far as we can tell, because that's what happened in the book is the reason, but the actual reason from the book is gone, so it no longer makes any sense.

 

I still sympathize with whatever happened in the writer's room. If they had people telling them that gendered souls denies the existence of trans and gender-fluid people and the savior has to be male trope is outdated and offensive, fine, but you have to weigh whatever you think you gain by changing that with the harm done to the story. You can't just assume you'll be able to rewrite all the parts that depend on the lore being what it is in a way that is equally coherent and satisfying. It's arrogant to think you can do that, given all the schedule constraints of television, when one of literature's all-time great world builders took decades to craft your starting point. At a certain point, you're better off just writing a different story completely.

This captures what went wrong with the show very well.  And the result is that no one is satisfied.  Book lovers don’t like it because it is so different from the books.  Non readers might like some of the changes for a while (like the dragon mystery) but are ultimately let down because there are too many holes in the story and they haven’t been given enough information for any of it to make sense.

3 hours ago, Spiritweaver1 said:

Just a little more fuel to the fire. Do we think the show Matt can actually get to this point.

 

"Tuon looked at him, squatting there by the map, moving his fingers over its surface, and suddenly she saw him in a new light.  A buffoon?  No.  A lion stuffed into a horse-stall might look like a peculiar joke, but a lion on the high plains was something very different.  Toy was loose on the high plains now.  She felt a chill.  What sort of man had she entangled herself with. "

 

In the books Matt comes from a very solid background with parents who love him.  As the twig is bent so grows the tree say the gardeners.  I would submit that the show Matt depicted so far can never transform into the Matt many of us know and love in the books.  Let alone somebody who can win the heir to Seanchan throne.   He is too far bent as evidenced by his failure to go through the Ways when the fate of the world may be resting on it.  Naturally the show team can do anything they want including turning him into the reincarnation of Ishamael.  Somehow I don't think they are going to get him to the point where I quoted from KoD.   Excuses from show ferrets pay coin little for me.    

That this isn’t evident to everyone makes me question their literacy.

Just like Rand, Mat’s entire character depends upon his upbringing.   Change that and you change everything.  It is the single most important theme in the entire series, and the show has not only missed it, they have overturned it.

At least with Rand they just ignored his relationship with his father rather than destroying it.  
 

The people who are making the show fundamentally misunderstand the books.  It is that simple.  

3 hours ago, notpropaganda73 said:

 

Super interesting, thanks for the response. I can see where you're coming from on that worry, and hadn't really considered it in this way. I think what I liked about it and how I think it might (hopefully) elevate Veins of Gold, is that a realisation informed by his fathers' words feels much more personal in some way. 

 

If we can imagine a perfect production from here on out (I know, just stick with me), and we see Rand's descent and becoming iron and cold and losing his mind etc. And seeing LTTs madness and the Breaking and the prologue from the books. All of that horribleness but the moments of light as well that have you really rooting for Rand. I just think Veins of Gold would be so powerful if he leans on words his father, his true father, had said to him before the journey ever began. 

 

Full disclosure, I'm a bit of a sucker for father-son relationships on film and television. So while I totally get what you're saying and especially in terms of Rand & LTT merging, having broken the world before and on the verge again - on a personal note I think there could be something really powerful about Rand's relationship and love for his father being core to Veins of Gold, calling back to the very first episode. I think/hope that Tam's words will play a part in the realisation, an important part, but something that sort of adds to the whole mixture of things you describe, and that Tam's words add a personal touch to it that will (hopefully) resonate even more for a television audience. 

 

But it will be quite delicate I think and could easily be diminished in the way you've said, I hadn't thought of it in that way, thanks again for sharing.

I too think that Rand’s relationship with Tam is the key moment in the entire series, and yet it is because they have bungled their relationship so badly, ignoring it to focus on their misguided vision of Emond’s Fields, and the development of Egwene and Nynaeve, that I am most disappointed.

The whole series turns on a) Rand’s mostly unseen upbringing and b) his relationship with his mentors (in BK 1 Lan and Thom), and the show ignored both.  
 

I don’t see how they backtrack from that, indeed no one who thought those two things were important would have made the choices they have made.  
 

If there were changes to be made to the series for TV, it should have leaned harder into those themes, not disparaged them.

15 minutes ago, Ralph said:

The mass Healing scene is way over the top, as I said at the time and I think most would agree. 

 

However, it did achieve the following things story wise (meaning it is not just for a moment of cool) :

 

1) Nynaeve demonstrated to all as a channeller the most powerful in a thousand years. (as in the books).

Remember they removed the ability to sense a fellow channeller so until this point Moiraine only knew (suspected) N could channel bc she listens to the wind. Sarah has promised us they have a very good reason for this change, and we have to wafo. I assume they will have a Forsaken hiding in the camp, and they don't want the Aran'gar sex change for obvious reasons. 

 

2) Showing how Nynaeve reacts to Lan dying, to bring out the developing romance. 

This is why he has to have a mortal wound, though that was the bit I disliked most, and it could have been done without it being his throat slit. 

BTW, did anyone else think Lan cut his own throat with his sword, rather than being hit with shrapnel. That's what it looked like to me. (Yes, yes, Lan diminished etc etc.) 

 

3) Forcing M to consider N as a Dragon candidate, despite her age.

Needed to give an excuse to take her to Fal Dara, although I think would have been better if M had wanted to leave her and the others had insisted on bringing her. 

In the books the reason for taking Eg and N to the Eye were very unconvincing. 

 

4) Allowing the gentling of Logain to be an instant decision not considered and discussed. Important for Ep6. 

 

 

I agree that those are all four story reasons, and yet each of those events make the story worse.  Moreover, these story changes are themselves driven by non-story reasons.

1 and 3 are similar reasons , driven by the decision to make a big part of the story arc about who is the dragon and to bring equity to the mystery (a women could be the dragon too).

2 is driven by the desire to accelerate the character arcs, which undermines the development of those same characters.

4 is driven by the decision to focus on aes Sedai politics.  Why you would want to do that is anybody’s guess?

So yes, driven by the story they wanted to tell, but this is a very different and , in my opinion, much worse story, itself driven, not simply in my opinion, by factors themselves extraneous to the story.

59 minutes ago, EmreY said:

 

I've written a lot of things over the years where my first draft doesn't look anything like the final version.  I'd go so far as to bet that everyone has.

 

I grant the evidence is in favour of your more nuanced approach, but it very circumstantial indeed. 

 

Also, how much does Judkins write for the series?

Your first draft won’t be as good as later drafts, but it will show what you care about, what you think is important.

6 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

Nonono, don't try to turn the table. 

There isn't a single fan here who wouldn't acknowledge the problems with the show. I haven't seen anyone doing what you describe here. 

Sure, a lot of fans defend the show. We like it despote the limitations. And we can "defend" some of them, in a "here i see what they wanted to achieve, they missed the mark", "what they did here actually works", "this other thing is not a big deal". But literally nobody denies the show has weaknesses.

 

The bookcloaks, though? 

"The show is crap"

"The show is horrible"

"The show is appalling"

"The show is vomit inducing"

"They didn't get a single thing right"

"Everyone who says anything posite on the show is a fraud"

 

I can easily produce dozens of relevant quotes. Don't you try to pass the other people as the prejudiced ones

 

Yeah, this is completely false.  There are many defenders who defend everything, reflexively.  
 

Ralph, Terry, Jakita something or others, Daddy . . . 
 

Off the top of my head.  
 

There are two that have made somewhat even handed remarks, you and not propaganda.

There are a few “critics” who are pretty vehement, but they give reasons, and at a certain point the reasons add up.  What difference does it make if there is a good thing here or there, if the whole is such an act of violence?
 

But this is all question begging. 

2 minutes ago, notpropaganda73 said:

 

I find this interesting because you see it so often in theatre, where race-bending or gender-bending happens which brings a different lens through which to view a character/relationship/story arc. Having the founding fathers all be POC in Hamilton has a point. Flipping these things don't need to necessarily make a story "better", but can serve to bring a different energy to a character or to make a wider point to the audience, holding up a mirror and all that. 

 

Maybe theatre is just a better medium for that sort of thing though, I dunno. There aren't too many Shakespeare diehards angry that Ruth Negga has played Hamlet because "no way would a mixed race woman be Prince of Denmark!" hahaha

 

You're right in that Arcane has an "easier" job in terms of the adaptation because they could play with the character stories a lot more than adapting from a novel. There's no doubt the writers of S1 are supremely talented though, I'd guess they would have done a great job with WoT as well. 

I just read an article on a new version of MacBeth staring Francis McDormand, which presents Lady MacBeth in a more modern,  sympathetic, and far less hysterical way.  And yet they do it without changing the dialogue at all.  
 

There is lots of room for interpretation and nuance that shifts some of the emphasis, adds depth to certain characters, etc. without taking a sledgehammer to the entire story.  

I would add that one of the differences between notpropaganda73’s view and mine, as it relates to the view of the whole as I see the “story” driven changes and the “agenda” driven changes as linked.  
 

The mystery of the DR is an important story element because they wanted the DR to be inclusive, at least in theory.  This desire for inclusivity then drives the story changes. 
 

Same thing with Ta’varen, the ensemble cast idea, or dividing up the big moments, the opening monologue, etc. None of these decisions are driven by the intrinsic needs of the story, they are driven by externalities, which makes combining them into a good story more difficult (even impossible).  
 

It was always going to be difficult to do a good adaptation of a story this long with this many elements, but they made it so much harder in themselves with these decisions. So I don’t see it as a problem if execution, good execution was never on the table, because the story was never the priority.  

The biggest challenge was always going to be how do you turn 14 books into 8 seasons, and yet somehow after one season we are only one book into the series, so with all the changes they haven’t even begun to cut.  
 

And it makes me sad, not simply because it means the series will never happen, but because the books are being tarnished/replaced in the process.  

Notpropaganda makes a lot of good points, most of which I agree with.

It is interesting that when you add up all these individual points I see a different whole emerging, and hence come to a different conclusion.  
 

At some point a picture comes into focus, but I don’t think this picture can be compelled through reason and argument.  You either see it or you don’t, and this will depend on the person. (Note, that this does not make it subjective.)

22 hours ago, Ralph said:

 

That just shows wanting women to be more obviously in control in this world, so that it can be shown later how wrong that is. 

 

Not evidence that there is any intention of trying to show the men as weaker than the women. 

I will bet you my children’s souls that this is not what they are doing.

Of course, when it doesn’t happen there will be some kind of rationalization, since if there is one thing this series has proved to me is that there are no goal posts that cannot be moved, nothing that cannot be justified.

I really wish people would stop dismissing criticisms by saying that is just an opinion.

Not everything that isn’t a fact, is therefore only an opinion.  
 

Not all opinions are equally valid.  
 

If everything is opinion there is no point in discussing anything, no point in speaking with precision, no point in giving reasons, no point to anything at all.

31 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

in several aspects, the tv show treats men a lot better than the books. for example, men are not dim-witted about women in the tv show. And they also don't have all the stupid bravado and toxic masculinity that the book tries to depict as innate for men. warders in the tv show are depicted as true companions; in the books, their interactions basically amounted to out-staring each other.

 

however, the tv show has made men a lot less capable. tam losing to a single trolloc. the women of emond field killing a trolloc. lan entering shadar logoth without a plan for dealing with mashadar, without even telling anyone of mashadar. nynaeve getting lan at dagger point. stepin accidentally giving logain the chance to break free. lan failing to prevent stepin's suicide. egwene doing all the job when escaping eamon valda, perrin not even throwing a punch when freed. Lord Agelmar turned into an incompetent leader, getting killed with all his men, and five women destroying the whole trolloc army.

None of those episodes is problematic by itself; each and every one of them can be justified.

But, when weighted all together, they all point in the same direction. It's not as bad as men only being damsels in distress - Lan was really badass protecting moiraine in emond field fight, thom merrilin was totally cool in everything he did (we didn't get enough of him), rand and mat handled themselves competently when isolated. Still, most awesome moments were given to women, and most blunders were made by men.

 

So, the show is treating men better than the books in some regards, worse in some others.

It is, however, treating women a lot better than the books. I haven't noticed a single sniffing or hair-pulling in the whole show

This is quite fair, and I agree with the second and third paragraphs.

On women in the books, I do think the portrayal is often flat, with the younger women in particular.  I think the book does a better job with older women.  Moiraine in particular I thought had a lot of depth, Verin, Sorilea, all great characters.  Nyneave, Egwene, and Elayne on the other hand struck me somewhat as caricatures.  However, people seemed to like those characters . . . Anyway, I completely agree that if there is an area where the show could have improved on the books it is by making those three characters in particular more dimensional.

And this is yet another failure which tells us something about the show creators and what they care about. Instead of making Nyneave and Egwene more interesting they made them more important, as if the two were synonymous.  The characters remain flat, they just take up more space, and in the meantime they made one of the more interesting women, Moiraine, both less effectual and with less depth.

Where I really disagree is with the Warders. I found them less effective, and because they were less effective, more subordinate, than in the books.  A mood that was compounded by the fellowship of the campfires, etc.  I don’t think the portrayal of the Warders can be easily separated from the other portrayals of men you rightly identify in the second paragraph.

I do agree, however, that Rafe thinks he is portraying men better, but in my opinion it is a vision of masculinity that is pretty political and alienating, and which undermines the virtues surrounding obligation upon which the books are based.

15 hours ago, KakitaOCU said:

I'm going to risk a comparison here.

GoT takes the approach of showing just how horrible medieval settings were for women and faces it head on while having a few women powerful or skilled enough to rip down that world.  The Show takes the same approach and so fans see what is largely a portrait for medieval times.

Wheel of Time approaches gender imbalance by instead flipping it.  The setting deliberately justifies women being the primary authority and imagines a world where men are stereotyped and often dismissed the way real women suffered for many years.  Because our main three protagonists are still men and men who become powerful enough to dominate the world around them, many people missed the gender topics being broached.

Along comes a TV show that drags them VERY much into focus and makes it abundantly clear what the setting was trying to say and they lose their mind.

I obviously don't say that as a lable for everyone who disliked the show, but if I had a dollar for every person that was confused, outraged or told me I was stupid when I pointed out things like the Aes Sedai being "The Catholic church, but real magic and all women" or other such points, I wouldn't be able to retire, but I also would have made roughly my annual salary.

I think this describes the disagreement about the TV show pretty well, the only disagreement concerns the relationship to the books and hence who is the one taking the pills.

The books treated men and women with respect, in a way that certainly did not reflect historical reality, but the world was not a matriarchal society broadly speaking and the books did not advocate for girl power or make some kind of comment on toxic masculinity.  
 

This is why people of my generation, who first read the books in high school, like them, they reflect their experience of equality and respect.

The show, on the other hand, has entirely different ideas about masculinity, equality, and respect, and those ideas have driven the changes to the story.  They aren’t bringing out something that was already there, they are advocating for different values.  I don’t think those values are something simple like women good, and men bad, they are more complex than that, but these values do include views on gender roles that are intended to be subversive, and this subversion is not supported by the books.  
 

So there is a disconnect, and because these changes were not done with any particular subtlety (a sledgehammer is more like it), the disconnect becomes overt.
 

2 hours ago, Terry05 said:

I remember them being pretty much the same ?‍♂️
And some of the WoT fans do appear to be uniquely toxic from what I’ve seen ?

Another bad faith argument coupled with an insult.  In the political context of the changes to the show the word toxic here is loaded.

3 hours ago, Terry05 said:

Meh the people criticising are the same as GoT… this change was pointless it doesn’t fit my head canon so I don’t like it. A valid opinion but when they try insulting other people for liking the show they lose all credibility with me.

And yet your post is a dismissive insult based on a willful Mischaracterization of all that has been said.  If people insult you it is because you deserve it.  It is not a good faith argument to reduce the criticisms to the show is bad because it does not conform to what is in my head.  No one has said anything like this, that you think they have says something about you not their arguments.

30 minutes ago, JeffTheWoodlandElf said:

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. 

Obviously I don’t know these people at all, but this fits for me.

I have a lot is sympathy for her, and think she is in an impossible position.  
 

I might even have some sympathy with Rafe, except in his public comments he comes across as . . . uncharitable at best.  

1 hour ago, Terry05 said:

To each there own. This is really nothing new. I was on Westeros when GoT first came on and it was exactly the same - show haters, show defenders and people in the middle who just enjoyed the show for what it was. The main difference now is the increased use of social media

This kind of hand waving away the criticisms is intellectually dishonest.  The situations are not at all analogous, and certainly cannot be presumed.

For my part, I was very excited for GOT TV because I really loved the books, but the e tv show was so good it has completely replaced the books in my imagination.  Every character, with the possible exception of Jon Snow, has become their TV versions.  

The difference between the two shows is as big as the universe.  You can’t put them on the same scale.  
 

People who defend the show really don’t understand the criticisms if they think they are the usual people don’t like change.

4 minutes ago, Terry05 said:

Depending on your tastes I'd recommend the following Amazon Tv:

The Expanse

The Boys

Hunters

Jack Ryan

Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

I haven’t watched any of the others but Marcellus Mrs. Maisel is one of the best shows I have seen in years.

Hanna is also good.

I have to admit I will watch the series no matter what.  
 

I can’t possibly dislike it more than I already do, but I have been reading the series for 30 years, it is the only thing I still have from high school, I can’t imagine not watching the series, no matter how much I hate it.

This is how the forsaken were turned, out of the betrayal of their love.

1 minute ago, DaddyFinn said:

That is obviously not true. What makes you say that?

I like tEotW but it's just o different from the rest of the series. The prose, silly dialogue, structure. Books 2&3 suffer from the same IMO. I hate the way that characters repeat the same words and lines during dialogue, I hate Ishy's evil monologues during dream sequences, the first books all end similarly etc. 

 

Tl;dr I like books 1-3 but I wish they weren't so different from the rest. I know why they are and I can't really blame RJ.

 

See this is one area the tv show could been better.  Instead of going for big changes, make these kinds of changes to dialogue, foreshadowing, make the dream sequences more significant and better, really lean into the prologue, take advantage that this time you have foreknowledge of where everything is going.

A season that spent 7 episodes on the book faithfully, and 1 episode on the theft of the horn could have been better than the book.

58 minutes ago, KakitaOCU said:

Explain please?  See, it's arguments like this that lose me when there's no given explanation of what plots are undermined and how.

This has been explained time and time again by so many different people.  I just tried again above.

38 minutes ago, Jaysen Gore said:

See, this is the kind of reaction that makes it hard to discuss. Because for me, WoT is about a world where the balance between Light and Dark, and men and women is fundamentally broken, and the Creator and it's guiding hand (the pattern) has spun forth the Chosen One to bring it back into balance. But for the Chosen One to succeed in that, he (the individual) needs to accept that it is in fact the Chosen Ones (the plural they) who need to undertake the actions that return balance. He is not responsible, and in fact cannot, succeed on his own. In book terms, he cannot carry the mountain alone. No one can.

 

I concede they have changed the emphasis on the characters, decreasing the importance of the Chosen One. They have moved story elements around, so things we learn in book one will be learned later (Saidar with the Girls, Saidin with Asmodean, the Prophecies with Moiraine and Verin, etc, etc, etc)

 

But what is it that you think they have obliterated so badly that there is no way for the series to convey the same themes as the books? Because I'm just not seeing it.

This is an answer I can work with this, unfortunately I don’t have time for a proper response.  So quickly . . . 
 

I agree with you with what the books are about, though I would say “wholeness” rather than “balance.”  
 

Here the reduction of Rand makes a huge difference.  While many of the characters undergo some kind of reconciliation of the different parts of themselves, the template for this is Rand.  Rand is the one who has the power, Rand is the one who has to come to terms with the implications of violence, Rand is the one who needs to learn he needs others.  
 

The tv show has demonstrated no awareness of this.  Rand is able to learn the lessons he needs to learn because of the way he was raised and his relationship with his father and his father figure (Lan and Thom).  The show ignores these relationships, relationships that are the bedrock of his character.

And it isn’t a one off thing,  Perrin and May are Tavaren because they are part of Rand’s thread, they have to do things he cannot do.  Egwene has a different thread, which is at least partly to oppose Rand, here her role is similar to Tuon in Rand’s journey.  Making her tavaren is just more of the dragon can be a man or woman nonsense, and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding.  
 

Or Lan, his journey is parallel to Rand’s, and yet show Lan seems to have learned these lessons already.  Early book Lan would not laugh and smile at a campfire, tv Lan would never say “duty is heavier than a mountain, death is lighter than a feather.”

May is a gigolo?  I mean there is a parallel with Tylin, but the context is entirely different, and so the effect on the character is entirely different.

Perrin kills his wife by accident?  How is this analogous to killing the whitecloaks?

Bizarre love triangle? Whose character is made more interesting by this?

What happened to the traditional Emond’s Field, where woman kill Trollocs with their bare hands and have sex whenever they feel like.  This is an entirely different place, but the place is at the core of the major characters, so now the major characters are entirely different.  
 

And like Tylin these changes happen in the book, at least somewhat, but because they started there, there can be no change, and hence no moment of “you can’t go home again.”

I could go on and on . . .