It’s pretty clear that RJ wrote the relationship between Elayne and Aviendha as sisters, even going so far as to have a ceremony where they are ceremonially reborn from a common mother. If you think that he also intended for their relationship to be romantic, that’s a pretty clear incest angle.

Not really. The incest angle is just creepy people being creepy.

Aviendha and Elayne, for instance.

Yes, it’s a joke, but it reveals the Rafe mindset that rubs a lot of book fans the wrong way. It sends the message that Rafe sees himself as the arbiter able to whimsically re-write the script rather than a steward with a duty and honor to convey the story of WoT to a new medium with proper respect and understanding of the books. This breakdown is deeper than homosexuality or the culture wars although that is often where it came through. It came through when a spike went through Uno’s head and when Mat stabbed Rand, when Rafe wanted to leave Thom dead, and dozens of other places. Rafe felt that he could just make changes and who was going to stop him. He had no sense of stewardship for the story.

If there was truly no way for the show to be better, then it was doomed from the start. In that case, the failure was not seeing the folly of trying to make the show. In other words, the makers of the show are at fault. The excuses serve no purpose.

It’s a pretty underhanded non-sequitur to make this about jobs. Not liking a product always has implications for the job security of people that make it. If Rafe wanted to give his people job security, he should have made a better product. It’s not the job of the audience to watch a boring show because we feel bad for the poor people working on the product. And frankly, that was the problem with the show. I didn’t dislike it. It was just boring. And as someone who was actually interested the whole way through the slog, I don’t think it’s a superhuman feat to make something interesting.

Never even heard of it.

The problem is that season 3 can’t stand on its own. Even if it’s really good, non-book readers won’t be able to step in without watching the first two seasons. The show diverged so far from the books that even book readers might not really be able to follow season 3 without at least some recap on how it has diverged. This alone accounts for the fact that viewership decreased even as production quality arguably improved. There are just naturally more people that watched season 1 and then stopped than there are people that dropped into season 3 without watching the first 2.

You can define your terms how you like. The reason I think people are using the term “fakeout death” is that the show is creating the problems that fakeout deaths create in that it undermines the stakes and sense of mortal peril. If characters are fighting, I know from general life knowledge that if one of them gets stabbed through the chest, it will be fatal. Thus, I sense the peril and understand that the current conflict is high stakes. However, if it’s established in the universe that characters can simply heal each other from wounds that should be fatal, I no longer know what the stakes are. We are no longer in a universe where real world judgment can tell us what mortal peril even looks like.

The justification for using spears was that spears are not dedicated weapons since they can be used as hunting tools. Swords are only used to kill people. Logically, that leads to the conclusion that it doesn’t so much matter how you use the spear. The important thing is that it is a dual use tool. The same thing comes up with Perrin’s hammer.

He’s there in the books.

That’s a hell of a question to ask about a character that effectively doesn’t exist in the book.

Perrin is literally not in TFoH. So he’s due for a break.

Definitely should be mutton.

It’s not unprecedented that a monarch might execute the head of a noble house and make peace with the heir of that house. Considering that the heir is likely the child or close relative of the previous head of the household, the forgiveness is significant. Familial guilt is somewhat foreign to modern, western sensibilities, but looms large in many historical and some modern cultures. The fact that all of the descendants and relatives of the guilty party are not considered to bear that guilt is meaningful forgiveness in this context. Even for the executed person, it allows for the ability to leave a legacy that can carry on the name and influence and could constitute a real negotiating point in a peace deal. That said, I think that the question is more the degree to which this was a betrayal of trust on Morgase’s part. Did the heads of households negotiate a deal that they understood would mean their own deaths because it would allow their families to survive? Or were they lead to believe that they would be allowed to live and then deceived?

I’ve heard this a couple times before, but I’m skeptical that CPR makes it better. In addition to feeling anachronistic(just my opinion), it also feels like a fakeout death that undermines the stakes. It’s drama for drama’s sake that doesn’t serve the larger narrative.

Perrin sneaks into the WC camp in the two rivers in TSR.

If it makes no difference, why would they change it in the show? You can’t intentionally change a bunch of things and then when anyone objects revert to saying it doesn’t matter. It mattered enough that they changed it. Matching it to the book is the default. Changing it needs justification. And it’s frankly really weird that anyone reads a romantic relationship into the sisters. Which part of them being sisters makes people think that they are also boinking?

Rage made up a part for his boyfriend. It’s nepotic drivel.

Sammael probably also has more consistent pronunciation among book readers. I bet we don’t all say Be’lal the same, especially considering it’s never really been clear what was intended by the apostrophes.

I don’t have any numbers, but I think it was always going to be a challenge for numbers to go up season over season in this type of show if the early seasons aren’t well liked. Regardless of how good season 3 is, new viewers will have to watch the first two seasons to understand what is going on(and that probably even applies to book readers since the story has diverged so far). If season 1 is great, you can tell people that the show is great and already into the third season. If it doesn’t get good until season 3, you’re stuck telling people to bear 16 hours to get to the good part. That’s a much less compelling sell.

If Sammael is replacing Bel’al and just straight up only really doing Bel’al things, what was the point of naming him Sammael? Someone just thinks the name sounds cooler? Bel’al was probably the most vanilla of the forsaken, but if you want to include his plot points you should just include him.

You don’t even need to go slippery slope on this one. If this is just a fixed portal between a specific room in the white tower and a particular hut in Tear, that is already an immensely powerful resource in the context of Randland. Those two places are weeks of travel apart and both important centers of the world. The transfer of information alone would be valuable, not to mention that various other important journeys would be shortened as well. What restrictions do you think would make that not useful? Yes, it’s more useful if you can move it and change targets, etc. But it’s still pretty useful in its most basic form.

In the books, weaves do not have integral verbal or somatic components. Words and actions are just mental crutches that some channelers developed to aid in forming certain weaves. Compulsion requires that a command be given, but I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that this command would necessarily be verbal or audible to others. A deep understanding of the brain would allow a forsaken to cause the subject to hear the command inside his or her head by touching the right parts of the brain in just the right way. Perhaps this would require two simultaneous weaves, but that should be well within Rahvin’s capacity.

I had assumed that the meetup was in the tower and that the item used was simply a connection between two rooms. In that case, it can easily be a terangreal that only works for those rooms and only the Amyrlin knows about it and she shared it with Moiraine. Mostly, I assumed that because, as you point out, the implications of the meetup being in a random hut in Tear are actually rather significant. Not only does it raise questions of why they are using this technology for sexual liaisons rather than finding the dragon, it also raises the question of what this hut in Tear actually is. Who maintains it? Why does no one explore it from the Outside? Siuan wouldn’t be wandering around Tear alone for reasons of her station and the relationship between the white tower and Tear. Worldbuilding is a foundational part of the WoT story telling. The writers don’t get to declare by fiat that something doesn’t matter to the story and thus won’t be explained when it breaks the worldbuilding.