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?