I think they clearly wanted to avoid the comparison to LOTR (and the map intro of GOT for similar reasons), but I think it would have been a great choice. These things have become tropes because they work, audiences expect something like that and it helps them settle into a show, to help it feel real. I was in no way turned off by the way the show started (Moiraine's voiceover, Liandrin gentling a man, Egwene's Women's Circle ceremony), but I do think epic background exposition would have been better for those first 5-10 minutes.

Rafe pushed hard for E4 and explained that he took the writing credit in his own name to give the show a better chance to get the expenses for it approved by the suits. He did it because it's universally acclaimed as one of the best set pieces in the books, it's foundational to the story. The ending of EOTW is not as important nor is it as widely loved by book readers as Rhuidean. Do we all wish many other scenes from the books had been made with the same reverence as S3E4? Of course. But doing that takes a lot of money and time from every other part of the story's production, and any producer/showrunner will have to pick their battles.

Easily yes, the show itself has given me new and interesting ways of looking at the books. And that's what a deeper understanding is, whether it's a holy book or pulp fiction. I'll write more here later, but the clarity on Ishamael's motivation to destroy the wheel as voiced by Dana the Darkfriend bartender in S1 is a great example of how the show brought some of the themes forward effectively. The explosion in interest and reaction and discussion and analysis can be frustrating, but so much of it has been an absolute delight. The non-reader reaction threads on places like r/wotshow were so much fun, seeing what they get right and more interestingly what they get wrong. I'm grateful to Rafe for that part too.

Jordan had so much fun with the ta'veren concept, all the extra details about people surviving terrible falls, flocks of birds colliding with each other and falling out of the sky for hungry people to eat, conversations that go Rand's way despite the express intent of who he's talking to. That scene where Tuon overcomes Darth Rand's will to squeak out disagreement is wild. 100% agreed on that last point, WOT is an amazing story and Jordan put so many ideas and perspectives into it that people can really take away many different messages from it.

It would settle a bunch of these debates that's for sure. We could all agree whose fault these changes were, and know what the end of S1 and most of S2 would have been like. If they don't get the show picked up elsewhere, then I would absolutely love to see those. ETA: And even if all these controversial changes are solely Rafe's fault, I'm still a fan of him for actually doing all the work to make a WOT show happen. I've seen no indication that anybody else was ever going to do it, and it seems a big chunk of the fandom had already settled into daydreaming about an anime or AI production by the time he came along. Nobody's obligated to like the show he made, but I think he did all fans of WOT a great service by getting these three seasons completed and bringing the story to millions of new fans.

As I and others have said before, they did NOT depart from canon on this. The Dragon is still a man, there is still a taint on saidin. Believing they changed canon is the mistake, falling for an obvious misdirection that book readers should be chuckling at rather than tearing their hair out. They changed the story in that the modern Aes Sedai are even MORE ignorant than they are in the books, and they appear to have done it in service of making the Dragon mystery include Egwene and Nynaeve. Whether that was Rafe's idea or whether it came from the 10,000 notes he reported from Amazon, nobody outside the production appears to know definitively at this point.

I honestly would like to know more about this assumption. My impression from everything I've seen about the show is that Rafe pitched the show and Sony/Amazon agreed to it, with iWOT/REE signing off. I can't recall hearing anything about the studios wanting to make the show and then choosing Rafe as the showrunner. Simplistically, the WOT TV show was driven by Rafe, and there would not be a show if he hadn't worked to make it happen, because nobody else was trying to do it. Is that inaccurate?

Citation needed on that one. I haven't seen it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. GOT was overflowing with fraught relationships though? I haven't read the books, but it seems like that was the flavor of the relationships in them, very bleak, whereas WOT is definitely more teenage crush and mean girl scheming. WOT as books don't appeal to precisely the same audience as GOT, why would the show? I do agree with a point you've made repeatedly, that the stereotypical male gaze was almost entirely eliminated from the show whereas some of Jordan's characters really embody it. I feel like that's what people are mostly complaining about with the Rand-Lan relationship, and I am among the many who would have liked to see at least a handful of strong scenes showing their growing respect for each other in S1.

I think it's at least as fair to say that the queer movement was undermined by people who were always steadfastly opposed to it. The division is absolutely real, and the people who wanted to straddle the fence and not worry about it were forced to choose sides when they never really cared that much. But toMAYto, toMAHto, sure. ETA: Reiterating another point, I feel like they did a great job in the show of simply showing a fantasy world without homophobia, the majority of characters are still straight and there's not really much discussion of sexuality either way, just that it exists. That certain people have responded with accusations of it being some kind of queer propaganda really feels like a case of "thou dost protest too much."

This show was greenlit in what, 2019? Rafe's pitch probably did include some appeals to the #metoo and "it gets better" queer movements that were going strong at that point, and Amazon probably had those numbers too. And then the numbers changed as the culture wars shifted into gear during covid and the 2020 election. At least in the US, everything really feels different. I think you've alluded to a facet of it that is absolutely real, these culture wars make everyone with a social media account and an activist bent into a strident critic, questioning motives, allegiances and at some times it really feels like the reality and experiences of everyone else. Chatting about a show quickly leads to ideological ambushes, even from people you'd probably share a voting preference with, but if you don't see every angle the same way then you're a traitor to the cause. Those conversations are way too common everywhere, and people are definitely weary of it in the way you described. ETA: I don't believe that Rafe's pitch was cynical in any sense. He's described at length how bonding with his Mormon mother over WOT after coming out is a core part of his own personal story, and as a big WOT fan with a big personal investment in it, in a position to make a showrunner pitch like this, he most likely viewed it as a great time to make this into a show. As far as I know, there were no competing pitches, nobody at iWOT/REE was doing anything with it, there would still be no show in production if Rafe hadn't felt like - as a fan of the books - it was time to bring the story to TV.

I agree with this, we are living in a time of intense political focus on the minutiae of every element of our culture. Distrust and tribalism are at peak levels, many many people (myself included!) are filtering our experiences ideologically to protect ourselves from perceived opponents. The Wheel Of Time really is the perfect story for our times, in so many ways. I've made the point before, but I really think reading about a world overbalanced toward female power in Robert Jordan's prose is not as visceral a challenge to real-world traditional perspectives as seeing that world on screen depicted by a feminist writing team. Very reductively: The book tells it, the show shows it, and that's too much for some people.

Both Moiraine's initial voiceover with "will he be reborn as a boy or a girl" and Liandrin's "when you touch it you make it filthy" mini-rant should have been a giant flag to bookreaders that the show was foregrounding the disqualifying ignorance of the Aes Sedai due to millennia of Black Ajah subversion, which is a major theme and plot point of the books. That so many fans of the books instead take Moiraine's ignorant belief and the words of a Darkfriend at face value and take offense at those lines is very disappointing to me.

Rafe and many of his team have a documented and obvious deep love of the series, and I'm so irritated with this slander. They read the same books as you and many of the "contradictions" are things long-time readers have also understood in the text of the books. There are choices they made that other teams wouldn't have - which is a simple fact of any adaptation - but they made them based on telling Robert Jordan's story as they sincerely understood it.

blood and bloody ashes