Rosamund Pike, star and Executive Producer of the show, recently stated that "I think we have to accept that it’s over.” https://www.thewrap.com/rosamund-pike-wheel-of-time-season-4-hope/ I loved the version of the story that Rafe's team was producing, but there's basically no chance it will be picked up and continued. None of the studios and companies involved with the rights have given much in the way of explanation, but Amazon definitively cancelled it.

Both these claims are false. Lots of book readers here and elsewhere very much enjoyed the series. Lots of new fans discovered it. You can argue that there weren't enough of them, sure, but there were many thousands of both.

Rosamund Pike Urges Another Studio to Rescue ‘Wheel of Time’ for Season 4: ‘Be Wise and Pick It Up’ The headline here is clickbait, here are the quotes from RP, taken from the longer interview at Collider: “The fans said Season 1 wasn’t good enough, which I think I agree with, for multiple reasons,” Pike said. “We were beset by COVID in the middle of our shooting. We had some heads of department change. Then, by Season 2, we knew what we were doing, and we offered up a much better season. By Season 3, I think we had our wings fully spread, and we were showing where we were capable of going, and there was a really well-acted, well-written, cohesive, deep show that was attracting powerhouse actors to come and play supporting characters. I think we showed what we were capable of doing with that material.” She added: “Of course, you wonder, had we started off at that place, would we not have been canceled? Maybe. I think we’re possibly victims to the terrible churn factor of people wanting to show that ‘We’ve got a new show.’ It’s all about what’s new.” “In my dreams, another studio would be wise and pick it up,” she said. “We have such an amazing team now. We have the ability to make a great final sequence of seasons for this show.” She finished: “We know what to do with these books now, so who knows? But I think we have to accept that it’s over.”

I am a fan of WoT and I am incredibly happy the show existed and I enjoyed it greatly. It's flawed, just like the books. That's a beautiful thing about this world, it's what gives it so much power in our imaginations.

There's not a both sides. There's a team led by Rafe who created the show and the show would not exist without them. There's people who didn't know anything about the books and checked out the show and had an opinion. There's people who read the books and checked out the show and had an opinion. Some of those people in the second two groups wanna argue about whether their opinion is right or not. There's another group of people that read the books (or claim to) and never meaningfully engaged with the show beyond trailers/youtube clips or maybe part of S1 and feel the need to loudly tell everybody else that the show should never have been made, that blahblahblah is an affront to the WOT legacy. As a book-reader since the '90s, that's the group that I feel actual contempt for.

I'm slowly working on a long post after I finish a re-read and re-watch, but there are so many. Most of the things that people are upset that "he added" are obviously there to lay the groundwork for future seasons. One example that got tons of hate was foregrounding Alanna as a major character. They did it to make the impact of her betraying Rand by bonding him clearer to the audience, it was a terrible action in the books and it was going to do a lot of the work of justifying Rand's deep distrust of Aes Sedai in the show. They even made Alanna the only Aes Sedai at the battle of Two Rivers so TV audiences would focus on her and have more sympathy for her. She's likable in the show, she's funny, she's sexy, she's wise and powerful, all that was set up for the audience to feel Rand's pain and realize how contemptible Aes Sedai can be, even the ones that are supposedly on his side.

Exactly! Do we have such a brittle fandom that there is only one true way to enter it?

It's a yawn because it's been said so many times on this very thread, let alone this forum. Everyone knows that the show tells a very different story, some people are very upset by that, some people are interested in that. I'm done engaging with the people who are very upset and can't think of anything more interesting to say.

Revisiting the wiki page on "unreliable narrator" I think it's fair to concede that the specific device is a minor theme throughout the series, it's used mostly for humor in things like the mid-series Nynaeve chapters where she constantly and comically reads people and situations in extreme ways. It's also right there related to the First Oath and everything Aes Sedai say, all of the Forsaken's speeches and interactions, and everything characters do in Daes Dae'mar, and many other discussions of false information that characters believe, but as "unreliable narrator" specifically focuses on the narrative voice, I'd agree the beginning paragraphs aren't exactly that. They are indicative of the major theme related to truth, defining the truth and whether it's possible to even know the truth. I'm not enough of a literature scholar to pick one correct term, but "misinformation" is probably the closest I can think of, and that is a core theme of the series that the Chapter 1 recitation is part of. It's not only about the vast span of time, the words chosen are specifically about the decay of knowledge.

"it's not the REAL story" /yawn

What do you think is the point of the first paragraph of the first chapter of every one of the books?

Awww, I thought my reply to Loose was pretty tame, and most of it was generalized. You make the call though.

I think you miss the point of what a tribute band is. Not sure if you're a musician or a live music fan at all, but I've played in several tribute bands and the appeal of it is to bring people together to experience familiar music in a live context where there's an element of excitement that something new is happening. That could be rearrangements of the music in the performance itself, or just in the social energy of a mix of people who are enthusiastic about the original artist coming together in a venue where that artist would likely never appear. There are beloved and successful tribute bands that do in fact change the words and the entire point of the songs, look up the McDonalds-themed Black Sabbath tribute band Mac Sabbath for one. Mailman, I've disagreed with your views on the show plenty over the past few years, and that's fine. You consistently brought a book-focused critique to every discussion, but you also kept watching, kept talking and also acknowledged points where the show was successful to some degree in your eyes. I'm not going to look it up, but I don't recall you consistently saying the show shouldn't exist, and I think you've stayed away from harping on perceptions of Rafe's personal agenda. Not for the first time, I think, I'm saying if this isn't about you then don't make it about you.

I think the casting was great, agreed! Josha in particular was really growing into Rand and I was very excited to see the rest of the story with him in the lead. I think S1 Rand was hard to pull off since they aged up the characters and the show was less sympathetic to him in particular because it showed how woolheaded he looked to some of the other characters rather than stay in his head like in the books. But S3E4 Rand with the Rhuidean journey was a true joy to see on screen, and I'm so happy it was made.

Hope you feel better soon, I'm sluggish with covid right now. So, the question of accepting opinions other than our own as valid is a fair one, but when we have such an overwhelming number of posters here and elsewhere who won't discuss the show as anything other than an abomination and an offense to Jordan's vision that would be better off not existing, I think it's pretty counter-productive in terms of discussion etiquette to put the responsibility of constantly validating that opinion on the people who want to discuss the show on its own terms, or as a lens to issues and topics within the books. The opinion that the show is an affront to the books and shouldn't exist is functionally just another way of stating that the people who do enjoy engaging with the show have an invalid opinion. This is what I would hope a "moderate" in these discussions, such as yourself Bodewhin, would agree with me on in order to make this and similar spaces enjoyable to discuss the show. The point about the books having so many different reasons to be a fan of them is one I've made myself several times, I agree with that and it's part of what makes WOT so endlessly fascinating. I heartily agree that there are so many ways to love the series: the "hard" magic system, the military details, the deep lore, the philosophical motivations for various cultures and characters, the relationships between characters, the brisk and vivid storytelling for so many important scenes... There's so much, and I would never imagine that fans of this series in particular would agree on much of anything, except they're glad it exists. That's what I - as a book fan and a show fan - was hoping this site could provide for the show.