Nobody wants the kind of help you're offering. I could offer you pity, but I doubt you're in that market either. Mat was a selfish slacker with a heart of gold until he turned into Dagger Mat who was everybody's least-favorite character until he got a re-boot in Book 3. The show making him a shade darker in the beginning is absolutely in tune with the early books. Everyone knows he left his friends in the show because the actor left the cast unexpectedly, and they did what they could to tie that off, unsatisfactory as it is. Claiming disdain toward book fans is ludicrous. Perrin was a relentless mope in the books, I have no idea why anyone would see him as any different in the show. Yes, they had him kill his wife, which I wouldn't have done, but all we have in the books is this big guy who walks small because he was afraid of hurting people like he'd done when he was a kid? Make that make sense without an inner monologue. The fridging makes sense from an efficiency standpoint, if absolutely not for creativity. Sure, Moiraine showing more power and doling out more lore would have been great. The "Weep For Manetheren" scene should have been one of several similar if I had my druthers, but we know that Rafe had to fight like hell just to keep that in. She is obviously the prime mover of all their adventures in S1, so I don't know how one could say her intelligence and drive are in any way diminished. Lan is more than just a super soldier, and I'm glad to see a wider range in the show, which is apparent to his peers in the books anyway, it's just that Rand and his daddy issues is who Lan gets filtered through. Sure, book Lan would never have been surprised by Nynaeve outside Shadar Logoth (and he easily overpowered her there too, btw), and we've discussed the "tell" stupidity ad nauseum, it's part of the panicked rewrite after losing Mat's actor and all the covid restrictions. To fixate on minor details like those as fundamental character traits is a choice one can make, but is certainly not obligated to. I would have loved to see Thom be more of the Merlin from Disney's The Sword In The Stone that I imagined in the early books, but that was always incongruous with the character we got to know later in the books. A courtly outcast who moves among thieves and brutes with swagger is an excellent way to introduce him in the show. That's how I see it, for the record. You've made it clear you don't. Let's both take a page from DojoToad and seek to convince no further.

Dealing with this in my non-WoT life, well said and a valuable reminder!

I say exactly what I mean as often as possible, thanks. The dotted underline is something related to me abbreviating Tel'aran'rhiod as TAR and the site wants to tag the rest of the paragraph with that. I futzed around a little trying to undo it and gave up.

Been rewatching with my gf, I'm trying to get her to listen to the corresponding Wheel Takes podcast episodes too, but that is a lot to ask! Through S1E5, I really like so much of the worldbuilding, and I feel like some of the book fans really got hung up on things that were intentional misdirections that they should have recognized as obvious biased lies from known sources of untruth (i.e. Liandrin's comment in the opening scene that this power wasn't meant for men, you make it filthy when you touch it). A couple things I really deeply enjoyed seeing again: - The intro to the Tinkers. I think Jordan's experience as a Vietnam veteran made it hard for him to convey a truly convincing pacifist ideology, The Way Of The Leaf was often not much more than a caricature in the books, especially early on. But Ila's story about her daughter really flesh out Jordan's skeletal idea and make it very believable. Aram had some great comments too, and we are gonna see them both again in S3, very excited to see if they can make Aram a more compelling character than the books did. - Similarly, Dana was a great amalgam and deepening of all the early Darkfriends that Mat and Rand encountered on the road to Caemlyn in the books. The show is going to be full of one-and-done characters like her, and I really feel like Rafe and team are using those roles to great effect. - Loved seeing Birgitte referenced, we will probably see her in S3 poking around TAR - All of the main characters so quickly settled into the people I knew from the books, it's such a joy seeing them interact on screen. I did not like the battle with Logain's army at the Aes Sedai camp. They did an ok job of conveying scale with very few people when they introduced Logain capturing the king of Ghealdan in the cold open, but it was a swing and a miss when it came to actual combat. If they were going to have a character say "no army can stand against seven full sisters" then they needed to show some real strength, and Alanna's Air weaves to catch the arrows and then throw up some kind of shield later absolutely did not cut it. The tiny number of people in the "army" was laughable, but they used the forest setting to try and suggest more, I get it and will happily cut some slack. But this was a real missed opportunity to show off the One Power, and they blew it. Thus far, the weakness of combat scenes has been my biggest complaint about the show, none of the battle scenes have been satisfying at all.

1. I think the show does a great job of foregrounding the Aes Sedai fear and loathing of male channelers, it feels real. Book readers need to remember how often that attitude was described in the books, even though it was typically voiced by non-sympathetic/non-POV characters. A huge part of the world, and clearly a prejudice based on partial and/or false evidence. 2. Yeah, this is something I wish we had a lot more exposition on. I give the show credit for leaving it unanswered since most people in-world have very little idea either, but I hope we start to get a lot more of this stuff in S3. 3. That was a bad line, I really think it's weak as an intro. Even for book readers who know what ta'veren are, the mechanics of how there would be these rumors and why so specific on four is confusing. Another thing the show needs to build out in S3.

for reference: https://winteriscoming.net/the-wheel-of-time-casts-galad-gawyn-queen-morgese-and-more-for-season-3 Both are canonically gorgeous men, it's just that Galad is the most beautiful man in the world and Gawyn is always in his shadow. Based on the photos in the link I posted, I think Fetherston and Kerr are great fits for the roles, casting continues to be a complete success for the TV show. Yep, go along with it is good advice! I will add that beauty is a much larger thing than just sexual allure, people are instinctually incapable of NOT judging the relative physical attractiveness of everyone they encounter, it's one of those pre-conscious dynamics that play a huge role in every culture. For my money, it's best to make it conscious when possible, at least enough to say "damn, that (person of gender I am not sexually attracted to) is a good-looking human being!" And on Lanfear specifically, the dark hair and eyes are canon and also exactly my type, so when you throw in her character's ridiculously sexy costumes, I will certainly "go along with it" and say she can be the most beautiful woman in the world.

I know your stance is that the show shouldn't feel obligated to do anything the way it is in the books. And I agree that as a non-reader, you as a viewer are in no way burdened by those expectations. However, on this particular point, there is a key scene early in The Shadow Rising that raises the issue of using the One Power to heal death, and suffice to say that it is impossible for very clear logical and emotional reasons, it's an absolute boundary for this magic system. If book readers start to see actual cases of resurrection with the One Power in the show, lots of them are going to have problems with it. Exactly the point I would make in response to the complaint about Egwene in S1E8.

He still has the taint on saidin to fight through, that will be reason enough to master the blade. It was a big part of his motivation in the books.

Not always. Probably that changes this season, we have the clip of Rand training with Lan from the teaser and we know from TSR that he spent a lot of time practicing martial arts with the Aiel as well as the blade with Lan. Reasonable to expect more development of this theme in S3, but of course we WAFO.

Yeah, the medallion would be sorely missed, and if they really expect us to be satisfied with the Shadar Logoth dagger morphing into his ashandarei then I will feel actually disappointed with that bit. I like Skipp's suggestion about how to do the doorways above, and I've also seen someone else posit that Mat will enter a doorway in Tanchico and come out hanging from avendesora in Rhuidean as a cliffhanger at the end of S3. Thinking along those lines gets me pumped!

Phew!!

Getting Gaebril before Gareth Byrne and making Gawyn older than Galad are both contradictions with the books, curious to see how they play these out.

The first two books are absolutely out of character with the rest of the series in the percentage of Rand's POV, he's almost the entire first book and more than half of the second, but ends up at a little over 20% of the whole series. This chart is a nice visualizer of that fact. https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/2479849/ In the books, yes, Rand is the vehicle for meeting the rest of the characters and world. That's not the only way to tell the story, and when producing a TV show, there are all kinds of factors - from casting great actors to keeping audiences invested - that would lead them to favor multiple lead characters with narratives that drive the story forward. Robert Jordan did this himself in the books, so this demand that Rand has to be the dominant character is about to be an open contradiction of what happens in the books, starting with Season 3 and the stories of Book 4. The TV show switching gears from Rand as the sole focus to bringing everyone else into main character status would be awkward, and the writers made the entirely justified choice to start with multiple leads. They didn't need to make Moiraine one of those leads, but I frankly think it was a great choice, because she's the only one at the outset who can give us any sort of background lore. I think it could have been interesting to make Thom our Gandalf-figure who instigates the EF5's journey and provides that background, but nobody else present at Winternight could have done it. Either way, if Rand is presented as a sort of Frodo "nobody saddled with a great destiny" then it would only increase the sense of being a LOTR derivative, and there are all kinds of reasons the show didn't want to go there.

Robert Jordan wrote The Wheel of Time and NOT Rand al'Thor and the Wheel of Time. Every main character is having their story pared back because the show has much less space to tell the story. It may feel like we're seeing more non-Rand characters in the show than the books, but that's because Rand's POV was so uncharacteristically dominant in The Eye Of The World and The Great Hunt, which are the main sources for the show's events so far. In the early books, many of the key scenes involve Rand. Given production circumstances (covid, Mat's S1 actor leaving mid-season), major changes to the scripts were necessary, and some of these involved giving those key scenes to other characters so they could happen in some form. I'm thinking of the flies hallucination from The Great Hunt... my understanding is that Rand and Mat were supposed to be with Perrin and the Shienarans and that would have been Rand's vision as in the books, but the show had to make a massive rewrite since Mat was no longer in the book location at the end of S1, and they made choices to deal with it. It's ok to not like their choices, but it's silly to accuse the showrunners of having some vendetta against Rand's character because of it. My strong belief is that S3 will make Rand's centrality obvious, but if you disagree there's no point arguing it until we see the episodes. Bookmark this post/thread and come back to it in May if you want.

I'm glad that we understand one another on the changes regarding innocence and sex. I don't understand much of the rest of what you wrote in this last message other than as a reductio ad absurdum and it's not persuasive.