The Wise Ones dropped hints about Aiel sister-wives sometimes having sexual relationships several times throughout the books. As well as some Maidens being lesbians.

A. He's right about Robert Jordan, who had polyamorous relationships and wrote that into his fiction, obviously. Polyamorous relationships are usually, though not always, at least partially queer. Jordan put these themes in the text of The Wheel Of Time and they are obvious. They were obvious in the '90s, but many readers - my young conservative self included - were happily oblivious to them because of straight culture's general resistance to acknowledging the existence of queer relationships. B. Just to reiterate, the show existed ONLY because Rafe Judkins wanted to make it. Yes, he owns all the credit and blame for it. No one else at anywhere close to his level of media influence (which was not particularly high to begin with) was interested in making a WoT show, and making the three seasons that exist was a massive accomplishment and win for expanding the audience for the franchise as it struggles under the inept and myopic ownership of iWoT/REE.

Agree with the sentiment but man, I wish we'd even gotten season 4. I wonder if Rafe and team will release their scripts/outlines for the next couple seasons, I'd love to have a clearer picture of how they planned to get to the end.

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.