As it seems we've basically all agreed on this board, trying to make the audience think all of our Two Rivers characters could be the Dragon Reborn was the mistake, especially as they didn't really flesh out what the Dragon Reborn is and why he's important. But I still love the choice to show all the Aes Sedai maneuvering instead of just making it a Tolkien-esque small-group quest like in the book, in my view it was the best way to set up future seasons. The execution was lacking (Logain's pitiful army, wasting all that time on Aes Sedai without lots more exposition of the DR and Tarmon Gai'don, Tar Valon seeming so cramped and dingy), but they did a lot of things I really liked. Finishing up a re-read and I'll post a lot more once that's done.

Hard agree, simply said. Yes, lots of discussion on the existing threads that's worth catching up on the various reactions people (almost all book-readers) have had. I'm very disappointed it was cancelled too.

My bad, I just noted that this user had a post count in the single or low double digits when the cancellation news broke, and I had never noticed their username in all the many debates over the last few years. People have been using the word in this forum. From what I've seen, the mods have been fair.

Highly dubious assertion. Your account was started after the show was cancelled, and I have seen every post on this board since that time and nothing even close to that took place. Maybe you were banned on another account and that's what you're referencing, but from what I've seen for the past four years the mods here do a great and very fair job.

S1E3 and S1E4's Rand/Mat scenes are a great distillation of the on-the-run scenes from TEOTW. The Darkfriend Dana scenes at the Four Kings inn are some of the best writing in all of S1. Internal thoughts matter A LOT to this story. I'm not arguing that writing them is a some impossible challenge, but you're hand-waving them away as minor and irrelevant, which is in contradiction to your contention that they needed to "just tell the darned story." T

And that growing darkness notably accelerated in the very brief timeline of the books. In the very first scenes in Emond's Field, the characters are talking about the exceptionally harsh winter. And then it got truly crazy for the next 18 months or so. The show writers understood this all very well.

I agree in part, and wish they would have done something like that. They could have done it with a scene where Perrin discusses killing Leila with Elyas. But if we skip the fridging, it would still fall short of the self-loathing that Perrin falls into based on the Ravens scene, so they would have to devote serious time to some other terrible thing Perrin did or contemplated doing.

That... is one reading, I guess? Another massive internal dialogue theme in TEOTW is Rand's struggling over the Winternight revelation that Tam is not his biological father. I can't recall a single time he even mentions this to another character, but it's a huge part of the story for him.

He just did. The Ravens chapter is foundational to Perrin's character in the books.

Mat's home was definitely a hovel, everything else about Emond's Field seemed well within the image I had from the books. Anyway, my comment was primarily in response to the "everything is too clean" complaints, so if that's not you then no need to make it so.

I absolutely thought the same thing. The increasing griminess would be another way to show the Dark One's touch on the world, to make it feel like the world is falling apart and the situation is becoming more and more hopeless.

I think "flush with money" is an absurd hyperbole, but it's true that Rafe did not come into this role with a lot of experience. He's a big book fan who worked himself into a position in the industry where he could pitch his dream project, and he may have over-reached professionally. Hardly unusual. They also lost a lot of money on things they invested in - like the location they booked to be the Blight - for the end of S1 and couldn't use due to COVID. That hit a lot of other shows hard too, but maybe it was a bit more out of balance for WOT.

I've only listened to her read the prologue, but she does a great job of it. I'm not really one for audiobooks at all, but clearly she put in a ton of work for her performance. Which was likely a part of her being an Executive Producer for the show, who definitely worked closely with the show's writing team at many points.

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.