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.

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

I think Judkins has been pretty upfront and realistic about his expectations of negative reactions from some portion of the readership. I think a lot of it is unavoidable when making an adaptation of such a dense and beloved work as this, I remember being pretty upset about several aspects of the LOTR movies when they came out. (The one I still stand by is that scene in Moria where Aragorn tells Frodo to "lean forward", it's too campy!) Well, and then there's the options related to If They ARE There, and whether or not that is satisfactory. Show Mat is full of problems compared to Book Mat, most due to all the rewrites when the first Mat actor left the show in the middle of filming. I think they've recovered and put him in just about the right space as a character by the end of S3, but the damage to his show arc this far is real. I didn't like the pairing with Min in S2, but I struggle to think of other ways to get him to Falme from his disappearance in S1, none that I can think of really seem any more satisfying. I think the S1 Dragon mystery was a bad choice that led them to give early Egwene and Nynaeve more power moments in addition to character moments. And we got almost no power moments from Rand, though I really liked a lot of the character ones we did get: angry at Moiraine after the first Ba'alzamon dream, the banter with Mat on the road, the pushing his friends away argument in Fal Dara. I would have liked to see more character development than the TV show had the time to devote with all of them, but I think as a book reader it's easy to feel like the balance shifted away from Rand because in fact - as a matter of word count - it did, and it had to. We got way more of him in the early books, and so the absence is palpable because we know him in that part of the story. Especially for those of us who've re-read those early books so many times, it just doesn't feel right.

Totally agreed, I think that's what they're planning and I think they could pay it off really well.

People can be and are angry about many things, and honestly it doesn't seem to make any difference to many of them whether other people think it's rational or not. If something makes me angry, I tend to not engage with it, because life is too short already. The extreme example here is totally absurd of course, and being implausible is hard to take seriously. But I do understand the point that producing a TV adaptation of The Wheel Of Time (or any book series) generates an expectation among readers that certain characters, events and themes will be shown. If instead we got a deep dive into Saldaean ice pepper production with the only references to the EF5 and Aes Sedai being a little gossip between farmers and merchants, then yeah, those expectations would clearly not be met. It would also be colossally bad business. My counter to your example: let's imagine the Amazon series showed iconic scenes from the books, like Winternight, Shadar Logoth, Machin Shin, Nynaeve's Accepted test, Egwene captured as a damane, the battle at Falme, the columns at Rhuidean, the battle of the Two Rivers, the Aelfinn, many more. Would you be pleased with the show, despite differences in the details between what you see and what you read? Comparison is the thief of joy. As I'll continue to say, I think your expectations are getting in the way of appreciating what the show is doing. In the books, it's all from Rand's and occasionally Perrin's perspective, at first, so we naturally feel that they are the most important characters and we sympathize with what Jordan tells us they think and feel. The show is starting out showing all the main characters as equally important, and this is a huge change in the feel of the story. It throws book readers for a loop, because we know Rand is the hero just from the structure of the early books, we're inside his head. But the show gives all the other characters big moments very early on, not just in service of the questionable Who's The Dragon? mystery, but also in the name of establishing each of these people in stories that a TV audience can care about spending time with. Because it's a complicated story and a lot of it happens away from Rand. For what it's worth, I think season 3 proved they're ready to take Rand, Perrin and Mat to the next level. Perrin basically goes silent in the books at this point, so his rearranged arc will be really interesting. Likewise with Mat, they ended with his biggest character turning point. Rand was really the star in S3, and he's set to become even more dominant from here on out.

I don't know what you're on about with this nonsense about heroes can do everything by themselves, you seem very single-minded. They all need each other to succeed, yet they all need to be individually strong in their different ways, this is a theme in the books. Sometimes characters do incredible things on their own, and sometimes they do incredible things together. To ultimately succeed in their biggest battles, they need to work together. It's implied that Aiel first-sisters can and do have sexual relationships in the books. Sister-wives with each other as well. If you want to contest that opinion, show me a definitive book or Jordan quote that says it's flat-out not possible.