Audiobooks are for the weak and the blind 😉 (Tongue firmly in cheek, I just hate listening to people talk and avoid audiobooks and podcasts and talk radio/news as a general rule.)

And voila! The Prime adaptation has introduced the books to a new person. You're trying to parse some kind of significance out of the differences in the narrative details to invalidate any credit for this effect going to the show, but I don't know what satisfaction you hope to gain through that effort.

People have been doing this since prehistory. The entire premise of Robert Jordan's The Wheel Of Time - reiterated at the beginning of Chapter One in every book - is that all stories are confused retellings of misunderstood experiences. The writers and producers of the Prime adaptation do a wonderful job of illustrating that point in their version of the story as well, highlighting that many of these characters have incomplete or just simply incorrect understandings of their world. It's particularly tedious that this specific fandom has so many people who choose to get angry about that basic fact of this imaginary world and Jordan's larger point about the real world we are all trying to make sense of. I understand we're all just people who love a good story and we feel connected to characters and events in ways that are intensely personal. But I also feel that Wheel Of Time fans have an in-the-text-of-the-canon responsibility to absorb adaptational flexibility without being knee-jerk reactionary against it.

A side note to this side note: Casting stars of Pike's caliber, along with non-US star actors like Fares Fares, Alvaro Morte and Priyanka Bose, has expanded the audience for The Wheel Of Time exponentially, and will continue to do so over time. Rosamund Pike is so invested in the books that she's recording new authorized audio books, which I have read great reviews of. Regardless of how a book purist might feel about the show, it's objective fact that the Prime adaptation of the show is introducing huge numbers of people to the beloved story in the books. henrywho, it sounds like you're one of these, and that's great! I'm glad this forum and others allow people to not only have critical discussions and theorizing about the show, but collect the bile and spleen of those who need a place to vent about their shattered expectations. That said, even recognizing that every new book purist is going to go through this phase and it's certainly valid for them to post it, the "they shouldn't even call it Wheel Of Time" gatekeeping take is just so boring at this point.

This is all true. It's a different type of fantasy from a different era, but this comment made me think of The Emerald City in The Wizard Of Oz, which was depicted as surrounded by farmland.

Yep. Whether a "serious fan" version would be better is up for debate given that Rafe himself and many of his team are themselves serious fans, but I welcome anyone with an extra billion dollars to generate more WoT content for me.

I've seen people address this point with what seems like a sensible justification for not doing that. In TV, audiences can get really upset if they expect a family-friendly fantasy show from a first season and then end up with more sex and violence as the show goes on. Basically, if a show is going to have any mature-level sex and violence, the producers want to show at least some of that right up front.

This one raises a lot of earnest questions that I feel are pretty fair, even applied to the books. We're past the obvious hero journey of TEOTW/S1, so what exactly is happening now? Why don't Ishamael and Lanfear just turn Rand now and kill anybody who tries to stop them? Why do our characters do any of the things they do? https://winteriscoming.net/2023/10/03/the-wheel-of-time-season-2-confusing/

Light willing, they stick the landing this time and we see tons more articles like this.

Perrin and Faile were the most extreme version of the very '90s "men are from mars, women are from venus" dynamic that underpinned most of RJ's relationship models. It certainly exists in the real world and many people find themselves most comfortable there, but it is also very frustrating to people who view gender roles differently.

I'm hoping for Tear/Callandor in S3E1 then off to the Waste. We could get a conflation of Falme and Tear this season. But I think it's most likely they come back to Tear/Callandor after Rand becomes Car'a'carn.

No, Sarah meant that the perception of "the last extreme defense of her own life, or the life of her Warder, or another Aes Sedai" is a subjective determination for each individual sister to make in the moment. Just like how they can say things that are untrue if they believe them to be true.

We really got a lot of Rand's POV in those first books, we are told over and over again that he thinks of himself as a shepherd. But is there one scene of him actually doing anything to do with shepherding in the entire series? Specifically to do with sheep, not just being a farm kid? It's been a while, but I don't recall one offhand. I think the point you're making, and it's a good one, is that we relate to Rand early on in the books as a humble, salt-of-the-earth guy. I do agree that the show hasn't shown as much of that as the books, and what they have shown of that Rand has been offset by scenes of him being petulant or frustrated with other characters. Still, I think a lot of it comes back to the fact that we are seeing Rand through his actions and not his internal monologue. S2 Rand gives a coin to poor street urchin and has ingratiated himself in the Foregate to where a vendor tosses him some bread as a friend, so we're still shown his good side. But later Rand goes to kill the jerk at his job, so it's obvious that he's starting to go nuts. I think we see more of his extreme mood swings in the show, where we were always sympathetic to his negative behavior when it's written from his POV.

The Wheel Of Time is - aside from being a wonderful fantasy story - Robert Jordan's main political statement of his views on many many topics. If you read between the lines, you can see it to be just as political as Gulliver's Travels in quite a few of his themes. Political discussion boils through the whole thing, but to his credit, he really did an admirable job of maintaining a degree of humility as he approached political topics like gender roles and sexuality and the role of religion in society and civil rights and tax policy. He doesn't make it a polemic in most senses, he presents all these topics in service of his story and readers are mostly free to see different approaches to all these topics favorably or unfavorably according to their own dispositions. Any adaptation of this story is forced to present discussion of all these topics because they are inseparably woven into this story. There is no apolitical option. In my opinion, insisting that there is such an apolitical option is the most disingenuously political critique around.

Rand is narratively depowered from the books mostly because we are seeing the story through everybody else's eyes rather than overwhelmingly his. To this point in the books, almost all the other characters don't see him as anything other than a hayseed/hometown friend, a mysterious outland lord, or someone the Tower is apparently boosting for their own purposes. *Yes, they skipped his TEOTW climax, but that a mess in the books too and I'm glad they did it the way they did because the "I need the hero to have his massive hero moment right now!" applied to RJ's need to publish the first novel, and it would get in the way of making a coherent and powerful version of the full series on TV.

Interesting interview with the VFX supervisor for Season 2 https://screenrant.com/wheel-time-2-vfx-supervisor-andy-scrase-interview/

I just read a good example of an opinion that I vehemently disagree with, but recognize as actually in good faith. The review of S2E6 at Tor.com is from someone who felt the Egwene/Renna scenes were too intense and broke a boundary of good TV is almost the opposite of what I feel, especially when the reviewer says they wanted the show to spend significantly more time on the brief Mat/Min betrayal scene. Me and this reviewer are looking for different things from the show, and we can disagree about it without ad hominem directed at each other or at the show's production team. https://www.tor.com/2023/09/22/wheel-of-time-s2-episode-6-review/

I'm totally sure they don't understand that they can channel, the sul'dam terminology in the scene where Renna used Egwene to burn that tree is a good example of how they've been acculturated to think of the feeling of channeling without recognizing what it really is. The feeling of being "complete" is actually the feeling of channeling, or at least embracing the Source.

Lan was making the very rational decision that Moiraine's plan wasn't working, and therefore he brought Alanna and her warders into the plot because there was no chance to help Rand by continuing to stonewall people who are his natural allies. He's done suffering for Moiraine's mistakes. Seemed like his best move of the season, I'm excited to see him step up in E7.

BDSM doesn't need to be sexual, it's more about the power dynamics. Though that final "good girl" likely gave many people pants feelings.

I see this point over and over from many people, but I don't know how to react other than "facts not in evidence." How are they elevating women over men? The only significant depowering in the show compared to the books that I can think of is that Rand didn't have the TEOTW climax, and I honestly don't miss it because it's a ridiculous overpowered scene that we have to just chalk up to ta'veren and prophecy in the books. In the show we're seeing lots of strong men dealing with their struggles the same way we're seeing strong women dealing with theirs. If we don't see the boys step up significantly and claim some more of their power by the end of this season and into S3, I guess I might start to be sympathetic to this claim. Especially if the girls do get all the hero moments. But the boys (and girls!) of Emond's Field are all still bumbling around and well short of figuring out their roles despite their massive potential at this point in the books.

In addition to the dynamics of the One Power, Jordan filled the pages of his series with detailed descriptions and comparisons of a pretty impressively diverse collection of cultural attitudes towards sex and gender roles. He presents an emphatically UNtraditional world through the POV of main characters who do have something similar to the US-based traditional view. From my perspective, as someone who grew up in a fundamentalist family and no longer shares those values, the show's scenes that highlight things like polyamorous relationships, homosexuality, and relatively casual premarital sex, can only be considered shocking or "political" in that they show the people who do NOT think those things are ok as the odd ones out. And that is straight from the books! It's just masked very well on the page because we are reading the embarrassed traditional POVs and have sympathy for them, rather than seeing them from other perspectives that consider their shame about sexual behavior funny or ridiculous.

I'm optimistic that this next episode is going to feature Lanfear finally giving us some decent exposition on what exactly it means to be The Dragon Reborn.

A) Moiraine's plan was the double-back, killing the horse convinced Lanfear she was trying to outrun her instead. B) Dang, I thought she was killing that lady with some Air-wrought pressure torture or suffocation! Lanfear can hurt people in any way she damn well pleases. C) Yeah, the Uno burial feint should have been followed through for it to land better. Surely Bornhald would have allowed Perrin to bury him? Though it could easily lead to a confrontation with Valda... D) Seanchan hierarchy seemed difficult to follow in the books too, like they were total sticklers for protocol -- unless they didn't want to. Which was used as a power move often enough, like the underling would be questioning whether they were being honored or were about to be killed. E) No issues here. #flickerflickerherewecome

The Heroes of the Horn emerging from fog while Rand and Ishy duel in the sky, apparently using some form of Illusion so they are somehow enlarged and clearly visible to all in the city... It's great on the page, but yeah, I don't know how they could pull that off without veering hard into some cringy CGI. I think they will keep things normal-sized and on the ground in a crowded battlefield, and rely on rumor to exaggerate the scene and confuse the news of it, much like in the book. But... They have already had Verin talk about a battle in the skies, and the production team has already started bragging about how epic the finale is, so maybe they have something really surprising and great.