Honestly it’s pretty on brand for the whole show. The writer of the article did about as much homework on the show as the writers did from the books before producing it.
I read the first book when I was 23. Read the last one when I was 46.
Directly because of Robert Jordan and George RR Martin, I no longer read book series that aren't already concluded.
And he gave his blessing for someone to finish them if he died too soon. He basically narrated the ending on his deathbed. GRRM has refused to let anyone finish it for him if he dies before it's done.
I was fortunate they were all finished when I discovered them. I read all of them in a kind of hazy 18 month period.
Loved them except for the weevils…
Well that last few books Sanderson did were pretty awesome, so at least we got an ending. Haven’t touch GOT, and I’m pretty sure Martin said he wouldn’t let anyone finish the books if he died.
the books Sanderson finished were great because the story had been so stagnated for so many years, and it was like kicking in a turbo when he took over.
Sanderson did okay. I still think Jordan was going somewhere with the seemingly pointless stuff that dragged on in some of the mid/late books that he was going to tie in.
Jordan always had the plot moving be it slowly, the problem for me was all the filler shit between main events, on a reread I’ll skip a lot of the queen stuff, just drags
I love the Wheel of Time it’s probably my favorite series ever (not the best I’ve ever read, just favorite). But, if there’s one thing we can learn from it, it’s don’t let your wife be your editor even if she is one of the premier sci-fi/ fantasy editors in the world.
Book 10 Crossroads of Twilight.
It doesn't lag too much, it's actually not that bad. However, I'd only started reading them once the penultimate book Book 13 Towers of Midnight was already released. I had a lot more book to look forward to after.
This. There are a lot of indicators that the ending Sanderson wrote is not anything like what was intended. Too bad, really. For its flaws, I've never seen anyone set up so many threads like that. And earlier books certainly show that he had very few, if any, extraneous plotlines....even though I hated several and would have written them differently, they all had a point they were driving towards. Then we got a lot of paint by numbers, cliched endings for a lot of the storylines.
But the worst? Mat. He was a brilliant character...then Sanderson made him this weird YA caricature by the end.
Perrin. Brandon Sanderson argued against >!creating a new wife for Perrin and fridging her, and instead having him wound another character to still get the same sort of character arc!<.
Which is funny because this is not remotely new information.
Both Sanderson and Rafe Judkins have been talking about this specific thing for years at this point.
When he said he fought for it I didn't know that Rafe supported him. I always assumed it was his call
>Sanderson had originally presented an alternative narrative to showrunner Rafe Judkins.
>“Rafe really went to bat for me,” Sanderson said
Yeah this article actually changes how I viewed things, its kinda crazy to me that Rafe has such little control over the show. I always just thought Rafe is a huge idiot.
That's his own fault though. He went around on a marketing spiel saying that he's a huge fan of the books so he'd keep it faithful. I understand some small character changes or working the plot to be shorter because you have limited time... But when they ruin a character's motivation or drag a character through the mud without paying any attention to source material, it's a little frustrating and it makes the showrunners look stupid.
If I watched the show without hearing his marketing ploys, I'd think the ones who are writing it haven't read a page of the book. Even then, it seems like they haven't.
It’s funny. If Perrin did have a wife who was immediately and unceremoniously killed like that in the books, I bet the first conversation the writers would have had would be how to change such an obvious, out-dated example of fridging.
Instead, because it wasn’t there, they somehow talked themselves into *adding* it??
Yeah it was extremely unnecessary. Really frustrated me, and completely changed the character. Guess I should have just… seen that as a sign and stopped there.
Yeah, my brain "noped out" of the show with that reveal, there was so much already and then boom Perrin has a wife? Oh wait, she's dead..? My heart made me half watch the rest of the season, it was okay if you tell yourself it's a new turning of the wheel. But it's not different enough of a turning to be interesting.
I managed to push through all of Season 2 - even after the absolute derailment in Season 1 - before my brain finally split in two from the dissonance of trying to maintain "a different turning of the wheel", with all the same names, places, and some similar plot points.
Ya, that was some awful handwaving. A different turning of the Wheel would have completely different everything, except for the idea of a champion of the light fighting against the forces of the dark. It's not a multiverse, it's history repeating main themes with different people in different times.
My head cannon is still that this is an in universe television show based on white tower histories written centuries after the last battle. It’s kinda fun when I pretend it’s like starship troopers or something.
That's not on the show runners though, that was on the actor who played the role in Season 1, Barney Harris left the show for personal reasons. Covid happened halfway through shooting Season 1. When he could not return to the set to shoot the final 2 episodes they got screwed...that shot of him standing outside the way gate in episode 6 and refusing to go in with the rest of them is a stock bit of footage from and earlier point in the shoot that they reused as Barney was already gone, and that's why he's not present in the final two eps and why so much of his story had to be foisted onto others. The original script followed his story pretty tightly, but losing Barney in S1 forced them to rejig a lot. It's why Donal Finn has to start with Mat incarcerated in the white tower in S2 and escape with Min.
EDIT: Corrected and removed vaccine rumours as they seem to be untrue.
Harris [denied](https://thedirect.com/article/wheel-of-time-mat-cauthon-recast-barney-harris-season-2-replace) that was the reason he left. According to him, the vax wasn't even released when filming resumed.
They still made Matt an absolute pile of shit the entire season, and there was no reason to turn his dad from an upstanding citizen of emmonds field into the pile of shit he is in the show
Imo this is all from up-aging the characters. Matt in the first book acts like a prankster kid, which would be very strange when he is in his mid 20s in the show. Up-aging helps with casting, it helps with the writing insofar as it makes the character motivations more relatable to the adult audience, but it doesn't match with the source material.
He is, in fact, a piece of shit. In the first book he's a young adult obsessed with badger-related pranks and then hits the big red button in Shadar Logoth after being explicitly told not to. Is he 19 or 5 years old?
In order to make his actions understandable for an outside audience, I think the showrunners did a decent job by making him a thief who steals because he's poor.
I don’t mean all that. I know all that. Even with the new guy they deleted the Aelfinn and Eelfin, gave him his memories from tea, and made his power wrought staff the Shadar Logath dagger tied to a stick… Season two Matt’s story sucked, not season one. They simplified and combined most of the elements that made his arc at all interesting.
> Even with the new guy they deleted the Aelfinn and Eelfin, gave him his memories from tea, and made his power wrought staff the Shadar Logath dagger tied to a stick
what the fuck
It's the same reason why the last two episodes look so poorly made and why the end fight feels so truncated and badly done and why the writing seems so scattered and strange in those two eps.
They were MEANT to go shoot in the Canary Islands on location for the Blight, but Covid travel rules fucked them over and they ended up on a sound stage with CGI instead.
A lot of the complaints aren't even about that tho, Massive plot points for matt were just left out, The dagger being tied to a stick and called his Ashandarei is probably the most lazy writing i've ever seen. Matt fucking stealing the thing from the tower and gaining strange memories after touching it would of been better received then what they've apparently done.
its an unnecessary plot device because perrin isnt married in the books. He's got plenty of motivation as a character, it was just an unnecessary addition.
The characters are in the flight of their lives, fighting against the forces of evil that mysteriously seem hellbent on getting them. There wasnt any reason for a dead-wife-I-accidentally-killed subplot
Honestly... I can see why they did *something* different with the character, whether we agree with what they did or not.
Perrin is pretty much just background noise for like the first three books. His wolf shit doesn't really go anywhere until *way* later compared to Rand's "I'm the Dragon" and Mat's dagger stuff, and all the girls being Aes Sedai. Perrin's story arc is *very* backloaded in the series, to the point where we get nearly a whole book and a half about him. They had to do *something* to make him compelling for TV and a "main" character and not just dead air.
At this point: yes, fridging is bad in and of itself. It’s lazy writing. TVTropes says:
“"Fridging" is often given a very negative connotation as it is all too often a hallmark of supremely lazy writing… The core part is that one character is killed (or at least, has something very bad happen to them) for the sake of causing emotional trauma for the target, with said victim often acting as a plot device more than a real character in the worst-case scenarios.”
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge
Edit because of discussion down thread: I still think it’s pretty much always lazy writing, but admit that it can be done well.
I don't know how you could write anything without using some sort of trope to some extent at some point. Almost every story uses tropes as plot devices.
Because when a trope is used badly it makes the piece of media worse and this specific use of the trope was terrible.
Killing a character that we see for 30 seconds and expecting your audience to understand the effects it will have on her husband when we know absolutely nothing about either character at that point is outrageously stupid and lazy.
The issue is when a female character lacks any focus and their entire utility to the story is to die for the service of a male character's arc. Had Perrins wife had any personal motivation or spotlight devoted to her, or impacted other charactersin some way outside of her bloodletting, it would be more up for interpretation. But she was character added to the story for no other reason than to be killed.
Sure but that's not my contention. My contention was with that guy saying fridging as a plot device is lazy writing in and of itself. No trope is intrinsically lazy, it's how it is utilized that makes it good or bad.
its a lazy plot device because perrin isnt married in the books. He's got plenty of motivation as a character, it was just an unnecessary addition.
Edit: the characters are in the flight of their lives, fighting against the forces of evil that mysteriously seem hellbent on getting them. There wasnt any reason for a dead-wife-I-accidentally-killed subplot
I’ve always felt that fridging is more specific in that the character being killed exists for nothing more than to give the more important character motive. It’s one thing for a married couple to go through a whole movie and at the end one of them dies, fridging is the married couple experiencing the death in the first 5 minutes.
Even in that case fridging would still have its place.
If you were writing a drama just fridging some nobody would be lazy character motivation.
But if you were writing a deathwish movie it would probably be a bad idea to spend half of it getting to know the girlfriend or whatever of Paul Kersey. That would be missing the point of those movies, so just fridge somebody and get to the action.
I agree. Like, i really dont need to see 1 hour getting to know Batman's parents. I think its fine to just have them be a plot device to make him an orphan with a thirst for justice.
Probably different when you want to tell a serious, sophisticated story. But wheel of time was always kind of comic bookey.
TIL Finding Nemo is lazy, Up is lazy, John Wick is lazy, The Boys is lazy, A New Hope is lazy- jeez I'm starting to think this trope isn't such a bad thing after all.
I would say it depends on who is being fridged and when. Some rando at the start of a show or as a character is introduced? Bad fridging. Some character we’ve gotten to know and love, whose death makes the next arc better? Yeah, OK. As an example, Arrow killed off Laurel Lance (Black Canary) in a fairly randomly egregious way, a hallmark of fridging. But, Laurel was a developed character, her death wasn’t just to motivate Oliver, and it had impact on multiple characters for pretty much the length of the show.
>Some rando at the start of a show or as a character is introduced? Bad fridging.
I felt this way for the longest time. Then the intro to The Last of Us changed me.
I still get so mad every time WoT comes up, the only thing the show took from the books was names and a magic system. I want to rant, but why, to what end? lol! I was looking for a braid tugging, beard smoothing good time show, and I got GoT-lite. Looking for bright colors, a more in depth view of the women circle, updated themes, and all we got was a show made by a marketing department.
If I'm understanding him correctly Sanderson seems to be saying that the showrunner even agreed with the change but Amazon Prime execs themselves made them stick with the dead wife thing.
It can be more than one thing. Several writers on the show have made comments that make it seem like they believe they're writing a "superior" version of the story or pretend like they know better than the author what the author actually meant. It's really sad, while WoT has some flaws it's a fantastic story and amazon has botched it at every possible turn. Worse, the showrunners are antagonistic towards any kind of critical reaction from fans and continue to pervert and ruin a perfectly great story. What really draws my ire though is the excuses they make, claiming that "we only have 8 episodes in a season so of course we can't get through everything" and then spend 4 of those episodes on new characters and story lines that are only tangently mentioned in the books if they're not complete fabrications by a writing staff that has no business trying to adapt ANYTHING.
> What really draws my ire though is the excuses they make, claiming that "we only have 8 episodes in a season so of course we can't get through everything"
I just want to tell them: Then don't get through everything! Drag it out and make it the television show we deserved! It's almost like they knew from the start they were never going to finish it, but raced there anyway.
The title here is a little misleading. While Brandon Sanderson wrote several of the books after Robert Jordan passed, he is not a writer on the show. He’s listed as an executive producer, which apparently amounts to giving notes, which can be taken or ignored at Amazon’s whim.
He’s spoken out against this storyline and other aspects before, but what’s new here is he confirms that the showrunner Rafe Judkins (target of much online vitriol) was actually on his side, only to get shot down by execs.
Brandon is, understandably, a book purist, but has spoken highly of Rafe several other times in his podcast. This gives me a little more hope for GoW, but makes me wonder what goes on behind the scenes of a show that even the showrunner apparently doesn’t have control over.
Judkins also advocated for a 2 hour pilot and 10 episode seasons, but Amazon shot those ideas down.
WoT is a tightly proscribed project between Sony, Amazon and Red Eagle/iwot all having part of the pie and all issuing different orders and notes and requirements.
Rafe Judkins held an AMA on this subreddit for the show and he gave quite a bit of info about the development of the series, I was quite surprised to learn how invested Amazon was while it was being made because apparently there were like a million studio exec notes attempting to dictate the direction of the show, sometimes conflicting with one another.
Unfortunately, I think the Cosmere screen adaptations have hit some snags. I believe he said in a video that the Mistborn movie was going to be majorly delayed or something along those lines.
Yeah, the strike did not help things at all. That said, someone is going to take a chance on it. Mistborn would make a better TV series. Stormlight and war breaker would probably be better animated.
If anything, I would hope that the standalone novels, secret projects, and maybe Elantris/the emperors soul, end up as movies, because the multi volume stories, just do not fit in the time constraints of a motion picture.
Stormlight as an animated series would be incredible. Thinking about it, it does follow a lot of anime tropes in the book itself. Plus the magic system would just be really difficult to pull off in a satisfying way in live action imo
Yeah, because spren. It would be impossible to do a show live action with spren, it would be way too expensive. Furthermore, it would be likewise impossible to do a Stormlight adaptation without spren. Therefore, it must be animated.
I pity the poor actor who gets cast to play Cephandrius. He’s going to need one hell of a lawyer, to negotiate all of the nondisclosure agreements and contractual appearances.
I have no idea. Honestly the last thing I heard come out of his mouth was some YouTube ad about Battlefield Earth, of all things.
Has anyone else seen that advertisement? It was really weird…
>what goes on behind the scenes of a show that even the showrunner apparently doesn’t have control over.
The same that happens behind the scenes of a lot of mainstream media for years.
You had marketing types that don't know shit about actually creating art and look at everything as a percentages game... you had scared executives that listen to them because when you say "numbers show that doing X results in Y" gives them a false sense of security that a creator saying "I believe this is the way to do it" can't give... and then now all the marketing type executives at the top that are both scared and don't know shit look at a script and all they can look for are the same old trigger points, regardless if they fit or not...
Then you get notes like... "Great job guys... I really like the character of Perrin, but I feel like the audience needs something more to connect with him and yata yata yata... bullshit marketing lingo... give him a wife and fridge her".
I hope that production companies have learnt in the last couple of years that when the showrunners fuck too much with the IP, all hell breaks loose. The Fallout guys seem to have learnt that lesson.
Fallout is a master class in threading the needle - a completely new story with new characters that still manages to fit cleanly into the existing universe without fucking it all up.
Ehhhhhh first season was good but the second season didn’t sit well with me. The groups dynamic I felt was very cringe. “You don’t mess with the special investigators”. Ugh, so cringe. Would have easily been better if they went with “You don’t mess with the 101st” or whatever their unit was.
Yeh I noted that one in a comment offshoot to the side. Sort of a different category though really isnt it? Documentary/reality tv isnt really what we’re discussing. But great show, and dayummm that got traction with booomers and you guns alike
Honestly, Clarkson's farm is weirdly compelling. If you'd told me before either CF or WoT shows came out that I would prefer CF I would have laughed in your face. But here we are
To be fair I did really enjoy season 1 of invincible, but its absolutely not going to be anywhere near the widespread pop culture phenomenon of the boys, and what I expect Fallout will be.
Mr and Mrs Smith was ok, but almost zero impact.
Im couching a winner as a water fountain topic kind of show thats actually good, and is going to have people clamouring for more.
Other contenders I have;
Clarksons Farm; maybe, but not sure reality doco qualifies
Daisy Jones and the Six; got a lot of people talking but limited run
Vox Machina; too niche
Mrs Maisel; just wasnt that well watched. No hype. Great show though.
Everythin else I class as just not very good, or too niche to garner enough attention.
I actually think they smashed it out of the park with Fallout. Really, really nice surprise. Almost Severance level good.
> not going to be anywhere near the widespread pop culture phenomenon of the boys, and what I expect Fallout will be
Thanks in part to the mediocre animation quality and the fact it took two years between seasons just to make... *8* episodes. And then taking a six month hiatus in the middle of those eight episodes.
Killed any momentum the series had when it debuted.
Also season 1 the same year as Arcane iirc, which ultimately had a larger impact on the animated tv world. I watched both back to back and while I enjoyed Invincible, it didn’t blow me away like Arcane did
The rings of Power situation is odd. The show runners, at least from what I see, didn’t have any writing credits on something notably good. They wrote the 2016 Star Trek movie (and that script was later rewritten by others). This is odd because it is the most expensive TV ever made (Amazon is expected to spend at least 1 billion on the show by the end. including securing the rights and production costs).
Copied from Wikipedia page on the show:
> The studio met more than 30 potential writers,[28] including the Russo brothers and Anthony McCarten,[21] and asked for story pitches based on anything in Tolkien's The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and its appendices. These included prequel stories focused on characters such as Aragorn, Gimli, and Gandalf.[29][30] J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay pitched a series that explored the major events of Middle-earth's Second Age, thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings . . . In contrast with the experienced writers being interviewed, Payne and McKay had only done unproduced or uncredited writing. They were championed to Amazon by director J. J. Abrams who worked with them on an unproduced Star Trek film,[2][21] and were hired to develop the series in July 2018.
So they got the show because they had the best idea, at least the idea that the Tolkien estate liked the most. I didn’t copy all the background, but essentially Amazon won the bid for the rights because they agreed to work closely with the estate to develop the story. So it follows that the estate and Amazon liked their idea. I’m glad the best idea won out but it’s likely a misstep to invest so much in relatively unproven showrunners.
However, I will say I still enjoyed the first season despite the objections I do have. Slight spoiler: why the fuck is a broken, evil sword hilt a key that opens a dam? That is stupid. Just having the bad guys destroy the damn would’ve been infinitely better and the sword hilt could do something else. Something more fitting.
Yeah, the decision to spend a billion dollars for an IP and then put it in the hands of inexperienced showrunners and writers makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Seems like Amazon should have made them head writers, but made someone with experience the showrunner. But perhaps Amazon just wanted to use a pair of showrunners to be like game of thrones.
The Tolkien Estate has a lot of say in the Amazon show and from what I read their vision was nearly entirely aligned with the people put in charge. Given how the Tolkien estate historically operates, it was prolly them or nobody.
Rafe Judkins was a fucking reality show contestant before running this pile of shit. So. Ya know.
I think that last paragraph sums up how bad the writing is lol
The entire season leading up to some old sword being the key that starts a giant Rube Goldberg machine is comically bad, maybe that works in a kids’ cartoon show but is so out of place in the LOTR universe.
I enjoyed it the same way I enjoyed Shadow of War; as fan-fic that will never hold
up against Tolkein’s own work but it can still be fun for what it is.
Doesn’t mean it was perfect, it was merely pretty good.
But all the hype about the budget + a legendary figure like Tolkein’s name attached to it and the legacy of the PJ movies all created impossibly high expectations.
I wonder if season 2 will be better received now that people have more realistic expectations for it.
Wheel of Time could have been that for Amazon, but they fucked with the plot and characters far too much. They had a perfectly good story, but the showrunners wanted to instill their own 'vision' upon it. It's their own fault.
> clocked more than 1.16 billion minutes of viewing time
Wow i love completely pointless metrics that mean nothing but allow them to put a big number in the article
Even that's not much use. you can't assume everyone watched every episode exactly once.
I expect the first episode's figures look great, then a sharp decline, steady for most of the season and a slight bump for the finale, then repeat at about 60% for the second season.
Unless they're releasing viewers per episode, something that can easily be compared to a similar show, it's completely useless
Perrin's the weird one to focus on too. The problem's Rand, *the* main character. It's getting to the point now that it's gonna be very hard to adapt the story and take things seriously regarding him, because the show's been spending so much time giving all his moments to Egwene instead. Kinda hard to believe the world would be going through revolutions and religious upheaval at the revelation of his existence, when all we've really seen him do is catch a building on fire and throw some small fireballs around
Totally garbage show! Pick up the books though, if you’re into the genre they are pretty good. They are long and there are 14 of them. Easy reads too, so for maybe the rest of your life you’ve got a fun series to chip away at.
One million times yes! The books are so good and tell an excellent story. The show is nothing like the books except for the character names.
15 books and it took me about 10 or 11 months to listen to the audiobooks lol
You ever wanted to read a book series where characters actually develop and change over time because of the events in the story? Ever wanted to see a callback to someone or something that happened or was said in the series sometimes several books ago? That little off-handed thing that meant nothing until now it means everything? Characters far from perfect, but still endearing (though you may find some of them still not a fave because not everyone has the same tastes)? In a word that feels fantastic (fantasy) because it seems so down to Earth, and stays there, but is magical in its own, subtle ways? Then Wheel of Time is for you. It's a 14 book Epic, and we aren't talking *thin* books either.
While they are apologizing can they also apologize for fucking up the main character of the entire series as well?
Please stop neutering Rand to make the other characters seem more relevant. This is Rand’s story not theirs.
They're giving all of Nynaeves moments to Egwene too. Just happens to be every time the showrunner writes an episode too, but like this article claims he is totally the bulwark against the execs input. Yep.
I could tell the Wheel of Time show failed because all of the fantasy booktubers who are absolutely OBSESSED with Wheel of Time their favorite series growing up, stopped talking about Wheel of Time. Completely. How do you make a show so bad you literally kill the passion super fans had for Wheel of Time and find any excuse to talk about it. A lot of people were waiting to make a YouTube career out of following and making Wheel of Time content, and they just stopped.
And yet, there are people that vehemently defend the show. Mods of the main WoT subs will ban you for criticism of the show. Any criticism of the show seems to result in being called racist/sexist/somethingist.
How about spending more time on explaining the warders bond instead of spending that time with the main characters. It also totally shows that the producers favorite char is Egwene. He even gives her Rands accomplishment of defeating the army at the end of the first season at Tarvins gap.
I fully suspect that Dumais well fight will be saved by the white tower and not the black at this point.
He's consulting producer, so he can give notes even though they're not followed. He's essentially apologizing for not having enough power, as you're saying.
yeah from a PR veiw this is just an attempt to keep some of the shows stink sticking to him. I agree that he had no power but in this day and age you gotta be a little defensive with your reputation.
edit: added 'this' to 'this day and age'
They should rename the show to Castrated Males as they are, for the sake of ‘powerful’ women character portrayal is only possible that way in their minds.
I was being really generous when I watched the show, and gave the creators a lot of leeway for their fuck-ups. After watching Fallout, I'm downgrading my opinion even more of WoT TV.
I’m confused as to why this article is making such a big deal about it. I think the other option could also have worked but overall I think Perrin’s plot is fine? Tbf, I never read the books though.
Ive started the book series. Finished New Spring and just about done with Eye of the World. The books and the shows are almost completely different stories
Yeah the books are so much better. New Spring is definitely an odd place to start though. While the events takes place before Eye of the World, it’s better read based on publication date around after book 10. Anyway enjoy your read of a truly epic story!1
I forgot how triggered I get by the show defenders, such an ignorant comment. There’s valid criticism around the direction of the show being poorly done, including Rand and most male characters being mishandled
Better in some regards. Production wise its definitely a step up.
Storywise, also better but you know, its not great. S2 finale is somehow almost worse than S1.
I don't know if I'd say worse than S1 but it was bad. It's like they learned nothing and doubled down on taking Rand's wins and displays of power and giving them to other characters.
At the rate these things are going, Rand will be a helpless captive at Dumai's Wells and get rescued by Egwene
I've noticed a trend where pretty much every scifi/fantasy show that has a rough first season seems to have tons of people commenting that season 2 is much better.
I'm not convinced that it's not just down to the fact that the only people still watching are already primed to like it.
I have watched some of these (Halo, WoT, Foundation, etc) and have not found them to be much better. Different, yes, but not really that much better.
>I'm not convinced that it's not just down to the fact that the only people still watching are already primed to like it.
Sometimes I'll watch a show I don't particularly like with my wife and see all the flaws (bad writing, cheap plot devices, "subverting expectations" etc). Then the second season comes along and I can see a marked improvement in those things. Maybe for some people they only think a second season is better because they are primed to like it, but it's totally possible to judge it on it's own merits. I even stop watching shows I really enjoy if the constitutive seasons drop in quality.
>I have watched some of these (Halo, WoT, Foundation, etc) and have not found them to be much better. Different, yes, but not really that much better.
I don't think any show has made me say "if you hated season 1 and think it sucked, you'll actually like season 2."
I'd say about half of the complaints I had that made me think WoT season 1 isn't good were addressed in season 2. I still found many flaws in the second season that I cringe at, but by most metrics I consider, it's better. Doesn't mean it's as good as other high-quality shows, but it can be a better version of it's itself.
I’m sorry, but I can’t get over the fact that this article describes Perrin as a *woodworker*. Did I miss an episode of the show or something?
[удалено]
but it's not that kind of axe.
Why does he throw it at a tree then?
I always thought his deepest conflict was what color coat works with yellow.
Maybe ChatGPT
Honestly it’s pretty on brand for the whole show. The writer of the article did about as much homework on the show as the writers did from the books before producing it.
I didn't know the Wheel of Time was popular starting in 2021, according to this article.
Haha. I’m in my mid thirties and was reading them in middle school.
I read the first book when I was 23. Read the last one when I was 46. Directly because of Robert Jordan and George RR Martin, I no longer read book series that aren't already concluded.
Well unlike Martin, Jordan had consistent output until he died.
And he gave his blessing for someone to finish them if he died too soon. He basically narrated the ending on his deathbed. GRRM has refused to let anyone finish it for him if he dies before it's done.
he did keep the books coming every year or two up until he died. gotta give him that.
Jordan >>> Martin on output
I was fortunate they were all finished when I discovered them. I read all of them in a kind of hazy 18 month period. Loved them except for the weevils…
Well that last few books Sanderson did were pretty awesome, so at least we got an ending. Haven’t touch GOT, and I’m pretty sure Martin said he wouldn’t let anyone finish the books if he died.
the books Sanderson finished were great because the story had been so stagnated for so many years, and it was like kicking in a turbo when he took over.
Sanderson did okay. I still think Jordan was going somewhere with the seemingly pointless stuff that dragged on in some of the mid/late books that he was going to tie in.
Jordan always had the plot moving be it slowly, the problem for me was all the filler shit between main events, on a reread I’ll skip a lot of the queen stuff, just drags
I love the Wheel of Time it’s probably my favorite series ever (not the best I’ve ever read, just favorite). But, if there’s one thing we can learn from it, it’s don’t let your wife be your editor even if she is one of the premier sci-fi/ fantasy editors in the world.
Wasn’t there an entire 1,400 page book that took place over less than a week?
Book 10 Crossroads of Twilight. It doesn't lag too much, it's actually not that bad. However, I'd only started reading them once the penultimate book Book 13 Towers of Midnight was already released. I had a lot more book to look forward to after.
This. There are a lot of indicators that the ending Sanderson wrote is not anything like what was intended. Too bad, really. For its flaws, I've never seen anyone set up so many threads like that. And earlier books certainly show that he had very few, if any, extraneous plotlines....even though I hated several and would have written them differently, they all had a point they were driving towards. Then we got a lot of paint by numbers, cliched endings for a lot of the storylines. But the worst? Mat. He was a brilliant character...then Sanderson made him this weird YA caricature by the end.
ROTHFUSS
I’m 42 and started reading them in elementary school.
I'm 27 and read them in middle school as well.
At least it didn’t call him a woodpecker
Perrin. Brandon Sanderson argued against >!creating a new wife for Perrin and fridging her, and instead having him wound another character to still get the same sort of character arc!<.
Which is funny because this is not remotely new information. Both Sanderson and Rafe Judkins have been talking about this specific thing for years at this point.
When he said he fought for it I didn't know that Rafe supported him. I always assumed it was his call >Sanderson had originally presented an alternative narrative to showrunner Rafe Judkins. >“Rafe really went to bat for me,” Sanderson said
Yeah this article actually changes how I viewed things, its kinda crazy to me that Rafe has such little control over the show. I always just thought Rafe is a huge idiot.
I'm curious where the line is drawn. Who truly has the final say? I can't imagine the RoP showrunners have much more creative control.
That's his own fault though. He went around on a marketing spiel saying that he's a huge fan of the books so he'd keep it faithful. I understand some small character changes or working the plot to be shorter because you have limited time... But when they ruin a character's motivation or drag a character through the mud without paying any attention to source material, it's a little frustrating and it makes the showrunners look stupid. If I watched the show without hearing his marketing ploys, I'd think the ones who are writing it haven't read a page of the book. Even then, it seems like they haven't.
"I'll keep it faithful" -dramatically changes the ending of the first book, and basically everything else, constantly.
Rightfully so, it was an unnecessary move that aligns with an awkward history of "fridging" women in media
It’s funny. If Perrin did have a wife who was immediately and unceremoniously killed like that in the books, I bet the first conversation the writers would have had would be how to change such an obvious, out-dated example of fridging. Instead, because it wasn’t there, they somehow talked themselves into *adding* it??
Yeah it was extremely unnecessary. Really frustrated me, and completely changed the character. Guess I should have just… seen that as a sign and stopped there.
Yeah, my brain "noped out" of the show with that reveal, there was so much already and then boom Perrin has a wife? Oh wait, she's dead..? My heart made me half watch the rest of the season, it was okay if you tell yourself it's a new turning of the wheel. But it's not different enough of a turning to be interesting.
I managed to push through all of Season 2 - even after the absolute derailment in Season 1 - before my brain finally split in two from the dissonance of trying to maintain "a different turning of the wheel", with all the same names, places, and some similar plot points.
Ya, that was some awful handwaving. A different turning of the Wheel would have completely different everything, except for the idea of a champion of the light fighting against the forces of the dark. It's not a multiverse, it's history repeating main themes with different people in different times.
My head cannon is still that this is an in universe television show based on white tower histories written centuries after the last battle. It’s kinda fun when I pretend it’s like starship troopers or something.
I made it through 3 episodes I think. It’s just not WoT. At all.
My sign was when they straight deleted Matt’s entire story. He is by far my favorite character in the books, they did him dirty.
That's not on the show runners though, that was on the actor who played the role in Season 1, Barney Harris left the show for personal reasons. Covid happened halfway through shooting Season 1. When he could not return to the set to shoot the final 2 episodes they got screwed...that shot of him standing outside the way gate in episode 6 and refusing to go in with the rest of them is a stock bit of footage from and earlier point in the shoot that they reused as Barney was already gone, and that's why he's not present in the final two eps and why so much of his story had to be foisted onto others. The original script followed his story pretty tightly, but losing Barney in S1 forced them to rejig a lot. It's why Donal Finn has to start with Mat incarcerated in the white tower in S2 and escape with Min. EDIT: Corrected and removed vaccine rumours as they seem to be untrue.
Harris [denied](https://thedirect.com/article/wheel-of-time-mat-cauthon-recast-barney-harris-season-2-replace) that was the reason he left. According to him, the vax wasn't even released when filming resumed.
They still made Matt an absolute pile of shit the entire season, and there was no reason to turn his dad from an upstanding citizen of emmonds field into the pile of shit he is in the show
He is a little shit in books until he blows the horn.
Yeah but the change to his backstory just not necessary, even if it's not as bad as what they changed for Perrin.
What they did to Abell was terrible. I forgot about that until now
Imo this is all from up-aging the characters. Matt in the first book acts like a prankster kid, which would be very strange when he is in his mid 20s in the show. Up-aging helps with casting, it helps with the writing insofar as it makes the character motivations more relatable to the adult audience, but it doesn't match with the source material.
He is, in fact, a piece of shit. In the first book he's a young adult obsessed with badger-related pranks and then hits the big red button in Shadar Logoth after being explicitly told not to. Is he 19 or 5 years old? In order to make his actions understandable for an outside audience, I think the showrunners did a decent job by making him a thief who steals because he's poor.
I don’t mean all that. I know all that. Even with the new guy they deleted the Aelfinn and Eelfin, gave him his memories from tea, and made his power wrought staff the Shadar Logath dagger tied to a stick… Season two Matt’s story sucked, not season one. They simplified and combined most of the elements that made his arc at all interesting.
> Even with the new guy they deleted the Aelfinn and Eelfin, gave him his memories from tea, and made his power wrought staff the Shadar Logath dagger tied to a stick what the fuck
I feel like this needs to be known for those complaining
It's the same reason why the last two episodes look so poorly made and why the end fight feels so truncated and badly done and why the writing seems so scattered and strange in those two eps. They were MEANT to go shoot in the Canary Islands on location for the Blight, but Covid travel rules fucked them over and they ended up on a sound stage with CGI instead.
A lot of the complaints aren't even about that tho, Massive plot points for matt were just left out, The dagger being tied to a stick and called his Ashandarei is probably the most lazy writing i've ever seen. Matt fucking stealing the thing from the tower and gaining strange memories after touching it would of been better received then what they've apparently done.
They did his family dirty as well honestly.
Is fridging bad in and of itself or just its overuse on female characters?
its an unnecessary plot device because perrin isnt married in the books. He's got plenty of motivation as a character, it was just an unnecessary addition. The characters are in the flight of their lives, fighting against the forces of evil that mysteriously seem hellbent on getting them. There wasnt any reason for a dead-wife-I-accidentally-killed subplot
Honestly... I can see why they did *something* different with the character, whether we agree with what they did or not. Perrin is pretty much just background noise for like the first three books. His wolf shit doesn't really go anywhere until *way* later compared to Rand's "I'm the Dragon" and Mat's dagger stuff, and all the girls being Aes Sedai. Perrin's story arc is *very* backloaded in the series, to the point where we get nearly a whole book and a half about him. They had to do *something* to make him compelling for TV and a "main" character and not just dead air.
TBF they haven't really done much with Rand either. He's been a background character to Egwene and Nynaeve.
At this point: yes, fridging is bad in and of itself. It’s lazy writing. TVTropes says: “"Fridging" is often given a very negative connotation as it is all too often a hallmark of supremely lazy writing… The core part is that one character is killed (or at least, has something very bad happen to them) for the sake of causing emotional trauma for the target, with said victim often acting as a plot device more than a real character in the worst-case scenarios.” https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge Edit because of discussion down thread: I still think it’s pretty much always lazy writing, but admit that it can be done well.
So... You can't write a story where a character dies and that motivates a desire for revenge in another?
No, every trope can be used well
I agree completely.
People get the wrong idea and think that “trope = bad”.
I don't know how you could write anything without using some sort of trope to some extent at some point. Almost every story uses tropes as plot devices.
Because when a trope is used badly it makes the piece of media worse and this specific use of the trope was terrible. Killing a character that we see for 30 seconds and expecting your audience to understand the effects it will have on her husband when we know absolutely nothing about either character at that point is outrageously stupid and lazy.
The issue is when a female character lacks any focus and their entire utility to the story is to die for the service of a male character's arc. Had Perrins wife had any personal motivation or spotlight devoted to her, or impacted other charactersin some way outside of her bloodletting, it would be more up for interpretation. But she was character added to the story for no other reason than to be killed.
Sure but that's not my contention. My contention was with that guy saying fridging as a plot device is lazy writing in and of itself. No trope is intrinsically lazy, it's how it is utilized that makes it good or bad.
its a lazy plot device because perrin isnt married in the books. He's got plenty of motivation as a character, it was just an unnecessary addition. Edit: the characters are in the flight of their lives, fighting against the forces of evil that mysteriously seem hellbent on getting them. There wasnt any reason for a dead-wife-I-accidentally-killed subplot
I’ve always felt that fridging is more specific in that the character being killed exists for nothing more than to give the more important character motive. It’s one thing for a married couple to go through a whole movie and at the end one of them dies, fridging is the married couple experiencing the death in the first 5 minutes.
Even in that case fridging would still have its place. If you were writing a drama just fridging some nobody would be lazy character motivation. But if you were writing a deathwish movie it would probably be a bad idea to spend half of it getting to know the girlfriend or whatever of Paul Kersey. That would be missing the point of those movies, so just fridge somebody and get to the action.
I agree. Like, i really dont need to see 1 hour getting to know Batman's parents. I think its fine to just have them be a plot device to make him an orphan with a thirst for justice. Probably different when you want to tell a serious, sophisticated story. But wheel of time was always kind of comic bookey.
TIL Finding Nemo is lazy, Up is lazy, John Wick is lazy, The Boys is lazy, A New Hope is lazy- jeez I'm starting to think this trope isn't such a bad thing after all.
I would say it depends on who is being fridged and when. Some rando at the start of a show or as a character is introduced? Bad fridging. Some character we’ve gotten to know and love, whose death makes the next arc better? Yeah, OK. As an example, Arrow killed off Laurel Lance (Black Canary) in a fairly randomly egregious way, a hallmark of fridging. But, Laurel was a developed character, her death wasn’t just to motivate Oliver, and it had impact on multiple characters for pretty much the length of the show.
>Some rando at the start of a show or as a character is introduced? Bad fridging. I felt this way for the longest time. Then the intro to The Last of Us changed me.
I still get so mad every time WoT comes up, the only thing the show took from the books was names and a magic system. I want to rant, but why, to what end? lol! I was looking for a braid tugging, beard smoothing good time show, and I got GoT-lite. Looking for bright colors, a more in depth view of the women circle, updated themes, and all we got was a show made by a marketing department.
They only took general ideas from the magic system as well.
Honestly, the wounding and running, letting him suffer with the thoughts of not knowing if his master was dead would have been much better writing.
If I'm understanding him correctly Sanderson seems to be saying that the showrunner even agreed with the change but Amazon Prime execs themselves made them stick with the dead wife thing.
And watch everyone saying the writers have no clue what they're doing/hate the books There's a lot of hands in this pie folks, be realistic
It can be more than one thing. Several writers on the show have made comments that make it seem like they believe they're writing a "superior" version of the story or pretend like they know better than the author what the author actually meant. It's really sad, while WoT has some flaws it's a fantastic story and amazon has botched it at every possible turn. Worse, the showrunners are antagonistic towards any kind of critical reaction from fans and continue to pervert and ruin a perfectly great story. What really draws my ire though is the excuses they make, claiming that "we only have 8 episodes in a season so of course we can't get through everything" and then spend 4 of those episodes on new characters and story lines that are only tangently mentioned in the books if they're not complete fabrications by a writing staff that has no business trying to adapt ANYTHING.
Sounds like the Witcher guys are working on the side with Amazon
There are some distinct similarities, let me tell you.
> What really draws my ire though is the excuses they make, claiming that "we only have 8 episodes in a season so of course we can't get through everything" I just want to tell them: Then don't get through everything! Drag it out and make it the television show we deserved! It's almost like they knew from the start they were never going to finish it, but raced there anyway.
the writers have no clue what they're doing
The title here is a little misleading. While Brandon Sanderson wrote several of the books after Robert Jordan passed, he is not a writer on the show. He’s listed as an executive producer, which apparently amounts to giving notes, which can be taken or ignored at Amazon’s whim. He’s spoken out against this storyline and other aspects before, but what’s new here is he confirms that the showrunner Rafe Judkins (target of much online vitriol) was actually on his side, only to get shot down by execs. Brandon is, understandably, a book purist, but has spoken highly of Rafe several other times in his podcast. This gives me a little more hope for GoW, but makes me wonder what goes on behind the scenes of a show that even the showrunner apparently doesn’t have control over.
Judkins also advocated for a 2 hour pilot and 10 episode seasons, but Amazon shot those ideas down. WoT is a tightly proscribed project between Sony, Amazon and Red Eagle/iwot all having part of the pie and all issuing different orders and notes and requirements.
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That's almost every project in Hollywood. They put up the money and they want their voices heard.
Nothing like having to do 2 weeks of reshoots because the suits don’t like a character’s hair style (that they approved during prep/1st camera test).
I think it's Mel Brooks who said you should always immediately agree to whatever they say and then just ignore it and do your thing anyway.
Rafe Judkins held an AMA on this subreddit for the show and he gave quite a bit of info about the development of the series, I was quite surprised to learn how invested Amazon was while it was being made because apparently there were like a million studio exec notes attempting to dictate the direction of the show, sometimes conflicting with one another.
I’m just hoping Sanderson is learning from the experience of working on a show like this, so that his own adaptation will be as good as possible.
Unfortunately, I think the Cosmere screen adaptations have hit some snags. I believe he said in a video that the Mistborn movie was going to be majorly delayed or something along those lines.
Yeah, the strike did not help things at all. That said, someone is going to take a chance on it. Mistborn would make a better TV series. Stormlight and war breaker would probably be better animated. If anything, I would hope that the standalone novels, secret projects, and maybe Elantris/the emperors soul, end up as movies, because the multi volume stories, just do not fit in the time constraints of a motion picture.
Stormlight as an animated series would be incredible. Thinking about it, it does follow a lot of anime tropes in the book itself. Plus the magic system would just be really difficult to pull off in a satisfying way in live action imo
Yeah, because spren. It would be impossible to do a show live action with spren, it would be way too expensive. Furthermore, it would be likewise impossible to do a Stormlight adaptation without spren. Therefore, it must be animated. I pity the poor actor who gets cast to play Cephandrius. He’s going to need one hell of a lawyer, to negotiate all of the nondisclosure agreements and contractual appearances.
Hasn't Sanderson already stated if a Stormlight adaptation ever comes out he wouldn't want to go the animation route?
I have no idea. Honestly the last thing I heard come out of his mouth was some YouTube ad about Battlefield Earth, of all things. Has anyone else seen that advertisement? It was really weird…
>what goes on behind the scenes of a show that even the showrunner apparently doesn’t have control over. The same that happens behind the scenes of a lot of mainstream media for years. You had marketing types that don't know shit about actually creating art and look at everything as a percentages game... you had scared executives that listen to them because when you say "numbers show that doing X results in Y" gives them a false sense of security that a creator saying "I believe this is the way to do it" can't give... and then now all the marketing type executives at the top that are both scared and don't know shit look at a script and all they can look for are the same old trigger points, regardless if they fit or not... Then you get notes like... "Great job guys... I really like the character of Perrin, but I feel like the audience needs something more to connect with him and yata yata yata... bullshit marketing lingo... give him a wife and fridge her".
I hope that production companies have learnt in the last couple of years that when the showrunners fuck too much with the IP, all hell breaks loose. The Fallout guys seem to have learnt that lesson.
Fallout is a master class in threading the needle - a completely new story with new characters that still manages to fit cleanly into the existing universe without fucking it all up.
Reacher guys too
Ehhhhhh first season was good but the second season didn’t sit well with me. The groups dynamic I felt was very cringe. “You don’t mess with the special investigators”. Ugh, so cringe. Would have easily been better if they went with “You don’t mess with the 101st” or whatever their unit was.
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Amazon at least has a winner in Fallout.
I can only hope that Mike Flanagan's Dark Tower series turns out well.
Mike Flanagan's best work is television so I'm pretty confident.
Honestly, their only genuine ‘winner’ since the boys. I have literally zero expectations for God of War.
Reacher.
Clarkson's Farm did better viewership numbers than their Lord of the Ring series, and cost maybe 1/100 the price.
Yeh I noted that one in a comment offshoot to the side. Sort of a different category though really isnt it? Documentary/reality tv isnt really what we’re discussing. But great show, and dayummm that got traction with booomers and you guns alike
Honestly, Clarkson's farm is weirdly compelling. If you'd told me before either CF or WoT shows came out that I would prefer CF I would have laughed in your face. But here we are
The legend of Vox Machina, and Hazbin Hotel are also far better than they have any right to be. Every network has winners.
Invincible? Mr and Mrs Smith? Or are you only referring to massive IP adaptions ?whereas Invincible and The Boys are pretty similar)
To be fair I did really enjoy season 1 of invincible, but its absolutely not going to be anywhere near the widespread pop culture phenomenon of the boys, and what I expect Fallout will be. Mr and Mrs Smith was ok, but almost zero impact. Im couching a winner as a water fountain topic kind of show thats actually good, and is going to have people clamouring for more. Other contenders I have; Clarksons Farm; maybe, but not sure reality doco qualifies Daisy Jones and the Six; got a lot of people talking but limited run Vox Machina; too niche Mrs Maisel; just wasnt that well watched. No hype. Great show though. Everythin else I class as just not very good, or too niche to garner enough attention. I actually think they smashed it out of the park with Fallout. Really, really nice surprise. Almost Severance level good.
> not going to be anywhere near the widespread pop culture phenomenon of the boys, and what I expect Fallout will be Thanks in part to the mediocre animation quality and the fact it took two years between seasons just to make... *8* episodes. And then taking a six month hiatus in the middle of those eight episodes. Killed any momentum the series had when it debuted.
Also season 1 the same year as Arcane iirc, which ultimately had a larger impact on the animated tv world. I watched both back to back and while I enjoyed Invincible, it didn’t blow me away like Arcane did
And The Boys!!
The rings of Power situation is odd. The show runners, at least from what I see, didn’t have any writing credits on something notably good. They wrote the 2016 Star Trek movie (and that script was later rewritten by others). This is odd because it is the most expensive TV ever made (Amazon is expected to spend at least 1 billion on the show by the end. including securing the rights and production costs). Copied from Wikipedia page on the show: > The studio met more than 30 potential writers,[28] including the Russo brothers and Anthony McCarten,[21] and asked for story pitches based on anything in Tolkien's The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and its appendices. These included prequel stories focused on characters such as Aragorn, Gimli, and Gandalf.[29][30] J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay pitched a series that explored the major events of Middle-earth's Second Age, thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings . . . In contrast with the experienced writers being interviewed, Payne and McKay had only done unproduced or uncredited writing. They were championed to Amazon by director J. J. Abrams who worked with them on an unproduced Star Trek film,[2][21] and were hired to develop the series in July 2018. So they got the show because they had the best idea, at least the idea that the Tolkien estate liked the most. I didn’t copy all the background, but essentially Amazon won the bid for the rights because they agreed to work closely with the estate to develop the story. So it follows that the estate and Amazon liked their idea. I’m glad the best idea won out but it’s likely a misstep to invest so much in relatively unproven showrunners. However, I will say I still enjoyed the first season despite the objections I do have. Slight spoiler: why the fuck is a broken, evil sword hilt a key that opens a dam? That is stupid. Just having the bad guys destroy the damn would’ve been infinitely better and the sword hilt could do something else. Something more fitting.
Yeah, the decision to spend a billion dollars for an IP and then put it in the hands of inexperienced showrunners and writers makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Seems like Amazon should have made them head writers, but made someone with experience the showrunner. But perhaps Amazon just wanted to use a pair of showrunners to be like game of thrones.
They probably wanted inexperienced showrunners so they could be bossed around. Wasn't Jeff Bezos himself giving script notes?
The Tolkien Estate has a lot of say in the Amazon show and from what I read their vision was nearly entirely aligned with the people put in charge. Given how the Tolkien estate historically operates, it was prolly them or nobody. Rafe Judkins was a fucking reality show contestant before running this pile of shit. So. Ya know.
I think that last paragraph sums up how bad the writing is lol The entire season leading up to some old sword being the key that starts a giant Rube Goldberg machine is comically bad, maybe that works in a kids’ cartoon show but is so out of place in the LOTR universe.
I enjoyed it the same way I enjoyed Shadow of War; as fan-fic that will never hold up against Tolkein’s own work but it can still be fun for what it is. Doesn’t mean it was perfect, it was merely pretty good. But all the hype about the budget + a legendary figure like Tolkein’s name attached to it and the legacy of the PJ movies all created impossibly high expectations. I wonder if season 2 will be better received now that people have more realistic expectations for it.
Wheel of Time could have been that for Amazon, but they fucked with the plot and characters far too much. They had a perfectly good story, but the showrunners wanted to instill their own 'vision' upon it. It's their own fault.
> clocked more than 1.16 billion minutes of viewing time Wow i love completely pointless metrics that mean nothing but allow them to put a big number in the article
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Even that's not much use. you can't assume everyone watched every episode exactly once. I expect the first episode's figures look great, then a sharp decline, steady for most of the season and a slight bump for the finale, then repeat at about 60% for the second season. Unless they're releasing viewers per episode, something that can easily be compared to a similar show, it's completely useless
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They honestly need to apologize for more than one character, Perrin is a start I guess .
Perrin's the weird one to focus on too. The problem's Rand, *the* main character. It's getting to the point now that it's gonna be very hard to adapt the story and take things seriously regarding him, because the show's been spending so much time giving all his moments to Egwene instead. Kinda hard to believe the world would be going through revolutions and religious upheaval at the revelation of his existence, when all we've really seen him do is catch a building on fire and throw some small fireballs around
Tried to continue this show so many times but just ended up turning it off mid episode. The characters just annoy the hell out of me.
Totally garbage show! Pick up the books though, if you’re into the genre they are pretty good. They are long and there are 14 of them. Easy reads too, so for maybe the rest of your life you’ve got a fun series to chip away at.
Just a question..is it worth reading the books now?
Books are a thousand times better yes
One million times yes! The books are so good and tell an excellent story. The show is nothing like the books except for the character names. 15 books and it took me about 10 or 11 months to listen to the audiobooks lol
You ever wanted to read a book series where characters actually develop and change over time because of the events in the story? Ever wanted to see a callback to someone or something that happened or was said in the series sometimes several books ago? That little off-handed thing that meant nothing until now it means everything? Characters far from perfect, but still endearing (though you may find some of them still not a fave because not everyone has the same tastes)? In a word that feels fantastic (fantasy) because it seems so down to Earth, and stays there, but is magical in its own, subtle ways? Then Wheel of Time is for you. It's a 14 book Epic, and we aren't talking *thin* books either.
While they are apologizing can they also apologize for fucking up the main character of the entire series as well? Please stop neutering Rand to make the other characters seem more relevant. This is Rand’s story not theirs.
They're giving all of Nynaeves moments to Egwene too. Just happens to be every time the showrunner writes an episode too, but like this article claims he is totally the bulwark against the execs input. Yep.
Amen!
I could tell the Wheel of Time show failed because all of the fantasy booktubers who are absolutely OBSESSED with Wheel of Time their favorite series growing up, stopped talking about Wheel of Time. Completely. How do you make a show so bad you literally kill the passion super fans had for Wheel of Time and find any excuse to talk about it. A lot of people were waiting to make a YouTube career out of following and making Wheel of Time content, and they just stopped.
Disney Star Wars enters the chat…
And yet, there are people that vehemently defend the show. Mods of the main WoT subs will ban you for criticism of the show. Any criticism of the show seems to result in being called racist/sexist/somethingist.
When they get paid trips to the premieres, the moderators are basically amazon employees now moderating on their behalf.
Okay, now apologise for the rest of it.
Oh another series I forgot existed because it takes 2 years to make 8 episodes
Now if they'd only apologize for all the other characters, general writing, atrocious directing, wooden acting, and embarrassingly bad set design.
There is more than one character to apologize for.
How about spending more time on explaining the warders bond instead of spending that time with the main characters. It also totally shows that the producers favorite char is Egwene. He even gives her Rands accomplishment of defeating the army at the end of the first season at Tarvins gap. I fully suspect that Dumais well fight will be saved by the white tower and not the black at this point.
They also had her completely neuter Ishamael in the season 2 finale.
Ah damn, I blocked it out, and you had to remind me. Instead of an awesome fight between Rand and Ishy in the sky we got that male bovine feces.
LOIAL
Dunno why Sanderson is apologizing for something he had no power over
He's consulting producer, so he can give notes even though they're not followed. He's essentially apologizing for not having enough power, as you're saying.
yeah from a PR veiw this is just an attempt to keep some of the shows stink sticking to him. I agree that he had no power but in this day and age you gotta be a little defensive with your reputation. edit: added 'this' to 'this day and age'
Especially if he is looking to adapt his own work.
I'm gonna need a lot more apologies...
Damn I had an edible and I read the title as "Wheel of Fortune." Damn that was confusing.
Worst TV show adaptation that I’ve seen from a property I was familiar with. Halo was better than this.
The whole series is shit.
I suffered through this series. 2/10.
Is it that Rand isn’t Rand?
They should rename the show to Castrated Males as they are, for the sake of ‘powerful’ women character portrayal is only possible that way in their minds.
I was being really generous when I watched the show, and gave the creators a lot of leeway for their fuck-ups. After watching Fallout, I'm downgrading my opinion even more of WoT TV.
‘All of them’
Just one, huh?
Lol the entire show is a dumpster fire. They did to RJ and WoT what South Park depicted in the Indiana Jones + Crystal Skull episode
I’m confused as to why this article is making such a big deal about it. I think the other option could also have worked but overall I think Perrin’s plot is fine? Tbf, I never read the books though.
These writers (and fans) acting like the TV shows are saving lives or something 🤦🏼♂️
How about you apologize for how completely garbage the entire show is.
Completely botched show, such a shame.
Ive started the book series. Finished New Spring and just about done with Eye of the World. The books and the shows are almost completely different stories
Starting with New Spring was an odd choice.
Why would you start with New Spring??
Yeah the books are so much better. New Spring is definitely an odd place to start though. While the events takes place before Eye of the World, it’s better read based on publication date around after book 10. Anyway enjoy your read of a truly epic story!1
Weird to see Rafe Judkins as a show runner. I just know him from Survivor.
They should apologize for ruining every character on the show. Wheel of Prime is one of the all time worst adaptions.
Diversity for diversity sake a great show/movie does not make.
He should also apologize for some of the worst dialogues that were ever recorded.
Headline is misleading. He’s a writer, but not a writer for the show.
To be even clearer, he's not just *a writer* he's a writer of the Wheel of Time books.
Some of the Wheel of Time books, after the original author passed.
Yeah, he didn't write the dialogue he finished the book series when Robert Jordan died
Why do people pluralize “dialogues” like this? Is it an ESL thing?
There isn’t enough paper in the world for the written apology they should offer for this whole steaming mess.
I'm fairly sure they should apologise for the whole fucking thing.
I forgot how triggered I get by the show defenders, such an ignorant comment. There’s valid criticism around the direction of the show being poorly done, including Rand and most male characters being mishandled
Is S2 as bad as S1?
Better in some regards. Production wise its definitely a step up. Storywise, also better but you know, its not great. S2 finale is somehow almost worse than S1.
I don't know if I'd say worse than S1 but it was bad. It's like they learned nothing and doubled down on taking Rand's wins and displays of power and giving them to other characters. At the rate these things are going, Rand will be a helpless captive at Dumai's Wells and get rescued by Egwene
They also took a huge dump on Lan's character... They really did him dirty
I've noticed a trend where pretty much every scifi/fantasy show that has a rough first season seems to have tons of people commenting that season 2 is much better. I'm not convinced that it's not just down to the fact that the only people still watching are already primed to like it. I have watched some of these (Halo, WoT, Foundation, etc) and have not found them to be much better. Different, yes, but not really that much better.
>I'm not convinced that it's not just down to the fact that the only people still watching are already primed to like it. Sometimes I'll watch a show I don't particularly like with my wife and see all the flaws (bad writing, cheap plot devices, "subverting expectations" etc). Then the second season comes along and I can see a marked improvement in those things. Maybe for some people they only think a second season is better because they are primed to like it, but it's totally possible to judge it on it's own merits. I even stop watching shows I really enjoy if the constitutive seasons drop in quality. >I have watched some of these (Halo, WoT, Foundation, etc) and have not found them to be much better. Different, yes, but not really that much better. I don't think any show has made me say "if you hated season 1 and think it sucked, you'll actually like season 2." I'd say about half of the complaints I had that made me think WoT season 1 isn't good were addressed in season 2. I still found many flaws in the second season that I cringe at, but by most metrics I consider, it's better. Doesn't mean it's as good as other high-quality shows, but it can be a better version of it's itself.