It's funny, they massacred one of the best bits about the pile that is the series (Fares Fares was a superb casting choice and I could really see him as Book Ishamael) with Poochie...no wait I mean Egwene. Who I had to mention because all characters should constantly be all about her all the time. It's garbage.

This is even true regardless of the books as show don't tell is a thing. In show, there is literally no reason why anyone cares about the Dragon...

 

The finale was indeed terrible. It looked early s1 levels of cheap. The action was poorly choreographed and shot (the heroes of the horn was so mid omg). We spent way too much time on Egwene. And the book changes were at best barely palatable.

A shame because the rest of season 2 was actually decent (at least when the focus was on Rand, Lan, or Nynaeve).

 

Is it weird that I'm rooting for the Forsaken at this point?

 

Very sensible. Also the things in show that have thus far been best, because Fares Fares and Nathasha O'Keefe have been killing it.

 

The worst part is probably non-book readers actually enjoying S2 and acting like this is some grand cinematography, validating this guy's butchery of Jordan's work.

Anyone else realized we have corpses disappearing: check the beach scene with Lan, he kills like 12 guys, but then the camera zooms out and there's 1 corpse, so funny?

 

Didn't watch but I feel this repost from one of my WoT meme dumps feels applicable.

Behold, the actual events of the Battle of Falme!

 

Corpses despawned so the framerate wouldn't drop

 

$, and lots of it.

 

Well, him being long dead doesn't help. I expect his estate sold the rights to Amazon a long time ago. Sanderson consulted on Season 1, but by the sound of it, they ignored a lot of his advice.

 

There's a long storied account of the rights to Wheel of Time (for films, tv shows, comic books, video games) here that I can't be assed to summarize. The tl;dr is that Sony and Amazon joined forces because of talks that began in 2014 after a Universal deal expired.

The crazy thing about the story behind the rights is that long-time right's holder Red Eagle did a self-funded pilot entirely in an attempt to hold the rights for slightly longer in order to secure some of the Sony adaptation money. This "fuck you pay us" pilot is somehow the best Wheel of Time adaptation which you can see below.

 

Billy Zane did such a wonderful job here. I can't emphasize enough how much better this portrayal of Ishamael is compared to Amazon's.

Anyway, how about that Horn of Valere, eh?

 

I've liked Fares' take on Ishamael so far. The Forsaken, their cast and acting, have been the one redeeming quality of the show for me.

Oh wow! I remember watching that video online when it came out. I didn't know it was a pilot, I thought it was fanmade or something.

 

Natasha O'Keefe has also killed it and generated an immense amount of thirst. Of course, I'm not sure how water is the butt of the joke here, but it's obviously the most important part.

 

Getting people into original shows, especially original fantasy shows, isn't easy. The reason that directors and studios buy these rights isn't to make the shows - it's because fandoms like the Wheel of Time come with prebuilt reach, which lets them reel in viewers with just a couple of nods to the original property while basically demoing whatever plots and stories they want.

I actually believe that the intention was to make a real, somewhat faithful Wheel of Time show for a certain amount of time. At some point (maybe when they got told they wouldn't get a 2 hour premiere and only 8 episodes a season), I'm also almost certain that shifted to 'let's demo some writers and actors so they have credits for their careers to land whatever their next roles are'.

Case in point, if it feels like Moiraine has been more or less the main character in terms of screen time and focus, it should be noted that Rosamund Pike is one of the executive producers of the show. Similarly, if it seems like Alanna and the warders have been forced to the center, it might be noted that Taylor Napier - Rafe Judkin's IRL boyfriend - plays Maksim.

Neither one of those things are some unique sin for show business, it's just disappointing to see for those of us hoping for a screen adaptation of Wheel of Time that's faithful in focus and spirit.

 

At this point my only hope is we might one day get an animated version that is more faithful to the books.

 

I'm just starting to feel that adaptions of novels into a visual media in general is just a bad idea.

 

Game of Thrones was fine as long as they had source material.

chronicles of narnia films have all been solid.

honestly I think Weiss and Benioff could have done amazing with wheel of time.

 

Not out of talent, but I'll concede that they were fairly good at stepping aside when they had a written property to work off of.

 

Sanderson did a let’s watch live. He hated it.

https://reddit.com/r/The_Black_Tower/s/od14N39F5M

 

'Wedge blowing up the Death Star' is exactly what I was thinking. It would be one thing if they had actually gone for an ensemble ending, but really we may as well call the show the 'Eg-Wheel of Time'.