The wheel of time turns, ages come and pass. And a new turning of the wheel brings Amazon’s interpretation. The trailer just dropped and it looks really nice.

The first season is supposed to encompass both Eye of the World and the Great Hunt. Moraine is taking a more central role from what I can see- I wonder how that will play out when they get to the Fires of Heaven.

 

It doesn't look....bad.

Just, the set pieces and cgi are very obvious. There's a lot in there that I absolutely recognize as "not real." I'm nervous this might end up Shannara tv series quality.

 

Man, it looks like the kind of show that would have never worked pre-game of thrones.

This kind of aesthetic is what used to turn off from Fantast TV.

Hope cast and writing can carry it.

I finally want to enjoy this fucking story.

 

I want it to be decent, but I don't have high hopes given that trailer. It is very clearly underbudgeted. Costume and set design is ren fair levels of bad. The light trails and PS3 quality CGI is not what you'd want to see in modern epic fantasy.

I'm not really surprised though because literally like 80% of Amazon's film and TV budget is going toward LOTR.

 

The look of those Trollocs worries me. Big time. I think what we're going to get are crummy CGI orcs with animal skull helmets, not the hybrids described in the books. Hopefully the cast can pull it out, Rosamund Pike has always been a great choice for Moiraine IMO. Also super looking forward to Zen-Jesus-Dragon Rand at the end if it ever goes that far.

Also hope it isn't too GoT influenced because I didn't like that show very much anyway and clones are always worse.

 

The myrddraal looked cool imo.

 

The Wheel of Time has been one of the more influential books in my life. I am nervous about how this will go.

The trailer is good, but also reveals very little. Which is also good.

Tar Valon looked fucking amazing. As did Shadar Logoth.

 

A fantasy world where the women are basically in charge isn't girl power enough, let's create some kind of bullshit coming of age ceremony out of whole cloth for Egwene and cram it in there. Doesn't she get all kinds of page time later, most of it being coming of age stuff? Yeah, but fuck it! Fans don't pay the bills, activists do, what are you talking about?

Spoiler

Did they pull it from Jordan's notes, perhaps? Maybe, and I still don't care. Those books are absolute doorstops; you literally couldn't pay Jordan to cut the fat out of some plots, so if he wrote a version of this and left it on the cutting room floor, it should have stayed there.

Maybe they give everyone some kind of new bullshit introduction... which I also wouldn't like. All sorts of book content is going to be cut in order to make this series, good content... and so they're busy adding new shit? Which necessarily means cutting even more book content. Do. Not. Want.

Is everyone in the secluded village of Two Rivers going to have a different accent? 'Cause, lore wise, I'm gonna kind of take issue with that.

If this is the CGI they're busting out for their big trailer, I am not looking forward to seeing what wasn't up to snuff.

Dual-wielding axe guy stuff looks lame as hell.

Looks like the producers decided to yeet WOT's social mores, given that it seems Rand and Egwene are in a physical relationship. Even with the aged-up characters, it still seems sketchy, given the way people generally behave in the books.

-A cynic who has been burned way too many times to not be at DEFCON 1 suspicion level.

 

I want this to be good so badly since I might very well die of old age before another screen adaptation happens.

The set design, CG, casting, pacing(7 episodes for two books, was it) all have me left in quiet dread. I hope, dearly, that it ends up good. I've had long enough to emotionally cauterize myself though so I won't be devastated if it's bad.

 

They are very decisive, even today.

In my opinion, the books have a wonderful plot but failed at execution. I was never able to get through books 6-8. Between endless plotlines going almost nowhere, women sounding like they are off r/menwritingwomen and terrible romance; I just couldn't do it.

My SO loves them however. It's his favorite series.

My hope is that the show takes the good while helping fix up the bad. Make the women less reliant on their husbands, trim the fat off the plot and focus on what makes it original.

I am doubtful however. It's gonna take a real fine balance between: 1) women actually being in control, 2) not going complete SJW, 3) Dealing with the fact that the book's women are always fawning over the men such as Rand and his 3(!) women, even though they are the ones in power and control almost everything.

 

I share concerns that the trailer isn't going to deliver on the promise. I'm hoping the trailer is focusing more on Moraine in order to avoid getting too spoiler-y about the Dragon Reborn.

The books are worth the read if you can see through 14 X 1,000 page volumes. I've read them multiple times. I've yet to see an effective argument for why #10 can't be skipped entirely.

 

This is pretty much me. I haven't let myself feel any anticipation for this, because I expect to be disappointed. I'll give it a fair shot, but we'll have to see how it goes.

I'm planning on doing my 3rd full reread at some point soon (this doesn't count the rereads before they were completed).

In my view these books are a masterpiece, but a flawed masterpiece.

As Lindsey mentioned, they are quite divisive. I personally don't have any problems with books 6-8, though the pacing is slower. As Joe pointed out though, book 10 is a gigantic fucking waste of time which is basically a reaction to an event that happened in the 9th book. It's not that it's bad per se, it's just that nothing fucking happens.

You may or may not enjoy them. For me, when I have my own place with my own library, this series will be one of the first that I buy to fill those shelves.

 

Why would they bother trying to avoid spoilers about that? That would be revealed by the most cursory of googling. It's like a trailer for Harry Potter being coy about him being a wizard.

I'm not sure why the trailer put so much focus on Egwene, when to my recollection for the first couple of books her viewpoint is mostly a tool for exposition and world building. If it wasn't for that one mention of the Dark One coming for the boys, I'd assume this show was about a girl discovering she can do magic and joining a heroic order of witches, rather than the second coming of fantasy Christ battling Satan. Feels a bit misrepresentative.

I'm not a fan of the books, I threw in the towel during book 6 because I couldn't stand any of the characters. So I'm vaguely interested in seeing what changes they'll make to it. Speaking of which, where the hell is Thom? I couldn't see a sign of him in Emond's Field and the group only seemed to have seven horses.

 

It looks like if Eragon was a CW show and there's a repeating pattern in the music that reminds me of the Twilight movies.

 

IIRC there was mention that they were cutting Thom? Which sucks because he provides a non-Two Rivers non Moiraine viewpoint in the first book and his sacrifice fighting the Myrdraal at Shadar Logoth is really cool. Him not being there also sucks because it shoots Mat's bit in Book 3 in the nuts and ruins the Tower of Ghenej and Moraine's resurrection.

Just not good all round.

The focus on Egwene also annoys me because I never liked her character. She is taught by literally the greatest Aes Sedai (and my favourite character) Moiraine, who really is what they should be. A leader when necessary, a soldier when necessary, someone willing to step back and realise it's not all about them and gain power through surrender...whereas Egwene takes all the wrong lessons and goes on about the greatness of the Tower and follows the failures of her forebears while calling it greatness. Really irritating for me.

Focus it on Moiraine for the first couple of seasons because that makes sense and to those who haven't read the series you can actually make it seem like Rand isn't clearly the Dragon and have a little mystery, but don't pick literally the worst choice for that.

Also, needs more Bela.

 

Well that's not an encouraging sign. There's definitely characters who can be removed with a minimum of fuss but Thom isn't one of them. Let's hope the changes don't snowball into inevitable terribleness like GoT.

 

I've never gotten through a full reread of this, and yet it might be my favorite fantasy series out there. The parts that were done well were done fucking exceptionally well IMO.

I wouldn't mind if they changed some things to make it more, shall we say, appropriate for the current social climate and I don't even mind the pacing for the first season covering two books (let's be real, book one was pretty generic).

I do worry about the characters. The cast ballooned very rapidly in the books, so I understand them cutting some/shifting focus, but cutting Thom? That sounds like a terrible idea. And it's hard enough to establish the og fellowship in just a couple of episodes considering how much plot they also need to also cover.

The trailer didn't hype me up as much as the idea of an Amazon adaptation of the series did back when they announced it, so let's hope the series will be better than the trailer promised. I'm not terribly optimistic.

 

@Ched if you read nothing else, books 1-3 of the series are fantastic. Even after that up till book five it is excellent but it can start to drag. 6-8 are … well, they are, and I couldn’t pick up one of Sanderson’s books for years because of how badly he finished the series. That said, this was still my favorite modern fantasy series growing up.

The trailer was a hell of a letdown.

• I didn’t realize we’d gone back to the nineties in terms of CGI design.
  
• Tbh, the Myrdraal was a bit too much. I always imagined a more uncanny valley person with no eyes a-la Neo with no mouth in the matrix. The concept art book that came out forever ago had that sort of illustration.
  
• The central character of the series getting a half second of screen time doesn’t fill me with hope that they’ve stuck to the source material to any meaningful degree. We’ve all seen how that invariably leads to a shitshow.

 

Everything I've seen is they're making Moraine the primary focus.