Meh. The plotting is fine, if generic and repetitive. The writing quality is inconsistent. The real reason I think they are so popular nowadays is just the piddling amount of good high fantasy out there. They read like masterpieces compared to 90% of the genre.

 

Wheel of Time utilized and perfected the use of a lot of modern fantasy tropes imo.

If Tolkien built the foundation of Modern Fantasy, Wheel of Time took that foundation and built a generic house in the suburb. It works. It's a classic. Nothing too fancy. Nothing renovated or neo-modern. Just a good home that you can enjoy.

In contrast, Harry Potter took the foundation and built a more modern home with a fanciful aesthetic.

And Game of Thrones took the foundation and made a ergonomic home that's still missing a few rooms. They're waiting on the builders to get back to them with a quote on how much it will cost to add the bedrooms.

I may be taking this analogy too far.

 

Yeah, here's the thing. I love the books, but...
It's a Mainstream Harem story. No Joke. I would not be surprised if almost every HP fanfic writer who wrote Harem fanfics took inspiration from those dozen books.
And the problem doesn't end there. Its a Harem story written by a SJW who was ahead of his time.

Like half the time I think RJ wanted his readers to feel conflicted. But then that's also the strong point. If a story can make you feel conflicted enough to care about the series, it is at the least, entertaining.

Fantastical world building, somewhat gripping story line, meh romance. If the Fantasy Genre had a wider range and audience, you would firmly rate it Exceeds Expectations. But considering the spectrum within the genre and the general quality of the feed we get, it gets Outstanding from a lot of readers.

Me, I'm hoping the series will fail. >_>
See if the series keeps true to the books; Everyone from Woke people to the Conservatives will be up in arms. The series is that amusingly conflicting.
But if they introduce new shiet or change stuff heavily, the series loses its inherent charm.
I do not see amazon balancing it at all.

As a matter of record, I'm avoiding amazon's LOTR at all costs as well.

 

I've tried getting through this series 3 times and I always fail at book 10. I'm too much of a purist to not read a book in a series, but seriously Jordan. What the fuck?

 

I agree with pretty much all of this. One of the reasons that I liked the series so much was because it forced you to really think things through. There are no easy answers in life, and the way the conflicts are portrayed in the book reflect that.

I think the Children of the Light are just such a perfect metaphor for our species in general. I can't help but compare them to so many groups today. Some of the most evil is done by those who are utterly convinced they are right beyond any doubt. And do it in the name of good.

There are a lot of scenes that are... 'weird' by modern conventions. The harem stuff is definitely one of them, as was the scene with Matt and that queen sometime in books 7-9. But historically speaking, pretty much everything that occurs in that book has a basis in human culture at some point in history.

The books are peppered with aphorisms, and when I first started reading them I thought they were banal. But as I grow older and reflect on them, I can't help but think there is true wisdom in here. I have taken a lot of those lessons to heart. Nowadays I have a lot of respect for the intelligence of Robert Jordan, I think he was a man who understood much of the nature of humanity and our world.

His death before finishing was a real tragedy. Sanderson did his best to be true to Jordan's vision when he finished them, and all things considered, it could have been a lot worse. Egwene's sequence in the White Tower was masterfully done. Sanderson has talked a lot about how Robert Jordan influenced him, but I can't help but feel that his works are a pale reflection of the depth of Jordan's work.

All this reminiscing has made me nostalgic, I think I'll start my third reread today. Or relisten actually.

 

For me, one of things that really made sense of the series was finding some of Jordan's words about his time in Vietnam. The whole gender role thing makes way more sense when you read it through the lens of a man who spent much of his youth door gunning in a Huey and tried to reconcile machine gunning people with what he'd been taught.

E; In one of the interviews I remember him saying he shot a Vietcong in the back, realised it was a woman later and it just screwed his head up.

 

Because the major plot line of the first book, which has been adapted here, is one of the kids from Emond's Field is the Dragon Reborn. It would be a safe bet to assume that the show will have that as a plot point too. If they focus on Rand in the trailer, it's going to give the game away to:

• Non book-readers
• Anyone who's seen the trailer
• Anyone who won't go out of their way and google said spoilers

Not to endlessly compare fantasy shows to Game of Thrones, but everyone thought Ned Stark was the main character right up until they chopped his head off--it's misdirect here for the sake of the plot which, as you say, can be rather easily figured out.

 

That's not quite the same situation though. Ned is the presumed protagonist of a fantasy novel, him not finding some way to escape his execution is a big twist. Rand is the protagonist of a fantasy novel that has a prophecy about a chosen one, it being him, is the assumption anyone who's read a book before is going to make.

If they're actually trying to make a plot point like that surprising, they're going to have to fiddle with a dangerous amount of stuff. The fact they're even trying something like that makes me worry for the shows quality. Again, not to endlessly compare to GoT but we've all seen the risks of placing too high a value on shocking the audience.

 

We're all worried for the quality. That's the whole thread in a nutshell.

I hope they nail it. But Rand is only the protagonist in the books. Maybe not so, initially, in the show.

I think we're arguing the same thing. And that thing is, unfortunately, that it won't work but we want it to.

 

I just really hope they give a true adaptation of the politics and the subterfuge in the show. I have no hope, and the books will always exist, but I truly, dearly wish they don't dumb down the show. People will not get it. Fuck'em. Idiots can either learn or not.

 

Pillow friends. Pillow friends as far as the eye can see.

 

I'm disappointed by Lan

 

So was nynaeve.

 

I think the main 3 male leads and moiraine fit pretty well in my head, but yeah... WoT was my first English book I read over 20 years ago as a child and I do have a fondness for the series while also acknowledging its weaknesses. I'm very wary about the TV series.

 

Mat Cauthon is being recast between season 1 & 2. That's not a good sign.

 

I mean, while I don't have that much confidence in Amazon's decision making history, the fact that it got renewed for a second season before the first season even airs is making me a little more optimistic about it all.

When that happens, it's usually the signal that the execs are confident they have a decent show. It may not be faithful, it may be a bastardization of the novels, but it is probably at the very least entertaining.

 

It probably shouldn't.

I mean, if you can pay for WoT individually, then they have to bring their A game, but if it's just lumped in with all of Amazon's other stuff, they're much less likely to give a fuck (unless the show they've paid for turns out to be an apocalypse-magnitude shit-show). When people are subscribing for access to a bunch of stuff, they're less likely to ditch the service over one show, and the companies behind these services know it.

It's not about making a quality production and telling a good story, it's about churning out 'content.' And with content, quantity is quality. The second season could have gotten approved because the first one was deemed 'meh, good enough,' or because the assets they had to create for the first season (sets, costumes, CG elements) were expensive enough that they need to reuse them for at least another season to make up for the money they spent.

Just being able to say they have it, even if it's sub-GoT mediocre trash, would be of value, because they can claim a bigger library of 'connnnnnntent' for the consumers.

Then there's the notion of using it as bait to lure WoT fans into subscribing, in the hopes that even if they hate the show that brought them there, they'll stay for the rest of the content.

I can't recall where I heard it, but I think it was Netflix that basically stated (to each other, behind closed doors) that this was their own strategy. It doesn't matter if the viewers hate it, because it's one show in a sea of content. We already have their money, so they'll suck it up and stick around for the other stuff.

I'm staying safely wrapped in my cynicism and skepticism, until I hear a decent review from a longtime WoT fan who A: Hasn't swallowed some weird brand of political Kool-Aid, and B: Doesn't have telltale angry tears of regret spilling down their cheeks, as they try to convince themselves and everyone else that it isn't total shit.

 

This should be on the banner at the top of the website, pretty much describes most of us at this point in all areas.

 

Damn the actor for Thom would be way more fitting for Lan. The second actor also fits better for Mat in my opinion.

 

Like most of you, I'm holding myself emotionally distant for this one and keeping my hopes firmly rooted on the ground.

The biggest issue for me is that my favorite parts of the book are things that are very likely to be either skipped entirely or made so small they may as well be.

For me, what sold me on WoT was the little things. The small moments between big characters, the little things where they had this moment where they saw each other differently. One of the things WoT did really well was that it spent so much time in the "main" 15-20 character's heads that you felt like you really grasped their PoV, what they cared about, how they thought, even if you didn't like some of those things. And as the books went on and the scope got bigger and bigger, the parties separated and went all over the world, the times when they would just sit down with each other and talk and share things and realize things about each other were so spread out that they had an innate sense of epic-ness and buildup and payoff.

One of my favorite scenes in the book is Mat going to confront Elayne about something in Book 7, and running into Birgitte, and him realizing who she is, and then a little later her calling him on the fact that they've been speaking the old tongue the entire time - that whole scene is magic because it's two characters you really care about actually realizing something cool about the other one and coming to understand something about each other. WoT did those moments really, really well and I just can't ever see a TV show giving them enough screen time, enough setup, enough breathing room to do them justice, if they even include them at all.

RJ was a pretty workmanlike writer, good but not great, IMO, but some of the best writing he ever did was Rand going to Rhuidean and seeing the history of the Aiel in backwards chronology through his ancestor's eyes. That was two chapters, IIRC, and beautifully written - the slow realization about what was happening, the details filling in our gaps of knowledge about the Breaking, the implications for the current moment - I think that would take at minimum an entire episode to really pull off well, maybe two. Does Amazon Prime have the testicular fortitude to do that? I don't know, but I doubt it.

So yeah, I'll watch it for sure, but more out of curiosity than any real sense of hype or hope.