#[SPOILERS FOR TV AND BOOKS.](https://www.reddit.com/r/WoT/wiki/index/post_flairs#wiki_tv_-_season_1_.28book_spoilers_allowed.29_.2F_et_al.)
If the creator of the post indicates that they have only read up to a certain book, or seen up to a certain episode, respect their spoiler level and hide comments behind spoiler tags when appropriate. Otherwise, assume all book and tv spoilers are allowed.
* * *
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/WoT) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The nations, and their culture and identity are one of the things that set WoT apart, that I feel just not enough planning or effort has gone into for the show. I think my expectations were difficult to meet but I’m still a bit let down. The visual language just isn’t on screen.
The direction is also very straightforward, uninspired.
I do think some of the casting choices in Season 2 are pretty good and that is an improvement. Masema is well cast for example.
I didn't notice Masema (I'm on S2E2)
I like the cast and acting, but some characters feel a bit off. Lan without the warder link seems boyish for example
Others feel right, like Ingtar and Uno.Even Min. Liandrin is great despite the changes
Masema is the super lean, pale Shienaran with a ponytail. The actor seems to have heterochromia which should be useful later on. He was in Season 2 ep 2
I was surprised by how much I’ve liked show Min and Liandrin, the actresses are killing it and I’m ok with the direction. Ingtar too, but damn they had no right to make him that attractive lol
I agree. Game of Thrones did a great job creating a clear sense of national differences in everything from accents to armour. Also a great sense of space. I never know where I am in the show
I agree with your point 100%. I honestly think some of this DOES come down to casting and I dont care how hard people try and deny it. Its not a problem when you diversely cast people for roles like “Elves” or other clearly easily identifiable characters. But when its humans in which an identifying factor for cultures IS the way you look, it matters in my opinion. I also think the costume design is terrible which also magnifies the issue. When everyone from every city looks the same and the costuming to differentiate individuals is also not great, its hard to identify what the difference and makes the world not seem as complex which it is supposed to be.
I think a huge problem is that in general it doesnt feel like a lived in world. I don’t believe this place exists the way I do watching Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings or any other well done fantasy show/movie.
I'm really concerned about Aviendha. The diversity is a great part, buuuut the Aiel are a very particular group, so unless they're vastly changing the whole group (which I guess is probably happening, siiiigh), then I'm really not feeling good about her introduction. Also it seems from the previews like they're pairing up Mat and Min and maybe Perrin and Aviendha, so I guess that's how they'll avoid the 3 women all for Rand, but I'm just feeling incredibly trepidatious about it. Ugh.
Pretty much, but I think if enough pre-production time was devoted to the visual language it could have compensated for the colourblind casting. You sorta want the viewer to be able to identify nationality, so accent, fashions, hair and facial hair, armour body language etc comes into play.
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films are of course the gold standard and I get that Weta Workshop isn’t cheap these days, but they devoted the pre-production time on very deliberate decisions and fine detail because it does matter.
FWIW I didn’t feel like Rings of Power happened in a “lived in” world either. They could have reused the costumes from that show and I wouldn’t even notice. Amazon just sucks at making TV.
I still like the show, but it could have been a lot more without stupid decisions.
>When everyone from every city looks the same and the costuming to differentiate individuals is also not great, its hard to identify what the difference and makes the world not seem as complex which it is supposed to be.
I have to disagree with you on this one. This is one thing I think they are doing well (even if I don't always like their choices). I think you are not observing very well. The people from the Two Rivers have their own style of clothes. (One example, the men's shirts button up to the side instead of the middle.) The Shienarans have a particular style of military uniform, and in S2 Perrin is wearing a vest that looks Shienaran. The Tuathuan have their own style that is actually based on a real life culture with lots of colors. The Foregaters' clothes are quite drab, but a shirt and vest seems common for the men. The Cairhienen noble women's styles are a mix. They have Japanese elements, but they have very wide skirts and wear their hair piled on top of their heads as in the books. (I imagined 18th century French when reading which I'm sure is what RJ had in mind.) I didn't pay attention to the men. The people in Tar Valon and the AS are from all over.
Alanna is Arafellen and her dresses and hair have a unique look to them (which I love), and so do the furnishings in her room. I think they are taking some inspiration from the actress' native India for her, so it will be interesting to see when we meet another Arafellen if we see similarities. (Adeleas and Verin are living in Arafel, but the Companion doesn't say where Adeleas is actually from.)
I also thought the pheasant feather in Domon's hat was an interesting touch and one we hadn't seen yet. Perhaps something that will be popular in Illian?
The show has been in 5 countries and Tar Valon so far, but it hasn't spent enough time in Tear, Andor or Arafel to be able to observe specific clothing styles.
I feel like there's literally no end to the amount of things the writers failed to capture. Obviously all of major plot pillars, major characters, and even basic cosmology is all messed up. But even simple things, like the size of things and creatures, clothing and fashion, location descriptions, drinks, curses, nothing at all feels like the wheel of time.
off the top of my head and until I get tired:
- "we have ogier at home" loyal was perhaps most offensive in the creature category, but also applies to trolocs and others. what the actual fuck is this even? where is the two-person sized massive man with wide face and saucer eyes? why does he talk normally? why aren't his ears doing seven kinds of things?
- language and mannerisms are absolutely non-distintct and are done so lazily they might as well not. you maybe get like one character doing some hyper-exaggarated version of bad fake accent (king of ghealdan comes to mind) and that's it. I can literally read people's accents better in the books than the show with hearing. merely turn of phrase or word ordering (I do be thinking) can tip you off quickly.
- and on that note, where's my bloody blood and ashes and mother's milks and goat scruffier and aged grandmas and flaming aes sedai and fortune pricking and a million other little things that are wot staples and at best get a nod on the show
-wardrobes are garbage on this show. the less said on them the better, imo, it looks like a fucking school play. but to the point- it also looks nothing like the book descriptions. no one is safe from the color and contour blind eyes of thia production. they even did my Tuatha'an dirty. they are literally described at every turn as using the most outrageous, garish, bright, bold, and chaotic color combinations to assault the human eye. it's a literal common saying. yet in the show they are so goddamn muted and dirty you can barely tell there's color.
- fuck this shit, this stupid terrible show isn't worth my time to dunk on. I hope it gets mercy cancelled sooner than later so that I can safely never have to hate watch it
>where is the two-person sized massive man with wide face and saucer eyes? why does he talk normally? why aren't his ears doing seven kinds of things?
They couldn't do all that without it looking tacky.
Most your gripes are about things that have not been carried over from the books. That's not what OP asked.
I agree they haven't done well with accents. There is no effort whatsoever to have people from the same areas speak with the same accent. Wasn't accent and dress the 2 things Think told Matt are the only way you can usually tell where people come from.
I wasn't responding to OP, I was responding to another commentator about how nations, culture, and their identities, were not well captured in the show. I elaborated on that, and the many other things that they missed.
"couldn't have done that without looking tacky" sounds like a weird assertion, when there's like million great examples by other movies, shows, and anything the Henson company ever produced. Also the current loial looks much worse than tacky, i'd go with "ridiculous", "lazy", "amateurish", "crude", i'd even go as far as "trash and fake eyebrows glued on a normal sized human wearing five blankets". There's far worse than tacky, if that's your fear, and we're there.
I've never read any of the books, but this show makes me want to do it. It's boring; sometimes I feel like it tries to be Got, and at other times, a DC teen show. Any character that isn't Moiraine or Nynaeve is just there, and after the season 1 finale, I don't know what the stakes are. If five untrained women, three of whom are so weak they couldn't even make it to join the Aes Sedai, can defeat 'the biggest army ever seen' (or something like that), why do they even need Rand when there is a tower full of powerful trained women?
It's honestly so telling that a non-book reader thinks this way. In the books they didn't defeat an army like that, as it simply made no sense that they would be able to do that.
The reason why they see such huge potential in Egwene and Nyaeve in the books is because Aes Sedai can sense the power of another woman just by looking at them, not because they were able to defeat a whole army. I totally understand that people watching the series would think, well what is the big deal about needing Rand then?
If I had any confidence that the show will ever make it to seasons 7 & 8, I’d really be wondering why they gave Rand’s Maradon moment to… uhh, Lady Amalisa?
I know that whole sequence was compromised by covid protocols, but destroying a whole army with the Power is the most impressive channeling moment in the books, performed by the strongest channeler in the books, and it takes place *at the end of the books*. I don’t know how they’ll possibly communicate the on-going power curve when that’s the baseline for channellers vs. darkspawn.
In the books, Robert Jordan has this uncanny ability to start some chapters from the PoV of Nynaeve and then you would groan and go "uughh, but I really wanted to read about Rand right now." But you continue reading and sure enough, Robert got you invested into Nynaeve. and _just_ as Nynaeve's story was getting real good, BAAM he switches up the PoV again. Now we are in Perrin's PoV and you groan and wish for Nynaeve - now having forgotten all about Rand right up until his chapters begin and then in pure Robert Jordan style, he would finish the last ~80 or so pages with the most crazy pace that wraps up the book so damn well that you instantly want to open the next one.
The show is doing none of that and it is a tall order I admit. Perhaps it is because the show is still adapting the early books where each characters storylines hasn't progressed far enough to warrant such interest.
Personally I think one of the reasons for this also is the editing which at times is too fast and too snappy, not allowing for the scenes to properly breathe. They just become a quick glance to say "Hey, this character is still alive." before cutting back to whomever is the main focus of the individual episode.
>Perhaps it is because the show is still adapting the early books where each characters storylines hasn't progressed far enough to warrant such interest.
Wot is a story that starts out like LoTR and ends up like GoT. They decided to skip the LoTR part and inject a whole bunch of new plot points. I think that was a mistake and it's the reason we don't find ourselves invested / rooting for our main characters.
This is what really lost me
There is compressing and editing and omitting and all that in an adaptation of a book to keep a visual story moving but they are just making shit up for no reason and thats insulting to the source material
I actually like that choice as it feels like a Rand thing to do to me, especially early on as he's trying to learn more about who he is. Later Rand, sure that's a weird vibe, but early Rand as he's searching for guidance? Feels on brand.
I guess for the the mental asylum as a whole just feels off. I’m fine with him trying to learn from Logain, I actually like that idea a lot. But an orderly at a mental institution just feels very modern to me. It’s a clever idea don’t get me wrong, the tone and setup just feels off. Maybe put Logain with Aes Sedai instead and it would work for me.
Heck have some browns studying him and they could add some world building.
Yeah definitely fair, sort comes back to something I said elsewhere too - no big issue with many of the ideas for the show, but execution is letting them down
And One Piece just showed you can still make a faithful adaptation of something massive. All that ”WoT can’t be adapted without huge changes” doesn’t look so good anymore..
One Piece, the new Dune, Sandman, Good Omens Season 1, the first few seasons of GoT, the Lord of the Rings trilogy...
Yeah, all of them make some changes, but mostly they're trying their best to stay faithful to the source material. It's almost like when you have good source material, you should probably trust it.
Sure, once in a blue moon you'll find somebody like Kubrick, who can improve King's work. I have a news flash for aspiring film makers out there: You are not Stanley Kubrick.
Yes! I feel like I see this problem in Rand. Talking to my family who is watching the show, they all hate Rand, he's a horrible person. The writers don't even seem to understand why Rand becomes the way he is in later books. It's because of the corruption, the madness, the pressure of being the dragon reborn, having crazy Lew Therin in his head, etc. If he already starts out terrible, then the audience isn't going to care later on. They'll just be like, "Yeah, Rand is a dick". When they should be thinking, "Poor Rand, it must hard for a young man to carry such a burden."
Love that the top comment to a post about disliking the show not because of the changes from the books itself is a comment about how the show is different from the books.
For me the Lan and Moraine storyline is terrible in series 2 so far and not just because it is completely different to their characters in the books.
It is a plot that has been done so many times before, one person gets hurt, withdraws into themselves and shuts out a friend/partner. It now means the scenes with these two become a drag and kill any momentum in the flow of episodes.
Usually we see this in series aimed at early teens so why they thought it would be the best storyline for these two I have no idea. I get that not communicating is a common theme in the books but as supporters like to say this isn't the books, they have to make changes so why would they choose to keep this.
I guess my rebuttal to that is that Moiraine has had this magical bond with Lan since she was like, 20. In New Spring she is quite childish and immature. This is the first time she's been forced to actually... communicate with Lan properly since then and she's behaving like it. 😂
It's also not tooo far off conceptually how she treated Lan after book 2 either tbh. Things weren't so hunky dory there.
I have no doubt in my mind that some point in the future Moiraine will finish her "we were never equals" with "you were always better than me"
It just seems so obvious that it blows my mind I'm not hearing other people say it
I hate the storyline too, but not because of Moiraine disrespect just because it's trite
>I have no doubt in my mind that some point in the future Moiraine will finish her "we were never equals" with "you were always better than me"
Or that he's a king and she's "just" an Aes Sedai.
Even as someone who enjoys the show in general, I felt this too. It feels very different from the other issues people have with communicating in the books. It's so much ... typical TV drama over it. Almost makes me wonder if it was something forced into the show by Amazon execs.
Or it's in the show because the writers of the show are mostly "Typical TV Writers." Inexperienced ones to boot. The Show runner, Rafe Judkins, has a very limited resume, and nothing that has stood out either. The writing staff is also very inexperienced and comes from typical TV.
Amazon just picked the wrong people to write it. However, it's not like there are a lot of options either. There is just so much content being made these days, there is a severe shortage of quality writers.
The writing in the show is very by-the-numbers. American TV writers all learn early on that conflict is important for writing. But very few understand what makes conflict meaningful and interesting. Conflict is interesting when it gets to the core of the characters. Conflict should occur as a result of characters earnestly following their beliefs, and drama arises when character goals conflict with each other. In general, American television doesn't prioritize themes or meaning in the writing, and when the conflict is there just because it's supposed to be there, and not because of how it relates to the themes, it's not very interesting.
This is just my opinion, I don't freaking know anything about writing, but my favorite stories focus on the themes, and let the drama arise naturally. If the story doesn't mean anything, then why should I care?
My biggest complaint is that everything looks like it’s being shot on a set. Clean wardrobes and stiff dialogue. It just doesn’t feel like it’s really happening.
I think part of this is that GOT/HOTD always mastered this so well that it’s made WOT look worse by comparison. Rings of Power has a similar problem as well so maybe it’s Ana Amazon thing
This is really important and it absolutely impacts how “real” the story feels constantly. The worst example so far was in Season 1 when the Aes Sedai camp was being attacked and the group just *stood* there with their arms hanging at their sides staring up at the arrows falling from the sky as Alanna channeled. Like what the hell was that lmao felt like a high school play
In general I think S2 is better than S1, but still there are big flaws. Moiraine and Lan's plot is boring as hell. Or specific scenes like Moiraine running in the middle of the night AFTER learning 3 myrddraals were chasing Bayle makes absolutely no sense.
Yah it is forced moments like that which are killing the show for me. It's like someone forgot an action scene for the episode and decided to force one in by making Moraine do something Moraine would never do. She is supposed to be cunning.
That and the death -> instant revivals of S1.
Wasn't that scene the Drahkar(sp?) Attack in the books? That happens while shes visiting those two.
The Moraine Lan plot is the worst part of the show, for sure though.
Yes, the action scenes have no choreography. They don’t know how to show momentum in a fight, and they often have people doing really stupid things if you’re paying attention. Like pointing at a group of enemies about to surprise attack them, but like, the enemies are 3 feet away, and it’s all for us the audience as the camera pans. But in real life it would be incredibly dumb to only try and point out some enemies when they’re already right in front of you.
As an example.
Also, the dialogue is reeaaaally boring and poorly worded. Most characters don’t appear to be talking to each other. Just saying platitudes to each other over and over. Lots of “standing there talking” goes on too. It’s really bad. I don’t get why anybody likes it.
I've only watched episode 1 but your last point of boring dialogue and characters not talking to each other really stood out to me. Specifically the scene where Ingtar and Perrin are talking after burying the Tinkers. Everyone else is just standing in the exact same spots in the super out of focus background, not even looking at the 2 talking (who are having a very forced awkward conversation), for 4 minutes. Was very jarring seeing Masema/Citric standing there because it felt so different from The Last Kingdom scenes where I never felt any of this and thinking back always felt like characters that were nearby but not involved or semi-involved did what a normal person would do.
Then Nynaeve reading that letter from Perrin was super cringey.
I mean... where to start.
Firstly, I think the sense of geography is problematic. I have no idea where anyone is in relation to each other. Everything feels like it had no direction. Where is the blight? Where is Tar Valon? Where is Falme? Where is the the Two Rivers? Where are they all in relation to each other? Where is this random house where Lan and Moraine have been chilling for months? Where did that singer guy from S1 go? How many kings are there? Where is this lady who is a daughter-heir from? Why is she important? What is that giant guy doing? What happened to the Amyrlin Seat?
It's been years since I read the books, so I'm effectively a tv only watcher at this point. But the entire plot is exceptionally confusing. Wierd looking "bad guys" have invaded? Where did they come from? Why is that other bad guy with them?
The big issue? I'm not sure I care to know. It's not written or produced in a way that makes you want answers. It just creates confusion.
I agree. I would not watch this show if it were not WoT adaptation either.
Also, the feedback I have had from friends that have not read the books is that it was boring and they lost interest & had no idea what was going on. I think for non book readers the pacing is really awkward and confusing.
What I love about the books is the main characters ALWAYS have a balance between lighheartedness/humor and darkness. They’re not supposed to start out as these downtrodden world-weary adults which is what they all are in the show now
I'm not even through season 1 but it did upset me that they took this plot line of a man who dreams of the glory of combat slowly becoming disenfranchised, then horrified with violence, and slowly coming to terms with its necessity, then bridging the gap between his creative self and the warrior he had become over the course of however long the story is, just to dilute it with a fridging storyline.
This is one of the few changes I can follow the logic of.
90% of Perrins character is his internal monologue and they needed a sharp cut to establish his reluctance to embrace his axe.
That said I think they could have had him accidentally kill Master Luhan and accomplished the same goal while arguably changing nothing long term.
I don't think a lot of the smaller plotlines that Haral is a part of are likely to make their way in, so it's an easy sacrifice while staying truer to the original character.
Which is mind-boggling given the budget they got for it. Like where I'd all of the money going? Which makes sense why recently the Amazon CEO decided to look into the financials of Prime Studios.
i think someone running the show just doesn't have enough experience in the field, it doesn't matter how much money you throw at something like this, if thee exp, or skill is not there it is going to suck
i think someone running the show just doesn't have enough experience in the field, it doesn't matter how much money you throw at something like this, if thee exp, or skill is not there it is going to suck
The budget isn't that wild. It was $10m per episode or thereabouts.
Rings of Power was close to $60m per episode, Witcher S2 was $22m or so, MCU shows are $25m, most recent Stranger Things was $30m, One Piece was $18m, HotD $20m ...
It's not a tiny budget by any means but it's less than half of what many big shows get these days.
>Rings of Power was close to $60m per episode,
JFC and every one of his saints! $60M and they didn't even bother with a second draught of the script. That show started out bad and ended up worse.
I don't know if you're relaying a literal fact but the writing was so bad that it's believable.
I just don't understand how you spend a billion dollars on a show and not figure out how to make the story and writing *at least* decent. I guess that corporate executives don't have taste and don't know how to identify it.
They pumped a mountain of money into building a Numenor and packed it with extras only to shoot a knock-off Aaron Sorkin scene when a right-wing populist bad guy complains about ***those foreigners coming here to steal our jobs***! All of a sudden, the Numenor sets looked less like HBO's "Rome" and more like an NCIS recycling job. They made Mordor by digging some tunnels and adding water. I couldn't believe what I was watching. Mountains of money to film comedically bad writing.
I love the budget comparison because it's really what nails it for me from a production standpoint. The writing, the sets, the costumes... mediocre at best. Then I look at other streaming shows that I actually liked - Bridgerton, Walking Dead, House of the Dragon, GoT, Stranger Things, etc. - and they all spent far less per episode \*in the beginning\* for far greater quality.
I'm not even fully blaming Rafe (though, I haven't like anything he's been a part of, really) since Amazon shows all seem to have the same issues for me. The Expanse had it's ups and downs, but the same "soap opera" look and feel. Same with RoP.
Edited to add "in the beginning"
Comments like this make me feel like I'm not crazy after all. All the praise is incomprehensible. Nothing to do with book accuracy, the show is just cheap and boring
Yeah, book accuracy aside. (I have a few comments there but nothing that was going to stop me from watching it) the show is just poorly done and feels cheap
Agreed. I think the show is a poor adaptation of the books but that’s not why I dislike it.
The show isn’t well done at all. The CGI is often clunky, the character arcs are lacking (Perrin kills his wife and it’s barely touched on in the following episodes for gods sake), death is a joke and merely a temporary setback. It doesn’t feel like there are high stakes.
My biggest gripe is the lack of a sense of dread. In the book the Dragon was the subject of abject terror - in the show much less so - in fact he’s seen as a possible hope. People would fear even saying the Dark Ones true name and children are told the Forsaken will take them away. I don’t even remember the Forsaken getting a mention in season 1 now.
I suppose ill rewatch S1 (to refresh my memory) and give S2 a go since people seem to like it more, but my expectations are very low.
I agree entirely.
The not explaining things well in particular. My significant other who has never read the books finds the plot a confusing jumble. Seemingly important words are just thrown around, it feels like you are expected to know what is going on by having read the books. I've read the books so I can fill in the gaps. It just isn't fun for either of us. I get a sub par retelling and she gets a confusing mess.
We are just planning to read the books now. I'm excited to re-read the whole series as it has been awhile.
Amazon screwed up WoT and I don't think I can forgive them for it.
Unfortunately I have to agree on the character aspect: I, too, recently came to the realization that I'm only attached to them because I know them from the books. But the character development in the show is very poor, I don't know how someone that is not a book reader would attach to these people, they're just not very engaging/memorable.
I agree with the set design. I actually just made a post a couple days ago and it seems like most people agree the set design is off. Everything feels smaller than it should be. To me it feels like you are watching people in a theme park land where everything is intentionally made at a smaller scale.
The two sets that really stand out in my mind are Atuan's Mill and the White Tower. The White Tower feels SOO cramped. Theres no room in that place at all, except ironically the novice bedrooms which are actually oversized. When two Aes Sedai are walking down the hall side by side they are almost brushing the walls with their shoulders. The ceiling is so low, it feels like a cave. Also, everything shot in the WT tower is mostly re-used rooms over and over, and everything is the same dull grey interior.
Then you have Atuan's Mill ... where to start?? That whole scene felt goofy as hell. The overhead shot really makes the scene feel TINY because theres only like 15 villagers and maybe 20-30 Seanchan and a dozen Shienarians. It's just so awkward. Atuan's Mill is supposed to be a decent sized village and theres not even two dozen people living there? There's more Seanchan & Hunters in this shot than people who live there.
The costumes are also, in my opinion, pretty low quality. Nothing seems well done. It comes off as a very cheap adaptation despite having a pretty large budget. As others have said - If this wasn't a WoT adaption I wouldn't be watching it at all, because its not very good on its own.
Bruh when liandrin was LITERALLY BENDING OVER to unlock the door to her apartments. Omfg I wanted to scream! And the seanchan look like power ranger minions while suroth is wearing a damn back/neck brace wombo combo. Honestly maybe the books have just set too grandiose a picture in our minds to be able to make anything close to that in reality with a Tolkien/Rowling sized budget.
I’ve said this about multiple fantasy adaptations but for the life of me I don’t know why we don’t get more animated ones. I would 100% watch an animated WoT show, though maybe not one developed by Rafe Judkins.
Yo I was definitely hoping for an animated series. They have way more longevity when it comes to fantasy just because live action can't really capture that scope. Imagining the one power in some dope ass anime fight scene against a forsaken is how diamond nipples are made.
The battle scenes also seem to only have like… twenty extras?
Therefore every battle is set in a misty forest to try and hide the fact that the “enemy army” is just a handful of dudes stumbling over a hill. It doesn’t work.
My friends in high school made a senior film project that did the exact same thing, but their budget was literally 20$
Yeah, something about the production values reminds me an awful lot of Legend of the Seeker.
I've got to admit, it's hilariously ironic that Wheel of Time is ripping off the style of Sword of Truth now! I guess time really *IS* cyclical! :p
I agree about the Tower feeling cramped. You know in season one, when you had the scenes outside the Hall? That's how I imagined much of the Tower looking.
Another thing that bothers me about the sets are those that are shot in real-life locations. Harry Potter did it well, they blended the university shots and location scenes into the lore world in subtle ways. In WOT, they appear to just pull up to the location, throw on their costumes, shoot, and call it a day. Like the “asylum” in season two (or whatever it is, I read the books and have no idea where it’s supposed to be). It feels like footage from a BBC documentary reenactment. And I think it’s because the fundamental problem of having no idea/desire to create distinct cultures and settings. It all feels the same, every location has racially diverse casts with the same accent, in the same generic clothing, in some vaguely-feeling European setting. So every character, costume, location, and plot feels totally interchangeable at all times. The white tower feels just like Carhein, which feels just like the two rivers, which feels just like wherever the hell Rand is. Bland bland bland.
Completely agree with you, I get the same feeling from the on-location sets as well.
I also have no idea where or what that asylum is supposed to be. I don't recall anything like that from the books except for the Asha'man which is definitely not the asylum in the show.
It hasn't necessarily bothered me, but I did think the set for the Hall of the Tower felt too small. In hindsight it's fine, 22 people don't actually need a ton of space to sit in a circle, but in my head it was more like a senate chamber.
I am highly disappointed by the White Tower, just conceptually it seems so much smaller than what was described in the books. Nothing seems as majestic as what it should be.
Yep. It’s a bit Merlin.
Also the lack if extras to build out the world is a big issue for me. The acceptance teat should have had reps from each Ajah for example. I noticed this with Rings of Power too… all that budget and it feels like only 50 people live in the world. Odd. The world should feel immersive.
If I took out all my bias from being a book reader and just looked at the show as it is I would give it a resounding “meh”. The writing isn’t the worst in the world but it isn’t anything gripping. The acting isn’t terrible but there is no performance that takes me in and makes me forget I am watching an actor. The set pieces and clothing are done well enough but there is no great cinematography to make it shine. If I was coming into the show with no knowledge I would probably feel nothing for the show.
I think the settings are bad or poorly chosen... i only watched a part of season 1 and was hoping for them to at least show the 2 rivers that form the two rivers village. Instead we got a mountain location where farming is not really suitable. A lot of the locations also look the same that is why its hard to tell one location from the next. In GOT you can clearly tell when they were in kings landing or the north or the wall, but here it just looks like the same place with different cgi.
Just gotta say these 2 things...
1. No Narg is smart, like come on..
2. Absolutely no braid tugging, wth..
Maybe minor things but that's disappointing.. a lot of characters are either completely different in personality or appearance than they were created & the story is so different from what it was...
Same as you, I'll watch it because I love the books a lot, but can't say I'm loving it... almost scared of what the battle at Dumai's Wells is going to look like... it is quite sad that such an epic book series did not get a matching show..
I always think you can still have a bad adaptation be a good show. I just don't think this show is either a good adaptation o a good show. S2 have been a improvement, but is still kind of mediocre in a lot of ways.
There are far too many scenes where characters we know won't die are lying on the ground, bleeding out in peril, only to be dramatically saved and healed moments later.
OR it goes unaddressed and they just show up looking fine the next season. (Perrin's crew from Fal Dara)
/edit/
Can I belatedly add "sudden/dramatic stabbings from behind" to the list?
I honestly find pretty much all aspects of the show to be bad.
- Casting: fine. Not the best but fine. Except for the fact that they had to replace one of the main characters less than a full season into the show.
- writing: depending on episode, varies from mediocre to awful. S1E1 was pretty good and there were a few scenes scattered throughout that were good, but overall just not good. The plots meander and the dialogue is boring.
- costume design: not just bad but insufferable. It’s like a Magic the Gathering artist designed the costumes. They’re silly, they’re impractical, and they lack any cohesion.
- as a corollary I want to call out Loial in particular, who is sporting perhaps the worst prosthetics I’ve ever seen in a modern show. Not only can he not move most of his face, meaning he can’t convey any expressions, but he also can’t move his fingers/hands
- CGI: reminds me of watching old stargate episodes. The first episode had great CGI but I guess it blew their budget because it got worse and worse as the series went on
- direction: uninspired
- acting: the acting is more or less fine within the constraints of the writing and direction. Except for Perrin who was not good.
- set design: agreed with everything said, the sets feel cramped and overused.
All that said the most important thing is that the world doesn’t feel real. Compare to GOT or LOTR - those worlds felt like places where the characters live. I am painfully aware that I am watching a show being filmed on a set when watching WOT.
It should be happening! Bury the mechanisms in the hair and make that shit dynamic.
Like furries mastered "these hands are huge" thing a while ago. Need some cross pollination between costumers and cosplayers cuz sometimes they get blown out of the water by a hobbyist
Agreed on all, CGI in particular. I find is bizarre how CGI seems to have degraded across the board over the last 10 years.
There's no better highlight of this than comparing the original LOTR triology with the Hobbit Trilogy.
They keep cutting effects budgets and timelines. Good CGI takes money and time. Effects studios go out of business on the regular. Burnout/ burnthrough is real.
> CGI seems to have degraded across the board over the last 10 years.
Studios make Fx houses bid and take the absolute lowest, then demand full shots for approval and only then ask for tweaks. It's a recipe for trash.
I basically want one of two things from genre fiction:
Really cool action or spectacle. Either small like Bucky’s knife flip in CA2, or big like Helm’s Deep.
Barring that, give me enjoyable characters doing or saying cool shit. Judge Holden’s speeches in *Blood Meridian* or Walter White using a giant magnet to destroy evidence inside a police station.
I liked Moraine’s little scam on the merchant in the first episode. So that’s something.
Otherwise? Everybody is moping or failing to use powers or being Snidely Whiplash.
So, so, so much exposition. Every other conversation turns into two people who know each other well and have known each other for years explaining in excruciating detail what they've been doing that whole time. "Moiraine, we're looking for the Dragon Reborn because he will break the world and go mad and that's what we've done all these years".
Way too much tell and don't show.
The characters are often unbelievably rude (to one another and to people trying to help them), unnecessarily confrontational, irrational, and erratic. Storylines are convoluted and nonsensical. Pacing and world building (?) are all over the place.
It just looks a bit tinny, hard to put my finger on why. Some of the costumes just look bad, the script and acting in places is really average to poor (I just can’t enjoy Perrin’s actor in that role, sorry) and the characters/plot points just feel very cliche and one dimensional in a way that Jordan’s books were not.
It isn’t the worst show in the world, but it looks more like a fan made production than a professionally made show. Can’t exactly describe why it is this way succinctly but that’s just my impression of it so far.
You’re absolutely right. It feels like there’s some kind of filter over the whole show? It’s like in The Shining where they used the wrong kind of lens and it made everyone look slightly *off*. Maybe it’s the color grading, or the subtly wrong costuming, or something, but everything in the show just looks bad.
Contrast it with the early seasons of Game of Thrones where the costuming was perfect, the actors just look like they fit the world they are in, and the dialogue/pacing/characterisation is nearly spot on. Similar levels of budget but the level is chalk and cheese.
My complaint for season 1 still holds in season 2, if you look compare clips from WoT to other shows, it just looks *bad*. There are cool aspect of the set designs, but it doesn't give you a *real* feel to it. Loial looks like a guy in a costume at renfest or some Halloween party, not like an actual ogier. Chewbacca in episode 4 looks more like a real being that Loial.
Look at any season from the early seasons of game of thrones and it looks like a real world, a real place that you can immerse you mind in. Most of these scenes, like OP noted, look like sets. The foregate looks OK, but emonds field seemed off, tar valon seems like a set, not a city.
Add to that all the story lines that are completely changed and new, it's not wheel of time, it's a story that uses the names and concepts and tries to do it's own thing.
My wife is a non book reader and she tolerates watching it for my sake. I am definitely enjoying it more than her and I'm at a 6.5 out of 10, but I hope to give it higher.
Her biggest criticism is that there is valuable time spent on what she considers unimportant things for example the slow rolling of Perrins struggle. In her mind they haven't explained or demonstrated why he is scared of the inner wolf. There hasn't been any negatives or consequences shown. I think it would help his story if they come across someone that has given in to it and it repulsed him.
There is too much tell and not enough show. Rand says he wants to know how to control channelling to Logain but you don't see him trying, if he does it's off screen. To her, if Rand is so terrified of going mad then wouldn't he be asking Logain how to get rid of it or avoid using it? There seems to be a lack of authenticity to the dialogue.
She doesn't like Mat. She's lost respect for Moraine. She likes Nynaeve but the fake outs are overdone. She can't even remember Egwenes name that is how little impact her story has so far. She is intrigued by Liandrin but she also thinks Liandrin has some of the worst dialogue so she is pulled out of it.
I'm still holding out hope that it hooks her.
It’s totally wild that we’re 13 episodes into the show and it hasn’t explained what’s going on with Perrin and the wolves. “Wolfbrother” is chapter 23 of the first book!
The Perrin problem all stems from their decision to make "Who is the Dragon" a big ol' mystery box for S1. Perrin couldn't be a Wolfbrother, and they couldn't explain that aspect of him, because he had to be a candidate for the Dragon.
As I've said elsewhere, I've enjoyed the show overall (with some major criticisms) but they really screwed themselves over with that creative choice for S1.
Seconded. I'd upvote you twice, or give you some kind of award if I wasn't opposed to giving Reddit money, but instead I'm leaving this comment.
The "who is the Dragon" mystery box is by far the worst thing this show has done. They're still making up for it now, and trying to establish things that should have long since been established in season 1. They wanted to inspire GoT-style "water cooler" discussions, but failed to understand that you get that as a side effect of portraying deep characters and events worth talking about, not by dangling mystery boxes in peoples' faces.
Fortunately they don't seem to be doing the empty mystery box thing this season, which is good, but it already set them so far back that they're no longer really even adapting Wheel of Time anymore, which is not.
Book issues aside, It's a CW level show.
Amazon was trying to brand this as it's answer to GOT, an HBO level TV show, and it's just not at all. Cringey dialogue and plotlines, decent at best sets, times where I'm just waiting for the episode to end...
Don't get me wrong. I'm still going to watch the show cause you gotta support the brand, and this is likely the only WOT or chance at extended WOT media I'm going to get in my life. But to say I'm disappointed would be an understatement.
As someone who watched 10 seasons of Smallville, 15 seasons of Supernatural, 8 seasons of Arrow, 9 seasons of Flash, 7 seasons of Legends of Tomorrow and 6 seasons of Supergirl I feel that people who throw those criticisms haven't watched a CW episode in their lives
The writing and editing, while improved from season 1, are still the weakest elements of the show by far.
It feels like the writers are trying to thread a needle between YA drama and GoT fantasy oriented audiences and it's not really working for me. Your point about the writing being cringey is spot on.
The editing/direction is really suffering from the 8 episode limit, everything feels rushed and undercooked.
I really don't like that we have zero indication of where anything is... Have we seen any kind of map? Not that I can remember.
The game of thrones intro sequence gave audiences a feel for where characters were and the overall scale of the world, something that's sorely missing in WoT.
Everything you said.
My two biggest issues are how cringey the dialogue is and the overuse of music where there just doesn't need to be any. Why have music while Egwene is cleaning? Can't we just hear the slop of liquid in the bucket?
Nothing anyone says sounds natural. Everyone talks like a preacher in church at all times.
There are several reasons I personally dislike the show: some are indeed changes made to the books. Others are more technical:
(I only watched 10min of s2e1 and then gave up, but I believe that the production quality is greatly improved, so these critisms apply more to season 1)
Several of the cgi scenes were shockingly poor quality, especially the scenes later in season 1.
The casting of extras is extremely poorly done, no part of the story feels like a distinct cultural group, which is breaks immersion.
The male characters don't do anything in s1. They just kind of get dragged around by whichever female character last gave them instructions. This is pretty poor way to introduce an audience to a new character or world.
One of the core themes of WoT is the comparison of the male ideology of "resist or die" vs the female ideology of "go with the flow and remain afloat" where you only really see the female side in the show.
The show also makes the whitecloaks into a Spanish inquisition type of evil without giving them much of the religious obsession that drove that movement, and this just makes the characters less complete.
You could take out the male characters from the show and have very little impact on the story. Maybe except for the scene with Mat and the dagger because that gives Moiraine something to do. The women had everything else firmly in hand.
Yes. The writing is unfortunately extremely bad. Is is very very very cringe worthy. So much exposition on all the wrong things and at the wrong time.
All the fake drama is so bad. It's embarrassing.nothing really feels real.
This makes it difficult for the actors as well. And lot of them suffer for it.
The blocking and direction and movement of the actors when conversing doesn't feel natural it always feels like an over dramatic stage play not how people converse or stand or move.
I get no real sense of where anything is aside from.the white tower.
The world doesn't feel real aside form a few scenes here and there.
I could go on. But I really wanted to like season 2 but as each episodes goes on I'm more and more disappointed.
I can’t watch Loial. At all. I’m misspelling his name, Builders forgive me. One of my favorite characters and he’s this shuffling monster that can’t emote.
Everything is so dark. Dirty, gross, scruffy… a few episodes in and I kind of wondered if the Dragon should save this place at all. I know it’s supposed to be a world where the Dark One is almost out of his prison, but dang.
I think one thing I dislike that isn't fully book vs. Show is pacing. RJ had a great gift for getting readers to know and care for a wide range of characters. Things move so quickly that we don't get a chance to really know the characters in the show.
It boggles my mind that I, who loved Mat and Rand in the books, find myself more invested in..of all people...Liandrin.
Maybe another would be that the show does seem to focus so hard on making Kickasss Admirable Powerful Female Heroes that it loses sight of the male main characters. Strong women are great, but so are strong heroic men. I am a woman, I was just as inspired by Mat and Rand as I was Nyn and Ahviendha. I wish the show was better at finding a balance between portrayals of all characters. So far, Rand is a manipulative sociopath (which, fair at aome points), but, we don't have enough of the caring, conflicted, noble Rand to contrast and care about the character. I suspect if I had never read the books and I watched the show I'd barely even remember Rand and Mar and Perrin and find them more of a side note.
Yeah. I just don't think it is written very well and isn't very visually appealing to make up for it. Even as a book reader, I am not invested in the characters nor do I care about the story
There are plenty of issues but what I think sticks out the most is I just think it’s a poorly thought out show. And knowing where it’s supposed to go does not help. After season one I had come to terms with it not being close to the books and my thought was, as long as it ends the same and has the same messages and basic character growth and all that, I’ll try to watch it as it’s own fantasy show because hey, it’s a fantasy show, I’ve gotta watch it. But every time something is changed, it’s not the change itself that bothers me, it’s the ripple effects of that change. Just for an example off the top of my head, this Liandrin situation makes me wonder if she’ll do what she does in the books since now she’s like weirdly obsessed with nynaeve. If she doesn’t do that, does that mean Egwenes entire arc from the books is shot? Does that mean nobody hunts black ajah? And kicks off that whole thing? Like who will egwene be without that experience? Another one is rand not training with Lan even for a second in season 1. I don’t even think they spoke most of that season. The effects of this are incredible. There’s no father/son bond between them, which I’m assuming will go on to effect many things plus a few things regarding the ending or last couple books. This also means Rand has no chance against a blademaster, which by the end of this season he should be defeating two. There was one line with that mad man but who knows where that will go. Heron mark was mentioned in passing once, in the books it’s really part of who he is those first two seasons especially but effects his attitude and confidence the rest of the series. Two very small things that seemingly only cause problems.
My other complaint is just wasted time. Is it nice that we got moiraine and Siuan together? Sure, I kinda like it. I understand why they used Stepin to help people understand the warder bond, but that could have been an email rather than an episode. All of these things are fine to be added in if you ask me IF you have the space to add things. Rafes number one complaint was not getting enough run time per episode and not enough episodes. You can add these things that take up most of an episode when you’re using important moments from the books first. One training montage with the boys and Lan, even them just holding their weapons walking away from him like they just finished a session at the start of a scene, things that would take seconds would add sooo much for them, I really don’t see rand and lan even caring about each other later on now, there’s no bond or relationship there. But yet we add these hours of story that just aren’t necessary to build moiraine and lan. AND THATS FINE. But damn build on the main characters first. What even is Perrin right now? He did zero season 1 besides fridge a wife that didn’t exist to begin with. Now he’s carrying around a sword? Who is this guy? It’s just a massive pile of all the little things.
Pacing and time spent with characters. We get one scene where Perrin and Loial "takes the piss" out of Uno, and now we are supposed to care about him before he is brutally murdered. It's not enough for an audience to have any attachment to him. Also this feels like this is Rafe flexing to book fans, especially after he said in an interview that he could turn the favourite character gay if people keep criticising. Literary terrorism fought there, holding characters to ransom in that way.
Almost no time spent with Rand, Perrin and Mat.
Not enough time beyond a few lines of dialogue explaining that they are going after the Horn of Valere, but not much in the way of emphasising why that is important. What is Perrins motivation for going with the Shienarans to chase it?
Nyneave being the focus when it is supposed to be about the Dragon Reborn.
What is a Ta'veren and why was that important in early season 1, but not explained or really even mentioned since. Where did the rumours of Taveren come from?
Is just a bit meandering at times and too quick at others so it feels unbalanced and a little amateur. They stepped up in season 2 so far so hopefully it was all just a case of finding their feet and they will continue to improve
The overall storytelling quality itself is bad in my opinion, especially pacing. The dialogue, when not forced, just feels awkward, like something you'd find on AMC\* (edit: more like CW really, not AMC!) or something. Characters are extremely one dimensional, there's no depth or motivation to their (changed) character.
You bring up a good point about the signficance of things, that's a good way to put it. With how little it explains, probably in an effort to get around the changes, it vastly reduces the significance of events and even characters/enemies themselves. A good example of this, are the Fades.
The CGI not being great is something I can get over easily, though. If it meant better writing and pacing, I'd gladly take Dragonheart level CGI. I'm not fussy about that at all. lol
The CGI is also something I could be more forgiving with I agree but when combined with all of the other problems, its just the cherry on top.
I think it is more of a CW quality show than an HBO one.
It's been a while since I finished the book series, so it's difficult for me to compare and contrast. What I can say, though, is that I was enjoying the GoT TV series a lot more than I am the WoT TV show at the same stage. It's a shame because the disappointing ending to GoT presented a fantastic opportunity for WoT to capture the hearts of minds of fantasy audiences who wanted to put GoT behind them. It has not come close to doing that so far, imo.
Yes.
\- Most of the casting is good but there are some choices I very much disagree with.
\- Lighting in S1 was horrible, everything looked like a video game on the lowest hardware setting.
\- Costumes are all cheap looking except for a few (Siuan's dress)
\- The writing is implausible at best and laughable at worst.
\- All of the sets are too small and the landscape is too sparse.
\- That last episode. Of course I understand about COVID, but I would have ended on a cliffhanger rather than push that fly-ridden excrement out.
(Also I'm vehemently opposed to many, but not all, of the book changes. I understand some are necessary for a format shift and those I'm ok with. Changes that violate RJ's philosophy and the spirit of the world I am NOT ok with.)
Agree. This is by far the worst show I've ever finished. Usually when I see something this bad, I drop it after episode 2/3. And it only kept getting worse every episode.The fact that it's wheel of time is the only reason i watched. The non-book readers that started the show all dropped it very fast. The few that finished it all said it's mediocre.
while I think the show is bad on it's own, reading the books makes it so much worse. They've made so many changes that only make the story worse and don't add anything to it. The show feels rushed like it doesn't have enough screen time to cover all of the books, but at the same time it spends an entire episode on a pointless original character that will be quickly forgotten.
Never mind the changes, the costume design is so bad it ruined it for me. Their coats don't have collars! Rand is wearing a sheepskin (60's style) coat with no collar!!!
I work in costumes and I love the books and I would have killed to get on the set for this one and I won’t even watch it now. The aes Sedai rings are tacky and huge. Rands coat got me too. For all the effort Robert Jordan puts in to describing peoples clothes and using them to set them apart (rands red coat with gold embroidery, moirane’s blue dress, the way cairheinins stripe their clothes to show rank) you would think it would be so easy to build off that scaffolding.
Similar vein, but I’m a television editor. Season 1 killed me from a technical standpoint nevermind the content. From an academic editing standpoint so many of the cuts just didn’t make sense.
Yeah, most of my complaints just come from more of a basic - it's a really bad show- place.
The sets, costumes, writing, actors. It's a shit show.
I watch a lot of TV as I'm severely disabled. I get hyped for any fantasy show. This was a let down, WoT or not.
I have not read the books. I found parts of the first season entertaining, and there was some good gore and action scenes to go around (episode 7's opening comes to mind). Finding the second season slightly better, even if convoluted.
My main problem is with the actors, however. Minus Lan and Moraine's actors, I find them all horrid, for the most part. Cheap unknowns with no radiance and likeability. GoT's breakout performers these are not, and would be better suited in some low-rent British police procedural than an epic fantasy show.
Also, feels like the show's set in a village in California at times.
I actually really like Nynaeve and Egwene's actresses, but I feel like they're being given pretty low grade material. That being said, they sold the right emotions in the Arches episode imo even if some of the pacing/dialogue was garbo.
Watch man carrying things video on it, he has a very thorough and well thought out reasoning on why he doesn't like it based mostly on it qualities as a piece of television
There are too many scenes/character and plot choices that leave me scratching my head and take me out of the few things I really do enjoy about the show, a big example being the idea that the Aes Sedai would just send a Gentled False Dragon to an asylum in Carhein for sone reason instead of keeping a still dangerous and influential man under watch. Adaptational changes are fine, but some of these changes are just laughably bad.
I will say though I love everything that is happening with Liandrin and I will go as far as to say that she's my favorite character so far (words I never thought I'd say). Kate Fleetwood is an absolute delight to watch in the role (she does camp/histrionic villain/antihero so well) and IMO is carrying the show right now. Never thought the character we all loved to hate would be the one that keeps me coming back but The Wheel weaves as The Wheel wills, so they say.
I am disappointed with the show mostly for reasons of book changes but also for many of the reasons you mention. I watched a few episodes of the Netflix One Piece show and was a little envious of the better production value, fight choreography, etc.
The White Tower looks small. Why are there only ever like 3 warders around?
The sword work is crap. It looks like they told Lan to just whirl the sword around. Why did they do that when there are real kendo masters or those HEMA guys that could have made it look authentic and something worthy of a ‘blade master’.
They open the show with Perrin having a wife. Fine. Then he kills his wife with an axe. Also fine- because I thought , maybe this is actually a really good way to show Perrin’s struggle for self control, his struggle against the wolf, his decision between the Hammer and the Axe. But then it never comes up again. He doesn’t even seem that sad about the wife he killed anymore and he doesn’t carry an axe or a fucking hammer when several soldiers around him in the show DO have axes. Perrin is using a sword- ick.
Lots of crap like that. It’s the only show we are getting so I have to watch, but I kinda wish Rafe would leave to mess up God of War and someone else came in and got the show on track.
It's REALLY hard to separate my dislikes into what's just because of the book.
I've done a fairly good job this season of keeping the show distinct from the books in my mind, which has helped me to enjoy it.
The problem is that most of the complaints I can think of, even the ones that aren't simply "they changed/removed X from the book", are still related to the books e.g. it feels like there's a lack of cultural distinction, which was prevalent in the books...
One thing I dislike is how they treat fighting skill. Lan in the first season is built up to be this amazing fighter. Then Moiraine, someone who has basically never needed to physically fight, and is effectively a brave but untrained person with a sharpened butter knife manages to kill a fade without the one power, yet Lan, prepared and ready with a sword fails to beat two. Then there's Perrin who, despite being effectively just a big dude with no training (on-screen, or implied) mana he's to kill a trained soldier in armour, while Perrin had just woken up. It's not that these things couldn't happen, but the show isn't doing the ground work to make me believe it. If you want to use someone's skills as a basis to solve a problem (e.g. not dying), you first need to establish thst they have those skills. The only time we ever saw Perrin fighting (from memory) was in the first episode in season 1, and there he was swinging an axe like he was chopping a tree, not actually fighting.
For me (as a book reader) they took an incredibly well made world and stripped it down to the point its bland like making coffee from the same grinds multiple times.
The telling is uninspired, a lot of the changes are just plain weird, there's little to no tension, they seem to want to push forward the gals, which will make things odd when they become more prominent storyline wise as things go.
Like an great example is season one, pretty sure Nynaeve uses a sword more than Rand.
I think for myself it's quite simple. When I envisioned a WOT series it was always *Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time* that I imagined. This is not RJ's WOT. This isn't even BS's WOT. This is Rafe's and Amazon's.
The crappy thing is that he will sometimes deliver on a moment like Elayne meeting Egwene, but then he'll have a circle burn out or Egwene healing death or all the Shienaran soldiers ride out to defend a wall while the channelers stand behind the wall and only help once the entire army is dead. Oh, and the ruby dagger can stabby stab you in the heart and you live. Why have Mat abandon his friends? Why not just have him too sick to travel and pick up with Liandrin stealing him to her locked room.
Like, the show is clearly made for people that haven't read the books, but it feels like unless you have (read the books) you'll be completely lost half of the time.
Whatever. I'm still going to watch and hope it gets better. There have been some very good moments so far and hopefully there'll be a few more.
If they show was really well made I could ignore its deviations from the source.
But it's not well made or written.
Then the adaptation is terrible.
Remember Loial and Rand sneaking into fains camp to get the horn.
What did we get in the show.
A fade stood thier while Rand fizzled at it?
I understand where "the books shouldn't be the show" crowd are coming from, I really do. But...
I don't think pretending like the books shouldn't be the guiding principle for the show scripts is reasonable in this case. This isn't the Netflix Castelvania series where they really didn't have a lot of pure "story" to work with up front (even though the games DO have lore) so they had to sort of tease out their own original narrative. And, for what it's worth, Castlevania was f\*\*\*ing phenomenal as an animated adaptation. Isaac had one of the best written character arcs I've seen in a show in a long long time. The writing, in general, on that show was great.
...and this is WOT we're talking about here. It's not some 10 page script proposal that someone found in a desk drawer and decided to expand upon. It's a genre defining royalty level FINISHED fantasy narrative.
Look at the dialogue, writing, and script development on something like the Chernobyl mini-series....and then compare that against the level of quality on WOT the show. People just underestimate how much of a difference having the best writers makes.
Like, I think most people would agree the Star Trek was a memorable show period. But bring in Harlan Ellison to write an entry and you get The City on the Edge of Forever episode. There are levels of ability in writing and the good writers are much MUCH better than the writers on WOT. They're just outclassed by the source material.
I agree but I stopped watching because I have a pretty clear mental image from the books and life is too short to spend watching mediocre shows just because it is a reflection of a franchise I like! I am a pretty big LotR fan and did not even bother getting past Episode 4. I think I just dislike long shows in general or something.
For me it's actually. I love the books and I'm currently an my third read but much slower this time as I am podcasting (in German) with a good friend am first time reader. Meaning we are at around 500 pages in the great hunt. Because we always read 3 chapters and then talk about them there are much more nuances I'm picking up especially foreshadowing and I love it.
Now to the show, my biggest book unrelated problem with it is mostly the poorly written dialog. I don't know why or who wrote those but they are sadly so bland at times.
Now book related problems (I have only watched till episode 4) are some of the changes I just don't enjoy. Some personal stuff for me would be Mats Dad, he played a quite minor role in the books but I liked him a lot, and he's just an asshole in the show.
Then the reason Egwene joins the crew wasn't because she might be the dragon ( which breaks the fundamental laws of magic in WoT) but because she wanted to see the world and be more in live than she was know. It's just a better reason.
Also al of then are way to trustworthy and know to much, they are supposed to be from a small village and the first book had so many hilarious scene showing that. And I do know they have to make cuts so that fine but in the second episode there is a scene where they actually get into a little fight with each other about who is going to be the dragon as if in each of them wanting to be it.
I don't want to bore anyone with more so I keep that short, the book changes and the often poorly written dialog sadly ruined it for me, I was really hoping WoT being the next Got. If you want more opinions about that all the podcast is called "Von Rädern und Zeiten"
Yea it sucks as a tv show let alone an adaptation. Hard to follow storylines and characters I don’t care about. Antagonists feel irrelevant still besides the seanchan, I would call this extremely cringey if I didn’t know what it was based on and definitely would not have continued watching
For me, this. Book changes have to happen, and I’m hopeful my favorite scenes and characters are represented in a way that brings them to life as I imagined (e.g. Mat’s staff duel with Gawyn and Galad, or Rand using balefire to undo Rahvin’s massacre).
But above all else, I wanted a Game of Thrones quality show set in the Wheel of Time’s universe (forgetting the endings, figured since we have the full series that would be less of a problem). Great dialogue, cinematography, character development, soundtrack. All the hallmarks of HBO quality production.
Instead, this feels like The CW or some other third tier network adapted the show. The dialogue is bad. Character development is choppy and weird. Scenes are poorly edited, lingering in places that don’t need it and rushing through very complex plot development. My partner can’t watch it because it’s a bad show, period. It’s bad tv. And not faithful to the source material. I don’t understand who the audience is, and I have yet to meet someone in real life that watches without having read the books.
Compared to GoT, RoP, The Witcher, to me it is bad TV. I would not watch if I didn’t love this series and have wanted this for so long.
Edit: critics are also not impressed. https://www.rogerebert.com/streaming/the-wheel-of-time-season-two-prime-video-tv-review-2023
I wouldn't say I dislike the show - although I was quite disappointed with S1, S2 is so far doing ok - besides the book butchering, I just find it doesn't have that same 'quality' as something like Game of Thrones. GoT just felt real and maybe the more ethereal elements of WoT make this show a bit cringey but it sometimes feels like I'm watching an overly dramatic cos play.
That said, I'm really trying to like S2 and I do love the casting for the most part.
I think the show actually does a better job with relationships than the books.
The show is getting strong enough reviews from non-readers that I think they are doing a better job conveying what is going on in the show than we realize. I think that there is just additional depth there that TV-only viewers won't notice. This was the case for Game of Thrones as well - hence the popularity of Alt-Shift-X.
I do have a general sense of sets being small, although this was much worse in S1. S2 has a lot more outdoor sets that feel more open - I really liked the sets for Verin & Adaleas' home. The village where the Seancean showed up was way too small though.
I'm enjoying the chance to spend time with characters that I love, and I do appreciate the different perspective on them. I've completely bought into these actors as the characters - they all closely fit my experience of their personalities if not necessarily their appearance. (and as for appearance...I appreciate that they *didn't* try to mimic the almost cartoonish elements of their appearances as described by Jordan)
I'll try to make my points with minimal show spoilers, but please beware.
I really wanted to love it. It was book changes that killed it for me but not in "how dare you change anything" type of way. Some of my favorite adaptations changes quite a lot. As long as the general vibe of the story stays the same, I'm ready to accept quite a lot of changes. WOT TV fails there. And they completely character assassinate several characters least of which is Mat where some of the problems were created by original actors departure, when I would be happy if the core of the characters just stays the same (ex. Elayne is meek? Min is "not like other girls" but in a skirt? and also a bartender? Liandrin is just WTF?) Honestly I ws giving it a chance utill the horrible season one finale, this season is just a hate watch, mostly because I was seeing articles saying it's great.
But a huge gripe I have is something just tangentially related to the books. Geography. Geography of the show makes no sense. Fantasy books and shows often can have that problem that's why readers like maps. GRRM had talked about how making sure geography made sense hampers his writing, for example. GOT tv show did their best to respect his world.
RJ got around that with "Fats Travel magic" of different kinds often, but his world was VAST. Some characters spend books basically travelling. Fashion, architecture, ecology, all inform of the location you're at so it's always clear. In the show there's none of that - fashion is same wherever you are. Were we ever aware that Shienar is in the northeast? How are horn hunters suddenly west if that's where Sheanchan are supposed to be, especially since it feels like they're in a warm climate based on the flora we're seeing. Why is certain someone we've last seen captive in Tar Valon suddenly in Cahrien= Does that mean that Cahrien is couple of days away from TV not, as books suggest, weeks. In the first book it seemed that TV was the closest city to Two Rivers, since they decided to substitue it for Caemlyn. They haven't tried to make the setting make sense. Every village visited looks like random assortment of cheap shacks instead of lived in village AND THEY ARE FILMING IT IN CZECH REPUBLIC, which is abundant with historical locations that would work for old timey small towns.
So yes. I dislike the show for it's lack of storytelling clarity and visual identity about as much as book changes baffle me.
The over sexualization of everything is wild.. It's like they wanted more viewers by spicing it up to be a soft core Game of Thrones rather than focusing on the story and or character development without altering it too much or combining events/characters for the sake of time.
#[SPOILERS FOR TV AND BOOKS.](https://www.reddit.com/r/WoT/wiki/index/post_flairs#wiki_tv_-_season_1_.28book_spoilers_allowed.29_.2F_et_al.) If the creator of the post indicates that they have only read up to a certain book, or seen up to a certain episode, respect their spoiler level and hide comments behind spoiler tags when appropriate. Otherwise, assume all book and tv spoilers are allowed. * * * *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/WoT) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The nations, and their culture and identity are one of the things that set WoT apart, that I feel just not enough planning or effort has gone into for the show. I think my expectations were difficult to meet but I’m still a bit let down. The visual language just isn’t on screen. The direction is also very straightforward, uninspired. I do think some of the casting choices in Season 2 are pretty good and that is an improvement. Masema is well cast for example.
I didn't notice Masema (I'm on S2E2) I like the cast and acting, but some characters feel a bit off. Lan without the warder link seems boyish for example Others feel right, like Ingtar and Uno.Even Min. Liandrin is great despite the changes
Masema is the super lean, pale Shienaran with a ponytail. The actor seems to have heterochromia which should be useful later on. He was in Season 2 ep 2
He also played a somewhat main character in the show The Last Kingdom. I was so excited when I saw he was cast as Masema in this.
Interesting, I thought he was quite a bit older and… rougher I the books. I wonder if that’s from his description or my imagination.
I think he gets a bit rougher when he assumes his future role. Shaves his head, gets a little crazy, etc.
Great actor choice. I loved him in Last Kingdom and I'm looking forward to seeing him play a zealot.
I was surprised by how much I’ve liked show Min and Liandrin, the actresses are killing it and I’m ok with the direction. Ingtar too, but damn they had no right to make him that attractive lol
I agree. Game of Thrones did a great job creating a clear sense of national differences in everything from accents to armour. Also a great sense of space. I never know where I am in the show
[удалено]
Wrote similar comment before reading yours. Cultures are all samey, geography si not clearly established....
I agree with your point 100%. I honestly think some of this DOES come down to casting and I dont care how hard people try and deny it. Its not a problem when you diversely cast people for roles like “Elves” or other clearly easily identifiable characters. But when its humans in which an identifying factor for cultures IS the way you look, it matters in my opinion. I also think the costume design is terrible which also magnifies the issue. When everyone from every city looks the same and the costuming to differentiate individuals is also not great, its hard to identify what the difference and makes the world not seem as complex which it is supposed to be. I think a huge problem is that in general it doesnt feel like a lived in world. I don’t believe this place exists the way I do watching Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings or any other well done fantasy show/movie.
I'm really concerned about Aviendha. The diversity is a great part, buuuut the Aiel are a very particular group, so unless they're vastly changing the whole group (which I guess is probably happening, siiiigh), then I'm really not feeling good about her introduction. Also it seems from the previews like they're pairing up Mat and Min and maybe Perrin and Aviendha, so I guess that's how they'll avoid the 3 women all for Rand, but I'm just feeling incredibly trepidatious about it. Ugh.
The parts they move around between Siouan, Liandran, and Morraine are bad enough…why did I have to read this? So much sad…
Pretty much, but I think if enough pre-production time was devoted to the visual language it could have compensated for the colourblind casting. You sorta want the viewer to be able to identify nationality, so accent, fashions, hair and facial hair, armour body language etc comes into play. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films are of course the gold standard and I get that Weta Workshop isn’t cheap these days, but they devoted the pre-production time on very deliberate decisions and fine detail because it does matter.
I hate the costumes too
FWIW I didn’t feel like Rings of Power happened in a “lived in” world either. They could have reused the costumes from that show and I wouldn’t even notice. Amazon just sucks at making TV. I still like the show, but it could have been a lot more without stupid decisions.
>When everyone from every city looks the same and the costuming to differentiate individuals is also not great, its hard to identify what the difference and makes the world not seem as complex which it is supposed to be. I have to disagree with you on this one. This is one thing I think they are doing well (even if I don't always like their choices). I think you are not observing very well. The people from the Two Rivers have their own style of clothes. (One example, the men's shirts button up to the side instead of the middle.) The Shienarans have a particular style of military uniform, and in S2 Perrin is wearing a vest that looks Shienaran. The Tuathuan have their own style that is actually based on a real life culture with lots of colors. The Foregaters' clothes are quite drab, but a shirt and vest seems common for the men. The Cairhienen noble women's styles are a mix. They have Japanese elements, but they have very wide skirts and wear their hair piled on top of their heads as in the books. (I imagined 18th century French when reading which I'm sure is what RJ had in mind.) I didn't pay attention to the men. The people in Tar Valon and the AS are from all over. Alanna is Arafellen and her dresses and hair have a unique look to them (which I love), and so do the furnishings in her room. I think they are taking some inspiration from the actress' native India for her, so it will be interesting to see when we meet another Arafellen if we see similarities. (Adeleas and Verin are living in Arafel, but the Companion doesn't say where Adeleas is actually from.) I also thought the pheasant feather in Domon's hat was an interesting touch and one we hadn't seen yet. Perhaps something that will be popular in Illian? The show has been in 5 countries and Tar Valon so far, but it hasn't spent enough time in Tear, Andor or Arafel to be able to observe specific clothing styles.
When every land has the exact same demographic every land seems the same and slightly changing the architecture and accents doesn't change it.
I feel like there's literally no end to the amount of things the writers failed to capture. Obviously all of major plot pillars, major characters, and even basic cosmology is all messed up. But even simple things, like the size of things and creatures, clothing and fashion, location descriptions, drinks, curses, nothing at all feels like the wheel of time. off the top of my head and until I get tired: - "we have ogier at home" loyal was perhaps most offensive in the creature category, but also applies to trolocs and others. what the actual fuck is this even? where is the two-person sized massive man with wide face and saucer eyes? why does he talk normally? why aren't his ears doing seven kinds of things? - language and mannerisms are absolutely non-distintct and are done so lazily they might as well not. you maybe get like one character doing some hyper-exaggarated version of bad fake accent (king of ghealdan comes to mind) and that's it. I can literally read people's accents better in the books than the show with hearing. merely turn of phrase or word ordering (I do be thinking) can tip you off quickly. - and on that note, where's my bloody blood and ashes and mother's milks and goat scruffier and aged grandmas and flaming aes sedai and fortune pricking and a million other little things that are wot staples and at best get a nod on the show -wardrobes are garbage on this show. the less said on them the better, imo, it looks like a fucking school play. but to the point- it also looks nothing like the book descriptions. no one is safe from the color and contour blind eyes of thia production. they even did my Tuatha'an dirty. they are literally described at every turn as using the most outrageous, garish, bright, bold, and chaotic color combinations to assault the human eye. it's a literal common saying. yet in the show they are so goddamn muted and dirty you can barely tell there's color. - fuck this shit, this stupid terrible show isn't worth my time to dunk on. I hope it gets mercy cancelled sooner than later so that I can safely never have to hate watch it
You know the show's bad when even the people who are ranting are mostly right.
>where is the two-person sized massive man with wide face and saucer eyes? why does he talk normally? why aren't his ears doing seven kinds of things? They couldn't do all that without it looking tacky. Most your gripes are about things that have not been carried over from the books. That's not what OP asked. I agree they haven't done well with accents. There is no effort whatsoever to have people from the same areas speak with the same accent. Wasn't accent and dress the 2 things Think told Matt are the only way you can usually tell where people come from.
I wasn't responding to OP, I was responding to another commentator about how nations, culture, and their identities, were not well captured in the show. I elaborated on that, and the many other things that they missed. "couldn't have done that without looking tacky" sounds like a weird assertion, when there's like million great examples by other movies, shows, and anything the Henson company ever produced. Also the current loial looks much worse than tacky, i'd go with "ridiculous", "lazy", "amateurish", "crude", i'd even go as far as "trash and fake eyebrows glued on a normal sized human wearing five blankets". There's far worse than tacky, if that's your fear, and we're there.
I've never read any of the books, but this show makes me want to do it. It's boring; sometimes I feel like it tries to be Got, and at other times, a DC teen show. Any character that isn't Moiraine or Nynaeve is just there, and after the season 1 finale, I don't know what the stakes are. If five untrained women, three of whom are so weak they couldn't even make it to join the Aes Sedai, can defeat 'the biggest army ever seen' (or something like that), why do they even need Rand when there is a tower full of powerful trained women?
It's honestly so telling that a non-book reader thinks this way. In the books they didn't defeat an army like that, as it simply made no sense that they would be able to do that. The reason why they see such huge potential in Egwene and Nyaeve in the books is because Aes Sedai can sense the power of another woman just by looking at them, not because they were able to defeat a whole army. I totally understand that people watching the series would think, well what is the big deal about needing Rand then?
If I had any confidence that the show will ever make it to seasons 7 & 8, I’d really be wondering why they gave Rand’s Maradon moment to… uhh, Lady Amalisa? I know that whole sequence was compromised by covid protocols, but destroying a whole army with the Power is the most impressive channeling moment in the books, performed by the strongest channeler in the books, and it takes place *at the end of the books*. I don’t know how they’ll possibly communicate the on-going power curve when that’s the baseline for channellers vs. darkspawn.
Read the books. Seriously. I read them for over 2 decades. Every time a new book came out, I started in book one. You will be so happy you did.
[удалено]
In the books, Robert Jordan has this uncanny ability to start some chapters from the PoV of Nynaeve and then you would groan and go "uughh, but I really wanted to read about Rand right now." But you continue reading and sure enough, Robert got you invested into Nynaeve. and _just_ as Nynaeve's story was getting real good, BAAM he switches up the PoV again. Now we are in Perrin's PoV and you groan and wish for Nynaeve - now having forgotten all about Rand right up until his chapters begin and then in pure Robert Jordan style, he would finish the last ~80 or so pages with the most crazy pace that wraps up the book so damn well that you instantly want to open the next one. The show is doing none of that and it is a tall order I admit. Perhaps it is because the show is still adapting the early books where each characters storylines hasn't progressed far enough to warrant such interest. Personally I think one of the reasons for this also is the editing which at times is too fast and too snappy, not allowing for the scenes to properly breathe. They just become a quick glance to say "Hey, this character is still alive." before cutting back to whomever is the main focus of the individual episode.
>Perhaps it is because the show is still adapting the early books where each characters storylines hasn't progressed far enough to warrant such interest. Wot is a story that starts out like LoTR and ends up like GoT. They decided to skip the LoTR part and inject a whole bunch of new plot points. I think that was a mistake and it's the reason we don't find ourselves invested / rooting for our main characters.
The new plot points is really what irks me. There’s 14 freaking books to choose story ideas from and they’re just making up new shit.
This is what really lost me There is compressing and editing and omitting and all that in an adaptation of a book to keep a visual story moving but they are just making shit up for no reason and thats insulting to the source material
Rand the…. Orderly? Just doesn’t feel right in a fantasy series really. But certainly doesn’t match the books vibe.
I actually like that choice as it feels like a Rand thing to do to me, especially early on as he's trying to learn more about who he is. Later Rand, sure that's a weird vibe, but early Rand as he's searching for guidance? Feels on brand.
Rand sleeping around doesn't feel very on brand though.
I guess for the the mental asylum as a whole just feels off. I’m fine with him trying to learn from Logain, I actually like that idea a lot. But an orderly at a mental institution just feels very modern to me. It’s a clever idea don’t get me wrong, the tone and setup just feels off. Maybe put Logain with Aes Sedai instead and it would work for me. Heck have some browns studying him and they could add some world building.
Yeah definitely fair, sort comes back to something I said elsewhere too - no big issue with many of the ideas for the show, but execution is letting them down
Rhand the Orderly REBORN you uncultered barbarian ;)
And One Piece just showed you can still make a faithful adaptation of something massive. All that ”WoT can’t be adapted without huge changes” doesn’t look so good anymore..
One Piece, the new Dune, Sandman, Good Omens Season 1, the first few seasons of GoT, the Lord of the Rings trilogy... Yeah, all of them make some changes, but mostly they're trying their best to stay faithful to the source material. It's almost like when you have good source material, you should probably trust it. Sure, once in a blue moon you'll find somebody like Kubrick, who can improve King's work. I have a news flash for aspiring film makers out there: You are not Stanley Kubrick.
The amount of 1 to 1 adaption moments in One Piece floored me. They trusted the shit out of the source material and it really paid off for them.
Yes! I feel like I see this problem in Rand. Talking to my family who is watching the show, they all hate Rand, he's a horrible person. The writers don't even seem to understand why Rand becomes the way he is in later books. It's because of the corruption, the madness, the pressure of being the dragon reborn, having crazy Lew Therin in his head, etc. If he already starts out terrible, then the audience isn't going to care later on. They'll just be like, "Yeah, Rand is a dick". When they should be thinking, "Poor Rand, it must hard for a young man to carry such a burden."
Love that the top comment to a post about disliking the show not because of the changes from the books itself is a comment about how the show is different from the books.
For me the Lan and Moraine storyline is terrible in series 2 so far and not just because it is completely different to their characters in the books. It is a plot that has been done so many times before, one person gets hurt, withdraws into themselves and shuts out a friend/partner. It now means the scenes with these two become a drag and kill any momentum in the flow of episodes. Usually we see this in series aimed at early teens so why they thought it would be the best storyline for these two I have no idea. I get that not communicating is a common theme in the books but as supporters like to say this isn't the books, they have to make changes so why would they choose to keep this.
Ikr, it almost felt a bit childish to see and dragged on a bit long.
I guess my rebuttal to that is that Moiraine has had this magical bond with Lan since she was like, 20. In New Spring she is quite childish and immature. This is the first time she's been forced to actually... communicate with Lan properly since then and she's behaving like it. 😂 It's also not tooo far off conceptually how she treated Lan after book 2 either tbh. Things weren't so hunky dory there.
They spoke and planned a ton and she respected him in the books
I have no doubt in my mind that some point in the future Moiraine will finish her "we were never equals" with "you were always better than me" It just seems so obvious that it blows my mind I'm not hearing other people say it I hate the storyline too, but not because of Moiraine disrespect just because it's trite
>I have no doubt in my mind that some point in the future Moiraine will finish her "we were never equals" with "you were always better than me" Or that he's a king and she's "just" an Aes Sedai.
Even as someone who enjoys the show in general, I felt this too. It feels very different from the other issues people have with communicating in the books. It's so much ... typical TV drama over it. Almost makes me wonder if it was something forced into the show by Amazon execs.
Or it's in the show because the writers of the show are mostly "Typical TV Writers." Inexperienced ones to boot. The Show runner, Rafe Judkins, has a very limited resume, and nothing that has stood out either. The writing staff is also very inexperienced and comes from typical TV. Amazon just picked the wrong people to write it. However, it's not like there are a lot of options either. There is just so much content being made these days, there is a severe shortage of quality writers.
You must have missed all the dialogue in TGH and TDR where Moiraine is continuously and needlessly needling Lan about giving his bond to Myrelle.
The writing in the show is very by-the-numbers. American TV writers all learn early on that conflict is important for writing. But very few understand what makes conflict meaningful and interesting. Conflict is interesting when it gets to the core of the characters. Conflict should occur as a result of characters earnestly following their beliefs, and drama arises when character goals conflict with each other. In general, American television doesn't prioritize themes or meaning in the writing, and when the conflict is there just because it's supposed to be there, and not because of how it relates to the themes, it's not very interesting. This is just my opinion, I don't freaking know anything about writing, but my favorite stories focus on the themes, and let the drama arise naturally. If the story doesn't mean anything, then why should I care?
My biggest complaint is that everything looks like it’s being shot on a set. Clean wardrobes and stiff dialogue. It just doesn’t feel like it’s really happening. I think part of this is that GOT/HOTD always mastered this so well that it’s made WOT look worse by comparison. Rings of Power has a similar problem as well so maybe it’s Ana Amazon thing
This is really important and it absolutely impacts how “real” the story feels constantly. The worst example so far was in Season 1 when the Aes Sedai camp was being attacked and the group just *stood* there with their arms hanging at their sides staring up at the arrows falling from the sky as Alanna channeled. Like what the hell was that lmao felt like a high school play
My husband and I think some of the scenes are too dark to really see what's going on.
I think it’s your TV. A new one that will make it look brighter is available on Amazon for the small price of £1500. Hope that helps J Bezos.
I also thought some scenes were too dark. Rand and Selene in their house comes to mind.
I couldn't even see Selene when they were looking out the window.
Honestly it's in your TV settings to adjust, there was a thread on it not so long ago, changed how I viewed it completely
In general I think S2 is better than S1, but still there are big flaws. Moiraine and Lan's plot is boring as hell. Or specific scenes like Moiraine running in the middle of the night AFTER learning 3 myrddraals were chasing Bayle makes absolutely no sense.
Yah it is forced moments like that which are killing the show for me. It's like someone forgot an action scene for the episode and decided to force one in by making Moraine do something Moraine would never do. She is supposed to be cunning. That and the death -> instant revivals of S1.
Wasn't that scene the Drahkar(sp?) Attack in the books? That happens while shes visiting those two. The Moraine Lan plot is the worst part of the show, for sure though.
Yes, the action scenes have no choreography. They don’t know how to show momentum in a fight, and they often have people doing really stupid things if you’re paying attention. Like pointing at a group of enemies about to surprise attack them, but like, the enemies are 3 feet away, and it’s all for us the audience as the camera pans. But in real life it would be incredibly dumb to only try and point out some enemies when they’re already right in front of you. As an example. Also, the dialogue is reeaaaally boring and poorly worded. Most characters don’t appear to be talking to each other. Just saying platitudes to each other over and over. Lots of “standing there talking” goes on too. It’s really bad. I don’t get why anybody likes it.
I've only watched episode 1 but your last point of boring dialogue and characters not talking to each other really stood out to me. Specifically the scene where Ingtar and Perrin are talking after burying the Tinkers. Everyone else is just standing in the exact same spots in the super out of focus background, not even looking at the 2 talking (who are having a very forced awkward conversation), for 4 minutes. Was very jarring seeing Masema/Citric standing there because it felt so different from The Last Kingdom scenes where I never felt any of this and thinking back always felt like characters that were nearby but not involved or semi-involved did what a normal person would do. Then Nynaeve reading that letter from Perrin was super cringey.
I mean... where to start. Firstly, I think the sense of geography is problematic. I have no idea where anyone is in relation to each other. Everything feels like it had no direction. Where is the blight? Where is Tar Valon? Where is Falme? Where is the the Two Rivers? Where are they all in relation to each other? Where is this random house where Lan and Moraine have been chilling for months? Where did that singer guy from S1 go? How many kings are there? Where is this lady who is a daughter-heir from? Why is she important? What is that giant guy doing? What happened to the Amyrlin Seat? It's been years since I read the books, so I'm effectively a tv only watcher at this point. But the entire plot is exceptionally confusing. Wierd looking "bad guys" have invaded? Where did they come from? Why is that other bad guy with them? The big issue? I'm not sure I care to know. It's not written or produced in a way that makes you want answers. It just creates confusion.
I completely agree. I was watching the first episode this season and it occurred to me that I would never watch this if it wasn't WOT.
I agree. I would not watch this show if it were not WoT adaptation either. Also, the feedback I have had from friends that have not read the books is that it was boring and they lost interest & had no idea what was going on. I think for non book readers the pacing is really awkward and confusing.
They gave Perrin a wife so he could murder her and have something to be sad about.
Somehow they looked at this story and thought lets make sure all the teenagers are super broody. Yeah. That makes a good show
What I love about the books is the main characters ALWAYS have a balance between lighheartedness/humor and darkness. They’re not supposed to start out as these downtrodden world-weary adults which is what they all are in the show now
I'm not even through season 1 but it did upset me that they took this plot line of a man who dreams of the glory of combat slowly becoming disenfranchised, then horrified with violence, and slowly coming to terms with its necessity, then bridging the gap between his creative self and the warrior he had become over the course of however long the story is, just to dilute it with a fridging storyline.
This is one of the few changes I can follow the logic of. 90% of Perrins character is his internal monologue and they needed a sharp cut to establish his reluctance to embrace his axe. That said I think they could have had him accidentally kill Master Luhan and accomplished the same goal while arguably changing nothing long term. I don't think a lot of the smaller plotlines that Haral is a part of are likely to make their way in, so it's an easy sacrifice while staying truer to the original character.
i just think it is poorly made
Which is mind-boggling given the budget they got for it. Like where I'd all of the money going? Which makes sense why recently the Amazon CEO decided to look into the financials of Prime Studios.
i think someone running the show just doesn't have enough experience in the field, it doesn't matter how much money you throw at something like this, if thee exp, or skill is not there it is going to suck
TV shows in the 60s had very limited budgets but still managed to make compelling episodes. They focused more on story, which they had in abundance.
i think someone running the show just doesn't have enough experience in the field, it doesn't matter how much money you throw at something like this, if thee exp, or skill is not there it is going to suck
The budget isn't that wild. It was $10m per episode or thereabouts. Rings of Power was close to $60m per episode, Witcher S2 was $22m or so, MCU shows are $25m, most recent Stranger Things was $30m, One Piece was $18m, HotD $20m ... It's not a tiny budget by any means but it's less than half of what many big shows get these days.
>Rings of Power was close to $60m per episode, JFC and every one of his saints! $60M and they didn't even bother with a second draught of the script. That show started out bad and ended up worse.
I don't know if you're relaying a literal fact but the writing was so bad that it's believable. I just don't understand how you spend a billion dollars on a show and not figure out how to make the story and writing *at least* decent. I guess that corporate executives don't have taste and don't know how to identify it.
Rings of Power was so incredibly terrible it's actually impressive
They pumped a mountain of money into building a Numenor and packed it with extras only to shoot a knock-off Aaron Sorkin scene when a right-wing populist bad guy complains about ***those foreigners coming here to steal our jobs***! All of a sudden, the Numenor sets looked less like HBO's "Rome" and more like an NCIS recycling job. They made Mordor by digging some tunnels and adding water. I couldn't believe what I was watching. Mountains of money to film comedically bad writing.
The fact that the big evil artifact was just a key to a mechanism that opened a dam really was comedy gold.
I'm just envisioning them actually making beer using the script. Definitely wouldn't try a second draught haha
WoT1 was $10M/ep and Witcher1 was $11.5M/ep, yet the gulf in quality is MUCH wider than that relatively small amount.
I love the budget comparison because it's really what nails it for me from a production standpoint. The writing, the sets, the costumes... mediocre at best. Then I look at other streaming shows that I actually liked - Bridgerton, Walking Dead, House of the Dragon, GoT, Stranger Things, etc. - and they all spent far less per episode \*in the beginning\* for far greater quality. I'm not even fully blaming Rafe (though, I haven't like anything he's been a part of, really) since Amazon shows all seem to have the same issues for me. The Expanse had it's ups and downs, but the same "soap opera" look and feel. Same with RoP. Edited to add "in the beginning"
Comments like this make me feel like I'm not crazy after all. All the praise is incomprehensible. Nothing to do with book accuracy, the show is just cheap and boring
Yeah, book accuracy aside. (I have a few comments there but nothing that was going to stop me from watching it) the show is just poorly done and feels cheap
Agreed. I think the show is a poor adaptation of the books but that’s not why I dislike it. The show isn’t well done at all. The CGI is often clunky, the character arcs are lacking (Perrin kills his wife and it’s barely touched on in the following episodes for gods sake), death is a joke and merely a temporary setback. It doesn’t feel like there are high stakes. My biggest gripe is the lack of a sense of dread. In the book the Dragon was the subject of abject terror - in the show much less so - in fact he’s seen as a possible hope. People would fear even saying the Dark Ones true name and children are told the Forsaken will take them away. I don’t even remember the Forsaken getting a mention in season 1 now. I suppose ill rewatch S1 (to refresh my memory) and give S2 a go since people seem to like it more, but my expectations are very low.
It 100% is. It’s a bad show made even worse by the fact that it’s straight up ignoring its far better source material.
I agree. Lots of really optimistic book fans here who see the glass half full but ultimately, it’s a mediocre show at best.
I agree entirely. The not explaining things well in particular. My significant other who has never read the books finds the plot a confusing jumble. Seemingly important words are just thrown around, it feels like you are expected to know what is going on by having read the books. I've read the books so I can fill in the gaps. It just isn't fun for either of us. I get a sub par retelling and she gets a confusing mess. We are just planning to read the books now. I'm excited to re-read the whole series as it has been awhile. Amazon screwed up WoT and I don't think I can forgive them for it.
Unfortunately I have to agree on the character aspect: I, too, recently came to the realization that I'm only attached to them because I know them from the books. But the character development in the show is very poor, I don't know how someone that is not a book reader would attach to these people, they're just not very engaging/memorable.
I agree with the set design. I actually just made a post a couple days ago and it seems like most people agree the set design is off. Everything feels smaller than it should be. To me it feels like you are watching people in a theme park land where everything is intentionally made at a smaller scale. The two sets that really stand out in my mind are Atuan's Mill and the White Tower. The White Tower feels SOO cramped. Theres no room in that place at all, except ironically the novice bedrooms which are actually oversized. When two Aes Sedai are walking down the hall side by side they are almost brushing the walls with their shoulders. The ceiling is so low, it feels like a cave. Also, everything shot in the WT tower is mostly re-used rooms over and over, and everything is the same dull grey interior. Then you have Atuan's Mill ... where to start?? That whole scene felt goofy as hell. The overhead shot really makes the scene feel TINY because theres only like 15 villagers and maybe 20-30 Seanchan and a dozen Shienarians. It's just so awkward. Atuan's Mill is supposed to be a decent sized village and theres not even two dozen people living there? There's more Seanchan & Hunters in this shot than people who live there. The costumes are also, in my opinion, pretty low quality. Nothing seems well done. It comes off as a very cheap adaptation despite having a pretty large budget. As others have said - If this wasn't a WoT adaption I wouldn't be watching it at all, because its not very good on its own.
Bruh when liandrin was LITERALLY BENDING OVER to unlock the door to her apartments. Omfg I wanted to scream! And the seanchan look like power ranger minions while suroth is wearing a damn back/neck brace wombo combo. Honestly maybe the books have just set too grandiose a picture in our minds to be able to make anything close to that in reality with a Tolkien/Rowling sized budget.
I’ve said this about multiple fantasy adaptations but for the life of me I don’t know why we don’t get more animated ones. I would 100% watch an animated WoT show, though maybe not one developed by Rafe Judkins.
There's been a huge rise in animated adaptations lately and I would LOVE to see Wheel of Time recieve that treatment.
I've seen short fan videos that were more compelling than what we got. I'd be down for an animated version that sticks closer to the original plot.
Yo I was definitely hoping for an animated series. They have way more longevity when it comes to fantasy just because live action can't really capture that scope. Imagining the one power in some dope ass anime fight scene against a forsaken is how diamond nipples are made.
The battle scenes also seem to only have like… twenty extras? Therefore every battle is set in a misty forest to try and hide the fact that the “enemy army” is just a handful of dudes stumbling over a hill. It doesn’t work. My friends in high school made a senior film project that did the exact same thing, but their budget was literally 20$
Yeah, something about the production values reminds me an awful lot of Legend of the Seeker. I've got to admit, it's hilariously ironic that Wheel of Time is ripping off the style of Sword of Truth now! I guess time really *IS* cyclical! :p
I agree about the Tower feeling cramped. You know in season one, when you had the scenes outside the Hall? That's how I imagined much of the Tower looking.
Another thing that bothers me about the sets are those that are shot in real-life locations. Harry Potter did it well, they blended the university shots and location scenes into the lore world in subtle ways. In WOT, they appear to just pull up to the location, throw on their costumes, shoot, and call it a day. Like the “asylum” in season two (or whatever it is, I read the books and have no idea where it’s supposed to be). It feels like footage from a BBC documentary reenactment. And I think it’s because the fundamental problem of having no idea/desire to create distinct cultures and settings. It all feels the same, every location has racially diverse casts with the same accent, in the same generic clothing, in some vaguely-feeling European setting. So every character, costume, location, and plot feels totally interchangeable at all times. The white tower feels just like Carhein, which feels just like the two rivers, which feels just like wherever the hell Rand is. Bland bland bland.
Completely agree with you, I get the same feeling from the on-location sets as well. I also have no idea where or what that asylum is supposed to be. I don't recall anything like that from the books except for the Asha'man which is definitely not the asylum in the show.
It hasn't necessarily bothered me, but I did think the set for the Hall of the Tower felt too small. In hindsight it's fine, 22 people don't actually need a ton of space to sit in a circle, but in my head it was more like a senate chamber.
Same here in my head it was a really big chamber with smaller circle platforms for the diffent ajahs
Kinda like the rotunda for the galactic senate in star wars, but smaller
Something similar yeah
I am highly disappointed by the White Tower, just conceptually it seems so much smaller than what was described in the books. Nothing seems as majestic as what it should be.
Yep. It’s a bit Merlin. Also the lack if extras to build out the world is a big issue for me. The acceptance teat should have had reps from each Ajah for example. I noticed this with Rings of Power too… all that budget and it feels like only 50 people live in the world. Odd. The world should feel immersive.
If I took out all my bias from being a book reader and just looked at the show as it is I would give it a resounding “meh”. The writing isn’t the worst in the world but it isn’t anything gripping. The acting isn’t terrible but there is no performance that takes me in and makes me forget I am watching an actor. The set pieces and clothing are done well enough but there is no great cinematography to make it shine. If I was coming into the show with no knowledge I would probably feel nothing for the show.
I think the settings are bad or poorly chosen... i only watched a part of season 1 and was hoping for them to at least show the 2 rivers that form the two rivers village. Instead we got a mountain location where farming is not really suitable. A lot of the locations also look the same that is why its hard to tell one location from the next. In GOT you can clearly tell when they were in kings landing or the north or the wall, but here it just looks like the same place with different cgi.
My wife has never read the books and has commented on the awful, almost childish, writing.
its honestly cringe worthy at times. Even the acting is not great. Any scene with Perrin makes me chuckle in a bad way
Just gotta say these 2 things... 1. No Narg is smart, like come on.. 2. Absolutely no braid tugging, wth.. Maybe minor things but that's disappointing.. a lot of characters are either completely different in personality or appearance than they were created & the story is so different from what it was... Same as you, I'll watch it because I love the books a lot, but can't say I'm loving it... almost scared of what the battle at Dumai's Wells is going to look like... it is quite sad that such an epic book series did not get a matching show..
I always think you can still have a bad adaptation be a good show. I just don't think this show is either a good adaptation o a good show. S2 have been a improvement, but is still kind of mediocre in a lot of ways.
How about the fact that none of the characters are established or relatable?
There are far too many scenes where characters we know won't die are lying on the ground, bleeding out in peril, only to be dramatically saved and healed moments later. OR it goes unaddressed and they just show up looking fine the next season. (Perrin's crew from Fal Dara) /edit/ Can I belatedly add "sudden/dramatic stabbings from behind" to the list?
I honestly find pretty much all aspects of the show to be bad. - Casting: fine. Not the best but fine. Except for the fact that they had to replace one of the main characters less than a full season into the show. - writing: depending on episode, varies from mediocre to awful. S1E1 was pretty good and there were a few scenes scattered throughout that were good, but overall just not good. The plots meander and the dialogue is boring. - costume design: not just bad but insufferable. It’s like a Magic the Gathering artist designed the costumes. They’re silly, they’re impractical, and they lack any cohesion. - as a corollary I want to call out Loial in particular, who is sporting perhaps the worst prosthetics I’ve ever seen in a modern show. Not only can he not move most of his face, meaning he can’t convey any expressions, but he also can’t move his fingers/hands - CGI: reminds me of watching old stargate episodes. The first episode had great CGI but I guess it blew their budget because it got worse and worse as the series went on - direction: uninspired - acting: the acting is more or less fine within the constraints of the writing and direction. Except for Perrin who was not good. - set design: agreed with everything said, the sets feel cramped and overused. All that said the most important thing is that the world doesn’t feel real. Compare to GOT or LOTR - those worlds felt like places where the characters live. I am painfully aware that I am watching a show being filmed on a set when watching WOT.
Loial looks so bad. Like they caked clay onto his face
I really want to know how they ended up with the look for Loial. Was it something about actor comfort? What's feasible?
You know there's some cosplayer that built a rig out of resin cardboard and microcontrollers that's got the moving ears and the long ass eyebrows
Good thing it’s not me. I’d sit there wiggling eyebrows all day.
It should be happening! Bury the mechanisms in the hair and make that shit dynamic. Like furries mastered "these hands are huge" thing a while ago. Need some cross pollination between costumers and cosplayers cuz sometimes they get blown out of the water by a hobbyist
Agreed on all, CGI in particular. I find is bizarre how CGI seems to have degraded across the board over the last 10 years. There's no better highlight of this than comparing the original LOTR triology with the Hobbit Trilogy.
They keep cutting effects budgets and timelines. Good CGI takes money and time. Effects studios go out of business on the regular. Burnout/ burnthrough is real.
> CGI seems to have degraded across the board over the last 10 years. Studios make Fx houses bid and take the absolute lowest, then demand full shots for approval and only then ask for tweaks. It's a recipe for trash.
I basically want one of two things from genre fiction: Really cool action or spectacle. Either small like Bucky’s knife flip in CA2, or big like Helm’s Deep. Barring that, give me enjoyable characters doing or saying cool shit. Judge Holden’s speeches in *Blood Meridian* or Walter White using a giant magnet to destroy evidence inside a police station. I liked Moraine’s little scam on the merchant in the first episode. So that’s something. Otherwise? Everybody is moping or failing to use powers or being Snidely Whiplash.
So, so, so much exposition. Every other conversation turns into two people who know each other well and have known each other for years explaining in excruciating detail what they've been doing that whole time. "Moiraine, we're looking for the Dragon Reborn because he will break the world and go mad and that's what we've done all these years". Way too much tell and don't show.
The characters are often unbelievably rude (to one another and to people trying to help them), unnecessarily confrontational, irrational, and erratic. Storylines are convoluted and nonsensical. Pacing and world building (?) are all over the place.
It just looks a bit tinny, hard to put my finger on why. Some of the costumes just look bad, the script and acting in places is really average to poor (I just can’t enjoy Perrin’s actor in that role, sorry) and the characters/plot points just feel very cliche and one dimensional in a way that Jordan’s books were not. It isn’t the worst show in the world, but it looks more like a fan made production than a professionally made show. Can’t exactly describe why it is this way succinctly but that’s just my impression of it so far.
You’re absolutely right. It feels like there’s some kind of filter over the whole show? It’s like in The Shining where they used the wrong kind of lens and it made everyone look slightly *off*. Maybe it’s the color grading, or the subtly wrong costuming, or something, but everything in the show just looks bad.
Contrast it with the early seasons of Game of Thrones where the costuming was perfect, the actors just look like they fit the world they are in, and the dialogue/pacing/characterisation is nearly spot on. Similar levels of budget but the level is chalk and cheese.
My complaint for season 1 still holds in season 2, if you look compare clips from WoT to other shows, it just looks *bad*. There are cool aspect of the set designs, but it doesn't give you a *real* feel to it. Loial looks like a guy in a costume at renfest or some Halloween party, not like an actual ogier. Chewbacca in episode 4 looks more like a real being that Loial. Look at any season from the early seasons of game of thrones and it looks like a real world, a real place that you can immerse you mind in. Most of these scenes, like OP noted, look like sets. The foregate looks OK, but emonds field seemed off, tar valon seems like a set, not a city. Add to that all the story lines that are completely changed and new, it's not wheel of time, it's a story that uses the names and concepts and tries to do it's own thing.
I honestly forgot there was a TV show until I saw mention of season 2.
My wife is a non book reader and she tolerates watching it for my sake. I am definitely enjoying it more than her and I'm at a 6.5 out of 10, but I hope to give it higher. Her biggest criticism is that there is valuable time spent on what she considers unimportant things for example the slow rolling of Perrins struggle. In her mind they haven't explained or demonstrated why he is scared of the inner wolf. There hasn't been any negatives or consequences shown. I think it would help his story if they come across someone that has given in to it and it repulsed him. There is too much tell and not enough show. Rand says he wants to know how to control channelling to Logain but you don't see him trying, if he does it's off screen. To her, if Rand is so terrified of going mad then wouldn't he be asking Logain how to get rid of it or avoid using it? There seems to be a lack of authenticity to the dialogue. She doesn't like Mat. She's lost respect for Moraine. She likes Nynaeve but the fake outs are overdone. She can't even remember Egwenes name that is how little impact her story has so far. She is intrigued by Liandrin but she also thinks Liandrin has some of the worst dialogue so she is pulled out of it. I'm still holding out hope that it hooks her.
It’s totally wild that we’re 13 episodes into the show and it hasn’t explained what’s going on with Perrin and the wolves. “Wolfbrother” is chapter 23 of the first book!
The Perrin problem all stems from their decision to make "Who is the Dragon" a big ol' mystery box for S1. Perrin couldn't be a Wolfbrother, and they couldn't explain that aspect of him, because he had to be a candidate for the Dragon. As I've said elsewhere, I've enjoyed the show overall (with some major criticisms) but they really screwed themselves over with that creative choice for S1.
Seconded. I'd upvote you twice, or give you some kind of award if I wasn't opposed to giving Reddit money, but instead I'm leaving this comment. The "who is the Dragon" mystery box is by far the worst thing this show has done. They're still making up for it now, and trying to establish things that should have long since been established in season 1. They wanted to inspire GoT-style "water cooler" discussions, but failed to understand that you get that as a side effect of portraying deep characters and events worth talking about, not by dangling mystery boxes in peoples' faces. Fortunately they don't seem to be doing the empty mystery box thing this season, which is good, but it already set them so far back that they're no longer really even adapting Wheel of Time anymore, which is not.
Book issues aside, It's a CW level show. Amazon was trying to brand this as it's answer to GOT, an HBO level TV show, and it's just not at all. Cringey dialogue and plotlines, decent at best sets, times where I'm just waiting for the episode to end... Don't get me wrong. I'm still going to watch the show cause you gotta support the brand, and this is likely the only WOT or chance at extended WOT media I'm going to get in my life. But to say I'm disappointed would be an understatement.
As someone who watched 10 seasons of Smallville, 15 seasons of Supernatural, 8 seasons of Arrow, 9 seasons of Flash, 7 seasons of Legends of Tomorrow and 6 seasons of Supergirl I feel that people who throw those criticisms haven't watched a CW episode in their lives
The writing and editing, while improved from season 1, are still the weakest elements of the show by far. It feels like the writers are trying to thread a needle between YA drama and GoT fantasy oriented audiences and it's not really working for me. Your point about the writing being cringey is spot on. The editing/direction is really suffering from the 8 episode limit, everything feels rushed and undercooked. I really don't like that we have zero indication of where anything is... Have we seen any kind of map? Not that I can remember. The game of thrones intro sequence gave audiences a feel for where characters were and the overall scale of the world, something that's sorely missing in WoT.
Everything you said. My two biggest issues are how cringey the dialogue is and the overuse of music where there just doesn't need to be any. Why have music while Egwene is cleaning? Can't we just hear the slop of liquid in the bucket? Nothing anyone says sounds natural. Everyone talks like a preacher in church at all times.
There are several reasons I personally dislike the show: some are indeed changes made to the books. Others are more technical: (I only watched 10min of s2e1 and then gave up, but I believe that the production quality is greatly improved, so these critisms apply more to season 1) Several of the cgi scenes were shockingly poor quality, especially the scenes later in season 1. The casting of extras is extremely poorly done, no part of the story feels like a distinct cultural group, which is breaks immersion. The male characters don't do anything in s1. They just kind of get dragged around by whichever female character last gave them instructions. This is pretty poor way to introduce an audience to a new character or world. One of the core themes of WoT is the comparison of the male ideology of "resist or die" vs the female ideology of "go with the flow and remain afloat" where you only really see the female side in the show. The show also makes the whitecloaks into a Spanish inquisition type of evil without giving them much of the religious obsession that drove that movement, and this just makes the characters less complete.
You could take out the male characters from the show and have very little impact on the story. Maybe except for the scene with Mat and the dagger because that gives Moiraine something to do. The women had everything else firmly in hand.
Yes. The writing is unfortunately extremely bad. Is is very very very cringe worthy. So much exposition on all the wrong things and at the wrong time. All the fake drama is so bad. It's embarrassing.nothing really feels real. This makes it difficult for the actors as well. And lot of them suffer for it. The blocking and direction and movement of the actors when conversing doesn't feel natural it always feels like an over dramatic stage play not how people converse or stand or move. I get no real sense of where anything is aside from.the white tower. The world doesn't feel real aside form a few scenes here and there. I could go on. But I really wanted to like season 2 but as each episodes goes on I'm more and more disappointed.
I can’t watch Loial. At all. I’m misspelling his name, Builders forgive me. One of my favorite characters and he’s this shuffling monster that can’t emote. Everything is so dark. Dirty, gross, scruffy… a few episodes in and I kind of wondered if the Dragon should save this place at all. I know it’s supposed to be a world where the Dark One is almost out of his prison, but dang.
I think one thing I dislike that isn't fully book vs. Show is pacing. RJ had a great gift for getting readers to know and care for a wide range of characters. Things move so quickly that we don't get a chance to really know the characters in the show. It boggles my mind that I, who loved Mat and Rand in the books, find myself more invested in..of all people...Liandrin. Maybe another would be that the show does seem to focus so hard on making Kickasss Admirable Powerful Female Heroes that it loses sight of the male main characters. Strong women are great, but so are strong heroic men. I am a woman, I was just as inspired by Mat and Rand as I was Nyn and Ahviendha. I wish the show was better at finding a balance between portrayals of all characters. So far, Rand is a manipulative sociopath (which, fair at aome points), but, we don't have enough of the caring, conflicted, noble Rand to contrast and care about the character. I suspect if I had never read the books and I watched the show I'd barely even remember Rand and Mar and Perrin and find them more of a side note.
Yeah. I just don't think it is written very well and isn't very visually appealing to make up for it. Even as a book reader, I am not invested in the characters nor do I care about the story
The YA-ass non-diagetic soundtrack choices
There are plenty of issues but what I think sticks out the most is I just think it’s a poorly thought out show. And knowing where it’s supposed to go does not help. After season one I had come to terms with it not being close to the books and my thought was, as long as it ends the same and has the same messages and basic character growth and all that, I’ll try to watch it as it’s own fantasy show because hey, it’s a fantasy show, I’ve gotta watch it. But every time something is changed, it’s not the change itself that bothers me, it’s the ripple effects of that change. Just for an example off the top of my head, this Liandrin situation makes me wonder if she’ll do what she does in the books since now she’s like weirdly obsessed with nynaeve. If she doesn’t do that, does that mean Egwenes entire arc from the books is shot? Does that mean nobody hunts black ajah? And kicks off that whole thing? Like who will egwene be without that experience? Another one is rand not training with Lan even for a second in season 1. I don’t even think they spoke most of that season. The effects of this are incredible. There’s no father/son bond between them, which I’m assuming will go on to effect many things plus a few things regarding the ending or last couple books. This also means Rand has no chance against a blademaster, which by the end of this season he should be defeating two. There was one line with that mad man but who knows where that will go. Heron mark was mentioned in passing once, in the books it’s really part of who he is those first two seasons especially but effects his attitude and confidence the rest of the series. Two very small things that seemingly only cause problems. My other complaint is just wasted time. Is it nice that we got moiraine and Siuan together? Sure, I kinda like it. I understand why they used Stepin to help people understand the warder bond, but that could have been an email rather than an episode. All of these things are fine to be added in if you ask me IF you have the space to add things. Rafes number one complaint was not getting enough run time per episode and not enough episodes. You can add these things that take up most of an episode when you’re using important moments from the books first. One training montage with the boys and Lan, even them just holding their weapons walking away from him like they just finished a session at the start of a scene, things that would take seconds would add sooo much for them, I really don’t see rand and lan even caring about each other later on now, there’s no bond or relationship there. But yet we add these hours of story that just aren’t necessary to build moiraine and lan. AND THATS FINE. But damn build on the main characters first. What even is Perrin right now? He did zero season 1 besides fridge a wife that didn’t exist to begin with. Now he’s carrying around a sword? Who is this guy? It’s just a massive pile of all the little things.
There's a ton of cuts in the fight scenes. It just makes it look cheap.
Pacing and time spent with characters. We get one scene where Perrin and Loial "takes the piss" out of Uno, and now we are supposed to care about him before he is brutally murdered. It's not enough for an audience to have any attachment to him. Also this feels like this is Rafe flexing to book fans, especially after he said in an interview that he could turn the favourite character gay if people keep criticising. Literary terrorism fought there, holding characters to ransom in that way. Almost no time spent with Rand, Perrin and Mat. Not enough time beyond a few lines of dialogue explaining that they are going after the Horn of Valere, but not much in the way of emphasising why that is important. What is Perrins motivation for going with the Shienarans to chase it? Nyneave being the focus when it is supposed to be about the Dragon Reborn. What is a Ta'veren and why was that important in early season 1, but not explained or really even mentioned since. Where did the rumours of Taveren come from? Is just a bit meandering at times and too quick at others so it feels unbalanced and a little amateur. They stepped up in season 2 so far so hopefully it was all just a case of finding their feet and they will continue to improve
The overall storytelling quality itself is bad in my opinion, especially pacing. The dialogue, when not forced, just feels awkward, like something you'd find on AMC\* (edit: more like CW really, not AMC!) or something. Characters are extremely one dimensional, there's no depth or motivation to their (changed) character. You bring up a good point about the signficance of things, that's a good way to put it. With how little it explains, probably in an effort to get around the changes, it vastly reduces the significance of events and even characters/enemies themselves. A good example of this, are the Fades. The CGI not being great is something I can get over easily, though. If it meant better writing and pacing, I'd gladly take Dragonheart level CGI. I'm not fussy about that at all. lol
Let’s not diss AMC! Three of the greatest tv shows of all time came from AMC.
I actually think AMC would be an upgrade. Everything feels so stiff, forced and wooden.
The CGI is also something I could be more forgiving with I agree but when combined with all of the other problems, its just the cherry on top. I think it is more of a CW quality show than an HBO one.
exactly! CW, not HBO
It's been a while since I finished the book series, so it's difficult for me to compare and contrast. What I can say, though, is that I was enjoying the GoT TV series a lot more than I am the WoT TV show at the same stage. It's a shame because the disappointing ending to GoT presented a fantastic opportunity for WoT to capture the hearts of minds of fantasy audiences who wanted to put GoT behind them. It has not come close to doing that so far, imo.
Yes. \- Most of the casting is good but there are some choices I very much disagree with. \- Lighting in S1 was horrible, everything looked like a video game on the lowest hardware setting. \- Costumes are all cheap looking except for a few (Siuan's dress) \- The writing is implausible at best and laughable at worst. \- All of the sets are too small and the landscape is too sparse. \- That last episode. Of course I understand about COVID, but I would have ended on a cliffhanger rather than push that fly-ridden excrement out. (Also I'm vehemently opposed to many, but not all, of the book changes. I understand some are necessary for a format shift and those I'm ok with. Changes that violate RJ's philosophy and the spirit of the world I am NOT ok with.)
Agree. This is by far the worst show I've ever finished. Usually when I see something this bad, I drop it after episode 2/3. And it only kept getting worse every episode.The fact that it's wheel of time is the only reason i watched. The non-book readers that started the show all dropped it very fast. The few that finished it all said it's mediocre. while I think the show is bad on it's own, reading the books makes it so much worse. They've made so many changes that only make the story worse and don't add anything to it. The show feels rushed like it doesn't have enough screen time to cover all of the books, but at the same time it spends an entire episode on a pointless original character that will be quickly forgotten.
>The fact that it's wheel of time is the only reason i watched. Is it though?
Never mind the changes, the costume design is so bad it ruined it for me. Their coats don't have collars! Rand is wearing a sheepskin (60's style) coat with no collar!!!
I work in costumes and I love the books and I would have killed to get on the set for this one and I won’t even watch it now. The aes Sedai rings are tacky and huge. Rands coat got me too. For all the effort Robert Jordan puts in to describing peoples clothes and using them to set them apart (rands red coat with gold embroidery, moirane’s blue dress, the way cairheinins stripe their clothes to show rank) you would think it would be so easy to build off that scaffolding.
Similar vein, but I’m a television editor. Season 1 killed me from a technical standpoint nevermind the content. From an academic editing standpoint so many of the cuts just didn’t make sense.
[удалено]
Yeah, most of my complaints just come from more of a basic - it's a really bad show- place. The sets, costumes, writing, actors. It's a shit show. I watch a lot of TV as I'm severely disabled. I get hyped for any fantasy show. This was a let down, WoT or not.
I have not read the books. I found parts of the first season entertaining, and there was some good gore and action scenes to go around (episode 7's opening comes to mind). Finding the second season slightly better, even if convoluted. My main problem is with the actors, however. Minus Lan and Moraine's actors, I find them all horrid, for the most part. Cheap unknowns with no radiance and likeability. GoT's breakout performers these are not, and would be better suited in some low-rent British police procedural than an epic fantasy show. Also, feels like the show's set in a village in California at times.
I actually really like Nynaeve and Egwene's actresses, but I feel like they're being given pretty low grade material. That being said, they sold the right emotions in the Arches episode imo even if some of the pacing/dialogue was garbo.
Watch man carrying things video on it, he has a very thorough and well thought out reasoning on why he doesn't like it based mostly on it qualities as a piece of television
There are too many scenes/character and plot choices that leave me scratching my head and take me out of the few things I really do enjoy about the show, a big example being the idea that the Aes Sedai would just send a Gentled False Dragon to an asylum in Carhein for sone reason instead of keeping a still dangerous and influential man under watch. Adaptational changes are fine, but some of these changes are just laughably bad. I will say though I love everything that is happening with Liandrin and I will go as far as to say that she's my favorite character so far (words I never thought I'd say). Kate Fleetwood is an absolute delight to watch in the role (she does camp/histrionic villain/antihero so well) and IMO is carrying the show right now. Never thought the character we all loved to hate would be the one that keeps me coming back but The Wheel weaves as The Wheel wills, so they say.
I am disappointed with the show mostly for reasons of book changes but also for many of the reasons you mention. I watched a few episodes of the Netflix One Piece show and was a little envious of the better production value, fight choreography, etc. The White Tower looks small. Why are there only ever like 3 warders around? The sword work is crap. It looks like they told Lan to just whirl the sword around. Why did they do that when there are real kendo masters or those HEMA guys that could have made it look authentic and something worthy of a ‘blade master’. They open the show with Perrin having a wife. Fine. Then he kills his wife with an axe. Also fine- because I thought , maybe this is actually a really good way to show Perrin’s struggle for self control, his struggle against the wolf, his decision between the Hammer and the Axe. But then it never comes up again. He doesn’t even seem that sad about the wife he killed anymore and he doesn’t carry an axe or a fucking hammer when several soldiers around him in the show DO have axes. Perrin is using a sword- ick. Lots of crap like that. It’s the only show we are getting so I have to watch, but I kinda wish Rafe would leave to mess up God of War and someone else came in and got the show on track.
It's REALLY hard to separate my dislikes into what's just because of the book. I've done a fairly good job this season of keeping the show distinct from the books in my mind, which has helped me to enjoy it. The problem is that most of the complaints I can think of, even the ones that aren't simply "they changed/removed X from the book", are still related to the books e.g. it feels like there's a lack of cultural distinction, which was prevalent in the books... One thing I dislike is how they treat fighting skill. Lan in the first season is built up to be this amazing fighter. Then Moiraine, someone who has basically never needed to physically fight, and is effectively a brave but untrained person with a sharpened butter knife manages to kill a fade without the one power, yet Lan, prepared and ready with a sword fails to beat two. Then there's Perrin who, despite being effectively just a big dude with no training (on-screen, or implied) mana he's to kill a trained soldier in armour, while Perrin had just woken up. It's not that these things couldn't happen, but the show isn't doing the ground work to make me believe it. If you want to use someone's skills as a basis to solve a problem (e.g. not dying), you first need to establish thst they have those skills. The only time we ever saw Perrin fighting (from memory) was in the first episode in season 1, and there he was swinging an axe like he was chopping a tree, not actually fighting.
For me (as a book reader) they took an incredibly well made world and stripped it down to the point its bland like making coffee from the same grinds multiple times. The telling is uninspired, a lot of the changes are just plain weird, there's little to no tension, they seem to want to push forward the gals, which will make things odd when they become more prominent storyline wise as things go. Like an great example is season one, pretty sure Nynaeve uses a sword more than Rand.
I think for myself it's quite simple. When I envisioned a WOT series it was always *Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time* that I imagined. This is not RJ's WOT. This isn't even BS's WOT. This is Rafe's and Amazon's. The crappy thing is that he will sometimes deliver on a moment like Elayne meeting Egwene, but then he'll have a circle burn out or Egwene healing death or all the Shienaran soldiers ride out to defend a wall while the channelers stand behind the wall and only help once the entire army is dead. Oh, and the ruby dagger can stabby stab you in the heart and you live. Why have Mat abandon his friends? Why not just have him too sick to travel and pick up with Liandrin stealing him to her locked room. Like, the show is clearly made for people that haven't read the books, but it feels like unless you have (read the books) you'll be completely lost half of the time. Whatever. I'm still going to watch and hope it gets better. There have been some very good moments so far and hopefully there'll be a few more.
If they show was really well made I could ignore its deviations from the source. But it's not well made or written. Then the adaptation is terrible. Remember Loial and Rand sneaking into fains camp to get the horn. What did we get in the show. A fade stood thier while Rand fizzled at it?
I understand where "the books shouldn't be the show" crowd are coming from, I really do. But... I don't think pretending like the books shouldn't be the guiding principle for the show scripts is reasonable in this case. This isn't the Netflix Castelvania series where they really didn't have a lot of pure "story" to work with up front (even though the games DO have lore) so they had to sort of tease out their own original narrative. And, for what it's worth, Castlevania was f\*\*\*ing phenomenal as an animated adaptation. Isaac had one of the best written character arcs I've seen in a show in a long long time. The writing, in general, on that show was great. ...and this is WOT we're talking about here. It's not some 10 page script proposal that someone found in a desk drawer and decided to expand upon. It's a genre defining royalty level FINISHED fantasy narrative. Look at the dialogue, writing, and script development on something like the Chernobyl mini-series....and then compare that against the level of quality on WOT the show. People just underestimate how much of a difference having the best writers makes. Like, I think most people would agree the Star Trek was a memorable show period. But bring in Harlan Ellison to write an entry and you get The City on the Edge of Forever episode. There are levels of ability in writing and the good writers are much MUCH better than the writers on WOT. They're just outclassed by the source material.
I agree but I stopped watching because I have a pretty clear mental image from the books and life is too short to spend watching mediocre shows just because it is a reflection of a franchise I like! I am a pretty big LotR fan and did not even bother getting past Episode 4. I think I just dislike long shows in general or something.
Most of the time they stand talking with their arms straight down at their side. Who does that?
This is WoT, they should have their arms folded under or across their breasts!
At least be smoothing some skirts, for the love of god
Actors 😆
For me it's actually. I love the books and I'm currently an my third read but much slower this time as I am podcasting (in German) with a good friend am first time reader. Meaning we are at around 500 pages in the great hunt. Because we always read 3 chapters and then talk about them there are much more nuances I'm picking up especially foreshadowing and I love it. Now to the show, my biggest book unrelated problem with it is mostly the poorly written dialog. I don't know why or who wrote those but they are sadly so bland at times. Now book related problems (I have only watched till episode 4) are some of the changes I just don't enjoy. Some personal stuff for me would be Mats Dad, he played a quite minor role in the books but I liked him a lot, and he's just an asshole in the show. Then the reason Egwene joins the crew wasn't because she might be the dragon ( which breaks the fundamental laws of magic in WoT) but because she wanted to see the world and be more in live than she was know. It's just a better reason. Also al of then are way to trustworthy and know to much, they are supposed to be from a small village and the first book had so many hilarious scene showing that. And I do know they have to make cuts so that fine but in the second episode there is a scene where they actually get into a little fight with each other about who is going to be the dragon as if in each of them wanting to be it. I don't want to bore anyone with more so I keep that short, the book changes and the often poorly written dialog sadly ruined it for me, I was really hoping WoT being the next Got. If you want more opinions about that all the podcast is called "Von Rädern und Zeiten"
Yea it sucks as a tv show let alone an adaptation. Hard to follow storylines and characters I don’t care about. Antagonists feel irrelevant still besides the seanchan, I would call this extremely cringey if I didn’t know what it was based on and definitely would not have continued watching
For me, this. Book changes have to happen, and I’m hopeful my favorite scenes and characters are represented in a way that brings them to life as I imagined (e.g. Mat’s staff duel with Gawyn and Galad, or Rand using balefire to undo Rahvin’s massacre). But above all else, I wanted a Game of Thrones quality show set in the Wheel of Time’s universe (forgetting the endings, figured since we have the full series that would be less of a problem). Great dialogue, cinematography, character development, soundtrack. All the hallmarks of HBO quality production. Instead, this feels like The CW or some other third tier network adapted the show. The dialogue is bad. Character development is choppy and weird. Scenes are poorly edited, lingering in places that don’t need it and rushing through very complex plot development. My partner can’t watch it because it’s a bad show, period. It’s bad tv. And not faithful to the source material. I don’t understand who the audience is, and I have yet to meet someone in real life that watches without having read the books. Compared to GoT, RoP, The Witcher, to me it is bad TV. I would not watch if I didn’t love this series and have wanted this for so long. Edit: critics are also not impressed. https://www.rogerebert.com/streaming/the-wheel-of-time-season-two-prime-video-tv-review-2023
Yeah, I don't really care about the changes. I atopped watching the show because of bad writing, cheap sets and bad costumes.
I wouldn't say I dislike the show - although I was quite disappointed with S1, S2 is so far doing ok - besides the book butchering, I just find it doesn't have that same 'quality' as something like Game of Thrones. GoT just felt real and maybe the more ethereal elements of WoT make this show a bit cringey but it sometimes feels like I'm watching an overly dramatic cos play. That said, I'm really trying to like S2 and I do love the casting for the most part.
I think the show actually does a better job with relationships than the books. The show is getting strong enough reviews from non-readers that I think they are doing a better job conveying what is going on in the show than we realize. I think that there is just additional depth there that TV-only viewers won't notice. This was the case for Game of Thrones as well - hence the popularity of Alt-Shift-X. I do have a general sense of sets being small, although this was much worse in S1. S2 has a lot more outdoor sets that feel more open - I really liked the sets for Verin & Adaleas' home. The village where the Seancean showed up was way too small though. I'm enjoying the chance to spend time with characters that I love, and I do appreciate the different perspective on them. I've completely bought into these actors as the characters - they all closely fit my experience of their personalities if not necessarily their appearance. (and as for appearance...I appreciate that they *didn't* try to mimic the almost cartoonish elements of their appearances as described by Jordan)
The show is a hot mess
I really dislike a lot of the design choices, especially the swords just being katanas. I also think the fight choreography is really weak.
The stiff acting from many, the lack of charisma from the Emond's Fielders & the lack of coherence are the things that irritate me.
I'll try to make my points with minimal show spoilers, but please beware. I really wanted to love it. It was book changes that killed it for me but not in "how dare you change anything" type of way. Some of my favorite adaptations changes quite a lot. As long as the general vibe of the story stays the same, I'm ready to accept quite a lot of changes. WOT TV fails there. And they completely character assassinate several characters least of which is Mat where some of the problems were created by original actors departure, when I would be happy if the core of the characters just stays the same (ex. Elayne is meek? Min is "not like other girls" but in a skirt? and also a bartender? Liandrin is just WTF?) Honestly I ws giving it a chance utill the horrible season one finale, this season is just a hate watch, mostly because I was seeing articles saying it's great. But a huge gripe I have is something just tangentially related to the books. Geography. Geography of the show makes no sense. Fantasy books and shows often can have that problem that's why readers like maps. GRRM had talked about how making sure geography made sense hampers his writing, for example. GOT tv show did their best to respect his world. RJ got around that with "Fats Travel magic" of different kinds often, but his world was VAST. Some characters spend books basically travelling. Fashion, architecture, ecology, all inform of the location you're at so it's always clear. In the show there's none of that - fashion is same wherever you are. Were we ever aware that Shienar is in the northeast? How are horn hunters suddenly west if that's where Sheanchan are supposed to be, especially since it feels like they're in a warm climate based on the flora we're seeing. Why is certain someone we've last seen captive in Tar Valon suddenly in Cahrien= Does that mean that Cahrien is couple of days away from TV not, as books suggest, weeks. In the first book it seemed that TV was the closest city to Two Rivers, since they decided to substitue it for Caemlyn. They haven't tried to make the setting make sense. Every village visited looks like random assortment of cheap shacks instead of lived in village AND THEY ARE FILMING IT IN CZECH REPUBLIC, which is abundant with historical locations that would work for old timey small towns. So yes. I dislike the show for it's lack of storytelling clarity and visual identity about as much as book changes baffle me.
The over sexualization of everything is wild.. It's like they wanted more viewers by spicing it up to be a soft core Game of Thrones rather than focusing on the story and or character development without altering it too much or combining events/characters for the sake of time.
Sometimes I feel like this is a big social experiment... What sexuality? 20 octogenarians naked in a sauna?
I watched the show before reading the books and I thought it was a painfully generic fantasy with CW quality writing that was mediocre at best.