Wheel of Time thread

I just watched the trailer and came here hoping to see your opinion I'm going to watch the season because I pay for Prime anyway, but it's got that cheesy fantasy look to it that I can never pinpoint the source of. Still, I'm not completely horrified yet

I just meant visually. It's hard for me to pinpoint the problem though. The Witcher show has the same visual problem (for me) to a lesser extent, while Game of Thrones didn't. Like I'm watching community theater instead of a big budget professional production. Maybe it's the Instagram-perfect makeup and saturated clothing colors? Or partially that?

If the first half of an entire episode isn’t spent in silence examining every minute detail of every female characters dress, then the entire show is a failure 

But also agree with your point - it’s too colourful.  But that’s ok, most of the POV characters were channellers anyway, and one constant - man or woman - was their noting that everything was brighter, sharper and had more colour when they held the Power.

Oh man, Sword of Truth sucked imo. I read it originally when I was pretty young (12-14 maybe?) and I thought it was OK at that time, but re-reading it as an adult was... woof, quite the different experience. Very transparently a WoT rip-off, and not even a decent one, and as the series went on it just got even worse. Also, from everything I've heard the author is pretty much a gigantic bag of dicks (massive ego problem- thinks he's the next Tolkien despite being a terrible writer, is an asshole to artists and others who have to work with him, etc.), whereas Robert Jordan was by all accounts a very nice and likeable dude so there's that.

But yeah, WoT is fantastic, definitely a top-3 or top-5 alltime fantasy series. I'd probably put it ahead of Game of Thrones, if nothing else because it was actually finished. My favorite is probably Lord of Chaos (the ending with Dumai's Wells and everything is still one of my favorite sequences in a fantasy novel), and Mat and Rand are probably my favorite characters. Well, pre-Brandon Sanderson Mat at least (I think Sanderson did a good job overall, but he just never got a good feel for Mat's personality or dialogue).

I'm also very skeptical about a WoT adaptation, because companies seem to be trying to replicate the success of Game of Thrones, and WoT is such a different type of fantasy series that I'm afraid its getting set up for disappointment. But I'd love to be mistaken about that.

I'm just a big fan of Taim in general. Probably my favorite baddie in the series.

agreed, although I liked Ishamael quite a bit. Less so as Moridin. But in general the villains weren't a strong point of the series (fairly one-dimensional as a rule), so Taim was sort of the exception imo

There won't be many excuses for not doing so.  Fight scenes are one of the few areas where TV/movie adaptations of books can exceed the experience of the book(s) they derive from.

I don't know if the scene with Bran and Hodor in "The Door" will even be in Martin's books, but if it is, I struggle to imagine how his description will be as impactful as it was watching Bran's soul wither and die when he realises that he was responsible for Hodor being the way that he was.  

It is similar with fight scenes - small scale, but awesome ones in particular - a picture worth a thousand words etc etc.

I agree to an extent only because visual media's potential to surpass a novel in regards to action scenes largely hinges on the capabilities of the choreographers, and actors. Since this is an Amazon production i'm optimistic that they'll hire quality talent in regards to choreography. There's really no excuse for them not to.

It took a long time for me to start reading them.  I initially found Lord of Chaos (book 6) in the bookstore, saw that it was a billion pages thick and that it was a ) the 6th volume and b ) didn't finish the story and thought to myself...



Then after finishing University, I decided to give it a try with the first book.  Really glad I did.  It was quite the journey.  No idea how it fares with literary 'critics' - but I enjoyed them (book 10 aside).

Trailer looks alright. I'm glad there's more epic fantasy coming to the small screen. After the wild success of the LOTR movies I had hopes we'd see more and more epic fantasy movies and shows, new IP too.

While there's been more, specifically this genre seems to have taken a bit of a backseat comparable to sci-fi and comic adaptations in the TV world instead.

***

In terms of the books, I've finished them, but the magic was gone after things dragged on for two decades. There was a slight spark of hope in book 9 that things would progress but... then book 10 happened and I put the series down for good.

Then I found out one of my favourite authors was going to finish the series, Brandon Sanderson. I actually didn't like that, because I wanted Sanderson to work on his own (significantly better) Cosmere series. I understood it got him worldwide recognition though, so there was some benefit. Because of his involvement I read the last books, but I'll never reread the series again.

I will give the show a try. I agree it's a lot brighter than I'd expect but that's not a deal-breaker for me. I don't care that Aes Sedai don't look ageless or the characters look a bit different from the books. That's just how TV adaptations work. What will kill it for me is if the pacing is as horrendous as the books.

Dude - the series can't possibly move slower than books 7-10 (the end of Book 9 notwithstanding).  If it does it won't be a motion picture it'll be a series of photographs.

I never got to the end of the Wheel of Time novels. There was a book or two where it felt like the plot moved with the speed of a particularly reluctant glacier, and I stopped reading in the middle of a book because I picked up something more interesting and basically forgot that WoT exists.