Sounds interesting.
::tugs braid, smooths skirt, and sniffs derisively::
I was a huge fan of the books in the 90s, but couldn’t get past book 9 or so. The plot threads became too meandering and complicated (and even boring, IIRC). But I enjoyed the first several books, so I’m looking forward to the show.
I was just going to say I loved the first 8 or 9, but then there was one where the overall plot wasn’t advanced one iota (less than A Dance With Dragons)and I never got past it. I want to say Crossroads of Twilight, but it might have been the next one.
I can’t imagine this will be good. It’s too big and high magic to do it justice without an Endgame budget for every season. And it would be too long to ever realistically finish.
I have a wide range of feelings. Being able to make jokes or references that people get? Great! Nice new people in the fandom? Fantastic! Trolls and spoiler people or an off the rails show like GOT became? No thanks.
And it has to be condensed and changed for viability but those changes… are they the changes I’d make?
I really started liking the books, but even into The Great Hunt, which as I remember was the 3rd book, things started slowing down considerably. At one point, it took 100+ pages to leave a town. Certainly the screenwriters will quicken the story. I did like the Trollocs.
I love the series and listen to the audio books completely most years. Sanderson did a great job of wrapping up the series after Jordan’s death and he’s been involved with the adaptation. They’ve made some choices I don’t get including making Moraine the main character. On the plus side the story is done so the showrunners won’t need to grope blindly at the end but I’m not certain the series will get the 14 seasons it would need to cover everything
I think there is also a separate Age of legends movie trilogy being developed. Hopefully they feed off each other.
It’s been a while since I read any of them, but as I recall, none of the characters from the village, Rand, Mat, Perrin, and Egwene had very interesting personalities. I think Moraine as the lead makes sense, at least initially. Might be like GoT where Eddard was the main character of the first season and then it was basically an ensemble until season 7 when it was the Jon and Dany show. So Moraine would be the focus until we’re introduced to the world then screen time is split as necessary.
One nice thing is you have to worry about aging a lot less than GOT.
“The split as necessary” is what I’m curious about. Moraine is spit off form the other characters early in book 1 and basically disappears from the story for half the book while Mat and Rand, and Perrin and Egwene have their own adventures. The Moraine, Lan and Nynaeve story easily could be dropped except for building the Nynaeve and Lan love story.
I assume the plot will jump to Rand at the end of season 1. Moraine isn’t even on the right half of the world for the events of season 2 and doesn’t turn back up until the start of book 3. Then she is a main character though book 5.
Trailer is out:
As I feared, nothing new. Looks almost identical to things like Cursed and Shadow and Bone.
I liked the trailer. If I wasn’t already excited for it, I don’t know if it’d draw me, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
This will live or die on word of mouth. If it’s good or great, fans will tell everyone they know that they need to watch the show. Hopefully it will be good.
The myrddraal looked pretty sweet.
I thought the last 3-4 books Jordan wrote were mostly very weak, but there were signs that he was getting the series back on track before his death. I thought the last three books Sanderson finished 12, 13 and 14 were very strong overall, and brought me back to what I loved about the series in the earlier books. Might be worth giving them a chance if are still interested in the setting.
I quit after 7 and came back fifteen years later to read 12-14, as I had become a big Brandon Sanderson fan in the meantime. I worked out just fine for me. From what I could tell, not much happened in the 4 books I missed, and what did happen I could figure out through context or, if I had to, by reading the very thorough WoT wiki.
Books 10 and 11 are tough for me. 9 is fairly week to but the ending is so huge I think it makes up for the rest of the book. Sanderson definitely saved the series though. Bringing in the all of the loose threads and doing it in a satisfying manner while writing in someone else’s voice is wildly impressive. I became a Sanderson fan after reading 12-14.
That’s funny. Watching the trailer I said to myself “Didn’t I just try to watch this and it sucked so bad I quit after two episodes?” Turns out it was Shadow and Bone.
And do they have so little footage that they had to use the same Asian guy with the leather thong around his forehead slowly spinning around to face the camera twice in two minutes?
I didn’t read the books but was the cast of characters so generic looking in them? Looks like a bunch of medium sized white guys with messy brown hair and scraggly beards running around with swords and women with long straight dark hair doing magicky stuff. And as long as I’m whining, why don’t any of these ancient civilizations discover how to provide enough torches inside to light up a room? Or maybe travel and fight during daylight hours?
The cast is a lot more diverse than the characters from Emond’s Field were. In the book, I think the folks from Emond’s Field were all Caucasians with dark hair and Rand was sometimes the butt of jokes because his red hair and height made him stand out like a sore thumb.
To be fair, he is the coolest character in the books. And I’m glad they made him Asian - the culture he comes from has some strong Japanese influences, and I was afraid the show would whitewash them.