All that mountain stuff is Slovenia.
It’s been a long time since I read the books. At some point, I decided to stop reading them until the series was finished, and haven’t had time since it was. Having to go back and reread the whole series everytime a new book came out so that I could remember what was going on was getting old.
So, I did notice a number of deviations from the books, but that’s okay. I’m not sure how I feel about the Perrin thing, as soon as Mat mentioned Perrin’s wife, I knew that she would be dead by the end of the first act. I was a bit surprised by how it happened, but I’m not sure that I like adding that level of darkness to his backstory.
All the characters are much older than they were in the books. It makes sense in that it would be difficult to find appropriate age actors, and for them to deal with all the things that the ones in the book had to. But, that does change the dynamic to some extent. In the books, they were children, uprooted from their home and exploring the world, and even with everything going on, there were still moments of joy at seeing something new. I have the feeling that the adults will be more jaded, and not react to seeing their “big” city with the same sense of wonder I got from them in the books.
No one has been called a woolhead yet, I’m not sure how I feel about that. 
Rand and Egwene starting off having a romantic relationship with each other also is a pretty big change. I do wonder how that will affect the upcoming relationships that Rand gets involved in.
Overall, I enjoyed it. I’ve only seen the first two so far, probably watch the third tonight. Having these changes at least means that I don’t know everything that is coming, even if I have hints of overall plot, I don’t know how they will play out. For instance, I knew very well what it was that Mat was “seeking” when he found the dagger, but I still enjoyed him searching it out and finding it.
Unless it goes downhill after the first two, I think I’ll keep watching, and while I will not exactly be waiting with bated breath for the next episode, I will be looking forward to it.
I’m a longtime book fan, and I think it’s good-but-not-great, so far. The general consensus seems to be that it improved after episode 1, so anyone whose on the fence or maybe slightly negative might give it a bit more of a chance.
There’s a fairly infinite amount of argument about the various changes over on r/wot and r/wotshow. So if curious to see what others are saying, gird your loins and head over there. Personally, I think the changes are nearly universally good (Perrin’s wife being the one I’m most skeptical about). If nothing else, they’re certainly deliberate and well thought out. It’s clear that the people making the show know and love the source material.
E2 was much better than E1. My teen hates it. It’s way too scary and gory. I knew there would be moments of it, but the show is going overboard with them. Seeing a horse get dusted or an Aes Sedai getting burned at the stake after her finger was chopped off is a step beyond what I expected. And then Shadar Logath, which genuinely terrified me in the novel barely got a reaction from me (other than dusted horse).
I’m not giving up, but I’m definitely not recommending it yet. And I was so excited for it.
I agree episode 1 was the weakest of the three. After episodes 2 and 3 I’m cautiously optimistic that the rest of the season could be good. I appreciate the beautiful landscape shots.
Most of the acting is just ok so far. They seem to be going for more of an ensemble cast over a single protagonist like in the early books. I think it’s a good decision, but you also need great acting to carry that. I can’t help but compare this unfavorably to something like Game of Thrones, which is clearly the vibe they’re going for. None of the main characters are bad, but not great either. I don’t know if it’s the acting, directing, dialogue, or maybe the characters themselves. Many of them weren’t that interesting in Eye of the World either.
IIRC, Mat didn’t develop a personality until Book 3. It’s arguable whether Perrin ever did.
It’s been a while but I thought this was exactly as the book, Rand and Egwene basically grew up thinking they’d end up together until Egwene got recruited to be town wisdom.
Rand and Egwene were “basically promised” to be married… that’s how it is described in the book. During the events of the books themselves is when they both decide to end their relationship; they just grow apart. There is no restriction on village Wisdoms having relationships; the Wisdom is just the woman who took the time to apprentice and learn herbs/healing/mediation skills. Book 4 (The Shadow Rising) is when they both let each other know that neither actually wants to continue their relationship.
And you would be right! Funny enough, I read The Wheel of Time before I ever read (tried to, anyway) Sword of Shannara; and I felt like the beginning portions of SoS were WAAAAYYY too similar to the beginning of The Eye of the World. And that was before I went back to the progenitor; when I finally read LOTR, it was very much an “a-ha!” moment. I then read sometime in the late 90s that RJ said he basically ripped off LOTR for the beginning just so readers would feel they were on familiar ground while in Emond’s Field.
Another “never read the books, but am enjoying the series so far” here. Yes, it’s derivative but, as noted above, almost everything fantasy is at this point. Obviously, not having read them, changes from the novel aren’t noticed, so they don’t bother me.
Binged the first three episodes tonight, plan to watch the others as they come out. It is interesting that the CGI is so spotty given that this has been billed as the most expensive series ever made on a per episode basis. I wonder how much of that is lack of time, rather than lack of money. Definitely getting that Anakin Skywalker vibe off of Rand at this point, but it could just be a superficial resemblance between the actors.
WoT is a 14-book series. The first book is, consciously, up front, very much in the LotR mold. It diverges significantly starting with book 2.
Yeah, I watched this, then watched Legend of the Ten Rings. I had to ask if Disney had been granted a copyright on good CGI.
It’s not bad, but we’ve been spoiled by more or less perfect CGI from other outfits that it does end up looking bad by comparison.
I did have higher expectations on it in that regard, given its budget and the backing. But, does Amazon have access to the same sort of experience and resources as Disney? It may very well be that at this point, it costs Disney only a fraction of what it would cost other production teams to do similar quality.
Anyway, still think it’s pretty good, and unless something changes to turn me off, I’ll look forward to seeing how this season goes.
I’d argue it really divulges sooner; I think it is mostly going its own way beginning at Shadar Logoth (which I hear is quite different in the series; no Mordeth? That basically removes Padan Fain’s abilities as a future foil).
I read the first six or seven books, and it literally killed my interest in epic fantasy as a literary genre. Aside from an aborted attempt to get into Game of Thrones (back when the second book had just come out) I haven’t read a fantasy novel since that didn’t wrap itself up in one book.
Curse you, Robert Jordan!!!
There’s some really fun epic fantasy out there that’s not derivative pap. A Crown for Cold Silver contains the best fight against an uncontrollable summoned giant pregnant demon possum that I’ve ever seen, and it’s way wronger than you’re imagining it would be. The Broken Earth trilogy opens with a deliberate apocalypse and then convinces you that the mass murderer has a point; it deserves the back-to-back Hugos it won. Her Majesty’s Dragon is just classic Napoleonic-wars-with-draconic-air-force nautical adventures.
I love so much of the genre; Jordan is far from the best it has to offer.
It wasn’t the length of it that got to me, but the scope.
More characters kept getting introduced, and they took on more and more “screen time” to where there were some books that didn’t even mention some of the people who were main characters in the beginning. Someone mentioned offhand in book 3 ends up getting 6 chapters in book 8. (A made up example, but probably not far off from a real one.)
It started to become too much to really keep track of, especially when the time between books kept getting longer and longer.
New book would come out, I’d get it, start reading, and have no idea what was going on. I’d have to go back and essentially reread the whole thing from the begining in order to find my bearings.
We haven’t watched Episode 3 yet, but there are definite hints that Padan Fain is up to something devious (I mean, it’s basically shown that he’s unsurprised by the Trolloc attack). So they may just loop him back into the narrative differently.
I have had a somewhat similar experience except I will do short series that have known beginnings and ends, so if someone recommends a really good, already-written trilogy, I’ll read it. I generally won’t even start some long open-ended fantasy series that’s already at 4-5+ books.
Interestingly the fact it’s derivative didn’t bother me a ton when I first read through the early books in the early 90s. By that point we’d already had the Shannara series come out that started the “let’s basically crib various versions of Lord of the Rings into different forms” concept, and there was a lot of fantasy series in the 80s that followed that. That in and of itself wasn’t a deal breaker to me because I consumed a lot of pulp fantasy as casual reading. Wheel of Time got more of a hook into me a couple books in because I thought the world building / magic system were a good notch above a lot else that was out there.
It was certainly never masterpiece literature, and I don’t know that anyone ever thought it was. But it was fun and enjoyable…but then it took a very negative turn of extreme plot expansion to dozens of new characters, and storylines, that became a giant bowl of spaghetti noodles of endless narrative threads that not only was it difficult to keep up with–you didn’t really want to, many of the new threads Jordan would spin out just weren’t compelling or interesting to begin with, and would have been better off simply not written.
I quit reading it around book 8 and mostly swore off epic fantasy after–I had already started A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones by then, but I actually abandoned that series the moment the 4th book came out after like an 8 year wait and ended up being a huge piece of trash.
Mostly out of boredom and pure completionist obsession, after Sanderson finished up WoT I did go back through and re-read the series start to finish. I can’t really recommend anyone does that, it’s by no means the worst fantasy written, but the fun parts don’t outweigh the drudgery, and there’s nothing really life changing about the series that make it a “must read” for fantasy fans.
That being said, the Amazon series feels very much like a “average” fantasy series to me. I don’t think it’s going to be award winning, but can it be successful? Maybe, I’m not good at gauging such things. There’s a lot of sci-fi and fantasy series in the streaming era that I’ve found to be no better than WoT looks to be that have enjoyed years of success, and some series that I think are outright awul (like The Walking Dead which I barely understand how it became so popular.) The thing about WoT is the source books are not really some masterpiece, so I take very little issue with the TV show runners massively editing/changing the story. The story frankly needed serious housekeeping to be fit for TV; time will tell if they’ve done a good job with it. I understand this was a very big budget for an Amazon Original Series, and thus far I’ve not seen a ton of it, I thought Moraine’s channeling scenes had fairly good CG, but some of the sequences with trollocs seem like 5 years out of date CG. Some scenes with the trollocs looked decent though, I’m not really an expert on CG so can’t explain why.
I don’t know that I would say that WOT is either. As said, it kinda starts off that way a bit, so that readers have a familiar setting to work with, but it certainly has a whole lot of originality to it, in world building, characters, a very complicated and rules based magic system, and all kinds of interleaved plot and intrigue.
I wouldn’t say that WOT is the best, but I’d rank it among the top 10% at least.
I would read it if I still had time to read anymore.
There are over 2000 named characters in the Wheel of Time books.
I started the books not long after the series started. Then it became apparent Jordan was drawing things out instead of wrapping the series up. And his writing became overly descriptive. I swear I knew more about how Nynaeve’s dress looked than anything else.
Then, Jordan stopped writing the series and wrote these side books that kinda hooked in to that universe but did nothing to advance the main story.
Then he died.
I gave up and never finished it all. And yeah…I’m a little pissed about how Jordan handled it.