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Ars Technica has a series-recap-thing going on for "The Wheel of Time" series on Amazon: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/11/two-book-readers-recap-the-first-three-episodes-of-amazons-the-wheel-of-time/
In the event that you dislike people ruining great books for stupid political agendas, perhaps you should steer clear of this review of Amazon's TV Series.
These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. If you want to stay unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.
#1 The way magic works in the Wheel of Time (WoT) is crucial to the plot of the entire series. This is ignored entirely in the first three episodes. Which makes me think, they're going to be doing even more stupid things.
#2 Being inclusive and trying to say, but the girls should also be included as possible main plot "Dragon Reborn" hype is stupid. Egwene goes from village girl to badass quite well on her own in the books, thank you very much.
#3 Lan in the first few episodes sucks. In the books, he can take a few dozen trollocs on his own. Whereas in the first few episodes, Moiraine is barely able to take down a nice grouped up bunch? That is stupid beyond words. (We will gloss over the deliberate destruction of the town's property, because apparently it's easier to throw bricks.)
#4 Mat is a thief and his parents are evil, essentially. His Mom is a drunk, apparently driven to it by his Dad who is shown as unfaithful and essentially a deadbeat.
#5 There is a lot of sexing going on. This is a long ways away from Perrin and his lady falling down the stairs on top of each other and being embarassed.
#6 Where is Elyas?
This is no faithful adaptation from the books. In the event that you happened to like "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", but were put off by "The Silver Chair", because they turned Peter into a whiny brat... you will be even more put off by the random stupid changes they made in this book. Rand wasn't always a brooding semi-sociopath and Mat is a lot more honorable than portrayed by these first few episodes.
[...] Probably the most annoying things to me are the twisting of characters and plot to make them more "woke". Like, if they'd added a scene in Lord of the Rings where someone asks, if Frodo and Samwise are gay. You know, because they are traveling together, so you must be gay. What kind of stupid?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 27 2021, @01:54AM (4 children)
My wife read ten of the 14 novels, I hadn't read any. She didn't like that they made the ta'veren older and sexually active. She didn't like that they opened the possibility that the Dragon could be reborn as a woman (apparently since it broke the central mechanism of the world's magic). She also disputed how diverse the little, apparently very isolated, mountain village was; she felt that after a thousand years everyone should have looked a lot more homogeneous. Lastly, she thought that the TV portrayal of Nynaeve was not mean enough.
I had no sense of established canon, so I enjoyed the cinematography. It was refreshing that they didn't film in New Zealand. :-) The special effects were good, especially the dead city of Shadar Logoth. Moiraine and Lan were the only main characters that were interesting; the rest were pretty flat. The supporting characters like Rand's dad with his mysterious past or Thom Merrilin or the White Cloak Questioner Eamon Valda had more dimension in their limited screen time. The Logain guy had interesting subtlety, too. It seemed that there's a pastiche of Tolkien and other fantasy references in the story, like how Mat's actions in the dead city echo Pippin's in Moria. Overall, the story seems a mildly engaging thought study of a world where women are the tyrants.
I do, however, want to read the books now instead of waiting for Prime to mete its episodes out in drips and drabs. Binge or nothin', baby.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @04:48AM (2 children)
I was thinking similarly - but for different reasons. Consider a middle-ages European town. How much diversity is there, really? Probably next-to-none. So it's not representative of how things happen at all.
Really, I feel like they're doing themselves the opposite service: to maintain so many diverse classes, there must be *EXTREME* segregation going on. Otherwise it would be bred out. The only way to maintain that diversity, at all, is to have an absolutely flawless sense of segregation.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @05:08AM
The TV producers aren't thinking about the implications or coming up with explanations. Just meeting the diversity quotas for the shows they crap out, even if it is a medieval fantasy. The quotas can be implicit, or explicit like at BBC Studios.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday November 29 2021, @03:23PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @06:55AM
let me save you some time: don't read the books.
"wheel of time" --- first two books are great, then everything starts going down hill. because instead of expanding on the established world, the author chooses to focus on more and more minute details, and then suddenly pulls out world-expansions as deus ex-machina when needed to fix some plot holes.
the entire "wheel of time" concept is never used for anything but detached philosophy about how everything is the same but everything is different. I kept reading because I kept wanting to see different cycles of the wheel. spoiler alert: flashbacks and flashforwards concern the current era, nothing is revealed about past and future incarnations of these characters.
I kept reading because I had nothing better to do at the time, and I guess the author is a good storyteller (and the guy who took over isn't bad either). but I regret that I didn't know about other much better books to use up the time.