[tonystride]

I don’t understand the hate for Amazon’s LotR compared to what they did to Wheel of Time! I’ll admit I’m not a huge LotR fan, but I didn’t hate the time I spent watching the Amazon adaptation. Wheel of Time though, they drove a truck through that poor franchise. Then backed up over it, and drove over it several more times!

[cthalupa]

I'd consider myself a WoT megafan. I've read the full series more than 10 times since AMoL, and did a re-read of the series before every book release when it was being written. I'm in the middle of a re-read right now, even - I just finished a chapter from A Crown of Swords right before opening HN and reading this article.

And... I think the WoT adaption is fine. It's not exactly how I would have done it, and there are a few choices that I think are just bad, but on the whole I have enjoyed the show and think it captures most of the primary elements of the series.

It's a 14.5 book series where the books average 600+ pages. Any adaptation is going to have to make massive changes, at least if they're filming it with real people. They also got dealt a raw hand with covid resulting in all sorts of set limitations and Mat's actor just... not returning after they filmed the first 6 episodes.

[xracy]

I reread the books after watching the show, and I have to say that I am in complete agreement with this take. I think there are 2 things that impact why people hate the adaptations.

1. Some people just don't like adaptations, and they need to understand what different mediums limit in terms of story telling. If you think of WoT as being 10,000 pages of content, and how you would shorten that to make it finish-able within a single human lifetime, then they have to change some things. But I gotta say, I think they capture a lot of the good of the books within the show.

2. Most people just have a picture in their head of what the thing is going to look like, and when that picture doesn't match up to what's made they're unhappy. And they don't understand why they couldn't just do the thing in their head because they don't understand the limitations of the medium.

2a. I think a thing that's important to a lot of people is the characters looking like the characters they imagine, and when casting is more diverse than that, people have a pretty negative reaction to the characters not "looking" like the characters. I think this ends up being more true the further from the description people feel like the characters are. ^This is a thing that has been hurting LoTR for a lot of people, in my opinion. I don't think it's a reasonable thing to expect.

[cthalupa]

For sure.

I've also learned that some people just... didn't read the books all that closely, either. Or at least not character descriptions. Two Rivers people are described as being dark eyed and dark haired with fairly dark complexions - probably mediterranean - but people seemed to think they were supposed to look like they were from England, forgetting that Elaida explicitly mentions Rand is too fair skinned in EoTW. Or everyone outraged about Moraine/Siuan, apparently not understanding what RJ meant when he said they were "pillowfriends," despite lots of other fairly explicit hints at what the phrase meant.

[monkeywork]

>I don't think it's a reasonable thing to expect.

It's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way they are described (or the way most people picture them), or it's not reasonable to expect people to accept a re-envisioning? Asking because I'm not sure which way you were leaning there.

In my opinion, If you are going to use an existing franchise with a built-in audience attached to it, you should feel obligated to honor the audience's vision for the franchise. If you have dramatically different visions then you should be creating original content.

The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed.

[xracy]

> It's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way they are described (or the way most people picture them), or it's not reasonable to expect people to accept a re-envisioning? Asking because I'm not sure which way you were leaning there.

I'm saying it's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way people imagine the characters in their heads. Which may or may not be "the way they are described." I'm saying this because I think there are a million different ways people can imagine characters differently. "Tall Dark and Handsome" is a pretty classical example of something that means different things to different people. To me, this always meant a person of color, and I only learned relatively recently that to most people this means "Mediterranean".

The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong.

> The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed.

I think the projects that I've seen that have failed that people complain about "identity politics" for fail for the plot being bad. But there's a separate issue I see that's unrelated where people blame people of color on the projects for ruining the projects when in fact the companies are ruining the projects, and the people of color are often just a small piece of the puzzle. I think people very often over-react to this, and it often comes across as racist. Both of those things can be true. That the company is bad, and that the audience is being racist about the casting including black people that otherwise don't change anything about the way the movie watches.

[monkeywork]

>The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong.

I disagree - I think for the most part there is a wisdom of the masses where sure not EVERY SINGLE person will have the same image of a character but if you had a character artist draw out what 1000 people think of that character you'd find they converge pretty closely... the problem happens when the casting is not close to that convergence and is far out on the fringes.

As I said before I think if you are looking to make a product based on an existing IP you are doing so because you want that built-in audience that IP has - if you can't make the effort to ensure you are honoring how that audience expectations then your project deserves to fail.

The place to do experiments with gender-bending, race swapping, expectation subversion etc is in original IP's that hommage the older franchises.

[xracy]

My point is that if you pick a diverse audience, you will come up with a diverse set of expectations.

In Twilight, the main character is not actually described very well. There's an old comic from the oatmeal [1] about how the main character should be named "pants", because they're made just so that every reader can slip into the place and pretend like they're the main character.

This is a lot more common in books than I think you may realize. So when characters don't match expectations, it's because people are saying that characters don't look like them... which is, like, accidentally racism. To be clear, I don't think people are doing this maliciously. It's just that what you expect is not necessarily what you have to get.

[1] https://theoatmeal.com/story/twilight

[tonystride]

I really respect that, if anyone can speak to this it would be a devoted reader like you. I might even be willing to consider it in a new light after reading what you have to say.

I’m not an adaptation hater, I mourn the cancelation of the live action Cowboy Bebop, I loved it, despite that being an unpopular opinion. That being said…

There was a scene towards the end of season two, where the dark one was lobbing bad CGI fireballs at Egwene, and Moraine was down on the beach and launched a bad CGI dragon? to like even out the fight. And I could just feel the writers being completely lost there and just punting it over to the CGI department to figure it out…

[cthalupa]

Yeah - I would have liked Falme to be more epic, and Tarwin's Gap/Rand's fight with Aginor/Ishamael in Eye of the World. Impressive CGI is apparently quite expensive, though, especially at the scale necessary to really depict what is described in the books.

(Spoilers for a 3 decade old series to follow, I suppose!)

But at the same time, as written, these fights were... kinda weird. For Falme, Mat blows the horn, and a fog covers everything and no one can really see what's going on except localized fights, and Rand's fight with Ishamael happens in the fog with swords, yet... everyone can also see his fight happening in the sky, apparently for hundreds of miles around where it happened? It's written almost like some sort of dream sequence.

And the Eye of the World fight is even stranger. Minimal explanation as Rand fights to wrest control of the Eye away from Aginor, but then Aginor tries to use too much of the power from the Eye, and it kills him? Then he Travels to Tarwin's Gap and pounds his fist on the ground and blows up a Trolloc/Mydraal army... and then climbs through a bunch of non-euclidean stairways in another dimension to end up in Ishamael's bedroom where he somehow cuts the link from Ishamael to the Dark One, which causes Ishamael to fly into the fireplace and get burned up. And then Rand faints and somehow ends up back on the ground where he was originally fighting with Aginor.

The first time I read either fight scene I don't think I could have explained exactly wtf was going on, particularly the end of Eye of the World. Later books revealed some of the power and magic being used and clarified them a bit, but at the same time, Jordan also retconned how some things worked later in the series, which also made them more confusing in other ways.

Thankfully most later fights of this nature are less fever dream-ish and more practical. There's just a whole lot of challenges with the show that make it quite difficult to adapt. I think a long-running animation might have been a medium that would have allowed for more flexibility, but the lack of realism would also hurt. Maybe someday AI stuff will be amazing and we'll be able to just generate hundreds of hours of premium television.

[phinnaeus]

Is that seriously why Mat just disappears?? Good grief.

[xracy]

Yeah, made for some continuity difficulties that I think they handled pretty well considering the circumstances.

[cthalupa]

Yeah. His storyline was supposed to track the original series much more closely, but filming got shut down for covid, and the actor didn't come back when it resumed. Deleted all his socials, etc. Didn't take any more work until just recently, too.

No one knows what the deal was - lots of people speculated it was vaccine requirements when it was announced, but filming resumed before vaccines were available, so that couldn't have been it.

[aleph_minus_one]

> No one knows what the deal was - lots of people speculated it was vaccine requirements when it was announced, but filming resumed before vaccines were available, so that couldn't have been it.

Relevant:

> https://www.reddit.com/r/WoTshow/comments/154r20d/barney_har...

[ivansmf]

I have not read the books, so I guess I'm the target audience. It was very hard to watch. The actors were fine, actually better than fine, but the writing was painful. There are lots of standard adventure and fantasy arcs that are just impossible to carry forward with the type of "modern" they wanted. For instance, you cannot have the most diverse village in the history of villages anywhere, then later the Orc (?) stares at one of the kids once and goes "you are not from this village, you are certainly from this other village because of how you look". How? Aura color? At least change it so the kid has a tattoo or some birth mark then. I could go down a long list of dumb stuff like this that makes me come back to reality instead of allowing me to stay with the flow and enjoy the fantasy.

[mind-blight]

I reread the books multiple times. I was actually pretty impressed with how well they cast each character. Which is impressive because I think that's one of the hardest things to do.

But, the dialogue and storytelling were terrible. They invented new, pointless content. There's ~18k pages of source material. Amazon's job was to figure out how the hell to pair that down without compromising the original story. Instead, they went for visuals over storytelling

[buildbot]

There’s actually an in book way to explain that, the clothing is always described as specific to the two rivers, and only Aiel have red hair. I agree The show was awful!

[geraldwhen]

Wheel of time takes place in Brooklyn, in the Amazon cinematic universe though.

[buildbot]

I don’t think that the ethnicity of the actors really matters all that much, the height & hair color are the only real trait that describes how Rand stands out. Honestly the only character with a skin color description I can recall is Tuon? And that isn’t really something that matters either…

Bigger issues as other people pointed out are things like inventing weird bullshit storylines when you have 10k pages of content to draw from, or messing with the “hard rules” of the magic system, such as you can’t burn out in a circle, or heal someone from death.

[geraldwhen]

It ruined the suspension of disbelief immediately for me though. A rural village that doesn’t do constant international trade should have people living there that all look, speak, dress, and act similarly.

But the village looked like like an HR training video. To contrast, a new season of squid game just came out. Everyone is Korean. Everyone speaks Korean. Everyone looks Korean.

This makes the show feel more real.

[buildbot]

Right, the characters skin tones and real life ethnicities ruined the suspension of disbelief, because that’s harder to explain than Trollocs and the One Power??? Or Fades? Or the Dark One?

Or maybe you are hyper focused on specific, racial, details that you care about due to some internal biases?

[FireBeyond]

> And... I think the WoT adaption is fine. It's not exactly how I would have done it, and there are a few choices that I think are just bad, but on the whole I have enjoyed the show and think it captures most of the primary elements of the series.

It's (and I say this as someone who sees themselves quite progressive) a bit too feminist.

It seems determined to make Nynaeve and Egwene the heroes of the show, the badasses on which everyone, including Rand, rely on. Not content with them already having access to the Power, and being among the strongest among the Aes Sedai, Amazon made them even more powerful and heroic than the books.

In contrast, in the books, Nynaeve and Egwene (it may be Elayne - in either case, two of these three) were actually rather "put out" by the fact that Rand was who he was and his access to the Power. Paraphrasing from the book:

"They were shocked, and not a little annoyed and upset. The Tower had told them that they were the strongest they'd seen with the Power in centuries, perhaps the strongest ever, and along comes Rand, barely able to control it himself, and yet even with them both fighting with all their might, he controlled both of them so... effortlessly... and then to say he wasn't even using a fraction of the Power he'd drawn before!"

I do give kudos to Amazon for respecting the diversity of the books, though.

[IshKebab]

I haven't watched the Rings of Power though I have seen enough YouTube analyses of it to know I don't want to. I think the issue with it is that they spent $1bn on it, so you'd think they'd make sure the story and action scenes were top notch, not middling cliche.

[AtlasBarfed]

Do you like even reasonable accuracy to the canon of a fairly well fleshed out and documented universe?

Do you like character development that rises above B-grade movie tropes?

Do you find blunt multicultural recasting for the sake of awkward forced multicultural injection, shock value, virtue signalling annoying?

Do you like epic battles between empires fought between more than 10 people?

Do you like timelines to be somewhat realistic?

[tonystride]

I get it, I just finished Arcane and that was pure chef’s kiss. It can be done and it’s so disappointing when it’s not, especially considering the budget. Although maybe with that much money involved it’s probably hard to keep one unified vision as I’m sure there are many interests competing.

That being said, it was still better than Wheel of Time. I’d argue that LotR was watchable, where as WoT was absolutely not!

[ethbr1]

> though I have seen enough YouTube analyses of it to know I don't want to

Eh. Probably don't trust ragebait TV.

YouTube optimizes for clicks and eyeball time, not honest considered takes.

[ghjfrdghibt]

I'd forgotten about WoT. I was going to mention what they did to The Expanse when they took over the show but as a straight steaming pile of shit WoT takes it. I couldn't even finish the third episode.

[w0m]

I liked most of the first season of WoT; though it got more and more divergent (and felt worse for it) as the season went on. The final episode lost me. I've been meaning to watch the second season but haven't been able to bring myself to do it yet. (I say this as one who happily completed multiple rereads of the original series as new books came out)

[cthalupa]

There's no world where anyone adapts the book series closely with live action. The series is simply too long, particularly for the level of CGI, etc., we expect out of this sort of "premiere" television. I think overall they've done a good job given how difficult the task is, though there's certainly some changes that I think were mistakes, and other things that while I might not outright believe are mistakes, are different from how I would have done it.

I will say I agree that the last episode of S1 is my least favorite, but, they had a lot stacked against them and had to rewrite the final two due to Mat's actor not coming back after covid forced a filming break. That set off a chain reaction with a lot of far reaching consequences.

I liked S2 more than S1. Quality went up on basically every metric for me, though the finale still wasn't as epic as I would have hoped for... but is probably about all you can hope for without a LOTR-like budget. If they somehow make it to Dumai's Wells, hopefully they have more money then.

[w0m]

I do love the books; I'll try and watch S2 at some point...

[tonystride]

Agreed, it started out alright but got worse and worse as it diverged from the books. The finale of S2 is truly laughable. If you switch your expectations to fantasy/comedy you mighhhhht be able to enjoy it?

[chrisweekly]

I might be in the minority here, but I couldn't stand the Wheel of Time book; given its popularity I gave it about 200 pages before discarding it as poorly-written, under-edited, over-wrought, unoriginal, derivative drivel. Different strokes, I guess.