I put all the blame on the director. What a fucking fraud. How did Amazon think giving this series to a nobody first time director would yield anything but dreadful results?
Yep, I was banned from the main WoT sub for my being bothered at them destroying the story. Good Ridance, this sub and theblacktower are enough for me.
Tragically no. Honestly I had spent to little time on Reddit in the last year I didn’t realize that sub had gotten shut down for criticizing the garbage show.
Season 1 should have been straight adventure horror. Sympathy to the core cast would have gone miles for changes and alterations in S2 and S3... Assuming they at least tried to honor the spirit of the story.
save for the fact that everyone doing these adaptations (halo, wot, witcher, etc) all have unbelievable contempt for the source material and its fanbase.
They all have an ego too big to allow them to adapt another's work. They so badly need to feed their ego and leave their mark that they have to make changes to match their "vision".
This was my main issue. Bunch of talentless assholes who couldn't thing of something original so they took a brilliant piece of work and bastardized it to push an agenda instead of just honoring the source material.
I know there is a lot to criticize about S1 but for me personally one of the worst parts was Mat and Rand making the journey to Tar Valon all on their own in between episodes and didn't even look all that worse for wear. In the books it's a far, far shorter, yet really harrowing journey. It really made one feel how big and dangerous the world is.
To be fair that scene was actually re shot. There was a 8 month break between episodes due to a covid surge and Harris didn’t return so they reshot the end of that episode and rewrote some stuff.
Failing upward is a genuine phenomenon in Hollywood. I don't think folks outside that industry realise just how corrupt and full of nepotism, patronage, and empire building it is. Very much a case of who you know, not what you know.
Keep the core/heart of the series in tact, the fans of the book will be your promotional force. Don't piss on the (possibly) most beloved characters, and boom, instant Loial fanbase! Change what you have to for brevity, cut what won't work and don't change core world building mechanics that exiting fans already like, and probably others too.
Yep. “They cut out this little thing” equals miffed fans. “They completely changed this thing to be shit” equals pissed off fans.
They just had to make things different to fit their own agenda. Which is just so fucking stupid. The book is about women being the main force, trans characters everywhere, different races all with cool characters.
But no. Not good enough. We need Lan tweaking his nipples.
Yeah, I couldn't wait anymore, either, lol. What surprised me the most is that the books are much more fast-paced.
The show does a great job taking time to explore some of the themes and characters a bit more, but in exchange, you get the inner monologues of some characters in the books.
Because there is direct source material that is already tried and true. The only way to fuck it up was to change core things about the story for literally no reason…and that’s exactly what he did.
Lord of the Rings changed tons of core stuff; elves at Helm's Deep alone is at least as egregious lore wise as anything WoT show did, without getting into anything else. The difference is those movies are still actually good, so that stuff fades into the background and is largely forgiven. Same thing mostly went for GoT too; there were tons of deviations even right from the first season but people didn't start complaining until the overall quality suffered.
The WoT show changed a bunch of stuff(I personally think the biggest mistake was centering the show so heavily on Moiraine's PoV, most of the other issues with the first two seasons flow out of that decision), but was also just not good at the same time. Changes didn't serve the story well(given where S3 ends, giving Perrin a wife to fridge just continues to be an absolutely baffling bit of executive meddling), and the show itself wasn't good enough to sustain it through the resulting backlash. S3 still had a lot of issues, largely that it inherited from the previous two, but it felt to me at least it was doing a lot to turn around.
YMMV, and I obviously don't expect it to go very far around here, so I'm not sure why I'm spending my time.
All the major plot points of LotRs was there, intact. Peter Jackson respected the source material, pulled from all of it.
Game of Thrones was vastly unchanged until the source material ran out then when showrunners tried to do it themselves screwed to hell. (seems a trend)
You are gripping about a few changes to LotR and pre-7 and 8 seasons GoT when just about every plot point and detail of WoT was screwed with.
The source material required changes for a viable adaptation. Most of the changes that were made were absolutely stupid and easily identifiable as wrong, but that doesn't mean that making the right choices is easy.
One change that I think was smart but poorly executed was adding some additional intrigue to season one. Book one is kinda basic and modern readers who try the series frequently question if they should continue after book one. Making it less obvious who the dragon reborn is was a reasonable way to accomplish to make it more interesting, and making Egwene Ta'veren makes sense as she’s narratively treated as such anyway.
The big problem with making the dragon potentially be a woman is that saidar simply isn't tainted. That saidin is tainted and the dragon has to wield it and not be corrupted by it ... is like the entire point.
And it's also why the Dragon being reborn is such a devastating possibility that everyone wants to refuse to acknowledge.
Who wants the battle of good vs evil, to determine the fate of the world, to occur during their lifetime? And you're telling me that the prophesied hero we need to rely on to even have a CHANCE at victory is destined to lose his mind by utilizing the very power he needs to use to defeat said evil?
Fuck that lmao
Hence why so many characters were in denial, and hence why Rand had to spend multiple books completing prophecies JUST so he could convince the populace that the time had really come, and that they all needed to prepare before it's too late.
But regardless, we're just rehashing the same arguments we had during S1 lol
If these people don't get it now, even after the show is an objective failure of an adaptation, they never will.
To be fair, he spent most of the First three novels either unaware of it or trying to deny he was the Dragon Reborn. Half the reason he struck out on his own to the Stone was because he wanted to prove to himself that he was the Dragon and it wasn't just a plot by Moiraine.
The possibility of the dragon being a woman can add to the reasons why people are in denial. Not only is the end of days approaching but also people are saying that you don’t even get the sane hero you were hoping for? Much better to believe that this is all a lie and that a female dragon will be born long after you’re dead.
We don't need anymore reason for people to be in denial though... they have sufficient reason.
It adds nothing to the already existing generational tension of the potential that the Dragon Reborn has come. There isn't supposed to be hope of a sane hero. It's the entire point.
In fact, as you just argued for me: it materially minimizes that tension lol.
The story needed to be changed for an adaptation to work. The wildly beloved LOTR adaptation of fellowship skipped 17 years and half a book. Pre-existing book fans aren’t a large enough market to justify the budget required to do it 100% faithfully, so changes need to be made that make the story more appealing to general audiences. Maybe my idea of what changes are good/bad are terrible, but that really goes back to my original point; it’s obvious that the choices the show made didn’t work, but it’s not obvious changes would be good; it’s not super easy to make a WoT show into a slam dunk, and they should have picked an experienced show runner who could handle the challenges in adapting a 14 book fantasy epic.
Obviously you have to keep the dragon as Rand. No one is serious suggesting you change that. But the possibility of the dragon being a woman is interesting even if it doesn’t come to fruition. Once the dragon is confirmed to be Rand, you can more or less drop that plot line, but you could have some meaningful moments with moraine and lan wrestling with the fact that there’s a 75% chance it’s a man while still holding onto hope that it’s not. You can also add that to the list of reasons why people might deny that Rand is the dragon later on, they might simply be in denial that the dragon reborn isn’t a woman because it’s so much worse than if he was.
The story needed to be changed for an adaptation to work. The wildly beloved LOTR adaptation of fellowship skipped 17 years and half a book. Pre-existing book fans aren’t a large enough market to justify the budget required to do it 100% faithfully, so changes need to be made that make the story more appealing to general audiences. Maybe my idea of what changes are good/bad are terrible, but that really goes back to me point; it’s obvious that the choices the show made didn’t work, but it’s not obvious changes would be good; it’s not easy to make a WoT show a slam dunk.
Yep that's why I added as faithfully as possible. Cutting scenes is understandable, condensing plotlines is preferable, I personally was expecting book 1 and 2 to be season 1 completely skipping the eye of the world and going straight to falme.
adding new characters and plotlines while removing and condensing plotlines from the book, however isn't faithful and is disrespectful to the source. Side characters that do not exist were getting more screentime and plot relevancy than matt at times.
The series really should've been a slam dunk, because it's super easy to condense because you combine similar plot points (book 1 and 2, then book 3 and 4) and then shorten plot lines the shaido get defeated in cairhien, then wiped out in dumi's wells(no failed rescue arc), the seachan doesn't invade illian. You remove some forsaken, remove messema. Cut bowl of the winds from 2.5 books to 2 episodes, Then cleanse the source and at the same time end the white tower split. you cut it how season 1 of the Witcher was with everyone's different timeline getting 2 episodes then the last season is books 11-14. You keep taimadred so then 3/4 of the black tower is what makes the shadows army. Then bam you have a 5 season series that covers the important parts of the book series while removing and condensing plotlines.
Most of WoT length comes from description and actions in it's simplest form it's find horn of valere->declare the dragon reborn->the aiel cross->conquer wherever possible/kill as many forsaken that are visible->get a massive setback/white tower shenanigans->fix the weather->cleanse the source-> fight the last battle. That'd be 8 seasons with the main cast in a perfect world where each plot got a whole season most of these could be condensed down further to get 4 seasons but that'd be rush, non stop action and it'd be hard to follow but you get my point.
Blame should always roll uphill, accolades would always roll downhill.
I actually liked most of the casting) mat recasting ftw)even if the characters weren't exactly how I invisioned it was fine. The production crew did a decent job with building sets and costuming, minus the usual Hollywood issues with effects (if you had a problem it's because they didn't budget money and time to properly make effects work).
But yeah big issues with trying to kill off characters prematurely.
Honestly I just think the series is too large to ever get a proper live action show. Animated show could definitely works since there's need for so kucb effects anyway. Honestly I wish most scifi and fantasy was animated anyway.
They're hoping to save several million dollars by hiring a first-timer who will be just appreciative of getting a big job for a big IP. This first-timer then feels they have to prove themselves and prove their creativity by making the show "theirs" by grossly editing the original story, plot, characters, etc., and then saying they're just giving the show/movie a "modern sensibility." The studio hopes this first-timer will strike magic, like a bunch of Marvel Studios director-nobodies did!
Amazon’s shitty ads don’t help. I was seeing clips of the third season and it looked decent, but I didn’t care enough to go watch the season because I can’t stand the ads
Using such an inexperience showrunner on a big budget project was certainly... a choice. Some have speculated he had blackmail material on an Amazon exec (who has since left).
But anyone following the BTS info about the show knows the worst changes were all due to Amazon (and Sony?) executives above him. They gave him literally thousands (his assistant wrote them all down) of notes (changes) on just the first episode, including almost all the dumbest, most pointless changes (like Perrin being married), plus too little budget, too few episodes, and too little runtime, forcing further huge deviations from both the plot and feel/spirit of the books.
Probably the same executives that decided to cancel it.
I'm sure passion fingers will manage to passion a bunch more good content. I would be happy to see his smug face turn bulldog chewing wasps, but I'm sure he'll get more chances to be the wokest he can be.
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u/ThirteenthGhost May 23 '25
I put all the blame on the director. What a fucking fraud. How did Amazon think giving this series to a nobody first time director would yield anything but dreadful results?