[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.

[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…

[phinnaeus]

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

[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!

[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)

[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.