[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.