I just want to say, seeing as this video is getting a lot more views than I normally do, that despite the reception to this show being (understandably) the most contentious I've seen in a LONG time... pretty much no one so far has blown up AT me for my thoughts and I GENUINELY appreciate that, so thanks! I mean I agree with almost all of you anyway haha, but I know the WoT book series is very dear to a lot of people, and while I can't relate to that (being a new fan) I really do appreciate you all watching and hearing me out nonetheless. Thanks again!
The channeling was terrible, and it was supposed to be weaving threads of the 5 powers, which is why the powers are called weaves. The Tarwin's Gap never happened the Shienaran were in the process or charged the trollocks, and rand Traveled to Tarwin's Gap and single-handedly decimated the darkspawn. None of the women were involved cause they were getting the crap beat out of them by one of the Forsaken. Now as to what happened in the show, it is impossible to burn out while in a a circle, it is literally one of the safety measures, or power blocks, inherent to a circles properties. Also death can not be "cured" it wasn't even passable in the time of Wonders. Padan fain is the one to stab Loail which means he used the shadar logoth blade, which has a fatal corruption.
I don't care about changes from the source material either. The problem with this show is that it stunk from every conceivable perspective, regardless of the source material.
The two major book scenes in the show (weep for Manetheren and the Lan/Nynaeve scene) Rafe really had to fight for. I wonder how much of Loial's scenes got cut because he lost the fight.
Here is my summary: Loial, an Ogier, is defenseless and useless. Perrin is a liar and a wimp. Rand (who?) suddenly mastered control of channeling (up to now only accidental while under extreme stress). Nynaeve's anger block preventing her from channeling (made clear during the other episodes) suddenly vanished and she could channel and surrender her flows in a circle. Lan who knows Moiraine like nobody else cannot track her, but a novice Nynaeve can. Padan Fain teleported the dagger to him (was with Lan and Moiraine last). Egwene is strong in healing. A circle does not protect the members in it and can burn out people against their will. Sigh. It is almost as if they are changing every single little thing from the books, except for the names of the characters and places. More than that they ignore the very foundations they themselves laid earlier in the series (Nynaeve). And Rand... he was such a background character the whole time that by the time it came for him to shine nobody cared less because he is still a stranger to the viewers. If he died in that scene I bet you non-readers would have felt "oh, that is too bad, he seemed like a nice lad" and moved on.
It genuinely did seem like they went out of their way to make sure no scene was the same as in the books. Everything seemingly had to be at least a bit different for some reason
There's such a gargantuan amount of source material to use for the show it is completely baffling to me that they made such unnecessary and ridiculous changes. Instead of using character and plot elements that are already laid out in the story they altered things for no good reason that don't improve on the storyline. Perrin being married at the beginning of the show is a good example, why in the fuck did that have to be included? Later on in the books it's important that he has never married and is inexperienced with relationships. Blood and bloody ashes smh
Rafe did Lews Therin dirty. Instead of our returning from Vietnam war hero like Jordan had him who goes mad after having a desperate victory charging hills in the jungle we have an arrogant fool who destroys the world. This character treatment was done to each male character, the source, the theme of WOT was changed even from men and women both war and need eachother to men suck. Fire Rafe! Hire Arcane showrunners.
Yeeeeah, have to agree with you there. After finishing the show, I still don't see why it was necessary at all to have the whole "Perrin accidentally kills his wife" sub plot. Seems like a bad attempt to make him more interesting of a character (like he wasn't already interesting enough)
The Loial "death" is even worse when you consider he was stabbed with the Shadar Logoth dagger (instant death). So either he is dead, or in addition to being another cheap fake out, it breaks the lore. Just needlessly awful writing. The CW love triangle was awful YA filler that isn't in the book.
If the dagger is no more harmful than a normal dagger and since Mat isn't connected to it anymore, the entire second book has no justification for happening at all. The ONLY REASON Rand goes to hunt for Padan Fain, is because he took the dagger, which is currently killing Mat by its absence. Rand was ready to disappear because he can channel and would go crazy and didn't want to hurt anyone. If there's no personal risk to Mat's life to motivate him, there's no justification to stop him from leaving to be a hermit. Think of ALL the things that happen in the second book, now NONE of it can happen with Rand, Mat and Perrin involved cause none of them have any reason to chase after a horn they don't care about. All so they could have a fakeout scare. One of TWO in this single fucking episode, remember Nynaeve DIES and is brought back to life by EGWENE in the same episode!
Yes the choice to kill Loial was a dumb decision. Particularly since Ogier are pacifist by choice but powerful nearly unstoppable juggernauts when they decide to fight
The show was a bust for me. They had source material readily available to make this an amazing series. Instead they deviated tremendously with no character development and it was rushed. I understand that TV adaptions require some changes from books but this was way out in left field. It was Meh for me as well.
Jeff Bezos wanted his Game of Thrones. He got it, the last 2 seasons of it anyway. This show has little to offer, I wanted to like it but I have doubts they'll do good in S2, it'll be just more of what we've already seen.
I'm gonna cross my fingers that they do better next season 😂 with this much backlash I would think they will try hiring some writers that have experience in more successful shows/movies. I guess we'll have to wait and see
As someone who hasn’t read the books, I was baffled that five channelers (at least two of which were novices) could defeat 20,000 trollocs or whatever, but the Aes Sedai and their warders struggled-suffering multiple casualties-against Logain’s menagerie of followers.
It is made worse when you consider there was no Aes Sedai at the gap so the channelers they found in the town would have been those put out of the tower who failed to become Aes Sedai and didn't have high potential.
@John Jaxson Correction... At this point, Egwene and Nynaeve have great POTENTIAL... which still requires development... not simply training to develop skill, but "exercise" to develop that potential strength. At this point, they are still supposed to be quite weak, in terms of actual power that they can use.
My favorite thing about this review is that you admit you only read book one and still feel in love with Loial. The ending he got was for shock value, that's isn't something you can blame on anything else other than shitty writing
Loial was Robert Jordan inserting himself into the story. Rafe hates the source material so killing off Jordan's lore, characters, locations, and plot along with likely a fake out death makes sense to complete the assassination of the Wheel of Time.
@@haplozetetic9519 the dagger is suppose to be a 100 percent death if you even get a scratch by it. In books people die in moments after a cut unless they are bonded to the dagger. Rafe hates the books at this point with these changes.
@@jonahdav9589 That episode was pretty messed up for various reasons, but the dagger not killing the way it did in the books needs to be explained. I hope they listen to the complaints of viewers and do better in the future.
A half baked woke fest of a show. The downplaying of the dragon reborn's powers and overall impact in favor of Egwene and Nyneve power trips, was a pointless exercise.
Mm yeah I don't have any problem with them making Nynaeve and Egwene more powerful, but them potentially being the dragon reborn doesn't make any sense when they establish that the madness specifically targets male channelers
@@Cam_Wolfe Nynaeve's group heal while simultaneously taking out the false dragon in Ep 4 was way too much way too soon. It left no room for gradual development of magical power.
@@Cam_Wolfe they really don't need to be more powerful.. Nyneave is already literally the most powerful female channeller in the series, second in power only to rand himself, and egwene is only second to nyneave. The PROBLEM is that they are uber powerful at the very beginning of the series with no training at all beyond moiraine teach egwene to embrace saidar. Breaking fundamental rules of the power in episode 4 and 8. Thats what's not okay
I have read the whole series of books a few times and can in fact still remember buying TEOTW when it was first published back in 1990. My overall feelings toward the adaptation is one of total disappointment. I honestly believe that either Rafe or the execs at Amazon have totally ruined something that could have been great. This propensity towards going overboard with the wokeness in a story that was already pretty woke with very strong female characters and organisations has totally ruined it for me. Right from the off in the first episode you had The Women's Circle in the Two Rivers adequately portrayed but no sign of the men's Village Council. Then when the trollocs attacked at Bel Tine, it was the women who banded together to kill a trolloc. The men just ran about screaming and dying. That set alarm bells off in my head. When they then started hinting that the Dragon Reborn could be female it baffled the hell out of me. Having Perrin married ruins a later story arc with Faile. Min being, by the looks of it, about 20 years older than Rand ruins another story arc, when in the books she is only 3 years older. Having those 5 female channelers destroying 10,000 - 20,000 trollocs and 50 shades, instead of it being the Dragon Reborn, which then alerts some of the survivors of the battle to his coming, again passed the act over to women. Not content with Aes Sedai, the Women's Cicle, The Maidens Of The Spear, The Wise Ones, The Kin or Knitting Circle, The Queen Of Andor, The Women of Ebou Dar, The Sea Folk, The Sul'dam and Damane all being female with plenty of story arcs, they felt it necessary to infringe on the male story arcs too. Season 2 is already nearly finished filming so I can't see any of this being altered or readdressed. Shame but I can't see this series lasting more than 3 seasons before being dropped.
I agree 100%. The writers and produce have basterdized TWOT with man shaming the men in the book because all they care about is injecting their Woke SJW BS into it. It is amazing how many strong woman are in the books in powerful positions and the talentless SJW series creators have to trash the men's rolls to get their SJW fix. This show is trash and hijacker the name of TWOT to sell tickets to sucker viewers into watching their pathetic SJW propaganda.
They already confirmed 3 seasons of WOT, I confirmed season 3 will be the last. With this kind of budget a serie must connect with a some audiance. And a dont see how , non-fantasy viewers, can connect with this kind of show. Sadly, WOT as a tv show, is a wasted opportunity
A wasted opportunity is a good way to put it. I'm glad they decided to adapt it, but there's no going back on some of the poor choices they made, sadly
(Don't take my wall of text as criticism, these are just a few points that came to my mind when I was watching your review) The idea that some people expected a "1 to 1 adaptation with no changes whatsoever" and literally couldn't grasp that an adaptation will always need changes feels like a straw man argument that the vehement show defenders started throwing around because it's an easy way to paint your opposition as dumbasses. I personally haven't seen anyone actually demand this mythical "1 to 1 adaptation" and the people who have been critical of the changes have acknowledged that changes were always going to happen and they simply disagree with the changes the show ended up making (for example, good changes would've been condensing and combining the events or giving more character interactions to flesh out their relationships more, whereas the show went for complete reimagining of the lore and story and assassinated almost every character). A vast majority of "book purists" would've been fine with a *lot* of changes as long as they were good and made sense, but unfortunately the show failed at that. Also, the "Dragon reveal" might have felt more impactful in the show because in the books it was never supposed to be a "mystery" in the first place. That was entirely invented for the show. The drama around the Dragon in the books is centered around how Rand deals with accepting it and how he manages with the sudden realization that he's essentially guaranteed to go mad and destroy the world. And lastly, while the line Lan said to Nynaeve is nice and lifted straight from the books, it also changes the context around it which makes it fall flat on its face in the show. It felt like an easter egg for the book readers by writers who didn't quite understand why he said that. For comparison: in the books, Lan and Nynaeve both realize their budding mutual attraction (this is very subtle, but you can actually spot when it starts and it's pretty clear in their interactions from that point onwards), but Lan refuses her because he's sworn to fight against the Shadow in a battle he cannot win. It's a bittersweet moment of Lan choosing not to hurt Nynaeve and intending to cut their romance before it can properly start, because he believes he's destined to die before long and won't "give her the sure knowledge of widow's black as her brideprice". In the show, however, they have already banged the night before and then Lan suddenly decides that "nah, nevermind". He feels like a major asshole who just pumped and dumped her.
"Ideology trumps art." - Quentin Tarantino There is your answer from a guy who knows more about the industry than pretty much anyone and summed up the problem in 3 words. That is the reason for all the absolute crap in this show.
@@lukaszzylik4437 what's so hard to understand? Clear feminism, misandry and multiculturalism in places where it makes no sense, just for the sake of it. Like how do you explain Emond's field being so diverse? A village at the end of the world, that barely gets a peddler every year and has been like this for over 2000 years has either been practicing racial segregation or else they would have all blended together over the generations
Having read all of the source material it dosn't really help understand what they've done. They have broken every concept from the book from the basic idea of saidin and saidar.
You really are easy to please, I agree with you on that. The show went woke in the first 40 seconds and got worse and worse. I do not see how a fantasy show that keeps hating on men is a good representation of a book series that propagates the idea of "when men and women work together we are better than apart". Allowing their misandrist ways by being too understanding only helps their male hating agenda.
So true. This was a man hating show to make even Disney jealous. The opening monologue set the stage for all 8 episodes which culminated in rand having his spot light stolen at the end. All this talk of the dragon reborn and they stole what he did to the trolloc army and gave it to the women effectively neutering his character. The show was tolerable at best up til episode 8 but that one was just a kick in the groin. So much unnecessary changes to push an obvious agenda that has no place in a story that's already progressive and way ahead of its time. This is not the wheel of time or a different turning of the wheel. This was just a shit show.
@@Tom-Servo when you saw the shorts and the focus was on Moiraine I knew it was going to be more woke bs, the books series itself has very strong women, I don't understand why they had to shift the dynamic between men and women. Then there was the casting in general was poor, it got the woke wash Edmunds field is meant to be largely homogenous (blood of mithrandir) with Rand standing out due to his heritage. There is plenty of cultural diversity as the story progresses and the world is explored.
@@danielm6871 because the 3 main characters AND the DR are all men. That won't fly for modern viewers. I know the book has strong female characters but Rafe had to get his feminism theme in right off the bat.
Do you know if the books ever describe the new hilt Rand has put on Laman’s Blade? Is it a katana styled hilt like on the cover of Knife of Dreams? Or is it a more typical medieval European styled hilt?
Just a comment, @17:22 you said that maybe first season doesn't makes sense "if you haven't read the books". Na, It doesn't make sense at all. I've read the whole series, prequel and played the TTRPG and I'm really disappointed with the show. Little bit angry actually. I'm convinced that the screenwriter has not read the series. He doesn't get the books. He was telling his own, worse story.
I think you said it so well regarding an adaptation “Changes will happen. I don’t mind changes as long as they make sense and they make the show better.” I agree 💯 What happened with this show, neither happened and it just kept getting worse.
The contention isn't about screen adaptations requiring changes from the source material - 99.9% of people get that. What it is about is a wonderful fantasy book series (I've read all the books) that has had the heart ripped out of it and been completely changed in all but name. I am seriously wondering if some of those praising it are bots. The show is awful. I cannot think of a single aspect they got right. Even the best parts are mediocre. And it's not just the poor creation but the insertion into the storyline of an entirely foreign and woke agenda. No respect for the spirit, theme, story or characters of the books at all. The books rank among the best fantasy series, the show among the worst of adaptations. Ruined by a team who clearly have no love for the books (and I would challenge the claim that they have read them) and simply wanted to use them as a vehicle for their own ideologically driven "fan fiction" (though I doubt they are fans).
I couldn't agree more. This whole adaptation they have gone through has been more of a sad attempt of the show writers to fix their believed failings of the original story. The show is an absolute loss.
I think Jordan didn’t even try to REALLY make a twist out of who is the Dragon Reborn. It’s pretty much confirmed when Rand channels to escape the tavern basement in the middle of the book. The books did show his denial of that though and how he’s struggling to not be the Dragon. TV pretty much missed that altogether, instead replacing Rand’s own struggles with his romantic problems and shifting the suspicion of being a dragon to Mat, who was a “channeling” red herring. And yeah, that didn’t work at all. Oh, and btw, you are right. The teenage drama love triangle wasn’t a thing in the books. But the show runner confirmed it’s gonna continue in the show. Yeaaaah.
I mean, the fact that 90% of the book is from his pov and from the beginning it's already made clear he looks different from the other Emonds Fielders.. it's pretty obvious who the dragon is from the get go. IMO by making it a mystery they ruined all of the EF5. Not just Rand.
@@hellgast0 yeah, I’m not sure Perrin and Rand are even friends at this point. Same goes for Mat, cause we didn’t get any of their journey to Caemlyn and how they looked out for each other.
Yeah - I wanted this to be so much better - and mate, tbh, with you only having read the 1st book there are a thousand other ways that you don't even know about yet in which they have ruined, yeah ruined, future arcs/stories/AMAZING MOMENTS. It's beyond frustrating. And the Loial thing is also my number 1 gripe. Mostly because of the BS reasoning they gave! 'Yeah we wanted him on screen more so couldnt spend all that money' but then they promptly cut half his damn scenes anyway, to insert whatever ideological touch point they were shooting for that episode, or some more teen drama nonsense. That irritates me even more than other things that I literally despise. I still think it can be fixed, but the fact they already started shooting S2 before getting feedback, which clearly, they needed - is a massive red flag.
@@Cam_Wolfe dude thats a win, you should absolutely keep reading, book 2 is inside the top 3 of the entire series for me personally. And it's ok, as Sando put it - different turning or something, which I think is a cop out tbh but - if it helps, I guess it helps. Just another reminder that people should just read more books because - the written word is always, always better than the screen. And thank god for that.
Sometimes changes are neccessary and we understand that. However you don't rewrite the damn book. The only thing they got right was the names of the characters and the cities. And that's just about it. They made sure to paint it with a bunch of woke homosexuality that never happened throughout the story but couldn't stay more true to the story.
"He exerts main dude energy." LOL! You got me laughing with my morning coffee, Cam. I haven't watched this yet, but the reviews have been very entertaining. Loial's makeup looks cheap, and so do the rest of the costumes.
Yeah, one of the thoughts I had throughout my watch of the series was, "Rand is giving me some serious Anakin Skywalker vibes here." Having finished off the series, I'm still not sure why, and I have no idea if that's a good thing or not...
@@Cam_Wolfe I don't understand how anyone can like it. The CGI and cinematography are complete trash. I don't even care that they changed the plot, but the writing is garbage too.
EDIT: Grammar 1.) The showrunner confirmed that Loial didn't die. (Why he did that, I don't know.) But another problem with this, is that they're then playing loose with yet another aspect of the lore: the Shadar Logoth Dagger. That thing is supposed to be lethal. Even a scratch should kill. Which in itself is perhaps not an issue. Okay, the dagger isn't as lethal. That removes a ton of tension from all future confrontations with Padan Fain. But it does present a problem depending on where they're going with the overall narrative, which involves situations where the lethality of the dagger is INTEGRAL to story events. Maybe they'll cut that out entirely. But if they were going to do that, there really isn't much purpose for Fain in the narrative to be honest. 2.) Rand as the Dragon Reborn...... The problem with them making it a huge mystery is that it required them hiding numerous character moments for Rand. His entire internal conflict of not knowing who his parents are is gone because it would have made him even more obvious than he already was. Then the show drops that insanely fast montage of past events in episode 7, revealing that we didn't see Rand channeling in past events, which is a problem because there was no foreshadowing that Rand was an unreliable narrator/POV. The show just says, "Ha! You didn't see him channeling because we didn't put the VFX in those scenes! Fooled you!" It's cheap. 3.) It seems like Rafe Judkins needed better support. He was clearly trying to set-up things with Lan, Moiraine, and the warder bond in Episode 5. And White Tower politics in general in Episodes 4-6. But the problem is, he only had 8 episodes for the season and hadn't really set up Emond's Field properly, nor the relationships between the Emond's Field Five. **Episode runtime is consumed with writers choices that spent a lot of time focused on things that didn't even matter in the season finale!** Judkins was too busy setting up future stuff when he should have been focused more on the fundamentals of a solid Season 1. And no one on his team brought this to their attention. 4.) The showrunner has made..... choices when it comes to the magic system. Achievements in the One Power are spontaneous and not connected to any sort of character growth or development. In the books, characters need to train up before they get the ability to pull off most of the amazing things they end up doing. In the show? Nynaeve mass heals an entire room of people at a distance before she even knows she can channel, let alone go through any training. 5 untrained channelers not only figured out how to make a circle, but nuked tens of thousands of trollocs. Egwene healed Nynaeve from death? Being burned out? When the story needs something, the One Power makes it happen, whether or not the characters involved have trained or not. Not to mention they've oversimplified the One Power. In the books, there is a lot in the story around people discovering new "weaves" of the Power, of which there are 5 Powers. Really, it wouldn't have been that hard to have the writers, concept artists, and VFX team sit down and plot out the major weaves and what they would look like. A day or two and they could have knocked it out and had a framework for the entire show's run. There's already work out there on this! Source: static.wikia.nocookie.net/wot/images/a/a9/Moiraine_saliba2.jpg/revision/latest/smart/width/250/height/250?cb=20091219031624 Instead, we got..... white threads and no weaves. Lazy as f--k. 5.) Seeing the attack on Winternight: In the show? The trolloc attack is a chaotic mess. Trollocs are just there killing anyone, burning everything down. And it was a spectacle for sure, but mishandling this simple event led to the Emond's Field Five's departure from the village coming off forced when it didn't have to. Book Moiraine and Book Lan pointed out to a stubborn Rand that the trolloc raid in the books was actually pretty targeted. Trollocs were largely ignoring most people except at the targeted houses of Perrin, Mat, & Rand. It provided a believable reason why the stubborn Two Rivers boys would leave Emond's Field. Egwene joined up out of a sense of adventure and Moiraine accepted her because she could sense she had the "spark" and would need training in the One Power or else she might die. In the show? They didn't have that reason because they decided to have the Trollocs indiscriminately attack everything and everyone. Moiraine just up and tells them that one of them is TDR, which is a problem of its own, and overall sloppy as f--k.
As someone who only read the first book, you exist in this in between space where you were able to see the all of the ways that they got the first book right and wrong, but you weren't able to see, in real time, the places where they destroyed huge plot points from the future books. So many things that should happen in this story won't now, and book readers already know because the starting points of these future storylines was supposed to happen this season and can't be put in later, because of spoilers that I won't mention. So, I think people who know the plots of the future books have less faith for season 2 and 3 because they already know how much the plots of two books have been screwed up by the events of this season. This is not to say that the show needs to match the books, but what I'm saying is the general plots of books two and three don't even make sense from where the show is at the end of season one.
Changing the lore from the books a bit so the tv-adaptation has a better flow or something like that I think everyone can understand that especially if there is so much lore and perhaps an impossible task to cram it all in the tv show. But what the showrunners did to the source material has absolutely nothing to do with that AT ALL! Face it, it's all agenda driven nonsense. I think you are way too easy on the showrunners. I have read all 14 (15) books of the Wheel of Time 3 times. This show has been hijacked by the extreme left SJW cult. It started with the race swapping casting choices. If you make such insane decisions that's immediately proof no one in the production team holds high standards. I called it 2 years ago this show was going to be crap just by seeing the forced diversity cast because the kind of people that thinks forced diversity is more important than logic world building doesn't give a crap about consistency or quality. They only care about their agenda and woke boxes. The story takes place in a medieval fantasy setting. The story is grounded. You don't infuse that fantasy world with current day politics. You just don't. A medieval fantasy story is not the stage at all for extreme left SJW feminist woke talking points to infuse. It's incredibly stupid to create a medieval world where in a remote medieval village that hasn't seen strangers or tax collectors for centuries that if you're a white person that your neighbors can be Bruce Lee and Mike Tyson. It's so dumb. These kind of medieval fantasy stories are part of western culture. WESTERN culture. It has it roots in European history. The main continent of the Wheel of Time is a reflection of Europe in medieval time with fantasy elements added. If you think black people should have black culture, Asian people should have Asian culture then you also wouldn't have a problem with white/European people to have white/western/European culture or whatever you want to call it. The forced diversity in this tv-show is insane. In current day you cannot find a village with that amount of diversity and where they also live happy together let alone in a time where the fastest way to travel is by horse. It's just stupid and it kills the believability of the world the story takes place in. Everybody knows that humans from different races live separately in all corners of the world and that it has logical biological reasons why we look different because of the amount of generations every human race has lived in the same area. Nothing racist about that just facts. Robert Jordan also described this in his books. The people from Emondsfield has brown/black hair with brown eyes like you would expect from French/Swiss/Italian people. Rhand is the one in the village that looks different because he looks more Dutch/Scandinavic. The people that live around the south coast they have more coppery skin. The people from Shara are more Middle-Eastern like and well the Aiel look like the white people from the Australian Mad Max people wandering in the dessert. The Seanchan are not white. Once our Emondfield hero's leave their village and venture into the world they will meet a lot of people from different backgrounds, cultures, races but you have to travel before you can see the changes just like it is in the real world. Even now as a Dutchman I can see the changes in the general population if I drive south through Belgium to French. People gradually will become shorter, have more darker hair. Look more French. It's just the way it is. So if diversity is so important for you then the source material already has plenty in it. You just have to wait a bit for our adventurers to travel that far. Then we have the over the top feminism which is also insane. In the books the story is more or less about finding balance again between men & women and good & evil. The balance for men & women has become completely corrupted because the male side of the One Power has been corrupted by the Dark One so male channelers will become insane and die. In the books the men have to fight to regain their position next to the female channelers. In the tv-show they made every male character into an idiot for the sole purpose of telling that men are bad and women are good. It's so obvious. Mart Cauthon is a good hearted scoundrel that likes to play pranks. In the tv-show he is low life thief. Perrin is a gentle giant that overthinks stuff because he doesn't want to make hasty decisions. In the tv-show he is a dumb cowardly oaf that accidentilly killed his wife (which didnt exist in the books). Rhand is the lead character in the books. He is basically you, the reader. In the tv-show he is a minor character and he doesn't even gets to play the hero in the last episode. Rhand is the one that kills Aginor and all the trollocks in the canyon saving the border army. But noooo we can't have a straight white male be the hero... the women has to be the hero in the tv-show because female empowerment reasons bladiebla. Thom Merrilin in the books is a charming gleeman, a great singer, a story-teller, an acrobat, a juggler. In the tv-show he is some sort of deranged cowboy. Lan in the books is a stoic masculine character. Tall with long hair that is starting to grey at his temples. Stone cold chilling BLUE eyes. He doesn't talk much. He is bound to Moiraine as her warder as the last king of a kingdom that doesnt exist anymore. He doesnt have a reason to live. It takes Nynaeve books to break down the wall that Lan pulled up around himself. In the tv-show he is whiny talkative bitch that rips his shirt open at a funeral where a fellow warder commited suicide after his 1st night of gay sex. Lord Angelmar welcomes every Aes Sedai in the books because they are most welcome fighting against the monsters from the Blight. In the tv-show they have to depict him as toxic masculinity because all men in this tv-show has te be made either stupid or bad to make the women look better. Even in the very 1st episode where you hear the voice over of Moiraine talking about the arrogance of men that caused all the problems. In the books it was a woman that had the idea to try to make a bore into the new well of magic that can be handled by both male and female channelers before they found out that new well was the Dark One. It was Lews Therin and a lot of male channelers that tried to close it down again. They did succeed but at the cost that the male side of the power was from now on tainted. But the tv-show cannot let a woman be seen as a bad person. Noooo. The men has to be arrogant. The entirety of this tv adaptation is bad because on every department of this show they hired forced diversity. They did not hire based on skill, merit or experience. No they hired based on gender, race and sex. And most probably also on your political views. These buffoons probably think high and mighty of themselves but basically all they did were racist, sexist and discriminatory decisions. If you don't hire the best writers you get sloppy story telling and badly written character development. You also have to rewrite a lot of stuff that at the end will cost you a lot more money. If you don't hire the best casting directors or in this case extreme left wing sjw casting directors you will get a lot of race, gender, sex swapping and that will never do the story or the world building any good. It just makes everything worse. But these don't care about holding high standards. They only care about their agendas. If you don't hire the best producers and financial people then you will have to spend a lot more money that could cost a lot less if you would have hired people based on their skills and experience. All that money that could have been saved, could be spend in areas where it was desperately needed. If you hire artists, special effects people, creatives etc all based on their gender, race etc and not their skills and experience, then everything will take twice as long to be completed. It probably needs to be redone more than 2 times because it will look like shit and then the end result will probably still look mediocre because there is no more money left. The showrunners of the Wheel of Time had such a big advantage over Game of Thrones because the books were already finished for years. The showrunners of Game of Thrones fucked up when they ran out of source material. A problem the Wheel of Time doesn't have. They even released a companion book with more details. Yet they decided to destroy the Wheel of Time tv-show by giving the show to a team of SJW's. The extrem left SJW feminist types cannot create something themselves and make it into something successful. They can only take something that has been made successful already created by a non-SJW and then infest it with their own insane political agendas. The SJW-cult is a cancer on society. They destroyed Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr Who, Terminator, LastofUs and now the Wheel of Time. And from what I have heard the Lord of the Rings will be next to be destroyed. The Wheel of Time is a dumpster fire and a complete atrocity/abomination of Robert Jordans beloved work.
Absolutely true. These talentless SJW woke cultists are baterdizing ever masterpiece the can get their hands on. LOTR is the next one they are taking a huge SJW Woke dump all over. I hope people actually decided to not even click on it to view it because support these SJW cultist by validating watching their propaganda is a great way to having them keep doing this.
Imagine if you took a African folk lore fantasy and injected all white people into. Yet this is what they intentionally did to this series. I actually thought the actors for the most part were good considering but could I could not get past the fact that they were cast for their skin color and SJW diversity. The 2 rivers cast has more ethnic diversity than you see at NY international Airport.
Watched the LOTR and The Hobbit films without reading the books, watched Netflix's The Witcher without playing the Witcher video games or reading The Witcher, watched Legend of the Seeker without reading the Sword of Truth books, but I love and enjoy the adaptations of the books while using the books as references to understand the lore of the books and their adaptations. The outcome for me watching the Wheel of Time without reading the books first and still enjoying the series will go the same way.
If you read the books you could understand why they skipped certain things and why they made certain things much more awesome than they were. I am talking about all the other series.... And sometimes if you did not read book 8.... well you made a bobo.... The books are better usualy. But usualy the "adaption" does not try to murder the books and piss all over everything that was in the first one.
The magic being weaved like thread in the Trollic attack is actually part of the story. It’s just not in the first book since it’s mostly from Rand’s perspective. Once Rand and the other start to learn to channel, weaving the threads of different elements (earth,air,fire,water,spirit) becomes important and more detailed in the books.
Well at least you enjoyed it for the most part! Genuinely. I'm not going to try and convince anyone they shouldn't have enjoyed something. But yeah, that last ep was something else 😂
For me, the biggest issue I had with the series is that it felt rushed. Eight one hour episodes is not a lot of time to get a feel for the characters and the grand story that the series was telling, even from the first book. While the start of the series was great (despite some rather... offputting casting choices - the actors and actresses all did an excellent job with their characters, it just didn't feel like the setting of the Wheel of Time and particularly Two Rivers was nearly as diverse as they are in the show), the show really could have done without the "one month later" timeskip halfway through, if only so we could see Matt's slow descent into madness and paranoia as well as the skills that the two were developing to help them get by, as well as getting a better feel for Perrin and Egwene's relationship and seeing the growing relationship between Nanaeve and Lan. I also wish we had gotten to see more of the Children of the Light (because they did such a great job making them so brutally cruel in the few times they appeared) and the Tuatha'an (for the opposite reason), and Loial's presence was criminally underserved. The political landscape of the White Tower could also have done with more fleshing out, and... Well, the point is, the entire thing could have used more time. I understand why that can be problematic in today's TV landscape of quarter to half half length seasons (6-13 episodes) - but if you're not willing to put in a full length season for what is, for many, the iconic epic fantasy series, you should probably think about looking at a story that doesn't require 60+ hours to appropriately tell the story. If you try, you're just going to end up with something that is unsatisfying for everyone (to paraphrase something I saw years and years ago - take the time needed to tell the story you want to tell. Don't try to stretch or shrink it to fit an arbitrary run time, give it the time it needs. No more, no less.)
Absolutely! It feels like they locked themselves into finishing the season with The Eye of the World, regardless of how many (or few) episodes they were given to film. They should have just taken their time
I don't think the identity of the dragon reborn was ever really meant to be a mystery to the reader in the books which I liked because it is very hard to fool a reader or a watcher without simply neutering the character ( case and point)
Oh come! Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, Netflix's Witcher, Game of Thrones, Jurassic Park, Legend of the Seeker, Merlin TV series, Robin Hood movies and TV series, adaptations of Sherlock Holmes and the Shannara Chronicles are not 100% percent like the books that they are based on since the directors and producers have taken liberties to make changes when adapting a book to movie/TV series on the big screen, but they are still success adaptations of books. Expect the same for Wheel of the Time TV series and Amazon's LOTR prequel series.
Rafe Judkins took alot of young men's favorite fantasy hero and turned him into a simp so he could focus the story on the powerful women.....yay. I honestly though he was going to make Egwene the Dragon Reborn. It probably would have been better if he had, as he did nothing nearly as impressive as what the women did at Tarwin's Gap. So bad
I thought he was going to go with the whole five-part dragon and have all of them "involved." As if they aren't in the books, but hey, this is Rafe's fan-fic instead of the Wheel of Time, so the worst is to be expected.
I thought the show was horrible. They had 3 episodes of filler in an 8 episode season and then said they didn't have enough time to do the main story justice. That's inexcusable. They didn't include enough world building to build the stakes, and repeatedly undermined the tension. Machin Shin and the Blight were pathetic, they seemed to forget that the villagers were being pursued after a few episodes, they trivialized healing, and featured repeated fake out deaths. The show can't stand on it's own because it doesn't provide enough context, but the changes they made makes the show a substantially worse story than the book, so it doesn't have a clear audience. The plot was completely unjustified, and on several occasions was delivered to the audience as bad exposition from one of the characters, usually Moraine. The characters made weird, unsupported claims, and everyone just took them at face value. They removed the character arc, development, most of the positive character traits, motivation, emotional investment, and agency from the main cast, and made Moraine the main character. They changed the message from men and women should work together to men are bad and should be subservient to women, and should derive all of their value from service to women without any kind of reciprocity. Some of the acting was strong, but the writing, pacing, and editing were so bad that no amount of good acting could have saved it. I specifically disliked the way that they portrayed the magic system. They implied that you don't need training, you just need to pull enough of the power and wish hard enough. What's the point of training channelers if that's the case? It also added to the inconsistency in how powerful channelers are. If a pair of untrained girls and a couple of weak wilders can blow up an army of tens of thousands of trollocs, why is the shadow supposed to be a threat? Why couldn't Moraine trivially deal with a much smaller number of trollocs? They didn't really show channelers weaving strands of the different elements, and it just comes across as generic. How the show handled the mystery of who the Dragon Reborn severely undermined many emotional beats throughout the story, although they were also undercut by how badly the show handled building emotional investment in the characters in general. I agree that they were going to have to make changes, but I hated the changes that they made, because the changes didn't pay off, and left us with a garbled, incoherent mess. It's not that they made changes. It's that they utterly failed to tell a compelling story while simultaneously going against the spirit of the original work.
Your praise is correct. The magic is fine and left room to make it larger later in the series. The costumes are great (I can even accept Loial's). Locations were good. The warder connection was done well (but time consuming). My complaints are great but homing in on ignoring the lore will hurt the show in the long run.
Well I am genuinely glad to get at least one comment that focuses on my praise for the show haha. It had it's problems, but I believe in credit where credit is due. Thanks for watching!
While i did like the magic in how it was visualized, I have two major criticisms of it: 1. they ignore that the one power is binary, with the male half called Saiden, which was tainted by the DO's counterstroke when LTT and the hundred resealed the Bore, and trapped the DO and the forsaken, and the female half called Saidar, which was untainted because the female Aes Sedai abandoned LTT for a different plan that was already thwarted. 2. Aes Sedai can now heal death, which makes the risk of death meaningless.
I've read the series, and I will say the only thing I really liked about the series is the actors. They did a decent job casting. I could forgive a lot of things (I understand changes due to different mediums), but this just seems like a shotty fanfic. I tried to be really positive and understanding while watching because I was so excited for the adaptation, but it's just so badly done. There were definitely scenes I enjoyed, but overall I was disappointed. I'm really hoping they get better in season 2.
I came in knowing that the show would have to change a lot of things from the books (I mean it’s a 15 book series ). For me what would make it or break it would be the characters and their growth. I thought the actors were well cast for the most part…and their acting was good given the material they had to work with. The first season needed to focus on the the 4 Edmonds Fielders and their struggle to grasp being in over their heads in a dire situation, while discovering the world outside of their sheltered hometown. The writers were inconsistent with that but I’ll admit they had some good moments. The main issue is that the season felt rushed and there was a lot of unearned moments. There is so many things that they needed to flesh out it’s too much to list. The main excuse writers use is that they don’t have enough screen time to add missing components etc… But there are a lot of unnecessary scenes in this season that could have been better put to use…like plot development etc.. Maybe the writers will do better next season. I mean it’s not like it’s as bad as the writing on season 8 of Game of Thrones.
I just think that they disrespected the source material. I did try to give this a chance but identity politics, the changes that they decided to make was really hard to swallow. Which I think hurt the quality of the show. It would be similar to taking an establish character from a classic novel. Lets use Lord of the Rings as an example, they decided to make Gandalf gay and was Saruman lover for the sake of representation and inclusivity. It was never mentioned by Tolkien that Gandalf is gay and itt completely destroys whatever the author originally intended for this character for sake of pandering to a minor audience. But if you think I am a bigot or homophobe, how would the audience think if we take another establish character like Black Panther make him into a white transgender female to represent that community? It can happen especially when Black Panther is just a mantle he doesn't necessarily need to be black or male to push this character change. We both know this would be wrong.
If you are refering to the relationship between Moiraine and Siuan with the whole Gandalf and Saruman suddenly being lovers scenario; the books actually state that the two women used to be lovers during their years training in the White Tower so it's not that much of a stretch imagining them still being intimate when possible even though they're almost always apart these days due to their situation.
@@baverpuppa1150 I dont recall them ever being lovers from the novels. But the entire point of my rhetoric is that they disrespected the source material, when focus of this series is all about identity politics then good story telling
Im not gonna lie one of my biggest problems in the show is how tam gets taken out almost instantly. Dude has a heron mark blade, he is literally a master blade wielder. Gets 1v1ed by a trollic. While nyneave 1v1s a trollic without using the power.
He still gets taken out by in the book but it’s because the swords the dark ones army uses are blood sacrifice blades that poison and eventually kill anyone they cut.
@@kevinsnider7550 while true it takes a small raiding party to do it in the book. He stops multiple trollics allowing rand to get out of the house and leads multiple trollics away from rand before succumbing to the cut but in the show its like 10 secs with one trollic before getting btfo'd. Show blademasters = barely compitent vs book blademaster = super dangerous
Honestly I would’ve rather have had them just go to caemlyn and fal Dara rather than tar valon. Spend half an episode at least in Shadar logoth, not 4 min; same with the ways. Did they learn nothing from MOVIES? You don’t have to make the whole season for a whole book. They could’ve done half-3/4 of the book and it still would’ve been better than what we got. Not including the prologue was a mistake, not having the tam delirium scene(until we got it as a flashback) was a mistake. So many other things. I’ve read all the books and was still lost half the time. It left me doubting as to whether or not I had actually read the books. I’m not saying it had to be a direct copy of the books by any means, but…there were so many unnecessary changes for the worse that I just can’t wrap my head around it. I really wanted to like it too, but it just wasn’t in the cards.
As a neutral this show wasn’t that good , things i Hated most 1. The generic Cringe dialogue 2 . Distracting Sound tracks 3. Colour coding Also I did get the feeling this show was made for people who were already familiar with the source material, too many instances things were happening or people were put into situations with out explanation. And I guessed the dragon reborn from episode 1 , He definitely exude “Main dude Vibes “ .
They probably should have done some CGI work with Loial and giving him a beard was against the fundamentals of his nature, he was supposed to be a young, beardless oiger. It would have been interesting to see him made the size of a trolloc and trying to fit into the human world, this was a major part of his character development. I think they decided that it was a fake death (yet another!) but killing him would be strange since Loial was actually supposed to be the one who wrote the WoT as the chronicles of the Dragon Reborn.
Nynaeve... I read this series over and over back in the day. I watched this show just to hear that name out loud. The pronunciation guide in the books helped but I just didn't want to say it that way in my head.
Happy hols! I'm in the "haven't seen but don't care about spoilers" club! I don't watch TV on paid streaming services so likely won't see it unless it gets released on physical media, so I am always gonna know the general consensus on things 😅 Disappointing to hear that the show has so many fundamental flaws. I'd say I'm also very easy to please (though can be a bit more difficult to "wow" or shock), and feel sometimes discourse on TV and film gets a bit hyperbolic and silly. Thanks for providing an overall level-headed take 👍
This was nothing more than an attempt to make money off a dead man not surprising though because making money is why these shows are done. It is obvious that the show was never intended to follow the book series at all except for a little fan service thrown into each episode in order to attract an audience perhaps to cover for the bad writing and plot contrivances. I have seen old black and white B movies with better writing. I can’t say anything bad about the actors themselves I love them all though in the future you might want to read the book and the script if possible before signing a contract. They didn't even try. an original series or idea would have been better.
I liked the show enough and I was very invested on it to the point I followed a spoiler free breakdowns as much as possible - what I think was a bigger factor and why I really feel in love with the world. I read the first book right away and took a break from the series. I was just rereading EotW and felt so many emotions being on Rand’s head all the time. I think how bland Rand feels in the show stuck out more but I’m glad I took my time to appreciate how he’s kind, loyal, how much he progresses and accomplishes in a single book, how he gets haunted by the fact that Tam isn’t his father. I really didn’t like the second season and I think I might abandon the show.
I want to see this still but can't afford Prime Video. With that said I've kept up on many reviews for each episode and I'm not very happy with many changes. They make changes to the magic system, make characters act like other characters later in the series, add in useless fodder that detracted from the main plot for the main characters. Five and six were completely from nothing in the source material.
Loial is alive, director said he didn't die. He said the actor who plays him is also well and shooting season 2 in Prague. Very stupid story telling. Robert Jordan is rolling in his grave.
I never read the source material but am a big fantasy fan and this just an awful series from beginning to end in simple storytelling, dialogue, writing choices, and the internal consistency of its own lore and world building. With the budget they had they should have done more and learning of all the changes from the source material pissed me off because it showed a lack of respect for the books and a poor show with dumb changes.
"is that you? You read books....nerd." Honestly in today's film environment movies don't even compare. So if you are looking for real escapism then your best bet is books
I never bother reading the books before watching the movie and tv show adaptations of the books. I've never been much of a reader who reads books for pleasure. Watching movies and tv shows entertains me more than silent reading. I only use the fiction books as reference/study guide better understand the lore of the movie/tv show adaptation.
"My epic, if I compose it-- and Loial's book-- will be no more than seed, if we are both lucky. Those who know the truth will die, and their grandchildren will remember something different. And _their_ grandchildren's grandchildren something else again. Two dozen generations, and you may be the hero of it, not Rand." -Thom to Elayne, _The Shadow Rising_ (Condemnation, not praise)
Loial is not dead, can't even imagine that. Wouldn't even make sense to have him display like they did, cause they choose to not make him a CGI-Character, cause he will be shown a lot more in coming seasons. I think that was one reason to not make him a CGI-Character, cause he will be there so much more, that it would be too expensive to do him in CGI.
Yeah, I hear you. I liked the cinematography and I didn't expect the show to be that amazing going into it (so I had low expectations from the get go). That said though, they really didn't do a good job of making the season feel like a cohesive whole; since they made changes, I was expecting that to be the purpose of the changes. But I will keep watching and I think overall, the existence of the show is still good for the franchise and bringing in readers. Peace!
Hit the nail on the head with this one, Cam. I disliked the series too. The poor Ogier - He looks like he belongs in a kid's panto! Rand's mother's fight was freeking amazing - and frankly, the best 60 seconds of the entire season. The pointless plot changes - and focusing on moraine as the central character - kind of ruined this for me. I haven't watched all of ep 7 and any of 8. It felt very much 'Star Trek Discovery'd for me.
I just don't see how you take some of the choices back? Traveling isn't really introduced till later book because it doesn't make sense to use the ways or stone if you can travel. If Wilders can link and don't really need training then the white tower doesn't really have any point to exist. Tom's characters is hardly in it and he's supposed to be a major character. By the time they get a few seasons in nothing in the later books is going to make any sense. And why does it look cheap, Got witcher vikings blood and bone his dark material cursed all don't look nearly as cheap.
Agree, the final battle was a bit sloppy, shouldn't been decided by a girl that wasn't even accepted as an Aes Sedai. But it makes some sense - she gets linked with 2 of the most potent casters in the last 1000 years (Nynaeve and Egwene) and she never felt this power before and gets addicted to it and can't let go. Not saying that this was the best choice, would rather have Rand finish that battle, but on the other hand it also makes sense from a show viewpoint to spare this for another battle... I guess they want to spare his true power for later seasons, so it can amaze us then:) Cause really, if he is kind of God-Like in Season1 already, it will be hard to develop the story for another 7 seasons.
This had failure written all over it from day 1. There is simply no way to film 14 books. Not just 14 books but several of the early books pushed 1.000 + pages. I knew they would have to condense the heck out of the books but as soon as I saw they weren't just cutting huge portions of the books but adding pointless plots, I said nope. Zero interest. If they just stuck to the plot without adding anything I would be fine with condensing and straight up removing 100s of pages and characters. It drove me nuts how every step forward Rand would make, Jordan would push him back 2 steps. Or how as soon as a forsaken was removed from the chess board, they would be revived so progress would be lost. Condensing would not only be fine, it would be preferred and necessary but from everything I read, they made nonsensical changes that detracted from the story. Yep, zero interest in ever watching this which is a shame.
I'm really salty about all the hate the TV show is getting. Not because the show is great (yea, I actually think it's good... whatever), but because people are acting like the book 1 of the series was that amazing thing that got destroyed by the TV show. I can't speak for the whole WOT book series, but book 1 (which I've read) isn't that great. It's really boring lmao, till about 250 nothing happens
That's fair. I'm legitimately glad to hear from someone who liked the show, especially if you weren't a fan of the book. That's genuinely interesting to hear (thanks for watching!)
I never read the books and don't care what the show changed. It's impossible to please book fans since everyone imagines the books differently. I enjoyed S1 of The Wheel of Time more than S1 of Rings of Power.
I have read the books and I didn’t mind anything changed from the story in the first 6 episodes. Episode 7 was just slow. Yes, character development. But, it did not advance the story. Episode 8 - WTF? There was a reason that they all went to the Eye in the book. This departure was not helpful. The high point of the final episode was the preview of the Seanchan and that’s sad.
Yeah, having only Rand and Moraine go to the Eye was a bit deflating. That's meant to be a big moment for all those characters to face together, and they ended up being separated for arbitrary reasons
Great review, can't argue with any of it. Loial's hair is truly awful. It looks like a clown wig bought at a costume store. How could ears have cost too much? They are gonna have to make major improvements if they want this show to really be successful.
book series are so damn good, book 1 is just scratching the surface. As for the skinsuit "wheel of time" amazon series, I cant recall a single thing I have liked about it. It is an abomination that has corrupted everything that has made the books great.
Yeah they did a great job of portraying the warder bond like showing how it can basically serve as some sort of "straight conversion therapy". They turned something cool and unique into something totally cringe and laughably stupid. Why? Because for these fringe idiots in the industry: "ideology trumps art" - Quentin Tarantino
Not really sure what you mean by the conversion therapy comparison, but I haven't read past the first book yet so I don't know how much they actually changed the warder bond. It worked for me, but to each their own. Thanks for watching :)
@@Cam_Wolfe There is something called "G@y Conversion Therapy" which was devised as a supposed treatment for homosexu@lity. It is a very ignorant and misguided thing that most people rightfully condemn. Yet on this show which is run by people who would be the most vocal in their outrage against such a thing have no problem depicting that the exact opposite is possible, insinuating that a straight man can just suddenly become g@y apparently through the warder bond. That is what I meant by "Straight Conversion Therapy". Had the reverse been depicted instead these same people would be screaming their outrage with accusations of bigotry and homophob1a.
@@Dave3Dman My problem is that the guy would probably have gone on a bar rampage and lan would probaby have been the one who put him down when he like started carving his aes sedais name into some random dude whit a broken ceramic cup. But yeah the attrocious show makes it out that somehow if only he could accept being gangbanged by dudes that would somehow make everything fine.
@@Ailthas It kind of was. If he agreed to be bonded by Alanna, he would have to accept being with men. Like he couldn't be her warder without participating in her activities with her other warders.
I also enjoyed the trollocks in the first episode. But as for making large changes from the books, NO, they should just make their own story from scratch and stop using good stories to promote badly written adaptations with large, shitty changes.
I thought the show was pretty good overall but I agree that the relationships and character development felt really weak, with the exception of Moirane and Lan. But also, stop killing people if you’re just going to bring them back to life! It just de-values the entire magic system in my eyes, really pulled me out of the moment. I haven’t read the books so maybe it would make more sense with that context, but it just felt predictable and pointless.
This is what happens when you take a book as large as the first installment of the wheel of time and try to shove it all in to 8 one hour episodes. I have personally always wanted to read the series but never have so this felt like a good way of maybe making myself want to read it, all this did was make the books seem shallow and boring (which I know they are not) I feel like amazon grabbed the title because it was super popular and paid it respect by completely rushing thru the content and seemingly disappointing most everyone who has read the series or even just the first book.
The unabridged audiobook only lasts 12 hours. That's 12 1-hour episodes. Except half the book is detailed descriptions, which can be shown onscreen instantly, so it would only take 6 hours to put the entire story into a show. 7 12-episode seasons, 6 hours per book, all 14 books.
Not a bad review. I agree with most of what you said. The show was horrible to watch. Its pretty clear rafe hates the source material. In the books Lan and Nyneave isnt a thing until later in the books, that line by Lan isnt earned. Nyneave would never sleep with him. The forced relationships is one if the worst things about the show. They've taken away all their morals. The two rivers is a very conservative place, everybody isnt sleeping around, small villages dont work that way. The worst part was the mysandry.
Damn, Cam out here calling me out for being a nerd who also reads books That heartbreaking remark aside, I largely agree with you. Season one was rough, especially in the later episodes. I get production changed things dramatically and there are things that couldn't be avoided, but... geez. This was not great. My hope is high for Season two, because I know that sometimes it takes a while to find your footing in a show like this.
I'm glad you're optimistic about season 2, no sarcasm intended. I'm trying to be too, like you said, first seasons can sometimes be rocky but it's not impossible for them to get it back on track
8:58 The ears. Yes. IF they were trying to save budget, then props which look like real ears and they can move the way Loial used them to express his feelings in the books, I'd say that kind of props cost.
This show doesn't deserve any praise, because they didn't do a SINGLE thing correctly. I don't praise shows for basic film making competency, like lighting a set so you can see or building a large set (even their one large set is BAD and lazy) I don't give praise for big flashy special effects (which this show doesn't really have either) I give praise for WRITING and I give praise for good ACTING and direction, NONE OF THOSE THINGS ARE IN THIS SHOW AT ALL. The acting is garbage, I assume most of it is due to bad direction, and the writing is ABSOLUTELY ATROCIOUS! None of the decisions they made were necessary changes, the ONLY changes acceptable in an adaptation. The changes they made, the cuts they made, the RETCONS to the established LORE they made, NONE of it was necessary. Cutting a part that you could do a bit faster with the same outcome is perfectly fine. Or cutting a complicated scene that establishes something when you can do that in this other scene you already have to establish something else. That's fine. But they cut out HUGELY important things, hugely important CHARACTERS and much more to have half an episode focus on a dude deciding between being gay and death, and then when he chooses death having LAN MANDRAGORAN SCREAM AND CRY AND TWIST HIS NIPPLES!! NO! THIS SHOW DESERVES NO PRAISE! Even THE ROOM has good parts in it. Just because a show did something technically correct, doesn't mean you should praise it. It's like if you see a fully grown adult walking across the street without dying. THAT'S EXPECTED, YOU DON'T GO UP AND PRAISE THEM FOR IT! They change INSANELY important things. If Loial survives that stabbing, the Shadar Logoth dagger is no longer relevant to the story as it's no more harmful than a regular dagger. In the books one single tiny cut from that thing is LETHAL, and in SECONDS you are totally and completely fucked. So either they've killed Loial, or they've removed Padan Fain as a threat cause he doesn't matter, and the dagger isn't connected to Mat anymore cause they cut out Caemlyn so the ENTIRE SECOND BOOK has no justification for happening. That's an ENTIRE book they've just made irrelevant, and it's a VERY important book for Rand's journey. They've changed how the One Power works. They've seemed to remove the 2 halves of the power, Saidin and Saidar, as Rand is being taught to channel like a woman, Moiraine says she COULD teach Rand, and Rand uses an Angreal that Moiraine also used meaning it had to be for a woman. The power isn't two halves anymore, THAT'S THE ONE THING THAT ABSOLUTELY CANNOT BE CHANGED! Egwene is just REVIVING THE DEAD APPARENTLY! NOT ONLY IS SHE NOT A HEALER, I GUESS SHE'S JUST GOD AS WELL! 6 people, 2 of whom don't know how to channel AT ALL and 4 of whom are WILDERS are so insanely powerful they can destroy an enormous army of the shadow! So the power level of channeling in GENERAL is just insanely out of proportion. There's no longer any excuse for why the Blight still EXISTS. 10 of the Tower's best Aes Sedai should be sent out, link and just burn it off the planet with EASE they'd be so powerful. But if you just cut off an Aes Sedai's hands they're COMPLETELY HELPLESS! Because they skipped Caemlyn that's like, almost half a dozen characters that have NO SETUP for later in the series, as early as THE SECOND BOOK which there's no reason for it to happen without the dagger being bonded to Mat. Lan is Moiraine's WARDER and they have a magical connection that enables them to always know where their bonded Aes Sedai is, so I guess they removed that too if Lan can't TRACK HER. Moiraine might be stilled, so that'll probably be to ruin ANOTHER thing from the books or to make Nynaeve dramatically overpowered some more, she's already absolutely broken in terms of where she should be. Several of the Forsaken were just ignored. The Eye of the World was removed from the world as well. If they moved the dark one's prison and called it the eye, then I guess his actual prison has no reason to exist, so that breaks tons of things. Oh yeah one of the great generals is fucking DEAD now, so that SHATTERS future events. Not only that, they made him utterly INCOMPETENT because he's a man and we can't have competent men in this show! No, they all needs to constantly talk about feelings, twist their nipples and run away from scrawny girls holding swords when she's outnumbered. The White Cloaks are just cartoonishly evil, so that ruins future events as well. Hell THE FIRST EPISODE RUINS ALL OF PERRIN'S ENTIRE ARC BY HAVING HIM KILL HIS WIFE WHO SHOULDN'T EVEN EXIST! This single season just DESTROYS so much of this series without giving a single damn about it. They actively hate the Wheel of Time and they think they're improving it by adding in a ton of woke garbage and just changing whatever they feel like.
Rand is the only one who channeled, the rest can't. And the women shouldn't count because a woman can not be the dragon reborn because she can't channel saidin. It's a absolutely absurd. As you read more books this show will make you more angry.
To me, Amazon Prime's The Wheel of Time and Netflix's The Witcher are oases in the middle of the desert of Marvel superhero movies and TV shows, the News channel, musicals, vampire and werewolves shows and movies, Star Wars extended Universe, family dramas, school dramas, talk shows, zombie apocalypse genre and sit-coms.
A completely soulless cash grab that shows zero reverence or regard for the original source material. And it doesn't even hold up on its own. Poor pacing, poor exposition, too many examples of trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole so you can get from point A to point B in the story conveniently. Yeah, no thanks. It's a no for me. 2/10
![I Wish They Hadn't Adapted The Wheel of Time | SPOILERY Thoughts On The Show [CC]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/hQgDleHFjFs/mqdefault.jpg)
I just want to say, seeing as this video is getting a lot more views than I normally do, that despite the reception to this show being (understandably) the most contentious I've seen in a LONG time... pretty much no one so far has blown up AT me for my thoughts and I GENUINELY appreciate that, so thanks! I mean I agree with almost all of you anyway haha, but I know the WoT book series is very dear to a lot of people, and while I can't relate to that (being a new fan) I really do appreciate you all watching and hearing me out nonetheless. Thanks again!
The channeling was terrible, and it was supposed to be weaving threads of the 5 powers, which is why the powers are called weaves.
The Tarwin's Gap never happened the Shienaran were in the process or charged the trollocks, and rand Traveled to Tarwin's Gap and single-handedly decimated the darkspawn. None of the women were involved cause they were getting the crap beat out of them by one of the Forsaken.
Now as to what happened in the show, it is impossible to burn out while in a a circle, it is literally one of the safety measures, or power blocks, inherent to a circles properties. Also death can not be "cured" it wasn't even passable in the time of Wonders.
Padan fain is the one to stab Loail which means he used the shadar logoth blade, which has a fatal corruption.
I don't care about changes from the source material either. The problem with this show is that it stunk from every conceivable perspective, regardless of the source material.
The best part of the show is the reviews trashing the show.
The two major book scenes in the show (weep for Manetheren and the Lan/Nynaeve scene) Rafe really had to fight for. I wonder how much of Loial's scenes got cut because he lost the fight.
Here is my summary: Loial, an Ogier, is defenseless and useless. Perrin is a liar and a wimp. Rand (who?) suddenly mastered control of channeling (up to now only accidental while under extreme stress). Nynaeve's anger block preventing her from channeling (made clear during the other episodes) suddenly vanished and she could channel and surrender her flows in a circle. Lan who knows Moiraine like nobody else cannot track her, but a novice Nynaeve can. Padan Fain teleported the dagger to him (was with Lan and Moiraine last). Egwene is strong in healing. A circle does not protect the members in it and can burn out people against their will. Sigh. It is almost as if they are changing every single little thing from the books, except for the names of the characters and places. More than that they ignore the very foundations they themselves laid earlier in the series (Nynaeve). And Rand... he was such a background character the whole time that by the time it came for him to shine nobody cared less because he is still a stranger to the viewers. If he died in that scene I bet you non-readers would have felt "oh, that is too bad, he seemed like a nice lad" and moved on.
I swear the writters are just trying to re-write everthing they didn't like about the books and big shock, it sucks.
@@ashinch0r - The taint of woke.
@@futurewavecs It's crazy because outside of rand almost every other powerful character is female in the books.
wait...Rand mastered channeling? I thought he got suckered into accidently breaking a seal and then laughed at by saddam hussein
It genuinely did seem like they went out of their way to make sure no scene was the same as in the books. Everything seemingly had to be at least a bit different for some reason
There's such a gargantuan amount of source material to use for the show it is completely baffling to me that they made such unnecessary and ridiculous changes. Instead of using character and plot elements that are already laid out in the story they altered things for no good reason that don't improve on the storyline. Perrin being married at the beginning of the show is a good example, why in the fuck did that have to be included? Later on in the books it's important that he has never married and is inexperienced with relationships. Blood and bloody ashes smh
Rafe did Lews Therin dirty. Instead of our returning from Vietnam war hero like Jordan had him who goes mad after having a desperate victory charging hills in the jungle we have an arrogant fool who destroys the world. This character treatment was done to each male character, the source, the theme of WOT was changed even from men and women both war and need eachother to men suck. Fire Rafe! Hire Arcane showrunners.
Yeeeeah, have to agree with you there. After finishing the show, I still don't see why it was necessary at all to have the whole "Perrin accidentally kills his wife" sub plot. Seems like a bad attempt to make him more interesting of a character (like he wasn't already interesting enough)
@@Cam_Wolfe it was the only thing perrin did all season
@@Cam_Wolfe They could have just kept Alias and gone more into the wolfbrethren stuff. smdh. They had plenty to work with.
Yes, thank you. ANd what's up with Rand and Egwene hooking up, wtf? The show is unbearable.
The Loial "death" is even worse when you consider he was stabbed with the Shadar Logoth dagger (instant death). So either he is dead, or in addition to being another cheap fake out, it breaks the lore. Just needlessly awful writing.
The CW love triangle was awful YA filler that isn't in the book.
Oh yeah lol
the love angles are just vomitous
If the dagger is no more harmful than a normal dagger and since Mat isn't connected to it anymore, the entire second book has no justification for happening at all.
The ONLY REASON Rand goes to hunt for Padan Fain, is because he took the dagger, which is currently killing Mat by its absence. Rand was ready to disappear because he can channel and would go crazy and didn't want to hurt anyone. If there's no personal risk to Mat's life to motivate him, there's no justification to stop him from leaving to be a hermit.
Think of ALL the things that happen in the second book, now NONE of it can happen with Rand, Mat and Perrin involved cause none of them have any reason to chase after a horn they don't care about.
All so they could have a fakeout scare.
One of TWO in this single fucking episode, remember Nynaeve DIES and is brought back to life by EGWENE in the same episode!
@@haku8135 They need to redo the whole first season with a completely different cast and story. They messed it up big time.
Yes the choice to kill Loial was a dumb decision. Particularly since Ogier are pacifist by choice but powerful nearly unstoppable juggernauts when they decide to fight
It's crazy that the animated shorts were better than the actual show.
That's not even true and you stole that comment
@@coin2039 nope. The shorts was overall more enjoyable than all the highlights of the series.
The show was a bust for me. They had source material readily available to make this an amazing series. Instead they deviated tremendously with no character development and it was rushed. I understand that TV adaptions require some changes from books but this was way out in left field. It was Meh for me as well.
100% agree
Jeff Bezos wanted his Game of Thrones. He got it, the last 2 seasons of it anyway. This show has little to offer, I wanted to like it but I have doubts they'll do good in S2, it'll be just more of what we've already seen.
I'm gonna cross my fingers that they do better next season 😂 with this much backlash I would think they will try hiring some writers that have experience in more successful shows/movies. I guess we'll have to wait and see
@@Cam_Wolfe They have already written and shot most of season two, don't count on any improvement.
@@ashinch0r and they are already committed to a production model. the chance of drastic improvement is zero
As someone who hasn’t read the books, I was baffled that five channelers (at least two of which were novices) could defeat 20,000 trollocs or whatever, but the Aes Sedai and their warders struggled-suffering multiple casualties-against Logain’s menagerie of followers.
It is made worse when you consider there was no Aes Sedai at the gap so the channelers they found in the town would have been those put out of the tower who failed to become Aes Sedai and didn't have high potential.
@John Jaxson Correction... At this point, Egwene and Nynaeve have great POTENTIAL... which still requires development... not simply training to develop skill, but "exercise" to develop that potential strength.
At this point, they are still supposed to be quite weak, in terms of actual power that they can use.
My favorite thing about this review is that you admit you only read book one and still feel in love with Loial. The ending he got was for shock value, that's isn't something you can blame on anything else other than shitty writing
Loial was Robert Jordan inserting himself into the story. Rafe hates the source material so killing off Jordan's lore, characters, locations, and plot along with likely a fake out death makes sense to complete the assassination of the Wheel of Time.
They definitely did Loial dirty, and of all characters to treat poorly he should have been one of the last 😔
Your comment makes me realize that yes, Rafe has metaphorically killed Jordan's vision by offing Loial.
@@Cam_Wolfe If it hasn't already been said in another comment, Loial isn't dead. He can be seen moving in a shot after he had been stabbed.
@@haplozetetic9519 the dagger is suppose to be a 100 percent death if you even get a scratch by it. In books people die in moments after a cut unless they are bonded to the dagger. Rafe hates the books at this point with these changes.
@@jonahdav9589 That episode was pretty messed up for various reasons, but the dagger not killing the way it did in the books needs to be explained. I hope they listen to the complaints of viewers and do better in the future.
A half baked woke fest of a show.
The downplaying of the dragon reborn's powers and overall impact in favor of Egwene and Nyneve power trips, was a pointless exercise.
Mm yeah I don't have any problem with them making Nynaeve and Egwene more powerful, but them potentially being the dragon reborn doesn't make any sense when they establish that the madness specifically targets male channelers
@@Cam_Wolfe Nynaeve's group heal while simultaneously taking out the false dragon in Ep 4 was way too much way too soon. It left no room for gradual development of magical power.
@@Cam_Wolfe they really don't need to be more powerful.. Nyneave is already literally the most powerful female channeller in the series, second in power only to rand himself, and egwene is only second to nyneave. The PROBLEM is that they are uber powerful at the very beginning of the series with no training at all beyond moiraine teach egwene to embrace saidar. Breaking fundamental rules of the power in episode 4 and 8. Thats what's not okay
I have read the whole series of books a few times and can in fact still remember buying TEOTW when it was first published back in 1990. My overall feelings toward the adaptation is one of total disappointment. I honestly believe that either Rafe or the execs at Amazon have totally ruined something that could have been great. This propensity towards going overboard with the wokeness in a story that was already pretty woke with very strong female characters and organisations has totally ruined it for me. Right from the off in the first episode you had The Women's Circle in the Two Rivers adequately portrayed but no sign of the men's Village Council. Then when the trollocs attacked at Bel Tine, it was the women who banded together to kill a trolloc. The men just ran about screaming and dying. That set alarm bells off in my head. When they then started hinting that the Dragon Reborn could be female it baffled the hell out of me. Having Perrin married ruins a later story arc with Faile. Min being, by the looks of it, about 20 years older than Rand ruins another story arc, when in the books she is only 3 years older. Having those 5 female channelers destroying 10,000 - 20,000 trollocs and 50 shades, instead of it being the Dragon Reborn, which then alerts some of the survivors of the battle to his coming, again passed the act over to women. Not content with Aes Sedai, the Women's Cicle, The Maidens Of The Spear, The Wise Ones, The Kin or Knitting Circle, The Queen Of Andor, The Women of Ebou Dar, The Sea Folk, The Sul'dam and Damane all being female with plenty of story arcs, they felt it necessary to infringe on the male story arcs too. Season 2 is already nearly finished filming so I can't see any of this being altered or readdressed. Shame but I can't see this series lasting more than 3 seasons before being dropped.
they couldn't even do decent CGI
Well said mate!
I agree 100%. The writers and produce have basterdized TWOT with man shaming the men in the book because all they care about is injecting their Woke SJW BS into it. It is amazing how many strong woman are in the books in powerful positions and the talentless SJW series creators have to trash the men's rolls to get their SJW fix. This show is trash and hijacker the name of TWOT to sell tickets to sucker viewers into watching their pathetic SJW propaganda.
They already confirmed 3 seasons of WOT, I confirmed season 3 will be the last.
With this kind of budget a serie must connect with a some audiance.
And a dont see how , non-fantasy viewers, can connect with this kind of show.
Sadly, WOT as a tv show, is a wasted opportunity
A wasted opportunity is a good way to put it. I'm glad they decided to adapt it, but there's no going back on some of the poor choices they made, sadly
Yep season 3 at most. Pity, the actors are good though. #wreckitrafe
(Don't take my wall of text as criticism, these are just a few points that came to my mind when I was watching your review)
The idea that some people expected a "1 to 1 adaptation with no changes whatsoever" and literally couldn't grasp that an adaptation will always need changes feels like a straw man argument that the vehement show defenders started throwing around because it's an easy way to paint your opposition as dumbasses. I personally haven't seen anyone actually demand this mythical "1 to 1 adaptation" and the people who have been critical of the changes have acknowledged that changes were always going to happen and they simply disagree with the changes the show ended up making (for example, good changes would've been condensing and combining the events or giving more character interactions to flesh out their relationships more, whereas the show went for complete reimagining of the lore and story and assassinated almost every character). A vast majority of "book purists" would've been fine with a *lot* of changes as long as they were good and made sense, but unfortunately the show failed at that.
Also, the "Dragon reveal" might have felt more impactful in the show because in the books it was never supposed to be a "mystery" in the first place. That was entirely invented for the show. The drama around the Dragon in the books is centered around how Rand deals with accepting it and how he manages with the sudden realization that he's essentially guaranteed to go mad and destroy the world.
And lastly, while the line Lan said to Nynaeve is nice and lifted straight from the books, it also changes the context around it which makes it fall flat on its face in the show. It felt like an easter egg for the book readers by writers who didn't quite understand why he said that. For comparison: in the books, Lan and Nynaeve both realize their budding mutual attraction (this is very subtle, but you can actually spot when it starts and it's pretty clear in their interactions from that point onwards), but Lan refuses her because he's sworn to fight against the Shadow in a battle he cannot win. It's a bittersweet moment of Lan choosing not to hurt Nynaeve and intending to cut their romance before it can properly start, because he believes he's destined to die before long and won't "give her the sure knowledge of widow's black as her brideprice". In the show, however, they have already banged the night before and then Lan suddenly decides that "nah, nevermind". He feels like a major asshole who just pumped and dumped her.
Brilliant points. (Though I wouldn't call Nyneave and Lans buildup subtle)
@@rasmusforchhammer9557 It's more obvious on a reread when you know to look for it, but it's easy to miss the first time.
"Ideology trumps art." - Quentin Tarantino
There is your answer from a guy who knows more about the industry than pretty much anyone and summed up the problem in 3 words. That is the reason for all the absolute crap in this show.
Uh...what?
ideology isn't the reason for the bad production, incompetence is
@@lukaszzylik4437 what's so hard to understand? Clear feminism, misandry and multiculturalism in places where it makes no sense, just for the sake of it. Like how do you explain Emond's field being so diverse? A village at the end of the world, that barely gets a peddler every year and has been like this for over 2000 years has either been practicing racial segregation or else they would have all blended together over the generations
Having read all of the source material it dosn't really help understand what they've done. They have broken every concept from the book from the basic idea of saidin and saidar.
You really are easy to please, I agree with you on that. The show went woke in the first 40 seconds and got worse and worse. I do not see how a fantasy show that keeps hating on men is a good representation of a book series that propagates the idea of "when men and women work together we are better than apart". Allowing their misandrist ways by being too understanding only helps their male hating agenda.
So true. This was a man hating show to make even Disney jealous. The opening monologue set the stage for all 8 episodes which culminated in rand having his spot light stolen at the end. All this talk of the dragon reborn and they stole what he did to the trolloc army and gave it to the women effectively neutering his character. The show was tolerable at best up til episode 8 but that one was just a kick in the groin. So much unnecessary changes to push an obvious agenda that has no place in a story that's already progressive and way ahead of its time. This is not the wheel of time or a different turning of the wheel. This was just a shit show.
I dont understand why they hate money or the paying customer. I am starting to think Amazom lost its way that the customer is first
@@Tom-Servo when you saw the shorts and the focus was on Moiraine I knew it was going to be more woke bs, the books series itself has very strong women, I don't understand why they had to shift the dynamic between men and women. Then there was the casting in general was poor, it got the woke wash Edmunds field is meant to be largely homogenous (blood of mithrandir) with Rand standing out due to his heritage. There is plenty of cultural diversity as the story progresses and the world is explored.
@@danielm6871 I gotta say, "blood of mithrandir" is a hilarious typo. Agreed on the points.
@@danielm6871 because the 3 main characters AND the DR are all men. That won't fly for modern viewers. I know the book has strong female characters but Rafe had to get his feminism theme in right off the bat.
Do you know if the books ever describe the new hilt Rand has put on Laman’s Blade? Is it a katana styled hilt like on the cover of Knife of Dreams? Or is it a more typical medieval European styled hilt?
Just a comment, @17:22 you said that maybe first season doesn't makes sense "if you haven't read the books".
Na, It doesn't make sense at all. I've read the whole series, prequel and played the TTRPG and I'm really disappointed with the show. Little bit angry actually.
I'm convinced that the screenwriter has not read the series. He doesn't get the books. He was telling his own, worse story.
I think you said it so well regarding an adaptation “Changes will happen. I don’t mind changes as long as they make sense and they make the show better.” I agree 💯 What happened with this show, neither happened and it just kept getting worse.
The contention isn't about screen adaptations requiring changes from the source material - 99.9% of people get that. What it is about is a wonderful fantasy book series (I've read all the books) that has had the heart ripped out of it and been completely changed in all but name. I am seriously wondering if some of those praising it are bots. The show is awful. I cannot think of a single aspect they got right. Even the best parts are mediocre. And it's not just the poor creation but the insertion into the storyline of an entirely foreign and woke agenda. No respect for the spirit, theme, story or characters of the books at all. The books rank among the best fantasy series, the show among the worst of adaptations. Ruined by a team who clearly have no love for the books (and I would challenge the claim that they have read them) and simply wanted to use them as a vehicle for their own ideologically driven "fan fiction" (though I doubt they are fans).
I couldn't agree more. This whole adaptation they have gone through has been more of a sad attempt of the show writers to fix their believed failings of the original story. The show is an absolute loss.
I think Jordan didn’t even try to REALLY make a twist out of who is the Dragon Reborn. It’s pretty much confirmed when Rand channels to escape the tavern basement in the middle of the book. The books did show his denial of that though and how he’s struggling to not be the Dragon. TV pretty much missed that altogether, instead replacing Rand’s own struggles with his romantic problems and shifting the suspicion of being a dragon to Mat, who was a “channeling” red herring. And yeah, that didn’t work at all.
Oh, and btw, you are right. The teenage drama love triangle wasn’t a thing in the books. But the show runner confirmed it’s gonna continue in the show. Yeaaaah.
well, the opening scene is on Rand and Tam walking into town, so it's obvious who the main character is
I mean, the fact that 90% of the book is from his pov and from the beginning it's already made clear he looks different from the other Emonds Fielders.. it's pretty obvious who the dragon is from the get go.
IMO by making it a mystery they ruined all of the EF5. Not just Rand.
@@hellgast0 yeah, I’m not sure Perrin and Rand are even friends at this point. Same goes for Mat, cause we didn’t get any of their journey to Caemlyn and how they looked out for each other.
Yeah - I wanted this to be so much better - and mate, tbh, with you only having read the 1st book there are a thousand other ways that you don't even know about yet in which they have ruined, yeah ruined, future arcs/stories/AMAZING MOMENTS. It's beyond frustrating. And the Loial thing is also my number 1 gripe. Mostly because of the BS reasoning they gave! 'Yeah we wanted him on screen more so couldnt spend all that money' but then they promptly cut half his damn scenes anyway, to insert whatever ideological touch point they were shooting for that episode, or some more teen drama nonsense. That irritates me even more than other things that I literally despise. I still think it can be fixed, but the fact they already started shooting S2 before getting feedback, which clearly, they needed - is a massive red flag.
Oh dang, I guess as I keep reading I might end up disliking the show even more 😂
@@Cam_Wolfe dude thats a win, you should absolutely keep reading, book 2 is inside the top 3 of the entire series for me personally. And it's ok, as Sando put it - different turning or something, which I think is a cop out tbh but - if it helps, I guess it helps. Just another reminder that people should just read more books because - the written word is always, always better than the screen. And thank god for that.
I have so many questions!!
1: Wtf were they thinking of Mat? He ornery, charming, a ladies man and
Very loyal to his friends.
2 : the ways?
Sometimes changes are neccessary and we understand that. However you don't rewrite the damn book. The only thing they got right was the names of the characters and the cities. And that's just about it. They made sure to paint it with a bunch of woke homosexuality that never happened throughout the story but couldn't stay more true to the story.
"He exerts main dude energy." LOL! You got me laughing with my morning coffee, Cam. I haven't watched this yet, but the reviews have been very entertaining. Loial's makeup looks cheap, and so do the rest of the costumes.
Yeah, one of the thoughts I had throughout my watch of the series was, "Rand is giving me some serious Anakin Skywalker vibes here." Having finished off the series, I'm still not sure why, and I have no idea if that's a good thing or not...
Haha "entertaining" is one way to put it 😂 I've never seen such a contentious reception to a show before, oof
@@Cam_Wolfe I don't understand how anyone can like it. The CGI and cinematography are complete trash. I don't even care that they changed the plot, but the writing is garbage too.
EDIT: Grammar
1.) The showrunner confirmed that Loial didn't die. (Why he did that, I don't know.) But another problem with this, is that they're then playing loose with yet another aspect of the lore: the Shadar Logoth Dagger. That thing is supposed to be lethal. Even a scratch should kill.
Which in itself is perhaps not an issue. Okay, the dagger isn't as lethal. That removes a ton of tension from all future confrontations with Padan Fain. But it does present a problem depending on where they're going with the overall narrative, which involves situations where the lethality of the dagger is INTEGRAL to story events.
Maybe they'll cut that out entirely. But if they were going to do that, there really isn't much purpose for Fain in the narrative to be honest.
2.) Rand as the Dragon Reborn...... The problem with them making it a huge mystery is that it required them hiding numerous character moments for Rand. His entire internal conflict of not knowing who his parents are is gone because it would have made him even more obvious than he already was.
Then the show drops that insanely fast montage of past events in episode 7, revealing that we didn't see Rand channeling in past events, which is a problem because there was no foreshadowing that Rand was an unreliable narrator/POV. The show just says, "Ha! You didn't see him channeling because we didn't put the VFX in those scenes! Fooled you!"
It's cheap.
3.) It seems like Rafe Judkins needed better support. He was clearly trying to set-up things with Lan, Moiraine, and the warder bond in Episode 5. And White Tower politics in general in Episodes 4-6.
But the problem is, he only had 8 episodes for the season and hadn't really set up Emond's Field properly, nor the relationships between the Emond's Field Five. **Episode runtime is consumed with writers choices that spent a lot of time focused on things that didn't even matter in the season finale!** Judkins was too busy setting up future stuff when he should have been focused more on the fundamentals of a solid Season 1. And no one on his team brought this to their attention.
4.) The showrunner has made..... choices when it comes to the magic system. Achievements in the One Power are spontaneous and not connected to any sort of character growth or development. In the books, characters need to train up before they get the ability to pull off most of the amazing things they end up doing. In the show?
Nynaeve mass heals an entire room of people at a distance before she even knows she can channel, let alone go through any training. 5 untrained channelers not only figured out how to make a circle, but nuked tens of thousands of trollocs. Egwene healed Nynaeve from death? Being burned out? When the story needs something, the One Power makes it happen, whether or not the characters involved have trained or not.
Not to mention they've oversimplified the One Power. In the books, there is a lot in the story around people discovering new "weaves" of the Power, of which there are 5 Powers. Really, it wouldn't have been that hard to have the writers, concept artists, and VFX team sit down and plot out the major weaves and what they would look like. A day or two and they could have knocked it out and had a framework for the entire show's run. There's already work out there on this!
Source: static.wikia.nocookie.net/wot/images/a/a9/Moiraine_saliba2.jpg/revision/latest/smart/width/250/height/250?cb=20091219031624
Instead, we got..... white threads and no weaves. Lazy as f--k.
5.) Seeing the attack on Winternight: In the show? The trolloc attack is a chaotic mess. Trollocs are just there killing anyone, burning everything down. And it was a spectacle for sure, but mishandling this simple event led to the Emond's Field Five's departure from the village coming off forced when it didn't have to.
Book Moiraine and Book Lan pointed out to a stubborn Rand that the trolloc raid in the books was actually pretty targeted. Trollocs were largely ignoring most people except at the targeted houses of Perrin, Mat, & Rand. It provided a believable reason why the stubborn Two Rivers boys would leave Emond's Field. Egwene joined up out of a sense of adventure and Moiraine accepted her because she could sense she had the "spark" and would need training in the One Power or else she might die.
In the show? They didn't have that reason because they decided to have the Trollocs indiscriminately attack everything and everyone. Moiraine just up and tells them that one of them is TDR, which is a problem of its own, and overall sloppy as f--k.
As someone who only read the first book, you exist in this in between space where you were able to see the all of the ways that they got the first book right and wrong, but you weren't able to see, in real time, the places where they destroyed huge plot points from the future books. So many things that should happen in this story won't now, and book readers already know because the starting points of these future storylines was supposed to happen this season and can't be put in later, because of spoilers that I won't mention. So, I think people who know the plots of the future books have less faith for season 2 and 3 because they already know how much the plots of two books have been screwed up by the events of this season. This is not to say that the show needs to match the books, but what I'm saying is the general plots of books two and three don't even make sense from where the show is at the end of season one.
Changing the lore from the books a bit so the tv-adaptation has a better flow or something like that I think everyone can understand that especially if there is so much lore and perhaps an impossible task to cram it all in the tv show. But what the showrunners did to the source material has absolutely nothing to do with that AT ALL! Face it, it's all agenda driven nonsense. I think you are way too easy on the showrunners.
I have read all 14 (15) books of the Wheel of Time 3 times. This show has been hijacked by the extreme left SJW cult. It started with the race swapping casting choices. If you make such insane decisions that's immediately proof no one in the production team holds high standards. I called it 2 years ago this show was going to be crap just by seeing the forced diversity cast because the kind of people that thinks forced diversity is more important than logic world building doesn't give a crap about consistency or quality. They only care about their agenda and woke boxes.
The story takes place in a medieval fantasy setting. The story is grounded. You don't infuse that fantasy world with current day politics. You just don't. A medieval fantasy story is not the stage at all for extreme left SJW feminist woke talking points to infuse. It's incredibly stupid to create a medieval world where in a remote medieval village that hasn't seen strangers or tax collectors for centuries that if you're a white person that your neighbors can be Bruce Lee and Mike Tyson. It's so dumb. These kind of medieval fantasy stories are part of western culture. WESTERN culture. It has it roots in European history. The main continent of the Wheel of Time is a reflection of Europe in medieval time with fantasy elements added. If you think black people should have black culture, Asian people should have Asian culture then you also wouldn't have a problem with white/European people to have white/western/European culture or whatever you want to call it. The forced diversity in this tv-show is insane. In current day you cannot find a village with that amount of diversity and where they also live happy together let alone in a time where the fastest way to travel is by horse. It's just stupid and it kills the believability of the world the story takes place in. Everybody knows that humans from different races live separately in all corners of the world and that it has logical biological reasons why we look different because of the amount of generations every human race has lived in the same area. Nothing racist about that just facts. Robert Jordan also described this in his books. The people from Emondsfield has brown/black hair with brown eyes like you would expect from French/Swiss/Italian people. Rhand is the one in the village that looks different because he looks more Dutch/Scandinavic. The people that live around the south coast they have more coppery skin. The people from Shara are more Middle-Eastern like and well the Aiel look like the white people from the Australian Mad Max people wandering in the dessert. The Seanchan are not white.
Once our Emondfield hero's leave their village and venture into the world they will meet a lot of people from different backgrounds, cultures, races but you have to travel before you can see the changes just like it is in the real world. Even now as a Dutchman I can see the changes in the general population if I drive south through Belgium to French. People gradually will become shorter, have more darker hair. Look more French. It's just the way it is. So if diversity is so important for you then the source material already has plenty in it. You just have to wait a bit for our adventurers to travel that far.
Then we have the over the top feminism which is also insane. In the books the story is more or less about finding balance again between men & women and good & evil. The balance for men & women has become completely corrupted because the male side of the One Power has been corrupted by the Dark One so male channelers will become insane and die. In the books the men have to fight to regain their position next to the female channelers. In the tv-show they made every male character into an idiot for the sole purpose of telling that men are bad and women are good. It's so obvious. Mart Cauthon is a good hearted scoundrel that likes to play pranks. In the tv-show he is low life thief. Perrin is a gentle giant that overthinks stuff because he doesn't want to make hasty decisions. In the tv-show he is a dumb cowardly oaf that accidentilly killed his wife (which didnt exist in the books). Rhand is the lead character in the books. He is basically you, the reader. In the tv-show he is a minor character and he doesn't even gets to play the hero in the last episode. Rhand is the one that kills Aginor and all the trollocks in the canyon saving the border army. But noooo we can't have a straight white male be the hero... the women has to be the hero in the tv-show because female empowerment reasons bladiebla. Thom Merrilin in the books is a charming gleeman, a great singer, a story-teller, an acrobat, a juggler. In the tv-show he is some sort of deranged cowboy.
Lan in the books is a stoic masculine character. Tall with long hair that is starting to grey at his temples. Stone cold chilling BLUE eyes. He doesn't talk much. He is bound to Moiraine as her warder as the last king of a kingdom that doesnt exist anymore. He doesnt have a reason to live. It takes Nynaeve books to break down the wall that Lan pulled up around himself. In the tv-show he is whiny talkative bitch that rips his shirt open at a funeral where a fellow warder commited suicide after his 1st night of gay sex. Lord Angelmar welcomes every Aes Sedai in the books because they are most welcome fighting against the monsters from the Blight. In the tv-show they have to depict him as toxic masculinity because all men in this tv-show has te be made either stupid or bad to make the women look better.
Even in the very 1st episode where you hear the voice over of Moiraine talking about the arrogance of men that caused all the problems. In the books it was a woman that had the idea to try to make a bore into the new well of magic that can be handled by both male and female channelers before they found out that new well was the Dark One. It was Lews Therin and a lot of male channelers that tried to close it down again. They did succeed but at the cost that the male side of the power was from now on tainted. But the tv-show cannot let a woman be seen as a bad person. Noooo. The men has to be arrogant.
The entirety of this tv adaptation is bad because on every department of this show they hired forced diversity. They did not hire based on skill, merit or experience. No they hired based on gender, race and sex. And most probably also on your political views. These buffoons probably think high and mighty of themselves but basically all they did were racist, sexist and discriminatory decisions.
If you don't hire the best writers you get sloppy story telling and badly written character development. You also have to rewrite a lot of stuff that at the end will cost you a lot more money. If you don't hire the best casting directors or in this case extreme left wing sjw casting directors you will get a lot of race, gender, sex swapping and that will never do the story or the world building any good. It just makes everything worse. But these don't care about holding high standards. They only care about their agendas.
If you don't hire the best producers and financial people then you will have to spend a lot more money that could cost a lot less if you would have hired people based on their skills and experience. All that money that could have been saved, could be spend in areas where it was desperately needed. If you hire artists, special effects people, creatives etc all based on their gender, race etc and not their skills and experience, then everything will take twice as long to be completed. It probably needs to be redone more than 2 times because it will look like shit and then the end result will probably still look mediocre because there is no more money left.
The showrunners of the Wheel of Time had such a big advantage over Game of Thrones because the books were already finished for years. The showrunners of Game of Thrones fucked up when they ran out of source material. A problem the Wheel of Time doesn't have. They even released a companion book with more details. Yet they decided to destroy the Wheel of Time tv-show by giving the show to a team of SJW's. The extrem left SJW feminist types cannot create something themselves and make it into something successful. They can only take something that has been made successful already created by a non-SJW and then infest it with their own insane political agendas. The SJW-cult is a cancer on society. They destroyed Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr Who, Terminator, LastofUs and now the Wheel of Time. And from what I have heard the Lord of the Rings will be next to be destroyed.
The Wheel of Time is a dumpster fire and a complete atrocity/abomination of Robert Jordans beloved work.
Absolutely true. These talentless SJW woke cultists are baterdizing ever masterpiece the can get their hands on. LOTR is the next one they are taking a huge SJW Woke dump all over. I hope people actually decided to not even click on it to view it because support these SJW cultist by validating watching their propaganda is a great way to having them keep doing this.
Imagine if you took a African folk lore fantasy and injected all white people into. Yet this is what they intentionally did to this series. I actually thought the actors for the most part were good considering but could I could not get past the fact that they were cast for their skin color and SJW diversity. The 2 rivers cast has more ethnic diversity than you see at NY international Airport.
Watched the LOTR and The Hobbit films without reading the books, watched Netflix's The Witcher without playing the Witcher video games or reading The Witcher, watched Legend of the Seeker without reading the Sword of Truth books, but I love and enjoy the adaptations of the books while using the books as references to understand the lore of the books and their adaptations. The outcome for me watching the Wheel of Time without reading the books first and still enjoying the series will go the same way.
If you read the books you could understand why they skipped certain things and why they made certain things much more awesome than they were. I am talking about all the other series.... And sometimes if you did not read book 8.... well you made a bobo.... The books are better usualy. But usualy the "adaption" does not try to murder the books and piss all over everything that was in the first one.
maybe you should watch it before writing a review
@@magnusarsland6887 I don't care. I only used the books as reference to better understand the lore.
The magic being weaved like thread in the Trollic attack is actually part of the story. It’s just not in the first book since it’s mostly from Rand’s perspective. Once Rand and the other start to learn to channel, weaving the threads of different elements (earth,air,fire,water,spirit) becomes important and more detailed in the books.
Oh that's cool as!
It’s not my idea someone else said it but doesn’t Loial look like a cracked out Burger King’s King???
I was enjoying this show. I was unhappy with some changes but I overall I was like “this is alright.” Then Episode 8 happened. It was terrible.
Well at least you enjoyed it for the most part! Genuinely. I'm not going to try and convince anyone they shouldn't have enjoyed something. But yeah, that last ep was something else 😂
For me, the biggest issue I had with the series is that it felt rushed. Eight one hour episodes is not a lot of time to get a feel for the characters and the grand story that the series was telling, even from the first book. While the start of the series was great (despite some rather... offputting casting choices - the actors and actresses all did an excellent job with their characters, it just didn't feel like the setting of the Wheel of Time and particularly Two Rivers was nearly as diverse as they are in the show), the show really could have done without the "one month later" timeskip halfway through, if only so we could see Matt's slow descent into madness and paranoia as well as the skills that the two were developing to help them get by, as well as getting a better feel for Perrin and Egwene's relationship and seeing the growing relationship between Nanaeve and Lan.
I also wish we had gotten to see more of the Children of the Light (because they did such a great job making them so brutally cruel in the few times they appeared) and the Tuatha'an (for the opposite reason), and Loial's presence was criminally underserved. The political landscape of the White Tower could also have done with more fleshing out, and... Well, the point is, the entire thing could have used more time. I understand why that can be problematic in today's TV landscape of quarter to half half length seasons (6-13 episodes) - but if you're not willing to put in a full length season for what is, for many, the iconic epic fantasy series, you should probably think about looking at a story that doesn't require 60+ hours to appropriately tell the story. If you try, you're just going to end up with something that is unsatisfying for everyone (to paraphrase something I saw years and years ago - take the time needed to tell the story you want to tell. Don't try to stretch or shrink it to fit an arbitrary run time, give it the time it needs. No more, no less.)
Absolutely! It feels like they locked themselves into finishing the season with The Eye of the World, regardless of how many (or few) episodes they were given to film. They should have just taken their time
@@Cam_Wolfe and hired some actual writers and producers
I don't think the identity of the dragon reborn was ever really meant to be a mystery to the reader in the books which I liked because it is very hard to fool a reader or a watcher without simply neutering the character ( case and point)
Oh come! Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, Netflix's Witcher, Game of Thrones, Jurassic Park, Legend of the Seeker, Merlin TV series, Robin Hood movies and TV series, adaptations of Sherlock Holmes and the Shannara Chronicles are not 100% percent like the books that they are based on since the directors and producers have taken liberties to make changes when adapting a book to movie/TV series on the big screen, but they are still success adaptations of books. Expect the same for Wheel of the Time TV series and Amazon's LOTR prequel series.
5 untrained chanellers shouldn't have been able to link at all. That was pathetic.
Rafe Judkins took alot of young men's favorite fantasy hero and turned him into a simp so he could focus the story on the powerful women.....yay. I honestly though he was going to make Egwene the Dragon Reborn. It probably would have been better if he had, as he did nothing nearly as impressive as what the women did at Tarwin's Gap. So bad
I thought he was going to go with the whole five-part dragon and have all of them "involved." As if they aren't in the books, but hey, this is Rafe's fan-fic instead of the Wheel of Time, so the worst is to be expected.
I thought the show was horrible. They had 3 episodes of filler in an 8 episode season and then said they didn't have enough time to do the main story justice. That's inexcusable. They didn't include enough world building to build the stakes, and repeatedly undermined the tension. Machin Shin and the Blight were pathetic, they seemed to forget that the villagers were being pursued after a few episodes, they trivialized healing, and featured repeated fake out deaths. The show can't stand on it's own because it doesn't provide enough context, but the changes they made makes the show a substantially worse story than the book, so it doesn't have a clear audience. The plot was completely unjustified, and on several occasions was delivered to the audience as bad exposition from one of the characters, usually Moraine. The characters made weird, unsupported claims, and everyone just took them at face value. They removed the character arc, development, most of the positive character traits, motivation, emotional investment, and agency from the main cast, and made Moraine the main character. They changed the message from men and women should work together to men are bad and should be subservient to women, and should derive all of their value from service to women without any kind of reciprocity. Some of the acting was strong, but the writing, pacing, and editing were so bad that no amount of good acting could have saved it.
I specifically disliked the way that they portrayed the magic system. They implied that you don't need training, you just need to pull enough of the power and wish hard enough. What's the point of training channelers if that's the case? It also added to the inconsistency in how powerful channelers are. If a pair of untrained girls and a couple of weak wilders can blow up an army of tens of thousands of trollocs, why is the shadow supposed to be a threat? Why couldn't Moraine trivially deal with a much smaller number of trollocs? They didn't really show channelers weaving strands of the different elements, and it just comes across as generic.
How the show handled the mystery of who the Dragon Reborn severely undermined many emotional beats throughout the story, although they were also undercut by how badly the show handled building emotional investment in the characters in general.
I agree that they were going to have to make changes, but I hated the changes that they made, because the changes didn't pay off, and left us with a garbled, incoherent mess. It's not that they made changes. It's that they utterly failed to tell a compelling story while simultaneously going against the spirit of the original work.
Your praise is correct. The magic is fine and left room to make it larger later in the series. The costumes are great (I can even accept Loial's). Locations were good. The warder connection was done well (but time consuming).
My complaints are great but homing in on ignoring the lore will hurt the show in the long run.
Well I am genuinely glad to get at least one comment that focuses on my praise for the show haha. It had it's problems, but I believe in credit where credit is due. Thanks for watching!
While i did like the magic in how it was visualized, I have two major criticisms of it: 1. they ignore that the one power is binary, with the male half called Saiden, which was tainted by the DO's counterstroke when LTT and the hundred resealed the Bore, and trapped the DO and the forsaken, and the female half called Saidar, which was untainted because the female Aes Sedai abandoned LTT for a different plan that was already thwarted. 2. Aes Sedai can now heal death, which makes the risk of death meaningless.
I've read the series, and I will say the only thing I really liked about the series is the actors. They did a decent job casting. I could forgive a lot of things (I understand changes due to different mediums), but this just seems like a shotty fanfic. I tried to be really positive and understanding while watching because I was so excited for the adaptation, but it's just so badly done. There were definitely scenes I enjoyed, but overall I was disappointed. I'm really hoping they get better in season 2.
I came in knowing that the show would have to change a lot of things from the books (I mean it’s a 15 book series ). For me what would make it or break it would be the characters and their growth. I thought the actors were well cast for the most part…and their acting was good given the material they had to work with. The first season needed to focus on the the 4 Edmonds Fielders and their struggle to grasp being in over their heads in a dire situation, while discovering the world outside of their sheltered hometown. The writers were inconsistent with that but I’ll admit they had some good moments. The main issue is that the season felt rushed and there was a lot of unearned moments. There is so many things that they needed to flesh out it’s too much to list. The main excuse writers use is that they don’t have enough screen time to add missing components etc… But there are a lot of unnecessary scenes in this season that could have been better put to use…like plot development etc.. Maybe the writers will do better next season. I mean it’s not like it’s as bad as the writing on season 8 of Game of Thrones.
I just think that they disrespected the source material. I did try to give this a chance but identity politics, the changes that they decided to make was really hard to swallow. Which I think hurt the quality of the show. It would be similar to taking an establish character from a classic novel. Lets use Lord of the Rings as an example, they decided to make Gandalf gay and was Saruman lover for the sake of representation and inclusivity. It was never mentioned by Tolkien that Gandalf is gay and itt completely destroys whatever the author originally intended for this character for sake of pandering to a minor audience. But if you think I am a bigot or homophobe, how would the audience think if we take another establish character like Black Panther make him into a white transgender female to represent that community? It can happen especially when Black Panther is just a mantle he doesn't necessarily need to be black or male to push this character change. We both know this would be wrong.
If you are refering to the relationship between Moiraine and Siuan with the whole Gandalf and Saruman suddenly being lovers scenario; the books actually state that the two women used to be lovers during their years training in the White Tower so it's not that much of a stretch imagining them still being intimate when possible even though they're almost always apart these days due to their situation.
@@baverpuppa1150 I dont recall them ever being lovers from the novels. But the entire point of my rhetoric is that they disrespected the source material, when focus of this series is all about identity politics then good story telling
Im not gonna lie one of my biggest problems in the show is how tam gets taken out almost instantly. Dude has a heron mark blade, he is literally a master blade wielder. Gets 1v1ed by a trollic. While nyneave 1v1s a trollic without using the power.
Absolutely valid point 👌
He still gets taken out by in the book but it’s because the swords the dark ones army uses are blood sacrifice blades that poison and eventually kill anyone they cut.
@@kevinsnider7550 while true it takes a small raiding party to do it in the book. He stops multiple trollics allowing rand to get out of the house and leads multiple trollics away from rand before succumbing to the cut but in the show its like 10 secs with one trollic before getting btfo'd. Show blademasters = barely compitent vs book blademaster = super dangerous
Love the 90s hair! :))
Thanks! I'm trying to grow it out haha, figured I'll give the longer hair a try while I still have it 😂
Great actors, great visuals besides episode 8, bad writing. This isn't 10 mil/episode writing :P
haha well said
Honestly I would’ve rather have had them just go to caemlyn and fal Dara rather than tar valon. Spend half an episode at least in Shadar logoth, not 4 min; same with the ways. Did they learn nothing from MOVIES? You don’t have to make the whole season for a whole book. They could’ve done half-3/4 of the book and it still would’ve been better than what we got. Not including the prologue was a mistake, not having the tam delirium scene(until we got it as a flashback) was a mistake. So many other things. I’ve read all the books and was still lost half the time. It left me doubting as to whether or not I had actually read the books. I’m not saying it had to be a direct copy of the books by any means, but…there were so many unnecessary changes for the worse that I just can’t wrap my head around it. I really wanted to like it too, but it just wasn’t in the cards.
As a neutral this show wasn’t that good , things i Hated most
1. The generic Cringe dialogue
2 . Distracting Sound tracks
3. Colour coding
Also I did get the feeling this show was made for people who were already familiar with the source material, too many instances things were happening or people were put into situations with out explanation.
And I guessed the dragon reborn from episode 1 , He definitely exude “Main dude Vibes “ .
Idk who made the music for this video, but it’s a really nice touch. Keep it up.
They probably should have done some CGI work with Loial and giving him a beard was against the fundamentals of his nature, he was supposed to be a young, beardless oiger. It would have been interesting to see him made the size of a trolloc and trying to fit into the human world, this was a major part of his character development. I think they decided that it was a fake death (yet another!) but killing him would be strange since Loial was actually supposed to be the one who wrote the WoT as the chronicles of the Dragon Reborn.
Nynaeve... I read this series over and over back in the day. I watched this show just to hear that name out loud. The pronunciation guide in the books helped but I just didn't want to say it that way in my head.
Happy hols! I'm in the "haven't seen but don't care about spoilers" club! I don't watch TV on paid streaming services so likely won't see it unless it gets released on physical media, so I am always gonna know the general consensus on things 😅
Disappointing to hear that the show has so many fundamental flaws. I'd say I'm also very easy to please (though can be a bit more difficult to "wow" or shock), and feel sometimes discourse on TV and film gets a bit hyperbolic and silly. Thanks for providing an overall level-headed take 👍
Haha, welcome to the "easy to please" gang 💪
This was nothing more than an attempt to make money off a dead man not surprising though because making money is why these shows are done. It is obvious that the show was never intended to follow the book series at all except for a little fan service thrown into each episode in order to attract an audience perhaps to cover for the bad writing and plot contrivances. I have seen old black and white B movies with better writing. I can’t say anything bad about the actors themselves I love them all though in the future you might want to read the book and the script if possible before signing a contract.
They didn't even try. an original series or idea would have been better.
I liked the show enough and I was very invested on it to the point I followed a spoiler free breakdowns as much as possible - what I think was a bigger factor and why I really feel in love with the world. I read the first book right away and took a break from the series. I was just rereading EotW and felt so many emotions being on Rand’s head all the time. I think how bland Rand feels in the show stuck out more but I’m glad I took my time to appreciate how he’s kind, loyal, how much he progresses and accomplishes in a single book, how he gets haunted by the fact that Tam isn’t his father. I really didn’t like the second season and I think I might abandon the show.
If you enjoy the "gentle giant" trope, give P. C. Hodgell's Kencyrath books a read.
Highly recommend them!
I want to see this still but can't afford Prime Video. With that said I've kept up on many reviews for each episode and I'm not very happy with many changes. They make changes to the magic system, make characters act like other characters later in the series, add in useless fodder that detracted from the main plot for the main characters. Five and six were completely from nothing in the source material.
Loial is alive, director said he didn't die. He said the actor who plays him is also well and shooting season 2 in Prague. Very stupid story telling. Robert Jordan is rolling in his grave.
Well I'm glad he's alive, even if the fake-out death is completely redundant 😂
I never read the source material but am a big fantasy fan and this just an awful series from beginning to end in simple storytelling, dialogue, writing choices, and the internal consistency of its own lore and world building.
With the budget they had they should have done more and learning of all the changes from the source material pissed me off because it showed a lack of respect for the books and a poor show with dumb changes.
It wasnt in the book the lack of knolege on the town was suspencful
In the book it definitely worked, absolutely! I think for the show though, it was cool to see some action
"is that you? You read books....nerd." Honestly in today's film environment movies don't even compare. So if you are looking for real escapism then your best bet is books
Absolutely. Just to be clear, I was definitely goofing when I made the nerds comment 😂 Books are top tier 👌
@@Cam_Wolfe you're good. We are nerds. It feels not many people read for pleasure nowadays
I never bother reading the books before watching the movie and tv show adaptations of the books. I've never been much of a reader who reads books for pleasure. Watching movies and tv shows entertains me more than silent reading. I only use the fiction books as reference/study guide better understand the lore of the movie/tv show adaptation.
"My epic, if I compose it-- and Loial's book-- will be no more than seed, if we are both lucky. Those who know the truth will die, and their grandchildren will remember something different. And _their_ grandchildren's grandchildren something else again. Two dozen generations, and you may be the hero of it, not Rand."
-Thom to Elayne, _The Shadow Rising_
(Condemnation, not praise)
Lol but nobody's grandchildren will be watching this show
Loial is not dead, can't even imagine that. Wouldn't even make sense to have him display like they did, cause they choose to not make him a CGI-Character, cause he will be shown a lot more in coming seasons. I think that was one reason to not make him a CGI-Character, cause he will be there so much more, that it would be too expensive to do him in CGI.
so it's a fake death, with the cursed dagger no less
Yeah, I hear you. I liked the cinematography and I didn't expect the show to be that amazing going into it (so I had low expectations from the get go). That said though, they really didn't do a good job of making the season feel like a cohesive whole; since they made changes, I was expecting that to be the purpose of the changes. But I will keep watching and I think overall, the existence of the show is still good for the franchise and bringing in readers. Peace!
I definitely agree with you there! Despite my complaints, I am glad it's succeeding and bringing new fans to the series
I’m done with this show regardless is season 2 is good or not. This show is ruined
Hit the nail on the head with this one, Cam. I disliked the series too. The poor Ogier - He looks like he belongs in a kid's panto! Rand's mother's fight was freeking amazing - and frankly, the best 60 seconds of the entire season. The pointless plot changes - and focusing on moraine as the central character - kind of ruined this for me. I haven't watched all of ep 7 and any of 8. It felt very much 'Star Trek Discovery'd for me.
I just don't see how you take some of the choices back? Traveling isn't really introduced till later book because it doesn't make sense to use the ways or stone if you can travel. If Wilders can link and don't really need training then the white tower doesn't really have any point to exist. Tom's characters is hardly in it and he's supposed to be a major character. By the time they get a few seasons in nothing in the later books is going to make any sense. And why does it look cheap, Got witcher vikings blood and bone his dark material cursed all don't look nearly as cheap.
I appreciate your review. It seems fair and balanced.
Agree, the final battle was a bit sloppy, shouldn't been decided by a girl that wasn't even accepted as an Aes Sedai. But it makes some sense - she gets linked with 2 of the most potent casters in the last 1000 years (Nynaeve and Egwene) and she never felt this power before and gets addicted to it and can't let go. Not saying that this was the best choice, would rather have Rand finish that battle, but on the other hand it also makes sense from a show viewpoint to spare this for another battle... I guess they want to spare his true power for later seasons, so it can amaze us then:) Cause really, if he is kind of God-Like in Season1 already, it will be hard to develop the story for another 7 seasons.
I hate changes when they are not necessary.
This had failure written all over it from day 1. There is simply no way to film 14 books. Not just 14 books but several of the early books pushed 1.000 + pages. I knew they would have to condense the heck out of the books but as soon as I saw they weren't just cutting huge portions of the books but adding pointless plots, I said nope. Zero interest. If they just stuck to the plot without adding anything I would be fine with condensing and straight up removing 100s of pages and characters. It drove me nuts how every step forward Rand would make, Jordan would push him back 2 steps. Or how as soon as a forsaken was removed from the chess board, they would be revived so progress would be lost. Condensing would not only be fine, it would be preferred and necessary but from everything I read, they made nonsensical changes that detracted from the story. Yep, zero interest in ever watching this which is a shame.
24:40 That quote sounded very misplaced, being said right after they have just had sex and Lan rather sounded like a "Love 'em and leave 'em" guy. 🙄
I'm really salty about all the hate the TV show is getting. Not because the show is great (yea, I actually think it's good... whatever), but because people are acting like the book 1 of the series was that amazing thing that got destroyed by the TV show. I can't speak for the whole WOT book series, but book 1 (which I've read) isn't that great. It's really boring lmao, till about 250 nothing happens
That's fair. I'm legitimately glad to hear from someone who liked the show, especially if you weren't a fan of the book. That's genuinely interesting to hear (thanks for watching!)
Nothing about what you've just said is logical or makes sense
If the book wasn't good, then only idiots would make a show out of it
Funny enough, Rosamund Pike is one of the reasons I don’t like the adaptation.
That's fair enough, I can understand her not being for everyone
I never read the books and don't care what the show changed. It's impossible to please book fans since everyone imagines the books differently. I enjoyed S1 of The Wheel of Time more than S1 of Rings of Power.
Despite everything, you still had a lot more nice things to say than other reviews I've seen LOL. Great vid
cheers mate!
I thought it was decent my initial watch, tried to rewatch the season and it just seemed like garbage, stopped after ep 3.
10:28 100% agree. The guy looks like a chosen one.
I have read the books and I didn’t mind anything changed from the story in the first 6 episodes. Episode 7 was just slow. Yes, character development. But, it did not advance the story. Episode 8 - WTF? There was a reason that they all went to the Eye in the book. This departure was not helpful. The high point of the final episode was the preview of the Seanchan and that’s sad.
Yeah, having only Rand and Moraine go to the Eye was a bit deflating. That's meant to be a big moment for all those characters to face together, and they ended up being separated for arbitrary reasons
Yeah but, they all went and only one did anything. It's like having spectators at a duel. Why are you there?
Great review, can't argue with any of it. Loial's hair is truly awful. It looks like a clown wig bought at a costume store. How could ears have cost too much?
They are gonna have to make major improvements if they want this show to really be successful.
book series are so damn good, book 1 is just scratching the surface. As for the skinsuit "wheel of time" amazon series, I cant recall a single thing I have liked about it. It is an abomination that has corrupted everything that has made the books great.
Yeah they did a great job of portraying the warder bond like showing how it can basically serve as some sort of "straight conversion therapy". They turned something cool and unique into something totally cringe and laughably stupid. Why? Because for these fringe idiots in the industry: "ideology trumps art" - Quentin Tarantino
Not really sure what you mean by the conversion therapy comparison, but I haven't read past the first book yet so I don't know how much they actually changed the warder bond. It worked for me, but to each their own. Thanks for watching :)
@@Cam_Wolfe There is something called "G@y Conversion Therapy" which was devised as a supposed treatment for homosexu@lity. It is a very ignorant and misguided thing that most people rightfully condemn. Yet on this show which is run by people who would be the most vocal in their outrage against such a thing have no problem depicting that the exact opposite is possible, insinuating that a straight man can just suddenly become g@y apparently through the warder bond. That is what I meant by "Straight Conversion Therapy". Had the reverse been depicted instead these same people would be screaming their outrage with accusations of bigotry and homophob1a.
@@Dave3Dman yeah, that was never insinuated.
@@Dave3Dman My problem is that the guy would probably have gone on a bar rampage and lan would probaby have been the one who put him down when he like started carving his aes sedais name into some random dude whit a broken ceramic cup. But yeah the attrocious show makes it out that somehow if only he could accept being gangbanged by dudes that would somehow make everything fine.
@@Ailthas It kind of was. If he agreed to be bonded by Alanna, he would have to accept being with men. Like he couldn't be her warder without participating in her activities with her other warders.
I also enjoyed the trollocks in the first episode. But as for making large changes from the books, NO, they should just make their own story from scratch and stop using good stories to promote badly written adaptations with large, shitty changes.
I thought the show was pretty good overall but I agree that the relationships and character development felt really weak, with the exception of Moirane and Lan. But also, stop killing people if you’re just going to bring them back to life! It just de-values the entire magic system in my eyes, really pulled me out of the moment. I haven’t read the books so maybe it would make more sense with that context, but it just felt predictable and pointless.
14:10 That would be as crazy as Rachel dating Joey...
This is what happens when you take a book as large as the first installment of the wheel of time and try to shove it all in to 8 one hour episodes. I have personally always wanted to read the series but never have so this felt like a good way of maybe making myself want to read it, all this did was make the books seem shallow and boring (which I know they are not) I feel like amazon grabbed the title because it was super popular and paid it respect by completely rushing thru the content and seemingly disappointing most everyone who has read the series or even just the first book.
The unabridged audiobook only lasts 12 hours. That's 12 1-hour episodes. Except half the book is detailed descriptions, which can be shown onscreen instantly, so it would only take 6 hours to put the entire story into a show. 7 12-episode seasons, 6 hours per book, all 14 books.
Not a bad review. I agree with most of what you said. The show was horrible to watch.
Its pretty clear rafe hates the source material.
In the books Lan and Nyneave isnt a thing until later in the books, that line by Lan isnt earned. Nyneave would never sleep with him. The forced relationships is one if the worst things about the show. They've taken away all their morals. The two rivers is a very conservative place, everybody isnt sleeping around, small villages dont work that way.
The worst part was the mysandry.
Damn, Cam out here calling me out for being a nerd who also reads books
That heartbreaking remark aside, I largely agree with you. Season one was rough, especially in the later episodes. I get production changed things dramatically and there are things that couldn't be avoided, but... geez. This was not great. My hope is high for Season two, because I know that sometimes it takes a while to find your footing in a show like this.
I'm glad you're optimistic about season 2, no sarcasm intended. I'm trying to be too, like you said, first seasons can sometimes be rocky but it's not impossible for them to get it back on track
I was also a bit disappointed by this show :( especially the finale
p.s. the longer hair looks nice!
Oh thanks!
8:58 The ears. Yes. IF they were trying to save budget, then props which look like real ears and they can move the way Loial used them to express his feelings in the books, I'd say that kind of props cost.
LMFAO the budget part xD
This show doesn't deserve any praise, because they didn't do a SINGLE thing correctly.
I don't praise shows for basic film making competency, like lighting a set so you can see or building a large set (even their one large set is BAD and lazy)
I don't give praise for big flashy special effects (which this show doesn't really have either)
I give praise for WRITING and I give praise for good ACTING and direction, NONE OF THOSE THINGS ARE IN THIS SHOW AT ALL.
The acting is garbage, I assume most of it is due to bad direction, and the writing is ABSOLUTELY ATROCIOUS!
None of the decisions they made were necessary changes, the ONLY changes acceptable in an adaptation. The changes they made, the cuts they made, the RETCONS to the established LORE they made, NONE of it was necessary. Cutting a part that you could do a bit faster with the same outcome is perfectly fine. Or cutting a complicated scene that establishes something when you can do that in this other scene you already have to establish something else. That's fine.
But they cut out HUGELY important things, hugely important CHARACTERS and much more to have half an episode focus on a dude deciding between being gay and death, and then when he chooses death having LAN MANDRAGORAN SCREAM AND CRY AND TWIST HIS NIPPLES!!
NO! THIS SHOW DESERVES NO PRAISE!
Even THE ROOM has good parts in it. Just because a show did something technically correct, doesn't mean you should praise it. It's like if you see a fully grown adult walking across the street without dying. THAT'S EXPECTED, YOU DON'T GO UP AND PRAISE THEM FOR IT!
They change INSANELY important things. If Loial survives that stabbing, the Shadar Logoth dagger is no longer relevant to the story as it's no more harmful than a regular dagger. In the books one single tiny cut from that thing is LETHAL, and in SECONDS you are totally and completely fucked. So either they've killed Loial, or they've removed Padan Fain as a threat cause he doesn't matter, and the dagger isn't connected to Mat anymore cause they cut out Caemlyn so the ENTIRE SECOND BOOK has no justification for happening. That's an ENTIRE book they've just made irrelevant, and it's a VERY important book for Rand's journey.
They've changed how the One Power works. They've seemed to remove the 2 halves of the power, Saidin and Saidar, as Rand is being taught to channel like a woman, Moiraine says she COULD teach Rand, and Rand uses an Angreal that Moiraine also used meaning it had to be for a woman. The power isn't two halves anymore, THAT'S THE ONE THING THAT ABSOLUTELY CANNOT BE CHANGED!
Egwene is just REVIVING THE DEAD APPARENTLY! NOT ONLY IS SHE NOT A HEALER, I GUESS SHE'S JUST GOD AS WELL!
6 people, 2 of whom don't know how to channel AT ALL and 4 of whom are WILDERS are so insanely powerful they can destroy an enormous army of the shadow! So the power level of channeling in GENERAL is just insanely out of proportion. There's no longer any excuse for why the Blight still EXISTS. 10 of the Tower's best Aes Sedai should be sent out, link and just burn it off the planet with EASE they'd be so powerful.
But if you just cut off an Aes Sedai's hands they're COMPLETELY HELPLESS!
Because they skipped Caemlyn that's like, almost half a dozen characters that have NO SETUP for later in the series, as early as THE SECOND BOOK which there's no reason for it to happen without the dagger being bonded to Mat.
Lan is Moiraine's WARDER and they have a magical connection that enables them to always know where their bonded Aes Sedai is, so I guess they removed that too if Lan can't TRACK HER.
Moiraine might be stilled, so that'll probably be to ruin ANOTHER thing from the books or to make Nynaeve dramatically overpowered some more, she's already absolutely broken in terms of where she should be.
Several of the Forsaken were just ignored.
The Eye of the World was removed from the world as well.
If they moved the dark one's prison and called it the eye, then I guess his actual prison has no reason to exist, so that breaks tons of things.
Oh yeah one of the great generals is fucking DEAD now, so that SHATTERS future events. Not only that, they made him utterly INCOMPETENT because he's a man and we can't have competent men in this show! No, they all needs to constantly talk about feelings, twist their nipples and run away from scrawny girls holding swords when she's outnumbered.
The White Cloaks are just cartoonishly evil, so that ruins future events as well.
Hell THE FIRST EPISODE RUINS ALL OF PERRIN'S ENTIRE ARC BY HAVING HIM KILL HIS WIFE WHO SHOULDN'T EVEN EXIST!
This single season just DESTROYS so much of this series without giving a single damn about it. They actively hate the Wheel of Time and they think they're improving it by adding in a ton of woke garbage and just changing whatever they feel like.
Rand is the only one who channeled, the rest can't. And the women shouldn't count because a woman can not be the dragon reborn because she can't channel saidin. It's a absolutely absurd. As you read more books this show will make you more angry.
Awzum criticism 😎🤘 Happy New Year! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🌟🌟🌟✨✨✨✨✨
The Wheel of Time Series > Game of Thrones Season 8
TWOT series =/= TGOT season 8
All 8 seasons of GOT > WOT season 1
To me, Amazon Prime's The Wheel of Time and Netflix's The Witcher are oases in the middle of the desert of Marvel superhero movies and TV shows, the News channel, musicals, vampire and werewolves shows and movies, Star Wars extended Universe, family dramas, school dramas, talk shows, zombie apocalypse genre and sit-coms.
Despite my negative thoughts on the show, I am glad to hear from someone that liked it. Thanks for watching Oliver!
A completely soulless cash grab that shows zero reverence or regard for the original source material. And it doesn't even hold up on its own. Poor pacing, poor exposition, too many examples of trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole so you can get from point A to point B in the story conveniently. Yeah, no thanks. It's a no for me.
2/10
Right on the nose.
WOT should hvae been animated. 40 epidode per season
This show was terrible. Honestly, it could be the worst adaptation I've ever seen.