Amazon releases the first trailer for its Wheel Of Time TV show
Rosamund Pike stars in the fantasy adaptation of Robert Jordan's best-selling books
TV News Amazon
After years of attempted developments—including one very strange late-night broadcast that Amazon would probably prefer everyone on the planet promptly forget about entirely—the first look at the retail giant’s adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time books is finally here. Amazon’s big, expensive fantasy adaptation (which isn’t its other, bigger, expensive-er fantasy adaptation) stars Rosamund Pike as Moraine, a powerful witch who’s hunting for the young Chosen One who’s destined to save the world from darkness—or maybe just blow the whole thing up. (The prophecies remain annoyingly unclear.) Will she find him? Will the Dark One (evil) get shoved back into the prison he’s peeking his big, dark head out of? Will someone tug their braid, smooth their skirts, or put fists on hips? (We have to assume we’re in for a pretty hefty amount of braid-tugging here.)
Suffused with a heady mixture of global-scale politicking and war, cut with plenty of romance and interpersonal arguing, the Wheel Of Time books were started by Jordan way back in 1990, and finished 23 years later (outliving their creator by a full six years). The series takes place in a world in which only women can use magic, because any man who does so turns into an insane murder machine. This, understandably, makes for some pretty complicated power dynamics—especially given that Moraine is seeking out The Dragon Reborn, the reincarnation of a male channeler who came very close to destroying the world in the setting’s past.
The first three episodes of Wheel Of Time—which also co-stars Josha Stradowski, Marcus Rutherford, Zoë Robins, Barney Harris, and Madeleine Madden as the five rural youths who get swept up in Moraine’s potentially apocalyptic quest, and Daniel Henney as her loyal bodyguard—will air on Amazon on Friday, November 19; the season will wrap up on December 24, and has already received its Christmas present (a second season) early, with Amazon announcing the news back in May.
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Moraine: A powerful witch who cares a lot.
When this was first announced the rumor was Gina Torres would be cast as Moraine and now all I can see is how much better Torres would have been in this trailer…
About disasters, fires, floods and killer bees.
About the NASA shuttles falling in the seas.
I have friends who are simultaneously eagerly awaiting this show and dreading its arrival.
At least fantasy series get proper adaptations nowadays. A long while back I was a fan of the Sword of Truth series. It got the awful WB treatment, I believe I watched half of an episode before it was cancelled.
To be fair that series got mind bogglingly bad in the back half so a crappy lazy adaptation is kinda accurate.
That is true, but I did stick it out for some reason. I don’t believe the show lasted for more than one or two seasons, so I don’t believe it got to the point where the series really went off the rails. I don’t even know if I’d like the series at all anymore, I’m not really a huge fan of reading fantasy anymore. I do admit that I will read the next Song of Ice and Fire book if it ever actually comes to fruition. I never watched the HBO series once it caught up to the books in hopes that old George actually finishes them someday.
I’mreally hoping it improves on the things I didn’t like and doesn’t introduce new unlikable things. I don’t want to have to pretend I never saw things like I did with the Mortal Engines movie.
I have no idea how that trailer is supposed to sell the show to non-book readers. Everything looks so damn generic. Witcher manages to keep the thirst taps flowing, GoT has tits and dragons, and the Silmarillion show has a ton of built-in name recognition.This just looks like one of Netflix’s average fantasy shows.
No, it doesn’t. Maybe you don’t have any taste. That trailer alone makes me want to watch it and read the books before I do.
I’ve never heard of the books so I probably would have skipped out watching the trailer if it didn’t star Rosamund Pike. Maybe they introduced a little too much in the trailer?
I was 18 when this series first started getting released and i enjoyed the first three books and than basically hate read the last 9. I didnt know what sunk costs were at the time i guess. Im doubtful that this show will be anything decent but i guess its possible.
The first trailer for Game of Thrones had no dragons, and only one implied pair of tits.
This would be a useful argument if WoT had either in any abundance. do they?
Just the one dragon. Lots of tits though!
Robert Jordan was well known for his ornithology passion.
The tits were crucial too. I know guys who wouldn’t have been caught dead watching any other fantasy show who were absolutely addicted to GOT.
Back when I worked at a grocery store I overheard a couple of “bro” types talking about it and one was saying “Oh and dude there’s this midget, and no, no dude the midget is the best character trust me. He’s awesome.”
It absolutely just looks generic. I know of the books, but have not read them, and I’ve been looking forward to the show – but you really nailed it, it looks like some random Netflix fantasy show.
WoT is always going to be a tough sell. Among other things, it relies way more on worldbuilding and magic and the like in order to understand its story (especially in comparison to GoT). I imagine the best thing it has going for it is the fact that everyone (audiences and studios) is looking for the next GoT, and a lot more viewers are primed for this kind of thing (even ten years ago was a very different marketplace). To say nothing of the fact that the books do have a huge following.I get that it looks like somewhat generic to a layperson, which is kind of a shame, because it’s arguably one of the most influential fantasy series ever. Personally, I’m cautiously optimistic.
Game of Thrones, though it couldn’t stick the landing, still changed the TV landscape into one that can support a big-budget fantasy show.I’d say that The Witcher wouldn’t have had a hope of being successful without it.“It’s a lavishly produced fantasy series, maybe it’ll be as good as the first few seasons of Thrones” is pretty much the main marketing pitch of most fantasy shows now, and for the foreseeable future.
Mm, I think there’s a lot of visual elements in this that aren’t especially generic, or at least have enough production value that it looks higher-end and not like some generic thing you put on the TV when you’re doing other things. The Amyrlin Seat chamber, the Ajah color outfits, the Myrddraal, several of the wide landscape/city shots; if I didn’t know what WoT was and didn’t know it was for a TV show, I’d probably assume it was related to Lord of the Rings.
Maybe the problem wasn’t so much the way it looked but the copy for the trailer? Other than women being protective magic users (which was interesting), the rest was a sort of typical “dark prophecy/army/chosen one needs to be stopped” fantasy thing that is kinda old. It’s more of a teaser, so I guess it did its job in getting me intrigued. But I’m not sure it’s going to be jumping to the top of my watch list on what I’ve seen here.
while I’m impressed w/ your knowledge of the books, you seem WAY too intimate with the production for me to take you seriously as anything other than a shill.
“a shill”I’m just an excited fan, and yeah, I’m definitely not objective about it (I’ve been waiting for this for thirty fucking years). But seriously, take five seconds to think about why you’re saying what you’re saying the next time you want to accuse someone of something.
Hey man, Amazon called. Said the cheque’s gonna be a little late this month.
Joke’s on you, I’m too busy being a Marvel shill to be an Amazon shill.
It doesn’t help that the first book very blatantly, obviously rips off Fellowship of the Ring (which even the author readily admitted!)
Does it? GoT has a lot of history and backstory involved to really understand what’s going on.I mean, a basic summary of what’s going on in WoT:Long time ago good guy defeated bad guy and then went crazy and killed a bunch of people. Now whenever a man uses magic he goes crazy and kills a bunch of people. Bad guy is coming back. Magic lady thinks one of three guys is the original good guy reincarnated and needs him to stop bad guy.Not super simple, but also not that difficult to grasp.
And that really is OVERsimplified. Look, I get the reason why one might do so, especially in the age of FORMULAIC GRAPHIC-NOVEL BASED FILMS, but this is no “Lord of the Rings” clone. As far as I can tell, It’s doing everything it can to be original.
GoTAncient powers that have been sleeping are returning to try to take over mankind’s land. Meanwhile a fight is brewing between the current ruling family, the family that got them there, and the family they removed from power. Also a couple dragons and some hints of magic. Also, lots of incest.Pretty simple.
Magic is a much, much bigger factor in WoT. Not to mention tons and tons of plot devices and rules of magic and magical creatures like…*deep breath*…Saidin, Saidar, the True Power, angreal, sa’angreal, ter’angreal, Tel’aron’rhiod, the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn, Shadar Logoth, the Forsaken/Chosen, gentling, stilling, a’dam, sul’dam, damane, cuendillar, balefire, raken, to’raken, gholam, trollocs, Myrddraal, etc. etc.It’s a lot to take in, and could be pretty demanding for audiences. I hope they’re up to the challenge, but WoT is a rather different beast from ASoIaF.
angreal, sa’angreal, ter’angreal, Tel’aron’rhiod, the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn, Shadar LogothOh, man, nothing kills my interest in a fantasy novel like giant piles of invented words and proper nouns filled with apostrophes. Find a way to achieve immersion without forcing your reader to learn the language that you came up with while staring at the blinking cursor at 3:00 a.m.
Not all of that stuff needs to be explained and a lot of it is just fancy vocabulary for things that can be reduced to simple concepts.I mean think of LOTR. Do you need to explain what exactly a palantir is to the audience? Do you need to explain what an orc is? Or a balrog? Yes, there is a great deal of depth and history in LOTR, but for a casual audience you don’t need to go into those details. A lot of it can just be explained by, “Magic!”And I still think GoT has its fair share of world building concepts. You’ve got all the various religions and their belief systems and how they operate. You’ve got various governments on various continents with their own conventions, laws, and histories. You’ve got the histories of the various families in Westeros and their relationships to each other. And yes, the magic isn’t as explored as deeply and is left more mysterious, but you’ve still got things like wargs, shadow babies, illusions of appearance, white walkers and wights, Faceless Men, etc. And all of this is wrapped in explorations of moral and political philosophy.I don’t know if they’re equally as dense or difficult to grasp, but I also don’t think WoT will be significantly more difficult than GoT.I feel that if GoT only existed as a book series at this point in time and the show and all other related media didn’t exist, the idea of making a big budget premium TV show out of it would seem equally daunting and problematic.I have no idea how successful WoT will be as a show. I’ve read the first few books and enjoyed them, but wouldn’t call myself a superfan or anything. That being said, I’m looking forward to it and hope it does well. Are their challenges? Yes. Will they satisfy all viewers? No.
Does Wheel of Time still have a big audience? The books wrapped up years ago and didn’t make much of a splash when they did.
I think it was a big franchise in the 1990s, but 28 years later, I don’t think so. I certainly don’t ever see anyone younger than Gen X speaking enthusiastically about them.
I’m mostly curious to see how/if they sexify it compared to the books, which handles sex like a Baptist Pastor.I’m not expecting tits galor like GoT, just hope that they live in a world where sex is something that can be talked about.
A lot of people like fantasy shows, and a recognizable star and the promise of an Amazon budget will get a fair number of eyeballs. The show, like most shows of this type (including/especially Game of Thrones) will live or die on word of mouth.
I can barely recommend the books to book readers.It looks super generic. The books really lend themselves to that YA audience, but there are so many of those shows now. How on earth is this series going to set itself apart.One of the things people love about the series (aside from the many characters and world building) is the excellent system of magic. That seems to be a pretty tough sell to the average viewer. Watch this show for how well thought out the rules of magic are! Wow!
I’m a big reader of SF and fantasy, so I’ve heard plenty about Wheel of Time without never having gotten around to picking it up. (The length kept me off, honestly)Yeah, I was watching that trailer trying to figure out what was so special about this setting. I’ll still be giving it a try, though. What might’ve you featured differently?
More tits and dragons, basically.
Jordan was kind of super Christian though wasn’t he? And that was a big part of the appeal? I only read one and a half books, but there was no sex and the male/female interaction was very conservative generally. So if there’s tits a) it will diverge from the books and b) I suspect a lot of his fans will be upset.
There’s a little sex, particularly a memorable scene in the snow in book 5. And lots of implied off-screen sex.
I think you’re thinking of C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia…
Jordan has the good/bad, light/dark thing going on, but pretty much every fantasy series has that. I have never read many parallels to Christianity into the series, whereas the were ALL OVER THE PLACE in Narnia.There is plenty of inferred sexuality in WoT, but it was written for a youthful audience. There is nakedness and arousal and all that stuff in the books, just not direct discussion of sex itself.
If it stays true to the books there will be on tits. It will be like tits don’t exist.
It really doesn’t get good for quite a while, but the world-building, filler books prior to the 6th are worth reading. The 5th is worth reading even if the others haven’t been read before.
A friend is a huge fan of the series. He almost had me talked into reading it until he showed me the books on his shelf. There were a lot of them, and they each got thicker. “This is all of them?” “No, he hasn’t finished the series yet.”
There comes a point where it stops being entertainment and starts becoming work.
I’m not a huge SF/Fantasy reader, but I have read LOTR, ASOIAF, The first 3 Dune novels, The Stormlight Archive, and TWOT.TWOT is as good as any – it’s the most expansive by far, and it does suffer some in change of voice/tone after Sanderson took over for Jordan, but it’s a good read overall and has lots of potential for lots of seasons of TV.
looks like cosplayers
As someone who hasn’t read any of the books, the trailer looks fine. There’s clearly some nice production values, but I couldn’t see myself tuning in the first time it’s available or even signing up for Prime if I didn’t already have it. Still, it’s only a teaser, so the next trailer might be better at conveying what makes this fantasy world different from all the other fantasy worlds.
the next trailer might be better at conveying what makes this fantasy world different from all the other fantasy worlds.
Admittedly I only read the first three or four books, and that was decades ago, but I’m not sure there is anything that makes this fantasy world particularly different from any other fantasy world.I think the most memorable thing for me was how atrociously bad the binding of the Tor paperbacks were. You’d get halfway through and the pages would start falling out.
I read the first seven books and fell off HARD after that. To this day, I only remember the Aes Sedai, the invading foreigners who cut their hair like Zorg from 5th Element and drink “kaf”, and that Nynaeve is possibly the most annoying character in all of fiction
I saw the promo image and assumed it was SyFy Network’s Eternals knock-off (which itself looks pretty generic in stills).
I never read the books because they looked like generic fantasy, and watching the trailer hasn’t changed my opinion.
Honestly, Wheel of Time itself looks very generic. Anything I’ve read from it or heard about it sounds like Honda Civic Tolkein.
There are a lot of fantasy tropes in WoT but the story follows a more natural narrative structure than GoT. You know who the good guys are, what their aim is and the stakes early on. They then go on a quest in the first book and have adventures and trials along the way. The groundwork is set up for world building and bigger tasks by the end of the first quest. Then things go sort of Dr. Strange as they get deeper into the weeds with gates, magic trials, etc. One thing they will definitely have to do is cut many of the dead end political subplots and redundant character. These caused endless bloat for no return. Sanderson rapidly killed these off when he took over writing and the last books are much better for it.
I watched this trailer having no idea the books existed. I posted the link to my group chat with this exact message: “Game of Thrones can get ALL THE WAY FUCKED”.
This looked awesome, and there was a distinct visual language that drew me in. I am in high anticipation for this.
Tons of my friends are into these books but I’ve never read them. Trailer looks dope. I wonder if the first episode will enthrall me as much as Game of Thrones did and get me to read the whole series before the show even begins its second season. On that note, at least till recently, I’m glad I didn’t have to wait like early fans, many, many years between books.
Not one braid tug…
I ran out of steam after the 7th, maybe 8th book. Hopefully the series can condense the stories somewhat. The first five book, I would say, were really gripping and engaging. Then things stopped happening.
They’ll kind of have to condense the story if they don’t want the 20ish year old cast members to be drawing social security before the end.
They’ve already implied several times that they’re condensing a lot of stuff, especially a lot of the side plots that don’t really add anything to the main story and just kind of kill time. Faile doesn’t need to be in a Shaido prison camp for three fucking books. We don’t need all the side bits about random Aes Sedai meandering around. The Little Tower doesn’t need to spend so much time on internal bickering. The Sea Folk subplots barely need to exist at all. The menagerie is colorful but Mat spends like an entire damn book travelling along with them. Etc.
I thought I was gonna wanna read the books but that all sounds very tiring to me already.
I mean ideally Faile doesn’t need to be in anything.
But without Faile, we don’t get “the horse’s name is Mandarb”
Not really. Yes there were tons of books, but nothing happened in most of them.
Yeah, books 8-11 are an awful slog. Sadly it was Jordan’s death that allowed the series to be revitalized by Brandon Sanderson.
Books 8-10 were an awful slog. Book 11 was quite the return to form though, and probably the 5th best book in the series after the high water mark of books 4-7.
I’m always shocked when I hear people say that Sanderson’s concluding books were good. He just couldn’t write any of those characters to save his life; it was excruciating.
Thank you! Book 11 was an excellent return to form and it just made it all the more sad to have that be the end of Jordan’s run.
I know its blasphemy in some circles but Sanderson is a better fantasy writer then Jordan IMHO
I got about 100 pages or so into the fourth book and it’s now been sitting on my nightstand for like 2 years.
That’s where I’m currently stalled out.
Yeah, my mom and I were reading them in the 90s. I think we gave up after the 7th book.
I started reading the series in 8th grade when A Crown of Swords came out. A Memory of Light came out when I was 30. I stopped reading at Crossroads of Twilight, but decided to give it another go once the final book was released but did audiobooks instead. There are two narrators (readers?) for the series, one for the male and one for the female parts and they are quite good. I made it through the whole series eventually and while there is a lot of filler, I did mostly enjoy how everything wrapped up. Sanderson was definitely a breath of fresh air.
Indeed. I stopped about where you did, read summaries of all the rest of the Jordan books, and picked up again with the last few. I’d encourage others to take the same approach. Started well, ends well, goes nowhere in between.
Started well
Boy, do I disagree with that. I made it all of 3 pages into the first book before abandoning it.It’s certainly possible the first book is great, but he sure didn’t know how to grab the reader from the first line.
Same. I never finished them.
I could not get into the first book. I tried a few times. It just did not grab me.
Hopefully the series can condense the stories somewhat.
The nice thing about this series compared to Game of Thrones is the showrunners have a full view of the entire story from the beginning, so they know what can safely be jettisoned without accidentally ruining plotlines three seasons from now.
This was the first author that betrayed me as a reader. And then I went head over heels for R.R. Martin and now after realizing that Patrick Rothfuss will probably fuck me over, I’ve stopped reading open-ended series.
Welp, are we going to get the typical brigade of dipshits bitching about Woke Casting—“Lan Mandragoran is just white! he just is!”—or did they tire themselves out in the Cowboy Bebop thread?
The fandom’s been pretty happy about the casting in general.
Lan isn’t the best example for that since he’s described as being sort of Asiatic-looking in the books (along with other borderlanders like the Shienarans), but the Emond’s Fielders are all described as basically generic white European types, and of the core five only Rand and Mat have been cast with white actors. So it’s going to be Egwene, Nynaeve, and Perrin who get the dipshit bitching you’re referring to.
Those three, along with Mat and most of the other Emond’s Fielders, are really only described as having dark hair and eyes. I’ve always kind of pictured them as darker-skinned people.
Correct. It’s not just Rand’s height, hair, and eye colour that make him unusual for a Two Rivers man, it’s his fair skin. Elaida specifically remarks on his skin colour when she notices the untanned skin under his sleeve when they meet in Caemlyn in the first book.
My read on the Two Rivers folk was that they were more brown than black, but both reads are valid.
Yup.
Just go to IGN and I’m sure you’ll find a ton.
The books are pretty lily white but the whole post-post-apocalyptic thing works well with race blind casting. There was an even literally called the breaking of the world leading up to the main story.
As I like to point out to ASOIAF fans, because I’m a dick: Robert Jordan fucking died and still finished his epic fantasy series faster than George R.R. Martin.And I didn’t see Min. I guess I’ll still watch it though.
I’m wondering how much of the story this is going to cover, because I haven’t seen any casting news (or any other evidence) of Elayne and Gawyn and Galad (and Morgase and Gareth), who all show up midway through the first book. Rand’s introduction to Elayne is one of my favorite bits in TEOTW. But I also understand that there’s a limit on how much you can do in one season of TV, so either they’re going to shift those characters to show up later (which, eh, fine) or they’re keeping their presence in the first season a secret.WoT has the problem that it’s so vast that even if you cut out all the unnecessary chaff, there’s still a million important core characters, and even a huge-budget TV show simply can’t do justice to them all.
Way too many important characters. The Expanse did it right (in retrospect) by making synthesis characters like the TV version of Drummer, but they had the help of the original authors to do that. Fingers crossed.
If the Wikipedia page “List of Wheel of Time characters” is to be believed, “The Wheel of Time has 2782 distinct named characters.” That’s too many!
Jordan had a bad habit of giving names to characters who were part of a group but had no individual effect on a scene; i.e. Egwene or someone would run into three Aes Sedai in a hallway and even though none of them said anything to her (they were probably just sneering at her) Jordan would still name all three of them and give them a little backstory before moving on, even if we never saw them again.
“Jordan would still name all three of them and give them a little backstory”Damn, that sounds tedious. I’ll give GRRM credit on this score. He knows how to create background named characters without wasting too much time on them.
I mean, I’m exaggerating a little, but he definitely went overboard in terms of providing detail. There’s a reason people still joke about “dresses and horses.”
The further GRRM gets, the more interested he is in wasting time on less central characters. His most recent ASoIaF publications are histories of generations preceding the main series, and prior to that he was adding ever more POV characters in the last two books.
Since those five characters suck shit, I don’t want them to cast them.
What? No. There are a BUNCH of characters that could be compressed into one that would serve several roles. FFS, I was only 7-8 books deep and recognized how he was padding the series out
I’m sure I read that they thought they could do 8 seasons, which would be absolutely fine, cos there’s sooooooooo much filler in the later books. But IMDB says there’s only six episodes in the first season, which is far more problematic. I could see the story being told in full across 80 episodes, but 48?
I think people were probably spoiled (I know I was) by the first… four? Or maybe 5? Wheel Of Time books coming out within a year or so of each other (i.e. a book a year)— because, if I remember what I read years ago correctly, Jordan had basically just started writing them long before there was a book deal and so had gotten through the first four before Book 1 was even published. Eventually of course it caught up to him, but he still managed a 900-page thing every 3 years or so.
Well, but now you’ve got workaholic Brandon Sanderson writing basically a book a year, some of them the doorstop Stormlight series.
Brandon Sanderson is a terrifying infernal machine-creature that expels books from its genetically engineered cloaca. That is the only explanation that makes sense.
How nice would it be if Martin just said screw it, and passed all his notes/outlines to another writer and let them finish it
tbh I like Martin’s books but I wouldn’t mind if Brandon Sanderson had a go.
To be fair, if Martin crocked tomorrow someone would be finishing his books based on notes within two years.
That’s fucking cold.
His death presumably contributed to it actually getting finished rather than continuing to bloat. If GRRM had died and entrusted someone else with finishing it, it would have happened (and the show basically had to do a version of that).
GRRM clearly enjoys editing nowadays more than writing. I wish he’d just find a good writer and act as the editor for the rest of ASOIAF. It would probably turn out fine and more focused.
A lot of people call me The Ta’veren of the Greys, Car’a’carn of Commenters, He Who Comes Hard in the Dawn, Coramoor of the Garbage People, and of course, The AV Club Troll Reborn.
Min has been cast. She’s played by Kae Alexander.
I meant no Min in the trailer, but I can wait.
I was hoping this was a gritty W.o.F. reboot where Pat Sajak gets the Ned Stark treatment.
WHEEL!OF!*THWACK* *THUD*
did you mean to use the cast photo for peoria’s 2015 season of ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ as the header image?
Choose wisely, wise chosen one!
A few comments:
1) It seems really odd that they didn’t de-age the Aes Sedai characters… The books make a big deal about Aes Sedai not aging, to the point where ageless features are the most-recognized way of identifying an Aes Sedai.
2) It seems like Season 1 is going to include plot points from both The Eye of the World and The Great Hunt, or else they are going to perhaps show the capturing of Logain, instead of just having Rand watch him being paraded through Caemlyn. The only named Aes Sedai to appear in the TEotW were Moiraine and Elaida a’Roihan (and there is no casting announcement for her), but there are the Aes Sedai who captured him and escorted him through Caemlyn to Tar Valon. This would also explain the four Aes Sedai wearing red outfits in the wilderness.
3) I suspect the guy at 1:11 is supposed to be Thom Merrillin. If so, they screwed that one up. He’s supposed to have mustaches, not a full beard.
4) It also looks like they got the bows wrong. The bows that Rand and Mat carry are essentially English longbows, since Jordan’s description of Two Rivers longbows matches the English longbow’s construction (yew wood), size (6’+ tall), and stopping power (able to punch through chain mail)
5) I mentioned it before, but they also left out the gemstone that Moiraine wears on her forehead.
1) They talked about the de-aging and said that it would basically destroy their budget to have to apply that much CGI to that many actors for that much of the runtime. Same for the warder color-shifting cloaks. The “ageless” thing is a neat narrative device that unfortunately is essentially impossible to pull off in a visual prdoduction.
2) I said this elsewhere but there’s so many characters that they have to shift some stuff around; even with an unlimited budget, you can’t introduce too many characters in a TV show, because most of the audience simply won’t be able to keep track. The Logain thing, though, I think the idea there is that in the books, we’re told how dangerous male channelers are and it’s basically exposition; by changing it to showing him get captured, the audience can get a more visceral sense of the danger. And it probably ties into the overall narrative restructuring necessitated by limiting the number of characters and elements being introduced. (E.g. as far as I can tell, there’s no Elayne, Gawyn, Galad, Morgase, or Gareth in this season, but they’re all really important characters and so will probably show up later?)
3) That’s Tam al’Thor (played by Michael McElhatton, more recently known as Roose Bolton on GoT).4) I think a lot of visual details like this are going to get changed for various reasons: 6′ bows are unwieldy to carry around and interfere with the visual look of costuming. It’s one thing to imagine it while reading, but having a giant bow strapped across your back for half the running time of the show probably wouldn’t work.5) I’ll miss the gemstone, it’s iconic, but I can understand adjusting costuming based on what looks better on screen. They probably did try the gemstone thing and decided it was distracting or inconsistent with the overall visaul style they were going for.
1) Odd, but that could still cause problems later on down the line, especially when it comes to Siuan and Leane’s plotlines.
2) I’m really disliking that they aren’t casting Morgase, Elayne, Gawin, Galad, and Elaida this season. After all, Elayne and Rand don’t cross paths again until Tear, and Gawin & Galad for a much longer time after that. Plus, it forms the basis for most of Elaida’s actions in later books. Meanwhile, they’ve already cast & included characters that don’t show up until the next book, such as Liandrian and Leane. The casting of “King of Ghealdan” for several episodes also confirms that Logain’s capture and potential escape is going to be an important part of this season. One of the really interesting things is that one of the Season 1 episodes is going to be called “The Dragon Reborn”
3) Ah yes, I hadn’t checked IMDB’s listing. I was looking at the book wiki, which had Thom’s casting but not Tam’s.
4) But this brings up another thing: Thom is only listed as being in a single episode the entire season.
1) Yeah good point. They might do some tricks with makeup or characters exclaiming “why you look so much younger than when I last saw you,” or handwave it away somehow.2) I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they remix a lot of the storylines in order to make it fit the format; as much as the first few books are wonderful, there is a lot of stuff that can be condensed or excised without hurting the core of the story. So yeah, I don’t know how they’re going to handle any of that. They could do things like make Elaida a narcissistic schemer, just with different specific plot elements than what were in the books.4) Yeah that’s a bit confusing. Thom’s great but his main role at first is (as I recall) “wise old mentor type” and they could distribute that between Lan and Moiraine for the most part.
*Spoiler alert follows for anyone else out there*
1) They’d have to be de-aged digitally. The entire reason why they are able to escape Tar Valon, and Gareth Bryne, is because they don’t just stop looking like Aes Sedai, but start looking like people they could have been decades previously. Literally no one recognizes them, not even Aes Sedai of their own Ajah.
2) Honestly, I don’t like remixing storylines in general, but especially with this series. Everything is so interconnected that breaking one part causes multitudes of problems down the line, as the events early on in the book shape the beliefs and actions of other characters much later on. They’re going to end up writing themselves into unsolvable problems that way.
3) Obviously he wouldn’t be involved in the whole season, since he stays with Rand and Mat until they get to Whitebridge. But this would mean that Bel Tine, the attack on Two Rivers, fleeing to Taren’s Ferry, meeting Nynaeve, arrival and stay in Baerlon, flight from Baerlon, their stay and separation in Shadar Logoth, the trip down river, all the way to Whitebridge would have to take place in a single episode.
Meanwhile, Min is credited in 3 episodes, despite only showing up in one or two chapters of the first book.
Double post.
I have read few things that so clearly cry out for the NERRRRRRRD gif as this comment, and I love you for it.If you’re not familiar, let me recommend the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.* It’s a ancient-military historian taking a granular look at what is gotten mostly wrong and occasionally right by representations of the premodern world in popular culture. Highly recommended.*I’m not actually sure what the style guide says about blog names. Italics? Quote marks?https://acoup.blog/2019/05/03/blog-overview-a-collection-of-unmitigated-pedantry/What I aim to present here are a historian’s thoughts (more on me and my interests below) on depictions of historical and quasi-historical societies and militaries in popular culture. Mostly this has been prompted by my response to how pre-modern battles are generally presented, but I hope to expand beyond just battles and armor, to also talk about historical societies and economies.The goal here is to do something more substantial than the bevy of internet nitpicks, sins-lists and the like. We’re going to discuss a lot of flaws here, but also where a given scene, book, or game succeeds in embedding some real sense of historical reality into a moment. Negativity for its own sake gets boring: we’re as much about the good as the bad here.But this is also a blog about history, and so the goal is for the reader to learn something – in each post – about historical societies, militaries, battles, weapons and so on. This blog is as much about how it really worked (in as much as we can know) as how it didn’t work in that one scene.
Eh. What I was really hoping for was a BMX-themed cooking competition show, “Wheelie of Thyme”.
That picture gives off high school play levels of costume design.
Okay so clearly if there are going to be reviews of this show here, we will need an experts and newbies separation. I have only read the first book, and I was here to see a trailer for a new tv show. But I come in the comments and IMMEDIATELY have half of the series DESTROYED by spoilers. Which really pissed me off rather.
Oh god. This is going to absolutely suck, isn’t it?I’ve read the entire series several times. Not sure why. It’s not THAT good. But something keeps drawing me back in. Also, my favorite character is Min and I hope they give her more to do in the series than in the books. She gets such short shrift.
WOT is that rare series of books that would be SO improved by having a judicious screenwriter rip it to pieces and cut it down drastically…
Little known fact that after you remove the braid tugging, skirt smoothing, and withering aes sedai stares you get a tight 30 page short story
Well that and combine all the unbearably tiresome councils of wise women into two – one “good” and one “evil”.
I kinda hope that if the Seanchan ever appear (which I assume they’ll have to, since they’re pretty integral to, well, nearly every plotline eventually) they keep the description I read once– in an interview with Jordan I think– that they drawled like Texans.
“Y’all hand over them channelers, y’hear?”
I wonder which of Amazon’s big fantasy shows will be better? This trailer looks a bit generic, but the show does have the advantage of having big novels’ worth of material to adapt, whereas the LOTR series is trying to stretch five seasons out of a couple of chapters/appendixes. But the latter certainly has the bigger war chest.
Meh. If you can’t figure out at least five season’s worth of episodes where Sauron corrupts the Numenoreans or the haughty elf prince does all the bad things while fighting literal Satan, then you shouldn’t be writing for a living.
Nope.
I agree on the generic fantasy nature of the trailer. Had to watch it twice to even figure out basic characters; I mistook Siuan for Morgase, for instance, until I realized the groups of Aes Sedai in Ajah colors meant we were in the White Tower. Slightly hard to write why without spoilers, but here goes.I suspect part of the generic aspect for me is seeing the five powers in action displayed as fancy CGI. I kind of get why they’re doing that, but I think there’s something to be said for how Jordan intended for magic to be seen by everyone else. Jordan’s comments that the later battle of wills between a character seen here and a Forsaken would have been seen by those without access to Power as just two women grunting and staring at each other has always struck me as a really interesting jumping off point for many things – like why the Aes Sedai are often so despised – and while you’re going to need to do something for visual representation, if the standard’s going to be like the stuff that’s swirling around Moiraine I think it’s probably a mistake.Also, it’s a trailer so it doesn’t necessarily mean much, but if their adaptation focuses on the narrative rather than how the plot affects the characters this is going to be problematic. Vivid personalities were one of the things Jordan did right, and I’ve always felt that if you’re going to successfully adapt this it has to focus less on the intricacies of politics and more on things like a particular lead character blowing up mountaintops and deciding that he needed to see in a daze of utter exhaustion – not for the ‘splosions, but for the physical cost of what being the Chosen One entails.As far as the casting, it’s fine on its surface and I’ll keep an open mind with physical resemblance like I did with The Expanse; it did strike me, though, that it may be better Jordan isn’t around to growl (which he probably would have.) The only concern I have is with how they plan to portray the Aiel – and I realllly hope that forest fight scene (with swords!) wasn’t them – since I could care less about someone’s racial background unless it directly goes to Jordan’s best single bit of writing in the entire bloated series, which was revealing their jawdropping history. That a particular character wasn’t wearing blue contacts (ala Eddie Olmos in BSG – Jamie Bamber has joked about his sacrifice for token family resemblance) does concern me slightly.Still better than Billy Zane at least.
I don’t think we’ll see the Aiel this season; none of the announced casting is for Aiel characters. I think in the books they don’t even start showing up until later in book 2.
Book 3. When everyone is on their way to Tear.
Ah right, thanks. God, I need to reread the first six books.
According to the show runner, they are going to show that channeling is only visible for some people. The trailer obviously doesn’t show how they are doing this. The forest fight scene is probably connected to the capture of Logain and has nothing to do with the Aiel. There is possibly a dead Aiel in a cage behind Mat in one of the shots, but the fandom is divided on that interpretation.
“So Damn Generic” was the title of Book 2 in the series, I think.(I only made it through Book 1, so I’m not entirely certain)
Both these books and Dune were incredibly important to me as a kid and I’m just utterly terrified of both adaptations.
maybe it was just the power of imagination, but WoT always felt colorful and bright, with heavy Chinese visual influences, unlike a lot of medieval fantasy books.this drab, low-saturation shit is extremely not it
From the picture, I’m assuming Nyaneve and Egwene get merged into one character, and they’re “green?”
No, Nynaeve is on the far left and Egwene is third from the right. (From left to right: Nynaeve, Mat, Lan, Moiraine, Egwene, Perrin, Rand)
okay, i’m buying. at least…unlike GoT, the series is there, it’s finished. So when you adapt…you adapt. There’s great stuff there. If you read the entire series, there’s a whooooole lot of dead space there, too. I wonder what happens if all that’s left is the real good stuff?
I’m actually kind of shocked how not-GoT that trailer felt. Not a positive or a negative, just had expected that would be the feeling the show would go after.Having written, agreed with the other comments here that it did feel pretty generic in a lot of parts, probably partially because the source material is ultimately is somewhat generic. Yet I am really intrigued by this show as WoT is essentially Gender Stereotypes: The Fantasy Epic, so I’m really curious to see how the showrunners deal with those issues.
I’m not sure how seriously U.S. viewers will continue to take it if there are multiple lines of dialogue (straight out of the books) like “Fear The Taint!” “It’s The Taint!” “We have to cleanse The Taint!” “I can no longer feel The Taint!” “He’s been driven mad by The Taint!”
Wheel of Time is simultaneously one of the best fantasy series I have ever read, and also one of the fucking worst. There are moment that have brought tears to my eyes and moments that make me want to throw the book against the wall. Ultimately its faults crush the good to smithereens – by the tenth book the series is downright unreadable, and its approach to gender and male/female relations grows grosser and grosser until, by the time you’re waist deep in ‘see, her screaming constant abuse at you is a sign of true love and you should like it’, you just feel kind of ill.
What I am saying is: why do they think adapting a series that is this retrograde in 2021 is a good idea? Either you’re faithful to the books and you end up alienating the half of your audience who is new, or you change it so much the you alienate the other half who want to see something faithful. This is a los/lose scenario.
Elayne Trakand is the worst female character in all of fiction prove me wrong.
Looks generic. Looks like Shannara.
This looks weirdly cheap. I think it’s partly that the costumes all look like they just came off the rack in the costume department and are being worn for the first time, and partly that all the buildings – all backgrounds more than ten feet from the camera other than landscapes, really – are so obviously CGI.
Every season after 4 had better have at least 200 episodes where nothing happens
Caption the photo above.
LARPers in pajamas.
Man, that is a generic fucking trailer, with generic fucking costumes, music that might as well be a free GarageBand track and no personality at all.
Some of the choices they made for the Witcher are snicker-inducing, but at least they made aesthetic choices. This looks unbelievably bland and generic.
The only marginally interesting thing in the trailer is that only women can cast magic, so maybe they should have focused on that more, along with canning their artistic directors and finding someone who could find something in or create something distinct from the books.
However good or bad it ends up being, I guarantee the new D&D movie will have a hell of a lot more personality than this mayo on white bread.
Wheel of Time, turn turn turn. Tell us the lesson we should learn.
I read this series, even the books that needed editing. I will definitely give this a try. The music in this teaser is dreadful.