Amazon rounds up a bunch of fresh-faced, beautiful peasants to star in its Wheel Of Time show
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Although it hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as the streaming service’s billion-dollar plan to dip into the world of The Lord Of The Rings, Amazon’s adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time series has been steadily building up its “Hey, I’m also an overly long fantasy epic, you guys!” steam over the last few years. The biggest movement came when Rosamund Pike signed on for the series back in June, starring as central character Moraine, a female magic user (or Aes Sedai, in the show’s argot-heavy terming) looking for the guy who’ll either save the world, or destroy it.
Now we also know who’ll be playing said maybe messiah, with Josha Stradowski cast as farmer-made-good/very-very-bad Rand Al’Thor. Born in the Netherlands, Stradowski is a relative newcomer to the world of English-language acting, although he’s starred in a handful of independent films. Meanwhile, he’ll also be joined by the rest of the just-cast population of bucolic fantasy village Two Rivers, a magical land where the cheekbones apparently flow like wine. Rand’s two best friends Perrin and Mat (who are also all filled-up with destiny; it’s destiny and good bone structure all over the place in these parts) are being played by Marcus Rutherford and Barney Harris, for instance. Rand’s childhood sweetheart Egwene, meanwhile, is being played by Madeleine Madden (currently co-starring in Dora And The Lost City Of Gold), while town healer/resident braid tugger Nynaeve is being played by Zoë Robins, who also appeared in the Shanarra Chronicles show, and is, thus, ahead of the game here in terms of having adaptations of bookcase-breaking fantasy tomes under her belt.
Of the main cast of the initial book, the only character yet to be announced is Lan, Moraine’s magically bonded bodyguard. (Presumably, this hardened warrior will eventually be played by several rotating castmembers of Riverdale.) Meanwhile, Amazon is presumably already in the process of securing the 8 tons of dirt it’ll need every day to make these fresh-faced children of the future look like the hard-living, shit-caked peasants they’ll be playing.
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I notice we also have yet to hear anything about Elayne. Dare I hope they’ll make the Andor royal family non-white, like I’d totally do just to piss people off?
She’ll likely only be in one episode of the first season unless they restructure the story.
They are giving more time to Logain, which means that Elayne and Elaida will probably have more scenes as well since they all go together from Caemlyn to Tar Valon.
I feel like Elayne’s gotta be mixed-Asian, since she’s half-Carhienin. But then they’ve cast Rosamund Pike as Moiraine, and Moiraine’s not only full-blooded Cairhienin, she’s a cousin to the royal family, so…
It’s interesting to me that the cast they’ve shown so is fairly racially diverse, but the Rand actor is one of the whitest while in the books he’s described as notably darker in skin tone than most westerlanders.
(((You))) are so edgy!
i feel like this might be a bad play for amazon- i had a series of long flights about a decade back, mentioned i’d bought the first two of the series to keep me occupied and the overwhelming response from my friends who had read it was that this series was bad and i should stay the hell away from it. if the people who had read them were that harsh, it doesn’t seem like a great start point
There’s actually a lot of potential in making it something of a reverse Game of Thrones: stay close to the books early on when they’re good, and then once you hit the point where Jordan completely disappeared up his ass and kept piling on the naked padding (typically noted to be around book 6 or 7), just start doing your own thing that will doubtlessly be better.
Books like 7-10 can be smooshed down into one season..
The whole series could maybe fill 1 season.
I quit reading the series when the cast and narrative “focus” had become so bloated that a single, massive volume appeared to cover about three or four days of story time.
The latter books suffer not only from naked padding but from the fact that Jordan kind of just forgets how to write endings. It’s like 30 chapters of bipping around and then one chapter of utter, incomprehensible chaos where not even Jordan is certain what’s going on. I think it’s the Sammael fight where he disappears in a building that later gets destroyed and Rand shrugs and goes “well, I guess he’s dead” and I had to look it up on the fan wiki to confirm that it wasn’t some weird fake out and the character was, in fact, dead.
They don’t need to do something different, exactly, they just need to excise all the extraneous subplots and condense the main plots. Bring in the Sea Folk for some exotic flavor but we don’t need the TV equivalent of entire chapters of Sea Folk arguing with each other.
Jordan went into extraordinary detail and you have to either go with that (eg: I’m fine with knowing exactly what people wear in this country, what their jewellery is like and what kinds of plant grow), plough through it, or read something else. I found the series much easier to read once Brandon Sanderson took over the writing, even though he tried to stay true to Jordan and provide a seamless transition.
Aout a decade back would have put your friends at a time when Jordan had died and it was unclear whether Sanderson was going to do great work keeping the truth of the characters. So there is that.
Man, I am a Sanderson fan, generally, but his work on WoT was hot garbage. I never felt that he captured the nature of the characters and, frankly, thought it was simply a way for Tor to create an audience for an up and comer out the one established by a man who would no longer be able to publish. Mistborn, Warbreaker and Way of Kings are all great (Steelheart was….ok), but the entire WoT/Sanderson matchup, while perhaps necessary, came of as cynical and ineffective. I mean, I haven’t met a single person IRL who thought that he stuck the landing.
he was still alive do maybe it was even a bit earlier. the vibe i got was basically ‘what if instead of just not writing any more GOT books when he got writers block, martin instead wrote increasingly bad wheel spinning books that made people sad’ as the problem.
i read the two books i bought (i kind of had to since those were the books i had on the plane) and i thought they were fine. typical tolkien-esque knockoff high fantasy. nothing particularly special and given that the feedback i was getting was that it bogged way down and it was deeply questionable if the author would live to finish the series i didn’t bother to continue, since i didn’t find the overarching narrative to be particularly compelling.
but i do wonder if there is much of an audience for this- the series took decades to complete and didn’t have a wider cultural impact the way a GOT did- it seemed closer to a shannara, then a LOTR or a GOT. plus, amazon got its own LOTR….. because it got LOTR. if they have the rights to the OG of high fantasy, are they really going to spend money and effort to build out a brand that started off the very common ‘what if tolkien, but i change names and settings a bit’ fantasy that was big for awhile? usually, the interesting parts of those tolkien-likes doesn’t really appear until a book or more in and i don’t know who sticks around past season 1
The GoT books are awful although Martin himself said that he was inspired by Wheel of Time to write them.
the series took decades to complete and didn’t have a wider cultural impact the way a GOT didWell even Lord of the Rings took about a decade to write, and A Song of Ice and Fire has taken as long to get this far as nearly three times as much Wheel of Time took. I’ve been on the ride for both of them for well over a decade, and as annoying as it was waiting for each Wheel of Time book to come out, it’s been long enough between aSoIaF books that I would have nearly forgotten about it if not for the show.
Anyway, I also am not sure this show is going to work, but keep in mind that Game of Thrones had absolutely no cultural impact before the show. Lord of the Rings definitely had some, but even that was nothing comparing before the movies to after them. The Wheel of Time has maybe a sliver more or less cultural impact than aSoIaF before the show came out, but it was more popular by far. Sales of the two series are about even now, after the show has finished, but they were much further apart before, and Jordan’s blurb was a pretty important get for Martin’s first book. So while the odds are heavily stacked against this show, I wouldn’t have bet Game of Thrones would be half as popular as it became when it first premiered either.
i’d argue though that GOT had a greater cultural impact, even if it didn’t sell as many copies. Maybe jordon changed stuff up later on (again- i only read books one and two.) But the stuff i read was a standard high fantasy tolkien boilerplate. for a long time, if you wanted to write high fantasy you basically had to sell a book that was fellowship and only after you sold enough copies would they give you a followup- terry brooks is obvious, but even tad williams (who is amazing) basically had to play the game.GOT broke the mold- it took the setup of the classic story and tossed it out. its easy to forget how shocking that the protagonist getting his head lopped off in a fantasy novel that didn’t feature a wizard was in 1996, but it was nuts.
i didn’t hate the two books i read or anything- they were serviceable. but i do still question if a network that has actual LOTR- and paid something close to a billion dollars for it- is going to make a decent show and stick with it for what is basically a LOTR, but not quite.and i say that as someone who kind of liked the shannara tv series and devoured those books for years.
Yeah, but those are two different metrics you’re tracking. Cultural impact is something like “Frodo lives” showing up on subway walls and bumper stickers or famous lyrics referencing the books. Ice and Fire had virtually none of that, no more than Wheel of Time did, anyway. It might be that Ice and Fire broke the fantasy mold more than anything else previous to it (and I wouldn’t necessarily argue that), but that’s not cultural impact, it just made some waves within a fairly insular fantasy community.
I mean, I get what you’re saying: they already have Tolkien, they don’t need Tolkien-lite, and Game of Thrones succeeded based on it’s novelty to those unfamiliar with fantasy of its type. But it was still a huge risk at the time, and so too was Lord of the Rings. And only reading the first two books will hide the fact that Jordan redefined the Tolkien mold entirely after the first three books (Not for the better, probably).
Anyway, we agree that it’s doubtful they’ll manage to pull it off, but there is a reason why Amazon invested in it, and it’s not a bad one, even if it doesn’t pan out.
I genuinely can’t tell if some of these negative posts are just an elaborate troll here – reading 2 out of 15 books doesn’t give you a great view of this series, the first book especially is pretty stuck on the Tolkien rails compared to later, and the ending that Brandon Sanderson wrote helped fix a lot of the issues of the latter books. I was incredibly skeptical going into those last couple books and I can’t believe how much I loved the resolution. Also there’s a fairly huge fandom out there for the series, and lets not pretend like your average joe had any idea about Game of Thrones before the series came out (plenty of book fans and readers sure but all those sales bros and stay-at-home-mom Dany-stans?). I guess my point is, I get that this series isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and I don’t think this is necessarily going to be their GoT, heck I’d be surprised if it doesn’t get cancelled halfway through but holy shit are me and a ton of other fans pretty excited for this to come out. More so than the LotR series – and I love LotR, I just am not inspired by a vaguely sketched out series set in the second age as of yet. But a series that is completely finished and done well? Hell yes
I disagree with your friends.
These books fucking sucked. It’s an “epic” with 5 characters and nothing fucking happens. It’s a series of 10 books that are each 1000+ pages but there’s not enough plot for a single short story. Half of the text is different variations of the sentence “Nynaeve sniffed and tugged her braid.” Rand bangs every female character, despite lacking any of the charm or charisma of Capt Kirk or James Bond. It spends like 7 books leading up to THE epic battle of the ages and they skip the whole thing, like End of chapter 27: ….the battle would start at dawn. Chapter 28: After the battle….
The fact that your go-to for charisma is Kirk and Bond is very telling as to why you didn’t like WoT.
LOL OK, they are my go-to for “male protagonist that inexplicably bangs every female character” and if you think they don’t have a lot of charisma, imagine a protagonist with less charisma. Thanks for making my point for me, even if you don’t understand how. After all, you were impressed by 10,000 pages about nothing, but without the wit and humor of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David.Wheel of Time sucked and if you liked it, your taste and intellect are suspect. You can’t tell an epic story with the same 5 fucking characters (from the same small fucking town) are literally the center of everything happening around the whole world, and nothing really happens. It’s like someone took the dumbest part of Star Wars (the only people that matter in the whole Galaxy are Skywalkers) and said “hey let me drill down on that hacky idea for 10,000+ pages”
“…sucked and if you liked it, your taste and intellect are suspect.”Spoken like a teenager who hasn’t realized that not everyone has the same life experience that he has had and that different people like different kinds of things.
Case in point: I DO NOT think Jerry Seinfeld is funny or all that witty. I had to google Larry David to realize he is the guy behind Curb Your Enthusiasum, another show I have no interest in. It does make me think that you are a city-dweller, which makes your anger at a “small fucking town” producing anyone of value, much less MORE THAN ONE, make sense.
Your entertainment touchstones make me think you are old, but your “my way or you’re stupid” attitude makes me think you’re very young.
So many layers of irony now….Go re-read the books and tell if you still think they’re good. Pro-Tip: they’re not good.
Also, Rand only “bangs” three of the female characters, its part of how he is three different guys all at the same time (sorta).If anyone is the shallow, mostly made of lies, sleezy-style “charming” character that bangs everyone, its Mat.
Who cares? The books are objectively bad, the story is very thin. MAYBE there’s one season of good tv in all 10 books. If you want to watch Nynaeve sniff and tug her braid for all of season 3, enjoy!
You really do not understand what an opinion is, do you? You think the WoT books are bad, I think Seinfeld is bad. Neither of these are facts or things that the other person needs to admit, they are just a difference of opinion. I don’t think that shows like Seinfeld shouldn’t get made or that people who enjoy that show are wrong or stupid or have bad taste, just different taste than me. Grow the fuck up and realize that there are lots and lots of different kinds of people in this world and they all deserve to be entertained!
“story is very thin” I’m just going to call full bullshit on this one. You may not like the story, or found it boring, but there is NOTHING thin about the WoT books. I would say it easily equals GoT for number of and depth of characters, plots & sub-plots(that go nowhere), world building, history…all the things that make a great, epic fantasy tale. Also, open ended comments like, “So many layers of irony now” without saying what is ironic about what I said, doesn’t make you look smart, it makes you look like you have no argument and just threw a generic criticism out there. Back up what you say or say nothing at all.
The layers of irony are there for the discerning reader, and I am just as complicit as you are. What I’m most interested in is hearing you support this statement:
“I would say it [WoT] easily equals GoT for number of and depth of characters, plots & sub-plots(that go nowhere), world building, history…all the things that make a great, epic fantasy tale.”
“the discerning reader” Lol. Great explanation, that was in no way a vague side step that absolutely DID NOT answer the question. You should be a politician when you grow up.
My support for my statement:
https://wot.fandom.com/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time
https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/A_Song_of_Ice_and_FireNotice the similar number of characters. Notice the similar number of nations/kingdoms. Notice the similar number of organizations among those nations/kingdoms that work for and against them depending on their reasons. Do I need to keep going? I could.
They may have different focuses; GoT more political with a side of end-of-the-world, WoT more end-of-the-world with a side of political, but still nation spanning, army clashing, world changing EPIC FANTASY TALES! While still taking the time to show the intimate struggles and arcs of many distinct characters.
Im glad you like WoT. Enjoy the show.
Well argued.
Wheel of Time sucked and if you liked it, your taste and intellect are suspect. And yet, you appear to have read (or at least know quite a bit of detail about) the series.
Lol Rand “bangs” every female character? The final battle lasting a sentence? A story told by 5 characters? Have you read the books?
I quit after 7 or 8, once I realized there was no payoff coming. Those books were hot fucking garbage, the nadir of “epic* fantasy” writing.Enjoy the adaptation, I hope it lives up to your expectations. *it’s not epic if all the main characters grew up best friends in the same small town. It’s Han and Luke, not Han and Biggs.
It spends like 7 books leading up to THE epic battle of the ages and they skip the whole thing, like End of chapter 27: ….the battle would start at dawn. Chapter 28: After the battle….What are you talking about? The “epic battle of the ages” covers around 300 pages of the last book.
Did you miss THE battle before that? From book 7 I think? The one they were hyping fir like 5000 pages? They literally skip the whole thing. I never made it book 10 because I quit after that. No payoff.
There are 14 books (15 is you count New Spring.) The books are amazing and have an excellent story. Books 8, 10 and 11 are slow although they are better if read back to back since the story separates to cover the events around the entire continent. You may find them subjectively bad but millions of people love them and it remains one of the best selling fantasy series.
The big battle in that general area of the story I can think of is the one at the end of book 6, the Battle of Dumai’s Wells, which was covered in detail. So I still don’t know which battle you’re talking about, because (having read through the series twice) I don’t remember any big, hyped-up battles that are then completely skipped in the text.
There’s one they hype up this epic battle but the entire thing happens while Mat? is KTFO’d and wakes up after its all over.
If you say so? I have trouble thinking of an epic battle Mat was even involved in before Tarmon Gai’don, much less one that was “hyped up” for “thousands of pages.”
*stops at book 7 out of 14 books and doesn’t finish series**whines about there being no payoff*
*knows when he’s being conned**quits when he’s ahead*
I found like the first 3 or 4 enjoyable and then the rest was just bloated crap. I was also maybe I was also 20 years old when the first book came out and my taste has changed a lot in the last ~30 years. Im excited for the LOTR series but im meh towards WoT.
It’s also going to be extremely effects heavy. Most of the bad guys are WETA level in terms of makeup and digital. Splashy magic effects, especially when seen from the version of the caster. Supposedly some high level weapon combat. Also, the cities of the world include ancient arcane structures, as do the countryside, and the wastes, and the….everywhere. Oh, and there’s huge armies in every book after two. And significant reality warping beginning in book three. Oh, and the flashbacks to the magitek past. Oh, and….It’s going to be super expensive to be remotely faithful to the books. GoT was low fantasy. There are some fantastic elements, but, excepting the odd dragon or zombie, there’s not a whole lot of magic flying around. WoT is high fantasy, and that **** ain’t cheap. In addition, if they decide to split the party like the books do, you’re going to get hit with the other part of the expense equation, which is multiple production companies in multiple locations.Up until book 5, these are pretty solid, and I think that they reinvigorated interest in fantasy at a time where it might have been flagging. However, I think that Amazon would have been better served with something else. Maybe the Belgariad by David Eddings? Popular among the fantasy nerd set, relatively short (five seasons), smaller cast that is usually together, less instances of magic (I mean, everybody is a freaking sorcerer, but they tend not to really utilize it much outside of climaxes), older IP so cheaper, fewer large battles, and, if successful, with another sequel series that could be two to five seasons, depending, and a prequel that could do the same.
Im not sure what series you’re talking about but if your friends said this was a bad series they weren’t true Fantasy fans, I do have issue with the cast choice, Mat and Perrin should be of the same coloring as they are from the same area and are described as similar in being darker, Rand is not a bad choice neither are the girls , the Woman they choose for Moraine isnt at all a fit, as shes tall and blonde. I curious about they selection for lan though
Being tall is not a vital aspect and she can easily due her hair. If you think of Moraine as a character and the parts that Pike has played, there’s no argument as to whether she can do it will. You’re much better off getting a good address who can play the part than getting one who looks the part more but can’t act it.This applies to all the cast, though the rest don’t have as much of a track record.
I say read it yourself and decide for yourself before making a post like this Your judgement of it as a bad idea it’s a declaration based on someone else’s opinion.
Definitely interested to see how it pans out. I do think there is a considerable fan-following for the series, and I will say that despite following the typical Tolkien-esque route, it was still an endearing, memorable series. Definitely bogged down with traveling & politics, but I think a tv series adaptation will take care of some of that. I’d say it’s worth snagging a few books from the local library to finish the series.
Im not sure why they said that, but I had a great time reading them. Really rich writing and world building.
The first few are good, and they are all at least solid up through the fifth or sixth. It goes pretty off the rails in the middle. Jordan badly needed a strong editor. There are immense amounts of pages where critical characters disappear and nothing meaningful happens.
I kind of doubt this show will last that long, but if they can get to the middle of the series there is an opportunity to reinvent and condense it in ways people will like.
Oh no! Well I guess it comes down to difference in taste and opinions. I loved these books, I’ve reread them twice. They are relatively easy to read once you get over the pronunciation of names and places. Its hands down top 10 best epic fantasy series I’ve read.
So 1 WOT IS BETTER THAN ASOIAF!it’s very different though truly if you made it through eye of the world you’re through the worst of it. The story doesn’t truly hit its stride until the shadow rising book 4. If you like fast paced storytelling then the wheel of time isn’t for you.. but in TV form of done right… the great hunt book 2 is probably one of the greatest pure fantasy adventure tales you’ll ever read.. If done right it will make for amazing tv.If done wrong it can turn out like shannara chronicles… which butchered another great standalone adventure in elfstones of shannara
I’ve read the entire series, twice over and it’s amazing. You have to read it twice if you want to really enjoy every detail. However, looking at this cast of actors, you could cut yourself on their jawline! Not how I’d imagined characters who were brought up in a rural village and its surrounding farms in the middle of no-where! Tough? yes. Muscular? yes. Looking like they just stepped off a ‘cute boys’ calendar? No way!
Is Rand Al’Thor the lovechild of Marvel superheroes Danny Rand and Thor, God of Thunder?
Unfortunately not, because that would be the crossover to end them all.
It’s funny you say that. In the book they mention that a LONG time ago “al’” meant “Son of”. So his name means “Rand, son of Thor”.
It’s not far off, amusingly. One of the premises of the book is that history is exactly cyclical, the titular wheel. Our present day is the mythic past for the book characters, with oblique references to some age long past ending with two giants annihilating each other with spears of (nuclear) fire. The present day of the book is conversely our mythic past and the experiences of the main characters are very deliberate amalgamations of the myths around various real world gods and demigods.Rand isn’t the Thor guy, however. He’s possibly the Danny Rand, the Immortal Iron Fist, Protector of Kun Lun and Sworn Enemy of the Hand guy; I’m not really sure.The mythic elements are something the books do quite deftly so you don’t need to be familiar with the Slavic pantheon for the plot to make sense. It’s admittedly not all subtle: the guy who gives up his eye to get hanged from a tree for knowledge is a little bit on the nose. Anyway, it’s a pretty nonessential bit of world building so I don’t expect the show to spend much effort on it.
More importantly, Perrin is Thor (and Vulcan). Mat is Odin. Rand is Tyr (and Jesus.)
Mat is Odin (and Loki). The rest is spot on.
The connection’s less explicit than with the eye and the ravens, but I can definitely see lumping a Trickster archetype in there, yeah.
Have you read the books? Dont go off of what the author is writing in this article or what other people are saying about Rand being “Thor”. Read the books and it will be easier to understand the world building.
No but his best friend is Odin, it’s really dumb
No his origin story is even dumber than that.
Yes.
*Love and Thunder
I’m a huge fan of Brandon Sanderson who has been unsure to plunge into this series, seeing it apparently sucks for over a quarter of its (very long) run. Maybe the series will eventually motivate me?
I dropped the books when they were still coming out after they started to bog down.Went back and re-read/finished them all a few years back.Much better that way.The hate they get was a bit justified at the time, but a now it’s very exaggerated vs the reality.
I’m guessing the slow parts are better knowing you can read the end at any point.
It also helps that you aren’t waiting for years between books. Being able to just power through makes “the Slog” (as it is known) much less of an issue.
There’s a disturbing feeling around book 6 of the story losing its momentum and gaining more and more sprawl. It’s a sense that sometimes comes over fantasy series that the author might just refuse to wrap up the story. Knowing that there’s a set finish line helps you punch through that inertia in a way you can’t when the series (and the uncertainty) is ongoing.
It’s been years, but I recall, everyone I knew who was reading them just gave up at the same point. Partly through Lord of Chaos, maybe?
I dropped them before book 10 came out, and always planned to re-read, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
If you finished book 9, you can literally just skip book 10. When I intro’d my dad to the series, he did them through Audible, and with his limited monthly book allowance I had him just skip it on his initial read through and he was completely fine. It literally just recounts the events of the last chapter of book 9 through different viewpoints around the world and checks in with one of the worst, most dragging storylines and thats about it. Book 11 thankfully is a huge step up.
I just skipped a bunch. I read the first seven back when they came out (1-3 were great, 4-5 were good, 6 was OK and 7 was dire), gave up, and then read the last 3 after becoming a Sanderson fan years later. I really don’t feel like I missed much: for one, I understand that some of the books I skipped had literally nothing happen in them, and for another, there are enough wikis out there to fill in any missing plot points. There’s no need to suffer though thousands of pages of sludge just to get to what is in my opinion a genuinely exciting and satisfying ending.
Madeleine Madden? Brandon Sanderson?Did Stan Lee create these people?
He sure did, true believer!
Excelsior!
Gesundheit!
No, Jack Kirby did, but Stan remembers it differently.
This
Of the main cast of the initial book, the only character yet to be announced is Lan, Moraine’s magically bonded bodyguard. (Presumably, this hardened warrior will eventually be played by several rotating castmembers of Riverdale.) Hopefully, this is because Amazon is knee deep in talks with Daniel Wu to star as Lan.
Well shit, that’d work.
Too young. Too small.I think Carter Wong could still pull it off at 72.
Possibly too young. It’s been a bit, but don’t Warders gain a bit of the aging slow down from the bond? How old is Lan supposed to be in-series? 50s?
That was my impression.
“Too small.”Daniel Wu is five inches taller than Carter Wong.
Let’s cross fingers.
Hey! Watch who you call peasants. They’re from the Two Rivers.
I appreciate how non-white this casting is! Sure, the books consciously mixed up real-world ethnicities and cultures, but I wasn’t actually expecting that to come through on a tv adaptation. Pleasant to have my cynicism refuted.
I may be mistaken, but while the book was definitely diverse, said diversity was kinda… segregated, for lack of a better term. In the sense that the geography spanned multiple kingdoms & countries with their own people groups, which roughly corresponded to real world ones. I.e., Andorans were largely one ethnicity, Borderlanders were another, Aiel another, Seanchan another etc.
Having all these people from a single village be a mixture of races is different. Probably a smart choice, because it gives a broader range of actors a chance to participate without having to wait until season two or whatever, and/or to be part of the main cast (the books’ cast is enormous but the three Two Rivers kids remain the principals throughout).Alternately, they could just be straight-up going with the idea that the majority ethnicity in the Two Rivers area is black/dark-skinned, and Rand’s whiteness is an exception due to his unusual heritage (Barney Harris playing Mat is ethnically ambiguous, so it’s hard to tell). I could see that decision— “oh, so the fact that he’s WHITE is what makes him the special Chosen One, huh??!”— pissing some people off.
Not accurate. Seanchan were definitely ALL races. The only people described in a way that would indicate race were the Aiel, the Cairheinin and the Seafolk … but even they varied a lot.
I think that’s probably true re: the Seanchan, since they were an expansionist empire and thus had conquered & absorbed countries of varying ethnicities. After a bit of research it seems Jordan was usually pretty coy about mentioning actual skin color, at least in a way that would track directly to real world analogues, while still mentioning hair & eye color a lot.
I haven’t read these in awhile, but that is my recollection as well. The overall world was diverse but each separate kingdom/region was pretty ethnically and racially homogeneous. I always assumed Two Rivers was pretty white, though I think Perrin was supposed to stand out.
So here it actually makes sense, unlike like in let’s say, The Witcher.
I get the multicultural casting, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for the five characters from Two Rivers, except maybe Rand. I mean, its a small village where everybody is on a first name basis, that has largely been on its own for so long that they don’t even receive tax collectors anymore, and it was big news when Rand’s mom came from outside. I’d expect the entire village to have blended together by now without any distinct ethnic groups.
One thing I find interesting is that the Rand actor is one of the lightest cast members revealed, but in the books Rand was always described as darker in skin tone than most Westlanders, a tell of his part Aiel heritage along with his height and hair color.
Will Pike’s character have a fondness for black sweaters? If so, I’m in.
No, her character almost exclusively wears blue dresses. It’s sort of a political statement. As in the real world, there’s a red “team” and a blue “team” of sorceresses. (There are like 5 other colors too, but those two *really* don’t like each other.)
I look forward to maybe 15-20 anonymous nerds bemoaning most of the characters not being white, and the hilariously disproportionate number of outraged tweets and kinja articles willfully pretending those idiots you’ve never heard of represent some sort of Toxic Fandom consensus.
Legend fades to myth.
I’m on the fence about starting to watch it, because I feel like I will be long dead before this series concludes.
Hot take: These books are great. Even the slow part of the series is great with the exception of one book (Book 10, Crossroads of Twilight, which IIRC takes places entirely during the climax of book 9). TBF, the series suffered GRRM esque delays that made the slower books seem interminable back when they were being published. But the books themselves are (mostly, see above) great and contrary to popular belief a TON of important and exciting events happen throughout the entire series, including the middle books that are so often dragged. That being said, all of the books are slow. That was Jordan’s style. Every book is a slow burn. To the shock of no one, a thousand page book is a slow burn. WEIRD.
Quite pleased with the casting of Perrin, Nynaeve, Mat and Rand (though Rand’s haircut is a bit weird as Rand has long hair in the books). The only problem is Egwene. In the books it’s clearly stated that Nynaeve has a bit dark skin so Zoe Robins is perfectly suited for Nynaeve’s role. The problem is Egwene. It’s clearly stated in the books that Egwene is not as fair as Mat or Moiraine but she is fairer than Nynaeve and in the casting they have made Egwene’s skin tone too dark. The directors should consider changing Egwene’s actress with another who has lighter skin than Nynaeve but not as fair as Mat or Moiraine. Otherwise apart from Egwene, the casting is excellent!
I look forward to much fantasy fun from this band of not-at-all-conspicuously racially diverse farmers from a typically insular medieval farm town!
Not to be super pedantic, but it’s not a medieval setting. It’s a good bit past that technologically.
Also not typically insular, having a rather unique history that the young protagonists are merely unaware of.
Having fewer Whites on tv is a big deal to you isn’t it Chaim?
Mat’s pretty good. Perrin needs to be at least a little bulkier than he appears to be. The rest are a solid, “meh, yeah, I guess.”
I’m cautiously optimistic about this. I think it has the potential to be a GoT-level fantasy hit. It’s basically GoT with less sex and moral ambiguity but with a matriarchal Jedi order. I do think, though, it is going to take a herculean effort by the writers to not only pare down all the plot lines to a manageable length, but also take out some of the weird sexism without killing important plots. It’s a world with lots and lots of powerful women, but there’s still nerd-wish-fulfillment polygamy, women’s conversations that are 95% fretting about men they have a crush on, and women punishing each other by spanking.
The showrunner addressed many of those concerns directly in a Q&A last year, and I for one was pleasantly surprised with the thoughtfulness that they’d approached it with.
This was a much better series than GoT imo. Definitely looking forward to seeing how it goes and what alterations and changes they make. (More Padan Fain and Min should be Thom’s apprentice 😅)
Hey the two rivers is a place.. rand mat Perrin, nynaeve and egwene are from emonds field the 3rd of the 4 towns that exist in the 2 rivers.. I know that’s alot to take in but WOT is far more complex than ASOIAF…as evidenced by above example ..lol
Such a Diverse™ cast, very stunning and brave!
This story isn’t supposed to follow Moiraine; in fact, book Moiraine disappears at one stage, maybe dead, and the story goes on without her. This means that if it’s a success, they are going to have to either alter her fate or change the main P.O.V. halfway through the story.