Wheel of Time (Amazon Prime originals series) - It looks exactly like you expect

[Prompt Critical]

I searched for other threads on this but didn't find anything; if I missed it I apologize in advance and please merge this.

In the ongoing quest to adapt literally everything into a streaming TV show, Sony Pictures and Amazon optioned the rights to epic fantasy novel series The Wheel of Time in 2018.

In the past, there were a few extremely low-budget attempts to adapt the series into a television show or film, all of which crashed and burned without producing much of note. If you are a cringe connoisseur you can search on YouTube for "Winter Dragon", the most recent attempt - the entire pilot is on there, and it's incredibly bad.

Author Brandon Sanderson, who took over and finished the series when original writer Robert Jordan died, was rumored to be deeply involved in the Sony/Netflix production, and fans were cautiously optimistic. But there were some early warning signs, of the type that shouldn't really surprise people anymore:

(Anyone who has read the series knows this statement is not just incorrect, but so far from correct it would lead to questions if the person writing it had even read the novels.)

Fast forward to today. The casting for the show has been announced, and - hoo boy - it looks exactly like everyone was afraid it would.

(Left to right: Egwene, Rand, Perrin, Nynaeve, Mat - all from the same tiny rural village. In the books, Rand's differetly-colored eyes and hair immediately marked him as an outsider, and his parentage was a subject of intense speculation among the other villagers.)

I keep finding more and more uses for this picture...

 

[Rand /pol/]

A few actors are brown? Who cares.

 

[MI 814]

Yeah the guys on the MCU thread keep telling me I am crazy for calling this crap out. But it just keeps happening.

They are very obviously making these on the cheap and aren't hiring the best people for the job, just hiring them because they aren't white. It's really really weird to see them do this and it's honestly quite fucked up.

"Oh who cares if a few of them are brown". Okay, then let's make a Black Panther with half of Wakanda being white. It's the blatant double standard.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

How hard is it to adapt a book with detailed descriptions of the characters? Apparently, very hard.

 

[Tootsie Bear]

When it comes to movies and T.V shows based on comics or popular novel series, it's going to last as long as it's profitable. Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit did very well in theaters, Game of Thrones was insanely popular, so every media company is going to rush to create the next hip series based on a novel that most people haven't even heard of before it became mainstream.

 

[Damn Near]

um sorry shitlords, everyone knows that niggers niggered in europe before europeans enslaved niggers somehow

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

TBH the books were kind of all over the place. The amount of filler, repetition and text vomit was beyond belief. 14 or 15 or maybe 16 volumes (depending upon how you count the ancillary stuff) and well over 4.4 million words to my mind overwhelms some interesting characters and world-building. Lots of braid tugging, arms crossed under breasts and well-turned calves in the nuts and bolts prose as well. What you get when you use your wife as your editor, apparently.

I bailed on the series around the sixth book, even before the volumes fans of the series refer to as "the slog." I think at one point in one of those volumes a character was pregnant for over a thousand pages and still didn't have the kid, something like that.

Then again, I'm pretty sure all five of the main characters were referred to as fair skinned, with Rand being notable for having red hair and blue eyes. The way he looked was actually kind of an important plot point.

 

[_blank_]

Well, time to add another line to the "intentionally mishandled IPs" list. However, I might give them a pass if they use Blind Guardian's Wheel of Time song for the show's theme, but they won't, so fuck 'em.

 

[Secret Asshole]

Wow diversity hires. Shocker. I'm just waiting for the constant failure of woke shit. Star Wars collapsed. Hopefully the super-diverse MCU is next, following along with streaming services.

"This actor is really good."

"No, lets hire this brown one that is monotone as fuck so we have some diversity"

"But this other brown actor is really good."

"She's too pretty. Uggos only."

"But this is a fantasy show, people don't want to bang or be uggos."

"That new kid from marketing told me everyone loves uggos and bad diversity hires, so lets do it."

*show is cancelled in the middle of first season*

"HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?! WE DIDN'T DIVERSITY HARD ENOUGH"

 

[eldri]

Then again, I'm pretty sure all five of the main characters were referred to as fair skinned, with Rand being notable for having red hair and blue eyes. The way he looked was actually kind of an important plot point.

It's ironic that the push for diversity hires excludes pale male gingers but, then again, pale male gingers are not sexy by past and present standards.

 

[inception_state]

This is pretty depressing. It's ridiculous that Amazon Prime felt the need to go full Netflix in a story that already has a pretty diverse cast of secondary characters. It's laid out pretty clearly in the books that the Two Rivers is a backwater village with near-zero contact with the outside world, descended from the ruins of Manetheren something like a thousand years ago. The odds of it having a photo-op diverse cast is basically zero. The character descriptions in the books are also completely inconsistent with these casting choices.

I guess it's going to be a competition between this and the Witcher to see which studio can produce the more noxious dumpster fire.

 

[Gabble Ratchet]

This sort of thing is exactly why I want a big company to latch onto Earthsea just to see how they would muck it up. Look, there's your very explicitly canonically brown strong hero! What are they going to do with old Ged? Make him trans for extra points or something? Even browner?

With Wheel of Time, they just want a nice little woke Game of Thronesy cash cow with some books as loose plot guidance and you know it.

 

[Done]

The only thing more boring than old boomer series getting green-lit with diversity hires are people who screech about it all day everyday.

At some point you'd think that ppl would learn to not to give a fuck, watch what they like to watch and let what they don't die a slow ignominious death.

Yet here we are, with old father autism.

 

[gobbogobb]

The only thing more boring than old boomer series getting green-lit with diversity hires are people who screech about it all day everyday.

At some point you'd think that ppl would learn to not to give a fuck, watch what they like to watch and let what they don't die a slow ignominious death.

Yet here we are, with old father autism.

I agree with this 100 percent and I'm a WoT sperg who wouldn't watch this even before the casting, because there is literally no way to.pit the good parts of RJs world onto film without turning it into a farce.

At least Legend of the Seeker said fuck the books, let's remake Hercules and Xena with sexier people.

Also for those of you who stopped reading: Cliff's notes 8-10 but read the final three. Sanderson did a fantastic job.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

So, wait.

They cast Perrin as a black man?

Perrin? The character that is almost universally reviled as the most boring character among the "core" cast, who's entire extended story arc goes from being a manual labor to a savage animal-possessed manimal-thing?

And he's the only black man in the core cast?

And the only black woman in the cast is Nynaeve? A character who's story arc for the first two thirds or so of the... shit, what did it get up to, 12? 14? book series was "Contestant on 'Biggest Bitch in The Universe'"? And this in a series where a friendly woman would be considered a tsundere character in any manga or anime?

Well done with that diversity, there.

Beyond that... Egwene and Rand don't look too far off their book characters. Two Rivers folk were dark complected all around, speculated to be something akin to Italian or some other Mediterranean sort. Rand was an Aielman, so a fair-skinned ginger fits. Except the actor for Rand looks short, and one of Rand's defining features is he stood out for how tall he was. Perrin was the only one of the main cast that was even close to his height, and he was still shorter by a few inches.

The other three are all wrong.

 

[Cloacan]

Marcus Rutherford, who plays Perrin, has a worn leather glove face like a young John C. Reilly minus the skill and charisma. That is one seriously ugly mutt. That is terrible casting all around. With a cast like that there is no way this will be anything other than crap.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

It's a really terrible series anyway but if Aviendha is a negress instead of a toned redhead it's gonna be a lot harder to fap to the episode that's just her and Elayne taking a bath.

This sort of thing is exactly why I want a big company to latch onto Earthsea just to see how they would muck it up. Look, there's your very explicitly canonically brown strong hero! What are they going to do with old Ged? Make him trans for extra points or something? Even browner?

With Wheel of Time, they just want a nice little woke Game of Thronesy cash cow with some books as loose plot guidance and you know it.

Scifi did this. Ged was Danny Glover and Sparrowhawk was a white dude.

 

[Goodbye Horses]

Scifi did this. Ged was Danny Glover and Sparrowhawk was a white dude.

Didn't it have the bitch that can't act from Smallville as well?

 

[gobbogobb]

I just thought of another thing that's going to really suck. Any cgi of the "weaves" is going to be really shitty especially when males and females are both doing their magic stuff at the same time

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

errin? The character that is almost universally reviled as the most boring character among the "core" cast, who's entire extended story arc goes from being a manual labor to a savage animal-possessed manimal-thing?

As far as I made it Perrin was actually my favorite character. He wasn't Rand "All the Chicks Dig Me" Al'Thor or Mat "Cleverest Dude Evarrrr" Cauthon, which somehow made him more real to me. From what I understand he became much less sympathetic after my stopping point, Book Six-ish, so I admit I'm not seeing the whole picture.

Edit:

I just thought of another thing that's going to really suck. Any cgi of the "weaves" is going to be really shitty especially when males and females are both doing their magic stuff at the same time

I dunno. I thought the F/X in both Good Omens and The Boys were usually pretty good, and at worst were at least passable. To what extent Amazon Studios is actually a studio with the same people working on the f/x I honestly have no idea, but I think at this point that is the least of my worries.