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

[MembersSchoolPizza]

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.

Actually, for what it's worth, that was my take on Perrin too, and he was my favorite character as well. He did wrecked at a bit as a character as the books went on, but I still liked him.

But talk to anyone else in the fan community, it seems, and Perrin is hated for being "boring" and "uninteresting". To be fair, it doesn't help that for a good chunk of several books, his story and the rest of the cast basically don't intersect much, and sometimes not at all.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

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

Magic being gendered is extremely problematic in current year. Even worse, in Jordan's universe men were generally stronger at it than women.

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.

He becomes another slave of Jordan's gynocracy not long after that and spends like 8 books trying to save his insufferable harridan of a love interest from the designated evil Aiel clan.

 

[gobbogobb]

Magic being gendered is extremely problematic in current year. Even worse, in Jordan's universe men were generally stronger at it than women.


He becomes another slave of Jordan's gynocracy not long after that and spends like 8 books trying to save his insufferable harridan of a love interest from the designated evil Aiel clan.

Men were only better at certain stuff though, like blowing shit up. WoT metaphysics were sexist as fuck, even when you take into account the "both sexes must work together to do really cool shit"

Who just so happened to not need his help (she totally needed his help), and didn't give a single fuck when Perrin killed the dude smuggling her out of the camp.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

Men were only better at certain stuff though, like blowing shit up. WoT metaphysics were sexist as fuck, even when you take into account the "both sexes must work together to do really cool shit"

I kind of got the impression that was just a coping mechanism for the Aes Sedai at being flat out inferior to their male counterparts on average but I hated all the women in that series except Min so much it may have just been my bias.

 

[Death Grip]

You guys obviously don't like the books that much so why are you bothered about the casting for the TV series.
Also that quote about what people look like in WOT is a direct quote from Robert Jordan, though it is clearly laid out in the series that people are distinct in their features delinatiated by where they are based so having characters from the main village depicted so differently (except for Rand obviously) is a tad dumb.

Anyways as a major WOT book sperg, think I will butt out now and leave y'all to your griping...

 

[gobbogobb]

I loved the books. I just don't see them ever translating to video.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

You guys obviously don't like the books that much so why are you bothered about the casting for the TV series.

Because its only possible redeeming characteristic is basically being a live action harem anime but all the waifus are ugly.

 

[Death Grip]

Say what?
Live action-as in being performed and/or acted
Harem-group of women owned by a man for the purpose of sexual pleasure
Anime-drawn Japanese cartoons
Waifus-attractive babes except in this context are ugly.
So you is all disappointed because you won't be able to fap to the series because of ugly female characters? Maybe you should all consider their internal qualities such as kindness or steadfastness or ability to tug their braid in a cute manner.
Or just hope that whoever they cast for Elayne is smoking hot...

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

You guys obviously don't like the books that much so why are you bothered about the casting for the TV series.
Also that quote about what people look like in WOT is a direct quote from Robert Jordan, though it is clearly laid out in the series that people are distinct in their features delinatiated by where they are based so having characters from the main village depicted so differently (except for Rand obviously) is a tad dumb.

I loved the first... six or seven books, anyways. And I stayed with the series to the end. I've got an autographed copy of the roleplaying game, even.

Doesn't mean I can't see the flaws in them. They sure had flaws.

And yeah, I know Randland phenotypes are supposed to be blurry compared to present day man, but that doesn't mean racial features become random. Genetics don't work that way. Two Rivers is a small, fairly insular, remote community. Excepting people like Rand who are explicitly foreigners, probably everyone in town is related to everyone else, to some extent. You aren't going to have one person looking obviously semitic, one person looking obviously african, one person looking... possibly gaelic, etc. Except for rand, all the Two Rivers folk should look roughly similar. And they don't.

 

[Death Grip]

I did say that. And that I thought it was a dumb casting choice for the people from the village.
Flaws though? No flaws in The WOT, most excellent book series EVAH .
Yeah ok, maybe some minor ones here and there...

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost]

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.

This will work up to a point, but how do you think the reaction would be if Peter Jackson was trying to make a LOTR film and they turned around an insisted that at least half the Hobbits, Elves, etc, be diversity hires. GOT last three seasons suffered from lazy writing and the inability of the showrunners to hand it over to people who would be more involved in giving it a decent send off.

No one I know disliked the fact that there were POC in GOT because it reflects the source material. All of the characters whether Dothraki or Meereen, or Ebony Islanders fit the description of the world and the expectation that the reader had.

Instead of what most script writers seem to be obsessed with, which would equate to the Starks being black for no particular reason, and why not make all of the Iron born Latinos, because they're under represented too.

It's getting to the point now where this diversity shit is not just insipid because it's being done for two reasons, one of them is the invasion of what is seen as a classically white male space. (Fantasy and Science Fiction) by neo-marxist and their puppet millennial ancillaries. But it's getting to the point now where it is going to actively harm the franchises they're purporting to help.

The Witcher is a great example of this. I know people who love the series of books and games, who won't be watching or are skeptical to watch the series now, because of all of the artificial race mixing/casting bullshit.
It's actively turning fans off of watching new things, and there is a point to this.

I won't watch anything now that has any of this sort of shit surrounding it, and I know a lot of people who won't either. You don't want your favorite characters maligned by some gender studies drop out who thinks they're going to change the world by making superman a disabled female gay black latino, don't watch. Support the properties that take care of their characters.

And the easy excuse would be to turn around and say "Oh you don't like POC as characters cause your a racist."

Wrong. If anything I agree with the sentiment that they're under represented in the industry, and if anything we should get more shows that have a diverse cast of characters already built into the story, or at least make the brave choice of addressing the fact that there are differences between the characters, instead of this weird utopian ideal that in a fantasy realm there is no racism, no sexism, no homophobia, etc, etc, etc.

A shining example of how the industry cuts of it's nose to spite it's face is one of my favorite TV shows is a historical drama called Shaka Zulu, it was an 80's TV production and filmed in South Africa and basically succeeded despite everyone trying to get it shut down, because interaction with the South African film industry at that point was seen as supporting apartheid. 80% of the cast is Black South African, the lead character in the series is a black, and manages to not only become a tribal leader, but essentially build an empire of the Zulu. The white "colonialist" characters in the series are basically in peril throughout the entirety of the series, because it's only by Shaka's will they're allowed to live or conduct their business.

It's a well made, well written and compelling series, which is why even after all this time like Shogun it remains a well rated mini-series, even though half the actors never worked in TV again after because of the boycotts that followed, because they'd worked in South Africa. And because no one wants to actually address the subject of colonialism now, because millennials are taught that the mission work and empire building of white Christian nations was somehow something to be deeply ashamed of an never discuss again, or hope that at least the majority of people will maintain the ignorant malaise of not going a bit deeper into the subject and realizing that what they're taught on the subject versus reality of the history surrounding it is woefully inadequate.

TLDR; Another fantasy series that will gather dust on the Netflix catalog.

 

[Prompt Critical]

I have vaguely positive feelings about Wheel of Time from my first read of it when I was younger. It's not a great series (others have pointed out some of the biggest problems - mostly flat characters, dreadful pacing, hundreds of pages of scenes and subplots that could have been cut with no loss to the overall story, repetitive over-use of certain descriptive phrases), but it is a fairly deep and well-developed setting that should translate well into a visual medium. It certainly has enough erotic lesbian spanking scenes that HBO would be able to run with it.

Also that quote about what people look like in WOT is a direct quote from Robert Jordan

Do you have a source for that? As far as I know, it's the work of showrunner Rafe Judkins, which he proudly tweeted out last year; Robert Jordan had been dead for over a decade at that point.

After getting some pushback in the comments, he further clarified:

Which is looking increasingly like it was a lie based on the main cast, but I suppose we'll have to wait and see.

As has already been said, the Two Rivers is a small, geographically isolated rural village in a faux-medieval world with no transnational transportation networks of any kind, where the primary occupation is tenant farming. Everyone on that casting list should be very similar looking, with the noted exception of Rand. If they'd picked all black actors I would have rolled my eyes because it's not strictly keeping with the written descriptions in the books, but at least you could suspend disbelief. Casting that looks like a college recruiting brochure is just disrespectful to the audience.

Magic being gendered is extremely problematic in current year. Even worse, in Jordan's universe men were generally stronger at it than women.

There is a lot of not-woke content in Wheel of Time that I'm sort of interested to see how they handle, including but not limited to:

- Ability to use magic is an immutable characteristic of birth and determined by your (binary) gender;
- One of the male leads (now cast as a black man) learns an important lesson that he needs to verbally abuse and threaten his wife to make her love and respect him;
- Another male lead is sexually harassed and repeatedly raped by a woman in a position of power, and his companions first blame him for the situation, then treat it like a joke;
- Same male lead marries an unrepentant slaveowner whose favorite hobby is breaking and training slaves, and to the best of my recollection she never gets any kind of real comeuppance or changes her views on this topic through the end of the series;

There's probably more that I'm forgetting at the moment.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

Maybe you should all consider their internal qualities such as kindness or steadfastness or ability to tug their braid in a cute manner.

I assure you I did.

 

[gobbogobb]

If Matt were written as a female the books would have been boycotted. I'm not being sarcastic in the slightest.

His entire character arc would basically be every Twitter liars' fantasies about evil men raping them.

I highly doubt the showrunners expect to get that far into the series so they probably will never even have to consider dealing with it.

 

[TungstenCarbide]

Men were only better at certain stuff though, like blowing shit up. WoT metaphysics were sexist as fuck, even when you take into account the "both sexes must work together to do really cool shit"

Just talking of "sexes" will make the queers reeeee. Giving the characters different powers based on sex is a recipe for disaster in this place and time. Then there probably will be retards sperging about "How cool it would be if transwomen could channel saidar, the proof that they are real women". But what am I saying, there are probably people in the fandom who already say this.

 

[gobbogobb]

Just talking of "sexes" will make the queers reeeee. Giving the characters different powers based on sex is a recipe for disaster in this place and time. Then there probably will be exceptional individuals sperging about "How cool it would be if transwomen could channel saidar, the proof that they are real women". But what am I saying, there are probably people in the fandom who already say this.

Arangar and osangar gotucovered fam. It's whatever gender your soul is, so when the dark one reincarnates you into an opposite gender body you still get to keep your original gender powers.

In Jordan's defense the dark one did it because he thought it was really fucking funny.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

IIRC one of them ended up getting off on it so it also has autogynephilia. Jordan had a lot going on under the hood in terms of fetishes.

 

[Death Grip]

Arangar and osangar gotucovered fam. It's whatever gender your soul is, so when the dark one reincarnates you into an opposite gender body you still get to keep your original gender powers.

In Jordan's defense the dark one did it because he thought it was really fucking funny.

It also served to really mess with the rebels against the White Tower.

 

[TungstenCarbide]

Arangar and osangar gotucovered fam. It's whatever gender your soul is, so when the dark one reincarnates you into an opposite gender body you still get to keep your original gender powers.

In Jordan's defense the dark one did it because he thought it was really fucking funny.

Seriously? Shit, I'm still at the beginning of the third book, where Rand sulks for days. Then the new woke audience will be happy, I suppose?

 

[gobbogobb]

Spoiler

Spoiler

the two that died in the first book get reincarnated, one in a female body, one in a male. The Female channels saidin