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

[Prompt Critical]

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?

Probably not, since the fact that no one knows it's possible for a woman to use man powers is a major plot point. That would suggest either a trans woman caster has never been born in all of the setting's recorded history, or that's not quite how it works.

If biologically male casters with female magic or biologically female casters with male magic had previously existed in the setting there would be a huge amount of re-writing required in all sorts of areas of the backstory and plot.

Admittedly it would be pretty hilarious if they went that route. Make sure you check the village girls too, Aes Sedai, any one of them could be a False Dragon!

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

There's a thread on Reddit with Jordan's casting choices. Too funny.

John Wayne as Gareth Byrne would have been ... interesting.

Spoiler: Size

Little bit different from the Burger King Kid's Club Amazon is casting, I'd suggest.

Edit: Boomered the embedding. Hopefully fixed.

 

[UnsufficentBoobage]

I like those books, and the person in charge of the series is a goddamn tumblr-brain, so there's 0 chance anything will be done properly - ignoring the physical descriptions for diversity is a given.

 

[Jub-Jub]

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.

You're right about it turning into a slog. I do re-read the books on occasion following these rules; find a chapter guide, read the chapters relating to the three ta'veren characters (Rand, Matt, Perrin) skip 60-75% of the rest. You don't miss much.

 

[mindlessobserver]

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.

Actually there is a trans in the books. One of the forsaken pisses off the dark one after failing "for the last time" and as punishment has his soul shoved into a dead ladies body creating a woman who can channel Saidin. General implication is its super evil/fucked up and that no matter how you look on the outside the universe does not care.

*edit* cougared

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

I like those books, and the person in charge of the series is a goddamn tumblr-brain, so there's 0 chance anything will be done properly - ignoring the physical descriptions for diversity is a given.
View attachment 892868

When did someone on the internet saying "die faget" become something worth mentioning?

 

[qu_rahn]

Dude this series is going to be dogshit I can't wait. I hope Billy Zane reprises his role as Ishamael


As a polish myself I'm think it's hilarious that a polack was casted as Rand Al'Thor All hail the aiel slav gods

 

[UnsufficentBoobage]

When did someone on the internet saying "die faget" become something worth mentioning?

Since that moron needed to justify turning respected fantasy into a gross fapfic?

 

[gobbogobb]

Also if you're gonna make lan gay he's gotta go for Rand given the books 1-5 bromance

 

[Foltest]

well fuck. Another one of my favorite book series is getting destroyed by assholes who don't care about the source.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

Since that moron needed to justify turning respected fantasy into a gross fapfic?

"Respected" might be a strong word. The only thing I ever heard about it was how the author snuffed it before finishing, and how it was basically Zeno's Paradox in literary form.

 

[Pargon]

Nobody should care about this.

If you hate the books sit back and relax as superfans slash their wrists and everyone involved in this project too stupid to keep their mouths shut tanks their careers because webhosted shows still don't have the clout they pretend to have.

If you love the books relish the fact that the chance any webhosted show will last longer than two seasons is functionally nil and there is no way the runners will even begin to pierce a narrative this long. They will make a complete hash of it that no one will remember two years from now except in jest and the finished product will resemble the source material in name only. It won't even draw in an appreciable number of newfags and your fandom will remain intact.

ETA: normies don't know about WoT. Amazon will advertise it, comparatively no one will recognize it and because it isn't deep in the cultural zeitgeist it will be largely ignored. The woke types will trumpet it as the 2000th First True Victory of Diversity in Nerd Culture and clickbait articles will be written before all press covering it dies off two weeks from the drop date.

 

[gobbogobb]

It was one of those things where the wheel of time series happened to get started when there was really no good epic fantasy, outside of maybe Feist. Authors that came after did better but Jordan did sort of start an epic fantasy Renaissance.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

It was one of those things where the wheel of time series happened to get started when there was really no good epic fantasy, outside of maybe Feist. Authors that came after did better but Jordan did sort of start an epic fantasy Renaissance.

Oh, we had a few others. Goodkind, Brooks (Well, for a definition of "good"), McAffrey (For a definition of "fantasy"), Donaldson (For a definition of... uh... "enjoyable"), Cook (If you never want to be happy while reading your fiction), etc.

 

[gobbogobb]

Yeah other than goodkind who came after, none of those were tolkienesque epic fantasy, except maybe Donaldson who took a big shit on the whole idea of the chosen one trope.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

Yeah other than goodkind who came after,

Huh! You're right, I could have sworn it was a little before it. My bad on that one.

none of those were tolkienesque epic fantasy, except maybe Donaldson who took a big shit on the whole idea of the chosen one trope.

Well, you didn't say Tolkienesque, originally. But if that's your metric, how cna you ignore Brooks? The man basically made a career of writing a Lord of the Rings pastiche.

 

[gobbogobb]

True. He should probably get credit for starting the revival, but God I want to throw up writing that. The show was better than the books ffs.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

Dude this series is going to be dogshit I can't wait. I hope Billy Zane reprises his role as Ishamael


As a polish myself I'm think it's hilarious that a polack was casted as Rand Al'Thor All hail the aiel slav gods

Maybe this show is taking all the slavs that weren't cast in the Witcher. And all the blacks in the Witcher were originally Seanchan in some sort of exchange program.

"Respected" might be a strong word. The only thing I ever heard about it was how the author snuffed it before finishing, and how it was basically Zeno's Paradox in literary form.

It used to be but it was a bad time for the fantasy genre and people's tastes have changed (mostly for the better).

If you love the books relish the fact that the chance any webhosted show will last longer than two seasons is functionally nil and there is no way the runners will even begin to pierce a narrative this long.

The narrative is actually not that big if you cut all the chaff. Four seasons would be more than sufficient to cover everything that mattered.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

Holy Fuck. My head hurts after reading these. Who knew nerds who read Fantasy are so autistic it kind of hurts? Sweaty SJW (first article) vs. Trumptard (second). Granted my view of things is fairly closely aligned to the second article, but the tone of the piece reads like somebody just yanked on his nuts.

Adn I couldn't even finish the text vomit of the first article. Got to the Promissary Estoppel section and kind of lost it. Will try again later.

Edit: The stuff in quotes is formatted like shit and I'm too lazy to fix it. Go read the archive.

From the Two Rivers: Casting and Race in The Wheel of Time

http://archive.md/7dewP

From the Two Rivers: Casting and Race in The Wheel of Time
Billy Todd
Tue Aug 20, 2019 12:00pm 29 comments 16 Favorites [+]
https://archive.md/7dewP/b54bf0d2068ca90882156d49fa10dd68476ff4f9
(Cover art by Raymond Swanland; Tor Books, 2011)

“It’s about my story, isn’t it? That’s what this is all about. He didn’t want to publish my story. And we all know why—because my hero is a colored man.”
—Benny Russell, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “Far Beyond the Stars”
“Momma! There’s a black lady on TV and she ain’t no maid!”
—Caryn Elaine Johnson, age 10, watching Star Trekin 1966, 16 years before becoming Whoopi Goldberg

Last week the producers of Amazon’s Wheel of Time television adaptation announced the cast for what can reasonably be called the show’s main protagonists, insofar as a 15-book series with over 2000 named characters and 147 unique point of view characters has main protagonists. In the books, the five characters announced today serve as the reader’s eyes for over 40% of the action, whether counting by words or by POVs. These characters matter—they are among the most famous characters in all of Western fantasy, with over 80 million copies of the Wheel of Time novels sold in the past thirty years.
Three of the five actors are of African ancestry or are Aboriginal Australian.
The announcement has sent shock waves across much of the fandom, and for an important reason: it serves as explicit rejection of an implicit promise made a very long time ago.


I.
From near infancy I have been a sci-fi fan. I gorged on Star Warsand Star Trek in my earliest memories; mandates for lightsabers and Vulcans are in my DNA right next to the bits that say I need oxygen. Fantasy took a bit longer. My first steps into fantasy as a literary genre were taken as a sixth grader alongside Lucy Pevensie, as the coats in The Wardrobe gave way to the forests of Narnia. I liked the Narnia books, some better than others. I thoroughly enjoyed The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, because the story’s main character arc is that of Eustace growing from obnoxious little bastard to a pretty decent kid; I liked The Magician’s Nephew because I love seeing competent villains struggle to do their thing when out of their element; I liked The Last Battle because I enjoy watching the hero slowly realize the imminence of the eschaton. I am not sure whether it was Lewis or me that correlated the most compelling scenes with male protagonists but the result is the same. And I knew what they looked like. They were English, and the book cover clearly showed them as white.
https://archive.md/7dewP/f0e20cd9d8a73f2dff3a6ea97aa35e4ef33dfbd9
Somehow this is not a Beatles album cover…
(Cover art by Roger Hane; Collier Books, 1970)
After finishing Narnia I moved on to Middle-earth, blithely unaware that Tolkien and Lewis were probably continuing some argument in a celestial pub somewhere in the afterlife. Once again, travelers from England—sorry, the Shire—went off on grand adventures, prevented the end of the world, and struggled to reintegrate back home after their quest. They were English, and they were white.
https://archive.md/7dewP/e870103dbbe0d08db609df16225dcb7aad06e6ef
Riddles in the Dark, or When Everyone Rolls a 1 for Initiative.
(Cover art by Michael Herring; Ballantine Books, 1983)
I was in seventh grade when I finished Lord of the Rings, and I needed some fantasy to read next. I ended up with Dragonlance, which was good enough for me, and it was well timed. I had just discovered character sheets and THAC0, and Krynn contained something neither Narnia nor Middle-earth could countenance: a main character who gets laid during the narrative.
https://archive.md/7dewP/595de23f06e9767be3e1fa87bf618124a852ca09
Larry Elmore is a pro at convincing me these people are very bored of dragons.
(Cover art by Larry Elmore; TSR, 1984)
Tanis, the main character, is white (you can tell; that’s him on the left, above). The barbarians are white (one is there in the center). Sturm, the warrior on the right, is white. As best I can remember, all of the relevant characters are white.
I finally finished Dragonlance after some struggle and my friend Matt (hah!) insisted I read the far superior series he was on at the time. It was longer than the other books—I knew this because Matt was reading them in class and those hardbacks were huge. And he had every book in the series. All four of them. This was 1992.
I had to catch up; the series was surely ending soon because they were coming out at a book a year and somebody at the Waldenbooks said there were only going to be six. My dad had a copy of The Eye of the World in paperback because in my lifetime Tor has never released a paperback that eluded my father’s bookshelf. The cover promised many things: a seemingly hot female wizard; a ridiculously badass warrior; other, more useless party members; and a journey. All of the essential elements were there, plus one: something about the people on that cover felt…familiar? Safe? Not weird? Not…other?
https://archive.md/7dewP/ffc68be81d7f8a8965a6b6f41a01ad1b2fcc654f
Starring Michael Dorn, Carrie Fisher, and Chad from Marketing. (Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet; Tor Books, 1990)
They had two arms and two legs, were clearly human, and just looked normal and not particularly worthy of comment for anything beyond what was clearly their assigned character class. Like the background noise of cicadas buzzing in the woods, incredibly loud and yet utterly unnoticed, they shared some trait—right below the threshold of perception—with Frodo, Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Samwise, Bilbo, a dozen dwarves, the Seven Dwarves, Willow Ufgood, every Narnian human, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, my parents, my preacher, every president ever, my teachers, all of them—all of the people who had mattered in my life at the time—all of the people who had mattered, anywhere.
Some of those works had heroic people of color in them: Lando Calrissian, Lieutenant Uhura, that one Calormene officer who comes to Aslan at the end of The Last Battle. But those works weren’t about them. Neither was this one. I knew, because the cover made that very obvious. Well, maybe not so obvious. The fighter dude up there looked kinda maybe brown, but that’s to be expected because those sorts of people are more likely to want to fight. That’s just how they are; everybody knows that. Anyway that woman was without a doubt the person really in charge here. No doubt I thought this because she is the one with a magic staff. That was, of course, the only reason my South Carolinian brain would think this. Oh look! This author lives in Charleston and went to the Citadel. How interesting.
Somewhere, a cicada buzzes.

II.
There is a doctrine in contract law called promissory estoppel. It arises when there’s a sort of agreement but no actual contract. Here’s an example: A tells B, “If you bring me 4 fantasy paperbacks from the bookstore, I will buy them from you, but don’t bring me any Piers Anthony because I cannot stand puns.” A doesn’t tell B this, but A thinks that B, a known cheapskate, will get 4 used books for a total of $10. B, seeing an opportunity, instead gets 4 paperbacks for $30 hoping to sell them to A for $40. A has sticker shock, so A refuses to pay. A and B never agreed on a price, so there’s arguably no actual contract that was ever formed. However, B did reasonably rely on A’s promise, so under the doctrine of promissory estoppel he is entitled to his costs back—just not the profit he was hoping to make, which he might be able to get under a full breach of a valid contract. A owes B $30. The purpose of promissory estoppel is to recognize that people can and do make investments when they perceive something is comfortable and low risk—even when they aren’t relying on promises presented as contracts.
There is another doctrine called course of dealing. Here’s an example: Suppose you have a good relationship with the pizzeria across the street. Every Friday night at 6 PM sharp you show up and ask for a large pepperoni and pineapple pizza. You do this for two months straight. Eventually they see you walk in and they don’t even take your order. They just ask, “the usual?” and you say “yes” and they ring you up. Another two months of this pass by, and the pizzeria now just has a pizza ready for you in a box already marked with your name on it thirty seconds before you walk in. Arguably, after 26 straight weeks of this, you and the pizzeria have a pretty solid course of dealing with each other. They know exactly what you want, and you know exactly how they’re going to give it to you. If one of you deviates from that course, the other one is likely to get upset, because their expectations have been thrown awry. Maybe not too upset, hopefully, because this is just a pizza.
What if you keep promising me the main characters are going to be white and you keep delivering that over and over and I come to trust it? What if you keep promising me that what’s on a cover matches what’s in the book? What if you don’t actually keep that promise? What if I thought I didn’t care about that, and I suddenly realize I do?
Who is the aggrieved party here? Is it me? Is it the publisher? Maybe the author?

III.
I consider myself relatively woke on racial issues and I would definitely consider myself an ally of people of color. Nevertheless, dear Reader, I saw Zoë Robins as Nynaeve and Marcus Rutherford as Perrin and I was annoyed. Not merely disappointed. Annoyed. After Rosamund Pike’s casting I had gotten my hopes up and now I saw that I had been betrayed.
I’d been had. I’d been took.
I’d been hoodwinked.
Bamboozled. Led astray. Run amok.
This is what they do. This is what these Hollywood types do; they pander and they sacrifice the art and I wish they would just change their minds and make—
What was I about to say there? What was I about to think there? I wish they would make what exactly?
Why, exactly, did I like Eustace Scrubb as a character when I was 10? Was it because he was a male or was it because he was a piece of shit who let the scales come off and become a better person? I hear the voice of Jean-Luc Picard in my head: “We think we’ve come so far. It’s all ancient history. And then, before you can blink an eye, suddenly it threatens to start all over again.” Picard again: “If we are to be damned, let us be damned for what we really are.” I am ashamed of myself and I force myself to uninterrupt the thought I’d short circuited.
I wish they would just change their minds and make them white again.
Why? Why do I care about this? It is true that I want the characters to be true to what they were on the page. So what were they on the page? I know for a fact they are white; I have read The Eye of the World probably seven times since I was a seventh grader. Where is the passage? Ah, here it is:

Elaida had put down her knitting, Rand realized, and was studying him. She rose from her stool and slowly came down from the dais to stand before him. “From the Two Rivers?” she said. She reached a hand towards his head; he pulled away from her touch, and she let her hand drop. “With that red in his hair, and gray eyes? Two Rivers people are dark of hair and eye, and they seldom have such height.” Her hand darted out to push back his coat sleeve, exposing lighter skin the sun had not reached so often. “Or such skin.”

What the hell? Two Rivers folk are at minimum darker than the untanned parts of white boys. They have dark hair and dark eyes. I flicker back to the casting photos. Yeah, ok, Zoë and Marcus definitely have dark hair; flicker; they definitely have dark eyes;flicker; their skin is darker than Josha Stradowski’s Rand; flicker; flicker flicker flicker flicker.
They pass Elaida’s test but they don’t pass my test. Why not? Not one thing in Elaida’s description says that Two Rivers folk are white. Elaida just says that Rand is an alien there and is too light to be normal there.
But it’s not just Elaida:
There were Marwins and al’Dais, al’Seens and Coles. Thanes and al’Caars and Crawes, men from every family he knew, men he did not recognize, from down to Deven Ride or up to Watch Hill or Taren Ferry, all grim-faced and burdened with pairs of bristling quivers and extra sheaves of arrows. And among them stood others, men with coppery skins, men with transparent veils across the lower half of their faces, fair-skinned men who just did not have the look of the Two Rivers.
Where did I get this idea that Two Rivers folk must be white?
I realize it immediately. It comes from two sources. As the Two Rivers themselves come from the Mountains of Mist, I realize this error has come from one source through two channels that warped my perceptions as a 12-year-old. I just never corrected it in all of this time.
First, the book covers by Darrell K. Sweet expressly and repeatedly depict the Two Rivers folk as white. Every time. All of them. Perrin may be a Wolfbrother but there is no brother to be seen on the cover of The Dragon Reborn:
https://archive.md/7dewP/636d862abb48f0faf573137e1811aeb1c66e3501
(Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet; Tor Books, 1991)
That is a Definitely Not Black dude on the cover of Winter’s Heart:
https://archive.md/7dewP/861a906ecc65882f0814e5323408d309c65f3565
(Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet; Tor Books, 2000)
This is a council of white folk here on the cover of Knife of Dreams:
https://archive.md/7dewP/a61a2a7b42586f689216cbddf7da7b0a179cbd89
(Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet; Tor Books 2005)
Now look at this by Raymond Swanland from the e-book forTowers of Midnight:
https://archive.md/7dewP/b54bf0d2068ca90882156d49fa10dd68476ff4f9
(Cover art by Raymond Swanland; Tor Books, 2011)
Look at that face. That face could easily be Idris Elba. Can Marcus play Swanland’s Perrin rather than Sweet’s Perrin?

“It was about a man whose family was taken from him, but who stood tall in his sorrow and protected those he could.” @Marcus_Rudda as Perrin Aybara #WoTWednesday #TwitterOfTimepic.twitter.com/4UTcqdpySA
— The Wheel of Time on Prime (@WoTonPrime)August 14, 2019

Yes. End of analysis. Yes.
Now here, you should be asking “well, you say ‘Sweet’s Perrin vs. Swanland’s Perrin,’ but what really matters is can Marcus playJordan’s Perrin?”
This goes to my second river: I envisioned the Two Rivers as white because everything before it was white. The Shire was white, Tatooine was white, my neighborhood was white. Rand views Emond’s Field as home, and my twelve-year-old self mapped a schema on top of that and said “THIS IS HIS HOME AND IT’S A QUEST STORY THEREFORE HOME MEANS THE DEFAULT AND THEREFORE LILY WHITE, THOSE ARE THE RULES, SEE THEY EVEN DO A BEL TINE DANCE WHAT COULD BE MORE WHITE THAN THAT?!” and that was pretty much the end of it. Yes, all caps is how the Dark One talks and that is exactly how this shit gets propagated—the voice enters your head from seemingly all directions and no direction all at the same time. The default is white. The default is white. The default is white. Any deviation from the default must be explained and justifiable, therefore any deviation from white must be explained and justifiable. If you don’t have a justification then you should just be white. And if you can’t be white, because you aren’t white, you need to justify yourself further.
I asked above, who is the aggrieved party when Rafe and the Awful Producers alter the deal and tell me to pray they don’t alter it further? I will tell you who the aggrieved party is.

https://archive.md/7dewP/c69cc0db4b41607726e4249cadf94fb53cc52519

BUY IT NOW

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• https://archive.md/7dewP/a6ae61b7ab0c18638c81469c64709112b10e17cb.png
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The aggrieved party is every twelve-year-old black kid in my class who over the course of several months saw me tearing through my copies of the The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, the Dragon Reborn, and The Shadow Rising which, by my count, combine in their cover art to depict a perfect record of twenty-four out of twenty-four white folks. The aggrieved party is the person who looks at fifteen consecutive book covers and says: That is a world in which people like me are not normal and have to be explained. Singing manbat vampires and armored goatpeople seem to be easily ignored elements of the milieu, but people like me don’t even exist in that world as far as I can tell.
Rafe Judkins and the producers of The Wheel of Time on Amazon have explicitly rejected the opportunity to repeat Tor’s mistake. They are openly and loudly and proudly repudiating the implied promise that we, the dear white demographic that so dominates the fantasy market, can comfortably rely on our status as the Real World default when we visit Their World.
We’re not the default on the TV show. It doesn’t matter. Yes it stings to have relied on that promise—that acquiescence—that assumption that we are the ones to be catered to by the art and the marketing and the money people for no better reason than that we are the default, and that we define ourselves as the default on the basis that we have settled on some definition of exclusion which we call “being white enough.”
In the days since the announcement I’ve seen many who try to sidestep this issue by saying they picture the Two Rivers folk as Mediterranean, and that’s light enough to count as white, while Marcus is too dark, so they object to his casting. And then they suggest instead somebody like a young Val Kilmer because Robert Jordan did once, as if this is evidence that Jordan actually cared about this issue. Yet right next to his suggestion of Kilmer as Perrin is his suggestion of Sophia Loren as Aviendha, which proves one of two things: either Jordan did not care about skin tone in his books, or he didn’t care about skin tone in a screen adaptation. Either way, the argument most heavily relied upon by the angsty fans—that this casting desecrates Jordan’s vision—has already been ruled upon and discarded by Jordan himself in his revealed preferences.
Angsty Rand finally had his moment of self-honesty on Dragonmount. Angsty white fandom should do the same. I do agree that it is bittersweet that the images I made of the characters I’ve loved for 30 years are now about to be replaced, just as Elijah Wood demolished my early mental picture of Frodo. But that’s ok. We’ve been told since day one that these images would fade into myth and eventually entirely out of memory.
The Wheel has turned. I welcome the new crew.

Amazon’s Wheel of Time Series Race Swaps Egwene, Perrin, and Nynaeve

http://archive.md/yWX0W

Amazon’s Wheel of Time Series Race Swaps Egwene, Perrin, and Nynaeve
John F. Trent

August 18, 2019

Books, Television

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Amazon’s upcoming Wheel of Time series will race swap Egwene, Perrin, and Nynaeve.






Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins confirmed casting announcements for the upcoming Amazon adaptation. They cast Marcus Rutherford as Perrin Aybara, Zoë Robins as Nynaeve, and Madeleine Madden as Egwene Al’Vere. They also cast Josha Stradowski as Rand al’Thor, and Barney Harris as Mat Cauthon. (Related: Report: Rosamund Pike to Star in Amazon’s Adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time)

Rafe Judkins
✔@rafejudkins
https://twitter.com/rafejudkins/status/1161672127449370624

This man walked into the room, read a scene that made every single person watching cry, and walked out. We all looked at each other and said “He is Perrin.” Glad you’re all getting to meet him now too https://twitter.com/WoTonPrime/status/1161670278448947201 …
The Wheel of Time on Prime
✔@WoTonPrime
“It was about a man whose family was taken from him, but who stood tall in his sorrow and protected those he could.” @Marcus_Rudda as Perrin Aybara #WoTWednesday #TwitterOfTime

1,914
12:13 PM - Aug 14, 2019
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Rafe Judkins
✔@rafejudkins
https://twitter.com/rafejudkins/status/1161672798303133697

We had the pick of the world on these cast members. Sent about two dozen Nynaeve tapes to the writers’ room to see who everyone liked and every. single. person. had one response — “Zoe”. I am already stanning her if that’s how you use that word. #twitterafficianado https://twitter.com/wotonprime/status/1161671427117867008 …
The Wheel of Time on Prime
✔@WoTonPrime
“It was about a woman who refused to believe that she could not help, could not heal those who had been harmed.” Zoë Robins as Nynaeve #WoTWednesday #TwitterOfTime

1,147
12:15 PM - Aug 14, 2019
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Rafe Judkins
✔@rafejudkins
https://twitter.com/rafejudkins/status/1161674569893199872

I’m glad you all finally get to meet Egwene. She is the character in the books I often identify with most and Maddy makes her even more than the woman I admired reading for all those years. These five are the most incredible talents and I am honored to be able to work with them. https://twitter.com/wotonprime/status/1161673919436185600 …
The Wheel of Time on Prime
✔@WoTonPrime
“It was about a woman who would not bend her back while she was beaten, and who shown with a light for all who watched.” @TigerMadden as Egwene Al’Vere #WoTWednesday #TwitterOfTime

1,272
12:22 PM - Aug 14, 2019
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The casting news comes after Rafe Judkins revealed his ideas of how the show was going to handle casting. Judkins posted a script grab that read:

“As much as possible, our cast should look like America will in a few hundred years — a beautiful mix of white, brown, black and everything in between.”

Rafe Judkins
✔@rafejudkins
https://twitter.com/rafejudkins/status/1034985363704438784

Hey! Sorry (especially to non-US folks) for the lateness on this. But this #WoTWednesday I thought I’d give another script grab — this time about casting. Actual casting is a long way off, but this at least gives you an idea of how we are thinking about it in a general sense.

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10:05 PM - Aug 29, 2018
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After the casting announcements were made Judkins took to Twitter to write that the casting team “embraced this world and these books fully and found people who perfectly embody these characters.”

Rafe Judkins
✔@rafejudkins
https://twitter.com/rafejudkins/status/1161690014796963847

Also, please make sure to give credit where it’s due for this cast — to Kelly and her team at @KVHendry They embraced this world and these books fully and found people who perfectly embody these characters. Thank you so much.
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1:24 PM - Aug 14, 2019
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Egwene al’Vere was depicted in the comic book adaptation of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World as white. The series was originally published in 2005 by Dynamite Entertainment, two years before Robert Jordan passed away. (Related: James Wan’s Mortal Kombat Film Race Swaps Raiden and Mileena)

Nynaeve al’Meara was also depicted as white.

So was Perrin Aybara.

Artist Ariel Burgess also posted Official Wheel of Time art depicting Perrin, Egwene, and Nynaeve as white. You can see some of her work on her Instagram regarding these characters below.



These casting decisions also appear to go against the vision of Wheel of Time creator and author Robert Jordan. (Related: Disney Announces Race-Swapped Ariel with Actress Halle Bailey For “Live-Action Reimagining” of The Little Mermaid)

Back in 2014, notes from the Robert Jordan Collection at the College of Charleston revealed the actors he modeled his characters after.

Egwene was described as Audrey Hepburn at age 18. Nynaeve was described as a young Jacqueline Bisset and Perrin Aybara was a young Val Kilmer.

What do you make of these casting announcements? What do you make of the thought process behind the casting decisions for Wheel of Time?

 

[Death Grip]

Ok coming back to this thread, I am genuinely sad about the casting of Nynaeve. She has a really long braid. This is going to lead to the actress wearing a shitty shitty wig. I am so gutted right now. Shallow but meh.
Lan as Idris Elba I could have got behind.
This though...
Well enjoy the salt y'all.