I casually ramble about Amazon’s Wheel of Time, and the limit of my tolerance for mistakes and imperfections in the writing of stories.
The Wheel of Time (Amazon Prime)
The Eye of the World (Robert Jordan)
The Great Hunt (Robert Jordan)
The Dragon Reborn (Robert Jordan)
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Meh… not my greatest, but I'm not gonna sweat it. I struggled to get into the mood to actually film this one, as I had recently suffered a major loss of work. But, at least it's something.
Short story. I lost my patience with the CSI series when the following happened. There was a character called 'the miniatures killer', who built detailed miniatures of their murder scenes, so that the team had to work out where the murder had taken place in reality, and the miniatures were always fabulously accurate.
At the end of one season, it's clear that one of the female members of the team has become a victim, the miniature shows her trapped under an upside down car but her arm is waving so they know she's alive. Now the have to find her.
Beginning of the next scene, the bad guy – SPOILER! who's actually a woman – is driving into the desert, with the victim tied up in the back. They have a spite-filled discussion. Then the victim is on her front, and the bad girl is lowering the car – not the one they came in, it's sort of a 50s style car IIRC – on top of her. There's more snide conversation, then the bad girl jumps in the car in which she drove to the site. The camera pulls back, it's an aerial shot, and we see the trapped CSI woman trapped underneath the car, and the other car being driven away.
I was yelling at the TV. "How did she lift and then lower an entire car? Where's the crane, or a tow truck with some lifting gear?' There was nothing there. Obviously we weren't supposed to think it was magic.
That's just insulting, and I don't like having my intelligence insulted by screenwriters, so I've never watched another episode!!
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Clearly they didn't read the books and they didn't have any grasp on which characters were beloved. Turning Matt into an evil character was the most heinous offense amongst many offenses. Loial was a close second. Heck, they neutered THE DRAGON. I think my limit was reached about 10 minutes into the series.
Excellent agree with your points. I'm always surprised you don't have a lot of thirty comments in your comment section, it must because your content is so good you attract a higher level of audience. Thanks for uploading
I'll say it again. The book series is one of my all-time favorites. Like most fans of the books, I'm one of the first to point out the numerous flaws. There were tremendous opportunities for editing several books out of the series and getting rid of some "Jordanisms" while keeping the spirit of the story. I wasn't expecting (nor did I want) a word-for-word translation to screen. I think Amazon shot the project in the foot by limiting the number of episodes and limiting them to an hour. But they didn't even try to keep the spirit of the story. This is just an abomination of fan fiction and I question if I should include the word "fan".
I really like the actors and I don't blame them for bad directorial/editorial/writing decisions. There are occasional glimpses of brilliance in acting and cinematography, but not enough to make the show enjoyable.
Great video, it's always nice to have a little framework to assess these things by. I really like the "objective" likeability distinction you made wrt villains
I sure appreciate these videos!
Helllooo…. lol
I didn't think a show could be written worse than W.O.T and R.O.P… enter the wokealyte….
The opening statements of the first episode completely turned the lore upside down. It was a pit they dug and never climbed out. The foundation was faulty with the changing of the fundamental forces of the world. The second major mis-step was allowing for the possibility of a female dragon reborn… that was just stupidity of the highest order, when you consider the lore of the world. That was key to every interaction Rand had with other characters in the book, and within himself. Making this change just to have a mystery box was even worse.
Everything from that point onward was just digging the hole deeper. The "point of no return" was the entire episode about the warder, that didn't exist in the books. Despite having so few episodes to adapt the books, they displayed their priorities when they chose to introduce that whole thing.
I can't refer to them as "talent" with a straight face anymore.
For the algorithm
Thank you for all the effort that you put in for this show. Watching you try to love it at first and then getting overwhelmed by all the BS that this show is, made my experience better. Someone else was going through this show and having the same, or similar experience that I was. Yet could put it into words so much better then I, made my day every time it happened. Thank you.
Loved seeing you 'back at it' but as I was watching, it became apparent I've missed some stuff you've done post recovery.
I'll have to catch up… And if this is anything to go by, I am blessedly relieved to anticipate some logical critical resonance, that is largely missing from both extremes of the WoT online Love & Hate, that seem to dominate discussions.
Season 1 was a largely unforgivable abomination of bad writing, silly story choices and handicapped performances that mostly ruined one of the TV Show's few out & out successes, THE CASTING.
And whatever the excuses being peddled, that finale was the absolute nadir of the Barrell of turds the Show consistently delivered throughout its first Season.
And while the first half of Season 2 was much more watchable, if no better in the writing stakes, my vehement argument is that its concluding Episodes were orders of magnitude worse than those in Season 1.
Not least because within the space of the last 3 or 4 Episodes they repeatedly shredded their own heinously conceived continuity.
Now, given that this non-adaptive TV Show blithely ignores the books in favour of their own heinously conceived dramatic choices, shredding that continuity ought to be a good thing, no?
NO!
And for me that conclusion is emblematic of all this TV Show's problems.
EVERY CHOICE THEY MAKE just makes the show worse. And over the last few Episodes of Season 2, this was happening so often, it felt like being continually hit on the head by analog alarm clock hammers.
Puerile scripting.
Moronic staging.
Imbecilic invitations to selective amnesia from one moment to the next… just to make things sort of fit.
Disgustingly poor outcome, unworthy of the source material or the earnest cast who, despite trying SO HARD, cannot save this midden heap from its own special kind of methane bomb implosion.
Amazing video. Exceptionally well made points. Instant subsribe from me. Thats all. o7
I couldn't get past the clunkiness of season 1 and it's choices of setups and deliveries to even give season 2 a chance. This series has felt like such a deviation from the essence of the books, that for the most part, I enjoyed very much…
Willing disbelief suspension is a two player co-op game. The authors tries to write the story as believable as they can, and the readers tries to gloss over the issues they encounter. But when one side (the writers in our case) fails their part badly, the other side can't keep things up.
To me it is almost never one big unforgivable mistake. It is usually accumulated effect of small ones that breaks my disbelief suspension. And once my limit is reached I can't gloss over things, or invent head cannons for explaining them any more. Funny enough it has backward effect as well. Once the line is crossed I bring up all the things I avoided before. They all stat bothering me. I think it works in similar way for other people as well. This is why you rarely see people complaining about few things. They either didn't reach their tolerance threshold and are glossing over everything, or they did and then they dump all the issues that brought them there.
If I'd want to point out one thing in the WoT season 1 that can break it alone it would be the flashback after the reveal of Rand as the Dragon Reborn. It basically changed past scenes. You just can't have a cohesive story where past events can be changed at any time to suit current plot needs. Season 2 did even worse thing with the revival of the dead characters.
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wow didn’t even realize there was a second season and it’s already ended. thank god. hope this show gets cancelled along with that abomination rings of power.
Love the unscripted vids!
Having no idea how long joureys take sin't an issue (for me) as long as it's consistent. You see it NOT working in the later seasons of GoT, where some people "teleport" from place to place because D& D just suck at writing.
The plot with Perrin's wife is just abandoned now, right? I mean they had the ring scene in S2 but … For someone having killed his wife a couple days before, he really doesn't seem to care.
I forgot about Egwene and her hands. But why does she need to channel without using her hands? Pretty much every Aes Sedai you see does the hand gestures for their channeling (or so I seem to remember).
Loial talking about how togh Egwene is … how would Loial know actually know? He doesn't really know ANY of them well at that point, IMO not well enough to make that statement. But it might just be an attempt to assuage their fears.
Where is the concept of "objective likability" from? Never heard of it, and it sounds to me like whoever came up with the term didn't understand what "likable" means…
I hope to god that we get a better adaptation in my lifetime. Hell, it could be animated, and I don't particularly care for animation compared to live action. I just want something that at least tries to adapt the books and stick more to the source material. They're adapting the best book in the series for season 3, and I just…I'm so worried about how they'll ruin it.
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I’m not sure if you touch on this, but they completely changed the setting.
The world of The Wheel of Time includes a very real Devil in the form of The Dark One (Shai’Tan, etc). In the first season he is way less involved than in the first book and completely absent in the second season. Which seemed odd until Ishamael broke all the remaining seals which would have freed Him. This HUGE departure from the books is completely glossed over because you’re supposed to fixate on the Forsaken all being free.
This change is the same as if Peter Jackson had made the LotR movies and just done away with Sauron.
It's very hard for me to separate the source material from the adaptation, but for me, if I hadn't read the books, this show would still come across as very generic; the romances, the tragic backstories, the sympathetic villains, all the attempts at creating mystery boxes.
I want to be fair; when I first read the plot blurb on the back of The Eye of the World all the way back in 2002 when I was 15, it seemed generic too. For the most part, it was. But the story was uniquely grand and complex in scope, so I kept going. The story felt more and more unique the more and more I read. By the time I finished The Shadow Rising, the series had evolved into this incredibly unique take on the classic clash between Good vs. Evil.
I really felt this "issues with writing" thing recently while watching Emma 2020. It was a beautiful movie with really great performances and comedic timing, but something that they stuck out to me was how poorly they structured the movie. I understand that every scene from a book cannot fit into a movie adaption, but time and time again I found myself relying on prior knowledge to understand what is going on. I don't even like Austin that much, but I've seen a mini-series adaption of Emma and there was so much knowledge I had to take from that to then contextualize the scenes of Emma 2020.
Without getting too into it one aspect was this character called Mister Knightly; he is a rich man's son who was sent to live with Emma and her father because that is a custom wealthy people use to practice in pre-industrial eras; you would said your children out (as teenagers / young adults) to go live with a friend or more distant relative so they could get life experience outside of their parent's influence. Now, the problem in the 2020 movie is that they just don't really spend time telling you that either; 1)Why Mister Knight exists near/around Emma in the same house and 2) How long he's been there. These two points are important to establish because it then tells you why they treat each other the way that they do. It becomes weirder when they fall in love and try to resist it; if you know their backstory, then you would know why it feels "messed up" for them to have any romantic interest in the other. It was just so weird for me to watch a movie that just never established or built up things; it kept giving out great individual scenes, but I couldn't imagine a random viewer able to make sense of the key points/stingers since nothing was ever set up.
Death is made meaningless in the show because mighty Nynaeve can cure death. Or they pretend it never happened (Loial, Ingtar stabbed with Shaddar Logoth blade means 0% chance of survival).
For me it started with Rand and Egwene banging in the Inn in a public room where anyone could just walk in. It should be re-named "The Waste of Time". Also, Amazon should do an investigation to find out where all the money to produce this garbage went.
I stopped watching after the destroyed the core lore in episode 1, and ruined all the main characters
Agreed on Lan and Nyneave (and all your other points for that matter). The unlikely dynamic in the novels was a surprise, but the tension that led to the union made great sense. The issue with the show is that Lan wasn't given much agency and doesn't seem like a character who wants much at all.
Good video for the generic viewer that demonstrated the poor quality of this series. But for the book fans, who WOULD have been the majority of the audience, the unforgivable sin was the complete disregard for the characters and themes of the source material. The bloody protagonist was an extra in the few episodes I watched. (I stopped watching when Matt was ejected from the plot.) The development of every character was mutated by the dark power of the producer and writers. The fundamental themes were twisted by their blight. That would be fine if it was fan fiction. But if you keep the original title and call it an adaptation, don't ruin the story and world. I forgave Jackson for his modifications in LOTR, because he stayed true to the story. I could not forgive what they did to WOT.
This show writing is the definition of toxic, so bad that you can't look away.
Forgivable? The action pacing in some (1 or 2) episodes. Unforgivable? The first one was where they chopped the edit and dropped Loial in a library, I think, with someone. I cant really remember now. But I do remember that edit actually felt physically jarring. Yeah it was a travesty of a production for the most part
I have been trying to forgive the whole production, and I am very forgiving. But with the production so far? I cant see meself crossing that bridge
There is one other strange, perhaps unforgivable, element though! Amazon, Geoff Bezos?. For some reason he reminds me of a sinister Detective Columbo, Peter Falk. Sorry!
RE: Egwene… Having Loial pump an entire dirigible's volume of hot air into her ego…
1) How the heck, of all people, is LOIAL supposed to know that about her?
2) because of #1, it is a major step in turning "Egg-wayne" into a Mary Sue… much more than if any of the other EF5 said the same thing.
Amber, I think to balance the bad out, you should do reviews on "The Chosen." Reguardless of people's religious beliefs, it is just well written. Not perfect, but good. It follows the tradition of Medieval Passion Plays, adding the human elements to the scriptural stories. Just an overall positive production, that would counter the horrible things like WoT, RoPower, or Disney Star Wars.
<Edit: I can see the pop culture references in my head whilst listening. African guide going "Oh-kay." "Into the garbage chute Flyboy!" "How did you know?" From 'Death by Murder.' I'm glad you're healing instead of meticulously fitting those into the video. Just hearing is enough to invoke them in mind.>
For me the fact that Rafe is doing this show is unforgivable. There is only going to be one attempt to make The Wheel of Time into a series, and to have it done so very poorly is unforgivable. To pick a scene where this was first reached is very difficult first because there are so many, and second because it was so long ago, but the White Cloaks capturing Egwene and Perrin within sight of The White Tower does stand out. Oh no, I’m remembering, it hurts! It hurts!
The hyper sexualization of the characters has ruined the primary development of the characters. Sex has its place in the story, but using sex to sell a series is just lazy writing.
There's definitely a point of no return. Once you reach that, even the small issues piss you off.
Amazon's production inspired me to re-read the whole story. Thinking back on it, the show gets exactly nothing right as it comes to world mechanics.
No shielded person with an education (like an Aes Sedai…) would even wonder if he/she was severed/gentled/stilled. A shield allow the shielded to sense the source but not touch it. Severing leaves a hole where the source used to be.
Similarly, you don't need to be able to channel to keep a warder bond, and a masked bond is like a muffled sense, like if you looked at a light and then put a thin layer of cloth between you and it. You still notice the light, just less clearly.
And that's how it keeps getting things wrong on every point. It is actually crazy, and this isn't even considering the immense lore-breaks from skipping Caemlyn, giving Mat his Ashandarei in season 2 and without any otherworldly stuff, and so on.
This is without touching the apparent malice and political floundering of the showrunner, the surreal diversity of the small isolated town at the start, or any of the rest.
The show should have had a few more years of planning. As it is, it is broken in every way, and a blemish on Wheel of Time far greater than the pilot from last decade was.
I find it funny that the major issues you bring up, Dragon mystery, Moiraine power situation, Perrin's wife, Egwenes shenanigan's etc. are all things that were changed for the show.
It's almost like Robert Jordan knew how to write a story and you need talented people to make drastic changes to that.
The moment Moraine referred to the Dragon as "He or she", I hated this show…. (but for some reason, I still watched it… go figure).
15:14 You could be The Dragon, and you could be The Dragon, and you could be The Dragon…
This was my breaking point in the show. They did so little character development IN ORDER TO KEEP THE MYSTERY OF "wHo Is ThE dRaGoN?"
I detest everything about Siuan and Moiraine's relationship, but I can forgive it because it just doesn't matter.
I can't forgive Loial inexplicably being resurrected for season 2. That's pretty far-reaching, I'd say.
I can't forgive canonical errors such as Moiraine destroying the Seanchan ships- she literally should not be able to do that because of one of the three oaths.
I can forgive writing Liandrin into every scene. I can't forgive inconsistencies in her character.
The things I can't forgive vastly outnumber those I can. I now watch WoT not because I enjoy it but out of horrified fascination. I wonder, "How much worse can it get?" and I'm constantly surprised by the answer.
That black lace bonnet might be the worst part of the entire show 😅
The point was never to make a good product, only to high-jack the already profitable one. It would be a bonus if it did turn out good, but we now know how it turned out.
The show was doomed when they made Moraine the main character, not Rand. But I gave up watching because of how terrible they made Min. She was my fav, and I have no idea who that was in the show
Appreciate this video. Have had similar discussions with friends. Here are some reasons that might explain the degradation of story quality over the past 10+ years : 1) Corporate Influence: Profit-driven decisions by large entertainment corporations lead to overly "safe" and homogenized content focusing on a relatively small number of popular IPs; 2) Writer Constraints: Overworked writers and lack of creative freedom (e.g. forced to write about things they don't want to) result in rushed and subpar storytelling; 3) Short production cycles and increasing executive interference leading to inconsistent characterization and weak plot coherence; 4) Audience Perception: Changing tastes and high expectations due to nostalgia affect how new content is received; 5) Nepotism and Diversity Issues: Favoring (personally) familiar names over fresh talent and lack of diverse voices stifle creativity. These reasons are no doubt weighted differently from one example to another.
Hmmm… this is something I've been contemplating myself. Only, I'm inclined to weigh a show's sins against the overall story. There is, for example, a massive flaw in Return of the King that, if LotR weren't the wonderful story it is, would completely destroy it for me. I'm referring to the scene where Faramir drags Frodo all the way to Osgiliath only to witness Frodo almost giving the ring to a Ringwraith, not to mention Frodo nearly killing Sam as a result. There's no way in Orodruin I'd ever let Frodo into Mordor after that. So, why do I forgive it? Because we still have magnificent scenes like: "you bow to no man", "but I can carry you" and "you shall not pass!", just to name a few. Similarly, we can find flaws in movies like Casablanca, the Searchers and the Maltese Falcon but still forgive them because they don't destroy our overall enjoyment of the story.
Thanks for doing these videos. All us long time readers need this cathartic release from the TV show.
For me the show slowly wore me down. I was willing to give it time even though critical scenes for Rand, Mat, Perrin and Nynaeve were given to Aes Sedai and Warders in Season 1. But when Season 2 doubled down on Aes Sedai and Warder time, the show totally lost me.
I really enjoy how you explain the problems with the show:)
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