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since i can't post this in the tv thread, just popping into say i'm utterly fascinated by the decision to raise the prospect that egwene could be the dragon reborn when everything else, including interviews, is pointing to it still being rand. it makes sense on a superficial "it's better for the marketing" level but feels a lot like the decision to lean into daenerys-as-girlboss without changing any of her ultimate arc. genuinely cannot wait to see what they do with it and how they reconcile the implications with what we've seen of the world so far (which still strongly implies a setup more or less like the books, with men going crazy and the red ajah doing its thing), and i sincerely hope it's not just "ah well you know people reincarnate as whoever all the time" answer.
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Nov 23, 2021 07:03
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stramit posted:Making her taveren is great though, and I think that ties in with it. There are 4 taveren and they don’t know which one is the dragon. that's exactly what's fascinating! you could just as easily have moiraine tell the emond's fielders that they're all fated by prophecy to be Big Deals (no need to even say ta'veren), and hold back "also specifically one of you is definitely the second coming of christ, and it's one of the boys" until later when it wouldn't feel as lame. instead, they hit "the dragon is reborn and could be a man or a woman" really really hard, while also putting "and there are four ta'veren" in seemingly specifically so book readers (who know the dragon bit's a hollow statement because it's not gonna be egwene) will still feel like the series is updating its approach to gender. it's so needlessly complicated i can't help but hope it means weird poo poo (intentional or otherwise) is coming. Valentin fucked around with this message at 07:28 on Nov 23, 2021 |
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Nov 23, 2021 07:17
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Hexel posted:stuff about perrin I understand why they made this change, but it's sort of darkly funny that everyone involved apparently agrees that audiences would have been confused by Perrin having issues with violence. Clearly, there's absolutely no good reason you might find it traumatizing or troubling to take a life, and we absolutely can't leave it to the acting and directing to convey anything about what he's thinking. Just doesn't make sense without a dead wife.
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Nov 23, 2021 17:25
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CainFortea posted:In the fantasy setting, it would be kinda weird to have a character doing violence and being bothered by it. I'd suggest it has substantially less to do with the fantasy setting (he grew up in a bucolic farming town anyways) and more to do with the foundational assumption in most modern media that doing violence to other people is clean, easy, and non-traumatizing. That's well past a fantasy assumption, it's also the assumption of 90% of video games and action films. It's extra funny because the scene actually does demonstrate wordlessly that Perrin finds the violence he carries out alienating and disorienting (the ringing in his ears, etc.), it's just that they assume audiences will never accept that as a reason not to kill. Real "shinji's a coward for not wanting to get in the robot" type vibes, to change media and genre entirely. E: to be clear, I don't consider it a failure of the writing or anything (though I think Sanderson's suggestion to use Luhhan was much stronger and didn't invent a woman to fridge), inasmuch as it's a practical decision they made in response to assumed audience expectations. It's just funny that the conversation starts from a premise of "obviously we all know everyone thinks killing people is fine and normal, so we have to write around that." Valentin fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Nov 23, 2021 |
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Nov 23, 2021 17:38
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yeah the show was pretty clearly writing towards a love triangle with that stuff. what they intended with it and where they wanted it to go is pretty hard to discern, but they very obviously did it and left it in the edit. also you don't really need to establish perrin's fears about doing violence to others in episode one if uhhhhh we don't actually need it in episode one. perrin gets plenty of exposure to different ideas about violence and force as part of his journey anyways, from the tinkers to the whitecloaks to the seanchan to aviendha. all that stuff can (and does) build perfectly organically towards his issues. also plenty of people wouldn't want to do violence to others after what happens to the two rivers generally. "we gotta give him a wife and immediately kill her to establish this character trait that will not be relevant in this season" is just sloppy, cheap, and insulting to the audience. like including a wife who exists only to be fridged in episode one and then never referencing her again is leaps and bounds more confusing to people than "this character who is big and strong doesn't like hurting people." it's genuinely stupid. in general the show as a piece on its own (like, just a regular genre tv show trying to tell a story in 8 hours, leaving aside the issue of adaptation wholly) has really struggled with focusing on stuff that matters rather than stuff that doesn't, which is why it's now 15 hours in and can't figure out what to do with or how to characterize like half of its ostensible main cast. imo they should've just made a full adaptational decision to focus in on moiraine, nynaeve, and egwene. put rand/mat/perrin intentionally out of focus, make that a creative choice. the show is much more lively when dealing with the aes sedai and the tower and seems greatly confused and drags whenever it has to do anything else; it would've been way easier to just not worry about anything else and let it be a show about how this institution responds to the dragon reborn. Valentin fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Oct 3, 2023 |
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Oct 3, 2023 20:30
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CainFortea posted:If it's a whole thing the show is trying to set up...where is it? It came up at the end, then like one or two scenes later Egwene and Rand have a talk where they dismiss it as an issue, and then it never comes up again. At all. It's right there in what you just described lol. It's a subplot they set up multiple times in episode 1 and pay off in episode 6 or 7 or whichever. Why? Couldn't tell you. But the scenes and dialogue you identified in this post literally exist purely to convey this subplot, have a (bad, stilted) narrative arc, and they are in the edit. It is indeed a whole thing the show came up with and put in.
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Oct 3, 2023 21:19
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where mat and rand are emotionally in the books is kind of irrelevant. egwene and nynaeve had rather more material in season one then they do in TEOTW and no one (worth listening to) cares about that or feels that stuff not being there at that time in the books made it bad. so far mat feels pretty adjunct to the show, and they highlighted that by choosing to silo him in his own specialboy plotline, and rand feels like he's been spinning his wheels for two seasons. he's even getting plenty of screentime, they just seem to have no approach as how to characterize him deeply without narration and they haven't made the lack of access to his headspace very interesting either. it's a shame because the decision he makes at the end of season one (explicitly rejecting ishamael's offer because he refuses to see egwene as a happy ending to be offered and understands her as a person in herself) was a super interesting and fun change for the adaptation to make. it gives us a glimpse of a very thoughtful and empathetic rand; a rand who understands the gendered nature of his role in a complex way could be really fun! But they sort of just left that there and imo haven't built on it much and now it just kinda falls into his "generally self-sacrificing" nature which isn't as interesting. . Valentin fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Oct 4, 2023 |
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Oct 4, 2023 18:53
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uh, yeah, most stories are about character's emotional journeys, wheel of time is not remotely unique in that lol. I mean in the context of an adaptation, where a character is emotionally in the books has no relation to whether their emotional journey as depicted in the adaptation is compelling.
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Oct 4, 2023 19:03
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I would say narration heavy POV switching makes adaptation extremely difficult, yeah. It made game of thrones hard to adapt, and that's a series where characters love to speak directly to each other and say "HERE IS MY PHILOSOPHICAL STANCE ON POWER." some of the best work GoTs1 does is in adding dialogue to help us really understand characters who are otherwise characterized heavily through other's narration. Robert and Cersei, for example, are both heavily informed by Ned's POV, so instead they added that scene of them eating dinner to get in some of their characterization. Not all of it works well (chaos is a ladder!; also the show fails to convey any of Dany's possible mounting targaryen madness until way too late in the game), but I think that show provides another example of a source material that has that difficulty and another adaptation that tries to handle it. I think WoT's approach seems to basically be "gently caress it we're adapting the plot" and I think that's a shame because the pov adds a lot of texture. Stuff like rand seeing lan and nynaeve in the blight in TEOTW does a lot to characterize all three, and what replaces it in the show loses a lot of power and weight imo. Valentin fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Oct 4, 2023 |
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Oct 4, 2023 19:08
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just remembering it now but GOT provides a great example of this in its flashbacks, which the show struggled with for AGES because they wanted to not use them, (imo) because flashback breaks the diegetic and chronological nature of a show in a way it doesn't for first person narration (the books don't have to ever "flash back" because they can have characters think about and remember things as they become relevant in the flow of the story). But it turns out stuff like the tower of joy flashback or Cersei meeting the witch is important not just for the plot points you can recount but for the emotional beats each offers, and the show eventually had to admit defeat* and get those on screen so it could adapt their emotional impact as well as plot relevance *(and imo it really was a defeat and a failure of adaptation; the main value of the tower of joy flashback is characterizing ned and understanding the decision he made w/r/t Jon more clearly, and through that a better understanding of catelyn etc. Secondarily it reinforces the book's critical vibe that we are at the end of a heroic age, and the true knights are generally all dead in the last war. So throwing it in waaaaay late in the game purely for R+L=J was a mistake) Valentin fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Oct 4, 2023 |
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Oct 4, 2023 19:14
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DTurtle posted:That seems to be a very ... unique ... interpretation considering all the plot lines added in the show that were nowhere in the books. "Plot" here in the sense of broad strokes and narrative. What I mean is that they've taken the core story from the books but are not maintaining its formal elements (the pov), or the prose, or afaict most of the dialogue, etc.
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Oct 4, 2023 19:57
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silly to chalk it up to the actor, imo. rafe's like "we COULDN'T tell that story" and it's like, yeah you could. you already did a six month mostly unexplained timeskip, you could absolutely be like "mat rejoined us in that time but he's still kinda twitchy from the dagger stuff and the other boys feel weird and a little resentful because he, you know, ditched them". i don't think they have to apologize for the storytelling choice to separate everyone but it's not like their hand was forced, they thought it was a good idea and swung for the fences.
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Oct 4, 2023 21:54
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rafe says he wanted to do the three boys hunting the horn, but that he couldn't because the actor was gone in season 1. i'm saying the actor being gone in season 1 is irrelevant to that, because they already teleport the actor from where he was at the end of season 2 into the hands of liandrin. they could've put him anywhere they wanted at the start of season 2 and no one would've batted an eye because everyone was extremely aware that season 1 got hosed by covid.
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Oct 4, 2023 21:58
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they should just lean into it and do five-headed dragon, and i don't even mean this as a complaint. if i'm a show watcher i'm substantially more invested in egwene and nynaeve than any of the fellas at this point, it's a new turning, have fun with it!
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Oct 6, 2023 04:56
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Dr. Clockwork posted:Judkins: In the books, there's this idea of a battle in the sky above Falme and we did want to achieve that in the show. But we also are at a place now where we've seen a lot of battles in the sky, in Marvel movies and DC movies, and you see a lot of people smashing away at each other in CG clouds and that I think it could have a different connotation now than it might have when the books were written. what exactly is the "different connotation" he's afraid of is the more interesting question. if the idea is that he doesn't want rand to look superheroic, then you should probably cut the people of falme cheering for the dragon while they stand in their avengers pose lol
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Oct 7, 2023 17:11
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The show has many positives but it has noticeable issues with the related points of 1) getting characters where they need to be when they need to be there, to the point of just teleporting mat to falme and shrugging at the audience about it (to say nothing of conveying geography, something this show doesn't even attempt, and usually I'd say that's a reasonable fantasy choice but GoT actually conveyed enough about geography for people to get cinemasins level mad about it by the end and I thought that was neat), and 2) giving characters business to do when the plot doesn't need them yet (for a macro example, moiraine and lan's arc this season; in the micro, nynaeve and elayne in the finale, or just chucking a bunch of seanchan at moiraine and lan for a meaningless action scene). loial just popping up like "hey great news I got freed and lanfear gave me the horn!" is another good example of the show's kinda slapdash approach to plotting. I know people joke about WOT being an American anime, but the truth is that it takes some degree of thoughtful planning to make sure everyone has something to do while Goku's running Snake Way back to the world of the living, and it's where the show's writing is often weakest. Valentin fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Oct 8, 2023 |
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Oct 8, 2023 16:34
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It's just kind of a basic error and obviously repetitive to make nynaeve do the same beat twice in one episode between elayne and rand. it doesn't even get intensified by happening twice because there's no real space for her to have a heightened reaction the second time, as we're too busy with the whole final boss confrontation and rand-elayne meet-cute of it all. it's weirdest because...there's absolutely no reason she has to fail at healing elayne, narratively? it reads like an obvious "okay stall for time, nynaeve and elayne can't get to the last fight yet," but distance is what the show declares it is (which is fine, it's not generally the kind of show where the action cares much about a sense of space or location), so it doesn't delay or facilitate the two of them getting anywhere. there's a million other ways to play it, like her healing elayne and then failing to heal rand because she is too overwhelmed to be angry. but really anything other than "the same thing twice" woulda been good Valentin fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Oct 9, 2023 |
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Oct 9, 2023 20:21
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that I can see, though I think it shouldn't have come at the cost of nynaeve's competence (elayne comes off as having to remind her of a very basic fact, it doesn't feel like nynaeve reclaiming her competence as a wisdom in the face of adversity, and I just kinda think that sucks). I just think of the two moments, her not being able to heal rand (which also, in its own way, means not being able to heal mat, because now this is His Fault Forever, sorry dude I know you were just feeling a ray of hope for the first time in a long time) is clearly the more interesting and vivid character moment in a lot of ways, but the lasting image of her in the episode is bluescreening over the arrow
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Oct 9, 2023 20:59
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i don't think we're actually supposed to think that nynaeve is incompetent in that scene. nynaeve struggles a lot with the idea of being an aes sedai and letting go of her old identity as a wisdom, as the arches highlight, and her confidence as a healer is supremely justified, as the show reminds us this season when she identifies that liandrin's son is suffering nerve pain and offers a remedy. a beat in the finale where her aes sedai powers fail her but she succeeds by 1) overcoming her own fear and dismay, 2) reaching out to other people and 3) relying on her old core competencies (proving that her identity need not be in question because her past as a wisdom can continue to inform her present, and becoming an aes sedai does not mean no longer being a healer), is i think supposed to be a heroic beat, especially because the arrow is presented as a real and threatening obstacle (again, they're stalled there for a while) that she overcomes, which lets elayne heal rand and ultimately enables ishamael's defeat. it's a beat of heroism before the ultimate ending note of frustration, which is the same thing they do with mat and a little with egwene right before perrin comes in (i think this reading also makes sense because frankly i assume the goal of the scriptwriters is not to feel like they are stalling their third-billed actress in a corner while the plot happens; the arrow business is supposed to be meaningful and the outcome is ultimately nynaeve's success). i just don't think it lands that way at all in how it's set up or delivered, and so comes off ultimately redundant e: VVV like i think we can all agree that's not the reaction the writers wanted, right? you're supposed to be like, wow, nynaeve did it, not "oh god, take the fletching off, wait you have to actually bind the wound, what are you doing, she's gonna bleed out the whole way up." but there was a disconnect between intent and execution here in several ways. Valentin fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Oct 9, 2023 |
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Oct 9, 2023 21:21
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the wheel line makes me kind of insane because it makes no sense whatsoever. the spokes in the wheel are the ages, it's a spinning wheel as the (sorely missed) full opening makes abundantly clear, rand is a thread in a pattern, why is that line written that way and then why did they use it all over the promo material. is it just because siuan=fish=water? man it sucks.
Valentin fucked around with this message at 11:09 on Oct 10, 2023 |
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Oct 10, 2023 11:01
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imo it's pretty clear that they wanted to avoid the LOTR vibe in part because a key pitch of the show is that it's the rare established fantasy IP that features lots of powerful women, particularly older women, doing Main Character poo poo; obviously the Rosamund Pike involvement likely plays a factor here, it's not like she and Daniel Henney are first billed on accident. this is pretty obviously a big part of why we end up at tar valon for a while in s1. personally I think that's fine, there's a lot of broad (and also deep and extremely specific) appeal in hard women making hard choices and their sworn knights, loyal unto death. in that vein i think they made the adaptational choice that it's much more appealing to watch lan mourn and get a sense of white tower social dynamics than to watch the EF5 bumblefuck their way through countryside adventures, and I think it's a defensible choice in theory. S2 again focuses in on the politics and aes sedai elements by adding stuff for moiraine and liandrin and alanna and making lanfear in many ways the season's focal point while cutting back considerably on the books' heroic fantasy adventuring and sword training. this is not, however, the same thing as tightening up and condensing WOT in the adaptation, because it merely alters the scope rather than reducing it. This is, I think, where a lot of the adaptational issues originate w/r/t pacing and focus, and I think is the source of much of the (non-racist, non-sexist) frustration with the adaptation that sometimes arises. Valentin fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Oct 10, 2023 |
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Oct 10, 2023 19:35
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th3t00t posted:I think Amazon has used the wrong modeling for their algorithm and badly miscalculated the proper episode count. Trying to game the system with low episode counts per season to cater to low attention spans doesn't work. Making content that is good enough to pay attention to no matter the episode count does work. the 8 episode season works great if you are the bbc and produce a really solid miniseries-esque season each year, or if you are netflix and studio mir is producing 8 episode cartoon "seasons" that you are going to drop every four months on an insane release pace. it works way, way worse when you have 8 episode seasons that happen every two years and those seasons are clearly built around a multiple season long plan Valentin fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Oct 11, 2023 |
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Oct 11, 2023 00:31
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given the obviously bizarrely-executed death scene I wonder if there is in fact an ingtar darkfriend subplot on a cutting room floor somewhere, or in an earlier draft of some of the shooting scripts
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Oct 15, 2023 07:14
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I mean it seems pretty obvious that if they'd had their ducks in a row they would've just had agelmar or whatever get vaporized by the dagger while loial just caught Mysterious Shadow Sickness from fain's nefarious behavior or just like, got beat up. having him get stabbed by the dagger even as a desperate writing decision was pretty obviously an error, he should have just been knocked to the side by a trolloc or something, but I assume you start to run into covid nightmare/cgi not being cheap there. so with that in mind I assume we'll just never talk about it again because...why would we. or it'll get one line about how the dagger was unpowered that time for reasons. Either way it's an obvious thing to ignore and never think about because why would you? The vast majority of the audience is not gonna care and remember about it.
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Nov 1, 2023 22:30
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there's a lot of weird decisions in this show logistically. why decide to make the moiraine/siuan relationship more important while also casting someone who apparently can't film more than 1-2 episodes a season?
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Nov 3, 2023 18:19
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"thinks most goons are loving idiots" is rabidity, yeah
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Dec 3, 2023 20:40
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the show makes a lot of changes but it makes neither enough to feel like its own animal nor few enough to feel like it's faithfully hitting the high points. its far bigger problem though is that the writing just doesn't exactly knock it out of the park especially when it is operating with original material (e.g. the changes to nynaeve's accepted test, which are superficially interesting in a star trek way but result in a boring and incoherent episode because the show isn't and can't be star trek and, more glaringly, because they set up her return super super super badly, just totally meaningless in a characterization way). also it's rarely firing on all cylinders; when you aren't running into problems with the writing you're running into the acting or the direction. even the wardrobe (a definite highlight at times) can also be bad or clunky or just look obviously off the rack. to their credit the one time they're really firing on all cylinders (the egwene ep) is a lot of original writing. also it's just not going to get 6-8 seasons and shouldn't be plotting that way but I try not to fault creatives for ambition Valentin fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 23:42
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You write your show to give everyone interesting things to do every season, or you move them offscreen if you can't. It's fine to write for 8 seasons. It's stupid to have perrin do nothing for two seasons as theoretical groundwork for the future. He shouldn't kill his wife if nothing in season one is going to address him killing his wife. e: VVV yes, and being highly ranked at a steaming service that exists largely in response to market trends and which doesn't have any original narrative programming past three seasons is a relatively precarious position, especially when producing a season takes two years or more. It should encourage you to try to use your time in a focused way each season given the current media environment doesn't seem to favor long-running expensive dramas at the moment. Valentin fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 23:56
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You don't have to resolve anything. But you should at least try to gesture at a character killing his wife in the first episode of the season by the season finale, or take a little more effort to leave someone in a conscious place of despair. also lan and moiraine's plot in s2 is literally just a loop to get them back to where they started the season. I have many questions about their overarching plan I guess is my main point
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Feb 29, 2024 00:10
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CainFortea posted:Also perrin was frequently quite emotionally messed up the whole time? this would also easily be true without a fridged wife given the devastating attack on his idyllic hometown and his personal issues with violence. Rarity posted:Tbf Perrin's S1 finale story was picking up the slack in the Fain story after Barney Harris left which clearly wasn't the original intention Yeah, the Fain story, which we really absolutely had to resolve and which was relevant to this season in the following ways: also like once you've written a fridged wife into your updated feminist take on the "gender binaries are real and extremely powerful and important" fantasy series you are obliged to properly pay off the fridged wife, lest her ghost linger over the whole thing like a reminder you have no idea what you're doing. you should absolutely not be adding a new wife to be fridged with no real plan for how that fits in or gets its own mini arc within the season aside from "two seasons from now when this guy doesn't like the violence and pain of war, that won't make sense unless we give him a dead wife NOW" (also that makes it really genuinely a textbook fridging; she literally wouldn't exist if they weren't trying to service his character arc). alas, the show is now haunted. Valentin fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 14:00
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also it is (production-related s3 speculation) decently likely to lose its only name, by far its most popular character, and half of its only meaningful wlw pairing next season both based on what we know about the plot going into it and the likelihood that Rosamund Pike moving away from Prague is related to filming. I don't think that's a death knell for the show itself or for fan sentiment next season or even s4 renewal or anything but it would also make me go, hm, maybe I don't actually have 6 to 10 years to complete this before Amazon comes calling.
Valentin fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 20:46
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fans agree: this fantasy TV show needs fewer cool swords. "too much cool magic," viewers say.
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Mar 27, 2024 16:50
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Data Graham posted:I mean I guess at some point you have to start asking questions like, is WoT about things like Callandor? Is it about "a specific array of props and magic items and spells and character catchphrases"? Or is it about more of a narrative arc where the trinkets and the minibosses and the cities and even the characters don't really matter as much as the central elevator-pitch, "men do magic like this, women do magic like this, here's what that looks like in practice" there are a lot of takes you could have on wheel of time and its adaptation but "really the characters and events don't matter so much, but they kept the important part: robert jordan's thoughts on gender" is i think a novel take on the show, congrats like i would say the bolded element is vastly, vastly de-emphasized in the show for many extremely obvious reasons
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Mar 27, 2024 18:46
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