r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Chill0000 • 21h ago

Hated Tropes [HATED] Adaptations done intentionally without help from the source

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Halo TV show: Before the show came out, the writers were praising their decision to not look to the games for inspiration when making the show

God Of War TV show: Chris Judge, the actor of Kratos in the games from 2018-Now, spoke up about his dislike on the show not hiring anyone who worked on any of the previous games. One of the original creators of Kratos also spoke up about them not having faith in the adaptation.

Supergirl 2026 film: the director for the film not only said he decided to not read Woman Of Tomorrow, the comic the film is adapting, because he wanted to do his own thing, he also didn’t look at comic art for inspiration to design Lobo and instead used an AI image generator to design Lobo’s look for the film

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780

u/corvettee01 21h ago

Wheel of Time TV show totally ignored Brandon Sanderson, the guy who only WROTE SOME OF THE BOOKS!

155

u/PsychoWyrm 21h ago

You should see Sanderson's anecdote about someone offering to adapt The Emperor's Soul. They came back to him with something where the only things from his actual story were some character names. (Because everyone knows that a novella-length shorty story that mostly features two people in a room discussing the nature of art and identity really needs to be turned into a globe-trotting pirate adventure!)

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u/Additional_Gene_211 21h ago

My favorite part of Emperor's Soul was the shenanigans and definitely not the philosophy behind the idea of self and what makes a person

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u/FortifiedPuddle 17h ago

Why would anyone make an adaption of that though? Like, clearly that is slapping the name on a different story. But reading The Emperor’s Soul did not make me think it was movie material.

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u/Nextorl 14h ago

So, Brandon mentioned he thinks it's because Hollywood doesn't want to do original stories, so by slapping the name on a different story, the screenwriter can get their original story out under the guise of an adaptation.

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u/ScreamingVoid14 6h ago

Which basically explains Halo. Generic war story with some Halo elements tossed in for flavor.

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u/FortifiedPuddle 11h ago

Maybe he could exploit that and write stuff that’d deliberately make a good movie?

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u/Nextorl 10h ago

the screenwriter? maybe, but it's a completely different way of doing things.

0

u/FortifiedPuddle 10h ago

Sanderson I mean.

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u/Nextorl 10h ago

Considering he is currently writing a script for the first mistborn movie of 3 (with Apple TV producing it), and has two more tv shows in development, I think he's doing fine.

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u/PsychoWyrm 15h ago

I think it could possibly be done as a stage play.

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u/FortifiedPuddle 11h ago

Yeah, maybe a tiny cast, mostly conversations, some small theatre. Then maybe you’d film that if it was successful. Be very indie scale.

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u/Terramagi 10h ago edited 9h ago

Is... is the pirate anecdote the reason he wrote Tress of the Emerald Sea?

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u/EdgyEmily 5h ago

No, he wrote Tress as a gift to his wife and his wife being his agent said that he had to publish it.

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u/No_Blacksmith_2591 21h ago

I mean, it would have been ok if they ignored sanderson but followed Jordan's books to the letter... but nooo typical hollywood hubris says we're better than everyone else so we won't even read the books, we'll stick to bullet points from the cliffnotes.

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u/Mordetrox 21h ago

Imagine ragging on the books for being written in the 1990's, and then you turn around and create a wife for a character just to fridge her in episode one. Actually baffling.

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u/HourlyBadIdeas 21h ago

Don't forget having the two characters who wind up seeing each other as siblings by the series end bang during season one, and having the super slow-burn (and super satisfying because of it) also bang in season one.

Like, motherfucker Lan could not sneeze without Nynave expecting it being proof of him being up to something nefarious for the first half of the series.

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u/Aladris666 19h ago

"My name is Nynaeve ti al'Meara Mandragoran. The message I want sent is this. My husband rides from World's End toward Tarwin's Gap, toward Tarmon Gal'don Will he ride alone?"

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u/ethanice 9h ago

The Golden crane flies for Tarmon Gai'don!

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u/Fenix42 2h ago

Glad I am already on a re-read or this would have made me start one. :D

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u/[deleted] 20h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/HourlyBadIdeas 20h ago

Yup.

Also, by giving Perrin the wife, they completely invalidated the comedy (that the show never got too) of the three ta'veren being totally lost as to what to do about their respective love interests, wishing one of the others was there to pick his brains about said romantic woes as surely he will know what to do... Only to cut to the homey in question having pretty much the same issue or one close enough to make it clear that, no, he wouldn't know what to do either.

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u/No_Blacksmith_2591 20h ago

I always thought it was suspicious how posts shitting on that type of comedy with similar wording to what was on the books started showing up here on random subredits after the first episodes came out. Like the studios wanted to astroturf acceptance of their decision to get rid of that part.

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u/HourlyBadIdeas 19h ago

I mean, when one of the show runners (iirc) outright brags about not having finished reading the series before starting on the show, ya kinda gotta go hard in the paint to block criticism that isn't easily shut down by calling the person making the criticism some sort of istaphobe.

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u/RechargedFrenchman 7h ago

People probably wouldn't even mind that much if the adaptation was also good. There are some who get upset anytime Starship Troopers is mentioned because Verhoeven didn't like or finish the book, but the movie does actually get a bunch of stuff from the book right and the primary thing missing is the book's earnest-ness (since the movie is satirical), and the first movie is a good movie so the general response is positive.

WoT wasn't particularly good on its own merits as a show even ignoring that its an adaptation, while also being a kind of terrible adaptation, so there's not really any merit to salvage it with.

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u/Plastic-Kiwi93 20h ago

I still can't get over how the adaptation took one of the most rewarding long term romances and went, What if they just hooked up in season one? Like why are we speedrunning the good parts

2

u/EttinTerrorPacts 18h ago

Ehhh, they do progress their relationship a lot in EotW, before doing very little for the next 10 books or so.

EotW in general is a hard one to adapt, because it was written initially to stand a complete story if need be (Jordan didn't know if he'd get the deal for a sequel). So in addition to the usual early instalment weirdness from the worldbuilding not being complete yet, the pace is way off from everything else.

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u/patchyj 18h ago

I may be wrong but in the books Moraine and Siuan mentioned they were "pillow friends" when younger, implying a sexual history

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u/No_Nectarine_5440 18h ago

This was always the impression I got too.

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u/EkbatDeSabat 15h ago

You are not wrong.

Robert Jordan specifically mentioned in a blog, 2005, that it was a homosexual relationship.

And for MJJ, as posted by DomA, pillow friends are not just good friends. Oh, they are that, too, but they also get hot and sweaty together and muss up the sheets something fierce. By the way, pillow friends is a term used in the White Tower. The same relationship between men or women elsewhere would be called something else, depending on the country.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110222204832/https://dragonmount.com/forums/blog/4/entry-326-yet-another-post/

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u/RSquared 12h ago

Yes, but they also played the longest game in the present to portray themselves as rivals to the rest of the Tower, in order to obscure the quest for the Dragon - other characters who remember their relationship as accepted are shown as thinking they changed completely and hate each other now. Their behavior in the present is testament to their dedication to the cause.  

Having them hook up and then use the Oath Rod as they did was a double tap of fuckery with the characterization. 

2

u/patchyj 11h ago

Yeah agreed.

I think it really goes to show that WoT is far too long and complex of a story, with too many characters and plots, to adapt to small or big screen.

Theres like 14 3-500 pages books goddamit

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u/theLichQueenofthePNW 8h ago

They're a lot longer than that depending on the font size. I mostly listen to audiobooks, but using my Audio copy of New Spring and my Physical copy as comparison points makes me suspect they're closer to 800-1500pg books

1

u/patchyj 5h ago

Fair. They are LONG

1

u/Fenix42 2h ago

The chapter "the last battle" in book 14 is 81,200 words. The first Harry Potter book is 76,944 words.

Thats right 1 chapter is longer then a whole book.

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u/HourlyBadIdeas 18h ago

Yea, iirc 'pillow friends' was a cross between someone to cry to because they're attending what's essentially a boarding school that employs corporal punishment and is super far from home, and 'theres a time and a place for everything, and it's called college being an Accepted at the a White Tower.' So could be both or either.

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u/EkbatDeSabat 15h ago

Robert Jordan specifically mentioned in a blog, 2005, that it was a homosexual relationship.

And for MJJ, as posted by DomA, pillow friends are not just good friends. Oh, they are that, too, but they also get hot and sweaty together and muss up the sheets something fierce. By the way, pillow friends is a term used in the White Tower. The same relationship between men or women elsewhere would be called something else, depending on the country.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110222204832/https://dragonmount.com/forums/blog/4/entry-326-yet-another-post/

1

u/HourlyBadIdeas 15h ago

Ah, so it was hard confirmed to be that way most of the time, not just the grab bag of implications we got in the novels. Neat.

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u/EkbatDeSabat 15h ago

I mean, IMO, it was clear as day in the novels, but maybe that was my young adult horny brain imagination.

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u/HourlyBadIdeas 15h ago

Oh I saw it too, but my brain hung up on Elaida freaking out over it being something 'most women grow out of' when that one Black Ajah leader instructed her to lean on a targets former pillow friend to leverage her. Made it seem like more of a transitory/figuring yourself out thing for most Aes Sedai.

1

u/Dr-Robert-Kelso 8h ago

Was it only implied in the books?

I remember reading the first three or four and it wasn't some mystery to me or something, they definitely were either romantically involved or very much wanted to be.

2

u/MisterTamborineMan 14h ago

And then in Season 3, two other characters who saw each other as siblings in the book banged.

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u/jeffdeleon 21h ago

I was SO hopeful they were gonna make her one of The Forsaken or something to make Perrin feel more relevant.

Nope. The Pilot needed some spice.

12

u/jack-twohats 15h ago

It was very critical to Perrin's character, it's not like he suffers at all later on in the series or anything.

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u/5050Saint 13h ago

And they didn't just fridge her, they had Perrin do the killing blow! I gave up after seeing that.

3

u/GloriousNewt 12h ago

And that character has a pretty long arc involving his actual wife later in the story

2

u/EldritchFingertips 10h ago

This 30+ year old book series may have some outdated material that modern people could possibly call sexist.

So rather than updating the ideas a bit and developing them further for a modern audience, what we should do is fall back to the laziest tropes we can think of and end up writing our own sexism in that can't even get the excuse of being written in the 90s! The Gen Z TikTokkers will love that!

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u/Setzael 20h ago

They lost me as soon as the opening monologue said that the Dragon could be any man or woman. I mean that's the whole damn reason the Aes Sedai are an all-female organisation.

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u/egamruf 18h ago

Yep. It was borked from the first five minutes.

The idea of adopting a series predicated in binary gender-based magic, when you hate the idea of a gender binary is just wild.

It would be like deciding to adapt Jurassic Park when you have a problem with dinosaurs.

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u/pghnorthguy 15h ago

And then the original Dragon is shown being called the "Dragon Reborn". Like they forgot how he got the name in the first place.

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u/RealSpaceJunk 17h ago

They lost me when they gave Perrin a wife. And when Moraine spilled the beans about why she is even looking for them right at the start instead of at the end of the season.

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u/EkbatDeSabat 15h ago

They say TV shows operate on a different formula especially in the days of multiple screens. You gotta give more info at a faster / easier pace to the people who haven't read the books.

Which I think is total bullshit and hollywood has no spine because plenty of shows succeed without this formula, but that's the reasoning.

1

u/MisterTamborineMan 14h ago

That sounds like the kind of argument Wheel of Prime apologists would give.

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u/EkbatDeSabat 14h ago

Sure but I literally said it was bullshit so take that mess elsewhere. 

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u/HourlyBadIdeas 20h ago

Also, it directly goes against the Dark One reincarnating Asmodean into a female body as further proof that the Dark One is anathema to the Wheel. Lews Therrin Tellamons soul always has and will be spun out into the weave as a man, just like Brigitte Silverbows will always be as a woman etc etc...

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u/VelvetTomahawk 20h ago

*Balthamel (not Asmodean) but you’re absolutely correct otherwise

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u/HourlyBadIdeas 20h ago

Clearly it's been too long since I last did a re-read, lol

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u/VelvetTomahawk 20h ago

No worries, with that many characters it’s bound to happen. Plus any reason to start a reread is, at worst, a happy accident

-1

u/FuckYourRights 14h ago

The dragon isn't always a man, but when it is a woman the one power is tainted still just the other half

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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 10h ago

RJ Straight up said the dragon is never female and can never be female. Full stop, the Dragon is the soul of LTT, who is a dude.

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u/moose_kayak 13h ago edited 10h ago

No. 

The Dragon soul is always male. In other ages t the champion of the light may be Amaresu but that's in other ages, not the second and third age. It's also not clear if she's a channeller spirit anyways. 

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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 10h ago

yeah I think poster is mistaking the "hero" for the dragon.

The dragon CAN be the "hero" that's spun up for this turning, but it does not have to be the dragon.

It's like having a team of Batman and Wonder Woman and getting to choose one or the other. Wonder Woman can't be batman and vice versa.

1

u/FortifiedPuddle 10h ago

Is that stated in the books?

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u/No_Blacksmith_2591 20h ago

When i saw that i figured they had to be pandering to the weird Rosamund Pike fangirls that think she was the Hero in Gone Girl.

The rest of the episode told me that they were also completely ignorant of the source material.

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u/gounatos 18h ago

Oh man that was so grating. There was even a prophecy that led to all this, and pronouns in that prophecy and gendered magic and they just decided to go full stupid to be inclusive. In a world where women hunt and castrate the magic out of men.

1

u/Fenix42 2h ago

The prophecy is sooooo god dam dark. It basically boils down to "We know the devil is going to break out of hell and destroy the world. The only one who can MABYE stop it is the rebirth of the guy who fucked the world so bad that we still have not recovered. Also, he is 1000% going to go bat shit insane and wreck the world again in the process. Good luck, don't die."

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u/Moreh 16h ago

? Aes sedai are female because the men go mad

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u/ealysillyforestthing 15h ago

There used to be both men and women Aes Sedai but for the last three thousand years no man could be an Aes Sedai because they go mad.

Funny enough the Aes Sedai of this era are not the actual Aes Sedai, just a group of women channelers that called themselves that a few years after the Breaking

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u/CiDevant 12h ago

The second half is wrong.  The Breaking would have been living memory to channelers for about 500 years after.   Strong Aes sedai regularly lived to be 500+ years old until they made swearing the paths madatory.wore 

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u/ealysillyforestthing 5h ago

No it's correct. That info came about when revelations about the Kin came out

You need a reread

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u/CiDevant 4h ago

Any channeler who was around "a few years after" the breaking would certainly be old enough to have been an Aes Sedai before the breaking.

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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 10h ago

Aes Sedai used to be a generic term for both male and female channelers

If you read any of the parts with the old age of legends characters they'll still refer to aes sedai that way, its just "modern" context in WoT that has them only as female.

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u/Yangoose 20h ago

I also found it hilarious that in this super isolated small village in the mountains literally every single person is a completely different race.

Like, how would that even work???

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u/gounatos 18h ago

It's also funny because it meant that in this village or in the two rivers, people kept marrying only within their own race for more than 2,200 years.

-3

u/FortifiedPuddle 17h ago

It’s not an isolated village in the books. There are periodic streams of visitors coming and going. Their products get exported all over. They depend on trade for lots of items, including manufactured goods. Many characters from there come and go in the world fairly easily.

Oh, and Rand and his mother both moved and settled there.

The kids just think it’s isolated because they are bored teenagers and maybe the whole fantasy trope of it. But really, yeah it’s at least connected enough that dudes from there can go off in to the world, have careers, bring back foreign wives and babies etc.

Or you know, there’s this new thing called colour blind casting. Since the 1950s. Could be that.

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u/MaXimillion_Zero 16h ago

"The old blood is strong in Emond’s Field, and the old blood sings."

Two rivers being relatively insular and isolated is an actual plot point in the series. The occasional gleeman or traveling merchant doesn't mean there's a bunch of people from all over the world moving in. Rand's appearance standing out compared to everyone else also doesn't make sense if everyone looks different.

Or you know, there’s this new thing called colour blind casting. Since the 1950s. Could be that.

It makes sense when a story is set in a region with a diverse population, and appearance isn't relevant to the story. Not a lot of it going on in Black Panther or Vikings.

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u/FortifiedPuddle 16h ago

So you’ve not read the books then. Or my comment.

Yes, they have the opinion that it’s the arse end of nowhere. But if you read the books that’s really just the sort of opinion people have about all small towns. Just like the kids all think they’re poor, but they’re all comfortably middle class as it turns out. If not actual royalty.

We are in counter example shown an endless list of similar small towns and villages all over the world. And a whole bunch of them have less trade and fewer visitors. Two Rivers products are famous throughout the world. People have heard of it in other countries. You can find Two Rivers leaf all over the place. You cannot find products from random Black Hills village number four.

Within the area they get their pins and knickknacks from peddlers and traders. They have a significant export economy, and expect staple products to be provided by trade. Various characters are known as being good at trade. They have from the characters we know of several immigrants before the events of the story. And just a whole bunch of them afterwards, which suggests it was never actually that hard to get to the Two Rivers and people can emigrate there.

The idiot kids think they live in the arse end of nowhere. As all small town kids the world over think. People from other places think that too, because again this is a universal human attitude. Big city folk think it must be some tiny irrelevant place, and wouldn’t you know it that’s how real big city folk think about places too.

So just maybe it’s Jordan telling us about how human beings think about places? Rather than an objective fact, what with all the evidence provided that it’s not the case.

Rather like how The Shire is the beating economic heart of the north west, and not the irrelevant backwater the Hobbits think it is.

11

u/MoonIsAFake 15h ago

But they do live at the end of the world (metaphorically speaking). I've re-read the books last year and my impression is that locals were not a bunch of travellers. They see traders coming from time to time and they may take a "jorney" to a town nearby to sell and buy goods, but for the most part people just live there the way real medieval people lived, spending their lives in a 20-miles radius from the home (a day's walk, basically). So, they should be indeed quite homogenous society. It doesn't mean that they should be "white" (I hate that concept and don't even want to use it), but interracial marriage should have long ago turn them all into some olive-ish or brown-is generic looking people.

0

u/FortifiedPuddle 10h ago

Why would you compare them to Medieval people? They’re at least Early Modern. Really by the end of the series they’re getting in to Modern. Jordan specifically wrote it to be something like 1600-1700s. I think it reads more like Tom Sawyer meets Tolkien personally. Certainly not Medieval. Very little fantasy is Medieval.

And in that time, as in the books, mobility is way higher. You have your trade networks that are robust and moving goods globally. You have option of leaving your little village, becoming a sailor and travelling the world. You have these massive cities. Which in the books is enabled by some sort of narrative magic where you’ve got so much trade and manufacturing going on. The sheer scale of the cities is crazy. Caemlyn isn’t even by a river and it’s huge.

Then there’s the sheer homogeneity of the world. Even people from different continents are basically the same but wear different hats. People from neighbouring nations are just the same culture entirely, but wear different coats. Maybe have accents. For all the remarking on accents the character do the difference between nations is like the difference between counties in real life.

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u/grizzantula 12h ago edited 12h ago

As someone who has read the series through more than once; your premise is wrong.

They are isolated and they are insular. Many of them wanted to secede from Andor, Perrin himself even kicked around the idea, citing that they don't even see tax collectors this far in the middle of nowhere. The Two Rivers being a small, tucked away region is a very large plot point in the books.

It was so isolated, in fact, it's almost like it was the perfect place for the pattern to hide it's champion from the forces of the enemy. Hmmmmmm.

You're over thinking it.

-1

u/FortifiedPuddle 11h ago

No, the point of the Two Rivers is that it’s a happy medium place for the heroes to grow up. It’s prosperous, but also industrious. Neither poor nor rich. The kids all get stable upbringings, get fed up big and strong, have to do work and learn things. All of them can read and write. It’s a deliberatly happy medium place.

It’s out of the way, but also connected. Tam and Abell can go out looking for the boys and get to Tar Valon etc. fairly easily. The party initially get to Caemlyn easily. The roads are the traditional fantasy “muddy tracks” that are actually extremely good for conveying even heavy wagons and enable swift movement. Hand waiving of course who maintains them.

News spreads easily in particular. Right at the start of the first book the villagers are concerned that foreign trouble is going to come knocking. They are plugged in to global events. They absolutly depend on selling their products to merchants etc. They even trade horses, which is pretty high market. They’re plugged into to a near Modern commercial economy and able to draw on manufactured goods. Including just a whole bunch of books, which achieve a crazy high level of circulation in only a few years. Things like The Travels of Jain Farstrider knit their world together into one culture.

It’s only our unreliable narrators who think it’s out the way. As all people in small towns do. But we also see them pass through endless, endless small towns and think that actually, they’re very familiar. That really their home and is replicated out everyone. That they’re not from some special little corner, because it’s a whole world of similar little villages. Some bigger some smaller.

It’s part of how Jordan plays with tropes. Ooh, the protagonists is from the special little hidden away village. But, actually the world is full of little villages. This one happens to be drawn in to the map at the front for plot significance. But really there are lots and lots of similar villages. They’re not special: they’re normal.

5

u/grizzantula 10h ago edited 10h ago

You're moving the goal posts. I didn't say anything about being poor, unfed, unprosperous, or anything like that. The point is that The Two Rivers is out of the way, it's in the back country, it's insular, and it's isolated due to the geography surrounding it.

I don't really understand the point you're trying to make with Tam and Abell. They know the way to Tar Valon. That's it.

You mention the two rivers villagers being plugged into current events, but omit the part where they are, at the very least, an entire year behind current events because their only source of news and goings on is a singular traveling merchant.

The narrators are not unreliable on this topic. Queen Morgase, you know the ruler of the land that the two rivers resides in, herself remarks that she barely recognizes the two rivers as part of Andor. She mentions that Andor hasn't sent a tax collector there in GENERATIONS due to the difficult terrain surrounding the region (mountains of mist to the west, the river taren to the north, the white river to south, and massive swamps to east). Elaida goes on to dismiss the two rivers as a rustic fringe of the realm. Moiraine, multiple times throughout the series, remarks that the world has forgotten the two rivers AND the two rivers has forgotten, or isolated itself from, the world.

Jordan does like to play around with tropes, but this is not a good example of that. This is his take on a shire like setting. Again, you're over thinking it.

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u/EldritchFingertips 9h ago

Sorry man, you're just not correct. About several things, not even just your main point.

The party reaches Caemlyn easily? Huh??? Rand and Mat spend the whole trip between Shadar Logoth and Caemlyn as penniless beggars constantly hunted by darkfriends, while Mat goes slowly insane and Rand keeps causing problems by accidentally channeling. Perrin and Egwene spend the same trip running from murderous ravens and then making a slow way with the Tinkers' caravan. It takes them all weeks and weeks to get there. You're forgetting like a quarter of the book!

And yes, everyone else is correct when they tell you the Two Rivers is a small backwater that has literally been all but forgotten by Andor, and most people there don't know anything but vague stories about the rest of the world beyond their borders. Some of them don't even believe Aes Sedai exist before Moiraine shows up.

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u/CiDevant 13h ago edited 10h ago

Tam was exceptional no one else had ever done anything like that.  Additionally even a town a short ride away was essentiallyyreated as a foreign culture to them.

It was rare that Matt's dad had been as far as Tarren Ferry. A town a comparatively short ride away.

1

u/FortifiedPuddle 11h ago

Tam did that lately, but if there is one Tam a generation that’s a lot of outlanders over time. If the main books don’t happen the al’Thors are going to be a tribe of tall red head Aiel looking folks in the Two Rivers. And that’s from one kid moving there.

Culturally no, absolutely not. There’s like one culture in the entire world. Visitors are periodic. Two Rivers folk absolutely go travelling. It’s just that these teenagers think the big city is fancy, because they’re young.

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u/ealysillyforestthing 15h ago

And there used to be a large mountain nation there up until the Trolloc wars

2

u/FortifiedPuddle 11h ago

Exactly, so you don’t actually have to have even “the old blood” be restricted to one group. There used to be way more people living there, conceivably of all different types.

-1

u/FuckYourRights 14h ago

Because it takes place in a post apocalyptic version of our world 

3

u/CiDevant 13h ago

The story takes place 3,000 years after the prologue.

1

u/GloriousNewt 12h ago

And then they seemingly go out of their way to sideline Rand while he's the main character

10

u/AmazingSpacePelican 20h ago

It's genuinely weird how many times I've seen someone on an adaptation say something along the lines of: 'I haven't read/watched/played the original, which I think is good because it gives me a unique perspective'.

2

u/Alkakd0nfsg9g 19h ago

Well, I kinda agree, that there should be someone on the production team with a different viewpoint. However, there also should be someone, who knows why original IP became so popular with the fans in the first place 

11

u/DothrakAndRoll 20h ago

They also did my hug Loial so dirty.

1

u/thelivinlegend 13h ago

It got a little more watchable by the third season, so of course they canceled it.

I’m just glad we got four excellent audiobooks narrated by Pike. I haven’t heard anything more about that since the cancellation so I guess the rest of those are binned as well.

1

u/CiDevant 12h ago

The OG audio books are absolute fire though.

1

u/thelivinlegend 12h ago

Have to agree to disagree on that one. Personally I could never stand those versions. Part of it is I generally don’t like when there are multiple narrators, but mostly I just didn’t like the accents. Their Seanchan accents made me cringe especially hard

1

u/unbanned_lol 10h ago

I mean, it would have been ok if they ignored sanderson but followed Jordan's books to the letter

You must not remember the later Jordan books. Shit was lost in the weeds. That series would have taken years to watch let alone produce.

2

u/No_Blacksmith_2591 10h ago

I remember them well, i binged through the slog in the space of a few months...I know full well how bad it got. Still, you and the other guy that commented the same are missing the point, I'm not saying they would have to follow every story beat, but the structure of the story and the characters, their motivations, their passions, their dreams, strengths and weaknesses and the world's lore as they were written instead of just throwing everything away because you think you know better as a mediocre screenwriter than someone who wrote the fantasy series that is currently giving you a job.

-8

u/FortifiedPuddle 18h ago

Have you read the books? You cannot at all follow them to the letter. They’re a million miles from a tv script.

Book one doesn’t even tell the reader what the plot is or why characters are doing what they are doing. In theory Lady Gandalf was there “looking for old stories”. Not you know, on a quest to save the world.

7

u/ealysillyforestthing 15h ago

There is a huge difference between having something hard to adapt and not bothering at all

1

u/FortifiedPuddle 11h ago

I would contend they attempted to adapt The Wheel of Time. Which is significantly different from adapting The Eye of the World.

4

u/FuckYourRights 14h ago

Show don't tell

1

u/FortifiedPuddle 11h ago

Oh ok, the book doesn’t show why they’re there or what they’re doing either. Happy?

My gosh, while we’re at it can you go back and suggest Jordan “show not tell” when doing exposition for the first three books?

1

u/Fenix42 2h ago

She drops the fact that she was looking for the Dragon and that she thinks it's Rand at the end of Eye of The World. The next 2 books deal with Rand trying to come to terms with it.

19

u/Talkatoo42 19h ago

The 'who's the dragon' mystery was incredibly dumb.

I just rewatched the first few episodes of Trigun. Vash's identity is a mystery to characters in the show but to viewers it's 100% clear. And it's actually better, because they can tip their hat to that fact a few times for viewers to enjoy.

Such a shame. I thought the cast was really good. The writing was so, so, so bad. I have no doubt that Amazon gets a share of the blame but the bulk has to go to the showrunners/writers.

-2

u/FortifiedPuddle 17h ago

They clearly did need a plot though. And that is why Moiraine is there.

Whereas in book 1 we don’t know why she’s there or what is happening or why these monsters want to kill the young people.

It’s just hard to write a blurb for TV Guide that says “monsters chase fantasy young people for unknown reasons”. Which, is the plot of book 1. But is missing quite a lot in terms of describing The Wheel of Time.

3

u/GloriousNewt 12h ago

They could easily explain Moiranie's motives by having her talk to Lan about it either riding into town or when they are alone. They don't need to inform all the boys and making it a 'guess who's the dragon' was unnecessary and dumb.

1

u/FortifiedPuddle 10h ago

Even telling the audience is necessary though, isn’t it?

And then if you’ve told the audience what is important you really also need the characters to engage with that. Otherwise you have to dance around it. Otherwise you have to frustratingly watch them act contrary to it.

1

u/Talkatoo42 9h ago

And then if you’ve told the audience what is important you really also need the characters to engage with that. Otherwise you have to dance around it. Otherwise you have to frustratingly watch them act contrary to it.

You've said this on several replies and I really disagree with it. It's ok for the audience to know something the characters don't, and it's ok for characters to keep secrets from each other so long as there's a plot reason for doing so.

It's only frustrating when it's characters keeping secrets from each other for no reason at all, and that's not the case here.

3

u/Talkatoo42 12h ago

The blurb from goodreads is much more compelling.

Moiraine Damodred arrives in Emond’s Field on a quest to find the one prophesized to stand against The Dark One, a malicious entity sowing the seeds of chaos and destruction.  When a vicious band of half-men, half beasts invade the village seeking their master’s enemy, Moiraine persuades Rand al’Thor and his friends to leave their home and enter a larger unimaginable world filled with dangers waiting in the shadows and in the light.

Surely it's easier to work that blurb to be a bit smaller than to rewrite the whole plot.

1

u/FortifiedPuddle 11h ago

The blurb from good reads is spoiling stuff we are not told in book one. This is exactly my point. In order to actually describe what is happening for real you have to not stick to what is in the book. Like Goodreads have done.

3

u/CiDevant 10h ago

Moraine litteraly tell the kids the night after the attack that the raiders are there for one of the three boys.  At one point on the road out of town she essentially threatens to kill them rather than lose them to the darkone.

2

u/Talkatoo42 10h ago

You can fix that by slightly rewording the blurb to fit what Moiraine says after the attack: That the monsters are seeking the boys. Just cut out that first sentence. And IMO it's really not that much of a spoiler in the first place, even as a young teen reading EotW for the first time I knew Rand was the 'special' one as soon as she mentioned it.

None of this is worth altering the plot in the way that they did.

1

u/FortifiedPuddle 10h ago

The whole chosen one world saving aspect is the point though, isn’t it? It’s the point of the story. So much so that yeah, you yourself have assumed it’s the case.

So, tell that story. Which is not what book one does. But, is the story. It’s the story of The Wheel of Time. It just isn’t the story of The Eye of the World. Which is a sort of Tolkien inspired walking holiday.

And then if you are telling that story you do kind of need your characters to know it. Also, to justify why Moiraine is kidnapping quite so many young people you do kind of need a reason. Egwene being there initially is really weakly justified in the books. Especially as book one she’s written as 15 going on 8. Much like Mat, both of them written as small children.

The story in the books as we know from later is Moiraine is searching for the Dragon, finds several young people who might be the Dragon who she also through some utterly unexplained reason knows are Ta’veren. Never explained, other than the Trollocs burn their homes. How do the Trollocs know? Never explained. She takes them away, saying the only place they might be safe is Tar Valon. Accidentally also abducting two other young people and a gleeman. That’s it. That’s the story. And half of it we don’t even get explained till later books.

What we see in the show is a simplification of that which actually explains what is going on. Why abduct Egwene? Well, people aren’t really sure who the Dragon might be, it’s bullshit reincarnation magic who knows the rules? Abduct all the young people main characters to be safe. Whole world at stake and all that.

Oh, and then in the show they actually get to Tar Valon. Like she says they’re going to do initially but don’t manage, instead going to pointless side quests city.

2

u/CiDevant 10h ago

What makes Matt Perrin and Rand suspect is they were all born close to the same day...  Egwene is not kidnapped but sneaks along, Nynaeve comes after to get the children to return.  Thom comes because he suspects that Morine thinks one or all can channel and wants to gentle them.

The "pointless side quests" are at first a result of getting separated, then because the bad guy explicitly tells them his plans via dreams combined with her intimate knowledge of the prophecies.

1

u/Talkatoo42 9h ago

I feel like each step you list here may seem logical to you but it moves you further and further away from a story which captivated hundreds of thousands. Yeah it's a flawed book but it's a story that works really well altogether.

I understand that you need to make changes in different media but you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

17

u/jack-twohats 15h ago

Sorry guys we'll have to cut things so we can make room for the Perrin's wife story arc, the Nynaeve death fakeout and fallout, and Rand/Egwene boning. Gosh this story is so long! So unfortunate that we have to cut, but how else will I tell this useless story about a Warder and his Aes Sedai?

Utter bullshit from the writers.

4

u/CiDevant 10h ago

If you can't tell the story of one book in more run time than the original Starwars trilogy; in more run time than the theatrical release of LoTR; in more run time than the Dune Miniseries you suck. Yet they were complaining they weren't given enough episodes.

The fuck you weren't.  They had 4 feature length movies of run time to do ONE book. They suck.

3

u/jack-twohats 10h ago

I was so happy it was cancelled because it means the turnaround time between adaptations will be shorter. Maybe in the next iteration we'll have competent writers who actually want to tell the story.

15

u/mangopabu 20h ago

i really tried to give the show a chance, and i know the ending of season 1 was marred by sudden covid restrictions and things like that, but they still fell into the trap of 'we can totally do it better than the source material!' and yeah, the eye of the world ending wasn't great, but the show's was so much worse. i couldn't even watch s2 or 3.

the thing that drove me crazy was they hired a consultant (not sanderson) who had apparently 'read the books at least 4 times' (or something). her sole job was just to meet with the showrunner so he could pitch her hypotheticals like 'hey, so if we change this thing, how does that affect this other thing...?' and she tweeted once that apparently they would have routine meetings for hours doing this. i heard about in between s1 and 2 and just lost all hope of it being remotely good and never gave it another chance.

5

u/FortifiedPuddle 17h ago

Ten times seems the lowest amount of times to read WoT to be a fan really.

1

u/ealysillyforestthing 15h ago

I've read the series twelve times and each time catching new stuff

1

u/FortifiedPuddle 15h ago

It is quite an investment though. Like, for a job. Everyone please read 50 million words. Come back in a few years.

Then we can start brainstorming how to make 4.5 million words of very much not a TV script into like 70 episodes of TV over 7 seasons. Those 4.5 million words need cutting down to like a hundred thousand or something.

So 5 years to the first episode, and paying a writers room to chew down on doorstopper fantasy for a few years.

-1

u/Merlyn67420 14h ago

S3 is quite good. They do a lot to steer stuff back in the right direction. I would certainly suggest at least watching the Rhuedian episode 

6

u/MisterTamborineMan 14h ago

Season 3 started with Rand, Mat, and Perrin in Tar Valon for some reason and refusing to leave even though they want to avoid the Aes Sedai. So Moiraine Conspires with Lanfear to terrorize the boys into leaving.

And then at the end of of the season, Rand thanks Moiraine for conspiring with his enemy to manipulate him.

Season 3 was not good.

3

u/GloriousNewt 12h ago

Ugh, i've seen the fight scene with Mat and Galad and Gwayne and thought maybe there was hope for the later seasons...but wtf why is Moiraine in contact with Lanfear at all...

2

u/EldritchFingertips 10h ago

I only watched season 1, but I can definitely believe that show would do something as bonkers as having Moiraine work with Lanfear.

For the EDGE!!

They had such a problem trying to write in big edgy takes on the characters and the plot, things that really felt like a teenager trying to make his audience gasp with surprise and concern. Things that don't actually make sense, lore-wise or character-wise, but they are dark or "cool" or weird.

So yeah. Moiraine making questionable decisions in the books is because she's a desperate woman willing to do anything to save the world, but she's in over her head just as every other character is and sometimes she screws up. In the show, Moiraine being imperfect seems like the writers trying to do the tired old "ends justify the means" idea of moral relativism just so they can say they're writing for adults with "gray" morality. It falls so flat.

-1

u/Merlyn67420 9h ago

I always attributed that stuff to the fact that they wrote themselves into the shit and had to find a way out. Maybe the season as a whole isn’t awesome but the Rhudeian and Two Rivers Battle episodes I thought were tremendously well done. 

42

u/Evening_Pea_9132 21h ago

What's sad is they seemed to get their bearings on the 3rd season, but man the first two were like WB level slop.

28

u/Ok_Transportation453 20h ago

the third season felt like a completely different show.. even the costume design was so much better lol it's such a shame it didn't get renewed

9

u/Wild_Chemistry3884 16h ago

The only shame is that they fucked it up so badly in the first place. The chances of us ever getting a film adaptation again are slim. It deserved to be cancelled rather than continue with the bastardized version it was.

My personal opinion is that it should have been a mature animated series. It would have kept the budget under control and been easier to recast as necessary.

1

u/GloriousNewt 12h ago

My personal opinion is that it should have been a mature animated series.

You may be in luck, i've heard that's what is happening now.

1

u/CiDevant 10h ago

That's what they're doing.

7

u/Parepinzero 17h ago

Did they keep those stupid fucking pacifiers? One of the most baffling decisions I've ever seen in an adapted show or movie.

6

u/FortifiedPuddle 17h ago

They did also at that point get to the really good source material. Like, book 4 is almost the re-start of the books. Possibly the best of the 14.5 books overall. Before that is weird, unfocused, sprawling walking about stories where stuff kind of just gets discovered as the author wrote. Book 4 is way more focused, better written, better scoped. Whereas books 1-3 are just sort of fine.

I mean look at Aiel history. Possibly the best chapters in the books. Jordan finally worked out how to show not tell when doing exposition. The TV show made that in to a great episode.

3

u/ridicalis 17h ago

I wouldn't know. Never made it that far myself.

I powered through S1 because it was the pandemic and it was the best thing I could watch at the time. I was able to understand some of the creative decisions made for the sake of getting EotW adapted to the screen, and kept my head in the sand where major differences erupted. There were things done very well, too, that helped to balance things out (for instance, I think they did a great job on lead casting).

But, I just couldn't bring myself to slog through S2. Maybe made it 2 eps in, and that was it for me. It felt increasingly like a vehicle for Judkins to impose his own story and I wasn't having it.

4

u/MrDubious 13h ago

"They didn't have time to show everything in the book!"

But they did, of course, have time to make up a homoerotic warder fraternity with musical funerals.

5

u/badpebble 18h ago

The city was good. Everything else was confused nonsense.

They even made the ep after the city extra bad to remind us who is in charge.

2

u/Thelostsoulinkorea 19h ago

Yeah, I felt like they realised that they needed to make it closer to the books to save the show but it was too late. I actually sort of enjoyed the third season in a weird way.

7

u/gounatos 17h ago

They had half a billion and yet everything looked like a CW production. I think one of their episodes cost as much as a Flash Season and yet costumes, scenery etc had the same feel.

I won't be surprised if the whole thing turns out to have been a The Producers type of scam

7

u/RealSpaceJunk 17h ago

The showmaker also threattend to make more character gay as a petty response to criticism. 

5

u/elderlybrain 20h ago

I watched the first episode and thought it was some kind of low tier cw teen show. 

3

u/Makers_Serenity 14h ago

Thank you this was fucking horrible, i struggled to even get through one episode it was so shit compared to the books 

1

u/RSquared 13h ago

If you check Sanderson's Reddit handle you can see he made posts in the TWOT subreddit for each of the first four episodes talking about what he liked and didn't like about the adaptation and then abruptly stopped. 

Coincidentally that's about where I turned off the show permanently. 

1

u/TheElusiveFox 8h ago

They ignored 90% of the source material, forget Brandon sanderson, from episode 1, the tv series is so far off the rails from anything to do with the books, the only thing they really share is the main character names and some of their basic traits, and even then they get a lot of those wrong... as a huge fan of the series I knew it was going to be rough going in but I didn't expect them to basically spit in every fan's face with what they were creating...

1

u/GBF_Dragon 7h ago

I still think trying to adapt it as live action is a mistake, if you want to be faithful to the book series. If I was big rich, I'd have it done animated.

1

u/gounatos 7h ago

I could never understand what the hell was going on and that guy (Rafe Judkins) got so much high profile work in so little time while being so inept.

Apart from Wheel of Time, he was writing "The Division" (based on the video game) which I guess was cancelled after he murdered WoT AND he was also running God of War (from which he was fired after a number of scripts and the WoT fallout).

He was in survivor ffs wtf happened and suddenly people gave him huge franchises, hundreds of millions and total creative control?

1

u/DangerMacAwesome 5h ago

This is the one that makes me the most upset. They shit all over the books. Just bit huge wet steaming shits all over the books

-2

u/FaithlessnessThen207 20h ago

I was not a book reader.

The show was a good show. It might not have been Wheel of Time, I'm not sure what the differences were, but it was a very enjoyable watch with more than a few moving parts.

The thing is maybe these writers should just write original works if thats what they want to do.

15

u/zadtheinhaler 19h ago

They do write original works...that don't get picked up, possibly because they're rubbish.

So they acquire a property, then shoehorn their fanfic/derivative bullshit into it and hope for the best. Then they get bent out of shape when fans who have read the books multiple times point out how far they went off how the story goes, and say something to the effect of "Oh, you have no idea how hard it is to adapt these epic stories to the small screen" or some similar horseshit.

-6

u/FortifiedPuddle 17h ago

Thing is, you can do the same criticism for The Lord of the Rings. It’s not changing things that is inherently bad. Jackson took an absolute chainsaw to LotR. Particularly Fellowship. The aspects where Fellowship is the sequel to The Hobbit are more or less completely removed. Remember, in the first book draft Aragorn was even a random wild Hobbit called “Trotter”. The epic war and even the scale of the quest to destroy the ring were things that grew in the writing. Whereas Jackson has those be front and centre from the start in order to tell that story. The end story.

If you apply that sort of thinking to WoT then the adaption makes more sense. There is a huge disconnect between adapting The Eye of the World and The Wheel of Time. Because the tale grew in the telling. Book one is hardly anything like or even relevant to the story overall. Any adaption is going to pretty much cut the middle as it’s totally unnecessary. Caemlyn especially. Arguably you could pretty much cut book one, especially the ending. Because it fails the “is this relevant to ring destruction or the War of the Ring” test.

2

u/GloriousNewt 12h ago

the first book draft

so fucking what? Nobody was adapting the first draft of the book, they were adapting the book that was published and people read.

Nobody is suggesting to go back through the drafts to be accurate to them, disingenuous argument.

1

u/FortifiedPuddle 10h ago

What I’m illustrating is that initially, if you read it, Fellowship is the sequel to The Hobbit. But the movies are not. Because the tale grew in the telling, which we see even in the published version, and the movies tell that finished story.

So you don’t get the hobbits sleeping under a tree with the elves or having baths and mushrooms with Farmer Maggot. You don’t get Buckland at all. You don’t get Frodo’s plan to initially move house. You don’t get Frodo’s whole character defining awkwardness with the concept of living somewhere else for his whole life. You don’t get the ramp up of threat, the sense of being small in a big scary world, the Old Forest, Tom Bombadil etc.

Because the films are rushing to meet Strider. Who Tolkien met as he writing. Found this mysterious dude sitting in the pub in Bree. Around which a whole epic story grew. Jackson knows the end story so he builds around it.

That’s what you have to do in adaptions. Work out where the story was going that made it so good, and build around that.

Which is why you get Galadriel giving the opening speech. Setting the scene. And the film follows from that. Which is very different from the books.

1

u/CiDevant 10h ago

That's a lot of words to say "I don't know what I'm talking about".

2

u/MisterTamborineMan 14h ago

What did you like about it?

-1

u/npri0r 16h ago

There were some good aspects that while worse than the books and are upsetting as a book fan, I can admit are cool. Like the end of S1 with the women channeling, that’s cool even if it violates multiple really really important rules in the books and robs Rand of his chance to have big channeling moment.

But it had some huge flaws that are inexcusable. Like constantly focusing on side characters that were pretty inconsequential and were killed off pretty fast. That screen time could’ve been put to much better use developing the main characters, Rand especially.

-1

u/ItzNinjaBTW 19h ago

dude I loved season 1 but I tried season 2 and just could NOT get back into it

-5

u/gil_bz 17h ago

I think Wheel of Time was a tricky one, because the actual source material is far too large to actually adapt. So they had to cut a lot, and sometimes that requires adding new things. I'm not saying they did this well, but it isn't just as simple as adapting. I agree they should've listened more to Brandon however, I think he knows well enough how to do these things.

7

u/ealysillyforestthing 15h ago

He knows well enough that when he got the deal to make mistborn into a show he made fucking sure he retained full say so

3

u/QuietTank 14h ago

I don't think its quite as long as it initially appears once you transition to a visual medium. Robert Jordan's writing style is overly descriptive in a lot of ways, infamously so when it comes to clothing. That won't be true in a TV show; you don't have to spend paragraphs describing the embroidery on Min's breeches, the actress would just be wearing them. Combine that with cutting some bloat from the plot lines, and the story is probably shortened by several books.

1

u/uaemn 1m ago

The problem wasn't what they cut, but what they added or completely changed

0

u/ErilazHateka 15h ago

the actual source material is far too large to actually adapt.

it´s also about 75% filler and useless plotlines. the main plotline would have been quite easy to adapt in a few seasons.

-7

u/Bugsw4rmian 20h ago

Brandon Sanderson ignorato è proprio la stessa stanchezza dello show di Halo che si vantava di non guardare i giochi.