The Wheel of Time (book wankery OK, see OP for rules)

That's a pretty deep cut, as they say. I did think of it though, I have to admit. Also small world when talking about fantasy because that 1987 Beauty and the Beast was written by George RR Martin.

Raised by Wolves did that well with the Mithraic, using the state of their white clothing to show passing of time etc

Even with all the scrubbing, trying to stay clean in a forest in Autumn is a nightmare!

GoT seemed to be set in a real place.
The opening scene of this seemed to be set in that gravelly quarry where all the SyFy shows are shot. (Which is a bit bigger than the gravelly quarry where they used to shoot all the Dr Who alien planets)

I think you have to remember that for some people (not pointing at anyone here, just generally), fantasy begins and ends with GoT, so they have no other frame of reference.

For me, the biggest difference between the two (book) series is that Jordan always knew his ending. I don't believe that Martin remotely knew what he was writing towards - which, imo, explains his ten year block continuing the story and the frustration of fans when someone else had to come up with an ending.

Anyway.

They've cast Uno, Masema and Ingtar for season two. Uno looks bloody flaming good, not sure about Masema, though.

(I don't believe those character names need spoiler tags).

In case anyone is interested, it's a little more complicated than that, and Martin has been pretty transparent about it. Also, everything he says is supported by his extensively catalogued writers notes, which are held in some university in the US, so we know he isn't lying (sadly you can only view said notes if you're an actual scholar and you'd NDA'd about what they say about future books IIRC).

Jordan's issue was that he didn't really know his middle, and let it expand wildly out of control. Which is actually basically Martin's issue too.

Anyway, GRRM first laid out a trilogy, with some fairly different events and characters who what we actually got, but a clear beginning, middle and end. Then that expanded to four books, then to a likely six divided into two trilogy. This is all before shit went wrong. And at this point, he definitely did have an ending planned - this isn't in really in question. So the first three books came out pretty much as planned, and I think most people would agree that they were pretty great. What GRRM had then been planning was a 5-year timeskip (or slightly more) followed by another trilogy. The timeskip would have allowed him to just skip over loads of minor plotlines, and only explain them or finish them in retrospect.

Then shit went wrong, because GRRM decided "Nah fuck the timeskip, I can just write my way through it!". The ten-year-block isn't about the ending, it's about the middle (I mean that may actually be more horrifying lol).

And he just fucked everything up, by adding in tons more POV characters with their own plotlines, and just complicating matters more and more, and has he himself has said, effectively created a Gordian Knot of plot that he wasn't able to slice through, but had to unpick. And that's been screwing him over - all the extra characters and plotlines he introduced and his decision not to do the timeskip.

This has had knock-on effects - he clearly did know the ending in say, 2002, but now does he know the ending? I think he knows in the sense of "Which major characters are alive, which are dead, who rules Westeros" and so on, but given his constant "perfecting" of the plot, I strongly suspect a lot of minor characters are in flux. There's no evidence to support the idea that he knew the ending any less than Jordan did though.

Fair, I'm just pointing out the fuck-up GRRM made is pretty well-recorded, and it's entirely of his own making in ditching a time-skip he'd assumed was going to happen in constructing books 1-3. His problem isn't that he didn't have a plan, it's that he deviated from the plan. That numpty.

I think it's totally fair to complain about some of GRRM's characters and storylines for sure, but it does feel a bit "Men in glass houses" when we're talking about WoT lol. Still I don't begrudge you feeling "Oh fuck not this guy again" with some of the chapters in ASoIaF. Honestly you're lucky you tapped out when you did. You think the characters and plotlines in 1-3 aren't great? Hoooo boy. 4-5 would have killed you.

That said, I think Brandon Sanderson is going to end up totally demolishing both Jordan and GRRM in the "overly long, extremely boring bits, characters you wish weren't there" stakes and possibly the "never actually finishing it" stakes when it comes to epic fantasy, thanks to The Stormlight Archive. I wouldn't say it started promisingly, but it started okay, and it's been like ski-slope levels of downhill in terms of boredom, terrible endless lore, cardboard as fuck characters, POVs you wish you didn't have, and so on. Motherfucker has 10 books planned, I had to quit at book 3 (and I have a high tolerance for this kind of shit), and it looks like he's going to blow right past WoT in all measures of length. If he can maintain his current rate he'll be done in 2038 or so. But I'm betting it'll be a fair bit longer than that in reality.

Yep, I also gave up after Oathbringer. I didn't even like Words of Radiance all that much, but at some point I convinced myself that the third book might be able to capture some of that initial magic again. And now it seems more like the series is getting worse rather than better. Or at the very least it seems to be stagnating at a mediocre level. Rythm of War is still mostly getting the usual 5-star-reviews on goodreads as far as I have seen, but some other voices are there as well. Some of them are pretty insightful.

Yeah. Cough, Sword of Truth, cough.

Malazan is my absolute favourite of the modern ones, though. Witness!

I was only really comparing with GoT in terms of production design. And I was largely joking as I'd only seen 5 minutes of WoT.

I think one thing GoT got really right was production design. I don't know why, maybe it was the low-fantasy aesthetic of the early series, maybe it was shooting in good places, but they managed to largely avoid the cheap-tv-show look that a lot of other tv fantasy shows end up with. Almost everywhere felt like a real place, rather than either a set, cheap cgi, or a quarry. Costumes and things also felt natural and not like costumes, which they do in most tv fantasy shows.

That said, i've now watched 35 minutes of WoT and it was only really that opening scene that had the SyFy Quarry vibe. The rest looks largely ok.

I don't think I've spent enough time with the cast for any of them to really grow on me. They're not quite as I imagined, but I think my imagined versions were probably based on wrong assumptions and wrong cover art anyway.
Nynaeve and Egwene in particular aren't how I'd imagined them.. but that's me.

For an opening episode, it's a bit more slow paced than I expected. Not that that's bad, and I guess things will kick off if I ever get to the end.

It's not the tv show's fault, but the LotR vibes are even more noticeable in tv form.

Don't you hate it when you realise you've been saying a name wrong all these years.

I realize that I've forgotten almost all the details from the books, and only remember the broad strokes, so I really can't tell what's from the books and what they've added.
Were the river test and the lanterns in the books?

The Way of Kings was excellent, but the second one less so and Oathbringer was an absolute slog. I can't find any real interest in Kaladin and Shallan, Dalinar is an arsehole (redemption or not) and the whole premise just started to feel laboured. 

I'm sure he knows where he's going with it, but I won't be going with him.

Absolutely fair enough. Again, just my very personal opinion and it should in no way affect anyone else's enjoyment.

THE LESBIANS HAVE ARRIVED

In the book, he (Valda) is not introduced until book 7 or so and even then he's not a Questioner or member of the Hand of the Light - he's a senior field commander of one of their armies.

This Eamon Valda is a character who seems to be an amalgamation of three children of the light from the books - Geofram Bornhald, a commander and Jaret Byar, one of his men... who actually capture Perrin and Egwene, but are not questioners and are not specifically looking for Aes Sedai (they take them prisoner because Perrin kills two Children who attack the wolves); and Jaichim Carridin who is the main antagonist of the Hand of the Light.

(BOOK SPOILER)

Yeah, sorry. I doubt Carridin is going to appear in the TV show. I'll edit and make it clearer.