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

Watched the 3rd episodes now. Found this one very enjoyable. There is a weird cheapness to it though. I have no doubt the budget is insane, but a definite low budget feel to the direction and acting (some are better than others though). Probably also not helped by the weird saturation look that we talked about a few pages back.

Also agree that we aren't gettinguch of a feel for the world. There isn't much of a sense of the lives of these people, beyond generic medieval fantasy. There was a little more to this in episode 3, particularly the traveling community, but we haven't had much beyond that. The White Cloaks, for example, sort of just appeared and disappeared in episode 2 without much mention of who they really were, even though the pre-title scene indicated they would be significant (no doubt they will reappear).

Do we know how well the series is doing in general? Outside of this thread, I've only really seen negativity, but not sure if that is just a few people bitter about book changes or the general opinion (one IMDB review I skimmed past had the word "emasculated" in the title, so they could all be nonsense).

It may not be perfect right out of the gate, but I've found it pretty good and definitely plenty of potential.

Me and the Mrs are 4 episodes in and I really do like it, even though 4 was a bit of a slog until the meatier stuff towards the end of the episode. I'm invested enough to watch the other 4 anyway to see where it's all going to head. Some stuff does look low budgety but their locations are amazing.

Ah, okay. That is good to hear, as I like the idea of a new fantasy epic series to get excited about. The Witcher didn't do too much for me the first season and this felt like it was getting off to a better start.

I think my perception that there was dislike came from an article my phone recommended for me saying that fans were so angry with it that there was doubt over whether there would be any more (clearly nonsense, as seems season 2 is well under way). I thought it was probably clickbait, but IMDB seemed to have mostly negative reviews at the top of the pile too and hadn't seen much discussion outside of this thread.

< Puts on nerd glasses/teeth >

Akshully... the characters aren't white in the books (at least the ones from the first book). Well, Rand is, Moraine sounds like she probably is, obviously Lan is Asian-ish (casting him as Japanese is probably hewing pretty close to the authorial intention), and the rest of them are unspecified but probably non-white.

We know this not only from the fact that only Rand is described in terms that clearly indicate he's white (and again possibly Moraine, I forget), and the rest all have dark hair and eyes (brown or dark brown). And the book makes this extra-clear when they all go to the first big city (which I can't remember if the show as changed around), and the characters notice that there are loads of people paler than them, and also some people darker than them. That's literally in the text. If they were Western/Northern European-type "white" that literally couldn't happen.

This isn't just me pointing this out - fan and some official art has reflected this (on and off) for literally decades. Nynaeve is usually shown with a skin tone we'd associate with Latino, mixed-Black-White, or Middle-Eastern people, for example. The other characters, particularly Perrin, are also often shown with skin-tones we don't associate with white, pretty regularly.

It's not constant, and earlier art often gets it completely wrong and has stuff like giving some of them blonde hair or blue eyes as well as pale skin (a constant issue with fantasy art is that artists prior to about 2010-2015 really had a strong tendency to "white-ize" characters) but that's definitely not what is in the first book - I read it recently and noticed this.

That said the audience might not have noticed. Remember with Hunger Games how people were "outraged" that Rue was a Black girl in the movies? Despite the fact that the book clearly and unequivocally describes her as being Black.

It's weird, because the books feel super chaste (no sex before marriage, characters do get it on but it's more implied than described), while having female characters that are all bosomy and attractive in a "stock fantasy lady" kind of way.

But this is the opposite so far. The female characters look basically normal, and there's definitely some fucking going on. Hopefully it doesn't go too Game of Thrones, though.

It was interesting reading the character descriptions. Every female character is 'beautiful', and almost every male character appears to be tall and well built.
Hollywood style.

I haven't read the later books but if you dare to put "Wheel of Time spanking" into Google (incognito mode exists for a reason I guess), you will find that yeah, there's a weird amount of spanking of ladies going on in WoT. Something I very much doubt will make it to this show, thankfully.

Jordan fits into the whole "weird about sex" trend with slightly-to-seriously religious American fantasy authors. Brandon Sanderson likewise, though Sanderson kind of mostly sorta kinda got over it, but there's still some "Man what..." stuff in Mistborn with a lot of people sitting in each other's laps and shit (once characters are married he feels it's fine to mildly imply sex though lol).

I think I might just rename this thread to allow for book things in spoiler tags. I know a couple of people have complained about it, but most people here don't seem to care either way, so... maybe the people who are super dogmatic about spoilers can make their own thread instead?

So long as book wankers spoiler tag their shit I don't mind where it goes.

To me this bit seemed distinctly defensive (first and last lines particularly):

"I wouldn’t challenge anyone who decided to read the Two Rivers folks as being darker skinned, but I also think you can read them as fairly white too. For me the way I consume and analyse my media has changed a lot since I first started reading these books like fifteen years ago, so these kinds of discussions are very useful and interesting. I haven’t really had the chance to draw colour interpretations of the (non-Rand) Two Rivers folks except Egwene, so I welcome the opportunity to challenge my old assumptions. But I hope you can also respect that my interpretations may not match yours."

As for the other article, not only is the intro rough in that it shows a pretty severe bias (of the "I'm not biased!!!" pseudo-intellectual kind), but the guy is an immense hypocrite to the point of being intellectually dishonest here:

"unlike say Lord of the Rings, that does arguably skirt around the edges of racism with regard to the skin colour of good and bad protagonists,"

No. Just no. LotR doesn't "skirt the edges of racism". It's directly racist (and colourist, and I'm not talking about the light/dark imagery), maybe not in a hateful way, but it's racist, however you spin it. That doesn't mean we have to burn it on a pyre or something, and indeed it has fans of all ethncities - but so does HP Lovecraft (who is approximately 100x more racist than Tolkien). The fact that the author is saying that, though, means they are either sufficiently ignorant that they're not worth listening to, or severely biased/intellectually dishonest about Tolkien. Which is pretty bad when they're trying to make an argument about whether something is racist or not.

Sure the writer ends up roughly on the right side of things (i.e. "we shouldn't really care what colours the characters are so long as the story doesn't suck"), but my god there's a lot of bullshit and shenanigans on the way (everyone who might disagree with him is portrayed as "desperate" for example, for using evidence, whereas his whole argument is largely unevidenced).

So the only level of which that is "good", for me, is that it shows a fairly ignorant and smug person can still get to a sane place if they really think things through and aren't actually thick (it's possible to be extremely clever and extremely ignorant, sadly). Though they may say some really dumb stuff on the way.

(His link is to a pure apologia for Tolkien's racism, note, not to a neutral source - it's also dishonest at times, conflating orcs and half-orcs and engaging in bizarre arguments like "Well, it's not racist if we say they look like "ugly mongols" because orcs aren't natural!", which is like... not an argument.)

(Also I promise not to derail this into a full Tolkien and race discussion, I'm the sort of person who owns literally a several hundred page academic book on Tolkien and race and culture - and I quite like Tolkien though he was clearly a maniac.)

You have a pretty low bar for "crazed ranting", mate.

I guess "writing too many words" is the actual thing you dislike here.

It's fine.