News The Wheel of Time Coming to Amazon Video

I really can't decide. In some ways it looks good - certainly beautiful images, and Moiraine looks and sounds perfect from the book.

But they absolutely butchered Nynaeve's characterization based on the trailers/clips I've seen so far.
There's no way Nynaeve would push Egwene off a cliff to test her ability with the One Power, ever. And especially not in the beginning of the books. If anything Nynaeve's defining characteristic is that she's dedicated to keeping the other Emond's Fielders safe. To the point that she has a hard time seeing how they've grown up at first. There's also no way she'd be so aggressive and threatening outsiders with a staff as we see in the Winespring Inn clip. Mistrustful? Sure. Threatening physical violence. Nah.

Also there was that Winespring Inn preview, which.... no.

Spoiler: No-so-secret-mission

So Lan is apparently leaving Moiraine out in the rain so he can dramatically enter, and then dramatically introduce himself and her - using their actual names! - and she makes a dramatic entrance flashing her Serpent Ring? The whole point of their mystery before the Trolloc attack is that they're traveling incognito and don't use their names because they can be tracked. There's an entire fantastic scene where Moiraine announces to a hostile, angry crowd that yes, she is Aes Sedai and she shames them into backing down after she saved their village.

Also, Moiraine says "One of you 5" can stop the Dark One? Again, huge change for no purpose.

Spoiler: The whole series, especially Book 1

Moiraine comes looking for the three boys because of the Foretelling about the Dragon's rebirth - specifically a he, and at a very particular time. It matters that Rand, Mat, and Perrin are all the same age and born within a few weeks of each other. They're the ones Moiraine has come to collect. Throwing Nynaeve and Egwene in there as well doesn't just muddy that water a lot and add a lot of complication both to the background and the character relationships (is Nynaeve being de-aged now? Is Egwene aged up? They're respectively several years older and a year younger than the boys - Nynaeve has clear memories of them all as babies, and once saved a child Egwene's life from a fever when she was a teenager), but it also undermines Nynaeve's and Egwene's motivations and stories.

Egwene 'jumps at the call' because she wants adventure, and she's both very excited to see the world and frankly more than a little self-centered; she was the only one that really wanted to go in the first place, and she has to learn to temper herself (and her hunger for glory leads her to incredible heights). Making her another one of Moiraine's "options" undermines that whole major part of the character.

Nynaeve meanwhile not only doesn't set out from Emond's Field with the others, she only comes along because she doesn't trust Moiraine and wants to keep an eye on her people - and preferably bring them back to Emond's Field sooner than later. There's a hostility from Nynaeve towards Moiraine throughout the whole first book (and a cool, if somewhat bemused reaction in return) that she has to work through. Moiraine sees a lot of talent in her, but Nynaeve coming along from the start instead of tracking them down on her own undercuts what a major role she plays as an independent person - and, down the road, somebody who Rand could always depend on for caring about him as an individual, not as the Dragon.

 

^ Those things don't sound to me like issues with the adaptation; they sound like issues with what you personally want out of a WoT adaptation.

Despite not liking the books all that much, I've been immersing myself in the WoT fandom ahead of the TV series' launch, and the response I've seen from die-hard fans of the books towards the TV series and what Rafe and his team are doing has been almost exclusively positive.

 

There are 14 pretty lengthy books in this series... so I think there's going to have to be a MASSIVE condensing of information and reduction of characters/plotlines if you want to see that story play out in a tv series.

I think some characters development and personalities are likely going to be fast-forwarded as they change during the series of books.

As far as I can tell this first season isn't even going to cover the entire first book because I don't see Elayne as having had an actress cast to play her and she appears in the first book.

 

Those fourteen books have a lot of fat that can be trimmed, a lot of repetitive scenes and wheel-spinning. Plus there's a ton of descriptive text.

 

Both Seasons 1 and 2 will cover story elements from The Eye of the World, with Elayne's story being an element of said novel being covered in Season 2.

Season 1 will also cover story elements from The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn.

 

The soundtrack for at least part of the first season is out already. It's in my Spotify library, but I wanna finish some of the other stuff I've been listening to before I start it.