23
Wheel of Time new season is so peak
(hexbear.net)
They nailed the characters, the story beats, the villains, costumes, everything. I was skeptical after season 2 though I'm not a book purist, but they really know what they're doing. Even constrained by the stupid 8 episode per season limit by Amazon.
And that episode this season is probably one of the best episodes of fantasy television.
Curios what you didn't like this season? For myself, I went with the expectation that it's not gonna match the story/character beats from the book 1:1 and they're not gonna be able to incorporate many characters from the books for brevity's sake. What I did care about was if they would be able to preserve the soul of the main characters and villains and how compelling is their development. I have not found a single main character or villain (heck even some side characters) that is not hitting it out of the park in that respect. I see Lan, I see Siuan, I see Egwene, I see Lanfear, I see moggy etc. My mind fully accepts these are the same characters I read in the books. Some even enhanced.
I guess I just see it differently. I keep on saying that I have to view this as a separate turning of the wheel, where everyone has been sniffing paint.
I don't really feel that anyone encompasses the character they are portraying, maybe if we are really lucky they take the most obvious surface level characteristic and make that the entirety of the character. They are so busy cutting content out to make door stopper books fit in less than 8 hours of TV while cherry-picking the exciting scenes that there is an increasing amount of disconnection and disjointed story telling. Instead of deliberate action the characters are just stumbling around having things happen.
It feels to me like they are adapting from chapter summaries not the books. Which would maybe be acceptable back in the 1990s/2000s but these days we have stellar adaptations like the Expanse to show how it can be done correctly.
I feel like we didn't read the same book. I never felt that the character had any depth in the books. I never felt that actions were a thing in the books. I never felt that the books were adaptable also, because they are so full of ... nothing? most of the time.
To be fair, i dislike how Jordan wrote. I know it's very vivid and full of details for some peoples but it feel very flat to me... And I did read and loved Malazan Book of the Fallen...
So to say, I prefer the TV version to the books, mostly because the books are written in a way that do nothing for me...
Where was I going with all of this ?
Nowhere, like book 4-5-6 ... I kid, I kid!
I had the same opinion as you when I first started the series. I felt like I was missing something about the characters but couldn't pin it down. I was taking what was happening on the pages at face value (and rushing thru it a bit tbh). The overly descriptive writing didn't help. But then I stumbled upon a liveblog of a person reading through the series and sharing their thoughts. Just reading a few chapters of the blog unlocked a whole new layer of depth for the characters and the story for me that I had been missing. So much so that the infamous 'Slog' didn't faze me at all and I prolly had some of the most fun reading WoT during that time. All because I was able to read between the lines of what Jordan wrote.
Now is it a knock against WoT that an external source was needed for me to understand it fully? I don't think so. Plenty of great works sometimes need a guiding hand to be fully appreciated. But that's just me. I'm bringing this all up in case you ever wanna get back into reading the books again. This will surely help enhance the reading experience and maybe make it actually enjoyable.
Honestly, I just dislike his writing style. I don't think the pages sings with his words like other authors do. I feel that it's wordy for the sake of using words and has absolutely no sense of rhythm.
I know a lot of people like it but it just does nothing for me. I'd rather read anything by pascal quignard than jordans.
I also dislike Tolkien's writing style... I know, I know... To be fair it's mostly a me problem