I am a massive WoT fan. Love the books. To me the only slog was for the people who first read the books, waiting a number of years for them to come out. Winter’s Heart ending is absolutely epic but we had to wait 3 years for Crossroads of Twilight to come out, which barely mentions the ending of the previous book, due to events happening in the same timeframe as WH. Sanderson did a great job imo with the last 3 books with the pacing especially. Jordan could spend chapter after chapter on the same storyline, particularly the succession storyline. I find the show very average though. The SFX are pretty poor imo. The whole Stepin funeral episode I thought was awful. So much to cover in the books and we spend all that time with a side character, to show the warder Aes Sedai bond! They have changed so much from the books for me. I’ll still watch it as there are bits of my favourite book series in there. Loved the Tigraine Aiel fight at the start of episode 7, that was epic! But they have done my man Lan wrong!
I think Winter’s Heart might have been the last WoT book I read. I then found out that Robert Jordan had passed away. After that I stopped reading the books, because I assumed WoT would never get finished.
The novels as I recall started off were entertaining page-turners until maybe the 6th or 7th book. Then it was like 2-3 entire novels of “She adjusted her skirt” - just a lot of waiting around and political stuff. I think this was when Jordan’s health started to spiral downwards and he struggled to decide on how to end the whole thing.
I’m sure the production staff have thought about how the novels started off as well-paced fantasy adventure, then got bogged down. Thus, I have no problems with any of the deviations in Amazon’s adaptation.
I think, I read most of the books. As always there is much more in the books, more details, but the story telling of the show was good until know.
Read the books - there is a great deal of ‘braid tugging’ and descriptions of dresses…but under all of that is a really great story and vivid world building…
but the show…yikes.
if this wasn’t based on a best selling book series - if it was just a ‘new show’ I think the reviews would be much worse and people would see this for what it is - a pretty poor effort all around.
the writing is awkward, most of the actors are clearly inexperienced and don’t seem to know what they’re doing, inconsistent direction, the practical Trollocks are pretty good but the VFX overall are very poor, really nice environments but the viewer isn’t given much sense of place, everything is shot with the very clear intention of hiding how small everything is - the streets of Shadar Logoth were about 8 feet wide and full of twists and turns - all to hide the lack of sets…really needed some CG set extensions.
I’ll keep watching just because I can’t seem to help it - but if I want to return to this world I’ll gather the courage to commit to reading the books again.
I haven’t read the wot books but am enjoying the show.
I wish the same would happen for my favorite unfishished series of books. Name of the wind from rothfuss. If you like fantasie and haven’t read them yet, it should be a must.
Major yawnfest IMO. I had high hopes for the series (after all the hype), but it’s been so boring that I’m not going to bother watching season 2 whenever it comes out.
Watched ep. 7. Well-choreographed fight for Tigraine!
Lan is much more talkative compared to the books but that’s the only difference about him compared to the TV show that stood out to me. Oh yeah, he was supposed to start teaching Rand how to use that sword - maybe they forgot to show even just a little of that?