[REVIEW] Wheel of Time

Just for laughs. Thought Roas might get a chuckle.

full article at link. ONly posting intro and end.

Why The Wheel of Time succeeds as an adaptation (and The Witcher fails)

Not all adaptations are created equal. For every Game of Thrones, which translated its source material fairly faithfully (until it ran out), there are legions of adaptations like The Golden Compass or The Legend of Earthsea, where the soul of the original work has been sucked out, not to mention groan-worthy cash grabs like The Hobbit trilogy.

Since the success of HBO’s fantasy phenomenon, we’ve seen a swell of companies adapting fantasy and science fiction stories that they might never have had the daring to before. At the end of 2021, two big ones dominated the conversation: Amazon’s The Wheel of Time, based on the 15-book series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson; and the second season of Netflix’s The Witcher, based on the bestselling short stories and novels by Andrzej Sapkowski. While both adaptations include large changes from their respective source books, one managed it far more successfully. We’re here today to discuss why.

A note before we begin: Opinions and tastes are subjective, especially with reviews like this. Both of these shows have done things that some fans have liked and others have loathed. I’m not here to try and convince you that you should or shouldn’t like a show; enjoy what you enjoy. What I am going to do is dissect how these shows are in conversation with their source material.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about why The Wheel of Time succeeds as an adaptation while The Witcher fails. Of course, you should be warned that there will be SPOILERS for both shows as well as their respective book series below.

Blight and cutting out two of the Forsaken. But again, they were mostly understandable since the show is playing up the ensemble nature of the story. The first book, The Eye of the World, focuses extremely heavily on Rand’s point of view, while the rest of the series is told from many perspectives. The show made the conscious decision to be an ensemble piece from the get-go, to give viewers a more honest idea of what to expect from the show overall.

In conclusion, it feels an awful lot like the changes and choices made by The Wheel of Time team were done with a lot of care and reverence for the source material. There was never a feeling that they were changing things for the hell of it, but because they were doing the best they could with the medium in which they were working.

Sometimes, the changes even ended up working out better for the story, as with the mystery over who the Dragon Reborn was. This was something the show played way up, and it worked really well. In the books it’s far more obvious that it’s Rand, since we spent more time with him. Here, first-time viewers could plausibly be in suspense.

There’s still a sense that The Wheel of Time is finding its footing…but to my mind it has never been a question that the show is trying really hard to do its best by Robert Jordan’s story.

As a long time fan of Robert Jordan (and his other pseudonyms used in his writing both fiction and non-fiction) there are far too many differences in this show from the books to be relevant to me as a fan of Wheel of Time…  The “Dragon” could only be male, period.  The magic system used also makes this quite clear as it is the male side of magic that is “tainted” by actions previously taken.  “Dragons” are always male and they are hunted because this “taint” drives them all crazy or will until the “real” dragon appears to cleanse it.  The Aes Sedai are split in their focus with half the orders being involved in hunting and, honestly, destroying any “dragons” that appear and the others are there to seek the “one true Dragon” that will fix everything and drive the “Forsaken” from the world.  Any “playing around” with this premise means that the show has no basis in the books and should be tossed off as an “inspired by but has nothing to do with the actual story” kind of show.

If you enjoy it, fine, but know that the original story and premise for this series is already bastardized almost completely past any hope of repair so just treat it like what it is: yet another series that has used an honored story/series to draw viewers and completely ignored major plot points.