WHEEL OF TIME officially optioned for television

[Ran]

Just now, Rhom said:

Thought she was tied to the horn now or something

Sanderson said in his mind, it would have been great to imagine that when the Horn was sounded again, one of the heroes would be riding Bela, yes. But the Companion seems to have retconned her heroic death, so I don't know as she could be tied to the Horn. But who knows, maybe that happens.

[Darth Richard II]

I like to pretend the companion does not exist.

[Ran]

Just now, Darth Richard II said:

I like to pretend the companion does not exist.

Like me, except with the Sanderson books.

[Corvinus85]

Bela is the Seabiscuit of the fantasy world. She'll be in the show. End of discussion. 

[The Anti-Targ]

On 8/4/2018 at 7:25 PM, A True Kaniggit said:

In any case Myrddraal should make an appearance in the first episode. I hope they're properly terrifying.

Now that I think about it, why not have the Trolloc Rand talks with be replaced by a Myrddraal? It's not like we have Trollocs speaking English anymore in the rest of the series. 

No, starting with trollocs is the right thing to do. Freak people out with the scary dumb brutes, and then several scenes later freak them out even more with Dementers dialed up to 11. The thing to do is have more instances of talking trollocs, only in every case they are being mind-controlled by a Myrddraal rather than talking for themselves. 

[fionwe1987]

9 hours ago, Risto said:

Speaking of that, have I imagined there was a huge decision on Sanderson to make regarding Bela living or dying? I remember there was some talk about it, but I can't remember what it was.

Ran gave the run down. On the whole, it was pretty stupid of them to "bring her back". Spoilers for the entire series follow:

Spoiler

It made perfect thematic sense for her death to be coupled to Egwene's. Every other major turning point in Egwene's life: leaving the Two Rivers, going to Salidar to become Amyrlin, heading to Tar Valon to fix the harbor chain and getting captured... it was all with Egwene atop Bela (real or otherwise). 

It made perfect sense to me that Bela dies around about when Egwene dies, in a similarly heroic manner. It was monumentally stupid to "bring her back" because she's a fan favorite. It bet most fans don't even know, given how the info was buried in the Companion.

In my head, Bela died, and Egwene went atop her for her last great job when the Horn summoned them: going and knocking some sense into Rand in Shayol Ghul.

 

[Myrddin]

I've read the books, so this spoiler discussion doesn't bother me, but maybe given we're discussing a television adaptation, we should avoid such major revelations as character deaths.

Bela lives. yo!

[The Anti-Targ]

I don't even remember Bela. But then again, I don't like horses in general, so I'm not going to get emotionally attached to a fictional one. 

But if Bela was a good and loyal dog... 

[fionwe1987]

15 minutes ago, Myrddin said:

I've read the books, so this spoiler discussion doesn't bother me, but maybe given we're discussing a television adaptation, we should avoid such major revelations as character deaths.

Good point, till someone marks this "Spoilers all", since I can't imagine people who haven't read the books being majorly interested in a possible series.

Quote

Bela lives. yo!

She does not!

[Darth Richard II]

I always felt like a lot of the things in the Sanderson books I did not like where Harriet's fault and the compendium just, like, increased those feelings 1000 percent.

[fionwe1987]

2 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

I always felt like a lot of the things in the Sanderson books I did not like where Harriet's fault and the compendium just, like, increased those feelings 1000 percent.

Hmmm not sure how true that is. I mean, I do totally think she didn't do the greatest job editing ToM and aMoL, but they also didn't have much leeway, from what I know.

As for the Companion... some things like Bela coming back might have been up to Harriet, but the rest is just RJ's notes. I absolutely think an alphabetical index was the worst way to arrange all that info, especially with the ebook, where there is neither a searchable index nor any kind of deep linking within the text. But the contents themselves are just RJ's notes. 

[Darth Richard II]

Well all the publicity and hype surrounding the compendium turned out to be complete bullshit. I remember the topic here pre and post release and false advertising would be an understatement, plus some things I’ve read make me think the problems I have were more hers then as Anderson’s but that’s probably a topic for the lit forum.

edit: I would argue against calling the compendium his notes, too. From what people who have read his actual notes have said very little made it in there

[fionwe1987]

2 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Well all the publicity and hype surrounding the compendium turned out to be complete bullshit. I remember the topic here pre and post release and false advertising would be an understatement, plus some things I’ve read make me think the problems I have were more hers then as Anderson’s but that’s probably a topic for the lit forum.

I agree the Companion was not all it was talked up to be.

Quote

edit: I would argue against calling the compendium his notes, too. From what people who have read his actual notes have said very little made it in there

That simply isn't true. The stuff from his notes that didn't make it were abandoned plans for earlier books, etc. The parts of his notes that made it to canon are in the Companion, as far as I know. No one's said different who has looked at the notes.

[Mladen]

12 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

I agree the Companion was not all it was talked up to be.

Companion book was, at least for me, "who the hell needs this?" Seriously, I have never met a book so void of any sort of beauty. I remember getting it at the same time as "World of Ice and Fire" was getting out. And while WOIAF was aesthetically to die for and the texts were very easy to read, this one was so dry that it was just... BLAH.

And the worst thing about it was an attempt to create levels of channelers.

 

[Ran]

25 minutes ago, Risto said:

 

And the worst thing about it was an attempt to create levels of channelers.

 

To be fair, that was directly from Jordan's notes. He always said he had a ranking of channelers and their relative positions in terms of strength, and there were a lot of fans who were eager to get ahold of it. Played on a couple of Wheel of Time MUSH/MUX games (text-based RP, like our Blood of Dragons MUSH) where it was a regular topic of debate. So can't blame them for publishing it.

 

My big thing in general is that I don't trust that Sanderson didn't fanboy his way through some things that they then canonized in the Companion and refused to indicate whether it was from RJ's notes or not. I still find Gareth Byrne being a blademaster highly suspect. It's the kind of thing you'd think Jordan would have mentioned approximately when the character was introduced, as he mentions the fact that someone is a blademaster almost immediately otherwise, but no, apparently we're supposed to believe it's from the notes...

[Werthead]

 

Quote

That simply isn't true. The stuff from his notes that didn't make it were abandoned plans for earlier books, etc. The parts of his notes that made it to canon are in the Companion, as far as I know. No one's said different who has looked at the notes.

Something that needs to be pointed out is that about 90% of "the notes" were copy-and-pasted text from the novels which Jordan had assembled into blocks so he could go back and remind himself about a subject. In some cases he fleshed out subjects a bit, but in most cases he didn't.

The Power channeller levels, the names of almost every single Aes Sedai and I think some more information on the Old Tongue were the only major chunks of information that hadn't been published before somewhere.

[fionwe1987]

2 hours ago, Risto said:

Companion book was, at least for me, "who the hell needs this?" Seriously, I have never met a book so void of any sort of beauty. I remember getting it at the same time as "World of Ice and Fire" was getting out. And while WOIAF was aesthetically to die for and the texts were very easy to read, this one was so dry that it was just... BLAH.

I think that while I agree, no one ever said the Companion was ever going to be a kind of *history*. That is the World of the Wheel of Time, which, while it had truly atrocious art, reads a lot more like WOIAF. I'd seriously love a reprint of that with better art.

 

Quote

And the worst thing about it was an attempt to create levels of channelers.

This was something RJ created right from the beginning, more or less. It was primarily needed to help him decide on the Aes Sedai interactions, at  a glance, since that depended on their strength, their age, the number of years they were Novice or Accepted, and whether they had been wilders. They didn't create the list for the Companion. 

And as Ran said, there was lots of fan interest in it.

2 hours ago, Ran said:

My big thing in general is that I don't trust that Sanderson didn't fanboy his way through some things that they then canonized in the Companion and refused to indicate whether it was from RJ's notes or not. I still find Gareth Byrne being a blademaster highly suspect. It's the kind of thing you'd think Jordan would have mentioned approximately when the character was introduced, as he mentions the fact that someone is a blademaster almost immediately otherwise, but no, apparently we're supposed to believe it's from the notes...

I agree. There are some very fanboyish aspects to Sanderson's writing, and the character of Androl is the worst of this, but the sudden proliferation of blademasters is another. 

I agree that if Bryne had been a blademaster, this would have been mentioned in one of the many, many interactions he had with Egwene or Siuan, especially the latter since she had considered taking him on as a Warder.

11 minutes ago, Werthead said:

 

Something that needs to be pointed out is that about 90% of "the notes" were copy-and-pasted text from the novels which Jordan had assembled into blocks so he could go back and remind himself about a subject. In some cases he fleshed out subjects a bit, but in most cases he didn't.

The Power channeller levels, the names of almost every single Aes Sedai and I think some more information on the Old Tongue were the only major chunks of information that hadn't been published before somewhere.

That, and small character details about the Aes Sedai, the history of the Black Ajah, their recruitment tactics, some secret details of the Red Ajah, a tidbits of character history, the history of the Amyrlin Seats of the past thousand years, etc. were also new. But to get to that, yes, you had to wade through a lot of stuff that was sometimes verbatim from the books. In fact, but for Tor making a chronological listing of all Amyrlins and their entries, you'd really be hard pressed to catch the steady decline of the Tower that RJ plotted through their stories, and the hints of Black Ajah involvement at various times that it looked like the Tower would get its shit together. They're buried in an entirely useless alphabetical order in the Companion.

It does seem like RJ had an excellent memory, and a very good mental organization of the plot and characters, which precluded the kind of detailed notes you would expect for such a vast work. And this hurt not just the Companion, but also the final three books. They made so many errors with timelines, for instance, whereas RJ was extraordinarily good at having a coherent timeline for multiple characters over multiple books, and conveying it to the reader through background quotes and events that linked when character A did something to what character B was doing at the time.

[Corvinus85]

1 minute ago, fionwe1987 said:

I think that while I agree, no one ever said the Companion was ever going to be a kind of *history*. That is the World of the Wheel of Time, which, while it had truly atrocious art, reads a lot more like WOIAF. I'd seriously love a reprint of that with better art.

I thought the Companion would be something like that, but bigger, with many more details on everything from history to cultures and geography, so I felt cheated in what I got. I've briefly perused it at the time, and didn't bother with it since.

[fionwe1987]

2 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

I thought the Companion would be something like that, but bigger, with many more details on everything from history to cultures and geography, so I felt cheated in what I got. I've briefly perused it at the time, and didn't bother with it since.

Nah, I knew it wouldn't be that. Harriet was very clear it wasn't going to be fresh writing about the world, just details from RJ's notes. We knew it would be like a bigger, series spanning version of the glossary that's in the books. I just had no idea how little fresh info there would be for most entries.

[Corvinus85]

21 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

Nah, I knew it wouldn't be that. Harriet was very clear it wasn't going to be fresh writing about the world, just details from RJ's notes. We knew it would be like a bigger, series spanning version of the glossary that's in the books. I just had no idea how little fresh info there would be for most entries.

Well not in the sense of fresh writing, but in the sense of the way it's organized. Not as a glossary, but like the The World of the Wheel of Time, and maybe some cool artwork. As Risto mentioned above, there is no beauty about this book. And I'll that there is no joy either, trying to read through it.