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THE WHEEL OF TIME TV Show: The braid tugs, as the writing wills [BOOK SPOILERS]


Corvinus85

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19 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

I'm hoping the rest of the two rivers folk are also mixed. Tam should probably be white. 

I was assuming that's exactly what they'll do. Plus, the main casting we have so far is a very small sample. Once you get more people into the mix in the background, it's easier to make Mat blend in better and Rand stick out. I don't think Tam has to be anything at all. Probably don't put him on the darker end of the spectrum, but Kari's outlander status is giving Rand enough cover.

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1 hour ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Maybe they could take the piss and have the Emobd Fielders all be black?

pale white Rand: wait, Tam’s not my father??

He has to be. He gives Rand his sword.

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On 8/15/2019 at 1:16 PM, David Selig said:

Gitara Moroso sent the daughter heir to head out to the Aiel waste, Moiraine had nothing to do with it and didn't know about it. And even Gitara didn't know that said daughter-heir would be the Dragon Reborn's mother.

^truth

She only knew the fate of Andor depended on it.

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All the talk about the "race" of the cast aside, (because wft?) can we all agree that at least they didn't choose actors based on the official art work from the book covers???

I mean, we could have had Perrin not existing in season 1 and 2 before looking like that guy from Karate Kid who yells "Put him in a body bag Johnny!" in season 3 then morphing into Hagrid from Harry Potter in season 4. All the while Rand goes from Sean Astin in LOTR to He-Man to Eric Roberts in 1998 over the course of the story.

 

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The main thing the Reddit thread baffled me by is all the people who said the casting exactly fit their images of the characters, and that they understood the Emond's Fielders to be black. Hmm! People read in different ways, I suppose.

Jordan's notes on actors and celebrities who sort of provided a visual touchstone for characters is actually really interesting in this regards. A young Cher as Faile? A young Sophia Loren as Aviendha? Young Ben Affleck as Rand? Neat. Omar Sharif as Demandred -- presumably from the Doctor Zhivago or Lawrence of Arabia days -- is a particularly good one, as I can just visualize it. 

For my part, I'd have made the Caemlyn bunch black, including the royals (there's precedent!), the Emond's Fielders white, the Aiel black, and have Rand stand out that way given his "mother" came from Caemyln.

Maybe they'll explain Mat and the Cauthons by claiming they're recent arrivals from elsewhere, but right now the casting feels disjointed for no good reason.

 

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8 minutes ago, Ran said:

 

Maybe they'll explain Mat and the Cauthons by claiming they're recent arrivals from elsewhere, but right now the casting feels disjointed for no good reason.

But Mat has strong Manentheren blood.

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2 minutes ago, Ran said:

For my part, I'd have made the Caemlyn bunch black, including the royals (there's precedent!), the Emond's Fielders white, the Aiel black, and have Rand stand out that way with the claims his mother was from down south somewhere (Kari was from Caemlyn). 

Maybe they'll explain Mat and the Cauthons by claiming they're recent arrivals from elsewhere, but right now the casting feels disjointed for no good reason.

It's interesting to me that there is so much focus on the skin color of the characters. "Look" of the characters I totally understand. We all want the tv version to match the version we've had in our heads (which is based on Jordan's descriptions) for the most part. It'd be weird if Loial was a short, quiet, super old Ogier for example. But if he's a huge, unintentionally loud, young Ogier but with bright yellow hair/fur/mustaches that wouldn't bother me in the least.

Actors embodying the character is paramount. Followed by a true look, as in; Rand should be a fairly tall, human man, between the ages of 17-22. Beyond that why does it matter what everyone's skin tone is? At the foundation, I don't think it affects the story in any way, and up from there, all adaptations should make some changes to represent the times in which they are made.

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1 hour ago, Corvinus said:

But Mat has strong Manentheren blood.

Aren't the Emond's Fielders in general the descendants of Mantheren?

 

Joey Crows,

Why does it matter what skin color any figure, historical or fictional, has in a drama? Why was Selma cast with black actors and not, say, Asian actors? Or better yet, Hispanic or Middle-eastern actors, given the political climate the last years....

(There are, of course, plenty of spaces where the remove from the historic allows for interesting _commentary_ on race, as with Hamilton.)


The answer, really, is worldbuilding. Our world is "built" naturally, fictional worlds area built artificially. Jordan put a lot of effort into it. I don't understand why anyone wants to adapt a work of fantasy with heavy degrees of worldbuilding, and then one of the early things they do is throw that worldbuilding out of the window by introducing inconsistencies. The Emond's Fielders as presented are an ecletic bunch you'd see in a cosmopolitan city, not the isolated backwater that Emond's Fields is supposed to be. They should all be one type (not the three we presently have in the casting, Rand aside) because that was part of the world Jordan built. Make them all black, all Asian, all Native American, whatever. But be consistent.

I no longer buy the idea that "Oh, these were simply the very best actors we got." I mean, I'm sure they were, _but_ I don't buy that they were _so much better_ than the 2nd best actorsthat they just had to cast them and throw the world-building out the window. (And for that matter, I'll wager that casting sides for the roles made it explicit they were set on a multiethnic Emond's Field cast; Judkins shared a note for casting about how the cast should reflect a post-racial future, which sounds all right because WoT has distinct races but no racism that I can recall, but Jordan also wanted very distinctive boundaries between different cultures and distinctive appearances between them to delineate many of them. It's what he wanted. Judkins doesn't seem to care very much.)

 

 

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I am pretty sure that's not how genetics work. Fairly isolated population groups don't develop a  completely homogeneous look in terms of skin colour over what is an extremely short period in evolutionary terms. The Two Rivers population originated from the population of Manetheren's capital which was most likely quite diverse. 

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16 minutes ago, Ran said:

Why was Selma cast with black actors and not, say, Asian actors?

Because that movie was based on actual humans. And the fact that they were black Americans was essential to the telling of the story. That's kinda the whole point of that movie....

 

18 minutes ago, Ran said:

The Emond's Fielders as presented are an ecletic bunch you'd see in a cosmopolitan city, not the isolated backwater that Emond's Fields is supposed to be. They should all be one type (not the three we presently have in the casting, Rand aside) because that was part of the world Jordan built. Make them all black, all Asian, all Native American, whatever. But be consistent.

While I agree that Emond's Field is very isolated and not at all cosmopolitan, I disagree that the characters from there should be "all one type." And that is because of what I was getting at in my previous post. It's not essential to the story. World building I get. I'm all for it. It's a very important part of creating a successful series be it book or television. But, like I said, the important parts of that are about the look and feel of the characters not detracting from the story and not about being pixel perfect in skin tone to what was described.

If you want to talk about being exact from book to screen we can debate whether GOT did ASOIAF an injustice by not making Peter Dinklage's version of Tyrion have two different color eyes and no nose (eventually). I'd argue that change in character look had little to no affect on the story or the character. Of course if you're simply concerned with the skin tones and nothing else then I'm not sure that's a conversation worth having.

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6 minutes ago, David Selig said:

I am pretty sure that's not how genetics work. Fairly isolated population groups don't develop a  completely homogeneous look in terms of skin colour over what is an extremely short period in evolutionary terms. The Two Rivers population originated from the population of Manetheren's capital which was most likely quite diverse. 

Right. And we can see how that might have played out by listening to the descriptions of the Two Rivers population after Perrin became Lord Perrin. People of different backgrounds started to arrive and settle there. Over time the borders of the Two Rivers would expand and various immigrants would become part of the population, changing the look of the whole just as Manetheren probably was. 

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34 minutes ago, David Selig said:

I am pretty sure that's not how genetics work. Fairly isolated population groups don't develop a  completely homogeneous look in terms of skin colour over what is an extremely short period in evolutionary terms. The Two Rivers population originated from the population of Manetheren's capital which was most likely quite diverse. 

Of course it's not how genetics work, but it's how Jordan wanted it to work to get those clear cultural demarcations. As we see in his personal visual models for the characters.

If you don't want to adapt an author's work as they envisioned it, at the very least maintain the rules for how things work. It's a very backhanded kind of compliment to the author otherwise. "We love it, except..."

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1 hour ago, David Selig said:

I am pretty sure that's not how genetics work. Fairly isolated population groups don't develop a  completely homogeneous look in terms of skin colour over what is an extremely short period in evolutionary terms. The Two Rivers population originated from the population of Manetheren's capital which was most likely quite diverse. 

If it's a small group and they are isolated they do. Much like how genetic diseases become more common in small isolated groups so too do physical traits defined by genetics. Genetic "bottlenecks" can also lose diversity through randomness too.  The founding population would have to be very diverse and considerably large for it not to happen. Obviously it would not homogenise over 3 generations, more like a couple of centuries.

 

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30 minutes ago, Ran said:

Of course it's not how genetics work, but it's how Jordan wanted it to work to get those clear cultural demarcations. As we see in his personal visual models for the characters.

If you don't want to adapt an author's work as they envisioned it, at the very least maintain the rules for how things work. It's a very backhanded kind of compliment to the author otherwise. "We love it, except..."

It’s a balance right? I mean the show can’t adapt the dialogue completely accurately. Otherwise there’d be a lot of extremely cheesy lines saying things like “Argh! That wool head. I should box his ears.” 

This is not going to be a visual reenactment of the novels. It’ll be an adaptation for television. Being as true to the source material as possible is definitely key to making it work, but some things can/should/will change. Be it dialogue or character appearance, as long as it’s true to the spirit of what Jordan intended, changes often enhance the narrative. And as long as they don’t detract from it, I say great.

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1 hour ago, Ran said:

Of course it's not how genetics work, but it's how Jordan wanted it to work to get those clear cultural demarcations. As we see in his personal visual models for the characters.

I am not sure how useful and factual these "personal visual models" are. A lot of them are very different from the actual descriptions in the books. Hedy Lamarr had blue eyes and was much taller than Moiraine. Jacqueline Bisset has gray eyes unlike Nynaeve. Young Val Kilmer was way more handsome than Perrin is supposed to be and he has blue eyes too and much lighter hair. Etc, etc.

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4 hours ago, Ran said:

Aren't the Emond's Fielders in general the descendants of Mantheren?

 

Joey Crows,

Why does it matter what skin color any figure, historical or fictional, has in a drama? Why was Selma cast with black actors and not, say, Asian actors? Or better yet, Hispanic or Middle-eastern actors, given the political climate the last years....

(There are, of course, plenty of spaces where the remove from the historic allows for interesting _commentary_ on race, as with Hamilton.)


The answer, really, is worldbuilding. Our world is "built" naturally, fictional worlds area built artificially. Jordan put a lot of effort into it. I don't understand why anyone wants to adapt a work of fantasy with heavy degrees of worldbuilding, and then one of the early things they do is throw that worldbuilding out of the window by introducing inconsistencies. The Emond's Fielders as presented are an ecletic bunch you'd see in a cosmopolitan city, not the isolated backwater that Emond's Fields is supposed to be. They should all be one type (not the three we presently have in the casting, Rand aside) because that was part of the world Jordan built. Make them all black, all Asian, all Native American, whatever. But be consistent.

I no longer buy the idea that "Oh, these were simply the very best actors we got." I mean, I'm sure they were, _but_ I don't buy that they were _so much better_ than the 2nd best actorsthat they just had to cast them and throw the world-building out the window. (And for that matter, I'll wager that casting sides for the roles made it explicit they were set on a multiethnic Emond's Field cast; Judkins shared a note for casting about how the cast should reflect a post-racial future, which sounds all right because WoT has distinct races but no racism that I can recall, but Jordan also wanted very distinctive boundaries between different cultures and distinctive appearances between them to delineate many of them. It's what he wanted. Judkins doesn't seem to care very much.)

 

 

Really a post-racial future should be of a melting pot sort of thing, people mostly looking quite similar with only a slight variation in skin tone and features. Within a given population that's been kind of isolated for many generations there should be a great deal of similarity. The thinking here is that post-racial means something like a multicultural city where everyone gets along, but where people mostly still breed within their race, with inter-racial breeding being uncommon. That's not post-racial, that's just peacefully coexistent multi-racial.

However, WoT might have no racism per se, but it has nationalism. If you think one nation is inferior in some way to another, and each nation has obviously differing majorities in terms of skin colour in the ruling class, then it's not terribly distinguishable from racism. The way to have nationalism without racism is either for all nations to be the same race or for variation to be only minor, or for all nations to be very mixed race with no particular racial majority in any nation.

So if ther producers want there to be no hint of racism anywhere in the show the best way to do that is to make most or all nations multi-racial. SO I guess that means I'm arguing against my initial objection to Matt being significantly paler than the rest of the Emond's Field folks.

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4 hours ago, David Selig said:

I am not sure how useful and factual these "personal visual models" are. A lot of them are very different from the actual descriptions in the books. Hedy Lamarr had blue eyes and was much taller than Moiraine. Jacqueline Bisset has gray eyes unlike Nynaeve. Young Val Kilmer was way more handsome than Perrin is supposed to be and he has blue eyes too and much lighter hair. Etc, etc.

I think the visual models concern facial structure, the gaze, etc. Possibly also something about manner or carriage. He obviously wasn't setting hair or eye color with Affleck as Rand. Or Sophia Loren for Aviendha I suppose

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2 hours ago, Ran said:

I think the visual models concern facial structure, the gaze, etc. Possibly also something about manner or carriage. He obviously wasn't setting hair or eye color with Affleck as Rand. Or Sophia Loren for Aviendha I suppose

Then why are we assuming he was setting skin color?

The very first book makes it explicitly clear Rand is significantly paler skinned than the Emond's Field folk. By no means could one say that of Ben Affleck compared to Val Kilmer, for instance. 

I don't think RJ was picking actors who looked identical to the descriptions so much as those he thought would embody the personalities well. Which is why he went from actors from very different times. He wasn't talking about his dream cast for a movie, because there was no point in time when these actors could be in a movie together as this set of characters.  

All we know, from the books, about the Two Rivers folk is that they're darker skinned than Rand, and lighter skinned than the Sea Folk/Tuon, etc. That's a pretty broad spectrum of skin tones.

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The folks at Theoryland did some research from the books:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Theoryland/status/1162364559539105793?s=09

Their broad conclusion, which is how I pictured things in my head too: 

While Andorans are usually fair-skinned, there is a lot of variety among Andorans regarding skin color. And, in general, Two Rivers folk are darker-skinned Andorans.

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