Wheel of Time TV Show 7: And There Shall Be Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

[Lord Patrek]

Thanks!

Fuck me, 4 albums!!! In this day and age when it's hard to sell music, that's more than ambitious!

Looking forward to hearing the rest. 

[fionwe1987]

Amazon doesn't have to sell this, though. They have that luxury. But 4 is huge, yeah. I wonder if the other "volumes" are just broken up by episodes.

[Lord Patrek]

Could be. In any event, that's a shitload of music and no doubt about it. Four soundtracks' worth of scores for one season is an immense amount of music. Could be that most of it will just be variations of the main themes, but even so. . .

Odd that the album being released on the 19th doesn't have an Amazon page yet. This is what threw me off.

[Corvinus85]

Meanwhile, the Amazon fuckers still haven't released the soundtrack for season 5 of The Expanse, though Clinton Shorter had it ready since last year. 

[Werthead]

7 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

Meanwhile, the Amazon fuckers still haven't released the soundtrack for season 5 of The Expanse, though Clinton Shorter had it ready since last year. 

Apparently the streamers are not prioritising soundtrack releases. They seem to be trying to find ways of doing it themselves rather than outsourcing, but haven't actually done anything with it. There's some Netflix shows which have the same problem (the GLOW Season 3 soundtrack has been on hold for two years, for example).

[Starkess]

Very relieved to see the saidin/saidar confirmed! Leaks that I had seen stated that 

Spoiler

it wasn't mentioned in the first 3 episodes

and that, combined with Judkins's interviews, did make me nervous!

 

Also, re: r/whitecloaks, I don't think it's so bad. I belong to about 6 different WoT subreddits, and whitecloaks, like the rest, have their good and bad sides. Part of their ethos is they don't want to ban people, so there's more reliance on the community downvoting things. I've seen some bad takes get downvoted and some not. But I think these things can quickly become self-fulfilling prophecies. Once it becomes "common knowledge" so to speak that everyone on a certain subreddit is XYZ, the only people that are XYZ continue to go there.

[Gertrude]

3 hours ago, Starkess said:

But I think these things can quickly become self-fulfilling prophecies. Once it becomes "common knowledge" so to speak that everyone on a certain subreddit is XYZ, the only people that are XYZ continue to go there.

Which is why I said I thought it was heading down the route to becoming a fairly toxic space. I think it can self-police itself into a productive discussion space if it wants to, but they have to want to. I haven't seen much of that lately, but when there is actual content to talk about instead of speculation, we shall see.

[Lord Patrek]

Well, you know that some are sure to be dumpster fires. As you said, it remains to be seen.

It will all depend on the quality of the TV series, I figure. If it's good, even changes that people didn't agree with will become easier pills to swallow. If it's the second coming of the Shannara Chronicles or Foundation, the proverbial shit will fly!

[Corvinus85]

14 hours ago, Werthead said:

Apparently the streamers are not prioritising soundtrack releases. They seem to be trying to find ways of doing it themselves rather than outsourcing, but haven't actually done anything with it. There's some Netflix shows which have the same problem (the GLOW Season 3 soundtrack has been on hold for two years, for example).

Amazon has its own music service, so there's no excuse.

I've listened to the WoT album they released. I'm not sure what language they sing in, but some of the songs sound like they could be Korean or Japanese pop. All the songs have Old Tongue names. Did they hire a linguist to develop the Old Tongue? Some of the songs were pretty good; the standouts for me were Moiraine Sedai, Goldeneyes, and Servants of All.

[fionwe1987]

It's all fully Old Tongue, and they've been posting lyrics, and Al'Naito even has a translation, I believe.

 

Several of the songs wouldn't be out of place in a Bollywood movie, which pleases me immensely. The music feels different from the bog standard orchestral pieces most fantasy shows/movies have, though how the actual score sounds is still up in the air.

I imagine the instrumental pieces would make their way into the show, actually, or variations of these themes, at least. 

[SpaceChampion]

There is a linguist hired but who that is apparently hasn't been announced.  Though I noted that David Peterson posted on his twitter bio he's recently work on Dune, The Witcher, House of the Dragon, and "[redacted]x4."

 

[Lord Patrek]

18 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

Several of the songs wouldn't be out of place in a Bollywood movie, which pleases me immensely.

Well, it might be a problem for some viewers, as WoT is a world away from a Bollywood movie. There is nothing in TEotW that warrants such musical influence, which is why the score often feels discordant in regards to the source material. The somewhat Turkish influence could have worked with scenes set in the Aiel Waste, but they sound odd when the action takes place in a decidedly Western European medieval setting.

But since it's not the official soundtrack, it's hard to tell if/how it will mesh with the footage.

Only 5 days to go!

[fionwe1987]

20 minutes ago, Lord Patrek said:

Well, it might be a problem for some viewers, as WoT is a world away from a Bollywood movie. There is nothing in TEotW that warrants such musical influence, which is why the score often feels discordant in regards to the source material. The somewhat Turkish influence could have worked with scenes set in the Aiel Waste, but they sound odd when the action takes place in a decidedly Western European medieval setting.

But since it's not the official soundtrack, it's hard to tell if/how it will mesh with the footage.

Only 5 days to go!

You really need to stop insisting your view of the books is THE view of the books. Its getting pretty annoying.

The Wheel of Time is a Hindu concept. Mythological tales of reborn heroes saving the world abound in both Indian storytelling AND in Indian cinema. Plenty of other concepts in WoT, from the world being a dream/illusion, to Shaitan, to cataclysmic breakings of the world, are from Indian mythology.

Far from being a world away, the world of WoT is very heavily influenced by Indian philosophies and mythology, and for the music to draw some of that is appropriate. WoT is NOT a Western European setting, and it isn’t medieval at all. Maybe you need to re-read the books without your Western-primacy glasses?

-x-

My cousin just got an Amazon package that’s literally a Wheel of Time ad. The poster is printed on the box. That’s pretty insane, as ad campaigns go. I wonder if every Prime box this week is a WoT box?

[Ran]

6 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

My cousin just got an Amazon package that’s literally a Wheel of Time ad. The poster is printed on the box. That’s pretty insane, as ad campaigns go. I wonder if every Prime box this week is a WoT box?

Funny, was watching a Youtube video of the day in the life of some person or other and they received an Amazon shipment... and the box had an ad for a car insurance company. I guess Amazon has started selling advertising on their packaging.

Re: music, the 13th Depository has fine stuff on music in WoT. Pat isn't wrong that for the most part music in the Westlands, as RJ envisioned it, was variations of various historical modes of European music. Just think about the dances that go with the music: jigs, reels, line dances, and so on. "Jak o' the Shadows" is to be sung to the tune of "Gerryowen". Many of the instruments are Western -- bitterns are a type of guitar, lutes, fiddles, and so on. And things like Low Chant and High Chant were explicitly connected to medieval Europe by RJ, when describing the a gleeman's chant as being similar to troubaduours in continental Europe.

That said, just because the diegetic music sounds one way doesn't mean that the extradiegetic music of the score needs to sound that way as well. In particular, given all the Old Tongue stuff, it almost feels like they're daring you to think of those pieces as being from the far past of the setting when it would be perfectly fine for them to sound very different.

[Werthead]

Yup, the Wheel of Time is many things, but a medieval Western European epic fantasy setting is not one of them. It has some elements of that, but RJ was very clear that his influences also came from Asia, India, the Americas, Africa, Russia and all over the place. The cultural and technology setting - apart from gunpowder - is also much more 16th/17th Century than it is 12th or 13th.

[fionwe1987]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Funny, was watching a Youtube video of the day in the life of some person or other and they received an Amazon shipment... and the box had an ad for a car insurance company. I guess Amazon has started selling advertising on their packaging.

I’ve only gotten one kind of ad on an Amazon package before: for Amazon Prime. While pleased to see WoT advertised, I’m not a fan of Amazon doing this, in general. They need less packaging, not more to sell their own shows.

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Re: music, the 13th Depository has fine stuff on music in WoT. Pat isn't wrong that for the most part music in the Westlands, as RJ envisioned it, was variations of various historical modes of European music. Just think about the dances that go with the music: jigs, reels, line dances, and so on. "Jak o' the Shadows" is to be sung to the tune of "Gerryowen". Many of the instruments are Western -- bitterns are a type of guitar, lutes, fiddles, and so on. And things like Low Chant and High Chant were explicitly connected to medieval Europe by RJ, when describing the a gleeman's chant as being similar to troubaduours in continental Europe.

That wasn’t quite his objection, though. If we see Thom Merrillin singing these songs, he might have a point.

Though its worth noting that even if the musical styles and terminology is from Europe, it doesn’t follow that all the sounds would be, as well, given that the length of time separating the two periods, in the world of WoT.  

2 hours ago, Ran said:

That said, just because the diegetic music sounds one way doesn't mean that the extradiegetic music of the score needs to sound that way as well. In particular, given all the Old Tongue stuff, it almost feels like they're daring you to think of those pieces as being from the far past of the setting when it would be perfectly fine for them to sound very different.

The music in this album sounds way too modern to be thought of as from the time period of the story, given the instruments used. I feel maybe they’re going for this to be music from the Age of Legends, or something, given the use of only the Old Tongue, too. 

[Corvinus85]

For all the criticisms I've leveled at some of the stuff I've seen and my skepticism, I am still excited for this show. In just a few days one of my favorite fantasy series is coming to live-action.

[Wouter]

On 11/12/2021 at 3:24 PM, Lord Patrek said:

I'd love to see the Strike at Shayol Ghul! Just a debate at the Hall of the Servants would be kind of lame. Either you go big or you don't show it.

This debate could well tie into Aes Sedai views/propaganda regarding Lews Therin. It could, potentially, be a way to show that the present day's Aes Sedai's view is not quite correct. If both Lews Therin and Latra Posae have good arguments, that could work (and show to the viewers that Lews was actually a good guy, if not without faults).

Showing the strike on Shayol Ghul would be very expensive to make, I think. And conceptually, it is probably better to wait until the series has had time to introduce such concepts as Forsaken and the Dark One, before you show Shayol Ghul.

[SpaceChampion]

Spoiler Free review

 

 

[fionwe1987]

Reviews from the British Press that are out seem...tepid, at best, though at least some of it seems to be generally against all fantasy, and I can't imagine they'd rate, say, the Witcher any higher.