Wheel of Time: The 2nd Turning (Book Spoilers Inclusive)

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

lthough Jordan (and Sanderson) allowed for exceptions: lighter-skinned Domani appear and Ishara Casalain, the founding Queen of Andor, was not just black but "very" dark-skinned (based on a stained glass window depiction of her in The Path of Daggers).

Yes, it's why in the past I said that had I cast the show, I'd have made Elayne and her family darker skinned since we have the Ishara precedent, and then the Aiel can be as well, and Rand too.

There's definitely some small variations, and more so when you get to boundaries between regions where Jordan showed that the cultures tended to blur and mix more. 

But in general, there's a "type" for many of these countries, and then there's variation within them, but in some cases they are because Jordan imagined they were part something else, and in others it's just, well, variation. Like... is it Sheriam who's the red-headed, green-eyed Saldaean? Just as there are naturally red-haired Japanese people, rare but not unknown, it doesn't make them any less Japanese.

Edited June 1, 2023 by Ran

[Wouter]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Although Jordan (and Sanderson) allowed for exceptions: lighter-skinned Domani appear and Ishara Casalain, the founding Queen of Andor, was not just black but "very" dark-skinned (based on a stained glass window depiction of her in The Path of Daggers).

This feels slightly hyperbolic. Daniel Henney, Rosamund Pike, Alvaro Morte, Alexandre Willaum and Sophie Okonedo were all excellent;

Fares Fares was also excellent as "The Dark one". I don't think Josha was bad either, he often didn't have much to do but he was OK when paired with good actors like Willaum and Harris.

By far the worst part of S1 was the decision to "downgrade" Lews Therin, though, especially pretending that no big war was going on when he took the decision to attempt to seal the DO.

 

Edited June 1, 2023 by Wouter

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, Wouter said:

By far the worst part of S1 was the decision to "downgrade" Lews Therin, though, especially pretending that no big war was going on when he took the decision to attempt to seal the DO.

Do we know if this was in part due to the multiple Covid lockdowns the production crew experienced and the challenges that the shutdowns/lockdowns imposed on filming, special effects rendering, etc.?

[Jace, Extat]

7 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Do we know if this was in part due to the multiple Covid lockdowns the production crew experienced and the challenges that the shutdowns/lockdowns imposed on filming, special effects rendering, etc.?

Pretty sure they only read a plot synopsis that Started, Middled, and Ended with "The wmnz right, bois dum." And that's as much exposure to the source material as they ever looked into.

[IlyaP]

24 minutes ago, Secretary of Eumenes said:

Pretty sure they only read a plot synopsis that Started, Middled, and Ended with "The wmnz right, bois dum." And that's as much exposure to the source material as they ever looked into.

There's no need to be mean. It's a well-known fact that Rafe is a giant WoT fanboy. 

[Wouter]

On 6/2/2023 at 1:44 AM, IlyaP said:

Do we know if this was in part due to the multiple Covid lockdowns the production crew experienced and the challenges that the shutdowns/lockdowns imposed on filming, special effects rendering, etc.?

I doubt it, as a simple dialogue choice could have made it clear there was a war going on. There was no need to make his female opposite number the Amyrlin, either. It even diminished her, too, as she could have ordered him to abort the mission but she didn't. In the books, she didn't have that power so it doesn't reflect negatively on her.

The production of the battle of Fal Dara clearly did suffer because of Covid, and Barney Harris dropping out (whatever the reason) didn't help either.

Rafe and part of his team definitely are WoT-fanboys, and streamlining is a necessity, but things like the intentional downgrading of Lews Therin are probably somewhat of an activist issue.

[Myrddin]

From all accounts, Barney has retired from acting. I hope the guy is ok.

[IlyaP]

17 hours ago, Myrddin said:

From all accounts, Barney has retired from acting. I hope the guy is ok.

From all accounts? Can you clarify what you mean by that? (Not wanting to sound hostile, just legitimately curious.)

[Myrddin]

Just that he's dropped off from public view and there's nothing past WoT on his IMDB. For an up and coming actor who was truly very talented, it's not a good sign. At his age, he should be booking shows/movies and building his career. Two years of silence/inactivity makes it appear he's retired or taking extended time off.

All that to say, I hope he's doing well and moving forward in his life, no matter what direction that is.

 

[IlyaP]

15 hours ago, Myrddin said:

Just that he's dropped off from public view and there's nothing past WoT on his IMDB.

That has just changed as of this afternoon. He's apparently attached to a film called Magpie. 

[karaddin]

On 5/27/2023 at 11:40 AM, IlyaP said:

Hey, don't you forget about those of us who watched Lexx for you so you didn't have to! 

Its the most powerful weapon of destruction in the 2 universes. It's like 15-20 years since I watched it, but I'm never going to forget that! That show is such a weird mixed bag of....weird. With an amazing chess episode, and I think I quite liked its musical episode too. I also remember <spoilers for a very old show>

Spoiler

It being a surprisingly affecting portrayal of the end of the universe at the end of the first(?) season.

On topic for this thread - I've been avoiding this thread and found myself suckered in, I think I need to do the opposite of Ran and watch the show but not read this lmao. Not saying you're all bigots, just not jiving with my experience with the show at all and the last thread showed I didn't handle that well.

[IlyaP]

6 minutes ago, karaddin said:

That show is such a weird mixed bag of....weird.

Lexx is proof that kinksters should not take drugs and make tv at the same time. 

[Maia]

On 6/1/2023 at 4:37 PM, Ran said:

 No, what's happened in Randland is that new ethnicities formed as the Breaking formed new isolated  communities that developed into nations, and that all the displacements of the Trolloc Wars just formed new enclaves and subsequent isolated groups that developed into distinct groups of their own with their own fashions and their own common appearances.

Except the way the books describe these ethnicities extremely distinctive appearances even when they are from relatively small neighbouring countries makes no sense in view of their history. They did start from a melting pot, after all, and there were a few other mass migration events in their history since. Also, intermarriages and so on. Let's not put his world-building on a pedestal - it is enticingly intricate, but pretty flawed.

And Jordan did go out of his way to make all of his somewhat central characters ambiguously white - even Siuan, who was from a country where most people were not, but she somehow just happened to be. Which wouldn't fly in a show today, rightly so. Before you point out Tuon, she is another can of worms and the attempts to whitewash her and her culture in the later books without any significant changes to their worldview were pretty awful, IMHO. 

Anyway, he was maybe ahead of his time, but time has moved on. In theory I would have preferred a more homogene casting for TR, but I appreciate that it would have been difficult to achieve. The whole "who is the dragon?" thing didn't help either, of course.

 

On 6/19/2023 at 9:48 PM, Wouter said:

There was no need to make his female opposite number the Amyrlin, either. It even diminished her, too, as she could have ordered him to abort the mission but she didn't.

Yea, this was a weird decision atop an even weirder one of not mentioning the war. But then again, maybe it will be revealed that she couldn't.

I can't say that I loved the show, but I thought that it was alright, with allowances for Covid. Of course it is quite different from the books, but they aren't holy cow to me, since I always had some issues with them. I am willing to give the second season a chance.

[Ran]

33 minutes ago, Maia said:

Except the way the books describe these ethnicities extremely distinctive appearances even when they are from relatively small neighbouring countries makes no sense in view of their history.

Sure, but that's the choice Jordan made. He thought it more interesting and more entertaining to have distinctive ethnocultural boundaries.

As I said before, people may prefer a more "realistic" or more cosmopolitan "blood of all nations" world, but that's manifestly what's not in the novels. Which goes to what I was saying before: it used to be very clearly understood that Jordan had these sharp ethno-cultural boundaries in much of the setting, but for some reason the TV show's existence completely warped how people perceived this so now we get told that Jordan barely ever mentioned these things and so on.

Edited June 22, 2023 by Ran

[SpaceChampion]

 

[Darryk]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Sure, but that's the choice Jordan made. He thought it more interesting and more entertaining to have distinctive ethnocultural boundaries.

As I said before, people may prefer a more "realistic" or more cosmopolitan "blood of all nations" world, but that's manifestly what's not in the novels. Which goes to what I was saying before: it used to be very clearly understood that Jordan had these sharp ethno-cultural boundaries in much of the setting, but for some reason the TV show's existence completely warped how people perceived this so now we get told that Jordan barely ever mentioned these things and so on.

 

Yeah I agree. Ethno-cultural boundaries are pretty important in fantasy as they help give people an idea of the geography of the world and where everyone's from.

They easily could've included different ethnicities by, say, making the Aiel black, making those sea people Asian etc

 

[Maia]

5 hours ago, Darryk said:

They easily could've included different ethnicities by, say, making the Aiel black, making those sea people Asian etc

Would people be less upset if they made Rand black as a result? I somehow doubt it, but YMMV. As to the supremely annoying Seafolk, I heartily hope that they appear as little as possible or not at all.

I also don't see why the choices Jordan made regarding his worldbuilding, some of which weren't particularly good or were even somewhat obnoxious in the books, should be an untouchable holy cow for the show. Yes, some sensible ethnical homogenity might have been nice in places, but cultural identities should be more important. And yes, there is room for improvement there too, so we shall see.

I also have to point out that the text does leave room for interpretation in some cases, but it shouldn't even matter, really. IMHO, YMMV.

[fionwe1987]

23 hours ago, Ran said:

Sure, but that's the choice Jordan made. He thought it more interesting and more entertaining to have distinctive ethnocultural boundaries.

He made plenty of choices the show simply steamrolled over. That the amount of discussion on the whole "Two Rivers is too diverse in the show" debate is just out of proportion with that reality, I feel.

That said, while Jordan did imagine distinct ethnicities, he didn't always imagine uniform skin tones to go with those ethnicities, and spent an extraordinary amount of time on the clothing, cultural and accent based distinction of these ethnicities, while progressively making it clear this wasn't an all-white world.

Even his own lead characters outside Rand got more ambiguous descriptions of their skin tones as the series progressed, if they got them at all, but there was also some lack of consistency.

Above all that, Jordan was a student of science. I think its fair to say that in the modern context, he'd have done his ethnicity/skin tone remixing differently. Or even if he wouldn't have, its fair game for the writers to, as you point out.

We can spend a lot of time arguing about whether the specific mix of looks chosen for the TR characters is scientifically accurate in the context of the imagined world history of the show, but we don't seem to be spending this kind of time on the many other flaws of this show. To me, that is troubling.

20 hours ago, Darryk said:

 

Yeah I agree. Ethno-cultural boundaries are pretty important in fantasy as they help give people an idea of the geography of the world and where everyone's from.

In our world, ethno-cultural traits overlap with skin color and geographic variation in bone structure, hair, eye and skin color. That's already changing, of course. In WoT, Jordan definitely has many ethnicities, and he does a lot of work in scene and costume setting, as well as accent, to clarify where a character comes from. Very often, especially in the later books, Jordan took care to diversify the looks of these ethnicities, adding geographic variations, especially in countries we spend more time in. The Two Rivers itself gets plenty of new side characters who complicate the way we should picture them.

20 hours ago, Darryk said:

They easily could've included different ethnicities by, say, making the Aiel black, making those sea people Asian etc

 

But that has cost to the production. Here's a golden chance to cast relatively blind by altering the imagined history of the story a little bit. Why should the Aiel look homogenous at all? Like, what real value does that add to this story? There were clearly dark skinned Aiel in the Age of Legends. We learn in Book 10 that several tribes in Seanchan are clearly descendants of the Aiel, and have dark skin, and do not live in deserts. Which all makes sense, the Aiel were not an ethnicity in the Age of Legends, they were the Da'Shain, a caste that had specific religious and cultural practices, and served specific economic functions. 

Now, Jordan imagined a big group of Aiel refugees from the world capital, Paraan Disen, migrating, over time, with many losses, to what becomes the Aiel waste. There is literally no reason for this group to be ethnically homogenous, and we have no proof they were either. It is possible the fairer skinned Da'shain just randomly ended up surviving better as they went into hotter environments, defying basic evolution because, maybe, the Wise Ones were able to heal folks? 

But none of this necessitates that our instinct that a culturally similar group of people must look similar be coddled. 

13 hours ago, Maia said:

I also don't see why the choices Jordan made regarding his worldbuilding, some of which weren't particularly good or were even somewhat obnoxious in the books, should be an untouchable holy cow for the show. Yes, some sensible ethnical homogenity might have been nice in places, but cultural identities should be more important. And yes, there is room for improvement there too, so we shall see.

Agreed on Jordan's choices being open to change. However, tthnicity is about shared identity. We assume that is only possible if looks are shared, but we know this isn't scientifically true, or necessary. So why are we continuing this conversation in a framing that ethnic homogeneity requires some kind of homogeneity in how characters look?

13 hours ago, Maia said:

I also have to point out that the text does leave room for interpretation in some cases, but it shouldn't even matter, really. IMHO, YMMV.

Exactly. And the writers have the right to reinterpret the text anyway, and have. Way too liberally for all our tastes, clearly.

[fionwe1987]

On 6/1/2023 at 10:25 AM, Corvinus85 said:

How did the Aiel identify it was the ancestors of the Cairhienin that aided them if the Cairhienin don't have some kind of cultural and ethnical distinctiveness?

If the cultural and ethnic distinctiveness of the Cairheinin is how the Aiel identified them, exactly why did it take the Aiel 2500 years to figure out that the short, fair folks who gave them water on their way to the Waste might be the short, fair folks who live just across the mountains, in a very water rich region, sharing whatever cultural traits the Aiel identified in the water sharers that somehow survived for 2500 years? 

Sure the Aiel were isolationist, but while they never made it to Randland in any numbers, they were also not clueless about its geography, and Cairheinin peddlers (or peddlers from the region that is Cairhein) have been entering the Waste for literal millenia. Heck, Hawkwing wasn't born far from Cairhein, and its highly likely that soldiers from the principality closest to the Aiel Waste were in the invasion force he sent there, which was defeated, meaning captives and all the stuff we've seen from the Aiel in the books.

Unless the Aiel were unutterably thick, the descendents of the water-sharers were identified using more than just simple cultural or physical markers of distinctiveness that the Aiel noticed in the VR replay of their ancestors they have regularly been getting for millenia. 

 

[IlyaP]

On 6/22/2023 at 11:36 PM, Ran said:

As I said before, people may prefer a more "realistic" or more cosmopolitan "blood of all nations" world, but that's manifestly what's not in the novels.

Had a google, but I don't think what I've seen/found has been helpful. What's a blood of all nations world? This is an unfamiliar concept to me.