[Book Spoilers] Wheel of Time 3: Black Ajahpaloosa

[karaddin]

21 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

No, it's definitely nothing like that. That would imply Rand is 10-20% stronger than the likes of Demandred and Sammael. 

...

Which all makes sense. An Aes Sedai one level weaker than another has to defer to her. Barely. That wouldn't hold up if there was a 10% difference. There also no way to fit 72 levels in there if there's a 10% difference between each. 

I think we're getting some crossed wires on our argument, as I feel like all the details about the cleansing fight just strengthen the case that the base power level gaps can be larger and skill is still overcoming them - Cadsuane with an angreal, even a weak one, should be getting bumped up to comparable power as Cyndane unless "weak" angreral are a lot shitter than I'm remembering (which is possible).

Prior to this conversation and looking at the power charts I would have absolutely said Rand was 10-20% stronger than both of them. I'm not making much sense of how to fit the life span extension into this, although I'll grant you from his chart he certainly intended that to function as a partial scale to be used - but half of my argument comes down to the depiction not matching these stated differences.

Jumping to the last part though because we're definitely meaning different things with the percentages we're talking about here, it sounds like you're talking percentage of an absolute max theoretical power ceiling whereas I'm talking about it with reference to each other. When you're doing it relative like that, "There also no way to fit 72 levels in there if there's a 10% difference between each. " doesn't make sense - you can have an infinite number of 10% drops. To illustrate what I mean...

Lets set Rand as 100 - the absolute cap. A 10% difference down to the next step wouldn't be any different from 10% in an absolute sense, Demandred etc would be at 90. Next step down has Asmodean at 81, Be'lal at 72.9, then 65.61 etc. If you run that down to 72 times you're left with something like 0.00014 which feels about right for how ridiculously weak Morgase is

[fionwe1987]

5 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I think we're getting some crossed wires on our argument, as I feel like all the details about the cleansing fight just strengthen the case that the base power level gaps can be larger and skill is still overcoming them - Cadsuane with an angreal, even a weak one, should be getting bumped up to comparable power as Cyndane unless "weak" angreral are a lot shitter than I'm remembering (which is possible).

Yep Cadsuane was definitely around Cyndane's strength, or greater. Yet she still struggled to hold the shield up, which is definitely a skill thing, no?

5 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Prior to this conversation and looking at the power charts I would have absolutely said Rand was 10-20% stronger than both of them. I'm not making much sense of how to fit the life span extension into this, although I'll grant you from his chart he certainly intended that to function as a partial scale to be used - but half of my argument comes down to the depiction not matching these stated differences.

But the depiction does. One level of Power difference is shown to be minor, among Aes Sedai, and all the power levels are equal in their difference. It isn't a log scale. 

5 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Jumping to the last part though because we're definitely meaning different things with the percentages we're talking about here, it sounds like you're talking percentage of an absolute max theoretical power ceiling whereas I'm talking about it with reference to each other. When you're doing it relative like that, "There also no way to fit 72 levels in there if there's a 10% difference between each. " doesn't make sense - you can have an infinite number of 10% drops. To illustrate what I mean...

Lets set Rand as 100 - the absolute cap. A 10% difference down to the next step wouldn't be any different from 10% in an absolute sense, Demandred etc would be at 90. Next step down has Asmodean at 81, Be'lal at 72.9, then 65.61 etc. If you run that down to 72 times you're left with something like 0.00014 which feels about right for how ridiculously weak Morgase is

My bad, I'd assumed we were both talking about a linear scale. 

A log scale doesn't work, though. This would make the gaps between the levels different, which there is plenty of proof against, in the books.

 

[karaddin]

I bow to your knowledge of what its 'supposed to be', I'm just saying that from the depictions my feeling (bearing in mind these impressions were formed literally 20-25 years ago lmao) does not match what it was supposed to be. 

9 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

Yep Cadsuane was definitely around Cyndane's strength, or greater. Yet she still struggled to hold the shield up, which is definitely a skill thing, no?

But the depiction does. One level of Power difference is shown to be minor, among Aes Sedai, and all the power levels are equal in their difference. It isn't a log scale. 

My bad, I'd assumed we were both talking about a linear scale. 

A log scale doesn't work, though. This would make the gaps between the levels different, which there is plenty of proof against, in the books.

See this just doesn't feel the case to me at all. There's a huge gulf between the powerful Aes Sedai, the average AS and especially the weaker AS.

For the first part - I guess I was just misunderstanding your point entirely as I thought you were saying Cadsuane performed better relative to Alivia which demonstrated the gap in power being small, but Lanfear is probably the weakest in raw power at the time and still the dominant one there while the one with the most raw power didn't do well at all due to poor skill.

I can't find where the chart was linked earlier in the thread, but how do Egwene and Elayne compare to Rand? Continue with the "Rand = 100" thing, what would that make them according to the out of story material?

[IlyaP]

27 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I bow to your knowledge of what its 'supposed to be', I'm just saying that from the depictions my feeling (bearing in mind these impressions were formed literally 20-25 years ago lmao) does not match what it was supposed to be. 

Time for The Great Wheel of Time Reread?

[karaddin]

You must be more flexible than I am if a reread could fundamentally alter opinions about stuff like this that formed while you were a teenager lol

[IlyaP]

Maybe we missed stuff from when we read it when we were in high school?!  

[Poobah]

2 hours ago, karaddin said:

See this just doesn't feel the case to me at all. There's a huge gulf between the powerful Aes Sedai, the average AS and especially the weaker AS.

Yeah I definitely see things the same way. Egwene and Elayne are seen as massively stronger than even the strongest current Aes Sedai and then Nynaeve is seen as staggeringly, terrifying stronger even than them, "a bonfire next to candles" is the quotation that stuck in my head for the comparison between them. 

That said I mostly think the 72(+6) point scale is a waste of time - most especially the extra male levels which even he pretty much admitted were a mistake with all the clarifications that female dexterity was enough to make up the gap - but the whole thing really. As I said earlier from how people actually match up in the books and how he describes perceived strength differences it feels to me much more like Jordan internally conceptualised power on a simpler tier/weight-class system where there isn't really much functional difference between people in a tier (a 1v1 would come down to other factors than strength - skill, luck, strength of will etc.) but a big one between tiers (Rand, Nynaeve, Logain, and the Forsaken are in a different league to Egwene, Elayne, and Cadsuane, who are themselves described as massively much stronger than the strongest Aes Sedai, and those in turn are shown to be very much stronger than an average one etc.). 

[Maia]

On 9/18/2023 at 1:24 PM, hauberk said:

So, 1,000-1,200 Greens. You’re still covering a continent or a massively porous border. From a force projection standpoint, it’s effective in a Dumai’s Well scenario but that’s not what they’re facing.

Likely even more than that, given the circumstances. Also, prior to and during the Trolloc Wars there were AS living in the kingdoms of the Compact of Ten Nations rather than being all cooped up in the WT - like Eldrene. They also had the Ways at their disposal for quick transport. However you look at it, Mat should have had memories of military channeling tactics and strategies of the period. But he doesn't that we have seen.

 

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I suppose he could have but, as a Vietnam vet, asymmetric warfare was his experience and that toothpaste doesn’t go back into the tube.  Not having a safe backfield and having dark friend (insurgents) literally anywhere is a part of his reality. 

 

This doesn't track, though - US, where weapons, equipment and troops were produced,  was safe. Like the heartland of the side of Light was safe according to Rand's ancestral memories, where an Aiel boy first saw soldiers on the day the Bore was sealed. And DFs everywhere fulfill that uncertainty without people being able to gate in and commit massive destruction anytime anywhere, as really should have been the case with unrestricted Travelling.

 

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Aeil =/= Ashaman. One group was actively being cultivated by a dread lord.  Certainly sipping tea and forcing apprentices was a thing but they knew the weaves and still needed to teach fundamentals, including mental fundamentals.

So what? Aiel have good training methods for their normal soldiers, they couldn't figure out one for their female channelers, once they knew that Tarmon Gaidon was coming? With the additional info they had from their ter'angreal tests and after TSR whatever *angreal were found in Rhuidean? Not to mention all the stuff that Egwene shared with them later, which also included AoL channeling knowledge. As to the fundamentals, didn't they say that they don't coddle apprentices and also taught them to Avi very quickly?

 

On 9/18/2023 at 4:32 PM, fionwe1987 said:

I don't think he said gender equality, either. 

Either way, Jordan really doesn't end up following a lot of the early book strictness with regards to gender. He had a separate and different rule, with men being stronger (in the Power) and women needing to link to beat them, then realized somewhere that this isn't any kind of equality, and changed things. 

 

OK. But the dexterity thing was mainly to explain why female FS could still be dangerous to the males and weren't apriori under their thumb. Also, maybe to reconcile contradictory statements about Lanfear's power level, who was supposed to be second most powerful FS after Ishy in the early books, but then got dumped under most male FS in raw power, IIRC.

It never came into play in Asha'man versus female channelers comparisons or their respective effectiveness on the battlefield - there OP strength was pretty much everything. Also in Travelling. Normal Asha'man's Gates are as big as those of the supergirls.

But the real inequality is in the rules of who gets to lead which links. The most basic level of cooperation is 2 people working together - and of course only men can be in charge there. Which means that a man and a woman can never be equal channeling partners. Etc. None of it was necessary. Lesser strength for ability to initiate links is actually a decent trade-off and it would have been OK if that was all.

Of course, as I  mentioned before, women also aren't allowed to shine in the areas where they  supposedly tend to be superior - men can do everything they do, except for starting a link, but better and quicker, while also fully utilizing their many additional advantages.

 

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With regard to women fighting, Rand's (and Perrin's and Mat's) pathology on this is Jordan's own pathology, I think. It's something born of Vietnam, and something he definitely addresses in the books, but it also made him unable to imagine major female characters with the ability to direct a battle.

Yea, but it doesn't fit a world with his premise at all. And often leads to incredibly patronizing treatment of women by the narrative.

 

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I really don't see the problem. While the instantaneous nature of them is unique, in terms of troop movement, the typical gateway is not different from a troop transport. And just like the presence of airplanes didn't end the need for ground forces, neither channeling nor Traveling does.

 

It is very different. Airspace can be effectively interdicted and only relatively small detachments can be transported by planes at once - with Travelling one can easily move entire armies, if one uses circles. Nor does one even need to send anybody through, necessarily, one could just open a gateway and blast through it anything anywhere. Which is why wards preventing travelling in an area should have been essential for the War of Power to make sense and later parts of the series proper ditto. Rand's ancestral memories even suggest something like this - when the Aiel leave Paaran Disen, nobody is worried that the madmen might just gate in - instead the AS can estimate the time of their arrival. Given that reckless Travelling can present mortal danger to random bystanders, it makes sense that it would have been suppressed in the cities of AoL even before the war too.

 

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I totally agree about wards and stuff. We saw Sammael use those, so he would know the instant someone opened a gate near him, but we stop seeing that be used in the Last Battle. The presence of widespread Traveling is huge for many plots, and I'm just fine with it's presence in the books. 

 

Yea, no. The conquest of Illian demonstrates the absurdity introduced into  military strategies by widespread Travelling. Oh, no, the eminent general Sammael would never guess that Rand intends to again use the very same trick that has already been successfully employed  by him and his followers twice and will surely get distracted by a slow-moving conventional army instead. His warning wards were so useless that I fully expected the whole thing to be a feint to make Rand believe that he won, while Sammy went to Shara to prepare his real army, laughing at the DR's gullability. I still believe that it would have been a better plot. YMMV, of course.

Not to mention how Travelling and Skimming being restricted to only a few individuals on the side of Light would have made Perrin's, Egwene's and Elayne's post ACoS plots feel more legitimate,  rather than like annoyingly contrived make-work.

Which plots couldn't have worked without wide-spread Travelling? As far as I can see, nearly all would have been greatly improved without it.

 

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There was no bulking up of numbers to do. Wise Ones know to sense the ability to learn, and plenty of women who can learn and want to be Wise Ones are taught.

 

I thought that they just found and inducted every sparker and didn't know how to test for potential? Which is why they had 6x WT's numbers.  Or was that the Sea Folk? They surely don't teach every woman with potential though - so with TG looming and the  prophecies about how Aiel have to give their all for "a remnant of a remnant" to survive they should have trained everyone who could learn, even if they hadn't been interested in becoming WOs previously. There absolutely was room to drastically increase their numbers.

And yes, Egwene shared weaves with them, but as we have established, AS suck at combat weaves and are stuck in the mindset of using their weakest powers for fighting. The WOs, some of whom are former military women, should have been able to come up with something better.

I also don't think that there should have been _that_ many Aiel male channelers for them to fight, since madness and rotting would have taken their toll on them and likely not every one could have been taken alive, but yea. They were made into barely an inconvenience, too.

I do think that Ishy additionally collecting other male sparkers since his return 15 years prior to TEoTW and stashing them somewhere for use in TG would have made sense, though. Would have explained why so few were found during that time period.

 

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Wait, how? They got good at blowing stuff up, but that's it, and nothing it the books shows this to be particularly more effective than lightning and fireballs, just more gory and gruesome.

Ah, no. They use weaves for construction, Damer Flynn is as good a healer as Nynaeve, they are as good at the lesser battlefield healing as the AS, they Travel better, they have invented the wife bond and the perfect Compulsion addition to it, etc, etc. All in a few months, BTW.

 

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The books are very clear about the Asha'man being a messed up organization taking huge (and to the Aes Sedai and Wise Ones, unacceptable) training losses because they are forcing their trainees.

Of course it is, but given how dangerous forcing is supposed to be, their losses were surprisingly small, and given what is at stake, should have been entirely acceptable for organizations that subject their initiates to mortally dangerous ordeals anyway. However, women should have had the advantage of being able to force their recruits completely safely, through linking. That's how it was with Egwene, a'dam being a perverted link. And she never had any negative effects from the forcing itself, only from the surrounding abuse. WOs and the rebel Tower should have jumped at this opportunity - naturally they didn't. Because it would have made too much sense.

 

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Isolationist, elite institutions can fail to achieve their mission, whether male run or female. The Aes Sedai are not extraordinarily incompetent. They're ordinarily incompetent and held to standards I rarely see applied to similar organizations that aren't all female. 

I fail to recall any all female organizations described as functional in fiction, so...

I also feel that WoT underplays difficulties that channelers who are not isolationist should have faced - the temptation of using their powers to elevate themselves, their country or their descendents ("a man will do for his children what he would never do for himself"), being open to blackmail via their families, being even less trusted to be impartial, etc.  For instance, it seems plausible that most of the AS that Hawkwing managed to kill were those embedded in their communities, who could be forced to give themselves up so that their families/people close to them would be spared.

Taim and his DFs also should have attempted to seize  families of the Asha'man to blackmail them into fighting for the Shadow/submitting to the turning. With their bonded wives horrifically experiencing the turning through the bond. Etc. Naturally none of that happened - and RJ almost certainly wouldn't have gone there either, because Asha'man having families was sign-posted as the right thing as opposed to AS not having them being wrong.

 

On 9/18/2023 at 8:14 PM, Slurktan said:

 The shadow hadn't been using those tactics as their troops primarily cannot use gateways.

The Shadow always had human troops too, particularly in the War of Power. Also one doesn't need to send troops  to do massive damage through one.

Edited September 20, 2023 by Maia

[Poobah]

1 hour ago, Maia said:

Ah, no. They use weaves for construction, Damer Flynn is as good a healer as Nynaeve, they are as good at the lesser battlefield healing as the AS, they Travel better, they have invented the wife bond and the perfect Compulsion addition to it, etc, etc. All in a few months, BTW.

All in a few months... with at least two forsaken helping, with a high rate of burnout, with the Pattern very obviously spawning enormous amounts of male channelers and rare talents because it's the last battle. Just like how Nynaeve reinvented healing and did something deemed impossible even in the Age of Legends, how Egwene figured out Traveling, Elayne how to make objects of the power.

[fionwe1987]

I'm going to skip a quote by quote reply, because I think this topic of strength is kinda derailing the show discussion a bit. That said, my knowledge of the stuff comes discussions that started in the early aughts, before the series was done, and I thought I'd just summarize what I know here.

The strength system was not consistent though the series. We know this from the Companion for a fact, but just sticking to the series, a lot of the early books have the leads talked about in terms that just don't pan out in the later books,and are best thought of as hyperbole. If Nynaeve were in fact a bonfire compared to Egwene's candle, suffice it to say most of the books post book 3 stop making sense in subtle and obvious ways. No such enormous gap can be found as the story progresses.

 

For example, in book 8, when Elayne and Nynaeve are together and surrounded by plenty of women from the Kin, the Sea Folk and the Aes Sedai, you really begin to see this play out, because Elayne makes all kinds of comparative comments, which line up with what's in the Companion, but not at all with earlier book statements about vast gulfs in strength.

 

But this is my reading. Plenty of folks see things very differently, but both from RJ's notes and in the books, you see him complicating the strength story and realigning things so the earlier vagueness is replaced by something more systematic. The language gets more precise (though never to actual numbers and percentages, which I'm just fine with). 

 

In the end, you have a pseudo mathematical system that kind of works, but still left Jordan unconstrained when it comes to any specific matchups. I think you absolutely can find a lot in the earlier books where statements are made about people's potential, or the Forsaken, that you can choose to buy as gospel, or treat as statements made from lack of knowledge/hyperbole.

For the show, almost none of this will matter, but I sure hope they don't overly focus on strength and instead look at skill and knowledge, which tended to be the determinative factors for any battle anyway. 

As for the differences between men and women, there's no denying at all the absurd implications of who leads circles, etc. Initiating one and leading one are not equivalent, and I don't see how one can claim balance between women and men if women can initiate links with another man, but never lead it.

That said, I disagree with Maia that the Asha'man are shown to be particularly skilled, or even all that destructive. They're just less uninhibited when it comes to violent displays, which all the female only organizations have had 3000 years to proscribe and control. The damane show no such inhibitions, and indeed, in battles where it is damane vs Asha'man, there's no massive difference in effectiveness.

The books clearly reject the idea that violence at this scale is any kind of cool. And sure, there's some "logic" in a very Western, military power focussed way, where converting the Aes Sedai and Wise Ones and Windfinders into killing machines makes sense. But I don't think it's sexism that prevented that in the books. It is understanding that uninhibited violence, especially at the scale the Power allows, is toxic and morally atrocious.

The story would be more "equal" if the women forced each other (linking is not a solution- you can't walk around linking with Novices and draining them to exhaustion. No sane human will stand for that), gave up the Oaths, and got to figuring out fancier ways to blow stuff up. But that's taking something that in our world is coded as male and "powerful" and sharing it out in this fictional world equally. 

But violence is not power. It may solve an issue in the short term, but let us think for a minute about the political impact of the Wise Ones and Windfinders, trusted members of their cultures who do heck of a lot more than blow up Trollocs, suddenly deciding to practice and dish our massive violence. Yes, towards the ostensibly laudable goal of destroying the Shadow, but what of the world and it's societies will be left behind? 

Rand, of course, created the Asha'man to be "living weapons" to be sacrificed to the meat grinder of the Last Battle, so they wouldn't remain to go mad and destroy the world. Taim twisted this into something worse, but the core failure was Rand's, as he realizes later. He gave the Asha'man no conception of hope or a moral system to follow except to kill when directed. When saidin was Cleansed, the stupidity of this was fully revealed, so I'm not sure why anyone would want this to be the route other characters take. 

In the world of WoT, as well as in reality, how you chose to fight what you identify as evil matters. And as a Vietnam vet, it's not surprising that "bigger and fancier explosions" was not RJ's solution. That's a little boy's worldview, and I think WoT would have been an infinitely worse (and stupider) series if RJ decided, for the sake of "equality", to make all the female channeler organizations into psychopath production factories like the Black Tower, all in the name of effectively fighting evil. That reeks of blind militarism, the kind whose toxicity RJ personally suffered from. I'm just fine he didn't make his series an advertisement for it.

Edited September 20, 2023 by fionwe1987

[fionwe1987]

5 hours ago, Poobah said:

All in a few months... with at least two forsaken helping, with a high rate of burnout, with the Pattern very obviously spawning enormous amounts of male channelers and rare talents because it's the last battle. Just like how Nynaeve reinvented healing and did something deemed impossible even in the Age of Legends, how Egwene figured out Traveling, Elayne how to make objects of the power.

Not to mention that pretty much all the more creative Asha'man are bonded to the Aes Sedai, and have the least time spent in the Black Tower. 

Damer, of course, got pointers from genetic engineer and Forsaken, Aginor, so I'm not sure how he counts as Nynaeve's equal, since she figured it out herself. 

Even the Aes Sedai have a ton of innovation going on once Elayne, Egwene and Nynaeve lead the way. We see that a lot of them did personal experimentation, and didn't share because of Ajah secrecy or because the Tower discouraged experimentation for safety reasons. 

Once they got the (mostly false) dataset of a string of "successes" from the Wondergirls, they went to town. The Yellows invented a whole new system of Healing once they got over the "don't use Fire and Earth for Healing" BS. They discovered a way to detect a man channeling and know what he was channeling. And we see them get plenty creative during the Last Battle.

As for compulsion, we see them discussing ways to modify the bond so that it doesn't take active effort to compel your warder, the way the traditional bond requires. This is what the Asha'man figure out, but as we've been told in the books, compulsion tends to be a very common "first" weave (the other being eavesdropping). Egwene shuts down all discussion of modifying the bond this way, correctly pointing out that this was Compulsion, which is banned, which is the sole reason the Aes Sedai don't do it. It's a morality thing, not a capability thing. 

Edited September 20, 2023 by fionwe1987

[karaddin]

@fionwe1987 

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a lot of the early books have the leads talked about in terms that just don't pan out in the later books

I think you're really getting at the core of the disagreement here. As I was joking about with Ilya those early books formed my impression while I was a teenager in a way that's hard to readjust later. I also started reading after The Eye of the World and reread the series before each new book prior to the slog so that was a lot of repetition of those earlier books on top of them being at a younger age. It all just looms larger in the subconscious interpretation.

I'm happy to concede the point that he intended to walk back some of that and it was ultimately meant to be much closer together. It doesn't help that Rand continues to seem that much stronger but a lot of that is due to always having his fat man angreal or better. 

On that note of concession, I also agree it's drifted away from the show and happy to move on.

[fionwe1987]

Just now, karaddin said:

@fionwe1987 

I think you're really getting at the core of the disagreement here. As I was joking about with Ilya those early books formed my impression while I was a teenager in a way that's hard to readjust later. I also started reading after The Eye of the World and reread the series before each new book prior to the slog so that was a lot of repetition of those earlier books on top of them being at a younger age. It all just looms larger in the subconscious interpretation.

Yeah I can see that. I began just before CoT was coming out. I've reread the series quite a few times, but the early books never had the chance to separately make an impression. I read through the first 9 books, if I remember right, over a week and a half. Then started over again promptly. Ah those were the days...

Just now, karaddin said:

I'm happy to concede the point that he intended to walk back some of that and it was ultimately meant to be much closer together. It doesn't help that Rand continues to seem that much stronger but a lot of that is due to always having his fat man angreal or better. 

And then Sanderson. He absolutely overpowered Rand for several scenes, then had him conveniently forget what he's capable of for others. 

In Knife of Dreams, we see Lews Therin take over and fight the Trollocs. He is impressive, but easily copied by Logain, and he peaks out at 12 weaves max. In the same book, we see Egwene do 14, all with less of the Power than Morghase uses to wave a handkerchief.

Sanderson thinks of and writes the Power very differently from RJ, so we'll never know where exactly all this would have gone. 

Just now, karaddin said:

On that note of concession, I also agree it's drifted away from the show and happy to move on.

Yep. One last One Power strength debate for me, to remember the good ol' times. 

[Myrddin]

I find the best way to enjoy the show is to treat it like the MCU. Accept that they've taken the origin comics as inspiration, but are changing as much as they need to make their narrative flow in a more limited time (8 seasons or 64 chapters).

Infinity Gauntlet, Civil War, Phoenix Saga (x2), etc. are very different on screen than the original comic runs. (And I'm anticipating Secret Wars to be nothing like I remember).

Amazon's WoT is another turning of the Wheel. I've stopped trying to reconcile the two.

[fionwe1987]

4 minutes ago, Myrddin said:

Amazon's WoT is another turning of the Wheel. I've stopped trying to reconcile the two.

Yes. I just wish they'd really lean into that, as opposed to this being something we must tell ourselves. 

[karaddin]

I wonder if it's for the sake of the show only watchers. Despite all the evidence to the contrary (remembering again I was a young teenager at the time of forming this opinion lol) I was convinced that the reason we were seeing "this" turning in the books was because it really was "the last battle" so the revelation of "lol no, it's a cycle, no beginning or end remember" still managed to land as a surprise that worked for me. 

Openly admitting it's another turning implicitly gives that away to anyone that might otherwise be foolish enough to make the same mistake as me.

[IlyaP]

4 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I wonder if it's for the sake of the show only watchers. Despite all the evidence to the contrary (remembering again I was a young teenager at the time of forming this opinion lol) I was convinced that the reason we were seeing "this" turning in the books was because it really was "the last battle" so the revelation of "lol no, it's a cycle, no beginning or end remember" still managed to land as a surprise that worked for me. 

Openly admitting it's another turning implicitly gives that away to anyone that might otherwise be foolish enough to make the same mistake as me.

I've just accepted it's a different turning of the wheel. There's simply no other way to reconcile the source material with this adaptation. 

[SpaceChampion]

Accepting an adaptation is an adaptation must be so hard, you all have my sympathies.

[Arakasi]

It shouldn’t be that hard with this series of books where multiple times in the series they go over alternate realities (both real and imagined) where things turned out slightly differently. And regardless of that they were going to have to cut tons of things. Sure we can debate the merits of straight cuts vs restructurings/merging but I think we’ve already hashed that out.

[fionwe1987]

9 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

Accepting an adaptation is an adaptation must be so hard, you all have my sympathies.

That's hardly the question. Is it a good adaptation? I'd argue it'd be a better one if it leaned into the "another turning of the Wheel" idea, and gave up the halfhearted attempts at staying true to the books. 

An adaptation of WoT was always going to be abridged and very different, especially with the short run times they're being given. A better adaptation would be one that looks at the themes of the story and preserves them, and the important characters and their interactions.

So far, I won't say they're there, though this season, I can at least see some signs of them trying to do this. Once the COVID related plot changes get ironed out to the extent they can be, it'll be interesting to see how they handle the rest. 

Edited September 21, 2023 by fionwe1987