[Book Spoilers] Wheel of Time 3: Black Ajahpaloosa

[Slurktan]

29 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

So going back to other disappointments - the Seanchan.

Way too weak militarily. The damane are their main weapon, but the Ever Victorious Army has plenty of other effective weapons. Sad we didn't get a glimpse of one of the exotic creatures and that the soldiers had paper armor and crap fighting skills. 

That is the Forerunners, not the Ever Victorious Army. The only important ones (rakan) can be brought in with the actual return.  The others are needless CGI expenses.  Are you also going to complain they werent wearing their "insectoid" helmets?

[fionwe1987]

Good point on the s'redit in the menagerie. But I'm pretty sure even if some were in the battle in the book, none were actually mentioned directly as having any particular impact on the fighting.

[Arakasi]

My two nitpicks is pretty much all tied to a 3 minute part of the episode.  Which is really just the Moiraine sinking the ships plus the last part of the fight with Ishamael. If they had just toned down what Moiraine and Egwene did and given Rand a bit more it would have been ideal. Say have Moiraine instead of blowing them up just distracts or disables (which gets around the oaths issue) the main ship and then Rand is unshielded and then nukes some ships or uses his power to support Egwene. Basically I feel he should have channelled somewhere in that exchange. Also Moiraine shouldn’t have made the dragon just have it happen on its own.
 

But I think that is just the reality of having your top billed star be a side character. They can’t just give her the very little she does in the books where after the first book she is mainly there to annoy Rand and lecture him.
 

Other than that I found the episode to be excellent.

[Corvinus85]

16 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

That is the Forerunners, not the Ever Victorious Army. The only important ones (rakan) can be brought in with the actual return.  The others are needless CGI expenses.  Are you also going to complain they werent wearing their "insectoid" helmets?

The forces of the Forerunners are part of the EVA. The EVA is the name of their entire military. After the Falme defeat, Suroth goes on to conquer Tarabon. I'm not sure if the show Seanchan can pull that off, though the writing will contrive them to.

And yes, I will complain about the lack of insectoid helmets, thank you very much; much more original than skull helmets.

[Arakasi]

I think they did a really good job with this episode working around the fact they don’t have a crazy budget. Much better large scale thing than season 1. But it’s still clear they do have a budget so I can see why no cgi wolves and no weird creatures. That stuff is expensive to get right and I think money can be spent better elsewhere. (Like getting good actors which is what they’ve done)

[SpaceChampion]

Some interviews with Judkins today:

From https://collider.com/wheel-of-time-season-2-finale-rafe-judkins-interview/

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In Book 2 of Wheel of Time, Moiraine and Lan only had one chapter together. So we really looked at that chapter and tried to see the core of what's going on there, and what goes on there is this breakup and makeup of Lan and Moiraine. She tries to drive him away, and he is resolute and dogged and will not walk away from her no matter what she tries to do. That's the story we wanted to tell with them, [taking] the juice of what's in that chapter and expanding it out to carry across the season.

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It was really in the moment where he died in the show, and it felt like unfinished business for him. We thought it was very important for the audience to understand this idea of the Heroes of the Horn, [to] also visually see someone who had died coming back as a Hero there at the end, because then you begin to process what this really means. There is a little Easter Egg of a character that we've combined Uno with from later in the books; I think they'll know from the two swords what we're doing there. But it's an important piece of visual storytelling. We knew we wanted one of the heroes to be someone that you knew because it lets you understand what that means, that after you die you can be brought back as a Hero of the Horn to fight battles again.

He's Gaidal Cain, confirmed.

From https://screenrant.com/wheel-time-season-2-showrunner-rafe-judkins-interview/

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That’s kind of what we went for: really taking the Forsaken and looking at them and how they function in the whole series of books instead of how they function in books two and three. Ishamael and Lanfear are often just seen through Rand’s lens or through Perrin’s lens, and they just come in sort of as these scare moments. The humanization of them through the whole book series is so incredible and makes you so interested in them, and that they chose the Dark not necessarily because they're evil; they chose the Dark for extremely human reasons, and that's why they swore to the Shadow.

We wanted to take what you learn about Lanfear and Ishamael across the whole book series and put it into their characters right from the beginning. I don't want to make the audience wait for season five to love Lanfear as much as everyone loves Lanfear. You’ve got to love her right up front. And, you know, Natasha (O’Keeffe) does that.

on Brandon Sanderson's help in season 2:

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Brandon also consulted on the second season, and I value every minute I get with him because he's one of the great epic fantasy storytellers of our time. To be able to have his brain helping you build these storylines is fantastic. For season two, one of the ways he really helped was in making sure that those through lines and payoffs were clean and clear. We may not have done it exactly the same way, but he was incredibly helpful to me in always keeping my eye on those payoffs. Sometimes those can be easier to deliver in book form than television form, but we really need it to feel like that; an epic fantasy has to have that feeling, and he was so helpful in helping us find that this season.

From https://www.tor.com/2023/10/06/the-wheel-of-time-showrunner-rafe-judkins-talks-season-2-finale-among-other-things/

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There were a couple of things at play in expanding Liandrin’s character. First and foremost, she just has a lot of action in the books and when that comes to screen, she does a lot of the bad guy things that get done across these next few seasons. So really understanding who she is and why she’s doing the things she does was really important to us. We’re also building towards where, in the books, there’s a big confrontation between Nynaeve and Liandrin, in terms of Nynaeve spending an entire two books hunting for Liandrin and trying to find her. So we wanted to give emotional underpinning to that as well—what is the relationship between these two women before Nynaeve is sent to hunt her?  I see her as a mentor figure for Nynaeve within the Tower where we can learn a little bit about what she’s learning too.

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One of the most iconic scenes in book two is the face-off between Rand and Turak. But we haven’t done the storyline of Rand doing the sword forms with Lan… yet. It’s a story that’s coming. And so, in order to deliver on that scene, what we tried to do was find another scene to pair it up with and there’s this really great scene in book three.

Season two is a lot of books two and three combined. You have the iconic fight between Rand and Turak in book two and then—there’s not very many scenes of Rand in book three, but in one of them, he kills all these bandits, and they all bow to him at the end of the scene. And it’s quite disturbing in the books, and it’s quite unsettling. And so finding a way to put those two scenes together was what we intended at the beginning of the scene. It gives this dual life to Rand—we really need the audience to see the amount of power he has, even when he doesn’t really know how to use it, so that you can start to fear him as much as admire him. 

From https://www.vulture.com/article/wheel-of-time-season-2-showrunner-explains-adaptation-choices.html

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People were like, ‘Should we do some fantasy thing where his face changes?’ No. He is Mat. I commit to that 100 percent, and Dónal, the actor, commits to it 100 percent. If we both do that, nothing else matters.”

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Yes, we have been stanning Lanfear since the writers’ room; there’s one writer in particular who would do her best Lanfear all over the room. As soon as Natasha O’Keeffe got to Prague and started playing the character, everyone could tell that something really special was happening. On set, we use the drag-queen dial. I’ll be like, “You’re kind of like 80 percent drag queen in this scene right now, and we need you dialed down to a 70.” That’s the shorthand we use for Lanfear.

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The American accents were the final piece of it. I’d always said I don’t want American accents on the show because they read as modern and disrupt your suspension of disbelief in the fantasy world. So in the books, when Robert Jordan describes them as having a kind of Texan drawl, we’d always been like, “We can’t do that.”

But then I thought, what if? What if they were American? It would feel so foreign in our world, and foreign in fantasy. What we did in working with the actors was work off this clip of Americans during the Civil War era, so the accents still have this strange little texture to them, this sing-song quality that hopefully keeps it from feeling too modern yet still really disruptive to the audience.

 

[karaddin]

The Seanchan were weakened by having their strongest established damane pulled out of the fight and dedicated solely to shielding Rand including the one I think will turn out to be Alivia. If they'd been on the tower as well the catapult shot wouldn't have gotten through and I think you see the damane turn the tide of the battle (if you take the main characters there out of the equation - just talking about the performance of the EVA).

6 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

And they brought back the title sequence for the finale! Why? I hope they have a title sequence for season 3, but I want them to update it because it's too Aes Sedai centric.

I know there's something about writer remuneration in the new WGA contract that increases pay at the 66 minute mark, I wouldn't be surprised if the old contact had something similar and omitting the credits kept the episodes under that number but that's just complete speculation as there were a couple of other episodes that hit the same 69 minute run time. Maybe it's residuals to the company that did the title sequence. I'm assuming it's evil corporation screwing artists at some point lol.

4 hours ago, Slurktan said:

That is the Forerunners, not the Ever Victorious Army. The only important ones (rakan) can be brought in with the actual return.  The others are needless CGI expenses.  Are you also going to complain they werent wearing their "insectoid" helmets?

I think the raken will remain in but the rest of the creatures take the hit of being too expensive and weird. We've already got the dark spawn eating CGI budget and they're the most important for that. I'd rather the Ogier pressed into service as fighters having the budget spent on them rather than the nightmare creatures.

[IlyaP]

9 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

ETA: On the whole "woke" thing... can we define woke and stick to that definition, please? At least for this conversation? Otherwise, you can say "anti-woke" and use it to cover nearly any viewpoint.

Here you go: Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". 

Every time I see someone misuse this term as a shorthand for "anything I don't like", I twitch a little. If you've been misusing this term, please stop - my neck is getting sore and is in dire need of physiotherapy. 

[fionwe1987]

38 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Here you go: Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". 

Every time I see someone misuse this term as a shorthand for "anything I don't like", I twitch a little. If you've been misusing this term, please stop - my neck is getting sore and is in dire need of physiotherapy. 

Oh I know the actual meaning, I was just trying to point to the fact that the OP was definitely not using it that way, and there's no point debating a moving target that can change meaning to whatever is wanted. 

[IlyaP]

10 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

Oh I know the actual meaning, I was just trying to point to the fact that the OP was definitely not using it that way, and there's no point debating a moving target that can change meaning to whatever is wanted. 

There's a definition, and a very specific social context from which it emerged. That it's become some kind of weird superheated political hot potato over the last few years is a whole other matter that's not germane to the discussion at hand here and it would be best if all of us were in agreement on that.

If we're not going to use words with agreed upon definitions, we'll all ultimately end up talking past each other - or worse - yelling at each other, and giving poor @Ran a headache. When all I want is for Ran to have ice cream. 

Edited October 7, 2023 by IlyaP
Formatting matters, kids!

[IFR]

1 hour ago, IlyaP said:

Here you go: Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". 

Every time I see someone misuse this term as a shorthand for "anything I don't like", I twitch a little. If you've been misusing this term, please stop - my neck is getting sore and is in dire need of physiotherapy. 

This is an incomplete definition.

Here's a link to the full Merriam Webster definition:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woke

The conversation arose when I quoted this comment:

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Am I a bad person for enjoying the absolute anger certain youtubers are expressing over the show? The ones who wanted a drastically more faithful adaptation and use words like 'woke' and 'agenda'.

My interpration of woke used in the context of the quote was definition 2:

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disapproving : politically liberal or progressive (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme

I argued that this description can be fairly applied to the show. Obviously it's open to individual interpretation of what falls into the category of "unreasonable" or "extreme". But I personally think that is the approach of the show: a clear pattern of reducing the spotlight moments of the books from the men and really going hard to emphasize spotlight moments for women. It's also worth pointing out that race changing characters would also fit this definition - whether you agree that this is a positive thing or not, I think we're all aware that this was in order to "update the story for a modern audience"; or, as per the quoted defintion, pursue a 'politically liberal or progressive (as in matters of racial and social justice' approach. Naturally whether you heavily weight the social issue itself of race swapping, or whether you heavily weight impact of story will color your perspective on if these changes are 'extreme' or 'unreasonable'. I would say the show's oscillation on the matter of the gender essentialism would also fall into the definition of woke described above - again, whether you weight story impact or social impact more will probably color your perspective.

Many other examples have already been discussed. People of course are reluctant to use the term woke. I don't care for it myself. But I do think that using that definition is an accurate representation of the motivation of the show writers. You may disagree, but at least we can be specific about where we disagree, because it is correct to point out that not defining a conversation can lead to pointless miscommunication.

It is fair to ask for an agreed upon definition of what we're talking about, and so I hope this clarifies my portion of the conversation if there was any ambiguity.

Edited October 7, 2023 by IFR

[SpaceChampion]

https://nerdist.com/article/wheel-of-time-season-two-finale-showrunner-rafe-judkins-interview-forsaken-dragon-reborn-prophecy/

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A lot of times, you’ll see us take the 13 and make it eight because 13 is such a repeated number in The Wheel of Time series. A lot of times, we’re taking it and making it eight just because it’s simpler to produce eight clans of Aiel. It’s easier than 13. Eight Forsaken could be easier than 13 Forsaken. But I will neither confirm nor deny that there are eight Forsaken.

 

[Slurktan]

29 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

https://nerdist.com/article/wheel-of-time-season-two-finale-showrunner-rafe-judkins-interview-forsaken-dragon-reborn-prophecy/

 

I like that he said the Rand/Lan training is coming.

[IlyaP]

44 minutes ago, IFR said:

This is an incomplete definition.

No, it's the original, intended meaning, as any black american could tell you, given the term was created by and for the Black American community. 

 

[Knight of Ashes]

Anyone see Ryma, the Yellow Ase Dai who got, um, damaned, (is she a book character, btw?) amidst the battle and eventual rubble?

I know the sitter for the Blue Ajah was there.

[Scott_N]

After two really good episodes what a comedown that was. That mess should never have been broadcast.

Aside from the forsaken, including the new one, there was hardly anything I liked in this episode. And, of course, even when it comes to the forsaken the rug was pulled from under us. Ishy was nothing at all too fear as it turned out. I still hope he comes back, I suppose, because up until then he, along with Lanfear, have been the stars of the show but having been neutered this easily he won't carry much menace.

A terribly rushed episode where everything seemed to happen just because it needed to happen. Contrived beyond belief.

Ingtar's death was clearly an attempt to create a lasting, emotional moment on screen and feel completely flat.

The Heroes were cringe. Should have come with a trigger-warning for those of us still damaged by that awful Army of the Dead in RotK.

The catapult thing, taking out the entire tower? Awful. 

The Seanchan? What a pathetic excuse for an army.

Lan plucking arrows out the air and single-handedly dropping Seanchan soldiers left, right and centre was just as bad, probably worse, than when the Aiel woman dropped all those whitecloaks. It is stupid and not necessary. He can be a badass without being a superhuman and suspending physics.

Why didn't the Aes Sedai who were in Falme sink the Seanchan fleet when it arrived? Or when it lay at anchor in the harbor? It clearly takes very little effort to do so.

Given Nynaeve's incompetence at dealing with an arrow in the leg, I suspect I'd make a better wisdom. And her 'anxious face' is now seemingly a permanent feature. It just looks like she really needs to go but don't know where she might find a toilet. Writing or acting - not sure where the fault lies.

I've been critical of the Egwene actor but she has done well last half of the season. She seems ridicolously powerful but that's hardly the actor's fault. It does feel like hers is the main arc which is fine but it does make this Dragon dude feel a bit like extra baggage. It has been explained in the show why the Dragon is to be feared but nothing on screen so far has backed that up.

Lastly, it is not much of a prophecy, surely, if anyone - at any time - can just throw a dragon illusion around a tower and, hey, prophecy fulfilled?

Really disappointed. A car-crash season finale.

[IFR]

15 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

No, it's the original, intended meaning, as any black american could tell you, given the term was created by and for the Black American community. 

 

Oh, I see. I guess language is immutable and we should ignore the dictionary and common parlance and stick to the original definition of words. Are we going to insist to the LGBQT+ community that gay and queer doesn't mean what they claim it means?

[karaddin]

39 minutes ago, Knight of Ashes said:

Anyone see Ryma, the Yellow Ase Dai who got, um, damaned, (is she a book character, btw?) amidst the battle and eventual rubble?

I know the sitter for the Blue Ajah was there.

I believe she's in the background on the ship with Suroth (I've seen that said, didn't see her myself) so I don't think that bodes well for her.

---

I've been thinking about some of the other visual story telling the show has done with the weaves and I think there's some nice choices going on that complement what we've seen primarily from the Forsaken this season.

One question mark I've seen a few times was whether Moiraine should have been capable of destroying the ships at that distance and I was struck by how elaborate and drawn out her movement were for directing the flows and I don't think it's unrelated - she's using very large "threads" of the elements when doing that, it's slow and it leaves her quite vulnerable while she's doing it and it's in keeping with what we've seen from her going back to the first episode of season 1 (which included her getting hit as a result of that vulnerability).

Contrast that with all the highly effective one on one weaves we've seen this season - they're all small, finely controlled with minimal body movements required to focus. We saw that from the Forsaken, we saw that from Siuan both shielding Rand and her defensive blades, and we see it from Rand cutting down Turak and again when he steps up after he's unshielded.

Needing thicker weaves makes sense, at least visually, for long distance effects and it makes sense they're much harder and thus slower to weave - think of it as trying to weave with a fine thread vs a rubber hose, the hose will take more strength to bend and requires a greater radius when twisting. So it feels to me like the show is telling us Moiraine is better than the average Aes Sedai at those high volume long distance weaves, while Siuan has better than average control and speed and is probably more dangerous as a result.

Rand will need to do things that are long distance later, and we'll probably see how much easier it is for him than Moiraine at that time. But for now the most impressive channeling isn't the overwhelming power - it's the really fast, well controlled weaves that surprise the enemy and don't do a bunch of collateral and that's exactly what he did here.

ETA: in my size analogy here the size doesn't have to perfectly correlate with the amount of power flowing through it either, the flow rate and pressure within a smaller hose can result in more liquid passing through it than there is through a thicker hose. The idea is just that a thicker one can be projected further without dissipating and does have a higher "minimum power" requirement

Edited October 7, 2023 by karaddin
Separated my reply about Ryma to the rest

[IFR]

37 minutes ago, Scott_N said:

Lastly, it is not much of a prophecy, surely, if anyone - at any time - can just throw a dragon illusion around a tower and, hey, prophecy fulfilled?

Fully agree here, it's completely absurd. And the people of Falme are immediately aware of what the dragon represents and joyfully accept it? It's crazy that in the long history of Aes Sedai or false Dragons no one has made such a simple display as a maneuver for power.

In the books, the fight in the sky was a feat of such magnitude that not everyone could dismiss it like Whitecloaks as an Aes Sedai trick. In the show it literally is an Aes Sedai trick. In the book Rand's features were clear to everyone for many miles, as was his fight with Ishamael. In the show, clearly women who could channel fought a great battle, and then you see a fiery dragon and a random guy among other people standing on the tower. And since people believe that the Dragon Reborn could be a woman, there's really no reason to think (or want) it to be Rand.

In the books, Callandor is what really drove home that Rand was the Dragon Reborn. It was the significant feat in the prophecies that was impossible to deny for most people.

I have no idea how the show is going to resolve this. Or if the writers will even bother, since it doesn't seem like they care much beyond the rule of cool. And who know what the Aiel prophesies are in this show?

Edited October 7, 2023 by IFR

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, IFR said:

Oh, I see. I guess language is immutable and we should ignore the dictionary and common parlance and stick to the original definition of words. Are we going to insist to the LGBQT+ community that gay and queer doesn't mean what they claim it means?

I am very careful to not use the term queer (despite being queer) around elder gays because it can be extremely triggering. Words don't come history-free, and refusing to acknowledge that can be extremely hurtful and unempathetic.

In this particular context, when you use it beyond its intended service, you assist the enemy: regressive right-wing culture warriors 

The word has a history, and as Professor Elaine Richardson rightly stated, it promotes anti-blackness (https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188543449/what-does-the-word-woke-really-mean-and-where-does-it-come-from). 

Now I don't want to derail the thread further, so let's stop here before we annoy the moderators.