Wheel of Time 4: Burning Threads [Book Spoilers]

[IlyaP]

11 hours ago, IFR said:

I suppose woke can in some instances be targeted at black people, but in modern parlance it has become a generalized word for over-reactionary progressiveness - and progressive here does not mean a positive progression, but rather a negative change from the established state.

Regardless of how it's been misappropriated, it's still a term that white folx, like it or not, stole from the black community. That's a historic fact that I encourage everyone to simply accept, alongside the inescapable fact that things change and if a person doesn't like our increasingly tolerant world ("a negative change from the established"), well, sorry, that's a them problem. Same-sex marraige, increased civil rights, an increased number of BIPOC actors in film and TV (and not nearly enough in publishing), increased minority voices, etc., these are net social positives. 

11 hours ago, IFR said:

Let's take an easy example that most people would agree on. The Netflix documentary of Cleopatra..

Deferring to a Roman specialist on this. Professor Devereaux has written on this quite intelligently, and I'm pretty much of the same position as him. 

11 hours ago, IFR said:

Let's also take another example: Dune. Liet-Kynes was gender swapped. It has no impact on the story, and was clearly made for the sole purpose of the social impact of representation. This is very common now. This is something many view as overreactionary progressiveness. There is an easy word for that description, and it has nothing to do with targeting black people.

What it does do is give more black actors/actresses roles and cultural exposure and exposed international audiences to the acting powerhouse that is Sharon Duncan-Brewster. It's a terrific casting choice and the gender/race swap is such a non issue for a role whose gender/race is immaterial to the plot.  

11 hours ago, IFR said:

You object to a word evolving outside the domain of the community where it originates. This is simply the nature of words, and it happens all the time. Woke, incel, misogyny, PC, elitist, etc., these words all meant something specific, but then became a broad, offhand way to refer negatively to general ideas unrelated to their original specific meaning.

Excusing it away with "just because everyone did it" bandwagonning is not a terrific position to take, especially if you've a desire to address and correct historical wrongs. 

11 hours ago, IFR said:

Well, sure, it is absolutely a sign of diversifying, it literally is imposing a change on a story in order to diversify. If you care about social impact in that direction over story, then it's a positive thing, and fortunately for Dune, the story impact is very minimal.

For many other shows, the story impact of forced diversification can range from mild to profound.

And Hollywood has not gone the positive direction of finding original property that accommodates diversification. They instead have been opting to select non-diverse works and impose diversification on them.

This is not a new trend, and has been going on since forever in so many mediums and I don't know why you or anyone else cares or are bothered. Did you kvetch when Johnny Rico was white-washed in Starship Troopers? Or when Sam Jackson was cast as Nick Fury instead of a white dude? Like, seriously, dude, the only people who make noise about this are people with unexamined racist anxieties. Everyone else gets on with their day. 

I'm going to quote Neil Gaiman now, who stated this in typical elegant Gaimanesque (Gaimanian?) fashion: 

"Oh, and occasionally, you get people shouting at us for having made up all of these gay characters who weren’t in the comics, and then we’d go ‘Have you read the comics?’ And they’d go ‘No.’ And we’d go, ‘They were gay in the comics.’ And they’d go ‘You’re just woke and nobody is going to watch your horrible show.’ And then we went Number 1 in the world for four weeks. And they went ‘It’s all bots! We hate you. You’re woke.’ It’s a weird silliness. These complainers don’t like gay people, they don’t like Black people, and they don’t like women. And if you look at their profiles, they don’t like vaccines, they don’t like Democrats, and they’re not big on voting."

11 hours ago, IFR said:

Now if you have a better shorthand, I'd like to know it. I mean, I don't even begin to see how using woke in the context of this show is harming the black community. You'll have to explain that one to me. As I've expressed before, I don't personally like the word. Like the other ones I mentioned above, it comes across as juvenile.

Why not simply state "Ilya, this is a show written by lefty liberal progressives, and I don't like that, because I identify as a conservative (ed  note: or Liberal, if you're in Australia, which...still confuses me) and I have complex emotional ties to this text and I don't like the decisions they're making and I find them socially repugnant" or somesuch. 

At least then you're being honest with everyone else about your politics and stances, rather than using a hopeless useless word whose meaning, as numerous comedians have observed, ostensibly means "I don't like a certain thing so I'm going to call it woke!". The term has honestly crossed the threshold into absurdist territory and no longer means anything useful, and those who use it only invite derision upon themselves. Like Ron DeSantis. 

Like, my dude, there are so many things in this show I don't like, and it's simply impossible for every adaptation to be everything to everyone. So instead, just treat this adaptation as a different turning of the wheel of time, where the narrative outcomes were a little like the turning that produced the tale told in the novels, but with slightly different changes. And an inferior soundtrack. 

[karaddin]

5 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

 (ed  note: or Liberal, if you're in Australia, which...still confuses me) 

Think Liberal as in neoliberal rather than liberal as in soy lattes. /tangent

[IlyaP]

1 minute ago, karaddin said:

Think Liberal as in neoliberal rather than liberal as in soy lattes. /tangent

Muchas gracias, senorita! It never made any sense to me when I moved here. I just stood there, slackjawed and wondered "WHAT ARE YOU DOING AUSTRALIA". 

[IlyaP]

(Also: soy lattes are pretty awesome with the right soy milk. Fact.)

[karaddin]

19 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

(Also: soy lattes are pretty awesome with the right soy milk. Fact.)

Soy mocha is my preferred coffee in fact, adding chocolate can only improve things!

[IlyaP]

8 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Soy mocha is my preferred coffee in fact, adding chocolate can only improve things!

Small Talk Coffee and Snacks in Dulwich Hill and Glebe have really good soy coffees - and snacks! - should you ever happen to be in either suburb. Used to live near the Dulwich Hill location. Man, that place: mwah. After years of awful American coffee, that place was like some kind of reward for my years of suffering.

[IFR]

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Regardless of how it's been misappropriated, it's still a term that white folx, like it or not, stole from the black community. That's a historic fact that I encourage everyone to simply accept, alongside the inescapable fact that things change and if a person doesn't like our increasingly tolerant world ("a negative change from the established"), well, sorry, that's a them problem.

You seem quite certain you've come upon the objective truth of the matter. I certainly disagree. In some ways, society has become increasingly tolerant. In some, we have become increasingly intolerant. But going into detail would lead to endless posts off-topic, so if you want to discuss this further I suggest starting a thread.

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Same-sex marraige, increased civil rights, an increased number of BIPOC actors in film and TV (and not nearly enough in publishing), increased minority voices, etc., these are net social positives

I agree, with the caveat that diversification, while a desirable outcome, should be appropriate for the story being told.

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Deferring to a Roman specialist on this. Professor Devereaux has written on this quite intelligently, and I'm pretty much of the same position as him.

Ok. I will raise you many experts, and then the director herself stating that the casting was a political act because she "felt" that Cleopatra should be black.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna81924

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

What it does do is give more black actors/actresses roles and cultural exposure and exposed international audiences to the acting powerhouse that is Sharon Duncan-Brewster. It's a terrific casting choice and the gender/race swap is such a non issue for a role whose gender/race is immaterial to the plot.  

Powerhouse may be going a little far. She did a decent job in a small role.

I agree it had minimal impact, and said so myself. I was using it as an example to illustrate the spectrum of story impact that forced diversification has, with Dune being an instance of very little. Wheel of Time is an occasion where it has a pretty significant impact. I know a lot of people in this thread disagree, but a good amount of the story had to be changed and (in my view) has been rendered nonsensical. It is not at all immaterial to the plot.

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Excusing it away with "just because everyone did it" bandwagonning is not a terrific position to take, especially if you've a desire to address and correct historical wrongs. 

I'm of course going to disagree that you get to choose what words are allowed to evolve and what words aren't. But as I said before you took us on this long digression, I'm willing to accommodate your desire and use whatever word puts you at ease for clear communication.

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

This is not a new trend, and has been going on since forever in so many mediums and I don't know why you or anyone else cares or are bothered. Did you kvetch when Johnny Rico was white-washed in Starship Troopers?

Of course not! That was the point. The movie was actively mocking the book. Didn't you notice the Nazi uniforms? I think it would have diminished the satire if you had a Filipino Nazi. Part of the hilarity was the whitewashing.

I have no problem with The Great being hugely anachronistic either, because it's part of the humor.

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Or when Sam Jackson was cast as Nick Fury instead of a white dude?

This didn't bother me either. I very much dislike Marvel comics and Marvel comic book movies, so I don't care what changes they make.

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Like, seriously, dude, the only people who make noise about this are people with unexamined racist anxieties. Everyone else gets on with their day.

And I suppose that since in this discussion I'm "making noise", the implication is that I'm a racist? Interesting coming from someone who very recently was pleading for civility.

Just because I don't agree with your views on the importance of representation even at the expense of the story (or are you arguing that forced diversification cannot have any impact on a story?), does not make me a racist. I hope you are able to understand this, and in the future be less eager to call the person you're conversing with a racist.

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

"Oh, and occasionally, you get people shouting at us for having made up all of these gay characters who weren’t in the comics, and then we’d go ‘Have you read the comics?’ And they’d go ‘No.’ And we’d go, ‘They were gay in the comics.’ And they’d go ‘You’re just woke and nobody is going to watch your horrible show.’ And then we went Number 1 in the world for four weeks. And they went ‘It’s all bots! We hate you. You’re woke.’ It’s a weird silliness. These complainers don’t like gay people, they don’t like Black people, and they don’t like women. And if you look at their profiles, they don’t like vaccines, they don’t like Democrats, and they’re not big on voting."

I have no idea how this is pertinent to this discussion. I obviously have read The Wheel of Time books and am specifically discussing changes (although when it comes to the magic system, I do not remember enough from the books, so my criticisms are focused on the internal logic presented in the show).

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Why not simply state "Ilya, this is a show written by lefty liberal progressives, and I don't like that, because I identify as a conservative

You may want to reexamine your own prejudices if this is the conclusion you arrived at. While I find it perfectly believable that the writers are indeed lefty liberal progressives, so am I.

The first president I voted for was Joe Biden. I voted Democrat all the way. I support most of their policies. I fully support gay marriage, transgender rights (including their presence in women's sports, which even among liberals is controversial). I'm pro choice (I mean - the thought of being forced to carry is an obviously awful thing for me), and I'm pro gun control - to the point that I advocate the revocation of the Second Amendment. I support many of the more liberal economic policies, to the point where most in the US would consider me to be a socialist. I support Affirmative Action, and many other liberal policies.

But because I don't support stories being altered for non-narrative purposes, you're ready to smugly declare me a conservative. You've implied I'm a racist. You threw that Neil Gaiman quote suggesting that my motivation is really that I don't like gay people, like black people, or like women (by the way - I am a woman).

Very civil indeed.

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

At least then you're being honest with everyone else about your politics and stances, rather than using a hopeless useless word whose meaning, as numerous comedians have observed, ostensibly means "I don't like a certain thing so I'm going to call it woke!". The term has honestly crossed the threshold into absurdist territory and no longer means anything useful, and those who use it only invite derision upon themselves. Like Ron DeSantis.

If you had paid attention to the conversation, I didn't use the word woke. Someone else did, and then I said that while I don't like the word, by the definition of the word it does apply. And it is not meaningless. I gave you a definition that has real meaning, and can be used in a discussion. You just don't like it.

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Like, my dude, there are so many things in this show I don't like, and it's simply impossible for every adaptation to be everything to everyone. So instead, just treat this adaptation as a different turning of the wheel of time, where the narrative outcomes were a little like the turning that produced the tale told in the novels, but with slightly different changes. And an inferior soundtrack.

I enjoy the show. I've said this before. I said it was like watching Starship Troopers, which is kind of a disservice to Starship Troopers. That movie was very self aware. It would be more accurate to compare the experience to Wiseau's The Room.

Part of the enjoyment is making fun of it. I would say that's most of the enjoyment. And so that's what I do. And I've made fun of many aspects of the show, not just this discussion on whether it's 'woke'. You are very fixated on this particular issue, and I respond to your comments.

And I think it's perfectly all right to do so, just as well as anyone who feels at liberty to praise the show because that gives them pleasure to do so.

Edited October 10, 2023 by IFR

[Poobah]

50 minutes ago, IFR said:

You may want to reexamine your own prejudices if this is the conclusion you arrived at. While I find it perfectly believable that the writers are indeed lefty liberal progressives, so am I.

The first president I voted for was Joe Biden. I voted Democrat all the way. I support most of their policies. I fully support gay marriage, transgender rights (including their presence in women's sports, which even among liberals is controversial). I'm pro choice (I mean - the thought of being forced to carry is an obviously awful thing for me), and I'm pro gun control - to the point that I advocate the revocation of the Second Amendment. I support many of the more liberal economic policies, to the point where most in the US would consider me to be a socialist. I support Affirmative Action, and many other liberal policies.

But because I don't support stories being altered for non-narrative purposes, you're ready to smugly declare me a conservative. You've implied I'm a racist. You threw that Neil Gaiman quote suggesting that my motivation is really that I don't like gay people, like black people, or like women (by the way - I am a woman).

I've very deliberately not gotten involved in this lengthy tangent and I don't want to but on this I feel that I have to point out that you've spent pages and pages, hundreds, probably thousands of words, complaining about "wokeness" and whether you want it to be or not this language and the way it is being used is strongly suggest right wing sympathies to say the least. I would say it's a dog whistle but it's quite overt - to anyone who has spent any time on social media it's an obvious and clear correlation. You've discussed how words come to take on new meanings and be used by new groups for new things and that's true, and currently when you see the word woke being used as a derisive term it's by a group of people you clearly don't want to be associated with. And no matter how much dressing up in pointy white robes is a totally neutral act to you and you don't have a racist bone on your body etc. you have to acknowledge that if you do it a ton of people are gonna quite naturally conclude that you're a racist, and you're kinda doing the linguistic equivalent of putting on that uniform with all the "woke=bad" stuff. 

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Poobah said:

and you're kinda doing the linguistic equivalent of putting on that uniform with all the "woke=bad" stuff. 

There's plenty of leftists who have pointed out that "woke" is a word they'll use because the people advocating the grab-bag of policies and ideologies are refusing to provide a term for themselves. Freddie deBoer, a hardcore leftist socialist, has made useful posts on this subject. 

I think, last of all, that if I hear another allusion to a poster being racist in this thread, I'll just tell people to go find some other forum to discuss this series, because it's not worth my time to police this about a show I don't even watch. Or, if you think someone is actually saying racist stuff, actually report it rather than arguing about it. Or take it to private messages.

 

Edited October 10, 2023 by Ran

[IlyaP]

3 hours ago, IFR said:

<snip miles of lines of text>.

As per Ran's request, I'm dropping the topic altogether. Sorry. 

Edited October 10, 2023 by IlyaP

[karaddin]

@Ran to be fair to poobah I didn't read that last post you're replying to as actually saying IFR is that, but rather that consistently using that language is going to lead some people to draw the conclusion and if that association isn't desired (and it very much sounds like it isn't) then using other language might be more productive.

IFR may not be interested in following that advice of course and is entirely within rights to not do so. 

That just seems to have been more of an issue in past discussions than this occasion. All that said I'm certainly happy to move the conversation along, I haven't been getting involved in it either. 

[Gaston de Foix]

So...I've been reading "AMOL" again and the writing leaves much to be desired.  This is an actual sentence in the book: 

"He had hated to leave Mat with Mashadar, but was confident—from a look Mat had given him after falling—that his friend could survive the mist, and knew what he was doing." 

What did book readers think when the book came out? Was it satisfying? Is the show going to be able to do it justice?

I'm struggling to see how the Rand/DO confrontation scenes can be done without extensive (and expensive) CGI. 

   

[Corvinus85]

11 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

So...I've been reading "AMOL" again and the writing leaves much to be desired.  This is an actual sentence in the book: 

"He had hated to leave Mat with Mashadar, but was confident—from a look Mat had given him after falling—that his friend could survive the mist, and knew what he was doing." 

What did book readers think when the book came out? Was it satisfying? Is the show going to be able to do it justice?

lol, I'm not sure that's the worst of it. Sanderson overused some words to the point I really got irritated. Like everyone freezes when they suddenly stop. I can't remember in which book there is a line where Egwene freezes but moves at the same time. Mediocre writer. I don't understand why he's so popular.

As for AMOL, it's among my least favorite in the series because of Sanderson's exhaustive writing. The battles are too drawn out and a lot of plotlines are quickly resolved with a sledgehammer. The Gathering Storm is the best of the Sanderson books, but only because of Rand's and Egwene's plotlines.

That being said, RJ should have gotten rid of Fain completely in Winter's Heart.

18 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

I'm struggling to see how the Rand/DO confrontation scenes can be done without extensive (and expensive) CGI. 

Does that particular scene need a lot of CGI? It could be Rand in a cave facing darkness. All the battles would require way more CGI than Rand's final confrontation.

[fionwe1987]

29 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

So...I've been reading "AMOL" again and the writing leaves much to be desired.  This is an actual sentence in the book: 

"He had hated to leave Mat with Mashadar, but was confident—from a look Mat had given him after falling—that his friend could survive the mist, and knew what he was doing." 

What did book readers think when the book came out? Was it satisfying? Is the show going to be able to do it justice?

I was glad we got some closure. The writing was terrible. I am to this day annoyed that despite all the characters being in one place multiple times, we got scenes of random Trolloc bands vs randomly human band more often than conversations between major characters who had history and shared plot.

RJ was an overly descriptive writer, but his visual intuition was good, and that comes through. If I'm in an RJ scene, I can picture where people are, and as you track their movements through the scene, it all makes sense, for the most part. 

With Sanderson, you will often have characters teleporting within the room, or doing entirely contradictory things. And Sanderson just doesn't know how to write big battles. This is less of an issue in his own work, but here, it really shows. 

Beyond that, the ending was reasonably surprising given the number of possible solutions that had been theorized, while the surprise worked well with what we knew before. 

But RJs own lack of a plan for the Seanchan is something that shapes the novel, and the ending there is infuriating. 

For a novel written based on sparse notes, by an author not native to the series, it's fine, I guess. 

29 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

I'm struggling to see how the Rand/DO confrontation scenes can be done without extensive (and expensive) CGI. 

Some of it, but other parts of the confrontation are scenes of Rand talking to one character or other, basically. 

Edited October 10, 2023 by fionwe1987

[David Selig]

4 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

The writing was terrible. I am to this day annoyed that despite all the characters being in one place multiple times, we got scenes of random Trolloc bands vs randomly human band more often than conversations between major characters who had history and shared plot.

I very much agree. We get a million repetitive tedious fighting scenes which didn't matter in the grand picture yet we didn't get a Siuan and Moiraine reunion. Or a meeting between Egwene and Cadsuane. Or a Lini and Elayne reunion (so much comedy potential wasted). Or even a reunion between the ta'veren trio. Egwene and Gawyn got married offscreen and no other character reacted to it, not even Elayne. IIRC Elayne and Egwene didn't even talk to each other once after Merrilor and all we got from the potential of interesting friction between them after Elayne was made the Supreme commander of the forces of the Light was a decision by Silviana and Egwene to start calling "Elayne Sedai" instead by her "civil title".

And there some really embarassing continuity errors by Sanderson and Team Jordan, like Mat and Min acting like old buddies even though they have never interacted before in the series.

[Corvinus85]

I know that the show has always intended to combine books, which we've already seen, but it's going too far when they combined Rand's side wounds. The SL dagger at the end of a staff. Come on!!! (*sarcasm)

[IFR]

2 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

So...I've been reading "AMOL" again and the writing leaves much to be desired.  This is an actual sentence in the book: 

"He had hated to leave Mat with Mashadar, but was confident—from a look Mat had given him after falling—that his friend could survive the mist, and knew what he was doing." 

What did book readers think when the book came out? Was it satisfying? Is the show going to be able to do it justice?

I'm struggling to see how the Rand/DO confrontation scenes can be done without extensive (and expensive) CGI. 

   

I read the series when it was complete, and the transition from Jordan to Sanderson was very jarring. Jordan is not a masterful writer, but I do enjoy his prose and the content, and Sanderson simply doesn't measure up.

That said, he wrote over a million words concluding a very long, very dense series of another person's work, and he did it in just a few years. That's impressive. And we know how badly concluding another person's work can end up, having watched season 8 of Game of Thrones.

But as we've seen from the show, there are far less capable writers out there than Sanderson. Sanderson managed to capture the personality of many of the characters pretty well, with Mat being the most glaring outlier. The show has been much worse at this, and characters such as Lan are far more egregious than Mat.

Also to Sanderson's credit, he seemed to care about writing something consistent to Jordan's vision, and made an (admittedly flawed) effort to follow the mechanics of his world. The writers of the show either don't care or think they can improve it with their changes, which has resulted in a string of plot holes, logically bankrupt scenarios, and general absurdity.

One of the great things about the show is that it really allows one to appreciate the scale and uniqueness of Sanderson's accomplishment. It could have been much, much worse. I shudder to think about how it would be if someone like Judkins was tasked with finishing the series.

[David Selig]

I have a pretty low opinion of Judkins' abilities as a writer, but this is a really flawed comparison. Sanderson was specifically hired to write his WoT volumes as close to Jordan's vision and volumes as possible because he wasn't adapting the work in another medium, he was continuing it. Judkins is making an adaptation and his main objective is to make a successful TV show based on The Wheel of Time book series, not to stick as close as possible to the books.

And I doubt Judkins is trying to depict Lan as the same character as he is in the books and falling badly, he (or his Amazon bosses) probably thought Book Lan is a a pretty boring character who needed major changes to be interesting to the tv audience.

[IFR]

7 minutes ago, David Selig said:

I have a pretty low opinion of Judkins' abilities as a writer, but this is a really flawed comparison. Sanderson was specifically hired to write his WoT volumes as close to Jordan's vision and volumes as possible because he wasn't adapting the work in another medium, he was continuing it. Judkins is making an adaptation and his main objective is to make a successful TV show based on The Wheel of Time book series, not to stick as close as possible to the books.

And I doubt Judkins is trying to depict Lan as the same character as he is in the books and falling badly, he (or his Amazon bosses) probably thought Book Lan is a a pretty boring character who needed major changes to be interesting to the tv audience.

True enough, and a good point.

I will however shift my position to saying that much of the ending Sanderson had to invent on his own, without the benefit of Jordan's notes as a guide.

And almost all of the show is purely invented content, with either a vague relation or no relation at all to the books. 

Comparing invented scene to invented scene, I think that Sanderson was much better.

You can point out that the invented scenes in the show are naturally diminished because we have the superior scenes in the books to reference them against, and Sanderson doesn't have that problem. But all the same, it makes Sanderson's accomplishment in my mind pretty impressive.

[Corvinus85]

I don't think Harriet McDougal would have agreed to have Sanderson's books published if they deviated greatly from her husband's vision. So Sanderson really have made his own thing even if he wanted. She was his editor, too.

Edited October 10, 2023 by Corvinus85