Sony to produce Wheel of Time TV series

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Anyone considering a reread, check out the audiobooks. They are absolutely fantastic. TBH I think the it's easier to get through the story through audio book than actually reading it.

Also, for people unaware, theres a comic series. Last time I checked seemed like it was abandoned though. Cool to see the designs anyways

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I, like seemingly many others, stopped at book 10 more than a decade ago. I remember almost nothing about the series, but I remember liking the previous books when I read them so looking forward to this.
 
zoku88 said:
I, like seemingly many others, stopped at book 10 more than a decade ago. I remember almost nothing about the series, but I remember liking the previous books when I read them so looking forward to this.
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Read a summary up to when Brandon Sanderson took over. The ending makes the entire series worth it
 
Sulik2 said:
Hopefully not. The Wheel of Time is not a bleak murder and sex filled rampage.
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WoT might play better with modern audiences than GoT. WoT is like a fantasy Star Wars were all the Jedi are women (with a deep story reason why). It definitely gets darker than Star Wars but it is more high fantasy than GoT and all of its rapey shit.
 
This is one of the first times I think they shouldn't stick too closely to the books. In fact, just make it a spiritual adaptation. I liked the series, but if they replaced the entire Rand foursome romance I would be fine with it. It read way too much like the Author's personal fantasy.
 
Hopeford said:
I imagine some heavy changes would be needed for the sake of pacing. I also imagine some minor scenes in the books would be given more focus because they'd make for good tv.

Like when Rand executes some of his own people to keep his law. It was a couple paragraphs, if that, but I imagine it would get a very intense scene because ambiguous morality involving executions would make for good television.

Likewise, I expect things like Mat's duel with Couladin to get a huge episode instead of happening offscreen.

Well...in perfect honesty, I think I just don't expect the series to happen or be good if it does, even though I love the books. But I'd love love love to be proven wrong.



I agree with you. I was mostly just joking because Mat was by far the greatest thing about the series. Like, his chapters were always way more fun than the other characters'.
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True, there are a lot of little things that happened off screen that would make for good TV.

Thom assassinating Galldrian
is another one that would go with the examples you mentioned.

Mat in general will be very difficult to show effectively on TV because
the guy has lucking the fuck out as a superpower.
It would be very easy for it to come across as cheesy shit instead of being portrayed as a thing that works in the context of the story.
 
zoku88 said:
I, like seemingly many others, stopped at book 10 more than a decade ago. I remember almost nothing about the series, but I remember liking the previous books when I read them so looking forward to this.
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Like a few people here, you stopped right where the slump ends and at the worst book, 11 by Jordan is pretty good, and then the last three co-authored by Sanderson are fantastic.
 
Akuun said:
Mat in general will be very difficult to show effectively on TV because
the guy has lucking the fuck out as a superpower.
It would be very easy for it to come across as cheesy shit instead of being portrayed as a thing that works in the context of the story.
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I guess a few careful small-scale shots to establish the idea and build from there? Like the rabbit foot episode of Supernatural.

I can only hope that unlike GoT, with the whole series done they can take the long view of what threads can be dropped, shortened, and moved around. Do a whole bunch of work with the main girls, shorten/edit Perrin's later stuff with Faile, drop the harem thing.
 
spootime said:
I'd be fine with Aviendha - theres just so much stuff to compress into a tv show I wonder if its even worth going into the past and future of the aiel. Theres a lot of really cool stuff they'll have to cut.
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They can't cut that, it's essential to the story. It explains how the Aiel came to be, it gives them much needed backstory. Personally I think it's some of the best worldbuilding in the series.

EDIT: If anything they need to cut a bunch of the Perrin/Faile stuff. Besides it being boring,
the capture and freeing of Faile takes 3 (!) books
.
 
Sulik2 said:
He
only has one hand at this point
and that sword makes his magic stronger, hes not really making a sword fighting pose.
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I've read all the books. I'm well aware. Still a dumb pose for a guy trained by a Warder.
 
Lanf said:
They can't cut that, it's essential to the story. It explains how the Aiel came to be, it gives them much needed backstory. Personally I think it's some of the best worldbuilding in the series.
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Yeah, they need that to set up what happens with the Aiel, which is one of the most important plot points in the series.
 
I started reading these books in about 1997? At the time I think only the first six or seven books were out. The last one I read I think was Knife of Dreams, basically because I got so sick of waiting for the books to come out. I must have reread the series up to that point three times because every time a new book would come out I would have forgotten a ton of the plot and felt like I needed to reread to catch back up. That became so exhausting that I just gave up on the series.

Maybe now that it's finished I can reread it all from the beginning and actually finish it.
 
Lanf said:
They can't cut that, it's essential to the story. It explains how the Aiel came to be, it gives them much needed backstory. Personally I think it's some of the best worldbuilding in the series.

EDIT: If anything they need to cut a bunch of the Perrin/Faile stuff. Besides it being boring,
the capture and freeing of Faile takes 3 (!) books
.
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Speaking of the Perrin/Faile stuff, I think out of all the plot threads that Sanderson had to wrap up, I thought how he handled the
Masema
plotline was the funniest.

He
just went "Okay, Faile comes in and stabs this fucker to death in the first chapter. Done. Now on with the rest of the fucking story."

And I 100% agree with his decision.
 
Hari Seldon said:
WoT might play better with modern audiences than GoT. WoT is like a fantasy Star Wars were all the Jedi are women (with a deep story reason why). It definitely gets darker than Star Wars but it is more high fantasy than GoT and all of its rapey shit.
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Rapey shit? WoT literally has a rape scene played for laughs. At least ASoIaF (can't comment on GoT) has the decency to portray it as a bad thing.
 
Dreamwriter said:
Why do you think that? Much of the books are scene descriptions, and it's got a lot of action in it. I think it'd translate quite well to TV. Potentially better than Game of Thrones, which is like 90% politics and intrigue.
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I can think of a lot of factors. Take the setting: it's pretty easy to approach Game of Thrones as a generic medieval setting, with knights and castles. It's pretty relatable so it's not until you delve more deeply that you see more nuance. The Wheel of Time is largely based on Early Modern Europe, and that's a more unfamiliar concept to communicate. To make matters worse, the stark differences between the societies in the Wheel of Time and our world play a big part in the story, and they're not going to be easy to explain on screen. Just trying to figure how to show off White Tower politics is going to be a big headache.

Next we have the storyline. It's huge, and complicated, and filled to brim with things like the technical bits of the magic system. It's sort of cool in book form, but I don't think that it translates very well.

And there are the characters. There are way more key figures in the Wheel of Time than there are in A Song of Ice and Fire so it's going to be more of a chore to juggle them. It's not too bad in the first couple of books, but starts getting pretty bad by book 3. I also feel that the characters themselves are going to be harder to pull off - the main characters especially seem really modern for the rest of the setting.

Don't get me wrong, I've read the books ages ago, and there are a couple of scenes that I'd love to see depicted. However, I have a hard time imagining them pulling it off successfully.

Hari Seldon said:
WoT might play better with modern audiences than GoT. WoT is like a fantasy Star Wars were all the Jedi are women (with a deep story reason why). It definitely gets darker than Star Wars but it is more high fantasy than GoT and all of its rapey shit.
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One difference is that the rules for Jedi are fast and loose and a viewer doesn't have to pay that much attention to it. The rules for channeling are complex, dense, and they play an extremely important role in the story.
 
4Tran said:
One difference is that the rules for Jedi are fast and loose and a viewer doesn't have to pay that much attention to it. The rules for channeling are complex, dense, and they play an extremely important role in the story.
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Yeah, the rules and structures really make it stand apart from other magic systems that just act...Magically.

I was pretty bemused when halfway through Sword of Truth, Goodkind aped weaves, the types of power, sisters of the light/dark, and collars that control you, lol.
 
Dreamwriter said:
One thing to note, when they first revealed this TV show they said the series was specifically about Eye of the World. It may not move on to other books at all.
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LordOfChaos said:
That...Doesn't seem like a lot of content for a whole TV series. Just season 1 to start with maybe?
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The Eye of the World was fairly self-contained. IIRC it was actually almost retcon-y how the it turns out that
Ishamael/Ba'alzamon that Rand beats at the end is not actually The Dark One.
At least from what I remember...I should re-read these.

Anyway, I could see a first season being designed as a complete story that then would be expanded into the rest of the saga based on its reception.
 
You know, despite the fact that I fucking hate Wheel of Time and think it's utter shit, I still said I would love to see an adaptation that can salvage the few positive aspects and write it into something that's consumable in an adaptation.

It would basically be a different product as a whole, but that's basically what Game of Thrones is to A Song of Ice and Fire. Except the adaptation could easily be an improvement!
 
LordOfChaos said:
Yeah, the rules and structures really make it stand apart from other magic systems that just act...Magically.

I was pretty bemused when halfway through Sword of Truth, Goodkind aped weaves, the types of power, sisters of the light/dark, and collars that control you, lol.
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But this is one thing they could simplify - the rules could still impact the story, but just be cleaner.
 
I'll be honest, I don't think a live action show can do this series justice. May be animation. How are they going to do Nynaeve vs Moghedien in the garden scene. It was exciting in the book, but the book also said it's basically looks like two girls chilling around.

At time it's also way more shonen rather than high fantasy
 
I always wondered how a WoT tv series would look. Since the plebs can't see the magic, the fights would be just two people staring intensively at each other lol

(I know they'd likely do their best to show the weaves and threads but it amuses me to think of it that way)
 
hey_monkey said:
But this is one thing they could simplify - the rules could still impact the story, but just be cleaner.
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They can simplify the magic system, but it's such an integral part of the story that talking about its details at great length is unavoidable unless they were to make wholesale changes.

Oh, and I forgot just how much specialized terminology there is in the books. Either the vast majority of that would have to go or they would risk losing the audience.

Media said:
I always wondered how a WoT tv series would look. Since the plebs can't see the magic, the fights would be just two people staring intensively at each other lol

(I know they'd likely do their best to show the weaves and threads but it amuses me to think of it that way)
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Showing the weaves is going to be one of the draws of the show, so there's no doubt that the magic will be animated whenever it makes sense to do so. I'd imagine that most of the channeling in the first book will not be animated because most of the cast can't figure out what's going on.
 
As much as I love the book series, I can't see this turning out well. I can't imagine how you would do most of the battle scenes, especially where channelers are involved. The last book has like
400 straight pages of fighting at one point, not counting several other major battles
plus stuff like
Dumai's wells, Falme, Malden
, etc.

You could probably do Eye of the World pretty well though, no major battles, only one major channeler for most of the book, very LotR-esque that might make it feel a bit cliche now days though in the opening.
 
I tried to get into WoT but the amount of reading is cumbersome. I thought I could cure it by listening to an audiobook but I found it put me to sleep more often than piquing my interest.

I read a lot too; this is too much reading though.

For example, the entire Bible audiobook takes about 70 hours. WoT takes 17 days.
 
Kabuki Waq said:
I would not mind books 8 to 10 being condensed to a 5 minute Montage.
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Haha that's a bit extreme, but yeah, overall they can easily cut a LOT of characters and subplots and still retain a very faithful adaptation. There were really some boring and meaningless chapters in the 9 books I've completed, but each of them had some pretty cool moments too. It'll all boil down to how good the writing team is.
 
Not the fantasy series I would most to be turned into a tv series. Currently going through them as audio books. Ok at best. It is a cool world but far from the best fantasy I have read. Tried reading them when I was younger. Think I got to book 7.

I would rather have seen Feist or Hobb books being books being adapted into tv series. But I am kind of hoping HBO will do that when they are done with RR Martins books.
 
NewGame said:
I thought I could cure it by listening to an audiobook but I found it put me to sleep more often than piquing my interest.
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Yeah, I just started the audiobook of Eye of the World today, and damn, they suck the life out of my favorite series. The male reader is almost monotone in his delivery, except he changes his voice for the characters. I'm hoping the female reader is better, and he gets more interesting after chapter 1.
 
Baliis said:
I can't imagine how you would do most of the battle scenes, especially where channelers are involved.
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Why couldn't you do them the same way battle scenes are done in Game of Thrones? They've had some pretty huge battles, including ones chock full of special effects.
 
man, I started to read WOT in the 90s, got the first book from a friend who was bored of it. The German versions divided one book into many, probably for profit .. Bought all of the remaining books and even wrote to the publisher as they became really slow with the translation .. So I picked up the next book in english which helped to raise my grades at school :)

Stopped reading after Path of Daggers, as it really bored me down ..

But loved the game in the Unreal Engine.
 
NiiloPielinen said:
Isn't like half the White Tower -stuff basically lesbian bdsm?
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The fuck? Nothing of that sort in the 9 books I read at least. There's a lot of exasperating filler shit in that tower though, most of which I don't remember at all. Parts of it are very intruding though and could definitely make for some great scripts.
 
NiiloPielinen said:
Isn't like half the White Tower -stuff basically lesbian bdsm?
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HarryHengst said:
Nah thats Sword of Truth.
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Spikematic said:
The fuck? Nothing of that sort in the 9 books I read at least. There's a lot of exasperating filler shit in that tower though, most of which I don't remember at all. Parts of it are very intruding though and could definitely make for some great scripts.
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White Tower full of lesbians, yes. BDSM, no.
 
Spikematic said:
The fuck? Nothing of that sort in the 9 books I read at least. There's a lot of exasperating filler shit in that tower though, most of which I don't remember at all. Parts of it are very intruding though and could definitely make for some great scripts.
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The term pillow-friends refers to a homosexual relationship between two individuals (usually female ones, making it a lesbian relationship). It is particular to the White Tower.

Novices and Accepted commonly enjoy these relationships as comfort during the hardships of White Tower training, but are viewed as a thing of girlhood and are almost universally abandoned upon gaining the shawl. Some attempt to continue the relationships even as Aes Sedai though.
 
Sheytan said:
The term pillow-friends refers to a homosexual relationship between two individuals (usually female ones, making it a lesbian relationship). It is particular to the White Tower.

Novices and Accepted commonly enjoy these relationships as comfort during the hardships of White Tower training, but are viewed as a thing of girlhood and are almost universally abandoned upon gaining the shawl. Some attempt to continue the relationships even as Aes Sedai though.
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Well, shit. I guess I completely glossed over those references.
 
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