This. Felt skeptical at the announcement, cautious but open at the casting; saw the stills, felt more skeptical. Probably not going to waste my time, and this review (no offense) doesn’t really make me think I’m missing a thing at all.
floribundas
floribundas
Is Ed in?
Yeah, but Charles doesn’t seem like one of them. Read more
Looked bad from the trailers.
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My hot take is that WoT is fairly progressive for having been written by a High Church Episcopalian, graduate of the Citadel, and lifelong resident of the South...
I was thinking of William Gibson, who has described SF as a kind of “cognitive toolkit” that writers can use, even if they’re not writing science fiction. Back in the ‘00s, he wrote a trilogy of spy novels with no SF elements to speak of — at least by ‘00s standards — but they felt more like his cyberpunk books from… Read more
That’s a really interesting insight to think of ASoIF as “fantasy from a scifi point of view.” I mean isn’t that basically the history of a lot of ancient medicine and engineering? Some dude or lady more or less accidentally realizes that giving someone a particular plant seems to help prevent an infection and says,… Read more
Piers Anthony was an SF writer who got in on the late ‘70s fantasy boom while the getting was good. I never liked his stuff — I bought On A Pale Horse because the Whelan cover was cool but never got more than fifty pages into the book because his style was execrable — but I can see why it was so popular with teenage… Read more
Yeah, you hear a lot about streamers wanting “the next Game of Thrones,” but what they really mean when they say that is literally “the next Game of Thrones.” And Wheel of Time ain’t it. Neither are most of the other big fantasy series that debuted in the ‘80s and most of the ‘90s. They’re essentially YA novels… Read more
It sounds like Jordan and Martin both made the same mistake — instead of doing a time jump and recounting key events as backstory, they felt the need to depict everything that happened in grinding, lugubrious detail. I get that these are important plot developments, but I don’t see why you’d need to add eight massive… Read more
There are definitely similarities. Read more
Adaptation is not appropriation.
A couple of quibbles: Read more
“As we know from the books, the Aes Sedai were realllly shitty at their jobs and were know it alls who did not know half as much as they thought they did about how things work. So them missing a spy really isn’t a huge stretch of imagination whether they know trans channelers exist or not.”
If Verin were trans, that… Read more
Maybe it’s because I’m old, but I see no reason why any epic fantasy saga has to be longer than three or four books. Beyond that it turns into a soap opera.
Just once, I want a fantasy world populated with people who have boring names. The great wizard Bob Smith of garden terrace. The evil Dick Muntly of hilldale. Jane Bork, the great adventurer/warrior who comes from the land of Sandwich. Read more
many people feel Jordan’s skill at depicting female characters was often lacking (myself included). Their personalities oscillate between domineering, angry, childish, jealous, or coquettish. Regardless of whatever power, influence, or initial independence they have, they’re happily dominated by their male romantic… Read more
While women must submit to saidar and allow it to flow through them to use its power, those men who can channel saidin must fight it and conquer it, and are more powerful than women as a result. Read more
Corrections that I hope will be taken as constructive:
“The omnipotent Creator created the Wheel to imprison his destructive counterpart, Shai’tan.” - incorrect, the Creator imprisoned Shai’tan outside of existence at the moment of creation. Shai’tan’s prison is literally ‘outside existence’. The Wheel drives existence… Read more
Do we really need to critique the streaming adaptation of these novels if Amazon doesn’t update them to be more diverse/inclusive? I’m all for representation, as every demographic/group should see people like themselves in media just as much as cis/het white dudes like me have forever. However, the source material… Read more