Modernizing Wheel of Time

 I was psyched for Assassin’s Creed Free Weekend, but it turns out that most of the games on that list are free on PS4 only if you have PS Plus Extra. Which is fine, I have all of those games, but I was going to try out Black Flag or Ezio’s story on PS4. Whatever. Valhalla is still free for all this weekend right now.

I finished reading The Samurai yesterday. I’m still sorting out some feelings.

For this week, I struggled a bit with picking a subject, but while I was deciding I read a lot about pre-Christian European religions and mythologies. I settled on this because I saw the first three episodes of Amazon’s Wheel of Time on FreeVee (I don’t have Prime, so this was my first chance to see them).

…I wrote this and then realized that I could totally do a Note on Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Modernizing Wheel of Time

I cannot fully judge Amazon’s Wheel of Time; I haven’t seen all of it. I only saw the three episodes posted on FreeVee. And there are many good things about the series–performances are good, the effects are good, and for a high fantasy series that needs to reveal a ton of worldbuilding information, it’s impressive that it doesn’t get overwhelming. But in just three episodes, I also had some problems, and they boil down to the adaptation A) condensing the content to fit on TV (understandable, there’s a lot to get through), and B)trying to update the content of the series for the post-Game of Thrones crowd.

This is embodied through fridging a character in the first episode.

All of the leads are aged up, and one of them, Perrin, is given a wife that isn’t in the books (she has the same name as a minor character who is mentioned once, but she’s invented). During the Trolloc attack at the end of the first episode, during the battle, Perrin accidentally kills her in the heat of battle. Meaning that they invented a female love interest character just to kill her off to motivate a male character.

[Also Screen Rant did a video claiming this didn’t happen while showing the clip of this happening? This video has a breakdown.]

This is meant to streamline Perrin’s character development. He’s a guy who wants to live a peaceful life, but keeps getting drawn into violence. And because he’s a big guy he’s really good at it! And he finds it upsetting. He hates violence not because he’s scared, but because he knows exactly how destructive he can be, which is multiplied with his Wolf Brother powers–he’s able to talk to wolves and travel into the dream world because of it. Being a guy who came from a small farming village, his first impression of wolves is not positive, despite the assurances that wolves are natural enemies to Darkspawn.

The show opted to speed through this complex inner torment by having it so that he knows his own destructive tendencies because he’s accidentally killed someone he loved. And that’s… well, that’s dumb, but making it a fridge moment is even worse. Brandon Sanderson (who wrote the last three books after Jordan’s death) was a consultant on the series, and has said that he was against the idea. His suggestion was that Perrin, being a blacksmith apprentice, would have accidentally killed his teacher. This has the same desired effect, while including a canon character who doesn’t do much in the original text, while also not inventing a female character to stuff in a refrigerator.

[sigh]

There are tons of other little things that really bothered me more than they should. For instance, the original books don’t have a lot of modern swears, unless you count ‘bloody’. There’s a few cursing by the Dark One, and saying ‘blood and ashes’. Not so in the show! It took me out of the show to hear characters (Mat, mostly) saying, “S***!” as an expletive. This is meant to be high fantasy of the highest caliber, and yet we’re reducing the actual vocabulary to what everyone else is doing to make sure we’re taken seriously. Okay, sure.

Then there’s also the fact that the writers couldn’t think of any way for the audience to understand that Rand and Egwene like each other than “they’re having sex.” This is a problem in Hollywood because so few writers can do subtlety in romantic arcs.

[Admittedly, Robert Jordan wasn’t a master in writing about sexuality in his stories either.]

To be generous, there isn’t actually a sex scene, and it may be that since there is sex later in the story they wanted to go ahead and add that aspect in so it’s not jarring. Being less generous though, I expect it’s because a lot of audiences simply don’t understand that two people who kind of like each other aren’t sleeping together. The YouTuber I linked to above proved as much in his review of the first episode, arguing that being aged up that they’re “not conservative” and are “more liberal” because of course this boils down to strains of American political thought rather than, I don’t know, character development and worldbuilding?

And weirdly, there’s the intro sequence. Which is quite good, but I don’t know if it fits. It has strands being woven and then forming images, presumably because the idea of “the Pattern” and “the Wheel of Time” are prominent throughout the book series. But the images formed aren’t of the main characters, who are the ones affecting the Pattern–it’s of the Aes Sedai sisters of different colors. I remembered that a lot of the marketing focused on them, emphasizing that, “In this world, women have the Power!” as if Wheel of Time depicted a matriarchy by virtue of having only female magic users. But that’s not really what’s going on, and simplifies the worldbuilding to make the story sound like it’s a progressive world than it really is.

And that’s not to say that an adaptation of Wheel of Time can’t be progressive in this regard–please, write gender relations better than the original books–but it shouldn’t present itself as being something it’s not. The story heavily features the Aes Sedai, and they’re a huge part of the narrative, but it’s not about them.

In short, it’s not as if this is the worst adaptation ever, but it feels like they’re trying way too hard to modernize it, or make Wheel of Time into something it’s not really. Now I’ve seen it said that many changes were demanded by Amazon. The showrunner wanted ten episodes, they got eight. The first scene was going to be Tam and Rand, the studio insisted it be Moiraine explaining the Plot instead. I’m wondering if any of the other things I complained about were studio mandates as well, and if the show manages to overcome them in later episodes and seasons.

But I’m not excited about this, when I absolutely should be. Wheel of Time needs some updating, sure, but by using what makes it good in the first place, and by making what’s there better, and by excising unnecessary content, not injecting elements that are dumb. Especially something as stupid as inventing a female character just to kill her off. The other things don’t help.

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