Braid Tugging - Amazon’s Wheel Of Time (occasional book spoilers)

[footle]

Ok, so we have a trailer. Featuring a scene I don’t recall from the books in the slightest (which is probably a good thing).

 

looks like a fairly hefty budget, but does anyone still care thirty years on?

[Festoon]

Does it have incessant skirt smoothening?

[footle]

52 minutes ago, Festoon said:

Does it have incessant skirt smoothening?

I’m not sure that the trailer has even one scene of braid tugging, let alone skirt smoothening. It’s almost like they didn’t want it to go viral at all.
Or Harriet McDougal isn’t keen on people taking the piss out of her husbands work,

[Festoon]

Just now, footle said:

I’m not sure that the trailer has even one scene of braid tugging, let alone skirt smoothening. It’s almost like they didn’t want it to go viral at all.
Or Harriet McDougal isn’t keen on people taking the piss out of her husbands work,

 

Accurately representing, more like.

[hub2]

Not feeling the trailer at all.

[Monkeyboy]

I've never read the books and know next to nothing about the story, so I'll probably give it a go.

[Festoon]

1 hour ago, Monkeyboy said:

I've never read the books and know next to nothing about the story, so I'll probably give it a go.

 

They start bland and weirdly chaste, then they slow the fuck down, like Jordan was being paid by the word, and they get embarrasingly into dreadful sex stuff, spankings and whatnot. 

 

People drink a lot of tea, braids are tugged, skirts are smoothed.

 

Jordan can't write for toffee. He's an objectively terrible writer, he uses 100 words to describe a simple action in the belief that more description adds more ornate worldbuilding, but he's just trying to say "the horse stopped". He also keeps making up aphorisms and proverbs that are, well, nonsensical at best and stupid at worst.

 

To quote Adam Roberts:

 

"...stylistically it’s the same hideous jumble, the same self-parodic bloat. Jordan is a writer who writes ‘this fire was not at all small, and the room seemed not far short of hot, a welcome heat that soaked into the flesh and banished shivers’ [343] because he is constitutionally allergic to the phrasing ‘a large fire warmed the room.’ He thinks the former sentence is more precise and therefore evocative. He’s wrong. That's not precision, it’s a finicky fussing textual aspergers, a style that can see nothing but details (and, more to the point, nothing but a certain very limited palate of details – colours of clothing, speed of movement, types of food, gradations of heat and cold—never the telling details great writers master). It is a style wholly incapable of illuminating penetration or evocation."

[lolly]

3 minutes ago, Festoon said:

 

They start bland and weirdly chaste, then they slow the fuck down, like Jordan was being paid by the word, and they get embarrasingly into dreadful sex stuff, spankings and whatnot. 

 

People drink a lot of tea, braids are tugged, skirts are smoothed.

 

Jordan can't write for toffee. He's an objectively terrible writer, he uses 100 words to describe a simple action in the belief that more description adds more ornate worldbuilding, but he's just trying to say "the horse stopped". He also keeps making up aphorisms and proverbs that are, well, nonsensical at best and stupid at worst.

Sold!

[Festoon]

3 minutes ago, lolly said:

Sold!

 

Oh, and he actually wrote this paragraph. It's like Spinal Tap wrote it.

 

"Ba’alzamon struck with the staff, as with a spear. Rand screamed. As he felt it pierce his side, burning like a white-hot poker. The void trembled, but he held on with the last of his strength, and drove the heron-mark blade into Ba’alzamon’s heart. Ba’alzamon screamed, and the dark behind him screamed. The world exploded in fire." --Robert Jordan, The Great Hunt, p. 666
 

[Monkeyboy]

I've read worse.

[footle]

8 hours ago, Monkeyboy said:

I've never read the books and know next to nothing about the story, so I'll probably give it a go.

once it gets out of the first two hundred pages of deliberate lord of the rings “homage” (mysterious wizard drops in on small rural hamlet and whisks party of kids including a potential chosen one away on an adventure, while chased by monsters) there’s an interesting underlying concept. Unfortunately that concept is lost under thousands of pages of the stuff that Festoon mentions, and is stretched to breaking point.

if they cut the chaff (because they can’t write about the fire) it might be ok.

 

the other thing about the wheel of time is that it was a lot of people’s introduction to usenet/internet theorising, and Jordan played up to this. Some characters reincarnate, by definition, and there are servants of the dark one (why is always unclear) hiding out in plain sight. You’ll find as many words as there are in the books on the net theorycrafting. Unfortunately 90% of the theories end up being right (and the remainder just end up being unanswered questions/loose plot strands), because in the end there’s only so many prophecies that one author can come up with, and there’s this thing called the wisdom of crowds.

 

TLDR? Just like the books. Watch the tv show instead, then about three episodes in we’ll all stop.

[JoeK]

Um. Well. I'm buggered if I can see this going the distance. 

 

I don't mind the books (up to where I've been able to get to in them...they become more of a struggle with each tome), but I've always thought that despite the fact that woman are the main 'powers' in the thing (despite the obvious Dragon...), Jordan always wrote as if he fucking hated each and every one of them. They're all so terribly unlikeable, and nothing in the tv show has done much to dispel this for me. 

 

I dunno. They missed a huge trick by not putting in the original prologue of the first book - that was great and properly gave you an entry point into things. I don't like much of the acting, and whilst the show looks fine, I don't think it looks like it cost the $$$ that have been mentioned.

 

I've got to feel some sort of empathy for someone  in the thing, and I don't at all.

 

Ah well. 

 

I wait for Dragonlance to come out - where things are nice and simple, characters are basic and fun shit happens.... 

 

 

 

 

[Scribblor]

When I was reading the books, my wife would refer to them as the Waste of Time series, and she was pretty spot on, really. The first... four?... are good. After that, they bog down really fast.

 

And I think it kind of soured me on hefty fantasy books full stop. I barely made it through A Dance With Dragons, have no interest in reading the new one if it ever gets published, and have given up on Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series because they're too long.

 

But I'll watch this series, or the first episode, at least.

[Darwock]

Similar story for me, the guy was fairly obviously just spinning the wheels (of time) to milk it as much as he could, then obviously went and died without any conclusion. It woke me up to the fact that a lot of these series are cynical money-makers, and is also why I don’t particularly trust GRRM to ever finish his saga.

 

(Not trying to give spoilers but when the whole thing takes a completely unforeseen tangent in the 5th book that turns the first 4 hefty times of build-up into a wild goose chase, it doesn’t look like he’s got much of a plan to finish it.)

 

With Robert Jordan it was just entire chapters describing clothing.

[davidcotton]

1 hour ago, Scribblor said:

When I was reading the books, my wife would refer to them as the Waste of Time series, and she was pretty spot on, really. The first... four?... are good. After that, they bog down really fast.

 

And I think it kind of soured me on hefty fantasy books full stop. I barely made it through A Dance With Dragons, have no interest in reading the new one if it ever gets published, and have given up on Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series because they're too long.

 

But I'll watch this series, or the first episode, at least.

At least Sanderson gets his stuff out frequently or explains what’s going on. 
 

Read Wot years ago up to about book 5 before noping out of it. 

[Scribblor]

Oh, absolutely. My point was more that Jordan's stuff was the thing that turned me off lengthy books, no matter who wrote them. Though I have found the Stormlight Archive too long on its own merits.

[squirtle]

3 hours ago, JoeK said:

Um. Well. I'm buggered if I can see this going the distance. 

 

I don't mind the books (up to where I've been able to get to in them...they become more of a struggle with each tome), but I've always thought that despite the fact that woman are the main 'powers' in the thing (despite the obvious Dragon...), Jordan always wrote as if he fucking hated each and every one of them. They're all so terribly unlikeable, and nothing in the tv show has done much to dispel this for me. 

 

I dunno. They missed a huge trick by not putting in the original prologue of the first book - that was great and properly gave you an entry point into things. I don't like much of the acting, and whilst the show looks fine, I don't think it looks like it cost the $$$ that have been mentioned.

 

I've got to feel some sort of empathy for someone  in the thing, and I don't at all.

 

Ah well. 

 

I wait for Dragonlance to come out - where things are nice and simple, characters are basic and fun shit happens.... 

 

 

 

 

What? Is this a thing that's happens or are you cruelly getting my hopes up?

 

Anyway, WoT... I'm actually reading it at the moment. I'm someway into the third book, but by Christ, it's a slog. Should I bother keeping going?

[JoeK]

10 minutes ago, squirtle said:

What? Is this a thing that's happens or are you cruelly getting my hopes up?

 

Anyway, WoT... I'm actually reading it at the moment. I'm someway into the third book, but by Christ, it's a slog. Should I bother keeping going?

 

Sorry, I should have said 'wait in hope' that Dragonlance will come out! 

 

 

[jonamok]

First episode was a load of trollocs. Does it get better?

[JoeK]

15 minutes ago, jonamok said:

First episode was a load of trollocs. Does it get better?

 

Apparently episode 4 is allegedly where things kick up a notch. 

 

But as I can't even get to the end of the first episode, I suspect it'll pass me by.

[JoeK]

Also...ALSO...fucking fake film grain.

 

I fucking HATE fake film grain.

 

I couldn't see any fucking thing when the battle was going on. 

 

Everyone should sacked and the money given to me for...erm...safe-keeping.

 

Edit:

 

Also...ALSO...ALSO...scene transitions. 

 

Don't ever...ever give me black screens in between cuts.

 

It's so fucking amateurish.

 

(I'm getting riled up now. Can you see? I'm turning green)

 

The more I think about it, the more I'm frustrated by it.

 

I think this could be one of the most disappointing things I've seen on TV for ages.

 

Doesn't bode well for the Middle Earth stuff really.

 

 

[Festoon]

5 hours ago, JoeK said:

 

I wait for Dragonlance to come out - where things are nice and simple, characters are basic and fun shit happens.... 

 

 

Isn't that in ownership rights hell?

[Scribblor]

Could probably pick up Belgariad rights fairly cheaply if you want things to be nice and simple and have basic characters. Mind you, the treatment of the different nationalities in those books is problematic.

[Sirloin]

I think the author's child abuse is probably a bit more problematic.

[Scribblor]

Shit, really? I didn't know that.

[footle]

I think you can see the money in the battle scene.

 

Book culture spoiler, though I can’t imagine anyone who hasn’t read the books watching this.

 

 

Spoiler

not sure about someone with a heron blade needing help with a trolloc though.

I’d say that’s a deep cut, but it’s only a deep cut because the series is so long.

[JohnC]

3 minutes ago, footle said:

I can’t imagine anyone who hasn’t read the books watching this.

That's very weird. Unless it's an unprecedented bomb, there will probably be millions watching it who have not read the books.

[dreamylittledream]

4 hours ago, Festoon said:

 

Isn't that in ownership rights hell?

 

Yes but so was Sandman until recently

 

If this does well and the LOTR thing add that to GOT mainstream domination and I'll eat my hat of the likes of Apple/Netflix or Amazon don't pick up the Chronicles trilogy

[Scribblor]

Well, that first episode was meh in the extreme.

[Timmo]

This is so fucking boring.