I watched episode 1. I thought it was better than the first season. Some better visuals and the pacing wasn’t as fast. It felt a bit more in line with the books on that front. So I hope that trend continues, because the pacing in the first season was terrible. It’s quality still doesn’t come anywhere close to the books though.
Edit: also the storyline of Nyneave is better than the first season, more in line with the books so far.
And the show gave more background information, so that’s good for people who haven’t read the books. But I still can’t really get over some storyline changes, because I don’t see the necessity.
Thanks for your helpful comments. I’ll give it a go and hope I can stick with it. I did read the first 6 books before I gave up as that could have been half the length with a good editor. What is it with these ‘blockbuster’ adaptations that can’t stick to the story or characters or pacing. The wooden acting/script doesn’t help at times either. Not saying I could do better but when you’re told they spent so many millions on it… Prime’s LOTR suffered a similar fate and I only managed 3 episodes of that.
I also gave up on the books around that time too. But I was only like 15 at the time. I remember it turned into something like reading a senate hearing and lost me. I just wanted magic and dragons, not a court procedural.
I just watched episode two and I’m less optimistic than before. While it’s still better than season one, they’re combining too many storylines which makes it chaotic. Right now I’m thinking that they should never have made the show. The story is too large and complex too catch within a tv-series. Even though I enjoy watching the books come to life.
I think it helps if you read the books once like 30 years ago. I only have vague recollections of what happened. That works for a show watcher. The show runners should probably be a little more familiar with the source material. I also only watched the first episode so far but I did enjoy it.
I had this thought as well. Read the books up until 6 or 7 a few years ago, enough to vaguely remember overarching plot but not specifics. I can tell they’re changing things but I’m not invested enough in the plot specifics to really care. It’s a nice spot to be in as a casual WoT fan.
They went with the game of thrones final season strategy of hoping everyone is watching in a very dark room with a good high contrast TV for so many scenes. I love playing the squint my eyes and try to figure out who’s talking game.
Out of all adaptation on a scale of Lord of the rings to The Watch it was fine. It was serviceable show with room to grow. The show did Mat Cauthon a bit dirty but I am willing to forgive because his actor didnt come back after covid shut down and they had to do a bunch of weird editing with old footage.
I'm a huge book fan, and I have to say that book purists are the worst.
The show has made some changes that I don't love, and some of the characters aren't portrayed as I imagined, but for the most part it has been wonderful to see one of my favorite fantasy series brought to life, and to be able to enjoy this world with new fans. I always expect screen adaptions to make creative changes, since things that work in a book just don't work on screen sometimes, and I'd say the changes and presentations have been pretty sensible for the most part.
For every change I dislike there's at least one I appreciate, and all of the actors are killing it (with what they are given at least, looking at you weird Lan funeral scene). I'm looking forward to how they handle the story going forward!
Book purists in general are at least the definition of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I think my "favorite" group is Halo fans. For some of them, you'd think their multiplayer centric FPS franchise and work-for-hire pulp tie-in novels were some glorious combination of Frank Herbert and James Joyce. The show was a bit silly and the plotline on the desert planet took WAY too long to say only a little, but it's a perfectly acceptable space opera show that took the aesthetics and basic setting of Halo and kept it completely recognizable.
Halo tv show was terrible, even as a non halo show.
But comparing it with the games and the book, it shits on any established elements, making every character unrecognisable, rewriting everything including well established lore and so on. The moment I saw “Reach city” I knew the rest of it was going to be terrible and yeah it really was terrible.
It was a poorly written irrelevant TV show, not really based on anything established in the franchise, and only using Halo as set dressing.
Only good thing about it was that the armours looked really nice.
Agreed. I love the Halo games but their stories unedited wouldn’t make a great TV show. The TV show we got wasn’t great either…it could’ve been better, but it was fine overall. The action scenes were particularly good, I thought. That’s when it felt the most like Halo. Probably because Halo is primarily a guy in a big suit shooting aliens.
The desert planet stuff with what’s her name was way too much though, definitely need much less of that if there’s a season 2.
I hadn’t read the books when Season 1 came out and didn’t really care for the show because I thought it felt like a rushed story. There characters didn’t really feel complex enough and the Aes Sedai felt like a joke of a community to me.
Not having read the books I didn’t understand why they were so popular after watching the series. It felt pretty generic to me.
Since then I’m through 11.5 of the books and I can understand why it felt rushed. Many of the characters were changed for the worst. Rand just accepting his fate early on is what I would consider a major change in the overall theme of the early character.
Honestly Moiraine and Lan are the only characters I felt didn’t get wrecked.
I understand condensing parts of a story to fit it in, there’s plenty of filler in the book that is just world building that could be removed. But the first season just felt poorly sequenced to me even before reading the books. I think LotR is a pretty good example of the pacing in the movies being an overall improvement for the big screen.
I hate all the instant hate and the martyrs out there crying about the changes they made. I feel like most of them were necessary. The actors are killing it. And book two onwards will have a far better story than the first book which in my opinion is one of the worst ones. Very excited for this season
But also … to all the book-readers … my sympathies.
Thank you. The show was a colossal disappointment for me. I couldn’t even finish the season. It was so boring, and had a very different tone than the books.
I’m really struggling to take this show as it is. I’ve read the books multiple times and can accept that things need to change for the screen, but some of the decisions the writers are making here are making are baffling.
Fundamental changes to the core systems of the world. Major character motivations and events.
I find myself asking, “What?” More then being sucked into the world. People are having things happen to them at such a breakneck place it’s a little hard to comprehend.
Same. I’m willing to give season two a shot but I’m not sure how far I’ll watch since they did in my boy Uno. That man is supposed to be at the last battle, not suck starting a golden rhino horn.
You’ve read 14 book series multiple times? That’s enormous investment that’s probably setting unrealistic expectations.
I’ve only started the first one to die out of boredom quickly so I can’t imagine repeatedly getting through a slog first few books supposedly are. My girlfriend read everything after the first season and once she was finished she did a re-watch which she enjoyed, in part because it’s different. Second season has higher production value but seems to be confusing with the amount of changes so far. I’m following along because the themes are interesting and there’s nothing so bad that would discourage me.
Even without reading everything it’s fair to assume that this couldn’t be a faithful adaptation. They’ll likely have to merge more story lines, characters, then remove some things entirely and it’ll still be a challenge to fit this into amount of seasons that’s reasonable to produce. The Expanse did plenty of that but it still had roughly a season per book, and that was with a book series that Bezos personally enjoys.
I hardly see how my enjoying the entire arch sets unrealistic expectations. As I said, I can accept changes for the medium’s and natural limitations sake. This show has gone beyond that, both in the first and this far in this season.
It’s a different story with the same names. That’s more my beef, than that things needed to be cut or merged.
Even the explanation of the One Power in the S2E1, drawing things out of what is already there is a pretty major shift from the books themselves.
“This series is 1:1 replica of a book” and “this series is only taking a passing inspiration from original books” are merely facts and a starting point to set expectations before moving on to describe and judge an adaptation. It’s okay to judge by comparing original to adaptation but “this is not a faithful adaptation, therefore it is bad” does not help in evaluating quality of derived work.
In as much as Lord of the Rings we’re to be adapted about a Hobbit (who looks like a minotaur and hates grass) wearing a magical necklace (which grants him extra speed) on the way to a mythical hot springs guarded by unicorns would be a faithful adaptation.
You’re assuming that readers of the books are expecting to see their internal movie played out before them. I think most are expecting an adaptation. What they’re getting is an “Inspired by a true story” level of faithfulness to the original work.
I can only speak for myself, which is to say I’m fine with the changes in timeline, consolidation of enemies, etc. Yet there are fundamental changes to characters, motivations, etc. That drastically change who these people are. That’s where my disappointment lies.
I see why Brandon Sanderson wants creative control over his adaptations if/when they ever go to screen.
Agreed. One of my biggest complaints about the first season was how much time they wasted on subplots that didn’t exist in the books, trying to explain stuff that would have gotten covered later anyway with better, more established characters.
I’m not judging someone who read the entire series or those who did it multiple times. People are free to enjoy what they want. Regardless of that, doing 8 months multiplied by even 2-3 times is a considerable chunk of a human lifespan. It explains takes like “I don’t like the adaptation because it made too many changes” and it needs to be put into perspective. I’ve elaborated more on this in my other comment.
I’m in the same boat. It’s as if they wanted to do original work but we’re scared of going “alone” without the bankability of big-name IP. They changed too much; the names are the same, but it’s not the story I recognize.
Yep … I’ve watched episode 1 and most of episode 2 … so far … I’m in. The writing and directing seems tight and effective and you get the strong sense of momentum in the plot.
I was waiting for Google tags to put one in my bike and car as an andi-theft measure instead of paying for GPS services (for my car only). But I see that it will soon be completely unusable for such a use case....
Tapping the AirTag icon on the screen will bring up information about the tracker in question — including a button to make it Play sound to help you track down its exact location.
This doesn’t seem like a good thing to have the ability to do? You can just click search and then force any AirTag that you find to play a noise?
I think i get what you’re stabbing at. This could be used as a nuisance for everyday normal air tag users. Pranks in class or wherever… in the end, it’s the few stalkers that ruined air tags for everyone.
Reading some other comments it appears that maybe you can only do this to airtags that aren’t currently “with” the owner at the time, but I can’t confirm.
AirGuard, the android app, seems to have this ability too but tbh I have never had the chance to play a sound on the train. You have to be in range for I think at least 15 minutes before you can ring a tag
available on Samsung devices running OneUI 5.1.1, like the Galaxy Z Fold 5, but not those running OneUI 5.1 like the Galaxy S23
I have the setting on Galaxy A34 running latest stable firmware with OneUI 5.1, but it is called “notifications for unknown bluetooth trackers”, slightly different from the post.
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