DRMacIver's Notebook
The wheel turns
The wheel turns
Please note: This will contain some spoilers for the entire Wheel of Time series of books and up to the end of Season 3 for the show.
Some of my earliest memories of reading Proper Fiction are of the Wheel of Time books by Robert Jordan.
I’m not going to claim they’re great literature. I’m not even going to claim they’re good literature. I’ve tried rereading them as an adult and just couldn’t. But as a kid they were definitely doing something for me, above and beyond their key virtue of being long and available in airports.I grew up in Saudi Arabia but came to England multiple times per year, so my childhood involved a lot of flights.
As a result, I’ve read these books a lot over the years. Certainly every book up to around… let’s say book 8 I think, I’ve read multiple times. The Fires of Heaven, book 5, I believe I have read no fewer than four times, but that was because it was the only book I had with me in a very unpleasant situation, so I read it cover to cover several times back to back as a form of very literal escapism. I don’t think I’ve done that with any other book before or since.
Also, notably, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about what happened in The Fires of Heaven. I was going to say that this was because it was one of the books where nothing happened, but looking it up on Wikipedia I’m not sure that’s true. A bunch of quite notable things happen in it. Probably the real reason why I don’t remember it very well is because I read it in 1993 and that was, allegedly, quite some time ago.I’m actually a little confused by this chronology because I don’t see how the events in question could have occurred in 1993, and 1994 seems much more plausible, but I was reading a hardcover copy of The Fires of Heaven for the first time, which was presumably around when it came out in 1993. But maybe this was the lag of books making it over to the UK back when the delays were longer or something.
I feel like this series was a sufficiently big part of my childhood that I should have more memories tied up in it, but I don’t really. Fragments of conversations about it with friends and family as kids come to mind (including several about how weird Robert Jordan was about girls), and an early realisation about differences in visualisation ability from talking to a childhood friend about our respective attempts to recreate the flame and the void exercise.I never did manage to figure out how to channel though.
Anyway, I was pretty excited about the TV show, though I tried to temper that down to cautiously optimistic.
My emotions since have been… mixed.
They’ve made a bunch of changes to the books and I think that this is mostly good. I’m a little irked by some of them - for example, I think giving Perrin a wife only to fridge her in the first episode in order to give him a more tragic backstory was extremely Not On. I also felt like they worked a bit too hard on giving Mat a tragic backstory. And I’m not sold on the new backstory for Nynaeve either.
In general, it feels like… they didn’t like how protagonisty Rand was, and they felt the need to make everyone else have more protagonist energy in order to make the whole show more of an ensemble show than it would naturally be (which matches how the books are later, but early on Rand is definitely The Protagonist), and I’m not sure that really improved things.I think it especially didn’t improve things for Nynaeve, who is incredibly well cast and didn’t really need the extra support.
This also shows up in the whole “we don’t know which one of them is the dragon” thing. I thought it was an interesting conceit, but also it didn’t work. I particularly think that “We don’t know if the dragon will be a man or a woman” part really is too big a departure from the books and ruins a lot of the worldbuilding such as e.g. the role of the Red Ajah. Some of this is an attempt to update the gender politics of the books to be less… Robert Jordan… and I generally approve of that, but I think there’s a tricky balance to be struck there.
You could see the discomfort with Rand as protagonist play out particularly badly in the end of Season 2 where they basically felt the need to give everyone a participation trophy. The big battle scene at Falme was… incredibly weak, and lacked any of the drama of the books. Frankly, I hated the ending of Season 2, and that’s part of why I took so long to start on Season 3. I’d given them a pass for Season 1 ending so badly, which was apparently mostly due to COVID, but Season 2 was them writing a season ending without those problems and the result was… extremely mediocre.
I think one thing this emphasised for me is that I do have a nagging feeling that the showrunners don’t really understand what was good about Robert Jordan’s writing. That’s understandable. I don’t really understand what was good about Robert Jordan’s writing, and I used to consider myself a big fan, but I think the contrast with the show has actually helped me understand that.
And I think one thing that Robert Jordan was very good at was endings. Many or most of his books have big dramatic endings that have both major plot impact and a real sense of grandeur to them. The season endings so far… didn’t. The season 3 ending is much better than 1 or 2, but even that it feels like it was a bit lacking.
Anyway, Season 3 makes some pretty dramatic changes from the books, partly in that it mostly follows book 4 and skips book 3 (presumably to incorporate it more into season 3), and I think that’s great. I’m actually a huge fan of most of the changes.
One of the big things that I feel like we’re starting to see is that they’re pruning plotlines. For example, there’s an entire plotline with Siuan Sanche post-stilling that got um… quite aggressively pruned, and I think the series is stronger for it. I think ditching the Choedan Kal (the giant sa’angreal) is a great choice.And not just because I think Callandor deserves better. This is I think really good, because one of the big problems Robert Jordan had as a writer was that he was absolutely incapable of doing that. Every plotline spawned two more plotlines, and a lot of why the books turned glacial as he wrote more and more of them was that there was too much going on for each book.
I’m not so sure about the change to Nynaeve overcoming her block this early on,In the books, that’s book 7. but mostly because of the degree it required Leandrin to be holding the idiot ball to set it up.
Another change I’m cautiously a fan of is the Aviendha/Elayne relationship. I actually quite like that one of my formative series as a kid had… actually reasonably healthy depictions of poly relationships, even if they were much more along the lines of a very heterosexual polygamous / harem fantasy,Though often reverse harem too! I don’t think it’s literally canon that the green ajah and their warders were often in relationships, but even if they weren’t literally having sex it’s very much a poly life partnership. and I like that that’s potentially better balanced out in the series.Although I’m a little concerned that they’re just going to pair people up and Rand will only end up with one of them. Certainly it seems like Mat and Min are getting paired up. Rand, Aviendha, and Elayne, seems like a plausible triad though given the Aiel traditions.
Anyway, Season 3 has definitely restored me to my cautious optimism. I still don’t think that this series is great, but it’s starting to manage to be a meaningful improvement on the source material, which is how I felt it might turn out at the beginning of Season 1 and didn’t really feel throughout most of Season 2. As a result, I find myself actually looking forward to Season 4.