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Comment by ivansmf | Hacker News Reader

I have not read the books, so I guess I'm the target audience. It was very hard to watch. The actors were fine, actually better than fine, but the writing was painful. There are lots of standard adventure and fantasy arcs that are just impossible to carry forward with the type of "modern" they wanted. For instance, you cannot have the most diverse village in the history of villages anywhere, then later the Orc (?) stares at one of the kids once and goes "you are not from this village, you are certainly from this other village because of how you look". How? Aura color? At least change it so the kid has a tattoo or some birth mark then. I could go down a long list of dumb stuff like this that makes me come back to reality instead of allowing me to stay with the flow and enjoy the fantasy.

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I reread the books multiple times. I was actually pretty impressed with how well they cast each character. Which is impressive because I think that's one of the hardest things to do.

But, the dialogue and storytelling were terrible. They invented new, pointless content. There's ~18k pages of source material. Amazon's job was to figure out how the hell to pair that down without compromising the original story. Instead, they went for visuals over storytelling

There’s actually an in book way to explain that, the clothing is always described as specific to the two rivers, and only Aiel have red hair. I agree The show was awful!

Wheel of time takes place in Brooklyn, in the Amazon cinematic universe though.

I don’t think that the ethnicity of the actors really matters all that much, the height & hair color are the only real trait that describes how Rand stands out. Honestly the only character with a skin color description I can recall is Tuon? And that isn’t really something that matters either…

Bigger issues as other people pointed out are things like inventing weird bullshit storylines when you have 10k pages of content to draw from, or messing with the “hard rules” of the magic system, such as you can’t burn out in a circle, or heal someone from death.

It ruined the suspension of disbelief immediately for me though. A rural village that doesn’t do constant international trade should have people living there that all look, speak, dress, and act similarly.

But the village looked like like an HR training video. To contrast, a new season of squid game just came out. Everyone is Korean. Everyone speaks Korean. Everyone looks Korean.

This makes the show feel more real.

Right, the characters skin tones and real life ethnicities ruined the suspension of disbelief, because that’s harder to explain than Trollocs and the One Power??? Or Fades? Or the Dark One?

Or maybe you are hyper focused on specific, racial, details that you care about due to some internal biases?

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