Amazon has canceled its Wheel of Time series,despite 97% Rotten Tomatoes rating | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has canceled its Wheel of Time series,despite 97% Rotten Tomatoes rating

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21 pointsrock5712 comments

> flagging viewership numbers

I was excited to see it but my viewership flagged within a few minutes, when they tossed out the whole gendered One Power yin yang conceit so central to the books. Did I miss anything good?

Something similar happened at the start of the Hunger Games, when one character playfully makes the protagonist miss her shot at a deer, when both of them have starving families to feed. That one did get a little better, partly because it was hard to get worse.

If you're going to betray the source material best to get it over with quickly, so I can go do something else. Thanks for that.

> they tossed out the whole gendered One Power yin yang conceit so central to the books.

Well... for one they didn't do this, so you probably should have watched a bit more!

  "The Dragon has been born again, and it's one of you. But we don't know whether they were born as a girl or a boy." -- Moiraine, in the series opening

That seems to throw out the gender determinism of the books. Do they walk that back? Is it an isolated exception? It's like starting The Fellowship of the Ring with a scene of Smeagol getting a great deal on the one ring at Diamonds Direct.

I mean, Rand is still the dragon reborn, Saidin is still tainted, men who channel still go crazy. Channeling saidin and saidar are still treated as fundamentally different.

Adding a couple other people to the candidate pool for TDR didn't change much except leave new viewers guessing who TDR was for the first season whereas in The Eye of the World it was very obvious from the start

A lot of people watched at first because the books were good. Then they stopped because the show was not.

That's what happened to me. Show had too much of a modern air, needed a far more gritty epic fantasy tone.

It just wasn't very interesting, or even good to look at.

With the exception of Lanfear.

If something costs a lot of money to make but not many people watch it, you can use your customers’ monthly subscription money more wisely by investing in a different show.

Like 2 more seasons of Mr Beast??? LOL

You laugh, but if the economics work out that way then the answer is an unequivocal "yes".

I’m surprised TV shows don’t get picked up by passionate patrons. A small group of millionaires and crowdfunding could probably keep a lot of these projects going.

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