Soooo...Wheel of Time ?

Uh. It's shit.

Boring shit.

Boring shit that pisses away its run time front loading all the female support characters instead of the actual boys who are the main focus; specifically Rand, the fucking Dragon Reborn. You know, the guy who's supposed to die saving the world in an apocalyptic battle against a self-proclaimed demi-god? Yeah? Him? Doesn't matter! We don't need to see the story from his perspective, as a vulnerable, impressionable boy who becomes a war-hardened sorcerer. Nnno, we don't need to see his origins, and thus his context in a vastly larger universe that he struggles to save for the sake of protecting his small village. We can just skip aaaall of that and focus on every character that doesn't have to command armies against a God of Evil; and why the fuck not! Let's just spend hours and hours of screen time, contextualizing everyone but the main character; let's prod this awkward, plodding, anthropologically-retarded, filler-tastic Epcot center of a show along until eventually the plot shows up. Of course, the vast majority of the original fans, who grew up with this saga, expecting an earnest deconstruction of "the chosen one" archetype (and not 'Game of Thrones' sloppy seconds) they're going to be livid; and (spoilers!) they absolutely are.

 Where do I even start?

Uh, the teenagers that lent the series an innate bedrock of innocence and moral objectivity? For a series intended for teenagers? For children? The entire cast of main characters are all adults; and they fuck now, fam! Because that's what makes a character mature and interesting and resplendent with socio-emotional subtext. Didn't you watch 'Game of Thrones', you guys!

The "fan" comments on these changes to the fundamental trio of boys, especially, have been enlightening; with claims that, now, Rand, Matt and Perrin have more palpable and realistic motivations to leave the Two Rivers, the sleepy little hamlet where they grew up--because Ba'alzamon putting their village to the torch, endangering their loved ones, nearly killing Rand's surrogate father, all so He could hunt these kids down, that, apparently, wasn't a realistic enough motivation to skip town with Moraine Sedai; the only person in thousands of miles with even close to the sorcerous wherewithal to pose even the beginnings of a threat to several hordes of flesh-eating monsters; the general of which is a demon that, besides being practically unkillable,  can bamf anywhere there's a shadow. What a flaccid excuse for cramming more T and A into the series, in a desperate bid to pander to the 'Game of Thrones' casuals.

 Did I need to see Lan's asiatic ass? Did I need to see Moraine's stretch marks marinating in a hot tub? Questions I never thought I'd ask.

And that's just the tip of this fatberg.

They turned the remote village of Emond's Field--a place so far off the map that the tax collectors haven't bothered with it in centuries--and turned it into a fucking UN pamphlet; and this matters because Rand, with his ginger hair and pale blue eyes, standing at 6 feet at 16, is supposed to stand out because that's a plot point in Rand's story; and because the Emond's Fielders are the direct descendants of a dead race. Understand? That makes them the exact opposite of culturally diverse, they're all interrelated, their families going back hundreds, if not thousands of years.  It also matters because the anthropology for this "remote village" flies in the face of basic verisimilitude---seriously, where did all these brown people come from! The climate in Emond's Field is cold and dark and wet and rocky,  what about that terrain would inspire a surplus of melanin? That doesn't "science", Amazon. The vast majority of peoples in cold environments that rain year round, that have little sunlight, evolved to have pale skin to absorb light, and light eyes for the exact same reason; and that's besides the fact that you're objectively taking a tommy gun to the goddamn story, punching plot holes left, right and center; and justifying it all to spell "diversity" in flowing cursive. Sure, it's impressive that you managed to fuck the Wheel of Time saga completely upside down, but, to paraphrase Ian Malcolm, your hacktivist writers were so occupied wondering if they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

Take a bow, Amazon.

You stood on the shoulders of giants, and then dropped trow to produce this unending diarrhetic post-modern froth. At 10 million an episode, by your own estimate, I hope it was fucking worth it.