Submitted by flabberghaster in GoldenAgeOfTV
I'm watching it because when I was a kid i really loved the books but I have a lot of questions about how they're going to do things.
A lot of the books description of how magic works is about 'weaves'; when you see a spell you see how someone has tied up a little knot of magic; so far they haven't shown a ton of it but i think visually they kind of pull it off.
But in one of the first scenes they have a bunch of Aes Sedai removing a male channeler's magic; in the books this is described as them sending in their own magic and basically uprooting the part of himself that can channel, but in the show it was just him screaming and them chanting. This is probably fine though, just something that jumped out at me.
Given that so much of the books revolve around specifics of how the source works, specifically how males can use one side of it which is polluted, and females can use the other side which is not, I'm curious how, if at all, they're going to handle the obvious gender essentialism inherent there. Not to mention the concept of male channellers going insane from contact with the taint.
Wonder if they will delve in to that at all or just kind of handwave it away.
voxpoplar wrote
I don't think you can adapt Wheel of Time without the gender essentialism. You'd need to rewrite a lot of the core ideas. I'm watching the first episode at the moment and they don't seem to be shying away from it with the taint still being there and the Red Ajah misandry, so it's odd that they are throwing in that the Dragon could be a woman, when part of the tension around the prophecy is that male channellers are inherently a massive danger but he is also meant to be a messiah.