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Also the teasers have been kind of fundamentally ill-conceived for the purpose of generating excitement. Most of them were of fairly mundane looking objects: an inn, a heron-marked katana, Thom's guitar (?!). a golden dagger. Like, imagine if Peter Jackson's LOTR had tried to drum up interest by releasing still pictures of Bilbo's pipe, Aragorn's horse, and Legolas's crossbow? It wouldn't have worked super well there either. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Jun 2, 2021 |
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Jun 2, 2021 16:02
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Gwaihir posted:The joke is that Thom had a harp, not a guitar, ditto Legolas and Bow, not Crossbow. Yeah the guitar is the prime example of what I'm talking about when I say that the teasers were poorly conceived* on a basic level. If the purpose of the teaser is to entice book readers by showing how objects from the books can be envisioned on the screen, then it doesn't work because Thom doesn't play a guitar in the books. If the purpose of the teaser is to entice non-book readers to explore your wondrous new fantasy world, then... you've shown them a still picture of a regular guitar. Not even a person playing a guitar, or a fantasy magical guitar, just a guitar. What's anyone supposed to get out of that? Like, the teasers aren't even bad so far, they're just nonfunctional as teasers. *I'm not super bothered by the guitar change, and I actually think replacing Thom's flute with a guitar would have been a really great idea, because A) it's really hard to show someone dramatically playing a flute on screen and B) it retains the high/low class disparity of Thom switching between gleeman and court bard personas present in the books. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Jun 2, 2021 |
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Jun 2, 2021 17:39
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:Legend of the Seeker is far, far better than it had any right to be. I will die on this hill. I think I’ve said it before, but after watching that show I think Bruce Spence would make a pretty darn good Lews Therin.
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Jun 3, 2021 02:14
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It looks okay. It looks better than the CW/MTV-level fantasy poo poo, which always felt like they raided the faux-vintage section of Forever 21 for their fantasy outfits, but not a LOT better.You can tell all the characters apart just by looking, although with Egwene and Nynave it's only because of the braid. I feel like Lan should be wearing some armor or something to visually set him apart; in the books it's kind of ambiguous whether he wears armor or not. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Aug 18, 2021 |
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Aug 18, 2021 15:09
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Shadar Logoth looks pretty cool.
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Aug 18, 2021 18:35
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Torrannor posted:I think we've discussed this before, but some iconic works are far less surprising in their twists to modern readers because these very twists/character progressions/etc. are now standard tools of the genre, so they've become familiar to the genre's readers. She also makes just as many incorrect calls*, but she's able to read Gus's face when she gets one right so she zeroes in on those. Clocking Galad as a Whitecloak in book 2 is still impressive though, no way around it. *Gawyn: Rand's #1 fan!
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Oct 6, 2021 11:47
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Gwaihir posted:I think the only cool little bit related to them is when Moridin first pops on the scene, and he's wearing a full rear end complete suit of Fancloth as a stealth getup while spying on Graendal and Sammael's toying with the Shaido. It's a nice reminder/throwback to the visions from the Age of Legends where it was just a normal uniform for soldiers, and it's kinda silly how they still have the ability to make it, but are sorta too nearsighted to use it as much more than a warder status symbol. I always liked the fan theory that the White Tower had a terangreal that could make fancloth, but they didn't know how to actually sew fancloth without breaking the invisible effect, so they could just make medium sized squares of cloth. Given the option between color shifting cloaks, color shifting ponchos, and and color shifting togas, warders went with cloaks.
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Oct 9, 2021 21:56
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Torrannor posted:Wow, that completely slipped my mind. Perrin and Mat's siblings are brought up a lot (and Rand's two half-brothers, I guess), but never Egwene's.
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Oct 13, 2021 18:07
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I would say that the main argument against Egwene being ta'veren is that she interacts with multiple characters who have the explicit talent of seeing ta'veren (Suian, Logain) and none of them ever mention it, even in POV. Nitrousoxide posted:Mat's whole power is being ta-veren. He's not strong or have wolf stuff like Perrin, or have channeling like Rand. Mat's just a hyper-ta'veren who causes all probability to warp around him to his whims. Nah, Mat has innate powers beyond being ta'veren. It's worth remembering that both his luck and his past memories are innate abilities that existed to a lesser extent before he encountered either the dagger or the Finn. It's strongly hinted that he's the direct reincarnation of a king or great general of Manetheran, possibly Aemon. His ta'veren-ness and the Finn just enhanced and added to what was already there.
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Oct 26, 2021 16:26
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Those two relationships are fun because they’re actually super obvious before they become explicit but only if you’re familiar with the tropes of a certain type of antiquated Romance novel, where characters often engage in flirtation that looks like an argument. That, and on second readings you go from “Huh, Nynaeve tracked Lan” to “Holy poo poo, I forgot that Nynaeve tracked Lan!”
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Nov 5, 2021 17:03
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Nynaeve likes him because he respected her for what she can do, and sees her as a person and not a wisdom. Lan likes her because...? Tha's always never really set well with me, considering he is prime marriage material until he becomes a warder, and loads of Borderland women are tough/capable. A’Lan Mandragoran is a messy bitch who lives for drama. Nynaeve was made for him like a warder-seeking missile. It all makes sense once you realize that Lan, like Nynaeve, is insanely disingenuous when commenting on his own internal state. He is only apparently stoic and dispassionate, but he’s actually a huge moody edge lord who wants to die in the most pointless and immaturely dramatic way humanly possible. He is literally the male Nynaeve.
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Nov 5, 2021 19:03
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Jaxyon posted:As far as the first book goes, there's absolutely nothing between Moiraine and Thom, though. It's honestly hard to say how much of it is RJ repurposing his plans in later books, but Min almost certainly viewed Thom and Morraine as being together and told her as much in Baerlon. It's why Morraine immediately dismissed Rand's story about Thom's death out of hand in TEOTW: she knew Thom still had at least one viewing yet to fulfill. This is probably the viewing Min alludes to in ACoS, when she thinks that one viewing she had about Morraine is the only viewing she ever had that failed. If not at the time of writing TEotW, this was certainly RJ's plan by TGH and TDR: he has Thom thinking affectionately about Morraine when he meets Rand and Mat separately. By TSR, Morraine ""knows the face of the man she will marry"; crucially, she knows this BEFORE she goes into the redstone doorway, although when she comes out she seems even more certain. A few chapters after this she meets with Thom, and promises him that he will not die in Tanchico, saying this plainly by her Aes Sedai's Oath so that he knows it will be true. The only way she can do this is if she has certain knowledge about some future event concerning Thom that must occur after he leaves Tanchico, such as that they will some day marry. It's really interesting to read the interaction between them in TSR, knowing that Morraine knows she will marry Thom all along. When she sends Thom to Tanchico, she isn't only securing Elayne and Nynaeve's safety, she's doing her best to buttress her own safety; with Thom on the other side of the world, Min's viewing assures her that she will probably also be safe, at least until the pattern begins to rot and render all prophecies unsure. Morraine even plans her love life ultimately to further her own plots and machinations. She is the ultimate Blue Ajah. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Nov 5, 2021 |
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Nov 5, 2021 22:08
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Book 2 is pretty loving solid. “I win again, Lews Therin!” Is the kind of thing that would be another series’s high point.
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Nov 17, 2021 17:57
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Ghislaine of YOSPOS posted:it doesn't refer to technique. it refers to two actually literally different things. the Taint on one of the two different things is responsible for most of the story. Yeah. If Saidar and Saidin aren't separate discrete things, then the Taint can't be a separate, discrete thing. And if the Taint isn't a discrete thing, then Rand can't cleanse it, and you lose one of the larger tent-pole events of the series, and with it the model for the solution to imprisoning the Dark One.. Gender essentialism is dumb, but it's also woven not just into the setting of the books, but into the plot itself. You can't cut it out without gutting the plot.
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Nov 18, 2021 03:57
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Nynaeve's actress has real strong Nynaeve energy and I am loving it. Not loving Perrin's Fridge-wife or the character assassination of Abell and Natti Cauthan but it's not like either will show up much again.
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Nov 19, 2021 04:34
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rafikki posted:My fiancée didn’t quite get to the point of identifying him as the dragon after all three episodes but made a similar comment about him looking like a/the protagonist. She also made this comment towards the end of episode 2 that I found amusingly prescient: “I thought Rand was going to be decent but now he’s kinda a dick” I think one of the problems is that, in maintaining the tension of who the Dragon Reborn is, they took out a lot of the setup for Rand being the Dragon Reborn is (finding out he's adopted, etc) but left the story beats the same, which means that now he's acting like an emo kid, but without apparent motivation.
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Nov 19, 2021 11:21
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Book merch tends to be really bad, at least until the book gets turned into a movie. Even for extremely popular books. I don't know why.
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Nov 21, 2021 15:10
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ChubbyChecker posted:i think that they only managed to hang one in the books, and she was already dead
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Nov 21, 2021 18:25
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Metaphors, similes, idioms, and hyperbole are open game for Aes Sedai, because the Three Oaths are ultimately governed by what the Aes Sedai thinks, not by any external reality check. An Aes Sedai could kill someone they falsely but genuinely thought was a darkfriend, for example, or they can harm someone if they don't personally think of it as using the power as a dangerous weapon; for example, Morraine clouted Rand across the shoulders with air once, and Red sisters bind and torture him with the power later on, but they don't think of it as a weapon. As long as they consider something to be in some sense true, an Aes Sedai could say it*. *Which is Why Morraine's cover story she gives the Whitecloaks is funny. "I am a Lady from a fallen house, and you are under my care." 
Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Nov 21, 2021 |
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Nov 21, 2021 20:32
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The series shows a lot of this. Part of it is that the Whitecloaks only have actual authority in one country where they've basically supplanted the local rulers. Every time we see whitecloaks outside of Amadicia, it's either somewhere with very weak local government or somewhere where there is a lot of political turmoil that the whitecloaks are trying to exploit to expand their power. Yeah, once you dig down into the specifics on how the Whitecloaks operate, they're basically a collective of organized predatory mercenary companies that wander around shaking down local lords for "donations" and exploiting regional political divisions for money and power, which was a very real problem in Europe during the 12-1400's. The Whitecloaks just added an extra side-hustle of witch-burning to the mix.
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Nov 23, 2021 18:09
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eke out posted:our very imperfect researchers of the current era can't conclusively rule out that it could be a woman, but it's not actually going to be one, i genuinely don't see why i should give a poo poo about this change It’s not so much that reincarnations have to be gendered, it’s that this particular person is prophesied to be this terrible figure of impending destruction, madness, and change, which every other part of the setting has set up to be a consequence of him being a male channeler destined to be in a race against time to save the world before he succumbs to madness. “ Let tears flow, O ye people of the world. Weep for your salvation!” loses something if there’s a 50% chance that the dragon will be reborn as a totally chill, not at all crazy woman.
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Nov 24, 2021 18:14
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Good news! We hired the team behind Mortal Kombat 11 to do the SFX on Dumais Wells! Asha'man... kill!
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Nov 30, 2021 13:58
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eke out posted:i wonder what conflict her parents would've even been killed in? aiel war doesn't seem right The timeline fits for the Aiel War, and the whole Two Rivers area is full of weird lingering touches of Manetheran handed down for centuries as bits and bobs of tradition, like the archery practice or the anti-Trolloc polearm tactics disguised as Bel Tine quarterstaff competitions.
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Dec 1, 2021 15:08
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The seanchan need to be viscerally awful colonizing slavers, because otherwise it makes it way too easy for people to buy into their whol “well, at least they make the trains run on time” justifications.
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Dec 3, 2021 18:11
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Moggy shields her and then inverts and triple ties off the shield, effectively stilling her without stilling her, then tells some other dark friends to treat her like a maid for the rest of her life. Presumably she’s still in. Amidicia When the seanchan roll in and take the place. Suroth picks her up as a curiosity: a marath’damane that can’t channel This episode was weird. It’s fine as a piece of filmmaking, but it’s kind of weird in the abstract to spend so much time setting up the consequences of what happens when a warder loses his Aes Sedai when that’s not going to happen again for…. What, two or three more seasons, even assuming they compress the books a lot?
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Dec 3, 2021 20:29
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It's ambiguous. Jain has gaps in his memories and a certain amount of mental degradation consistent with being under heavy compulsion, but we also never learn about the series of events that cause him to become entangled with Ishamael or meet Graendal. Jain seems to personally feels like he has something to atone for, but whether that's being a Darkfriend or just not being strong enough to resist being used by the Forsaken, we don't know.
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Dec 5, 2021 15:08
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silvergoose posted:"Kneel, or be knelt" is one of those iconic lines. "The unstained tower, broken, bends knee to the forgotten sign" in the epigraph. Really glad you're enjoying it. And then, in a single chapter, every rule gets broken at the same time. From then on, every character lives in a new and more terrifying world.
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Dec 5, 2021 22:15
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El Grillo posted:Out of interest, does anyone know when the first time is in the books that we see or hear what happens to a warder if their AS dies? Definitely by The Shadow Rising, when Morraine tells Lan she made arrangements to transfer his bond, which itself is a setup for what will happen to Suian later. It may have come up in The Great Hunt, when Morraine is chilling with Vandene and Adelas.
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Dec 6, 2021 03:24
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Fal Dara with no Agelmar, Ingtar, Uno or Masema. Alright, sure. Only two of those showed up in EotW, and they didn't really do much that a generic Shiernan noble (or even border guard) couldn't also do.
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Dec 6, 2021 21:58
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CainFortea posted:Also someone ELSE can hold you up with air. I think they did this to Egwene for one of her amyrlin speeches.
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Dec 8, 2021 02:19
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eke out posted:isn't westeros just barely-altered great britain Yes. It's England piled on top of upside down Ireland. EDIT: the Wall is just Hadrian's Wall.
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Dec 8, 2021 04:13
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Sad warder owned, but I'm not sure it was worth missing the really important scenes of Mat and Rand learning to juggle. This, but unironically. TV-Rand's a borderline cypher at this point and I'm worried the non-book audience is going to turn on him when the uninteresting white guy turns out to be the Dragon Reborn.
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Dec 9, 2021 16:11
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Rarity posted:I think he's mentioned as the leader of the Whitecloak force at Tar Valon around book 3/4? Yes, he’s the one who gives Galad a copy of the Whitecloak bible. He shows up in person in book six, where his whole deal is being outwardly the pinnacle of Whitecloakness but secretly he’s a treacherous little poo poo.
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Dec 10, 2021 21:51
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Devorum posted:My issue with Elayne's plot is that the politicking is bad. Their system for power transfer is bad, and I refuse to believe the nation hasn't fully collapsed long before now. "Lol, let's have a fake (unless...?!?) civil war right on the eve of the literal apocalypse!".
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Dec 12, 2021 05:23
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Rarity posted:Yeah it's this, the problem with the plotline is you have to suddenly care about 18 new characters, none of whom have any interesting or standout features and none of whom are actually any good at what they're trying to do. Like, I remember Dyelin cause she shows up a lot but you could put a gun to my head and I still wouldn't be able to name the rest As far as I can recall, there's Basically-Elaida-But-Dumber-Lady, Alzheimers-Creep-guy, Doormat-To-His-Wife-Guy, and Borderline-Sociopath-Girl. And the little kids. But the main casualty is that the dullard politics gang have to be presented as a credible political threat in order for the story line to work, which ends up being character assassination on Elayne's part that she can't just plow through these nitwits. Up to that point Elayne had been presented as fairly politically astute, if dumb about other things. And then the whole thing ends up largely pointless because it gets resolved as part of the Black Ajah plot anyway; other than sort-of-allying with a dark sister and launching a sneak attack, all their machinations that occupied more than one book don't amount to much.
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Dec 12, 2021 15:52
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Rarity posted:It's literally just a gate, who cares? The fact that it requires channelling to open is an unnecessary and baffling change given that the fact that waygates are the only method of rapid transit open to non-channellers is going to be a major plotploint multiple times going forward in the books. it's also completely unnecessary; they just did it because they thought it looked cool.
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Dec 13, 2021 16:38
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Nitrousoxide posted:It's possible that the Aes Sedai removed the key from that waygate due to its proximity to the city if they knew of a weave to open them in order to prevent others from fast traveling onto their doorstop without their assistance. This assumes that there's still a way to open them without the One Power, which I HAVE to assume there is, in order for the Ogrier to be able to use them. Or the people who made the show could have just had Loial open the gate, like he does in the book. That's why Morraine said she went and got him in the show, after all. Then you don't need to waste time on subsequent convoluted explanations about how there are multiple ways to open gates, or creating channellers where no channellers were before to advance the plot. Just have Loial open the gate. It's actually better, because it advances Loial's characterization as it moves the plot forward; we already knew Morraine can channel, but now we know that Ogier and Gateways go together. This is the opposite of a change made to streamline things for TV; it's a change that makes things more complicated, to no purpose. It's a gently caress-up, pure and simple. People in this thread need to get less defensive and admit when the showrunners gently caress up, because they are going to gently caress up. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Dec 13, 2021 |
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Dec 13, 2021 21:52
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MegaZeroX posted:I know someone said it in the Maiden of the Spear show, and I feel like I remember seeing 1 or 2 non-book reader reactions talk about it Yeah, people definitely said it. I just dismissed it at the time because it can go nowhere. Genuine question: do Perrin and Egwene speak to one another in a single scene together in the entirety of books 2-11? There are points in the books where they could have interacted (Shienar, Tear, Camelyn in LOC) but I don't think they actually do until they meet again in the World of Dreams. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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Dec 21, 2021 13:13
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Rarity posted:They have a very brief crossover in TAR in book 3. There's definitely nothing in LoC, Egwene's in Salidar by the time Perrin arrives Oh that's right, she sees Perrin bound in chains and he yells at her to gently caress off. And then they literally don't speak again until Perrin helps her during the battle of the White Tower, and then they are both signatories to the Dragon's Truce, and then they never meet again. Buck loving wild love triangle.
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Dec 21, 2021 13:27
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Hexel posted:It's a good thing they can chop the slog and all the other bullshit nobody wants to see on screen On the other hand, other than the famous slog books of 7-10, Book 1 has arguably the most fat to be cut of all the books, and it still feels rushed. They already compressed the first 10 chapters of TEotW into a single episode, excised Camelyn, and cut away 90% of the Rand/Mat travelogue and barely fit it into 8 episodes. Book 2 is a much denser, meatier book by comparison; the Seanchan have to be introduced, there's the hunt for the horn, Lanfear's introduction, the Wonder girls entering the White Tower, Egwene's enslavement and rescue, and the final battle with both the Seanchan and Ba'alzamon. All of that's load-bearing material for future seasons, and none of it can really be cut.
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Dec 21, 2021 18:56
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