Once again, Hollywood has taken a big steamy creamy dump on my childhood.
It was bad enough when Star Wars ruined the Hero's Journey by making all the heroes failures, quitters and weak assholes at the end of their lives.
The Wheel of Time TV show has done Star Wars one better. They took a complete book series, gutted and skinned it, and are wearing the skin as camouflage to ruin the story from start to finish. The series is so poorly miscast to meet diversity quotas that the tv characters would be considered caricatures of the book's characters had the tv characters not been rewritten to be almost universally awful people. Seriously, 5 episodes in, EVERY character has been rewritten to be unlikeable, even the characters like Mat, who is supposed to be a fun-loving troublemaker, and universally likeable, is a broody thief, and generally as likeable as a burlap bag of smashed assholes on the show. Perrin, the hulking blacksmith is a retarded Geico caveman, a mouth breather who accidentally killed his wife, a tormented character, where in the book he was a very soft-spoken and humble but intelligent teenage apprentice blacksmith. In fact, the 3 main characters of the story are all relatively happy teenage boys in the books, and in the TV show each gets saddled with more weepy terrible backstory than story.
If you read the books, the Wheel of Time has it's flaws, in that it makes and relies on some tropes (men and women can't communicate with each other is a popular theme, and carried to the point of sillyness), and goes too deeply into irrelevant sideplots. But for all that, it's an amazingly complex, BIG story. Epic. And innovative in that it's essentially the Hero's Journey again, but with fresh takes and a massive cast of characters.
Put another way, I always thought of "Game of Thrones" to be a terribly-written hot take derivative of The Wheel Of Time books. Piss-poor competition, in my eyes... but that's just it- in my eyes. I get that YMMV. But fuck me, why take a good story and make it bad? That takes actual work, to fuck up a pretty great story. And somebody got paid to do that. Why?
I suspect that the concept of a Heroic Journey offends the sensibilities of Hollywood these days. Imagine a man bettering himself and overcoming a terrible challenge. That sounds classist and maybe racist, almost certainly capitalistic. Let's make everyone hate everything instead.
Anyways, the show has managed to ruin another great story.
3 comments:
Rafe Judklinsd had to put in a lot of effort to screw up a perfectly good story.
His apologists just say 'adaptation, you can't get a perfect transistion'.
Yet another reason to ignore the Media.
The show is terrible on its own "merits."
Couldn't watch it.
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