#like rj got rightfully flake for doing this to Eg in tGH

[lunamond]

Okay I have a bunch of thoughts for the Wot Finale.

Warning! Show Spoilers for the whole season and Mild Book spoilers mostly for comparing characterisations between book and show (no plot)

This was probably the episode that left me with the most mixed feelings. However, I definitely think that my viewing is strongly coloured by my reading of the og story as a book reader.

I watched the entire show twice once with a non-reader friend and my non-reader parents. And while they do have some critiques they were very engaged and overall enjoyed the finale, so te season was definitely as success.

I personally enjoyed quite a lot of the changes and additons. Some personal favourites include the Moiraine stilling/shielding, Amalisa as a trained but weak channeler harnessing the power of wilders Egg, Ny and turning the Eye into a trap by Ishy in which he tries to tempt Rand.

However, there a lot of small things that definitely bothered me. This includes the Fake-out Nyneave, Loial and Uno death, Egwene's wonder healing, basically having all the men of Fal Dara die just for the woman to completely destroy the trolloc army (like I get the need for dramatic stakes, but why couldn’t the channelers join them at the fortress?), also Lan needing to be told Moiraine's "tell" seemed very silly (like he is a master tracker and traveled for decades with her... but he couldn’t follow her?)

Ultimately though these minor issues didn’t truely detract from my enjoyment of the episode.

However, I finally realized why I personally can't enjoy this adaptation as much as I wanted to. And most of this comes down to Rand's characterisation.

(He and Nyneave are my favourite characters, though so there is a clear bias here)

This whole season has reduced a lot of focus on Rand's character journey for the benefit of the other 4 Emond's fielders. This I actually really liked as the show has much less time to set them all up as main characters and definitely benefited from giving each of them more to do early on. This of course meant they had to streamline Rand's journey for it to still work on Tv.

To do this they decided to focus on Rand's relationship with Egwene, and while they definitely improved this relationship by a lot, it ultimately always felt like one of the least interesting beats in Rand's journey to me.

While they did touch on Rand's relationship with Tam, his friendship with Mat and his Aiel looks, these things never really came up during his big moment in the finale episode. In the end his big test came down to not taking away Egwene's free will and recognising that her ambitions are bigger than a simple farm life.

Which is fine I guess, but Rand pretty much let her chose her own fate already in Ep1 and reaffirmed her decision to become an Aes Sedai in Ep 7... which made this whole moment feel kinda hollow to me.

This, to me at least, is just much less interesting than his struggle in the books, where he feels alienated and isolated due to always having been set appart physically coupled by his discovery of his adoption and that he ethnically belongs to a group of people that are feared/hated in his community.

This made me personally really connect with his character as this is definitely something I can relate to a lot.

This whole struggle is of course a lot harder to portray on screen, but I feel that if they had used Ishy's temptation in the last episode a little more cleverly they could have shown us this identity struggle. Maybe by bringing in Tam and letting Egwene leaving him behind for bigger things play into his feeling of alienation.

Added to that I wish they had given Rand something to demonstrate not necessarily his power but the utter destruction that he could cause, as his fear of his own potential madness and the danger this represents is central to his character arc (at least to me).

Ultimately, I think a lot of this comes down to different interpretations of the books. Rafe has said multiple times that he intense to preserve the characters and their essence. However, the issue is that what makes up these characters is still highly subjectiv. So this probably means that what made me attached to Rand's character wasn’t what the writers saw as vital to him and that is fine. It doesn’t mean that it is bad adaptation or that Rafe and his team didn’t respect the books. It just means that their vision isn't mine.

#wot on prime #wot show #the wheel of time #wot 1x08 #mixed feelings #wot show spoilers #rand al'thor #imagine if rand was a woman and his big moment was a about a guy #like rj got rightfully flake for doing this to Eg in tGH