D&D Movie/TV Dragonlancing TV show being worked on by WotC confirmed

[Parmandur]

no ending justifies me having to wade through 13.5 books of boring drivel.

It is not that, at all. It is incredibly long (~10 Lord of the Rings trilogies in length), but it is not boring and pretty close to the opposite of drivel. It does take a little time and attention, but it is magnificent.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It is not that, at all. It is incredibly long (~10 Lord of the Rings trilogies in length), but it is not boring and pretty close to the opposite of drivel. It does take a little time and attention, but it is magnificent.

I'm sure that's true for you, but even among the most ardent fans, it's very common to admit that, depending on the fan, between 4 and 8 entire books (or 75%+ of each) could have and proably should have been skipped, and even from reading the first two books, it's clear that Jordan has a number of writing tics, together with a verbose style that make his books about 20-30% longer than they "should be" with a sharper writer who had planned or just executed the story a bit better.

And those are, as I understand it, those the better ones re: tics/verbosity/etc., before he became basically the best-selling fantasy author of his era, and his editors clearly just gave up.

This isn't a dig at Jordan - clearly that approach has value to some people. Personally, I'm just about okay with 600-1200 page books and series that go beyond trilogies, but I personally feel like the author needs to justify them by making every page actually have something of importance on it (i.e. characterisation/character growth/change, meaning, plot, insight, etc.), and that isn't even the case in book 1 and 2 with Jordan. His writing is the equivalent of one of those utterly sprawling anime series, in which 50%+ of the episodes are "filler", i.e. episodes which may or may not have "cool stuff" happen in them, but which don't advance the plot, don't really do anything but reinforce existing characterisation, and don't offer up any particular insights re: the human condition.

Sanderson has a related but different issue where instead of tics, verbosity and so on, in Stormlight Archive he just exposition-dumps/world-builds/makes Cosmere refs for incredibly long periods, and most of it is completely unmemorable and downright meaningless-seeming unless you're a true lore-squirrel - I mean, I thought I was based on my ability to absorb lore from various IPs (Star Wars/Trek, Mass Effect, X-men, LotR - which I don't even like!, and so on), but Stormlight proved me wrong.

 

[SteveC]

This. The obsession with books being the same as tv / movies is odd to me. Like, really odd.

Let me explain it: the fans of a book are fans of the way it is presented, the plot, the characters, the settings what the environment looks like, you name it, down to the dialog.

When things get changed, the question is: does the person making the changes do the series justice? Do they get the themes that the author was trying to present and are they making it work the same way in a different medium, or are they updating it based on what they like or telling the message they want to tell? And if they are, what level of storyteller are they?

As an example, I am a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings films by Peter Jackson. Yet I understand that he made some rather significant changes to the characters to tell the story in the way he wanted to. Fans of Faramir will tell you that he was done dirty by what Peter Jackson did, and there are many examples of it. And yet, on balance it's my opinion that Jackson did about the best adaptation of the material that he could have. And as a fan of both the books and the films, I'll disagree with my friends and say the changes were relatively minor. (And please, before you respond disagreeing, know that I have heard the arguments from some of the most knowledgeable Tolkien scholars in the world, so I get where you are coming from).

I have seen a lot of adaptations of other books that are much worse, and I think that's much more the norm these days. I watched the Wheel of Time season one and there were so many breaks with the original story that I just had to shake my head at. Telling the Wheel of Time on screen means you have to make some changes but it was a very different story, and I'd say it wasn't made any better for it. I am at best a casual fan of the Wheel of Time, but I know the hard core fans ripped it apart.

So the TLDR version: yes, you have to make changes when adapting a book but are those changes in service to the story the author wrote or to one you're making out of the shell of what the author did?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

no ending justifies me having to wade through 13.5 books of boring drivel.

Not saying that is what Wheel of Time is, never read it, but some here sure manage to make it sound like that while presumably being fans of it



Going by the series, there is no chance of me giving the books a try or returning for season two

No. Wheel of time is great. Just in the middle he lost his focus. But overall the story is sound.
And Brandon Sanderson managed to write a very good trilogy of books that took all the loose ends and brought it to a very satisfying ending.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

So the TLDR version: yes, you have to make changes when adapting a book but are those changes in service to the story the author wrote or to one you're making out of the shell of what the author did?

I was quite a hardcore fan of WoT, read every fan theory etc. And yes, the story of the TV show is very different. Good? In my opinion closer to good than to bad. My wife who did not know the books found it quite good with a few exceptions.

I never understood hardcore "fans" who are moping around if any little detail is changed. Why? Because I don't have to watch the same story over and over again and since my memory is very good, I like to be surprised once in a while...

I can understand that someone dislikes a show though if they have seen it. But never because "character x did y instead of z" and that killed it for me...

 

[Parmandur]

I'm sure that's true for you, but even among the most ardent fans, it's very common to admit that, depending on the fan, between 4 and 8 entire books (or 75%+ of each) could have and proably should have been skipped, and even from reading the first two books, it's clear that Jordan has a number of writing tics, together with a verbose style that make his books about 20-30% longer than they "should be" with a sharper writer who had planned or just executed the story a bit better.

Admittedly a big factor is thar I really enjoyr Jordan's writing of Inn and Tavern scenes and clothing description. Indeed, through hia careful exploration of minor details of logistics and people watxhing I think he accomplished some of the greatest worldbuilding in literature. He is not following the 20th century trends of concise biting literary style, but I like that, and not everyone will. But thst doesn't make

And those are, as I understand it, those the better ones re: tics/verbosity/etc., before he became basically the best-selling fantasy author of his era, and his editors clearly just gave up.

To be fair, his editor the entire time was his wife, even early on (when she co-founded Tor with Tom Doherty, she convinced him to come write some Conan novels for them and things escalated from there: those Conan novels showed what he could do when he wasn't concerned with an overarching plot or big themes). The big issue with books 7-10 (11 was his final finished work, and is a banger) is that the different plot threads, which do come together, had multiplied to the point that none got more than 10% of each book. If he had cut out the different viewpoint plot threads from those books, instead of interlacing them, it would have flowed better, because individually they remain fantasric...and do come together with spectacular results (action and theme wise). In the final analysis, I don't think any other fantasy writer succeeded in conveying as much of their experience and insight of the human condition as he did, and I'm the end the little details are important to what he has to say. Like, each little thing.

but I personally feel like the author needs to justify them by making every page actually have something of importance on it (i.e. characterisation/character growth/change, meaning, plot, insight, etc.), and that isn't even the case in book 1 and 2 with Jordan.

Actually, having recently listened to EotW and TGH, I can say that a lot of what you might think is filler really isn't...but that's not clear at that point. I'm really surprised in my current read (listen) just hiw clearly planned out the ending really was, even if Jordan couldn't quite overcome Zeno's Paradox by himself in the end.

Sanderson has a related but different issue where instead of tics, verbosity and so on, in Stormlight Archive he just exposition-dumps/world-builds/makes Cosmere refs for incredibly long periods, and most of it is completely unmemorable and downright meaningless-seeming unless you're a true lore-squirrel - I mean, I thought I was based on my ability to absorb lore from various IPs (Star Wars/Trek, Mass Effect, X-men, LotR - which I don't even like!, and so on), but Stormlight proved me wrong.

That's actually what I've been reading in the evening since the New Year, in the middle of Rhythem of War now. Really loving it, but yeah, considering how intensely inspired by Jordan's style he us, kind of opposed strengths and weaknesses as a writer. The last three Wheel of Time books, edited by Jordan's wife, manage to combine their strengths and minimize their respective weaknesses. I...did not believe the series could stick the landing, wven as I loved reading them. And I was very, very wrong.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Admittedly a big factor is thar I really enjoyr Jordan's writing of Inn and Tavern scenes and clothing description. Indeed, through hia careful exploration of minor details of logistics and people watxhing I think he accomplished some of the greatest worldbuilding in literature. He is not following the 20th century trends of concise biting literary style, but I like that, and not everyone will. But thst doesn't make

To be fair, his editor the entire time was his wife, even early on (when she co-founded Tor with Tom Doherty, she convinced him to come write some Conan novels for them and things escalated from there: those Conan novels showed what he could do when he wasn't concerned with an overarching plot or big themes). The big issue with books 7-10 (11 was his final finished work, and is a banger) is that the different plot threads, which do come together, had multiplied to the point that none got more than 10% of each book. If he had cut out the different viewpoint plot threads from those books, instead of interlacing them, it would have flowed better, because individually they remain fantasric...and do come together with spectacular results (action and theme wise). In the final analysis, I don't think any other fantasy writer succeeded in conveying as much of their experience and insight of the human condition as he did, and I'm the end the little details are important to what he has to say. Like, each little thing.

I totally agree.

I remembered a lot from the first 2 books and rejoyced when the little details appeared in later books.

I often read books by skipping from one Mat chapter to another and finishing with all the Perrin chapters. Most of the time the story still worked well, as most of the time they did not intermingle with each other in a single book.

A strength of the TV show was how they tried to combine different plots to make the story less unwieldy. A great a difficult task.

I reminded me a bit of the Harr Potter: order of the Phoenix. Often cited as one of the worst movies because it deviated most from the source, it was my favoutite one, because of that. It was the one movie that did not feel stuffed with too much details.

 

[Demetrios1453]

When it comes to WoT, it did help that when the first books were first being published in the '90s, it was the one big series that was doing things diffferent and subverting tropes in the fantasy genre. That became far more common later on, especially after GRRM completely upended everything.

As for the TV show, it did a lot right, and did make some questionable changes, but I'm forgiving after we learned what a mess the last filming block had to deal with (Mat's actor abruptly leaving, very stringent Covid filming restrictions, and Covid not allowing them to travel to do location filming), forcing them to film only in studio and having to do massive re-writes of the last two episodes.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So the TLDR version: yes, you have to make changes when adapting a book but are those changes in service to the story the author wrote or to one you're making out of the shell of what the author did?

Personally I'd say, ultimately, all that matters is that you tell a compelling story which:

A) Basically has the same/similar themes to the original.

B) Doesn't like, actively burn down the original unless that's very much the intention.

And the WoT adaption absolutely was fine on both points, and indeed, I'd say it's completely impossible to reasonably argue the changes in WoT were not "in service to the story the author wrote" - indeed, they absolutely were in service to that story.

The problem really is that a lot of fans are incredibly precious about a lot of stuff that ultimately doesn't matter to the question you're asking. In many cases they have extremely unrealistic viewpoints about what can/should be changed about a story when adapting it, too. This isn't something unique to fantasy epics, either. Questionable supernatural romance novels have fans making the exact same arguments and having the the same "but you're changing too much" takes (c.f. True Blood and Vampire Diaries).

Telling the Wheel of Time on screen means you have to make some changes but it was a very different story, and I'd say it wasn't made any better for it. I am at best a casual fan of the Wheel of Time, but I know the hard core fans ripped it apart.

Yeah, many "hard core" fans did, but it's just silly to say that, whilst rejecting the same issue for LotR. "Hard core" Tolkien fans absolutely lost their minds over LotR at the time, and it took like a decade for them to calm down and reassess it as "not that bad, actually". If WoT continues I have no doubt the exact same thing will happen.

And "hard core" fans are THE WORST, frankly. Because they're the group with two huge problems:

1) They're obsessed with absolute minutiae, and are very often completely unable to see the forest for the trees.

The biggest "lore experts" are often people who don't even understand the themes of the books on even a very basic level. Like, with LotR, they can name every Elf in the entire thing off the top of their head, but they very often don't get any of the messages Tolkien was trying to send. Because their obsession is solely with the superficial and the specific, not with the tone, not with the meaning, not with the message.

Again, this isn't just a LotR or WoT fandom thing - this is a consistent problem with every fandom where there's significant worldbuilding/lore - you can get tons and tons of "hard core" fans who absolutely obsessed with the series, but don't understand the series beyond the superficial. Everything from Star Trek to Steven Universe has these guys by the boatload. And there's no denying they're "hard core".

2) They're incredibly precious about specifics - even the ones who can "see the forest" often are.

Particularly serious fans will often have some single ultra-specific character or little bit of character history or even piece of equipment or whatever that they're ridiculously emotionally invested in. And like, I kind of get it. If someone remade Deep Space 9 and messed with Major Kira or deleted her from the story, I'd be mad as hell - but I would still judge the remake based on what it actually did - or at least not watch it and thus have no comment beyond "Messed with Major Kira, not watching".

That's not how most people behave though - instead they hate-watch - the know the thing they're extremely emotionally invested in has been changed/modified - and they still watch it, and then get really mad and absolutely castigate the show/movie and say it was the worst thing ever. The saddest is when they know something needed to be changed, and they get mad anyway.

There's also a subset of fans who get mad as hell about stuff that's entirely headcanon (particularly the sexuality of minor characters), or even outright misreadings (c.f. all the people angry that "they made Rue Black!" in the Hunger Games movies, where in the books, Rue (the competitor, not PRUE, Katniss' sister), is clearly described as dark-skinned and curly-haired. They're even worse, but let's discount them for now.

When it comes to WoT, it did help that when the first books were first being published in the '90s, it was the one big series that was doing things diffferent and subverting tropes in the fantasy genre. That became far more common later on, especially after GRRM completely upended everything.

What is it about WoT that you would say subverted fantasy tropes?

I would say that, based on the first two books and knowing the entire story of the rest (but not having read the actual books), in leans extremely hard into very traditional fantasy tropes, though nicking a bit from Dune and Western takes on Eastern religions.

I'd really say I thought his success was down to the opposite - he was one of the authors in the 1990s hewing closest to standard fantasy tropes.

Especially after 1995/1996 when there's an absolute NUCLEAR EXPLOSION of trope-subversion. You mentioned A Game of Thrones in 1996, but we also have The Golden Compass (1995), Wicked (1995), Tigana (1990 and ultra-subversive of tropes), Neverwhere (1996), Assassin's Apprentice (1995), The Gardens of the Moon (1999), Ship of Magic (1998), Imajica (1991), King Rat (1998) - I could go on, I know I'm missing tons.

Steven King's Dark Tower series had been going for some time by then, and whilst it's not all subversion, I'd say it was far more subversive of tropes and did things far more differently that WoT. Plus Terry Pratchett, but because it's humourous maybe it doesn't fit the same niche?

For my money, Robert Jordan fits solidly into one of the "big four" trad-fantasy authors of the 1990s:

Terry Brooks (Shannara), David Eddings (Belgariad), Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time), Raymond E. Feist (Riftwar)

(Could include Tad Williams and Stephen R. Donaldson maybe too? A lot of important female fantasy authors in the 1990s but none of them were writing fantasy quite as trad as the above four.)

They all did things a bit differently to Tolkien, but like, it's still clearly trad-fantasy in all cases imho, and tropes remain fundamentally un-subverted even if specifics are changed.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Personally I'd say, ultimately, all that matters is that you tell a compelling story which:

A) Basically has the same/similar themes to the original.

B) Doesn't like, actively burn down the original unless that's very much the intention.

And the WoT adaption absolutely was fine on both points, and indeed, I'd say it's completely impossible to reasonably argue the changes in WoT were not "in service to the story the author wrote" - indeed, they absolutely were in service to that story.

The problem really is that a lot of fans are incredibly precious about a lot of stuff that ultimately doesn't matter to the question you're asking. In many cases they have extremely unrealistic viewpoints about what can/should be changed about a story when adapting it, too. This isn't something unique to fantasy epics, either. Questionable supernatural romance novels have fans making the exact same arguments and having the the same "but you're changing too much" takes (c.f. True Blood and Vampire Diaries).

Yeah, many "hard core" fans did, but it's just silly to say that, whilst rejecting the same issue for LotR. "Hard core" Tolkien fans absolutely lost their minds over LotR at the time, and it took like a decade for them to calm down and reassess it as "not that bad, actually". If WoT continues I have no doubt the exact same thing will happen.

And "hard core" fans are THE WORST, frankly. Because they're the group with two huge problems:

1) They're obsessed with absolute minutiae, and are very often completely unable to see the forest for the trees.

The biggest "lore experts" are often people who don't even understand the themes of the books on even a very basic level. Like, with LotR, they can name every Elf in the entire thing off the top of their head, but they very often don't get any of the messages Tolkien was trying to send. Because their obsession is solely with the superficial and the specific, not with the tone, not with the meaning, not with the message.

Again, this isn't just a LotR or WoT fandom thing - this is a consistent problem with every fandom where there's significant worldbuilding/lore - you can get tons and tons of "hard core" fans who absolutely obsessed with the series, but don't understand the series beyond the superficial. Everything from Star Trek to Steven Universe has these guys by the boatload. And there's no denying they're "hard core".

2) They're incredibly precious about specifics - even the ones who can "see the forest" often are.

Particularly serious fans will often have some single ultra-specific character or little bit of character history or even piece of equipment or whatever that they're ridiculously emotionally invested in. And like, I kind of get it. If someone remade Deep Space 9 and messed with Major Kira or deleted her from the story, I'd be mad as hell - but I would still judge the remake based on what it actually did - or at least not watch it and thus have no comment beyond "Messed with Major Kira, not watching".

That's not how most people behave though - instead they hate-watch - the know the thing they're extremely emotionally invested in has been changed/modified - and they still watch it, and then get really mad and absolutely castigate the show/movie and say it was the worst thing ever. The saddest is when they know something needed to be changed, and they get mad anyway.

There's also a subset of fans who get mad as hell about stuff that's entirely headcanon (particularly the sexuality of minor characters), or even outright misreadings (c.f. all the people angry that "they made Rue Black!" in the Hunger Games movies, where in the books, Rue (the competitor, not PRUE, Katniss' sister), is clearly described as dark-skinned and curly-haired. They're even worse, but let's discount them for now.

What is it about WoT that you would say subverted fantasy tropes?

I would say that, based on the first two books and knowing the entire story of the rest (but not having read the actual books), in leans extremely hard into very traditional fantasy tropes, though nicking a bit from Dune and Western takes on Eastern religions.

I'd really say I thought his success was down to the opposite - he was one of the authors in the 1990s hewing closest to standard fantasy tropes.

Especially after 1995/1996 when there's an absolute NUCLEAR EXPLOSION of trope-subversion. You mentioned A Game of Thrones in 1996, but we also have The Golden Compass (1995), Wicked (1995), Tigana (1990 and ultra-subversive of tropes), Neverwhere (1996), Assassin's Apprentice (1995), The Gardens of the Moon (1999), Ship of Magic (1998), Imajica (1991), King Rat (1998) - I could go on, I know I'm missing tons.

Steven King's Dark Tower series had been going for some time by then, and whilst it's not all subversion, I'd say it was far more subversive of tropes and did things far more differently that WoT. Plus Terry Pratchett, but because it's humourous maybe it doesn't fit the same niche?

For my money, Robert Jordan fits solidly into one of the "big four" trad-fantasy authors of the 1990s:

Terry Brooks (Shannara), David Eddings (Belgariad), Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time), Raymond E. Feist (Riftwar)

(Could include Tad Williams and Stephen R. Donaldson maybe too? A lot of important female fantasy authors in the 1990s but none of them were writing fantasy quite as trad as the above four.)

They all did things a bit differently to Tolkien, but like, it's still clearly trad-fantasy in all cases imho, and tropes remain fundamentally un-subverted even if specifics are changed.

If you've only read the first two books, and just a general outline of the rest, it's really in the fourth book that things go very different, especially with the ontoduction of the Aiel and how Rand changes as a character. It's far too complex for me to go into, but there is plenty of stuff out there on how WoT really begins to subvert tropes starting with TSR.