I don’t understand the hate for Amazon’s LotR compared to what they did to Wheel of Time! I’ll admit I’m not a huge LotR fan, but I didn’t hate the time I spent watching the Amazon adaptation. Wheel of Time though, they drove a truck through that poor franchise. Then backed up over it, and drove over it several more times!
I'd consider myself a WoT megafan. I've read the full series more than 10 times since AMoL, and did a re-read of the series before every book release when it was being written. I'm in the middle of a re-read right now, even - I just finished a chapter from A Crown of Swords right before opening HN and reading this article.
And... I think the WoT adaption is fine. It's not exactly how I would have done it, and there are a few choices that I think are just bad, but on the whole I have enjoyed the show and think it captures most of the primary elements of the series.
It's a 14.5 book series where the books average 600+ pages. Any adaptation is going to have to make massive changes, at least if they're filming it with real people. They also got dealt a raw hand with covid resulting in all sorts of set limitations and Mat's actor just... not returning after they filmed the first 6 episodes.
I reread the books after watching the show, and I have to say that I am in complete agreement with this take. I think there are 2 things that impact why people hate the adaptations.
1. Some people just don't like adaptations, and they need to understand what different mediums limit in terms of story telling. If you think of WoT as being 10,000 pages of content, and how you would shorten that to make it finish-able within a single human lifetime, then they have to change some things. But I gotta say, I think they capture a lot of the good of the books within the show.
2. Most people just have a picture in their head of what the thing is going to look like, and when that picture doesn't match up to what's made they're unhappy. And they don't understand why they couldn't just do the thing in their head because they don't understand the limitations of the medium.
2a. I think a thing that's important to a lot of people is the characters looking like the characters they imagine, and when casting is more diverse than that, people have a pretty negative reaction to the characters not "looking" like the characters. I think this ends up being more true the further from the description people feel like the characters are.
^This is a thing that has been hurting LoTR for a lot of people, in my opinion. I don't think it's a reasonable thing to expect.
I've also learned that some people just... didn't read the books all that closely, either. Or at least not character descriptions. Two Rivers people are described as being dark eyed and dark haired with fairly dark complexions - probably mediterranean - but people seemed to think they were supposed to look like they were from England, forgetting that Elaida explicitly mentions Rand is too fair skinned in EoTW. Or everyone outraged about Moraine/Siuan, apparently not understanding what RJ meant when he said they were "pillowfriends," despite lots of other fairly explicit hints at what the phrase meant.
It's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way they are described (or the way most people picture them), or it's not reasonable to expect people to accept a re-envisioning? Asking because I'm not sure which way you were leaning there.
In my opinion, If you are going to use an existing franchise with a built-in audience attached to it, you should feel obligated to honor the audience's vision for the franchise. If you have dramatically different visions then you should be creating original content.
The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed.
> It's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way they are described (or the way most people picture them), or it's not reasonable to expect people to accept a re-envisioning? Asking because I'm not sure which way you were leaning there.
I'm saying it's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way people imagine the characters in their heads. Which may or may not be "the way they are described."
I'm saying this because I think there are a million different ways people can imagine characters differently. "Tall Dark and Handsome" is a pretty classical example of something that means different things to different people. To me, this always meant a person of color, and I only learned relatively recently that to most people this means "Mediterranean".
The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong.
> The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed.
I think the projects that I've seen that have failed that people complain about "identity politics" for fail for the plot being bad. But there's a separate issue I see that's unrelated where people blame people of color on the projects for ruining the projects when in fact the companies are ruining the projects, and the people of color are often just a small piece of the puzzle. I think people very often over-react to this, and it often comes across as racist.
Both of those things can be true. That the company is bad, and that the audience is being racist about the casting including black people that otherwise don't change anything about the way the movie watches.
>The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong.
I disagree - I think for the most part there is a wisdom of the masses where sure not EVERY SINGLE person will have the same image of a character but if you had a character artist draw out what 1000 people think of that character you'd find they converge pretty closely... the problem happens when the casting is not close to that convergence and is far out on the fringes.
As I said before I think if you are looking to make a product based on an existing IP you are doing so because you want that built-in audience that IP has - if you can't make the effort to ensure you are honoring how that audience expectations then your project deserves to fail.
The place to do experiments with gender-bending, race swapping, expectation subversion etc is in original IP's that hommage the older franchises.
My point is that if you pick a diverse audience, you will come up with a diverse set of expectations.
In Twilight, the main character is not actually described very well. There's an old comic from the oatmeal [1] about how the main character should be named "pants", because they're made just so that every reader can slip into the place and pretend like they're the main character.
This is a lot more common in books than I think you may realize. So when characters don't match expectations, it's because people are saying that characters don't look like them... which is, like, accidentally racism. To be clear, I don't think people are doing this maliciously. It's just that what you expect is not necessarily what you have to get.
>My point is that if you pick a diverse audience, you will come up with a diverse set of expectations.
You don't "pick" a diverse audience; you respect the audience/fandom how it currently is. I refuse to believe that if you surveyed ANY fandom and asked them to do a character description of the main character, they wouldn't come to a fairly common consensus overall.
>which is, like, accidentally racism.
No it's not, it's people saying the character isn't as they expected them to be - and again that's on the person using the franchise to match what they are creating to that built-in audience FIRST and FOREMOST - if they don't want to respect that audience they shouldn't be touching the franchise they should be making something original.
> I refuse to believe that if you surveyed ANY fandom and asked them to do a character description of the main character, they wouldn't come to a fairly common consensus overall.
Even if the consensus is wrong? Jesus wasn't white, and wouldn't be described as white, but everyone in the US 'fandom' thinks Jesus looks like them. Also, Jesus is frequently portrayed differently in different parts of the world.
I really respect that, if anyone can speak to this it would be a devoted reader like you. I might even be willing to consider it in a new light after reading what you have to say.
I’m not an adaptation hater, I mourn the cancelation of the live action Cowboy Bebop, I loved it, despite that being an unpopular opinion. That being said…
There was a scene towards the end of season two, where the dark one was lobbing bad CGI fireballs at Egwene, and Moraine was down on the beach and launched a bad CGI dragon? to like even out the fight. And I could just feel the writers being completely lost there and just punting it over to the CGI department to figure it out…
Yeah - I would have liked Falme to be more epic, and Tarwin's Gap/Rand's fight with Aginor/Ishamael in Eye of the World. Impressive CGI is apparently quite expensive, though, especially at the scale necessary to really depict what is described in the books.
(Spoilers for a 3 decade old series to follow, I suppose!)
But at the same time, as written, these fights were... kinda weird. For Falme, Mat blows the horn, and a fog covers everything and no one can really see what's going on except localized fights, and Rand's fight with Ishamael happens in the fog with swords, yet... everyone can also see his fight happening in the sky, apparently for hundreds of miles around where it happened? It's written almost like some sort of dream sequence.
And the Eye of the World fight is even stranger. Minimal explanation as Rand fights to wrest control of the Eye away from Aginor, but then Aginor tries to use too much of the power from the Eye, and it kills him? Then he Travels to Tarwin's Gap and pounds his fist on the ground and blows up a Trolloc/Mydraal army... and then climbs through a bunch of non-euclidean stairways in another dimension to end up in Ishamael's bedroom where he somehow cuts the link from Ishamael to the Dark One, which causes Ishamael to fly into the fireplace and get burned up. And then Rand faints and somehow ends up back on the ground where he was originally fighting with Aginor.
The first time I read either fight scene I don't think I could have explained exactly wtf was going on, particularly the end of Eye of the World. Later books revealed some of the power and magic being used and clarified them a bit, but at the same time, Jordan also retconned how some things worked later in the series, which also made them more confusing in other ways.
Thankfully most later fights of this nature are less fever dream-ish and more practical. There's just a whole lot of challenges with the show that make it quite difficult to adapt. I think a long-running animation might have been a medium that would have allowed for more flexibility, but the lack of realism would also hurt. Maybe someday AI stuff will be amazing and we'll be able to just generate hundreds of hours of premium television.
Yeah. His storyline was supposed to track the original series much more closely, but filming got shut down for covid, and the actor didn't come back when it resumed. Deleted all his socials, etc. Didn't take any more work until just recently, too.
No one knows what the deal was - lots of people speculated it was vaccine requirements when it was announced, but filming resumed before vaccines were available, so that couldn't have been it.
> No one knows what the deal was - lots of people speculated it was vaccine requirements when it was announced, but filming resumed before vaccines were available, so that couldn't have been it.
I have not read the books, so I guess I'm the target audience. It was very hard to watch. The actors were fine, actually better than fine, but the writing was painful. There are lots of standard adventure and fantasy arcs that are just impossible to carry forward with the type of "modern" they wanted. For instance, you cannot have the most diverse village in the history of villages anywhere, then later the Orc (?) stares at one of the kids once and goes "you are not from this village, you are certainly from this other village because of how you look". How? Aura color? At least change it so the kid has a tattoo or some birth mark then. I could go down a long list of dumb stuff like this that makes me come back to reality instead of allowing me to stay with the flow and enjoy the fantasy.
I reread the books multiple times. I was actually pretty impressed with how well they cast each character. Which is impressive because I think that's one of the hardest things to do.
But, the dialogue and storytelling were terrible. They invented new, pointless content. There's ~18k pages of source material. Amazon's job was to figure out how the hell to pair that down without compromising the original story. Instead, they went for visuals over storytelling
There’s actually an in book way to explain that, the clothing is always described as specific to the two rivers, and only Aiel have red hair. I agree The show was awful!
I don’t think that the ethnicity of the actors really matters all that much, the height & hair color are the only real trait that describes how Rand stands out. Honestly the only character with a skin color description I can recall is Tuon? And that isn’t really something that matters either…
Bigger issues as other people pointed out are things like inventing weird bullshit storylines when you have 10k pages of content to draw from, or messing with the “hard rules” of the magic system, such as you can’t burn out in a circle, or heal someone from death.
It ruined the suspension of disbelief immediately for me though. A rural village that doesn’t do constant international trade should have people living there that all look, speak, dress, and act similarly.
But the village looked like like an HR training video. To contrast, a new season of squid game just came out. Everyone is Korean. Everyone speaks Korean. Everyone looks Korean.
Right, the characters skin tones and real life ethnicities ruined the suspension of disbelief, because that’s harder to explain than Trollocs and the One Power??? Or Fades? Or the Dark One?
Or maybe you are hyper focused on specific, racial, details that you care about due to some internal biases?
> And... I think the WoT adaption is fine. It's not exactly how I would have done it, and there are a few choices that I think are just bad, but on the whole I have enjoyed the show and think it captures most of the primary elements of the series.
It's (and I say this as someone who sees themselves quite progressive) a bit too feminist.
It seems determined to make Nynaeve and Egwene the heroes of the show, the badasses on which everyone, including Rand, rely on. Not content with them already having access to the Power, and being among the strongest among the Aes Sedai, Amazon made them even more powerful and heroic than the books.
In contrast, in the books, Nynaeve and Egwene (it may be Elayne - in either case, two of these three) were actually rather "put out" by the fact that Rand was who he was and his access to the Power. Paraphrasing from the book:
"They were shocked, and not a little annoyed and upset. The Tower had told them that they were the strongest they'd seen with the Power in centuries, perhaps the strongest ever, and along comes Rand, barely able to control it himself, and yet even with them both fighting with all their might, he controlled both of them so... effortlessly... and then to say he wasn't even using a fraction of the Power he'd drawn before!"
I do give kudos to Amazon for respecting the diversity of the books, though.
I haven't watched the Rings of Power though I have seen enough YouTube analyses of it to know I don't want to. I think the issue with it is that they spent $1bn on it, so you'd think they'd make sure the story and action scenes were top notch, not middling cliche.
I get it, I just finished Arcane and that was pure chef’s kiss. It can be done and it’s so disappointing when it’s not, especially considering the budget. Although maybe with that much money involved it’s probably hard to keep one unified vision as I’m sure there are many interests competing.
That being said, it was still better than Wheel of Time. I’d argue that LotR was watchable, where as WoT was absolutely not!
I'd forgotten about WoT. I was going to mention what they did to The Expanse when they took over the show but as a straight steaming pile of shit WoT takes it. I couldn't even finish the third episode.
I liked most of the first season of WoT; though it got more and more divergent (and felt worse for it) as the season went on. The final episode lost me. I've been meaning to watch the second season but haven't been able to bring myself to do it yet. (I say this as one who happily completed multiple rereads of the original series as new books came out)
There's no world where anyone adapts the book series closely with live action. The series is simply too long, particularly for the level of CGI, etc., we expect out of this sort of "premiere" television. I think overall they've done a good job given how difficult the task is, though there's certainly some changes that I think were mistakes, and other things that while I might not outright believe are mistakes, are different from how I would have done it.
I will say I agree that the last episode of S1 is my least favorite, but, they had a lot stacked against them and had to rewrite the final two due to Mat's actor not coming back after covid forced a filming break. That set off a chain reaction with a lot of far reaching consequences.
I liked S2 more than S1. Quality went up on basically every metric for me, though the finale still wasn't as epic as I would have hoped for... but is probably about all you can hope for without a LOTR-like budget. If they somehow make it to Dumai's Wells, hopefully they have more money then.
Agreed, it started out alright but got worse and worse as it diverged from the books. The finale of S2 is truly laughable. If you switch your expectations to fantasy/comedy you mighhhhht be able to enjoy it?
I might be in the minority here, but I couldn't stand the Wheel of Time book; given its popularity I gave it about 200 pages before discarding it as poorly-written, under-edited, over-wrought, unoriginal, derivative drivel. Different strokes, I guess.
Tbh this is a bit over my head as my music degree only qualifies me to count to four. But all joking aside, I wonder how Pythagoras would feel if he knew that one day he would be better known for this theorem and not for music?
I’m amazed by how many people I meet who don’t know about his contribution to the discovery and development of tonality! You mean the triangle guy invented music???
Completely agree. One can be skeptical, but the actual man is likely greater than the legend.
I own a coin designed by Pythagoras. Well, it’s from 510 BC Croton, features the tripod from Delphi, and has little snakes at the bottom. Also 10 little dots. No tetractys, but that’d be a bit much. Also, the front is the opposite of the back (Aristotle describes the Pythagorean obsession with opposites).
I mean, maybe it wasn't Pythagoras — but his father was a gold smith and it is the most beautiful coin of the era, suggesting genius. But it might have been Hippasus, who was known for having conducted the first hypothesis driven experiment of all time: casting bronze chimes in musical proportions to see if the 1:2:3:4 intervals that make stringed music consonant apply with the thickness of chimes. They do. The mathematical model generalizes.
Currently, I’m working on a textbook callout that helps students learn about fractions using musical intervals — and introduces all the DEI glory of Pythagoras (multiethnic, gender-mixed community, credited his moral doctrines to a woman, Themistoclea of Delphi, etc). I’m leaving out the fact that he was kicked out of the boys Olympics when he was 16 for being too effeminate. He won the men’s Olympics in boxing, introducing some kind of new martial arts. Then he trained the most successful Olympic athlete of all time, Milo of Croton, who won 5 consecutive Olympics. No one has done that since.
Let me know if you need sources for any of these facts, I collect them all. Pythagoras is the bessst
Well, technically he founded “philosophy” more than a religion.
Polytheism was really old, of course. But intellectual polytheism (which requires an esoteric treatment of gods as metaphors) was basically new and then lasted for 1000 years. Pythagoras is also credited with coining the term “philosophy” and the term “Cosmos.”
In addition to his coinage, he also started the first communist society. So many opposites. Music/math, religion/science, communism/capitalism, harmony/war (he conquered the sybarites), etc. He was vegetarian but, when he discovered his eponymous theorem, he sacrificed a “Hecatomb” at Delphi — that’s 100 cattle.
Of course, all of this is disputed. (But happy to provide sources for any of it).
He is textually associated with the druids and the Jews! Nuts.
Most likely he didn’t come up with the theorem. He lead a cult, whose followers attributed their achievements to him and it is alleged that he himself had little interest in mathematics. I don’t know about music specifically, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the story was similar there. His core competency was religion.
Where did you come up with this ? This is just not true, that Pythagoras had little interest in math. He had a love of numbers and thought that math was a way to the divine or at least understanding the divine. His philosophy, not religion , but philosophy was a way of life that entangled mathematics profusely.
If I recall rightly, it's not even that clear that a single person named Pythagoras really existed. If he did then he never wrote anything down, there are few contemporary accounts of his life or work, and what details there are contradict each other. And, as you say, he was chiefly interested in things like life after death as opposed to mathematics.
This level of skepticism flies in the face of references to Pythagoras across multiple contemporary authors. Keep in mind that it is damn hard to prove something in the 6th century BC with the same level of evidence as today.
But Heraclitus, for instance, was contemporary and accused him of plagiarism and trickery. Why abuse a person that doesn’t exist? Ion of Chios was contemporary and said that he authored Orphic hymns.
The Orphic hymn to Apollo proclaims “your resonance attunes the whole globe”. Now, we don’t know that Pythagoras wrote that. We can’t prove that sort of thing. But it sure seems Pythagorean.
Did you know that Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton all claimed to be Pythagorean?
The man is a legend. Embrace the legend. He wrote lots of things down but he either destroyed it to avoid creating a doctrine or it was destroyed during one of the different massacres of Pythagoreans. Because that happened.
The evidence for figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Heraclitus is far more compelling than it is for Pythagoras. There is a singular lack of evidence and sources for his existence.
No one is denying that a cult named the Pythagoreans existed, that many of their writings are preserved, and that they influenced Copernicus etc ...
Heraclitus was notorious for his cutting critiques of predecessors. There are a total of three very brief mentions of Pythagoras in fragments of his work (fragments 40, 81 and 129). This is not really enough to go on - it's not clear whether he's criticising someone he's met in person, some learnings that he's heard through a third party, or a cult figure that was invented and idolised by the Pythagoreans.
I'm just saying it's not very clear that the figure of Pythagoras existed. It's like Robin Hood or King Arthur - maybe there was a historical person on which the mythology is based, but at this point we just don't know with any certainty.
Musicians know a whole lot more math than they are aware of. Music is math. Even if you don't read sheet music or study the intervals of scales and chords. Musicians that become programmers write some of the best code, same for lit majors.
Tbh I feel like this is a ‘read the room’ situation. So if I’m on HN, providing thorough, cited sources, with as much nuance as possible is right. On the other hand, if I’m teaching a class of middle school theory students, giving them a fun digestible story about ‘the real thing about the triangle guy’ is more effective.
It’s impossible to know the true scope of how it was all made whether it’s Pythagoras and the origin of tonality or Bach and the birth of common practice. There should always be a ‘click here to go deeper down the rabbit hole’ option, but sometimes Pythagoras and Bach are easy focal points to begin delivering the concept that this all came from somewhere.
This makes a lot of sense when it comes to vibrating large volumes of air in a concert hall.
But something in this realm that also surprises me is how a small amount of strings can sound like a much bigger ensemble through composition and arranging techniques. For example I’m always amazed at how full Mozart’s string quartets sound.
It’s also interesting how early game systems had to make use of these techniques since their synth chips had limited voices. Sometimes just three waveforms and a noise wave form (for ‘percussion’)
As a pianist I love the ragtime era. It’s full of low hanging fruit like this that’s just waiting to be reawakened. The coolest thing I’ve noticed is how timeless these pieces can be via live performance. Tbh recorded ragtime can be meh, but there’s something truly captivating about watching the velocity of that left hand stride irl.
This was a pleasant surprise to see on HN, I’m looking forward to adding some of these pieces to my repertoire
From a pianist perspective, when I was in college I played at a restaurant with an old beat up grand piano. I’d constantly complain about how bad it made me sound. Then one day I went to hear one of my mentors play on said piano. He sounded great. It was a pretty vivid demonstration of this principle for me.
One thing though, is that this title doesn’t paint the idea of amateurs with a great tone. Nothing wrong with being an amateur since it really means to do something for the love of it. I think pros need to be careful not to lose their amateur mentality wrt to the love.
Fakebooks also improve classical playing. Learning how to read a lead sheet format forces a musician to internalize core music theory principles. A common classical music pitfall is relying too much on shallow rote learning, black dot = push down key without the substance of musical grammar & vocabulary.
I often see classical music as a lead sheet with the written notes being the composer’s suggested arrangement technique. It takes some time to see the collections of dots (notes) as higher level pattern like chord symbols but it all leads to the same place!
[edit] your playing becomes less fake by learning how to fake from a fakebook!
Yes, for me I usually get trapped in a fractal maze of whatever media I consumed last. Video games, tv shows, etc. after my second Moderna dose I binged ‘The Circle’ on Netflix, that was a mistake when I dipped into the fever dreams...
I really like the analogy of trying to learn to run by speed walking faster and faster. It can’t be done, you have to specifically practice your ‘running’ form. Sometimes I do this way before I’m ready and make tons of mistakes like you mentioned, but with the focus of understanding the ‘running’ form as opposed to the speed walking form. This can literally be hilarious, I laugh so much at how ridiculous it can sound but it is really helpful!
What do you think about accidentally learning too rote like? For example I never really understood how to play a lot of classical until I was able to feel what it feels like to ‘speak’ music as a jazz pianist. Now I really try to understand what I am saying when I play as if it were my own notes. I can still get in the habit of relying on reading & memorizing without really getting to the heart of the notes and it usually causes me to hit a plateau.
For example I’ve been working on James P Johnson’s ‘Carolina Shout’ off of a transcription and hit this plateau without even knowing it. I realized it when I heard Ethan Iverson perform it and realized he was owning the song so much more than the rote attempt I was making. What do you think about moving past the rote learning and owning a piece?
My own experience is that I can't really develop the appropriate expressiveness and dynamics in a piece until the notes and fingering can fly on autopilot. So learning it by rote is sort of a necessary first step towards owning it. But the exact mechanics of musical memorization and expression are different for everyone, so there isn't a lot of one-size-fits-all advice out there.
I’ve been working on a project converting my piano curriculum into a 42 week YouTube series (currently on week 34, almost there!) and one of the first challenges I ran into, other than sucking a video production, was what to do about teaching repertoire so as not to run into copyright claims.
I decided to compose my own material each week and it has turned out to be the best thing about producing the series. At first the idea of writing a new intermediate level piece each week seemed daunting but it’s actually been quite liberating. Also when I’m finished with the series I’ll be able to publish the collection as my own book of repertoire.
If you’ve been teaching for a while (like 10 years) I would highly recommend going beyond the safety net of pre published teaching repertoire and try making some yourself. Find the deeper connection to what you teach about music by encoding into, well, music! New music, that reflects your unique relationship with the craft.
