I am doing a re-read, but I don't really need it for a refresher. I don't listen to podcasts or audiobooks because I hate sitting still & listening to something. I hate sitting still for anything but reading, or watching football, actually. I need to do something else with my hands or brain if I'm listening to something and then I miss stuff if it's as content-heavy as a book.

I did watch a series of videos on YouTube, by some douchey twit named Daniel Greene, where he summarizes each Wheel of Time book, but the summaries are full of egregious errors, which I did not need to re-read to catch. I actually posted a response in the comments listing at least a dozen mistakes on each summary video.

As far as the show goes, Sanderson's appalling takes and horrible prose had taken a sledgehammer to my expectations for other writers' ability to handle the show. "Game of Thrones" also set the bar for "missing the point". I watched "The Shannara Chronicles" and "Legends of the Seeker" which were crap but it was entertaining crap, that was clearly the best they could do, rather than clearly demonstrating they COULD do it right, but missed the point by a couple hundred miles. I just roll my eyes at the people who think not having books handicapped the show in the last four seasons. The mentality was obvious in the early seasons, where a lot of minor adaptational decisions about characters clearly signposted a tendency to view the stuff in hindsight, which led to their major flaw of writing to get to a certain ending, regardless of how little sense the steps to get there make. By writing Ned, Robert and Robb as stupid, because they are going to be defeated or murdered, by writing Stannis as evil because of his ultimate desperate mistake, they gave away the same flaws that led to everyone being incompetent in the end, because of what they knew would not work.

There is so much thematic stuff I am seeing as I randomly re-read Wheel of Time, that I am beginning to understand how some people think Sanderson was acceptable or competent to write the series. I missed it consciously, but it had the effect of creating an atmosphere, of conditioning the reader to see things in a certain way, and Sanderson did none of that. "Game of Thrones" similarly neglected setup and establishing work, with the intent of creating dramatic moments and shocks. They also threw in a lot of fan service and that was a heavy element of Sanderson's writing as well, from the shoehorned cameos by members of the fan community he knew, to Androl, to the meta-comments by various characters that flirted with breaking the fourth wall. My favorite baseball broadcaster, Vin Scully, handled the greatest moment of my baseball-watching life, Kirk Gibson's homerun in the 1988 World Series, in a way that is universally praised - he kept his mouth shut and let the sight speak for itself. That's how Jordan handled the greatest moments of WoT. No one talked about the Horn of Valere, they just mentioned "Falme". No one talked about Dumai's Wells. No one talked about Moiraine vs Lanfear. No one talked about the amount of balefire Rand threw at Rahvin. The only discussion of the Battle of Emond's Field was to point out that the same tactics would not work in a different situation. Sanderson didn't get it.

And for all his theatrics, Sanderson completely screwed up the drama and tension of the final book by breaking it up by character, rather than chronology. So the second book had very low stakes, probably because Sanderson (like a lot of shallow fans) thought Moiraine's rescue was a bigger deal than Rand's Dragonmount apotheosis, because "something happened" so on the one had, we have Super Zen Rand running around creating miracles, leaving no doubt he has the Last Battle in the bag, and we have Perrin and Egwene fighting silly, low-stakes battles that just make them look incompetent because they are stretched out to fill the role of a novel's climax, when, if Jordan planned to have the Slayer-duel and Mesaana hunt at all, they were mere stepping stones along the way, in a book intended to climax at Tarmon Gaidon.

So next to all that, what's the worst the TV show can do? Sanderson put the Dominion Bands on WoT fans and forced us to participate in the murder of something we loved. And Rafe Judkins is no Shai'tan. We are beyond breaking now.