After hearing how bad it was, I decided to watch for myself. I believe that the show must have been created with some hard rules that are responsible for the final product. I'll share my opinion of what those rules must be.

1. Every shot must look like the United Colors of Benetton™ because otherwise it would be Racist™. It’s no surprise that Amazon was going to take its wokeness to 11. I expected it. It was done so poorly, though. Jordan’s writing had many, many flaws, but a lack of diversity in the characters wasn’t one of them. His descriptions of the various countries provide the opportunity to populate the screen version of his world with actors and actresses (or, as they say now, “actors with vaginas” or some such nonsense) of virtually every ethnicity on the planet.

But the Two Rivers? What the fuck happened there? How am I supposed to suspend disbelief that an out of the way community that even in the TV show represents the “blood of Manetheren”, a kingdom that was overrun hundreds of years earlier, has people that look like they’re from every corner of the real world? What sort of segregation have they been practicing for the last few hundred years that they haven’t intermarried and created a somewhat uniform ethnicity (Rand excluded, obviously)?

The absurdity keeps going, and I soon came to realize that someone at Amazon must have put out a directive that every single shot, no matter where the action takes place, should look like the United Colors of Benetton™. I’m sure they’re quite proud of themselves, even if it’s just silly. To paraphrase Xena from the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, “Anytime you see something that doesn’t make sense, a wizard did it.” People must just get born and no one knows what ethnicity they’ll come out as. Yeah. Totally. Because it doesn’t have to make sense. It’s not the same turning of the Wheel. Forgive me as I pause to vomit.

2. More girl power please. No, still more. No, not quite enough. No … can you just give me the series and I can do it? Just as with the ethnic makeup, the producers decided that Robert Jordan’s series, about a world where women control a lot of the politics because only they can wield magic, wasn’t progressive enough for them. They had to dial it up to 11 here, too, because otherwise they would be supporting that cisnormative patriarchy they like to blame for their PMS.

The Dragon could be a woman? Seriously? Why not say it could be a man, a woman, a non-binary person, a cat, a sea sponge, or an inanimate object while we’re at it? The whole damn point of the Dragon is that everyone knows he is going to go insane like the other men who can channel, but he can’t be gentled and he has to fight the Last Battle. Saying “we don’t know which one of the four is the Dragon” was just a needless additional sop to some misplaced notion that the series doesn’t have enough female strength.

Furthermore, anyone watching the show without reading the books would quickly come to the conclusion that the main hero is Moiraine. She’s always right, especially when douchy Agelmar decides to mansplain to her, and even when she destroys half of Emond’s Field fighting the Trollocs. And who’s next in our heroics? Nynaeve, of course, who can magically sneak up on Lan, kill Trollocs with a knife, and save Lan’s life with a blast of saidar that full-fledged Aes Sedai couldn’t muster. Perrin sucks (partially because he killed his wife, see Point #3, below), Rand is really almost absent, and Mat … well, they really shat all over his character from start to finish, didn’t they? The men are outright bad or forgettable, because apparently the women don’t shine enough in Jordan’s original series.

We also have the completely asinine “battle” where a woman in labor is able to fight off grown men with her magic innate strength. I guess she was wearing boots of speed and gauntlets of ogre power and had +3 spears, and was a 10th level ranger, while the soldiers were just lowly 0-level guards ready to be killed. Or a wizard did it.

And part of girl power means casting ugly women to play beautiful women, because of course, real beauty is ugliness (and lies are truth, and war is peace) in the minds of the people running this shitshow. Both the Aiel woman (I forgot her name and don’t care to look it up because I threw my WoT books into a box in the basement) and Min are supposed to be attractive from their book descriptions. I’m pretty sure Egwene doesn’t have a giant nosewart in the series or Jordan would have drawn our attention to it the way he mentioned Nynaeve’s braid. Can’t she go to a dermatologist or something? Cannoli is right – it’s really obvious and detracts from the show.

3. Throw away 75% of the original story – 50% because we need to condense the story and 25% so we can add useless garbage of our own. I understand that a series is going to have to make some hard choices about taking things out. Cutting Baerlon and putting Eyesore Min in Fal Dara makes sense. Cutting Bayle Domon makes less sense. Removing the entire Caemlyn sequence is getting bad.

It wouldn’t be as bad, though, if they didn’t cut so damn much just to put in all sorts of crap that wasn’t even in the series. What’s up with the entire Random Warder #322 sequence? Why do we care if he kills himself? I don’t. Jump off the underwhelmingly boring White Tower. Yawn. Can we move on to something I might care about? Aes Sedai #298 died too. Oh well. It’s no big deal … oh wait, what the holy fuck, they’re coming up with some fucking contrived religious ceremony they pulled out of their asses and burning through … what, half an episode? Two episodes? … on this shit.

Oh, and why give Perrin a wife (with all those fucking ear piercings) if she’s just there so he can kill her? Granted, given how good Perrin is with his role they might as well have killed him too. He certainly doesn’t evoke any strong feelings. But he’s a wolf friend, magically (because we cut that whole Elyas storyline). He must have been bitten off screen by a werewolf. Or a wizard did it.

No Mordeth, either. That’s going to cut out a lot of source material going forward. Good thing they filled it with useless crap they made up. That’s clearly so much better. Oh, and they recast Mat. You know the show is doing well when they recast a major character (unless it was because he said something absolutely crazy like “math isn’t racist” – then he will be fired to the thunderous applause of the Twits).

Narg didn’t stay, either, even though he was smart. The opening sequence was gone, the second opening sequence with the myrddraal (or however it’s spelled; I have been successful at forgetting some of these things) was gone, the Finns’ tower was never seen, and in exchange we get to watch some dumbfuck dramatically drop an Aes Sedai ring into a molten pool.

4. Special effects you can do at home, kids. Didn’t this slow-motion car crash of a series have a budget? They have some impressive landscape shots that prove they at least had a drone or a helicopter or something. So why does the One Power look like something from a 1990s TV series on the WB? Did they blow their load on Aes Sedai dresses (why weren’t the Aes Sedai in pants more? It’s so oppressive to force them to wear gendered clothes)?

They also apparently couldn’t spend any money on a CGI Whitebridge, a White Tower that looks like something better than a bad Minas Tirith ripoff, a dynamic Blight or Ways that don’t look like Lincoln Logs on their sides. The village with the fat Darkfriend woman with the nosering looked like it was taken from a very low budget show (again, perhaps from the 1990s on the WB).

The Logain portion had terrible special effects, whether it was the actual channeling or the effects of channeling. Maybe the producers spent a shitload of money on pot, because they clearly didn’t spend it on making the special effects look like it’s 2021 instead of 1999. Call Prince. Oh shit, we can’t, he’s dead. Such a shame. He was an underrated artist.

5. Please don’t try acting; the way you delivered the lines at your amateur home town playhouse are just fine, thank you. It’s just so bad. So terribly, terribly bad. They found a lot of bad actors, and told them to either read their lines in the most amateurish fashion possible, or to go so over the top that people laugh from the cliché that results. Nynaeve seems to have only one pained expression on her face, Rand is forgettable and Perrin is so annoying I can’t imagine how that will spike when we have to deal with Faile, too (I would bet the series gets canned before then). I actually thought the guy playing Mat was the strongest actor, which must be why they decided to replace him. The Red Ajah woman with the over prominent jaw and Logain are just caricatures and I can’t stop laughing over their performance.

The Moiraine actress is just okay, and the actor playing Lan is legitimately good, but they’re the exceptions, not the rule. The rule seems to be to play poorly and display the nosewart prominently to distract the audience from how bad the lines are delivered.

In fairness to the actors and actors with vaginas, Robert Jordan’s writing style sucked. The plot was mildly entertaining but his style was terrible. Part of the problem might be hearing the hackneyed and stilted words of the characters out loud for the first time and realizing how godawful it all sounds. “The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills” – what tripe! “It wasn’t the beginning, but it was a beginning” is positively retarded. A good actor could make these inartful expressions sound good, though. The fact that I’m noticing again how bad a writer Jordan was is also an indictment of the acting skill of the cast.

I understand this series was renewed for a second season before the first one was shit out released, but hopefully the viewership will tank enough, and the negative reviews will pile up enough, that Amazon will quietly smother this abomination with a pillow before Season 3 or, at worst, 4. Or a wizard will.