Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead!

Which Old Witch? The Wicked Witch…

I shan’t lie to you, dear reader: this was not what I intended to be writing about this week but I just can’t help myself: break out the booze and raise a cup in thanks, because Amazon’s The Wheel of Time series has been cancelled.

I say again: this abomination against God and man is done.

Over.

Kaput!

I never intended to crash out on Amazon in back to back weeks but, hey, I’m not complaining.

Apparently someone over there realized the irreparable harm this show was doing to Amazon as a brand because this piece of shit is gonzo. Does that mean Rings of Power is next after this coming third season? One can only hope.

But enough of the future, let’s celebrate the now!

This mean spirited take on one of my most beloved franchises could not die fast enough, dear reader, so let’s do a quick postmortem on this bitch and consign its memory into the deep netherrealms of our collective subconscious to never see the light of day again.

Agreed?

Good.

Let’s begin.

This entire show was one massive turd aimed at “modernizing” the subject material its own showrunner deemed “problematic.” That alone was a massive red flag but then the fucker actually came out and it showed these hacks were so preoccupied with “owning the chuds” they’d failed to actually understand the story they were adapting.

In the book, for instance, the main characters hail from a reclusive homogenous village where everyone is the same race. When they go on to meet (and fall in love) with peoples of various races it sparks a creative discussion about racism as they view the practice through the eyes of an innocent (ie why would I care that you’ve got a better or worse tan than I do? I love you!). Amazon, meanwhile, in an attempt to modernize the story made the village representative of downtown LA, race swapping the main characters at will while failing to do so to their respective counterparts, resulting in the rather perplexing scenario where mixed race relationships are presented as doomed to failure and only people who have the same amount of melanin can fall in love.

More than that, this show embarked on a fundamental and intentional misrepresentation and/or misunderstanding of the characters it portrayed. For examples A and B look no further than Perrin and Nynaeve.

Now, I spoke of Perrin in a previous post involving pacifists in fiction (you should check it out) but in short: he’s one of my favorite characters of all time and this show does him dirty as fuck. You see, in the book Perrin is a gentle soul who realizes he is capable of great violence and it shakes him. He doesn’t want to hurt people, but he has a literal beast within that is clawing to get out. Take this as a metaphor for boys growing up: they realize they have a strength within them, an anger. Perrin matures, accepting that part of himself and mastering it for the good of others. Amazon’s version is actively afraid of anything approaching masculinity however and constantly runs from it while acting like a bumbling idiot.

Nynaeve in the book is a hothead who has to learn to let go and submit to a power greater than herself in order to use magic. A literal metaphor for mastering one’s own ego in order to aid others if you will. Amazon’s version though? Oh, she doesn’t need to jack shit. She’s just that good! Cue the girl boss theme music because she doesn’t have to work for anything, she just needs the world to accept how great she already is. Sigh.

Worse than all the character assassination and terrible writing (and horrible special effects) however, is the active shitting on Robert Jordan by the creatives involved.

Robert Jordan found out he was dying while writing the final books in this series, dear reader, and did everything in his power to see that it was finished before he shed this mortal coil.

He gave everything to see his work finished.

As the karmic Uno Reverse card to GRRM’s existence Robert Jordan actually delivered.

And these schmucks at Amazon had the balls to shit all over him while trying to profit on his life’s work.

The sheer fucking hubris of it all was astounding and the fact that this escapade cost them hundreds of millions of dollars does not even begin to repay that particular fucking debt in my book.

So take a victory lap, dear reader. We won this round and that’s a fact.