- WoT is basically about Rand with lots of time to interesting supporting characters. The show is about Moraine. This is a fundamental rearrangement of the story.
- Show Mat is a methbilly thieving loser with an abusive alcoholic father and idiot mother. WTF?
- Show Perrin is hopelessly moody and useless. Starts off with "Girl In Fridge" trope with his wife. WTF?
- Show Thom gets about 12 seconds of screen time. Lousy screen time, at that. WTF?
- Show Lan is a sensitive little girl. Something something duty and mountains and death and feathers. WTF?
- Show warders in general spent a lot of time talking about their feelings. WTF?
- Show Nynave is a little less of a raging lunatic jealous cranky b i t c h than Book Nynaeve. I'm not sure if this was an improvement or not. It didn't fill me with rage, at least. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get to hate Show Nynaeve as much as I hated Book Nynaeve (at least until she grew the **** up around book 8 or 9 and became a tolerable person).
- Show Egwene is OK. Kind of annoying, like Book Egwene. She's probably the least objectionable character change on the show.
- Show Loial is the worst gradeschooler cosplay bit of absurdity I've ever seen on television. The 1970s show Buck Rogers had better costumes. Oh my god does he look ridiculous. He looks like Beavis did when he and Butt-Head glued hair to their faces so they could have beards and look older to pick up chicks.
- Tarwin's Gap and the blight and the EotW and the Horn are just ... just ... I don't even have words for how terrible that last episode was.
- Show Logain was excellent. Credit where credit's due, the show gave him a lot of screen time and a bunch of scenes that were not in the book, and they really delivered nicely.
- Show Eamon Valda was pretty great, until he fell to pieces during the Perrin/Egwene escape.
- Show Moraine was pretty good. Except that bit where she took a nap all the way through Shadar Logoth. WTF?
- Show Trollocs aren't bad.
- Show Myrddraal are pretty good.
- Show Padan Fain is pretty good.
- Where the hell is Show Elayne?
I almost hate to bring this up, but wokeness damaged the show, badly. Male and female differences are the foundation of the series, it's hardcoded into the magic system, the history of the breaking of the world. You can't tweak any of the male/female bits of the world without fundamentally changing the entire mythology. There was plenty of opportunity to showcase strong female characters without ****ting on the book source. I mean the entire White Tower is women. Moraine and Nynaeve and Ewgene are great characters. Elayne, Avienda, Morgase, Berelain, Tuon, the Aiel Wise ones, Atha'an Miere, even the Seanchan damane and sul'dam, for **** sake the book is FULL of awesome and competent and powerful female characters. There was no need to cut down every single male character in the show to a caricature of incompetence or irrelevance.
Fabricating the "uncertainty" of whether or not the Dragon was male or female? WT actual F'ing F?
Having "girl power" save the day in the last episode at Tarwin's Gap? Never mind that doing so completely got rid of yet another key plot point in the books - Rand using the EotW - and all of that associated foreshadowing.
They did an OK job of integrating LGBT characters into the show. There's support for it in the books, though most of Jordan's writing was vague. There isn't an explicit scene anywhere in the 178,486,183 pages of source material. But there's Aiel sister-wives and "pillow friends" in the tower - so the Moraine-Suian romance wasn't a jarring change, even though it's not explicitly part of the books. I don't know if it was necessary, strictly speaking, but it fits with their history. Same with the gay/bi warders. Not surprising, everyone who read the books knew the Greens were having threesomes with their warders, but I don't know if it added anything to the show besides some virtue signaling.
There's even room for a book-consistent trans character later on in the series (male Balthamel getting reincarnated into female Aran'Gar yet still touching the male half of the source), with lots of opportunity to explore some gender identity issues, but I have no doubt the show writers will **** that up with giant hammy fists too.
Most of the sets are nice. The production is good. I'm a sucker for anything fantasy and I wanted to like it, and I stuck with the show through the entire first season, even though episode 1 Mat and Perrin made it clear exactly where the trainwreck was going.
90% of the show is just those awful writers dropping a giant steaming pile of **** on the book source I grew up with and enjoyed. The books weren't perfect by any means. The gender stereotypes and braid-tugging and spankings were awkward even in the 90s. But the show is awful.
