The Wheel of Time is coming alive with the underlying energy of Jordan’s creation while The Rings of Power has smothered Tolkien’s genius, allowing it to break through only at the edges. Both, however, serve as a valuable lesson for other television producers and filmmakers who bow to the whims of the woke.
In the quest to launch a new fantasy series with the cultural impact of HBO’s seminal Game of Thrones, otherwise known as the modern equivalent of Spaceball 2: The Search for More Money, Amazon Studios has invested heavily in two existing franchises, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. Both came ready-made with complex worlds, a wealth of material to adapt, and rabid existing fanbases, but only one was widely known outside the fantasy community following the critical and box office success of Peter Jackson’s (wildly overrated in my opinion) films based on both the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit. The difference in pop-culture recognition was reflected in their respective budgets, public relations, and marketing. To date, The Rings of Power stands as far and away the most expensive television series ever produced, with a budget including the rights to the source material approaching a borderline ridiculous billion dollars and counting as a lackluster season one moves to season two. The production process itself was widely covered with splashy first looks in major entertainment publications showcasing the supposed diversity of the cast, the achievement of made up historic milestones such as the first people of color playing fake creatures, elves, dwarves, and the like, all in an attempt to build an audience for the show before long before its premiere last summer. Fortunately or unfortunately, many of these announcements and much of this coverage was met with concern if not outright outrage from long time fans who viewed the desire for diversity above all else as a bastardization of Tolkien’s original vision in the service of wokeness. There was the general sense among lovers of the original novels, myself included, that the showrunners, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, did not sufficiently respect or appreciate the works of the master fantasist, and instead were pursuing modern political bugaboos rather than true greatness. Not surprisingly, those who voiced their concerns were promptly labeled racists, Tolkien himself was branded as too retrograde for modern sensibilities, and no concerns about the direction of the franchise were considered valid. In contrast, The Wheel of Time was developed and released with a much lower profile, not generating nearly as much coverage or interest, and flying onto our TV screens under the radar as it was. This doesn’t mean fans of a work that first began publishing 30 years ago weren’t engaged and concerned, aware that a sprawling world revealed across 14 main novels and additional supporting properties would have to be changed significantly to succeed in a visual medium, while dreading what those changes might be. Will our favorite moments make it into the show or would showrunner Rafe Lee Judkins completely muck it up?
This was doubly true when Jordan’s original novels “suffer” from an exceedingly slow start, only revealing the genius of the world and the complex subtlety of the story over time, after extremely meticulous table setting and patient character building. This is somewhat typical of the genre in general, where the first book in a trilogy reads like a slow burn leading to an explosive second entry followed by an even faster paced denouement. Jordan takes an even more leisurely approach, where the initial trilogy of books serves as an extended burn across close to three thousand pages before the story really gets moving and events really start to make sense. Thus, some, particularly those who aren’t a fan of the immersive, high fantasy genre, might say the overall work is too meticulous and too patient, especially given some story and character arcs only play out across multiple books and almost nothing appears to be self-contained. Personally, I remember reading the first two novels in the series and being less than impressed, viewing it as a merely passable knock-off of Tolkien until the third brought everything together and propelled the series in its own unique direction. It was only then that you realized, in retrospect, how much was going on beneath the surface and how Jordan had a unique ability to keep altering your perspective and paying off on the promises set up earlier in the series. How this would translate to the small screen in an era when people generally lack patience, consuming content in short, bite-sized chunks, remained to be seen, however. Even if significant, necessary changes to the source material were made to speed the pace, would viewers commit to a series that only paid off over time?
So far, at least, this appears to be the case. The first season debuted in January 2021 with limited hype and reasonably good reviews, but the viewership was large enough that the third season was rapidly approved by Amazon Studios. The second season, just completed last week, built upon the first with a renewed cultural awareness and at least some believing the show has emerged as the next Game of Thrones. Meghan O’Keefe, writing for Decider.com, described the shift between the two seasons this way, “For the past few weeks, I have been riding a high called The Wheel of Time Season 2. The nerd in me enjoyed the first season of Prime Video‘s adaptation of Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy saga just fine, but the last few installments of The Wheel of Time Season 2 have catapulted the series to the top of the genre TV heap. What was once a decent stab at high fantasy storytelling is now a thrilling drama on the level of Game of Thrones‘s golden years. In fact, the last time I found myself so obsessed, so entranced, and so satisfied by a science fiction or fantasy show was during the HBO hit’s halcyon days of Red Weddings, Purple Weddings, and White Walkers taking Hardhome. The Wheel of Time Season 2 has gotten that good, further proving that Amazon finally does have its coveted answer to GoT. Only it’s not Jeff Bezos’s baby, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s The Wheel of Time.” Others might not be willing to go that far yet, but remain enthused. Alex Lauer, writing for InsideHook.com, claims Mr. Judkins and his team have done the “impossible.” He sets the stage by noting, “If you stopped watching The Wheel of Time after season one ended, I can’t fault you. The big-budget fantasy epic, streaming on Amazon Prime Video alongside the even-bigger-budget Lord of the Rings prequel series, received two waves of criticism during its debut: when fans of the 14-book series binged the first three episodes that were released simultaneously in November 2021, seemingly every comment online was on the spectrum of disappointed to enraged (I was the former); and when the eight episodes concluded, newcomers to the material mostly fell into the camp of the Reddit commenter who wrote, ‘I’m not a book reader and honestly the tv show is boring me to death. Probably not going to watch the next season.’” Season 2, however, changed all that, “Rafe Judkins and crew have done the impossible, turning a misstep-laden snoozefest into must-see TV that’s increasingly meeting the precedent set by Game of Thrones. This second season feels like a new show entirely, and while a third season had already been greenlit in July 2022, this follow-up saved the series from irrelevance among the glut of streaming options.” To me, this is not the least bit surprising: All I can say in my best Bachmann-Turner-Overdrive impression is, if Mr. Judkins and his team can keep this going, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Beyond the lower profile and resulting expectations, The Wheel of Time has also benefited from a world far more in line with modern sensitivities than Tolkien’s Middle Earth. While Tolkien’s conception is far more diverse and dare I say progressive, than he’ll ever be given credit for, The Lord of the Rings and its supporting material is fundamentally a European work and one of Tolkien’s goals was, in fact, to create a new mythology for England itself. Jordan, however, took a different approach by introducing an innovative magic and resulting society where women, at the start of the story, wield far more power than men, and setting the story itself in a world with over a dozen countries, each with their own ethnicities and culture. Jordan himself was traditional in his conception of sexuality and his characters rarely engage in premarital trysts, but the universe he created is ready-made with powerful, complex female characters and roles for actors of all racial backgrounds, resulting in a rainbow cast that works without feeling artificial, the product of bean counting producers casting minorities simply to say they cast minorities, bragging about their own sensitivities. Notions of good and evil are also inherently more complicated and subtle in Jordan’s creation, much more in line with the film-noir influenced darkness that generally prevails regardless of genre today. To be sure, both fantasy worlds feature a clear demarcation between good and evil, known as the Light and the Dark in The Wheel of Time, but in Jordan’s conception determining right from wrong is itself a challenging task, allowing his characters to flirt with the dark side of their personalities in a way that Tolkien simply does not. Tolkien largely focuses on the burden of being good and just, and the sacrifices those who follow the righteous path must make. Jordan focuses instead on how we can judge between the two. Much like diversity is built into the world, this subtlety is reflected in all aspects of the story from the very first book. Simply put, the events center around a figure known as the Dragon Reborn, who will either save the world or destroy it. All of the various cultures believe in the Dragon Reborn and the prophecies that surround his emergence, but none of them agree on the specifics or what needs to be done to ensure he saves the world rather than breaks it. Instead, everyone has their own idea of what the Dragon means and how he’s supposed to achieve success, setting up a situation where even characters with the best intentions are fundamentally at odds on how to proceed. The result is the opportunity for endless conflict and drama, even between characters on the same side.
Ultimately, whatever word you choose, The Wheel of Time feels more modern out of the box than Tolkien, which while certainly a true masterwork of literature and a timeless classic if ever there was one, could’ve been written centuries ago. Personally, I do not consider this a bad thing, merely a fact of the matter. Tolkien is the founder of the entire genre and remains supreme in my view, but adapting his work successfully requires an understanding that The Rings of Power obviously lacks and the result is far more Spielberg than Tolkien, as your humble author has previously described it. Putting this another way, it seems that Mr. McKay and Mr. Payne don’t sufficiently love the source material enough to immerse themselves in it successfully and extract the greatness within. The two are playing with characters, stories, and creations they do not understand or respect, disregarding what makes them truly great in the first place in favor of cheap thrills and political correctness, substituting their own mediocre talent for the true genius of the creator. Hence, an immensely powerful and interesting female character in Galadriel is reduced to Buffy the Sauron Slayer in armor, strutting around like a cheap warrior, doing more gruff bitching and moaning than leading the elves through her presence and persuasion. Mr. Judkins, on the other hand, appears to start first and foremost with a love for Jordan’s work and the intricacies of the world he created, fully knowing that he could never create such a thing on his own. I could, of course, nitpick some of the changes he has made here or there, or the quality could dramatically decline as the show moves forward, but the difference with his current competition could not be more striking. The Wheel of Time is coming alive with the underlying energy of Jordan’s creation while The Rings of Power has smothered Tolkien’s genius, allowing it to break through only at the edges. Both, however, serve as a valuable lesson for other television producers and filmmakers who bow to the whims of the woke: You are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, the same phenomenon we witnessed following HBO’s diverse casting choices for House of the Dragon. Rather than applauding the diverse cast, powerful, complex women characters, and the exploration of alternative power structures, The Wheel of Time has been criticized for depicting too much violence against people of color. Sylas K. Barrett, writing for Tor.com, takes issue with a sequence where one of the main characters, Egwene, is captured by an invading army from across the sea and a magical device in the form of a collar transforms her into a slave. In the hands of her new master, another female, Egwene is physically and mentally tortured, close to the point of breaking.
The sequence itself is striking for several reasons. Egwene is young, but she has been gifted with magic and has the potential to be one of the most powerful women in the world. She is headstrong and believes she will come into this power inevitably, only to learn that her capacity for magic can be turned against her. The collar she is bound with doesn’t work on a normal woman. It does, however, reduce a woman who can channel magical energy into a slave. Jordan’s genius is even more subtle than that, however. Magic in his world is exceedingly powerful. A powerful magic user can destroy an entire city, as though it were hit by an atomic bomb. Powerful magic users already came close to destroying the world three thousand years ago, prompting the question: Should anyone be allowed to freely exercise that kind of power without restriction? The invading army has answered that question with a resounding no, turning them into slaves. The White Tower, which represents magic users like Egwene, has answered the question by binding them with three oaths, not to lie, not to harm anyone with magic unless their own life is threatened, and not to make any weapon with magic that could harm another. In the real world, we have answered the question in our own way: You can’t own a nuclear weapon, a fighter jet, or a bazooka for obvious reasons. This is the question posed by Jordan’s magical collar, far beyond calling it merely slavery. Ms. Barrett willfully ignored this complexity and simply claimed “the show isn’t sensible enough to the way this violence read when almost everyone being harmed is a woman, and they are all people of color. I think what disappoints me the most is the fact that the gratuitous brutalization of women is one of the hangups of the original series—I actually just talked about this issue in the most recent installment of my read of The Wheel of Time books. Although there is so much I love about The Wheel of Time, this problem, and issues of sexism in general, often hampers the other excellent aspects of it as a fantasy epic.” She continued, “I had a lot of hope that the show would also strike a better balance when deciding which elements of violence and subjugation served the plot and theme elements, and which were unnecessary torture porn. This is especially important when most of the characters put through these experiences are women. Not only that, but because the show has done a good job of casting diversely, everyone (with the nominal exception of Liandrin and her son) who is harmed, tortured and/or enslaved in this episode is a person of color, which gives an additional aspect to the violence that the audience is witnessing.” There’s an easy answer to this: Go back to casting white people, but all kidding aside, precisely what do they expect? The journey of the hero is necessarily rife with conflict. The hero suffers before he or she prevails, and frequently that suffering is more than the average person could possibly endure. To a large extent, the suffering is the point and if shows are going to feature more diverse casts, more people of color are going to suffer. The alternative is not to cast them in the first place or water down the story to the point where people of color spend their days dancing on fields of green, not doing what the hero has to do. One can imagine the bean counters figuring out who to cast, and then figuring out what can happen to them based on their racial background, but of course art is not supposed to work this way and something tells me Ms. Barrett would be complaining just as stridently if that was the case. I’d recommend she change the channel instead, spare us all a lecture, and let us take the lesson that these people will never be pleased to heart.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 