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Make you laugh / Re: Things that made you laugh today
« Last post by dweez on May 01, 2024, 04:05:07 PM »I'm reading a book about gravity...it's pretty heavy.
That place looks fabulous. Let us know what you thought.
I think that a good series needs either a good source, or a good team of makers (or both, but I'm not sure that has ever occurred). And a defined ending*.
I think the primary problem with WoT is that it was written without real characters: most of the participants are cyphers designed to further the story in various ways. This makes bad TV.
GoT (or ASOIAF) is different: GRRM writes characters that are interesting, but it is dangerous to care about them, as he has a habit of killing them off. It makes for good TV, because they do stuff, and despite yourself you do care. Where GRRM stopped writing, the suits were clueless.
Dune 2 is way better than Dune 1, but between them they only cover the introduction to the Dune saga: In the first book (2 movies) the kid wins, but in the next book he becomes the monster: in the rest of the saga the author attempts (with limited success) to show how the "continual evil emperor cycle" is broken.
* this is the bit that rendered several potentially great shows into rubbish (Lost, Heroes, even X-Files - amongst thousands of others. Great ideas, great starts, sagging middles and no ending)
The general public are not the target for the current crop of "Republican" politicians, their core (if not only) audience is the large body of Americans that are fed up with "progressive leftism"; the same body of people that truly and deeply believe any and all conspiracy theories, and don't care for democracy because it lets the woke-left dominate thinking through the deep state and subversion of the media. And for those people she absolutely definitely is leader material. As far as they are concerned, she has the courage to do things that are unpopular with the pinko-commie-fags, and the strength of character to stand by her beliefs. I find it odd that the same constituency that supported and fuelled McCarthy currently prefer Russian leaders to elected American ones.
These "Republicans" are betting the farm on that core audience outnumbering the rest in a count, so that they can permanently subvert democracy in their favour.
Tricky for TV, I guess.
Like in Dune where the whole series can be summarised as "we have all seen the boy that fights the evil emperor and wins, but what happens then? Does the boy then become the evil emperor and restart the cycle?", the point of the WoT books is not the people, but the cyclic nature of things: the characters are just a means to illustrate the complexities of going round in the circle (and the "magic" schema is an attempt to distance the saga from all the others that do the same). It is difficult to see how this can be made for the screen (like Dune), because on the screen the makers want the audience to care for the characters and, as you note, to identify with the characters; hence we have to have one of each ethnic group, gender and religion in every group.
GRRM's adaptation solved the problem by regularly killing folk - often while they were copulating, so people were invested in the experience without really caring about the characters - the makers' problem in that case was guessing the ending (which was doomed to fail, as there won't be one. GRRM has painted himself into a corner, and is stuck)