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)

In GoT (the tv series), there were characters that I did care about.  Not here.  amazon prime is capable of producing good series.  I'm watching The Legend of El Cid, which is not bad and the main actor, (El Cid) Jaime Lorente has sufficient range that you care if his character survives all the plots against him (he plays a genial doofus in Casa de Papel).  There's kind of heavy handed character development (bad guys about as subtle as Snidley Whiplash) but you care.  I think that perhaps the problem with WoT is that there's too many moving parts, too many characters, so it just doesn't hang together, despite great costumes, really first rate CGI and probably actors who can act but just have bad scripts.  Because it's generally kind of lame, I tend to watch it when I have nothing better to do.  So the continuity is a problem. 

I've only seen the first Dune movie, which was camp and kind of embarrassing.  I'm sure the more recent ones are more beautiful and compelling.  But, if I remember from the book the main guy who figures out how to ride the spice worms ends up saving people and then becoming an oppressor?  Right?  I'm still kind of pissed at the degeneration of GoT in the final season where people just got personality transplants to become new characters and behave in ways that beggared belief, and ended up like some kind of summer camp meeting.  So that's another WTF candidate.

 

Jalepeno poppers.

Turns out mom didn't wipe down the toaster oven tray this morning, so I got to hear the smoke alarm.

Honestly, I should have checked it myself, but I checked it last night!

The Jalepeno poppers were a winner, and might go into regular rotation. They're such a low fuss, high calorie option. And no tomato!

I think it is. The characters are never quite as annoying as the White Gold Wielder in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, but some (most) of them are really annoying. They all act like spoiled teenagers, and wilfully do stupid things, but this idiocy is often (nearly always) the only thing that allows the story to move forward. I have only watched episode 1 (and won't watch any more until I am sure that they complete the story, which I truly don't believe that they will. GRRM has harmed me for life) but it was obvious from the start that they have modified a lot of the events to avoid upsetting modern sensitivities. I don't recall a single ugly female in the books, good or bad, and surprisingly few ugly males: very few of the baddies were ugly (qv the Children of the Light) but monsters, however, were universally baddies.

I enjoyed the books, and was pleased that the series got an ending (although it was very much an "and then the good guys won, and lived happily ever after"), but most of the characters not so much.

Aside: The author(s) worked really hard to make "strong women" characters, but they very much seem to be the male idea of what a strong woman is (either magical powers, or contrarily headstrong and often both) rather than really strong. But as a chap myself, I understand that it must be quite difficult to write a strong female without making her unpleasantly masculine or shrewish. It is an interesting trait in some recent novels that the gender (or race) of a majority of the characters is unstated, but that doesn't really work when the gender conflict is an essential part of the story like in WoT. The whole a'dam thing made my stomach turn, so I can't imagine what that would have been like for a lady to read/ watch (assuming it makes it into the TV show).

The main group of young people are dull and predictable because they seem to embody some millenial ideals of diversity and gender neutrality in the talents and advancement.  They are not particularly interesting because it's like someone at Google dreamed them up.  Then there's a couple of super smart people, a woman and her gorgeous samurai support guy, and of course, she's smarter than most of the oddball women who hang in this tower waving their arms around with CGI lines of force emanating from them.  This has caused her to becone somewhat of an outsider.  I haven't even bothered to learn their names.  The show had such a long hiatus that I hardly remember what they're going on about at this point.  There's a force of evil and a couple of the teenagers have special powers that have the potential to save the world but it's by no means a foregone conclusion, but, hey, I've seen enough Disney movies to figure out how this will work out.  There are times that I think a random episode of Doc Martin has more emotional complexity and interesting characters, but I digress.

I don't know if South Dakota is "local" (and to the extent that it isn't, I'm completely grateful) but the governor is currently enjoying a well deserved backlash for taking a 14 month old puppy that was bred to hunt pheasants and shooting it in a gravel pit.  This was followed by a similar summary execution of a goat because she found it disagreeable and smelly.

After everyone was horrified by this cruel behavior, she doubled down on this approach to the disposition of unwanted animals by boasting that they'd also just killed 3 horses that had been owned by the family for 25 years. 

article here:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/26/trump-kristi-noem-shot-dog-and-goat-book