I had the same opinion as you when I first started the series. I felt like I was missing something about the characters but couldn’t pin it down. I was taking what was happening on the pages at face value (and rushing thru it a bit tbh). The overly descriptive writing didn’t help. But then I stumbled upon a liveblog of a person reading through the series and sharing their thoughts. Just reading a few chapters of the blog unlocked a whole new layer of depth for the characters and the story for me that I had been missing. So much so that the infamous ‘Slog’ didn’t faze me at all and I prolly had some of the most fun reading WoT during that time. All because I was able to read between the lines of what Jordan wrote.

Now is it a knock against WoT that an external source was needed for me to understand it fully? I don’t think so. Plenty of great works sometimes need a guiding hand to be fully appreciated. But that’s just me. I’m bringing this all up in case you ever wanna get back into reading the books again. This will surely help enhance the reading experience and maybe make it actually enjoyable.

Lowkey same about season 2. It took me a minute to get into and it was mostly cuz of wanting to see how they developed Mat. They mostly nailed the main arcs that season (a few characters were stagnant but ig with only 8 eps it’s bound to happen especially in early seasons). Season 3 I’d say is a vast improvement partially because the story/character setup of the last 2 seasons is finally paying off and they’re fully leaning into the high fantasy element of the show and not hand holding the audience. And partially because how it looks and feels. They switched to cinemascope (21:9) aspect ratio, to achieve a more “cinematic” look and it shows.

Oh and this season has some of the best moments from the entire series so it has that going for it, but credit to them, they nailed it.

The viewing numbers this season were great across countries and the critics reviews are on par with best seasons of GoT. It’s as good a foundation as any to get renewed. Here’s hoping.

Curios what you didn’t like this season? For myself, I went with the expectation that it’s not gonna match the story/character beats from the book 1:1 and they’re not gonna be able to incorporate many characters from the books for brevity’s sake. What I did care about was if they would be able to preserve the soul of the main characters and villains and how compelling is their development. I have not found a single main character or villain (heck even some side characters) that is not hitting it out of the park in that respect. I see Lan, I see Siuan, I see Egwene, I see Lanfear, I see moggy etc. My mind fully accepts these are the same characters I read in the books. Some even enhanced.

I don’t mind Perrin’s actor that much since the character itself is mostly stoic. Rand’s actor seemed fine to me apart from a couple moments here and there.