I loved the books. I started reading them during my first year in college, 1990, all the way through the last book released during 2013. I’ve read all of them 4 times, except the last one which I’ve read 3 times.

The acting is consistently excellent, the casting is very good. The show gets many things right visually and does many things cinematically that range from great to a couple of things that are pretty poor, such as the depiction of The Fingers of the Dragon delta of the Erinin river (which looked hilariously NOTHING remotely like a river delta).

The story itself has been problematic. I expected some changes to be made, but what I can’t stomach is that some of the relationships have changed, some minor and some major.

For instance, Morraine being “pillow friends” with Siuane Sanche? The show runner says that “clearly this relationship existed between them in the books.” Man, I’m calling this out as a big-ass pile of B.S. if I’ve ever heard it. There was absolutely NO justification for other than representation for representation sake.

Other times there are conflicts between characters that NEVER existed for no apparent good reason. A good example would be Agelmar accusing Morraine of meddling in his ruling decisions. This serves no purpose, but who knows maybe that purpose will be payed off in the future.

These are just two examples of many, many others I could name, but there is not enough space to include them here. The show runner needs to be a better writer and/or be surrounded by better writers. The production crew needs to deliver better value for the bucket loads of money Amazon gave three at them.

I don’t know if they have consulted Harriet McDougal on any of these changes, but maybe they should and then ACTUALLY listen to her.

Brandon Sanderson gets executive producer credits so I’m certain they have consulted him but I’m not convinced that they listened to him. On the other hand, if these changes were a result of listening to Brandon then maybe he should not be heavily consulted in the future. I do not know the specifics here, I just know that something HAS to change in the future because this is getting really hard to watch.