Brandon Sanderson Is Not A Fan Of One Big ‘Wheel Of Time’ Change

The ‘Mistborn’ author says he didn’t like the change to Perrin’s backstory in the first episode of … [+] The Wheel Of Time.

Credit: Amazon

Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson has weighed in on Amazon’s The Wheel Of Time TV series.

Sanderson, who has made a name for himself in the fantasy world for his Mistborn and Stormlight Archive novels (among others), finished writing Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series after the author passed away in 2007.

He’s also a consultant and a producer on the show as well, though he wasn’t in charge of calling the shots. That’s up to showrunner, Rafe Judkins.

According to Sanderson, the two did not always see eye-to-eye on the changes the show has made from the books. Spoiler territory ahead.

One of the big changes from the first book, The Eye Of The World, has to do with Perrin (Marcus Rutherford).

In the show, after the village of Emond’s Field is attacked by a large band of Trollocs (evil man-beasts that are essentially the orcs of this show), Perrin and his wife, Laila, fight off a group of the creatures in their smithy.

In the heat of battle, Perrin accidentally kills his wife, swinging blindly at what he thought would be another Trolloc. Soon after, he and the other companions flee the village with Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) and Lan (Daniel Henney). There is no time for a funeral apparently.

In the book, Perrin isn’t married and doesn’t kill anyone on accident. It simply doesn’t happen, which has confused many readers. Why this massive change?

According to Judkins it was an attempt to give Perrin a more compelling backstory and help viewers to get to know his character better from the outset of the story.

“So I talked to people,” Judkins told the Hollywood Reporter, “when we first started the adaptation, about like, “What are things you didn’t like about the books?” One thing that pretty consistently came up was people felt like they didn’t really know Mat or Perrin, especially, until later in the books. You can’t really afford, in a television show, for one or two of your seven leads to not be characters that really pop until season four, right? (Laughs.) So one of our big tasks was to make sure that each of these five kids from the Two Rivers, you could understand the kernel of the story that they’ll face in season one — and through the whole series — in that first episode.”

Apparently there’s a line in one of the books that has Perrin saying if he’d stayed in the Two Rivers a few more years he would have married Laila Dearn, and that’s where the inspiration for the character came from.

In a long post on reddit, Sanderson writes that he disagreed with this change, as well as other changes that made the story feel more “grimdark”—a sub-genre of fantasy that Game Of Thrones would fall into, but which The Wheel Of Time does not.

Quoth Sanderson:

“Biggest thing he and I disagreed on was Perrin’s wife. I realize that there is a good opportunity here for Perrin to be shown with rage issues, and to be afraid of the potential beast inside of him. I liked that idea, but didn’t like it being a wife for multiple reasons. First off, it feels a lot like the disposable wife trope (AKA Woman in the Fridge.) Beyond that, I think the trauma of having killed your wife is so huge, the story this is telling can’t realistically deal with it in a way that is responsible. Perrin killing his wife then going off on an adventure really bothers me, even still. I have faith that the writers won’t treat it lightly, but still. That kind of trauma, dealt with realistically and responsibly, is really difficult for an adventure series to deal with.

“I suggested instead that he kill Master Luhhhan. As much as I hate to do Luhhan dirty like that, I think the idea Rafe and the team had here is a good one for accelerating Perrin’s plot. Accidentally killing your master steps the trauma back a little, but gives the same motivations and hesitance. One thing I don’t want this WoT adaptation to try to do is lean into being a tonal Game of Thrones replacement—IE, I don’t want to lean into the “Grimdark” ideas. Killing Perrin’s wife felt edgy just to be edgy.”

I think this makes a lot of sense and I wish Judkins had listened to the advice. A lot of book fans are upset with this change as well as with some others, like the notion that the Dragon Reborn can be any of the five Two Rivers youths, not just Rand al’Thor (it’s probably going to be Nynaeve).

But Sanderson has a smart way of looking at these changes. “I view this as a new turning of the wheel,” he writes in a comment further down the thread. “It’s not an adaptation of the books to me; it’s an adaptation of the NEXT time these people are living this story.”

That’s a good way of looking at it and fits thematically with Jordan’s ideas. Sanderson has some other good insights into the show’s adaptations.

First, he points out that the reality of adapting a book to screen results in challenges we might not be aware of, such as casting and location obstacles. Two other issues also arose. Judkins wanted to accelerate the “ensemble” nature of these stories, but the first book is very Rand-centric. So changes were made to make the first season less focused on Rand and more focused on the broader cast.

The obvious reason for many changes was simply time. Adapting a pretty long fantasy novel into just eight episodes requires cuts and rewrites, and the fact is some of these changes are bound to be unpopular with readers. But a more “faithful” adaptation doesn’t always make it better.

“However, you can watch the first three Harry Potter movies to see why sometimes adaptation like this is needed,” writes Sanderson. “The first two are very faithful, and are also boring, because the pacing of a book is so different from a film or TV show. The third is much more heavily adapted, and is in my opinion the best of the films.”

I completely agree with this. The third film is by far the best in the entire Harry Potter film series and one of the better novels, too. The movie is certainly a big step up from the first two.

You can read Sanderson’s full reddit post on all these changes below:

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