What are you reading?

[Ashe]

I hadn't made it a point to watch the show, as I normally don't watch television, until I reread the first book a couple of weeks ago. I found it on YouTube. Some of it is good, and some of it is like "WTF, really?" They contradict themselves a lot, and busted out most of the book's big reveals within the first five episodes, reveals that provided much of the secrecy and conflict until the second half or very end. I understand perfectly that they can't keep everything the same, and the object of the series was to "give the fans some new surprises," but they also completely butchered some of the characterizations. That being said, it's still entertaining and I can enjoy it for what it is. I feel bad for Goodkind, though. The reason he hadn't released the rights until now was because he thought people wouldn't honor his series properly.

This, especially your last sentence. He made a huge point of that.

Josh, all I can really say to help point out the extreme differences (not things like "Gars look different, a magic map instead of a cloud to follow Richard, etc, all of which are entirely acceptable changes to most people). Male confessors. Lots of them. Entire towns of male and female confessors. The entire series makes a point of why there are no male confessors (in fact, Kahlan is the LAST confessor alive after escaping the Midlands, THAT is why she's Mother Confessor). To prevent the type of things that happened before (Male confessors have no limit on their use of their power, unlike female, and abused it etc etc), everytime a male is born to a confessor, they have the father (since he's consumed by the power from the confressor's ability) put a metal rod over the baby's neck and step on both ends. That's how extreme a point of "NO MALE CONFESSORS ALLOWED" it is.

I even let go the fact that in the show Kahlan activates Con Dar all because "ouch, I'm being tortured, RAWR". Otherwise they did a good representation of it. But as a friend said, "wtf, is she going super saiyan?" Con Dar was originally activated when she believed Richard to be dead, but like I said, that's something I can get past.

The cast entirely said that nearly all of them have never read any of the series before or heard of it. So on that basis, the guy playing Richard does... an ok job for what he has to work with. For his script, he does fine. For the book character, he's an entirely different character. A young, whiny teenage version of who he was at the beginning of WFR. Zedd (to me) isn't that bad at all, really. He does his part alright. The scripting for him is terrible in some cases though. Lots of other people think this Zedd is horrible.

I even forgave them of the new additional ability they gave Mord Sith to magically breath into other Mord Sith and bring them back to life. (In the books, a Mord Sith could only use this ability to bring back someone that she'd essentially tortured to death with the Agiel from the brink of death. It HAD to be someone she was training with her Agiel. Not "anyone".) So instead of the very important moment to the series where Denna is killed, she's just magically brought back to life at the end of the episode (though in the book, she died as a way to be set free from her roll in life, glad for this freedom and the pain that came with her forced life. In the show, there's no emotion, she comes back "with a vengeance rawr" and its more an anger killing, which removes the White Sword aspect entirely). Even this is accepted by most fans. In fact, the Denna episode was, for a large portion of it, actually word for word accurate (not so much the other prisoner thing but some of the conversations with Denna). It just sucks that they condensed something that took an entire half of the book (and sent him to the Palace of the Prophets in D'hara to kneel there) into a single episode.

EDIT: To clarify, again, I'm not saying the show isn't enjoyable in its own aspect. I'm only saying that is an adaptation in the absolute loosest form. Its got about as much similarity to the real storyline as Chubbs does to DBZ.