PS - I never thought about the race of the protagonists or antagonists once when reading the book (except when it was waved in your face like Loial), but they come from a "world" where there are many, many tribes that get all jumbled up together: I think that gives the TV producers the right to cast as many different races as they can find (including orcs, ogres, gnomes, dwarfs and hobgoblins. And welshmen.) The racial heritage of the lead character is an important plot point though, and is remarked upon regularly and often.
Thanks for weighing in on that. Of course, this is fiction. I was thinking of Earth and the Western hemisphere, mostly medieval Europe, in terms of how diverse a small farming village would be where the same families tended to stay put, tied to working the land and intermarrying, so minimizing the diversity of local populations.
The women and power theme in this series strikes me as throwing a sop to women in what I generally have seen as a male dominated genre -- fantasy, so while I appreciate the gesture, it seems a kind of false feminism. The CGI in the show is very good and I'm glad it gives young artists work.
And there's a very good cast, although some of the actors are much better than others. I was watching Madeleine Madden (Egwene) make a pathetic attempt at grief last night and thought she could use a refresher course at the Actor's Studio or someplace. Some of them are just so Disney level virtuous that they irritate me. Alvaro Morte does a reasonable job of conveying a kind of resigned madness. Some of this is probably the writing that veers too close to plain old soap opera level melodrama for my taste. I just looked it up and it was kind of amazing in that the cast list is super extensive. There's lots and lots of characters here, so more employment for actors.
The idea of plowing through 10k pages of this in a book series doesn't really appeal to me. I think maybe Don Quixote is next on the list. Basically, I ran out of Fallout, so went back to this out of boredom. I had started watching it, got tired of it, stopped and picked it up again last night. I probably should have read a book instead. I can easily see why others would find it entertaining. I guess I'm too nit-picky.
