Wheel of Time, Season Two

[Mechalich]

Regarding the faithfulness to the asthetics of the source material when it gets adapted into TV, I wonder what fans would say if, for example, a non-redhead Kvothe appeared in a Name of the Wind adaptation.

Almost certainly they would complain, because that exact case occurred in season one of The Witcher regarding Triss Marigold - a character who's most notable descriptive trait is her chestnut hair (it was vividly red in the games) who was portrayed by a distinctly brunette Anna Shaffer. Fans complained, loudly, and funny thing, when Triss reappeared in season two, Anna Shaffer's hair was now the appropriate color.

[Whoracle]

Almost certainly they would complain, because that exact case occurred in season one of The Witcher regarding Triss Marigold - a character who's most notable descriptive trait is her chestnut hair (it was vividly red in the games) who was portrayed by a distinctly brunette Anna Shaffer. Fans complained, loudly, and funny thing, when Triss reappeared in season two, Anna Shaffer's hair was now the appropriate color.

I personally don't have a horse in that specific race, I just found the actress in S1 really dull, and I attribute most of that to the script writers, but the "appropriate" color is way closer to what google shows me as "chestnut" in your comparison picture. Well, after the "washed out" filter, anyways. So from where I'm sitting I'd say S2 Triss is way more on the mark.

(relevant google result: https://htmlcolorcodes.com/colors/chestnut/)

[warty goblin]

I kinda just found the first season visually dull. Not bad, and the trollocs were genuinely good, but stuff like the costumes were decidedly meh. I get that in a lot of cases they were trying to show that the societies in the show inherit stuff from our world through the costumes, but it mostly made the wardrobe look like second rate cosplay stuff. What's his face the singer dude was really guilty of this, he looked like somebody sent him to the thrift shop with $50 for a post-apocalyptic Bard costume.

Next to both Rings of Power and House of the Dragon, which absolutely nailed costume aesthetics, it comes up extremely short. HotD really got the believable but slightly elevated medieval fantasy look. Everything everybody wore was awesome and made sense. RoP just went whole hog on high fantasy and boy was it high fantasy. There's a lot wrong with that show, but it looked excellent, like a lost golden age should look.

[Taevyr]

Regarding the faithfulness to the asthetics of the source material when it gets adapted into TV, I wonder what fans would say if, for example, a non-redhead Kvothe appeared in a Name of the Wind adaptation.

Never was that big a fan of Name of the Wind, but I guess my opinion'd be that it's somewhat understanadable if the actor's a practically perfect fit except for the hair, but still quite lazy to not get said actor a bottle of high-quality hair dye anyway.

Essentially "While small changes are understandable when they aid the production and don't really impact the lore/source material, this is just laziness masquerading as that".

And for WoT, the "problem" is that its filled to the brim with unnecessary detail, except a surprisingly large chunk of that turns into a plot element 5 books later: it's Jordan's trademark worldbuilding depth adding a ridiculous amount of minor cultural elements/personal quirks, and a large of those end up playing into each other for plot or being important for that one scene or the like, which I can imagine makes it very hard for any "lore director" or whatever they call the person responsible to separate the vast bushels of wheat from the equally vast fields of chaff. And then you have to assume the showrunners/writers are willing to listen to said lore director when she insists the twice-mentioned odd quirk of side Aes Sedai #268 is actually of vital importance 6 books later. Even if the writers were already very passionate and highly familiar with the series (and I won't deny harbouring doubts about that), that's still a tough job. And as seen in part of the previous thread's discussion, some of Rafe Judkins' comments in AMA's/interviews on the subject didn't generally instill trust in that regard.

[KorvinStarmast]

... bogged down by too many side perspectives that each had their own entirely disconnected plots...snip...The pacing would have been better if he'd figured out earlier to just either focus on a couple of perspectives for long periods and/or start combining plotlines.

Said it better than I did, thank you. I bolded the part that got me fed up: I was expecting to see the threads weave together sooner than they did, and I lost patience with the digressions. But yes, world building he does / did well.

This appears to be derived from the artistic depiction of the Burning of Catherine Hayes which appears on wikipedia and in the top results if you type 'burn at the stake' into google image search (which I just and discovered that connection, it took me about three seconds), rather than anyone actually thinkings about how big of a fire you'd really need to burn someone with any kind of thoroughness. It's a sloppy, poorly considered shot that falls apart if the audience thinks about it much.

As compared to the burning of Stannis' daughter in GoT ... or even the burning of the hunchback in the Movie Name of the Rose from a few decades ago. (Sean Connery, F Murray Abraham, et al).

Frankly, that's my tl:dr opinion on the show as a whole: it's the network TV treatment of WoT masquerading as the prestige TV treatment.

One hopes that they'll raise their game.

[Sapphire Guard]

Not physically matching the characters is not usually a big deal for me, the performances are more important.

If the hair colour is narratively important, that might be different. It is a large plot point that Robert Baratheon's children had golden hair, for instance.

Honestly, I don't care about incorrectly burning someone at the stake either.