markantonys

[markantonys]

BRIDGERTON 3.07 Joining of Hands

[markantonys]

If you hadn't already read the entire WoT series, could you see yourself finishing at this point? I'm still in A Crown of Swords and seem to have lost all motivation post cancellation

the grass is always greener i suppose, because i'd been thinking that i wished i hadn't read the whole series already so that i would still have some new WOT material left to discover now! on the other hand, being able to think "the show will fix this" during the more annoying/boring parts of the later books definitely helped me get through it, so it's tough to guess how i would feel about continuing on reading post-cancellation if i was still midway through.

if it's any motivation, i'd say that the best is still to come for elayne, egwene, and gawyn; they all shine the brightest and/or have their biggest storylines in the second half of the series (in my opinion). lan probably is in this bucket too, even if i personally am not that interested in him generally. mat and nynaeve kinda peaked already lmao and perrin is perrin, and rand is a mixed bag where min's presence makes a lot of his ACOS-onwards chapters insufferable but on the other hand he also has some great moments to come and it feels really satisfying to make it all the way through his full series character arc.

on that note, that's how i felt when i finished the series: while it was hard to get through at times, i felt so satisfied and accomplished when i got to the end of it and could look back on the whole story. even though i knew most of the major things that were going to happen due to pre-reading spoilers (and i think you're in that boat as well), it still felt worthwhile to read it all for myself and experience the entire story firsthand. i saw it said once, and i think i agree, that WOT is a greater whole than the sum of its parts. some of the individual books might be meh, but put them all together, and the full arc of the story & characters is incredible.

i think my attachment to the characters would've been strong enough that i would've wanted to soldier on and finish the books (not least because i had a good post-canon fic idea from before i started reading and was sooooo determined to finish the series so i'd be able to write it haha and i did!), but it might've taken me longer to get through them all or maybe i would've needed to take a break for a while during the mourning period for the show.

also, if you're interested in continuing but finding it hard to get through, then don't be afraid to skim the boring parts! don't be afraid to skip entire chapters and read summaries! don't be afraid to slap on the audiobook in the background while you do something else and only half-listen! maybe more of a selective read where you don't spend too much time forcing yourself to read every word of POVs/storylines that don't compel you might help out.

[markantonys]

The Wheel of Time, 2025 Season 03, Episode 04: The Road to the Spear

[markantonys]

make a wot ship tier ranking!

i have been given license to share My Opinions! behold them below, and i will make this unrebloggable so no one tries to get in here and start shit haha

godtier and i have been compelled to write many fics for them: rand/mat/elayne/aviendha and all sub-pairings therein

great tier and i have been compelled to write a handful of fics for them: egwene/gawyn

i always enjoy their scenes but i don't really think about them if they're not actively in front of me: nynaeve/lan, moiraine/siuan, perrin/faile (show; but i think this could have risen to Great Tier if we'd gotten more time with them)

they have the occasional banger scene that gets me right in the heart, but more often they are pissing me off: perrin/faile (book), rand/egwene (show)

if i was more invested in the characters i'd hate these ships, but i don't care that much so it's more of an eyeroll for me: moiraine/thom (book), siuan/bryne (book)

the equivalent of showing me your shopping list and getting me excited because i see it's all the ingredients for a decadent layer cake, and then you call me down for the meal and i discover you have thrown out all the ingredients you just bought and instead served me a plate of rotten trash: mat/tuon

makes me apoplectic with rage whenever i think about it, and i know some of you will be shocked that i could consider this a worse ship than mat/tuon but listen, time & distance from my series readthrough has somewhat cooled my anger at mat/tuon but my anger for this one still burns just as hotly to this day, and at least mat/tuon has the grace of excellent potential whereas this one would at BEST be meh and boring and a waste of time better spent on the vastly superior other randmances: rand/min

and now for the crackships!

crackships that genuinely compel me: perrin/dain (show), rand-LTT/ishy/lanfear (show)

crackships that amuse and tickle me: rand/gawyn, rand/various forsaken who want to fuck him so bad it makes them look stupid, nynaeve/liandrin (show)

crackships that are beloved but that i never got into myself: nynaeve/moggy, moiraine/lanfear (show)

crackships that are harmless but irrationally annoy me: mat/min (show) (stop it they're siblings), elayne/birgitte (stop it they're siblings), mat/talmanes (i think it's out of a How Dare You Stand Where He Stood feeling with this just being the poor man's cauthor substitute in the late series haha)

i'm sure i'm forgetting a million other ships (especially in the endless realm of crackships/non-canon ships), but this is what i could think of off the top of my head!

[markantonys]

THE WHEEL OF TIME 3.01

[markantonys]

i love that RJ went "rand has red hair which is unheard of in the two rivers, and it might make people think he's aiel, but actually his mom is just a wetlander with red hair, so that's a fakeout. but actually, surprise, that itself is a fakeout, because that woman is in fact his adoptive mom and his bio mom was an aiel with red hair. but actually, surprise, that's a fakeout too, because his bio mom wasn't an aiel, she was a wetlander with red hair." i've never seen a Character Who Doesn't Look Like The Rest Of Their Town have that many uno reverses in the explanation for why they look that way.

[markantonys]

Josha Stradowski in Hoogvliegers, Episode Two “Icarus”

Bonus:

[markantonys]

Chapters: 1/6 Fandom: Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Rand al'Thor/Mat Cauthon, Rand al'Thor/Aviendha/Mat Cauthon/Elayne Trakand Characters: Rand al'Thor, Mat Cauthon Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Accidental Baby Acquisition, rand and mat fulfill their most important destinies: becoming girldads, Family, Friends to Lovers, Polyamory, cauthor is the main story and the polycule is more of a background storyline, but it felt prominent enough to merit being ship-tagged, spoilers through Winter's Heart Summary:

Mat burst into Rand’s tent, covered in blood and thoroughly disgruntled. This was all Rand’s fault! Mat hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near the battle for Cairhien and had tried to leave, but Rand’s bloody ta’veren pull had dragged him right back into the thick of it, and now somehow he had an entire army looking to him for orders, and as if that wasn’t bad enough—

“What is that?” Rand said, raising his eyebrows at the wailing bundle in Mat’s arms.

“Your fault, that’s what!” Mat said. “I found some bloody idiot giving birth on the battlefield while dying of a stab wound, and now I’m stuck with this thing!”

[markantonys]

THE WHEEL OF TIME (2021- ) 2.01 A TASTE OF SOLITUDE / 3.07 GOLDENEYES

[markantonys]

showing my work friends wot:

ishamael came and said min needs to get mat and rand back together

he said she needs to get mat to fuck the dragon

do you think he fucks the dragon or gets fucked by the dragon

if it were anyone else, get fucked by but because it’s rand…fucks

[markantonys]

I’m currently reading Tower of Midnight and I am really seeing your vision for Gawyn/Rand (I am also seeing the vision for Gawyn/Egwene. Wow, the duality of man)

i'm glad you're seeing the light of truth!! god that scene where gawyn is like sitting in a garden looking at flowers and dramatically thinks "i don't care about you anymore, al'thor" and immediately feels closure and positive catharsis reads so much like him finally getting over his toxic ex after 7 books, i crack up every time i think about it. (important to note: rand has never had any idea that they were ever in a relationship and has thought about gawyn maybe twice in the entire series. this is why randwyn is top notch.)

and TOM Gawene gets so much hate, but i really enjoyed (most of) their stuff in this book! (bar a couple moments where it felt like sanderson was pulling some wonky characterizations.) the common reading of "gawyn hates that his girlfriend is more powerful than him" is too shallow of a take imo; to me, it mostly read like gawyn struggling with the public vs. private balance of dating the most famous public figure in the entire world. that would be really hard! and i like that we see him and egwene both struggle with finding the right balance, where at first gawyn treats her exclusively as his girlfriend and never as his amyrlin and egwene treats him exclusively as her subordinate and never as her boyfriend, and eventually they meet in the middle and both gain a better understanding of what roles they need to take with each other depending on the setting/context of a given moment. and thus they form a true partnership! we never really got any "difficulties of dating a ruler/public figure" stuff with either rand or elayne, and i'd been hankering for it, so i was glad to see it tackled with egwene and gawyn. (although i still say that the whole "gawyn needs to learn how to be a warder instead of a prince i.e. how to be in a woman's shadow rather than hold the spotlight himself" was the wrong angle into the conflict seeing as gawyn is a prince in a *matriarchal* royal family and thus was ALWAYS raised to be in a woman's shadow rather than hold the spotlight himself. so that particular thing should not have been an issue for him. but all the other stuff with him being overbearing in his desperation to Be Useful to egwene and struggling to keep his personal & professional feelings separate is bang-on for me!)

anyway! in keeping with the WOT theme of "[character] has two hands", gawyn has two hands, one for egwene and one for rand. i can just picture it, rand/elayne/avi/mat enjoying happy domestic family life in caemlyn while egwene/gawyn are childfree-power-couple-ing it up over at the white tower, and sometimes they invite rand over for threesomes, and gawyn and elayne both Aggressively Do Not Talk About This (but mat loves to bring it up at family dinners because he thinks it's hilarious)

[markantonys]

[markantonys]

Wheel of Time Season 3, Episode 7 || Perrin Aybara & Faile Bashere, Victory

[markantonys]

Scenes I would've liked in season 4 (#3):

A redux of a book fanart I did, but now for season 4.

Rand being dramatic over Mat stepping out. I don't know what context this needs to happen, but it would be funny.

Basically I just want more Cauthor crumbs.

* insert a sad WoTverse song here

[markantonys]

i'm pretty sure the real reasons for a viewership drop between WOT s1 and s2 were:

it was almost 2 full years between seasons

s2's entire promo timeframe & release were during the strikes, so not much promo could happen (on top of prime not being great at promo even at the best of times)

so there were likely plenty of people who enjoyed s1 and would've happily tuned in for s2, but had forgotten or lost interest after 2 years or didn't hear that it had returned due to lack of promo

and also, it's natural for a show's pilot season to have artificially inflated viewership numbers and then settle into the true viewership in subsequent seasons (and sure enough, i think s3's numbers were pretty similar to s2). how many of us have checked out the first season of something just to try it out and then never continued? it's not necessarily a mark against the quality of a show, just an effect of it finding its real viewerbase over time, especially these days when there are one million shows to choose from and viewers do a lot more shopping around and dipping their toe into first seasons without committing to the rest.

readers harping on about "maybe s2-3 viewership would've been better if s1 didn't suck so much" just feels like another example of readers mistakenly assuming both that their opinions of the show are universal and that readers make up a larger portion of the show's audience than they actually do. in all my time on the internet, pretty much every single piece of outright dislike i've seen for s1 has come from a reader; the worst i've seen the general audience say is that s1 was somewhat slow or felt like generic fantasy (which is true of EOTW as well). i vividly remember the day 1x08 aired, and as a show-only myself i loved it and felt so hyped for s2 and i went on the show-only reddit discussion thread and all the other show-onlys felt similarly, and then i turned a corner and was baffled to see readers acting like 1x08 had personally murdered their entire families. while every viewer readily acknowledges that each season was a step up from the prior one, i don't think the majority of viewers had NEARLY as much of an issue with s1 as readers believe they did. the portion of viewership dropoff that was due to people going "s1 sucked so much, i'm not coming back for s2!" is probably pretty small compared to the above factors. in conclusion, we should be putting the blame for the cancellation where it belongs (shitty corporations) and not at the feet of the creatives who did their best to beef up a fairly bland coming-of-age fantasy quest book while having a ton of real-world factors and unforeseen circumstances hampering them.

[markantonys]

So I started watching Dune: Prophecy because I needed more Olivia Williams politicking in a sci-fi/fantasy setting ... and there's one scene in the fifth episode where a mother tells her son "you were brought into this world to protect your sister, the future leader of the Imperium" ... and I was like. That is so Gawyn core.

THE MOST gawyn core!!!!!! that's exactly what he's all about, bless him and his Issues <3

[markantonys]

in addition, i'm not sure how much longer it will run for since it's several days old already, but you could vote for WOT in this poll sony is running on youtube! currently WOT is winning by a healthy margin and ALL of the comments as far as the eye can see are people voicing love for WOT and asking for more seasons, so we can hope that sony might pay attention to all the support WOT is getting here even against some of their most popular shows.

So Prime wants to focus on their other fantasy show, especially given their contract with the Tolkien estate. Fine.

It would make a lot of sense for Sony, the actual rights holders, to still want to make use of their ip especially since the show has momentum and a following right now, and take the show to a different streamer. And Apple TV does make a lot of sense as the best option, given their catalog of originals that are currently very sci fi heavy, to pick up a fantasy that can compete with house of the dragon and the rings of power.

So here’s hoping Sony and Apple TV agree. And we can help that process along and POLITELY ask them to consider it through every medium we can (such as socials like YouTube, Bluesky, and Instagram).

There may be hope for a Wheel of Time season 4+ yet! Don’t give up just yet y’all. Make your voices heard to #SaveTheWheelOfTime!!