#casting reactions

So I've seen more than one article describing Elayne as a "fan favourite". And I don't think that's really an accurate summary of Elayne's status!

She's a central character who is part of the story from almost the very beginning, she has lots of connections to other main characters, and plenty of readers think she's awesome, but she has her detractors too. She's not a character who springs to mind when I hear "fan favourite".

It’ll be jarring for the audience, but at this point in the story jarring is kind of in-character for Mat. The dagger affects his personality and behaviour, and even after he’s Healed, he’s still wary of his friends having magic and missing a bunch of his memories.

It might even be possible to have some sort of in-story acknowledgement or explanation for Mat’s change in appearance, if one is considered necessary. (Consequence of the dagger, being healed, portal travel, Tel’aran’rhiod shenanigans, the Aelfinn, a random magical artefact... lots of possibilities!)

It’ll be jarring but I’d much rather they recast Mat than had season two begin with The Death of Mat.

At the end of the day, Rand’s a ginger, Moiraine wears blue and isn’t blonde, Nynaeve has a long braid, Lan has his hadori, and so on. These are the sorts of details I’d be disappointed -- not to mention concerned! -- if the adaptation wasn’t interested in getting right.

But otherwise, there are so many things which matter more than the characters’ appearances. So. Many. Things. How well the cast can act, whether they can bring their character to life, and how much the script allows these characters to stay true to their book counterparts; whether I’m satisfied with the extent to which the story stays true to the books; whether the TV episodes are effective and coherent pieces of storytelling... etc.

But the trailer doesn’t really answer my questions about all that. There’s much one could speculate about but I know trailers can be cleverly misleading. (Is that a dream? Is it a flashback? Are those shots from connected scenes? Is that implying that...?) Because it’s not long to wait now, I think I’d rather see these scenes in context before I start Having Opinions about any changes the show may have made.

So, with that disclaimer out of the way, today I’m commenting on characters’ appearances!

Close enough to what I imagined that my brain’s like yep, that’s exactly right:

- Lan (hair style doesn’t quite match the books but the overall effect is so Lan-ish that I’d seen the trailer multiple times before this occurred to me);

- Perrin (the facial hair means he looks more mid-series-Perrin than EOTW-Perrin).

Mostly but not quite what I imagined, doesn’t contradict the books:

- Rand (fits my mental image except, strangely, for his smile);

- Egwene (but I'm really pleased by Egwene’s casting, no complaints).

Doesn’t quite match the books but I can see how it might be what someone else imagined:

- Moiraine (in the books she’s shorter, and I imagine her with shorter hair too... but she still looks reasonably Moiraine-ish);

- Nynaeve’s braid (looks cool, but more elaborate and more tapering -- if not for this, Nynaeve would fall into one of the categories above).

Doesn’t match the books or what I imagined:

- Siuan (she looks older, older than Moiraine, but the trailer made believe that she’s going to nail Siuan-the-Amyrlin’s character and it’s no surprise that the adaptation is going to drop the Ageless look and presumably aspects of Siuan’s story post-TSR).

Doesn’t really match what I imagined: 

- Mat (maybe it’s the facial hair? Once I see him doing Mat-ish things I’m sure I’ll be convinced he’s Mat);

Both reactions didn’t last.

Henney’s almost 40, which isn’t too young to be cast as a character in his mid-40s. And going slightly younger is better than slightly older for ensuring he’s still in the right decade by the end of the series, or if they want to do some New Spring flashbacks.

The other thing we can determine from these casting choices is that Rafe et al. were a lot bolder and more forward-looking than I was when I did my pretend casting picks. As you may recall from my 2016 post, one of the dilemmas I ran into was that since I had more or less limited myself to casting the first book, The Eye of the World, my casting turned out to be a lot more lily-white than I was particularly comfortable with. My reasoning in defense of that was that TEOTW was, in true Lord of the Rings homage style, very much set in either the Hobbitesque bucolic English-y countryside of the Two Rivers, or the extremely Arthuriana-laden, Camelot-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off city of Caemlyn, and later on the series moved on into much more non-European-inspired nations and got very diverse indeed, so the whiteness of my TEOTW-only cast was okay.

I looked at all their faces and thought, Yeah, that’s about right. No one has that serendipitous quality of looking exactly like how I imagined the character, but honestly, that’s a rare occurrence when casting adaptations and I wasn’t expecting it to happen.