#shienar

Maybe it only stuck out because I just finished Eye of the World, but Shienar in the books is up north and super cold. Here it looks like a desert, with Tarwin’s Gap literally right outside the fortress.

I got pretty quickly why they might have changed it. 

- To avoid comparisons between the Borderlands in WoT and the North/The Wall in Game of Thrones.

- To make the threat of the Blight more intense and immediate.

- To heighten the contrast between this environment and the Two Rivers, which is a cold, mountainous, heavily forested region. This is especially important since the show has to be more condensed and they will probably skip a lot of the locations between The Two Rivers and Fal Dara.

Overall, I think I like the changes. It helps that it looks like they kept a lot of the implied Eastern influences in Borderlander culture and emphasized those elements. The interior shots and costumes are generally similar to how I imagined Fal Dara when reading but distinct enough to be cool and exciting.