So far everything that I’ve read from Brandon Sanderson has done a fantastic job of wrapping everything up. I don’t think he has such crazy and sprawling plot threads. But every time I think “there is no way this can be wrapped up in the next 20 pages” and yet, everything is.
Avatar: the Last Airbender
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GOT was garbage writing from day 1. The ending is no shock. Very consistent. I was laughing the entire episode. Seriously the best episode, but only if you’ve seen every other episode. I’ve never been so entertained by such garbage, it’s amazing.
Ehhhhhh that’s not quite the same degree of “epic” as GoT or WoT.
Imagine if GoT was as tight as Avatar, though. Really, that’s my main complaint - there’s entirely too much filler in GoT, and it could’ve been pared down into a focused, compelling narrative.
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#15characters of get out
I’d argue the Avatar franchise is at least more “epic” than GoT, though maybe on par with or slightly below WoT. Generations of Avatars, entire cultures and civilizations having genocide committed against them (and successfully at that), each nation having distinct cultures and subcultures, unique fauna, local legends unconnected and interconnected with the overarching plot, royalty fighting for what’s right versus gaining power, and many other things make the world of Avatar just as epic as any fantasy. I’ll agree that Avatar fails to have the giant battles of other fantasies but that shouldn’t detract from how “epic” the work itself, and the stories within it, are.
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Touca and Bertie is excellent A+ television.
If I had the money, I’d EP a “The Prince of Nothing” miniseries.
Market it as “a thinking person’s GoT”. The pilot episode would end at the moment Kellhus leaves Leweth to die and then encounters the Nonman.
I’m sure it won’t be rated XXXX unsuitable for human eyeballs at any point.
I’d back that stuff off to GoT level and/or cut away.
Focus on a lot of flashbacks and “replays” of scenes we just watched in slow motion with Kellhus explaining the situation. Imagine a highly elevated form of House of Cards
I’ve spent too much time thinking about this.
The bad guys will be a lot more sympathetic if you back down.
You back down a little and make them more sympathetic… up to a point.
Then you eventually learn what came before. Before the Breaking of the Gates. The Womb Plague. You have an episode where all that shit gets laid down hard. Focus on the genocidal brutality and absolute nihilism, as opposed to just graphically showing that crow demon doing his thing.
Even reading the books I pretty much tuned out completely on several Sranc chapters. I read the words, but after a certain point they just didn’t mean anything anymore.
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I wouldn’t even worry about how I’d portray later books. If you could get a series that got up to the point of him taking over the Holy War, you’d know if it’s a hit or not.
You can’t show lil brudder’s granaries on television. People will ask “WHAT DID I JUST SEE?”
There is a head on a pole behind you.
Animated Malazan would be my flavor at the moment.
Why animated as opposed to live action?
That scene, the kind of person who watches Game of Thrones would be really excited at the “clever and deep dialogue.”
Costs, actors, settings, races, magic, monsters, etc.
If you really wanted to do it live-action I’d just call it Bridgeburners and focus on the characters that are actually comprehensible and mortal-seeming. I think the first book is the easiest in that regard, but by the last one everyone and everything is larger than life. In game of thrones it was still dudes with normal weapons 99.9% of the time.
There is also nobody fit to play Karsa Orlong, and just the sheer amount of animation and actors having to interact with non-human things, and then costume work… I don’t see it going over great. Spending ten times the money to tell a that-much-more unrelatable story…
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I mean, I agree with you, but if we’re talking about a hypothetical show, I’d prefer a live-action version.
An animated version of Malazan is even less likely than a live-action one.
Wheel of Time would be a better series than GoT probably. And it’s done. The story is known. It would be easy to adapt to the screen by the nature of how straightforward it is.