Spoilers ahead, if anyone cares. Spoiler: you shouldn't.
The three primary male characters in this series are Rand, Mat, and Perrin.
In the TV show, Rand is dating and fucking Egwene. Mat comes from a broken home with a lecherous and alcoholic father. Perrin is married, and he accidentally slaughters his wife in the very first episode.
None of this happens in the books.
Rand and Egwene seem like a thing initially, but it never happens. Mat's dad is a stand-up dude and a pillar of the community. Perrin is very single and doesn't accidentally murder anyone.
Let's summarize the changes:
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Rand goes from having no physical relationship with Egwene to fucking her in the first episode
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Mat's father goes from good and decent member of the community to drunken adulterer
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Perrin is given a fucking wife out of nowhere, and he accidentally kills her for cheap effect
I've never seen such radical, unnecessary, and terrible changes to a beloved series. I've also never seen the sheer cope I witnessed when surveying the WoT communities online. People are glossing over these massive, character-wrecking alterations like they're somehow part and parcel for adapting anything to TV/film. No, retards, this is not normal. This is fucked.
Brandon Sanderson, the dude who finished writing the books after Robert Jordan died, is on record saying that he tried to fight these changes, and that the fans would be upset about them. He of course moderated his position because you can't burn any bridges in the industry - especially not when you've got a whole bunch of your own books you'd like to see adapted. But even with his tacit permission to hate this nonsense, people are still posting about how they cried when they finally saw their favorite books on TV.
I'm rambling. I knew it would be bad. But Jesus Christ, I never expected it to be this flagrantly disrespectful. Robert Jordan is turning over in his grave.
WOT in unfinished. The last book in the series is KOD.
BS wrote fan fictions.
BS himself admitted back in 2008-2013:
'Scenes for the last book, either in written form or dictated during his last months. This includes some completed scenes. [BS later admitted that he rewrote the last scene: putting POVs, characters into it etc.]'
'A lot of these are fragments of scenes, a paragraph here and there, or a page of material that he expected to be expanded to a full chapter.'
'What was handed to me was a big pile of half-finished scenes or paragraphs where he wrote, "Well, I am either going to do this, this, or this. I was thinking of this, but it could be this."''
''Harriet handed me full creative control for the first draft. But going into it, nothing was off-limits. So I wrote them like I write any novel. Nothing is taken for granted, nothing is sacrosanct.''
''Finally he [BS] spoke of plotting, and how sometimes Jordan's notes have said two contradictory things 'maybe I'll do this, or maybe I'll do this other completely opposite thing'. Brandon said he then often had to choose between them, or sometimes choose a third thing entirely.''
''The thing about the notes is that a lot of the notes were to him, and so he would say things like 'I'm going to do this or this' and they're polar opposites. And so there are sequences like that, where I decide what we're going to do, and stuff like that.'
'Did you have to invent any of it yourself, or did Jordan leave a lot of it for you?
Brandon Sanderson: He left some of it for me, and then I had to make the rest.
'In the interviews that were posted this week, Brandon said he wrote Egwene's death scene [Jordan was undecided about it, just as in the case of Bela, Siuan etc or in the case of Aviendha, Galad etc], came up with Lan's final scene in ToM, and that it had been his idea to reunite Rand with Tam. Now that the final book is out, I have a feeling we're going to hear more about who wrote what, and that many fans will be surprised at how much Brandon had to come up with on his own. '
'Hey Terez any thoughts on Jason's statement in a recent interview that the outline was done by Harriet not RJ? That was the first I'd heard of that and was curious if you knew how it worked?
Terez: We've been told several times by Brandon that Alan was the outline guy, and Maria assisted him. I think Harriet gets technical credit sometimes for what Alan and Maria do, which is not to say that Harriet's own contributions aren't essential.'
I gotcha.
I don't really agree with your conclusion. I'll just say that I loved Wheel of Time, and Robert Jordan is one my absolutely favorite authors. Those books were a huge part of my childhood. I used to dream about a TV show, and now ... ugh.
Anyway, I've only read the Sanderson-WoT books once. They were fine. I mean, I'm also a big Sanderson fan, and I think he did about as good a job as could have been done. He was given an INCREDIBLY difficult task and yeah, he and others have fully admitted that he had to come up with a lot of material from scratch. But, I don't think it's fair to call them merely fan fiction.
My biggest problem with Sando-WoT books is that the characters didn't feel right. Jordan was a master of characters. Sando-Mat just doesn't feel like Mat. Sando-Rand is just a bit off. etc.
Again, no knock on Brandon Sanderson, I think he did a better job than almost anyone else.
2 for 2 on badly done adaptations now, although the Billy Zane one off between Ishamael and The Dragon was likely done to retain the rights to it.
Book 12 (AMOL): Jordan wrote about 15 000 words ('A lot of these are fragments of scenes, a paragraph here and there, or a page of material that he expected to be expanded to a full chapter.')
This was calculated by an editor.