The Wheel of Time show introduces its eyeless villains and their minions in a new video. Amazon is hoping it can find its own Game of Thrones as it adapts Robert Jordan’s sprawling fantasy novel series.
The first trailer for Amazon’s Wheel of Time released back in September and indeed teased a huge fantasy world filled with magic, monsters and prophecies. The magical element of the story as fans of the novels know revolves around The One Power, an energy that allows its users to perform feats like healing, teleportation and mind control. Season 1’s story follows a magic practitioner named Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) as she leads a group of five young people on a journey, believing that one of them may be the long-awaited Dragon Reborn.
Of course any good fantasy story needs its villains and The Wheel of Time has some monstrous ones indeed. A new video shared on social media gives fans their first good look at these baddies, who go under the general name Shadowspawn. See the clip in the space below:
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In Wheel of Time lore Shadowspawn are in fact divided into a number of different groups. The two main groups, both mentioned in Pike’s voice-over in the clip, are Trollocs and Myrddraal (or Fades as they’re called in the video). Trollocs are horned ogres who operate as foot-soldiers of the story’s true Big Bad The Dark One, while the eyeless and big-mouthed Fades are more advanced and dangerous and also less numerous. In season 1 of Amazon’s Wheel of Time, Pike and her group of heroes are being pursued by these creatures. “Armies of Trollocs and Fades a million strong will wash across the Land, killing and eating every person they find,” Pike’s character Moiraine ominously intones, pointing up just how terrifying the Shadowspawn are.
It’s interesting indeed that The Wheel of Time seems to dive right in and introduce this monstrous threat in all its horror. Contrast this approach with Game of Thrones, which took time teasing its own swarming enemies the White Walkers. Of course, Game of Thrones didn’t have a huge budget right out of the gate, so fully visualizing George R.R. Martin’s supernatural ice zombies wasn’t really an option in early seasons. The Wheel of Time on the other hand reportedly had an $80 million budget for its first season, which obviously allowed its creators to immediately go whole-hog in bringing to life the books’ nightmarish bad guys. Of course, just being able to go wild with special effects doesn’t guarantee that a story will work – as became painfully evident in later seasons of Game of Thrones. Hopefully The Wheel of Time won’t fall victim to the same big-budget pitfalls that ultimately hurt HBO’s iconic fantasy series. The first three episodes of The Wheel of Time arrive on Amazon on November 19, 2021.
Source: The Wheel of Time/Twitter
