When I first heard that Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth series was being adapted for television, I was pretty excited. I hadn’t even finished any of the 11 (or 12) books in the series, and the one I had started a while ago (book 3) kind of drove me nuts. But I had heard a lot of good things about the main characters of Richard and Kahlan, which is why I went scouring around in the library to find one of the books to begin with. I always like it when the stuff I read has both strong and likeable female characters as well as male ones. I suppose that’s not so uncommon nowadays, but when I was growing up it was rather unusual to find those kind of females in fantasy and science fiction. That’s probably why I had no problem with what Peter Jackson, et al, did with Arwen and Eowyn in the LOTR films.
When I finally found a copy of book 1, Wizard’s First Rule, I knew I’d have to hurry and read it if I wanted to finish before the tv series premiered. It seemed at first a daunting task because the book is 836 flippin’ pages long (the paperback, I mean). However, only a few pages into it, I became intrigued with the story and was able to zip through it, raising my eyebrows and blinking rapidly once in a while at sudden graphic descriptions of violence, but as they were nothing worse than what you’d see on the X-Files . . . maybe . . . I continued with the fascinating story. That is, until about three-fourths of the way through when I hit the torture chapters. I call them torture chapters because, not only is Richard tortured for pages on end, but it was torture for me to have to read them. So I resorted to skimming lightly, slowing down enough to see if the word “agiel” was in the text, and speeding up again if it was. Finally, those chapters were over. I’m so relieved. But the next thing I know, Kahlan is being beaten up and nearly raped, but ¡phew! she starts screaming her way into ultra-Confessor powers at the last second. Then some very hideous things happen, and an annoyingly sarcastic talking dragon joins the crew, and there's more torture and more violence and more beatings, and finally Richard tricks the bad guy and a happy ending. Until book 2.
A lot of the discussion had to do with varying situations, like self defense, war, etc, where the killing is deliberate but is not considered murder. Anyhow, I thought the diagram in the text pretty much cleared up the question of whether “kill” and “murder” mean the same thing, as in they don’t. So how, may I ask, does a big pine tree deliberately kill a scrawny one? Where is the deliberateness? So yeah, people are stupid. And so, apparently, are pine trees.
But even if they include that absurd dialogue in the tv series, I will still watch it. It's worth it to see Richard wield his sword and Kahlan her Confessor power.