At least a decade since I read them, but I read them over and over as a kid.

I’m not gonna be in here like a GoT reader was ready to pounce on every surprise or mistake, but they really meant a lot to me as a teenager so I’ll definitely pick up on when they swap things around or alter the general feel of the story. Episode 2 treated parts of Boreal’s story the black detective) fairly passively for how massive (and late) they occur in the books, while Lyra and Pan just don’t behave like themselves, which is a large part of the story’s charm.

Somebody elsewhere made a comment that if you didn’t know the material, large swaths of the first episodes could’ve come from any regular network fantasy show, and it’s not necessarily the world’s lore that carries the books. It’s wild stuff, but even more than GoT it’s the characters and how they react to the situations they wind up in that’s the hook; it’s ultimately a story about faith more than more traditional tropes like family, love or whatever, so the show really needs to find that side of it I think if it’s going to reach its potential.

It is in many ways Lord of the Rings if you pulled (most of) the lineage and royalty bits out of it and made it about a journey to discover you’re external rather than internal strengths.

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