The canonicity of the Companion had long been a matter of some debate.  And further, an obscure, secondary, reference book of questionable reliability, making the claim that a character is gay, long after the primary text had been published, and long after RJ had already faced criticism for the lack of gay characters in his text, does not refute the fact that the primary text establishes Galina as gay absolutely nowhere.  Tenuous inferences from vague passages is not an establishment of anything. If anything, it's yet another example of a premise in my main argument, that RJ left enough gaps regarding sex and sexuality in his stories that anybody can fill those in just about any way they wish. Show me where Galina expresses a desire to be with a woman.  Or where another character refers to her as preferring women.  And not as a matter of interpretation.

Moreover, it hardly counters the position that the Wheel of Time is not "woke" or gay or trans-friendly to point out the fact that it's yet another bad guy that's gay, nor does it counter the fact that in the primary text, homosexual and bisexual affect are only ever overtly referred to as a demonstration of either immaturity or evil.  And remember, my claim was not that Min was the only queer character in the series.  It was that she was the only honestly queer character.  The Forsaken are queer, at least, some of them, but their queerness is not an honest expression of human sexuality.  It's a demonstration of power and domination. 

For Min, her queerness is an honest expression of who she is.  But it's through that honesty that she becomes less queer, to the point of becoming cis, as the plot develops.  She begins embroidering her boyish clothes, and has them cut in a way to accentuate her femininity, begins wearing her hair longer and curled, and even wearing makeup.  And to drive the final nail in the coffin of her queerness, she sparks something of a fashion revolution in women's clothes thanks to her close relationship to the Dragon Reborn, to the point where at the height of that style's popularity, one couldn't even say that her preference for dress was out of the norm!

The Forsaken are "bisexual" mostly as a way to illustrate that their appetites are unconstrained.  Especially for the Forsaken, it seems to be less about how and with who one prefers to be intimate, and more about how they like to express their power and domination.  But that is another excellent example of how the Wheel of Time is sort of innocently anti-woke, where a bisexual affect is used as an illustration of evil.

I do have one minor quibble here, in that there's no such thing as "period specific" attitudes towards sex and sexuality.  The Wheel of Time isn't set in any period with which we would be familiar.  And Jordan is on record, when talking about sexuality in his series, that it has roughly the same status as religion in his series.  There just isn't any cultural or social tension in his world along those lines.  Sexuality, as we understand it, isn't really a thing in his world, just like religious faith, as we understand it, isn't a thing in his world.  People still have sex, but they don't draw lines or make assumptions about people based on their preferences, or even assume that they have preferences really.  It's just that his books don't make that at all clear, or talk about sexuality or preference at all.  They leave enough of a gap for people to fill in their own blanks, and make their own assumptions.

We don't know exactly how Moiraine comes to know of Mat's memories from the 'Finn, but there are a couple of places where she could have learned of them. 

The first being where she goes through the redstone doorway in Tear, to get answers.  We don't know what questions she asked, though it doesn't seem likely that she asked about Mat, it is nevertheless possible that she asked about three ta'veren being so closely linked, and learned about it there. 

Then there's the rings ter'angreal in Rhuidean, where she lived out all the variations of her life.  In at least some of those variations, she would have learned of it, and could have retained that knowledge from there. 

Then there's all that time she spent as a guest of the 'Finns courtesy of Lanfear.  She got three boons from that, but we only know of the one: her angreal bracelet.  It's possible that one of the others could have included knowledge of what Mat got. 

And, of course, there's Mat himself.  She, Thom and Mat would have spent at least a little time together after her rescue from the Tower of Ghenjei, and Mat would likely have wanted to explain himself, as to why they took so long to come get her, and what his worries were in making their plans.  He may also have wanted to get some reassurance from her about those memories, and what they mean regarding his ongoing ties to the 'Finns, since she's the only Aes Sedai he might suspect knows anything about it and would trust enough to ask.

Calling her "weird" is already putting tags on it.  The only difference is you have a negative normative reaction to something being called "queer" that you don't have to something being called "weird." Further, tolerance and acceptance require understanding.  And understanding requires words, i.e., labels, with which to talk to others about what is to be understood and establish standards of observation and analysis for those things.  "Queer," largely just means "outside the norm" when it comes to sex, sexuality, and gender.  "Queer theory" is just the name for a set of academic theories which analyze gender and gender roles, sex and cultural attitudes towards sex and sexuality, as socially constructed and expressions of the power dynamics that exist within a society.  Importantly, being "queer" doesn't mean being homosexual, or necessarily related to homosexuality at all.  The visceral normative reaction against it is akin to the current right-wing trend against Critical Race Theory.  It is a visceral reaction that leverages ignorance of a set of academic tools for analysis to create a cultural enemy where none exists.  

And it's ok to be ignorant of a set of academic tools.  And it's ok to have visceral reactions to things.  The only moral error is in thinking that one's own visceral reactions are at all important or illuminative of the things they are reacting against.

And lest you think I am attacking you, I do have to thank you, king of nowhere, as your own visceral reactions to an extraordinarily basic and elementary queer-theory oriented treatment of a very few elements of the Wheel of Time illustrate my point.  RJ avoided issues of queerness, after setting them up. This allowed readers to fill in their own gaps, even to denying the set up, apparently.  The only proper way to adapt a TV show based on the book series is to follow suit.  But since we have a gay man who found "deep personal meaning" in the series with messages of diversity and inclusiveness apparently being core to his experience of it, and who has already gutted the original story and completely ignored the original aesthetic, it's very unlikely the TV show will follow the books on their treatment of these issues.

Min meets the hallmarks for queerness from a literary perspective.  The most obvious is strangeness or abnormality when it comes to the typical hallmarks of gender expression in the literary world in question.  Dressing like a boy is sufficient in a world where every other girl wears dresses and skirts and long hair, and where it's repeatedly remarked upon about how strange it is.  Being a "tomboy" is queer in a world in which there are no other tomboys.  Quite apart from the fact that there is a rich academic literature treating treating tomboyhood as a level of more or less socially acceptable queerness in itself.  

The most important hallmark for Min's queerness, however, lies not in her preference for male dress, or male jobs, but in her acute, and unique awareness that who she loves is not something she can choose.  The Pattern chose for her, and she knows that directly.  That lack of choice, particularly when it comes to gender and especially sexuality, is central to queerness as a concept.  Gay men can't help but be attracted to and love men, and likewise for gay women.  A pre-transistion trans woman can't help but feel trapped in the "wrong" body.  The notion that fate, or biology, or society has imposed sexuality and gender from the outside, is sufficient all by itself to establish queerness as a live topic or characteristic of a work of literature.

This reluctance to acknowledge Min's queerness is itself, however, reason to believe that focusing on the queerness that can be easily uncovered in the story, if not easily injected, is going to be alienating and divisive.  People still have a normative reaction to queerness, and that reaction is nearly always instinctively negative.  Notice how the mere identification of some of those elements of Min's character that are clearly queer causes a defensive reaction to protest that she's not "really queer," she's just being "practical." In spite of the fact that no other woman or girl dresses that way in the series.  What would the reaction be if the analysis of Perrin's character as queer, or Mat's, or Rand's, was given, or explored within this TV series?  Because there are elements there that can be analyzed through that lens.

But that's not Jordan's series.  Jordan created an interesting, (unknowingly) anti-queer world with inversed gender dynamics that practically begs for deep conceptual and narrative exploration of those themes, and he completely avoids doing any of that in favor of a mainstream-suitable depiction of fairly shallow badassery, with just enough gaps in that shallow narrative to hint at those unexplored depths and invite the reader to plumb them themselves.  And it's natural enough for readers to fill those gaps with their own ideas and mistake that for what Jordan wrote or intended.  But didn't explore sexuality or gender; he assiduously avoided them after setting them up.  He wrote the gaps.

RJ's writing was not at all progressive or "woke," even for its time, with regards to sexuality.  He wrote exactly one "queer" character, in Min, who has the blatant hallmarks of queerness in that she prefers to dress like a boy, and is uniquely and acutely aware of the fact that she has no choice in who she will love (and despondent of that fact as well).  And her lack of choice involved a cis relationship anyway, in spite of some early hints at a homosexual or asexual affect. And then Jordan turns her into a sidekick, and eventually a very one-dimensional hanger-on to the other side of that cis relationship.

He wrote zero homosexual characters, and wrote zero long term homosexual relationships into his story.  It's not until Sanderson that any character was even acknowledged as homosexual.  Prior to that, homosexual acts were universally written as juvenile dalliances that some, perhaps, never really grew out of.  This was at roughly the same time, culturally speaking, that Ross's ex-wife Carol was raising his baby and living with her girlfriend Susan, eventually marrying her, on Friends.

His treatment of the trans-gendered Halima is arguably anti-woke.  Her transition is forced on her as a punishment, which can be likened to being born "the wrong gender," and having to deal with society's pressures to conform, but eventually she accepts, and even embraces "the wrong gender" she was forced into.  And while we're told a story whereby a trans individual can come to accept the gender they find themselves in, we're also told that there's an ineliminable element of gender that persists through the transition, represented in the story as the ability to channel saidin.  I mean, hell, the very notion of a universe that's fundamentally gendered via equal and opposite forces is a flat contradiction of the queer-theory of gender as a social construct.

Now, I don't think very much, if any of that, is purposefully directed against homosexuals,  trans people or the idea of transexuality or queer theories of gender more generally.  The exclusion of homosexuality I think mostly comes down to RJ not writing about sex or sexuality much anyway, both because he wanted to keep things in the YA book aisle where they'd sell more copies for fantasy in the 90's, and because he was bad at it and knew it, having tried to do it with some of the Conan stories he wrote when he was younger. 

The anti-trans stuff is probably less about being anti-trans, and more a consequence of the metaphysical reification of gender that's used as a tool for world-building and a story-telling device to explore a world where women are dominant over men.  Trans issues were not on many people's social radar at that time, except those directly suffering from them, of course. And gender as a social construct, while already largely accepted in academia, was only barely beginning to be part of the public zeitgeist and policy landscape at the time.  In fact, one could argue that the Wheel of Time is subversively queer in that it establishes gender as a fundamental and deep reality, and then puts that on the fantasy-fiction section of the library or bookstore.  It's almost too bad that subversion is itself subverted by the narrative hints and outright admissions by RJ that the Wheel of Time universe is meant to be our own, in a far distant future/far flung past, thereby giving up its tacit admission of being fictional.  Almost, except that those tidbits and that notion are saved by the Rule of Cool.  

Still, one could see why a young, gay person, who, like so many socially ostracized young people, finds solace in the pages of fantasy and sci-fi fiction, would find solace and inspiration in the Wheel of Time.  And it's because RJ meticulously avoids sex and issues of sexuality, and instead tells more universally applicable stories about being in relationships and worrying about hurting the other person, or when and how much to tell them of the truth, and all sorts of other things like that.  There's so much more to being human than how and whether one enjoys sex and who they enjoy it with, and RJ's stories are rich with those experiences. It tells of a world where sex and sexuality are such a non-issue that they're barely even thought of.  It's easy to see why that would seduce a young person struggling with living in a world where such issues are a daunting and daily personal pressure.

It also creates amorphous voids around those issues that the imaginations of the reader can fill up to suit their own personal desires and needs for the story, and attach to the larger narrative or characterizations or world-building via sometimes the most tenuous of inferences from the text.  It's one of the strengths of the the book series that it can accommodate that. 

Unfortunately, it's also why "wokeness" is a live concern, seeing how the showrunners is a gay man who claims a deep personal connection to the story, and who insists on diversity and inclusion as key parts of the story, when in reality they are only present in the story by being conspicuous in the absence of issues surrounding them.  When combined with the fact that we already know of immense changes to the structure of the story, as well as an almost complete abandonment of the aesthetic so vividly and meticulously described by RJ, demonstrating their attitude towards this project as less an opportunity to tell RJ's story than to display their own "creativity," and it's not so much a yellow flag as a bright red one.

We already know there will be significant deviations from the source material.  And because of that, there will be endless fights and divisions about "wokeness" and the motivations behind Rafe's deviations.  So gird your loins.

Unlikely, as Be'lal's plan was to have Rand take Callandor from its warding, then take it from Rand, and use it to set himself up as highest among the Chosen.  Killing him before he got there would be rather counterproductive to that end.  Most likely it was somebody from the Darkfriend Social from the prologue of the Great Hunt, who was high enough ranking to ask a fade for the assistance of a Gray Man.  The most likely Forsaken behind it, if a Forsaken indeed was, would be Sammael, since it was in or near his "territory" though that's not really his style.  It could conceivably be Rhavin, or Demandred or Asmodean, or even Ishamael at this point, but their only motive would be to prevent him from taking Callandor, and for Ishy, possibly to punish him for failing to be turned to the Dark yet.  Demandred is likely off playing with the Sharans.  Graendal and Moghedien wouldn't stick their necks out that far, Semirhage would be busy wrangling the Seanchan, and Messana the White Tower.  Lanfear doesn't want him dead, and Balthamel and Aginor are dead.

Probably looking for the Eye of the World.

No, New Spring doesn't have spoilers for anything that happens after where you are in the books. 

Fwiw, many readers find the same faults with the characters that you do, particularly around this point in the series.  It is worth keeping in mind, though, that Rand is legitimately insane at this point, and all the other main characters, barring Nynaeve, Min and Galad, are barely 20, with all the teenaged hubris that entails, confronting institutions that are themselves pretty stupid and hubristic, having suffered from a few millennia of corruption and decline.  I will say this, hopefully without spoiler, that the problems that stem from a lack of communication "cross-group," will get worse from here, before they get better.

This is, I think, another one of those examples of how this series really shines only on multiple read-throughs.  The first time through them, as you're reading, there's so many things that don't make sense, and won't, until the whole story is done and there's time to ruminate on how all the little bits and pieces fit together.  Things that can be kept in mind and appreciated really only only the second or subsequent read-throughs.  It's only when we're done anticipating the culmination of the story, of wanting them to just get on with it, that we can go back and appreciate how these annoyances can be realistic and immersive representation of how problems can be born of a failure to communicate, that is itself born from pride, uncertainty, paranoia, fear, and so forth, some of which may be well-justified.  In other words, these are some very painstaking set-ups, and right now, you're in the pain part.  The real tragedy is that Jordan didn't get to write the pay-offs for much of that pain.

As are you.  This is a series that, despite its length, can really only truly be appreciated on multiple read-throughs.  So much foreshadowing, things that are hard to appreciate on a first read-through that are easier the second or third (or dozenth) time through, elements of real-world myth and ancient religion and legends woven in that you'll want to look up, and then read it again just to see how deep those connections go.

Subtlety and symbolism are just not the strong suit of today's TV showrunners, I guess, nor of audiences I suppose.

Cutting Caemlyn makes little sense, as Basel Gill's tavern could have been a redressed tavern set they're going to need a lot of anyway, and the Caemlyn palace and palace grounds are important settings for future events anyway, so they should have just gotten that very expensive set designed and built and out of the way for season one.  Cutting it is only a good idea for not having to cast and keep under contract the Trakands, who would otherwise have a brief scene and then not show up again until season 2.  But replacing it with Tar Valon, having the Emond's Field 5, and particularly Rand, go there on the way to the Eye, just blatantly undermines and ignores important symbolism RJ drew upon and built into his story and world.  But this show doesn't seem to care that much about that kind of symbolism.  I would not be surprised to see them change Tar Valon so that it no longer resembles female genitalia, or put Dragonmount so close it actually overshadows the city and the Tower.

Mah'alleinir was also a stylized blacksmith's hammer, modified, of course, to be a more effective warhammer, as well "the hammer of a king," whatever that means.  I suspect that it would likewise have been immune to that bubble of evil.  The choice of the hammer over the axe is significant for Perrin, because the hammer represents the possibility to create/forge/build, as well as destroy, where the axe can only destroy.  I'd have to imagine that distinction would carry over to Perrin's "leveled-up" hammer as much as his original one.  But it would depend on how Perrin views it, is Mah'alleinir just his weapon, or is it also his tool?

It'll probably be a teaser-trailer, on the order of ~1 minute long.  He'll probably also reveal a more precise release timeframe, as in, "late November 2021." Though I would be moderately surprised if they committed to a specific day, it's within the realm of plausibility.  If I had to bet, I'd say the full-length promotional trailer will come out at Dragoncon, in the latter half of the second week of September, which corresponds somewhat to the new edition release of the books tied to the show. 

As to content, I'd say we might get to see what Loial looks like, what Fades and Trollocs looks like, and maybe less than 1 second of actual channelling/weaving.

His hammer didn't attack him because it wasn't a weapon.  It was a blacksmith's tool that he taken to using as a weapon, but it was still ultimately a thing of creation, not destruction.  Every other weapon made of metal attacked people, but things that were not weapons didn't, even if they would have been pretty effective at killing people.  No shears started stabbing seamstresses, or leather worker's punches started making holes in people's hides.  Lengths of chain didn't wrap around people's necks and break them or drag them up into the air to hang.  Belt and harness buckles and unshod horseshoes didn't start pelting people. Perrin's not immune to bubbles of evil, he just happened to not be in a great deal of danger when that particular bubble hit.

@SinisterDeathAnd when, or rather if (and at this point, it's a big if) that happens, then nothing of consequence will occur.  I'll have some egg on my face, and that's about all.  It'll be about as momentous as Elder Haman's numerous failed predictions.  Maybe I'll ask him how he deals with it.

As for your character attacks, I would hope a mod would behave better.  Are you gonna start comparing us to rubber and glue next?  I mean, you've already pulled the, "Nuh-uh, you!" card over your unprovable assertions denigrating fans on a fan board.  Either fans of the Wheel of Time are allowed to be pessimistic about the show, and present their arguments and evidence for their pessimism, or they're not.  Is this thread merely an exercise to create a toxic environment for people who are already expecting this show to be a failure and are already upset at the divisiveness it's created?

@king of nowhere You want to know what I consider respect?  It's pretty simple, and I've laid it out multiple times before.  And it's less about what you do than what you don't do.  You don't elevate your taste over the source material, as they did with Tam's sword, Thom's guitar, and the Shadar Logoth dagger.  You don't use superficial elements of the source material to tell your own story, unless that story is a necessary addition to make sense of the story as told in the books, as they are doing with Logain's story and in making Moiraine the "protagonist" of the first season.  For the fans, you don't spark a casting controversy that you know is going to cause an uproar (because most fantasy and gaming communities host closeted communities of racist mouth breathers and anybody that is a fan of any fantasy or gaming community knows this) no matter how book-accurate your casting is, no matter how warranted and welcome it is to un-closet them and roust them out, and then spend all your next reveals showing how different your show is from everything the fan community has created over the last 20+ years in celebration of that material, let alone everything the source actually describes in great detail.  You don't hint that you're going to change aspects of the story that exist for important thematic reasons, namely as the relations of these characters to our own myths and legends, so that you can explore a faddish theme of your own choosing.

And as I've pointed out, Jordan's wife, even his and Brandon's assistant, hasn't said anything about the show, good or bad.  Harriet likely can't, given the fallout from the Winter Dragon.  At least not anything bad or anything not approved by Amazon ahead of time.  Rafe has said they're being consulted, but I see no evidence of that.  You'd think Maria at least would say something, even if just to confirm that she has been consulted and that that consultation mattered.

As for what I consider a fan, anybody posting on these boards or any others devoted to the discussion of these books I would consider a fan.  Including you.  It would be a pity, almost as much as a pity as the show's lazy omission of the Warder's cloaks, if you were to make me go through your comment history to show you where you've couched or lessened your own expectations.

You want an admission from me, here you go.  I could be completely wrong and off-base in my assumptions and in the conclusions I draw from what's been released.  Maybe, even with everything we already know or have strong reason to suspect that's been changed, and even if the optimists are right about the reasons for those changes, this show still succeeds in telling us the original story in an elevated way perfectly suited for this new format.  It's possible.

But what are you going to do if I'm right?  Who are you going to blame when mainstream audiences fail to be hooked and there's nothing for book fans to be excited about any longer, because any and all actual fan-service has been stripped out of the show?  When the story you get told is not Rand's, and to a lesser extent Perrin and Egwene's story of running for their lives from an enemy they don't understand and stumbling into their first awareness of their power, and setting up Mat's and Nynaeve's stories.  A story of revealing to the audience, if not himself, Rand's role as a man of prophecy and destiny. But instead is Logain's story of his rise and fall as false dragon due to Aes Sedai manipulation, and Moiraine's story as the one lone "true" Aes Sedai on the trail of the true Dragon Reborn. And the crazy antics of her discovery of the true Dragon and his surprising entourage.

Because that's what Rafe has said we're getting.  And while the latter we get some of from New Spring (though who knows how true to that book they'll be), the former is a completely new invention of Rafe's own.  And in nearly every communication, in every little teaser or release, he and others have repeatedly emphasized the differences between the books and the show.  It's hard not to draw the conclusion that we're getting an "inspired by" show, and not a real, faithful adaptation.  That Rafe will be doing the one thing Jordan would have hated: having other people tell their stories in his sandbox, and not his.

No, I'm making the case for why nobody should be expecting any kind of greatness out of this, and explaining exactly why a great many of the die-hard fans like myself are being turned off of this whole process.  They could have made a show that respects the story and the fans, and there wouldn't be this level of division.  It's not just me.  And it's not just racists being upset about biracial people being cast in main roles.  So far, I haven't seen a fan who's excited for this show who hasn't had to couch their expectations, to pre-forgive transgressions against the story and the characters, or ignore the disrespect inherent in making "creative" choices that can serve no plot or adaptive function, but merely elevate the taste of the showrunners over Jordan's own.  In nearly every discussion about what's been changed or what's being speculated, even the most forgiving of Rafe's cheerleaders end up saying, "yeah, that sucks if they're doing that, but...." I'm just over here pointing out that there is no "but," this just sucks.

And I'm also laying the groundwork for when this turd finally drops on the ground and starts stinking up the place, you don't get to blindly scapegoat the "purists" for badmouthing the show and making it unpopular.  After all, there's not enough of us to make a difference, right?

Actually, considering the changes and division created within the Wheel of Time community that's already been created by this show, with the exception of running out the racists and bigots, I don't want this show to do well.  I want it to be a bigger dumpster fire than I already suspect it will be.  I want it to be so bad they don't even bother airing the episodes of the second season they're already filming, that they strongly consider not even finishing the airing of the first season.  I want this to be right up there with Shamalamadingdong's The Last Airbender, or the live action Dragonball Z movie; so bad that people pretend that they don't even exist.

I want that so that the next attempt, in five or ten years, the showrunners will know better, and come at this show demonstrating actual respect for the story and the fandom that had grown up around it already.  And it actually sucks to want that, because I think these actors they've picked for Rand and Mat and Perrin and Egwene and Nynaeve and even Moiraine and Lan, deserve better than that.  I think this cast could have been the faces of a really awesome retelling of a really awesome story on TV.  But I have no faith in anything I've seen from the marketing team or Rafe or Brandon that it will be anything close.  And if it won't be anything close to that, then better that it's a dumpster fire so we can rip that bandaid off and move on.

It's real convenient to say that nothing would satisfy fans even if they did make an effort to make things remotely look like they're described, but it's also completely unprovable.  There are plenty of examples of pre-existing fans approving of design choices in TV and movie adaptations, at least as many examples as their disapproving, if you actually look for them and account for the fact of human psychology that nobody makes a lot of noise over something they find acceptable.  And the casting controversy was only the biggest controversy because the fandom had to deal with the racists and bigots among their ranks.  Snowflake bigots had to make it the biggest controversy, to make themselves victims, as their ideology dictates they must.

And we've already seen the complaints about Moiraine's business attire outfit.  But you're making my point, because any actual fan of the series would know beforehand that these kinds of style choices would be controversial among the fans.  So they are either consciously choosing to make the controversial and alienating choice at every opportunity, or they aren't fans enough of the books, or of the fandom itself, to recognize that they are making controversial and alienating choices.

Sanderson did an acceptable job finishing the series.  Some stuff was great, other stuff, like what I mentioned, was terrible.  But he's not perfect, and I don't think he'd have been able to do that job at all without Maria and Harriet.  The point I was making is that Sanderson's judgement is not authoritative, and wouldn't be even if his "endorsement" of Rafe wasn't couched the way it was.

As for the rest, you miss the point.  Sanderson largely has the respect of the "superfans" as you put it, and he still has my respect, because he respected the fandom, he listened to their criticism, and he got better.  But there is zero evidence that Rafe respects the fans, or the story for that matter, considering the changes that we know of thus far.  Even Sanderson only goes so far as to say that Rafe understands the "core" of the characters, and considering how badly Sanderson himself did at that, that's not saying much.

I have no doubt that if Harriet had anything good to say about the show, she'd have said it, and everybody from here to the Dusty Wheel YouTube comments would be touting it.  I also have no doubt that following the Winter Dragon debacle, she's not allowed to say anything publicly about it without getting it approved first.  Which makes this a case where the absence of evidence is evidence of something, and that something doesn't smell good.

And of course they're not gonna make it just for the book fans.  But why go out of their way to alienate the book fans?  If I were running the show, I'd want to synergize with the existing fans.  Not divide and alienate as many of them as I could, which appears to be the direction they're going now.

People are people, and streaming didn't spontaneously cause people to mutate to have goldfish memories.  The biggest reason you see marketing moved up to closer to release dates is because it's easier for the data analysts to measure the effectiveness of that marketing.  When you drop a trailer 11 months ahead of release the way Amazon did with the Tick, it's hard to tell how much good that trailer did for driving views.  There's too many confounding factors that happen between then and the show's release.  There is of course the need to hit the sweet spot for marketing, not so far out that the show becomes old news before it even airs, and not so close that it catches people by surprise, but where that sweet spot is depends entirely on the audience to which you're marketing. 

For die-hard fans of an IP like us, who've been waiting 20 years for some kind of mainstream media adaptation, there's no such thing as "too far out." They could have been dropping weekly, 15 minute long behind-the-scenes interviews for the last two years, showing off the actors in costume and the sets and props and talking about the script and shooting for the week, or special effects and sound when they get into post, even going so far as to drop heavy spoilery hints, and we'd all still be here for it.  That they're not really coming even close to that, indeed that most of what they have already teased or shown has been to show off what they had to know would be controversial differences, is a big red flag that this show, whether it ends up being good or bad, is not intended to be a show for the pre-existing fans of the series.  

And no, Brandon's newest take on it is not a reassurance.  For one thing, he's a terrible judge of the core of the characters, or even the core of the story.  You all saw how he butchered Mat in his first book, and it took a pretty big outcry to get him to see it too, back then.  And he still thinks he nailed Perrin, when what he did was a repeat of Perrin's prior character development, all to throw it away at the Last Battle where Perrin doesn't even lead the people who he had to struggle so hard to accept the leadership of, and spends half the time asleep.  And he doesn't just break main characters, he broke the world-building too, making Travelling into something that RJ clearly never even considered, and likely would have balked at.  And that's all fine, because none of those transgressions really ruin the story that had already been set up by RJ.  But if you want to impress me with an endorsement, show me Harriet's endorsement, or Maria's.  

At the end of the day, I don't know whether this show will be any good or not.  It could be good.  What I do know is that this show will not be the Wheel of Time as I understand that story or as the expansive fandom of the last 20+ years has understood and discussed it.  Thus far, I recognize nothing of the Wheel of Time in what we've been shown, except in the names and faces of the characters.  In spite of all the marketing purportedly being aimed at fans, there has been no clear instance of fan-service yet.  At this point, I'm half-expecting that Nynaeve will never even tug her braid in the whole of the first season.

Reddit's wot sub actually has a decent system for dealing with spoilers.  You tag your post with the book you're at or want to discuss, and for the most part, the users and mods are pretty good about not spoiling things past that.  

There are no guarantees, though, even users with the best intentions sometimes slip up.

It's also worth mentioning, do NOT go googling stuff.  Google is terrible about spoiling character's ultimate fates, when all you wanted was to be reminded of who that S-named Aes Sedai was, or something similar.

Regardless of whether you're a Harry Potter fan or not, it's just bizarre to me to think that the first two movies were weaker somehow than those that followed, for being more faithful to the stories, when those two movies are largely responsible for Harry Potter becoming the cultural icon it has become.  I mean, god forbid the TV show do for Wheel of Time what those first two movies did for Harry Potter, right? (That last was sarcasm, btw)

That's a frankly bizarre take about those Harry Potter movies.  The first two movies, the first one really, but the second one helped, were what propelled Harry Potter into being a huge cultural phenomenon.  The fact that the casting and sets were so spot-on and atmospheric, while the story was so well and faithfully adapted, meant that nobody was left out, not die-hard book fans who were pleased with the initial movie adaptations specifically because of its faithfulness, and not the newcomers who need the adaptation to be good to get hooked. 

And you can see that in their publication numbers.  In 2000, prior to the first movie, but with the book fans already hyped due to WB announcing the year before that they had acquired the rights to adapt the movies, Goblet of Fire was released, and sold three million copies in the first 24 hours of its release.  The next year, The Sorcerer's Stone movie was released, and then two years later, the Order of the Phoenix was released, and it more than doubled the first 24 hour sales numbers, going up to 6.8 million copies sold.  It's crazy to me to think that the first and second Harry Potter movies were in any way worse than the ones that followed.