Likely because he's the main character.  Though who knows what a poster 14 years ago might have had as their motivation for making the OP?

It was partly a figurative claim, and partly just a mistake on my part. CW is who carries Agents of Shield around my parts.  I guess it's the first seasons in syndication.  I tried watching it when it first came out, which, incidentally is also when Rafe was with the show.  Obviously, it didn't hook me.

As for numbers, the Wheel of Time fanbase already brings around 7-8 million fans in just North America, judging by book sales and print runs.  Another 5 in Great Britain and Europe.  That's a lot of fans that can push a show to the top of the ratings, if they like the show.  That's also more than enough fans to tank it if even a significant portion of them feel like the show doesn't respect them or the IP.  That's why it's dumb to make stupid, pointless cosmetic changes and poke the bear with dumb little teasers that seem more designed to infuriate than titillate.

It was always going to have to be different.  It's the nature of the beast.  Tv shows have budgets.  There are time constraints for episodes.  And narrating or voice-over-ing inner dialog or observations just isn't a feasible story-telling device for modern audiences.  Whole characters and side-plots have to be excised or mushed together and brand new scenes have to be invented and written to do some of those things that voice-overs and narration can't.

Of course, to me that makes it all the more important to keep as true as possible to the iconic imagery established in the IP being adapted.  And particularly foolish to make the kinds of changes or appeals to the fans they've been making, considering the size of that book fanbase before any "mainstream" media adaptation of it's work has been made.  

Making the changes they have isn't a matter of making the world feel "lived in." There's nothing inherently unrealistic or cartoonish about slightly curved swords with crossguards, or a wickedly curved dagger with a ruby capping its hilt, or an elaborately engraved and inlaid instrument for a royal-court-bard-in-exile.  It's a matter of their making a conscious decision to put their own aesthetic stamp on things, even if it means overriding the aesthetic of the IP it's based on.  And that's a stupid decision every time, that is nearly always a big red flag that somebody in the showrunners team is too far up their own butt.  The vibes I get here are not The Last Airbender than anything else right now.

You also asked about Sanderson and his involvement, or Harriet and Maria and theirs.  The last we heard from Sanderson, he had only read six scripts of the eight episodes.  He hasn't said that he's seen any footage or final edits.  He's also said that there's going to be things that fans of the books probably really won't like.  As for Harriet and Maria, neither has said anything about it on social media or elsewhere that I can find.  Rafe has talked about Maria's help, but he either must have been joking about what she helped with, or there is a horrifying lack of familiarity with the IP going on in the writer's room.  And as for Harriet, considering the events following The Winter Dragon, it's not surprising that we hear nothing from her, especially if she doesn't have anything nice to say.

And when we look at Rafe's own credentials, he's not some genius auteur with a demonstrated knack for adapting popular literature into TV.  He's a former producer for some middling CW shows, and it's not like CW is known for producing great TV.  It's mostly just watchable, at best.

No, "any" does not mean "every" in this context.  It means that, given the palest Andorman, there are faces she sees that are at least as pale as that, and given the darkest Sea Folk, there are faces she sees that are at least that dark.  It's a comparison to the extremes found in those peoples, at least, the extremes known to Nynaeve, and has no meaningful implication about the norms of either.

Because the series is so long and intricate, with a lot of travel, and simply enormous amounts of side-characters and side-stories, I expect a great deal of change regarding the specifics of the story.  It's the themes, progression and symbolism that are important.  We don't know anything about the themes other than what Rafe says about it, and I trust Rafe's self-reporting about that about as much as I'd trust a new mother telling me her baby's not ugly. 

Similarly with progression, there's too much unknown, though what we do know is not that great.  Caemlyn and the Trakands being cut, and Tar Valon showing up too soon, are not great signs.  But the rumors of those changes lack context.  Similarly with Logain's expanded role.  There's not enough known about it to know whether  it'll be a good idea or not.

The symbolism, or rather, the aesthetic, is where they are losing me at the moment.  While they started off strong with excellent casting, their props and teaser choices are not good.  Jordan was incredibly descriptive about those kinds of things, Tam's sword, Thom's harp, the Shadar Logoth dagger, and none of them look at all the same.  To the detriment (and intentional disrespect) of the existing fanbase because there have been literally millions of dollars spent on WoT themed swords and daggers and cloaks and everything else by fans over the past couple of decades that will henceforth be basically worthless for their intended purpose.  And then how they chose to depict Moiraine embracing the source, or at least the very little bit they chose to show us, and the same little bit of Lan's fighting.  It looks cheap in the former case, and weak in the latter.  The Whitecloaks armor design doesn't look good either, being too slim and also not how Jordan describes their armor.  Basically, it doesn't look like Jordan's Wheel of Time, and what it does look like doesn't look great, and often doesn't even look good.  And if they're not going to make the effort to make it look like the Wheel of Time, particularly on the easy stuff like making sure the distinctive samurai sword with crossguards Jordan describes actually has crossguards, or that the ruby-hilted dagger looks even vaguely like the illustrated chapter icon Jordan chose for it, let alone like the description of it that's given multiple times throughout the books, then it's hard to have much faith that they'll make it feel like the Wheel of Time.

The Dreams are pretty critical to the story, considering the role that TaR plays in Egwene's, Perrin's, Elayne and Nynaeve's, and Rand's development.  Ishamael's use of them to try to locate the boys is both our first introduction to this critical element of the world-building, and one of the primary tools for setting up that uncertainty as to who the Dark One is really after.  I think the Dreams have to be included in the first season somehow.  I don't think there's going to be anything particularly unique or subtle about them, though.  But who knows?  I know if given the choice between cutting Taren Ferry and Baerlon, I would have cut Taren Ferry.  I also wouldn't have cut Caemlyn from season 1, or replaced it with Tar Valon.  That's not what they chose to do, though.

Naively, though, both Min and the Whitecloaks are in the first season; they found a way to shield them from those "ripple effects." So it's not clear that's a list of things we won't have, and more a list of things that will be changed up a bunch in order to preserve.  Who knows, though.  It's not as if they've shown much deference to any other aspect of the story thus far.

I have a different metric for success.  Wheel of Time has sold over 80 million copies of its books.  The only American fantasy authors to have sold more are Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series.  Both of which have had successful blockbuster movies adapted from their franchise.  Rice's books slightly top out WoT still being in the 80 millions, while Meyer's got over 120 million sold. 

So I'll consider the TV series a success if it pushes WoT book sales past Meyer to reclaim the top spot.  I'd consider it gravy if it pushed the books past Chronicles of Narnia fame or began to challenge Tolkien.

Of course there reason to believe it will be a massive departure from the books.  Lots of reasons. Logain's expanded role is a big enough departure on it's own.  The lack of the Trakands is another.  Moiraine being the "main character" is another.  No significant prop that looks anything like the descriptions or icons representing them in the books.  And then there's Rafe's own words, that he's really doing "an adaptation of the whole series" and that they're not trying to exactly reproduce the story as told in the books, and that fans should, "gird their loins" for big changes and departures.  It's already nearly unrecognizable.  If you showed someone who knows the books but doesn't know anything about the show the marketing they've done so far, the prop showcases or the cast photos and all that, the only thing that might hint to them that that stuff would be for a Wheel of Time show would be the cast photos.

Agelessness was always going to be a tricky, if not impossible thing to depict on the screen.  I doubt there's be a good way to do it that didn't just look bad.  

The Warder's cloaks are a different matter, though.  That's just laziness.  The LotR had similar cloaks that faded into an apparent invisibility when still.  You really only need to show off that color-shifting near-invisibility cloak aspect occasionally.  Most of the time, a plain silvery gray-green cloak that's a bit reflective would be fine.  And then every once in a while you swap in the CGI using green-screen technology that half of Twitch streamers already use live.

Here's what we're gonna have to get used to, Elessar.  They're not making Wheel of Time.  They're making A Letter for the King.  If they're lucky. 

If you haven't seen that series yet, it's only six episodes on Netflix.  If you've read the book it's based on, though, and you like it at all, you might think twice about watching the series.  About the only thing the series has in common with the book is the names of main characters and that the main "quest" is about a guy named Tiuri trying to get a letter to the king.  The series is "inspired by" the book.  And that very much looks like what we'll be getting with the Wheel of Time.  Rafe's "inspired by the Wheel of Time" Wheel of Time.

And the reason I say they'll be lucky if they pull off an "A Letter for the King" is that the series isn't bad.  It's actually kinda enjoyable if you don't have any expectations from reading the books.  It's a bit trope-y, it drags slightly in the early parts, it's in a weird place maturity-wise, and a couple of twists and reveals towards the end feel a bit unearned, but the special effects and acting are good, as is the story itself.  There's not really anything glaringly bad about it.  Or at least there wouldn't be if it weren't ripping off a beloved book to tell a very similar, but still markedly different story. 

That seems reasonable.  It would not be unheard of to have a press release to officially announce the season 2 renewal.  Still doesn't mean much in terms of accelerated marketing.  And it wouldn't make much sense to ramp up marketing very much now for a show not due to release another 6 months.  A teaser, sure.  But their history also suggests we should expect any such teaser at July's SDCC.

I think it's pretty clear that the cloaks won't exist at all.  They probably just won't even be a thing.  Viewers won't know there's a thing to miss, and readers are already going to be up in arms about all the other dumb changes that it'll just be lost in the storm.

Longer episodes could be good, or they could be bad.  I've rarely been disappointed with and not want to continue with shows who's episodes feel too short (though I will prefer to binge them).  On the other hand, episodes that run too long will often feel like they start to drag, or feel all over the place and disconnected, leaving me either bored, or confused as to what's going on, and thus disinterested.

Have you seen the way they operate generally?  Variety and Hollywood Reporter put out the same kind of drivel as CBR and Screen Rant and Yahoo News and the rest, at roughly the same rates.  They're just usually a little further behind and very slightly better written and edited.  They don't write those kinds of stories based on press releases.  They've just decided to start getting in on the hype.  They had pieces ready to go as quickly as they did because everybody was given a heads-up last night by @WheelofTime.

As for conventions, I can only go off what they've done in the past for all of their prior sci-fi/fantasy/superhero shows.  History is generally the only reliable guide to the future.

Chivalry becomes sexism when it turns paternalistic, robbing that which it would purport to protect of what is most important: its own autonomy.  That's the offense that Rand committed against the Aiel maidens who beat the crap out of him for it.  That's the darkness that he had to learn to let go of, that regret and self-blame for Egwene and all the women who 'died for him,' in his final confrontation with the Dark One, before he could finally win.  And intention doesn't matter.  You don't have to intend to rob someone of their autonomy to do it, and you don't have to intend to be sexist to be sexist.

Gender and sexism are at the heart of what is being explored in the Wheel of Time.  To the extent that Jordan built binary gender into the very fabric of his universe.  And sexism is an inherent part of the relations between genders, the exploration of which Jordan is on record as doing.  It's no more inappropriate to talk about sexism in the Wheel of Time than it is to talk about population sizes and the logistics and actual strategies and tactics of waging all those battles and wars.

What's the ambiguity there?  The question said, "blink twice" if the trailer is coming soon.  Rafe responded with "?".  There's no blinking there.

Other outlets spinning off stories within minutes or hours of a WoT Wednesday news drop doesn't mean anything either.  Wheel of Time's social media presence has always been among the biggest of any fantasy book series.  Because it's the most popular American fantasy series of all time, and it "grew up," for lack of a better word, with the rise of the internet and the birth of social media.  It was always going to generate outsized social media buzz as the adaptation nears realization.  Those other outlets are just trying to cash in.  And they have a small set of reliable, regular social media channels to watch to be able to do it.

The most reliable speculation for the release date circulating now is from WoTUp, who uses the advance notice to book publishers who are going to want to push out new editions of the books in line with the release of the series, that they should be doing that in November, to suggest a Black Friday release date.  That would put the most likely date for a full-length trailer at sometime in October, or possibly as early as September, and a ~1 minute teaser fairly soon, likely June or July.  I would guess we'll get the 1 minute teaser at San Diego's Comic Con in late July, and possibly the full-length trailer at Dragoncon in early September, though that may be as late as Baltimore's Comic Con in October.  Dragoncon's kinda small for a venue to do a first trailer showing, but they may not care too much about that, as it'll be on YouTube minutes later and on Prime and other networks within days anyway.

Complaining here about a reddit phenomenon?  Interesting.  I don't think Dragonmount mods here can do anything about the subreddit.  And that subreddit is itself enormously more active than these boards, and as such, moderated much less well.

But in any event, the easiest rejoinder to your "observations" is that they are anecdotal, uncontrolled and appear to suffer from confirmation bias.  

In general, however, Sanderson is treated generously among the fandom for a few reasons.  Most importantly, he completed the series.  That can't be understated.  And he did it with a great deal of respect for Jordan and what he had already established, relying on RJ's notes and Maria's help with research and prior knowledge, and Harriet's editing.  While he did get things wrong, for the most part he acknowledged what he got wrong and worked to fix it through the subsequent volumes.  Throughout the process of writing the ending, and even to today, he's displayed a great deal of humility and respect for the franchise and the fans.  And that earns him a good deal of respect in return.

Jordan's works had been criticized for years prior to his death and Sanderson's arrival as well.  Let there be no mistake, here, Jordan is the best American fantasy writer of all time, and makes a good play for being among the best anywhere of all time.  But nobody's perfect either.  His huge, sprawling epic started, well, sprawling.  Timelines got all out of whack.  Characters seemingly forget earlier development.  And uninteresting things that Jordan wasn't as good at writing about began to dominate the story, like Aes Sedai and Andoran politics.  

As for the TV show commentary, a lot of people don't seem to understand how adaptations, particularly adaptations that work well, actually work.  I'm aware of no successful adaptation of any work of literature that didn't significantly streamline the plot and prune characters.  And it's simply not realistic to plan on a 14-season TV series.  I am highly pessimistic about the show myself, but not because they will be pruning and adapting the story.  That's necessary.  It's what they prune and how they adapt that determines whether it will be good, or sufficiently honor the source material. 

For example, rumor has it that they'll be cutting the Caemlyn palace scenes between Rand and Elayne and Rand and Elaida.  I don't like the idea of cutting that.  That scene with Elaida is thematically too important to cut, and it is important that Basel Gil, who we know has already been cast, have his inn at Caemlyn, for future story arcs.  Rafe has said that Logain will have an expanded role, particularly in the first season, and that the show will write Moiraine to be the main character of the first season.  I don't know how that will turn out, so I'm indifferent to it.  It could be good, it could be bad.  It's also been said that a lot of locations visited while traveling will be cut out.  And that's fine, as long as the cuts are done well, because it's just not realistic for TV show to build that many different sets.

I don't know if you noticed, Elder_Haman, but I haven't been insulting you.  I've been making a specific case about why the creative decisions they have decided to show off have been bad decisions, observing and describing the excuses made for them, and lamenting the changes and divisions within the community that this whole affair has engendered.  And you know very well that it has been on these very boards that it has been insinuated that my motives for expressing my discontent lie in racism, you read through these threads at least as assiduously as I do.

And fewer people every "release" like what they've been putting out.  You yourself admit they've misstepped.

When this thing fails to pick up a third season because it couldn't find their audience, or worse gets itself cancelled part way through filming season two because the first season stunk so bad, I can't promise I'll refrain from the "I told you so's" as I have with the filming wrap speculation, trailer speculation, or release date speculation, so far.

No, Moiraine is not Moiraine from the Wheel of Time if she's a six-foot tall redhead who looms over almost everybody.  That she's shorter than almost every adult we meet, yet still dominates a room with her presence and is serene even when confronted by those who tower over her is an essential part of what the Wheel of Time Moiraine is.  I've seen people make this argument before, and it's a dumb argument.  Just like Rand and the Aiel wouldn't remain the Aiel from Wheel of Time if they were re-written to be 5-foot tall people with black hair and purple eyes.  Sure, you can re-write the story and change every distinctive detail and still have it be the "same story," for some intents and purposes, but you lose its distinctiveness.  For what it's worth, I'm not personally that concerned over Rosamund Pike's height, because, as I said, making a tall person appear short or a short person appear tall is one of the oldest camera tricks in the the book.  As I have said repeatedly, I think casting is one of the only things they've gotten right so far.  But I understand and respect the trepidation of those who are.  

And we've seen more than just "six seconds of footage and a few stills." We've also got tweets and interviews. And leaks from other sources.  And let's not forget that it's not just a couple of unforced errors here.  Every single prop reveal thus far has deviated significantly from the items as described in the books.  Both the character highlight clips of Moiraine and Lan were insultingly short and disappointing, from embracing the One Power being turning an industrial fan and a spotlight on Moiraine's face, to Lan hopping and flapping about with his mouth open in fear and exertion.

What's demeaning is when every complaint is dismissed as stemming from racism, or as coming from an unsatisfiable standard of complete fidelity, or as being insulting to people who don't care or even like that Rafe is elevating his aesthetic sense over Jordan's in adapting this series.  There are specific issues with detailed reasons and arguments for why people are upset with these creative decisions.  What's demeaning is seeing those people dismissed by lumping them in with racists, or accusing them of unsatisfiable nitpicking, or elevating their subjective aesthetic over Rafe's when that's exactly what Rafe is being accused of in elevating his aesthetic sense over Jordan's.

If Kevin Feige or Jon Favreau had decided to "put his own artistic mark" on Iron Man by changing something about Iron Man that doesn't matter to Tony Stark's character or to the plot of the movies, like, say, making Iron Man's eye holes little circles instead of the rectangles any passing fan of the Iron Man comics would expect, he would have been ridiculed and those movies would have flopped.  Because the kind of person who would make that kind of change would not be able to pull off an Iron Man story that respects even those passing fans, let alone the die-hard ones who would have flipped their lids over it. 

There are iconic, distinctively Wheel of Time aesthetics to things, from the Tree of Life to the well of saidin at the Eye of the World, from Tam's sword to the Shadar Logoth dagger, from the plaza of Rhuidean to the redstone columns in the Heart of the Stone.  An aesthetic that Jordan went to pages of effort to describe in almost agonizingly vivid detail.  The color of the main characters' skin is almost the only thing they've gotten clearly right in that aesthetic so far.  Rafe is gonna have tons of places to "leave his artistic mark."  Because he has to change the story.  He has to choose what to cut, how to merge and what to add.  And those things matter, a lot.  Which is why it's all the more important to leave those things that "don't really matter," that iconic aesthetic that is as much the Wheel of Time as Aes Sedai and Ogier, as true as possible.  At least, it's important if your goal is to respect the source material and the legacy of the author who created it, and the community of the fans, both casual and hardcore, for whom that source material is important.  Or you could just give Iron Man round eyes

Nobody's asking for a recreation of the novels detail by detail.  What's being asked is that what's produced on the show be recognizably Wheel of Time.  Almost nothing that has been shown fits the descriptions except the cast.  It's simple stuff, and it doesn't matter a whit to the plot.  The changes to Thom are the perfect example.  Make his harp into a guitar so Willaume can use his talents to better portray Thom and I am here for it.  Make that former royal court-bard's signature instrument a folksy, plain, burnished wood affair that could have been dug out of some farmer's attic and I have to wonder if they've understand Thom at all, or read the same stories I have.  

But whatever.  My only ask was for some real demonstration that Rafe and the show's writers, directors and producers understand and respect the source material.  Not only has that not been demonstrated, but what has been put out has been tone-deaf and ridiculous little clips so short they may as well be stills.  I don't see respect for Jordan's story from that production team, and I don't see respect for the fans of that story.  Just a bunch of shallow and transparent manipulation of wannabe social media content creators.  

You're right, I don't.  And I may yet not.  The thing is that whether I watch or not is immaterial.  That culture which has grown up around this series is being irrevocably altered.  And while I can celebrate the purge of racists and bigots, I do not condone the rest, nor the inevitable divisions within that culture which lumps in those who dislike and distrust Rafe and the production crew's already demonstrated lack of respect for those characteristic details of the original story with those racists and bigots who would whitewash the Wheel of Time.

"The plot" is less important than the core of the story, and that the adaptation be distinctly and recognizably "Wheel of Time."  "The plot" will have to be significantly changed from the books to the small screen, with locations and characters and whole subplots cut, merged or completely replaced with brand new ones.  But the complaint that Rosamund Pike is too tall to play Moiraine is a valid one, because having a tall Moiraine completely changes the feel of that part of the Wheel of Time.  It also might not matter much because changing the apparent height of a character versus their real-life actor is one of the oldest camera-tricks in the book.  So maybe it won't change the feel of that part of the story, because they'll make sure to do their camera work with Rosamund in such a way as to preserve that feel.  But it's not inappropriate to feel trepidation about it.

See, this is the thing that the sycophantic defenders can't seem to grasp.  They think the complaint is about any kind of change at all.  When really, the complaints are about Rafe failing to respect that distinctly Wheel of Time aesthetic and core spirit that has had literal decades to grow and reinforce itself among the fans of the number one-selling American fantasy series.  Indeed, even those racist complaints about casting have that as their core motive, though their complaints and their white-washing of the Wheel of Time aesthetic and core spirit deserved to be challenged, exposed and thrown out.  

But the general defense of this show has gone far beyond merely running out the racists.  It insists that there is no such thing as a "distinctly Wheel of Time aesthetic."  As if Jordan didn't spend literal pages and pages describing the way characters and geography and clothes and food and every little thing looked and seemed.  We can ignore all that because "this is a different Turning" and because if we admit that there's a way things are "supposed to be," we might open the door for those racists to complain about things for racist reasons while covertly hiding their racism behind a real aesthetic disagreement. Nevermind that those racists were and are literally wrong in their whitewashing, not just morally wrong.  

We can trust that things are on track because Brandon and Maria and Harriet are "consultants" on the show, even though Brandon has already disavowed any influence he might have had or his involvement in the production, and early on warned the fans that they won't like some things being done.  And because Rafe has talked about Maria helping, though not in anything like specific terms, while Maria herself has said nothing, and Harriet likewise has been uncharacteristically quiet, though perhaps not unsurprisingly considering the fallout from the Winter Dragon debacle.  After all, we do have some specifics about how Sarah has helped keep things true to the series, though if those stories are true, it demonstrates a horrifying lack of familiarity with the source material by the writers and the showrunner, and if they're just jokes, it demonstrates a complete lack of respect for the fans who are worried about the show, and what they're worried about.

And at the end of the day, we don't need to worry because Rafe's not making the show for the fans of the series.  This show's for the people who don't read, they just tune into the latest fad streaming series.  It's for the ~8 million viewers of the Boys or Carnival Row, not the more than 80 million readers of the series, who have already made @WoTonPrime, now @WheelofTime, one of Amazon Prime's most popular TV series twitter accounts in spite of not having aired a single episode yet.  After all, it's not like the MCU, who had to make radical changes to the plots and characters of Marvel's Infinity War Saga to bring that story to the silver screen, were successful because they ignored their existing fans.  No, they made sure to incorporate as much as possible from the comics in the characterization of their characters, and giving great big winks and nods to the stuff they couldn't.  For all the changes they made, nobody was arguing that Hawkeye wasn't authentic because he didn't have a big purple spiky mask, or because Wanda started out with dirty blonde hair instead of red.

And the most remarkable thing about all this, to me, is that the engagement with their community has been so sloppy, so unconcerned, and so lazy, and that these things have only gotten worse, and yet still there are those who defend them.  We have no reason to believe that Rafe even understands, let alone respects the core of the Wheel of Time or the characters or their individual journeys.  Virtually every release from December on has done nothing to demonstrate that they do understand or respect that core.  They had the benefit of the doubt from me, for a long time.  And then they proceeded fritter away and waste that benefit at nearly every opportunity. 

Now, I no longer believe they will deliver anything recognizable as the Wheel of Time, and I doubt that their show will be much of a success.  The latter is still possible.  Not likely, considering the damage they've done with the former, but possible.  But they've burnt enough bridges on the former that it's basically a foregone conclusion that it's not gonna look like anything like what the fans from the last three decades, what the culture that has grown up around the fandom for these stories, would expect or hope for.  Because if you can't respect the little details, where the showrunners have basically free-reign to respect the canon without the constraints or limits of the differing media or the need to respect the changes they do have to make, there's no reason to expect that there's going to be any respect for the core of the story or the characters therein.  Just because you have a TV show with some women magic users you call Aes Sedai and some major characters named Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene and Nynaeve and locations named Emond's Field and Fal Dara doesn't mean you're telling the Wheel of Time.

Don't worry about it too much, Elessar.  There's a certain contingent for whom Rafe can do no wrong, who appear to be of the opinion that we should thank our lucky stars that there's any kind of TV adaptation at all.  Any change at all is forgivable, no matter how far from the text or any prior interpretation of the significance of the text it is.  Or at least, it can't be judged yet, particularly not negatively, even if it's something as simple as judging the way a prop looks.

And Carebear Sedai, I have to disagree with you about one thing.  Writing the coming-of-age stories of the main characters was not the weakest part of Jordan's writing.  The Andoran and Aes Sedai politicking, followed by the romances, were the weakest part.  The coming-of-age part, at least for some of those characters, is among the strongest. Particularly among that cohort, like myself, who were coming-of-age along with the publication of the story.

To me, it comes down to a simple question.  Would we be having this discussion, arguing over these issues and with a not insignificant portion of the existing fanbase growing more skeptical of the possibility of a faithful adaptation, rather than less, if Tam's sword had quillions, the Shadar Logoth dagger looked like it is explicitly described and illustrated, Thom's guitar looked ornamented and elaborate like something a royal court-bard would play rather than a plain wooden affair, if the bare few seconds of a clip of Moiraine with her voiceover was a few seconds longer, and was at all relevant to her character instead of being made up for that spot, or taken from the show, or if this clip of Lan showed him standing tall and ready with steely eyes and grim determination on his face, rather than the crouching, open-mouthed, borderline desperate feeling he portrays here?

This all comes down to expectations, and the fanbase has had decades to hone their expectations.  And these expectations are not nearly so vague or disparate as to excuse these changes.  Whether these changes are enough to result in a bad show, no one can yet know, because no one's seen the show.  But this is definitely bad marketing.  Because you don't go to an established fanbase with longstanding and largely consistent fanart and a passionate community and say, "Hey, you know that thing you love so much that we're adapting for TV?  Let us show you how nothing we're doing looks or feels like what you expect.  Aren't we so clever in subverting all your expectations?  I bet you really trust us to honor the story, the characters, the themes and journey you all have been on for the last 30 odd years now!"

5 minutes ago, SinisterDeath said:

And the actor that plays Lan is literally as tall as the actor that plays Rand, and you'd be lying if you try to tell me from the pictures of both, that Daniel has narrower shoulders then the actor that plays Rand.

Which is why I begin my next paragraph with:

21 minutes ago, Thrasymachus said:

Which is not to say that Daniel Henney couldn't pull off that kind of look.  And for all we know, he still might. 

Because there's nothing about him, as a person, and certainly not because of his race, that prevents him from pulling it off.  But Daniel Henney is not in charge of how he looks on the show.  The directors and showrunners are.

11 minutes ago, SinisterDeath said:

That's valid criticism.

But we also have no idea where that clip is taken from, whether it's even supposed to be Lan in his best gear. 

 

That 6 second clip didn't really show you anything about his fighting style. (I REALLY HOPE, they didn't have him do a hand swing with that sword)

 

You're right, we don't know any of that.  But they did have the choice of what clip to show us.  Why show us that?

8 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

These choices are "simply bad" - for you. No sense of excitement - for you. But these are entirely subjective. I get that your excitement has dulled, but it is certainly not true for everyone in the fandom.

 

I guess I just don't understand the attraction of crapping on the show before we've actually seen it.

They're actually not entirely subjective.  If art were entirely subjective, there'd be no such thing as bad art.  It wouldn't be possible to have whole degree programs devoted to various forms of artistic expression.  But there is, objectively, bad art out there.  

And the "crapping on the show before we've actually seen it" is not a fair characterization.  To be more accurate, it's crapping on the aesthetic choices they've made that they're showing us, and the way they're being shown.  And that's fair crapping because they are bad choices that are either objectively ugly and/or fail to respect the source material and that doing so is unnecessarily divisive amongst the pre-existing fanbase.