Unfortunately, these are exactly the "cool" sort of scenes I cherished and was looking forward to seeing, but which I have absolutely zero faith in their ability to deliver them properly (or even at all).

Looks as though Rafe got canned from working on scamazon's God of War after having several iterations of the script rejected. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technologyinvesting/the-wheel-of-time-showrunner-departs-god-of-war-tv-show-as-amazon-tosses-out-scripts/ar-AA1sNoTJ So it's NOT just the WOT material, it's the showrunner after all. Huh. 😐

"Just nonsense..." Most succinct way of summing up the entire adaptation. Kudos. 🙂

Science is a by definition a never-ending process of testing and retesting assumptions about the physical world (and measuring it) until enough errata accumulate to create a crisis, at which point competing theories vie to best replace the old system while taking into account the new anomalies. Sometimes technologies will unfold "asymmetrically" because of different availability of resources and/or conditions. E.g., It's tough to create steel if there is no iron available in your region. E.g., Aztec's may not have invented the wheel because it was less useful in jungles than the open areas of say Ancient Mesopotamia. Their astronomy was more advanced than the Greeks because they had over a thousand years' more time to work out the details. Perhaps certain weapon techs don't get developed due to isolated location and/or few native enemies. To believe there should be a linear or standard process of discovery is really missing a lot of factors that may not even be scientific but rather cultural or circumstantial.

I was going to respond that he's more emo than metal, but then I read the OP. 😄

No, of course not.

A tie to Achillles, perhaps? Seems a stretch, but that's the only mythological leg wound not already mentioned that springs to mind.