The hackles of the fantasy community were already up over the rape of Wheel of Time by Amazon last year.
I'm a huge fan of Robert Jordan's 14 book Wheel of Time and was very excited to see a decent treatment of it. At $100 million for the first season's budget, hopes were high across the fandom.
And then they were dashed in the first 2 minutes of Moiraine's opening monologue. Anyone who has read the series knows how antithetical those lines were to Moiraine's character, to the Blue Ajah of the Aes Sedai (Aes Sedai are an order of sorceresses that basically rule the world) in general, and to the mythology of Jordan's world he created. Then we have Rand and Egwene copulating on a bar countertop outside of wedlock in a back country middle ages town that has a history of shotgun spearpoint weddings, and Myrdraal that are a cheap ripoff mish-mash of DeathEaters and Ringwraiths instead of being the unique creations they should look like.
Everyone in this back country town has disparate racial features. We have Maori, Irish, Huguenot, Australian Aboriginal, Italian, and the Creator alone knows how many other Earthly nationalities all crammed together in this isolated town at the ass end of no trade route that has no introduction of new blood, ever. All these people should be the same race. Doesn't matter which one, pick one. But after a thousand years of intermarrying they should all be the same (with the notable exception of Rand Al'Thor, which is explained later due to story reasons). But because the show runners screwed up the ethnicity of Emond's Field, Rand doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. Instead, everyone does.
The show spent an episode and a half exploring random side character #22 (named Steppin if you watched it) rather than critical early exposition elements. Technically, the first book has zero pages of content set in the city of Tar Valon (where the Steppin crap happens). But they chose to build a Tar Valon set and pursue made-up plot points there rather than the far more important elements that happen in a different city called Caemlyn, involving a Queen, a princess, and an Aes Sedai advisor named Elaida that meets Rand.
There is ENORMOUS resentment over the butchering of this series. Many of us have been waiting decades for this series to come to TV or movie format. There was already bad blood due to an IP-blocking hackjob by Red Eagle Entertainment when they made a short film called Winter Dragon back around 2015.
Those of us that feel betrayed by Wheel of Time and Amazon, see hallmarks of the same betrayal in the marketing tactics that surround this Tolkien adaptation. Tokenized black elves, turning female characters into action heroes that were never any such thing canonically, heterogeneous hair/skin tones and facial features in places that should be more uniform. We call it out and the first thing we get hit with is "racism." Next is usually "you just want a 1:1 adaptation and that's not realistic." Nevermind Jackson's LotR was not a 1:1, and even introduced female action characters that were not any such thing (Arwen/Glorfindel) and we have no problem there.
Amazon's Wheel of Time adaptation DESTROYED Jordan's core of the story. The misandry going on in that presentation is at the author/production level, it is not a component of the world and not being used as a storytelling device (which might be an acceptable deviation if that were the case). Every single upstanding male character from Jordan's story has been emasculated or converted into a villain in the Amazon adaptation, or cut altogether. Lan Mandragoran, Tam Al'Thor, Abell Cauthon, Agelmar Jagad, Elyas Machera. And that's just in the first season.
It's pretty well assumed that the Middle Earth adaptation will destroy Tolkien's core of his story, too.
