Modernizing the Wheel of Time

[Seppl]

The message of the original was
"Adventures are Boys only clubs, no girls allowed"

Was it? In the story that is literally about a little Hobbit becoming the big hero, despite everyone saying he cannot? Making Bilbo a woman, now that would have been a change that fits the story and keeps the real original message intact!

Nobody would seriously have batted an eye at the fact that the adventuring scene in a pseudo-4th-century setting is male-dominated. But because of Tauriel it gets framed as if that were some huge problem, while at the same time Tauriel shows that the real problem is in our society, not in 4th-century-adventuring parties. And the problem is not that people would be irritated by female heroes, but that story tellers see the worth of female characters primarily in tokenism.

That is the same kind of mindset that leads to movies about Vikings, where the population of the Viking village mirrors the demographics of present day New York. Which, incidentally, is also something the Hobbit did, and also sent a terrible message. They showed that there were non-white people in Lake-Town. Bit of a stretch for such a time and society, but acceptable. But the way it was executed sent the opposite message: You people appear in the background of one scene, so that we get to tick off another box from marketing! That is your worth to us!
The inclusion of black people in one background crowd only highlights the fact that all the heroes are white. Without that background shot, it would just have been normal and expected that everyone, including the heroes, in the pre-medieval, northern trading village is white. Instead, we have the unfortunate implication, that the town had a black demographic, but none of them were heroes.

Sorry for stating this parallel-discussion about The Hobbit and TLotR. But I think it nicely contrasts two adaptions of two old books (and both works are somewhat similar to Wheel of Time!), one of which is widely regarded as one of the best adaptions of all time, and another one is the opposite. Despite both being done by mostly the same people in similar styles. There you can see, what kind of changes work or do not and why.