Wheel of time books gay characters

There are no coming-out storylines, no declarations of evolving identity upon finding love and there is no homophobia. Very rarely does anyone ever make any negative commentary about any queer relationship in the books. Queerness whether in personal identity, relationships, cultural customs or power structures is an unquestioned, innate part of this fantasy world.

My dad would read to my brother and me from Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit as we were kids going down for bed, which sometimes was disturbing. I had nightmares about Gollum. I loved it, but there was this gap in it for me in some ways until I read Wheel of Timewhich is actually what I read with my mom.

She gave it to me. I and she grew up in the Mormon church, and she was kind of a feminist figure within the church, trying to find ways to fight against it. I was coming to terms with the fact that I was gay at the same time. So as we were both reading these books, we saw ourselves in them.

For me, it was very important to find wheel of time books gay characters in the show today. I feel like part of our job as artists who are adapting something is to bring it to life, not just word-for-word but to also bring its context to life. I have also found myself frustrated.

I have dear friends who work on Game of Thrones, and I love the show, but I often found queer representation very othered all the time. In adapting this into a show, what were the touchpoints in the books you leaned into — the groups of people, the belief systems — that felt queer and that you wanted to live in the show?

I come from a science and anthropology background, and a lot of what I studied was the history of homosexuality around the world and in different cultures. One thing that I think the Wheel of Time books did incredibly well was culture creation. They feel real, and they are all attached to the rules of their world in different ways.

Women have power, so how each culture within the Wheel of Time world attaches to the idea that women have more physical power available to them than men is interesting.

Wheel of Time Wednesday: Special Interview with Rafe Lee Judkins on Queer Representation in Fantasy

They all do it very, very differently. Similarly for me, queer representation is very different in the different worlds of The Wheel of Time. In the White Tower, we have this place that is almost exclusively a female domain, and there are a lot of conversations about the different kinds of relationships that women have within it.

One thing that I was very interested in was the idea of these pillow friends or, quite obviously, loving relationships that happen within the tower amongst women. That was one thing I wanted to lean into with the show because often with single-gender places, you see a lot of homosocial and homosexual behavior.

That idea of this place where only women live was very interesting to me. One of the most fully formed cultures in the books is the Aiel, and in the books, they always had this very fascinating idea, which was called First-Sisters. Two women sort of marry each other first and they may have relationships outside of that with men, they may not, but that core relationship in their life was with their first-sister.

We have two main characters Aviendha Ayoola Smart and Elayne Ceara Coveney who eventually become first-sisters in the books. I love that. I like having a multiplicity of queer relationships and a multiplicity of how different cultures approach queerness in the world of the Wheel of Time.

But I do feel like seeing three different first-sister couples and how they operate with each other this season is an interesting insight into this world. At the center of the show is the relationship between Moiraine and Siuan, which gets a notable development in episode five.

They were described as pillow friends in the books, but you pulled that out and are very direct about their romance across each season.