The Wheel of Time is chugging along on its third season, which has been getting rave reviews. The TV series adapts Robert Jordan's massive Wheel of Time book series, a sprawling affair that showrunner Rafe Judkins and his team are having to compress to make into a TV show. "We have five billion characters and it feels like there’s never time to do anything," he told The Hollywood Reporter.
Judkins has to pick and choose which aspects of the story to highlight and which to streamline. One thing he's made a point of exploring is the multiplicity of queer relationships on the show, whether it's the life-long love bond between Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) and Siuan Sanche (Sophie Okonedo), the budding relationship between Elayne (Ceara Coveney) and Aviendha (Ayoola Smart), or the polyamosous relationship between the Aes Sedai sorceress Alanna (Priyanka Bose) and her warders Maksim (Taylor Napier) and Ivhon (Anthony Kaye).
You don't often think of high fantasy as a genre with a lot of queer relationships, but Judkins thinks The Wheel of Time series always had them, even if they weren't made explicit when Robert Jordan was writing the books in the '90s and 2000s. So he made the choice, for instance, to make the relationship between Moiraine and Siuan explicit where it's a little more subtextual on the page.
"It is one of the most important relationships in the books for how it drives plot," Judkins said. "It’s almost like the inciting incident of the show is contained within the relationship between these two. To me, the show didn’t make sense without that relationship being explicit because we are also putting more of the emphasis certainly on [Rosamund Pike’s] character, Moiraine, than there is in the books. You’re also always looking as an artist for, 'Why am I telling this story? I have to devote my life to this for years and years.' It was worth devoting my life to telling this beautiful story, but also that the lead was a queer character. I’ve never seen a fantasy show where our lead was just casually a queer character that wasn’t only directed at the queer community. To have that was an important part of why I wanted to tell this story and why I fell in love with the books in the first place."
We also have the relationship between Aviendha and Elayne, two characters who are incredibly close in the books, even if the nature of their relationship isn't spelled out like Judkins is doing in the show. "We have two main characters Aviendha (Ayoola Smart) and Elayne (Ceara Coveney) who eventually become first-sisters in the books," he said. "How we pulled it up was to forefront that relationship and the loving nature underneath it early in the show, so when they eventually become first-sisters, it’s based on this relationship they already have with each other. 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."
Finally, we have the polyamorous relationship between Alanna, Maksim and Ivhon. Ivhon dies in the first episode of season 3, leaving Alanna and Maksim to grieve. But what does grief look like in this situation?
"[T]hey have now lost the person that was most important to them and they’re left behind," Judkins said. "Is there still something there for these two who have loved each other in part just because they loved the third person the most? That was to most of us in the room not only a relationship that we hadn’t seen in fantasy but also a relationship we hadn’t seen on TV that much before. We have a couple of people in the room who have been in poly relationships at different times, so we had a lot of conversations about that and said, 'What’s interesting about this to us? What do we want to write about here?' It’s a small story through the season, but I think again, for people who maybe haven’t been able to find themselves in fantasy stuff before, they might find a relationship that feels more like theirs with the three of them.
There are even relationships on the show you might not think of as queer but that have a queer subtext. Take the Aes Sedai-warder bond between Moiraine and Lan (Daniel Henney). They're a man and a woman who are very intimate with each other, but not explicitly romantic or sexual. To Judkins, there's a queer element to that because of how outside the norm it is. "To me, one thing that I found really powerful about it, especially with Moiraine and Lan is, we don’t often get to see beautiful platonic friendships between men and women," he said. "So to people, it feels queer because it doesn’t feel like a part of our world that a woman and a man could have such a deep and special friendship with one another."
"Rosamund would say it herself. It’s one of her favorite things about being in the show, the ability to have this relationship with Lan. She’s like, “I’ve never even been in something that came close to having a relationship like that between a man and a woman before.” It’s one of those things where I think fantasy and genre are interesting because you can use them in this slant world. You can use it to puncture ideas about how we interact with our world. I think the fact that this relationship feels so unusual should make us think because it shouldn’t be that unusual that a woman and a man have such a deep and caring relationship with each other that has absolutely nothing to do with sex."
How The Wheel of Time challenges norms about relationships
Moiraine and Siuan Sanche keep their relationship a secret, but not because it's a homosexual relationship; they don't want people to know they're looking for the Dragon Reborn. In general, queer relationships of all kinds are out in the open on The Wheel of Time, with little in the way of bigoted pushback.
That was intentional on Judkins' part. “We made a conscious decision in the first season writers room to make sure homophobia didn’t exist inThe Wheel of Time," he said. "I think a lot of our audience won’t notice it, but some of the audience does notice and feel it — that it is fantasy. We go to worlds different from our own, and people think about the world and the people in it differently than our own. We don’t need homophobia to exist. It doesn’t really in the books. Very rarely does anyone ever make any negative commentary about any queer relationship in the books.”
The Wheel of Time is set in a world where the rules around relationships we're used to don't really apply, allowing people to imagine something different. There are more homosexual relationships, but also characters who are sexually fluid. When Moiraine sees visions of her future when visiting the Aiel city of Rhuidean, there's one where she's making out with Rand.
"It’s interesting because early on in the show, Rosamund came to me, and she was like, 'I wanted to know if you believe that Moiraine is a lesbian or that she is bisexual.' I was like, 'What I believe for the show is that those identities don’t exist in the exact same way in our world, and Moiraine doesn’t believe that one of those identities has to sit upon her and she has to choose it,'" Judkins said. "Rosamund really responded positively to [that] and put that into her creation of the character. We do a lot in the show with this idea. In the same way that homophobia doesn’t exist in the world of The Wheel of Time, I do find that often in our world, we fight the hardest for our identities and the definition of who we are when we feel like we’re fighting against something."
Beware SPOILERS for The Wheel of Time books below
Part of the strategy for including more alternative relationships in The Wheel of Time show is to set viewers up for a big alternative relationship coming later in the story. And it's now time to get into some SPOILERS.
Later in the books, Rand will take multiple wives: Aviendha, Elayne, and Min (Kae Alexander). By this point in the books, Rand and Elayne are already something of an item, and Aviendha is showing interest in him. They're taking a longer time to get there on the show, but it does sound like that's where Judkins is going.
"Rand’s relationship is ultimately with Elayne and Aviendha," Judkins said. "It’s a very serious relationship that they have. But it’s crazy sometimes, the things people remember about the books. They don’t remember that there were Black people in the books, even though it’s literally described in the text. And people don’t remember that Elayne and Aviendha spend about 10 to 20 times more page count with the two of them together than either of them ever does with Rand. Their relationship is the central relationship in that three-person relationship in the books. They get married and Aviendha talks about how she holds Elayne in her arms at night and when she doesn’t have her there, it’s like a piece of her is missing. If you’re a queer kid reading that in the ’90s, you know what’s happening. A lot of people who were not queer kids, read it and didn’t realize that that’s what’s happening. But I think that we are just taking what was in the pages of the book and putting it on screen."
Judkins doesn't mention Min, which is interesting, but we'll cross that bridge when and if we come to it. "All over the show, we are trying to have those moments," Judkins said. "It’s not the number one thing on the page that we’re going for, but I think you feel it infused in the show. We are puncturing and questioning those identities, and because this is a fantasy world, are those identities exactly the same here or not?"
Judkins intends to keep exploring these kinds of topics "as long as the show gets to continue." Let's hope that's a long time. In the meanwhile, new episodes drop Thursdays on Prime Video.
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