2 Wheel of Time books pulled from schools pending investigations into sexual content

Fun fact: according to the Tallahassee Democrat, the state of Florida leads the United States in book bans, with double the number of bans of second place finisher Texas. Book bans are up in general, according to a new report from free speech group PEN America, which found 3,362 instances of books banned across the country in the 2022-23 school year, up 33% from the year before.

In Florida, the bans are coming into effect under laws like the Curriculum Transparency Act, which requires school districts to catalog every book they offer and put a formal review process in place for complaints. House Bill 1069 requires districts to remove any book something thinks has pornographic or sexual material within five days of recieving the complaint, and keeping it off shelves until the complaint is resolved.

There's actually a list of thousands of such books pulled under House Bill 1069 in Escambia County in Florida, and Redditors noticed that it includes some interesting entries: two books from The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan: Path of Dagger and Winter's Heart.

Those are the eighth and ninth books respectively in Jordan's 14-book series, which makes you wonder why the other books in the series escaped complaint. I'm only four books into The Wheel of Time series myself, but so far they're pretty chaste affairs, with hints of romance happening off-page if at all. A Song of Ice and Fire this is definitely not, and I have a hard time believing that they get much more explicit a few books later, especially considering that these books are being removed from high schools.

Amazon is adapting Jordan's sprawling fantasy epic as a TV show, and things are little more explicit there, what with Rand (Josha Stradowski) and Lanfear (Natasha O'Keeffe) breathing heavily at each other the whole second season through. But even there, the show falls well short of the explitic sexual content fantasy fans saw on HBO's Game of Thrones.

It seems more likely that Path of Daggers and Winter's Heart are collateral damage in a fear-mongering moral panic where people are complaining about pornography in books as a respectable pretense to work out their homophobic and racist beliefs. Books with characters of color and themes of race and racism made up 30% of banned books. Ditto books with LGTBQ+ characters or themes. Books about student health and wellbeing made up 42% of banned books. As for The Wheel of Time books, well, Jordan does describe women as folding their arms beneath their breasts a lot. Better keep those books away from teenagers, just to be safe.

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