Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Robert Jordan: Trans Ally & Wife Guy

Episode Date: March 27, 2022

Part 2 of our talk about Wheel of Time. We discuss the gender binary of magic, consensual harems, and the Amazon adaption.Please consider supporting Alex's gay bakery/book shop here: https://humva.dev/2022/03/15/books-baking-and-queer-things/Or listening to Roberto's podcast here: https://historyofsaqartvelo.com/patreon.com/swordsandsocialismFollow the show @SwordsNSocPodEmail us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 bro are you fucking real man come on yeah welcome back everyone to sword sorcery and socialism podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre fiction. Just like the last episode, this is again about the Wheel of Time, as always, I'm Darius, and with me again I have my guests Alex and Roberto. How's it going, you two? Just fine. It feels like it's been such a long time since we last spoke. I don't know about y'all, but I went and did some bread baking in the meantime. I don't know about y'all, but I went and did some bread baking in the meantime. So we're back again.

We're back at it again. We know we had to do it to him because, boy, how did we have to talk about some gender and some gender roles in this world? Because Robert Jordan definitely made some choices. About the way he wanted to do things. And, yeah, why don't you start us off, Alex? I see the real reason you invited me on was to have the token girl talk about things. Can I give a quick comment? Sure. So at the time, Robert Jordan was probably a proto feminist who was way ahead in his thinking.

You know, okay, let me start there. Okay, there we go. Let me start there. I will repeat what I have said previously. And, you know, I will put this disclaimer. My thoughts are my own thoughts. I am sharing them to the world. I am not making the statement that my thoughts are superior to other people's thoughts, or that other people's thoughts are inferior to mine. Other people's thoughts are inferior to mine. I am putting my opinions out there. This is not necessarily like how I'd apply to everything.

This is my favorite disclaimer so far. And beyond that, if you have read The Wheel of Time or you start reading The Wheel of Time and you're like, wow, I cannot handle how this man writes women. That is okay. Your opinion is valid and you are welcome to like read the cliff notes or disregard it entirely. I will say if you pick fights with me on Twitter, then yes. Now we have like, when you like thrown down the gauntlet and challenged then sure but otherwise like no i'm not i'm not here to like i i say genuinely i'm not here to fight

people about these things the man had some takes and that's a great way to like that i love starting all conversations on wheel of time gender with the man had some takes because like it prepares people for this worst case scenario when it's really like you can tell you can tell sitting down and reading these books but robert jordan is probably a guy who dearly loved his wife. Like, just really liked women. Like, a real women appreciator of a guy. Real wife guy. Real wife guy.

But, like, he just could not understand women. Like, I feel like... The most cis man to ever live you know like the most controversial statement i can probably make is like robert jordan probably is like so far removed from i don't even know how to like i don't even know how to like expand on the idea beyond like Robert Jordan truly is the definition of super cis there is not there's not one one feminine thought in this man's head and it's it's one of those things where like, you know, somebody I've had, I've seen this happen in real time before where somebody will be like, ah, real time, gender, awful, terrible books. And people will be like, oh, wow.

I got to go read this trash fire. And then they like get through it. And if they somehow stick around for the first 700 pages of eye of the world, you get to the end of it and they're like where's this fucking trash file fire i just promised the drama and what did i get and i do feel like this is like my most milquetoast of criticisms about the act of criticizing wheel of time a lot that started happening around the time the show dropped was is just like people i don't want to say blowing things out of proportion because that does feel like it trivializes some of the things and i don't want to make the argument of oh it's not that bad guys

but like it's i do feel like it's the sort of thing where people get this notion worked up in their head almost from just like playing games of telephone that you'll get one person who just really doesn't like it and then five quote tweets later you get this notion that like robert jordan was this woman hating monster of a dude. And it's just like, no, the man was just not great at writing women. And you can tell like he starts to get better at it. The further you get into the series. Like a lot of his writing we talked about before,

like he gets better at it the longer he's practicing. The truly hot take that I won't get into, because we're limiting our focus to the first three books, is there is an opinion that goes around that Brandon Sanderson cranked up the misogyny for the last three books when he was writing. And I bring it up specifically so I can shut the door on it and say, congratulations. We only get to talk about the first three books.

Oh, thank you for bringing that up and refusing to answer it. Fantastic. Can I say a few things actually? Oh, sure. Oh no, no,

no. I was, I was just kind of like, just to kind of top off on that. I was like, yeah, Alex question. No, no, no. It's just kind of like, just to kind of top off on that. It's like, yeah. Alex, question. Does this book, does this series pass the Bechdel test? You know, I feel like this is, if passing the Bechdel test is a precision sharpshooting contest

Wheel of Time is like fucking just carpet bombing Dresden into the ground because you have fucking 1800 characters and it's impossible it's impossible not to pass

the Bechdel test it has 1800 characters and700 of them are male. Or more about. And of those hundred that are women, half of them are fucking Rand. So, like, okay.

So, I guess to get the immediate thing off the floor here, gender is baked into this world. And I think that is the first thing that throws off a quote unquote modern audience. And I put modern in the most heavy of air quotes, because like,

as I remind myself constantly, queers existed in 1989 and the queer culture did not come about after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like, but simultaneously for our modern viewpoints on fantasy. modern viewpoints on fantasy and when i say modern i'm not saying it in the sense of ah people in the past were so dumb and didn't know these things but more so that we expect these things out of our fantasy today we have very good fantasy works exploring much more queer themes and well really digging into gender to to kind of add to that i mean the robert jordan does add a slight queer theme but like it's he skirts around it with very fluffy and pillowy talk because he calls him bedfellows for pillow friends he calls them pillow friends okay so like every time you see someone referenced as a pillow friend, that is a queer relationship going on.

Okay. I have to fucking interject there. This is why I say I don't think that when Robert Jordan wrote that I don't think he can conceptualize the idea of lesbian sex in his head I don't think like he actually is capable of formulating that

I think he just genuinely thinks like women in relationships do nothing but cuddle each other which you know valid valid, my dude. That's supposed to be my relationship. What's a relationship? Cuddling, clearly.

Apparently. But yeah, no, it still has that very, like, because there's, like, I think there's, like, the one male pillow friend group and that's about it and then there's like all the ace should die are like oh yeah we're like they were pillow friends when they were novices but then sex doesn't exist in the soviet union once they're you know uh in the once once they're actual they should die and it's like oh yeah well nothing hit sex unless you're a green

then you get all the sex but it's all the heterosex though all the heterosex you can handle I mean it's very much the the green A Shaddai are very much the reverse Mormons, essentially

because they have a ton of guys for one ace to die. But yes, like, gender baked into the world, baked into the magic system. For sure. Yeah. I mean, it's so like,

to interject, my bit as a brief explainer. We referenced in the first episode the sort of two sides of the true source. You've got the two ways to access, so like to interject to like you know my bit as like brief explainer in this when we reference in the first episode the sort of like two sides of the true source you've got the two ways to access your magic which is sort of the male side and the feminine side and you know the reason why you know rand atreides is special is because he just surpasses the need for male side or female side and goes to the true one. But like you said, this sort of duality besides good and evil,

which we talked a lot about last episode is the other major duality is the duality of gender in this, in this story. I mean, and even to like add onto that, like the main symbol for like the ace to die and the likes for like the, for the side in and side are is literally a black and white yin and yang symbol so like the symbol for the true source is literally yin and yang because like you have the dragon's tooth and then you have like the the tower's tear yeah so it literally does represent the yin and yang without the main center inside of it. Oh, and just before I forget,

I would like to send a picture of the tower of the... What's the town's name of the tower? Taoran? Taoran, yeah. Oh, no, no, no. Okay, so look at this picture and tell me what that looks like to you because this is where the Aes Sedai are actually at. This is where they're located. Uh-huh. What is me what that looks like to you. Cause this is where the H and I are actually at.

This is where they're located. Uh-huh. What is that supposed to look like to you? You know, I don't know, officer. I just see an Island. It's very much a vagina.

I mean, I mean, you know what? At least we know Robert Jordan vaguely knew what one looked like. But, like, to be fair, like, this is pointed out to me by, like, a bunch of my friends. It's like, yeah, the Tar-Valon

is literally shaped like a woman's vagina. Like, with everything. They are going to go live on vagina island goodbye yep exactly but except i am also a male so like uh this is just like my opinions and i am probably being like overweight thinking this but this is what like the official map is and that is the first thought i had in my mind, which was like, that looks pretty like genital.

As is quoted from The Big Lebowski, it's powerfully vaginal. Great movie. So, Alex, help the men here. Please do. I'm afraid I have to immediately peep today

if I can point out that it's a bull butt not a vagina you know thank you because like you know I just went for the full term I'm sorry I've actually I actually have I've never participated in any sexual activity in my entire life so I wouldn't know

I'm also a nerd so yes I mean I am hosting like a sci-fi lit podcast, so I don't know. All right, Alex, tell me about this hard-coded male versus female and weird harems of women just agreeing. Actually, to be fair, that part might not actually come until after these three books i don't remember it's just it starts showing up from like book one uh so like the whole thing here i'm like the instigating cause of this world is yes you have the magic system which is divided into siding which is the male half

and cigar which is the female half sorry non-binary people can't be magic it's simply impossible well well well non-binary people are just the dark friends who use the dark ones power clearly yeah there is like a spoiler but like i don't know their name, there is, like, spoiler alert, but, like, I don't know their name, but there is a male or female who uses, like, the opposite. I forget who it is, but I know there is someone who uses, like, Scydina Zydar. So, okay.

So, like, this has... Okay. So, like, telling on myself here. Let me get for the synopsis of the power and then i'll tell myself all right there we go i feel like an important thing to immediately throw out there is you do have you know this very strict binary magic system you know joking about joking about folks aside like in this world you have a very strict binary people fall within

that binary and jordan doesn't experiment with that very much he is very clear that he is not interested in pushing the boundaries of that. You can see in a few points that he does get a little bit interested in it, but as a whole, he is not interested in exploring the depths of this magic system that he has created. And this is where I will say I love the magic system in Wheel of Time. I love how it is a weave-based magic system. So you have your main elements. You have fire and earth and air, these elements.

And you're putting them together into different combinations to do different things and i love tactile magic systems i love the idea that you know throughout the books it's constantly described that you can you know different magic users can see their half of the power being used and so it is very vividly described as these different multi-colored weaves and you can see them touching things and interacting with the world and i love magic systems like that i love magic systems that are visible and bright and very clearly magical i i also love me some good magic tech, but I don't like bland magic. I don't like these

to pick on inheritance again. I don't like just shouting words and something happens. I'll dog LeBron. We have this ongoing thing Kethel and I are doing where every time we read one of these more famous and foundational

fantasy works, we find which part of it Christopher Paolini took for inheritance and there's a we found a lot of them so far like just gonna throw that out there we'll talk about those books eventually but there's a lot of things you're like you know you read like Le Guin in Wizard of Earthsea the way magic works by knowing things, true names. And like, that's sort of like how the magic of like inheritance works is by saying, you know, the name and like,

well, powers of, sorry, that was a side note, but it's a, it's one of our fun ongoing gambits is like looking at a foundational work and being like, Oh,

Paulini read this. Well, that's also in the King color Chronicles too. Well, that's Brent. So, so Brando, his whole like thing is the hardest,

most codified magic systems you could possibly imagine. Like, you know what I mean? Like every magic system has very clear, defined, specific rules and laws that manage it. Like if you've read like Mistborn and like the, what is it?

The metal, the, his magic that like using there, it's all very specifically codified. So that sort of does remind me, Alex, about, you know,

the way how you're, you're describing the magic here in wheel of time, which is probably partly why they picked Brando to finish the series. Cause he sort of writes that way. So we have this binary hard codedcoded system that you enjoy, which is good. And it is fun that sort of separates the genders and stuff. So what does,

what does our boy Jordan do with this? And that is, that is where like the, problem there i feel and you know the most uncontroversial takes there is the thing that um part of this magic system is that women are better at weaving certain aspects women are better at healing with magic men are better at blowing things up with magic and and there's that it's very hard-coded in of like all these things the ice die excel at in comparison to male channelers are things that are very traditionally feminine very traditionally uh caretaking healing promoting versus men are generally

better at constructing things blowing things apart doing these more hard masculine coded things and that gets played with i do feel like that gets played with is flagging me to stop i just want to interject without interrupting you sorry um i also wanted like like even to add on top of that like because there's there's five subsections of like this side inside dar which is air water earth fire and soul essentially where like men are more hard-coded towards the earth and fire women more towards air and water and then they both equally share the soul so i can see like where you have like you can kind of see that and, like, even in the show, like, Avatar. I was going to say, where's Aang fall? Is that Rand? Basically.

But, like, you can see, like, even, like, you know, women are better at healing. And air tends to be a lot more nonviolent, more nonviolent solution to things. Which you can see in also in Avatar. Because, like, you know, you still have the water and air tend to be like the more like peaceful ones but like then you kind of go into like the men's side which is earth and fire which you know you use for construction you use for just you know destruction and like you even like there's even like shown like same with like the witcher or in like wheel of time if you access the fire magic thing as a woman things are going to go bad like because like you could cut yourself off from the true source from like using like fire

magic you know as a woman which is also a very gendered thing because like even if you like in the witcher if you use chaos magic and you draw your energy from fire it's too much to handle but like whereas the men can just do it pretty much naturally and just add on top of that like the the men's source is also tainted by the dark one so like men are inherently like drawing on tainted magic yeah men are inherently drawing on tainted magic because the dark one tainted the men's source of magic, which is why the women are like the true magic users because they won't be influenced by the dark one. And if Alex wants to like add more on top of that, because I can't see if you're going to flag me down or not. No, and that is, you know, as anyone who has seen the trailers for the show, you know, amazon really loves to promote their stuff whenever you watch a show on there um that is you know one of these big parts of the books and especially

the first three books is you know rand coming to terms of oh i i think i'm magical i have this ability and moraine being like hey i'm going to teach you but also i'm going to keep an eye on you and possibly have a knife up against your foot the entire time because like one of the consequences of you know in this universe the male half being tainted by this great evil is all male channelers eventually go insane they lose their minds they they are they succumb to this corruption and so moraine's kind of sitting there like yeah you're probably going to save the world and if you don't then i'm going to kill you before you can break it yeah so like that's also like so like once we start talking about the show that's gonna be one

of my the biggest gripes i'm gonna have with the show in general you still kind of like mentioned that because like not from like the gender standpoint but like but like how they handle it in the show is one of like my biggest gripes yeah i think structurally i think what we're gonna do is we'll have our talk about gender we'll have some like other final thoughts about like sort themes. And I think we can say for the end of the episode, we can just have, I'll let you two sort of have your session about the adaption because I specifically can't have an opinion on it because I haven't seen it.

I just have opinions about adaptions generally, which we're going to do a whole episode about at some point. Sounds great. But yes, there is, I will say, putting this initial thing out of, hey, this is a very binary world. I will say then, there is with the amount we do get to play with it, with the amount that Jordan does look at things,

especially as you get later on in the work, I do feel Jordan becomes more self-aware of this sort of box he's written himself into. And while I never feel like he pushes against it too heavily i do think you can see i'm at least starting to like fill up the edges of the box and figuring out what he can do with that system i do find it also very interesting of like going into telling on myself and talking about what Roboto just pointed out at the beginning of this, the body,

Robert Jordan, perhaps accidentally, I don't know like how intentional it was on his part, but like does kind of say trans rights at one point in the sense of magic goes off of your soul not your body okay it is possible to have a body that is incongruent with your soul and you know everyone has different opinions uh there is no one, you know, way of viewing being trans or having a non-conforming gender identity. But, you know, for myself, speaking for myself as a heretical Christian,

I do kind of gel with that idea more that, like, there is an aspect to me that is metaphysical that is connected to my gender i don't feel like my gender is entirely just my brain soup because i don't like the idea that a intrinsic part of myself can be just modified by brain soup i think brain soup can make things worse or better but like it's not modifying that fundamental part and that's the way Jordan does by working in the system that he built does explicitly have

one of the forsaken fucking Bathamel Bathamel is one of the forsaken and gets yeeted he dies a very ignoble death and uh to such the point that like so another part of this universe is that once you have pledged your soul to the dark one

you can't escape via death the dark one has its grasp on you forever and so this this chief lackey gets gets blown away and in death the dark one is like wow you were a real fuck up you didn't do anything right and here you are you didn't even kill anyone as you went down like what good are you and so like decides to fuck with this dude and so part of you know the forsaken's deal is that they are people that pledged themselves to the dark one back during the great age of wonders back when the last big battle was fought and bathamel had a big reputation back then of being this notorious womanizer and so the dark one is like you know what i'm going to fuck with you and so reincarnates bathabel in this super attractive woman's body and says go out do my bidding once more and this becomes plot relevant more than just jordan being like hot this is a neat idea because part of the magic

system is you cannot see the other half's weaves and specifically female isodite cannot see male channelers weaving as a result this reincarnated forsaken who is now trans mask question mark i'm not sure how i would exactly categorize that but we're going with that it's very specific that he still identifies as a dude um he is now using male magic you know in the guise of a woman. And this becomes a big plot point because he can go do channeling and be embedded in Aes Sedai. And nobody is a wiser. Nobody can see that he is weaving. Young Alex had some real complicated feelings about this.

Really? Really. real complicated feelings about this. Oh, really? And this is why, you know, I believe that unless a work of fiction is just downright heinous or otherwise just like derogatory, I believe even poorly executed works of fiction can have use and, you know know should not necessarily be shunned

on the basis of being poorly executed i think you know very obviously i do shun some works of fiction for being just straight up bad like there are there is very much a way to just not be cool about these things i feel like ro Robert Jordan, while not always executing these things, did still explore things in a good-willed enough way. But young Alex was able to look at that and be like, huh, this gives me weird gender feelings that I don't have the words for. I don't know how to describe this. But here's something in a book. Describing this idea of. Oh.

Here's this person. And they still identify this way. But it's not congruent with their body. And. How does that work? And like. Of course back then. I didn't have words for these things

and so i had they hadn't invented that yet so i hadn't invented it yet and so and i will say you know the flip side of this and so there's like without turning this into the trans episode there is a whole work of analysis in media about and analyzing how trans folks are presented in media and analyzing how specifically trans women are depicted as predatory that you know you have folks who are disguising themselves as women and preying on the these these helpless women folk as a result i feel like and this is definitely something that there are a variety of opinions on but one thing that i do appreciate jordan here is, as far as I can remember, there is never a point where Jordan has written a scene where Bathamel, now adopting the name of Arangar, tempts a man and you get some ace ventura scene where it's like oh no you're you're not a woman actually which like to be clear this is also like a weird twist on things because this isn't

that this this is a trans mask thing but also trans femme coded because it's, you don't get this. I, I have such a tangle of words for this because it's not, you know, it is this thing that is not being crafted with this in mind. I don't think Robert Jordan, like again, I don't think the man thought that seriously about it.

I think he was just like, oh, what if I do this? And this will create an interesting plot contrivance where I can have a Forsaken weaving around and nobody suspect anything. But this is like a man who is stuck in a body that is not congruent with his experience, but you don't get that in literature like this. So that's still playing on some of those trans feminine tropes while being a fundamentally trans masc experience. And you get into this whole overlapping and certainality nonsense. I say nonsense, but you know, I say that in a jovial way.

It's something I read frequently. Anyone who follows my Twitter knows I think these things very seriously. I hate to say to his credit, he never did a heinous thing, but like to his credit for the time, this was, you know, the very, this was eighties, nineties. This was the peak of that very predatory trans experience being written into works and being displayed on film and other media. As far as I can remember, there's never a scene in which there's entrapment. There's never a scene in which it's like, ah, I've used my feminine wiles to trap you in this awkward situation.

It's just, ah, I'm stuck in this body, but now I got to go still serve my dark master and go figure out how to kill the protagonists and well according to the fan wiki it it says uh that angra was was a little bit angry at first for being a woman and then was just like i never mind this is cool too and according to the wiki uh she's canonically bisexual so good for him her which i also want to put the wiki does literally uh does put the pronouns as a him slash her for mouth and no angro are yeah and i think what you think is interesting in a very progressive wheel of time fan wiki yeah and i do think that, like, there is also a deeper conversation to be had there of, like,

in the way Arundhara is written, is this an example of gender fluidity, of gender queerness? Like, if you gave me more time to do a proper analysis, I could probably do a video essay on this and you know maybe get some YouTube views but I do well not like a perfect example of this

I do think that Aaron Gar Bathamel does demonstrate Robert Jordan isn't using this as a crutch to say ah gender norms have been violated by this evildoer it's more just a thing that happens not a thing that happens and we have to let and you're to be disgusted or reviled by it's just like yeah this is a thing that happened yeah and it's fine i do appreciate the casualness of that of uh of that being a like admittedly i'm working off of

some shaky memory here and rapidly trying to refresh myself with whatever resources i have but like if i remember correctly erengar is introduced in like a quick cutaway where like the forsaken just have hangouts that they just sort of chill at when they're not off doing their evil deeds that's like the opening of book two is just a cutaway to like the forsaken like chilling and chilling in the the bro cave The evil bro cave. God, I want an evil bro cave to hang out and plot in. The best part is it's in a dream world.

Oh, I gotta go to the dream world and hang out with the bros. That sounds fantastic. You get to sleep and hang out? What's the best? What's bad about that? And if I remember correctly like it's being written from a perspective of another forsaken and they're like ah erengar that is it's bathamel but the

dark one got angry and this is the this is you know what what has happened to them and as i recall that scene is just like, ha, that's kind of, that, that, that's like, that's a good joke.

Dark one turned into this womanizer and then like, way to go. Say, way to go. Say 10 great jokes. Oh yeah. I can't believe this is the first time we pointed out the dark one is literally called Satan.

Yeah. Yeah. It's Shaitan. Yeah. Shaitan. It's Shaitan, which is. Shaitan. Yeah, yeah. It's Shaitan, yeah. Shaitan. It's Shaitan, which is... Shaitan, yeah. I mean, look, Robert Jordan is a lot of things.

I don't think subtle is necessarily one of them. I mean, that's just fantasy in general. It's like, what subtlety is there in fantasy? And even just to kind of go off of what alex is saying is like yeah like i don't know much about erengar because you know this is just spoiler territory for me now but yeah this is definitely outside the bounds of the first three books but it's important for us to cover no but exactly and like i really appreciate the whole talk because it's like i mentioned at the beginning of this episode that i robert jordan may have been a proto-feminist

and it's also like but and like you know i i don't stand by that because it's more said in a joking manner but it's also he writes things but like he doesn't write them in a bad way it's just more so he's a product of his time i'm gonna say and kind of like oh no so i was gonna say i think alex kind of made the point that it's sort of writing from this place of almost like it comes out good because it's almost this kind of sort of simple innocence or ignorance to like the the negative connotations of possible things you know what i mean yeah he's just sort of like i don't know the dude got reincarnated as a lady why not it's a plot point you know what i mean like there's no it doesn't feel like there's a negative connotation to it because he didn't even consider that there could

be exactly and i feel like that's kind of like for me i feel like that's probably the best way to write things it's like no it's just it's just a thing that happened instead of just like oh let's make a big deal about it's like the the fact that you're making a big deal out of it kind of takes away attention from the fact that this is happening to begin with i don't know what alex feels about this but as a cisgendered male like i don't i probably have the wrong viewpoint on this and i'm glad to learn more um but it also feels to me like the fact that it's just a thing that happened naturally in the book and there's not a lot of attention put onto it kind of makes it a thing that's just you know the that shaitan can do in the world and like kind of it's the thing that

happens in the world it's not something that's given a lot of attention because it's just a natural process suddenly a bunch of my friends are hurriedly trying to disappoint shaitan it's for the gender swap and and so there's there's a thing that i will say that like it's never touched on in the books as far as i'm aware but is makes sense in the context and like you know definitely fucking 10 year old alex had ideas back then but like they're in the way that the world is crafted there does seem to be like this idea of you know everyone is getting reincarnated. Everyone is getting put, you know, back into new bodies over and over through the ages.

And there are examples of where that process gets messed up. There are examples of, there is, I forget their names, but there is this brother and sister pair that come up later in the books. And there are these legendary hunters and a big thing that happens is one of them gets stuck in the reincarnation cycle and points out how bad she feels because her brother is going to now be reincarnated because they were just chilling out in purgatory dreamland world and

her brother is going to go get reincarnated and never have her around and is just going to spend his life being like why do I feel so empty and lost because now this legendary pair won't be because her...

Is that Bridget? Maybe? I think there were a couple, not a brother-sister. Okay. I might be getting wires crossed here. I don't know. There's a lot of them. Yeah, there's a lot of them. There's 1,800 characters. But the point there being, you know,

they're supposed to be together and they are not. And this is an example of where reincarnation gets messed up and i do feel like if there was ever a possibility of like expanding and something you know to briefly you know do a hey amazon if you want to explore gender politics you know hint hint i have some complaints later on about how Amazon did gender politics. So before we get to those, I want to, if you don't mind, I'd like to take one more quick detour about something that obviously caught my eye. I made a joke right before we started recording. Let's talk about Rand's semi-consensual harem.

It is fully consensual, though. I'm not going to ignore that. I'm just quickly saying of Amazon, if you want to do something like this, give us trans Aes Sedai. Just have it next season. Just have a casual

oh yeah, we figured out this person was trans because she channels fucking Cydar. That would be a pretty dope way to have that sort of discovery. You start doing magic and you're like, oh, shit, this is the wrong gender magic. Fuck. So I wanted to, one more weird magic. Fuck. So I wanted to one more weird

gender role thing I wanted to talk about is the fact that Rand is just apparently so badass as the Dragon Reborn that he has just at least three women just agreeing

that they can all be his women all at the same time i mean like which like on the one hand you're like yeah sure be polygamous that's dope do your thing but like it's also not entirely as accepted by all the some of the women as by other ones and like i guess i didn't get into much like how does ran feel about it where he's just like okay let me just do this thing fam i i can give my little spiel on that and then i guess alex can just kind of take off from there but like it's it's weird because you have these three characters because like min is the one she shows up in the first book and she's the one who can

foretell that like he's gonna have three people like three love interests in his life and she can tell that she is one of them so but like she's kind of resigned to the fact that she can tell prophesize into the future through seeing people's auras and she's like yeah you know this is just a fact that i'm gonna have to deal with even though i don't want to my aura tells me i have to be your fuck buddy no but she actually legitimately falls in love with him like it's like one of those things it's like she just falls in love with him she can't control that for some reason and then you have um elaine who's a literal princess to a kingdom so you know backwater ran gets you no has a princess fall in love with him on first sight after he literally falls down into her palace grounds

and as you do as you do um and then she's like after you know it's happened to me once or twice but exactly but like she falls in love with him, and then you have a third character who shows up in the next few books, who I'm not going to get into. But she's a Nihil, which is, like, essentially, that's the Fremen of the Wheel of Time. And she's one of the Fremen who can also use the True Source. So, like, you basically have two people who can use a true source plus men who can prophesize into the future and they're different in the process and they can all like take into they'll take the different roles in his life because men becomes more like his confidant because you have two super powered women who can kind of just go off

like you have one who's a princess who's really good at like creating like being an alchemist essentially or an artificer and then you have like battle warrior spell sword lady as well who's a fremen who can use magic and she's a fremen so she's a badass fighter

so like and your third one is like your prophetess slash counselor prophetess slash counselor she's kind of there to help him throughout his whole process of becoming crazy and all that and then like elaine is essentially like the person he's like going to get married to and then like the ieo have a culture where they're like yeah women can marry multiple women can marry the exact same man and it's like because you still have like a very male-centric polygamy polygamic culture but the

women have to agree to it beforehand but like and like say and the women have to ask the other one for permission to marry that man as well and then they become like sisters essentially so they're and then they become like sisters essentially so they're like somewhat less misogynist mormons yeah they're somewhat like less misogynistic mormons old school mormons let me be clear yeah not the current mormon church according to their policy yes so like essentially it's like the women have to be able to have to agree to the to the men to being with that man but it's like the women have to agree to being with that man. But it's a very open culture sexually. They can just like, yeah, I want to have sex with that guy. They go and have sex with the guy, then they leave.

So it's a very woman control, kind of like what happens in the bed, essentially. And it's a very matriarchal society because you have these wise women who are essentially in charge of everything. And you also see there's women who are essentially in charge of everything and you also see like there's a lot of like women in control you have the uh the queen of andor who's essentially the ruling she's their queen regent and then you have like the aesha die and you have the wise women or nine eve in like and the woman's council in um the two rivers three rivers two rivers yeah so you have like a lot of these like women sent was matriarchal societies but like back to the topic on hand

before i get into a tangent is essentially you have like these three women who fill different roles for rand because min is essentially your counselor uh the iiel lady, Evienda, is essentially his bodyguard for a while. And then Elaine's essentially... But she's always like, I'm keeping you safe for Elaine. So Elaine's essentially the person who's

going to be his true wife. So basically, he has someone he's going to get married to, and then two mistresses. But they all have this semi semi consensual thing. Cause I'm going back to the whole predestined, like predestined thing from the last episode is like, this is essentially meant to happen no matter what this is going to happen. It's referenced multiple times throughout his dreams and through prophecies.

It's like, this is going to happen whether Rand likes it or not. Just telling my girlfriend I'm predestined to have multiple girlfriends. Let's see how that goes for you, Darius. Look, we gotta be poly. I had a dream that says so.

So, you know, I will say I can chime in on this perspective for being semi-Polly myself, question mark. These things get confusing sometimes, like described. But, you know, the most basic thing there being I'm married to my wife, who also has two girlfriends. So there is some, you know, constellation going on there. So your wife is Rand. Yes.

I am part of my wife's harem. Nice. All right. So which role do you fulfill? Are you the counselor, the bodyguard, or the queen? I feel like I am the bodyguard in this instance. All right. Fair enough. Sorry, i just wanted to clear that up it's not figuring it's not looking at a queer relationship and trying to figure out who the man and who the woman is it's looking at a queer

relation figuring out who's the bodyguard who's the counselor who's the queen exactly see like this is why iran has such a great relationship with these three women it's like oh my gosh he has three roles filled in his life that he absolutely needs i'm joking by the way for any other listeners i have a very joking manner when it comes to things and you can tell when i'm being serious and i'm being joking and then all he knows robert jordan is telling us that every man is essentially so inept that he needs three separate women to take care of him at any given time well that's actually a theme that shows up a lot in the books is like the women say like men is essentially so inept that he needs three separate women to take care of him at any given time.

Well, that's actually a theme that shows up a lot in the books. The women say men can't do anything without women helping them throughout the series, which also goes back to the thing we discussed with Robert Jordan basically being so in awe of his wife that essentially he's like, yeah, I can't do anything without you. that essentially is like, yeah, I can't do anything without you. So he has this whole thing where it's like, I need, you know, women, men need women in their lives to be able to do anything, essentially. So the title of this episode is going to be

Robert Jordan, Trans Ally, Wife Guy. Yep. Trans Ally and Wife Guy. Yep, I like that. I like that. That's a great episode title right there. Trans Ally and Wife there an ultimate wife guy no i i do feel like the depiction of polygamy in this book and before anyone asks me yes polygamy and polyamory are adjacent but different concepts in this book it's polygamy because he is marrying them uh him uh but they're i do feel like robert jordan couldn't make up his mind on what he was wanting to do and this

does of course get past the first three books and goes further into the series but like i just I just, I don't think Robert Jordan knew what he wanted to do beyond. I think he was just like sitting in his chair one day, smoking his pipe. And he was like, I want, I want Rand to have a harem. And he just wrote from there. And he's like,

how do I make this work? And I do. It does genuinely feel like he's just writing the text around, I want my main male protagonist to have multiple girlfriends. I mean, like, honestly, I think

Robert Jordan was trying to write Ran as a Japanese RPG character. He's a JRPG. JRPG, because if you played Persona, just date all of them and see how it goes you know rand truly is the classic harem anime protagonist exactly he is like he's a powerful guy who just ends up dating everyone in his thing it's like it's like it's like an anime visual novel it's like sorry robert jordan trans

ally wife guy weeb okay but i'm genuinely trying to think there is a romantic interest that ran pushes away that absolutely feel fills the yandere slot for okay so that's what he said uh uh uh tear or tear yeah and like she like tries to like seduce them and then he's at, okay, so that's when he's at at tear, or tear. And, like, she, like, tries to, like, seduce him, and then he's like, no, no, uses, literally uses magic to, like, assault her, and, like, to push her away, because it's like, no,

I'm too dangerous, and all that. Which is a horrible situation, but she leaves him alone after that. And then she goes straight after his friend, who's, like, also seeing this other woman who like is essentially like on his ass all the time so like um we didn't even get into rand's like the other three parts of rand's like male hero tripod which it which yeah parent is literally your you know, if Ren is your spell sword, Perrin is your like barbarian.

And like, and Matt is your rogue. Yeah. Matt's the rogue Perrin's like the beast master barbarian. Like they fulfilled roles. We didn't even talk about them, but that's because number one, I couldn't remember everything about them because my brain's too small for all

those details. They're not that important to the fourth book, though. That's the issue. That is kind of the problem of like... And, you know, I will quickly put in for the Wheel of Time fans here, about my five second synopsis. Perrin,

Wolf Boy, Matrim, fucking nerd. Like, I will say, like, Mattram is probably one of my favorite characters out of the whole books. Is he the one that's just lucky? Yes.

His entire skill set is luck. Luck and has all the knowledge of all the generals before him. Okay. I don't think you can talk about Ram's harem and the gender politics of that without talking about matrim's relationship okay so it was the io lady uh all right so cover that for me quick because again i don't can't remember all of this so you haven't just

you haven't gotten into this yet because this is something that goes further into the series. This is Matt we're talking about? Yes, Matt. I will say, to quickly say, Ran's relationships not perfectly executed, but also they're all mostly consensual. Later on in the series, the free

women get together and hey, if we're all going to marry this guy we have to all get on the same page and they like basically drag rand in by the caller after having this this meeting and like okay listen here fuck boy this is how things are gonna work and like it i i do feel like that's handled better in the sense of like, they show much, a great amount of agency there and are, you know, very self-determined in the sense of they are setting rules of conduct. They are having that conversation of how are we going to make this multifaceted relationship work. Then we get to Matt. Oh, God.

Then we get to Matt. Oh, God. And Matt falls for slash is fallen for by this Shin-Chan prince, the Empress, in disguise. So, like, the Empress of this invading power comes over and disguises herself and goes out and does the whole i will be amongst the commoners thing in a land that she's invading yes and meets matt and this relationship is probably one of the most uncomfortable in the books for me because i can speculate on what robert Robert Jordan was trying to do here, but like, I do feel like it's one of those things where because the execution was not good enough,

it diminishes the end result. So like there is this weird power dynamic between the two of them. And so on one hand you have matt who is one lucky that is his power is he is lucky he as long as it's random everything works out so long as it's random but like the rules of randomness are bent several times like things that are not honestly random become random because robert jordan wanted them to be and vice versa so on one hand you have this dude whose power is he's lucky and he's a tavern so the wheel is bending the weave around him on the other hand you have this empress who is the empress of this invading power who like the again this invading power is a slaving imperial power that

is laying waste to nations and enslaving any women who can channel and killing any men who can and generally just not being very nice i don't think it's a controversial statement to say the xin chan empire not great um so you get this super weird thing of like as their relationship progresses and you know of course he finds out that she's empress and laments his bad fortune that he is now tied to the empress of this invading power um it just goes back and forth on like the fact that she can just have him killed at any moment and the fact that like the wheel won't let her because it's actively fighting back against it and ultimately it resolves itself by matt basically making her swear to always follow his orders and to let him be the man in the relationship.

And this is, I hate this for multiple reasons. One, you know, the obvious thing of, okay, if we're going to have a relationship, honey, you have to do everything I ever tell you. Wait, so does he become the emperor? Yes. By way of marriage, he becomes the emperor of the shenzhen empire literally like this guy becomes like one of the most powerful people in the land

like i'm not even that far yet so i'm like what the fuck and so but so you know i hate it for the obvious reasons of this is a very misogynistic stereotype and template and it's not good but also this just eviscerates matt's character like this is not a decision that is in character for matt nothing nothing you see of matt would make you go yeah this is the sort of guy who would use his ability to bend space and time around him to force compliance from a lover like that's not how matt is matt is your lovable rogue who does pranks and like gets himself in trouble the dude is not a yep i'm going to make you follow my orders and also i'm going to assume control of this empire now which like he does it's i do feel like this is something where

jordan wrote himself into a ball because there's also the thing of this empire was started by this ancient general, this ancient king who conquered all of Rand land. And then it was like, I conquered everything here. I'm going to go across the ocean and conquer more. Very much an Alexander the Great sort of situation. I've conquered everything. I must go further. So Matt is not strictly the reincarnation I don't think nope it's still Rand Arthur Hawking was still the dragon yeah but like Matt is connected to Arthur Hawking in this very

particular way and assumes the role of Arthur Hawking, basically. And I feel like Jordan just wrote himself into a corner where it's like, okay, I want Matt to become this thing. How do I make Matt become this thing? Oh, I'm going to have him marry the Shin-Chan princess, the Empress. And then he gets to the point where he's like, oh, Matt's entire character would be, I'm going to run away as soon as I can.

I'm going to, like, have a really good night of sex. And then as she's sleeping soundly, I'm going to jump out the window and run away. Like, that's Matt's entire character. And I feel like Jordan was just like, well, I want him to become emperor. want him to become emperor so i'm going to just fucking write this in where matt suddenly becomes this controlling asshole of a guy and so like if people want to complain about relationships in real time it's this one they should be complaining about like yeah if you're going to, there are valid criticisms of Ran's little polygamous harem. But like, again, the women of it get together. They hash it out. They like, okay, one of the things in polyamory circles is that if you have multiple partners in the constellation, everyone needs to get together at some point and set respective boundaries and say, this is what I'm comfortable with.

This is what I'm not comfortable with. These are things that, you know, how are we going to split up time? You know, what are we going to do to make sure everyone's happy? That happens, like not in as in depth of a way as you might see in other works of fiction or real life but like that happens with what ran's wives coming together and being like hey before we you know make this official we need to have this discussion and you know props to jordan for being like yeah you should have communication a relationship what which is also kind of grim dark in a certain way because he was doing a lot of communicating with his wife at the time because he was dying.

Yeah, he was dying. And she had to be able to organize and maintain all of his notes and recordings to hand them over to Brando. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Communication and relationship, though. Is that a thing? Is that what makes it work?

I mean, I've never tried, so who knows? Oh my gosh. Communication and relationship, though. Is that a thing? Is that what makes it work? I mean, I've never tried, so who knows? But jokes aside, yeah, now that I've heard about that, because what Ran shows, the only relationship I've seen, not with Ran, with Mattram, or Matt, the only relationship I've seen Madden was with the Aeol lady, which is

also kind of like this whole power thing, because it's kind of like, she can also kill him at any time or he's kind of scared that she will kill him. Um, and especially cause she's just kind of like, wait, yeah,

she does try to kill him. Doesn't she? Yeah. I, I will admit. Okay. So like for, for people who have made it this far and haven't read the books

for some reason, or you're listening to spoilers, which I understand, I do that too. If you've made it this far and you're like, I'm curious about these books. An infamous thing about Wheel of Time is that, you know, you've got 14

books in the main series, plus prologue um yeah and about the middle third everyone in the community agrees the middle third is just a fucking slog and even as a child i was like dear god this is so so much. Robert Jordan spends three whole books just futzing around in the desert, doing nothing. And you're just like, why? Why has he done this? Nothing is happening. Nothing is happening.

And unfortunately, that's also like during the Aeolian arc. So like. which is like the best arc yeah like there's a lot of genuinely cool things that happen in the aeol arc and there's a lot of genuinely good character development that goes on and it's just interspersed in this mind-numbing just wreck of a slog that is these free books and everyone disagrees on which free it is but everyone agrees it's in the middle and that is what you have to prepare yourself for at reading this series is that you're going to get to the middle and it's going to be like oh dear god this is so much why why am i doing this to myself? I promise it gets better.

Thank you for promising that. I'm getting to the middle now. But I also do want to, like, you know, we have the, you know, Rand's polygamic relationship. We have Matt's super hella toxic relationship. But, like, the relationship, like, that's actually kind of nice is Perrin's relationship with Fela. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I love Perrin's relationship. Oh, no, Perrin's relationship with Fela. Yeah. I love Perrin's relationship. Oh, no. Perrin's relationship with Fela is literally like the clock. I feel like Perrin is supposed to be a stand-in for Robert Jordan, and Fela's supposed to be his wife. Yeah, Perrin is just a wife guy. Perrin is just a wife guy. Yeah, he's the wife guy of the book, and this woman literally is like, I don't know.

I don't know about you, but Fela is one of my favorite characters, just because Perrin is just so indecisive and doesn't know what he wants to do that he needs someone like phala to kind of put him on the right track or else he's going to get kind of like spun around by all the ongoings and all the people because he's kind of like i don't want to do this i want to be a blacksmith and he's and phala's like you can be more than a blacksmith you should do this thing instead and i don't know she's just like she's a mean character she's your yandere character basically but like she's like such a like supportive character who's like she's there for him and it's like it's one of those things it's like with all the other characters you don't really see that it's kind of like they all have

their own goals initiatives like it's also very like she's there to be you know she falls in love with him but she has her own goals and shit and but like she falls in love with him it's also very like she's there to be you know she falls in love with him but she has her own goals and shit and but like she falls in love with him it's like yep if you want to be with me you got to marry me because i don't want to see you with any other woman but it's very much a very conservative look on like parent is very much the he's the wife guy and he finds a person who wants to marry him and she marries him and that becomes like the marriage but it's a very not she's very much in control of the relationship at that regard and like perrin just kind of does what he does sometimes because he's a taverin but like she's she's in control of him because he's very indecisive

well at least we have one good one nice wife guy in the series that's good to have of the tripod of of dudes yeah no he's a really nice guy but you know it's also like he's very indecisive all right you know what fine so unless we have any other final thoughts i think that's a good discussion on just a few of the things that are going on. I mean, I'm sure if we kept picking other things, we could be going on forever. You know what? Maybe in a little while, we'll come back and just cover another topic.

You know what I mean? Sort of another aspect. Yeah, another aspect of what's going on. But I think I promised we would reserve a little time here at the end for you two my my my dearly beloved guests to talk about the show oh god first so the wheel of time obviously has been adapted into a show by Amazon.

And I only am aware of it in passing because people on the internet talk about it because I'll be honest with all, all of you. I don't almost ever watch things. So I haven't watched any of it. I don't know what's going on and I haven't read enough of, I hadn't read the books until now. So I wouldn't have had opinions about the adaptions. I have opinions about adaptions as a thing,

but I'm going to save those for later. For now, I'm going to let my guests have a little bit of time here to talk about these shows. Cut off Roberto to say, look at how they massacred my boy, Perrin. I know. Right. Like, boy Perrin. I know, right?

Like, oh my gosh. So my biggest gripe with the show was honestly with the pacing and how they did the politics of the Ace to Die. Because like we didn't get to cover this in this series, which I would like to cover

later on because the Ace to Die take a lot There's things that happen later on in the series. That really affect the politics of the Aes Sedai. But like. They made the Aes Sedai very two dimensional. In the show. And it's very much like. They're very secretive.

They use words to kind of mask what they're doing. And in the show. It very much felt like. They were just kind of like. Oh yeah. I'm going to do this thing. And everyone's going to know about it. what they're doing and in the show it very much felt like they were just kind of like oh yeah i'm gonna do this thing and everyone's gonna know about it the way they kind of like did like the whole dragon reborn itself the fact that it could be like which you know it's kind of like it's cool

it could be a man or a woman but like the whole point is that the dragon reborn is meant to take the like the the male half of the true source to tainted half because it's basically that's how the shaitan gets to them but it's also like it kind of removes like the whole like fear of like the whole power of the aesha die because it could be the dragon reborn could be one of them and like it for me it was just kind of like one of those things like it just removes like the whole power they should i have just because the it could they could be the dragon reborn or could it be a man and no one really knows who it could be and it just removes that whole like fear of we gotta take we gotta wipe out all the men who can use the true the true power because we you know they could be the dragon reborn we don't want that to happen we don't want the breaking of the world and that just kind of removes the fear of like the end time

because it could just be a man or a woman so they kind of the whole point of the red asha is just kind of like removed essentially i know you have thoughts on this yeah go go off queen go off like i don't even know where to start with that because okay so like to put it immediately out there before anyone goes you know making assumptions i liked the show it was i'm not going to go so far as to say it was a good show but if i turn my brain off and i'm like look, Amazon has made a fantasy series called Wheel of Time. I'm going to go watch this. If I remove my knowledge of the books, I can say, yeah, the show wasn't anything spectacular. The CGI kind of sucked in some points.

But you can very obviously tell, like, the show fell victim to covid because it was being shot in the middle of it and so like you had shots beforehand and shots after that you can very clearly see like the end climatic battle of season one which like has received a lot of criticism i've given it a lot of criticism for still story aspects but one of the reasons it looks so weird is because you can tell everyone on set is in a big open space standing six feet apart from each other oh okay the reason it looks so weird is because they're following covid protocols because they had to shoot that scene during covid i say during covid but now now COVID's just going to be up us forever, apparently. Didn't you hear COVID's over now? It's fine. Don't worry about it.

I also do want to add that the actor for Matrim did leave the show three-fourths of the way through filming. That's why in one of the episodes, Matrim just leaves, stays behind instead of joining the main group because like the actor just left so they had

to put in a stand-in for him instead yeah now that that also hurt the show and caused some weird character development there i guess you know kind of transitioning into the show from gender politics and touching more on what you've already said about how this affects the Aes Sedai. Amazon did do that really big campaign push of who is the dragon reborn? And I understand why they did it. I understand why they chose to push that angle because they want this initial mystery. And you can very, very clearly tell that

one of the things that is coming up here is there is the prequel book to the series, New Spring. And New Spring is different from the rest of the books in that it is following mostly from Moraine's perspective. So for folks who might not be as familiar with the books or listening in, Is this Aes Sedai. Who belongs to a group of Aes Sedai.

Whose job it essentially is. Is to find people. To do conspiracies. They are the conspiracy Aja. The blue Aja. Yes. And. So her whole thing.

Is. One of the. Aes Sedai. Who can do prophecies, has this moment 20 years ago, and is like, oh God, the dragon reborn. The dragon is born again. The dragon is born atop the dragon mount.

And so the Blues get together, and they're like, okay, Moraine, you're going to go hunt the dragon. You're going to go find where the dragon is and raise him and teach him and do these things before you know the dark one can get a hold of whatever this they they take this perspective of moraine being the main character and move it into eye of the world more which some of eye of the world is written from marine's perspective so that's not like as far as adaptations go i'm not going to fault them

for being like here's making marine the protagonist because honestly in eye of the world the bullies while they are the centerpiece don't do like a whole lot of main characters yeah i wasn't upset with that yeah so yeah moraine being the main character is okay it's not a bad thing i enjoyed it yeah the problem there and the problem of this doing this mystery side is that they're expanding the mystery, as you said, in a way that negates the world building. Because Moraine, you know, is very much like, hey, you free boys, you're all to burn. And any of you could be the dragon. be the dragon they for some reason and i have read interviews of the film of the directors and producers of the show and to be clear i don't think they're bad people for doing this we sometimes have this tendency to be like ah you wrote a bad you you didn't do a plot point correctly so you're

bad no that only applies to the people that ran game of thrones yes yes uh they were actively bad people but besides that i mean they wanted to go fuck off and write their confederate fucking miniseries so yeah uh but no like they the the writers and directors of the show did kind of touch on why they did that and were like oh well you know we want to make it you know more you know we want to bring things up to the times and we want to you know expand the mystery there i do think the mystery side was not a good pick for this because you can't change who the dragon reborn is in this series like if they had a fucking round of standing ovation for how if they could have pulled that off if you could change this 14 book series that contains four Bibles worth of words and take

Rand out as the main character and put Naneve in as the main character that would be the most impressive work of fan fiction I've ever seen that would go down in the halls of whatever that

big fan fiction aggregate site is that I can't remember right now. Not AO3. Is it Wattpad? Something like that. Yeah, but actually, speaking of Nynaeve, I do have a joke for you that I want to say.

Oh, Nynaeve perished in a braid-pulling accident. Sorry. Okay, so let's talk about Nynae And, okay, so, let's talk about Neneve, okay? Let's talk about fucking how they did our girl Neneve.

Okay, you know what? I think they did Neneve really well, because she annoyed me as much as she did in the books, and I think that was a perfect portrayal. I I a perfect portrayal i my problem with the adaptation fundamentally and this does you know everything ties together but so first of all i don't i think that they took Wheel of Time, and of the fundamental changes they did to it, yeah, I can gripe about it. I can gripe about the Dragon Reborn being male or female

and how they're trying to change up this very gendered magic system, but also still adhering to its binary elements like you can only work so much of that box before you need to start changing things and if they had if they had like introduced a you know non-binary or gender fluid character that could do multiple weeding like i wouldn't mind it like yeah same same like it's it's an adaptation some things are going to change and like i'm not going to sit here and be like ah purist i have to only have the things in the books my faults there are i do think that they removed a lot of the themes of the book. One of the big gripes I have is very first episode, episode one,

you get introduced to what's going on. And your introduction is you have a band of reds hunting down a man who has gone insane from sight and use. And that is your introduction to the show is is this big is this man hating red you know as they get portrayed and then eventually you have the episode they're like we don't really hate men we just you know protect the world from them um but you know she stands over this man who's riddled with his magical insanity and says how awful men are and how their place is to put them out of this world so your very first introduction to this is very steeped in gender politics that then the show i don't feel like has the momentum

the curiosity or the desire to explore. I feel like that is where that just immediately stagnates. Compare this to how Eye of the World opens. Eye of the World opens, you have Louis Theron in his castle being like, oh, my lovely wife and children, we're going to have such a great day. And then Ishmael comes up and is like hey dude how you doing and lewis there is like oh you're here for the party and he's like oh your mind is so far gone you just can't even realize what you've done and then he snaps his fingers and does his dark

magic and lets lewis there and see that he's slaughtered his wife and children and let everyone in his castle and you know this is you know he his big moment of ah the world I've betrayed everything I am Lewis Kinslayer now if they opened with that I would have been

much more amazed because like that was such a great prologue yes that that sets the tone for the whole series and that does as we've discussed you know at the very beginning of this whole uh this two-parter we have here that sets this cyclical thing of here you go here's this mysterious man who was the great the greatest of his age brought low and here is our current day and oh no one of these boys is going to be like that or maybe it's one of the girls like that's i can't bring myself to hate on the idea of oh the dragon reborn could be you know male or female because

like fundamentally sure something could be you know even if the dragon is most of the time male as we've already discussed previously it's been shown the reincarnation cycle can be messed up it's been shown that dark one can just be like ha i'm going to play a laugh like yeah it's very clearly that and you know what you know what would have been great you know what would have been great if the amazon had the fucking guts to do it make fucking trans mask dragon make that be your your change to the gender politics of this world is you have a trans mass dragon and moraine is the one who's clever enough to figure out ah we need to be looking, you know, not just in traditional places here.

Perhaps something has happened. Perhaps, you know, we are, you know, looking for... That is my five-minute pitch to make the real-time trans is Moraine just sitting in a room going, oh, we have trans sisters in the Aes Sedai. What if the Dragon Reborn is trans? And then, you know, credits roll. But...

So, like, I don't care about that. Amazon would never be cool enough to do... Sadly, no. Anything wild. That only exists in my 4 million word fanfiction on AO3 so like I think my biggest gripe is the fact that they

opened up the show with gender politics and then they like make the Dragon Reborn like can be both because it's like you steep you know you're hunting down men from the get go and then you're like but it could be either one so then my whole thought process is then why are they just hunting down men yes if

they think they could be the dragon or because they could use magic if it could be anybody who can like kill who can be the dragon and end the world it's like and so like so my biggest gripe with it was it's like yeah like i agree with you on your points but it's also my biggest gripe with it was, it's like, yeah, like, I agree with you on your points, but it's also, my biggest gripe has just been, but you set this up, and then you, like, do a 180 and, like, try to, like, do, include everybody with, but you already set it up in a way that's very much dualistic men, women, and then we're hunting down the men because they could be this antichrist essentially to be fair to defend them a little bit that does come up later when they're discussing that eve possibly being the dragon in that you know the reds are making the point of if if a woman is a drag is the dragon then we want her in the light tower we want her part of our system of doing things and i do think that like even though they emphasize that you know potentially man can be reborn and you know break the world men are still going insane from using magic that is still their

main purpose is to gentle men before they cause wreak havoc and break the world again. Okay, I get your point there. I will say I see where you're coming from, because the problem is our only other exposure to male channelers is Loghain. And I don't like how they did him. I don't like how he is portrayed i don't know for sure yeah no i did not like logane the only character who i like portrayed like 100 was tom maryland because he's my favorite character yeah so i i will say they really, really went hard into, they really went hard into like just how much of an asshole Loghain is when

like, that's not how he's portrayed in the books. Like, like straight up. The first we see him is at the trial at the white tower where he's like yeah i know what you're going to do to me fucking just put me out of my misery and in fact i don't even think we see him at the trial first i think we see him in the garden i'm pretty sure that one one of our you see him um when he's being taken through andor when and ran to him from afar and he's like that

could be you know that that could be me or any one of us essentially and i do think like one of the first like proper interactions of him is in the garden where he's like everything has been taken from me I will never see life the same way and like spoiler territory but eventually Naineev learns how to

heal gently and Legayne gets his powers restored and like it's this big thing and I

can't see how that characterization is going to work with how they've made Legayne in the

show now like exactly I will say that is an overriding theme one of my

biggest grips of the show everyone's an asshole Rand's an asshole Matt's an show. Everyone's an asshole. Rand's an asshole. Matt's an asshole.

Perrin's an asshole. Naneev's an asshole. Moraine is kind of an asshole. Moraine's always an asshole, though. Like, insert Spaceballs. I knew it. I'm surrounded by assholes. Exactly.

But, like, you know, like, overall, like, I gave the show a chance. I wanted to like the show. I watched all the episodes, but it was also like, there was a lot of stuff that they changed. Cause I, I admit it. I could be a bit of a book purist myself. So like, if it's not exactly or close to what the book says, I probably won't like it. But like, I wanted to give a chance.

Cause I understood, you know, this is a modern take for a book that's essentially 32 years old by this point. And like I wanted to like see, OK, what changes can they do? And I could accept the fact that, yes, the Dragon Reborn can be a man or woman because I understand that it's based off the soul. But it's also like my gripe is, as I mentioned, the general politics are introduced right at the beginning they completely skip over luceran's like whole prologue which sets as you mentioned sets up the whole story and then they're like kind of like you just rush through a lot of stuff when there's a lot of stuff that happens between them going from the two rivers to uh tyren and it's like they literally bypass like meeting elaine like essentially could have cut that whole

book in half or even if they had like two more episodes they could have pasted a lot better for example because you have like that whole like character building arc uh for like um rand and matt where it's like oh yeah matt's slowly descending into like craziness because of the dagger but like you just see matt just being sick one day and then uh moraine is kind of curing him from like the dagger's evil and just hiding the dagger away and then you're like what like we saw like no progression for this gotta love it i love television i love adaptions of fantasy works i definitely don't think that any time it works well is a miracle and that them being bad is the standard it's totally not an opinion i hold generally that you should expect every adaption to be absolutely terrible and that if it's good

it's only by the grace of god that it was good right oh but anyways like i just to kind of cap it because i understand that like as a cisgendered male like i might hold some viewpoints that aren't like great um and i just kind of like want to take this as a learning chance to kind of like sit down and just like learn more about what I can do to improve like my viewpoints on the show. Because as a book purist, this book is also outdated. So it's like what can make it better for me to kind of work in and understand like what Amazon is doing to make this show more up to date, essentially. You know one thing I loved out of this show that was a quote-unquote modern updating is the fucking Greens just being super like, yeah, I have a bunch of dudes and I'm fucking them and they fuck each other. My husbands are gay for each other and for me.

I didn't catch it at all. I was just like, yep, it's just the greens. The greens do whatever the fuck they want. I just love Nadeem sitting there as these green warders are talking. And she's just like, do you two like, and just does the little fingers motion. Do you two like? Touch dicks. Because we know that's how it works. It's just go like this.

Yeah, exactly. And like, you know, all women are just cuddle buddies. They just love that. Yeah, no, but it was just like, I don't know. There are some moments in the show that I did honestly enjoy. Like, seeing, like, even though it was just crappy CGI, seeing the weaves actually being used. Especially later on. The title sequence. Yeah, the title sequence is so great.

But I think my biggest gripe is also... I have a lot of gripes with this show. I have a lot of gripes. I really did like the white cloak dude. lot of grimes with the show um i have a lot of grimes but like just to kind of add like i really did like that uh the white cloak dude i thought he was a great actor for that because like he kind of like represents that whole like he is a white cloak he he gave off that presence of i hate his guts so much he's the perfect white cloak and like nineve's character like her actress did such a great job

in making Nynaeve so annoying that it was just, like, it's great. Because, like, Nynaeve is, like, one of those characters, like, you hate her until you love her. Because it's just, like, she has such a great character development overall in the series. But there's the point where, like, she's very, like, set in a way, is very annoying up until, like, she, like, learns, like, essentially to be, more open which is

essentially like in the books it's around the same time where she starts where she finally has sex and then she's more open to things essentially you know i think on that note it's perfect i just want to point out for the record that despite being a system man, all my opinions are perfect at all times. This is my show. I get to say that. I'm kidding. Don't hurt me. I would just like to add that I am open to having my opinions changed and I will have conversations with people. I've never changed my opinion once. I'm just kidding.

So Catching the Rise is a great book then, right? Oh my God. Oh my God, I hate that book. I do too. Oh my God, I hate that book so much. Thank you both for being on the show for both episodes. Thank you for, you know,

coming and hanging out with me and filling in for my useless co-host who's off i don't know having a life or something i don't know i didn't ask uh we this is maybe a couple weeks after this uh kethel should be back and we're gonna have a special episode um with a guest talking about the history of genre fiction as it is like where it's like its roots where it came from essentially fiction and fantasy uh before tolkien more or less like its roots and where it came from so it's going to be not a story but actually sort of a a dive

into like where the genre came from and what it grew out of. So somebody is going to have to do some actual research for that one. Hopefully our guest, but thank you all. Thank you both. My guess. Thank you, Alex. Thank you,

Roberto for joining me. Roberto is the host of the history of Sarkat Velo, Georgia. Yes. And Alex is an aspiring librarian Baker. That works. Yes. And Alex is an aspiring librarian baker. Librarian baker. That works, yeah. Yeah.

Links to Roberto's show and some fundraising for Alex's new business venture are going to be in the show notes to both of these episodes to support both of our wonderful guests. Again, the show does have a Patreon. If you're interested in that, $3 a month, you get one to do bonus episodes where we talk about non-book stuff. So if you particularly like the part of the show where we talked about the TV show, you can join the Patreon and you can listen to our first bonus episode where I talk about why Star Wars is a fantasy story and not a sci-fi one.

And that's why all the new movies and shows feel empty, because it doesn't know what it's trying to be. Bring me on for a special episode, and I will debate you. Okay, well, we'll bring Alex on so I can have my opinions changed. But thank you

all for listening. We'll see you next week uh bye bro are you fucking real, man? Come on.