What would you want to tell Rafe Judkins about making the show?

[king of nowhere]

49 minutes ago, Thrasymachus said:

Notice how the mere identification of some of those elements of Min's character that are clearly queer causes a defensive reaction to protest that she's not "really queer," she's just being "practical."

It's another matter entirely.

I would like for our society to stop having prejudices on what constitutes "masculine" or "feminine" traits. isn't that the whole point of the current feminism? equality is set in law, but there are still prejudices on what men should do and women should do, and those prejudices perpetuate discrimination.

Well, if the point is to stop prejudices, then calling someone queer because she does not fit some stereotype of feminity goes completely against that. It perpetuates prejudices. In the past, women were not allowed to do men's jobs, and men were not allowed women's; now they are, but they are called queer if they do? doesn't seem such a huge improvement. if we laber queer someone who goes against gender stereotypes, then we are merely swapping old, outdated prejudices with new, trendy prejudices. It's not what I want to stand for.

 

And second, just as important, I dislike the current fashion of putting tags on everything.

When I was young, some people were bad at math. Some were bad at drawing; now those people are certified as "discalculic" and "disgraphic". Some people were loners, or weird; now they are diagnosed some disturb of the autistic spectrum. Some people were bad; now we say that they come from a bad neighborood and they are in need of help.

And while there are some advantages to do it, and it helps in some instances, I feel like people are stripped of free will. You did not choose to be different. You don't have an identity. Instead, you have a certified medical condition with a complicated name. You are not a good or bad person, you are merely a product of your environment. You did not shape your identity, you were born with it. You are nothing but a deterministic machine.

Again, I don't like where this is going. If you do not conform to the mass, you are no longer an outsider to be ousted; instead, you become a sick person to be helped. This is not acceptance. This merely swaps the crowd's reaction from revulsion to pity.

Furthermore, we are told that we can do whatever we want, become whatever we want. But we are also told that we're not responsible for who we are, that we are a byproduct of our genetics and our environment. Am I the only one to see the glaring contradiction our culture is going through?

I am weird, I like myself weird, I want to be weird, I absolutely do not want someone to start putting tags on my weirdness to fit me into a schematic, simplicistic worldwiew. Especially not tags that I did not embrace myself.

 

Min is different from most people in her demographic category. She has an individual personality. She is weird. Let her be weird. She does not need someone to put tags on her, to reduce her to some preconceived category. Not unless she herself chooses to embrace those categorizations.

And in all her pows, I don't remember anything that would indicate she does not perceive herself as woman.

 

Finally, I don't think it's fair to basically accues someone of being a reactionary bigot because they express doubts about a character interpretation.

 

[Thrasymachus]

Calling her "weird" is already putting tags on it.  The only difference is you have a negative normative reaction to something being called "queer" that you don't have to something being called "weird." Further, tolerance and acceptance require understanding.  And understanding requires words, i.e., labels, with which to talk to others about what is to be understood and establish standards of observation and analysis for those things.  "Queer," largely just means "outside the norm" when it comes to sex, sexuality, and gender.  "Queer theory" is just the name for a set of academic theories which analyze gender and gender roles, sex and cultural attitudes towards sex and sexuality, as socially constructed and expressions of the power dynamics that exist within a society.  Importantly, being "queer" doesn't mean being homosexual, or necessarily related to homosexuality at all.  The visceral normative reaction against it is akin to the current right-wing trend against Critical Race Theory.  It is a visceral reaction that leverages ignorance of a set of academic tools for analysis to create a cultural enemy where none exists.  

 

And it's ok to be ignorant of a set of academic tools.  And it's ok to have visceral reactions to things.  The only moral error is in thinking that one's own visceral reactions are at all important or illuminative of the things they are reacting against.

 

And lest you think I am attacking you, I do have to thank you, king of nowhere, as your own visceral reactions to an extraordinarily basic and elementary queer-theory oriented treatment of a very few elements of the Wheel of Time illustrate my point.  RJ avoided issues of queerness, after setting them up. This allowed readers to fill in their own gaps, even to denying the set up, apparently.  The only proper way to adapt a TV show based on the book series is to follow suit.  But since we have a gay man who found "deep personal meaning" in the series with messages of diversity and inclusiveness apparently being core to his experience of it, and who has already gutted the original story and completely ignored the original aesthetic, it's very unlikely the TV show will follow the books on their treatment of these issues.

[bmarluke]

Ok, could be be missing something someone already stated here. Forgiveness please. There are like 2 billion posts here. You all are filling up my inbox people!  I digress… Are there not many statements of bisexuality on the part of the Forsaken? Especially from the females. (Not just Halima.) Having many “pets” of both sex’s and talking briefly on enjoying “talents”? 
 

No wokeness in TV series... Unless you have a director who is very dedicated to accurate, period specific timelines, modern day colloquialisms will bleed through and be interpretative depending on audience as such. Basically, what I’m saying here is, sorry. There’s gonna be woke, because the definition of work is up for interpretation depending on demographic. 

 

 

 

[Thrasymachus]

The Forsaken are "bisexual" mostly as a way to illustrate that their appetites are unconstrained.  Especially for the Forsaken, it seems to be less about how and with who one prefers to be intimate, and more about how they like to express their power and domination.  But that is another excellent example of how the Wheel of Time is sort of innocently anti-woke, where a bisexual affect is used as an illustration of evil.

 

I do have one minor quibble here, in that there's no such thing as "period specific" attitudes towards sex and sexuality.  The Wheel of Time isn't set in any period with which we would be familiar.  And Jordan is on record, when talking about sexuality in his series, that it has roughly the same status as religion in his series.  There just isn't any cultural or social tension in his world along those lines.  Sexuality, as we understand it, isn't really a thing in his world, just like religious faith, as we understand it, isn't a thing in his world.  People still have sex, but they don't draw lines or make assumptions about people based on their preferences, or even assume that they have preferences really.  It's just that his books don't make that at all clear, or talk about sexuality or preference at all.  They leave enough of a gap for people to fill in their own blanks, and make their own assumptions.

[Beidomon]

On 8/9/2021 at 4:46 PM, imlad said:

 

Not sure what books you were reading. We've got a world where a person's skin color, or the fact they are a woman, does not make them a second class citizen. We have two arguably bisexual characters in prominent roles (Moiraine and Siuan) for the plot, and there are undoubtedly other LGBT characters in the series. The power dynamics of the world are much more balanced between men and women than were seen in just about any other Fantasy literature at the time, or even now (as far as I can think of off hand), if not leaning a bit towards the women's side. You've got at least one culture that the woman controls who gets married, and when (the Aiel). There at least two Body Positive cultures in the series (Aiel and the Fal Darans), if not a third (the Domani). The Domani economy appears to be dominated by women instead of men. At a time when women were still not allowed in combat under US military regulations, Jordan had female warriors taking center stage numerous times in this series..

 

All this starting 30 years ago when none of this was taken lightly or considered common place.

 

So, exactly what the FRAK is "not woke" about this series? Or are you just being an antiWoke troll, with misogynistic, homophobic, racist and/or transphobic tendencies (as those are the only reasons to object to "wokeness")? I'm not accusing you of those, mind, I'm just asking if your motivation for saying "don't go woke" is because you're antiWoke, and thus have one of those mental disorders.

 

Finally, you live in the 21st Century. This Century is FRAKKING WOKE. GET USED TO IT, cuz that ain't going away. It's called progress, that's what happens as civilization grows and evolves, and becomes more mature, not the petty little boys club those who object to wokeness want it to remain. That's the realm of nematodes like Putin, Stephen Miller, the Proud Boys, and Trump.

Wow. That was really something. I’m gonna just bow out of this one. 

[imlad]

On 8/11/2021 at 6:33 PM, Thrasymachus said:

He wrote zero homosexual characters

 

Page 290 of The Wheel of Time Companion (and I quote from the second paragraph of the entry for Galina Casban) "She was a lesbian; she was very interested in Erian Boroleos."

 

What's this about "zero homosexual characters" and only one queer character? The text of the series made it pretty clear she was a lesbian as well, but in case your reading of it wasn't good enough, I figured the Companion should solidify that fact. And I'd say the Companion is a better authority on the matter than anyone posting in these forums, unless someone from Team Jordan hops in and directly contradicts the book.

 

3 hours ago, Thrasymachus said:

The Forsaken are "bisexual" mostly as a way to illustrate that their appetites are unconstrained. 

 

Sorry to break it to you, but they're still queer (even if you don't want to call them bi or some other "blank-sexual" term) which you said there was only one of. 

[Thrasymachus]

The canonicity of the Companion had long been a matter of some debate.  And further, an obscure, secondary, reference book of questionable reliability, making the claim that a character is gay, long after the primary text had been published, and long after RJ had already faced criticism for the lack of gay characters in his text, does not refute the fact that the primary text establishes Galina as gay absolutely nowhere.  Tenuous inferences from vague passages is not an establishment of anything. If anything, it's yet another example of a premise in my main argument, that RJ left enough gaps regarding sex and sexuality in his stories that anybody can fill those in just about any way they wish. Show me where Galina expresses a desire to be with a woman.  Or where another character refers to her as preferring women.  And not as a matter of interpretation.

 

Moreover, it hardly counters the position that the Wheel of Time is not "woke" or gay or trans-friendly to point out the fact that it's yet another bad guy that's gay, nor does it counter the fact that in the primary text, homosexual and bisexual affect are only ever overtly referred to as a demonstration of either immaturity or evil.  And remember, my claim was not that Min was the only queer character in the series.  It was that she was the only honestly queer character.  The Forsaken are queer, at least, some of them, but their queerness is not an honest expression of human sexuality.  It's a demonstration of power and domination. 

 

For Min, her queerness is an honest expression of who she is.  But it's through that honesty that she becomes less queer, to the point of becoming cis, as the plot develops.  She begins embroidering her boyish clothes, and has them cut in a way to accentuate her femininity, begins wearing her hair longer and curled, and even wearing makeup.  And to drive the final nail in the coffin of her queerness, she sparks something of a fashion revolution in women's clothes thanks to her close relationship to the Dragon Reborn, to the point where at the height of that style's popularity, one couldn't even say that her preference for dress was out of the norm!

[Beidomon]

[Borderlander]

@Thrasymachus 

 

Well said! Thanks for taking the time to write all that; very thoughtfully, fairly, and respectfully expressed.