Stop touching the dark one's taint

It's funny to remember the gender panic happening in The Wheel of Time

One of my favourite things to do is armchair psychoanalyse the fears and fetishes of canon male fantasy authors. I know the author is dead, and I know that reading too deeply for biographical truths from a work of fiction is deranged, Swiftie conspiracy nonsense - but trust me when I tell you that some of these authors are telling on themselves through thinly veiled prose.

The amount of urban fantasy authors who seem to genuinely believe hats on their male protagonists will drive heterosexual women wild with both desire and respect is honestly troubling.

The fantasy books that were big when I was a teenager are ripe for this kind of scrutiny - an era of epic fantasy series with either a lack of women protagonists, troubling or one dimensional depictions of women, or a disturbing commitment to rape as a plot device. Or let’s be honest, all of the above. I’m not saying that David Eddings, for example, is necessarily a misogynist - but perhaps you can understand some of the attitudes around gender and towards women that existed when he was writing, and that he was perhaps grappling with.

To be fair, some of these authors were just outright misogynists, but it was more common to see attitudes towards gender and sexism from the time - which were usually troubling - reflected in the story and the characters.

The author of the Honor Harrington space opera series David Weber was questioned, criticised and lauded for the simple choice of making his strong sci-fi protagonist a woman, with the question of “why do you write strong female protagonists” so common that he put an exasperated FAQ on his incredibly outdated website.

 “I'm inclined to think that there is a little quirk in my gallop which enjoys putting women into traditionally ‘male’ occupations and positions,” he writes in 2009. In today’s feminist perspective it’s kinda wild to see - Honor Harrington is literally just a common protagonist trope from the time - ultra competent at space ships and sword fighting and strategy - who happens to be a woman. That alone was apparently worthy of commentary and celebration and criticism for the time (the first book was published in 1992).

But from this era, and worthy of looking back on due to the TV adaptation, there’s no greater example of gender panic in fantasy than Robert Jordan and The Wheel of Time.

**spoilers abound for a series of books that came out in the nineties, so…**

The magic of gender essentialism

In The Wheel of Time, ideas of gender essentialism, tension and panic are built into the very roots of the worldbuilding. The entire structure of the universe in these books hangs off the idea of men and women being fundamentally different, with the two forces that drive the world (and more importantly, the magic system) being integrally and fundamentally coded to either men or women.

Saidin, the male half of the One Power, and Saidar, the female half, are a kind of fantasy appropriation of the concept of Yin and Yang, which relies on giving gendered attributes to two opposing and complementary forces that are separate but working together. Of course, the idea of Yin and Yang in the real world aren’t actually as essentialist as Jordan’s appropriation, limited to defined ideas of how human gender expresses itself, but to be fair to him, people in the real world don’t use it to shoot fireballs from their hands.

But basically, the entire world is set up with an idea of women and men being in opposition to each other, fundamentally different. It’s here that Robert Jordan is clearly working through some things around gender roles. Men, are always more powerful in the one power. However women make up for that by having the ability to “link” with each other - men are alone and strong, women are weak and have community. You can see, when you consider him writing this in the 70s and 80s, where this attitude stems from.

The funny thing is that with a modern feminist lens, there are some characters who seem the opposite of the casually misogynistic fantasy books of the era. In fact, women are conspicuously given power in The Wheel of Time, with several organisations and systems set up as kind of matriarchies. From the village we start off in, Edmond’s Field, we have the “women’s circle” as a kind of feared governing force that rules in everything but name, to the Aes Sedai, the most powerful force in the world, who wield great power both magically and politically, and are again, seen as a group to fear.

On paper, seems like another Honor Harrington type flip - but it’s through how these women and these organisations are treated in the book that we can see Jordan’s anxiety around gender roles manifest. Powerful women are feared, their motivations suspect. But more than that, women are treated as something almost inherently comical in these books - while people fear them, they’re also mostly depicted as bickering, haranguing, petty creatures. The most powerful channeller we’re introduced to, Nynaeve, is given the emotional depth and character traits of a kind of turbo-fishwife trope.

And don’t even get me started on Jordan’s humiliation kink. Every powerful female character in this book is not just humbled at some point, but literally humiliated. He loves great reversals of fortune for his women characters - look at each of the Amyrlin Seats, arguably the most institutionally powerful women in this world, and see how humiliation is the consequence for their power. Siuan Sanche is deposed and stilled, forced to work as a laundress for a man who she eventually falls in love with. Elaida, who schemed and took the seat essentially has humiliation as her entire plotline, the punishment for daring to scheme her way into power - ending with her beaten and chastised by one of the forsaken, then captured and humiliated by the Seanchan. Egwene, our final Amyrlin, has a two book humiliation arc, where she goes from being the rebel Amyrlin to a novice again, beaten every day.

There’s so many more examples of this it’s actually bonkers. Even Moraine, the closest thing we have to a Gandalf figure, is “put in her place” multiple times. And speaking of the Seanchan - the entire A’dam situation could be interpreted as a device to humiliate powerful women. Once again, it’s fiction, so reading Jordan’s motivations as being expressly misogynistic is a stretch - but his choices, repeated again and again over the series, are compelling to compile together.

Stop touching the taint, Rand

One of the reasons that I read Jordan’s work as a kind of gender panic - reacting, maybe even subconsciously to developing societal attitudes towards the roles of men and women - rather than specifically about hating women (although I have to say there’s probably a bunch of that in there too) is how he writes men.

It’s funny how when a narrative doesn’t treat women as people, the relationships between the men start to read as homoerotic. It’s also funny how sexualised the descriptions of using the One Power are, spellcasting give the same descriptive flair as cumming in erotica. Also, Rand is constantly described as “touching the dark one’s taint”. But these are also the straightest books known to man.

There’s an anxiety around what it means to be a man in these books. It’s a common idea in canon fantasy - the hero’s journey is often linked explicitly or implicitly with ideas of masculinity and coming of age, that have traditionally not been extended towards women protagonists.

Somehow, in a world where Jordan has “flipped” some of the outdated power structures and put organisations of women in positions of control, the men still have instinctive patriarchal values. It seems like Jordan is navigating what value chivalry has in a feminist society, with the men having deep crises around protecting and saving women. Rand keeps a list of all the women he’s either killed in battle or have died “because of him”. Mat and Perrin each having similar attitudes.

The humiliation that Jordan lathers onto powerful women is absent from the men - in fact, power is reluctantly grasped, and always rewarded. Rand and his troubled attitude towards being the prophesied Dragon Reborn is classic protagonist stuff, but it’s repeated across the board, notably with Perrin who has about a six book arc about whether or not a flag declaring him a ruler is up or down.

Men also endure suffering, rather than are humbled by it. His obsession with enduring pain could be also explained by Jordan writing through both illness (leading to his untimely death) and a rumoured painkiller addiction, but Rand’s unhealing wounds are the things that literally elevate him according to prophesy, rather than humiliate or lessen him.

You can also look at the Red Ajah as a pretty blatant example of this anxiety - an organisation devoted to fighting and gentling insane and violent and powerful men, depicted one and all as man-hating zealots (who are also our only lesbian representation in the books lol). What kind of insecurity about being a man is reflected in creating a hypothetical world where women have more power than men, and use it to hunt and castrate them? Is it a commentary on our current society? Or an anxiety about powerful women?

the books would never have depicted Lanfear as MOTHER like the show did

That old wheel of time it just keeps on turning

The reason I’ve been thinking so much about these books is because I’ve just finished the second season of Amazon’s Wheel of Time adaptation. I won’t go into a full review, but the first season was profoundly disappointing (but apparently we can blame COVID for some of that) with the second season being MUCH better. I need everyone to go and watch it so we get a third season, it really is pretty great.

My attitude towards the TV series changed after I read one person describe the adaptation as being more like another turning of the wheel, rather than a faithful recreation of the books. In this world, we see all sorts of alternate realities, as it’s part of the lore of the world - entire universes of Sliding Doors narratives. The differences from the books therefore become a choice rather than a mistake.

And obviously, one of the biggest changes is removing, rewriting, and adjusting much of the gender panic from the story. It’s pretty simple - the women characters are given equal billing and narrative weight to the men, and some of the imbedded gender essentialist concepts are just smoothed over to reflect changing attitudes.

It’s pretty simple, basic stuff - I don’t think anyone is breathlessly praising the show for its feminist message. It’s still a fantasy. It has not “gone woke”. Like most recent shows, it’s putting in basic diversity of cast, reflecting some updated attitudes - Siuan and Moraine are lesbian lovers in this, with a complicated and enriching relationship that I think adds so much to their story.

It shows how malleable a story can be, and how much this one has been flavoured by different attitudes and different societal preoccupations. You can even see it happen in the last three books, which were written by Brandon Sanderson after Robert Jordan sadly died (who famously is not great at writing women either), who does tweak some of the attitudes towards women, that probably wouldn’t have been changed if Jordan had stayed alive.

In 20 years time, someone could be watching this old series and writing an article about how weird regressive 2023 era feminism or gender studies ideas have influenced the show. Much like the different turnings of the wheel, it’s fascinating to see our own concerns and preoccupations with gender impressed onto this story in its TV iteration.

They also stopped talking about the taint lol.

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