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The Wheel of Time's showrunner explains why it's so important for the Prime Video series to be openly queer
"We made a conscious decision in the first season writers room to make sure homophobia didn’t exist in The Wheel of Time," showrunner Rade Judkins says about the adaptation of Robert Jordan's fantasy books
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For fans, one of the joys of Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time — adapted from the fantasy novel series created by Robert Jordan — is how unapologetically queer the show is; according to showrunner Rafe Judkins, that was a very deliberate choice on behalf of everyone involved in the show, building on the alternate reality shown in the source material.
“We made a conscious decision in the first season writers room to make sure homophobia didn’t exist in The Wheel of Time. I think a lot of our audience won’t notice it, but some of the audience does notice and feel it — that it is fantasy,” Judkins told The Hollywood Reporter. “We don’t need homophobia to exist. It doesn’t really in the books. Very rarely does anyone ever make any negative commentary about any queer relationship in the books.”
Judkins explained, “I loved being able to go away to a world that I didn’t know anything about and that I could escape from [via fantasy books], but I never met or saw myself in those worlds until I read Wheel of Time… When you’re reading it, it felt like big billboard signs of: These are queer stories; these are queer characters, especially in comparison to all the other fantasy I’d been reading. For me, it was very important to find that in the show today. I feel like part of our job as artists who are adapting something is to bring it to life, not just word-for-word but to also bring its context to life. And the context of Wheel of Time in the ’90s is very different from the context of reading the books today. I wanted to infuse that into the show and hopefully let people who weren’t seeing themselves in other fantasy shows see themselves in Wheel of Time.”
The fantasy setting — and the removal of certain real-world societal attitudes, including homophobia — allows for the show to explore topics, ideas, and identities that are otherwise unseen in most television shows, the showrunner argued.
“In the same way that homophobia doesn’t exist in the world of the Wheel of Time, I do find that often in our world, we fight the hardest for our identities and the definition of who we are when we feel like we’re fighting against something," he said. "I was a gay Mormon kid, and you have to fight so hard to find yourself in that gay identity because of the pressure that is coming at you. But if you don’t have that homophobia coming at you, do you need to define yourself so specifically and cleanly and with such a force behind it?”
The Wheel of Time continues on Prime Video weekly, with new episodes every Thursday through April 17.
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