Instead of adapting the story as it is, the writers of the now-canceled show decided they had more important things to say.
Instead of adapting the story as it is, the writers of the now-canceled show decided they had more important things to say.
I n his famous anti-allegory statement, J. R. R. Tolkien says that he prefers history, “true or feigned,” over allegory, because where history allows for the “freedom of the reader,” allegory depends on “the purposed domination of the author.” Now consider another conservative titan, Yuval Levin, who harshly critiques the modern tendency to treat institutions not as molds of character, but as platforms from which to perform. Keep both ideas in mind as we think about streaming’s latest big-budget failure.
Late in May, Amazon announced the cancellation of The Wheel of Time, the slickly produced, marquee fantasy series based on the book series of the same name. Shortly after the announcement, the show’s costume designer shared a hopeful message on Instagram:
The sun won’t go down on our hopes and dreams. Let’s keep the faith going people. I am so proud of being involved with a show that put diversity and inclusion front and centre.
After reading this, my eyes involuntarily rolled, but not for the reasons one might expect. In a vacuum, I have no problem with someone celebrating “diversity and inclusion.” But I love this quote because it perfectly encapsulates in three short words the problem that diversity and inclusion present for so many adaptations: “front and center.”
And it’s not just the costume designer. The showrunner himself, Rafe Judkins, recently said in an interview, “Even though it’s been 30 years since Wheel of Time came out we still don’t have a lot of big fantasy content on TV with queer stories centered and having real emotional and plot stakes attached to them.” [emphasis added]
Queer characters and stories may be present in the Wheel of Time books, but to center them means pushing out what really is central. Putting anything “front and center” that is not the story being adapted will cause your adaptation to fail.
Adaptation is, simply put, translation. Translating from one language to another requires a tightrope walk between fidelity and paraphrase. The great sin of translation is not variance in phrasing, but in changing the intent of the original writer. A translator imposing his own views on a text is committing a cardinal offense.
Like translation, adaptation transmits ideas, characters, and stories from one medium to another, where the original structure and vocabulary are often unavailable. It’s a daunting task, and audiences do well when they give an adapted work plenty of grace. But when they detect that an adaptation is a vehicle for the adaptor’s own views or priorities, they’re right to recoil.
Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time (finished after his death by Brandon Sanderson) may be over 4 million words long, but it’s still, to put it simply, a story — a “feigned history,” as Tolkien might have called it. The world is sprawling, and each nation is home to culturally and racially distinct peoples. (That’s all gone in the show, by the way, where every village, city, and nation we visit is a Benetton ad.) The themes and plots are realistically varied. Characters have their own motivations, strengths, and foibles. For one minor example, take the main character Rand al’Thor’s refusal to fight or harm women in any way. Is this a wrongheaded view, or a noble one? As the story goes on, what may seem at first like a chivalric position puts him and his companions in real jeopardy. The freedom of the reader is in making up one’s own mind about whether Rand’s stance is the right one. At no point does Jordan purpose to dominate the reader with a clear answer.
Let’s turn to something more fundamental (we might say, central) to the story. In the world of The Wheel of Time, magic is gendered. It is wielded by both men and women, but each has access to only one half of that power. Before the events of the story, the creatively named big bad, the Dark One, tainted the male half of the magic so that any man channeling that power will, sooner or later, go mad and kill everyone he loves. That would be problem enough, but on top of that, the prophesied savior, the Dragon Reborn, will be the reincarnation of a magic-wielding man from a previous age. The books begin with the task of identifying which of the three boys is the Dragon Reborn, then follow his quest to defeat the Dark One before the power can drive him insane. During that quest, this lone man must contend with a female-led power structure that’s been built over thousands of years atop the rightful fear of magical men. The power dynamics between men and women, their relative positions and strengths in matters big and small, drive much of the story. Indeed, the ancient symbol of the magic-wielding Aes Sedai is a dual-teardrop yin-yang circle. The push and pull, the tension and balance between male and female, is what turns the Wheel of Time itself.
Fast forward to Amazon’s adaptation and the decision in the first episode of the first season to remake the mystery of the Dragon Reborn. Now the prophesied hero could be any of five youths, not three, and two of them are women. No meaningful distinction between the two groups is made. The show nods to, but never grapples with, the tainted nature of the male half of the magic. Gone are the sex-based power struggles that are central to the story. A vital theme of the books has been rendered inert in the service of . . . what? An image of gender equality that appeals to a narrow band of 21st-century progressivism? The result is a weak sauce. Where the books’ dominant theme is a timeless one of balance, the show throws that out in favor of a relentlessly feminist and queer perspective.
I’m uninterested in hashing out the many, many changes to characters and locations that are to be expected in any adaptation. Those things are not why the show failed. Ultimately, the show failed to adapt the fundamental reality of the story: that this is a long, rich, excruciatingly detailed version of the ancient Chosen One template. The books have a whopping 148 point-of-view characters, but they never stray too far or too long from their six core heroes, and each side narrative points back inevitably to the central story of the Dragon Reborn’s eventual confrontation with the Dark One. No such focus is evident in Amazon’s version, where equal or greater screen time is given to considering the relationship politics of a wizard-warrior throuple (alluded to only obliquely in the books) as to the main character they accompany. Their story serves absolutely no purpose in the grand narrative, but it is clearly important to the show’s writers.
Amazon’s Wheel of Time gave in to the translator’s temptation: instead of adapting the story as it is, and as it has been loved by tens of millions of readers for over 30 years, the show’s writers decided they had more important things to say. They used an institution — and take it from a yearly attendee of JordanCon, these books are an institution — as a platform to elevate themselves and their politics. And frankly, it doesn’t matter what those politics are. In this case, there was a left-wing focus on “diversity and inclusion,” but it could just as easily have been the latest right-wing cause du jour. The lessons are the same. Do not use an institution as a personal platform. Do not seek to dominate your audience.
These are great lessons for anyone looking to adapt a book to the screen. I just wish it hadn’t come at the expense of such a delightful story. The Wheel of Time deserved better.