Wheel of Timeless Tropes Against Women*

In the last, lorn fight
'Gainst the fall of long night
The mountains stand guard
And the dead shall be ward
For the grave is no bar to my call.

Tomboy, Imperious Noblewoman, Imperious Noblewoman/Shrew

The most deviation you'll find in a female character is in Egwene, whose complexity derives from her character 'development' - from one trope to another.

I can't decide which non-plot-focused interactions are worse - those between the women and the men, or those among the women.  The last four Jordan-authored books are proof that the Bechdel Test should be taken as nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek bare minimum and not celebrated when it is passed - and that it is possible to pass it and still have completely depthless women all over your work.

And the worst part?  Oh, the worst part?  Is how often Planet of Hats applies to these tropes.  Saldaean women are all as ridiculous as Faile.  Mayeners are all as...I don't even know what Berelain is supposed to be.  (I think Jordan was shooting for Mata Hari, missed, and hit Pussy Galore.)  Domani women are literally proud that their power derives entirely from their ability to tempt and manipulate men with the never-fulfilled promise of sex.

Let's consider the Order of Nuns, in which everyone is an Imperious Noblewoman.  It is divided into seven tropes:

1. Seven of Nines  (Sevens of Nine?).
2. June Cleavers ("Now boys, don't fight...").
3. The aforementioned Amazon-Nuns (who, like the Desert-Amazons, practice polygamy.  The other order rocks the polygyny, this sub-order likes theirs polyandrous.  Either way, lots of straw-man "Men are only good for two things, and fighting is the other one" stuff attached.)
4. Librarians (who are literally librarians).  To be fair here, there's a healthy smattering of Absent-Minded Professor, which is a far less gendered piece of the pie.
5. Hillary Clintons.
   
6. Healer-women.
7. Man-Haters.

Tell me I'm wrong.  (Yes, there's an eighth group, but it's stated explicitly that its members retain the traits that predisposed them to their initial choice of the seven.)

Let it also be observed here that among this ginormous order of nuns is the only place you can find lesbianism in the entire series.  But don't worry!  It's just a phase.

Tomboy, Shrew, Imperious Noblewoman.

Then, there's this problem: the fact that an incredibly rigid gender binary is central to the underlying foundation of the world itself and the events that comprise the plot.  Three thousand years ago, a thing happened that drove men and women to the opposite sides of a basic line.  Men are this, women are that, and only on the opposite side of this Battle Against Evil can the two ever truly intermingle again.

I want to be clear: I'm not faulting Robert Jordan for this choice.  One of the things I find singular and love about Wheel of Time is that, unlike every fantasy epic back to Tolkien, it's grounded in Eastern philosophies.  Things are cyclical; all that has happened will happen again.  There is yin and there is yang; the extent to which there is balance between the two is the extent to which there is balance in the world.  Jordan's founding principle is that the two have been out of balance for millennia, and that sets the stage for our pending apocalypse.  But this isn't actually philosophy; the "male" is represented by actual males, the "female" by actual females, and the more ephemeral notion that we all contain both is almost nowhere to be found (at least, not for what would be the first several seasons of this show if it gets picked up).

Thing is, I'm certain that a televised adaptation would destroy what little nuance remains in Jordan's adoption of these founding principles.  What would remain could only come across as regressive, given our recent and relatively swift progress in America as pertains the fluidity of gender identity.

So, the big news came out today: The Wheel of Time has been optioned.

As someone who recently quoted Pedron Niall in the formulation of a political argument, I feel I should caution my fellow heads not to say "Look out, Game of Thrones!"

Wheel of Time is beloved - epic and iconic.  But it's got one linchpin problem that places series creators in a double-bind: its characterization of women.

Readers know what I mean.  "Caricaturization" would be a better word.  Their traits, which are founded almost exclusively in TVtropes.com-worthy gender stereotypes, drive their behaviors in such a monolithic way that it's not even believable at the level required for fantasy epics. 

The Shrews.  No tale should ever have more than one of those (no tale should have one of those; Shakespeare's only an exception based on your interpretation of his intent).  The Imperious Noblewomen.  The Sirens.  The Tomboys.  The Amazons (there are Desert-Amazons and Amazon-Nuns). The Girl Next Door.

A special note about Boy-Crazy: at one point in time or another in this series, Every. Female. Character. Does something stupid (and therefore usually out of character since they're all described as intelligent) because of their desire for a man.

Moiraine is the single exception to this, and that may only be because she sits out nearly half the series - thanks to the actions of another Man-Crazed character.

Two Imperious Noblewomen (and the only non-white main character to be found *anywhere*) and a Shrew

A note: I've only mentioned the good guys here.  Team Evil's women are even more ridiculous in their rote reflection of everything wrong with how men write women in the sci-fi/fantasy world.

The saving grace here is the sheer number of main characters that are women; the ratio has to outdo Game of Thrones (and most other fantasy epics) by quite a bit, not that I care to do the math.  Jordan must have tried hard, considering the state of feminism within sci-fi/fantasy writing in the early 90's (to my knowledge: mostly nonexistent).

Still, nobody who thinks women are underrepresented and poorly served in visual media could possibly watch the as-written versions of these characters without objecting.  Loudly and often.  I figure, though, that a rewrite is totally possible without shifting major plot points.  That's the thing about the women of WoT - the things they *do*, the roles they play in advancing the main plot, are actually pretty damn meaty and interesting.  It's just that - especially with respect to the romantic aspects - Jordan defaulted to the flattest of motivations and gender identities.  Basically, if you rewrote none of what the characters did in the Battle Against Evil, everything else they did and half of what they said, you'd have a beautiful thing: a fantasy epic whose major players are maybe more than half female, in which women have true agency and influence, with few "damsel in distress" scenarios and more than one situation in which that particular trope is well and humorously subverted.

But here's the double-bind: you'd piss off the True Heads and undermine your viewership if you did it.  This ain't Game of Thrones; Martin fed Benioff a very real-world-style set of political machinations that served as an effective bridge for non-nerds into the fantasy world.  Jordan's versions of those machinations are too fantastical at the outset.  Wheel of Time: The Series creators are going to need the book fans to buy in, and as far as I can tell that requires either Faithful Adaptation or a damn good marketing strategy.  So here's the choice:

1. Adapt faithfully.  Keep the True Heads, but reap the ire of anyone who has a stake in seeing progress in how women are represented in filmed media.
2. Rework things a bit.  Show the modern world you know things have changed in the last 25(!) years, but inflame the die-hards.

Either way, tumblr is going to be the first and largest battleground of an Internet war on a scale not unlike that found within the subject material.

Amazon, Siren, Girl Next Door -> Imperious Noblewoman. I could do this ALL DAY

This is a tale that could make a beautiful transition to the small screen; I've thought so since the first time I finished The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, and The Dragon Reborn many years ago (not coincidentally, after I'd read all the Song of Ice and Fire books released at the time and was looking for something new).

But some serious editorial freedom would be required; even with that permission, the showrunners would have a seriously difficult and delicate job of adaptation on their hands.

Ah well.  Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.

All of the artwork on this page comes to you from Seamas Gallagher, whose Wheel of Time fanart is - in my estimation - better than the award-winning Wheel of Time cover-art.

* with all love and respect to Anita Sarkeesian, whose Feminist Frequency keeps stalwart watch on all the genres and media I love.