"The Wheel of Time" and Moving Beyond "Bury Your Gays"
The Amazon series has shown that the death of queer characters on-screen can have power and can serve storytelling aims without indulging in lazy and harmful tropes.
Hello, dear reader! Do you like what you read here at Omnivorous? Do you like reading fun but insightful takes on all things pop culture? Do you like supporting indie writers? If so, then please consider becoming a subscriber and get the newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. There are a number of paid options, but you can also sign up for free! Every little bit helps. Thanks for reading and now, on with the show!
As an added bonus, every month I’ll be running a promotion where everyone who signs up for a paid subscription will be entered into a contest to win TWO of the books I review during a given month. For April, this will include all books reviewed during March and April. Be sure to spread the word!
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode, and for the Wheel of Time book series, follow.
Few TV tropes are more irritating and more pernicious than “bury your gays.” It’s one of those writing decisions that has long been the scourge of television and film before it. It often betrays a lack of imagination or, even more perniciously, a desire to teach the general public about how dangerous and deadly queer desire can be. Increasingly, however, television–and, to a lesser extent, film–has begun to expand on the types of stories that can be told, detaching queer death (and queer tragedy more generally) from its former trappings. Now, a queer character can die on-screen without it partaking in nothing more than a lazy storytelling trope.
Which brings us to the finale of the third season of The Wheel of Time. By the time the episode has come to a close, we have had to say farewell to Siuan Sanche, played with such scene-stealing charisma and power by Sophie Okonedo. Having been deposed by her nemesis Elaida do Avriny a'Roihan, portrayed by the one and only Shohreh Shohreh Aghdashloo, she is subsequently executed by beheading. This is a death that makes both emotional and narrative sense, for in addition to devastating Moiraine and changing her trajectory, it also sets the stage (I suspect) for Elaida’s eventual downfall.
For those who haven’t been paying attention, one of the most important relationships in the show is that between Moiraine Damodred and Siuan Sanche who, though from very different worlds before their time in the White Tower, nevertheless managed to forge a romance for the Ages. The brief glimpses we get of their past–as well as their interactions in the present–make it clear that they are one another’s guiding lights and lodestars. As the seasons have gone by, however, the two have gone on very different tracks. While Moiraine has gone out into the world to try to find the Dragon Reborn and ensure that he is adequately trained and guided so that he is ready to fight the Dark One in the Last Battle, Siuan has had the less enviable task of navigating the fraught politics of the White Tower. Love, as so often, has been sacrificed on the altar of duty. Though the third season reveals that they can never regain what they’ve lost, it also makes clear that they will find one another again in Ages to come.
In addition to clarifying the state of Moiraine and Siuan’s relationship, the third season has also shown us how deeply-rooted the conflict between Siuan and Elaida has been ever since the former beat the latter in the pursuit of the Amyrlin Seat. For a while it seemed as if the two might find some form of rapprochement, but it was also clear that Elaida was too ruthless, and too convinced of her own rightness, to ever let Siuan off the hook that easily. And then, as the finale gears up, the inevitable confrontation between Elaida and Siuan comes to pass, and it is nothing short of explosive. Elaida, having managed to manipulate just enough members of the Hall to secure a vote against her nemesis, manages to not only depose her but also have her executed as a Darkfriend. This is quite a coup on Elaida’s part, and it reveals just how duplicitous she is and will remain.
For her to order Siuan’s death seems extreme, until one remembers that this was a woman who was willing to kill Darkfriends in cold blood in order to get the information that she wants. Given that, are we really surprised that she would be willing to do the same to Siuan, whom she has come to regard as a threat to the White Tower and all it represents? For all that Elaida seems to be at the apex of her power, however, it seems to me that Siuan’s death is a harbinger of things to come. Elaida, I propose, is about to find out that sacrificing her enemy on the altar of her own overweening ambition and moral certitude will be what destroys her, whether because Moiraine and Egwene and the others strike back at her or because her overwhelming victory will allow her to indulge her hubris to such an extent that she makes some other fatal mistake.
Just as importantly Siuan’s death also marks a significant emotional turning point for Moiraine, just as it also shows just how much Moiraine’s love has been the central guiding force of Siuan’s life, despite all that now stands between them. Indeed, even when she’s standing before Elaida and her minions in the Tower, it’s her love of another woman that Siuan chooses to pronounce and to defend. This makes sense, though, given the extent to which Elaida–never one to pass up an opportunity to deliver a withering criticism of her enemy–has already scathingly remarked on Siuan’s devotion to Moiraine when they were both students at the Tower. This moment, then, represents the former Amrylin’s last chance to assert her own identity, to claim for herself that which Elaida has attempted to take. Siuan might have been stilled, and she might be facing death, but nothing is going to stand in the way of her declaring her undying loyalty to Moiraine, Elaida’s contempt be damned.
To be sure, it is quite devastating and wrenching to say farewell to a character we’ve come to love as much as we have Siuan. Watching Moiraine grapple with the reality that her beloved has died is heartbreaking in itself, and both Okonedo and Rosamund Pike wring every moment of pathos out of Siuan’s last moments in this Age. As a result, Siuan’s death feels earned rather than trite. She has given up everything she has for both her goal of guiding the dragon and for her love of Moiraine and, though she has lost, she still gets to die with her honor and her dignity intact.
This, then, is the thing. There is a difference between killing a queer character in the genuine service of storytelling and doing it because it’s easy or because it sends a message about the fact that queer characters are ultimately expendable. And there’s even bigger difference between giving a character a wrenchingly and heartbreakingly tragic narrative arc because it makes for compelling and captivating drama and doing so in order to prove a point about the wages of such “sinful” behavior (see also: the majority of queer characters in Hollywood cinema up until relatively recently). Obviously I would have liked to have been able to spend more time with Siuan, even if, as seemed quite likely, she was never going to be able to have the reunion with Moiraine that we all wanted for them. If that wasn’t possible, then at the very least she deserved a noble send-off, which is exactly what she got and I, for one, will always be grateful to Rafe and his team for their decision.
It’s also worth pointing out that, in many ways, Siuan’s story in the books is quite anticlimactic and even misogynist. Personally, I would prefer that she gets a climax that is true to her character and that allows her to go out on her own terms rather than the rather milquetoast narrative that is her fate in Jordan’s novels. (If you don’t know, she ends up falling in love with the exiled Andoran General Gareth Bryne, who essentially makes her do his laundry and spanks her, and then they both end up dying during the Last Battle). Not everyone will agree with me, and that’s fine, but I continue to insist that this is one of the better changes the series has made to Jordan’s work.
There’s no doubt that The Wheel of Time is one of the queerest fantasy epics that we’ve seen reach the small screen. It has, time and again, shown us how possible it is to find new ways of bringing quer people into the fantasy fold. Part of that is giving queer characters storylines that end in sadness and death. Rather than hampering the series or damaging its legacy, however, I would like to suggest that Siuan’s death will instead ensure that it earns a reputation for being brave and willing to take big risks with its queer storytelling.