'The Wheel Of Time' Scrapped After 3 Seasons By Amazon Following Showrunner Admitting It Was LGBTQ+ Propaganda

Amazon MGM Studios has reportedly scrapped The Wheel of Time following the conclusion of the show’s third season.

Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva reports, “Prime Video will not be renewing The Wheel of Time for a fourth season.” As for the reason why, she claimed it was due to finances.

When the show arrived on Prime Video for its first season with a three-episode premiere back in November 2021, it recorded 1.163 billion minutes viewed according to Nielsen.

The season 2 premiere, which dropped three episodes on September 1st only attracted 515 million minutes watched.

The Season 3 premiere, which also debuted three episodes, saw an increase of 534 million minutes watched in its first week according to Nielsen.

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In its second week, it saw total minutes watch increase to 538 million minutes. By its third week it fell to 505 million minutes.

However, by the week of the release of its 6th episode, it had fallen off the charts below 470 million minutes watched.

In the week of its finale, it arrived back on the charts, but only attracted 427 million minutes watched.

The show’s scrapping comes in the wake of Jennifer Salke stepping down as Head of Amazon MGM Studios at the end of March. Salke’s departure was announced by Head of Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios Mike Hopkins.

He stated, “Having accomplished so much as an executive, Jen has decided that her next challenge and chapter will be on the production side, with the aim of getting even closer to the global creative community — which she’s been such a vital member of over the course of her career. As a result, Jen will step down from her role as Head of Amazon MGM Studios in order to start a new production entity, and we’re so pleased that she’ll continue to make her home right here on our lot via an overall first-look deal across both film and TV.”

It also comes after Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins admitted he intentionally made the show as LGBTQ+ propaganda to normalize sodomy.

While discussing why he turned Moiraine and Siuan into sodomizers, he told The Hollywood Reporter, “It felt essential that their relationship be textual. It is one of the most important relationships in the books for how it drives plot. It’s almost like the inciting incident of the show is contained within the relationship between these two. To me, the show didn’t make sense without that relationship being explicit because we are also putting more of the emphasis certainly on [Rosamund Pike’s] character, Moiraine, than there is in the books.”

“You’re also always looking as an artist for, ‘Why am I telling this story? I have to devote my life to this for years and years.’ It was worth devoting my life to telling this beautiful story, but also that the lead was a queer character. I’ve never seen a fantasy show where our lead was just casually a queer character that wasn’t only directed at the queer community. To have that was an important part of why I wanted to tell this story and why I fell in love with the books in the first place,” he added.

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Earlier in the interview, he justified denigrating Jordan’s work by claiming the books were coded as gay. Ironically, he also admits that they were not gay.

He said, “A lot of it also — this is the ’90s and early 2000s — was very coded. It’s always, women are pillow friends. They’re not lesbians. But it’s all there. 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,” he continued. “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.”

Judkins went on to admit one of his main goals with the show is to normalize sodomy, and he attempts to justify it with an alleged quote from Robert Jordan.

He said, “That’s something that we’ve tried to infuse into the world of the show and is something that comes from the books. Robert Jordan once famously just said casually, ‘I would say 30 to to 50 percent of people in the world of The Wheel of Time are probably not straight.’ That’s a huge thing that he was doing. We’re trying to infuse that in the show and not make it feel like the exception to a rule, but make them feel like a natural and central part of our world.”

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As for how he’s normalized this, he admits he did it by twisting the Aes Sedai to fit into his homosexual vision of the White Tower as well as making Aviendha and Elayne sodomizers.

He explained, “In the White Tower, we have this place that is almost exclusively a female domain, and there are a lot of conversations about the different kinds of relationships that women have within it. One thing that I was very interested in was the idea of these pillow friends or, quite obviously, loving relationships that happen within the tower amongst women. That was one thing I wanted to lean into with the show because often with single-gender places, you see a lot of homosocial and homosexual behavior. That idea of this place where only women live was very interesting to me.”

Next, he admitted to twisting the Aiel’s First-Sisters, “Then in season three, there’s this world that we go into. One of the most fully formed cultures in the books is the Aiel, and in the books, they always had this very fascinating idea, which was called First-Sisters. Two women sort of marry each other first and they may have relationships outside of that with men, they may not, but that core relationship in their life was with their first-sister. You see we have three first-sister relationships in season three, and they’re all different from each other.”

He then declared he did this with Aviendha and Elayne, “We have two main characters Aviendha (Ayoola Smart) and Elayne (Ceara Coveney) who eventually become first-sisters in the books. Justine Gilmer, who’s an amazing writer, was a big part of pulling it up. How we pulled it up was to forefront that relationship and the loving nature underneath it early in the show, so when they eventually become first-sisters, it’s based on this relationship they already have with each other. I love that. I like having a multiplicity of queer relationships and a multiplicity of how different cultures approach queerness in the world of the Wheel of Time.”

What do you make of the show getting scrapped?

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