Episode 99: Transcript

Episode 99: Gender Is Magic in the Wheel of Time with C.L. Clark

Transcription by Keffy

Charlie Jane: [00:00:01] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction, fantasy, science, the universe, and jelly babies, and just everything. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of a young adult trilogy. The second book Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak comes out in April.

Annalee: [00:00:17] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I am a science journalist who writes science fiction. And my latest book is about archaeology. It's out now in paperback and it's called Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:30] So today, we're going to be talking about the Wheel of Time. Boop, boop, boop! The Wheel of Time is a super… It’s one of the most successful fantasy book series of all time and it's now become a hugely popular TV series on Amazon. Why is this show and the books so incredibly addictive and fascinating? And how does it kind of reflect some interesting tropes about gender and society? 

[00:00:57] To help us figure all of this out, we're going to be joined by author C.L. Clark, the author of The Unbroken which is the first book in the Magic of the Lost trilogy. And just a warning, there's going to be some spoilers for both the books and the TV show of Wheel of Time, although I don't think any major ones after the first season. 

[00:01:17] Also in our audio extra next week, we're going to be talking about why so many epic fantasies seem to take place in the late Middle Ages or early modern Europe. And, by the way, did you know that our patrons get audio extras with every single episode, plus, essays, reviews, and access to our Discord channel. It's all amazing. And it can be yours for just a few bucks a month. This podcast is entirely supported by you, the listeners. So anything you give goes right back into making our opinions even more correct.

Annalee: [00:01:49] It also pays for our candy budget.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:52] That's true. 

[00:01:54] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:21] We're so excited to be joined by C.L. Clark, the author of the amazing new book, The Unbroken. And C.L., thanks for joining us. Welcome.

C.L.: [00:02:30] Thank you guys so much for having me. I don't want to be too much of a fan kid on main but between Never Say You Can't Survive and Autonomous, I'm a little. Whoo. It’s a little hot in here.

Annalee: [00:02:44] Wow, well, feeling is mutual.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:47] Definitely back at you. We are loving The Unbroken.

Annalee: [00:02:49] Thanks for being here. Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:51] Yeah, and it's so great to get to talk to you. So we just wanted to start with the most basic question in the universe, which is, what is the Wheel of Time about, and between, like 15, 20 books, I don't know, of like story in a few sentences, please.

C.L.: [00:03:09] Yeah, definitely. Really easy. So basically, it's about this plucky gang of kids who go off to discover that they all have some important role to play in this last battle against the Dark One. And in particular, one of them is the Dragon Reborn who is important because he's the reincarnation of the man who imprisoned the Dark One in the first place. So you've got like 15 books of finding him, finding all of them, and dealing with all of the internal politics of the universe to go fight one big bad guy.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:45] And he's not Sauron. He's totally not Sauron. He's some other guy. He's like, Cherae, you've said that the Wheel of Time books were really important to you and that they kind of helped who inspired you to write fantasy? What is it that you love about these books?

C.L.: [00:03:59] You know, honestly, I think that part of it is that they came at the right time for me. They were my first big fantasy series, like some people found like the Terry Goodkind series first, some people found the Shannara series first. But the one that I found was the Wheel of Time, it had been… Like, I was in middle school, and it had been repackaged as a sort of, I don't even know if it was a kid's version, because it wasn't abridged. I'm pretty sure it was the same book, but it was illustrated. And—

Charlie Jane: [00:04:35] Oh, wow. 

C.L.: [00:04:37] Yeah, it was illustrated and book one, The Eye of the World was cut in two. And so the two books were called From Two Rivers and the second was called To the Blight. And so that was how I was introduced to it first, and then I remember trying to find the sequel, and I was like looking through all of the kids section because I bought the book from my Scholastic Book Fair from school. And so I'm walking around. And I'm super shy. So I don't ask a single bookseller where to find the books until one time, whoever adult was buying the books for me, they're like, look, just, we're gonna go talk to these people just hold your panties. And so then they just walked me right over to a shelf full of them. And I'm like, oh my gosh. The adult section!

Annalee: [00:05:26] There’s a million books!

Charlie Jane: [00:05:31] And it’s the adults versions. Oh my God, it’s like so much more grown up. Oh my God. Yeah. Well, you learned an important lesson, which is that booksellers are friends.

C.L.: [00:05:38] Yes. Yes, now I always talk to booksellers. I love booksellers. And that was pretty much the beginning of the end for me, because once I found out that there was an adult fantasy section. And so then, like, the thing that did kind of set Wheel of Time apart was that there are so many women in charge of things. And at the time, I was definitely more women identified and, and so it made sense to me to be like, ah, yes, all these women have magic powers. Now, maybe I want to be like one of the sword people. But there was a lot of gender stuff I wasn't ready for. So I also really identified with the Maidens of the Speer, because they got to fight, they got to do the physical stuff, in ways that the magic women didn't get to. And so it was a lot of, yeah, it was a lot of that I think that made me really really glom on to it.

Annalee: [00:06:37] So it sounds like what really got you excited was the characters and the fantasy setting maybe was secondary to just the fact that there were all these characters that you could really get into.

C.L.: [00:06:47] I mean, I think that it was, it is still, it boggles me when I think about trying to write something like this. It's such an in depth world, it's so I don't even… like, the amount of wiki-ing, I would have to keep. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:09] Oh my God. Yeah. 

C.L.: [00:07:10] And so there’s definitely something about that that I stick to. Just like, I stick to The Lord of the Rings. There's just so much and it's so, I mean, as far as I can tell, so organized.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:23] Yeah, I mean, having tried to do that, and having actually tried to keep a wiki for my world, it's actually, it's a nightmare. It's just a super total nightmare. And I've ended up just sort of having to just go back and look at the previous books and be like, what the heck was this thing? What do they do? Oh, yeah. So it’s a pain in the neck.

[00:07:40] So you know, talking about the TV show, not having read the books, full disclosure, my impression is that the TV show kind of is queerer and maybe a little bit more more progressive in some ways. Like do you think that that's true? Like in terms of how the characters are depicted?

C.L.: [00:07:59] Oh, yeah, definitely. And I don't know, obviously we could get into the whole like, is this what the author intended, blah, blah, blah, kind of stuff, but it wasn't until later in the books. I don't remember… If my memory serves me, well, because I read them but I haven't for a while and I don't remember if we start talking about the quote unquote “pillow friends” that the Aes Sedai are in the Brandon Sanderson era or before that.

Charlie Jane: [00:08:35] Oh my God.

C.L.: [00:08:39] But it's definitely mentioned that… which is fair because, you know, it's an all women institution. It's just like he I kind of assume that somebody is having lesbianic type sex.

Annalee: [00:08:51] Yeah, like what are they doing up there—

C.L.: [00:08:54] Exactly!

Charlie Jane: [00:08:54] In the White Tower.

Annalee: [00:08:56] In the White Tower, exactly, yeah. The Tower of Thrusting.

Charlie Jane: [00:08:58] You know, I love the that one episode where Moiraine and the Amyrlin Seat are just hooking up and doing kind of like BDSM roleplay and stuff and I was just like, okay, yes. This is, I need this, I need way more of this in my fantasy stories.

C.L.: [00:09:11] Oh my God.

Annalee: [00:09:11] Okay, so is that actually in the book, or was that purely like just for us in the TV show?

C.L.: [00:09:19] Both. So of the pillow friends I believe that Moiraine and Siuan were said to have had a historical, like it's not current, by any means. A historical relationship as pillow friends. 

Charlie Jane: [00:09:38] Oh, I see. 

C.L.: [00:09:41] And maybe that ended when Siuan became the the Ambyrlin, but I always, in my head when I was reading it. I always called it A-Merlin, so it's taking some adjusting. Yeah, so that, putting it texturally like that and making it a continual relationship. That's new. And frankly I love it like I screamed out loud when I saw that moment but also like the moment later, the moment later when Moiraine is telling the girls telling a Egwene and Nynaeve that Siuan Sanche waits for one woman and it's not you. That was, oh.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:28] The look on her face when she says that, I was like, I actually did kind of scream when she said that. And the kind of like, the way she winks at the camera almost. Her back is turned to them and we see her kind of go woohoo. I’m that bitch. Anyway.

C.L.: [00:10:41] That’s so smug and so hot. So into it.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:44] Oh my god that. I gotta say that that whole storyline with Siuan was like where I really, I mean, I already loved the show, but I really fell in love with the show during that part. I also just love how nurturing and gentle the male characters are allowed to be with each other and with other people. Like there's so much male nurturing in this show and so much like, men treating each other like wounded baby birds, which I feel like is something that I don't know if it's in the books. It's definitely something—

C.L.: [00:11:11] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:11:12] Okay. Good. I mean, that makes me like the books more.

C.L.: [00:11:16] The friendship between the three, Ta’veren boys in particular. So Mat, Perrin, and Rand. They're actually really close and really sweet to each other. And I think that it's certainly different in the TV show. I think they're nicer. And even Rand, I think, is a little bit cuter. He's, I mean, I'll be honest, he's not my favorite character.

Annalee: [00:11:37] I have been actually calling him, in my mind, I've been calling him Bland. Just from watching the show, like I haven't read [crosstalk]

Charlie Jane: [00:11:45] I like Rand, I mean he’s not my favorite.

C.L.: [00:11:44] Yeah, yeah.

Annalee: [00:11:44] I think he's a little bland.

Charlie Jane: [00:11:49] I like Rand. I don't know. 

[00:11:50] So, you know, I feel like the show kind of seems to… I guess, part of why I never read the books is because I had gotten the impression that they were extremely gender essentialist. And I’d read about how there are two kinds of magic, there's male magic and female magic, and that male magic is harsh and violent and female magic is gentle and yielding and nice. And it felt very essentialist. And I feel like the TV show, from what I understand, makes a change to that where it's like magic has been poisoned so that men can no longer do it safely. 

WoT Clip: [00:12:26] It’s true, isn’t it? What they say about men who can channel, that eventually they go so mad they kill everyone they've ever loved. 

[00:12:36] It is I have a favor to ask you. Just one. Tell them I died here.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:43] Although I want to throw out there, this is still very essentialist it's still men and women and a difference between how men and women can act and there's no there's no non-binary people. There's no trans people, there's no, well, there's no kind of edge cases. And there's also just like, it's very gendered. 

Annalee: [00:13:02] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:03] What do you think about that in the books versus in the TV show?

C.L.: [00:13:07] So the thing about the the poison source, it is still, that’s textual, and even at its… when it is, because it does get, like you said, spoilers. So here's a warning everybody, it does get cleaned at some point.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:22] Okay. 

C.L.: [00:13:23] And even then, the male side of the One Power is still like riding a river is how it's described, or like, a torrent of flames. It's very, like rarrr rarr rarr.

Annalee: [00:13:41] I mean, I feel like, they capture that in the TV show, too. Like, there's a lot of like riding the flames and hearing the wind and all that kind of stuff.

C.L.: [00:13:48] Yeah, so it's definitely still very binary like that. And to be honest, I don't know that even the TV show could fix that. I think because the source material is just, it's very split. But it is, in theory, it is the same thing. It's just how the different sides are tapping it. And so sometimes I wonder if that could be seen more as like women are socialized to approach, in this world they're socialized to approach the power in this way because they are taught by other women who are taught by other women who are taught by all of these women who have learned to deal with the One Power in opposition to these men who have broken the world.

Annalee: [00:14:37] Yeah, and the men are all untrained because there's no, as far as we can see in the show, there's no institutions that are for like, magical guys. 

C.L.: [00:14:47] No.

Annalee: [00:14:47] We do meet the one guy who's like a bard who's like, actually I'm secretly kind of a magical guy. I didn't actually understand what his…

C.L.: [00:14:55] Oh, Thom, the gleeman, the guy with the daggers who saved Mat, yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:59] Yeah. That guy.

Annalee: [00:15:01] Yeah. And I was, because all I do is play D&D, I was like, oh, it's a bard with magic. That's that type of bard that you can be. Like, bards do have spells.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:09] I don't know if you… he doesn't actually do magic, does he? He just sort of knows a lot of stuff.

Annalee: [00:15:13] Yeah, he’s.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:16] He’s sort of an Obi-Wan.

Annalee: [00:15:17] And he's aware of men who have magic, it felt like.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:19] He’s a singing Obi Wan.

Annalee: [00:15:22] Yeah, he kind of, yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:23] He’s like, singing Obi Wan.

C.L.: [00:15:24] Without the… He's more like a really wise Jaskier.

Annalee: [00:15:34] Yes, yeah, because he is a bard. 

C.L.: [00:15:37] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:15:37] Like, that's his main job. And I was wondering what you two thought about what… And again, I'm kind of focusing on the show. What is the show trying to do with gender? Like, I liked that idea that there's this hint that maybe it's not an essentialist view? Maybe it's just that women are kind of put into institutions where they learn how to use magic. Do you think that this is a show that's trying to do like a gender flip? So that it's like, oh, this is fantasy, but like women on top?

Charlie Jane: [00:16:08] I mean, I think it's more complicated than that. Because we do have, you know, there are a lot of powerful men in the show who are like powerful in the ways that men are traditionally powerful, like with military strength or with political power. And there's a lot of like rhetoric in the show about like, towards the end, I think it's Nynaeve says, “You know, women are always alone, except they're never alone, and blah, blah, blah.” There's a lot of talk about women and what it means to be a woman and what women know that men don't know. And like, it feels like it's, there's a little bit… It feels like a show that's trying very hard to be feminist and that does succeed and being feminist in some really important ways, like giving Moiraine a lot of nuance and giving the men more gentleness and nurturing, like I said, but it's also a show that feels in some ways, like it's embracing some very 90s feminism, of like, you know, kind of what it what, whatit means to be a woman and how there are things about being a woman that men will never understand, kind of.

Annalee: [00:17:03] So it’s like power feminism. This is like Naomi Wolf… 

Charlie Jane: [00:17:08] Kind of, but also kinda Clarissa Pinkola Estes, maybe, like women who run with the wolves or something. I don't know.

Annalee: [00:17:12] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:17:12] It's got a little bit of that going on. I don't know, what do you think Cherae?

C.L.: [00:17:17] You know, in some ways, I think that they're doing the best that they can with what they have. 

Annalee: [00:17:21] Yeah. 

C.L.: [00:17:21] Because this is a very, it's definitely a product of its time. And for me, when I watched the TV show, it seems like greatly changed in some really good ways that make it a lot more enjoyable for me. But at the same time, yeah, like, I don't even know. I tried to think about how they would handle a trans person with this magic system, for example. And I'm like, so mostly we'd have like, so say I'm, so I walk up into the tower, and I'm like, hey, guys, nice to see you. I've got some cool powers. I can channel your kind of magic, but I don't want you to talk to me, call me your sister. I don't want you to call me, like, I'm not a woman of the Aes Sedai. Like, to be honest, I think they’d just be like, all right, I guess. Fine.

[00:18:23] But they might if you were to walk up and say, hey, I'm a guy, I can channel, then of course, they'd lock you up immediately. But then they'd start probing you and they'd be like, well, wait a minute. You have the wrong kind of magic. You have the okay, magic. And so, I mean, I feel, I feel like at some point they’d figure it out and be like okay, well.

Annalee: [00:18:44] Yeah, I just I think that the question is, are they TERF or are they inclusive?

C.L.: [00:18:50] I think that some of them would be and some of them wouldn't. I bet we can all imagine what Ajah would probably be more TERF-ish.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:56] Yeah, there was definitely… I feel like the show, one of the things I like about the show is it's kind of like hinting at like, oh, yeah, the the TERFs are the really bad ones. And like, stay away from them. Blondie, whatever her name is. Liandrin is super TERF-y.

C.L.: [00:19:08] Yeah. LIandrin, yeah.

Annalee: [00:19:10] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:10] Okay, so we're gonna take a really quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the tropes of Wheel of Time.

[00:19:18] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Annalee: [00:19:21] This week, we'd like to recommend a podcast that we love called the Science for the People. And it's exactly what it says on the tin.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:28] Science for the People hosts Bethany Brookshire, Rachelle Saunders, Anika Hazra, Carolyn Wilke and Marion Kilgour, go deep with scientists and science journalists about issues in the world of science that impact society in the past, present, and future. They've talked with authors like Mary Roach, I love her, about human-wildlife conflict and with indigenous scientists about decolonizing scientific research.

Annalee: [00:20:00] They've also even spoken with me about my book Four Lost Cities. What I like about this podcast is that they always go into avenues you don't expect. They explore the social implications of science. So you'll learn a lot about new discoveries but you'll also come away understanding the politics of how science is done. 

[00:20:22] Do you feel your nerd powers intensifying? We thought so. Subscribe to Science for the People on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, you will not regret it. This show is truly amazing.

Charlie Jane: [00:20:40] Yeah, so one thing I keep thinking about that's super interesting is that Wheel of Time is getting this really big budget amazing adaptation at the same time as Dune. And they both kind of share this trope that's actually kind of an unusual trope of like, the dude who's like the kind of prophesied savior who people have been waiting for for thousands of years and he's the only one who can do the magic that's normally done by women. Which, in Dune  is the Bene Gesserit magic. And the Bene Gesserit are basically a lot like the Aes Sedai in some ways, but it's very much about like the one dude who can save us in a world where women have magic. And I'm wondering, like, is it weird that we're… is it just a random coincidence that we're getting both of these like, super gendered kind of magical savior stories at the same time? Or is there a reason why they're both happening now?

C.L.: [00:21:31] I had a couple of thoughts about this. And on the one hand, I think it's slightly different because Rand / the Dragon Reborn is definitely still using the men's magic. And it's definitely tainted. There’s problem with it still. He’s dealing with the same problems that all men who channel use, which means throughout the books, he slowly starts going through the same madness that that Logain does. In the first season of the TV show.

[00:22:04] But to your point, I kind of wonder if it's more like that was a thing of, older, genre fiction. That it's not that we're doing it now because we want to, but I wonder how much of it is just that it takes a really long time for these to get made? And it just happens.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:25] I mean.

C.L.: [00:22:25] That they both happen right now.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:27] That actually makes sense, yeah.

Annalee: [00:22:28] Yeah, it's like a residual trope that's still sticking around.

C.L.: [00:22:33] And I can think of like, you know, after Game of Thrones people cast around for the next big high fantasy man epics and Dune and  Wheel of Time were right there with like, built in fan bases, because they're not gonna, they're not taking like that many chances on new, just recently published type stuff. And even when they are, that's like, five, six years of production into the future anyway. And so they have similar kind of ingredients, that Savior/Destroyer thing. Because for me, it feels actually kind of common in fantasy, even though like when I think about it, I don't know, maybe I maybe I can't think of any more. But.

Charlie Jane: [00:23:10] That's the thing that like, really surprised me because I went looking and I was like, okay, is this a trope that's used a lot of only women have magic, but there's this one dude who's super powerful. And like, those are the two examples. That's pretty much it. They’re it. And like, I feel like it's, it's a trope that offers a lot of like, you know, wish fulfillment in the way that a lot of like chosen Savior tropes do. And it's like, specifically  getting to be the one dude who is super awesome in a world where women are mostly the ones who are awesome makes you an even more awesome, dude. 

Annalee: [00:23:43] Yeah, but I think Cherae is right that this is part of the Savior/Destroyer trope as well. That this is just a little tweak on that kind of character. And I mean, both Dune and you know, the Wheel of Time series are written after sort of the 1960s and ‘70s, feminist science fiction became more mainstream.

Charlie Jane: [00:24:08] Right.

Annalee: [00:24:08] So it's two dudes who are responding to the rise of feminist fiction. And they're like, oh, well, where do I fit into this? Maybe I can be the coolest! Maybe I can figure out a way to incorporate women's power but still be even more powerful.

C.L.: [00:24:25] And see and I wonder like, because I don't think this really happens with Rand. He does get his little harem, and—

Annalee: [00:24:34] He gets a harem? [Laughs.] Oh, God.

C.L.: [00:24:37] Yeah!

Charlie Jane: [00:24:35] He what? Okay, that’s… I thought he was all about Egwene. Like, Egwene is like his—

C.L.: [00:24:44] Yeah, she gets she comes to her senses, it's fine. 

Annalee: [00:24:45] Oh, good. 

C.L.: [00:24:47] But he gets all the other hot ones like Min. Oh my God. When I saw her, I was like, he does not deserve her. He does not deserve Min. 

Charlie Jane: [00:24:58] Which one is Min, again? 

C.L.: [00:25:00] The one who can see the future. 

Charlie Jane: [00:25:03] Oh yeah. Oh, she hooks up with Rand?

Annalee: [00:25:05] Oh, what?

Charlie Jane: [00:25:06] No! She can see how bad that's gonna be and she still does it? I don’t understand. 

Annalee: [00:25:11] Oh, man, what a bummer. Wow, I really like her character. Well, whatever, we'll see how it goes.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:16] [crosstalk] different in the show.

C.L.: [00:25:16] We’ll see what they do. There's also a couple others who also, I think that, you know, I can't remember. But there's a Twitter bot that couples his other two women together often. So I wonder if they have their own thing and I just don't remember it because that would make me happier.

Annalee: [00:25:37] Yeah, I've heard that in the books. There's a lot of like, open and also hinted at polyamory, too. So that's kind of exciting.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:45] That is exciting. 

C.L.: [00:25:47] Oh, yeah. I wonder why not? Why they don't seem, to these authors. They go… their man characters go and take the girl magic, but not all the associated softness that goes with it, you know? Like, if they're trying to say like, look how I can infiltrate the women’s spaces, they don't infiltrate the women's spaces and then become like the women, they just infiltrate and then take their own thing out of it.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:17] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:26:17] Although, to be to be fair, both the Aes Sedai and Bene Gesserit are pretty badass. I would not call them… at least the Bene Gesserit I would not call soft. They're pretty, like, I will stick a poison needle in your throat level, they’re—

Charlie Jane: [00:26:34] That’s just Saturday, that’s Saturday for the Bene Gesserit.

Annalee: [00:26:36] I feel like they are very, they're hard. And that's one of the things that's awesome about them. 

C.L.: [00:26:39] That's true.

Annalee: [00:26:42] Yeah. But I know what you mean, because I feel like in Wheel of Time, there is more of a hint that there's a kind of intuitiveness to their magic, like something that we associate with traditional femininity.

C.L.: [00:26:53] Yeah, and I'm thinking also just specifically of how they approach the magic, like I remember in the books, the way they teach the men to channel is focus on this flame, this fire and then you feed everything into it. And then when they teach the girls to channel, it's always think of this rosebud, and you're going to like, put your stuff into it and it's going to unfurl. And part of that. Yeah.

[00:27:22] And part of it is that they're learning from people who learn from the same institution. And so it's kind of like that institutional problem. Like if you have these teachers, and these teachers learn this thing, and they learn this thing, then you all end up stuck in the same mode. But yeah, that was just my thought I was trying to find again.

Annalee: [00:27:42] I wanted to make sure that we talked about the political structure of this world, which both Charlie Jane and I were confused by as we were watching the TV series, because so there's the Aes Sedai, which I feel like the TV series basically lays out kind of what they are. But then there's the Whitecloaks. There's the gleemen. There's presumably some other governmental structures too, because otherwise, who are the Aes Sedai dealing with? So we don't get a real concrete sense of like, what's going on? Like, what's… are the Whitecloaks like the sworn enemies of the Aes Sedai. So how does this work in the books?

Charlie Jane: [00:28:19] Is there a church behind the Whitecloak? Like, who—

Annalee: [00:28:21] I feel like it’s supposed to be… 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:23] Where do they get their authority from?

Annalee: [00:28:24] Right, it’s supposed to be the Inquisition. And I think we're supposed to just see it and be like, oh, it's the Inquisition. Obviously, they're here. And it's like, but also where is Spain? Who’s funding them? 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:34] Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. 

Annalee: [00:28:35] Yeah, as Charlie was asking, who's like, dry cleaning all their Whitecloaks? Because they're like, they have to have a whole fleet of people. So how does that work in the books? Do you feel like it's more fleshed out there?

C.L.: [00:28:48] I think it definitely is, though I did. So the Aes Sedai are just like… they're essentially a centralised magic situation. And so there are roaming Aes Sedai, who, kind of they follow hints of oh, this person can channel, there's a weird wisdom over here. This girl blew up a thing, we’ll just take her to the whatever. Oh, this boy blew up a thing we're going to take him, definitely, like…

Annalee: [00:29:20] They can kill him.

C.L.: [00:29:23] Exactly. So there are people who are like, they have, in theory, they have complete purview over all the One Power stuff. And their power is given by actual power capacity, their strength in the One Power. And so that's the really badass thing about Siuan is that, in theory, she is the most powerful channeler in the world. And then these like, four or five kids show up and she's like, damn, what?

Annalee: [00:29:54] Yeah, so where are the Whitecloaks from? Are they from another country, or like…

C.L.: [00:29:59] They're from another country. Well, in theory. They start as from another country. And so each different country has its own government, some are councils, some are kings, monarchies, whatever kind of thing. And so I had to go back and double check because I was like, wait, but there's not a church. Is there a church? There’s not a church. So the Whitecloaks, in theory, they are hunting dark friends. 

Charlie Jane: [00:30:23] Oh.

C.L.: [00:30:23] Hence, the Whitecloaks. And they're kind of like this, they’re this paramilitary group that came out of one country and got so powerful that essentially they are the political ruler of that country even though there's a king or whatever.

Annalee: [00:30:38] And they think the Aes Sedai are kind of also dark friends or something?

C.L.: [00:30:41] Yes. Anybody who can touch the One Power is a dark friend because the One Power is what broke the world in the first place.

Charlie Jane: [00:30:49] Oh, okay, that's interesting.

C.L.: [00:30:53] So it's become like a religion. It's like they have that sort of zealous fervor but yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:00] Yeah, I just kept wondering with like the White Tower like they have like a town around it. They have all this stuff and presumably they have food. Who grows the food to feed the Aes Sedai, like in the White Tower like are there farms that are beholden to them? Do they get tribute from neighboring areas?

C.L.: [00:31:17] Yeah. I mean, I think they're a city state, essentially. And… A city tower state. Their city is Tar Valon. And I think they have no other external governing body. They are, themselves.

Annalee: [00:31:32] So they're kind of in charge of their own country. So it's like a magical country, or magical city state.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:36] Because they must have peasants who actually, if it's like quasi-feudal, I don't know.

Annalee: [00:31:42] What is that even called? A mono… a mancy-archy? Or a… what?

Charlie Jane: [00:31:48] Like a magical [crosstalk] state?

Annalee: [00:31:51] What is like an oligarchy with magic? It's like a olimancy? Sorry.

C.L.: [00:31:57] Technically, they are a council.

Annalee: [00:32:01] Okay, so it’s a—

C.L.: [00:32:02] The Aes Sedai, because they have the 12 people in the Amyrlin Seat, or however many there are, I forget.

Annalee: [00:32:08] But they're not elected. It's not a democracy.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:10] It’s not a democracy. 

Annalee: [00:32:12] I doubt that the farmers voted for the Amyrlin Seat.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:16] Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Anyway.

C.L.: [00:32:19] Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:19] So one thing that sort of interests me about the Wheel of Time I think both and this is probably from the books as well as the TV show, is this the notion that fate and reincarnation are kind of intertwined, and that reincarnation is part of what determines your role in the world. They talk about the wheel and the threads and everything. And when they talk about that they use it to describe both the notion of your past lives, especially in the case of the Dragon or your next life and we're going to be together in our next life or whatever. But also what you're destined to do and how important you are the wheel.

WoT Clip: [00:33:03] The wheel does not care if you were young or afraid. It certainly doesn't care what you want. The wheel calls you to this whether you can bear it or not. What any of us want now is meaningless. The only thing that matters is what you do.

Charlie Jane: [00:33:25] I think that's super interesting, especially considering how Christian most European fantasy is. And this feels like it's trying to graft on almost like Hindu, or some other religion involving more reincarnation and predestination onto a very what still feels like a very Christian world. How do you feel like that works and why is reincarnation such an important thing?

C.L.: [00:33:52] I mean, it does some interesting stuff with the stakes for me. I mean, because it has the same kind of fate thing as a lot of fantasy like you are the chosen one. You are destined to do this. And sure you can try to get out of it. But the wheel’s just going to turn you back in again somehow. And then the same thing with the Ta’veren kids. I like how the TV show has kind of spread the Ta’veren to the girls as well. But there are things that can happen that, if you get hurt in a certain way with a certain kind of magic attack, it’s called balefire. Like it just rips your entire thread out. You can't come back. Everything you ever did in the past is gone.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:36] Whoa.

C.L.: [00:34:37] Yeah. So like that's a fate worse than death, in theory. And other cool stuff happens as well. Like there's a little, for those who read the books. At least I got really excited when Mat takes the little girl’s toy and he's like, “Oh, it's Birgitte.” Or however they say it in the TV show because Birgitte is one of the great heroes of the past. And there's a horn that Mat will blow and bring all of the heroes of the past out of the wheel and back to fight in the last battle. 

Annalee: [00:35:13] Whoa. 

Charlie Jane: [00:35:15] Dude.

C.L.: [00:35:15] And Brigitte is one of them. And yeah, it's so awesome.

Annalee: [00:35:20] So it allows for…  Yeah, I love that it kind of like allows you to kind of tap into heroes of the past. And I do think, I mean, what we were just talking about with different nations, like the nation where the Whitecloaks come from as a more Christian nation. And it seems like the Aes Sedai nation is much more being cast as some kind of, like you said, Hindu or some other type of spirituality. So maybe that's why they get the power of reincarnation.

C.L.: [00:35:47] I mean, I think everybody kind of believes in the same wheel thing, just like the the traveling people, Tuatha’an, they're looking for this thing they lost, and they're hoping to find it again. The Aiel are also looking for someone to be spat out of the wheel. Surprise, surprise, it's going to be the Dragon. But you know.

Charlie Jane: [00:36:09] Well, that's convenient.

Annalee: [00:36:10] So it’s less reincarnation and more like, I mean, people do get reincarnated. But it's not like, everyone gets reincarnated, right? It's just like certain, fancy. 

C.L.: [00:36:20] They kind of make it seem like everyone does. And I mean, I guess that's fair, it's certainly easier to explain. I don't remember that as strongly from the books, even like the big bad guys. I guess they’d be most analogous to the Nazgul. So they supported the Dark One. But even they die and get reborn. I think, the path is a little different because I think they like force their way back into the world. But it's the same kind of concept. They get born again, in new bodies, there's even, oh, I completely forgot. Some of the Forsaken do come back in different gendered bodies, like different like physical sex bodies.

Charlie Jane: [00:37:02] Nice.

C.L.: [00:37:02] And so that is, I wonder, I wonder if the TV show will do anything interesting with that.

Annalee: [00:37:08] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:37:08] They did keep saying oh, the Dragon could be reborn as a woman, this time, the Dragon could be reborn as like more than one person. Yeah, I mean, the impression I get from the TV show is that like, everybody gets reincarnated. But most people just don't matter that much. Most people just kind of like, you’re cannon fodder, you're gonna be cannon fodder in your next life and your next life. And you'll just keep getting, like, not mattering too much in the grand scheme of things. 

C.L.: [00:37:32] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:37:33] Before we wrap up our discussion of all of this, I want to make sure that we talk about the big trope, which is the chosen one. And, you know, we've been talking a little bit about already how the chosen one works in Wheel of Time. And, you know, there's been, especially over the last, like, 10 years or so a lot of criticism of this type of trope that we're a little bit sick of chosen ones, maybe we could start thinking about, you know, collectives, as heroes or subverting the idea of the chosen one. 

[00:38:09] Obviously, these are books from before that period of criticism, these were books written in the ‘90s when we were still all in on chosen one. I'm wondering what both of you think about how the TV show is kind of grappling with that? Are we seeing any subversion of it? Is it really just re embracing the Chosen One trope because we’re still hungry for it even though there's a lot of criticism that's legitimate of that. 

C.L.: [00:38:39] So I think there is legitimate criticism, and I mean, there are like, essays upon essays written about it. But I think I, personally, as a reader and stuff I’m into it, it’s fine, whatever. But what I do want is that it's not the same demographically, like cis het white man chosen one. Because I think, theoretically, a different person in any demographic, other than that, which is our kind of textbook individualist playboy. That's just what we put in, we put cis het white man, individual, save the day, whatever. Like it's all about, it's all about him. He has the power, he's gonna do all of it. He's gonna make all the sacrifices, whatever, we don't care about anybody else. 

[00:39:32] And to be honest, I do think actually, that Wheel of Time itself changes that quite a lot. Like the last battle is literally, I mean, like the 15 book series is about all these people, basically, handing out flyers to all the different royals of the world and being like, hey, guys, do you want to come to my Last Battle? Thanks. Cool. Hey guys, do you want to come to my Last Battle, we need some army? Hey, guys, you guys can't fight each other. We need you both for the last battle. Okay? Hey guys. So it's like it goes on like that. And we've got, you know, Rand and his two best friends who are supposed to bring all of these other aspects like, there are so so so many different players like even from Mat finding this weird little fox people. They're like the Aelfinn and Eelfinn, it gets really complicated. It's really weird. It just, you just got to go with it. 

Annalee: [00:40:33] Yeah. 

C.L.: [00:40:34] And so he's asked to bring these people from across the sea, the people that we see at the very end of the season. We have to get all these people to go fight this big bad guy. And so it is a very communal thing. And that's like so like, that's why there's like 50 different points of view when you're reading the books. And I don’t mind that. But at the same time, I don't know, I would like to see more, I guess. 

[00:41:10] So when I think about it in terms of what actually happens in the real world. We don't have chosen ones per se, but we do have individuals who are loud about things that need to change. We're not all the heroes. We may follow the hero, which is great, like, fine. I'm like, we can’t all be heroes, we all just have to go. Because otherwise, we have too many people going in too many different directions. Like, you know, we need we need people to just support and do the thing. But so then how do we get those chosen ones in the real world? They have to choose themselves. Like they have to decide, okay, I know enough about this, this is the wrong thing. I'm gonna go do this thing. And people either come along for the ride or they don't. And so I don't think that the chosen one is so bad in that way. I think it's it just oversimplifies what it means to be a leader. Very often, it's just too simplistic.

Charlie Jane: [00:42:15] That's a really interesting way of looking at it. That basically, it's a model of like inspiring people or leading or you know, providing kind of a focal point, but we want to simplify it down to just like you are the one who is going to defeat the bad thing. You're the only one who can hold the sword. You're the only one who can do the thing.

Annalee: [00:42:32] Do the lady magic. 

Charlie Jane: [00:42:36] You know, I've been one of the people who've criticized the trope of chosen ones and like the whole hero’s journey thing, which is kind of related to the chosen one thing often, I've been a critic of that for at least 10 years. I feel like I've definitely written some very bitchy rants about the hero's journey, which I feel like actually, one of the things that about the Wheel of Time show is that I'm like, okay, stop refusing the call already. Yes, we get it. You want to go home. Okay, yeah, you can't go home. Yeah, get over it, kids. Which I feel like that's part of that goes along with that. But I do feel like the chosen one and the hero's journey, and all that kind of stuff. It's comfort food. And it's one of those things where like, I feel like those of us who obsessively read like every fantasy novel, or write our own fantasy novels, and who obsessively think about this stuff like 24/7 get jaded faster than, like, average people. And like so you know, it's just like, where everybody's like, oh, paranormal romance is over, portal fantasies are over. People who are kind of in the know, people in the inner circle of publishing and writing and criticism, will decide that a trope is like, finished. And then, ordinary readers might be like, no, I still want that trope, I still really like that trope. And I feel like it is comfort food. And one of the things I worry about sometimes is that, because there's a certain overlap between those of us who obsess about this stuff all the time, and marginalized creators who are kind of really active in these communities, that you’ll get tropes like the chosen one only being created by someone like Robert Jordan or JK Rowling. And that those are actually really popular tropes. And I feel like what's good is if you can bring something new to it, which I do think actually the Wheel of Time is doing by being like, no, there's actually five people who are important.

Annalee: [00:44:22] And they're not all white Jesus. 

Charlie Jane: [00:44:23] They're not all white Jesus. There’s a little bit more diversity in those five than in just Rand. So I think that that's a plus. And I think that the more you can make it into, like, we're doing this together and like, yes, there's somebody who's a leader, who's an inspiring figure, that's sure. That's great. I actually really like that. I mean, I think that that's given me a new way to think about the chosen one trope. So thanks for that.

Annalee: [00:44:48] Yeah, no, I like the the point that in fact, pretty much every chosen one you can think of, their role is really to consolidate a bunch of communities. Nobody wins… I mean I'm sure there are occasionally chosen ones who do win on their own. Like they get the super weapon and then they’re—

Charlie Jane: [00:45:08] Jake Sully rode the dragon! He rode the fancy dragon, and like… anyway, sorry.

Annalee: [00:45:13] But yeah, I think that the difference between kind of like a toxic chosen one narrative and a generative chosen one narrative is probably that one acknowledges the community and one is just hyper focused on white Jesus, I'm gonna just keep picking on white Jesus. Sorry. 

C.L.: [00:45:34] Yeah, and I think that probably also just depends on the writer and if they let themselves focus on everybody, all of the tech crew behind the scenes. Or are we only focusing on the lead? Because somebody, like you said, somebody's got to do the dry cleaning. And who is it?

Annalee: [00:45:52] And I want to know about them.

Charlie Jane: [00:45:54] I totally want a fantasy epic about the dry cleaner who cleans the heroe’s cloak, and is just like what did you get into at this time? Oh, my God.

Annalee: [00:46:05] That’s kind of the Persian Boy, a little bit. So if you've ever read any Mary Renault, he’s like… The Person Boy is basically just the lover of Alexander the Great, who hangs out in his room and does his laundry and dances for him and he's actually not a very good dancer. But because Alexander loves them so much everyone has to pretend like he's a really great dancer. Relatable. Yeah, so definitely. Let's have our Mary Renault revival. 

[00:46:36] So alright, we're gonna take another quick break. And when we come back, we're gonna talk to Cherae about her novel The Unbroken.

[00:46:43] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Charlie Jane: [00:46:51] I'm in the middle of reading The Unbroken and I'm just loving it so much. I'm just like, I don't even want to be sitting here talking, I want to be back in my room finishing reading it because it's just such an incredible book. And I already want the next one really badly. So you know, I read an interview where you said that one of the reasons why you wanted to write fantasy is because you didn't feel like you looked like or loved like the heroes in the fantasy stories that you grew up reading and you know, is The Unbroken in part, a response to things like Wheel of Time?

C.L.: [00:47:19] Oh, yeah, definitely. 100%. So, like I mentioned earlier about not yet figuring out gender feelings or even sexuality feelings until, I don't know, like halfway through the series, at least. I just, I don't know, man. You’re gonna make me go into some sort of self reflective crisis of the soul. But, first off, I just really wanted gay women. Like I wanted to read that, I wanted to see that. And even at that point, I wasn't even. I had a lot of internal stuff about race to deal with. In fantasy I was like, oh, well. Is this is this real fantasy if it has black people, because black people can't be elves. So clearly, I need to go look for the white elf fantasy or something like that. Like it was it was really fucked up. It was really messed up. Can I say that? 

Charlie Jane: [00:48:25] Yeah, of course.

Annalee: [00:48:27] Absolutely.

Charlie Jane: [00:48:26] You can absolutely curse on our podcast.

C.L.: [00:48:27] Okay, well, it was really fucked up. It took a long time to get over and around that and everything is still a work in process, a lot of things to constantly be interrogating. And one of the things that I really did want to do is put people like me in and on some levels, it's a gender thing and on some things, it's like a it's about like, including butch lesbians in particular. 

Annalee: [00:48:57] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:48:57] Yeah.

C.L.: [00:48:57] Because I still don't see those anywhere in any media. Like, when we got Gideon, and we got Gideon on the cover with like, Tommy Arnold art. I lost my mind. The first thing I saw is that she had, like, girl porn mags and was doing push ups and I was like, damn.

Annalee: [00:49:21] Yeah.

C.L.: [00:49:21] Like, what.

Charlie Jane: [00:49:21] I think that first page is what sucked in a lot of people with the porn and the push ups.

Annalee: [00:49:25] Yeah, it was amazing.

Charlie Jane: [00:49:25] And that's Gideon the Ninth of course. Yeah, I mean, I love the character of Touraine, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing her name right. Touraine. 

C.L.: [00:49:36] Touraine.

Charlie Jane: [00:49:38] Touraine and like how how buff her arms are. There's a lot of like, her arms are so buff. And she's such a total badass. I love that about her. 

Annalee: [00:49:47] Yeah, I wanted to ask about Touraine’s character more because you were saying that as you're thinking through Wheel of Time and your love of fantasy, you had a lot of racial stuff that you wanted to deal with and Touraine is dealing with basically internalized racism. And I wanted to just ask you to talk a little bit about that, and why you chose to do that with your character and kind of how that might be different from what we normally see in a fantasy story.

C.L.: [00:50:14] So basically, with The Unbroken, my goal was to complicate everything, like from sexuality to what we see of how people present as their genders. Like, I love my little soft boy Bastion. Like, Touraine and her arms and things that we don't often get to see depicted in our kind of stereotypical epic fantasy type things. And with colonialism, we have all of these, we have all of these fantasies where we're going to conquer somewhere, we're going to go steal this magic object. And you're stealing it from somewhere, right? And so one of the things I wanted to complicate with Touraine is like, so we have this situation where we've got the colonized and the colonizer and I don't think that there are… until Until recently, like, I think of Arkady Martine’s Memory Called Empire and Desolation Called Peace. We don't actually talk about the consequences of that conquest that often. 

[00:51:20] And I mean, sure, sometimes people will mention, like, and then the land was desolated by all of the war. And I'm like, okay, cool, but what about the people? What happened to them? And so that was what was really important for me to deal with, with Touraine, was to just see, what does it mean to be a person caught in this actual sort of machine of fantasy, but also real world colonialism?

Charlie Jane: [00:51:54] Yeah, and of course, like in the book, Touraine is returning to the country that she was ripped away from as a child, and she was conscripted as a soldier in the Balladairian Empire, which colonized her home and she's come home to kind of help impose order on her former home and her own people. And she sort of looks down on her people and thinks that they're inferior.

C.L.: [00:52:15] It's such a common thing, not just in the fantasy world, but there are so many of us who are removed from a quote unquote, “homeland” or “motherland,” and raised in some metropole, as a privileged person of that metropole, with all of the… Like, I have an American passport, and the power that gives me to move about the world, regardless of where I came from. It's definitely different from someone who doesn't have that. And even if on the physical outset, or in interactions with other people, we have the same stigma and so that's something that I really wanted to explore with Touraine and with the other Sands is what that does to you and how it distances you from people you might call family or can't call family.

Charlie Jane: [00:53:10] Yeah, and that's just so complicated and so heartbreaking. And so like so powerfully depicted in your novel. And then you have this intense relationship between Touraine and like the princess, Luca, who is kind of the prospective heir to the throne of this empire and who has come to basically finish subjugating Touraine’s people. Why did you think it was so important to represent Luca’s point of view in the book as the colonizer and why was it important to have that relationship be kind of so central on the book?

C.L.: [00:53:39] Part of it's just my id,  I was like, mmm, we want a bodyguard and royal romance.

Charlie Jane: [00:53:51] Well, yeah. 

Annalee: [00:53:51] True.

Charlie Jane: [00:53:51] Who doesn't want that?

C.L.: [00:53:55] So that's kind of how it started. But that was just like it was the first foray into the story. And the more I got into it, I was like, no, no, this is what I actually really want to do. This is what I want to talk about. The more I realized that I couldn't just have that relationship be so simple. And then I realized how much it was actually, like, the personal negotiations between them, or you know, they're they are representative of the larger political landscape. Just like in the real world, the same thing. We have to deal with political struggles within our own, like power struggles within our own relationships, because there's always some sort of power differential to navigate even with the people that we love. And so partly, I was just like, well, you know, this is one of the big bad tropes. The good guy who’s… the servant falls in love with the master and how do we… Can this work? If it can, how? What has to happen for it to work? Is it doomed? And so you know, I don't know, we'll find out in a couple books.

Charlie Jane: [00:55:08] I mean…

Annalee: [00:55:08] I just love how you remind the reader that the process of colonization is both personal and political. think that that's the kind of phrase that we often hear used talking about gender. But I think as you're saying, this is something that affects us psychologically. It effects our romances, it effects our families. It’s not always just a whole bunch of people marching in and killing people. That's generally how it starts. But then, as you know, and then there's sort of and how it's going. And the way it's going is, is always going to be personal, as well as, of course, political and economic. 

Charlie Jane: [00:55:46] Yeah. So one last question. So one of the things that's super fascinating about the book that it's sort of, I mean, the world building is really rich and complicated, and I can't possibly do justice to it in the next five minutes. But one thing that I really thought was super fascinating is that there's this kind of… there are these two schools of thought among the colonizers. There's the Duatiest[sp?] school where it's like, we basically have to be as brutal as possible to the people we're colonizing. And then there's the Tioriest , which is the more gentle, we've just got to like, re educate people. And they both seem objectively awful. They seem objectively awful different ways. And I'm wondering, what inspired that and why did you want to have two different competing ideas of how to destroy people?

C.L.: [00:56:32] I mean, the short answer, because they are in the real world, that's very much where it comes from. I mean, we have the, I can't remember who it was, but it was one of the old American generals while he was sweeping west and stealing Native American children. But there's the idea that you could save the person and turn them into a civilized version of a human aka a white human.

Annalee: [00:57:07] Yeah, through like, residential schools and other horrible practices. 

C.L.: [00:57:11] Right, exactly. And, you know, you've got that kind of rote schooling. And you've also got American slavery. There was physical, it was, you might have a quote, unquote, “good master,” who would give you small benefits, or you might just have nothing but brutality constantly. And so there's always been this kind of gentle hand versus the whip, but all of it's meant to control you. And then we look at the American school system now. Nobody is getting corporately punished, anymore. In theory. They shouldn't be. But minds are still being curtailed, to think a certain way about certain things. People are taught like, oh, don't speak, in this accent, don't speak this language. Because, in theory, American schools are a mélange of sorts. It's not an isolated boarding school, where you're trained out of things. But the children also now will help to curtail anything that's different about you. And so it may be more gentle than beatings, like physical beatings, but it's not necessarily. It doesn't feel good. And you still end up with the same warped sense of yourself. So.

Charlie Jane: [00:58:38] Yeah, it's very true. And on that, uplifting note, thank you so much for joining us Cherae. Where can people find you online?

C.L.: [00:58:48] Yeah, you can find me online at Twitter, I’m at @C_L_Clark or at my website, www.clclarkwrites.com.

Charlie Jane: [00:59:08] Nice.

Annalee: [00:59:09] Awesome. Thanks again for joining us.

Charlie Jane: [00:59:11] Thank you so much. Have a great evening.

C.L.: [00:59:11] Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much.

[00:59:14] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Charlie Jane: [00:59:16] Thanks so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. You can find us wherever you might find podcasts, even just possibly lying on the ground somewhere. If you find us at Apple or some other place where you can leave a review, please do leave a review. It makes a huge difference. Also, we're on Twitter as @OOACpod, and we have a Patreon, like we mentioned, at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. We appreciate any and all support. 

[00:59:41] Thanks so much to Veronica Simonetti, our incredibly brilliant and fearless producer. Thanks to Women's Audio Mission for letting us record here. And thanks so much to Chris Palmer for the music and thanks again to you, our beloved and wonderful listeners. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Bye!

Annalee: [00:59:58] Bye!