Rafe Judkins/2022 Dragonmount

*Dragonmount* had a live video interview with Rafe Judkins on December 17, 2022.

Participants included:

* Rafe Judkins, showrunner and executive producer
* Thom DeSimone, interviewer and host with *Dragonmount*
* Kathy Campbell, interviewer and host with *Dragonmount*

 *Notice: This interview contains **spoilers** for season 2 and the book series.*

## Interview transcript

### Introduction

**Thom DeSimone:** Hello everybody. How is everybody doing? Hey! Oh, Bane & Chiad, what's up, what's going on? So just going to give a quick couple seconds. Make sure you can all hear us and chat just give me a shout out. If anything sounds terrible because I'm horrible at my job and--
**Kathy Campbell:** that is a lie, you're doing great, Thom.
**Thom:** I'm the worst, it's okay you can be honest. She reprimands me all the time.
**Kathy:** Well yeah. In private.
**Thom:** It's true, it's true.
**Kathy:** In public, you are perfect and [indecipherable]
**Thom:** All right. So thank you everybody for coming to join us today. Obviously, we are Dragonmount and this is a special edition of my usual Saturday live. As you can see, I am joined by the lovely and amazing executive producer, magical unicorn Kathy above me over here. And there's this, like, very weird kind of blank space. Maybe someone special should be coming in there?
**Kathy:** I don't know. Are you guys -- do you want -- ?
**Rafe:** [*joins*]
**Thom:** Oh my god look it's Rafe Judkins! Oh my god!
**Kathy:** What a surprise!
**Rafe:** That paper reveal was flawlessly pulled off.
**Thom:** I am super professional at this I don't know if you know that.
**Kathy:** It's good. It's good. It's good. Thank you so much for being here, Rafe, we're so excited.
**Rafe:** I'm so happy to get to talk to you guys, it's so good to see you.
**Kathy:** Yay!
**Thom:** And I thank you for answering those questions when we were doing that rewatch stuff, that was a ton of fun.
**Rafe:** Oh no, it was really fun. It's just always great when people are able to go back and watch through it and there's so many So many thousands of things that we've thought about and done. But we had fun cuz we're in the writer's room for season three right now in London. And so a couple of them too, I like to go back into the writer's room was like, "Guys, what were we thinking on this one? Remember what we did with this? Can we tell them this? No, we can't."
**Thom:** I love that you tried, though!
**Kathy:** Amazing amazing. All right, Shall we get started? Let's go.
**Thom:** Yeah, go right in. So we got you in the hot seat now. So we got to ask the hard-hitting, right down to the meat of it questions.
**Rafe:** That's how interviews start, straight off the bat, right?
**Kathy:** Yep yep.
**Thom:** Exactly.
### Favorite dinosaur

Timestamp: 02:30
**Thom:** So right off the bat: What is your favorite dinosaur?
**Rafe:** My favorite dinosaur has always been... the... Pachycephalosaurus.
**Kathy:** Ooh, nice. And what a fun name to say -- [indecipherable] my favorite dinosaurs.
**Rafe:** Yeah, I was like, "I know how to spell it. Do I know how to say it out loud?"
**Thom:** You know how to spell that? There's way too many repeat letters in that for my dyslexia to keep up with, it'll be -- [*gestures for bad*]
**Kathy:** All right, so now that we've gotten that off, we're gonna probably get WAFOed but we're gonna, you know what, we're gonna try.
**Rafe:** Yeah, there could be a fair amount of that. We haven't been able to do an interview with people who really know this stuff for a while. So if I hit you with too many WAFOs, then I apologize.
**Kathy:** That's fine.
**Thom:** And by the way, thank you so much for doing this live with us. We know this is not something you do normally almost ever, so thank you.
**Rafe:** no, great, we finished writers room yesterday, so for the first time in a while it's like a day off.
**Kathy:** That's exciting!
**Rafe:** It's a holiday!
**Kathy:** And you're spending it working. We really appreciate it.
**Rafe:** Yeah, well, this isn't working.
**Kathy:** well I know you probably won't tell me to have an affair with a German Shepherd so I'm gonna use this right now okay.
### Season 2 release

Timestamp: 03:48
**Kathy:** We saw a recent report from Delhi Comic-Con suggesting season two would be premiering in early 2023. Is there any truth to that?
**Rafe:** I can say that there's some truth to it in that I do believe season two will be premiering in 2023. I think early there's still a lot of work that we've got to do on the show -- in post, VFX, all of that. So I would not expect it in *early* 2023, but you can expect it in 2023.
**Kathy:** Excellent.
**Thom:** That's good because I'm really excited, I can't wait.
**Rafe:** Yeah I feel like every month we'll be actively shooting an episode and they're like, "There's a spoiler online that it's coming out next week," and you're like, "We haven't shot it..."
**Kathy:** "We're still filming."
### *God of War* series adaptation

Timestamp: 04:39
**Thom:** Speaking of releasing and television shows for Amazon, I feel like if I don't ask this we may get harangued endlessly in chat. So it was also recently reported that you are going to be heading as another showrunner for a recently picked up series. I believe it's called uh *God of War* maybe?
**Rafe:** It is.
**Thom:** Some people might be...
**Rafe:** Yes, yeah, well it's funny for me. This is something I've been working on for a long time with Mark [Fergus] and Hawk [Ostby]. So the announcement just came out but it's something that we've known about and been involved with for a while. It's really exciting, I love the games, I love working with those two guys, they're great, really smart. I love *The Expanse*, I'm sure many others are fans as well. *Iron Man*, also a good film, don't know if you've seen it.
**Kathy:** [*joking*] Yeah I've heard about that.
**Thom:** [*joking*] Once or twice, I think, years ago.
**Rafe:** So it's great, it's just a really fun project to work on. And I've always worked on other stuff while I'm working on *The Wheel*, so it'll never affect my commitment to *Wheel*, obviously. But it's something that I'm really happy to be working on because I really love it. And it's also really different than *Wheel* in a lot of ways, so it's a good balance to do between the two.
Timestamp: 05:54
**Thom:** Do you think there's anything that you can take that you learned or experienced in *Wheel of Time* over to that show in any way?
**Rafe:** Yeah, so much. It's a very different project and medium to adapt, so in a lot of ways things are very different than adapting something like *Wheel of Time*. But especially from a production perspective, we've just learned so much. When we first started filming *Wheel of Time*, it was kind of only *Game of Thrones* that had attempted something so large before. And now there's so many shows that are doing it. I've gotten to know a lot of the showrunners of those as well. There's so many really smart women and men who are doing this and figuring out how to put these things together. I think if anything I've learned a lot about the production aspect of it that will be useful in going into *God of War* -- and also flick back into *Wheel of Time* hopefully. Things that we can find out about that because the fun thing about making film and TV is that it's always changing and there's always new technology, new cameras, new things that you can use to bring these worlds to life. So it's fun, it's fun to be able to do both.
**Thom:** kind of like that bolt camera that you used for the...
**Rafe:** Yeah exactly. Like the things that you -- oh, I was gonna say something I definitely shouldn't.
**Kathy:** I swear that's not our goal. I promise, I promise.
**Rafe:** No no no, I'll be careful. I have to twist my words a lot.
**Thom:** Yeah, I'm sure I'm sure you're used to it.
**Rafe:** I've sworn way more than Three Oaths to Amazon though. But yeah, we're doing just that with with season two and three now, I can say at least, where we have some fun new kinds of technologies coming up.
**Kathy:** Excellent, can't wait to hear about it.
### Lessons from season 1 for season 2

Timestamp: 07:52
**Kathy:** Along those same lines of lessons, Sean was wondering: What major lesson did you learn that you took from season one that helped inform your process or the structure or the setup or anything for season two?
**Rafe:** Yeah I think season one coming in, we had a very clear plan of doing a longer season to tackle that, and had to compress it. Going into season two, we tried to be -- Obviously, I have my long-term plan for the show, and so that all shifts with eight episodes instead of ten episodes. But going into season two with more foreknowledge of how long it would be, we were able to try to figure out ways to get longer episodes and figure out how to get more of the story that we need to tell. Because we had a lot of story to tell in season one, we have a *massive* amount of story to tell in season two. It's... mind-shattering at times.
**Kathy:** It only gets bigger.
**Rafe:** I think a big lesson we learned was being able to approach it from the beginning like that. And in some cases changing the story more in order to be able to get through the whole story more effectively. So it's kind of a counter-intuitive thing where I feel like sometimes we can actually pull off some of the story pieces and delivering on things from the books more effectively if we don't try to hit every single tiny beat of it, because the adaptation we're doing is just at a different scale than other things in terms of like the amount of page -- we're trying to do, if we get our whole series, we're doing like 200 pages an episode, versus *Game of Thrones* 50 pages an episode.
**Kathy:** Right.
**Rafe:** You have to sort of -- it's a little more -- I know this will, uh -- People are probably shaking and dying in the chat right now. But there's more re-mixing, kind of, sometimes to be able to deliver the story overall, so that you kind of get to -- you know.
**Thom:** I imagine it like a jigsaw puzzle that you're kind of making as you go.
**Rafe:** Well and a piece of it too is like you know for season two especially one of the first things Brandon -- I think I can say all this, oh well, I'm going to, all right -- so when I first talked to Brandon Sanderson about the show, and my worries about the overall adaptation I was like, you know one thing I'm thinking about is that books two and three both have the same narrative arc essentially of landing with Rand in a confrontation from a man who we'll come to realize is Ishamael, and how do we...? You can't do that in television, two seasons in a row, because that doesn't work in that context. And he said the same thing of like, no you have to combine those two. Even though there's these incredible stories that are in both of those books, if you told them sequentially like that it would sort of break it down. Which was his same instinct as well. So I think one of the big challenges we face with season two is -- I think you'll feel this when you watch it -- is almost like we throw up some of the juggling balls at the end of season one where it's like, okay here's a bunch of pieces that we've put in play. This is foundation here. All the pieces go up and by the end of season two you'll see them start to all land in places that set up *The Shadow Rising*. But a lot of those are taking different paths than than you might have anticipated from the books because we can't tell those two books sequentially. Even though I love the stories in both of them and they're really strong stories, you just structurally can't do that.
**Thom:** Of course, and the best part about that is like, we get to go on this journey through the *Wheel of Time* again where we thought we were never going to get any more content. Especially for someone who's been reading it for like 20 years, it's like, "Ah! New Wheel of Time content!" that I get to be surprised by.
**Rafe:** Yeah.
### Diversity

Timestamp: 12:01
**Thom:** So the next question was submitted by an anonymous user, but it is a great question. The diversity in the writer's room and behind the camera with the crew has been praised by the community. Has the diversity perspective enriched the show's production in any way that you'd like to share?
**Rafe:** In so many different ways. I always think of diversity as a much larger category than how it's sometimes talked about in online communities. When I'm putting together the writer's room, I'm thinking about people who also have diversity of thought, who are -- are they comedy writers? Are they people who are really good with structure and investigative beats? That kind of thing we're also putting into it. One thing that was important to us especially first season was -- a lot of Western cultures do not believe in reincarnation, so it's not something that's ingrained in us from the beginning. So a big thing I was always trying to do with the writer's room was get us in the headspace of our characters who all believe in reincarnation, and it's just like a fundamental piece of their life. So we had a writer on the show, Celine Song, who grew up in Korea and she was very helpful sometimes of being like, "Oh you know, my family believes in reincarnation, like everyone I know does and this is how it sort of filters into our daily life" as opposed to just the big ideas of the mythology of it. It's like, what do you think when someone yells at you? And how do your beliefs affected? And how your interpersonal relationships affected by that? So she was really helpful, for instance, with the Rand and Egwene storyline. They have this idea of souls brushing across each other in lives, and that sometimes you'll have a very strong relationship with someone and you know that it's not going to be for this life -- sorry, spoiler alert for anyone that doesn't know *The Wheel of Time*. I don't know how --
**Thom:** We're full book spoilers!
**Rafe:** Yeah, you know, if you're there. Those two characters won't be together in this life. So that idea of like, you have to build a certain number of brushes in your past lives before you're ready to be with someone. And philosophically, we could think of Rand and Egwene's relationship as like one of those brushes on their way to being together in a future life. That kind of stuff from a writer's room that has a strong diversity of thought and culture and backgrounds, it can really bring a lot to the show and I think it has to ours.
**Thom:** I agree.
**Kathy:** Absolutely.
### Religious and cultural practices

Timestamp: 14:50
**Kathy:** So along those same lines we see several ritualistic almost religious-like practices on screen: Stepin burning incense to ward off Forsaken, as well as Lan praying in episode four. What is the thought process for expanding this on screen when in the written work there is far less a portrayal of an organized religion?
**Rafe:** Yeah and we kept that very clear always with the production design team and with the story team -- is that there is no organized religion in *The Wheel of Time*. However, there are very strong cultures in *The Wheel of Time*. And what are some of the ways that we could see those cultural practices come into play? You see them in a lot of the scenes too. There will be like little, we call them sort of like "ritual stories" on screen, where there's something in the background of a scene that suggests this backstory of culture for a place and a history of life there. And I do think those are in the books, like even the maypoles in Two Rivers, there's so many examples of this that are these pseudo-religious ritualistic things that happen. I think trying to find ways to bring those into the show was really important for us. And create a world where, for people who don't know the books at all, they're able to subconsciously and subtly take in the idea. You ask most people who don't read the books about religion in the show and they're like, "I don't think there is a religion." But people come from different places and you can see that they care about those things. Like that scene with Lan and Stepin, we don't say it, but you can tell from how it goes that this is not something that Lan does but it is something that Stepin does. So they must have different upbringings and different places that they come from. So there's a lot of that subconscious world building that we're trying to do too, with not just the way we wrote it but the way that it's produced so that the things that you take in with the many many pages of information about this in the books, we can feed those things subtly through the show so that actually an audience who knows nothing about the books has built that foundation in their brain for how this world works even though we've never had a scene about it.
**Thom:** I like that. And having spoken to a few people that haven't read the books and have only watched the show, I think that that comes through pretty strong because they've said they've picked up on some themes that you would really only be able to get from reading the books but from you know just watching the show and I think that does come through pretty strong.
**Rafe:** Ah, thanks.
### Minor characters

Timestamp: 17:35
**Thom:** Our next one is from another Community member. This one should be a little bit easier for you.
**Rafe:** [*shrugs*] It's all easy, it's great.
**Thom:** I know. So only taking into account the books, having no impact on the show whatsoever, just your love of the books, is there any particular -- and this is from... oh they didn't write it -- Are there any particular minor characters that you're passionate about?
**Rafe:** Oh! I mean... I really like Pevara. So, I don't know, she may find her way into the show. Also Brandon does too. There's a couple of those characters, there's some of the Aes Sedai characters, that I am just unduly obsessed with. And some of the wise ones as well. They end up bleeding their way -- I think the fans of the books would be -- it would be so wild for them to hear the writer's room talk about some of these characters because we have a very big mix also of people who know the books, versus don't know the books, versus have read some of the books. The level of *detail* that people know these characters -- Everyone in this writer's room, some of them who had never heard of the books before coming to this show, know every name of Liandrin's Black Ajah cabal. And they're -- We call her Jeaine Caide [*Genie KaDee*], that's not how you pronounce her name from the books, but the love for Jeaine Caide in the room is *wild*. And the amount of time that is spent talking about her, versus Chesmal, versus Ispan, versus Rianna, like everyone knows all of them and all of their character traits in a way that I think would *shock* people.
**Kathy:** Oh my gosh, I can't wait to hear it being spoken about more publicly when the show is over and have some more behind the scenes interviews and discussions, and just see the love that I can just feel that the writer's room has. I love that.
### WoT's place in modern fantasy

Timestamp: 19:50
**Kathy:** Okay so when you pitch *The Wheel of Time*, at the time, like you mentioned earlier, *Game of Thrones* was pretty much the main fantasy series. And you were really strongly believing *Wheel of Time* is very matriarchal, very female forward, in a world that didn't have a lot of that going on right now. Now that we have more high fantasy, and more high fantasy that has these strong female characters, how do you feel *Wheel of Time* fits into that relevance of the whole world that's now becoming more relevant in society?
**Rafe:** Well I think the great thing about *The Wheel of Time*, and when I pitched it -- because people have tried to make *Wheel of Time* TV shows and movies before -- but the way that I pitched it and saw it coming in was really that -- At that time in my career, I was being approached to do a lot of these big projects because of the pieces I'd done previously in TV and features. And so what I felt when I was reading and looking at a lot of them was that they were chasing something. And my pitch was that *Wheel of Time* is chasing nothing. *Wheel of Time* is its own entity, and that it is what other things have been chasing for a long time. And if you really stick to what it is -- and we'll always lean into the pieces of it that feel fresher today, we have to, that's just part of the adaptation that we're doing and that won't change -- but *Wheel of a Time* itself is not chasing *Game of Thrones*, it is not chasing *Lord of the Rings*. It is something that exists on its own, and other things will chase it someday. And [other things] are [chasing it] now even, like people talk about *Wheel of Time* as a comp for things that they're trying to make because of the success the show's had. And I think *Wheel of Time* is not just about women either, it's about gender and balance in the world. And actually I think those messages still feel very fresh and very interesting today. There's a lot of pockets within that that Robert Jordan opened that the books don't fully go into, but that we can look at in the show, and that can be things that we develop further. So I think it's just as fresh and relevant today as it was when I pitched it, which is like four or five years ago now. I think at it's core, it is because it's not chasing, because it's driving its own path.
**Thom:** Since we mentioned other attempts, there's a lot of Billy Zane love going on in chat right now.
### Fun stories from filming

Timestamp: 22:45
**Thom:** Another question, user submitted, was from Katie. She wanted to know if you could share any fun stories from filming on season one or season two, like behind the scenes, like oh "so-and-so did this" or whatever.
**Rafe:** Oh my God, there's so many crazy things. We did do -- I think I could talk about this, Joanna [indecipherable].
**Thom:** Joanna can yell at you in the chat.
**Rafe:** We did when Rosamund won her Golden Globe for *I Care a Lot*, we presented it to her on set. So we had this scene, it was a scene in Fal Dara where that core group of seven were together. We did it because I like pranks and the Golden Globes people had contacted my office to see what to do with her Golden Globe and I was like, "Send it to me. I've got a plan."
**Thom:** Fantastic.
**Rafe:** They do this whole thing you know where she basically does one of her classic Moraine like, "We leave it dawn," and then storms out of the room. And so she's supposed to do that and it's all set up and we're shooting the first shot of the scene. And she's doing her beautiful speech, and then she goes to, "We leave at dawn," and then Lan doesn't go with her because in his bag is the Golden Globe. And then she is trying to stay in character as Moiraine and convince Lan to come with her and then he instead presents her with the Golden Globe.
**Thom:** Oh my God that's fantastic. I love Daniel so much.
**Kathy:** Amazing, so fun.
### Fan theories

Timestamp: 24:19
**Kathy:** Okay, Bridget from the community would like to know what -- w-o-t, I just had to clarify -- what if any fan theories about the show have left you completely flabbergasted?
**Rafe:** Oh my god, they're so--! Sadly, and I really wish I did have more time to engage with -- I'm so so busy making the show that I don't get to read a lot of the stuff online. So what I do here is, like it'll come into our writer's room group chat, or like people will throw in and they'll be like, "Did you know that the fans think X?" And we're like [*looks impressed*]. Oh here's the other thing is sometimes it's very correct. Where they've picked up on something so so so tiny but that we've set in place that we're gonna pay off in like season three. I'm trying to think of any of the ones that I thought were particularly hilarious because there were so many really good ones for season one, but it was a long time ago now and I'm trying to remember any of the ones that we had like a real crack up about.
**Thom:** I mean, "Bela's the Creator" is always a good one.
**Rafe:** Well, that. I mean, so we have the book fan theories and those we love, and trying to do nods to in the show. But there's also, I was thinking of like, the crazy show fan theories that they have. And also, the people who don't know the books but have theories about what's going to happen in the show. Some of those are, I don't know if you've looked at those --
**Kathy:** Those are great.
**Rafe:** If I ever have time to read the internet, I am reading exclusively those because they're so hilarious.
**Thom:** So interesting, yeah.
**Rafe:** Right. So I gave you no answers to your question.
**Thom:** It's fine, that was a ton of fun.
**Kathy:** You know we don't have specifics, but we know that they exist so keep those fan theories coming and entertain our writers.
**Thom:** Entertain the writers at the very least.
**Kathy:** Speaking of entertaining the writers.
### Memes and GIFs

Timestamp: 26:15
**Thom:** James submitted: Do you share any of the memes and GIFs [*jifs*] or GIFs that the fans have created amongst yourselves?
**Rafe:** Yes, we definitely do. There's a lot of water and shade in the office. We really love especially, there's like a special love for the intersection of drag queen culture and *Wheel of Time* memes that that we really get behind. There's one of our writers, Justine Gillmer, her GIF work is like on an Oscar-worthy level. Any writer on the show would tell you that one of Justine's most significant characteristics is her ability to, *in nanoseconds*, deliver the perfect GIF. And she has a lot of *Wheel of Time* ones. She has the Moraine turning around to look at Rand after he says "no" to her -- is a very effective GIF in chat. If you want, get Justine on here and she will give you instantaneous perfect GIF work.
**Kathy:** I think the answer is yes, we do want her here, so feel free anytime, any moment, we will work around her.
### Consuming other media

Timestamp: 27:36
**Kathy:** Okay so, as you mentioned previously, you don't have a lot of time for the internet, but I'm guessing you have some free time sometimes, occasionally, maybe, just a couple minutes. What media are you consuming? Are you watching any TV shows, playing video games, cooking knitting sweaters? How do you unwind?
**Rafe:** "How do I unwind?" is a good question. I don't get too many moments of downtime. Sometimes, it's funny, because in some ways I try to watch a lot of other shows, obviously, that are like this show, or that are doing things that I think are interesting in television and film. Even though I have literally no time I've still watched *Everything Everywhere All At Once* three times this year. There's things that you have to find. But when I... Sometimes I just need my brain to shut down and not be doing anything whatsoever and I watch this show in the UK called *Taskmaster*.
**Kathy:** [*gasps*] Yes!
**Rafe:** I'm obsessed with it right now. I've just finished season five today. So if I ever get a spare moment right now in my life, for
the last couple months, because I get to watch like one episode of *Taskmaster* a week, but that is my special Rafe Time, is just watching *Taskmaster*.
**Thom:** That's great. I gotta watch it now.
**Kathy:** Amazing choice, such a good show. Oh it's so good, Thom.
**Rafe:** It's great you'll love it.
### Pranks

Timestamp: 29:07
**Thom:** So we're we're getting down toward the end of our interview right now, but we have we have a lot of fun questions that we wanted to get to from the community. Since you brought up particularly liking pranks before, Rapunzel asked: Are there any fun ones that you can share and have any come close to Moiraine and Siuan's level from the book? [*pause as Rafe thinks*] And "no" is a perfectly acceptable answer.
**Rafe:** I'm trying to think of any of them that I can share, because we have a lot of them. ... What can I share?
**Thom:** I think the fact that you have to go through the rolodex of pranks in your head to figure out which ones are shareable is funny.
**Rafe:** There's a lot of excellent excellent *Wheel of Time* pranks. One that I did -- this was awful, actually, I felt terrible about it afterwards. But when we wrapped on season one, it had been such a hard shoot on everyone because it was during COVID and we were back-and-forth, and we were all literally forced to live alone in rooms in our place, just *alone* all the time, me and the cast and the director and writers, so that we won't bring COVID to the set. So it's very very emotionally hard. And at the end of the season, when we wrapped, we had a party. And we had not seen each other socially for a long time. And Josha had asked me if he could shave his head because we had a plan -- you've seen images from season two and because Josha likes to wear his hair shaved. And so he shaved it and came to the party. And then he got there and we did a whole prank where AK, one of the other producers on the show, texted Josha saying, "I'm trying to get hold of Rafe, we have to do one more scene tomorrow with you. Hair and makeup's already gone home." And did this whole prank about him having to shoot another scene and we didn't have a hair and makeup team with his hair. And then I found this sweet sweet sweet man that Josha is in the other room talking to his agent being like, "I think I have to change my flight home because I'm shooting this scene tomorrow and Rafe's gonna do my hair and makeup." Like it was such chaos. And it made me sad, but it was a pretty good prank. I'm still waiting to be got back for that one.
**Kathy:** which is very smart to keep keep you waiting because that anticipation and you're always on [???] waiting.
**Rafe:** I never see Josha and don't have a slight bit of tension in my soul that he's about to get me back for that horrible prank.
**Kathy:** Which I'm sure is totally healthy.
**Rafe:** He's the queen of pranks, so he maybe, he's going after her for it instead.
### Name the fandom

Timestamp: 32:03
**Kathy:** Giada would like to know if you could help give *The Wheel of Time* fandom an official name? What would you call us?
**Rafe:** I mean, I feel like -- is it because we're moving away from Twitter? "Twitter of Time" I feel like has been a nice name for the fandom. I don't know if you guys know this but they do these sort of statistics on different fandoms for big projects like this, and *The Wheel of Time* fandom is statistically the best fandom.
**Kathy:** We have proof! Scientific proof!
**Rafe:** Yeah, in terms of being kind and positive. For our show, I know there are the crazies, but it's something like 70% of people who've read all 14 books think the show is as good or better than the books, which is a *crazy* number. It's not a lot of the online community necessarily who interact with it, but like the wider world of people who love *Wheel of Time*. Consistently, statistically, *Wheel of Time* will come in and deliver that it's the nicest, the most welcoming, all of these things. It's a really beautiful fandom, so we should come up with a perfect name for it.
**Kathy:** Yeah put your writers -- you know you just wrapped writing so...
**Rafe:** [???] - the holidays and then [???]
**Kathy:** Okay fine.
**Thom:** We don't we don't want to get in trouble with any unions.
### Favorite WoT insult

Timestamp: 33:36
**Thom:** We have to end on one fun note, so the the very last should be easy for you. What is your favorite *Wheel of Time* curse word?
**Rafe:** Oh, well, it's not a curse word, but I'm obsessed when Lanfear calling anyone a pale-haired milksop.
**Thom:** I love that, I love that.
**Kathy:** That's so good.
**Thom:** That's fantastic. Well, you've heard it here, folks, pale-haired milksop.
### Ending

**Thom:** Thank you so much, Rafe, for coming and hanging out with us. And thank Amazon for allowing you to come in here. I'm sure you could beat them into submission.
**Rafe:** No no, it's very nice that they let me do it. It's great that we have the time to do it. It's so nice to see you guys.
**Thom:** Make sure to like, subscribe, hit the share button, notification bell, and I will see you guys on Monday for episode one of the re-watch of *Rings of Power*. See you around!
**Kathy:** Bye!
## Navigation

1. *Leavetaking*
2. *Shadow's Waiting*
3. *A Place of Safety*
4. *The Dragon Reborn*
5. *Blood Calls Blood*
6. *The Flame of Tar Valon*
7. *The Dark Along the Ways*
8. *The Eye of the World*

Season 2
1. *A Taste of Solitude*
2. *Strangers and Friends*
3. *What Might Be*
4. *Daughter of the Night*
5. *Damane*
6. *Eyes Without Pity*
7. *Daes Dae'mar*
8. *What Was Meant to Be*

Events
* JordanCon 2022 video
* The Prime Experience 2022 panel
* New York Comic Con 2022 panel
* ***Dragonmount* 2022 interview**
* JordanCon 2023 video
* New York Comic Con 2023 panel and Q&A

## External links

* *Dragonmount*: Dragonmount.com,   YouTube (@dragonmountcom)
* Thom DeSimone:   @Thom\_DeSimone

## References

This transcript of a live event has been edited for clarity and readability. Filler words (such as "uh", "like", "you know", etc.) have been removed.