My queer, trans mom taught me to love reading, especially to love reading fantasy books. My mom gave me The Eye of the World shortly before my parents divorced, and she left our home to pursue gender-affirming medical care. I was about ten years old. It was the last gift I received from her before she moved out. It was, in a sense, the last gift from the father I had known, before I met the woman she became.

For a long time, I didn’t read the books because they were associated in my memory with the hardships of that part of my life. I understood her decision to leave—my family is extremely transphobic, and they obstructed her visitation rights—but I was angry at her for not being there for me anyway. For decades, I set the books aside, but even though I never started the series, I always associated the books with her and the fantasy literature that she taught me to love.

Around the time that Amazon released the first season of the show, my mom reached out to rebuild our relationship. She had learned that she had an incurable and fatal disease. She wanted to get to know me better before she died. Finally, the time was right for me to finish The Wheel of Time: I watched the Amazon show, read the Kindle books, and also listened to the Audible books. The series was a gentle way for me to connect with her and reweave the lost threads of the years we had spent apart.

I was delighted to see that Amazon had revamped the story in a way that respected the cultural and gender diversity of the books. I applaud their decision to uplift the queer elements of the original books. For me, a major draw of the books is their exploration of themes of gender and power: the core crisis in the books is that the world’s magical gender binary has been corrupted, and the tainted male half of the binary destroyed civilization. In the wake of that catastrophe, new sex and gender systems have developed, many of them matriarchical (the White Tower and the Two Rivers’ Women’s Circle, for example). There are a lot of queer and trans-coded characters in the books, and I loved seeing those brought to the screen in such a positive way.

In the years since my mom gave me The Eye of the World, I discovered that I was bisexual and gender queer. When I came out as queer, my family rejected me as well.

The books helped me to process my grief and build a connection with my remaining parent.

The news of the show’s cancellation hit me especially hard. The show has been a major source of happiness and joy for me during a hard period of my life. Slowly and horribly, my mom’s health continues to deteriorate. Losing the show feels like another step towards losing her. Like grieving yet another loss.

It is difficult to express how important and meaningful shows like The Wheel of Time can be to viewers. Amazon knows us as statistics, not as people. These shows help us to see ourselves differently and process the events of our lives in new ways. They are companions that we carry with us through the plot twists of life.