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This page was originally adapted from a Reddit post by /u/ncsuandrew12, one of the moderators of r/whitecloaks and r/WhitecloaksToo.
WARNING: Spoilers abound for Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time book series and Amazon's The Wheel of Time TV series.
We are the Dragonsworn, allied under the Light against the forces of the Shadow. Asha'man, Aiel, Tairens, Cairhienens, Illianers, Band of the Red Hand soldiers, Wolf Pact liegemen, Whitecloaks under Lord Captain Commander Damodred in service to Lord Perrin Goldeneyes, renegade Taraboners, Domani, and those few true servants amongst the remnants of Masema's rabble - all are welcome beneath our roof.
Enjoy your stay, even if you number yourself amongst the Darkfans who defend Amazon's TV show adaptation, but be prepared for arguments. Be civil, and we'll get along just fine. Join us in discussing Robert "The Creator" Jordan's The Wheel of Time and critiquing Rafe "Raginor" Judkin's The Wheel of Prime. Darkfans are also welcome, lest we forget that no man may walk so long in the Shadow that he cannot come again to the Light!
YouTube (Whitecloaks) - Trigger Warning: Artistic criticism, coarse language, rampant alcoholism
Discord - Trigger Warning: Artistic criticism, honest discussions, memes Tainted by the Dark One himself
Wait... did I read that right? Whitecloaks?!
Yes. Our little "fan club" originally formed from WoT fans who were driven from the main Wheel of Time subreddits into /u/sneedmemesanddreams' r/whitecloaks, formed for that purpose.
Oh, those guys! You all are a bunch of racist incel homophobe Nazis!
While a small subset of pretty much any fandom will be bigots, no, the Dragonsworn - and their predecessors, the Whitecloaks - are not a group of bigots.
But I heard r/whitecloaks is full of racism and bigotry!
Don't believe everything you here. Robert Jordan told us that information distorts across time and space. To this we add that it distorts across cultures, sociopolitical and demographic boundaries, and across the lines of opinion regarding any work of art.
r/whitecloaks was founded by /u/sneedmemesanddreams1, a user with a very fervent belief in free speech. As such, he took a "sunlight is the best disinfectant," hands-off approach to moderation. Therefore, you can indeed find a number of racist comments among the many, many r/whitecloaks comments (at one point, r/whitecloaks was the third most-active subreddit in terms of comments per user). But you'll note that the vast majority of these comments (aside from those that went too far even for our laissez-faire policy and were removed) were written by 2-3 particular users, at least one of which was admittedly a bonafide "white people should run the country/world" racist. Moreover, you'll see that such comments tend to max out at 2-3 upvotes when low-profile, and more generally are heavily downvoted.
That being said, the current leadership of the Dragonsworn/Whitecloaks are less insistent on our communication platforms being no-holds-barred free speech areas and are significantly more aggressive about policing actual bigotry.
"Actual bigotry"?
Yes, "actual bigotry". One thing that Amazon apologist muckrakers 2 use to denigrate us is the common criticism amongst us that the TV show's actors don't match their book counterparts' physical appearance.
Our detractors grossly overstate the prevalence of this casting criticism. For example, since the first episodes of the show were released, casting criticism accounted for maybe 2-3% of all r/whitecloaks criticism.
But even if it were a more prevalent subject, criticism of the casting is not inherently bigoted. Not even close. At the end of the day, the casting of a TV show isn't really a big deal. And one can reasonably argue for changing the physical appearance of a character when adapting them. For example, many Dragonsworn love the casting of Samuel L. Jackson as the previously-white Nick Fury. And we generally approve of Will Smith's casting in Wild, Wild, West even if that movie is objectively terrible. Those casting decisions were presumably made with the goal of capitalizing on those terrific actors' abilities and star power, and not to fulfill sociopolitical goals that should be separated from art.
It is not bigoted to point out that, for example, Egwene al'Vere was clearly pale (if not necessarily "white") in the books. Nor is it bigoted to argue that the nations of The Wheel of Time would, like most real-world nations, have physical looks associated with them and that the rural areas would generally be racially and ethnically homogenous within a given region (whatever that race or ethnicity might be). Indeed, the very first book makes this very explicit, calling out Rand al'Thor as being a physical outlier for his height, hair, and eye color in the Two Rivers, and repeatedly remarking on the physical similarities between Two Rivers folks and the populace of western Andor, and between Rand al'Thor and the Aiel as a whole. Everyone is free to have their own opinion as to whether the casting is accurate or whether it even matters, but it is only blowhard ignoramuses and execrable bad faith actors who decry all casting criticism as "racist".
Also of note is that the vast majority of the Whitecloaks think most of the actors did a good job acting in the show, even if they suffered from sub-par cinematography, horrific writing, and abysmal direction. And minority-acted characters like Padan Fain and Loial are generally touted as being well done and generally book-accurate (Loial's diminuitive and comically wigged physical character design notwithstanding).
On a personal note, /u/ncsuandrew12 mentions that the most opinionated Wheel of Time fan he knows IRL has mostly the same negative opinion of the show as many Dragonsworn, with Kenyan-born skin is nearly as black as an Atha'an Miere sailor. His criticisms include many of the exact positions that - when stated by Dragonsworn - have induced accusations of racism. But he also hates Mat and Nynaeve, so take his opinion with a grain of salt. 😜 (In fairness, he hasn't read the last two books yet; as of the summer of 2022, he's in a re-read leading up to them right now.)
Then why does everyone say casting is such a big deal to the Dragonsworn and the OG Whitecloaks?
Because casting is basically the first thing you find out about a show. Before you know much of anything about the story, themes, plot, or production values, you know who's playing the major characters. For a good amount of time, casting was basically all that was known about the show, and so it was all people really had to talk about outside the context of "fluff" hype-focused comments and general speculation. And of course, there are always a few real racists getting mad and some trolls fueling the fire. But your average Whitecloak longs for the days when casting was the biggest failing of the show. It is far, far more forgivable that the inversion of themes and the mutilation of the story.
There has also historically been a number of anti-r/whitecloaks Rafists who deliberately bring up casting in any conversation they can. This derails the conversation and of course they crow to whomever will listen that we're hung up on casting to the exclusion of all else.
Well what about criticism related to derision of the alphabet soup demographic?
The Dragonsworn span the spectrum of opinions related to homosexuality (et al) in general. But most Dragonsworn don't take issue with LGBTQIA+ people (they are fans of the Wheel of Time, after all), but rather take exception to their perception that the sexuality of characters has been changed from the books, or that Amazon showrunner Rafe "Raginor" Judkin's sociopolitical leanings has been the cause of such changes.
For example, the idea that Moiraine Damodred and Siuan Sanche had a physically romantic relationship, while not in direct contradiction with the books, is not explicitly supported by them. But more importantly, the idea that they had a decades-long love affaivery much is in direct contradiction with the books, which explicitly state that >!they dreamed of marrying princes as novices! Indeed, in the course of the story, both women ultimately fell in love with and married men.
Dragonsworn also take issue with the flippant tweet by Raginor implying that changing the sexuality of a character is an appropriate and necessary response to the real-world behavior of some Wheel of Time fans.
Banning of r/whitecloaks and r/WhitecloaksToo
Well, if y'all aren't bigots, then why did a Reddit admin ban r/whitecloaks and r/WhitecloaksToo?
First of all, neither subreddit has been banned as of June 16 of 2022. What the admin 3 did was (a) remove some mods and (b) restrict permissions such that (1) only mods can post, and (2) mods can only access modmail, sticky posts, and otherwise can't take any moderator action. The removed mods also received personal suspensions or bans, mostly due to their tone and responses to the admin.
However, none of these punitive actions were even ostensibly due to bigotry. In all their communications, /u/chtorrr never verbalized any issue with the show criticism, and they never mentioned bigotry. The only complaints were concerning perceived harassment and brigading by r/whitecloaks and violation of specific rules the Admin imposed beyond the normal Reddit rules, presumably to combat the perceived brigading.
The admin (/u/chtorrr) is a known bad faith actor who, days after shutting down r/whitecloaks, was caught abusing their admin privileges to spam pixels in 2022's r/place.
There was never any organization of harassment or brigading against other subreddits by the moderators of r/whitecloaks or r/WhitecloaksToo, and to our knowledge, there was never any significant such organization by our members. Most of the subs we were supposedly brigading against were between five and three hundred times our size. This perception of harassment comes from several things.
First, subscribers ofr/whitecloaks were generally active members in other Wheel of Time subreddits and generally had been since long before they were r/whitecloaks members.
Second, many of the more vocal critics of r/whitecloaks (including some mods of r/wheeloftime and r/wotshow) used very liberal definitions of "harassment" and "brigading". As an anecdotal example, (/u/ncsuandrew12 was banned for brigading/harassment from r/wheeloftime after his very first comment there.4
But aren't the mods known to personally be bigoted white supremacists?
Depends on how broad your definition of "bigot" is. /u/sneedmemesanddreams did make an anti-immigration comment in passing while summarizing the actions of the Fal Daran leadership in the first season finale, but that was probably facetious.
One of the ~4 r/whitecloaks mods at the time approaching the subreddit's restriction was Asian. Another mod, /u/ncsuandrew12, makes a pretty poor Nazi indeed. He's interracially married and between the 33 descendants of his and his wife's parents (and the spouses thereof), there are only 5 with any white ancestry. The others are a mix of Latino, Indian, and black. And yet not one of those individuals has expressed a negative opinion of his character, preferring instead to good-naturedly mock his nerdity.
As for the alphabet soup demographic, while [/u/ncsuandrew12](https://reddit.com/u/ncsuandrew12 has opinions that would make many WoT fans angry (but which he declines to share in such forums as ours), he clarifies that (a) he bears no ill will towards anyone of any identity or orientation, and (b) a certain longtime male friend of his is attracted to other men. When they see each other, the friend almost always goes out of his way to tell Andrew he misses him and wishes he could spend more time with him and his wife, who is extremely fond of said friend. As for inceldom, Andrew and his wife are biological parents.
None of the Dragonsworn leadership has noted any racism from the others even in their behind-closed-doors communications. As for the alphabet soup demographic, the longest-serving r/whitecloaks mod after founder /u/sneedmemesanddreams was very vocal in his support for them. He's a professional artist working on commission; hardly the generally accepted image of a Nazi.
So where do these accusations come from?
Some are due to genuine misinterpretations of various statements or a misreading of tone. And a lot of people take what others say about us on faith without verification.
But in our opinion, the core of these accusations is a deliberate "diversity shield" tactic, where the proponents of The Wheel of Prime are using racism's extreme evil - and well-deserved extreme unpopularity - as a means by which to chill critical speech and cow people into silence or agreement due to fear of being labeled an evil person or "-ist". This is why this dissertation is addressed to you, the curious newcomer, and not these bad faith, vitriolic, insecure, agenda-driven ideologues.
Well, if you aren't bigoted against minorities, why name yourselves after such hateful bigots from the books?
The Whitecloaks were only bigoted - if you can call it that - against those who channel the One Power (and maybe, admittedly, against women as a male-only organization).
They were not only not bigoted against minorities; they are perhaps the most diverse, multiracial, and multiethnic organization in all of the world of The Wheel of Time, after the Seanchan (who are only diverse by dint of having conquered everyone on their landmass) and arguably the White Tower and its eventual male counterpart, the Black Tower. Consistency with this is one of the few areas the show got relatively correct.
Whitecloak villainy came principally not from bigotry, but from their self-righteousness and overly zealous religion 5, their propensity for violence, their lack of respect for the laws of the nations, their arrogance, and their assumption of condemnable guilt against those who disagree with them. Truthfully, the hardline fans of The Wheel of Prime bear more resemblance to the book Whitecloaks than do most of the r/whitecloaks members.
And as the founder of r/whitecloaks pointed out in explaining the reasoning behind the name choice, the principles of the Children of the Light were generally good and sound (as argued by noted moral authority and handsome devil Galadodred Damodred and they served a useful purpose as a foil against the power of the White Tower, but had unfortunately been greatly corrupted in their purpose and behavior. Moreover, by the end of the series, the Children were largely redeemed under Damodred's leadership.
But all that being said, if it were up to me (/u/ncsuandrew12, "Dragonsworn" or "The Band of the Red Hand" would have been chosen instead of Whitecloaks, hence the name here and in the Discord.
Okay, so you aren't bigots, but surely you "bookcloaks" are overly obsessed with the books and just can't stand any changes!
Some of our more hardcore members notwithstanding, no. We generally acknowledge that a great deal of compression and omissions (and accompanying changes such as character consolidations) is necessary for any adaption. Even amongst the Dragonsworn, the inclusion of the Logain storyline is - at least in principle if not execution - perceived positively. So is the consolidation of some Whitecloaks into Valda. Prior to the show's release (and the nonsensical plot it revealed by episodes 4 through 7), /u/ncsuandrew12 was even okay with the omission of Caemlyn in favor of Tar Valon. And he understood that Ogier would probably be smaller than in the books (so long as they were noticeably larger than humans and not literally shorter than Rand). There are a great many things in the show we would find acceptable on their own, but when combined as a whole, and with the near-utter lack of payoff in the show, are abominable.
And we reject time limitations as a catch-all defense of the show's changes, particularly in light of the first season's fifth episode's near-total irrelevance to the story of the season.
Nor is Covid a valid defense of many parts of the show, particularly the much-reviled first episode, which was written pre-Covid. It can be a valid defense for the sparsity of crowds, but it doesn't justify, for example, the tactical idiocy of Agelmar Jagad and the rest in the first season's finale.
Nor does Barney Harris' departure justify what was done to his character in the final three episodes, particularly since both the books and the show handed the writers a solution on a silver platter: the Shadar Logoth-diseased gambler could simply have been left behind in Tar Valon to be Healed or to recuperate from Healing!
Aside from all this, we assert that The Wheel of Prime is a terrible show even absent any knowledge from the books (and partially as a result thereof). The actors generally perform their jobs well, and some of the sets, props, costumes, and cinematography is well done. But ultimately it is all for naught thanks to atrocious writing, deplorable direction, sometimes baffling lighting, and often comical sets, costumes, and props, to say nothing of schizophrenic pacing.
We hope this has helped clarify who we are, who we are not, and what we are and are not about.
Walk in the Light, and Tai'shar South Carolina!
- /u/sneedmemesanddreams was known in r/whitecloaks as the LCC or Lord Captain Commander
- The Wheel of Prime's apologists are known variously amongst the Dragonsworn as "Darkfans", "Showsworn", "Showspawn", etc.
- Reddit admin /u/chtorrr is known amongst the Dragonsworn as Paitrrr or Marrrillllllin Gemalllphin
- Said ban-worthy comment was merely to provide some examples of very uncivil comments made by a mod (known here as RA) of that sub (usually in reply to very mild comments), in Andrew's reply to a comment RA had written insisting that his only requirement was that people be civil in their comments. Furthermore, Andrew was banned from r/wotshow within a couple of hours because he contended that his week-old post - which explicitly was inclusive of show-based discussion and which was removed shortly after his r/wheeloftime ban - was not in violation of the cited "all posts must be related to the show" rule. For what it's worth, RA also frequently complained to the r/whitecloaks mods that he was being harassed by another user (here known as AP). AP may indeed have been harassing the mod, but among RA's examples was an argument thread they had wherein AP generally replied to RA's comments in kind, so draw what conclusions you will based on that track record.
- Note that the basic religion of the Whitecloaks is adhered to by almost every single individual on their planet aside from those who literally worship WoT's devil analogue. It is so universal, the concept of atheism is almost unheard of within Randland.