Welcome to Close Reads! In this series, Leah Schnelbach and their guests dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, our own Aes Sedai, Caro Perny of the Publicity Ajah, muses on the trailer for Rafe Judkins’ adaptation of The Wheel of Time, trailers in general, and how we cope with an unknowable future.
If I’ve learned anything from my lifelong obsession with fantasy, it’s that liminal spaces are uniquely powerful things. SFF media is littered with stories about crossroads and life-altering riddles, fae appearances at dawn, the veil between worlds thinning at dusk—but all of those seem anachronistic in our modern world. In the present day, I’d argue that there is no liminal space quite so powerful as the time between the release of a trailer and the actual airing of the story it corresponds to. Simply put, trailers are a glimpse into the future where we as the viewer are required to fill in the blanks—both about the story being told, and who we’ll be when the telling happens. That’s what makes them so powerful.
