There’s a particular kind of betrayal that only fantasy can deliver. It’s the sting of watching entire worlds get invented — dragons soaring overhead, cities carved into mountains, prophecies spanning centuries — and yet somehow queerness still doesn’t make the cut. You’re telling me you can imagine an immortal witch queen who feeds on souls, but two men holding hands is unrealistic?

This is why queer audiences have such a complicated relationship with the genre that raised us. Fantasy promises escape, spectacle, possibility. But too often, it still plays by the rules of the most boring world we already live in.

Take Game of Thrones. A world with ice zombies and flying lizards had plenty of room for endless incest, beheadings, and the “what if we made everyone more miserable” school of storytelling. But queer characters? They got the axe before their arcs even warmed up. Renly Baratheon, dead. Loras Tyrell, dead. Yara Greyjoy? Survived, technically, but shoved to the side. In Westeros, queerness was shorthand for tragedy. Our reward for visibility was a quicker, bloodier exit than most.

And don’t even get me started on J.K. Rowling’s post-hoc “Dumbledore was gay all along” reveal. A decades-long franchise that micromanaged the species of every tertiary owl apparently couldn’t find space for an actual queer storyline. Instead, we got the PR-friendly equivalent of “surprise, he liked men, but only in my head.” Retroactive queerness. The weakest form of representation — and now poisoned entirely by Rowling’s descent into TERFdom.

For years, we made do with crumbs. A lingering glance. A friendship that felt like something more if you tilted your head. Slash fiction filling the gaps because the writers wouldn’t. Queer subtext was survival. But survival isn’t enough anymore. We’re not starving for scraps. We want the feast.

That’s why shows like Sense8 hit like a thunderclap. It wasn’t just that queer characters existed — it’s that their queerness wasn’t a footnote. It was central. Essential. Tender, erotic, messy, joyful, woven into the DNA of the show. Watching Nomi and Amanita love each other with zero apology felt more fantastical than any psychic orgy montage (though, bless those too).

And then there’s The Wheel of Time. It’s not perfect, but it dares to ask: what if queerness wasn’t an exception, but part of the fabric of this vast imagined world? A world where two women can be warriors and lovers, where tenderness doesn’t have to hide behind metaphor. Seeing Moiraine and Siuan carve out their own legacy in a genre that usually buries women like them under hetero destiny feels like the radical act fantasy should have been doing all along.

The good news? Some shows are learning. Good Omens gave us an angel and a demon whose centuries-long partnership wasn’t just wink-wink subtext, but an aching, romantic epic. Our Flag Means Death dared to say: what if pirates were queer, tender, ridiculous, and in love? And audiences showed up in droves because — shocker — queerness isn’t niche. It’s human. It’s story.

Even Shadow and Bone carved space for queer relationships, letting Jesper and Wylan exist without apology, without being punished for desire. That’s not nothing. That’s what progress looks like — when queerness isn’t a subplot, but part of the air the world breathes.

The irony is brutal: fantasy is the genre most obsessed with possibility — and yet it’s where queerness keeps getting treated like an anachronism. As if queerness belongs only in “modern” settings, not in ancient empires or futuristic galaxies. But here’s the truth: queer people have always existed. In every century, every culture, every mythology. To strip us from fantasy worlds isn’t just lazy — it’s dishonest.

What it really reveals is who these worlds are being built for. Whose comfort is prioritised. Whose stories are considered “universal” and whose are seen as distractions.

The best fantasy has always been about imagining otherwise. What if power worked differently? What if history bent a new way? What if monsters weren’t monsters after all? To imagine new worlds and still replicate the same old erasures is the most depressing kind of failure.

Queer audiences don’t just want representation — we want possibility. We want to see futures that aren’t bound by hetero defaults, worlds where survival isn’t the ceiling but the baseline. Give us magic and queerness. Give us quests where our bodies don’t end up as cautionary tales. Give us stories where desire isn’t punished, but part of the power.

Because if fantasy is supposed to be the genre of infinite possibility, then why does it still imagine a world without us?

We’ve been here. We’ll always be here. And we deserve to be written into the worlds that promise to hold everyone.