The Shannara Chronicles LGBTQ Storyline: Eretria and Lyria

The Shannara Chronicles LGBTQ storyline, explained

The Shannara Chronicles was a fantasy series built on Terry Brooks's Shannara novels, created for television by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar and shot in New Zealand. It ran for two seasons of ten episodes each. The first aired on MTV from January 5 to March 1, 2016, and loosely follows Brooks's novel The Elfstones of Shannara. The second moved to Spike and aired from October 11 to November 22, 2017.

Most of the attention in season 1 went to the quest at its center: Wil Ohmsford, a half-elf carrying magic Elfstones, and Amberle Elessedil, an elven princess tied to the Ellcrys tree, with the druid Allanon guiding them and Eretria, raised among the Rovers, joining the road. Season 2 reshuffled the cast and the setting, and that reshuffle is where the series' LGBTQ storyline comes from.

Anyone searching for the Shannara Chronicles LGBTQ material is almost always asking about one relationship: Eretria, played by Ivana Baquero, and Lyria, a new series regular played by Vanessa Morgan. The show never makes the pairing a mystery to be solved or a secret to be revealed. It is simply where Eretria is when the second season picks up.

Where Eretria and Lyria meet the story

Season 2 is set a year after the first. The Four Lands are in chaos, and a group called the Crimson hunts anyone with magic. While Wil trains as a healer in Storlock and meets Mareth, the season opens its second thread in the ruins of San Francisco, where Eretria scavenges old-world technology with Lyria. Safehold, revealed in season 1 to be the ruins of San Francisco and Oakland, gives Eretria a life of her own, away from Wil's quest.

Lyria turns out to be the Princess of Leah. Leah is the Four Lands' only human kingdom, ruled by Queen Tamlin, played by Caroline Chikezie. A golden elfstone necklace Lyria wears is tied to Heaven's Well in the plot. By the finale Lyria has been crowned queen, which gives the relationship a political ending as well as a romantic one.

What Ivana Baquero said about it

In an interview with Den of Geek before the season premiere, Baquero said the show treats the relationship as nothing out of the ordinary: "It's not even a thing. It's normalized and it's great." That sums up the approach on screen. There is no coming-out scene and no character who objects to it, and the relationship is part of the season's world, not a debate within it.

Baquero also described what Eretria's own story would be about that year: finding out where she comes from, who her parents were, and what her tattoo means. Wil was still looking for her, and the identity of the figure she sees with the Trolls in the tunnels was set to be revealed. So the romance sits alongside a heavy plot about Eretria's origins, which comes up again when she is possessed by one of the Mord Wraiths serving the Warlock Lord.

The cast and production around the couple

Season 2 filming began on January 31, 2017, in New Zealand. Returning cast included Austin Butler as Wil, Poppy Drayton as Amberle, Manu Bennett as Allanon, Aaron Jakubenko as Ander and Marcus Vanco as Bandon, while Malese Jow joined as Mareth, Allanon's daughter, with Gentry White as the bounty hunter Garet, Desmond Chiam as General Riga and Caroline Chikezie as Queen Tamlin.

The network change is part of the context. MTV carried season 1, and the series moved to Spike for the 2017 season, with the move announced in May of that year. The first year had been nominated for a Saturn Award for best fantasy television series, even as its ratings later slid.

Den of Geek's season preview describes a year of scattered storylines, with the Crimson hunting magic users and Bandon planning to resurrect the Warlock Lord. Eretria and Lyria are one of several threads, not the spine.

How critics and viewers read the pairing

Reviews of the season were broadly positive, and Wikipedia's summary lists five reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, all favorable. A season-long review at Fangirlish called the couple an important step in normalizing LGBT couples on TV and named the series the best fantasy show on television. Its main complaint was screen time: the reviewer felt the pair were constantly separated and wanted more of them together.

That complaint matches the way the season is built. Season 2 spreads its cast across Storlock, Safehold, Skull Mountain and the Ellcrys, and no one character gets an uninterrupted stretch. Eretria and Lyria share the scenes the schedule allows.

Shannara Chronicles season 2 episodes

Several episodes aired in pairs on the same night.

Verdict: how the Eretria and Lyria story holds up

The storyline works because the show asks very little of it. It does not carry a message episode, and it does not wait for a finale to be allowed to matter. Lyria arrives as a character with her own title and her own necklace, and the couple is simply part of how the show describes Safehold.

The criticism is fair, too. Eretria spends much of the season pulled between her origins plot and the main fight, and a relationship that gets few scenes together stays thin. Season 2 had ten episodes to cover the Crimson, the rise of the Warlock Lord, Wil's sacrifice and Ander's death, and Eretria and Lyria were not the priority of that outline.

Even so, the choice is clear on screen: The Shannara Chronicles put a same-sex couple in the middle of its second season and ended the year with one of them crowned queen.

For a first-time viewer, the order matters. Season 2 opens a year after the first and assumes the viewer knows Wil, Amberle, Allanon and the Ellcrys, so the season 1 run on MTV comes first. Eretria's move from a Rover-raised thief on the road to a scavenger in Safehold makes more sense after watching how she enters the story.

The series itself did not last. Viewership fell from roughly 0.9 to 1.0 million live viewers in the early part of season 1 to about 0.2 to 0.3 million in season 2, and the cancellation was announced on January 16, 2018. What remains is twenty episodes, and a couple that many viewers still look up.

Sources

• The Shannara Chronicles, Wikipedia — cast, characters and episode list