Sometimes Family Is Found One Story at a Time: Amanda & Rory Webb on Faith and Ruin
Found family, unwavering friendships, and a world where belonging isn't something you have to earn. Amanda and Rory Webb join us to talk about the relationships at the heart of Faith and Ruin.
Family isn't always defined by blood.
Sometimes it's the people who stay through the hardest parts of your life. The friends who have your back when things fall apart. The people who may live halfway across the country but somehow still feel like home.
For Amanda and Rory Webb, those relationships are at the heart of their epic fantasy series, Faith and Ruin.
Beginning with a priestess-in-training and her bodyguards, Faith and Ruin: The Dawn of Reckoning brings together a group of characters who grow closer as they're faced with murder, political intrigue, looming war, and challenges none of them expected. Along the way, what begins as circumstance grows into friendship, support, and found family.
During Pride Month, as we celebrate stories of belonging, identity, connection, and the many different ways people find family, I sat down with Amanda and Rory to talk about what found family means to them, why stories about belonging matter, and the kind of world they wanted to create in Faith and Ruin. 🌈💚
What does found family mean to you?
Found family is the people who support you through the most challenging parts of your life. These people are your constants: they are there for both the good AND the bad times, the small and the large. This can be both blood relatives or close friends, and sometimes even people who don’t live anywhere near you physically. Some of our closest, staunchest friends live halfway across the country.
Found family has your back no matter what.
Have you ever read or written a relationship, friendship, or community that felt like home?
Our fantasy series, Faith and Ruin, has strong themes of found family. It begins with a priestess-in-training and her bodyguards, and turns into a group of close friends who have each others’ backs through challenges none of them expected. They closer throughout the series, and support each other even when it’s hard.
We love writing stories with this theme, because there is something uniquely beautiful about reading themes of love and friendship that matter. It gives us hope, makes us feel that, even in the dark times, there are people who love us no matter what. As long as you have your family/support network, you can get through any hardship. We need stories like that, especially during times like these.
Why do you think stories about belonging resonate so deeply with readers?
Everyone wants a place where they belong; that’s just human nature. We aren’t meant to be alone. Humans are inherently social creatures, and burdens are so much easier to bear when you have a friend there to help you along the way.
Faith and Ruin includes LGBTQIA+ representation. What does that representation mean to you and the world you've created?
We wrote the world of Aukera to be a queer-normative world, which was important to us. Though it’s not the main theme of the story, as neither one of us is considered queer and we don’t feel those stories are ours to tell, it’s an important cause we believe strongly in, as many of our friends, family, and loved ones identify as queer in some way.
What do you hope readers take away from stories that celebrate connection, acceptance, and chosen family?
We want readers to believe that found family is possible, and that the connections between all of our characters feel realistic, relatable, and beautiful.
One Last Stop Before We Go...
For Amanda and Rory Webb, found family isn't simply a trope. It's the people who remain beside you through the good and the bad, the small moments and the life-changing ones.
That idea lives at the heart of Faith and Ruin, where a priestess-in-training and her bodyguards become something much more than the circumstances that initially brought them together. Through danger, uncertainty, and everything still waiting for them in Aukera, they find people willing to stand beside them.
And perhaps that's part of why stories about found family mean so much. They remind us that home can sometimes be something, and someone, we find along the way.
Thank you so much to Amanda and Rory Webb for joining us and sharing what found family means to them. 💚