What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

Captive Prince Trilogy: Review

fozmeadows:
Warning: major spoilers for the entire Captive Prince trilogy.
Trigger warning: discussion of rape, slavery, child abuse, paedophilia.
Late last year, a friend recommended I try the Captive Prince trilogy by C. S. Pacat, describing it as an excellent queer fantasy romance series. I made interested noises and then, somewhat typically, forgot about it until it cropped up again on my tumblr dash. I don’t know what alchemical combination of blogs I’m currently following to make this so, but thus far, everything I’ve ever read, watched or played on the basis of hearing about it through tumblr has been something I’ve loved, or at least enjoyed despite whatever criticisms I’ve made of it. That being so, and as it was my birthday that weekend, I shelled out for an ebook of the first volume, Captive Prince, and decided to give it a try before bed.
I stayed up until 5am to finish it, then read the next two volumes – Prince’s Gambit and Kings Rising – in less than a day. They’re not long books, but length aside, I couldn’t put them down, and given how much I’ve recently struggled to stay immersed in any story long enough to finish it, that’s saying something. The series is, as advertised, a queer fantasy romance, but while it’s certainly SFF, it counts as fantasy only inasmuch as it’s set in an original secondary world – there’s no magic or mythical creatures, with the focus instead resting on romance and politics.
These are not, by a long shot, perfect books; in fact, they contain a great many elements I traditionally despise, and which would ordinarily cause me to run a mile in the opposite direction. Which is, in part, why I’ve spent the past three months drafting this review: to get my head around exactly how and why I enjoyed them anyway. Because I did enjoy them, for all that I’m about to launch into a lengthy, detailed criticism of their failings, and as easy as it would be to simply write them off as a guilty pleasure, I feel like they deserve more than that.
[more at link]
This is nuts. An Italian woman writes about a Greek/Roman slave in a classical Greco-Roman setting, and gets called out for racefail. Yes, the slave has olive skin, Greek and Italian people have olive skin??? Are Greek and Italian people not allowed to write about themselves or their own classical history now? WTF tumblr.

She’s writing in a fictitious setting. The fact that it’s inspired by Ancient Greece (which also had people of colour) doesn’t mean the characters *are* Greek: you can picture them any number of reasonable ways based on the given descriptions. But that’s not the point; the point is that it’s a story centred around slavery, one where the protagonist is frequently abused with language that’s STILL used to vilify people of colour *in the actual real world* (cur, brute, barbarian, savage) and which has deep associations with the justifications used to enslave and oppress POC in the modern era. If the story wasn’t about slavery, this would be a very different conversation, but as things stand, slavery narratives of any kind are *always* going to be hard limits for some people, and with good reason, let alone in contexts where a slave character is subject to what is real-world racist language, where he’s violently whipped by a white man, and where his own skin is described as dark or olive. And in the first book, we’re told that Damen has skin dark enough not to show bruising in the first chapter; that’s the only descriptor we get for quite a while, and it’s ambiguous enough that yeah, you can very easily and reasonably read him as POC and not feel like that’s contradicted at all when the word “olive” is finally used.

Yes, I am aware of how race is constructed in Australia. Yes, I am aware of Pacat’s intentions. But intention is not the same as effect, and fictional settings are not the same as their real-world analogues. I’m not saying nobody is allowed to enjoy the books; I’m saying it should be pretty fucking obvious why POC readers in particular might look at a narrative that starts with a darker man of any kind being brutally enslaved by a white man and thinking, “Yeah, that’s a fucking problem.”

(via yogayodayo)