Captive Prince Trilogy: Review
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.
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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.”
I understand your point about slavery and I don’t think anyone thought that you said people are not allowed to like the books.
However, I feel like there is a certain undercurrent of literary imperialism (if that is the correct wording) here. You dismiss yogayodayo’s protests about the main character being Greek/Roman in a Classical setting as mere inspiration (”The fact that it’s inspired by Ancient Greece doesn’t mean the characters *are* Greek“) while positioning the white/POC division as rather relevant (Damen can “very easily and reasonably” be read as POC). To me this reads as positioning the rather American (where the white/POC classification was developed, mostly) worldviews as more important than basically any other way of seeing things.
You could argue that white/POC classification is relevant to our world while Classical world isn’t, anymore, but it still feels like prioritizing one specific worldview over any other.
Firstly, I’m Australian. I grew up with the same constructs of race re: the Mediterranean that we’re discussing. But without having encountered any prior discussions about race in the books before I started reading them, as soon as Damen’s skin was described as being too dark to show bruising in the first chapter, in combination with his dark eyes and dark hair, I read him as POC. Which is an obvious thing to do, even given the clear Greco-Roman influence in the names at that point - though it’s notable that we hear next to nothing about Akeilos as a culture in Captive Prince beyond the BDSM-y treatment of slaves - because, and I will say this again and again and again until it sinks in, people of colour existed in the ancient Greco-Roman world.
And no, that’s not me insisting that being olive-skinned Greek/Italian is the same as being POC by all and every standard; it’s a literal historical fact that the ancient Mediterranean was a racial melting pot, with people from India and Africa and the Middle East all mingling together. It’s not dismissing the Classical inspiration of the setting to view Damen as POC, because POC existed in the Classical world. That doesn’t make me pro-American; it means I’ve actually studied Classical history.
Secondly, the reason it’s important - the reason I chose to write about it in the first place - is because nobody seemed to be mentioning this aspect of things at all. I started following a bunch of Captive Prince fandom blogs after I read the books in February, looking up meta and reviews, and even in a context where pretty much all the fanart depicts Damen as some degree of brown, I didn’t see anyone saying “hey, it’s kinda fucked up that we’ve got all these glamourised drawings of a collared, chained, whip-scarred brown Damen staring adoringly at Laurent”. The closest anything came was a few posts exhorting fan artists not to whitewash him, suggesting that even when people were reading Damen as POC, they didn’t think there was anything racist or problematic in his depiction as a slave, or in his falling in love with a white man who acts as his master.
Now, maybe those discussions were happening elsewhere and I just missed them, but from my perspective, it felt like the bulk of the fandom was being pretty blithe about, if not demonstrably oblivious to, the racial implications of that dynamic. And as stated, I enjoyed the books! I wanted to talk about them! But I didn’t feel I could recommend them without acknowledging that aspect, knowing full well it would be a dealbreaker or triggering for too many people. I write most of my reviews and blog posts in a single setting, maybe taking a couple of days for the longer ones if I’m busy; I worked on that Captive Prince review for months, because I wanted to do justice to both the problems and the material.
Point being: if your argument is that Damen-as-POC is still a legitimate interpretation of the source material, even if not the only one, then the implications of that still needed to be raised and discussed. What’s really disturbing to me is that, since I posted the review, I’ve been hearing about POC critics and readers being attacked or hounded by white fans for daring to object to the series. Like. Do I have to explain why that’s messed up?
The bottom line is that, even knowing the cultural context in which Pacat is writing - even knowing her intentions - that doesn’t mean other people are wrong to be upset by the result, or that criticism on those grounds is somehow missing the point. Remember when Weird Al Yankovitch wrote that Blurred Lines parody song, Word Crimes, where “spastic” was used in the lyrics? That’s a term with a very different usage in the States to Australia and the UK, where it’s understood to be a slur. When this was pointed out to him, Weird Al didn’t double down and plead his own cultural context as an exemption; he apologised.
By all accounts, C.S. Pacat is receptive to criticism, and always seems to respond politely and thoughtfully when people bring up (for instance) the lack of women in the books, or other related issues. In fact, someone linked her my review on Twitter, and she wrote back to thank me for writing it. Which isn’t the same as her agreeing with everything I said, obviously - the point is that, whatever her agreement or disagreement, she was gracious about it.
I’m a white reader. I’m Australian. I’m queer. I’m a Classics nerd. I have a degree in history. And I also found the racial implications of the books really unsettling. That’s not me asking for a cookie; that’s me saying I wrote the review in that context as a way to parse my own reactions while addressing what felt to me like an unexplored issue in the fandom. And yet people are legit arguing that it’s racist to read Damen as a POC, not because there’s zero textual basis for his having non-white skin, but because he’s a slave. Like. I just. The cognitive dissonance is staggering.
One of the first things I saw being discussed about Captive Prince on Tumblr was basically “holy shit it’s brown slave fetish bullshit stay away and do not engage the fandom because they’re all apologists for it.” Glad to see the “all” part is not true; thanks fozmeadows for that. But sad to see the mental gymnastics I was warned about at work, even in this conversation thread.
respectfully @fozmeadows, if you are a white anglo-australian, i don’t think its completely appropriate for you to critique a wog author for “racefail” when she is writing a wog character clearly based on her own ethnic identity
the slave character is never described as brown-skinned as you claimed in your original review, and the author has consistently talked about him as ethnically southern european, a wog like her
i think race crit of the book is a good thing, but any race critique should at the very least acknowledge that Pacat is writing the slave character out of her own identity. as i’ve said elsewhere, she is an olive skinned bisexual Italian writing an olive skinned bisexual pseudo-Greek guy, and she lives in a country where Greeks and Italians are considered part of the same ethnic minority along with lebanese like myself - we are called “wogs”. Pacat is a wog writing a wog.
i don’t think it is “mental gymnastics” to include this as part of the critical discourse around captive prince.
as a lebanese australian and fellow wog, i’m often frustrated by the way that wog identity is left out of the discussion, or the way that the wog perspective is shouted down by fans, because i think the books do some fascinating things with wog representation, and i would love it if exploring that was part of the wider conversation
that said, i think it is perfectly reasonable for any reader to be uncomfortable with ANY depiction of slavery from a racial standpoint, even if it were slavery between two white guys.
i liked a lot of parts of your review and i agree that Pacat herself has said she values critique and has stated that she doesn’t want critique shut down.
i know that captive prince has a lot of fans of colour such as myself who love the books and love damen as a character. but many of us are not americans, so i also think its important to respect and value american critique on the books, and for brown fans like myself to respect the views of black readers.
truthfully, i would love someone to have a nuanced discussion about the race politics in captive prince that included all the subtleties of Pacat’s background, the books take on wog representation, and how that intersects with american white/poc colonial slave narratives. in that sense i think captive prince is doing some fascinating things and some problematic things. but the discourse seems caught between two simplistic extremes of “you cant criticise captive prince at all!!’ and “brown slave racefail”.
I’m reaching my emotional limits for discourse here, so I’m going to politely tap out after this reply, but:
- You’re right to say it’s an elision on my part not to have mentioned that Pacat was writing Damen from her own identity. That’s an important part of the discourse, and I apologise for the lapse.
- Nonetheless, the fact that someone is writing from their own identity, while deeply important to their intentions, does not speak to their effect, nor does it void their use of problematic tropes. Example: I recently read an otherwise amazing m/m novella, written by a queer author, which ends in queer tragedy. As a queer reader, I was devastated and angry. The fact that the ending itself was rushed and came out of nowhere, completely out of keeping with the rest of the story, didn’t help matters, and so I was critical of it.
Thus: I’m not trying to say Pacat doesn’t get to write characters who resemble her, or that there’s none of her experience in the story; I’m saying that, even if you account for that, the imagery of someone olive-skinned - or brown, or dark; however you picture Damen - being enslaved by someone white is going to have a powerful, ugly resonance that extends beyond that context. It’s a dynamic that actively evokes the spectre of racism and modern slavery, particularly - as I’ve said above - as the language used against Damen is still used to vilify black POC in particular. And what I’m finding really unsettling in this discourse is the number of people acting as though that perspective is optional or somehow reader-imposed; as though saying “Damen is Greek” completely removes the racial overlay that the language and premise evoke regardless of how you picture him.
- Which ties in to Pacat’s execution, and the reason I’ve used the term racefail to discuss this aspect of things: the story itself does not acknowledge this problem. Damen is called cur, barbarian, savage, brute - instead, Pacat might have easily used insults for him that aren’t still racially loaded. She might have introduced some characters who *were* brown and compared their skin to Damen’s, reducing the ambiguity around his appearance instead of trusting the reader to know she was reflecting her own heritage. She might have given us more obviously Greek-themed worldbuilding for Akeilos in the first book, instead of leaving it largely to the names alone. There are lots of tweaks she might have made which, while not voiding the spectre of racist slavery entirely, would nonetheless have telegraphed her awareness of it, and spoke to her intent to do something else; but she didn’t.
- And as I’ve said in the review, I think a big part of that problem was that she went from posting tagged chapter by chapter updates to writing the third book on its own - her intent changed, her audience changed, the context changed, and she didn’t have room to retroactively adapt it all. Whatever she writes next, I’m going to read! And I do think that Damen is otherwise a well-constructed character, so I understand why people relate to him.
I just. There’s an attitude in many of the responses I’ve been seeing - and in the stories I’ve been hearing about POC readers being attacked for even mentioning it - that the racist imagery only exists if you fail to read Damen “correctly”, as Greek, in the context of Pacat’s heritage, and is therefore an imaginary - or at best, minor - problem foisted on the books by overzealous readers, and nothing whatsoever to do with the source material. And that, to me, is unequivocally racefail.
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Okay I LOVE what your’e saying but I HAVE to point out this:...
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if you’re american @unedopinion: “olive-skinned” in australia is a primary racial signifier for “wog”, an ethnic...
unedopinion reblogged this from fozmeadows and added: I blame The Hunger Games, where “olive-skinned” became “Jennifer Lawrence”.
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I realise I’m in full-on Ben Wyatt pedant mode here, but you’re misquoting both the book and my review, and it’s bugging...
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