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(Content warning: discussion of rape and sexual slavery)
In response to C.S. Pacat's tweets as screencapped here, and also the resulting Tumblr discussions.
The question of whether Captive Prince (CP) is racist has waged for quite a while now, with the most common arguments being (in simplified form):
I'm not Australian; I'm American. But I'm not commenting on the content of her tweets about Australian racial politics per se; my argument is that from the point of view of execution, CP doesn't escape racial issues just from this explanation.
Because here's the thing: There are plenty of ways to construct a metaphor exploring Australia's racial divide, championing a protagonist from a Mediterranean-coded culture, without including sexual slavery. The author could have accomplished her goal perfectly well by having Damen be a POW instead of a slave, for starters.
At the very least, Laurent could have acknowledged that his treatment of Damen was wrong (because, dude, just because the guy killed your brother in combat doesn't mean brutal slavery constitutes morally justified revenge).
That's the part that bothers me most about the series in retrospect. It ties into the race issues, but it also overlaps with the problem of a toxic, or at the very least unhealthy, romantic relationship. We still have the narrative of a dark-skinned man forced into slavery for a white man, who nearly flogs said dark-skinned man to death and also sexually assaults him by proxy (twice, once unsuccessfully, once successfully), and the result is that the dark-skinned man falls in love with his white master, who never really apologizes for his treatment of him.*
(*And in case someone wants to come after me because Laurent did apologize vaguely in Book 2—no, I don't view that as enough, especially since it was a very general apology that didn't really acknowledge all the horrible things Laurent did to Damen...particularly the sexual assault by proxy, which is the most egregious thing to me that much of the fandom doesn't acknowledge.)
Also, I presume colorism is no less of an issue in Australia than it is in the US, so having the male protagonist of color specifically lust after blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned people is still discomfitting.
In response to C.S. Pacat's tweets as screencapped here, and also the resulting Tumblr discussions.
The question of whether Captive Prince (CP) is racist has waged for quite a while now, with the most common arguments being (in simplified form):
- "CP is racist because it features a male protagonist coded as a man of color [Damen] who is subjected to dehumanizing sexual slavery and eventually falls in love with his white master."
- "CP is not racist because Damen is not a man of color, since Akielos is based off Greece, therefore you shouldn't apply US racial politics to the situation."
I'm not Australian; I'm American. But I'm not commenting on the content of her tweets about Australian racial politics per se; my argument is that from the point of view of execution, CP doesn't escape racial issues just from this explanation.
Because here's the thing: There are plenty of ways to construct a metaphor exploring Australia's racial divide, championing a protagonist from a Mediterranean-coded culture, without including sexual slavery. The author could have accomplished her goal perfectly well by having Damen be a POW instead of a slave, for starters.
At the very least, Laurent could have acknowledged that his treatment of Damen was wrong (because, dude, just because the guy killed your brother in combat doesn't mean brutal slavery constitutes morally justified revenge).
That's the part that bothers me most about the series in retrospect. It ties into the race issues, but it also overlaps with the problem of a toxic, or at the very least unhealthy, romantic relationship. We still have the narrative of a dark-skinned man forced into slavery for a white man, who nearly flogs said dark-skinned man to death and also sexually assaults him by proxy (twice, once unsuccessfully, once successfully), and the result is that the dark-skinned man falls in love with his white master, who never really apologizes for his treatment of him.*
(*And in case someone wants to come after me because Laurent did apologize vaguely in Book 2—no, I don't view that as enough, especially since it was a very general apology that didn't really acknowledge all the horrible things Laurent did to Damen...particularly the sexual assault by proxy, which is the most egregious thing to me that much of the fandom doesn't acknowledge.)
Also, I presume colorism is no less of an issue in Australia than it is in the US, so having the male protagonist of color specifically lust after blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned people is still discomfitting.
