Salty ramblings
Nov. 8th, 2017 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkCaptive Prince is, by itself, a problematic series, but I think it might be the behavior of its fans and its author that makes me even angrier about it than I already am.
I just find the author's defenses of her book incredibly disingenuous. It feels to me like she tries to deflect criticism of her books by talking about how #ownvoices they are (without specifically using that term, but still), which is incredibly subtle and yet that just makes it worse because it's, again, completely disingenuous.
Like, she simultaneously insists that Damen is dark-skinned but also insists that "because he's Mediterranean" there are no racial problems with having a brown-skinned character enslaved to and then in a romantic relationship with his white master. And she spends a lot of time talking about how Damen supposedly represents her own experience of being from a Mediterranean culture because Mediterranean people are supposedly discriminated against in Australia. I'm not going to comment on that part, not being Australian and all, but my question is: if she intended for Damen to be positive representation of a "minority" group, why did she write Damen as being enslaved, tortured, raped, and then made to fall in love with his rapist?
Because that's not exactly an empowering narrative of fighting against prejudice and oppression? At all?
I also hate this disingenuous deflecting of criticism, because I think it ignores a very important idea: You can write a story that is true to your own experiences and still have it framed in a way that is harmful toward another group, and THAT MAKES IT PROBLEMATIC.
If I wrote a story in which a dark-skinned Asian is enslaved to a pale-skinned Asian and make a romance out of it, and people criticize that story for having race problems, I'd be completely unjustified in trying to defend myself by saying "But they're Asians, so GTFO with your criticisms about race-based slavery." That's why Captive Prince can't escape race problems, so long as the author insists that Damen is dark-skinned.
I just find the author's defenses of her book incredibly disingenuous. It feels to me like she tries to deflect criticism of her books by talking about how #ownvoices they are (without specifically using that term, but still), which is incredibly subtle and yet that just makes it worse because it's, again, completely disingenuous.
Like, she simultaneously insists that Damen is dark-skinned but also insists that "because he's Mediterranean" there are no racial problems with having a brown-skinned character enslaved to and then in a romantic relationship with his white master. And she spends a lot of time talking about how Damen supposedly represents her own experience of being from a Mediterranean culture because Mediterranean people are supposedly discriminated against in Australia. I'm not going to comment on that part, not being Australian and all, but my question is: if she intended for Damen to be positive representation of a "minority" group, why did she write Damen as being enslaved, tortured, raped, and then made to fall in love with his rapist?
Because that's not exactly an empowering narrative of fighting against prejudice and oppression? At all?
I also hate this disingenuous deflecting of criticism, because I think it ignores a very important idea: You can write a story that is true to your own experiences and still have it framed in a way that is harmful toward another group, and THAT MAKES IT PROBLEMATIC.
If I wrote a story in which a dark-skinned Asian is enslaved to a pale-skinned Asian and make a romance out of it, and people criticize that story for having race problems, I'd be completely unjustified in trying to defend myself by saying "But they're Asians, so GTFO with your criticisms about race-based slavery." That's why Captive Prince can't escape race problems, so long as the author insists that Damen is dark-skinned.
