I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.
As promised, I’m importing the A Court of Thorns and Roses recaps here from Patreon. These were originally written beginning in August of 2020, so there will be references to upcoming or seasonal events that won’t fit with our current timeline. I am not a time traveler and you’ll never be able to prove that I am. I will also include editors notes like this every now and then as we go, mostly to amuse myself but to give re-read value to those who’ve already been on this awful, awful journey with me.
CW: Racism, Slavery
As someone who has written their fair share of racist fantasy tropes, I think I’m uniquely positioned to recognize them in the work of others. And this shit is looking real, real familiar to me.
Strap the fuck in.
First of all:
It wasn’t the dawn that awoke me, but rather a buzzing noise.
Yes, we’re starting another chapter off with Feyre waking up, having her breakfast, and taking a bath. Because none of us are intelligent enough to assume that she’s eating or bathing or waking unless it’s explicitly mentioned.
She’s expecting Alis but instead there’s a fairy “with skin made from tree bark” who brought breakfast.
Her bird mask was familiar. But I would have remembered a faerie with skin like that. Would have painted it already.
Look, Feyre would have remembered if she saw brown skin before because if there’s one thing they don’t have in Prythian, it’s anybody darker than a sourdough starter. ed.—Maas eventually retconned several characters in this series as being men of color; fans insist that they have been described so throughout the series. One of these characters is the pale man she met at Calanmai. The other is Lucien, described as “tan,” the same way the canonically white characters are described as “tan.” I pointed this out to a Maas fan on Facebook; her response was that the author may not have ever encountered BIPOC people in real life (and there was no way we could prove that she had) and therefore felt uncomfortable writing “diversely.”
The author was born and raised in New York City. The fandom is complicit in SJM’s racism.
Two things to note about the painting comment: This is the first time I can remember that Feyre has seen something in Prythian and thought she would be able to paint it. And it just so happens to be brown skin. Usually, she feels she can’t paint things because they’re so beautiful. But brown skin? No problem.
Why would that be, ma’am? Care to comment?
Also, the way it’s phrased and the fact that the skin is wood made me briefly think she meant she would have literally painted on the fairy.
The thing is, the treebark-skinned fairy is Alis.
It was impossible. The Alis I knew was fair and plump and looked like a High Fae.
The Alis I knew was white!
Then Feyre makes the connection that all the fairies she’s seen so far have been glamoured and she’s now seeing them the way they truly look.
Because I’d been a cowering human, that’s why. Because Tamlin knew I would have locked myself in this room and never come out if I’d seen them all for their true selves.
That’s a pretty loaded statement, Feyre. Tamlin knew that if you saw people who looked different from you, you’d freak out? I mean, he was taking you into the fairy world, so it’s not like you weren’t expecting to see fairies.
And if he meant to protect her from freaking out about creatures…why did he show up at her house in full-on beast form?
Also: if he knew this about her, why didn’t he remove the glamour before Calanmai, when he wanted her to be scared enough to stay in her room? Without the glamour, maybe she would have been too freaked out by the creatures to leave the house.
Things only got worse when I made my way downstairs to find the High Lord.
How did things get worse, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you, dear Patron: she can suddenly see that there are more fairies in the castle than she previously believed, and not all of them look like Tamlin and Lucien.
I was almost shaking by the time I reached the dining room. Lucien, mercifully, appeared like Lucien. I didn’t ask whether that was because Tamlin had informed him to put up a better glamour or because he didn’t bother trying to be something he wasn’t.
Like present in the story?
I’d almost yelped when I looked out my bedroom window and spotted all the faeries in the garden. Many of them–all with insect masks–pruned the hedges and tended the flowers. Those faeries had been the strangest of all, with their iridescent, buzzing wings sprouting from their backs. And, of course, then there was the green-and-brown skin, and their unnaturally long limbs, and—
DARLING COME QUICKLY THE HELP IS SPOILING MY VIEW WITH THEIR DARK SKIN CALL THE SERVICE I WANT THEM FIRED.
I’m sorry, it’s just so weird to me that she wrote this like, “AND, OF COURSE,” before mentioning their skin color. like, OF COURSE the thing that’s freaky about them is their green and brown skin. Now, to be fair, if she’d said pink and purple or translucent, I wouldn’t think anything about it, but now we’re at two different mentions of brown skin freaking out the heroine. And the idea that here’s this blonde white lady “almost shaking” as she realizes there are brown-skinned people around is just hilariously bad. Just so, so bad.
Tamlin tells Feyre that all these fairies have been around the whole time, she just couldn’t see them. Which makes Feyre all freaked out because that meant they saw her trying to escape the night the puca was there.
I thought I’d been so stealthy. Meanwhile, I’d been tiptoeing past faeries who had probably laughed their heads off at the blind human following an illusion.
I read that sentence and immediately followed it with a mental clip of Janis from Mean Girls saying “unfriendly Black hotties.”
“But I could see the naga–and the puca, and the Suriel. And–and that faerie whose wings were … ripped off,” I said, wincing inwardly. “Why didn’t the glamour apply to them?”
Editor: Why could Feyre see some of the fairies and not the other ones?
Maas, probably: Because it would be detrimental to the story and I don’t want to have to scroll up in my Word document.
“They’re not members of my court,” Tamlin said, “so my glamour didn’t keep a hold on them. […]”
A likely story.
“I see,” I lied, not quite seeing at all.
Look, it’s very, very simple: if the author needs you to see a fairy, you see a fairy. If you don’t, Tamlin deus ex machinas them away.
Lucien is sitting there at the dining room table picking his nails with a dagger. It’s a good thing Feyre’s really at second breakfast since she always eats in her room. Someone cleaning their nails where I eat would make me lose my appetite.
Maybe they’re finished eating and it’s not rude. Maybe Lucien and Tamlin just sit quietly in the dining room and wait for Feyre to make an appearance. This and “the border” seem to be the only places these dudes go.
Anyway, Feyre mentions that she hasn’t seen Lucien around much, which of course prompts Lucien to make a remark about her kissing Tamlin and…leave.
I imagine Lucien’s daily schedule goes something like “sit quietly in the dining room, existing only to be present every time Feyre enters the room. Make a shitty remark to Feyre. Cease existing until the narrative demands my presence again.”
Feyre asks Tamlin if she’d see the Attor if it came back.
“You said it didn’t see me at that time, and it certainly doesn’t seem like a member of your court,” I ventured. “Why?”
Editor: Why couldn’t the Attor sense her presence if Tamlin’s spells don’t work on fairies from outside his court?
“Because I threw a glamour over you when we entered the garden,” he said simply. The Attor couldn’t see, hear, or smell you.”
Maas, probably: Because magic. Stop questioning my deftly woven plot.
Hey, guess what I did? I went back to that scene in the garden, where Tamlin allegedly “threw a glamour over” her.
You know what didn’t happen?
She didn’t “taste the metallic tang of magic” or whatever she always did when a spell happened before that.
BUT THIS IS ALL VERY PLANNED OUT AND TIGHTLY WRITTEN YOUS ALL. MASTERFUL.
Tamlin tells Feyre that he’s worked overtime trying to keep other creatures in Prythian from seeing her, but the blight is getting worse and soon they’re gonna be overrun with monsters he can’t do anything about. He tells her that if she sees anybody looking at her funny, to let him know.
This was for my own safety, not his amusement.
I assume you’ll be ignoring him, then?
He didn’t want me hurt–he didn’t want to punish them for hurting me. even if the naga hadn’t been part of his court, had it hurt him to kill them?
No, killing is super cool and barely bothers anyone. You know, like how it barely skimmed your fucking conscience when you learned that you murdered Tamlin’s friend?
Tamlin tells Feyre that she’ll be safe in his territory. Which has not been the case at all, so far. She’s almost died like six times and all of those incidents happened in your territory. But why not? We’ll go with Feyre being safe and just hope that’s not true because I wish nothing but the worst for her.
Since she’s falling in love with him, Feyre is like, oh, it’s not my safety I worry about and then laments the fact that he won’t let her help with the blight. Which, if you will recall, is a problem in Prythian related to magic and which magic users can’t even figure out, but Feyre would be able to fix it no problem, I’m sure.
There’s a section break and:
The next morning, I found a head in the garden.
Wait. Hang on. Did you wake up? Did you take a bath? Did Alis bring you breakfast? I’m all confused now because I did not see these actions take place explicitly on the page. How did you even get to the garden? Are there Sparknotes for this?! Never since House of Leaves has a book so flummoxed and perturbed me with its inaccessible, incomprehensible events.
That line about the head would have been an incredible chapter opening. Much better than “I woke up and took a bath and had a conversation with a servant that meant absolutely nothing and went nowhere but you have to throw in a Bechdel test so White Feminists will rave about your book online.”
Somebody has straight-up previously on Hannibaled a fairy’s head onto the beak of a heron statue.
The stone was soaked in enough blood to suggest that the head had been fresh when someone had impaled it on the heron’s upraised bill.
More CSI: Prythian going on here.
Feyre had planned to paint in the garden but sudden head obviously unsettles her and she drops all her stuff.
I didn’t know where I went as I stared at that still-screaming head, the brown eyes bulging, the teeth broken and bloody.
I would have gone with “silently screaming head” because, you know, magic and stuff could very easily mean the head is outright screaming. In which case, finding it wouldn’t be such a startling surprise, maybe? ed.—I still occasionally think of this scene and question whether I would rather find a screaming head, so the sound would alert me to spooky goings-on and I wouldn’t be caught by surprise, or just a regular head, which would be unsettling and sudden but not otherworldly. I still haven’t decided.
Tamlin is right behind her, because that’s what Tamlin does. He just randomly appears whenever Feyre runs into some plot.
Neither Tamlin nor Lucien recognize the fairy, at least, and Lucien gets closer to investigate.
“They branded him behind the ear with a sigil,” Lucien said, swearing. “A mountain with three stars—”
NXIM?
“Night Court,” Tamlin said too quietly.
Oh, that’s much funnier.
If you’re not a million years old, you might be unaware that there was once upon a time a show called Night Court, it was beloved, and it had very distinctive theme music. And every time I see the words “night” and “court” anywhere near each other, I think about John Larroquette.
Is he Canadian? I bet he’s Canadian. ed.—He’s not Canadian.
Feyre is all like, why would someone leave a head in your garden? and Tamlin goes:
“The Night Court does what it wants,” Tamlin said. “They live by their own codes, their own corrupt morals.”
How dare you speak ill of wise-acre Mel Torme aficionado and legendary close-up magician the Honorable Judge Harry Stone!
That’s a little tv humor from the ’80s kids for you, folks.
But what a weird answer, huh? Like, why did these people leave a decapitated head in your fountain? IDK, they do what they want. Cool, that’s a very normal thing to say.
I don’t want to make it seem like Lucien and Tamlin don’t care about this development. They do, and Lucien in particular doesn’t like the Night Court. He calls them sadists and says they probably left the head on the fountain to be funny.
And then he takes the head down and there is some amazing description:
[…] I cringed at the thick, wet sounds of flesh and bone on stone as he yanked the head off.
Did you hear that? I heard it. And somehow, felt the resistance of it pulling off the heron’s beak.
Lucien’s theory is that the head was left on the fountain to prove that not only could the Night Court get onto the property, that close to the house, but then pull off killing somebody close enough to get this huge amount of blood everywhere.
But like…
What about all the fairy gardeners? Why didn’t they find the head? And how did nobody see the attack? Just pages ago, we learned that those garden fairies are present even at night. It’s how they would have seen Feyre trying to sneak out to the puca thing.
I guess Lucien isn’t the only fairy that conveniently vanishes when the story calls for it.
Tamlin tells Feyre:
“You’re still safe here. This was just their idea of a prank.”
And she’s like, does this have anything to do with the blight?
“Only in that they know the blight is again awakening—and want us to know they’re circling the Spring Court like vultures, should our wards fall further.”
Sarah. Either this head is a warning/message or a prank. You can’t have the same character who is brushing off the idea that they’re in danger then announcing that these people want to attack them.
This would have been a good place to get out of Feyre’s head a little and let us see Lucien and Tamlin talk it out, with Lucien arguing for his stance that it’s a message and Tamlin believing that it was just a prank. We could have seen more of their relationship and gotten more of Lucien’s character, since he’s either going to end up the love interest or the villain by the end of this thing.
There’s gonna be a twist coming, I can feel it. But no spoilers.
There’s no reason a first-person POV character can’t sit back and observe a conversation without participating in it. In this book, we could have used a lot more of that. Instead, every single time something comes up that would expand on characterization or worldbuilding, Feyre just stands there and asks questions so people explain everything directly to her, and they only ever talk about these things in terms of whether or not the events will impact her. It’s almost like nobody in the book is allowed to interact with other characters when Feyre is in the scene. She is the conduit through with all must flow.
That’s not realistic in terms of how life goes in general. There are times when we’re not the center of the universe and we have to stand by awkwardly while other people reveal who they are through actions that don’t directly involve us.
I didn’t have the heart to say that their masks made it fairly clear that nothing could be done against the blight.
I don’t remember whether or not the blight was the cause of the masks in the first place, but either way “didn’t have the heart” is a strange way to describe not actively insulting someone.
Lucien makes a remark about hoping the blight will take care of the Night Court (’80s sax in the distance), too, and Tamlin tells him to get rid of the head. Feyre has her own clean-up to do, as her painting supplies are all over the ground. Tamlin kneels down like he’s gonna help her, but he holds her hands instead.
“You’re still safe,” he said again. The Suriel’s command echoed through my mind. Stay with the High Lord, human. You will be safe.
Yeah, but safety makes for a fucking boring fantasy adventure story, doesn’t it? But my bets are still on the “high lord” in question being Lucien, based on all the little hints tossed in so far about his background.
My knees shook as I rose. Faerie politics, faerie courts … “Their idea of jokes must have been even more horrible when we were enslaved to you all.” They must have tortured us whenever they liked—must have done such unspeakable, awful things to their human pets.
Okay, let me pick this apart a little.
It took me a long time, as a white American person, to understand that even though slavery existed in other parts of the world throughout history and that yes, even some white people were slaves in various times and cultures (not your Irish-American great-grandfather so keep that ahistorical nonsense outta here), the enslavement of Black people in my country is far too recent for me to be playing with the concept of slavery in fiction. Maybe not everyone feels that way, but it’s a personal line that caused me to toss out a horror novel I’d written and set in ancient Rome.
Regardless of personal lines, it’s still super weird to write a fantasy novel in which:
- there do not appear to be any Black people
- there are brown-skinned people the heroine finds unsettling
- the heroine is a white woman
- and she’s carrying generational trauma about enslavement
I can’t possibly be the first blogger to notice how uncomfortable that is.
It’s also very strange that this woman who grew up in a culture with a legacy of enslavement is only just now thinking about what slavery would have meant for the people who were enslaved.
Especially since I’m pretty sure she already mentioned this in one of the early chapters. But Maas doesn’t scroll up and she’s not gonna start.
It’s also very weird to be writing a book in which the person from the enslaved race is falling in love with an enslaver and that dynamic is not only playing out between two white characters but is only playing out to be waved away:
A shadow flickered in his eyes. “Some days, I’m very glad I was still a child when my father sent his slaves south of the wall. What I witnessed then was bad enough.”
Some days you’re glad slavery ended? Other days, you kinda miss it? Why just “some days” and why didn’t an editor catch that?
I did not think five centuries would be enough to cleanse the stain of the horrors that my people had endured. I should have let it go—should have, but couldn’t.
Here is our white heroine, written by our white American author, using the same metaphor frequently employed to describe slavery in the U.S., and basically saying that the heroine knows better than to hold the enslavers accountable even in a simple conversation because it’s not polite.
IDK, maybe it was all the stuff about how brown skin is bizarre earlier in the chapter that’s making me react this way to this section but it certainly reads like Feyre knows that it’s good manners to forgive and forget slavery.
“Do you remember if they were happy to leave?”
Yeah, no, this is becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
“Yes. Yet they had never known freedom, or known the seasons as you do. They didn’t know what to do in the mortal world. But yes—most of them were very, very happy to leave.”
Wow, way to accidentally include pro-slavery talking points from the nineteenth century in your twenty-first-century fantasy novel.
No wonder he’d been so awkward with me, had no idea what to do with me, when I’d first arrived. “You’re not your father, Tamlin. Or your brothers.” He glanced away, and I added, “You never made me feel like a prisoner—never made me feel like little more than chattel.”
Yup, there’s our white heroine, telling an enslaver it’s okay because he’s one of the good ones.
Like.
What in the Tumbr is happening here and why didn’t this book get absolutely blasted for this shit when it came out? It’s not like it was published in the ’90s or the ’00s. This book is like five years old.
And for someone who never felt like a prisoner, Feyre sure tried to escape a lot. Usually, you don’t have to try to escape when you don’t feel like a prisoner.
Feyre decides that since he’s so traumatized by his father enslaving people, she won’t ask him any more questions, and the chapter ends with:
Still, I couldn’t bring myself to paint that day.
This is a weird way to end the chapter when literally nothing in the conversation about slavery suggested she would be able to paint now that they’d discussed it.
Like I said, I wrote some really racist fantasy novels (that I would love to be able to rework and fix but alas, they are owned by Harlequin), so maybe I’m just overly sensitive to this or overly critical of this book in general. But something in me just thinks, you know, maybe white American people shouldn’t write about slavery in their books where Black people don’t seem to exist.
Maybe we shouldn’t be using slavery as a plot device, at all.
I think this story sucks more than 50 Shades simply because of all the wasted potential. There was a cool story here but the author chose to meander through pointless descriptions of sleeping and waking and eating and bathing rather than let us naturally explore this new world and develop a plot.
There didn’t ever have to be slavery in this book. There didn’t have to be all these issues. She could have just been a poor starving girl, trying to care for her family who shot a buck, not knowing she’d wandered into fairy protected forest and killed their white buck they needed. She now has to repay a debt and that’s why she has to stay with Tamlin in the Spring Court. She could have caused the blight even, unknowingly, by killing their sacred deer. Now it’s up to her to fix it before time runs out. The story writes itself and instead we get…nothing. Nothing and awkward/horrific slave apologia. Thanks, I hate it.
I agree about the frustration of all this wasted potential. The story could be so much better than Maas seems to want it to be. Even her writing/descriptions show moments of good writing that she then tosses aside. She really puzzles me because there are signs that she might actually be a good writer but just can’t be bothered. Maybe she’s trolling us all! (I feel she is not. That would be giving her way too much credit. I think she’s just lazy and unfortunately understands that general populace have really low standards.)
I decided to look into the history of this drek since it was hitting me the way Eragon did and sadly it seems to be a combination of her writing a What-If retelling stories as a teen, it getting super popular, then some book company paying for the rights and her publishing it without putting much work in to retool it because I seriously doubt the Throne of Glass novels have any more effort put into them. Clearly her ego had grown after the Cinderella series was green-lit and the book company wasn’t willing to pay for a heavy rewrite so they mostly encouraged her to have her say and leave it. The editor(s) were probably tearing out their hair but they did what they could and weren’t being paid enough or given enough power to bully her into a full revision. So, yeah, I suspect laziness had some impact but a lot of it was because no one else forced her to have higher standards.
The rest of it was due to inexperience as a writer, more or less ignorance, a lot of internalized crap that she’s not aware enough to sort out or at least that was certainly true when these were published. If any of her newer books are better, maybe she has some insight but there’s not telling and I’d guess no. Apparently she was raised Jewish (so wikipedia says) but her mother was Catholic and her father was Jewish. That said, apparently she was born in New York which surprised me, she went to college there too for a major in Creative Writing and a minor in Religious Studies. Also she apparently used to write Sailor Moon fanfiction.
I find this amusing, taken from the wikipedia article directly:
Writing style and influences
In an interview with Writers & Artists, Maas told them that movie scores and classical music are her inspiration as a writer.[29] She continued on to say that Sabriel written by Garth Nix and The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley began her love for reading fantasy and writing it.[29] Her character development has been lauded as one of her best qualities for storytelling, with morally grey characters and strong world building.[30]
Maas has mentioned that, “The sense of discovery is why I love writing so much. It’s a total thrill for me.”[31] Her books are known for heavy romantic themes, and Maas herself has said that her fantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses “does skew older”, sitting somewhere between young adult and adult genres.[32]
I’ve read “The Hero and the Crown” by Robin McKinley btw and I haven’t reread it in years but that makes sense. It’s a better example of a stubborn female protagonist who’s determined to become a warrior but she ends up with a fellow I didn’t expect at the end (in hindsight she probably reads as Ace without being labeled as such; she shows no strong interest in the guys if memory serves me right and just kinda chooses this one bandit dude.) Also she gets burnt up by a dragon halfway through and has to recover from it because she becomes a knight more or less. I mean, I can’t confirm it’s great but it’s got to be better than this book even if I read it as a kid/teen. It’s the sequel to the Blue Sword which probably has more problematic stuff in it, various stereotypes about the middle east most likely, but it has a strong female protagonist as well and both of them definitely had a stronger editor but I haven’t been back to either book though I still own both. I might find them annoying now. I don’t think I’ve read Sabriel but it’s at least vaguely familiar and sounds like a cool plot. I kinda wonder if they’re legit influences or she just picked some that sounded really fitting? Sabriel would explain the “wall” with north and south if Song of Ice and Fire didn’t influence her (and of course Prythain might be inspired by the Black Cauldron or purely coincidental.) Eh in all honestly it doesn’t matter but I’m amused.
Oh this is taken from the Court of Thorns and Roses wiki page:
Development
Maas initially intended the series as a retelling of the fairy tales Beauty and the Beast, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and Tam Lin. These tales inspired the finished series, though it was not ultimately a dedicated retelling.[13]
She began writing A Court of Thorns and Roses in early 2009, with the first draft taking about five weeks to complete.[14]
Daaaaaamn this explains so much and confirms a lot. She was 16 when she first wrote her Cinderella story but she was 23 and might’ve had kids by the time she started working on this book. I’m not shocked she did it like a Nanowrimo, probably just needed to get it done. She says she likes writing too but I suspect that’s not entirely true. Or maybe she has my problem where she’s better at writing fandom stuff than original novels but who knows?
I realized there was no link to her new series so I hunted up some info and it’s about angels this time, sort of. I’d provide a link but I don’t feel like waiting to make sure it goes through so I recommend the 2-star review of House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City, #1) written by Ellie. It was the first one I saw when I clicked on 2-stars and the review was great but clearly Maas has actually gotten LAZIER which isn’t shocking but I genuinely can’t fathom how. Apparently everything wrong with this series is present in the new one plus the wiki for Maas mentioned one of the books in the series, I think the third, had a cover generated by an AI. Dang.
The one good thing I can say about her writing is that it has inspired my nanawrimo this year. Write a better version of the shitshow novel she wrote. lol
My main writing problem is that I am great at coming up with ideas, fabulous at dialog, love creating elaborate backstory, but I’m total shite at actually writing a book from start to finish. But no matter how bad I am at it, I feel confident I can do it better than Maas.
Oh, yeah! I have the same problems as you do lol. It’s why I’ve never actually done nanawrimo though I’ve considered it a few times so huzzah if you manage to do it this year! I’m sure you can write a better version of this idea, especially since you’ll probably feel determined to actually turn the first draft into something of better quality.
I thought she was 26… maybe I’m misremembering. Iirc she’s 37 now.
Yeah, it definitely got so popular based on the wasted potential everyone noticed but may or may not have mourned. I think that happens a lot with the headscratchers. (That plus luck and backing.) Unfortunately, I think one of the problems with the whole “popularity motivates media” trend is that capitalism is only concerned with the almighty dollar and popularity doesn’t automatically determine if this is what people want, it simply determines what they’re willing to buy for whatever reason.
Ohhhh that’s a perfect way to resolve it. Drop Andras, kill the stag, make her the origin of the blight, and give her a reason to either feel motivated to get involved or be forced to do so or a bit of both columns. I’m certain the problem is that she decided to crib the Mists of Avalon idea much later in the writing phase, she didn’t critically assess it and simply inserted it without any additional thought, but if she’d gotten a second opinion from anyone else who wasn’t simply being paid to catch typos and minor problems, and she had some determination to make a quality product and revise the whole thing, she could’ve rewrote it with all of that in mind. And yeah, the former slavery thing just… adds nothing and is better off being removed entirely.
As a white European I find it very interesting to learn about modern handling of the concept of slavery in fiction, so thank you for pointing it out. (I’m from Germany, where the discussion leans more toward fighting Antisemitism.) I wonder whether Maas could’ve avoided this association by using, for example, something like the Middle Ages’ serfdom? In my understanding, serfdom would’ve fit better with the feudal sounding fairy courts, from a purely worldbuilding pov. Or she could’ve left it out altogether and made do with “only” war.
But then, Maas obviously grew up in a locked cellar (the only place where you will never encounter BIPOC people unless you really, really work at not meeting any). Perhaps her reading choices in that cellar are limited and the history section got eaten by rats?
Nah. The USA likes to consider itself past segregation and racism (we obviously aren’t) but the truth is white Americans have implemented lots of subtle systemic ways to avoid POC and not think about BIPOC people at all or know they exist (in fact, it was illegal to “mix” at certain points during the segregation era I think.) And that’s true even if they’ve met them. I was surprised Maas apparently was born and raised in New York and now lives in Philadelphia but while the South is sometimes more direct with its racism, the North has some potentially more covert racism.
Amusingly enough, I was just at her wiki page and apparently her father is Jewish, her mother Catholic, and she was raised Jewish so maybe she thinks she gets a pass using slavery because of that? IDK! I mean, we also had the presumably Jewish leaning Lani Sarem who didn’t realize Romani still exist. I suspect in general there are a lot of people who think having certain backgrounds makes them exempt from being racist towards other groups who aren’t explicitly Black. In fact, a lot of White people probably think you can’t be racist (or at least discriminatory) towards any other group!
er to clarify I say she didn’t realize the Romani exist based on her lack of research and reliance on stereotypes and the simple fact I think the average American probably has no idea they’re still around. (I certainly didn’t know until I started reading those recaps about the 1# bestseller!)
Well, ok, Germany does have a few villages, especially in the east, where people might not be able to tell a Black human from a Marsian, but those villages are basically cellars, too
Interesting that Sinti and Romanies (as we call them) might be less known in the US as compared to Europe. Not that Europeans are free from stereotyping. In recent years, we had a hot debate over new names for “gypsy sauce”. Some people probably think they will be poisoned if they eat it as “paprica sauce”…
Well, the thing is, being “white” is what’s touted as the best, most beautiful, and correct way to be. So although African American and other groups may have held onto their culture to the best of their ability, engaging with it and sharing it in the ways that they can, doing so comes with stigmatism to the point that many African American people have internalized the notion that they must be pale, skinny, and speak in bland “proper” English to be acceptable to White people. Other groups like Asian Americans (who are touted as “the good ones” and lumped together under certain stereotypes even though they’re diverse groups and tones from many countries) and Hispanic Americans (similar situation, who can also be all sorts of varied shades from sundry assortment of countries and continents, but only deemed “tolerable” by some) while the only groups more shit upon are the Native Americans who don’t “accept” Americanism, don’t integrate into it, and want to live in their traditional culture (forcing them to live on reservations and be ostracized if not outright tormented by other people around them) and the Islamic/Muslim minority (which are potentially even more variable than the other groups with nationality and skin-tone.)
Other more European groups, such as the Irish and Italians who moved to America for example, purposefully “integrated” into “whiteness” (which makes sense because whiteness itself is a construct, something Americans borrowed from the Portuguese possibly and really hammered into profound nastiness.) Those groups lifted themselves up from the oppression they felt even in America by sanding off or hiding their cultural roots, or waiting until their roots might be deemed more “acceptable” by the general public and adopted (white people have no distinct culture and that’s why appropriation keeps happening.) Hence my comment about how some white people probably don’t even think they can be racist against anyone except Black people because they focus so much on skin tone. Which is why Maas is very cagey about whether there even are any darker tones among her named characters.
Just based on my own previous knowledge, even though North America is enormous and the USA is big on everyone driving cars, at the detriment of public transportation in most places, Americans pretty much assume all nomadic peoples stopped being nomadic at some point and that groups like that are purely historical (based on the way we rounded up the Indigenous tribes, took their lands, forced them to live in the places we didn’t want, and essentially took most of their freedoms if they didn’t get assimilated in our Indigenous murder schools that literally tried to take their culture from their children, something I only learned about within the past 5 years but had been happening since the US took over a large chunk of the continent.)
I don’t think most of us even realize anyone else was targeted during the Holocaust because I’m pretty certain most Americans think of that as being against Judaism only and forget the details about everything else unless they’re a member of a group that felt some impact from the camps (LGBTQA+++, any country who was conquered, Romani, sympathizers, etc etc.) And unfortunately there are also some radicalized people over here, some of them might be conspiracy theorists, who think the Holocaust is a lie and that it never happened and they spread that message online. I don’t know how large of a group they are but there are a lot of racist people trying to rewrite history. They’ve done it in the past, that’s why our text books routinely suck, and they’re continuing to do it. Also online it’s hard to tell who is actually from another country so no telling, there could be other people in other countries who deny or disbelieve that it happened. IDK.
Unfortunately, fascism is on a major rise in a lot of countries right now, including the USA, but the extremists want to make people think fascism is just the Nazis and WWII and nothing that bad could happen again. Possibly very unlikely for WWIII to occur, most people consider that sci-fi, but you’d probably know better than I would regarding that (not because you’re in Germany but just because you’re in Europe.) I’m not particularly well-learned on this topic so everyone please take all of this with a huge grain of salt, but this is what I know to be true based on my own awkward history of racism (I’m trying to be a better person but it’s a process) and some of what I’ve learned online. We’re doomed to repeat the history other people want to reinstate.
I’m 100% positive most Americans have no idea that the word gypsy is racist. I didn’t really learn about the Sinti, Romanies, Travelers, or any other groups like that until then. My main knowledge was of Esmeralda from the Hunchback of Notre Dame lol. And of course we tend to think of the Mongolians as just Genghis Khan and that’s it. I’m pretty certain most Americans don’t think of that region beyond him. But I can only truly speak for myself.
Sorry that was so wordy and probably rambling and confusing. I’ve been learning this year that I’m terrible at explaining things in person a lot of the time and only moderately better online. Also just the last decade or so learning there’s a lot that I don’t know.
I guarantee Maas is ignorant as hell and some of it isn’t on purpose (though it’s extremely hard to know what is purposeful because I’m certain a lot of things are also turning a blind eye but I very much doubt she knows a lot about history, socialism, racism, or sexism.) She’s also probably the kind of person who thinks a woman can’t be sexist against other women. The entire point of internalized stuff is to train people into not questioning things and comprehending how they’re being manipulated. That’s how it works.
I meant to say “We’re doomed to repeat the history other people want to reinstate if they successfully bury it so we can’t or won’t learn from those past mistakes.” Because that’s why they’re doing it. They don’t want things to change. The victors write history which can be dangerous depending on what they want to hide.
Also, I realize the reply chain has been long enough that there isn’t even a reply button to my comment. Sorry about that, folks!
Arrgh also to clarify, yes, I know not all of the Native American tribes were nomadic but I’m pretty certain that’s the extent of what a lot of US citizens know about or think about regarding that concept, beyond any other potential groups in history books and historical novels.
Also also I was mostly talking about Lani Sarem regarding the Romani but Maas regarding just about everything else. (Though I wouldn’t be shocked if she also thought they were just a historical group of nomads who stopped being nomads at some point or vanished into history or what have you.) I’d bet both are racist without thinking they are and that neither woman knew there are Romani living in the USA. I didn’t and I’m not saying I grew up as a well-rounded individual but I’ve always lived in bigger cities in NC. I’m not from the rural middle of nowhere and neither is my family. That said I can’t read anyone’s minds so I don’t actually know what Maas and Sarem know or what they’re like. I’m just saying stuff based on my own limited knowledge.
Americans be like
White: normal, default, the actual citizenry that the powers that be are intended to protect
Black people: thugs and hoodlums who are clearly violent/dangerous so use of deadly force by cops is justified.
Hispanic/Latine people: invaders of our precious (white) country
East Asians: model minorities, perpetual foreigners, submissive sexless entities who don’t get to complain because the racism they experience is the “nice” kind of racism.
South Asians and Middle Easterners: terrorists who are scary and should be shunned and frisked at airports
Jewish people: control everything including the media, but somehow can’t control all the antisemitism that gets spewed in the media. This makes no sense but we refuse to examine it.
Native Americans: cartoonish caricatures from the country’s past; pretending they don’t exist makes it easier to handle.
Of course this isn’t what *every* American citizen thinks, but that’s roughly the different strains of racism by visible race present in the national subconsciousness. And sometimes it’s fully conscious for some people; there are pundits, TV personalities, and even politicians who voice some of these sentiments out loud in front of large audiences. It’s something we need to work on as a country, but sadly it seems like a lot of people don’t want to work on it.