#and a serial assaulter at bare minimum in book canon

[kataraavatara]

“back in the day you could say you liked Joffrey and no one would bat an eye” back in the day i don’t think there were swaths of people writing essays about how Joffrey is the rightful heir to the throne and just has mommy and daddy issues and actually isn’t a villain and actually everything he did was justified. nowadays if someone says “i like aegon ii” we have to figure out what KIND of “i like aegon ii” person you are. do you enjoy a funky little evil dude or are you like…a rape apologist.

[ace-trainer-risu]

omg i would like to know the hated author...

OH thank you for asking I was. of course secretly deeply hoping someone would ask so I would have an excuse to go off. 

The author [dramatic pause] is VE Schwab!

Now I will pause (again) to say that I just spent like two hours writing a six page long essay on exactly why I dislike her as an author (I don’t know anything about her as a person so no feelings there) but then when I reread it I started to feel worried that it might hurt someone’s feelings who really likes her as an author, so this is a slightly redacted version.

But basically there are three things I hold against her.

For context, I’ve only actually read one book by her, A Darker Shade of Magic. But it’s not just that I didn’t like it. It’s that it left me angry. I read it a year ago and I still get furious when I think about it. It is, in my opinion, a profoundly toxic and hateful book. 

While at the same time also being a very boring and bland book.

So that’s point one) I just don’t get the hype. I read ADSM b/c I saw it recommended everywhere, but I really don’t get why? It’s not very well-written. Purely on a technical level her writing isn’t bad, but it’s not good either, its very...okay. The world building was really disappointing (it’s about four alternate worlds but they’re all almost. exactly the same. which was super disappointing. and also she seems to be under the illusion that london is like the most important place in the world?) The characters are bare minimum sketches, they basically feel like she came up with an initial concept and then never went any further. The characters aren’t particularly likeable or compelling, either, except for one character who...I felt like you weren’t actually supposed to like, lol. The pacing was actively bad. The plot doesn’t really start till around halfway through the book. I actually started ASDM twice and gave up on it the first time b/c it was boring. when I tried again the second time, I thought I had only read maybe the first quarter of it on the first try b/c I couldn’t remember anything happening, but it turned out I had actually read about half, its just that nothing happens in the first half. 

to be fair, I have read reviews of a different book she wrote which specifically praised the writing, so maybe she just did a shitty job on this book and she writes better in her other work?

point two) if you only pay attention to the text of the story, it’s fine! again, its not particularly compelling but its fine. but if you pay any attention to the subtext, its...really misogynistic and queerphobic. its incredibly pervasive through the whole text. 

for one thing, the female protagonist is introduced and is immediately like “Oh. I hate all other women.” (No one asked!) which is not necessarily bad in and of itself, except that...not only is her sexism never called out or contradicted, its actually actively supported by the text. there’s only one other important female character, and she’s Evil(TM), and also gets killed. the very few other female side characters are either someone’s mom or are portrayed as being extremely shallow and vapid and silly. they act exactly how the female protag despises women for acting. so...I don’t think its intentional but you’re left with this weird impression that the female protag is completely justified in her internalized misogyny b/c apparently all other women ARE bad. also, the female protag likes wearing boy’s clothes, which is great, but there’s this weird vibe that girls who don’t wear boy’s clothes are like, dumb and bad and sexist. I think the author is trying to critique repressive female clothing in the past (female character is from regency era england) but she does it really badly and instead accidentally(?) implies that girls who wear skirts are like. dumb sluts. a very weirdly sexist take. like it literally feels like this book hates women and specifically hates them for wearing “women’s” clothes.  *also not the point but it’s really funny that of all the time periods to critique for restrictive clothes, she picked regency england. ah yes, the torturous constraints of...empire waisted dresses and minimal or no corsets. dastardly! 

for another thing, the queer rep is just...so so bad. there’s one explicitly multisexual person (bi or pan isn’t specified but something along those lines) who gets tricked by a manipulative man older than himself heavily implied to be gay (bad) and gets horribly injured and almost dies (bad) basically just so the straight male protag can have angst (bad!). 

the manipulative guy implied to be gay is in turn being magically controlled by...a different! manipulative older man (bad) and is strongly implied to be sexually abused by that man (bad) and the straight main character literally never tries to help him in any way (bad) and ultimately kills(ish) him (bad) but it’s revealed that he basically chose to die (bad) because it was like, the only way he could ever escape his suffering (very bad!!) and the main character then! uses! his dying body! in a spell! to save his own fucking life! and basically disposes of his still alive! body into hell like he’s garbage (so bad I’m literally still fuming of it over a year later)

and then there’s the guy who is manipulating that guy, who is an older man heavily implied to serially abuse and assault teenage boys and young men (bad!!). he also dies too which is fine and good in and of itself...*

except for the fact that of our three queer-adjacent characters, two die and one is horribly injured and almost dies. two are abused and one is an abuser. two are used as angst-fodder for straight characters and one is literally sacrificed, coldly and selfishly and without his consent, to save a straight character’s life. they’re all closely associated with injury and death and trauma and abuse and it’s suggested that death is the only escape. 

subtextually speaking, this book hates queer men and punishes them for existing. 

*note: I want to specifically say that “enjoying abusing teen boys” does not automatically make a person gay or queer. that’s not what being gay/queer means. HOWEVER, there is a long and ugly history of gay men being portrayed as predators who deliberately prey on and abuse younger men, and this character plays directly into that stereotype, and that is why I included him. not b/c he’s positive queer rep but exactly because he isn’t

thirdly) about a year ago there was a bit of buzz about ve schwab writing a book with a canon asexual character...except I looked into it and a) it’s not actually canon at all; the book only says he’s disinterested in sex, which is by NO MEANS the same and it’s shitty to conflate the two when there’s a vast spectrum of asexual experiences (to be clear, it would be one thing if the text said he was asexual AND disinterested in sex. to say he’s disinterested in sex and that equals asexuality is a whole other thing, and is wrong), and schwab then confirmed on her twitter that he’s meant to be asexual. That’s not the same its not the same and we all know its not the same. b) this character is in fact a villain, which is frustrating when asexuality is FREQUENTLY and harmfully associated with people being heartless and unfeeling and evil and like, literal serial killers; to be fair, as I understand it the majority (all?) of the characters in these books are villains, so that’s less bad, but to be fair again, apparently this specific character is also portrayed as being, like “a sociopath” which is ableist AND goes back to all the stuff I said above. and c) what really annoys me is that in her tweets at the time she was very smug about this and fully patted herself on the back. she did half-assed, unresearched “rep” which wasn’t even actually canon and then acted like she was doing ace ppl a favor. excuse me, I didn’t actually ask to be represented by you. 

SO YEAH that’s not the...medium and short of it. the long and short is reserved for a Cursed(TM) google doc filled with my rage. but the tl;dr is that I think she’s an overhyped writer who wrote a profoundly misogynistic, homophobic book and trumps herself up over rep she didn’t actually do a good job of providing. and I would definitely never read another one of her books. The End!