#to basically wrench as much money from poc as possible through misleading

[mermaidsirennikita]

Yeah this needs to be talked about more, the amount of articles, podcasts, youtube/tiktok videos or just online comments that I saw after season 1 came out that just assume the Bton books were diverse because the show is? And the fact the new marketing push around the books is not disabusing people about that notion, mainly through the new covers (both regular and the show tie-in ones).

It's a really complicated, thorny issue in some ways and very simple in others. If I look at Just Romance Novels (which is obviously a niche, just zeroing in a genre for the sake of discussion) the genre is still dominated by product from white authors, largely with characters written as white. While it's diversifying (far more slowly than it should be) a lot of the older "proven success" books are written by white people, about white people. I don't think it's wrong to cast diversely if you're adapting those books--and on a practical, "people putting food on the table" level, I want actors of color to have as many solid, well-paying opportunities as possible.

At the same time, there are still so many authors of color neglected. Not all of whom wrote people of color on the page, of course, especially in historical romance--Sherry Thomas and Stacy Reid are two historical romance novelists who write about white characters, and it's no surprise that the potential adaptation of Stacy's works would be cast more diversely. There's a level of tracking how expectations have changed when you look at how Sinful Wallflowers was presented as a book series, and how it could be presented as a show.

And like, I'll allow that we're in the midst of a sort of "boom" (who knows how long it'll last) of period pieces cast more diversely than they would've been even 15 years ago. The approaches are often different and individualized. The Great has people of color playing characters who'd be literal white Russians "in real life", and it's literally never commented on, which I think many would prefer for a show like Bton. BUT, most of the lead characters are white, with Orlo (who I think did not get the strongest writing from jump, though Sascha wanting to leave after s1 didn't help) and Arkady (who I think is hilarious and finally got more screentime in s3, but he could've gotten more from the beginning... so much Velementov screentime should be Arkady screentime) being two of the only truly prominent people of color onscreen.

Then you have something like Sanditon, where Georgiana gets better writing than many people on Bton, but the show obviously never knew how to really confront her background, made the racist old lady the peak comic relief, and never prioritized Georgiana the way her white counterpart Charlotte was prioritized. Georgiana got an afterthought of an ending after being humiliated by the narrative several times.

One of the shows that handled this best was Tom Jones--Sophia is treated as this gem of a girl whose grandfather and aunt love her, but clearly aren't fully sure about how to solidify her safety as a Black woman of means in England. There's a very tender scene where she discusses her father enslaving her and her mother with Tom, and the show doesn't shy away from Sophia's mixed feelings on the entire thing. There's a heavy implication re: her being made to perform whiteness with face powder, etc, but nonetheless this is not dominating Sophia's storyline. She gets to be the swooning girl who falls head over heels and is desired by a good man and upheld as his ideal in every way. She confronts conflict, but she does not SUFFER, and she is not MINIMIZED in favor of white women in the story--Sophia is really pretty explicitly like, The Woman of that piece. Presented as the most beautiful, as not flawless but good and deserving of love, as a true classical heroine whose personal narrative is actively expanded to match Tom's. The only thing I find prominently weird (after one viewing) is that she and Tom never had like, a sweet wedding night scene, as we saw Tom have sex with three different white women onscreen, of of which was like.... the core villain. I would've liked to have seen Sophia get the full physical adoration there, onscreen, and it did stand out a bit that she didn't.

So those are adaptations with growing pains, not getting everything right, but some being better than others (and Bton being the bottom of the barrel, there).

Then there are things that are unequivocally wrong, and not a part of growing pains as adaptations navigate between what sells and what diversifies and what works, and one of those unequivocally wrong things is selling the Bton books as diverse reads. Those books are some of the most conventional Regency romances out there; you don't even get a lot of economic or class diversity, let alone any racial diversity. Almost everyone in that series is upper class. Even Sophie is the daughter of a nobleman. And I'm not saying it's wrong to write about those people, but for the books to now be sold as something they're not, when the author didn't even think people of color could get HEAs in her Historically Accurate World... is the worst kind of capitalism.

That's part of the extra ugliness (on top of all the obvious ugliness) here. Julia Quinn was against what she's now profiting from. It's not just picking a white author's works to be emblematic of diversity they don't represent; it's THAT author's works. And I think that making Queen Charlotte from all this, putting Julia's name on the cover (I am.... 90% sure that book was ghostwritten, with input from Julia and Shonda, but go off) just adds to all of it.