Princess Weekes

algorithm and their relationship to reading is a lot more tropified and so they are reading to get particular tropes out of the stories and they tend to kind of bristle at more critical discussions of like those power structures and they just want to they they don't want anyone to perhaps what they might feel is interrupt their fun

Yeah.

I have complicated feelings about that.

Because on the one level, I do agree that we definitely police what women read more so than men.

We have these kind of discourses about the genres that especially young women and older women all around enjoy.

I do, however, as a Black woman, do Bristol because I will see my white female peers really...

gleefully sit in racial ignorance of how certain characters are written and presented and how...

passive imperialism is recontextualized in these texts unintentionally.

Like one of the criticisms about ACOTAR is like how it sort of reinforces very passive anti-Irish aesthetic in its text.

Someone noticed that the map looks exactly like UK and Ireland and several of the courts that are in the good side are in the UK and the evil ones are in the Ireland section of the map.

And I don't think anyone believes that to be intentional, but when you are repeating common fantasy tropes without understanding the racial or sexual context that they existed within, you accidentally can be...

you know, replacing certain things.

I think even with monster romances, you know, I enjoy Ice Planet Barbarians.

I think it's a very fun series.

I definitely enjoy it.

I do, however, bristle at how those Ice Barbarians are depicted because they do sort of reinforce this kind of very Orientalist sort of like hyper-masculine savage imagery that I feel for like non-white readers is,

we don't connect the same way that certain white readers might connect those same kind of archetypes.

And just a willingness to have that conversation, I think, is what most of us really want.

And what ends up happening is this idea that if we bring it out, we are therefore calling readers that enjoy it racist, rather than saying what we are trying to address is the fact that this is something that keeps happening.

And I think that's kind of the balancing act that we try to do as feminists who critique or teach is trying to balance the fact that, like,