My little gingerbread cookie

On reception to criticism

Most authors refuse to look at negative reviews. This goes for creatives as a general rule- look up any interview with an actor where they discuss recieving criticism, and nine times out of ten they'll say something along the lines of "Oh, I stay away from that stuff." And, to be honest, that's completely understandable. But when Mx. Stothers is also the type of creative who searches up every single slightly negative post, tweet, and skeet that just might possibly be about them (including the ones that aren't,) just to routinely block everyone who interacts with said posts within an hour of said interaction, it becomes somewhat less understandable- especially when so much of the negative criticism is from trans people and people of color discussing the transmisogyny and racism within their work.

I understand they've recieved harassment before, including threats of violence from nazis and other types of fascists. I understand becoming the "Main Character" of any social media site- even a dying one such as this- is a deeply hellish experience. But to equate the actual serious concerns being brought up to said threats of violence from fascists is, at best, completely out of touch. To be blunt; if Mx. Stothers can't stand to even see in passing negative feedback regarding how they handled certain marginalizations from members of the marginalized groups in question, they shouldn't be posting their creative work publicly- let alone for profit.

Not that their attempt to address said criticism was any better.

Breaking down the "white-ify" post

The context, for those who don't remember it (or have managed to avoid it thus far.) Content warning for whitewashing and antiblackness.

Mx. Stothers starts their defense by mentioning a lore detail that (as far as I remember, including my near-exhaustive review and similarly detailed reviews of others,) was never mentioned in the book. Any creative's first instinct when defending themself from accusations of racism should not be to bring up a lore detail in defense of said racism that one would either have to scour their social media for (which they seemingly consider tantamount to gangstalking) or ask them about it directly (which would be pretty difficult, since the people who made them write the defense in the first place are all blocked.)

Next, they proceed to confirm that Hydna is not black, but "tanned", which- as most of us know already- still makes their depiction of her colorist. If the darkest main character in your novel acts like that, that's still really bad! That's still stereotyping darker-skinned people! You're still passively reinforcing negative biases about darker people! They also confirm who is black in Sir Cameron- two characters, "Felix Noor" and "Captain Abel". I'm going to be completely honest with you all, as someone who had to read the entire book twice: I have no fucking idea who either of these characters are. Let me Ctrl+F the book.

After doing so: Oh my god. Okay. You want to know who the canonically only two black characters in the entire book are? "Felix Noor" is the chancellor, an incredibly minor character who's so insanely corrupt that when he gets arrested (that's right, one of the two black characters gets arrested and is never seen again,) he initially doesn't even know it's specifically for helping Merulo. He's mainly described in terms of his "paunch." And "Captain Abel" is the ship commander from the lunar colony who picks the main characters up from the transformed Earth, and the first mention of them is in chapter 56 of 60.

Again, they just confirmed that these are the only two black characters; both minor characters, one whose main character traits are being corrupt and fat who eventually gets arrested, and the other a personality-less ship captain who exists as a vehicle for lore and also pilots a literal vehicle, which the main characters (who are now all confirmed to be white) use to get transported from planet A to planet B. For anyone at home scrolling back up to the screenshot, we have only just finished paragraph 2/4 and it's already this bad.

They immediately segue into framing the accusations of their racism as "interpretation," and that "with that interpretation" people have accused them of depicting Hydna in a stereotypically racist manner. Since we're talking about "interpretations," I "interpret" this phrasing as though Mx. Stothers believes the critique of racism in Sir Cameron comes from an inherently flawed and itself biased reasoning, instead of people looking with their own eyes at the text depicting the "tawny" massive musclebound seven-foot-tall bodybuilder with "a wild mane of hair" who doesn't know her own strength and is constantly described in terms akin to a beast, a fantasy-mixed-race woman who was forcibly given what I can only describe as fantasy race reassignment surgery at birth to remove her dragon aspects and called "mongrel" by her traveling companion more often than her own name (who later has feelings for her that seemingly change her mind about being homophobic,) and- with this post's confirmation- two almost-nonexistent black characters, one of whom is described by his weight and is incredibly corrupt up until he gets arrested, and the other who is first mentioned in the 4th to last chapter of the book (not counting the epilogue.) But sure. It's just "intepretation," right?

But, apparently, according to them, when they saw such "intepretations" of what I just mentioned, they were "frustrated, and wrote it off as a bad faith reach." For anyone wondering, the author is (from the pictures of themself on their interviews) a thin and pale blonde Canadian with blue eyes. And their initial kneejerk reaction was to immediately dismiss criticism of their book's casual racism and mistreatment of characters of color in frustration.

Not to worry, though! After seeing snippets of further critique (despite apparently mass blocking anyone who brought it up) they realized that, just maybe, there might be a problem! How openminded and generous of them. To be clear, if a public figure does something initially bigoted, then later apologizes for it and works to make up for it, that's not a bad thing in and of itself. But in my eyes, and the eyes of many others who saw this screenshot, this did not fix anything. This actually made them come across as even more cluelessly bigoted than before they posted it. By the way, so far, we are still halfway through the screenshot.

To paraphrase their words, they believe the problem lies with them describing Hydna as "tawny"- specifically, to quote the book, having a "tawny complexion." I've mentioned this before, but let's go on Google Images right now and see what results come up when I google "tawny complexion".

Wow look at that! NONE OF THOSE SHADES LABELED AS "TAWNY" ARE BEING USED BY WHITE WOMEN.

I did actually find a couple pictures of white women being described as "tawny." They were all super light, except for one AI-generated one that was technically darker than the other white women- and by that, I mean she looked like Donald fucking Trump.

So, did Mx. Stothers just not use references for their descriptions, or google what words meant? Because if you look up the word it's pretty blatantly obvious what it refers to- light to medium-toned women of color, predominantly black women. But, since they admit they "might have goofed," and seeing the response "made them go 'uh-oh'," they're going to fix it, right?

...Right?

Well, now we get to Eres. Both people who did not read the book and who did may be asking themselves; "Who the hell is Eres?" That's because she was never namedropped in the book, and was only mentioned as a source of Merulo's sadboymoments that would make you go "Aww" and have all the feels. She was Hydna and Merulo's adoptive mother, who was also a dragon, until her untimely murder and subsequent sacrifice of various parts of her body to power spells by elves and humans, as well as the incredibly creatively named Church. Even the prophecy that kickstarted the whole story (using "story" here in possibly the loosest manner I ever have in my life) was powered by her heart. Now, when I read this, I thought "Wow. That's quite misogynist to have Merulo's (and later also his sister's) mother be not only fridged but have it come up as a bonding moment for the two male leads." But it turns out I was wrong! It was also insanely racist.

Mx. Stothers, in an attempt to not have people call them racist, confirms that Eres is "brown-skinned." Do they mean South Asian? Native? African? Mixed? Who fucking knows, because they then immediately make her "Caucasian 😬", calling her race an "easily changeable detail" due to the work-in-progress nature of the prequel they are writing about her (later confirmed to be called Eres Loses Everything, because we needed more stories about people of color having insanely tragic stories before being killed and sacrificed in rituals practiced by white people.) They do at least say how "kind of sad it is to white-ify her," so. There's that. They even admit that it is solely due to the backlash they already received for the racism, which comes across as a petulant attempt to get back at critics by removing some of the tiny bits of representation for people of color that existed in Sir Cameron (not that it even actually existed in the fucking book until they canonized-then-decanonized it!) rather than any genuine attempt to receive good-faith criticism gracefully and become a better writer as a result.

Look. I know people are probably going to get on my ass for how much I've read into- sorry, "interpreted" the author's words and deeds already. I'm not trying to psychoanalyze them or anything (although it's a little difficult not to when they were just previously posting for the past week about how bad their mental state is after seeing all those mean comments about their racism.) But this comes across to me as someone who "knows whitewashing is bad" in a very detached sense. They "know" it's bad, because they've seen posts saying it's bad, and they've reblogged them, because they're an Ally. But they seem not to have actually internalized that it is, in fact, quite horrible for their fans of color to have seen this shit on their dashboards where one of the people they follow decided to remove part of the already tiny representation they had in their novel about two white guys and presumably known that if they spoke up they would most likely get blocked, just like all the other Haters Mx. Stothers referred to in their dedication as their second reason to finish the book and prove them wrong. By the way, they seem to have been unable to do the latter.

But hey, it's all good- because they "can see why people might read subtext into her portrayal." Again. Same issue that I had with "interpretation." At some point, it does not matter what you intended, if this is the result. And, sadly, since there "aren't any other dragon ladies in the book," they have to "white-ify" her. You get it. You get it, right? It's just simply out of their pale little hands! They can't stop it now because people were being soooooo mean to them, ohhhhh my god-

Final thoughts

It's pretty rare that not just a book, but the author behind it, gets me this pissed off. This is partially due to the poor quality of the writing itself, and the author's reaction to criticism (as well as at least one of their fans making a throwaway blog in an attempt to dig up dirt on a fellow reviewer) but it's also their seeming lack of response to other criticism. Predominantly, in my opinion, the glaring issues in regards to misogyny, especially the transmisogyny which plagues the narrative, acting as a plot device for offscreen sex and lasting somewhere between a third and a fourth of the book. If you can let me know if they addressed this (and how), I'd be interested to see their response, because so far I haven't seen anything about any of the misogyny apart from flippantly canonizing Cameron's female form as now having diarrhea and an ovarian cyst when she's on her period. I assume I don't need to explain how much that fails to address the issues- to put it generously.

Mx. Stothers did eventually take down the "white-ify" post, as well as the initial post apologizing for it, because even they realized it was a bridge too far. (Would they have taken it down if they hadn't recieved the same amount of backlash? Who can say. Food for thought, though.) Their next apology was to share various resources for writing black characters- after they profited from a book that featured multiple black characters- and they didn't even find most of said resources themself. You can't make this shit up.

They have also said they will not be mass blocking further negative opinions regarding themself or their book, because they will only be responding to posts that tag them directly, which is significantly healthier than their previous response to negative feedback, so that's better than nothing. Does that mean that further criticism regarding the issues with their writing, and then their posts regarding said criticism, will be fully ignored? Who knows! Regardless, I will, as I planned even when my critique had a single-digit amount of interactions both here and on Goodreads, be reading and subsequently reviewing whatever further writing they post as an author- so not blog posts, or snippets, or loredumps, or whatnot. And while I was admittedly incredibly mean, I do also like to imagine I was fair. If they write something of genuine good quality, my review will reflect said quality.

In any case, this is my final statement regarding this entire debacle. You may occasionally see me in your notifications liking posts referencing the events because some of you are funny as hell. And if some egregious misinformation about the situation begins to spread, I will make a post correcting it. But aside from that, the next posts I'm making regarding writing will be my weekly Pale Lights Friday updates.