to all the ppl in the anti sjm/anti cassandra clare/etc. communities: please hype up books by authors of color and not just stuff by leigh bardugo or whoever the latest woke white woman writing young adult lit is
So, I’m probably missing something re. Sarah J Maas and Cassandra Clare, and yes representing and talking about authors of colour is important, but there’s also nothing wrong with hyping up whatever books you fall in love with, regardless of the colour of the author.
Oh I completely agree!! I also haven’t read Bardugo’s work even, but I’ve heard really good things about it from a lot of my friends and I’m hoping to read it and enjoy it a lot too!
It’s just that I’m specifically talking about an issue I’ve seen in the SJM and Cassandra Clare “anti” communities where people talk a lot about how racism is bad and especially with the “anti sjm” community how these books are very much white feminist and written by a cishet white woman who doesn’t care much to expand her boundaries of inclusion and how much that work is harmful to poc. Then you try to find the books that they actually LIKE and think are good, and the only books they continually discuss in a positive light are like. Other YA books by white women. With seemingly no effort to include authors of color on their reading lists. Which in my opinion is pretty hypocritical if you’re going to spend so much time acting like you’re championing poc or whatever on the internet.
Obviously read whatever you want! Don’t curate your reading list entirely on getting The Most Diverse Authors Ever because a) you’re really not going to have a good time and b) you end up sorta tokenizing minorities. Of course, constantly push your boundaries and try to understand the stories of more and more people, especially marginalized people! Reading is so good at helping us truly understand and empathize with other people and learn so much more about the world. And that includes EVERYONE, not just minorities; it’s just that we have to work a little harder to seek out the stories of marginalized authors.
Sorry for rambling so long essentially to just agree with you haha! It’s a pretty community-specific problem that had irked me for quite a while now.
Hey so I’m just wondering if this post is in response to my blog? I’m very open about my enjoyment of Bardugo and I try to view this blog and all its criticisms as a learning experience, but I’ve gotten this and similar responses to the way I run my blog before. So even if you meant to direct this post more as a community call-out/PSA, you can see why I’m responding here. I also understand why you wouldn’t want to come directly into my inbox, anon or not, to discuss this with me or one of the other blogs you’ve noticed who do this. But I just want to say my piece.
When I first started polysorscha, a little over a year ago, I did tend to brandish Bardugo as a “better” version of SJ/M. I’ve gotten my share of flack for that, so I’ve tried to move away from that tendency. I just made a new tag a few days ago called “lb criticism” as a place to put all my non-positive thoughts about her work because I get a lot of anons talking about their dislike of Mal, the flaws in the love triangle, the use of violence against women, etc. There are some still sitting in my inbox as I’m writing this. I don’t mention this as a way of saying “I criticize LB too” because in the grand scheme of things, yeah, I discuss SJ/M and her flaws way more than I do Bardugo, and I praise Bardugo way more than I praise SJ/M. Plus, the point of this post and the issues you’re bringing up are bigger than that. I guess I’m just confused about how liking Bardugo’s books better than SJ/M equates to “seemingly no effort to put POC on [our] reading lists” and ~acting~ like we’re championing POC.
It’s definitely fair to call us out for generally centering a conversation around white authors, regardless of whether we’re criticizing or praising, and I feel like I fall into that trap frequently. I’m just at a loss for what to do because so many people have input their say into what I’m doing wrong with my blog and I’ve tried to change accordingly and yet I still get stans ridiculing my blog style and anons trying to dictate what I post. When I say I like Bardugo, people say I hold SJ/M to a higher standard. When I criticize her and her fandom, people say I don’t like any authors I claim to like, or they ignore my criticisms of her. I’m not saying you do any of this; it’s just something I’ve noticed throughout my tenure here. My blog started out as an anti SJ/M blog, but to me at least it feels like it’s evolved into something way bigger and more nebulous, especially because ever since GOT season 8 the conversation has veered into writeblr, writing advice concerning representation, racial fandom dynamics, the general state of YA publishing right now, other TV and movies, etc. I’ve been trying to do more than just deride SJ/M because that’s just not as productive as I’d like to be, and I’ve been trying to fill up my book recs tag with every opportunity I get because I completely agree with you that championing POC requires putting our work, wellbeing, and experiences into the spotlight. Championing POC is something I’m always learning how to do, especially in such white arenas as YA fantasy, but I do feel like I’m at least doing it in some way. So I don’t know. I guess this is a statement of both digression and self-defense? But I wanted to add to the conversation in this post because my thoughts on this topic have been changing and growing ever since I got my first anon saying that I unduly praise Bardugo.
All I’m going to say is that big releases are going to be the most commonly read books, and people generally aren’t going to rec what they haven’t read. Big releases are also overwhelmingly white. If we don’t ourselves know about the books because they get next to no marketing hype, we can’t exactly do anything about that.
So like, should we try our best to read more diverse books? Sure. Every time a diverse rec list comes around, I’m the first to share it, and it gets passed around anti circles within days. I don’t know how exactly that gets missed.
Also, our rate of intake for new books is a lot slower than you seem to think, and we’re not exactly going to talk about books we haven’t read. Reading is very time consuming and also potentially very expensive. Access to books is limited if libraries don’t always purchase what we want to read. I haven’t been able to read a new book since Bloodwitch, which I also found rather disappointing. Every anti I know has a TBR list a mile long, and we’ve collectively not even come close to making a dent in them.
Hey Laini, I wanted to link this post I made in response to Maxine’s addition because I think it’s relevant to your point. In fact, to all of the sjm antis following this post, please read what I linked over there!
In addition, I’m entirely aware that it’s hard to read, and also that it’s often inaccessible and expensive! This is something I’ve talked about on my blog before as well. I, too, have a massive damn tbr and I don’t read fast enough to ever really reach the end of it haha, especially because I’m a pretty busy person in general.
I know that antis boost diverse lit! I have an anti sjm tag on both this blog and on my now pretty inactive snark sideblog, @punitivepunning. I have participated in this community for a pretty damn long time, so I do know what happens around it.
As a person of color who both reads and writes fiction, I’m fully aware of how white traditional publishing is, and how skewed in favor of whiteness the bestselling charts are. I know how damn hard it is to find books by poc, and just how few people talk about even the mind-blowingly spectacular works by authors of color. It always takes extra work to seek out and subsequently boost authors of color, but I’d argue that it also does take a lot of work to generate content critiquing authors like SJM beyond just funny shitposts.
I tried to snark a book once (Tiger’s Curse by Colleen Houck, eventually I gave up and here’s my Goodreads review of it from a few months ago). I thought my comments about it to my friends both in group chats and IRL were pretty entertaining, but ultimately trying to snark it ended up taking quite a bit of effort even though complaining about it periodically in a less structured manner was fun and somewhat cathartic. Obviously, what feels like a lot of work for me will be effortlessly done by others, and vice versa. The thing is, though, snarking and this sort of social media setup for critiques will always be quite time-consuming.
The entire anti sjm community is oriented around reading and critiquing books. Of course, these books are more easily available in places like libraries because they’re popular despite their bad quality. And even though Bardugo’s work is better in terms of quality, she still has the benefit of whiteness propelling her to the bestseller charts and so she gets more attention, and then more library shelf space, which cycles back into more attention. Still, though, I think it’s important to constantly be reading new stuff and actively putting effort into being more inclusive in what we’re reading. Reading fiction critically is a skill just like any other, and we have to keep engaging with new stuff to keep ourselves sharp!
This, once again, isn’t an attack on you or anyone else who is actively putting effort into supporting authors of color. It’s a comment on how, even in a community that critiques racism and puts effort into recognizing and addressing it, whiteness still dominates in terms of what kinds of books get praise.
Have a nice day! <3





















