i'm getting a bit tired of this rachel reid hate train. its at this point too excessive and as is the case with all these misogyny fueled pseudo-righteous movements, they have quickly looped around to being worse examples of any crime leveraged against their target.
i just saw a post on here likening the rivalry between ilya and shane to that of hanyu and fernandez (figure skaters btw) in which they are by the publics eye considered equal when in fact, the asian is better and more decorated. And this btw was meant as a dig at rachel reid. they were calling her racist for calling her fake character and his fake wins as equal to the fake white character. normally, this would be seen as rachel reid ACTUALLY depicting the subtly of racism but instead, shane's wins are treated as reality and rachel reid as someone who is utterly oblivious. the only way you come to this conclusion is if one, you think everything in literature ought to be explicit which god help us or two, you have been so inundated by the incessant hatred for her that you are unable to critically think and are eager to join the dogpile.
so many of the people on here that are calling her racist and are even disgustingly at one point, saying that shane ought to have racial trauma equal to seeing your mother's dead body at 12 are in fact, acting far more racist than rachel reid who doesn't touch the subject. I want people to ask themselves in what ways should she have depicted shane as asian that were not themselves stereotypes or not some kind of trauma-porn in which the poc is subjected to disgusting acts of racism? Should Shane have pointed out his $200 rice cooker instead of a well? Should he have drunk matcha and not ginger ale? Do you have anything other than food? Is this really a route we want to go down? On this topic, is this even true? Do mixed raced third generation children actually behave in this way? As a mixed race person myself, there would be absolutely no way someone would be able to accurately depict what that means without being themselves that said identity and frankly, that experience is not universal nor would it be detectable by an outsider. But more importantly, IT IS BEYOND THE SCOPE OF A FUCKING ROMANCE NOVEL. if you think she needs to read 20 books of the japanese canadian identity to write hockey smut, i think you need to reorient yourself. SINCERELY. If you are expecting that kind of work for a writer to include a person of a different identity what you will get will be nothing but white people non-stop. All you will get is nothing but characters of the same identity as the writer because you're standard for such a work is WAY higher if you include diversity.
But that takes me to another point, because let us say for example, Rachel erred in some way. She is not doing anything that we don't see men and the larger culture do. By showing Shane as successful without talking about his race that is a long the lines of thousands of depiction of BIPOC docters in tv shows despite the overwhelming barriers they face in becoming doctors or how NONE of these characters talk in an urban dialect but always in "standard" english. This goes beyond tone-switching btw. There are tons of shows and movies that have POC that do not at all address the fact that they are. Which btw, I don't mind but I guess some of y'all are thirsting to see brown people in pain so... the big question here is: why are we suddenly holding Rachel Reid to a higher standard? And for a romance novel with cartoon characters on the front of of all things?
the fact that this is happening concurrently with the excessive hate emerald fennell is facing while racist ass del toro is being praised left and right for doing literally the same thing or for example colleen hoover is viciously attacked when you have neil gaimen and george rr martin routinely writing teenage girls being raped, is all a part of the same shit. (Gaiman does write a teen girl getting raped in american gods btw and he calls the act them making the two-headed monster).
You all hold women at an insane high standard. All this support women's wrongs posts is full of shit. You can't detect it in reality when its actually happening. You're dogpiling. If any of y'all come in here and be like, I write about men all the time, please have a semblance of reality and realize that the internet is a web and not a journal. whatever you say or do contributes to the larger culture and any criticism will be added, swept up, and included in some asshole's youtube video essay.
