I didn't see the Rachel Reid post before, omgggggg. The way she talks about Shane is SO CRAZY AND ACTUALLY UNIRONICALLY EITHER RACIST OR ABLEIST OR BOTH 😭😭 I low-key thought people were maybe exaggerating, that it's impossible for her to straight up say "Shane's not smart", yet here we are. Like idc if she "only" said Shane's not "*very* smart", that's not how that works here... Once again, if I were HW reading that, I'd curse this woman for 3 generations, lmfao....
I don't think it was ableist because I don't believe Rachel Reid intentionally made Shane autistic. She definitely didn't intentionally make him autistic before the first book, so she was not subconsciously being influenced by a negative perception of autistic people when she wrote that list.
As for Reid saying Shane is not very smart... here's the thing.
Sometimes characters are stupid and the fact that their writers made them stupid is not inherently indicative of something malicious or ignorant. Sometimes characters are stupid because they are meant to represent real people and real people are stupid sometimes.
Writers are also not required to love their characters or to make their characters lovable or to give their characters traits people generally admire even if the character in question is meant to be empathetic. In fact, one of the harder lessons I had to learn when I was going to school for writing is that if I love my character too much, it actively makes my writing weaker. (Reid is a clear example of this with Ilya. The fact that he's her precious baby makes the whole series worse).
And, on top of this, Asian characters are typically stereotyped to be super smart. I can't say that Reid was attempting to subvert this stereotype - I have no idea if that thought occurred to her and won't assume - but the point is, "positive" stereotyping is still stereotyping, and for this reason, it can actually be progressive or at least subversive to characterize Shane "negatively."
AND - there's the fact that I frankly want empathetic characters who exhibit traits that are traditionally considered negative or unempathetic. I sometimes want the character who has XYZ thing most people look down on to be a character that challenges the viewer to reassess their view of that trait. Stupidity, to use the harsh term here, is not a moral failure, and it's not something that should make us inherently dislike someone - it could be a positive thing to have a character who is, to use the harsh word again, stupid, and also be a character we are made to love.
AND AND - he's a fucking hockey player lmao like. Some of them are a little dumb ok.
So. I do not have a problem with Reid writing that Shane is unintelligent in a vacuum. That on its own is not what offends me about that list.
What offends me about that list is how she frames it. She is placing Shane in opposition to Ilya in that list. She is quite literally defining Shane by what he isn't in some of the list items, and then on top of that, defining him by how he compares to Ilya. She didn't have to do that. She could have just made lists of defining traits and not placed them in opposition to each other. She especially didn't need to define either of them by what they're not, which is extremely loaded language.
And then when you look at the list as a whole, and you view the traits she gives Ilya, and you view the traits she gives Shane, you notice that she is giving Ilya traits that we traditionally empathize with more, admire more, and are generally more interested in. She is making Ilya a character that we would traditionally view as having a lot to explore, and Shane a character that we would traditionally view as having significantly less to explore. None of those traits are inherently unexplorable, but most of the traits Ilya is given are the traits we see purposely explored in fiction a lot more often, and a lot more empathetically. Only the last in the list feels like it's possibly on an even playing field for me.
And it also becomes clear when looking at it that she did not pick any of Shane's traits because she was really trying to envision what Shane, gay, half-Asian, and growing up in Ottawa and playing an extremely white sport, would be like. Those are not the traits she deduced his character might have, and she didn't choose them for him because she was specifically thinking of him, Shane, this hypothetical person who if he existed in real life, would be influenced by real life. She didn't give any thought to that at all, or she would not say Shane doesn't have trauma.
And I can't know if this was consciously her process at the time, but when I read the books, it's hard not to conclude that she either chose those traits to contrast Ilya, or that was the purpose they eventually came to serve in her work. She didn't make Shane uncool or unintelligent or untraumatized because she wanted to explore his uncoolness, unintelligence or untrauma - she made him uncool and unintelligent and untraumatized because she wanted to explore Ilya's coolness, intelligence and trauma.
When I read that list it so clearly suggests to me that Ilya is her experiment and Shane is her control group.
THAT is why that list offends me.
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