So, story time: in my tweens and teens, I was really into an Australian fantasy author called Sara Douglass. I read her first two massive trilogies upwards of eight times each in the space of eight years, plus everything else of hers I could lay hands on, because I loved her work to bits. Along with Anne McCaffrey, she was pretty much the first SFF writer whose books I collected religiously – my very first foray into adult fantasy novels, before I’d even heard of writers like Kate Elliott and Robin Hobb.
I haven’t read Douglass’s work in years. But I can tell you now, without doubt or hesitation, that pretty much every single relationship depicted in those books is abusive and rapey as fuck, with every negative aspect pretty much continuously excused in the narrative Because He Loves her. Like, these books are MESSED UP, and adult!me is horrified by it.
But I didn’t know that when I was twelve. I didn’t know that when I was nineteen, even. But I know it now, and it retrospect, it chills me to recall that, when I first read Kate Elliott’s King’s Dragon aged fourteen or so – which is to say, at a point where Douglass’s works were my internal template for fantasy everything – I struggled to understand how a character that Elliott had purposefully and clearly written as abusive was, in fact, a villain. Hugh is an abuser, a rapist, and deeply manipulative, but he’s also described as beautiful, and he wants the heroine, Liath. He’s portrayed as tormented by how much he wants her at times, and in other contexts, we see him do good deeds, which… is basically the template for every. single. one. of Douglass’s romantic heroes. And as such, I remember reading Elliott’s books and feeling deeply conflicted, because even though I was intimately in Liath’s perspective – she hated Hugh! feared him! loathed him! – a part of me kept wondering at what point the narrative was going to redeem him or push them together, because that’s what I was used to.
Anne McCaffrey’s books were another early source of the same problem. I mean, there’s a lot to love about the Dragonriders of Pern, but it entirely escaped my teenage notice (for instance) that F’lar literally uses the word ‘rape’ to describe his sexual relationship with Lessa in the first book, which the story treats as totally fine, or that Kylara being a victim of domestic violence was maybe not okay, instead of a thing she somehow deserves for being mean to Brekke. So that when I finally did start reading authors who portrayed abusers as complex characters who were nonetheless unquestionably abusive, I had no narrative frame of reference with which to interpret that information. At times, I’d even feel frustrated that a particular story wasn’t doing what I’d anticipated – why wasn’t the heroine together with that guy? Why had the narrative set them up romantically, then dropped him off the board?
Answer: because the story hadn’t been setting them up romantically. The story had, in fact, been at pains to establish the dude’s abusiveness; I just didn’t know to call it that until I started reading authors who clearly, loudly debunked the tropes – authors like Robin Hobb and Kate Elliott, whose books I still read today; who I’m lucky enough to have met, even – that sustained my misapprehension.
So, yeah. While there’s a lot of YA and SFF around right now that’s perpetuating the same problems, and especially in media directed at teenage girls, it’s not a new problem. Which is why we still need to discuss it.
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