Technically, this story starts about ten years ago when I was still on this stupid website and witnessing from afar the discourse surrounding C.S. Pacat’s Captive Prince. I was pretty busy with being a kid at the time, so I threw the novel on the faithful TBR list with promises to one day go back and find out for myself what the fuck all that was about.
Well, it only took me ten years. Time to crack at it.
I will start off by saying that I came into the book with the best of intentions. For years, I’ve always been sympathetic to this book and the way it got torn apart by public opinion. I was convinced this book had nuance that its critics had misinterpreted, if not outright ignored. More recently, the idea of reading Captive Prince became a bit of a, well, bit between me and my friends. I went on a months-long saga of trying to get my library to buy it for me. It was a huge ordeal. Frankly, I wanted this novel to be an underdog I could root for-- a real everyone is wrong about this book except me moment.
It turns out, everyone is wrong about this book except me.
I hate it for the correct reasons.
For those who do not know, Captive Prince is the first of a trilogy of the same name. It started as a web story, turned indie publication, turned Penguin Random House distribution. It’s about a disgraced prince who becomes the sex slave of the prince of an enemy nation. On top of the slavery, there is a lot of rape and CSA.
This book is often classified as erotic smut. The sexual slavery is supposed to be kinky. This is some kind of BDSM. That’s fine by me. I took a pornography seminar in college, which was taught by a professor who was writing a book about the history of queer BDSM literature. A lot of it was hardcore. I am used to reading smut that does not appeal to my kinks. I can tell when something is meant to be erotic even as it is horrifying.
Captive Prince’s second biggest problem is that it’s not erotic. Not one bit. Our point of view character, Damen, is horrified by the sexual acts he witnesses and rightly calls them rape. The prose is pretty clear that it is rape. There’s no unwitting sensuality, even when it is being done onto him. Pacat puts the emphasis on the horror of the scenario. It’s not smut.
So if it’s not erotic, then it must be plot-heavy. Right? Not really. Laurent’s machinations saves the plot from flopping entirely, but there really is not much of a plot. Events sort of happen, and right when you think the story is about to get going, the novel ends. On top of that, the plot is not structured to support a political intrigue story.
The story opens with Damen already betrayed by his half-brother and sent off as a slave to fantasy France. What we learn about his background comes in internal musing during a bathing scene, with few splatterings of extra details later. Because the story begins with Damen enslaved and denies the reader a chance to truly understand what his relationship with one of the main antagonists is like, you get the impression that it really does not matter. The betrayal is the excuse for Damen to be in the sexy situation; don’t think about it too hard.
Except, the situations aren’t sexy! The plot wants to be about the politics! Why didn’t the story start before the betrayal? Why was the reader denied meeting Kastor and understanding the political atmosphere in fantasy Greece? Why was I denied the opportunity to see what kind of person Damen was before his life went to shit?
I cannot emphasize enough how infuriating Damen is. I get it. He’s Laurent’s foil. He’s not supposed to be cunning or well-versed in court politics. But there is no way he’s this naive. The plot wants you to believe that all these French people are such advanced schemers that he has no hope of playing their games-- except, this is some of the most obvious political moves in the world. Sure, Damen doesn’t get the context of every situation, but he should be able to know what would happen if he helps the Reagent and not Laurent. For Christ’s sake, he’s 25 and the heir to a throne! He should know better! I refuse to believe fantasy Greece has such simplistic politics that this man can be so shocked by political allegiances and bartering.
By far his dumbest move was trying to run away right after being accused of trying to assassinate Laurent. Like, c’mon dude! Everyone is only going to be more suspicious of you, and the guard is going to be out there looking for other perpetrators. Use your damn brain.
Maybe Damen really is this dumb. Hard to tell. Would be easier to tell if I got to see him, you know, before the whole betrayal thing. Maybe life in fantasy Greece really was that good, or he’s always been this dumb. Context would be excellent.
Which takes us back to the giant elephant in the room: the sex slavery.
Writers are allowed to write about whatever they please. They should explore darker topics. They should strive to make the reader uncomfortable. This isn’t an argument that no one should write about sexual slavery. This is a criticism for how poorly Pacat handles this.
Sexual slavery seems to be a constant in all of the mentioned kingdoms in this fantasy world. However, they are all beholden to different customs. That’s good world building. I appreciate that. What I don’t appreciate is the lack of nuance.
The text makes it clear that the French are cruel to their slaves and that they do slavery “wrong.” Damen has plenty of moments where he is horrified by what he is witnessing. You would think that this would lead him, someone who used to have his own slaves, to realizing that this system is inhumane. I wish that was the conclusion the novel drew.
I read the greater portion of this book over the weekend, disbursed between around seven hours driving. I had a lot of time to think about this book and discuss my thoughts to a captive (ha!) audience. At one point of time, my brother joked that maybe the text was going to say that there was a correct way to do slavery.
And what do you know? That is what the text says!
I don’t expect characters, especially protagonists, to be virtuous. I love reading about bastards. If Damen wants to insist in his brain that his culture’s take on slavery is the correct one, he’s allowed to do that. My problem is that there is no nuance. There are no characters anywhere who object to slavery, waffle on the topic, or whatever. You either believe in it like the not-French do, or like the not-Greeks do. It offers two perspectives, and even goes so far as to reaffirm the “correct” way via Erasmus’s storyline.
This would have been such an easy problem to fix. Fantasy Greece’s slavery is not only described to be consensual, but also involves a lot of professional training. So, don’t call it slavery then! Call it a harem, complete with trained concubines! That would have gone so far in not only making your worldbuilding far less monolithic, but also made Damen far more sympathetic. I certainly do not care about the wellbeing of a slave holder who experiences the horrors of slavery and walks away believing that his methodology was correct. You could even have a character cheekily suggest that the two systems are the same. That would have worked so much better!
(It would also go so far to prevent Damen from being stupidly naive. A lot of his argument for why his kingdom’s system is better comes down to a culture belief in respecting your slave and the social punishment that would be inflicted on masters found to be cruel-- my brother in Christ, you cannot seriously believe that a system like that would be flawless and truly protect a group of people with little to no rights.)
This just pisses me off so much! This had such an easy fix, and you let it slip through your fingers! You fucked it up!
The only thing preventing me from loathing this novel completely is Laurent and his relationship with the Reagent and Nicaise. I enjoy the gradual reversal of opinions for Laurent and the Reagent, with one seeming cruel and the other just until vice versa. There’s a subtlety in realizing what exactly happened to Laurent, and I appreciate how it’s implied and not stated outright as of right now. It makes Laurent’s relationship with Nicaise all the more compelling. And Nicaise is a great example of a tragic figure-- such a cruel person who is stuck in a cruel situation. I appreciate all of them.
Everything else? Fuck off.
One last note I wasn’t able to put anywhere else-- Pacat’s prose is not good. She obviously has a pedestrian writing style. Which is fine. But she tries to elevate it and make it sound more fantasy-esque by using distractingly fancy words and awkward phrasing. There was always something more pressing on my mind than her occasional awkward turns of phrase, so it didn’t bug me all that much. That is, until the last few pages when she hit me with this: "Punctuating [the noise within the stable] was the discharge of breath through equine nostrils, and the occasional strike of a hoof against paving."
I lost it. “Discharge of breath through equine nostrils?” For the love of god, just say the damn horses huffed. This shouldn’t bug me as much as it does, and yet I am irate. This is now my top contender for Worst Sentence of the Year.
I am happy that I read this and learned for myself what this novel is like. I understand the controversy a lot more. Yes, this novel is extremely problematic. It has one of the worst depictions of fantasy slavery I have ever read. But it’s not romanticized. If you say this book is problematic because it thinks slavery is romantic, you read this wrong.
The skill displayed in writing Laurent’s plotline suggests to me that there is hope for the remaining two novels, especially in regard to Damen’s insistence that his form of slavery is superior. Maybe when he gets back to not-Greece, he’ll realize that things weren’t always better for the slaves there. Or this trilogy will continue masquerading as a kinky erotica epic and refuse to actually criticize the sexual slavery it thinks it is already being critical of until it is solidly both a terrible fantasy and erotic novel. Whatever happens first.
Unfortunately, I refuse to put any money down on this series so I have to get my local library to spend precious tax dollars on getting me the next two volumes. It took about three months for the first book to come in, so hopefully we’ll get to find out how the rest of the story goes before the year ends. I’m sure my friends and family will be very happy to continue listening to me scream about the politics of sexual slavery.
Captive Prince by C.S. Pacat
Rating: (the world's most generous) 3/5
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