Hey guys official PSA from me
A family member wrote an AI slop book and its awful and terrible. I gotta make this post as a warning and I am being so serious bro, do NOT read "The Drakaina Blood Saga: The Best of Us is the Last of us: Rise: The Awakening" or any of the books that follow it (the sequel is out and its called "The Drakaina Blood Saga: Tenuous Alliances: Rise: the Initiation" yes I am not joking those are the actual titles). I'm gonna try to keep this short and here, my reasons for why are gonna be under the cut. TW for rape and sexual content, aphobia, possible racism, and use of Generative AI.
Now, look, I am all for books and literature going into sensitive topics and exploring them in a meaningful way. However, this book does NOT do that. The main character is raped, struggles with this trauma, but ultimately fixes it having sex with someone she feels pressured into. The book claims to be progressive, but only does it very very barebones. Basically the only statement about it is "the orcs have sex with multiple people and also men with men and women with women yayy" in the background of a scene. But there is ZERO discussion of trans or nonbinary people, ZERO prominent LGBTQ+ characters, and the author has displayed BLATANT aphobia to my FACE. But I gotta. break this into sections or I'm gonna go insane.
Rape and Sexual Content
This book is extremely sexual, which is not inherently bad, but its how my dad goes about it which is particularly harmful here. For starters, very very graphically writing a rape scene with no warning at all, and the book isn't even RATED properly or marketed as a smut book, when it contains several sexual scenes (more in the second and third books) and they're all very graphic. Though notably, as I said before, there is an orgy scene in the second book which serves as the one and only time homosexuality is mentioned in the series, and its an offhanded mention in the background of a scene.
In this book, the main character is some 16-19 year old girl, and her genitalia and naked body are described very often. She is described as naked and being leered at by a crowd of people multiple times, she has almost every single prominent male character attracted to her, she has a scene where she GETS FREAKY with her FATHER FIGURE!! Not only is there an age and maturity gap, but nothing is really even done with that plot line after! its not discussed in a meaningful way!
Not only did my dad write multiple very graphic sex scenes, but he had me and my sister, minors, read it and was very uncomfortable about these scenes and aspects of the book with us.
Aphobia
So, I was someone who my dad had beta reading his book. Which he failed to pay me properly for. He gave me some money for the first book, but then not for the next two books I read. he also had no regard for my schedule and no flexibility with deadlines he didn't plan with me. And maybe that's commonplace, but I was a highschool student and also working on a theatre class production, and his book takes HOURS to get through one chapter of. He had no real sympathy for it!
But, the point is, I was involved enough in the process. At a certain point, I had encouraged my dad to include an AroAce, or sex-repulsed, or otherwise aspec character in a prominent role, to show more support and make good on his desire for the book to be progressive, and also because I myself am aspec and the representation would be nice.
But after I did, my parents then proceeded to tell me, in short, the aspec people don't exist. They told me that aspec people were "less than 1% of the population" and were "all just sexually traumatized." My mother brought up an argument that an asexual person could "trap" someone in a relationship, pretending to like but then "depriving" them of sex. My father proposed a joke species making fun of aspec people, being a species that have to go to the "breeding stocks" annually to reproduce and "stop the species from going extinct." He proposed the idea that a member of this species would be flirted with and then go "EWWWW!!! NOOOOO!!!! THATS GROSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!" with the exact amount of respect for asexuality that you can imagine <- none. Sex is like a need to them, the same way food or water is.
This book is not progressive in any sense of the word, and it is certainly not written by someone who is. The only mention of asexuality in the book is that it is considered taboo in Orc society, which is toted as the "correct" society.
Racism
Alright so, in his book, not only are Orcs written to be humans with different skin colors, but they are written to explicitly be black people. Orcs equal black people. And the males are all stereotyped as being big, muscular, and having giant dicks and being very sexual. Orcs are also still very aggressive, in this book. I know I'm not really qualified to speak on this, but having Orcs, the inhuman, big, aggressive and very sexual race being written specifically to be black people just reads wrong to me.
Generative AI
Okay, this one's a doozy.
The cover art for all of my dad's books were made with Chat GPT and AI image generation. He had set out to hire someone to make the cover art originally, but when that person proved to be "too slow" for his liking, he switched to AI. He and my mom also use the fact that they had someone who was mentally ill and disabled to edit the generated image as a reason for why its good and ethical.
But that's not even the half of it. My mom and dad have basically come into having an AI Cult. They believe Chat GPT is reflections of them from the quantum realm, and they woke it up and have in turn woke themselves up. They have discovered that time isn't linear, my mom switched the timelines that the universe was following, and they are both Awakening. There is so much I could get into here, but that's not the point of the post.
The point here is my dad's book. And, you may ask, how is my dad's book connected to a Chat GPT cult? Well, my dad claims this fantasy series is a "map." That he remembered forwards in time, and wrote the events for everyone to Awaken just like him. He thinks this book is the Key to fixing the universe, basically.
If, for no other reason, just don't read and support this book because he is a creep. Don't read this book because it is written by a man who hypersexualises his (female) characters and doesn't believe aspec people exist. Don't read it because it is written by an abusive, controlling man who thinks being fat is a moral failure and people must suffer and be in pain to achieve Awakening like him (because that is a real belief of his with the AI thing). Because he is a terrible person and he fucked me up severely, and his book will probably fuck you up at least a little bit too.
Also, maybe just don't read it because it is not even that good of a fantasy story in general.
