Okay I was talking to my brother about the relationship dynamics in Tamora Pierce books. She has these two characters, Alanna and Daine, who are very young (Alanna is 18 I think, Daine is 16) when they fall in love with adult men whom they will eventually marry. For the record, Daine’s relationship is WAY more egregious: unlike Alanna, Daine had never dated anyone else, plus she was younger than Alanna, her bf was older than Alanna’s, and most importantly NUMAIR WAS DAINE’S TEACHER, admittedly not at the time they started having sex but for several very formative years before that. In a time when she was orphaned and pretty alone in the world he was her primary protector and mentor. It was extremely gross.
And I’m trawling the internet looking at discussion forums, mostly because I want to avoid doing my homework, but also because I wanted to know if anyone else was appalled by this. Like, has Pierce gotten any significant criticism for portraying these relationships in a romantic uncritical light?
The answer seems to be mostly no, not from literary critics or journalists or anyone who might impact her career. There are people on the Internet At Large, though, who have issues with Diane/Numair. But I noticed something, which is the same thing I noticed when people talk about Buffy/Angel, or (sorry for bringing it up) Twilight, or that weird romance between a high schooler and a teacher in Pretty Little Liars (which to be clear I do not watch):
People debate whether the age gap creates a bad power dynamic, and people even point out that these are bad role models to have for girls reading/watching this stuff, that even if this particular relationship has an okay power dynamic because the girl/young woman is Empowered, that it sends a message to girls that it’s safe and okay to date adult men. And they’re right. That’s a big part of the problem. I’m glad people bring that up. But I’m also sort of horrified that these people only ever seem to talk about the girls. No one seems to be asking the question that to me is the biggest and most important: WHY ARE THESE GUYS INTO TEENAGE GIRLS?
Why does Numair Salmalín, who is in his goddamn thirties and an accomplished world-renowned wizard with the world at his feet, find something irresistably compelling about the sixteen-year-old girl who has spent the last four years under his protection and tutelage? When did he fall in love with her? They’ve been together almost nonstop since she was thirteen; at what point in that process, as he Watched Her Go Through Puberty, did he realize that he wanted to sleep with her, and that in fact she was the only person in the world he wanted to sleep with? Don’t get me wrong; Daine is hot. Twelve-year-old me, reading that series, did not question his motives for a second because twelve-year-old me, a Lesbian, very much also wanted to marry Daine. But I SHOULD have questioned his motives. Daine should have questioned his motives. The STORY should have questioned his motives, because it makes perfect sense for a preteen to have a crush on a cool powerful impulsive sixteen-year-old whose journey of self-discovery she’s tracked from the start, but it does NOT make sense for a thirty-year-old man to feel that way. What about her was so damn attractive to him? I know what was attractive to ME but I was a CHILD. What I looked for in a crush was and should be different than what an adult man looks for in a romantic partner.
You can ask the same questions about Angel, or Edward Cullen, or George Cooper (who was younger than Numair but still fell in love with a fourteen-year-old, I think, when he was well over eighteen). But no one does. We criticize authors, sometimes, for setting bad examples for girls. But no one points out that it’s not normal or reasonable, actually, for these men to be interested in these relationships in the first place. Why was Buffy into Angel? Because he was hot, next question. Why was Angel into Buffy? She was fifteen when he decided he loved her. She was fifteen, and naive and overwhelmed, and a bit of an idiot. The first time he saw her, she was stepping out of a car in front of a goddamn high school, laughing with three other fifteen-year-olds. What about that turned him on?
I don’t CARE if Daine initiated her sexual relationship with Numair. Numair should have turned her down, and not out of guilt or reluctant emotional wisdom, but out of a total honest disinterest in dating with his teenage student. Sidestep the whole conversation about adulthood being subjective, okay, about Daine being an adult in that fictional society and therefore able to consent. I read the books; I know she consented. I don’t care, because HE SHOULDN’T HAVE, because HE SHOULDN’T HAVE WANTED TO. Numair wasn’t some weird skeazy guy who she met in a bar and decided to fuck bc she felt like an adventure, he was a hero, he was her friend, he was supposedly intelligent and honorable and kind, and the person he found himself falling in love with was the person he’d practically parented. THAT’S NOT NORMAL AND IF A GUY HAS THAT REACTION TO A MENTOR/GUARDIAN RELATIONSHIP, HE’S FUCKED UP. And I’m super creeped out that everyone seems to think that’s a normal way for men to be.
It’s not enough to ask “Well, should we show teenagers falling for adults, we might send a bad message?” Teenagers are gonna fall for adults. Kids have crushes on teachers, or their older siblings’ friends. People have crushes on people who seem cooler and more grown-up than them. We need to ask “Why are we treating it as normal to have adults falling for kids? What are the assumptions that we’re making about sexuality, about power, when we write and read those stories uncritically? What are we normalizing?”
