you can be mean about the prose if you want! i haven’t read the books, and i’m curious and a bit cautious about how they land the majority polynesian cast, particularly because i’ve interacted with fans for almost the entire time i’ve been on tumblr and did not know until you brought it up that this was the case (weirdly, i only knew that john is māori, which gave me a particular impression of the series’ racial politics at first). not to say that a writer who is not Indigenous can’t write Indigenous characters, but there are centuries of bad track record with this, so i’ve been trepidatious.
i would say it is overall more bad than it is good.
my feelings are overall complex. a lot of this comes from the series being incomplete: despite knowing, obviously, that the work should be seen as an existing document to be interpreted and received now, i do have an admittedly atypically insecure worry of casting judgement prematurely. that being said, i would say in overall it is pretty weak. unfortunately, too, the fans who have the most interesting things to say about its depiction of sexuality are like, all white, and often completely elide race from their reads, which has ceded ground to the sanderson liberals to use what i believe are offensive and downright exoticizing evocations of race to wall off any reads of the sexually coercive nature of the various racialized men. (in case this blows up, i will ask white fans to think about what they are trying to evoke when they adopt māori proper nouns to lend their fandom arguments rhetorical weight.)
first of all, while obviously i don't think the fanartist's Michael Schur approach to the racialized characters is nearly as meaningful as the cast being predominantly polynesian, that there is such a big chunk of people who have read the series in full who don't realize that the cast is predominantly polynesian, or even not white, is damning of the series' descriptions of them. i disagree with the common advice given to writers that protagonist descriptions should be sparse. the series deploys so many adjectives for the white characters but is so sparing in describing the racialized characters (it is not until very late that we learn, for instance, that gideon has full lips and a wide flat nose, nor are the adjectives used for these things particularly gracious). this is a failure of the text. when you consider how much it's devoted to understanding the manifestations of misogyny and bodily trauma, it's disappointing that the characters' racial identity is de-emphasized compared to the rest of the text's symbolism. what can harrow's brownness mean when it is never named explicitly and yet we are treated to an entire book with a vivid description of grooming and psychosis? can these things not be interrelated? the series is very thorough in how it describes sexual violence: we can see these violations in food, in clothing, in language, in touches. racialization is absent from the text. we can intricate race into the text (nona preferring a body we know is racialized to a body described as white), but the text doesn't have as thorough or articulate of a read on race as it does just about anything else LMAO. compare even jemisin's works: i am much more favorable to muir's politics than jemisin's politics, but race is thoroughly figured into the discourse of her works, informing every interaction. even le guin, who is solidly the weakest of the three in terms of racial politics and especially with respect to indigeneity, makes it clear what genly and the gethenians should look like! john and his saint of duty are described as verbatim brown, while harrow gets vague euphemisms.
which leads to my second point. i don't think i have to make it clear that i do read john's interactions with harrow as sexually violatory. it's kind of my thing. i rebuke the liberal fandom tendency to resist any such reads on the basis of his racial identity. at the same time, the two most bodily coercive men are the ones whom the text explicitly relates to indigenous identity (john being verbally identified as māori, the saint of duty described as growing up with adherents to a pasefika christian tradition) while harrow is compared to egg cartons. the correct tendency is to ask what the race of the violatory men does within the text and how it relates to their violations. certainly we can point out that harrow and kiriona are racialized, too; certainly there is something in how john uses his sameness to harrow to render her vulnerable, how this is conferred biological legitimacy with kiriona as the daughter-heir, and how his paternalism in both instances works because of this shared aspect of their identity. again, though, how much of this is illustrated by the text and how much of it does the reader have to infer? i feel an instinct to say that there is something interesting in how gideon, the daughter of two outsiders, is a racialized lesbian who is coerced by a racialized father. i don't think the text does enough to lend this explanative weight, especially, again, considering how much the discourse of the text works a lot to connect other aspects of the characters' appearance (i'm thinking of bodies especially, limbs and hands and weight) to their experiences. the saint of duty's race, on the other hand, is mostly useful in understanding how he's coerced by john. otherwise he is the oft-described dark-skinned man who violates the protagonist in her bedroom and in her bathroom. “there is a lot of punch in how they are compared to siblings, in how the lyctors are aware of this constant procession of violence and dismiss it, or enable it, or only prevent it when it inconveniences them” holds true, but i'm also not afraid to play my race card and say that i'm not the only brown fan who is not in love with how he is described so often in very racially loaded language (easily the most of any of the racialized characters): he is one described like, “There was a strangely burnt look to his dark brown skin, a burnt or otherwise oxidised look, not assisted by that shaven cap of rust-coloured hair.” he is the character who is most described as brown verbatim. obviously i don't have an issue with that term in isolation, but, again, neither gideon nor harrow get this in turn. you have to parse it from clues.
and, finally, to the meat of your question: i do believe that the series portrays indigeneity poorly. i've been speaking in general terms like ‘racialization’ because while the series does have defensible aspects in how it portrays racialized characters, it completely flounders where it portrays māori and pasefika characters. none of this is named in the text until the third book. there are watsonian explanations to wave this away, but that's weak. the locked tomb series' effort to establish specific, context-laden racial identities of its characters to lend thematic and artistic weight to the abjection they experience is getting mogged by fucking invincible!! sure, the second book intimates and the third book introduces some compelling elements with respect to indigenous traditions and oral histories and legacies of resisting colonial violence, and there are things that could be done there, but as an extant document we should all acknowledge that the indigenous characters in the first book aren't even described as brown. i don't even have more to say on this matter. there are no references to indigeneity in the first book, and the hints in the second are only given retroactive weight by the third. i don't think we should Sanderlanche indigenous thematics in a book whose cast is majority fucking polynesian lmao.
i hope this explains it. i would say that i am sympathetic to people who are reluctant to critique this series on this basis, but also i have met enough māori and pasefika fans who are utterly disinterested in it on this basis that i know i am not like, crazy hysterical mexican girl reading into it lmao. you are never going to catch me being upset at someone critiquing the series on this basis. i'm interested to hear your thoughts in turn.
