I always feel like im screaming into the void about how Infold is already ruining their characters with their writing and that this isn’t reserved only to Caleb. Here’s an excerpt demonstrating how Rafayel’s character was butchered entirely in Fire of Devotion, from This essay isn’t about Caleb: a dialectical analysis of incest, class society, and authoritarianism :
3.2.2 Rafayel is a national bourgeois
I was so thoroughly distracted by the nuclear after-effects of Caleb’s card that I had completely forgotten that there were other cards released. And so, I read Rafayel’s shortly after, and I was nothing short of appalled. How the writers managed to ask so many pertinent questions within just one hour was beyond me: have you ever wanted to put yourself into the shoes of a brutal imperialist dictator? Have you ever wanted to fall in love with the man whose people your empire enslaved? Have you ever wanted to disregard the slaughter of his people and tell him that they endured such horror because they were “weak”?
Rafayel is my favourite character. He represents to me an avenue to explore colonial trauma and the refusal to succumb quietly to the powers that be. I enjoy the complexities of his softness that exist alongside his anger and melancholy. Some of his stories even touch on passive suicidal ideation in someone with depressive tendencies. Though, I don’t think I need to wax poetic about him to fully illustrate that the decision to make him into a national bourgeois (see Appendix 4)—who allows his imperial lover to extract resources from his people’s native land by the end of his card—was an awful decision.
We begin with tension between the two. MC sees Rafayel as an obstacle to her imperialism, and Rafayel sees her as he sees his other oppressors. After their first meeting, MC goes to Murya (a phonetic play on Lemuria) and follows Rafayel into the Stella Ocean only to interrupt his Tideprayer ritual by triggering the sea beasts. They are stranded together after the fact, and their relationship builds from there in the span of a day. We learn that there are rumours that Rafayel “eats raw meat, drinks blood…” which is reminiscent to me of how many colonized peoples are dehumanized in colonist rhetoric. The card will never address this again.
Perhaps the most appalling part of it is that during their initial moment of bonding (if it could even be called that), MC tells Rafayel that the reason for his people’s annihilation by the Cosmic Empire’s occupation was owed to the fact that “the strong prey on the weak”. Surprisingly, he does not drown her for this comment.
After MC leaves Murya, she calls for a blockade of the planet. In response, Rafayel uses the Sanctide Court as a proxy to murder powerful Empire officials to take their military power, essentially fortifying Murya’s defenses. MC describes this as “strangling half of the Empire’s lifeline”.
MC suddenly becomes obsessed with the notion that she and Rafayel could be something outside of their titles the night before her coronation despite all that she has done to his people, in what she dubs as “the last night that belongs to…two people without any identities”. This is patently false. MC was and has always been an agent of the imperialist state in one way or another, and she is complicit to the highest degree. Here is Sartre’s preface to Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 1963: Ixiv) that I do not want to paraphrase in fear of obscuring its original succinctness:
“Get this in your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors.”
MC seems to think that she is innocent until crowned, that the title of Empress would have changed her relationship to Rafayel regardless of the fact that she had hitherto already been performing imperial duties. MC is a willing oppressor regardless of whether she believes it or not, and she does not question her position as an oppressor. She questions her personal role as Empress, yes, but makes no inquiry into whether imperialism is a flawed ideology. Crucially, the writing does not present her ideology as imperialism at all. The violence Murya has faced at the hands of the Empire’s fascism is presented as a mere power struggle on MC’s way to amass more power, a “both sides” approach that the writing team seem to adore.
Even so, the layer of romance in the conflict of the story still made very little sense. This is not to say that there cannot be a romance, but the romance aspect must do colossal amounts of heavy-lifting when it is within a story about the colonized falling in love with a colonist. In the card, we know that Rafayel fought fiercely and ruthlessly to protect Murya from imperial mining, only to end up splitting mining rights with MC by the end of the story because she confessed her affections to him. His concession had no narrative basis and the development of his bond with MC was not compelling enough to justify his surrender of his dignity to her. The card is not bad because of its portrayal of Rafayel as a national bourgeois (intentional or not), I think it is bad because it explores the subject with such embarrassingly little depth that to call it ‘writing’ at all would be a disservice to actual writers. Like LADs does in many other instances, the politics and ongoings of the world in which the card occurs in are relegated to mere passing backdrops for the romance.
A Marxist analysis of Fire of Devotion would stipulate that Rafayel represents a lumpenbourgeois in the story. The term was used most notably to describe internal elites in Latin America in the 70’s, i.e. the middle and upper classes who sought to benefit from the surplus produced by lower classes already being exploited by the colonial power. In this essay, I use the term ‘national bourgeois’ which was coined by Frantz Fanon in his effort to stretch Marxism into a context informed by 20th century colonialism. He detailed how the native elite class of each colony inherits the colonial structure of the colonist bourgeois, be it judicial, cultural, or economic in what Fanon calls a “rearguard campaign" (Fanon 1963:9). This occurs both during the active colonial period and after. In this way, even after the colonist bourgeois withdrawal from the colonized, colonialism is still exacted by the national bourgeois who, in Fanon’s words, “oversee the looting of the few natural resources” (Idem:12).
Rafayel, having become the revered Sanctarch of the Sanctide Court which has control of Murya, is then a national bourgeois. Although he is equally native to the planet under imperial siege, he holds the privilege of the bourgeois class and thus was able to disregard Murya’s initial slaughter and following systematic oppression in favour of allowing his imperialist lover to extract resources from its native land because he had adopted the mindset of the colonist bourgeoisie (i.e. MC and the Cosmic Empire). To quote Fanon again, “[the national bourgeois] doctrine is to proclaim the absolute need for nationalizing the theft of the nation” (Ibidem).
