The Mystical Captive Series (A Trilogy in One Volume)
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Not unreasonably, Damen assumes the pets are slaves, and so, in turn, does the reader.
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The slaves themselves — or one in particular, Erasmus, whom we take as being a spokesman for the others — are grateful for this opportunity; the question of freeing them is never raised. Which is where, once again, we run up against the intersection of kink and criticism: Slaves are taken as captives and trained; the practice is a legitimate source of anger in Vere, whose people suffer in border raids. This forces Pacat to walk a very thin line in expanding on her own, unalterable canon: Or, looked at another way, a problem of success: At the very least, it might have been easier to distinguish intention from accident.
At base, the Captive Prince trilogy is an enemies to friends to lovers narrative, with each book representing one of those three stages. And yet — again — the offences of the first book cast a long shadow: Context the first, which constitutes a major reveal of the final book: And context the third, which leads directly to the whipping: This conversation happens in a bathing room, where Damen is shortly instructed to wash Laurent — not with any sexual overtones, but as a servile chore.
Nonetheless, Damen becomes aroused, and when Laurent notices, this happens:. Damen let his gaze wander downwards — wet from chest to taut abdomen — and further. It was really a very, very nice body, but the cold outrage was genuine. Laurent was not even a little amorous, Damen noted; that part of him, quite as sweetly made as the rest, was quiescent. Damen released his grip, as though burned. A moment later, the blow he had thwarted landed, harder than he could have imagined, smashing across his mouth.
Damen and Laurent are both deeply flawed characters, and Pacat, in writing them, is aware of this. It simply never occurs to Damen, whose blind trust in the goodness of family is why his half-brother, Kastor, was able to capture and enslave him in the first place, as a possibility. When Damen rejects Nicaise, for instance, Nicaise becomes hostile to him; dangerously so. I drink whenever I like.
Marilynn Hughes
At your age, the body begins to betray itself. When the time comes. You might prefer that. That would wreck you. You have quite a good mind for strategy, to have thought of that. Maybe you will hold him longer than the others. You can watch me get told off by my uncle. Knowing what comes later, however, many such early exchanges are rendered chilling.
That he still rebukes him like a child is an early warning sign, yet similarly easy to miss on a first pass:. Petulance is ugly in a child and worse in a man.
Why must you always defy me? I hate it when we are at odds, yet you force me to chastise you. You seem determined to wreck everything in your path. Blessed with gifts, you squander them. Given opportunities, you waste them. That Pacat is able to take the hostile dynamic between Damen and Laurent presented in the first book and make anything legitimately romantic of it, let alone something quite affectingly so — even to a reader both conscious of her elisions and critical of the premise — is nothing short of astonishing.
This is a vital point: At the same time, her skill in this respect also serves to cast her failures into stark relief. To use a technical term, that is super fucked up. The more Laurent comes to trust Damen, the more his confidence in his own judgement unravels: She is also, in every technical respect, an extraordinary writer. Great review, captures some of the feelings I have around the books. As someone who took part in the early fandom days when Captive Prince was a serial I can say, yes, it was pre-figured by a list of content warnings, and in fact they are still in place if you are curious to see what they were.
Olive skin and dark hair are often coding for white southern European, such as Greek or Italian. For context, the author herself is an olive-skinned Italian. Reading Damen as a POC is relatively new and has arisen largely out of a movement on tumblr. I personally think there are a lot of issues to unpack around fandom choosing to fancast the slave as a POC, and the fanart and imagery that fandom generates, all of which I find uncomfortable at best and creepily racist at worst.
Books by Marilynn Hughes (Author of Michael Jackson)
This is a brilliant review, and I thank you so much for taking the time to analyze the Captive Prince trilogy to come up with such a deeply nuanced analysis. I too strongly felt that the criticism of slavery as an institution was underdeveloped, but that the power dynamics between the relationship of Laurent and Damen were well-handled. What I wanted to say is in response to your other comment stating how Damen was meant to be seen as white. The author CS Pacat has publicly said that Damen is brown and that the fandom whitewashing of her character made her uncomfortable.
A while back I did come across this post. Pacat has not said publicly that Damen is brown. She has stated over and over again that he is southern European. It does not make Damen a POC. Pacat has never used the term brown or POC to describe Damen. But in this case reading a Greek-coded character — from a country with a Greco-Roman culture, written by an olive-skinned Italian, who is obviously writing from and about her own ethnic identity — as a POC, does more than just ignore author intention.
It introduces a racist dynamic into the construction of slavery that is not present in the book itself. Why do people keep insisting that the slave character is a POC? Why do you want this dynamic? Why make this assertion, which to me seems racist? I wish fandom would stop casting black men as Damen and then drawing fanart of black men in positions of subjugation to a white owner.
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It is racist imagery that has no basis in the books. In the books Damen is simply not black or a POC. But why do that? To me it is the fandom that has created this racefail dynamic and fandom that revels in it.
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And not all of the fandom, just recent, tumblr fandom, who shouts down every person — including all of the Greeks and Italians! The ancient Mediterranean was a goddamn melting pot. Rome conquered Carthage, which is in North Africa; various Roman emperors were black, and the Egyptians certainly were. Those are slurs with a deeply entrenched history of being used against POC in the modern era.
Do I really have to explain this one? Yours hides the bruising. So reading him as a POC? Olive skin is not brown skin. Olive skin is not QED a person of colour. Olive skin occupies a different space in the wider discussion about race and ethnic identity to brown skin. There are some countries where olive skin is constructed as white like Greece, Italy and Australia. There are some countries where it is not. Whether an individual with olive skin identifies as white or not can depend on many factors.
People with olive skin have different levels of privilege to people with brown or black skin, and their own different issues of race and ethnicity to navigate. You start to see things like how Pacat is engaging with wog identity, that she wrote Damen as a prince to counter the working-class connotation that wog has in Australia. That when he enters a northern or Anglo-European country he experiences a class shift and is viewed as low culture, despite the high classical culture of his home — again the wog experience in Australia.
Or that to use the words from that linked post his being marooned in a northern-european country and feeling sense of ethnic difference as well as a sense of cultural isolation, is an analogy for the wog experience living in australia for greek, macedonian, maltese, italian, etc. Why make Damen black or brown when he is not stated as black or brown in the books? Why ignore the books exploration of Australian ethnicity? Why throw out the dialectic around wog in exchange for that of American POC? It said unequivocally Damen IS poc.
You say nowhere that Damen was intended by the author as a southern European with olive skin. Or that the author herself is a southern European with olive skin. If Pacat wanted Damen to be read as brown, she could have used the word brown skin. Greek and Italian people have olive skin. I didnt argue that. I said that usually I support reading characters as POC. Please note that you will be liable for damages including costs and attorneys' fees if you materially misrepresent that the material is infringing your copyright.
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