Modern Social Commentary (Part 1 - The Instant DNF)
I don't often DNF a book.
Completionism compels me to grit my teeth and finish even bad books. This is especially true if I paid for the book in question. I want to at least get my money’s worth out of it by transforming the bad experience into a review. That’s why, despite seeing a whole lotof red flags in the opening of The Last Contract of Isako, I am not willing to admit defeat. I do plan to finish that book at some point.
Still, even I have my breaking points. For Andrea Hairston’s Master of Poisons, it was the head-inducing lack of focus in the paragraphs. For Django Wexler’s Ashes of the Sun, it was the chapter spent detailing the sexual awakening (including first experience with masturbation) of an underage girl and the setup of said underage girl for a romance with an equally underage waifu (bonus points for the fact this waifu was introduced naked and with sexualized description). For Armitage & Culican’s Slayer and Isaac Hooke’s Forerunner, the wish-fulfillment fantasies were laid on so thick that I just couldn’t stay immersed in the story.
And for Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn, it was the gut instinct that I wasn’t going to have a good time - I was just going to get preached to.
ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST
The premise of Legendborn - a Young Adult Urban Fantasy that takes the concept of teenaged demon hunters and puts a King Arthur spin on it - intrigued me. I decided to check it out of the library on April 21st and started reading it the same day. The prologue was also very promising, setting up strong character work built around grief.
There was a red flag that I chose to ignore. Among the many author endorsements decorating this book was one from Dhonielle Clayton, praising the book for incorporating “Black Girl Magic”. This book was being marketed based upon the race of the Main Character.
Still, that was the only element on the cover that leaned into identity politics. Books that are marketed off of this sort of thing are usually a lot more vocal about it. Maybe Clayton was making race an issue because she personally thought it was the best way to market the book, without any prompting from the publisher, or maybe she was showing her personal biases by taking a story that just happed to feature a black protagonist and decided to make race the focus. It was only fair that I gave the book a chance to speak for itself. Onward I went into the prologue, and from there into Chapter 1 …
… whereupon I was bludgeoned with the Main Character’s obsession with race. Her narrative voice is saturated with it, to the point that she treats someone complimenting her hair in an attempt to defuse an awkward situation as a racially motivated micro-aggression.
At that point, I put the book down and started working on this post.
I’m sure Legendborn is a wonderfully written book. The character work genuinely was promising. In fact, right up until the moment where the Main Character made forced conversation into a race issue, I was prepared to embrace her fixation on describing people (and activities) in terms of their skin color as an aspect of her character. There are many ways to give a character a distinctive voice. Maybe this was just Deonn’s way of going about it.
The thing is … I’ve given too many trad-pub books a free pass after seeing these red flags. I’ve chosen not to buy books over less. Between the endorsement framed around race and this particular voice, the odds of being annoyed by preachy (if not outright racist) prose was just too high. I don’t read books to subject myself to that sort of thing. And with no incentive to finish it for a return on investment, I returned the book the very next day.
THE SLEDGEHAMMER
Back in the review of The Elf Tangent, we covered two issues that can turn social commentary in story into a death sentence for the audience experience.
Oversaturation. A message can be hammered into the audience’s faces so many times, across so many contemporary works, that it loses any weight and just becomes annoying.
Specificity. A message can be so tied to contemporary context that it disrupts immersion and/or creates a situation where the story only works if you are aware of the context and agree with the message.
To put this another way, Disparu made a certain comment while reviewing the the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials that stuck with me. Not his exact words, mind, but his message. He pointed out that, once people have been bludgeoned with certain social commentary over and over again, they become conditioned to expect more browbeating. At the slightest whiff of the ideology associated with the browbeating - dialogue that grinds to a halt for virtue signals, characters of one demographic belittling characters of another - they tense up. They can’t relax and just enjoy a story, even if it’s good, because they’ve been taught that their immersion will be shattered any minute so that the writers can preach to them.
I experienced this very thing while reading the ARC for Magic and Majesty. After “Fate of the Nightbloom” wasted my time by using “all men are evil rapists” as a crutch for bad storytelling, I immediately disengaged from “The Gryphon Key” when it opened on the exact same message. If I wasn’t committed to an ARC review, I might have skipped it, and thus missed out on a story that is actually good. Had these stories been in reverse order, I wouldn’t have cringed away from “The Gryphon Key”, and seeing the same theme repeated in “Fate of the Nightbloom” would have merely annoyed me (well, until I realized how bad that story is).
A Slap in the Face
Imagine you like going to Starbucks … and then, over time, the owners of every Starbucks in the prefecture begin to greet you with slurs. Half of these stores also have some belligerent drunk who would moves into your person space and breathes heavily on you. At two of them, teenagers will run in, slap you in the face, and run out, to which the owners simply shrug and say, “It was important that you get slapped in the face.” When a new Starbucks opens, can you honestly say you’d go on for a Frappucino once you notice there are drunk people inside and teenagers lurking on the doorstep?
That’s what social commentary has become in the modern literary sphere. It’s no longer about deep, compelling stories that explore issues and inspire reflection and action through resonant ideas. It’s loud, preachy, blunt, in-your-face (that is to say, it has too much specificity). Virtue signaling is everywhere on the trad-published pages and even louder in the social media accounts and interviews of people associated with trad-pub (that is to say, there is oversaturation of these ideas). The endless echo chamber prioritizes the Message (whatever the Message of the week happens to be) over telling good stories (feeding both the oversatuaiton and specificity issues).
It Doesn't Have to Be This Bad …
Not every trad-pub writers fails at this. Fonda Lee, for example, very much touts the party line while writing good stories with an aspect of the Message.
In Jade City, Lee very bluntly criticized “testosterone-dominated culture”. This is a decision in lockstep with the Message of identity politics, and it is both undeniably specific and oversaturating the market. The thing is, when it came to actually delivering this idea, Lee put in the work. The exploration of patriarchy and the limited agency of women within her world is an organic extension of her setting, tempered by the contemporary attitudes of the local culture. The antagonist is allowed to agree with the broad strokes of the theme without being justified by it. The male protagonists are allowed to have a reasonable perspective and remain sympathetic even as the story Shows us that they are wrong to be dismissive of women. All this is to say that Lee earned the audience’s time and attention, rather than just breathing heavily and slapping us in the face.
… And Yet, It Is.
Most authors are not Lee. For most, their commentary lacks substance, is delivered without discipline, or is nothing more than a virtue signal. For every Lee, there’s an Evans and a Yarros, a Clark and a Drayden, a Chakraborty and a Zhao and a Paolini and an Okungbowa and a Bennett (and a whole lot more, if we also count all the writers I swerved around because of identity politics marketing).
Writers wanting to say something profound and fumbling the attempt is nothing new. What is new is the sheer, unrelenting density of messages that are treated as valuable additions simply because they are shoved into the reader’s faces. It’s an attitude that has made the messages shallow, flimsier, less earned, and generally more irritating.
If more writers wrote their messaging the way Lee did in Jade City, I would not feel so burned out. I would have given Deonn the benefit of the doubt and kept reading Legendborn. I would trust that there was actually a story to go with the fixation of race.
After everything trad-pub has pumped out in recent years (and has promised, through its virtue signaling, to keep pumping out), I’m not playing games like that. Reading is something I do for fun. I’m not wasting time and energy on a story that can’t get past Chapter 1 without warning me that the author put preaching to the choir above entertaining the wider audience.
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Am I saying that Deonn couldn't have fixated on race in the opening of Legendborn? That authors cannot write about race, or identity politics on general, anymore?
Of course not. We are all free to argue about whether a message is right, valid, or necessary in the real world, but in a strictly literary sense, no message is inherently good or bad for the quality of the work.
Instead, I feel there are two important points authors really need to consider before ramming messaging into their story, plus an additional point that is relevant to modern social commentary in particular.
空気を読む
Before deciding that your message is very timely and important and absolutely needs to be imposed upon your audience with zero nuance or subtlety, ask yourself:
Does it really need to be said?
This applies to all messaging, but for the sake of contemporary relevance. I am going to use identity politics as the example.
Is this message saturating books that are already on the market? (Yes. Identity politics is filling every space it can.)
Is the trad-pub industry actively promoting this message in both their Manuscript Wish Lists and social media presence? (Yes. We went over this last August.)
Is the message being used as a marketing tool? (Yes. “Black Girl Magic”, “female rage”, “sapphic romance”, and other tropes like these are splattered across covers and social media.)
Is opposition to this message given an equal chance to thrive? (No. See, again, the events of last August, where a writer was ridiculed merely for pointing out the obvious biases in the industry.)
There is no longer anything functional to be accomplished by just putting identity politics into a story. For this sort of message to actually have any merit anymore, is now needs to say or explore something new about identity. If it doesn't, then I'm sorry, but it isn’t necessary. It is another echo is a chamber that is already degenerating to meaningless noise.
Take Legendborn. If it had come out in 2016, I would not have cared about the racial fixation. Even if I read it when it came out (right after the death of George Floyd and the Summer of Love), I probably wouldn’t have DNF’ed it. With how long it takes trad-pub to release books, Legendborn’s timing would be coincidental. After years upon years of having race-based identity politics shoved in our faces, though, myself and so many other members of the audience are just tired of it.
Nothing new is being said with race-based identity politics anymore. It's just predictable, repetitive narratives about white people being evil and every other race being on a hierarchy of perceived victimhood. There’s certainly an audience for that … but the rest of us have the right to say, “No, thank you. Please stop feeding this to us.”
And once that happens, and readers start checking out, the messaging is no longer fulfilling its supposed purpose. It’s just extracting validation from the echo chamber while alienating the people whose minds would need to be changed for the message to actually accomplish anything.
The Book Needs to Stand on its Own
Jade City didn’t need to be marketed on the fact it explored “testosterone-dominsted culture”. Sure, Lee didn’t keep that element to herself in interviews, and she’s happy to virtue signal on and off the page, but the book itself didn't need to have “female rage” scrawled across its cover. It was a good story in its own right.
Think about all the classical literature that features (or, at least, is remembered as) contemporary social commentary. Do you know what Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Crucible, and Farenheit 451 all have in common? It’s that they all have the elements needed to endure even after their contemporary relevance has faded from the public consciousness. You don’t need to understand the rise of Stalinism, the plight of the Midwest farmer during the Great Depression, the racial prejudices of 1930s Alabama, or McCarthyism (or, for that matter, whatever exactly it was Huxley and Bradbury were reacting to - I don’t remember, and that provides my point) to appreciate these stories. They are written in a way that makes them compelling in isolation, and makes their messages universal despite responding to contemporary issues.
The problem is that too much of trad-pub (and a chunk of the indie sphere) takes the attitude of, “Book have Message, Message is Good, Book is Good.” That is the argument made every time a book is marketed based on identity politics, every time an agent requests books with a specific message, every time a critic or reviewer judges a work based on its adherence to the message, and every time a writer cowers behind the Message to avoid criticism. The Message becomes a thumb on the scale. Much like an actual thumb, with its joints and vulnerable tissues, it will inevitably buckle if the weight it opposes is too great.
And even if we ignore that … if the Message is so important, surely it deserves to be handled with care, right? Surely it deserves to be coccooned within a story that is good in its own right and doesn’t need to Message to validate it? Is it not an insult to the Message to demand that it support the weight of mediocre writing?
Bottom line: messaging should not be a crutch for bad writing.
Stop Attacking Your Audience
Given how the Message of the present day is identity politics, this last point needs to be acknowledged.
Identity politics establishes hierarchies of victimhood. People are designated as inherently victimized - or, conversely, deserving of suffering - based on inherent characteristics or religious beliefs. The reason this is a problem is that stories that push the message will frequently play into this hierarchy. This means that certain groups of people will be increasingly portrayed as inherently good while others are portrayed as inherently evil.
Audience members tend to notice when they are being browbeaten with the fact that people of their skin color, sex, sexual orientation, religion, etc. are consistently and deliberately being portrayed as the bad guys, especially when that appears alongside themes that fixate on those characteristics. It is not unreasonable for said readers to get tired of being demonized in entertainment media. If you deny your audience any escape from the pressures of the real world, they are not going to thank you for it.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Does Legendborn fail on any of these points?
Well, outside of a compliment being interpreted as a micro-aggression because the person offering it was a white man, I have no idea. Maybe Legendborn is actually the embodiment of what messaging should be. Maybe the racial stuff really was just character voice and a misguided endorsement.
But I’ve been burned too many times before to give any book with this marketing and this sort of start the benefit of the doubt.
NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT
While Legendborn has been the focus of discussion throughout this post, it is not the actual reason I am writing this.
See, earlier on the same day that I started and DNF’ed this book, a Substacker decided to bait engagement by commenting on this very issue. Her argument was one made in bad faith. It relied on misrepresenting basic facts and oozed with the rancid fluid of projection. Unfortunately, this precise argument is also one I have seen parroted far too often.
So, next Wednesday, we’ll break down this bad faith argument, and … respond?
I feel like calling it a response would be giving myself too much credit. Like many bad-faith arguments, this one ends up shooting itself in the foot. It would be more accurate to say that I will be highlighting how this bad-faith argument ends up upholding the points I’ve covered here today.
That’s coming your way next Wednesday. Thank you all for joining me today. Please remember to subscribe and share if you enjoyed what you read here. Take care, everyone, and enjoy the rest of your week.
