Burn The Heretic
So it’s happening again. Another author – a debut one, as usual – has been accused of racism and is currently being pressured into canceling her debut novel.
The author is Rebecca Mix, and the title of her book is The Ones We Burn. It is scheduled to be published November 1, 2022, so we’ve got a few months to go before it hits shelves. Here’s the synopsis:
Love and duty collide in this richly imagined, atmospheric young adult debut about a witch whose dark powers put her at the center of a brewing war between the only family she’s ever known and the enemy who makes her question everything.
Monster. Butcher. Bloodwinn.
Ranka is tired of death. All she wants now is to be left alone, living out her days in Witchik’s wild north with the coven that raised her, attempting to forget the horrors of her past. But when she is named Bloodwinn, the next treaty bride to the human kingdom of Isodal, her coven sends her south with a single directive: kill him. Easy enough, for a blood-witch whose magic compels her to kill.
Except the prince is gentle, kind, and terrified of her. He doesn’t want to marry Ranka; he doesn’t want to be king at all. And it’s his sister—the wickedly smart, infuriatingly beautiful Princess Aramis—who seems to be the real threat.
But when witches start turning up dead, murdered by a mysterious, magical plague, Aramis makes Ranka an offer: help her develop a cure, and in return, she’ll help Ranka learn to contain her deadly magic. As the coup draws nearer and the plague spreads, Ranka is forced to question everything she thought she knew about her power, her past, and who she’s meant to fight for. Soon, she will have to decide between the coven that raised her and the princess who sees beyond the monster they shaped her to be.
But as the bodies pile up, a monster may be exactly what they need.
So it sounds very interesting to me, but of course, ticks all the boxes necessary to actually be published these days: gay representation, non-white person representation and feminism. Of course, the two big sins are that the antagonists are powerful royals that happen to be black, and the inclusion of “blood magic” which is an anti-Semitic reference to “blood libel” – according to the crazies on Goodreads and Twitter anyway. Of course, we’ve seen this accusation before – Emily A Duncan was also accused of being anti-Semitic because the characters in her fantasy trilogy, Something Dark and Holy (I reviewed the first novel in this series, Wicked Saints, which you can read here) simply because the characters used “blood magic”. This accusation is completely ridiculous and has nothing to do with demonizing Jews or being bigoted against Jews. Of course, this gave a bunch of other dumbass authors license to accuse her of being a racist mean girl in some random Slack channel (you can read about that here – yes, the site is heavily biased, sorry about that).
Anyway, so of course, some Professional Victim, who may or may not have read the book in question, started ranting away on Twitter (of course):
ashia monet 🕯 on Twitter: “I can’t wait for y’all to read your white sapphic fave’s upcoming book and realize she wrote a reverse racism fantasy in which the Black siblings in power are oppressing poor, helpless white ppl (because said fave has no understanding of how to write QPOC) 🥰 / Twitter”
I can’t wait for y’all to read your white sapphic fave’s upcoming book and realize she wrote a reverse racism fantasy in which the Black siblings in power are oppressing poor, helpless white ppl (because said fave has no understanding of how to write QPOC) 🥰
(Archive)
I don’t want to rebut every single tweet in this imbecile’s tweet thread, but the charge of “reverse racism” is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard. It’s similar to what happened with Keira Drake’s novel The Continent in which the antagonists were dark skinned, and of course, she had to change antagonists from a tribe of dark-skinned people to white-skinned people with platinum blonde hair, which just smacks of racism to me. So basically, what all these leftists are saying is that black people, or Hispanics, or Asians, or whoever cannot be antagonists or villains of any story, because to portray them as bad is racist, even though one character or even a number of characters in a given story is not an indictment or even commentary on all people of that race within a story or in real life.
The two characters in questions are royals and they are black, and the imbecile on Twitter, and many others, believe that this is racist because a) black people are oppressed in real life (which is bullshit and everyone knows it) and b) back people cannot be portrayed as being bad, flawed, or anything less than perfect and angelic. They certainly can’t be portrayed as having any power, especially compared to white people, because that’s not how it is in the real world and, I dunno, white people might read The Ones We Burn and forget that they’re enjoying their privilege and that they owe black people reparations and blah blah blah.
Ashia Monet, if that’s her real name, is an imbecile who knows nothing of current world events or of world history. She’s so overwhelmingly offended and outraged at the notion that a pair of black siblings might actually oppress other people (even though, if you do a little digging, it’s clear that the author does not mean for the two siblings in question to be flat-out villains, and may just be pawns of someone else). Again, we must remember that black people are perfect, sinless angels that never hurt other people and certainly wouldn’t hurt whitey, who they’ve been conditioned to hate for decades now. Revenge is something that has never, ever crossed a black person’s mind – nope, never.
Of course, if one actually knew fuck all about current events and world history, particularly African history, one would know that that’s a load of garbage. Ashia Monet is an absolute moron who knows absolutely nothing of the world, and all the imbeciles over at Goodreads and other places are blindly accepting her idiotic take on a novel that hasn’t even been released yet.
Another thing – this isn’t a “white supremacist fantasy” or whatever they’re calling it. No, white people, supremacist or otherwise, do not fantasize about being oppressed by black people. Are some worried that, in the future, they may be oppressed by black people? Probably. And their fear isn’t unfounded. Over the past several years, particularly since Barack Obama was first elected President, Democrats across the board have been squeeing and bragging about how white people will literally be a minority in, what, twenty years? Thirty years? And that once white people are a minority in the US, the Democrats will be invincible at the polls and Republicans will never win an election ever again.
White people, particularly Republicans, read that kind of shit and then these Democrats wonder why the so-called Great Replacement Theory exists. I mean, all of the Democrat policies are designed to create this outcome, from the heavy promotion of abortion to the subsidizing of illegals and the poorest people in the country using welfare and other social programs that basically pay people for existing. Making it difficult and expensive for middle-class people to have and raise children. Ignoring all immigration laws and not even enforcing them, and allowing illegals to not only remain here in some sort of gray status (all the while being paid for existing), but allowing them to bring their entire family trees to this country via chain migration, and to top it all off, some states, like my wretched home state of California, are handing out driver’s licenses to people that aren’t even citizens of this country.
And what do you suppose these people do with those driver’s licenses, besides (drunkenly) driving? Oh, they run to the polls and vote, presumably for more Democrats who will keep the gravy train rolling. Democrats will brag about this every chance they get, and they have the nerve to get offended when some Republican points out that, gee, it seems like they’re trying to replace us on purpose because more and more white people might just decide to vote Republican in the future.
What they didn’t count on was that a great deal of Hispanics are starting to look away from the Democrat party, particularly Hispanics born and raised in this country. But I’ll stop going on and on about that. My point is that the fears of these so-called “white supremacists” isn’t completely unfounded, especially when you see the kind of things black people say about white people. Oh, and some of the heinous crimes black people have committed against white people.
I have one more point to make, and that’s this: dumbasses like Ashia Monet would not hesitate to treat white people exactly the same way actual racists in the past have treated black people. People like Ashia Monet want revenge on whitey, and they hate it when people point that out, or even allude to it. Ashia Monet reads about two black people possibly oppressing a white person, gasps and says, “I’ve been found out!” She wants to do that to white people, and so do a great deal of other black people, and doesn’t want to admit it because that would be a step too far in regards to their carefully cultivated Professional Victim image.
Something interesting has happened on Goodreads, however. Of course, there’s the usual assholes rating and reviewing a book they haven’t even read (myself included, because I just wanted them to see what I had to say about it), but some of them have actually taken their reviews down, to avoid “promoting” the book, you see.
I am going to call this progress. All my sperging on this topic over the years, along with the outrage from other people far more influential than I, has actually amounted to something. Take a look at the Goodreads page for the book – there’s already a couple of people who have pulled their reviews because they’re afraid the book will end up being successful, like Amelie Wen Zhao’s Blood Heir trilogy.
The book is still on track to be published. The author, Rebecca Mix, did post an explanation on Twitter that has not assuaged the critics, but that does serve to defend her story, and assure that the book has gone through additional “authenticity” reads to ensure it’s not raaaaacist. According to her statement, there are no plans to delay or cancel the release of the book:
So there you have it. I also can’t imagine that publishers are going to stand for someone cancelling their book release, especially at such a late stage in the publishing process. That being said, I would not be surprised if the author chickened out, and withdraws the book release, but I hope she does not.
Photo by Anastasia Latunova