They Come First
Sep. 14th, 2012 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
settecorviI didn’t start listening to Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series expecting deathless prose or incisive social commentary. I just wanted YA fluff to mentally snark my way through while I processed data for my research project. The back blurb placed a female friendship front and center, which made me a bit hopeful that this would be a step above the morass of cookie cutter “[Special girl] fights [supernatural creature] and falls in love with [brooding dangerous man]” novels glutting the market.
I didn’t expect Mead to create a bleakly dystopian society built on systemic prejudice and abuse of unearned privilege.
Background time: In a hidden society alongside but apart from the human world are moroi, living vampires who can use elemental magic; strigoi, undead vampires who are eeeevil without exception; and dhampirs, the half-vampire product of a moroi-human union. The problem for the dhampirs is, they’re not fertile with one another. Contrary to all biological probability, dhampir-moroi crossbreeding produces pure dhampirs. To preserve their species, dhampirs need to keep the moroi from dying out, and the moroi are the strigoi’s snack of choice.
It might have been kinder if they’d decided quality of life was better than quantity and let their species die out in peace, because as it is they’ve enslaved themselves and their children in everything but name. Moroi hold continuation of the dhampirs hostage in return for protection. Dhampir men are expected to become guardians, trained from birth to defend moroi to the death. Dhampir women can become guardians, but few do; instead, they live in communes tobrainwashraise their children.
We’ll come back to the communes. Oh will we ever.
To put it more explicitly: dhampirs are taught from the time they can toddle that the only acceptable path for them is to sacrifice their lives for moroi. The one dhampir man we meet who doesn’t adhere to it is looked on with shock and contempt; even going off to fight strigoi on their own terms is seen as irresponsible, and this assessment is backed up in-text. With the exception of our protagonist, all women but those who stay at home to care for children are shamed even more explicitly. The guardian motto, repeated by trainees until it makes my skin crawl, is “They come first.” These poor kids have so completely accepted that their lives come second to the moroi’s that by the time they’re teenagers, they regard a desk job as punishment and are champing at the bit to go on active duty.
At the vampire high school, there’s a clear moroi track and a dhampir track, with no overlap. Dhampirs - and the only dhampirs at this school are those training to be guardians, so I don’t know if the girls who decide/are directed to be broodmares get any formal education - spend much of their day in combat classes. Moroi get to take electives, to explore subjects they enjoy, to learn for the entire day. They get to be students. They get a childhood. They’re told that they can be anything they want, while their half-siblings are trained to die for their sake in the next room.
After high school, at eighteen years old, dhampirs who graduate are deemed full guardians and assigned to a moroi. There’s a flesh fair where graduates are interrogated by adult moroi to ascertain whether they’re worthy of dying for prospective owners, and for a salary explicitly described as “meager.” It really wouldn’t matter if the compensation were commensurate to the danger, I can’t get past adults asking teenagers to fight monsters on their behalf. It’s made worse when you remember that all dhampirs have one moroi parent, even if the douchenozzles don’t bother contacting their halfbreed bastards. The moroi are asking their children, their brothers and sisters, to give up their lives for them. Did "owners" sound harsh when I used it before? Dhampirs don’t have any say as to whom they’re given; the queen* assigns them based on personal whim and intra-moroi hierarchy. Whoever they’re given to, they follow that person wherever they decides to go. Guardians can’t even consider the idea of seeking further education on their own. I have class privilege, and maybe this skews things when I put myself in a dhampir’s shoes, but I was raised knowing that I’d go to college after high school. In this culture and time, I wasn’t so much taught as just absorbed that higher education was the only way to get a decent job. The friends and mentors I met, the classes I took, the stupid mistakes I made in undergrad have added such richness and opportunity to my life. Dhampirs can’t have any of that. Even if their moroi decides to attend a college, a guardian would take the classes their charge chose rather than pursue their own interests. Classwork would come a far second below the need to protect their moroi. Their friends would be the moroi’s friends, they would never have the chance to make independent connections. If they bothered to graduate, they’d never have the chance to use their degree, much less attend a postgrad program.
* Of course it's a monarchy. How can you have luxury porn without a monarchy, silly bunny?
I try to imagine such a stifling, regimented life and it makes me want to scream until I pass out. This setup would be brilliant, if only I had the sense the author knew what she’d created. I would love to see a series where a dhampir and her moroi friend start realizing how screwed up their society is and decide to tear it down from the foundations. Just imagine the conversations about class and privilege that could spark among teenagers! You’d be pitting your heroes against stodgy adults who’re convinced they know best, and that has to be bait for the intended audience if nothing else is. The series even begins with Rose, our dhampir protagonist, and Lissa, her moroi friend, being dragged back to the vampire school after they’d run away to the human world for two years. That would give them the perfect background to look at moroi society with new insight. Instead, all of this is right there in the text, and Mead just breezes by the horrors to focus on fighting strigoi and stupid teenage relationship drama. Rose occasionally wishes that she didn’t always have to put Lissa first, but it’s never pursued or explored beyond those scattered mentions. It seems impossible that the abusive moroi-dhampir relationship could have been created accidentally, yet the entire tone of the writing is off if these were issues Mead knew she was presenting. Rose isn’t supposed to be taken as an unreliable narrator blind to the injustice perpetrated by the moroi. Lissa isn’t meant to be a selfish, privileged brat who takes it as a matter of course that her “best friend” will have no life outside guarding her and is literally willing to die for her.
Halfway through the fifth book in the six book series, Mead almost tries to address some of the problems inherent in the system, and just fails that much harder. The moroi queen and the twelve royal houses that make up the governing force* decide to lower the guardian graduation age to sixteen. Rose and all of the guardians she meets with are horrified and outraged. Sixteen is far too young! Those extra two years of training can make all the difference in being prepared to fight stronger, faster, vicious murderers! Except nobody takes the logical next step and asks: why is eighteen old enough? Would twenty be old enough? Twenty-five? At what age can we reasonably demand that an entire group of people give up their lives for the sake of another? Throughout the passing of the motion and the discussion surrounding it, there’s the strong implication that a few bad, cowardly moroi are behind the push to get guardians into the field at too young an age. They’re contrasted with the good moroi who... want the guardian age to stay at eighteen, and maybe a few want to learn how to fight alongside dhampirs with magic? There’s no acknowledgment that even if they’re the nicest people in the world and treat their guardians “just like family,” all moroi are complicit in the privilege of their race and the abuse of dhampirs.
* Of course dhampirs don’t get a voice in their government. Of course that's never commented on.
Guys, guardian-guarded relationships are one of my favorite narrative tropes. I love it when a bond between two people is so strong that one is willing to die for the other, so I'm not objecting to the mere concept. What bothers me is the way it's been warped, because Rose was never given the freedom to choose the guardian’s path, no matter how much she loves it. She and all of the dhampirs have been brainwashed into laying down their lives for a race that takes their sacrifice for granted at best and views them with contempt more typically. Rose is told that she has “impure blood” and that her presence is “profaning” a moroi-only event meant to honor the deaths of guardians who’d fallen defending moroi. And not even her dear moroi friends come to defend her.
This series annoyed me when I first started listening, then I got angry, and now I’m just sad. At the point when I was seesawing wildly between “oh Rose you poor brainwashed baby come here so I can hug you” and “get over here so I can chew you out, you irredeemable brat,” I finally remembered that I don’t actually have to finish every book I start. It’s beaten me. I gracefully accept my defeat, because not having to listen to any more is reward enough. It made the tedious image processing feel even more time-consuming and annoying, which was the exact opposite of what it’s meant to do.
I went looking for spoilers, on the offchance the reduction in graduation age was the start of Mead actually addressing any of these myriad problems, and no surprise, nothing changes. The status quo is happily restored by the end, with Lissa as vampire queen and Rose as her guardian. Mead acts as though a happy ending for our protagonists makes up for the vast injustices that remain ingrained in this society.
I still have four pages of notes full of issues I haven’t even touched on yet, so there may be more as I can stomach revisiting it.
I didn’t expect Mead to create a bleakly dystopian society built on systemic prejudice and abuse of unearned privilege.
Background time: In a hidden society alongside but apart from the human world are moroi, living vampires who can use elemental magic; strigoi, undead vampires who are eeeevil without exception; and dhampirs, the half-vampire product of a moroi-human union. The problem for the dhampirs is, they’re not fertile with one another. Contrary to all biological probability, dhampir-moroi crossbreeding produces pure dhampirs. To preserve their species, dhampirs need to keep the moroi from dying out, and the moroi are the strigoi’s snack of choice.
It might have been kinder if they’d decided quality of life was better than quantity and let their species die out in peace, because as it is they’ve enslaved themselves and their children in everything but name. Moroi hold continuation of the dhampirs hostage in return for protection. Dhampir men are expected to become guardians, trained from birth to defend moroi to the death. Dhampir women can become guardians, but few do; instead, they live in communes to
We’ll come back to the communes. Oh will we ever.
To put it more explicitly: dhampirs are taught from the time they can toddle that the only acceptable path for them is to sacrifice their lives for moroi. The one dhampir man we meet who doesn’t adhere to it is looked on with shock and contempt; even going off to fight strigoi on their own terms is seen as irresponsible, and this assessment is backed up in-text. With the exception of our protagonist, all women but those who stay at home to care for children are shamed even more explicitly. The guardian motto, repeated by trainees until it makes my skin crawl, is “They come first.” These poor kids have so completely accepted that their lives come second to the moroi’s that by the time they’re teenagers, they regard a desk job as punishment and are champing at the bit to go on active duty.
At the vampire high school, there’s a clear moroi track and a dhampir track, with no overlap. Dhampirs - and the only dhampirs at this school are those training to be guardians, so I don’t know if the girls who decide/are directed to be broodmares get any formal education - spend much of their day in combat classes. Moroi get to take electives, to explore subjects they enjoy, to learn for the entire day. They get to be students. They get a childhood. They’re told that they can be anything they want, while their half-siblings are trained to die for their sake in the next room.
After high school, at eighteen years old, dhampirs who graduate are deemed full guardians and assigned to a moroi. There’s a flesh fair where graduates are interrogated by adult moroi to ascertain whether they’re worthy of dying for prospective owners, and for a salary explicitly described as “meager.” It really wouldn’t matter if the compensation were commensurate to the danger, I can’t get past adults asking teenagers to fight monsters on their behalf. It’s made worse when you remember that all dhampirs have one moroi parent, even if the douchenozzles don’t bother contacting their halfbreed bastards. The moroi are asking their children, their brothers and sisters, to give up their lives for them. Did "owners" sound harsh when I used it before? Dhampirs don’t have any say as to whom they’re given; the queen* assigns them based on personal whim and intra-moroi hierarchy. Whoever they’re given to, they follow that person wherever they decides to go. Guardians can’t even consider the idea of seeking further education on their own. I have class privilege, and maybe this skews things when I put myself in a dhampir’s shoes, but I was raised knowing that I’d go to college after high school. In this culture and time, I wasn’t so much taught as just absorbed that higher education was the only way to get a decent job. The friends and mentors I met, the classes I took, the stupid mistakes I made in undergrad have added such richness and opportunity to my life. Dhampirs can’t have any of that. Even if their moroi decides to attend a college, a guardian would take the classes their charge chose rather than pursue their own interests. Classwork would come a far second below the need to protect their moroi. Their friends would be the moroi’s friends, they would never have the chance to make independent connections. If they bothered to graduate, they’d never have the chance to use their degree, much less attend a postgrad program.
* Of course it's a monarchy. How can you have luxury porn without a monarchy, silly bunny?
I try to imagine such a stifling, regimented life and it makes me want to scream until I pass out. This setup would be brilliant, if only I had the sense the author knew what she’d created. I would love to see a series where a dhampir and her moroi friend start realizing how screwed up their society is and decide to tear it down from the foundations. Just imagine the conversations about class and privilege that could spark among teenagers! You’d be pitting your heroes against stodgy adults who’re convinced they know best, and that has to be bait for the intended audience if nothing else is. The series even begins with Rose, our dhampir protagonist, and Lissa, her moroi friend, being dragged back to the vampire school after they’d run away to the human world for two years. That would give them the perfect background to look at moroi society with new insight. Instead, all of this is right there in the text, and Mead just breezes by the horrors to focus on fighting strigoi and stupid teenage relationship drama. Rose occasionally wishes that she didn’t always have to put Lissa first, but it’s never pursued or explored beyond those scattered mentions. It seems impossible that the abusive moroi-dhampir relationship could have been created accidentally, yet the entire tone of the writing is off if these were issues Mead knew she was presenting. Rose isn’t supposed to be taken as an unreliable narrator blind to the injustice perpetrated by the moroi. Lissa isn’t meant to be a selfish, privileged brat who takes it as a matter of course that her “best friend” will have no life outside guarding her and is literally willing to die for her.
Halfway through the fifth book in the six book series, Mead almost tries to address some of the problems inherent in the system, and just fails that much harder. The moroi queen and the twelve royal houses that make up the governing force* decide to lower the guardian graduation age to sixteen. Rose and all of the guardians she meets with are horrified and outraged. Sixteen is far too young! Those extra two years of training can make all the difference in being prepared to fight stronger, faster, vicious murderers! Except nobody takes the logical next step and asks: why is eighteen old enough? Would twenty be old enough? Twenty-five? At what age can we reasonably demand that an entire group of people give up their lives for the sake of another? Throughout the passing of the motion and the discussion surrounding it, there’s the strong implication that a few bad, cowardly moroi are behind the push to get guardians into the field at too young an age. They’re contrasted with the good moroi who... want the guardian age to stay at eighteen, and maybe a few want to learn how to fight alongside dhampirs with magic? There’s no acknowledgment that even if they’re the nicest people in the world and treat their guardians “just like family,” all moroi are complicit in the privilege of their race and the abuse of dhampirs.
* Of course dhampirs don’t get a voice in their government. Of course that's never commented on.
Guys, guardian-guarded relationships are one of my favorite narrative tropes. I love it when a bond between two people is so strong that one is willing to die for the other, so I'm not objecting to the mere concept. What bothers me is the way it's been warped, because Rose was never given the freedom to choose the guardian’s path, no matter how much she loves it. She and all of the dhampirs have been brainwashed into laying down their lives for a race that takes their sacrifice for granted at best and views them with contempt more typically. Rose is told that she has “impure blood” and that her presence is “profaning” a moroi-only event meant to honor the deaths of guardians who’d fallen defending moroi. And not even her dear moroi friends come to defend her.
This series annoyed me when I first started listening, then I got angry, and now I’m just sad. At the point when I was seesawing wildly between “oh Rose you poor brainwashed baby come here so I can hug you” and “get over here so I can chew you out, you irredeemable brat,” I finally remembered that I don’t actually have to finish every book I start. It’s beaten me. I gracefully accept my defeat, because not having to listen to any more is reward enough. It made the tedious image processing feel even more time-consuming and annoying, which was the exact opposite of what it’s meant to do.
I went looking for spoilers, on the offchance the reduction in graduation age was the start of Mead actually addressing any of these myriad problems, and no surprise, nothing changes. The status quo is happily restored by the end, with Lissa as vampire queen and Rose as her guardian. Mead acts as though a happy ending for our protagonists makes up for the vast injustices that remain ingrained in this society.
I still have four pages of notes full of issues I haven’t even touched on yet, so there may be more as I can stomach revisiting it.
