![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
For all that Pierce tries to tackle sexism and racism, and even, lately, attempts to tackle heterosexism, she never really seems to tackle classism much at all.
(By the by, yes, I know she fails miserably at the tackling heterosexism and racism, and I'd argue she also fails at tackling sexism. Let's leave those aside for now.)
She sort of pays lip service to classism and fighting it with, largely in PotS, mentions of nobles caring for commoners. The eeeeevil conservatives, of course, find this abhorrent. (Pierce, please create villains who aren't totally anti-good. I'd like human baddies, please.)
But in reality, she shows something very different. On a narrative level, she's in love with the noble class. Almost all her heroes are noble; the two main characters who aren't are a powerful mage who hangs out at court and is treated like a noble (Numair) and a god-born wildmage who ALSO hangs out at court and is treated like a noble (Daine). And Daine, who is one of the characters we follow, obviously, never seems to spare a thought for her fellow commoners, really. Then again, no one else does unless we need to show Why Someone is Good.
Commoners are mostly treated as ornaments. They're there to fill in the gaps. In SotL, the major commoners are the thieves, there to provide some exciting friends for Alanna; Coram, there to be Alanna's trusted servant; Eleni, there to be a female healer not affiliated with the palace that Alanna can go to; and Liam, who is the Shang Dragon and often seems to get more respect than Alanna does. Oh, and there's Buri.
What happens to them? The thieves mostly die. George and Rispah, Coram, Eleni, and Buri become nobles. Liam dies a heroic death, and is more hero than commoner. It's easy to forget, actually, the way the narrative treats him, that Liam IS a commoner.
Yet for all that the commoners in SotL either die or become nobles, SotL handles commoners better than any other Tortall book. (I am not counting PD, because it's not finished and because I haven't read it in ages. Also, it feels like a totally different world to mainstream Tortall, as separate as Emelan in its own way.) SotL treats its commoners as people with independent wills, and does have a few commoners in WWRLAM (namely, all the Bazhir) who go their own way and do their own thing, even if WWRLAM is entirely forgettable in terms of its actual impact on the series. SotL also is the only series that really attempts to address classism; Alanna is presented as pretty damn classist, and this is (somewhat surprisingly) actually presented as something of a flaw occasionally.
On the other hand, a lot of Alanna's classism is treated as noble pride and therefore a good thing, and SotL is rather infamous for ennobling every commoner in it who appears at a later date. (It just takes longer with Buri.)
TIQ has, in theory, two commoners as its major characters. That seems to be treated more as a bit of flavor for Daine, and as for Numair, he is never treated as anything other than a mage, and one who has always moved in not just noble, but royal, circles. As Daine gets more powerful, all traces of commoner get dropped except for the occasional cute turn of phrase; it's like as far as Pierce is concerned, they're not commoners, they're mages.
At least in SotL, we had commoners who practiced magic.
An honest-to-god mage class would be very interesting, but that's not actually what we see. Powerful mages are just absorbed into the nobility as sort of honorary nobles. They can hang out at the palace and have whole towers to themselves where they apparently have no overlord but the king.
The Riders aren't entirely noble (in fact, the ones we see in WM don't seem to have a noble among them), but we leave the Riders really fast, and honestly, this is another way that WM is a better book than the rest of its own quartet. WM had Daine acting like a commoner, not ashamed of being a commoner, hanging out with commoners, and the nobles present felt like inserts into a world of commoners. Then, bam, Daine is moving in noble circles, dealing only with nobles or gods aside from a minor character here or there, for the rest of the books.
PotS is probably the most problematic in terms of classism. Kel supposedly has commoner relatives, yet the great Protector of the Small lets classist slurs be used against nobles who slur her - and the text treats this as okay, in much the same way that it treats the bullying of Ralon as okay. (Look, it's not okay to turn around and hurt someone who hurts you. Pierce, why is this so hard?)
Kel is described repeatedly as being unusual in that she cares for commoners, yet while we do see that in the text, the text also repeatedly infantilizes commoners. The people at Haven can't make even the smallest decision without noble guidance. Their one big battle they fight when Kel's gone is the one they lose.
Lalasa is a huge mess of issues; Pierce manages to send nasty messages about lesbians, rape, and commoners all in one package. Lalasa is unable to do anything until Kel saves her. Lalasa has no personality until Kel basically learns her one. And Kel uses her authority over Lalasa, who is older and implied to be an adult by Tortall standards, to force Lalasa to take lessons not essential to her job as a maid, lessons that Lalasa explicitly doesn't want.
All I can think, when I look at that, is that that's the kind of abuse of power unions formed to stop. If you think it's a-ok for Kel to force Lalasa - who is employed as her maid, not her bodyguard - to learn self defense for her own good even though she doesn't want to, let me ask you this: is it okay for your boss to decide you're too fat and need to run a mile every day, even if you don't want to? When your job has no physical requirements?
PotS is rife with instances of commoners being entirely helpless and unable to save themselves. A noble - namely Kel - has to come and save them. A whole slew of adult commoners can't escape Stenmun's men, but a handful of people under a green knight manage to free them. None of the commoners can free themselves from Blayce; it takes a noble to do it for them. A foreign one, at that.
More problematically, the text considers commoners part of "the Small" that Kel protects. That's infantilizing language. Moreover, when establishing a pattern for protecting small, helpless things, Kel saves kittens, a dog, sparrows, a griffin, and a horse. The next thing she protects? Commoners. The random first-year pages also fall under this, but that is written differently, phrased as Kel vs. Bullies, not Kel Saving A Firstie. We also see the pages with more agency; to my recollection, the only two named pages she saves are Merric and Owen, both of whom have personalities and develop their own agency and will.
The commoners, on the other hand, are treated by the text like the animals. Hell, Peachblossom and Jump, especially, are written as being more independent and having more will than the commoners of Haven and Lalasa are.
It's a pile of fail. Which saddens me, because that's my favorite series to reread.
And then there's DotL. Which is such a narrative fail it's hard to tell what the hell Pierce was getting at with anything, really. Was it a slave rebellion (and she'd said there were luarin slaves; it's why Aly doesn't stick out), or a raka rebellion? The muddling of that garbles everything.
I would note that DotL definitely follows nobles, and a noble enslaved, who spends the whole book playacting. There's a weird sense there that Pierce thinks it's easy to slide back and forth between classes; that a girl born and raised noble can just pretend to be a commoner so easily no one questions this. This was done better in SotL, as so many things surprisingly are; when no one knows who Claw is, Myles theorizes he was a common-born noble bastard educated by his noble parent, because in that book Pierce actually realized there'd have to be a good, solid explanation for why a supposed commoner acted and spoke like a noble.
A lot of the supporting cast is common, but again, there are huge problems with everything thanks to that garbled plot, so I have to set all that aside. I would note, though, that this rebellion revolves around royalty, and it takes an imported white noble who just happens to be a superspy at 16 to fulfill the raka prophecy and kick-start the whole rebellion. Again, it's all about the nobles and a noble has to save them all.
The biggest incident of classism I feel I can discuss cleanly in DotL is the blood oaths the bandits make. Blood oaths are described as nasty things; the only time we see them used, it's nobility extracting blood oaths from starving commoners. This is treated like it's wise and wonderful, and maybe it is. I won't touch the moral issues of blood oaths.
And yet, at the end of the rebellion, blood oaths aren't extracted from the nobility. Taybur, former head of security for the previous rulers and proved traitor, doesn't have to swear a blood oath. It occurs to me that a blood oath would have been a fantastic way to prevent challenges to Dove's throne in a way that prevented the deaths of at least some characters. Also, we have no indication blood oaths are used on rebellious or conquered nobility. (That I recall, at least. I reread DotL least of any books.)
....
So blood oaths are for commoners to nobles, then. There's a nasty message.
All of this thinking is really making me appreciate SotL more. It's a world that doesn't try to be ours-with-fantasy, but its own thing, and despite (or because of) its rough edges, it feels more like we can separate the classism demonstrated by its heroes from the author's own voice. We can't do that in the later Tortall series; the text is even more uncritical of its heroes as time goes on.
At least, for all that SotL glorifies violence, Alanna's temper, and the beatings of Ralon, SotL actually steps back and lets Alanna's classism at least occasionally be a character flaw. Can we have more character flaws, please?
And less embracing of classism? Nobles aren't all that, interesting stories can be told about commoners, and I am really sick of the noble-saves-the-day and the best-reward-is-nobility messages in Tortall.
(By the by, yes, I know she fails miserably at the tackling heterosexism and racism, and I'd argue she also fails at tackling sexism. Let's leave those aside for now.)
She sort of pays lip service to classism and fighting it with, largely in PotS, mentions of nobles caring for commoners. The eeeeevil conservatives, of course, find this abhorrent. (Pierce, please create villains who aren't totally anti-good. I'd like human baddies, please.)
But in reality, she shows something very different. On a narrative level, she's in love with the noble class. Almost all her heroes are noble; the two main characters who aren't are a powerful mage who hangs out at court and is treated like a noble (Numair) and a god-born wildmage who ALSO hangs out at court and is treated like a noble (Daine). And Daine, who is one of the characters we follow, obviously, never seems to spare a thought for her fellow commoners, really. Then again, no one else does unless we need to show Why Someone is Good.
Commoners are mostly treated as ornaments. They're there to fill in the gaps. In SotL, the major commoners are the thieves, there to provide some exciting friends for Alanna; Coram, there to be Alanna's trusted servant; Eleni, there to be a female healer not affiliated with the palace that Alanna can go to; and Liam, who is the Shang Dragon and often seems to get more respect than Alanna does. Oh, and there's Buri.
What happens to them? The thieves mostly die. George and Rispah, Coram, Eleni, and Buri become nobles. Liam dies a heroic death, and is more hero than commoner. It's easy to forget, actually, the way the narrative treats him, that Liam IS a commoner.
Yet for all that the commoners in SotL either die or become nobles, SotL handles commoners better than any other Tortall book. (I am not counting PD, because it's not finished and because I haven't read it in ages. Also, it feels like a totally different world to mainstream Tortall, as separate as Emelan in its own way.) SotL treats its commoners as people with independent wills, and does have a few commoners in WWRLAM (namely, all the Bazhir) who go their own way and do their own thing, even if WWRLAM is entirely forgettable in terms of its actual impact on the series. SotL also is the only series that really attempts to address classism; Alanna is presented as pretty damn classist, and this is (somewhat surprisingly) actually presented as something of a flaw occasionally.
On the other hand, a lot of Alanna's classism is treated as noble pride and therefore a good thing, and SotL is rather infamous for ennobling every commoner in it who appears at a later date. (It just takes longer with Buri.)
TIQ has, in theory, two commoners as its major characters. That seems to be treated more as a bit of flavor for Daine, and as for Numair, he is never treated as anything other than a mage, and one who has always moved in not just noble, but royal, circles. As Daine gets more powerful, all traces of commoner get dropped except for the occasional cute turn of phrase; it's like as far as Pierce is concerned, they're not commoners, they're mages.
At least in SotL, we had commoners who practiced magic.
An honest-to-god mage class would be very interesting, but that's not actually what we see. Powerful mages are just absorbed into the nobility as sort of honorary nobles. They can hang out at the palace and have whole towers to themselves where they apparently have no overlord but the king.
The Riders aren't entirely noble (in fact, the ones we see in WM don't seem to have a noble among them), but we leave the Riders really fast, and honestly, this is another way that WM is a better book than the rest of its own quartet. WM had Daine acting like a commoner, not ashamed of being a commoner, hanging out with commoners, and the nobles present felt like inserts into a world of commoners. Then, bam, Daine is moving in noble circles, dealing only with nobles or gods aside from a minor character here or there, for the rest of the books.
PotS is probably the most problematic in terms of classism. Kel supposedly has commoner relatives, yet the great Protector of the Small lets classist slurs be used against nobles who slur her - and the text treats this as okay, in much the same way that it treats the bullying of Ralon as okay. (Look, it's not okay to turn around and hurt someone who hurts you. Pierce, why is this so hard?)
Kel is described repeatedly as being unusual in that she cares for commoners, yet while we do see that in the text, the text also repeatedly infantilizes commoners. The people at Haven can't make even the smallest decision without noble guidance. Their one big battle they fight when Kel's gone is the one they lose.
Lalasa is a huge mess of issues; Pierce manages to send nasty messages about lesbians, rape, and commoners all in one package. Lalasa is unable to do anything until Kel saves her. Lalasa has no personality until Kel basically learns her one. And Kel uses her authority over Lalasa, who is older and implied to be an adult by Tortall standards, to force Lalasa to take lessons not essential to her job as a maid, lessons that Lalasa explicitly doesn't want.
All I can think, when I look at that, is that that's the kind of abuse of power unions formed to stop. If you think it's a-ok for Kel to force Lalasa - who is employed as her maid, not her bodyguard - to learn self defense for her own good even though she doesn't want to, let me ask you this: is it okay for your boss to decide you're too fat and need to run a mile every day, even if you don't want to? When your job has no physical requirements?
PotS is rife with instances of commoners being entirely helpless and unable to save themselves. A noble - namely Kel - has to come and save them. A whole slew of adult commoners can't escape Stenmun's men, but a handful of people under a green knight manage to free them. None of the commoners can free themselves from Blayce; it takes a noble to do it for them. A foreign one, at that.
More problematically, the text considers commoners part of "the Small" that Kel protects. That's infantilizing language. Moreover, when establishing a pattern for protecting small, helpless things, Kel saves kittens, a dog, sparrows, a griffin, and a horse. The next thing she protects? Commoners. The random first-year pages also fall under this, but that is written differently, phrased as Kel vs. Bullies, not Kel Saving A Firstie. We also see the pages with more agency; to my recollection, the only two named pages she saves are Merric and Owen, both of whom have personalities and develop their own agency and will.
The commoners, on the other hand, are treated by the text like the animals. Hell, Peachblossom and Jump, especially, are written as being more independent and having more will than the commoners of Haven and Lalasa are.
It's a pile of fail. Which saddens me, because that's my favorite series to reread.
And then there's DotL. Which is such a narrative fail it's hard to tell what the hell Pierce was getting at with anything, really. Was it a slave rebellion (and she'd said there were luarin slaves; it's why Aly doesn't stick out), or a raka rebellion? The muddling of that garbles everything.
I would note that DotL definitely follows nobles, and a noble enslaved, who spends the whole book playacting. There's a weird sense there that Pierce thinks it's easy to slide back and forth between classes; that a girl born and raised noble can just pretend to be a commoner so easily no one questions this. This was done better in SotL, as so many things surprisingly are; when no one knows who Claw is, Myles theorizes he was a common-born noble bastard educated by his noble parent, because in that book Pierce actually realized there'd have to be a good, solid explanation for why a supposed commoner acted and spoke like a noble.
A lot of the supporting cast is common, but again, there are huge problems with everything thanks to that garbled plot, so I have to set all that aside. I would note, though, that this rebellion revolves around royalty, and it takes an imported white noble who just happens to be a superspy at 16 to fulfill the raka prophecy and kick-start the whole rebellion. Again, it's all about the nobles and a noble has to save them all.
The biggest incident of classism I feel I can discuss cleanly in DotL is the blood oaths the bandits make. Blood oaths are described as nasty things; the only time we see them used, it's nobility extracting blood oaths from starving commoners. This is treated like it's wise and wonderful, and maybe it is. I won't touch the moral issues of blood oaths.
And yet, at the end of the rebellion, blood oaths aren't extracted from the nobility. Taybur, former head of security for the previous rulers and proved traitor, doesn't have to swear a blood oath. It occurs to me that a blood oath would have been a fantastic way to prevent challenges to Dove's throne in a way that prevented the deaths of at least some characters. Also, we have no indication blood oaths are used on rebellious or conquered nobility. (That I recall, at least. I reread DotL least of any books.)
....
So blood oaths are for commoners to nobles, then. There's a nasty message.
All of this thinking is really making me appreciate SotL more. It's a world that doesn't try to be ours-with-fantasy, but its own thing, and despite (or because of) its rough edges, it feels more like we can separate the classism demonstrated by its heroes from the author's own voice. We can't do that in the later Tortall series; the text is even more uncritical of its heroes as time goes on.
At least, for all that SotL glorifies violence, Alanna's temper, and the beatings of Ralon, SotL actually steps back and lets Alanna's classism at least occasionally be a character flaw. Can we have more character flaws, please?
And less embracing of classism? Nobles aren't all that, interesting stories can be told about commoners, and I am really sick of the noble-saves-the-day and the best-reward-is-nobility messages in Tortall.
