would you be able to give examples/explain more about how race only impacts gideon in the tlt-universe? not being facetious or condescending, genuinely asking. thank you!
Hi anon! If you mean my tags to this post, I wrote
By which I mean my Worstie and main antagonist of the series, John Gaius (PhD).
I don’t think TLT as a series engages with race in any especially meaningful ways. It’s set in a post-Earth society with entirely different social norms, and there’s no concept of race and ethnicity within the population of the Nine Houses. Physical descriptions of the characters are scarce to say the least, and they rarely spell out the kind of features that suggest specific racial connotations, because the POV characters don’t seem to think it’s something worth remarking upon. iirc, it takes until halfway through HtN for the narrative to confirm that Harrow has brown skin.
[See also Tamsyn’s GtN characters description post. It quotes passages from the book, and you can see how minimal the descriptions are, and she repeats several times that her characters’ appearances are up to the readers’ interpretations. It just doesn’t seem to be a big concern of hers]
Then there’s John, who grew up in twenty-first-century New Zealand and IS explicitly Māori in a way that absolutely impacted his character arc. It’s not A major theme of his Nona chapters, but it’s there if you read between the lines. The boarding school he went to, which IRL had a high percentage of low-income Māori students on scholarship. The depth of his climate anxiety, his uncompromising “Nobody left behind” stance before the cryo project was halted, and his fervent hatred of ‘the trillionaires’ afterwards… these are all informed to some extent by his background as an indigenous man imo, and so was the global reaction to his developing powers. The “We were going to put you fellas in jail, weren’t we?” the way his initial attempts at publications are all flat-out ignored by the scientific community and dismissed as culty gimmicky faith healing until he leans into it.
John being Māori is just one of the many pieces of his backstory, and far from the most impactful to what eventually went down, but my point remains that he is the ONLY character in TLT whose racial background 1) affects his story arc and 2) is relatable to the audience. Everyone else is ten thousand years removed from Earth, and I’m just not very interested in using racial identifiers when exploring these characters and their dynamics, because the characters themselves don’t care and neither does the narrative.
Tags from @liesmyth:
#on a more hashtag meta level
#John is why I’m personally uneasy about any analysis of the series that tries to interpret TLT through racial allegory lenses
#especially when it’s weaponised for discourse purposes
#You can write meta about John’s war crimes without comparing him to white imperialism
#Or you can go ahead and do that anyway but I highkey disagree that it’s a fitting metaphor or in any way deliberate on Tamsyn’s part
#and I think the implications are unfortunate to say the least
#That said I AM extremely interested in the ways John relates to the culture he left behind
#and why he made the choices he did when it came the moment to reshape humanity’s cultural consciousness after the Resurrection
#but that’s on a character level!
#I don’t think we can apply twenty-first-century social / identity labels to the series as a whole
#especially a series where the author says ‘I imagine X character as Y but it doesn’t raelly matter’
#and it doesn’t influence the canon directly in any way
#SORRY THIS IS LONG!
#anonymous #ask #elle tlt posting #ejg #tlt thoughts