i love the locked tomb but I find it super tiring that no one is able to have willing legitimate and critical discussions abt how tamsyn muir is not a race conscious writer at all, it’s very peak White Writer. and I find it is more exasperated in NtN (slight NtN spoilers here but nothing that major tbh). very rarely does tamsyn describe the skin tone of her characters, they’re pretty much aracial, her only confirmation of gideon and harrow being mixed Māori and camilla and palamedes being of “middle eastern” descent came from a Word Of God tumblr post. Even then, on the covers of GtN and HtN under the face paint you can clearly see gideon and harrow are both brown-skinned but by NtN harrow’s body is described as “skin the colour of the egg carton” and like that’s literally white skin. And when the cover of NtN was released ppl were rightfully saying that nona looked too white to be harrow’s body and ppl tried shutting it down by saying there are whitepassing Māori, well harrow was certainly brown-skinned on the cover of HtN if u looked more closely, so yes it is whitewashing.
Speaking of cam & pal, they’re described as middle eastern and look rather similar due to the very small gene pool in the sixth house, which has led ppl to surmise that the sixth house is deeply inbred. now that’s for interesting worldbuilding, but it’s in bad implications considering TM envisioned cam & pal (and probably the rest of sixth house due to high consanguinity) as middle eastern. Speaking of bad implications, John is heavily implied to be Māori: “P▬ said I looked like a Māori TV Pink Panther,” from a book of jod chapter in NtN. Now before this, John was merely described as brown-skinned, but making this imperialist head of a post-apocalypse, Christianity-inflicted, fascist empire an indigenous man?? wholly terrible implications, especially from a white New Zealand writer. I’m not calling TM a flat out racist mind you, it’s just simple media criticism of how blind white writers are to nuanced portrayals of race often.