Can we talk about Bridgerton? Because I’m having a lot of conflicting feelings about it.

Spoilers ahead.

I’ve been a romance reader since I was in middle school. It’s my favorite genre, and in hard times it’s my staple. It’s a comfort and relief knowing there will always be a happy ending.

I’m not alone in this. Romance is one of the most popular genres in publishing. It generates over $1 billion in sales for publishers every year, and romance readers are uniquely voracious.

While most folks read 5 books a year, 43% of romance readers plow through a book a week. We’re a large and reliable market for publishers, and yet…

Anytime “serious” people talk about romance, it’s largely to poke fun at romance readers as being frivolous and empty-headed and to dismiss the books themselves as trash.

Beyond books, for the last 20 years, romance has largely been relegated to low budget small screen treatments by Hallmark or Lifetime.

There are vanishingly few lush, high-end romance treatments in the 21st century.

The reasons for the above are simple: romance is a genre perceived as being by, about, and for women. In a society where women are less than, anything closely affiliated with women is also less than.

So to have the Bridgerton series get picked up by Shondaland and Netflix and for it to get the kind of budget and cast generally reserved for more “serious”/"masculine" genres is exciting.

It’s even more exciting to see Julia Quinn’s all-white vision of the British regency/Victorian era be reimagined with a diverse cast.

Not least of all because Quinn’s Bridgerton series is 20 years old with plenty of problems, and the casting seemed to indicate the creators would take a more updated approach with the narrative.

But this is where I start to have problems, because as reviews start trickling out in the days before Bridgerton releases, it sounds like a lot of the problems with the original content were not addressed.

We have a Black duke in a white world, with no reference to the racism that was prevalent then (or now!), or any examination of the white supremacist colonialism that underpinned the British aristocracy’s wealth.

What’s more (major spoiler alert and CW for rape ahead)

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we have a Black duke marrying a white woman who rapes him, and the show does not examine this rape critically at all, any more deeply than it was examined in the books.

And apparently there's no examination of how much more horrifying the rape scene becomes when you consider the power dynamics in play and the racist history of the relationship between Black men, white women, and rape.

The rape scene and the aftermath, which largely focused on Daphne Bridgerton gaslighting Simon, and Simon internalizing this gaslighting and blaming his disability for his [completely natural, expected] negative reaction to being raped, were hard enough to read in print.

I don’t know that I can watch the series, knowing what will be coming at the end and knowing how much worse it will be given the casting.

I want to support a big, glossy, over the top romance adaptation with a diverse cast. It’s exactly the sort of thing I’ve wanted to see for years.

But this raises the question of: why option THIS series, and not one of the many popular romance series written by authors of color, about BIPOC to begin with, if Netflix wanted a glossy romance with a diverse cast?

And why pick a series that has a consistently poor track record when it comes to consent?

I mean, I know why. Problematic white fantasies are the vehicles marginalized creators often HAVE to use to make the case for hopefully better representation in the future.

To prove a big budget romance can make money, you adapt a popular, long-running romance series with a built-in fan base.

To prove a diverse cast can make money, you cast BIPOC into roles that were originally white characters, and change nothing about their stories…

...even though changing a character’s race, even in a fantastical fiction, at the very least changes how WE experience their stories.

As I said before, Daphne raping Simon was bad enough in the book. But to make Simon Black, and to have a white woman rape him, and to avoid the very real-to-OUR-world context avoided is gruesome.

IDK. I want to support Bridgerton, because I want more romances to be made and to get the lush, big-budget treatment romance fans deserve.

I want to see more BIPOC in romance, and I want to see them get to be joyful and celebrated and experience the happy endings they deserve.

I worry if I don’t watch Bridgerton, it will fail, and instead of those with the ability to greenlight future romance adaptations going, “It failed because we fucked it up,” they’ll say “romance doesn’t sell” and worse, “diverse casts can’t sell.”

And this is one of the biggest problems with having so little media produced that is by, about, and for marginalized people. Every property made becomes a litmus test for whether more should be made.

If a property made by, about, and for marginalized people fails because it fails the marginalized people who are hungry for stories about them, that’s never how the failure is interpreted.

All this to say: I'm frustrated and angry, and we all deserve so much better.

If you made it this far, please go read this thread next. https://twitter.com/SashaDevlin/status/1341378936127823873