I will say this about [the thing]:

being confused by the middle of a series & judging it harshly because you didn’t read the first book is the odd double-edged privilege of always reading stories about people like yourself—nothing is ever new, so nothing needs to be learned.

While BIPOC in particular have to ride the line between simultaneously being self-ambassadors & just as relatable as everyone else, a large amount of Western fantasy back to the classics have relied on touchstones that white readers are accustomed to, even if the names change.

So it isn’t just about the cruelty of hollow reviewing (although I do still see it here)—it is also about the invisible aggression of never fully committing to PoC stories, labeling them difficult because of your lack of patience and not anything inherent to the work.

As a writer and as a reviewer: both of these things are actually very challenging and require similar shapes and expressions of diligence. One of them has always been the diligence to do the reading you must do in order to know what you’re describing.

Colouring marginalised creators’ work as difficult from the middle without tasting the rest of the series-meal is the kind of thing you do when you’re used to consuming the familiar. Perhaps a reviewer’s at their deepest when they’re willing to be confronted with newness instead.

Perhaps the job is about sharing an experience of wonder you’ve had with people who would like to feel the same. Perhaps that job’s best done seeking out as much about the story as possible, being willing to dive deep and take your time with the entire thing.

Perhaps not having done so, then, is as much about the waters you’re used to diving in—waters you can swim in unimpeded, unlike other readers—and the waters you’re conditioned to avoid as it is about your actual swimming technique.

So perhaps that’s another realm worth discussing: not just how BIPOC work is reviewed, or giving space to BIPOC reviewers (both of which sorely needed), but the very landscape within which BIPOC work is still subtly exoticised compared to white contemporaries of like genre.

It very much resembles the way BIPOC food is discussed, in its own way: it is either new and strange and therefore an experiment to try out at home, definitely worth a try; or new and strange and therefore vile or impossible to parse, so maybe pass on it.

More reviewers (in any art form in any genre in any style) need to be willing to admit to and confront the ways their ‘palates’ have been shaped by their space and how it affects their approach.

Because that kind of approach strikes me as how folks read when they’re used to never being *too* surprised by anything before. The way you eat when you’re accustomed to the middle of the plate being the best part of the meal back home.

ETA, re: ‘the right reviewer’—

the right reviewer is always the reviewer who allows the story to make its best case for itself.

I also very immediately chafe at the notion that what BIPOC stories need is for only BIPOC reviewers to critique them.

Only letting marginalised stories be observed by marginalised critics is the same industry-constructed ghetto as assuming that those stories are specifically or only for marginalised readers.

They need all kinds of reviewers. But those reviewers owe real work to what they read.

I can concede that there are thousands of stories. I can concede that even the mildest of genre biases can make us less than as objective as we wish (even if I disagree that reviews are wholly objective at all).

But it must never be an excuse to not let the story make its case.