The online bookish community has a US-centrism issue.
This is not a new or insightful observation, by any means. You can discover these skewed demographics any time the subject of race, colonialism, and imperialism happens to catch fire on any discourse-heavy social media platform.
Whether the conflagration begins on TikTok, X, Threads or YouTube, the result is the same—you’re often left witnessing a group of white middle-class Americans browbeating another group of white middle-class Americans, LARPing as radical theorists without the reading list, and citing theory and academic lexicon to use as buzzwords to win arguments during internet slapfights.
Nowhere is this flattening more obvious than in the way American readers insist on treating book genres like romantasy as a referendum on their own national traumas.
As the current highest-selling book (sub)genre in the American market, romantasy’s rocket to stardom has not come without immense scrutiny and catastrophising over what its popularity means for the state of literature—and of Western culture. Opinions have ranged from championing the genre for bringing female-written fantasy to the literary forefront to decrying it for promoting the commodification of literature.
Wherever you happen to fall on the spectrum, it’s clear that romantasy as a (sub)genre is the current zeitgeist of the cultural moment—and that its existence sparks passionate, even vitriolic, debate over its merits and pitfalls. Both authors and readers continue to discuss elements of what they consider to be “conservative propaganda” in most popular romantasies.
One of these elements was the focus on royalty and nobility as characters—which many claim as a cover for enforcing colonial/imperialistic sensibilities and apologism.
Personally, I disagreed with this assertion and said as much on Threads. To paraphrase:
“Depiction isn’t endorsement. I write royalty because gowns are fun and political intrigue is hot, not because I’m endorsing monarchy.”
This received some pushback. Among the rebuttals were arguments that “you write what you believe” and that the ability to enjoy monarchy without politicising it is a privilege reserved for white women from colonising cultures.
Responses like these expressed, to me, the exact problem with American internet discourse around political themes in fiction: it flattens the world into a US-centric moral binary. It goes on to assume many things—that monarchy is inherently colonial, that people who aren’t politically triggered by monarchy must be culturally dominant, and that romantasy writers default to “white American women.”
I find this is reductive considering I made this comment from the position of being a Black British author of Caribbean descent who, nonetheless, enjoys including a hefty dose of aristocratic debauchery in my romantasy fiction—but also because it ignores the many countries who sought to maintain their monarchies precisely as resistance to Western inteference and hegemony. This is what happens when people assume their own frame = default humanity—provincial masquerading as “critical thinking.”
To assume that regal aesthetics are something only white people enjoy, and are capable of consuming apolitically, implies that everyone outside of the West uniformly hates monarchy. A quick glance into any textbook will tell you that monarchy as a system of governance has transhistorical and transglobal roots—from the African monarchic traditions, to the Indigenous hereditary chieftain structures, to the Asian dynasties that predate European colonisation by millennia.
But the problem of the modern American online-left is that it’s started treating everything—even escapist fantasy tropes—as though they’re case studies for media ethics dissertations. They can’t just let a pretty gown be a pretty gown; it must be Problematic™, because fun is suspicious.
People like this mean well, but they take an overly academic framework and generalise it onto literature that is not operating primarily in an academic or political mode.
And this is exactly the rot at the core of modern “fantasy discourse”: a compulsive need to frame every imaginary monarchy as commentary on British colonialism circa 1850–1960, as if the rest of human history and global culture simply… didn’t exist.
Meanwhile, danmei—a thriving genre in the Chinese publishing industry—is full of emperors, princes, concubines, cultivator sects operating like de facto aristocracy… and no one calls it “colonial cosplay.”
Why? Because their political priors don’t apply there, so suddenly they’re capable of enjoying it like normal humans. And in doing so, they reveal a huge blindspot that has not reckoned with the fact that power and oppression aren’t a European export—they’re a global system of interconnected hierarchies that still affect many countries today, for the worse.
Nowhere does anyone bring up Han imperialism, Hindu nationalist myth-building, and Ottoman/Turkish imperial nostalgia in discussions of colonial propaganda in fantasy—even though these are not systems of the past, but very active and violent regimes enacting terror against ethnic minorities in their respective regions.
This is perfectly illustrated in the massive gap between homeland readers and diaspora readers. Diaspora readers, especially those raised in Western countries, tend to process fantasy tropes through Western racial discourse because that is the political grammar they grew up with. Homeland readers don’t. They aren’t projecting white supremacy onto every crown or throne because their frame of reference is local: their own dynasties, empires, hierarchies, and mythologies.
A great example outside fantasy is the discourse surrounding the massively popular animanga—Attack on Titan. Western viewers insisted the Germanic aesthetics signalled commentary on white supremacy and Nazism. Meanwhile Japanese viewers recognised it instantly as about Japanese nationalism, militarism, and historical trauma. Same images. Two completely different readings. Neither “wrong,” but only one was treated as universal.
That’s precisely the problem: American frameworks get exported as the default, even when they make no sense in global contexts. Because in the eyes of one Japanese man, white people might be symbolic tools for his own agenda rather than superior, untouchable entities.
Ironically enough, in a bid to engage with a fantasy version of anti-racism, many white people end up stumbling into a weird, patronising regurgitation of the noble savage trope, which peddles falsely:
“All non-white cultures are inherently egalitarian and anti-authoritarian!”
As any author hailing from an immigrant family might tell you—this is very much far from the case. People are people all around the world, and will hold a buffet of beliefs which could range from monarchist to moderate to nationalist to socialist to none of the above.
Brown people are not a monolithic hiveminded horde (contrary to what some fantasy novels depict). The idea that everyone outside the West is some innately progressive collectivist is… not kindness. It’s infantilisation. And white people who indulge this rhetoric only prove they’re not seeing other races as people. They’re seeing them as avatars for their own moral fantasies.
Yet American internet leftists love flattening things to:
“White = coloniser. Brown = colonised.”
A conversation that can only exist within a Western, white-centric, American political schema. And people don’t even realise they’re doing it because they think they’re being “critical,” when actually they’re just universalising their own historical traumas and pretending they’re the only ones that matter. They insist that all depictions of monarchy = Western colonial nostalgia, when what they’re really saying is:
“I don’t know any other histories except Britain’s.”
It erases every non-European imperial structure and treats whiteness as the only group capable of domination—which ironically reinforces the idea that whiteness is uniquely powerful and decisive in shaping the world.
They think they’re being anti-racist, but it loops straight back around to white exceptionalism.
Sometimes a ball gown is a ball gown.
Sometimes readers want: betrayal, coronations, blood oaths, palace intrigue, a villain prince, and hierarchies because they make narrative tension spicier. Fantasy has always borrowed from the symbols of power because power creates conflict. Crowns, thrones, dynasties and succession crises are narrative engines before they are political manifestos. Humans have been fascinated by these dynamics in literally every culture. It doesn’t automatically equal “pro-monarchy propaganda.”
The absolutism is absurd, but understandable when you realise it’s not meant to serve as genuine literary analysis more than a performance of purity. Because what modern fantasy discourse has become, especially online, isn’t about intellectual honesty and an exchange of ideas. It’s about moral posturing.
You can see the strain in their language each time they use politically-loaded terms such as “privilege”, “positionality”, “awareness”, “lens.” It’s the vocabulary of someone trying to perform a high level of political literacy without actually having global literacy.
They’re terrified of someone accusing them of consuming something “problematic,” so they contort themselves into knots trying to “interrogate” imaginary worlds. Meanwhile marginalised writers like myself—who actually come from complex diasporic histories—are treated like we must fit some imagined ideological mould.
It’s exhausting, and it’s dishonest.
But here’s the truth: fantasy is not a political treatise unless the author wants it to be. Royal aesthetics aren’t inherently colonial. And non-white people are allowed to like whatever the hell they like without being shoehorned into white women’s theoretical frameworks.
The fact of the matter is: most of the people taking part in these discussions have never read a political theory text, studied revolutionary movements, understood material conditions, or even lived outside of middle-class online bubbles.
They’re great at tweeting about praxis, terrible at understanding it.
And quite frankly, I’d rather not watch them try to shoehorn half-baked “anti-capitalist analysis” into a genre about dragons and magical tyrants. Because they don’t understand socialism, they don’t understand revolution, and they definitely don’t understand feminism (hence why every feminist heroine they write is either a girlboss caricature or a trauma-fuelled wish-fulfilment chaos gremlin).
Better to write a palace full of bloodthirsty aristocrats doing morally dubious sexy things than watch someone try to explain Marxism using vibes and TikTok voice filters.
If you're interested in fantasy that treats politics as more than aesthetic wallpaper, you'll find many of these questions explored throughout The Essence of the Equinox.
Comments ()