I’m supposed to write these author’s notes about Tremontaine episode 4, “All That Glitters,” but Donald Trump was just elected President of the United States, and he’ll have a Republican House and a Republican Senate behind him, and I feel the need to talk about that. I believe this is a terrible victory for racism, misogyny, and homophobia, among a lot of other prejudices. You may not agree with me, which is fine. But because fiction is worthless if it doesn’t teach us something about how to live in the real world, instead of talking specifically about episode 4, I want to talk about racism, misogyny, homophobia, and TremontaineWhen Ellen wrote Swordspoint back in the 1980s, my understanding is that it was like a bolt of lighting striking the world of fantasy writing. (At the time my fantasy reading was limited to Dragonlance and The Belgariad, so I didn’t have a great deal of context.) People just weren’t writing about worlds in which homosexuality and bisexuality were not only accepted but normal. Because of Swordspoint and a few other books like it, fantasy became a genre in which those of us who weren’t straight could imagine a world where we weren’t marginalized. And that was amazing. To see people like me swanning around and loving and hating and being villainous and heroic and just like everybody else—it was a gift beyond compare.Lately, the same thing has been happening with race: people of color have been publishing fantasy in which other people of color can read about societies that don’t marginalize them. Because we think that’s an important trend in fantasy, Tremontaine has made sure that people of color are prominent both on the writing team and on the page (well, on the screen/through the headphones). There’s Kaab, obviously, and the Kinwiinik, and this season she’s been joined by Reza and Esha. The thing that I love about this is that, since Tremontaine is a prequel, giving people of color important roles in society in this work means that, though they’re mostly not explicitly on the page in Swordspoint, Privilege of the Sword, and Fall of the Kings, they’re in the world. When the words of these novels create images and scenes in the minds of readers who know Tremontaine, those images and scenes will have people of color in them. It’s making the world diverse both retroactively (in real time) and prorsoactively (in story time (retro is Latin for “backward,” prorsus for “forward”)). Furthermore, racism isn’t at play in City society in any meaningful way—we have the Duke of Karleigh from the Swan Ball last season, but my intention in writing that (whether I succeeded or not isn’t up to me to say) was to make his disgust as much about xenophobia as it was about racism, if not more so.One area in which City society is definitely pretty retrograde, however, is the treatment of women: this world has very, very clear ideas about the roles of women and the roles of men. Somewhat less rigid ideas in Riverside than on the Hill, but no less clear. And I believe that this, too, was part of Ellen’s design in creating this world, and it’s one of my favorite things about Tremontaine—its exploration of the different ways in which women maneuver through a world that denies them power. I’ll talk mostly about last season, so as not to be spoilery, though I believe this season continues that exploration.First, and most obviously, we have Diane. She does all her work invisibly, behind the scenes, by whisper, by intimation, by unspoken threat. She makes sure she appears just as powerless as every other woman on the Hill, while gradually attempting to amass more power than any man in the City. She isn’t there yet, but she’s on her way, and by Swordspoint she will have reached the zenith of her might. Society has denied her agency, and instead of standing for it, she’s going to rip agency out of society’s grasp. She may have to do ugly things to do so, and things she hates doing, but nothing is uglier to her than the feeling of being powerless, and if the price she has to pay to rid herself of that feeling is blood on her hands, so be it. (This is one reason that, though I have no desire to emulate her, I do admire her a great deal, because rage at feeling powerless motivates most of my actions on this earth.)Kaab takes a different approach. Kinwiinik society is matriarchal, and while there are ways in which men have more explicit power than women, there are also ways in which women have more explicit power than men. So society on the Hill is a curiosity to her, full of quaint and inexplicable traditions. I think she feels compassion for Hill women but I also think she feels a certain amount of disdain for most of them, because they have accepted the roles to which their backwater society has consigned them. She has great respect for Diane, however, precisely because the duchess refuses to accept those roles. Meanwhile, Kaab herself responds to the strictures City society places on women with a nod to tradition—she understands that she’s not acting like a woman is expected to act, so she decides not to dress like a woman is expected to dress—and allows society to see her, in part, as a man. That way, she has the freedom to act like a man, and she takes advantage of that freedom. I’m not entirely sure that Diane isn’t jealous of her.Then we have Micah, whose response to the limitations on women is to ignore them entirely. Micah is more or less asexual, and she takes advantage of that aspect of herself, without even knowing it, to get an education and to navigate society. There’s great power in not caring, and Micah uses that power to the fullest. She’s not interested in the things City women are interested in, so transgressing the rules of City womanhood doesn’t cost her anything she wants.Which brings me back to Clinton. I believe that part of what lost her the presidency was an unwillingness in America today to allow women to transgress the strictures society places on them. I’m not aware of knowing any women who hold the kind of power in America that Diane holds in the City, but since so much of Diane’s power is based on keeping men ignorant of its existence, I wouldn’t be, would I? I am aware of knowing women like Kaab and Micah, who either don male costumes in one way or another or ignore expectations completely because doing so doesn’t usually cost them enough to be worth it.But for a woman to claim power openly, as a woman—well. The point of writing anything is to hold up a moral mirror to society, even if—especially if—the reflection it shows is unpleasant (I wrote about this last season, sort of). And today, what I see in the mirror is that 2016 America is more like the society of Tremontaine than we’d like to believe.
