Finding myself angrier about Somewhere Beyond the Sea than I expected. For a book that is dedicated to trans people and features technically-not-Rowling as its villain, it features a single non-binary character in a brief, barely speaking role. No major characters are trans, and this isn't because because the series is devoted to using magical beings as a stand-in oppressed class—one of the children specifically calls out that because he is Black, there are aspects of his oppression that his adoptive white (magical) father is not equipped to understand as intimately.
And "Rowder" for example is also specifically mentioned as having forwarded homophobic and transphobic legislation before she got put in charge of oppressing magical persons. So people experiencing these marginalisations are present in the story world, the author just doesn't feature them in a story that he dedicates to them and bases off them. Nearest comes is "Rowder"'s minion Harriet (haha) having some physical features that I thought might have made her trans coded, just as one of the romantic leads in the first & second books had some features that at first I thought might have signified him as a trans man. But apparently not.
I think maybe what I am maddest about is how easy things were for them in the end. In the real world we don't get to turn things around by going out and about in the community for a year. We don't have a monarch who can simply banish our oppressors from our sanctuary. We can't provoke "Rowder" into behaving abusively and expressing bigotry in front of a crowd of journalists and have her shuffled out of public life and relevance shortly thereafter.
Or maybe it's the idea that she actually suffered at the hands of the people she oppresses, in the past? That's one of the classic problems of using supernatural beings to represent marginalised categories of people--we can't really zap people with lightning or turn them into trees or whatever other terrible thing is taken as justification for oppression. In the real world, marginalised people are just people.
I think I would have preferred if this story stuck to the realm of the supernatural, and didn't try to make a direct statement about events in the real world. Wouldn't have felt like such glaring omissions then. Wouldn't have felt like a slap in the face to be reminded of the easy endings we don't get.
Perhaps this is a matter of clashing preferences. I think I prefer stories where either marginalisation is not depicted as e.g. queer romance is taken as a matter of course in the first book. Or if it is depicted it be treated in a more serious manner as in e.g. the systemic bureaucratic grind magical beings are made to endure earlier in the story.
But no matter the reason, this book aggravates me. Which is a shame as there is otherwise a lot to delight in with The House on the Cerulean Sea and Somewhere Beyond the Sea.
