#Surprise! There's a lot of eugenicist values everywhere and it's not just one problematic author you can condemn

[synchodai]

My post about "girlboss eugenics" has reached 10k+ notes, and while i understand i can't control how people take a post once it's escaped containment and will ultimately interpret it to fit their personal blog and tastes, i can't help but resent that a good chunk of reblogs have completely ignored that i was complaining about the trope promoting eugenics. Instead, it's been read to be about chosen one narratives in general which oftentimes aren't about eugenics at all.

Just to be clear, chosen one narratives are not inherently eugenicist! ATLA is a chosen one narrative and explicitly anti-eugenics. The main character being special because she's secretly related to a special person is not eugenics! The Last Skywalker is not eugenicist and its core message that Rey can reject her Palpatine side and choose to be a Skywalker actively goes against bioessentialism. Eugenics isn't when a character is born special because of blood ties, genetic inheritance, or just being magically chosen.

Eugenics is actively breeding people to promote "desireable" traits and neutering, disenfranchising, or even just outright killing those with "undesireable" traits so they won't "pollute" the gene pool. Eugenics is the numerous amount of times I've heard someone casually saying "dumb people shouldn't breed." Eugenics is using genetic disability and illness as a narrative shorthand to convey that a character is twisted and evil, and that the kindest fate for such a "wretched creature" is death. Eugenics is a character saying she never wants to have children so she won't pass on her curse, dwarfism, or whatever else it is to her offspring and being lauded by the story for making the right, selfless choice. Eugenics is calculating how much percent race X character is compared to Y character and using them being more Valyrian/Illyrian/whatever race to justify why X is the better ruler instead of Y.

I get that some people are tired of biological and divine determinism and just want to see characters reject that and carve out their own path, but chosen one and secret princess tropes by themselves are hardly as deleterious as what I noticed in the recently published books I read that have this obsession with breeding. It's English royal family fanatic level of obsession over maintaining the continuation of a bloodline and calculating who's even distantly related to who to justify who gets to receive fame and wealth for basically just existing. It's glorifying a woman's womb and her pregnancy as something absolutely necessary for the continuation of a good and civil society. THAT is what I find absolutely horrific in what's supposed to be my escapist, meant to empower women readers, fantasy fiction.