I hesitate to say this is a rec since it's clumsily handled and there are Other Issues, but this author was a favorite for a long time and thus this pleases me:
I just marathoned the Elemental Masters series by Mercedes Lackey, having not read any new books almost at all (certainly none from this series) since 2016, and in those books I hadn't read before, there's a prominent trans secondary character! the …fourth? fifth? person named Peter in this series is introduced to us by his deadname as a woman's ghost, and when he changes his name is also when he gets to live his life on approximately his terms; this is all very literal, but also entirely not. he's in The Bartered Brides and The Case of the Spellbound Child.
(the marathon reread, right after a marathon reread of Valdemar, has also highlighted Lackey has quite a few villains whose sexual violence and violence against especially children are depicted in great detail, even if the worst bits are offscreen. and lots racism issues I hadn't picked up on before. in particular, though it is possible to argue that the attitudes described re Chinese people are exactly what one would expect of white people in these places and times, those attitudes come up fairly often and without counterbalance in the form of sympathetic Chinese characters: there are exactly two and they only appear in The Fire Rose, while unnamed and voiceless Chinese characters being subject to violence are at least mentioned in Several books. racism against Black people hardly comes up at all, though mostly because the only Black characters are people Sarah remembers fondly and/or with great respect but who don't actually show up onscreen. racism against Native Americans literally only comes up in explicit context of it being a problem, but implicit context of it isn't, that is to say, a Wild West show doing poorly in Germany because popular novels have primed Germans to think of Native Americans as heroes and the show starts out depicting the other thing. racism against South Asians is discussed frequently, and the only prominent character who thinks British imperialism might be bad actually is the villain of The Serpent's Shadow, but there are lots of sympathetic South Asian characters, including the female lead of The Serpent's Shadow.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2022-10-14 09:18 pm (UTC)I just marathoned the Elemental Masters series by Mercedes Lackey, having not read any new books almost at all (certainly none from this series) since 2016, and in those books I hadn't read before, there's a prominent trans secondary character! the …fourth? fifth? person named Peter in this series is introduced to us by his deadname as a woman's ghost, and when he changes his name is also when he gets to live his life on approximately his terms; this is all very literal, but also entirely not. he's in The Bartered Brides and The Case of the Spellbound Child.
(the marathon reread, right after a marathon reread of Valdemar, has also highlighted Lackey has quite a few villains whose sexual violence and violence against especially children are depicted in great detail, even if the worst bits are offscreen. and lots racism issues I hadn't picked up on before. in particular, though it is possible to argue that the attitudes described re Chinese people are exactly what one would expect of white people in these places and times, those attitudes come up fairly often and without counterbalance in the form of sympathetic Chinese characters: there are exactly two and they only appear in The Fire Rose, while unnamed and voiceless Chinese characters being subject to violence are at least mentioned in Several books. racism against Black people hardly comes up at all, though mostly because the only Black characters are people Sarah remembers fondly and/or with great respect but who don't actually show up onscreen. racism against Native Americans literally only comes up in explicit context of it being a problem, but implicit context of it isn't, that is to say, a Wild West show doing poorly in Germany because popular novels have primed Germans to think of Native Americans as heroes and the show starts out depicting the other thing. racism against South Asians is discussed frequently, and the only prominent character who thinks British imperialism might be bad actually is the villain of The Serpent's Shadow, but there are lots of sympathetic South Asian characters, including the female lead of The Serpent's Shadow.)