Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

[lightreads]

Red, White and Royal Blue

4/5. You guys. You guys! Someone wrote a queer romance basically to spec for me. Son of the first woman POTUS falls in instant dislike which turns into, yeah, you know where this is going, with the youngest Prince of England.

I started this on a NY to DC train yesterday and finished it this morning. I laughed. I sniffled. I sighed. It's an unapologetically wish-fulfilment* book about American politics and elections and blended first families, written by someone who has 110% read the fanfic classics in the modern British royal romance genre like Drastically Redefining Protocol and The Student Prince (the one I have deeply unpopular opinions about, but that's a whole other story). It's snappy and witty and extremely of the now, to a fault, maybe. And also about different experiences of queerness and power and family. And they write each other love letters emails. Did I mention this was basically written for me?

*Maybe too wish-fulfimenty? I don't know. I have this odd sort of flinch reaction sometimes to things that are this committed to making me feel uncomplicatedly good about a fantasy political timeline that didn't happen. IDK if that's healthy or not. I'm a realist to a fault, and I have basically no patience left for the people on twitter who are still (fucking still!) going on about what President HRC would be doing. I mean, jesus, over here in the real world we've got shit to do, maybe you could try, like, engaging with that in a useful way instead of this pointless wanking? But I respect the balls-to-the-wall commitment of this book – she's going to make you feel good about a 2016 election that wasn't, and she's not sorry.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

which one do you have unpopular opinions about? I personally loathe DRP because of what's revealed in one of the side stories, though it's been ages since I read TSP and so I don't know if it would hold up.

[lightreads]

I have unpopular opinions about TSP and the way it seemed to treat outing oneself as a moral requirement, but I literally haven't read it since it came out. And I'm guessing the DRP thing is how Arthur dropped his phone? or did something on purpose to out them? Because that really stuck in my teeth too. The truth is that this whole genre is so squarely all over my buttons that very few examples of it actually satisfy, if you know what I mean. My expectations are just too high or something. And tbf, more broadly, I have almost never read a celebrity/politician queer romance whose handling of outing and the politics thereof I liked, so.

I was about to say that probably means I should write one, but then I remembered that I did like 15 years ago, and come to think of it, I don't like that one's take on it much either.

[kate_nepveu]

yeah, that about DRP. thanks for the info!

[readerjane]

Sounds intriguing. *adds to list*

I think I know what you mean by too wish-fulfilmenty. It's sort of an inverse to the Uncanny Valley, where CG characters get so close to real-looking but not *quite*. That not-quite is more disturbing to look at than a clumsy CG which is obviously unreal.

With wish fulfillment, there's an almost-there which is very satisfying, because it's just different enough from your personal ideal to seem genuine. A too-close match to the reader's ideal feels... suspicious, somehow, like tailored advertising designed to manipulate us.

I wonder if there's already a term for this.

[lightreads]

Tailored advertising, yes. In this book, a woman is elected in 2016. She's not an HRC stand-in, but there's something picture-perfect about her mixed race, brilliant kids and her blended family and all of it. I do think there were enough stubmles and warts to make this enjoyable and believable, though. The blended family doesn't always get along, and the kids are equally adored and the objects of racism, etc.

[ravurian]

I read this today on your recommendation, and I did enjoy it, but it has so many beats that are lifted wholesale from DRP, as you say, and also from Yahtzee's X-Men First Class Monarchy AU 'Anarchy in the UK' (which I think she took down with the intention of retooling it for publication). I was really startled by how brazen she was about it. This book has plenty of really excellent original elements, and I was thoroughly charmed by it (and I did laugh aloud at the President's powerpoint presentation), but I sort of wish that she'd had another draft or two to make her own voice clearer without the heavy and unacknowledged reliance on other people's work. I mean, sure, what was she going to say? That she read a lot of monarchy au fanfics and then nicked bits from several of the best? Of course she wasn't. But that soured it for me, a little, ultimately. By the end she was so clearly onto a story that had begun to stand in its own right, that if she'd gone back to the beginning in another draft she could have done away with everything she pinched from elsewhere. Argh. What a waste of her, what a waste of the story that she found midway through plagiarising several other people. I'm not sorry I read it, but I am sorry no one smacked her all the way into originality.

[lightreads]

Eh, I think calling that plagiarism is overstating the case, but yeah. The back third of this book is really doing it's own thing that the first 2/3 aren't. I kind of wonder about whatever she does next and what it will look like.