I’m sick and tired of fantasy books doing this.

Now, in all of the books that I mentioned previously that are big favorites of mine, the moments of sexual violence specifically, since that's the topic we're talking about first, are on stage. They're with the characters. The characters have to carry these things. And yet, the brightest spotlight is still on the character themselves.

For example, in Dead House Gates by Steven Erikson, which is one of my favorite fantasy novels of all time, there is every possible kind of content warning in that book. It is a very heavy book. There is a lot of things, horrible things that happen to the characters, and one character in particular as we move through the story.

Lisa See does not pull punches with this content. She shows the lives of these characters in very honest detail, and sometimes that is gut-wrenching and hard to read. And horrible things happen to these characters.

When it comes to The Poet Empress, what frustrated me about this so much, not only because it was happening on page to a minor character, that trauma became the front and center spotlight of the entire story. The world-building around it, the political tensions around it, the relationships around it did not carry the same weight in terms of how the world-building was designed in this story.