Laura answers “Besides portraying violence in the form of...”

☯ DαякєηRнαℓ ❛ ᶜʳᵒᵘᶜʰᶤᶰᵍ ʰᵘᵐᵃᶰ ; ʰᶤᵈᵈᵉᶰ ᵗᶤᵗᵃᶰ ❜ asked this question about Ash Princess (Ash Princess Trilogy, #1):

Besides portraying violence in the form of 'brutal whippings', does this book include rape? What are the trigger warnings?

Laura Hi! I've actually been getting this question a lot and I did a Twitter thread about it. I'm compiling it here so it can be easily found.

"Hey y’all. I’…moreHi! I've actually been getting this question a lot and I did a Twitter thread about it. I'm compiling it here so it can be easily found.

"Hey y’all. I’m seeing some discussion of the violence in Ash Princess so I want to talk a bit about that so that readers can go in with open eyes. AKA here are some trigger warnings. I’m going to try to be vague enough to avoid spoilers, but there may be some very light ones.

Ash Princess is about a conquered country where the original inhabitants are all slaves. About half of the main cast of characters are or were slaves and they talk very frankly about their experiences, including being beaten, starved, and raped.

To be clear: there is no on-page rape or attempted rape in the book. The discussions of it happening off-page aren’t graphic or explicit.

One of my biggest pet peeves in storytelling is when rape is used as a plot device. I didn’t want to do that here. But at the same time, it would have been been disingenuous to write about colonization without including it.

Though there isn’t on-page rape, there are some scenes where the unspoken threat of it hangs over Theo’s head. There are scenes with uninvited and inappropriate touching.

There is also physical and psychological abuse including one graphic whipping scene. Again, this kind of violence was not something I set out to write and, in all honesty, they were the hardest scenes for me. But again, I felt they were necessary.

Theo’s world is an ugly one and I found its roots in real history. Not including the violent aspects and the ripples created by them would have been, I felt, to gloss over the atrocities of war and colonization that persist to this day in our very real world.

However, the last thing I want to do is to blindside people who already understand that all too well. If anyone has any questions about this, please feel free to reach out to me through DMs."(less)

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