For Parents
As a parent myself, I am often frustrated by the lack of information available regarding media content. Determining what age appropriate even means is already difficult enough.
I want my child to be challenged by the books, movies, and video games he consumes. I want him to encounter different viewpoints and ideas. But I want to know what those ideas are so we can talk about them.
For parents who are interested, here are some of the topics, themes, and content that you might want to be aware of.
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Readers and potential readers, be warned:
Massive Spoilers Ahead.
The Talavara Prophecy
YA / Crossover Fantasy Series
The First Whispers of Fate
The Talavara Prophecy Book 1
Racial, Gender, and Class Identity
The Talavara Prophecy is set in a world populated by many of the classic fantasy races. Humans, elves, dwarves, and all the rest. But I’m staying loose with Tolkien’s tropes. The point of these fantasy races is to explore identity and culture. Or more importantly, the friction between those cultures. Racism, class, and gender inequality exist in spades in this world.
The main protagonist, Aideen, is a mixed race teenager - her father human, her mother an elf. Aideen is able to present as human, avoiding the discrimination elves face in her society. Her mother is dead, like so many other YA protagonists. This leaves Aideen caught between cultures, being raised in the world of humans and trying to understand the elven part of her heritage when she only has her uncle to tell her about it. Aideen struggles to find her place in the world, her feelings on her own identity inconsistent.
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Aideen’s father is wealthy now, but was a common sailor for most of his life. Aideen is new money, her family’s status an uncertain outlier between commoner and nobility. Her family is essentially the first among an emerging urban merchant class, and this shifting social dynamic plays into the story.
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Much of Aideen’s story is an exploration of how the world sees her and an evolution of how she sees herself.
On Literary Merit
The story itself is supposed to be fun. But it can be more than that. So while fancy balls and sword duels and heists are front and center, this series explores a number of societal issues without the baggage of reality and politics.
On Morality and Choice
This is a fantasy world with made up gods, so any discussion of morality lacks the religious connection to our own world’s faith traditions. But I grew up in church, so it’s hard to divorce myself from certain ideas. I introduce an elven concept called pouv’oua. This is, in essence, a variation on timshel from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It is the power of choice. It is the idea that you are the sum of your choices, and that the small acts of good and evil stack up. You are shaped by the choices you make, especially the ones that are known only to you. If this sounds like the fable of the two wolves, you get the idea.
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In this story, Aideen is seeking truth. She seeks her father’s murderer. She seeks justice. It’s a noble pursuit on paper. And yet along the way she is making choices and mistakes. In the end, she discovers that there will be no justice for her father. In response to this, she chooses a path of vengeance. This choice will shape the rest of her life. The recognition of this being a mistake, and seeking to redeem herself, is a primary theme in the second book.
Sex and Sexuality
Minimal in book one. There is a wedding engagement. A kiss. A scene where a scantily clad woman dances on a stage and the implication that she and others in the room are prostitutes. This latter scene exists to fuel a discussion on the choices some people have in this fantasy society due to gender, race, or status.
There is a scene where Aideen discovers somebody is gay, and in the closet. We learn that homosexuality is scandalous in Elora. Aideen’s reaction to this information is mostly centered on the secrecy of it - that here is somebody who hides a part of himself just like she hides her elven ears.
Violence
The protagonist finds her father dead in his study. She later suspects he was poisoned. One scene depicts a sword fight and a several “bad guys” die. The protagonist threatens a man who has information on her father’s murderer. ​There is a scene of murder with a knife.
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The descriptions of violence are gritty and intended to capture the seriousness of the situations. The descriptions are not gratuitous.
Enslavement / Human Trafficking
A secret slave trade is part of the plot. One character seeks to discover the people facilitating it. The slave trade in this book is highly fictional and tailored to the fantasy setting, but is based on historical accounts from across time periods and continents. Book 2 deals with this theme in much more detail.
On Historical Influence
Many ideas and events in this series are based on American history and ideals, ranging from the American Dream to the Underground Railroad. The intent here is to spark curiosity into ideas and historical events that have shaped the modern world.
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The Elorian slave trade has many parallels to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism, but it isn’t a perfect allegory. The plight of the minority races in Elora is based on realities across times and continents. It ranges from discrimination to enslavement to erasure through conquest. These are stories as old as time.
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Similarly, gender roles in Elora don’t fit neatly into any particular real-world time period or culture. Women have few rights and little autonomy without the supervision of their fathers or husbands. It is a diluted take on roughly Regency-era ideals. The idea was not to get bogged down in specifics, and to focus on how this society affects the characters.