- Joined
- Mar 12, 2021
Follow-up to the Emily Duncan drama.
After the initial bullying accusations, a lot of readers said they found portions of her book antisemitic. The book is set in fantasy Eastern Europe, and there are villains who practice blood magic and are the shadow power behind the throne. The leader's name is a variation of Malachi (Malachiasz) -- he is also a major love interest. However, the entire country practices blood magic, and the country they are at war with practices human sacrifice / bone magic. It seems like in researching Slavic folklore, Duncan thought, "This might come from antisemitic sources," but her magic system was enough its own thing that she didn't think it would matter.
She posted an apology that was not received well.
In her callout post, Rin mentioned that "HF" had been bullied by Duncan. This turned out to be Hafsah Faizal, author of We Hunt the Flame, which also debuted around the time Duncan's book did. Hafsah said she was constantly getting subtweeted by Duncan's circle before her book was released.
There's a lot of confusion about which Asian author Duncan called "ugly," with some saying it's Hafsah and some saying it's Amelie Wen Zhao of Blood Heir. But now there's a burner account that links Duncan directly to AWZ, basically claiming that she and her friends engineered the controversy of racism in Blood Heir by spreading rumors that the author was petty and a social climber.
I can confirm the burner account is correct about the timeline: there were rumors going around about AWZ, and then the dam broke with racism accusations from LL McKinney and Ellen Oh, and the publisher pulled the book at AWZ's request until revisions could be made. Slate covered the timeline here.
Emily Duncan and Claire Wenze (who owns bookcoversalt on Tumblr) were around the internet before Duncan got published. I can confirm that they liked critiquing books and being excessively salty about popular YA fantasy even then, sort of as a way of articulating what they wanted to write/read and common pitfalls to avoid. Without better receipts, the burner account could just be referring to that; yes, snarking on books probably has a different connotation when you're a soon-to-debut author talking about other authors instead of speaking as a reader, but there aren't any particularly damning tweets left to refer to. And according to the Slate article, @LegallyPaige was the first one to bring up the rumors, so it's unclear whether those rumors were laundered through her or if she was getting any of this from Duncan at all. I still don't see that Duncan/Wenze was specifically saying AWZ were a difficult person, just that her book was bad.
In the screenshots, one user calls for screenshots of "private DMs" that the burner account allegedly has access to, and the burner account goes all "I'm going to protect my sources" and refuses to show them. It WOULD be absolutely Machiavellian if the Blood Heir controversy stemmed directly from Duncan. Absolute full circle.
After the initial bullying accusations, a lot of readers said they found portions of her book antisemitic. The book is set in fantasy Eastern Europe, and there are villains who practice blood magic and are the shadow power behind the throne. The leader's name is a variation of Malachi (Malachiasz) -- he is also a major love interest. However, the entire country practices blood magic, and the country they are at war with practices human sacrifice / bone magic. It seems like in researching Slavic folklore, Duncan thought, "This might come from antisemitic sources," but her magic system was enough its own thing that she didn't think it would matter.
She posted an apology that was not received well.
In her callout post, Rin mentioned that "HF" had been bullied by Duncan. This turned out to be Hafsah Faizal, author of We Hunt the Flame, which also debuted around the time Duncan's book did. Hafsah said she was constantly getting subtweeted by Duncan's circle before her book was released.
There's a lot of confusion about which Asian author Duncan called "ugly," with some saying it's Hafsah and some saying it's Amelie Wen Zhao of Blood Heir. But now there's a burner account that links Duncan directly to AWZ, basically claiming that she and her friends engineered the controversy of racism in Blood Heir by spreading rumors that the author was petty and a social climber.
I can confirm the burner account is correct about the timeline: there were rumors going around about AWZ, and then the dam broke with racism accusations from LL McKinney and Ellen Oh, and the publisher pulled the book at AWZ's request until revisions could be made. Slate covered the timeline here.
Emily Duncan and Claire Wenze (who owns bookcoversalt on Tumblr) were around the internet before Duncan got published. I can confirm that they liked critiquing books and being excessively salty about popular YA fantasy even then, sort of as a way of articulating what they wanted to write/read and common pitfalls to avoid. Without better receipts, the burner account could just be referring to that; yes, snarking on books probably has a different connotation when you're a soon-to-debut author talking about other authors instead of speaking as a reader, but there aren't any particularly damning tweets left to refer to. And according to the Slate article, @LegallyPaige was the first one to bring up the rumors, so it's unclear whether those rumors were laundered through her or if she was getting any of this from Duncan at all. I still don't see that Duncan/Wenze was specifically saying AWZ were a difficult person, just that her book was bad.
In the screenshots, one user calls for screenshots of "private DMs" that the burner account allegedly has access to, and the burner account goes all "I'm going to protect my sources" and refuses to show them. It WOULD be absolutely Machiavellian if the Blood Heir controversy stemmed directly from Duncan. Absolute full circle.
