Why are there hardly any protagonists of color in young adult (YA) sci-fi fantasy?
This is the question that led me to read “Cinder” (2012), a dystopian fairytale retelling of Cinderella as an Asian cyborg, an excruciating and entertaining three times for a high school research project.
YA sci-fi fantasy, and especially YA dystopia, exploded in popularity in the early 2010s. Books like “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent” featured strong white female protagonists battling against oppressive power structures. Yet the group that does the most fighting against oppressive power structures –– people of color –– made up only 12.2% of the protagonists of early 2010s American YA sci-fi fantasy.
Of those protagonists of color, Asian protagonists such as Linh Cinder, the main character of “Cinder,” were represented the most, at 29.9%. But was that representation authentic or exotic?
The author of “Cinder,” Marissa Meyer, is a white woman. She lacks the necessary identity and lived experiences to move her representation beyond the point of exoticism. At the time of writing, her greatest claim to Asian culture was being a superfan of Sailor Moon and visiting China for ten days when she was thirteen.
Linh Cinder, like all Cinderellas, is decidedly an underdog. She’s a second-class cyborg citizen in New Beijing, capital of the pandemic-stricken Eastern Commonwealth. Her cyborg status allows her evil adoptive family to forcibly donate her to plague research.
However, certain elements of Cinder as a protagonist are rendered stereotypical and orientalist. Is it ever resolved why Cinder’s presumably Vietnamese family (given their surname Linh) is living in a pseudo-Chinese capital city ruled by a Japanese emperor? Are the tensions of a multicultural society resulting from imperialism ever explored?
Nope! This plague-ravaged “dystopia” is actually a society where ethnicity is ignored and everyone somehow speaks the same mix of English, Spanish and Chinese. Because Meyer doesn’t include these details to explore what a futuristic Asia could look like, she simply decorates and exoticizes the story.
“Of those protagonists of color, Asian protagonists such as Linh Cinder, the main character of “Cinder,” were represented the most, at 29.9%. But was that representation authentic or exotic?“
Neither is Cinder’s cyborg status ever properly explored. It is ultimately revealed that the metallic modifications from Cinder’s childhood were done to prevent her from finding out that she was a princess of the extraterrestrial “cruel, savage” Lunar people who are the originators of the plague for which she’s being researched.
Interestingly enough, the Lunars are Asian-passing and also oddly racialized by Meyer. They’re described as a “greedy and violent race” who are also “eerie and superstitious.”
I’m not kidding about this random alien subplot.
What’s worse is that once Cinder figures out she’s special, all concerns toward a system that disenfranchises cyborgs go out the window. While a love interest, the son of the emperor, unfolds, she never once considers that he is complicit in the anti-cyborg system. All she worries about is how he’ll find out that she’s a cyborg and that he will stop liking her.
Still, I think “Cinder” is worth reading if you want to experience some laughably satire-level depictions of Asian culture, from phrases like “Abracadabra, you’ll be home in time for dumplings,” to a description of her evil adoptive mother’s “chest heaving underneath the modest neckline of her kimono.”
Reading “Cinder” is also a great lesson for writers: Simply increasing the number of tropes –– fairytale, cyborg, alien, Asian –– doesn’t make a book more compelling. In particular, the awkward cultural mishmash that results from Meyer’s lack of cultural research is a great example of what not to do.
Because protagonists of color in YA sci-fi/fantasy are few and far between, it’s especially important that we scrutinize existing representation. Diversity in speculative fiction is necessary because it has the potential to imagine a future for people of color, whose stories are too often marginalized.
The fairytale of Cinderella is meant to be a rags-to-riches story. But reading “Cinder” as an Asian American (albeit not a cyborg), I felt the opposite of enriched. All I was left with was the author’s ragged understanding of Asian culture and, most importantly, the motivation to write something better.
Vivian Fan PO ’28 recommends the Asian American vampire dystopia, “The Immortal Rules,” as an alternative to “Cinder.” She has spent more than ten days in China, most recently when she was eighteen.
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