PT 1: Are you there, Horde King? It’s me, Smol Bean.
Captive of the Horde King by Zoey Draven is the first book in the well-loved Horde Kings of Dakkar series. Humans are unwanted refugees on Dakkar, kept tightly in line by Dakkari warriors who don’t allow them to hunt for food or interfere on the land. The Dakkari frame this as a conservationist stance: humans are prone to environmental destruction, so incredibly punitive measures are warranted to keep their planet healthy. To make things a little more dire for the humans, who are starving, Dakkari justice is the space equivalent of the medieval stereotype: everything’s a death sentence.
When Luna’s brother starts a fire to encourage crop growth, she knows he’s in big trouble. Before she has time to fully register her grief and dismay at what will become of her last living family member, Dakkari warriors have shown up to her village to demand justice. She pleads for her brother’s life, and the Horde King takes her for himself.
Goodreads is littered with reviews calling Captive of the Horde King a “Game of Thrones fanfic,” which feels both rude to fanfiction and a reductive way to view the story. To me, Luna’s abduction is more reminiscent of Warprize by Elizabeth Vaughn, the first in a low fantasy romance series that begins with a dead king’s daughter, Xylara, being gifted to Kier, the conquering ruler of the Firelanders.
The single POV works in both of the books’ favor, as Xylara and Luna’s assumptions about their captors create believable misunderstanding and conflict. Both Luna and Xylara are under the impression that their captivity is hostile. Why wouldn’t they be? Xylara is the spoils of war, and Luna likely has whiplash from how quickly she’s recategorized from ‘likely death sentence recipient’ to ‘object of lust and lifepartner.’
The Dakkari and Firelanders both have traditions that are inspired by Indigineous peoples, which is particularly troubling considering that, in-universe, they are both the colonizer authority. Don’t get me wrong, the Dakkari and Firelanders are the heroes, but it’s a muddied allegory, particularly in Captive of the Horde King. Luna, having newly embraced the Dakkari, is relatively untroubled the fate of other humans. In later books, the Dakkari right their wrongs and bring the ostracised humans into the fold, all without explicitly having the Dakkari come to terms with their part in the oppression. World building is one thing, world deconstructing is another.
There were moments during the Horde Kings of Dakkar series where I forgot that it was supposed to be set in space. The two groups we focus on are the humans (particularly the human women who function as love interests for each Horde King), and the Dakkari, who are very humanoid. How the books describe the Horde Kings is laughably similar to how some historical romance authors describe Scottish men: Just like regular men, but bigger.
Okay, so the Dakkari men have tails, too, but the books are less interested in that feature than the Eternal Question of the Space Heterosexual: “How am I gonna accommodate this massive dick?”
“Fetishized” is a word that I wish people would tread more carefully with when talking about romance, as we can often pick up talking points from prudish, finger-wagging, self-anointed moral authorities that see any expression of physical attraction as inherently deviant. Here, though, fetishization is worth exploring because the Horde Kings overwhelmingly read as men of color, conveniently paired off with tiny, delicate white women. In this context, classic romance staples like “Will it fit??” and the “Alpha Male” are less of a harmless fantasy for white women to indulge in, and more an outright racist stereotype.
There’s a portion of the romance community that’s thoroughly uninterested in examining why The Big Dick has some subgenres in a chokehold. (Sorry.) The more defensive romance readers have a Pavlovian response to criticism thanks to years of mockery (Does “mommy porn” ring a bell?) and infantilizing takes ('“Romance creates unrealistic relationship expectations!”). Combine that with the impulse that white women have to mirror the oppressive behaviors of men and call it feminist, and suddenly the gleeful reverence of big dicks is not just tit for tat, but Progressive, Actually.
PT 2: Romance is a fantasy romance is a fantasy romance is MY fantasy my fantasy is virtuous
Science fiction and romance seem like the perfect place to let our body hangups go, to throw out what we know about gender and performance and to finally be free of the deeply unromantic notion that genitals are the end-all-be-all of sexual attraction.
It’s kind of a bummer that so many heterosexual alien romances are not just disappointingly humanoid, but bound by the same sex and gender constructs we have here on Earth. Sure, the Horde Kings have tails, but take those out of the picture and suddenly you have the star of the next highland romance. (Someday, not today but someday, I will talk about how deeply uncomfortable I am with the way historical romance talks about Scottish men.)
I’ve lost count of how many other alien romances have this same dynamic. The alien man might have wings, green skin, or scales, but ultimately his penis is salaciously large and his partner (almost always a human woman) meets the challenge with trepidation and brimming excitement. After reading it for the umpteenth time, this spectacle feels hollow to me.
Is this it? Is this the best our imagination can do?
Enter Strange Love by Ann Aguirre.
“The alien—oh God, an alien—stood over two meters, mottled green and brown, with light striping along the sides. Two arms, two legs, but that was where the similarity to humans stopped. It had arched and scaly feet like a bird, and three fingers tipped with ferocious claws. Spines grew out of the creature’s skull and ran down the back, while side-set eyes looked faintly insectoid. No ears or nose, just slits in the face plate, and what looked like a maw or a beak. The alien had what she’d call a thorax more than a chest, and prickly things growing out of the…neck? While she stared, tissue puffed out, thickening its throat with transparent webbing.”
This description is of Zylar, a Barathi alien who thinks he’s on his way to find a date that he was paired with online. Instead, he accidentally kidnaps a human woman named Beryl, and her dog Snaps.
Zylar’s planet is technologically advanced and morally horrifying: in order to have companionship and eventually children, the Barathi have to participate in a deadly competition to entice a partner. They can attempt this five times before they’re relegated to a lifetime of loneliness and servitude, and Zylar has one chance left.
Beryl agrees to be his partner, both in the competition and for the rest of their lives, should they score highly enough. The competition is wacky, stressful, and surprisingly funny.
Zylar is in awe of Beryl, a vivacious and confident woman who rapidly becomes his biggest advocate. I don’t remember Zylar expressing physical attraction to Beryl at any point, but if he did he was already face-plate-over-claws in love with the woman he calls “Terrible One.”
Barathi sex is very different than the human sex Beryl is accustomed to, and while she and Zylar can see each other’s bodies and note differences, they don’t really know what is erogenous until they ask. Nothing about their relationship is intuitive, but they trust each other enough to be vulnerable and to try the unfamiliar.
“‘Please,’ he said, and it was both permission and a plea.
His sex organs were arranged near enough that she could penetrate all four simultaneously with two fingers on top and her thumbs below. That might not be enough pressure in the lower pouches, but she’d give it her best shot.”
I have nitpicks for Strange Love that I ultimately don’t care about. Strange Love built a world mired in oppression (the Barathi openly engage in eugenics!) and dumped the main characters in a rat race for a dignified life, gave us an absurd talking dog (Snaps!) that should have been annoying but he absolutely wasn’t, and so casually introduced a nonbinary character that I didn’t even notice until the third or fourth “they.” Strange Love takes itself much less seriously than Winter’s Orbit, another space romance (or as some (not me!) would argue, science fiction with a hint of romance) that is not only queer, but willing to break apart the binary.
The interesting thing is that Strange Love isn’t pitched as a queer story, despite being queer-friendly with its almost radical insistence that genitals don’t matter when two beings are in love.
That’s what “love is love” means, right? In space, that can be heterosexual, too.
THIS IS SO GOOD