ALLURE OF THE VAMPIRE KING Diversity Review
KINK REQUIRES CONSENT
DNF: 0/5
**contains spoilers**
If you know me, you know I will read just about any dark paranormal romance. Add an enemies to lovers element and I’m yours from now until eternity. So when I stumbled across the ALLURE OF THE VAMPIRE KING, book one out of seven of the complete Blood Fire Saga, I didn’t hesitate to download it. For those of you interested, it’s part of Kindle Unlimited so the buy-in is minimal, though to be clear I don’t recommend you download it.
If you’re triggered by rape, sexual violence, or drug abuse, then please steer clear.
The basic premise of the story revolves around powerless mage Mera who was dumped by the Vampire King Valentine. Turns out that she actually has a ton of powers (which four books in she still can’t use), was bred from a phoenix, and can bring people back to life. She also was never dumped by Valentine, rather they formulated this plan to keep her safe because being a fire mage is illegal and someone tampered with her memories to make her think it was real.
Now at this point, you’re probably thinking okay sounds juicy enough for a good read, why the heck didn’t you finish it?! Because by the time book three came around, and ultimately book four I simply could not read any more scenes where rape was being paraded as acceptable.
To be clear, I love a bad boy turned good storyline as much as anyone, and with dark romance you have to leave the pearl clutching at the door and buckle up for the ride. I understand that. In fact, it’s part of the reason I love dark romance so much. This also, by default, means that dark romance is filled with triggers. It’s why any author worth their salt will list out the trigger warnings in the beginning.
But there is a very clear line, and when you pretend rape is anything other than rape, you’ve crossed it.
You’ve gone from dark romance to perpetuating misogyny and rape culture. You’ve caused harm.
Before I go fully into this, I’d also like to add that even if there wasn’t a serious consent problem in these books, they were still poorly written. I got through the first three and a half but by the time I was half way through the second one, I was essentially skimming. If the last three books were written the same way as the first four, the series could have been shortened to three books, four max. The MC’s inner monologues are long and often unnecessary. Homegirl is an overthinker, and as an overthinker myself I empathize. But the problem is that she takes up, what feels like, 50% of the story just thinking of a thousand different angles on one plot point, and then most of the time she’s wrong. So basically I read through that entire three page monologue, just for it all to be irrelevant. I suspect the author uses this as a strategy to familiarize the reader with the inner workings of the world, but it’s more distracting than anything else.
It also takes away from Mera’s strength and boldness, and makes her seem lost and confused. Plus the way she reacts to Valentine only exacerbates that and makes her indecisive as well. She has a whole plan (a plan I had to read her go into excruciating detail about), and then one look at his six pack, and she forgets everything. This book only had one type of diversity: gender, and because the characters were superficial, confused, and ineffective, so was the diversity representation.
If I could go back, I would have stopped at book one, said goodbye to these characters and lived happily ever after. But I didn’t, and now through my pain, I hope I can save you some.
So let’s get into it — where it all went wrong: thrall, rape, and the preternatural vampire.
Thrall in this story is a chemical compound that vampires secrete from their fangs. It acts as a drug which is forced into the bloodstream of the human they’re feeding off of to make them more “compliant”. Think of it like vampire heroin as it has similar effects.
Essentially in book one Mera has a curse put on her that makes her irresistible to vampires. Valentine attacks her in a frenzy, but manages to kill himself to save her. But because he has some of her phoenix blood in his system, he becomes a preternatural vampire. Preternatural vampires need to drink a lot of blood to survive, and are basically walking primal bodies without souls. They’re also controlled by whoever has their heart, which in this case is the book’s big bad. Throughout book three and what I got through in book four, preternatural Valentine is still into Mera, and thinks of her as “his”. He begins having sex with her without her consent and against her will, meaning he rapes her. Half way through the rapes she “gives in”. Eventually, it escalates to preternatural Valentine drugging her with thrall so she’ll be too drugged out to move and “escape”. This way he can properly “protect” her (y’all I’m eye rolling even as I write this). At this point she’s so drugged out that she can’t give consent anyways. By the end, she spends half her time trying to wake up from her thrall induced haze and the other half of the time trying to convince Valentine to not lock her up or inject her with more thrall. With what time she has left, she meditates and talks with Valentine’s soul and tries to avoid having her magic sucked dry by the big bad. That’s it, that’s all I got through.
The whole plot made Mera so ineffective, and it got to a point where even Valentine’s soul was telling her to get the hell away from his body. But, in her mind, Valentine had sacrificed himself for her so she needed to save him, and that, for some unfathomable reason, meant she needed to constantly be raped. Mera’s explanations and behaviors slowly started morphing into those of a victim of abuse. And that’s not surprising because she was a victim of abuse. To make matters worse, Valentine’s soul is used to make the reader continue to empathize with him, and to humanize him so we can forget all the pain and violence his preternatural side is putting Mera through.
Though the preternatural plot line is used to up the stakes, it did the opposite for me: it made me want to watch Mera walk away from Valentine before he caused her any more harm. I was no longer rooting for them as a couple, and truthfully I was no longer rooting for Mera. The only things I did want was, one, for her to stop with the monologues, and two, for her to get away from her abuser.
If we zoom out to a more macro lens, I have a big problem with this book parading itself as a dark romance. This is not a dark romance. This is not enemies to lovers. This is not romance at all. This is abuse. This is the story of someone who is physically stronger than our female protagonist, doing whatever they want to her body without her consent. This is the story of her making excuses for her abuser and taking on responsibility for actions that were not her own or her choosing.
And while dark romance can and does have rape, it requires the rape to be acknowledged as rape. It requires some sort of resolution to the harm that was perpetuated. Don’t pretend what Mera and Valentine have is anything other than toxic and abusive. Don’t pretend this is smut.
Sex without consent is rape. Period. Point blank. The end.
If one person is into it at the beginning, and then they say no, any point after that no is rape. If someone’s body reacts in a way that makes it seem like they’re aroused but they have not vocalized consent, you don’t have consent. Drugging someone against their will is abuse. A relationship where one person has to bargain to not be drugged is abusive and toxic. There’s no way to make it anything other than what it is: rape. So don’t package a book as a dark romance when really what you’ve written is the story of domestic violence. Don’t package it as kinky, when its sexual violence.
Kink requires consent, without it its rape. Plain and simple.
To flaunt it as anything other than is harmful and promotes misogyny and rape culture. It endangers women. It’s misogynist to suggest that Valentine has a right or claim to Mera’s body. It’s harmful to say Valentine should be forgiven because oh he’s just not himself, or he’s not normally like that. That’s the excuses we give abusers and perpetuators of sexual violence. There are real women in the world who have been the victims of sexual assault, and when we create storylines where abusers don’t repair their harm or recieve justice, we make it harder for those real life women to speak up about their abuse, we make it harder for them to accept that they were harmed and hurt, and we make it harder for them to receive the justice they deserve.
What’s more, when we try to play off rape as sexual kink we do a disservice to the liberation of sexual pleasure. You want to throw on a pair of handcuffs in bed? You want to explore BDSM? You like a little role play? Some dom sub action? Have at it. Whatever gets you off is your business and you should be able to explore that in whatever way that feels best for you, as long as everyone involved in consenting.
Rape on the other hand is sexual assault, not sexual deviance, and not sexual exploration. To equate the two, as this book does, dismisses rape as less than what it is and it suggests that kink is somehow wrong or harmful. It’s not, again, if there’s consent.
Truth be told, it didn’t have to be this way. There are so many other ways this story could have progressed without resorting to rape:
- Preternatural Valentine could have not forced Mera to have sex with him.
- Mera could have wanted to have sex with preternatural Valentine. Listen, it’s not for me, but if it gets your motor running , no judgment, have at it!
- Preternatural Valentine could have slept with some else who was consenting. I don’t condone cheating, but I stand by the opinion that it’s better than rape.
- Valentine didn’t have to die but could end up being locked up and Mera could have saved him that way.
- Acknowledge rape as rape.
As I haven’t finished the series, I’m aware that some of these may not have been possible depending on how it ends, but I can also say without a shadow of a doubt that wrongfully portraying rape as kink was not the only only option.
So I had to put the book down and add it to my very limited Did Not Finish pile.
All of that being said, I do believe that the author can do better. I won’t say I’ll never read any of her books again. What I will say is that I hope this message reaches her in whatever way the universe intends, and she takes it to heart. And if there’s any way I can help with that, I would be happy to.
Until then, remember folks: kink requires consent.
To stay up to date on my latest work, you can subscribe to my Medium or any of the below social media platforms. If you’re looking for diversity advising, or would like to have your own script or novel analyzed, you can schedule a free consultation on my website.
