Dear humans,
While this isn’t meant to be a political or religious post, these things will be touched on by necessity. Debate on religious or political subjects is not welcomed. You’ll understand why soon.
At least once a week, someone asks the female if her books reflect her personal beliefs. Sometimes, people accuse her of things, including being a pedophile, all because she wrote a book series that includes the very real issue of child marriage in the United States. Honestly, these people are just ignorant idiots most of the time, as they have no idea that their government aids and abets older men and women in marrying young children.
Since it’s important, at the bottom of this post is a copy of the notice the female had to include in Null and Void and a bunch of Royal States novels, because there are an unfortunate number of Americans who are uneducated about the nature of their own civics system.
TL;DR: if you impregnate a young girl, be it through rape or ‘consenting’ sex, your state may very well let you marry her. In these states, if a rapist marries the rape victim, the case can no longer be pursued as a rape. It’s roughly a fifty-fifty chance of being able to do this. Some states have minimal age restrictions. (Read: 14 or 15 years old.)
Note: consenting is in quotes because the female doesn’t believe a little girl is really consenting to an older adult having sex with her under any circumstance.
But, to showcase the issue, a 11 year old child from Florida was forced to marry her rapist because of religious (Christian, in this case) reasons. To protect the rapist, a church deacon. You can read the article by clicking the link above. If you’re Christian, I do hope this offends you, because only those within the religion can change the religion.
In the United States, ‘Christian’ men are typically the spearheads of keeping child marriage laws active. Tennessee is the worst offender, with a known history of marrying 12 year old boys and girls to older adults.
Note: the female has demanded I use quotes around the term Christian, as she would like to think a morally outstanding individual following said religion would understand that pedophilia is bad and should not be legalized. Also, she made me remove the quotes around men because we’re supposed to avoid being too insulting.
Please insert the quotes around men at your leisure, as real men would not need to take advantage of a little girl to get laid.
If you don’t believe us about the statements above and the legislators who support child marriage, human, go google it and educate yourself. If you have even a halfway decent moral compass, you’ll likely emerged sickened, disgusted, and so on.
Something for you to think about.
The case mentioned helped protect little girls in Florida. But for those of you who want to claim it’s not a significant problem, here are some statistics from Florida alone.
A legislative staff analysis showed that between 2012 and 2016, 1,828 marriage licenses were issued in Florida to couples when at least one party was a minor. That includes a 13-year-old, seven 14-year-olds and 29 15-year-olds.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/03/10/forced-marry-her-rapist-11-woman-finally-changes-florida-marriage-law/413284002/
If you think that’s unacceptable, congrats! You’re a decent human being.
The female doesn’t like pedophiles. She’s certainly not one. But it’s fiction, and she wrote the book about a generally extremist society founded on the current laws and principals of the United States.
That means child marriage is on the table in the stories, no matter how much she personally loathes the subject.
A lot of couples in the Royal States are the product of forced marriages arranged by their parents. This is something humans have been doing to royalty for centuries.
It. Is. Not. Reflective. Of. The. Human’s. Beliefs.
It’s fiction.
Don’t assign the female moral values based on her fiction. If you want to see evidence of people who do just this, go visit Null and Void on Amazon and read the reviews. The female’s inclusion of the note at the end of the book helped, but readers are very willing to decide what an author believes based on what they read in fiction.
And that’s bullshit.
Just don’t. Thank you.
P.S.: Thank you to the wonderful fans who rallied once upon a time and left thoughtful, positive reviews of the book. We do appreciate it very much.
Anyway, the last time the female did some research on the child marriage situation, a quarter of a million girls and boys, some as young as 12, were married in the United States.
That’s a quarter of a million too many.
We will not discuss our personal beliefs beyond this statement: pedophilia is bad. If you disagree with this statement, please go fuck off.
Was that clear enough for those of you in the back?
But back to Null and Void: the general inability of readers to separate the inclusion of a social issue in a story with the author believing any which way about the issue almost ended the Royal States series at its conception.
It sucked. She hated it. She grew to hate the book because of it, too. Because there were so many readers who simply couldn’t come to terms that the beliefs of the author are not what shows up in the book.
Let me spell this out for you, humans: my female includes only a few things in her fiction that are purely hers. What are these things? Cars she likes, food she wants to eat, food she does not want to eat. Her love of books. Cats. Puppys. Animals in general. (Why yes, she would love to have an entire pack of kittens and puppies and basically any animal. She’d even consider adopting a pet spider despite being really, really afraid of them.) (Oh, look! Another thing she wrote about that she isn’t at all keen on: in Shammed, Alice loves spiders. The female usually screams and bolts across the room if there’s a spider nearby.)
Some elements of her personality certainly shine through. She likes snark and humor. That’s why she writes it.
But, allow me to demonstrate:
The female owns three pairs of shoes: a ruined pair of patent ruby red tieks, a pair of patent lavender tieks, and a pair of cherry and blue raspberry Columbia hiking books. (They’re blue and red. They’re adorable.)
Sassy, from Cheetahs Never Win, must have all of the shoes!
Yes, people automatically assume the author has a shoe fetish because Sassy has a shoe fetish.
Nope. Sassy is the one who likes shoes, not the female, AKA RJ Blain.
Also, Sassy and the female do have something in common: cheetahs. The female adores cheetahs. When she found out cheetahs are likely going to go extinct in the wild, she literally started to cry.
She loves cheetahs.
She does not like child marriage despite having written characters who are products of or have participated in the act of child marriage.
Hopefully, the point has been thoroughly made.
But, since people have been asking, continuously, here is the official answer regarding RJ’s religious beliefs:
The female is agnostic.
Thank you for your understanding.
As for her political beliefs, here is the official answer: her political beliefs are nobody’s business, and she has and will continue to write about characters from all spectrums of political beliefs.
In fact, the female doesn’t want to know about your political beliefs. It’s none of her business. That’s why her page and blog have always been politics-free zones.
The female is an entertainer, not a politician.
Will there be social commentary in the books?
Absolutely. It’s impossible to write a book of any depth without its inclusion. But, and here is the big but, humans: she is not her characters.
Their beliefs are not hers.
What is on the page is the belief of the characters.
Seriously. Separate characters from the person who wrote them. They are not the same.
Now, granted, there are totally authors out there who inject their personal beliefs into their books. The female, generally, is not one of them. If she had written the Royal States world to her personal beliefs, it would be a much different story.
Thank you for your understanding.
Here is the letter included at the end of Null and Void:
Dear reader,
Underaged marriage is a serious problem within the United States (and other parts of the world,) and Null and Void touches on this current practice. Yes, it’s a current practice in the United States.
When I wrote the book, my intention was to bring this practice to light, taking what is (questionably) the best-case scenario and using it to showcase the issue, which at its base level, is horrific.
In Texas, current laws allow estranged (IE, runaway) children to marry anyone they choose as long as they are 16 years of age or older. In Null and Void, I changed this law to 15 with parental consent, which is a current law in the following states: Hawaii, North Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Washington.*
Washington requires a superior court judge waiver.
Many other states allow 16 with parental consent. There are states with younger than 15. Tennessee has a history of marrying ten year old girls to adult men.
In the case of pregnancy, the following states have no limitations on the age a girl can be married: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Washington, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Massachusetts.
Georgia, Maryland, and a handful of other states have rulings on pregnant girls being married at 14 or 15+ years of age (with or without parental consent.) The rules vary by state.
This arc was not a mistake. It was not a glorification of the issue, either.
It is a social commentary about how current laws can dramatically harm our society. The Royal States world is a post-dystopian society that embraced elements of extremism.
Before change can happen in the Royal States world, it must be faced.
In the Captive King, this issue is revisited, and some of the more astute readers will be able to identify the shift against child marriage in the society.
In A Guiding Light, this issue is faced in blunt clarity, beginning the end of the practice.
Including this arc was not a decision made lightly.
For more information on the problem of child marriage in the United States, American Child Bride is a book you may wish to check out of the library or order from your favorite bookstore. It touches on the history of this issue.
However, you can simply verify the truth on google or with your local government law offices. While I don’t typically recommend wikipedia, due to the easy nature of age verifications for marriage, it’s a good starting point for those interested in understanding the issues and current laws.
Thirty-six states permit minors to be married if they meet certain requirements. These requirements vary but may include pregnancy (consensual or otherwise,) parental consent, and common law circumstances.
Thank you for reading.
Disclaimer: Laws change on a yearly basis, so these rulings were valid at the time this afterword was written.
Please enjoy this picture of Tia the Majestic, RIP little Tia! (Isn’t she delightfully catty in this picture?)
I finally read the Royal States books. I didn’t hold off due to the child marriage issue. The description just didn’t catch my fancy. Bonds did so I read. FELL. IN. LOVE. So I had to go back and read them (I had actually bought a number of them just hadn’t read them, don’t judge).
I’m very perplexed at the whole ‘author supports child marriage’ thing. Did these people not read the books? She CLEARLY points over and over and over again it is wrong. She writes how people’s lives are damaged from being forced into arranged marriages, how the children of those marriages suffer.
How are people missing the concern for the issue and the absolute need to stop the practice? Everyone of the Royal States books points out how someone is trying to stop the practice. Where are people getting the idea the author supports any of these abhorrent practices? They aren’t glorified an any way. I just don’t get it. : (
Because too many people skim/read superficially and don’t really internalize what they are reading.
I have read almost every book you have available, even those by pseudonyms, and I cant wait to see new ones. One of the main reasons I think they appeal to me so much is that they take real world problems, and present them in a fictional way without taking the problem away or making it seem unreal also. This isnt the only reason I enjoy all of your books, but it definitively helps. Life is made of many issues, and moral ones are one of the hardest to deal with as they are very much point of view. Your characters point out issues, fight to resolve them, and the frustrations in them and just how fulfilling even the slightest positive change is. It is so typical of our society that they have jumped on the aspect of child / arranged marriage but nothing has been said about the social caste system that is so very prevalent. I put this down just as someone that just strings a bunch of words together instead of actually reading what has been written.
That does kind of amuse me, since the caste system in the Royal States is really just mirroring the economic systems already in place in the United States. I just added actual boundaries between the various groups and assigned magic and money to the system. It isn’t a far leap if you’ve studied economics in the United States.
Oh sneaky kitty, your human is an artist. Her words hold up a mirror which shows the truth, and trolls do not handle truth very well. Personally the only thing my human says is “You can’t fix ——” starts with an s. My human sews so she won’t bounce idiot heads on the desks at work, glad to know your human is painting. The paintings are cool ?. It never ceases to amaze me how many trolls there are.
Please continue writing whatever you want. I have enjoyed all the different characters in your books. (I also love Declan). I will never understand people who don’t understand that fiction is fiction. Just because a mystery writer writes about mass murders does not make them a mass murder. Please try to ignore the mentally limited persons that expect authors to only write what they believe.
P. S. I own all of the books you have written and I have read them more than once.
R.J., Some people just don’t understand. Hang in there. You’re awesome!
Kari ???
I own all your books and eagerly await the next. Personally I think these people just look for something to attack about. Don’t they have something better to do. It pains me to know that I might have missed out on these books. I also adore Declan. And Dustin. Am sure I will enjoy Ethan too.
I must say that you might have forgotten that you talked about spiders in yet another book/story. I am re-reading the Witch and Wolf again (3rd time? 4th?) and just came across the pink and black tarantula that Pedro gave to Nicolina. And instantly my mind went to Shammed and laughed. If I recall correctly, Pedro liked spiders too, which is why he introduced her to Kitty Killer. No, her spider wasn’t as big a part as Alice’s, but it was there! And was the first sighting!
No, I hadn’t forgotten about Kitty Killer. I just felt Shammed was a better example.
It’s fiction people. Just because the “great literature” is often called semi-autobiographical doesn’t mean that most authors include their personal views in the books they write. The fact is that pedophilia is often committed, much more than is reported, doesn’t mean that anyone who writes about it is automatically a pedophile.
Sorry people are so ignorant sometimes.
Personally I love the Royal States novels, and Null and Void is my current go-to book when I’m at a loss as to what to read next.
Thank you for bringing child marriage to our attention. I had no idea that it was current law in so many states.
I started with the MRC books broke down and bought NULL and VOID loved it and have perrty much brought every new book since.
I have enjoyed your books so much that even though I own all of them, I have began to buy them as audio books. All of yours have many social issues that are trying to be addressed. My favorite is Jesse Alexander and cant wait for the next book. I think you do a great job of portraying that the children aren’t human beings but chattel to be sold and traded and that these aren’t good things but things to be overcome and are most of the reasons for the character’s problems
It’s sad that the human lets these things get to her so much.
(Though I can’t really blame her, as I myself prefer to hide and pretend humans don’t exist when they keep behaving in a way I can’t handle anymore. And rant when I have enough energy left to.)
No proper reader or human being would mix up author including topics to bring attention to them and including them to embellish them.
And those who do, don’t deserve the energy and time to be wasted on them. (I also kind of hope that, since those people feel so strongly about it, they also mustered and expressed similar opinions around works like, say, Song of Ice and Fire (a.k.a. GOT) and the treatment of underage characters there. That likely would’ve went well for them. )
I love Null and Void.
Readers dont assume books written about murders condone murdering people, or shoot-em-up books are about approved behavior. Why would they assume anything about an author of fiction except the she has a good imagination? Books are written about really awful things all the time and many people enjoy reading about awful things, knowing they are fiction. It is ridiculous that anyone would criticize a work of fiction for content – if you dont like it dont read it. I will occasionally pick up a book, read a few pages and go – yuck – too gory – too violent – too sexist – whatever – and close it and never read it (never your books of course) – but that is a reader’s choice to do. I would never dream of contacting that author and criticizing and complaining …
I think that’s a bit too extreme. ‘Contacting and complaining’ is maybe going too far, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying ‘I find this too sexist/too gory/etc’ if you write your feedback/review for a book somewhere. Further more, as there ARE, unfortunately, writers who would write an embellishing piece about paedophilia, as there are beings who’d practice it, there’s nothing wrong about saying that paedophilia and rape are wrong and that writing books that describes them as not wrong is wrong. Saying ‘don’t read if you don’t like it’ in this case is a bit too close to saying ‘don’t look if you don’t like it’ about the actual crime happening in front of us.
There is absolutely nothing wrong for criticising work for its content… Isn’t that what critique is for? If we don’t criticise works for content, what are we supposed to be criticising based on?
The problem here, I believe, is putting words in authors’ mouths and trying to say that they ‘endorse’ a subject, where their aim was the opposite. Or assuming (especially incorrectly) things about authors and their believes from the behaviours of their characters, and then criticising said authors based solely on own incorrect assumptions.
I believe my favourite two Royal States novels are ‘Null and Void’ and ‘A Guiding Light’ — because those two, while they are blatant in pointing out some pretty nasty facets of a very uncomfortable set of discussions — when I read or listen to them (it’s often), there is a massive amount of those stories that translates in my head as “Do Better !”
As for the reviews… some people don’t get that shining a spotlight on an issue, idea, or pattern of behaviour is quite often like writing “This is BAD. Don’t be this way.” in magic marker across something. I thought the Royal States novels were closer to a marching band with megaphones screaming it, but who knows? Maybe it was ostriches posting. Or people putting their fingers in their ears going ‘lalala’. Anything to protect their beliefs.
Its a tribute to the human’s writing talent that I enjoy the Royal States novels despite disliking the social structure intensely. If I had to choose between them the society in the MRC books appeals far more.
That’s like the entire point of the Royal States society. It isn’t there to be adored. It’s there to be changed. And as the books go, it’s gradually changing, which is half the fun!
The foundation trilogy is going to be… intense.
Because yeooowwcchhh~ if you think the ‘current’ society is bad… slavery was re-established during the second civil war.