Improbable Press Blog — Representation

By Kaitee Yaeko Tredway Seeing Jessie Mei Li as Alina Starkov in the Netflix adaptation of Shadow & Bone was hugely important to me. I had never seen a biracial (and Asian!) main character in mainstream fantasy before. In the wake of the show, there was a lot of backlash against the microaggressions Alina experiences and the level of racism portrayed, especially among the bookstagram community. This essay was born from my need to say something, to advocate for this kind of representation. When the teaser for S&B dropped and I saw Jessie Mei Li for the first time, all...