The Unaddressed Maleficence of Cait Corrain
The superiority complex of traditionally-published authors, and cultural appropriation (it sounds unrelated but it isn’t).
As an author debuting in 2024 myself, Cait Corrain has unfortunately slithered onto my radar. Luckily[?] for somebody who jumped ship from Twitter years ago, the situation regarding them has percolated to the wider internet, making itself available for my hyper-critical consumption.
For those unaware, Cait Corrain (she/they) was at one point a 2024 debut SFF author who created multiple Goodreads accounts to review-bomb (prolifically give 1-star ratings to) her fellow debut authors, most of whom were non-white with some under her own publishing imprint/in her debut group, as well as an already-published friend!! of hers—Thea Guanzon. Sloppily, Cait employed those same accounts to up-vote her own book, including voting for it on multiple lists. They then provided “screenshots” of her “conversation” with a supposed “friend” whom she blamed this review-bombing shenaniganry on, only to then be exposed for photo-shopping those screenies and the fact that this “friend” was indeed just herself. Cait then posted a .doc apology on their social media where they did not address their clearly racist actions, instead blaming their behaviour on substance abuse and changes in medication, and then dipping off-line. Her book is no longer being published, and she has essentially lost it all to her own selfish whims—a misguided belief that she may only succeed at the expense of her peers, as well as a complete, and hypocritical, misunderstanding on the way Goodreads both functions, or is utilised by readers.
If you would like two in-depth breakdowns of the situation, I suggest the videos by withcindy and Reads with Rachel on YouTube.
I, however, want to supplement the current and past discourse with my own commentary, as I think I have a perspective which may be of value.
Namely, I would like to centre a victim of Corrain’s who has been receiving only cursory empathy, a phenomenon which reflects a hierarchical dynamic within publishing. Further, I intend to touch on the cultural appropriation and commodification engaged in by Cait Corrain within her own ex-debut.
Among that authors Cait Corrain review-bombed in her crusade was R.M. Virtues (he/him), a Black Nahua author of fantasy and paranormal romance.
What sets Virtues apart from the others targeted by Cait is that he is an independent author. And that is where I take issue: the lack of attention offered to him.
The targeting of R.M. Virtues’ work Drag Me Up, a Greek mythology retelling like Cait Corrain’s ex-debut (though concerning different myths), does nothing but prove the racially-motivated nature of Corrain’s deplorable behaviour. After all, what other reason would an agented author with an impressive multi-book deal backed by not one but two large publishing houses and alleged old money have for targeting a self-made indie author, who is required to work tirelessly for even a fraction of the accolades the elites are handed on a silver platter, other than racism and jealousy against a marginalised author on Cait’s part?
Independent authors feel it much more acutely than their traditionally-published counterparts when their work is hit with unbidden low reviews, and yet R.M. Virtues has been receiving categorically less platforming following Corrain’s disgrace. This highlights the elitist culture of publishing and readership. Independent publication is considered “giving” up, “lower quality”, “not real books” notwithstanding the reality that editors are heavily employed by indies too, including an often even better focus on both beta and sensitivity readers as well as providing fresh, unique stories and perspectives otherwise censored and watered down by trad. Despite too the fact that utter schlock is admittedly being pumped out by trad publishers en masse.
Keep in mind, Cait Corrain is a white non-binary individual, and one thing white Westerners will do without fail is weaponise their disability and queerness against racially, ethnically, nationally, and culturally-racialised identities. This does not give people the right to misgender Corrain, to ignore her pronouns, or to denigrate her struggles with mental health and substance abuse disorders. At the same time, none of that gives her a justification or even the explanation for her targeting of non-white fellow debuts for the sake of uplifting herself, because mental illness does not make you bigoted. That is something within you. Obviously, mental illness affects us all differently and you cannot make a blanket statement, but if an alternative is possible—and a lot of invisibly disabled individuals have testified that it is—then it is evident that Cait’s excuse is weak. I have no obligation to be sweet about this person, especially as someone who has suffered xenophobia and Orientalist racism.
Support R.M. Virtues, support indie authors and small publishers, support me while you’re at it—a queer Easterner.
100% of the royalties earned from my May 7th debut, Non Serviam, will be donated to Doctors Without Borders, the Kurdish Red Crescent, and All For Armenia, so you’ll be supporting people who need it most, alongside.
And remember: as an author—trad or indie, Goodreads, StoryGraph, and other book review platforms ARE NOT FOR YOU. They are for READERS!
Stop watching your Goodreads pages, stop reading your reviews and invading reviewer spaces, stop putting stock in your ratings and Adds numbers.
Rachel at Reads with Rachel made the excellent point that Cait Corrain would have likely destroyed her own career later on due to the way she interprets reviews and ratings—how much value she ascribes to these ultimately-minuscule components of the publishing ecosystem (ones misunderstood by both publishers and agents too, as Rachel brings up). Cait just destroyed their career before it could even begin, instead, through their own racism and unmanaged insecurity.
But that’s not all the issues I take with Cait Corrain, oh no.
My other gripe is something I see brought up in essentially no space, and it is both related to and somewhat aside from the Greek mythology retelling that is Cait’s ex-debut novel.
Crown of Starlight—the aforementioned ex-debut—was an adult romantic sci-fi reimagining of Ariadne, a Cretan princess, and Dionysus, the god of wine and revelry among much else.
However, not only are Dionysus and Ariadne not a love story if you actually analyse it, but Cait Corrain’s depiction of her fictional Crete is as inappropriate as it is befuddling.
First of all is these fictionalised Cretans’ worship of the Moirai as a purity culture allegory. The Moirai (Μοίρες), or the Fates, are a representation of destiny and the life cycle, and have nary a thing to do with puritanical statutes. Moreover, presenting Crete of all locations as somehow a hub of repression and prudishness is sorely a-historical and arguably offensive. The Minoan Civilisation, centred on the island of Crete, was uniquely flourishing and progressive for the time period (the Bronze Age: c. 3100–1100 BCE). Women held positions of power, and sexual liberation was in all-too-rare an abundance: certainly exceeding that of its descendants, including the beaten-to-death Ancient Greece, which literally found its genesis in the Greek Dark Ages, wherein Athenian women were scarcely permitted to exist, where the most rights a femme-bodied could garner was in Sparta of all places. Hell, have you seen the iconic Minoan women’s dresses? Those committed to sculpture and mosaic? The ones which entirely exposed the breasts?
The more you learn, the more you understand just how butchered the representation in Crown of Starlight is. It falls perfectly in line with Corrain’s racist behaviour, yet she dared to depict non-white people in her works and throw her performative activism at the feet of a biracial artist whom she didn’t even end up commissioning despite the absolute soliloquy about “platforming marginalised voices” she subjected them to (watch withcindy’s video for a little further insight).
And you can argue “it’s fiction” all you want, but I’ve already made it abundantly clear in many a previous publication how such a characterisation is fallacious. Not just that, but what an absolute waste of an interesting and unique cultural coding in a genre as milquetoast as traditionally-published SFF. But we don’t deserve that, I suppose, subjected instead to suffer the unending barrage of Greek myth retellings by non-Greek Westerners about dead-horse tales thick as bone broth we all already know, like the 736th Hades & Persephone “romance” as if that’s not a literal uncle-niece Stockholm Syndrome rape story. Corrain’s love for Lore Olympus is painfully unsurprising.
And this ultimately circles back to Cait Corrain’s internalised white supremacy.
Western people believe they have the right to tell and retell stories that they have no connection to, no real reason to idolise and no cultural insight and discernment to properly dissect. They blindly believe in some sort of queer liberation within these ancient tales of Gods and consorts, unwilling to analyse the misogynistic, paedophilic, colonialist, xenophobic realities behind these myths that give absolutely no agency or footing to us LGBTQIA+ folk, to femme-bodied people, to culturally-subjugated groups like Cretans and Anatolians and Cypriots and Mesopotamians and Macedonians and Etruscans, but instead suck us in with ambiguity and the prospect of “novel interpretation” and “reinterpretation” and queerification and romanticism. All in this diluted, Western, white-washed sham pastiche.
Or perhaps not us. But y’all.
~Sfar~Ⓐ🧿֎⨳
Are you Italian? Than why are you using MY roman alphabet? Cultural appropriation! What a load of nonsense.