[talk of real-life and in-narrative anti-foster/adopted child sentiments, violent ableism, and child abuse/neglect/homicide cw, as well as mentions of racism.]

i think probably the biggest reason ivan's narrative makes me so goddamn angry is that not only was it hateful toward foster/adopted kids and disabled ND kids; it tries to take the intersection of those two, which gets children neglected, violently abused, and Straight Up Fucking Murdered at sky-high rates even compared to NT foster/adopted kids, and spin it as privilege. a novelty adoption by an explicitly abusive parent, no less.

and to make it even worse, they repeatedly and explicitly try to use his body type to go 'well i mean technically he's a kid but he LOOKS like an adult because he's Big and Threatening, so we're just gonna ignore that and judge him by adult standards.' which, for one thing, hi that is an extremely racist idea to perpetuate, even when you try to trojan horse it by applying it to white kid characters. fuck outta here with that. but it's also vile because 'big scary brutish violent neurodivergent boy who can't be meaningfully controlled through anything but more violence' is--surprise!--a piece of rhetoric that results in violence toward neurodivergent kids, autistic ones in particular. guess the fuck what ivan is coded as. 🙃

like. i cannot overstate that kids like ivan are at enormously high risk for severe abuse and outright murder. they do not get privilege handed to them on a silver platter, and they certainly don't get to lord it over the '''real''' children in the family. and it's fucking sinister that the authors try to make you sympathize and side with the '''real''' child in this scenario, who is constantly spouting off exactly the ideas that get foster/adopted kids killed, by making him the Good Nice One and ivan the Evil Mean One, and contriving a situation where there's on any level a power imbalance in ivan's favor.

fuck these books, man. how are these writers' arms even long enough to punch down that far.