This might seem a little redundant, seeing as how Ollie, Robin, and myself have spent the past four week complaining about and nit-picking this novel. However, in case you're not the type to subject yourself to ~four hours of exasperated sighs, Robin complaining about excess lungs, and me repeating "I can't" over and over, here's the tl;dr version, because this book pissed me the fuck off. 
 Things Wrong With the Red Queen 
 It's Another Dystopian Novel About Oppression with Almost Zero Marginalized People In It 
 - like literally almost zero 
 - the heroine is a straight white girl SURPRISE 
 - love interests are also straight+white 
 - there's one brown girl + her grandmother but they're oppressors AND direct antagonists to the heroine 
 - 0 queer people 
 - I mean we still don't know the story behind Thomas and Maven, but nothing canon 
 - There were a couple of disabled people though 
 - Mare's dad was inaccurately disabled so that was a thing 
 - also there was one mute woman whose tongue was cut out 
 - but she has one scene, and really she's just there to be a living source of manpain ~representation yeahhhh~ 
 - Why do you keep doing this YA 
 - Why 
 Girl Hate Everywhere 
 - literally every female character in this novel gets hated on 
 - I'm going to be using the word literally a lot sorry 
 - but no every female character is a BIIIITCH 
 - girl!Magneto Evangeline is one of the primary antagonists, and she's called a bitch by everyone, even randos who've never met her 
 - no seriously this is how our heroine can tell when people are trustworthy, they open with "that bitch Evangeline" 
 - it's like their "good guy" secret password 
 - crimes women are demonized for: liking/discussing "silly" things, being too pretty, partaking in ~magical~ plastic surgery, being good at things the heroine is not good at, wanting things, being women, existing 
 - men are allies, women are antagonists: canon binary 
 It's Anti-Rebellion 
 - no seriously this is a dystopian that actually goes on about how bad rebellion is 
 - specifically violent rebellion 
 - "no but if u hurt the people oppressing u ur just as bad as they r omg" 
 - that's literally the message 
 - one guy goes on a rant about how thinking all oppressors are evil is just as bad as thinking all oppressed people are inferior 
 - literally he says that 
 - and not in the "all racism /= KKK racism" way 
 - in the #NotAllMen or #NotAllWhitePeople way 
 - #NotAllSilvers 
 - The point is that we shouldn't fight, guys, even when being violently oppressed by people with literal superpowers for centuries 
 - Just talk it out, because some of them are basically decent people, right? 
 - #NotAllSilvers 
 - It's like the book version of your racist uncle's Facebook feed during Ferguson 
 - This book is evil 
 - No I mean that sincerely 
 - It's evil 
 - These politics are terrible 
 - It's like propaganda designed to uphold the status quo 
 - It's novel-length tone policing 
 - AND IT'S MEANT FOR TEENAGERS JESUS FUCKING CHRIST 
 - This is insidious shit 
 - Don't read it 
 Also Plot Things Are Bad 
 - It's like a weird AU Hunger Games/X-Men fanfic 
 - Plus some Cinderella? 
 - There's even a District 13 though 
 - RADIATION AND EVERYTHING 
 - Also a "Capital" 
 - Rough-around-the-edges, brassy heroine with a fairer little sister 
 - I'm just saying 
 - It's also like a YA genre cliche buffet 
 - Except none of it goes together 
 - Mmmm, here have some mashed potatoes on that spaghetti yummm 
 - You want some ketchup on that ice cream? Yeah, unf 
 - For a minute it's all dystopia, with desperately poor people + obscenely rich people and arena matches and shit 
 - Then the heroine runs into the prince dressed as a commoner 
 - Seriously 
 - Then she witnesses girls in a contest for the prince's hand in marriage 
 - You think you know where that's going? 
 - Yeah it totally goes there 
 - She falls (LITERALLY) into the competition and turns out to be the most powerful of them all 
 - God why 
 - So it's pseudo-medieval but there's also X-Men powers and diamondglass walls and a love interest who invents the motorcycle and extremely basic military tactics like the surprise attack 
 - Look Reading with a Vengeance covers it much better here but the world-building shit makes no sense 
 - It's a world completely held together by author fiat 
 - Also the king's plan (aka the excuse for everything that happens in the book) is terrible 
 - It's basically to pretend the protagonist's blood isn't red 
 - Because Silver blood = rich people, Red blood = poor 
 - But red blood is like impossible to hide 
 - Fingernails, eyeballs, lips, paper cuts, god forbid she GET HER PERIOD 
 - Then the king puts her into X-Men power training 
 - PHYSICAL EXERTION MAN I DON'T CARE HOW FIT YOU ARE, YOU SWEAT AND GET FLUSHED 
 - This also makes her 1500% more likely to get into a situation where she could bleed 
 - WHICH HAPPENS BY THE WAY 
 - THIS IS A TERRIBLE PLAN 
 - HOW HAVE YOU PEOPLE BEEN IN POWER FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS WITH SUCH TERRIBLE STRATEGIZING CAPABILITIES?? 
 - Oh yeah superpowers 
 - Also it takes forever to get to any interesting stuff, and by the time you get there, you hate everyone 
 - See also: terrible politics and girl hate 
 THINGS RED QUEEN DOES RIGHT 
 X-Men as the Oppressors, and Not the Oppressed 
 - I mean that shit never made any sense right? 
 - Erasure much? 
 - Also marginalized people don't legitimately pose more of a physical threat than other humans so the metaphor can be sketchy 
 - Superpowers as a metaphor for/manifestation of privilege, wealth, and power just makes more sense 
 - Congrats on doing one thing right