69 pages • 2 hours read
Tracy DeonnBloodmarked
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Series Context: The Legendborn Cycle
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses anti-Black racism, violence, rape, and enslavement.
Bloodmarked is the second book in The Legendborn Cycle after 2020’s Legendborn. Legendborn starts with 16-year-old Bree learning about her mother’s death before starting an early college program at the University of North Carolina, her mother’s alma mater, with her best friend Alice. Bree begins early college lost in grief. She sees monsters no one else can see. She later discovers these are Shadowborn, and she can see them because of her ancestor Vera’s Bloodcraft pact to help her ancestors sense danger. By happenstance, Bree’s early college peer mentor is Nick; she pieces together his involvement with the Order of the Round Table and, thinking the Legendborn have answers about her mother’s death, convinces him to reclaim his inheritance as the Scion of Arthur and sponsor her as a Page.
The Legendborn are made up of “Scions” who are “Awakened” and inherit the power of their Round Table ancestors. Scions are always born into their positions. When a Scion ages out of their inheritance at 22, they become “Lieges” and the inheritance passes to the next in the bloodline. Each Scion has a “Squire” selected from a group of “Pages” who compete for the honor. If chosen, Squires are bonded to Scions and inherit their knight’s power. Pages are picked from families of “Vassals,” who are regular “Onceborn” humans who pledge fealty and resources. Though anyone can technically become a Vassal, in practice, they are from wealthy white families. Legendborn belong to either the Southern Chapter at UNC or the Northern Chapter at an unstated location.
The “Order” is the governmental structure of Legendborn society. Samira makes it clear to Bree that loyalty to the Legendborn is not the same thing as loyalty to the Order. The Order is led by the Regents, a group of three ex-Scions with authoritarian power. Bloodmarked focuses on what the Regents would do in order to maintain power and hide the start of Camlann, the ancient war between Legendborn and Shadowborn that begins when Arthur is Awakened.
At the end of Legendborn, the Southern Chapter discovers that Bree is the Scion of Arthur, while Nick is the Scion of Lancelot. Bree’s ancestor, Vera, was raped by Samuel Davis, an enslaver. Samuel tried to kill Vera and her unborn child, but Vera used her root—a fictional magic inspired by Black Southern “rootwork” or hoodoo—to craft a Bloodcraft oath to keep her and her descendants safe. Nick’s ancestor, Lorraine, Samuel Davis’s wife, had an affair with her neighbor Paul Reynolds. While her child had the name of Davis, he carried the blood of Lancelot, while Arthur’s line transferred to Bree’s family. This parallels medieval Arthurian romances, which suggest a romantic relationship between Guinevere and Lancelot.
Ideological Context: Arthuriana, Nationalism, and White Supremacy
Arthuriana is the name given to materials that relate to the legend of King Arthur. Arthur originated as a legendary Welsh folk hero between 600-1200. In these tales, Arthur and his knights were demigod-like heroes whose exploits were inspired by Celtic folktales. The Historia Regum Brittaniae, completed in 1138 by Geoffrey of Monmouth, is a fictional history of the kings of Britain, beginning with Brutus from the legendary Troy. Geoffrey melded mythic and historical kings without distinction, and the Historia was taken as historical fact until the 16th century. In contrast to the Welsh Arthur, Geoffrey’s Arthur was a colonist who took over northern Europe. The Historia establishes Arthur as a Christian king, distancing him from his pagan roots. This Arthur was a rallying figure for nationalist sentiment in a Christian Europe on the precipice of the Second Crusade (1145-1149), in which English and European Crusaders slaughtered and raped thousands of European Jewish people on their way to “liberate” Jerusalem from Muslim rule, and the disastrous and bloody Third Crusade (1189-1192), in which Richard the Lionheart brutally executed 2,700 Muslim prisoners.
Tales of Arthur remained popular sources of nationalism in subsequent centuries. In Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s late 19th-century work Idylls of the King, Arthur exhibits “ideal manhood closed in real man” (Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “To the Queen.” Idylls of the King, edited by Ng E-Ching and David Widger. Project Gutenberg, 2022) to rejuvenate patriarchal nationalism in Victorian society. Winston Churchill wrote that Arthur “slaughtered innumerable hosts of foul barbarians and set decent folk an example for all time” (Churchill, Winston. “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Volume 1: The Birth of Britain.” RosettaBooks LLC, 1956). This paradigm reveals how Arthur’s legend becomes not a source of pride, but a justification for violence against non-Christian, non-white people.
In the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the 2021 attack on the US capital, far-right white supremacist hate groups flew flags with medieval iconography. These groups see their Islamophobic, anti-Black, and anti-queer views as a modern “Crusade,” and they use medieval literature such as Arthurian legend to justify their violence. Black medieval literature professor Cord Whitaker describes how “the idea of chivalry motivates white supremacists. They apply it to multiple objects. They defend their families. They defend their neighborhoods. They defend their way of life. The flag. Western Civilization. The police. Always they use the language of honor” (Whitaker, Cord J. “The Secret Power of White Supremacy—and How Anti-Racists Can Take It Back." Politico, 2020).
The Legendborn Cycle directly addresses the propensity of racists to co-opt Arthurian legend. In Bloodmarked, Alice says it’s “misinformation baked into mythology. It’s a classic strategy. Everyone is swept up thinking of themselves as heroes, the romanticism of it all” (228). In Legendborn, Lord Davis tells Bree she is unsuited to Arthur’s legacy because she is Black. In Bloodmarked, the Regents want to maintain their power, supremacy, and whiteness at any cost, even if it means murdering Bree and using the “archaic language, the restored antiques […] the robes, the rituals” of Arthurian legend as a distraction so “the Legendborn don’t see the reality of what the Order has become” (173). In this way, Tracy Deonn draws attention to how medieval legend is appropriated for violent ideology even today.
Genre Context: Contemporary Fantasy
Contemporary fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy set in a real location contemporary to the time of the novel’s composition. The Legendborn Cycle is set in the American South in the early 2020s. Often, fantasy books will contain commentary on social issues by allegorizing or metaphorizing them. For instance, a high-fantasy franchise like Andrzej Sapkowski’s Blood of Elves in The Witcher Saga can be said to portray the oppression and genocide of elves as a correlative to real racial and ethnic violence that is inflicted on non-white people. Black speculative fiction author N. K. Jemisin asks why so many fantasy books “use elves as an allegory for skin color issues” while almost always depicting them and other “fantasy races” as having white skin (Jemisin, N. K. “Saaaay. Why AREN’T There Brown Elves?" NKJemisin.com, 2008). Jemisin says fantasy’s tendency to elide “brown elves” erases the lived racial violence that these allegories are supposedly commenting on.
Deonn discusses the tendency of fantasy sub-genres to “skew fantasy,” saying that fantasy deals with social issues in “ways that are only internal to its own fantasy structure. Like, there’s people with blue horns and they don’t get to vote” (“Tracy Deonn Presents LEGENDBORN, in Conversation With Kwame Mbalia.” YouTube, uploaded by Flyleaf Books, 2021). Deonn says that instead of reading about fantasy characters with constructed in-world differences, she wished more fantasy books included “characters [who] looked like me, and where the things they were wrestling with actually also wrestled with the stuff I had to deal with in the contemporary world” (“Tracy Deonn Presents LEGENDBORN”). She has thus constructed her series around systemic, real-world issues so that the characters’ struggles are recognizable to the reader. Striking this balance challenges “all sorts of systems of power,” including the prevailing norms of the fantasy genre (“Tracy Deonn Presents LEGENDBORN”).
Deonn clearly distinguishes the contemporary fantasy of The Legendborn Cycle from the urban fantasy. She says that urban fantasy gets “applied in weird ways” to her series, which “takes place in the South on an almost-suburban campus […] This is not urban fantasy” (“Tracy Deonn presents LEGENDBORN”). Deonn is referencing the marketing tendency to use the adjective “urban” as a racialized descriptor meaning Black. In media genres, especially music, “urban” has been used to “reinforce stereotypes and marginalize [B]lack musicians for decades” (McEvoy, Jemima. “Here’s How ‘Urban,’ A Term Plagued By Racial Stereotypes, Came To Be Used To Describe Black Musicians." Forbes, 2020). Through the mid-20th century, federal programs targeted areas labelled “urban” where “poor people and people of color were concentrated, deepening the interchangeability of ‘urban’ and ‘[B]lack in the public vocabulary” (McEvoy). Moreover, this interchangeability silos “Black artists, lumping them into one homogenous group and tarring a wide expanse of Black talent with a very broad and biased brush” (Robinson, Nina. “The Problem With ‘Urban.’” Representology: The Journal of Media and Diversity, 2021). This association between the word urban and discrimination prompted prominent Black musician and producer Tyler the Creator to say, “I don’t like that word, it’s like a politically correct way of saying the N-word to me” (Robinson). In the 2020s, the music industry began to drop this descriptor, though publishing industries continue to market books as urban fantasy despite their author’s wishes. Works by Black artists in all forms of media demand more nuance, as indicated by the reactions of people like Deonn and Tyler the Creator when they are assigned this label.
