Red Queen
Written by Victoria Aveyard
Red Queen is a young adult fantasy novel written by Victoria Aveyard in 2015. The story follows Mare Barrow, a red blood, as she becomes a servant for King Tiberias Calore VI. The King is a silver blood who, with his blood type and supernatural powers associated with silver blood, rules over the powerless red-blooded citizens. Their world is divided between silver blooded people with supernatural powers and red-blooded people. The silver blooded citizens and court punish the red-blooded people with their supernatural powers. While Mare Barrow works for the King, she realizes that she has supernatural power even though she has red blood. With this realization she begins to secretly work with the Scarlet Guard to destroy the inequality between the red-blooded citizens and the silvers.
After reading the novel, it is clear that Aveyard wants her readers to question the power and inequality struggles that the red-blooded people face compared to the silvers. Additionally, it allows the readers to examine how people, especially higher authorities, overuse their powers. Although society is not divided through blood type, Aveyard is pointing out that there are other qualities that are used to discriminate one another.
Red Queen demonstrates Aijaz Ahmad’s concept of “Othering”. Othering is the idea that people treat and view people differently based on his or her beliefs, race, gender, etc. This concept creates the “one” and the “other”. In Red Queen the silver-blooded citizens and court are the “ones” and the red-blooded citizens are the “other”. The silver-blooded people see the red-blooded people as inferior because they have different blood types that do not offer supernatural powers. With that being said, the silver-blooded people treat red-blooded people with disrespect and overuse their supernatural powers on them. Additionally, the red-blooded people serve the silvers. It is impossible for the red-blood people to gain a higher status because of their blood type.