YMMV / Saga of the Exiles

• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Felice; YMMV somewhat on how much of a woobie she is. But for a certainty, bad things happened to her and tipped her into raving insanity (and power).
• Values Dissonance: The series has an awkward track record with LGBT characters. It's referenced that many of the human men who live with the Tanu in exile partake of homosexual acts; this is depicted as a disturbing sign of their adaptation to slavery, and no actual *relationship* between men is ever shown. Felice is a Psycho Lesbian who becomes obsessed with the man who raped and tortured her and calls him her 'beloved'; she has a one-sided attraction to another female character, but again no lesbian relationships are ever depicted. The crossdresser Mr. Betsy is treated as no more eccentric than any other exile who wants to dress up as a pirate or a samurai, but the most vitriol is aimed at the one transgender character. Tasha-Bybar is a post-op trans woman who is depicted as having a blasphemous obsession with female power. She is the human Quisling who figured out how to reverse the sterilizations of Exiled women so the Tanu can cross-breed with them. Not only does she perform the surgeries, she treats them as a sexual fetish, dressing up and performing a belly dance before carrying out the operation! By the author's description, In-Universe, 100% transgender modification is utterly impossible, and she has turned "real" women into Baby Factories because she can't get pregnant herself and thus sees the breeders as proxies;
  "Oh, you could stow away some real woman's fertilized egg in her fake uterus, and maybe shoot her full of preggy hormones, if you could get them in this primitive world — and perhaps the embryo would live a few weeks before dying. But that's all, lover. Maternity is a marvelous and tricky symbiosis. And of course, no one in our Galactic Milieu or anywhere else has ever made a true mother out of a male."

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