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A review by jordandotcom
Rebels: City of Indra: The Story of Lex and Livia by Maya Sloan, Kendall Jenner, Kylie Jenner
1.0
It is deeply strange to read this & its heavy-handed critiques of beauty standards - complaining about facial procedures to eliminate aging and undergoing machines that are meant to make your waist as small as possible - and at the same time to know it’s “written” by two women who use their fame to hawk lip fillers and detox teas and plastic surgeries.
At a purely analytical level, the most grating thing about this is that while it amplifies social/cultural norms to the level of dystopian allegory to Make a Point, it doesn’t really seem to understand Why These Things Are Problems to begin with. There is nothing artful about the worldbuilding - it is done like blunt force trauma. Any meaningful critique is drowned out by utter rubbish - whatever it tries to say about the harms of beauty industry is washed away by the narrative’s love for those same things, such as its insistence that you know Livia’s assassin (Lex) canonically has big tits. The assassination attempt being the result of systemic exploitation and class stratification is irrelevant - no, instead you must know that at least this scum of a girl killing an elite is ~beautiful~. Also. Their dad created legal eugenics in this world???????
It tries to emphasize the Importance of Things simply by Capitalizing Them, such as a Proper Young Man, and Cohabitant. The world adopts the typical structures present in western society and thinks it is effectively critiquing them by merely upping each thing up a notch. No, one does not simply diet and detox and fast in this world - rather, there is a machine that cinches a girl’s waist for them - but only if they’re rich, of course. No, the nuclear family isn’t simply a social expectation but rather a law - unless you’re rich enough that it doesn’t matter. And of course, these elements are only seen as unfortunate because Livia, the girl entirely Unlike Any Other Girl Ever, does not fit neatly into these expectations - however this does not pose any meaningful resistance to the structures of marginalization. It sees real things in this world that harm people, and turns them into flimsy caricatures that are impossible to take seriously. It becomes an Honor for a “scholarship girl”, an orphan from the orphanage where children are regularly sacrificed to who-knows-what, to join the force that aims to violently police the Rock Bottom - a place where the only alleged crime is simply that one lacks privilege and is thus criminal. But is this arc truly a critique of the way policing functions in the US, the way that poverty alone seems to become a crime? No, rather it seems to embrace all of these horrible facets of society, and then believes that it makes a Poignant Point about them by Capitalizing Things. By trying to Say Everything, it says nothing at all.
So with all this said, it’s no wonder one of the Jenner sisters (I don’t care to remember which one) happily partook in a commercial where simply handing a police officer a pepsi resolved police brutality and every bit of violence that supports it. Based on this work of “theirs”, it’s clear that neither care to comprehend what a dystopia is meant to say or do, but rather use it to forcefully point at their understanding of a problem and say “wow, this is a problem that Originated From Somewhere For Sure”.
At a purely analytical level, the most grating thing about this is that while it amplifies social/cultural norms to the level of dystopian allegory to Make a Point, it doesn’t really seem to understand Why These Things Are Problems to begin with. There is nothing artful about the worldbuilding - it is done like blunt force trauma. Any meaningful critique is drowned out by utter rubbish - whatever it tries to say about the harms of beauty industry is washed away by the narrative’s love for those same things, such as its insistence that you know Livia’s assassin (Lex) canonically has big tits. The assassination attempt being the result of systemic exploitation and class stratification is irrelevant - no, instead you must know that at least this scum of a girl killing an elite is ~beautiful~. Also. Their dad created legal eugenics in this world???????
It tries to emphasize the Importance of Things simply by Capitalizing Them, such as a Proper Young Man, and Cohabitant. The world adopts the typical structures present in western society and thinks it is effectively critiquing them by merely upping each thing up a notch. No, one does not simply diet and detox and fast in this world - rather, there is a machine that cinches a girl’s waist for them - but only if they’re rich, of course. No, the nuclear family isn’t simply a social expectation but rather a law - unless you’re rich enough that it doesn’t matter. And of course, these elements are only seen as unfortunate because Livia, the girl entirely Unlike Any Other Girl Ever, does not fit neatly into these expectations - however this does not pose any meaningful resistance to the structures of marginalization. It sees real things in this world that harm people, and turns them into flimsy caricatures that are impossible to take seriously. It becomes an Honor for a “scholarship girl”, an orphan from the orphanage where children are regularly sacrificed to who-knows-what, to join the force that aims to violently police the Rock Bottom - a place where the only alleged crime is simply that one lacks privilege and is thus criminal. But is this arc truly a critique of the way policing functions in the US, the way that poverty alone seems to become a crime? No, rather it seems to embrace all of these horrible facets of society, and then believes that it makes a Poignant Point about them by Capitalizing Things. By trying to Say Everything, it says nothing at all.
So with all this said, it’s no wonder one of the Jenner sisters (I don’t care to remember which one) happily partook in a commercial where simply handing a police officer a pepsi resolved police brutality and every bit of violence that supports it. Based on this work of “theirs”, it’s clear that neither care to comprehend what a dystopia is meant to say or do, but rather use it to forcefully point at their understanding of a problem and say “wow, this is a problem that Originated From Somewhere For Sure”.