C.S. Pacat

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Name: Catherine[1] S. Pacat
Also Known As: freece, supacat
cspacat, S. U. Pacat
Occupation: Author
Medium: online, books, comics
Works: Captive Prince, FENCE, Dark Rise
Official Website(s): freece at LiveJournal
cspacat at Twitter
Fan Website(s):
On Fanlore: Related pages

C. S. Pacat is an Australian author and former fanwriter, best known as the creator of the Captive Prince series, firstly published as a original web series on LiveJournal, in mid-2009, under the username freece, gaining a following before going pro.

About

Pacat was born in Melbourne, Australia, educated at the University of Melbourne.[1] She[note 1] lived in several different cities including Perugia where she studied at Perugia University, and Tokyo, where she lived for five years.[2][3] Pacat wrote the Captive Prince trilogy around her day job as a translator while training as a geologist.[4]

Pacat is queer and genderqueer, using both she/her and he/him pronouns.[5] She identifies as "a proud wog,"[6] and states that this played an influence while writing the Captive Prince trilogy: "As for the influence on Captive Prince, I'm a bisexual wog, and Damen is a bisexual wog - so there's that[7]....There's a lot of wog-politics in the series, although its rarely read from that perspective outside of Australia[8]".

Controversy & Misunderstanding

Due to her Australian origin and for using the slur term wog to describe herself and her character Damien from Captive Prince, Pacat made it clear that there might be some difficulty in explaining this outside his home country.

Due to the lack of interpretation by some readers and people who have never consumed his work - in addition to the political theme of it and the approach to physical and sexual slavery -- led to misunderstandings that rated the author in some countries as a person whom reading should be avoided, with the creation of Twitter threads of problematic books and authors where his name and his work appeared.

The lack of interpretation and/or perhaps in-depth research also led the publisher who published the work in Brazil to erroneously report that Captive Prince had been published on Wattpad instead of LiveJournal. This error added to the old controversies due to previous disagreements plus the cover used in the first version in Brazilian Portuguese increased the level of criticism from some groups and people and specific.[9][note 2]

Publications

Influences

C.S. Pacat has quoted The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett as one of the main inspirations for Captive Prince.

For FENCE, inspirations cited include Haikyuu!!, Hikaru no Go, Check please and Yuri on Ice.

Quotes

On starting as an online pseudonymous writer:

The serial format really allows you as a writer to interact with your audience directly. And as an artist there’s so many moments where you have to be kind of vulnerable and by that I mean write something that might seem embarrassing or like ‘aw no that’s too sentimental, that’s too this, that’s too that’ and it’s really easy to back off from those moments. But because the audience was there and they were really supportive I got to learn, it’s when I’m feeling at my most vulnerable and like ‘aw should I be doing this?’ That’s the moment when the audience responds the most. So that’s the most powerful stuff.

“Another simple reason was people would develop passionate caring for a character that I didn’t realise was important at all, like guardsmen B or something would get a dedicated fanbase. And then I’d realise I have to go away and actually think about this character a little bit more. And I think if not for that meticulous caring of the reader-base I might have been a little bit lazier about that kind of stuff.

thegeekiary.com interview

When you write pseudonymously as I did, you’re allowed a kind of creative freedom that you don’t get when people are watching you. As soon as pressures are attached to your work, they do change things. Everyone who reads online writings understands the unconstrained way of expression. I know when Captive Prince got picked up commercially, there was a lot of positive talk around it saying this is new, or what is this. I think it’s been published as a different genre in every country so far – it’s been published in not fitting in a general mould.

Sydneyunleashed.com interview

On writing queer stories:

When I was growing up, my adolescence was in the ’90s, and if you were interested in genre fiction, books with any kind of queer representation were really thin on the ground. It was literally possible to finish all the books that had any kind of LGBT content. You could turn the last page and finish the book and think, “What’s next?” because you had finished everything. So like a lot of readers that age, I was really hungry just to see different representations and I was always looking for it. [...]

So when I started to write, I knew that was what I wanted to do but I also knew that there was very little like it on commercial bookshelves. So the reason I originated that book as an online serial was because I simply assumed “this cannot be a book”. Because I knew what a book was, and a book was nothing like what I was doing.

meldmagazine interview, pt.1

I think the biggest challenge but also the greatest strength of the [male/male] genre is that it is comparatively new. [...]

And I think that on the one hand, that’s very liberating because it means you can construct the new when you write. [...] You’re a little bit more free when it comes to gender constructs. Although, unfortunately, no one is ever free from gender constructs, you’re always engaging with it in some way.

Also, you’re slightly freer in terms of reader expectations. How the story goes, how the erotic scenes are going to play out – there is much more of a blank canvas. What makes that more difficult though, in writing, is that the absolute most difficult thing to do is to imagine something new.

meldmagazine interview, pt.1

I am also really into homo erotica or sexuality or power games and interactions. That kind of intense homo erotic subject is not always found in [fantasy] so I explored that.

Sydneyunleashed.com interview

On fans and fandom:

I feel like the characters belong to the readers. I mean obviously, in my head they belong to me, but once they are on the page, they belong to the reader. The reader will learn things about the text that I never even knew about the text. The reader will see problems with the text that I might not recognise, and I think that’s great! It encourages a dialogue.

meldmagazine interview, pt.2

[interview with The Geekiary]
I love that they’re writing fan fiction about my characters, and the only sad tragic part of it is that I cannot read it. I feel I can’t just because I don’t think it’s appropriate in the sense that I might get influenced by what they write. I think it’s important to keep my version intact. I wish that I could read it, every now and again I’ll hear someone on the periphery of my social media where someone will be like there’s a blah blah AU of Captive Prince and I think WHY CAN’T I READ THAT? But I love it.[10]
[response to a fan on Goodreads]
I'm always amazed by how creative fans are, by the fanart, cosplay and enthusiasm. I love seeing different interpretations of characters.

[...]

[...] fascinated by the way that the book is first written by the writer, and then in a sense written again when it is read by a reader, who brings their imagination and ideas to the story.[11]

Resources

Notes & References

Notes

  1. ^ Pacat uses both she/her and he/him pronouns. This article uses feminine pronouns for consistency.
  2. ^ The cover art used in the Captive Prince trilogy in Brazil diverges in context with the international covers used in other countries, showing a knight in iron armor, set a medieval environment of dark tones that makes no reference to the work's LGBT content. Many Brazilian fans accused the publisher of using a straight marketing strategy, selling a medieval bait and hiding the real theme of the books, in a kind of straightbait/hetbait alluding to the term queerbait.

References

  1. ^ a b Myke Bartlett (2015-06-09). "C.S.Pacat, Melburnian author of Captive Prince". The Weekly Review. Archived from the original on 2017-07-04. Retrieved 2016-01-30.
  2. ^ About C.S. Pacat, Archived version
  3. ^ "C.S. PACAT". Penguin Books Australia. Archived from the original on 6 January 2018. Retrieved 4 January 2018.
  4. ^ "Erotic fantasy trilogy Catherine Pacat's Captive Prince finds niche". The Australian. Archived from the original on 2017-01-24.
  5. ^ Pacat, C. S. (2017-11-04). "Heya all, I'm out as queer, and genderqueer. I've been out for almost twenty years (since the 90s!)". @cspacat. Archived from the original on 2022-05-19. Retrieved 2019-02-23.
  6. ^ Pacat, C. S. (2016-08-28). "I'm a proud wog, though the Australian minority-ethnic identity "wog" can be difficult to explain to non-Australians". @cspacat. Archived from the original on 6 May 2017. Retrieved 2019-02-23.
  7. ^ cspacat (2016-08-29). "As for the influence on Captive Prince, I'm a bisexual wog, and Damen …". Twitter. Archived from the original on 2022-07-17. Retrieved 2019-02-23.
  8. ^ Pacat, C. S. (2016-08-29). "There's a lot of wog-politics in the series, although its rarely read from that perspective outside of Australia". @cspacat. Archived from the original on 2021-09-11. Retrieved 2019-02-23.
  9. ^ Thiago Coss (2023-01-23). "EXCLUSIVO! A trilogia "Príncipe cativo" será relançada pela Plataforma21!". Blogger (in português do Brasil). Archived from the original on 2023-06-22.
  10. ^ Undie Girl aka. Von (2015-04-17). "A Chat With Captive Prince Author C.S. Pacat". The Geekiary. Archived from the original on 2015-04-20.
  11. ^ C.S. Pacat. "I'm always amazed by how creative fans are, by the fanart, …". Goodreads. Archived from the original on 2023-06-20.
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