An ubiquitous element
of the superhero genre is the origin story. How did this extraordinary
individual get these amazing powers? Is he an alien from a dead planet powered
up by our sun? Was he bitten by a radioactive spider? Was she forged from clay
and empowered by the Greek gods? Did he have a ridiculous budget and some
deeply unhealthy coping mechanism after the death of his parents?
In Urban Fantasy we
see a trend of another origin story to explain the special magic a protagonist
has. Being a POC - or having a POC ancestor at very least.
To be clear here,
we’re not talking about having a magical POC protagonist. This is Urban
Fantasy, your characters will have magic or other woo-woo, it’s kind of what
this genre is about and we’re definitely in favour of several of those
characters being POC. Awoke, The
Shadowmancer, The Keys
Trilogy, Rayne
Whitmore Series, World of
the Lupi and many others are not problematic because they have POC who happens
to have magical abilities - far from it. They have magic and are POC but
at no point did the books try to suggest that their woo-woo exists BECAUSE they
are Black or Asian.
Equally we’d expect
many of these POC, their lives and their magic to be affected by their
ethnicity and culture. We love and celebrate books like The Black
Dog’s Drums, which excellently incorporates Yoruba derived religions into the
setting, the world building and the characterisation. The same applies to the Habitat
Series and the Egyptian elements of the Shadowchasers
Series. The Jane
Yellowrock Series links a lot of Jane’s woo-woo to her being Native American - but being
Native American also informs her characterisation and her history. It’s not
just a convenient label to justify her accessing exotic woo-woo. The Changeling
Sisters has a lot of the magic related to Korean, Latinx and Hawai’ian culture
- but that’s because it has Korean, Latinx and Hawai’ian characters whose
ethnicity is an integral part of who they are, the world building and the
story. Ultimately they work because there is considerable research and respect
for the source material - something we can see with depictions of western
mythologies like Irish and Norse in, for example, the Iron Druid Series.
We want more of this,
so much more; with both white and western dominated media there are so many
stories this genre could be telling by integrating POC and the mythologies and
magic of other cultures and I’m still mourning that some of these series have
come to an end.
But that isn’t
achieved by having books treat Voodoun beliefs, Rroma heritage, or Native
American ancestry as the same as a Freak Lab Accident, super-soldier serum or a
Green Lantern Ring.
A glaring example of
this, as well as why it’s so problematic, comes from Midnight Texas.
This has the special prize of having Manfred have his psychic powers in the books because of a Native American ancestry.
And in the TV series because of his Romani ancestry. It says a lot about how a
minority culture has been represented that you can easily exchange one for
another and not really change the story, magic or anything else.
Ancestry
is a common trick in these origin stories - after all, if Superman can get his powers from
being an alien, why can’t Jeremy in the Otherworld series get his hands on some
quasi Japanese Ofuda from his absent Japanese mother? Hemlock
Grove threw in some basic Romani stereotypes to go with their using being
Romani as why characters were psychic and… werewolves somehow. Twilight
is also notorious for creating an entirely fake Native American mythology to
justify the presence of a pack of werewolves. The appalling on several levels Houseof Night series also went with that Native American woo-woo - deciding to
have the protagonist, Zoey, be Cherokee - but only so they could introduce lots
of woo-woo and turquoise and smudge sticks and a whole fake mythology while the
Mercy
Thompson Series is pretty notorious for treating all the Native Americans in the book
as walking avatars of woo-woo. Literally all of them.
In all of these cases
the actual ethnicity, culture or characterisation that should stem from having
a POC character is absent. The writers weren’t interested in creating fleshed
out, well researched and developed POC characters or in respectfully portraying
and representing non-western cultures in a way that showed research and regard.
They want the woo-woo. They want the different, the exotic, the alien.
In many ways it’s
similar to how many
book and TV series will introduce a monster from a non-western culture for a
more “exotic” episode-of-the-week that we’ve spoken about tbefore… why have a werewolf when you can have
a wendigo? And it shares the same flaws - deciding one of your main
characters is POC or has POC ancestry purely so you have some backstory for
their woo-woo isn’t representation or respectful. It’s appropriative and it’s
belittling - it clearly sends the message that the writers are pretty
indifferent about these actual cultures and just wants something suitably
dehumanised and “exotic”, something that is sufficiently “other” to most of
their readers to justify why they would have such different powers. For DC that
meant an alien from Krypton. For Urban Fantasy a Romani or Cherokee are
considered alien enough.
This is backed by and
propagates harmful stereotyping, promoting the idea that POC are both
inherently Other and also inherently Mystical. While being “mystical” sounds
like a positive, or at least neutral, trait, it comes with baggage. The
Mystical is often regarded as the opposite to science, knowledge and modern
civilisation. Our seeing POC as more believable as magic users than a white
person ultimately stems from us not seeing POC - or POC culture - as civilised,
as seeing them more backwards, more savage and barbarous and credulous (or if
you want to use euphemisms “closer to nature” or “in harmony” or “spiritual”).
We’re able to see POC as more inherently magical than white people because
we’ve decided that science, technology, reason and modern civilisation is a
white person realm. And if you want your character to tap into that sweet
woo-woo, then we need to get that character hooked up with some non-western
connections
There can be no
greater proof of just how little these writers care about the cultures they are
drawing from then by how little the woo-woo they portray actually reflects the
beliefs of the culture they’re appropriating. The Anita Blake Series
regularly refers to Anita’s dead Mexican mother for angst - but also as a link
to her necromancy and vodun in general. In fact, all vodun practitioners in the
books are non-Black Mexican characters. At which point it’s hard not to think
that the author has seen one too many Dia de Muertos parades and had an almost
hilarious misunderstanding of where vodun comes from.
The, again dreadful, House
of Night Series invents and entirely new mythology to attribute to the
Cherokee people for the sake of her plot - which Twilight similarly does
to the Quilites.
This is especially
egregious because these cultures and mythologies are not dead or historic - or
fictional. These faiths still have adherents - there are numerous practitioners
of voodoo, santeria and other Yoruba-derived religions who deserve better than
to have their religion be used as a cheap trick to give a character woo-woo.
This faith, along with the cultural and religious practices of Native Americans
and Rroma continue to be suppressed and persecuted - these fictional
portrayals, appropriations and outright ongoing colonisation, further demeans
and disrespects that, reducing them to some fictionalised and unimportant that
is free to be taken and twisted however the consumer desires. These people,
these beliefs, these cultures are real, they continue and they are suppressed
and twisted - and when included in media it must be with the greatest respect
and acknowledgement of this otherwise you are just furthering this suppression.
Especially since
continued depiction of something as fictional, or even as historic, contributes
to the erasure of these cultures and people. By presenting them as fantasy
stories that can be easily and casually manipulated, we are undermining their
actually reality in the minds of the reader - we’re presenting them as something
as unreal or unimportant as the author’s own fictional world building.
You can’t pretend to
be respecting or representing a culture when you do nothing to include it
beyond stealing the name - or when you just make shit up and attribute it to
said culture. If you need to create a justification for why your character has
powers, name them the chosen one or expose them to cosmic rays - but don’t take
an ethnicity, a culture, a faith, a history and reduce it to the same level of
depth and importance as a radioactive spider.
