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.
