POC as Origin Story

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.

Romance: Persistence is Not a Virtue

There are many times in life where persistence and patience are rewarded. Times when we - and certainly the characters we read - should fight on no matter what, against all obstacles, in the teeth of the most vicious opposition. After all, a hero winning against all the odds is always good for an epic story. And it’s almost a trope now that if your hero gets into a fight this will start out badly for them, they’ll be beaten until they rally, the dramatic music plays and they give their enemies a good kicking. Everyone loves a scrappy underdog story and there’s nothing quite so underdog as rising from the ashes of defeat

Then we come to romance and… this trope continues. Not only continues but it has been thoroughly embedded in our society - faint heart never won fair lady, women play hard to get and, most toxically “no means yes”. We have entire genres of romance, rom-coms and more centred around the plucky male underdog, being rejected and refusing to take that no for an answer, persevering and then winning the reluctant woman’s stubborn heart. All “no” means is that you need to try harder, try again and again and again until you wear her down.

Or, to put it another way, men don’t take no for an answer and continue to stalk, harass and generally annoy a woman until she gives up. These stories don’t show love or romance and these men don’t approach their prospective love interests as people - but as prizes to win, obstacles to overcome to earn their eventual reward.

This can be very prevalent in long running Urban Fantasy series where a relationship is a slow burn rather than an insta love.

It takes Kate Daniels several books before her relationship with Curran became a thing. Oh he fixated on her quite early in the series but she wasn’t buying, despite being impressed by his physique. She resisted him, insulted him generally tried to make it clear that they were never going to be a thing. While he pursued her, pushed her, challenged her and even broke into her house (this seems to be a theme of these relationships - it’s not true love if the guy hasn’t broken into her house at some point).

I love Kate and Curran’s relationship. I love it, they’re awesome together - but they way they got there was a problem. Kate said no, Kate refused but Curran pushed and pushed and persisted and thought and… won.

We see this with the Otherworld series’ original partners - Elena and Clay. Their relationship starts in the rockiest possible way with Clay biting Elena and risking her life turning her into a relationship without her consent. After some rocky beginnings she runs - yes she has other issues as well prompting her to run, but after leaving the country she is very clear that she doesn’t want Clay in her life. Like a good Urban Fantasy protagonist, he takes this as a challenge, pushing back into her life, using circumstances to move into her home (and wedge between her and her actual fiance) and even getting handsy. Elena says no to Clay, Elena does not want him in her life - yet he persists. And he wins.

White Knights, Easy Moral High Ground & Hollow Heroes

Often, writers look for short cuts. Quick easy tropes, themes, concepts or scenes to helpfully convey an idea to the audience without necessarily going into too much detail. This can be an excellent way of quickly getting a point across without being sidetracked. It can also be lazy, shallow, characterisation and world building

One such habit is what TV Tropes calls “Kicking the Dog” itself apparently a Hitchcock reference. Basically having your villain do something pointlessly cruel to show that we have a genuinely evil person here. Their evil is pointless, it’s shallow, it achieves nothing other than cruelty for the sake of cruelty

This simple villain labelling is now being rebranded from "kicking the dog" to "being a bigot, as media in general at least pretends to be more aware of marginalised people and prejudice, now starting to use bigotry as the dog kicking. Your Designated Bad Guy won’t kick a puppy, but they will drop the N-word or F-word or say something grossly and gaspingly misogynist.

The flip side to this is when our designated hero - or otherwise designated good guy, gets a special White Knight moment. Bigotry happens and they get to stand up and nobly declare that Prejudice Is Wrong, guys, sometimes with a convoluted PSA dumped into the story to make it clear how very much this character Does Not Approve of these things.

On the face of it this sounds like a good and noble intention - after all challenging bigotry is always good, right? But the point of these scenes are not to challenge bigotry or declare bigotry as wrong - these scenes use bigotry to build up their main character as a nice person we should support. The prejudice they’re challenging is somewhat irrelevant - the character could achieve the same effect by hugging a kitten or volunteering in a soup kitchen or being nice to their granny. The actual victim of the prejudice is generally forgotten or irrelevant; any analysis of the prejudice is incidental to the main point: that the Hero is a Good Person. It’s like the scene in Game of Thrones when Daenerys is hailed as “Mhysa” and raised up by a crowd of brown people: that scene wasn’t about liberation, freeing people, ending slavery - it was about the greater glory of Daenerys.

It’s not even a half way decent indication that the writers are even basically aware of the issues they’re challenging. Some classic examples include Mist using some random extras using the f-word to insult Adrian and Jay, eventual good guy and heroine’s love interest, championing him. This is from a show which managed to be one of the most epicly homophobic shows we’ve seen: and this was certainly not a show that covered the homophobia Adrian faced even remotely well. Or there’s the infamous House of Night Series where Zoe has several convoluted moments where she calls out homophobia, racism and sexism when faced with blatant, easy take downs to remind us she’s a good person (while doubling down on ableism, because someone once challenged the author on her repeated use of ret*rded so she had to include a DEFENCE of that). Yet this series fails on… just about every possible level one can fail on and most certainly does not develop any of these marginalised characters in anything resembling a decent fashion.

Crimson Death (Anita Blake #25) by Laurell K Hamilton

Dear gods. I’m almost stunned. This is gonna be a long one.

This was, quite frankly, the worst Anita Blake book of the entire series. Yes, I’m aware of the very rocky road of this series. I have followed it from its early moments of awesome as it careened every downwards, occasionally showing sparkles of hope but ultimately plunging deeper into the abys and hitting rock bottom and then positively wallowing there

Well, this book went deeper. At rock bottom it pulled out mining equipment and made a spirited effort to reach the centre of the earth. And may have achieved it. If I was not already 25 books into this series I would have DNFed this book so hard, formatted my tablet, exorcised said tablet, burned it and then scattered the ashes over at least 3 different bodies of water. I honestly don’t even know where to begin because there’s just so. Much. Awful.

Ok, let’s start with the rapetastic, misogynist, homophobic shitstorm that is Damian, his partner Cardinale and this utter trainwreck of awful

Firstly, we have to remember that all women in this series are terrible if they are not Anita. Oh, since the very very very straight Anita who is still straight decided to start having sex with women in the straightest way possible there are some female names following Anita around pretending to be full characters while fawning and serving but not exactly existence (And, hey, I’m generous about calling Anita Blake characters, characters-I’ve even accepted Micah as a character rather than a walking penis). Fortune, Echo, Magda – they’re just names that drift around behind her without actually doing anything – which is lucky for them

Because when we actually have a woman? They become a parody of awfulness – Cardinale is presented as utterly irredeemable, unreasonable, incapable of being professional or mature or sensible. Her every attitude is treated as utterly unacceptable – the idea the she actually wants a monogamous relationship with Damian is considered not to be love but “obsessive jealousy” (this applies to anyone who wants monogamy in this series because Laurell K Hamilton has decided this is a sign of deep emotional damage and evil); she is violent, emotional, uncontrollable – and literally says she would rather Damian be dead than with anyone else. She commits the unforgiveable sin of decorating their shared room with flower prints (how dare she be so female!). She also literally loses her shit because Damian has the temerity to LOOK at other women and feed on them (he is a vampire, she is a vampire). She is incapable of doing her job properly because she can’t stop stalking Damian.

Oh and she’s thin because she’s starving – just in case you thought for a second Anita was saying something almost complementary about her. And in case we weren’t clear we have this:

Cardinale is like the ultimate drama queen, an extreme girl. Let’s not be subtle about the misogyny, let’s just lay it out there.

Of course Anita, we’re reminded repeatedly, is “one of the guys” and Damian, a man who is literally a thousand years old, says “You don’t think like any woman I’ve ever met”. She’s not like those other terribad awful women, guys! Don’t worry!

She also coins the phrase “girl trap”. This is when terrible, manipulative, awful, emotional, unstable woman asks mean unfair questions of her long suffering man who cannot possibly give a good answer so is being set up for an argument. She uses this phrase a lot.

So having established that Damian’s long term monogamous girlfriend is the absolute worst, we throw in some woo-woo reason why Damian absolutely has to have lots of sex with other people (monogamy is evil!) and we run into the next great trainwreck of this book – rape.

Damian agrees to sleep with (non sexually) Anita and Nathaniel because of their woo-woo bonds which means if he doesn’t he gets terrible nightmares (remember, this is the series where if you don’t consent to all the sexy times, the magic will force it on you and absolutely no-one is allowed to ever say no to sex). Nathaniel is bisexual (this book, it tends to alternate depending on the author’s mood) and wants to have sex with Damian – Damian is described as “very heterosexual” and “homophobic” because he doesn’t want to have sex with men (yes, as we’ve seen repeatedly before, while Laurel K Hamilton is happy to include the shit storm of homophobia we’ve seen repeatedly, and continually degrade and demean gay men and lesbians, she also thinks homophobia means “not wanting to have sex with your own gender”. Which is, y’know, what “heterosexual” actually means.) So to get past that hurdle Damian borrows Anita’s magic to mind control Damien to having sex with him.

Let’s repeat that – Nathaniel uses magic to rape Damian. Not only rape him but he uses this magic to change Damian’s sexual orientation so he’s bisexual (for Nathaniel only – of course – because these books never deal with LGBTQ orientation, only as a fetish – which I’ll come to).

Anita’s concern about all this? Is how hot she finds two men together – and concern about the lack of using condoms. They don’t have the slightest concern that Damian has just been raped and his sexual orientation magically converted (which is revolting and terrifying).

What’s almost ironic is through this Anita has finally acknowledged that the Mother of All Darkness raped her and several weretigers by mind controlling them with mystical woo-woo and into an orgy they don’t remember. Excellent that this is finally acknowledged as rape and Anita has issues form that, especially about having sex with the men who were involved – except we go from that to her cozying up with Micah who raped her on first meeting and no-one even coming close to acknowledging that Nathaniel did the same thing in this very book to Damian and Anita, including forcing Damian to completely discard his sexual orientation – and there’s not even a second of acknowledgement of this even while labelling the previous rape. How can someone not draw the comparisons?

Of course Damian isn’t mad or upset or even slightly perturbed by this because why would he be about a rape that Anita is getting off on? He even recriminates himself for daring to have issues about having sex with another man (how dare he not wanting to have sex with someone he’s not attracted to!)

We end up with Nathaniel being sad that Damien may be angry with him so Damien gives his rapist a hug – and then keeps on hugging and comforting him. He even strips off in front of Nathaniel, his rapist, to turn him on. And he says this:

“I love that you both want me”

This. Is. His. Rapist. Not one day after the rape and he’s stripping off in front of him and saying how much he loves that his rapist is turned on by his naked body.

Anita notes “I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him so relaxed and happy before”.

Hahaha, yes isn’t it wonderful how rape and mind control totally help with centuries of abuse! Dear gods I need a drink with this… Damian has been RAPED INTO HAPPINESS aaarglebaaargleeeaaaaar

We also continue the theme of no-one having a right to say no to sex. See, Jean-Claude is concerned about sexual contact with Cynric because when he joined them he was under 17 and he’s still under 20 – Jean-Claude sees him as a child an even calls him “nephew” because that’s how he envisages that relationship (which I prefer to Anita’s “I’m having sex with this boy and also going to parent’s evenings as his guardian at school” approach. Because uckies uckies uckies). Well clearly Jean-Claude has to get over that because how dare he have sexual reservations about anyone?! Nope that is now allowed in the Anitaverse so we have an awful scene of them bringing Cynric into a foursome with Jean-Claude, Anita and Nicky – because Jean-Claude cannot have any boundaries, no-one can.

Oh and Nicky – he’s still a “bride” of Anita – which means he’s a slave who not only has to what Anita wants but literally exists to make her happy. He can feel her emotions and is driven to make her happy – which goes beyond slavery and completely removes any capacity for consent. And, yes, of course she’s having sex with him.

Let’s look at the homophobia of this book because ye gods it keeps on getting worse. Nathaniel justifies his rape of Damian in that straight men are totally fine with other guys giving them oral sex or if they’re the top in anal sex.

She’s also laid the groundwork for future straight people being forced into sex for her amusement – members of Harlquinn are losing their powers unless they have a sexual relationship with Jean-Claude and co. To keep their power, they have to have accept sexual useage AGAIN. More compromised sexual consent, more sex between people of the same gender who are most definitely straight straight straight.

This all just really sums up how Laurell K Hamilton treats sex between people of the same gender – it’s never a matter of LGBTQ identity, never a matter of attraction and rarely about relationship. Sex between 2 men or 2 women is a fetish that straight people engage in. She reduces being LGBTQ to being a kink – this is even more clear when she degrades and demeans gay men and lesbians as “conservative” or even prides (and even straight in previous books) because they won’t have sex with the opposite gender. The only remaining gay characters she has are not even really present in this book – we have Jade, a lesbian, who has been completely demeaned and sidelined because she won’t have sex with men and she’s portrayed as damaged and broken. And Kane is just an evil jealous monster standing in the way of Asher being properly redeemed and accepting how awful he is. In fact, this looks like Asher’s path to redemption back to lady-loving and Anita: kick out and turning on the gay man he loves.

Dead Ice (Anita Blake Series #24) by Laurell K Hamilton

  

Let me get a drink. No, a bigger drink. Right, let’s dive into this one

When this book started I actually felt hope. Actual, real hope. Because we had a storyline – an actual storyline that drew on previous world building and involved Anita working with the police and solving crime and even *gasp* actually doing zombie stuff. It was the same kind of false hope Affliction gave me. Alas, hope is a cruel, fickle mistress

We opened with Anita helping to track down a zombie sex trafficking ring, a ring that has zombies with souls being used as sex slaves which is something that she’s seen before. It could have been interesting, involved lots of police work and woo-woo…. Except after that introduction we then put that entire storyline on hold for over 300 pages, it barely comes up again for the rest of the book. Whyyy? You had a plot here! There was plot! Why ignore it?

So what did we have instead? Endless humping? Actually no, the last few Anita Blake books have actually managed to escape the trap of being porn. Rather than have endless sex we tend to have endless talking about who Anita should have sex with

This is not better.

Part of what consumes the book is the sheer longwindedness of distractions which I’ve said over and over. Anita is investigating a crime, so why are we spending this much time talking about her engagement with one of the FBI agents? Before they even play the tape (they have tapes? Actual tapes? Who has tapes? I’m sure there’s a whole generation of actual adults now who don’t even know what a tape is) with the terribad zombie porn on it, we have 2 solid pages of them discussing how terrible it will be and how the site will bother them. 2 pages. Just play the damn tape already – mooooove.

This is the writing throughout the book. That same scene with them waiting to play the tape comes with an aside about the ethics/morality/opinions of Anita marrying a vampire (why are you discussing it with these people? Is no-one here going to pretend to be a professional?). The entire first chapter is literally “we need you to look at these tapes” which they don’t watch until chapter 2! And even then they start discussing the police force’s acronym before playing the tape. The acronym.

Again I have to say how this continues through the book with lots of pointless moments like super-excessive description of the gym/showers under the Circus of the Damned or just endless recaps of her many many many many relationships or her spending like 5 pages deciding which shifters can share a bed with her so she can heal.

So other than long windedness, what else fills the space?

Stuff

That’s the problem – there’s less a plot here but more a series of events that don’t really add anything or help in anyway to advance the story or expand anything – they’re just random encounters. Like there’s a painfully long diversion in a book where Anita raises a zombie and it all goes a little wrong so they have to fix it. There’s some ghouls in there as well. And the whole thing could have been cut and made into a short story because it wasn’t even slightly relevant to the main plot, the storyline or add anything to the character or the world building or anything else

There’s some random woo-woo going on which changes Micah’s shapeshiftyness. There’s Jean-Claude and Anita’s wedding. There’s Asher again screwing everything up just because. There’s Narcissus screwing everying up just because.

But there’s also a lot of mini scenes that just bemuse me. Like a scene where Anita has to spend a painfully long time putting an uppity werewolf in his place for sexualising her (more on that later). Or another scene where Anita has to. Oh and one of the werelions is beating up another werelion and Meng Die is being all nasty about it and Rafael is facing fights for leadership oh and the jeweller Jean-Claude has chosen to design their wedding rings is actually secretly in love with… OH MY GODS WHO CARES?! WHY IS THIS HERE! WHY? WHY AM I READING PAGES ABOUT THE DAMN JEWELLER YOU HIRED?! WHY?!

Consent in Romance - Love at First Woo-woo

Romance will always be one of the central elements of Urban Fantasy - and is certainly the foundation for Paranormal Romance. Naturally, there are many many tropes that are dubious or troublesome when it comes to romance (and more than a few that are mockable), but in our society where rape culture is so entrenched, there are few things more damaging and more disturbing than the many issues around consent.

We have already spoken about magical romances that bind the couples together, removing their consent to leave - but now we look at the foundation of so many of those romances.

We have referred to this in the Lexicon as Love at First Woo-woo, but often it is far more pervasive and destructive. Whether it’s magical bonds, the whims of some deity, magically induced lust or some other convoluted reason, all too often we see the woo-woo swoop in and the characters squished together into a romance.

Whether they want it or not.

Whether they chose it or not.

Whether they would ever choose it. Even when it goes against everything they want or dream or stand for. The woo-woo has spoken. Choice, autonomy, sex is irrelevant.

Magical sexual attraction seems to be the mildest form of this - and we have no end of incubi/succubae/witches et al who simply must have sex or are overwhelmed by the woo-woo lust for each other. Anya Bast’s Witch Series, is a classic example, elemental witches are drawn to each other by the woo-woo. The sad thing is it’s completely unnecessary - there’s no reason why these characters couldn’t have just found each other attractive - but no, there had to be coercion. There has to be that external pressure that forces that sexual step

There has to be an excuse.

At the core a lot of these tropes stem from the enduring, sexist, trope that a sexual woman is evil. A woman who pursues sex is a slutwhorejezebel and terribad awful, to be shamed and condemned. Nice Girls don’t sully themselves with the dreadful, awful sex and reach shakily for the smelling salts and the fainting couch, pearls clutched in a death grip, at the very idea. The only way your pure shining womanhood can possibly use her sinful ladyparts is if it isn’t her choice - or, more accurately - her FAULT. It’s very closely linked to the trope where a woman says “no” and has to be “worn down” by a male love interest until her defences are finally breached.

This is epitomised by the Anita Blake Series where we see Anita having one of the most expansive sex lives of any protagonist ever - but had to be dragged kicking and screaming to every sexual encounter.

It’s a tragic trope and the prevalence of it - that women need to be able to blame magic for them actually having sex - is why I still repeatedly praise series like Yasmine Galenorn’s Otherworld series that show pro-active, sexual women who enjoy their sex lives without any magical nudge to justify them getting down. This shouldn’t be praiseworthy, this shouldn’t stand out - but sadly it does

Of course this trope goes beyond reinforcing the idea a “good” woman needs to have an excuse to have sex - we can’t stress enough how often this violates consent.

Twilight is an especially infamous example of this trope - where magical “imprinting” results in werewolves (nearly all male) bonding with their love interests after just looking at them - making the relationship pre-ordained. And consent? Well one of these “women” who is “imprinted” on is actually a small child. The other a baby in the womb - but we’re assured they’ll have an attentive, loving caring future-boyfriend to dote on them until they come of age.

That’s called grooming. It’s a crime. And even if they don’t touch that girl until she’s 18, honest, that’s still a lifetime of brainwashing to impose on her. No reasonable person can call this consent.

While Twilight is extreme because of it’s involvement of children - it’s not alone. Nalini Singh’s Psy/Changeling series has changelings begin the “mating dance” with their chosen mates - even when those mates are completely uninterested not just in love, but in emotion at all! But the woo-woo has spoken! Personal consent, lives, beliefs or inherent nature are irrelevant! Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Werehunters form magical bonds - again before any real acquaintance has even been established. Eileen Wilks World of the Lupi series has mating bonds so strong they can’t even move too far away from the other! They’re literally joined at the hip!

It’s not just shapeshifters (though they do seem to dominate for some reason) - the Black Dagger Brotherhood (which has never seen a terrible romance trope without claiming it) has vampires getting in on the bonding-at-first sight nonsense as well.

This is another element that has to be emphasised of this trope - nearly all of these bound-for-life-at-first-sight people are virtual strangers. It emphasises not just a lack of consent but also strikes us as lazy writing. You could build a relationship, you could write the things about the other that attracted and endeared your protagonist. You could write them falling in love as they come closer and see all the wonderful qualities. Or, woo-woo could strike within seconds of seeing each other and they could be happily skipping down the aisle before they even know each other’s surname.

Magical Plot Glue - a Lazy Author's Best Friend

This week we have to look at a collection of some of the laziest story tropes we’ve come across in this genre of magic and mystery

Magic appears a lot in out books - it’s Urban Fantasy, magic is almost required. Some of those systems are intricate and detailed and fascinating. Some are powerful and dramatic. Some have deep backstories, some draw upon real world traditions.

And some involve an author chanting the powerful worlds’ “Fuck it, Magic did it” and lo, the knotty problems of the plot are solved…. By magic! Alas, despite it’s vast power, magical plot hole sealant does not have the ability to make a book or show be coherent or enjoyable. It may be convenient to use magic to hastily glue together the shattered remnants of the plot, but like your grandma’s ugly vase you’ve dragged to the Antique Road Show, we can see the cracks

One form of this Magical Plot Glue is Swiss Army Magic. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of magic is specifically designed to be flexible and I’m certainly not going to say that a wizard or witch can’t do something - but if you’ve established your character is an Earth Elemental with the vast powers of big heavy rocks, I’m going to call shenanigans if they start swooping through the air in the name of Granite.

Or if your character starts tying people up, moving them around and bobbing them on the head with fire - somehow without burning them - I’m going to be less intrigued by the plot and more confused by the author who doesn’t know what fire does. Or your have several gods running around but with infinite unrelated skill sets - your god of war and god of love are pretty much indistinguishable. Though, having read a lot of Paranormal Romance, this doesn’t surprise me.

Of course, while Swiss Army Magic is useful, it lacks the power of the greatest Magical Plot Glue:

Legends speak of many artefacts of incredible power. Of tomes that contain the secrets of the ancients. Of swords that radiate power. Of staves that can move mountains and rings that require epic treks across the wilderness to remove (despite those damn birds who would have been really helpful). But truly, there is one source of power that outshines them all:

The Arse of an Urban Fantasy Protagonist with a Lazy Author

Shallow Descriptions of People of Colour

Writing characters of colour has often proven to be a difficult thing to do for Caucasian authors. Because we live in such a segregated world, many often don’t know enough about cultures outside of their own to write a convincing portrayal.  One of the biggest stumbling blocks outside of ensuring proper cultural markers, is creating a proper description. How many times have you read about coffee coloured skin for instance?  Often, there’s absolutely no nuance because there is a tendency not to see the individual uniqueness of people of colour.  We are not now, nor have we ever been a homogeneous group. Furthermore, different racial groups have specific markers and while not always present are often in exsistence.

Far too often the descriptions of people of colour are lazy and are used as quick and easy ways to convey one thing only - Otherness. This character is not described with any real desire for us to know what they look like but simply so they can be duly labelled as not white - as not default

This can be so glaringly seen when we see descriptions of white and POC characters next to each other. Often the race of the white character will not even be mentioned - because there’s no need to mention it, it will be assumed. When two children are described in A Kiss Before the Apocalypse they are described as “a girl and an Asian boy”. Quick quiz - what race is the girl supposed to be?

If you said anything other than “white” you know you’re kidding yourself. Sure there’s nothing overtly labelling her as such, but the mere fact that she isn’t described while he is, is labelling enough.

In some ways we can see why an author would do this - there is such an overwhelming assumption that all characters are White that even characters that are described as POC are too often assumed not to be - making it all the more important to clearly label minorities (as we mentioned when talking about Quiet Minorities). In some cases this may even lead to such overwhelming excessive labelling that we have the Blackety Black Black trope; it almost feels necessary to try and force an audience that is almost unable to see POC to see the non-white skin!

But by singling out the POC for this kind of description while leaving the White characters as blank slates that we know the societal default will fill in serves to Other the POC. The fact you’ve spent several paragraphs mentioning the mocha, caramel, chocolate skin of the POC but not done the same level of milk vanilla yoghurt description of the white characters is glaring. When you talk repeatedly about “the man doing this” or “Jane doing that” or “the lawyer said this” but then that all becomes “the Asian man”, “the Latina woman” or “the Black lawyer” when a POC is involved then you are underscoring the difference; constantly reinforcing the idea of the societal default, the societal definition of normal, by overly drawing attention to POC as needing emphasis, as needing description.

The contrasting different descriptions emphasises the Other, reinforces the Other, underscores that these characters are Other. That doesn’t mean the characters shouldn’t be described or have their race mentioned - again, our objection to overwhelming societal default means we want minorities to be clearly labelled as such - but make that description universal so it doesn’t other someone. If you’re going to spend 3 paragraphs being slightly fetihistic about dark skin tones, then do the same with white ones. This is also a useful tool to see if you are being fetishistic and slightly creepy when it comes to describing skin tone or any racial characteristic - if that jumble of words describing a White character seems slightly-in-need of a cold shower or a restraining order, then there’s a good chance it applies in the same way to the description of POC. If you’re going to mention the “Asian wizard” or “Black shapeshifter” doing something, then include the same racial identifiers for White characters as well - do not allow the very absence of description to be a filler for assumed Whiteness. We see this excellently done in the Bone Street Rumba series - by not singling out POC, race becomes a characteristic to describe rather than a marker of the Other to draw attention to.