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.

Review All Timelines Lead to Rome by Dale Cozort

When the police are called in to investigate the murder of a woman, the journey doesn't just take them across middle America but into an alternate earth. This secondary earth is a world where no industrial revolution has happened, and Romans still rule Europe. To get the menial tasks done, the Romans have enslaved a group of pixies, which are humanoid creatures bred specifically to please there master in whatever fashion is needed. No colonization has occurred and this means that Indigenous people still control all of the land in North America.  This is a world out of time essentially. This is a world where none of the natural resources have been tapped and untold treasures are still to be discovered.  Ancient artifacts are easily available for the taking.

Someone has been accessing the alternate earth and this means the possibility of them wiping out the  Indigenous population with diseases that we have long ago built immunity to, or introducing advanced weaponry and starting the project of colonization again. It also puts our current earth at danger of small pox, should someone infected with the disease return. There is also the danger that interacting with the Romans or indigenous peoples will change their culture and path of development. Do we have the will to allow these people to develop naturally without our intervention?

I think this book walks the line between sci-fi and alternate history and manages to pull it off well.  When it does move to the alternate world, Cozort adds little details like being able to drink directly from streams and a lack of things like satellites and motorized vehicles to provide convenience. This alternate world quickly becomes real to the reader and one can almost smell the pollution free air.

Though the title of the book is All Timelines Lead to Rome, the book is really all about the exploitation of North American Native people. I can see that Cozort took some time investigating the various tribes and how they lived, the problem is that the book read very much like a White saviour complex.  Much of the motivations behind the characters was to save the Indigenous people from colonisation  and of course exploitation. Scott, the professor, was highly aware of how the introduction of Europeans to North America not only brought diseases which the Indigenous had no immunity to but advanced weaponry.  Obviously, what happened in our timeline was a genocide and it makes sense that the characters would want to avoid this, the problem is that those truly concerned where all White, making the book read like Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden.  Jeni sought to give the Indigenous a chance by introducing them to advanced weapons in an effort to speed up their development because she believed that it was only a matter of time until our timeline began  exploiting them.  This approach of course does not factor in potential harm from disease. This entire book seemed to reify the ridiculous binary that Native tribes are backward and need saving.  It makes absolutely no sense to me why Indigenous people from our timeline would not be concerned about their people on the other side.  All we got were the opinions of White people on the issue.

Review: Thunderbird Falls, by C.E Murphy, book 2 of the Walker Papers.

Joanne Walker, or Siobhan Walking Stick and reluctant shaman, returns to face her powers that she can’t keep running from. After the vast events of Urban Shaman, she is intimidated by the power and the responsibility that comes with it – but she can’t deny the damage she did in saving the city last time, nor can she deny her urge to heal. After months of neglect, she’s finally acknowledges she needs to learn more, she needs to explore her powers and she needs to use them – to heal, to help and to fix what has been broken.

Thankfully, she finds a teacher who is willing to pull her stubbornly through the nature of her powers, allow her to explore them further and develop them to their potential regardless of Joanne’s reluctance; though Joanne still has a lot of trouble accepting – her power and her teacher.

And she can hardly focus on her power alone. Her friend, Gary, is in the hospital after a heart attack, giving her more impetus to learn to heal. There’s a mysterious murder in her gym which, her boss is thrilled to learn, has a supernatural element; and she is approached by a local witch coven who are uniting their powers to try and help fix the damage to the city and summon an ancient shaman from the spirit world

But the witches may be in over their heads, things are moving too fast for Joanne to keep up and she’s not sure who to trust or what to do as more and more demands are put on her, not all of which she is comfortable with. But is this reasonable or her own reluctance to accept the supernatural getting in the way?

Storywise I had a little bit of a genre-savvy moment that almost detracted a fair bit from the book for me. I basically pegged the villain long before the villain was supposed to be obvious. As I saw Joanne become ever more involved in the villain’s plans it was frustrating to me because the villainous intent was pretty obvious to me.

I can’t say it was unrealistic storywise, though. Joanne, because of her interactions with Coyote, had reason to trust the people she did. I think she threw herself too quickly and too deeply into the plans of the coven, but even then she did some basic fact checking before. There was no reason for Joanne to not do what she did, her every action was reasonable, even if mistaken, and it didn’t require foolishness or spunkiness for her to do what she did. Though, it did require a little naivety. I’m torn because I’m not sure how much of my objection is based on, as I say, genre-savviness and pattern recognition because internally, within the book, there is no real reason to be suspicious.

Other than that, the story is excellently well paced, perhaps a little rushed, again there’s the sense that Joanne has 100 things to do and not enough time to do it in – I wonder sometimes when she finds the time to sleep (she hardly does). But the number of plot lines going on sometimes feel like when Joanne takes some time to do something important, like visit Gary or look after Melinda’s kids, there’s a sense that she doesn’t have time for it. I think the author did an excellent job of conveying a sense of urgency – but the sense of urgency was so emphasised that it felt like Joanne should be running everywhere – and if she weren’t, what was she doing?

Blood Ties Season 1, Episode 7: Heart of Ice

Vicki and Celluci are doing their flirty thing, with Celluci blurring the boundaries around their relationship and Vicki giving him not too subtle “back off” vibes. And Vicki doing some actual, mundane detective work for money.

On the supernatural front, Francine, a homeless woman is attacked by night-versioned beast-like hunter under the light of the full moon.

Annie, another homeless person and a friend of Francine takes the case to Vicki. She remembers Vicki from her police days as one of the few who had any sympathy for the homeless – and with at least 4 people missing, they need sympathy.

After finding some of the dead woman’s stuff and some blood she, of course, turns to henry, hoping to use him as a bloodhound to track the blood trail into the sewer. Yes there is flirting. Vicki takes the bag they found to Celluci to try and get the police working on the case. Celluci is unwilling to devote resources to the case and deems it a low priority and a “hard sell” especially since it’s based on the witness statements of homeless people.

While not helpful on her case, he does want Vicki to look at his; Celluci and Graham are working on the murder of a sex-worker who was drained of blood with tiny holes on her neck. And a big, neon sign saying “vampire” flashing over her corpse. Yes, of course Celluci is aimed at Henry and Vicki is protecting him. The fact that Vicki has given Henry blood before also raises itself in the conversation

Henry’s tracking of the beast doesn’t find it – but does find a human who is also hunting it – and he calls it a Windigo. The man, Peter, a Native American, returns to Vicki’s office with Henry to tell them a dramatic story about the Windigo – a creature that used to be a man that eats people. He tells all of this in a rather stilted English for some reason. Coreens’ research fills in some gaps on the big hairy monstrous Winidgo

Celluci is approached by a Javier Mendoza over the dead sex-worker. He’s an officer of “canon law” and is basically hunting Henry because he’s a vampire.  He also brings a file of other supposed victims of Henry, including Delphine, a  woman he was in a relationship with in 1944 – which Celluci then takes to confront Henry with in his classic jealous style. Celluci is left with the difficult choice of handing Henry over to Mendoza or not – he doesn’t like Henry, but working with or helping a vigilante killer is a hard choice to make.

Javier presents Henry as a monster with a mass number of kills and that Vicki will be the next victim. And Javier gives him a sun pendant that will drain Henry’s life if placed on his chest. And Javier should know because, unknown to Celluci, he has already used it on Delphine – who isn’t dead, she’s a vampire (something Henry neglected to mention) and imprisoned at Javier’s mercy, left for the sun.

Review: Tricked by Kevin Hearne, Book 4 of the Iron Druid Series

Atticus is back for another excellent adventure. Now having left his home after killing Thor and a goodly part of the Norse pantheon he has some problems to handle. Firstly there’s the fact that the Norse want him dead and so do several Thunder Gods… just because really (they’re thunder gods, they don’t need a lot of explanation).

There’s also a problem of killing a large portion of the Norse pantheon. Seems that those gods were largely the reason Ragnorak wasn’t happening – and now you have Hel and the denizens of Niffilheim running around unchecked. Add in that Leif’s incapacitation means that there’s a whole lot of vampires flocking to the area to fill the void.

And Atticus owes Coyote a favour. Which is never, ever, ever a good thing. It seems simple enough (in an almost impossible way), Coyote wants to rebuild the economy in an area for the Navajo (Diné) people. But the Trickster has far more in mind than that – as you would expect – and Atticus soon finds himself up to his eyebrows in far more than he expected.

When I finished this book I was sad. Because it was over and I now have to wait months, MONTHS, before Kevin Hearne releases another awesome book.

To assuage myself I turned back to page one and read it a second time – I didn’t even put it down between readings. Alas, I have finished it again and, again, I am sad that it is over.

In short, this book is most awesome.

What? You want more?

The characters are amazing. I love Atticus and Granuaille and their relationship. Atticus engages in a lot of deep and fascinating introspection, grows as a character as he accepts his own arrogance and pride have tripped him up once too often. And, of course, he is utterly and unbelievably funny and awesome with amazing wit, clever ideas without them being ridiculously over the top and a powerful sense of both the ridiculous and righteous wrath.

Oberon remains beyond hilarious. And he gets to be the hero as well, showing he’s not just a witty, sausage obsessed doggy with the best lines. And Snugglepumpkin has a very very very amusing and likely accurate hypothesis.  The whole book is full off wit and humour that lightens

The world is incredible – the pantheons of the different gods and belief systems with creatures and beings from each pantheon and culture all apparent. And the mob attack by the collected thunder gods was worth reading over and over again.