#but what if he could be transformed into something more interesting without erasing the problematic behaviour

[existentialflirt]

*kicks in door and runs in panting*

What if Xander is an egg and a lot of the friction in his relationships (with women), both romantic and other wise, is because they represent someone he wants to be? That someone being also a woman.

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

Five years ago, the women on this site who treated me like trash over loving Labyrinth and shipping Jareth/Sarah were almost always obliviously consuming Radfem propaganda, or were out and out Radfems/Terfs themselves.

They were the types of people who casually threw the word “pedophile” around against grown women who shipped an adult Sarah with Jareth, aka literally one of the most popular ships for women in fandom for 30 years.

Pretty much invariably, these women had serious sex-negative anxieties, which included a severe paranoia about any and all kink and fetish, and porn in general. I saw a lot of shocking, fear-mongering propaganda surrounding sexual expression. Pretty much invariably, their method of approach involved immediate personal shock-value attacks on anyone they perceived to be “bad.”

Today, you can look at the way some people react to other popular so-called “problematic” ships and recognize the same toxic, fear-mongering rhetoric coming from women who consider themselves regular, trans-inclusive feminists. Sometimes it even manifests in the words of very well-meaning people (including myself here), who feel the need to talk about specific issues that pertain to their own experiences of trauma and oppression.

The people who shit on Labyrinth often seem to not really be able to comprehend that the Goblin King, like the film itself, is canonically a representation of a teen girl’s psyche, a soup of fears and anxieties and desires and dreams. He’s not a literal human adult preying on a literal child, and to read the film that way seriously undermines the entire point of the film. 

When I (and people of many fandoms) say “This is fiction, calm down,” I’m not just saying it’s not real so it cant hurt you and you can’t criticize me. I’m trying to call attention to what fiction actually is - artistic representations of feelings and experiences. The Goblin King is Sarah’s fiction. Therefore, he can be anything she or any woman who identifies with her wants him to be, including her lover when she’s grown and ready for such a thing.

I once took an alarming dive into Beetlejuice fandom to see what content was there (the cartoon was a favorite when I was little). Chillingly, what you’ll find is an extremely wounded fanbase, with a sharp divide between the older women who had long been shipping BJ/Lydia because of their love for the cartoon series (and whom were previously the vast majority of the Beetlejuice fandom), and a massive amount of young people riding the wave of the musical fad who had decided that the entire old school Beetlejuice fandom was populated by literal pedophiles. 

I saw death threats. Suicide baiting. Constant, constant toxic discourse. It did not matter how the BJ/Lydia fandom dealt with any particular issues that would exist in their ship, in fact I’m certain that the people abusing them cared very little to even consider if they were trying to handle it at all. The only thing that mattered was that they were disgusting subhuman scum asking for abuse. If you have at any time reblogged recent Beetlejuice fan art or content from fans of the musical, you have more than likely been engaging positively with the content of someone participating in toxic fandom behavior.

Nobody is really sticking up for them, either, as far as I saw. It’s really hard to imagine how painful it must be to have such a large group of people explode into into your relatively private fandom space to tell you that you are evil, vile, and deserve constant abuse, and also you are no longer allowed into the fandom space to engage in it’s content. But I think there’s something very alarming indeed about this happening specifically to the BJ fandom, and I’ll explain why. 

The pop-culture characterization of Beetlejuice, which is heavily influenced by the cartoon series to be clear, has always in my mind been a vaguely ageless being who matches with the psychological maturity of whatever age Lydia is supposed to be. He’s more or less like an imaginary friend, a manifestation of Lydia’s psyche. In fact, I would argue that i think most of us who grew up with the cartoon or it’s subsequent merchandizing before the musical ever existed probably internalized the idea as BJ and Lydia as this ageless, salt-and-pepper-shaker couple beloved by the goth community, similar to Gomez and Morticia. In each version of canon he may be a creepy ghost in the literal sense, but any adult who is capable of identifying literary tropes (even just subconciously) would read cartoon!BJ as an artistic representation of a socially awkward outcast girl’s inner world. Lydia’s darker dispositions and interests, which alienate her from most others, are freely accepted and embraced by her spooky magical friend. BJ/Lydia in the cartoon were depicted as best friends, but to my memory there was always an underlying sense that they had secret feelings for each other, which I identified easily even as a small child. In fact, their dynamic and behavior perfectly reflected the psychological development of the show’s target demographic. They are best friends who get into adventures and learning experiences together, who have delicate feelings for each other but lack any true adult romantic/sexual understanding to acknowledge those feelings, let alone pursue them.

Though I haven’t seen the Musical yet, I’ve read the wiki and I would argue that it embodies this exact same concept even more so for it’s own version of the characters, in that Beetlejuice specifically exists to help Lydia process her mother’s death.

This is not a complicated thing to recognize and comprehend whatsoever. In fact, it looks downright blatant. It’s also a clear indicator of what BJ/Lydia means to the women who have long loved it. It was a story about a spooky wierd girl being loved and accepted and understood for who she was, and it gave them a sense of solidarity. It makes perfect sense why those women would stick with those characters, and create a safe little space for themselves to and imagine their beloved characters growing and having adult lives and experiencing adult drama, in just the same ways that the women of the Labyrinth fandom do. That’s all these women were doing. And now, they can’t do it without facing intense verbal violence. That safe space is poisoned now.

Having grown up with the cartoon as one of my favorites and been around goth subculture stuff for decades, I was actually shocked and squicked at the original Beetlejuice film’s narrative once I actually saw it, because it was extremely divorced from what these two characters had evolved into for goth subculture and what they meant to me. It’s not telling the same story, and is in fact about the Maitland's specifically. In pretty much exactly the same way two different versions of Little Red Riding Hood can be extremely different from each other, the film is a different animal. While I imagine that the film version has been at the heart of a lot of this confused fear-mongering around all other versions of the characters, I would no more judge different adaptations of these characters any more than I would condemn a version of Little Red in which Red and the Wolf are best friends or lovers just because the very first iteration of LRRH was about protecting yourself from predators.

I would even argue that the people who have engaged in Anti-shipper behavior over BJ/Lydia are in intense denial over the fact that BJ being interested in Lydia, either as blatant predatory behavior a la the film or on a peer level as in the cartoon (and musical?) is an inextricable part of canon. Beetlejuice was always attracted to Lydia, and it was not always cute or amusing. Beetlejuice was not always a beloved buddy character, an in fact was originally written as a gross scumbag. That’s just what he was. Even people engaging with him now by writing OC girlfriends for him (as stand-ins for the salt-and-pepper-shaker space Lydia used to take up, because obviously that was part of the core fun of the characters), or just loving him as a character, are erasing parts of his character’s history in order to do so. They are actively refusing to be held responsible for being fans of new version of him despite the fact that he engaged in overt predatory behavior in the original film. In fact, I would venture to say that they are actively erasing the fact that Musical Beetliejuice tried to marry a teenager and as far as I’m aware, seemed to like the idea (because he’s probably a fucking figment of her imagination but go off I guess). The only reason they can have a version of this character who could be perceived as “buddy” material is because...the cartoon had an impact on our pop cultural perception of what the character and his dynamic with Lydia is. 

We can have a version of the Big Bad Wolf who’s a creepy monster. We can have a version who’s sweet and lovable. We can have a version that lives in the middle. We can have a version who’s a hybrid between Red and the Wolf (a la Ruby in OUAT). All of these things can exist in the same world, and can even be loved for different reasons by the same people.

I’ve been using Beetlejuice as an example here because it’s kind of perfect for my overall point regarding the toxic ideologies in fandom right now across many different spaces, including ones for progressive and queer media, and how much so many people don’t recognize how deeply they’ve been radicalized into literalist and sex-negative radfem rhetoric, to the point where we aren’t allowed to have difficult, messy explorations of imperfect, flawed humans, and that art is never going to be 100% pure and without flaw in it’s ability to convey what it wants to convey.

This includes the rhetoric I’ve seen across the board, from She-Ra to A:TLA to Star Wars to Lovecraft Country. We don’t talk about the inherent malleable, subjective, or charmingly imperfect nature of fiction any more. Transformation and reclamation are myths in this space. Everything is in rigid categories. It is seemingly very difficult for some of these people to engage with anything that is not able to be clearly labeled as one thing or another (see the inherent transphobic and biphobic elements of the most intense rhetoric). They destroy anything they cannot filter through their ideology. When women act in a way that breaks from their narrative of womanhood (like...not having a vagina), then those women must be condemned instead of understood. Anything that challenges them or makes them uncomfortable is a mortal sin. There is an extraordinary level of both hypocrisy and repressive denial that is underlying the behavior I’m seeing now. Much like toxic Christian conservatism, these people often are discovered engaging in the same behaviors and interests that they condemn behind closed doors (or just out of sheer cognitive dissonance). As an example, one of the people who talked shit to me about Labyrinth was a huge fan of Kill La Kill, which to my knowledge was an anime about a teenage girl in like, superpowered lingere (hence why I stayed the fuck away from that shit myself). Indeed, they even allow themselves plenty of leeway for behavior far worse than they condemn others for, and create support systems for the worst of their own abusers. 

Quite frankly, I’m tired. Instead of talking about theoretical problematic shit, we need to start talking about quantifiable harm. Because as far as I can tell, the most real, immediate, and quantifiable harm done because of anybody’s favorite ships or pieces of media seems to consistently be the kind that’s done to the people who experience verbal violence and abuse and manipulation and suicide baiting and death threats from the people who have a problem.

[radiantresplendence]

ΔΗΜΗΤΡΑ - Boss Notes

So, Covid 19 and other Covid-related activities have kept me pretty busy lately, but I have been keeping up with Fate/Grand Order: Cosmos in the Lostbelt’s new Lostbelt, The Interstellar City on a Mountain Range - Olympus: The Day a God was Shot Down. And I figured that I’d share my notes on the Demeter bossfight which has had a certain portion of the fandom calling this the biggest difficulty spike since the Camelot Singularity years ago. 

The Concept: Demeter is an unorthodox bossfight, as it requires you balancing your sustain and damage abilities without the use of a friend support. Instead, it has you locked into a forced story support in the front row of your team, a Caenis (NP5 10/10/10 thankfully) which is not optimal to say the least with the boss being a Caster and Caenis providing no team utility whatsoever. 

She has 3 health bars, with her first break bar being one of the two major danger timings of the fight, upon which she removes all party buffs and attempts to apply a 3 turn, 3 buff, buffblock to your entire party. 

The second breakbar turns the fight into a more-standard damage test, granting her a 150k guts and healing over time at the cost of randomly sealing her active skills at the start of her turn. 

The key to the fight is finding some balance between the damage required to kill her on her last legs and the sustain required to survive her two most dangerous timings. I should also note that she does fairly heavy area of effect damage with her normal attacks, making some degree of sustain strongly recommended for success at this fight.

The Struggle: Demeter has 3 actives skills that she likes to cycle through in a predictable rotation. On turn 1, she uses Earth’s Authority that gives her an effect similar to Tamamo’s Transformation skill on steroids. The defense buff is so potent, that unless you remove it, you will likely do negligible damage to the boss on your second turn. 

On turn 2, she will use Mourning Mother to give herself a 3 bar NP charge and a one-turn attack up. This skill isn’t dangerous now, but she will repeat it on her first action on turn 6, granting herself an immediate NP modified by the attack increase. This is the other danger timing of the bossfight, as her NP will likely do enough damage to kill your entire front line if you are not prepared. 

On turn 4, she will cast Mother’s Authority to remove any debuffs you’ve applied to her, give herself a one-turn single debuff immunity and heal herself for 25k. This discourages typical stalling strategies during any phase of the fight, but really isn’t terribly problematic. 

After turn 4, she’ll repeat her skill rotation, casting Earth’s Authority on turn 5 and Mourning Mother on turn 6. Followed by (I believe) a normal turn then repeating the established rotation. I am unsure exactly how her self skill seal on the third bar interacts with the rotation, whether it pauses it or simply skips the skill for the current turn. Either way, if you plan to be successful, you should be focusing on damage over party sustain to offset her healing at that point. 

Her Noble Phantasm is nothing terribly interesting, it deals heavy area of effect damage and applies a max health debuff. 

What Works: Caenis tends to die fairly early unless you go out of your way to keep her alive, something I wouldn’t recommend. As far as I’m concerned, her primary purpose is to apply as many attack debuffs as possible using her second skill to Demeter on turn 3, before Demeter uses her first NP. Then she is to die and be replaced by someone more suited to the fight. I’d recommend not even using Caenis’s defensive skill to ensure that she leaves the field when she needs to. 

Merlin doesn’t really help you here, as many players have learned, as his healing doesn’t effectively offset the damage that Demeter can do without a rather high NP level and his illusion magic can only mitigate one of her NPs, which in practical terms, occur once every 3 turns. She’ll also cleanse any Garden of Avalon stacks you manage to apply when you break her first bar. 

Your best bet is to use Riders over your typical support Casters, with Fragments of 2030 and defense buffs if you have them. In practice, Rider’s class advantage combined with defense buffs removes the threat of Demeter applying continuous pressure to your team, so you can focus on dealing damage when advantageous to you.

DO NOT break her first bar on turn 3 unless you want your front row completely erased. I found doing so on turn 4 much more effective as the 3 turn defense buffs that I applied turn 1 had worn off and I had a few turns before the boss could NP. 

I cleared the quest pretty easily with the following team using the Atlas mystic code. 

Caenis (support), Reines (2030), Quetzalcoatl (Victor from the Moon), Ushiwakamaru (2030), George (I don’t remember/Not Applicable), Heracles (Bond 10). 

Reines and Ushi were wiped out on the last turn, were Quetz killed the boss with a 100% crit brave chain, the last two party members didn’t even need to be there. 

Honestly, if you have Reines, she may be the best unit for this quest. I applied her defense buff turn 1, used it to mitigate almost all of the damage to herself and Quetz until it wore off, used the atlas skill haste, broke the boss’s 1st bar, and promptly reapplied Reines’ buffs. 

Through Reines’ defense buffs and Caenis’s 3 attack downs, Riders in your party will only take 5.5k or so damage from the boss’s first NP. In other words, with Reines, you don’t need to waste some form of hard protection against the boss’s fist NP and can save them for the more dangerous second NP. Realistically Quetz, Ushi, George and Herc can be replaced with whatever units you like who can effectively do damage to the boss. The Atlas mystic code can remove the boss’s buff block to make sure you can buff your damage unit when you need to. 

Alternatives to Reines: I understand that Reines is a limited SSR that due to no friend support, a lot of players won’t have access to. To that end I’ll recommend some alternatives. 

I could see using Boudica on an Arts/Rider comp with Ryouma Sakamoto and Mandricardo, so long as you’ve done some skill leveling. I can see it working much more consistently if you’ve managed to pull Da Vinci (Rider) and some good NP gain CEs. Essentially making an arts variant of the team. If you have Kintoki (Rider) I can see you paring him with Alexander for some Quick/Crit composition that exploits Rider Kintoki’s excellent generation skills and single target damage output. 

Conclusion: I really hope that this helps someone out. In my opinion, this fight is less difficult, and more requires unorthodox teambuilding from someone with a strong account to clear without the use of command spells. If you have Heracles bond 10, he can probably secure much of Demeter’s last health bar including the guts if you can make sure that he’s the only unit on the field when he comes out. 

Anyways, these are just my thoughts. If none of this works, feel free to call me out. 

[cassandraclare]

prejudice in fantasy lit and the use of metaphor

reallybigshadowhunterstvfan said:

what can you say about making Simon a shadowhunter, Mrs Clare? it seemed odd to me that after a whole series of battling for equality between species/races, the downworlder had to become a shadowhunter. not only he basically ceased being a minority, he also became a part of a privileged community, and it just didn't sit well with me.

 Just for the record — I’m not Mrs. Clare; there is no Mr. Clare. I am married, but my pen name is not my husband’s property. :-) 

I think this is a very interesting question that brings up a ton of issues, but there are some aspects of it I’d love to clarify — for instance, I am puzzled at calling Simon “the Downworlder.” Is he more a Downworlder than Magnus? Things like that actually are really important when discussing stories — if he were the only Downworlder in the story, that would be one discussion, but he isn’t, and therefore his story does not speak for the experience of all Downworlders or even a small fraction. 

I am sorry you were surprised negatively by Simon’s story in TMI. Simon never wanted to be a vampire — he always hated it, and unlike Raphael and Lily, he never joined the community of vampires but instead spent all his time with Shadowhunters. Being a Daylighter had already changed him from being any kind of regular Downworlder, as did bearing the Mark of Cain: both made him even less “the Downworlder” and more of an anomaly. It also separated him from the other Downworlders, who treated him with distrust. In my experience, very few readers expected Simon to remain a vampire, given that it was something he never wanted or got used to, and that it was not his dream. More on that in a bit.

As to the question, to me the suggestion that Shadowhunters are “the privileged” and Dowworlders are as a block “the marginalized” — instead of being a complicated metaphor in which they sometimes but not always stand in for people who have had their rights curtailed —  overly simplifies the situation. It is an argument seems to ignore the fact that in fact, humans exist along axes of privilege and marginalization: that people can be privileged in one way and marginalized in another and that when Simon becomes first a Downworlder and then a mundane and then a Shadowhunter, he is not moving clearly from marginalization to privilege, but rather exchanging some types of privilege for others (he remains white as a Downworlder, and is a Daylighter), and exchanging some types of marginalization for others (the marginalization of being a Downworlder for the marginalization of being a mundane-born Shadowhunter and a Jew in a world where Shadowhunters are meant to have one religion). 

Because the argument disclaims spectrums of privilege and marginalization, it also suggests that the world of the Shadowhunter Chronicles is one in which there are no gay or POC or trans people in existence; one in which there is no racism, homophobia, ableism, cis privilege, or bigotry against the neuroatypical. But that is both problematic erasure, and also not true of these books. Downworlders don’t stand in for people of color or LGBTQ+ people because people of color and LGBTQ+ people are in the books; they have not been subsumed into metaphor. (I know the showrunners said there was no homophobia in the Shadowhunter world, only warlock-phobia, but that’s the show, not the books, and it has a different world and world-building. I notice this is a question I get since the show came out, and I sometimes wonder if it’s a question of confusion between the two different universes? It’s easy for that to happen.)

Fantasy prejudice metaphors are complex and confusing and they rarely work as a one to one comparison (in other words, there is a difference between saying that this fantasy situation is reminiscent of this real world thing and saying this fantasy situation is exactly the same as this real world thing. For instance, one of the really interesting things about True Blood is that it made many deliberate parallels between “vampire rights” and GLBT+ rights — referring to vampires “coming out of the coffin” and “God Hates Fangs” on church signs. However, its vampires were also often violent predators who killed and ate people. The argument that Simon “basically ceased being a minority” (while, somehow, remaining Jewish) is similar to making an argument that True Blood was saying that gay people kill and eat their neighbors; I’m fairly sure in fact, they weren’t. They were reaching for a resonance — the echo of a real world situation that would give a layer of relatability and meaning to their points about difference. But they were not creating a literal “these things are the same” comparison or they wouldn’t have had vampires chewing off people’s heads.

So: are Downworlders discriminated against? Yes, sometimes, by Shadowhunters, who are a small specific group. Do they “stand in” for a specific minority group? No, they cannot, because they are accessible as a metaphor to any marginalized group or groups whose rights have been abridged. Also: the world at large does not discriminate against Downworlders because they do not know they exist, nor do they privilege Shadowhunters because they don’t know they exist either. It would be one thing if this was a high fantasy and Shadowhunters and Downworlders were all there was, but these books are set in our world, and the characters experience real-world bigotry, racism, homophobia etc. because of it.

Alec sighed. “Sorry to wreck your vision of our happy family. I know you want to think Dad’s fine with me being gay, but he’s not.” 

“But if you don’t tell  me when people say things like that to you, or do things to hurt you, then how can I help you?” Simon could feel Isabelle’s agitation vibrating through her body. “How can I—” 

“Iz,” Alec said tiredly. “It’s not like it’s one big bad thing. It’s a lot of little invisible things. When Magnus and I were traveling, and I’d call from the road, Dad never asked how he was. When I get up to talk in Clave meetings, no one listens, and I don’t know if that’s because I’m young or if it’s because of something else. I saw Mom talking to a friend about her grandchildren and the second I walked into the room they shut up. Irina Cartwright told me it was a pity no one would ever inherit my blue eyes now.” He shrugged and looked toward Magnus, who took a hand off the wheel for a moment to place it on Alec’s. “It’s not like a stab wound you can protect me from. It’s a million little paper cuts every day.”

 *** 

“He hurt you. It was a long time ago, and I know he tried to make up for it, but—” Bat shrugged. “Maybe I’m not so forgiving.” 

Maia exhaled. “Maybe I’m not either,” she said. “The town I grew up in, all these spoiled thin rich white girls, they made me feel like crap because I didn’t look like them. When I was six, my mom tried to throw me a Barbie-themed birthday party. They make a black Barbie, you know, but they don’t make any of the stuff that goes with her—party supplies and cake toppers and all that. So we had a party for me with a blonde doll as the theme, and all these blonde girls came, and they all giggled at me behind their hands.”

***

If we carry the theory through (Shadowhunters are THE privileged, Downworlders are THE marginalized) that means that Alec, as a gay Shadowhunter, is more privileged than Simon, a straight vampire. That Ty, who would be locked in a mental institution if the Clave discovered his autism, is privileged beyond white, rich, immortal and powerful Malcolm Fade. It’s saying that when Cristina encounters a wealthy, white, straight, misogynist male werewolf in Lady Midnight who tries to force sexual attention on her, she, a Latina woman, is the one who is the privileged character because she is a Shadowhunter and he is a Downworlder (though Sterling has arguably, given that he lives outside the supernatural world, never experienced a whit of prejudice because of it.) So I’m sure you can see where the problem lies.

It also erases Simon’s Judaism entirely. Stating without caveat that Simon has become “part of a privileged community” means ignoring the fact that Simon is Jewish; that he decides in Tales that he will continue to practice, and that he was the only Jewish protag written by two Jewish authors that I’m aware of having been on the bestseller lists last year. He didn’t think about being a vampire as he was preparing to transform — he never wanted to be one or consented to be one, nor was he part of the community, as Raphael constantly pointed out — though he does later think of having previously been a Downworlder when interacting with vampires and Shadowhunter prejudices. He thought of the important thing to him: his Judaism, which he both couldn’t and wouldn’t give up. To me it is personally painful to think that for any reader, Simon’s status as a vampire is more significant than his status as a practicing Jew.

I think sometimes it is possible to invest yourself so heavily in a metaphor that you forget the real world that surrounds the metaphor and the flexibility of metaphors in general. The Shadowhunter/Downworlder situation could stand in for the systemically privileged and marginalized of our world: sometimes it does. However it also can stand in for the way totalitarian governments abuse their own people: there are echoes in Shadowhunter history and current events of the Cambodian genocide, of Stalinist violence against intellectuals and resistors. There are also echoes of police brutality — what Shadowhunters have is the privilege of the Law, specifically: the Law is what allows them to enact bigotry in the name of justice, and when they abuse their jobs, it has resonances of the way police can abuse their jobs and use the privilege conferred on them by their authority to murder and abuse the helpless and marginalized. There are also echoes of the way soldiers carry out immoral orders given by superiors: the Shadowhunters are taught to be obedient to the Clave, and one of the ways we know who our Team Good is in any TSC series that they question that obedience. All of these are echoes and resonances: they are not saying that the Shadowhunters are the police, or the US military, or the Khmer Rouge; the resonances provide context and hopefully add a sense of realism to a situation that is fantastical in its nature.

 (It’s also a wise idea not to so totally buy what the Shadowhunters are selling about themselves. They think they’re special and better and awesome, but the books constantly question and problematize that. Shadowhunters also pay a high high price for their runes and their sense of superiority: they die young and often and experience brutal constant violence and the pressures of a repressive society that allows for little divergence from an idealized norm.)

There are reasons that the Downworlders were never constructed to be a specific marginalized group and their situation was never meant to be limited in its relatability to one situation— for instance, it’s very hard to not look askance at the argument that Downworlders are meant to be specific “race” when you can become a Downworlder and then stop being one: when you can, as Simon does, change what kind of magical creature you are, because there is absolutely no correlation between that and what race or ethnicity means in our world. 

 So yes, Simon becomes a Shadowhunter: however, what I don’t see acknowledged here is not just his ethnicity and religion, but the fact that he becomes a Shadowhunter partly because he is aware of the prejudice of Shadowhunters, and fights against the bigotry they show not just to Downworlders but also to their own. He is part of Magnus and Alec’s Shadowhunter-Downworlder Alliance. He continues to work for change from within the system, arguably something almost no one else could do, because there are almost no other Downworlders who have become Shadowhunters. It is odd to me to consider Simon as simply ascending to a height of blithe privilege when he is fact much more like someone who has become a police officer in order to root out corruption and racism in the police, and brings his own knowledge of marginalization (which he still experiences) with him.

That is why Simon in Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy is constantly fighting and bending the rules in the name of his evolving social conscience, though I understand if you haven’t read TfTSA. One of the things about having had a flood of new readers enter fandom because of the TV show is that I’ve seen a lot of arguments based on the idea that TMI is the entire story of Downworlders and Shadowhunters, or the entire story of these characters. I see people talking about characters getting a happy or sad ending in TMI even when those characters go on to feature heavily in the sequel books and could by no reasonable account be considered to have any ending, happy or sad — unless you thought TMI were the only Shadowhunters books that existed rather than a chunk of a larger ongoing mythology. In no sense has Simon’s story ended: you have no idea if he will remain a Shadowhunter or not. Perhaps if you consider the fact that TMI is not a story that has ended for Simon, but rather one that continues, the fact that he has now been two magical species and might well move on to become another will sit less poorly with you? After all, this is not “after a whole series of battling for equality between species/races” this is “in the middle of a whole series of battling for equality between species/races.” Usually the middle of a story isn’t the place it’s best to draw all your conclusions from. :-) 

[newmayhem]

Remixing Risika: Family Dynamics + Race

You can find a recap of the changes I’ve made to Risika’s backstory so far here. In this post, I’ll be going a little more in-depth talking about her family situation and also discussing more about the role that race might play in shaping her experience. As mentioned before, I’ll be referring to everyone by their new names just to keep things consistent, but I’m using her original name in the title because I’m posting this in the main tag and I just want to signal that it’s relevant.

So I’ve relocated Roksana’s backstory from Concord, Massachusetts to Puebla, Mexico. I’ll go in depth about this setting with some actual historical research in a separate post later on, but for now, here are the basics: Puebla, Mexico in the 1700s was a part of New Spain- the predominant religion of that setting is Catholicism, the Mexican Inquisition was a thing, it was a highly diverse society, but was also strictly (almost obsessively) socially stratified along racial lines.

It should be noted that the Catholics definitely were not as intense about the whole hellfire thing as the puritans were and they (or at least the Spanish Inquisition) firmly believed that witchcraft wasn’t a thing. They were way more concerned with heresy. That said, the Spanish were super into aggressively evangelizing the native population and supplanting the traditional indigenous religions. Remedios’ family, because they are mixed race, they were a part of the mainstream society, but were of low status. One of the ways they might try to better their situation was probably to prove that they were good Catholics (which would fit really well with all of OG Alejandro’s angst about his powers and his fear of damnation).

Something I noticed about Roksana is that throughout the story, she’s going through an identity crisis of sorts. She’s adjusted to life as a vampire as best she could and on some level she’s ok with it, but you get the feeling that she still hasn’t come to terms with it and that she’s still haunted by her past. Additionally, in the flashbacks, there’s also brief mention about how she and Alejandro did have some sense that they were different from the people around them mainly because of their golden eyes but subtextually due to their magical heritage. I’d really like to lean into all that and explore the parallels between these two struggles, but particularly explore how her early identity crisis informed her worldview and personality.

So like I said in my that previous post, I’m not just race-lifting Roksana on a superficial level. I have to take responsibility for it by fully going into how it affects the character’s experience and I think this is a good angle to further explore her identity crisis.

Acknowledging that this could get problematic if I’m not careful (i.e. the Magical Negro trope), I think it would be interesting to have their father, Pedro, and their half sister, Lupita, be more white-passing while Remedios and Alejandro would have taken after their mother (who was mostly African and Indigenous), and to have the family be raised in a mostly white (or white-passing mestizo) community.

Remedios would not only feel othered and alienated, but she’d also be missing a connection with a part of herself because she grew up without a mother and without any knowledge about that part of her heritage, and that probably makes everything worse. For marginalized people, especially when all of that oppression is not only overt, but legal, life sucks, but it’s definitely much easier when you’re part of a community and when you can turn to things like your traditions...but Remedios and Alejandro didn’t have any of that.

In the original text, the lack of a maternal figure in their lives didn’t seem to have a lot of impact, and it makes sense because I imagine at that time people had shorter lifespans and it was common for women to die during childbirth. But with this additional dimension of their mother being a representative of/connection to their otherness, the loss is probably more deeply felt. I think this could also be used to further galvanize Roksana’s story. Maybe she made the connection between Alejandro’s powers and their mother’s side of the family and she wants to investigate that.

In terms of family dynamics, having to grow up in a community that’s not only so different from her, but also actively treats her as inferior would definitely cause a lot of tension and resentment against Remedios’ father, who most likely thought that he was protecting his children by 1) moving them to the place where he grew up, a place that has nothing to do with magic; 2) never telling them anything about their mother; 3) treating their race like it’s the elephant in the room; and 4) keeping them very sheltered even from the human world they lived in because he also felt the need to protect them against racial prejudice.

Remedios would’ve also had some resentment towards her half sister, who looked more like she belonged and never seemed to have any of the emotional baggage that only Roksana and Alejandro had to face. Roksana would never outright admit it, but a part of her wished that it was Lupita who was sacrificed instead of her. And then in the post-transformation, Roksana was hurt by how quickly her father moved on from the loss of her and Alejandro (like how he moved on so quickly after the loss of her mother), and the fact that he moved on again with a woman who was whiter than them also reinforced her deep seated belief/fear/paranoia that he was always trying to erase them. And with Lupita, at time that Roksana (post-transformation) visits her family, Lupita’s the same age Roksana was when she was changed and so Roksana kind of sees her basically living the life that she always wanted but never got to have. Lupita got to keep her innocence and live out her life peacefully, which is something Roksana would never have.

In the original text, her relationships with her father and her half sister were fairly neutral and weren’t given much development, which was kind of a missed opportunity. I’m hoping that by embedding some more tension as well as moments of caring and love would really flesh out Roksana’s character and make her transformation even more impactful (so like, something along the lines of The VVitch).

I’ll go into her relationship with Alejandro in a separate post because it’s just so much, but I will say that based on the personality differences I saw in the original text, I think that though this common struggle caused them to develop a sort of codependent relationship, they probably had vastly different viewpoints and coping mechanisms that eventually caused a rift between them.

The original text kind of portrayed Remedios’ human life as...not necessarily idyllic, but definitely more comfortable, safer, and happier than her life as a vampire. I just think it would be an interesting complication to completely destroy that. It’s no longer a black and white, “humanity is beautiful/vampirism is a terrible curse” type thing. Like, what if a part of Remedios craved the ability to be strong and have the power to fight her oppressors? What if on some level, she kind of hated her life as a weak, vulnerable human and enjoyed being a vampire.