#my people - black people - were just cool af is2g

[odinsblog]

"People get after me because I say there's no such thing as a creative person. This business of - we don't create a fly or a raindrop or a snowflake, but we can reflect creativity. And when we reflect creativity, we discover. And that's the whole thing about life - discovery. And that's what I live for - discovery."

—Ahmad Jamal

[isalabells]

Here, have a list of all the things Brigitte Johanna Henkel-Waidhofer managed to incorporate into her ??? novels bc Is2g, I’ll lose my mind if that gets swept under the rug for one more minute:

Native Americans and Asian Americans

interracial couples

a lesbian couple (while I am pretty certain that both Kosmos & Europa were way more liberal and laissez-fair with the stories’ content back then and are way more cautious and strict about it now (it’s givng me a headache, too) incorporating the gay in such a casual, incidental way in a children’s series in the mid-90s was ballsy af even for this context!! And I am *convinced* that she served as kind of a role-model for Minninger’s work; as in he never would have been so courageus and straightforward with lgbtq content lateron if it hadn’t been for her initiative here!)

a characters who keeps screwing with everybody’s assumptions about conformity to gender binarity (#Babette Eberle existed before Monique Carrera was cool)

black women in positions of power/having a succesful careers, eg as psychologists, head of a water management office, internationally renowned authors, businesswomen

women who can be anything they want: doctors, lawyers, undercover agents, secret agents, cooks, artists, inventors, shop owners, fashion designers, mechanics

some of the most iconic settings that are bound to bring vivid images of the US to life, eg snowy Lake Tahoe, Sedona, Virginia City, all of them I find unrivalled until this very day

women who always maintain an agency, no matter if they are the do-gooders or the villains

contemporary racism in the mid-90s US, its racist history, a reflection on how we might be racist without actually intending to be/noticing it (it took them 13 years before another author somehow approached this topic again. Just let that sink in)

TLDR: Within just 4 years, BJHW contributed 16 (!!!) novels, was the first and only author who ever had to carry the whole weight of responsibility on her own, without a single colleague to confer with, and managed to include characters of different ethnicity, skin color, sexual orientation, and (to some extent) gender identitiy, without making a big fuzz about it because that’s simply the way the world works, while also adressing pressing sociopolitical issues that define the very core of the country all of the freaking stories are set in. Oh, and there’s of course the small fact that the ??? wouldn’t exist anymore without her doing - she literally kept the series alive and kicking when it had bitten the dust in its orgin country a long time ago.

And still she got nothing but shit from a male-dominated fandom who felt insulted and threatened bc she refused to murder the trios’ girlfriends (aka characters that had been introduced by US authors, so by including them she actually made sure to keep some consistency) and dared to favor more realistic crime-incidents over writing the empteenth paranormal mystery. The majority of the fandom is villifying and bashing her until this very day, and all I can say is ‘People, have you even *bothered* to look at her stories and read them closely?’

Sure, if you wanna lament on how the classics are the best since sliced bread, go revert to your Robert Arthur (who wrote all of his stories while the Civil Rights Movement was still in full swing and who wrote his first story before the Civil Rights Act was even enacted, just so you give a hint about what kind of US society we’re talking here and what kinds of fictional products a white male would produce at that time) or William Arden who couldn’t write a decent female character if you held him at gunpoint. If you are still too blind to see that BJHW was a more sensitive, insightful, progressive, and open-minded person (who understood that even a children crime series should have some didactic value, hence used her position to make a difference) in the 1990s than you probably are today, then damned be we all. also do people who say they prefere the series to be stuck in the 80s forever even realize how problematic this makes them sound