The “real” stereotyping of fake creatures…
I’ve covered both of the topics that I’m going to talk about today, but I want to pair them up to make a point to readers and writers. Lately, I’ve been seeing promotions from writers and reviews from readers that alternately praise or shame a book for the “real” nature of their mystical creatures, or lack thereof. This behavior was goofy enough when it centered around “real” vampires, but now I’m seeing people complain about fairies, pixies, zombies, and werewolves all in the same vein. It’s like, once a trope has fallen into a cliché, the people who like living in a rut are suspicious of anything that doesn’t fit into their favored cliché. Real fairies are mean. Real zombies don’t run, or talk. Real pixies play violent pranks. And so on and so forth.
I was tempted to talk about this solely as a prejudice problem, because it is very much a prejudice. If you took the sentence, “real fairies are ugly and cruel” and swapped out that identifying word with any minority group, the prejudice is apparent. It’s a denial to the idea that there could be just as much diversity in mystical races as there are in humans.
But no, what I want to ask is, where are all your real humans in your fantasy stories? Where are the sycophants who idol worship one celebrity “god” while trashing the others for not having talent? Where are your cowards who see bad situations, look away, and say “it wasn’t my problem”? Where are your religious nuts who attack innocent people in the pursuit of proving their love for God? Some of you folks insist that all mystical races be written in a monstrous and unforgiving light, but when it comes to the humans in those same stories, you don’t want to see a reflection of yourselves. You demand an “everyman” to slip inside, one possessing none of your worst traits while only exemplifying the traits you wish you had.
Some of you might claim the monsters are the reflections of our dark side, but they’re not. The monsters are the other predatory animals on our planet. They’re the wolves, sharks, and bears. Humans are the monsters who campaign to cull a whole race of animals like foxes because four of our billion strong population got attacked. Humans are the ones who cast themselves in the role of the poor and downtrodden when they have historically been stomping down on animals all over the world. Now that they’re running out of animals to harm, they’ve turned on each other, casting minorities as animals unworthy of respect.
So where are these real humans in your fantasies? Why is there no recognition that the endangered mystical races hide from the humans because the humans are prejudiced toward monoethnicity in their respective cultures? Why is there no assessment of our prejudicial desire to hunt these predators to extinction even though they don’t pose a threat to our comfortably asserted dominance on the planet?
I want to compare this to cop shows, where the cops are always good, and where 99% of cases get solved, and the right bad guy ends up in jail week in and out. The black dude on the street is usually a gang banger, or a drug dealer, or a thief. The cops rarely haul in the wrong guy, smack him around, and then discover they’ve been barking up the wrong tree. Again. The writers of cop shows lecture us on morality and how the ends justify the means, but rarely do they examine the so-called thin blue line and how it allows dirty cops to commit horrible crimes and get away with it. Where are the real cops? Why don’t the viewers of cops shows demand real cops the way fantasy and horror readers and writers demand “real” monsters?
It’s a prejudice. and it’s a desire to be cast as the good guy even when our real world humans could never live up to these moralistic ideals. Fictional humans might make mistakes, but they still save the day. Harry Potter can go a full school year completely clueless about all the mistakes he’s making, and it doesn’t matter. At the end of the year, the villain will come out of hiding, carefully explain everything Harry missed, and then let Harry kill him anyway. This isn’t realistic, and it casts the underdog human in such a positive light when he’s done absolutely nothing right to earn his victories. He doesn’t deserve to win, but we’ll let him anyway, because the alternative is being honest and letting the villain kill or imprison another clueless dimwit.
People say they want to read fantasy and horror for the escapism, and it’s really sad how they go to such huge lengths not to do anything about problems in the real world while at the same time insisting that their fictional heroes be such gifted problem solvers. People get pissy over a vampire depicted the wrong way, but never question the humans being cast in such a favorable light. This is really no change from the books and films of the 40s and 50s, where the handsome, rich white hero has to fight dumb savages to rescue his woman, usually tarted up and of course completely willing to be treated as an object to be won. We didn’t evolve our fiction to be more realistic in all this time. We just shifted our racism off of real races and saddled monsters with the role of scapegoat.
The central point we’re still ignoring is, humans aren’t as noble as we want them depicted. We may want to be the heroes of our own stories, but by never examining the side effects of our fictional goodness, we also never see how we’ve shifted the focus of our prejudices rather than confronting and erasing them.
Go ahead and praise that vampire novel because the monster still acts the same as a character from the 1970s. Shun that fairy novel because the fairies aren’t evil enough to suit your prejudice. Ridicule that zombie story with talking zombies because the “real” monster is supposed to be mindless evil that frees you of any moral qualms over killing them. But when you do these things, you leave unanswered the main question, “Why aren’t the humans in these stories depicted realistically”?
Writers in the past let their work run the spectrum from light and sappy to dark and discomforting. Writers of the past gave us stories where people were kind of shitheads, and where even the protagonist was morally grey at best. But even as the technology we have to share and develop stories has improved, our ability to tell an honest story has become weaker and weaker. And modern writers, in their failure to be honest, have now conditioned the readers to clamor against stories that would have been popular in previous generations for being reflective of our cultures as opposed to projecting values onto us that are not there. Our job as writers is to challenge the status quo, not to reinforce it.
And yet, look at all the writers who not only enforce these prejudicial stereotypes of monsters, but who also rally their fans to sneer at any work that presents the mystical races in a more diverse way. All the while, they write human monster hunters who are the same as the good cop stereotype on TV. The good guys win, the evil monster dies, and the seven billion humans were kept safe from an endangered species who surely cannot have more than a thousand members in their population left in hiding. And the reader walks away comforted knowing that the monster will never have an equal place in our society, because there will always be a glorious white hero stepping down on the mystical races to keep them oppressed. In the narrative of Us VS Them, we still won’t examine our ugliest habit of othering people to justify killing and torturing Them. We won’t look in a mirror because that would be ugly. So we look in a book to be comforted by pretty lies. Or we stare for hours at the TV to reaffirm a goodness that we do not posses.
We’re not challenging the status quo or pushing the boundaries of our art. We’re pandering to a sentimental racism in the casual reader. So where are the real humans in our modern fantasies? Where are the racists, the morally righteous oppressors, the sexist objectifiers, and the manipulative white liars? Where are the real people to balance out your insistence that all monsters live up to racial stereotyping? Or do the humans get a free pass to be evil shits without writers calling them on it?
