Mordax et al

fierceawakening:

madeofpatterns:

fierceawakening:

dagny-hashtaggart:

fierceawakening:

fierceawakening:

Because I see being monstrous as a good thing. Because I think I am. Because I think most people worth knowing are.

Because I did not realize that person would take what I said as an insult at all, and felt awful when he did.

Why are you coming here weeks later to ask that question?

Also:

Because I write fantasy and science fiction, and care about representation.

Why should only cis people get to be the monsters, when the monsters are the most interesting part of the story?

Also: because marginalized people have often been presented in terms evocative of or directly referencing monsters, beasts, and so on*, sometimes as a way of further marginalizing them, sometimes because that’s the only terminology with which people were allowed to discuss them (or themselves) at all. By consequence monsters in fiction provide a powerful set of images and ideas for dealing with oppression and the state of ostracism from mainstream society. Presenting a person or class of people via the imagery of monsters can be a commentary on the moral character of those people, but it can as easily be a commentary on how others see and think of those people.

*(Examples: too numerous to discuss exhaustively, but include references to black people as apes and troglodytes through a lot of European and American history, the lesbian vampire archetype in Victorian fiction, the references to diseased people and fear of physical pollution in vampire folklore, the fear of race-mixing implicit in a lot of Lovecraft and his contemporaries’ work, etc.)

This.

I get why there is a push for more diverse representation among heroes. I agree wholeheartedly with it. I want more kinds of people saving the day, saving a life, saving the world.

But I think the insistence on “minority, therefore hero” sometimes makes it sound like there are no perfectly understandable reasons for minority members to identify with the villains or the monsters, and that’s an overcorrection.

Probably an unwittingly harmful one, actually.

We should not make our sources of power into sources of weakness when we can avoid it.

This is a pretty good way of summing up why I feel very uncomfortable about “don’t queercode villains.”

I think it’s important to make people aware of how villains have over time been queercoded and why (and similar for POC coding them, Jewish coding them, etc.) but I am uneasy about saying things the internet will surely flatten to “so therefore just immediately stop doing that,” when a lot of those depictions mean things to many of us.