The Werewolf Ate My Homework

The Introduction

I’ve been reading Young Adult (YA) Fantasy for quite some time now, mostly because adult Fantasy just bores me out of my mind.  It’s either swords and elves or fairies and lots of creepy sex, and guys?  I just don’t need more of that in my life.  I get enough of it in romance novels.

But I digress.

Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot of YA fantasy, and while there’s much that I love, there’s also much that I love to hate.  It wasn’t until the other night, though, when I threw down a book in disgust whilst screaming, “God, not another Blond Eurasian!” that I realized I’d collected enough material to Dead Gay Husband the genre.    And so, without further ado, a “loving” sendup of a genre that has given me so much joy and gotten so much money out of me.

The Omnipresence of Pallor.

Now, I come from a long line of Regency Romance readers, so I am used to loving descriptions of pallor.  “Her creamy thighs,” and “her translucent skin,” and “her pale, milk-white shoulders,” are phrases that I read often enough that they should have ceased to creep me out by this point, but they never have.  It’s just…weird to more or less write an ode to the Aryan nation during a sex scene.  I’m sorry, but it is.

Ahem.  Anyway, YA Fantasy isn’t that much different from Regency Romance in this respect.  The heroine is always pale.  ALWAYS.  PALE.  She may even go so far as to lament the fact that she cannot tan, can never wear shorts, can’t be viewed in direct sunlight, etc.  Anyway, she is WHITE WITH THE WHITENESS THAT IS BLINDING IN ITS WHITENESS.  No exceptions.  YA Fantasy writers don’t even like, write a tan white girl.  No, that honkey’s gotta look like crisco or we’re not in business.

The Sassy Black Friend

Since the heroine herself is whiter than white, the side characters need to pick up the slack in the racial diversity department.  The hero, of course, can’t be in any way ethnic, but the heroine’s friends?  Why, the heroine gets her own sassy black friend, all to herself!

The sassy black friend has a lot to bear on her shoulders.  To begin with, she must provide both some much-needed color AND a much-needed reality check.  She’s always the one to bring the heroine back down to earth, because she’s “street.”  Because, you know, all black people come from impoverished urban environments.  All of them.  Every last one.  Seriously.  Go up to the next black person you see and ask them how they liked growing up in the ghetto.  But be prepared to run if things get tense:  they all have illegal firearms, too.

Sigh

Yes:  either by accident or design, YA fantasy authors seem to be incapable of writing a black female character who is not a complete and utter stereotype.  Oh, sure, there are exceptions, but by and large?  If a black female character appears on the page, you know that she will A.) Become the female Protag’s best friend; B.) Counter the Heroine’s white, middle class naivety by being “street-smart”; and C.) Not be romantic competition in any way, shape, or form.  In fact, although she will probably mention that the Hero is “fine” at one point or another, she will not so much as have a crush on him.

Ladies?  Ladies who were once teenage girls?  How damn likely is it that you and your best friend NEVER had a crush on the same boy?  Not once?  EVER?  My best friends had the worst taste in boys EVER, we STILL overlapped at some points.

But I digress.  Anyway, hateful, boring, asexual stereotype.  But the heroine’s gotta have a friend who’s a little more worldly than she is, because she’s…

The Wee-est Superhero

You know, I love short people.  Some of my best friends are short people.  One of my grandfathers never got over 5′4″, so you know short people are close to my heart.  And I’m not saying they can’t be bad-ass, because seriously:  Grandpa owned a bar, and he occasionally dived over it to kick the ever-loving shit out of large drunks. 

Don’t ever make a small Italian man angry—they’re scrappy.

Anyway, I love short people and they rock, but Our Heroine?  She is always short in a way that’s…dainty.  Precious.  In other words, useless.  She’s always all weak and tiny and pale and shit.  And naïve.  So naïve.  With notable exceptions, our Heroine is almost always drug-free, sex-free, and remarkably life experience-free.  Which is apparently why all the boys like her, because she’s essentially a blank slate on to which they can project their fantasies.

In a word:  crap.  In two words:  misogynist bullshit.  In three words—oh, hell, let’s move on to the examples of cultural imperialism, shall we?

Miles Standish Was a Werewolf

Now I can’t be certain, because American public schools don’t consider Native American cultures important enough to impart much information about them to students, but I’m pretty sure the indigenous peoples of North America had mythologies of their own.  And yet, not a single YA fantasy novel deals with mythological creatures that are anything other than European in origin.  Fairies? Check.  Vampires?  Check.  Werewolves?  Triple Check.  We have got European folklore all up in this bitch, but actual Native American stories?  Naw.  And it’s weird, because there’s like…zero explanation for this.  Oh, some half-assed attempts are made to explain that there are mentions of such creatures in “every mythology,” but come on.  You can’t do a little research, maybe dig up something that’s indigenous to North America?  You’re asking me to believe that magical creatures exist:  fine, I’ll play.  But you’re also asking me to believe that only the ones that originated in European legend do?  That’s…lazy, Eurocentric, and very probably racist.

Also, seriously, we only have 8,000,000,000,000 books about teenage vampires, 4,000,000,000,000 about teenage werewolves, and 7,000,000 about MOTHERFUCKING FAIRIES.  Wouldn’t it be nice to write about something that hasn’t been done to death already?

Superpowers Are Lame

Ahem.  Onward.  So anyway, the Heroine usually has some kind of superpower, and if she does?  SHE IS NEVER HAPPY WITH IT.  And although the whining about how lame her abilities are starts to grate after, oh, THE SECOND PAGE, I can’t say I blame her for being disappointed.  Because while everyone else gets useful things like super-speed or super-strength or laser beams that shoot from their EYES, our Heroine can like, see dead people.  Or fairies.  Or like, knit really superfast. 

Basically, our Heroine, while she might have a genuinely cool power, almost NEVER has one that’s any good in a fight.  The author may talk it up, may even make it the key to the entire series, the One Way To End All Strife, but in the meantime?  Our Heroine has to get rescued by every available super-powered gentleman or woman in the series, because she is useless in a fight.  And since there’s pretty much ENDLESS FIGHTING in these books…

Very feminist of you, guys.  Go ahead and make the heroine a sitting duck, why don’t you.  Terribly progressive, yanno, to have a girl who’s “the key to everything” but can’t so much as throw a punch.

Out here it may be 2009, but in the world of YA fantasy?  It’s always 1810.

The Ethnic Backup Love Interest

And speaking of it being 1810 in here…Our Heroine always has her twoo wub, but oftentimes, authors try to make things “interesting” by introducing another competitor for her affections.  Since the actual Hero and Our Heroine are both white (hobvs), here’s yet another opportunity to incorporate some diversity!

It’s like these writers never stop to consider how it might look to young, impressionable people of all races and ethnicities to never have the Native American kid, or the black kid—wait, who are we kidding, the secondary love interest is never black.  Um, anyway, as I was saying:  how do you think it affects young readers to see that the non-white kid never gets the girl?  I mean, first off you’ve made anyone who’s not white that much more alienated by these books (as if they hadn’t been already).  But you’ve also just told white girls that it’s okay to crush on that Asian kid, but ultimately, you belong with another white person.

Nice reinforcement of social norms, people.  Oh!  And while we’re at it, thanks for reinforcing every ethnic or racial stereotype about the secondary love interest’s particular group of origin.  Because, you know, making the Asian or Jewish kid ineffectual and vaguely asexual?  Not at all offensive.

In conclusion:  GAH.

Blond Eurasians

I don’t know what it is about YA fantasy authors, but they are EXTREMELY taken with the idea of blond Eurasians.  It’s like they’ve read too much Phillip Pullman or something. 

…actually, considering the genre they work in, that’s very likely.  Anyway.  Moving on.

So guys, I recognize that hair color isn’t exactly a punnent square type deal; I mean, my own parents—a blond and a guy with black hair—managed to produce another blond, a dark brunette, and me, the semi-redhead.  So it’s definitely a combination of genes, not just BL/BL, BR/BR, or whatever.  But, um…seriously?   Nevertheless, there’s got to be a gene on both sides of the family for a recessive hair color to come through.  If you’ve got one white, blond parent and one Asian, black-haired parent, the odds that you will end up being anything other than a brunette are…well, let’s just say they’re pretty laughable.  And yet, blond-haired Eurasians abound in YA Fantasy.  I know that their “abnormality” and their rareness is the point—you want something more “exotic” than just a plain ‘ol biracial kid.  But.  BUT.

Guys, I said this before in I Love My Dead Gay Husband II, and I’ll say it again:  when you pull this atypically-blond shit, you’re trying to have a character of color who is not, in fact, anything other than white.  That’s racist.  It’s not exotic, it’s not interesting, it’s just…racist.  You know what would be truly interesting and unusual in a YA fantasy novel?  A biracial kid who was just…biracial.  I know, it’s revolutionary, but it just might work!

In Conclusion

In conclusion, I love YA Fantasy.  I love it more than I love Safeway cake, and that’s kinda like saying I love it more than I love taking communion, because the experiences are about equally holy.  So yeah, I love it.  But guys?  Guys.  We’ve got some things to work on.  Please, give me a heroine who can kick some ass.  Give me a heroine who’s not white.  Who’s not short.  Someone whose black best friend can snatch a guy out from under her nose because they are EQUALS and that means they are EQUALLY HOT.  Gimme a biracial kid who’s not blond, and give me a story that focuses on magical creatures that aren’t straight out of the Brother’s Grimm.  In short, give me something a little different.  And give it to me fast, because I’m bored over here, and these Georgette Heyer novels can only hold me for so long.