Reveals the diversity crisis in children’s and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination.Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with … not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter.
The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world.
In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”
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“The principles of the dark fantastic are so ingrained in our collective consciousness that when the expected pattern is subverted, most audiences cannot suspend disbelief. Readers and viewers complain that dark heroic protagonists are not likable. Critics observe that the characters, settings, circumstances, and resolutions are unbelievable. Agents regret that they just cannot connect with the characters. Television and movie studios, as well as publishing houses, tell writers that their stories are not marketable. Thus, whether the story in question is a novel, a television show, or a graphic novel, the Dark Other remains caged.”
This paragraph hits home as someone who loves (and writes) imaginative fiction for most of my life. My definition of imaginative fiction includes fantasy, science fiction, horror and the subgenres associated with them. I have created my own fictional worlds since childhood and it was my place of escape from the realities of growing up in the late 1970s-early 1980s as a black kid from St. Petersburg, Florida. I’m forever grateful for my mother, who understood this need I had to create my own stories that featured people from various backgrounds. However, I had a family member tell me that only white people may imagine the future or fantasize about a world that reminded them of Medieval Europe. That comment has always felt wrong to me and has sent me down a path to do my part to change that paradigm.
It is a welcomed sight to find that a book like The Dark Fantastic by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas exists to corroborate my innermost feelings to my relative’s myopic comment. Thomas examines the role race and the imagination intersects in four of the most popular fantastical works brought for public consumption in the past twenty years: The Hunger Games, Merlin, The Vampire Diaries, and Harry Potter. Each of these works has a black female character that plays a groundbreaking element to their stories but is still problematic regarding the trope of the Dark Other and its manifestations through the lens of the White Imagination.
Thomas argues that manifestation of the Dark Other reveals itself in several factors that includes self-sacrifice for the white main character, violence against this dark person in an imagined white world, hesitation to embrace a person of color as being worthy, and unrelatability of seeing a person of color in a context outside of the slavery-civil rights-ghetto paradigm. She shows through Rue Everdeen from The Hunger Games, Guinevere Pendragon from Merlin, Bonnie Bennett from The Vampire Diaries, and Hermione Granger from Harry Potter how those aforementioned factors reveal themselves in both subtle and overt ways. What hurts the most as one who prefers imaginative fiction over realistic fiction is how people can suspend their disbelief to acknowledge dragons, unicorns, and monsters in a book or movie but not a person of color in a nontraditional role outside the aforementioned paradigm.
The Dark Fantastic is a much needed book, and the author’s argument needs to be examined carefully and constructively to make genuine changes for imaginative fiction on the whole. In closing, I want to state that representation is not just about reading someone in a book or seeing on the screen that looks like me. It is about seeing someone in the full range of their humanity and not the box that society has placed for people who look like me. Thomas’ book begins the process of the emancipation of the imagination and it is about darn time. Also, I love the cover.
This book is a lot. I feel like I went through it too fast, but I just couldn’t put it down. I’m certain I’ll be re-reading this one more than once.
I found it fascinating, albeit infuriating, to learn about the Dark Fantastic Cycle and to see how different works, in different times, repeated the formula and trapped their characters in it. It was eye-opening, not only as a reader, but also as a writer (maybe especially so).
Thought provoking look at some of the most culturally pervasive young adult fantasy series of the last decade and how they treat girls of colour. It was such a pleasure to read a book by an author who so skillfully walked the line between academic and fan!
I came to this book for two reasons. One is that I’m a fan of BBC “Merlin”, and I was happy to see the show finally being considered in an academic work. The other is that I’m a writer, and a White person, who is interested in writing non-White characters and mixed-race relationships – and the more I learn, the more I realise I still need to learn.
Back in 2008 when “Merlin” first screened, I was delighted by the ways in which the showrunners mixed things up. Arthur wasn’t a noble and just king, but a spoiled brat-prince. Merlin was a naïve youth of the same age as Arthur, and not in control of his magic or indeed anything else. And Gwen was not only a lowly servant but also Black, in a place where the ruling family and most (though not all) of the aristocracy and knights were White.
I loved all of that, and very much enjoyed all the fanworks that celebrated Gwen. While the end of the last series was heartbreaking, I loved that Gwen ended up as Queen of Camelot in her own right.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas shows me, however, that wasn’t enough. While I would quibble with one aspect of her description of Gwen’s bleak ending – Gwen is not entirely alone as she has life-long friend Leon and long-time friend Gaius with her, among others – that’s not enough either. As Thomas says, if “Merlin” had ended after season four, Gwen would have had a fully happy ending: married to Arthur, crowned as Queen, and surrounded by friends including her brother Elyan. It would have been the sort of happy ending that is so rare or even non-existent for young Black women in our stories. The showrunners mixed things up in terms of the Arthurian legends, and are to be applauded for gifting us with a non-White Guinevere – but they didn’t take it far enough when it came to gifting her a happy ending in season five.
It’s not enough to point out that the Arthurian legends always end in tragedy. As Thomas shows in her consideration of young Black female characters in “The Hunger Games”, “The Vampire Diaries”, and the “Harry Potter” ’verse, Gwen is not an isolated case.
It’s not enough to claim that many of us fans (I hope the majority of us) enjoyed and celebrated Gwen in all aspects of her identity. While I tried to steer clear of it, I’m all too aware of the hostility that Gwen (and actor Angel Coulby) attracted as a person of colour – and waving the #NotAllFans flag misses the point.
It’s not enough that Thomas’s young niece is already used to identifying with characters who are White. As a queer woman (and non-American!), I am used to identifying with characters outside my own identities, too. Needs must! But I have also had the privilege of identifying with a few characters who match me very closely indeed, and time and time again I’ve had that privilege reinforced by the happy endings awarded to White characters. It’s not enough.
On one hand, I am (partially) heartened by the fact that we are obviously meant to care about and grieve for all those non-White, gay and lesbian characters who are killed off as the stories progress. On the other hand, it’s not enough. They deserve their share of fully explored storylines and happy endings, too.
Thomas challenges us with the idea that this lack of full representation in our creative works is due to a lack of imagination. We can do better. We can imagine better. Let’s get in there and write better, too!
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The publisher kindly gave me an ARC of this book via NetGalley, and I have also preordered a hardcover copy for myself via Amazon. The views expressed are my own, and are (always) still evolving.