What’s even wilder is that cultural critics have declared that Americans are living in an artistic and cultural renaissance largely due to the creations of Black writers, artists, and filmmakers. These same cultural critics declare one of these renaissances every few years, which I think speaks more to the capricious inattention of cultural critics than it does to some sudden proliferation of black creativity. American media has long relied on Black people’s inter-communal conversations to power their idea machines and fill our screens with flat, subpar representations of the stories of our ancestors. They seed our history with hashtags and create an image economy built on the products of our continued resilience. Their christened golden children, who can be and at times are Black creators, fill these not-quite-stories about not-quite-slavery with all sorts of wack shit from our history and culture, presenting it to us with a wink and nod in hopes that we will share these snackable moments. Even more contemporary projects often seek to situate stories from slavery as high profile, highly shareable content, rather than what they should be: art that pushes us, however uncomfortably, toward deeper understanding and realization.
But alongside this trend there is meaningful positive change. The people guarding the gates have had to necessarily shift how they operate and now Black stories, especially those in film, are appearing more and more often on digital streaming platforms. Slavery films with creators who are descendants of slaves at the helm have begun in recent decades receiving funding, distribution, and support.
Works like The Good Lord Bird, Underground, the novel Cane River, and the recent Seizing Freedom podcast show that stories about slavery can be more than studies of violence against Black people. There are creators who understand the weight of American slavery’s historical impact, who see in full color the depth of this country’s despicable campaign against Black life, but are armed with the creative language to look past the weight of the institution and see the humans who were at the heart of it, the Black humans who lived and loved and bled and died and survived and made their own resilient, joyous existence despite the American project to eradicate us, and its indigenous population, and any other group that insisted on claiming their space in this country.
The decades that slavery was legal in America were filled with humans living out their stories, stories that can serve as inspiration for true examinations of the Black perspective. More carefully wrought projects dealing with the subject of slavery will even allow us to experience the perspectives of those enslaved people that we’ve erased, like those of enslaved Black women. And more power to these projects if they are speculative fiction, because situating this painful and complicated history inside the speculative can help us explore even more critically what would have happened during slavery or the following periods of discrimination. What if time travel or astral projection were real, or if my ancestors’ prayers fell on the ears of slumbering gods of the deep, who, upon hearing them, became filled with the desire to destroy modern society?
The point of these stories should be to force us to truly, honestly reckon with the reality that Black people were—and continue to be—subjugated, ethnically cleansed, and made the victims of colonization efforts solely because of white people’s dedication to creating and preserving their position of social superiority. Sometimes, the fatigue we feel at the mishandling of these stories or our own internalized commitment to anti-Black ideas can get in the way of us understanding that fact. The stories of our enslaved ancestors, and other people who lived under, and struggled against various American campaigns of oppression and eradication, are worth more than our disdain. They are worth our care, our consideration, and our attention. Slavery was more than just a jumble of violences. It is a shared history that starred and featured Black people engaged in the most essential and important projects that any human could undertake: the quest for true freedom from violence and oppression, the fight to live fully realized human lives.
© 2021 Troy L. Wiggins
Troy L. Wiggins is an award-winning writer and editor from Memphis, Tennessee. His short fiction has appeared in the Griots: Sisters of the Spear, Long Hidden: Speculative From the Margins of History, and Memphis Noir anthologies, and in Expanded Horizons, Fireside, Uncanny, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies Magazines. His essays and criticism have appeared in the Memphis Flyer, Literary Orphans Magazine, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, PEN America, and on Tor.com.
Troy is a founding Co-Editor of the Hugo Award Nominated FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, which received a World Fantasy Award in 2018. He was inducted into the Dal Coger Memorial Hall of Fame for his contributions to Speculative Fiction in Memphis in 2018. Troy infrequently blogs about writing, nerd culture, and race at afrofantasy.wordpress.com. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with his wife, Kimberly.
The Bad Dad Redemption Arc Needs to Die
by Nino Cipri
A few years ago, right as my relationship with my own father reached a breaking point, I started noticing how often bad dads and father figures get redemption plots in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. A Quiet Place had just come out. John Krasinski, who also wrote and directed the film, stars as Lee Abbott, a soft-apocalyptic hipster dad in a beard and flannel, who kind of looks like he was in an experimental folk band at some point. Carnivorous aliens with sensitive hearing have invaded the earth—a very handy excuse for Lee’s utter inability to have a conversation with his estranged, Deaf daughter Regan. Despite everyone in this movie telling Lee to get his shit together and talk to Regan, he waits to tell her he loves her until approximately seven seconds before he sacrifices himself to save her.
That’s how these things always go; it’s never a conversation, but a one-sided declaration moments before annihilation. These redemption arcs inevitably end with the fathers’ self-sacrifice after spending most of the movie ignoring, neglecting, or abusing the kids under their care. They die, because death is the only way we imagine fatherly failures being forgiven. And we applaud them for it, the writers and the dead dads both. It’s meant to be cathartic. In fact, it is bullshit.
I’ll willingly admit that some of my bias against Bad Movie Dads is rooted in my decades-long estrangement with my own father, who was an abusive alcoholic in my childhood and a fraught ghost haunting the peripheries of my adulthood. My grandmother, with whom he lived, became the mediator between him and his children: buying birthday cards and prompting him to sign them, keeping us all updated on each other. When she developed dementia and went to live in an assisted living facility, he stopped initiating any contact with us at all.
So yes, I’ll admit I’m particularly unsympathetic to the Bad Dad Redemption Arc. But once I started looking for it, I started seeing it everywhere. A Dad (or a stand-in for one) is abusive, violent, neglectful, or unwilling to do the emotional labor of raising a kid. A catastrophe presents itself as the ultimate Get Out of Accountability Free opportunity. The Bad Dad will impart some final stunted effort at affection, usually for the first and only time, and then conveniently die. His fuckery is redeemed, and he avoids being held accountable for all the shit he pulled.
Most of the big SFF franchises of the past decade are veritable Bad Dad Graveyards. Harry Potter’s many father figures get Avada Kedavra’d throughout the series. Peter Quill’s kidnapper/adopted father Yondu is forgiven for being an abuser and human trafficker. Star Wars is an entire saga of garbage dads begetting other garbage dads. Even Luke Skywalker, the one guy you thought might just avoid children like the celibate space monk he is, decides to kill edgelord teen Ben Solo instead of having a conversation with him. When that fails, Luke exiles himself to the ass-end of the galaxy to stew in his manpain, then whiffs out of existence.
All of these sacrifices are self-centered, however. The children in these movies are only ever an afterthought to someone else’s character development. It’s like the concept of fridging was turned inside-out: the children live and the men die. But men get the spotlight, the good deat
h scene, the redemption. The children get the consequences and the lifelong trauma, but that all happens off-screen. I guess it’s not as compelling.
If we read these stories in a harsher light, the Bad Dad Redemption Arc actually punishes men for finally acting like the fathers they should have been all along. Death is the consequence for that ultimate betrayal of cis-masculinity: admitting you messed up, have feelings, are vulnerable. It’s the worst sin a father can commit. There’s no coming back from that. There’s only death.
It surprises me not at all that some of the more interesting and complicated looks at fatherhood in recent years have come from Black writers and directors. I’m unqualified to talk about portrayals of Black fatherhood in depth, but it feels safe to guess that part of this care comes from having to write against racist stereotypes of Black men and families. Such stereotypes were and are used to forward white supremacist agendas, justifying policies that see Black families and populations overpoliced, over-represented in the carceral system, and overly scrutinized by the state.
Black Panther presents us with a father, T’Chaka, who, rather than being forgiven in death, is held accountable in the afterlife. Moreover, his son actually assumes responsibility, atoning for the sins his father committed. We feel complicated sympathy instead for Eric Killmonger, and for all the children like him: abandoned, angry, too hurt to distinguish the boundaries between demanding justice and perpetuating violence.
Black creators have also imagined white fathers in more interesting and nuanced ways. Alex Murray in Ava Duvernay’s A Wrinkle In Time, father of Meg and Charles Wallace and played by Chris Pine, has his shitty moments; his ambitions and refusal to be wrong lead him to abandoning his family for years. But Alex admits that he’s failed, goes home, and lives with his mistakes. Making amends for his failures as a father will probably not be easy, but we see the consequences of his abandonment. Meg in particular is deeply wounded. The journey she takes is ostensibly to save Alex, but it’s also to bring herself back out of the shadow of that trauma. A Wrinkle In Time got a mixed reception, but it’s one of the only movies in recent memory where a dad was forgiven, but his daughter got the spotlight. The accountability lay on Alex Murray, and it was a burden he was willing to shoulder. The story, the journey, the resolution, and the decision to forgive him belonged to Meg.
Here’s a hard truth: death doesn’t guarantee you forgiveness. Dying is not sufficient. Atonement takes effort. For the children who survive their terrible fathers, the pain will not end when their fathers do, in a tidy funeral montage and a few poignant words. Grieving someone who hurt you, not once but over and over, is a terrible legacy to leave behind.
I’ve nursed a suspicion for years: that my father’s move to Oklahoma when I was fourteen—a state that previously he had expressed nothing but contempt for—was a sort of descent into the underworld for him, a willing sentence in purgatory for being a violent failure of a father and husband. When I can look past my own anger and channel some empathy, I think maybe it was a retreat; my father is disabled, with limited mobility and a speech impediment that makes moving through the ableist world frustrating. Why fight to stay in a world that tells you at every turn that you’re not welcome? Why fight, except it’s where your children are?
When he left, our relationship froze in time. He still calls me by a name I no longer go by—not out of malicious transphobia, but because he has no interest in who I am now. He’s too intent on wearing all the mistakes of his past, and I have no idea how to invite him into the present, or even if I want to. For a while, my mother tried to keep him apprised of his children’s accomplishments when my grandmother no longer could. Then he got rid of his phone, and his internet access. I last saw him in 2017, when my older sibling graduated from med school; he hadn’t realized that Donald Trump had been elected president until months after the inauguration.
Does he know I’m a published author? Has he read my books? Or does he only remember me as a child who once accompanied him to open mics and read his poetry for him? Does he think of the writing workshop he drove me to the summer I turned fourteen, how he let me play Neil Young’s Heart of Gold and Led Zepplin’s IV on repeat? Does he think about trying to hit me and my older sibling with his cane, heavy and hand-carved from oak? Does he remember how I used to shut down and freeze whenever his voice rose above a certain decibel?
Most likely, he doesn’t think of me at all. A great-uncle who lives in town told my mother, “He is used to living like he does and accepts the blame for his problems and is content.” If he follows the script Hollywood has laid down, it’ll take a supervolcano or alien invasion for him to reconsider his approach to paternal responsibility.
If his exile was an ongoing trial period for his physical death, my father dragged his children into the underworld with him. I’ve spent nearly twenty years in its shadow, wondering how I’ll handle it when he dies for real, and knowing very well that it might wreck me. He was part of my life long enough to carve out an absence in the shape of his silhouette; for me to know all the ways in which I am like him and of him, for better or worse. Having practice at loss rarely softens the blow.
And as I was first writing this essay, a year since our last conversation, there was a death in my family. Not my father, but his mother; the same grandmother that maintained the link between my father and his estranged children.
The only reason I didn’t find out she died from Facebook is because my mother saw my uncle posting about it first and called me. I didn’t hear from my dad until nearly a day and a half later. “I hate talking on cell phones,” he told my voicemail, in a studied, reading-from-a-script voice. “It’s not you. It’s everybody.”
That’s the best comfort my father could offer: his neglect, at least, wasn’t personal.
Listening to my father’s half-assed apology, I came to a decision. I no longer want any part in his redemption. I abdicate my position as my father’s judge and jury, as his audience, as the witnesses called to testify or condemn. I’m not his keeper, his redeemer, or his character development.
I am abandoning this narrative that I hate so much. I wanted to imagine a good ending for this story, but I’ve reached the limit of my own creative powers. As creators and as audiences, as the children of all kinds of fathers, we deserve better stories. So I’m closing this book, and I’m walking away.
© 2021 Nino Cipri
Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. A graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Kansas’s MFA, Nino’s fiction has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, Lambda, Nebula, and Hugo Awards. A multidisciplinary artist, Nino has also written plays, screenplays, and radio features; performed as a dancer, actor, and puppeteer; and worked as a stagehand, bookseller, bike mechanic, and labor organizer.
One time, an angry person on the internet called Nino a verbal terrorist, which was pretty funny.
Nino’s 2019 story collection Homesick won the Dzanc Short Fiction Collection Prize and was chosen as one of the top ten books on the ALA’s Over the Rainbow Reading List. Their novella Finna — about queer heartbreak, working retail, and wormholes — was published by Tor.com in 2020, and its sequel Defekt came out in April 2021. Nino’s YA horror debut, Burned and Buried, will be published by Holt Young Readers in 2022. They also write a sporadic newsletter, COOL STORY, BRO, about narrative storytelling and how cool it is.
WWXD: A Warrior’s Path of Reflection and Redemption
by C.L. Clark
Whenever we circle around the topic of best redemption arcs in fiction (TV, books, etc.), crowd favorites tend to be Zuko of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005) and recently, Catra, of the recent She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018). I am always surprised at one notable absence: Xena: Warrior Princess (1996) with Xena’s complicated (and subtextually queer) six season long redemption arc.1
I’ve often wondered about this fascination with redemption arcs, why it tugs at our story-sens
e so hard, why we write them so often for children’s shows, and what we can learn from them—what we need to learn from them, especially as adults. This fascination could come from many places. There’s the very Christian idea that through belief in Christ, all earthly sins will be forgiven, and it has its own adherents and interpretations. But there’s also the simple—or perhaps not so simple—acknowledgement that even the tales of Christian forgiveness appeal to the fact that part of being human means hurting people and being sorry for it. We have all hurt people or likely will hurt people in the future, accidentally or, even more likely, on purpose, especially in pursuit of our own ends. In short, according to many moral codes, religious or otherwise, we’re flawed. When we watch shows or read books for their redemption arcs, maybe we’re indulging in the fantasy that we too can be forgiven—or the fantasy that those who have wronged us will put themselves at our mercy in an attempt to atone.
In the first episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, “Sins of the Past” (no, it’s not subtle), we meet Xena the Warlord. She’s on her way back home to Amphipolis without her army. She strips off her armor and buries it with her weaponry in a clearing just outside of a little town called Potadeia (where she’s about to meet her soulmate, obviously, as one does). From the very beginning of the series, she regrets the crimes she committed as a warlord, though it will take many episodes for her to fully come to grips with the lasting damage she’s caused others and how she’s received and perceived by others.
Shortly after she buries her armor, though, she comes across a warlord’s minion trying to round up some villagers to enslave. Xena fights the brigands, digs back up the weapons of her past, and turns them on her fellow warlords. It’s apt foreshadowing for the way Xena proceeds to attempt to atone for her crimes across the series: turning the violence she once used against the vulnerable to their defense instead. This is also when she meets Gabrielle (cough-soulmate-cough). Gabrielle is innocent, kind, and persuasive: Xena’s perfect foil. (And look at the casting: small, blonde, colorful, compared to Xena’s tall, dark, and handso—I mean, broody.) In this episode and thereafter, it’s her faith in Xena’s potential for good that persuades skeptics to give Xena another chance. Gabrielle is Xena’s vouchsafe, and later on, Xena’s touchstone when she needs to remember her new path.
Uncanny Magazine Issue 41 Page 13