Uncanny Magazine - JanFeb2017

by Uncanny Magazine

  Just a couple scenes later, I figured out the movie’s big twist once the concept of an Obscurus, a dark force borne of a wizard who suppressed their magical abilities, was uttered by Newt. It was so obvious to me because I saw myself in Credence. I saw a kid who could not control what he was born as, under the care of someone who believed that his very identity was an evil, wretched thing. I saw my own mother’s ferocious Christian beliefs in this fictional character, as well as the same willingness to try and abuse away my sexuality.

  And then the movie switched right back to a whimsical discovery story; it’s jarring, as if another film lived inside of this one. Fantastic Beasts alternates between Newt and his newfound friends tracking down magical creatures, and the tensions surrounding the mysterious Obscurus that is not only destroying New York City, but killing people. All of this risks exposing the wizarding world to the No–Maj (or muggle) community. The path was clear to me: Newt would realize that Credence was the Obscurus and he would use his characteristic empathy to get others to understand that this magical “creature” deserved just as much respect and sympathy as all the other creatures under his care.

  I wish that was how it went.

  We are told to love our parents. In American society, family is often touted as the one bedrock of civility and peace, the framework under which all successful relationships are built. Family is important within the Harry Potter universe as well. We can see that in the love that James and Lily had for Harry; Lily’s love is what saved his life that fateful night in Godric’s Hollow. The Weasley family is held up as an example of love that exists despite difficult circumstances. Molly Weasley herself ends up being a mother figure for Harry, accepting him into the Weasley family upon their first meeting. There’s even the value of found–family within Harry Potter , too, and I’d argue that the large group of friends Harry makes—especially Ron and Hermione—count as a family.

  Corruption exists within this world, too, and the Dursleys are a prime example. From the first chapter in the first book to the very end, their treatment of Harry is abysmal. They’re abusive, mean, cruel, and stand in direct contrast to the love we see throughout the series. I found it empowering to read Harry’s story through the lens of abuse because, for all its flaws, Harry still got to be the hero. He got to stand up to the Dursleys, to Dolores Umbridge, to Snape, to Voldemort, and we knew Harry deserved to be loved. To be respected. To be listened to.

  Perhaps Rowling intended the same for Fantastic Beasts , but the text itself does not offer Credence the same respect or love that is given to every magical creature within this film. He is abused regularly by his mother, so much so that he suppresses his magic. Graves, the investigator within the Macusa (think the American wizarding world’s FBI, if you will), who tries to track down the Obscurus, viciously uses and abuses Credence as well. He pressures him to find the child giving off such powerful energy; later in the film, when Credence is clearly lying to protect himself, Graves strikes Credence across the face, and the cycle of abuse begins all over again, but this time with a different adult perpetrating it.

  And yet, I still held out. I still believed that Rowling would use Newt to give this kid redemption and love. I still believed she would show us the redemptive, healing power of family. If she could vindicate Severus Snape, who abused children for years without any repercussions, then surely she could give some sympathy to an abused teenager who just wanted to be himself.

  The climax of Fantastic Beasts is one of the more horrifying things I’ve ever seen. Credence transforms into a literal monster: a swirling mass of black magic and energy that rips apart New York City and tries to kill countless people. And when he is finally confronted by the three main characters of the film, when he is finally given sympathy from Newt and Graves, when he is close to some sort of relief from the relentless pain he has been in, he is murdered. A group of Macusa wizards lines up like a firing squad and rains magic down on him until he is gone. The film spends maybe ten seconds addressing the murder of a young wizard before, in a shocking viciousness, it completely forgets about him. His name is not mentioned by Seraphina Picquery, the president of Macusa; Newt does not offer him a final goodbye; no one says anything about him. He is the main conflict of the film, and not a single character reflects on the central problem they all just had to deal with.

  In the end, Credence is a plot point. He exists to suffer so much that he creates the conflict for the story. He is then further abused on–screen by everyone he comes into contact with. (Except Newt, though they don’t even meet in any significant way until the final 20 minutes of the film.) The movie’s message –that dangerous creatures should still be understood and accepted—is not extended to him. If this film were a grand tragedy, I might understand. However, Fantastic Beasts instead gives the “saddest” moment to Jacob Kowalski and the wizard he fell in love with, who must obliviate him and wipe his memory after everything he went through.

  Credence does not matter in these scenes. Instead, Rowling invokes the dreaded trope of abused characters turning into evil, and she never subverts it.

  Abuse does not inherently give closure. Even if I were able to impart upon my mother the severe damage she exacted on me, I would not feel better. It would not repair the decades of scars in my brain and in my heart. They are ghosts that haunt me and probably will for a long time. Watching Fantastic Beasts dredged up these memories, and it made the final act of the film unwatchable and unforgivable. There’s so much talk toward the end about how Credence cannot control who he is, that he was born that way, that the world needed to accept him first before he could begin to heal. How could I not see my young queer self within that metaphor? How could I not see the societal power that was wielded against him? And in the end, that brilliant, scared, and intense light was snuffed out. Extinguished. Gone.

  There’s a wisp of Credence’s Obscurus that floats up into the sky after his demise. People have latched on to this as a sign that he survived, that he’ll return in the next film, that all of this will be addressed. But how can Credence ever be given closure? His adoptive mother is dead by his hands; his sisters are terrified of him; his anger and rage and terror were responsible for a large–scale destruction of New York City. What possible sympathy could he be given at this point? How will he be allowed to heal in a society that is, according to this film, so terrified of exposure to No–Majs that they will do anything to conceal themselves?

  It’s difficult for me to ignore how this very writing choice perpetuates a specific aspect of abuse: the elimination of hope. When you’re stuck in a cycle, hope is often literally inconceivable. You cannot imagine any way out of it. Harry himself is not offered a window of hope, a glimmer of possibility, until Hagrid reveals to him how long he’s been lied to by the Dursleys. That moment is, unsurprisingly, the first scene in the series that truly grabbed me as a first–time reader. Hagrid found a way to break that cycle, even if he didn’t fully understand the importance of it.

  I just wanted Credence to be given hope. I don’t see that anywhere in this film, and it’s why I was so disappointed by it. It is vital that abuse narratives don’t work toward lengthening these cycles. As it stands, Fantastic Beasts betrays the very theme it sets out to celebrate, and it does so with a scared, abused kid who just needed one person to believe in him.

  © 2017 by Mark Oshiro

  * * *

  What if you could re–live the experience of reading a book (or watching a show) for the first time? Mark Oshiro provides just such a thing on a daily basis on Mark Reads and Mark Watches , where he chronicles his unspoiled journey through various television and book series. Since 2009, Mark has been subjecting himself to the emotional journey that one takes when they enter a fictional world for the first time. He mixes textual analysis, confessional blogging, and humor to analyze fiction that usually makes him cry and yell on camera. All of this earned Mark a Hugo Award nomination in the Fan Writer category in 2013 and 2014, and he has no plans on stopping. He was
the nonfiction editor of Queers Destroy Science Fiction! and the co–editor of Speculative Fiction 2015 . He is the President of Con or Bust, a non–profit that helps fans of color attend SFF conventions. His first novel, a YA contemporary about police brutality, is in need of an agent and will make you feel lots of things. His life goal: to pet every dog in the world.

  * * *

  Why You Should Read Romance

  Natalie Luhrs | 1740 words

  When I was 12, I read my mother’s copy of Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’s Shanna . A typical romance of the late 70s, it features a defiant heroine who tricks a cad bound for the gallows into marrying her and their eventual “reunion” in the Caribbean some time later. My mother was less than thrilled to discover I’d read the book—she never specified precisely why, but I suspect it had something to do with the very interesting sex scenes. I was specifically forbidden from reading any more of her romance novels—which were kept in her bedroom—and which I snuck out, to read one at a time, for years afterwards.

  When I was 14, I ran out of books on a family camping trip and picked up one of the books my father had finished: the first in Charles Ingrid’s Sand Wars series. I was hooked by the action and the futuristic setting. Over the next few years I read through all the books my father read, as well as the ones I found in my school and local library. Both libraries were fairly small and my father has somewhat narrow taste in science fiction (he prefers military SF, Baen–flavored), so I read a lot of things with manly men who did manly things and the women who decorated their lives.

  My teenage years were marked by openly reading speculative fiction and sneaking my romance novels for reading after hours. Due to my mother’s reaction when she discovered I’d read Shanna , romance was illicit in a way that speculative fiction simply wasn’t.

  I share this because it took me a long time—too long—to be open about reading and enjoying romance. I never felt like I needed to hide my love of speculative fiction, not even when I was obsessed with the Heinlein novel where Lazarus Long travels back in time to fuck his mom.

  Which book am I more ashamed of being obsessed with as a teen? To Sail Beyond the Sunset or The Valley of Horses ? Why, it would be the one with the time–traveling incest and not the one about the isolated prehistoric woman and the man with the magic dick who finds her valley.

  The fact of the matter is both romance and speculative fiction often have completely ridiculous, implausible, and wholly inappropriate things going on and yet only one of them is predictably portrayed as something readers should be ashamed of liking. In fact, it can be argued that speculative fiction is wholly mainstream and the days of nerds having dirt kicked in their faces because they liked books with spaceships on the covers are long, long past.

  I’m going to challenge everyone out there to think about why this may be the case.

  Is it because we, as a culture, don’t value stories about emotions and connection? Why not?

  Is it because we don’t value works written (primarily, but absolutely not exclusively) by women for women? Why not?

  Romance, for the most part, centers the stories of women. It centers their needs and wants and desires. It gives them agency and choice. It also centers the stories of people who are, so often, denied happy endings in fiction and in real life: queer people, non–binary people, trans people, people of color, disabled people, asexual people.

  Romance makes people fully human and exposes the lie at the heart of white hegemony.

  Whenever I read or hear a sneering comment about romance I feel like I need to pull out my copy of How to Suppress Women’s Writing and have a come to Jesus moment with the speaker.

  Do you have any idea how exhausting this is? To feel like I have to constantly defend reading that I find entertaining, pleasurable, and enriching?

  Before I go any further down this road: there are many romances that are not good, that are full of the same sorts of outdated and toxic attitudes as the most regressive flavor of speculative fiction. I am not talking about those books. I am talking about the romances I read, which are emphatically not catering to people mired in a past that never was.

  I recently devoured Courtney Milan’s Hold Me , which is the story of Maria and Jay, who meet for the first time at the beginning of the book and have also been flirting in each other’s general direction online for 18 months. Maria is a Latinx trans woman going to school full–time and Jay is a Thai–Chinese cis man who is a professor shooting for tenure (the possible power imbalance in their relationship is directly addressed in the text). While the set–up felt a trifle contrived, I loved the emotional journey that both Maria and Jay have to take to get to a place where they continue together, instead of separately.

  I tend to feel this way about most of Milan’s books—she writes about people who are either on the margins or who are interrogating their place in the center of their societies. Her settings are diverse, with people of color and queer people in nearly all her books—including her historicals.

  Over the years, I have read more than my fair share of speculative fiction novels where the female characters are ancillary or almost wholly non–existent. The most prominent example I can think of here is Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles : the female characters orbit around Kvothe and none of them seem to be people in their own right. Hilariously, Kvothe loses his virginity to a magical fairy woman named Felurian, and she chooses not to kill him because despite his inexperience, he’s amazing in the sack.

  This sort of shit does not fly in romance and we shouldn’t let it fly in speculative fiction, either. Cecilia Grant’s A Lady Awakened has one of the best awkward–bad sex scenes in the genre (the female lead’s hands are described as flopping around like dead fish while she endures) and the amount of work that scene does to show the reader who these two people are and the narrative oomph the final sex scene in the book has—where Martha takes charge of Theo in a way that is utterly compelling—has so much to do with Grant’s authorial willingness to build the relationship from the ground up.

  And Grant is not unusual in her willingness to go there—some of the most exciting stories being told in romance really dig deep into the characters’ emotional lives and explore, not only who they are, but why they are who they are, including both internal and external factors. But it’s done in a microcosm of society, in an incredibly intimate interplay between characters where their interactions with each other are as much reflections of the larger society in which they move as expressions of their feelings for each other.

  Romance writers know how to move the story along and not spend 30 pages explaining a hyperspace drive that doesn’t exist. Every paragraph and every sentence has to move the reader toward the end of the story or else it doesn’t work. Their characters have to be fully realized or the basic structure of the genre simply doesn’t work—without fleshing out the characters, the reader can see the scaffold upon which it is built.

  Interestingly enough, when speculative fiction writers do praise romance writers, it’s nearly always on the latter—their business savvy—and not the former—their craft.

  I see romance writers subjected to questions about their personal lives—including what sorts of activities they prefer in the bedroom and wink–wink, nudge–nudge questions about “research.” I see jokes about bodice–ripping and rape. I see disrespect for these authors who are not only incredible writers but who are also savvy in the ways of marketing and reader outreach.

  I have always found this incredibly confusing because if I want to read a story about human beings connecting with each other, I’m more than likely going to read a romance. In the aggregate, romance writers are so much better at integrating emotional arcs into their stories than many other writers are.

  One of the tour de forces of the romance genre is Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels . First published in 1995, it is still incredibly readable and I find myself returning to it on a near–annual basis. This novel uses one of the most tired tropes in the
genre: the alpha asshole hero and the woman who loves him. The arc of the book humanizes Dain by contrasting him with Jessica—she is smart and knows how to manipulate the society he eschews while still making it clear that while Dain may be a powerful man, Jessica’s got his number.

  Chase interrogates Dain’s motivations and history while never making excuses for his awful behavior and general terribleness at being a human being (a theme which continues in subsequent books where Jessica and Dain appear as secondary characters—he is always an asshole). He is deeply, deeply damaged—and Jessica knows this, understands, and loves him anyhow. Jessica’s love doesn’t redeem him or make him a better person, but it is there and real nonetheless.

  What makes Lord of Scoundrels such a fantastic book is that in many ways, it is a re–imagination of the romances that burst onto the scene in the 1970s and is in conversation with them as much as it is in conversation with its peers. Chase takes the very traditional romance elements of a dominant man and the woman who loves him and up–ends it in such a way that it is Dain who is subdued, not Jessica. And while Dain may be subdued, at the end of the book, he is not broken.

  Romances are stories about embodiment and desire and feelings––all things that we are, in many ways, encouraged to minimize in our daily lives. Romance is about meeting people where they are with nothing more than what you already have. And often that’s not enough, and then romance is about growing up and becoming the sort of person who is worthy of another. It’s about sticking with your loved ones through good times and awful ones. It’s about showing up.

  And now, more than ever, we all need to show up.