Anita Blake, Superheroines and Why I Am Here

A couple of years ago, I asked a bunch of online friends to recommend some books that were easy yet solidly fun and not intelligence-insulting reads. My friends came through admirably, and I read a lot of great books out of this list -- like Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Terry Ryan's The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio and James McBride's The Color of Water -- and a few duds, like Max Barry's Jennifer Government. Yet what fascinated me the most about my friends' recommendations was that almost every one recommended Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, because the rest of the Internet had left me with the impression that those books were absolutely horrible.

Most of the complaints about the actual series (we'll get to the comic book series another day), centers around a superpower Anita Blake gets in the tenth book in the series, Narcissus in Chains, which requires her to have sex multiple times a day. For those of you who have never heard of this, yes, this is what actually happens. It's gotten to the point where people say if you pick up one of the later Hamilton books and flip to a random page, nine times out of 10 you will see the main character having sex. I'm bad at this game, (although I found it worked very well for this book, oddly enough) and I haven't read the later books, but I did read the first book of Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, A Kiss of Shadows, and thus I have no problem taking others' word for it.

Still, many of those who vociferously condemned the later books did so because they loved the earlier books so much. So I decided to give them a try. I've read six of the Anita Blake books now, and I have two general things to say about them.

1.) They're a lot of fun. Anita has a great character voice: a gee-whiz type of sarcasm that keeps the books funny and as grounded as possible for a series centered around an integrated human-monster society where vampires vote and have their own churches. Also, while I think most of Hamilton's vampires are slightly less scary than the guy wearing fake fangs at your parents' Halloween party, I really like her zombies -- The Laughing Corpse is easily the best book in the series -- and a lot of the worldbuilding in general.

2.) For a series with a female heroine that had some degree of good feminist intentions (or at least evening-the-score intentions) in its origins, as Hamilton describes here:

I started reading a lot of hardboiled detective fiction—Robert B. Parker in particular—and I read a lot of strong female protagonists. But there was one problem, a difference between the male and female protagonists of the different series—even the strongest of the women did not get to do some of the things the men got to do. The men got to cuss, the women rarely; the men got to kill people and not feel bad about it, if the women killed someone they had to feel really, really bad about it afterward and it had to be an extreme situation; the men got to have sex, often and on stage and very casually, but if the women had sex it had to be offstage, very sanitized. I thought this was unfair.

... the way female characters are treated in the series, and in the Merry Gentry series, is kind of messed up.

In Hamilton-world there are three types of women: 1.) the heroine, who is exceptional in the face of working against a sexist system perpetuated by bad men and women who hate her, and this exceptionalism is shown by her amazing superpowers 2.) the villainous women, who are not much different from the heroine except they're, y'know, evil and 3.) a mass of female victims -- usually ones who are in an abusive relationship -- who the heroine can feel pity for, mixed with some disgust because they do not work hard enough to escape their situations and/or fight the system and are basically not special like her.

One of the most egregious examples occurs in A Kiss of Shadows, where Merry's evil male cousin Cel takes Merry's female childhood friend as a slave. While Merry feels sorry for her friend, the text also emphasizes that her friend's debasement is her friend's own choice because her friend is submitting to be Cel's slave to enter into faerie society. Basically, her friend is being abused and that is terrible, but she asks for it, and not in a BDSM sense, either, so Merry doesn't have to feel too bad about it. After the first book, the friend is never seen again.

These problematic elements could be dismissed as a writer's own quirks, yet I have read a number of other urban fantasy novels with female heroines, and found they had a number of problematic elements as well, especially with race and gender. This is perhaps surprising to some. Urban fantasy seems to be one of the only mainstream genres where women (white and of color) can write superhero stories about and for women, and yet they seem to have just as many problematic elements as male comic book writers writing superheroines, or comic book movies/TV series centered around superheroines.

Yet I find comic book and urban fantasy heroines fascinating, because the idea of a superheroine is one that has always held an appeal for me and still does. There's still a little six-year-old inside me who wants to run away and slay dragons, and I've been on the Internet and met enough other comic book, manga and urban fantasy fans to know I'm not the only one. Basically, urban fantasy and comic book superheroines are genres where I want to see women succeed in a fantasy/sci-fi/horror setting, and yet they often do not.

So the wish-fulfillment fantasy is a big draw and I know that among the seekers of superheroines we're always looking for something more, but I find I usually have a lot to say about where these stories -- whether written by men or women -- go wrong, as well.

Thus, this blog, where I try to look at the big, wide world of chicks killing (or maybe just beating up) things in the media. I hope you'll join me.