Thoughts on “Cuties” (“Mignonnes”) (2020 film by Maïmouna Doucouré)

[Note: I wrote most of this review in October 2020, after I chanced to see this film. It just never felt appropriate to post it in the midst of all the political turmoil and nonsense of recent times. Then I kept forgetting to publish it. I guess I may as well do it now?]

I ended up watching Cuties after defending it to my mother, who had heard a lot of outraged media talking points about it. She suggested we watch it to see for ourselves, and after having done so I felt uncomfortable with myself for having defended it so vociferously. I ended up with a lot of very mixed impressions.

 

Hench: A Novel (Natalie Zina Walschots, 2020)

[amazon]

This book has been on my to-read list for a while, ever since I happened to see the author in some Twitter conversation earlier this year (I don’t remember the context, for better or worse). Anyone who’s known me for any length of time is probably aware that I love stories that subvert expectations and explore the perspectives of characters who normally tend to be glossed over (villains, servants, etc), or which attempt to interrogate tropes through the lens of “what if we take it seriously and let reality ensue”. I also tend to enjoy what I’ll call “competence porn”, which it looked like this might be (it is). If anything, this book seemed too perfectly designed to push my buttons so I worried it might be too good to be true, but I was cautiously optimistic nonetheless.

I finally got around to reading it (in more or less one sitting) this week, and, well. I did end up having some quibbles here and there (as I tend to do; I’ll get into them later in this review), but overall I can’t help but say I absolutely loved it. It feels weird to say something so explicitly positive, but it’s true.

Hench is an ambitious book (especially for an author’s first novel) that is willing to engage with a lot of complex and charged topics and unabashedly take sides, while remaining fast-paced and entertaining, and it genuinely impressed me. It is also very refreshing to see a story like this in which the main characters have no powers and the narrative is firmly on their side. We need more books like this.

 

Sigh. Guess I have to talk about Rowling being a TERF again.

I didn’t want to write about J.K. Rowling’s transphobia again, and considered myself to have said all I wanted or needed to on the subject the last time this came up. That said, the discussion has been raging over the last few days, and I feel guilty for not having said anything.

Let’s get this out of the way first: The Sun’s interview of her abusive ex-husband, in which he brags about assaulting her, is unacceptable and unwarranted (and I shall not be linking to it). That said, I don’t know why anyone would have expected better from the Sun, nor why anyone thinks mentioning it is a defence of her. It’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time: we can condemn both of them. The Sun doing this appalling thing to Rowling does not in any way excuse her for the appalling things she herself has said about trans people and the harm that those words will do.

While Rowling’s manifesto of transphobic dogwhistles is certainly more substantive than anything she’d said on the subject before, most of it is not surprising given what we already knew she believed. The danger, I’ve seen argued and I think I agree, is that a lot of her rhetoric is superficially plausible and may look convincing to people who know little about the subject (as most TERF rhetoric is designed to be), and she has a very large platform due to her fame and wealth, so it’s likely to be widely read.

The other aspect is that her tweets and manifesto came at a time when they distract from widespread civil unrest that actually seems to be having an impact for once. The protests against police brutality and systemic racism set off by the murder of George Floyd are incredibly important, and Rowling managed to divert the media attention to herself instead. Even if this is a mere coincidence, it shows incredibly bad judgment and a certain degree of narcissism; if not, it looks like a deliberately racist act.

It is, however, an encouraging sign that so many members of the Harry Potter movie casts have spoken out against her, including Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Evanna Lynch, Eddie Redmayne, Rupert Grint, Katie Leung, Bonnie Wright, Noma Dumezweni and I’m sure others I’ve missed or am failing to recall at the moment. Kudos to them for doing this. It doesn’t erase the damage Rowling’s words have done, but I hope that it at least helps mitigate it a bit for those transgender fans who are hurting right now.

I want to highlight a few things I found noteworthy in this conversation:

First: this thread (unrolled version) highlights an incredible irony, which I’ll summarise, but I highly recommend reading the entire thing because it’s wonderful. This line is quoted:

“‘Harry, your eyesight really is awful,’ said Hermione, as she put on glasses”
—Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, chapter 4, “The Seven Potters”

This is from the scene in which multiple people use Polyjuice Potion to transform into Harry. As the tweet puts it, “At this point in the narrative, if you’ll forgive me for putting it so bluntly, Hermione has a penis and testicles.” Her body is currently identical to Harry’s (even to the point of his myopia), and we know Harry is cis male. Yet Rowling instinctively knew to continue using “she” for Hermione, because her gender identity didn’t change despite not matching her current physical configuration.

(On the subject of pronouns, it’s also… interesting, let’s say, that in the awful Silkworm scene involving Pippa which has been rightly criticised so often, which comes up every time this issue gets discussed, Rowling’s narrative gets her pronouns right. She wrote a scene in which a stereotyped trans woman is villainised and threatened with prison rape, but she got her pronouns right. If anything, Rowling’s transphobia has gotten worse since then. She’s not learning, and if anything she’s being radicalised.)

This is beyond just Rowling – I’ve definitely seen other transphobes instinctively use the correct pronoun for a binary trans person, only to then “correct” themself in order to deliberately misgender them. They already know.

Second: once you start looking for it, transphobia isn’t hard to find in Harry Potter canon. For example, look how Rita Skeeter is described [quote source]

“Skeeter was described as having blonde hair set in elaborate curls that contrasted oddly with her heavy-jawed face. She wore jewelled spectacles studded with rhinestones, and had thick fingers ending in two-inch nails, painted crimson. Her blonde curls were curiously rigid, suggesting it was styled with the magical equivalent of hairspray. In addition, she had penciled-on eyebrows and three gold teeth, as well as large, masculine hands. Her bright scarlet painted fingernails and toenails were usually likened to claws or talons.”

Hyperfeminine presentation. “Heavy jaw”. “Masculine hands”. It reads like a litany of dogwhistled stereotypes. Rita may or may not actually be trans, but this certainly looks like she’s coded that way. And beyond that, I saw someone point out that the rest of Skeeter’s character starts to look more sinister, in that she transforms her body to sneak into places where she doesn’t belong and spy on children. That sounds very similar to the bathroom invader nonsense.

Third: what I didn’t know about “Robert Galbraith”

Robert Galbraith Heath is apparently the name of a psychiatrist who pioneered gay conversion “therapy” and was extensively involved in human experimentation (not to put too fine a point on it, torture).

Again, it is possible Rowling chose the name Robert Galbraith by coincidence and did not know this (Galbraith is a surname that people still have), but it seems unlikely, given Heath was by far the most prominent, and if she had done a cursory Google search of the name before choosing it as a pseudonym he would definitely have come up. So we’re required to believe either (a) she picked a pseudonym and didn’t bother doing any research on the name at all, or (b) she saw this history and said “yes, this is definitely the association I want”. Neither of these are a good look.

Fourth: on underlying bigotry and how to engage with literature

Let’s not pretend that this is the first time we’ve learned Rowling has bigoted views, nor that transphobia is her sole offence. There is a deep social conservatism underlying all of the Harry Potter books, which I hope I’ve managed to point out instances of over the years. They are deeply fatphobic. The goblins are an anti-semitic stereotype. The portrayal of house-elves reiterates a common apologetic for slavery, as well as implying activism is naive and foolish. There’s Cho Chang.

The books aren’t even feminist, despite Rowling’s pretensions. From the beginning you have the narrative that maternal love is inherently magical and special, most women are discussed in terms of their roles as wives and mothers, and so on. Love potions exist and are never condemned, to the point they’re played as a joke; this culminates with Cursed Child presenting a supposedly sympathetic character (Ron) as an advocate for date rape.

The supplemental material doesn’t help either; recall the discussions of cultural appropriation and racism against indigenous peoples in “history of magic in North America”.

(And one of the reasons I’ve spent so much time defending Slytherin over the years is that not to do so would be to go along with the books’ conceit that some forms of bigotry are correct.)

I could go on, but I hope I’ve made my point. None of this is to say that you can’t enjoy the books, but (as I’ve said before) it is important not to ignore these things. I won’t tell anyone not to read HP Lovecraft, for instance, but to do so without noting his incredible level of racism and that it’s a fundamental theme in his work is extremely irresponsible. Lovecraft fans, to their credit, know this, and tend to be willing to engage with it.

Harry Potter has become such a cultural touchstone, for better or worse, that I understand the desire to read it and know about it. I’m glad I’m not a parent, and don’t have to wrestle with the decision of whether or not I want to give these books to my children. What I would say is, go ahead and read them, but unpack the implications rather than ignoring them. I’ve written about this before. At the same time, I would also say don’t read these and ignore works from authors whose work is less problematic, and especially seek out writing by authors of colour and authors who aren’t cishet, so that this isn’t the only view they get.

I am also not going to tell anyone they can’t continue engaging in fandom activities. As I’ve argued before, fanfiction is inherently conversational, any piece of fanfiction is by mere fact of its existence a response to the source material and that’s part of the beauty of it. Interpreting works in a way that runs counter to the author’s intent, and using them to explore these issues in more nuanced ways, can be very valuable and even therapeutic.

The author isn’t dead, but we can work to kill her. (Note for any alarmists reading this, I obviously don’t mean this literally, but in terms of the literary concept of “death of the author”. Please don’t physically harm anybody.)

I do think it’s imperative to stop purchasing the books and merchandise. Stop giving Rowling money, she already has far more than any one person should.

Here are a few recommendations for reading/watching on the subject:

Ashley Miller did a point-by-point rebuttal to Rowling’s manifesto at the Orbit.

Here is a very thoughtful and in-depth video essay on the subject by Sarah Z, I second pretty much everything she says here; I’d say if you follow only one link from this post, make it this one.

Here’s another good one by EssenceOfThought, who is a nonbinary trans person.

I can’t link to everything valuable I’ve seen in this conversation, there’s been so much over the past few days, but I think all of these are worth it.

That said, by writing about this I recognise that I too am contributing to the problem of distracting from the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and institutionalised racism. Please don’t ignore them, nor let the media get bored and downplay them. They are continuing to happen and still need all the support they can get.

 

On Nagini apparently secretly being a human

Apologies for the dearth of content recently. I don’t have much excuse except that I just haven’t had the energy to write; hopefully this will change soon, but I can’t make any promises.

[I’ve had some stuff going on recently that drains my free time and energy. Chamber of Secrets has not been abandoned but it could be a while yet.]

I have to admit that we haven’t had our ears to the ground in Harry Potter fandom as much lately, so we’d missed hearing about this one until All-I-need brought it to our attention in the comments. Here’s the article she linked us to.

So. Um. That’s a thing, apparently. Nagini is now a “Maledictus”, a “blood curse that only affects women, and one that Nagini has no control over”. Charming. So it’s like a werewolf but not because reasons, like an animagus but not because reasons, and it only affects women because why not have more sexism? [There’s been no mention of a male equivalent. Unless werewolves are the equivalent, since it’s just occurred to me that we’ve never heard of a female werewolf in this universe, but I didn’t see Greyback being turned into Voldy’s pet/food source/soul vessel and deprived of all agency and freedom.]

There is also apparently a fair amount of discussion about racism happening, because the actor is Asian and this may have been an attempt to use something from Southeast Asian culture (and no doubt badly, given Rowling’s track record; that said, I don’t know enough to comment on that). [All I know for sure is that Nagini is the name of the female cobra in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and given Kipling’s usual naming conventions it probably just means ‘female cobra’. Potterverse Nagini is not a cobra. Beyond that, I have nothing.] What I can say is that “maledictus” is far too Latinate a name, which comes off as rather colonialist: if it really is based on something Asian, why not use the actual name, or come up with a variant on that?

Rowling claims she’s been waiting to reveal this for 20 years. I categorically do not believe this, because it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and it is very typical of her tendency to retcon things that didn’t need changing for the sake of shock value. I would be utterly shocked if there was any evidence of this being a thing before the last year or two at best; it seems obvious to me that it’s an attempt to link the Fantastic Beasts films more closely to the original series in an effort to increase fans’ investment in them. [Yeah, it’s obviously a total ass-pull that came to her while putting together this clusterfuck of a script.] Also, the maths just don’t work (as per usual) – 20 years ago would have been 1998. The year Chamber of Secrets came out. It would be two more years before Nagini the character existed in canon.

So let’s get this straight. Rowling’s best idea for adding a female character of colour to the story is for her to have nonconsensual transformations into a snake form, previously only seen being used to obtain potion ingredients via milking venom, fed human flesh, made a vessel for Voldemort’s soul (again, presumably without her consent?), possessed and controlled (even just saying that feels gross in this context) as a weapon, and eventually killed. Killed only in order to make Voldemort vulnerable, for the exact same reasons as various inanimate objects: she has the same level of narrative agency as a goblet. [It’s particularly troubling since we now have a woman of colour being turned into a literal possession owned by a white supremacist. These people really do have no awareness whatsoever.]

This also raises the question of why Nagini’s venom would have been an effective restorative for Voldy if she wasn’t (as we previously thought) some product of his own power or a unique magical species. [And this also becomes yet another thing Dumbledore supposedly knew about all along – since he’s in this film – and just never bothered to mention.]

(On the human flesh thing, Loten’s complained about this to me before. Rowling doesn’t know how snakes work, a snake eating something as large as a human corpse would go into a near-hibernation state while digesting and that might well take over a month. I also seem to recall that snakes tend to prefer live prey to corpses?) [Yes, most snakes prefer live food. I suppose this stupid handwave would somewhat explain why Nagini doesn’t act like a snake; in addition to this, she never seems to shed her skin and seems unbothered by the temperature.]

I don’t have much else to add. If this Nagini character was a willing participant in everything Nagini did in HP canon, then it’s basically just another Bellatrix, another hate-sink character who is evil for evil’s sake and doesn’t serve much of a useful narrative purpose. If she wasn’t, then this is yet another female character being created solely for the purpose of her exploitation. Neither is a good look, really. (Also, is she older than Tom Riddle then? I’m not entirely clear on the timeline, but that also seems weird to me. Why would Rowling do this?)

[Presumably there will be a reason why Nagini is in human form in Fantastic Beasts 2 but only ever exists as a snake in the main canon timeline. Presumably this reason will be terrible.]

Before reading the article, my first thought was that Nagini being human was a (bad) attempt to patch the Cursed Child timeline problems – if Bellatrix didn’t have time to be pregnant, why not shoehorn in another female character who could be Dolphin Sue’s mother instead? (The mental image of her hatching from an egg or something and later being told Bella was her mother is something I have to admit I did find amusing.) This doesn’t appear to have been the motivation at all, but if anything there seems to be even less purpose behind it, so I figured I might as well share that for a laugh.

I really can’t see any way this could have been a good idea. I guess Rowling wanted more attention or something. Honestly, it’s all so stupid I’m having a hard time remembering it’s also problematic and offensive.

[Of course Rowling’s latest shock reveal is tiresomely racist and misogynist as well as making no sense whatsoever. Why wouldn’t it be, most of the others have been.]

Edited to add this – in case you wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, don’t.

 

Monthly Spotlight: Tamora Pierce

something something Harry Potter soon mumble mumble

This month we’re looking at Tamora Pierce, a rather underrated young adult author who seems less well known now than she was when I started reading her stuff aged twelve or so. In many ways she is the first ‘young adult’ author, I suppose; her first book was published in 1983 and nobody was quite sure how to categorise it. Which caused a few issues, as we’ll see later. She’s known for decent female protagonists (before the world and his wife started throwing around the term ‘strong female character’) and for addressing everyday practical concerns such as menstruation and birth control.

Her books mostly consist of quartets following individual characters, and are set in one of two fantasy worlds, Tortall and Emelan. I’ve talked to a lot of her fans over the years, and without exception it seems that the ones you read first are the ones you like best. It has to be said that one of the reasons for this is probably because there are quite a few similarities in character and storyline between the two, but more on that later. Since I read Tortall first and Mitchell has only read Emelan so far [I did read the Alanna quartet also, just not the rest of them yet], you get both of us rambling at you this month. I’ll let him go first, under the cut.

 

Get Out (2017) initial reactions and review

My apologies to our regular readers for our silence recently; we’ve had a lot going on offline and haven’t had as much time to write as we’d have liked (though we do have a few more posts in the works that should be coming relatively soon). Thanks for your patience. In the meantime, have a thing I dashed off pretty quickly.

One of my coworkers recommended “Get Out” to me recently; I ended up watching it last night, and wrote up my thoughts shortly afterward to aid in the subsequent discussion. I hadn’t really intended to do a blog post, but I realised it would probably be publishable with a bit of minor editing and there might be discussions worth having about this film. The remainder of this post will contain spoilers for the film, and for various genre reasons this is a film which is probably best watched unspoiled, so if you are interested in seeing it you may not wish to proceed. That said, I was not nearly as impressed as I was led to believe I would be, and can give it only a lukewarm recommendation at best, so I am not necessarily saying to stop reading this post if you haven’t seen the film.

Also, as an advance warning, this is a film that deals directly with racial issues and seems to have been written by Blacks primarily for Black audiences; as such, I feel a bit uncomfortable as a white person criticising it and there may well be things I missed due to not having the cultural context. Let’s get that disclaimer out of the way.

 

More Fangames: A first look at Pokemon Sage (Demo 2.0)

Last year, I wrote about my experiences with some fan-made games, one of which was Pokemon Uranium. One of our commenters made us aware of Pokemon Sage then, and I thought it looked promising and would be well worth keeping an eye on. At the time, I got the impression it was still in a very early state, there was plenty of concept work to look through and a short playable demo but not enough to draw any firm conclusions one way or another.

I later stumbled across discussions of Pokemon Sage again, in reading discussions of Pokemon Uranium in a Let’s Play thread by Orange Fluffy Sheep on the Something Awful forums (the Let’s Play forum is a guilty pleasure of mine, I lurk but don’t participate). People there were much harsher on Uranium than I was (I think rightly so; I do still mostly like it, but I’ll readily admit most of the flaws they tore it apart for are real and deserve the mockery), and several of them kept bringing up Pokemon Sage as an example of a Pokemon fangame that gets right the things Uranium got wrong.

To make a long story short, they’re absolutely right. But we’ll get to that.

Anyway, I was in the mood to play some Pokemon recently, and remembered that earlier this year (late July, I don’t know the exact date) a more substantial demo of Pokemon Sage had been released. I don’t normally care for playing incomplete games – I can tolerate incomplete or abandonned serial fiction, but when it’s a video game and you add to that the possibility of getting psychologically invested in a save file (which may not be compatible with future versions of the game even if it does continue to update), the frustration level increases greatly. That said, Sage intrigued me enough and the new demo had enough of it implemented that I thought it was worth giving a try, so here’s my review of Pokemon Sage Demo 2.0.5 (this version released 10 August 2017, available here) after having played it to completion.

[I won’t be contributing much to this one, I haven’t played it yet – it looks really promising and I probably will, but I also want to try and wait for the full game.]

 

Mitchell’s Feminist Relationship Advice for Heterosexual Men (& everyone else too)

For better or worse I’ve ended up having way too many conversations about romance/sex/etc advice recently, so I thought I might as well collect my thoughts in one place (and just in time for Valentine’s Day too, sometimes coincidences are fun). It’s a good time for it anyway; the mainstream culture is always so terrible about these sort of things, and I think it’s especially important to push back against that in this age of the Sexual-Predator-in-Chief.

This is a serious post despite the snark.

I’m afraid this may feel disjointed in places, as it’s mainly a collection of things I’ve found myself saying or wishing I had said in response to things people have said to or around me, but so be it. I’m fairly certain the core ideas should still come through just fine. That said, I’m not entirely sure who the target audience is here: I’ve tried to keep this mostly at 101-level for accessibility but I’m not sure I entirely succeeded, and also I’ve tried to address various different stages here so it’s unlikely it all is likely to be applicable to everybody.

(And as this excellent piece I encountered the other day points out, patriarchal relationship norms aren’t good for men either. I think it’s always a worthy effort to undermine them.)

[I likely won’t have much to add, but I’m here agreeing with these points.]

 

Some disorganised thoughts after the Women’s March(es)

So yesterday (21 January 2017), for anyone who doesn’t already know, the day after the tragic inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the (not-so-) United States (I will not give him the dignity of the office and refer to him as President Trump, he’s a loathsome despotic buffoon #notmypresident), was also the day of the Women’s March on Washington and its sister marches in major (and not-so-major!) cities throughout the US and beyond.

Here’s the official Women’s March site and the Sister Marches page.

 

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Spoiler Review

Those of you who have been paying attention will have spotted this post that went live yesterday morning, containing photographs of notes taken by Mitchell in the cinema as we watched Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (IMDB). The release date allowed us just enough time to see it together before he goes back home tomorrow. Now we’ve had time to put this together, enjoy our full rambling review. Spoilers later.

It probably won’t surprise any of you that Mitchell and I had pretty different views of the film by the end. We both picked out the same issues with it – spoiler, there were a lot of issues with it – but I’m far more willing to overlook most of them than he is. I’m more forgiving of bad writing in films than I am in books, too. Though we both hated the ending.

[I don’t actually think we disagree on much of anything, except how much we’re willing to forgive. I found this film utterly infuriating overall, while Loten enjoyed it, but when we started comparing complaints we found they were pretty much identical.]

If you go into this film with the right mindset, it’s mostly a lot of fun. Just don’t expect miracles. A lot of it makes no sense, there are some bad plotholes, and a lot of it is wildly inconsistent even by the already inconsistent rules of the Potterverse. But it’s pretty, and mostly silly in a good way, and has some cute moments.

[Here’s a quick attempt at a spoiler-free review for anyone who wants that. Overall, this is the sort of film that can be mindless fun if you like that sort of thing, but definitely don’t forget to switch off your brain before watching or you’ll be heavily disappointed. The core conceit of “absentminded zoologist loses magical monsters in New York City, needs to track them down, chaotic shenanigans ensue” is reasonably fun and the creatures are visually interesting (and the way they move is mostly well done too, the CGI is pretty good). Those parts are mostly fine, and we’d have liked the film much better if they’d just stuck to that (I’d probably have still complained about it being pointless, but that’s really just a matter of CGI slapstick not being my genre). But they decided it had to have an overarching plot beyond that, so they shoehorned in political intrigue and personal drama (and cringe-inducing “romances”) and very forced connections to Grindelwald and so on, and those things… just didn’t really work, and created so many issues that could have been easily avoided.]

Spoilers below the cut: