In just a few short days I’m going to have the privilege of giving a presentation on evolutions of the vampire in literature and film at a pop culture conference. In preparation for that presentation, I have read (and watched) a lot of vampire stories. Although many have had enjoyable and unexpected portrayals of vampires (and various fascinating takes on where vampires fit in a Christian or culturally relativist world), many have also had a few deeply unfortunate trends. Since my talk has nothing whatsoever to do with the role of athletes in vampire literature (and other young adult fantasy novels), I’m ranting out my feelings on the subject here instead.
So, here it goes: I am sick to death with the extent to which fantasy school stories are entirely dependent on stereotypes for their plots and characterization.
There is a huge subset of YA (young adult) fantasy literature, with and without vampires, that is basically the story of "I am a nerd. I am misunderstood. I am beautiful and intelligent and talented and socially facile and have magic powers and possibly an undead significant other, so clearly everyone just hates me because I'm too perfect. However, I never actually suffer any serious consequences for not being popular, because I still have 2.5 friends of assorted races and genders and anyway none of the people who dislike me are actually worth talking to. Plus, they'll all be proven wrong in the end anyway." A couple quick examples off the top of my head: Vladimir Tod. In the Forests of the Night. Ink Exchange. Vampire Academy. Bleed Like Me. Betrayals. Vampire Kisses. The Morganville Vampires. Sweetblood. City of Bones. Tithe. Demon in my View. The Silver Kiss. I Am Number Four. Blue Bloods.
ALL OF THEM portray high schools with supporting casts that are made up of some combination of The Dumb Jock (the idiot, the aggressor, the human incarnation of evil), The Queen Bee (the whore half of the virgin-whore dichotomy, the airhead, the giggling shallow embodiment of feminine = evil), The Weird Theater Kid (the kid who is actually weird, mind you, not like the protagonist), The Bully (the slightly different incarnation of The Dumb Jock who is often actually redeemed because he's just deeply ignorant and will eventually realize the error of his ways), The Mean Teacher (the one who hates the protagonist for no reason at all), The Nice Teacher (the one who loves the protagonist for no reason at all), The Tragic Goth (the girl who's beautiful, deep, probably skinny and pale while we're at it), The Loyal Sidekick (the guy who's slightly less good at everything than the protagonist and therefore exists solely to be his/her best friend), The Saint (the virgin half of the dichotomy), and The Swarm (the six or seven indistinguishable females with essentially the same attributes as the Queen Bee who exist only to worship her and put down the protagonist). And the plot basically revolves around what I often uncharitably assume is an excruciating revenge fantasy on the part of the bullied writer: the hero has conflicts with The Dumb Jock and/or The Queen Bee. The hero eventually reveals either superpowers or a boyfriend (depending on whether the protagonist is male or female, respectively) that makes the antagonist's eyes fall out with jealousy. The hero saves the life of the antagonist, leaving the antagonist either thanking the hero for his/her graciousness on bended knee or rejected by everyone else, who has swarmed over to go worship the hero instead.
And the thing is, from my limited sampling it actually seems to be a worse problem in teen fantasy/sci-fi than it does in other high school stories. There seems to be a chronic problem with stories like Vampire Diaries and Vampire Kisses where the vampire plot and the mundane plot are largely incompatible, barely interact except to give the protagonist a secret to lord over the antagonist(s), and one or the other fades completely to the background for most of the book. (The vamp plot disappears while the mundane plot comes to the fore more often than you'd think--Eighth Grade Bites, Sweetblood, and In the Forests of the Night all end up focusing so hard on the triumph of the nerd/goth over the jock/prep that they seem to forget that vampires exist in places.) The plot is driven by the assumption that OF COURSE the Dumb Jock is a terrible human being, OF COURSE the protagonist is Just Misunderstood, and OF COURSE anything nasty, judgmental, mean, or outright bullying that the protagonist says to the antagonist is entirely justified on the grounds that He Started It. There are probably lots of realistic fiction books that suffer from this same problem, but a) I’ve read a lot fewer of those, and b) I suspect that this kind of lazy characterization flies under the radar more when there are vampires or wizards there to distract people from just how awful the school story is, and c) I think this might even appeal to some publishers because vampire books are so often aimed at non-mainstream audiences.
First and foremost: this kind of thing is wrong because reinforcing stereotypes is wrong. Suggesting that an entire group of people is less intelligent, less complex, less human, or less deserving of love and happiness because of a single external attribute (such as quantity of makeup or presence of a letterman jacket) is wrong. Portraying entire groups of people as uniform and unappealing is wrong. All of that is obvious enough to hardly be worth writing down, but I feel the need to do so anyway after reading some of these books.
Where it crosses the line from driving me nuts to actually making me angry is that books have the power to influence behavior. (I’m in the process of writing my thesis on this effect.) These books portray genuinely awful beliefs and behaviors as acceptable, and I don’t want to know what those ideas are causing teens who read them to think. While it might be cool to suggest that unlikely heroes like The Weird Kid can save the world, that idea is no longer remotely radical anymore, and is now a cliche in and of itself. And often showing the “triumph” of the weird kid portrays really awful behavior as justified (name calling in I Am Number Four, slut shaming in Vampire Kisses, spreading malicious rumors in Vampire Academy, exposing others' secrets to harm them in Vladimir Tod) on the grounds that this is The Unpopular Kid (aka the stated hero) going up against The Popular Kid (aka the stated villain). And these books suggest that this behavior is okay. That revenge is a perfectly justifiable reason to be mean and nasty and say or do ugly things.
It also bears mentioning that the unpopular protagonist so often wins the contest on the antagonists' terms. It's often not the story of a character learning to love oneself or to value one's demographically appropriate 2.5 friends (The Wish by Gail Carson Levine is one awesome exception), it's the story of the protagonist's triumph through becoming more pretty, more beloved, better at football, better at bullying one's enemies, or more in control of the rumor mill than the antagonist.
The other thing is that this kind of writing can actually end up justifying a status quo in which kids are punished (with ostracism or mean rumors or being stuffed into lockers) for being "ugly" or "weird" or incorrectly dressed or socially unaware. Most of the social-outcast protagonists in these books are conventionally pretty, able to afford coordinated outfits, confident enough to express their uniquenesses, of average or below-average weight, in possession of above-average intelligence, socially aware, friendly, funny (more on that in a second), white, straight, fully abled, cis, American, and (with a couple notable exceptions) upper-middle class. I seriously question whether these books then accurately represent the dichotomy of the bullies vs. the bullied in real-world high schools. Unfortunately, it's usually the outsiders in a class who turn to bullying and frequently the insiders who are more or less nice, intelligent, mainstream, socially acceptable people.
Generally the most damning sin that marks the antagonists and gets punished time and again in these books is a lack of intelligence. And guess what? The kids who are apparently "clueless" or "dumb" in any given real life high school are often (although most certainly not always) a) from family environments that don't encourage them to focus on school, b) dealing with stuff that ranges from depression to autism that can get in the way of showing up to school every day bright-eyed and ready to learn, c) not coming from English-speaking households, or d) unable to afford (in the financial sense or the emotional resources sense) to devote time and energy to looking good, speaking well, and reading lots of books. Again, I'm massively oversimplifying it, but how about an awkward fringe vamp (or vamp lover) who is physically disabled? How about one that loves makeup? How about one who has terrible fashion sense but also excels at football?
Also, the fact that (shockingly) most high schools have more than two social groups means that as long as there is any kind of rivalry it's fairly easy to cast oneself as persecuted or an outsider even if that's not necessarily the only way to look at it. Which would then, according to these books, be sufficient justification to engage in a little social aggression of one's own. My group of friends in high school was composed entirely of socially awkward nerds, but that doesn't mean we would have had the right to start pushing people into snowbanks (Vampire Academy) or "outing" them as closet theater kids to punish them (Eighth Grade Bites) or deliberately trying to break up their romantic relationships to get even (Blue Bloods). People get picked on in high school for all kinds of awful reasons, and that doesn't mean that the correct solution should be more awfulness.
Meanwhile, there are lots of kids who are going through all kinds of hell in high school that is inflicted by their peers, and those kids often do not have a ton of great options when the administration can have limited power, their parents can't watch them 24 hours a day, and school counselors might not know what to do. Most of the time the persecution is real, not perceived, and most of the time the correct response to bullying is a form of limited ostracism or a form of external punishment acquired through telling adults about the situation, if there even is a correct response at all. That said, writing books that display a tiny shred of compassion for the popular kids or the aggressive kids or the preppy kids or the kids who like makeup and boys but don't fit in anyway wouldn't be the end of the world.
As Cates has said, it's always stretching the limits of believably to suggest that beautiful, intelligent, highly unique teenagers would ever not be well-liked by many people in their high school classes, because a combination of a smooth exterior and a confident interior is going to be one of the biggest forces driving one's upward social mobility in most teen social settings. Characters like Luna Lovegood of Harry Potter ("quirky" and therefore painfully socially awkward and punished for it) are relatively rare in YA fantasy literature compared to ones like the eponymous protagonist of Stargirl (good, unique, likable people who for some mysterious reason aren't liked at all), and half the protagonists I'm talking about are exactly Stargirl’s sort of smart, pretty, aggressively quirky teenager.
Circling back to the thing about the protagonist being "funny": you ever notice just how often that kind of humor is malicious? There are so often conflicts between the hero and the villain where the hero "wins" by mocking the villain more viciously than the villain mocked the hero. There's also a lot of behavior like that of Harry Potter’s Marauders (rebellion, whackiness, rule breaking, "having fun" at the expense of others, laughing at people rather than with them, letting pranks get to the point of bullying) on the part of these YA fantasy heroes that never gets called into question the way that the Marauders' behavior does. There's a world of difference between comedy that's based on irony or self-deprecation (most of what we see from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and comedy that's based on mean-spirited mockery (Pride and Prejudice, to use my favorite love-to-hate example, for all its lack of vampires), and YA vampire books only too often rely on the latter type for their lighter moments. But the meanness tends to go without criticism as long as it's directed at the (unintelligent, sex-seeking, fashion-conscious) Lydia Bennets of the world.
A couple vampire books that I actually think get their portrayals of high school right: Twilight shows the Cullens as ostracized because they genuinely act weird (lurking in little groups, staring at people, never eating at lunch) and also has a complex miasma of shifting social groups rather than the "in" crowd and the "out" crowd, also taking the time to mention that "the best friend" (Jessica) is fairly surface-obsessed and that the quasi-antagonist of the class (Lauren) is a scared insecure kid who doesn't want to lose her popularity. Vampire Diaries (for all its many other flaws) also shows a high school with dozens of shifting cliques and protagonists who have social popularity, portraying a conventional bully in Tyler but rapidly making him more complex and sympathetic by rooting his aggression in his family struggles. Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows that Buffy's tendency to skip class and show up to dates with grave dirt in her hair gets in the way of her popularity, but also that most of the kids in her class are (gasp) decent human beings who take notice that she's their "class protector" and like her anyway. Percy Jackson deliberately sets up and then knocks down those stereotypes by having the shallow, popular, jock antagonist (SPOILERS) reveal hidden depths and then die to save the world... and then portrays the protagonist becoming the shallow, athletic top of the food chain in the sequel series.
And then, of course, there’s Animorphs, K.A. Applegate's story about a princess who becomes a fierce and terrible warrior, a criminal who acts as the heart and soul of his friend group, an athlete who plans out a strategy to save the world, a brain who becomes a Hollywood star, and a basket case who ends up joining the U.S. government. (Not sure where Ax fits in the Breakfast Club metaphor, but he also definitely starts out the shallow militarist who becomes a tough but adaptable diplomat.) Rachel and Jake, their school’s Queen Bee and Dumb Jock, respectively, are just two more sympathetic members of the team of heroes that saves the world in Animorphs. Almost like boys who enjoy sports and girls who enjoy buying clothes are real human beings capable of complex emotions or something.
I’m not asking writers to stop focusing their YA fantasy stories on the fringes of the high school social structure. I’m asking for more stories that portray even the popular kids with complexity, with compassion, and (at least occasionally) with brains. I'm asking for an end to the idea that social tit-for-tat is all okay as long as it's an outsider who is the aggressor. I’m asking for heroes that are socially clueless, or less intelligent than average, or not clear-skinned and slender and pale. There are too many stories out there right now that are downright cruel to huge subsets of teenagers, and I want stories that recognize the humanity of even those teenagers who happen to play on sports teams or enjoy going on dates.
- Bug
