Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: The Legacy of Christian Paternalism in the Harry Potter Universe

As long as there has been racism, people have been trying to justify it to themselves and others. Unfortunately, all too commonly, religion has been a prime factor in these justifications. While the Atlantic slave trade was just beginning, before slavery was made hereditary, slavery was justified by the simple fact that slaves weren’t Christian. Worse—they didn’t even know about Christianity! It was obviously necessary to capture them all and take them under the loving wing of white overseers in order to educate them about the Lord and Savior, right? Jesus did say to go and make disciples of all men! And otherwise they wouldn’t be able to get into heaven! And Christian salvation was just the first perk in a long line of awesome things slaves got for being slaves!

Yeah, that was my sarcasm voice.

Slavery is rampant in the Bible. The Hebrews were God’s chosen people, and they had slaves. Not only did they have slaves, but God must have approved of them doing it, because He gave them specific rules in Deuteronomy and Leviticus on how to do slavery the Yahweh way. In the New Testament, in St. Paul’s Letter to Philemon, Paul doesn’t so much reject the idea of slavery as he recommends that slaves and their masters maintain an imbalanced system of mutual respect, e.g. slaves should be obedient to their masters, and masters should repay that obedience with compassionate lordship. (Sounds a lot like what he had to say about marriage, so, uh, yikes on that one, dude.)

(via Beacon Broadside)

In the beginning, God created a bunch of stuff, including Adam. In both of the Creation stories included in Genesis, part of the myth involves God granting dominion over the earth and all the creatures He created to Adam, to hold in stewardship. As nonwhite peoples, in particular Black Africans and brown Native Americans, were seen as lesser, subhuman, and savage by white colonialists, it was easy to argue that this sense of God-given stewardship, this paternalism by divine right, should extend to include these other races. (The troubling principles of social Darwinism later lent pseudo-scientific credence to these arguments.) Instances of cultural genocide like the Trail of Tears, the doctrine of manifest destiny, and the Indian Residential School System were all in some way justified by the God-given belief that the white man had authority over how these “lesser races” should be living their lives.

Now, this is all horrifying and unpleasant to say the least, but what does it have to do with geeky stuff? Well, this Christian paternalist mentality is front and center in the Harry Potter universe, with the serial numbers filed off just enough to make it kind of secular.

Lady Geek Girl & Friends’ Best of the Blog Mondays

We’re still on hiatus until tomorrow. Happy New Year, everyone, and we’ll be back soon!

Magical Mondays: Sleeping Beauty, Fairy Tales, and Inserting Magic Into Magic-less Narratives. Here, Luce explores the hows and whys of magic becoming part of fairy tales.

[Fairy] tales used to be dark, moralistic stories to teach people lessons, yet as time went on, people decided that fairy tales ought to entertain children as well as educate them—they weren’t meant to please ancestors of Hannibal fans. Throughout these versions, themes of rape, adultery, and cannibalism were gradually erased from the overall plot, leaving a sanitized version behind. To fill in the blanks with respect to the characters, numerous writers used magic instead. Evil fairy solves all your problems, right? Then the king doesn’t commit adultery and the queen isn’t a heinously one-dimension villain and the princess isn’t raped, but just kissed without her consent, which is… better.

Magical Mondays: The Mundane and the Magical in Welcome to Night Vale. Earlier this year, Lady Geek Girl talked about magical realism in Welcome to Night Vale.

Welcome to Night Vale makes the magical mundane and the mundane magical by drawing our attention to something weird and magical, but then focusing on the mundane aspect of the event so that we cannot escape or ignore it. The magical element essentially acts as a big blinking sign pointing to the mundane and inescapable element.

Fanfiction Fridays: A Villain State of Mind by Mikkeneko

Hey, have any of you wondered what would happen if, after the events in The Avengers, some sort of shenanigans ensued, in which Loki is somehow ejected from Asgard and left in the capable yet frustrated hands of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Well, considering just how many fics there are about Loki being taken in by the Avengers and becoming friends with them, chances are that some of you have.

I don’t want to say that those stories are bad—they’re more numerous than anything—so much as they’re a little repetitive. Though each of these fics give a different take on going about Loki’s reformation and can be very insightful, they can get old really fast. Because there’s just that many of them. Mikkeneko, however, puts a really different spin on it, and her story A Villain State of Mind is by far one of the best character studies I’ve read about Loki. The summary goes as follows:

To no one’s pleasure, Loki ends up stranded in SHIELD custody after the events of The Avengers. Wary of Loki’s dangerous abilities, Nick Fury calls in the favor of an old friend to help him keep this new threat under control—but can even the formidable Professor X save Loki from himself?

Probably one of the reasons A Villain State of Mind is so insightful is because it’s literally about a telepath helping Loki deal with his issues. My biggest complaint about this is that because Loki doesn’t consent to Xavier reading his mind, the story does have mind rape. At the very least, Loki is not happy about such a violation, but that’s all the more credit I can give the fic on that issue.

Throughout the course of the nine chapters, Loki starts to form a bond with Xavier and even begins to regard him as a father figure, going so far to wish that Xavier had been the one to find him as an infant. Xavier, in turn, is reminded by his own failings with Mystique when confronted with Loki’s issues. This comes to light when Xavier sees Loki in his true Frost Giant form and remarks on how similar the two look. Xavier tells Loki about how it was wrong that he acted ashamed of Mystique’s true form and that she is beautiful. He uses this analogy to tell Loki that he doesn’t think being a Frost Giant automatically makes Loki a monster.

Xavier only has around a week or so of helping Loki overcome his internal conflict and attempt to rehabilitate him. As such, when the story concludes, we never find out whether or not Loki changes his ways. It ends with a very possible chance of redemption for Loki, but as Xavier says, he and the Trickster only knew each other for about a week and that the threat of a relapse is nowhere near gone.

While the story does have a plot and many subplots going on, the majority of it is just Loki and Xavier sitting in a room talking to each other. That said, it is still a fascinating read. Be sure to check it out on ff.net here or on AO3 here.

Doctor Who Series Seven: A Top Ten Wish List

I am starting to get tired of waiting for Series 7 and the 50th Anniversary special! Who’s with me?

Some plot spoilers and set photos and whatnot have been creeping out over the past few months, and we know that there are a few certainties: the Ponds are leaving, new Companion played by Jenna-Louise Coleman (and possibly named Clara?) is joining Team TARDIS, and the Daleks and Weeping Angels will be making appearances (as might Madame Vastra, the awesome lesbian Silurian Victorian ninja).

That still leaves a lot of wiggle room, though, for my wish list. I mean, we don’t even have any idea what will happen in the 50th Anniversary special, which won’t be occuring until 2013. Let’s throw out some ideas and hope Steven Moffat reads this blog.

1. Possibly!Clara has been billed as a fast-talker and a match for the Doctor’s exuberance.  Pleasepleaseplease keep her in check, or make the Doctor a little bit more subdued. He already has puppy-like boundless energy and he really needs a more Donna-like check on his craziness than someone who will out-crazy him.
2. The Ponds’ leaving has already been drawn out unecessarily what with bringing them back after the Doctor already said goodbye once. Give their farewell some dignity, don’t make it unnecessarily tearjerking just for the sake of tearjerkingness, etc.
3. Make the scary villains scary again. The Weeping Angels have been a little over-exposed in my opinion, and their appearance in Eleven clashed with the canon given in Ten that they could be any statue. The Daleks are sort of a joke at this point.  Make them scary again. (Although with a first episode titled ‘Asylum of the Daleks’, I think I may get my wish.)
4. Exciting new locales, please! Let’s try dinosaurs (which I seem to recall might have been hinted at, or I just saw fanart of the Doctor riding a dinosaur and got confused…) or, y’know, anywhere in Asia or Africa since they’re basically never been seen (an Egypt episode! or mix up the constant WWI and WWII stories with an Asian world war setting! Literally anywhere on those forgotten-by-the-writers continents would be nice!)
5. I’ve heard speculation that the ‘Doctor’s true identity’ plotline ties back into a plot arc that had to be scrapped when Seven was taken off the air twenty years ago. It would be really awesome if we could have a more solid tie to Old Who than just the recurring villains.
6. Lady Bacula expressly desires a Cervantes episode where Eleven is the inspiration for Don Quixote. I want an Oscar Wilde episode if they can make it a proper episode and not a PSA gay-issues story.
7. Can’t believe I’m saying this, but… Fewer timey-wimey shenanigans? The whole kerfuffle with River about broke my brain, and I have a high tolerance for timey-wimey stuff—hell, I’ve seen the Star Trek reboot at least ten times.
8. I’m still not exactly sure how the hole in the universe thing/the big bang affected the actions of previous Doctors, or the spinoff-series universes (I’m three seasons behind in Torchwood) but I’d like to see some reunions for past companions. I’ve heard ideas tossed around regarding a multi-Doctor mashup a la Time Crash or Old Who’s The Five Doctors, but that could be tricky considering Eccleston’s definitely not gonna come back and as much as I love Rose, she needs to stay in Pete’s World—she got several last hurrahs and a Doctor of her own, and bringing her back randomly would be a great way to make the fans think DW‘s writers are truly out of ideas.  Mostly I want Jack Harkness back. I know he’s working full time at Torchwood now but he could benefit from a more light-hearted adventure. And fan theories about him being the Time Agent who arrested River Song abound.
9. I see no real reason to switch Doctors at this point, but the world could be a better place if the 50th Anniversary special gave us a regeneration into a POC or female Doctor.
10. If nothing else happens in the whole of the seventh season and the 50th Anniversary special, FIX DONNA NOBLE. SHE WAS YOUR BEST FRIEND, DOCTOR, AND YOU RAPED HER MIND ‘IN HER BEST INTERESTS’ AND LEFT HER A SAD, SELF-ESTEEMLESS SHELL OF HER FORMER SELF. YOU WILL ALWAYS BE A DICK FOR THAT UNLESS YOU FIX HER. DON’T WHINE ABOUT GUILT—DO SOMETHING.

What else would you like to see in the upcoming season? Only two more grueling months of Wholessness till we can be happy (or at least angry at Moffat) again.

The Morality and Commonplace of Mind Rape

The idea that there’s someone out there with telepathic abilities certainly has an element of horror to it, and that’s an element pop culture likes to latch onto. Villains with this kind of ability strike a chilling terror in their victims, and even in us, the audience. It goes without saying that the invasion of someone’s mind against his or her will often has long-lasting, damaging effects that leave us with little to no question on the morality, or lack thereof, of the perpetrator. These acts come in different forms, whether mind controlling, binding someone against his or her will, the implantation or removal of memories, or just plain mind reading. The best way to describe such a thing is “rape of the mind”, or “mind rape”. Unfortunately, mind rape is not always committed by the bad guys. Often in fantasy and sci-fi, the good guys will do this as well. And even more unfortunately, when our heroes commit such a heinous act, the narrative will either excuse or refuse to acknowledge the rape in question.

Trigger warning for rape after the jump.