The Cold Light of Tragedy
Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.
My principles, when it comes to the art of fiction, tend to be molten: hotly held and hotly defended, but ultimately a fluid thing, able to be shaped and re-formed. But real-life tragedy has a way of turning principles from debatable points of discussion into immutable, inarguable doctrine.
One of my principles, which I often repeated in blog posts, columns, and convention panels, is that using the death or brutalization of women as a motivator for a male protagonist or as a quick way to show that a villain is, indeed, villainous is lazy and offensive. Especially common in comics, a medium so often used for stories targeted toward young men, this lazy writing turns women into objects and depicts women as perpetual victims, never as protagonists in their own stories.
Horror struck my family on December 10. My 22-year-old niece Michel was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. He shot her several times with an assault rifle when she went to walk her dog and then shot himself with a handgun. Michel was about to graduate from college. She was about to do everything.
After the shock began to wear off - or maybe it was part of the shock, for me to think about such an abstract thing - I began to think about Gail Simone’s “Women in Refrigerators,” a list of female superheroes who have been killed off or otherwise victimized. This is what happens, I thought. This is what happens to women who dare to be the protagonists of their own lives.
You see, Michel had had a transformative year. She had become a leading figure in a community service fraternity at her university, Alpha Psi Rho, and was voted “Miss Lady Rho” for her efforts. (An honor that has been since renamed as the Michel David Award.) Over the summer, she had gone to Costa Rica to volunteer at a sea turtle refuge and had overcome a lot of her insecurities and fears.
So much so that she would not take back someone who had mistreated and disrespected her. She was ready to move on, to be fully her own person - something that a selfish, possessive, sick young man was not willing to allow to happen. Dan Shoemake was a murderer, like so many murderers of women depicted in comics, but, unlike them, he was real.
You know who else was real? Michel. She was beautiful, smart, fun - just the type of wonderful girl who gets murdered in stories. In superhero comics, she would be a reason for a man to take on the evil in the world. In indie comics, she would be the tragic backdrop to the journey of self-discovery of some melancholy man who loved her. I’ve seen these stories all too often - in comics published by prominent publishers and small publishers alike, in the slushpile again and again as I read submissions.
But in Michel’s life, she was the main character. Her story was her story. Women like her - and women unlike her, and men of all kinds, too - deserve to have stories like theirs told, deserve to read stories that are actually about women.
Click to viewThis video is kind of ironic because Michel herself was a gamer.
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