I’m thinking that what makes for a good feminist character is a character who demonstrates feminism. They don’t put up with patriarchy, makes feminist arguments for their reasoning, and points out the way society fails women, female persons, and female identifying persons.

While subverting gender norms is a good start, I think more needs to be brought to the table by that character to make them a “true” feminist character.

I think the same goes for other types of characters, like anarchists, socialists, anti-racists, or disability activists.

Maybe it’s not the most subtle approach, but when one as an author wants to drive a message home to an audience that is unlikely to be familiar with the message, one can’t really risk being subtle and having the audience miss the message completely.

I just oppose viewing crafting as fictional characters as role models. Much simpler.

I like having likeable but deeply flawed people driving the narrative.  But the “Eric and Tammy are feminist role models” thing doesn’t work for me.

Maybe feminism is being watered down to “she has a job!  she doesn’t always agree with her husband!” 

I don’t know because I don’t watch the show.

And in fact, any art that starts with the premise, “We’re going to view ourselves as instructional manuals on how to be more progressive,” is probably gonna suck.

I agree with you on FNL (I haven’t seen HP), but you should really revisit this discussion after you’ve watched the whole thing.  It’s very hard to discuss it without major spoilers for you.

That said - of course, Coach is basically conservative - he’s a Texas high school football coach.  I’d be surprised if there were any liberals in that job.  I’m sure he would never think of himself as a feminist, but he loves his wife, so he takes her seriously.  That was my read on the female in the locker room thing.  He hates the idea, and never would have done it himself, but he wants to make his wife happy, so he offers the kid the job.  Once he does, he starts to see her value.  So he’s convervative, but not rigid.  I see Tammy as the impetus for expanding his horizons and getting him out of the conservative, macho, small-town mentality that he grew up with.

I also like your take on Coach’s disillusionment.  I think that was a major part of the move to East Dillon.  He had done everything right, but refuses to appease the new moneyman in town, and so he got kicked out of the Panthers program.

Old, it actually has a lot to do with Tammy’s a) self-respect b) intrinsic sense of fairness and c) common sense.  She makes decisions that a feminist would, but it’s clear not for any political reason.  She probably is one of those people who stops political conversations with “Stop it, y’all!”  I guess that’s why I just don’t like characterizing a character as anything that isn’t on page; Tammy is a good woman who does things that a feminist would, but she also is uncritical of stuff any feminist would balk at.

I’m with Clare, you need to revisit this after you see the whole season. I don’t think it will change a lot of your opinions, but maybe just a bit.

To me, whether or not a character is written to be “feminist,” a show can advance feminism by showing realistic women with well-rounded personalities and then treating them as being as important as its male characters.  Those are two different things—a feminist character can be a shallow, one-dimensional cipher whose opinions and experiences are not taken seriously, or a non-feminist character can be used to critique the ways in which gender stereotyping harms women and society.  To the extent that the characters cause viewers to take seriously the ideas of feminism, whether or not those characters identify as feminist, I see that as positive.  But good art is not about depicting political ideas in character form—a show that attempted to depict a “feminist” probably wouldn’t be very good, because didactic fiction is so rarely good.

That’s a good way to put it, Kit.  I think “FNL” elides didacticism elegantly by resisting the urge to do something unrealistic like make Tammy some kind of Obama-sign-posting Democrat.

I mean, you could have a character who self-identifies as a feminist without being didactic.  I think Peggy on “Mad Men” is coasting in that direction.  Part of it is just avoiding the “role model” view of characters.  I don’t look to Peggy for cues on how to behave.  With Tammy/Eric, there’s a temptation there, because they are community leaders.  But it’s an urge to resist.

@Amanda

Have you even tried to write these kinds of characters?

I write comics and writing characters with ideological viewpoints can be the source of the conflict that moves the story along. It works especially well for short, character driven works.

Thanks for touching on the Harry Potter thing. I am very much a fan of the series but I’m not particularly disillusioned about it. Fighting against outright prejudice, tyranny, and fascism are progressive 101, kind of like how even rightwingers think stoning women for adultery is terrible. Harry Potter is a very conservative story and nothing hammered that in more than the epilogue. I think that’s part of why people hated it so much. People who got swept up in fight for liberty against Voldemort weren’t expecting an “and then everyone got married, had kids, and settle down to reinforce societal norms” ending.

@Scrumby - I’m sorry, and I am not trying to snark at you, but nothing has yet given me any thought that rightwingers WOULDN’T embrace (enthusiastically!) the stoning of adulterous women (but only women)(well, maybe a man of the wrong social class, or a case of miscegenation).

Does anyone else find the wizards not helping the muggles thing in the Harry Potter books, and in wizarding books in general kind of disturbing?

You’ve got people who could end famine, cure pretty much any disease, solve all sorts of problems we face in the world, and instead they hide in their own separate reality from the rest of the world.

I haven’t read Harry Potter, but have seen some of the movies and have asked readers of the books why they don’t help people and I’ve gotten answers like “magic has to remain separate” and “muggles would destroy the magicals” (which strikes me as unlikely) and “muggles couldn’t handle the reality of magic” and in wizarding books I have read the author has given similar answers to these questions.

This strikes me as cheap world building and bothers me as a social justice advocate.

I’m wondering if I’ve been given the right answers to this in Harry Potter universe, and am wondering if this is true if it bothers anyone else.

I’m also wondering if anyone can recommend any fantasy books that take place in a contemporary setting where magic and fantastical things aren’t hidden from the rest of the world as in all the urban fantasy I’ve read and am aware of.

I also got the answer that “muggles have to find their own way and magic would make it too easy for them” which really, really bothers me more than the other answers I’ve been given.

@paleotectonics- I know it’s fun to make the rightwing into some lurking evil force straight out of Mordor but it’s good to remember it’s ranks are made up of spiteful people hobbled by fear of the other. I doubt most of them could stomach stoning someone to death but more importantly their fragile little sense of divine self-importance rests largely upon the opinion that they are Chosen People and above certain lowly acts. They don’t really think about why it’s wrong to bash another living thing with rocks until it’s dead; they just know that that’s bad because preacher says so and those barbaric foreigners over there do it.  The lack of morals founded in logic, introspection, and deep personal conviction is a big part of the shallow progressiveness I was talking about. It’s doing good or opting not to do bad because someone told you to not because you soul searched and truly believe it to be right. Harry Potter is rampant with that kind of belief and that kind of character. James, Sirius, various Weasleys and members of Dumbledore’s Army are all out to fight the obvious baddy doing bad things not because they themselves are particularly loving or compassionate but because they must stop the obvious evil from taking over the world.

@R.T.- Harry Turtledove’s The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump comes to mind.

This strikes me as cheap world building and bothers me as a social justice advocate.

This is a fairly standard plot device. World building becomes infinitely more difficult otherwise. Even Superman had to explain that he felt he would be “holding humanity back from dealing with its problems and advancing” if he took care of every single mundane human problem.

It’s simply that readers just want to hear about an elite secret society of super-beings saving other individuals or fighting other super beings rather than engage in an intellectual exercise about what would happen if super powers could change the world. It’s just a narrative fiction trope.

Why hasn’t Mr. Fantastic, the world’s most brilliant scientist, cured cancer? In a world with Tony Stark, why aren’t we all flying to work in our armored suits, or at least using some consumer-grade/civilian version of Iron Man technology? It’s generally because people want to read about stuff that takes place in “our world” but with a small difference to set the plot, rather than a completely different world unlike ours.

RT, it’s because you have to read HP in the way it’s intended to be read. The wizards not helping the Muggles is precisely the point of the whole story. HP is a really good example of a really old literary mode: allegory. The stories are compelling not because they’re well-written (they aren’t, particularly) or because they’re exciting (they drag, drag, drag in a lot of places), but rather because HPworld is a mirror image of our own. Certain people are born into power, and others are not, and that’s the way the world works. If you’re not born to power, you have none, except in the rare cases where a talented outsider (Hermione) manages through sheer talent and hard work to crash the barrier—and even then it’s about inborn talent more than anything else. Most powerful people simply view the disempowered as a backdrop or extras or cannon fodder. All powerful people are much more concerned with their internecine power struggles than with the disempowered. Connection to the disempowered is viewed by the powerful as a kind of taint (“Mudblood”). No question is ever raised about whether the distinction between powerful and disempowered is just or justified.

In other words, HP is a reflection of the class system in Britain and most of the rest of the Western world. Harry himself is a kid who lives with poor parents and finds out he’s secretly of noble blood, then claims his legacy—this is one of the oldest stories in literature. But he leaves the poor behind once he gains entry to rich culture. Ron is a whiny douche: but he’s got a great bloodline, so who cares? People read HP because ooh neato wizards, but they KEEP reading HP because consciously or unconsciously they see truths about our own world in it.

It isn’t a mother’s love that is the most powerful force in the universe. It’s love in general.

How else do you expect to summon the god of true love to smite the living fuck out of a robotic demon?

I find it somewhat troubling that a toyetic cartoon, with a target male demographic, that is older and from a notably more paternalistic society would still use “love is the ultimate weapon” without succumbing to gender essentialism. seriously, just as meaningful when it’s about his “bromances” as the kids say.

Sorry for the aside, but literally, the cheesiness of this has forever linked any mention of the power of love with this in my mind, and I can’t think of anything else.

You’ve got people who could end famine, cure pretty much any disease, solve all sorts of problems we face in the world, and instead they hide in their own separate reality from the rest of the world.

The most common trope is that either the normal people would harm the wizards/aliens/time travelers (usually by subjecting them to government research), or they would break out in war to control this particular resource.  I don’t know if that’s actually true, but that is the prevailing theme.  I actually just tracked down a book from my childhood and checked it out of the library and it’s the exact same theme, where all kinds of people try to kidnap this alien to abuse his power, so it’s really ingrained in the sci-fi/fantasy genre.

There are also other risks like people assuming the wizards/aliens/time travelers are evil and just outright killing them, or of people enslaving them to use their power.

I think the most realistic option is a combination of witch hunts and people paying massive amounts of money to the “sell-outs” to do cool things that aren’t necessarily the most beneficial.  The highest bidder would likely be a corporation and a charity or government organization couldn’t compete.

Also, even very powerful magic would rarely be enough to actually solve all the world’s problems.  And of course there’s the philosophical argument that some people are innately evil and there’s really nothing you can do to stop war and greed, even with magic.

I’m not necessarily defending it, just explaining the common tropes.  From a practical view, it’s just a more interesting story to keep it hidden and separate.

“Watchmen” tries to invert the trope of “why don’t the superheroes actually affect the world?” where Dr. Manhattan has single-handedly changed the world’s technology, won the Vietnam War for the US, and prevents tensions with the USSR from escalating.

J. Michael Straczynski’s “Rising Stars” inverts this trope towards the end of the series where the heroes realize that they can basically do whatever they want, whenever they want.

As I said, I think the simple answer is that we like our “hero stories” simple, and if you’re overturning the entire world (which is what the presence of super-powered heroes does if you take it to it’s logical conclusion), the story we were hoping to read falls apart.

Comment #16: scrumby

Thank you for the recommendation. I’ve bookmarked it on Amazon. I think I’ll buy it next month.

Comment #17: Tyro

This is a fairly standard plot device. World building becomes infinitely more difficult otherwise.

World building is hard when it comes to sci-fi and fantasy, but I don’t agree that it would be infinitely more difficult. Merging the magical with the mundane would be as hard as building a world from scratch, which is already done often in sci-fi and fantasy.

I also think that say merging the magical with the mundane at say contemporary times might be a bit easier, especially if the world being built has concrete rules to how its magic works. All it would take (and I realize I might be making it seem too easy) is asking a lot of questions about how our world would be effected by magic. Like asking if buses or airplanes would be replaced by hiring a magical to mass teleport people to their destinations, and asking if instead of flight controllers, there would be teleportation controllers to prevent telefrags. And then so on and so forth by asking more questions.

Even Superman had to explain that he felt he would be “holding humanity back from dealing with its problems and advancing” if he took care of every single mundane human problem.

If the mundane could be easily taken care of the energy otherwise wasted on handling crime, feeding people, keeping people healthy, removing pollution and repairing te environment, etc, humanity could spend more energy and time developing the sciences, the art, philosophy, and other intellectual and engineering pursuits that everyone can benefit from. And maybe the problems humanity has could be solved if we weren’t stuck in the middle of them, and could step outside of them.

And since magicals are a part of humanity, they would have a responsibility to help solve those problems too. Since they could do things so much easier than non-magical portions of humanity who are doing things the hard way, asking magicals to do their part would not be an unfair imposition.

It’s simply that readers just want to hear about an elite secret society of super-beings saving other individuals or fighting other super beings rather than engage in an intellectual exercise about what would happen if super powers could change the world. It’s just a narrative fiction trope.

But it doesn’t have to be an intellectual exercise, it could be fiction too; there could still be conflicts large and small in such a world that one can write a story about. Fiction can handle both telling a story and conveying ideas and messages.

I don’t begrudge secret societies fighting secret wars, I read stuff like that too, such as Simon R. Green’s Nightside series, but I see a potential that so far I haven’t perceived being utilized in the media I consume.

I’m also absorbed in another project to do more than sketch out fiction that utilizes this potential.

Star Trek kinda does this stuff in a way with its replicator technology creating a society without want, but it isn’t the same as having magical people working with non-magicals to create an ideal society, or exploring what a world would be like with the two groups mixing and working together.

Why hasn’t Mr. Fantastic, the world’s most brilliant scientist, cured cancer? In a world with Tony Stark, why aren’t we all flying to work in our armored suits, or at least using some consumer-grade/civilian version of Iron Man technology? It’s generally because people want to read about stuff that takes place in “our world” but with a small difference to set the plot, rather than a completely different world unlike ours.

Well established comic series suffer what every franchise seems to suffer, or maybe the better word is benefit from, which is the status quo being god. People don’t want the characters or world of a franchise to change because the setting and characters are why people stick with the franchise.

But there are so many possibilities open to a creator when inventing original fiction, so why make what everyone has already consumed already? With so much of the same and similar floating around, there is room for something to stick out and be different.

To be continued in the next post…

To continue:

Comment #18: felagund

RT, it’s because you have to read HP in the way it’s intended to be read. The wizards not helping the Muggles is precisely the point of the whole story. HP is a really good example of a really old literary mode: allegory. The stories are compelling not because they’re well-written (they aren’t, particularly) or because they’re exciting (they drag, drag, drag in a lot of places), but rather because HPworld is a mirror image of our own. Certain people are born into power, and others are not, and that’s the way the world works. If you’re not born to power, you have none, except in the rare cases where a talented outsider (Hermione) manages through sheer talent and hard work to crash the barrier—and even then it’s about inborn talent more than anything else. Most powerful people simply view the disempowered as a backdrop or extras or cannon fodder. All powerful people are much more concerned with their internecine power struggles than with the disempowered. Connection to the disempowered is viewed by the powerful as a kind of taint (“Mudblood”). No question is ever raised about whether the distinction between powerful and disempowered is just or justified.

I sit a bit in the death-of-the-author camp though I also feel that it is worthwhile to know who the author is and their intent with their work. I don’t agree that there is a right or intended way to read or view or otherwise consume any work, but I do understand what you mean by the elites making their concerns more important than the concerns of everyone else, but this is also what I find disturbing about Harry Potter. We’re asked to pick among these characters bad guys and good guys, when none of them are really good guys.

In other words, HP is a reflection of the class system in Britain and most of the rest of the Western world. Harry himself is a kid who lives with poor parents and finds out he’s secretly of noble blood, then claims his legacy—this is one of the oldest stories in literature. But he leaves the poor behind once he gains entry to rich culture. Ron is a whiny douche: but he’s got a great bloodline, so who cares? People read HP because ooh neato wizards, but they KEEP reading HP because consciously or unconsciously they see truths about our own world in it.

I’m not entirely convinced that people see the connection of “good wizards” and “bad wizards” to our real world the same way people don’t seem to connect the jedi and sith to our world. Yeah I’ve know of people who do make the connection, but it seems to me that many just go along with who is the designated good guy and who is the designated bad guy without anymore thought put into it than that.

Comment #20: bananacat

The most common trope is that either the normal people would harm the wizards/aliens/time travelers (usually by subjecting them to government research), or they would break out in war to control this particular resource.  I don’t know if that’s actually true, but that is the prevailing theme.  I actually just tracked down a book from my childhood and checked it out of the library and it’s the exact same theme, where all kinds of people try to kidnap this alien to abuse his power, so it’s really ingrained in the sci-fi/fantasy genre.

There are also other risks like people assuming the wizards/aliens/time travelers are evil and just outright killing them, or of people enslaving them to use their power.

This trope pops up when people with powrs or are different suddenly seem to poop up out of nowhere in fiction, like the mutants in Marvel Comics.

But if magicals and different people where a part of humanity since the beginning, I think the chances would be good that they would just be accepted as a normal variation of human existence.

I also think that until the invention of modern weaponry, mundane humans might have a problem enslaving magicals and the like. More likely if slavery were to be a problem, it would be the powered enslaving the non-powered.

I think the most realistic option is a combination of witch hunts and people paying massive amounts of money to the “sell-outs” to do cool things that aren’t necessarily the most beneficial.  The highest bidder would likely be a corporation and a charity or government organization couldn’t compete.

Stuff like this could be used as showing a source of conflict in the world of mixed non-magical humans and magical humans to drive a plot, and allow the author to show contrasts in the relationship of the two groups of humans.

<blocckquote>Also, even very powerful magic would rarely be enough to actually solve all the world’s problems.  And of course there’s the philosophical argument that some people are innately evil and there’s really nothing you can do to stop war and greed, even with magic.</blockquote>

But it could help even if it couldn’t wipe out the problems, and who knows what could be accomplished when people, magical and non-magical, work together

I’m not necessarily defending it, just explaining the common tropes.  From a practical view, it’s just a more interesting story to keep it hidden and separate.

Maybe for some, or even most people, but my favorite stories are the ones where different kinds of people team up to work together against some foe or threat or problem. I don’t know why but I just like that kind of stuff a lot.

Comment #21: Tyro

“Watchmen” tries to invert the trope of “why don’t the superheroes actually affect the world?” where Dr. Manhattan has single-handedly changed the world’s technology, won the Vietnam War for the US, and prevents tensions with the USSR from escalating.

J. Michael Straczynski’s “Rising Stars” inverts this trope towards the end of the series where the heroes realize that they can basically do whatever they want, whenever they want.

I’ve read Watchmen. I liked it but unfortunately all the copy-cat deconstructive superhero comics that came out after it that I’ve read just focus on how shitty things could be, which was and is a missed opportunity to me.

I wish I read Rising Stars. I got to read six issues of it but couldn’t find the rest of the series and this was before I got the internet, then I forgot about it and never bought the rest of the series.

As I said, I think the simple answer is that we like our “hero stories” simple, and if you’re overturning the entire world (which is what the presence of super-powered heroes does if you take it to it’s logical conclusion), the story we were hoping to read falls apart.

I think there is room for the stories I’m looking for though, and they can advertise themselves so that those of us looking for those stories can find them and enjoy them, and those looking for something different can find and enjoy what they like.

Pop up, not poop up.

I’m a crappy editor.

Even Superman had to explain that he felt he would be “holding humanity back from dealing with its problems and advancing” if he took care of every single mundane human problem.

And here’s what SMBC thinks the result would be…

(Today’s strip takes on Batman)

The series was worth the price of popcorn and admission, but that was about it. Taking Rowling at her word, that the series was about “death”, I have to say this final instalment left me cold. I’m decidely un-Christian, and I would prefer a better adaptation of the His Dark Materials trilogy to Harry Potter. I just don’t get what Potter’s “resurrection” is supposed to teach kids about dealing with “death”. There’s all this wailing and reminiscencing, but what else other than escape the movie suggests kids do is too complicated for me to fathom.

As for feminism, how can movies full of tokens be expected to offer any insight? There’s the token witch at Hogwarts, the token friend of Potter, the token African guy. And, thankfully, British public schools are gender-integrated, because, if the model for Hogwarts were Korean schools, the series would have had to flip between boys’ and girls’ academies.

I also think that until the invention of modern weaponry, mundane humans might have a problem enslaving magicals and the like. More likely if slavery were to be a problem, it would be the powered enslaving the non-powered.

The Wheel of Time series is way too long, but one of the reasons that it is so long is that it really thoroughly develops all kinds of societies.  And in one particular society, the magic-users are ridiculed and enslaved by magical items so that they can be used as weapons of war.  It only took one traitor to create this item for the normal people, and then the Empress used it to enslave all of them, eventually including the one who first invented the technology.  So that is one plausible mechanism for how it could work even in a low-tech world.

Loved this post.  In my opinion, a good tv show gets people to continue to discuss it after it ends and to think about how the show echoes and deviates from reality.  Because Friday Night Lights totally succeeds at doing that, it’s probably helped people liberalize their own beliefs, but it doesn’t make its characters or plots feminist.  Frankly, it’s an insult to the work of feminist activists to insist that feminism should be applied to people who do not exist and will never experience oppression or domination. 

People who don’t understand the difference between “feminism” and “decently written characters” shouldn’t be writing about feminism or pop culture.

I always figured that in a world such as Harry Potter, one of two things would happen if the two ‘worlds’ were to intermingle—

1)  Muggles would become resentful and force wizards into hiding, slavery or extinction.
2)  Wizards would take control, becoming dictators, if not eliminating Muggles altogether.

One of the better modern day fantasy series I’ve read is the Dresden Files , and in that world wizards stay out of mortal affairs partly because it is the only way to stay unified enough to defend humanity from magical threats.  Otherwise, politics between wizards from different parts of the world would tear them apart.

@8:

I agree. I don’t see people arguing that every non-white character on TV, or in movies or books, should be a civil rights activist. Like Kit said, what a non-racist, non-sexist writer does is create women and non-white characters who are as diverse, three-dimensional, and sympathetic as the white men. And when you put it that way there’s shockingly little of that in our media.

That said, it shouldn’t be ignored that a book, TV show, or movie can still make moral statements. I mean there’s a very, very important difference between depicting something happening in fiction and actually expressing approval of that thing. But on the other hand, looking at Transformers 3 and the way the men in that movie are constantly dismissing and mocking Frances McDormand’s character, it sure looks like Bay is trying to normalize and even valorize that behavior.

Jayn’s reasons are Rowling’s.  Voldemort wants to conquer the world, and anyone not full blood, or born of proper magical using wizards should be a slave or exterminated.  This goes for other magical creatures, who often have more powerful magics.

At any rate, Harry and Ron would be screwed if Hermione wasn’t there.  She may not understand time travel, but she gets spells better than they do, and actually knows how to think, so she’s prepared not only for exams, but for going on the lam and finding horcruxes.

I think the last book might have been more fun if we’d stayed at Hogwarts and seen the fight between Neville and the death eaters in charge.  Draco’s story has more pathos than Harry’s, with Dumbledore reaching out and trying to helpmhim as well.

I think there’s a better story hiding in books.  As is they’re fun, but not challenging.  Funny how so many conservative types want them banned.

About Harry Potter

A) The “mother’s death/love protected Harry from dying” was a lie Dumbledore tell’s Harry but it isn’t the reason V-mort’s spell backfired. The fact that the last movie perpetuated the lie was irritating.

B) You have to read them. And again. And again. Even then you still don’t see everything.

C) Magic can not fix world hunger, one of the rules of transfiguration: you can not create food from nothing. Also, the Minister of Magic is in communication with the Prime Minister so surely there is already some cross-over though the books make it clear that there is less than there used to be because of the witch hunts and other muggle backlash against wizards.

D) Harry Potter is about many things but in this context I would say the 2 biggest are:
1) There is no good and evil, black/white. Everyone are shades of grey, decisions too can be bad but were made for good reasons and the reverse. Do the ends always justify the means? People are effected by their upbringing and related experiences (Kreacher).

2) Privilege corrupts. The pure bloods hate the muggles, wizards look down on goblins, goblins look down on house elves, centaurs, giants, and so on and so on. S.P.E.W. was the allegory. Unless everyone is free and respected than no one is. The fight can’t just be about muggle-born wizards.

Comment #33: NerdGirl

C) Magic can not fix world hunger, one of the rules of transfiguration: you can not create food from nothing.

But one doesn’t have to create food from nothing. One can seed the land the non magical way. Provide the nutrients the non-magical way and the have a magical alter weather patterns cause it to rain in places where it would otherwise be a drought, our maybe cause it to rain just off a coast by encouraging evaporation and cooling the air, and then teleport the water to where it is needed. Maybe they might be able to make things grow faster too provided they have water and nutrients.

What about turning rotted food that has been thrown away into fresh edible food? That isn’t creating food from nothing. And since bringing things back to life is against the rules, as one would need for plants, meat is already dead and avoids that complication.

Also when looking up this rule I read that a character turns a desk into a pig. Well couldn’t that pig be butchered for food? It wasn’t made from nothing as the rule states, it was made from the desk.

I also read that food being multiplied from existing food is allowable. This could also be used as a way to end world hunger.

Also, the Minister of Magic is in communication with the Prime Minister so surely there is already some cross-over though the books make it clear that there is less than there used to be because of the witch hunts and other muggle backlash against wizards.

Would witch hunts still be a problem in the modern world, especially from people who aren’t motivated by religion to kill those their fictional deity tells them to kill. There is also the potential for alliances between muggles who want to help wizards and wizards who want to help muggles. A muggle warplane dropping a JDAM on Voldemort and things like him would certainly solve a lot of the wizards problems.

Privilege corrupts. The pure bloods hate the muggles, wizards look down on goblins, goblins look down on house elves, centaurs, giants, and so on and so on. S.P.E.W. was the allegory. Unless everyone is free and respected than no one is. The fight can’t just be about muggle-born wizards.

We know this, but privilege can be countered and with time and effort no-one has to be hated and ground underfoot. Even if we won’t see it in our lifetimes isn’t this what we as activists work for?

The thing is though, someone has to take the first step.

Re: Magic/superpowers solving the world’s problems.

Someone’s already mentioned Watchmen; Alan Moore’s Miracleman (written at around the same time) tackles this more explicitly, with the main character solving most of the world’s major problems, including death, around the end of his run on the series. It’s fascinating.

The Authority is another comic where superpowered/magical beings intervene to stop world hunger, topple dictators, and so on. It’s quite explicitly anarchist in its ideology and deals surprisingly realistically with some of the implications of superpowered (read: privileged) beings interacting with the human world.

Superman: Red Son takes a darker twist on the question of “why doesn’t Superman just fix all of humanity’s problems.” It does not go well.

@sabotabbby
Is The Authority any good? I’m helping a buddy put together a queer comics list on Goodreads but got pretty burned last time I stepped out into mainstream comics.

@ scrumby

I confess I haven’t read the entire thing and it may start to fail later on, but what I’ve read is a great deal of fun and gleefully subverts a lot of the problematic elements found in most mainstream comics.

@ R.T.

It would be interesting to know what the limits of magic are, both in terms of abilities and raw power.  For your example of weather manipulation, there would probably be side effects if use was widespread.  Would it be doable for just farming purposes, or would there need to be more overarching control to prevent inadvertent storms?  And in the latter case, would that even be possible?

Then you get to other problems such as war, which would probably be much worse if wizards lived alongside muggles.  Suddenly outsourcing your weather manipulation to China doesn’t look like such a good idea…

For what it’s worth, Kate Millett in “Sexual Politics” was a fan of Charlotte Bronte’s female characters as embodying feminist values.

I’ve been a fan of FNL from the beginning—book, film and t.v. series.  The “living right and hard work equals success” formula is challenged in the first season of the t.v. series when the Mr. America QB becomes a quadriplegic from a football injury.

I was disappointed in the writing of Eric Taylor’s part in the last season over his reactions to his daughter’s affair with the TA and his dealing with the father’s recruiting violations.  In other contexts he managed to get past his knee-jerk anger and to the right place.  It would not have been difficult to put in a speech where he tells Julie why it’s important to return to school and face down the music of social criticism or where he realizes her vulnerability to seduction wasn’t a moral failure but a forgivable human frailty. Nor would it have been difficult to write in a few lines of Eric explaining to Vince that the coach knew recruiting rules and therefore would be a better guide than Vince’s dad. They could still have the story line of rule violations but Taylor’s failure to say why college contacts should go through the coach strained credibility.  It was hard to figure out why players loved the coach so much if he was so silent and inflexible with them over the long haul.

It was nice to have the series wrapped up by the writers, though, instead of what happens to so many canceled series.

RT, you can’t make rain from nothing either.  If you put rain here, then it doesn’t go there, where it was headed and may have been going in a regular cycle for centuries.  It would cause desertification unless aplied very carefully.  Much as taking all that water from the Colorado for Arizona and California has caused all sort of water issues downstream or dams in China are shifting weather patterns there (put simplistically).

I don’t see resentful ordinaries jealously slaughtering or enslaving magicals. We don’t go around killing genius scientists or political leaders even though they’re a lot smarter and/or more powerful than we are, have much more interesting jobs, and are making a much bigger impact on the world. A magical becoming a cruel dictator is a much more likely prospect, as long as they have a lot of popular and professional support.