Earlier, friends got into an argument
about shipping (specifically,
Finn/Poe, but it doesn’t really matter). It devolved into the
usual “why must you take our nice hetero friendships and make them gross” vs “because nobody gives us nice gay relationships”
arguments and then everybody just stopped hearing each other.
I’m too goddamn tired right now to go on a polemic about
all this. Instead, let’s talk about fairy tales. Specifically, let’s talk
about Romanian fairy tales, which I grew up on, and which are the
best fairy tales in the whole world. (I will fight anyone who thinks
different. Proper, round the back of the Wetherspoons after closing
time, might bring a blade, fight.)
I’m not Romanian. But my dad hung out with
Communists a lot*, and spent a good chunk of time in the early 1980s
in a pretty riverside town called Curtea de Argeş. After
his first long stay in Romania, my father brought back gifts for me.
You will be unsurprised to learn that dolls were never a go. Seeing
the dog-eared state of my copy of D’Aulaires, Dad figured that more
books of fairy tales was a good idea. He was right. I received two
books of Romanian fairy tales in English translation, from the
foreigners’ hard currency store in Bucharest. They soon became my
all-time favourite books. I have one to this day, and occasionally
comb used-book sites to try to find the other, though I only dimly
remember its cover.
*There’s much more to this story, but you’ll not get it unless I’m in a bar, and you buy me decent whisky for the telling.
Folks,
I will reiterate: Romanian fairy tales are the best. Especially
coming off D’Aulaires, which was a sort of Ovid for the short-pants
set. Let’s briefly refresh things that happen to female characters in
Ovid: Europa, raped by a bull. Leda, raped by a swan. Syrinx, turned
into reeds because she wouldn’t put out. Daphne, turned into a tree
for same. Echo, wasted away after falling in love with a boy who
never texted back. Eurydice, trod on a plot point and sent to the
underworld. Persephone, abducted to the underworld for more
rapey-tiems. Semele, turned to ash for demanding a paternity test,
and her fetal child sewn into Zeus’ thigh to be taken to term. Yeah,
Cronenburgh doesn’t have shit on the ancient Greeks.
Then
we come to Ileana Simziana, a Romanian story about an unnamed female
heroine who dresses up as a boy, obtains a magic horse because she is
clever and kind, fights giants because she is brave, wins both the
freedom and the love of a badass fairy queen (the titular Ileana
Simziana) via a mix of cunning and force, and finally swaps genders
after being hit by a stray curse while she was stealing some holy
water. That’s right, girls: why wait for Prince Charming, when you
can become him?
I
originally found it curious that the heroine was never named. She is
referred to throughout as “the emperor’s daughter”. In the rest
of the stories in that particular book, the (male) heroes are all
named. Although there are almost no decent resources in English for
Romanian tales, I did find several references to the Ileana Simziana
story where the emperor’s daughter simply took on the generic
Romanian hero name of Fet-Frumos, aka Prince Charming. Perhaps the
translator of my book chose not to name her, since there were a
couple of Fet-Frumos stories in the collection as well and she was
afraid lest we foreigners become confused. (She was probably right.)
I
need to track down a copy of the other book I had, as I remember it
had even more stories where a lot of queer longing was neatly
sidestepped by princes magically becoming princesses and vice versa.
It was to the point that I became uncomfortable reading the book,
because that sort of thing never happened in the stories I had access
to. Women in the King Arthur tales were either virgins moping wetly
in castles, or evil temptresses. I could be… something other than
that?
Not
that there weren’t women in castles in Romanian tales. But they were
all fairy queens who took precisely zero
shit and were busy making the lives of everyone around them
miserable, including their captors’. Often they simply existed as
formidable figures with no male antagonist / imprisoner: women like
Inia Dinia or the other Ileana (Cosinzinea) who took off in annoyance
after the hero did something stupid (divulged her name to a stranger;
slept through a booty call), went to the ends of the earth, and made
the hero go through years
of hell to win them back. The hero almost always accomplishes this
via something he’s baked, too. It wasn’t all chucking hairbrushes at
giants. Women in these tales had more heroic agency than anything
else I had read at the time, and possibly to this day.
And not that girls aren’t perfectly able to read the Arthurian stories
and just, fuck it,
imagine themselves as a knight. It’s what most of us have been doing
our entire lives: reading stories in which we have no agency, no
significant function, and then creating a new character for that
story in our heads. Sometimes that character is female, and sometimes
it’s not.
This is how we come back around to fan and slashfiction, and why it
has (to a white, cis, male audience) such bewildering popularity: we
are so unaccustomed to seeing our gender / sexuality in roles of
power that the most comfortable way we can express a romantic
relationship of equals using the pre-existing figures of mainstream
fiction is via the interactions of two straight males.
Yeah,
just stay with that for a moment. That really sucks, doesn’t it?
Where are the female characters with equal screen time and
power/agency to the (white) male heroes? Where are the queer ones?
Where are the heroes of colour? It’s fine to deny us the ability to
be leads, but don’t then get mad when we do aftermarket adaptations
of the ones that you give us.
It’s slowly getting better. People are
a lot more conscious now about representation, and the messages we
send to young girls about what it is acceptable for them to become,
encased in the sugary wrappings of fiction.
That’s fantastic, of
course. But there is an overwhelming resonance, a sense of place,
that occurs when you find something very old, something that’s been
around a long time, that whispers to you it’s always been okay to
be like this… You have always belonged here.
