The Ways That Monsters and Mad Scientists Can Be Empowering Characters to People From Marginalized Identities
I’ve spent most of my career in the world of animation fighting for better onscreen representation for marginalized people. There’s still a long way to go, but during that time, we’ve won many small but significant victories. We no longer have to hide behind fantasy metaphors or veiled language to get our stories told. Instead, we can write about grounded, relatable characters from our own communities who get to be the kinds of empowered role models we desperately needed as children.
(On Writing Representation in Fiction.)
And that’s great. Really. But now that we finally have the freedom to tell these stories, I have to admit . . . they’re not the kinds of stories I personally want to tell. Because when I was a kid, I didn’t want to be a grounded, relatable role model other marginalized kids could look up to.
I wanted to be a dinosaur.
I would have also settled for a shark, or a lion. I loved that one choose-your-own-adventure Goosebumps book where you get turned into a vampire bat, and I forced my very nice and patient mom to read it to me over and over again until I got the ending where you got trapped as a bat forever. And you know my favorite Animorph was Tobias (the one that gets stuck as a hawk).
When I eventually graduated to more human-oriented fantasies, I became obsessed with gothic horror. As an adult, that ongoing obsession inspired me to create my graphic novel The Glass Scientists, a reimagining of Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Frankenstein, and many other classic mad scientists in an alternate Victorian London filled with bubbling potions and misunderstood monsters. I chose this heightened fantasy setting to tell a very specific story about identity and self-acceptance. Because even in an age with “better” representation, stories about monsters, mad scientists, and other otherworldy beings can still be a rich source of empowerment and understanding for anyone who’s ever felt like an outsider.
For starters, not everyone grows up aware of their own identities, especially if you fall anywhere on the LGBT+ spectrum. I was never taught that being gay was a sin, exactly, but through years of offhand comments and innuendo, I came to understand that gay people were simply not like us. The representation of bisexual women in particular during the early 2000s was often hypersexualized and/or villainized, and since I didn’t want to be either of those things, I avoided any story with the slightest hint of bisexuality like the plague. If you’d confronted me an unapologetically queer character during those years, I would have absolutely hated them. But stories like Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde allowed me to explore the yearning and ambivalence I was grappling with without having to say the gay part out loud. Even though I eventually sought out more explicit forms of queer representation, Strange Case helped me take that vital first step toward self-acceptance.
But these stories aren’t just for the closeted among us. As much as it hurts to face rejection from mainstream society, it can hurt even more to be rejected by your own community, especially if, like me, you live at the crossroads between several identities. Mixed Asian people are never Asian enough. Bisexuals aren’t gay enough unless they’re dating someone of the same gender. Trans people aren’t trans enough if they don’t medically transition or perform dysphoria correctly or act too “cringe” in public. And it’s often not safe to vent your frustrations about intra-community drama, especially in front of the straight white folks. You yourself have to be good representation within the scope of your own life.
But no one can be good representation all the time. In her iconic AMC theaters ad, Nicole Kidman declares that the heroes in movies “feel like the best parts of us.” Well, I don’t need stories about the best parts of myself. I want stories about the worst parts of myself, the parts that are too weird for the weirdos, too toxic to share even with the people I care about most. I want to know that, even if I’m not heroic or aspirational or good representation, I am, at the very least, worthy of existence.
Check out S. H. Cotugno’s The Glass Scientists here:
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These stories can also help readers explore new aspects of their identities. It can be difficult, for instance, to interrogate your own gender with the specter of transphobia and the medical industrial complex hanging over your head. “I might enjoy being a man,” you think, “but those botched surgery photos transphobes keep shoving in my face look pretty scary, and do I really want to be on hormones the rest of my life?”
Faced with the inherent unpredictability of such choices, a sufficiently avoidant person might put off transition until the day they die. But what if you could set all those practicalities aside? What if you could just take a potion and instantly, perfectly change your gender? What then?
Plus, monsters are super fun. As cathartic as it can be to see your own experiences reflected back to you, it’s often easier to process those heavy emotions with a candy coating of escapism. I want to process my lingering angst about being told, “You’d understand if your parents were really Asian,” by my extremely cool Chinese-American friend in high school. I also want to fantasize about raising the dead with vaguely-defined lightning science magic. Is that too much to ask?
There are plenty of pitfalls to fantasy metaphor, of course. Many a well-meaning writer has tried to fill a world-building hole only to find themself accidentally reinventing eugenics or crafted a magic system that casually endorses gender essentialism. But even though it’s hard, even though it requires a lot of critical thinking and you will almost certainly mess up at some point, don’t be afraid to write a story filled with whatever fantastical creations and scientific abominations your heart desires. You never know who might need it.