the oxymoron paradox: hybrid monsters

in urban fantasy or paranormal fiction, the stories usually revolve around 'people' that are not really your normative next-door-neighbour 'people'... ergo, 'paranormal' or 'fantasy'... both are sub-sub-genres of a HUGE genre in fiction - 'fantasy fiction', which also goes by the name 'speculative fiction'...

so, your leads in urban fantasy and paranormal fiction - and in cases where its not necessarily leads, its the supporting characters - can vary from vampires, shifters of various kinds - so that's all the cat family, wolves, hyenas (which are considered belonging to both wolves and cat families), rats and bears even - to wyr - that's your fantasy generic term for what common folk might call dragons/ griffins or gryphons / unicorns, etc... - to magic-users, witches - or what in geek-talk are called 'wicca' (go figure!)- and sorcerers, revenants, zombies, ghouls, ghosts, erstwhile gods, and fallen angels and what not!

so here's the thing.. your first premise - the world humans live in - yes, humans and not 'people' - is very different to say the least... most books in these genres will hardly feature humans, and when they do, the takes on humans vary from ridicule and spite, to pity or nostalgia, to indifference or mockery, to anger/rage and the need to avenge the humans for the millennia of social ostracism, torture, and killings of what humans considered 'abnormal' or in other words, 'monsters'...

so all of the paranormal beings are abominations in themselves... now, i'm disregarding the fact that recent teen/young adult pop fiction would cry hoarse to prove otherwise - what with sparkling vampires and six-pack-abs-wolf-boys - or that in most fantasy/paranormal books, this 'being-seen-as-abomination' is taken to task; and its usually humans who are depicted as narrow-minded fanatics who have launched century-long crusades against these 'abnormal' beings that are neither human nor animal - in short, they're worse.. abominations..

now, your second premise - aka the oxymoron paradox - in many books i've read in these two sub-genres, the lead is usually not fully monster, nor fully human, nor fully anything... in short, they're half-breeds or hybrid monsters. if the two terms 'hybrid' and 'monsters' were earlier seen as synonymous, in these books, the half-breeds are themselves abominations... abomination within abomination, ergo the oxymoron paradox.

most world building and plots in UF/paranormal books, when not concerned with humans so much, often engage in meticulously weaving out the socio-political systems and structures of the characters... so vampires and ghouls usually function with a rather feudal 'master'-'servant' or king-subject dynamic; shifters and wyr have the pack leader, aka the alpha, and the rest of the pack, witches have covens, fallen angels are tied to the gods that rule, and so on, and so forth... and needless to say, most books, have brilliant takes on these social and political structures... so there's shifters who find the pack-lifestyle stifling, or vampire subjects who wish to be freed from their masters.. and so on..

and in books featuring half-breeds, one of the most fascinating aspects of the plots is in the severe disdain expressed by the half-breed/hybrid monster towards those 'pure-breeds' who are puritans... or in other words, if you haven't caught the drift by now, those pure-breeds who believe in the 'purity' of their blood/kind... of course, most often this sentiment is reciprocated by the pure-breeds as well... who persecute the half-breeds as abominations...

in fantasy fiction, this is most popularly recognized in the harry potter series by j.k. rowling... one of the main characters, hermione is a 'muggle' - a human-born girl who has come to wield witch powers... and the supreme villain of villains in the series - he who must not be named - is a pure-blood, born of witch and wizard parents, and believes in the purity of the witch-wizard race and sets out on the task of cleansing the world of such muggle-borns... eh.. similar, what say, to what has happened so often in human history?

so, to end, let me say that there's a way in which the half-breeds/hybrids here, often find a way out, to not just tackle the persecution and so on, but that it is in the very 'half'-ness of them that they discover their strengths... or their opponents weakness...

more on this, and what it might mean, with some examples, next time...

Re-view.One

so Ra.One is a movie i like.. for reasons i'd like to believe i know... and yea, this is despite its silliness, crassness, typecasting, the neither-here-nor-there-ness of it, and the many more reasons that reviews cite explaining why its a bad film...

one of the things that has been stated unequivocally about the film is that its stereotyping of the south indian is not only over-the-top as is usually the case in bollywood films, but that its been-there-done-that...

now, to my mind, the film was only too aware of the fact that such typecasting has not only run its course, but that its come under much fire... so i'm wondering, why go ahead with it then? i mean, it certainly was not mocking the 'generations of typecasting that is the history of bollywood', as was done in movies like Om Shanti Om...

and frankly speaking, i thoroughly enjoyed the typecasting, and this was not despite knowing fully well the problematic that it poses, but because of it... the noodles and curd??? it hit so close to home, i was giggling away in my seat watching that scene... is mixing curd with everything a very tamil thing? maybe not, but for me, it so is. and, the lungi-tying scene? i thought it was ridiculously cute....

did i at all have any scruples about any of it then? i did... and this is what i'm going to try and explain to myself.. it was the entry of satish shah's character that had me squirming in my seat... till then, the typecasting had not so much to do with sexual-stereotyping as it did with other everyday-routine stuff... but enter satish shah, and the jokes became lewd, the southern-male-sexuality was all over the place with the pelvic thrusting and innuendos... and this is perhaps where i thought the film took it too far...

logically, it is the everyday-routine stereotyping that is as, if not more, dangerous in terms of its implications and after-effects... and yet, i could ignore all of that precisely because the film, it seemed to me, was speaking at a time when those routines, precisely because they are so over-done in bollywood, no longer felt insulting, but rather, just downright silly... and i laughed at the silliness of it all...

but sexuality and stereotyping is once again not new in bollywood... the virile punjabi men, or the macho jat men... or for that matter the pelvic-thrusting-south-indian-men... in fact, i'm amazed that when shahrukh khan was doing the pelvic-thrusting, i found it hilarious, but when satish shah did it, it just felt gross and wrong... so what was it about an individual doing it that made it ok, but when it came to stand for a community that didn't? did i see shahrukh khan as not actually part of that community when he was blubbering away in tamil and eating noodles and curd, or is it only when the over-statedness of the community nature of the pelvic-thrusting, literally passing from one man to another, that it irked???

i'm not stupid enough to imagine that there would be a stereotype-free film at all... but stereotyping needs to be closely shadowed by an acute sensitivity... and it is in grasping fully the sensitivity of typecasting at every given moment, that we might make inroads into humor...