Shadow and Bone and Portrayals of Racism
Shadow and Bone, Netflix’s new epic fantasy series, comes at the perfect time, as I’ve been on a fantasy spree lately, with a new flash fiction project, my current readthrough of The Masquerade series, and of course, my weekly DnD session with friends. I’m halfway through the series and I’m enjoying it a lot. I may even read the source material when I’m done with all eight episodes.
As with many fantasy series, the show follows several characters on multiple arcs, though central is Alina Starkov (played by Jessie Mei Li, below right). Alina is an orphan who discovers that she is a grisha, a magic wielder, and a unique one at that. She is a Sun Summoner and her powers might be the key to saving her war-torn country of Ravka. She is trained and supervised by General Aleksandr Kirigan (played by Ben Barnes, below left), the leader of the Grisha, whose power is manipulating darkness.
Is he a bad guy? I mean, he is called “The Darkling”…
We also follow Kaz Brekker, Inej Ghafa and Jesper Fahey—my new favorite trio. Coming from the seedy underbelly of the city of Ketterdam, they’ve been hired to abduct the newly discovered Sun Summoner. I have a very strong affinity for rascals and enterprising criminals, and I often found myself wanting to follow their story more than Alina and Kirigan’s. They banter, they heist, they get into scrapes and get out of them with wit and grit. I love them.
Jesper (Kit Young), Inej (Amita Suman) and Kaz (Freddy Carter). Emotional support goat not pictured.
As with many fantasy media, Shadow and Bone uses real-world analogues in order to address social and political issues. In the show, Ravka is basically Russia, and Shu Han, from where Alina derives her ethnicity, is coded as East Asian. Alina is half-Shu, a fact that is thrown in her face repeatedly via the use of racist slurs. This has earned the show a bit of fair criticism, especially since the books did not have this element. The showrunners made the character Alina half-Shu to make the show more racially diverse than the books.
Seeing racism depicted in media can be hurtful and (re)traumatizing, and this is why more is required from creators than what the writers did here. The characters that use slurs against Alina are clearly portrayed as Bad, and at least one of them gets some sort of comeuppance, but that is the bare minimum. Showing racism to be bad, and to have some sort of consequence, feels lazy. There is racism in this fantasy world, as there is in the real world—sure, but then what?
That “then what?” feels more urgent here, because the writers made a choice to infuse the story with racism, which (from what I understand) the source material did not have. Racism didn’t need to be in the show, but, having decided that it should be in the show, the writers needed to develop it more—show why racism is bad, show how much deeper racism goes, beyond slurs and name-calling, show some balance in the experiences of the oppressed, show an internal consistency in how race affects different kinds of ethnicities, all of which Shadow and Bone fails to do.
There’s also a lot to be said about the shorthand that the writers used in creating Alina’s backstory. The writers seemed to decide that since she is half-Shu, the adversity that she has to overcome would of course have to be tied to her being mixed race. Racism is a real and immediate problem to Asians (as we are seeing in the news lately), but in creating a character in a world that has a war not tied to race, and a world where there are complicated racial and political dynamics, the choice to have Alina suffer in these obvious ways is too convenient. There are so many more ways that this character can have conflict, obstacles and depth, especially since this world has so many other systems of prejudice.
Shadow and Bone is not a bad show but it has harmful, hurtful parts. There’s value to portrayals of racism, for readers/viewers and for writers, but if you’re the one portraying it, there’s a high bar to clear.
All photos courtesy of Netflix