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themonsterblogofmonsters:
So. This is a thing.
I’m sure some of you already know about this - its been tweeted about, its been updated on the Wikia, there’s two articles on it on Pottermore… the information is out there now. Claudia Kim’s character, the unnamed Maledictus, is named Nagini. It is outright stated that this is indeed the very same Nagini we see in the main series at Voldemort’s side.
Guys, JKR has never been perfect. There’s some stuff even in the original main series which wasn’t great (The goblins. I mean the goblins). But as time has gone on, things have got worse. We all know about the Illness & Disability thing from Pottermore. We all know about the treatment of Native American groups in the Pottermore pieces on magic in the USA. We all saw the massive whiteness of the first Fantastic Beasts film.
This, however, this takes the fucking cake. Mod is angry, peeps. Be warned.
There’s multiple issues with this narrative choice, if this is indeed a) what they’re saying, b) what they’re going with and c) what they’re sticking with. And d) please note that given her heavy involvement in the Fantastic Beasts films, this decision was okayed by JKR herself. The woman who made her millions with a pretty obvious race metaphor.
Lets dig in, hm?
As it stands we know only a few things about Claudia Kim’s character and the Nagini of the main series. As a basic list here’s what we’ve got:
Claudia Kim herself is South Korean, and so its quite likely that her character is either Korean or at least East Asian.
The character is a Maledictus, an individual with a curse on their bloodline which only affects women of the line, enabling them to turn into a beast with the eventual cause of them losing their humanity entirely to be a beast forever.
That she works at the Circus Arcanus, which is a wizarding circus full of living oddities, including Credence Barebone the Obscurial, but also an Oni (a kind of Japanese ogre-like creature), a Kappa, Firedrakes, and the Zouwu we’ve been seeing in trailers. She works under the name Nagini.
The character can transform back and forth between snake and human form at will, at least when we meet her in 1927. At some point, however, she will lose that ability, and become a beast forever.
She is described as having “powers that are yet to be explored” and we are pointedly not told if she has magic of the same kind as wizards. She also does not have a wand.
By the 1990s she had transformed completely and was utterly and only a snake.
It was in the 1990s that she met and allied with Voldemort, possibly in the forests in Albania.
As a snake she was loyal to Voldemort with her venom being used to provide him with a rudimentary body, as well as she herself warning him of spies, and becoming one of Voldemort’s many Horcruxes.
She worked with/for Voldemort for several years, killing and attacking a number of people including Arthur Weasley, Charity Burbage, Bathilda Bagshot, and Severus Snape.
She was eventually killed by Neville Longbottom as one of Voldemort’s horcruxes.
I’m going to start with a summary to really drive home the ways this is fucked up, ok?
Nagini was already a female snake of unknown origin, named for a highly significant and usually benevolent part of Hindu religious belief who was the willing ally of a Wizard Neo-Nazi as well as his pet and soul anchor.
With this new information we can add this to it:
Nagini was a Korean - or at least East Asian - woman under a curse which specifically only affected women forcing them to transform into an animal shape and which would eventually lead to them losing their humanity. She worked under an Indian stage name - whether that was her birth name is up for debate - in a Circus which displays primarily for Western wizarding audiences, and at some point transformed completely, losing her humanity, resulting in a Korean woman with an Indian name acting as the pet and soul anchor of a genocidal Neo-Nazi Metaphor.
I hope I do not have to explain how fucked this is!
Firstly, for whatever reason, we have been informed by JKR (fourth bulletpoint, below) that only women are Maledicti, meaning this is a thing which is specifically and solely dehumanising to women who already get enough dehumanisation by society and media thank you very much.
Secondly this very Latinate curse has been applied to an East Asian woman. East Asian women who are often displayed polarisingly in media as either demure fainting flowers or dragon ladies, neither of which is great! And now we can add “literally dehumanised forever because she’s forced to become a snake for all time” to the list.
Thirdly, we’re clearly told that this character has no wand. Now, wandless magic is a thing we know that. But we’re also pointedly not told if she has magic like that of other wizards and witches leading me to quite strongly believe that she may not meaning that someone placed a Latinate - and so likely European curse on an East Asian Muggle Woman for reasons of ??????????????
Racism? Sexism? Desire to dehumanise? Both? Who fucking knows, but its really not painting a very good picture.
And sure, lets play nice and ooh and ahh because this is actually a genuinely sad thing for someone to be put through. This is a woman who may not even have known about magic until the Maledictus curse affected her and who is now stuck going back and forth between human and animal knowing that one day she is going to lose all trace of who she is forever, likely long before she’s actually due to die. To the point where she feels compelled to leave her family - and possibly her home country even - to travel amongst strangers and live under an appropriated name and work in a circus as a sideshow and carnival attraction.
These are terrible and sad things! That these people chose to write about. That these people want us to think make for a cool character and ignore the knock-on effects this then has because they’ve decided to combine this tragic individual with Nagini.
I’m not saying not to consider racist motivations and narratives in your stories. Considering those things can lead to some excellent trope and narrative subversions that allow us to heavily critique the prevailing and often racist and sexist narratives of the media that we consume.
But that really doesn’t seem to be the case here because they combined her with goddamn NAGINI. The pet, servant and soul anchor of a literal goddamn genocidal neo-nazi.
I’m not going to make a holocaust comparison, because I don’t have the right. But this is… a special level of scummy. This is up there with MCU having the Maximoff twins experimented on with Nazis. In that case, that the prelude comic revealed that they didn’t know that Strucker and List were HYDRA when they signed up frees the twins of any guilt sure… but it only makes the narrative more gross when you consider that they were tricked into it. In this case, with the Maledictus? They try to - and arguably succeed in - freeing the character from guilt by making it so she loses her humanity ensuring it wasn’t her choosing to ally with Voldemort… but all that means was that the ability to make that choice at all was robbed from her by a curse which quite literally dehumanises her.
They succeeded in making Nagini sympathetic.
They haven’t done anything to make themselves sympathetic.
There are a myriad options they could have chosen instead. They could have simply not named her Nagini. They could have kept the character being called Nagini and made a narrative about appropriation and directly addressed the name issue by casting a white actress. They could have had an Indian Parselmouth who young Riddle heard of and took the stage name of for his pet.
They chose this.
I’m going to take a line from Yahtzee, one of the internet’s favourite shouty men.
No. That’s too much. That’s gone right over the Tropic of Fuckabout on a jet-ski full of dicks. I’m done.
I’m going to be continuing this blog because I’ve got too many ideas not to, but I am going to massively up my crit of JKR and any time I think she’s created something beyond the realms of acceptable I am going to change it and I am going to explain why.
The decision making process for this character, to take another line from Yahtzee, was a cock-up cascade and I hope I’ve adequately explained why.
Links:
https://ew.com/movies/2018/09/25/fantastic-beasts-claudia-kim-nagini/
https://www.pottermore.com/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-nagini
https://www.pottermore.com/news/11-intriguing-moments-from-the-third-fantastic-beasts-the-crimes-of-grindelwald-trailer
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1044584072285052930
https://zeropunctuation.wikia.com/wiki/The_Surge - for the last quote.
(Your picture was not posted)
themonsterblogofmonsters:
So. This is a thing.
I’m sure some of you already know about this - its been tweeted about, its been updated on the Wikia, there’s two articles on it on Pottermore… the information is out there now. Claudia Kim’s character, the unnamed Maledictus, is named Nagini. It is outright stated that this is indeed the very same Nagini we see in the main series at Voldemort’s side.
Guys, JKR has never been perfect. There’s some stuff even in the original main series which wasn’t great (The goblins. I mean the goblins). But as time has gone on, things have got worse. We all know about the Illness & Disability thing from Pottermore. We all know about the treatment of Native American groups in the Pottermore pieces on magic in the USA. We all saw the massive whiteness of the first Fantastic Beasts film.
This, however, this takes the fucking cake. Mod is angry, peeps. Be warned.
There’s multiple issues with this narrative choice, if this is indeed a) what they’re saying, b) what they’re going with and c) what they’re sticking with. And d) please note that given her heavy involvement in the Fantastic Beasts films, this decision was okayed by JKR herself. The woman who made her millions with a pretty obvious race metaphor.
Lets dig in, hm?
As it stands we know only a few things about Claudia Kim’s character and the Nagini of the main series. As a basic list here’s what we’ve got:
Claudia Kim herself is South Korean, and so its quite likely that her character is either Korean or at least East Asian.
The character is a Maledictus, an individual with a curse on their bloodline which only affects women of the line, enabling them to turn into a beast with the eventual cause of them losing their humanity entirely to be a beast forever.
That she works at the Circus Arcanus, which is a wizarding circus full of living oddities, including Credence Barebone the Obscurial, but also an Oni (a kind of Japanese ogre-like creature), a Kappa, Firedrakes, and the Zouwu we’ve been seeing in trailers. She works under the name Nagini.
The character can transform back and forth between snake and human form at will, at least when we meet her in 1927. At some point, however, she will lose that ability, and become a beast forever.
She is described as having “powers that are yet to be explored” and we are pointedly not told if she has magic of the same kind as wizards. She also does not have a wand.
By the 1990s she had transformed completely and was utterly and only a snake.
It was in the 1990s that she met and allied with Voldemort, possibly in the forests in Albania.
As a snake she was loyal to Voldemort with her venom being used to provide him with a rudimentary body, as well as she herself warning him of spies, and becoming one of Voldemort’s many Horcruxes.
She worked with/for Voldemort for several years, killing and attacking a number of people including Arthur Weasley, Charity Burbage, Bathilda Bagshot, and Severus Snape.
She was eventually killed by Neville Longbottom as one of Voldemort’s horcruxes.
I’m going to start with a summary to really drive home the ways this is fucked up, ok?
Nagini was already a female snake of unknown origin, named for a highly significant and usually benevolent part of Hindu religious belief who was the willing ally of a Wizard Neo-Nazi as well as his pet and soul anchor.
With this new information we can add this to it:
Nagini was a Korean - or at least East Asian - woman under a curse which specifically only affected women forcing them to transform into an animal shape and which would eventually lead to them losing their humanity. She worked under an Indian stage name - whether that was her birth name is up for debate - in a Circus which displays primarily for Western wizarding audiences, and at some point transformed completely, losing her humanity, resulting in a Korean woman with an Indian name acting as the pet and soul anchor of a genocidal Neo-Nazi Metaphor.
I hope I do not have to explain how fucked this is!
Firstly, for whatever reason, we have been informed by JKR (fourth bulletpoint, below) that only women are Maledicti, meaning this is a thing which is specifically and solely dehumanising to women who already get enough dehumanisation by society and media thank you very much.
Secondly this very Latinate curse has been applied to an East Asian woman. East Asian women who are often displayed polarisingly in media as either demure fainting flowers or dragon ladies, neither of which is great! And now we can add “literally dehumanised forever because she’s forced to become a snake for all time” to the list.
Thirdly, we’re clearly told that this character has no wand. Now, wandless magic is a thing we know that. But we’re also pointedly not told if she has magic like that of other wizards and witches leading me to quite strongly believe that she may not meaning that someone placed a Latinate - and so likely European curse on an East Asian Muggle Woman for reasons of ??????????????
Racism? Sexism? Desire to dehumanise? Both? Who fucking knows, but its really not painting a very good picture.
And sure, lets play nice and ooh and ahh because this is actually a genuinely sad thing for someone to be put through. This is a woman who may not even have known about magic until the Maledictus curse affected her and who is now stuck going back and forth between human and animal knowing that one day she is going to lose all trace of who she is forever, likely long before she’s actually due to die. To the point where she feels compelled to leave her family - and possibly her home country even - to travel amongst strangers and live under an appropriated name and work in a circus as a sideshow and carnival attraction.
These are terrible and sad things! That these people chose to write about. That these people want us to think make for a cool character and ignore the knock-on effects this then has because they’ve decided to combine this tragic individual with Nagini.
I’m not saying not to consider racist motivations and narratives in your stories. Considering those things can lead to some excellent trope and narrative subversions that allow us to heavily critique the prevailing and often racist and sexist narratives of the media that we consume.
But that really doesn’t seem to be the case here because they combined her with goddamn NAGINI. The pet, servant and soul anchor of a literal goddamn genocidal neo-nazi.
I’m not going to make a holocaust comparison, because I don’t have the right. But this is… a special level of scummy. This is up there with MCU having the Maximoff twins experimented on with Nazis. In that case, that the prelude comic revealed that they didn’t know that Strucker and List were HYDRA when they signed up frees the twins of any guilt sure… but it only makes the narrative more gross when you consider that they were tricked into it. In this case, with the Maledictus? They try to - and arguably succeed in - freeing the character from guilt by making it so she loses her humanity ensuring it wasn’t her choosing to ally with Voldemort… but all that means was that the ability to make that choice at all was robbed from her by a curse which quite literally dehumanises her.
They succeeded in making Nagini sympathetic.
They haven’t done anything to make themselves sympathetic.
There are a myriad options they could have chosen instead. They could have simply not named her Nagini. They could have kept the character being called Nagini and made a narrative about appropriation and directly addressed the name issue by casting a white actress. They could have had an Indian Parselmouth who young Riddle heard of and took the stage name of for his pet.
They chose this.
I’m going to take a line from Yahtzee, one of the internet’s favourite shouty men.
No. That’s too much. That’s gone right over the Tropic of Fuckabout on a jet-ski full of dicks. I’m done.
I’m going to be continuing this blog because I’ve got too many ideas not to, but I am going to massively up my crit of JKR and any time I think she’s created something beyond the realms of acceptable I am going to change it and I am going to explain why.
The decision making process for this character, to take another line from Yahtzee, was a cock-up cascade and I hope I’ve adequately explained why.
Links:
https://ew.com/movies/2018/09/25/fantastic-beasts-claudia-kim-nagini/
https://www.pottermore.com/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-nagini
https://www.pottermore.com/news/11-intriguing-moments-from-the-third-fantastic-beasts-the-crimes-of-grindelwald-trailer
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1044584072285052930
https://zeropunctuation.wikia.com/wiki/The_Surge - for the last quote.
(Your picture was not posted)
