Tag: Paul and Renee

Horror Week 2012: American Horror and the Evils of the Sexual Woman

Alexandra Breckinridge (l) and Frances Conroy (r) as American Horror Story‘s Moira
This is a guest post by Paul and Renee
In terms of the female characters on American Horror Story, there are quite a few problematic elements. There are the issues of violence and rape, but one that often gets overlooked is the treatment of sex. It is impossible to have a discussion about sex and American Horror Story without examining the character of Moira. 
In many ways, Moira is defined by her sexuality. Even her origin as a ghost came about through her sexuality, when Constance killed her for sleeping with her husband by shooting her in the eye and burying her body in the garden. 
Since that moment, her ghost has been stuck in the persona as a sexual object for the pleasure of straight men. It is expressly labelled as this by the way her body shifts form depending on who looks at her. Independent of all of the ghosts in the house, she is not stuck in the body she died in — she is not always the young, attractive woman that Constance murdered. She only ever appears as her original form when a straight man is looking at her and not only does her appearance change, but so does her demeanour, her words and her actions. Moira’s attractiveness, her body, her sexuality is only ever apparent when it is time to titillate a straight man — it’s expressly there for both straight male pleasure and to be used as a tool for power against straight men. And many of the living straight male characters recognise this: for example, Ben is surprised that Vivien is happy to keep Moira on, because her attractiveness and her overtly sexual and seductive demeanour is so blatantly aimed at him that he assumes Vivien must see her as a threat or problem (especially since he has cheated before).
When Moira is not around a living straight man, a target for that sexuality, she is an old woman displaying a damaged eye where she was shot. She is presented as completely lacking in sexual attractiveness — not only in appearance but in demeanour as well. Her sexual nature is reserved for straight men.
Moira’s most fascinating persona is that of an older woman played by Frances Conroy. Older Moira is virtually passive until Vivien Harmon enlists her help to scare a new family away from the murder house. This character plays upon the idea that seniors, particularly senior women, are not sexual and most certainly never the object of sexual desire.This is a societal construction that’s continually reified by the media. Consider for a moment that Sean Connery and Richard Gere are most definitely senior citizens but are still constructed as sex symbols and paired with significantly younger women in movies. There is never a question that they are desirable and their age is certainly never a barrier to sex. With Moira, her advanced age makes her decidedly non-sexual and, without the veneer of youth and sexuality, she is powerless and impotent.
Moira’s sexuality is also presented as dangerous. She is the temptress who leads men astray — the woman whose sexuality causes the man’s downfall. It is positively biblical with Moira representing Eve.

“Be it Lilith or Eve, is seen as the enemy of harmony, well ordered life and peace. She is the source of all evils, the originator of sin in the world. This negative understanding of the woman, particularly Eve, is presented in the words of some prominent male scholars. The Jewish commentator, Cassuto, maintains that the serpent too is female and the cunning of the serpent is in reality the cunning of the woman. The German Old Testament scholar, claims that women confront the allurements and mysteries that beset our limited life more directly than men do, and therefore, woman is a temptress. Mckenzie connects woman’s moral weakness with her sexual attraction and holds that the latter ruined both the woman and the man. Thus, male interpreters understand woman as responsible not only for the origin of evil in the world, but makes female “to represent the qualities of materiality, irrationality, carnality and finitude, which debase the manly spirit and drag it down into sin and death.”

In “Open House,” Moira seduces Joe Escandarian when she learns that he is considering buying the house and putting a pool out back. What makes their meeting interesting is that their flirtation occurs in the presence of Vivien and Marcy, who are shocked because, of course, all they can see is the older and certainly sexless Moira. Her goal is to get someone to dig up her bones, so that Constance can finally be held accountable for her murder. The next time Moira acts, she gives Joe oral sex, further enticing him to buy the house to get what she wants. In the end, Moira learns that Joe intends to tear down the house, she acts again, and this time it is to take part in Joe’s murder. She seduces him, initiates oral sex and then bites off his penis. In this we can see her constructed as Joe’s downfall. It’s not a new storyline, because women have been positioned in this manner since Eve fed Adam the apple and Delilah cut Samson’s hair. A woman’s sexuality, and any power ensuing from it, is a threat to men and eventually leads to some sort of disaster. And every scene where she is young and seductive has a faintly sinister feel, the way it is presented is threatening — her overt sexuality a weapon used against the helpless man who is desperately trying to resist. In some ways, Moira is almost a Jekyl and Hyde figure – with the good, supportive elderly Moira for the living women contrasting the evil, seductive, menacing young Moira for the men. 
But to look at Moira’s sexuality as purely a source of evil seduction for the poor men is to ignore the power differentials in these relationships — starting with her relationship with Constance’s husband that resulted in her death. In every case she is an employee, even with the living men who do not realise she is a ghost, she is in an inherent position of weakness to these men. We also have to ask what other tools she has? We have seen, in episode 7, Moira trying to seduce men to convince them to dig up her bones where they are buried. She wants freedom, she wants to be away from the murder house, we even see that she had family outside the murder house she wished to see and could only do so on hallowe’en. She is using the only tool she has to try to obtain freedom, to try and obtain some form of justice.
Moira does get to be seen as a tragic figure for this. We see her pain and her loss when her mother dies in a nursing home. We get to see her fear and frustration over trying to be free from the house and having her plans thwarted. We get to see her pain and anger in the face of Constance’s constant taunting and needling of her, still holding a grudge for her husband’s infidelity. But in all these instances we’re expected to sympathise with the older Moira — the good Moira, the non-threatening Moira and, tellingly, the non-sexual Moira. Sexual Moira is not a person to be pitied or a person due sympathy or who feels pain. 
As with many of the prejudices that run rampant on this programme, the sexualisation of Moira is overtly displayed but poorly challenged. The depth of Moira’s character and any sympathetic characteristics are all overshadowed by the simple narrative of the dangerous and even evil sexual woman. So strongly is this message carried that the writers don’t even try to make sexual Moira someone we can empathise with — only when she is stripped of all her sexuality does she get to be human.
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Paul and Renee blog and review at Fangs for the Fantasy. We’re great lovers of the genre and consume it in all its forms — but as marginalised people we also analyse critically through a social justice lens.

Women in Science Fiction Week: The Problem with Female Representation in Science Fiction on Television

Falling Skies‘ Margaret

Guest post written by Paul and Renee.

The wonderful thing about science fiction is that the writers have the opportunity to create a world, which while based on ours, can be markedly different. This means that there should be a place for strong female characters who are not restricted by sexism or forced into a situation in which they must perform femininity on a daily basis to be accepted as ‘woman.’ Despite the freedom of this genre; however, nothing is born outside of discourse, which means of course that we end up with the same sexist tropes repeatedly.

Even in shows which readily lend themselves to recurring scenes of violence, because women have historically been framed as delicate and passive, men end up in the leadership roles. This also means that when the action does finally happen, women are placed into nurturing roles like doctors and nurses to aid the wounded men. While some may see this exchange as complementary, it in fact sets up a serious gender divide that is reductive.
We actually see this most strongly and most blatantly in dystopias. In Falling Skies, humanity is locked into a battle for survival against an alien threat. Humanity is nearly extinct, the group is excited at the prospect of a capital that has managed to scrape together 2,000 survivors. The 2nd Massachusetts itself is reduced to a mere 150 people, meaning it has lost nearly half of its already low numbers since the series began. Clearly, this is a series about desperation – every man must be ready to fight, desperately, to survive.
And I said “man” purposefully there. Because, while there are plenty of women in the crowd scenes and even in most of the fight scenes we will find one token, nameless female fighter in a large number of men, the vast majority of the fighters are male. In fact, there’s only ever one named female fighter at a time (Karen, who gets replaced by Maggie after she is captured. She also inherited Karen’s love interest – which did rather make the two women seem interchangeable).
Remember how desperate humanity is here. For most of the show, Jimmy, a 13 year old boy was drafted to fight. As they get more desperate, Matt, a 6 year old boy, starts carrying a gun around and taking part in military action. Where are the women? It’s clearly not a matter of military background with both children and school teachers on the battlefield, why do we only see one or two women standing side by side with their men to hold the line against the alien threat?
By contrast, the most prominent female characters we do see except for the interchangeable-Hal-Love-Interest are, of course, caregivers. Dr. Ann Glass and Lourdes, the medical team for the 2nd Massachusetts. It’s the 21st century, humanity is nearly destroyed, every day is a struggle to survive – I think we can move past men holding guns while women roll bandages.
We can see a similar pervasive female passivity in Alphas, reinforced and ingrained by the special abilities the characters have. Two of the characters, Cameron and Bill, have abilities that make them dangerous in a fight. Their physical capabilities make them the team muscle – contrast that with the two women. Well, they have super senses and limited mind control respectively. The women are inherently placed in support roles and set up as support from the very beginning. And I know that someone will say “well, they don’t have combat powers!” true – but why was it written that way? Why couldn’t Nina have the super-strength? Why did the writers choose the women and the disabled character to have the less active, support powers? And that’s not to say their powers aren’t powerful or useful – far from it – but then, so is rolling bandages.
Sanctuary‘s Helen Magnus
Even in shows like Sanctuary where we have female leadership, not all women are created equal. Helen Magnus is the only female of the original scientists to survive. The two most prominent recurring female characters outside of the protagonist are Kate Freelander and Abbey Corrigan. Kate essentially is the replacement for Ashley, Magnus’ daughter who died at the end of season one. She is a woman of colour who seems to exist only for Magnus to reform her evil ways. She disappears for large swaths of time and is barely missed by the team. In this way, they make her quite disposable. There were other options to send to work in hollow earth, but it was Kate that was chosen. Biggie would have made a much more natural choice but because he was a fan favourite, there was no way he would have been sent.
In the case of Abbey, she exists it seems solely to be the Mary Sue of the show. She is just shy of vapid and has no real storyline other than being Will’s girlfriend. Everything that the Sanctuary deals with is far above her pay grade. Kate was also featured in the highly regrettable musical episode which was her only form of communication for a time. So it would seem that to elevate one woman, all of the other female characters must pay a price and it is particularly troubling when it comes to Kate because of the racial dynamic at play. Once again, we have White woman acting as earth mother to a person of colour.

Even when we have strong female characters, they are still not free of damaging tropes. In Continuum, Kiera is strong and is proactive; each week she and her partner Carlos, take turns hunting down the bad guys. Keira is not afraid to get physical if she has to. That sounds great doesn’t it? It would be if that was all I had to say about her, but it seems that once again, a strong female character cannot just be strong. She has to have a vulnerable side and for Keira it’s motherhood. It makes sense that a mother living so far away from her child, would miss her son desperately, but it does not make sense that this sense of loss would turn into her deciding to lecture her grandmother into giving birth and rejecting every legitimate reason she had to have an abortion.

Continuum‘s Kiera
In “The Test of Time,” Lily Jones, is a homeless high school dropout with no parental support, who finds herself pregnant. Obviously, becoming a parent at this point would be absolutely daunting, but Kiera does not even pause for one moment to legitimise a single thing that Lily says. Instead, the entire message of the episode is that marriage is the answer to teenage pregnancy. Marry the father and everything will magically become fixed and you won’t regret the sacrifices you have to make to parent effectively. The writers prove this to us by showing us that when Kiera had her own unplanned pregnancy, she of course married the father and was happy. Ta-da instant fairytale. 
If you are going to go to the trouble of having a strong female character, you would think that the writers would then attempt to exclude messages that are obviously anti-woman. The entire episode implied that abortion in and of itself is the wrong choice to make no matter the circumstances and they used the strong female character to send this message. This isn’t empowerment, this is sending us back to the days of the back alley, coat hangers and death.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this female passivity and women taking an incomprehensible step back in combat is that we should be past this. We have so many shows that have female characters who will stand forward and kick arse – Mutant X had Shalimar, Heroes was willing to have women who were as dangerous as any of the men.
And we have several female protagonists now, taking charge, fighting the good fight with everything from swords to lasers (though often, as we said above, even these characters have to be made vulnerable); so why oh why do we keep doing this? Why do we keep making the female fighters the exceptions? Why is it so hard to have female warriors standing side by side, in like numbers, like skill and like strength to their male counterparts?
Paul and Renee blog and review at Fangs for the Fantasy. We’re great lovers of the genre and consume it in all its forms – but as marginalised people we also analyse critically through a social justice lens.

LGBTQI Week: The Problem with GLBT Representation in True Blood and Lost Girl

This is a guest post by Paul and Renee.

When it comes to GLBT representation in the media, unless a television show is targeted specifically at the community, erasure continues to be the norm. Urban fantasy has moved from a small die hard audience to the mainstream and though we can regularly see shows about vampires, werewolves, fae, and ghosts, there are few GLBT characters and a dearth of decent representation.

HBO’s True Blood and Showcase’s Lost Girl have the most visible GLBT characters on television in North America, in terms of the urban fantasy genre. Though both shows have GLBT characters who have extremely high profiles and a reputation of being extremely GLBT friendly, there are certainly many problematic elements.

True Blood is based on The Southern Vampire Series written by Charlaine Harris. In the novels, Lafayette is killed off quite early and is shamed for participating in a sex party. Thankfully, the character of Lafayette in True Blood has become a staple of the show. Despite being a fan favourite, Lafayette is a character that inarguably fulfills a lot of stereotypes that are aimed at same gender loving men of colour. Lafayette is a cook but he moonlights as a sex worker and a drug dealer. Though he is routinely given some of the best lines to say, he too often falls into the sassy best friend role.

Nelsan Ellis as Lafayette and Kevin Alejandro as Jesus in True Blood

In season three, we learned that Lafayette only started dealing V and doing sex work to pay for the hospitalisation of his mentally ill mother and though the reason is understandable, no other character on True Blood has been forced into this position though they are all working class.

If Lafayette is dogged by several stereotypes, Talbot revels in them. The lover of Russell Edgington (who is an awesome villain but also personifies the depraved, psychopathic homosexual trope), Talbot is a 700-year-old vampire who squeals at the sight of violence. He throws epic temper tantrums over the interior decorating. Someone stamp a rainbow on him and call his unicorn, he’s done. But to quickly fill his shoes we have Steve Newlin – get yourself another trope bingo card because he’s a) a gay man trying to force his attentions on a straight man b) a closeted homophobe, c) a closeted, bigoted preacher and d) getting campier by the episode – have you hit bingo yet? Bet you will by the end of the season, this was just 2 episodes!

The women aren’t free from stereotyping either; Tara finds her love for women and with it an interest in kick boxing – did she get some free dungerees and power tools with that?

I do have to say that not all the portrayals are stereotyped – Eddie subverts many (albeit he exists to serve and help Jason grow) and Jesus more – we don’t see enough about Pam and Nan to see what they fit. But except for Pam, they all fit one trope – GAY DEATH. Yes, there’s a drastic amount of “gay death” on this show. It’s a sad trope that GBLT people rarely live long on the television screen and their sexualty is often the cause of their deaths – and with Talbot (who actually died during gay sex! And to hurt his gay lover), Jesus (at the hands of his gay lover!), Eddie (found by his killers because he hired a gay prostitute), Sophie Ann and Nan were racking up the body count.

But, perhaps the most glaring flaw in True Blood is how the GBLT romances compare with the straight counterparts. True Blood is not a show that is shy about nudity or sex scenes – it is pretty unusual for episodes to go by without at least someone humping someone wearing very little. Eric, Sookie, Jason, Bill, Sam – we have seen them naked and going at it hammer and tongs. But Lafayette and Jesus? The contrast is blatant – even most of their kisses are in low light conditions. They go to bed wearing multiple layers of clothing (in Louisiana, no less) and their scenes together commonly have them sitting pretty far apart and lacking any real physical (or even emotional) intimacy. The emotional distance is very telling in what should be some of the most poignant scenes between them – when Jesus is grieving over his dead friend, when he is risking his life going into Marne’s shop, when Jesus emerges from that shop injured (Lafayette actually ran to hug Tara while Jesus bleeds); you’d expect some emotional angst here. But throughout season 4, you could have mistaken them for roommates, not lovers. This sanitisation is sadly prevalent with gay and bi male couples in television in general – their sex lives are considered more obscene than their straight counterparts, in need of censorship and “toning down.” True Blood’s straight explicitness makes this extremely blatant – with Lafayette and Jesus and even with Sam and Bill’s “Water in Arkansas” dream sequence (that cuts out just before a kiss). The closest we get to any explicit scenes is with Eric and Talbot – again with low light kissing, no nudity and, of course, saved for straight audiences by including the dreaded gay death.

We contrast that with the lesbian relationships and, if anything, we see a different story. But is this putting them on the same explicit level as the straight relationships or is it an attempt to pander to the straight male gaze? If anything, the scenes between women are more sexualised than between straight couples – not because they’re more explicit, but because they are less personal. Nan Flannigan and Pam both have sex (oral sex that doesn’t smudge their perfect make up, no less) with nameless, characterless women. The only actual relationship we have seen between two women is Tara and Naomi – and again, we saw them make out and have sex almost before we knew Naomi’s name. She appeared in exactly five episodes – and not for much of them at that – and in that time they were either having sex or fighting over Tara’s deception. She has now disappeared. Tara and Naomi’s relationship seemed to exist more to show sex and provide Tara with conflict than to be an actual relationship. All of these sex scenes feel even more gratuitous than the majority of the straight sex scenes because they add precious little to plot, story, development or any relationship – they’re there for the sake of the sex.

Rutina Wesley as Tara Thornton in True Blood

I love that True Blood goes out of its way to include so many GBLT characters – yet at the same time they make me cringe. Inclusion of many characters is great – but we shouldn’t be able to go through TV Tropes, ticking off the stereotypes, the tropes and the unfortunate prejudiced portrayals.

In Lost Girl, we move from having a GLBT character as a sidekick to the protagonist. Bo is a succubus – a being which takes life force from others through sexual contact. At first she is only interested in taking energy from evil doers because she has absolutely no control over her abilities. When she discovers that she is actually a member of the fae, and not some sinful freak, Bo begins a relationship with Dyson – a male werewolf. Vying for her attention is also the beautiful human doctor Lauren.

Essentially what develops is a love triangle and, as to be expected, it is far from simple. Bo has good chemistry with both Dyson and Lauren and in the end engages in sex with them separately. The problem then becomes a question of who does Bo really belong with. It is clear from the outset that though she cares very deeply for Lauren, her real love is Dyson. Dyson even goes as far as sacrificing the most important thing in his life – his love for her at the end of season one, in order to save Bo’s life. When they do have a break in their relationship, it is because he is temporarily unable to feel passion for her. It is during this period that Bo explores further possibilities with Lauren, which rather makes Lauren look like second choice.

Lauren is heavily attracted to Bo, but she is searching for a cure for her comatose girlfriend Nadia, who has been in stasis for five years. The first time that Lauren and Bo have sex, it is because Lauren has been ordered to do so by The Ash – the leader of the light fae. This amounts to sex through deception. Unfortunately, this isn’t the last time that sex between women happens at the behest of a man, which reads like cheap titillation. In a break from both Lauren and Dyson, Bo briefly dates the dark fae Ryan and he initiates a threesome, but what the camera focuses on is Bo’s interaction with the woman he procured. Clearly this was a sexual performance meant to please the straight male gaze.

The cast of Lost Girl

One of the most frustrating aspects of same sex love on Lost Girl is its treatment of the relationship between Nadia and Bo. After spending five years looking for cure for Nadia, Lauren is finally successful. However, after Nadia is infected by The Garuda, a few short episodes later, Lauren quickly assents to her desire to die. How are we to believe that Lauren held this faithful love for all of these years and then so quickly agreed that her partner should die? Nadia and Lauren’s feelings for her were determined disposable for the sake of furthering a love story which has clearly already been decided.

Even when Bo learns to control her desire to drain life energy during sex, there are still only two instances of sex between her and Lauren, which pales to the numerous times that Bo engaged in sex with Dyson. Lauren is the fragile human that Bo can potentially hurt, whereas Dyson literally represents everything that is good in terms of protection, strength and healing.
 

This of course places a premium on the heterosexual relationship over and above the gay one.

And this is perhaps the cornerstone of GBLT depictions in media in general – and certainly in these shows specifically – GBLT relationships are nearly always depicted as secondary to relationships of straight people. They can be there, but they have to take a back seat to the “real” relationships and depictions. Too often this backseat results in characters that are fraught with tropes and are frequently laden with stereotype after stereotype.

We’re happy, after so much erasure, that we’re actually seeing GBLT inclusion – and these programmes certainly do a lot right – but there’s still a lot dogging these characters.

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Paul and Renee blog and review at Fangs for the Fantasy. We’re great lovers of the genre and consume it in all its forms – but as marginalised people we also analyse critically through a social justice lens.

 
 
 

Motherhood in Film & Television: Absent Mothers in Urban Fantasy

Urban Fantasy is here to stay
This is a guest post from Paul and Renee.
Urban Fantasy — the bringing of the fantastic (vampires, werewolves, magic, fae and so much more) to a modern, real world setting — has become ever more popular as a mainstream genre. From Twilight to True Blood to The Vampire Diaries, it is now firmly entrenched on our televisions. The books regularly reach the best seller lists – this isn’t a fringe genre. It’s here, it’s huge and it’s here to stay.
This means the portrayals represented matter. Any popular media has the power to shape culture and society; any stories that are consumed by a large number of people are going to draw upon our societal prejudices and, in turn, feed and encourage those prejudices and portrayals. 
Urban Fantasy is a genre that seldom gets critical examination. At first blush, the opposite would appear to be true when one considers the social conversation around Twilight or True Blood, but these are only two examples within an extremely large genre. It is interesting to note that much of Urban Fantasy contains female protagonists and is largely produced and consumed by women. Considering the ongoing gender divide, it is hardly surprising that this immensely popular genre is being ignored by critics. 
Just because Urban Fantasy is largely produced by women and consumed by women does not mean that it is free of sexism and misogyny. When it comes to motherhood, a role that most women will one day assume, it is hardly surprising that within the genre most examples are highly problematic —  when they appear at all. 
The lack of representation of motherhood is so extreme that the viewer is forced to ask is, “where are the mothers?”. It seems like such an odd question, because you’d expect most characters, like most people, to have a mother lurking around somewhere; especially since most of the heroines in these stories are young women or even teenagers. Search as we might, the mothers are conspicuous by their absence. 
The most common cause of the missing mother seems to be death — indeed, it is almost mandatory for an Urban Fantasy heroine to have a tragically dead mother. In The Vampire Diaries Elena’s mother is dead. True Blood has the orphaned Sookie; Charmed killed the sisters’ mother off before the series even started; Cassie, Diana, Melissa, Jake and Adam all have dead mothers in The Secret Circle. Buffy’s mother died part way through the series. In The Dresden Files, Harry’s mother died before the series began. In Grimm, Nick is yet another protagonist with a dead mother. The whole beginning motivation of Supernatural revolves around their dead mother. In Blood and Chocolate, both mother and father are brutally murdered. In The Craft Sarah Bailey’s mother is dead. In Underworld, Selene’s mother is murdered by Viktor. 
This list is extremely — even excessively — long but it’s shocking that we looked through all the shows and movies that we’ve watched and actually found it hard to find a series where the mother was alive and present.
Even in stories where the mother is lucky enough to have dodged the bullet and is actually alive, she is still often absent. In Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, Renee, Bella’s mother, is absent, living in a completely different state. In The Vampire Diaries, Bonnie’s mother, Abby, is absent through much of her childhood and, when they are finally reunited, Abby not only presents Bonnie with a child that she raised as a replacement, but quickly disappears after becoming a vampire. Abby is well aware of the pain that her absence has caused Bonnie and yet she steadfastly finds a reason not to engage with her daughter. Once Upon a Time sets records for absent mothers — Augustus never had one, Snow White and Ruby’s mothers are dead, and Emma grew up in the foster system without her mother.
I suppose we should be grateful these mothers ducked the Urban Fantasy plague that has put so many parents in their graves, but they still have little to no actual influence and presence in their children’s — the protagonists’ — lives.
With such a massive pattern, we have to ask why. Why is it almost a requirement in Urban Fantasy for the young, female protagonist to be lacking a mother (and often a father too for that matter)?
One reason seems to be to make the characters sad, relatable and, frankly, angst ridden. It’s quick, cheap and easy characterisation to establish a sad, tortured or otherwise issue-laden character with “depth” to kill off a parent and have them be sad about it. These dead mothers are sacrificed for quick and easy back story for the protagonist. Take a heroine, load her up with a shiny ability, a bit of snark, a love interest — now kill her mother so she has “depth.” The back story is established: we have a “3-dimensional character” who has suffered (which seems to be shorthand for an established character in far too much fiction).
The mother is thrown away, killed — often violently — for the sake of the heroine’s story. These absences (often deaths and often graphic, violent deaths) are thrown in almost casually. These mothers are disposable, convenient story points, not characters in their own right. In fact, “disposable characters” may be giving them too much credit, since they don’t even have chance to become characters before they’re cast aside to haunt their children. 
We live in a world in which violence against women, while often decried publicly, is still very much acceptable socially. These deaths, even when in faultless instances like traffic accidents, amount to violence against women because of the frequency in which they occur. We can see this especially emphasised in Rise of the Lycans, when Viktor murdered Sonja when he discovered she was pregnant with a lycan’s child. Violence rates against pregnant women are even higher than against other women and this also reflects not just the disposability of mothers but also the control of men over their fertility. Men decide whether she is “allowed” to carry that child, which is often seen as a threat to the man — in this case to Victor’s power base but often in real life to a man’s freedom or lifestyle. To be clear, there are instances in which both mother and father dies; however, the near universality of the death of the mother definitely makes it a female-driven trope. When death comes through an act of violence it serves to reify the violence that women are forced to live with. 
As it stands, it seems almost as though women are being punished for being mothers. Motherhood has often served as the impetus for women to engage in civil disobedience but, in Urban Fantasy, motherhood — more often than not — results in death. Women are given very little opportunity for agency. These deaths deny motherhood as a site of power for women and instead turn women into eternal victims who are then responsible for the misery of their children.
This also serves to emphasise how little we regard mothers as characters or people in their own right. A mother is seen as an extension of her child rather than a person — and since a mother is all about her child, why shouldn’t she be sacrificed to further her child’s back story? She isn’t important as a person, and if she contributes best by being dead or absent, so be it, she doesn’t matter.
Related to this lack of independent existence is the eternal trope of the Bad Mother. It is a societal constant that mother is always to blame for whatever problems a child faces or suffers. While “blame the parents” is commonplace, this by far and away falls more on the mother than the father. The mother is a constant scapegoat for any and every issue in their child’s life. 
Lettie Mae in True Blood
Do we really care about the issues of Lettie Mae, Tara’s mother from True Blood? Or is her alcoholism there to reflect on how hard a life Tara has to lead? Do we analyse Bonnie’s mother, Abby, on The Vampire Diaries to consider what drove her to pursue a life outside of Mystic Falls? Or does she only appear as and when she helps her daughter’s friends? It is not accidental that Lettie Mae and Abby are women of colour. Historically, women of colour have been seen as unfit mothers, unless we are nurturing and raising White children. Lettie Mae is not only absent but she is an alcoholic and she engaged in emotionally abusive behaviour throughout Tara’s childhood. For respite, Tara was forced to flee to the Stackhouse residence. What does it tell us when a Black girl can only find safety in the care of a White family, and abuse and neglect in her own mother’s home? Ruby Jean Reynolds is Lafayette’s mother on True Blood and we are first introduced to her in a mental institution. She is neurologically atypical and we learn that Lafayette has been doing sex work and selling drugs in order to pay for her care. She is extremely homophobic and uses anti-gay slurs to refer to both Lafayette and his now deceased boyfriend on the show, Jesus. The depiction of African-American mothers who are both physically and emotionally unavailable, and neglectful and abusive, is just another negative manifestation of how the media has chosen to construct the motherhood of African-American women.
It’s also worth noting how many of these “failure” mothers are marginalised. Lettie Mae is both black and poor. Abby is black. Darla from The Crow is a poor drug user. Even Sally’s mother on Being Human (US) is only around for 2 episodes of character growth for Sally — and in that time we learn she had an affair while with Sally’s father and wasn’t there for Sally as she wanted and needed. All the mothers we’ve mentioned are disposable characterisation tools — but the wealthy or middle class white mothers in The Secret Circle, Charmed, The Vampire Diaries, The Dresden Files, Once Upon a Time, Underworld and True Blood are killed off or absent through forces outside their control. They are absent because they are victims — and certainly beyond reproach. While poor women or mothers of colour are not innocently absent,  they are to blame for their failure.
Finally, we have to take it to the full extreme – the villainous mother. Again, this is, in many ways, an easy characterisation. You have instant angst and pain and emotional conflict just because of the relationship between the antagonist and the hero/heroine. 
It also feeds further into the prevalent theme of mother blame we see repeated so often and it is, again, used as an excuse to blame any of the problems the protagonist has. In Lost Girl, Bo’s problems of being a succubus without any guidance is down to her villainous, succubus mother’s abandonment. In Being Human (US), Mother’s smothering control over Suren is to blame for her childishness and self indulgence. In Once Upon a Time all of Regina’s evil plans ultimately stem from her mother’s ruthless ambition and destroying her dreams. They are the ultimate problem mother, to blame for everything in the child’s life – both their own personal issues and their ongoing conflict — it’s all completely Mother’s Fault. 
It is disturbing that this prevailing idea of the dead, absent or outright villainous mother is so common within the genre. It devalues motherhood, sets mother up as disposable and ultimately to blame for the wrongs in their children’s lives, and this heavy burden of blame falls all the more heavily on marginalised mothers. In the aftermath of these absent mothers we have a mob of young female protagonists who have no mothers, frequently no parents at all. They’re alone, usually much younger, less experienced, more naive than the male love interest. They are exposed to the often predatory advances of these men — which is another topic entirely, but the seeds of it are planted by the absent mother leading towards her vulnerable, lonely daughter. 

Paul and Renee blog and review at Fangs for the Fantasy. We’re great lovers of the genre and consume it in all its forms – but as marginalised people we also analyse critically through a social justice lens.