Must the baby be blue-eyed?
I wrote about Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams this week, mostly from beneath a snuggly throw on my sofa, because I have had flu for the past seven days. It's the sickest I've been since I moved here and it did that special thing of making me feel very, very homesick, because people at home know how to treat me when I am sick, which is to say: crowd me with love and handle me very tenderly, and ask me if you can get me another cup of tea, or some toast, or mix me a cup of specifically apple and cinnamon Lemsip, thank you very much.
Instead, on the third day of feeling like a bag of rubbish left on a blisteringly hot pavement, I tried to order some goat pepper soup from a Nigerian restaurant and have it delivered by Uber Eats or Postmates and both apps told me they could not deliver to my address, which made me feel good, because I felt relatively untouched by gentrification in my corner of Brooklyn (yay), but angrier than a box of hornets because NO PEPPER SOUP DELIVERY (wtf, man)? In the end, I called in my order and then dragged my diseased body into a Lyft to go pick it up. Feed a fever, indeed.
It's been a whirlwind of high emotion and phlegm.
Let me preface this bit of this letter by saying: I love fanfiction.
I love it so much that I wrote a long-ass piece about it last year. I'll read anything, for the most part. But my favourite flavour is also my OTP, Richonne, aka Rick and Michonne from AMC's The Walking Dead. I love them, and I love the community of writers who craft some of the most compelling stories I've ever read (not just in fanfiction, in general). In fic, the couple (now one and a half seasons a canonical fact) turn up in tweaked variations of the show's own universe i.e. with walkers, but they also appear in alternate universes: in new cities and countries, speaking new languages, at different ages, in space, even. Writers gift them with incredible backstories, interesting jobs, and remarkable remixes of canon lines and familial ties. Sometimes Rick and Michonne co-parent the two existing Grimes children from Rick's first marriage, Carl and Judith — or just one, or neither. Sometimes, the fic writers create a world in which Rick and Michonne make a baby, and a new challenge is presented: what will this baby, who does not exist in either the comic books or the TV show, look like?
On screen, Michonne is a dark-skinned black woman, played by the luminous Danai Gurira; Rick is white, played by Andrew Lincoln. Here is what we know: mixed race people come in all shades: think Rashida Jones and Jesse Williams, but also think Jordan Peele. We know that the most common eye colour in the world is brown. And we also know that in fanfiction, the ~fictional~ baby resulting from the Richonne union somehow often finds him or herself in possession of stunning sapphire eyes. I mean, it's possible. Genetics are a curious thing! But really and truly—what are the odds?
I have nothing against mixed-race relationships — I've been in a few! (Find love, revel in it. Congrats.) But here's what I have a problem with: the instinctive urge to create a work of fiction—that you have grounded in some version of reality as we understand it—that leaves us with a mixed black-white infant with cerulean eyes. Possibility vs probability, friend. Something like that could happen. But will it? A good test: out of 100 times, how often will it? The detail of the blue-eyed Richonne baby jars me almost every time — it pulls me out of the story, regardless of intent (they want the baby to have a thing that marks them as distinctly Rick's offspring, I get it) and really stirs my rice. There are other markers of parentage!
Look, give all the fictional babies blue eyes, if you want. That's not the issue. I am just, as ever, nudging us all, as consumers and creators of popular culture and popular art, to question why. What is the significance of giving this baby bright blues? Dig deep and ask yourself how the story would *truly* suffer if this baby had some regular-degular brown eyes. We know its father is Rick Grimes — you did the work of getting us to this point in the story — so paternity is covered. Then ask a further question: what is the significance, considering the wider culture (because art is not made nor consumed in a vacuum!) of having a half-black baby with blue eyes? If you feel, strongly, and in your shondo, that the story cannot progress convincingly without a blue-eyed, mixed race baby, godspeed. More grease to your elbow, may your muse never depart.
But if you are sitting there, asking the question over and over, and are unable to come up with that compelling reason, then sis, consider yourself closely. I have often found that when I am grappling with a conundrum, the answer lies on the more difficult side of the line. Decolonise your fanfic.
May Junot Díaz be with you.
I have a ~secret project~ that I am very, very excited about, and hope to write to you about very soon. In the meantime, think good thoughts, please. Thanks, friends.