Black Retarded Lesbian- Diversity in fiction gone wrong

How i already pointed out in my Essay „Star Trek: The lost Generation” there are two major traps waiting for you as a writer when you are dealing with the topic of diversity.
The first and most known one is the one of Oversimplification or Romantasizing, for example the stupid American tourist or the always nice and smiling Chinese people. This is mostly known as stereotype and very wide spread, you just need to watch a movie made by Michael bay and wait for the black people.
The second and least one is to overwhelm a character with problems and handicaps with the intention to make him relatable as possible. This technique leads very often to what I like to call “Black Retarded Lesbian”, derived from the song “Even Black Retarded Lesbians can be god awful” from Funny van Dannen.
Inspired by the term “Women in Refrigerators” coined by writer Gail Simone as a reaction of the treatment of women in comics I like to start a collection of every BRL in fiction I can find.



Here are the rules:
1. It has to be a fictional character. I don’t want to make fun out of a real BRL, because it is most likely not a easy living. On the other hand there are a lot of real life stereotypes running around, for example Paris Hilton is the self designed blond cliché.
2. To be a BRL it is unimportant what gender the character is, he or she just need to have at least three points of token character attribute.
To start this collection I will go back to the very first BRL I have mentioned:

B'Elanna Torres
One of the main characters of an awful show called Star Trek: Voyager

What makes her a BRL? Lets find out.
1. She is an Engineer.
Now we all show our well educated PC personality, shake our head with a comment that something like that is in our modern times nothing special anymore.
Wrong. It most certainly is. Even when you look in other movies, for example “Transformers”, women who are introduced as “Grease Monkeys” are mostly there for the sake of being sweaty and dirty. And in real life Engineering is still mostly a male playground.

2. She is a Klingon/Human Hybrid.
And we all know that means, she had a troubled childhood and she also feels misplaced in both cultures.
2.1. Her Human father left the family, because he couldn’t get along with the wild Klingon woman and is therefore a perfect example for all the douchbags who cannot work with woman who can count to ten and read.

3. She joined the resistance group known as Maquis.
Because she didn’t fit in anywhere and her hot temperament made her time at Starfleet Academy rocky, so she left and this is just contrived, just imagine how big all underground organizations would be when everyone who had a hard time at some academy or university would join them.

B’Elanna, I am sorry, but you are a Black Retarded Lesbian.


Because it is very lame to recall something you already said, I will give you another member of the BRL, and this time we take a man to demonstrate that BRL’s are everywhere.

And our candidate today is:
Matt Murdock also known as the superhero Daredevil.
He started as one of the last original creation made by Stan Lee Daredevil started as a sort of a Spider-Man rip off. He was a wisecracking hero and there was also the love triangle in the B- plot, for what Lee was famous.

This direction changed in the late 70’s when Frank Miller took over writing and drawing and since then the book was known for its dark tone and I think it is not too much to call DD the Batman of the Marvel- Universe

And now let’s look why Daredevil is a BRL

1. He is blind.
To start with this point is maybe not the kind way, but that makes him to one of the few token handicapped characters in comics.

2. His Mother left the family to become a nun, his father was killed by mobsters.
It is a recurring theme in superhero comics that it is not OK to have parents, I mean face it: Batman, parents dead; Superman, birth parents dead (And I don’t envy his adoptive father. He is maybe the Aunt May of the Dc Universe. I lost count of how often he dies in the comics and movies.) ; Spider- Man, parents and uncle dead and so on and so on.

3. He has maybe the most terrible love life of all heroes. His Girlfriends are mostly victims of “Women in Refrigerators”- Syndrom
a. Karen Page – turned drug addict, later killed
b. Elektra - professional killer, killed and resurrected
c. Mary Walker - turned out to be the mad villainous Typhoid Mary, who has a identity disorder
d. Milla Donovan – his current wife, driven mad by a supervillian.
Of course all this is very terrible for the persons to which all these bad things happen, but just imagine you had just two of those girlfriends, and I didn’t mentioned all of them. Whenever Murdock is getting close to a woman, you know that this relationship will end not very well.

4. When his enemies are bored, they are messing with his secret identity.
I mean seriously at least every second villain seems to know his real person, starting with the Kingpin who discovered it through Karen Page who sold her knowledge for drugs continuing with Mysterio who gained it from the Kingpin to the very public community who read it in the Newspapers because some FBI agent sold his knowledge to them.
I mean cheeeech, for what does he need his mask anymore.

I am really sorry, but one of my most famous heroes is a Black Retarded Lesbian.