Black Retarded Lesbian: Maggie Fitzgerald

It is time for drama baby!
Maggie Fitzgerald from “The Million Dollar Baby” is our today’s candidate for BRL. So let’s find out:

Black Retarded Lesbian: Harry Potter

After we had a look into comics and TV series, lets see who is the first BRL we find in the books.
Before someone starts to complaining, I like the Potter books, I’ve read and enjoyed them, but look on the facts. At the very beginning I want to recap a wannabe copyright infringement concerning “The Books of Magic” written by the great Neil Gaiman.

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.

Black Retarded Lesbian

Isn't it a nice and cosy world we live in. Everybody is polite an careful and when there is someone the opposite, then there are self appointed moral watchers who will lecture us about the correct political correcteness.

Oh in what an enligted cheerful PC society we are living. But even this brand new world has its dark shadows. Failures are luring in between pages of Books, comics and on the screen. Those can happen when you want to write an character as relatable as it is possible.

Here is the collection of the Black Retarded Lesbians.


Part 1
B'Elanna Torres and Matt Murdock