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gryphonseggMy broadband connection has been sporadic these last few days and will remain so for the near future, so I’m posting quickly while I still have access. I might cross-post later, but LJ hasn't been working for me at all today.
Lately I’ve been reading a mostly good book, but it, like many other books before it, threw me out by casually dropping an aside about one of the characters having been Jack the Ripper in one of his previous incarnations. And then the matter was dropped out of discussion as quickly and casually as it had been dropped in. The character is rather villainous in most of his incarnations, at least a bit skeevy in all of them, but part of the plot is that another character is determined to redeem his multiverse-crossing soul. It’s complicated. Anyway, various versions of him have done some quite nasty things, but the ripper murders kind of stand out. Well, they stand out to me, but apparently not to anyone else who knows about it. Other real-life murders have been touched on in the story, but none so casually as the ripper murders, which were treated as merely a minor side effect of other events. That’s especially puzzling since one of the few female characters is supposed to be an avatar of a goddess who was, among other things, a protector of prostitutes. (I have some qualms about the way other RL murders are fictionalized, but at least they seem to be taken more seriously.)
This is far from being the first time I’ve noticed such light, dismissive treatment of Jack the Ripper and his crimes and his victims in a work of fantasy (although at least this time the murderer is something that started out as human and still manifests as mostly human in most place-times, not an alien motivated by its natural biological drives or a being completely removed from humanity). I am seriously disturbed by the popularity of treating Jack the Ripper as just another character from Victorian fiction whom we’re all perfectly well entitled to cross over with any long-lived, time-traveling, or Victorian character, just like Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Moreau. It’s as if there is widespread confusion about the fact that the ripper murders were real life murders that actually happened to real people. When you use Jack the Ripper in your fantasy story, you’re not borrowing from an influential early horror novel; you’re basing someone in your story on the earliest publically recognized and documented serial killer. I can’t help but wonder if that might be because many of us still don’t think of the women he murdered as having been entirely real people.
Lately I’ve been reading a mostly good book, but it, like many other books before it, threw me out by casually dropping an aside about one of the characters having been Jack the Ripper in one of his previous incarnations. And then the matter was dropped out of discussion as quickly and casually as it had been dropped in. The character is rather villainous in most of his incarnations, at least a bit skeevy in all of them, but part of the plot is that another character is determined to redeem his multiverse-crossing soul. It’s complicated. Anyway, various versions of him have done some quite nasty things, but the ripper murders kind of stand out. Well, they stand out to me, but apparently not to anyone else who knows about it. Other real-life murders have been touched on in the story, but none so casually as the ripper murders, which were treated as merely a minor side effect of other events. That’s especially puzzling since one of the few female characters is supposed to be an avatar of a goddess who was, among other things, a protector of prostitutes. (I have some qualms about the way other RL murders are fictionalized, but at least they seem to be taken more seriously.)
This is far from being the first time I’ve noticed such light, dismissive treatment of Jack the Ripper and his crimes and his victims in a work of fantasy (although at least this time the murderer is something that started out as human and still manifests as mostly human in most place-times, not an alien motivated by its natural biological drives or a being completely removed from humanity). I am seriously disturbed by the popularity of treating Jack the Ripper as just another character from Victorian fiction whom we’re all perfectly well entitled to cross over with any long-lived, time-traveling, or Victorian character, just like Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Moreau. It’s as if there is widespread confusion about the fact that the ripper murders were real life murders that actually happened to real people. When you use Jack the Ripper in your fantasy story, you’re not borrowing from an influential early horror novel; you’re basing someone in your story on the earliest publically recognized and documented serial killer. I can’t help but wonder if that might be because many of us still don’t think of the women he murdered as having been entirely real people.
