If there’s a fantasy trope I absolutely despise, it’s the Persecuted Witch.
You know her. She lives her life in fear of being identified as the witch she is and burned, stoned, tortured, whatever, by benighted neighbors. Yet she uses magic (or what looks enough like magic to make those neighbors suspicious) to help the same benighted murderers. And when a wielder of magic arises to take revenge upon the killers of witches, whose side will she be on? You got it.
Because taking revenge on people who burn your kind to death isn’t nice. It isn’t good. And our heroine has to be nice and good, doesn’t she?
So our persecuted witch hides in hometown shadows, doing good from a distance until somebody else’s need requires an open display of magic. Then she flees, sporting a crop of bruises from her grateful townsfolk. She runs down endless stony roads past the drying corpses of ex-witches, snatching moments of rest and gathering fresh bruises in endless towns full of suspicious eyes, burning stakes, ducking stools. If lucky, she becomes apprentice to a wiser witch, who will explain why things have to be this way or why it’s wisest not to use magic much at all.
In the end, our witch will turn out to have the greatest talent of any of them, a talent strong enough to take control of all the lands that persecute witches. The final battle will be with her own conscience. Will she rule, or use up her power and sacrifice all she loves to save her persecutors so she can return to the helpless life of a poverty-stricken, barely tolerated healer?
You only get one guess, because that’s all you need.
You’re not supposed to blame the victim, I suppose, and these persecuted witches are the ultimate victims. So I will have to blame the authors, and ask:
What are you thinking when you create a persecuted witch? Because it’s been done to death, folks. It really has. Nobody can claim to be creating a work of imagination when they write this saggy old story, no matter how unique the powers are that you deck your heroine out in as she stumbles toward the stake.
And what are you trying to tell us about women? That their role is to eschew power and hope persecutors will kindly let them give, and give, and give some more, until it seems more convenient to burn them alive? Because that is the message of the Persecuted Witch. That it’s better to live on sufferance than to defend yourself. Or, if you’ve written a lighthearted version of it, that if you’re good and nice, or old and cross and impressive, you will somehow not have to defend yourself. And God forbid you should abandon these benighted murderous peasants. Because they need you, don’t they. Until the day they burn you.
I’m not naming names because I don’t need to. Anybody who’s been reading fantasy has six of these books on their shelves. I have one of them in my backpack right now. Next week I will take it to work, and donate it to a collection we’re setting out for a forum on feminist and anti-feminist images of women in YA literature. I think you can tell which pile I’ll be putting it on.
