Jasmine Mas: Why we love darkly funny heroines
We all love a darkly funny heroine, because most women are one. Women are hilarious. It’s a fact. If you take a second to think of the best times you’ve ever had with your girlfriends, you probably think of laughter and saying inappropriate things.
In my fantasy romance book, Blood of Hercules, the main character Alexis Hert grows up as a poor human girl in a post-apocalyptic world run by god-like Spartans with powers. Because of physical trauma from her foster parents, she’s permanently blind in one eye and deaf in one ear. A quiet, shy girl who struggles in social settings, on paper Alexis is the last person you would ever expect to be Hercules. But she is. The first indication readers get that Alexis has the makings of a hero–-she has a sarcastically funny inner monologue.
The ability to find humor in a dark situation is at its core a sign that someone is coping because it means a person is mentally reframing what they are dealing with and making it something positive. Something positive to laugh about. Something less egregious, because at its core, funny things aren’t scary.
The first indication readers get that Alexis Hert is a resilient impressive figure—that she is Hercules— is that she is coping with her trauma by making sarcastic jokes. She’s not lying down passively and accepting her situation, but she is mentally getting through it. Emotionally she is handling it. It may not be the healthiest or best way to deal with something, but the fact that she is dealing at all, shows she is a strong character.
A darkly funny heroine is not just resilient, she’s relatable.
We’ve all been in difficult situations in life, whether it be a hardship in school, work, or with other people. One similarity to dealing with those times is humor. Sure, we all cry and eat ice-cream, but there’s also the second part to dealing and that’s healing. It’s a scientific fact (says me) that morbid humor is CRUCIAL to healing. When I was a D1 athlete in college, I remember vividly making morbid jokes with my friends after we’d just run for miles and could barely walk. It’s the jokes after we cry, the laughter with friends or families making fun of a situation, that is universal to struggle and human resilience.
So, a sarcastic heroine is resilient and relatable, who cares? Why does it matter?
It matters because Alexis Hert is Hercules and Hercules, as we all imagine him, is the quintessential HERO. In the English dictionary herculean is an adjective defined as “requiring great strength or effort” and it is also defined as “muscular and strong.” Hercules is the modern archetype for what makes someone strong, and that might just be something we need to grapple with as a society. It’s something we might want to not accept blindly, because of what that means about our society.
Today in popular media, just like with the term herculean, strength is often, if not always, portrayed as a physical thing. Superman lifts the car to save the passengers. Spiderman stops the train with his strong web and saves everyone. Hercules grows from a scrawny boy into a very built man who can lift heavy objects and crush monsters with his fists. These are all what traditionally comes to mind when we think of heroes. There’s also one thing in common with all of these popular examples. Can you guess what it is? They’re all . . . MEN (*everyone gasps with fake shock*).
It also doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why.
If a hero is physically strong, and women are stereotypically viewed as not being the “weaker sex”, then it makes sense that your best, strongest, most impressive hero would be a man. Duh. Or, in the case of wonder woman, they would also have those same physically strong characteristics.
I’d argue that we all love darkly funny heroines because we are them, and it’s something that we should be proud of.
The fact that Alexis Hert has a sarcastic inner monologue but physically is not that impressive compared to everyone else, is a rebellion against the traditional idea of what it means to be a hero. It challenges our ingrained stereotypes and is a true celebration of resilience and what it means to help others. And if we’re all funny heroines, that means we can all be heroes, because we can.
And we are.
Blood of Hercules by Jasmine Mas is published in hardback by HarperVoyager on 21 November 2024
