In Praise of Naive Tricksters
Issue #32 of New Mutants comes out on Wednesday, and I'm super proud of this one. (Above is a sneak peek from the four preview pages Marvel just released, featuring artwork by Alberto J. Alburquerque, with colors by Carlos Lopez and lettering by Travis Lanham.) You can get New Mutants from your local comic book store, even if you didn't pre-order, and it's also available online. If you want to see more of Escapade, the trans superhero I co-created, please support this comic!
Anyway, to celebrate another appearance by Escapade, I thought I would talk about one of my favorite character types: the "naive trickster."
When we meet tricksters in stories, they're usually wise and experienced mentors, who know a lot of secrets. They play a trick on the hero(es), because they understand something about the world that the hero doesn't, and this is the best, or possibly most fun, way to make the hero understand.
A naive trickster, on the other hand, loves to play tricks and pranks, and who enjoys sowing chaos, but is also really new and still figuring out how the world works. There's something wonderful about a character whose whole jam is destabilizing other people's sense of reality — but their own sense of reality is still being formed. This can lead to some interesting mishaps, where a character is trying to pull a trick, and accidentally tricks themselves instead. But also, it's just a really fun way of having a lot of messy fun. (Which is, to be honest, my favorite kind.)
[Obviously, I'm generalizing a lot here. And I know there are many cultural traditions around the world that include tricksters of various types, so please feel free to let me know if I'm totally off base.]
Hey, check out this gorgeous New Mutants cover art by Rafael de Latorre!
One form the naive trickster often takes is the childish prankster. Like, say, Aang in Avatar: The Last Airbender, who is constantly pulling pranks and stunts and causing various kinds of mayhem, but is also innocent and easily surprised by the world.
But I also love to see someone who is both a fool and yet fools everyone else. Here I'm thinking about Stede Bonnet in Our Flag Means Death: a wide-eyed naïf who understands little of the harsh pirate world that he's entering. He becomes obsessed with the idea of doing a "fuckery" and pulling the wool over people's eyes. He's actually even more adept at mind-fucks than Blackbeard himself, on the occasion when they visit a ship full of decadent rich people whom Stede expertly turns against each other.
In fact, I think the best tricksters are the ones who understand in their bones what it is to misunderstand a situation. The ones who are used to being beguiled, confused, and undone.
And you know what? Even when you meet a more seasoned trickster, they often seem a little childish. Like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, who still gets like an enormous child-like satisfaction from confusing the heck out of Luke. And I've always had a huge soft spot for Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream: a joyfully anarchic and playful queerdo, who traipses about making the biggest silliest mess possible.
The naive trickster is an archetype I've enjoyed playing with a lot in my own fiction. In All the Birds in the Sky, Patricia is very trickster-identified, using trickster magic instead of healer magic to get herself out of some of the sticky situations she finds herself in. But she's also very sheltered and closed off. I remember thinking a lot about how I could have her misdirecting other people, while also very clearly fooling herself about some stuff that was going on in her life, even once she's a grown-up.
Tina in Victories Greater Than Death is part of a prankster crew called the Lasagna Hats, who pull elaborate stunts to screw with terrible people — but you come to realize this trickery is actually part of Tina's somewhat innocent view of the world, in which everything is an epic struggle between good and evil. And part of Tina's arc in that series is learning to be a better trickster, while also learning to trust other people's perceptions alongside her own.
Which brings us back to Escapade, aka Shela Sexton!
Detail from New Mutants #32, art by Alberto J. Alburqurque, colors by Carlos Lopez
Escapade is the closest I've come thus far to getting to write a purely a pure version of the "naive trickster" trope. Her whole vibe is tricksy: she's all about stealing from the super rich, and she uses a mixture of gadgets and disguises and random fuckery to pull off her heists. And her best friend Morgan is a beast at creating confusion through technomancy. But also, Shela's actual superpower is all about confusion and substitution. She can swap places with anybody —which can mean anything from just exchanging locations to taking someone's whole status and authority and role. As Emma Frost points out in Shela's debut story in Marvel Voices Pride 2022, Shela could be President of the United States for an afternoon.
But at the same time, Escapade is at the bottom of a really steep learning curve. She's just dipping her toe into the world of mutants and heroes and villains, and part of the fun of writing her is getting to see her surprise (and occasional consternation) when the Marvel universe turns out to be more complicated, and sometimes nastier, than she was expecting. Escapade gets punked at least as often as she manages to punk others, and her open heart and her generosity lead her to make some truly godawful decisions. And this just plays into the underlying darkness of her story, in which she constantly has to worry that she's going to fool herself so badly that people she loves are going to get hurt.
I feel like as long as Escapade manages to play with that tension inherent in being a fool who fools others, she's going to continue to be a lot of fun. I adore ping-ponging back and forth between the sly pulling-a-scam vibe and the startled I-wasn't-expecting-that reaction. I feel like this is a very common note in coming-of-age stories: one minute, you have total mastery and can turn everything on its head; and the next, you are completely taken by surprise and thrown off your axis by something you hadn't understood about the world yet.
I almost feel like those two things go hand in hand: you're constantly being thrown off balance, so you find ways to throw others off balance, too. And another common feature of coming of age is that you're painfully aware that older people believe in all kinds of things that are obviously fake, and it's so easy to trick them by making them realize that they're leaning on thin air when they thought it was something solid.
Anyway, did I mention that New Mutants #32 comes out on Wednesday? And it's got literally everything in it, including some dark/scary bits and some jokes that still make me snort out loud and a discussion of consequentialism versus deontology? And there are more newspaper strips by Ted Brandt, Ro Stein and Tamra Bonvillain??? I bet your local comics shop has a copy!
Stuff I Love Right Now
Netflix has a ton of Brazilian TV shows and movies, which is great for me practicing my Portuguese. My latest favorite is Volta Aos Quinze (Back to 15), a show about a thirty-year old woman who goes back to being her fifteen-year-old self whenever she looks at her old photoblog. It's kind of ridiculous but super charming, especially once you get past the rocky first episode. And there's a wonderful transfem character, Camilla, who is handled with a lot of sensitivity and love. There's a scene involving Camilla in the season finale that made me tear up.
Speaking of media featuring a transfem character who's handled with care... there's a new movie on Hulu called Darby and the Dead, which I absolutely adore. It's gotten mixed reviews, but its campy tone absolutely worked for me. Darby Harper can see and hear ghosts, ever since her near-death experience as a small child, and she's become a social outcast in high school — until her frenemy dies and starts haunting her. It's a ludicrous teen comedy with ghosts and a lot of heart. And one of the cheerleaders is a trans girl, played by Nicole Maines, and it's absolutely not a big deal — she's just one of the popular girls, and nobody cares. Not surprisingly, Darby is directed by a trans guy, Silas Howard, who also directed a ton of episodes of Dickinson. (And the tone feels pretty Dickinson to me, though the comedy gets more broad.)