Everybody has that friend. The brilliant, wonderful, warm and beautiful friend (usually a woman) who by some divine reason unbeknownst to everybody around them, is entrapped by their absolutely heinous boyfriend. He’s white, probably got a scraggly beard going on (or trying to), rude to his mom and also everyone else, and irredeemably evil in his core. Maybe he has a bad boy appeal. Maybe she thinks she could fix him. Only time will tell. And yet, this malicious marriage, this phenomenon persists as a pandemic that knows no bounds. Of course, not just in real life.
For years I have been tormented by the elusive “cockroach” character, and the corresponding fanbases of each character as they rose to popularity. Below are some examples you may or may not be familiar with, namely because this character design is particularly popular within teen media and teen audiences.
As I said previously, I’ve begun to weave this story in more condensed formats, but in order to fully unpack the Dracos, Rafes, and John Murphys of this world, we’re gonna need a bigger boat.
These men, these boys, are the ones who are put down and get back up again. They are the villains, the underdogs, the misunderstood. They are almost always abused by their fathers or father figures, because there will always be an angry man in your house as we all know. Hurt people hurt people, or whatever Sabrina Claudio said. They are your punks, your delinquents, your racist neighbor you don’t want to cross the street at the same time as. They are mean, unnecessarily cruel, and undeniably the low underbelly of white supremacy. Here’s why.
A truly vile cocktail of insidious biases has infected white women and girls in recent years, albeit not being a novel problem. When it comes to aligning themselves with white supremacists and truly awful men, white women have long since shown it is what they do best often! Regardless of relative proximity to women of color and some projected care or regard for people of color in general, a primary proximity to and general openness toward those who resemble the men in their life and family is this group’s greatest fault- even more so when the mass adoration of terrible fictional white men bleeds into tolerance in an ever relevant reality.
Let’s start with the most prominent cockroach of the pack. Dragon Malfunction received his own honorary sect of TikTok and consequent rabid cult, numerous occasions of press coverage and a renewed social media presence that singlehandedly revived and laid to rest Tom Felton’s career. That man is set for life, I mean it.
Regardless of the numerous reprehensible pretenses in Harry Potter, Draco himself is a character frequently centered in discourse regarding morality and repentance over the course of the book and movie series. Without wasting time on how those both diverge from one another, the general argument presented by his vehement militants (read: fans and defenders) is that his morally grey nature makes both Draco a sympathetic character and one worthy of redemption when he finally turns from his wicked ways.
The primary fault in this argument is that it usually lacks the bones to call the Malfoy family’s ideologies what they are: eugenics. Eugenics that is also paired with racism, namely white supremacy. Because these fans either are too young to have properly heard that word in a history class, or are old enough to know and just don’t care, the real nature of the problem Draco presents is never named, and thus cannot be addressed.
Here’s a name you probably haven’t heard in a while: Billy Hargrove. Stranger Things is rumored to come back any month now, so we might as well talk about him. Besides bearing a suspicious likeness to Human Shrek and catapulting Dacre Montgomery into mainstream Hollywood consciousness, Billy’s accomplishments are few. His two-season span on the Netflix show was secondary, but crucial to the plot, until his necessary death as one pawn of the Big Bad threatening Hawkins at the end of Season 3. I will admit that in a moment of weakness I too was wooed by Montgomery’s baby blues (both his eyes and his jeans), enough to sympathize with Billy’s rudeness and standoffishness in the beginning of his time on screen. This graciousness only extended so far, and by the time he was telling his sister to not hang out with “that kind”, referring to the only black character on the show, I was over it. One last grasp attempt at getting the audience to care about his death (the usual what-if-paradise vision in his final moments) seems cheesy and misplaced, only truly appreciated by his diehard fans. He was there, he was evil, he was gone. And he was still a jerk.
As for a modern example, let’s talk Rafe Cameron from Netflix’s Outer Banks. I discussed him previously in my Outer Banks review (which you can check out here, shameless plug) but didn’t quite complete my thoughts on his character’s appeal. As I previously stated in a post:
Look, I get the hype. I do. But Rafe being so forcefully inserted into main character lists, fics and fandom culture, behind the scenes photos etc is just another case of chronic slimy white man love disorder and ALL of you are guilty. This happens time and time again (cough cough Draco and Billy) when an unlikeable, usually classist, always racist evil white man or boy gets major screen time and people latch onto him like a leech. They get thirst tweets, “I could fix him”isms, redemption fics and rallying amounts of social media attention. This is uninteresting to me, it doesn’t provide much to the story to me, and as much as I appreciate a good side antagonist, it hurts to see these reactions when black leads are being slighted and forgotten at every turn by showrunners and fans alike.
Well said, past me.
What I was beginning to formulate with those words was the aggravating concept that when placed next to these wholly distasteful and secondary (albeit interesting to analyze within the context of plot) white characters, black characters and cast members are grossly overshadowed. We saw this happen years ago to Caleb McLaughlin, when he was still a child amongst his white Stranger Things co-stars. It’s happening today, to Jonathan Daviss amidst a (formerly) primarily white cast on OBX. The deliberate and ever-frequent erasure of black cast and characters in fandom is by no means a new problem, and spans from television to literature to film and back.
Another example from OBX is JJ Maybank, a young cockroach who happens to directly oppose Rafe on all fronts. Both characters are straight white men, raised by abusive fathers and no present mother figure and present a fierce loyalty to their community. The divide here is environment; nature versus nurture turns JJs into Rafes when their upbringing is cushioned by plantation money and a poor model of behavior from those around them. JJ is reined in by his Pogue friends, humbled by his poverty and deeply wishes to be different from his father. He wants to break the cycle. This brings me to my final witness, an example with a journey unique to only himself under his belt: John Murphy.
RAVEN: Go, survive.
MURPHY: That's what cockroaches do, right?
RAVEN (to MURPHY): I may not be able to rely on them, but you will do anything to save your own ass.
COMPUTER: Secondary containment sealed.
RAVEN: Go be a cockroach.
I dared not tip my toes into these waters with my The 100 review, because I knew there was simply too much to discuss. Let’s begin with a brief life history.
Murphy was the product of a thief and a drinker, both of which met undue ends by the chains of injustice on the Ark, a space station where the survivors of the nuclear apocalypse are surviving. When imprisoned for setting fire to his father’s arresting officer’s quarters, he is sent down to the ground with 99 other incarcerated teenagers, and leads the charge of an anti-establishment rebel group. His vehement refusal to act in concordance with authority, government, or organized leadership is his fault, and he quickly becomes disliked for his rudeness and questionable morals. When he is falsely accused of killing someone and almost hanged for it, Murphy attempts to have the real killer (a 13 year old girl) killed. When banished from camp, he returns with a deadly infection and vengeance that leads him to kill two of his former friends. He attempts a few more murders, permanently disables a woman of color, and gets captured by the enemy in the final battle. That’s just Season One.
Over the next four seasons, Murphy has a rough go of it. He is captured, tortured, mind controlled, raped, groomed, abandoned, and generally faces the consequences of his actions. Any brief attempts he makes to attempt friends or allies are moot because they only serve his short term interests; Murphy so frequently finds himself on the wrong side of a war that almost nobody is willing to align themselves with him anymore. And yet, like the cockroach he is, nevertheless he persisted. Somewhere along the way he gets a girlfriend, Emori, and his selfishness is barely extended to act in regard for her survival as well as his own.
By the beginning of Season Five, Murphy finds himself pulled back into the fold of his peers and leaders. Reluctantly kept around like a stray dog, he is given the opportunity to be loyal to those who have protected. Of course he fails at first (primarily because of insecurity and isolation), but by the end of the show he has earned his stripes and learned his lesson. He chooses the greater good and goes to great lengths to preserve the future of the human race, even when faced with great danger and the opportunity to let innocent civilians die as he would have in the past.
The rocky road to redemption Murphy walked is one paved with breadcrumbs of what actually makes a sympathetic character. Audiences learned that his childhood was a joyful one until he became an orphan, which checks out considering Murphy’s soft spot for children and acts of sympathy toward them. He cared for a population of oppressed people in Season Seven, enough to endanger himself and Emori to protect them from the forces of evil. This empathy once again recalls Murphy’s fate as a citizen of Arkadia, and evokes the recognition he felt when seeing others who have been slighted the same as him.
There is no doubt that Murphy’s actions in the past were abhorrent, nor is the audience urged to forget or absolve them. In fact, he is the first to confess them and express guilt, something he does frequently. When he fails, he is shunned; when he lets people down, they don’t forgive him. It is only after much blood, sweat and tears that Murphy is considered a hero, one title duly earned by sacrifice and repentance. He represents what I like to call the evolved cockroach, an increasingly rare breed in today’s day and age.
When the evils the cockroach represents and professes are watered down to “being on the bad guy’s side” or “parroting what your parents tell you”, the excuses being made to justify said evils begin to sound suspiciously similar to those made for real life white supremacists. Remember the aforementioned omnipresent Bad Boyfriend? His out of pocket comments and offensive actions are usually explained away by the words of those around him, protecting his innocence and voiding him of responsibility. You may often hear the tune, “It’s just how he was raised”, referring to the infestation of bigotry in his household. Why this is supposed to be a comfort, I have no clue, but I digress.
Lastly, these types are romanticized when that cocktail of biases mentioned previously begins to take effect. This poor kicked-puppy-in-the-rain type is the perfect amount of messy for the white girls and women sitting in their rooms, reading about and watching him. Hypersexualization of teenagers in young adult media also plays into this, but that’s a topic for another newsletter. These audiences think this guy is swoony, battered, complex, all the things men around them aren’t. They shower him in attention, analysis and affection, all until the next one comes along. We few of sound mind are subjected to blonde bowl cuts in velocity edits for a solid eight months on Instagram, until these snivelling creatures crawl back into their holes and the hype surrounding their franchise dies down a bit. Somewhere amidst all of this, the real evil begins to take root.
Sally Smith, the average Draco Malfoy fangirl, meets Robbie who attends her school. He’s a bit rough around the edges, but that’s what makes him fun! Her friends might not like him, but he has a car (and probably guns) and a long line of kard karrying Klansmen framed on his bedroom wall. How deep!
The seeds planted in Sally’s mind began with the approach she and millions of others take when idealizing the fiction presented to them. These guys just need some TLC, they were treated poorly, and thus their charges should be absolved. This openness to dismissing the actions of white supremacists and generally douchey men in favor of a heated romance filled with angst has real life repercussions, ones that will actively endanger the safety of the people around these men. Whether these fictional characters have the option of consideration for redemption isn’t for me to say. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a different conversation between them, God and the writers who bore them. Until then, I’d just like less eugenicists on my feed.
Thank you so much for reading, and for being here today! If you’re reading this, I’ve recently hit 100 subscribers to this newsletter which warms my heart endlessly. I’m probably twirling around my bedroom or eating Jeni’s ice cream in celebration right now. Whether you’re new here or an OG reader, I have even more good news for you.
My review commissions will be opening December 1st! If you have ever languished over a piece of media or even observed it from afar and wondered to yourself, I wonder what literateleah thinks of this. In fact, I need to know. Oh look, I also have change to spare for an emerging writer!, this moment is for you. I am not currently offering commissions for essays, prose or poetry, given that my level of skill in those mediums is significantly lower than what I would consider that of my reviewing prowess. You can observe some of my previous examples (x, x, x) to get a taste for my work, and I’ll let you know any more relevant info (including pricing) as it arises!
Depending on the length of the piece, availability (how soon/how cheap I can get my hands on it) and requested extent of analysis, you can expect my review in your hands by 1-2 weeks after placing the request. You can also indicate whether you would like this to remain a private commission, or if I have permission to share the review with this newsletter community up to a week after you’ve had time to digest it all by yourself. Any questions, comments and concerns can be sent to literateleah@gmail.com and I will respond to you as quickly as possible! Please note that I reserve the right to veto any commission for a piece of media with excessively harmful, inappropriate or violently racist content, an action which will be executed prior to any payment being exchanged.
Again, I thank you for being here. I cherish your presence, feedback, and support more than you can know! I love you, and I’ll see you next week.
incredibly thoughtful + well written as always. dated a guy a little too close to the one you described in your opening paragraphs for a short while recently and was definitely left reeling a little bit before continuing to read. so much admiration & appreciation for your writing!
Loved this :)