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Hello my beautiful watchers. Being pissed that JK Rowling is at it again
is probably not the healthiest motivation a fellow could have to expand his literary horizons but
I am honestly grateful for whatever reasons lead me to the subject of today's review because
it was just really really enjoyable and a wonderful end to the palate cleansing
I’ve been allowing myself before jumping back into more stressful reviews. Let’s do this.
Dreadnought is a 2017 young adult superhero novel written by american author April Daniels.
It's the first of currently just 2 books in an ongoing series about a 15 year old trans girl who
through a twist of fate inherits the powers and legacy of the world’s
most famous and beloved superhero and as an unexpected but much appreciated side effect
is instantly magically transitioned into conventionally super attractive female form.
The book seems to have been pretty well received overall and
ended up being a Lambda Literary Award finalist.
I’m feeling doubly out of my depth on this one. I possess a (at
best) average knowledge of the superhero genre and the comics it primarily exists in,
and I have exactly zero first hand knowledge of the trans experience.
Regarding the former I’m probably still going to be making a few comparisons to
the other superhero worlds that I do know of just because it makes things easier to explain.
Because of the latter I obviously can’t make any expert judgments on the realism
of the trials and tribulations the lead character faces in that regard but I can
at least still describe them to you and ya know no book is ever about only one
thing there’s plenty of stuff here I think I can be insightful about.
The super condensed description of this book, the kind that I might type into the limited available
characters of twitter or yell to the retreating back of a friend who is running to catch a bus
is “it's kind of a cross between Into the Spiderverse and My Hero Academia with a
trans hero, you should seriously try it” oh no he missed his bus.
Neither of those comparisons are an accusation of plagiarism by the way. Even a comic luddite like
myself knows that the events I’m referring to are pretty common superhero tropes.
I’m going to begin with a synopsis of the start of the story but I will try to be as
spoiler light as possible because this is another book that I really
hope that you’ll try for yourselves and I don’t want to ruin any big plot twists.
The world of Dreadnought is a pretty standard super hero set up. It's basically
our world but a small percentage of the population have superhuman abilities and
a small percentage of them are made so powerful by them they have taken to fighting crime,
saving people from disasters and ya know rescuing the world from peril and whatnot.
And of course when there's great power to be had there's people who will abuse it for
their own gain so there's supervillains making everyone else's lives pretty sucky at times.
There's a pretty close parody of the DC Justice League called the Legion Pacifica,
headed by a superman stand-in called Dreadnought.
The other members of the Legion appear to be either original creations or parodies or
amalgamations of other famous comic characters with varying levels of subtlety but I will
not embarrass myself by trying to break down each one with my limited experience.
Dreadnought is the 3rd known incarnation of this super hero
as his powers can apparently be transferred to someone else upon
his death kinda like All Might from my Hero Academia but not a secret.
Danielle Tozer, usually known as Danny to her friends is a transgender lesbian struggling to
stay alive in this world, not because of any super human threat but due to the oppressive
misery of living with a highly abusive father and the rampant dysphoria she feels of having
to stay in the closet and present male to avoid worsening his treatment of her.
She happens to be nearby when Dreadnought is fatally wounded by a new upcoming supervillain.
She tries to help him but he knows he’s on the way out so
to keep the legend of Dreadnought going he transfers his powers to her.
One of the many things the mantle of Dreadnought does is transform one's
outer body into whatever the host considers to be their ideal form.
In the cases of past heroes its just made them tall square-jawed and muscular but
because Danielle is trans she’s transformed into a stunningly pretty teen girl.
She’s overwhelmingly happy and grateful and not opposed to taking up the responsibilities
of a superhero, but she quickly discovers that being the most powerful being on the
planet isn’t a guarantee that all of your problems will go away and
the world isn’t necessarily any more willing to accept her for who she is now than before.
For one thing, in a shock twist when she’s recruited by the Leagon is turns
out that a core member is a hardcore TERF which is just unbelievably sucky.
Worse, the other members of the Legion, all great heroes known for standing up for
justice kindness and freedom seem much more inclined to try to talk, cajole, guilt and
generally persuade Danny into being ok with fighting alongside this transphobe
than they are willing to even consider cutting their ties with the transphobe.
Because of this, Danny finds it much more agreeable to team
up with an independent vigilante crime fighter around her own age.
Unfortunately because her father’s abuse takes the form of
constant screaming fits and verbal takedowns, being more powerful than
a battleship and faster than a jet doesn't really fix anything there.
Things then escalate continuously from there with both the trans and superhero related stuff.
According to April, despite the fact that it might limit her audience: Dreadnought was
always intended to be a book by a trans person, about a trans hero, for trans people to get
enjoyment from and take comfort in, and while she more than welcomes cis readers she never
felt inclined to write a single word for the sole purpose of making it more accessible to them.
Speaking as a cis male I still found it very engaging despite my
lack of personal connection to the subject matter.
She also described it as a pretty clear cut trans power fantasy
and I mean yeah super powers is pretty much everyone’s power fantasy but
I can also certainly understand the appeal of a seamless, painless, instantaneous transition.
Ms Daniels has also stated that while she drew heavily from her own experience with
transitioning, her protagonist and her story is much more of an amalgamation
of the multiple trans people that she researched with than a direct insert.
She also makes it clear that despite this she never intended Danielle to be representative
of every trans experience even excluding the superhero stuff.
The impression I got from the superhero side of things is even though the genre currently
sorely lacking for trans representation, April is a very positive and knowledgeable fan of it.
Certainly enough to know all the tropes and which ones she likes.
The result is the book reads much more like a love letter than a takedown.
I found the ways that the different superheroes reacted to Danny being transgender depressing but
also kind of facinating because of how well thought out it seemed to be.
The superheroes whose powers came from science, your Mr. Fantastic or Doc Oc lookalikes were
much more accepting of her gender identity because they understood a lot more of the
up-to-date realties of it while the before mentioned TERF power’s were magic based and
as a result she was way more oldschool in her belief system.
This story was nuanced as heck in a lot of other ways too. Every time I thought it was
about to take a black and white stance on something it caught me off guard with
layers of the kind of frustrating uncertainty that you get in life all too often.
There were a lot of negatives to living day to
day life presenting female that caught Danielle completely off
guard because she had unwittingly had been very used to a certain amount of male privilege.
For one thing the guy who used to be her best friend is a raving misogynist and hardcore
creep who acts entitled to sex from every women around him. She just genuinely hadn’t noticed or
hadn’t really thought about how unpleasant that makes him to be around
until she was on the receiving end of it.
This is absolutely not to be confused with transition regret. At no point does truly
experiencing the full crushing weight of everday sexisum for the first time
make Danielle less sure of her gender identity and she rightly points out to
people that her lack of experience with it until now is through no fault of her own.
The runtime of the book is fairly evenly split between the struggles Danny faces due to being
trans and the struggles she faces trying to stop the whole world from dying horribly and the two of
them don’t always tie into each other. For once I think this lack of cohesion is a good thing.
The hardships that arise from Danielle being transgerder, the
TERF superhero and her friends/parents make her life bloody miserable but
they are not the reason that she struggles to save the world.
She struggles to save the world because the threat she ends up facing is exceptionally terrible,
and it overwhelms the good guys so hard and so fast even if they had been working together
in perfect harmony there's no guarantee that things would have gone any better.
While finding the self confidence to believe that she can truly become
Dreadnought is a struggle for her, Danielle’s dysmorphia and the transphobia she faces
are not treated as obstacles in the way of saving the world,
they are their own thing that require their own solutions or unfortunately lack thereof.
And likewise, saving the world doesn't magically fix any of her other hardships, it doesn't
even earn her the respect of the TERF legion member. Danny has to learn one of the hardest
lessons anyone can learn, that she has to love herself and not chase the validation of others.
Another thing I noticed was very prominent in Danny’s new life was
the constant fear that even super powered as she was, there might be some way for someone to take
her womanhood away from her and it really drove home for me how awful it must be to feel like
an essential part of oneself is somewhat out of your hands and considered to be so open to debate.
Again, I can’t personally attest to the realism of this but it hit me hard to see how much worse
it broke Danny’s heart when her allies were thoughtlessly kind of shit to her compared to
the outright bigotry she sometimes faced as she was fairly numb at this point.
There were the heroes; before mentioned unwillingness to consider disassociating
with a transphobe and her otherwise loving mother who piting her “son”
and blaming herself for turning her into something unnatural.
There was also a sad moment early on when the legion hero who bonded with her the quickest,
who was a sort of doctor and slightly mad scientist type performs a medical exam and
shows that the magic that changed Danny her couldn’t give her a uterus
or change the fact that she had a Y chromosome.
While the doc correctly assures her that’s not the defining factor regarding what
makes someone a woman, she also immediately shares this info with the other heroes and
it gives the TERF all the ammo she needs to call her a freak.
This part of the book was a hard reminder to me and I hope anyone
else that considers themselves an ally that
we have the potential to hurt our LGBTQ friends so badly because they have put their trust in us and
it's really important to try not to do something thoughtless that would betray that trust.
I do want to mention that Danny’s trans story isn’t all stress and sadness. It
was uplifting to read through the sheer joy that she feels post transition as she
finally gets to feel more comfortable in the body she’s in and not horrified by what she
sees in the mirror each day and gets to go buy womens clothing and shoes for the first time.
There’s a few plot threads left unfinished by the
end as it is in a series but it still has a satisfying ending as a stand alone book.
I’m obviously going to order the sequel because I really liked this but if you choose to just
read the first one you’re not gonna feel like you only read a part of a story.
I have to admit I’m very curious as to why the first two books in the series
were published within months of each other in 2017 but the third has yet to surface.
I was even tempted to tweet to Ms Daniels and ask her directly but apparently her account
was suspended for saying mean things about ICE. Ain't that a son of a bitch.
Anyways, all in all I’d definitely recommend this book.
As April herself has attested to, there's probably a no more a universal trans
experience than any other human experience. As a species we’re just too bloody unique.
That said I’m grateful for the insight that I think I’ve gotten
from this book about some of the pains and joys of life as a trans person.
My recommendation also extends to fans of superhero stories especially if they enjoy
nuance and mature themes without it being grim dark and gritty. I think it super stands up
in the genre in its own right and just in general April is a really talented author.
I don’t know about anyone else but man, I would kill to see this book adapted into a film someday.
If any of my trans beautiful watchers would like to weigh in on some of the things that
I’ve mentioned with an actually expert opinion you can comment,
catch me on twitter or email me at this address.
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Thank you for joining me my beautiful watchers, just the usual reminder that
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subscribe if you’re new. Please take care of yourselves out there and I will see you soon.
According to April- (stumbles on lines and goes into hilarious word vomit)
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