The Lion and the Unicorn

Introduction: Diversity and Inclusivity in Adaptations

Adaptations offer audiences a new way of seeing a classic story. Some adaptations exist as a method in which to continue a story, even enabling the creation of a franchise by doing so (e.g., Frankenstein, James Bond) based on one concept alone. Others ensure a new readership for a well-known story, and alterations to the plot may place the adaptation into a new genre. A written or oral source text provides its audience with a recognizable plot while also offering writers the opportunity to update a story that may contain dated representations. As renowned adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon has noted, “Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change” (4). Lately, adaptations have allowed writers to give famed female characters and character types agency that they have not had before. They have also altered readers’ perceptions of characters, diverting focus away from White, middle/upper class characters’ experiences. Commonly, visual and textual adaptors change characters’ gender but, in fewer cases, ethnicity. There appears to be a slight movement toward altering the ethnicity of famous characters, as seen in the casting of Dev Patel as David Copperfield and Sir Gawain in visual adaptations of those same texts. The reenvisioning of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as a streaming series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022–), features Black actors in primary [End Page 167] roles, sparking interest in the adaptation despite racist internet backlash for its casting. The evolution of adaptation has been recently shown via the casting of African American actor Halle Bailey as the new live-action Little Mermaid; her casting met with celebratory or discriminatory reactions. This inclusive casting is one example that pertains to a young viewership instead of that directed to an adult audience.

As adult readers and educators, we must consider why adult audiences are favored for adaptations over adolescent audiences. Readers must question why advancements in diversity and inclusivity have been enacted for adult audience over an adolescent audience. It is discouraging as child and adolescent audiences have repeatedly expressed their desire for diversity and inclusion in multimedia directed to their readers and viewers. I posit that the written adaptations of the vampire genre exist more readily than others due to a twenty-first century readership that insists on diversity and inclusion in their literature. In reference to Young Adult literature, the number of adaptations featuring characters of color are few but are increasing with time (e.g., Kalynn Bayron’s Cinderella is Dead, Tiffany D. Jackson’s The Weight of Blood, etc.). I have referenced Charmed and Cinderella and, although visual media contributions, they show that the issue of diverse and inclusive representation is a large, far-reaching one that needs to be tackled. For this reason, the novels selected for this essay—Renée Ahdieh’s The Beautiful (2019) and The Damned (2020; The Beautiful quartet) and L. L. McKinney’s A Blade So Black (2018; first in a trilogy)—belong to the fantasy genre.

Before delving further into the novels selected for this examination, the genre categorization is explored, identifying the type of fantasy and its implications for readers. In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn states that contributions to the vampire genre are traditionally classified as horror (xxi). While there are events on Ahdieh’s series that may be “read with expectation,” namely the graphic vampire and werewolf attacks, the fantastic elements (e.g., Ahdieh’s fae) lessen the fear-evoking effects for the young adult audience (xxi). Ahdieh and McKinney’s series may be approached as belonging to one specific subgenre of fantasy: the intrusion fantasy. Here, the protagonist’s reality—the ordinary—is interrupted by the fantastic, which cannot be explained via objective means. As Mendlesohn delineates, “The intrusion fantasy is not necessarily unpleasant, but it has as its base the assumption that normality is organized, and that when the fantastic retreats the world, while not necessarily unchanged, returns to...