MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Following the success of girl-power fantasy shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed, SyFy’s Lost Girl follows Bo, an unapologetically bisexual and politically unaligned succubus as she adjusts to her recently discovered Fae identity. The series follows Bo’s quest for self-actualization as she uses her queer, liminal identity to walk an unconventional line of justice, helping others in need with her newly-realized supernatural skillset. The episodes “Fae Gone Wild” and “Waves” are fairy tale revisions of “The Little Mermaid” and selkie folklore which employ humor, anger, and pro-feminist sentiment to criticize and triumph over underlying themes of patriarchal control present within these original stories. Lost Girl restages mermaid and selkie experiences within contemporary issues of objectification, imprisonment, and violence against women: in “Fae Gone Wild” female sex workers represent selkies whose pelts have been stolen; in “Waves” a lonely mermaid desperately attempts to steal a pair of human legs in hopes of reuniting her family. All of Lost Girl’s characters are intensely human, even when they aren’t actually human—they are complicated and flawed, raising important questions about the difficulty of trying to self-identify in a world that recognizes a need for feminist revisions of fairy tales yet still considers “feminism” a dirty word. Although the show at times walks the line of gratuitous sexual content (thereby opening itself up to anti-feminist criticism), Lost Girl’s women repeatedly save the day by being everything women are taught not to be by fairy tales: intelligent, brave, sexually liberated, powerful, even a bit ruthless and reckless. Overwhelmingly, the series celebrates the very aspects of identity that traditional fairytales caution women against, offering a necessary, and more broad spectrum of female identities for contemporary viewers to select between and potentially emulate.