I get the feeling that someone was trying to write about racial issues without the knowledge to handle it. Like talk to some actual Black people,dude or dudette.

One blown opportunity: Queenie. She was an obese Black girl, but in the first episode she mentioned being at the top of her class in math. And yeah, she was stuck in a shitty chicken shack, but was the manager. At like I think 16? And on the other hand she did not seem to get people very well. And I was like; cool. They are playing against stereotype. They have a fat black girl who is a book smart, and people and street dumb. A female geek who is not just a male geek fantasy.

And from then on, absolutely nothing showed her as being book smart. In this last episode she is picking films to educate LaLaurie about racism. And she picks the Roots series? Which is know for lousy history? And freaking Mandingo? I have no problem with her being pushed around like a chess piece by people like Fiona and LeVeau who are clearly master class manipulators and button pushers. But, in spite of occasional articulate outbursts of insight, Queenie seems stupid about everything. Which makes her a stupid fat black girl. In short a really awful and prevalent racial stereotype.

Or again LeVeau - much more of a stereotype than she needed to be. The historical LeVeau owned slaves. And her second husband was white. And she had tons of white followers. I'm not saying they need to be historically accurate. And even given the background, hundreds of years of disappointment every time it looked like things were going to get better could well have changed her attitude. But still, it seems like they are not making her particularly a complex character. Fiona gets to have contradictions, doing horrible things but still caring about her daughter, and maybe even (for selfish reasons while she is dying and no longer had a long term ftures) even about her coven. We have seen her do at least one random act of kindness. LeVeau seems to pretty much exist to get rich, and get the Salem witches. It takes being the sole survivor of a massacre to get her past that. She is not allowed the complexity and contractions of Fiona. Even LaLaurie is allowed more complexity than LaVeau is.

So should I watch AHS? What I'd heard about the first season sounded too creepy for me, but my juniors are addicted to the show and keep telling me how much it connects to what we've been talking about in class (?!?). I don't want to watch something that will creep me out completely, but I would like to be more informed about how "accurate" it is re: American history. Is it weirder or more disturbing than True Blood, for example?

Uh. I'm pretty sure accuracy is way down the list on the things the show is concerned about.

Yeah - the object is to tell a good story. Concern with accuracy is close to zero. I will say it is worth watching for over the topness and fuckedupness. And amazing acting.

What are you guys studying, Pix?

I haven't watched TB in yonks, so I can compare, but there's some disturbing stuff, for sure, but also some really funny momemts.

It's discussion-worthy, for sure.

We talk a lot about big ideas of American identity, especially in terms of race and gender. We are about halfway through Huck Finn currently, so we've been talking a lot about caricature; I did a lesson on minstrel shows and blackface recently to talk about how Jim starts out as a completely stereotypical Jim Crow caricature but then develops (at least somewhat) into more of a real character as the story continues. We've also talked a fair amount about the tension between the Old South and the New South (mainly when we were reading Streetcar, but in Huck too) and realism vs romanticism.

Watching the show could spur a lot of interesting discussions about race, but like Dana said, historical accuracy, not so much.

Pix,

Having never watched the show until this season, my feeling is that AHS:Coven is kind of a masterclass on how to troll on race and gender issues.

It is not more gory than True Blood (hard to be since this is FX), but it shares TB's over the top aesthetic.

I would agree that it trolls rather than explores.

I will say that when they were giving free samplels of TB a while back, I thought the Faerie birth scene was one of the funniest I had ever seen. Brilliant bawdy "low" comedy.