Masquerade or Unmasqued? Hiding Urban Fantasy’s Magic
It’s one of the longest shadows cast over any story that places the fantastic in our own world: how much can it still be “our” world if the man on the street believes in magic? And the answer always used to be, he can’t know.
It’s best known as “the Masquerade.” The idea that the supernatural (or the horrific, or the hints of Weird Science, or whatever the story plays with) is still a secret from the public at large.
Lately I’ve been wondering, just what made that the rule for so long?
Under the Masquerade – or not
Because it has been the rule. Not always in the same form, but it’s been one of the defining forces of all kinds of contemporary fantasy. If a more-than-normal story wasn’t set in Middle Earth or the rocket-riding future, that had to mean its power was tucked away in a dark corner. Think The X-Files putting its truth “out there” and always out of reach, or Harry Potter keeping so much of its action in a secluded castle complex.
But that has… changed. Today urban fantasy makes settings like Ilona Andrews’s magic-wracked Atlanta a counter-trope to all those years in the shadows, but there are just as many Jim Butchers keeping their Harry Dresdens under wraps. –Except even there, Harry used to advertize as “a wizard,” and the police had a barely-official Special Squad that paid some of his bills.
(I’d say “brave new world,” but I can’t call unmasqued worlds all that new since Harry did that advertising in the phone book; remember those? So yeah, writers have had options for a while now.)
Of course, it could be just be an FX issue holding the onscreen media back. TV tended to look silly when it showed too much power flying around, so it took tales like X-Files and Buffy The Vampire-Slayer (superb stories, kickboxers in makeup for critters, and “so call it another gas leak story” jokes) to pad their monsters out with suspense until tech was able to let The Flash run free. And movies took their time too, but actual comic books were lifting cars back in 1938 using nothing but ink.
–Except Smallville had more superpowers to juggle with than Flash does, and that show still kept Clark Kent out of costume for ten years, with classic masquerade battles. And superheroes are known for not only saving the world but putting on their street clothes and going back to a workplace that’s almost calm about the apocalypse of the month. DC and Marvel worlds don’t hide their superpowers, but they’ve still kept everything else more normal than not by sheer force of tradition. Especially making secret identities possible.
(And yet, Civil Wars and Batman V Superman will be taking anti-hero riots onto the screen this spring. But then, comics did them first, and their worlds recovered from those too.)
Do They Want to know a Secret?
So what does that say about masquerades and the story itself?
I have to take one more glance at history here, and note that a lot of the energy in real-world supernatural tales used to be in out-and-out horror. If someone was going to melt into mist in “our” world, odds are it would be a vampire or an experiment gone wrong… emphasis on wrong, dangerous, and a battle for survival for outclassed heroes. And sure enough, urban fantasy today is likely to keep those vampires around, even if it’s let the human side grow up enough to fight back.
Call it a reminder: we keep finding ways to make our fantastic elements feel fantastic, whether it’s by tying them to mysteries or forcibly keeping Clark around for contrast with Superman. So putting a masquerade over a world can mean…
- Starting beside the reader: Most of us don’t know what it’s like to fly, so opening with a completely muggle-raised Harry Potter gives us a hero we can relate to. (Beginning with a grown Harry Dresden is certainly different, but that mundane point of reference is still in view from his office.)
- Exposition = Suspense: The nearer the hero is to the world’s ignorance, the more we can savor each glimpse of the deeper world because there’s more room for it to be new. Uncertainty becomes thrills, and each world-building glimpse is a much appreciated revelation, done right.
- Spotlight: Filling the world with people who don’t even know about the weirdness makes the hero look cooler by comparison, and the public that much more in need of his protection. (If they don’t come off as idiots, anyway.)
- Interactions: As long as the town doesn’t know there are monsters, Buffy can walk around the halls trading normal school gossip and being judged for something more important than her slaying skills—like whether she still hangs out with Willow. Ordinary plotlines come more easily and feel more real when the world still has a sense of that normal.
- Consequence Control: Logically, how well would the human beings we know handle finding out about demons, clawed mutants, or other supersized unknowns? It’s hard to write a world that’s only a little panicked, and easier to just keep it in the dark.
On the other side, ripping off the masque means anything’s possible. You can show a world tearing itself apart over the uncanny, or one like Laurel Hamilton’s that known about vampires for so long the books begin after they’ve been granted legal rights. (Barely.) You can show how many jobs a wizard can really do, and what the union fights over them are like. You can work out layer on layer of altered history or interacting institutions and forces and all the fun that true speculative fiction writers have been hogging for themselves, and do it based on forces that don’t have to follow any rules but your own and the story’s.
All in all: writing a masquerade forces the focus off the world and back onto the characters. It’s a simpler challenge than doing justice to how magic would change everything… but I still like it.
Part of the fun of The High Road has always been keeping Mark and Angie aware of how conspicuous they’d be if they started flying anywhere in public view. As magicks go, that one’s one of the most deliciously difficult powers to keep under wraps. But (since there’s a levitation pun for every occasion), we’ll have to see if they’re up for the challenge.