Transgender Tuesday: Reviewing "Dreadnought" by April Daniels

I just discovered Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, which is like my new favorite website.  Naturally, I’m going to immediately complain about it, starting with the review of my new favorite book, Dreadnought by April Daniels.

Also I love the low-key trans pride colors in the
background! (Image swiped from GoodReads).

Dreadnought is an #OwnVoices story about Danny, a transgender teen who stumbles into superpowers - one aspect of which instantaneously gives her a body she thinks of as ideal (yes, that’s problematic; yes, that’s addressed; yes, it’s handled tastefully and not overdone).  She then encounters a bunch of bullshit as a result of this immediate transition, as well as a bunch of more “mundane” problems (i.e. problems not resulting from her transness) clustered around taking on the mantle of the superhero Dreadnought whose powers she has inherited.  SBTB reviewed Dreadnought and found it lacking, but I found the review to be lacking, so that’s what I’m writing about today.  I’ll be taking a Good/Bad/Ugly approach, and also citing textual evidence for my arguments, so:  SPOILERS AHOY!

The Good:

Merits of the SBTB Review

I’ll start with what’s good about the review:  the author, Carrie S, cites textual evidence for her best claims and picks up on some subtle themes, as well as making appropriate concessions for cultural necessity vis-a-vis her second-to-last paragraph on how Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped.  She acknowledges that Danny’s trans-related issues are faced by real-life trans folks, and deserve to be brought to light.  She also demonstrates genre savvy by expressing desire for themes and events that are developed in the second book, Sovereign, which is available now (Daniels is currently writing the third book).  She openly accepts that some of the bad decision-making on the protagonists’ part is due to their adolescence, and lets it go at that, finding it believable.

Moreover, Carrie correctly points out that the support from Calamity and Doctor Impossible does more for Danny’s character development than her actual superpowers.  This is a nod to the thoroughgoing realism (despite being a superhero comic in literary form) reflecting that we are social creatures who need love and support to flourish, as much as we need proper nutrition.  It also alludes to the fait accompli motif, only mentioned twice in the book but implicitly elaborated all over, that Danny suddenly looks female and everyone else just has to deal with it - which they often do in ugly ways, which again with the realism.  Having one’s transition over in a snap is, for lots of trans folks, the ideal fantasy: “Transitioning is hard, and if I could just snap my fingers and wake up in the right body, my life would be so much better.”  But Daniels shows that this instant transition absolutely does not solve any problems aside from the need to transition and the difficulty of transitioning:  most of trans people’s problems, it turns out, are caused by living in a society with strong undercurrents and dense pockets of transphobia, despite our growing acceptance.  While Carrie doesn’t discuss this motif as much as I’d like, neither does she flat-out ignore it.

The bottom line for me is this:  I wish her concessions, understanding, and savvy were brought to bear in her treatment of the trans-related issues as experienced by Danny in the book.  They are not, and what’s more, Carrie straight-up ignores a good deal of textual evidence, to the point that she makes claims in her review that are demonstrably untrue.

The Bad:

Dreadnought’s Flaws

I don’t want to give the impression that Dreadnought is flawless, or even that I think it is flawless.  I am obviously and understandably ecstatic at having a superhero story about someone who’s trans just like me, but that does not blind me to the book’s flaws, which exist and shall be enumerated by me presently (perfect segue!).

In the first place, this book is praised on the jacket copy as having “the most exciting new superheroes in decades,” and it simply does not.  There are four interesting superpowered characters: Dreadnought herself, Calamity, Doctor Impossible, and Utopia. I’ll briefly outline each of their interestingnesses before getting into why the rest of the superpowered characters are boring:

• Dreadnought is trans and her mundane struggles are frontlined, but as a superhero per se, she’s a more interesting Superman.  She has the Flying Brick powers, but with limitations that are creatively explored through “the lattice,” which I very much liked because it’s similar to (but much more limited than) my own superhero’s power over (and perception of) quantum probabilities.
• Calamity has Captain America’s powers, but a mirrored backstory:  she is a person of color born into both her powers and poverty, whose grandfather was a Captain America of color who was discarded after he outlived his usefulness - but far from superheroes of color being a progressive element in this world, the super-serum has a 50% mortality rate, and so PoC were used unwillingly, explicitly for their “disposability” to the dominant culture.  This gives Calamity perspective and motivations that are realistically portrayed and make her a much more nuanced character than The Other Boy Scout.  Additionally, caping at such a young age has given her visible PTSD, which affects both her personality and her relationships.
• Doctor Impossible is a mad scientist (and un-stretchy Reed Richards), the gynoid daughter of Malice/Utopia, whose struggle with her own nature provides funhouse-mirror juxtapository insight into Danny’s own struggle with her transness.  To make herself “more human,” she chooses flaws for herself:  an addiction to nicotine and to only use one of her three available bodies at a time.  To me, this reads as a very believably robotic “Check, Done!” way of “humanizing” herself, and this oversimplification has consequences on both her emotions and her effectiveness that she then has to deal with.  Excellent showing as opposed to telling!
• Utopia is a half-reformed Dr. Doom, having once been Malice, the first major supervillain and the greatest-ever in history.  Her defeat caused self-reflection that resulted in an actual change to her approach, though she’s still trying to be Prime Intellect (and in fairness, Prime Intellect also thought it was doing the right thing).  But she is driven by a threat that only she takes seriously at this point in the story, which gives her a very humanizing motivation and makes her actions more understandable (though still misguided).

That done, let’s look at the others, in no particular order:  Magma is just The Incredible Hulk minus Bruce Banner; Bosco is a non-metamorphic Colossus; Chlorophyll is gay male Poison Ivy, and his sister Aloe is original flavor but also a reformed villain; Carapace is Iron Man (or possibly War Machine); Valkyrja is Thor (though that changes in Sovereign); Red Steel is Superman in Red Son; The Artificer is Forge; Charlie is an apprentice mage who plays the plot role of Magical Negro (though this is fixed in Sovereign); and Graywytch, while a more developed character, is Scarlet Witch and/or Raven.  The Legion Pacifica (Magma, Chlorophyll, Valkyrja, Graywytch, Carapace, and Dr. Impossible) is basically just The Avengers (with some key Avengers West Coast elements), and the Five Man Band of antagonists in the penultimate battle are more or less incels but about powers instead of sex.  That’s ten derivative superpowered folks (six of whom make up a highly-derivative team) to four interesting and developed superpowered folks.

I’m going to immediately waffle and say this is both a good thing and useful to the plot, because the similarity of the side and bit characters acts as convenient shorthand:  these are Expy characters, so savvy readers can immediately identify them without further ado.  Making the characters more original would have taken more time and detracted from the short-and-punchy format, which is a major selling point to me:  this and the highly-visual storytelling make it more like a comic, and easier for cis readers to pick up for its short length. My point is that anyone calling these “the most exciting new superheroes in decades” simply isn’t that familiar with the past several decades of superheroes.

On a lore note, I would have liked to see the two superheroing manuals given to Danny by the Legion explained more.  We really only get a couple points of each, and only in the very moment that it’s relevant to the plot - but Danny is a good student and superhero fangirl, so this is a missed opportunity for significant worldbuilding and foreshadowing.

Danny’s struggle with insecurity is also poorly handled in some ways.  The best portrayal is how she makes some progress when she’s away from her father, gaining conviction and confidence, only to immediately backslide with just a look or a breath from her abuser - then the cycle repeats, with her regaining the conviction and confidence from another angle, only to immediately lose it again.  Having some abuse trauma of my own, I can say firsthand that this is an accurate portrayal: I can’t count the number of times I resolved something in private, only to immediately fold when confronted by my abuser.  But what’s missing from this picture is the scaffolded experimentation and growth: I also did try things in order to hold on to that progress I had made, and even though I lost the little battles, I felt like I was still gaining experience and making progress, which culminated in me finally winning the war.  We don’t really see any of this with Danny, she just comes bravely and abruptly out of the closet at the very end of the book - which is a fantastic and powerful beat, but she’s more or less cornered into it so that she can stay ahead of the media.  I would rather have seen it be the culmination of various failed attempts to stand up to her father (whereas she doesn’t even really properly attempt it except for two times). To be concrete, if two more of Danny’s immediate folds were turned into successive approximations of standing up for herself, then I’d feel much better about how the struggle was handled.

The Ugly:

Fisking the SBTB Review

This will be the longest section because I’m going to go through Carrie’s claims point by point, more or less in order.  She characterizes Danny’s trans-centric arc as a “parade of wretchedness,” which I think is a complaint but I’m not certain; so I’ll simply mention that it’s Truth in Television and leave it at that.

Her next complaint is more serious:  that Danny doesn’t avail herself of any QUILTBAG-friendly organizations.  This is thoroughly justified, however, because Danny is still in the closet until the very last page - every nudge out she gets is forced upon her, and the shame and self-loathing she has internalized (from both her father’s abuse and society’s transphobia) prevent her from reaching out for more support than she gets from her ally friends.  She even feels unworthy of that much, at points! Attending a support group, therefore, would be unthinkable - perhaps this could have been lampshaded, but I find it supremely believable without even a mention.

Carrie states explicitly that “Danny doesn’t have any hobbies or interests beyond being transgender until she is forced to add being a superhero to her list of interests.”  This is plain wrong: Danny is a responsible student who plays online games with her friend David and is an avid reader and superhero fangirl. She doesn’t have any social meatspace hobbies that bring her face-to-face with others, but this is entirely believable due to her closetedness - which she also hobbifies, vis-a-vis painting her toenails when she can find the time and space to do so.  I had a whole pile of hobbies in high school, but I wasn’t a responsible student for most of my life; when I finally became one, I only had time to read the occasional online article in my downtime and play games with my friends a few hours a week.  My interests and hobbies had to be sidelined because of how much time it takes to be a responsible student, and I see this realistically portrayed in Danny’s life.  To say that she has no interests or hobbies is to ignore textual evidence throughout the book; we don’t see her spend a lot of time on these interests and hobbies, but who cares?  That is definitely The Most Boring Thing in her life right now, so leaving them with an occasional mention is perfectly in order for keeping the book short & punchy.

Carrie also complains that Danny’s parents are flat characters, and while I can see this criticism more than the last, it is also demonstrably false and with an in-Universe justification for appearing to be so.  Again, speaking from firsthand experience, abusers tend to flatten both themselves and everyone around them: they flatten their own perceptions in the eyes of others, and they flatten the victims who they turn into doormats.  As Dreadnought is told from Danny’s first-person perspective (and not by a Fly on the Wall that happens to mostly follow her around), the apparent flatness is completely justified:  her father’s abusive nature dominates her perception of him, and minimizes the authentic interactions between Danny and her mother.  But even with this justification, an entire flattening is still thoroughly averted: we see, through Danny’s eyes, that her dad has been going through some hard job times and is taking it out on his family.  Both the job situation and having an “effeminate son” are emasculating to his toxic masculine personality, which oozes through even the positive interactions like his efforts to “care” for Danny’s “problem” and the “man hugs” he gives her, and also completely explains why he is doubling down on the toxic masculinity.  And at several points, such as the doctor visits and the Bad Guy Bar, we see him struggle to come to terms with reality and square that with his toxic masculinity:  while he starts and ends as an abusive transphobe, he still changes and develops during the story, just not in the ways we want.  His arc is tragic, as every action he takes causes (or at least is followed by) things getting even worse (from his perspective):  this is change and development, though it’s a blend of tragic/toxic/bad, and while it’s a little bit one-note, this is also in keeping with how toxic masculinity flattens actual men in real life to one-note Dudebros (making it Truth in Television once again).

Danny’s mom is similarly nuanced, which we see explicitly in Danny’s observations of her, but also implicitly in the events as described but on which Danny does not comment.  Yes, she is a doormat who has been pounded flat by her abusive husband, but she also tries to be supportive to Danny in whatever way she can. This starts with shopping, but that becomes twisted into apologetic bribes, poisoning their relationship.  Her arc is also tragic: when faced with the choice to side with her daughter and stand up to the abuser, or double down on trying to preserve or restore a hopeless status quo, she chooses the latter.  Notably, this is after a long period of fence-riding which makes things even worse, and she is forced to make a choice - she chooses wrong, but she still develops and makes a choice, working within the narrow range of agency she has as a result of her internalized victimhood.  As a child of a violently abusive mother and codependent doormat father (don’t worry, it got loads better), I can attest to the verisimilitude of this portrayal.  It’s nuanced and implicit, but it’s there, and Carrie either doesn’t notice it or flat-out ignores it - and as with the aforementioned discount superheroes, I don’t think that frontlining this theme would have improved the story.  It simply would have been so much dwelling on the nature of trauma and abuse, whereas I think the story is more effective for showing the trauma and its effects instead of taking more time and losing more pacing to tell us explicitly about them.

Carrie also calls Graywytch “almost a parody” figure because “her only characteristic is her transphobia.”  This one is not plain false, just mostly false, and is justified in-Universe (to the extent that it’s true at all) with more Truth in Television.  Danny is outed to Graywytch before they even meet, and Graywytch is a TERF (or gendercrit, if you prefer) - while Carapace and Chlorophyll harbor some amount of transphobia, Carapace is trying to sweep the issue under the rug and Chlorophyll is blatantly pro-trans-inclusion.  Add to this the fact that Magma, Doctor Impossible, and Valkyrja are all clearly pro-trans, and Graywytch is outnumbered. But she behaves in true TERF fashion and vehemently stands her ground, unwilling or unable to capitulate or compromise in the slightest degree. This is the only way in which she is willing to engage with or about Danny:  first and foremost, she is driven to establish that Danny is not female, and she is unable to move on to any other matter without getting her way on this.  While she does go on one rant at the confrontation outside Danny’s home, the rant consists entirely of real-life TERF rhetoric, not some silly strawman.  Graywytch says what TERFs actually believe, with the possible exception of the bit on how the priests killed the Goddess - which I kinda wanna see more developed, because it’s an in-Universe justification for her hatred, but I really wanna know what happened and see if she’s misinterpreting something or if some part of this world’s history legitimates the TERF perspective.  And because of her hatred, she is absolutely opposed to seeing the mantle of Dreadnought be carried by a trans woman, as she thinks this would taint his legacy: a perfectly reasonable position justified by a premise that is simply false. Graywytch’s behavior, in short, is entirely representative of and in keeping with the real-world people who she represents. Many times, I found myself wanting to argue back with her, wanting another character to step in and tell her what’s what, wanting her to be proven wrong; this is a sign of good writing in fiction, because Danny is a teenager and the others aren’t super-educated on trans issues, so while Graywytch is wrong on these issues, she’s still the most prepared to speak on and about them, which creates tension.

I need to quote Carrie here, because I can’t paraphrase her, because I’m not sure what it is she’s trying to say with this:  “Without nuance, the book sometimes reads less like a well-developed story and more like a Very Special Episode About How Transphobia Is Bad. Transphobia is bad, but when all the transphobia is presented in such extreme terms it’s no challenge to the reader to come to that conclusion.”  Now, I will concede that the Very Special Episode perception is entirely valid, because this book is about two things:  being a superhero, and being a trans girl. For the sake of pacing, whenever Danny isn’t dealing with some superhero shit, she’s dealing with some trans shit; and fully half of trans shit is transphobia, meaning that a full quarter of the book ought to be explicitly about transphobia.  But this makes the non-phobic trans parts stand out as a counterpoint to the transphobia, and the superheroing half be a reprieve from the hammering on trans issues - so I can see that perception.

But here’s the thing:  the transphobia as portrayed isn’t “extreme” in the slightest, it’s 100% real.  The slurs and abuse from her dad, the shitty looks and gossip at school, Graywytch’s TERFy bullshit; it’s all true to life.  I can’t go on any social media and get trans-related content without it, because every trans-adjacent social media account - even the ones explicitly dedicated to positivity - has to engage with transphobia, even if only to debunk it.  It’s “no challenge to the reader to come to that conclusion” because transphobia is obviously bad.  Yes, Danny says at the end that she’s a transgender lesbian and unashamed, and this is a Crowning Moment of Awesome for her, especially in light of the last sentence (“And I think maybe I could be a good person.”).  But as previously mentioned, she’s cornered into this, which irrevocably taints the moment with the very shame and self-loathing she is overcoming to make the statement.  But - and I can’t stress this enough - this is life for trans people, and an appropriate and proportionate portrayal of it, at that.

Finally, Carrie mentions that there’s no romance, which I’m not even sure is a complaint as opposed to a mere observation.  Again, this is true to life, because dealing with trans issues sidelined my own romantic pursuits for about a decade while I was sorting out my bullshit.  I don’t want to harp on this too much, though, because again, I’m not even sure this is a criticism. So I’ll close by simply saying: Carrie S, if you’re reading this, then you should definitely read Sovereign.