I\u2019ve always been fascinated by the intersection of commerce and art, the vertex where so much that I love\u2014pop culture, genre, and kitsch\u2014makes its home. A prime example is the merchandising-driven show, designed mainly to pitch toys to the kids watching at home. When I was young, this was the domain of the Saturday morning cartoon, of He-Man and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and My Little Pony. Nowadays, it\u2019s, well, the latest versions of all of these, and a few newer ones, like Monster High, that are themselves now several reboots deep.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To achieve their goal of selling toys, these shows have to do something beyond simply presenting stories for a young audience to passively absorb: they must teach them how to tell stories, to model in simple ways the fundamentals of plot and character and conflict so that they can go off to create their own adventures\u2014and shell out for the official toys to do it with, of course.<\/p>\n
We have here the encouragement of creative play, an invitation to a young audience to become storytellers and a toolkit for doing so. It\u2019s a introduction to the ephemeral first fanfictions of childhood, the ones that aren\u2019t written down, but lived in the moment through a child\u2019s hands and voice. There\u2019s something beautifully fundamental to human culture here, and yet there\u2019s also an overt profit motive\u2014the paradox of all commercial art. (Unboxing Libby, available through all major online booksellers and in stores, preorder today!)<\/p>\n
Because these characters, and the toys behind them, are intended for beginning storytellers, they tend to be simple archetypes. Pinkie Pie is a goofball. Frankie Stein is the new kid. Raphael is cool, but rude. In a long-running series, and especially in recent years, they might develop more complexity, but they\u2019re archetypes at their core.<\/p>\n
Unboxing Libby takes place in a future where sentient robots are sold as consumer goods, and follows a member of a product line called A.I.Cademy Girls, designed as friends for children. Each A.I.Cademy Girl has an archetype that they\u2019re expected, and programmed, to live up to \u2013 there\u2019s even an animated show which presents the official, canonical version of the characters. Robin is the sporty one, Wendy the smart one, Izzy an environmentalist, and Libby, the model for the book\u2019s main character, is relentlessly nice and peppy. There\u2019s a villain, Roxanne, created to be an antagonist for the others. In this book, I wanted to take tropes familiar from the pop culture world of toys and cartoons and use them to explore the idea of self-willed, complex beings struggling with societal expectations to be two-dimensional. What does it mean to be handed a script, pointed at a cartoon character, and told \u201cthis is who you are \u2013 not just as a game, not just temporarily, but for real, and forever\u201d?<\/p>\n
The premise could be taken as an allegory for a lot of different things, and I hope it\u2019s one that resonates with readers of all kinds. There is a specific personal element I drew on in the writing, though, and it\u2019s gender identity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019m an outsider to gender\u2014I\u2019ve never experienced whatever it is people are feeling inside them that tells them what they are. (Decades ago, before I learned terms like \u201cnonbinary\u201d and \u201cgenderqueer\u201d, I described this as like missing a compass everyone else was born with.) From outside, gender mostly looks to me like a list of things you can\u2019t do. Boys can\u2019t do this; girls can\u2019t do that. Boys can\u2019t be vulnerable; girls can\u2019t be angry. Boys can\u2019t have close emotional relationships; girls can\u2019t have important jobs. Gender often manifests as a demand that you cut yourself off from an entire swathe of possibilities in life \u2013 that you put yourself in a box, stop trying to escape, and embrace the archetype you\u2019ve been given, even when that means not being a complete person.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Recently, more and more people have been looking at this system and flatly rejecting it. Even people who do experience gender identity are questioning the premise that someone else gets to tell them what their gender means about who they are or how they should live. I wrote Unboxing Libby in the hopes of a world where identity is descriptive, not prescriptive, where who we are is something more than a box to squeeze ourselves awkwardly into.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like the toy companies, I\u2019ve got something to sell (in my case, it\u2019s a book, and did I mention that compared to most toys it\u2019s both more intellectually stimulating and hurts less to step on barefoot?) \u00a0 But I\u2019m also trying to show kids that they can be tellers of their own stories, not toys posed and defined by someone else\u2019s hands. They can take the simple labels they\u2019ve been presented with and build something better with them.<\/p>\n
And hopefully have some fun along the way!<\/p>\n
Steph Cherrywell<\/strong>\u00a0is a nonbinary librarian, author, illustrator, and game creator in the Milwaukee area. They have previously written and illustrated the YA-and-older graphic novels\u00a0Widgey Q. Butterfluff<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Pepper Penwell and the Land Creature of Monster Lake<\/em>, and written and programmed the award-winning text adventures\u00a0Brain Guzzlers from Beyond!<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Zozzled.<\/em>\u00a0They love comics, science fiction, roleplaying games, and exploring the city by bicycle.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve always been fascinated by the intersection of commerce and art, the vertex where so much that I love\u2014pop culture, genre, and kitsch\u2014makes its home. A prime example is the merchandising-driven show, designed mainly to pitch toys to the kids watching at home. When I was young, this was the domain of the Saturday morning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}