Heroine Complex

"The Heroine Complex books came out at a time when people were saying that they wanted to see more diverse urban fantasy. Urban fantasy shares a lot of roots with both paranormal romance and detective fiction , and is largely dominated by white authors. So if you line up all your urban fantasy protagonists in a row, most of them are going to be white people. But readers would like to see more diversity, and I agree; and here comes Sarah Kuhn, who is Asian-American, writing about Asian-American superheroines. They are witty, they are fun, they are lightly written, they are extremely well handled, and they draw from authorial experiences that are not necessarily universal to everyone, but are universal to a large enough group of people that they really needed to exist. And if those aren’t your experiences, they’re well-written and relatable enough that they make sense, and you can absolutely follow them. The books follow family, and friends that are basically family, as they deal with a world where superpowers have happened. “Urban fantasy shares a lot of roots with both paranormal romance and detective fiction” In the first book, we have Evie Tanaka and Aveda Jupiter. Aveda is Evie’s childhood best friend and has become the most beloved superhero in San Francisco. She has turned being a superhero into being a Kardashian. She’s a star. She’s always perfect. She doesn’t eat carbs. Her clothes always fit. She can kick your butt in six-inch heels. Then there’s Evie, who is a little more relatable to a lot of us, who also has some superpowers—but her superpowers have never seemed to be quite as powerful or marketable as Aveda’s. Then Evie winds up having to step in as Aveda for a night, which pisses Aveda off—because when you’re the biggest diva in the room, you want to stay the biggest diva in the room… The two wind up at loggerheads. Then we get a bigger threat. It is two superheroines learning how to put their differences aside, learning how to let friendship be more important than ego—and then beat the crap out of something really large. The inclusion of superheroes as a fantasy sub-genre is frequently argued, but if you look at our old folk heroes—Jack, Gilgamesh, all of those people—most of them are what we would class in today’s terms as superheroes. I would argue that superhero fiction is one hundred percent a fantasy sub-genre."