Lovecraft Country Season Finale – Your Critique Of the Black Female Characters

Published October 30, 2020 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hi,

So it could be that the black writers didn’t do a good job of conveying the black experience to a wider audience or it could be that they were writing directly to us and simply didn’t feel the need to explain more deeply.

These characters all had clear motivations. Not sure why you all don’t think they did. They needed to save their family and protect their own. Dee was traumatized multiple times – how her friend died, her father died, her mom is missing, she gets attacked and loses her arm. Way too much for a kid to go through and she goes through all of it alone. Suffering along is not unlike what many black female children go through. She finds herself powerless, hurt and angry. She finally finds her power the moment she picks up the baseball bat to defend herself in that previous episode. That moment made me feel triumphant – like yes, go get em! She gets a new bionic arm – (gets back some power), and she finally gets to express her rage by killing christina. It doesn’t matter that christina didn’t cast the curse on her, christina is hurting her family and she’s a convenient substitute. So what motivation is there to not see?

Lettie’s “babbling” was her casting the spell to bind all white people from doing magic. That’s what I figured she was doing after they did the binding reveal. She wasn’t pigeon holed. She had to have the baby who wrote the book which was eventually given to Tic. It served the story. And she was bad ass multiple times in many episodes. I don’t think she stopped being bad ass in the end. Her character experienced some emotional growth over the course of the show.

Hippolyta like many women of that era gives up herself for her family and because society tells her she can’t be anything other than a mammy, a maid, a wife. She had ambitions – she wanted to be an astronomer. She likes science. She wanted the same kind of freedom white men have. When she has the opportunity to live over 200 years worth of earth history she finds herself finally and names herself. She doesn’t let other people tell her who she is, which is what happens to black women all the damn time. After she names herself she is more confident and assertive when she comes back. I can only imagine that we’d get more of her in season 2 if there is a season two. I don’t think she was wasted in the final scenes. She was there to support her family.