#BlackGirlJoy: The Exuberance of Posthuman Black Girlhood in Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts

Fig. 1 - Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (Radford Sechrist, 2020-).

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (Radford Sechrist, 2020-) is a colourful, post-apocalyptic animated adventure series based on the webcomic Kipo, which debuted on Netflix in early 2020 to much critical acclaim (Fig. 1). The story follows the titular Kipo, a 13-year-old “burrow girl” who finds herself thrust from the safety of her underground home to a surface world filled with talking, anthropomorphized animals, or “mutes,” as well as titanic, kaiju-sized “mega mutes.” The first two seasons are packed with fast-paced fantasy hijinks and phantasmagorical exploits that revolve around Kipo and her friends/family. There is a lot to love about Kipo, from its not-so-subtle commentary on anthropocentric humanism, to its representation of queer youth, to its fire soundtrack (“Grrrl Like” by Dope Saint Jude has become a staple on my personal pump-up playlist!). Moreover, while Kipo is unquestionably an action/adventure show, the narrative cornerstones are love, friendship, the ethics of care, and—of particular importance to this post—joy. Kipo’s relationship with her sister-friend Wolf, the pint-sized, badass Lancer of the team, is an excellent place to examine the ways joy functions in the series. In particular, I’m interested in how these two characters—whom I argue are posthuman Black girls—enact radical acts of joy in defiance of a frequently hostile surface world. 2020 has been painful and demoralizing in many ways, so radical joy in a hostile world seems particularly salient. In this post, I first establish what I mean by Posthuman Black girls and then will examine a key moment toward the end of season two in which their bond, predicated on love and previous playful experiences, saves the day.

If you haven’t watched Kipo at all or haven’t finished season two, please take this as your spoiler warning.

My reading of Kipo nestles at the juncture between what is known in scholarly circles as posthumanist theories and Black girlhood studies. Posthumanism is, without a doubt, a far-reaching field of study with a variety of subcategories and areas of thought. Generally, posthumanist scholars challenge the boundaries of what it means to be, and to move beyond, being human. Bioethicist Andy Miah, for instance, defines the project of posthumanism as research “about what might be termed a perpetual becoming,” or the consistent process of being (Miah 2008: 98). Similarly, I understand Black girlhood studies as defined by gender and women’s studies professor Nicole Ruth Brown: a focus on “the representations, memories, and lived experiences of being and becoming in a body marked as youthful, Black, and female” (Brown 2009: 1). There is a distinct, fruitful overlap in language employed in both discourses, including but not limited to terms like embodiment, shapeshifting and transformation, alternative temporalities and reimagined futures, pushing beyond prescribed boundaries and, of course, being and becoming. Professor and digital humanist Kristen Lillvis gestures to the importance of transgressing borders in both fields in the introduction to Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination, stating, “the boundary crossings that exist within posthuman cultures enable black subjects to make connections to diasporic history in the present and also imagine the future as a site of power” (2017: 8).

Fig. 2 - Season 2, Episode 1: "The Paw of the Jaguar" - Source: https://collider.com/kipo-and-the-age-of-wonderbeasts-season-2-release-date-trailer-teaser/.

Kipo’s fantasy narrative underscores transformation, being/becoming, and transgressing boundaries as principal concepts and they are central to understanding Kipo and Wolf as posthuman Black girls. Starting with Kipo, the entire narrative centres around her “being and becoming in a body marked as youthful, Black, and female.” Though her skin may be purple, she is nonetheless explicitly bi-racial: her father is Black, and her mother is Korean.[1] Her purple skin comes from her hybrid mute-human genetics enacted when her parents enhanced her with Mega-Jaguar DNA as a foetus.[2] She thus complicates the animal/human binary, one of posthumanism’s favourite boundaries to disrupt. Moreover, the visual fantasy of shapeshifting becomes a key site of tension for Kipo as she struggles to channel the jaguar part of her—changing her hands to paws, growing a tail, adapting to heightened senses—without losing herself to the mega-mute within (Fig. 2).

Fig. 3 - Season 1, Episode 6: "Ratland" - Source: https://kipo.fandom.com/wiki/Wolf/Gallery#.22Ratland.22.

Wolf, on the other hand, is clearly visually coded as Black, with a crown of 4b/4c curls and a broad nose (Fig. 3).[3] Like Kipo, she also unsettles the animal/human binary, as she was literally raised by wolves. Wolf exists as part of a lineage of “‘feral’ children,” including Mowgli and Tarzan, that childhood studies and sociology scholar Ingrid E. Castro argues are “posthuman children” (2019: 266). However, unlike Mowgli, Wolf is betrayed by her family and, in turn, lives a solitary life of survival on the surface, relying on her fighting prowess and quick wits. She even dons a blue wolf pelt as a warning to any mute that might cross her.[4] While her combat expertise and general unapproachability may seem antithetical to a discussion about joy, I argue that the fluid, artful way her battles are depicted, along with her trust in her own abilities mirrors anthropology and African American studies professor Aimee Cox’s discussion of Black girls and choreography. Cox notes that “they use their bodies to alter spaces, thereby making room for themselves…as they confront various oppressions” (Jordan-Zachery & Harris 2019: 18). Part of Wolf’s transformation is coming to see combat as only one of many tools to “make room” for her and her friends in a hostile world. [5]

Throughout the show, the girls deepen their bond in both action sequences and quiet moments, with Wolf teaching Kipo how to survive on the surface, and Kipo teaching Wolf how to let loose a little. One of the most poignant examples of radical joy occurs in the season two finale. After saving a stadium of mutes and humans from a terrifying demise in a lake of liquid gold, Kipo is trapped in her mega-jaguar form, having lost the ‘anchor’ that would allow her to transform back into her usual, two-legged self. All hope seems lost, until Wolf steps forward with tears in her eyes, saying “Kipo doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘impossible…’ and neither should we” (Kipo S2:E10). She proceeds to take the place of the anchor by grounding her friend, extoling Kipo’s traits of kindness, acceptance, and support. From the audience’s perspective, this is not a difficult argument to make, as every episode depicts Kipo’s attempts to connect with, understand, and befriend antagonistic forces, from the Timbercats, to the Umlaut Snakes, to even the series big-bad Scarlemagne.

Fig. 4 - Season 2, Episode 10: "Heroes on Fire" - Source: https://taigan-bxe.tumblr.com/post/620860264569536512/so-youve-turned-into-a-giant-pink-monster.

Moreover, Wolf expresses how having a relationship with Kipo has transformed her: “You taught me that change can be good! I mean, you taught me how to have fun! You even taught me how to sing.” In the finale’s last tense moments of desperation, Wolf turns to her joyous memories with her friends, singing “Heroes on Fire” (AKA “their song,” according to Kipo [Kipo S2:E4]) as a Hail Mary. Wolf’s voice triggers a montage of treasured memories for the mega-jaguar girl and, ultimately, allows her to transform back into her initial anthropic body (Fig. 4).

Radical, unbridled joy within a hostile world proves just as important as battle prowess in the season finale. Wolf and Kipo’s compassion, the relationships they build, and their expressions of community in the end bring Kipo back from the brink. Their adventures in the surface world help us better understand the potential empowerment that grows from the connections between posthumanism, Black girlhood, and joy. In a year that has been, to say the least, a complete dumpster fire, Kipo reminds us of the power in joy, the importance of fun, and that taking a moment to sing might be just the thing we need as we fight forward towards a reimagined tomorrow.   

**The third and final season of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts premieres on October 12 2020**

**Article published: October 9, 2020**

Notes

[1] Interestingly, this is not the case in the comic. Wolf also underwent a redesign in her move to animation, as she does not have the same markers of Blackness in the webcomic.

[2] Writer Kevin Johnson raises some concerns that Kipo being half-mute opens up the potentiality for story threads that “at worst … may take on a ‘both sides’ or a ‘reverse racism’ kind of vibe” in equating the “relationships between humans and mutes” with the relationship between “Black people and society” (n.p.). While this is a valid concern, I believe conversations about Blackness and anti-anthropocentrism can coexist and support each other, without cannibalizing one another. For an interesting, though somewhat controversial, take on the cross section of these two disciplines, please see Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out by media scholar Aph Ko.

[3] 4B & 4C are kinky/coily hair textures that bend in sharp angles like the letter Z. Think Lupita Nyong'o or John Boyega.

[4] Naming also plays an important role in Wolf’s becoming/transformation, as Kipo gives her a variety of names throughout the series, including “Wolf”.

[5] I do want to note that while I wouldn’t classify Kipo as an Afrofuturist text, the show does “[acknowledge] the significance of the past to present and future ideas of black identity” (Lillvis 2017: 6). For example, in season two’s “The Ballad of Brunchington Beach,” Team Kipo arrives at a restaurant that refuses to serve humans in a clear reference to segregation. As noted by Johnson, “many viewers will already recognize the concept: any place that refuses to serve the protagonists in any show is, at best, an obstacle, and at worst, a race metaphor … in the eyes of our Black protagonists, it’s specific, historically-fraught, and prescient” (2020).

References

Brown, Nicole Ruth. Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2009).

Castro, Ingrid E. “The Emergence of Agency After Bionuclear War: Posthuman Child—Animal Possibilities,” in Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction: Travel, Technology, Time, edited by Ingrid E. Castro and Jessica Clark (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019).

Johnson, Kevin. “How Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts Codes Blackness,” Den of Geek (June 24, 2020), available at: https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/how-kipo-and-the-age-of-wonderbeasts-codes-blackness/.

Jordan-Zachery, Julia S. and Duchess Harris. Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag; Twenty-First-Century Acts of Self-Definition, (Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2019).

Lillvis, Kristen. Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (Athens, Georga: University of Georgia Press, 2017).

Miah, Andy. “A Critical History of Posthumanism,” in Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, edited by Ben Gordijn and Ruth Chadwick (Dublin: Springer, 2008), 71-94.

Biography

Ayanni C. H. Cooper is an English PhD Candidate at the University of Florida, specializing in comic and animation studies. Her research interests include monster theory; feminist critique; gender & sexuality; science fiction & fantasy; representations of Blackness in speculative fiction; and anime & manga studies. Her dissertation project is tentatively titled “‘We Live in a Time of [Sexy] Monsters’: Desire and the Monstrous in Contemporary Visual Media.” (To put it simply, she’s curious why so many folks are attracted to monsters. It’s a very important research question.) Ayanni also co-hosts the podcast Sex. Love. Literature., which takes a semi-scholarly look at why the “sex-stuff” in media matters. When not dissertating, she enjoys playing Destinywith her family (#TitanMain), finding new cartoons to watch/comics to read, and making friends with the neighborhood cats.

You can find Ayanni on twitter (@AyanniDoesStuff), Instagram (@AyanniDoesThings), and on her website, Ayanni.com.