Spain in Fiction

Hispanic Heritage Month began last Sunday! 

Bit of a stressful week, but I made it through. I am currently reading Shadow of the Gods by John Gwynne, and after that will be a Batman comic, I think. And we’ll see how much Dragon Age: Inquisition I get through this weekend!

Spain in Fiction

Have you ever noticed how often historical fiction likes to portray Spain as the Evil Empire?

This isn’t a blanket condemnation of using the Spanish Empire as an antagonistic force in fiction: sometimes, it makes sense, given that the setting may be a country that is enemies with Spain at the time (The Musketeers comes to mind, though we’ll bring this up again soon). This is not going to be me arguing that Spain as a country has never done anything wrong, either: we know that’s not true, given colonialism, slavery, and, uh, Franco. A story that deals at all with the Americas during or around colonization of the territories Spain claimed are going to have to deal with the all-around douchery.

The problem is that Spain is depicted as if, historically, they had a monopoly on this douchery. This idea is historically referred to as “the Black Legend”, but I won’t refer to it too much because there’s a lot of Discourse about that, and some of the kickback against the Black Legend goes too far into the other direction, suggesting that actually, Spain never did anything wrong. And that’s… not true at all.

There’s a scene in Castlevania: Nocturne, for instance, in which Olrox, a vampire of Mexica origin, makes a comment about how he doesn’t like fanatics because he’s seen his people destroyed by armies slaughtering in the name of religion. Uh, okay, but you guys know that the Mexica Empire was doing exactly that to all of its neighbors? That part of why Spain was able to conquer Mexico was because several of the other peoples living under the foot of the Aztec Triple Alliance wanted out from under that foot? That gold and glory were also factors here? Well, of course not, we all know the Spanish were insane fanatical conquerors, right?

Marvel’s What If…? did this, too. One episode in season two had Spain trying to conquer the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk), with Queen Isabel of Spain trying to have the entire native population of the Americas brutally enslaved. This despite Spain never colonizing that far north in the Americas, and Queen Isabel actually calling for more humane treatment of indigenous Americans (which was promptly ignored by her Spanish subjects in the Americas, as we pretty much all know). The writers tried to excuse the geography issues with, “They were searching for the Fountain of Youth!” Uh, okay, but my guys, that’s not a thing that really happened in history, either.

In short, instead of the actual colonizers of this region, the English and French, they decided to stick in the Spanish, because we’re trained by pop culture that conquistadores are bad so they can be the villains here. And to be clear, I’m okay with the general view that the Conquest of Mexico was a bad thing, and the conquistadores as villains, but they weren’t the villains this situation. Like, imagine if you watched a historical science-fiction movie set in World War II in the Pacific Front, and the villains shown torturing Chinese civilians were Nazis instead of, y’know, the Imperial Japanese who were actually ones doing crappy things there? Yeah, Nazis were evil, I’m not going to argue that, but they didn’t have a monopoly on malevolence*. Pinning historical evil on a group that would not have been there paints the illusion that only that one group did something wrong.

[I should note that having an indigenous superhero, and an episode with dialogue in Kanien’kéha, IS a really cool thing, though.]

Compare this to another Marvel project, like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In that, Namor has a flashback of his backstory of his people being colonized by the Spanish–which they actually did to the Maya. The beginning of the movie also shows the French trying to steal Wakandan vibranium, showing that no, it’s not limited to one group of people trying to take advantage of others through force of arms.

And let’s hop back to The Musketeers. In that show, the main antagonistic force in the second season is Spain. And it’s true, at the time, France and Spain were gearing up for war (and to be fair, it isn’t as if the main antagonist in that series is Spanish, but he does work for them for a while). But it feels odd to see on screen, given that the novel the show is based on features tension between France and England, and England is hardly ever mentioned at all in the show. One cannot help but feel that the show, produced by BBC, doesn’t want to portray England in a negative light, and so excised Buckingham and switched the villainous faction to Spain in order to avoid dealing with it.

It feels like so often, people are grabbing onto stereotypes and being like, “Aha! Yes! The Spanish! Those people are irrational, fanatical foreigners! They will be good villains!” without reflecting that, yeah, the English also had religious persecution, tyranny, slavery, and colonization in its history.

“But the English didn’t have the Spanish Inquisition!” True, but I’m betting you can’t tell me a thing about the actual Spanish Inquisition that you didn’t pick up from pop culture, which itself is built off of English Protestant propagandists telling people that they’re much better than those nasty Spanish Catholics. If you can tell me what was the actual purpose of the Spanish Inquisition (hint: it’s not hunting witches), then maybe we can talk. This isn’t to say that the Spanish Inquisition was good–it wasn’t! It really wasn’t! But it wasn’t the torture orgy you were told about.

What I really like about Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides–which I will admit is very far from a perfect movie–the Spanish are antagonistic, and are presented as religiously motivated to destroy the Fountain of Youth. But they’re absolutely right that it’s too dangerous to use, and they’re incredibly competent at accomplishing their goals (Spain gets it done). Furthermore, England wants the Fountain, and they’re not getting it for altruistic reasons, so it’s not as if we view them as a virtuous alternative. 

There’s also the book License to Quill, which is basically a James Bond book but the main character is William Shakespeare, where our protagonist points out that despite all their posturing over the threat of a takeover by Catholic Spain, England’s goals aren’t so different, other than with Protestantism instead. Not all of that book worked for me, but that was a nice little aside.

I’m not asking that everyone take that approach, but something closer to that. Like I said, I’m not against using the Spanish Empire as an antagonistic force in fiction. By all means, do it! Especially with indigenous protagonists! But I am very tired of reading and watching fiction in which the Spanish Empire is uniquely evil in a way, and other countries, particularly England, are elevated beyond that because… essentially, the storytellers are English, or speak English, and hence therefore the English must be the good guys, and the Spanish are evil fanatics.

*...that could be a cool name for something, “Monopoly on Malevolence”

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