Dora Wilk and racial issues
For a story mostly focused on magical adventure and various love/sex shenanigans, Dora Wilk Series has surprisingly lot to say about Fantastic Racism and even makes a subtle point about real life racism without resorting to Anviliciousness. The universe Dora occupies seems to be crafted (purposefully or not) to represent the problems.Let's start with quick overview of all sides.- Heaven: what one might call the imperialists of Dora's world, Heaven is by far the most organized of all factions. Ruled by centralized government, the Archangelic Council, it has strict rules of law, and it seems as if all citizens were in service of one of seven archangels. Moreover, majority of population is connected to archangels by extended family ties. As the Designated Heroes of the world in their own eyes, they have tendency to look down on hellians and magicals - the fact that annoys everyone else.
- Hell: it was occupied even before the Fall by local demons and czarts, whom the fallen angels conquered. Entire land looks like a loose federation, the fallen archangel Lucifer being the first among equals, giving the others much freedom. However, the others princes of hell envy him the high position he has in eyes of the outside world, and anti-Fallen sentiments are still big among the original denizens.
- Vampires: due to the nature of vampirism in Dora's world, vampires are grouped into so-called covens, the leader of a coven being its absolute ruler. Each coven treats itself as if it was a separate country and each of them seeks to acquire more power. Vampiric Council, deciding the fate of their world, does little to lessen the tensions between the covens, as only the most influential vampires can belong to it. If anything, it heightens the rivalry. Their feeling of superiority can rival only this of angels.
- Werewolves: similarly to vampires, werewolves group, and those groups are called packs. They are very territorial, and the werewolf becomes pack's alpha by the way of Klingon Promotion. This makes any negotiations with werewolves complicated, as the new boss tends not to hold the view of his predecessor. Moreover, the werewolves gravitate naturally towards crime, low life and gangs, lowering the already bad opinion the rest of the world has about them even more.
- Magicals: Probably the most varied group in Dora's world, it consists of dozens of species, at all tiers from Empowered Badass Normal to Physical God. Interestingly enough, they're cosmopolitan and interspecies marriages are something of a norm. Sometimes they consider vampires and werewolves as "us" as well. However, there's a lot of old resentment against the Heaven and Hell, who conspired in previous ages to start real-life witch hunts, whose real purpose was to kill magicals. The fact that many can still remember this doesn't help.
The entire world is pretty much a powder keg, locked in a state that's perhaps two steps from cold war. The groups are full of prejudices against each other, and sometimes even find working together appalling, to the point where magical in bar owned by czart is seen as unusual at best. This is how the series starts, and then Our Heroes (that is, Dora, Miron and Joshua) come in.
The first thing Dora Wilk Series notices is that it takes specific people to start reaching out to other, so-called "enemy" groups. Miron presents the situation in which the kid raised in tolerant family decides to rebel against the parents and leaves the house. As you can't really hide against the liege lord of Hell in Hell, he lives in magical world - which, as noticed before, is the most cosmopolitan of the five. Joshua's situation is that of an outcast in his own world, friendless and with rather cold upbringing. Having no friends, or chance to make friends, in Heaven, he moves to magical world as well.
And finally, Dora. Dora has an unique position of an outsider - she was raised in Muggle family and had found out about magical world when she was eighteen. Moreover, even after finishing her training with the magicals (them again!), she spends majority of her adult life in human world. Therefore, she enters the world of magic without the baggage of stereotypes and prejudices that locals have, and refuses to listen to them before she finds out for herself what the truth is.
The thing you might've noticed in the previous paragraph is the huge presence of magicals in lives of the Trio. As it was mentioned before (twice, in fact), the magicals are the most cosmopolitan of all societies, with dozens of different races, intermarrying, having children together and considering themselves all "magicals" rather than "elves, witches, gods, banshees..." Jadowska notes here, without stating it out loud, that the society that's already partially equal is a fertile soil for the ideas of equality of all races, not just angels/demons/vampires/what have you. The Trio's "power base" is the land of magicals; the place of meetings between all groups is the land of magicals. This society works as the middle ground, on which all sides can meet and discuss their issues in peace. Even if the magicals themselves look suspiciously at angels, werewolves, vampires and hellians, they are willing to accept them because they already have the ideas of racial equality and live by them.
Finally, Jadowska points out the need to actually look over the prejudices and stereotypes of nations (or, in this case, factions) and see the truth behind them. Once Dora (and, by extension, the readers) learns more about societies other than her own, the big races turn into collections of real creatures, with characters, emotions and motivations not so different from out own. So, long story short, at closer look "others" turn out to be just like us - a good message for every story, even in our times.
