A Wicked Twist On the Lump Child

With diving into stories like The King Of Tars, race and religion are two distinctly important topics that are brought up. In The King of Tars, a formless child is born to a couple of different race and different religion. The mother is a white Christian, while the father is a colored Muslim. When this story was written, race and religion were so closely associated with each other that it was believed you had to be white in order to be a true Christian. Marrying someone of a different faith is sinful, and because of that sin, any resulting child could not be completely healthy or normal. Of course, today we know that this reasoning is complete nonsense, but people believed it was true for a long time. Since this crazy logic appears several times in medieval stories and texts, the sins of the family, along with mixed race and culture, bringing a curse on the child is also employed into modern day storytelling.

The story is a bit too close to fan fiction, but it does have great music!

The best example I could think of, other than Game of Thrones, is Stephen Schwartz’s musical Wicked, which is based off the book by Gregory Maguire. The story is basically a retelling of The Wizard of Oz; however, the protagonist is the Wicked Witch, named Elphaba, and it shows her descent into wickedness amongst other elements of her life. Elphaba, unknown to her but known to the audience, is born out of wedlock. Her mother committed adultery with a man from Kansas who arrived to Oz by balloon (three guesses who that is), and, as a result, Elphaba was born - with green skin and other abnormalities. Similar to The King of Tars, the parents of Elphaba are both from different cultures, her mother being native to Oz and the wizard being native to our world. Seeing that Elphaba’s mother is married, their union is also adulterous and considered sinful. Throughout the rest of her life, Elphaba causes commotion by simply being present. She is the only character in the story that can perform magic properly, she has crazy ideas about protecting animals, and, of course, everyone freaks out over her green skin tone. No matter what her good intentions are, everything she does backfires and makes her appear villainous. Elphaba carries the weight and the consequences of the sins committed by her mother and father. She is the definition of abnormal; therefore, she ends up isolating herself and losing everything.

Not exactly a lump child, but it does the trick. This story of mixed culture combined with sinful nature producing unnatural results is still used today, and in a smash hit musical for families no less. However, whatever progress we have made as a society definitely shows through. In Wicked, there is no battle of whose religion is the right one and no one’s skin tone changes based on the chosen religion. Ultimately, the wizard is seen as the fraud he is and goes to prison, and Elphaba’s mother dies after giving birth to another daughter. Neither one really wins in the end.