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fortressofserenity · 11 months

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Racist geeks and writers

As I said before about X-Men, even if X-Men may preach against prejudice such a story still has very prejudiced fans. I actually know one who related to the X-Men but is kind of anti-black in some regards, making fun of black people and stuff. They might not even be an isolated example, there could be more of them in the X-Men fandom than one realises.

It doesn’t help when so many popular X-Men tend to be white, that it sets the tone for how these people see themselves in. Many popular X-Men characters tend to be white and western, so for every Jubilee and Storm there’s a Kate Pryde, Rogue, Emma Frost, Jean Grey and Mystique. For every Bishop, there’s a Scott Summers, Wolverine, Charles Xavier and Nightcrawler.

Did you see a pattern that some of the more popular X-Men tend to be white? To make matters worse, as pointed out by Cheryl Lynn Eaton Storm is divorced from any black culture. She’s even worse than Black Panther because she’s divorced from an actual African culture, especially Kenyan culture at that. Kenya is a real country, you could really go there if you wanted to.

I feel when it comes to a country like Kenya, you should really get the details right to make her better represent herself as such. There are even comic book fans in African countries, so Africans aren’t that ignorant of US superheroes really. But when Storm doesn’t celebrate Boxing Day, that is the day after Christmas in both Britain and former British African colonies like Kenya, this says a lot about how little they know about Kenya.

They don’t even have actual experience with Kenyans to better know what they celebrate, do and practise, to the point where Storm is pretty much a white person’s idea of an African. Not so much Africans as they see themselves as, if you go by comics like Aya de Yopougon though it’s set in Cote D’Ivoire. Even then, I get the impression most X-Men writers aren’t black and African.

Neither are they interested in any real African country and culture, which has the effect of whitewashing Storm a lot arguably until recently. It doesn’t help when Wolverine is X-Men’s biggest breakout character, that it seems easier to bank on the more popular characters (most of them being white) than to take advantage of mutants who come from nonwestern, nonwhite countries like Nigeria and Vietnam.

When it comes to most of the X-Men, especially most popular X-Men members being white and that most X-Men writers tend to be white as well, it makes any attempts at addressing racism and exploring nonwhite cultures really awkward at times. When Kwannon was in Betsy’s body, she wanted somebody to kill her but since she’s Japanese she should’ve killed herself out of dishonour.

Xian Coy Manh might have the potential to have her nation and culture be explored more deeply, though some of the biggest problems behind her is that the writers who portray her neither have experience with Vietnam in any way nor are they interested in Vietnam. Maybe that’s why she comes off as something of an afterthought, though one who really needs a writer of Vietnamese descent to do her right.

As far as I know about Vietnam, it doesn’t use Chinese characters that much anymore. In fact, at this point more Vietnamese people use Latin orthography these days instead, they also celebrate Year of the Cat instead of Year of the Rabbit. Since 2023 is Year of the Cat, I feel Marvel missed an opportunity to showcase covers with Xian hanging out with cats to celebrate that occasion.

The fact that Vietnamese farmers still use cats for pest control could’ve coloured many Vietnamese people’s decision to have cats instead of rabbits in their version of the Chinese zodiac is a real missed opportunity, even if this gives a glimpse into Xian’s culture better. You could say that Vietnam’s not that well known as China is.

But even then, it’s interesting in its own right and something that has to be explored more in light of Xian’s heritage and upbringing. When it comes to these two mutants whose cultures are misrepresented or underrepresented in some way or another, I feel they come off as missed opportunities when it comes to exploring their cultures and countries.

I feel these portrayals could’ve further coloured some X-Men fans’ racism, in the sense that if they do get represented at all they’re either afterthoughts (Karma) or made more exotic than they really are (Storm). Whatever their portrayals, they get othered in ways most X-Men writers wouldn’t do with American and to some extent, British cultures.

Well X-Men’s no stranger to having white British writers like Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis, both of whom wrote X-Men and X-Men related stories themselves. But when it comes to nonwhite, nonwestern X-Men writers Vita Ayala’s the only example to come to mind who writes or wrote a serialised story. I can’t think of any African or Asian writer who wrote X-Men stories.

This could’ve not only coloured why Xian and Storm are written the way they are, but also how this would’ve fed into some X-Men fans’ racism in the form of ignorance. When it comes to some X-Men fans being racist, it doesn’t help when some X-Men writers are racist themselves that it’s a self-perpetuating cycle.

It is getting better these days, but much work needs to be done when it comes to representing nonwestern cultures better as well as combatting fandom racism.

#x-men #xian coy manh #ororo munroe #racism #misogynoir

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thornfield13713 · 7 years

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If you're still taking prompts for the '5 things I'd change about x' meme- The Marvel Cinematic Universe?

I am, thank you. And if we’re going for the ‘verse overall, here’s the highlight reel:

1. More female superheroes. Yes, the representation in this ‘verse is all kinds of screwy, but female superheroes is one thing they have no goddamn excuse for because the source comics have dozens of them. Janet Van Dyne, the first Wasp, actually led the Avengers for years! She-Hulk is an amazingly badass female character who needs more representation in mainstream media, Kate Bishop was Hawkeye for a while, Mockingbird exists! Captain Marvel sounds great, but do you know what would have been great? If all the Avengers had gotten their own film before their team-up. All the guys did, so our one holdout is Natasha, of the original Avengers line-up. Or, if you couldn’t come up with a plotline for a Black Widow movie, there’s always the goddamn Wasp, who is usually more interesting than Ant-Man anyway. Janet Van Dyne deserved better than ‘died to give Hank Pym angst’!

2. Better thought-out villains. Some of these villains have the potential to be very interesting - they just aren’t always used that way. Killing off your main villain at the end of almost every film doesn’t exactly help that, because you don’t get enough time to develop your villains in as much depth as they deserve. Ivan Vanko got most of his scenes cut, reducing him down almost to the level of ‘generic doomsday villain’. Loki lost most of his characterisation between Thor and The Avengers, leading to a wafer-thin plot that has been pointed out by any number of internet commenters. Kaecilius in Doctor Strange also had potential for greater depth than he ended up having, and while I understand setting up Mordo as an ally first, there are other ways of giving a villain depth, and setting up a more complicated villain later does not justify not dedicating enough attention to the villain you have now.

3. This one isn’t strictly Marvel’s fault, but I would kill to have all of Marvel’s properties under one roof. I love the Fox X-Men films, don’t get me wrong, but bringing mutants and the Fantastic Four into the MCU would be amazing, and it would mean we got to see far more of the depth and richness that characterises the comics universe. Also, it would mean that we got Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver’s original backstories, because what Whedon came up with instead was an insult to both the characters and the audience. And, provided Marvel also obeyed point number 2 up there, they might stand a chance of producing the first half-decent cinematic Doctor Doom there has ever been, because no-one else has even come close to the character from the comics. It would also allow for a far wider picture of this universe, and how it works.

4. This comes back to the ‘representation’ thing, but it’s the twenty-first century, not all your protagonists have to be white men. Nick Fury alone proves that even if you take a character originally written as white and change their ethnicity, this will not lead to people thinking of that character differently - black Nick Fury has become a hell of a lot more iconic than the original ever was, after all. Asian Danny Rand would be a good change. Oded Fehr as Doctor Strange is something I would cheerfully sell my soul for, however much I liked Cumberbatch in the role. At the very least, don’t whitewash where there are canonical minority characters who deserve representation too. For that matter, changing just a few of those epic bromances to epic romances wouldn’t be that bad - there are already internet petitions for some of them.

5. Captain America and Iron Man WERE FRIENDS! BEST FRIENDS! THAT WAS WHY CIVIL WAR HAD THE IMPACT THAT IT DID! They did not spend all their time squabbling, they got along marvellously, they! Were! The! Best! Of! Friends! And ‘foreshadowing’ Civil War by having them fight all the time? Completely destroyed the awful, gut-punch impact that their fight in the comics had because it brought the whole thing down to ‘Oh, Steve and Tony, they can never agree’. Which…no, that completely misses what made Civil War such a massive, massive thing. Because the thing about a story about a friendship being destroyed? First, you have to establish the friendship, or else what reason does the audience have to be invested at all?

#marvel cinematic universe

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