#but also just like... the racism from white fans in general | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jyndor · 2 months

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atla fans can be pretty orientalist ngl like TEXTBOOK orientalist.

like okay I know I know the original show is so good but it isn't perfect and there is PLENTY of room for improvement. plenty. we all knew this at the time, back when it was airing and then there was that long break between books 2 and 3. like we all knew it was great but also had its problems. idk why fans from the original run act like this show is perfect.

one of the biggest problems has always been how white the writers room was. how the creators, especially bryke, were profiting by selling the aesthetics of various asian and indigenous peoples to a us american audience.

this is how you get the borderline weird anti-indigenous focus on sexism and misogyny in the water tribes without much exploration of how sexism and misogyny impacted other groups. like actually I'm GLAD that it's toned down but still present in the live action show because sokka was mostly around women and girls for a lot of his teen years. why would HE be so over the top sexist? like in comparison with anyone else, it makes no sense. unless of course you think about it through the lens of how white colonizers tend to think of indigenous peoples - backwards.

I think it's interesting that this show is mostly being worked on by Asian and indigenous people and so many fans never even wanted to give it a chance. I know, I know- I remember the film too. but from the jump, fans have been so quick to dismiss EVERY little detail* or leak without even seeing it first.

bryke are a big part of the story, I know. but they are not all of the people who were behind it. it seems to me that a lot of the fans of this show are weirdly protective of these two white guys who decided to part from the show. they weren't forced out, they left. and yes I'm biased because I saw just how shitty they treated fans of zutara (largely girls and VERY, VERY diverse) at literal conventions, how they egged on some toxic bullying from other parts of the fanbase to the point that frankly it's never really worth engaging in non-zutara fan spaces because people are so reactive and weird about even the mention of zutara. and then these same assholes will make comparisons to reylos as if zutara fans EVER harassed poc fans and especially actors. but whatever, that's my bias. but I can respect that they also created this amazing show that I've loved for half of my life.

I still see it as a good thing that the people working on this show come from the cultures bryke and nickelodeon profited off of without giving anything back.

so I guess my question to white fans is this: if you haven't watched yet because you are mad about bryke or some of the changes you've heard about or whatever, why do you not trust people from the cultures atla draws upon to adapt this story? are you just here to consume exotic aesthetics? why are bryke the only people who can sell those aesthetics to you?

*btw I'm not talking about the sokka casting shit, that's different and should be criticized. Also Albert Kim was the showrunner of Sleepy Hollow and was complicit in racist treatment of Nicole Beharie so he is not someone I trust very much. also there are definitely critiques I have of the show but it's not bad, not even remotely. it's worth watching.

#ive got fire for atla fans always #ALWAYS lol theyve been irking me for sixteen years #ive seen black and brown girlies run out of this fandom and into only small subfandoms like zutara fan spaces and #a lot of the general atla fanbase has to answer for that #but also just like... the racism from white fans in general #they want to consume the pretty exotic aesthetic but dont want to support a show done by asian and indigenous ppl #shocking /s #atla #fandom racism #atla fandom #atla live action

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txttletale · 28 days

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can you elaborate on the reasons ? what criticisms do you disagree with?

criticisms i disagree with:

"they character assassinated jane" amiguita there was no character to assisnate.

"they character assassinated dirk" dirk is at his most interesting and likeable ever and is just about the only redeeming thing about these

"they were just written to spite the fans" if true tht would have been Epic, and Based. but they very obviously werent

"its too violent and sexual for cheap shock humour" did you. read homestuck, the web comic? what were you Expecting... also like it or not the sexual content isnt just random or gratuitous it is obviously trying to be a conclusion to the whoel coming-of-age theme of homestuck as a work.

"so-and-so is out of character" homestuck characters are malleable little dolls that can be rearranged to suit the narrative at a whim. this is true about all fictional characters ofc but it is like explicitly textually metaphysically true in homestuck

my criticisms:

the heavy-handed political messaging is fucking tedious and awful and so profoundly of its time in a bad way. its clearly a reaction to trump but it doesnt have anything interesting to say about him or fascism or racism or anything, really, except, um. Cheeto in the white house?. the whole Evil Jane plot is too stupid and contrived for the sake of the satire to take seriously but also its awful satire written by liberals who think fascism as invented in 2016 by the orange man

god can we fucking talk about how fucking embarassing the obama shit is. jesus fucking christ. for a start it's a callback to a running jhoke in homestuck that is straight up just super racist. and they decide to pivot from the joke being 'its funny that theres a black president', which is good, but they pivot it to 'obama seems so heroic and magical now that we're stuck with the Orange Man', which, admittedly, is better than Being Racist, but also sucks shit. he killed people amiguitas.

'post-canon' is cheap bullshit. like, the work makes a big deal about tryng to talk about What Canon Is, without ever acknowledging the concept of, like, IP law. claiming to just be a non-canon continuation like any other when it's made by people with the Official Exclusive Legal Rights just feels hollow and detooths any liberatory/deconstructive potential there. unironically my opinion of it would go up like tenfold if it had been actually published in AO3 instead of just joking about it.

in general i think that all of the attempt to deconstruct fiction or storytelling is rooted in a really weird and flawed model of storytelling. a lot of it seems to be taking an extremely long route to writing something bad on purpose and then saying 'see, if you wrote something like this, it would be bad'. Okay. i like deconstructive collapsing narrative shit in e.g. if on a winter's night a traveller because i think calvino has trenchant and interesting insights about literature and storytelling. i do think hussie also has those but they essentially dropped and explored all of them in homestuck and the epilogues just seem like an attempt to connect ohomstuck's disparate and contradictory approaches to Narrative into one overarching schemata and then crtiique that schemata, which i think is a doomed project that results in little of interest to me.

#ask #homestuck

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maquet591 · 5 days

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We need to talk about the Watcher "fans".

These are the top comments on Shane’s IG post. Just look at the number of likes.

“Steven Lim is a greedy, manipulative evil CEO that twists his white co-founder's hands and forces the said co-founder into his will!!!” – this narrative is being prevalent in this fandom since April 19. People harassed him all across social media on every platform. People wrote nasty comments not only to his social media accounts but also to his wife and friends.

People made a Change.org hilariously dumb petitions to have him leave the CEO post.

People gleefully demonize and tear down his reputation. Twist his words out of context in to something vile. Weaponize the years old inside jokes his friends made on camera.

“This is not racism!!!” they say. “These are just the facts!!!”

No they aren’t. And here’s why:

because this

is the same as this:

Covert racism in language, or coded racism, is the deployment of common stereotypes or tropes to elucidate a racially charged idea. Rather than expressly perpetuating racist tropes, covert linguistic racism is seen as rational or "common sense", and many are not aware of its impact.

Racial stereotypes. Racial or cultural stereotyping refers to generalizing a group based on a simplified set of norms, behaviors, or characteristics.

The Yellow Peril (also the Yellow Terror, the Yellow Menace and the Yellow Specter) is a racist color metaphor that depicts the peoples of East and Southeast Asia[a] as an existential danger to the Western world.

Fu Manchu is a fictional character created by Arthur Ward, a music hall writer and journalist in London in the early 1900s. Writing under the pseudonym Sax Rohmer, Ward had absolutely no knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese people – but his invention of a Chinese supervillain struck a chord in Victorian Britain and became a smash hit.

Fu Manchu was the original fictional Asian villain, a trope which became embedded in popular culture and Western psyche spawning spin-offs, spoofs, pop songs, video games and even consumer goods. But how damaging is Fu Manchu and how much can he tell us about modern Asian racism?

Ward wrote Fu Manchu as the personification of the so-called Yellow Peril threat: exotic, alien and inhuman, a mastermind boasting degrees from top universities. Using sinister powers to control minds, he aimed to undermine Western civilisation.

"This led to the idea that the Chinese were deceiving – they weren't being honest, they weren't revealing who they really are as people. This spawned into stories of Chinese as cheats and liars and deceitful – never giving you the truth, always fabricating."

Seven Lim being labeled as “greedy” “evil” and “manipulative” (of his white co-founder) is rooted in Anti-Asian racism. Whether people admit it or not.

Racism is not always derogatory slurs or white hoods. Racism is also casual micro-aggressions and putting people of color in the metaphorical boxes of harmful stereotypes. Racism is twisting the narrative and shaping it into a vile stereotype straight from the 19th century.

Also, let's not forget that people are happy to jump on Ryan in the similar way for the same reasons.

#watcher #watcher entertainment #steven lim #watchertv #watcher tv #shane madej #ryan #ryan bergara #tw racism

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wetsocksinbed · 8 months

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shit people need to hear about COD:

Ghost isn’t some broken uwu boy. Infantilising assault victims is demeaning and disrespectful

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, König is extremely overrated for a character that only appears as a playable operator and not as anything in the campaign

You’re allowed to ship whoever you want, it’s a free world, but throwing a tantrum when people say they don’t ship GhostSoap or Korangi, and calling them homophobic (I’ve seen this too many times at this point) is disgusting and you’re essentially stereotyping us LGBTQ individuals as aggressive and pushy when it comes to queer ships. The characters of Ghost and Soap are canonically coded to be like brothers, and you need to stop thinking that a headcannon is the same as real cannon

Stop replacing Gaz with König, it’s giving ✨racism✨

Alex, König, Farah, Alejandro, Rudy and Horangi are not part of TF141, stop including them in it?????

König and Ghost are canonically enemies and wouldn’t have each other on speed dial just tag your fics as OOC at this point

the entirety of the Call of Duty franchise was coded for straight white “alpha male” boys who live in their mothers basements, stop acting like it’s anything more than that. You won’t find the representation you’re looking for in it and honestly with the way it’s headed at the moment, I don’t think you ever will

we can tell if you’ve never played the games based on how you write the fics. You don’t have to be a game fan or player, but at least do your research on the characters you’re writing about before you hit “post”

Makarov and Graves are terrible people and shouldn’t be idolised. Before you tag me with your “let people do what they want” let me remind you that Graves is canonically racist. @mockerycrow made a good post about why Makarov is a shit person and I recommend you read it

All of the characters have their flaws. Ghost, Soap, Gaz, Price, they all have done bad things. Price is known to commit war crimes if it means getting the mission done

König having social anxiety doesn’t mean he’s a broken husk. You can function completely fine with the disorder if you can find a way to distance yourself from who you are as a person. Say, like, constantly wearing a mask? I promise you that the Austrian soldier wouldn’t be a sobbing mess because he got looked at funny

Also, he is only obsessed over because of his mask and the weird obsession people on this app have with infantilising people with trauma and mental illnesses (see first paragraph regarding Ghost)

The way some of the fans obsess over the actors is uncomfortable and genuinely creepy. It’s like this generation thinks that anything behind a screen isn’t real and can’t feel anything. They’re people who act. They’re not the characters you play.

feel free to add more to this, I’m tired and sick and wanted to rant

notes:

don’t attack me with the “yeah but not me” shit. Obviously I don’t mean everyone.

this doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the games the way you want, it just means don’t fucking police it and gatekeep it and expect everyone to accept your interpretation of it

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tangibletechnomancy · 4 months

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The (Personal) Is (Political)

~7 hours, Dall-E 3 via Bing Image Creator, generated under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

Or, Dear Microsoft and OpenAI: Your Filters Can't Stop Me From Saying Things: An interactive exercise in why all art is political and game of Spot The Symbols

A rare piece I consider Fully Finished simply as a jpeg, though I may do something physical with it regardless. "Director commentary" below, but I strongly encourage you to go over this and analyze it yourself before clicking through, then see how much your reading aligns with my intent.

Elements I told the model to add and a brief (...or at least inexhaustive) overview of why:

Anime style and character figures - Frequently associated with commercial "low" art and consumer culture, in East Asia and the English-speaking world alike, albeit in different ways - justly or otherwise. There is frequently an element of racism to the denigration of anime styles in the west; nearly any American artist who has taken formal illustration classes can tell you a story of being told that anime style will only hinder them, that no one will hire them if they see anime, or even being graded more harshly and scrutinized for potential anime-esque elements if they like anime or imply that they may like anime - including just by being Asian and young. On the other hand, it is true that there is a commercial strategy of "slap an anime girl on it and it will sell". The passion fans feel for these characters is genuine - and it is very, very exploitable. In fact, this commercialization puts anime styles in particular in a very contentious position when it comes to AI discussions!

Dark-skinned boy with platinum and pink [and blue] hair - Racism and colorism! They're a thing, no matter how much the worst people in the world want you to think they're long over and "critical race theory" is the work of evil anti-American terrorists! I chose his appearance because I knew that unless I was incredibly lucky, I would have to fight with this model for multiple hours to get satisfactory results on this point in particular - and indeed I did. It was an interesting experience - what didn't surprise me was how much work it took me to get a skin color darker than medium-dark tan; what did surprise me was that the hair color was very difficult to get right. In anime art, for dark skin to be matched with light hair and eyes is common enough to be...pretty problematic. Bing Image Creator/Dall-E, on the other hand, swings completely in the opposite direction and struggles with the concept of giving dark-skinned characters any hair color OTHER than black, demanding pretty specific phrasing to get it right even 70% of the time. (I might cynically call this yet another illustration against the pervasive copy-paste myth...) There is also much to say about the hair texture and facial features - while I was pleased to see that more results than I expected gave me textured hair and/or box braids without me asking for it, those were still very much in the minority, and I never saw any deviation from the typical anime facial structures meant to illustrate Asian and white characters. Not even once!

Pink and blue color palette - Our subject is transgender. Bias self-check time: did you make that association as quickly as you would with a light-skinned character, or even Sylveon?

Long hair, cute clothes, lots of accessories - Styling while transmasc is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation, doubly so if you're not white. In many locations, the medical establishment and mainstream attitude demands total conformity to the dominant culture's standard conventional masculinity, or else "revoking your man card" isn't just a joke meant to uphold the idea that men are "better" than women, but a very real threat. In many queer communities, especially online, transmascs are expected to always be cute femboys who love pink (while transfems are frequently degraded and seen as threats for being butch), and being Just Some Guy is viewed as inherently a sign of assimilationism at best and abusiveness at worst. It is an eternal tug-of-war where "cuteness" and ornamentation are both demanded and banned at the same time. Black and brown people are often hypermasculinized and denied the opportunity to even be "cute" in the first place, regardless of gender. Long hair and how gender is read into it is extremely culture-dependent; no matter what it means to you, if anything, the dominant culture wherever you are will read it as it likes.

Trophies and medals - For one, the trans sports Disk Horse has set feminism back by nearly 50 years; I'm barely a Real History-Remembering Adult and yet I clearly remember a time when the feminist claim about gender in sports was predominantly "hey, it's pretty fucked up that sports are segregated by sex rather than weight class or similar measures, especially when women's sports are usually paid much less and given weirdly oversexualized uniforms," but then a few loud living embodiments of turds in the punch bowl realized that might mean treating trans people fairly and now it's super common for self-proclaimed feminists - mostly white ones - to claim that the strongest woman will still never measure up to the weakest man and this is totally a feminist statement because they totally want to PROTECT women (with invasive medical screenings on girls as young as 12 to prove they're Really Women if they perform too well, of course). For two, Black and brown people are stereotyped as being innately more sporty, physically strong, and, again, Masculine(TM) than others, which frequently intersects with item 1...and if you think it only affects trans women, I am sorry my friend but it is so much worse and more extensive than you think.

Hearts - They mean many things. Love. Happiness. Cuteness. Social media engagement?

TikTok - A platform widely known and hated around these parts for its arcane and deeply regressive algorithm; I felt it deserved to be name/layout/logodropped for reasons that, if they're not clear already, should become so in the final paragraph.

Computers, cameras and cell phones - My initial specification was that one of the phones should be on Instagram and another on TikTok, which the model instead chose to interpret as putting a TikTok sticker on the laptop, but sure, okay. They're ubiquitous in the modern day, for better and for worse. For all the debate over whether phones and social media are Good For Us or Bad For Us, the fact of the matter is, they seem to be a net positive-to-neutral, whose impacts depend on the person - but they do still have major drawbacks. The internet is a platform for conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and dangerous hoaxes to spread farther than ever before. Social media culture leaves many people feeling like we're always being watched and every waking moment of our lives must be Perfect - and in some senses, we are always being watched these days. Digital privacy is eroding by the day, already being used to enforce all the most unjust laws on the books, which leads to-

Pigs - I wrote the prompt with the intention that it would just be a sticker on the laptop, but instead it chose to put them everywhere, and given that I wanted to make a somewhat stealthy statement about surveillance, especially of the marginalized...thanks for that, Dall-E! ;)

Alligators - A counter to the pigs; a short-lived antifascist symbol after...this.

Details I did not intend but love anyway:

The blue in the hair - I only prompted for platinum and pink in the hair, but the overall color palette description "bled" over here anyway, completing the trans flag, making it even more blatant, and thus even more effective as a bias self-check.

The Macbook - I only specified a laptop. Hilariously ironic, to me, that a service provided through Bing interpreted "laptop" as "Macbook" nearly every time. In my recent history, 22 out of 24 attempts show, specifically, a Macbook. Microsoft v. OpenAI divorce arc when? ;) But also, let us not forget Apple's role in the ever-worsening sanitization of the internet. A Macbook with a TikTok sticker (or, well, a Tiikok sticker - recognizable enough) - I can think of little more emblematic of one of the main things I was complaining about, and it was a happy accident. Or perhaps an unhappy one, considering what it may imply about Apple's grip on culture and communications.

Which brings me to my process:

Generated over ~7 hours with Dall-E 3 through Bing Image Creator - The most powerful free tool out there for txt2img these days, as well as a nightmare of filters and what may be the most disgustingly, cloyingly impersonal toxic positivity I've ever witnessed from a tool. It wants to be Art(TM), yet it wants to ban Politics(TM); two things which are very much incompatible - and so, I wanted to make A Controversial Statement using only the most unflaggable, innocuous elements imaginable, no matter how long it took.

All art is political. All life is political. All our "defaults" are cultural, and therefore political. Anything whatsoever can be a symbol.

If you want all art to be a substance-free "look at the pretty picture :)" - it doesn't matter how much you filter, buddy, you've got a big storm coming.

#ai art #generated art #dall-e 3 #bing image creator

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graffitibible · 2 years

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genuinely confused wdym by gerard way white saviorism

you asked me this about 3 weeks ago, and i'm sorry it took me so long to get to it. i had to think very hard about how i was going to answer this one, because i want to be transparent in just how frustrating i find this issue without drawing a lot of fire from really pissed off my chem fans who hate the idea of my daring to speak up against their perfect white fav (which has happened often, and continues to happen often. fortunately i'm pretty immune to this by now but i do find it very annoying)

i want to be very transparent in that i think that pretty much everyone can benefit from the idea that their favs are flawed. i'm very aware of the flaws and missteps that people i admire, both personally and professionally, have committed in their lives, and it is down to my own sense of morality over whether that's a dealbreaker for me. i don't like the idea of calling out bad behavior for the sake of clout or whatever. but i do care about not people being spoken over when they point out a legitimate criticism, and that is the bottom line here.

below the cut, i'm going to be discussing some very heavy topics: racism of all flavors is the most prevalent one, but i'm also going to touch (briefly) on topics such as antisemitism, incest, and abuse.

and i am also, in general, going to be saying a lot of very unkind things.

when it comes to criticisms of the scene, of narrative writing, of mistakes that people make...my chemical romance, and gerard way in particular, are consistently rendered immune. when we discuss misogyny in the scene in the early and mid aughts, my chem's name never comes up (despite the fact that bullets, their first album, most certainly has lyrics that certainly evoke the same violent misogyny present in a lot of works from that era). when we discuss racism within the scene, my chem is never really discussed at length except perhaps to point out that ray toro is a latino man who is either ignored or sexualized (or both) by a deeply racist fanbase. there is a tendency, within these spaces, to give my chem the benefit of the doubt where the same grace is not extended to others.

this is what i mean by "white saviorism." because gerard way's whiteness in particular protects them from a lot of this. and i say this because of all the things that has made it deeply uncomfortable to interact with broad swathes of my chem's fanbase, the racism has unquestionably been the number one deterrent. there is a very unique brand of racism present within my chem spaces - and i know i am not the only person of color who feels this way, because i've spoken to many who can say the same - that is particularly violent, particularly virulent, and particularly ingrained. experiences with this, along with my own growing distaste for gerard way as a writer, has soured my experience with the music so tremendously that i can no longer really interact with it at length.

i am not, however, above citing my sources. so. let’s talk about racism in gerard way’s writing, shall we?

i have always been up front about the fact that i do not find gerard way to be a particularly inspired, interesting, or good writer. i find most of their work to be aggressively mediocre and highly derivative. but my own personal opinion of their work has very little bearing on the extremely racist rhetoric that upholds a distressing amount of it. here is where i'm going to link a pretty informative twitter thread that outlines a lot of these instances in detail, but it is by no means exhaustive.

it's in the umbrella academy comics, wherein the main characters are all white despite being children taken from "all over the world." it's in the orientalist racist caricatures of the vampire viet cong group that the heroes square up against. it's in the casual instances of slurs that have cropped up several times in their works without any understanding of the impact those words have (an anti-indigenous slur in the umbrella academy comics, an anti-romani slur in the killjoys national anthem comics - which, i should state, came out in 2020). it's in the appalling writing decision to, in national anthem, make the sole black character the character with "animal powers" who rips out adversary's throats on all fours. it's in the frequent and persistent sexualization of women of color, particularly asian women. it's in the colorism involved in the interplay between mike milligram (a white man), code blue (a latina woman), and jaime ramirez (their mixed child), wherein jaime's skin tone shifts at the drop of a hat depending on which of his parental figures is in the frame (code blue is dead by the time the story picks up properly, but her sister, code red, effectively raises him...and he ends up staying with his father).

and it is unquestionably, overwhelmingly present in danger days. this is a danger days blog so this is the area in which i have the most research, so i want to be very clear when i say this:

racism is an insidious, incontrovertible, and inextricable foundation of the very conceptual underpinnings behind danger days and all its associated works.

the orientalism is baked into the very aesthetic of the album. better living industries is a japanese mega-company that takes everything over, the big bad of the franchise. the asian "aesthetic" is all over the canon in the music videos and comics: non-asian characters are seen wearing it, it's in all the marketing and even present on the album itself, wherein a woman is clearly heard speaking japanese on the "party poison" track. there was also the baffling inclusion of the "clown monk" character that was cut from the music videos back in 2010, wherein a white man is wandering around wearing buddhist robes (they inexplicably liked this concept so much that they brought it back for the national anthem comics which, again, i will reiterate: came out in 2020).

this is not surprising. danger days is deeply derivative in concept (up to and including the name itself), and because most of its influences come from cyberpunk dystopia fiction from the 80s, most obviously the 1980s film blade runner. works of fiction in that vein frequently draw from the idea of "yellow peril," and are rooted in the extremely racist and xenophobic rhetoric that western civilization will be invaded and dismantled by the evil, scary asians. the end result is a concept of a "dystopia" that is mired in the very stereotypical fears of the time: fears of an east asian surveillance state invading the west, fears of the all-powerful homogenized "other," and so on.

this did not stop gerard way from exotifying and fetishizing the fUCK out of all their asian characters though!!! the director of better living industries gets to be the primary major asian character in the killjoys california comics, and she spends a good chunk of it in dominatrix gear, with a whip to boot - both villain and sex object. the comic’s sex workers, referred to as “pornodroids,” are all asian-coded and, although we get one of the comic’s two same-sex pairings (3/4 of the characters involved in said pairings are dead by the comics’ end), the characters of red and blue spend the entirety of their screen time in the highly sexualized apparel of their occupations. there’s also the character of korse’s boyfriend, who does not get a name and spends all of his screen time lounging around shirtless in korse’s apartment. nice of gway to reduce the only asian dude to eye candy fridged for korse’s manpain. i guess.

also, i should not fail to mention - the killjoys california and danger days sections of canon are INCREDIBLY white for pieces of fiction that take place in california, which is one of the most racially diverse areas in the states. in terms of latino characters, we get jet star (by virtue of being played by ray toro in the music video, though i should point out that there is no guarantee that this is actually reflective of jet star’s true appearance, since none of the killjoy appearances are necessarily 1:1 with those of the band in the comics), and we get...POSSIBLY vaya and vamos, who are ambiguously brown and have names in spanish which implies they might be latine (but given that this is california and most of the population speaks spanish, is not necessarily a given). we also get volume, the sole black character, who gets a handful of lines before being unceremoniously killed off within moments of meeting him. the girl’s mother is definitely drawn as a woman of color, but she gets one line, no name, and the girl herself is drawn as very straightforwardly white and considered to have a “fair complexion” in the comics.

this trend unfortunately continues into national anthem, wherein there’s certainly a more diverse cast, but unfortunately, very little of that cast actually gets concrete development. mike milligram is our central protagonist, our sole white character (gerard way basically only ever commits to writing white protagonists)...and he’s also the only one of them who gets an arc of any kind. code blue (a latina woman, and his girlfriend) is fridged for his manpain. code red, blue’s sister, does not get nearly as much focus on her grief despite losing someone she knew for much longer than mike ever did. jaime, mike and blue’s child, resents red for raising him and chooses to stay with his birth father once the events of the comics are over. i’ve touched on how animax, our sole black character, is given “animal powers” and is pictured several times brutally ripping apart his enemies, but i should also point out that his big character motivation is - no joke - rosa parks. as in, rosa parks being erased from history, and he wants to stop it (these comics were weird, and also incredibly bad). everyone else has a deeply personal motivation save for animax, whose motivation is basically that he wants people to not forget that the civil rights movement like, happened.

there’s also the instance of kara jeong, or kara 100%. this is the one that really makes me grind my teeth, because she’s frequently praised as a cornerstone for trans representation. and i agree that having more trans women of color in comics is great! but this does not erase the fact that, like literally every other asian character gerard way has ever written, she is very much sexualized. her job as a model means that “it was essential that she was good looking” and it is not as egregious an example as, say, the director in the california comics...but it’s an unsettling addition to a constant pattern. there are a lot of shots of kara’s bare neck and shoulders and long legs, and all that on top of the fact that, like anyone who isn’t mike milligram, she gets very little characterization at all...well, it’s not a great look.

these are the issues in gerard’s writing that are the most frequently dismissed and ignored. this post is horribly long to begin with, so i don’t want to carry on (ha...ha....), but i want it on record that i very much could. this does not even begin to touch upon the bizarre inclusion of a constant incest undertone in almost everything gerard way writes (the umbrella academy is the most obvious here, but even in the killjoys canons...red and blue are lesbian lovers in california while being sisters in national anthem, and that’s kind of a little uncomfortable, all things considered), nor does it address gerard’s insistence on including very homogenous abusive backstories for no reason besides, i guess, character angst (and these abusive backstories all involve a physically abusive male figure, because i guess this is the only kind of abusive relationship gerard way can visualize).

[EDIT: just remembered, because i forgot to mention it (knew i was forgetting something) - there's also quite a bit of antisemitism present in the umbrella academy comics that is further exacerbated in the show. i'm not the best equipped person to talk about that (i've only watched the show up to s2, at which point i kinda got sick of that garbage enough to just tap out of it), and i also have only looked over the tua comics a few times as opposed to the show, which is not run or primarily written by gerard way. that being said, he's definitely a creative consultant on it, so...i think maybe they should've reconsidered making reginald hargreeves a baby-stealing lizard man and having the bad guys all speak to each other in yiddish, possibly.]

let me be the first to say...none of this surprises me. these are all pitfalls i’ve seen white writers (and writers of color with internalized issues) commit as well. and i also, as well, want to make it clear that i imagine very little of these appalling writing decisions were committed with active malice. i sincerely doubt that anyone involved in these writing processes steepled their fingers and cackled wickedly over what crimes they would commit to their many brown fans.

i want to be very, very clear here. i lay all of this out not to “shame” gerard way or write a “callout post” or anything to that effect. i want to be utterly transparent in that i think gerard way’s racism is as mediocre and unremarkable as their writing is: derivative, lazy, shallow, and incredibly commonplace.

and that is where the idea of “gerard way white saviorism” comes from. because these are all, individually, acts of horribly insensitive, damaging, and deeply racist rhetoric that would unquestionably be addressed if it were anyone else doing them. but because it’s gerard way, and the internet loves gerard way, and everyone has decided that gerard way is their white liberal fav who can do no wrong...like the case with everything else surrounding my chemical romance, they get a pass. they are exempt.

this is far from everything. it’s just what i can remember at the moment. i am not the first person of color to point this shit out. i imagine i will be ignored, much like every other fan of color who has made these points in the past. people don’t like to imagine that gerard way can be capable of these sorts of oversights. they don’t like to think about it. they want to persist in painting their very ordinary, centrist, white liberal fav as someone whose every word is deeply progressive and insightful and flawless. because, consistently, they get the benefit of the doubt where others, especially folks of color, do not.

so no one talks about it. no one talks about how gerard way’s writing is consistently racist in a very clear and distinct way that no one wants to address, making it more insidious. no one wants to talk about the mind-bogglingly racist conceptual underpinnings holding up the entire danger days album. no one wants to talk about how gerard, and all of my chemical romance accepted, or at the very least tolerated, bob bryer’s overt antiblack racism for years, for nearly a decade, and never said a word.

no one wants to talk about it. because that would mean they’d have to come to terms with their white savior not being so perfect.

so they don’t.

and shit like this is why i find the overwhelming majority of my chemical romance fan spaces to be deeply unwelcoming to someone like myself: a brown person who tries to call out racism when i see it. and i know i’m not the only one.

#ask #anon #z speaks #gerard way //#im...not going to maintag this. feel free to reblog it though.#posts that are the equivalent of firing a couple shots into the air to keep the rent low lol

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professorcalculusstanaccount · 1 year

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hi! loving your art. I was watching your awesome stories/gifs and I was wondering: how did Chang develop his feelings for Tintin? Did he discover them before or after him? How did he react and why? (English is not my first language so if you see a grammatical mistake, I'm sorry. Also, sorry if so many questions made you feel like you were in a philosophy exam)

Thank you so much! As a contrast to the rest of the Marlinspike team I'm writing Chang as someone who makes friends and develops crushes pretty easily!

I imagine he's had a crush on Tintin for some time, possibly from when they first met. He's been at the mercy of his circumstances for most of his life until that point - Tintin basically makes him feel capable of doing stuff.

He's pretty heartbroken after the Blue Lotus. Tintin doesn't contact him for years. Chang is struggling to adjust to his new family and is failing at school, having missed out on a good education for a few years prior. Until Tibet he feels pretty hopeless, he will never live up to the time when he took down a drug ring.

His near death experience in Tibet shakes him out of this rut. He starts to travel and take up hobbies like dance and photography. Didi trains him in some basic martial arts. Tintin makes an effort to actually stay in touch this time. Chang has some abandonment issues as he's frequently lost people throughout his life, so he's someone who's willing to give people second chances, even if they've hurt him badly. Chang thinks he's well over his crush on Tintin when he comes around to Belgium for his studies, but falls for him again very quickly!

Unlike Tintin, Chang is a lot more comfortable with who he is. He's used to being the odd one out and has generally low expectations for himself, so just goes with the flow.

Below I talk a little with how I'm going about writing him and the historical context surrounding this, cw for mentions of racism (sinophobia) and queerphobia:

I'm writing Chang as bi, I thought it would be interesting to explore as Asian men were perceived differently in the 30s compared to today. While Asian men in the West are currently heavily desexualised in the early 20th century they were stereotyped as predatory and deviant. In London a lot of Chinese immigrants were male dockworkers, so when they married white women there was a lot of fearmongering about predatory and disloyal Chinese men.

A lot of depictions of Asian men in Western media reflected these stereotypes (and often used queercoding to push the idea of Asian men being animalistic seducers - General Henry Chang in Shanghai Express (1932) was written to be bisexual while posing as a threat to the white leads). Some examples off the top of my head include Hishuru Tori from The Cheat (1915) and The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). Novels frequently depicted Chinese drug lords with borderline supernatural powers in manipulation.

On the other hand I've noticed how fans frequently depict Chang as someone who's submissive, demure and soft, which ignores how ridiculously brave and proactive he is in canon (stealing documents from police officers, charging into a man immediately after getting shot at by a machine gun, I could go on!). It's a common example of Fandom Racism (not accusing anyone specifically, it's just a trend I've noticed.)

When writing Chang I'm kinda reckoning with two different eras. From a contemporary angle I'm writing him as a love interest, which as an Asian guy I rarely see in media today. I also gotta consider his own time and context, how he would navigate being a queer Chinese guy, and how that would affect his relationship with others and himself.

#asks #fanart #tintin #adventures of tintin #chang #tinchang #gif #animation #2d animation #comic #racism cw #biphobia cw #i am Absolutely overthinking this whole thing but i will not stop #tldr chang falls in love easily #he has a small crush on tintin from the blue lotus #gets his heart broken #meets tintin again and they rebuild their friendship #and he falls for him again #the blue lotus

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mutfruit-salad · 13 days

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i find the way fans are already shipping cooper with lucy over her black love interest very telling of the clueless white supremacy and media illiteracy in the fandom. coop and lucy are obviously being setup as a father-daughter duo who need to learn caution/kindness from each other to survive, but these weirdos can’t have their white-man fave without a self-insert stand-in for 1 season. and the way people are glorifying cooper’s character is a load of bs - a morally greg white guy who realises he endorsed and was sympathetic to a massive war crime/political injustice… so he goes on to indiscriminately kill/hurt more people who have no idea of, nor say in the bigger picture that he was complicit in… is sooo boring and nothing new. also, giving him a biracial daughter as an accessory to show he’s Not Racist isn’t something we’ve seen half of a million fuckin times before 🤪 the way the show back-tracked on fallout’s message of blind american nationalism and militarism being a problem to It’s All Capitalism’s Fault, seemingly in reaction to the US currently endorsing and aiding in foreign war crimes, and past ones becoming common-knowledge, is horseshit on a platter.

I find the complete lack of a character for his daughter really horrifying- how she only exists to die dramatically for the sake of his sadness. It's odd because his wife is a well-established important character, yet their daughter is not allowed to be a person.

Fallout, in general, has had a habit of completely ignoring racism- presenting the prewar world as some fully integrated post racism utopia. Which is weird when the games regularly display overt anti Chinese (and broader anti Asian) sentiments in prewar logs and ads. This is a problem both the classic games AND the bethesda games have- racism has always been a touchy subject to the devs of the series and it seems like every game they've been content to ignore it, occasionally invoking it for horror or stumbling headlong into depicting it without realizing.

The way Ghoulgins regrets his past and just takes it out on everyone around him is absurd and plays into a lot of very hostile ideas the character peddles.

People shipping Ghoulgins with Lucy is baffling to me also considering he spends the entire series physically abusing her. People just don't want to acknowledge Max's existence, I have noticed. I know her and Ghoulgins get closer by the end, but it's after he's done just unspeakably cruel things to her- and you're right that it is absolutely framed as a father/daughter relationship.

I would also like to point out that the series has always criticized capitalism as well- but would generally frame it as sort of tangled up in American imperial ambition- with one feeding into the other. They were two halves of the same coin.

Vault Tec's entire existence in the classic games was selling smoke- profiting off of the extreme tension and stress of US military buildup- a process which would always inevitably end in disaster: either with Vault Tec going under or brinksmanship coming to its inevitable end.

Vault Tec (and the entire idea of luxury bunkers as a whole) WAS a critique of capitalism, and how it goes hand-in-hand with the American military industrial complex. It was selling the fear of annihilation to the populace. They didn't need to be some secretive controlling force to achieve any of this.

Making Vault Tec the sole antagonist, and the driving force of the apocalypse, is both deeply conspiratorial AND undermines the Cold War roots the series has always had- replacing the fear of American military buildup with a sort of hateful simplicity.

#fallout #fallout new vegas #fallout show

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bubblinelovechild · 11 months

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The RWBY fandoms treatment of Adam makes me very uncomfortable

This is very long sorry I was rambling <3

There’s something really odd about the dedication RWBY fans have to hating Adam. So much so that they’ll admit the writing of the WF is racist but refuse to admit that Adam a member of the white fang also suffered from that racist writing.

There’s this weird dedication to pretending there are no problems with the choices made around Adams character and vilifying literally everyone who tries to talk about it, for the sake of continuing to blindly hate him. The fandom seems to struggle with understanding that the show is fictional and everything that happens in it is a direct choice of its writers. Y’all talk about Adam like he is a real person who has personally offended you irl. Just a huge lack of media literacy tbh.

A white man wrote a civil rights group, that he admittedly based off the black panthers, as the generic bad guys of his shitty anime knockoff and made a central theme of the show the idea that fighting against your oppression violently makes you just as bad if not worse than your oppressors. Then he mad the leader of that group a generic abusive meanie bad guy. Who essentially is what white supremacists think civil rights activist are all the way down to being the fictional equivalent of a black supremacist.

When there was backlash to this he made a knockoff Malcom X and then killed her in her only scene and made a character whose ideology is basically sit down and lick the feet of your oppressors and had the audacity to say he was based off of MLK. How the fuck do you base a character off of somebody without doing basic research on them because contrary to what people seem to believe MLK was not a doormat and this is a conversation for a different day but I’m sick and tired of his memory being weaponised against black people.

What’s worse is that Adam is the only character portrayed as actually doing something to fight racism. Ghira’s faction is only ever seen fighting against other groups. I don’t know if y’all know this but that’s not how the civil rights movement worked. Most of the leaders didn’t agree on methods but they coexisted because the main goal was the liberation of black people and they knew they had to coexist. MLK did not go around calling the cops on revolutionaries he disagreed with.

The problems with Adam and the WF are not separate and cannot be. Most of what’s wrong with the Faunus plot line is the way the show handles Adam. The choices made with his writing cannot be separated from those they made with the WF overall. Adams choice to kill his attackers to keep himself and other Faunus safe, from people literally trying to kill them, is treated the way it is because of the stance they took with WFs writing. When Adam kills a human supremacist trying to kill Ghira you’re supposed to see it as an extreme and the beginning of his turn to evil. Adam isn’t a real person every descisiom he makes is informed by the white writers of the show. Why would the bias they displayed writing the WF not apply to him?

Some of you have been abused and relate to Blake in that sense, a lot of you seem to be projecting your abusers onto Adam. I’m sorry you went through that but you are not excused from buying into racist rhetoric. It’s incredibly uncomfortable as a black person to watch people talk about how “healing” it was for them to watch a civil rights leader admittedly inspired by black people slapped around and killed by two white women. It is anger inducing to watch fans celebrate “queer representation” dancing on the corpse of a monumental disrespect to black people and our history.

RWBY doesn’t even handle abuse well tbh and most of the queer rep is not that great, there are many shows that do it so much better, there is actually no excuse for hanging on to the black people are bad for fighting against racism show.

#before you start no i don’t give a shit about bumblebee #this really isn’t about them #i wouldn’t have had a problem of killing the civil rights leader wasn’t treated as a bee moment #this is probably the only post I’ll make on that show #im going back to strictly reblogs #let’s hope this doesn’t get me death threats #rwde

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fitsofdespair · 2 months

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i have hesitated to say anything before now. in part because i removed myself from fandom discourse and really from actively discussing iwtv a year ago. i consider it all a lose-lose situation.

but also because i’m generally of the opinion that black fans don’t need people to be their white saviors, least of all me. black people have never been saved by white people. they were never just given anything when it comes to strides in equality, they fought for it and still fight for it, against constant violent pushback every step of the way. only instead of the good ole’ days when racists just called those fighting for equality uppity, they’re now “bullies” for daring to call you out on your shit after the repeated condescension and the resulting harassment you’ve exhibited towards them.

in this day and age the word bully has zero meaning anymore. i mean come on, melania trump calls people mean about her husband bullies. elon musk thinks he’s being bullied by twitter users, though he clearly holds all the power and is absolutely the problem. its become a meaningless word that goliaths use to call davids because they won’t use the real word they actually want to say. some of these popular blogs are not being bullied, they’re being held accountable for their own actions.

it’s pretty disgusting the number of you who decided to identify strongly with these users that not only fail to question their own racial biases but have gone so far as to suggest black people don’t face racism anymore. this is so fucked. tbh it can be argued in many ways white people, especially in the deep south where i’m from, are inherently raised steeped in racism, even if its not direct. just because your family aren’t ostensibly racist doesn’t mean they didn’t bake their own little prejudices into your upbringing and being raised in your environment didn’t encourage them. even if you don’t see yourself as racist, you have to unlearn all this shit, even if it never once occurred to you that you are part of it. just cause you believe in equality and don’t hate people for their color or cultural background does not make you free of perpetuating microaggressions against them. this applies to fans across the world of course. (like for you white euro iwtv fans, you may say you have no problem with black people but i’ve heard some wild things some of yall have to say about the turks.)

i understand that probably half or more of you are not usamericans. but no matter what environment you live in, no matter where you were raised, there is no excuse for your behavior. just because YOU don’t see racism in your day to day life or are in the more likely situation, too blindly comfortable in your place in society to notice it right in front of your face, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist as a constant presence in other parts of the world or isn’t deeply ensconced in online rhetoric.

so for you white iwtv fans who can’t be fucked to mention let alone defend people you, in many cases once called friend, against the absolute horseshit your current comrades are spewing wrapped up in their nice safe cocoons of victimhood, i hope you do some serious soul searching to figure out if this is who you are, a person too cowardly to call out a friend because it might cost you their friendship. a person quick to condemn others on hearsay because you couldn’t be fucked to wonder am i on the right side of this? and if you do manage to get wise and change your mind, remember its not unforgivable to say, you know what? i was wrong. i wrote in an old post that the hallmark of being a functional adult is changing your views accordingly when you learn new information or even just ruminate on what you know (i myself was a little bitch about ep 5 when it first dropped until i had to sit down and ask myself why i was actually feeling some kind of way about it). dying on a hill is not all its cracked up to be. being told you’re wrong is not always a personal attack and its often an opportunity for improvement if you can be bothered to genuinely hear other people out. an alarming number from all walks of life never figure that out. for my part, i am still learning and hope i never stop learning.

while that sentiments all nice and gooey (i mean them, but i understand its still sacharine to put out there), i am still guilty for not having directly written anything about this until now. and thats on me and i earned any flack i get for that. again, i am more of the mindset that black people don’t need white spokespeople, but that doesn’t mean they'll mind allies. and as a sidebar, going out of your way to say you are rising “above the noise” or “ignoring the drama” is absolutely your right, but it does not make you superior. it just makes you complacent with the status quo. i mean as long as you get to squee!! about anything and everything who cares about other people, right?

#and to be clear since i think some people may be a bit confused: i’m admonishing user nalyra-dreaming and their followers #some people who reblogged seem to not understand that #iwtv #interview with the vampire #alex.txt

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bijoumikhawal · 8 months

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I've gotten tired of making a post like this every few months so let's just fire a few of these off, and feel free to add on! Tropes you should at minimum reconsider using when you write or talk about Julian Bashir:

Mentions of "harem" pants, "Arabian nights" aesthetics, etc. These are improper terminology (that feeds into racist ideas) for real things, and when using that terminology those things are often being misrepresented. For my part, if you would actually like to know about the material culture of the Middle East and North Africa, I'm a "hobby" researcher of that very topic and will readily answer asks about it- with the caveat that I mostly know about Egypt, and I'm not the best person to ask about Sudanese specific culture even though I know a little, and I don't know much about Indian or Pakistani fashion (mentioning because these seem to be the most common cultures brought up around Julian).

comparisons to monkeys, apes, the word "simian". This should be obvious but it happens a fair amount, and it's almost comedic given a common trope is to comment on how much Garak hates being compared to a lizard.

This is separate but the way some people use mammalian tips from writing xenofic and trying to understand how an alien would think and categorize things into something that feels very exoticifying. It's not a "full stop, do not do this" but it is something I've noticed

Jokes about how undesirable Julian is. He's the exception that proves the rule about fandom's obsession with white twinks and a rare example of a brown nerd who isn't pinned into the "Couldn't sleep with a woman if they were the last two people on earth" box. I'm not saying we can't make fun of how he flirts just- Stay clear of Raj BBT territory

Conversely: my most hated garashir trope is when the author makes Julian's libido a problem by making him inconsiderate, cruel, and outright manipulative in service of his dick, and the writing often makes it clear they're connecting this to his masculinity. Julian does do some really stupid shit when it comes to his relationships, but this particular way of trying to incorporate this into writing him is just OOC, and you need to not confuse writing Julian's canonical robust and healthy sex life with negative stereotypes about lecherous Black and brown men. There's fics that pull off Julian being a bit of a dick or manipulative well- such as Salt the Earth or the ageswap series (at least where I last left off on it).

making his eyes green or blue. I have the same eye color as Siddig, more or less, and while it's technically hazel (or olive, as some people call it) most people think it's brown and most lighting makes it look brown. If you look at screencaps of Julian, you'll notice it also most of the time, looks brown. This sounds minor if you haven't experienced it, but it has a real and very negative impact on people's self image.

Older one but to be clear: if you're writing Julian as explicitly Muslim, find and replacing "god" with "allah" in English text is not how Muslims (or Arabic speakers in general) use the word? It is really funny to read, but please...

Over focusing on Julian as British. There's a long, LONG conversation that could be had about the dynamics of assimilation and how European racism (ime) very specifically views it as progressive to strip people of their culture and thinks they're causing the problem if they don't go along with it that would need its own post and which I've had with white fans before and feel exhausted thinking about- but to put it simply, there is no such thing as "just British", even for white Englishmen.

Yes the inverse is also wrong but I really haven't read a fic newer than 2014 guilty of that lmao and I think some of the more recent complaints about it are overblown, given I've read only a few fics recently published that delve into Julian as a Brown/African Person and I enjoyed them

I would personally appreciate it if fic writers were a little more balanced about cultural discussions honestly. If you write a lot about Cardassian culture, it'd be nice if Julian’s background was discussed. I won't say that kind of research is easy (again, I do this as a "hobby" that's very important to me, it's actually really annoying and difficult sometimes), but it is possible. I recently talked about how not doing this kind of mentally slots Julian into a "white guy" role.

This is not a matter of me policing your "artistic expression". I have no control over what you do. I would just like for fandom, a hobby I do for fun, to be a place where people stop being racist in a way that directly impacts me.

#cipher talk #ds9 #julian bashir

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inamindfarfaraway · 1 month

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So I saw your post here [https://www.tumblr.com/inamindfarfaraway/690058488775327745/batfamily-fanworks-that-purport-to-be-set-in-the] and oh my gosh YOU ARE SO RIGHT!

As much as I enjoy it, Hush is definitely to blame for this as it is held as THE end-all-be-all of all BatFam stories yet Cass (who an acclaimed ongoing series as Batgirl around the same time) was suspiciously missing from it along with Steph. Yet we only ever get flashbacks to Bab's time as Batgirl so that storyline also ended up cementing Bab's legacy as "the one and only Batgirl". Methinks a certain editor in charge at the time mandated for Cass and Steph to not appear in Hush because they-according to him-"were way too toxic" for said storyline. Because you see, as soon as he became a leading editor, his number one priority was getting rid of Steph and stripping Cass of her Batgirl role.

And so the age of darkness began...

First, there was War Games that solely existed to torture Steph in the most vile, most voyeuristic ways before killing her off. Then there was Robin: One Year Later, one of the worst, horrific character-assassination storylines since Spider-Man's One More Day, where Cass was suddenly turned into an over-the-top Saturday Morning cartoon villain obsessed with killing everyone, giving long-winded "together we can rule the world" speeches and being able to speak and write in fluent Navajo. ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT LANGUAGES IN THE WORLD. Then there was Redemption Road which, despite its good moments and happy ending, did even more damage to Cass's character. And finally, we have Battle For The Cowl which ended up pushing Cass and Steph so far into the background, they were basically erased from the BatFamily altogether.

Yet despite Steph's well-received run as Batgirl, DC's poor marketing and the lead up to the New 52 prevented the series from becoming a proper bestseller and it was cancelled without any fanfare whatsoever. Still, all those horrible decisions and storylines (like War Games and Robin: One Year Later) did such massive, long term damage to the characters that, even despite all the small good things (Steph's Batgirl series to the excellent Gates Of Gotham mini-series starring Cass), they were buried from public consciousness. As for Duke (another character, I'm a fan of), I think its just a case of him being a very recent character, a lack of marketing and higher-ups not knowing what to do with him.

As for the asshole editor who everything to burry the Batgirls, he was eventually fired for creating an "unsafe working environment". And yes, his name rhymes with "Ban Video".

As for the people who keep erasing Cass, Steph and Duke from fan works, I know it sounds depressing but hear me out: Fandom, be it comics, video games, films, cartoons, TV shows, ect, has an unconscious bias of white male favouritism. (Yes, I know Dick is Romani, Damien half-Arabic/Asian yet they're still quite white-passing)

YES! THANK YOU! ALL OF THIS!

It is so sad and frustrating that these bias persist even in communities that are meant to be about joy and love; but of course the Batfam fandom has issues with sexism and racism when the canon also has for so long. I'm sure most fans don't try to be prejudiced, but male and white-passing characters are so much more popular than others. The unfair treatment of Steph as Robin and both her and Barbara in making Babs Batgirl again for no reason is one of the things I wrote Robins: The Musical to vent about, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Thanks for the explanation! I was already familiar with most of the context you generously provided, but I still really appreciate it as a specific comics shame/recommendation guide and education for others. I wasn't aware of Gates of Gotham and will read it! Black Bat my beloved. Dan Didio when I catch you...

(My original post is here)

#batfam #batfamily #batfam fandom #dc comics #dc #dc fandom #cassandra cain #batgirl #black bat #stephanie brown #spoiler #duke thomas #the signal #comics history

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queerofthedagger · 9 months

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not to stir the pot but i’ve seen some really shitty takes recently about arthur being gay and completely erasing gwen’s importance to him. what are your thoughts?

oof well that is in fact a loaded question but I genuinely feel your frustration so let's give this a shot lmao

the short of it, to quote a friend of mine: 2012 tumblr called and wants its shitty shipping discourse back (derogatory)

the slightly longer of it.... to start this off, no one has to ship anything. no one's saying that anyone has to ship anything, or headcanon characters a certain way, or that you're not "allowed" to say that you don't ship certain ships. that's just . not a thing that's happening, and I do wanna reiterate strongly that you don't have to ship anything.

that said, well. maybe if you find yourself with the urge to nail your 'why i don't ship this canon interracial couple' against the proverbial church doors, you should ask yourself.... why is it always the black characters you find "badly written." why is it always the black and the white character who have "no chemistry." why is it always the black character you find unrelatable, that you think would be soo much better suited dating another character of color, etc. etc. These things do not happen in a vacuum, and you don't need to hate or even dislike that character to play into tropes, stereotypes, and issues that very many people have very extensively explained to be less than stellar, to put it mildly.

And Imma come out and say this: fandom is not activism, you don't need to be a loud, outspoken activist and/or turn this into anything more than a hobby. if, even amongst the discussions had in the last years, you have never once stopped to ask yourself how you might deal with the internalized racism that we're all dealing with, how it might affect people in the spaces you share while doing your hobby, then, frankly, you gotta do better. fandom is not activism, but we all have some basic responsibility of not causing more harm than there already is going around. this should not be a controversial statement either.

you can ship merthur without invalidating and trampling all over the frankly brilliant fact that this show went and casted a black woman as queen guinevere. you can ship merthur without taking away scenes that are not about them - god knows there are enough. you can acknowledge that 75% of your shipping takes are subjective, that merthur isn't, wasn't, and was never going to be canon, and literally none of this takes away from the two generic white dudes whose faces you'd like to smash together. this entire fandom is and has been majorly about those two generic white guys, for well over a decade, and i'm saying all this as a white merthur shipper. like, this is the bare minimum. and yet, here we fucking are.

as for the arthur being gay thing - again, you don't need to headcanon anyone a certain way, but whenever i do see this specific headcanon it "somehow" always comes with an incredibly weird (to put this mildly also) understanding of sexuality, top/bottom discourse, and - you guessed it - takes on arwen, that are maybe something people might want to uhh. examine also.

this isn't a callout, or a call for a witchhunt, or or or. personally i block and move on, and I wouldn't have said anything more on this than a vague shitpost on my sideblog, but god knows i can never shut up and even less so when asked, and I do think that while, again, fandom is not activism and I'll stand by this, people should... try and aim to make some basic attempts at not causing harm. it's not even hard (although that should not be your measure but like, again. bare minimum). it really is as easy as not constantly invalidating and side-lining ships and/or characters, by doing basic research in how not to whitewash characters, why not to compare skintone to food when writing, etc.

On that note, none of these are things that I've come up with. A lot of people, especially fans of colour, have done a great deal of work to provide resources and education that are... incredibly easy to find if you can be fucked to make some effort. Imma link a bunch beneath too but like. Yeah I guess that's my take. You can ship whatever you want, genuinely, from the bottom of my heart. But 1. maybe sometimes take some time to consider what you're saying, 2. maybe take some time to do some basic self-education on some issues in general, and 3. writing posts on why you don't ship whatever ship has never accomplished anything beyond getting people who agree with you to stroke your ego, and step on the toes of people who don't. at best.

But also, last but not least, the block button is your friend and all that

Resources by people much better equipped to talk on these things than me:

How to stan the white guy with minimal contribution to fandom's racism problem

The racism in the Merlin fandom and towards Gwen specifically

Educating Merlin - a blog that's specifically tackling racism in this fandom

Fanlore on Fandom's Racism Problem(s) (use to find many links leading you to further discussions on it)