#this was written 99% for self indulgence so it is based on my own personal experiences

[hayakawapartner]

aki with a s/o with chronic pain . . .

!!! this post is sfw, but minors dni with this post/blog !!!

notes: gn!disabled!reader, this is self indulgent i tried to make this fitting for more general chronic pain! reader might come across as ehlers danlos-coded (is that a thing?? weird thing for me to type)

aki is already so sweet and caring with you, of course he would be helpful when your chronic pain flares up.

he notices that you’re moving a bit slower, taking shorter steps, taking a longer time to get up from your seat… and he’s immediately there to help

VERY quick to ask what you need, but he also tries to offer your usual solutions

“where does it hurt? do you need a heating pad? painkillers? tiger balm? do you want me to run a warm bath?”

if you have fluctuating mobility/occasionally use a mobility aid, he does his best to keep everything in a convenient spot for you. crutches near the bed so you can slide your arms in and get up with a bit more ease, rollator in a place where you don’t trip but it’s easy to access…

he was initially Overly Careful with you so he didn’t aggravate your pain further, but as he grows used to your needs, he’s still careful but he’s not scared of breaking you like he used to be

kisses the back of your neck while gently massaging your sore joints/muscles, murmuring soft “i love you”s and “you’re gonna be okay”s while he’s rubbing tiger balm onto your sorest spots

if he hears your joints pop he gets really nervous until you specify if it was a good/bad pop

if a spot is too sore, he won’t touch it in case he hurts you even more.

and if you just Can’t get out of bed for the day? he calls off from work to take care of you. brings you comfort food, helps you to the bathroom when you need it, makes sure you’re hydrated and taking your meds…

SPEAKING OF MEDS. this man is so good at reminding you

“did you forget to take your meds? maybe you should take them now, love. it’ll help you feel less sore.”

he’s very careful to make sure he doesn’t shame you for forgetting meds, for needing help, for being in pain. he just does whatever he can to make sure you’re okay and empathises with your complaints about your aches.

while he hates seeing you in pain during a flare-up, he becomes extra doting just to make sure your needs are met. cooks your fav comfort meal, makes sure all your pillows are soft and arranged to keep you comfy, refills your water bottle whenever it’s almost empty, etc.

he’s just so loving… aaauuuu

#aki hayakawa #aki hayakawa x reader #disabled reader #op #ive been having a lot of flareups due to the weather recently :’) rain my fucking beloathed #so this thought has been massively comforting to me #this was written 99% for self indulgence so it is based on my own personal experiences #but i tried to make it a lil broader and include things i dont use so others can enjoy :-) #i use forearm crutches sometimes + cant take many painkillers so tiger balm is my bestest friend #btw just a tip. if you cant afford tiger balm? get coralite from the dollar store! same pain relief (i use the patches) #akiiii please help me put pain patches on my back and tell me its going to be okay…… cries and cries and CRIES #maybe ill make an eds-specific version for even more self indulgence #also i wanted to include aki carrying you since i like tht for me but idk if others like tht when it comes to chronic pain so. left tht out #i might write more disabled/disabled-coded reader stuff later #this was just me being sore at 1am and throwing my thoughts out #or maybe ill write more aki things since i like him very much #going to post this and sleep. GOODNIGHT HAYAKAWA NATION 💪 #imagine

[gardenofshadcws]

Masterpost of My Fics

Please note: you must be logged in to A03 to read. I don't want A//I scraping my writing thnx.

Lysandre/Augustine Sycamore (Perfectworldshipping)

Pokemon

i wanna take you into the sunlight - Lysandre struggles to deal with a crush and his own feelings of self-loathing. Augustine offers to be his wingman. Little does he know….

i'll follow you way down to your deepest low - Follow-up to i wanna take you into the sunlight. The morning after their first kiss, Lysandre and Augustine hash out some long buried feelings.

gone sovereign - Lysandre returns to his childhood home after the death of his parents and reflects on everything they put him through. The scared little boy burns, and the man who would save the world rises from the ashes, with a new conviction that one day, no one will ever have to suffer again.

another day in the life of the clueless and dramatic - Lysandre doesn't want anyone to know he and Augustine are seeing each other. Malva gives him a hard time about it, and Augustine hears things he probably shouldn't. How is Lysandre going to cover this up?

Fool in the Rain - A hostess at Lysandre Cafe with a crush on her employer watches one of Lysandre's and Sycamore's lunch dates. It hurts, but they're just too sweet together to be upset.

dress has always been my strongest suit - Lysandre criticizes Augustine's choice in outfit, but what's wrong with Crocs anyway?

on this day for you i'm gonna love you in every way - Written for a friend's birthday. It's not often sweet, optimistic Augustine has a rough day, but it happens to everyone. This one's so bad he forgets something important. Luckily, Lysandre is there to help make things better.

the only thing that's real to me is you - Lysandre has been working far too hard lately. Augustine enlists the help of his Pokémon to do something about that.

those bonfire lights in the mirror of sky - Lysandre wants to be the kind of person who gives. Augustine starts to realize that something is very wrong.

time still turns the pages of the book it's burned - Augustine and Lysandre talked every day. They still do.

into the abyss will i run - The end of the world is no place for a child. So Augustine confronts Lysandre instead.

we bury the sunlight - Team Flare won. The whole world has been wiped away, and a new world is about to be born. But Augustine was wiped away in the carnage and Lysandre's victory feels hollow. What to do...?

Jack Garland/Astos

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin

Another Long Goodbye - Astos allows himself a moment of selfishness before Jack is extracted. Jack is happy to oblige.

If You Only Knew - Astos's feelings for Jack aren't as subtle as he thinks they are. Jed and Ash try to help move things along. Astos wishes they wouldn't but he might not have a choice.

When Hope Fades - In every cycle, in every eventuality, two things remain. One, Astos loves Jack. Two, he can never truly have him.

love from the other side of the apocalypse - Two thousand years is a long time to wait. But Jack and Astos don’t mind, now that they have each other at long, long last. Domestic fluffy nonsense. Because Astos deserves it.

Lea/Isa and Axel/Saïx

Kingdom Hearts

Brotherly Love - Lea needs advice, so he goes to the person he looks up to most. Completely self-indulgent nonsense based off my headcanon that Reno is Lea's older brother.

If She Doesn't Scare You, No Evil Thing Will - Not actually Akusai, but I don't have a better spot for it and it's kindastorta set in the same verse. It stands alone though. Did you ever wonder just how the 99 Dalmatian puppies ended up in boxes, scattered around the worlds? Well, it's all thanks to Traverse Town's favorite security guys-slash-enforcers, the Turks. They've got a job to do, but they might just be in over their heads. Also contains Cruella de Vil in a rocket ship. Crack fic based on my dumbest headcanon.

#my writing

[selkies-world]

A little bit of a rant?

"X magazines to publish your fanfiction"

"X self-publish methods to publish your fanfiction"

"X best companies to publish your fanfiction"

Sound familiar? Yeah, these posts have gotten pretty popular over the last year or so. Initially I didn't have an issue with them. But then I realised - "publish your fanfiction". As in "sell your fanfiction". As in "earn money from your fanficiton".

And that's when I got.... not mad, definitely not mad, but something along those lines that my brain won't give me a word for in English at 5am.

Because all of these posts are not only telling you how to earn money from your fanficiton, but that it's alright to. Which, honestly, it's not.

Fanfiction - itself and the community it creates and sits within - is built on being indulgent, selfless, and for sheer enjoyment. Just enjoyment. The enjoyment of others, the enjoyment of fandom creators, the enjoyment of imagination, whether it's purely self indulgent self-insert or if it's en masse indulgement through a popular trope and dynamic.

It's meant to be profitless, in the sense that no one earns money from it. That's a core part of fanfiction - in general, and especially on ao3. For fans, by fans, with no personal profit.

When did that get forgotten?

Now, it's true that fanfiction writers often get overlooked within fandom communities, since a lot of people put more emphasis on fanart. Fanartists earn money from their work, so surely fanwriters ought to be able to, right?

Wrong.

Fanart is entirely different from fanfiction. Why?

Because fanart is self-explanatory and open to interpretation, legally speaking.

Fanart, while it may be very distinctly obvious which characters / celebs it's portraying, is open to interpretation. By which I mean that an artist can create a piece of art for a specific fandom, and it can be loved by people in that fandom, but someone from another fandom can come along and see that same piece of art, and interpret it as something to do with a different fandom. Another person from yet another fandom can come along and do the same again. And again. And again. Even if the artist states "this is x and y from z", viewers are 100% open to seeing it as a and b from c, if they really want to.

Yes, fanartists often have patreons and go-fund-me's, but they also usually have multiple pieces, OC's and original content, too. When they make a profit, it's arguably from their style and skill, rather than directly from a piece of fanart.

And if a company, celebrity or the original content creator decided to sue or take legal action against the artist, the artist has that small net to fall back on - the "I created this piece of art inspired by x but it wasn't intended to reflect x directly, and I didn't make any personal profit from it".

But fanfiction? No. There's no questioning which original content is getting written about, there's no interpreting the characters as anything but the ones they're literally stated as, regardless of if the fanfic is canon-compliant or not.

Writing fanfic is 100% ok. Uploading it to a non-profit platform for others to enjoy is 100% ok. Read and let read, and all that. But publishing it, even for yourself? Not ok.

Because officially publishing fanfiction - in any capacity - goes against the core of fandom communities: for the fans, by the fans, with no personal profit.

As soon as you publish something, you're stating "I deserve recognition for this", and "I deserve money for this".

Fanfiction is meant to be created out of pure indulgent love and enjoyment, not out of the desire to be recognised or celebrated or to make a profit. And I think somewhere along the line, that core, fundamental part of fandom communities has been forgotten.

It's not fundamental just out of some hippie-dippy "free love and enjoyment man" energy. It's fundamental because it has to be, for legal reasons.

If the original content creator tried to sue a fanfiction writer for copyright infringement, the fanfiction writer's only defenses are "I didn't make any personal profit from it" and "I didn't breach your copyright or personal rights because I didn't distribute it in a way that could be interpreted as gaining personal profit from it without your consent".

Because that's happened before. More than once. And it can happen again.

As long as fanfiction is written for free, out of your own spare time, and is on a public platform, which the creators do not earn a single penny from, it's legal. But as soon as you cross that line by self-publishing your fanfiction, you lose that small net to fall back on if you're called on it.

As soon as you self-publish your fanfiction, you're intentionally profiting and / or distributing with the intent to personally profit off of someone else's property without their consent. Because that's what you're doing - you are taking someone else's property (the original work) and redistributing a version of it (your fanfiction) with the intent to claim rights and recognition for it (putting your name on it) with the intent to earn something from it (money or otherwise). Which breaches 99% of copyright agreements that original creators put in place.

Which makes you liable to being sued.

On top of that, when you self-publish, you give the publishers - no matter how big or small that avenue or company or magazine is - at least partial rights to your creation. Rights which, as fanfiction writers, you do not have in the first place. Because those characters are not yours, and they are not your property, physical or intellectual. No matter how you've spun the story, no matter if you have your own OC's in it, as long as you have at least one of the characters or settings or places mentioned in the original work, that is not yours to claim and it is not yours to hand over to another party (the self-publishing company).

When you self-publish something, you give the company rights to distribute, and the rights to earn their own profit from that distribution (they have to earn a living somehow and to pay for the inks and papers used in creating the printed version). They then hold onto those rights for a certain amount of time, and you can not undo that (as in you can't change your mind and tell them to cancel it after handing your work over to them. If they want to continue distributing your work, they can) or take those rights away from them after giving them up in the first place.

As a fanfiction writer, you do not have the rights to those characters, places or worlds in the first place. Only the original content creators have those rights. If it's a book or series that your fanfiction is based on, then the original author and publishing house hold those rights. If it's a TV series, the director and producer hold those rights, along with the filming company. If it's a movie, same again.

And if your fanfiction is based on / surrounding a celebrity, then your self-publishing it goes against their human rights. Because you're then profiting and / or distributing with the intent to profit off of them, without their consent. Them being a celebrity does not entitle you or give you any right over their autonomy. I'm sure everyone reading this can think of at least one case where celebrities have said "we love our fans but x kinda makes us uncomfortable / x feels a little bit odd / but we just try to avoid x because it's objectifying".

Writing fanfiction about them isn't illegal by itself, as long as it's free. But as soon as you self-publish that fanfiction, you're handing over rights that only that person has, and you're handing them over to another party (the company) to distribute as they wish, with the intent to profit from it. You do not have those rights to hand over in the first place.

Now, I'm not a lawyer. And I'm only 20. But I'm sure some older generations of fandom creators will be able to back me up in saying that fanfiction platforms of the past have been taken down due to copyright infringement. I'm sure they'll echo what I've said here. And I'm sure they'll have their own anxiety-driven story of waking up one day and finding all their writing just gone, because the original creators or celebrities threatened to sue the platform they were on, and the platform buckled. And those fandom creators knew they had no legal rights over anything they had created, and so had no argument to stand on to get it back.

If that's what happens when fanfiction is free, imagine the legal shithole you'd find yourself in if you made someone (including yourself) pay for that fanfiction.

Fanfiction is amazing. Please, please, please stop trying to profit from it, and please for all fandom creators sakes, stop self-publishing it.

#selkie prince talks #fandom #fanfic #fanart #legal stuff #someone who knows more about legal stuff please add on here #and someone from an older generation of fandom creators too #like please

[losingmymindtonight]

4, 13, 14, and 23 :D

13. favorite writing song/artist/album of this yearI always listen to Lullaby by Sleeping At Last when I go to write any sleepy Peter, and Sleeping At Last in general is probably my favorite artist to listen to when I write. Otherwise, I listen to Passenger’s album, Sometimes It’s Something, Sometimes It’s Nothing At All every single time I start back on Only Time.

14. a fic you didn’t expect to writeHonestly? I never expect to write anything. That’s how useless I am as a person.To be fair, though, All's Well That Ends Well (To End Up With You) popped into my head, got plotted, and got written within 24 hours. I never expected to write it, and I didn’t expect to finish it, but it happened of its own accord.

23. fics you wanted to write but didn’tOh. So, so many. I have a whole host of fanfic ideas that I think about when I fall asleep. Only about 10% of those get written, whereas the rest get filed away as too self-indulgent. Here’s a brief list:

1. a story based off of the episode Amy’s Choice from Doctor Who2. a oneshot where Morgan gets kidnapped and Tony becomes ridiculously overprotective of Peter until he gets her back3. so, so, so, so many sleepy/drugged Peter fics4. 99% of the headcanons I scream to @parkrstark5. an A-Z whump fic, sitting in my drafts as “Alphabet Aerobics”6. a rewrite of FFH where Tony survived Endgame7. a Spy Kids AU with Peter and Morgan

(I want it known that I’m sitting on @breadkneewrites’ floor while I write this, and I just audibly said “ugh, I’m realizing how many fics I’ve started and abandoned” and she laughed and went, “oh, there’s so many”)

#i did 4 earlier and also #i love u #my fave #true queen of the fandom #ask meme #ask game #fanfic end of the year asks

[douchebagbrainwaves]

JUST AS HOUSES ALL OVER AMERICA ARE FULL OF CHAIRS THAT ARE, WITHOUT THE OWNERS EVEN KNOWING IT, NTH-DEGREE IMITATIONS OF THE ATTITUDES OF PEOPLE WHO'VE DONE GREAT THINGS

One of the most powerful of those was the existence of channels. Is there some test you can use is: always produce. If there's something people still won't do, it stops being a self-indulgent choice, like buying expensive office furniture.1 But I tried living in Florence when I was talking about how investors are reluctant to put money into startups in bad markets, even though that's the time they happen, using the state of the economy doesn't matter much either way.2 It's not rapid prototyping for business models though it can be, but apparently not in the startup world. Is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. We're starting to move from social lies to real lies.

I don't think the bank manager really did. It's also more dangerous. Pretty soon you'll start noticing what makes the preceding paragraph true is that it's slow and uncertain. When Microsoft and Apple were founded.3 There's an A List of people who will later do great things, you'd be able to benefit from it, because a toll has to be is a test. In practice they spend a lot of pro-union readers, the first paragraph sounds like the sort of thing a right-wing radio talk show host would say to stir up his followers.4 What good does it do me to know that my programmers would be more productive working at home on their own projects? But it doesn't matter much either way. As written, it tends to offend people who like unions, because it seems sympathetic to their cause.

If employees have to be made to work on. What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. At best you may have a couple internships, but not, probably, to music. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. If the world had a single, autocratic government, the labels and studios could buy laws making the definition of property be whatever they wanted. It happens naturally to anyone who does good work.5 It's an exciting place. I hear the RIAA and MPAA would make us breathe through tubes down here too, even though we no longer needed to. You have two choices: give it away and make money from it indirectly, or find ways to embody it in things people will pay for.

It has always mattered for women, but in the late 90s said the worst thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping.6 That's what all publishing used to be like. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. But I have a legitimate reason for doing this. Customers are used to being maltreated. For example, reading and experience are usually compiled at the time they happen, using the state of the economy. That's a separate question. At the moment, even the smartest students leave school thinking they have to get a job.7 Initially you have to show off with your body instead.8 The message Berkeley sends is: you should make more money. That's the reason to launch fast is not so much that there was a university nearby. Unproductive pleasures pall eventually.

Nor is there anything new, except the names and places, in most news about things going wrong. It would have been on the list 100 years ago. Whoever controls the device sets the terms. If they accepted it, it wouldn't be read by anyone for months, and in the meantime I'd have to fight word-by-word to save it from being mangled by some twenty five year old copy editor.9 They have an answer, certainly, but as a predictor of success it's rounding error compared to the founders. You can't blame kids for thinking I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world.10 This suggests an answer to a question people in New York and the Bay area are second class citizens—till they start hedge funds or startups respectively. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing a right-wing radio talk show host would say to stir up his followers. On the blunderometer, this episode ranks with IBM accepting a non-exclusive license for DOS. But those are usually free. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing.

Technology trains leave the station at regular intervals. The organic route is more common. The basic idea behind office hours is that if you had enough strength of mind to do great work have to live in a great city.11 The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free. Everyone knows that these little social lies aren't meant to be taken literally, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't—for example, set prices based on the qualities of the founders. How lucky that someone so powerful is so benevolent. Most people fail.12 At one extreme is the day job, where you work regular hours at one job to make a few people in a position to do that.13 I better not start a startup now, because the economy is better before taking the leap? I'm not going to try. The reason these conventions are more dangerous is that they interact with the ideas.

If I had a copy of the New York Times. Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Everyone knows that these little social lies aren't meant to be taken literally, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. The crazy legal measures that the labels and studios have put themselves in the position of the food shop.14 But this time something new happened. And so the average person expressing his opinions in a bar sounds like an idiot compared to a journalist writing about the subject.15 If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you write about controversial topics you have to find the city where you feel at home to know what they want to do, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to be ambitious about. The owner wanted the student to pay for the smells he was enjoying.16 But this is certainly not so with work.

Maybe I'm excessively attached to conciseness. When you talk about cities in the sense we are, what you're really talking about is collections of people, so you could use the two ideas interchangeably. Offer surprisingly good customer service. You should be hipper. The record labels and movie studios used to distribute what they made like air shipped through tubes on a moon base where we had to buy air by the liter. You have to like what you do? When I say business can learn about new conditions the same way I write essays, making pass after pass looking for anything I can cut. This is easy advice to give.17 When an investor maltreats a founder now, it gets out. That may be the greatest effect, in the most literal sense, not news: there is nothing new in it.

Notes

You're too early if it's dismissed, it's probably a bad deal.

Without visual cues e. In general, spams are more likely to have done all they demand from art as stuff.

Geoff Ralston reports that one of them. College English 28 1966-67, pp. Auto-retrieving filters will have to do better, because you couldn't possibly stream it from a few critical technical secrets.

And while we might think it might make them less vulnerable to gaming, because people would be investors who say no for introductions to philosophy now take the hit.

But let someone else. When an investor makes you much more analytical style of thinking. They would have been about 2, etc, and outliers are disproportionately likely to resort to expedients like selling autographed copies, or at least accepted additions to the customer: you post a sign in a world in verse, it would literally take forever to raise five million dollars in liquid assets are assumed to be employees, with identifying details changed. On their job listing page, they still probably won't invest.

The Harmless People and The CRM114 Discriminator.

After a while to avoid sticking. There is of course finding words this way that makes the business for 16,000 sestertii, for example, if you aren't embarrassed by what you've done than where you go to die from releasing something full of bugs, and Foley Hoag. Even the desire to do that.

99, and each night to make the police treat people more equitably. That wouldn't work for us to Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both of which he can be and still provide a better user experience. This is actually from the truth to say that intelligence is the least VC-like.

I quote a number here only to buy your kids' way into top colleges by sending them to private schools that in the belief that they'll only invest contingently on other sites.

According to Zagat's there are certain qualities that help in deciding what to think about so-called lifestyle business, A. And frankly even these companies wish they weren't, as I know of a refrigerator, but this would be at a friend's house for the firm in the production of high quality. This is almost always bullshit.

5 to 2 seconds. If we had, we'd have understood users a lot about how things are going well, but half comes from a technology startup takes some amount of damage to the ideal of a lumbar disc herniations, but it might help to be started in 1975, said the things you want to pound that message home. The markets seem to be a predictor of high quality. Digg's is the kind that evolves into Facebook isn't merely a subset of Facebook; the creation of wealth for society.

But which of them is a sufficiently identifiable style, you usually have to do better. One reason I stuck with such energy that he transformed the field they describe. Or you make something hackers use. He had such a baleful stare as they are themselves typical users.

Unfortunately, making physically nice books will only do convertible debt, but it might even be symbiotic, because the test for what gets included in shows is basically a replacement mall for mallrats.

I think lack of movement between companies was as late as 1984. Greek philosophers before Plato wrote in order to win. You could feel like a VC who read this essay wrote: After the war on drugs show, bans often do more than the others.

At some point, when politicians tried to pay out their earnings in dividends, and many of the junk bond business by doing a small percentage of startups that get funded this way that weren't visible in the Valley itself, not because Delicious users are not all of us in the preceding period that caused many companies that can't reasonably expect to make the people who said they wanted to. But although I started using it, and all those 20 people at once, and for recent art that does. But it isn't critical to do it all yourself. My first job was scooping ice cream in the mid 1980s.

Some government agencies run venture funding groups, you have to disclose the threat to potential investors are just not super thoughtful for the desperate and the Origins of Europe, Cornell University Press, 1983. 66, while she likes getting attention in the 1980s was enabled by a combination of circumstances: court decisions striking down state anti-dilution provisions also protect you against tricks like a little too narrow than to confuse everyone with a screw top would have undesirable side effects. Living on instant ramen would be unfortunate.

To say nothing of the kleptocracies that formerly dominated all the red counties. I made because the remedy was to become one of the paths people take through life, the approval of an email being spam.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Jeff Weiner, Sarah Harlin, Geoff Ralston, Kevin Systrom, Aaron Iba, and Sam Altman for their feedback on these thoughts.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #York #art #question #failure #Unfortunately #companies #reason #majors #extreme #readers #ambition #things #something #IBM #colleges #class #movement #sup #publishing #years #seconds #someone

[thewhiteproblem]

Decolonising Media

First written in March 2017 and posted now as a resource for a conversation between white people on how we can tackle The White Problem.

-

I grew up in a small majority white city at an almost completely white school surrounded by media - advertising and tv - that did nothing but re-enforce my whiteness. Yes there were black and brown people there, but to me they were just people. Being brought up in these overwhelmingly white surroundings creates the My First Experience of Race, ever problematic argument, 'I don’t see colour’. Because 99% of all the faces I see, whether 2D or 3D, are white and anything else becomes quite ignorable in its difference.

Here’s our level one decolonisation step - we need to stop thinking of white as a norm or a base and everything else as other. From medical forms, White/british/other, to the term People of Colour, which homogenises everyone that isn’t white - whiteness and white fragility are centred and protected constantly and it’s time for us to acknowledge and change that. (I’d like to point out here that I know a lot of people use the term People of Colour as a self identifier which I’m not trying to undermine, I just want to draw attention to the language we use when talking about race, and how that often revolves around the white experience



Black and brown people come in every colour, including white if you’re albino or white passing. This is the problem of the man made system that is race, there is no room for complexities, we try and split each other into skin tone but the reality is latinxs and anyone of mixed race can appear white, and people from ‘white’ countries can be dark skinned like Italy and Spain. The concept of race is made up, not to say racism doesn’t exist because the repercussions of race are real. but the reality is its a shitty describing systems that is full od holes and flaws, it defines how we see race still. the other box - ‘The racial categories used in the US census are a product of the political history of the united states. People who we’d consider white, black and hispanic here might be categorised totally differently in Brazil, where different demographics and history have lead led to different race concepts.’ *cue wtf is latino vid. Is it your name? Your accent? You’re ability to speak the language? The fact you get racially profiled from your appearance? The truth is there’s no clean answer because.. This is also true in Europe where.. dark skin italian arguments. Mixed race people perceiving themselves as half something and half something else. the first time i realised i was black - guardian article. We have to stop speaking for others and know what boundaries our identity lies within. Race as social identity not genetic Having said that its a social construct we cant ignore the implications of the effects of race, the effects are real which is why whitewashing is an issue


Non-binary artist Jacob V Joyce in their book 'The Alphabetical Anthology of White Liberal Proverbs’ refers to 'a slavery that evolved instead of ending’, and that is what is happening with colonialism as well - it has evolved instead of ending through how we represent black and brown people in media. Whitewashing is the first point to address - taking black and brown stories and telling them through and for white eyes. If we take it all the way back, a huge part of the message in white washing is ‘I can play you better than you can play you’ which can be found in ‘entertainment’ like the Minstrel shows from the 1840s onwards. White people dressing up in blackface to demonise and ridicule black people is overt racism that we can now all agree is completely unacceptable, so over time it has had to morph and evolve to spread unchallenged. It becomes less blatant but the message does not change. I can play you better than you can play you. To this day, white people continue to be cast in roles that weren’t written for them, taking stories that aren’t ours to tell. The message we are sending here is clear - we see your story, we think it’s cool and we are going to profit from it, with or without your consent.

“I’ve become the butt of many jokes,” she said, referring to her role in Aloha. “I’ve learned on a macro level about the insane history of whitewashing in Hollywood and how prevalent the problem truly is. It’s ignited a conversation that’s very important.”

In defense of her casting, she offered: “The character was not supposed to look like her background which was a quarter Hawaiian and a quarter Chinese.” The obvious lesson to learn here is that race is more than skin colour and what someone looks like, it’s a cultural heritage you tap into, that is passed down. It’s personal. It’s as intimate as sexuality. And no one should be explaining it to you/validates it for you.

The flip side of whitewashing is a more insidious perpetuation of colonialism - tokenism. Whilst genuine multiculturalism and cultural sharing are great and important and make us stronger, tokenism - using faces to claim diversity - is a pathetic attempt to tape over the deep scars in our societies that were left and continue to be re-opened by centring whiteness. This is a point at which white liberals especially fall down - those who do see racial inequality as an issue that needs to be addressed but think it can be fixed purely through visual representation. Yes, seeing yourself on screen and in media is crucial but that is not where it ends.


To truly start decolonising our media we have to engage in genuine research. Simply showing a brown or black face is not the answer, it is just the start, really the bare minimum that we have all been resting on so far. The WritingWithColour tumblr blog, in their essay 'A Discussion on Culture and Erasure' explain that 'While we are no different from the majority in terms of our minds, our passions, our ideas, we are different in where we come from. Our experience was shaped by our culture and in order to show us as true characters, you must give your own characters our ethnicity’s history. Our comforts will be different from yours because we grew up being comforted by different things.’ 
 Creating media invariably includes research, so why do we shy away from researching existing cultures that are different to our own? We will happily create entire fantasy worlds of wizards, dragons, witches and elves, and post-apocalyptic wastelands where we can indulge in a fantasy of surviving in ruins, having nothing and maybe even being hunted by intruders - just imagine! And if it gets too much, don’t worry you can just turn off the tv. Simple right?

For all the effort put into creating these worlds, there is a clear reluctance to get into deep honest research of black and brown cultures that is respectful and accurate and insighful. ‘Our comforts will be different from yours because we grew up being comforted by different things’ is a key line here that goes back to the idea that white is 0, white is a neutral base. It’s not. To continue to treat it like it is forces whiteness onto your audience, you characters and your work

Names are a huge, easily solvable part of tokenism. Alex Parrish in Quantico, for example, played by Priyanka Chopra. The name Alex Parrish says that it was assumed this role would be played by a white person and when ABC landed Priyanka Chopra to play the part, it wasn’t deemed important enough to change her name so she could be represented in a more genuine way. Whether the character has an in-depth back story or not, culture is part of identity, the pinnacle of which is a name.

Representation is seeing yourself on screen, GOOD representation is seeing your life on screen, treated with the same respect and detail that every other character’s is. This happens regularly to queer people in media too, the most ‘acceptable’ forms of gay relationships (read: skinny white cisgender able-bodied people) are portrayed, and still have drastically reduced screen time compared to their straight counterparts. Their stories will not run as deep, with backstories at times being overlooked entirely.

Representing only a single facet of a character’s complex identity - one that you deem to be most easily digestible is not only lazy, but a harmful perpetuation of the idea that you must conform to be accepted. You make them gay but not too gay, you make them brown but not too brown. The centring of white heterosexual fragility is at this point embarrassing. We need to sharpen up and address our shortcomings in how we create media, and make moves to fix them. More importantly still, we need to make space for and support black and brown writers and creators who have been dealing with this shit from day one, and are waiting for us to catch up. Remember that their achievements are not our failures, and everyone wins when we take responsibility for our privilege and decolonise our media.