#and like. i'm not an authority on racism i'm a white person at the end of the day

[bobbinalong]

insane things going on on twitter over this drawing of dick:

[bluecrocss]

Yes. You are racist. (Buckle up, this is gonna be a long one)

So approximately half a year since the premier of the Disney+ Percy Jackson show, and almost two years since the announcement of the Trio's casting, I would like to take this moment to look back at the insane, racist and anti-black backlash that was launched at Leah Sava Jeffries and a few other cast members from the PJO fandom.

I'm not concerned with the trolls who are openly racist, who resorted to racist slurs and outright threats, everyone agrees that they "took it too far". I want to talk about the rest of you, the "I'm not racist, but.." people, the "What's wrong with wanting book accuracy?" people. Just to let you know, for the unasked question... yes, yes you are.

I've noticed the Percy Jackson fandom has been lording some weird superiority complex over a certain *unnamed* fandom that has fallen out of grace due to their recently outed bigot of an author. But honestly, y'all are not much different. The amount of vitriol and anti-blackness I have seen from this fandom (beyond just bullying a 12 year old girl), y'all don't have a leg to stand on.

Below is a breakdown of the most common arguments I have seen used to justify y'alls absolutely insane bigotry. I am going to explain why none of these justify the amount of anger and vitriol y'all have sent towards Leah, Rick or any of the cast.

I am not here to argue, and this is not a democracy. I am giving you a chance for some self-reflection and to understand that this pattern of violence directed towards POC actors (mostly black women) has never been justified in the name of "book accuracy"/"comic book accuracy"/"ending forced diversity" or whatever other excuses y'all try to make up.

If you still try to justify or argue further for any of these points, I will just block you. I am not coddling you through your racism. If anyone has seen any other dumb arguments floating around that I might've missed, feel free to sound off in the comments.

She's not book accurate:

Neither is Percy, Luke, Grover, Dionysus, Poseidon, and just about every other named character.

Rick already made it clear that physical features were not the priority with casting, rather it was actors that embodied the role. So why are the biggest complaints about Annabeth and Zeus? 🤔

What? You're gonna say everyone else got backlash too? I see you trying to obscure the main issue by playing dumb 😉

See my friend, yes, there were one or two comments about how Percy's hair should be black or how Luke is supposed to be blonde, but as soon as Leah was cast, none of those actors got any significant backlash. In fact, Walker and Charlie literally have an army of fan girls at their beck and call, calling them the perfect Percy and Luke, despite neither being "Book accurate". But then again, have we not observed the pattern of White boy of the month vs WOC to hate for the year? (Yes, I know Charlie isn't white. Further adds to the irony, doesn't it).

Why include character descriptions if you won't stay true to them, you cry? Well, my dear sweet moron, see, books and TV are two different mediums. Because in literature, you can't *Literally* SEE the characters, the author has to add descriptions to paint a picture in your mind, in TV... that's not an issue. So unless the character's appearance is necessary to the plot (like Luke's scar, or Nico being Italian) the show runners can actually focus on more important things.. Like ACTING and PERSONALITY.

2. It's just not how I imagined her:

News flash, babe! ANNABETH ISN'T REAL. None of these character are. They are concepts that originated from the brain of Mr. Rick Riordan. It doesn't matter how YOU imagined her. There are millions of people who read these books that imagined her several different ways. When the creator of the character watched Leah's audition and said, 'Yes! She embodies the character I created!", your imagined version of Annabeth ceased to matter. And guess what? The books still exist... they have not been burned. Your version of Annabeth has not disappeared. Go read the books.

3. Zeus can't be black/Gods have to be Greek/*Insert Character* can't be black:

Y'all did not read the books, I swear. You have to be fake fans looking to troll atp.

The gods move based off the center of western civilization. They change their forms/environment to reflect the culture they are occupying (they did it with Rome, now they're doing it with America). The gods change forms all the time. How we see them is not their true form as a mortal would disintegrate if they were to see their true form.

America is a cultural melting pot (specifically NY where Mount Olympus is now based). If the god's choose forms that reflect the current society they inhabit, they could literally be any race (keep in mind NYC is only 33% white).

All of this is literally SPELLED OUT in the Lightning Thief.

Furthermore, if you're going to push the ethnically Greek thing... Poseidon is British with a British accent and Hermes is Latino. The only ethnically Greek actor is Dionysus (who still doesn't look book accurate). Y'all are sounding like some white supremacists because do you forget that race is a social construct?

Before the advent of the transatlantic slave trade, I can promise you that the Greeks and the Anglo-Saxons did NOT view themselves as the same people. Why are y'all not taking issue with Poseidon's actor then?

Also, Percy Jackson has canonically had a slew of explicitly black demigods since the second book (including Harriet Tubman, which I have mixed feelings about 😭), so I genuinely have no idea where some of y'all are going with this point.

4. She was our smart blonde representation:

Don't pmo. I swear to God!

White, blonde women have NEVER been excluded from Hollywood. Representation is not something you lacked. The dumb blonde stereotype was a simple branch off of a larger misogynistic "dumb woman" stereotype. It has not truly been relevant since the mid 2000s outside of childish jokes.

This iteration of Percy Jackson will probably not go beyond the first 5 books, based off pacing and the age of the actors. So here's a fun game: 5 bucks to the first person who can find me a quote in the first 5 Percy Jackson books, where Annabeth laments her insecurities about being blonde (hint: there aren't any).

Also, her blonde hair does not hold her back at Camp because she is head of the Athena Cabin who are highly respected (and guess what?), ARE ALL BLONDE!

Her insecurities about her hair color are two or three lines at most in the later books, not this fundamental, core part of her character y'all all of a sudden wanna pretend it was. And guess what, as a non-blonde black girl, I was able to read those scenes of Annabeth feeling undervalued because of her looks and relate to her even if she didn't look like me at the time.

Why all of a sudden can y'all not do that with a black Annabeth? By every metric black girls are undervalued for their intelligence in academia more than white girls are, regardless of hair color. So your little representation of a woman undervalued by her looks would still hold. Do y'all dehumanize black women so much, that you are incapable of empathizing with show!Annabeth's plight in the way I could with Book!Annabeth simply because she doesn't look exactly like you?

Your issue isn't that she isn't blonde, it's that she is NOT WHITE.

Furthermore, Becky Riordan had tweeted previously (before the show was even cast) that Annabeth never needed to be blonde (probably recalling the BS y'all put Alexandra Daddario through), so even if they cast a white Annabeth, the blonde hair was never a guarantee. the author and producers all agree that it was not a significant part of her character. It's been a non-issue since day one.

Also, stop acting like smart blondes are rare in media... If you don't go watch some Legally blonde, Iron Man (Pepper Potts), Zack and Cody (Maddie), Liv and Maddie, FMAB (Winry), Captain Marvel, She-Ra, Buffy, The boys (starlight) etc. etc., and go sit down somewhere 🙄🙄🙄 (those were literally all things I've watched recently, off the top of my head, btw 💀)

5. It's not about race, but...:

Yes it is. It was always bout race. No other actors got as much hate as Leah. Her grandmother and other family members on IG had to mute their comments because they were getting so many threats.

Alexandra Daddario had to come to her defense on Twitter. Rick had to put out an official statement on his website. This girl has endured years of psychological torment for simply having the best audition. No one else is book accurate, no one else is ethnically Greek (except Jason Mantzoukas). Walker literally has British and German ancestry.

Why was she being called racial slurs on reddit and in youtube comments?

I know what you're gonna say, "I actually had problems with the entire cast", "I actually had a bigger issue with Walker's hair color", blah blah blah. Then why aren't you in Walker's comment sections? Why are you only making your displeasure known on posts defending/advocating for Leah? Why is she always your first example of 'wrong casting"?

Well, she "looks the most different"... Look up the term "scapegoating".

"Oh, I don't agree with the harassment. I just don't like the casting." Guess what? She's already been cast. They are not going to uncast her. What do you get out of still complaining about it.

All the vitriol you're stirring about her when you complain about her on Social media, it is directing people to send her hate, even if you're not writing it directly. It's is not enough to "not agree" with the racism, it is your duty to actively prevent it. And btw, these are young gen z actors, they are active on social media. They see the edits of themselves (even comment on it) and they most likely see these little "harmless" complaints you're posting. Are your upset feelings really worth contributing to the racist dogpile on this poor girl?

6. Why couldn't they atleast give her blonde braids?:

Why should they? Y'all wanted blonde because of the "dumb blonde" trope... that doesn't apply to POC.

A blonde black girl is gonna be viewed the same as a non-blonde black girl (or at worst, someone might decide she's "ratchet" or some shit for wearing colored hair). What difference would it make?

Why shouldn't Walker dye his hair, then?

7. Annabeth has Gray eyes:

Less than 3% of the global population has "gray eyes". Even if they cast a white actor, they would've needed contacts. Her being black is not the reason Annabeth's eyes aren't gray. Simply put, it is a plot element they removed, like the whole "names have power" element, or Ares having flames for eyes, or Dionysus using his powers to grow strawberries at Camp.

That's how adaptations work. Unnecessary plot elements are cut to save time and budget. This has nothing to do with her casting. They probably also didn't want to make child actors wear contacts (not a new practice).

8. Even if Rick chose her, he was wrong/Disney is forcing him to be okay with it:

Where do I start? Rick created the character. He can't be wrong. Do y'all have no self-awareness? Death of the author has no place here, because y'all are hung up on an aspect of the character that is not relevant to her arc or development.

Y'all's justification for wanting a "book accurate" Annabeth is that she was such an inspirational and important character growing up, and yet your behavior is so in conflict with the character you claim means so much to you. You're narrow minded, dismissive of bigotry and injustice, and disrespectful to the wishes of the creator of your favorite character; everything that Annabeth would never be. Y'all were never genuine fans of the books. You're bigots that needed an outlet for your rage.

Keep in mind, Rick has said countless times that PercaBeth directly mirrors his relationship with his wife. Y'all think he would have allowed them to cast someone who doesn't live up to the woman who has been by his side for decades? The mother of his children?

Regarding Disney forcing him, show me one piece of direct evidence that proves Disney in anyway pressured Rick to cast her. Cuz if you can't, that's baseless speculation. And if you have to resort to baseless speculation, maybe try to examine why it's so important to you to hold on to this belief.

9. So, I'm racist because I hate "race swapping"?:

To start, there is a difference between "race swapping" and "color blind casting". Often times, when y'all complain about the former, you're actually mad about the latter.

It would be "race swapping" if Rick and the team decided ahead of time that they wanted a black Annabeth and ONLY allowed black actors to audition. But the actual reality was that they accepted auditions from everyone (there were white actors and non-black poc that also auditioned for the role) and chose the best person who embodied the role. They didn't "make Annabeth black" and they didn't "make Zeus black", they cast black actors for those roles.

Y'all think you're being slick with your wording. Dismissing that is implying that they did not earn their roles fair and square. Which is racist. It's the equivalent of going up to a black college student and telling them they only got in because of affirmative action. You're dismissing the achievements of a person solely because of their racial background.

For all you people complaining about "unfairness" and "forced diversity", I would think hiring based on merit would appeal to you 🤔

71% of theatrical Hollywood leads were white in 2024 in comparison to 29% POC and you still think "black washing" is a thing? You still get this angry over a black person fairly earning a role because you think in a time where Hollywood only knows to do remakes and adaptations, that the majority of lead roles still *have* to be reserved for white actors?

Once again, white people have never been excluded from Hollywood for being white. Representation has never been something you lacked nor is it something you can lose. Your anger comes from seeing a black face where you think they don't belong. Because you feel you are owed a disproportion of representation in Hollywood.

10. Woke agenda/DEI/Forced Diversity:

If you are unironically using any of these terms in a negative light, it's already too late for me to reason with you. Look up the term "dog whistle". If you are sharing the same terminology with Elon Musk and his fanboys, maybe reevaluate some things.

POC are objectively underrepresented and have been historically excluded through actual laws and policies in Hollywood. There is no such thing as "forced diversity", you have bought in to a right wing conspiracy theory.

"Woke" is a term that was intentionally appropriated from the black community. It originally meant being aware of injustice and systematic threats to the community and is now being weaponized by bigots. Good job.

Diversity and inclusion is a good thing.

11. But POC deserve to have their own stories told:

We do. And we have been fighting for it for over a century now, and we've made great strides, no thanks to y'all.

No thanks to y'all gaslighting us about how little representation we get or that representation matters at all. No thanks to y'all pushing the idea that POC can't sell globally and obscuring POC actors in international promos. No thanks to y'all continuing to whitewash even to this day (Bullet train, the beguiled, gods of Egypt, atla, every portrayal of Jesus ever, etc.). No thanks to y'all calling every piece of media that has more than one black lead and more than one queer couple "woke". No thanks to y'all throwing a fit every time a black person in a fantasy setting isn't a slave.

Fact of the matter is, y'all never cared about POC "getting their own stories", you're only parroting our own words back to us now as a politically correct way of saying, "leave white roles alone" lmao

Well fun fact, actors of color getting opportunities to play lead roles and allowing poc to "tell their own stories" are not mutually exclusive. If y'all cared that much, instead of bullying a 12 year old actress, you could actually support up and coming independent POC writers, directors, and studios 😱

12. Studios need to stop "setting up" actors of color:

Do me a favor and google the term DARVO.

Your racism is not the fault of the studios for giving a POC actor a role that they earned. It is not up to the rest of society to tiptoe around racists to avoid their vitriol. It is our responsibility to hold them accountable and protect minorities from unwarranted hate. At most, you can say it's the responsibility of the studios to provide adequate support to POC actors who face this backlash.

At the end of the day, Hollywood only allows very few spots for POC actors (especially WOC), while simultaneously pushing a new white boy every month to put in everything. Putting minorities in these roles that are usually closed to them, usually opens the door to more actors of color than before.

Brandy being cast as Cinderella did a lot to push her into the mainstream (yes, she was already extremely famous in the black community atp), Halle Berry being the first, black, bond girl literally shot her to icon status, and even going as far back to what Anna Mae Wong did for Asian American actresses with her "femme fatale" roles.

At the end of the day, even with the backlash, *some* rep does more good for POC actors than *no* rep. The solution to racist backlash isn't to take away those opportunities, but rather to not be racist??? 🙄

Also, for everyone that claims that "POC race-swapping" is just as bad as "white-washing", despite white washing having a longer history and objectively causing more harm, note how the backlash to white washing never lasts as long as the harassment that POC get.

Like, no one brings up Scarlett Johansson's ghost in the shell role anymore, but you can best believe Candace Patton is still fending off racist trolls. As much as people hated the atla movie, people moved on quick from Nicola Peltz playing Katara since she was just a kid that accepted the role (re: daddy bought her the role), but y'all would not have any of that consideration for Leah Sava Jeffries.

But I digress...

13. What if we made Tiana white? Wakanda white? Hazel white...:

Ah, my favorite inane point. I was so excited to get here :)

See, I could start out by pointing out how "White washing" and casting a POC actor as a traditionally white character are not equivalent.

I could point out the history of hollywood ACTIVELY excluding POC actors and POC stories. I could point out how grossly over represented white people are in hollywood. I could point out that POC characters are so few in comparison that whitewashing them causes actual harm, where white people have never lacked rep.

I could point out how, because poc characters and stories are so often tokenized that their racial/cultural background is often directly tied to their character's identity, in opposition to a lot of white characters, since hollywood treats white as the "Default".

See, I could make all those points, but the thing is, the people who make this argument already know all that. They are trying to waste time by drawing me into a pointless circular argument that will sum up to "fair is fair", while ignoring all the context and nuance I previously provided.

So you know what? Forget it. Let me play your game.

I am actually fine with a white Tiana. Would it make sense, for her and her family to experience Jim Crow era racism, in the south while white? No. But we can look past it. Disney was never known for historical accuracy anyway 🤷🏿‍♀️

However, in exchange, the live action frozen will have a black Elsa and Anna, live action Rapunzel will be black, live action Merida will be black, we're re-filming Cinderella and Beauty and the beast to cast a black belle and Cindy, snow white will need to be recast as black, and we also get aurora whenever the live action sleeping beauty is announced. But then y'all can keep Tiana, deal?

You want a white T'Challa? Fine! (I'm partial to Ryan gosling), in the meantime, we'll be recasting Iron man, Captain America (Steve version), Bruce banner, Thor, Loki, hawk eye, black widow, ant man, captain marvel, Bucky, Peter Parker etc. All the avengers and their side characters, then y'all can have Sam Wilson, war machine and the whole of Wakanda (will it make sense that a sole, hidden, African nation is randomly made up of white people? Who cares? We get the avengers!).

You want white Hazel? You got her! I hope you have no problem with us taking Percy, Nico, Will, Poseidon, Jason, calypso, Rachel, Tyson, Silena, the stoll brothers, Sally Jackson, Hades, Hepheastus, ares, etc. But y'all can have Hazel and Beckendorf.

If we're gonna do this, let's commit all the way. Fair is fair, after all.

14. Leah isn't as "pretty" as Book Annabeth/Movie Annabeth:

I wish I could say this wasn't a genuine point I had read, but when all else fails, they will always go for a woman's appearance.

Now first of all, as a rule, I will never hold black women to white beauty standards. Our hair will never be long and silky enough, our nose will never be narrow enough, our skin will never be fair enough and our eyes will never be light enough (Might I recommend Toni Morrison, when you get the chance?). But Leah is unfairly gorgeous idc what any of you say, and you're not gonna have me use my defense of Leah as an opportunity to bash Alexandra either because she is also beautiful. These two queens slayed to the best of their abilities within this toxic ass fandom.

I find it funny, however, that so many of you harped on the "blonde" issue because you thought it was important that Annabeth be seen beyond just her looks, but quickly devolve to bashing an actress's looks when it comes to why she's not right for this role 🤔

I would also like to sincerely apologize that the 13 year old girl they cast in the show, wasn't as sexually attractive to you as the 24 year old woman they cast in the movie and sexualized through like 25% of her screen time (I'm actually not sorry. You're very weird if this is an actual point for you).

15. I don't agree with sending hate to the actor, but she's just not right for the role:

Once again, what are you doing by complaining about her casting on no other basis than her race?

The creator of the character said she embodied the role. She has already been cast, and Disney would be in a legal/production hell to recast her atp. Just because you're not directly leaving comments on her social media doesn't mean you're not part of the hate mob.

No matter how you look at it, your issues with her casting come from a very entitled and narrow-minded place. When you join in on these dialogues you are bolstering a sentiment that pushes more people to harass this teenage girl. When you leave these "harmless" complaints, on show content, fan posts or posts defending her, she's liable to read them because the cast regularly interact with fans online.

What do you have to say that is so important that it trumps protecting a young girl from the long-staying trauma of racism, of being told she doesn't deserve something she worked for because of how she was born?

16. I can't even criticize the show without being called racist:

Get. Over. Yourself.

Y'all are not the victim. Have fans of the show gotten protective of Leah and the young cast? Yes.

With good reason. This fandom is unbearably toxic.

Racism outweighs your need for a "perfect adaptation", sorry.

If you explain yourself properly and keep your critiques fair (like, even I don't think this was a perfect season, and will be sharing my thoughts shortly), no one is gonna call you racist.

You're preempting with that because in all honesty, you're probably planning to use your "critiques" of the show to pivot to one of the many points that I just outlined, and you want to pre-empt the criticism.

If a black Annabeth is the end all be all for you, just don't watch the show, no one's holding a gun to your head. Geez.

17. I'm Black/POC and I don't agree...:

Hey, Candace Owens... No one gives a shit.

First of all, for all the "I'm POC and I don't agree" people, you don't speak for us. Anti-blackness is rampant in just about every culture globally. You being not-white doesn't somehow make you less prone to hating black people.

But for the "I'm black and I don't agree" leftovers (assuming you're not just a 👩🏼‍💻 behind a keyboard). Black people are not a monolith. You're not obligated to think a certain way because you're black.

But consider why you're putting yourself up as a barrier to protect this hate mob. It's one thing to just state why you don't like Leah's casting, but to start off your spiel with "I'm actually black" as a way to weaponize the very identity politics you're critiquing... very strange. Not to mention, what are you defending?

The black community is coming together to defend one of our own, a kid who has been receiving death threats since she was 12, and this is when you feel the need to back the opposition?

I mean whatever... sometimes the house slaves would snitch to the master. There will always be some of y'all in the woodwork. It is what it is.

But when the exact ideology you defend is turned against you, when a Baltimore elected official is being accused of getting his job through "DEI", when conservatives are claiming that they wouldn't "trust a black pilot", don't decide that's where you'll finally draw your line in the sand.

All that being said, This is my Annabeth:

May every tongue that rose against Leah Sava Jeffries Shrivel and die in 2025 🙏🏿 My girl will keep winning ❤️

(video by @/waleahhasmyheart on TikTok)

[jesncin]

Coddling Colonizer Guilt

"Performative diversity is when MAWS features a Native American variant of Lois Lane in the multiverse episode only to end the season on a Thanksgiving episode."

...is something I like to joke with my friends as a shorthand for referencing MAWS' squeamish approach to politics while still trying to reap the clout of "diverse representation". I want to get my thoughts out there and perhaps start a discussion over why this feels off.

Some disclaimers: Firstly, I'm not Native American. Understand this is an observation I'm making from an outsider perspective with no personal authority. I'm just a disappointed Asian Lois Lane fan. Secondly, I know the MAWS crew/creators had no malicious intent in any of these (what I consider) poor writing decisions. I'm simply here to challenge and analyze these narrative and visual choices.

MAWS takes a fairly controversial take on Superman mythos so far. Unlike Superman's historic roots as an allegory for Jewish immigrants with Clark coming from a Kryptonian socialist utopia (leading the imperfect people of Earth to a better tomorrow), MAWS chooses instead to reimagine Superman as a descendant from a planet of "alien invaders". If the leaked(?) concept art (warning potential spoilers for s2) is to be believed, Clark is the direct descendent of the leaders of the "Kryptonian Empire". Supposedly gone are the parents of Superman being scientists that warn of the destruction of their home planet- instead we have the "proud, loving, brilliant" "leaders of the Kryptonian Empire".

While we don't know if this is the direction the show is going in, there are already cryptic hints of it being planted and thematic elements set up that point to it being a possibility. Clark had spent a majority of the season wondering what/who he is (being incapable of talking to Jor-El's hologram because of a language barrier) only to find out his supposed origins in episode 9. He's devastated learning that he's an alien invader and, once he regroups with his friends, angsts about believing he's a weapon sent from Krypton to invade Earth. Asian-Lois Lane and Black-Jimmy Olsen assure White-passing-alien-man Clark Kent that he's different and not like other colonizers. Clark ultimately saves the day, proving he's an exception. It's curious then that the season ends on Thanksgiving.

As I've mentioned before, MAWS is exhaustively squeamish with getting political. Whatever happens in the show that resembles "themes" is quickly contradicted with very little consistent internal logic. One minute Superman is supposedly a threat that "wipes out good American jobs", should "go back to where he came from" and Lois makes a hope speech about how we shouldn't treat people who "are different" and "don't look like us" (??) with cruelty (so Clark's an immigrant going through xenophobia?) and the next he's a redeemed colonizer (a more prominent thematic arc). One minute Clark is "different" and scared of being othered- likened to a gay couple and allegorically closeted, and the next his friends call him out for being a lying liar for not disclosing his marginalized identity within a week (the narrative frames Lois and Jimmy as being in the right). This show's writing is non-committal with what it wants to say, and largely goes on vibes. That is to say I don't think the writers intended for the themes of colonizer guilt to accidentally tie into Thanksgiving as a set piece for their final episode.

I'm sure the reason the writers chose Thanksgiving as their final episode is because it's "relateable". Half the episode is dedicated to slice of life family reunion shenanigans and the dang turkey still not being cooked through. But in choosing Thanksgiving, the writers told on themselves here with their biases. The existence of Thanksgiving implies the existence of genocide (of Native American people) by colonists in the MAWS universe. And yet Black Jimmy Olsen doesn't know what racism is (Mallah and the Brain give him a judgmental stare as Jimmy admits he can't relate to being violently marginalized) and Asian American Lois Lane doesn't understand immigration and xenophobia (constantly being entitled to Clark's immigrant identity, being incapable of comprehending why he would keep it a secret, because secrets are lies). The MAWS crew wanted a "relateable" set piece but in doing so ended up reinforcing the historical revisionism the holiday entails. A foreign colonizer sharing a meal with his friends of color on Earth, whose culture, history, and identity are all white washed.

I would like to challenge this idea that Thanksgiving is somehow the "relateable" choice. Why pick this holiday? Why not celebrate Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning (as some Native Americans do)? Why not pick any Jewish holiday as a nod to Superman's creators (ignoring this version's colonizer interpretation for a second)? Why not pick Lunar New Year, a holiday celebrated by many people including Koreans (Seollal in South Korea)? It could've been another fun opportunity to showcase Lois' heritage, and create a fusion of cultures from Jimmy and Clark's families. At its most non-political and secular, why couldn't they pick any weekend? This is what happens when a show doesn't consider its world building and setting in a holistic way. MAWS will nod to xenophobic rhetoric, portray allegorical queer marginalization, and make the vaguest nods to systemic bigotry (Prof Ivo displaced a whole neighborhood! Yet we never hear from those figurative displaced people). But it does nothing to discuss any of that on a deeper level. Its characters of color don't know what racism is and Thanksgiving is just a fun family reunion, guys.

All this and they had the audacity to sneak in a Native American Lois Lane in the multiverse episode?? Why is she, out of all the Lois Lanes in this screencap, the only one in full traditional wear? Why isn't she in a smart casual business fit like Black Lois and STAS white Lois? Would she not have been recognizably Native American to the non-Native audience otherwise? Isn't this tokenizing? Do you think she has a xenophobic dad in the military like Korean American Lois does?

But that fits MAWS' approach to diversity, doesn't it? Surface level cultural nods, maybe make Lois wear a hanbok one time, and let the audience eat it up. Never mind that both Korean American Lois and Native American Lois have been stripped of their culture and history in every other aspect.

I use the word "relateable" a lot here, but I think the important question to ask is "relateable for who?". 'Immigrant' is too charged a word, so MAWS universalizes Clark's marginalization to "being different". Superman isn't even an immigrant in this version, that was all a smokescreen for the twist that he's actually a descendent of colonizers! Being wracked with colonizer guilt is way more relateable to the white audience than being an immigrant, surely. Thanksgiving is more relateable than celebrating any culturally specific holiday our "diverse reimagining" could have represented. Characters of color being functionally white (in a way that doesn't threaten middle America) is way more relateable. MAWS is a show that doesn't want to delve into Native American history. It would rather put a Native American Lois hologram on a pedestal and call it a day.

[antiyourwokehomophobia2]

I got to be so real I kind of have mixed feelings about this post, and I'm not as mad rereading it as I was the first time I read it.

On one hand, I kind of agree that doing fucked up things to a fictional character doesn't necessarily mean that you're bad.

If I write a story in which a child is put to death, I'm not suddenly in favor of children dying. The person who wrote "the lottery" isn't in favor of people being stoned to death just because they wrote about it. I write stories all the time where characters are subject to homophobia or racism or general bigotry and I'm obviously not in favor of those things. However, there's a reason some stories that deal with the same subject matter are better received than others. There's a reason that even though "Avatar: the last Airbender" was written by two white men it's not called racist like some other works by white creators that handle POC.

I feel like the idea that how you approach fiction and fictional characters says absolutely nothing about you is insane.

If you watch a piece of media and then you go to write fanfiction about the media and you give all the white characters a good, happy ending but give all of the black characters sad ones where they're beaten to death, I absolutely think that says something about you! If you read/watch media with a fictional child and immediately want to write a story in which that child is raped by one of their parents, I absolutely think that says something about you and your character! The characters might be fictional, but you are not. Your choices do not exist in a vacuum. Why do you want to produce and see media where people of color end up unhappy and/or dead? Why do you want to write a lot of non-con? why do you want to see two siblings fuck?

Even though you didn't do anything to anybody in real life, I have to side eye why you're obsessed with seeing and writing that type of content. If you're writing a rape scene just because you like it (you don't comment on it or anything. In fact, it hardly ever comes up again) then yea, I do think you're probably a bit fucked up.

A white woman who writes all of her black male characters as "big" and "manly" and "dangerous" and "dominant" is absolutely revealing something about herself through her fiction! Maybe the fake black guy isn't being objectified since he's not real, but you can't seriously tell me that the white woman who wrote him has not revealed anything about how she views black men lmao. You can't tell me you'd seriously believe her when she says she's not racist.

I mean this site in particular talks all the time about the way certain groups are portrayed by certain authors. This site will be the first to cancel authors who write marginalized people in an unsavory light. If you think the fiction you consume doesn't matter, then you can never say anything about representation mattering ever again. A black child who only ever sees white characters cannot be influenced by that because fiction doesn't matter, right? You can't cancel an author for being racist. So what if all of their characters of color are portrayed as violent and evil? If what you write doesn't say anything about you, then that author is not racist at all!

I mean, seriously. How many authors have been canceled because they wrote black characters in a way that left the viewers with a bad taste in their mouths? How you choose to treat fictional characters absolutely says something about you!

I understand that fiction is how a lot of people deal with stuff. If something bad happened to you when you were a kid, you might want to see your favorite character go through that and overcome it, but the thing is: I feel like there's a line. I feel like too many of you use past trauma to justify what has honestly just become a paraphilia. Some of you don't read media about SA because you were SA'd and are trying to deal with it; you read it because you have a 'kink' for it. Too many of you hide under "healing" when you genuinely just get off on seeing fucked up things happen to characters. It's no secret that people who have experienced trauma sometimes go on to become abusive and perverse themselves.

The things that you enjoy and dedicate time to absolutely say something about you! Whether you think it says something good or bad doesn't matter, but the idea that it just exists in a vacuum and says absolutely nothing about your character and who you are as a person is quite frankly insane!

Even if you're writing it because you're trying to deal with trauma that happened to you or you're trying to create a safe space for people who have been through fucked up stuff, that says something about your character and who you are as a person. The stories you dedicate your time to reading and writing absolutely reveal who you are. We talk endlessly about the misogyny of male writers in the past and present. If posts like the one linked were true, then it wouldn't matter if a man spent all day writing stories where every single female character of his is treated like shit and assaulted. Media would be entirely unable to be criticized because the fictional characters aren't real and thus how you treat them says nothing. If a man with three daughters wrote a story where a fictional father SA'd all three of his children, that wouldn't be cause for concern at all? It'd say absolutely nothing about him? You wouldn't side eye him? You wouldn't be concerned if a primary school teacher spent all day writing stories where children are molested? You would send your child to a school with a teacher like that and be completely and utterly okay because "the fiction you write and consume says nothing"?

Of course there is nuance, but I don't like the way this post seems to absolve anyone into fucked up fictional stuff of guilt. No, reading and writing fucked up stuff does not *automatically* make you bad, but if you're doing it uncritically and because you get off on it, I'm not gonna pretend that's irrelevant to who you are as a person.

[morlock-holmes]

A Review of John McWhorter's Woke Racism

While I was reading through White Fragility @limeadeislife recommended I might check out John McWhorter's book, or maybe more of an extended pamphlet, Woke Racism: How A New Religion Has Betrayed Black America especially because I was looking at White Fragility through the lens of how it resembles what I understand about certain right-wing Christian cultures.

I'm not entirely sure how to approach McWhorter's book.

On the one hand, unlike Robin DiAngelo, McWhorter can put together a cogent argument in the format of "A leads to B, which suggests C" which DiAngelo never bothers to do, which means the book is both a breath of fresh air after White Fragility but also that I found myself wanting to argue with some of his tangential political views about, say, education, just because they were coherent enough to argue against.

But in terms of the central thesis, the book is, openly, aimed at left-wing centrist types who find people like DiAngelo utterly inexplicable, and less directly at members of DiAngelo's ideology who are starting to question the dogma.

In fact, I did enjoy this roasting of White Fragility

"Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, for example, reads in the present tense like a bizarre exercise in mind control created by someone bent on manipulation and getting paid. That's a misinterpretation: It is a work-book based on principles foundational in seminars of critical race theory, which its author sincerely believes in, promoting it out of a sense of benevolent mission."

I both feel that I should, for consistancy's sake explain why this invocation of Critical Race Theory doesn't bother me too much while at the same time feeling that this would be a boring tangent of interest only to a handful of people who are constantly annoyed with me.

But this leads to my big issue with the book, which is that it is very "101". This book is aimed at me eight years ago; by 2020 I had already deprogrammed myself and if you are reading this tumblr you already think this stuff is obnoxious nonsense as well, and you'll be very familiar with most of McWhorter's arguments (Including his trade school advocacy and belief in ending the war on drugs). You already read about and were outraged by the egregious examples he cites.

There's room for a deeper book about all this stuff, which delves more deeply into both the history of ideas and the culture of the religion that McWhorter sees.

The Ideology With No Name

McWhorter doesn't actually use the word "Woke" in the book. He says he finds it dismissive, and the phenomenon is serious, but I also do get the feeling that he knows that a bunch of the people shrieking about "wokeness" are as mendacious and dishonest as DiAngelo and her ilk.

There's a silly bit in White Fragility where DiAngelo writes:

"[Charles W.] Mills describes white supremacy as 'the unnamed politcal system that has made the world what is is today.'"

Which... Like. You named it in that sentence.

In fact, one of the major propaganda victories of DiAngelo et al has been to assert that they do not have an ideology, that they are merely anti-racist, and that any anti-racist movement or person obviously agrees with them, and anybody who disagrees is disagreeing with anti-racism as such.

So there just isn't an agreed upon name for the particular thread DiAngelo is part of.

McWhorter calls the ideology "Third Wave Anti-racism" and the people who follow the ideology, "The Elect" after an essayist named Joseph Bottum who I have not yet read.

Basically, McWhorter sees third wave anti-racism as a religious movement rather than a political movement, and I also agree that it has a lot in common with Right Wing American Protestantism in particular. I thought I might just go over some of the parallels, some of these are things McWhorter goes over in his book, some are my own thoughts or expansions of my own thoughts based on things he says.

Anti-Racism is the Gospel, by which I mean "The Good News". There is a strain in American missionary work that professes to be baffled that anybody rejects the Gospels. The Gospels are obviously true, and obviously good. The fact that Jesus Christ died for your sins and rose from the dead is as obviously true as the fact that the sky is blue. And so anybody rejecting the Gospel is pathologized the same way that you would pathologize someone who insisted that nobody has ever seen a blue sky. You can't admit that maybe the Gospels could be false, or that the evidence for them is anything less then overwhelming, so you invent psychological reasons for why non-believers insist on saying things that are obviously false. DiAngelo specifically is like this, she constantly acts baffled that anybody would respond to her wisdom with anything other then sheer gratitude. White Fragility asks the question, "Given that everything I, Robin DiAngelo, say about race is true and helpful, why do people get so angry when I say it?" It sounds like I am exaggerating but I promise she says this in almost the same words in the introduction to the book, which I'd quote if I hadn't already returned it to the library.

Racism is Original Sin, This is so obvious that basically everybody who is opposed to third-wave antiracism has picked up on it. It's held that every white person is inherently racist, and we can't ever stop being racist, we can only acknowledge our racism and attempt to minimize the damage. But something that I think has been talked about less is that this can be used to enforce hierarchies. Something that happens often in Christian circles is that when a leader of the community is found doing something corrupt or bad, the response is, "Of course, it just goes to show you that every one of us can sin, but the leader has repented his sin and been forgiven by Jesus Christ, so if you don't forgive him as well it shows how unchristian you are." Meanwhile, if you are found to be sinning, well, doesn't it say something very bad about you that you let yourself do this despite the community looking our for you? A similar thing happens with this "We're all a little bit racist" two-step. DiAngelo's racism is the unfortunate problem with being raised in a racist society; your racism is evidence that you haven't done the work.

Your everyday life is the battleground between God and Satan One of the reasons Christianity appeals to people is that it elevates the everyday struggles into amazing battles for the universe. Your decision about whether to masturbate while thinking of that hot barista is actually a demon from another plane of existence locked in a deadly battle for your soul with the creator of the entire universe. As much as third-wave Antiracists talk about systemic racism, in practice they are really heavily focused on inter-personal racism. DiAngelo specifically professes that once enough white people have healed our internal racism, systemic racism will sort of... disappear in an act of pure white person will. Whether you talk over Monique from HR is elevated from petty office drama to a very battle for the soul of America and the fate of her minorities.

Have you heard the good news? One of the silliest tropes in American Christian media is when our Christian heroes run into people who have never thought about Christianity and don't know anything about the bible. Of course, that idea is absurd; Christianity is one of the major political forces in America, it's basically impossible to be ignorant of it, but because it doesn't have a hegemony, it's adherents often pretend that it has no power at all and only a tiny elect even know about it. Third-Wave Anti-racism constantly does the same thing, asserting that Whites just don't think about race or racism even as millions of them rush out to buy White Fragility. Because Third-Wave Antiracism does not have a hegemony in the US, this is taken as evidence that it is utterly powerless and nobody has even heard of it, even though that is patently absurd.

I've Done Everything The Bible Says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! McWhorter points out that often, third-wave anti-racists will applaud both of two entirely contradictory opinions: e.g. if whites move out of minority neighborhoods, that's white flight and evidence of white racism. If whites move into minority neighborhoods, that's gentrification and evidence of white racism. From outside, this looks like, and frankly is, pure hypocrisy. But what it does in practice, and I say this from inside experience, is build out a social hierarchy. On the lowest rungs (The ones I used to occupy) are the people who actually believe this. We are surrounded both by obvious contradictions and by friends, coworkers, and celebrities telling us that actually all this makes perfect sense, and we assume everybody else just has access to a secret knowledge that allows them to resolve these apparent contradictions. What I very slowly learned, which lead to my conversion from the culture, was that this is not the case. You don't actually figure out some crazy third way out of that dilemma, you just move to the all-white suburb because you just had a kid and you're worried about crime, and then you occasionally publicly confess how guilty you are that you did it, and that it just shows how far we have to go. The people on the highest rung are, from what I can see, people who are so utterly lacking in self-awareness and so incapable of putting together a logical argument that they simply don't understand the contradictions in their own world-view, and just confidently do whatever.

Man, I've tried to write this a couple of times and it feels like it gets away from me.

One last trope in Christian media is the unbeliever who doesn't know anything about Christianity, but he reads the bible and then comes away with the exact political beliefs of a 21st century right-wing Evangelical. Which is of course absurd; the idea that you could reconstruct Evangelical beliefs on gun control or border security by reading the Bible is patently insane, but there is a cultural bonding ritual that comes from explaining how actually all of modern day Republican politics actually comes from the bible. People who don't get it are the outgroup, people who do are the in group.

I thought about this a lot while reading White Fragility. The ideas in it are not complex; rather, they are contradictory (Or at the very least, in extreme tension with each other) and explained incredibly badly.

This allows us to identify the in-group and out-group; our in-group are the people who are already so familiar with her ideas that they can take her rambling nonsense and explain that actually it's a bunch of simple, correct ideas (I can absolutely do this, by the way), while being confused or hostile marks you as a member of the out-group.

I may just make a different post about the other thing I wanted to talk about, which is how this stuff is different for black and white people.

McWhorter and a couple of other people I talked to reminded me that there were foot washing ceremonies during some of the George Floyd protests, and I just want to remind you all that any white person who washes the feet of a black protestor is symbolically casting themselves as Jesus Christ.

[olderthannetfic]

Something that's always stuck with me is Stitch's followers dogpiling me for writing a Jewish Star Wars AU. Basically it was an AU where Finn was space Moses, the last of a noble Force-sensitive family who made sure he survived the destruction of their planet, and when his Force abilities awakened he went on to fight to free the other Stormtroopers. Stitch didn't like that I went in a Finn/Hux direction wherein Hux was a double agent embedded deep in the First Order, sabotaging it from the inside.

I was called a Nazi. I'm Jewish. I was called anti-black. I'm Beta Israeli, black and Ethiopian-American and proud. I was called a Pick Me POC, I was sent pictures of starving Ethiopian children, I was sent Holocaust pictures, people flooded my comments on AO3 - this was before it had a block feature - and even after I deleted my tumblr the hate bled over onto my other social media accounts. I was called slurs, I was told I should've starved to death, people told me my "Jew money" wouldn't buy off people this time, and I got hit by enough people calling me a monster, a bad person, etc. that I took the story down just to escape them.

Stitch only mentioned me once. Just once.

I think the real issue they have with AO3 is that at any point you can be blocked, comments can be turned off, people can find themselves unable to keep clawing at you again and again. You can make it so they have to be logged in to send their threats and then you can report them. They can dogpile "bad" fans all they want, but there are consequences for their actions. I was 14 then and easily intimidated. Many people on AO3 are not either of those things. You can't harass them off their own platform. And when you try, you end up being booted off of it instead.

The real reason Stitch doesn't like AO3 is that it's designed to protect authors, including "Pick Me POC" and "POC TOO" (get it, it's funny because it's like #MeToo, Stitch is oh so hilarious). It protects those of us who are neither white nor onboard with all of Stitch's opinions and, more broadly, not onboard with purity culture, respectability politics and people's demands that you change your content to match their idea of what a respectable fictional story looks like.

This is not about racism. It's about kicking people who are "wrong" aka write anything they don't like off of AO3 for pure, morally good, self-righteous reasons that they tell themselves make them not the bullies here. It's about control. They want you to do what they want or leave.

I've been rewriting my old fic and I'm planning on putting it back up sometime this year.

No, antis, you don't get to bully black people off of AO3 and call yourselves anti-racist and act like you're moral guardians. To be a moral guardian, you'd need some morals. If you don't like the site's policies, get off of it. I am entitled to my space on AO3 just as much as anyone else. I am not Less Than, and the fact that my own people were the ones telling me I was has permanently made me suspicious of alleged anti-racism campaigns in fandom. I know who these people are when they know there won't be consequences for their actions and they're not people I'd trust to run a bake sale, let alone a fandom archive.

--

Yikes! That's quite an experience for a 14-year-old!

[cenvast]

heyo! i read your analysis on laios and racism and it's an interesting read, and i'm wondering if you ever wrote about marcille relation to it? when she had that argument with chief zon, she seems to see the orcs as a group prone to violence that killed a lot of people and that's why they cannot live outside of the dungeon and doesn't acknowledge how elves and tall-men colonised the orcs land so the orcs are forced to fight them and to live in the dungeon, and the reveal that marcille herself is an elf and tall-man is definitely an added layer to that. i'm interested to see your analysis on this!

You did a great job pointing out and explaining the implications of Marcille's racism in the text in your ask! And thank you for reading my Laios meta, and I'm glad you found it interesting. Marcille's racism is much more textually blatant, so I ended up writing about the text's less straightforward racial commentary first, but I'm very glad you asked about Marcille because I really enjoy her character <3 Here's the Marcille meta with a bit of Kabru sprinkled in:

What Does Being a Gay Half-Elf Have To Do With Imperialism?: On Marcille, Kabru, and Blind Spots

Marcille's relationship to in-universe racial issues is complex. She holds a more privileged position than demi-humans like orcs and the accompanying racist biases against them. Simultaneously, she experiences racial discrimination for being half-tallman from other elves, and this is further complicated by the elves' imperialism negatively impacting tallmen. Unfortunately, Marcille's position as both someone who experiences and enacts racialized harm rings true to real life; people of color can still be racist to other people of color and uphold systems of harm. To clarify, I don't see Marcille as coded as anything other than white in text, but her experiences can, of course, be analogized to real-life racial issues.

Notably, Marcille's mixed-race identity fuels her primary motivation: achieving lifespan equality between the races. Her experiences with her father dying when she was young and feeling othered as a half-elf from other elves motivates her to erase the most glaring difference between the races (in her eyes, at least). We see the races being divided into short- and long-lived categories multiple times, and we can glean that the elves' extended lifespan allows them to more effectively enact colonialism and imperialism. Though it's unclear if Marcille aims to erase inequality on a sociopolitical scale like, say, Kabru, achieving racial lifespan equality would likely weaken the current elven imperialistic structures and promote a higher level of social equality. However, I don't believe her solution would "solve" in-world racism; neither would I say that that's her main goal.

Marcille's motivations are very personal. She wants lifespan equality because of a personally traumatic experience she doesn't want to repeat. Her father died before her, so she doesn't want her other loved ones to die before her. Once again, her main aim is not really stopping elven imperialism. Still, her relationship with elven power remains fraught. She obviously doesn't want to be taken into custody by the Canaries, and her family seems to have had negative experiences with elven authority in the past.

We can draw interesting parallels between Marcille and Kabru. Like Marcille, Kabru has had a personally traumatic experience (being a victim of elven colonialism), which motivates him to rid the world of dungeons. He understands that the elves use the threat of dungeons as an excuse to invade other nations and incorporate them into their empire. In service of maintaining their hold on power, the elves withhold information about dungeons and ancient magic, which would make peoples' lives safer. Kabru perceives his trauma as one instance in a larger tapestry of imperialistic violence. His goal is to strategically target a nexus of elven power by destroying dungeons and thereby, minimize the possibility of others experiencing the harm he experienced. Significantly, Kabru is a Brown man and Marcille is a white woman, which does seem to influence how clearly they perceive their trauma as a result of racialized systems of power or not.

I said that Marcille is gay in the title, so let's talk about Marcille straddling the line between upholding and transgressing expectations of conformity and respectability. She attended the Magic Academy and excelled at her craft, which aligns with being a good citizen, etc. But she also studies ancient magic, obsesses over dungeons, and performs ancient magic to save her loved ones. Interestingly, Marcille has a stigmatized view of dungeoneering as a dead-end job at first and doesn't seem to want to permanently be a dungeoneer. Still, for her research's sake, she joins a dungeon party and ultimately practices ancient magic because of her relationship with Falin.

Throughout her life, Marcille has been strange. Her half-elf identity informs her goal of equalizing racial lifespans which expands into an interest in dungeons and ancient magic. She develops these transgressive interests and enters a research field which is both frowned upon and illegal. This further codes her as queer, forcing her away from the respectable path, so she can pursue her true interests and goals. Her queerness is additionally underscored by her deep love and care for Falin driving her to illegally revive Falin with ancient magic. Her revival of Falin snowballs into her confrontation with and near arrest by the Canaries. Marcille has always been queer in the sense that she pushes back against societal norms in her interests and behaviors; it's an added bonus that her queer interests manifest most intensely in her queer relationship with Falin.

Even within her queerness, Marcille maintains this tension between both upholding and transgressing societal norms. She places expectations of normative femininity onto Falin by discouraging her from wearing her hair short and encouraging her to dress feminine at the cost of Falin's comfort. Once again, if we read Marcille as a lesbian woman (or generally queer woman), she is also actively harmed by reductive, cisheteronormative gender expectations, but like when she voices her racist beliefs against the orcs, she has failed to unpack her own biases, even when they personally harm her.

Overall, Marcille is an example of how a person can hold multiple marginalizations, consistently clash with systems of power, and still hold blind spots and not be fully cognizant of the systems of power at play in their own life.

Another important parallel between her and Kabru is that they're both racist against demi-humans. Once again, Marcille and Kabru holding racist biases underscores how someone can be deeply empathetic and work towards remedying inequality in one area while still failing to recognize how they're complicit in replicating other systems of harm against others. I'd like to think that Marcille will mature over time and come to a fuller understanding of how she can both be injured by and benefit from unjust systems of power.

Thank you for reading! :D

[ultfreakme]

and on our agenda is JonJay. How many times have I told myself not to go under comments on Tumblr, but this time misfortune took me by surprise. It was about Bernard, I decided to go into the comments, which was my main mistake. The author of the post wrote that Jay is worse than Bernard, since he can control the minds of other people (I don’t remember this at all, I know about his ability to pass through walls and any solid objects) and how Jon can meet with him. God, there was no explanation, but if this person meant that Jay forced Jon to fall in love with him by penetrating his mind, then I'm leaving this planet. How blind do you have to be when you read a comic book so as not to read that Jon agreed to help Jay himself, since people needed help. And he didn’t fall in love with him right away either, rather after Jay met the superfamily, like, yes. I’m still It's still killing me that people think Jay is the worst option for Jon, although if you ask my opinion, they couldn't find each other better. Jay literally exposed himself for the sake of Jon, what else do they need for them to believe in his sincerity. By the way, they don’t have any thoughts about the setup from Nicky to Damian. Sorry, but it still really annoys me, like ,how so. I'm still wondering why people love Bernad and Nika more than Jay. Maybe you have an answer, I don't know. (I love them too, but this injustice is killing me)

Anon, I get you so much. I answered something like this before but I love ranting and the Jon Kent tag is filled with Jay hate so I'll do it again. The reason why people hate Jay is:

Racism and Orientalism

People think Jon should've ended up with Damian

He's associated with Jon's age-up

Potential covert biphobia

None of the Jay haters have actually read SOKE. The 'mind control' rumors started spreading and becaus basically 70% of tumblr DC fans haven't actually touched more than 3 issues of the comic books and out of context panels in their lives, they don't know that Jay's NEVER 'seduced' Jon. Which is, by the way, a classic offensive stereotype assigned to Asian characters; that Asian characters, especially ones who are into men are all seducers. This is primarily applied to women but now its being applied with Jay.

It's funny because Jon WAS affected to be attracted by an actual telepathic character; Imra, aka Saturn Girl.

And this is where the biphobia comes in because Saturn Girl dated Jon, it was a disaster fire relationship in a book that mischaracterized both of them.It's implied that Imra accidentally used her powers to make Jon be into her, but NO ONE talks about it because it's a seemingly heterosexual relationship. Also she's a white blond girl. It's far easier to target the sparse Asian rep we get.

Nika and Bernard also don't get as much hate because of this reason. People can talk around it all they want, but they are more loved and accepted because they are white. If either of them were POC, they'd be getting the same treatment.

The DamiJon shippers for some reason got it into their heads that Damian x Jon is going to be a thing and now they're mad that they're headcanons aren't real. Like I can't even be kind about this because these assholes have been nothing but racist, clogging up Jon's tag by not tagging anything right, and have also attacked actual content creators to the point they've had to respond to them to tell them to STOP.

Nothing will get these people to like Jay, because they don't actually care about comics, storytelling, the messages these stories bring, the characters, or anything really. They just care that their headcanon vision of Jon's gone and it isn;t easy to project their "sunshine baby" tropes on Jon anymore since now he's actually got adventures of his own outside of Damian. And those adventures happen to be with his boyfriend Jay.

[edwardsvirtue]

Hi!

I'm writing a Twilight fanfic, any suggestions about how best to be sensitive and respectful of the Quileute? I've done some preliminary research, but I suspect I'm doing a terrible job.

Thank you.

I'll start by saying that I am by no means an authority when it comes to matters of the Quileute people (which I'm sure you understand, I get that you're probably just looking for advice from another writer!). I am an enrolled member of a totally different tribe in a different part of the country, and I've been very fortunate to reconnect with that part of my heritage, but at the end of the day, I am a white-passing person who has mostly lived a white experience. so take that for what it's worth.

my first piece of advice is to be patient with yourself. the fact that you care enough to ask this question at all means you're doing better than stephenie meyer ever did. but by the same token, understand that the connection to twilight means we unfortunately can't really achieve a result that's 100% unproblematic. undoing all that racism is WAY too big of a task for any one fanfic writer to expect of themselves.

other than the obvious (e.g., avoid depicting flagrant stereotypes, don't just "make up" your own aspects of quileute history and culture on a whim, etc.) I would focus first on treating your poc characters like complete, well-rounded beings. well written representation will have characters who are messy and complicated and riddled with flaws IN ADDITION TO all their positive qualities. as long as you're not reducing anybody to just one or two aspects of their identity, then you're on the right track.

I know you said you've started some research already, but I'll still share these links because every twilight fan needs to see them :) good luck & have fun writing!

truth vs twilight

mthg.org

[multi-fandom-lunatic]

booktok is odd because white women so badly want books where white people lead revolutions/save the world/make society more progressive and yet they only see this as an escapist fantasy. Like, they don't seem to actually want to change things in real life. It's really strange. Trying to change the world for the better doesn't have to be a fantasy! You can read up about things, listen to marginalised groups and put in the work!

It's because when POC lead revolutions it hits too close to home for them and forces them to confront the reality that they are benefitting from a system they should be against.

They understand that the Capitol from Hunger Games are the villains; greedy people who use the system to keep up their lifestyle while stepping on a lot of people to get there. They want to be like Katniss who's not had that privilege but had the courage to lead a revolution. But they realise that they benefit from the system like the Capitol do, and it draws uncomfortable parallels.

(Side note - I haven't read the Hunger Games, just done a little bit of Google search, and I also know that the Capitol benefit from the system by being wealthy, not nessesarily white. But. I think the comparisons are easiest to draw from HG, because they make it so absolutely clear that the Capitol is in the wrong and Katniss is right. , Also. I'm not hugely a reader of the dystopian genre, so I haven't read enough books to find a better one to use for parallels.)

They (white women) tend to find that mentioning race at all, especially to have a nuanced discussion on where racism is present and how it affects even the smallest part of their lives, is uncomfortable. It's often rooted in the (incorrect) understanding of racism being equality despite differences, instead of while embracing differences. Bringing up race brings up those differences, and that reminds them of the differences they (usually subconciously) would like to bury. It upsets their balance. And that's why bringing up race at all (even in the BookTok and similar) rocks this teetering tower of equality. But it's foundations are shaky. And it will fall.

Anyways, got a little tangent-y at the end there. And I'm writing this while quite sleep so my points might not be super coherent, and I apologise for that. I also haven't really touched on the facet of white feminism that benefits upper middle class white women, but you know. There's always next time. Still, this was very refreshing to talk about. I just find this whole concept very interesting to discuss. Thank you so much for the ask!

(Side side note: Yes! Absolutely, supporting POC should be the next course of action after this. I'm not from the US, but I hear that there's a lot of Black owned bookstores being shut down. The best way we can support POC authors is to buy their books and hear their voices.

Books with POC protags, Books by Black, Brown and Women of Colour and Queer POC books are some good places to start (these are books by POC with POC protags). I'd personally like to spotlight the Momo Arashima series by Misa Sugiura, a middle grade fantasy series with Shinto gods, much like Percy Jackson, and is also very queer. Check it out!

[tittytania]

🚨PLEASE HELP SAVE LUCKY THE CAT FROM HEARTBREAKING ABUSE AND NEGLECT, AND STOP A MAJOR PUBLICATION FROM PROFITING OFF OF ANIMAL ABUSE🚨

Back in August, The Cut (@thecut), an online division of New York Mag (@nymag), published a story by an anonymous woman who, after giving birth to her baby, started to despise her cat Lucky and chose to abuse her, including starving her and leaving her to live in filth.

Some selections about Lucky from the article:

Obviously, openly admitting to chilling animal abuse did not go over well with The Cut's readers. People were rightfully outraged at both the anonymous writer and the magazine for publishing the article and profiting off of animal abuse. After the predictable backlash, The Cut put the article behind a paywall and added an editor's note to the beginning, claiming that they confirmed the welfare of the cat prior to publication. (Here is an archived version without the paywall. Look at a more recent capture to see the note that was added.) The magazine also made a post to their Instagram about the situation, reiterating their claim of confirming Lucky's safety and health. They are limiting comments on their socials to remove comments that relate to the backlash about Lucky's abuse, and they are blocking accounts that comment on it. A screenshot of the Instagram post is below.

(note: I cannot confirm or deny the claims of racism and misogyny. I have not seen anything like that myself, but someone on reddit claimed they saw a person call the anonymous woman's behavior "white woman bullshit." That is the extent of what I have heard on that. I also cannot comment on the claims of abuse and threats towards the staff).

Clearly, The Cut's claims about Lucky's welfare are bullshit. The resolution of the article ends with the author saying simply "I haven't fallen back in love with Lucky, but it could still happen. I'll shut the windows til then." According to the article itself, Lucky is still in the home with an owner who is abusing her, an owner who has, and I quote, "an unwillingness... to change anything about (the abuse)." By definition, this means Lucky's welfare is not being probably cared for. You cannot claim that Lucky is ok when her owner already said that she is abusing her and is unwilling to stop the abuse. New York Mag is hiding behind activism buzzwords to protect an animal abuser and shelter themselves from the justified backlash to their publication's choices so they can continue to profit off of animal abuse.

Please please please help to get a real update about Lucky's condition.

What can I do?

There is a change.org petition requesting a real update about her, which as of writing has over 17,000 signatures. You can also reach out to the magazines' staff and demand a real update from them. Their emails are listed below:

swati.sharma@voxmedia.com | bill.carey@voxmedia.com | lauren.starke@voxmedia.com | priyanka.mantha@voxmedia.com | amani.orr@voxmedia.com | lindsay.peoples@nymag.com | rachel.bashein@nymag.com | jen.ortiz@nymag.com | marisa.carroll@nymag.com | evan.murray@voxmedia.com

The email of Jim Bankoff, the Chairman and CEO of vox media (which owns New York Mag) is bankoff@gmail.com

Here is an email template that you can follow.

You can also report online animal abuse to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) here.

If you are in New York, you can contact the 311 website or call 1-800-577-TIPS (1-800-577-8477) to report ongoing online animal abuse or neglect.

The Instagram account @lucilletherescuecat has a story highlight where she has posted several resources in addition to the ones mentioned here.

My heart deeply aches for poor Lucky, who cannot understand why the human she loves has changed so drastically. Why her life changed from daily brushies and pillow snuggles to being ignored and starved. She used to have her own space heater, and now she doesn't even have water. I'm devastated at the thought of how heartbroken and miserable she must be. Her owner even admitted that she would be in jail if she did this to a person. While I doubt this will result in a jail sentence, we can at least make sure that Lucky is rehomed to place where she is properly cared for.

Please share and encourage others to do the same, using the #SAVELUCKYTHECAT hashtag. Thank you so much for reading.

[antimony-medusa]

Hi! I don't know if you've followed the debate on twitter these last few days (if you haven't, feel free to ignore this ask, I don't want to drag you into stuff) about whether themes of slavery can be depicted in fictional settings. I'd be curious to have your opinion because you have very based takes on the topic of fanfiction

Boy. I have been at a wedding so I have NOT been following, but a friend dug that one up for me, and boy. Isn't that something.

Okay, do I think that slavery can be depicted in fictional settings?

I'm gonna start this with a caveat of saying that I'm white, and as far as I know my family tree doesn't include any enslaved people. So slavery is an atrocity, but not a personal one for me any more than I feel personally about all atrocities, and your opinion on this subject might be different based on your experience, and that's completely fair. This is just the opinion of someone who thinks about content warnings and representation and exchange rules sometimes, and honestly if you want to take my answer as me saying "i'm white, anything I say after this doesn't really matter" that's a fair read of the situation. End post.

But further, the siren song of being asked a question:

My general stance is that there are very few things that can't be depicted in fictional settions, but there are a lot of things that should be depicted with care and research. And I consider major archive warnings to be one of these things. (I'm on the team that says that in an ideal world we would have a major archive warning for racism or slavery.) I don't think that there are any topics that are inherently off-limits for fiction.

If you're interested in writing professionally, there's a workshop called Writing The Other that does intros into writing topics that you don't share experiences with, and they do a really good job of breaking down the ways that you can analyze your work for cliches and stereotypes and other weaknesses, and ways that you can research to avoid them. It's an excellent workshop and I really recommend it— they even do scholarships, which is how I got to join! I consider them the industry standard of the question of "can I write about this", and as I remember it their basic answer is that the more outside of your experience a thing is, the more research you have to do to make sure you don't mess it up, and the more central to your story a thing is, the more you want to make sure that you don't mess it up. So sometimes you do hit topics and you go "am I the right person to tell this story, should I leave this topic to someone who knows it more personally, who's studied this". But that doesn't mean that you can't tell the story, it just means that to do it well, you have to put the work in. And that no one is obliged to trust you on the surface of things to have put the work in. I am probably going to trust an author who I know is disabled to have written disability well, for example, more than an ablebodied author. But there are authors out there that I know do their research and I pretty much trust them to deal with any topic carefully, if they want to take it on. A lot of the time, the more sensative a topic you are touching, the more you need a relationship of trust between author and reader, and sometimes you have to earn that trust carefully.

And boy is there fiction out there that deals with sensitive topics in ways that does not earn that trust. I have read things that I find highly distasteful. I have read published work that chooses to deal with real life atrocities in ways that I find wildly uncomfortable and I do not tend to recommend those books or authors.

I have also read nuanced and insightful explorations of horrific things, including slavery, including domestic violence, including racism, in ways that I felt enriched my understanding of the world and the people around me. I've read books that carefully touched on things like childhood sexual abuse and police violence and involuntary commitment, and that didn't make the story not a life-affirming and joyful experience, because the stories were able to take these things and make healing and catharsis out of them. Simply hearing that a story deals with a topic does not tell you if it's a story to recommend to others. We all live lives that sometimes touch on terrible things, and I think that trying to police who can tell stories about bad things leads into bad things like making people prove that they've suffered enough to write or shit like "are you black enough for this story", and I don't want that in my writing community. I have literally seen the bad end for going down that road, check out "helicopter discourse," and I'm against that.

I'm against that enough that I'm willing to endure people who do not share an experience writing badly about terrible things as the price we have to pay to allow people who have personal stake in the situation to be able to explore sensitive topics without harassment. Especially with fanfiction, we're dealing with amateur writers, so unfortunately most of the time when you have a subject come up the default assumption is going to be that it's dealt with badly. But I personally fall on the side that it's worth five people writing it badly to allow the one person who's personally impacted to write about it as much or as little as they want. My personal bugbear is terminal illness in children, that's my trauma, but I would personally rather have people write horrible tearjerker fic about aging down their characters and killing them off and it's so sad, even though I don't want that, rather than to say that that topic is off-limits to people.

On the topic specifically of slavery, this fandom, as many fandoms do, has a habit of including slavery and human trafficing as themes in their writing. A lot of the time this is not done well. We have a lot of baby writers who are deliberately writing the saddest thing they can think of or writing unjust societies for their guys to rebel against. This is not what I would say is a strength of the writing in the fandom, taken as a whole. And some people do their research and do it well! I've read great fics that pull from history in an informed way and do interesting things with it! But not everybody, good lord.

But saying that because a lot of people deal badly with slavery nobody should deal with slavery is not a path forward that I'm personally in support of. Do I think it should be tagged? Absolutely. Nobody should hit that unawares. But a lot of societies through human history practiced slavery of one kind or another! If you are drawing from roman history for your gladiator au, most of those guys were not there of their own free will. Tropes like fae folklore includes themes of posession and ownership, because that was the background radiation to the lives of the people who told these stories in the first place. There are a lot of tropes where these topics are going to arise, and I don't think that's inherently bad (though I personally would certainly feel a lot more comfortable with pulling on classical and medieval history for these stories rather than 1800s America, for example). And like, you can absolutely try your best to steer around these topics! That's an option! But honestly if you're doing something historic or historic-inspired, I'm not sure if it's more respectful to write a fantasy past in which greek history did not include slavery. That's whitewashing of history by definition. So if you want to avoid that, you're left with most of human history off-limits to write about, because of the atrocities? And I don't think that's ideal.

And like, I think with fanfiction you kind of just have to accept as background radiation that there are going to be a lot of people dealing with topics that they are not equipped to deal with. That's just how it goes. These are people writing with minimal research, experience, and editing, cause we're all here for fun, not professional development. You're gonna have people mishandle things. And that's why I think tagging is really really important, so that you can see the tags on a fic and go "oh I do not trust them with that topic" and navigate away, or filter the topic entirely. I have my touchpoints that I steer away from, and I have 100% clicked away from stories in horror going "oh no no no no no that's not good." But I don't think people should all be banned from writing about these things because some people do it badly.

Note: that doesn't mean that like, we shouldn't have conversations about how maybe if you put the minecraft men in your story where hybrid trafficing is a metaphor for the underground railroad, you should do that Carefully. We can still strive to do better. I have Seen Things and there is room to improve. There's room for discussion about people using slavery for cheap angst, in the same way that I've talked about the treatment of disability used for angst, and I've seen people talk about the agency allowed female characters, and the list goes on.

And that doesn't mean that I'm not going to 100% respect it if I get a DNW in an exchange where someone has said they don't want slavery or hybrid racism. People should be able to opt out of these topics (entirely! even if they're dealt with well!) and nobody has to read things they don't want to.

So in essense, when it comes to writing sensitive topics like slavery I'm going to do my best to think about what I'm doing and do my research— and I have written slavery and human-trafficing-type-deals before, I like gladiator aus and classical-inspired fantasy— and I'm going to tag so that anyone who doesn't trust me— and nobody has to trust me— can navigate away. But when it comes to policing what other people are writing, I don't think it does anyone any good to post callouts on twitter. At most I'm going to warn a friend that a certain fic deals with a topic badly. That's my viewpoint.

[jesncin]

Hi! Thanks for answering my other ask! I also haven't seen a lot of criticism for Lonely City aside from a few tumblr posts that saw the same issues with it that I did, so I made sure to read the comic again just to ensure that my criticism is accurate (that's why this reply took a few days). I'm sorry for how long this ask is, but I hope it makes sense 😅

Basically my main issue with it is the ableism present in the comic as well as certain racist or colorist writing choices. There are other issues regarding queer rep that don't fit into these categories, too, but those might be more of a personal interpretation so I'll summarize them at the end.

I'll try not to focus too much on complaints about characterisation in this ask, since that can be a matter of personal taste, unless the differences in characterisation play into the other problems I see in the comic. Also just in advance: this is my personal opinion, which may ofc be off, but that's why I wanted to ask for a second opinion in the first place.

These first two problems are unfortunately pretty common in DC comics in general, so it's not like Lonely City is unique in doing this, but since the comic spends a lot of time promoting itself as progressive they left a particular sour taste in my mouth. It felt disappointing to me to see a comic claim progressiveness and add OCs of color while still running into the same bigoted writing choices as other DC comics.

The first writing choice I has issues with in this regard is the depiction of Catwoman herself. Catwoman's mother Maria Kyle has been depicted as afro-cuban since the 90s, but despite that fact comics almost exclusively portray Selina as a pale blue eyed woman who gets treated as white by the narrative and other characters in the universe, completely ignoring her mother's race. Lonely City goes out of its way to show that Selina is half cuban - which is great! - however, since the artist still decided to draw her as a pale blue eyed woman and the comic doesn't make any reference to her mother being black whatsoever this just rubs me wrong. It's not like the author simply wasn't aware of Selina being canonically half afro-cuban, since her cuban heritage keeps getting referenced, so it can be assumed that the author must be aware of her mother being a black woman as well. To me this makes it stand out even more that she is drawn and treated as a white(-passing) cuban woman, instead of a black one. It's unclear if this was the author's decision or a requirement by DC editors (though Selina is drawn as black in Absolute Batman and iirc in one of DC's highschool AU comics so it doesn't seem to be a publisher mandate), but either way it means that despite being fully aware of Selina being half afro-cuban, the comic completely ignores her mother's (and by association Selina's) canonical blackness.

The second issue to me is the depiction of Waylon Jones/ Killer Croc. Waylon has been coded as a black man fairly often throughout his appearances in DC comics, with at least one comic directly drawing him with brown skin instead of the usual crocodile green and the new Absolute Batman directly depicting him as a black man without the crocodilian traits the character usually has. Now, presumably in part due to this DC has been changing their approach to the character from writing him as an animalistic cannibal monster to more sympathetic characterisations as a regular human man with a skin condition who got ostracized, treated as a monster or assumed to be a violent and aggressive perpetrator due to the way his skin looks even before having to get into crime because it was the only career path available to him (which ofc also plays into an interpretation of him as a poc or at least as an allegory for racism). All of this is presumably something the author of Lonely City would be aware of, so the choice to depict Waylon not as a regular human with a skin condition but as someone more visually animalistic (given that Waylon is drawn with a snout and animal eyes), as well as having other characters directly refer to him as an animal, insinuate that he would just urinate on the floor and generally writing him as 'unhygienic' (stating that he doesn't care to flush after defecating etc) feels ...not great. Of course it is debatable wether the author wants Waylon to be read as black in Lonely City (his outfit design does seem to potentially point to him being coded as an older black man though), but even if that isn't the case the writer still would likely be aware of the character being coded as black or as a racism allegory in other works, which makes the choice to depict him as gross and animalistic a problem.

Now these next two cases include one of the most glaring problems I saw with the comic's writing. The writing, at least to me, seems pretty ableist. Of course ableism in regards to mental health is a problem with DC and especially Batman comics in general, but before reading Lonely City for the first time I genuinely thought it wouldn't be an issue here, since the comic markets itself as progressive and even goes back to depicting Barbara Gordon as a wheelchair user, which current comics have unfortunately moved away from.

The ableism in Lonely City imo particularly shows in the writing of Riddler and TwoFace, so they're going to be the characters I'll talk about here. Their cases basically represent opposite problems with the way DC tends to portray mental illness: in Riddler's case Lonely City decides to completely erase his mental health problems, while in TwoFace's case they use his mental illness to portray him as more evil.

I'll talk about Riddler's portrayal first, since TwoFace's is the arguably more offensive one. The Riddler as a character has pretty consistently been portrayed as struggling with his mental health, mainly with ocd and some variant of bpd. He's also usually portrayed to have low empathy, either due to npd or general neurodivergence. These are core character traits that usually still persist even when the character gets 'reformed' in canon and aids the 'good guys' (like in his arc as a P.I. in comics in the late 2000s or in Batman Unburied/Secrets in the Dark), which, if handled well enough, helps balance out the portrayal of mental illness in the character's appearances by essentially stating that it's not his mental health issues that made him a villain and that they aren't an inherently bad or evil trait.

Now Lonely City essentially does the inverse of this: not only does the comic write its version of Riddler as a mentally stable, fairly well adjusted and empathetic man that seems to lack pretty much every single one of his usual mental health issues, they also ascribe his mental illness (as well as his usual flamboyance and queer-coding) to him having been a cocaine addict that has been 'cured' by the time the comic's plot takes place. There's no issue with giving the character an addiction ofc, if handled well enough, and Lonely City isn't the first comic doing that either; the problem, to me, lies in the comic specifically pointing out that Riddler's usual characterisation - and everything that comes with it regarding his mental health - was not something inherent to him as a person but instead was caused by drug abuse. By doing this, as well as by portraying him as well adjusted and neurotypical after his rehab, the comic essentially posits that the ocd/bpd/npd/general neurodivergence associated with his usual characterisation were 'weird' negative traits exclusively caused by him doing cocaine and that he needed to be 'cured' of them in order to be able to reform and become a better person. It essentially states that he used to be weird, ridiculous, villainous and "crazy" because of drugs, but now that he went to rehab and got "cured" he is normal, well adjusted and a good man that is fit to be a romantic option for Catwoman. And while the comic states that even as a villain he never seriously hurt anyone, it still makes the suggestion that he got cured of mental illness along with his drug problem, and that he had to be cured of both of it in order to reform.

Now, it could be argued that this negative portrayal of mental illness as something caused by addiction or something to be cured of wasn't the intention of the comic - and maybe it really wasn't - but that's where the second problem comes in: Throughout the entire comic there are only two direct portrayals of mental illness we get to see: the first is Riddler's short flashback to his "embarassing" pre-rehab self, the second, more direct, portrayal of mental illness is TwoFace. There are further mentions of characters with mental health problems, but those are only short and offhand, though not without their own problems, which I'll get to during this argument.

I've already discussed the problem I see with the way Riddler's mental health is handled, but the portrayal of TwoFace is ...worse, imo, to say the least. In Lonely City TwoFace is characterised as a far-right fascist politician, trying to force his bigoted and classist policies onto Gotham via police brutality and propaganda. He is also the only character in the entire comic that is consistently shown to struggle with his mental health: Every other character (including post-rehab Riddler) is shown to be well-adjusted and mentally healthy, their problems mainly stemming from grief or circumstance, not mental illness. Meanwhile only TwoFace exhibits behavior linked to his mental health on panel: in closeups he is shown to have ocd tics, like having to rhythmically tap on his desk when agitated or struggling with the thought of needing to use his coin, his behavior is often erratic, other characters treat him as off-kilter and ultimately when he is defeated it is said he will be interred at Arkham again. Arkham, specifically, where at the point of the story only the "truly evil" and mentally ill villains like Scarecrow are still being held, as the comic makes sure to point out. By doing this, by showing only TwoFace to struggle with his mental health, by mentioning that only the irredeemable villains are still at the mental health hospital, by showing all the reformed rogues to be mentally healthy and stable - the comic directly associates mental illness with being a bad person.

More than that, by not only making TwoFace a bigoted fascist but by specifically revealing that his bigotry and fascism was caused by his "evil alter" after all at the end, the comic directly links being far-right with being mentally ill. Seeing the comic handle things like that and especially the "evil alter" reveal at the end was a genuine shock and huge disappointment for me, especially after how much Lonely City seems to flaunt its supposed progressiveness throughout the story. Writing TwoFace as an evil racist bigot and Trump-allegory not (just) because he is a privileged white man in power, but specifically as someone that is a far-right populist because he is "crazy" and mentally ill is just so...hurtful. Add to this that throughout the story TwoFace's fascist policies are consistently portrayed as the actions of one single mentally ill "maniac" that others only go along with out of fear or sense of duty instead of being a systemic issue (the police commissioner keeps telling TwoFace off about his fascist policies, his financial backers stop supporting him once his right wing ideology becomes too overt, whenever TwoFace issues commands for police brutality police officers voice their concerns with those actions and only go along because they are scared of Harvey and then ultimately abandon him as well). And in the end, fascism in Lonely City is defeated not by thorough systemic reform but by simply throwing the Trump-analogue into a jail for mentally ill people "where he belongs". It's extremely frustrating to me, as you probably can tell, and it just feels so disappointing to see a comic presenting itself as progressive and anti-fascist while falling into the exact same ableist tropes as every single other comic that portrays mental illness as something evil that needs curing to even have a chance at becoming a good person, and fascism and bigotry as something caused by mental illness instead of a sytemic issue (and specifically having the police 'only following orders' while actually disagreeing with fascism, when far right ideologies infamously thrive in the police system irl).

Like I said at the beginning of my ask, there are other issues I have with the comic as well, but those might be more based on personal opinion, so I'll summarize them here: Another thing that irks me about the comic is that despite showing pride flags in the background multiple times the queer rep in it is, imo, flimsy at best. Harley and Ivy are mentioned to have been a couple, but Harley has been fridged before the events of the story while Ivy gets killed during it, making the comic essentially commit a double "bury your gays" with the only two explicitly queer characters in it. Yes there is the implication that Barbara Gordon might be in a queer relationship with her campaign manager, but as far as I could tell during my second read through it's never actually made explicit that they are a couple or that either of them are actually queer, it's only ever implied. And while Catwoman has been canonically bisexual for over two decades, there hasn't been a single mention of her queerness (that I noticed) throughout this entire comic either. Of course her ending up in a relationship with a man wouldn't erase her bisexuality (nor Riddler's for that matter, who had been confirmed as canonically bi prior to Lonely City's release), however since there aren't even any allusions to Catwoman being romantically interested in women whatsover in the entire comic (as far as I could tell, maybe I missed something if so feel free to correct me), personally speaking I can't really count this as bi representation, since for all it matters if a reader that isn't aware of Selina (and Eddie) being canonically bi in other comics reads Lonely City they would most likely read her and Riddler as a heterosexual couple (particularly since as previously mentioned the comic imo does erase Riddler's usual queercoding as well by ascribing his flamboyance to his cocaine addiction and by having the 'clean' version dress and behave in a very heteronormative way, for example by dressing mainly in beige and muted colors instead of his usual bright greens and pinks and by otherwise acting like the stereotypical "dad" character in a sitcom). Having Catwoman end up in a relationship with a man wouldn't be an issue otherwise, but in combination with other queer rep being either only alluded to (Barbara) or being killed off (Harley and Ivy) the fact that Selina's bisexuality is never even hinted at and her "happy end" in a comic that set out to write a story about Catwoman being her own character separate from her relationship with a man (Batman), that she so often gets defined by, being that Selina ends up in a by all accounts "heterosexual" relationship as the (step) mom of a teenager just leaves a bad taste, imo. It really wouldn't have been hard to make her (or Barbaras) queerness explicit, but the comic didn't do that.

Either way though, I'm sorry that this ask has gotten so incredibly long and seems so negative, but like I said I only saw a handful of people make the points I did here about Lonely City with everyone else treating it as perfectly progressive and it really made me doubt if my criticism and disappointment in the comic (I really wanted to like it!) has any ground at all. And since you seemed to have the same issue with the MAWS fandom and generally always have thoughtful commentary about representation I thought I might as well ask you for a second opinion.

Please don't stress about answering btw., and if you disagree with any (or all) of my points here I'd also love to hear why you think I'm wrong, after all that's why I'm sending this in the first place. Either way though, I hope you have a nice day and thanks again for letting me talk to you about this!

Hwoof! Okay this is a lot! I'm gonna put this under a read more so that it won't be a super long scroll. But my takeaway is that this kind of fixation on continuity and details is detrimental for engaging with larger themes and an elseworld interpretation of these characters. Media crit thoughts below! Spoilers for Catwoman: Lonely City.

I know it might seem redundant, but being aware of the premise and parameters for this story can help us better understand the decisions that went into it so:

Catwoman Lonely City is an Elseworlds miniseries (4 long issues) under Black Label; an imprint publisher of DC. It follows a much older Selina Kyle, recently released from jail following the death of Batman from a massacre orchestrated by the Joker (known as Fool's Night) 10 years ago. During the time she was in prison, Gotham had changed. Costumed heroism and villainy is heavily outlawed, resulting in what seems like a safer albeit less free Gotham under the rule of Mayor (reformed) Harvey Dent. Catwoman has one final score in mind; to break into the Batcave and find out what "Orpheus" is. The last message Batman gave her before he died.

The entirety of Lonely City is written, drawn, colored and even LETTERED by Cliff Chiang. Which is nuts.

This story is tightly written with an expansive cast system. The main themes are about grief and aging. There's so much emphasis placed on how a lot of these characters feel like they're past their prime. We see Selina struggle doing the acrobatics she was once used to. The theme of needing to "let go" of the past is paralleled with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice "Don't look back". Ultimately it asks what the point of all that costumed heroism was for and why it's worth chasing those glory days.

So keep all this in mind as I respond to each of the points you brought up!

Catwoman

So talking about a character's race like that of Selina's is tricky. I try to avoid using words like whitewashing in cases like this since she's not a character that started out that way like say- Sunspot from X Men. Instead when I'm criticizing things like Caped Crusader I'm looking at it from an angle of narrative opportunity. If Selina's going to be white again (and rich) what story does it tell? And my conclusion for Caped Crusader is that its commentary on classicism would've been stronger if Selina was portrayed like she was in Reeve's The Batman. To me, she doesn't offer much the way she was re-imagined in Caped Crusader.

I don't personally feel that's the case for Lonely City. Despite being an elseworld, Lonely City is very holistic in its application of Selina's history. The writer recognizes she's a white passing Hispanic woman in this story. In a flashback to her youth, Selina is portrayed as looking exactly like Julie Newmar (as opposed to Eartha Kitt) did as Catwoman in the 60's Batman show.

In terms of how her whiteness is integrated into her character, there's a flashback sequence that goes back to Selina's time in jail. She meets an Asian woman named Yoona who's dealing with racist harassment from the other inmates. Selina tries to train her to stand up for herself, but it backfires. Yoona's not as good at fighting, ultimately saying "guess we can't all be Catwoman". Selina tries to stand up to Yoona's bullies herself-but the big criminals of the place decide to fight back by killing Yoona and placing her corpse in Selina's cell. This causes Selina to close up, feeling guilt for putting someone vulnerable in danger.

Narratively we see this as one of Selina's arcs in this story. She can't break into the Batcave alone, so she recruits a handful of new friends and former rogues to help her. But the whole time she's worried she's putting them all in danger for her own goals. She's hesitant about training the Riddler's daughter Edie to help out on the heist, she later loses Killer Croc, and then Selina gets so paranoid she cuts Edie and the Riddler off the team. Part of Selina's growth in this story is to accept help and support. She can't do any of this alone.

The whole point is that the story ends with exactly what you're asking for in your criticism. Selina lets go of her past in some way and lets someone new take on the Catwoman mantle; Edie, The Riddler's afro latina daughter. It's a story about Selina letting go of her pride and guilt so that she can trust the newer generation to take the role. Yes things will be harder for this girl, but Selina's got to have hope; because some other girls can be Catwoman after all. Meta-textually this combines the differing histories of Catwoman into a conversation about legacy. Selina's whiteness plays a role in this elseworld story, so it justifies itself in my eyes instead of being an uncreative default.

Killer Croc Waylon Jones

I'm not an expert on Killer Croc history but from my brief brushes with him throughout being a Batman fan, I say there's 2 Waylons; 1. a guy with a skin condition 2. a guy who is a crocodile man. There's merits for either take, each with varying levels of sympathetic portrayals. He's also been white, coded as Black or straight up re-imagined as a Black man.

While I think there's a conversation to be had about dehumanization and treating a Black character as animalistic- I know at the end of the day the reason some writers pick the Crocodile variant of Waylon Jones is just because they want Batman to fight a gator guy. So he literally is just that, a gator. Not much malicious intent behind that, he's just an animorph gator. I think it's unfair to treat the "skin condition" variant of Killer Croc as the more progressive version of his character. Sometimes I'm playing Arkham Asylum and I wanna see a big croc instead of a guy with a skin condition running at me in the sewers. Either version is fine, I say with respect to furries and monster-boinkers.

At most, we see Waylon being a part of that arc where Selina's worried about putting vulnerable people in danger. Waylon dies in one of their heists and it causes Selina to close up again. I think it's fair that jokes made about him peeing on plants from Ivy/Eddie can be read in bad taste considering his history, but this take really is just the Animal Guy version of the character. I think going in too deep about the allegory of his marginalization would've lost the focus of this story in the short time frame that it had.

The Riddler Eddie Nygma

I think interpreting the way Eddie Nygma talks about his past and recovery as a broad "mental illness is evil" is reductive to the story. When he says "Hey, I was doing a lot of coke then." during his flirty catch-up date with Selina, I don't think he's saying "the substance abuse made me evil, Selina." The point of change/redemption for Eddie isn't necessarily "rehab". Eddie explicitly states that when his wife/partner Lorena died, it made him question what he was doing and put his life together. That included getting into recovery. He mentions he wasn't always there for his daughter Edie, but that he is now-he's no longer just thinking about himself. That's a conscious decision on his part.

I personally try not to get caught up in concepts like "the core of a character" because that can be subjective and people can choose to shift the pieces of a character and focus on something else. Reeves' Batman for example is a very untraditional Riddler take, he's a serial killer, and not a dapper guy at all. I'm more concerned with the concept of "through-lines" in characters, because it reveals what's resonant about them to be worth revisiting.

I get that Eddie's perceptive + genius mind and egomaniac tendencies is a huge part of his character. But I don't really know what (in your words) a "balanced out" take on Redeemed Riddler's mental health/neurodivergence in a story like this should look like. He joins Catwoman's heist team, he offers his expertise and says some quips. Is there something else he should be doing to demonstrate mental illness isn't evil or what? I know there's other redeemed Riddler takes where he still has his ego, but I don't think that fits for what story Lonely City wants to tell with him. He's narratively a humbled character in this. Lonely City wants to explore that kind of Riddler.

I'm gonna group your later queer criticisms here since I want to keep this categorized by character. But your argument about Riddler's queer coding erasure and acting like a heteronormative dad is missing the bigger cultural picture. The Gotham Rogues are heavily queer coded because- they're villains. It didn't start out as earnest representation because these were the un-questioned historical short-hands to how villains where characterized and designed. Sure as time goes on, some of that characterization will be reclaimed and canonized as queerness, but to read representation solely on historical coding is a misleading approach to analysis. Because it relies on signifiers over narrative.

Again, one of the main themes of Lonely City is about how these characters have aged passed their primes. They're tired and nostalgic for their colorful pasts, but are trying to move on in their own ways. The Riddler now looks unflamboyant and toned down to reinforce that theme. Eddie's tired now, he's wants to be a better dad, he has experienced the long prophesized twink death that comes for us all and has to embrace his new silver fox status. To hyper-focus on the details where he must perform a certain type of queerness is greatly limiting to queer representation.

John Constantine is one of DC's most prominent queer characters. He was coded and then canonized as queer early in his original Hellblazer run. In his backstory he used to be this over-the-top non-conforming punk young man, but then he was sent to a mental facility after accidentally banishing a little girl to Hell. He came out of that traumatizing experience looking,,, like how you describe Eddie Nygma looking like in Lonely City. Gone is John's colorful non-conformity, and all that's left if this beige coat wearing homeless guy. But that's the point and tragedy of his story. He's still queer even when he's not performing what people stereotypically associate as being visibly queer. So if you want to read Riddler as queer in Lonely City, nothing is really stopping you. I don't know how else to end this point other than saying there's nothing homophobic about mellowing out into your silver fox era.

Two Face Harvey Dent

To fully understand the portrayal of Two Face in Lonely City, we need to talk about what role he plays in the narrative. Because it's broader than you think.

Two Face exists as an allegory for Gotham itself in this story. After Batman died and costumed heroism/villainy is strictly outlawed, Gotham seems like a better, safer city. But in reality, it's a heavily policed city, where only the richest are doing better off. It's got the appearance of progress, but really it has same systemic problems still bubbling within. That's Harvey Dent's character in Lonely City. He promises people he's reformed, but really we just see his classic standard downfall happen again when challenged.

Much like with what I talked about queer coding villains, Two Face never started out as earnest representation of DID. The horror surrounding his premise is often really reliant on the vilification of DID. And once again, much like Waylon, sometimes we get sympathetic treatments of that part of him.

But I think the trouble with Two Face as DID rep is that as long as that "darkness bubbling within him" is represented through an alter, he's going to struggle with how his premise is tied to the vilification of DID. There are some takes of Harvey where this part of him is removed completely like in The Dark Knight, where his descent is a straightforward story about a good guy getting corrupted rather than an alter showing up. On one hand you can see that as erasure, and on another hand maybe it's refreshing to have a take that doesn't rely on an evil alter. Your mileage will vary. Tons of people with DID love Harvey, it's complicated!

Calling Harvey a Trump-like bigoted fascist is reductive of the narrative allegory he represents. I notice there's a tendency in media analysis to label any remotely bigoted or rich villain character as being a stand in for Trump or Elon Musk and that's a superficial reading. I've seen many fictionalized stand ins for Trump in media, and Lonely City's Harvey Dent doesn't feel specific enough to be a commentary on the guy.

Trump is a blatant bigot, spouting explicitly racist rhetoric and mocking disabled people. Harvey in Lonely City is performative about his justice. When talking about Barbara Gordon, he says "she's not the only one with a disability" as he touches his disfigured face. He's shown saving a brown boy from a fire. Things Donald Trump would never do. We don't see the usual fictional Trump-isms like allusions to building a wall or tweeting about celebrities.

Harvey's not evil because he's mentally ill, his alter isn't what motivates his actions. That reading ignores how Harvey genuinely believes what he's doing is good for Gotham. You say that the police in this story only go along with what they do because they're scared of Harvey, "and specifically having the police 'only following orders' while actually disagreeing with fascism, when far right ideologies infamously thrive in the police system irl" but that ignores scenes like this:

Where the police have no problem enacting prejudice and threatening violence without Harvey's supervision. When the police commissioner is frustrated with Harvey, it's not because he's some good guy being forced to be bad by the Mayor. Whenever something goes wrong, Harvey uses the commissioner as a scapegoat so that he can keep his own reputation intact. When the commissioner advises Harvey that it's bad to attack protesters, it's not because he disagrees with bigotry- it's because it looks bad on Harvey as a candidate. When one of the bat cops abandons Harvey in the climax (only to get shot by him), that's not him disavowing bigotry, it's him being fed up with being bossed around.

You say that "in the end, fascism in Lonely City is defeated not by thorough systemic reform but by simply throwing the Trump-analogue into a jail for mentally ill people "where he belongs". But that reading ignores scenes like this one:

Where after Barbara Gordon gets elected as Mayor, she's still criticized even after the protesters had her back earlier. Despite Barbara starting out the story begging Catwoman to leave vigilantism behind to become a respectable member of society, she ultimately learns that doing things from within the system isn't enough. That corruption still exists in Gotham and she's going to have to play dirty to fight it. That's an awareness of systemic problems, not a story where all the problems are solved when the antagonist gets punished.

Then there's your reading of mental illness in this story. Much like how your queer analysis relies on signifiers like performance of queerness in order to be read as queer at all, you do the same thing with mental illness. If you're willing to read Harvey tapping his fingers during his debate with Barbara as OCD tics, -even though it's a classic visual short hand for portraying nervousness or impatience- or his attachment to the coin as OCD -even though Harvey's obsession with duality and chance being a theme to his character- and confidently claim that "only Two Face exhibits behavior linked to his mental health" then you're willfully ignoring another strong candidate for a mental illness reading: Selina Kyle herself.

We see her taking meds after she's released from jail. We see her immediately remembering Bruce's death when meeting the Bat-police. We see her obsess over Bruce's final words to her, unable to let the past go. We see her struggling to open up and accept help after Yoona and Waylon die, she even acts out in paranoia. We see her thinking she's protecting others by pushing them away. We see her getting so focused on Bruce's final message for her, it seems like there's nothing else she has planned after the finding out what it is.

When asked about this, she continues to justify that she's protecting others "No one else is going to get hurt." She's self-destructive, not looking out for herself anymore. When she finally makes it to the batcave and watches it self destruct, she's willing to just sit there and go down with it. "Life after Batman is a dream, he said. I should have believed him. And life after Catwoman? Maybe I could've figured it out...with enough time."

I don't know about you, but that's not reflective of what you described "Every other character (including post-rehab Riddler) is shown to be well-adjusted and mentally healthy, their problems mainly stemming from grief or circumstance, not mental illness." Sometimes grief can result in self destructive mental illness, it's not any less because it's stemmed from a tragic circumstance. Our main hero character, is struggling with how her grief and love is consuming her. It may not look like classic vilification of mentally ill villains, but it's still explicitly there.

To bring this back to Harvey, no, I don't think the end is supposed to be some kind of twist that everything bad was his evil alter's doing. Harvey wasn't lying when he said he embraced his alter and made a compromise with him instead of running away from that part of himself. This is the classic Two Face descent, everything seems fine on the surface but then his inner darkness resurfaces. Harvey explicitly says "we had a deal, do things my way-" before being interrupted by his alter who says "-Fuck the deal, Harvey!" They both agreed to be doing things Harvey's way for a while, but his alter's tired of all the pushback and finally decides to take control in this moment.

There's a lot to critique at the core of Batman's mythos, the inherit copaganda in a rich man's goals to eliminate crime, the vilification of mental illness for its horror elements among many things. It would take a much bigger shake up of the status quo to see these things challenged outside of a "there's a lot we still gotta fix" ending. I think criticisms where people say "Batman beats up mentally ill poor people" is pretty disingenuous. It ignores that many of his rogues are well off and powerful, but it also infantilizes them as villains. Batman's rogues aren't clueless mentally ill people, they choose to do bad things. Some of them are mentally ill as they commit crimes, but they make a choice. Harvey Dent isn't bad because he's mentally ill, he's bad because of his flawed beliefs.

I don't think Harvey being sent away to Arkham in Lonely City is supposed to send the message that he'll only be good if he's a cured, neurotypical guy. We see how the jail system treated Selina during her 10 years behind bars, the whole system's broken and the comic is aware of that.

Queerness: Barbara Gordon, Harley Quinn + Poison Ivy and Catwoman (+ Riddler)

"Bury your gays" does not refer to when queer characters die, it is to talk about how they're treated as more disposable/expendable than their non-queer counterparts. A character being "fridged" is not about them dying, it's about how they're treated as disposable for the development of another character.

Harley Quinn is just as much a "fridged" character in Lonely City as Batman is. Both Selina and Pamela are grieving over the loss of their loved ones, but they react in opposite ways. Pamela's moved on to the point of leaving Gotham, while Selina's fixated on Bruce's final message to her. I don't know how we're supposed to have a story about grief without someone dying? So I don't really know what this kind of criticism is asking for.

Sure, Ivy dies in the story. But she goes out in a defiant stance against Harvey's vision for the city. She's comes full circle in recognizing that Gotham wasn't all awful; it nurtured her and taught her to accept herself. She dies because the story has stakes and consequences to its actions. Again, I don't think being queer means the characters should be invulnerable and immortal. Ivy has the same narrative weight to her death as Waylon did.

I agree that Barbara's queerness is subtle in Lonely City. But I don't think that's a bad thing. My impression is that she recognizes she's in a very dangerous position in Gotham, hence she keeps her relationship with her campaign manager Josie very private. But when you look into it, there's really no denying it or reading it any other way. In these finale panels, what business does Barbara have to be in Josie's son's room? Even more so, why is he named Wayne?

The comic even bothers making Selina pause upon hearing that name. Barbara named him after Bruce, so wait- how come she has a say in naming Josie's son? When Wayne tells Selina "Are you here for mama? She's in the back." Selina goes to the office to see only Barbara in there. Josie shows up in the room way later. Hence, Barbara is also Wayne's mom. If we genderbent Josie, the nature of their relationship wouldn't be up for debate.

I get that it would be cool to have a queer Barbara story, but this is a detail in Catwoman: Lonely City. It implies something interesting about Barbara still hiding a part of her identity even though she's not a costumed vigilante anymore, but that's it. Normally I'd like for these things to be expanded, but I'm aware this is Selina's story's first and foremost. And it's a miniseries. At most, this relationship is an interesting characterization detail.

Ignoring the fact that Selina's silver fox futch game is on fire in this series, I think the queer Catwoman criticism falls into the same problem with relying on queer signifiers and performance for representation. I get that an elseworld needs to re-establish its take on these characters since I don't know if they're queer in this iteration or not. But for a tight story like Lonely City, what exactly do I stand to gain from Catwoman turning to the camera and telling me she's bi again this time?

Lonely City is about Selina's grief over Batman turning into an obsession. When Bruce was alive, Selina would ask him if he ever considered retiring from his mission and settling down with her. Bruce would lead her on, saying that a life like that is just a dream for him "but when I do let myself dream Selina...in that life? I'm with you". So she clings on to that, hoping that the final message he left her, "Orpheus" could maybe be some kind of recognition of their love. But in the end, she discovers "Orpheus" is a lazarus pit meant to temporarily revive someone from dying. Bruce was asking Selina to revive him. "The cape came first [...] nothing else mattered, nobody else mattered...not even me."

Her relationship with Eddie is meant to show that a part of her does want to move on from Bruce and find love elsewhere. But she's caught between her self destructive quest and having to think about what life after Catwoman looks like. Ultimately she learns she can move on without sacrificing who she is as Catwoman by passing that mantle on to someone new. For a tightly written 4-issue miniseries, I don't see how having Selina hitting on a woman or saying she finds a woman hot, or Eddie doing that for men really adds anything to that story. Maybe if it was a longer series we could've gotten something about queer solidarity? But I'm content with Lonely City the way it is right now.

I've written in my comic essays before about how I don't want "show not tell" to dictate how queer characters have to have very specific relationships (bi person must always be with man and woman) or display specific attractions (bi woman must show interest in woman at some point) or express themselves in a specific way (queer man has to be flamboyant) to be considered queer. But I also don't want the verbal confirmation of queerness to be mandated in every story with queer characters. Taking either points to an extreme would result in really formulaic queer stories.

Maybe Selina and Eddie at the end of Lonely City are a bi couple who are happily mellowing out into their old age, judged by on-lookers as a straight couple because they're not performing bombastic queerness hard enough or something, I hear that's a very bi thing.

Also "Selina ends up in a by all accounts "heterosexual" relationship as the (step) mom of a teenager just leaves a bad taste, imo." Man, what you got against step moms? :((((((((( The teenager is robbing rich people too, it's not that domestic.

haha but I hope this doesn't come off as mean spirited in any way! I think Catwoman Lonely City is a rich text to discuss so I'm interested in people's interpretations of it.

When I talk about performatively progressive things like My Adventures with Superman, it's that media like that wants the clout of looking like it deals with serious topics (like Superman's immigrant allegory), but it'll be squeamish about tackling that in any serious manner. It's a show that has surface level diversity but is unwilling to discuss how that diversity informs its world. MAWS shows us an endearingly girlfailure Lois Lane who needs the help of men to get hired as a journalist because it believes that's far more relatable than being a jaded successful career woman. The show loves rebutting Superman discourse about red undies and being a nice guy who saves cats from trees, but it can never show us what its version of Superman's ideals are. It's a show that fails to say anything of substance.

Meanwhile Catwoman Lonely City is a story about loss and what a Gotham trying to move on from its costumed past looks like. It's wrapped up in issues of class disparity and racism, but in the end of the day it's a really personal story about grief and aging. Its characters' identities inform the way they navigate its political world. Lonely City takes advantage of the Batman mythos' history to tell its remixed story.

At times, that means working within its limitations. Two Face is a character that would require a really big re-imagining to separate his premise from the vilification of DID (which I was hoping Caped Crusader would do, but alas), and this elseworld version plays him pretty straight and standard to tell a story about repeating cycles and facades. It has the bad guy sent to Arkham, as is the usual for Batman stories.

My main concern when reading Lonely City was that the characters telling Selina to "let go" of her costumed vigilante past was going to lead to an ending where Selina has to settle down and be a respectable member of society. But that didn't happen! Barbara recognizes that working within the system isn't enough. Instead of Selina getting assimilated into the government like an honorary cop, she's still a vigilante robbing the rich.

Catwoman Lonely City ends with the recognition and hope that things could be better, that its problems don't end in the final page. And that's way more substance than anything MAWS could pretend to have.

[djinnandtea]

so I got some interest on this post where I tossed out that I wanted to talk more about monster romance and race and gender. it's been really nice to see a few folks are also wanting to hear/talk about it! I'm not prepared to say anything at length [eta: this turned out to be kind of a lie] with any certainty or research to back me up, but I thought I could post a rough outline of sorts of what I'd want to research and explore further, just as a starting point for myself but also a jumping off point if anyone else has any thoughts or resources.

I guess I'll start with gender first. I'm new to the romance genre generally, but I don't think it's a surprise that the genre has always been dominated by discourse around who reads romance and the kind of gender dynamics presented in a lot of conventional romance books (which are generally heterosexual/heteronormative in a lot of problematic ways). I'm thinking of the harlequin romances my mom and grandma used to read, but also of the discussions around colleen hoover's work and then the dark romance sub-genre too.

this means that there's the obvi discussion to be had about content vs. context. who is writing the romance, what informs their writing, what messaging comes through via choices made by the author, as well as by the context the author is writing in. I'm sure if you've been reading romance--even fanfic--for a while, you're well versed in some of these conversations, even if just in a casual way.

after considering romance on a macro level, I think you'd then have to look at some of those more micro sub-genres. where are gender norms accentuated and exaggerated, and to what end? why is dark romance a thing, why do (usually) straight white women want to fantasize about being in that kind of relationship? what's the purpose being met? (this is all asked non-judgmentally, btw, as I also enjoy dark romance.)

and maybe there are folks who would dislike my comparing of monster romance to dark romance, but I do think the two are related, especially based on a lot of posts I've seen since joining this corner of tumblr. I think there's a lot of interest in exploring ideas around control and dominance that dark romance and monster romance provide contained space for. if you watched my YouTube video, I touch on this a little bit more at the end as well.

I'm sure I'm missing a lot re: gender (like all the stories being told about lgbtq+ MCs), but this is just some initial thoughts at the fore of my brain.

as for race...........well. lol.

there's the very surface level question around what percentage of monster romance FMCs are white. I genuinely don't have this answer, and I know there are a lot of nonwhite FMCs too! but I'd be really curious to know the actual numbers here. why? well, bc diversity matters. but also because of the decades long narratives around white women as victims of men of color, and how that narrative has been used to weaponize whiteness and demonize blackness specifically, and non-whiteness more generally.

I am def not saying that all monster MMCs = depictions of non-whiteness, I'm just thinking about the connections between equating non-white people/bodies with monstrosity. I'm thinking of the historical framing of non-white people and communities as sub-human, as savages, as beastly. inhumane. monsters have kinda always been a metaphor for the other, including the non-white other, and I think it'd be naive of us to assume that vestiges of that brand of racism (which is still alive and well) never inform the ways creators engage with monster romance and monsterfucking, consciously AND unconsciously.

I'm also thinking about orientalism. I'm thinking of the exotification and classification of the east. the way westerners invaded the eastern world and began treating the people there like specimens. I'm thinking about how othering and abjecting and exotifying a culture or community or person can create a power-informed version of sexualizing that culture or community or person. like, othering/abjecting/exotifying can lead to creating a perverted sort of desiring. I have a special interest here because I'm arab, so this stuff feels particularly personal, but yeah. it makes my wheels turn.

there's also a dehumanizing element of turning an othered body into a piece of sexual meat. I'm thinking about the way monsters in these books are always excessive, the way their penises are always massive. we can't pretend that doesn't seem a little familiar to the degrading ways white people have also discussed black bodies, too. like. I'm not saying wanting our monsters to have big dicks is racist, I'm just saying there are some aspects of the genre that I think deserve to be ~unpacked~ and considered in a wider context that takes this kind of stuff into account. not as a confirmed given, but as an avenue worth approaching with curiosity, if only to point out the ways in which it's NOT a product of racism/anti-blackness.

obvi this post is not backed up at present with a single source because I'm just thinking out loud based on stuff I've read previously over the years that I definitely would need to revisit, so I totally get if you read this and think I'm being ridiculous. but if you saw my first post and were kinda wondering what I had in mind when making it, this is it.

[unforth]

I started to write this as a reply to @vex-verlain but realized it should be it's own post.

To be clear, this is about @end-otw-racism and why I support this movement (even if I don't agree with all their proposals).

I am profoundly anti-censorship. It has been one of my biggest personal issues my entire adult life. I will absolutely defend the speech rights even of people I think are utterly reprehensible, even the rights of people who want me and my family dead. I think their speech has a right to exist, full stop.

But.

Being anti-censorship in no way means being anti-moderation. I often see people who are pro-ship, anti-anti, or "too old to use a name for telling yall you're clowning" say that AO3 is supposed to be a safe space for WRITERS, not READERS, and that to me is one of the big ways that the current harassment and moderation policies are badly failing writers of color. There's no way to 100% protect all writers, period, on AO3, and to me it seems like a no-brainer that if the goal is "protect all speech, avoid all censorship, minimize harm to real people," the only way to accomplish all those goals it to have a really robust, well-moderated system that prioritizes reducing harassment - ALL harassment - without looking the other way on certain topics just because they're harder and thornier to sort through. A way to section the groups that are oil and water away from each other, through blocking, powerful filters, comment options, etc (some strategies we do have now, btw! They HAVE been adding functionality in this direction, but it's clearly not enough.)

Currently, protecting people who write bigoted shit is causing active harm to fans of color. We see the impacts of this harm constantly; I personally have seen many, many Chinese and Chinese diaspora fans driven out of white danmei fandom circles for all sorts of reasons, and if yall are in fandoms that often have bipoc in them I'm sure you've seen the same (and if you are in a fandom that doesn't have many bipoc it might be wise to take a moment and consider why it doesn't.)

I just really want more people to take a step back and ask themselves why they think an anti-censorship position necessitates an anti-moderation stance, and also why they think being pro-moderation is the same as being pro-censorship.

I defend the rights of bigoted shit to exist.

What I don't defend is the right of the people who create that stuff to weaponize it against vulnerable people.

Regarding AO3, I personally support a solution that involves some way of sectioning off the bigoted shit. I'm not sure exactly how that would work but I think some kind of major archive warning is a solid start. Also maybe a way of flagging authors who are frequent offenders. And to be clear...it's not my job or responsibility to know exactly how to accomplish this. I'm no expert. That's why I'm supporting a movement that explicitly says AO3/OTW SHOULD HIRE AN EXPERT. And I know it would be expensive...and I know many, many of us would donate to a funds drive to raise the money to cover that expense.

I've seen too many friends get profoundly hurt, and I'm so tired of (overwhelmingly white) fandom circles pearl clutching over this not being an issue, that the real problem is that this will lead to censorship of (checks notes) Nazi shit, spitefic, and the other dregs of fanfiction (which, again, has a right to exist! But God why are so many of y'all favoring IT over ALL THE FIC THAT WILL NOW NEVER EXIST BECAUSE BIPOC GET BULLIED OUT OF WRITING IT.)

It's clearly an issue.

And we have to speak up and demand better or it will continue to be an issue.

Please, please listen to the bipoc who've managed to not be driven out of fandom and understand that *things need to change,* which means, for us white folks:

1. A lot of listening to the people who've been harmed

2. Using our voices to amplify theirs

3. Standing up to bigotry we see in our fandom communities

4. Shutting up when they ask us to shut up

5. Checking our own behavior and doing our best not to be part of the problem, and, if and when we go awry, owning it with maturity and apologizing and doing our best to make amends and not repeat our mistakes

...and probably more but those are the first things to come to mind.

Please stop siding with people who've decided they are entitled to spew vile shit, stop prioritizing their writerly protection over the safety of equally valid writers who also deserve protection and are being targeted and hurt. All you do by siding with the assholes is amplify their voices while silencing bipoc and create a space that protects bigots. Is that REALLY the hill you want to fight on?

None of us know it all. We can all learn to do better. I'm personally here to learn, and listen, and improve.

And I'm here to shout from the rooftops that we can be anti-censorship and pro-moderation.

I am, and you should be too.

[olderthannetfic]

One of the things I've seen people who support End OTW Racism talk about is wanting to make sure only people who should reclaim slurs use them in their work. This raises a lot of questions to me, such as 1. how are you going to determine who gets to reclaim a slur 2. how are you going to determine that an individual is in the group you've decided should be allowed to once you figure out the answer to point 1, and 3. how are you going to deal with the fact that sometimes, a word is a slur in one language or one region of the world and not the rest? A lot of people I know in the United States only found out what the slur is for Pakistani people when a YouTuber from the UK (who is black, not Pakistani himself) got heat for saying it, for instance. If someone accidentally uses it as an abbreviation, not knowing it's a slur in the UK, then how is the moderation team supposed to handle that?

I like the idea of having more moderators who can review instances of harassment and racism, but I feel that some of these proposed ideas are not practical or realistic to implement online in large-scale on a site as big as AO3. I hate that anyone who asks these questions is being framed as being "pro-racism". Of course I'm anti-racist, I'm not white and I've experienced it in fandom, but having been in fandom for this long, I'm aware that it's a big space. It seems to me to be an impossible task to check that every single person using a slur is someone you've decided should be allowed to do so for every single instance of it being used in every story on the entire archive. My main fandom alone is half a million works. It would take an astounding amount of volunteers to look through that.

Also, though... people lie. People lie about their race a lot online. I have caught out many, many people in the act of lying when they claim to be Afghani because, as a mixed black/Pashtun person myself, I know enough about the region to ask them things like what language their parents speak or what part of the country they're from, etc., and people haven't put in enough effort to read up on the thing they're pretending to be, so they say something so incorrect it's readily apparent. But there are a lot of Afghani-Americans with very little knowledge of the country, too, as a result of generational trauma. Even I have sometimes found myself going, "Is this a lie, or is this someone who's just disconnected from their roots?" So how are volunteers on AO3 supposed to know if someone is or isn't the race they say they are? Even BIPOC can misidentify someone as a liar or believe someone who is actually lying if the liar in question put in a lot of work into their grift.

And that's without getting into the obvious fact that people are assholes who will lie about authors and forge evidence against them to try to convince the mods so-and-so is lying about being black so they shouldn't be allowed to use the word 'colored' in their historical fandom set in the 1890's. You know people would do that to each other, it's fandom. Fandom has always had toxic people in it.

A lot of people who back End OTW Racism keep saying, "we're just holding AO3 to it's promise back in 2020" but don't seem to have thought through their suggestions on how AO3 does that. I really want to be onboard here, but these ideas were not well thought-out. Even disregarding how many people it'd take to moderate a site this big, the flaw baked into this and many other proposals is that it falls into asking the moderators to make personal judgments and assessments of sensitive matters and situations where they don't have all the information they'd need to make that judgment call.

Honestly I think before calling for action, they should've had a list of actionable ideas for what AO3 do that are not so obviously rife with flaws and room for abuse by bad-faith actors.

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There really doesn't seem to be a lot of willingness to deal with the reality of both racefakers and POC getting harassed for doing their own identities "wrong".

Frankly, I'd rather have lots of questionable works than one instance of demanding some hapless minority teenager prove their identity because they ~don't sound authentic~.

How much must that fuck a person up, especially if they're young? Especially, especially if they're some kind of diaspora, quite possibly displaced for unpleasant reasons.

I frankly think people massively overestimate any "harm" from some crappy fic a person refused to click back on and massively underestimate this other kind of harm.