#and so did all of her western chauvinist peers

[hypermascbishounen]

I have very little patience for people that take the 'representation' in this show seriously, given what we know about the people making it. But also what I know about the industry they inhabit.

I grew up with someone who made it into the western comic book industry. They were radicalized into the alt right through it, and the process started at a prominent sequential art school.

They were taught very blatantly that art from other cultures or people who aren't white, is inferior, competition, and the only thing to do with it is "elevate" it via appropriation, as an industry standard. The school was incredibly white, while in a very black area.

Once they started working, they found multiple bigots who feel they're being "silenced", and even more people - some well intentioned, but many not - who absolutely see minority stories as a way to advance their own careers. And they do often get the idea that it's nice of them to do, bc in a nepotistic and insular environment, their main pushback will be from a neonazi working for the same publisher.

Not everyone there is white or racist, but it can be very hsrd to be a poc, or to write a story that isn't defining its minority characters by their minority status, bc your justification to even write them is probably being pitched directly against a white supremacist. And it's very hard to treat the work of other cultures respectfully, when your bosses boss doesn't want their works to take any sales away from an adaptation.

So the whole system from the bottom up is designed to filter for bigotry and reinforce white supremacy, whether it's someone who sees writing black people as "pandering" to someone who see writing black people as pandering and they deserve a biscuit for doing it. Same for other races, queerness, or any other topic that could be connected to civil rights. Animation is not much better than comics on this, their industries overlap.

And ultimately: the main function of this is that the majority of people working in comics and animation will still be white. And that the poc working in the industry, have to play by the rules of white people, who dictate how they are written about.

N!Isaac and N!Annette are not black creations, they are more or less mouthpieces for how black people are percieved by people who aren't black, which is they exist to teach others lessons. Same with N!Isaac as a muslim, or N!Annette as a girl - they are Lessons for Christians or Men. Their entire existences revolves around white men, from a wider storytelling context(and also in story in Annettes case).

As far as I'm aware, Shankar has been the only poc in a particularly prominent position in nfcv's writing. And as much as I don't really care for his writing either, I don't doubt Ellis was hard for him to work with and was probably ultimately deferred to often. That the best nfcv has to offer minorities materially irl, is an indian-american possibly being spited by a big name white guy sex-pest throwing a tantrum, I'm really not feeling like all rep on this show is likely to be flawless and beyond criticism. Least of all when I can feel so much contempt for the Japanese source material off of this "adaptation" in general.

As bad as it may sound, it really seems to me that N!Isaac and N!Annette have both been written as Perfect Minorities™.

OG Isaac was the perpetual second one. Not incompetent by any means, but you know the deal, he was salty as hell that Hector was just a tiny bit better :P In the show, the dynamic is flipped: it's Isaac who is Dracula's special babyboy. But he is the special babyboy to such an exaggerated degree that he makes Hector's inclusion not only completely useless, but even detrimental: why would Dracula bother to hire an average Devil Forgemaster, without a shred of physical prowess, who he considers to be "a child in a man's body", and who he had to resort to lie to (Hector literally shouts in the war room that he doesn't enjoy the needless suffering Dracula is causing)... when Isaac by all means is strong, smart (allegedly), much more efficient in Forging, and 100% on board with Dracula's extermination plans to the point of being the only person Dracula can trust?

The story would improve if Hector, again, was the better Devil Forgemaster, even with his pesky morals. But we can't have that, can we? They were absolutely adamant, for whatever reason, that Isaac had to be black, despite him being probably the worst character to make black and Muslim. And black people can't be inferior, right? They can't need the help of a white person lesser POC, right? So Isaac in the show has become literally untouchable by the narrative. He gets everything he wants. He gets all the sympathy, because boohoo don't you feel bad that the guards are a bit mean to him, of course he should kill them all and turn them into monsters. He gets all the badass scenes, hell he literally gets wounded once in the whole show. He gets to be Enlightened.

And Annette... well, we talked about it plenty of times. Annette has Special God Powers. Annette gets coddled by total strangers. Annette has the right to hurt Richter where it stings the most without anyone calling her out. No one dares to point out Annette's genuine mistakes or bad behavior, even the most confrontational character after herself, Maria. Annette gets to make a Rousing Revolutionary Speech to the same French people she looks down upon. Annette gets to have the most prominent character arc, while Richter is left bumbling around and gets one (1) cool scene.

Representation in NFCV seems to be limited to three characters: 1) the narrative's darlingest babies who can do no wrong because they need to be popular on twitblr, 2) cardboard cutouts with barely a speaking line to pretend our world is more complex than it actually is, and 3) jesus christ please think more than three seconds next time.

Let's be perfectly real here:

both Isaac and Annette are the way that they are to appeal to a very specific,wide and vocal crowd on social media, the same crowd who cries for representation, by which they usually mean utterly perfect characters who can do no wrong and can easily vent their frustrations on other cast members because people, through these characters, can feel vindicated for their own frustrations. Frustrations that can be justified in a way, especially where racism is involved, but it essentially means that characters like Annette and Isaac are not really characters, but rather they are meant to be power fantasies of sorts. They're there to be black characters who are very strong and look down on the white oppressors etc. And you know what? There's nothing wrong with power fantasies, but only as long as they're written competently. Otherwise you don't really have a power fantasy. You have a weird amalgamations of Mary Sues mixed with social media discourse

This is especially blatant with Annette since, at least with Isaac, I don't think he ever uses the color of his skin as a justification for his attitude (he uses his religion but that's another can of worms).

I am almost certain that characters like these are inserted partly because it's a no-lose scenario, because you absolutely cannot criticize them without being accused of bigotry. This is made all the worse by many ACTUAL bigots chiming in and making any actual discourse impossible. I'm sure that big corpos like Netflix know this by now: create a character who's a minority who the US public cares about (I need to specify that last part because I get the feeling that people would not get nearly as uppity about, oh I dunno, Roma characters? Native American characters? Because social justice is only about those "cool" minorities that the public has been taught to think are worth it, anyone else barely even registers on the radar), write them in a way that satisfies the social media pseudo activist crowd, wait for the bigots to show up in order to easily paint any detractor as a racist, thus creating a very easy equation of "show has representation= good. Bigotry= Bad. Hate the show= You're a bigot"

I say "almost" because there's always the possibility that the guys behind the wheel genuinely think they're doing a great job

This may sound crazy, but look at all the praise they get, look at how much encouragement they get. And all this goes beyond NFCV, this sort of phenomenon is very widespread so it wouldn't surprise me if even the Deats brothers think they're masters of representation who can do no wrong because if enough people keep saying one thing without pause then you're bound to think it's the truth.

For instance I am pretty certain that Deats and the gang genuinely don't think that Alucard's threesome is not rape, or Lenore's treatment of Hector. Because they're not conventional depictions of rape and if you go ask most people on social media, hell even on the street across your own home, they'll most likely tell you the same.

I hate NFCV but what I think I hate more is the overall social climate that lead to its creation