#being colorist on anon is definitely a choice

[survivalove]

are you going to call katara's actress 'whitewash' too because she isn't as dark as the cartoon? get real you self important ass 🙄 you're just going to have to suffer through looking at fan art that looks like real life indigenous actresses ig

so i guess every single indigenous person ever is lightskin? i must have imagined all the darker indigenous people i’ve ever seen on the internet and real life. thanks for enlightening me! 😃

the art is still whitewashed. good day

[throne-for-queens]

Different anon. She might not be racist, but she is the very least aware of white privilege, or she wouldn't have allegedly changed eye color to make the most out of it. She has this weird thin nose obsession: she was unironically freaking out on the CHD podcast about lack of make up, even after the countless surgeries and on the Instagram live where she applied makeup on her man, she kept praising him for how much small his nose is, same man who fathered a biracial black daughter. There is more. All the boasting about how special and unique the kids she would have with "twin flame" would be, the fixation with "blonde angel baby" being half Norwegian, the mention of their ancestors teaming up (where did they meet, on the Mayflower?) just to bring them together... if you don't want to see her as “colorist”, “featurist” or as somebody "proud about being white", you have to admit she is at least extremely tone-deaf. Wouldn't be surprised if she became ableist too and came up with a fake spectrum self diagnosis just to justify all the stuff she said.

We know for a fact she might xenophobic towards other white women like her. She mocked and sexually objectified Eastern Euro women in a time as rape was being used against them as a war weapon. And this was for an Instagram caption, so she couldn't use "they twisted my words" excuse, this time.

What can she possibly think of brown and black women?

I get that she is tone deaf and has eurocentric beauty ideals, but I wouldn't call that racist. If she’s just applying those standards to herself and not claiming they’re superior to anyone else’s, then it’s her choice to keep altering her appearance. Honestly, her changes seem more like a reflection of her own insecurities and self-esteem issues.

Her fixation on Colon's traits and the desire to pass those on to a child definitely comes off as featurist and, honestly, feels like a weird fetishization of European beauty standards.

[paunchsalazar]

(1)I'm the anon who sent the ask about Piper and Hazel. I read your reply and I understand your views and your reasoning for drawing the girls like that. With my previous ask, and the reason I used the word "whitewashed" at all, was due to Piper's skin which seems too light to me. I brought up the eye/hair color, of both Piper and Hazel, to point out the discussion of colorism that has been going on in the fandom for a few years now. I was not directly accusing you of being racist or colorist

(I put these together because I figured it’s easier to read them, I didn’t receive part 3 though, but if you are willing to resend I am eager to hear what you have to say!)

Hi! First - I am not angry with you whatsoever! I hope it didn’t seem that way. I appreciate you bringing up a point of genuine concern and wanted to address it because I do not take whitewashing lightly.

I am aware that the gods don’t possess DNA but at least for my personal reading experience, I’ve kind of taken it as that they can still inherit physical traits from their godly parents? vs. being genetic clones of the one parent. Like Percy doesn’t only have his mother’s features, he has some of his father’s too, and I imagine those being among the features his father appeared with when he was with Sally.

As for Piper being half white, my reasoning came from this moment in The Lost Hero:

I think, while Aphrodite doesn’t have DNA, she still played a part in Piper’s appearance, and I think Piper herself assumes her mother is some mysterious white lady they don’t have any pictures of. Anyway, I don’t imagine her as resembling just her father, who I imagined with black hair and darker eyes. I think while she’s half god, she seems to appear visually mixed white/indigenous. At least that was my reading!

*** I read the posts on mixed characters in my inbox! and I don’t want it to seem like I am insinuating that all the half bloods are automatically 1/2 white or more specifically 1/2 Greek. I don’t think that is the case! Just that some of the characters seem (to me) to be described as having features apart from their mortal parents. Perhaps they’re further back, grandparents etc. or come about magically, and I think it varies from character to character for sure. But for Piper in particular my choice was informed by that snippet! ***

I appreciate you elaborating and would be happy to speak about it further if you’d like! I don’t think Riordan is without flaws or that these characters/designs are the end all be all as far as representation goes. I think these problems all came about because he definitely wasn’t thinking about it at the start and is a white man... a white man who tries but still lol. Although I am happy they are there rather than not at all!!

Thank you and I hope you have a good day too!