#comic written by a white person who loves being racist

[official-saul-goodman]

The only thing I disagree with is the implication that Bechdels transphobia to trans men is not as serious, because it is. But in this case she has also done a lot of important activism in other areas which is why she's a legend in the lgbt community, and the flaws in her work and her personal politics cannot be overlooked. And in comparison to Andrew Hussie, her work is obviously more significant. Obviously. Andrew Hussie has always been an OPEN racist bigot who wrote the n word into their comics and just cause a bunch of white lgbt ppl found solace in a comic made by a blatant bigot who encouraged children to say racist, ableist, transphobic, misogynistic slurs doesn't make homestuck in any way comparable to Bechdel's comic.

You don't get to point the flaws out in the work of a lesbian historical figure just so you can get people to ignore the work of done edgy cunt who hasn't done a minute of actual lgbt activism in their life. If we're holding everyone accountable we will hold anyone accountable, get a grip.

[ender--slime]

thinking about how. in all the sludge of mascot horror games made just to sell merch and get big on youtube there’s one gem that’s a harrowing and horrifying story about a poor black family getting taken advantage of and exploited by a company who doesn’t even see them as human. about a little black girl who had her childhood taken away and wasn’t even allowed to be a little girl. about a black man who was likely killed by this company and then accused of “abandoning his daughter”. about a library and a neighborhood getting gentrified in the background.

and then people went and whitewashed her and said “i can draw her how i want”

[tonixe]

I saw you were looking for The Boys requests. Please I beg of you ANYTHING between Firecracker and reader. She’s so beautiful and I need to be with her so bad! Literally anything you want to write. It’s just that NO ONE has written for her!!

♱ — country girl — ♱

A/N: Thank you for ur request, I also agree, nobody is writing about Firecracker, our country girl needs some love <3.

WARNING: cursing, tw: abortion, firecracker as a person, tw: tek knight, this might be crackfic sorry.

PAIRING: firecracker x reader

WORD COUNTER: 974

It was so boring at the Tek's Knight party, you were mindlessly taking glasses of alcohol served on a platter to guests that attended, mostly the room filled with important, rich, people of America.

Like you want to be here with these superficial assholes and fucking racists, you had better thing than to be here in this party but you were forced to attend. Most of the members of the seven were here, including you. Here you are, in a party filled with old people who controlled the country, you looked up at the seemingly staring Tek Knight portrait that was on display, "Creepy" You muttered, before you gulped down the content in the glass, swiftly placing it on the waltzing waiter passing by.

It was going to be a while till you were able to leave the party. It was an event where people were the best dressed and for you, the best dress was your costume, shut up and stay still while people talked to you, talking about nonsense and political matters you didn't care about.

You just nodded with a smile.

Tap your fingers on your glasses, looking for anything that can occupy your time. It wasn't the worst, free high-quality alcohol was being served, and interesting-looking food was being served around the party. You looked around the room of guests, and your eyes quickly landed on Homelander, Sage, and Neuman. You quirked your eyebrows at the scene, before taking a sip of the champagne in your glass.

"Hm," You exhaled, swirling the liquid in your glass. The sound of heels clicking on the floor took your attention. You looked up from your cup to see Firecracker walking by you, you didn't get to know a lot about her only to know that she was involved in pageants, hate Starfire maybe a pedophile. You kept your eye on her with amusement as she walked toward the group of supes.

You were way too curious about how the interaction was going to play out, especially with her introduction, it was almost comical.

Everyone in the group just stared at her awkwardly, it was all truly funny and made you laugh a bit. Then Sage dismissed her straight, I guessed it was something snarky towards her. You watched her as walked away quickly, it looked like she was upset about what Sage said. "Trailer trash, huh?" You gulped down your maybe 10th glass of the night and placed it on the walking waiter's tray before you strode to the dessert table.

You recognize the greeting butler of the house taking the cake. “Hey, are you going to take that?" You asked the butler holding the chocolate cake in his hand. "Yes, Miss H/N" He stated, “Would you like a slice?” He questioned, “No, actually I��ll take the whole cake” You shot him a smile, grabbing the cake from him. “Thanks for being such an American patriot” you exclaimed before you walked out to follow Firecracker.

You stepped out of the room where the party guests were. You followed Firecracker, you wanted to keep your steps as silent as possible maybe to surprise her a bit, maybe this was a bit creepy, a little at least. You hid behind one of the white columns, hearing the door behind her close with a 'click' sound.

You stepped out into the hallway, with the cake in hand. You paused for a moment when you reached the door. Before putting your ear near the door to hear sniffing coming from her you backed away. You hesitated to knock, so you just waited on the side of the door until she opened up.

Propping yourself up on the wall, it was a couple of minutes until she opened the door. It was evident she was crying with her tear-stained cheek and the reddening of her irises. Bounced off the wall, "God were you crying, you look like shit" You said bluntly, her brows furrowed when she heard the comment escaping you.

"Shit, my bad, cake?" You prominently offered the cake to her, she looked at it and then at you, "Is this a joke?" She said with her strong accent shining through as she spoke.

Narrowed her eyes at you.

"No, actually this was from the good of my heart, I saw the exchange between you and you know sage?' You said you heard her groan as you talked.

"So, are you going to tell me to drink Everclear or SunnyD" She exclaimed.

"Of course not, I was going to tell you to drink some Dr. Pepper and Jack Daniel" You grin at her smugly,

She furrowed her brows more, you got her pissed, "Jokes" You put up your free hand defensively, "But seriously, I saw you upset and what better way to calm down than with cake, especially chocolate cake" You grinned pointing at the chocolate cake in your hands.

"What in god green earth would make you think I would eat cake with you" She crossed her arms, "Geez if you put it that way...I just wanted to support a friend in need, since you are part of the seven, you know..so cake?" You offered her again before she looked at you and the cake.

"Fine"

..

"You know Sage is like a slithering snake, I just should known" Firecracker grumbled, taking a spoonful of cake and shoving it in her mouth, you hummed in agreement.

"The whole thing with the show and live cast with the starlight bullshit, should of fucking know" Firecracker finished,

"How did you...I mean she even gets information about Starlight abortion?" You asked, stabbing your fork in a piece of cake, Firecracker just shrugged it off, "I mean you took those punches like a champ" You said bluntly, Firecracker glared at you.

"Hey Y/N" You turned towards her,

"What?"

"Fuck you"

[leikeliscomet]

“But We Love Martha Jones!” - The Doctor Who Fandom’s Selective Memory of Racism

Be aware that this article contains explicit examples of anti-black racism and misogynoir.

Chapter 2 - Utopia-ish

The constant nitpicking of Martha Jones for reasons white female companions could get away with was blatant anti-black racism. Let’s get that bit clear first and foremost. As a Black person in fandom, watching Black characters get torn apart while never being given the grace of their non-Black castmates is an experience that’s too common. Microaggressions are more subtle so the easiest way to shut down any mentions of racism is to accuse Black fans of making things up or telling us “Well it’s not like REAL racism”. Luckily Doctor Who Tumblr birthed the Martha Jones affirmative action and Aunt Jemima “memes” so I can cross both covert and overt racism off the list. As mentioned in extensive detail in the previous chapter, plus the various Martha Jones articles written before me, the treatment Martha experienced was racist. I don’t care if you personally didn’t like her. I don’t care that you missed Rose. I don’t care that Ten is your smol bean. Martha’s treatment was racist. Freema Agyeman’s treatment was racist. It might not have been everyone. It might not have been you personally. But it was there. The fandom can never be a safe space for POC, specifically Black people if this elephant in the room can’t be addressed over a decade after it arrived.

On paper, you’d assume Martha’s rep was good because “at least she wasn’t a Black stereotype”. Some fans praised her for having a present father, not speaking MLE and not being from the ends. This goes into respectability politics but the fandom’s weirdness about Black Brits and class is not the point of this article. The point is the revisionist history of how Martha was really treated and to do that it helps to know what Black tropes are. The Mammy trope is a Black woman whose main purpose is to serve her white counterparts and during slavery, she mainly cared for the slave owners' children. She is usually fat, dark skin and asexual, not as a representation of those things but as a statement of how if she isn’t used for sexual exploitation like the Jezebel (the promiscuous, reckless, sexualised Black woman), she has no sexual value at all. Her value is serving the needs of others only. Martha doesn’t fit this trope in theory but in practice, she fulfils the sub-categories of this trope both in show and fandom: the disposable Black (girl)friend trope. She is used as Ten’s emotional punching bag before he’s ready for Donna and then Rose again. She had to endure edgy moody S3 Ten so no one else had to. She’s the excuse people use to deflect any critical analysis of how race was handled in RTD1. She’s the fandom’s excuse to deflect from their own racial biases. Racism? No way! Everybody loves Martha Jones! What do you mean?

Some parts of the fandom have tried to mend things by suggesting Martha be paired with other doctors or romantically shipping her with other characters a bit better than Mickey Smith. But does this hold up? As much as I’m a big fan NineMartha as a concept and as someone who honestly saw one-off characters like Riley Vashtee from 42 or Tallulah from Daleks in Manhattan having way more romantic chemistry with Martha than Mickey ever did, simply re-shipping Martha isn’t enough. Doctor Who’s racism isn't exclusive to one doctor, one series or one era and new Martha pairings suggest the issue was “right person, wrong doctor” instead of what the issue actually was: racism. Moffat and Chibnall’s eras weren’t full of golden Black representation either so I doubt the Martha issue would’ve magically disappeared under those two. From Nine’s hostility to Mickey, to Twelve’s hostility to Danny Pink to Thirteen handing a South Asian Spymaster to the Nazis and Eleven only travelling with POC in comics most fans haven’t heard of and being besties with Churchill, simply putting Martha with another Doctor isn’t the serve fans think it is. Even RoseMartha seems like putting a bandaid on a bullet hole. If it's not enough for Martha to be compared to Rose, put down in favour of Rose, told she isn’t Rose and told she's worse than Rose in fandom and in show over and over and over, she has to be shipped with Rose too. Martha’s a great character… as long as you can tie her to Rose… again. Even in my own article I have to talk about Rose because Rose is centred in what was supposed to be Martha’s story. A doctor-to-be Black girl from London with a hectic family meets a Time Lord and gets abducted by space rhino police at work in one day. Her main conflict isn’t balancing work and time traveller life, or fighting to get her family back together, or seeing what’s out there in the universe - it's that she isn’t “Rose” enough. The Mammy and her sons’ main thing in common is simple; how well they serve and centre the white characters. In attempts to mend Martha’s treatment she is still only valued in relation to white characters. She should’ve been with Eleven because he would’ve fucked a Black woman. Or maybe Dilfy Twelve. Or a sapphic romance with another female companion who she saw twice or doesn’t actually know. Or maybe Ten in an alternate universe where he supports #nubianqueens. None of this is done to explore sexuality or romance with Black women and is definitely not to centre Black lesbianism and bisexuality. It’s Mammy with a dash of Jezebel. It's adding romantic and sexual value on top of physical and emotional value like a crappy meal deal.

I’m tired of Black women being treated as extensions of white women both in media and in real life. I’m tired of our value being determined by how well we serve white people emotionally, physically, platonically and sexually. And I'm even more tired of white feminism especially in this fandom. It would be so easy to label this article as anti-Rose, anti-Ten or anti-Tenrose to invalidate my whole racial analysis because it's the easy way out. I’ll admit I like both characters individually but not the ship but this isn’t something I decided on since birth - it's my conclusion as a Black fan in a predominantly white fandom, watching a predominantly white show, watching the first companion of my race be told she isn’t good enough compared to the white characters, and that the hatred of her is justified for the greater good of its popular white ship. Black fans can never have this conversation without being told we’re “pitting women against each other” and that Martha and Rose hugged once in S4 so everything's hunky dory. Martha’s happy that Ten found Rose again so what’s the problem? It sends a clear message that Black women’s pain will never matter a much as white women’s feelings. “Rose is amazing! Martha’s amazing! Stop pitting women against women!” but who was pit against who in the first place? These faux girl power posts fail to acknowledge the overlap of race and gender which separates the treatment of Black and white women. It fails to acknowledge Martha’s hate was rooted in anti-black racism. It fails to acknowledge the anti-Rose pushback was in response to how the show and fandom convinced us Rose was the untouchable bar this Black woman failed to meet. It fails to acknowledge Freema Agyeman the actress was targeted not just her character. It fails because the female empowerment rhetoric that leaves the Black ones at the bottom of the pile only “empowers” women of a certain demographic.

The harassment Martha experienced was swept under the rug of “stan wars” but it was so much deeper than that. I’m not saying Martha stans are angels but there was no “Great Stan War” because the sides were never even. At the end of the day no amount of “Martha’s better than Rose” tweets will ever compare to the fact that Martha hate was rooted in misogynoir. Rose was and still is considered the greatest companion of nuwho, whilst Martha is constantly erased and undervalued. Rose’s video views and hashtags have always been bigger than Martha’s. Amy and Clara came after Martha but still surpassed her in popularity and got plenty of fan edits of “The Girl Who Waited” and “The Impossible Girl” whilst Martha was conveniently skipped in the companion lineup. The fandom’s bias still shines clearly in favour of Rose over Martha. Rose’s jealousy towards other women is justifiable and just the ups and downs of a 19-year-old whilst Martha’s is entitled bitterness. Rose’s flaws are compelling character moments and depth, Martha’s are “holding her back from being a good companion”. Hell, even Donna calling out Ten’s BS was entertaining accountability whilst Martha was just the angry Black woman. Fans will weaponise Rose’s working-class roots to imply a pro-Martha bias, failing to acknowledge the working-class to poor background of the average Black Brit, the anti-blackness middle-class Black people are not spared from, the many working-class Black characters of the show like Mickey, Bill, Rigsy and Ryan or how most fans don’t consider Martha middle class because she doesn’t fit the white British cultural stereotypes. You can't be the most loved and hated at the same time. The hard truth is Billie Piper wasn’t racially abused by Martha stans but Freema was absolutely racially abused by Rose’s and the effects of this are still around. Go into Martha Jones tags today and you’ll see snarky posts of how Ten could never love another companion like Rose. Even when Freema bravely shared her experiences of literal racism, fans were quick to yell “But I wanted Ten and Rose though” as a justification for years of misogynoir. Again, we need to address the elephant in the room instead of covering our eyes and ears to act like it’s not there. A Black character and actress was collateral damage in order for a popular white ship to rise and whilst I’m not an anti, I as a Black Doctor Who fan, I’ll never be a supporter. At the end of the day, only one of these actresses is still carrying the burden of misogynoir over 10 years since RTD1 ended. A lonely walk across the Earth yet again.

<- Chapter 1 Chapter 3 ->

[bitterrobin]

I see a lot of confusion on why calling Damian Wayne "feral" is racist/problematic, so here's a rundown.

There's a difference between calling your child or your younger sibling "feral" and calling a character like Damian "feral." You know your child/sibling/niece/nephew etc. They're real people, and unless they have a problem with it personally, then there's nothing wrong with calling them feral as a joke. It doesn't (shouldn't) affect their perceptions by other people. It doesn't become a label that follows them.

Damian al Ghul-Wayne is a fictional character. A canonically mixed Arab/Chinese/Jewish White character with a history connected to some of the most prominent Arab comic book characters, who themselves also get insanely mischaracterized.

He's constantly whitewashed. He's been written with racist undertones (the suicide bomber vest). He's had his character development and progress backtracked time and time again by DC. DC treats him weirdly most days and completely shitty in the worst stories.

A good majority of fanon hasn't done any better than DC. You cannot pat yourselves on the back for being more inclusive or mental health aware than DC when you call a mixed Arab/Chinese boy "feral". It's constant. You can come up with various titles and nuances for every Bat-character, for every Robin.

Tim can be smart, a skater, a genius, the one holding everyone together, the little brother, the one who needs love. Jason can be cool, morally "right" or "wrong", unstable, PTSD-stricken, the one who was betrayed, the one with Shakespearean tragedies. Dick can be fun, happy, the first one, the prodigal son, the one with complicated history and the big brother.

You give them room for exploration. Love and care and attention and research. Many headcanons. You either comply with canon or you don't, but there's substance to their character.

What does Damian get? He's feral. He's rabid. He's a gremlin. He can't be reasoned with. He has no self-control, he's impulsive. He's hurt others, and you can't forgive it. Sometimes he's homophobic. Or classist. Or plain mean and rude to your favorite boy. He's always carrying a sword. A psychopath with no regard for another's well-being (usually Tim in a lot of fics). He can't be taught what's right.

I've seen people cry that Damian needs to punished or kicked out or treated the same way he's treated others. He needs to be brutalized or talked down to. He can never grow as a person, because he's mean to Tim or Jason, and you need him to exist as the abuser. His first move is always violent.

Fanon compares him to an animal often; he bites, claws, hisses, growls. Bruce or Dick or Jason or Tim have to wrangle him, tame him, civilize him the white man's way in lieu of his brown mother and grandfather who "clearly" raised him wrong. You don't see the issue with that? The issue with always labeling one of the few major brown characters in Batman comics as the unreasonable animal? That the child of color is always the abuser, the instigator, to older characters?

And even if you don't see him this way, you don't write him this way - then are you giving him the care and attention you give for other Bat characters?

Do you know anything else about him other than his "anger"? Because he isn't always angry. In fact, he's typically well-mannered. Quiet even, when he's not being provoked. DC's writing will always vary but whenever Damian lashes out, he's usually written with a reason to act the way he does.

Are you making him intelligent like he should be? A hard believer in redemption? A neglected and abused child who isn't meek or crying or closes himself within? Are you willing to explore that he's always exhibited the "wrong" kind of trauma responses - lashing out, being snippy, ruining relationships, refusing to admit weakness?

Do you write anything about him without making his mother and grandfather comically abusive and violent? Will you give him the supporting cast/friends he actually has? Can you write his dad/siblings interacting with him without making them white saviors or therapy pets? Can you write him without a ship or his love for animals or being vegetarian overshadowing everything?

Is he a character to you at all other than a glorified plot device with a sharp tongue and the convenience of being violent?

[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

[jesncin]

As the number one J'onn fan(s) what do you think of jli. I find him so funny in it and he really gets to show off his leadership skills and his funny side. Sorry if this has already been asked before I love all your work.

We're very happy to be called the number one J'onn fans, thank you. This hasn't been asked before so no worries!

I have complicated feelings about J'onn in JLI. On one hand, JLI is a beloved team and absolutely got people to become fans of J'onn. On the other hand it popularized those fans into liking a version of J'onn I personally (half-affectionately) label "meme J'onn". He's got more humor and a chance to shine as the stoic straight man to everyone's silliness, but in the process he's undeniably flanderized and pigeon holed into that role. I categorize him under "Nostalgia J'onn" right there next to DCAU J'onn. I get that people enjoy J'onn as team dad, but the reason he's getting phased out a lot is because being a team player with weak solo potential doesn't keep a character relevant.

I think that's why I struggle discussing his character with MM fans who primarily like him through the DCAU or JLI, they like him for what he brings to a team, and the impression + intrigue he gives off as a potentially interesting character. It's why many (generalizing) DCAU + JLI fans loudly wonder why we aren't getting more Martian Manhunter content from DC. "I haven't really read any of his solos but he seems so cool and powerful and funny in the League stuff" yeah because if you actually read any of his solos you'd recognize how he falls a part the second he has to hold the whole stage himself.

This is a necessary tangent but it's also hard to enjoy how his character is written in older comics when you headcanon him as Black or Black coded. So much of MM fandom is nostalgically attached to J'onn playing team therapist straight man. Which, is a common role white people love tokenizing the One Black Member of a Team into. JLI introduced the whole Choco/Oreo thing with J'onn, which would lead to Ostrander flanderizing it later in his solo. Oh, J'onn is genetically predisposed to be addicted to cookies and then becomes hulk-rage level of violent when they're stolen? That certainly pairs badly with how Black and brown people are profiled through racist drug policies as being "more violent". Oh, this is considered an endearing part of MM lore that his fans love pointing out any chance they get? Because they don't really know anything else about him? Ugh.

I generally have a hard time with team comics because I like jumping into my niche character solos to see how they really tick on their own. Especially when it comes to J'onn, my brain just keeps flipping the pages until I spot a green man lol. But I am trying with JLI since it's so beloved! These overall things just get in my way of fully enjoying it.

[tikiki05]

"Fun" (actually fucked up as fuck) fact that someone pointed out to me a while ago: Miles Morales is currently the only Black superhero in a romantic relationship with another Black character in mainstream comics.

How many Black love interests has Peter Parker/Spider-man had? Zero. Steve Rogers/Captain America? Zero. Wolverine? One - Storm from X-men. Tony Stark/Iron-Man? Zero. Marvel/DC has their white characters all mainly date other white people, but almost always has Black characters with non-black love interests.

T'Challa/Black Panther is one Black character who mainly dates Black women. I'm pretty sure the only reason why is because making the king of Wakanda not date Black women would be too suspect. His most well-known and longest relationship was with Storm who he was married to for second, but they're no longer together for some random reason and T'Challa has been single since, so it's literally only Miles/Spider-man and Tiana/Starling left…das it.

It's fucked that even ONE Black couple in a serious relationship is one to many for Ghostflower stans. They want the rare Black girl character being loved up on to be booted out to make way for yet another white one because if there's one thing media doesn't have enough of it's white girl and white women protagonists being centered or fawned over. Sure.

Obviously, interracial relationships are fine. But Marvel/DC definitely seems to have an aversion to portraying Black men and Black women together in love. There were racists who hated Storm and T'Challa together too by the way, I think it might be because a popular superhero Black couple could lead to more undeniably Black popular superhero children, and they do no want that.

So now another "fun" fact, the non-black writer for the comic Spider-man Reign 2, Kaare Andrews, is also the main artist for it. Spider-man Reign 2 is not Miles' main comicbook, his main comicbook is currently written by Cody Ziglar, who is doing a pretty brilliant job writing Miles. The plot for Spider-man Reign 2 is not worth summarizing in detail, it's a very horribly written au focusing on a dystopian world with an old Peter. Miles for some reason, was dragged into this mess as a guest star. In the latest issue, Kaare Andrews made the creative decision to strongly imply visually that Miles and Gwen were in a relationship - Gwen isn't mentioned by name - and had a child together, and then he proceeded to draw that child as *white* as possible. If you're wondering what kind of writer Kaare Andrews is, in the original Spider-man Reign comics that he created and wrote he had M.J. die of cancer by making Peter have radioactive sperm that M.J. was exposed to whenever they had sex. That last sentence is not made up or an exaggeration.

Hooooo boy this is a lot of loaded information, thanks for sending it in!

The conversation of diversity is always so frustrating with people who just don’t want to see it. Like as a white person, are you not bored only seeing white people in your media??? Don’t you want your media to reflect real life??? Which is really really diverse??? Rhetorical question, I know, because as I have said before, racists cannot think critically about the media consume.

It’s such a shame, because it’s not like its ghostflower shippers fault at the lack of diverse romance, all they do is like the ship that the ATSV writers fed to them. Except of course for the overtly racist ghostflower shippers, who throw a hissyfit at the idea of anyone but especially anyone POC being shipped with Miles. You just hate to see it :(

As for the last part, I do think I recall hearing about the radioactive sperm thing before at some point, what is bro on 😭 marvel should let me be a writer fr (i would be so bad at it i can barely write action and villains to save my life, but my characters are so cool and diverse and deep and itd be really really really funny i promise /j /lh /silly)

Sorry I didn’t have quite as much to say on this ask like I typically do, always love hearing thoughts from anons and sharing them with my followers though! Thanks bunches for sending this one in! I hope you have a nice little sweet treat today, whatever you’re most into👍

[rikomoriyama01]

kinda inspired by that response u did to someone else's post. but like. it just reminded me of how different Americans see nationality/ethnicity/race to other people, and how it can come through in the things they write.. like especially fanfiction. like how everyone who isn't a white American (and sometimes even those that are) can just become stereotypes. nicky is repeatedly a victim of this, ive read so many fics that just 'exaggerate' the fact that he's Mexican, even though it makes no sense! nicky has lived in America and Germany his whole life, his dad's a racist and his mum barely speaks to him, he'd be almost completely disconnected from Mexican culture realistically, and u can kinda see that in the books. but in fics, they make him like only eat stereotypical Mexican food, speak Spanish, listen to music in Spanish... like it's nuts. they do it to riko too except he becomes the Japanese mafia racial stereotype instead. Jean suddenly being obsessed with all things French, ranting about baguettes, even though canonically he has no good memories of France and seemingly wants nothing to do with the country or culture. it drives me crazy. like. even with neil 😭 he's canonically white and American, lived in America his whole life, but suddenly a British mother means he has a strong British accent and complains about how people make tea.

am I crazy?? its like almost comical levels of stereotyping, you'd think they'd be doing it for a bit, and that post just kinda reminded me of it.

the neil vs Jean British vs French thing is crazy too. I've never heard a British and French person argue over their countries under the age of like 60. but in so many fics, usually raven neil fics, its all they wanna talk about. wtf!!

everybody who could be classed as even slightly not "100% American" suddenly becomes a stereotype. and yknow the thing that rlly gets me? the accents are always exaggerated and always mentioned. nicky has a strong Mexican accent, neil has a strong British accent, and so on... but the "100% American" characters can be from varying parts of America with widely different accents (and cultures), but you'd never know it because the writer never mentions them even having an accent. it's just so blatant and shameless, and they don't even seem to realise they're doing it. they'll have other Americans in the comments being like "I love your British neil 🥰🥺" that is not neil. that is a stereotype.

even the books themselves to a lesser extent do this... like I'm pretty sure Jean having a French accent is mentioned. which isn't bad in and of itself, but a lot of the foxes are from different parts of America but again no accent differences ever mentioned. :/

all of this in every fucking fandom just for the record the og post we talked about was written by non American but it's just .. fandom think that is repeated by people as stupid fucking joke like yes it is very normal for immigrants to move to different country and still care and cultivate their traditions but then you look at how fandom represent it and like ... the rest of the world sees you and thinks you are fucking weird for handling it this way ✌️✌️✌️

[thedevotionaltour]

oh we all saw that slur replacement patch post didnt we

YEP what prompted my post about that was friend davie vernard getting an ask that was like (still unknown to me if that was a funny anon from a friend or genuine) going homestuck is queer history die mad about it and it's liiiike. i think my summary is so much about bc since it was a homestuck prompted post it's like. so much i think of a lot of fandom discourse around that could be snipped if we didn't try to pretend homestuck is something other than what it is. don't pretend it isn't a comic with offensive elements It Is. plain simple fact. product of time and author views. but more than anything what i mean by that is alongside that comment is i wish we stopped trying to market homestuck as like crazy cool queer webcomic and that's why it's important but rather acknowledge that if we wanna approach it this way it's important bc it was huge for WEBCOMIC HISTORY!!!!!!! what makes homestuck stick out within pop culture is how it functioned in the webcomic sphere and the large influence it had!!!! if we acknowledge it for being significant in like pop culture history for that as opposed to trying to go wait noooo guys my interest is secretly progressive or can be made that way i think ppl would give homestuck a lot less flack. it's like how undeniably important movies and literature in history also has like, horrible views on race and misogyny etc etc. they're inescapable in a lot of things though that doesn't detract from it's like, significance or even fan enjoyment As A Thing. i think that's really hard to grapple for ppl who don't necessarily engage in like the actual history side of fandom and entertainment bc they're so used to it as. well i don't know i don't know how to describe what im saying but it's like it feels so personal to them instead of going this is a thing i like but it also exists in a far broader context than me alone. this isn't quite it but i really don't know how to say what i mean im so so sorry. im not saying homestuck is this evil thing that should never be spoken of im just asking others to not act like hussie doesn't have some terrible views reflected in offensive writing and statements he's made about his comic and through his comic.

like god knows i love a lot of shit that doesn't age well and is quite offensive. my current biggest example for this is literally the comic kick-ass. as much as i rag on it i do in fact really enjoy this comic. it appeals to a lot of my cynical superhero loving nerd senses. i don't kid when i call my interest in comics my cishet white guy nerd interest, bc even though comics are for everyone, this comic appeals to that extremely particular part of me. it is the embodiment of annoying white nerd comic. however. this comic was also written in the mid 2000s by white guy mark millar. is is very offensive and relies on a ton of offensive edgy humor. it is terribly racist and homophobic and many other things. i do not let this detract from my experience and engagement with it however and rather let it inform me on how to approach it and what type of people i can recommend it to. it's far more ephemeral in comparison to like, the huge impact homestuck has, but it's my Personal Experience Comparison.

tldr we should stop trying to make things we love things they are not in order to get others to look at it too and by denying what goes on in them takes away from a lot of meaningful discussion to be had and also makes people understandably upset with you.

also i wish we for real acknowledged how homestuck functions as a comic history thing i think that has more value than going but my queer comic. at least for homestuck. bc while i know there are in fact queer elements in it i also know it's So Complicated and i don't know enough to touch on it. but for real. fandom and entertainment and comic history is cool and also if you talk about it that way i think everyone will cut that fandom some slack bc hate it or love it it has an undeniable place within comic history in the webcomic sphere. so you at least have an accurate history defense on your side. Ok I'm just repeating myself a bunch now SORRY

[brw]

isn’t the grim reaper an openly racist white supremacist

I'm not going to sit here and lie by saying no, but I'm also not going to sit here and lie by saying yes, either. Eric Williams / Grim Reaper is a F-tier Marvel Comic villain whose only justification for staying around past V&SW/WCA is his relationship with Simon, who is already a C-tier hero. This means he does not have a consistent characterisation within these issues, and because Eric is kind of a lame villain all things considered, nobody particularly cares about having a consistent characterisation the way they do with big name villains like Ultron.

Anyway, yes, in the V&SW and WCA plot that sought to put the question of Vision and Simon's relationship to rest once and for all, Eric was racist. Not mutant racist or robot racist, capital R Racist. This was mostly a character detail specific to this arc; it never came up before, and I can't remember any extensive times it really came up after. Of course, it is powerful subtext to his relationship with Nekra, and if you're analysing that relationship it's a major component of their dynamic. Outside of that, writers have always focused on the fantasy racism against mutants and synthezoids rather than real world Actual racism, probably because it's easier and more comfortable for writers to do. Does it make sense for his character that he would be racist? I think so, yes. With a man as abrasive and ass-backwards as he usually is portrayed, it's not much of a stretch (although his racism, while not benign, has never really been put at white supremacy levels, so I'm not sure where that's coming from? His rhetoric has never really went down those avenues, or at least I've never read them as such) but equally it does take away from the most interesting parts of Eric's characterisation, and while I do love this arc it's definitely the beginning of the end of interesting Eric characterisation and shows the move from being a F-tier, but narratively interesting and complex character to being Guy With A Scythe Hand and a death motif.

You see, one of the more interesting parts of Eric's characterisation was that despite being incredibly unstable and abrasive, he was very genuine in his love for Simon and his desire to right the wrong of his death. Villains motivated by love above all else weren't particularly common in Avengers comics at the time, and throughout the initial run of his appearances there's this sense that if things had been a little different, he could have been a force for good. He protects Vision repeatedly when they meet each other, and for those early appearances seems largely hesitant to actually hurt Simon. Simon even says this at the end of the V&SW/WCA arc.

There's this idea that in another life Eric could have been a force for good instead of one for evil, that his motivation is true and genuine and it is just the warped ways he's attempted to reach his goals that are the problem, that I personally found really interesting with Eric. Martha even says if you'd asked her when they were children, she would have said Eric would be the hero, implying again that he wasn't just demented and murderous from birth, the way writers after have retconned him to be.

Simon also suggests that in another life, Eric could have been a Nazi hunter.

Ultimately Eric is not a character consistently written, because of his obscurity. If Englehart wants him to be racist, that works. If Roy Thomas wants him to be a shambling corpse of a man who has lost his soul after one too many dealings with death, why not. If Frank Tieri wants him to be a master manipulator who in turn gets his strings pulled by those more experienced than him, that's what's going to happen. If Remender wants just a generic psychopathic demented murderer, that's what he's going to be, and nobody is going to complain or say otherwise. And if I want Eric to be a Greek tragedy, well I can do that too.

[soleminisanction]

You seem like youre frustrated with her character the same way I get with her too.

I think see the potential of the character she could be and should be with the correct writing and stories.

I really didnt like her Batgirl run either. There are bits and parts of it I do like and concepts of things there I love but I really dont care for it.

I also wish she wasnt used as a marketing tactic during "run" as Robin. If they were actually serious about it, they wouldve written her run differently and hopefully better.

Thats also the problem with all comic book characters, they have so many different writers with different ideas of what to do with these characters. Unfortunately some of them dont like the characters they write for. I know that Dan Didio hates Steph and never wrote her well because of that. (He also hated Dick Grayson and wanted to kill him off too)

Characters like Steph really are up to interpretation how they are supposes to be personality wise. Recently i havent been liking how shes been written for certain comics (Batgirls, Wayne Family Adventures)

You and I similar to seeing a character we want to be better. I see that she has all this potential to be a great character and love her despite all the garbage writing shes had over her 30+ years of existence

The lack of good stories is a part of it, yeah.

It's also the fact that, while she's hanging around not telling any stories of her own, her ability to do so often comes at the expense of other characters. Like a few months back, they randomly shoved her into a Titans line-up when she's never been a Titan, not once in her entire career, while the actual Batgirl who joined the Titans, Betty/Bette Kane, was nowhere to be seen. And she's part of what ruined YJ 2019, getting forced in awkwardly purely because a bunch of her stans spent months harassing the creators on Twitter, spewing racist epitaphs at the new black characters and demanding that she be included in a team she wasn't solicited for and, again, had never been a part of, purely because Tim was there and they decided he wasn't allowed to have a life without her.

And speaking of that last bit, don't even get me started on the Tim Drake Pride Special again or we'll be here all day. It is genuinely offensive how many people demanded that Tim's coming out be oriented entirely around the feelings of his straight ex-girlfriend.

That's why I can't read Batgirls, either. I can't stand the way they write the relationship between Steph and Cass, it's got no teeth, and perpetually reduces Cass to Steph's "Kato," the hyper-competent Asian sidekick who does all the actual work for an inept white person. Even the issue where they tried to make a big deal out of, "Ooo, this is a special CASS CENTRIC ADVENTURE, we're doing it COMPLETELY SILENT with NO WORDS!" turned out to be all about her running around trying to find Stephanie, and then they copped out with the gimmick and made it so the only words in the book were Stephanie's, talking mostly about -- surprise! -- herself, how great she is and how much she loves being a Batgirl.

Ugh. Spirit World can't come fast enough.

Honestly, when it comes to her run as Robin, I think the story itself could've been just fine if they'd left it as it was and just, hadn't made a big freakin' marketing deal about "OoOoOooOooOoo, the GIRL WONDER, how SPECIAL!!!" They didn't do that with Carrie. Or Tris Plover. Hell, at the time a few people pointed out how silly it was for them to make such a big deal out of her being a girl when Carrie Kelly is the most well known alt-Robin period and the co-star of one of the defining texts of the age.

But, y'know, Carrie was a short-haired butch tomboy with thick glasses who fought with a sling-shot, while Steph is the single most gender-conforming Bat-femme since Betty Kane and is consistently drawn to show off her child-bearing hips so. Yeah.

The part that honestly needs fixing is War Games, which I honestly think is still something that Steph needed to happen, because it did lead her to a moment of growth that she desperately needed (even if Chuck Dixon and Bryan Miller later ruined it.) I think you could fix that story up with just a few adjustments. But, hindsight is 20/20 and all.

I do have to caution a little against attributing malice where ignorance or incompetence is more likely, though. I've never seen any evidence that Dan Didio "hated" either Steph or Dick; rather, what he saw them as was expendable. By all accounts I've ever heard, when he was editorially mandating Dick's death in Infinite Crisis, he legitimately didn't know that Dick used to be the original Robin, he just knew that Nightwing wasn't Batman or Robin and thought that made him expendable enough to kill off for shock value. It took Geoff Johns talking him out of it at literally the last minute to get him to see sense.

(Seriously, you can tell that the page was drawn off a script where Dick got full-on murdered, and the original floppy release didn't have the hilariously awkward page they inserted into the collected editions where Dr. Mid-night promises to save him. It's kinda funny in retrospect.)

Stephanie was the same way, it wasn't that he "hated" her, he just didn't care about any character introduced after the silver age and thought that killing her off would be more ~shocking~ than letting her live and learn a lesson. Didio wasn't evil, he was just bad at his job. Your standard incompetent white guy failing up.

[semper-legens]

27. Thank You, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse

Owned: No, library Page count: 263 My summary: Thanks to his insistence on playing the banjolele, Bertie Wooster has been 1) kicked out of his flat and 2) dumped by Jeeves. But not to worry. He's out into the country, where nothing can go wrong! Except maybe love triangles, wacky escapades, imprisonment on a yacht, forced marriages, and a distinct lack of butter. Just his lucky day. My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

You know, despite my usual tastes in literature and my general predilection for the stuffy English gentleman, I've never actually engaged with any Jeeves and Wooster. I've seen clips from the Steven Fry/Hugh Laurie show, as every English person is legally required to, but I've never actually sat down to read any Wodehouse myself. Well, one of my coworkers is currently working her way through Jeeves and Wooster, and decided that I'd like it too. So, on her recommendation, I've gone in blind with this book. Let's see what it's like!

First off - Wodehouse's voice is delightful. Archaic without being impenetrable, sardonic and drawling, punning and witty in all the right ways. I was charmed and captivated from the start, not less because of how full-on it is right out of the gate. It's a very droll writing style, the kind that was definitely a spawn of the 30s; I can't imagine someone writing like that now except to satirise. Still, it's wonderfully charming. And Wooster himself is well-characterised as a complete brainless twit. He actually had a lot more heart than I was expecting from what I knew of his character, but he's still a big idiot who doesn't ever help himself out of any situation at all.

Also, like, I know calling Jeeves and Wooster gay isn't exactly the hottest of takes, but it surprised me just how gay it was. Seriously, Jeeves says that he's got a policy of never working for a married man. I can't be the only one reading implication into that. And he's always at Wooster's beck and call, even in this book where he's not technically working for him. (More on that in a bit.) And Wooster is not all that put out that the eligible young lady who is also his ex in this book isn't into him. In fact, he goes out of his way to avoid getting into a relationship with her! Any tension between them is coincidence and awkward encounters. Just…so gay.

Unfortunately with literature written in the early 1900s, and particularly literature by white people, you're gonna get some racism. In this book, it takes the form of the banjolele and the blackface. The former is the inciting incident for the novel; Wooster has to move to the country because he has taken up playing the banjolele, a cross between a banjo and a ukulele. Everyone hates the noise, but it's the instrument itself that's brought up as being the problem. Jeeves, in particular, hates it. The racial connotations of this can't be ignored - the banjo is associated with black Americans, where obviously the ukulele is a native Hawaiian instrument. But more egregiously, Wooster spends half the novel 'comically' in blackface. There is a never-seen troupe of minstrels referred to with the n-word - whether they are actually black or white people in blackface is unclear from the text, but apparently that was the contemporary term for blackface performers. And every person who sees Wooster in blackface assumes he's a devil and screams and runs away, again 'comically'. Look, I know this was written in 1934, but honestly I don't care. This is just straight-up racist. The idea of Wooster being blacked up is treated as hilarious rather than insulting, and of course not a single actual person of colour shows up at all. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, the casualness of these stereotypes and this behaviour. It's just bad. (And apparently, the TV episode based on this book also had the blackface in 1991. Plus ca change…)

Next, we're off to the Arctic, where there's a haunting on a beached ship…

[mermaidsirennikita]

Yeah this needs to be talked about more, the amount of articles, podcasts, youtube/tiktok videos or just online comments that I saw after season 1 came out that just assume the Bton books were diverse because the show is? And the fact the new marketing push around the books is not disabusing people about that notion, mainly through the new covers (both regular and the show tie-in ones).

It's a really complicated, thorny issue in some ways and very simple in others. If I look at Just Romance Novels (which is obviously a niche, just zeroing in a genre for the sake of discussion) the genre is still dominated by product from white authors, largely with characters written as white. While it's diversifying (far more slowly than it should be) a lot of the older "proven success" books are written by white people, about white people. I don't think it's wrong to cast diversely if you're adapting those books--and on a practical, "people putting food on the table" level, I want actors of color to have as many solid, well-paying opportunities as possible.

At the same time, there are still so many authors of color neglected. Not all of whom wrote people of color on the page, of course, especially in historical romance--Sherry Thomas and Stacy Reid are two historical romance novelists who write about white characters, and it's no surprise that the potential adaptation of Stacy's works would be cast more diversely. There's a level of tracking how expectations have changed when you look at how Sinful Wallflowers was presented as a book series, and how it could be presented as a show.

And like, I'll allow that we're in the midst of a sort of "boom" (who knows how long it'll last) of period pieces cast more diversely than they would've been even 15 years ago. The approaches are often different and individualized. The Great has people of color playing characters who'd be literal white Russians "in real life", and it's literally never commented on, which I think many would prefer for a show like Bton. BUT, most of the lead characters are white, with Orlo (who I think did not get the strongest writing from jump, though Sascha wanting to leave after s1 didn't help) and Arkady (who I think is hilarious and finally got more screentime in s3, but he could've gotten more from the beginning... so much Velementov screentime should be Arkady screentime) being two of the only truly prominent people of color onscreen.

Then you have something like Sanditon, where Georgiana gets better writing than many people on Bton, but the show obviously never knew how to really confront her background, made the racist old lady the peak comic relief, and never prioritized Georgiana the way her white counterpart Charlotte was prioritized. Georgiana got an afterthought of an ending after being humiliated by the narrative several times.

One of the shows that handled this best was Tom Jones--Sophia is treated as this gem of a girl whose grandfather and aunt love her, but clearly aren't fully sure about how to solidify her safety as a Black woman of means in England. There's a very tender scene where she discusses her father enslaving her and her mother with Tom, and the show doesn't shy away from Sophia's mixed feelings on the entire thing. There's a heavy implication re: her being made to perform whiteness with face powder, etc, but nonetheless this is not dominating Sophia's storyline. She gets to be the swooning girl who falls head over heels and is desired by a good man and upheld as his ideal in every way. She confronts conflict, but she does not SUFFER, and she is not MINIMIZED in favor of white women in the story--Sophia is really pretty explicitly like, The Woman of that piece. Presented as the most beautiful, as not flawless but good and deserving of love, as a true classical heroine whose personal narrative is actively expanded to match Tom's. The only thing I find prominently weird (after one viewing) is that she and Tom never had like, a sweet wedding night scene, as we saw Tom have sex with three different white women onscreen, of of which was like.... the core villain. I would've liked to have seen Sophia get the full physical adoration there, onscreen, and it did stand out a bit that she didn't.

So those are adaptations with growing pains, not getting everything right, but some being better than others (and Bton being the bottom of the barrel, there).

Then there are things that are unequivocally wrong, and not a part of growing pains as adaptations navigate between what sells and what diversifies and what works, and one of those unequivocally wrong things is selling the Bton books as diverse reads. Those books are some of the most conventional Regency romances out there; you don't even get a lot of economic or class diversity, let alone any racial diversity. Almost everyone in that series is upper class. Even Sophie is the daughter of a nobleman. And I'm not saying it's wrong to write about those people, but for the books to now be sold as something they're not, when the author didn't even think people of color could get HEAs in her Historically Accurate World... is the worst kind of capitalism.

That's part of the extra ugliness (on top of all the obvious ugliness) here. Julia Quinn was against what she's now profiting from. It's not just picking a white author's works to be emblematic of diversity they don't represent; it's THAT author's works. And I think that making Queen Charlotte from all this, putting Julia's name on the cover (I am.... 90% sure that book was ghostwritten, with input from Julia and Shonda, but go off) just adds to all of it.

[trickstarbrave]

i have a lot of thoughts about "problematic" media and the dumb fucking "pro-ship vs antis" discourse that are probably disjointed bc i am half awake

for one i wanna preface this with: i think it is good actually to critique problematic elements in any media. movies, games, comics, tv shows, even fanfiction. if you think me saying something is "problematic" means i think it should be outlawed and banned and i personally want you, a fan of that thing, to die and i support suicide baiting you, you are just as braindead as the people you claim to hate. you are annoying. this post is not for you and is in fact also about you. you are a tar pit.

there is a vocal minority of people who do in fact see any depiction of something bad and think it has to be condoning it. they are genuinely few and far between, but they are VERY vocal, and typically very young. but i think after looking at how these people thing and present arguments, i really understand why they think this

depiction, if you are something with any critical thinking skills, does not inherently condone or condemn its subject matter. it can condone it, yes, but it can also condemn it. typically a story is mature enough to depict certain things, it is doing so for a reason and has a lot of nuance and shows if it condemns or condones it in indirect ways. for example in a very clear cut way: slasher films show a killer murdering people. they are screaming and dont want to be killed and try to stop him or run away. it is supposed to make you, the audience, feel bad and go 'well i wouldnt wanna get killed'. but at no point does someone look at the camera and go "killing people is wrong and should not be condoned. people dont like being killed".

this gets a bit more messy in other topics that are commonly normalized or go under the radar like racism and abuse. ultimately i think many stories that are "problematic" arent really done that way on purpose, hence why i dont believe in attacking the people who made that story for these things. a lot of times these things sneak their way in subconsciously or by pure carelessness. example: i do not think all of the designers for skyrim are racist white supremacists who intentionally made this story to be a perfect recruiting and radicalization tool for white supremacists. skyrim is a story about fantasy pop culture vikings in fantasy pop-culture viking land where you kill dragons. however there are also elves, which oppose the fantasy pop culture vikings and the vikings hate, and a civil war where many of the fantasy vikings want to purge and non-pop culture fantasy viking out of magical fantasy viking land. that shit is like catnip to white surpremacists. they love that shit. ultimately skyrim is just written badly. at no point was that the INTENTION behind the game, but it has been used to radicalize a lot of white guys and also is still beloved by white supremacists for these reasons.

ultimately that example is one most people im talking about wouldnt even get though, because it requires a lot of thought, understanding of how white supremacy operates, how we even got the concept of "vikings" in our larger pop culture (it was nazis, lol) and that those concepts are wildly inaccurate, etc. instead these kinds of critiques go after very overt depictions of subject matter or literally children's media.

and i think there is a very real reason why they do this i have come to realize: not only do they not know how to critically think, actually trying to think critically even in the slightest is mentally exhausting to them. by this i don't mean "ha ha they are stupid and lazy" i mean they genuinely dont understand critical thinking. at all. like they lack media literacy entirely. ive heard dumb takes from these people like "symbolism is trying to hide/bury the themes of a story" or "because the abuse in this story is metaphorical it doesn't count". they dont understand the parts of a story and why they are utilized as literary devices and actively resent having to think about the things presented to them.

this is a larger cultural issue. i see it beyond just self aggrandizing, black and white morality faux activists. you can see it in spaces of pretty much any political view or in any community: a lack of understanding of how to break down information and stories to evaluate it. we all have a tendency towards bias and they familiar and things that make us comfortable, but these people are on a whole other level. thinks like metaphor are seen as nothing more than lies and detraction used to obscure information rather than help build information up. understanding nuance, personal flaws, deeper intentions, and how you actually convey complex information is completely beyond them.

they live, ultimately, to just drink up content and media while having to think as little as humanely possible. they crave exciting stories but with extremely simplistic meanings and those stories just don't exist. because confronting these topics means rethinking their entire world view, be they extremely insular "leftists" or right leaning morons. it means admitting maybe they are not always right and perfect in more complex ways than simple mistakes a 4 year old would make. even when people like to bitch and moan that "depicting something doesn't mean you inherently condone it" they don't give examples on how you can tell. they don't talk about how personal biases can contribute to a story condoning it when the author does not consciously believe it. unconscious biases aren't even necessarily harmful, but going unchecked they can evolve to full on bigotry, born out of a refusal to admit you can be wrong about things and things are allowed to make you uncomfortable without being a personal attack on you.

because again, this thought pattern exists to preserve the ego and to think as little as possible. admitting things have nuance means admitting EVERYTHING can have nuance. that maybe the people who hurt you are not all irredeemable monsters or that you were the villain in someone else's life. that people you love to attack for moral superiority are complex individuals with their own lives and experiences.

this thought process is ultimately AGAINST accountability too. things are bad because they are bad. there are no pieces that give it nuance, the existence of them is either morally good or morally bad. which means if you think of yourself as morally good, as we all like to, that means you can never, EVER admit to doing something "morally bad", intentionally or not. i saw it recently with mods for a community refusing to admit they did something racist (attacking a black woman and making her life miserable) and would instead rather burn the community down with them while whining about they feel "unsafe" because people said that behavior was unacceptable, wanted them to apologize to the person harmed, and put steps in place to keep it from happening again. which is basic accountability. but that requires thinking about your actions, why they happened, that it doesn't make you an irredeemable monster who can never be better ever, and accept responsibility for what you did.

it is protection of biases and your own beliefs rather than challenging them. to think critically we need to know how to break these things down, evaluate them individually, how they work in a larger whole, and why these things are being told to us. maybe people refuse because they are comfortable in their biases. maybe people are comfortable in their biases and dont like acknowledging them because they dont understand critical thinking and media analysis. maybe its both. i dont really know.

all i know is it is annoying and maybe we really need to by and large teach people literary analysis and critical thinking skills from the ground up. because i cannot keep looking at the same brain dead takes in every community about how symbolism exists to obscure and metaphors are actually lies because "why not just be literal" and watch people make the dumbest moral arguments on both sides of any debate

[spider-xan]

I liked Spider-Gwen at first, but then actually read the comics and they weren't. That Good. She is a good character in ITSV/ATSV, but idk I still feel indifferent about her. And she's been, once again, relegated to just The Love Interest by the majority of fans. Regular Gwen is Peter's love interest and Spider-Gwen is Miles' love interest. Nothing else. It wouldn't bug me if people weren't so obsessive about her, most fans are like "Gwen HAS to be there she HAS to we NEED Gwen!!!!" and it's very annoying. It especially annoyed me that people were drooling about the fact that Insomniac might (or might not) include her and make her Miles' age, so they can be together. Completely disregarding the fact that Hailey exists.

I like her design and all, but she's very meh to me, speaking as a woman myself. Beside the things I've mentioned, my biggest gripe with her that she feels like a completely different character and not a variation of Gwen Stacy. With alternate versions of Peter, while they feel slightly different, they still have the character's essence. The only thing she shares with the OG Gwen is the blonde hair and name, she might as well could've been an OC.

Yeah, this actually is p much how I feel about Spider-Gwen as well tbh! I actually do remember when she debuted and it was coming off hot from the massive spike in mainstream popularity she got after the first TASM film came out in 2012, and I think a major selling point was that her comics would explore what if Gwen lived and got spider superpowers - so I was surprised when I read the comic and aside from having blonde hair, a strong personality, and a cop father, she was basically a new character, rather than if 616!Gwen had a different life; I know a big Spider-Man fan on here wrote a really good meta post examining why Spider-Gwen fell flat for her that I don't have the link for on hand right now, but I remember it discussed the odd choice of taking away Gwen's science skills from 616 when that was a trait that set her apart back in the 1960s and would have been interesting to explore if she had spider powers.

But yeah, like, I would consider myself on the flexible side with adaptations instead of being a strict textual purist, but I agree that you do have to keep a core spirit to a character or else they may as well be a new character with a superficial resemblance, and that's what Spider-Gwen felt like to me - if she had been branded as Spider-Liz Allen or just a new Spider-Woman, I wouldn't have thought of her as actually being a Gwen with someone else's name.

And yeah, you're right that Gwen in general often gets reduced to a love interest who doesn't exist independently of Peter or Miles. (My controversial TASM opinion is that she's not really written as an independent character so much as the perfect girlfriend for nerds.) In Miles' case, it also happens in reverse where the non-Black fandom struggles to think of him as a character separate from Gwen, in stark contrast to how Peter is not treated that way by fandom unless they're hardcore shippers who only ship - and then yeah, you get misogynoir like people screaming, 'Where is Miles' girlfriend??', re: Insomniac Spider-Man 2 while posting a picture of Spider-Gwen and erasing Hailey.

Anyway, yeah, I agree she does not and should not be in everything, and it honestly bugs me when people try to point at Miles by comparison and act like she's on par with his importance when she's not - Miles was groundbreaking and still important to this day on a meta level bc he was an Afro-Latino Spider-Man who became THE Spider-Man in his universe and took Peter's place originally amidst a lot of racist backlash to that change in the (Ultimate comics) status quo, whereas Gwen is far from the first white woman Spider-Woman, nevermind the only one, like, no, she is not the Miles Morales of (white) women.