#if we thot there was discourse now i can only imagine

[niceandbluept2]

this is the butchest julien can look before tswift fans start getting scared

[erazonpo3]

WOWM

so What Once Was Mine came out and I read it.

My General Thoughts are that this book was something of a rollercoaster but in like a pop up carnival with dubious safety regulations and diseases in the DIY log flume water kind of way. I had some fun reading it but I also feel like I picked up a rash.

If you're like me and you enjoy picking a book apart for morsels of interesting concepts then you might enjoy it, if you think holy shit why the fuck is a literal real historical serial killer in this book I need to see this then you might enjoy it, if you care about engaging plots and character beats then you probably won't.

If you want to ask me anything specific go ahead, but otherwise for more in depth thoughts: spoilers ahead

Basic Summary of the Plot

Okay so here's the deal. The story has the framing device of two siblings in a cancer ward, where one tells the other a story. I'll get into that later, but that's how it starts. Our actual story starts with a pretty long prologue: We learn that the King & Queen got the Moonflower thinking it was the Sunflower, Rapunzel was born with silver hair, and then baby Rapunzel kills a maid who accidentally hurt her when brushing her hair.

Oh, by the way, Max is a human man named Justin Tregsburg. Yeah.

Anyway, the royal family puts out feelers for legit witches who can safely take care of Rapunzel because the baby is too dangerous, and Gothel shows up to take her away. Queen Arianna visits Rapunzel once (but is only allowed to watch through a peephole) and decides watching another woman raise her child is too painful and throws herself into restoring the kingdom's orphanages instead.

Now we're in the present. Rapunzel is nineteen and she wants to go and see the lanterns (a mourning tradition of the Dead princess in this story). She tries to argue with Gothel but gets shut down, and Gothel makes her kill a chicken to prove the point that she can't go outside because she's too dangerous. However we as the audience already know Gothel plans to sell Rapunzel off as a bride or a servant or a weapon to some other nobles, because she's evil.

Also by the way Gothel still has access to our Sundrop Flower and is using it to live forever that's just a thing that happens in the background.

When Gothel is gone Rapunzel watches as a man (Flynn) stores a satchel in a tree outside of her tower, and that motivates her to leave the tower for the first time. Then she goes back inside the tower with her prize of a crown, and a skink she found and named Pascal. Rapunezl and Gothel have another spat, and Rapunzel decides she will run off to see the lanterns and she will find Flynn and make him her guide.

She ends up at the Snuggly Duckling and she doesn't find Flynn but she does find Gina, a young career criminal girl looking to break the glass ceiling. Gina agrees to help her find Flynn. They find Flynn, and he agrees to help guide Rapunzel to see the floating lanterns for a split reward of the crown with Gina.

The Snuggly Duckling gets burned down by Countess Bathory (yes that Elizabeth Bathory) and the Pub Thugs are pissed about it and also they're helping Rapunzel even though she didn't sing the I've Got A Dream song don't worry about it. We learn that the nobles that wanted to buy Rapunzel are now hunting her down so she can go to auction.

Gina takes them to her adopted mother's cottage. Gina's mother is a white witch, who goes by the name of Goodwife. She doesn't get an actual name she's just The Goodwife. Anyhow, the cottage is a magic safe space (for now) and Goodwife teaches Rapunzel that her hair isn't inherently evil and may not even be all that deadly! Rapunzel learns that her hair has other powers too, like the ability to turn skink Pascal into a sentient Chameleon. Yeah.

Also Goodwife tells Rapunzel she's the dead princess but this isn't like, an immediate call to action. Not a lot happens until we get this story's version of the Mother Knows Best Reprise where Gothel finds Rapunzel again but has to flee, but this Rapunzel has a bigger support network and isn't buying it. Flynn and Gina decide the safest course of action is to bring Rapunzel to the castle, but along the way she gets kidnapped by the Countess.

Gothel is pissed because she still wants the money for Rapunzel, so she rallies the armies of all the opposing bidders. Flynn and Gina convince Max the Man to send for his troops, and he joins them in going to the enemy castle. Flynn tries to sneak in, gets caught, and meanwhile there's a bloody battle out the front between the noble armies. Max jumps into the fray, Gina turns around and rallies the Pub Thugs.

Rapunzel uses her shrinking magic (!) to disappear half the castle and escape with Eugene, and the Pub Thugs arrive and basically end the battle. The Captain is dying but it's okay! Rapunzel turns him into a horse :) Also Rapunzel sees Gothel and tells her to fuck off.

The story ends with a tearful reunion between Rapunzel and her parents, Eugene and Gina are implied to be biological siblings, and things are good but of course in direct parallel to Cass Gina leaves at the end to become an adventurer. The end.

(There are a few other smaller plot beats, but you get the idea.)

MY THOTS

So here are my thoughts™.

Framing Device

I'll just state that I didn't like that the story was told via the vehicle of an older brother telling his 16 year old sister a different version of the Tangled Movie in a cancer ward. From what I've heard it also isn't normal for the Twisted Tales series to use a framing device for the AUs either.

I sympathise with the author's personal story, of course I do. That doesn't mean I'm stirred with compassion every time the flow of the story is interrupted to remind you to be sad because this is a story being told to a girl sick with cancer. It feels more than a little tragedy-porny rather than emotionally touching, and maybe that's because I'm too burnt out on real life tragedy to waste emotional energy on fictional cancer patients but we don't need to do Fault In Our Stars discourse again.

Real World References

This story goes heavy with Real World references. And another issue with the framing device as above is that you do feel like this is a story being told by someone namedropping every historical figure they know which makes it harder to get into the story.

There's like... a lot of references to Christianity, particularly in the prologue. There's a priest that thinks Rapunzel's hair is the work of the Devil or whatever. It's a lot. The Patriarchy is a thing. And that's not even getting into the Countess. I put it very succinctly in my notes so I'll paste it here:

I wish she’d just been an OC who could exist to chew scenery because the fact that she was a literal historical serial killer is super. Off putting. Like, she could have been an obvious reference to Bathory, but it feels like Miku Binder Hamilton levels of uncomfortable to me.

I miss Lady D.

Which basically sums up my problem with trying to take the setting of Tangled and put it somewhere in the Real World and somewhere on the Timeline. Who thought this was a good idea.

Misc. Thoughts

So, I used the five highlighter colours my ipad allows to organise my thoughts and organised them accordingly: Yellow for out of place IRL references, Blue for worldbuilding/character points that aren't plot relevant but still interesting, Pink for when something I find personally amusing happens, Purple for when the story feels like it's trying to 1-up the movie in some kind of way and Green for Heterosexual Nonsense. I'll touch on those last two in the Character sections but be prepared.

Also: for a book about giving Rapunzel killer hair, her hair isn't very dangerous. I wanted to see Rapunzel kill someone, and I'm disappointed that I didn't.

Characters

I'll do a deep dive into my thoughts about the characters before wrapping it up. I'm starting with Gina because she's honestly the easiest to get through.

Gina

Gina is a new character introduced for the story. She's a young woman trying to make it as a career criminal but keeps hitting that glass ceiling. So here's the down low, for all those who want to know: Gina is basically Cass, only not really. She's implied to be Eugene's biological sister, as previously mentioned, but you can imagine she's Cass the entire way through without breaking your immersion because if you imagined Cass if she were adopted by a Goodwitch rather than the Captain and had a looser, more wilderness survivor than trainee guard upbringing then you get Gina.

I liked Gina! I think she's fun as her own character too, and her best moments are when she's interacting with her mother Goody Goodwife, and she of course picks up a natural sibling rivalry with Eugene, but I was disappointed with how little she really bonded with Rapunzel because she needed to make room for Eugene and Rapunzel's romance.

Rapunzel

Okay, here's our protagonist. There's a notable effort to make Rapunzel more active in her destiny and whatever, and sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't. I was worried they'd try to go full butt-kicking girlboss with her but I was pleasantly surprised that Rapunzel was pretty useless in most scenes, genuinely love to see it.

With a more intimate look into Rapunzel's psyche through the medium of prose, we see Rapunzel really questioning Gothel's behaviour even before she leaves the tower, and while I appreciate that she can develop her own cynicism I feel it starts unnecessarily early. This is my purple colour; the movie needs to be "fixed" by showing the readers that this Rapunzel is quicker to distrust Gothel. She's also quicker to hatch a plan to go outside of the tower on her own, and she makes a plan to make Flynn her guide for the lanterns even though he never stumbles upon her in the tower- and even though she has a perfectly rational reason not to trust him which is that he is a stranger and a Wanted Thief.

In the moments where it does work is when Rapunzel is surrounded by her new support network: Flynn, Goodwife and Gina, who encourage her to question Gothel's sincerity, and Rapunzel comes up with her own defences for Gothel so that she can poke through them herself.

I have some other thoughts about Rapunzel's hair and her powers, like how the story provides the interesting concept that her hair gets different powers with the different phases of the moon, but a lot of the powers are uhhh stupid and also I feel like it really robs the story of the whole gripping conflict of "Yes I'm Rapunzel Yes my hair kills people what of it".

In as far as just Rapunzel herself though, she still felt pretty in character nonetheless, and maybe that's all I can ask.

Flynn Rider / Eugene Fitzherbert

My boy I am so sorry. They neutered my boy.

Long story short: Eugene in this story is the sexy lamp. He contributes nothing to the plot except to be there for Rapunzel to drool over. And of course because he won't get any character development, he starts from the very beginning as a sweet soft boi with none of the Flynn Rider characterisation from the movie because we don't have time for that, he needs to be husband material stat.

His whole character is the colour green for Heterosexual Nonsense.

So, here's the problem. In the movie, there's not a lot of time for ~friendship~ between Rapunzel and Eugene because they kind of immediately see each other as a romantic prospect. And whatever, it's a movie and there's only so much time. But this book had the opportunity to take things a bit slower and instead chooses to make Rapunzel get jealous whenever Eugene and Gina interact and for her to be constantly wishing he was holding her hand.

Say what you will about Lost Lagoon, but it tells a good romance story just by virtue of not intending to be a romance story, because the author is trying to convey a strong bond between Rapunzel and Cassandra without using "and they kiss" as a cheatcode. What Once Was Mine says "he was a boy, she was a girl, could it be any more obvious?" and leaves it at that.

Now as for how this all pertains to Eugene's character? Well, it just robs him of any flavour. In the movie there's a clear distinction between Flynn and Eugene, when we learn Eugene's real name about halfway through. We see a clear difference between the Flynn we knew- kind of an asshole, wanated to drop Rapunzel off at the Snuggly Duckling and get rid of her- and Eugene, who is sincere and chooses Rapunzel as his New Dream in opposition to his Old Dream of living alone on an island with a bunch of money.

This version of Eugene is basically Eugene all the way through, because the plot doesn't really need Eugene there but he has to be there because it's a Tangled AU so there's no Rapunzel rescuing Flynn from the guards and healing his hand scene, he just loves her immediately and that's that. They have a little spat at one point but it's cleared up later and not because they actually communicate but because they kiss.

Rapunzel only learns Eugene's real name at the very end of the story, and gives a speech about how Eugene is the real him, but it's just so flat because 'Flynn' has been sincere this whole time? Anyway he does nothing of value for the entire story except be there for Rapunzel to lust after. Eugene I'm so sorry.

Gothel

Gothel's sort of the Big Bad and is characterised as an abusive asshole, the usual. I wish there were a bit more nuance to her character but then again in this story she's not just being passively evil- taking care of Rapunzel for selfish reasons but nevertheless maintaining the status quo- she's being actively evil in trying to sell Rapunzel off.

It's notably funny that Gothel sees the Countess Bathory and is like "what the fuck".

Anyway Gothel in this story also feels very weak in part because this Rapunzel is more critical and in part because this Rapunzel has a new support network. It's for that reason the Mother Knows Best Reprise scene doesn't really work, because the original has Gothel pit Rapunzel against Eugene, whereas she can't do that here so it remains a Gothel vs Rapunzel thing.

She gets a boring death as an epilogue addendum that someone rips out the Sundrop flower, which tbh? lame. It would be a lot more fun if it were open ended but I am also preferential to Rapunzel actually using her killer hair to kill someone. Please

Captain Justin Tregsburg

It's Max. He was a human but then he got turned into a horse. what the fuck you guys

[protectwoc]

thots on little women (2019)

or, y’all are giving greta gerwig too much credit, part one

(Before y’all say anything, I know)

I have a lot of thoughts about the new Little Women movie.

I should probably start by saying that I loved the new movie. I thought most of the acting performances were good (Emma Watson’s accent notwithstanding), and it was a pretty faithful adaptation of the book; a lot of the quotes were lifted verbatim from the novel, and I often found myself mouthing along with the actors. I don’t usually like book-to-screen adaptation changes, but I actually didn’t mind most of the changes here. The two biggest things that were changed were the decision to start the story in the middle and jump back and forth, and the positioning Jo as the writer of Little Women who was forced to write in the “Jo marries Bhaer and gets a happy (married) ending” bit. I actually really liked both of those choices and thought they were good additions to the story, making this probably the only time I’ve ever liked any book-to-screen adaptation changes. Also, I am and have been since childhood an Amy March stan, and I liked that her character was more fleshed out and relatable to other viewers. I also think Florence Pugh did a superb acting job. Overall I liked it a lot, and I fully intend on rewatching it again.

I should also say that I read Little Women when I was very young, probably nine or ten, and I loved it, and it has been one of my favorite books since. Regardless of these facts, I never saw any of the live action versions, so the only version I have to compare the 2019 one with is the movie inside my head. With that said, as previously mentioned, I have a lot of thoughts.

Look, the movie was really good. I thought so, my family thought so, and clearly critics thought so too. But when I started reading the reviews after I had seen the movie, something about them kept rubbing me the wrong way. Something kept nagging at me, but it wasn’t until I read this particular review that I realized what it was: “here’s the thing about greta gerwig’s little women. it’s really not just about jo anymore...she showed the struggle and sacrifice and love that meg has. she gives beth one of the most beautiful story arcs ever. she lets beth exist in the movie and grow on us before her death.” But… she didn’t, I remember thinking. And that is the crux of my issue with the movie, or at least, the conversation around the movie. It feels like a lot of people are giving Gerwig credit for things she didn’t actually do, like fully fleshing out the non-Jo characters, or exploring Jo’s sexuality. And that is what I am going to discuss in this essay.

I imagine the Venn Diagram of people who read my first Descendants meta and people who will be interested in this is virtually nonexistent (probably just me, honestly) but just in case, this essay will be set up similarly to my last one. It will probably come in at least two parts, since I can already feel this getting away from me, and I will start with an unnecessarily long list of prefaces:

This meta is not, for the most part, about race. I do believe Greta Gerwig is a White Feminist™, which shows up in a lot of her work, up to and including this one. Obviously the racial diversity of Little Women is virtually nonexistent, but coming from a Greta Gerwig adaptation of Little Women, I’m not sure what y’all were expecting. Since I didn’t go into the movie anticipating any sort of racial diversity, I wasn’t disappointed, and for that reason I will be leaving racial dynamics and Gerwig’s fraught history with racial diversity out of this meta almost entirely.

As previously mentioned, I read Little Women when I was pretty young and loved it. I read it way before I knew anything about the internet or media discussion, so I formed my opinions on the story writ large independently of basically everyone else. With that said, it wasn’t until way later, like about 14 or 15, that I actually started reading online discourse about Little Women and discovered that my opinions ran contrary to just about everyone else’s.

For example, I have always loved Amy March. She was always my favorite character, her chapters of the book were always my favorite to reread, and I was ecstatic when she married Laurie and thought it made perfect sense.

Conversely, I have never been a huge fan of Jo. I know, in the book community that’s basically blasphemy, but whatever. This sense of apathy is probably due to the fact that Jo and I have virtually the same personality, and I get on my own nerves quite often, and also that even as a child I was never a huge fan of Jo’s “not like other girls” personality.

I am what some people would call hyper-romantic. Consequently, my favorite section of the book has always been the last half, with all of the romances and drama. I also didn’t have a huge problem with Jo’s marriage to Bhaer; I didn’t love it or anything, but given that I was never super attached to Jo’s character, I wasn’t super broken up when she married him, also partly because…

I never read Jo as queer. I know, I know, but as a bi woman, I never picked up on whatever subtext everybody else seemed to. I grew up around a lot of white women in the country, and they all acted exactly like Jo did, so maybe that’s why. Of course, it’s a perfectly valid interpretation/headcanon, I’m just telling y’all that I personally never saw it. With that said, I was excited to watch an interpretation where she was more explicitly queer, as all the reviews seemed to say she was, and boy, was I… disappointed.

To clarify, I’m not saying all of my opinions because I want to change anyone’s mind, or convince them that they’ve been reading the book wrong all these years. But I think it’s important to let y’all know where I’m coming from, since I’m sure it’s going to color the way that I view the movie, and the problems within it. In the same way, if my personal opinions about the book change the way you are going to read this essay, I suggest stopping now.

With all that said, I present: Thoughts on Little Women (2019). Also, spoilers, obviously.

Part One: The Sisters

A lot of the praise given to Gerwig’s Little Women centers around one thing: Jo’s sisters. Specifically, how the three sisters are given a much more prominent role in the storyline than in previous adaptations, almost to the level of Jo herself. Now, as previously mentioned, I have never seen another adaptation of Little Women, but I can speak for this adaptation and say that I feel supremely let down.

Let’s start with the obvious: Beth. The review that I cited claimed that Gerwig “gave Beth one of the most beautiful story arcs ever” and “let viewers get to know her so that you really feel her loss.” While of course this reviewer is entitled to their opinion on this movie; all media is up for interpretation, I can’t say that I agree with these statements, or even know where this interpretation came from.

Beth basically only has five major scenes in the film. Obviously she’s a part of many of the other girls’ scenes, but when I’m discussing her “major” scenes, I’m referring to ones where the main focus of the directing is on Beth and her feelings/behaviors. Anyone who read Little Women can tell you that the most memorable thing about Beth is her death. Unfortunately, in the movie, the scenes that deal with her sickness/death are more focused on Jo’s feelings than Beth’s. In the past, Jo mourns her hair with more concern than she shows for Beth, and in the present, the focus continues to be more on Jo’s emotions. Beth’s only actual major scenes are:

Beth is too nervous to talk to Mr. Laurence and hides behind Marmee

Beth is the only one of the March sisters to go visit and take care of the Hummels; she contracts scarlet fever

Beth overcomes her fear of Mr. Laurence and goes to play the piano in his house.

Mr. Laurence gifts Beth a beautiful grand piano; she goes to thank him.

Jo takes Beth to the beach where Beth confesses she is ready to die.

The problem with these scenes is that they tell us basically nothing about Beth’s characteristics. From those five scenes, we can glean that she is selfless, shy, until she isn’t anymore, and that she is a musician, which, contrary to what many musicians believe, is not a personality trait. In actuality, we cannot even concretely say that she is shy, since we only see this behavior through her interactions with Mr. Laurence. She seems to have no problem engaging with the Hummels, and it could just as well be that she is more nervous interacting with a rich older unmarried man, which would not be uncommon for a woman of her situation in her time period.

The only personality trait that differentiates Beth from her sisters is her selflessness, since all three of the other sisters have moments of selfishness that define their characters. But the only time this is ever contrasted with them is when she goes to visit the Hummels, (and then she contracts scarlet fever as a punishment?) One occurrence does not a personality trait make. We know virtually nothing about who Beth is. When viewers see Beth’s sickness and eventual death, they feel sympathy for Jo instead of mourning Beth’s character.

In fairness to Gerwig, much of this is the result of the source material instead of a directing choice. Beth was never given as much focus on Alcott’s Little Women as her sisters. For context, each of the sisters were given “chapters” that focused on their adventures and exploits. Meg has eight, Jo has fourteen,  and Amy has ten. Beth has a grand total of five chapters actually centered around her point of view. So it seems obvious that in an adaptation of the source material, Beth would not have been given nearly as much precedence in the narrative.

BUT, and this is a huge but, we knew that Gerwig has no problem changing huge parts of the story she’s telling. This is not a bad thing; as I’ve already mentioned, I think it works to her advantage in many parts of this movie, namely the ending change. So it would not have been out of her scope of abilities or desires to change parts of the source material to flesh out Beth’s character in the same way she fleshed out Jo’s. The fact that she elected not to do that shows that she simply didn’t want to.

Again, this is not a bad thing. Even though it is always presented as a story of four sisters, it is no secret that Jo is the main character of both the book and basically every adaptation. It is no surprise that she is the most developed character because she is essentially the protagonist.

HOWEVER, with all of that knowledge, the thing that irks me about this movie is how the conversations around it has been giving Gerwig so much credit for how developed all of the sisters are when this just isn't true. As it turns out, it is untrue across the cases of all of the sisters.

The next most obvious is Meg. Meg’s case is arguably more egregious than Beth’s, because arc-wise, she is the one who lost the most in the book to screen adaptation. As before, let’s take a look at Meg’s major scenes:

Meg is invited to spend several weeks with her rich friends and she allows them to parade her around and turn her into someone she’s not (even if she wants to be.)

After Laurie sees her in at the party with her friends he judges her, then apologizes, and then they dance and he treats her like a lady.

When the sisters go with Laurie and company to the beach, John Brooke flirts with her, which she reciprocates.

Later on, John volunteers to go with Marmee to take care of Mr. March, and Meg kisses him on the cheek.

Before her wedding to John, Jo asks Meg to run away with her, and Meg responds that “Just because my dreams aren’t as big as yours doesn’t mean they aren’t important.”

Meg’s rich friend Sally convinces her to buy a length of expensive silk to have a dress made.

After purchasing the silk, we see Meg regretful outside her home, and she hugs her twin children.

Meg and John have a conversation about the silk, in which she tells him that she “is so tired of being poor.” When John looks hurt, she apologizes.

John comes to the March household to tell Meg that she should have her dress made. She tells him that she’s already sold it to Sally, and they make up. 

Meg definitely has more focused scenes in this movie than Beth does, which makes sense, as she is clearly a more prominent character than Beth is. In the book, Meg has a total of eight focused chapters, to Beth’s five. However, proportionately, the ratio of Meg’s focused scenes to Beth’s is considerably less than the ratio of Meg’s focused chapter’s to Beth’s. This is because for whatever reason, many of the scenes that dealt heavily with Meg’s character, particularly in the second half of the book, were done away with in the movie. Meg’s lifelong dream in both the novel and the movie was to be a wife and mother, and she has an entire arc in the book that centers around that. In the movie, however, it was entirely cut out.

Look. I’m not here to pass judgements on the merits of Meg’s lifelong goal from a feminist perspective. Meg is allowed to have her dream just as Jo is. In the movie, Meg has a wonderful line right before her wedding, when Jo suggests that they run away together. “Just because my dreams are different than yours doesn’t mean they’re less important.” This is a lovely, sentimental, and even feminist take on Meg’s hopes. Desiring to be mother to a man and mother to children is not necessarily a feminist dream, but she is entitled to it just the same. Following that same logic, if you are going to go out of your way to include a line about how Meg and Jo’s dreams are equally important, they should be treated so in the narrative. At the bare minimum, Meg’s arc should be on par with the source material, but it simply isn’t.

In the second half of Little Women, Meg has several focused chapters where she learns to manage a household, comes to terms with being the wife of a poor man, and how to balance having children with having a husband. She has several important discussions with Marmee and with John that are entirely cut from the movie, and we only see her children, Daisy and Demi, twice.

To reiterate, none of this is bad filmmaking, per se. If Greta Gerwig set out to make an adaptation of Little Women that is more focused on centering Jo as the protagonist than the novel, that is perfectly fine. The problem is that Gerwig seems to think she made a more balanced adaptation than the source material, and so does everybody else.

[i-am-very-very-tired]

Are CGI models taking jobs away from real people of colour? | Dazed

Maybe you’ve seen them while scrolling on Instagram, then stopped and scrolled back in disbelief. “Them” being CGI-created models. Yep, if beauty standards weren’t yet high enough, there are now uber-perfect models who don’t really exist – even if they do have personalities and their own social media accounts.

And being avatars hasn’t stopped them from being the faces of beauty labels or modelling in editorials for magazines. One of them even took over at Milan Fashion Week. Still, as you might imagine, reception to these new faces has been mixed – what do they represent? Is this just the creepy AF Pygmalion myth for generation Instagram? And what about the actual, IRL models they’re putting out of a job? Here, two writers argue for and against the use of CGI models in fashion.

AGAINST – BRANDS LOVE POC’S AESTHETICS BUT NOT POC

Text Kemi Alemoru

I’m someone that exists on the fringes of what is fashionable. For example, I don’t actually own any luxury items and spend Monday-to-Friday throwing together the first things I see strewn across my floordrobe. Nevertheless, even though I don’t feel a part of the industry I know what is trending and right now people of colour are having a “moment”.

For years, all-white campaigns were something you’d never bat an eyelid to. Now, a make-up ad or streetwear campaign without any people of colour looks incredibly out of touch. You see this in how something as simple as swatching cosmetic collections is inherently political post-Fenty Beauty, with companies being dubbed “embarrassing” if their darker shade range is limited.

Just this week a “colonialism” themed fashion line modelled by a white man sparked outrage for being so obviously tone-deaf. This is probably because young people have become increasingly empathetic towards race issues since social media has made debates more accessible. The absence of black, asian, hispanic faces in your brand only help to strengthen online discourse about exclusion and prejudice. In short, it’s just not good for your brand to exclude people of colour (POC) right now.

This backdrop is impossible to ignore when considering the rise of CGI influencers of colour. Some commentators think the likes of Lil Miquela and Shudu are a clever comment on authenticity on social media or the fashion industry’s obsession with perfection. However, there’s a danger that this is just another vehicle for brands to cash in on what is popular without having to give props and jobs to POC.

Take Lil Miquela. Her feed is very of-the-moment oscillating between streetwear looks and pivotal pop culture moments like celebrating Lena Waithe’s Vanity Fair cover after becoming the first black woman to win an Emmy for comedy writing. She’s vocal about social issues in Bushwick, Brooklyn – an area of New York where only 9 per cent of the population is white. Aided by her ethnic ambiguity, the Spanish-Brazilian Californian has enough cultural cache to talk about racial issues like Black Lives Matter while managing to look socially conscious, rather than aggressive or divisive. If Miquela was actually real, her radical passion and ethnicity might work against her. Luckily, she is a pixelated simulacrum – an embodiment of what is popular – without the burden of actually having to exist. So she’s picking up brand partnerships at quite a rate, while influencers of colour remain largely ignored by luxury brands. 

In February, Prada and Miquela teamed up for an Instagram takeover. Until recently, the brand’s record on diversity has been questionable – before Jourdan Dunn in 2008, the last black model to walk for the brand was Naomi Campbell in 1993. While Miquela was taking over on IG, Sudanese-American model Anok Yai became the first black model to open a Prada runway show in more than 20 years. So while it’s props to Prada for helping Yai make her way into the industry, couldn’t they have given their social media accounts to an IRL POC?

This isn’t an isolated issue. In 2016, a Fashion Spot report found that almost 80 per cent of models in luxury brand ads were white. Yet, the “world’s first digital supermodel” Shudu, has 99.5k followers and a burgeoning career. She has already modelled Oscar de la Renta jewellery, Fenty lip shades, and has a host of viral shoots with her male counterpart Nfon.

Shudu and Nfon are the brainchild of London-based photographer and digital artist Cameron-James Wilson who told Harper’s Bazaar that Shudu was his “art piece”. “She is not a real model unfortunately, but she represents a lot of the real models of today. There’s a big kind of movement with dark skin models, so she represents them and is inspired by them," he explained. “Obviously some models like Duckie (Thot) were definitely big inspirations for her as well.” Funnily enough, Thot has been vocal about how difficult it was to get her start in the industry because of her shade.

What Wilson is inadvertently saying is that black people are trendy right now, not because the industry wants to improve its shocking record diversity, but purely because people love the black aesthetic. It’s objectification in its purest form. Now brands can borrow Shudu’s deep melanated skin, Nfon’s wide sculpted features, and Miquela’s feisty online persona without the hassle of smashing the glass ceiling to let POC reach the top.

In the past, I’ve argued against the boring backlash of calling individuals out for appropriation when they borrow from black culture. Enjoying someone else’s culture is a natural way to appreciate differences and develop culture in music, fashion, and beauty – if you cite your influences then it’s all good. However, what I do take issue with is a whole industry that clearly favours black and minority ethnic aesthetics on anyone but minorities.

To champion a coded character over POC influencers and models looking for jobs is nothing short of fetishisation. As Naomi Campbell told GQ recently: “We’re not a trend.” If you like what women of colour represent, and how they look, then hire them. They should be remunerated and championed. Until then, your CGI imitations only prove that you love the looks of POC, but not the reality of us.