#representation: racial

[icedsodapop]

I really need to stress how groundbreaking Martha Jones literally is. She made her mark as the first official onscreen Black Doctor Who companion, and quite literally paved the way for future Black and other companions of colour to star on the show, like Bill Potts, Yasmin Khan, and Ryan Sinclair. And these characters would also make Doctor Who history in their own ways with Bill being the first onscreen Black lesbian companion, Yasmin being the first onscreen South Asian companion, and Ryan being the first onscreen Black companion with a disability.

Marth Jones' power? Unparalleled.

[alwaysbewoke]

[grecoromanyaoi]

btw i will always advocate for writing a fantasy setting thats (at least also) inspired by nonwestern cultures over simply putting black n brown ppl in a setting thats based entirely on europe

[rhetoricsofraceandidentity]

[comparativetarot]

The Tower. Art by St. Jinx, from the Reclaimed Earth Tarot.

[bluemink5822]

Doctor Who's 15th Doctor (16th? 14th...? I'm counting Jo Martin but not David Tennant twice so 15th.) in brown-tinted pencil on mixed media paper.

Another request from my sibling of a fandom I'm not in but know much about anyways.

Daily portrait #8 and only BIPOC portrait #2, which is rather a shame, honestly. I do love the white/white-passing characters that I've drawn, but to me at least, drawing and painting people of darker skin tones is way more fun, and there's an actual reason for this. The highlights on people's skin will always be the same light shade, regardless of skin tone, simply due to how reflection works, but with people of darker skin tones, the middle values and shadows are allowed to be a little darker and a little richer, and you don't have to dance around putting actual value into the skin. BBC Sherlock, for example, is a great character, but absolutely pasty, and trying to get his skin an accurate shade was absolute hell. More importantly, I just love diversifying my artwork since every field, including art, seems lacking in representation, and it seems Doctor Who also picked up on this sentiment with Ncuti Gatwa, their first BIPOC Doctor here to stay.

Taking free requests for any live-action character you want to see in a monochromatic medium.

Other Doctors:

15

Fugitive

13

[oh-hush-its-perfect]

I once said this on Twitter and got a LOT of backlash for it, but I think it's worth saying. Piper McLean is not hyper-femme. She's not even femme. Piper McLean is a butch sapphic woman. Though there's no problem with portraying her in pink or doing "girly" things every once in a while, if everyone is doing it all of the time, it creates a fandom misinterpretation of the character. It erases her identity as butch. Yes, she improved her internalized misogyny. No, that does not mean that she has become femme or "feminine." Part of feminism and eliminating internalized misogyny is the realization that women have the choice of how they want to present. Piper presents in a more androgynous/masc way. That's how she is, and I don't think all fanart of her should misrepresent her in such a way.

[audioroleplayconfessions]

I usually avoid posting my own opinions, but I've seen a few posts like the one in the screenshot below creep across my feed lately and they're bugging me too much to keep my mouth shut. I censored the identity of this particular example because I don't want to start a Tumblr war or make them feel like I'm singling them out or attacking them.

I don't feel good about celebrating black history month through a character who was both written and performed by a white man. I know this is all just low-stakes fandom headcanon stuff and I'm not trying to control what other people do, but something feels not-quite-right about taking a character played by a white VA and deciding (on his behalf might I add) that he's black and using him as your example of black representation in the audio rp fandom.

There are black VAs out there, they can represent themselves. I really think it's disingenuous to sort through a cast of characters all played by the same white guy and assign POC races to them in order to give a singular white guy's one-man show racial diversity, then celebrate said "diversity".

Sorry, I'm not trying to be a Tumblr drama queen. If you're the person from the screenshot (or have posted something similar), I don't think you meant any harm. Your post probably wasn't meant to be that deep and not the worst thing in the world, but I don't know why you would pick a random character written and performed by a white guy and cheer "Rahhh, let's celebrate black history month with this!". If it really matters to you, you can celebrate a black VA, or a canonically black character, or even just a listener character that you/others HC as black. You can celebrate fan artists and writers who are black.

Why use characters played by Redacted for this? I promise I'm not trying to start a fight, or accuse people who've made posts like this of being racist or cancel anyone. I don't think they mean badly. But I see this a lot even outside of the context of BHM. It's almost always with characters written/performed by Redacted and it's always made me a little uneasy, especially with the amount of enthusiasm people throw onto the race they decided to HC for this one white man's characters.

If you disagree with me, I'm open to hearing you out. I don't want to try and dictate what people can/can't do in a fandom space or send a mob after anyone, but something feels off to me about using Redacted characters to celebrate BHM.

-Ringmaster

[hussyknee]

Not entirely sure how I'm expected to respond when I point out something is white as fuck and the person I'm criticizing goes "I'm literally PoC!!" Okay? Good for you? Get well soon??

I literally live in South Asia, a place still nursing the world's worst colonial hangover. That's like one billion brown people desperately in need of joining Bootlickers Anonymous. If I had to respect the rancid takes of every yahoo that lives here I'd have to drown myself in the sea.

Living in white countries does something odd to diaspora brains. If you call yourself BIPOC in your own head long enough you end up forgetting you're just a garden variety idiot mainlining white supremacy like everyone else.

[alwaysbewoke]

[haveacupofjohanny]

How 'Evil' Teaches a Masterclass in 'Show, Don't Tell' Through Racial Inequality

Evil TV show, C for COP episode, racial inequality, show don't tell writing, storytelling techniques, police bias, impactful TV episodes, African American representation, writing lessons from TV, media portrayal of racism

Learn more about the show: https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/evil/ Transcript So I am watching this show evil. And, and I was talking to my husband about this last episode that we saw, and that it does a great job of showing the theme that it wants to focus on during the episode. And I think I took that as a great writing lesson. Because oftentimes, as authors, we are asked to show and not…

[murder-incarnate]

tfw the bhaalspawn is the only one in your friend group with a real conscience and they are hanging on by a fucking thread

my friend ez's tav trine (at least they're a tav in her bg3 au) + my durge abaddon + astarion. trine and abaddon typically live in separate universes but ez and i love to talk about how the two would interact, and they both romance astarion so like. this squad gets talked about a lot. abaddon tries so hard to be good despite everything, trine and astarion not so much, and things aren't helped by trine especially having a real tendency to poke the metaphorical bear because it's funny.

colors are messy so here's the lines-only version, which i also like, and is, admittedly, also messy

[pinkcadillaccas]

Like it's no wonder media literacy is dog shit in so many young people we are being written TV that spoonfeeds all of the information to us and leaves no room for subtlety or creative world building and we keep saying that this is good and it's not! And if we all keep watching bad TV and saying that it's good then all TV is going to become badly written contrived crap that thinks it's being deep and annoying libs on Tumblr are going to keep saying that omg this episode was so brave it literally said eat the rich!!

[comparativetarot]

Two of Blues. Art by Stacey Williams-Ng, from the Rhythm & Soul Tarot.

The friendship in the 2 of Cups (Blues) is shown as a pair of Mississippi sharecroppers.

[wolf-tail]

Worst conservative argument against diversety in media is shit like:

"Well I'm not white and I related to White Character XYZ which means that you should never be upset about not seeing anyone darker than a paper bag on TV ever"

[spite-and-waffles]

Do diaspora PoC actually like it when white fans keep race-bending random Batkids? Apparently Jason's Asian now too? In a fic where he had red hair. And I'm sorry but white people making Jay Latino and Tim East Asian is racist stereotypying. The entire point of Tim is his white privilege.

Y'all are a hair away from making one of these people white-passing Black or Native, and I don't think you'd understand the enormity of insult that would be either. Unless you actually belong to the community you're race-bending them for, please for the love of God stop. This isn't representation, it's brownface for brownie points.