#she was also the english voice of suletta mercury

[beeftony]

Izetta: The Last Witch has way more parallels with Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury than I was expecting, to the point where the latter may have taken direct inspiration from parts of the former.

Izetta is a red-haired protagonist who acts flustered in social situations where she doesn’t think she belongs, who’s an absolute demon on the battlefield and makes use of various floating objects that she controls remotely, and is so devoted to building a brighter future for someone she admires that she makes use of a power that could literally kill her if she overuses it. Izetta and Suletta’s names rhyme with each other, as do a lot of the themes their stories explore.

Hell, in one of the early battle scenes, Izetta shouts “Everyone!” and moves the swords she’s controlling to form a shield, in almost the exact same way that Suletta uses her gun-bits.

There’s even yuri.

[russenoire]

i think this is primarily an american thing, or at the very least an anglosphere (british commonwealth and former territories) thing.

speaking as an american: i am a member of a minority group here. people of african ancestry number ~13% of the population, and this country has done its utmost for centuries to make us feel like shit for existing, to varying degrees.

i have lost count of the americans in general i've encountered who see anime characters as white unless explicitly stated, because 'white' is still considered 'default' in the US even though this hasn't been true from a purely demographic perspective for some time. i'm not even going to get into the wall street journal regularly freaking out about this, or much of the anti-abortion fervor here being driven by this specific fear. the people who draw characters as black just want to see themselves included in the media they enjoy, period. or represented in a positive light for once. my guess as to why we rarely see other racebends is because other PoC maybe don't feel as left out with respect to skin tone representation?

outside the US, this center doesn't hold; this just reads like PoC erasing representations of other PoC. asians are also PoC; their cultures are important as well.

whenever i see serizawa from mob psycho 100 drawn as black because he has extremely curly, pouffy hair...

or hear about people who claim nurugai (indigenous sanka) from jigokuraku,

or mugen from samurai champloo (indigenous ryukyuan),

or anthy from revolutionary girl utena as black,

i wonder. are y'all also reading the characters like this because you don't know that not all asians are pale-skinned with bone-straight hair? anthy actually wears a bindi.

like, how much of this is lack of awareness and how much is desire for honest representation?

in the case of nurugai, american fans took to twitter to complain for days that she didn't 'sound black' in the english dub. this whole line of protest was so unintentionally racist in so many directions that it looped in on itself: nurugai's VA, cassie ewulu, is actually black.

WTF does it mean to 'sound black'?? why savage the casting of an actual black person, who did an awesome job voicing her character, for not 'sounding black'? need i mention again that nurugai is an indigenous japanese girl that people chose to read as black because of her dark skin and pouffy hair? a real-life case of fans imposing their character headcanons on the actors who play them.

the casting of witch from mercury's suletta in english saw similar fuckery; suletta looks like she could be west asian if you squint hard enough, and fans demanded she be voiced by someone with middle eastern ancestry (it didn't happen, and her dub VA jill harris also did a fantastic job despite the initial hate). make it make sense...

white americans who lighten the skin of darker characters emphatically do not have the same aims. they already claim the bulk of media representation in the US; so often when they do this, it's about 'correcting' a supposed imbalance brought on by the presence of PoC where they 'shouldn't' be (as an example, the sheer amount of white folks in the US who are unaware of the historical presence of PoC in medieval europe is, um, distressingly large), or pushing back against calls for more racial diversity on a larger social scale ('keep your "woke politics" out of my entertainment'), or an only slightly more innocent and defensible preference for lighter-skinned characters in general. this kind of shit gets called 'whitewashing' by PoC for a reason; i refuse to call it racebending.

other races? they've been sidelined for so long in the US that they may as well not register in some parts around here. the USA touts itself as a very diverse place, but that diversity is NOT evenly distributed. there are swaths of the country, mostly rural and suburban, where the only place you'll find real live PoC is on TV. or working as unseen domestic/agricultural labor.

outside the US? it gets simultaneously more and less complicated, and can look just as problematic as black racebending in fan art for non-american audiences... especially with respect to anime characters. almost half the world's population is asian and it's just a different kind of erasure.

i would love to see more black characters in anime! but we're even more rare in japan than we are in the anglosphere, and racist anti-black/dark-skin caricatures are not uncommon (terraFORMARS, anyone? superalloy darkshine from one punch man?).

though i'm grateful for whatever decent actual representation black folks get, i would rather see none at all than... whatever ethnicity the otherwise forgettable takeuchi from mob psycho 100 is supposed to be:

i don't read him as black, for what it's worth, but his coloration and little black sambo-redolent character design are fucked. up. what were y'all thinking, studio bones??

this is takeuchi in the manga, btw:

i must add: on this website where saying something at all is frequently equated to silencing others...

my voicing my opinions does not take away anyone's rights to their headcanons. i have reblogged some racebent art! i appreciate the skill of the artist and genuinely like the art, outside of my own complicated feelings about racebending. nuance exists and contradictory thoughts can coexist in one person. so please, do whatever the fuck you want. if anyone harasses you and i see it, i will speak up for you. if i don't love your art, i won't reblog and i will keep scrolling. it's that simple.

this does not apply to cosplay. black anime fans should be able to cosplay any character they want without harassment or death threats... cosplaying someone of an ethnicity different from one's own is not racebending, and it's usually the only option black cosplayers have.

</end rant>

The automatic assumption of so many people in fandoms that every character with a darker skin color = black and every character with a lighter skin color = white. And the absolute outrage that ensues for some reason when artists draw dark-skinned Asian characters as Asian instead of black. More races than just black and white exist, people.