#I also headcanon Jet Star as non-binary and using both he/him and she/her

[hairasuntouchedaspartoftheamazon]

#because they see a man of color w vaugely long hair and go ah yes i will she/her#this character without thinking of the various compound biases probably encouraging me to do so @glitching-desert-snake

Can I bring up these tags for a sec actually?

I have a lot of...complicated feelings about how race is brought up in the danger days verse/fandom bc 1. it's not handled well in the source material to begin with (see the blatant villainization of eastern Asians in the mvs, the white-washing of The Girl in the comics, etc.) and 2. bc this is connected to MCR, a great many of the fans are hailing from emo bandom, which is a notoriously racist space!

So we're already working with a group of people who generally aren't going to be thinking about the implications of racial headcanons and how they interact with gender and stereotypes.

The thing is however, there's a SIZEABLE portion of the danger days fandom who are (and I say this with affection, if not a small amount of annoyance) baby gays. Teenagers who want to put gender headcanons on everything they can bc they want to see themselves in their stories/fuck around with gender in fiction and again, aren't thinking about the implications of their various racial and gender headcanons.

How many people are actually aware of the extensive history of Latino (and in the continental US, Native) men simultaneously being feminized/emasculated AND portrayed as disgustingly and overbearingly masculine/threat to white women due to having long hair?

And how many of you draw Jet Star, who is portrayed by a light-skinned mixed Puerto Rican man, as SIGNIFICANTLY darker skinned to make him more 'visibly ethnic' while keeping the rest of the cast white as all hell?

What some of you need to understand is that:

Having long hair, especially as a man of color, is not automatically GNC or feminine.

There are a lot of implications when you take a predominantly white story, mix it with a predominantly white fandom, and then try to slap racial and gender headcanons onto that without examining the foundations on which the story is built.

This all gets worse when you combine it with the danger days fandom/bandom's long-standing tendency to make Jet Star/Ray Toro the 'mom friend' in fanworks, which is just entirely fucking racist. A lot of people take a look at a real-life man and a character he plays-who doesn't have a single line of dialogue in either the mvs or the comics to give us a characterization-and say "yeah this is a 'mom friend', like every other person of color in media I like."

THAT SAID. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with slapping weird genders onto stupid comic book characters. In fact it's really fun and I do it regularly! But I'm also coming at this from the angle of 1. giving all the characters weird genders, not just one of the two people of color in the danger days cast and 2. I'm literally a light-skinned trans mixed Puerto Rican dude.

No, this is not a 'write only what you know' situation. It's a 'think for a hot second about the implications of gender and racial headcanons and how your biases are influencing what you're putting in your art'.

There's nothing wrong with using she/her for Jet Star. But if that's the only character you're focusing on for gender headcanons and specific racial headcanons, think about why, and then knock that shit off.

why do people always use she/her for jet star?