#ppl are all upset over her being latina when she’s supposed to have skin white as snow

[greenvillainredemption]

Sooo I’m not sure if this costume leak is legit because it really does look like a halloween costume, but I do like the basic shape of it and wanted to see if it’d be better with different colors that more closely matched the original. Honestly I’m not super picky about cartoon-to-live-action accuracy at this point, but the yellow skirt was just so eye-bleedingly bright.

[king-maven-calore]

ayo as a poc, Mare’s poc status seems very iffy in my eyes idk 😭😭

To me it feels like Victoria rlly said “yk what I feel like avoiding some controversy” *vigorously tries to call Mare a poc without giving her any ethnic features or even mentioning it at all in the 1st book*

I had to read the RQ for school so no, I didn’t miss it, I took heavy annotations on it. Mare is honestly my least favorite character because of how WHITE she’s written from a poc standpoint.

It’s this very common thing with yt writers where they darken a characters skin tone and think that’s all it means to be a person of color. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect Victoria to make insightful commentary as she IS a white woman, and since it’s fantasy and our ideas of race in this world aren’t supposed to exist. But representation isn’t just “wow she also has dark skin” it’s more the features. Mare is consistently described as having Eurocentric features.

And then white people always try to talk over us like “oh well it doesn’t matter she’s just written that-“ like shush omfg. People calling Mare Latina is hella disrespectful 💀 like what the actual fuck Latin countries don’t even exist in their world. Her last name is fucking Barrow. Her middle name is Molly. That’s so European I had a seizure. Just randomly saying “yuh girlie this character is Latina” seems fucked up.

Not directed @ you but just in general this shit sucks because it gets us further and further away from actual helpful representation in media.

I get you're upset about this. Maybe you've read too much of this type of character and you're fed up with it. I feel you. I agree Mare's skin color being barely described in canon (it got better as the books went by, but it was too little too late🎵) when the Calore boys' skin color was mentioned every two sentences was not great. I don't think Mare was described as having Eurocentric features tho... she simply wasn't described all that much 🤷‍♀️

My personal take on white writers making characters random ethnicities in fantasy/sci-fi and that not having any relevance whatsoever on the plot is that I freaking love it. I find it refreshing, a good step toward diversity in fiction as long as they don't bring up real-life stereotypes into the page 🤡. Why does the character having X skin color have to affect their journey if the plot has nothing to do with it? It's like the issue with the S&B adaptation: in their effort to be more "woke" and shoving fictional anti-Asian racism into the show, they alienated Asian viewers. I'm a brown, indigenous Latina. I like reading stories where people who I can imagine looking like me are getting the magical stone and their skin color doesn't matter. When I want to read stories where racial/gender/sexual orientation issues are central topics, I'll simply go read authors who have an actual say in the matter bc of their lived experience.

About Mare having a European name. I say this with all the love in my heart: please stop thinking of us Latines as brown-skinned, brown-eyed people with the last name Torres or Rodriguez. That's not what our demographic looks like (I do look like that tho). There have been so many immigration movements all through history, there are black ppl with European last names, there are blond-whiter-that-mayo ppl with Torres last name. We mixed around these places. I kindly invite you to watch a video on the topic (reading statistics on Wikipedia is no fun).

And finally, you won't catch me defending a white writer lady in my house, but VA only said Mare would be of latine descent after being asked about it by fans. Her reply and explanation made sense with the RQ world-building. Now it became of relevance bc of fancasts and for me personally bc I write modern AUs where Latin America is very much still around geographically speaking 🥴.

That's my personal stance on the matter, but I respect your frustration and the points you brought up about the lack of description of Mare's physical appearance.