#racebending

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Me: Huh, the trailer for the new Superman cartoon looks mildly interesting.

Me: Wait, why is literally everyone but Superman racebent? 

Me: And why is Lois a generic tomboy? Are they trying to attract the Tumblr demo? 

Me: Is that why the art style looks like She-Ra: Princesses of Power?

Five bucks says Lex is still a white guy.

[sunshinemarauders]

Racebending In The Harry Potter Fandom

In 2012, the fan cast were all white actors- Andrew Garfield for Remus Lupin, Ben Barnes for Sirius Black, Aaron Taylor Johnson for James Potter, Karen Gillan for Lily Evans. However, as the years progressed, fans pointed out that all the actors chosen as face claims were much too old to play the role of characters who died at 38, 36, and 21 respectively. As the Marauders fandom had another wave of popularity with All The Young Dudes in 2020, fans started to use younger face claims who were young enough to be in their late teens and early 20s, and they also began to racebend characters like James Potter and Sirius Black. Making James Potter Desi and making Sirius Black East Asian offered much more nuance to their characters. However, there’s also been a rise in Harry Potter edits using the original fancast- the all white one. I think this is a reaction to the diverse fan casts that have been used in edits over the last two years- white fans are uncomfortable no longer seeing themselves in every character, so they’ve reverted back to the 2012 fan cast.

The fan spaces are predominantly white, which is evident by the fans who make TikToks with their own faces instead of their faceclaims. The racebending of James Potter and Sirius Black, however, has shown that those who do identify as South or East Asian do carry power in the fandom, and they are able to bring their own experiences into the fandom. For example, making James South Asian and making Sirius East Asian can offer more nuance and power to the canonical events in the Harry Potter texts, like James’ in-laws being rude to him and abusive to his son was because of their race, and Sirius’ family uses shame and guilt to manipulate their children because of the shame cultures that are so prominent in East Asian countries. The experiences that Asian fans have had in the real world have influenced so much how they view the Harry Potter texts, and therefore it also influences their transformative content they produce as well. 

[theonlinemuse]

Some of the actors of colour suggested for Jareth based on an idea from the In Each Retelling Discord, suggesting that you don’t have to choose who can play the Goblin King. After all, what’s more fae than shapeshifting and genderfluidity? Especially when Jareth tells you that they move the stars for no one.

Lil Nas X

Eugene Lee Yang

Manny Jacinto

Assad Zaman

Rina Sawayama

Sacha Dhawan

Dylan Wang

Janelle Monáe

[moon-toons]

You're so cute when you cheer us on... I love you, my Julietta!

my final Blacktober piece for 2023 is Aizo and Yujiro, the idol duo LIP×LIP from the Honeyworks music videos, and the anime Heroines Run The Show!

The images were inspired by the music video for "Romeo", my fave LIP×LIP song~

[correctopinionhaver]

[bonobochick]

fandom criticism / racism is always loudest when the racebent character is a Black woman whose love interest is a white man. that seems to set those folks off like none other.

[ephemeralfuture]

Aoba but make it black

[profiction-anomalocaris]

Your Headcanons Are Not Canon: Johnathan Ohnn Edition

Dear Spider-Verse fandom,

Johnathan Ohnn is not blond or blue-eyed. He is a black-haired, black-eyed man with a surname most commonly found among the Hmong people, though is does appear in Korea and China under different spellings. His exact ethnicity has not been confirmed in canon yet. His hair and eye color, however, are not up for debate. We saw both of those things very clearly.

If you want to headcanon him as white, that's fine. But I don't think you get to insist on him having the exact opposite coloration of what canon showed us.

I get it. The idea an Asian man could be powerful and intimidating, in a world in which Western media depicts us (I say loosely, being Central Asian myself) as powerless and weak is hard to swallow. However, even if you want to say Ohnn is somehow Scottish or something... he's just simply, flat-out, canonically not blond or blue-eyed. And people noticing that didn't "not watch the movie". These are shots FROM the movies:

If you want to view him as having the same ethnicity as his voice actor... that man is also not blond, nor blue-eyed, nor is the majority of his heritage even from ethnic groups that commonly have blond hair. Again: his canon appearance is not up for debate. It's just simply not. You can debate your conclusions, but not what's on screen.

Johnathan Ohnn is not blond. I do not know why this is a controversial take. However, I think even a fandom this toxic should be able to agree that a character's in-movie appearance is not negotiable. You can still have your headcanon recolors, but there's no need to belittle people who know how he actually looks. Please make peace with this.

Regards, Someone who did, in fact, watch the movies

(YouTube OP's info blurred to avoid the dogpiling this fandom loves to engage in)

[fandomshatewomen]

Imagine a reboot of H2O : Just Add Water except that this time, the three main characters are Indigenous Australian girls and their culture and its mythology are at the center of the show. And we get more consistency when it comes to the mermaid lore and plot.

ok so ngl I had no idea what you were talking about but I looked it up and found it on netflix!

here's the imdb link so you all can see it for yourselves.

It's that kind of low budget girly stuff and honestly the original doesn't interest me at all because it looks so white but your reboot sounds amazing!!! thanks so much for sharing Nonny!

mod laina

[bookishfeylin]

Racebending vs Whitewashing 101

In this essay we’re going to be answering two questions: Why is it ok, from a race perspective, to make white characters POC but not the other way around? And why don’t you make original characters that are POC instead?

There are quite a few reasons, and I’ll be discussing them all below the cut for anyone who's genuinely curious about this and wants to educate themselves :)

⭕️ Firstly: most white characters have no plot relevant reason to be white. White people are considered the default human being, so their race or culture *usually* does not affect or contribute to the plot or story or game in any way. Like, pick your average piece of media with white characters in it and see if they actually *have* to be white for the story to work/make sense. Unless being WHITE plays some important role in the story, then in most cases, characters do not need to be white. This is especially true for non human characters depicted as white (mermaids, faeries, aliens, etc.). Unless being a *white* non human is important to the story for a specific reason and then they can be almost ANY race. For example: In Gremlins do Billy and his family have to be white for the story to still work? Does making the Skywalker family POC impact the plot in any way, shape or form in Star Wars? Is being white relevant to Iron Man's, Batman's, or Superman's stories at all? Why do the main characters of Jaws have to be white? Do Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, and Claire Dearing and Owen Grady, from Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, respectively, need to be white in order for the movies to make sense? Does being white play an important role in Indiana Jones' character, or would the movies still work if he was another race? Does it impact the story if I were to change the Russels (Maddie, Emma, and Mark) in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, from white to black?

⭕️ Conversely, people aren’t as used to seeing POC in media, so often their existence is “justified” with some form of racism. It would not make sense to make a character facing racism (say, antiblackness) white (for example, in Disney's The Princess and the Frog, Tiana lives in a segregated Black community that is decidedly poorer than the wealthy white community Lottie lives in, and is denied the ability to buy the mill to make into a restaurant because it would’ve been too hard for a woman of her “background” to run a business)

⭕️ Another way POC are “justified” in western media is making something specifically about their culture. Unlike most white people in media, we cannot simply *exist* and, say, survive an alien invasion, or steal the Declaration of Independence, or get sucked into portal to a magical land, or survive a natural disaster, or have a very very very bad day, or solve a mystery about a haunted house, or worry about prom. No, our culture almost always has to play some SIGNIFICANT role to “explain” to the audience why that character is not white. Not that that’s a bad thing. For example, Mulan is about a Chinese woman overcoming the deeply ingrained sexism in China and becoming a soldier. The movie is all about China and Chinese culture, so it makes no sense to make her white.

⭕️ Making a POC white plays into whitewashing and colorism (the basic idea that paler skin is better/more beautiful/less “savage”). For example, in slavery lighter skinned ppl were “better,” and were allowed to serve in the house because, being lighter, they were viewed as closer to white and as being “more human.” Changing or “improving” a POC by making them white is just feeding into that nasty idea that people with darker skin tones are “less than” or aren’t real humans. Conversely, there is no relevant history of white people being considered “less-than”, or, you know, NOT HUMAN for having lighter skin, in fact lighter skin tones have been promoted as desirable for centuries. White people by and large aren't harmed psychologically from seeing a character being redesigned with darker skin/being racebent, because society has never told them that their lighter skin makes them nonhuman or undesirable, unlike I, a Black woman, who’s been told all my life that darker skin is masculine and ugly on a girl and that I would be pretty if I only had lighter skin :)

⭕️ All those reasons are important, but there is one MAIN reason why racebending works but whitewashing does not: representation. Representation is very important and very powerful, impacting our own self esteem as well as impacting how we perceive groups of people who are different than us (x, x, x, x, x). Representation can help you develop empathy for a certain group, or it can perpetuate harmful stereotypes about them. White people are represented literally everywhere in Western media--books, movies, TV shows. Even most toys. It’s not taking representation away from them if we make a white character a POC--they have tons of other characters to make up for it! Even if we NEVER had a white main character in any movie or TV show ever again, white people still have the past century's worth of media with themselves as the main characters for them to watch. Conversely, we have comparatively few prominent characters that are POC in Western media, and even fewer that aren't just side characters or walking stereotypes. Making them white takes away the limited representation POC have in the west. Racebending (either in fan art or in reboots of a series/movie) is typically done by people who lack representation and want more.

Why don’t you make original characters that are POC?

⭕️ Most of us would prefer original characters. I WANT original characters of color. But when we do make new characters that are POC, or new stories with POC leads (especially if they are dark skinned POC) they are usually ignored or overlooked by consumers in favor of white characters or white-led stories (Finn and Rose vs Kylo Ren and Hux from Star Wars; and Black Lightning being wayyyyyy less popular than white-led DC shows; Still Star Crossed being, like, forgotten?). This often happens on movies and on television shows, and usually the end result is that the new characters of color are written off or are minimized in the show/following movies because they are not profitable (once again, what happened to Finn and Rose in Star Wars) or the shows are canceled (Black Lightning, Still Star Crossed). Or the story is labeled “woke” and “political” and is boycotted by the same people who said we should make original characters in the first place.

——————————————————————

I'm not saying you have to *like* racebending white characters. I am merely EXPLAINING why one way is racist and the other way around is not. But the sad thing is, all these reasons are common sense. Most people know we have a racist history, they know it’s wrong to make Tiana or Black Panther white even if they have problems articulating *exactly* why: because the point of these characters existing in the first place is to show that we’re human too. That we can be heroes and princesses and role models too, despite centuries of being told we were nothing. We still live in a world where being white is considered the default human, and nonwhite people have to be *justified* in their existence, because most of us weren't viewed as human for centuries. If it truly bothers you that much, then support original characters of color and diverse franchises instead of white characters and predominately white franchises. That way you will send a message—we all will—that we want more original characters of color. In the meantime? I, a Black woman living in a white-centric world, am going to enjoy all the characters of color I can get.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Fanartist draws Miguel O’Hara from Across The Spider Verse, except it’s more Miguela(?).

People get mad at her for changing the skin color.

Even though Miguel in the movie spends almost every single second in colored lighting.

Someone else complained that she wasn’t as “muscular” as Miguel, ignoring the whole “Miguel’s body is also idealized” thing.

A bunch of people draw fanart of the fanart in solidarity.

According to KYM, the artist claimed someone tried to blackmail her. Over fanart. Tweet now deleted.

https://www.deviantart.com/alessandrogoku/art/Spider-Woman-2099-design-by-Kamii-Momoru-968194266

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spider-woman-2099-genderbent-miguel-ohara/photos

Also, here’s the canonical Spider-Woman 2099.

Also, anyone remember the Dream Daddy controversy? Someone genderbent a “husky” dude into a “curvy” woman, and a bunch of idiots got mad over it?

[alatismeni-theitsa]

okay, i've heard you're one of the 'greek gods are white' people. how do you explain 'zeus athiops', considering linguistic research proved that's a word for what we now call Black. how do you explain drastically different depictions of the same deities in Syria and Lybia and more. how do you explain that a third of the pantheon have eastern roots. like girl... please get out of that mindset.

i think you need to legit drop that whole whiteness thing. it'd reductive as fuck, to us Europeans too. leave it to the people who made it, adhering to whiteness is just erasing heritages.

If that's what you got out of the discourse, you have a really USAmerican thinking pal, albeit not a USian. Or perhaps someone simplified this to you in this way and you took it word-by-word. Let me tell you what the discourse is actually about, and why there's a problem even when the Greek gods are depicted (for example) blue-eyed and blond, like N. Europeans.

It is about the treatment of pantheons by Western nations, a treatment with colonizing and imperialistic attitudes which separate the gods from their culture. A treatment that ignores depictions of a culture with an extremely large history and reduces it to distinctly Western and Anglophone pop-culture and Fandom.

Just because this happens to a nation which is considered generally light-skinned it doesn't mean it shouldn't alarm you. And the complaints of Greeks only alarm you when they address changes from lighter to significantly darker appearance, and not the opposite.

I bet you didn't send Greeks any hatemail when they were complaining about actors being too pasty and saying "This person doesn't even look like a Greek. More Irish. They even have an Irish accent…" We had this problem for centuries. N. Europeans had this super pale depiction of our gods which they considered "noble" and they saw actual Greeks are dark barbarians who are "not like the original Greeks". Now this type of projection is happening again, in order to make the West feel better, and we are actually told how we look and don't look.

Now we constantly hear "You are too light to be Greek"/"You don't look Greek" because another stereotype has settled among the powerful nations that control our image. Needless to say, this is negative too, just by the nature of being untrue, and harmful to Greek people. But this doesn't seem to worry you. You only worry when the West tells you to worry because now the cause is "noble" according to them. They never stopped seeing themselves as the righteous and noble ones. Fuck other cultures and their specific issues and histories, right?

Treating popular pantheons as a blank canvas will happen to more "races" and ethnicities when they start being considered "white" specifically in the US, our "beloved" planetarch nation. (There's already some discourse about Mexicans and Asians being the "new white"). In 50 years perhaps your grandchild will shout at a Mexican for not understanding why "it is okay" for the deity Tezcatlipoca to be depicted half-Chinese half-Nigerian.

The same thing happened to the Greeks. In many parts of the world, Greeks are still "non-white" and in the US we only recently became "white". The Middle Easterners and N.Africans are also "White" on paper. The Greek Whiteness is also only on paper, since the Westerners get the hickeys every time they hear our names, or see a part of our culture which so resembles the Middle Eastern ones. Or they clock us as Mexicans, Arabs, Turks etc. But I digress.

My point so far is that this Western approach, in its effort to be progressive, has used pantheons of foreign cultures in a way that it negates these cultures and their depictions, or their beliefs. (Something that I wouldn't call progressive)

Onto the depictions themselves. As you understand, me - and the overwhelming majority of Greeks - wants to maintain them. To this day, within the Greek culture I haven't seen depictions of native gods as - we would say today - Black. If we had some that would be okay. But we don't. I reckon, even other lands who got Hellenized didn't change the "race" of these gods. Sometimes they were alterations, yes, but to the point we are talking about a new deity, and certainly not a deity the Greeks would recognize or worship. Then we are not talking about Greek mythology, but mythology of other nations which, at some point, came in contact with the Greek culture.

But, again, it doesn't look like the Greek gods had different races in the depictions of other nations. Even today the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern nations don't racebend the gods. They see them as they are in the ancient depictions. Perhaps they indeed saw these gods looking a bit more like them but if you think Greek people and their neighbors (N. Africans, M. Easterners) belong to different races… you might want to check some racist notions you might hold.

"Aithiops" can mean "glowing" and "of burnt face". (αἴθω < πρωτοϊνδοευρωπαϊκή ρίζα *aidʰ- (φλέγω) = burn/on fire + όψη = face/look) It's an Epithet (an adjective) of Zeus on the island of Chios (Lycophron, Cass. 537, with the note of Tzetzes.). You can see where this island is and you may easily understand that it had more or less the same population as the rest of Greek areas, in which "Black" individuals were very rare.

But the most important thing is, we also haven't found a depiction of Zeus as a "Black" individual. If we had found a statue with the features of a "Black" man and the name Zeus underneath, I'd be happy to say "Some Greeks indeed saw Zeus as Black". I don't mind the "race", I mind how everyone gets in mental gymnastics to try and defend a lie just because it sounds progressive.

Perhaps in their minds this aspect of Zeus had the appearance of a Middle Eastern but... this is not what you call another race. Even today Greeks don't consider Middle Easterners and South Arabs a different "race". Also, as I said in the beginning, it could just mean "Glowing Zeus", like his face is glowing so much as if it is on fire. One word can have more than one use. The "αιθ-" root is also used about the sky, because it's glowing. The word Aether/Aitheras which we still use in Greece (αιθέρας/αιθέρες) refers to the skies. Maybe he had a "appearance/face like the sky"

Also, very important: Back then the region where the country of Ethiopia is today was called Abyssinia. The Greeks, in the period you're thinking about, probably had no contact with the land which today is Ethiopia. Aethiopia was a whole region, possibly the Middle East. (See the post here where many sources are gathered)

The first depiction of Andromeda, an Aethiopian princess as "Black" came from Ovid, who came much later and who is not part of the Greek narrative. He's also very unreliable because with his stories he wanted to oppose the status quo and therefore the mythological figures of his time. The Greek depictions have Andromeda and her family look more or less like Greeks. (Otherwise, they would have noted the difference in appearance)

Plus, Andromeda and Perseus birthed the nation of Persians. As you know, while there are "Black" Persians the population, in general, is not "Black". Plus, I am not even sure the Greeks had contact with the "Black" Persians because they are mostly extremely far south. Such a small population so down south it's not something to base the whole Look of a Nation on, at least.

It's the Northwesterners that always use the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern nations as an excuse to disrespect these depictions. (Meanwhile the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern nations don't agree with this. They never get ACTUALLY asked)

Not to mention, the changes the western nations make are not part of a cultural exchange and they don't happen naturally through cultural osmosis. It's plain theft and ownership over the gods of a foreign culture, which they have been doing for some centuries now. The Western cultures are dominant over the Greek one. We are towards the bottom of the ladder socioeconomically in Europe. The US is literally a puppet-master of the Greek nation (and many other nations). Our government can't even fart without checking with the US. Oh, and the US also helped the 70's Junta rise to power.

Lastly, the Greek gods don't have "Anatolian origin". This rhetoric (which again implies that ancient people of a region were all the same stock) has been refuted. Nobody "stole" gods from anyone. There are so many posts on these blogs about it. Greeks were also in Anatolia for 3.000 years before the genocide, so we are not even talking about separate regions. (But I know that you saw them as separate so I approached the argument the way you meant it)

There are common roots, common beginnings, perhaps but the difference grew so much that neighboring nations had distinct gods. They also believed that their gods were distinct. You have to respect that, and also you can't lump them all together because they "all look the same to you" or some sort of a similar mindset. The Greek gods are not interchangeable with the Assyrian gods etc.

One or two, like Dionysus, indeed were brought from outside. But most are considered native to the land. (Aphrodite, too, is native to the island of Cyprus) And the Greek gods are considered ethnically Greek. The Greeks considered themselves born by these gods. Each line had a god that gave birth to it or claimed to descend from a god. See more at the end of this great video: (Video with Timestamp) Again, the Greek gods are not ethnically Japanese, or ethnically Argentinian, or ethnically Norwegian. They come from a specific culture, with specific stories and appearances. You cannot imply otherwise without making all cultures a disservice.

You can see more discussions about this, including why the argument "But a minority must be represented!" kind of argument.

Some are a bit old but the general point is the same.

*In my language "Black" for a person is not exactly a positive term so it's in quotations. The term "race" is also extremely bad in Europe. I leave this disclaimer cause I know no one gives a shit if non-Anglophones must say slurs to convey a point, as long as we all speak the USAmerican way :) We also know that the individuals I am talking about weren't identifying as "Black".

[mcufandomhatespeopleofcolor]

it feels like a missed opportunity to not cast an actor of color for either Reed or Sue and Johnny, especially as Kang is a poc in the mcu and he's supposed to be a distant relative/descendant of Reed

You're so right!!! Personally I would have loved having all three characters cast with actors of color but I would have settled for say Sue and Johnny as poc.

Personally I would have loved seeing like Anna Diop as Sue Storm

and Daniel Kaluuya as Johnny Storm

shhh if gemma chan can be in the mcu as several characters so can Daniel!!!!

Also I would have loved seeing Sterling K Brown as Reed Richards.

mod ali

[theonlinemuse]

Some of the actresses of colour suggested for Margot Mills based on 6DOSW’s episode of The Menu. Margot’s role as the final girl would gain additional nuance to her characterization and her interactions with Slowik and the other diners if she had been portrayed by a woman of colour, especially considering the film’s themes of worker exploitation and class division.

Indya Moore

Samantha Pauly

Stephanie Hsu

Tati Gabrielle

Amber Midthunder

Zión Moreno

Ivory Aquino

May Calamawy

Havana Rose Liu

Ritu Arya

Madeleine Madden

Alexandra Grey

[magickgirl786]

as much as i like florence pugh, i really hope that the rumours of her rapunzel casting are just rumours because i really want rapunzel to be south asian/desi

my choices for rapunzel are maitreyi ramakrishnan, charithra chandran, ari afsar, or avantika vandanapu

do you guys have any other south asian/desi rapunzel choices? i'd love to hear them!

[supranatra]

(WIP) dark skin riku agenda full force