The true identity of men without hats in xkcd

Something I never really thought about until it was pointed out to me but have been noticing more and more is who goes "unmarked" in cartoon depictions. One of the more obvious examples is stick figures: white male characters just get the default stick figure, while female/black etc ones will be marked as such explicitly. One consequence is that characters whose ethnicity/gender is not made explicit (eg most of them) are assumed to be white/male/etc.(*)

xkcd is not immune from this, the female characters pretty much always have long hair while the default/male ones hair tends not to be drawn at all.

But see Understocked. The "marked" quantities are having a beard/glasses and being a police officer, but not being black.

"Awesome" I thought "He hasn't felt the need to make non-white ethnicity a marked quantity, which in turn means his unmarked characters can be read as POC as easily as they can as white."

And then I thought "Wait, Obama isn't marked at all. He looks just like the generic protagonist(s). What if all the unmarked characters are Barack Obama?"

So that's how I'm going to read the comic from now on :D This is definitely him.

(*)This effect confuses westerners about anime/manga, since japanese people see themselves as the default and draw non-japanese people as the funny looking marked other. Unlike western animation, characters with features/colouring etc never seen in real life who don't fit preconceived stereotypes of foreigners (eg white people have big noses) are always assumed to be japanese.

Slash/Yaoi misogyny bingo

Reading this misogynist slash fangirl bingo card I started thinking about how much more effective it would be if you put the contradictory squares next to each other. It's rather like solving a jigsaw puzzle making them all be contradictory, including the "Sod it, this doesn't quite fit but I'll put it there anyway" stage :D (And yes, no "Free Space", it mucked up the order)
Slash Mysogny bingo card

Note: Not all slashers/yaoi fans are misogynist, not even (necessarily) when they use these arguments. But if you manage to fill an entire row all at once then you probably are.

I had some gaps, then came across this post about Uhura bashing in the Star Trek kink meme via friendsfriends. The "GLBT activists" pushing for Kirk/Spock is a good example too. Thanks for the inspiration, Star Trek fandom!