Yet another failure to realise that POC/non-white people are people too

[sqbr]

So, for anyone who reads fanfic but is unaware of the imbroglio, there has been a lot of discussion around an amazingly racist Supernatural RPF Big Bang fanfic using the Haiti earthquake as backdrop for pretty white boy sexing.

That link has lots to look at, note the ones with asterixes in particular.

But two that I think make a nice pair of points:
This Is Not JUST about Writing Characters of Colour about how it's only the VERY racist fanfic that gets this level of criticism so people should stop whining that "writing non-white/POC characters is SCARY because people will yell at me"

Itys (oh the hue and cry) This is about the silencing of POC/non-white people, which isn't my struggle to ramble about, so it informs the rest of this post more obliquely. Still, definitely worth reading.

Rambly thoughts:
I have written and drawn many fanworks with characters of colour(*). The ONLY criticism I have gotten that had anything to do with race/ethnicity has been (a)People very politely correcting my use of Chinese characters (which I always seem to screw up :/) and (b)Someone giving me crap for perceived anti-racist subtext.

What is a real fear for me is that I will create a horribly racist work and nobody will say anything, or they will and I'll belatedly realise it's TERRIBLE and can't be fixed. And given my Issues with beta-ing this is a genuine possibility but I'm figuring out ways around those Issues and thus far it's been a hypothetical fear (the closest I've come is deciding, based on further thought rather than criticism, to add a "This turned out a bit heteronormative" note to a fic).

On the whole I have experienced way more flack for being anti-racist than racist (though I've definitely gotten flack for being racist too), and it is the fear of being attacked for being One Of The Anti-Racist Meanies, plus the fear of BEING racist, that silences me more than the possibility of people pointing out that I've done something racially problematic. But I guess that just proves that I'm one of the Anti-Racist Meanies :/

EDIT: reading this comment objecting to the term POC got me thinking about the conflation of all people who aren't white into one homogeneous group despite the issues facing the various ethnicities often being quite different (even if the white people being racist against them don't always realise this). And it was interesting re-examining at this post from that POV. For a start, I've never created any works about Caribbean characters, though I have made a few about black characters from Africa and the U.S.

(*)Also, as it happens, in contrast to the discussion in the comments to the first post, a lot of my most popular works are about non-white/POC characters. Of course with Avatar the Last Airbender in particular it's not like fandom can concentrate on the white characters since there aren't any yeah you heard me M Night Shyamalan.

Comments

[darkrose]

One of the things I love about by two favorite artists in DA fandom (you and aimo) is that you both frequently make your PC Wardens non-white. For all that skin color isn't an issue in the game, it's awfully white, and a lot of the fanwork reflects that.

[sqbr]

o.O

I'm sorry, I'm going to have to take a moment here to flail that you put me in the same category as aimo.

*flails happily*

Anyway: yeah, as much as Ferelden is relatively "colourblind" (especially for elves and dwarves, I don't think there's any mention of darker skinned ethnicities, just random characters who happen to be darker for some reason) it is awfully white which is definitely one reason I made my second character non-white/a POC. The fact that all the non-mages (hmm. And maybe Mahariel?) have pasty white biological family members doesn't help, but fandom could still stand to be a little more diverse with their PCs.

[sami]

W.T.F.

oh SPN fandom, why do you keep embarrassing me for liking the show...

I don't get it even slightly. I mean, I *get* wanting to write in quasi-or-actually-post-apocalyptic* settings, but that's why you MAKE ONE UP. Dean and I have had an extremely positive response to our post-apocalyptic BigBang fic. This would partly, I think, be because it did NOT treat real people's pain as colourful backdrop to Our Boys.

(Of course, ours actually also had non-white characters, since, in our universe, in addition to non-white Americans, there are soldiers from Japan, the indigenous Canadian peoples including Aleuts, some surviving Mexicans, and refugees from the far eastern end of Siberia in the amalgamated military forces of the North American Protected Zone, so some of them made appearances in the story. But you know, we could have had every single character who gets named, let alone a speaking/important role, be white as the lilies and still been doing better than this.)

(The regions most devastated are determined by a combination of climate and population density. Warmer areas are harder hit, but more isolated areas are safer. Perth fared much better than the east coast of Australia; northern Europe survived better than the Mediterranean; northern Siberia is dangerous ground, where humans still live but the defences aren't great; a lot of China and India are gone, but Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan are intact. That kind of thing. Northern South America was devastated, Chile and Argentina are almost untouched. That kind of thing.)

(Sorry, I'm rambling.)

* I kind of believe in the concept of localised apocalypse, when talking the kind of apocalypse by which "post-apocalyptic" as a description is triggered. Massive devastation of an area, you're basically looking at post-apocalyptic, thematically, if you set fiction there, which, in most circumstances, you BLOODY SHOULDN'T DO.

[sqbr]

Yeah, I think if you're not going to give a real place/situation the attention and centrality it deserves then it's better to make one up. Though obviously a fic set in a made up country during a made up natural disaster which used the same racist stereotypes would still have been Fail. There's multiple levels of wrong in that fic and any single change wouldn't fix them.

And now some meta about fiction in general rather than from a social justice POV: As someone who doesn't tend to enjoy post-apocalyptic stuff I think localised disasters aren't quite the same, since there's a whole functioning world still going on outside same as before, and after people rebuild the country/area might be different but the WORLD will be much the same, and the future isn't totally uncertain (it may not be happy, but "My town/country etc is doomed to collapse and ruin" is different to "human civilisation is doomed to collapse and ruin"). This goes double for a story about characters who aren't from the place having the local disaster, as this one was.

[sami]

It's true about the multiple levels of fail. I love how she kept obsessing over the 6'5" guy's hugeness - JARED is 6'5". And fandom has noted more than once that, for example, when he has a kiss scene with a girl and he has his hand on her face his hand is generally AS BIG AS HER HEAD. He holds basketballs like normal people hold softballs! He makes Jensen "no really he's over six foot" Ackles look short! Etc.

Now, yes, fandom has dwelt occasionally on the whole Jared Padalecki Is A Giant Seriously thing, but that only means that she'd get a pass on all the comments on the black dude's giantness if there were similar comments about Jared's giantness. It would just be a wow, she is obsessed with the hugeness of these dudes, sort of thing. (And it is very rare for fandom Jared Is A Giant obsession to be marked in fic, as far as I know, so much as just in occasional picspams.)

And that would STILL leave the REST of it...

On to general meta: That's a point, I guess. It especially applies to when the characters are non-local, which I wasn't really thinking about. The thing about the local apocalypse is the idea that while the rest of the world may go on as normal, that doesn't matter all that much if *your* world is destroyed.

But it's not like I've ever written that story - the one genuinely post-apocalyptic universe I've created (since the initial Veterans setting was my idea, for a short story that ended up getting rewritten by Jen as the last third-ish of the long version) pretty much toasted the whole world. The parts that didn't get wiped out are under serious threat, etc.

But I think it could be an interesting, character-centric story.

[sqbr]

Yeah, I think it does depend on the type of story you're writing. It could be interesting to write a story set in a remote or neglected location where they genuinely don't know if it's a local or global apocalypse.