people of color connecting: BtVS
Um, I may or may not have spent 6 hours reading old BtVS meta last night. One of the things I happily came across was one of my favorite visuals about what rocks about BtVS and Xena: gabrielleabelle's Women, Connecting graphic showing the many relationships among women on those shows. I know I've linked to this in the past but I still think it's awesome. Besides, a fangirl should always cite her sources.
Because I've been thinking: one of the things I've been loving about Sleepy Hollow is the many relationships it shows among people of color. Like, at the point I'm at in the show, Ichabod is basically the only white character, at least in the present day scenes (and the Revolutionary War flashbacks hardly count as part of the show in my head). I thought it would be awesome to do a graphic like this for characters of color in Sleepy Hollow, but since I haven't caught up on the series, I thought that for contrast it'd be interesting to do something similar for characters of color in BtVS.
So I did. A quick guide: I only used characters who appear in more than one episode, which means I included far more minor characters than Gabrielle did in her graphic. Lines connect characters who have some kind of relationship; the thickness of the line represents the strength or significance of the relationship. I dash-dotted the lines where the connection is so tenuous that it hardly counts -- they shared scenes but probably never were shown interacting.
(I considered drawing a line between the First Slayer and all the other slayers, but I decided that a mythological connection was not nearly good enough. It's not an actual relationship between two people.)
A few words: I included Jenny Calendar and her uncle Enyos, because they are Kalderash Romani people -- an oppressed ethnic minority. However, they are both played by white actors. Conversely, both Cordelia and Kennedy are played by Latina actors but are probably meant to be read as white characters. For a long time I maintained that reading Cordelia as Latina was totally valid, however, in the Angel episode "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" we see a photo of her parents and they look super white. However, I would still argue that Kennedy can be read as Latina, so I included her on the graphic.
Apart from Season 7, the few characters of color who exist have absolutely no connection to each other; the only ones who do are played by white actors -- and are killed off before S2 is out. It's only in the seventh season, when she show is purporting to show a cross section of girls from around the world, that they begrudgingly bring a few young women of color into the fold -- and give even fewer of them speaking parts.
If I were to do an exercise like this for all the white characters on the show, and go to this level of minor character, I'd have to use a much, much bigger frame. And there would be lines everywhere. If, on the other hand, I were to use only characters of about the same level of significance as Gabrielle used for her Women, Connecting graphic, it would look like this:
It will be interesting to compare this to Sleepy Hollow.
ETA: I've since realized that Gabrielle did an update to her Women, Connecting graphic that's pretty on par, in terms of major/minor characters used, with my first one. Perhaps more interestingly, she did one for men and shows that what's unique about BtVS is not that relationships among women outnumber those among men, but that they're roughly equivalent, unlike say Star Trek TNG. I do suspect that in Xena you would find that women majorly outnumber men, but maybe that's just internalized sexism speaking.
comments at http://frayadjacent.dreamwidth.org/71484.html.
Because I've been thinking: one of the things I've been loving about Sleepy Hollow is the many relationships it shows among people of color. Like, at the point I'm at in the show, Ichabod is basically the only white character, at least in the present day scenes (and the Revolutionary War flashbacks hardly count as part of the show in my head). I thought it would be awesome to do a graphic like this for characters of color in Sleepy Hollow, but since I haven't caught up on the series, I thought that for contrast it'd be interesting to do something similar for characters of color in BtVS.
So I did. A quick guide: I only used characters who appear in more than one episode, which means I included far more minor characters than Gabrielle did in her graphic. Lines connect characters who have some kind of relationship; the thickness of the line represents the strength or significance of the relationship. I dash-dotted the lines where the connection is so tenuous that it hardly counts -- they shared scenes but probably never were shown interacting.
(I considered drawing a line between the First Slayer and all the other slayers, but I decided that a mythological connection was not nearly good enough. It's not an actual relationship between two people.)
A few words: I included Jenny Calendar and her uncle Enyos, because they are Kalderash Romani people -- an oppressed ethnic minority. However, they are both played by white actors. Conversely, both Cordelia and Kennedy are played by Latina actors but are probably meant to be read as white characters. For a long time I maintained that reading Cordelia as Latina was totally valid, however, in the Angel episode "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" we see a photo of her parents and they look super white. However, I would still argue that Kennedy can be read as Latina, so I included her on the graphic.
Apart from Season 7, the few characters of color who exist have absolutely no connection to each other; the only ones who do are played by white actors -- and are killed off before S2 is out. It's only in the seventh season, when she show is purporting to show a cross section of girls from around the world, that they begrudgingly bring a few young women of color into the fold -- and give even fewer of them speaking parts.
If I were to do an exercise like this for all the white characters on the show, and go to this level of minor character, I'd have to use a much, much bigger frame. And there would be lines everywhere. If, on the other hand, I were to use only characters of about the same level of significance as Gabrielle used for her Women, Connecting graphic, it would look like this:
It will be interesting to compare this to Sleepy Hollow.
ETA: I've since realized that Gabrielle did an update to her Women, Connecting graphic that's pretty on par, in terms of major/minor characters used, with my first one. Perhaps more interestingly, she did one for men and shows that what's unique about BtVS is not that relationships among women outnumber those among men, but that they're roughly equivalent, unlike say Star Trek TNG. I do suspect that in Xena you would find that women majorly outnumber men, but maybe that's just internalized sexism speaking.
comments at http://frayadjacent.dreamwidth.org/71484.html.