Wherein I Pimp My Roommate's Coming Essay Like A Hard Hard Thing.

Mar 30, 2007 16:59

Wherein I Pimp My Roommate's Coming Essay Like A Hard Hard Thing. And I Declare White Bread & Mayo Isn't Always Everything.

The roommate was going to write (and actually did write) an essay about how to figure out if you like a character of color. In the end, she couldn't find anyone who could moderate for her so she pulled the essay which was ( Read more... )

meta, racism, vent, fannish, fandom_and_race, bad storytelling

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Comments 64

sidherian March 30 2007, 22:33:21 UTC
I always find your posts like this very interesting, but am wary of saying much because as a white woman, what can I say really? I always agree with you, and what you say is just so much common sense, that I just can't understand why other people can't see it.

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troubleinchina March 31 2007, 09:54:46 UTC
There's an image in western culture that says "racism is the KKK". To call a white person a racist is considered a huge insult, and one people will take very personally (and by people, I include myself - the only call I ever disconnected when I was a tier 2 on a complaints line was the man who called me racist, and not the guy who threatened to hunt me down and kill my whole family). However, as long as we keep considering "racist" to equal KKK, nothing changes. No one has to consider what's racist about Buffy being an almost entirely white cast. Because that can't be racist - Joss rocks ( ... )

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sidherian March 31 2007, 10:29:51 UTC
I have no idea what you are talking about.

And as an Aussie, the KKK just isn't a factor in my life.

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troubleinchina March 31 2007, 10:34:04 UTC
No, of course it's not, I'm sorry.

This is what I was reacting to you in your comment: "I always agree with you, and what you say is just so much common sense, that I just can't understand why other people can't see it."

I don't understand why other people can't see the racism that Willow is talking about, either, but the attitudes that I see expressed in the Greater Fandom Sphere is "omg, I'm not racist! I don't think X!"

The KKK isn't a factor in my life, either (expat Canadian living in Aus), but the reality of fandom is that the majority of people in it are American. In the US, the prevailing opinion is "racist = KKK" as opposed to, say racist = acting as though black people don't exist.

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ephemera March 30 2007, 23:06:29 UTC
I don't know your fandoms - *is frustrated with self* - and, yeah, my big problem with Riley/Forrest was the Riley ...

[popslash - I've seen a good amount of Justin/Timberland love recently, and read Justin/Nelly, and JC/Lonnie and other mixed-race pairings (which are minority pairings, admittedly, but they're also outside the band pairings, so that scans) - and the two members of Backstreet who are / look Hispanic both get a *lot* of love, and the blond, blue eyed Brian is the least-slashed and the least-written I'd guess. (IIRC AJ was turned down for the Mouse Club for looking too Hispanic?)]

Scrubs - JD/Turk is practically cannon, and Carla is *hot*.

Farscape, I've got to admit, is short on characters of colour - in human terms at least.

I'll stop ramblinig now ... I am making no sense.

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witchwillow March 31 2007, 00:00:47 UTC
I think there might be a touch more reality in popslash than in media fandom. In that there are quite a few prominent minorities to play with as far as plotting and character pairings etc go.

I don't know too much about Scubs, it's not my fandom. And in Farscape the characters did do their best to be truly alien.

*hugs*

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kalinara March 31 2007, 08:50:19 UTC
Ooh! You brought up Andromeda fandom! I hovered on the outskirts of that for the whole run of the show, almost! Admittedly, this is all from my solo experience/perspective, others might remember it very differently ( ... )

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witchwillow April 3 2007, 01:13:21 UTC
Hey Kali,

I've been thinking about how to respond to you for a couple days now. I've other things going on and then I had a brain fugue.

I'm not sure I want to get into Kevin Sorbo ruined my show. Because that's not the point of this post and that could take me forever. My disappointment was and is keen.

The verbal sparring as the background of SGA, however, is something I can address and I think it's one incredibly insightful point of view into the show's composition and how and why they ended up replacing Ford with Ronon.

My problem with that, however is that it means the show writers were just as caught up in the same trapping modes of thinking as fanfic writers. They obviously knew at some point before creating Ford that they were bringing McKay over. And the writers for SGA have worked in SG1 and they know McKay's character. So they already knew there were going to have to come up with a cast to contain and match him ( ... )

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kalinara April 3 2007, 02:57:23 UTC
Oh, believe me, I'm in the same boat with Andromeda. It was so GOOOD at first. Really something new!

I definitely agree that they could have given Rainbow more to do. I mean, if nothing else a straight man in the midst of a bunch of mouthy snarky folks can be the funniest one of the bunch.

I wasn't as annoyed by the replacement of Ford by Ronon as I was with the whole Lost Boys/Wraith-serum abusing storyline in general. I can understand not necessarily wanting to keep Ford as a main character, (I think Rainbow is lovely but he seemed to be the weak link acting wise), but he didn't have to be disgraced and then abandoned like that. Why couldn't he have been like Commander Lorne or one of the Kawalsky/Feretti/Makepeace types from SG-1 and lead his own team largely off screen.

Lost Boys was pretty much Ford as a runner, and I hated it, to be honest. What happened to that sweet, competent character? Wraith-serumed-Ford was a flipping idiot.

...

His wraithy-face thing was kind of hot though.

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witchwillow April 3 2007, 19:49:45 UTC
The roommate and other company found the eye etc to be creepy :)

Is Lost Boys the one where they find out he's been Wraith-Serum Dealing and all hopped up?

The arc to make something happen to him to do with the wraith and have him deal with that, could have been Ford as Runner that I'd have enjoyed. A way to keep the sweet boy conflicted with new instincts or new attitudes.

Yes, I find the conflicted ones hot and interesting. Have I not said I'm Batman's Bitch? *points to icon*

But I was really excited at what might happen with Ford.... And then it became "OMG, Ford's on Crack! Oh Noes!" and I was so damn frustrated/disappointed I was like a mystic cat spitting acid. Hiss hiss every secon. And where I spit no grass would grow.

People with some stretch do write Ronon as a sweet boy who was serving a compulsory term, or at least wasn't a lifer in his planet's military. But with Ford, we could have seen him running. We could have seen that the reason he was running was because of the tracker and so he had to leave clues and notes ( ... )

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troubleinchina March 31 2007, 09:57:08 UTC
Willow, I'd love if you could answer this, and maybe get your room mate to answer it as well:

What good do you think comes from writing these sorts of posts? Who is your audience?

As I have whinged a bit in the past, I'm really struggling with the posts I'm writing. I no longer know who I'm writing them for, or why I'm writing them. I just know it's important, I just know I want more people to think about what I'm saying, and why I'm saying them. I want more people to be thinking about these things, but it becomes harder when it feels the only people who are reading them are people who already agree with me. I don't really feel I'm accomplishing anything at all anymore, and it just seems very exhausting to deal with that lovely combination of being ignored and hated by people just so a few others can go "Hey, sexism still exists! My god, why did no one tell me?"

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witchwillow March 31 2007, 18:45:51 UTC
I think my roommate writes to have actual dialogue and inspire change. I'm always a bit awed at the calm she can have about it. She'll promote these kinds of essays anywhere she thinks will help. Or rather her flist will promote it for her, since it's so varied but full of people appreciative of a well written point of view. But you'd have to ask her why she really does it. This is just my opnion at how different she is than I when she reaches the point of putting her words down ( ... )

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PS witchwillow March 31 2007, 18:50:03 UTC
In my comic blog when I first started, I did a piece about female characters in comics and a male blogger wrote me to say it affected his thinking. In his own post about it, I thought he'd missed my point a little bit. But it did start him thinking about women wanting to enjoy their own power fantasies just the way men do when they read about Midnighter and Batman kicking ass etc.

And recently I got an email from another male blogger who said he reads my posts because I make him think about things from another direction.

In that blog I write to be heard and to encourage dialogue even if I think no one's reading or listening. I tend to be more prepared there than in my personal journal for a conversation. That whole journal was created for the purpose of making my lone voice heard as a woman who reads comics and has opinions about it.

Maybe I'm just a statistic in that blog, but there it's really about proving I do have opnions and I do read and I do think as a consumer I should be catered to some.

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zvi_likes_tv April 3 2007, 02:21:03 UTC
The first couple of times I wrote about race and fandom, it was just to say, "Hi, fandom, you have a problem." Because I hadn't seen anyone say anything like that before. Which is not to say that no one did, but they hadn't said it where I could see it. (Part of the problem almost certainly is that I started out in XF, which had a really white cast. I didn't think it was about race that there were only two or three Mulder/Mr. X fics. There were only a few Mulder/CSM fics or Mulder/Spender fics, and they CSM and Spender both had bigger roles ( ... )

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utterfrivolity March 31 2007, 10:16:38 UTC
You've certainly made me very curious about your roommate's essay! The subject of physical attraction is particularly interesting to me, as a dear friend and I have been discussing (read: arguing) this for years now. She's not white but is quite clear that she is attracted almost exclusively to white men. If she is attracted to someone who isn't white, it's because they have what she calls "white features." She does have some understanding that this is a result of her upbringing, but has never seemed interested in expanding her vision of hotness. I'm hoping that your roommate's essay might give us some new ideas to debate ( ... )

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witchwillow March 31 2007, 19:10:06 UTC
Does your friend watch accepted pretty people of color? Bollywood movies, J-music groups, bands and artists? I grew up with exposure to a lot of different people and I was really surprised when I came to America and everyone who was popular and ackkjnowledged all seemed to look the same ( ... )

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utterfrivolity April 6 2007, 03:35:06 UTC
Well, thanks to RL this is a week late. I'm sure you've moved on, but this is an interesting topic for me, so I'll just kinda move on, thinking to myself...

I'd say it needed exposure but it also sounds like there's some sort of cultural conditioning in how she grew up.

She grew up in Toronto but her family was Chinese, and I think she was more or less explicitly taught that certain people are acceptable objects of attraction while others aren't. She admits as much but continues to claim that for her it's just a matter of organic attraction, which, I don't even know why she's so insistent about this. I guess she's more comfortable blaming it on the biological?

Now I have to ask the same question I think my roommate would in terms of what attracts you to your pairing choices? You know, I can't believe that I haven't really thought about this before. Hmmm...the majority of pairings I love are friends from childhood or close to it. I think that I totally idealize male bonding, and I like the idea that the relationships the ( ... )

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