(((Digimon Is Forever)))

Joan Hooley about the story behind Emergency – Ward 10 interracial kiss on television (Video)

If you’re a white person and you’re thinking about writing a long rant about how that one interracial couple in your favorite series is totally heteronormative i want you to do a little exercise with me.

Can you name 50 interracial couples off the top of your head? Can you name 40? 30? 25? Even 15? Of those you could name how many are actual canonical relationships? How many are portrayed as fetishistic caricatures with a bunch of racist tropes?

How many have their relationship based on cheating (like a white man cheating on his white wife with a black woman)? How many are portrayed as something taboo and shameful that needs to be kept in secret? How many have to struggle with their families/society not approving of their relatonship?

For the couples who have children, how many of them have the conception of the baby treated as a regrettable accident? How many of them are married? How many of them are portrayed as irresponsible parents? How many of them are portrayed in a miserable relationship where they can’t stand one another and don’t genuinely feel any love? How many are toxic and/or abusive, to the point the narrative itself acknowledges the relationship is wrong?

How many of them are actually allowed to have happy endings? How many of them break up at some point in the story, especially if each of the persons involved ends up in a intraracial relationship? How many of them end in tragedy, like one or both of the partners dying?

Finally, how many are actually portrayed in an heteronormative way and how many are just ships you personally dislike because they get in the way of your white/white otps?

Anika Noni Rose in Vanity Fair, via this excellent Buzzfeed article on diversity in publishing. (via leeandlow)

Holly Quinn in Episode 22A of Fansplaining (via fansplaining)

also seriously if a character isn’t white, i promise your only descriptive options aren’t food words and varying degrees of tan. it’s okay to say brown. pale brown! light brown! golden brown! medium brown! dark brown! deep brown! so many kinds of brown!

BROWN BROWN BROWN BROWN BROWN

#brown is not a bad word #you do not need euphemisms #B R O W N

This post by writingwithcolor might help in picking good words to use plus reading about why not to use food words! In general if you’re writing a character of color I highly recommend @writingwithcolor

Thank you!

white women are always like “more strong kickass female leads!” and when i say i want to see a black female love interest who is allowed to be girly and fall in love they give me weird looks and say that i’m supporting gender stereotypes and heteronormativity but what a lot of white women don’t get is that black women we’ve had hundreds of years of having our femininity ripped from us, of being deemed unworthy of male (especially non-black male) attention. black women in media are never allowed to be the “cute” ones or the love interest, we’ve always been the “strong kickass street smart woman” trope that white women want so badly. so basically if a black girl says she wants to see another black girl fulfill the role of “love interest” there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that and it isn’t a hindrance to feminism

I actually feel this post so hard because as a black woman I know I’m never seen as soft or cute or girly or feminine or fragile because I’m not a white blonde waif even if we both wear the same white dress and put the same flowers in our hair I am not viewed as cute and maidenly and that’s so fucked

I will forever want justice for every female character who was demonized by fandom because their canon ties to a male character was deemed a threat to a popular slash pairing. 

Insisting that a m/m ship MUST be canon isn’t activism. Insisting that a personal interpretation of acttractive men, usually yt be a canon m/m ship as the *official interpretation*, and all actors playing those parts need to be onboard, lest they face fandom wrath, isn’t activism. Insisting that the VALID POINT that Anthony Mackie made about the importance of normalizing affection and sensitivity as part of the lexicon of regular-eglur straight masculinity in pop culture, ESPEC. given his blackness and how often black men’s masculinity is weaponized against them, doesn’t matter…. because your personal fanon ship is the real issue here… Nitpicking words, when you KNOW WTF he means… Is peak toxic YT entitled nonsense and B.S. STOP.

Yep!

The problem isn’t even that they ship m/m ships, it’s insisting they be canon and distorting everything to have a romantic notion that doesn’t exist. People don’t understand the layers mackie is working with and is intentionally misconstruing it to be something negative.

Men should be allowed to have platonic intimacy without any sign of affection being portrayed as romantic or sexual. Then when cis straight men aren’t doing this and trying to “prove” their masculinity and how straight they are, that’s also a problem (it is!). However, attractive men being vulnerable and caring for each other is shipped and seen as gay.

Then people are claiming that they’re being queerbaiting and, folks, most of that stuff isn’t queerbait. I’ve read many compelling metas across many fandoms, and the MCU isn’t one of them largely speaking. It’s funny how queerbaiting and an “obvious” gay ship is only framed with the attractive male characters, where as not many mention Carol and Maria. Not many care.

Anything didn’t say no one can ship m/m, but insisting it be canon, esp when the narrative doesn’t support what fans claim are happening, is ridiculous.

This, THIS THIS…. And stepping on Mackie’s point to do this?! OMG, is only revealing how far (TOO FUCKING FAR) yall are willing take something that should *only* be funtimes for fandom and our creations/ imaginations. This isn’t about a fucking ship.

I repeat and clarify…

This is BIGGER than your personal fucking ship.

It is an important idea that a black man in pop culture be seen being sensitive; can be vunerable and have that be a default trait w/o any caveats (and yes, saying ‘he *must* be gay’ as an explanation for it is included, and low-key homophobic -gay men run the spectrum, just like everybody else in how they “act”). Being clear again. Ship it. Have fun. Don’t insist everybody including the actors must be onboard because then that makes you an asshole.

I get the desire to see lgbtq+ representation, but people act like two white women/white men are the be all to end all, they never recognize pairings with people of color.  And they never consider how our identities intersect.  Like they don’t realize that seeing a black character gaining importance through relationships is often the only representation queer black people get, we don’t get the lgbtq+ part.  So for me, seeing people have violently negative reactions to het romances involving a black character becomes a red flag.

I’m really tired of white LGBT people sanctimoniously preaching to LGBT people of color what constitutes “good” vs “bad” LGBT representation. You expect us to put up with heavily white-dominated, often toxic and racist representation that harms us, in the name of progressiveness, but at the same time you turn around and make fun of our sources of representation and tell us that they aren’t “good” enough or don’t hold up to your racist, exclusive standards. 

You’ll tell us to endure racist writing and racist white characters but then mock LGBT characters of color using all sorts of absurd reasons - “there wasn’t enough time for them!” or “they just aren’t realistic!” or “I’m going to rant about how a children’s cartoon is reinforcing bourgeois, imperialist conceptualizations of class”. You never give LGBT people of color a chance to celebrate the few sources of representation they have. You rant endlessly about white LGBT characters being tokenized or killed off, but when the same things happen tenfold to LGBT characters of color, who are also brutalized, fetishized, and sexualized by both their creators and their fandoms, you use all sorts of justifications to whisk away any criticisms LGBT fans of color have. 

Stop telling us what to prioritize and what not to like. Stop making us feel bad for finding representation in sources that you might decry as not “good” or “intellectual” or “radical” enough for you. Stop condescendingly informing us that the shows we love are bad but that the shows you love are good using x circular logic. 

You’ll celebrate 0.2 seconds of a same-gender couple’s appearance in a children’s movie (like Finding Dory) but if a show begins to flesh out a storyline for LGBT characters of color (as in The Get Down), you’ll say “lol Dizzee only kissed another boy for a couple seconds so it’s terrible representation and you’re an idiot for liking it”. You’ll lament Commander Lexa’s death but justify Poussey Washington’s death. You’ll fawn over Clarke Griffin but claim that Asami Sato is a “bourgeois light-skinned imperialist”. You’ll drool over Connor Walsh but call Magnus Bane “predatory”. You’ll say “lol Barb from Stranger Things is clearly a lesbian because she died” but remain silent when lesbians of color are brutalized or killed off. You’ll claim needing LGBT representation and use that as a reason not to watch shows with people of color in them but when The Get Down and Queen Sugar both have LGBT representation, you won’t say anything about them or give them the time of day. You’ll glorify Carol, which had sex scenes, but claim that The Handmaiden, which also had sex scenes, involved “the male gaze”. You’ll get angry at cishets for expecting us to put up with heternormative media but tell LGBT people of color to shut up when they criticize how white and racist LGBT shows are and how they alienate LGBT people of color. 

And I am completely exhausted by this. It is not “divisive” or “whiny” of me to bring this up because guess what? White LGBT people use the exact same arguments against cishets when they talk about how “LGBT representation is unrealistic and blah blah blah”. Yet you turn around and pull the same line of rhetoric when LGBT people of color try and express themselves. You’ll either use our media (all the “foreign” LGBT movies that you watch and consume, all the iconic LGBT characters of color who broke boundaries and stereotypes, all the LGBT celebrities of color who are outspoken and compassionate, etc) without giving credit where credit is due, or you’ll tokenize our media, stamp it as not good enough, and glorify your often racist, exclusive, and frankly bad media and demand that we put up with it. It is immensely hypocritical, not to mention self-righteous. 

thing is, being a part of fandom and Not Being Racist isn’t just about not hating the non-white characters. it isn’t even about “liking” the non-white characters. just like being a part of fandom Not Being Misogynistic isn’t just about not hating the female characters, and it isn’t even about “liking” the female characters. fandom is a creative collective. what makes fandom move and grow is creativity, sharing and community. saying “I don’t hate X” doesn’t have the same weight as writing a fic about X, commenting on a text post that “Y is such a good character” isn’t the same as writing meta and/or headcanons for Y.

fandom, though we like to think of it as a Naturally Subversive Space, reflects all the same prejudices and power imbalances of any other community. specially because it roots itself in mainstream media, and it has to works with and around the prejudices and power imbalances of mainstream media. as such, fandom is inherently racist, misogynistic, queerphobic, ableist, etc. because we are inherently racist, misogynistic queerphobic, ableist, etc. and, though we like to think of ourselves as perfectly progressive and radical, the truth is that we have a lot of internalized hatred towards ourselves and a lot of prejudices towards those we perceive as others. fandom, like any other social space, requires self-criticism and conscious effort towards social change for it to be equal.

we can’t say “I’m not -ist” and expect that to make us a shining example of fandom correctness. we can’t be progressive in a passive way. it’s not enough to not be openly hateful towards minority characters or celebrities: we have to actively support them, to create and promote canon and fanon works about them, to criticize the content that harms minority communities, to constantly and proactively strive for more inclusive content both in the mainstream and within fandom itself.

Seriously though, modern fandom, y’all need to remember that you can, like, ship multiple ships. 

Like I can ship two ships that are diametrically opposed, at the same time, because I like both ideas. You don’t have to choose one or the other. 

Like I can ship, for example, Sam/Frodo, and also Sam/Rosie, both AT THE SAME TIME. I don’t have to pick ONE couple and denounce all others, and tell everyone else that their ships are WRONG and BAD and mine is the only TRUE AND CORRECT ship. 

“don’t reduce this female character down to a love interest” does not translate into “this female character shouldn’t have a love interest.”

preventing female characters with strong, compelling narratives from experiencing love, intimacy, and affection is just as regressive as reducing them down to sexual accessories for male characters. it assumes that women must choose between a romantic interest and depth of character and ignores a far more productive message: that women are capable of possessing both.