[ SECRET POST #3070 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3070 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 072 secrets from Secret Submission Post #439.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

13. http://oi62.tinypic.com/14e30ja.jpg

[(Anonymous)]

Oooh this outta be fun.

Personally I don't have a problem with characters drawn as other races or whatever.
It can be pretty interesting when done well, and at the end of the day it's just fanart. If you don't like it, don't go looking for it. Boom. Promblm solved.
Whitewashing actual non-white characters still kinda annoys me and puts a bad taste in my mouth. :/ Mostly because from my experience, every artist who did this was (surprise!) pretty racist and not very likable.
I understand why people would be annoyed with drawing Rose skinny, but it crosses the line when the same people then declare that nobody skinny can cosplay her. At that point I just start rolling my eyes.

[(Anonymous)]

Some random Internet person draws their headcanon fantasy of Indian Harry Potter, and this somehow counts as a drastic change? It's not on the cover of Time magazine or anything, just scroll on by.

[rivia]

from what i've seen other people say, the crux of the issue is more that when you take a PoC (or other minority) character and then make them white or straight or so on, there are so few minority characters in (most) media that it takes away the little bit of representation that members of those minorities have. there are also people who just like to headcanon characters being like them, a different race, trans, or something else. which goes back into what i said before because people usually only do that when there's no representation of people like them in that media in the first place.

i just woke up so i hope this makes sense, heh.

[(Anonymous)]

My problem with this line of argument is that I don't see how depicting a minority character as a non-minority takes away that representation. It seems to me that the representation is still there whatever happens in fan works.

I mean, I don't have much interest in seeing POC-as-white interpretations, or gay characters turned straight, or any of that, because it seems really fucking boring. But I have a hard time figuring out how it's inherently problematic.

[(Anonymous)]

But the 'minority' characters are not minorities in every country... And I keeps seeing people darkening anime characters.

[feotakahari]

I think representation in for-sale products, especially mass-market ones, is a more important target than representation in some random fanfic with three readers. Fanfic will have straight people, gay people, bi people, people with wolf penises, etc. Hollywood movies, for instance, are more of a prize if they portray minorities fairly.

[ketita]

I personally just don't find a lot of these kinds of fanart particularly interesting. Just looking at a picture of the character as a different race/ethnicity doesn't *mean* anything.

It's like how I saw a post going around that drew the Elric brothers as Ishbalans, and I kind of meh'd and moved on. It was only when later I started talking to a friend and we started really plotting out what it might have been like had they been Ishbalan, conflicts, how each brother's personality would have developed - that I realized that it would actually make a great fic. It's a fic I want to read, tbh. But just looking at the picture? Idk, maybe everybody else comes up with all this stuff in their mind and they're all sitting around imagining the potential fic together...

Point is, the way I see it - it's not about them being a different race/ethnicity. It's what you DO with it and the resulting story that matters.

[dani_phantasma]

Elric brother's as Ishbalan? I'd read the hell outta that fic!

And I think you're right. The idea of "the chracter is this instead of that" is an incomplete idea that isn't really interesting by itself . It's like an incomplete sentence.

"Hermione as a black girl!"
"aaaaaaaaaand?"

If there's more to it, the it's interesting. By itself it's just, "okay?"
Sometimes I wish that instead of people writing essays on why their headcanon is canon, they would write AUS about "what if the character was this" because those would be really interesting and would create more fanfic.

[(Anonymous)]

Setting like this make interesting AUs if they're handled with care and research. But it is often not, and stops at the point of swapping skin colors and dropping the canon entirely for the sake of headcanons.

To me, seeing a POC character whitewashed is just as unnatural as seeing a caucasian character coloured with the skin tone of an Afro-american. It's just not the way I'm used to them.

I think this is similar to the case when Coca Cola decided to change the bottle colour of their regular coke for some campaign, but the final version ended up looking rather similar to their diet coke, so people got confused and frustrated.

[iceyred]

I always thought this sort of thing was a lot of people excreting fake outrage at someone else's interpretation or 'what-if.' Either way, the hyperbole and exaggerated offense taken is stupid.

[(Anonymous)]

As long as it's a "what if this character was X", I'm fine with it. If the artists always draw them wrong (whitewashing, colorwashing, changing their body type...), then I'm not okay with it.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's because there's such a huge push in the real world for skin lightening products and diet products that imposing those standards on a fictional character feels a little gross. Because there's not a huge RL push for POC to darken their skin, or for people to become chubbier, doing the opposite doesn't seem quite as charged.

[(Anonymous)]

Except in the summer when people keep pushing tanning products on you.

[(Anonymous)]

Pick and choose from real problems. God knows there are enough.

[sachiko_san]

I saw a post on Tumblr yesterday that had Hermione as black and Harry as Indian. Hermione as a black person makes more sense than Harry being an Indian, considering the last names of Harry's parents. They also had Harry in traditonal Indian clothes... which doesn't really fit with a kid in 1980's/1990's England or at Hogwart's where they have to wear a uniform/robes.

But I have to say is that good for your headcanon, but I don't care. I have my interpretation of the characters and it doesn't fit with yours, deal with it. And if I wanted to read something where the characters were changed in some way, I'd read fanfic with that change or write it myself. If it's written down, I accept that as canon and don't want anybody else's take on it.

[(Anonymous)]

I know, that's so weird him being in traditional clothing. It's almost like in the movies the kids are out of uniform 90% of the time and their dress robes are depicted as whatever they like. http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121229165556/harrypotter/images/9/9d/Shefali_Chowdhury_as_Parvati_Patil_%28GoF-promo-01%29.jpg

[otakugal15]

That post pisses me off because they actually believe that JKR wrote Hermione as being black when, there's no description of her as being such at all. the ONLY time we get any sort of skin description for her was after she'd tanned up some during a vacation.

Somehow, that translates her to being black. And they will ROAST YOU if you point that out.

Like, I like headcanons from time to time with the characters as a different race. When I used to draw human!MLP characters, I always diversified them as having them all white (and one asian) was boring as fuck. But DON'T say it's actually canon when it's NOT.

[(Anonymous)]

"I dont understand the difference between taking away representation and people being so starved for it that they have to change canon characters"

[(Anonymous)]

Technically if it's fanart nothing is really being taken away. The canon doesn't change because someone made a fanart making the character something else.

Like I get the whole idealistic problem with it and the issue with "correcting" minority characters. But when people talk about representation being taken away, it technically isn't unless the author themselves changes the canon.

[(Anonymous)]

"White devils have no real culture so it's fine to change them into whatever you want, but you're a fucking viper if you remind people that they can use the same powers they use to make fanwork to make ORIGINAL work that doesn't have any white people in it to begin with"

[(Anonymous)]

I get what you're saying. I can appreciate some reinterpretations, though. There's a Hermione Granger headcanon where she's mixed-race that makes a kooky kind of sense.

Am I the only one who...

[(Anonymous)]

... saw the background, went "OMG KINO NO TABI" and then was massively disappointed by the secret's actual content?

Re: Am I the only one who...

[(Anonymous)]

I wasn't massively disappointed, just a little bit tho.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's all about the reasoning behind it. I change characters because I like seeing "well what if they were this way instead"

but if someone changes a character because 'skinny is prettier' or 'white is relatable' or 'straight is normal' they need to take a deep look inside themselves and reevaluate.