fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3935 ]

[ SECRET POST #3935 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3935 ⌋

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[Stitchers]

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[The Dectectorists]

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[iZombie]

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[Bob Saget]

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I mean can we explore the problematic nature of makign Mr MC brown and thinking this solves anything or is somehow A Good Deed, instead of focusing on the fact that all the actual poc characters are both minor, and minorities, and engaging in a real actual discussion about the depictions of nonwhite people in fantasy?

Making Mr Potter into Mr Patel addresses none of these issues and even worse, is sort of overlooking and ignoring actual PoCs in canon. It's like if someone who's Asian was like 'hey, the depictions of Asians in this series kinda suck, can we do something about that' and you go 'okay let's PRETEND that the MC is asian and has a Magical Special blessed Life where no one around, INCLUDING HIM, ever notices that he's not white. there. I fixed it for u. stop complaining.'.

THIS FIXES FUCKING NOTHING lol

Anon that is responding above.

I enjoy your oceans of salt.

thank you :>

honestly I don't comment on this often because it's like, a lot of pretty big named fanartists and people in fandom who basically cream themselves over being all hey you could see!! the MC! as nonwhite! look at me, I'm supporting DIVERSITY!

then you see like a hundred positive likes and reblogs and stuff and it's just sort of oddly depressing and vaguely alienating, and you can just kinda TELL that responding to that and being sort of 'uh no, but this seems kind of weird, really' is just going to be inviting a ton of wank that will basically never fucking end and I much prefer my actual online fandom experience to be 90% butt jokes and 10% silly theories, not 100% white people telling me that I should be grateful they noticed people like me exist.

TL;DR: salty solidarity woo yeah

I get this. I think "Could you see an Indian boy being Harry Potter?" (Yes!) is a fundamentally different question from "Could you see Harry Potter as having been Indian all along, as written?" (No...)

An Indian boy going to a magic school in the UK is an interesting idea and hell, I'd read that story. But trying to shoehorn that story into an existing one that's very obviously white and insisting it works just because nobody said, "Hey Harry, you're definitely white!" and indeed, Harry Patel could be the one magical special Indian boy in the UK that doesn't realize he's Indian and not the majority race, sits badly with me.

If they're going to do that, what's wrong with making it an AU? Why must there be the insistence that it's a headcanon that could be a valid interpretation of the existing text? Why must there be an insistence that minorities who don't face any issues over race ever in their lives are totally a possibility in 1990s UK society, and somehow this wizard school found all three unicorns? Is Harry Patel the Indian wizard AU not a good enough AU idea??

https://media.giphy.com/media/l4Jz3a8jO92crUlWM/giphy.gif

I would embed this but sadly I cannot anon

But yes! Like - a lot of people who are white probably miss that one of the biggest indications that a major character is white in a story like this is that no one mentions their race.

Like, this is not a bad thing. Race doesn't have to be brought up unless it's significant or important somehow or different or whatever, I'm cool with that. It's just, 'this character's race never gets mentioned or comes up in any significant fashion, THEREFORE he could be an obvious minority, right' smacks of either ignorance, privilege, or both.

'this character's race never gets mentioned or comes up in any significant fashion' <-- THIS IS YOUR BIGGEST OBVIOUS TEXTUAL EVIDENCE OF HIM BEING WHITE

I would amend that to

'this character's race never gets mentioned or comes up in any significant fashion' <-- biggest obvious textual evidence of the character being the majority race in the setting they are in

Because a story set in India would have Indian people as a default. If race is never brought up, they are obviously Indian, or else it would be brought up.

Which happens to white characters too. When you have a white character in India, their race is brought up because they're not a majority. Or else you'd assume they're Indian.

White people are the majority in the UK. If someone's race is not brought up, you can do the math.

But otherwise, yes to all that.

Yeah, makes sense to me!

Making Mr Potter into Mr Patel addresses none of these issues and even worse, is sort of overlooking and ignoring actual PoCs in canon.

Like... I don't really disagree? And if people think that this constitutes "fixing the diversity problem", I agree that they're wrong. But I don't think the headcanons are bad or wrong in themselves. I don't think the only motivation for this has to be "fixing the diversity problem".

Also, the problem with the point about other POC characters - as I see it - is that those characters don't play the role in the narrative that Harry or Hermione or whoever else does. Right? Harry and Hermione play a central role in the narrative in a way that Padma and Parvati don't, and I can see why someone would want to engage with the idea of what happens if you take the person in the central savior role in Harry Potter and make them a POC and see what comes out of that. I don't think that you have to like that but I don't think it's at all invalid. And on the other hand you can say that why don't people make fanworks about stories where the central characters already are POC, and they can and should, but I don't see why that means you can't do a POC headcanon for a series that you have a particular emotional connection to for whatever reason.

It is, in my opinion, one thing that some people can do if they like. I'm sure people are annoying about it, because people are annoying dickheads about everything popular online, but all I'm really saying is that I think it's fine and I don't think it's basically fundamentally worse or different or less valid than any other kind of fan engagement or fan interpretation of something. It is an interpretation.

Like, I don't know, man. I'm not saying that you have to find it compelling personally.

yeah, wow, like you know what, I am the first person who'd want to see a series that explores an Asian character in White Magical School or see what that would be like. I wrote that as a terrible, self-insert OC when I was a kid, frankly.

but what I and LIKE EVERYONE ELSE in this thread have been trying to tell you is that you cannot reskin Harry Potter and say that's the same thing. Even 11 year old me would tell you otherwise. Know why I never self inserted myself into the main trio's roles? Because my experience as a minority was PRETTY DAMN DIFFERENT from how it would be for a white person... and their stories are not my stories. They can't be seen that way just by changing their skin colour. This is also a pretty big damn part of why why you have people going 'my culture isn't a costume' and so on. My culture and experiences is not having curly unruly hair and a funny surname.

Like, dude, this isn't really isn't in any way a valid interpretation. It's not about bad or good, it's just wrong. You can't capture the nuance or background or issues of being PoC in a single artwork, nor can you change the race of someone who's pretty blatantly white and then refuse to think it through any further and somehow see this as plausible without also realising how offensive that is at the same time.

'What if the MC was indian' - it's an interesting idea. It's one I want to see explored. A lot! But what it's not, is a valid interpretation of the canon we have. This is a 'what if', not a 'could totally have been'.

Just, this is what's basically happening here:

Person: "hey i believe harry potter could be brown lul"
Brown person: uh no, his story is very, evry white and full of very obviously white experiences and those of people like me would be very different there
Person: "stop harshing my squee, i do what i want"

...I mean, not to assume your race, but you're basically telling a bunch of PoCs that other people totally have a right to be unbelievable and inaccurate about their race! Those fans are just having fun!

Well, it's not very fun for me.

I get that the headcanons don't work for you and don't match up with your experience. It hasn't been my experience that the universe of people who like these headcanons is exclusively white but I mean I don't know, man.

Different anon butting in here.

I don't think it's an exclusively white thing either. But I do think it's something that the people who claim it "could be canon" don't really think about. When someone claims they can take a white character with no non-default experiences and layer a skin tone and hair type over him and say he could've been brown all along, it's implying that a brown person would have had the same experiences and nothing needs to change about them, and that is at best inaccurate.

The difference between "there's no reason an Indian boy couldn't have done everything that Harry did and ended up in generally the same story" and "there's no reason Harry couldn't have been an Indian boy the whole way through canon" is small but pretty significant, at least to me and looking at this thread, several other people too. I think the former is what the people who want headcanons are going for, but they're confusing it with the latter, and when they insist it could have been canon they don't realize the implications that has.

I don't think it's malice. But I think the people just having fun don't think far enough to consider that, and maybe they should.

AYRT

just to be clear I would hope that someone who was actually advancing the headcanon would be able to go through and make more specific textual arguments in support of it and why they thought it was good

have... have you perhaps missed the part where we are saying that this does not exist

did you somehow ignore the part where I said, look, dude is obviously white? and that searching out for SPECIFIC TEXTUAL BREADCRUMBS of why it might be good to see him as non-white is like otheranon said, ignorant at best and, like what otheranon left out, pretty rude and offensive at worst?

I mean, the whole point is, if you have to search that hard for microscopic textual evidence so you can tell a couple of PoC people that that 'yeah my offensive headcanon might totally not be offensive okay I really want to cling to my SJW Approved Brownface', you maaaaay want to re-examine your fandom fun priorities.

(OR JUST WRITE AN AU where he's harry patel and have done with it, perhaps? I still don't see why there's somehow something terrible and scary about that. Is it because they all suck at writing or actually putting themselves in the shoes of brown people, is there something deeply terrifying about that or what.)

Other anon.

Eh, I doubt it's terror. More that it's easier to paint brown, say it's theoretically possible that they could have had a charmed partially post-racial life, and have done with it than to explore a realistic AU where so many other little things have to change. Especially if they're not Indian, familiar with actual Indian culture, or actual minorities.

Gosh I wish I lived a charmed partially post-racial life.

But sigh tat'that's true and probably explains why it crops up in fanart a lot; easier to simply change someone's skintone than to actually think about and examine the various issues something like this would cause. Like, holy shit, the amount of slurs and derogatory comments and prejudices people hold about Indians, especially Indian men, that crop up in a 'Good Old Boys Very English Somewhat Upper Class School' type of environment - I mean, I went to one of those schools, and, uh, it was pretty bad.

Earlier anon but yeah, this is about right.

'I would like a Captain America movie that stars Sam Wilson in the superhero role' <- yes please x 100
'We can make STEVE ROGERS black and keep his IRISH IMMIGRANT and WWII soldier story EXACTLY THE SAME at the same time and this is a totally valid interpretation!! diversity!' <- OH MY GOD, fucking do not

I don't get how somehow people can get this, yet ignore it for Harry Potter. Is it because it's a book medium, so because the only 'canon' graphics are the cover, they feel free to ignore the fact that he's obviously blatantly white?

DA

This was explained extremely well, thank you, anon.

Honestly I would really want the story of an Indian kid in the 90s who grows up on British Boarding School stories and Enid Blyton books and whose parents immigrate to the UK and then they get a Hogwarts letter! And holy shit they are PUMPED like, it's not even Boarding School, it's MAGICAL BOARDING SCHOOL, what could be better, seriously, this is like everything they dreamed of!

Except that all the British Boarding School books don't have a single brown character and this experience is simply never even considered to be a possibility, and they have to actually confront and deal with it while surviving in the background of everyone else being heroic and stuff...

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[ SECRET POST #3935 ]

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