[ SECRET POST #5798 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5798 ⌋

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


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03.
[Jeeves and Wooster]


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04.
[Devil May Cry V]


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06.
[Vanderpump Rules]


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07.
[Arcane]












Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 40 secrets from Secret Submission Post #830.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT but I dunno... you have a visibly non-white actor playing this character with (okay maybe subtle if you're white and not big on nuance/racial things), what's the benefit to HCing them as white?

Maybe 'benefit' is the wrong word, but this isn't like a trans/LGBT HC to me where the character could reasonably be one of those things because there's no firm 'proof' in the other direction. There's no reason (to me) to HC a character as any colour/race than the actor playing them.

[(Anonymous)]

There's no reason (to me) to HC a character as any colour/race than the actor playing them.

I agree it's clearly not a correct interpretation of the show. And I agree that it's not a very interesting reading, and there's no real benefit to going with that interpretation. I don't really like the interpretation personally.

But... the character is based on a historical person who was, as a matter of historical fact, white. So I feel like that might be why the OP started thinking about whether the character could be white. It seems like a pretty plausible reason that isn't particularly sus. Bad taste, OK, I just don't know about sus.

[(Anonymous)]

Well. Given that no one knows for certain who his parents were or whether his surname was Thatch, Teach, or something completely different before he became a pirate, his racial background isn't so much a matter of historical fact as it is a matter of historical assumption.

[(Anonymous)]

OK, but do you think it is fundamentally unlikely that he was white? And if we can't know for certain his ethnic background, how in your view does that affect the underlying point here?

[(Anonymous)]

I find it fundamentally unknowable whether or not he was white. Mixed race pirates were not exactly uncommon, and given that Blackbeard's origins are still a mystery he's just as likely to have been mixed race as anything else. And it affects the underlying point because the person I was responding to specifically said that it's perfectly plausible to headcanon that Taika Waititi is playing a white guy in OFMD because it's a "historical fact" that the real Blackbeard was white. Since that is false, it invalidates that particular argument.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not saying that it's a good justification for headcanoning the character as white. I think that it's a straightforward explanation as to why someone would come up with the heacanon in the first place, though, and I don't think it's sus.

And I think that still applies if you look at it and you say Blackbeard's race is unknown but he appears to have been an Englishman from Bristol, and most though not all Englishmen are white so there's at least a strong possibility of him being white, and he's generally been depicted and discussed as white, and so on. My point is all of that context around the historical figure is a very obvious and straightforward reason why someone might look at the fictional character based on the historical figure and think "could he be white". Rather than OP being "sus".

OP here

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, that was more or less why I started thinking about it. Ed being white is not my headcanon, or anything I'm particularly invested in. It's just a headcanon that I didn't think of as incorrect, but these comments have made some great arguments about why it is.

[(Anonymous)]

There's no reason (to me) to HC a character as any colour/race than the actor playing them.

What about when you have actors of one ethnicity playing a character who is meant to be another ethnicity, though?

[(Anonymous)]

In that case, the character is explicitly meant to be a specific ethnicity, so why would you headcanon their race at all? If anything, you might HC an explanation for why this Israeli can pass for Latina so well.