Stuffies

Racebending again?

First read this article: http://geektyrant.com/news/2012/7/9/michael-fassbender-to-star-in-assassins-creed.html

I don’t know how true it is, and I don’t claim to know much about Michael Fassbender or studio decisions, but I’m super disappointed with this development. Hollywood has ONE CHANCE to cast an Arabic character in a lead role and replaces him with a blue-eyed Caucasian looking guy (I say that because I don’t know if he’s of mixed race ancestry or purely European). I’m not hating on Fassbender or anything, he’s a very talented actor and I loved him in X-men but…please, please don’t mess up Altair…

How the heck are they going to cast a movie set in Syria (I think?) with the main ARABIC character being a white guy? 

I’m gonna trust Ubisoft’s decision on this, because Ubisoft has done brilliant work in the game itself when it comes to cultural/racial diversity, but still…I’m very disappointed at how whenever there’s a legitimate chance for a PoC to be a main character, they get replaced by a white male because that’s how Hollywood works. I mean, the game was still very popular even though the main character was an Arab—so why do they think that the movie won’t be?

Maybe Fassbender can be Desmond >_>

The racebending blog

As you can see, I find it absolutely fascinating! There are so many things that just go undetected in main stream media, and this blog just highlights it all to reveal broader social issues. See it here: http://racebending.tumblr.com/

One thing I found particularly interesting was the idea that if a character in a book is not described in any other way, that character is taken to be white. And it’s so true!! I’ve even been brainwashed into thinking like this (mainly because I read European/American books which tend to whitewash characters anyway).

I’ve noticed it while I write my own stories as well. I caught myself thinking, “How many people will be able to tell that my character Thomas was supposed to have brown skin?”
I didn’t explicitly mention it, but in my head he has brown skin with greeny-brown eyes and thick black hair. But that very thought proves that if I don’t mention it, even I (the creator) have an assumption that people will automatically identify him as white. The same can be said of my characters Ariella and Archie, except in my head they ARE white, but once again I haven’t mentioned it in the text and it is just presupposed. =|

It’s not like race matters, and I try to be very diverse in representing things like race in my work, but…I lost my train of thought. I’ll come back to this later!

This is me trying not to whitewash my own comic: Yamase has a half Asian in the titular role, a half demon (Kai) and a character from a mixed cultural background (Eric) in secondary roles and a whole lot of tertiary/supporting/extra characters from all walks of life (Yuuna, the wizards in the wizarding realm and Yamase’s class in Chapter 8). As you can see, I really like the idea of a mixed society because I believe that is where the human race will ultimately end up in if we ever get rid of things like racism and die-hard nationalism. I very rarely use any type of “pure” character in terms of race, and this is probably because I am not from any “pure” race.

Here’s the problem though: I don’t mind having white characters, but I do feel like I have a lot of them in the big roles in my work while characters of colour are tertiary or secondary. To be perfectly honest, far too many of my titular characters have European backgrounds or have some sort of tie to European culture. Not saying that it’s a bad thing, but it does tend to side line the non-racial approach I’m trying to take. For example, Yamase’s dad is white, Eric’s whole family is a mix of European culture (His dad is from English/Polish descent, his mom is from Dutch descent), and I’m not sure what race Magnus and Kai would be called (because they aren’t from our world) but they look white too. And (aside from Yamase’s dad) all these characters appear on almost every single page of my comic!! So if you just look at my comic from a distance, it does look fairly white-washed.

It’s not that I think white = better, or anything like that, it just automatically happens! I’m so brainwashed!!! ARRRGGHHH!!! >_<