kinda related but i was goin thru archival images today for a project of mine and i ran into a sort of protoeugenicist (?) racial classification drawing for my own ethnic group. and i paused cuz the woman in the image was actually notably darker-skinned than the man… i had never seen that before anywhere ever.
we need to invent a way to explain how deep running and pervasive and subliminal racism and antiblackness is without immediately sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist
female characters are always lighter than male characters. strong characters are almost always dark. aggressive characters are almost always dark. peaceful and intelligent characters are almost always light. even amongst darker characters the lightest one is usually either the leader or the girls. dark is evil and light is good.
if you try to explain this to a white person they look at you like youre insane
briefly pursuing a career in animation radicalized me on this. So many stories from the industry about how you have to start with your character design as dark as possible, because INEVITABLY you’ll get “notes” from higher-ups asking you to make them lighter.
In a class about making a pitch bible my teacher once role-played as a shitty executive with a classmate, pressing them in intentionally abrasive ways about why they made their characters diverse. He emphasized that we had to learn to defend these things, because the racism in the industry is extremely deliberate.
Ronald Wimberly’s comic essay, Lighten Up, stays evergreen
you people are out of your mind when you nostalgia post about the kindness of the olden days of fandom. You really think people weren’t telling each other to kill themselves in comments on deviantart? You think independent forums didn’t have 50 page flame wars? Wordpress didn’t have authors doxxing each other?? Take off the rose tinted glasses, my darlings. Look upon the pile of filth and see it for what it was.
