I read an interesting post on Racelicious which discussed how black female characters are the subject of hatred even though some of the non-black characters have committed worse actions. For the most part, I agree with their post, but I think it's not just female characters who are picked on or ignored because of race; black males get the same treatment at the hands of fanbrats. I cite as example Aqualad in Young Justice. Artemis had more fanart then him even before she premiered on the show.

I suppose part of the problem is the Role Model trope. White male characters can be lazy or rude without it reflecting on the white race as a whole, but if you make a black character lazy, people act like you're saying all black people are lazy.

So talk: what issues regarding race have you seen in your various fandoms? Are characters of colour given less attention than other characters? Are they unfairly bashed?

Aqualad is my main gripe right now, actually. I love him, and I immediately skipped off to DA and AO3 to find other like-minded people. And I found almost nothing. He's shipped with no one (WTF?) (...I was only shipping him with Superboy a little bit), while two one-shot villains are shipped like crazy. He has almost zero art, which I don't understand, because aesthetically, he's very interesting. He's dark-skinned with light eyes, which I love, and always looks interesting on paper.

I just don't get it. How is Klarion the Witch-Boy somehow so much more fic-worthy than an apprentice of Atlantis who is the son of a villain and has awesome water powers?

Because Aqua____ is lame, duh.

Note that Blaise could fit the 'racist bully' part of that based on what we see of him, and he doesn't look like a ferret (not that that seems to matter with Draco). Are there any other HP characters who got a bunch of fics despite being only a name, or was Blaise the fandom mascot for all those in-name-only characters in HP?

So, uh... anyone here want to write some fanfiction about this totally awesome character?

Mouse wrote:

I'm totally with you. Aqualad=awesome. But fanbrats seem to like their characters pale. Another example I want to bring up is Blaise Zabini. How quickly did the fics about him dry up once it was revealed he was black? JK Rowling did say he was attractive, but apparently the fanbrats prefer a racist aryan bully like Draco.

He had like, what? Two, three scenes? Four or five spoken lines?

I haven't read Harry Potter, but I do remember that, in the beginning, given the gender neutral name, a fair number of fans believed he was a girl. Was it specifically said he was black before we found out he was a guy, because I seem to remember a goodly amount of Female! Blaise fic existing. Were the fans more inclined towards writing fic about what they assumed to be a black female character, then abandoned him once they found out he was male, or did they know he was black before they found out he was male?

You guys are yankin' me. "Hey, let's put one over on Knorg."
Blaise is actually a guy?
What? That's insane. That's impossible.
...
Oh god. Oh my god. I've got all these magazines. Oh god.


[/FG]

It really is. But Cho was never portrayed as stupid, just a typical teenage girl, and after Cedric's death, a teenager trying to get over a death.

I just don't get it, I guess. Why does she have to be painted as an idiot? They broke up and now they get along. They're teenagers for chrissakes. They do that.

Hufflepuff gets a lot of shit in fandom for some reason, when I don't see anything wrong with the house. They're about being loyal and making friends, and, above all, trying. Cedric was a Hufflepuff, and he was a clever boy who did really well in the tournament. They're not the useless house, they're just the people who aren't sure what they want at eleven beyond to make friends.

Which doesn't strike me as unusual.

Cho wasn't portrayed as much of anything beyond a crush of Harry's, and teenagers don't really need much more than that.

As for Hufflepuff... let me put it this way. The story's about magic and heroism. The sort of people fortunate enough to be blessed with magic yet still crave the mundane (i.e. wizard Dursleys) are going to be uniformly lame and utterly uninteresting. Spares, if you will.

I see a lot of racism among cosplayers, sadly. Ellie, one of my friends, constantly gets bashed for *le gasp* being a black girl who likes anime, cosplays as white or Asian characters and dresses in lolita clothes.

Yes, Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness was written by an American.

Fandom non-specific observation, but, whenever I see an alien or non-human humanoid race or whatever being depicted, and they're supposed to be beautiful and elegant, they always have extremely Caucasian features and facial structures.

Also, I wonder what the numbers are on fanfic that feature non-white OCs? Somewhere between abysmal to completely nonexistant, probably.

I find it hilarious that people try to say that if a character is black, and is one of the main characters, he/she should automatically not get as much time as the whiteys(no offense to any white people here). After there were hundreds of Fandom stories put up with them put up as a 'so and so ethic group here' person. Then it eventually makes me not care.

People are always being jerks to me because I want to have sex with anthros.

If that's not racism, what is?

Oh yeah, the race thing, not the species thing...

I don't know about racism, but you know what gets me?

In every gay badfic relationship, there's one 'pure' gay, and one 'bi' who changed their minds when they met their One Twu Wub.

And bisexuals never end up with a girl, even though they could.

To a certain extent, you got that in Dr. Who fandom. For all the fact they trumpeted about how Martha was the first non-white companion The Doctor had, they really didn't treat her terribly well.

And it always bothered me that after building up the relationship between her and Tom that formed during 'The Year That Never Was,' they eventually paired her with Mickey. Like, it's okay to have a person of color travel with the Doctor, it's okay to have her fall with love with him (of course, he can't return it, because he's still in love with Rose), but it's not okay to have her fall in love with and marry a white man, who's also a doctor. No, lets find the only other male person of color on the show (not counting her father and brother) and hook them up, despite them having nothing in common besides having fought alongside The Doctor.

And yes, I know that it was suggested that the scene 10 saw of her and Mickey fighting Sontarans was a different universe, but is you ask most people who watched the show who Martha eventually married, most of them will say Mickey.