sunrisenfool:punky-peach:I’m posting this over here too, as I feel it’s important! We s
sunrisenfool:punky-peach:I’m posting this over here too, as I feel it’s important! We see time and again, white voices are being valued more in fandom spaces. This is something we see even in the Arcana fandom, and the biggest place I’ve noticed it (due to the fact that I’m most active on there now) is on instagram. This can apply to all platforms, however! Something we see often is white creators such as myself will be applauded for doing the bare minimum when it comes to speaking up about current issues and events. We will be applauded for sharing posts on our instagram stories, while POC creators will be silenced and in worse cases, punished for sharing these same thoughts. We should not be silencing creators who likely have actually experienced these things that we talk about, we should not be punishing them for speaking up about something that they care about and that greatly affects them. This is not only a vicious double standard, but a blatant example of white privilege. I myself benefit from white privilege simply by posting online. In terms of allyship, it’s important to be the best that we can be. *I myself have had fuck ups and failings, and have not always been the best ally. Many of us aren’t always on our best game. What is the most important thing is that we *change*, we continue to educate ourselves, and most importantly, we must not make excuses, but instead make up for our past fuck ups.* Uplift marginalized voices in fandom spaces online, and every else you can. Listen to people’s experiences when they bring them up, and most importantly, do not speak over marginalized voices. Make space for them online and everywhere else, and do not speak for them. I’m sorry for piggybacking from your post, and this is in no way a callout to you, but rather, a continuation of the topic by a creator of colour. There has always been a serious imbalance when it comes to creators of colour in this fandom, in all of its platforms, just like you said. There exists already with Cosplay and Visual Artists. Writers, such as myself, also suffer from it, but in general, writers in the fandom suffer from a more widespread problem where they do not have the same engagement as visual artists do. When it comes to the creation of characters for the Arcana, one of the main advantages of the game is how it lets you do pretty much whatever you want. I criticise them a lot, for a lot of things, but this is something I will happily recognise. Though it comes with it’s own set of problems —like (white) people thinking they can do anything within the Arcana World without examining the repercussions it may have or the place of bias it may come from— it can be agreed the world of the Arcana does not have either colourism bias and gender biases. Supremacy as a cultural phenomenon does not exist in the same way White Supremacy exists for us, and neither does western, global north colonialism over the global south. In game cultural tensions and aggressions (like Scourge-Kokhuri ones) do exist, and they are mostly unexplored or worse, explored poorly (imo) through fault of the Devs. This isn’t surprising as the Scourge —a seemingly all white culture— are the culture we have the most insight about. We have very little insight on the Kokhuri, we have very little insight on any other culture, including Vesuvian culture where shows of it’s multiculturalism are mostly Word Of God, and tells rather than shows. We have no insight of Prakra beyond “they don’t have marriage” and some background explanations from the devs, and we have no insight on Zadith beyond magic and science coexist, and Asra’s parents. Asra, for example, is not shown to know Zadithi in the game, and has very little connection to his culture beyond the whole ‘grew up without parents’ deal that he has going on. I believe this and other Dev-behaviours predispose white fans to simply not pay attention to us, because colonialism, colourism and racism like we-in-the-real-world know it may not exist in the Arcana, but it exists within the creators which created it, and the fans that engage with it. The lack of willingness to confront this within the fandom exacerbates the problem. (As of late, criticising NH outside of Tumblr, and within certain Tumblr circles has been getting increasingly harder. Not because you can, but because people are willing to defend NH like it was a real person, and not a business who has shown their money and their mouths have zero communication within each other. This is it’s a problem on it’s own and I’m trying not to derail too much, because I have a tendency to ramble.)Because the Word Of God says that people of colour in the Arcana are mostly aestheticism, it makes it really easy for (white) fans to emulate it, many times engaging in digital brown face and stripping characters of colour of a well-rounded portrayal. While our cultures are not everything we are (being Black, African or Diaspora, East Asian, Non-White Latino, Indigenous, Native, Southern East Asian, Arab etc etc aren’t personality traits) we cannot be separated from our cultures. We may not be monolith, but we all have our livelihoods shaped by the experience of belonging to certain culture, in a Neo-Colonialist world. Whether diaspora living in the Global North, or still residing in the Gobal South, we are still shaped by local and international tensions and messages, without this being our sole existence. I’m not saying every white creator does it, nor that people shouldn’t create characters from outside their own culture. I’m saying they should do it in appreciation and respect, and they should not take on spaces that creators of colour deserve. At the end of the day, no one is entitled to have their content consumed, but creators of colour deserve to play on equal grounds. I have seen too many non-descript brown/Black ocs done by white people who absolutely never disclose that they’re white. Sometimes they’re just characters, with their personalities and lives, other’s they’re just Brown. That’s their placeholder. Meanwhile, creators of colour introduce their experiences into character creation creating representation and getting none of the credit. A person writing or drawing characters from a culture they’re not will never be representation, because they don’t have the lived in experience to represent an aspect of that culture or identity (if you will). It’s just diversity. However, creating with diversity in mind can be done so responsibly or irresponsibly. There’s a lot of apprentices who are created by white people who play into white-imagined visions of what the aesthetics of certain cultures are (rromani aestheticist caricatures for example) while otherwise being entirely white characters. Meanwhile POC in the fandom get backlash, like OP said, or creators of colour get scraps. I’ve been in the fandom for a long time, and I’ve seen the uplifting, seemingly united, take that in this fandom you can just “look at us, creating ocs left and right with interesting backstories and unique traits” in several different forms. This isn’t always right for creators of colour because apprentices and ocs of colour, created by people of colour, just get less engagement. If you can’t tolerate these characters or find them unpalatable, for whatever reason, I encourage you to revise where does that belief come from, that in order to engage with people of colour in fiction, you need to do it from a white person’s perspective. It’s even more acute for writers because people who write for specific ocs get generally less engagement than people who write second person pov, for gender neutral apprentices, as a wink towards ‘inclusion’ like the game has too, but in the end, end up being AFAB people. That’s a whole other bag that I’m not going to open right now, and you know what, you can create whatever you want, just be honest about what you’re doing. One thing I will say, however: If you cannot handle the LIs of the Arcana being queer, then I don’t know what you’re doing playing the Arcana. Actually, that goes for all aspects of it. If you can’t handle the Devoraks being Jewish, the Alnazar being Muslim/Muslim-coded, Asra, Nadia and Muriel being POC, Muriel being an indigenous man, and all of them being Queer with the proper respect it deserves, then what are you doing playing the Arcana. That the Devs have thrown queer fans under the bus (personal opinion) despite being queer themselves, as well as throwing poc under the bus, doesn’t mean that you’re allowed to do it too. Whataboutism doesn’t count as an actual justification. No fallacy does. I know way to many creators of colour who do excellent worldbuilding and create characters with nuance and beauty. I’ve seen route reworks from people of colour surrounding concepts of their cultures that shines a whole different light on them. For example, I love writing characters of colour who exist in cultural intersections of any kind. There’s people who have filled in the gaps —both creators of colour and white creators too— who do so respectfully and not just “allowing” cultures, creators, people and characters of colour to have a space within the fandom, but who actively realise they do not deserve to take all the space there is.Uplifting us and supporting us is not enough. It is bound to devolve in the exceptionalism of some non-white creators. What white fans and creators in the Arcana have to learn to do, is to not hoard all the space, bending everything to their specific ‘player preference’, because it’s often not preference, but whiteness they have not bothered to examine. Whiteness isn’t the norm or what is ‘more common’ while perspectives of colour are an outlier, and you have to understand that operating on this assumption with make you a racist fan. I guarantee you that if you begin to do it in a fandom space, you’ll find it easier to accommodate and stand with people of colour (as a white person) and our varied struggles in real life too. -- source link