(Part One) Hi, I am planning this fantasy series all set in a completely fictional world. There are no humans. Looking through your blog I already know some of the do's and don'ts of fantasy species and poc, but my question is, some of my fantasy species do have real skin tones and I wanted to give them features from different real races.

I read all your asks about fantasy races but I there wasn't one that talked about a fantasy world with no humans. My question is: is still othering to have poc in that context? Should I include more humans to balance it out?

Fantasy races with features from real human races

From what I gather, you are saying you are writing a fantasy series with no humans, but a variety of fantasy species, some of which have human-like features, including skin tones. I think this is a simple problem. 

When coding cultures and traditions:

Do not:

Code whole ethnicities/ races for whole species.

This would reinforce the racist pseudoscience notions that differences between groups with different outward appearances connote different intrinsic, biological and behavioral attributes.

Do:

Show ethnicities within species.

Show societal attributes that can all be linked to the circumstances of the environment, even if the outcomes are different for different groups living in the same region. 

Avoid dehumanizing coding Lastly, I advise against creating a [human-like features] = [more human personality] / [animal-like features] = [Less human] dichotomy as this too falls in line with “dehumanizing based on physical appearance” reasoning you are looking to avoid in the event your culture-coding ends up revealing any intrinsic biases.

Marika

(Edited for repeat paragraph Dec. 11, 2023)

i still dont get the racial politics of this show if a character calls another character an imp sometimes is a neutral descriptor (ie “oh that orc” or “my elf friend” in a dnd context) and other times it seems like just saying imp is a slur? and even the imps say stuff like “succubitch” and slut shame the succubi, is that a common thing or is that just bc blitzo is bitter? and thats not even getting into millie being racist against hellhounds?

I know…what is it about?

Millies “dehumanising” of Loona is very under focused, but is stated by Loona and blitz to be bad. “I’m not just his hellhound” “yeah, she’s my daughter” And yeah it seems like Blitz hates succubi because of Verosika. I’m more excited to see their episode than much else. Who gives a shit about stolas story number what, six??? Even Blitzø hasn’t had an episode star entirely on him, maybe Ozzies??isn’t that crazy???

Why code your characters to have races and ethnicities, Black Hispanic Italian Australian French latino etc etc? And almost accurately depict their struggles with racism, but then kiss the monarchies ass? The one you established as being bad? And use your characters of colour to shill that one crying white boy?

The social classes suffer from real in universe racism that is largely based on coded human racism. For example the sloth ring pharmacy conversation. They then play it for laughs half the time but take it seriously the other half of the time.???

And isn’t it funny how for example Moxxie, he kills people as part of his job. He kills other imps if his job requires.

But using a holy weapon to kill demon royalty like Stolas?? Gasp!! Unthinkable. For some reason blitz rejects the idea too. But why? Why are overlords and royals’ lives worth more?

But why? Moxxie has taken lives across the board, he’s an assassin himself. Why is it so bad and evil for striker to be an assassin? Is stolas really that much superior to others in Moxxies eyes?

I stick to stolas because it really seems like Moxxie agrees with the hierarchy now, when before, he said “oh are we so evil for wanting a selfish greedy authoritarian capitalist to keel over dead?” But then, he starts doing what Cherubs did!!! Protecting his life!!

Throughout, he is: cowering to stolas, following his commands, trying to reason with him and talk him down when he’s enraged “they caught us off guard your highness” and has seen him many times attacking Blitz. Screaming at him as if he’s a child so beneath him. He has seen firsthand how terrified Blitzø and arguably more importantly, Millie, are of him. Yet he calls him “your highness” constantly looks after him, is scared when he’s hurt, and basically saves him at the harm and risk to his and Millie’s own lives over and over again, and MnM feel so much sympathy and empathy for this man, but why?

Knowing as well that Moxxie is a victim of abuse by an authoritative figure, and Fizz is as well, yet they’re both so defensive of Stolas, who they don’t know, and who is another abusive authoritative figure, for no reason, It’s just weird.

The Deku Scrubs and Racism in Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

Content Warning: Depiction of Racism, mention of cannibalism

I briefly touched on this in my Zelda video, but I wanna talk about the way the Deku in Majora's Mask are portrayed.

Zelda utilizes racial coding to depict nearly every group/race in the series. Racial coding if you're not aware is you apply traits associated with our real-world understanding of race, gender, disability and so on to non-human characters. It's neither inherently good nor bad to do and can enrich a story if used consciously and carefully.

It can also be done unintentionally without a storyteller realizing the implications often because they're repeating elements from stories they enjoy without catching these details.

It can also just be used maliciously in making harmful commentary using racial coding as a way to bypass any restrictions or legal issues that would come up in showing something directly. Much like queer coding, it also offers a form of plausible deniability.

A lot of cartoon characters wear gloves for instance because they were designed to embody minstrel caricatures popularized as a way to perpetuate Anti-Blackness. The practice of minstrelsy has never really died out, it's only changed and evolved with time.

Legend of Zelda uses that same coding in its storytelling. The Deku are plant people with a great deal of plant clothing and architecture. Their color also gives them a dark brown appearance which is common with a lot of the savage islander tropes used here.

They're also portrayed as prone to violence and anger, impatient and impulsive in how they wrongfully assume this monkey harmed their princess, and most notably they utilize the trope of boiling their victims alive as a scene of shock for the white explorer:

During the first section in the Southern Swamp, you can't even access the Deku palace as they don't welcome any outsiders except those the same race as them, not realizing that Link is a white boy with magic powers and has taken the form of their bodies (which is a thing all on its own in this context.)

Even then they don't welcome outsiders of any kind but only allow Deku Link entrance to witness a spectacle at a barbaric showing of publicly executing a monkey they believe has kidnapped the princess.

This is a trope commonly used toward several groups of people, many of them often lumped together as vaguely "brown" people, but you see it done with a lot of Native characters, Black people, Pacific Islanders, Asian folks, and many groups in South America. There's real-life overlap of these people--Afro-Indigenous and Latin Indigenous people exist for example--but the point in the eyes of a white gaze is to depict these as some evil and dangerous other to the horror of the white protagonist.

It conflates a lot with race, nationality, and ethnicity and which specific demographic of people will vary, but it's often done by portraying dark-skinned people of some kind in contrast to the civilized, rational white protagonist.

A lot of times this often goes hand in hand with the portrayal of cannibalism and blood rituals which isn't shown in Zelda, but to give an example of what this trope looks like, compare the visuals in Majora's Mask to the 1932 Mickey Mouse episode Trader Mickey:

Note: (you can watch the entire episode here if you'd like.)

There's an entire genre of film that utilizes the savage brown person in with the white explorer protagonist that go into this idea of framing whatever group of people it is weird, uncivilized, dangerous, and thoughtlessly impulsive often utilizing white fears of the "other" to portray them as beings of horror.

Often these films had usually one "good" brown person and often would have a lone woman character, usually the tribe leader's daughter who was objectified for the protagonist and audience and was usually portrayed as the only civilized or "good" ones, often exoticized and hypersexualized. If she wasn't, she was often abused into submission for the white character.

Also adding to this is the...everything about the Woodfall temple and the boss, Odolwa leaning into the same tropes.

I bring this up mostly as a way to provide an educational resource for other Zelda fans so we have a better frame of knowledge to not reproduce these narratives in fanart, fanfics, and so on. Majora's Mask is my favorite Zelda game! But that doesn't mean it's above critique especially in how it utilizes racial coding.

I'm deliberately avoiding showing more graphic imagery of film examples to make this as not triggering as possible, but cannibalism is a common element in these portrayals as well.

This kind of imagery pops up in quite a few Nintendo games and outside the gaming sphere as well. Off the top of my head, there's Kirby Superstar with Wham Bam Rock as portrayed in the SNES version and the Spear guys from the Mario brothers series.

Here's the Zelda Gerudo video if you haven't seen it before.

The core issue with Isle of Dogs' use of language is that it was made for a monolingual English-speaking audience.

It's not made of monolingual English-speaking and bilingual (Japanese and English-speaking) audiences. Nor was it made for the general US audience as well as the general Japanese audience.

The Japanese language is not meant to be understood by anyone, either having English speakers translate it or leaving the audience to infer what is being communicated. The spoken English translation often overlays the spoken Japanese. Not even basic Japanese is used for the benefit of English-speaking audiences, only English words from Japanese speakers. Then written Japanese is set dressing. If it's not translated, it goes by so fast that if you understand it, you don't have the time to read it. Then the dogs all have standard English dog names with tags that are written in English. And you know, the whole thing where the dogs, our main characters, speak English.

The movie is designed in such a way that translating to Japanese is impossible without being uniquely awkward.

While there must be much to enjoy if you understand both, the movie does not just favor English, it others Japanese.

When it comes to the movie's use of language, every related issue branches from this and every potential praise has to contend with it.

And yes, there are movies made for both domestic and international audiences as well as ones for both monolingual and bilingual audiences. It can be done.

Black/Racial Coding Doesn't Equal Racial Stereotypes

I can not believe we live in a society that genuinely believes racial coding = 'stereotypes but woke'...

Y'all, racial stereotypes are overexaggerated and meant to generalize a group as a whole....

Yes, racial stereotypes are technically coding, but that doesn't mean racial coding itself is based on stereotypes. [Think square = rectangle but rectangle =/= square.]

If it was all the same, you can not create any characters with a race because anything can be a stereotype by their POV.

Gave your white oc straight hair? "Racist. Not all white people have straight hair."

Gave your black oc dark skin? "Racist. Not all black people have darker skin."

Your character comes from a place with a language other than English, and they dare speak in that language? "Racist. Not every person knows their home language."

All of these rebuttals in isolation are correct, but context is extremely important. Yes, if someone claims an entire group of people have to look like XYZ to be a certain race, that's stereotyping. Making characters who happen to have very common traits among certain races, specifically the one they're meant to represent, is not.

You can literally spin anything into being racist if you view characters with this amount of malicious intent.

Getting so butthurt over someone simply calling a character X-coded (especially when it's confirmed and extremely obvious) is so incredibly dumb.

Getting mad at people critical of an X-coded character because there's no traits for people to actually connect the dots (without reading an outside source) is also extremely dumb.

TLDR: Racial coding is simply giving characters traits to represent a certain race. Racial stereotypes are still coding, but that doesn't mean racial coding itself is inherently stereotypical. Otherwise, every depiction of race is a stereotype and/or racist.

Here’s my personal recommendation of a YouTube video to check out:

Hazbin Hotel Season One Spoiler-Filled Review

Hazbin Hotel is a mature animated series by Vivienne Medrano. It began as an indie animation by Medrano and her company, SpindleHorse Toons, along with Helluva Boss not long later, with both in the same universe. The franchise began as a YouTube pilot in October 2019 and garnered over ninety-four million views. Most recently, it was developed into a full-fledged animated series by the…

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Are your characters from Star Cross Warriors racial coded?

Parfait = white

Florabelle = latina

Willow = black

Fabricorn = black

Ragamuffin = white

Merriberry = tanned

Sugarcoat = white

As for the Ironites: Neonyx, Myrcuri and Alumina are poc/black coded. Irogun is Asian and Silverlance is white. Don’t know about Tombsteel.

I’m sorry, I’m not as culturally aware as I think I am. I just designed these characters without race in mind. And since they’re critters and robots respectively I thought I didn’t have to worry about racial coding. It’s like trying to find out what race Hello Kitty is. And if I’m putting racial coding into this, the last I want is to enforce racist stereotypes in any of my characters. Racial coding is still a very new issue for me when the characters aren’t human/human-like beings like elves or mermaids

However, if it’ll make the story better, I will do some research and find out which ethnicity best suits each character best. Sorry for such a roundabout answer. I really need to sit down and think this through.

In 1865, enslaved people in Texas were notified by Union Civil War soldiers about the abolition of slavery. This was 2.5 years after the final Emancipation Proclamation which freed all enslaved Black Americans. But Slavery Continued… In 1866, a year after the amendment was ratified, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina began to lease out convicts for labor. This made the business of arresting black people very lucrative, thus hundreds of white men were hired by these states as police officers. Their primary responsibility being to search out and arrest black peoples who were in violation of ‘Black Codes’ Basically, black codes were a series of laws criminalizing legal activity for black people. Through the enforcement of these laws, they could be imprisoned. Once arrested, these men, women & children would be leased to plantations or they would be leased to work at coal mines, or railroad companies. The owners of these businesses would pay the state for every prisoner who worked for them; prison labor. It’s believed that after the passing of the 13th Amendment, more than 800,000 Black people were part of that system of re-enslavement through the prison system. The 13th Amendment declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Lawmakers used this phrase to make petty offenses crimes. When Blacks were found guilty of committing these crimes, they were imprisoned and then leased out to the same businesses that lost slaves after the passing of the 13th Amendment. The majority of White Southern farmers and business owners hated the 13th Amendment because it took away slave labor. As a way to appease them, the federal government turned a blind eye when southern states used this clause in the 13th Amendment to establish the Black Codes.

this woman tugging the children out of the way/putting herself in front of them as the klingons walk past.. they're just going somewhere do u think they're gonna attack your kids unprovoked? it's such an interesting detail establishing how klingons are perceived by federation civilians but also worf's served on this ship almost a whole season do you shield your kids from him too? did you used to?

"If you point out subtle but invasive forms of bigotry then maybe YOU'RE the REAL bigot 🤔" I am biting you and I am killing you.

Bridgerton states from season one, through Simon and Lady Danbury, to season two, with the Sharmas, to Queen Charlotte, from the beginning episode to the end spelled out clear as day, that racism exists in this world and many of the characters of colors have been impacted by it in some way. And, supposedly, I'm supposed to believe that Marina, that Kate and Edwina, that they all had more privilege and power than Penelope? No, I don't think so, a lot of things aren't right with that statement.

Holy crap I didn't think about the Ars Goetria feeling more royal than the Sins themselves! And Andre mentions that Stolas has legions and such? Okay, how does someone lower than the rulers of hell themselves have armies but the Sins don't? Or maybe they do? Idk the world building in this universe is shit and makes me want to scream into the void? Honestly it'd make more sense that Heaven has some control over Hell in regard they're not allowed to have armies due to a fear of another war and why no one stops the Exermations. I'm not saying it's a perfect solution but that's worldbuilding at least! At least make an effort for things to make sense, Viv!

As for the club owner thing: I don't fully mind them having ventures outside of their royal duties. Heck, Mammon was even a rock star on top of being a ruler of a ring and building a business empire. They're the rulers of hell that lived for thousands of years, they can do whatever they please. Even then tho they should at the least give up some sense of royalty at the same time? Idk I'm barely awake still lol

I have no idea why she chose to create a hierarchy of demons, incorporate racism and oppression…it’s not executed well at all. Royal demons are worshipped by all, especially imps like Moxxie and Fizz to stolas. It’s bizarre. If stolas has legions of soldiers, why does he demand that a single group of three imps to serve his every need? Why do these three serve and protect him without question, and yet stolas is the one we have to feel sympathy for? Not them? Millie was almost killed, Moxxie was almost crushed, Strikrt almost died, all for Stolas. Who merely got stabbed once and was perfectly fine in a week. It was his first time experiencing an injury….boohoo??

The sins should technically have more legions than stolas but can you imagine them commanding any authority of that nature? All they do is throw parties. Maybe you’re right and that’s why Lucifer agreed to the extermination?? But it annoys me when fans have to do the heavy lifting for world building.

I’m fine with them throwing parties if and only if, it’s a break from their usual duties. And what is Asmodeus’ duty…? Making sex toys…seems a bit disrespectful to such a respected feared powerful demonic figure in the texts. Asmodeus is a leader of the Ars Goetia apparently, and stolas fears him, there must be a reason. One of the things Asmodeus could at least be in charge of is arranging the marriages of the Goetia kings and princes. Imagine that kind of twist? It would tie up the stolas blitz and fizz Ozzie stories nicely. Those four are all deeply interconnected now.

Why have the absolute heads of the monarchy and all of the oppression be these sweet kind soft people who we have to know everything about their romantic life. Why are the rich, kinder and more revered than the wild savage poor people? This really screams to me like it’s a pro monarchy message. Striker isn’t a supremacist in this narrative, Stolas Goetia is. While Blitz is yammering on about stolas lovingly following his sinstagram and fizz is defending royalty from striker and saying he’s no better than them, SOMEHOW, but meanwhile Oz and stolas are calling blitz “that feisty imp” “This imp” and later, fizz works with Ozzie to kill a lower class demon for threatening him and being part of a lower class mafia trying to make money off of a king.

More pro monarchy agenda. Rich people forget that injustice creates crime. Especially organised crime like the mafia. It’s Not that “inferior” beings are simply more prone to crime as part of their DNA and need to shut up, play nice, and pick themselves up from the bootstraps. What’s next?? Fizz saying that money will trickle down of you be patient and work hard?

And why have the main “love” story being an imp forced into the love life and family life of a royal demon explicitly against his will? Constantly putting him and his family in danger since he was a young boy?? Even in Hazbin, the royal character is served by lower castes. It’s bizarre.

Also, by isolating the sins from sinners and from other royals, they have no choice but to mingle romantically with mortal citizens, so it doesn’t make any sense for people to be surprised. Who else can they date? Who cares??

Oh that’s without getting into the idea that Rich aristocrats having top secret interspecies BDSM between upper and lower class people is somehow activism against oppression “racism” (implied) and classism….yikes..

Quick Rant, I hate people who make Kanaya white because my god. LOOK AT HER. I know she’s white BUT THATS BECAUSE SHES A DAMN VAMPIRE 😭😭

Most critics have failed to consider the full implications of the monster's Otherness, overlooking the fact that the main variable upon which the monster's Otherness rests is his physiology, his dark and grotesque body that locates him firmly as an Other within the racial social hierarchy of the early nineteenth-century. (source)

The Whale Frankenstein films have multiple political connotations, including the queer resonances with which James Whale, an out gay man in homophobic Hollywood, sympathetically suffused them. My interest here is in their relation to U.S. racial politics of the 1930s, specifically the rise in lynchings and the 1931 conviction of nine young Black men known as the “Scottsboro boys.” There are, of course, no visible African-American characters in the Whale films, whose setting is an unspecified Europe and whose director and actors are English. But the films indirectly offer a surprisingly radical intervention into American iconographies of race, rape, and lynching. Within their cinematic fantasy space — or perhaps because of their cinematic fantasy space, given that more realist films of the 1930s were more cautious about racial politics — the Whale films offer an antilynching perspective.

In both Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, for example, the monster is depicted in flight from a crowd of angry townspeople, whose pursuit of him is represented with the visual markers of a lynch mob, including barking dogs, fiery torches, and angry shouts. At one point in Bride of Frankenstein, the monster is strung up on a tree as a cluster of white people surrounds him, their anger sparked by his perceived violation of a white girl.

The monster is presented sympathetically at this moment, his iconography blended with that of Christian martyrdom. Here the Frankenstein monster meets both Christ on the cross and the victim of lynching. Whale’s monster also seems kin to that other 1930s film figure associated with blackness and violence: King Kong. Like Kong, Whale’s Frankenstein monster is as much sympathetic victim as he is source of horror, while the true location of monstrosity becomes the mob who demonizes him.

(continue reading)

Omg the sound I just made…

What a lovely thing to wake up to! ✨

Also bonus 💕

YumaGami vibes here :3