zeegoeshere

Pete never wrote a song about locking up a woman in a basement because he never wants to let her go and filming her as she cries, though. Like, Gabe deliberately created a character in a song who is a villain and presented it in the first-person, and and when fandom didn't know much more about him than SoaP and the When the City Sleeps album (I think back when villain!Gabe was rampant, fandom might not even have known that he was Latino) he was a convenient villain. Especially since Pete and Travis are more obvious minorities, I'd think if the villain-thing was race-related, they would more often be cast as the villains.

For my own part, when I wrote Gabe as the villain (well, relatively the villain) in the first cultverse story, I knew nothing about him except a) he sang the SoaP song, b) he'd just has a huge falling out with Elisa, who made all sorts of cryptic allegations about him, and c) he talked about his teenaged drummer living in his basement, and there were a bunch of jokes in fandom about his basement. I didn't know he was Latino.

I'm not saying bandom writers don't have race issues, I just don't think that's particularly a manifestation of them. Our race issues tend to not manifest, actually--meaning, as ficbyzee says, the cocs just don't have much fic written about them.

Exactly. It drives me crazy that PoC are more often cast as villains and sexual predators (even Travis gets hit with the sexually predatory label), there's a history of the Latin Lover and the Black Buck, and yet when men of color are written this way, it's a coincidence.

Also, Pete doesn't get it and the man was with a 15 year old when he was in his twenties. Personally, though I think it's fairly obvious, I think it's because he's read as white by so many people and Asians don't have the same "animal sexuality" attached to them that Latinos and blacks do.