zeegoeshere

Yes, the mods of d_d apologized and took the word out of their community, and maybe I should just be the bigger person and forgive them and be pleased that they did what was asked of them in the end.

But I can't help but think of their actions regarding witchqueen, especially what rydra_wong pointed out to me here. I disagree with the fandom consensus that this has mostly do with language and the power of words; I think the difference in the way they behaved when confronted by Zvi and the way they behaved when confronted by white fans is deplorable, and that I have a harder time forgiving or forgetting.

Um, just a general post to say that, while I really, REALLY appreciate every single comment to my frothing-at-the-mouth post about the DD crap last night, I might not be getting to those comments for a while. I suck at replying to comments as a general rule, but last night's post was some bitter, bitter venting for me and I don't especially want to revisit that while I'm trying to focus on happier things.

I do appreciate the comments so much though, and the fact that so far no one has really tried to be an asshole about it in my livejournal. My overall impression of fandom this go-round is that 99% of people seem to be coming down on the side of witchqueen and appear to be as appalled as I am at the behavior of the community mods, and that's really nice to see.

And now I'm going to focus on the fact that My Chemical Romance exists and want me to be happy as a fan. Oh yes, they do, and they're telling me with their tongues. I can't help but think that if this is what they're doing for the majority of Projekt Rev, what are they going to do for the last show (my show)? Fuck onstage? Grab Bob down for a threesome, just to make me happy? These are the questions I'm going to be pondering at work today. Also, if you're looking for a way to get out some righteous anger and/or show how much you're not like the racist dickheads in fandom, you could write me some Travis/Bill. I mean um.

Sometimes, fandom, you make it difficult for me to like you.

I'm sure many of you have already heard about this, but if you haven't, please check out this collection of links concerning the daily_deviant mods being clueless, offensive asshats. I can't even be articulate enough to discuss it here, but please, check out some of those posts, especially witchqueen's (here).

I just can't even comprehend how someone might not see that equating interracial relationships and bestiality is racist and wrong.

SIGH. I'm unable to focus on my political science reading because people keep making interesting and awesome posts on race.

(Posts in question: http://witchqueen.livejournal.com/390111.html, http://thete1.livejournal.com/616790.html, and http://moxie-brown.livejournal.com/149834.html)

(Okay, I also can't focus on my reading because I'm watching this clip over and over. I wish that Youtube had a 'repeat' option.)

edit: Okay, actually, I have some ideas about this that I want to write out.

One of the reasons that I see held up to why characters of color get written less than white characters is that, because of the racist nature of TV, movies, comics, etc, the characters of color we get in canon are less fleshed out and simply given less to *do* than their white counterparts--if they're there at all. And this is sadly true, but--come on. Are you telling me that *every* fannish darling that gets tons of porn written about them is an incredibly well-written, fleshed-out character in the canon? Hi, Jim and Blair, how ya doin'? liviapenn pointed out that I shouldn't take potshots when I'm not that familiar with Sentinel, so uh, just ignore that. *g*

But okay, since I really don't know much about The Sentinel beyond the questionable quality of the canon, I'll use an example closer to home. Bright Abbott from Everwood, let's say. I adored Bright, was interested in his character, found him slashy, and wrote some fic about him.

Everwood has its own charm, but it was not a brilliant show and for the most part, the Bright-in-the-show is not the three-dimensional wonderful character he is in my head. In canon, at first he's the stereotypical Dumb Jock, then later the Dumb Jock With A Heart Of Gold and the Best Friend. While the show's script occasionally gives him great moments, for the most part the character's charm comes from Chris Pratt's warmth and charisma and chemistry with Gregory Smith.

When I decided to write Bright, I fleshed his character out far beyond what I saw in the canon. I often wrote him as bisexual, something that definitely wasn't explored in the canon, first of all. I gave him character quirks and details in his life that weren't in the show, and a past that extrapolated and went beyond what canon gave me. I used canon as my basis, but because I was trying to tell interesting stories rather than write an episode of Everwood (zing), I didn't feel compelled to stick *only* to exactly what I saw in the show.

Now, recently I wrote slash about Storm from the X-men movies. I think everyone can agree that neither Halle Berry now the script for the movies bring a great amount of verve to poor Storm. If I just looked at what I saw in the movies, she barely *had* a character.

So when writing her, I used the information I gleaned from the movies as a starting point, but didn't feel restricted to using *only* the information from the movies. I wrote her as bisexual, I gave her a past that wasn't explicitly stated in the movies, I gave her character quirks and details in her life that I also didn't take from the canon. I used essentially the same process that I used to write Bright.

And yeah, writing Bright was a *lot* easier and more intuitive for me. I come from a similar background to his, am comfortable in his culture, and identify with him a lot. I'm not an Egyptian mutant who emigrated to the United States when she was a teenager, so it was more difficult for me to go through this process with Ororo, but it wasn't that hard. I just had to think a little bit more.

If you read this and are now thinking 'well, that's all well and good, but I'm in fandom for *fun* and what's fun for me is writing my OTP, which happens to be white', hey, I totally get that. Fandom *should* be fun. Trying to police everyone who doesn't write characters of color all the time (which, uh, *I* don't write characters of color all the time) would not be fun for *me.* But just, please, do not tell me that you're not writing CoCs because you want to stick to the canon and the canon sucks, because unless you're writing for a canon that is perfect in every way, where very detail you put into your characterization (including a character's sexuality) is backed up by canon, you've probably gotten around that to write characters before.