race fail is full of fail, aka this is a rant (but with gifts!)

[kristin]

i do not generally read sf/f anymore. not since high school, except a few beloved authors i keep up with. i had been considering getting back into it, but have decided not to. right now my list of authors i would be willing to read is far shorter than the list i am now avoiding.

maybe it is because i had been paying so much attention to racefail, to everyone (at least outside of flock) in fandom decrying the pros, but i got super angry earlier looking at the fandom steel cage match. i saw the qualifying round, voted without really looking at the results, then checked back for the first round and noticed my options.

now i don't know all the fandoms, but using wikipedia i found (not surprised, but disappointed) there are seven characters of color who made it through to the first round, two of which (Cameron from T:SCC and Michael on Prison Break) are not coded as CoC. That is out of 48 characters, so roughly 15%. discounting cameron and michael, 12.5%. as an aside, there are 19 women. all in all, not surprising, and not as bad as it could be.

the issue i have is when you look at the results so far. only one CoC (the wonderful Gus of Psych) is winning. only one. (of the women only 7 are winning, none of whom are CoC.)

i think it is a pretty safe bet a white male will win this. now i know the CoC are often underwritten, suffering from lack of knowledge on the part of the creators, shoehorned in and under utilized. i know this. but still, it is a bit disappointing.

people, there are characters of color and they are awesome! take a look at nextian's characters of color yenta meme!

.

Now for the gift. tell me about your favorite CoC and i will make you an icon of them. (i would appreciate it if you could provide an image if it isn't a fandom i know.) depending on how many people reply, you might get more than one.

eta: i'm now unlocking this post
eta the second: gus didnt make it to the next round, so the sweet 16 is all white, with four women, at 25%, when fandom is 95%(guesstimate) female. looking at the results, it looks like there will be one woman (VMars) in the top 8 for certain (is she just that awesome or is it the fact that she hasn't been up against a guy before? i really hope it is the former, because she is pretty fucking awesome.) and one possibly (lorelei gilmore).

Comments

[nam-jai.livejournal.com]

I'll gladly take you up on your icon offer! It was easy to choose: My absolute favorite character in all of Star Trek is Dr. Julian Bashir from Deep Space Nine. I went to fetch an image, but got a bit indecisive and saved five, which I will now dump at your doorstep to choose from as you please. :)











Thank you!

haha trying that again

[voksen.livejournal.com]

Hey :D Zul'Jin (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/downloads/wallpapers/images/zulaman/Zul%27Aman_1600x1200.jpg) is one of my favorites from the Warcraft series. Long spiel on race coding in Warcraft aside, ZJ is really awesome and I'm disappointed in Blizzard for setting him up as a killable raid boss instead of using him to give trolls a more recent/larger "friendly" lore figure. If you'd rather do a real person or if this picture doesn't work for you, I'll find someone else :)

[whetherwoman.livejournal.com]

Just went and voted and looked and... ugh. It's going to be all white men by the last 8, if not sooner. That's horrifying, especially since there were some amazing women characters in the first round. (Who the hell voted against Aeryn Sun? She is awesomer than everybody ever, and I don't even like Farscape.)

I think this is actually driving home for me, more than all the essays and posts and comments I've read, how easy it would be for FoC to feel invisible in this community.

Ugh.

[mjules.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

My favorite C'soC are originals to my stories! I have one supporting character (dubbed 'Racket' by his girlfriend) in my first story, but none of the others have yet been published. They WILL be, though. I'm just building up to it. *g*

rant for the win! (part 1)

[ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com]

Oh, RaceFail... I'm a couple of days behind on following rydra_wong's links, but I'll be catching up soon. What good I can say that's come out of all that horrible fail is the new writing and fandom and publishing projects by POC like verb_noire. As a woman of color, I'm disheartened yet unsurprised about what's gone on with the fandom steel cage match; Summer Glau (who plays Cameron on T:SCC) is non-POC, to my knowledge. I remember back when I was becoming disillusioned with Firefly I looked her up, but there's hardly one Asian actor who has lines in English in either the TV series or the film. I'm so glad for people like you and nextian who are pushing back against the long tide of Everybody Loves the White Guys Best. Which inspired me to think about my favorite character of color, Detective Meldrick Lewis... and since I love him so much, I ended up writing more than I originally meant to. If you're still up for icon-making, I would love textless iconery of Lewis. I have a selection of images here (http://pics.livejournal.com/ticketsonmyself/gallery/000046qw). ScrapBook is goofy sometimes, so if the gallery or any images don't appear, just hit reload a few times until they do. It really does work!

(This was originally supposed to be a comment to nextian's meme, so I've mostly tried to avoid spoilers; I didn't finish it for the other characters I wanted to write about, though I may yet do so...)

The TV series of my heart is Homicide: Life on the Street (David Simon's stint with television prior to The Wire) through about season 4, episode 18 or 19. (I, uh, take most episodes in the later seasons as my painkiller-induced fever dream or something.) I love the early seasons, before everything started coming down and while the show has more of an ensemble feel—though that's more true of seasons 1 and 2—I totally love the first season finale, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." By ensemble I mean the overall sense of a cranky family-like group with believable tensions related to race, class, and gender running through it, but which works on a daily basis and which, almost despite themselves, can inspire individual members to exceed themselves, to really DO BETTER. As Frank Pembleton says far more eloquently in season 4, and convinces Tim Bayliss to stay because of it! That type of ensemble feel is one possible gold standard of what I look for in a cast of characters.

I love Meldrick Lewis and his partnership with Mike Kellerman (even though I couldn't find any good pictures of them together!): their sometimes-grumpy but mostly good-natured banter in season 4; the great sense of initial awkwardness and the sharp edges that end up jostling together and clicking in a way that works; the tensions between them that the show keeps sparking; the almost easy, casual, real closeness they achieve despite those tensions, before the end of the season. I'm really fond of their chemistry. Whether it's comfortable, bluntly challenging, or volatile, actors Clark Johnson and Reed Diamond sell it. I like that Kellerman really, really wants to be partners—however you want to define that, and I'd totally push that limit, just like Kellerman keeps pushing it!—and Lewis isn't immune to that. There's a lot that goes unspoken, but that's a lot that's still real.

[blueheronz.livejournal.com]

I was just going to request icons of Stringer Bell, OR Meldrick Lewis, OR Cedric Daniels.

May I friend you?