When it comes to racial represenatation in fandom, not only are black characters either left out or stereotyped and othered in ways they aren’t in canon but outside of racebending there aren’t a lot of transformative fans who’d bother making fanfiction and fanart out of something coming from say African countries. Supa Strikas is one and it does have fan fiction but numbers wise it pales in comparison to say Naruto and My Hero Academia. Though Supa Strikas may be lesser known than Naruto, the sad fact that transformative fans tend to revolve around anything Western and East Asian to the point of deliberately ignoring anything else can suggest a degree of racism on their part.
I highly suspect that when it comes to transformative fans stanning for people of colour, it’s only for certain people of colour that there emerges a theme of the model minority or honourary white motif among them in a way that’s not afforded to say anything starring and made by blacks and even other Asians. (There are fans of Bollywood but outside of India they don’t exist in big numbers the way there’s one for Japanese anime, I could say many of the same things about Nigeria and Nollywood.) For people who’re so into black representation that they don’t bother actively finding a lot of black representation outside of Western media for some reason.
Unfamiliarity is one thing, openness to African media is another matter where you actively pursue it and find it. It’s not easy but it’s worth finding it from my experience. Consider this, India has quantitatively more people (around 1 billion) so there’s bound to be a lot of fans of Bollywood movies both casual and hardcore but objectively speaking there are more Western fans of K-Pop and Japanese anime than those who’re into Indian cinema, music and clothing. So more Western people are sadly more likely to be fannish towards East Asian media than they do with South Asian and African media.
At any rate, there’s going to be way more fan art of Naruto and BTS than there is for say Motu Patlu and Adnan Sami or Bombay Vikings. For some reason, there seems to be more of a fannish attitude towards anything East Asian than anything South and Central American, African or South Asian which can risk being racist in that if East Asians are the only people of colour ever considered by white fandom at all. Black people can and do matter as well but when they get ignored, stereotyped, othered and objectified by whites in ways East Asians and whites aren’t subjected to, as well as white fans being too biased to find African media interesting and fannish then there’s the risk of being racist.
fynm 