No Kazakh mutants

When it comes to underrepresentation, it seems to me that although other former Soviet republics and satellites do show up in the Marvel canon of comics, animation and the like, they generally appear as backdrops for American heroes to do their business there. But there are really no recurring characters (villains, supporting characters and heroes) coming from countries like Moldova, Kazakhstan, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, North Macedonia, Armenia and Tajikistan, let alone without resorting to stereotypes that they’re practically underrepresented this way. It’s even weirder to think that given a number of Marvel writers are no strangers to rewriting the characters’ backstories, that it might be feasible to out both Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver as Slovenian Romanichals this time.

It’s just as feasible to out Doctor Doom as Croatian or T’challa and Shuri as Cameroonian Bamilekes, there are even Cameroonians who do fanart of things like Looney Tunes and Hunter x Hunter. But I’m afraid there are likely two schools of thought Marvel fans fall into: the one obsessed with the franchise’s canon (or commonly called lore) and the one that dismisses the existence of these countries and cultures, regardless if there are possibly some people in those countries who’d like to see themselves represented in the Marvel world themselves. There are prominent recurring Russians throughout the Marvel canon like Red Guardian, Black Widow, Colossus, Illyana Rasputina and Darkstar, but their Estonian and Armenian counterparts are practically nonexistent. One would hope that given America’s declining stature, that it might be feasible to do a fiction story featuring prominent recurring Estonian characters outside of both Europe and Estonia itself this time.

The only place where you can find recurring Yugoslav representation in any way in the US comics canon is Joe Sacco’s body of work like Sarajevo and Safe Area Gorazde, even if these are nonfiction than the purely fictious tales that predominate the Marvel canon. But it does insinuate a certain message that since Marvel isn’t real, why bother retconning Doctor Doom to be Yugoslav himself? To them, Marvel is escapist. To do is to consciously pretend or ignore one’s desire for any real Yugoslav representation in the Marvel world, there are practically no mutants coming from Uzbekistan so far. There are no mutants who hail from either Baku or Tashkent, just as there are no mutants coming from either Baturi, Georgia or Tbilisi, Georgia. And when I mean by Georgia, it’s a European country next to Russia and Armenia I think.

There are really no mutants from Yerevan whatsoever, there are no mutants from somewhere in either Bucharest, Romania or Chisinau, Moldova without being vampires themselves. There are no mutants from Almaty, Kazakhstan; nor are there any mutants from even Belgrade, Serbia for this matter. As for Romanian speaking countries like Romania itself, there’s a tendency to tie it with vampiric stereotypes if it weren’t for Dracula. But if you peruse Romanian media from this country rather frequently, a different story emerges and one that’s in some regards more ordinary. Like if you use Romanian language websites to read up on things like lectionaries, foxes and more, then Romania is actually rather ordinary or at least much more (normal) than the popular imagination presumes it to be.

This is compounded by that America’s such a superpower, such a hegemon, that it’s going to popularise such misconceptions on a much wider scale than any other country comes close to doing. To get a Romanian or Moldovan character who’s not a vampire themself, despite the writer not being Romanian/Moldovan themself (or yourself), you’d have to regularly consume Romanophone media in any capacity and way to get a vision of either one of them not falling under popular stereotypes, or perhaps both. Even then it’s kind of hard getting a Romanophone character right without falling into popular memes, especially if you’re not Romanophone yourself. Not that Romanian characters are nonexistent in Marvel at all, but a non-stereotypical character is rare at best, nonexistent at worst.

Similar things can be said about the paucity of recurring Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian characters in either DC or Marvel, they might as well be glorified NPCs and mere afterthoughts in the wider scheme of things. A nonstereotypical Kazakh mutant would be nice, a mutant who comes from the European country of Georgia would be nice, an Armenian mutant would be nice, so on and so forth but they never really came to pass as actual, recurring characters in the X-Men canon. But when coupled with America’s declining stature that it’s feasible to create well-known Armenian superheroes outside of Armenia and possibly the rest of the former Soviet sphere itself, or their Estonian and Lithuanian counterparts for that matter. Maybe not immediately but it’s clear where it’s going now that America’s declining.

The Stars, Their Destination

Sometime ago I came up with Iosif Ionescu, who’s the Romanian counterpart to Joseph Joestar. His wife is a veterinarian named Irina, his son is a paralegic archer named Ioan and and his daughter is an ecologist named Ionela, all referencing the likes of Erina Pendleton, Johnny Joestar and Jolene Joestar. Iosif Ionesco is a Romanian biologist who encountered stray dogs resembling Danny and Iggy respectively, except that Danny is the father of Iggy and both of them are stray dogs hanging out in the Romanian wilds eating wisent together with some provisions from people. Ilmar Tuglas, who is based on Kakyoin Noriaki, is a good friend of his who met each other online talking about what life was like under communism. Joseph Joestar was first seen in the Battle Tendency storyline, before resurfacing as an old man in the subsequent ones (Stardust Crusaders and Diamond is Unbreakable). Kakyoin mostly shows up in Stardust Crusaders.

Ilmar comes from a family of fur farmers and socialists alike, even when he and his father (a Lutheran priest in the Ahja parish) sometimes work in animal care themselves despite Ilmar being a financial adviser for most of the part. If Iosif Ionescu is Joseph Joestar who works as a biologist studying Danny and Iggy in the wild hunting wisent and wild rodents in the Romanian steppes and forests, then Ilmar Tuglas is Kakyoin Noriaki who’s shown to look after the cats Tama and Dolce somewhere in Estonia where he owns an animal shelter (a former fur farm itself) with his father, even though he usually works as a financial adviser to Kira Yoshikage (Graham Knightley). Both Romania and Estonia used to be communist countries and moreso when Araki Hirohiko was a young, budding cartoonist, so there was a Cold War between the Soviet Union (which Romania was affiliated with and Estonia was a part of) and America.

America’s allies include South Korea (which was created to contain the spread of socialism to the rest of the Korean peninsula), Japan (where Araki comes from), United Kingdom (the namesakes of characters like Wham and Pet Shop Boy come from this country alone), West Germany (where Kraftwerk’s from), France (where Jean-Pierre Polnareff’s namesake, Michel Polnareff, comes from) and Italy (most of the Golden Wind characters reside there). There is a new Cold War but between China and America this time, also this is a cold war where America’s clearly in decline. So it would be befitting to aim a game like this with the accompanying characters (including the afformented Jojo analogues Ilmar Tuglas and Iosif Ionescu) at a more global (read non-American) audience, with America becoming increasingly irrelevant to the wider world. Maybe not necessarily entirely irrelevant, but nowhere as powerful as it was before.

There are prophecies of not only China getting more powerful, but also Russia resuming its superpower status that if these two were to defeat the United States together (which some say is Mystery Babylon, the end times country said to corrupt the entire planet), then this would further hasten America’s decline. It may not happen yet at this point, but it’s clear that America really is in decline and may not recover from a forthcoming economic crash at all this time. So it becomes even more crucial for this potential franchise to actually pander to more powerful markets in the future, with America declining at present, that America will no longer be a benchmark for how successful a media franchise would be overseas. Although there are ACG franchises that perform better in other, non-American markets before like Saint Seiya in Latin America for instance, with America in decline that it’ll no longer be the gold standard for international success these days.

It’s even telling that American studios aim their films at Chinese audiences, which goes to show you how powerful China has become. If this trend continues for other countries to begrudgingly follow, then it makes more sense to aim such a potential franchise like this at Chinese and generally nonwestern audiences more. Even if it comes at the expense of things like LGBT couples and the like, considering that China, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya are rather censorious of what they allow. Which means the countries that are okay with LGBT matters and the like are increasingly in the minority and are much likelier to be allied with the US, complete with both declining birth rates and mature gaming markets as well. So this gaming franchise will not have LGBT characters because these do not appeal to more conservative markets like Nigeria and Ghana.

Additionally it seems stray dogs and the ecological problems they pose appear to show up less often in ACG media than they would in both journalism and academia, even if this is something of terra incognita for both gaming and comics in a way. With gaming, you can find a way to not just observe stray dogs attack wildlife but also find ways to not only stop them from doing this, but also prevent this from happening in the first place. With comics you can depict how and why dog predation occurs and what problems they pose to both people and the environment, considering that Iosif Ionescu is a scientist who studies stray dogs attacking wildlife a lot. Even Japanese journalism takes time to dwell on such a subject matter that’s mostly untouched in animation, cartooning and games, despite the latter three’s potential to take advantage of this to educate the public in a different way.

Ilmar Tuglas has observed similar things back in Estonia as well, having to rehome dogs attacking deer because he doesn’t want them to get killed. You might say it’s ironic because his own family are no strangers to farming foxes for their fur, even though they don’t do this anymore because of how unpopular fur farming’s gotten over there too. Ilmar and his family end up giving the food meant for foxes to cats and dogs instead, which is far from ideal in their case, but a matter of having to go with the changing times from then on. Fur farming was a thing in both Europe and North America, especially en masse, that it was as normal as pig farming is today. But it’s also kind of speciesist in this regard that the ire’s aimed at people using cute doglike animals for fur, though there’s still not much sympathy given to pigs, even when they’re useful for sniffing out certain fungi.

To further complicate matters, animals like pigs have a longer and more consistent domestication history than foxes do, so turning pigs into pets wouldn’t be that drastic because they’re more heavily tied to humans than foxes were and still are. And they’re still more widely domesticated anywhere else in the world, whereas foxes are largely restricted to paleoarctic regions with the exception of Australia. But it’s easier to throw fits over people skinning animals resembling Rover and Fido, than they would with animals like Babe just the same (since the Chinese word for fox fur clothing is really fox leather clothing). Which is still speciesist in a darkly ironic way, since pigs are far likelier to be domesticated in nearly all corners of the globe, but foxes largely reside in the paleoarctic like I said before. It wouldn’t be drastic making pigs find mushrooms anywhere else.

You might as well consider how this person feels about chickens as opposed to parrots, where since their point’s that chickens have been domesticated by people longer and earlier, so treating them like one would with cats and dogs shouldn’t be this drastic compared to say parrots. Considering that foxes don’t just have different care requirements, but have a more inconsistent domestication history compared to say cats and dogs, that Ilmar’s own relatives and possibly Ilmar himself at some point would’ve known that they are rather tricky to deal with. So transitioning to cats and dogs doesn’t seem drastic but these two are so familiar to humanity that it would be this easy to take them for granted at times, so even if it depends on the individual animal, Ilmar and his family would’ve found them much easier to raise than they would with foxes even for years.

And they’ve been breeding foxes for fur until recently, so they’d have experience in knowing a thing or two about fox behaviour. So both Ilmar Tuglas and Iosif Ionescu represent rather underrepresented character types and topics, in the sense that they don’t show up this often in ACG media for some reason. Ilmar Tuglas’s own family (if not Ilmar Tuglas himself) house pastors, socialists and fur farmers alike under one roof, I’m pretty much certain this isn’t even unique to them as similar arrangements might also be found anywhere else in the world to varying degrees. But most especially post-Communist Europe once they went from socialism to capitalism and when freedom of religion has resumed in these places, coupled with the decline of fur farming, that such characters can also be found in places like Poland and Slovakia, like one would with Estonia in his case.

Given how demonised Protestantism is in X-Men (which for some reason never gets remarked upon much by Evangelicals), it would be nice to turn such a portrayal on its head by having a lot more sympathetic Protestants in the forms of Ilmar Tuglas, his mother Margit, his late cousin Priit Mihkelson and his father Tanel, who’s even a local pastor in Ahja. Gail Simone actually had a good point about the way Christians are portrayed in both the DC and Marvel canons, but most especially X-Men where they’re often kind of demeaned if they’re Protestants in question. It’s really strange to think that an atheist like her took offence to such a depiction but most Evangelicals are ironically indifferent to this, even though ideally it should have been the other way around. But a Redditor said that a lot of Christians are worldly, so it didn’t turn out the way it should’ve.

Ilmar’s Christianity represents a different sort of Christianity from the one North Americans are used to, which involves awareness of global warming and sympathy to immigrants, the latter’s also there in the Bible. He’s also somewhat sympathetic to socialism, which would surely surprise North Americans. But his family has socialists in them, so this would’ve rubbed off on him, however inappropriate it maybe either for his religion or his occupation as a financial adviser. Estonians are weirdly underrepresented in American ACG media, despite Estonia being a capitalist country as of late. They continue to be underrepresented, because there are no Estonian superheroes, supporting characters and villains to this day, even when both DC and Marvel writers could have at this point.

Ilmar and his family might not be the only Estonians in American and American ally ACG media, but when Estonians are generally so underrepresented in those media that it’s going to be hard naming a prominent Estonian character from either DC or Marvel, if because there’s really none at all and still none to this day. Or in Iosif Ionescu’s case, Romanians who aren’t vampires. It does bring up a certain possibility that many in America and American-allied media aren’t that exposed to both Estonian and Romanian cultures (media included), even when both Estonia and Romania are just as interesting as South Korea and Japan are. The one thing more underrepresented than a mere Romanian is a Romanian scientist, one who specifically studies stray dogs to boot. Which dovetails with the lack of ACG media that’s about dog predation in any way.

It’s not necessarily entirely unheard of in the media but usually canine predation is mentioned in either journalism or academia, not so much more escapist fare like video games even when video games provide an opportunity to not only stop dogs from killing wildlife, but also preventing them from doing this altogether even when it’s done virtually. Video games have been used to educate people about things like wild animals and ecosystems, that it shouldn’t be a stretch to make and use a video game to educate people about the perils of dog predation really. If you could make a video game that’s about caring for dogs, you could also make a video game about stopping dogs from killing wild animals just the same.

Not to mention there are people who make a living from studying dog predation and stray dogs in general such as Andrey Poyarkov, who originally set out to study wolves but ended up studying feral dogs instead. Iosif Ionescu’s no different because he also set out to study wolves but when stray dogs are far more abundant, that he ended up studying and even adopting some of the latter instead. The two dogs he studied and then adopted are Danny and Iggy cast in the roles of father and son respectively, which was something Ilmar suggested to him since he doesn’t want them to get killed. Well they’re part of a pack of stray dogs so he could’ve adopted more of them with his other relatives and also Irina too, Ionela is the one who owns a dog looking like the one killed by Tonio.

Ioan owns dogs that look like the ones killed by an arrow or something, a kind of inversion of what goes on in Jojo where the characters actually keep dogs from getting killed themselves. I kind of speculated before that Araki Hirohiko does or did this because he wasn’t in a good mood, but this involves realising he did this unconsciously, especially whenever he didn’t feel right himself. He admitted that he didn’t let Pannacotta Fugo betray the team because he wasn’t feeling right at the time, so it’s plausible Araki did this to dogs in a way because admittedly I used to obsess over dead dogs whenever I wasn’t feeling right before. But this kind of humanises Araki in the sense he does things whenever he wasn’t feeling right at any point in time, which might explain why some characters like Johnny Joestar and even Ghiaccio appear to have symptoms of depression.

Or why some characters have stands or powers relating to guilt in some way, as guilt’s also a component of depression. Which means Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure might also be more cathartic than one realises, along with a profound air of foreboding regarding what will happen next, that it does differ from something like most superhero comics in this regard. Like I feel a lot of superhero comics from both DC and Marvel have a rollicking air where the hero’s expected to save the day largely mentally unscathed, not to mention these two have a rotating rooster of differing writers with equally clashing views and approaches to familiar characters and storylines. JJBA for most of the part can easily be traced back to one author, albeit with some helpers to the side, so what goes on in JJBA is clearly from one mind.

If this includes characters who appear to be depressed in many ways more than one and the like, then it does point out to a cathartic mindset at any point. But I’m getting off-topic here and even then it’s kind of telling that there’s really not a lot of characters of any ethnicity and nationality who bother studying stray dogs in any capacity in most ACG media, even when these could’ve picqued one’s interest in such a subject matter. I remember the essay ‘Education Of A Cartoonist’ pointing out why comics stories are repetitive is because their own authors don’t read or learn much, don’t bother doing anything else that would lead to less repetitive characters and storylines. This also involves doing a different take on something familiar, like what if both Danny and Iggy aren’t just stray dogs but also related to one another and have the fortune of being cared for and adopted by Joseph Joestar.

What if Kakyoin Noriaki lived long enough to become a financial adviser who also cares for stray animals to the side, well in the form of their analogues Iosif Ionescu and Ilmar Tuglas that does speak volumes about certain directions not taken or done often. Even less commonly done is using such abilities for quotidian and forensic means, like imagine if Trish Una grew up to be a forensic scientist herself who softens things to make it easier to solve cases this way. Imagine if Kakyoin Noriaki used his ability to not only pick up items, close doors and the like (though he could’ve done that before in canon), but also help out detectives when it comes to solving criminal cases. It seems more common to find characters using preternatural skills in combat, but not so often when it comes to more practical situations that demand you to not only save lives, but also do things like preparing food and solving criminal cases.

This goes back to the point posed in Education Of A Cartoonist where it seems it’s easier to write glorified fistfights because such writers don’t really bother doing anything else, learning anything else and knowing somebody/anybody else who does this to write something else altogether. Whether if this even includes the vexing subject of fur farming is up to anybody’s guess, but it does beg the question over which character with such an ability would gravitate to this controversial practise. Ilmar Tuglas comes from a family of fur farmers who were in the habit of raising foxes, mink and the like for fur clothing, they don’t do this anymore due to animal rights activists getting in the way. Instead they make a living from veterinary pet care instead, as his own father and mother are veterinarians (even if one of them’s a parish pastor in Ahja), though it could be argued that what they do is speciesist since they care for cats and dogs a lot.

It would be particularly controversial to even humanise fur farmers this way, given how politically correct both the United States and its allies tend to be and are. From both the Russian and Chinese perspectives, these countries tend to be very politically correct. These countries are more in-tune with things like anti-racism, intersectionality, feminism, LGBT rights and animal rights a lot more than these two are, not that China’s particularly inclined towards animal cruelty. Mind you even in China there are people who make their dogs hunt rodents, guard premises and hunt boar, a lot like what their western counterparts do or for another matter, their Vietnamee and Indonesian counterparts just the same. But I feel it’s more like America and its allies tend to be really self-righteous from being very politically correct on many matters, that anybody else who aren’t in their orbit seem much worse by comparison.

Even when it’s not always exactly nor precisely the case, but it does feel this way at times due to political correctness being more normalised in the west. This might also include animal rights activism in a way, given the antipathy towards fur farming in Russia isn’t as pronounced as it would be in Canada, despite sharing similar ranges of climates, latitudes and biomes together. Unless if Russia succeeds in conquering Canada and then incorporating it into one of its many territories which would be the one situation where such practises would even be mainstreamed. And even then it would still take time for it to become socially acceptable again, with indigenous North Americans being far likelier to take up this cause. Even if not all Native North Americans do this, they’re still likelier to do this than their white counterparts would. And fur farming would be pretty niche in the interval at the very least.

But it does make one wonder if it were possible to portray fur farmers and even ex-fur farmers in a more sympathetic light, especially when it comes to how politically correct the west is relative to both Russia and China. In the sense that some people turn to fur farming as a way to earn money this way, even actually caring for the animals they’ll farm for their fur. It’s even telling that both Russia and Canada were on equal terms when it comes to fur farming, or for another matter former Soviet republic Estonia in this regard. Estonia banned fur farming sometime around four years ago, so it would’ve been fairly recent that Ilmar’s family stopped fur farming due to such presssures. The Tuglas fur farms have been converted into shelters for stray cats and dogs, given they’re not only more abundant but also easier to manage due to their longer histories of being domesticated, relative to foxes.

As for the farm foxes, well although the activists succeeded in freeing them, there was the issue of rehoming them. Foxes aren’t particularly popular as pets, not that they’re entirely useless, but they’re not the animals one would often use for things like pest control the way one would with cats and dogs (even in China, this is also the case there too). They could’ve gone stray, plausibly interbreeding with wild foxes. But this also left some Tuglas relatives in a financial quagmire, especially if others continued fur farming (especially with Priit’s side of the family), that they ended up farming vegetable and fruit crops instead. With Priit’s passing (at the explosive hands of Graham Knightley, one of Ilmar’s clients), Ilmar now amasses a large collection of fur coats. They can’t be sold to people anymore, lest Ilmar be pelted with stones when he comes close to doing it.

And even then he gets questioned why would he continue hoarding fox coats when he cares for dogs, who are their relatives and doppelgangers. I feel this is a depiction of fur farming that goes unheard of and unseen in such media, wherein the fur farmers in question are really ordinary people like me and you. It’s like in an effort to humanise foxes, fur farmers get seriously dehumanised and demonised. If fur farming were to have a human face in video games and the like, it would go to Ilmar Tuglas and his family instead. But it would say a lot about the sort of environment westerners are raised in, where furbearers are humanised but fur farmers aren’t. And why a counter-narrative would be interesting to explore really.

Underrepresented

I said before that Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians and the like as well as actual African nationalities are painfully underrepresented in American ACG media until recently, but even then it’s kind of hard naming an Estonian character in either DC or Marvel who’s not a background extra. If because there’s really none at all, and there still isn’t one to this day. Senegalese characters are in short supply in DC and Marvel, but they might as well be similarly nonexistent. The same can be said of Latvians, Georgians (as in those coming from Georgia the country), Lithuanians, Armenians, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Tajiks, Krygyz, Ghanaians, Zimbabweans, Ugandans, Liberians, Angolans, Gabonese, Congolese (and Kinois), Mozambicans, Ivorians, Rwandans and so on.

It’s kind of hard naming any prominent Czech, Hungarian or Slovak DC or Marvel character because there’s really none at all, none to begin with and still none today, like if you want real Czech, Hungarian or Slovak representation you might as well persue and peruse Czech, Hungarian and Slovak media instead. Romanians might as well be vampires and not ordinary people like everybody else, Estonians could easily be mistaken for Russians, and many Americans would think of Georgia as a US state, not a separate country somewhere in the Caucasus. So whatever Georgian mutant that shows up in the X-Men canon will mostly probably come from Atlanta, not somewhere like Tbilisi for instance. Who cares about Moldovans, they might as well be Romanians all along.

Ditto Croatians, Serbians, Bulgarians, Bosnians and Slovenes unless if they appear in Joe Sacco’s comics, and unfortunately Joe Sacco seems to be one of the few US cartoonists who do bother putting Yugoslavs in his comics. It’s even odder still to think that despite DC rebooting its canon every now and then, Slovaks and Latvians have yet to show up there even when it’s now possible to do so, or for another matter making existing characters like Terra and Vixen belong to actual nationalities this time. Terra being a Slovak woman and Vixen a Zimbabwean woman, DC writers could be free to grandfather a Congolese nationality onto Bwana Beast. Marvel’s no different to some extent, yet not a single Marvel writer bothered to retcon both Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver into being Romani Slovenes.

Making Victor von Doom Croatian would be nice but it destroys the illusion of plausible deniability if he actually came from somewhere in Croatia himself, who knows what would happen if somebody like Shuri were to be retconned into being a Bamileke Cameroonian herself. It’s even wilder to think there are practically no Namibians, Botswanans and Nigeriens in Marvel, there is some Botswanan representation in DC but he’s just a bitplayer. Just a character to be saved by Superman and nothing more, Superman being the resident All-American hero at DC Comics. There are really no Botswanan superheroes in either the DC or Marvel canon, not even a recurring Botswanan supporting character like what Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen are to the Superman canon.

Botswanans are cannon fodder to DC and Marvel writers alike if they ever show up at all, Storm is pretty much alone in the entire US comics canon as the best known African character there. One would be hard-pressed to find any Kazakh characters in DC and Marvel, because they’re practically nonexistent there. You’d have to find Armenians in DC and Marvel in vain, even when Armenia’s no longer part of the Soviet Union at this point. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are all part of the European Union now, but there’s not a single Baltic superhero to this day at either DC or Marvel. Not even a Baltic supervillain at that. Supposing if someone made a story involving an Estonian man named Ilmar Tuglas. He doesn’t just generate and manipulate strings, but also emeralds.

He also works as a financial adviser, despite having harbouring pro-socialist sentiments every now and then, come from a family of communists and fur farmers and lives somewhere in Ahja, Estonia, with family somewhere in Saaremaa (an Estonian island). He’s based on Kakyoin Noriaki from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure right down to his fashion sense and personality to a large extent, JJBA being a Japanese comic involving superpowers by the way. Let’s say that his author isn’t from Estonia themselves, and this character shows up in a North American comic or video game, he may not be a Marvel or DC character. But it does speak volumes about how strangely underrepresented Estonians are, despite Estonia being an EU member at this point in time, but I guess US writers could rather pay more mind to America’s longer-standing allies instead.

Estonia might not be that poor either, compared to say Georgia for instance, but it’ll often be overlooked by DC and Marvel. Especially when it comes to having a particularly prominent superhero of its own or more, compared to long-standing US allies like South Korea, to the point where Estonia might essentially serve as cannon fodder to US superheroes instead. Estonia had been thoroughly influenced by Russia before, around the time South Korea was created to contain the spread of socialism throughout the Korean peninsula, Russian influence was already years deep in Estonian culture. South Korea kind of inherited the showbiz culture from America, both K-Pop and K-Rap are evidently derivative of American popular music. It’s not that a showbiz culture is nonexistent in Estonia, but that it would’ve resembled Russia’s own instead.

It’s kind of astonishing to think that Russia was at some point the only other major superpower in the Cold War, but it never got its own Hollywood even when it had all the other communist allies around, or at least nowhere near the scale Hollywood does for America. As South Korea is a longer-standing US ally than Estonia is, it would’ve inevitably inherited the American showbiz culture. To the extent that US publishers are more willing to represent South Koreans than Estonians, because of the residual feeling that South Korea is really on its side, despite Estonia being a western country itself and it was a US ally for quite a while in recent memory. You could also say that South Korea has K-Pop, but then again K-Pop is derivative of American popular music in many ways, so it’s going to be more palatable to US and US ally tastes.

That’s why Marvel has Luna Snow, a K-Pop musician who moonlights as a superheroine, even if Estonia’s currently capitalistic at this point but it’s still going to have the suspicion of being a Russian ally despite appearances to the contrary at this point. That’s why Netflix, a US streaming service, has KPop Demon Hunters. Even if Estonia was for a long time a Swedish colony, then a Russia colony and now a ceritified member of the European Union, South Korea is a US ally from the get-go and its exports are going to be more compatible with American and US ally tastes, than with their Estonian counterparts (if they exist at all). So Estonians as well as Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Armenians and Moldovans are going to be this underrepresented in DC and Marvel, or for another matter Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Bulgarians.

A common thread with many of these countries is that they’re all former socialist countries, as to be conflated with Russia especially if they’re European countries at that. I suppose if somebody were to substitute Latveria, Transia/Trasnia and Sokovia for Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary, it could still run into problems but if they got represented in Cold War era stories, their characters would either serve as antagonistic foils to US heroes or join US teams if they’re heroic, which Natalia Romanova is both of these things and she’s Russian. From my personal experience reading US comic books and the like, the only times actual Yugoslavs get any representation at all in is Joe Sacco’s nonfiction works. But these highlight a strong disparity between Yugoslavs and their fictionalised proxies, because Joe Sacco’s a journalist who uses cartooning to talk about social issues in other countries.

Similar things can be said of the differences between the way actual African countries are portrayed in nonfiction as opposed to say the DC and Marvel canon, where in the former they actually show up and sometimes realistically so. But in the DC and Marvel stories, most actual African countries are nonexistent. There are practically no Angolans, Cameroonians, Ugandans, Namibians and Rwandans in either the DC or Marvel canon, which gets really weird because these two are no strangers to retcons and reboots that at any point where a writer could’ve grandfathered a Cameroonian nationality onto Black Panther and Shuri, this never came to pass. DC’s no stranger to reboots and the opportunity to make Vixen Zimbabwean never came to pass either, you might as well tell me to make my own characters so I did.

Fabrice Tientcheu is a Cameroonian forensic scientist who has the ability to soften things, is very high-culture himself (he likes reading books on sciences like astronomy and chemistry, as well as books by Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus), owns cats because his father’s afraid of dogs (Cameroonian rapper Mink’s is afraid of dogs himself as well) and is actually based on another Jojo character, Trish Una who also has the same ability herself. He lives somewhere in Cameroon, whether if it’s Bamendjou or Bafang. But these are real places in Cameroon and also Africa, you could go there if you want to. He has a twin sister named Yvette, a seamstress who’s in love with his colleague and the resident detective Jean-Louis Lumiere.

Nigerians do get some representation in Marvel, via the character of Temper. But she’s not as well-known as Storm is, so Storm’s practically alone in the entire US comics canon as the best known fictional African to come from a real African country. If the adage the more, the merrier works; then it serves to have another Nigerian character around in the form of Tifeoluwa Babatunde Olatunji. He works as a lawyer and lives somewhere in Lagos, he sometimes gets into joking banter with Fabrice over rice and other foodstuffs. Even odder still over at DC is how and why there’ll never be an Elseworlds or Imaginary Story featuring an Icelandic Fire and a Chilean Ice, but I feel it kind of ties into stereotypes about Latin Americans and Scandinavians. Not just in terms of ability, but also personality.

From what I’ve read, Beatriz da Costa (Fire) is shown to be brash and flamboyant but Tora Olafsdotter (Ice) is more mild-mannered. That’s not to say there aren’t any Brazilians who act like Beatriz nor are there any Norwegians who act like Tora, but it still wouldn’t fit into the way they actually see themselves as. Supposing if there are characters with abilities similar to these two, but Fire is Scandinavian and Ice is Latin American this time. Sometime as early as 2010, I came up with an Icelandic male character who is Fire and manipulates volcanism himself, and Ice is a Japanese woman. This time both characters are female, thus further paralleling their DC counterparts. Linhildur Solveig Arnleifsdottir is analogised to Beatriz da Costa, though she has red hair and often at the receiving end of her husband’s affairs.

(She’s also a natural redhead to boot.) She comes from somewhere in Iceland, more specifically Reykjavik and she works as a government official. That’s not to say there aren’t any Scandinavian redheads out there in American ACG media, but it seems Age Of Mythology’s the rare instance of this unless if Jimmy Olsen counts (he’s obviously of Scandinavian descent himself). Dark-haired Scandinavians in DC do exist, but particularly in the form of Pieter Cross. Marvel’s Loki could also count in a way, because he’s based on Norse mythology. That’s not to say all Scandinavians are dark-haired (or red-haired or blond-haired either), but it still wouldn’t reflect the way they see themselves. Linhildur being a redhead reflects on the fact that Iceland does have a good number of redheads itself, then come Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

It seems within the Marvel canon, if foreign redheads do exist they’re usually more likely to come from either Scotland or Ireland. Not that redheads are nonexistent in both places, but it still wouldn’t be how they see themselves as. Quite frankly, I’m unable to name a famous Scottish or Irish redhead in music. People like Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh, Ronan Keating and Nicola Cloaghan are all Irish blonds, though with the last one you wouldn’t guess this until she stops dyeing her hair red for Bridgerton. The rest of Boyzone and Altan all have dark hair themselves, everybody in Clannad has natural dark hair (until lately as they’re getting older) and the same can be said of everybody in the band Capercaillie. Sinead O’Connor had natural dark hair. Nightcrawlers’ John Reid had natural blond hair when he was younger, Kevin McKidd’s also blond.

Karen Gillen are Moira Shearer are both the only natural Scottish redheads that I can think of, but since natural red hair’s rare so it’s to be expected that it would be easier naming blond and dark-haired Irish and Scottish celebrities instead, especially in my case. Moving over to England, I could name some natural redheads there. You have Mick Hucknall, Patricia Hodge when she was younger, Newton Faulkner, Ed Sheeran, arguably David J from Bauhaus when he was younger and Jess Glynne, even if red hair’s not stereotypically considered to be an English trait. Marvel’s Elsa Bloodstone could count, but in her earlier appearances she had blonde hair. Betsy Braddock’s also a natural blonde and so is her brother, though you could say that I’m very much wrong in here.

But it still reinforces a message that rufosity’s the domain of Irish and Scottish people, especially in the Marvel canon. Even if not all redheads are Scottish or Irish themselves within Marvel itself, it still reinforces a particular view about these people. A view that some Irish and Scottish people internalise themselves, not that they’re any less red-haired either. It’s likely why outside of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic media, redheads are rarely ever Scandinavian in American media. I’m thinking in the lines of things like Age Of Mythology being the rare instances where you can find Scandinavian redheads in any way, the other one being God Of War when it comes to its own version of Thor. Ditto Latin American blonds, even when Cameron Diaz is a thing in real life.

Despite Cameron Diaz’s prominence and moreso when she was younger, given her father was Cuban himself, whenever Latin Americans show up in American media they usually tend to have dark hair. Beatriz da Costa might be the only instance that I can think of in American fiction who’s not dark-haired herself, one would wonder why there are so little to no natural Latin American blonds and redheads within DC and Marvel. They do show up in Latin American media, both nonfiction and fiction, but they’re very rare in DC and Marvel, if they show up at all. I do know that white Latinos exist and characters like Julio from X-Factor reflect on this in a way, even if natural blond and red hair aren’t necessarily common in Latin America either, but the fact that these two traits show up in Latin American comics among fictional characters acknowledges their existence.

The character I came up with is Piedad Franulic Kristof, a Chilean woman of Croatian and Hungarian descent. She’s analogised to Tora Olafsdotter in that both of them are light-haired women who manipulate the cold, but she’s also based on Nijimura Kei in that they’re resentful towards the people they serve (the Orvilles in Piedad’s case) and Kei also manipulates the cold herself. Piedad more specifically has mousy blonde hair which can also be regarded as light brown hair just the same, though it’s lighter than that of Colin Sallow. I feel it’s easier to think of Latin Americans as not only commonly dark-haired, but also somewhat darker than that of white Americans is the way the latter views the former and vice versa at times, when it comes to othering one another. Like if the prototypical American’s of either Western or Northern European descent, then the prototypical Latino’s of indigenous descent.

Blond hair’s more commonly found among countries like Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, even if not all Britons, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Norwegians and Danes are necessarily natural blonds, let alone for life. Like I said John Reid had blond hair when he was younger, Liam Howlett had blond hair when he was a young boy. But this is also where most white Americans come from, so to the prototypical white American resembles the prototypical Northern European. The prototypical Latin American is someone who’s either of indigenous or Spanish descent, and the Spanish are often assumed to be dark-haired themselves. Not that the Spanish are any less dark-haired in reality, but the way Americans conceptualise both Latinidad and Spanishness is different from how these people view it in themselves.

It should be noted that there are Latin Americans of Polish, German, Dutch, Croatian, Hungarian and Ukrainian descent, Piedad is a Chilean woman of both Croatian and Hungarian descent. So it reflects on this in a way but perhaps outside of Latin American fictions, this is very nearly nonexistent in US media. There’s a version of the Babysitters Club where one of the blonde characters got made into a dark-haired Latina, but I feel this is one of the few instances that kind of reflects on it in their own respective ways. But I feel when Latin Americans are in the US themselves, whether in real life or in fiction, they will be othered in a way they aren’t back in Latin America. Even if not all Latinos are practising Catholics or even Catholics in general, if being American means being Protestant, then the othering’s bound to happen anyways.

It wouldn’t be the case in countries like Ireland, Poland, Croatia, Austria, Slovakia, Czech Republic and France, where Catholicism’s part of the cultural mainstream there. Not so much in countries like America, Britain, Canada and Finland where Protestantism’s part of the cultural mainstream there instead, so even white Latin Americans would be really othered in those places. It may not always be the case within DC and Marvel, but being American institutions, it’s going to play a role in some way. It’s not hard to see how and why Latin Americans, real or not, are going to be othered in American culture. It’s not that the Baptist church, Methodism, Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism are nonexistent in Britain, Finland, Latvia, Canada, Sweden and Norway, but America has been the hotbed of world Protestantism until recently.

If because due to Christianisation, the African countries are catching up real quickly here. Especially places like Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya, though they’re not without considerable Catholic populations to boot. But even if denominations don’t always get factored into the equation, Latin Americans are still going to be othered in America in other ways. So that’s why Latin American superheroes like Beatriz and others are portrayed the way they are in American ACG media, the portrayal’s not always racist but there’s a kind of implicit othering in some cases. Central Asians are weirdly very underrepresented in US fictional media in any capacity, given they don’t neatly fit into American boxes regarding not only both East Asia and West Asia, but also Eastern Europe.

This becomes particularly the case with both Kazakhs and Krygyz, because although many of them look East Asian, they also aren’t from somewhere further east like in both Indonesia and Malaysia, speak Turkic languages and actually have a degree of Western Eurasian DNA themselves, so they don’t neatly fit American prototypes for what Muslims ought to be. Both Uzbeks, Tajiks and Turkmens may fit American conceptions of Islam in many regards, but sadly they remain underrepresented in the American imaginary. Instead of actually representing Uzbeks, Tajiks and Turkmens this time around in both DC and Marvel, DC creatives like James Gunn and Greg Weisman would rather use proxies like Jarhunpurians and those from Qurac instead. Ditto Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians and even Palestinians to my knowledge.

There are Marvel writers who do kind of represent those coming from Lebanon in a way as it is with Sina Grace, but then again a good number of Marvel writers like Chris Claremont are Zionist, to the point of portraying even the worst Jewish character like Magneto more sympathetically than he would with an Arab like the Shadow King. David Haller, when he initially appeared, was the illegitimate teenage son of Charles Xavier and an Israeli national, who got possessed by the Shadow King. So with the combined efforts of Xavier and somebody else, David Haller finally got exorcised. But I don’t read comics that often, much less the DC and Marvel variety at this point, so I’m going by what I recall reading. But it kind of insinuates a message that Arabs are ought to corrupt minors like David Haller, well at the time so.

And more recently in Absolute Superman, West Asians Ra’s Al-Ghul and his daughter Talia have invaded the US. Even as a Christian it’s kind of telling that it plays into a kind of xenophobic sentiment, but aimed specifically at West Asians regarding their supposed ability to ruin and undermine western civilisation (as represented by DC’s quintessentially Midwestern town Smallville). Palestinians are very underrepresented in US fictional media, especially when the US itself has a strong Zionist streak, that it’s this easy to demonise them. Even weirder still is that Palestine actually houses the world’s oldest Christian community, coupled with that there are some Israelis like Paul Wexler suspecting them to be the actual direct descendants of the ancient Israelities in a way Ashkenazi Jews aren’t.

Arthur Koestler, a Jew, was one of the earliest to point out that Ashkenazis aren’t related to the ancient Israelites as much as they are to the Khazars, a long-lost Turkic people. Even studies pointing out that Ashkenazis are the descendants of Judaised Caucasians, Slavs, Greeks, Turks, Iranians and East Asians (who may be Mongols, the folks who were close to the Turkic tribes) would still bring up the Khazar ghost in some way, given the Zionist insistence on the idea that Ashkenazis are the direct descendants of the Israelites. Actually Ashkenazis being more closely related to Slavs seems more plausible, not only because their folkways are more Slavic than West Asian, but also because they lived in Slavic lands far longer than they do in West Asia, as to be Slavicised over time. Mr Wexler even said that Yiddish really is a Slavic language with a heavy Germanic influence.

Not helped by that Ashkenazi Jews lived in Slavic countries like Slovakia, Poland, Belarus and Russia for so long, that they’d inevitably be fluent in Russian, Polish, Slovak and Belarusian which would’ve further Slavicised Yiddish despite having Germanic influence too. And Yiddish sounds like a Polish speaker trying to speak German themselves, or sing in my case since I listened to a duo singing the song ‘Tumbalalaika’ which seems like a German song with a Polish accent. (This is what you get for finally listening to something in Polish.) The profound Zionist streak that a number of DC and Marvel writers exhibit is likely why there are practically no Palestinian superheroes in both the DC and Marvel canons, why somebody like Kitty Pryde gets away with the very thing that got a Native American like John Proudstar into trouble and so on.

It’s as if being Jewish is enough to automatically absolve somebody of their wrongdoings, which reflects in the way the western world continues to support Zionist Israel at any time. It’s kind of also like this in something like Power Mark, where a number of characters who aren’t Biblical characters who get to be flawed are a Russian boy, a Chinese woman (Power Mark’s sister) and a Latin American girl, but the Jewish boy’s portrayed as rather flawless. I feel as if western countries readily support Zionism is partly because Jews are a kind of model minority’s model minority, if you know what I mean, as opposed to the way the Chinese, Indians and others are regarded as such, especially if they’re not only Gentile but also significantly more numerous and oppose western values themselves in some manner.

This might explain the orientalist othering these people often get in western fictions, where a westernised East Asian like Jubilee is considered a good guy but not the Mandarin. Or for another matter, characters coming from former European colonies like Vietnam (Karma) and the Philippines (Galura, Wave), which kind of insinuates the message that western countries are the gold standard for what’s good and progressive. Even when both China and India were far ahead of the west when it comes to women wearing trousers, West Asian countries and Russia having more women in STEM, China having had women play ball games in ancient history, Japan continuing to have a solid tradition of and industry for female readers of comics and so on.

Or even the odd fact that Japan’s ahead of the west when it comes to publishing professional M/M fiction out in the open, Patalliro being an old anime that features a sympathetic gay couple at the front. I’m getting off-topic but when it comes to media like DC and Marvel as well as their writers, being westerners they often promote western worldviews, sympathies and preferences, sometimes deliberately but more often than not unconsciously because of what they’re socialised and exposed to for years. The underrepresentation of other former communist western nationalities like Estonians and Latvians has to do with conflating them with Russians proper, even when at this point Estonia and Latvia are currently capitalist, that it shouldn’t be a stretch to actually introduce Estonian and Latvian superheroes right now.

Maybe not as America ended up alienating these two, them being staunch European Union members at this point, but I feel it’s possible to create an international media franchise that features actually Estonian and Latvian characters at the front and centre this time. It’s kind of obvious that as a lot of DC and Marvel writers are Americans, they’ll inevitably and usually have pro-US sympathies, sentiments, mindsets and sensibilities that get reflected in the stories they write about. Whether if it’s the othering of nonwesterners like Africans, West Asians and East Asians, the continued underrepresentation of certain nationalities and ethnicities (Latvians, Estonians, Georgians, Kazakhs, Slovaks, etc), or the propagation of western values and sensibilities, it’s there with many DC and Marvel writers for years.

Although the character of Linhildur might play into the redhead with fire powers stereotype in a way, she also represents a kind of Scandinavian character not commonly represented in US fiction stories. So far the only Scandinavian character with a fire ability is Karl Hansen from the Wildcats stories, whereas Norwegians like Sigrid Nansen and Tora Olafsdotter both have ice-based abilities. And even if Norway has glaciers, so does Chile and Chile’s close to Antarctica. It’s not a coincidence that both DC and Marvel writers habitually give fire-based abilities to Latin Americans, as if they’re so hot-tempered they’ll burst into flames anyways, when it comes to characters like Dante Pertuz, Firebird, that tattooed guy and Beatriz da Costa, even if it’s not true for all of them. Magma could also count in a way, as she has power over volcanism herself.

And she’s also a Brazilian citizen by the way, though similar things can be said of Iceland too. But it still plays into a kind of American conceptualisation of Latin American nationalities and countries, regardless if countries like Argentina and Chile both beg to differ as they’re closer to the South Pole as to get cold and dark around June and July, that Chile has glaciers says a lot about the missed opportunity to have a Chilean version of Ice this time. Sunspot being able to manipulate solar energy himself plays into the American belief of countries like Brazil having nearly constant unlimited daylight hours, but even if it were true and the same can be said of a certain Peruvian Overwatch character (I think), one would wonder why there’s no Argentinian character at either DC or Marvel who manipulates darkness themselves because it gets dark in Argentina every June and July.

It’s kind of depressing to think that in 2025 there are still no Namibian, Uzbek, Tajik, Kazakh, Armenian and Georgian superheroes and even supervillains at either DC or Marvel, when it comes to Georgians these characters come from somewhere in Batumi, Tbilisi or Gori. Not somewhere in Savannah, Atlanta or Douglasville, Georgia here is a country in the Caucasus. Latveria is real but not Slovakia, Transia is real but not Slovenia. So logically Wakanda is real, but not Cameroon. Qurac is real, but not Syria. What I’m saying is that Latveria, Transia, Qurac and Wakanda are treated as if they’re real countries in Marvel and DC, but for some reason their real-life doppelgangers are nonexistent in their place. You could actually travel to Ljubljana and even stay there for long after acquiring EU citizenship, but Transia will take its place in Marvel stories instead.

Singapore is so nonexistent in the Marvel canon that Madripoor takes its place instead, even when you could actually go there to Singapore yourself. Some of my relatives have done this more than a decade ago, you can even access to Singaporean websites too. Singaporeans speak English like Americans, but Madripoor is used in its place in Marvel. You should get an idea of how underrepresented Singaporeans are in Marvel, or for another matter Malaysians and Burmese since I can’t name a single character from either Malaysia or Myanmar in both DC and Marvel. Ditto Laotians, Cambodians get some representation in the forms of Rose Wilson and Sweet Lili. But I suppose no such equivalent exists for those from Kazakhstan, even to this day that Kazakhstan might as well belong in the world of Elseworlds and What If.

But countries like Qurac are serious business, despite being technically nonexistent in the real world.

On the lack of Estonians in DC and Marvel

Or at the least the lack of any famous Estonians on par with their Russian counterparts there, where I feel they wouldn’t just be conflated with Russians proper (moreso when the Soviet Union was a thing), but also that they’d be immediately outed for having any possible communist sympathies back then. Even if countries like Estonia and Latvia have finally transitioned to capitalism lately, they’re still weirdly underrepresented in Marvel and DC. I feel it’s much easier for American writers like Jude Winnick to unconsciously have South Korean characters around in place of their Estonian counterparts, or Filipinos for another matter, that despite Estonia and Latvia being technically capitalistic at this point, Americans would rather represent its staunchest, earliest allies over its more recent ones.

This is also why there aren’t any prominent Ukrainians in either DC or Marvel, it’s as if America’s interests in its new allies are oddly conditional and even performative, it’s like they want to stand up to Russia but tend to continually not represent Ukrainians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Moldovans and Latvians despite their newfound penchant for capitalism. Another is a tendency to put prior storytelling canon above recent political and economic developments in these countries, to the point where they didn’t effectively remove the ghost and corpse of the Soviet Union, they just removed the external signifiers of it whilst keeping the corpse around for some reason. America would rather much invest in its earliest allies like Britain, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, above the newly capitalist Baltic countries, which is telling why there’s not a single prominent Latvian in either DC or Marvel.

It’s weird trying to name a single Ukrainian in the Marvel canon, let alone a supervillain or superhero, that despite America being technically sympathetic to Ukraine, it’s weirdly conditionally performative. Deep down inside that when it comes to the insistence of upholding the status quo, they’d rather represent Russians to this day, instead of sincerely representing Ukrainians, Romanians, Moldovans, Slovaks, Czechs, Poles, Georgians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Armenians. America’s interest in the other former communist countries, especially those that are neither Vietnam nor Cambodia, is painfully conditional and superficial, because America would rather invest in either its allies or the countries it has invaded, over the ones that got invaded by Russia. Americans’ interest in Ukraine is superficial really, or perhaps the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania for another matter.

To the point where despite being technically sympathetic to Ukraine, America never really got over the ghost of the Soviet Union this way.

Emeralds

Considering that this game’s kind of influenced by Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, despite being an ostensibly superhero-detective story, it seems logical to have a Kakyoin Noriaki analogue here. He’s pretty much an Estonian financial adviser going by the name of Illmar Tuglas and has some of the same abilities as Kakyoin’s stand Hierophant Green does, to further the similarities between the two Illmar often wears green (though Kakyoin himself doesn’t always wear green depending on the colour illustration). Interestingly he’s actually based on a colour illustration of Kakyoin with blond hair, but then again Araki Hirohiko isn’t always this consistent with his characters’ hair and clothing colours. Giorno’s sometimes shown as having white hair, Trish Una’s often shown with blonde hair and there are instances where Hirose Yasuho has blonde hair as well.

He could give Kakyoin blue hair and it might have happened before, but he’s also from an earlier school of thought where it wouldn’t matter what hair colour the character showed up with, readers were expected to identify them by other traits and not by hair colour. The way the Jojo characters are portrayed in both the direct to video animations and the subsequent television productions proves this point right, where it seemed with Kakyoin’s first animated appearance he actually had brown hair then. The Clamp fanfiction kind of follows this portrayal, as with a blond Jean-Pierre Polnareff. Or Abdul in yellow clothing for another matter, but it’s still telling that they’re still recognisable going by other traits. Identifying Japanese ACG characters by hair colour is actually a more recent innovation, given characters like Kakyoin do show up with contrary hair colours from time to time.

And even if some characters are designed with contrary hair colours in mind, they’re not necessarily intended to be western, especially characters like Naruto may have their Japaneseness reflected in other ways (particularly sensibility and Japanese perception of phenomena and people). Even if Uzumaki Naruto was designed with blond hair in mind, he’s not necessarily the westerner’s idea of a blond as he’s portrayed as something of a delinquent possessed by a fox spirit. In the sense that he’s very much an outsider’s outsider, whereas in American media blond characters will almost always be portrayed as one of the cool kids. Which tells you about how the Japanese see blond hair as: not necessarily unattractive, but always strange and can be kind of preternatural. In real life, this would be informed by those with albinism, white foreigners, fashionable people and delinquents.

It’s not necessarily unappealing but it is strange to the Japanese, however I’m getting really off-topic here regarding the way blond characters are portrayed in Japanese ACG media. Illmar Tuglas also represents another underrepresented character type in western ACG media: that of Baltic peoples, countries and cultures, as it is with its Japanese counterpart Estonian characters do exist. But in the case with western ACG media, this is often overshadowed by Russia which was America’s de facto rival during the Cold War, to the point where there’s a preponderance of Russians in the Marvel and DC canons. But not much attention’s paid to those coming from Georgia (the country, not the state), Armenia, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, mostly because they’d be subsumed by their Russian counterparts by then.

Ditto Romanians, Czech, Poles, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Serbians, which would explain why there are Transia, Sokovia and Latveria in the Marvel canon, but no Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia. Maybe I’m wrong here but it does explain why it’s kind of hard for me to name an Estonian character from either DC or Marvel when there’s practically none at all, whereas there’s no shortage of Russians coming from either publisher. Maybe I’m still wrong but there’s really no prominent Estonian character at all from either DC or Marvel, given America had bigger fish to try when contending with Russia over being one of the dominant superpowers during the Cold War. And even then an Estonian character would have to join an American team to prove that they are a good person, especially for as long as they don’t subscribe to Soviet style socialism. Otherwise they’ll be immediately suspect, given Colossus and Natalia Romanova both emerged at the height of the original Cold War.

But since we live in a world where America’s in steep decline so it’s now feasible to make a video game where the American market has grown irrelevant, if it weren’t for Donald Trump angrily issuing taxes over Chinese, European, Canadian and Russian products. This means having to target these markets more aggressively and deliberately, given America’s increasingly no longer viable as a marker of international success. So you’d have to design characters in a way that even appeases these markets from now on, sort of like how Hollywood movies have come to pander to the Chinese a lot. Now that America’s increasingly less powerful, we might as well target the game more to those international audiences instead. Not to mention with US influence being undone, stronger foreign influence is the needed alternative.

As for Illmar Tuglas himself, he’s pretty much a financial advisor to Graham Knightley’s father. Yes, the guy who’s related to the murderous salesman with the preternatural ability to explode people by touch. He’s kind of the opposite of Graham Knightley in some regards, because one of them is blond and quiet. The other is dark-haired and more talkative, Illmar’s not a particularly flamboyant man. Not that he doesn’t enjoy fun at all, but his idea of fun’s pretty much fishing, reading up on finances and business, playing football and looking after pet pigs. Despite his rather flamboyant dressing (that is green and purple), even if he’s not necessarily a man’s man, he’s still pretty much closer to the average man in some regards. Graham Knightley seems more playful and kind of childlike, even childish in some regards. As in he loves going to theme parks, partying and seems unmanly, despite not dressing in jewel tones.

Given that Graham Knightley’s based on Kira Yoshikage and his connection to cats is largely implicated, especially when it comes to his middle name being Leopold (play on leopard, he even has a leopard patch on his suit) and his mother’s maiden surname being Pussmaid (it’s a real surname), so Illmar Tuglar’s connection to Kakyoin Noriaki’s also implicated in another way because he wears a pearl and emerald choker, dresses in green (though sometimes Kakyoin himself’s shown to wear blue and black in other illustrations) and in another occasion, wear emerald-encrusted bracelets. Maybe I could change it into merely an emerald-encrusted choker because a row of pearls would be too hard to illustrate for some people, but it still keeps the connection to Kakyoin Noriaki intact. As I said before, Illmar bears a similarity to an illustration of Kakyoin with blond hair.

But given there’s a preponderance of blond-haired, blue-eyed characters in ACG media that perhaps giving him green eyes makes for a good change of pace, though it’s possible DC’s Oliver Queen has also been depicted as having green eyes before. But then again both characters tend to be blonds who wear green, so having green eyes would be a logical extension of this in a way. It’s even odder still to think that characters who’re supposed to be blond-haired and green-eyed (well at some point) end up with blue eyes eventually, as it is with DC’s Stephanie Brown before made odder by the fact that magenta and purple are the actual opposites of green, not red because if you take out green between red and blue, you get something purplish instead.

Because green is the actual middle ground between red and blue, thus making purple white minus green which is an odd scientific fact. The actual opposite of red is really closer to light blues than to greens, that if you take out red from blue and green, you get a light blue colour in its place. If something absorbs a lot of light blue light, you get something reddish instead and if something absorbs a lot of red light, you get something light bluish instead as well. It makes for a weird scientific fact that the actual opposite of red is a light blue colour, to the point that they play off each other better than red would with green. Well there’s a blond character in green from the Jojo canon and his name is Pannacotta Fugo, even if he’s not always depicted as such whenever Araki Hirohiko himself depicts him in his own illustrations. So he’s really in good company here and arguably DC’s Guy Gardner at this point just the same, especially when portrayed by Nathan Fillion in the latest Superman movie by Marvel alumnus James Gunn. Yep, two more blond guys in green.

This is also possibly why there’s not a lot of prominent dark-haired characters in green from either DC or Marvel, over at Marvel there are just Electro, Rogue and possibly a few more. DC has well Green Lanterns Hal Jordan, John Stewart, Boodika and Kyle Rayner, and then Shrinking Violet from time to time. But both publishers have no shortage of redheads in green since on the DC side, you have Jimmy Olsen (in his earlier days), Poison Ivy, Maxima (who’s a kind of DC Jean Grey), Kinetix, Cyclone, Guy Gardner as usually portrayed, Barbara Gordon (sometimes), Knockout and Micro Lad. Then on the Marvel side, you have Sean Cassidy and his daughter Theresa, Jean Grey and her daughter Rachel from time to time, Medusa in fleeting moments, Rahne Sinclair (sometimes) and possibly a few more that I may not know of.

There are some blonds in green from the Marvel side of things like its version of the Enchantress, Meggan and maybe a few more, but that’s just it and DC also has a paucity of blonds in green. The most notable one to date is Oliver Queen, maybe a few more as well but that’s all there is to them. Illmar Tuglas being a blond man who dresses in green might not change things much, whether on his own or with other characters around, but I suppose the more the merrier when it comes to seeing both green-eyed blonds and blonds in green. Also facially speaking, he’s a masculinised version of the French singer Sylvie Vartan. A blonde-haired French singer at that, just as Mylene Farmer is like a French Chappell Roan, despite predating her by decades.

Kind of like how and why Tommy Heikkinen is based on Nina Hagen, mind you Finnish is also a Finno-Ugric language like Estonian. Both of them were former Russian territories, just as close to Russia as they are to Scandinavia proper. So far only one of them’s based on a woman who came from a place that was allied with Russia in the past during the height of the original Cold War, well as far as I know about it, but it’s kind of interesting that Tommy’s a suspect and a criminal whereas Illmar is merely a civilian who gets caught in the crossfire.

It’s still there

From my experience perusing and discovering both devotionals and Bible reading websites from countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, Portugal, Hungary, Croatia, Poland, Britain, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Romania, Finland and Russia, whilst it’s true that Europe is less religious than America but I’d argue Europe seems less religious than America is because it doesn’t have a particularly substantial Christian right wing bloc comparable to the United States. It could vary between countries but even then I don’t think many of them have this much of a substantial Christian media industry the way America does, like how practically none of them have their equivalents to things like DC Talk, Veggie Tales, so on and so forth, let alone be famous outside of their borders.

The Chronicles of Narnia, Divine Comedy and the like may count, but they’re from the past and it’s kind of hard coming up with what amounts to the European equivalents to Veggie Tales and DC Talk, and even if European countries do have their own Christian media industries they still wouldn’t be on par with their United States counterpart in terms of quantity, scope and scale. Thus contributing to the perception that Europe is very secular compared to America, even though by going to online Bible readings and devotionals from these places reveals something to the contrary. In the same way that China might be less anti-Christian than one realises, especially from going to its own online Bible readings and devotionals, or for another matter India, Vietnam and Indonesia. And even if they have their own issues with Christianity, this hasn’t stopped Christian ministries from being operational in any way.

This hasn’t stopped Christian ministries from growing and popping up whenever one discovers or finds them at all, to the point where they seem to be this way due to something like media illiteracy. Media literacy is when somebody critically analyses the way media communicates messages and portrays or conveys ideas and sentiments to people, which may reveal certain biases that may not be found in media coming from said country this nation’s talking about (i.e. China, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Indonesia, Cambodia, India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Greece, Italy, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Ireland and etc). Countries like India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia and China have more of a Christian presence than one realises, so logically countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania still have more of a Christian presence than one realises. They seem less Christian because they don’t fit American expectations of Christian religiosity/fidelity.

Not just in terms of numbers/quantity (though in China, Vietnam and Indonesia it is growing), but also the apparent lack of a substantial Christian socioeconomic bloc that contributes to the perception of being less Christian than America is with the odd exception of Israel. I could be wrong about countries like Germany, Ireland and Italy, but as it stands I don’t think all three of them have a substantial right wing Christian subculture the way America does. That doesn’t mean they’re this irreligious as they do have Christian ministries putting out online devotionals and Bible readings, as much as they don’t have a substantial insular Christian subculture the way America does. They do have Christian media industries but it’s not as large as the one in America, I don’t think European Christians have their own versions of people like Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson and James Dobson, let alone enjoy the same scale of influence these three have outside of their borders.

A Christian media industry exists in each respective European country, but it’s not particularly substantial compared to the US counterpart, thus contributing to the assumption (or perhaps presumption) that Europe is less religious than America. Or for another matter, China, Vietnam, India, Malaysia and Indonesia. If God keeps a remnant of his in Europe, then they will persist and go on for long.

Wolves in religion

I admit to being skeptical of the idea that Christianity demonised wolves since other religions are guilty of similar things. Especially Zoroastrianism (a native Iranian religion who also ironically worshiped dogs) and Hinduism (especially in the Rig-Veda*). Even some Native American communities don’t always have a high opinion of dogs and wolves (to whatever extent) and they even associate those with witchcraft from what I recall.

From what is known, some of the societies that revered wolves also tend to have a fascist nature or future. Especially Japan, Turkey, Italy and Germany. Again not always the case (when it comes to Estonia having a wolf culture before, same with Mongolians) but damningly so when some cultures that do revere wolves also tend towards fascism at some point or another.

*The Rig-Veda mentions killing the dog-sorcerer, the owlet-sorcerer and the vulture-sorcerer I  think.