Evangelical Hypocrisy

I think it bears repeating that many, if not all, Evangelicals are rather hypocritical when it comes to the things they find objectionable. When I mean by that, many more Christians objected to Harry Potter than they do with X-Men even though the latter’s more vitriolic towards Christians (most of the Christians portrayed there are massive bigots and murderers or something), to the point where atheists are clearly onto something. How can a Christian condemn Harry Potter and Dungeons and Dragons so much when they don’t apply that same attitude to things like Wonder Woman and Justice League?

Every few, if any Christians, find anything truly spiritually objectionable with superheroes despite the existence of otherwise ‘good’ demonic characters like Nightcrawler, Blue Devil, Kid Devil and Damian Hellstrom. Those who do, especially on Spirit Reports, are in the minority and are in some regards the more spiritually consistent of the two. I guess this is why so many Evangelicals like Narnia, deep down inside despite objecting to magic, they still yearn for it in some form or another. Narnia’s just one socially acceptable form, superheroes might be another despite getting more blatantly worldly over the years.

I don’t think many Christians are aware of what they’re doing, even if it hurts people’s trust in them, if because that would mean they’d have to really give up on those to lead a truly Godly life. They would gain more people’s respect, but that involves letting go of things that prove to be tempting to others like art nudes for instance. Or for another matter, superheroes as some of them tend to be really tied to the occult. Consistency is something I think many Christians take for granted, even moreso than secular and atheist people, since I think they really don’t know any better. Christians are even more miserable, if because they should know what they’re doing is wrong.

If you object to Harry Potter, you should also object to X-Men. Unfortunately, only a minority of Christians do it with superheroes at all and you’ll find this on Spirit Reports and the like. Kind of unfortunate in hindsight, since they should reject what’s wrong with the world but when it doesn’t seem so objectionable that they just take it for granted. That’s probably why they don’t object to superheroes that much.

Extremely bad

When it comes to X-Men standing in for ethnic minorities and nonwhite people in general, writers generally do a horrible job at it. Not just because most of the characters are white, but also because most of the writers there are white themselves. In the case with Storm, it gets more disappointing as she comes from a real African country (Kenya). Since Kenya exists in the real world, they should ought to do the research and get much of it right. For starters, Kenya is an East African country that uses both Swahili and English as the official languages with a good deal of Luo and Kikuyu among other languages. Its capital is Nairobi and its currency is the shilling, but it doesn’t just end there.

Due to British colonialism, many Kenyans, as well as Ghanaians and Nigerians, celebrate Boxing Day or the day after Christmas (though it’s St Stephen’s Day in other countries). As I realised, Storm never felt truly Kenyan. While it’s true not all Kenyans speak Luo, Swahili and Kikuyu (or any other Kenyan language) that fluently, it’s also true that things like Boxing Day are a big part of Kenyan culture. For some reason, we don’t get to see Storm eat or cook Kenyan foods like ugali and githeri. As I said before, it’s very disappointing since Storm hails from an actual African country so they should get the details right. Wakanda doesn’t exist, but Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Uganda do.

There are other African characters in X-Men such as Tempest, but even then they should either get the details write or hire Kenyan and Nigerian writers to do X-Men stories. Free Nigerian comics/cartoons exist on websites like Vanguardngr and The Guardian.ng, both of them give an idea of what Nigerian culture’s like and what the Nigerian sensibility’s like. For Kenyan comics, there are Bogi Benda and Shujaaz. But not all of it’s free online, so your best bet’s through free African comics on websites like The Guardian.ng, though these are Nigerian websites that I’m talking about.

Somebody has brought up the issue of cultural appropriation in X-Men comics, though nobody ever bothered talking about the elephant in the danger room that is Wolverine. Though Canadian in nationality, Japanese culture has been presented through him. Even though in reality it should’ve been done with Sunfire, who’s actually Japanese but sadly he’s nowhere as popular as Wolvie is. Ironically he’s the one who’d represent Japanese culture better, if because he’s Japanese himself and even today it gets repeated with non-Japanese characters again when it comes to Kate Pryde.

To be honest, I have done my fair share of cultural appropriation at some point. But I did learn from my mistakes, from my clumsy attempt at trying to be more Chinese I eventually grew to learn and enjoy writing in Chinese characters and learning Mandarin. It’s not that sophisticated yet, same goes for my Vietnamese. But it does bring up the question whether or not X-Men writers bother learning from their mistakes, as well as actively learning any non-Western and minority language. Not to mention the fact that there are so few X-Men writers of colour, the only ones I could think of are Peach Momoko and Vita Ayala, speaks volumes about the near-absence of any nonwhite, nonwestern perspective.

It’s getting better these days, but honestly I can’t think of any Kenyan, Nigerian or Filipino who has written any issue of any X-Men comic. As cartoonists and inkers maybe, but hardly as writers on par with British and American luminaries like Grant Morrison. When it comes to the portrayal of nonwhite, nonwestern characters it’s often a spotty record. Either they are stereotypes, Western ideas of what an exotic nonwhite woman’s like (as it is with Storm) or conduits for white characters like Kate Pryde and Wolverine in the case of Ogun. The paucity of nonwhite X-Men writers magnifies this problem.

What is mainstream, again?

When it comes to what constitutes as mainstream in the Anglophone comics sphere, it almost always refers to superhero comics but not newspaper cartoons, which are the kinds of comics more people read by chance. I even have the pleasure of encountering Cathy and Calvin and Hobbes in books that have little to do with comics in general, which makes them more mainstream than X-Men will ever be, despite spawning more merchandise than the former two do. Mainstream in the sense of being more readily encountered by chance especially in non-comics and non-geeky venues like newspapers and Chicken Soup For The Soul, with the possible exception of the Spider-Man comic strip these deal with either humour, political commentary or ordinary life.

Most ‘mainstream’ comics tend to be rather cultish things, in that they don’t sell above more than a hundred thousand plus copies that much. They also tend to be more restricted in their accessibility, whether if it’s through subscription services, annoying popup ads in piracy sites, comic shops or in bookstores. I have the pleasure of encountering comic strip anthologies in grocery stores for goodness sake, which goes to show you how accessible newspaper comic strips really are. It may not be true for all of them, but you can encounter them on websites for free. They’re even on newspaper websites like The Guardian.ng and Philippine Inquirer, though I’m pretty much speaking from experience.

To put it this way, things like Cathy constitute the pop music of comics whereas X-Men’s more like the Ramones. The Ramones have clout, but they’re not that as mainstream nor as commonly encountered on the radio the way you do with, well, The Carpenters and Steely Dan. Again, I’m speaking from experience but this sets the tone for what’s really mainstream and it’s not what geeks like. While Cathy may not spawn that much fanfiction and merchandise, it’s still more mainstream than X-Men comics are not just in terms of sales but because it’s something you can encounter outside of geeky circles and locales.

The vast majority of comics published by Marvel (or affiliated with it in some way) aren’t that readily accessible, for whatever factor, circumstance and reason. With the exception of the Hulk and Spider-Man comic strips, many Marvel comics aren’t that commonly encountered well as far as I know. Sometimes they might even be very expensive, sometimes even if they’re found online for free you’ll encounter annoying popups which ruin the experience. Sometimes you can only have access to them if you subscribe to a service, all of which make it harder for them to gain that much readers as much as they wanted to. Maybe they tried, but it’s only for a select number of comics they publish.

I think Steve Bolhafner brought up a similar point where he said many of the same things as I have, only with Dilbert and Garfield as his go-for newspaper cartoons examples but it still stands and holds up well. The only real reason why X-Men seems more mainstream is a matter of geek brand recognition, though it doesn’t hold up well when it comes to something like Garfield selling not just a lot of merchandise but also having several bestselling books in a row. Wouldn’t that make Garfield more successful than the X-Men will ever be, if the number of copies and merchandise sold ever got counted at all? Even if all other newspaper cartoons don’t make much merchandise either, they’re still more widely read than most superhero comics will ever be.

We’re talking about normal person mainstream, not geek mainstream which just reaches out to a handful. The sort of people who aren’t so dedicated to geek stuff, maybe not so much to begin with but still. Not saying that X-Men fans are autistic, but that there’s really not a lot of people who are into X-Men for this long. Though it could also be said that there’s not a lot of people who are lifelong Peanuts fans either, except that Peanuts have sold far more books than X-Men ever did. So there’s really a difference between something that has geek cachet and one with real mainstream cachet. Peanuts definitely falls into the latter.

I guess with many in the Anglophone comics sphere, they have a peculiar idea of what’s mainstream even though it really isn’t. Mainstream for them would be the things most geeks are into, not so much what most people are into. If it was the latter, it wouldn’t be X-Men and Batman, but rather Doonesbury and Cathy if you’re American. They may not always sell a lot of merchandise, but they sell far more book copies than X-Men graphic novels ever would. In fact, from my personal experience, many comic strip collection books tend to be cheaper as well.

Now that’s something that can easily lead to a wider audience, DC and Marvel have tried this but that would mean they aren’t competitive enough. Only a handful of their comics are for free online and officially so, while you can find free comic strips on newspaper websites like Philippine Star, Philippine Inquirer and The Guardian.ng. You can find three comic strips on GoComics.com, which’s something like the real Billboard Hot 100 of comics. Perhaps in a way DC and Marvel barely are these days, since they’ve come to pander a lot to a cult readership until recently.

While a cult audience is more devoted, a casual audience is more financially rewarding if you desperately aim at a wider audience. Perhaps this is where newspaper cartoons succeed at, surely the readership is more normie but it’s more successful at attracting casual readers this way. Now that’s something to consider when it comes to creating comics that appeal to a wider audience.

Ahead

The Legion of Super-Heroes revolves around the adventures of an intergalactic teen team, though the magazine has been rebooted a couple of times and still is so today. I felt that LOSH was kind of ahead of its time, perhaps in a way the X-Men magazines never got to be in the 1990s. It could be that LOSH wasn’t as popular as X-Men was, well at least during the 1980s and 1990s when X-Men rose in popularity. But that also gave subsequent LOSH writers more freedom to out existing characters as queer, something that didn’t get to happen with X-Men until much more recently.

It was speculated that at least two characters, Light Lass and Element Lad, were queer and then later writers would out them as such. I could go on saying that LOSH was well-ahead of the Batman magazines in having queer characters as well, something Batman comics would eventually do in between the 2000s and 2020s. Of course, there are certainly things about LOSH and others that didn’t age well. For all the talk X-Men has when it comes to having queer characters, Legion got there first (for something published by a big name publisher). LOSH isn’t that popular, but it does deserve more credit.

An extremely immodest proposal

When it comes to X-Men’s (and Marvel’s) Kate Pryde coming out as bisexual, it may’ve been teased and hinted before though there’s this part of me that makes me want to explore her sexuality in a different angle. Supposing if she wasn’t just merely friends with Illyana Rasputin but also has such a crush on her that she even masturbates to a photograph of her, and has Rahne Sinclair discovering this in horror that it seems even if she does get into romantic relationships with men it’s Illyana whom she has the strongest romantic and erotic feelings for.

To prove this, I’ll go a little further that should Illyana be straight and get married to a man to the point where Kate cries a lot when they kiss as if she lost a part of herself, the woman she loved (whom Illyana never reciprocated romantically) betrays her for somebody else. I guess some people who do love somebody feel hurt whenever they realise the person they pine for ends up with somebody else, that it’s the most painful feeling and experience to go through.

Charles Schulz has gone through this before, he loved Donna Wold but she ended up with another man and he with another woman. No wonder Charlie Brown pines for her and has heartbreak when she’s going away. What Kate Pryde’s going through when Illyana marries a man is no different, but it does turn ideas about Kate Pryde’s attractions to people on its head. Kate’s capable of being attracted to men, but when she’s caught dead masturbating to a picture of Illyana and sending love letters to her that’s when you realise who she’s really attracted to.

While there are some people who pair her up with Rachel Summers, I feel with her having a massive crush on Illyana suggests even if Kate is bisexual or lesbian there are people she’s sexually attracted to and those who she sees as a friend even if they’re of the same sex. Supposing if I get married to a scientist one day and then I befriend an old classmate, there’s one man I’ll be attracted to for life and one man who’ll just be my platonic friend. Even if most people are straight, there will always be men and women who will be friendzoned and those they marry or date.

It seems when it comes to the depths of one’s sexual or romantic attraction, I feel with shipping they’ve scratched the surface of this. Especially when it comes to the sort of men (or women) people are attracted to and those they merely befriend, with Kate masturbating to a picture of Illyana as a teen and merely befriending Rachel you’d realise why romantic attraction isn’t always the way you expect it to be.

Whites writing nonwhites and the like

There are websites and media dedicated to men writing female characters and these run into stereotypes and cliches like a never-ending focus on their breasts (I even read a story where a woman’s breasts bounce like jelly when hit by something), not so much about their hobbies and the like if there’s any at all. They’re also highly unrelatable to actual women, like why on earth would a female detective bother posing as a nude model to catch a criminal? Couldn’t she just have done it with her clothes on all the time? Not to mention some of the women who do willingly pose in the nude for art are artists themselves.

There’s no way a woman involved in law enforcement would bother posing in the nude in the name of art to catch a criminal, it’s so implausible and impossible that it’s unrealistic to begin with. Things like those compounded with the tendency to portray female characters in demeaning situations and roles does show a sexist portrait, they don’t come off as characters people will identify with and relate to. I guess in order to come up with something like whites writing nonwhites and the like, it would be more extensive and more damning when it comes to nonwhite women. I think I said this before.

Characters like Storm and Cheshire are nonwhite women evidently written by white people and play into white people’s ideas of what nonwhite, nonwestern women are like. In the case with Storm, as initially presented in Giant Sized X-Men, she was shown nude and worshipped as a goddess in Kenya which plays into colonialist ideas about Africa. Ironically due to colonialism, at this point Kenya has a majority Christian population and suspicious of paganism (and immodesty) so Storm as presented wouldn’t fare well there. Likewise Cheshire is Vietnamese and shown to have a habit of seducing people.

But the fact that there were Vietnamese women being prostituted during the Vietnam War and Cheshire was created not too long after has tainted and coloured the way she’s portrayed, even today some Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines and Thailand attract sex tourists a lot and where American soldiers father children with poor Asian women. So she’s going to be more sexualised than the other DC female Asian characters are, let’s not also forget that she has a child with the white Roy Harper out of wedlock. It does humanise her, but in light of her being a temptress and that there are mixed race children who are born out of wedlock between Southeast Asian women and American men has tainted this.

It does seem romantic and cute, but it’s not as rosy and romantic when bringing up the reality of American soldiers fathering children to Southeast Asian prostitutes. When you factor in colonialism, these take on a different, perhaps more uncomfortable tone. It’s not a nice association, especially when you have sex tourists around hanging out in the Global South in search of exotic sex. It’s not just the women that get this, female sex tourists would go to Indonesia and Jamaica for the same reason. Historically, it was Italy and Greece for northern European women so romance novels featuring Italian and Greek heroes take on a fetishistic tone this way.

These characters can be divorced from such an association, but they were initially created by an unconciously colonialist mindset. They’re exotic others who look and act the way they do because they’re conceived by white minds when coming up with a global south woman at all, it may not be true for all global south female characters. For every Lady Shiva and Shuri, there’s a Cheshire and a Storm playing up colonialist ideas of global south women. Especially when it comes to sexual objectification and exploitation in light of prostitution and colonialism.

Thoughts on race, culture and ethnicity

When it comes to coming up with nonwestern, nonwhite characters in both DC and Marvel comics as well as their respective fandoms there’s a new tendency to reimagine some existing characters as being of another ethnicity altogether. I guess when it comes to humanoid alien characters like Garth Ranzz/Lightning Lad, since their cultures are blank slates and with the added opportunity of racebending comes the ability to transpose an existing culture onto theirs. I can imagine Garth reminiscing of his favourite holiday (26 December, Boxing Day) and eating Jamaica patty with his older brother Mekt and his twin sister Ayla. To go further with him being Jamaican, unless if his parents immigrated somewhere he would default to Commonwealth (read British) spelling and words since Jamaica was a British colony.

Then again the same thing can be said of many Anglophone African countries, since they too were British colonies with the only real difference is that they’re not as westernised as Jamaica and Barbados are. Since Rokk Krin (Krinn) is portrayed as East Asian now, I can identify him as Chinese so he eats baozi and shanghai rolls with chopstick, writes in Chinese characters from time to time and his own mum does Chinese calligraphy a lot. But that could be me having some familiarity with Chinese culture, not just the food but also learning Chinese words and Chinese characters fairly often. I guess that’s the advantage of fictional locales like Central City and Star City as well as planets like Braal and Winath, they’re blank slates so you can impose your knowledge of or familiarity with a certain place over them.

When it comes to characters who come from actual nonwestern countries like Storm being Kenyan, there’s the possibility of more disappointment since Kenya exists they should do more research on and familiarise a lot with these countries. Assuming if Storm spent much of her childhood in Kenya, she ought to be this familiar with Kenyan culture and know a degree of Swahili (one of the national languages there and the lingua franca of East Africa). This makes me think she does come off as a white person’s idea of an exotic black woman, perhaps worsened by that Kenya’s portrayed in ways it really isn’t and more precisely, no longer is. Due to British colonisation, Kenya’s a Christian majority country so a supposedly pagan goddess like Storm would be more ostracised there.

Xian Coy Manh (early on, Shan) is Vietnamese, but for some reason based on my reading experience, she doesn’t speak or know some Vietnamese. Just as Storm doesn’t throw in Swahili words and sentences, Xian doesn’t pepper her dialogue with Vietnamese vocabulary and grammar. If a white European character like Piotr Rasputin peppers his dialogue with Russian words, so should Xian with the Vietnamese language. But that would mean X-Men writers aren’t that greatly familiar with the Vietnamese language, though that could be me learning the Vietnamese language. I think these kinds of characters are even more disappointing as they come from real places.

There ought to be more effort in learning about and familiarising oneself with these places, not to mention if one is this willing to learn the local language like Vietnamese for instance. While racebending existing characters isn’t any better either, since in the case with Batman fans this runs into stereotypes when it comes to people like Tim Drake being Asian and Jason Todd being Latino characters who come from actual foreign countries risk being this shallow especially if those writers aren’t too familiar with those countries they come from. I could also say the same thing about DC’s Cheshire/Jade Nguyen, since she too doesn’t speak much Vietnamese.

Well as far as I’ve read about her. I guess that’s why some people turn to racebending existing characters, if because if the characters who come from actual countries are shown to be really detached from the cultures their countries have they aren’t just stereotypes. They might as well be made into white people and nothing would change, if because their ties to their countries and cultures are already this superficial. Making Cosmic Boy culturally Chinese or Lightning Lad culturally Jamaican would actually be better than what Cheshire and Storm got, but that involves familiarising oneself with these cultures.

While the Internet has made it easier to find well some of the things one is interested in, I don’t think other writers bother prioritising it. They also don’t have much familiarity with these cultures and people, so that’s why Storm, Karma and Cheshire are written the way they are. Well to be generous, if they don’t bother learning those languages they should still get other aspects of their cultures right. Especially when it comes to customs, cuisines, dress and the holidays they celebrate. Kenyans celebrate Boxing Day every 26 December, again a byproduct of British colonisation.

Even then, this still proves my point about how little familiarity they have with these cultures and countries they’re depicting in their stories.

Just Like Me

At this point, there’s greater demand for ethnic and disabled representation than ever before. When the live action remake of the Little Mermaid film came, while there is racist backlash there is also video evidence of children responding positively to it. Comes to think of it, even if it didn’t revolve around racial representation I still think there are people who waiting to see themselves represented. Characters they aspire to be and relate to.

Or at least something that’s refreshingly not a tired stereotype, but it’s still telling when it comes to seeing oneself or others represented. When it comes to popular media, while nonfiction’s full of accounts of sailors (especially male sailors) as well as farmers and their cats they’re nonexistent in fiction. Now that’s the kind of representation I’d like to see, if because it’s new and different and that we don’t see sailors that and farmers often with cats in pop culture.

For another matter, witches with dogs since an association did exist in early modern Europe before and you still have people believing in this. There’s even a newsreport of a Ghanaian witch doctor who used dogs to attack a footballer like Cristiano Ronaldo, which goes to show you how certain people are this underrepresented in pop culture. So underrepresented they might as well not exist, if at all. Then there are other depictions.

Just as there are some black people who don’t feel flattered by depictions of them in a stereotypical fashion since it doesn’t represent them truthfully and authentically, I don’t feel flattered by depictions of certain characters for a similar reason. When it comes to Felicity Smoak, despite her popularity she doesn’t really represent me in any way.

I do know my way around computers, but I’m not that proficient in high tech. Felicity’s habit of babbling comes off as annoying and artificial, so artificial that a robot character would be more human and organic than she’ll ever be. And that’s my two pennies. It seems this character’s popularity lies with either tech geeks or cynically fangirls who lust after Stephen Amell, so much so they despise attempts at pairing his character off with someone else.

Someone else who isn’t like them, but that would mean they get really jealous. Then comes a a matter of cultural authenticity, where people aching for representation don’t get their cultures properly represented and respected. It could be cultural appropriation, especially if that culture or country’s portrayed as a conduit for a white character to explore but not somebody belonging to that culture or country.

That’s the case with Wolverine, Betsy Braddock and Kate Pryde in relation to Japan, but the equivalent doesn’t exist for actual Japanese mutants like Sunfire, Surge and Kwannon let alone outside of their relationships with white people. For another matter, I don’t think there are stories about Jubilee hanging out in a Chinatown eating Chinese foods daily and stuff.

For another matter, we don’t see Lady Shiva and Cassandra Cain eat Chinese food that often either despite being Chinese Amerians themselves. Perhaps this is made more embarrassing by the fact that I’m of partial Chinese descent and I actually study Chinese characters, while not a single Chinese DC or Marvel character does this.

In fact, you could make Lady Shiva and Cassandra Cain Swedish and it wouldn’t change much because their ties to China and Chinese culture are already shaky. They’re fine characters in their own right, but if you’re going to represent Chinese culture do it truthfully and authentically. Well any nonwhite non-Western culture in general.

I guess when it comes to representation, certain characters get overrepresented. In this case, we get no shortage of technically competent white blond people like Felicity Smoak, Barry Allen, Black Canary, Green Arrow, Chloe Sullivan, Patty Spivot and The Question. But not a single Asian seamstress or tailor, let alone one outside of Asian media and fiction.

The closest international equivalent would be nonfiction studies on Asian sewers working in Western countries, even then there really is a serious underrepresentation of Asians working in the garment and fashion industry in pop culture. What we usually get in pop culture is either the martial artist or the STEM type, but not a seamstress, footballer or rugby player.

Despite the existence of Son Heung-Min and him playing for both Tottenham Hotspur and the South Korean national football team, I don’t think we see Asian footballers that often in Western comics even though they exist in the real world. It could be a narrow point of reference to put it generously, but even then it’s telling which people get represented and which don’t.

There’s also no room for Asian rugby players and coaches in Western comics either, even though the half-Japanese Eddie Jones is a thing. To the point where people like him don’t even exist at all, which makes you wonder about gets represented and who doesn’t. There are people who’re dying to see themselves represented; but usually it’s either stereotypical, nonexistent or inauthentic.

There’s no shortage of Asian STEM geeks and martial artists in pop culture, there’s however a serious paucity of Asian footballers, rugby players, tailors and seamstresses in that same place. Not to mention, Asian cultures aren’t always authentically represented and respected in relation to Asian characters themselves. Japanese culture is explored through Wolverine and Kate Pryde, not through Sunfire and Surge.

Representation’s very much needed, but there are some areas waiting to be improved on. Especially if certain people aren’t represented at all.

Racebending characters

From what I’ve come to realise, while racebending characters isn’t inherently wrong in and of itself there are cases where it’s pulled off well. I actually saw one interesting racebent take on Frozen where it took place in Australia and reimagines the characters as Australian Aboriginals, it even went so far to give Elsa different powers. Not that snow and ice don’t exist at all in Australia, but if it did it’s only in just a few places. Much of Australia is desert and it’s also prone to bushfires, so it’s more sensible and actually cleverer to give Elsa fire powers instead.

This is good because it takes geography and culture into account, while an aboriginal cryokinetic Elsa could still work it wouldn’t be that practical considering that Australia’s mostly made up of desert and this prone to bushfires. (Though it makes one wonder why nobody bothered creating an Icelandic character with volcanic powers, since Iceland has a lot of volcanoes.) In the case with the live action iteration of Namor, as far as I know about him in the comics, he’s a white guy who’s tied to Atlantis. His live action incarnation is played by an indigenous Mexican man so the lore around him has changed.

It’s gone from Greek to Mayan, I’ve yet to watch it myself but it’s a good way to reimagine the character as that involves taking the actor’s culture into consideration. Racebending can work well if one take’s the character’s newfound ethnicity into consideration, but that involves putting a lot more thought into it than just simply changing the character’s appearance and worse playing into stereotypes. This is what happened to Marvel’s Betsy Braddock that there was a story that dictated her to look Asian, then came another writer who made it into a story about her swapping bodies with an Asian woman.

For all of X-Men’s anti-racist posturing, it feels really pretentious considering that the way the nonwhite characters and cultures are portrayed are evidently conceived by white writers. Whether if it’s Storm’s backstory steeped in colonialism or the orientalist reasoning of making Betsy Braddock Asian, though the latter was undone but it does make wonder why it took so long for it to be undone. For another matter, Batman fandom’s tendency to make Tim Drake Asian plays into Asian stereotypes.

Model minority, emasculated and nerdy. Cassandra Cain’s already something of a stereotype and reeks of being written by a white writer for so long that making Tim Asian worsens an existing problem (well he’s half Asian, half black in the Titans programme). I actually think a Native American Tim Drake would be more interesting to explore, since there’s not a single indigenous person who inhabits Gotham. Native Americans do live in cities in addition to reservations, so an indigenous Tim Drake living in Gotham’s closer to reality than one realises.

As for another DC character, Valentina Vostok, she’s Russian but I thought she’d be more interesting if she were Yakut. The Yakut are one of the ethnic minorities in Russia and indigenous to Siberia, but that involves realising that part of Russia’s based on stolen land since Siberia didn’t get conquered until the early modern era. The only prose mention of them outside of Russia, that’s other than the Internet, would be Farley Mowat’s The Siberians and even then it’s nonfiction. Okay Yakut representation in Russian media wouldn’t be any better either, but they’re practically nonexistent in Western media.

A Yakut Valentina Vostok sheds light on a demographic little known in the West, it’s also something Russian superhero publisher Bubble Comics have yet to it that if DC were to make Valentina Yakut it would make a big wave because it’s something we’ve never seen it before in superhero comics. That’s why making Valentina Vostok Yakut matter in a big way her white counterpart wouldn’t and will never do, we already have a glut of well-known white Russian superheroes like Natalia Romanova and Piotr Rasputin. It would be refreshing to see an indigenous Siberian for once.

Indigenous characters are pretty underrepresented in superhero comics, indigenous characters outside of America are even more underrepresented. At this point, to my knowledge, DC just has one Australian Aboriginal character in the form of Thylacine and no indigenous Siberian to date. Making Tora Olafsdotter Sami would be interesting, since the Sami people are a pastoralist culture native to Norway, Finland and Sweden. Why haven’t anybody ever attempted this angle, since it’s something neat to explore if there’s ever a Sami superhero at all? This proves my point that DC’s really short on indigenous non-Americans.

Then again the Sami don’t look that different from non-Sami Scandinavians and it’s not uncommon for them to intermarry each other, so making Tora Sami is like making Barry Allen Irish American. It doesn’t change the way they look, though it would change their respective cultural backgrounds. Irish Americans were subjected to ugly anti-Catholic prejudice upon their arrival to the New World from a famine stricken Ireland. Sami people are subjected to an ugly prejudice that involves not only stripping them of their practices but also their languages.

Then again with Barry Allen’s creator being Italian American, him being tardy and having guilt over his mum’s death one would only wonder if he’s essentially a crypto-Italian as Italians are stereotyped for being tardy. That and Catholic guilt if he were an Irish American it wouldn’t be a big stretch considering the stereotypes minus tardiness, though it’s not considered by many writers and fans considering they stereotype Italians as swarthy and Irish as red-haired. Even though, he got Italian stereotypes written on his head that if he ever has any Italian relatives it’s not a stretch really.

Well there goes the expected stereotypes, which is the tricky part of changing a character’s ethnicity. Helena Wayne gave way to Helena Bertinelli, but if you believe those in the Italian diaspora like Ragnell the latter’s a stereotype. Making Barry Allen Irish American would make him stereotypical in one way, in that it plays into the Irish cop stereotype as he’s a forensic scientist. But then again there’s not a lot of blond Irish and Irish American characters, well to my knowledge, so there’s hope for an Irish American Barry Allen. Well that involves actually knowing about Ireland and the Irish diaspora.

To make a racebent character actually work, sometimes you’d have to consider the characters’ cultures into consideration. Otherwise you’d get a careless mistake like with Betsy Braddock for a long time, so it’s not something you could simply change the character’s appearance and call it a day. But also digging deeper into their cultural backgrounds, what are their community’s customs are like and the like. That’s what Marvel did to Namor once he got played by an indigenous Mexican actor that they changed the lore to accommodate him.

Likewise with making Tim Drake indigenous, you’d have to confront the thorny problem of stolen indigenous land. In this case Gotham is built on stolen land, the very land some of Tim Drake’s ancestors inhabited since immemorial but went lost over time. Surely an indigenous Tim Drake who knows computers and bojutsu is a novel character, but it does make one wonder why aren’t there more indigenous characters living in Gotham? Other than Man of Bats and his sidekick, there’s not a single indigenous Bat character let alone with any real staying power the way Cassandra Cain does.

Tim Drake has any real longevity, so making him indigenous opens up a door of possibilities never done with Man of Bats. This is probably similar with Namor, except that he’s around longer in comics and he’s being introduced in a big way by being played by an indigenous Mexican actor. Changing the character’s lore for the film as a way to accommodate the character is one of the few instances of racebending that involves considering the characters’ cultures a lot. No doubt changing the characters’ ethnicities would upset people.

But in an era where multicultural representation is much needed and desired, where actors get cast as the characters they play sometimes considering the actors’ cultures is where they racebend the characters at all.

Written by a white person

(This was originally posted on and edited from Medium.com)

When it comes to what it means to be written a white person, it is to adhere to white people’s ideas of what nonwhite people are like. It becomes really off to some people of colour, especially if the character acts and behaves in ways they can’t relate to or find rather stereotypical and hollow. My go-for DC example is Lady Shiva, an expert martial artist. In the 1970s comics, she proclaims that she named herself after Shiva, the goddess of destruction despite being male in actual Hinduism.

The actual Hindu goddess of destruction would be Kali, which shows you how little they know about actual Asian cultures and belief systems. Okay, I’m a Christian and I won’t have full knowledge of Hinduism either but even then it reeks of somebody who isn’t so familiar with the various Asian cultures. One wonders why she never called herself Lady Mólìzhītiān, an actual warrior deity in Buddhism (the one South Asian religion that’s more commonly practised in East Asia).

Perhaps made even more relevant now that she’s outed as coming from China, this should be important when it comes to creating more believable Asian characters as well as portrayals of their cultures. From what I read (based on excerpts), she rarely if ever indulges in actual Chinese customs and practices. She may drink tea, but we don’t see her write using Chinese characters (simplified for contemporary mainland China, traditional elsewhere) and eat baozi.

What makes her Asian is that she practises martial arts, as if it were the sum and whole of her culture. This is also what plagued her own daughter, Cassandra Cain, since we rarely if ever seen her engaging in the deeper aspects of Chinese culture. Well any Asian culture. But they’re not the only ones who reek of being written by a white person.

Storm might be a good Marvel example, as what Cheryl Lynn Eaton pointed out, she was written by white people for a long time that she’s bound to be a white person’s idea of an ‘exotic’ black woman. To go further with her perspective, she’s a white man’s idea of an African woman but has no deeper connection to Kenya.

She doesn’t use Kenyan colloquialisms, she doesn’t speak Swahili to any degree, she doesn’t even listen to country music (which’s really popular in Africa and I have the pleasure of listening to it on a Kenyan radio station online every Monday) and she doesn’t celebrate Boxing Day. It’s the day after Christmas Day and it’s celebrated in places like Kenya due to British colonisation.

Her first appearance in Giant Sized X-Men reeked of Western colonialism, in the sense of portraying Africa as steeped in paganism even though ironically due to colonisation Africa is no longer like this. Considering how big the fear of witchcraft is there as well as the importance and popularisation of Christianity there, she’d be more feared and hated there too.

Again, this goes to show you how ignorant they are of African cultures. Let alone a real African country like Kenya, which makes me wonder why hasn’t a Kenyan ever written her? Or to put it generously, whether if they’re really intimated with Kenyan culture in any way. Wakanda is one thing, Kenya is another. There could be more examples of this.

Dick Grayson has been outed as Romani by Devin Grayson, but so far writers have yet to explore the deeper aspects of his ethnicity. Perhaps never, since we never see him running away from frogs in fear, find cats dirty, eat hedgehogs and the like. I’m basing this after a study called ‘The Traveller G****”, the word used for Romani would be considered offensive and outdated these days.

Even if not all Romani do this, I feel Dick Grayson’s tie to Romani culture is so superficial it could easily be written out. He’s functionally white because of this, he’s Schrodinger’s Romani. His ethnicity’s very much an afterthought and remains so, since writers barely indulge in the deeper aspects of his culture. If Storm and Lady Shiva are white people’s ideas of African and Asian women, Dick is only exotic when it’s convenient.

It gets worse when they’re not written by people of their ethnicities, to the point where you don’t just question their writers’ intimacies with nonwhite and non-Western cultures but also what would happen if they were written by people of their ethnicities. They barely ever indulge in the deeper aspects of their cultures, to the point where one could make them white and it wouldn’t change them much.

That is what it means to be written by a white person.