Written by a white person

There are some black people who feel certain black characters give off a strong air of suspicion in the sense of being written by white people, Cheryl Lynn Eaton felt that way around X-Men’s Storm and another felt the same way around Lucas Sinclair of Stranger Things. To take it further, Storm is what happens if white Americans wrote about an African woman. Not that it can’t be entirely not-racist but there’s the risk of not only cultural inauthenticity but also falling into stereotypes and expectations about what African women (ought to) be.

I think the problem with the way Storm is written is that she’s both othered in relation to other X-Men and also in some regards detached from actual Kenyan culture, since she’s from Kenya herself. We don’t get to see her celebrate Boxing Day (26 December, courtesy of the British as Kenya was a British colony) nor hear her speak Kikuyu and Swahili from time to time. She may not always be that bilingual, but even then she’s detached from her ties to Kenya.

Since she doesn’t use colloquialisms unique to Kenyan English, she could easily be a white American woman. I pretty much brought that up about DC’s Lady Shiva where she may have Asian ties but they’re so tenuous that one could make her Swedish and it wouldn’t change her that much, since we don’t see her write Chinese characters and eat baozi. Assuming she’s Chinese but even then she’s further apart from the country or culture she’s supposed to be a part of.

As for X-Men, when it comes to exploring Japanese culture it’s usually through a white character be it Wolverine, Kate Pryde or Betsy Braddock (until recently) as far as I recall. I don’t think there’s ever a story that explores Japanese culture through a Japanese character like Sunfire or Surge, even though they were born and raised in Japan and lived there far longer than Wolverine has. So it’s a form of narrative cultural appropriation where such a country is only explored in depth in relation to a white character.

Never or at best, hardly about a character who was born and raised in that place. I detailed a sort of racism where on one hand, the character is one’s impression of what a POC is but never that closely tied to the culture/country they’re supposed to belong to and on the other hand you have a foreign culture explored through a white character’s lens and life. It still has vibes of being written by a white person either way, to put it generously it’s all that they know and identify with.

But one with damning ramifications when it comes to who the readers are made to identify with and follow, as well as (unconsciously or accidentally) playing into their expectations of certain ethnicities. In the case with Lady Shiva, what makes her Asian is her ability to do martial arts but we never see her eat spring rolls, celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival and as I said before write Chinese characters.

What makes Storm African is her vague connection to a goddess, but we never see her celebrate Boxing Day the way Anglophone Africans do. One wonders why nobody bothered making her listen to country music, since it’s popular with Africans and there are African radio stations that play country music from my online experience. These characters really don’t have a deep connection to the cultures they’re supposed to hail from.

This strongly reeks of white writers creating characters of colour that unless if they actively unlearn it and go against racism, they will always reek of being culturally inauthentic. Then you have the Wolverines, Kates and Betsies of the world where a nonwhite culture is explored through them, while we don’t get that from Jubilee, Sunfire and Surge well not to the same extent the former three get. While some characters of colour receive only a superficial tie, it’s the white characters who are used as conduits to explore a foreign culture.

As if a foreign culture’s palatable if it were tied to a white character in some way or another, especially if that white character’s the protagonist of the storyline that it’s troubling why a similar treatment was barely if ever given to Sunfire. I don’t think these writers were careful with the kinds of tales they conjure, the characters they come up with and why there’s always the risk of falling into stereotypes and cultural appropriation when they do this.

They may be getting better at this point, though a Kikuyu-speaking Storm or a Cantonese-speaking Lady Shiva has yet to see the light of the day.

That’s a bad portrayal

For a story that’s about championing the oppressed, X-Men does suck when it comes to portraying those who are from ethnic minorities. Even when restricted to white people, I don’t think X-Men have ever portrayed the plight and joys of somebody who speaks in a minority language such as Basque or Skolt Sami. Those who speak in minority languages have faced discrimination and pressure to give up on those, the better to assimilate I suppose.

Lately, there’s some furore over the way Dani Moonstar is portrayed over the years. For those who don’t know, Dani Moonstar is a mutant with the ability to create illusions and a good marksman herself. There’s this one portrayal of her that makes her look like Disney’s Pocahontas, itself not a good representation of indigenous women. Especially when it not only distorts actual history and events, but also because it plays into stereotypes about indigenous women.

The stereotype being that they’re sexually available for white and non-indigenous men, they are exotic but this portrayal dehumanises them and puts them at increased rate of abuse (including rape and kidnapping). Those who survived rape and any other form of abuse say they’ve been compared to Pocahontas before, perhaps made ironic by the fact that if we believe the Mattaponi she was also raped and kidnapped.

This makes Disney’s Pocahontas and other portrayals (to some extent) all the more problematic as they promote a idealised distortion of what indigenous women are actually like, these portrayals along with cultural appropriation contribute to the abuse of indigenous women. Dani Moonstar’s not the only one who’s fallen into a racist portrayal at some point, so has Gen13’s Sarah Rainmaker. Gen13 being another young superhero team, but where Sarah Rainmaker has fallen into bad stereotypes.

Both as a sexualised indigenous woman and an idealised portrayal of what lesbians are like, especially as time passed where she became more conventionally feminine looking. Not that feminine looking lesbians don’t exist, but even then the way their love lives are like are nothing like the ones in porn. It may be getting better these days, but if the fury over Marvel’s King Conan is any indication once somebody falls into an anti-indigenous portrayal it offends them a lot.

Especially if somebody like Matoaka was abused in her lifetime.

A smoking romance

I remember writing that a good number of Olicity fans (fans who pair Oliver Queen and Felicity Smoak together) are romance readers, whether if they’re aware of it or not well there’s one Olicity fan who’s a romance writer. I don’t read romance that much, being more of a nonfiction reader as time goes on. But having read a romance at some point makes me think a good number of Olicity shippers are into those kinds of things, even if that’s not true for all of them.

Felicity Smoak, from what I remember watching, seemed like a rather contrived character. She has a habit of saying innuendos, which are supposed to make her awkward. She was a Goth hacker, which makes her even more contrived. Not that there aren’t any hackers who’re into Goth stuff like The Cure, but it reeks of the Goth girl meme so fetishised and objectified by /co/ posters and some geek men in general if you go to the website Fireden and search for those threads.

The only thing that doesn’t seem contrived is her romance with Oliver, though I think judging from the comments in this blog post, there seems to be a lot of women who identify a lot with her. Not so much that they’re always at the computer, but I think if they are romance readers they wouldn’t identify much with Laurel Lance. There was somebody who couldn’t identify with her because she was too perfect. That’s until she admitted to doing drugs and stuff.

Pardon if it makes me sound like a sexist, but I personally don’t know any woman who’s into tech, hacking and programming. I personally don’t know any Felicity Smoak and the closest to her is actually a man, my own father. But I do know two Laurels, their real names are Marianne Faithfull and the late Gia Carangi. Even if Laurel did become more fallible, there are others who can’t relate to her at all in any way. But it could also be a matter of jealousy in that if they identify so much with Felicity, they see Laurel as competition.

Especially when they lust after Oliver, that any other woman who goes near him is their enemy in some way or another. They may not always be aware of it, though it’s not always a matter of geek girl versus popular girl dichotomy. When it comes to writing romance and the like, the heroine has to be someone the readers will identify with. Not to mention she has to be a character who is enamoured by the hero, despite being rather plain.

Or in Felicity’s case, awkward (though in a contrived way) and most likely a little horny. Maybe that’s the real reason why they don’t identify much with Laurel Lance, who in addition to being competition isn’t somebody they identify with. From what I know and recall, Laurel never seemed to be that horny for Oliver the way Felicity is (or anybody else). I could be wrong, but when Felicity has a habit of staring at a shirtless Oliver and so do some fans that’s telling.

While it could be said that Felicity Smoak is a blank slate for some viewers/fans to project onto, personally speaking she’s an odd (or unique, if I’m generous) combination of every geeky guy’s fantasy girl and every romance novel heroine/fan fiction reader insert. Either that she went from one direction to the other, or that in my opinion she’s a weird combination of fantasy girl and reader surrogate in a way Laurel Lance isn’t.

While I think the former might be truer than the latter, I still think Arrow’s Felicity Smoak is a rather weird combination of two different ideals for women. Laurel was never like this, though that’s because I never watched a lot of Arrow to be honest. Whatever became of Felicity Smoak, she always struck me as a strange combination of geek fantasy girl and audience surrogate. Well, she might not be the only one who’s like that.

Her most immediate predecessor, within DC media, would be Smallville’s Chloe Sullivan. Like Felicity, she also pined over the protagonist though she ended up marrying somebody else. Coincidentally that man is Green Arrow and there’s a Black Canary who dressed a lot like her comics counterpart. It seemed even if Smallville writers did come close to pandering to Chloe’s fans, such a relationship never came to being the way it did for Arrow.

In the realm of comics, we have Gen13’s Caitlin Fairchild and X-Men’s Kitty Pryde. The latter started out as a kind of reader surrogate, albeit one who became more of a geek fantasy girl as time went by. Somebody like Kalinara said that Kitty panders a lot to a narrow audience, which I could say some of the same things about Felicity. If it’s true, that might be Olicity’s real undoing. Fairchild, as I recall reading, is a refinement of the character Kitty ended up as.

Fairchild even got undressed often and she’s a geek girl, a serious case of a geek fantasy girl if there ever was one. Felicity is pretty much Kitty Pryde in reverse, she started out as a geek fantasy girl and ended up becoming the audience surrogate for some people. Maybe not exactly the case as I make it out to be, but she did resonate a lot with a certain female audience in a way Kitty Pryde didn’t. Maybe not to the same extent, but it’s telling.

While Felicity did fall for other men, the man she fell in love with the hardest is Oliver and it’s clear that she has a habit of looking at him exercising while shirtless. Kitty falls for other men too, but she doesn’t have a habit of staring at men shirtless as far as I recall. This makes Kitty more of a geek fantasy girl than Felicity will ever be, which explains why some people hate Felicity. None of it’s to say I like Felicity.

What I’m saying’s that even if there are people who ship Kitty with other characters like Piotr Rasputin for instance, it didn’t become canon the way Olicity did. So much so that Kitty’s well within the geek fantasy girl territory, that’s a character who panders a lot to geeks and is actively sexualised and objectified for it. Kitty may have dated other men, but she never came close to objectifying another character the way Felicity did.

Which’s why Felicity worked too well as an audience surrogate. She was a character who pined after Oliver a lot and so do some people, so much so they paired her with Oliver and showrunners came to pander to them so badly it even turned off others. I think Patty Spivot never worked well as an audience surrogate, but because she’s too much of a geek fantasy girl for others to identify with. Maybe it’s not true for others, but it’s telling in some regards.

Felicity did, which might be Olicity’s own undoing.

Ethnic stereotypes and powers

While there’s a study that enlists the kinds of powers more commonly given to women, it doesn’t take ethnicity into account especially which ethnicity’s more likely to have these abilities and skills at all. It’s even goes without saying that while there are well-intentioned attempts at introducing multiethnic and multicultural superhero teams, for some characters they’re beholden to stereotypes. Characters like Siryn and Shamrock play into stereotypes about Irish people being red-haired and in the case of the former, drunk.

I’m not saying that there aren’t any red-haired Irish people, but the Irish people I personally know (online to be certain) aren’t big on drinking and I can’t name any red-haired Irish celebrity. Blond maybe, especially if you’re Ronan Keating and Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh. But I can’t name a single red-haired Irish celebrity, which again tells you how these characters play into stereotypes about Irish people made worse by that they’re not written by Irish people.

In the case with two Norwegian superheroes in DC Comics, both Glacier and Ice have ice powers and the latter was created to replace the former (in a way, by mistake). Even not all Scandinavian heroes in DC Comics necessarily have ice powers, it does play into stereotypes about Scandinavians being frigid. Not that there aren’t any glaciers in Norway at all and part of it is in the Arctic Circle. But for some reason, there’s not a single Argentinian character with ice powers.

Argentina’s very close to Antarctica so it gets really cold down south and it’s a missed opportunity when it comes to creating an Argentinian superhero with ice powers, likewise since Iceland has a lot of volcanoes it should make sense to create an Icelandic superhero with volcanic powers. It’s these quirks of geography that can and should inspire writers to create characters based on those, but due to ethnic stereotypes this may never come to be.

The biggest risk of say a Norwegian superhero as written by a non-Norwegian is that there’s a chance of playing into stereotypes, even if it happens accidentally, but it does tell you about how they see a certain ethnicity as. If you want to know what a Norwegian superhero would be like, if they were conceived by a Norwegian here are two examples. The other one’s even black, which’s something neither DC and Marvel have done outside of the latter’s version of Thor.

Likewise, a Brazilian superhero by a Brazilian writer would more accurately depict Brazilian culture. I think no matter how well-intentioned the writer this, if the writer doesn’t share the character’s ethnicity and nationality there’s a chance of playing into stereotypes even if it happens accidentally but still.

If Caitlin Snow becomes a werewolf

If Caitlin Snow were to become a werewolf in the Flash, bear in mind that DC Comics did have a female werewolf before in House of Mystery (a 1950s publication). But the best-known recurring female werewolf in American comics would be Marvel’s Rahne Sinclair, otherwise known as Wolfsbane. She has appeared outside of comics before like X-Men: The Animated Series and X-Men Evolution before, in fact it can be argued that although the other Killer Frosts (Crystal Frost and Louise Lincoln) predated Rahne in comics, Rahne beat both of them to the punch by appearing on television first.

Let’s not also forget that the film series Ginger Snaps also revolves around a female werewolf, so if Caitlin Snow does become a werewolf at all she will not be the first and only one in this context. But she could become the most well-known, especially if this reinvention is permanent, controversial among fans and would happen in September. In terms of folkloric appearances, it’s not that there aren’t any accounts of women turning into canids. But that’s usually in the context of witchcraft and in many, if not most cases, when witches do turn into a canid at all it’s usually a dog. Okay, dogs are domesticated wolves but in some sense witches turning into wild wolves don’t seem that common.

Dogs maybe, but not wolves as in pure wild wolves. While witches turning into wolves may not be that unheard of, it seems the greatest and most common association occurs in Estonia. There’s a precedence for women turning into canids in folklore, but it’s more commonly a dog than its wild predecessor. In fact, in Russian the word for dog is feminine. So is the case with Dyirbal and Oromo, well as far as I know about it. But I’m getting off topic, so with Caitlin Snow as a werewolf she would come from a long though nearly sparse line of female werewolves. Clawdeen from Monster High could be another, though because of the controversy surrounding Caitlin as a werewolf that she might easily become American pop culture’s best known female werewolf.

Perhaps moreso than Rahne Sinclair because of how unexpected this is for her, even though DC has one in the House of Mystery. Though if she does become a werewolf, she could even replace a certain character from Creature Commandos especially in comics if she does become one at all. The other one would be that if Caitlin is now a werewolf, then Barry Allen would be her Red Riding Hood. Blatantly obvious when you think about it. If she does become a werewolf on the Flash, it would occur in the first episode of the new season and have her go evil again. Going so far to attack his relatives, per the fairy tale.

This is what you get for turning her into a werewolf, if at all.

Where are the Native Americans in fantasy again?

When it comes to fantasy, admittedly I’m not a big fan of it, but from what I know best it’s a broad church that not only encompasses contemporary settings with highly fantastical elements (urban fantasy) but also those set in a quasimedieval setting like Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons writ large as well as retellings of fairy tales. Perhaps outside of retellings of folktales, especially if they’re adapted from non-white cultures, Native American and indigenous representation is almost non-existent in fantasy.

Maybe not entirely nonexistent but when the portrayals of barbarians is co-opted from indigenous communities yet not a single indigenous person exists in those stories, that’s when it gets iffy and problematic. Not to mention, I even think indigenous mythologies and folklores are an unexplored landmine of ideas waiting to be explored carefully and in-depth when it comes to exploring and examining such cultures at all.

As said in that essay, there’s a bad tendency for speculative fiction writers to commodify and co-opt, perhaps appropriate the experiences and customs of nonwhite people but keep them either nearly nonexistent or stereotypical. X-Men is notorious for this where it portrays mutants as undergoing prejudice for being mutants, but not a single nonwhite writer has written the stories and not a single nonwhite writer has ever written any of the X-Men magazines.

Other than Marvel Voices, there’s not a single Asian, black or indigenous writer who ever wrote the official X-Men magazines. Even if X-Men writers don’t intend to practise cultural appropriation, the near-absence of nonwhite writers is telling when it comes to how the X-Men characters face prejudice for being mutants yet intersectionality and the ups and downs that come with being a brown, black or Asian mutant’s barely ever explored.

It seems Japanese culture is only explored in-depth through Wolverine and Betsy Braddock (both of them are white and the latter was bodyswapped) and Ashkenazi Jewish culture’s portrayed with more depth than say Chinese, Kenyan or Nigerian cultures. Actually not a single mutant’s ever been ostracised for speaking in a minority language and/or practising their culture’s customs, as far as I remember, which proves my point that X-Men actually sucks at minority representation.

What I mentioned or said is what minorities and those speaking in a minority language go through, something that’s never been touched at all in the X-Men comics and media. If geek media has a bad habit of both appropriating ethnocultural minorities yet not representing them as they are truthfully, then there’s a problem. This is the problem with how barbarians are portrayed in the Dungeons and Dragons world, not only are they given slurs that hurt indigenous people but the writers depicting them appropriate from indigenous people.

While it’s true that totem animals aren’t unique to indigenous people, since Ghanaian and Ivorian Akan people also have this but even then it’s not an excuse to co-opt what’s sacred or important to them. I think a good number of Ghanaians and Ivorians, as the Akan form the majority in both countries, would get offended if a Western starts saying their totem animal is a dog. Not knowing that the dog totem is important to a certain community and that totem stands for adroitness.

True, not all African cultures and communities have a totem animal but even then the totem animal is so important to Akan people that it shouldn’t be taken so lightly out of context, it would like if a Nigerian starts proclaiming that apple pie is Nigerian then any American would get mad. At times, I feel whenever these people proclaim their totem animal at face value they don’t have a connection to indigenous cultures (or Akan culture) and have no friends belonging to those communities.

They may not even belong to those communities, which makes their ties to them all the more tenuous. This is the problem with cultural appropriation, they can take away something but have no deep connection to those communities, don’t speak on behalf of them, don’t have friends from that community and hardly ever know and interact with them. Then that’s when it gets phony and suspicious, that is why cultural appropriation is problematic to its core. Not to mention, there’s no genuine interest in or experience with that culture.

Supposing if the Philippines were to be occupied by China for a significant amount of time, if Filipinos start practising some Chinese customs it would be more authentic than taking parts of Chinese culture without coming into contact with an actual Chinese person. Likewise anybody who spent a long time in Iran would pass down Iranian customs more authentically than those who never spent time there unless if they’re Iranian themselves.

To make matters worse, the only way to receive the animal totem among the Akan is to be born into that community. (Even then, this is passed down matrilineally that is from mother to child and especially from mother to daughter.) This is probably true for any Native American or indigenous community with a totem animal, you’d have to be born into that community to receive a totem animal so you’re out of luck when you’re not born into it.

The only way to do this, well the closest thing to it, would be to marry a person from that community and even then the child would receive the totem animal, not you. Cultural appropriation, no matter how well-intentioned, risks being disrespectful especially if that person has never set foot on a certain locale or interacted with that community. It would not be cultural appropriation if somebody brought in something from Jordan if they spent a long time there.

The lack of sincerity is what makes cultural appropriation problematic, which makes cultural appropriation in geek media all the more obvious if customs are appropriated but where such people they appropriate from are either nearly nonexistent or portrayed hurtfully.

Obscured inspirations and topics

It’s been said that when it comes to the X-Men, for all its anti-prejudice message, has a history of fumbling a lot when it comes to nonwhite characters. Characters like John Proudstar and Dust are stereotypical, Elizabeth Braddock being bodyswapped with a Japanese woman to get ninja skills (until recently when it got undone) and that Dazzler was going to be black as she was based on Grace Jones. Grace Jones was certainly a big name celebrity in her time, but Dazzler got racially whitewashed half-way.

Comes to think of it, this kind of tampering might not be unique to superhero stories as this also affects other kinds of stories. In the case with romance novels, there could’ve been romance stories that tackled abortion, getting one’s tubes tied, miscarriage, STDs and the like with a likely number of romance novel heroes being based off of somebody else. Somebody who doesn’t fit the romance hero mold, so there’s a good (and weird) chance that one romance hero may’ve been based off of somebody like Nick Rhodes. He may not have a great body, but he and his band Duran Duran were pretty popular in the 1980s with girls having crushes on them.

So it’s likely some romance novelists and readers grew up with Duran Duran, though it could be said that one’s preferences change over time. But for others, there’s bound to be those whose preferences aren’t beholden to the stereotypical norm. There are even romance readers and possibly romance novelists who’re turned off by muscles, that their own romance heroes were at some point not the typical romance novel hero. They could’ve been thin or chubby, they could even be middle class or working class.

Romance novels might be changing for the better, but the fact that muscular rich men are very popular stereotypes remain. Same goes for bad boys, while not all romance novels have them as heroes, it’s likely some novelists are pressured to keep writing these kinds of characters even if they’re not really interested in or attracted to them as they would in real life. I also think there are romance novelists who likely have less stereotypical Latin or Arab heroes, less stereotypical in the sense that they’re not rich sheikhs or Latin Lovers.

Even if these characters may have at some point more closely resembled what other Latin or Arab men are actually like, they got changed halfway to meet editorial and sales expectations. This could’ve been to the chagrin of novelists who either go against the grain or create characters based on the people they know so well that we never get an opportunity to read them as they actually were. Or rather were going to be, since other than any possible surviving draft we don’t get to see them as what their authors intended them to be.

Thus these characters get rewritten in the interim to meet romance expectations, that’s to fulfill a stereotype. While the Duran Duran example is only hypothetical, it does make you wonder why there isn’t more room for romance heroes who’re openly based on what some romance novelists are actually into or inspired by. Likewise for Arab and Mediterranean men, there could’ve been stories where these characters differed greatly from the stereotypical depiction but were made into stereotypes halfway.

There could’ve been romance novels that tackled the topic of infertility and to some extent, they already have but when it comes to meeting market and editorial expectations authorial desires are compromised or altered to meet such demands.

Fandom to professionalism and pandering

To be fair, this isn’t unique to geek fandoms and industries as the more ‘normie’ ones like football, fashion and pop music have this to some extent, though the main difference is that these three attract a bigger audience perhaps far bigger than the one for say superhero comic books. That’s because they also attract more casual fans to boot and that most people don’t read comics, let alone superhero comics that regularly. So it feels less inbred than the one for superhero comics, where it seems at this point almost every superhero writer or artist was and still is a diehard fan of something.

As with many things, the pioneers of anything like superheroes or football weren’t fans of something but rather the originators who help create the rules and conventions of what is to come. The only real difference is that football has far more casual fans than superhero comics do, which means a lot of people are into football without being big fans of the sport (and certain athletes). This can be applied to any popular sport, whereas the vast majority of superhero media (comics and increasingly television) caters to a cult audience.

With that cult audience comes a degree of narrative inbreeding, that’s if those fans ever start working on something that wasn’t so hugely popular to begin with. One good recent example of a superhero fan turned professional would be Jay Edidin, who’s behind one such X-Men fansite called Xplain the X-Men or something and since then have been portrayed in one of the X-Men comics and has written a story about Cyclops (one of the X-Men). The earliest superhero comics fan turned professional would be Roy Thomas, who has written superhero comics since then.

While the advantage is that they’d feel a lot of enthusiasm for the stories and characters they like, there’s also the risk of feeling too fannish when it comes to understanding fannish in-jokes and fanfiction stereotypes and conventions. This has happened to Arrow before where the writers and producers began pandering to a subset of fans who wanted a pairing between one character and Oliver Queen, one person compared this to prioritising an obscure Harry Potter over the main ones except that Harry Potter’s far better known than Green Arrow and has sold far more copies.

So it’s safe to say that even to those who haven’t read the books and watched the films (like myself) are familiar with Harry Potter on some level, so much so that those adapting the stories will do their hardest not to tamper with the source material as it’s so well-known to many people. That’s something the Green Arrow comics will never get, being rather semi-obscure and not much of a bestseller even when compared to other kinds of comics.

For most of the part this makes the fandom relationship between Arrow and Oliciters far more intimate than the one for Harry Potter when it comes to fan pairings, the closest Harry Potter got is to have a black woman play Hermione (who’s sometimes portrayed as black by some fans) in one play. Perhaps significantly more intimate in that Arrow doesn’t have that much viewers as Harry Potter does, so it doesn’t have as many casual watchers and readers as HP does too.

It may not always be the case, but it does speak volumes about things fans know very well. Especially if it’s something that’s not regularly consumed by a lot more people, that makes the relationship between fans and their objects of fandom all the more intimate.

Which character is relatable again?

When it comes to what constitutes a relatable character, as people’s experiences vary, so should the characters. But when it comes to common interests and experiences, this is where it gets tricky. Batman’s commonly held as a relatable hero, but when there are comics readers who relate more to either Superman (one did because he was brought up in a farming family) or Batman’s villains (like this person), this throws the character into sharp relief. It also brings up a possibility that a character like Kitty Pryde might not be relatable to other people.

Consider this: many people own dogs, there aren’t a lot of people who own reptiles (if dragons count as reptiles). Even in comic books, this gets played out. Obelix, Superman, Charlie Brown, Dilbert and Batman all have dogs, Kitty Pryde has a dragon. Though you might say that Kitty is Jewish, but real life Jews like Michelle Hanson and Jon Bernthal also own dogs themselves so the argument is moot. Not to mention somebody brought up that as time went, Kitty went from being a merely intelligent lass to somebody who’s a ninja and a hacker that’s when she stopped being relatable for them.

Kalinara pointed out that Kitty panders a lot to a specific readership, which’s why she’s only relatable to them and not to anybody else. If it’s true, then one would have to wonder if Wolverine (considering that he even got a comic book series and movie of his own) might actually be the more relatable of the two, especially when it comes to movies having a wider audience than comics ever would. Not that Kitty hasn’t starred in a movie, but when Wolverine stars in a movie of his own that’s when red flags appear.

While it’s possible to indulge in your own interests, the key here is balance this with things many people can relate to. Not to mention, there are always certain characters certain people relate to more, as well as characters people can commonly relate to. These two people I mentioned before related to characters other than Batman, in the case of the latter she related more to his villains. I could go on adding and arguing there are people who can’t relate to Kitty Pryde as well.

Statistically speaking, this should be obvious and while pet ownership rates do vary between ethnicities, nationalities and communities generally speaking more people own dogs than they do with reptiles. More people own mammals than they do with reptiles, to speak more generally and this should be obvious to anybody. If Batman’s not relatable to other people, this proves my point right. I could say the same thing about Kitty Pryde, which would be just as correct.

Not every character is going to be relatable to other people, especially if they have different interests and experiences. If this is true, then there’s a chance not everybody can relate to either Batman or Kitty Pryde. Characters like Wolverine, Superman and Poison Ivy might be and are more relatable to other people in this regard, if it were taken more seriously here. If people might not have the same experiences, then there’s bound to be those they’d relate to more. This extends to fictional characters in this regard.

As I said, if not everybody can relate to Batman and Kitty Pryde then their experiences aren’t what others experience. Not everybody are rich nor good at computers and hacking. Or anything else. Though many people do have common and shared interests and experiences, they also have interests and experiences with their own (though that’s something they can share with some people). This extends to the characters they like and identify with.

Transforming controversy

Stephen McAlpine has a good blogpost about the newer controversy surrounding the Harry Potter books and it’s not what you think it is: a generation ago, it was the hardcore Christians who wanted the Harry Potter books banned because they promote witchcraft. Now it’s the transgender activists and their sympathisers who take issue with JK Rowling (the books’ author) because she has opinions about the transgender community. I do have my sympathies for the series, despite not reading the books nor watching the films.

I would believe many Evangelicals’s criticisms of Harry Potter more if they held X-Men and Narnia to the same standard, but that would involve a greater deal of consistency and introspection than what they’re used to. Whatever Christian criticisms Narnia gets is a minority compared to what Harry Potter got, which’s something I will not accept and the same goes for X-Men. The hypocrisy Evangelicals have and do gets on my nerves a lot, like if you hold one thing to one standard and another to something else that’s pretty much having a speck in your eye.

You can’t chastise one without chastising the other, double standards and favouritism. It’s not that I like Harry Potter but I neither dislike it, but that the double standards regarding it and other franchises has gotten on my nerves. As for Harry Potter and trans controversy, I think something like Ranma 1/2 wouldn’t age well in this environment mostly because of how transphobic it would come off as to newer audiences. It’s one thing to turn into a woman willingly, it’s another to turn into a woman against one’s will.

The fact that the protagonist had to be turned back into a man makes me think this goes against the experiences of transgender people who willingly live as the opposite sex, but so far to my knowledge the author (Rumiko Takahashi) isn’t as widely disowned as JK Rowling currently is. Again double standards.