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I meant to post these ages ago, but failed to do so.
This is a genius piece on visual shortcuts and what they mean to us. It's really interesting, especially the bit on 'blonde, skinny and blue eyed' being this automatic short cut for 'really really beautiful', although I disagree that the heroines are usually tall. Most fantasy heroines that I've encountered recently had been little and elfin. This actually used to be worse, once upon a time. I remember being little and being obsessed with Snow White for no reason at all other than that she had dark hair. In all the books I had of fairy tales, every heroine was blonde. There were no olive skinned, tall and dark haired heroines like me. So I hooked on to what I could get.
I'm not saying I understand what it feels like to be a PoC in the face of the horrific lack of balanced and positive images in fiction of people who look like you. But it is an issue that has a special resonance for me.
This is Charlie Brooker, who is almost always awesome, writing about the row that blew up with some moron producer at the 'Midsomer Murders' explained that having black people in the show about a village with a higher murder rate than mid '90s Sarejavo would make it unrealistic. Charlie Brooker's argument here makes me glow and can also be applied to almost any situation in which stupid people complain that racial diversity would make it 'unrealistic' (for example, the movie version of Thor in which having a black Heimdall ruined the otherwise documentary feel of the movie about a dimension hopping norse alien superhero, or Merlin, where a dark skinned Gwen made the film about wizards and dragons lose its credibility when it came to accurately representing 5th c. Britain).
You should all read both of them. And I should now go and eat tapas.
This is a genius piece on visual shortcuts and what they mean to us. It's really interesting, especially the bit on 'blonde, skinny and blue eyed' being this automatic short cut for 'really really beautiful', although I disagree that the heroines are usually tall. Most fantasy heroines that I've encountered recently had been little and elfin. This actually used to be worse, once upon a time. I remember being little and being obsessed with Snow White for no reason at all other than that she had dark hair. In all the books I had of fairy tales, every heroine was blonde. There were no olive skinned, tall and dark haired heroines like me. So I hooked on to what I could get.
I'm not saying I understand what it feels like to be a PoC in the face of the horrific lack of balanced and positive images in fiction of people who look like you. But it is an issue that has a special resonance for me.
This is Charlie Brooker, who is almost always awesome, writing about the row that blew up with some moron producer at the 'Midsomer Murders' explained that having black people in the show about a village with a higher murder rate than mid '90s Sarejavo would make it unrealistic. Charlie Brooker's argument here makes me glow and can also be applied to almost any situation in which stupid people complain that racial diversity would make it 'unrealistic' (for example, the movie version of Thor in which having a black Heimdall ruined the otherwise documentary feel of the movie about a dimension hopping norse alien superhero, or Merlin, where a dark skinned Gwen made the film about wizards and dragons lose its credibility when it came to accurately representing 5th c. Britain).
You should all read both of them. And I should now go and eat tapas.
