and there was much rejoicing

[glass_icarus]

First Deadline has been made! *\o/* (Okay, am a bit nervous about PDF previewing failure but I did check the online form about 230947 times, so.) Time for a celebratory linkspam, haha.

» some overdue fanspam
+ Check out the Merlin lexicon, risingsunpub!
+ zahrawithaz wrote some Morgana meta!
+ I have spent shameful amounts of procrastination time devouring Guide Me Home, a gigantor Ursa/Hakoda fic. >.>
+ Also, Disclosure will never stop being hilarious. Mai/Zuko complementary failboats, ahahahahahah! &hearts
+ game on: Mai vs. Iroh in a pai sho showdown! Also Mai/Zuko cuteness, hahaha.
+ rs_small_gifts has begun posting, yay!

» foodspam (now I want a food carnival!)
+ deepad: Doodh se Dhuli
+ vi: gross, weird, inedible
+ Jha's Lunar Year's End! AWESOME. &hearts
+ troisroyaumes: Seven things

» +1: Via deadbro, Keeping Hobbits White since 1937 made me laugh and laugh, but also prodded me into some thoughts regarding racebending.

See, I never expected to have a place in Tolkien's world, or in any white European fantasy land (which isn't always quite the same as generic fantasy land). I'm not saying that chromatic people haven't been erased from these fantasies, just that many mythologies built up around worlds full of elves and dwarves and fairies and goblins and whatnot read to me as specifically white European, intentional or not. I grew up with them, but I grew up knowing that they didn't belong to me, that those worlds were ones in which I had no part.

Part of me wonders whether this is a failure of my imagination, or perhaps a side effect of growing up surrounded by white-dominated media; I've only just started asking "why not?", after all. Racebending something as coded-white as Arthurian legend would never have occurred to me without Angel Coulby as BBC Merlin's Guinevere! But in the end, I personally am less interested in carving out chromatic spaces in white European mythologies. I would rather re/claim the stories that aren't explicitly coded, the blank "universal" narratives (e.g. superheroes or space explorers or cops-and-robbers capers), than expand upon the ones that were never mine to begin with.

Comments

[glass_icarus]

You're welcome! &hearts And thanks! :D

I think a lot of it also has to do with what makes sense to me? Like, because of the coded-whiteness, a Pakistani hobbit or a Chinese leprechaun or whatever would make me boggle and go but why are we here to serve your narratives which have nothing to do with our cultural context? Whereas if someone told me I couldn't racebend a blank-slate character like Jim Kirk, I'd say but why CAN'T a black/Latino man be the captain of the USS Enterprise?

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

Very belatedly--

Ah, I think I better understand your point now. It's like when someone says "every culture in the world has had vampires" without regard for the word itself and all the contemporary associations coming out of an intensely European context, and without regard for how that flattens all those other traditions and makes them only visible insofar as they match up to a pre-existing assumed white "norm." Just one more example of inscribing whiteness as a universal norm, even if using bodies of color to do it.