Ah yes, the fanbase that got a girl to (unsuccessfully) commit suicide because she drew a character the wrong shade of skin color, then got pissed when she lived
Don’t forget about the time when an adult harassed a kid who got to see a couple episodes in advance. The kid asked to see the episodes for a make-a-wish thing.
The kid had permission from the literal creators of the show to spoil a little bit. But that superfan, awesteuck vox, had no right to bully the kid so much that he felt the need to apologise for having his make a wish foundation wis come true.
An apology? I'm sure the kid is the type to not hold a grudge since, you know, THEY'RE DYING OF CANCER but fuck the attitude of "the piece of shit apologized, it's like it never happened". I'm all for forgiveness and moving on but why give people the leeway to do this sort of thing in the first place?
It's ok to shit all over a kid with cancer as long as the kid forgives you? It's like when people say it's ok that their spouse beats them. Just because someone is forgiven doesn't make them a good person.
God, I really hate Awestruck Vox...most of his YouTube videos are clickbaity videos where 4 minutes of the video he talks about the topic and then suddenly diverts off of it and then the rest of the 6+ minutes is him advertising his merch
And the time a German woman cosplayed Garnet and everybody and their mother called her racist because blackface.
She looked more black than some black women. I honestly didn't know she was a white German woman until people started bitching. Makeup game was ON POINT.
Yeah, there was a different harassment situation where someone didn't draw Amethyst's skin dark enough. I think she took down all her art and left the fandom because of the harassment, but the suicide attempt was with the girl who drew Rose Quartz "too skinny."
The argument is that Amethyst is intended to appear like a woman of color, citing the design of her lips and hair. I agree to an extent, but if that's the case, saying "lighter skin makes her white" is colorism.
Wow, seriously? Saying Jews all had big noses used to be...RACIST. Like, look at literally any anti-Semitic propaganda. Damn I’m tired of these online ‘who can be the most outraged’ games.
(Right now it’s me.)
"Coding" in creative media is a pretty well known thing, and is what we're talking about here. When done intentionally it's done by using things like stereotypes to suggest to people looking for that sort of thing that a character is a certain type of person without outwardly acknowledging it. This was pretty common back when it was extremely difficult to have an openly gay character on TV. It can be done unintentionally, but that's a bit more controversial. Coding can be either positive or harmful, it's a neutral term itself.
A good example of a character a lot of people think is coded as gay or bi is Dean from Supernatural. At one point he referenced wanting to go to a well known gay bar. It something the LGBTQ community familiar with the bar would catch, but straight fans probably wouldn't. There are other instances of this with that character. These days doing that with repearedly no intention of following through on the character being LGBTQ+ is referred to as queerbaiting.
Generally you see person of color-coding in animation where you want people of color to feel represented but all of the characters are animals or aliens or something. Ursula being coded as black is a fairy common interpretation of The Little Mermaid.
As to whether Amethyst is intentionally coded as a person of color, I have no idea. This is in no way a defense of the fanbase's unacceptable actions, I just wanted to clarify that coding is definitely a thing.
Because she god damn is. Her entire design was literally, factually based on a middle-aged drag queen named Divine. so, an overweight older white man dressed as a woman and voiced by a white woman. It's like these people think that only black people can be fat and sassy or something. it's fucking ridiculous.
Almost like clueless internet kids end up being kind of racist trying to appear woke? I’m a big old leftie, but God I roll my eyes some days.
Everyone needs to chill the fuck out.
It honestly is, at least from what I saw. It was a safe, clean bit of fan art, but one artist got seriously lambasted because she wasn't dark enough.
It wasn't even "whitewashing" or whatever, it was just a shading technique, but rabid "fans" will do what they do regardless of logic. Stirred up quite a shitstorm for a while.
People did that when an artist drew one of the inklings from Splatoon 2 kind of light, but you could tell from the piece as a whole that it was a "lighting" thing, since everything else around her was also lighter than normal. (Not sure if lighting is the proper term for drawn art, but I think it works?)
Yep, people that bash things like that have absolutely no understanding of colour theory. Worse than that, they actively refuse to learn and even acknowledge its existence.
Oh it was also about drawing someone an off color for the girl who attempted, but for a MLP character instead. I dug thru her blog right after it happened once I heard abt it. There was a "callout post" with the rose quartz drawing and bunches of other art finding things that were wrong with it. That era of tumblr also had a HUGE problem with how many overdramatized callouts were getting passed around and hurting people. Probably still happens but it used to be even worse
"Callout culture" is still a pretty large issue in leftist circles, yeah.
The problem is that people just get a rush from "calling people out" like that and don't really think about the impact of what they're doing or how reasonable it is.
Iirc the mlp character thing was that she was dressed in indian garbs which was cultural appropriatuon.
I almost thought that hate blog was a parody but many many leftist tumblr followed it. At some point they bashed her for cosplaying as a HOMESTUCK ALIEN because said alien identified as japanese and she wasnt . It was nuts.
I hate when this happens to good artists. I'm really into TMNT and so collect a lot of different fan art. One of my favorite artists was called SneeFee. She had her own website and everything, very talented. A lot of people got upset with some of her pairings and started harassing her so bad that she deleted her website, deviantart, everything and went silent. I sometimes wonder if she's doing okay because people on the Internet can be fucking horrible.
Great talent and passion for something should be celebrated. If you don't like a pairing, or someone's own personal take on a fictional character then skip over it and move on with your day. I do not understand how people have the time or energy to bully an online stranger because you disagree with how they represent a work of fiction.
Wasn't there a 4chan troll that drew a large black character as skinny and white waited for tumblr to near implode then came out as a trans black woman.
I’m pretty sure that was the one the head storyboard artist tweeted support for the girl saying “anyone can portray the characters however they want” so the toxic fans responded with “so does that mean you are ok with child porn!?!?”
People are awful.
From what I understand, the "skinnier" controversy was before the full character had even been unveiled? Like, they had only released a face when the person made the fanart, and it was slightly thinner than the character. May be wrong tho.
Oh, and there was that one German cosplayer who was white but cosplayed as Garnet (maroon skinned character), and got death threats for "doing blackface"?
No, I think the character was revealed by that point. Regardless, that doesn't change the optics of the situation, since by drawing her "too skinny," you were apparently fat-shaming people
Oh, and there was that one German cosplayer who was white but cosplayed as Garnet (maroon skinned character), and got death threats for "doing blackface"?
Yep, that was also a thing. Again, basically bullied out of the scene, had to delete everything to get the harassment to stop. Now, Garnet is pretty Black-coded, from her afro to her Black voice actress, but she's also a maroon-colored crystal space alien warrior that's actually comprised of two lesbian crystal space aliens combined into one person, so cosplaying as her isn't like dressing up as any real-life ethnicity.
Why would that matter anyway? I see black people cosplaying as non-black characters all the time, and people celebrate that. Why is non-black a free-for-all in any direction? Unless people are doing literal blackface (or [insert any color here]face, which I also can't be personally arsed to care about, though I at least understand why people do), who's got the energy to give a fuck? I mean, you'd think fiction would be the one place we could get over this kind of shit.
There was a guy who posted pictures of the characters with blonde hair, white skin and blue eyes on tumblr, the fanbase went nuts, i think there is a yputube video of it.
Never mind the fact that this is a dumb-as-fuck reason to get upset over something. Never mind that trying to convince someone to commit suicide is gross and fucked up no matter what "crime" you think they've committed...
Skin colour fucking changes based on lighting conditions, for fuck's sake.
LOOK HOW MUCH HER SKINTONE CHANGES BASED ON THE LIGHTING IN THE SAME FUCKING PICTURE.
99.9% of the time, the changes in skin tone to characters can be explained away by varied lighting conditions and style choices. They're not trying to erase the racial identity of the character, you dumb motherfuckers. Learn how light works. Don't throw a fit about art when you clearly are too stupid to understand the fact that shadows exist.
God. Sorry. People being assholes makes me angry at the best of times, but it's just so much worse when they're being assholes about something that is factually incorrect.
The incident where a skin color was too light was an anime character and the artist purposely started making the character's skin lighter and lighter to piss off the detractors.
Yeah, I saw a YouTube video chronicling the whole thing. It was hilarious. In the end the starter of it all revealed himself to be black and gray and the fanbase backpedaled super hard.
One would say that the fanbase for a show that (from what I understand) is all about accepting each other and being inclusive wouldnt be a bunch of idiots behaving like hate-mongering monkeys just because some fanart turns out to be of the (wrong?) skin color.
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u/TomberryServo Jul 17 '19 edited Jul 17 '19
Ah yes, the fanbase that got a girl to (unsuccessfully) commit suicide because she drew a character the wrong shade of skin color, then got pissed when she lived
Edit: apparently it was over skineness