Diversity Representation in MU*ing
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@Tinuviel I mean. Scissors are and were a thing. They can carry them or a knife to cut that long hair while traveling.
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@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Prototart said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
there’s also just that white people “dreads” are so universally gross
Dreads and braids aren't the same thing, mind.
...until you sleep on the latter long enough without washing your hair. College roommates can be special.
It was less a dreadlock and more a dreadlump. -
White people's ignorance/policing of black and brown people's hair is a huge issue. Like a very sore point issue, and understandably so. (And yes, before anyone whatabouts, I'm very aware that within the community there's often policing going on too).
I think this point is lost on a lot of people when they think they're going in for "simple" debate about well these non-black people had dreads/braids tooooooooo.
When I did therapeutic foster care/emergency placement, it was horrifying how many times in all the trainings/updates and even in talking with some people who I did respite care for, you would hear white people bitching about how to care for curly hair properly, or would just...butcher the kids' hair without permission to make it easy for themselves. It makes me sick to think about, really. One foster carer in particular I will never forget when she was mocking/annoyed at a grandma at visitation bursting into tears to see the her granddaughter with a shaved head because they didn't get what was the big deal was, since they didn't know how to care for the child's longer hair and it "looked bad" anyway. This was a metro area foster care agency that had a lot of kids of all races, and even some native American kids. The person leading the training just laughed along, and commiserated with dealing with picky bio families. I hope things have gotten better since then (this was decades ago).
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Every time I see the hair debate come up, I am so grateful for my best friend in early high school (until she moved
). We were 14 and it was the 80s and every hair style sucked for everyone which made it super easy to just laugh about together and grouse about our respective hair struggles. I mean, standing in front of the same mirror with so many hair products and devices between us they covered the entire counter and filled the sink, not talking about it would have been so much weirder.I'm stupidly grateful to have had experiences like that, even back in the 80s stone ages. It's depressing to realize that there's much less of that since, at least in most of the US, because there's so much more social segregation since in some ways, and they're ways that often pretty dramatically reduce the chance for open conversation.
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@mietze In my jurisdiction at least, we have ensured that if the Department respects no other wishes of the bio family, they get a voice in hair. Uhh, and religion. Hair and religion. That's about it, but they're pretty significant to people.
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Thank goodness. And people today have even less excuse now that you can look at videos and there are web resources. It is just not that fucking hard if you give a shit, and wasnt really back then either.
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i'm not a nazi and no one who has ever met me could ever think that was my reason but whatever makes you giggle
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@Kanye-Qwest I have to second this one; my dearest friend on earth is very much Mr. Viking, and all the co-opting of all things Norse by alt-righters and white supremacists is one of the very few things I have ever seen him get hardcore pissed off about in over a decade.
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@Groth said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
There exists astonishingly little historical record about what kind of hairstyles the 'vikings' used. What we know is that they used a lot of combs and there exists a few references to a hairstyle that's something like this Cossack one where the sides of the head is shaven and the hair falls over the eyes.
.Ah so not dread locks, Devils locks. Easy to confuse.
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This probably counts as a minor peeve, but it's somewhat on topic.
Searching for black and other non-white races of PBs is a pain in the ass.
Like, for example, you can search "man with sword" or any other "man with" things, or search "man wearing suit", and like 99% of the results are white dudes.
Now, yes, I understand that I can type black man or chinese man or whatever else, but that is why this is a racial peeve rather than something where I'm like "I want this fixed right now!". But like, I guess my point is, searching for PBs and such with all these extra racial caveats and sometimes having to very precisely figure out how to get non-white dudes to pop up (sometimes there's a bizarre complication), is annoying, and is a reminder that there's literally a default race irl lmao.
I'm like, damn, I want to experience typing "man in boxers" and it's like a variety of sweaty men instead of 99% white sweaty men.
It's not like I sit there losing sleep over this or just being like "FUCK THE MACHINE" every time I do a PB search, but it's a little thing that pings in my brain and makes me go "there's literally thousands of photos of every race of man and woman in each of these categories, why do I always have to see one very specific race without making a bunch of caveats". And it legitimately does complicate my searches in a way where I just get kind of annoyed that I even have to do this extra step that is sometimes not as simple as typing "black swordsman", which I'm sure people can see would get complicated right away.
Could type African swordsman, but then I start getting very specific African cultural stuff that has nothing to do with what I'm looking for.
And "African-American" as a search term to narrow down searches is functionally useless.
This is just an example, but this happens a LOT. Having to figure out how to search for a specific race in a specific category since the default results are always white dudes is just a pain in the ass. We have the technology to make this significantly easier, algorithms can be trained to make this easier, and hell, algorithms can be trained so that the default result isn't just a wall of white dudes, but that's just not the internet we're on right now.
I'm sure there's plenty of people who will find this post rather silly, but honestly, I've been a black dude for 32 years and after a while these minor peeves and annoyances tend to pile up and just become these little annoying pin pricks.
And I guess the broader point beyond this very specific thing is that sometimes I'm just doing something and then it hits me "yeah this is definitely going to be harder because you're trying to do something normal but the black version of it, lmao eat shit I guess".
And, back to the PBs in general, it stood out to me more because early in my MUing I used to play exclusively white characters (I think I mentioned this before), because as a teenager, due to where I grew up, I thought people would hate me or think I was dumb for being black (and not just dumb because I do dumb things). So when I started playing POCs, particularly black characters, I realized just how much fucking harder it was to find PBs I wanted to use for specific things. And even beyond the search results nonsense, it's not like there's a million shows and movies out there with black people doing wizard shit or swinging swords around, even though that stuff definitely does exist, and there's enough of it for there to be adequate search results in my opinion.
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@HelloProject It's just a small thing in the grand scope of things, but many small things combine to something big - and I'm hoping I will be - and am - one of those that contribute, and try to learn more day after day.
I can say with some shame I used to be ignorant about MANY things related to it all, and white priviledge. Over the years I've gotten more and more aware of my own biases and how I've been just not looking things up or trying to understand.
Either or, the thing I was coming to was that on Arx, I play a PoC - undefined in a manner, but definitely PoC, which when I picked the character up, due to his desc being vague on it, I /never even considered/. I immediately looked for pictures I enjoyed, and ANYTHING that came up, was indeed, white males. I belatedly had a conversation with one of his IC relatives, his cousin, who had a PoC desc/picture, and I had that unsure feeling of whether I should change or not, and decided NOT to at the time.
I decided to change his PB now, and oh boy - you're right. There's no reliable way of searching. If you search for black swordsman you do indeed get something else entirely. It should ABSOLUTELY be as you describe, and it annoyed the fuck out of me, and I mean, I'm as pasty white as it gets, and it gave me an eye-opener. Another one.
Either or, I did find a nice picture. My character is not black, but a PoC anyway (also I do feel a bit unsure about terminology, I am not American and I don't mean any offense if I chose the wrong words, feel free to educate me if I'm being dumb.) A picture that I am chuffed to bits about, that fits the character description perfectly. (Also to be sure you understand, he is not described as black - but black hair, dark olive skin.)
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@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
Like, for example, you can search "man with sword" or any other "man with" things, or search "man wearing suit", and like 99% of the results are white dudes.
^ This.
It's that the 'target audience' for almost all things is -- stupidly -- not just 'white', but 'white dudes'.
A search for female warrior types of any race proves this out depressingly, too, full of 'the law of female fantasy armor'.
That specific concept has improved a little over the past few years? But not much.I soooooo share this peeve and I absolutely see this problem with the 'here is the one point of focus to which everything is meant to appeal', and it's shitty as hell and depressing to navigate through. There's nothing remotely silly about it!
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@Goblin said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
Either or, the thing I was coming to was that on Arx, I play a PoC - undefined in a manner, but definitely PoC, which when I picked the character up, due to his desc being vague on it, I /never even considered/. I immediately looked for pictures I enjoyed, and ANYTHING that came up, was indeed, white males. I belatedly had a conversation with one of his IC relatives, his cousin, who had a PoC desc/picture, and I had that unsure feeling of whether I should change or not, and decided NOT to at the time.
I decided to change his PB now, and oh boy - you're right. There's no reliable way of searching. If you search for black swordsman you do indeed get something else entirely. It should ABSOLUTELY be as you describe, and it annoyed the fuck out of me, and I mean, I'm as pasty white as it gets, and it gave me an eye-opener. Another one.
Either or, I did find a nice picture. My character is not black, but a PoC anyway (also I do feel a bit unsure about terminology, I am not American and I don't mean any offense if I chose the wrong words, feel free to educate me if I'm being dumb.) A picture that I am chuffed to bits about, that fits the character description perfectly. (Also to be sure you understand, he is not described as black - but black hair, dark olive skin.)
For olive skin, you can usually search for Italian/Spanish/Greek/Arabic etc. Also Bing image search seems a lot better then Google image search but you get a bunch of wargaming miniatures and yu-gi-oh cards either way.
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@Goblin said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
My character is not black, but a PoC anyway (also I do feel a bit unsure about terminology, I am not American and I don't mean any offense if I chose the wrong words, feel free to educate me if I'm being dumb.)
A POC (person of color) is any non-white person. It's generally best to use it when referring to the overall concept of POCs, or something that involves people of multiple non-white races (I.E: A Topic that affects Asians, black people, Native Americans, etc). When referring to a single race it's generally best to just straight up refer to that race rather than say POC.
Obviously on Arx that's complicated due to them being from fantasy ethnic backgrounds inspired by real ones, so in this case, in my specific opinion at least, I think POC is good for fantasy Arx races based on real backgrounds. Though if anyone disagrees feel free to explain why, which isn't me being defensive or anything, I just genuinely want to know if someone thinks there's a good alternative in this Arx situation.
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@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
A POC (person of color) is any non-white person.
That's not as helpful as it may seem, honestly. Since 'whiteness' isn't solely the providence of those with white skin. Italians, Greeks, Spaniards... not white, but White.
He/Him
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@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
A POC (person of color) is any non-white person.
That's not as helpful as it may seem, honestly. Since 'whiteness' isn't solely the providence of those with white skin. Italians, Greeks, Spaniards... not white, but White.
Anyone who wouldn't get racially profiled in the U.S or just entirely banned from the country by conservatives is white by the general American definition of POC. I hope that helps.
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@HelloProject Agreed. Whiteness is what Republicans consider acceptable levels of melanin at any given time. Irish and Italians are white now. Hispanics are no longer white.
It ebbs and flows.
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@HelloProject I don't know how well your definition works for the Mediterranean & Middle East, where the definition is often cultural (the Muslim ban you're referring to) as much as phenotypical.
A nice mass media example was the 'discussion' (to put it mildly) of Gal Gadot's casting for Wonder Woman, and the dialogue was extremely illustrative of the whole 'what actually counts as a white person.' She's Ashkenazi Israeli cast as a (crazy fantasy origin but basically) Greek woman. Some POC advocates got upset about it in the vein of 'She's a European being cast as a POC!', which implies Greek = not white and European Jew = white. Some went the other way, declaring it important POC casting, which hilariously (to me at least) seems the more white supremacist take since it's effectively asserting that neither Jews or Greeks are white.
Yet more generally, while Greeks might get a little of the 'greasy, hairy foreigner' racism that's targeted other borderline groups like Italians and Eastern Europeans (heck, Greeks are basically the mid-point between those) they generally aren't getting hassled by police.
So, I don't know. I think this shit is really complicated and context dependent, and any quick definition of 'who counts' is going to fail to be useful for anything other than twitter-based tribalism and points-scoring, as the Gadot debate sort of illustrates.
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@bored I was against Gadot because she is a skinny little twiglet cast in the role of a woman that could have done a bit more for body positivity.
But. Watch any Zack Snyder movie. -Every woman is a stick figure white lady-.
A more physical woman without waif-like dimensions would have been fantastic.
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This is so amazingly off topic but also so painfully stupid I feel like I can't NOT answer.
@Admiral She's a former IDF fitness/combat trainer, and knowing nothing about you, I'm pretty confident to say she'd beat your ass.
In the realm of 'this is Hollywood and we have to cast someone conventionally attractive or our movie will not receive a budget,' casting someone who could do the work seems reasonable (to say nothing of the fact that the rest of the Amazons got precisely the casting you're asking for, with MMA fighters, boxers, and other martial artists among them). And bear in mind that it is work. As with other comic action stars like Hugh Jackman, actors don't walk around with action bodies in their normal lives. It takes months spending more time working out in a day than most people do in a week (generously, more than most of us probably do in a month) to get in shape for those roles.
Also my personal take is that calling a real person a 'skinny little twiglet' while you're supposedly promoting body positivity makes you sound like a jackass.
