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meggannn · 7 years

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race and character customizing

this is a post about a discussion other people have been making before me for ages but i’ve seen it spark up again on Andromeda’s release. a few comments i’ve seen over the past few days on white fans who are interested in making non-white Ryders have made me want to talk about it.

this is not an argumentative post. this is a post documenting my understanding of different sides an argument to help me to get my thoughts down. please do reply or reblog if you have thoughts or comments, especially if you’re a BW fan who’s not white (and a writer).

so there’s this discussion i see going around with white fans of bioware games asking whether or not they’re “allowed” to make non-white characters. to fully document my perspective on this, i need to first list reasons that white fans, in my experience, won’t or don’t make poc characters in customizable games. reasons tend to be the following:

they don’t want to “mess up,” ie, accidentally fall into stereotypes about poc characters when they don’t mean to

they don’t want to offend poc fans

they genuinely just don’t want to make poc characters, either because they’re only comfortable playing white people, or they don’t want to spend the energy to connect with poc (when they have a million other white ocs....), insert racist reason here, and some of them have learned to hide behind reason #1 or #2 when confronted about it

and there are so many problems that occur when white fans do make poc characters that i’d consider it really irresponsible to say “if you consider yourself an ally, you should probably consider making a non-white character,” which was more or less a recommendation i’ve loosely supported until recently. and yet, i’ve seen white fans making characters of color:

as a way of earning ally brownie points

then oversexualizing their character/using them for an “aesthetic” with no substance

then ignore criticism of their character from actual poc they’re representing

then trying to “claim” a race, ie, saying things like “i got angry at [my friend/a random person on the internet] for making an [asian] character, because i was going to make an [asian] character!”

that last one isn’t a joke, i actually saw it yesterday, the day of andromeda’s origin access launch -- someone making the default character heads at bioware must’ve done a really good job, because one of the female asian models is supposedly very popular, and someone posted that in response. i really hope i don’t have to explain why these things are wrong, but needless to say, when i want to encourage people to write outside of their comfort zone and create diverse rep, that sort of fake ally shit doesn’t help anyone and in fact actually hurts fellow fans by making character customizing into some sort of contest.

i was part of a discussion on @omegastation‘s blog this morning and an anon said they were interested in making a non-white oc but didn’t want to because they had been more or less intimidated out of it. i replied voicing my support for them to do it because, if i’m honest, i’ve started to view “i’m too nervous to mess up a coc” as a socially acceptable excuse not to bother caring about coc -- even though i do know there are people who genuinely mean it.

the thing is, if someone is a writer or content creator of any sort and consider themselves an ally to marginalized groups they aren’t apart of, i think this way of facing our fears and stretching our boundaries is necessary as creators who want to write inclusive and respective material. (it’s just a responsibility to not act as though these characters are the epitome of representation or the best that will ever be done, so those marginalized should be nice to you for it.) as a mixed wlw and aspiring writer, i think examples like character customizations in games like mass effect and dragon age are great ways of stretching a writer’s legs with diversity. largely the characters are technically already written for us -- characters like shepard, hawke, and ryder are free of bias or racial leanings, they already have depth, and they’re just waiting for you to fill in the blanks with headcanons and fanart and fic and whatnot.

and yet that seems to be where white fans trip over the most. either they fall into stereotypes; or they’re so afraid of messing up that they avoid engaging or thinking about their coc too much, so they end up flat and more or less ignored for their white characters; or they oversaturate their coc so much it doesn’t even become a real person but just a empty mould with a diverse face for the sake of Peak Representation. it’s been a rare instance when i’ve seen a white fan of a BW game create a poc character that has actually been, like, a decent, fully-rounded character; on this site i see coc by white people fail usually by either doing too much or not enough. i am usually guilty of doing not enough when i make characters who aren’t my race, so this isn’t exclusive to white fans. i’m attempting to rectify that in andromeda by making my ryders multiracial with largely ambiguous heritage (mostly out of annoyance tbh, because mass effect takes place 200 years in the future, right? and bioware has confirmed that most humans are at least biracial by this point, so why are there so many natural blondes and redheads???? it drives me NUTS). mixed rep is representation I personally feel really passionate about because so many of us are misrepresented by being forced into one ‘category’ or another, but even with a narrative reason for widespread multiracial heritage in the mass effect universe, I feel like mixed characters are so rarely explored in this fandom.

ANYWAY. for most of my time in BW fandom i’ve largely been theoretically supportive of white fans making diverse characters because i’m quite frankly tired as shit of seeing white people complain about BW’s diversity and i figure interest is at least step in the right direction. hell, my friend is looking into MEA fan boards right now and is reporting to me that there are white fans complaining there is no good ‘pale white’ skin color. like frankly, if that’s your biggest concern, i don’t care about your feelings on representation and don’t expect you to understand what real underrepresentation feels like. (and no, you’re not actually losing hairstyle options when some of the designs are specifically for black women so they can have natural hair options. what the fuck?) so if i see other fans who want to stretch outside their comfort zone and be more inclusive in their character designs, like sure, why not? at least some people are stepping in the right direction, and if they’re friends, at least i can help them if i see them making a wrong turn and know they’ll respect me.

well, okay, more seriously: why not? after reading other opinions on this, i have a few reasons.

sometimes i see poc characters written or drawn by white ‘allies’ and i literally want to run my nails down a chalkboard. it might be well-drawn or -written, but even in tumblr’s relatively liberal atmosphere, it can still offensive, and it can still clearly done for attention or ‘friendly’ stereotypical jokes, not for actual love of the character. i want to think most people know better not to make obviously stupid mistakes, but I’ve driven people away with unintentionally offensive jokes in the past, so i know absolutely nobody is above this one.

even unintentionally, it can still drown out characters made by actual non-white fans -- who are just as talented, and spend just as much time creating and promoting their work, and consistently are paid less attention to on average than white fans.

fetishization. ties in with the ‘aesthetic’ point above.

it’s not enough for me to say “okay, only DECENT allies can make poc characters” because obviously everyone considers themselves a 'good’ ally, and even people that you thought were ‘good’ allies can get defensive when they’re confronted with the fact that they messed up.

i’ve also been thinking and i don’t think i’ve ever seen a white fan make a mixed race character who’s been my specific mix of heritage, but if i did, i don’t think i’d be offended. i’d be offended if they acted like they should be rewarded for it, but just the character? sure, go ahead. but i totally understand why other people would be offended, and i one-thousand-percent respect that and don’t want to talk over their feelings just because i happen to be more of a “do whatever you like so long as you’re not hurting anyone” kind of person anyway.

i also 100% think that white fans making non-white characters might actually make us better writers and storytellers and artists, but i 100% understand why poc consider that absolute bullshit, because we’ve seen the evidence and sometimes it does more harm than good.

so, i guess i have a question for my followers: if you’re a bioware fan who’s not-white, what’s your stance on this? if you’re a content creator, do you feel overshadowed by white creators when they make coc or does it happen so rarely it doesn’t affect you*? am i overthinking or not considering a point? do you have an opinion on this? (or do you care?)

this is not intended to start discourse. this is meant to be a question post to ask how other non-white BW or custom RPG fans feel about a common problem I personally feel very divided on.

(*personally i see white OCs far more than non-white OCs in BW fandoms, so much that it’s a fair assumption on my end that 95% of the COC i see are made by poc, which makes it practically a non-issue for me, but that's just be my experience.)

#race #da stuff #me stuff #bioware stuff

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