@Verily Classism, I've noticed, is still incredibly prevalent among alleged activists, which might have something to do with why it doesn't occur to them that it was a class analogy instead of a race one.
Actually, come to think of it, it being a classism analogy makes sense of one of the typical whines about why it doesn't work as racism. No, black people can't shoot lasers from their eyes and white people don't live hundreds of times as long as other people, but higher classes do have advantages others don't. Poor people still can't shoot lasers from their eyes, but most of the lowbloods apparently don't have very powerful powers either if Hiveswap's anything to go by, and the ones the upper classes have are less flashy but more widespread and more useful in the field of keeping their rank.
I have similar feelings about people in the TF fandom trying to twist the central metaphor to be specifically about race and gender and thus inevitably writing the Decepticons as a Barbarous Horde That Are Fundamentally Biologically Incompatible and Unequivalent To The Autobots (but this isn't, like, bad or racist because they think the Decepticons were right, and also Autobot labour frames, what Autobot labour frames :) they're all cops dontcha know). The amount of people who ignore that a class of people marginalised literally on the basis of the work they do might have more to do with class hierarchy than biology. Hell, even good writers too often end up going "there are fundamental physical, cognitive and social differences between the Autobots and Decepticons" like that's just a completely unproblematic bit of worldbuilding to include and doesn't horribly snarl up whatever Get Along Now point about political discourse that they were trying to make. It's like Baby's First Criticism of Social Hierarchy sometimes and sometimes I enviously look onto my Marvel Comics friends being able to discuss the mutants as a race allegory, a queer allegory and a disability allegory all at once, mostly without problems.
Late to comment on it but ... I see it's racists raging about the actress choice of a character they've never fucking seen from a series they've never fucking read o'clock again! *checks notes* Oh wait no I see here it's also racist -fans- raging about the actress choice of a character they apparently only have a Literal surface-knowledge of time as well! o h what a joy, I cannot wait for what will surely be a nuanced and understanding reaction to a well-needed reimagining of this work! because we all know there's nobody so open to new ideas as the die-hard fans of a 30 year old property!!!! edit: I realized too late in my attempt at cleverness I neglected to mention this is about the new Sandman series
Also transphobes! Along with the racists throwing tantrums about Death, there were transphobes who never read the comic whining about Desire being nonbinary. Which they have literally always been. Dream calls them "sister-brother" at one point, IIRC.
Desire would make less sense as a character/magical being if they weren't nonbinary. You could change the gender of any of the other Ds without too much trouble (though I think you'd lose something if you made Death a dude) but Desire being enby is actually kind of important.
This and all wank about gender goes to show that the majority of people really just want stories to remind them of other stories.
I’m not that familiar with Kirby Howell-Baptiste, but the vibe she gives off in photos seems startlingly perfect already? It takes me zero brain effort to imagine her as Death. Even if that weren’t the case, she’s an experienced professional actor. I’m sure she could work something out, and that’s why they hired her. I don’t want to see Sandman: It’s Just The Comic But We Spent Millions Of Dollars To Make It Worse. What is the point if they can’t make Sandman work in 2021? If it seriously cannot accommodate the reality of social change and still remain faithful to the spirit, that would mean Sandman isn’t relevant anymore. If that were true, parading its corpse around wouldn’t make it feel alive again. It would just be sad and weird. But I don’t think that’s true of Sandman at all. I hope it’s awesome, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be. I was never a superfan, but I did read the comics as a teenager, and they were very influential in goth subculture. It’s sort of a fascinating train wreck when people who hate diversity but want to make it sound more acceptable than “I’m a bigot” manage to create contradictory demands. Do y’all want the characters to adhere as close to the comics as possible because you don’t want Death to be played by a Black actor, or do you want looser character interpretations because you don’t want Desire to be nonbinary? FIGHT
for anyone wondering why some people get really defensive over positive stories and happy endings and suchlike: it's because people make shit like this and other people write articles like this about it (the article is about a game called 'Palworld' which is, according to the tagline for the article on facebook, 'a more honest look at Pokémon' because it involves guns and making your Pal monsters work slave labour in factories)
Oh, yes, the conflation of grimdark with "realism" is one of my least favourite things, too. People really go out of their way to not understand that the tone and aesthetic of a story may be actually thematically and conceptually important is literally the kind of nerdbro-y bullshit that ruined both tragedies and grimdark. Like, it's apparently just completely impossible to admit that a story does not work for you thematically and go seek out something that works for you better. No, a soothing, positive tone is treated like a problem to be fucking fixed, it's obnoxious as hell.
As a fat person, I really hate artists and authors tacking fatness onto a character who was canonically very thin when it's screamingly obvious they're only doing it for woke points. That's not body positive, it's "I just have to draw this character round instead of long and everyone will love me!" I don't like feeling used as a woke flag.
Are there other fat characters in the canon that aren't treated as jokes? Because 90% of the time I see that, or things like that, for canons where you have thirty perfectly identical mesomorphic characters and then one designated fat buttmonkey that doesn't get much fandom love because they only exist to be a joke.
I'd rather they stick with the body types the characters have and give the already fat character(s) a chance to be cooler, personally, if there are any.
It's the "if there are any" that's kind of the sticking point for me. I'm also a bit biased because I've been in too many fandoms where canon has absolutely no idea what an actual strongman looks like and it bugs me more to see guys who should be heavy suddenly and inexplicably rail thin when they take their clothes off (looking at you, Yakuza).
It can be hard to give canon fat characters the chance to be cooler, too, when so often their personality consists entirely of "likes food" maybe with a side of "is lonely" or "wants to be normal" and a lot of characters in non-visual media don't have their weight described unless they're either exceptionally heavy or exceptionally thin, but I still see people complain that a character is "canonically" thin when no weight is given but they should by all rights- as in PR's strongman example- be heavier and an artist depicts them as such. Or just depicts them as such because they want representation and there's no canonical reason why they shouldn't be, they get people going "oh but the narration never calls them fat, so they have to be thin" because thin as a default is definitely a thing that exists. This also happens with, for instance, visual media where there's some abstraction. Video game sprites without a lot of detail, or some comics or cartoons, especially with nonhuman characters where fat would be hard to depict.
I was reading a charming and earnest but not particularly good fic where the romantic leads were two teenagers, both about 14 or so. Het ship. When they started dating, there was a scene where the boy told the girl's parents that (1) he was a sex-repulsed asexual and (2) he was "touch-starved" and had anxiety so he needed a safe place to cuddle with their daughter in private, unchaperoned. Of course, because this was not-well-written, her parents went "oh of course you can have extended private alone cuddling time" and not "uhhhh that sure sounds like the sort of lie a non-ace teenage boy who is hoping to get laid might tell his girlfriend's parents" or even "are you seeing a therapist about this touch-starved anxiety thing". Later, I tried sharing my amusement/exasperation in an 18+ discord for this fandom, and people there thought my skepticism was... that parents in their 40s-50s wouldn't believe in asexuality.
There is something vaguely adorable about that sort of very earnest badfic's total lack of correspondence with human behavior. Too anxious to cuddle with the door open but not too anxious to explain your mental illness and attitude toward sex to people you just met.
Did I mention that the in-fic reason he told his GF's parents that he was sex-repulsed ace was not to reassure them re: unchaperoned cuddle time, it was because he thought they wouldn't Approve of their daughter dating an asexual. Because that was the reason given in the fic.
