Race in the Coraline fandom
Apr. 27th, 2009 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaebilityA couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how bemused I was that some of the Coraline fandom portrayed Wybie as white (here at my IJ and LJ). Since then I've been mulling over it some more - and finding more white!Wybie pictures at DeviantArt - so I'm revisiting the subject.
Some of my FL pointed out that Wybie could be mixed-race; I completely agree that this is possible. However, I maintain that whitewashing him is odd.
I thought and thought and strained the few braincells I have, but there was still something that bothered me about this that I couldn't figure out. Then Spielcheck nailed it: "My guess is that some of them are being racist - they are trying to make an ideal version of the character, and to them ideal = normal = white. But I would guess lots of people simply don't recognize it because they're not used to seeing it. They automatically interpret characters in terms they're more familiar with."
I think that's it, exactly. And I also think that's damn interesting. I wish I knew more about race and racism in America (if anyone could recommend some books, I'd be really grateful); I'd like to know if this has happened in other medias. There's the castings of the Avatar: The Last Airbender and 21 movies - in which Asian characters are going to be played by white people or were changed to white characters - and I think they might be related to this, but it's not exactly the same. I'm not sure -- Again, I need to learn more about it.
Man. "But I would guess lots of people simply don't recognize it because they're not used to seeing it. They automatically interpret characters in terms they're more familiar with." If that's true, then fiction needs more diversity immediately. I hope Verb Noire is crazy successful. It's bad enough that the majority of characters are white heterosexual guys (and that the target audience is the same), but to then reinterpret minority characters to fit that stifling mold -- Wow.
Additionally, I said in my first post that I thought that Wybie being black/mixed was a deliberate attempt to engage minorities -- I was wrong on that. Ravenbell gave me a link to a video of Shane Prigmore (check out his blog for his awesome art), one of the character designers, talking about his work on the movie (here).
It's hard to hear, so Prigmore makes a post to clarify:
"[Wybie] was approved and finalized as a sniveling white kid. Infact I was even doing his temp voice for the story reels. THEN …I was doing a ton of exploration for a new little ghost girl (that was shown on this video just before my Wybie stuff), and in my explorations I did some African american versions , just to throw it out there, to mix it up. Well out of all of them Henry chose the little African-American girl hands down. Well that changed things , because that little ghost girl is supposed to be related to Wybie…..So , Henry and I changed Wybie to an african american kid in the eleventh hour…."
So: Bummed that Wybie and his relatives have a token black character feel, but! I'm still glad that Selick and Prigmore decided to change his character design.
(Tangentially, I was talking to The Boy about this [again] this past weekend. The only piece of media I could think of where a character was changed from white to black was in movie adaption of The Shawshank Redemption. There's gotta be more, but that's the only one that came to mind.)
Some of my FL pointed out that Wybie could be mixed-race; I completely agree that this is possible. However, I maintain that whitewashing him is odd.
I thought and thought and strained the few braincells I have, but there was still something that bothered me about this that I couldn't figure out. Then Spielcheck nailed it: "My guess is that some of them are being racist - they are trying to make an ideal version of the character, and to them ideal = normal = white. But I would guess lots of people simply don't recognize it because they're not used to seeing it. They automatically interpret characters in terms they're more familiar with."
I think that's it, exactly. And I also think that's damn interesting. I wish I knew more about race and racism in America (if anyone could recommend some books, I'd be really grateful); I'd like to know if this has happened in other medias. There's the castings of the Avatar: The Last Airbender and 21 movies - in which Asian characters are going to be played by white people or were changed to white characters - and I think they might be related to this, but it's not exactly the same. I'm not sure -- Again, I need to learn more about it.
Man. "But I would guess lots of people simply don't recognize it because they're not used to seeing it. They automatically interpret characters in terms they're more familiar with." If that's true, then fiction needs more diversity immediately. I hope Verb Noire is crazy successful. It's bad enough that the majority of characters are white heterosexual guys (and that the target audience is the same), but to then reinterpret minority characters to fit that stifling mold -- Wow.
Additionally, I said in my first post that I thought that Wybie being black/mixed was a deliberate attempt to engage minorities -- I was wrong on that. Ravenbell gave me a link to a video of Shane Prigmore (check out his blog for his awesome art), one of the character designers, talking about his work on the movie (here).
It's hard to hear, so Prigmore makes a post to clarify:
"[Wybie] was approved and finalized as a sniveling white kid. Infact I was even doing his temp voice for the story reels. THEN …I was doing a ton of exploration for a new little ghost girl (that was shown on this video just before my Wybie stuff), and in my explorations I did some African american versions , just to throw it out there, to mix it up. Well out of all of them Henry chose the little African-American girl hands down. Well that changed things , because that little ghost girl is supposed to be related to Wybie…..So , Henry and I changed Wybie to an african american kid in the eleventh hour…."
So: Bummed that Wybie and his relatives have a token black character feel, but! I'm still glad that Selick and Prigmore decided to change his character design.
(Tangentially, I was talking to The Boy about this [again] this past weekend. The only piece of media I could think of where a character was changed from white to black was in movie adaption of The Shawshank Redemption. There's gotta be more, but that's the only one that came to mind.)
