TEYONAH PARRIS & JOHN BOYEGA: They Cloned Tyrone (2023)

Yo-yo's room is great storytelling

TEYONAH PARRIS as Yo-Yo They Cloned Tyrone (2023), dir. Juel Taylor

THEY CLONED TYRONE 2023, dir. Juel Taylor

Look, I get it. You're obsessed with the white guy. Maybe two of them together. And maybe your series has one or more main Black characters or Asian characters or a brown Latino star. You're here because of the irresistible pull of that white guy (or two), who is fascinating beyond belief. His acting is above anything anyone has ever seen. When you write about him, the words just pour out.

This is a fan-centered space so I feel confident in saying — we've all been there. I'm not going to lie and say I've never been invested in white characters. There's nothing innately wrong with liking white characters (that would be silly).

But when it comes to the characters of color in your chosen media, you have a choice. 

You're unmoved by the Black major characters and find them unrelatable? Ok. If you're not able to keep that to yourself, prepare for a discussion about the empathy gap. Because we literally do not need content about your inability to relate to CoC if the intention is for it to stand as some kind of undebatable truth about the inferiority of CoC.

And then there are the deflections. At the first mention of sidelining CoC it comes like clockwork: They're poorly written! The acting is sub par! The character is just not interesting! It's got nothing to do with race!

Except when it happens over and over and over again, it does. It just does.

I can't count how many times a conversation on Reddit or the Jedi Council Forum (or anywhere, really) started out about Finn and became all about Kylo Ren five replies in. Just today I saw the same thing on Tumblr, a post about the poor treatment of Lucas from Stranger Things, and in the comments people were talking about Billy and his trauma. 

If you stan the white guy(s) and don't want to be perceived as part of fandom's racism problem, do not hijack threads about CoC. Not every conversation has to center your guy. Conversations that center Black characters, and I can't stress this enough, do not take anything away from your white fave(s). Nothing at all. It's not a competition.

Stop making excuses about why you don't like the Black character. No one really cares until you start tearing them down with excuses. Don't come up with meta about how the Black hero is a villain, actually, and the white bad guy is a tortured sweet baby who represents all of the forgotten children of the world. It's not clever, it's not good or interesting meta, it's transparent empathy gap racism. 

And, again, that will be discuseed. You can't believe in "maximum inclusion" and draw the line at discussing racism. Responding to racism is not breaking the fandom social contract. It's a long established part of fandom by now.

It really shouldn't bother white guy stans so much to see a Black character in a major role in genre media to the point where they feel the need to aggressively dismiss them and their fans. Not doing that, at least, should be easy. Not doing that means that maybe that fandom critical post about racism isn't about you.

It's not about white guy characters or even their inevitable popularity. It's about fan behavior toward characters and fans of color, whether it's on Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit or AO3.

Also consider this: maybe the character IS poorly written. Racism extends into writing spaces and a lot of very good writers’ rooms will tell you the corporate meddling is REAL.

…so extend to the characters of color the same grace and fix-it-ism you do to the white characters.

My main fandom right now has three Black characters and they’re all poorly utilized. One disappears for half the series, one leaves being a secret agent to be a secretary, and one is forced to play second fiddle to the main character. All three have great actors and actually interesting storylines up to a point…so we just kind of sandwich the first one back into the story, the second one has a pretty prominent fanon that says being a secretary is actually her cover and/or she left fieldwork because she could ascend higher at a desk (and then we show it), and the third one tends to get, at a bare minimum, mentions of badassery in stories she’s not a part of. (Or she’ll just get written back in.)

It’s okay to say the character is poorly written if it’s true. It’s not okay to use that as a way to dismiss them when you’ll carefully and lovingly rehabilitate all the equally-poorly-written white characters.

Well, that's the thing. Shallow white characters are lovingly treated as "blank slates" while thinly written Black characters are just considered bad.

I'm a fan of Finn from the Star Wars sequels. Love him. But he was written very poorly, especially after The Force Awakens (where he was set up as a Force sensitive character, even while there was some bait and switch that put Rey above him rather than an equal). I have criticized the shit out of that. I hate what the ST did to him. But he's still my favorite character in the trilogy. I'm disappointed, but I won't call him a bad character. He's a character whose potential as the most original character in the trilogy was dropped. Because of racism. There's a big difference between saying you hate a Black character because of the writing and acknowledging that the writing for a Black character you love became shit.

Reva in the Obi Wan series is a good example of a character where "the writing" was used as an excuse to hate a perfectly good Black character. "The writing" is absolutely used as code to safely hate on Black characters.

Ben Solo/Kylo Ren is an example of the laziest writing I’ve ever seen. They tried to make him Anakin 2.0 and he’s just... not. But then all the girlies fell head over ass for him because Adam Driver is moderately good looking. It doesn’t excuse how badly written is character is, but here we are with everyone rooting for him...

Meanwhile you have Finn that was absolutely brilliant, funny, an awesome inclusion into the cinematic universe because we hadn’t had stormtrooper POVs yet... and they did him fucking dirty and just let his character rot after Force Awakens. He’s one of the best and most underutilized characters in the sequels (Rose too btw, they used her as a plot point and it angers me to no end).

And Reva... god that hate of Reva I see everywhere... She’s a survivor of Order 66! Her story is super intriguing! If anything, we didn’t get enough of her in Kenobi. She deserves her own goddamn show. Some people wanted only to see Obi-Wan and Vader and they try to frame their complaint as Reva being badly written/played but the only problem I see here is their misogynoir...

For real. Kylo was well written for about 5 minutes of TFA, the opening scene where FINN was centered and had his epiphany and Kylo recognized that he was Force sensitive. As a foil to Finn he was great. But TLJ ignored that, retroactively ruining Kylo for the rest of TFA and making him the worst character of the entire saga.

So this happened on a post I made on a reddit sims forum. So I made a thread about that, which was locked because they don't want people to discuss racism in their community.

And like here's the thing. Trolls, trollish behavior, racism doesn't get to me too much on the internet, but not being able to talk about it in the community where it happens does.

People have a right to run their subreddits however they want, but this just really left a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm not into Sims, but this is totally relatable. One of my Star Wars communities (Jedi Council) used to do the same thing. They had a strict "no racism" policy that when applied punished people for calling out racism.

The Finn thread used to get shut down all the time -- and a lot of times it wasn't because people were being racist. I remember one time someone was being super racist in Finn's thread and it wasn't shut down until someone said "dude, this is racist." The person who said the word "racist" was punished and the thread was locked.

That forum did eventually amend its racism policy from "any mention of skin color or racism is a violation" to "any overt disrespect toward Finn including coded racism is a violation."

But in general, calling out racism is a bigger fandom crime that being racist.

Look, I get it. You're obsessed with the white guy. Maybe two of them together. And maybe your series has one or more main Black characters or Asian characters or a brown Latino star. You're here because of the irresistible pull of that white guy (or two), who is fascinating beyond belief. His acting is above anything anyone has ever seen. When you write about him, the words just pour out.

This is a fan-centered space so I feel confident in saying — we've all been there. I'm not going to lie and say I've never been invested in white characters. There's nothing innately wrong with liking white characters (that would be silly).

But when it comes to the characters of color in your chosen media, you have a choice. 

You're unmoved by the Black major characters and find them unrelatable? Ok. If you're not able to keep that to yourself, prepare for a discussion about the empathy gap. Because we literally do not need content about your inability to relate to CoC if the intention is for it to stand as some kind of undebatable truth about the inferiority of CoC.

And then there are the deflections. At the first mention of sidelining CoC it comes like clockwork: They're poorly written! The acting is sub par! The character is just not interesting! It's got nothing to do with race!

Except when it happens over and over and over again, it does. It just does.

I can't count how many times a conversation on Reddit or the Jedi Council Forum (or anywhere, really) started out about Finn and became all about Kylo Ren five replies in. Just today I saw the same thing on Tumblr, a post about the poor treatment of Lucas from Stranger Things, and in the comments people were talking about Billy and his trauma. 

If you stan the white guy(s) and don't want to be perceived as part of fandom's racism problem, do not hijack threads about CoC. Not every conversation has to center your guy. Conversations that center Black characters, and I can't stress this enough, do not take anything away from your white fave(s). Nothing at all. It's not a competition.

Stop making excuses about why you don't like the Black character. No one really cares until you start tearing them down with excuses. Don't come up with meta about how the Black hero is a villain, actually, and the white bad guy is a tortured sweet baby who represents all of the forgotten children of the world. It's not clever, it's not good or interesting meta, it's transparent empathy gap racism. 

And, again, that will be discuseed. You can't believe in "maximum inclusion" and draw the line at discussing racism. Responding to racism is not breaking the fandom social contract. It's a long established part of fandom by now.

It really shouldn't bother white guy stans so much to see a Black character in a major role in genre media to the point where they feel the need to aggressively dismiss them and their fans. Not doing that, at least, should be easy. Not doing that means that maybe that fandom critical post about racism isn't about you.

It's not about white guy characters or even their inevitable popularity. It's about fan behavior toward characters and fans of color, whether it's on Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit or AO3.

Also consider this: maybe the character IS poorly written. Racism extends into writing spaces and a lot of very good writers’ rooms will tell you the corporate meddling is REAL.

…so extend to the characters of color the same grace and fix-it-ism you do to the white characters.

My main fandom right now has three Black characters and they’re all poorly utilized. One disappears for half the series, one leaves being a secret agent to be a secretary, and one is forced to play second fiddle to the main character. All three have great actors and actually interesting storylines up to a point…so we just kind of sandwich the first one back into the story, the second one has a pretty prominent fanon that says being a secretary is actually her cover and/or she left fieldwork because she could ascend higher at a desk (and then we show it), and the third one tends to get, at a bare minimum, mentions of badassery in stories she’s not a part of. (Or she’ll just get written back in.)

It’s okay to say the character is poorly written if it’s true. It’s not okay to use that as a way to dismiss them when you’ll carefully and lovingly rehabilitate all the equally-poorly-written white characters.

Well, that's the thing. Shallow white characters are lovingly treated as "blank slates" while thinly written Black characters are just considered bad.

I'm a fan of Finn from the Star Wars sequels. Love him. But he was written very poorly, especially after The Force Awakens (where he was set up as a Force sensitive character, even while there was some bait and switch that put Rey above him rather than an equal). I have criticized the shit out of that. I hate what the ST did to him. But he's still my favorite character in the trilogy. I'm disappointed, but I won't call him a bad character. He's a character whose potential as the most original character in the trilogy was dropped. Because of racism. There's a big difference between saying you hate a Black character because of the writing and acknowledging that the writing for a Black character you love became shit.

Reva in the Obi Wan series is a good example of a character where "the writing" was used as an excuse to hate a perfectly good Black character. "The writing" is absolutely used as code to safely hate on Black characters.

The co-creator, writer and producer of Sleepy Hollow, everyone.

It's Ok tho, he liked that one couple in Six Feet Under 20 years ago.

Anyway. Did I mention this is a co-creator, writer and producer of Sleepy Hollow?

h/t: ungodlywests on Twitter

Wow.....WOW

I mean ...the lack of fantasy is palpable. Jist because you cant write a compeling couple that's friendly and romantic doesn't mean others can't.

It's wild to me how this "isn't a race thing" because he cites two couples he apparently ships in shows he had nothing to do with.

Like he clearly has no desire or capability of writing an interracial romance himself.

I haven't seen The Bear but "this man wrote Sleepy Hollow" is enough for me to know that this is some extra bullshit. Has he already tried to pair the white man up with a bland white woman that he doesn't have chemistry with? Hope he doesn't kill off this black woman.

It's also fucking wild to me for someone to get upset that people are shipping characters you created who have a close relationship. Like why do you care?

Gonna tread careful here because I don’t know this writer or anything about Sleepy Hollow. I give that this person may be racist in intention or effect.

AND I hate the Carmy/Syd shipping so hard. I’ve been wanting to rant on it. I rarely care what anyone else ships but this one makes me want to crawl out of my skin. It’s all because the way I experience the Carmy/Syd working relationship as depicted on screen as an incredible and rare depiction of “our love of this particular kind of work/creativity is both so extreme and we share values about it” and also they both carry such deep grief (Camry’s more fresh, Syd’s more ancient and deep inside) and they see the sameness in one another and that feels so important because these attributes has made them feel like they’re different than others in other environments (work, family.) There’s also a lot of “our skill sets and strengths are very complimentary in the kitchen and in business and HOLY SHIT what could we really accomplish together if we unleash this. We push one another toward greatness and will be and do ultimately so much more together than separate.”

To me, they have no romantic chemistry and would be a disaster “together” like that but they definitely are “IN LOVE” in a way that I have only been w/ like 2-3 people ever on work or creative teams. Love is so much more than romantic or sexual and WAY TOO MUCH western media reduces everybody down to romantic partner relationship = peak experience of love. Syd/Carmy in how they are so far, as basically business chemistry soul mates, is incredibly unique and rare in stuff that I watch anyway and it feels palpably real and special. It really does make me so frustrated to see this dynamic reduced down to “boy and girl look at each other meaningfully, so they should kiss.”

I don’t have enough words right now to fully explain why I also want romantic relationships for them w/ someone who is NOT also their business partner bc they clearly need to develop healthier lives outside of the restaurant after this launch. Combining alllllllll of your life facets and spheres into one person can lead to so many complexities and issues I don’t want them to have. Sometimes your partner specifically needs to be a reprieve from your intense work relationships. Sometimes your other relationships need to be a reprieve from your partner.

Dang I care about these particular fictional people more than I usually do. Anyway, this guy sounds up to no good and I don’t think creators need to get all riled up about ships, but this one just really does rub me allllll the wrong ways, personally, stepping off the soap box now thanks 😂

I'm not sure why you decided to add this rant, which looks like every other passionate "no romo for Syd and Carmie" post on Reddit, here. Especially after claiming no knowledge of Sleepy Hollow, a TV show that treated its Black woman lead so badly that fans still have trauma over it. Not just because a ship didn't happen. The actress was mistreated. The character was brutalized and shunted in favor of white women appearing out of the blue. It turned out that her "purpose" was to help the white guy, after which she, a supposedly primary lead character, was killed off. But not before fans were told repeatedly, in one way or another, that dark-skinned Black women are unworthy of the kind of love story comes naturally to white woman characters.

A lot of the anger directed toward Syd and Carmy shippers opens those wounds, and this guy thought nothing of jumping in on the flogging.

An example of racism in fandom (thanks I hate it✨)

Be mindful of racists in fandom. Personally I’m not a fan of indulging racist fans who say white supremacist talking points like the idea of “blackwashing” being a thing. The only people I’ve ever heard use the word are weirdo racists who get mad when folks reasonably raise an eyebrow at whitewashing nonwhite characters.

It frankly doesn’t surprise me a lot of “fandom elders” who are white, have issues with being racist.

Here’s an archived link to the post

https://twitter.com/VestaBlackclaw/status/1673067896589942784?s=20

No surprise at all.

the national news talking about the marriage between a groomed niece and her war criminal uncle: game of thrones is now openly appealing to the female gaze and women. every woman who has ever watched the show wants to be railed and choked by their hapsburg chin uncle. thank you house of the dragon for allowing women and their true desires to be seen. thank you for redefining the genre of fantasy and romance. thank you for feminism. thank you for social justice

the national news talking about two passionate coworkers with the same hopes and dreams: do we really need sexuality in television anymore? is sexuality RUINING tv? can i really suspend my disbelief to buy that two friends who spend a lot of time together might think of fucking each other every once in a while? is young people's desperation for romantic relationships in a tv show a reflection of their crippling loneliness and delusion? what if we all lived the pious and chaste lives of the clergy?

WHEW.

because this has seemingly made like no noise on the timeline, lets give it up for the legendary robert townsend–

(📸 credit: @ciegeinc)

–and his guest star appearance, as well!! so cool seeing him. i fucking love this show.

Fandoms will ship two het men who simply breathe next to each other but god forbid a Black woman has a relationship with or even just chemistry with the popular male lead. And this happens in EVERY fandom (see tags for examples) with a prominent Black female character. They were even vehemently against Miles Morales and the Black spider girl (Margo).

It’s just very telling that certain people are suddenly “platonic love/besties/sibling energy only otherwise the show is ruined!!” when the fem character is Black.

It’s ok to not ship characters, but the overwhelming backlash to these specific ones has been so ridiculous and very obviously racially motivated. There are articles now discussing whether harmless shipping of two fictional adult characters is acceptable, and on the cover of them is typically an interracial pairing involving a Black woman…

TIME magazine wrote a story on whether fans should ship Syd and Carmy and it didn't mention race, or the history of racism when fans ship a Black character with a "fan favorite." Not just the fem character either --- with the Star Wars sequel trilogy the extreme reaction to the very idea of Finn and Rey as a romantic couple literally, not being histrionic, destroyed the trilogy.

How someone can write about the state of The Bear S2 fandom and not mention Michonne and Rick from The Walking Dead is beyond me. Fans spent years calling their shippers delusional (even though the buildup was *right there* all along) and they were right, it went canon. How could they not mention ANY of the history of fandom hatred of ships with Black people, especially if a fan fave white character is involved?

They're dancing around it as if all of this is fresh commentary that hasn't been said a million times before as an excuse to delegitimize the very idea that these ships are valid. The Reddit sub is probably a step away from forbidding it because every Syd/Carmy comment leads to long irate rant posts about how they have no chemistry, are like brother and sister, and other greatest hits of fandom racism.

Star Wars: Sana Starros #5, featuring Sana Starros (Marvel, June 2023) Pride variant cover by Betsy Cola

“As a queer artist, it means so much to me that queer characters exist in canon and that I get to draw them! I’m thrilled that we have the chance to recognize characters like Sana Starros in this year’s Star Wars Pride celebration.” — Betsy Cola

As a big fan of Sana, this series has been everything.

Still forever mad that she wasn't in Solo.