I'm in a POC (people of color) book club group on a different site and one of the members shared these tropes that I thought is interesting and relevant for those looking to include POC's in their writing. The pictures ARE NOT mine, credit goes to the artist: (ETA: i realized i clicked "Plot Development" instead of "Character Development" to post this in....)
Hello, J.T. Woody, I think this is some really useful information to consider but I also think it shows the point of view that many people of color (POC) often believe others have of them. For me, these gave me the inspiration to make sure I'm not falling into the common troups. I do believe that this was a very helpful summation of what to consider as we write and can be applied to all things, not just POC but I would surmise (without proof) that POC faces these issues more prominently than other groups do. Thanks for Sharing this.
Regarding Point 4: I honestly don't see what's so wrong about "it just looks cool" as a justification for quirky or unusual design choices when creating a character. Sometimes we do stuff just because we think it's cool or for the sake of whimsy, and that's okay. I don't think it's fair to say that even purely aesthetic decisions should necessarily be plot-relevant. As for characters with black skin and white hair, I'm pretty sure the main idea is that the stark contrast makes the character come across as visually striking and slightly fantastical. Besides, naturally white hair is pretty damn rare among Caucasians as well, and in fiction this is likewise a way to signify the character as special and/or to give them a very distinct appearance. I haven't met a lot of "Europeans" with hair like that, is what I'm saying. Regarding Point 5: Isn't this more of a general issue than something specific to people of color? It has certainly been unfortunately common with most female characters, regardless of ethnicity. Shouldn't you always make sure your heroes and heroines possess agency, since that's pretty much the point of heroic characters? I'm not sure I'd call that a negative POC stereotype as much as bad writing in general.
I dont think it means just white hair. i think it simply means hair in general that is more Eurocentric (i.e. blond... straight.... silky), and eurocentric eye color. if you read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, it does touch on this. Its about a dark skinned young girl who sees white features everywhere and wants to become white and "beautiful". she wants blond hair and blue eyes. Having a POC character with these eccentric features just for the sake of having them(that serve no purpose to the story), is a negative trope because why cant they have normal features? if it was because of the plot... like there is a race or culture in your SFF novel that has eccentric features (I have a race of people in my Fantasy novel that has copper skin, red hair, and golden eyes and people call them "Golden bastards").....then it serves a purpose. I see this more so in movies, especially animated ones. often when there is a POC MC, he/she spends the majority of the movie as a non-human searching for their humanity. Other examples: Spies in Disguise (Will smith spends almost he entire movie as a pigeon), Soul (aside from the beginning and the end, Joe spends the movie as a ghost). They are tossed into these situations against their own will and are stuck trying to find their way out of it all the while discovering their "humanity" (Joe is this rigid man who is afraid to follow his dreams and pushes people out.... Will Smith's character is just an arrogant asshole. by the end of it, they are "nicer"). Same goes for the examples in the picture: Tiana (more so Niveen), Kenai, Kuzco. To be honest, I've never seen this in books. in MY childhood, there werent many books written by POC readily available. literally every book on my shelf growing up was written by a white person and had white characters (if they had POC characters, it was in a historical context... like To Kill a Mockingbird, Huck Finn, and the "Dear America" books... or they were side characters, like Nudge in Maximum Ride which, in manga and movie iterations of her are just terrible). the first AA novel i read written by an AA woman was given to me for christmas and had been come out 8 years prior to it being gifted to me. its A LOT better now. POC books written by POC are everywhere now and more non POC writers are conscious about representation.
#3: The Stoic Savage is a side character to the White Savior trope. Dances With Wolves, Avatar, The Last Samurai, The Thirteenth Warrior (a flipped script though) and probably a hundred others have the White character who is able to not only bond with the indigenous population but do a better job at whatever skills they've managed to hone over hundreds or thousands of years. There's usually a Stoic Savage lady around to be bedded. #2, the Mammy is also closely related to the (I mean no offense, it's the term) "Magical Negro" trope embodied in The Green Mile and The Legend of Bagger Vance. Key & Peele did an excellent takedown of this which is available on Youtube.
People living most of their stories as animals is common in mythology, fairy tales, and literature, and I don't think it symbolizes anything especially derogatory when fictional POC are cast into similar roles. I'll be sure to make all my shape-shifters in my own image, though. Stereotypes aren't the best addition to good novels and it doesn't matter who is being stereotyped or who is doing the stereotyping. The Color Purple is an outstanding novel, but there isn't a single non-stereotypical white person in the novel. If the world is going to advance past dividing people into us and them, we're all going to have to pay better attention to what we're saying and writing.
At first glance, the MC in 'Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts' (Netflix, 2020) doesn't come out of this too well: a light-haired, purple-eyed, baleful shapeshifter whose best friend is a stoic savage? Even a charge of colourism could be lined up, if Kipo's lighter skin colour is what entitles her to the others' support. Spoiler But the series is celebrated for its treatment of race - the friends (Wolf, Benson, Dave) might escape the critical test on either arm (i.e. because Kipo is BIPOC, or because they have sufficient self-motive) - Kipo's transformations might not be felt to reduce her agency more than any other plot device - Kipo's project of uniting everybody in peace might not meet the definition of colonization, since it's a colonization-of-values - the culture into which Wolf (as the possible 'stoic savage') introduces Kipo might not count as a cultural culture but just be everyone's shared post-apocalyptic future - or maybe it knowingly plays with these tropes (e.g. Wolf being a Stoic with a capital S, or the way Benson struggles with his own niceness)
As a BIPOC i find the descriptions above interesting. I would say 2 and 3 are pretty obvious and only in the past decade or so are we seeing them being less the norm. 4 is a weird mix bag, that's a bit more case by case. I find the Yue from Avatar is cherry picking, as she's from a culture of BIPOC's that play a prominent role yet she's the only one with hair like that. I agree it is a problem, especially if the ONLY or main BIPOC has blonde hair and blue eyes, you're on thin ice. But if your cast has tons of BIPOC and one has different features for magical fantasy reasons... I'm willing to role with it. 5 I'm not sure I follow. I would like more examples. If I'm reading it right it sounds more like a general 'bad writing' issue. I would not say the Princess and the Frog was problematic because of Baleful Polymorph per se... it was more Tiana was the FIRST Black Disney Princess (Disney Princesses being setting standards of beauty for young children for generations) and she is a Frog for 75% of the film. Yeah she gets pushed around from plot point to plot point but that's most Disney protags. I'm not saying #5 isn't a problem but I would need more examples. Bad writing is not a race issue. 6, again I would like more examples. OH I KNOW COLORISM!!!!!! It is very real. Growing up black I have heard, seen, witnessed and been the victim of colorism to the point I get shocked when I hear non-POCs have no idea about it (but why would they). But the specific example given above is not something i've seen. What I have seen is light over dark as far as protagonist and ESPECIALLY love interest. Until VERY recently you would never see a dark skinned love interest in media intended for the masses. And by recently I mean the last 5-7 years. I'm thinking that is what the author is talking about but they are using one very specific example (from a work I don't know well) so I'm not sure about the "Bully" stuff, but if you are a POC it is well established in fiction (and the real world) you are viewed as more attractive if you are lighter. It is nice to see we are moving away from some of this stuff, as a kid growing up a lot of this was just a given it is really nice to know... it doesn't have to be.
In The Proud Family, LaCienega is light skinned hispanic girl who is pretty and popular. All the boys like her and all the other girls want to be her friend. But she bullies the MC (the girl in the center) and its "ok". The girl on the right is Nubia. She is african and mean and a bully. But because no one likes her and her sisters, they dont get a pass from their meanness the way LaCienega does.
If this sounds offensive, then I apologise, but I would take issue with no. 1. While this may well be true of American literature, it's not necessarily (I don't think) true of literature from other countries. I can't think of many examples from British literature off the top of my head, except perhaps the 1890 poem Gunga Din by Rudyard Kipling, where the eponymous Gunga Din is portrayed as a loyal servant, caring the wounded British soldiers despite the abuse he receives, and ultimately proving to be a better man than the white narrator. Perhaps that makes him more of a Stoic Savage character. As far as colourism is concerned, this was mentioned in another thread, but in Asian cultures, lighter skin is preferred as well. Part of this is socio-economics - darker skin was seen as a mark of being a manual labourer (who would spend more time working in the sun), and therefore of a poorer economic class. Even today, television adverts for beauty products promote lighter skin, and products that promise to produce lighter skin. I recall a Chinese wuxia (martial arts) TV series where a certain bride of the Emperor was shunned because of her dark skin, although in the end, she proves to be the heroine. In Japanese media, there is pretty much only one black character type - he (and it's almost always a he) is always American, always large, and always some kind of gung-ho GI type. Sometimes, he's basically B.A. Baracas. Now, in fairness, most American characters are depicted this way, but if he's black, even more so. However, the anime Macross, which was remade into Robotech for the West, notably had a black character, Claudia LaSalle, a bridge officer of a space ship, as the girlfriend of one of the white main characters, Roy Focker. This anime was made in the 1980s.
Hmmm..... I find that very fascinating. Given the nature of the above author I'm assuming Proud Family did not do as a way to intentionally show how colorism exist and is wrong but rather it was an unintentional possibly subconscious creative choice. I know the Proud Family was mostly produced by BIPOC and is usually praised as a positive example of proper diversity in fiction (and this doesn't take away from) but it is interesting how these things can seep into even anyone's.
Wait a minute are we talking about Robotech! Are we talking about Macross!!!!..... FINALLY! I love Macross!!!! Anyway, yeah Black people in Anime especially black women are almost non-existent. Claudia is one of the only examples and to be fair (or unfair) she is a strong example of #2 (black best friend), pretty strong example of #5 (zero agency in her own life), an a little bit of #4 hair brownish red but really it's that she has green eyes. Claudia is a very interesting case on this subject, by our standards she has a list of these "problems" but by early 1980's standards (especially in anime) she was massively progressive, to an almost unheard of level. While she wasn't the love interest of the main character, she was the love interest to the main characters best friend and mentor who was a bit of a Casanova and it is implied he could get any girl he wanted, and he gets with the only black girl on the show who sported a mini-fro.
in terms of Anime, its getting a whole lot better in terms of appearances of POCs... take Cannon Busters (2019): Sam (the character with the blonde hair green eyes), is an android. She's made like that to stand out as something not human. she's literally a weapon of mass destruction. (all the other androids/humanoid weapon, i realized, look as outlandish as Sam. like, they'll have pink hair or purple eyes, etc.) The society that made Sam, look "human." They look like this (below) HOWEVER... Sam is an example of #1.... she has no other purpose than to care for the Prince (below). she was made to be his companion and is loyal to a fault. the entire "adventure" happens when the city is destroyed and the prince goes missing, and Sam wants to find the prince. DESPITE THIS... Sam is STILL not the main character. she is second to Philly, who has more of a back story/plot than her. With Philly, she is simply a support character. She is also #5 in the sense that she has no agency. she is used. When she's revealed to be a weapon, she literally morphs into these weapons of destruction and used by Philly OR blacks out and wreaks havoc but has no memory of every doing it.
As for Sam's design.. when they first teased the series... they gave Sam straight blond hair and a straighter nose: but when they released the series, she had curly hair and a rounder nose: So, even though Sam is an Android and not seen as human by the people of her society... she was still made in their image
I can't see a No. 1 - is this about the first picture (i.e. Mammy, which is marked No.2)? If so, Britain received that trope from Hollywood near-contemporaneously. Mammy appears quite often in younger children's comics of the 1950s-1970s. And food labels - we had lots of the same brands There's a difference of degree, but I'd suggest that's because British audiences saw kindly-maternal black domestic workers to be "something they have in America," and because here it wasn't as important as other negative tropes The black best friend trope I'm struggling to find any early British examples of, and I suppose in the imported TV shows it was received under a heading of tokenism, with the 'serve and nurture' subtext being less noticed At some point, the trope being dismantled in the US morally necessitated its being desisted from here. It might have different history and dynamics but there is supremacism here, so anything that supports it should be criticized Kipling is far enough back that we wouldn't expect to find the same tropes. An equivalent tropes-to-avoid list for 1890 would need various other figures - and it probably wouldn't help WF's search engine ranks to mention them For anime, what about Vector in Battle Angel Alita (1993)? Spoiler Interesting to compare with the recent remake. Did the character utilize a 'Baron Samedi' archetype, or is he a typical Noh-theatre antagonist - an evil daimyo? If the character did follow an archetype, does it leave some of that behind in the recent film version?
I'd never heard of this the Baron Samedi archtype and googled. Interesting. Seems like an "evil" version of the Magical Negro. I dont remwmber much about Alita (movie) but from what i remember, Vector was a crime lord. No voodoo or religious convictions or physical characteristics (other than race) that would make him a baron samedi character. Idk anything about the anime version. He's just your typical movie villain crime lord... Like Kingpin imo
Yes, Uncle Ben's is quite popular here. It still stuns me that people need boil-in-the-bag or easy-cook rice.
I remembered him as a strong antagonist with complex motives and relationships, but then I wondered if technology=magic here, and if his mysterious contacts in Zarum (the flying island everyone wants to get to) might parallel Dr Facilier's "friends on the other side." And there might be something physical in dandified clothing plus physical slightness. But it matters too, doesn't it - who authors the trope? Is Baron Samedi's top hat received as his symbol, a familiar funeral custom, a transgressive-heroic challenge to a white ruling class, or a sinister assumption of status?
Surely out-of-scope as he predates the Mammy archetype. By early, I meant early 1960s or so when Mammy starts to be censored out of the mainstream media
But that's the point - that the trope predates the stereotype, therefore isn't necessarily descended from it.
We have this thing called Pot Noodle. It's as tasty as it sounds. And no people, it doesn't contain weed, but it might conceivably be used as weedkiller.
Originally Cup-O-Noodles, now Cup Noodles for some reason. It's ramen in its own cup, you don't even need to wash a dish afterwards.
The OP wasn't formulated in terms of stereotypes and tropes, only tropes, and the black best friend trope was defined with reference to the Mammy trope. With Man Friday, even moreso than Kipling, there is enough of a time gap that he's more likely to be a different trope than the same one. If he was a trope at all.
