Thread by @shuurens

so i think there are a few different reasons why the fantasy racism subplot in #ShadowAndBone doesn't work, but it mostly boils down to: it FEELS like racism written for the white gaze (1/)

https://twitter.com/yourtitakate/status/1385792811237142530

there are a few ways of engaging with race in SFF worlds. three very prominent modes in recent stories have been: A) normalisation, or what we sometimes call "color-conscious" casting, B) SPECIFICALLY anti-racist/colonialist themes (2/)

and C) the awkward middle sibling that wants to be both. this is where #ShadowAndBone sits.
these aren't hard and fast delineations—ofc stories that specifically challenge racism are also going to normalise the presence of non-white people in the narrative (3/)

but it's the middle one that is usually written by... well-meaning white people. it's when the narrative acknowledges that racism exists, but only at the level of fictional national borders and physical externalities. to my knowledge, the shu han aren't really... (3/)

that prominent in the books? so we already don't know much about the region/people save for the fact that they're... vaguely coded as east asian. beyond her appearance, alina doesn't REALLY have any cultural markers that contextualize her Otherness (4/)

which is why, in a fantasy world of magic and Darklings and mostly-white fictitious nations inspired by diff Western European countries, the "rice-eater" insult & East Asian coding feel out of place. anachronistic. (5/)

it's racism reduced to its most visible manifestations: name calling, caricacture—the ones that are most easily understood by people who don't necessarily face the mental/emotional consequences of racism in their day-to-day (6/)

without an in-depth understanding of WHERE these microaggressions come from other than just "they look different from white people". it's also just Whitness VS East Asianness in this show, too, which is... certainly a choice given the current political climate in the US (7/)

(i might have more to add later but it's brunch time for me!)