I Wanna Be Thick For You, Jesus

darkmagyk:

Where Christian is a 107 year old vampire, and Ana is a high school student, and they don’t have sex. Just lots of emotionally abusive relationships. Maybe called: To early for Night but Not Quite Day. The world will have come full circle, and their would be no hope for humanity. 

And if enough fan fiction of terrible books gets published as ‘original’ novels, will we eventually get a good book?

(via backyardgoldmine)

I knew that I wanted Bella to be Black and but I struggled with the Cullens; did I want them to stay all white and have the BellaxEdward relationship be a jumping off point for a lot of discussion/issues that might naturally come up especially if the person of color in a white/POC relationship is socially conscious and not white-identifying? Or did a want a more respresentational approach with the Cullens being a very multicultural family of “adopted” kids of all different nationalities? However, I thought that might be difficult for how old all of the Cullens are and how much attention that would draw.

So all the Cullens are Black and except for Carlisle, African American. My goal is to keep with the progression of the novels and canon character backgrounds as much as possible, with the only differences being where I think the canon would conflict with the characters’ backgrounds. I think this will make for a pretty awesome compare/contrast. So Carlisle is Ethiopian and the son of a Ethiopian OrthodoxTewahedo priest known for his exorcisms and vampire hunting. Obviously he has to leave when he becomes a vampire and basically follows canonCarlise’s story from there until getting to America (wow that part’s going to be… interesting).

One thing that I really want to focus on is the way being Black would affect being a vampire, especially ones such as the Cullens, who basically try to reintegrate into human life without drawing too much attention to themselves.

Things like Carlisle being a doctor, all of them going to university over and over again, amassing the huge amounts of wealth the canonCullens have… all that would be possible but much more difficult, and when you add the fact that the Cullens migrate often and had to have changed identities quite a few times, at a time when Black people were confined to a smaller community and the rich Black community was an even smaller than now, the same family popping up unaged a few times over a few decades would be sure to draw some kind of attention I assume, so I’m still thinking of how to navigate that…

It’s been really fun researching the Black history of the last century and reworking Twilight to fit characters to fit that history and make the story as realistic as possible. 

I will soon be posting my fancastings for each character and more on my headcanon backstories, I haven’t started writing yet but I should begin in the next month or so (RL likes to interfere).

angrytrekkie:

cross-posted from my blog, Scribbles & Sonnets

I’m writing a fantasy series. To be specific, I’m writing a multi-ethnic, supernatural, steampunk high fantasy series. If you’re not sure what I mean, I’ll give you some reference points. Think the television show “Heroes” meets “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” meets “A People’s History of the United States” and throw in some colonialism, imperialism, racism, and other -isms. I’ve always loved the fantasy genre every since I was a kid and here are some things I’ve noticed about the genre (books, film, television and video games) in regards to race:

1. Dark / Brown people are bad.

Dark people are almost always the villains in high fantasy series. I say dark because notions of race are different in imaginary worlds but that doesn’t mean that racism in our world doesn’t carry over through the author’s depiction of dark people. J. R. R. Tolkien specifically stated in The Lord of the Rings trilogy that all of the men who joined Sauron were dark-skinned, and that the pirates were supposed to look “yellow” or Asian. Sound racist? That’s because it is. 

In David Eddings’ Belgariad and Mallorean series, the story is told from the perspective of the Alorns (also known as white people) who fight a war with the Angaraks, a race of people with “yellow skin” and “slanted eyes.” They’re often referred to as “yellow dogs.” 

In Terry Brooks’ Shannara series, which spans hundreds of years and generations upon generations of humans, dwarves, elves, trolls, etc. the dark elves are the ones who are evil. Read: dark-skinned elves.

Game of Thrones, the new HBO series based on George R. R. Martin’s series A Song of Fire and Ice has to this point (one season and four episodes of the second season in) only included three kinds of brown people: the first is a tribe of horse-lords call the Dothraki who the white protagonists view as savage, backward, and ignorant. Then there’s a cursory appearance of a black pirate, who is in the scene for approximately five minutes. In the last episode, there was a black person who is in charge of a city called Qarth (supposed to be modeled off of Egypt) and he has approximately two lines.

or…

2. Dark / Brown people don’t exist

There are plenty of other authors that wash their hands of race entirely, with token brown characters here and there or no brown people altogether. Harry Potter comes to mind, with only two or three named characters of color in seven books. A fantasy phenomenon, easily the most popular series of all time, and there are no people of color who figure prominently in it? Something about that just seems wrong. 

Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles has absolutely no people of color in it at all - and this series centers around the ability of the main characters to alter reality as they see fit. So you’re telling me that a group of people who can alter the very fabric of space and are all white? 

Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn Chronicles are completely devoid of any brown people. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games only makes mention of two who are named, and they both serve as tools to help the protagonist. They don’t have inner lives or desires or anything remotely like character development because they only exist to further the plot.

3. Brown people exist to be exotified and ogled by the white protagonist.

Jaqueline Carey’s Kushiel series is guilty of this particular trend: she sets up a pseudo-Renaissance world where the protagonist is a facsimile of a white European (seems French to me) and along her travels and journey she meets strange looking yellow-skinned and brown-skinned people. She marvels at how barbaric and savage their customs are. She feels pity for them when something bad happens and feels maternalistic towards them because they aren’t civilized enough to understand what’s going on around them.

Twilight is another series very guilty of this: Jacob is Native American and a werewolf and it’s not a coincidence. All of werewolves in Twilight are Native American, further reinforcing the stereotype that Native Americans are savage, wild, and uncivilized.

and the very rare…

4. Some people are brown and that’s okay because race doesn’t exist! 

My beloved Star Trek is guilty of this one, as is Star Wars, The Matrix, and many other science fiction films. Just because we’re in the future doesn’t mean we’re post-racial. As much as I love The Next Generation, there is not a single mention of race in regards to Geordi LeForge (Levar Burton) or Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg). Since Worf (Michael Dorn) is a Klingon, I guess I could see how race wouldn’t be the same for Klingons, and I can even see the argument that because there are races other than human racism within the human species no longer exists… but that’s pretty farfetched to me.

Heroes does this as well, and not only does it refuse to acknowledge race, but it kills off the majority of its characters of color in the first season and then replaces them with blonde white women! 

I would put The Hunger Games in this category as well because of the way race is never discussed other than as a descriptor of appearance. Collins had the opportunity to comment on systems of oppression and offer some insight on race as a hierarchical structure but she shied away from it.