Racebending: It's not just for that one fic challenge!

[gryphonsegg]

Lately, I've noticed several posts/comments floating about LJ/DW that basically go like this: Fic Writer wants to write a fusion story in which characters from Source A have always already lived in the world of Source B. The characters are white/played by white actors in Source A, and Source B is about characters of color and/or from a non-Western, non-European country. So Fic Writer hesitates for fear of "whitewashing" Source B. So . . . am I the only one who thinks the obvious solution is to reimagine the the Source A characters as people who would have plausibly grown up with analogous backgrounds in the Source B setting, i.e. as people who like the other people of their social position in Source B? I mean, it wasn't that long ago that the racebending challenge, in which the whole point is to reimagine white characters as characters color and explore the differences that might make in the characters' lives, kicked off. The answer to the fusion problem would be reimagine Character A as someone who fits into Setting B in much the same way ze fits into Setting A. So if Character A is white in Source A and blends in with the background crowd in Setting A, but a white person would stick out like a sore thumb in Setting B, writing Character A as having always existed in Setting B without comment would entail changing Character from white to whatever racial/ethnic group blends in to the same degree in Setting B.

I'm a little puzzled because this doesn't seem like that big a leap to me. List/Circle, is there something I'm missing?

Comments

[holyschist]

Well, yeah. If you stick characters from Buffy into His Dark Materials they will have daemons, so if you stick them into ATLA, they should be Asian/Inuit, right? It seems logical to me.

[gryphonsegg]

That's what I was thinking. But apparently making making a white human character an Asian human is considered a lot stranger than making a white human character a pale-skinned Vulcan.