So I showed this to people on reddit I wanna see what people here feel,
Do you think that Steven Universe has done a poor job portraying people of color?
2.https://medium.com/@soverybee/discovering-yourself-a-fan-of-the-problematic-fbfd04717b83#.jp6g
Characters being "coded" as a certain race or ethnicity is often up for debate, and in the eyes of the beholder. I don't see it for Amethyst or Jasper; aside from the latter having a black voice actor. Part of this also comes from the fact that most of the Gems are voiced by women of color; eventually, you're going to have villains.
@First Article: ...And Pearl can't, say, be an Asian-coded who gets storylines typically given to white characters?
I mean, there's definitely room for discussion about this...but that sounded like they started with a conclusion and worked backwards.
Oh God! Natural light!I don't really have much in particular to say about the first article, but I do have a lot of thoughts on the Bismuth one, and some other thoughts about the show in general. Long post ahead.
Everything that's said in the Bismuth article is spot on. I'm not even black, but I felt uncomfortable watching her episode because I could tell what was coming. I haven't been able to rewatch Bismuth because of how uncomfortable it made me, showing the message that a big butch black activist is a violent, murderhappy extremist.
And it goes beyond that. SU is a very progressive show, but it reeks of "not too progressive". Ruby and Sapphire are gay! But not actually because they're genderless space rocks. Pearl is gay! But not really, because she's a genderless space rock.
The only actually LGBT characters on the show are S and a lesbian couple who appear in some crowd shots. They get no lines, they get no full names, they're barely even characters at all.
And then you get to the one thing I was dreading for months, ever since the theory popped up.
Jasper's corruption. And there are two big reasons for it.
A) Jasper, the big butch woman of the homeword trio, has to suffer and go through hell, while Peridot, who is cute and small, gets to redeem herself by just calling her boss a jerk.
B) Jasper, the big butch woman, catches cartoon AIDS. She tries fusing (bonding physically and intimately) with another gem without thinking of the consequences. And then we watch in horror as her body degrades slowly and painfully.
I love SU, but there are times where I watch an episode, and it hurts me so badly that I need to switch over to reruns of We Bear Bears just to feel better.
edited 24th Sep '16 4:00:07 PM by smokeycut
I read the whole thing, and it is wrong. It is aggressively, and objectively, wrong. Just adding the word 'Black' in front of everything most of the Gems do doesn't make it a Black issue: these are aliens, just because they are coded black doesn't mean that everything they do should be focused on with a microscope insisting that they are black (as an aside, if we're putting race on some sort of arbitrary scale, there's NO WAY that Jasper is blacker than Garnet).
Also, this whole rant completely ignores the entire Pizza family. *drops mic*
I'm not even going to bother. As far as I see it, Gems are Gems, and aside from Garnet and Bismuth having more defined black mannerisms, race is unimportant to what they do. If anything it's more about how Gems aren't human than what human group they can fall under. Voice actors aside.
The human cast is plenty diverse, so this all seems to just be drama importing.
A meaningful discussion is fine, but when the article begins by assuming race and working backward to that conclusion, they kind of already shot themselves in the foot.
I will ask the question of what the logic is behind saying that Jasper is coded as black.
Is it because of her voice actress? Well, that'd be fair, I suppose, but that first article also argues that Pearl is coded white, even though her voice actress isn't.
edited 24th Sep '16 4:30:12 PM by KarkatTheDalek
Oh God! Natural light!Kind of have to agree on that.
The idea of character race coding has been discussed before, and it's a complicated subject that I'm not super qualified to talk about, but for what it's worth, about the only characters I've seen coded as any particular ethnicities are Rose (white) and Garnet (black). I can certainly see the arguments for Bismuth, but I think coding Jasper as black seems to be pretty subjective and based on your own predilections rather than something more substantial in the show itself. Not to say it's my place to tell people what to consider the characters in their own headcanon, but if you're going to make an argument about implications in the show your headcanon is not really proof.
edited 24th Sep '16 4:40:48 PM by Draghinazzo
I always get confused when people say that Pearl is coded as white because, like you all said, first of all, her VA is Asian, and second of all, what exactly does a character need to have to be white-coded, exactly? Because to me, it seems like Pearl isn't really coded as anything very strongly, and to just assume that because she's not coded as any race means that she's coded as white is really.... well, iffy. And really relies on a "white-as-default" mentality.
When we're done, there won't be anything left.It would be disingenuous of me to say that I saw Pearl as being asian-coded because of Deedee Magno-Hall but I also agree that there's no particular reason to see her as being white-coded either other than by a tenuous association. It's not as if caucasian people are the only ones with lighter skin colors.
The whole concept of "coding" the characters is just stereotyping them anyway. It's not based on anything they actually are. It shows more about what the author sees of the world than it does about the creators.
That's all I'm gonna say on that. I don't really consider this an actual issue. They're just trying to stir the pot, and clickbait people for money.
"Gay doesn't count because of genderless space rocks" is an insanely reductionist viewpoint that craps all over Willing Suspension of Disbelief. If we go that way none of this counts because it's a cartoon.
That said, those medium posts were both an abyss of overanalysis where the joy of viewership goes to die. Specifically it runs into the Left's problem of eating itself; anything progressive that isn't progressive *enough* is suddenly worse than all of the regressive stuff out there.
Apparently the reason why the person who wrote the first codes her as white is because they say the women of color suffer for the sake of Pearl, like her beating Sugilite in Coach Steven and her conflict with Garnet in Steven bomb 3
I honestly just think about these things in technical standpoints not racial ones. The sad truth is that SU can't please everybody
Also the Gems clearly have gender. In that they identify with female pronouns.
They are sexless, I think.
Forever liveblogging the Avengers
