Genuine question about Saltanubis: Although Mr. Riordan portrays Anubis as a teenager, is someone in your opinion bigoted, if they're still uncomfortable with shipping two teenagers with a deity who is thousands of years old? (The hypothetical reader in question here does understand how the author meant to write the character, however his hatred for the ship lies in the fact that the egyptian myths are real within the Kane Chronicles universe.)
You're allowed to feel uncomfortable with it, you're allowed to dislike it even, I don't care about that. What I do care about (and what I specified in that post) is the people who are extremely vocal about that hatred so often just have a lot of unconscious biases and the 'age gap' is a shield they use so they don't have to confront them.
If you don't like the whole 'immortal teen dating other teens' thing that's fine but, lets face it, that's one of the most common fantasy tropes like. ever. You still don't gotta like it but I feel like there comes a point where you don't gotta be yelling about so much. Constantly trying to reaffirm that it's 'problematic' when (to my knowledge) there's no irl precedent for this just makes you look kind of silly.
Where the bigotry comes in is *why* so many people do get so viscerally mad over a fictional ship. Yes, perhaps some people do just hate anything that makes them uncomfortable, yes internet exaggeration is a factor, but considering how I've seen a lot of these people speak, I don't think it's any stretch of the imagination to say it's racism. Sadie and Walt are both canonically and explicitly Black (yes Sadie's mixed, yes she's lighter skinned but she's still Black, that's the point of the series), we'll not go into Anubis right now since Sadie and Walt are enough for what I'm talking about. Rrverse fandom loves discounting the romantic relationships Black characters have (notice how a similar 'age gap' thing happens with frazel) and with Sadie specifically because she's much lighter skinned than Walt, she often just gets paired off with Jaz (who is ambig. race but people think she's white) or Drew (You will note I am NOT saying Jadie or Tanakane are bad ships, people who know me know i like tanakane a lot, what I am saying is there's racial bias in why these are the characters Sadie gets shipped with more often than not). Walt, however just gets ignored.
I'm not done talking about the antiblackness here (it'll likely be the rest of this post) but the biphobia usually comes in from people who insist Sadie is a lesbian. I'm not gonna touch the whole "character who's canonically attracted to men can't be a lesbian" disk horse with a 10 foot pole but with Sadie specifically her character explicitly has the conclusion of realising she doesn't always need to choose between 2 things, main eg. I think of is "would you save your father or save the world" in book 1, and she can have multiple things at once. Yes, this relates to her being polyamorous but there's definitely an interpretation you can make that she's probably bi too.
This thing isn't even unique thing to tkc, Fandom at large has an antiblackness problem. Not only are Black characters either pushed to the side or only paid attention to when they're with the white character they've been stapled to but Black people are treated horrendously, especially on this website. Any openly Black person on here probably has some experience with antiblackness because that's how prevalent it is. To go back to tkc characters, on the rare occasion people talk about tkc, what do they usually talk about? Not Walt, not Carter (never on his own at least), not Julius, not Amos, not any of the darker skinned Black characters. It's "Sadie was pretty cool" or "Anubis plot bad" or "Drew was there".
The extra annoying thing about this though, the thing that genuinely infuriates me is that this conversation is the only big thing people talk about with tkc. It is this or the assumption that Anubis is white. It's not the genuinely heartwreching depictions of familial love, it's not the shockingly mostly decent handling of characters of colour & their stories for once from Riordan, it's not the many queer readings you can do of Walt, Sadie, Amoset or Zia to name a few, it's not any of the things I love tkc for. It's fucking ship discourse. There's no definitive proof of this and there never will be but other people have said this sentiment and I agree so much: people haven't read tkc despite having read most of Riordan's other series because the MCs are Black. And, this is my words now, I honestly think a lot of this discourse comes from people who never read it. I'll admit, every time I bring this up I do feel bad because I feel like I'm contributing to this, even if I'm on the other side of this argument.
Lets go to you now, anon. I've been deliberately avoiding talking about your stated reason for disliking saltnubis for the fact that I Have No Clue What You're Saying (Don't give a follow up trying to explain it further, I don't really care and being forced to see more reasons people hate a ship I actually quite like sounds terrible). But the rest of your message kinda gave the impression you wanted to feel absolved of any guilt. Like you felt like someone might have thought of you as a racist for this and needed to not feel like that, so I've generally been assuming you're white. I could be wrong, I think you read my post wrong so who's to say but here's my genuine advice for you (and anyone else who got this far in the post) if you feel this way again. Educate yourself. That's it. Learn how to deconstruct your own biases and where and how to spot racism of all kinds. Read books by authors of colour (and especially Black authors), fiction And nonfiction. Listen to people of colour (once again, especially Black people because of what we've been talking about here) and take lessons from them. And generally, try to think on your own, it mightn't happen all the time but applying the things you learn is the best way to know you're actually taking it on. And if you need to ask for further advice, a) maybe try not going to a white person again (I've tried my best here but generally a person of colour is going to be much more knowledgeable than me) and b) make sure the person is actually willing to help you (because lord knows pocs get asked way too much by the white people around them if x thing is racist)
If you need a starting point, Creatingblackcharacters is a pretty good place to start
