Hey, I would suggest looking up the history of blackface/racist depictions of black people. You seem young and Iām sure you donāt mean to be offensive, but it is a racist plot point to use the mockery of black people as an āearth cultureā that your main character must overcome. By changing it, your comic will seem a lot less racist and probably attract more readers
That wasnāt the point of that chapter at all. I made that chapter because I saw a bunch of people on the internet getting cancelled for covering themselves in a black or brown substances in a way that was not as a reference to blackface. Think: playing in dirt and getting dirty, traditional morris dance attire, someone wearing makeup the that is legit less than one tone darker than their natural skin color and you would have to squint in order to notice that itās darker in the first place, people getting Malibu Barbie type tans.
I wanted to say that those people shouldnāt have been cancelled, and what they do isnāt offensive. The whole idea was āif aliens were to see this kind of weird illogical cancel culture stuff, they would be embarrassed.ā
I planned on Umi and Oboko being used as a way of critiquing ideas in leftism that I thought were antithetical to true equality or just extremely illogical, but that comic strip I made just ended up feeling like the ālossā comic strip from āctrl alt delā. The comic up to that point was just lighthearted fun, and thatās why I changed the comic to what it is now.
I think it was a little hypocritical of me to try and make the comic political when Iām an advocate for there being more comics that one can use to take a break from the culture war instead of being inspired by it (mainly for mental health reasons).
But the thing isā¦ I had planned that strip that youāre talking about in your ask before I even came up with the Umi and oboko story. (Before I came up with the story I made a bunch of concept art sketch comics and one of them was nearly identical to the comic about the covering yourself in a dark substance thing.)
The entire premise of the story and, most of the characters backstories are inspired by the aforementioned political subject matters I talked about.
Violetās backstory was inspired by a true story. She was originally a girl from the UK. One day, one of her family members sadly passed away and as a way of honoring them, she decided to post the lyrics to her loved oneās favorite song on her twitter. The only problem? It was a RAP song, and thus, it had a certain no no word in it, and as a result, she was arrested by the cops. Just as she was about to get sentenced the roof of the court room was RIPPED OFF, revealing a giant spaceship that came abduct her from earth.
Obokoās backstory was that he was a member of a government organization on his planet for a time. For that job, he had to research earth, and thus, he was exposed to weird earthly cancel culture stuff, and it made him depressed. He was really REALLY depressed until he met Umi, and he is now recovering from the sort of trauma that existing during the 2021-2022 cancel era was. (This was definitely meant to represent my own traumas from being an impressionable tween at the time.)
Umi is meant to represent someone who hasnāt been exposed to that kind of negative stuff yet, and remains to be traumatized by it. A shining ray of hope.
What Iām trying to say is that basically the entire premise of Umi and Oboko, the characters/their backstories/their planned arcs, and all of the story I have planned so far are intrinsically connected to the aforementioned political subject matters, and in order to do what youāre asking (in your ask), I would have to rewrite the entire story that I have planned and the characterās motivations and arcs.
I will accept any constructive advice/writing advice on what I should do next, because what Iāve done so far on my own has gotten me banned from multiple communities! I need help!
