Vivian M. and misusing features.
Next on our list we have the infamous Vivian M! Author of: Pregnant by my Boyfriend’s Twin (lol), Teenage Warfare, and Holiday Collection.
So I was always skeptical about Vivian using full round lips and upturned feline (I mean.. purple eyes too? Sis goodbye) on her character. But I never really thought much of it because 1. I don’t care for her appropriating ass 2. I had never actually seen her face. But recently it has been brought to my attention by Vivian herself (which has now been deleted, thus I’m sharing it with y’all).
So it all began with this tweet:
To which Vivian liked & replied that she agreed with something along the lines of “I agree with this.. ***It bugs me when people misuse features…*** blah blah blah I use full round lips because my lips take up half my face” She deleted the reply & I never screenshotted it but GIRL WHERE LOL. So I brushed it aside because… keep in mind… I’d never seen her face. The thing that bugs me most is that this tweet was followed by this one:
(It’s kind of funny because she does this exact thing in her story Teenage Warfare, a story aimed to represent diverse backgrounds, but I’ll get to that later in this post) So this rant was obviously preaching natural features of people of color that white people LOVE to use on their characters. Therefore: THAT TWEET WASN’T FOR U GIRL WHY DID U REPLY LIKE IT WAS.
So I thought this ended there, but Vivian, a few weeks later, posted this on her Instagram story. This shows one of the comments (now deleted, just like her reply) she received on her Youtube video where she showed her face.
To which she later posted:
Half of your face where. Have you seen actual full lips.This shit don’t add up fam. Anyways, I’m BIG tired of people using features they don’t actually have i.e. upturned feline eyes, which is the closest thing that Asians have to monolids. I’m aware that there are non-Asians that have slender eyes, but Vivian clearly doesn’t have them either. Neither do a lot of white people that use them.
In Teenage Warfare, Vivian put upturned feline eyes on EVERY main white female character… itsjustnotrealistic.gif……
Fetishizing features: Check.
Also… I don’t know why Vivian liked that second tweet when she literally gave purple eyes, an unnatural feature only to the token Muslim character, Alaya. Honestly the way Islam was included in this story was borderline stereotypical for Muslim Americans in the first place but that’s for another day.
Exclusively using atypical features for POC: Check.
In conclusion, please be wary about features you use on any character. You don’t want to be seen as a hypocrite later on.
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