The Beginnings of “Pawns”
So, this is officially the first post (of hopefully many) regarding a project called “Pawns.” It’d be kind of cheesy to say that this project had humble beginnings and things like that, but it totally did. The idea for this came from a comic I had done in the spring term of my junior year at Cornish (which I shall put in the next post) and eventually turned into my big, scary senior degree project. Began working on it for well over a year— I’m not gonna lie, sometimes I wanted to burn everything to the ground.
The ideas behind “Pawns” were an array of social issues as well as those found in animation and media. All of my paper work-y parts of my project spoke about the need for representative media for all misrepresented and underrepresented groups (women, People of Color, and LGBTQIA) because speaking about accurate representation and inclusion of one group cannot exist unless you advocate for the inclusion of all. This was not an easy thing to accomplish in 1.5 years, especially working alone. I could not tell you how many books I read or essays I wrote about these issues, but the thing that kept me going was past personal experiences and conflicts that arose in my family regarding those very same issues. Media reflects the issues that society likes to mock, ignore, and straight up deny and it’s time that we address this in our systems and our media.
For my BFA project, that’s what I was going to do. Since I was small, fantasy has been my absolute FAVORITE genre and it still hold that title. However, most fantasy related things were always based in white European settings and myths; being a small brown girl, I would always change the stories to ones I knew (which were myths my dad had told me from Chicano, Yaqui, Mexica, and Dine culture) so I or my siblings could be the heroes in them. Or if we were playing princesses, my sister and I would fight over who could be Pocahontas or Kida— it wasn’t until much, much later that I realized we picked those two because they looked like us. Having recognized the need to see ourselves in media and how important it is not just for young kids, but for everyone, I set out to make a story that fit in the genre I loved while incorporating ideas/myths/histories from people we barely talk about in western schools, believable female characters, and inclusions of queer characters.
Senior Project Summary: Representation in Narrative Media
“My goal is to create a narrative that exists within a High Fantasy genre that features traditionally underrepresented groups, such as: women, People of Color, and the queer community. I am creating the story in such a way that “non-traditional” identities do not become the driving factor for the plot, but rather facets in the characters to build multidimensional people.”
Over the course of the year, I created a concept art book to explain my ideas and where I would continue to drive the project forward and thanks to berntkat’s pestering I’m finally getting around to starting a blog to show not only what I have, but where I’m going. Along with the book, I created a D&D campaign and title sequence to “prove” that an inclusive narrative could be driven across many platforms of media and that there is no reason not to be creating stories like it. So I’m gonna stop talking now and cut the red ribbon. Without any further delay, I am opening up the blog and posting pages from my book to kick this bad boy off.
