Yeah, don’t worry dear disciple, We didn’t read that as malicious at all. ( ´ ▽ ` )b
See, the key difference here is the context. You don’t shit on the original designs & while you DO draw them differently, it’s because of your own personal style & not because you want brownie points for making them look more “ethnic”. Also you said you try to keep things true to model, which is something THOSE types of artists avoid like the plague (“whew, got rid of Lance’s ugly pointy chin & made his hair extra curly, like & reblog my Cuban Lance edit~”).
The “fanon VLD characters” we were mocking? Those all had captions & tags saying (or the artist themself later saying) that the show’s artists were stupid & racist (”Give her black features you cowards”, “Dreamworks should hire me because I can actually draw POC :)”).
That type of art very clearly doesn’t use references (Human Lance with white freckles??? Vitiligo on Hunk but it looks like a giraffe pattern instead???) & the end result is more racist caricature than actual fanart. (And in those cases, it’s very clear that it’s not because “oh the artist just has that sort of style”.)
You also have people screaming about how Allura is black rep (solely because of her skin color & nothing else) while shaming or outright ignoring South East Asian Allura or Native American Allura even though those races also have dark skin like canon Allura does. (So warbonnets are inappropriate on actual warrior princess Allura, but dreads & afros aren’t? 🤔)
There were even people yelling how Lotor (whose mother is as dark-skinned as Allura) could not possibly BE dark-skinned & that any fanart of human Lotor being dark-skinned was unacceptable because Galra are oppressive, white people are oppressive & so Lotor HAS to be white. It doesn’t matter that he’s mixed race, he’s a villain so he MUST be Caucasian in fanart.
Not to mention - these same fucking people cannot even recognize the actual canon skin tone of the characters from the show.
We’ve discussed before on Whitetron smugly “advising” artists to use the eyedropper tool, but even when people actually DID do that (INCLUDING the Canon vs Fanon pic - the OP for that explicitly decided to use the eyedropper tool & not just pick a similar tone to it), they were still yelled at by Whitetron & other antis in a condescending smug tone.
Because those antis literally do not know what the characters actually looked like.
It’s all performative. They don’t & have never actually cared about POC or those characters in the first place.
gummygunk
kianamaiart
