As everyone hops on the YaraSteph train and Brombal’s Titans I think it is incredibly important that we all remember that Yara Flor is a racist caricature and do our research about the flawed writing of her character rather than immediately praise her for yuri potential..
Problems of indigenous representation, sexualization and other serious questions. By Débora Carvalho, originally written on Garotas Geeks.
Above is a great article going over the core flaws to her character as it's introduced in Future State: Wonder Woman. But it leaves out the current status quo of Yara's character (which actually manages to be worse!) Here's another article written by a Brazilian reviewer going over the flaws in how she's written elsewhere in Future State, and in her comic, Wonder Girl (2021).
You either put in the work or let others who are more qualified do it instead.
Both this articles are great but I would like to add my two cents, because there are way too many people who read this and their immediate conclusion is a desire to cancel Yara, and if I have to see one more person advocating for Yara's erasure from mainline I will go insane.
So here's a list of most things wrong with Yara and how to easily fix her, because we can't change the past, but we can be better moving forward.
1- I want to start with her conception, the idea of an Amazon from the Amazon rainforest, an interesting idea, but not a new concept. Do you know why the Amazon was named like that? It was not a random name or a weird coincidence.
"In the heart of the forest, a group of women decided to abandon their villages. They were unhappy with the rise of new rules and codes instituted by the Son of the Sun, which belittled their activities and sought to control their bodies. [...]
There, near the Yacy-uaruá lagoon (Mirror of the Moon) and far from the laws of the Son of the Sun, they formed a new community. [...] They were also known as Icamiabas (icami-milk, breast; aua-who or that one), those who have breasts that give milk, indicating a community formed solely by women.
[...]
However, the Icamiabas do not only appear in mythical narratives. In 1541, the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro organized a large expedition, which was to leave Quito in search of gold and spices, venturing into the forest. Faced with difficulties in advancing and also in returning, and with resources dwindling, Pizarro decided to form a small group led by Francisco de Orellana, who would explore the region and obtain provisions.
Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, chronicler of the expedition, recorded the journey in his ship's log. It was during this undertaking near the Nhamundá and Trombetas rivers, that the expedition supposedly encountered the Icamiabas tribe, whom Carvajal called Amazons, associating them with the warrior women of Greek mythology. For this reason, the Amazon Rainforest, the state of the Amazonas, and the Amazon River received these names."
Excerpt from the article Icamiabas: The resistance of the indigenous woman by Soleni Biscouto Fressato
More information on the Icamiabas can be read in this amazing article, that is in portuguese but can be easily understood with Google translate.
Foto: Reprodução/Portal Amazônia
But how does all this affect Yara Flor?
Instead of following the myth on what could've been a beautiful story of womanhood, sisterhood fighting the oppression of patriarchy and forming a community for themselves, with the nature and Indigenous divinities and entities part of Indigenous Mythology (I was thinking of specifically Tupi-Guarani Mythology). But they decided to completely disregard it in favour of creating their own thing, that they don't explain completely and don't make sense with their own Amazonas mythos as a whole. They named the indigenous Amazon tribe Esquecidas, a portuguese word for forgotten, but why would an isolated indigenous tribe have a name in portuguese?
So how could this be fixed?
My pitch would be to retcon the Esquecidas into the Icamiabas (If that can be even called a retcon with how vague they are with the Esquecidas origin). Of course, now it may be hard to change their name, but they had already said that they had many names through the years, Icamiabas could've been one of them, with their origin being the same as the one in the Myth.
The one addition I would do is to have Yacy (Goddess of the moon and associated with womanhood) bless them with their powers, in a similar way to how the origin of the Amazons is in DC, making them more cousins than sisters, in the sense that they're formed and related to different gods, but I do not believe that this would take from the sisterhood between Themyscara, Bana-Mighdall and Esquecidas.
Because in the Icamiabas myth they abandoned their villages because of the Son of the Sun, I thought about the possibility of making Jurubari (The Son of the Sun) a good potential villain for them, but his image was already demonized so much by the Catholic Church that I fear that this could be tone deaf.
2- Which leads me to my second point, They absolutely NEED a indigenous brazilian consultant in the writer room
Not just a Brazilian consultant, someone who is indigenous too.
Which somehow may be asking too much because I know there was not a single brazilian involved in any part of the creation of her books no matter what Joelle Jones may say. And I discovered this in the first page of her mini, because they committed a mistake so stupid and so easy to fix that proves that no brazilian has laid their eyes in this book before it was published.
Yara says Queijo to take a picture. No one ever says Queijo to take a photo, it is literally just Cheese translated to portuguese, but what we say when we take a photo is Cheese or maybe Abacaxi (Pineapple in portuguese). And if any brazilian had read it, the mistake would have been fixed just by changing one single word.
How to fix? Hire a Brazilian indigenous consultant
3- The treatment of the indigenous entities
Unlike the Greek Gods, the indigenous mythology to this day is important to this day to a group who has been oppressed because of their faith for so long.
And indigenous folks don't mess around with the entities, the entities should be treated with respect. So you may be able to understand that many indigenous were pissed when Yara treated Caipora, a protector of the forest, like this:
Before talking about how to fix this, I want to introduce the next issue and solve both of them at the same time.
4- Yara's stereotypical personality
Yara Flor is a victim of the spicy Latina trope, she is brash, hot-blooded, fights first and asks questions later.
How to fix both of these issues? I would have Yara go through a character development where she learns how to control her temper and to respect the entities. Yara is still a recent character and she has plenty of space for her character to grow and evolve.
5- Yara Flor unknown father
While we know her father is a "river God" he is unnamed, which really is their mistake because if they're gonna say her father is associated with the river and then I'm gonna assume it's the fucking boto-cor-de-rosa (the fucking pink dolphin), whose whole thing is that at night he becomes a man, seducing women and impregnating them with his children. Just kidding, but we don't know who Yara's father is, and that's a problem.
Many people speculate for him to be Tupã the creator god, but Tupã is not associated with rivers, he's more associated with thunders.
And while I searched I couldn't find a indigenous Tupi-Guarani God who fit the description of Yara's father, so DC will have to work with indigenous consultants to find someone who fits the description or retcon it into another God who makes the story interesting.
There's more I could say about how she was raised in Idaho apart from her culture, how geographically her mini makes no sense, and on and on. But I want to end this with the hopeful feelings that Yara is going to receive better writing in the future. She is a great character with a lot of potential, and there's already a lack of representation of Brazilian, indigenous brazilians even more, and to erase her or completely throw her away because she is not perfect does more harm than good.
