my patience with the hypersensitivity in this community is frayed, so i apologize in advance if i come across as brusque or confrontational. i’m really a wimp irl, but this thread irritated the hell out of me.
before going any further, i would like to plainly state that I am both a brown woman and a fanartist in the grishaverse fandom, one who has given great thought to zoya’s design. this is one of the few topics i feel qualified to speak on 1) because of my background and 2) because of my work.
@unpopularcharacterstan : i don’t think it’s anyone’s place to claim that a certain image is incapable of fitting *any* beauty standards in *any* region/culture of the world. unless your interactions with said cultures are extensive, that is only an assumption made from a western lens (assuming you reside in the west). realize, too, that so many cultures of the world have had their notions of beauty disrupted by colonialism and imperialism. In many places the whiter you are (not just in skin tone, but “typically european” features as well), the more attractive you are. since we’re discussing a brown character, i feel it necessary to mention that south asia is notorious for it’s obsession with whiteness. hindu deities have been whitewashed, for god’s sake.
as for “masculine” zoya, there is so much wrong with this terminology alone, the heteronormative stereotypes it reinforces and more. however, as someone with little experience in the nuances of opposing the gender binary, i don’t think it’s my place to get into that.
all i will say is that having or not having muscular definition should not weigh as heavily on the overall attractiveness of a character as it is being made out to, *especially* when there is no evidence from canon to dismiss either end of the spectrum. having muscle does not detract from femininity; see many of today’s fitness content creators. broad shoulders do not mean “masculine”; see the runway models of the world.
to be honest, the fixation with zoya’s muscularity is unnecessary. she’s described as “lithe”, fine. lithe can be used to refer to someone with little to no muscle definition, but it can also be used to refer to some athletes with substantial definition. additionally, it was a word used to describe her in the trilogy. who’s to say that she didn’t begin to train more heavily after the war? or maybe she did so after realizing how much she relied solely on her power during her sessions with juris. there’s so much room for interpretation that the preoccupation evident in these replies and comments seem only nitpick-y.
post-kos there has been an influx of zoya fanart across the board, and yes, a good deal of it depicts her with features common in south asian and sa-adjacent populations. (side note, but zoya does not need to be 100% suli in order to look suli/have suli features. genetics don’t work like that. there is far more good done by portraying her as someone phenotypically brown than as someone with white-passing features and a tan.)
it is enormously presumptuous and harmful to imply that neither the artist or our world would find the zoyas with these features attractive. some of you have already said it, but the whole point of drawing zoya with features such as prominent brows, noses, etc. is to explicitly challenge common notions of beautiful, shocking, stunning.
apart from her eye/hair color, “perfect skin” and “delicate bones”, we know nothing about what zoya looks like. not her nose shape, eyebrow thickness, whether she has body hair, moles, muscles - nothing. nothing. time and time again we are told she is beautiful, and undeniably so, but that is all. to say for certain that she looks any specific way is inaccurate and nothing but a projection of what you think she should be.
if anyone got “delicate”, “feminine”, or “traditionally beautiful” (which seems to me just another way of saying “beautiful by european standards”) from that, it wasn’t from anything explicitly stated in text. sure, the connotations are there, but only because of a lifetime of being force fed variants of virtually the same image with the word “beautiful” attached.
it is impractical to expect leigh to spell out every hair and mole on her body. do you really need her too in order to accept a fanartist’s work? if in row we get more detailed descriptions of zoya, so be it, but quite often we fanartists have to fill in the blanks and sometimes it’s for characters of races/ethnicities different from our own. as long as caricatures are absent and the work is done with good intent, there should not be problem.
@ruthlesstormwitch my version of zoya is not more acceptable than a non-brown fanartist’s featuring many of the same details because of my background. i will not have their designs of zoya (or any other brown character) demonized for not being yet another - frankly, boring - airbrushed picture in a near literal sea of cookie-cutter protagonists. certainly not for supposedly playing into toxic masculinity. in fact, attaching the ideas like muscle = masculine and body hair = unattractive is more toxic by leaps and bounds.
if there’s one thing i’ve learned about representation this year, it’s that it doesn’t have to mean the same thing to everyone in order to be good. as long as someone somewhere feels seen, that is enough.
in reading through the replies/reblogs, i have marked only one instance of a brown woman dissatisfied with these portrayals of zoya. to each their own, i won’t argue. but i couldn’t tell you how many of the following dms/comments i alone have gotten from young women - of all walks of life, not just brown - on the subject of my art of zoya .
“i love her arms, they look like mine.”
“her nose is beautiful, it looks like mine.”
“seeing her sideburns made me feel a little better about mine.”
i find that words like these matter infinitely much more than whether or not someone else finds her to be “not pretty/delicate enough”.
and i don’t mention all that to flex or whatever, but put into perspective how much larger that number is once having compiled the works of other artists. so much more good is done by these portrayals of zoya than you can imagine. maybe it takes being from this demographic to see it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
it’s a tale you’ve probably heard several times before, but for many bipoc it is a rarity to see people who look like you, who have features like yours, portrayed at all - much less as someone beautiful.
when we do, it’s hard not to see that it’s because they embody an image palatable for hollywood, the west, or even white individuals holding an overwhelming amount of the world’s purchasing power. zoya with features less frequently shown in a positive light is meant to be a afront to that.
as (again) a brown woman, i have never once seen the supposed stereotype of the angry, muscular brown woman perpetrated. it’s only ever been the opposite: demure, small, shy, etc.
if so much of the argument against these designs for brown characters stems from wanting a woc without certain features in order to be considered strong, why can’t the same thing be said for her beauty? it’s been iterated over and over again and i don’t know why it needs to be repeated so often, but you don’t need certain features in order to be considered beautiful.
just because the image you associate with a beautiful woman isn’t one that matches with an artist incorporating diversity of features into their work, does not mean their illustrations of a character are any further from canon.
@curtsydear , please do elaborate on as to why bucumber’s zoya is “right”. is it because her features are quite small? typical of european ideals?
making zoya “look masculine“ only implies “that you can be beautiful or you can be strong“ if you don’t find these features attractive. the two are not mutually exclusive, and for many, these character designs embody the intersection.
and, sorry, but who are you to to say that zoya must be someone that removes her body hair? with the confidence that security in herself that woman has, she’d be more likely to say to hell with your opinions on her body.
@zoyalensky , i don’t think we have seen enough fanart of tamar or tolya to make that call. like i’m sure many of you, there isn’t a single drawing of tolya i can call to mind and only a very small number of tamar. zoya, in stark contrast, has been drawn hundreds of times over.
i am more than willing to bet that the artists who draw zoya as muscular would not shy away from doing the same for the twins. the fact is that they haven’t, or haven’t often, or we haven’t seen it circulating online.
depictions in fanart are greatly influenced by an individual artist’s comfort with their putting to paper their subject matter. if all i’ve ever seen is art of slim characters, it is likely all i will draw. we are simply mirrors of our environment in that way.
if you are unsatisfied with an artist’s interpretation of a character, ask yourself why. i can almost assure you that there are internalized issues with the idea of beauty and social acceptance there.
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