I will disagree with you Mimi; I don’t think they’re being protective, I think they’re being defensive, the connotation is important in this context.
I liken the treatment of characters to the treatment of children because it’s easier for people to understand things when they’re relating to children. If you keep a child from any experience that can be considered harmful in any way, from a scraped knee to a broken heart, you are being defensive, subjectively. If you let the child go out with a helmet and arm and kneepads and let them cry on your shoulder after their crush, you are being protective. Being protective allows for the danger of being hurt and corrects behavior as a learning experience to then be avoided. Being defensive is attacking everything around you with the slim possibility of possibly hurting you.
Which one do you think Black Panther fans are?
As a black fan who has experienced fandom for the past 20 years I can tell you black characters are not treated fairly at all, in any capacity. This is not just in reference to them existing but to fandom’s treatment of them. We are all familiar with the thug/gangster, proud black woman who doesn’t need a man, sassy black guy/girl/queer comic relief friend, and single mom/dad characters that we were allowed. Fandom is not safe for black characters. The world isn’t and fandom is fake but everyone tries to bring the real world into the fantastic and their only interaction with blackness is these stereotypes.
Intersectionality should be the name of the game but it’s not. It’s not revolutionary for a black woman to be single and taking no shit, that’s all black women get sometimes. That’s the one black woman they get in a show or movie. It is revolutionary for a white woman character because she always gets her man and happiness. The common thread is the fans that identify with these races are bored of it. Still, Star Crossed, Belle and, yes even Game of Thrones, has revolutionary characters for black girls Juliet, Belle and Missandei were black women embodying the princess archetype. Characters like Lorraine Broughton, Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, and Furisosa are revolutionary to white women because they are used to being the princess and rarely ever get to embody the roles of women who take no shit and take care of themselves.
T'Challa’s character is fresh for a lot of black fans because of how multifaceted he is. He is ruthless, he is kind, he is noble, he is intelligent, he is merciful, he is vulnerable and he is a strong, good man. Black people do not get this in a character.
Erik Stevens is also multifaceted but he is nuanced and deeply, deeply subtle of a character and this is Ryan Coogler’s first superhero film and he assumed that people would try to understand Erik as he presented him; Erik is a trauma survivor, he is a person who clung to the incomplete lessons of a radical spy who had gone native, he is very intelligent and he bought into his own lies.
Erik does not care about black lives and we are shown this with his every interaction in this movie; he kills his love interest when she becomes inconvenient, we are shown footage of him as a sniper he could have reasonable killed Klaue and left her unharmed, he killed her to remove her as leverage. He strangled that shaman, he threatened to kill Shuri and Romanda, tried to kill Shuri, killed T'Challa for being T'Chaka’s son, which is ridiculous and unreasonable. He lashes out and kills the very people he wants to help and when asked and confronted by T'Challa he admits to his lies and says he wants to hurt the whole of the world because T'Chaka killed N'Jobu. That’s it. No other reason. No one in Wakanda did anything to him.
Erik is a character that uses black power rhetoric to achieve and camouflage his goals but he does not value black life and he does not believe in what he is saying. He is lying this whole movie except when T'Challa confronts him.
He tells T'Challa the truth.
He tells him he trained his whole life to kill him. He tells him he’ll kill anyone who could possibly support him just because he can. He tells him he will kill millions upon millions of people simply because he is hurting on the inside and he wants everyone to hurt.
Black people rarely get characters like this and to be honest the entire fandom is overlooking his complexities to pigeonhole him into a Malcolm X metaphor when Malcolm X said the most disrespected woman in America is the black woman. Do you think a person like that would try to kill that many black women as Erik did in the movie?
Erik’s little quote is cute and all but that has nothing to do with anything. T'Challa closes his eyes because it’s a waste and a shame and it didn’t have to happen. Erik’s ancestors are the descendants of the people who made it to slave ports AND THEY ARE WAKANDAN. T'Challa’s ancestors are half of Erik’s and Erik knows nothing of his heritage as a Wakandan and he flees justice for his crimes by killing himself.
White characters have been represented in every way in every medium possible. White characters get hundreds of thousands of fics of long diverse fics and graphics and fan works. Black characters don’t get fractions of that. There is almost no content left for this ship. Period. It is projected to die off in a couple of weeks because no one is making anything for them. Between the antis, no one supporting the creators and no one else making anything the content for this ship is dry as a well in a desert.
When I first joined this blog we were asked a similar question to the one you asked earlier; I said I will read anything as long as it’s good and that I wanted diversity from the fics being made because that would sustain and inspire people to make more fics and really dare to go there. No one has done any such thing.
Mimi has been speaking to you all recently because I am so mad at all of you I really don’t want to say anything. I created the wishlist from the first post to coding the pages with Mimi and working through the rules to get you all creating something and you guys won't even read the FAQ and rules. You come to this blog complaining about us posting about bottom Erik for what reason? Why? Ignore it if you don’t like it.
I backed out of the fic rec page because I am tired of reading the same 3 fics where Erik is an aggressive black male stereotype and T'Challa has the personality of a domestic abuse victim. I don’t want to read that. There are about 230 fics like that on ao3. I’m not interested. Bottom Erik fics are the only ones trying to work on Erik’s canon personality and intimacy issues.
There are about 16 fics written with any sort of care or intelligence where Erik’s character is concerned. I am a queer dom of color. Erik Killmonger would kill T'Challa in any sort of BDSM setting because he would be terrible at it. Everyone is writing canon Erik with rage issues having absolute control over T'Challa and trying to convince me that just because you say so Erik is going to take good care of T'Challa. You won’t show me his growth and you don’t write him that way.
You all are writing the same aggressive thug black man character with Erik and making T'Challa into I don’t know who to let Erik abuse him or fuck him. Why? T'Challa is shown to loathe Erik’s behavior and the way he disregards and harms everyone around them and you think he would love it if Erik did it to him? What?
Every piece of logic used to assert that Erik is a top is faulty and he’s objectively terrible dom material. Here’s a secret from the real life scene; you have to sub first to see how it is before you can Dom. And you all have already established that you won't.
But cool, if you believe Erik’s lies that’s fine; where are all the fics where Erik feels remorse for killing his girlfriend, where are all the fics where Erik tells T'Challa about the American black queer scene, where are all the fics that talk about how Erik felt that night when T'Chaka killed N'Jobu? Huh? Or do all 1000 of you only care about who is where when Erik and T'Challa fuck?
In the real queer world heterosexual gender roles are looked down on with scorn because those in the know acknowledge that it is all a bunch of bullshit. Why would it matter who’s fucking who? Anal sex feels good, if it didn’t no one would do it, the only people who care about something going in their ass are people who feel like it makes them less of a man, because no one conditions women to hate penetrative sex. If it’s two men fucking how does which man fucking which factor into that? Either way they’re still fucking a dude.
That’s what actually matters to straight people: Are you fucking a dude? Not which dude is fucking which.
That’s internalized homophobia; the need to conform to heteronormative categories of “So which of you is the girl?” Because that’s what Top v Bottom is: Which of you is the girl?
That is where the intersectionality from before plays in; it is not novel for a black male character to have deep-seated issues with which end of the dick he’s on. That’s literally D Major’s plot line on Empire and idk how many other shows with 1 black gay character.
Why are you guys doing this and why are we having this pointless fucking discussion?
Why are you over looking them being cousins and fucking and going “Well T'Challa is soft and delicate and I think he’s the girl and Erik is being strong and aggressive so he’d be the boy. Alpha Erik and Omega T'Challa ftw.” Why? What are you doing new? Why bother when there are 230 fics just like it and yours is ooc. Go back to the character you were shoving into this box before and leave them out it.
As a black queer poc we get exactly zero nuanced black queer characters: if you are going to make Erik queer then fucking do it with some integrity and intelligence. He is lashing out at the world because he was never shown kindness by anyone but his father and T'Challa offers him that so he can heal and you don’t see this beautiful capable man who is demanding to be taken care of by someone who will honor his feels and going, “I only want them to fuck and I want the big, aggressive black guy to rough up and fuck the multifaceted kind black guy because he’s the guy in here and it’s hot when guys are abusive assholes.”
