#fandom discourse-

[altairattorney]

For all the times I’ve seen the Steven Universe fandom say things I thought indefensible and completely devoid of analysis: this is not one of those times.

If you think this artbook thing is okay, you are dead wrong. And regardless of intention or not, there are a few crucial reasons why, and you cannot ignore them:

Concret/e isn’t even a gemstone, gems do not wear clothes, and you cannot tell me writing “can’t read :(” isn’t super shady. So if you don’t think that commentary alone was racist as fuck, fuck you for that.

Anybody, and I stress, anybody who works as a cartoon artist has a professional duty to know animation and history of animation like the back of their hand. Wherever you look from Warner (side-eyeing Looney Tunes) to Hanna & Barbera to Disney, it is very likely that within five minutes of viewing you will encounter at least one example of that rich history of American racist filth flooding animation. Anybody who has even the vaguest of interests in animation has seen a blackface once, and holy flying fuck, that design is the essence of blackface. Any professional artist would have looked at their quick sketch with a cool mind, observed it for 5 seconds, then crumpled it and thrown it in the trash. This thing made it in the OFFICIAL ARTBOOK and nobody. in the team. blinked once.

I love this show but yes, this is disgusting and unforgivable. And I don’t care if anyone thinks my opinion doesn’t count because of who I am, it still is.

[altairattorney]

@gonturan0 thanks for the tag, I already saw Rebecca’s apology on Twitter. I never doubted she’d make one and see to changing the situation. However, her apology -- which is honest and responsible and I accept -- does not change my position on this happening in the first place. 

Not only is it something that should never have been overlooked, but it’s bad enough already that nobody realized how bad it looked in the first place. Once again, I speak out of my personal knowledge: that design is a textbook blackface from the early decades of animation, and if I know enough to recognize a blackface cartoon, hired professional animators of today shouldn’t have a second thought while even DRAWING one. Mistakes happen, but a good worker recognizes it when it’s done at the very least. Concept art is a miscellaneous field in which the most unformed, unoriginal etc. ideas happen. However, a well-rounded artistic formation should inherently prevent racist traditions from carrying over to concept art itself. And if it does happen, I see no reason why an attentive artist should believe including it in official artbooks is okay. To top it off, SU is no naive, uninformed show; it has proven over and over again to carry enormous attention towards diversity, and many things that are absolutely correct and important are way too often misunderstood by the fandom itself (like Bismuth, or like when people criticized the episode in which Ronaldo wants to be included in the Crystal Gems and makes it all about himself, coherent representation of a very real phenomenon).

My favorite comic series, Asterix, had an inherent trope of portraying all cultures and ethnicities with heavily exaggerated and stereotyped traits, both psychological and physical. The reason for this is that Asterix was an ante-litteram crusade against prejudice, and the way it achieved that was ridiculing stereotypes by bloating them into the senseless grotesque things they are. However, people of African descent are all blackfaced. If the authors had recognized the enormous racist weight of blackface for what it was, I have 0% doubt they would never have used it. There was a very different sensitivity towards these issues 70 years ago, but what we know now cannot be ignored. This is why: racist views in historical animation are bothersome, but they can’t be helped. It certainly cannot be said for shows that are being created and air today. When these things happen, it is more than right to be aware of it and criticize them as civil, informed people. Which doesn’t mean sending death threats to the crew.