I have a confession and was wondering about your view, no pressure to answer though
Ive seen posts of people hating Derek Landy for calling Frightening Jones and Temper Frey their first name because theyre black, claiming racism.
Ive never understood it, Frightening is his name because hes an assassin the same as Tanith, of course he has a name alluding to that
Temper makes me even more confused. He has a gist. He uses it too often. His name is foreshadowing the fact that he uses his gist too much due to a short temper.
I think we as a fandom go too hard on landy. Hes made some STUPID decisions but this doesn't seem like one of them whatsoever.
Things coming through my askbox occasionally remind me that I am a person who's word holds actual weight in this fandom
ANYWAYS. I've thought about this before so I not surprised it's come up with people more versed in this subject than me. What you seem to be doing, anon, is viewing Landy's characters through a Watsonian lens. And that's fine! That is generally a good way to analyze characters. But if we're going to talk about how the biases of creators impact their characters, we're going to have to ignore that Watsonian lens because literally anything can be justified in a Watsonian context.
In short, what needs to be understood here is that no fictional character comes from a vacuum. They come from a vast collection of their creator's personal biases and experiences. With that, you need to examine characters to look for what stereotypes they embody, whether or not there is a canon justification for that aspect of them. One example would be if a creator made all physically disabled characters of theirs also be angry or antisocial. Whether or not they manage to create an in-universe justification for this, it doesn't change the fact that all characters belonging to one demographic embody a negative stereotype associated with that demographic. You get the idea.
So, back to Frightening and Temper. Their names are Frightening and Temper. There are not that many black characters in this series. Neither of these traits are things we see actually associated with them in their characterization. It is an extremely common stereotype that black people are angry or aggressive, and Landy, being an Irish white guy who has clearly managed to go most of his life without doing any sort of examination of his own beliefs, is not immune to that. Honestly, the names of these two characters isn't the worst I've seen him do in regards to racism (he is also not immune to exoticism/orientalism), but I can totally understand why people might bring it up as something to be criticized. And it should be! Criticizing the flaws in media you enjoy is a good thing! Especially when it comes to pointing out more minor or insidious forms of racism, and opening your mind up to that and learning to identify it is important in developing your understanding of the world.
I'm putting all of this quite simply, especially in regards to my analysis of the situation with Frightening + Temper, but I do hope that my intention is clear, at least. Canon justification means nothing in cases like this and that means I do think that his naming scheme for these two characters is a minor case of racism. I do think he's improved at least somewhat since then but he's also constantly finding new and interesting ways to fuck up, so who even knows. Hope this was helpful.
