Okay hello again, sorry for my absence and lack of response to your ask. I have been busy with real life and I have also been considering it for a short amount of time before deciding on the most appropriate course of action and response in order to make everyone feel comfortable and give you the utmost respect in this situation while explaining from both sides. First of all, I certainly appreciate you bringing your concerns to me directly and you have very clearly made your opinion known to me so that I can consider this in the future if nothing else. I’m hoping to engage your criticism and continue to speak with you for your continued commentary in order to be open and so we can both challenge each other’s views through an open discussion if you will.
I would like to frankly and openly address your concerns that my posts about Lardo portray her as unfeeling and cold. I do not believe this to be true. As you explained, you have seen my posts around the fandom but you do not follow my blog. As such, it is perhaps possible you have only seen a fraction of my posts that characterize Lardo. This could be due to a number of things, including my audience and the popularity of certain posts, but in the last few days I have been scrolling through my Lardo tag to find each and every post I have attributed to her as an incorrect quote in the last two months I have been running this blog. At this point in time, I have approximately 230 posts that contain Lardo. Even with an extremely lenient measure of seeing any post where I categorize Lardo as a tough character as being your view of her shown as “cold/unfeeling” I count around 80 of these quotes that are cold/unfeeling. That accounts for just over 25% of my Lardo posts. A fourth of my posts about Lardo may indeed portray her as tough. I do, however, believe that if you look through, the remaining three-fourths of my posts show Lardo to be a character of great depth, showing her as playful, strict, serious, funny, emotional, fearful, and more. I believe my characterization of Lardo is thus two important things: 1) canon compliant and 2) three-dimensional. According to my own interpretation of Lardo through the primary text and all the extra canonical sources by Ngozi Ukazu, Lardo is shown as being tough and capable especially in comparison to the particularly soft hockey boys of the SMH that main Check Please as a comic. She is, however, also seen as a great friend, a lover of ducks, an artist, and she is indeed seen as emotional. If you notice a trend with my posts, I have particularly seen Lardo feel free to express her emotions around Shitty in contrast with other characters in the comics which is one of the greatest reasons I think these characters are depicted as complementary and compatible in the comic, and this is something my posts often reflect. I do believe that Lardo is tough and a very strong, capable woman of color. I also believe some of it is putting on airs to seem tougher than she is, which is definitely something some of my quotes have dealt with. I disagree that I have shown Lardo in an unfair or prejudiced manner. I believe my interpretation of her is lacking any implicit or explicit bias because my quotes depict the character as I see her in the comics, regardless of her ethnicity and racial background. While those traits are ultimately likely important to her characterization and many readers/fans’ interpretations/headcanons of Lardo, none of that has really been shown in canon at this point yet. Besides that, though I completely understand how tropes and stereotypes can be hurtful to marginalized persons, I do not agree that showing a character to express certain facets of a trope despite displaying a great range of three dimensional qualities qualifies her to be labeled as a harmful trope/stereotype, because many real people probably identify closely with the Lardo depicted in the comic - an Eastern Asian woman with a lot of confidence, strength, dynamic character, a range of emotion, a tough outer exterior, a capable and organized leader, etc - and to label their real world experience as trope-like is problematic and creates a shame that the trope is claiming to inflict on others upon the self-identified person. Furthermore, even if that above point were completely incorrect in your opinion, you seem to be confused with what the “dragon lady” trope even is in the first place. The trope of the dragon lady involves more than being cold/unfeeling or putting on airs to seem that way. The dragon lady is described by TV Tropes as such:
“The Baroness meets Yellow Peril. The Dragon Lady is characterized by her overt sexual and physical aggression, untrustworthiness, and mysteriousness. Probably wears a qipao or kimono often with a dragon on it (even if she's not Chinese or Japanese), and knows martial arts. If she carries a weapon, it's usually a concealed stabbing or slashing weapon; folding metal fans are a perennial favorite. Is contractually obligated to have legs that would make Tina Turner jealous, to better pull off the dress.
The Dragon Lady overlaps heavily with The Vamp, the Femme Fatale, and The Baroness, but is set apart by her level of stereotypical Asianness. However, please note that just because a villainess is Asian (especially in non-Asian works) doesn't mean she's automatically a Dragon Lady. Nor is it the same thing for a woman of any background to simply be called ‘Dragon Lady’ just because she's overbearing. This trope has a very specific look and feel.”
I would like to address that while Lardo may in a good fourth of my quotes be depicted as a character that is sometimes standoffish, overtly tough, imposing, overbearing, and maybe particularly determined to not show her emotions, she has neither the overt sexual and physical aggression nor the untrustworthiness nor the mysteriousness nor the foreignness that make up a Dragon Lady trope. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t try to nitpick on the details if a particularly offensive trope perhaps exhibited almost all of the traits of a label but maybe parted from it in a single, one-dimensional way to try and hide behind a fake level of diversity and depth but your accusation of the Dragon Lady trope applying to Lardo simply does not fit, it has one trait that might be seen as a Dragon Lady yet lacks all substance that would actually make her a Dragon Lady and even TV Tropes includes a note in the first two paragraphs of this entry to specify that a character that could be seen as overbearing is not a determinedly sure qualifier to prove a Dragon Lady.
But please don’t let this response end our discussion. I have no interest in trying to be dismissive or unsympathetic. I completely understand you might still have concerns to address. I tried to go point by point to defend, explain, debunk, and engage your criticism and my portrayal so that we can understand where each other are coming from but I completely welcome you to continue to engage me in more conversations about how I can be made aware of my actions and their consequences and work to make it easier for the people of the fandom that you claim to represent who may or may not be uncomfortable with anything I might create to have a more pleasant experience.
