White Gurathin 2 Electric Boogaloo
(this is re: my previous post about disliking white gurathin portrayals)
@dathen @star-born
this is my primary reading as well. a lot of the fandom is white, and i get the impression that people are more comfortable having him as an antagonistic figure (in murderbot's pov, that is) if he's white. actually - and i find this pretty funny - i feel like the people i see headcanoning gurathin as nonwhite tend to be gurathin fans or even gurathin-was-right truthers! not to say that i place a moral value on this at all, and i genuinely don't have any personal problem with anyone who writes/draws gurathin as white or think they're terrible people, i just think it's a baffling and boring choice.
(baffling because his name immediately reads as south asian to me. i'm not alone in this, right?!)
i also believe that part of it is a sort of "diversity" mentality, as silly as that sounds. most of the presaux crew is either directly described as having brown skin or has a name that would suggest they aren't white (pin-lee comes to mind here), which is obviously very uncommon in a lot of mainstream american media. so, if you flip the usual formula of "white people plus token person of color", you have a predominantly nonwhite presaux team plus their token white man gurathin. which, i'll be honest, does make me chuckle a bit. but, again, with a name like gurathin, it just doesn't make sense.
@violetkirk
i've been in fandoms where people did use this kind of sleuthing to try to figure out details of a character's appearance, so i'm sure you're right, that some parts of the fandom do use this as their reasoning. but, as robin said in the reblogs of the original post, you don't have to be white to visibly blush! i agree that it wouldn't make sense for him to be especially dark complected based on this line - one of my writing pet peeves is when authors describe very dark-skinned characters as blushing visibly, and martha wells seems to avoid those kinds of pitfalls - but people with lighter brown skin can visibly blush, even if they don't turn tomato red. not to mention that people of color can be light complected too! lots of middle eastern and east asian people (and other ethnic groups obv) are on the fairer side, and unfortunately we can blush with the whitest of them.
again, i want to stress that i am not calling anybody racist for headcanoning gurathin as white. at worst, i'm calling you a little boring. i just think that in a fandom around a canon that is so deliberately filled with people of color, in defiance of the norms of both american media and specifically the SFF genre, it is a shame to make an important character like gurathin white just because you're nervous about having an antagonistic character of color. remember:
people 👏 of 👏 color 👏 can 👏 suck 👏 too!
