as a mixed person, it is incredibly rude and honestly racist to refuse to acknowledge a character or person’s racial identity as mixed race. recently, the top ao3 ships of 2025 came out, and it sparked something I’ve been angry about for a long, long time.
while not in touch with every fandom on that list, two of the highest ships on there were CaitVi(Caitlyn/Vi from Arcane/League of Legends) and Hollanov(Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov from Game Changers/Heated Rivalry). along with the characters, fandom, and number of works, the chart also showed the racial identities of each character.
both of these ships contain explicitly Wasian(mixed white/asian) characters. Shane Hollander is Asian-Canadian, specifically Japanese-Canadian in the books, and Caitlyn Kiramman, while from a completely fictional world- seems to be Ionian-Piltovan, Ionia being notably “Asian-like” or inspired.
yet both of these characters are ONLY listed as Asian.
as a Korean-American, I fully understand the fact that this was likely just so they didn’t have to get more complex with the spreadsheet, but it still displays a lack of care that should be put into handling characters’ identities.
growing up, surveys usually only had the option to select one race, and none of my peers were mixed. even in my diverse communities, it was just Asian kids and White kids. and any other mixed kids always looked more Asian than I did. typically from what I’ve gleaned over the years, people with an Asian mother tend to look more Asian, whereas people with a White mother tend to look more White.
and I’ve noticed that because I’ve always been incredibly White-passing. now, overall that does mean I’ve experienced a lot more White privilege, and especially in this current situation in the US I’m very grateful for my looks, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t felt isolated from my Korean heritage.
I’m not going to go into it entirely, but as someone growing up in the Southern US surrounded by my White family, I’ve always felt disconnected to my father’s Korean family. I was never taught Korean, I never ate Korean food at home, the most I was attuned to his culture was taking our shoes off in the house. and that was my experience solely being left out of those experiences. unlike a lot of mixed kids, I didn’t also have to deal with bigotry due to my racial identity.
mixed children often face a lot of racism from multiple cultures. many Asian countries and cultures, especially East Asian ones, tend to be very racist towards anyone with darker skin. many Black cultures will be racist towards children they don’t think are “Black enough”. and of course, many White people, especially in the conservative US, or in the South where I’m from, tend to be ignorant or supremacist. this is the case for many other cultures too, ones I’m not aware of enough to speak about.
to reduce someone to only part of who they are, to strip away their experience of culture, is an ignorant and racist thing to do.