It's somewhat sad to see (judging solely by what I see in the tag and reserves) that this site had so much potential to be super diverse and opened so many opportunities to have characters from all places and backgrounds and still 90% of the character's I'm seeing are white and either from North America or Europe. Do you have any sort of plan to make sure there's at least some geographical diversity?
hi, anon, it’s heather here, and i’m sorry that you feel that way. and while i can’t speak for the entire staff team, i know that i can say that anais and i (given that we’re the two who kicked this site off) have tried our best to make certain that we do everything in our power to keep the site diverse. with the way that we’ve set up our forums on the site (i believe we’ve already said somewhere – but i could be wrong – that we’re setting up our boards by continents and then individual countries by member need/request) as well as in where the location for various b.p.o labs will be (information not yet released, though on our site b.p.o will be spread out across at least four continents) and in our canons. we’ve both tried our best to keep things diverse because we feel that for this site in particular that’s something important and if we didn’t do that then we wouldn’t hold true to one of the main aspects of the show.
now that i’ve gotten that bit out of the way i’ll go ahead and address what you’ve said in your ask, which is what you’ve seen, judging solely by the reserves and the tag. most of our members haven’t spoken about which faces they plan on using in the tag because they’re waiting for reserves to open (completely understand and soon guys!) and those who have, which i do believe are just the two people that have already won early reserves via our reblog the ad contest, along with one or two other people, probably can’t give you a strong enough sense of what everyone else is planning on doing. it’s not a large enough number to judge an entire group of people on what they’re going to do.
although, if what you were commenting on were the staff teams reserves then i’ll go ahead and comment on that now. in total each member of our staff has three reserves, which is a total of fifteen and there are four poc’s on that list which, if you want to get into percentages, means that about 26% of poc face claims make up that list. each of our characters are from different places (for example, i have one character who was born in london, england and will be there at the start of the site, another who was born in mexico and will also be there at the start of the site, and my final character who was born in france, but will be in iran at the start of the site). we, ourselves as a staff team, have tried to be diverse with not only the faces we’ve chosen, but also with the places that we’ve had our characters either come from or have decided to have them be at the beginning of the site (as the site progresses your character can always move around, which is a way that we plan to encourage diversity, too).
we plan to encourage diversity by… well, honestly just everything we’ve been doing so far? i’m sorry if this isn’t a very satisfying response, but i don’t particularly understand where you’re coming from in saying that we had so much potential and yet you believe that we’re not living up to said potential in such a way. with our canons i’ve done my best (as i am the person who is writing the canons and the only person responsible for this job) to keep faces diverse, as well as locations, whether it’s where they were born or where they currently are (although, in all honesty, i haven’t specified where most canons were born because i want to keep them as open as possible for people to mold them as they wish, another way we’re trying to keep things diverse and allow members to have creative freedom with characters). we haven’t given out any information as to where the canons are located either (that information will be released with blurbs, which can be asked for once our current contest has ended).
again, i’m sorry if you don’t find this answer satisfying and if you want to come off of anon to further continue this conversation, explain your point of view more, then please feel free to! you can either message the site’s tumblr again or even contact me (heather) and we can speak privately about this matter.
