CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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It Was Super Difficult to Find A Picture For Yesterday

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

this entry brought to you by radiohead, "go to sleep"


Did you read yesterday's entry, about the black girl at comic con? Okay, good. Now we're all caught up.

I need to tell you what it was like finding that picture.

Firstly, the idea for yesterday's entry was just that there's very few options for black people to dress up as, and as few options there are for black guys, it's even worse for black girls. For example: I've read a lot of X-Men comics. Obviously there's Storm. But uhm. I can't name another black female X-Man. I'm sure there is one, but I can't think of one. Actually, I just looked it up. There's just Storm.

So part of the joke was going to be the only black women conceivable to a Comic Con audience was going to be Uhura and Storm. I needed an image to go along with it. I wanted someone somewhat recognizable-- the joke wouldn't work if it was, say, a black girl dressed as Wonder Woman, but it also wouldn't work if she was dressed as the most obscure anime character.

Go ahead. Do a Google search for "Black girl cosplay". Or even "Black girl comic con". Or any variation you can think of.

First, let me say, if you Google "Black girl cosplay" right this second, the first image you will see is the one I ended up using. That was not the case when I was looking up the image. The first one I saw was a beautiful black girl dressed up as an anime character with white hair. This couldn't work, because White Hair Black Girl would be confused with Storm. The second one I saw was one who was an obscure anime character-- no good. The third one was a fat black girl dressed in a silly costume, making a silly face. No good. And that was it. Every other picture was of a white girl dressed as a character with the word "Black" in her name, and this being comic con, the girls are getting increasingly white and pale as you scroll down, so not only are they not black, they are getting even less black. If you Google "black girl comic con" you'll get absolutely nothing.

So I had to go to Yahoo, try similar searches, and eventually, nineteen rows down, I managed to find the image I ended up using. And that's it!! That is it.

Furthermore, when I found the anime girl with the white hair, I decided to click on her and see if she had other characters that she'd done. So I clicked on the website and started looking-- she had posted them on a forum, and a large number of forum users were saying "Uhm, but that character isn't black."

That was their response. Not, oh, look at what a good job you did! Or oh, you're really pretty! It was your skin color is wrong. There was even a commenter who responded, "Hey guys, you know, people in the mainstream world think we're weird for dressing up, anime is niche as it is, there aren't any black girls for a black girl to dress as, are we really going to ostracize her for not being the right race? Technically most anime characters are supposed to be Asian, so even white people are the wrong race."

Here's the thing. I thought I was just going to write a goofy gag about how there's nothing for black people to dress as at Comic Con, and it's even worse if you're a black girl. But as I was doing research for it, I was being proven more and more right-- to the point where I almost couldn't do the entry the way I wanted to do it!

Hey! Comic book, sci-fi, anime, and video game producers! How about giving us some more people of differing races (and no, Asian doesn't count-- there's plenty of Asians to choose from). Please?
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with love from CRS @ 11:45 PM 

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