WAAGSH he was so cool this ep !! i knew i made the right decision to stan lapin since he uttered his first words on ep 1.,..he is my favourite badass old man
We all know that Rhys last name is a huge mystery. But do we really wanna know his last name? Can’t we just let it be the never solved secret of our fandom?
What if it’s something boring like Smith or Tailor?
ID: Six photos of the cast making various expressions of distress, devastation, and sadness. Ally has their face in their hands and Emily is crying and staring forward sadly. Zac is staring stonily forward, face set. Murph has his hands on his forehead, and is looking forward, stressed. Lou has a hand on his chin and is looking intensely downward, with a similar energy to Zac. Siobhan, like Emily, is crying and looks very sad.
I’ve been a D20 fan for a little while now, although I’ve only recently come back to tumblr. It’s been great seeing all the wonderful fan content, the beautiful art, the heartbreaking fics, the deep meta and headcanons. There’s so much creativity, and it’s wonderful and inspiring to engage with.
(For context, I am Chinese-Canadian)
But I have noticed one thing, or rather, haven’t noticed it. There have been four Asian cast members throughout the different seasons (Zac in the main cast, Erika Ishii, Rekha Shankar, and Lily Du in the side quests), and a lot of the time, fan content about their characters seem to go with “default white.” Thankfully not with Ricky Matsui (although there’s also a conversation there about recognizing the Japanese part of Japanese-American). But there seems to be a subconscious trend that with most of their characters not being human or human-looking, a lot of fan content treats them almost as default white, despite the fact that they’re played by Asian actors.
This isn’t to say that people can’t imagine Gorgug, Lapin, Cumulous, Lilith, Maggie, and TI-83 as white. They aren’t explicitly Asian, or explicitly any human race (although Cumulous is part of House Rocks which is canonically black-coded - black Asians exist!), so it’s all headcanon. Some of them even have official art that is white/white coded. But that’s what fans do, take canon and find new ways to engage with it! Given that the actors are Asian, it’d be really neat if there were more headcanons and more content where the characters were interpreted as explicitly Asian (especially the specific ethnicities of their actors, because Asia is not a monolith). There isn’t a lot of positive Asian rep out there, especially in fantasy. Why not have more explicitly Asian content in fan spaces, where there’s so much room to engage with media?
So this is some positive encouragement to D20 fans to start approaching those characters as more than “fantasy race defaults to white.” If fandoms can take white characters played by white actors and reimagine them as people of colour, it’s definitely possible to take unspecified characters played by Asian actors and depict them as explicitly Asian. Again, there’s nothing wrong with interpreting the characters in other ways, there are lots of different lived experiences among fans! It’d be really heartening though to see some more explicitly Asian representation in fan content. Asians are people of colour too, and we have so many stories to tell! There are so many different experiences across the whole breadth of the continent, from West Asians to East Asians to South Asians and all in between. And that’s not even getting into trans-Pacific and immigrant experiences. There’s a lot to explore, and it’s worth it, I promise.
(Anyone is free to interact, but please engage in good faith. This is a post for positive dialogue and encouragement!)
Some extremely important commentary by @acedetectivegukgak. Thank you so much for your tags, I’m really glad you brought a lot of this up! A lot of fantasy media is based in inherently racist stereotypes (see the history of orcs and orientalism, the whole way that WOTC botched monks), and it’s important to address those while talking about Asian representation in fantasy media.
From my own personal experiences as a Chinese person who loves fantasy, it does suck that there is still so much work that needs to be done, often by Asians themselves, to reclaim and/or deconstruct anti-Asian racism in the genre. And it sucks that until that happens (and even after it happens), we still have to tread carefully around those racist histories! I grew up watching Chinese martial arts movies, so when I first heard about D&D monks, I was super excited until I found out how WOTC had actually constructed the class. Personally, I’m holding out hope that one day, some really clever Asian game developers will rework the class into something decidedly less grounded in orientalist stereotypes. But until then, we still have to be careful with how we handle monks now, especially if treating them as Asian characters.
What my thoughts are on this is that a large part of including more Asian representation must necessarily include careful research and due diligence, especially if the creator is not of that particular culture. It isn’t positive representation when it’s just carelessly assigning the characters some general “signifier” of “Asian” culture! Positive representation includes thinking carefully about how a certain portrayal of a character fits or doesn’t fit into anti-Asian stereotypes and rhetoric, to borrow your phrasing, listening to Asian voices when they say that something is/is not offensive, and being prepared to learn and take action if something is wrong.
[ID: Digital illustration of Cumulous Rocks from “A Crown of Candy.” Cumulous is a cotton candy man with blue skin and swirling, pink hair. He wears a set of pink monk robes and purplish-brown arm wraps. In one hand he holds a magical artifact reminiscent of an oversized Kinder egg, pressing it to his cheek. In his other hand he holds a small, sparkling Ring Pop. He’s crying. End ID.]
[ID: Digital illustration of a scene from episode nine of A Crown of Candy. The six player characters have squeezed into a small closet containing oversized milk crates. From left to right: King Amethar leans against the closet’s door, hunched over; Sir Theobald sits on the floor with his knees pulled to his chest; Princess Jet sits between Theo and Princess Ruby, leaning against the milk crate that Ruby rests upon; Liam sits upon another milk crate behind Ruby; and Cumulous, floating, presses into an upper corner of the room. Everyone turns towards Cumulous as he speaks. End ID.]
REVENANT ROCOCO…. SACCHARINA FROSTWHIP…….. SIR AMANDA MAILLARD….. could you have IMAGINED how the gays would’ve eventually won should have all the kids died in the lingerie shop
Throughout this season I have felt halfway about Ruby. I preferred Jet and though Ruby was a fine character, but wasn’t a favorite. Even a week ago I wouldn’t rank her above half of the other PCs. But after this finale, I would say she is not only Siobhan’s best character but also the best character arc in all Dimension 20.
Let me elaborate. Other contenders (like Fabian in Fantasy High, Pete in The Unsleeping City, etc.) have very full and well rounded narratives. However Ruby is not only well rounded but mirror her flaws from the get-go but now turning them into her strengths.
In the beginning she is childish and playful, which literally leads to her getting shot through the throat and almost dying. Seeing her return - from Jet’s death, from the war, from her quarrel with Saccharina - to that childlike wonder of returning to her dreams in the circus on the very same road that almost took her life is poetic and beautiful.
After Jet dies, she becomes isolated, hurt, and cold. This is entirely natural for a child that was swung into this life to react like that to her sister dying in front of her. Watching her return to the warmth of family, forgiving others to forgive herself, returning to the comfort sisterhood gifted her. She learns to heal, she learns to give again.
I just truly believe Ruby may be my favorite narrative in Dimension 20 and all that happened in the last hour of the series she’s in. Anyway everyone say thank you Siobhan ❤️
All I’m saying is if Ruby or Liam would’ve died and Jet lived y'all would be up in arms about how we never got to meet Saccharina so y'all better say thank you Emily Axford rm
