And for as bad as the writing is, trying to remove all of the bad things from the character isn’t the way to go about remedying it either. Black characters deserve universal storytelling. They should not have to be a monolith of a good or bad character.
Riot failed in writing Mel because they did not give her the same development as the other characters and made her an accessory to a main male character for far too long. But fans who point out the aspects of that bad writing are not somehow conjuring it out of nowhere.
And then you have to account for the fact that colorism doesn’t seem to exist in universe too. Like it’s similar to the butch cop conundrum of dooming analysis by writing “diverse” characters into positions they would almost never have irl without any acknowledgement
The colorism thing pisses me off so badly because no! You can’t say colorism doesn’t exist in your fantasy world when your staff doesn’t have a single Black writer! That is what us normal people call an excuse!
So many deliberate choices were made with depicting Mel and Ambessa as powerful characters that they stumbled right into the repeated trope of white writers accidentally adding layering to their Black characters that they have no business trying to handle.
Comments