I'm going to double down, if some westerns decided to make a story, wherein the atrocities that was historically commited against us (like what Japan did to half of Asia) and it was trivialised or simply a footnote in a story. The backlash would have been so severe, and we'd be calling them insensitive, uneducated, etc. No one would be defending it as 'just a story'. Oh, the hypocrisy.
Thank you for saying something about this!!! I was getting really tired of people saying that we shouldn’t be so caught up in the mc and ml’s actions, and that we should “consider the time period” or wtv.
Its super strange that the barbaric people are always the brown ones, and the FL has to go and prove they are not just brutes and make an allience with the hot tan dude... #－.－)
now that you've said it... you're totally right. damn
It’s so disgusting these people know what they’re doing they’re not dumb
To give credit, the artist had fair skinned slaves there too. The focus of this arc is just on a darker skinned culture. Would have been neat to have kept a specific feature, like the green eyes or bone structure, but make the people multi-raced for variety. At the same time, I would hate for authors to get too intimidated to write other cultures or races because it lowers representation. But yeah, introducing these characters OUTSIDE of any slavery should be more mainstream. Meet the kid while he's being chased, etc.
Yeah that would be much better. Slavery is something that existed, but it is getting quite stale that they use the same narrative all the time. Even when it's a white character they are a slave and then saved by a calculating Mc so many times. Its getting boring and repetitive. Its always "useful character to regressed/transmigrated mc" speed walk to nearest slave auction to save them, saved character gets attached like a puppy to the Mc out of "stockholmsyndrome" and either becomes the most loyal or the most obsessed yandere/psycho in the work.（￣へ￣）
I'm glad people agree, usually the response would be the downvote the person and bombard them with 'let people enjoy stuff'.
They are reinforcing colonial oriantalistic language of portraying non-Western (brown) cultures as exotic or inferior. It just comes across as incredibly uneducated. Like come up with something else man (●__●)
Definitely! More people need to call this shit out. Everytime I see a black person bring it up, they get boo'd to hell. More Asians need to start standing up for others (｡•︿•｡)
I'm at chapter 16, and genuinely WHAT? Why are tan skinned people still being portrayed as uncivilized, barbaric folk? This is historical fiction, which means the author doesn't need to stick to the old "dark-skinned people as slaves and barbarians" narrative. That trope isn't historical accuracy, it's a stereotype that colonizers spread, and fiction gives writers the freedom to reject it.
Before you tell me "the author is just an Asian uwu, baby writer who doesn't know much about the outside world, and you should be grateful tan characters are even included" I AM ASIAN, and these authors clearly know what they're doing, GIVEN that they have even gone as far as to represent the cultural clothing accurate to real life counterparts. This isn't an isolated incident either. I keep seeing the same trope again and again and again, across different stories, which makes it feel less like an oversight and more like a pattern nobody's bothering to question. Or if questioned, they are met with 'No one is asking you to read it.'
Media representation matters, and it's exhausting to watch brown characters get written this way. Especially in a genre where the author has already invented an entire world and could have made any choice they wanted. This isn't a neutral default. And it matters in the real world too, because repeated portrayals like this shape how people perceive and treat the group being depicted, especially when that group doesn't have much other representation to balance it out.
It is that deep. Do you know what popularized the KKK? A dumbass movie shot on a shoestring budget, 'The Birth of The Nation'. Some of you will truly 'It's not that deep' right back into colonization.
All I can do is pray that my people get freed from their colorism and white worship shackles.