Tag: representation matters

ephaerie:

can we please take a moment to just appreciate this anime that just came out???

it’s about four middle school girls who are members of the “hero” club – they go around and help people wherever help is needed. in the first episode you find out that they were actually all selected because of the high aptitude they show, and they are needed to help fight off bad guys to save their world. oh my!

yes. it’s a magical girl anime.
yes. it’s a magical girl anime with a girl in a wheelchair.
yes. it’s a magical girl anime with a girl in a wheelchair WHO TRANSFORMS and DOES NOT MAGICALLY GAIN THE USE OF HER LEGS and STILL COMPLETELY KICKS ASS.
the second episode is devoted pretty much entirely to her character overcoming the mental block of her perceived “inability to fight” because of her disability. and it’s great. she kicks so much butt.

the first episode has repeated instances of world-wide (for the girls their world is mostly school-related, but still) accessibility. 

it’s not a perfect (i kind of wtf’ed at her transformation sequence tbh), but it looks promising so far as that sort of thing goes.

anyway. it’s call yuki yuna wa yusha de aru, or yuki yuna is a hero. look it up, if you’re into magical girl shows.

working on gifing some stuff, too~

fuckyeahfemaleyoutubers:

Earlier today Laura Chernikoff made this tweet

Which prompted this conversation

And that got me interested in working out what the demographics have been for the Special Guests (as listed on their websites) of the past four major YouTube events. I feel like we’re all generally aware that women and people of color are underrepresented at these things, but when you look at the numbers it becomes embarrassingly clear how ridiculous this disparity is.

The highest percentage of female Special Guests at any of these events was 32% at Summer in the City. LESS THAN 1/3. 

The highest percentage of Special Guests of color* at any of these events is 16% at the current Buffer Festival. LESS THAN 1/6. (And SitC only had ONE PoC on their Special Guest list this year, which is fucking absurd.)

I don’t want to rant about this too much, I just sort of want to make these numbers known because I find them maddening. And if you guys do too, I encourage you to message the organizers of these events, let them know your thoughts, and maybe recommend them some of the incredible prominent women and PoC we have in this community. 

  • Playlist Live: http://www.playlist-live.com/contact/
  • VidCon: info@vidcon.com
  • Summer in the City: support@sitc-event.co.uk
  • Buffer Festival: support@bufferfestival.com (Corey contacted me not too long ago about female representation at Buffer and I gave him a ton of names, but I don’t know if he had time to take any of those suggestions on board in time for the event. Hopefully it’s something he and the team are genuinely serious about and that next year will be better on that).

C’mon YouTube events. I love you, but you seriously need to get your shit together.

*Note that my count is based primarily on looks and the people whose races I know for sure. If I made a mistake and missed anyone who’s white passing, let me know.

gohomeluhan:

As I’m walking through Target with my little sister, the kid somehow manages to convince me to take a trip down the doll aisle. I know the type – brands that preach diversity through displays of nine different variations of white and maybe a black girl if you’re lucky enough. What I instead found as soon as I turned into the aisle were these two boxes.

The girl on the left is Shola, an Afghani girl from Kabul with war-torn eyes. Her biography on the inside flap tells us that “her country has been at war since before she was born”, and all she has left of her family is her older sister. They’re part of a circus, the one source of light in their lives, and they read the Qur’an. She wears a hijab.

The girl on the right is Nahji, a ten-year-old Indian girl from Assam, where “young girls are forced to work and get married at a very early age”. Nahji is smart, admirable, extremely studious. She teaches her fellow girls to believe in themselves. In the left side of her nose, as tradition mandates, she has a piercing. On her right hand is a henna tattoo.

As a Pakistani girl growing up in post-9/11 America, this is so important to me. The closest thing we had to these back in my day were “customizable” American Girl dolls, who were very strictly white or black. My eyes are green, my hair was black, and my skin is brown, and I couldn’t find my reflection in any of those girls. Yet I settled, just like I settled for the terrorist jokes boys would throw at me, like I settled for the butchered pronunciations of names of mine and my friends’ countries. I settled for a white doll, who at least had my eyes if nothing else, and I named her Rabeea and loved her. But I still couldn’t completely connect to her.

My little sister, who had been the one to push me down the aisle in the first place, stopped to stare with me at the girls. And then the words, “Maybe they can be my American Girls,” slipped out of her mouth. This young girl, barely represented in today’s society, finally found a doll that looks like her, that wears the weird headscarf that her grandma does and still manages to look beautiful.

I turned the dolls’ boxes around and snapped a picture of the back of Nahji’s. There are more that I didn’t see in the store; a Belarusian, an Ethiopian, a Brazilian, a Laotian, a Native American, a Mexican. And more.

These are Hearts 4 Hearts dolls, and while they haven’t yet reached all parts of the world (I think they have yet to come out with an East Asian girl), they need all the support they can get so we can have a beautiful doll for every beautiful young girl, so we can give them what our generation never had.

Please don’t let this die. If you know a young girl, get her one. I know I’m buying Shola and Nahji for my little sister’s next birthday, because she needs a doll with beautiful brown skin like hers, a doll who wears a hijab like our older sister, a doll who wears real henna, not the blue shit white girls get at the beach.

The Hearts 4 Hearts girls are so important. Don’t overlook them. Don’t underestimate them. These can be the future if we let them.

You can read more about the dolls here: http://www.playmatestoys.com/brands/hearts-for-hearts-girls