Vous connaissez les vampires ? … Vous savez, les vampires ne voient pas de reflet dans le miroir ? On dit que les monstres ne peuvent pas voir leur reflet dans un miroir. Et ce que j’ai toujours pensé, c’est que le problème n’est pas que les monstres n’ont pas de reflet dans le miroir. C’est que si vous voulez transformer des humain-e-s en monstres, refusez leur toute représentation d’elleux-mêmes au niveau culturel. Et en grandissant, je me suis senti en quelque sorte comme un monstre. Je ne me voyais jamais représenté.

Sur la race et la représentation dans les médias – Junot Díaz on race and representation in media (via medievalpoc)

You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all.

(via prenezcecouteau)

neutralnewt:

pepitamia:

Dear heterosexual white cis male showrunners,

Claiming that after killing off a major queer female character you “understand the outrage and can relate to the pain,”  is at best entitled, and at worst offensive. 

Our pain isn’t yours. You can’t relate to shit when literally 94% of your Netflix, Hulu and HBO accounts reflect and cater to you… Try again. 

i’m not sure where these numbers are coming from, but here is a complete breakdown of representation in regular characters appearing in primetime broadcast TV series, which assesses not only LGBT representation, but representation for POC and disabled folks as well (as well as some intersections of these).

the numbers are slightly off from what this picture suggests, but not by much. according to the stats, 96% of recurring primetime characters are straight, while 4% are LGBT. breaking down those 4% reveals that:

2.16% of all characters are gay men;
1.12% are lesbians;
0.6% are bisexual women;
and 0.12% are bisexual men.

meanwhile, Black and Latinx LGBT characters appeared at the same rate, making up 11% of LGBT characters, or 0.44% of all characters each. pacific islanders also accounted for 5% of LGBT characters. all other characters were white; no other races were represented for QPOC.

THIS is why it’s so damaging and outrageous when straight writers decide to include queer characters, when white writers include characters of color, only to kill them off. a lot of people act like it shouldn’t be a big deal because “Straight/White Characters Die All the Time!” — but straight white characters absolutely dominate media, so IT IS NOT COMPARABLE.

like, aside from anything-goes shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, how often do you ACTUALLY see major, recurring straight/white characters killed off that DIDN’T have something to do with the actor leaving the show? let alone, how often do you see those characters killed compared to recurring straight/white characters who DON’T FUCKING GET KILLED?

when you only see people like you represented 2% of the time or less, and those characters are killed on a regular basis, you tend to lose hope that you will ever find a character like you who gets a happy ending. and, by extension, this perpetuates the idea that LGBT people don’t get to be happy—an idea that a lot of LGBT folks and (Q)POC end up internalizing, which is just the sort of thing that contributes to depression, anxiety, self-harm, substance abuse, and suicide for queer folks.

representation matters. “including” token minority characters only to kill them off while the majority characters go on DOESN’T. COUNT.

This is kind of related to your last ask…but I have a question about representing sexuality in comics. Why are a lot of artists trying so hard to more or less shoe-horn gay or bi characters in their comics for the sake of having them there? Even when the focus of the story isn’t romantic at all, it’s like some people just tick off boxes for certain characters to be gay. I can understand wanting to be inclusive, but it does seem like people are really pressured to have sexual diversity now.

secondlina: arythusa: I think the simplest way to answer this is to adapt a question I asked in the last response: If you’re going to ask, “Why should this character be queer?” you should also ask yourself, “Why should this character be straight?”  To paraphrase your words, why do we have so many straight characters in our…