Oya Mandalore

I've already made a tumblr post about this but I want to talk about it again on a website where I don't have to worry about phrasing things in a way that I'm okay with getting spread around to dozens, possibly hundreds, of strangers.

The fandom pretty much agrees that the animated clone model looks absolutely nothing like Temuera Morrison, who is a Maori man, and the clones look like pretty generic White Guys. I agree with this, and it's especially egregious with the bad batch, who bear basically no resemblance to the clone model, and certainly none to Tem.

The animated model has straight hair with the exception of some cadets clearly based off of Daniel Logan, who has wavy hair. Temuera Morrison has very curly hair. (See tumblr post for a couple pics from one of the few movies he grew his hair out for.) The animated model is very angular, while Tem has a rounder face shape and features.

For years the tumblr fandom has been aggressive and accusatory about fanartists whitewashing the clones. I think this is a problem for several reasons.

1- Bringing attention to the fact that a professional animation studio creating models for one of the biggest media corporations in existence did a shit-awful job at representing a Maori man is different from getting after fanartists who want to draw their blorbos. Of course fanartists should think about this too, but it's different. You should not attack individual people in the same way you would attack a company.

2- A lot of fanartists are young, probably teenagers, who don't have a wide base of artistic expertise yet. They have a comfort zone and have not stepped outside of it. They probably haven't thought of going back to use the Jango Fett actor as a reference instead of just referencing the characters they are drawing. This isn't a moral failing and everybody needs to stop acting like it is.

3- What has ended up happening is that the fandom has created a culture of fear where you had better make it CLEAR that when you're drawing a clone, you are not drawing a white man. The fandom has failed to motivate people to draw Temuera Morrison. So long as you are not drawing A White Man.

And this has created a strange phenomenon where people will draw the clones with a significantly darker skin tone than Tem has. His skin tone, depending on how much sun he's had lately, varies from quite pale to a warm medium tan. I've seen fanartists drawing the clones as black, complete with a delineating line where their palms are light. Drawing a Maori man as a black man isn't as progressively inclusive as everyone seems to think it is.

I keep seeing people bemoaning the 'loss of melanin' specifically- especially with Echo, who, sure, looks like a damn ghost now, but with all the clones in general. The animated model skin tone is not the problem. These are men who grew up on a planet with like 8 days of sunlight out of the whole year and they were inside for those 8 days anyways. They live in armor. They aren't getting tan. The melanin is not the issue.

Especially wild is when I see skin tones that are darker than Tem has ever had, but they leave the hair... straight. Or give the clones loose fluffy wavy curls.

And I feel very confident in saying that fanart of clones who just sort of look like if you race-bent the animation model to be black (in the more extreme examples of this) is a result of fandom witch-hunt fear culture. Fanartists feel like if they don't make it clear that they are Not Drawing A White Man they'll get cancelled. So they draw A POC Man but don't really bother actually looking at Temuera Morrison.

Just... either draw Temuera Morrison or draw the animated model. Stop inventing a third guy that doesn't look like either. And I'm not going to cite some Moral Impetus or guilt trip anybody- which is exactly the sort of shit you get on tumblr and exactly the kind of thing that got us to this point in the first place. Draw either Tem or the animated model for me, because the third guy annoys me.

What can I say? This place is cozy.

I've been on tumblr since about 2015 (subtracting a 2-3 year break in there when I deactivated my old blog, heartache-hit-the-trail, and then later came back as kaelidae, which is now lazerbang). I made some great friends, back when the culture actually revolved around talking to other people and sending asks.

Lately it's really felt like just another Content Consumption Website. I've made a couple friends, but its mostly just people liking posts. People don't even reblog and talk in tags as much. The only asks I get are art requests (yay!) and spambots with fake fundraisers. Of course, I'm guilty of not sending asks anymore too.

It doesn't help much that the only fandom I'm actually interested in participating in is Republic Commando. Not Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008). Not The Bad Batch. Just repcomm, and if you're into repcomm, it's pretty much impossible to avoid tcw/tbb. Not that I necessarily hate them, I'm just not compelled by it in a way that makes me want to participate in fandom about it. Because they're kid's shows.

Top that off with actually enjoying repcomm, all of the characters (Yes, I said ALL the characters), and not being interested in complaining about how a 20 year old book series reads like it was written in the 2000s- although I will die on my 'repcomm is incredibly progressive and forward thinking in 2004' hill- and tumblr accounts that don't irritate me on some level are few and far between.

Every time I have a good fandom experience, it's not some fanart or a post I made getting a lot of notes. That tends to be some of my worst fandom experiences. Every time I have a good experience, it's having a conversation about something I or someone else made, telling a story with them, inspiring each other. I have literally two people I roleplay with and that is the pinnacle of my fandom experience.

I don't know if I'll be able to build the sort of community I'm looking for here, but even if it's just me yelling at two other people, that's better than my ever-increasing tumblr blocklist. To be honest, me migrating is spurred partially by getting blocked on tumblr. Not that I mind- my own blocklist is huge. It's just that a site where the main purpose is to share around content, even more than to make it yourself, kind of conceptually breaks down when you can't stand a majority of the other people there.

I find myself frequently on the defensive on tumblr- and sometimes going on the offensive as a reaction to the outright hostility being levied against my favorite thing. It just plain isn't healthy. So I think I'm going to keep posting fanart there, but move a majority of my fandom interaction over here, where you seem to have to try a lot harder to get in a fight, and it's more one-on-one, rather than on a stage for your followers.

And if only two or three people talk to me, that's totally okay.