Romeo's Sins

Hello my blushing malevolent😳❤️

I really wanted to do a very small and quick emotion animation for John <3

As you can tell I tried the most at the last two emotions, ehehe.

Also, I did the wonderful decision in finding all the audio clips once I was done animating, so I had to redo some frames :/ (honestly, finding the clips was the hardest part of this).

Little fish eats his foods 

I felt like painting fabric and textures

idk guys it just sort of feels like we’re making the monster poc and his (sometimes romantic) partner small and white….. maybe we should all take a look at what we’re doing here.

and i am NOT saying to make them both white. that’s not a solution. just…. let’s play around with some other interpretations. make arthur black and john kind of pallid and blond, that could be neat! make arthur chinese and john greek. there are genuinely so many more options than white arthur and poc john. step into a wonderful world with me where we stop doing this, because even though it’s not intentional, it is racist.

addition: YOU CAN BE RACIST BY ACCIDENT!!! even if you didn’t go “oh john and kayne are both scary monsters so i will make them brown,” the widespread depiction of them both as POC does in fact mean something.

This pertains to writing, not drawn art, but it still applies.

Fundamentally, in Malevolent, there is no reason for Arthur Lester to be white. He's white because whiteness is assumed the default. We, as fans, have an opportunity to deconstruct this. The show itself is already doing it, actually--point A in the article above talks about highlighting a white character's specific ethnicity or immigrant status, which happens in part 3 of Threshold.

Arthur willingly separates himself from the status of "American", which gives us a unique window into his view of the country and himself as an immigrant. We know he emigrated from England when he was 17. His best friend Parker Yang is, at the very least, a child of immigrants who are *very obviously East Asian*, if not explicitly Chinese. We can see a connection here--while Arthur in the show is intended to be white, there's still a subtextual sense of kinship between him and Parker because both of them may not have been born in America. If Arthur isn't white, this aspect of their dynamic instantly gains another level of depth.

If we look into the other aspects of his character in terms of historical context, he was a poet and composer in Boston during the birth of the Harlem Renaissance. His community during that period of time would've been majority Black. Composing is how he found his way home and it's what sustained him--losing it when he lost Faroe is a pivotal part of his arc, and so is his reluctance to return to it. It was part of his identity. Once again, you can see how him not being white makes this element *more* compelling.

There are more things I could go into. But these are what stand out to me. There is nothing that a white portrayal of Arthur can achieve that a non-white portrayal can't, and the latter would expand upon things only hinted on in the former. To think that this isn't true is just racist.

With all of this taken into account, in addition with what OP said: if you are a white fan of the show and feel the need to retaliate or insist that it "doesn't matter", you should really think about why it wouldn't matter to you. Of course it wouldn't. As white people we benefit from deep-rooted systems of oppression that are reinforced through the art we make and the stories we write. Being annoyed at changing a design is nothing compared to the baggage of centuries of racial trauma we actively perpetuate.