I'm working on a fantasy project set in another world. A lot of my characters aren't white, and they come from a lot of different ethnic backgrounds and ages (immortal gods that travel the world). One of them is this glorious Black woman - Jana the Blacksmith of the fallen star
Before becoming a god, she was a travelling merchant on the "silk road" equivalent of my world, that happens to go all the way through the south pole (like it starts way higher, goes all the way down to change continent, and then back up, so she's from near the tropic)
Now she's a blacksmith goddess established near a fallen star, and her "godly Domain" is about the forging stuff, but also merchants and travellers in this difficult region and a figure of ingenuity, strength and organization. As of what she thinks of herself, she's an artist of the iron and a sort of ingenieur.
(Gods in my world have human bodies and often have a little region of theirs + their global influence)
Since it's a totally invented world, history was as bloody as ours but the presence of gods made massive scale invasion/slave/trade/etc impossible because you can't exactly invade a place and kidnap its people without being just flattened out by the gods. Local events did however happen.
I wanted to know, firstly, if you had anything to say/point out about her design that would be problematic. The keys in her hair comes from her native region where the separation of money/lands/etc is made like this : women have everything that can be locked (houses and fenced fields included), while men inherit the other things. So traditionally, women wear keys as a status symbol.
Secondly, I was wondering about the topic of racism in my world. It's not the main focus of my story, but since most gods have "human appearances", they are subjected to the same things as everyone else (as in, non gods of the same ethnicity/community/etc). This I wanted to discuss it.
I've been wanting to maybe introduce it by having Jana visit one of her temples in a different area, and find a representation of herself as white. Which would lead to her and her travelling group getting rightfully angry and destroying the temple after (lot of other gods destroy temples/villages/cities for far lesser reason so it's wouldn't be an instance of her being the only violent person in the room - most of my gods happen to be violent). But at the same time I'm afraid it would feed in the Angry Black Woman stereotype, so I don't know what to do exactly.
(if anything is weirdly worded, please let me know, English isn't my first language)
Thank you for your time 🙏
1) everything about the design is fine to me! I do think it's interesting, the key thing, because you could really pull some technicalities with that. Great time for a female trickster goddess, women in general, if you were interested in that.
2) a Black woman that is angry is not an Angry Black Woman stereotype. We aren't stereotypes whenever we're mad- that's an easy way to invalidate Black women's anger and hurt. Getting rightfully angry, and having the narrative not invalidate her for that, would prevent that from happening.
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