An open statement as an Anidala fan of colour
On June 14th/15th, @anidalaweeks announced that their chosen theme for their Anidala Week 2026 event would be "A Love Across Time", with event prompts spanning both the Star Wars and real-life timelines. While the prompts have inspired many fans to create various forms of fan art of their ship, they have also attracted criticism from other community members for several reasons, one of which I would like to address here.
The real-life AU (or as phrased in the announcement post, "modern AU") prompts are as follows, skipping the Free Days: 80s/90s/2000s, Medieval, Victorian, Western, and Futuristic. The Victorian era and Western prompts are the main subjects of this discourse, in part because they largely overlap in time scale: the Victorian era was 1837–1901, whereas the age of the Wild West was 1840s–1910s/20s or 1865–1910s/20s, depending on whether you count the American Civil War and the years leading up to it.
However, more pressingly lies a deeper issue of Westerncentrism (i.e. Eurocentrism and Americentrism): the Victorian era is defined by the reign of Queen Victoria of the British Empire, whereas the concept of the "wild west" is based on American expansionism, both of which are characterized by White imperialism and colonization of non-White nations — especially the forcible displacement, genocide, and oppression of Indigenous peoples.
Although the mods have stated that it was not their intention to exclude non-Western fans and that the community is free to use any other events from those time periods, the fact remains that these time periods as they are currently labelled were defined by Westerners to convey their own history, which is still inherently exclusionary towards non-White historiography, e.g. me using Chinese dynasties to help contextualize timelines as a Hongkonger (e.g. Did you know that the medieval period spanned from before the Suí Dynasty to halfway through the Míng Dynasty in China? That is a lot of time to cover!).
It is hoped that the mods will use more open-ended and universal prompts in the future for inclusivity, e.g. "19th century" in lieu of the two disputed prompts mentioned above. That said, no matter how well-intentioned, there is no time period in history that isn't ugly and hateful in some way (especially the 19th century, re: colonialism; I recommend looking up the First Opium War, the Tàipíng Rebellion, and the Boxer Rebellion for the perspective I am personally examining such prompts from as a Chinese Hongkonger), and in a fandom where several main characters hail from marginalized communities and pertinent topics such as enslavement, genocide, prejudice, and systemic failure are critical plot points in the main storyline, the depiction or discussion of similar events in fan-works in general are unavoidable. The best we can do as a community is to be more aware of socio-historical contexts and seek to portray different settings with appropriate nuance and respect (and creativity if we can make it work!); I have faith that we as a community will be able to learn and grow from this and do better in the future.
Disclaimer: I do not hate anyone involved in the current situation, mods or participants of Anidala Week, and I have nothing against anyone who has been inspired by these prompts (yes, Victorian-era fashions and Western aesthetics are both very pretty, I understand the appeal). I am not saying that anyone who holds subconscious biases is a bad person — we all do. All I wish to do here is remind our community that we should be more mindful of how we view history looking forward.
