when i was growing up the only brown people i saw on tv or in the movies was like jasmine and aladdin and the terrorists in 24 lmao. i really wanted to have antiheroes and complicated antagonists and scary ruthless women that were not white. how come nuance and justifying backstories and foreshadowing and redemptive arcs and bad decisions later reflected upon to make the character stronger, how come all that only happened to white characters? even now i see it still, poc characters delegated to “safe” positions in a story because authors, usually white authors, are too frightened to make a poc as dimensional as a white character. i saw a comment on instagram on a post about this where a white author was expressing this exact thought, that they were too frightened to make a black villain and didn’t even realize what they were actually saying with this comment. even with hero characters, authors and storytellers often smooth down the edges when the hero is black, a good example is wyll from bg3, who is sanded down (from early access and based on user feedback) to a disney princess equivalent because expressing any kind of complicated and “ugly” emotion like anger would scare the audience. some people really overcorrect to a degree that ends up racist anyway. please make poc into as interesting antagonists, narrative foils, and pragmatic and complex characters as you would with white characters. as for me im writing the characters i wish i could see more of and now that i am, their absence everywhere else is so obvious and scary. and before anyone says that im accusing all authors who don’t have poc as the antagonist or something as racist, please don’t do that. im saying that if you have intentionally, maybe subconsciously, decided not to give poc characters the layers that your white characters have, you should think a little more about that. think about why