About Callum’s drawings of Rayla…
Can I just say I love how he draws her as she is? Like he doesn’t tone down the badassery and toughness of her at all, if anything he takes it up a notch. So often in our society, women are expected to be “less than” the men they’re involved with, less intelligent, less talented, less successful, less strong. Because we’re supposed to hold ourselves back so the man can feel better about himself. But I then I see the way Callum draws Rayla, and he draws her in all her strength and confidence; he doesn’t try to tone her down to make himself feel better about his own lack of combat skills. He acknowledges her skills and appluads her for it. And neither does he try to over-sexualize her, he just appreciates her as she is. It’s just really refreshing to see girls being appreciated by boys for who they are, not for who boys want them to be.
what’s also interesting about this is to compare how he draws Rayla to how he draws Claudia, the girl he canonically has a crush on:
we only have two examples as the sketchbook pages flash past, but i think it’s significant that these are the drawings of Claudia the show lets us see. they’re both rather soft, feminised renditions of Claudia - you can almost sense the rose-tinted filter of a teenage crush coming into play in how Callum draws her. and of course, Claudia can be feminine and girly - but she’s also an absolute badass who is happy to crush helpless animals for her dark magic spells. so it’s interesting to note which side of Claudia Callum chooses to draw: the softer side, the prettier, girlier side. these drawings filter out the eye-glowing magic-chanting badass side of Claudia, whereas Callum’s pictures of Rayla reflect a more well-rounded perception of her. it makes Callum’s admiration of Rayla feel more sincere and earnest, because he’s not filtering out parts of her to fit into the picture he wants to see.
