#fangirly-thoughts

African American Family of Villains

We would love to celebrate having a diverse amount of representation for any identity and experience, but we have to keep reality in mind. The reality that we have to balance our representation with what’s already out there, as we already deal with a lot of bad and harmful rep. With representation like this, it’s important to look at how other characters who share said identity are presented.  

Villain/antagonist is in the eye of the beholder 

Villains are the hero of their story. They have goals, motivations, and sometimes loved ones.  Define what type of villain yours are. Is your villainous family actual bad guys or just getting in the way of the protagonist’s goals? Explore their motivations. Being an antagonist doesn’t necessarily make someone a villain in the big picture.

Not All Villain Types are equal. 

From observations in fandom: exaggerated, pure evil villains are less intriguing to readers. A lot of people are into intricate villains with motives beyond just ‘cause. When it comes to Black villains, moving away from stereotypical villainous violence (gang violence being one example) to more complex roles is another thing to consider, the latter being more welcome.

Character example: Fish Mooney in the TV series Gotham (Jada Pinkett Smith) is a Black woman mob boss. While she’s involved in illegal activity and is essentially one of the bad guys of Gotham, in Season 1 she does help her police friend solve cases a lot (on her terms), has goals, and is portrayed as sensual, alluring, powerful and clever. The character is developed beyond a flat everyday criminal character. 

[Image above: Fish Mooney in television series Gotham.]

I (Colette) remember seeing on social media how excited Black fans were to receive this character. Me among them! Even as a villain, she was presented with allure and complexity that I craved to see in Black characters. It was nice to be able to personally root for her, even if not everyone in the show would be.

Note: I am no longer up to date on the series past the first season, but this is how she is first presented to us at least. Although, user @thepoisonking says she stays amazing throughout the series!

The Costs of Goals

Your character’s goals seems noble (protecting their family), but what are the costs of the goal? For example, if it involves decisions that hurt others, particularly people the protagonist care about, then it’s obvious why they’re seen as villains. On that note…

Help us understand them

Present the facts. Explaining doesn’t necessarily mean you’re justifying actions. You are simply helping us to understand the why. Whether you purposefully incorporate a sympathetic angle or not is another decision to make, and to make carefully. (For example: A bully torments an innocent character. Explaining how they were bullying victims themselves helps us understand the actions but does not erase or justify the real hurt they have caused others.)

Avoid Tokenism

You say you have other Characters of Colour. This doesn’t really make it okay if all your African American characters are villains and all other said Characters of Colour are not (AA). If you meant you have other AA characters who aren’t villains, then that’s helpful. Create balance, even if they’re sympathetic villains.

~Mods Alice and Colette

Commentary

@leosgrimoireMay I suggest you watch Black Lightning. Almost entirely AA cast, hero’s and villains, and family based

This was a super interesting question! We talked about this in our group chat, and so here are some things we thought might be helpful:

- Generalize the character’s niche. What’s important to you about who Taako is? To us, it was his growing up in poverty, his aptitude for food and fashion, his unapologetic living of his identity. How do those things fit into the AU? How does his character change because of it? For some characters it changed they way they acted in the AU—Lup and Lucas are good examples. That’s okay! If it follows the logic of your world, it works!

- Preserve the diversity of TAZ and expand it as much as possible. Especially when you’re changing everyone to human like we did. That doesn’t mean assign identities at random; do your research here on harmful stereotypes and listen to people who belong to those identities. (writingwithcolor.tumblr.com is a great resource for this).

- Embrace the silliness. A main character in this canon’s name is Taako. You can’t navigate around that, you just have to go for it.

- If you’re doing a time period, like we did with the 90s, do some research about your chosen period. We were lucky enough to have some personal memories of that time and could draw on that on occasion. But we still did research a lot.

- Understand what the heart of your story is. Imho, for BOB that would be Found Family, and Stronger Together. Some people might disagree, but I think themes are important to a story, especially longer stories. If you have something to return back to, it keeps your top from spinning too wildly off the mark the further you go with it. 

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