#inickel

Harry might of stolen you a Candy Gram

Happy holidays! 

Surprise @inickel I was your descendants secret Santa :D! 

I’m so happy I got you and I hope you like your gift! I had fun going through your blog and ended up watching a bunch of your YouTube videos too. Hope you have an amazing day!!!

((Take this doodle I did too under the keep reading lol)) 

I’ve seen race get brought up a lot in Descendants, both in positive and negative lights.

The fandom itself, I don’t think I’ve seen racism in. From what I’ve seen, people applaud the racial diversity of the franchise. It seems to me that Uma, Carlos and Evie are probably the three most popular characters in the franchise and are well loved by the fans.

The Descendants franchise is where I think race and improper representation show up. The first film had a story line divided fairly evenly between Mal, Jay, Evie and Carlos. Mal was the central character, but the other three had plots and purpose and roles. The second film brought in two more characters of color, Uma and Dizzy, and gave a larger role to Lonnie. While Uma was meant as the antagonist, I think the film did great at making her sympathetic and likable, with a lot of fans siding with her over Mal.

Descendants 3 gets very weird in terms of race. Almost all of our established characters of color get no screen time or story line (Carlos, Jay and Evie, of course, but I’m super mad Dizzy was basically a background character? What was that??). The three that we’re left with are Uma, Audrey and Celia. All of them are great characters and pretty well loved by the fans, but they’re not loved in D3. Celia was very heavily marketed as a villain in the previews, though her character was not even close to a villain or even an antagonist? Audrey was turned into a villain and even though she was redeemed, it’s a shady story line to have a hero be white and a villain be black (or any other race), even if Mal had help from Uma.

Another point I haven’t seen get brought up with D3 is the ‘white savior’ thing that comes with Mal. From the characters we get, we see that a large part of the Isle isn’t white. In fact, most of the characters of color in the franchise come from the Isle. Jay, Evie, Carlos, Dizzy, Celia and Uma and their respective parents (all of which we see, or at least hear in Ursula’s case) are from the Isle while Auradon’s only (noticeable) characters of color are Lonnie and Audrey (we see Queen Leah, but never Mulan). By having Mal and Ben be the ones to lower the barrier (which is a dumb idea, but that’s another topic) and ‘save’ everyone on the Isle (which was created by white people, Belle and Adam). It’s especially weird since D2 was preparing Evie for the role of being the ‘Isle diplomat’, or at least the one who saw and acknowledged the problem! Like, I expected that to be her role in D3, but it was given to Mal. Or even Uma could have been the one to fix the problem and help the Isle, but this role was given to Ben and Mal and reinforces the White Savior stereotype.

Sorry, I’m not sure if this really answered your question!

The fandom itself, I haven’t seen racism in. But then again, I really only follow for ships and, because of that, I limit myself to which blogs I interact with. There very well could be shit going on that I haven’t seen from fans, but I think all the fans are excited about a racially diverse cast.

The franchise starts off great, but kind of shoots itself with D3 and how poorly the characters of color are treated.

imo, chloe is redeemable, lila is not.

sigh.

Chloe has done far worse than Lila.

And like I said, in that post, any character CAN be redeemed, it’s more a question of whether they should.

Chloe has done FAR, FAR, FAR worse than Lila.

Chloe is not more redeemable than Lila.

hi, thank you so much!