Recently, SFF author Tansy Rayner Roberts wrote an excellent post debunking the idea that women did nothing interesting or useful throughout history, and that trying to write fictional stories based on this premise of feminine insignificance is therefore both…
Point being, I’m sick to death of historical accuracy being trotted out as the excuse du jour whenever someone freaks out about the inclusion of a particular type of character in SFF, because the ultimate insincerity behind the claim is so palpable it’s practically a food group. - from the essay. read it.
Prismatic Art Collection is a free library of art representing heroes of all backgrounds. In geek culture, there are plenty of Lukes, but not enough Landos or Leias. We want to change that. Funds were raised through Kickstarter to hire a diverse group of artists to create fantasy art depicting heroes of all backgrounds.
This work is free to use in both indie and commercial products like role-playing game rule books. Oh, you don’t include diverse representation of heroes because art is scarce? Here is the solution.
Sure there are plenty of Lukes… but we want more Landos and Leias!
The Prismatic Art collection aims to commission a more diverse set of fantasy character illustration and release it into a Creative Commons license, making it easier for publishers and gamers alike to populate their games and stories with more women and people of color.
Even $1 helps!
Go to our Kickstarter page and throw us as much money as you found in your couch! Or maybe even a little bit more to help us create a practical solution to a complicated problem.
I am a featured artist on this project and can’t wait to lean into it. We just need your support. :L
Try not to label me as racist, Tumblr, because this is simply an observation I’ve made. But, really and truly, a lot of characters in anime who seem to be intended as ethnically Japanese, or at least East Asian, look….really white.
I was drawing, you see, and sometimes I come up with stories and…
Same thing happened to me, in a way. I don’t know anything about anime, but I do crawl about in sci-fi and fantasy. I didn’t like what I noticed (an overwhelming lack of diversity) and I didn’t like that I’d been a participant in that.
^ I wrote about my own conflict and what eventually came of it: a more conscious awareness of my own white-ness in the fantasy world, and a resolve to populate my world with more types of bodies.
I mean, just count. Star Wars. Star Trek. Lord of the Rings. Harry Potter. Firefly. Battlestar Galactica. Who are the non-white characters in those stories (if any!) and what are their roles?
This little revelation was a teensy bit shocking to me, since I feel acutely aware of how left out I feel as a woman in those genres. Do the same count again. Who are the women in these series and what do they do? (Honestly though, in the gender department, Firefly and Battlestar do the best by large margins.) So in feeling so often excluded in sci-fi/fantasy, I entered into the steampunk project with that wholly in mind. The project required that half the characters be female, but I wanted to make extra sure I didn’t make them fantasy/sexy and I didn’t restrict their roles to the ‘clothies’ of the genre.
On the subject of race and steampunk, I love following Silver Goggles. She shoots straight.
Image taken from tumblr.
