White Washed!
What is the process of White Washing Characters?
When someone whitewashes a character, they take a character generally made by someone else; they take that character's skin color and change it to be white. Most of the time, this happens in fan art of certain characters, but can also occur while making books into movies and shows. A famous example of this is in the movie for Avatar the Last Air Bender. Aang, whose ethnicity should be Tibetan, Katara, and Sokka, originally Inuit, are all played by white actors.
White Washing Fan Art: Why is it Wrong?
Most creators disapprove of doing this to their characters for somewhat obvious reasons. However, along with the fact that the creators don't like it, another thing about whitewashing is that a character's original design is supposed to be cherished by others, not changed because ‘why not’. Now, don’t twist my words, fan art is a fantastic thing, but people should make the designs of the original characters to the best of their ability using the color palette provided naturally by the creators of said characters.
White Washing is Ruining the Fan Art Community!
Now you may think that surely the fan art community doesn’t do it that often, but that's where you’re wrong. There is always a constant output of whitewashed fan art; even if you don’t see it, that doesn’t mean it’s not there. This is mainly because people that see it just scroll past it because they don’t care for it. And it’s not just the whitewashing of characters in the fan art community. There’s also over-sexualized characters, pedophilia, rape, and plenty more stuff that is just plain terrible. If I were to try and cover all the horrible things that the fan art community had to offer, I would have to write a book, but today I’m focusing on whitewashing and how that hurts the community. It hurts the community, not just by giving them a bad reputation but also it kind of leeks into a racial matter. Are the people making this type of art doing it solely for the purpose that they wanted to change the character to be white? The sheer amount of white-washed fan art is truly the shocking part, yes there is probably not as much compared to typical fan art, but the fact that it’s even there is just sad.
