Hi, This is something that has been bugging me for a while. I would like to know how come they are no "white characters" tag? I've seen Asian Characters, Black Characters and Native American Characters tags but I have haven't seen any "White Character" tags.
I find the aforemntionned tags quite disturbing, as I usually see tags used as a warnings for readers. Many stories are written in fandoms based on TV shows or movies where you would already know what the characters look like, and even for those based on books there would be descriptions so I find this emphasis to be unecessary and to a certain extent racist.
It also gives the impression that white characters are the norm and it's the "others" that you have to warn of. The first time I saw an author use the "character of color" tag, I asked why they tought it was necessary and her answer was that AO3 made these tags available and she thought it would be a good idea to use them. So if they are tags for everyother "race" how come there isn't a tag for "white characters"?
Thanks for asking about a "White Character" tag. As of yet, no one’s made that tag for us to mark as canonical. By and large, unless we’re making a metatag to link related tags or seeding a fandom with characters for a challenge, the wranglers do not make tags; instead we work solely with user-generated content. If work creators or bookmarkers feel the need for a "White Character(s)" tag, we encourage them to create and use it. Once it's been used by at least three different users, we'll likely canonize it!
“Character of Color” (first used in 2009) and the other tags you listed are user-generated tags. In our experience, their usage is typically not discriminatory: with characters of color being under-represented or totally absent from a lot of mainstream media sources and therefore also under-represented or absent from a lot of fanfic too, users created the tag to be able to search out and enjoy stories that have significant character of colors even if they don’t know the fandom. So a user might not know that a particular character in an unfamiliar fandom or story is of color, but want to find stories or new fandoms that have such characters, if only to find stories that are more representative of the real, multi-racial world that we actually live in.
For this reason, it appears that the creators of those 4400 works felt that the tag (and its various subtags) conveyed useful information for their work. Looking at the tag cloud for the Kaleidoscope Fanwork Exchange seems to support this hypothesis. Most of the subcollections, as well as the parent user-made "Dark Agenda" collection, have similar distributions.
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Post_script (Guest) Wed 11 Dec 2013 10:30PM UTC
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