|
Red Rat Blog Entry |
|
June 28, 2024, 12:00:15 AM 6/28/24: r/SketchDaily theme, "Free Draw Friday." This week's characters from my anthro WWII storyline are Lance Corporal Red Rat and Private First Class Purple Rat. They're pretty old characters (Red was originally Corporal Gold's best friend, Purple was kind of antagonistic) who kind of fell by the wayside in more recent updates but I should perhaps reclaim them. There'll be more about them later in my art Tumblr and Toyhou.se. Regarding their design, I'm a bit meh on both (I gave Red a scar to make him a bit more interesting, hm) but especially on Purple, I dunno, I just picture him bigger and darker, more imposing. But anyway, here they are. TUMBLR EDIT: Red and Purple Rat date to the earliest versions of this series. Very old characters. Although they were moderately important back then, they fell out of use as I focused on other characters but also because the entire story itself, as I've mentioned repeatedly, fell out of my favor and I moved on to other things. There's another possible explanation behind my semi-abandonment of these two, however, and it's one I'm not proud of but I feel the need to own up to: Race. Red and Purple are both meant to be Black (African American). (And yeah, this is confusing as Black is not Black, despite literally being black...you'll notice my POC Rats mostly have brown hues of fur. I won't try to explain it, the only real logic is the feeling I assign it. Just bear with me.) The following will be modified to avoid repetition in entries. Ugh, I hate admitting this...but I suck at writing minorities, largely due to my highly sheltered life in a super-white family in a super-white neck of the woods. (The most color I've found in my genealogical digging so far is a Native American ancestor from the early 1700s, and a French Jew who converted to Christianity back in the 11-1200s. Everything else is just...really freaking white.) The result is that many of my early characters of other races usually boiled down to stereotypes, because I didn't know how to depict them in a way that made it clear they weren't white. Red Rat literally spoke with "Black person accent." ;_; And while Purple's accent wasn't as pronounced, he had a troubled upbringing and difficulty with authorities because OF COURSE he did. Ugh...sorry about all this. I'm fully aware now of the flaws in all this because I went through a similar experience when I started writing LGBT+ characters. (I'm old fashioned, used to writing GLBT...ah well.) I still remember hopping on Ask Jeeves and asking the fine people there, in M/M relationships, how do they decide who is the masculine/"husband" role and who is the feminine/"wife" role...? I didn't phrase it like that but you get the gist. And oh wow did I get reamed. I remember feeling surprised, hurt, and confused, why was everyone getting so mad at me? I never got an answer that satisfied me (aside from all the offense I caused, I was told...they're like straight people!--do straight people all have strict roles they follow??...but my simple brain did not get it), so I just started writing my gay couple on my own. Like with all my characters, I put myself in their heads, lived them through the story. And...THEN I understood. And I still grimace when I think of how moronic and offensive I was, asking that question and expecting a straight (heh) answer. Well...this is that, but times ten. I can argue I have some personal experience with LGBT+. Not so with race. I've had a couple of Black friends in the past, but that was decades ago, they were both adopted by white families, I've never had any significant exposure to culture. One can argue it's like the above experience, they're just people like the rest of us, why make them different, "others"? And indeed I follow that with a newer Black character, Amaranth. Yet here one could be accused of whitewashing. Amaranth's personal circumstances fit this treatment, yet Red's and Purple's don't. They're meant to rather stand out from the rest of the Rats, largely due to their race. The Trench Rats are an integrated battalion, though barely so, and I imagine Rats of color stick out and are treated accordingly. (Copper is one such character I haven't had as much difficulty with, likely because he's mixed race, but check his entry for a bit on his interactions with his fellows and the enemy.) Amaranth blends in with the majority, Red and Purple do not. Uneasy race relations are a major theme of a work set in this time period, so I feel that, rather than downplay it, in some cases it needs to be played up. The problem is I seem currently incapable of putting myself into the head of a person of color. I feel too ignorant (which is true) and uncomfortable about the potential for appropriation or just plain getting it wrong. I have no experience on which to draw. (I've outright been told, in the past regarding my Manitou Island fiction, to not even try to write from the POV of other cultures and to stick to my own, which according to the person saying this meant George Washington :/ ...I have no family from Virginia, my ancestors immigrated mostly from France and Germany and the Netherlands and Scotland, but anyway...still white...that's another reason I'm leery of making the effort.) Maybe someday I'll reach a point where I can achieve this, but that time is not yet, and it definitely wasn't then. I set Red and Purple aside in the hopes of developing them beyond stereotypes at a future point. I dig them out again now to add to my collection of characters, yet I can't say that I'll give them the attention they deserve. It isn't that I don't want to, just that I don't want to mess them up. I'll share what I can so far, but heavy character development may have to wait indefinitely. You can safely blame my super-white life experiences for this...sorry. Red Rat was originally intended as Gold's Rat's best friend and comic relief, so never really had much personality of his own. As I previously mentioned, he was rather a caricature of a fast-talking "Black sidekick." I don't know the proper, non-offensive name (is there one?) for his particular accent...my dad once called it "jive," but my dad was definitely not the authority to ask about such things, trust me. (I swallowed my anxiety and Googled "Black accent" and Wikipedia tells me "African-American Vernacular English," okey-doke, let's go with that.) In any case, he spoke with that kind of accent. I always imagined he came from the inner city (of course ;_; ), likely a working-class family, but in my own defense, so does Gold. I always imagined Red as a smooth talker, perpetually clownish and joking around (like an amped-up version of Gold), and willing to go along with whatever stupid ideas Gold came up with. Damn, what really differentiated these two aside from race?? I'm not sure. Let's try out some newer details that likely did not exist before now. You see I gave Red a neck scar to distinguish him a bit. I haven't yet come up with a story for this, but I imagine he had his rough-and-tumble moments. He still comes from the inner city, a working-class family, which I assume is how he meets Gold (Gold spends much of his childhood neglected by his drunken father, so probably wanders into neighborhoods he wouldn't otherwise--this is around the 1920s in New York I think, I'm assuming the neighborhoods are highly segregated), and they're peas in a pod. Race? Gold doesn't see it. Red does, though, and probably has to school his naive new friend on how things work. I imagine they find their own spots to explore and play in, beyond the view of judgemental adults, and have a good old time. I imagine Red's family being rightfully concerned about but cautiously accepting of the friendship, maybe even letting Gold in to visit. Meanwhile, I imagine Gold's father, if he catches word of the friendship, taking a belt to him and threatening him never to indulge again. Like that would convince Gold to give up what's probably the only friendship he has, though. These two obviously enlist at the same time and place, likely heading in together (though Red presumably has to take a different door and talk to a different recruiter). They both end up in the Trench Rats, likely because it's integrated and they're thus allowed to serve alongside each other. I imagine they grow a bit more distant from each other simply due to their duties, and the fact that Gold ends up promoted to corporal; maybe Red gets passed over despite having equal qualifications...? That could be an intriguing plot point; I can picture Red being disappointed and a bit frustrated by it, while Gold would feel guilty. So there's the potential for some character development. Red remains a background character for now, as I haven't had the interest or motivation, in the onslaught of other characters and their histories, to develop him more. But I wish to put out there ALL the characters, and owe it to him to give him his spot. Perhaps at a future point he'll claim more of a place in the story. [Red Rat 2024 [Friday, June 28, 2024, 12:00:15 AM]] |