Post by Liou on Jan 13, 2022 12:35:56 GMT -5
lovejoy1997
Full disclosure, I do not understand why you are so focused on giving the Neopets characters nationalities and ethnicities of real world humans. It seems important to you, since you have put time into this whole list.
The Neopets plot characters are not humans, they are sapient animals from a world where they come in paintbrush colours, and they already have their own stories set in their fictional lands. Some of those fictional fantasy lands are definitely based on real world cultural stereotypes, and the connection could be visible depending how you write these characters. Other Neopian lands are not based on real world cultural stereotypes, and if you connected them to a real world culture, that would beg the question, why did you decide that culture was like that Neopian world.
I do not know which setting you will place them in, I do not know which story you are planning to write for them or how close to their original plot stories they are supposed to be, and especially, I do not know for which audience you are aiming.
I cannot tell you if any of these headcanons are right for any of them, because that would entail linking a whole real population to a cartoon animal's personality.
If your main goal here is to catch problems before someone an art community somewhere can yell at you for being A Problematic, I'll try to work that out.
The main thing that I notice in your list is to watch out for the set of characters you decided were Romanian, see what they have in common, and ask yourself why you picked those, and how it might look like to other people.
The other thing that jumps out is why you decided to make Roberta, a human, not an Acara, part Polynesian. Humans all across the world enjoy various athletic activities including swimming, ethnicity does not grant innate predilection for one sport, and more confusingly, despite being an Acara, the character Roberta herself has never been said to enjoy swimming as far as I've read. But really the important thing here is watching out for Polynesian stereotyping.
One might also question why you made some characters, like Lilian and Clara, biracial, but not some others, like Roxton.
There seems to be diversity in your overall cast and among groups from each Neopian land, but other forumers would be more qualified than me to assess this.
I still do not quite understand how this matters exactly, why this is necessary.
If you are writing them as human characters in your own stories, then their character development comes first, and their ethnicities and/or nationalities may or may not be disclosed if they are relevant to the story.
And if the ethnicities/nationalities/cultures are not relevant to the stories you are writing around these human characters, that would just mean you are assigning real world cultures' stereotypes to cartoon characters, which is unnecessarily reductive.
Full disclosure, I do not understand why you are so focused on giving the Neopets characters nationalities and ethnicities of real world humans. It seems important to you, since you have put time into this whole list.
The Neopets plot characters are not humans, they are sapient animals from a world where they come in paintbrush colours, and they already have their own stories set in their fictional lands. Some of those fictional fantasy lands are definitely based on real world cultural stereotypes, and the connection could be visible depending how you write these characters. Other Neopian lands are not based on real world cultural stereotypes, and if you connected them to a real world culture, that would beg the question, why did you decide that culture was like that Neopian world.
I do not know which setting you will place them in, I do not know which story you are planning to write for them or how close to their original plot stories they are supposed to be, and especially, I do not know for which audience you are aiming.
I cannot tell you if any of these headcanons are right for any of them, because that would entail linking a whole real population to a cartoon animal's personality.
If your main goal here is to catch problems before someone an art community somewhere can yell at you for being A Problematic, I'll try to work that out.
The main thing that I notice in your list is to watch out for the set of characters you decided were Romanian, see what they have in common, and ask yourself why you picked those, and how it might look like to other people.
The other thing that jumps out is why you decided to make Roberta, a human, not an Acara, part Polynesian. Humans all across the world enjoy various athletic activities including swimming, ethnicity does not grant innate predilection for one sport, and more confusingly, despite being an Acara, the character Roberta herself has never been said to enjoy swimming as far as I've read. But really the important thing here is watching out for Polynesian stereotyping.
One might also question why you made some characters, like Lilian and Clara, biracial, but not some others, like Roxton.
There seems to be diversity in your overall cast and among groups from each Neopian land, but other forumers would be more qualified than me to assess this.
I still do not quite understand how this matters exactly, why this is necessary.
If you are writing them as human characters in your own stories, then their character development comes first, and their ethnicities and/or nationalities may or may not be disclosed if they are relevant to the story.
And if the ethnicities/nationalities/cultures are not relevant to the stories you are writing around these human characters, that would just mean you are assigning real world cultures' stereotypes to cartoon characters, which is unnecessarily reductive.
Really, if you just started writing stories about human characters named after the Neopets characters and with some other similarities, without putting all this focus on ethnicities, it would probably be fine.
