sorry i'm gonna be insufferable about the final casting for s2 but just. yt ppl you seriously don't know what it's like to never see yourselves in media. or to only see yourselves in side characters who might be killed off or dropped or stereotyped or denied any sort of narrative power. you don't know what it's like to believe that you're inherently undesirable because no one who looks like you ever gets a thoughtful arc. you don't know what it's like to feel as though your own life/death is foreclosed because no one who looks like you or who comes from your culture survives in mainstream media. and yeah, sure, representation is NOT liberation, but you don't know how it fucking wears on you to NEVER be visible, to be told no matter what you are NEVER legible, unless you slot into a very specific trope that serves whiteness. not YOU. never YOU.
i would also like to add a preemptive counter to the people who are like "well Death and Destiny are Black! they're the two eldest and most powerful of the Endless! Death is one of the most beloved characters in the canon! what more could you ask for!"
yes. all right. perhaps. but the thing is: the Endless are not actually real. yes, maybe in-universe Death and Destiny are basically omnipotent, they don't die in the narrative, they don't get challenged or undermined or whatever.
you know what else they are?
peripheral to the narrative.
that is the real issue here. the real issue is that it's been decided, once again, that showing Black faces onscreen for one scene or one episode is sufficient to earn a program the Antiracist Merit Badge, while once again, the characters who drive the narrative, whose stories we follow as an audience, who walk complex emotional arcs and take action onscreen instead of just being sketches that are brought to life by the actors' choices, are white. as always, stories rooted in a Black or brown central character—stories that lean into the complexity and the humanity of the individual—are considered unnecessary. as a brown person (even more so if you are a Black person), you are shown from a very young age that your stories do not matter. that, very possibly, you don't even have a story. you are a side character in some white person's grand epic, a bit part, a set dressing. you do not get to be centered. you do not get to be treated like you have a rich inner life. even if lip service is paid to you being loved or powerful or respected or what have you, you never get to see the benefits of that. it's all talk.
sandman made a gesture towards redressing that with Rose and Death and even Lucienne last season, and with the way it populated its world with more people of color and more women. now it's walking that back. and after seeing all the Sick Clapbacks people were doing about how this show is SEWWWWWWW PROGRESSIVE and SEWWWWWWWWW GOOD FOR REPRESENTATION...honestly, i'm fucking pissed.
a white Delirium. fucking honestly.
also...i feel like it's such a disservice to position a handful of Black actors as Thee Representation within a piece of media. like Blackness is universal? (it's not.) or like Blackness isn't already made hypervisible and fungible in visual mediums? (it very much is.) it's the slotting of Black actors into "peripheral" roles AND it's expecting that to be Enough for ALL nonwhite fans. i had such hope when they cast Rose Walker as a Black woman but i guess the backlash to Vanesu should've been a red flag that casting would walk back the "diversity" in s2. the Endless appear as human because they're supposed to represent fundamental concepts in the collective human un/sub/conscious but [checks notes] i guess Blackness is reduced to Destiny and Death (as if THAT isn't already skirting the line of essentialism - yes i'm thinking about the Neilman's annotations to the comix where he said that Nada was the catalyst behind Black women's historic suffering) while whiteness gets to represent everything else. including Desire and Delight/Delirium. once again Blackness bears all the burdens of representation and whiteness gets to be centered.
"oh well, that's British media" - how are there no Indian or Pakistani actors among the Endless? you're telling me we couldn't have ONE other ethnicity represented? c'mon.
