Imagine you made a terrible fancharacter in your teenage years. (shit, there's a good chance you won't have to imagine anything here. God knows I made some stinkers in my day.)
Let's say she's supposedly a strong female character created from scratch. Supposedly meaning she turned out to be sexist, racist, and ripped off from several existing intellectual properties. You didn't mean for her to turn out like that, but that's what happened.
You're unaware of this at the time, though, because you're a teenager and while exceptions exist, a lot of teenagers are kind of stupid. So because you're kinda dumb, you don't realize what you've done wrong. You're really proud of her, so you top it off with an over the top name which you think fits her perfectly.
Now fast forward till you're well into your twenties, and oh no! A blog says that this character is really really offensive to a lot of people based on the sexism and heaps of orientalism.
Maybe you say to yourself, "Oh, crap, they're totally right, I don't know how I missed this." So you apologize, genuinely, and get rid of the character. You're a decent human being, so most people will write off your character as you being young and dumb.
But maybe you don't really understand how this is orientalist and sexist since it's not really a thing you've ever experienced. When confronted, you decide to take the word of people who have experienced these issues, and you do the right thing by sincerely apologizing and getting rid of the character. You are also a decent human being, and most people won't hold the offensive character against you since you listened to people when they explained why she's problematic.
Or maybe you keep using this extremely offensive character and refuse to change. You refuse to apologize or acknowledge anyone's points because you don't like criticism. Anyone who dares to say you're wrong is a meanie doodyhead buttwipe who's just out to persecute you because you're a bible-believing real troo chrischun.
You are a heterosexual white Christian cismale. You know what sexism is. You're even more familiar with it than women, even though they live with it every day! And you're so much more aware of racism than people of color are, even though people of color live with racism every day!
... okay, so you probably don't say that, but that's the impression it gives off. Which means that while you might otherwise be a candidate for sainthood for all I know, this is a disrespectful megadouche move and people will be incredibly unhappy with you.
If you somehow haven't picked up on it yet, I'm very clearly talking about Ryuu and his Nabooru ripoff Rebe Anjeliia.
Rebe is so problematic and such a mess that if I could magically obliterate every single trace of only one of these characters, it'd be Rebe. Yes, I would get rid of Rebe even over Ryo. Ryo is a shit character, but he's a fucking joke. Rebe is offensive and everything she represents is incredibly fucked up.
I really, really don't like Rebe.
If this is a surprise, it probably shouldn't be: my very first proper article was on some of the sexist aspects of Rebe, and she's come up a few other times since.
So why am I doing this now, of all times, instead of when we were actually posting regularly? It's partially because the She-Elf had a post planned on why Rebe is awful and orientalist before she left the blog. It was a good idea, and I've always thought that it was too bad she never got a chance to make that post. I'll elaborate on everything else as we go along.
So the general gist of this series is that I'm going to try to cover all of the highly problematic aspects of Rebe's character. And I'm also going to touch on some other stuff that isn't problematic, but definitely could've been executed better.
But hey, welcome to my new series of TL;DR. I like to call it
DO NOT.
Because seriously, guys, do not do any of the bullshit I'm covering here. If you have any respect for humanity in general, yourself, or even just your characters, but you think anything Ryuu's done with Rebe is a good idea, stop and think about what you're doing.
This was supposed to be one bigass article but it got massively out of hand pretty fast, so breaking it up seemed less painful. Have an index of articles with song lyrics/titles for titles (I make no claim to any of these songs and am not profiting from them in any way shape or form, all songs are property of the artists, etc.):
1. Calling Mr Killjoy (I'm The Death of Every Party): Her Names (you are here!)
2. It's Getting Hot In Here (So Take Off All Your Clothes): Her Wardrobe
3. Just Stop: The Sexism
4. Our Attitude's Queer and Quaint: The Orientalism, Racism, And Cultural Appropriation
5. Burned It Down Anyways: How To Fix This Fiasco
Okay, so it seems like Ryuu changed Rebe's design (possibly because people, ourselves included, complained about her being a crappy Nabooru ripoff) and he switched her over to an 'original universe', as he posted this:
 |
| Oh jeezus. |
"Hey everyone!
Been ages since I uploaded anything, so I decided to put up a chibi I drew a while ago I'm pretty fond of. This is Reba, the alias of Rebé Anjeliia. This is an experimental outfit of hers and hairstyle as well. A number of my OCs have gone through a lot of changes, and this is one of them. Reba's more based on wilderness/barbarian style as she's a rogue bandit. What I mean by that is she's a bandit who goes after other bandits and takes THEIR stuff. She's meant to be a woman of the wild. I may draw a more detailed version of this outfit in a more normal-scale picture, but this is the concept anyhow.
And if you're wondering, yes she's being based on a new background instead of Gerudo fortress because she like other characters of mine have gone to a more original story base.
I hope you guys like it. I know not everyone is into the style, but we know it's one of the things Reba's known for - being exotic. ^^"
I'm going to be coming back to this piece a bunch in my future posts for a variety of reasons, but for now let's start with some of the bandit garbage he's feeding us. Specifically, let's start with the name.
Also, from here on out I'm gonna refer to the character as Rabies basically because fuck that multiple name bullshit.
Okay, I called Ryuu out on stealing Rebe's name from Star Wars (and also her mom's) quite a while ago. I went pretty in depth about that here, so I'm not going to go into it again. Why does this bear mentioning, then?
Because I'm assuming it got back to Ryuu somehow since he changed Rabies' name to Reba.
...it's more like 'changed,' really, because Reba is her alias now. And my first reaction to that when someone mentioned it to me was 'are you fucking with me now?'.
A criminal using an alias to keep the nice policemen-or-in-universe-equivalent away actually makes a lot of sense, especially with a name like Rabies has. It's a really good idea, so kudos to Ryuu for having an idea that actually makes a lot of sense.
The problem is if you're gonna do that, why the fuck would you pick an alias that's ONE LETTER AWAY FROM YOUR OWN GIVEN NAME? Ryuu's made some really bad judgement calls with names before, but this one is asinine even by his standards. I honestly thought this was a really bad joke until I remembered that we're talking about Ryuu.
Look, if you somehow missed the painfully obvious, the whole point of an alias is to hide your identity. Even a half-decent bandit would probably pick an alias that's nowhere near their own name, especially someone who's stealing from other bandits.
Why is that an issue? Because it means Rabies will have to contend with law enforcement and the bandits, who are not gonna be at all happy when they realize someone's taking their loot. That's two groups of people who are gonna want to either arrest her or KILL HER, and here she is with flaming red hair, facial tattoos, fur suspenders, and a distinctive
(side note: I guess no one told Ryuu that facial tattoos are a great way to identify a suspect, because he's been slapping them all over Rabies for ages. Oopsie-doodle.)
Quite honestly, this alias crap smells an awful lot like someone told him told him to change Rabies' name since people were onto the fact that he stole it from Star Wars, but he didn't want to change it because that's admitting that those poopyface jerks won or something.
It really feels like he went "hey, Reba is a real name, they can't critique me on that."
Except "they" can, because he very clearly whipped this bullshit about her alias out of the darkest part of his ass. In theory it's a good idea. In practice it absolutely is not due to the complete and total lack of critical thought he put into it.
I'm really disappointed, to tell you the truth. At first, I thought someone finally actually got through to Ryuu about his questionable naming choices. If he flat-out changed her name to Reba and changed or even dropped her pompous surname entirely (it was bad enough but NOW IT RHYMES) then I'd actually be really happy he was taking steps in the right direction.
But he didn't, because I guess admitting he's wrong is tantamount to taking a dump on the bible for him or something. It's a shame he does shit like this, honestly, because Rabies could have so much potential if she was written well.
