starsandboulevardsroleplay:

Don’t apologize to me, seriously, you’re entitled to your opinions and I my own. You’re calling our writing community unwelcoming to diversity and that’s simply untrue. This has been a very sour subject for me personally so I’m going to address this publicly. If any of our other affiliates would like to leave us for something like this then that’s fine in my book because our affiliates will only ever be Roleplays I can see the writers here joining. That means welcoming, to every type of character and writer. A writing community that actually is a community, that means they don’t oppress others for their thoughts.

Let me start with: Despite popular Tumblr opinions, being a “person of color” isn’t about your skin tone. I highly doubt you sat there and went through QUITE LITERALLY all 450 of our written biographies and checked to see the ethnicity of every FC. You went and looked at a person’s face and assumed they were white and ticked us off your affiliates. You’re wrong, I’m a person of color- I’m Hispanic. I’m a 100% Venezuelan that embraces both the culture of my family and the country I was raised in and I’m a polyglot. You would look at me, with my practically straight jet-black hair and my gas-leak-victim white skin, and either call me white or Asian because I “don’t look Hispanic”. Yet, I am, and I have a very very hard time getting tan. However, since I can’t tan (just saying I was famous) if an RP is using me as a FC you’re going to dock of a FC for not using lets say my sister instead of me. My sister has tight curls and dark beautiful mocha skin that will tan if she simply thinks about the sun. People look at her and automatically write her off as black. On a whole different level, diversity is in the eyes of the writer. Look at Saoirse Ronan and the many different countries characters she has portrayed are from, the writer had a facial image or a vocal image of that character in their head and Saoirse brought them to life.

This whole “POC” stuff on Tumblr has been taken to a disgusting extreme. Here at SABR we focus on writing and character development. If a writer wants to write a black actor that was born and raised in America as someone who is escaping the conflicts in Gaza, awesome. If someone feels motivated to write Lily Collins as an Italian transgendered porn-star, fantastic. Writing is about the vision. I will never be so unwelcoming as to say someone can’t apply here because his or her desired FC is too white. We’ve had is all and then some and SABR has been happy and great without being judgmental. So think before you send some message like this to other RPs because being diverse is more than what’s on the outside and it certainly far more important than the actors, actresses, and singer’s lives.

Being diverse is more than skin! Being bi-tri-whatever-racial, it’s all diverse and it’s all beautiful. By putting some ridiculous quota on what you call “diversity” isn’t encouraging anyone to apply. You can’t force writers to pick up someone with dark skin. Sure, you can put up bans, but what does a ban accomplish other than encouraging amazing writers to apply to other roleplays. Your plot and biographies may be amazing but you’re treating Tumblr and the roleplaying community as some retail sales department. Your writers aren’t sales reps. They’re not going to hit POC quotas, orientation quotas, or disabled characters quotas. All we as admins/mods can do is encourage and educate. I do that by running an RPH specifically for our roleplay that has helpers on how to write different kinds of characters and we have some of the most amazing characters I’ve had the pleasure of writing and read here. If you want to label diversity as “people with dark skin” that’s your prerogative, not ours.

With that being said 30% of 450 is 135. Below you will find a list of all our posted faceclaims here at SABR that aren’t just “those white people ethnicities” of Australian, English, French, Finnish, Welsh, Irish, German, Scottish, Danish, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Manx, Afrikaner, and Dutch (and probably a couple more, but I think you understand). Note: This list doesn’t include any FC that took longer than a minute to research. Also, it’s subject to change but in the nice growing way.

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