Shipping Characters of Color (or not, actually)

[allyndra]

So, I've been reading a lot of blogs about race, both in general and in fandom, and I'm trying to become aware of and confront my own skanky race issues. I remember discussion over the fact that people don't ship characters of color as much as white characters. And it drew me up short, because I don't. Chad/Ryan was my first inter-racial OTP, and that's pretty darn recent. All the approval-seeking by Ford never made me want to ship him with John, and even though Ronon is the hottest character ever to grace SGA, I take Rodney over him every time. I do like Gunn (and want him slashed with Xander), but I tend to overlook him. But I could, to some extent, brush this off. Everyone has favorite characters and pairings, and the fact that my pairings tended to exclude characters of color could just be a coincidence.

Then I watched Iron Man. I don't think I'm spoiling anything when I say that Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) and James Rhodes (Terence Howard) had a close friendship. And lately, I watch everything through slash goggles. Still, despite Tony and Rhodes showing emotional connection, long-term friendship, and a willingness to express affection physically, I didn't have any urge to slash them. And that bothers me. If Rhodes had been played by an attractive white man instead of an attractive person of color, I would probably be frantically searching for the Iron Man slash.

The thing is, if I'm just dismissing interesting, attractive characters out of hand because of their color, how do I fix that? Awareness is usually considered the first step, but what is the second? Should I challenge myself to write more characters of color? Make an extra point of giving fic featuring those characters a chance? I'm going to try both of those, but if anyone has other suggestion, let me know.

Comments

[allyndra.livejournal.com]

I don't argue that the backstory and development we get for many CoCs is shallow, but so is what we get for a lot of white characters, and they still get written like crazy. Parrish, anyone? He had, what, one scene? And somehow becomes half of an incredibly popular slash pairing? I'm not saying, "Hey, stop writing that Laura Cadman fic, people." But I think I am saying, "Let's write some awesome Peter Grodin fic." Because he was a pretty amazing guy: brilliant, dependable, attractive, and ultimately heroic. So I'm kind of bugged that I've never felt like writing him.

If you (as reigning queen of the plot bunnies) have any prompt ideas for Grodin or Bates or anyone, throw them my way. I want to try and jar myself into writing for characters I've ignored.

[ariadne83]

Now that I think about it, I'm Jonesing for some "Grodin at university" fic (I blame Rodney-and-Daniel-at-Oxford from Pegasus B).
Or maybe Bates gets home and as he's struggling to recover from his injuries from and losing his job :,-( he finds his brother has turned into a teenaged brat who doesn't think he's cool anymore