Halloween 2012

welp

Go On and Community comparison

So I've added Go On (plot synopsis: Chandler's wife died and he has to go to a support group full of loveable weirdos to cope and ends up befriending them) to my shows that I watch, and I've realized the reason I like it so much is because it reminds me of Community.

Chandler Bing Ryan King: Jeff Winger, obvs
Lauren (the group leader): a combination of Britta and Annie. Like Britta, she is the girl the sarcastic main character is totally going/supposed to end up with, and is a fake therapist who wants to help people. Like Annie, she has gorgeous brown shiny hair and adorable clothes I want to steal, and she wants him to be a better person (wait, Britta does too. And Annie is also cute together with Jeff).
Anne: much like Britta as well. She's angry, blonde, and constantly calling Ryan out on his ish. Also a recurring joke on Community is that Britta is lesbian and Anne actually is (her wife also died, like Ryan's).
Yolanda: Shirley! Also Annie, the overachieving, sweater-wearing, persnickety prude version of her.
Owen: A combo of Abed and Troy? idk.
Mr. K: Pierce, obvs. Also Abed. And Chang but not malevolent. And Dean Pelton? Like if you put the Dean and Pierce and some Abed and Chang together. Yeah this makes no sense.
Sonia: Britta (blonde single cat owner) but also some Annie and Shirley?
Fausta: Pierce? I have no idea. They don't have a Hispanic stereotype on Community (yet).
Danny: No idea. A bit Abed-ish.
George: Pierce because of the oldness. He's not been on lately.
Carrie: Annie-ish but not really anything.
Steven: No idea.

Yeah, that ended up being less clear-cut than I thought. Oh, I just remembered that Jeff is always being compared to Ryan Seacrest and Ryan King is always being mistaken for Rachel Maddow. So that's funny.

Disney's First Hispanic/Latina Princess?

All right, finally found something to blog about! I have no idea how I missed reading about this earlier, but apparently Disney is going to have its first Latina princess. Her name is Sofia and she becomes a princess because her mom marries the king of Enchancia (yeah, I know). Read this article and this one too. What I find weird is this:

• while Sofia's mom is clearly Latina (she is voiced by Sara Ramirez from Grey's Anatomy, while Modern Family's Ariel Winter voices Sofia) and has dark brown hair and eyes and brown/tan skin, Sofia has auburn hair, blue eyes and basically just looks white, and
• Sofia is going to be in a computer animated Disney Juniors television show, not in a full-length feature film like any of the other Disney Princesses.

Being Latin@ is an ethnicity, not a race, so obviously there is a great deal of physical variation among Latin@s or Hispanics (Latin@ [the @ is used as a combination 'o' and 'a' symbol; in Spanish males' words end in o and females' words end in a, so this way both genders are included] is a newer term that roughly means the same thing as Hispanic, but the latter is a word applied to our ethnic group by the US government [aka white people] to classify us, so many Latin@s prefer this word. It's roughly the same to me, although I grew up using Hispanic because my parents do). I myself am a 'white' Latina; my dad is Mexican and my mom is of Cuban descent, but there is so much Spanish blood (my dad's family were land owners and he had a French whoknowshowmany-great-grandfather, while my mom's family are Cubans who also pretty much directly descended from Spaniards) that my immediate family pretty much all pass for white (my sister is blond, even). You don't have to dig very far in this blog to find pictures of me; I do have dark brown hair but I also have white skin and blue eyes. I'm whiter than most white people. Obviously, just because someone has light skin, hair and eyes does not mean they can't be Latin@.
The problem is that this is Disney's first Latina princess. This is a big deal. I think this is just about the only ethnic group the Disney movies haven't covered. Quick rundown of Disney Princesses: Snow White (come on. It's in the name/fairy tale), Cinderella (blonde/blue-eyed), Aurora (ditto), Ariel (first redhead! still white even though she is a mermaid), Belle (brunette and brown-eyed, French), Jasmine (first non-white princess! Arabian? Clearly Middle-Eastern. Agrabah is not I think a real place), Pocahontas (Native American, an actual person but she was so not like that), Mulan (Chinese, what I said about Pocahontas although technically she is not a princess since her dude wasn't a prince), Tiana (first Black princess! also from a real place, New Orleans, and is African American), and Rapunzel (after all that diversity I guess we needed to return to a blonde, white princess. She has green eyes, though). Oh, and Pixar's Merida (Scottish; red, crazy curly hair; blue eyes. Love her). These are the official Disney Princesses™, although Giselle (played by strawberry blonde Amy Adams), Kida (Atlantean princess with tan/brown skin, white hair and blue eyes who is all *~exotic~*), Ariel's daughter Melody (also white and has black hair like her dad Prince Eric), and Eilonwy (princess from The Black Cauldron. She's your basic blonde/white/blue-eyed princess but in her defense TBC is based on a book that was heavily influenced by your typical European fairytales) also exist. There has been no Latina princess, though, so it's rather disappointing that this one looks like your basic white girl. Yes, white-looking Latina girls like me exist (obviously), but we already have enough princesses to look up to or hold up as being or looking like me (Belle 4eva). What about the brown-skinned girls? There's just Pocahontas, Jasmine and Tiana for them, but none of these are Latina.
I think it's been a long enough time since the only two Hispanic-adjacent movies in this vein that we can do another movie set in pre-Columbus America about Mesoamerican peoples. The Road to El Dorado (which was made by DreamWorks but was clearly trying to mimic Disney's movies/success) was about two bumbling conquistadores trying to find/steal from a city of gold with a wily Mayan babe's help (can't remember if she's royal but I doubt it), while The Emperor's New Groove (set loosely in the Incan empire in Peru) does not have Emperor Kuzco actually get married (his wife would be an empress, though) since it is an odd-couple buddy movie. Despite Tumblr's lovingly referring to Kuzco as the best Disney princess, he does not actually count (although he is entertaining). It would be really neat to have an Aztec or Mayan princess, but it would be just as neat to have a standard princess with the dress and tiara and everything who just happened to have brown skin and dark hair/eyes. The Disney representative mentioned as the source of this information in one of the articles linked to above said that they're not flouting her ethnic background, just treating it matter-of-factly, which I think is fine. It would be nice if a brown-skinned princess were treated as normal.
This is especially a bummer since Sofia's show is set in Enchancia (ugh), a made-up country. The people there could look like anything you want (although at least it does seem rather diverse, judging from the trailer), and you have that girl and the ruling family looking white? Disappointing. I'm definitely not saying I want a sombrero-wearing stereotype or a story you can't watch without 'Cielito Lindo' constantly being played (I'm looking at you, From Prada to Nada), but why would you say a character, especially one you're trying to market as a Disney Princess, is Latina but then not have their culture be anything relevant? As the EW article says, "Sofia is half-Enchancian and half-Galdizian. The two kingdoms are in a world where a few real countries like France exist, but they’re still fictional, making words like Latina and Hispanic less clearly applicable." Some of the light-skinned Latin@s talking about Sofia on Facebook (link from the Mashable article) are angry that other people think she's too white, pointing out that skin color doesn't determine Latin@-ness (which is true) and that the white princesses and famous people don't share our culture and experiences. However, it's not like we light-skinned Latin@s are finally getting representation either; the child's from made-up lands. How does that count as Latin@? It doesn't, in my book. It feels like Disney's trying to seem diverse without really being so. Dora the Explorer's better than this. We're getting the short end of the stick, representation-wise.
I also think it's weird that Sofia is from a (pretty basic-sounding) TV show for young children. All of the 'real' Disney Princesses were at least in their teens, of marriageable (for their medieval/fantasy settings, anyway) age, and this one is clearly a little girl. This is Disney's first Latina princess, and she doesn't even get her own movie? That plus her age makes her not really count as a Disney Princess; it makes her not very important. I just barely heard about her today, and the show starts next month. Maybe they will do a real, brown-skinned Latina princess with her own movie in the future. Who knows. It feels like we still have a ways to go.

Image from Mashable. Note Sofia's mom, fourth little box from left.