There's a land to burn out everything that you've learned

[sovay]

Internet! I am looking for a good database and/or personal recommendations of science fiction media foregrounding characters of color. My father was expressing his disappointment in the latest season of Doctor Who tonight and he is quite right (among other complaints) that reverse-fridging a male character reads much less cleverly and much more sketchily when the male character is black. I should like to be able to recommend him some antidotes.¹ More than one person of color in the cast preferred—who are not the canaries in the coal mine or the sacrifices on behalf of the white characters, if there are any white characters; there don't need to be. Bonus points from my perspective if there are women with agency and queer characters. (I should just hand him Janelle Monáe's back catalogue, right?) He is a hard sell on animation and does not play games, but enjoys things that are not in English. I can do this a lot more easily with books.

1. It is not like my father has never seen science fiction with protagonists of color; he followed Eureka for a while just because it contained Joe Morton. I just know there's always room for more. A lot of room.

Comments

[sovay]

(Half-Korean women don't exist in kdramas; it's only the men who, like pale half-Japanese men in jdramas, are automatically uselessly pretty and/or secretly evil.)

Feh.

There is a character in Summer Wars (2009) who I'm told is half-Japanese, half-Korean and he is neither useless nor evil—he's an estranged computer genius who designed an AI that endangers the planet, but he's also part of the communal family effort to defeat it—but it's a Japanese animated film, so I don't know how much that helps, statistically.

For jdramas, Tenchuu comes to mind for strong protag/etc., but it only has an unresolvable temporal ambiguity, not a SFnal basis. (Blogged it a few months ago but can't summon link easily using phone.)

Thank you! My knowledge of kdramas and jdramas is zero except for the reviews I read on DW.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

There is a character in Summer Wars (2009)

Thanks--that's good to know. (Sorry I missed the comment notification earlier!)