BlackHeart Biohazards

I automatically assume that people saying they want more POC in anime are lying because that was a complaint for years in the Pretty Cure fandom and then when we got Elena, a Mexican-Japanese dark-skinned superhero, people tore her to shreds for being bad Latine representation. She has five siblings so Pretty Cure is racist and using the ‘big Latine family’ stereotype, and first the fandom was angry she wasn’t speaking Spanish at home so Pretty cure is racist against Mexicans, then when we did see her speak Spanish the complaint was that she never struggles with Japanese or Spanish so Pretty Cure is pushing the false idea that biracial people have to be multilingual, she doesn’t have a love interest so Pretty Cure is anti-Latine (nevermind that nobody in that season had a love interest, at all) etc.People said they want more POC but the second a badass adorable sweetheart character comes along who’s Mexican-Japanese, they tore into her harder than I’ve ever seen the fandom tear into any other character. People don’t want good rep, they want a target to latch onto and bash en masse.They also bashed a lot of Latine fans who like Elena Amamiya, from people who did fanart of her to people who cosplayed her, and it was so exhausting to see. The Japanese half of the fandom loves Elena, to be clear, to the point where merch of her sold out periodically at the Pretty Cure store IRL, so it’s very much just white people speaking over Latine people to object to her. (And white people speaking over mixed race people who liked Elena’s backstory of being picked on for being mixed and deciding to be happy in spite of them because she has control over her own destiny and will be happy if she so chooses. Which my mixed ass loved, because the show frames racists as being evil and I am living for that shit.)This is why I don’t trust people who say “we need more POC” because it feels like what they mean is “I need a character to hate who’s a minority (while using social justice buzzwords so people think I’m cool)”.