itsinthetrees:gailsimone:fyeahlilbitoeverything:thefingerfu...

itsinthetrees:

gailsimone:

fyeahlilbitoeverything:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

fyeahlilbitoeverything:

thehappysorceress:

meesely:

Birds of Prey 101

Dammit, I miss this.

I really dislike Judomaster A LOT but I love this scene.

I couldn't stand how she was written in JSA.

But in her brief appearances in Birds of Prey I didn't mind the character

And this is a great scene :D Huntress's expression here is just perfect

TBH if there was never another Asian superhero dressed in their country's flag and who was martial-arts based, it'd be no great loss.

It's a fair point, I always had the same problem with Katana.

IN this case, it was actually meant to be a course correction for the only thing that seemed even more problematic…which is having a white American military dude wearing the flag of an Asian country.  The original Judomaster was created in 1965, an army Sergeant, I think, and very much a product of his time. I think the SECOND Judomaster was also a white dude, if I remember correctly. I swear to god, if there had been a character called MEXICO MAN in the 50's, it would have been a white guy who got his magic powers from an enchanted sombrero.

Which just seemed wrong to me.

So I created Sonia Sato, to at least put an Asian in the costume of her country.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to give her enough page space to really make her interesting. I wanted a playful, young, but very formidable character.  It seemed weird and unjust to have only white guys have the costume and title.

However, yeah, it's problematic to have all Asians be martial artists, and it's weird to always put people's flags on their clothes, two cliches that should have been avoided.

My issue with the Sonia Sato Judomaster (since I can't speak to the Asian representation issues) was that there was already a legacy to the original — his son Tommy Jagger, a great, stereotype-defying gay character in Checkmate. Checkmate avoided the problematics of -calling- him Judomaster or putting him in the flagsuit, but he was still clearly a legacy and it was weird to me to have an unrelated character introduced afterward claim the legacy when he already existed.

I mean, I was generally annoyed about Tommy Jagger's steady marginalization after a strong introduction — and introducing a new Judomaster felt like yet another aspect of it.

I like Tommy, but I am not certain I would say he was a legacy character in the sense that is traditionally used in comics. No use of the name or costume, for one thing.

And he's still a white American dude, so it's not like the issue of cultural appropriation in his father's case goes away.

Sonia and Tommy would have been very, very different characters splitting the Judomaster legacy in very different ways. One is his father's son without the name or costume, the other has the traditional trappings of the outfit without the blood relation.