Fic: Out of my skin [Eames/Saito]

[ineptshieldmaid]

Title: Out of my skin
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: Eames/Saito
Character of Colour: Mr Saito
Rating: Mature
Content: Forging // no major warnings apply
Summary: The first time Mr Eames came onto him, Saito didn’t recognise him. Of course, he should’ve known something was up, but this was a dream, after all. It wasn’t exactly unheard of for women to proposition him in dreams.

This fic is hosted on the AO3 // Light Style

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Ok. I really don't understand this feature "Character of Colour: Mr Saito" is it suppose to be a warning. Frankly as a person of so called colour, I find it insulting. If all the characters in the story are white should there be a monochromacy tag or maybe non-people of colour tag?

I would like to apologize in advance inceptshieldmaid, this is not an attack on your story or yourself, It's just these tags have been popping up all over the place here and on Archives of our own as well and I wonder at their usefulness.
- from postscript-

[ineptshieldmaid]

No, it's not supposed to be a warning - I put warnings under "content notes". What happened here is that I posted this fic header to chromatic_fanfic first, and they ask you to identify your CoCs. Sorry, I should've taken that field out before posting outside of that comm.

As for the AO3 tag... honestly I'm a bit iffy about it myself - as a white Australian person, it feels unnatural to me to use the American umbrella term for non-white people, and the particular set of racial politics which go with the term don't always map well onto my fandoms.

The usefulness of the tag is, I believe, to allow people who don't want to see the non-white characters erased or ignored to navigate, via that tag, and find fic where the author has been consciously handling the character as non-white and (ideally) respectful of their heritage. I think the idea is supposed to be that it reduces (although not eliminates) the chance of surprise!racism, in that you know someone who uses that tag is probably aware, to some degree, of race politics online and in fiction.

The other useful thing about that tag is that it allows the author to track the number of their own works which feature a non-white person (there are similar tags for female POV and trans character, I believe). That's important for people who are participating in various chromatic fanfic challenges. For me, although I haven't so far participated in chromatic challenges, tagging 'Character of Color' on the AO3 allows me to go into the dashboard and quickly crunch stats for my own curiosity. I wasn't surprised to find that I'd written a reasonable number of CoC fics in Star Trek, but I *was* surprised that I'd also written a handful in Narnia. It's mostly a curiosity thing for me, but it's useful all the same, and it told me that I had written *more* characters of colour than I thought I had, so.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for not taking any offence and answering my posting. I'm strictly a reader so I've never posted anything so I was not aware of these guidelines. Why am I not surprise that it's an American guideline. While I understand that it's supposed to be something positive it still makes me quite uncomfortable.

Anyhow,
Best Wishes for the New Year.
-Postscript-