Talk:Griselle Damgaard/@comment-26414442-20150510075543/@comment-10860529-20150607122925

Yooooooooo~

Nono Zena I get what you're saying – often times, when an OC's fairytale parent is meant to be the most beautiful person in their story, said OC tends to be beautiful in a conventional, Western-centric sense: white, blonde, that whole deal. Even with most Ugly Duckling OCs (who are usually gray-haired anyway), they're often white while maintaining something of a Hollywood-geeky/homely appearance.

And I really hate to toot my own horn and I really don't mean to others down a peg because people put a lot of hard work into their OCs, though at the same time I want to be more flexible than that?

I mean when I first created Griselle (under the name of Cynthea at the time), she wasn't black tfor the sake of make statement. She just was because "why not?" since you know, a character's race/ethnicity/etc can play a certain role in their development, but an OC should be treated as a person first and foremost, not just as an insert-marginalized-trait-here character with said trait being their only defining characterization.

And at the same still, and it really only came to me after almost two years of development, I also realized that yeah, Grisey might not be the most popular Ugly Duckling girl and all, but even representation among OCs is important? Like, Grisey, even though she has her own insecurities, she knows she's not as "ugly" as her dad's title would probably suggest. She doesn't want her beauty to be defined by her Happily Ever After; she wants folks to realize that she's beautiful now and that she's not the one who needs grow up in order to be seen as such.

Grisey's black and beautiful and she has vitiligo. Her beauty isn't "in spite of" any of these traits, she just is. And maybe I'm rambling too much and I've kind of lost where I was getting at, but yeah. but I understand what you mean. Beauty comes in all shades, and it's great to have it represented in a fairytale where beauty is the central theme of the story.