“Apparently, my TikTok has been banned. Yes, my TikTok has been banned. Someone banned the account, and I now have no more TikTok,” 12-year-old Leah Jeffries, the newly announced Percy Jackson and the Olympians actress, says in a clip from an Instagram Live she did shortly afterwards. “I guess all the people that did not want me to be Annabeth or something, they literally took down my whole account, so I now do not have a TikTok account no more.”
From the moment that Rick Riordan announced that Leah Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri would play Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood, respectively, in a new adaptation of the beloved YA novels, fandom reacted poorly. So far, much of the racist anger online has been aimed squarely at Leah Jeffries; people mass reported her TikTok account until it was banned (likely for Leah being under 13, the bottom age on the platform) and made rude comments in the vein of “You are not Annabeth” or “Percy wouldn’t want to be with her now.” All of the insults and harassment, even from people who’ve never even read a Percy Jackson book before, stem from Leah not matching up to the in-book description of main character Annabeth Chase, who’s first described as, “a pretty girl, her blonde hair curled like Cinderella’s.”
The thing is, Alexandra Daddario’s Annabeth also wasn’t a blonde with gray eyes when she played the character in the film series. The aggressive fandom claiming to love novel accuracy so much that they are compelled to harass a child didn’t have that smoke for her back then, when they waved away her visual dissimilarities by insisting she must have been the best actress for the role. People who hate racebending will always find a way to doublethink. For example: Those who criticized live action versions of comic book characters like James Olsen or Starfire (both recently played by Black actors Mehcad Brooks and Anna Diop respectively) said nothing about how the actors who have played Barry Allen so far don’t look at all like the illustrated character.
We see this happen again and again: cast a performer of color in a lead role — especially when the character they’re playing is a racebent legacy character — and the internet will explode with complaints that the casting is just “woke” pandering. Cue the harassment and abuse towards the actors, who would probably like to celebrate their role in peace. See: Ncuti Gatwa taking up the mantle of the Doctor in Doctor Who, Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman, Anna Diop as Starfire, and on and on ad nauseum.
If “woke pandering” sounds like poorly tossed word-salad, that’s because it is. In 2022, “woke” exists far from its original definition amongst Black social media users. What started out as a comment on people being “asleep” before they awaken to full awareness of social justice issues has since shifted. As The Urban News pointed out in a 2021 op-ed, “The term “woke” has come to encompass everything and anything conservatives don’t like, from defunding the police, or abolishing capitalism, to the use of gender neutral terms.”
What else is “woke” to these people? Casting Black and brown people in modern media even if they’re original characters or, ostensibly, “the best actor for the role.” Think about how Naomi actress Kaci Walfall is subject to antiblack harassment on social media and she’s playing a character who has been Black from day one. Kelly Marie Tran received horrific amounts of hate and harassment just for playing an original Asian character in Star Wars. Even the sight of DeWanda Wise’s Kayla Watts in Jurassic World: Dominion gets called “woke bulls**t” that ruins a franchise. Just by existing as people (or characters) of color in pop culture properties, we’re assumed to be pushing an agenda… one that is “justifiably” then met with racist hatred and harassment by entitled fanbases.
Mars Sebastian, a lifelong Percy Jackson fan who first read the books when she was the same age as Leah, has spent most of her time on social media watching Black women and girls come under fire in fandom. For her, this latest installment of fandom misogynoir in the shadow of white supremacy is exhausting.
“It becomes incredibly hard to be invested and excited as a Black fan of anything because you can surely count on fandom to attempt to rob you of your feeling of belonging,” she tells Teen Vogue. “And as someone who once gave up singing and acting because I was told I was too Black, too dark, or too fat to ever be the leading lady or hero of the story, these are incredibly painful and frankly, triggering, conversations to watch happen over and over again. Why do some of us have to settle for having our dreams die on the vine for the sake of fandom’s racist ‘comfort?’ We can come along as long as we are in the ensemble? Seen but barely heard. All due disrespect, eff that.”
Few people complain when shows or film franchises debut new (or newly racebent) sidekicks of color as long as those characters aren’t valued in the story. Minor Superman antagonist Mercy Graves being racebent in Batman vs Superman didn’t set off nerds because her character was severely underutilized. Selina Kyle being racebent in The Batman, however? That threatens established beliefs about which women are deserving of love. It’s the same nasty behavior real Black women, like Zawe Ashton and Meghan Markle, get from fandom because of their relationships. And when it comes to racebending a big hero or updating their legacy with a little melanin? Fandom reacts poorly and predictably.
Doctor Who is a household name and a cornerstone of science fiction fandoms. The franchise – dating back to the 1960s – was revitalized back in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston’s introduction as the surly but kind-hearted Nine. With precious few exceptions (Jodie Whittaker, the current Doctor, and Jo Martin, the “Fugitive Doctor”), every single incarnation of the Doctor has been a white man despite the character’s capacity for regeneration. A key point to Time Lords’ physiology is their regenerative capabilities and yet, there are people shouting that the Doctor is “an intrinsically Caucasian character” now that Sex Education star Ncuti Gatwa has been cast as the 14th Doctor.
First of all, the Doctor isn’t real and exists as a humanoid alien that’s supposed to be beyond our concepts of gender, race, and other forms of identity. Second, there are no actual rules about what the current Doctor or any other time lord regenerates into. Ncuti, a talented actor, isn’t a “diversity hire” because he’s now playing the Doctor. He doesn’t break the (notoriously retcon-heavy) Doctor Who canon. If the Doctor’s regenerations are only limited by the creativity of the people writing them, a Black Doctor breaks nothing except the ignorant minds of racists that see the very existence of people of color in pop culture as “woke nonsense” or whatever buzzwords they’re slapping together.
On top of the wild reactions from racists in fandom, I’ve also seen people claim that there’s no racism in Who fandom or that racists don’t belong. That isn’t true. I was around for the backlash against Martha Jones, a backlash that had a long-lasting impact on actress Freema Agyeman and still crops up when new people watch her tenure as a companion. The same goes for other fandoms surprised by how racist a fandom is only after the “big racisms” occur. See the Star Trek fandom and the blowback to the diversity of the new characters in Picard and Discovery or racebending minor characters in Strange New Worlds. Or how about the immediate and loud response to brief glimpses of diversity in the upcoming Lord of the Rings series – elves of color, Black dwarves, women doing… things? Before we ever get so much as a trailer in some cases, fandom often decides that the diverse new take on established characters are wrong and the people that need to pay are… the performers. Look at how different fandoms over the years have treated Candice Patton (Iris West on The Flash), Kat Graham (Bonnie Bennett on The Vampire Diaries), Danai Gurira (Michonne on The Walking Dead) and countless other performers. While they’re not the only ones subject to racism in and from fandom, Black women and girls tend to get the worst of it – back in The Hunger Games days, people openly said that they stopped feeling empathy for Rue because Amandla Stenberg essentially couldn’t ping their brains as an “innocent” little white girl the way they’d imagined).
If you were a fan of color in these spaces, you’d clock how many times fandoms go after people of color, hunting them down as if reenacting “The Most Dangerous Game”… and how rare it is that wider fandom pushes back against the racists. In fact, fandom is only ever hostile to racists in small doses and outside of rare moments; those doses come from Black fans, journalists, and celebrities rallying around a vulnerable actor under attack from people who are treating bigotry as a fandom activity. When we see that a new performer of color – especially one that’s young and Black – has been cast as the lead or a significant supporting character in a piece of pop culture, one of the first things we feel is panic. We feel concern as fans of color who have likely been harassed ourselves over fandom, and we hope that for once, they get support a little stronger than your local defense squad.
That's what’s so different about the immediate and frankly disturbing reaction to the casting announcement with Leah and Aryan. Unlike previous backlash to celebrities being cast in racebent roles – Anna Diop only had a few of her castmates for Titans show up to support her when she was being harassed — Rick Riordan and his wife Becky quickly showed up to condemn racism and support Leah.
In an essay examining the bigoted backlash to the casting announcement, Riordan condemns people trying to argue that he was “forced” to add diversity to what is a remarkably diverse franchise already. Riordan writes:
This is one of the only times I’ve seen a creator push back at racism coming from their fanbase. For the most part, we get poorly received tweets on company social media accounts or radio silence. But while I strongly appreciate Riordan’s support of Leah and condemnation of the racism, he shouldn’t have had to do that. Neither should his wife have to get on social media and make tweets calling out and shutting down racism and harassment towards a 12-year-old child. This isn’t supposed to be what fandom is about and yet, it is also what fandom has always been like for performers and fans of color. We’re always reminded that our presence is seen as an agenda, and our participation is automatically positioned as aggressive and unwelcome by people who are themselves aggressive and unwelcoming. Fandom is supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be a safe space for people at every single moment of their lives. However, a sad reality of fandom is that it’s never been as welcoming as people insist when they look back at it through rose-tinted glasses.
Leah’s first experience with online fandom was colored by malicious reporting and racism from people several years older than her harassing her on social media. It’s led to her needing to get new social media; the hashtag #LeahisOurAnnabeth is trending on Twitter. While I’m glad that so many people are coming together to fight racism in fandom, it remains unfair that fans and performers of color can’t exist without being harassed and reminded that many people think we don’t belong by default. Fandom is a place where people are willing to be unbelievably cruel to a child because the creator of a beloved children’s franchise chose her to represent one of his characters. Think about how awful and alienating that is for Leah. At 12, she should be happily celebrating her new role. Instead, she’s already living one of the harshest realities of fandom: people will harm you, will seek to ruin what you want to celebrate, will destroy anything in their path to feel some kind of power… all because they can suspend disbelief long enough to believe in a fantastical story of gods and monsters, but not enough to see a little Black girl as a hero.
Stitch will continue discussing the many layers of fandom in Fan Service, published every other week on Teen Vogue. You can follow their work on Stitch's Media Mix and on Twitter.
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Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: On Tom Hiddleston & Zawe Ashton, Misogynoir, and Why Fandom Should Stop Punishing Black Women
