And POC'd look good doing it.
We make up a significant portion of the US population and an even bigger portion of the world's popultion. We're resourceful as hell - overcoming adversity is practically drilled into our DNA. There is no way in the goddamn world big swaths of us wouldn't survive the apocalypse - be it man-made or natural disaster.
So why is every dystopian, post-apocaplyptic tale translated for the big screen from the pages of YA novels so very lily white? WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE OF COLOR???
Come with me, for a moment, throughout this post, as we image M.I.A.'s "Bad Girls" video as a full-length feature film.
You're telling me you DON'T want to follow a nomadic band of desert-based female mercenaries with harems of men and Mercedes dressed and dancing like this??!!!?
If the answer is yes, I don't even know what to say to you right now.
Before you answer, please do not use tokenism as proof of diversity. And while there's been some clever up-ending of the traditional "The Black Guy Always Dies (Usually First)" trope, Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner, as The Atlantic so astutely points out, just sidestep (read: ignore) the whole issue of race. They employ the age "old sci-fi tradition of subjugating white people, essentially saying, 'Things could get so bad that people who look like Liam Hemsworth are now at the bottom, too!'"
It is a story that has been told ad nauseum at this point, and as geeks, we are are nothing if not hungry for new and innovative stories.
Octavia Butler patiently waiting for you to realize that at its best, Sci-Fi is Speculative Fiction.
Thing is?
