Vixen and Its Diversity Problem

Vixen, Vixen, Vixen. I want to like you. I do. I just binged all six of your episodes. You’re a good show. The animation is nice. The actors are good. The story is good. BUT there is one big fricking problem – You don’t seem understand that there is more than one shade of brown. 

Okay, that’s unfair, maybe you know there are two or three, but come on! Mari kept changing tones, sometimes due to lighting, sometimes not. All of the African characters were pretty much the same light shade as both Mari and Professor Macalester. You showed two characters with darker tones, a cop and an assailant. This makes no sense to me. Look at your cast! They all have different skin tones. Why is that diversity not represented in your animation?

Also, have you been to Detroit? It’s consistently ranked in the top ten, usually the top five, of cities with the highest percentage of African Americans. So why did I see mostly white people?

And don’t get me started on Cisco? I liked how you handled Barry and Oliver. You captured their essences. And I liked the vibe of Cisco, but Carlos Valdes has a different skin tone than Grant Gustin and Stephen Amell. All you had to do was change his coloring a little bit, and he would have been perfect. If my Microsoft Word can give me customized shades, I think whatever animation programs you are using can do the same. It’s lazy. And this show is too good for to be screwed up by laziness.

Get it together, CW Seed. Vixen has a lot of potential. I want it to succeed, but I also want respectable representation of who these characters are and the environments they live in. You can do better. Do not fail this show.

Like what you just read? Let us know in the comments below and keep up to date by following us on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr!