Racebent Disney

Although I would like to lie and say that I frequent the New York Times often and use the internet to look up academic inquiries, but that is not the case. I like news articles that have a lot of pictures. I enjoy being able to take quizzes that tell me what type of cat my personality is most similar to. It makes me happy to be able to go to a website that provides stories about the conflict in Syria as well as entire articles about the left ear of my favorite celebrity. 

"But where can one find all of this Jessica? In what world does such a place exist?"

That place my friends, is called 

Buzzfeed.

Buzzfeed often writes about Disney and Harry Potter and other facets of media that young adults often consume. Lately they have been following a trend called "Racebending", where they take popular fictional characters and change the race of them. The concept of this started with "Genderbending" which is the same concept, only gender is the aspect that is changed. Tumblr was also the original source of origin. The latest article that Buzzfeed posted on the concept of Racebending was on Frozen, using images found on Tumblr. The link is below:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jennaguillaume/these-racebent-frozen-characters-are-absolutely-stunning#.eoD775dK4

Changing the race or gender of a well known character does a number of things to it's original purpose. It provides an incredible amount of depth to it's design and the foundation the character was built upon. If Elsa were African American, the idea of being afraid to be her "true self" has a whole new meaning in terms of isolation and fear. Every character has a package that allows readers to relate to them, but by bending something so minimal, we are able to observe things we have never noticed before. 

If only you could do this to real people. The world would be a much more interesting place.