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I've been reading a lot of Inception fanfic, as you do, and I have noticed a trend. In fics taking place in the canon'verse, Yusuf is often regulated to the background or used (with Ariadne) as a greek chorus, if he's present at all. He's around in most AUs, where he's usually cast as greek chorus (with Ariadne) or a stoner (or a cook. Mafia AU, I’m looking at you).
It is (wildly) out of character for Yusuf to be:
1) A stoner
2) Manic/careless/irresponsible/in need of supervision with his work
3) A stoner
To be blunt: fandom is taking the only brown character, one of only two characters of color (Saito gets better treatment but not by a lot), and turning him into a caricature. Warping and dismissing his character when its not ignoring him entirely.
Which, just. No. No. We can do better than this.
~*~
It’s an easy fix - we get about the same amount of information for him as we do for Arthur and fandom has shown that is plenty. Let’s sit down and go through it.
These are basic things we know about Yusuf: He's a chemist and pharmacologist. He lives in Mombasa. He's desi. He has an Arabic given name.
( Those are just the essentials, though - there’s plenty more to be picked up from the movie )
( Obligatory Fic Recs )
It is (wildly) out of character for Yusuf to be:
1) A stoner
2) Manic/careless/irresponsible/in need of supervision with his work
3) A stoner
To be blunt: fandom is taking the only brown character, one of only two characters of color (Saito gets better treatment but not by a lot), and turning him into a caricature. Warping and dismissing his character when its not ignoring him entirely.
Which, just. No. No. We can do better than this.
~*~
It’s an easy fix - we get about the same amount of information for him as we do for Arthur and fandom has shown that is plenty. Let’s sit down and go through it.
Dileep Rao describes Yusuf as “an avant-garde pharmacologist, who is a resource for people, like Cobb, who want to do this work unsupervised, unregistered and unapproved of by anyone. Yusuf obviously has a monetary interest in helping Cobb, but he is also motivated by a burning curiosity. He has been experimenting with this stuff for so long and now he wants to see what it’s like.”
“The role of the chemist was particularly tough because you don’t want him to seem like some kind of drug dealer. He’s absolutely not,” says co-producer Jordan Goldberg. “He’s someone who is committed to the art of dream sharing and making it work in ways it hasn’t before. We needed Yusuf to be funny and interesting and obviously smart, and Dileep is all of those things.”
These are basic things we know about Yusuf: He's a chemist and pharmacologist. He lives in Mombasa. He's desi. He has an Arabic given name.
( Those are just the essentials, though - there’s plenty more to be picked up from the movie )
( Obligatory Fic Recs )
