WP2: Amali’s Interview
Amali Morgan, a.k.a @sweetkitsu on most platforms, is an anime style artist who has been using the Internet to share art for years, starting around elementary or middle school age and, frankly, a huge nerd and one of my closest friends. For her, artists have been a huge part of her social circle. The two of us actually met online because of our connection in art and animation. Her testimony pertained a lot to the circumstances in which we met, talking a lot about specific communities under the “art” umbrella and mutual artists that have a larger following.
I first asked her what her relationship with numbers are when posting. It’s a core part of what makes social media what it is today. As someone who looks at numbers a little too often, I was curious about her thoughts on it. Mind the vernacular “like”’s, she’s from California just like me.
She responded: “I don’t really care about the number of followers. I care more about the interaction for, like, two reasons. One, obviously, like, if I want to be like posting on social media, I need that like interaction of likes and comments and stuff like that. But also, like, social media is social media. So I like to be social on there. And I, like, I don’t like being treated on my platform like I’m some sort of like idol or like untouched being. I like talking to basically random strangers on the internet.”
Discord, a popular messaging app for gaming and artists, has also been a main pillar of her experience online and where we met. It prioritizes that socialization aspect she values so much. I think once any artist or creator online puts so much mental energy into looking at numbers and statistics online for too long, they start to care significantly more about the real words and conversations between them and their audience.
Personally, it’s exhausting and dehumanizing to see my followers as numbers and analytics. If you respond to comments instead of just seeing them as another notification, it’s way more of a rewarding process to form real bonds with the people who keep up with an account.
“I guess having numbers kind of helps out a little bit, but at the same time, um, it’s also a little bit scary because, like, some people will like, take charge or take benefit of that kind of being, like, ‘Oh, she has big numbers and she followed me, I need to give her all this praise so I could like take some of her numbers’ kind of deal. Myself, that’s not even the thing that I hugely care about.”
Although, as she’s built up these connections, Amali mentions how it’s burned her before. She’s crafted friendships with larger creators like Yeagar on YouTube and Oiivae on Twitch which makes her an easy stepping stone for fans to get closer to the creator they idolize. When I asked her about it, she responded:
“[It doesn’t happen] a lot anymore. Just because, like, I haven’t been really been posting and I’ve also, like, just kind of been encouraging more of… not parasocial relationships but more, like, a mutual… like, I will talk to you. I’m not someone that you can’t talk to, kind of.”
She brings up the word “parasocial” which, in this context, refers to fans or followers who act like they know their favorite creators on a personal level. Amali makes a clear distinction between what many people call parasocial and her sweet spot of valuable friendships with people she met through her twitter followers, for example. Another struggle with this boundary is with how fans might draw her in their fanart for her.
“I feel like ‘parasocial’ kind of also ties into people like, you know, just giving you gifts. Like, ‘Oh my gosh, like, I gave her a fanart and she interacted with me, she’s like, totally my mutual now’ kind of deal.”
She goes on to tell an anecdote about this experience, specifically. “The biggest thing that happened to me was when I first joined Yuki’s crew. Which, for context, I think you know, but she was basically a big Minecraft YouTuber who did, like, Minecraft roleplays. I joined the crew because my friends invited me to and I was a character on the show at the time. I’m pretty sure I was like the only person of color.”
As a black artist, Amali later talks about her experiences with her racial identity.
“I was mostly involved with the people who worked with her. But once my name started being credited in videos or when I started working on, like, some of the fun animation projects that she did… It was a little bit weird, but in a nice way. I got some genuine messages of, like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so happy to see another person who looks like me on this Minecraft series’. And then there’s like some people who are like, Oh my gosh, I’ve been a fan of Kittendoodles [Amali’s old username] for so long, and I’m so happy she’s in SirCutieYuki… and they like followed me like a month ago.”
Being seen as a bigger creator on SirCutieYuki’s YouTube series opened up the floodgates to many fans seeing her as a way to get to Yuki as well as an “up and coming artist” that they can befriend before she allegedly would blow up online. Alongside that, though, many people loved seeing a non-white creator on the series, despite Amali’s persona being a more minor character in the story. She grappled with the idea that she was, as quoted earlier, “some sort of idol” that other users looked up to. It was the classic pop star struggle.
What she mentions is the root issue to all of this is the lack of authenticity people get from her when they find her through bigger creators. Being shown online as a mere connection to someone bigger made it significantly harder for her to carve her own identity in the space:
“Yeah. Which I don’t know. I don’t really mind. But it was kind of like, what I want to do now of, like, when I’m trying to make my own thing for myself, I just want more sincerity or, like, more like general interest. And not just because I am a name mentioned by someone else or because I know kind of deal. Yeah, I kind of, like, want to work something up instead of, like, actually just being, like, carried by one thing that doesn’t represent me.”
A lot of popular content creators online credit users with bigger followings as the primary reason for their success, but Amali would prefer otherwise. As someone who has experienced that, she’s trying to create her own brand and interest rather than piggy backing off of another community that doesn’t match what she’s trying to do on her account.
Other than her experiences interacting with other people in the community, Amali speaks in depth about how being an artist online heavily influenced how people saw her and how she saw herself in terms of her race and identity.
As a black artist, she talked with me about how many microaggressions and subtle racism there are when approaching the anime space in particular. Growing up watching and drawing anime, there was a starkly non-black standard. She had mentioned to me before how little black or person of color artists there were in her circles to look up to and collaborate with. I asked her what her experience with it was like:
“Um, either there wasn’t any or I didn’t know that they were, like people of color. Um, I mean, like tl;dr [too long; didn’t read, an abbreviation to summarize her story], I originally grew up in, like, a non-human fandom, which is like My Little Pony. Like, everyone was drawing, like, colorful horses and cat girls […] or our cat characters. But once I moved to Twitter and I was drawing, like, the Aphmau [another Minecraft roleplay channel] community there… again, it was mostly everyone growing up on, like, the anime art style and thinking that the default skin color was like white. So even, like, with Aphmau being a series of like still having POC characters were like, not as much. There was still a lot of whitewashing in the community. Intentionally or not, yeah.”
Drawing only animals and non-human characters primed her and a lot of other artists who were interested in the same things to be less experienced with drawing humans, including different hair styles and skin colors. Amali even admits herself that she struggles with drawing black features in her characters.
“It’s definitely like the mental… and it’s like, it’s really bad. But the mental default of it just being, like, white is just default. So like being, like, a huge anime fan and also growing up in the community, I didn’t really have any, like, any one to really teach me how to draw like people of color. I’ve only got it from cartoons of, like, the token black character, best friend kind of deal.”
According to her, many of these cartoon POC caricatures all had similar traits and “merged together” for her. Even the sparse amount of representation in the media she consumed was subpar for her artistic identity.
Though not surprised, I remarked during our conversation how platforms like Twitter and Instagram have a total opportunity to create that representation that is lacking on TV and in cinema. In the industry, racism is very systemic, where online, there’s significantly more freedom in what you can post– there’s no corporate exec that’s telling you it’ll be bad for business. She agreed, but in response, she brought up an artist who drew Hamilton, the popular musical from 2015, fanart.
“I think one of the big things that like started making people more comfortable with drawing, like more like colored people. I don’t know if you remember, [she couldn’t remember their username] Besides the point, they did like Hamilton animatics. […] I think they were a really big, like, I don’t know, pusher for, like, drawing more, like, inclusive characters and they’re not even black themselves. I’m pretty sure they’re Filipino, which, like, they’re still a person of color, but, like, also they just encouraged more, like, darker skin and more curly hair like drawings of people. Which I think made people a lot more comfortable.”
We agreed that Hamilton, as it casted POC for almost all of its main roles, was huge for people in the animation community specifically for people to start drawing non-white and darker skinned POC in their art. Hamilton was insanely popular on art youtube as many artists took to creating storyboards and animatics of the songs from the musical in a more cinematic, stylized way. Thus, drawing the actors as cartoon caricatures helped the community become more inclined to learn and develop more inclusive styles.
In order for this to happen, though, a more mainstream piece of media had to lead to way, rather than independent artists leading the charge for more non-white characters in their art, I learned.
Similar to the idea that Paulo Freier wrote in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, change can only be started and headed by the oppressed party. “Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both [classes].” (Freire 42) In this case, change finally happened when a POC showrunner put other POC in main cast roles, which in turn affected the fans and the art for the show.
“This is like, really hard to remember, and I feel like I’m probably skipping over some people that I first followed, those who were, like, like black artists. But I’m going to be real, I feel like the only like black artists that I really looked up to, like, as far as I can remember on Twitter, it was probably Sunny. And she was just super unapologetically her, like, self.”
Amali references @OhTheSunnySide on Twitter as being a large inspiration to herself and her work. Sunny and her became good friends on the site, and Amali credits her as being someone who set the example for black created and centered art.
https://twitter.com/OhTheSunnySide
She continues: “I’ve been seeing a lot more, like, openly black artists do more openly black things” She uses the term ‘openly black’ to refer to her experiences in communities that are prone to whitewashing or drawing non-human characters. Many of those groups didn’t focus too directly on what the actual artist looked like and more on how the character they drew looked like.
When the previously discussed anime communities start drawing more POC characters, she continues on about the alleged controversy it sparked: “I know stupidly, I know there’s, like, quote unquote controversy of, like, quote unquote black fishing of like anime characters.”
Black fishing, for context, is used for when people, typically white, pretend to be black or mixed. In this context, it refers to when people draw canonically light skinned characters black.
“Yeah, but like most of the artists who, like, grew up in that like, uh, in that community of like just watching a ton of anime and like drawing anime characters, they only knew how to draw all those anime characters. So they’re like breaking out to, like, draw more, like, inclusive versions of like those characters is very, like, incredibly helpful more than, like, people like will they judge them for?”
For Amali in particular, drawing characters in an anime style but with darker skin helped tremendously for her to bridge the gap between what she had learned to draw for years and what she hoped to draw. For other Internet users in her situation, an unfortunately big learning curve is not uncommon.
“Like, again, I, like… when I first started drawing, especially for the internet, I was drawing, like, colorful animals. But my first technical quote unquote persona was white. When SkyDoesMinecraft was a thing, I was, like, really super into Minecraft at the time, and I was drawing, like, my friends, like minecraft skins as their characters. And I had this, like, scene girl. this like black and red haired girl, but the beret and like a red and white striped sweater. But um, she was white. And whenever I like to draw other people, people would draw me as a character.”
Going from using a white character to represent her and being blissfully ignorant of the implications of people drawing her and seeing her as white to where she is now took a lot of learning and unlearning, as many more have to do. For others who continue to draw animal characters, some have found some fun ways to incorporate their identity into their designs:
“I know some furry artists who are very like, more comfortable drawing themself with dreadlocks, which is, like, super cool.”
The creativity exercised by these furry artists is honestly pretty cool to me. They used what prevented them from learning how to draw black features and combined it with said traits. It feels like a sign of rebellion against the racism, intentional or otherwise, in their community.
I finally asked Amali for any last statements, to which she replied, “To be honest, I’m not mad at it. I lived through it and I learned from it, and I’m learning to be more comfortable with it. And hopefully I can inspire other people to be more comfortable in their skin, you know, metaphorically and also not.”
Sources:
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. Continuum, 2000.
Morgan, Amali. Personal Interview. 2 March 2022.
“My Shot ll Hamilton Animatic” YouTube, uploaded by szin, 29 April 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ozDDHUsi6I