Hombre de Fuego

One of my biggest pet peeves of the Percy Jackson fandom is this habit artists have of refusing to acknowledge that some characters have different skin colors - though, yes, not all Mexicans are light brown like I depicted Leo, here. I did that because I have yet to see in fiction or on TV a Latino/Hispanic character that is dark-skinned. Instead, we usually see them depicted as light as Selena Gomez. I mean, it is so freaking rare for there to be a Latino/Hispanic character in fantasty, let alone for there to also be an African-American, Chinese-Canadian, and Native American character in the same story, as protagonists! Sorry if I sound like I'm bending backwards to sound politically correct - it bugs me, too, that POCs are known as hyphenated Americans while white people are called just plain American.  

So, yeah, there are definitely Native Americans and Mexican-Americans who do look white, but to refuse to depict anyone dark-skinned in one's artwork to me is insulting, especially because opportunities like these do not come around often. What's so crazy about drawing people with brown skin and brown eyes? That's a criticism I have of Riordan, too. Call me oversensitive, but it seems whenever there is a POC character in fiction, and especially in fantasy, they are made to be exotic - like making Hazel have golden eyes and golden hair, or Piper with eyes that change color, like blue or green, but not usually brown, the color the probably would naturally be. As a kid with virtually no media representation of Hispanics/Latinos, I felt like my appearance - a darker one - was a problem. Where were all the kickass Mexican kids, ones that looked somewhat like me, having wild adventures in books and movies? Hardly ever in mainstream American media, I quickly learned, and so I will never draw Leo any other way than this. The end.


I was going to call it "Child of Fire," but I couldn't find an accent/symbol/character thing anywhere on here that would let me spell "Nino" with an accent on the "n."