#But these characters are never treated as living Jews or represented as living Jews in aus and fixits | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mortallyclearwonderland · 2 years

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Star Wars and racism

Normally I don't like to talk about this topic and given Tumblr's reputation I might as well have a ''kick me'' written on my back but just like those people are allowed to write pages upon pages about how star wars is ‘‘problematic’‘ I’m allowed to disagree. And I'm sure a lot of people have similar opinions but are too afraid to show it.

1. ‘’An alien has an accent therefore it's a caricature of whatever people have this accent.’‘ It's a huge galaxy with thousands of different species, planets, and cultures. Of course, not everybody will speak the same way. I think it's pretty cool and accurate.

2. ‘’Toydarians, Muuns and Trandoshans are Jewish stereotypes.’‘ It's just like the Orc argument. If you think any of those creatures and your immediate thought is, Jew, maybe you're the racist.

Watto is the poster child of the Jewish star wars stereotype and I never understood that. Because of his accent? Because of his nose? When we see more Toydarians in the Clone Wars, we see they are nicer and nobler than Watto. Their clothes and their king's saber remind me of Polish szlachta. And even Watto has a great backstory that explains his selfish and greedy behavior. Basically, he took part in a war that left him traumatized and he took it out on others.

Random person: Then why didn't they explained it in the movie?

Me: Because that's not what the movie is about.

Random person: How was I supposed to know that not every single member of this species is an asshole?

Me: Basic logic. Just because a white person, a man, a Chinese person, or whoever was mean to you doesn't mean that everybody is like that.

Muun noses help them warm up to the cold air in the mountains that they live in. Their architecture is similar to that of Greece. In the clone wars, we see that they have somewhat of a clockwork theme. Because they're so good at math. That's more of the Alps and the Switzerland inspiration.

Neimoidians have Asian accents and hats. But their clothes and jewelry is more similar to the European aristocracy. Even their guards look Spanish to me.

Long story short the star wars aliens aren't supposed to represent one single group of people. They’re a mishmash of multiple things to create something completely new and alien.

Trandoshans were never a Jewish allegory. The voice actress for Cid is Jewish and some dumb people come to the conclusion that now all Trandoshans are Jewish. Cid is a Trandoshan! She's not even the villain. The actress was chosen because her voice fits the character. Also, Cid has a bar and her VA played in the show Cheers. This is grasping at straws to create a controversy.

3. ‘’But there are bad guys who are racist.’‘ ''But this guy was a victim of speciesism! Why is he a bad guy?'' ''But these are good guys why are they racist to other species?''

It's almost as if things aren't so black and white.

Someone can spontaneously be discriminated against and discriminate against other people. Chiss think of themselves as the best in the galaxy. Meanwhile, Thrawn is being looked down upon for being not human. A taste of his own medicine in a way. And it doesn't look like he thinks ''This is terrible! No one should be treated this way!'', it's more like ''I'm going to put up with this until I get to rule you all, you pathetic humans.''

That one episode of the rebels in which pretty much everybody calls the last Geonosian ''the bug''. Or during the Umbara arc when our beloved clones call the Umbarans ''shadow people''. Or how in the unfinished Utapau arc Anakin is a dick to a Toydarian because he reminded him of Watto. Or how Anakin hates Hutts, even a baby.

It's almost like the characters can have grudges against their enemies or form their opinions on their worst experiences.

Besides, in a galaxy where you can die any number of ways, be enslaved, full of alcohol, drugs, crime, and other terrible things name calling isn't that big of a deal.

It also shows the tragedy of it all. Every species suffered in some way and if they were allowed to talk about it and bond they might've been friends.

It’s getting long. I might write a part 2 or responses if I get any comments.

#star wars #star wars the clone wars #star wars rebels #star wars the bad batch #the bad batch #Toydarian #muun #neimodians #tbb cid #agent kallus #Garazeb Orrelios #zeb #star wars the clone wars season 7 #Trandoshans #neimoidians #Neimoidian

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zhnnveuxpasdrmir · 2 months

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Trying to explain that this quiet, braided anthology of short-short, thought variant, actor driven one-offs is a must-see breakthrough teleplay, a timeless masterpiece!, a work of explicable magic.

I was one of the six people in the world that actually saw this in 2010, but I'd only caught a few bits of it at the time. They were arresting as hell. It's exciting to finally get a chance to appreciate it now, due to the grisly stupidity of all corporate media conglomerates, and the ease of getting high quality archives of unfairly treated past media anonymously on the dark web, along with heroin and guns! 😁

I liked how The Booth At The End examines the fallacies inherent to popular reads of morality, and somehow criticizes specific religious cultures without once mentioning any of them, or admitting to any particular central framework by name. The script is rooted in widely understood monotheist ethics.

It's unrepentant, dour, merciless, and openly, loudly, glaringly deceptive in its candor.

Xander Berkeley. Holy shit. was just unbelievably powerful on this show. Every actor turns in a lifetime achievement award worthy scene, but mr Berkeley is just: setting your disbelief aside, so casually! You believe. The unthinkable is thoroughly plausible in these weency, handy little scenes that.... feel longer. You'll think it was an hour. It was like six minutes.

I don't know fully why this isn't a better known show! Maybe it's too hard to face. If you have an interest in the craft of acting, in show, this little one-sitting binge demonstrates expert theatrical film making.

And these goddamn endings will fuck you up for life!

so here's my theory on the Man, Doris, and the doom of human kind:

oh he's certainly not the Devil. He's a creation of G-D though for sure. As is Doris.

If he has to be a specific character from the stories, he's The Christ, not exactly The Messiah, but something a lot more like christian Jesus if he'd lived on since Resurrection, only through a magical realism lens instead of a worshipful one. The Man is aware of what G-D is, knows it's not what humans think it is. Some say "the wandering Jew" but no: this is not and never was a human.

if Doris has to be a specific character from the stories, she's Satan, or a fallen angel, but let's be real, G-D's ex-favorite, luring the new boy away from G-D's detachment, and into "the trap". I don't agree with the above article in thinking it ended too soon, it ends exactly where it should, where it has to.

because that demand Doris makes is real, and it's one that our planet's conception of G-D has always, always failed. She's right to state this demand, and the Man must comply. Both of them will be literally destroyed by the task. This is shown over and over in both seasons.

The Booth At The End is a genius series of stage teleplays that criticizes flaws in popular conceptions of G-D, how it distorts our perceptions, and how those distort our experience of need. Each "normal" character symbolizes a specific 'mistake' or foible; each supernatural character represents an attempt, by 'history' ambition institution or spiritual quest, to understand and eliminate those errors. The two seasons are a diptych demonstrating respectively How and Why we are trapped forever in a Hell of our own device. 🌞❤️

#xander berkeley #the booth at the end #stoned uncle recommends #this will end up being the only faintly important thing I ever wrote #lol #christian mysticism

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beardedmrbean · 3 months

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Hi this is about that racist dev would working in the black panther game.

But this statement

https://x.com/salvoghost/status/1767889986777436478?s=46

This ring true line

Pan African Americans Activists: Africa is our home! We are all connected-

Me: Don Cheadle did a movie about the Ramada GENOCIDE. And we recently pulled a “Jews Lionizing the Nazis” thing with women king

With my Yoruba ideas is that I would like to show what my potential direct ancestors were doing prior to the Dahomey kidnappings but I acknowledge that I’m from a DIFFERENT culture from the modern Yoruba as if white Americans and British treat each other like aliens

I don’t expect much connections with black Americans and Yoruba

Also why act like those entitled Indian Americans that believe they know everything about their heritage…when in reality Indians can recognize a American born desi a mile away

*le gasp* Almost like environmental factors play a role or something

Okay this guy is racist, but if I can tell a Midwestern rapper (Kanye, grew up in Chicago) from a a southern rapper (Andre 3000 grew up in Georgia) by their music alone

Why you guys think how obvious a black American is in Africa? Especially given we grew up on the pan Africa bs and we never left our 13 year old mindsets as adults?

I been thinking about making a steampunk fantasy country called the Chimera Republic. It basic the USA after we got industrialized (what that period where Matthew Perry and Teddy Roosevelt came from again? I think I’m using that as a basic)

But the reason why I’m calling it Chimera to represent what most people in the Americas are in reality

My tongue is Germanic, I grew up in a mostly Baptist environment, yet the religion came from the Middle East. Our government structure is Hellenist, our main culture root is Anglo Saxon

We stole the gods power(Atomic bombs) and we seek to live in the heavens (interstellar travel)

Sorry my writers side acting up, but the Americans are basically Frankenstein monsters come to life with the multiple different characters and roots that make us.

I just don’t understand this idea that black Americans are automatically connected…didn’t that lead to Nazis Germans empire or no when Hitler tried it?

We made all kinds of jokes about it, but it's also still true the elon musk has more experience being African that most every black American out there, Kenyan Hippies husband probably comes out ahead of most of them too.

as if white Americans and British treat each other like aliens I don’t expect much connections with black Americans and Yoruba

Been a bunch of cultural shifts in the centuries yes, the various US communities that would likely have the least difficulty looking weird in the old country would be the various religous ones. Greek Orthodox, Coptics from Egypt, Armenians, ect. because they can at least all relate to that.

That's the Victorian era, you might look up the movie "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" it's set mid 1930's but it could give you some ideas to work with.

Sorry my writers side acting up, but the Americans are basically Frankenstein monsters come to life with the multiple different characters and roots that make us.

Never apologize for that, let the creativity flow like the dark side through darth vader.

I just don’t understand this idea that black Americans are automatically connected…didn’t that lead to Nazis Germans empire or no when Hitler tried it?

Not quite, he considered Germans to be superior to others, aryans specifically which is dumb since it's a linguistic group and it's Turkic but nazis be dumb.

I think goebels was working on something like that but they were doing this whole mysticism thing, since despite what anyone who hasn't looked will tell you that they were Christian.

Which they weren't, that may have been a vicious rumor started to discredit Catholics or something by drawing a parallel to the inquisition, but that's just a wild guess.

#zoomer huey anon

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unwhitewashthebadbatch · 3 years

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Disney Email Draft 2

(going under a cut because it's much longer. Here is the Google Doc link for anyone who would like to comment directly)

Reminder that we are encouraging critiques and comments regarding this email!

To Bob Iger, Kathleen Kennedy, Dave Filoni, Jennifer Corbett, and the creative team of Star Wars: The Bad Batch:

We hope this email finds you all well. We are fans of color, disabled fans, neurodivergent fans, and Jewish fans writing out of concern for the portrayal of our communities in the Disney+ series Star Wars: The Bad Batch. For several months now, we have been campaigning on social media to spread awareness about these concerns through #UnwhitewashTBB, a movement we began to raise awareness about the ways in which the series has poorly represented several minoritized groups of people.

Just like the creators of Star Wars: The Bad Batch, all of the creators of #UnwhitewashTBB grew up with Star Wars as the backbones of their childhoods, and for many of us, Star Wars: The Clone Wars was crucial to our development as artists, writers, creators, and lifelong Star Wars fans. We are all firm believers in the phrase “Star Wars is for everyone”, and we would like to see Disney support that message by hearing our plea.

As fans of color, as disabled fans, as neurodivergent fans, and as Jewish fans, we’ve seen ourselves on screen in both good and bad ways, but recently it has been more the latter than the former. One such reason is Star Wars: The Bad Batch, a show whose premise piqued many fans’ interest, but whose main cast has left an increasingly sour taste in the mouths of those who watched.

The series follows an elite squad of clone troopers who have named themselves The Bad Batch, due in part to their series of mutations that gives them an edge over regular clones on the battlefield. These mutations drastically altered the appearance of each of the members to a generally lighter, more Caucasian appearance--one that is inconsistent with how the original Jango Fett actor Temuera Morisson looks. Fans take issue with the implications in the writing and design of The Bad Batch: that in order to be elite, special, and better than one’s contemporaries--in order to have a story worth telling--one must also be white or as close as possible.

Merriam-Webster defines whitewashing as “to alter (something) in a way that favors, features, or caters to white people: such as to alter (an original story) by casting a white performer in a role based on a nonwhite person or fictional character” The #UnwhitewashTBB movement comes with two carrds explaining the grievances of the fans. A summary for each character is given below:

Sergeant Hunter, the leader, closely resembles Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo character, despite being a clone of a man of color. The importance of his character, the fatherliness he has with Omega, and his centrality to both their Season 7 appearance in The Clone Wars and the series itself sends the message that important people look

Wrecker is the demolitions expert, and he’s the only member of The Bad Batch with features similar to that of a Maori man’s, like Temuera Morrison/Jango Fett. He’s large with broad features, brown skin, and is a stereotype of men of color. His personality as first introduced to the audience was that of a loud, aggressive, impatient, slow man who called frequently for violence/destruction. He falls into the “Loveable Brute” trope, an observation that is supported by statements from supervising director Brad Rau and voice actor Dee Bradely Baker that Wrecker is like a little boy and has a heart of gold.

Crosshair is the sniper on the team, and he’s the most derisive of the “regs”--the regular clone troopers. Taken in conjunction with his appearance (inspired by Clint Eastwood), the various messages being sent by the writing and appearance of the other team members, and his comment about the regular troopers--the he and the Batch are superior and thus should join the Empire--his character pushes forth a message that there is superiority inherent in whitened or fully white features.

Tech, the technology specialist, has incredibly light skin and hair compared to the regular clones. His mutation made him a genius, with an IQ that outpaces that of any other clone in the Republic. Fans of color are upset that Tech’s genius mutation apparently also affected his skin color, as now this creates a direct link between intelligence and appearance/race. Contrast Tech with Wrecker, who is the exact opposite in every way, and this harm becomes only more apparent. In addition to this, many Autistic fans of The Bad Batch have noted that Tech, being “on the spectrum” (according to Dee Bradley Baker) is a popular stereotype of Autistic people: a nerdy-looking white man with a formal way of speaking who’s a genius but dismissive of others’ feelings. Baker also plays Tech with a British accent, further cementing the harmful message that intelligence is in some way connected to ethnicity.

Omega is the newest member of The Bad Batch. Despite being a pure Jango clone, she’s come out looking nothing like Boba Fett--she has lighter skin than he does, as well as blonde hair. Fans are concerned about the connection between genetic purity and light skin/blonde hair, as this is directly harmful to the people of color who don’t sport those features.

Echo is the ARC Trooper of the team, but many fans--disabled fans especially--fear that his series of disabilities have reduced him to the “droid sidekick”. Echo does not have a prosthetic, instead sporting a scomp-arm attachment that allows him to plug into computers but would otherwise hinder him greatly in daily tasks. He rarely is the focus of an episode, and the series has not given him as much attention as it has given characters like Hunter and Omega. Disabled fans worry about the lack of attention given to his medical trauma, and fans of color note that his skin color goes beyond what a brown man who’s been without sunlight for a few months would look like.

The issues do not stop here. Asian fans noticed and were harmed by a Tiananmen Square parallel in 1x10, “Common Ground”--a recreation that was led by an Eastern Asian-coded woman. Jewish fans are hurt by the antisemitic stereotype in Cid the broker, a greedy lizard woman who speaks with an accent commonly associated with New York Jews--and who is played by Jewish actress Rhea Perlman. Black fans were harmed by the whitewashing in Saw Gererra and the one other Black character in The Bad Batch being a Black woman who works for the Empire and burns civilians alive.

The full analyses can be found in the official #UnwhitewashTBB carrd: unwhitewashthebadbatch.carrd.co. We respectfully ask that you read this carrd and give a public statement in response to these criticisms.

Our movement has only gained traction since its inception on March 30th, 2021. A few months later, we wrote and released an open letter on Change.org to be signed by supporters of #UnwhitewashTBB, and every day it gains new signatures and draws nearer to the next milestone. A survey we released over a month ago has received over 1,100 responses and also continues to climb. The latter displays a range of opinions regarding The Bad Batch, but one sentiment stands out: Hunter, Crosshair, Tech, Wrecker, Omega, and Echo are written in stereotypical and actively harmful ways. Respondents were shocked at outdated portrayals of Autism, sickened by antisemitic stereotypes, and confused at how, in this current social and political climate, a family-friendly corporation like Disney could greenlight a series that sends a message that is the complete opposite of “Star Wars is for Everyone”. Some sample responses are below:

“I would just like to elaborate on the ableism aspect. As a amputee myself, I don’t like how Echo’s trauma has been ignored. The whole reason he is with the BB is because of what he went through. Losing one limb, never mind multiple, it’s extremely difficult. They made it seem like just because his prosthetic can be of use on missions, that means he isn’t grieving the loss of his actual hand. There is no healing or evolution. It also feels wrong to only address the fact that echo uses prosthetics for the sake of hacking into machinery. Prosthetics are so personal and become a real part of who you are as a person.” - Respondent 130

“...I can't believe Star Wars is still doing this, and that an entire team of animators with a huge budget can't get skin tone right. I didn't even know the clones were supposed to have a NZ Māori accent until a friend told me. That's a big deal, since I live in NZ and hear it every day…” - Respondent 209

“As someone who is neurodivergent myself, Tech and Wrecker just. sting, you know? in a “is that really what you think of us” kind of way. I grew up in an environment where intersectional equality was heavily discussed, and I can still miss things. Having Jewish friends does not mean that Cid’s antisemitic implications can’t go right over my head until someone points them out (thank you).” - Respondent 87

“As a fan of color, its irritating and painful to watch and be brushed off as "lighting issues" and see justifications made by white fans and producers...It also feels very bad to me that TCW spent 7 seasons with several arcs emphasizing that the clones were all as individual as a 'normal' person, but then undo all that with TBB, which centers a group of "special" clones (who are suspiciously white) and have them treat the "regs" as a homogeneous group who are lesser than them, and then expect us to find it within ourselves to put that aside to enjoy the MCs. The way the treat "regs" is very offputting and it made me dislike them since their introduction...Star Wars is no stranger to racist and antisemitic media, but I must say, the blantancy of Sid, a greedy lizard who essentially financially enslaves the protaganists, being Jewish-coded and being protrayed by a Jewish voice actress is really next-level even for Star Wars. As a Jewish fan, it really grates on me.” - Respondent 40

“I’m disabled and autistic, and the ableism is appalling to watch. Watching Echo be treated as subhuman for needing machinery to survive makes me feel like having implants to keep my spine from breaking itself would have me be the pitied member of any group. I am disgusted by the blatant antisemitism, as a fair number of my friends are Jewish and it hurts me to think that people can so easily hate others based on internalized stereotypes. Me and my friends have also critically analyzed the fact that, despite being clones of a character portrayed by Temuera Morrison, for some reason the bad batch look nothing like him in any way. No resemblance in any way: just a bunch of someone’s badly worked characters fraught with disgusting writing decisions and design choices that make no sense. It makes me angry to think that the writers for this show, and to an extent any modern writer, would believe that using harmful tropes to make a story is acceptable and someone brings in profit. I tried to watch it out of fact that my family likes Star Wars and we all grew up watching it, but all of these unhealthy assumptions and terrible choices in terms of writing and design leave a bitter and nauseating feeling.” - Respondent 605

In the survey, various questions were asked about fans’ feelings about The Bad Batch. Before reading the carrd, 34.7% of fans answered that writing was their least favorite aspect of the series, with the next being the main characters. Elaborations in the following free write made clear that the whitewashing and stereotypical writing were huge factors of these opinions. One a 1 to 5 satisfaction scale, 68.1% of respondents rated their satisfaction at a 3 or lower--again, due to the whitewashing and other issues respondents perceived in The Bad Batch. When asked to analyze pre-post carrd-reading feelings regarding the above issues, every category saw a marked increase in awareness of the issue at hand. The perceived prominence of the whitewashing went from 81.3% to 91.4% in respondents. The awareness of ableism jumped almost 30%, from 52.6% to 84.4%. The majority of respondents (59%) were not aware of the antisemitism in the series, but after reading the carrd, that statistic flipped to 80.5%, a near 60% increase from the original 26.7%. Regarding the other racist issues, the respondents went from 63.1% to 83.7%.

Fans of color, neurodivergent fans, disabled fans, and Jewish fans have been waiting for the day where we can see ourselves on screen a level of attention and care that makes us feel even more at home in the Star Wars community . If Disney’s message is truly family-friendly, if Star Wars is for everyone, then Disney needs to support these views with not just words, but with actions. Resolve the racism in Star Wars: The Bad Batch, take out the antisemitism, and treat your nonwhite, disabled, and neurodivergent characters--and fans--with the respect and dignity they deserve.

This will not be a benefit solely to the fans who are asking to be represented properly. In today’s time, popular media is facing a reckoning; media that is inclusive of and respectful towards minoritized groups ends up with leagues more popularity, high ratings, and good reviews than those that don’t. A recent and prominent example is Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a movie for which the inclusion of Asian-Americans at nearly all levels of production boosted its image and aided in its successful box office release. Black Panther is another prominent example--a movie spearheaded by Black people that completed its box office run at more than five times its initial budget in total revenue. The proper representation of people of color is a two-fold benefit.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch already has beautiful animation that reminds many longtime Star Wars: The Clone Wars fans of their childhood.

It is our hope that you will take our concerns as well as the concerns of others into account, and address the issues that we have outlined in order to better reflect the Walt Disney Company’s commitment to inclusive, diverse entertainment for audiences of all ages. Thank you for your attention to this issue.

Respectfully,

Fans of The Bad Batch

#mod CH #email #disney #star wars #the clone wars #the bad batch #unwhitewashtbb #swtbb #racism #antisemitism

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normal-thoughts-official · 3 years

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Fandom racism anon here and yeah absolutely (I didn't realise I had anon on lol)

Because while LOTR has problems within its themes (ie the orcs can be seen as to be coded as people of colour, especially since they ride elephants) the explicit message of the book is evil bad

Because the only people who work for sauron are evil. There are no morally grey people, they aren't misguided or tricked they just are evil and want to take over the world

And yeah I totally agree that this is more of a literal take on like empirical war (is that the word) and that makes total sense considering Tolkiens history

Whereas I would say that the allegories in shaowhunters is way more based on racial conflict within a country itself especially slavery, I can't remember if this is show Canon but is it that they have the warlock tropheys? I remember that in the books magnus talks about shadowhunters hanging warlock marks on their walls? (sorry to bring the books up)

Idk it's very hollow to me, unlike with LOTR though it's a different allegory it's totally irritating to show many of these supremecists as morally misled. LOTR says bad guys are bad guys, shadowhunters says well yeah they did follow a guy which thinks that downworlders are subhuman and should be eradicated but they just made a mistake

I want to compare this to tfatws which while it isn't really fantasy I just feel like it shows how the priorities of the writer can impact the message of the show so powerfully (I know u aren't up to date so I'm gonna be pretty vague)

There's a scene in tfatws where the new white perfect captain America does something bad and doesn't pay for the consequences - done to comment on white privelege and how America condones white supremacy and how Sam is in comparison to that

Mayrse and Robert revealed to be part of the circle! And paid no consequences Shock horror my parents were the bad guys (even rho they were either implicitly or explicitly extremely racist the entire time) also I haven't finished the seires but do the lightwoods ever try to get their parents to face the consequences?)

Only one actual really critiques the situation and the reality behind it whereas the other one is just to centre the white characters once again and present them in a further sympathetic light

AND ANOTHER THING! I was mostly talking about show Canon here and I'm sorry to bring up the books but I literally can't believe I hadn't picked up in this before.

So like downworlders = people of colour, Simon is a vampire so is coded as a person of colour. However in the books in the last one he stops being a vampire and becomes a shadowhunters instead, coincidentally that's also when he starts dating Izzy HOW IS THIS ABLE TO HAPPEN!!????

I mean I know cassandra clare is lazy right? The original seires is by far the worst of all her writings but come ON!!!!! By the allegory has he become the white man!????? These books made no fuckin sense when I read them at 15 and they make no sense now I'm digressing anyways

I don't know man I wrote this ask because I was trying to find some fantasy book recommendations on booktube and SO MANY of them were about slavery or general ly extrême préjudice with à White protagonist to save this 'poor souls'.

Also I was watching guardians of the galexy the other day and realised nearly every movie set in space is just bigger stakes imperialism - planets instead of countries. Literally star wars, star trek, guardians of the galexy 2, avengers infinity war - all are facing genocidal imperialistic villains without actually paying much, if any attention to those effected

Just writing this ask made me exhausted I'm so tired of lazy writing and exploiting other people's struggle. I'm white and I'm trying to be more critical about the movies, shows and books I watch and read but let me know if I said something off here❤️❤️ you gotta get up to date with tfatws man, Sambucky nation is THRIVING!!!!

i'm not sure i agree that the whole "the evil people are evil" thing is a good thing, because i feel like more often than not making the bad characters just like... unidimensionally evil just means that the reader will be like "lol i could NEVER be that guy" and when it comes to racism that is a dangerous road to take because white people already believe that racism is something that Only The Most Evil People, Ergo, Not Me, Can Do, which makes discussions of stuff like subconscious racial bias and active antiracist work become more difficult because people don't believe they CAN be racist unless they're like, Lord Voldemort

which is not to say that racism should be treated as morally ambiguous, just that the workings of racism should be represented as something that is not done only by the Most Hardcore And Evil, but rather as a part of a system of oppression that affects the way everyone sees the world and interacts with it and lives in it

yes the warlock trophies are mentioned in the show, albeit very quickly (there is a circle member who tells magnus that his cat eyes will make "a nice addition to his collection" and then it's never mentioned again because this is sh and we love using racism for shock value but then not actually treating it as a serious plot point or something that affects oppressed ppl). and you are absolutely right, shadowhunters (and hp, and most fantasy books) has genocide as its core conflict and treats it, like you said, in a very hollow way, treating racism as both not a big deal and not something that is part of a system of oppression, but really the actions of a few Very Bad People. it's almost impressive how they manage to do both at the same time tbh

i think you hit the nail right on the head with this comment, actually. for most of these works, racism is SHOCK VALUE. it's just like "lol isn't it bad that this bad guy wants to kill a gazillion people just because they are muggles? now that is fucked up" but it's not actually an issue. in fact, when this guy is defeated, the whole problem is over! racism is not something that is embedded into that world, it's not a systemic issue, it's not even actually part of what drives the plot. the things that led to this person not only existing but rising to power and gathering enough followers to be a real threat to the whole world are never mentioned. it's like racists are born out of thin air, which is dangerously close to implying that racism is just a natural part of life, tbh

anyway my point is, it is never supposed to be questioned, it is never part of a deeper plot or story, its implications are barely addressed except for a few fleeting comments them and there; so, it's not a critique, it's shock value, even though it is frequently disguised as a critique (which is always empty and shallow anyway. like what is the REAL critique in works like hp or sh/tsc other than "genocide is bad"? wow such a groundbreaking take evelyn)

about simon and the book thing: i actually knew about this and the weird thing about this is that, like... simon is jewish, and he's implied to be ashkenazi (calls his grandma bubbe which is yiddish, which is a language spoken by the ashkenazi ppl), and it seems like cc is always toeing the line between him being accepted by shadowhunters and then not accepted by them, which sounds a lot like antisemitic tropes and history of swinging between (ashkenazi) jewish ppl being seen as the model minority myth and thus used as an example by white christians, and being hated and persecuted. i'm not super qualified to talk about this since i'm not jewish and i'm still learning about/unlearning antisemitism and its tropes, and i don't really have a fully formed thought on that, tbh; it just reminds me of the whole "model minority" swinging, where one second simon is part of the majority, the other he's not, but always he is supposed to give up a part of himself and his identity in other to be "assimilated" by shadowhunter culture. this article (link) covers a book on jewish people and assimilationism into USan culture, this article (link) covers british jews' relationship with being considered an ethnic group, and this article (link) talks a bit about the model minority myth from the perspective of an asian jewish woman

it just really calls to my attention that cc chose to make her ashkenazi jewish character start off as a downworlder and then become a shadowhunter. i don't think she made that decision as a conscious nod to this history, because it would require being informed on antisemitism lol but it's incredible how you can always see bigoted stereotypes shining through her narrative choices completely by accident. it just really shows how ingrained it is in our collective minds and culture

and anyway, making a character go from the oppressed group to just suddenly become the oppressor is just. wtf. not how oppression works, but most of all, really disrespectful, especially because she clearly treats it as an "upgrade"/"glowup" that earns him the Love Of His Life

also, out of curiosity, are you french? it seems like your autocorrect changed a few words and i'm pretty sure extrême and préjudice are the french versions of these words, and since u said ur white, that's where my money would be lol

#anti cc #anti tsc #anti tmi #anti sh #racism tw #antisemitism tw #reference #ask #residenthottiesamwilson

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moontheoretist · 3 years

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This moment when you wonder why there never was a slavic or another targeted by holocaust superhero (not american) who was the face of fighting Nazis.

[This post was written like... so many months ago. Maybe even a year ago, and it was sitting in my drafts and I just said “fuck it” and decided to publish it.]

You know what bugs me about Captain America outside the fact that MCU Steve is made in such a way that it’s hard to not accuse him of doing bad things under the misguided sense of self-righteousness and justice? That Captain America as an idea is associated with fighting Nazis. I mean I do not dislike the idea as Steve Rogers as a character at the same time represents the people whom Nazi would kill in his pre-serum state (ill people were considered faulty, Nazi ideology was halfly based on eugenics ideology so Steve before serum was likely candidate to be killed) and a mockery of an Aryan ideal man in his after-serum state (because he looks like the “ideal of race” and fights Nazis, it’s pretty ironic) because of course America also fought in WWII, but they joined pretty late, and I cannot stress how cool it would be if the superhero associated with fighting Nazis was in fact not American.

Because you see, my whole country’s history is always taught by the lens of WWII, because we were the ones who were invaded when the WWII started (and let me tell you, this history is taught as if we were martyrs on pair with Jesus, and it is annoying as fuck, because no, polish people weren’t only victims of the war, this was so tragic that people who should know better who should fight with it, often joined in on committing atrocities, some people were hiding Jews, some were heartlessly giving their locations up, living in camps was even worse, people were there and even though there were acts of kindness here and there people had to live in this reality in which everybody fends for themselves, in which they had to help around the newcomers leaving the trains and couldn’t even tell them that half of them will be dead before they even enter the camp or warn them, because they would be killed, they had to either be quiet or lie to those people to not scare them and don’t let them try to escape or panic [at first nobody really knew that death camps were death camps, people were told those were places when they can find a job and came in with hope, but then it turned out to be a lie, Nazis often masked death camps as those zones for Jews and non-german people where they were happy, but it was all a cover-up and later on a lot of people who were in the trains knew they were going to their deaths, mothers who just gave birth were killing their infant babies so Nazis wouldn’t be the ones who kill them - it was an act of mercy even though it was horrific] and I cannot even imagine how the people who survived the camps felt when they remembered that they were expected to help SSmans in their daily work), so wouldn’t it be nice if someone at Marvel came with the idea of polish superhero (polish Jew or polish Romani superhero for example or someone else, some other European victim of nasizm like german Jews or Romani ppl in general or gay people from different countries than Poland and Germany etc.) helping our underground army fight of the Nazis? That would be nice to see.

It would be a very tragic story though, showing that even if you have an enhanced person fighting Nazis, you won’t be able to just win the war single-handedly. This character would suffer a lot, they would see deaths and atrocities of WWII, they would see victims of death camps, the experiments and such, probably being one of the victims themselves, have to deal with failures, because that’s what war looks like. Even with an enhanced the efforts to take over the country back could fail and the superhero would then learn that their innate strength and their purpose isn’t something so easily achievable. So it wouldn’t be second Captain America, because Captain, to my information, never lost to Nazis. I dunno, maybe he did, but he is mostly known for winning, while in truth fighting Nazis is something more than sticking a shield into Red Skull’s face, or saving soldiers from the other side of the enemy line. It’s a tragedy.

Maybe that’s the reason why there never was a hero like that? Because it would be too depressing to see it all, or maybe because Marvel doesn’t have access to all the diaries and historical stuff we polish people have, written by survivors who shared their experiences and reality of living during the war under the Nazi rule?

Disclaimer:

This post was written before I knew who Isaiah Bradley was, and even in his case, he was just a side story. Nobody cared enough to show the atrocities of WWII, or they were afraid to do it, because it is gut-wrenching and scary.

Still, if Isaiah was Captain America instead of Steve Rogers I would still have an issue that he was the American hero send to help those “helpless slavic, Jewish, Romani etc. ppl”, but he would be at least better than the walking ideal of Aryan race which Steve was, even if Steve’s look is supposed to be mocking Nazis.

Why he would be better? Because he is black, because he was not treated right, because he was forged in pain, and he saw death camps from the inside. Am I too fatalistic to want a hero who was forged by the holocaust? Maybe. But I want them, because you cannot be a face of fighting Nazis without actually suffering by their hands. And Steve never did suffer the same as survivors did. The people who did suffer were never made into heroes. Ask Magneto.

#tw death camps #tw murder #tw child murder #marvel #captain america #captain america critical #marvel critical #isaiah bradley #magneto is usually #a villain so I don't count him here and also he never was a face of fighting nazis #because captain america had stolen that #slavic rant

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paulinedorchester · 3 years

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Mosley, Leonard. Backs to the Wall: London Under Fire, 1939-1954. London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971; reprint, as Backs to the Wall: The Heroic Story of the People of London During World War II, New York: Random House, 1971.

Each generation gets the history that it needs — or wants, or demands. That’s what kept going through my head as I read Backs to the Wall, which appeared three years after France’s youth explicitly rejected both Charles de Gaulle, the self-appointed leader of the Free French during World War II, and the political ideology that he represented, and amidst ongoing unrest over the Vietnam War. (It’s also worth mentioning that it was published in the same year as Norman Longmate’s How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War and two years after Angus Calder’s The People’s War.) This book gives up a World War II narrative in which Churchill was an improvement on Chamberlain only in that he wasn’t an appeaser, de Gaulle was worse than both of them put together, the Allied leaders all cordially loathed each other, half the British public wanted to sue for peace, and there was across-the-board mutual dislike between London civilians and American troops (and British dismay at the way African-American troops were treated by their white counterparts was far from universal). Do I exaggerate? Only slightly. Backs to the Wall is a sort of distant, city-specific pre-echo of Juliet Gardner’s sour 2004 book Wartime: Britain, 1939-45.

As with Wartime, however, this book does have the virtue of introducing us to a number of very interesting people. I became interested in reading it because it brought Vere Hodgson’s wartime diary to public attention. Mosley quotes or paraphrases Hodgson’s writing from the beginning of the war through its end, and also seems to have interviewed her extensively. His primary villain, meanwhile, is not Chamberlain but Chamberlain’s chief acolyte, Henry “Chips” Channon, from whose diary he quotes widely (and who turns out to have been born and raised in the United States, to my surprise). We hear a great deal from the chemist and novelist C.P. Snow and follow the misadventures of two civilians, Jenny Martin and Polly Wright, whose consistency in both bad luck and bad choices meant that neither of them was able to stay out of serious trouble for any length of time.

There are many glimpses of the London home front through the eyes of two boys, both eight when the war began: John Hardiman, of Canning Town and later of Aldgate, who was evacuated in 1939 but soon returned to London, and Donald Ketley of Chadwell Heath, who was never evacuated at all. Donald, who thoroughly enjoyed himself during the war, had an experience that speaks to our own recent reality:

Another good thing: quite early in the Blitz, his school had been totally destroyed by a bomb. Since Donald was shy, a poor student and unpopular with his teacher, he was overjoyed when he heard the place was gone. Thereafter he went each day to his teacher’s home to pick up lessons, which he brought back the next day for marking. In the following months he changed from a poor student to an excellent one, and although he was aware that his teacher rather resented it, he didn’t care.

Mosley also introduces us to Archibald McIndoe, the real-life counterpart of Patrick Jamieson, Bill Patterson’s character in the Foyle’s War episode ‘Enemy Fire.’ Art seems to have imitated life pretty accurately in that instance: he and his burn hospital in East Grinstead were apparently exactly like what was depicted, the only difference being that the hospital was set up in an existing hospital building, not in a requisitioned stately home.

Backs to the Wall seems to have been one of the earliest books to make substantial use of Mass-Observation writings. Most M-O diaries are anonymous, but there are two named diarists here who stand out. John James Donald was a committed pacifist whose air of lofty detachment as he observes the reactions of those around him to air-raids and other wartime event and prepares for his tribunal — which, in the end, he decides not to attend — quickly grows irritating. More interesting is Rosemary Black, a 28-year-old widow, in no small part because she differs markedly from what I had thought of as the archetypical M-O writer. Here’s her self-description on M-O documents: “Upper-middle-class; mother of two children (girls aged 3 and 2); of independent means.” Mosley continues:

She lived in a trim three-story house in a quiet street of the fashionable part of Maida Vale, a short taxi ride from the center of the West End, whose restaurants and theatres she knew well. She was chic and attractive, and lacked very few of the niceties of life: there was Irene, a Hungarian refugee, to look after the children; Helen, a Scottish maid, to look after herself and the house; and a daily cleaning woman to do the major chores.

Black took her children out of London at the beginning of the war but quickly brought them back, and when bombs began falling she kept them in place — air raids might be disruptive for them, but apparently relocation had been worse. She was very much aware that she was riding out the war in a position of privilege, and she often expressed guilt feelings; but this tended to fade away before her irritation at the dominance of “the muddling amateur or the soulless bureaucrat” in the war effort. Offering her services, even as a volunteer, proved very frustrating. “She was young, strong and willing; she typed, spoke languages, was an expert driver and had taken a course in first aid,” Mosley tells us, “but finding a job even as a chauffeur was proving difficult” in September 1940. (She actually wasn’t all that strong physically: as we learn, she suffered from rheumatism which grew worse during the war years and probably affected her outlook.)

Black was greeted with “apathy and indifference” by both A.R.P. and the Women’s Voluntary Service. Early in 1941 she was finally able to get a place handing out tea, sandwiches, cake, and so on to rescue and clean-up workers at bomb sites from a Y.M.C.A. mobile canteen. She was a bit intimidated by the women with whom she found herself working:

Their class is right up to the county family level. Nearly everyone is tall above the average and remarkably hefty, even definitely large, not necessarily fat but broad and brawny. Perhaps this is something to do with the survival of the fittest.

And the work did bring her some satisfaction, even if it was of the type that lent itself to being recorded with tongue placed firmly in cheek:

We had a pleasant and uneventful day’s work serving City fire sites, the General Post Office, demolition workers and Home Guard Stations, etc. We were complimented at least half a dozen times on the quality of our tea ... I think the provision of saccharine for the tea urns to compensate for the mean sugar allowance is my most successful piece of war work. What did you do in the Great War, Mummy? Sneaked pills into the tea urns, darling.

For all her good humor and astute observations, Mrs. Black was far from immune to tiny-mindedness. After an evening out in 1943 she wrote:

I had to wait some time for the others in the cinema foyer, and I was much struck, as often before, by the almost complete absence of English people these days, from the capital of England. Almost every person who came in was either a foreigner, a roaring Jew, or both. The Cumberland [Hotel] has always been a complete New Jerusalem, but this evening it really struck me as no worse than anywhere else! It is really dismaying to see that this should be the result of this war in defence of our country.

Indeed, Mosley cites the results of a multi-year Mass-Observation study that showed a marked increase in anti-Jewish views London’s general population over the course of the war. Since it’s just one study, and since I haven’t seen that study mentioned anywhere else, I am reluctant to trust blindly in its accuracy; and there’s also this:

The small flat which George [Hardiman] had procured for [his family] ... in Aldgate was cleaner and airier than the old house in Canning Town [which had been bombed], and the little Jewish children with whom John now went to school seemed to be cleaner than the ones in Elm Road; at any rate, he no longer came home with nits in his hair.

On the other hand, Mosley himself gives us only a fragmentary view of London’s wartime Jewish population: everyone seems to be either a terrified refugee or an impoverished East Ender. We hear nothing about the substantial middle- and upper-middle class population — mostly of German descent and in some cases German birth — that had already taken shape in Northwest London; and while we are briefly introduced to Sir David Waley, a Treasury official, in connection with the case of an interned Jewish refugee, we aren’t told that Waley himself was Jewish, a member of “the cousinhood.” On yet a third hand, Mosley also quotes other M-O surveys from the same period that indicate largely hostile attitudes to most foreigners in London, with Poles at the bottom of the ladder and the small Dutch contingent on top. (Incidentally, the book’s extremely patchy index identifies Vere Hodgson as a Mass-Observation diarist, which she wasn’t.)

Backs to the Wall closes with a very brief, remarkably non-partisan account of the 1945 general election and its immediate aftermath. “Neither side had any inkling of the way the minds of the British voters were turning,” he writes.

When [Churchill’s] friends suggested that he was a victim of base ingratitude, he shook his head. He would not have such a charge leveled against his beloved countrymen. Ingratitude? "Oh, no," he said quietly, "I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time."

The book is worth reading for the primary materials that it includes, but it probably tells us as much about the era in which it was written as about the period that it covers.

#world war II #u.k. home front #london #non-fiction after the fact #recommended with reservations #long post

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ryanmeft · 4 years

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Movie Review: A Hidden Life

“You have to remember what you knew in a better hour.” So speaks Franz Jagerstatter, as he is held behind the walls of a Third Reich prison and heaped with endless emasculation and abuse for refusing to swear loyalty to Adolph Hitler, or fight in the German army. Before even being marched through the prison doors he has suffered much. His hometown spits at his feet, snubs his children and insults his wife. His own mother struggles to look at him. No one can be found to help with the work and so the days are long and full of toil. Those better hours seem few and far away. Yet they are there, in his mind.

Jagerstatter was a very real person. His film self, played with both stoic determination and singular emotion by August Diehl, is a typical Austrian peasant of the late 30’s. The film jumps around in time a bit, and we see him meet and steal the heart of Franziska (Valerie Pachner). They have three children, and they spend their days working the farm, helping their neighbors, playing games, and flowing with the cadences of everyday life in a rural Austrian mountain town. Franz reports for mandatory training with the army, but at the time thinks little of it: war is far away, and they are guarded from it by their hills like mountains and mountains that reach beyond measure. The Austrian landscapes have inspired many myths, and among them they build their own small-but-important one: that the war can be held off, that they can be happy. Franz and Franziska know, though, that sooner or later Franz will be called. As surely as they know this, Franz knows he cannot serve. It is against God and Jesus and the spirit of his own culture, but more importantly it is against him, for when the Nazis come to punish anyone who will not submit to their will, it is Franz, not his culture or his faith, which must take the blows.

Terence Malick has never made a film quite like A Hidden Life. Certainly, the impressions of his handprints are to be found, and in abundance. The camera relishes low shots of faces that tower above it, frequently contemplates the surroundings of the people and the untranslatable power of nature, and virtually all of the dialogue is thought, rather than spoken. Yet it has been the filmmaker’s modus operandi to exist within dreams---dreams based on his life, sometimes, but most often dreams based on a shared collective American consciousness. Tree of Life captured the small details of life in the American Heartland circa mid-century; The New World retold an essential American myth in Malick’s patented cinematic language. None of his films have ever been very concerned with linear plot, have never deigned to be constrained with reality, and certainly have always floated above physical pain---his characters drift and never touch the ground even when fallen, something his fans call genius and his detractors call tedium.

We may be surprised, therefore, to find this latest film prefaced by something we’ve never seen in a Malick picture before: that this story is based on true events. I settled into that idea, but I admit I inwardly scoffed at it. I was certain that when I left the theatre and did my research for this review, I would find there were not a few dissenters from the Nazis, that they were treated as terribly as might be expected, and that perhaps the general cadences of Franz’s lifestyle were true to the time. Instead I found that Malick, a man whose wandering mind and frequent cinematic deviations are core to his artistic identity, had stuck remarkably close to Franz’s true story. His identity, and his wife’s, were accurate. He did have three children. He was born and lived where the movie has him living. He trained on the bases where he trains, and even the specific prisons he was placed in are accurate.

One question I had was, why the attention to accuracy, when his fans would have forgiven him any transgressions---and indeed would likely never have known of them, since if you are seeing a Malick movie you’re there for the director and not the subject? The answer is that in every other respect than historical details, Malick has made a Malick film. If every daily movement and every minor character were found to be meticulously researched, it would still be true that Malick has painted them with the soaring brushstrokes of myth and timelessness, rather than the workmanlike attention to dry biographical detail that usually gets in the way of a good story in such films.

The first example of this is Franz himself. What he went through is true. The version of him seen on screen, though, is a deep philosopher, a man of very long thoughts who seems to contain the entire national identity of Austria in his heart, and who can look at a man and disassemble them into the things that make them tick, understanding the nature of everyone around him in moments. The real man left behind little writing and certainly never composed anything so grand as the musings given to him; most of what we can know is from the memories of his wife, who lived for decades after Franz’s death. The man seen on screen is a mixture of the real Franz---a simple man who could not tolerate evil nor make concessions for it, and who followed his convictions to the end---and the thoughts Malick has on this. Franz-Malick’s internal monologues are wide-ranging. He muses on the struggle to remain true in a world where ethics can be bought, sold and traded. He ponders the nature of God and how men can possibly tell themselves that such a being would condone hate and death. He gazes at the beauty of the land he is a part of and ponders how small he is in it. He has incredible faith in the basic good nature of people. When the local representative of the church (the late Michael Nyqvist in his final role) insists Franz must do his duty to the fatherland, Franz believes he is only afraid to publicly display his resistance. The audience is, I think, rather more doubtful.

These are themes that have animated most of Malick’s films. In some cases they are spoken out loud by tertiary characters. A church painter (Johan Leysen) decorates the local church with idealized images of Christ and Mary, but laments that he has not the courage to display their sufferings as they really were---someday, he says, he might. The local mayor (Martin Wuttke, who also played Hitler in Inglourious Basterds) is a hateful, drunken windbag who goes on long tirades against immigrants and Jews; since the horrors are taking place far from the village, he serves to give presence to the terrors Franz is rejecting. Complications and dissenting opinions are expressed by his mother (Karin Neuhauser), who cares little for current events but seems to believe Franz should serve as his father did, and his sister-in-law (Maria Simon), who both admires his courage and dislikes him personally, suggested to be because her own life has not gone the way she wished it. Matthias Schoenaerts and the late Bruno Ganz play representatives of whatever the Nazis have that passes as a justice system; they say mildly sympathetic things and Franz believes on some level they are hearing what he is saying with his protest, but ultimately they are indicative of the fact that when faced with evil, most people will go along.

God is mentioned often, for Franz Jagerstatter was a devout Catholic. The landscapes and beauty of Austria are an equal focal point. These two things seem to instill in Franz a powerful sense of something larger than himself---that if he should give in, he will have to answer not only to his maker but to the very land whose air he breathes and which the Nazis are despoiling. Jorg Widmer’s camera, certainly at Malick’s insistence, lingers on shots of the battered church as it does on towering mountains capped with snow and running with tiny waterfalls. It also takes time to lovingly film everyday activities---Franz and Franziska playing a game of cups and blindfolds with the children, a dirt-encrusted hand stroking Franziska’s pristine golden hair in a moment of emotional distress, a black shawl against the frigid mountain snows, the rhythmic patterns of bringing in the crops and keeping the buildings repaired. The movie, early on, exults in shots of the towering and majestic. As hate grips the village, it closes in, and in the first scene where the mayor goes on a bigoted rant while Franz maintains silence, it eventually squeezes the two men into a small alley, the wonder of nature compressed by hatred into a small world where a man can find little hope. Yet as Franz’s world contracts, his hope strengthens. The real man held onto something indescribable, and Malick has captured that something for us---at least, as much as film ever can.

Verdict: Must-See

Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.

Must-See

Highly Recommended

Recommended

Average

Not Recommended

Avoid like the Plague

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All images are property of the people what own the movie.

#terence malick #a hidden life #movies #michael nyqvist #bruno ganz #august diehl #valerie pachner

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girlactionfigure · 5 years

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"Magneto’s Jewishness is central to his character

According to recent rumors, Marvel intends to give Magneto – the iconic Jewish supervillain – a fresh coat of paint. But what exactly is meant by “fresh coat of paint” here?

Put simply, it is alleged that they intend to cast a “POC” actor – or actors – as Magneto in any future appearances.

Why is this a bad thing? Well, it’s not. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that Magneto is a Jewish Holocaust survivor. He is already a POC, at least insofar as indigenous Middle Eastern populations are considered to be such (which Marvel undoubtedly does), and they arguably should have been using Jewish (or other Middle Eastern) actors from the get-go. However, since it’s highly unlikely that Marvel actually considers diaspora Jews like Magneto to be Middle Eastern (even though they are Middle Eastern, by definition), and since there are no other notable anti-Jewish genocides in the past 50 years to draw inspiration from, the implications of this rumor could not be more clear: they may very well end up erasing Magneto’s Jewish origins.

I’m deeply bothered that Marvel is even considering this – that the thought of it has even entered their heads, let alone their board room discussions. And I’m even more bothered that it’s being framed as a bid for “diversity”, as if this is really “no different” than changing Ariel’s race. It absolutely is different. In fact, these scenarios couldn’t be any more different if they tried to be.

There are many reasons why changing Magneto’s origins would be damaging and oppressive to Jews, especially in light of anti-Semitism’s meteoric rise and resurgence in mainstream culture. For starters…

Magneto’s Jewishness is central to his character

His experience as a Jew – as a survivor of the Nazi death camps and a member of one of the most despised ethnic groups on Earth (not just in the United States, but in the entire world) – is the main impetus for Magneto’s actions. It’s why he is who he is. Magneto is an extremist because he sees the way mutants are treated as parallel to the way Jews are treated. His realization that humans will never accept mutants also parallels Herzl’s realization that Europeans would never accept Jews. And Magneto’s proposed solution, while certainly 100x more extreme than Herzl’s (whose solution was to repatriate Jewish exiles to their indigenous homeland, to liberate it from foreign rule, and to regain sovereignty therein), is borne of a similar distrust and cynicism towards those who hate his kind.

Magneto is a Jew. That’s who he is to most fans, especially to Jewish fans who grew up with him and identified with him for much of their lives. Why take that away from us? Especially now?

Magneto embodies Jewish anger, fear, trauma, and pain like no other character, before or since. You can’t just treat that as if it’s some trivial thing, or if it’s just “white” people crying about their “privilege” (which, it must be emphasized, Jews do not have). Changing him now would be horrifically insensitive and immensely disrespectful to Jewish fans, especially to children/grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.

If it’s Magneto’s age people are worried about, I’m certain Marvel could come up with something. If they can prolong Wolverine’s life for as long as they have, there’s no reason why they can’t do so for Magneto.

And if there’s another minority out there whom they feel is “more deserving” of representation, they can simply create a new character. Problem solved.

Jews deserve representation too

Like it or not, we’re minorities too. And we don’t exactly have stellar representation, contrary to common belief.

We’re all but invisible outside of some very stereotypical characters. I mean, what else do we have besides lonely nerds, gold diggers, terrorists, bankers, and eccentric rabbis?

We have this…

Yup, that’s right. Gargamel, the main villain of the Smurfs, is supposed to be Jewish. And if his Levantine features didn’t make that painfully obvious, he also had a mezuzah in his house in his first few appearances.

There are exceptions to this rule (e.g. Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman), but that’s all they really are: exceptions.

I know what people are going to say next… “But what about these Jewish actors who’ve done characters like Indiana Jones and Jackie Kennedy? They even did blackface back in the day.” Well, here’s the thing: they weren’t Jewish actors playing Jewish characters. They were white-passing Jewish actors (and usually only half or even 1/4 Jewish, like myself) playing white characters. That’s not representation, and referring to it as such is essentially tantamount to whitewashing. It is every bit as absurd as saying Indians are “white”/”well-represented” because Ben Kingsley played Adolf Eichmann (yes, that Adolf Eichmann), or that Arabs* are because Lebanese actor Danny Thomas (to name one example) did blackface and other white roles, or that Latinos are because Cesar Romero did The Joker.

*Speaking of Arabs, Jewish actors who are more obviously/visibly Jewish (particularly those who aren’t half or 3/4 non-Jewish) are very frequently cast in Arab roles. And no one even notices. Why is that?

It’s because…

Ashkenazi Jews are not white people

Non-Ashkenazi Jews exist, of course. That is undeniable. But since Magneto was born in the Jewish diaspora communities of Central Europe, it is quite obvious that he is Ashkenazi.

And Marvel’s assertion that they intend to rebrand Magneto as a “POC” is a pretty clear indication that they have a piss-poor understanding of (if not utter contempt for) who Jews are.

Magneto isn’t white. He’s a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Jews are an indigenous ethnic group and nation of the Levant, so it makes little sense to refer to Magneto as white unless A ) he is a convert (which he’s not) or B ) one views all indigenous Levantines as white, which is highly unlikely (at least in Marvel’s case). Ergo, Magneto has always been a POC.

However, all of his live-action portrayals were done by white actors, and this suggests that whoever was responsible for their casting sees Jews as nothing more than a religion. And for someone whose view is that Magneto is an “ethnic Pole” or “ethnic German” whose family “just so happened to practice Judaism”, it’s not too far of a leap (or even a leap at all) to cast white actors in that role. This view is, of course, patently absurd.

This popular narrative that Ashkenazim are “white”, and that we are therefore already “over-represented” and don’t “need” characters like Magneto, is the reason why things like this keep happening. Were it not for that, the idea of replacing Erik Lensherr with a “real” minority would have never entered their heads.

Just because we’re not black, doesn’t mean we’re white. And you can’t treat this as if it’s somehow akin to rebranding Ariel as a black woman. It’s just not comparable.

It indicates that Marvel does not see Jews as a “real” minority group

Marvel is a politically progressive company. And the progressive left has been infected with its own form of Jew-hate – distinct from its right-wing counterpart, but similar in many ways. One thing they both have in common is that they both feel Jews are “hyper-powerful” and absolutely swimming in “privilege”, and are therefore not oppressed or marginalized in any meaningful way – and that if anything, we’re the oppressors. And for this reason, it is argued that we do not “deserve” the same respect or consideration that other oppressed outgroups do, and this argument naturally extends to representation in media. After all, this isn’t the first time Marvel whitewashed a character’s Jewishness (Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver), and it likely won’t be the last.

And it is precisely this line of thinking that facilitates antisemitism and contributes to its growth.

Bottom line: Magneto is Jewish. He is a Holocaust survivor. He is an ethnic Middle Easterner. And despite his (typically) villainous portrayal, he has done more to give Jews a human face than any other character. And if there’s anything we need right now, it’s for people to see our humanity.

Source

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wisegirlandseaweedbrainforever · 5 years

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The fact of the matter is if I'm complaining about a character in a movie or show not having the right hair color, I am not complaining about the actor/actress, I rarely will complain about an actor/actress period, no I'm complaining about makeup and hair artists' choices, and or the directors for either allowing it, or asking for it. I'm complaining that those in charge of representing that character didn't think the image we were given in a book or comic was enough, that they were ether trying to be edgy, or didn't respect their core audience enough to give them the character they came for. But I'm especially complaining about when they decide that the reason their doing it is better represent a minority like the Jews, or Native Americans not because I think they shouldn't have representation but because Hollywood is mostly made up of racist pigs, and it is never more evident then when the try give these people representation, like when they make every Jew have brown hair and brown eyes, like there aren't Jews of every size and color??? Or like every native american has the same bone structure, and all their customs and accents are exactly the same??? It's just so rude, arrogant and ignorant, and we're all supposed to jump on board and praise them when they give us the bare minimum of effort, and if we don't we're the ones called racist pigs. And honestly I'm tired of it. I have standards to how I think people should be treated, and I'm not gonna stop living by them just because Hollywood and apparently a good portion of the world jumped on board a wagon headed right off a cliff, no thank you "I choose life".

#wisegirl rants #and has no respect for hollywood

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diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 5 years

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Cathedrals belong to everyone. In vox pop interviews in secular France after the Notre Dame fire we heard so often: “I’m an atheist, but Notre Dame is part of me.” Reactions in Britain would be the same: a great cathedral stands for so much more than religion, narrowly conceived. It represents human skill, the quest for beauty and the continuity of communities over a length of time far greater than even many lifetimes. Attendance at cathedral services now bucks the national downward trend in the Church of England, but does not necessarily signal a widespread conversion to Christianity.

At Easter, it seems natural to commentators to speak of the resurrection of the damaged cathedral, or to use the image of the phoenix reborn from its own ashes. Resurrection, too, is so much more than a religious symbol. In the northern hemisphere it has associations with the resurgence of nature – hence daffodils and bunnies – and speaks to the universal wish that death could somehow be defeated.

Christianity began as a small Jewish sect whose focus was on the alleged resurrection of Jesus, a Galilean teacher and healer. It’s obvious to anyone reading the New Testament that this sect survived only because it believed Jesus had risen from the dead. It had no raison d’être apart from celebrating, and trying to persuade other Jews, and then non-Jews too, of the truth of this improbable claim.

But what did they mean by “resurrection”? When lightning damaged York Minster in 1984, some misguided religious commentators thought it a divine punishment because David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, had recently been consecrated there. He had referred to the resurrection of Jesus with the expression “a conjuring trick with bones”. Few noticed that what he actually said was that it was not a conjuring trick with bones but the phrase stuck to him thereafter. What he meant was that the resurrection was not the reanimation of a corpse, but something much more mysterious.

It was also something much more important. A corpse coming to life would be a miracle, no doubt, but it might not mean anything. It might be a random freak event. Early Christians believed that the resurrection of Jesus meant a transformation of reality, despite the fact that other Jews pointed to the fact that reality did not seem to have been transformed in any measurable way. Christians clung to the belief that something vitally new was happening in the world, and associated it with Jesus having been granted some kind of new life that would never end.

What that new life consisted of, they could not precisely say. No early Christian accounts purport to describe the event of resurrection, yet all associate it with the belief that the resurrected Jesus had “appeared”. However, the accounts do not even agree on whom he appeared to. It seems obvious that legendary elements have been mingled with a memory of some kind of cataclysmic experience that could not be adequately described. Something must have kickstarted the early Christian movement, yet its leaders appear unclear exactly what it was: they can only call it Jesus’ resurrection, without telling us what that really amounted to.

The gospels exist because some Christians decided that they must record who the resurrected person had been in his lifetime. The resurrection of just anyone might not be good news – Nero, say, or Pontius Pilate. The nascent church needed a profile of Jesus that would show why his resurrection was “gospel” – glad tidings. But with the same maddening lack of clarity, what it got were four divergent accounts. The stories in the gospels do not merely supplement each other, but sometimes conflict. This is true of the stories of Jesus’ birth as much as of his resurrection. In Matthew, Jesus and Mary live in Bethlehem and only move to Galilee to escape Herod, whereas in Luke they go from Galilee to Bethlehem for the census. And the story of Jesus’ life and work before the last week of his life varies greatly among the gospels.

Yet for all their confusions, all these stories have become central to western culture. Popular devotion has smoothed them out, and has treated them as “gospel truth” – historically sacrosanct, despite the doubts that many individuals may harbour about some of their details.

The gospels were not written as parts of a bible, but as alternative ways of describing the character and sayings of Jesus. They, too, are paradoxical. On the one hand they were not seen as scripture, in the way that the Old Testament was, but simply as memoirs, sources of information about the earthly life of Jesus.

They were not written in the solemn scroll format of scriptural or high-cultural books, but on codices bound down one side – what we now think of as normal books. At that time the codex was an informal format, used as a notebook rather than a vehicle for serious literature. On the other hand, their contents were regarded as even more important than what was in the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. This was because they described what Christians were sure had been a special divine intervention in the world – in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

These old stories flicker in and out of focus as we read them. Every time we ask them to give us solid fact and unambiguous testimony, they disappoint. The New Testament is no definitive document, but a series of slanting beams of light on something that always just eludes our gaze. But its sense that God will ultimately bring life even out of death continues to resonate even among many who could never commit themselves to a religious faith yet sense that there is something here that requires investigation and promises hope.

I have a cartoon on my wall showing a small church with a notice outside reading “Important if true”. Reading the New Testament books will not necessarily convince you that it is true. But it is likely at least to leave a sense of yearning for new life beyond the deaths that we, and even our most valuable cultural icons, are bound to suffer eventually.

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kyliafanfiction · 6 years

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Reboot Thoughts - Characters

So who do you all think will make it into the Reboot, if it actually happens?

Buffy, obviously, but who else?

I feel like it's almost certain that Giles, Xander and Willow will, in some fashion, make it, though if they last is an interesting question, as is the question of what their nature will be.

I saw a very interesting (albeit super-unlikely) post wanting SMG to play a female Giles, and the idea of a female Giles sounds great. I've also seen some people, in various 'fan reboot' ideas, talking about an Giles of Indian extraction, which would let him/her still be British (which is kind of essential) while being more racially representative (yes, non-Indian, non-white people live in the UK, but the UK is much more "white" (by US standards of race) than the US, and the average ignorant American probably doesn't think about the concept of African-British people, unless they watched Season 3 of the New Who or the like. Stupid, but that's America)

Willow will absolutely have to be wlw (and my money is on her being lesbian closer to the start if not from the start, but who knows where exactly they will take it), and almost certainly stay Jewish. That probably means she'll also be white in appearance (this is not to say that jews with skin colors other than white don't exist, they emphatically do, but they aren't as common in the US, certainly not in the popular imagination). Red hair seems likely, but then, maybe they won't want to copy everything. The broad outlines of her basic mold will probably be the same, but who knows about the particulars.

Xander is kind of the wild card. He could be more or less the same, just updated for the times (that is, a well-intentioned, well meaning guy who struggles with a lot of toxic masculinity ideas and thus carries around a certain amount of entitlement and sexism that he tries to shed with various degrees of success over the course of the show, while making insensitive comments someone thought was funny... or an incel, if you're a hater of him and think he was one originally - he wasn't, but if he's the same general trope he was in the original, you'll think he's an incel again), or he could be radically rewritten, while still being the comic relief everyman trope. I'm gonna guess he stays white too, but he could be anything else (if he's not white, he probably becomes Hispanic, is where my money is, if they're going for as wide a spread of diversity as possible). Xander could be gay or bi as well, since he could have been in canon (as has been noted, they weren't sure, when they started, if it was gonna be Willow or Xander who became gay later on)

Beyond those four? I mean, Angel in some form will probably come in, but Spike is pretty contingent, as would be Drusilla. Darla maybe, if only long enough to die early, but maybe she's more popular. I think it's unlikely that Buffy will be wlw, but if they do that, might Angel be a woman? or maybe they'll just decide the Slayer shouldn't be dating vampires anyway?

The various villains - we might get the Master again, but after that, I imagine we'll have a broader, more original set. Dawn may never show up (or she may be a thing at the start). I have to admit, my fave of Amy Madison will almost certainly never be a thing unless they decide to borrow the name at some point for a character, the way Arrow/The Flash/Supergirl/Lot pull out various comics characters, sometimes from the depths of obscurity, for one-shots and such (and thus the reboot may treat the original the way a TV show adaptation treats its source comics - a mineable resource for names and basic ideas reshaped for monster of the week).

But Tara? Kendra? Faith? Cordelia? Wesley? So much of this is contingent on actors, on chemistry, on what they decide to do with the story in various places at various points. They may come in, they may stick around (what if the actresses for Tara and Willow have zero chemistry? I mean, presumably if they want to do that a chemistry test would be required for casting Tara but still). The various AtS characters are unlikely - even if they get a spinoff, would it be Angel 2.0 (don't get me wrong, I'd be quite enthusiastic about it, as personally I find AtS > BtVS, but it's super likely).

I imagine that even if they only show up briefly, there will be a lot of callback characters from the original show, minor and major, and it would be interesting to see them turn arc villains into monsters of the week and monster of the week villains into arc big bads, and so on, if that's how things shake out.

What do ya'll think? Who is gonna make it into the reboot, and how do you think they'll shake out in terms of changes to their character and role and story?

#Buffy Reboot #Buffy the Vampire Slayer #I don't want this reboot but I have thoughts about the form it might take #BtVS Reboot #Musings

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pargolettasworld · 6 years

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So here’s something interesting. This film has so many layers to it. Every time I watch it, I find something else to think about. In some ways, it’s one of the thousands of mental hygiene/social engineering films that were popular between about 1944 and 1970. They’re mostly little morality plays designed to encourage proper behavior, and they range from being sweetly dated, dull, and conformist (most of Coronet’s oeuvre) to being completely bonkers (the collected works of Sid Davis). An American Girl . . . wants to be like that, but just doesn’t quite fit into that mold.

For one thing, at a runtime of nearly half an hour, it’s three times as long as the average mental hygiene film. It needs this length, though, because, also unlike the average mental hygiene film, it really takes time to introduce and develop its characters. I’m particularly fond of Mr. Davis here. He’s smart, thoughtful, and completely supportive of Norma, even as he prods her to examine her own conscience and work out her moral dilemma for herself.

Most mental hygiene films live in a bright, sunny world where the (at the time very recent) Second World War was never mentioned or thought of. This one dives right into it, showcasing the diary of Anne Frank in the first act. The diary had been published in English for the first time in 1952, about six years before this film was made, and had been adapted for the stage in 1955. Norma herself appears to turn sixteen at the end of the first act, which would suggest that she was born around 1941 or 1942. She’s just a bit too old to be a Baby Boomer (although her little sister is one), and she probably has no real memories of the war. There’s no hint at what her father was up to, but it’s very likely that he was in the Army. When he initially tells her that the best way to deal with the existence of antisemitism is to forget about it, you have to wonder what he saw, and what he might be remembering, what traumas he doesn’t want to pass along to his daughters.

Antisemitism is something that Americans don’t like to talk about. We like to pretend that, because we were on the side of WWII that opposed Hitler and won, we get a free pass. We could never be, you know, openly against the Jews, because we never did anything like what Hitler did! (We did, but it wasn’t to American Jews.) But, as Norma’s friends and community keep telling her, everyone knows what not to talk about . . . and whom to shun.

Over the years, this film has developed another interesting little wrinkle. People didn’t use the phrase “cultural appropriation” in 1958, but the heart of this film is about non-Jewish Norma’s choice to wear a bracelet with Jewish charms on it. Her friends are horrified because it’s a Jewish bracelet, and she’s not Jewish. People might get Ideas! (And they do!) Norma defends herself, saying that the bracelet is pretty, and that the Jews won’t mind. In 1958, that was probably more or less true; in any event, her town seems pretty red-lined, and it’s clear that no one in Norma’s social circle knows anyone Jewish who might notice her bracelet and comment on it. In 2018, if Norma’s granddaughter were to do a similar thing, her friends would be equally horrified, but for rather different reasons! One hopes they might treat her better than Lucille and Wendy treat Norma, though.

Finally, An American Girl walks that fine line between good and uncomfortable in that it’s a surprisingly nuanced, thoughtful, well-made film about antisemitism that does not have a single character who is actually Jewish. It’s like Gentleman’s Agreement had a more radical baby sister. It’s an odd feeling, to see a piece of media take such a strong stand on educating people about a prejudice against a group that you’re a part of, and yet, you’re not represented anywhere in it. But it gets even weirder. You know who produced this film about antisemitism with no Jewish characters? The Anti-Defamation League! The major organization devoted to fighting antisemitism decided that one way to do this was to produce a half-hour mental hygiene film featuring only goyim. Go figure.

Like a lot of mental hygiene films, this one doesn’t really have a resolution. Sure, Norma gets up and speaks her piece, and her parents seem awfully proud of her, but we never do get to find out whether she actually changed anyone’s mind or not. Still, I hope she at least got the town thinking a little bit. Because three years later, Adolf Eichmann would be put on trial in Jerusalem, and that little morality play would be broadcast to the entire world. One wonders what Norma and Lucille and Wendy and Jack made of it.

#movies #mental hygiene films #anti-semitism #puzzles to chew on

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architectnews · 3 years

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Chulalongkorn University presents 10 student design projects as part of INDA Parade

An educational programme based on a train and a cultural funhouse are included in Dezeen's latest school show by students at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand.

Also featured is a digital display exploring the river species in the Gulf of Thailand and a bus stop that also functions as a florist.

Chulalongkorn University, Thailand

School: Chulalongkorn University, Thailand Courses: Architecture Tutors: Design Studio Instructors, Dr. Surapong Lertsithichai, Dr Sorachai Kornkasem, Dr Scott Drake, Christo Meyer, Marie-Louise Raue, Tijn van de Wijdeven, Paul Francis Feeney, William Bertram Hulbert, Michal Jurgielewicz, Patrick Donbeck, Payap Pakdeelao, Pratana Klieopatinon, Takanao Todo, Thomas Lozada, Chon Supawongse, Ekapob Suksudpaisarn, Pitchapa Jular, Eduardo Cassina, Per Stefan Svedberg, Hseng Tai Lintner, Warisara Sudswong, Liva Dudareva, Oliver Losser, Juan Cuevas Duran, Ema Hana Kacar and Kamonsin Chathurattaphol Design team: Takanao Todo, Wasutop Viriyasuebpong, Nattha Dhamabutra and Santasak Apasuthirat Video Team: Wiput Vitayarueangdej and Thanapat Chintanapramote

School statement:

"INDA is the International Programme in Design and Architecture of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. It aims to nurture diversity in design approaches and methodologies based on a clear framework of constructive dialogue.

"The school is a four-year bachelor programme with a strong emphasis on design studios through architectural design, topics and methodologies relevant to contemporary architecture, with a particular focus on South East Asian dynamics and specificities. Although INDA has adopted architecture as its main course topic, it aims to show how architecture connects to other disciplines, such as landscape architecture and urban design.

"INDA Parade is the main event of the school held at the end of each academic year. It aims to enable the community of students, instructors, alumni, guests and the public to discover and celebrate students' works collectively as an ongoing conversation.

"Today, we are bridging between physical reality, AR/VR, and online platforms for communication. INDA annual student show, INDA Parade 2021 – The Butterfly Dream represents the seamless dialogues between these realities."

Atlas by Jew – Chinnapat Asavabenya

"Atlas is an autonomous digital platform created to govern change and enable the flow of data. To map time, the transaction, proposition, and interaction of our nature are discussed without making assumptions. Different systems and ideas of ownership are contextualised in various layers.

"Where the hierarchies of each layer are established through their relevancy among each inhabiting entity. Usage of the 'map' is done in parallel with the simulation of time, allowing us to envision the consequences of each decision consciously.

"Each map becomes an artefact of dialogue, an archive of the past discussion and simulation of the future."

Student: Jew – Chinnapat Asavabenya Course: Year Four, Semester Two Tutor: Michal Jurgielewicz Email: chinnapat.asavabenya[at]gmail.com

Bureau of the Urban Commons by Orm – Santhila Chanoknamchai

"The 'Bureau of the Urban Commons' is redefining the rule of engagement within the public realm of Bangkok through a series of civic-scale interventions that stitch the urban fabric vertically and horizontally.

"The project capitalises on the spatial potential of The Green Mile, a hidden 1.3-kilometre linear bridge that stitches across central Bangkok. It deploys multi-level connectivity strategies to promote active participation and co-creation engagement, operating on a feedback system expressed through the performative structures. Where along with the commonalities throughout the Green Mile, our everyday life would never be the same."

Student: Santhila Chanoknamchai Course: Year four, Semester one Tutor: Christo Meyer Email: Santhila.ch[at]gmail.com

Funhouse by BamBam – Rachapon Jidapasirikul

"The project challenges the notion of symbolism and ornament in architectural design. It explores a new typology of a public building, destabilising the increasingly obsolete libraries, cinemas and museums today.

"Instead, this building, its architecture, and its interior apparatus act as an interface between the physical world and the virtual world of the internet.

"Through a series of interactive sensory media rooms and AR and VR devices, visitors interface with information, education, communication, gaming, multimedia consumption, exhibitions and other forms of exchange. It is the spatialisation of the internet in the form of a recontextualised funhouse."

Student: BamBam – Rachapon Jidapasirikul Course: Year four, Semester two Tutor: Per Stefan Svedberg Email: rachapon.jidapasirikul[at]cuinda.com

Quarantine Cities: The Continuous Journey by Minnie – Anchalika Thepnumsommanus

"Quarantine Cities: The Continuous Journey" approaches the civic as an architecture for the instrumentalization of mental and emotional conditions as a consequence of the essential solitary quarantine during pandemic society.

"'Quarantine is a disease towards mental health', explores the possibility of offering 14-days quarantine as a continuous trip where travel is fearless."

Student: Minnie – Anchalika Thepnumsommanus Course: Year three, Semester two Tutor: Payap Pakdeelao

Against the Dry by Khem – Thongthat Harnvorrayothin

"This era's consummation of 'dryness' has contributed to the rise of inequality throughout architecture and society. Dryness criticizes the in-create disconnection between existing and new builds. This project compares 'wet' and 'dry' design. It explores architectural ideas and modern needs and how theory influences design in the contemporary era.

"It explores the connection between them, discussing the widespread usage of architectural approaches in modern design through the observation from indigenous living in Bangkachao Bangkok. The natural layer is separated from the concrete coating.

"It concludes with the utopian planning proposal, which touches on all the subjects that made the city more 'wet'. The plan was called "fluid design," which included the allocation of the site, the architecture, and the community."

Student: Khem – Thongthat Harnvorrayothin Course: Year three, Semester two Tutor: Eduardo Cassina Email: fahkhem[at]gmail.com

GoogleExpress by Than – Thanapat Limpanaset

"GoogleExpress is an educational programme situated within a train. It critiques traditional institutions, and is a proposal built off of the upcoming 'Google Institute' with the ambition to disrupt the college degree by launching a new programme on digital citizenship and business start-up.

"Google Culture is embedded in the programme, treating education as a hectic, crash course to be completed together alongside the company, allowing levels of intimacy to be formed in every aspect of life on the train.

"To conquer the train, it strips away schedules, exams and uniforms and pushes friendships and connections, where the emphasis is not the courses, but a rather hectic sprint towards digital citizenship. Here, trainees are fully in control of their own education."

Student: Than – Thanapat Limpanaset Course: Year three, Semester one Tutor: Liva Dudareva Email: Tansinstagram[at]gmail.com

Responsible Incinerated Passing (R.I.P.) by Poon - Tassaporn Sukhumhanakul

"Responsible Incinerated Passing (R.I.P.) is a site-specific methodology that aims to offset the carbon emitted into the atmosphere of Bangkok in the process of cremation.

"R.I.P. merges the technology of direct air capture with the sensitivity of Buddhist belief and aims to not only redesign the three existing temple typologies (the temple for The Commoners, The Monks, and The King) to decrease their environmental harm, but also acts as a behavioural guide on how to reduce one's carbon footprint, both before and after your remains are emitted into the sky, in the form of harmless mist rather than smoke."

Student: Poon - Tassaporn Sukhumhanakul Course: Year two, Semester two Tutor: Ema Hana Kacar Email: sukhumdhanakul.t[at]gmail.com and poonsukhumdhanakul[at]gmail.com

Dressed for the dead by Pann – Nara Lojanatorn

"This project investigates a range of informal to formal outfits. They are explored through contrasting rituals of the Teochew Cemetery, the everyday routine of a cemetery that has become a public park and an annual gathering place for ancestral worship.

"The typology of the cemetery presents no end. The tomb tiers are developed from traditional tombstone forms and construction, while the wood scaffold facilitates changing activities throughout the years. The visits may cease, but the spirit remains."

Student: Pann – Nara Lojanatorn Course: Year two, Semester one Tutor: Pratana Klieopatinon Email: pannnara[at]gmail.com

The Crustacean by Poon – Poonyapa Arakwatan

"The Crustacean explores the sea and river species in the Saen Saeb canal and the Gulf of Thailand. It is a series of cabinets of curiosities inspired by exoskeleton sea creatures and the darkness of the polluted canal.

"To express aesthetic sea creatures through digital display in contrast to pollution caused by people living along Saen Saeb canal and to encourage people to take responsibility for our waterways and the ocean.

"The cabinet includes two main displays; the AR texture is hidden in part of the cabinet, and the VR effect for experiencing the whole cabinet creatures come alive in the digital world."

Student: Poon – Poonyapa Arakwatan Course: Year one, Semester two Tutor: Per Stefan Svedberg Email: poonyapaarakwatana[at]gmail.com

The Petal of Time by Poon – Poonyapa Arakwatan

"Every place has character uniqueness, similar to Wat Kheak (Sri Maha Mariamman Temple) Hindu temple. Focusing on transportation and the rotting process of organics offering to the god, The Petal of Time is a kiosk where arrival and departure are waiting for the bus and interacting with flowers.

"The main programmes of The Petal of Time are the bus stop and the flower shop. Providing an opportunity for passengers waiting for the bus, buying flowers, and composting them after use. The essential concept that makes these programmes run harmoniously is inspired by organic transformation."

Student: Poon – Poonyapa Arakwatan Course: Year one, Semester one Tutor: Patrick Donbeck Email: poonyapaarakwatana[at]gmail.com

Partnership content

This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post Chulalongkorn University presents 10 student design projects as part of INDA Parade appeared first on Dezeen.

#Architecture – Dezeen

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headlesssamurai · 6 years

Note

Your thoughts on the new Star Wars?

[Disclaimer: The following is sarcasm targeted at social trends and contrarians the world-over. If it offends you, buck it up and have a fucking sense of humor.]

A Completely Serious Breakdown OfStar Wars: The Last Jedi

by Anita Sarkeesian & Rachel Maddow

To begin, let’s just say the best format in which to write anything on the internets is by breaking it down into a comprehensive list for no goddamn reason, other than maybe the idea that lots of people like to read lists or something because it feels a lot less like reading, and lots of people dislike reading. Right? Right.Thus, the following is a list of reasons why Star Wars: The Last Jedi is an atrocity bordering on Nagasaki levels of horror.WARNING: The following will contain spoilers and angsty disappointment.

1. Not enough transgender charactersThis one is clearly a no-brainer. Every respectable sell-out of a Hollywood screenwriter ought to know by now that their movie should contain at least one transgender, one gender-fluid, one gender neutral, and one tri-sexual character, if not more. And this is especially true in bombastic, overblown blockbusters. It disgusts me to see them disregard such a large percentage of their viewership. I know they tried to placate us with the pink-haired drag queen admiral who takes command after Leia is incapacitated, and the Asian kid who is running around with Finn the entire movie, but these characters seemed more like afterthoughts than anything else. To see them be so cavalier and conservative with their dramatis personae is just shameless.

2. It supports animal murderRight off the bat, we’re treated to a horrific scene in which Luke Skywalker, previously a shining beautiful example of a peaceful pacifist Zen master, is shown violently murdering an innocent fish with a barbed spear, then casually carrying the poor slaughtered animal back to his hut like a caveman. If that’s not enough, we later see Chewbacca, previously the most non-violent and docile character in the entire franchise, roasting a poor decapitated penguin on a spit over an open fire like some uncivilized neanderthal. Did he skin the creature while it was still alive? Perhaps we’ll never know, but it was clearly murdered with an intent to eat, and the Wookie carelessly roasts the creature’s remains in full view of its mournful cousins who must be wondering which of them will be next for bloody execution. This blatant disregard for the lives of the magical, peaceful animals of nature is truly horrifying. I can’t imagine how the filmmakers could be this vulgar. For achieving such advanced levels of technology, the people of this galaxy sure behave like feral savages.

3. Not enough wacky comedyI know there was a scene in which a confused elderly woman plays the general of an army, a riff on Karate Kid, an awkward reference to deep throating, a robot doing its best Solid Snake impression, a little kid getting mercilessly whipped by a character from a Pixar movie, Yoda acting like a weirdo again, furry anime creatures making cute noises, a guy getting unexpectedly electrocuted, enough bad dialogue to fill a Star Destroyer’s cargo hold, a fucking prank phone call scene in a Star Wars movie, and Benicio Del Toro’s face; but still. This movie could’ve used more comedy. This is made by Disney, after all, the same studio who gave us Guardians of the Fallacy, I mean every gag in that movie is just such a fucking knee-slapper, you know? Goddamn.

4. Too much explicit sexualityI was very glad to see that in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens Disney decided to completely sever all of the vulgar and explicit sexuality depicted in every previous Star Wars film, particularly making certain this new portrayal of the galaxy was as sterile and sexless as a Dominican cloister. However, they’ve decided to flush that newfound dignity down the fucking toilet with this film. You all know what I’m talking about. There is a single scene in this movie where one character kisses another character on the lips. I know it’s just a little peck, but that’s just too much. This movie is vulgar, kids should not see it. Don’t even get me started on Kylo Ren’s sexy shirtlessness, Snoke’s pervy sex offender vibes, and all of Rey’s wet t-shirt scenes.

5. Not enough Han SoloHan Solo isn’t in this movie. ‘Nuff said.

6. Female heroine needs a manRemember Rey? That amazing, strong feminist icon from Episode VII who could do anything, fix a ship, fly a ship, shoot a gun, wield a laser sword, speak any language, and conquer anyone who stood in her path? Yeah, that girl decided to take a nap in this movie. You guessed it, she’s all fire and energy, yet the moment she sees Kylo Ren’s sweaty shirtless abs this new Rey can’t resist and falls head-over-heels for a guy who tried to slice her in half the first time they met. I mean, nothing comes of it, thank god! But seriously Disney? This is just lazy writing, and feminists everywhere should boycott this movie and fire-bomb any theater still showing it, along with all the homes of those who buy tickets to support it.

7. Too much talkingAgain, this movie was made by Disney, right? So why the hell is all the talking filled with so much boring character-driven dialogue, and not a goofy joke or lyrics in a sing-a-long? I cannot imagine how they expected to tap their drooling Marvel MCU fanbase with this many narrative-relevant scenes of people talking which don’t include funny gags or nerdy references from a Tony Stark-esque character. What a disappointment.

8. Not enough racial diversityI know there’s a Spanish-Puerto Rican man, a black man, a Guatemalan man, two Vietnamese women, a few white people, another black guy, a Wookie, the previously mentioned drag queen, a Mon Calamari, some other aliens visible when they go to Monte Carlo, and whatever alien that one dude was; but still. That’s only representing a few out of, like, hundreds of thousands of other ethnic groups all over the planet, not to mention the millions if not billions of alien species throughout the galaxy whose children have no characters to look up to in this movie. The distinct lack of Jews was most jarring for me, and I wouldn’t hazard to call this film anti-Semitic exactly, but it does make you pause for contemplation.

9. Glorification of violenceDo I really need to say this out loud? Holy shit. There is so much violence in this movie it makes me nauseous. People blowing people up, decapitation and dismemberment, savagely beating each other to death with clubs, animals being whipped, children being whipped (even if it’s funny, it’s still violent), casino patrons being violently trampled to death by stampeding anime creatures, bodies being engulfed by fiery explosions, explosions engulfing explosions, and at least two cases of fanatically intentional suicide which result in the violent death of hundreds if not thousands of others. All told, it’s one of the most violent movies released this year, with a body count that likely surpasses Man of Steel and the first Avengers film combined. How can audiences be this bloodthirsty? It��s just, I don’t know, sickening. You fandom kids should renounce yourselves and practice self-flagellation, as far as I’m concerned.

10. It supports child slave soldiersIn the very first scene, the character Poe Dameron supports a group of Resistance bombers who are trying to destroy a First Order dreadnought. We see the flight leader protecting the bombers is a young girl who couldn’t be older than twelve piloting an A-wing fighter and mercilessly blasting TIE fighters out of the sky. Forgetting the fact that war is already traumatic for fully grown adults, how is the Resistance okay with putting a child in harm’s way like that? I’m astounded. This is so controversial, I can’t believe it isn’t being hotly debated by mouthbreathers all over the internets.

11. Not enough lightsabersLikely the film’s biggest transgression of all. It’s a well-known fact that the mindless drooling fans who attend the cult gatherings known as Star Wars Celebrations and sew their own costumes to wear to premieres (only to turn around and hatefully review the film later on YouTube) only really want to see one thing: lots and lots of lightsaber battles. That’s the only thing Star Wars has going for it these days, after all. And this time nobody bangs a lightsaber against another lightsaber even once. Not once in the entire movie! Jesus, Joseph, and doggy-style Mary! What pointless drivel. I’m considering petitioning the studio for a bid to get my money back after seeing this farce. Don’t they know anything about what makes Star Wars great?

Parthian shotsDespite all of these many, many flaws, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi is not entirely without merit. There are some cool CGI effects in almost every scene, for one thing. Throughout the film we also learn some very valuable life lessons, such as:- Anime creatures have invulnerable faces that can smash through anything without the slightest injury.- Shields work best when gunfire is coming from very far away.- Any man in a position of power is either irredeemably evil or an impulsive and weak-willed incompetent fool.- All roads lead to failure.- The best way to be good at something is by sucking at it.- It’s okay for bystanders to be violently trampled to death so long as they’re rich.- All law enforcement officers are evil corrupt bastards.- Freeing captive animals is more important than freeing the slave children who tend to them.- And the only way to win a war is through the magical power of love, even if the enemy is in the process of blowing up your friends while you’re deliriously saying so.

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Huzzah.

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