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otakusapien · 4 years

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@tauntedoctopuses

The WHAT???

In reference to this post. More specifically, it’s called The Bunny Song.

I’m tempted to leave it at that because it’s funnier, but I gotta talk about this.

The Bunny Song is an idolotry song about a chocolate bunny. (I love that sentence)

It’s from the episode Rack, Shack, and Benny, summarized beautifully in this post as

Bible version: since they won't bow down before an idol, the king has them burned alive

Veggie Tales version: since they won't bow down before a chocolate bunny, the manager has them burned alive

Rack, Shack, and Benny work in a chocolate bunny factory where their boss loves the bunny so much, he wants his employees to start worshipping it by singing a song he wrote about how great the bunny is.

Original: The bunny. The bunny. Whoa, I love the bunny. I don't love my mom or my dad, just the bunny. The bunny. The bunny. Yeah, I love the bunny. I gave everything that I had for the bunny. I don't want no health food when it's time to feed. A big bag o' bunnies is all that I need. I don't want no buddies to come out and play. I'll sit on my sofa, eat bunnies all day. I won't go to church, and I won't go to school. That stuff is for sissies, but bunnies are cool!

Let me tell you, the “I don’t go to church” line has gotten gasps from little kids who didn’t know you could do that.

The episode goes as stated above, and the manager is reformed after realizing he almost killed 3 people over a chocolate bunny witnessing a miracle.

You may notice The Bunny Song is a villain song. To make it more obvious, the guy singing it plays the villain in almost every other Veggie Tales skit and is named Nebby K. Nezzer, after someone who’s basically a recurring villain in the Old Testement. It’s supposed to be wrong and bad.

That didn’t stop so many parents complaining that their children were singing this monstrosity about loving a bunny over their parents and not going to school that the company was forced to rewrite the song for sing-a-long videos and all future versions of the episodes. It’s even hard to find versions on youtube.

Censored version: The bunny, the bunny, whoa I love the bunny. I don't love my soup or my bread, just the bunny. The bunny, the bunny, Yeah I love the bunny. I gave everything that I had for the bunny. I don't want no health food when it's time to feed. A big bag o' bunnies is all that I need. I don't want no buddies to come out and play. I'll sit on my sofa eat bunnies all day. I won't eat no beans, and I won't eat tofu, That stuff is for sissies, but bunnies are cool!

They kept most of the lyrics the same, but they changed the most important parts. They completely changed the meaning to be about eating healthy, which kills the entire point of the parable. They took the idolotry out of the idolotry episode.

Also they tried to rhyme “tofu” with “cool” and that crap should not stand.

TL;DR Instead of being about idolotry and standing up to people who force their beliefs on you, they made it about standing up to people who encourage you to eat junk food.

#long post #veggie tales #This is super reflective of how mainstream American Christianity views religion even coming from the same group.#They don’t like anything that challenges you no matter what the intent.#Nothing that even suggests disrespect for your parents/the church/authority #regardless of the fact he was /meant to be wrong/#They just heard their kids singing about how they didn’t love mom and dad #and church and school were for sissies and got angry enough #to literally make the showrunners change the song’s entire meaning.#bc apparently children can't think and will ignore every other part of the episode that says this was bad /s/#there is just no critical thinking from the PARENTS here and it just really speaks #to how little deep/critical thinking and challenging is allowed in the church #no matter what the context #that even this gets them angry and makes them feel threatened

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howelljenkins · 4 years

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As a muslim Iraqi American with a significant tumblr following, I feel as though I should let it be known exactly where I stand when it comes to Riordan’s statement about Samirah. I have copied and pasted it down below and my reaction to it will be written down below. This will be the first time I have read it. If you want to engage with me or tell me that I’m wrong, I expect you to be a muslim, hijabi, Iraqi American, and from Baghdad. If you are not, I suggest you sit down and keep quiet because you are not the authority on the way I should be represented.

Like many of my characters, Samirah was inspired by former students of mine. Over the course of my middle school teaching career, I worked with dozens of Muslim students and their families, representing the expanse of the Muslim world and both Shia and Sunni traditions. One of my most poignant memories about the September 11, 2001, attack of the World Trade Center was when a Muslima student burst into tears when she heard the news – not just because it was horrific, but also because she knew what it meant for her, her family, her faith. She had unwillingly become an ambassador to everyone she knew who, would have questions about how this attack happened and why the perpetrators called themselves “Muslim.” Her life had just become exponentially more difficult because of factors completely beyond her control. It was not right. It was not fair. And I wasn’t sure how to comfort or support her.

Starting off your statement with one of the most traumatic events in history for muslim Americans is already one of the most predictably bad moves he could pull. By starting off this way, you are acknowledging the fact that a) this t*rrorist attack is still the first thing you think of when you think of muslims and b) that those muslim students who you had prior to 9/11 occupied so little space in your mind that it took a national disaster for you to start to even try to empathize with them.

During the following years, I tried to be especially attuned to the needs of my Muslim students. I dealt with 9/11 the same way I deal with most things: by reading and learning more. When I taught world religions in social studies, I would talk to my Muslim students about Islam to make sure I was representing their experience correctly. They taught me quite a bit, which eventually contributed to my depiction of Samirah al-Abbas. As always, though, where I have made mistakes in my understanding, those mistakes are wholly on me.

As always, you have chosen to use “I based this character off my students” in order to justify the way they are written. News flash: you taught middle school children. Children who are already scrutinized and alienated and desperate to fit in. Of course their words shouldn’t be enough for you to decide you are representing them correctly, because they are still coming to terms with their identities and they are doing this in an environment where they are desperate to find the approval of white Americans. I know that as a child I would often tweak the way I explained my culture and religion to my teachers in order to gain their approval and avoid ruffling any feathers. They told you what they thought you’d want to hear because you are their teacher and hold a position of power over them and they both want your approval and want to avoid saying the wrong thing and having that hang over their heads every time they enter your classroom.

What did I read for research? I have read five different English interpretations of the Qur’an. (I understand the message is inseparable from the original Arabic, so it cannot be considered ‘translated’). I have read the entirety of the Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim hadith collections. I’ve read three biographies of Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) and well over a dozen books about the history of Islam and modern Islam. I took a six-week course in Arabic. (I was not very good at it, but I found it fascinating). I fasted the month of Ramadan in solidarity with my students. I even memorized some of the surahs in Arabic because I found the poetry beautiful. (They’re a little rusty now, I’ll admit, but I can still recite al-Fātihah from memory.) I also read some anti-Islamic screeds written in the aftermath of 9/11 so I would understand what those commenters were saying about the religion, and indirectly, about my students. I get mad when people attack my students.

And yet here you are actively avoiding the criticism from those of us who could very well have been the children sitting in your classroom.

The Quran is so deep and complex that its meanings are still being discovered to this day. Yes, reading these old scripts is a must for writing muslim characters, but you cannot claim to understand them without also holding active discussions with current scholars on how the Quran’s teachings apply today.

When preparing to write Samirah’s background, I drew on all of this, but also read many stories on Iraqi traditions and customs in particular and the experiences of immigrant families who came to the U.S. I figured out how Samirah’s history would intertwine with the Norse world through the medieval writer Ahmad ibn Fadhlan, her distant ancestor and one of the first outsiders to describe the Vikings in writing. I knew Samirah would be a ferocious brave fighter who always stood for what was right. She would be an excellent student who had dreams of being an aviator. She would have a complicated personal situation to wrestle with, in that she’s a practicing Muslim who finds out Valhalla is a real place. Odin and Thor and Loki are still around. How do you reconcile that with your faith? Not only that, but her mom had a romance with Loki, who is her dad. Yikes.

First of all, writing this paragraph in the same tone you use to emulate a 12 year old is already disrespectful. “Yikes” is correct. You have committed serious transgressions and can’t even commit to acting serious and writing like the almost 60 year old man that you are. Tone tells the reader a lot, and your tone is telling me that you are explaining your mistakes the same way you tell your little stories: childishly and jokingly.

Stories are not enough. They are not and never will be. Stories cannot even begin to pierce the rich culture and history and customs of Iraq. Iraq itself is not even homogenous enough for you to rely on these “Iraqi” stories. Someone’s story from Najaf is completely unique from someone from Baghdad or Nasriyyah or Basrah or Mosul. Add that to the fact that these stories are written with a certain audience in mind and you realize that there’s no way they can tell the whole story because at their core they are catering to a specific audience.

Yes, those are good, but they are meaningless without you consulting an actual Baghdadi and asking specific questions. You made conclusions and assumptions based on these stories when the obvious way to go was to consult someone from Baghdad every step of the writing process. Instead, you chose to trust the conclusions that you (a white man) drew from a handful of stories. Who are you to convey a muslim’s internal struggle when you did not even do the bare minimum and have an actual muslim read over your words?

Thankfully, the feedback from Muslim readers over the years to Samirah al-Abbas has been overwhelmingly positive. I have gotten so many letters and messages online from young fans, talking about how much it meant to them to see a hijabi character portrayed in a positive light in a ‘mainstream’ novel.

Yeah. Because we’re desperate, and half of them are children still developing their sense of self and critical reading skills. A starving man will thank you for moldy bread but that does not negate the mold.

Some readers had questions, sure! The big mistake I will totally own, and which I have apologized for many times, was my statement that during the fasting hours of Ramadan, bathing (i.e. total immersion in water) was to be avoided. This was advice I had read on a Shia website when I myself was preparing to fast Ramadan. It is advice I followed for the entire month. Whoops! The intent behind that advice, as I understood it, was that if you totally immersed yourself during daylight hours, you might inadvertently get some water between your lips and invalidate your fast. But, as I have since learned, that was simply one teacher’s personal opinion, not a widespread practice. We have corrected this detail (which involved the deletion of one line) in future editions, but as I mentioned in my last post, you will still find it in copies since the vast majority of books are from the first printing.

This is actually really embarrassing for you and speaks to your lack of research and reading comprehension. It is true that for shia, immersion breaks one’s fast. If you had bothered to actually ask questions and use common sense, you would realize that this is referring to actions like swimming, where one’s whole body is underwater, rather than bathing. Did you not question the fact that the same religion that encourages the cleansing of oneself five times a day banned bathing during the holiest month? Yes, it was one teacher’s opinion, but you literally did not even take the time to fully understand that opinion before chucking it into your book.

Another question was about Samirah’s wearing of the hijab. To some readers, she seemed cavalier about when she would take it off and how she would wear it. It’s not my place to be prescriptive about proper hijab-wearing. As any Muslim knows, the custom and practice varies greatly from one country to another, and from one individual to another. I can, however, describe what I have seen in the U.S., and Samirah’s wearing of the hijab reflects the practice of some of my own students, so it seemed to be within the realm of reason for a third-generation Iraqi-American Muslima. Samirah would wear hijab most of the time — in public, at school, at mosque. She would probably but not always wear it in Valhalla, as she views this as her home, and the fallen warriors as her own kin. This is described in the Magnus Chase books. I also admit I just loved the idea of a Muslima whose hijab is a magic item that can camouflage her in times of need.

Before I get into this paragraph, Samirah is second generation. Her grandparents immigrated from Iraq. Her mother was first gen.

Once again, you turn to what you have seen from your students, who are literal children. They are in middle school while Samirah is in high school, so they are very obviously at different stages of development, both emotional and religious. If you had bothered to talk to adults who had gone through these stages, you would understand that often times young girls have stages where they “practice” hijab or wear it “part time”, very often in middle school. However, both her age and the way in which you described Samirah lead the reader to believe that she is a “full timer,” so you playing willy nilly with her scarf as a white man is gross.

For someone who claims to have read all of these religious texts, it’s funny that you choose to overlook the fact that “kin” is very specifically described. Muslims do not go around deciding who they consider “kin” or “family” to take off their hijab in front of. There is no excuse for including this in her character, especially since you claim to have carefully read the Quran and ahadith.

You have no place to “just love” any magical extension of the hijab until you approach it with respect. Point blank period. Especially when you have ascribed it a magical property that justifies her taking it on and off like it’s no big deal, especially when current media portrayals of hijab almost always revolve around it being removed. You are adding to the harmful portrayal and using your “fun little magic camoflauge” to excuse it.

As for her betrothal to Amir Fadhlan, only recently have I gotten any questions about this. My understanding from my readings, and from what I have been told by Muslims I know, is that arranged marriages are still quite common in many Muslim countries (not just Muslim countries, of course) and that these matches are sometimes negotiated by the families when the bride-to-be and groom-to-be are quite young. Prior to writing Magnus Chase, one of the complaints I often heard or read from Muslims is how Westerners tend to judge this custom and look down on it because it does not accord with Western ideas. Of course, arranged marriages carry the potential for abuse, especially if there is an age differential or the woman is not consulted. Child marriages are a huge problem. The arrangement of betrothals years in advance of the marriage, however, is an ancient custom in many cultures, and those people I know who were married in this way have shared with me how glad they were to have done it and how they believe the practice is unfairly villainized. My idea with Samirah was to flip the stereotype of the terrible abusive arranged match on its head, and show how it was possible that two people who actually love each other dearly might find happiness through this traditional custom when they have families that listen to their concerns and honor their wishes, and want them to be happy. Amir and Samirah are very distant cousins, yes. This, too, is hardly unusual in many cultures. They will not actually marry until they are both adults. But they have been betrothed since childhood, and respect and love each other. If that were not the case, my sense is that Samirah would only have to say something to her grandparents, and the match would be cancelled. Again, most of the comments I have received from Muslim readers have been to thank me for presenting traditional customs in a positive rather than a negative light, not judging them by Western standards. In no way do I condone child marriage, and that (to my mind) is not anywhere implied in the Magnus Chase books.

I simply can’t even begin to explain everything that is wrong with this paragraph. Here is a good post about how her getting engaged at 12 is absolutely wrong religiously and would not happen. Add that on to the fact that Samirah herself is second-generation (although Riordan calls her third generation in this post) and this practice isn’t super common even in first generation people (and for those that it DOES apply to, it is when they are old enough to be married and not literal children).

As a white man you can’t flip the stereotype. You can’t. Even with tons of research you cannot assume the authority to “flip” a stereotype that does not affect you because you will never come close to truly understanding it inside and out. Instead of flipping a stereotype, Rick fed into it and provided more fodder to the flames and added on to it to make it even worse.

I would be uncomfortable with a white author writing about arranged marriages in brown tradition no matter the context, but for him to offhandedly include it in a children’s book where it is badly explained and barely touched on is inexcusable. Your target audience is children who will no doubt overlook your clumsy attempt at flipping stereotypes.

It does not matter what your mind thinks you are implying. Rick Riordan is not your target audience, children are. So you cannot brush this away by stating that you did not see the harm done by your writing. You are almost 60 years old. Maybe you can read in between your lines, but I guarantee your target audience largely cannot.

Finally, recently someone on Twitter decided to screenshot a passage out-of-context from Ship of the Deadwhere Magnus hears Samirah use the phrase “Allahu Akbar,” and the only context he has ever heard it in before was in news reports when some Western reporter would be talking about a terrorist attack. Here is the passage in full:

Samirah: “My dad may have power over me because he’s my dad. But he’s not the biggest power. Allahu akbar.”

I knew that term, but I’d never heard Sam use it before. I’ll admit it gave me an instinctive jolt in the gut. The news media loved to talk about how terrorists would say that right before they did something horrible and blew people up. I wasn’t going to mention that to Sam. I imagined she was painfully aware.

She couldn’t walk the streets of Boston in her hijab most days without somebody screaming at her to go home, and (if she was in a bad mood) she’d scream back, “I’m from Dorchester!”

“Yeah,” I said. “That means God is great, right?”

Sam shook her head. “That’s a slightly inaccurate translation. It means God is greater.”

“Than what?”

“Everything. The whole point of saying it is to remind yourself that God is greater than whatever you are facing—your fears, your problems, your thirst, your hunger, your anger.

337-338

To me, this is Samirah educating Magnus, and through him the readers, about what this phrase actually means and the religious significance it carries. I think the expression is beautiful and profound. However, like a lot of Americans, Magnus has grown up only hearing about it in a negative context from the news. For him to think: “I had never heard that phrase, and it carried absolutely no negative connotations!” would be silly and unrealistic. This is a teachable moment between two characters, two friends who respect each other despite how different they are. Magnus learns something beautiful and true about Samirah’s religion, and hopefully so do the readers. If that strikes you as Islamophobic in its full context, or if Samirah seems like a hurtful stereotype . . . all I can say is I strongly disagree.

I will give you some credit here in that I mostly agree with this scene. The phrase does carry negative connotations with many white people and I do not fault you for explaining it the way you did. However, don’t try to sneak in that last sentence like we won’t notice. You have no place to decide whether or not Samirah’s character as a whole is harmful and stereotypical.

It is 2 am and that is all I have the willpower to address. This is messy and this is long and this is not well worded, but this had to be addressed. I do not speak for every muslim, both world wide and within this online community, but these were my raw reactions to his statement. I have been working on and will continue to work on a masterpost of Samirah Al-Abbas as I work through the books, but for now, let it be known that Riordan has bastardized my identity and continues to excuse himself and profit off of enforcing harmful stereotypes. Good night.

#*#og #rr crit #samirah al abbas #rick riordan

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iron--spider · 4 years

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I woke up at 3am yesterday to watch The Devil All the Time and I’ve been thinking about it since. I’m gonna put my thoughts and feelings and a review of sorts behind the cut, because I am gonna talk about it freely, so there will be spoilers! So don’t click if you don’t wanna see. I’ll also be discussing the content of the film and I know that might bother people, so that stuff is in here, too! And it’ll be really long because you know I can’t shut up.

So, I loved it. I loved it loved it loved it. I read the book a long time ago when I first found out Tom was gonna be in it, and the only problem I had with the book was that the POVs would change in the middle of a paragraph lmao, but other than that I thought it was pretty perfect. I knew the movie was gonna be pretty brutal, because the book is brutal, so I was prepared.

-BUT I think the critics HIGHLY HIGHLY exaggerated how bad the content was. Like, seriously, they acted as if this was gonna be a Saw movie. I was preparing for blatant, horrific gore, but it didn’t live up to their dramatics at all. There’s blood and nasty situations, but every single episode of Game of Thrones is worse than this movie, as are most episodes of any crime drama on a paid network. I actually thought they were super, super tactful of all their horrific shit. The dog death was off screen and the shot of the body (described by the critics as literally traumatic) was so quick (enough to shut your eyes) and in the dark. I also argue that particular moment is extremely important for Arvin’s journey, because it’s the moment he truly turns on his father and turns on religion entirely, and he carries it with him his whole life (it’s what he flashes back to when he says “I know what my daddy did” because it’s the marker of all Willard’s mistakes) and it winds up being one of the last things he does before he leaves everything behind. Burying Jack’s bones. So, like, I despise dog death or any animal death in my entertainment, but it’s important here and handled well. And all the worst death scenes are either extremely fast (Helen’s and Gary Matthew’s) or shown in negative (all the photos). I think Bodecker’s headshot with Bobo is probably the worst and is also pretty quick. I don’t know if this means I’m a jaded bitch, but God the way they were all whining and crying, I thought it’d be a million times worse. It could have been, with the book’s descriptions, so it was actually pretty tame. Lenora’s death affected me the most and they cut away from that, too. I guess it’ll still bother some people, but there are many, many mainstream things that are far more violent and gory than this was.

-I thought it was a beautiful movie. I never mind films that are slightly slower but I love ones that use their time to lay things out and really show us what’s going on, build the ambiance and the relationships. I loved the narration (which I was worried about), and it really made me feel like we were visiting a moment in time that was important. Like something that was written and should be learned about. Rumors in a town you’re passing through. The ghosts of past trauma and transgressions looming over everyone that’s left.

-I liked the changes they made with Roy and Theodore because I thought that storyline kinda meandered in the book and I’m glad that Roy was actually gone the whole time and not just neglecting to come back to Lenora.

-The only real complaints I can make, I’ll get out of the way here: I wanted a little bit more time with Carl and Sandy. Carl was really creepy, but he could have been much creepier. In the book he was the one looking at the pictures constantly, Not Sandy, and that really showed that he was the one with the sickness, the one pushing them forward and orchestrating it all. I thought they did well with showing how Sandy deteriorated in her efforts with him through the years, but I would have liked to see a bit more of their personal lives together and her fear of him and her genuine feelings about what they’re doing, because the book goes into that a lot more. I also wasn’t a fan of Lee finding the picture early and knowing some about what they were doing, because I liked how it was a surprise to him in the book and yet he still did all he could to cover it up. And lastly, in the book there’s a scene with Arvin after he kills Sandy and Carl where he’s in a motel and he takes like 18 showers because he can’t get the grime of what he’s done off of him, and he looks at the picture and has a nightmare about killing Sandy, and I really would have loved if they’d kept it in. It would have been another ‘acting’ moment for Tom, and it would have been nice for us to see his direct trauma and reaction to everything that’s piling on top of him.

-BUT that’s it. I loved pretty much every single other thing and decision that they made. The cinematography was TOP NOTCH. You could tell they filmed on 35mm film, you could see the grain, and it really, really added to it. Antonio Campos is a very skilled director and I trusted him at the helm of this story. Everything looked so authentic, all the sets and the costumes. The soundtrack and score were AMAZING and enhanced the film. Technically it was just perfect in every regard to me.

-Acting! Acting! God this was like...a massive testament to the casting department and the talent of these people. Everyone was on their A game. Bill Skarsgård has been on my radar since Castle Rock (which I recommend to everybody, both seasons) and he was so natural and great in this role. Haley Bennet was absolutely adorable as Charlotte, I loved her cute face and her sweet relationship with little Arvin. Riley Keough was so great as Sandy with the limited amount of time she had, and Jason Clarke is one of my favorites but he was unrecognizable in this as creepy ass Carl. Harry Melling was a far cry from Dudley Dursley and he did a great job with his screen time, too. Same with Mia Wasikowska, who didn’t have much to do (same as poor Helen in the book) but she was able to garner our sympathy anyway. Seb Stan was slimy and gross but he pulled it off so well. Eliza Scanlen has been one of my favorites since Sharp Objects (another one that’s brutal as hell but I recommend it, she’s so scary) and she was so, so great here. Robert Pattinson was ALRIGHT, everybody talks him up over this but he felt a little hammy to me and a little too over the top, but there’s no denying his talent.

-Now, the reason we’re all here. Tom. My God. As soon as it was over I just didn’t know what the hell to do, I didn’t even know how to....go on, lmfao. We all know he’s talented, that’s why we’re here, that’s why we love him, but his performance in this is just BEYOND all that. Beyond comprehension. The man is only 24 years old and he’s out here outacting people who have been in the industry for longer than he’s been alive. He is SHOCKINGLY good. I knew he’d be perfect for Arvin as soon as I read the book, but he just completely embodied this role in a way that I couldn’t have imagined. He doesn’t show up in the movie until about 45 minutes in (which doesn’t hurt it because of the strength of the leadup, Bill’s performance and the performance of little Arvin’s actor) but God, as soon as he’s there the whole thing comes to life in a way that it hadn’t before. Tom is literally just a shining light, and he draws your eye in every single scene he’s in, and when he’s not there you’re wondering when he’s gonna come back. Arvin, to me, is a very complex character—he has been inherently changed by how his father twisted religion in his childhood, how deeply he betrayed him by his behavior, but he still has a kind heart and a protective streak and the need to be strong despite the pain nearly breaking him apart from moment to moment. Tom is just outrageously good at portraying all Arvin’s little nuances, how he clenches his jaw, how his voice breaks when he’s afraid or trying to convince someone of something or get his point across, how his hands tremble after he’s done something he wishes he didn’t have to do, how his whole body wilts when he realizes he’s emulating his father. And his eyes. Tom can do so, so much with his eyes that it’s unbelievable. He tells you so much with just a simple look, a glance, a wince, a long blink. I’m not exaggerating when I say he’s just an absolute revelation in this, he cements his place in Hollywood with a firm hand and a tender look, and I will not be forgetting what he did here anytime soon. There’s a reason that everyone called him out for being so stunning in this. He is magnificent. He has a gift.

-I wanna say, in particular, how much I love Arvin’s relationship with Lenora. Their lives were both marked by such tragedy and pain and Arvin just took up the torch of protecting her from the moment he said hello as a child. He wants so badly to be tough, and he IS, but there’s just miles and miles of love in this boy’s heart, and it manifests itself for his family—for his uncle, for his grandma, but for Lenora in particular. I loved how he just showed up when she was being harassed and just ran in there without thinking, and it’s purely devastating that he was out taking care of her bullies while a worse predator was cornering her. The scene where she was sick wasn’t in the book but it was a beautiful addition. Tom sometimes wears this very open, unguarded, honest expression, and this is the only scene in which he shows it, and it really expresses the love between them and how much she means to him. Arvin didn’t find Lenora’s body in the book, but it was the right change for them to make. Tom was devastating here, and that pain and that moment truly fuel every second of his journey through the rest of the film. “My Lenora”. The saddest siblings. Both Eliza and Tom did so beautifully with this relationship and I hope they work together again.

-Favorite acting moments for Tom: when he’s in the car in the rain after beating up the bullies, when he’s in the church crowd and realizes Preston is insulting his Grandma (the way his face changes oh my GOD), when he finds Lenora, when the cop comes to tell him Lenora was pregnant (this is just....so damn good), when he was telling his uncle to look after his Grandma, THE ENTIRE CHURCH CONFRONTATION (the way he trembles when he’s trying to get his attention, how he speaks the whole time, how he slowly gathers his strength), when he thinks Sandy has shot him, the moment where he’s over Lee’s body and just....pleading with his eyes for him to listen and realize what he’s done. And the last scene, in the car, all the emphasis on his face....once again, he can do so, so much with a look, with his eyes. Someone called out the beautiful last shot in the film, and of course, it’s Arvin’s sleeping face. And it was so beautiful (and devastating, to think of him enlisting. Tom draws so much sympathy that you just want Arvin to have a normal life so badly. He deserves it, he does, but will he get it?)

-Last thing I’ll say, I really loved how, despite turning his back on religion, that God seems to be protecting Arvin the whole time. He’s terribly afraid confronting the preacher and that could have easily gone badly, especially when he tosses the book, but Arvin was somehow able to get a shot off and get the upper hand. And with Carl and Sandy, he senses something is off immediately once they pull off the road, and he would have absolutely been killed had Carl not switched out Sandy’s bullets for blanks. And in the confrontation with Lee, he once again shoots at the same time as him, shoots without looking, and manages to come out unscathed and on top. A few spoiler reviews pointed out that the last person that picks Arvin up is supposed to be a Jesus-like figure, almost like he’s finally been saved. It hurts that everyone around him that he loved is almost forsaken by God, but he himself is protected. It’s such a complicated commentary on religion throughout the entire piece, but it’s so interesting and engrossing.

So I’d recommend this movie to anyone that loves movies, loves Tom, can deal with a gritty story that takes its time laying out all the chess pieces. It is definitely heavy subject matter but it doesn’t go overboard with the horror as it easily could have. Yes, there are triggers to look for, but the critics hugely over exaggerated how awful it was. I can probably go get time stamps for certain things if people wanna ask me after reading this, but if you can get through a Tarantino film or any HBO drama, you can do this. And Tom’s performance is one for the ages and not one that deserves to be passed over or downplayed. It is beautiful and heart-wrenching—a magnificent turn that displays his monumental ability to reach out and guide you into any world he decides to make his own.

I loved The Devil All the Time.

#tom holland #arvin russell #the devil all the time #text post #LONG #I’M SORRY

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bondsmagii · 3 years

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I have no idea where to find spiritual commumity anymore bc I'm a polytheist pagan, so I believe there are Actual spirits, fae & deities, not just the "essense"/idea/representations of them like a lot of newage wiccans. And I feel very at odds with how actual spirituality in general is so removed from popular practices. Like some of these people are saying they're atheists & look down on theists while practicing magick! It feels kinda appropriative? Like they only want the Witchy Aesthetic™

yeah, I don't get that either 🤔 I've seen a lot of people claim to be atheists but then also claim to believe in the paranormal, or practise various superstitions, or even dabble in magic, and I'm like. dude. you do realise that "atheist" doesn't mean "I don't believe in the Christian god", right? like. it means you don't believe in any god or higher power or higher force. nothing at all. just you and the big, empty expanse of the universe. people really do seem to think it's shorthand for not being Christian, which is just... bad form. like. Christianity isn't the only religion out there, my dudes.

I'm really not involved with any part of the witch community online because it's just not what I'm into, but I've heard a lot of criticisms from pretty much every angle. it's definitely also been commercialised and turned into an aesthetic, overwhelmingly by young white people who just want a cool look for the internet. it's similar to how paranormal investigation has been turned into a gimmick for YouTube views, which makes what I do (genuinely trying to collect and archive real, actual experiences for real, actual research purposes) very difficult. not to sound like an old edgy bastard here, but sincerely when things go mainstream it's the death of them. quantity is prioritised above quality, and misinformation runs rampant, and before you know it you have people hexing one another over Twitter drama and 2049403 videos of people's faces being far too over-expressive as their bedroom door slowly blows shut behind them.

I'm very lucky in that I have no need for community and in fact despise the very concept, so my advice for this might be useless if that's something you require in order to get the most out of your spirituality. but for what it's worth, I stopped trying to define things and stopped talking to people about it. my beliefs are private and intensely personal. in my opinion, nobody can experience their spirituality in a communal way because it is so intensely personal and no two people will ever agree on anything. I believe you can commune far more easily with what's out there if it's just between you and them, and you can come into it sincerely and with absolutely no influence from anyone else. like I said, though -- this is what works for me. in a great example of what I literally just said, it's a very personal thing and so this might not work for you.

#anon #asks

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oceanspray5 · 4 years

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Just wanted to say that as a Muslim woman, I too agree with your critic of that upcoming French movie about Cuties. I get that it’s about her own story, and I truly respect that, but is so frustrating and tiring that this is the only trope we see about Muslims in the West, that it’s always, always Islam at fault. Hardly ever about the positive experiences that many of us have as well.

Thank you! I’m so glad to hear you agree with me. I knew many people were frustrated but there were also people coming in defense of the movie and that simply isn’t it! They’re also bringing race into the mix and I’m literally so confused like...NO? The fact that the director is a black woman has ZERO ZIP NADA to do with the fact the movie is problematic and very very islamophobic. I would be criticizing it the same if a white Muslim director had created it. My issue is that its a Muslim director behaving no better and coming up with an awful story that once again victimizes Muslims as if we’re oppressed and in need of saving from white people!

Its true that Hollywood Executives are the MAIN reason to blame behind these pathetic excuse of representations we get in mainstream media but the fact of the matter is, we can blame them but the blame won’t stick because they’ll always have the ‘We aren’t Muslim so we didn’t know’ excuse. This time a Muslim director had a chance to create a film to stream on a widely used platform which is something so few Muslim actors get a chance to do let alone directors and producers!

Instead of maybe showing the struggle of a Muslim girl in France with the Hijab Ban restrricting her freedom of choice, she did what every other white male Hollywood non Muslim exec did and the fact that she’s Muslim doesn’t excuse her because it doesn’t excuse the white males either.

If the director didn’t want to add a positive storyline, she always had the option of excluding any religious plotline altogether. Why must religion be relevant and important to frame the message of the movie? All it does is make Islam and Muslim parents abusive villains when that is not the case for the majority even if it is for the minority. If you remove Islam, the story remains the same and the ‘battling hypersexuality’ part of the story takes center stage with no unnecessary religious debate mixed in!

I am furious to no end and I want to scream and shout at everyone trying to justify this action or trying to defend this decision. I’ve had more than enough of being labeled as oppressed and I realize that a lot of people are held victim to the cultural patriarchy but Islam has nothing to do with that. It’s a religion! Not a culture! And everything oppressive is a byproduct of culture and yet its always Islam getting the blame!

Why must these inaccurate stories be told? Why can’t the stories with supportive parents, with Muslims leaning on each other for help, with asking Allah SWT for strength and help and gaining success through their faith be told? Those are the stories of the majority and yet only the negative stories are told and rehashed the same way every time.

It’s pandering, pure and simple to predominantly white Islamophobic audiences. And at the end of the day, no one will remember this movie for being ‘anti-hypersexual’. It will be remembered as just another movie that stereotypes Islam and people will applaud the little Muslim girl’s ‘victory’ where she escapes her parents making them the villains instead of the society that sexualizes them. If the director wanted to focus on the horrors of hypersexualization, she should have left religion out of it completely.

I have refused to watch any and all content in Western media because of the explicit fact that I loathe seeing myself misrepresented on screen and my hijab and my choice and the reasons behind why I wear it thrown away and disrespected in such a way. The fact that this movie is directed by a Muslim woman is the absolute last straw.

I refuse to watch this movie. I have said it before and I’ll say it again. A trailer is what ‘sells’ the movie to an audience. The trailer for Cuties disrespected me and hijabi Muslim girls all around the world for the nth time. It has only convinced me that it is worth boycotting and forgetting it ever exists. It has only led me to hoping it bombs and that no one remembers it and uses it to hate Muslims and see Muslim women as victims because most of the time we are NOT.

I do hope the director stops getting death threats cuz she doesn’t deserve those but I hope she learns to not meddle with religion unless she wants to undo the damage the Western industry has already caused.

One can criticize something only if the opposition also exists to make an argument and currently there is none. The director has lost my respect completely. She may have had a negative experience growing up and that is truly tragic. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to accept or be happy about the story she’s telling because at this point she only seems to be adding Islam to villiainize it, especially since the movie could have worked just as well without any religion at all.

Sorry... I went on a little tangent there again. I’ve just been fuming since yesterday so its taking a while to get all the frustration out. I’m really glad you voiced the fact that you agree with me and that the majority of Muslims I’ve seen are also angry about this film for the exact same reasons as it once again fails to do justice to our experience and our faith.

I pray Allah SWT gives us the opportunity to see actual good mainstream representation soon that fixes peoples’ negative perceptions about Islam and Muslim families instead of us having to silently fume through more and more awful caricatures of Islam and Muslims that these people in the industry make as an obvious cash grab. Ameen.

#netflix #netflix cuties #Anti cuties #Netflix mignonnes #Anti mignonnes #Muslim representation in media #western media #islamophobia #hijabi #hijabi women

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anarcho-smarmyism · 4 years

Text

Long post heads up

so im assuming this will be controversial but i’ve been thinking about this for a while, so please hear me out on this: pagans, even white American ones, literally are marginalized. now, i realize that by making this post i’m opening myself up to a lot of ridicule and accusations, so i ask that yall please do me the courtesy of actually considering what i have to say before you write this post off completely.

a few things to get out of the way first: to act like it’s equivalent to widespread racialized religious discrimination against well-known established religions such as Judaism or Islam is obviously wrong. to act like modern pagans aren’t mostly white and that our communities don’t have huge issues with racism is obviously wrong. i laugh at most posts criticizing pagans, because i genuinely think most of them are funny; it often comes across to me mostly as bemused roasting more than anything actually hateful. i feel like pagans often just need to learn to take a joke and take ourselves a little less seriously, as many religious people need to remind themselves. also, as someone who’s been hanging out in these groups for about 6 years now, i’ll outright tell yall that most pagan groups have ongoing issues with racism, transphobia, ableism, and other social prejudices, as well as the aforementioned predators and cults. many many pagans really do just go “lols The Spirits Don’t Care About Race silly sjws” and then appropriate the hell out closed traditions and act disrespectful as hell to the people who say it’s wrong; if you’re criticizing us for shit like this, GOOD. That’s legitimate criticism that we choose to ignore far too often.

however, more and more of the “criticism” i see on here toward pagans is just saying we’re crazy, stupid, gullible, or other shitty nu-atheist talking points that have just been repurposed to target a growing fringe subculture that has been widely declared an acceptable target by culturally christian progressives AS WELL AS the religious right.

the justification for this is that no white pagans are discriminated against for being pagan, and i know for a fact that isn’t true. all the pagans i talk to report having to keep it a secret from family, friends, or coworkers -but for this post, i’ll keep it limited to my own experiences. i was abused by my parents as a minor for converting from christianity to a pagan faith, and having to keep my religion and experiences a complete secret from most of my friends and family really did take a toll on me. now, as an adult, i’ve learned to keep my religious beliefs a secret from most strangers and especially anyone who might know me at work, because people will start treating you differently -either like you’re evil, or gullible and stupid in a way they (mostly) don’t accuse mainstream religions of. when i was in the psych ward, i was refused my paperback holy text which i had brought with me for the same reason a christian would bring a bible into a scary and traumatic situation, but because the mainly-christian patients were bullying me for being pagan and the nurses didn’t want to deal with it, so the staff withheld it from me for 3 days until i could talk to a social worker. when my aunt took me in so i could move away from my parents, she coaxed me into sharing about my religion, which i naively did because it was rare for people to take an interest in it, and then the next day she told me if i didn’t get rid of all my “occult” stuff (mostly books and tarot cards), she would kick me out. i can’t get holy days off and in some states i can’t run for a lot of public offices unless I’m Christian. (yeah, i realize the post is talking about atheists, but people use those same laws against pagans as well, because as far as they’re concerned, we don’t believe in God, either.)

if any of this happened because i converted to buddhism or another well-known established open religion, people would call it religious discrimination. non-pagans who talk about this almost always say “yeah well you CHOSE to convert that religion, it isn’t a culture or religion you were raised in”, as though that means we’re under some obligation to quietly absorb any insults or abuse related to something so universally personal as one’s faith -like why does it matter to yall if i was raised in this faith, or converted? why is a faith only “real” if you were raised in it, or are adopting it literally from your direct ancestors?

i realize to people who aren’t religious that this may sound like nonsense, but my experience as a kid wasn’t that it looked cool and trendy and i wanted to feel special. i’m sure that some people are like that, but on the by and large, that’s just a strawman. Personally, whether my experiences that led me to convert were real or not is irrelevant: I was a kid who needed to be able to confide in adults about what i was going through, but the fact that I had started to perceive the world vastly differently than Christians did, and no longer believe in Christian theology, meant it was unsafe for me to do so. not being able to talk to anyone about it without getting either literally accused of being crazy, demonically possessed (happened many times) or like i was just stupid caused real, lasting damage. instead of being the source of stability, comfort, and fellowship that faith can be during difficult times, it’s often been something i feel i need to either hide from others, or defend my right to care deeply about.

as a result of people taking this attitude toward pagans, i and many other young pagans have to rely on online spaces to find any kind of fellowship with people who believe the way that we do. this is isolating and uncomfortable for most, and legitimately dangerous for some. see, if you confine a whole subculture to be either a joke or Satanic depending on your political leaning, the subculture generally develops an Us Against Them in-group/out-group mindset, which makes it much easier for predators and some actual cults to prey on vulnerable people.

keep in mind: pagans are not a monolith; it’s an umbrella term for a lot of different religions. (i don’t claim any kind of ancestral tie to my particular pagan faith, but since it was always an open culture and religion, it doesn’t matter if i have a “hereditary right” to it.) there are a lot of pagans of color, even including Heathenism which has a literal Nazi problem. (i’m referring to people i’ve met irl as well as online here.) lots of young queer people who feel rejected by mainstream religions find a lot of comfort in worshipping queer icons like Loki, Dionysus, Artemis, Set, etc. When you write off pagans as a whole for being just dumb racist white people, you throw them under the bus by erasing them. you isolate them the same way you do me, and they are even more likely to experience the kind of discrimination and abuse i have. is it really worth it to make them feel even more alienated in their religious choices, because they go against the mean-spirited stereotype that secular and non-pagan progressive people have crafted for pagans?

Also, antifascist and progressive pagans are already swimming against the tide to make social prejudices persona not grata within our spaces, and it makes pagan reactionaries’ recruitment tactics WAY more effective when the world around new, insecure pagans tells them they’re automatically racist privileged white people for being interested in paganism. you don’t need to have any sympathy for bigots, but you should at least acknowledge the end result of this kind of rhetoric. i don’t like it either, but most people aren’t going to stop being pagan, or stop talking about it publicly altogether (as that seems to be the only thing that will make yall happy lol) when people make fun of them constantly; they’re gonna dig their heels in and do the in-group out-group thing people always fuckin’ do in these situations. that mindset makes otherwise-normal people, who may have been willing to learn and grow out of their background prejudices under other circumstances, easier for the truly racist monsters in our community to begin grooming.

paganism is a swiftly growing counterculture, and it’s more than likely that at some point it’s going to be part of a larger conversation on religious freedom. i don’t think people on tumblr or twitter roasting pagans is discriminatory necessarily, but life isn’t split up into “discrimination” and “okay things to do”. yall are pretty obviously just petty and excited to make fun of people who you think are weird, because yall can easily insist that every pagan is a privileged racist cis white lady, therefore it’s totally okay to be rude, dismissive, or just outright mean-spirited to pagans as a group because you’re pretending your bullying is enlightened or required by social justice laws. this is what we in pagan culture call “a dick move”.

besides, it’s ten thousand times more accurate and funnier to roast us for being too self important and arguing over whether emoji spells are Serious Magic or not lmao.

#pagan #smarmyanarchist #this ended up really long because im trying to cover all my bases before ppl start twisting my words lmao #ableism

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lowkeyorloki · 4 years

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I really love how you weren't afraid to call out the mcu actors and their bs. I was hoping for some advice if that'd be okay? Who else besides Loki would in your opinion be safe to stan from the mcu that doesn't have someone with a lot of bs playing them? I understand if this question isn't your cup of tea, thank you anyways

Well anon, first let me thank you for your praise, though I don’t entirely deserve it: I took the post telling rdj/mark ruffalo/zoe saldana to develop critical thinking skills about fifteen minutes after I posted it. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but the main one is (despite all my angsty content) I want this blog to be a source of escapism for myself and my readers.

However, I’m willing to answer your question because I always encourage conversation and I am more than willing to give my opinion on anything, I just prefer to be asked it first. If you came to me, I want to honor that. I also want my blog to be open for my readers to discuss any and everything.

This is a really hard question to answer. I’m going to preface by saying that I am minoring in ethics (which is directly what this question is about) and I have read a good handful of philosophy books. That being said, I am still just a 19 year old girl on the internet and while my perspective can influence your opinion, it should not form it. I hope you take what I say seriously, but do not take it at face value. Doing your own research is still necessary. I’m okay with contributing to your views, but I do not want be directly responsible for them. I don’t want to take that power from you.

A lot of behavior from the MCU cast and your thoughts on that is going to be dependent on your experiences your personal morals. For example, because I was raised Jewish, Robert Downey Jr publicly defending two men (Mel Gibson and Chris Pratt) who have said or belong to groups with anti semitic rhetoric, I’m going to be more critical of RDJ than someone who was raised or still practices more mainstream religions. These are the types of questions to ask yourself when you’re deciding how you feel about certain people: What behavior is okay to me personally? Should I change that? How is my bias/privilege affecting my view?

It’s also important to note that no one in unproblematic. No one. Even Tom Hiddleston worked with one of the scummiest men alive. Your own core values will dictate what is and isn’t okay from people. I can excuse Tom for working with Woody Allen because he worked with him in 2011- a pre #metoo world. Tom is also English and Woody Allen is American, meaning that there’s a fairly big chance he never heard about Allen’s issues and demeaning behavior towards women at that time. Furthermore, Tom has never (to my knowledge) publicly supported Allen since around 2015. Would it be nice for him to address that he worked with one of the world’s most hated men? Sure, but until Tom expresses he still respects Allen, I’m not going to have an issue with him. However, not everyone will agree with me on that. It’s subjective.

No one, especially people who grew up before the 2010s, is going to be without fault. What’s more, we shouldn’t expect them to be. We have to make mistakes to grow- first mistakes aren’t an issue. Repeated behavior is. Tom Hiddleston is one of the only MCU cast members who hasn’t repeated his shitty choice. That’s why I’m still comfortable being his fan.

I also want to express: You can like the characters even without liking the actors! That’s totally okay. Actors do not have to dictate if you like their characters! I promise.

All that being said, I don’t think the majority of the cast should be “cancelled”. If you’re looking for my opinion, I only really have a problem with three other cast members.

I do not support Scarlett Johansson. Almost all of her behavior falls under that of a white feminist. She also has immense problems with transphobia. For that same reason, I don’t like Benedict Cumberbatch. He also had a horrible incident when he got defensive over being asked if his character on BBC’s Sherlock was autistic, and acted as though being autistic was bad and that people shouldn’t think Sherlock was that way (not cool! very mean). That was also a show with crazy problems over queer baiting (which was literally confirmed by Mark Gaitiss).

The reason I can’t look past these things is because Johansson and Cumberbatch in particular have a complete inability to take accountability. They consistently defended their behavior, with Scarlett Johansson claiming it was okay for her to take POC and trans roles, and Benedict Cumberbatch not thinking his performance in Zoolander 2 could be harmful. They can’t take criticism, even when marginalized groups are begging them to.

Jeremy Renner... just do a google search. I can’t unpack all his shit. Actually, just search up the movie “Neo Ned.” That should give you enough perspective.

Again: I am just a teen girl on the internet. I don’t know every single bad thing every single cast member has ever done, and I don’t want to. I’m not interested in holding people to impossible standards. That isn’t fair, and it’s a really self-indulgent stance to take. Who am I to decide if someone’s a bad person? I can only make that decision in regards to myself. I’m not going to tell you to unstan any of those people because it’s not my job or right. I can only give you my views and my justification.

My personal method of when to stop supporting someone is when I see repeated bad behaviors. Everyone makes mistakes, but when we see the same ones happening over and over despite the ignorance being addressed, that’s when I begin to struggle with justifying it. That’s what works for me, that’s how I choose to live my life. You can do what you will with this information. I hope I answered your question or gave you some clarity.

#ask #anon

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 4 years

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I saw your post on how Animorphs is written from a childist perspective where you very neatly outlined the boundary between a cast for children and one for YA. But what delineates the boundaries between YA and Adult fiction?

[OP refers to this post.]

What’s the difference between YA and Adult fiction? In a word: Marketing. Young Adult novels are Young Adult novels if they’re classified that way by bookstores, critics, publishing houses, and/or researchers.

People have pointed out that libraries had YA sections decades before I put the “official” inception with Twilight and Crank. While that’s true, my local library also has sections on “Queer Paranormal Romance” and “Memoirs by Muslim Authors” (reason 491.2 that my local library is the best) but I doubt either of those genres is going to become mainstream anytime soon. It wasn’t until Barnes & Noble (and other major gatekeepers) started incorporating YA sections that critics and scholars and publishers started considering it a “real” category worthy of study and discussion, and that didn’t happen until ~2005.

That’s also why the core of my argument about Animorphs is that it’s published by Scholastic, and Scholastic only publishes children’s books, and therefore Animorphs is a children’s series. Genres are fairly-arbitrary marketing categories, and so are target ages of novels.

So what’s the difference between YA and Adult fiction?

Literal answer: If it’s in the YA section of a bookstore or has a “YA” sticker on the cover, it’s YA. If it’s not, it isn’t.

Actual answer: Generally, novels that are about adolescents, focus on adolescent conflicts, written for adolescent readers, and/or concerned with the problems of adolescence are Young Adult.

There are some genres that are far more common within YA than others. Paranormal romance is a big one. So is “problem lit” that focuses on angst and characters’ first struggles with sex/drugs/death/finance. (Like I said, Twilight and Crank were trend-setters.) Period dramas are common, as are Chosen One stories, as are urban fantasies, and those three genres often overlap. Bildungsroman, or the coming-of-age school story, is the O.G. YA genre.

There’s also a big convention around length. YA novels tend to be physically quite large, even if publishers have to force the issue through screwing around with spacing and margins like a bunch of high schoolers whose essay has a five-page minimum.

[Image description: Side-by-side comparison of p. 112 of young adult novel Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi and p. 112 of adult novel Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. The pages are the same size, but the Gone Girl page has approximately twice as much text on it.]

The end result is this.

[Image description: Children of Blood and Bone’s spine lined up next to Gone Girl’s spine. Gone Girl is noticeably thinner, even though it has a higher word count.]

This shit drives me BANANAS, but it speaks to the importance of this convention, and the extent to which arbitrary trends drive contents of books instead of the other way around.

Anyway, a few marginal cases that I think speak well to the YA/Adult divide:

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. I used to play a game where, every time I entered a new bookstore or library, I’d guess in advance where The Golden Compass was located and then check to see if I was right. Partially because I’m a dork with really boring ideas of fun, partially because there was no knowing in advance where it’d be classified. I’ve seen HDM classified as children’s literature (because the main character is 10), as adult adventure (because it deals with religion and death and sex), as religious fiction (because it’s about kids who kill God), as Litératuré (because it attracted Critical Acclaim™), as adult sci-fi (because it’s in a steampunk world), as romance (because ???), as fantasy (because there are talking bears), and finally as YA. It seems to have settled in YA, I think it belongs there, but YA didn’t really exist at the time when it was published. It’s got adult and child themes, adult and child characters, and very adolescent character arcs about coming into one’s sexuality and becoming an independent individual... so no one knew what to do with it in 1995.

Song of the Lioness by Tamora Pierce. Pierce herself has talked about the fact that the books were first marketed as romance (because they’re by a woman and about a woman, and publishing is full of sexist BS), they later got moved to children’s lit, then to “genre fiction.” Now they’re YA, and they belong in YA. Again: they’re books about adolescence, where most of the characters are adolescents, and they focus on adolescent concerns.

Crank by Ellen Hopkins. First of all, I want to make clear that I love that book, and that I learned more about how to write poetry from Hopkins than any English teacher. However, Crank was also the inspiration for some of my least-favorite trends in YA. It’s a verse novel, so it has as few as 5 words per page but is also a fucking tome. Publishers took the message that they could charge $29.99 for a novel with the same number of words but three times the pages as one going for $7.99, and acted accordingly. It also featured Baby’s First Discussion of Serious Topics like addiction, homelessness, assault, and prejudice. That helped launch a lot of genuinely brilliant novels whose authors took the time to do it right and/or wrote what they knew (The Hate U Give, Wintergirls, Miseducation of Cameron Post)... aaaand it helped launch a lot of condescending, ablest/sexist/problematic, “those Other People are just like us” type novels (13 Reasons Why, The Fault in Our Stars).

Anyway, people have been writing novels about adolescence for adolescents for as long as there have been novels. Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, The Chocolate War, A Wrinkle in Time, Speak, Silent to the Bone, and Killing Mr. Griffin all make that patently obvious. However, those novels all kind of wandered around homeless inside a lot of bookstores until mega-sales of books like Twilight, Harry Potter, The Book Thief, Just Listen, Crank, So Yesterday, How I Live Now, The Hunger Games, and (sigh) Looking for Alaska forced Barnes & Noble to build a home for them.

It’s interesting to look at lit crit from right around 2005, because a lot of scholars are saying “there’s this... new category? about teenagers? it’s becoming a thing?” But in 2020 scholars can just write “YA” and not even spell it out because yeah, yeah, everybody knows. So the category is useful if it helps people find books, obnoxious to the extent that it controls what books get published or marketed and what they look like on the shelf, and probably going to split even further into “YA - Teens” and “YA - Emerging Adulthood” if trends continue as they have been.

#literature #young adult literature #ya #lit crit #children's lit #publishing #marketing #(almost) nothing to do with Animorphs #young adult novels #john green negativity #long post #fury-brand #asks

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thatlittleegyptologist · 4 years

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So I saw that post about 'Academically dubious sources' and am especially curious about this horrible 'Judit.' As someone who wants to avoid barely qualified fringe sources when researching do you have any pointers or a list of 'sources' to avoid? Feel free to answer this at your leisure or send me elsewhere. The reactions to that post have simply intrigued me.

Um, well @somecunttookmyurl might be better to explain who Judit is, at least with more vigour, since it is her former department.

I do not have a list of ‘sources to avoid’ because....we’ll be here for years. Honestly. Literal years. The reason we’re screeching in horror at that reading list is a) it’s from Judit (Lex will elaborate) b) they’re all hyperlinks c) there is not one academic Egyptological source that discusses Egypt and the Bible there. Those do exist!

When objectively looking at a source of information you have to analyse several things:

Who wrote it? - Are they a University lecturer/researcher? Do they have a job in the field?

Do they have any qualifications in the field? Provable qualifications. Generally you can tell if someone has qualifications in the field you’re looking at because a) they have a confidence in the way they write b) they’re able to withstand criticism and counteract it without screeching.

Why did they write it? Is it an academic article or is it a blog post? What were they intending to do with the information? If they’re saying that ‘mainstream academics’ are wrong, you may not want to trust that information.

Who did they write it for? (Target audience) Does the information seem brief and lacking any depth? You may be on shaky ground. Blog posts (yes even mine) are not intended to be ‘academic’ so you should be looking for sources of the same information elsewhere.

Where did you find this information? I find this a lot with Egyptian religion in particular but stuff like ‘crystallinks’ isn’t a good source of information. Personal blogs are not a legitimate source of information (yes, that includes this one. Find the information in reliable academic books please). If a blog has written on a topic and they’re just citing other blogs/internet sites who then go onto cite other internet sites and wikipedia, then alarm bells should be sounding.

Who else has written on this topic? Look for other academics in the field who write on the topic. Every academic has a specialist topic and it won’t be hard to find others who also write on the topic, especially if you look at bibliographies. Bibliographies tell you everything. Especially if the information presented is worth looking at. Have they cited known academics in the field? Great! Do those cited academics also work on the same topic? Even better!

Honestly sisterofiris wrote a really good post on this once, and I shall link it here because they explain it much better than I do.

#lethebantroubadour #thatlittleegyptologistresponses

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whaq · 3 years

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Fuck You, Animu (3/4) - Cells at Work! Episode 7

While still providing the edutainment expected of the series, Cells at Work!’s 7th episode overreaches for your emotions and may have you yelling in anger instead of sobbing in tears as it tackles the topic of cancer.

From the power couple that brought you the community darling Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’s anime, Director Kenichi Suzuki and David Production’s adaptation of Cells at Work! has brought biology to the mainstream. Based on Akane Shimazu’s debut manga, the series follows a red blood cell and a white blood cell’s day-to-day in the human body where we encounter anthropomorphised versions of the little beings that live within all of us.

A notable element of the series is its effort to use tangential learning to spoon-feed us biology through cute anime girls and surprisingly violent (which is ironic given how the characters consist of literal blood) action scenes. We meet many of our body’s protectors, from the onee-sama Macrophages to the delinquent T Cells that make the biodiversity of the cast impressive. If you want a casual but oozingly creative series to serve as a dose of edutainment, then Cells at Work! is for you.

I binged this series about a year after its original run because My Anime List is as bottomless as it is a cruel reminder of your lack of dedication to it. At the time, I only had a few key thoughts: “I wonder if my little cells feel as bad as I do when I get hay fever every morning,” “Oh my God, look at the cheeks on those adorable little platelets,” and, “Wow, that cancer episode was really something.” People seemed to agree with me on that last thought. Critics like the Anime Pope himself Jared of Mother’s Basement shared in the sentiment that the series’ 7th episode was well done. It humanized something that we humans are very inclined to hate: a malignant cancer cell whose only purpose is to turn our own body against us; a daunting task that anyone who’s tried writing sympathetic villains can tell you. But, after watching the episode again on a whim, the feelings I had on my first viewing suddenly did a complete 180 as I began watching in horror in lieu of sympathy. Here’s a hot-take: this episode is about Nazi sympathizing and here’s why:

We are taken to the scene of a previous episode where the NK cell is chasing after a suspicious cell that reveals itself to be cancerous. Cancer’s character design and subsequent animation are reminiscent of works like Akira or anything Junji Ito’s had his hands on. It’s gruesome, detailed, and overall as grotesque as it needs to be to get you to fear it. The animation of this fight consists of some decent sakuga as the Cancer cell is able to use its shape manipulation to stretch its limbs and morph them into practically anything. On the other hand, much of the episode’s, and by extension the rest of the series, animation is pretty inconsistent like when NK is seen strafing during Cancer’s speech. We see NK awkwardly slide across the screen while Cancer’s lipflaps remain static during his mini diatribe. “Begging for a Bluray cut” quality animation is the least of the episode’s problems.

Eventually, we’re given a look at Cancer’s backstory, and it is one of the series’ most emotional scenes. We see that the cancer cells are products of an error in cell division and appear with birth defects because of that. A pair of these newborn cancer cells, including our antagonist, attempt to run from the authorities that consist of the Killer Ts and Whites that we’ve grown fond of by this point of the series. In a heartbreaking dialogue, we find Cancer asking his friend if he is “-meant to die as soon as we are born?" This is nothing less than an emotional gut-punch, a nihilistic ponderance I wouldn’t have expected from a comedy. This is immediately followed by his friend being murdered by the guards while Cancer hides. The pained expression on this child that is mirrored on his present counterpart in the next scene really does pull at your heartstrings. The show effectively uses visuals and story to get you to sympathize with cancer, until it doesn’t.

It’s right before the arrival of our heroes that our antagonist is able to pour out his feelings. His people are oppressed and slaughtered for existing, something they obviously couldn’t have had a hand in, and it obviously pains him to see that. Right after this tear-jerking speech, he sprouts a pair of fleshy wings, that are grotesquely beautiful in their own way, which almost immediately have a machete tossed at them by the arrival of the other cells that begin to mercilessly murder Cancer’s people. The amount of thematic dissonance is palpable when you begin to hear the triumphant battle music that underscores the massacre of a race of cells you were just conditioned to feel bad for earlier. Upon defeating him, our other protagonist, White, is asked by Cancer why his people are targeted the way they are “We can’t save you. You violate the rules… hog nutrients and destroy healthy tissue. I can’t let you live… it’s my job.” Upon closer inspection, it’s easy enough to draw the line comparing the cancer cells to any persecuted race. What makes me think of the Jewish specifically is due to the events of the Holocaust, and its subsequent aftermath, that seems to mirror the events of the story. The cancer cells are even shown to be kept imprisoned in a cell full of green liquid, almost like the acid that served as one of the methods the Nazis used to exterminate the Jews during World War II. While Judaism is a religion, not a race, it’s intrinsically linked to people who descend from the original tribes of Israel, which is a huge group of people. It’s estimated that 1.7 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust by the infamously White-Supremacist Nazi Party that relied on propoganda that said Jews were taking all the money in the world and ruining the lives of the “superior race” of whites. Adding to that the display of a soldier just “doing their job” of assisting the genocide of an entire people. Knowing this, is it really too far-fetched to understand why I began gawking at my screen when our Jew surrogate, Cancer, is killed by an army, for the exact same reasons of being thought of as deplorables no less, made up of WHITE blood cells?!

Adding insult to injury, Cancer’s tragic death is then abruptly ended by Red comedically checking up on White as we see Cancer’s corpse desecrated by Looney Tune style black X-marks for eyes; as if his death was nothing more than a joke. As the show’s ending theme played behind scenes of the army celebrating their genocide, I could’ve sworn I heard the lyrics “it’s okay, I’m okay” in the song, that truly was the last straw for me. In a world divided between people who want to defend the defenseless and those who want to further oppress the oppressed, the meta-narrative this episode contains is down-right dangerous.

Thankfully, the rest of the series’ usually light-hearted and comedic antics can serve as a palette cleanser to wash the taste of this episode out. Continuing on from here, you’ll be met with more of the same edutainment you’ve been served so far in Cells at Work!’s last six episodes. If those episodes caught your attention, you’ll want to stick around to learn more about this corporeal incorporation.

#cells at work #hataraku saibō #hataraku saibou #hataraku saibo #anime #manga #satire #review #critic #media criticism #anime review #parody #otaku #this entire review was a joke

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mechanicalinertia · 4 years

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Some thoughts on re-reading Snow Crash

Sorry if you expected me to have a new update on the RPG. I’ve been all over the place mentally lately. Anyway, since I last read Snow Crash like ten years ago, and probably didn’t understand most of what was going on, I’ve been re-reading it, which is something I almost never do. Here’s some thoughts on what the book does, what it gets right, what it doesn’t, etc.

1. You can draw a pretty straight line from the Neal Stephenson who wrote The Diamond Age and the one who wrote the other books of his I’ve read, the Mongoliad, SevenEves, and Fall: Dodge In Hell. It’s something in the way his prose is written, the way it unfolds. His books have gotten progressively longer, progressively more serious, progressively more weird and less weird at the same time. I will say this much: I never finished SevenEves or Fall. They’re just so fucking long, and so dull, so exposition-y. Moreover, they kinda lack the exciting stuff that Snow Crash is saturated with - dudes with katanas, Japanese rap-stars with glowing afros, gatling railguns, Mafia pizza delivery, nuclear motorcycle sidecars. Christ, if it weren’t for the book’s obsession with really interesting Sumerian linguistic shit, I’d almost say that Snow Crash and all Stephenson’s other books were written by different people.

2. While we’re on the topic of linguistic stuff, religion as a virus, etc, it amazes me that when Stephenson was doing his research about Sumerian and Babel and how Snow Crash would spread, he didn’t come across Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I say this because Jaynes’ work has a similar hypothesis - namely, ancient man was not conscious in the sense we are conscious, and that the Late Bronze Age Collapse triggered a revolution in the invention of the self and the conscious mind - and, of course, that religion is a desire to revert to that more primitive state where something higher, something separate, the literal words of the gods, tells you what to do. It’s not exactly about viruses, or hackers, and it seems to pin the sea change in mind and language much later than Stephenson, but god damn. Both authors’ sets of evidence are based on not neurophysiological evidence (for how could you? You’d need millennia-old brains to compare!) so much as they are based on linguistics, archaeology, all sorts of evidence that may not seem as hard to modern readers but which is still interesting stuff.

Which reminds me. I first learned about the bicameral mind theory in context with an essay about the Aztecs in this book. Freshman year of high school and our history teacher gave us that, wherein Kunstler proposes that the Aztecs turned to human sacrifice as a way to traumatize their own society to reverting back to bicameralism. It’s an interesting theory, I’m just not sure it matches up with archaeological evidence - I remember vaguely that it was suggested that the whole delusion that Cortes was God was likely a Spanish invention, likewise the human sacrifice was a fabrication. I gotta look this up. (If you want to really dig a rabbit hole, lemme just say that the historical account of how Cortes and company brought down the Aztec empire would make a truly excellent HBO miniseries.)

(I just realized there’s a plot hole - Civilization arose independently, at several different river valleys - the Sumerians might have been the first, and their descendants might have hacked out all of Abrahamic religion, but the Yangtze, the Indus, the Amazon, the Nile - there’s no reason to assume they were under the same Babelian thrall that the Sumerians were. So the whole idea of Babel being real, of having an impact on every living person, is a little shaky. Whatever.)

3. Stephenson’s cyberpunk isn’t as urbane as Gibson’s or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. If anything, it describes an un-urban future, balkanized into ‘burbclaves’, sovereign microstates linked by megacorporate franchises. Which is - interesting? If one exaggerated everything about the 90′s, the Post Cold War Capitalism, then yeah, the idea of dissolving state sovereignty itself is pretty sensible. Gibson did the same thing in his Bridge Trilogy, now that I think about it. And Malka Older, much more recently, did a similar thing in Infomocracy (which is a truly excellent book, though it feels weirdly outdated in the wake of Trump’s election). I’m not sure what, exactly, the urban density of the future will look like, especially knowing that a) climate change will fuck up large parts of the world, and b) more sprawl = more human-wild interfaces = more bugs jumping from wild animals to humans and causing economy-wrecking pandemics (see: COVID-19). One would hope we’d try building denser cities, ones with less climate-impacting sprawl, be more sensible about our design choices, but capitalism is probably going to do what capitalism always does, which is make retarded decisions about the direction of humanity. (See: Fossil Fuel Lobbies).

4. Some say that Snow Crash, then, is a reaction to cyberpunk tropes, the ones so engrained in the popular consciousness at that point, that they just had to be taken apart, deconstructed with a satirist’s eye. I mean, c’mon. Hiro Protagonist, master hacker and ninja swordsman? He’s like if Gibson’s Case mixed with Bruce Lee. Corporations so powerful they’re states unto themselves? Rich dudes buying entire aircraft carriers? Guns, sex, drugs, rock n’ roll? You get the idea.

I’m not so sure, though. The Metaverse feels like a pretty novel take on Gibson’s Matrix, but it’s one that updates the idea of a global information network, not pokes fun at it. I mean, this was the era that cyberpunk entered the mainstream, when it sold out and was eaten alive by Hollywood, culminating in the Wachowski’s The Matrix, which is at once the height and the death of cyberpunk as a legitimate genre (or maybe CP2077 will be, it’s hard to say). This is a book that could have been much nastier towards the Gibson-Sterling conception of cyberpunk, could have marked it all up as nasty people with too many guns in trenchcoats and shades. I say that because that’s a criticism a lot of cyberpunk fiction has had to deal with (and indeed, those critics may be right for the pop-culture image of cyberpunk, the one propagated by Shadowrun and CP2020). But I don’t think it is.

5. This is a fun book to read. It’s right up there in my mind with Hardwired, another cyberpunk ‘classic’ (because the genre is old enough to have classics, now, I guess). You should read it.

#snow crash #cyberpunk

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nightcoremoon · 4 years

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I like horror.

(this post has screenshots of horror media)

I don't like 3edge5u gore porn that ~looks so realistic because tom savini used a real pig~, paints the walls with blood, and makes you find entertainment in watching characters you care about die.

I hate friday the 13th

I hate nightmare on elm street

I hate dawn of the dead

I hate hellraiser

I hate halloween

I hate final destination

I hate the hills have eyes

I hate texas chainsaw massacre

I hate hereditary

I hate escape room

I hate unfriended

I HATE anderson's resident evils past the first

I hate the conjuring LITERALLY SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THE CONJURING

I hate fucking birdbox

I hate most stephen king adaptations (except for reiner's misery)

I hate most american remakes of japanese films (except for verbinski's ring)

I hate everything by blumhouse productions (every single goddamn horror movie they made is a billion dollar steaming pile of shit and only their horror comedies are worth anything)

(saw is a guilty pleasure of mine because it's just so off the walls insane and cartoony if you go by "everyone dies except cary elwes and matthew passmore" because they're the only famous people in the series except for tobin- because well he IS saw- and chester b because he's famous for other reasons)

I hate gory jumpscarey horror. it's shit.

but with that being said:

I fucking love dead space.

It is literally my favorite FRANCHISE.

Not just video game: favorite fucking franchise.

My first tattoo is gonna be the marker (and my second will be rainbow dash's cutie mark right next to it and my third will be a tramp stamp that just says "this machine kills fascists" in block letters), the first games I cracked into when I first got an xbox 360 were dead space (up against bioshock, the orange box, fallout 3, elder scrolls: oblivion, and gta iv) because it was the coolest horror concept I'd ever seen. "shoot off the limbs and not the heads? THATS AWESOME!". I even loved dead space 3 even though it sucked and killed the series. I read the comics, watched the movies, played the multiplayer, love every game in the series yes even the puzzle game and the rail shooter (the iPhone game is legit amazing). only part I don't like is the awakened dlc because that's dumb. But dead space 1&2 are in my top 10 faves, 2 in the top 3 (behind resident evil 4 and tales of symphonia, of course).

But sheena, I hear you say,

I thought you hated gory jumpscarey horror, and that's exactly what dead space is! It's 3edge5u and has incredible graphics even for 2008 (!) and literally paints the walls with blood and guts, and you watch at least four beloved character deaths over the course of the series!

and you're right

clearly I don't mind gore in horror since there's gore in dead space, resident evil, silent hill, the evil within, cry of fear, and doom 3.

clearly I don't mind jumpscares since there's jumpscares in dead space, cry of fear, five nights at freddy's, and spooky's house of jumpscares (fuck you that's what I call it).

clearly I don't mind edginess, realistic effects, overuse of blood, and character death either.

so what gives?

and I gotta say

idk

I don't know why I love dead space even though it's just system shock 3 but resident evil 4 with scientology and 90% of the mainstream horror staples I hate. but clearly there's something that dead space does differently from horror films.

maybe

just maybe

horror as film is overly predictable and follows traditional story arcs we've all seen a zillion times and there's no influence on the outcome no matter how many times you watch, it's just the same bloody mess each time and that's why I have no desire to watch any of them again because there's no ethical way to derive entertainment from watching people die in the same way over and over again.

perhaps I like dead space and horror games as a medium a lot more because the control and the direct integration into the game as a factor of immersion plugs it deeper into my brain juices and lets me actively enjoy it as a participant (even though I love horror music so that argument holds no water)

...

*avgn voice* or maybe it's just because schlocky sensationalist horror movies suck ass, merely appealing to the lowest common denominator recycling the same shit to keep audiences happy and make billions of dollars off of loud noises and a red filter over a cgi monster.

ffs I hate highschool of the dead because it sucks but it's still better than 90% of horror movies because there's actual meaning and heart behind all the panty shots and jiggling titties and skimpy underwear on junior high school girls which is you know still weird but like... japan be japan when it comes to anime and that's just how it be; it's still entertaining though and very gory and with high stakes and lots of character death but HOTD is still eons better than the similar walking dead became, partly because hotd didn't wanna go past the source because the author died but TWD was like EH, FUCK IT, KILL EVERYONE. and anyway this isn't a criticism of japan as a culture at all, just at the men in charge of anime, because japanese FILMS are incredible. their horror is so much more compelling than american and it really shows in the side by side comparisons (except for gore verbinski's version of the ring which was... better in some ways. nakata hideo sama please don't kill me for saying this, it's just that gore's an amazing director from a punk rock background- literally he was in a band and he was like "hey bad religion and nofx can I do your music videos" and they were like hell yeah bro- and only it makes sense that he would make a better horror movie). and I can say with no amount of irony that highschool of the dead is a better zombie series than george romero is physically capable of producing (well, outside of call of duty black ops).

if you disagree...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ hey it's your opinion man

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buzzdixonwriter · 6 years

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Lena Horne, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump

Back in the Golden Era of Hollywood* white folks would point to Lena Horne as an example of how America wasn’t racist, America offered opportunities for everyone.

“Look at her! She’s a movie star! She appears in big movies!

“How could she do that if we were racists?”

Every society, no matter how stratified or hidebound, has space for a few socially approved outliers.

You can always afford one rigidly controlled exception to the rule, who can paradoxically serve as both a reassurance that there’s room for others and as an easily dismissed distraction should they arouse too much or the wrong kind of attention.

Lena Horne was an exceptionally beautiful singer-actress in a time and place where beautiful singe-actresses were the norm. She appeared in dozens of major movies from big studios, and was well respected by her co-workers and peers.

And she was -- or rather the role she occupied in America was -- totally fake.

Ms Horne never had a substantial role or dramatic scene in any movie that did not feature a predominantly African-American cast.

The big budget musicals she appeared in, the ones aimed at mainstream audiences -- white audiences -- typically cast her as a specialty number: In the middle of a big show within the movie, the camera would pan over to her standing in front of a curtain where she would belt out a show tune.

And white Americans would say to foreigners who criticized the US for its racism, “What about Lena Horne? Look at all the movies she appears in!”

She appeared as an appendix, a wholly superfluous addition whose presence or absence didn’t affect the film one whit.

Her musical numbers in mainstream (i.e., white) musicals were filmed and edited into the final picture so they could be cut out!

See, there were parts of the US that did not care for Ms Horne’s skin color one little bit.

And when her movies played there -- snip-snip.

Out she came.

That way no lily white audiences ever had to be offended that a n[FL play]er dared sully their lily white screen.

Why was she in there in the first place?

As a sop to the African-American community, to lure them into the theaters so they could have five minutes enjoying a performance by somebody who looked like them.

And to a lesser degree, as a sop to those few white Americans who, while not exactly “woke”, were at least stirring restlessly in their sleep. “Hey, we can’t be all bad if we let a colored girl sing in a movie, can we?”

[SIDEBAR: You wanna see what Ms Horne was capable of, track down Stormy Weather, an all African-American musical that I rank as the 3rd best movie musical ever made, trailing narrowly behind Singin’ In The Rain and The Band Wagon.]

Barack Obama was 21st century white America’s Lena Horne.

“Hey, how can we be racist if we elected a black president?” was white code for “We want you black people to shut up about the injustices you have suffered and continue to suffer.”

White America wanted Obama to be their Oreo: Black on the outside but white on the inside.

They wanted him to champion white values and interests.

Not American values and interests.

White values and interests.

“Hey, we elected a black president…”

”…so we don’t have to do anything about the disproportionate justice meted out against African-Americans.”

“Hey, we elected a black president…”

”…so we don’t have to do anything about inner city communities that are still reeling from the effects of hundreds of years of dehumanization.”

“Hey, we elected a black president…”

”…so we don’t have to do anything about addressing the needs and concerns of people who have been deliberately and consciously excluded from the American dream.”

No, Obama was supposed to be the magic cure-all, the ultimate placebo that would get those pesky minorities to stop complaining so white folks could like their lives in ease and comfort and not have to worry about how non-whites were being treated.

Just stand up against that curtain, Barack, and sing…

But Barack Obama didn’t do that.

Barack Obama said, “Hey, we still have a problem if police accost an African-American in his own home and accuse him of being a burglar even when he can prove he lives there.”

And ya know what?

We do have a problem if that can happen.

Because in order to reach the relatively mild level of just getting falsely arrested by a police office who doesn’t believe your identity, we first have to undercut your basic rights as a human being and as a citizen of the United States.

We have to pre-judge you on the color of your skin, to assume you are intrinsically criminal and hence worthy only of suspicion and distrust.

We have to assume you are not educated enough to hold a job that would pay enough for you to buy the home we’re accusing you of burglarizing.

Many white people voted for Obama because they wanted to shut up minority critics.

And to their surprise and horror, Obama basically said, “No, they’ve got a point: There still is a lot we need to work on to make this nation what is claims it wants to be.”

White people lost their shit over that.

Things got worse as the #BlackLivesMatter movement started.

White folks really lost their shit over that!

Most white people do not hate minorities…

…but they do fear them.

They fear minority crime, but not in the way one thinks.

White people are the biggest criminal threat to other white people.

Rather, they fear minorities because they ultimately fear a loss of status.

As I’ve noted previously, white identity defines itself by whom it excludes.

Barack Obama had one white American and one black Kenyan parent.

In the eyes of white America, that made him black.

And to many white Americans, it made him Kenyan as well.

White Americans define themselves by whom they exclude, never by whom they include.

Also as noted previously, despite its claims to be a classless society, America is very much a class-oriented society, one in which white people were guaranteed at the very least working class status by the simple fact non-whites were automatically regulated to lower class status.

When non-whites achieved skills and education that enabled them to climb out of their lower class status, they were only allowed to climb to higher status within their own communities.

An African-American lawyer might be able to plead a case in a white court, but only for a black client, never a white one.

Middle and working class whites feared losing their status; middle class whites feared slipping down to working class, working class feared becoming lower class.

Only if there was a built-in cushion, a concrete floor they were guaranteed they could not fall below, did whites feel comfortable.

(The astute reader will note this also applies to matters of gender, and orientation, and religion; we focus on race in this post because it’s the most obvious example, but it’s far from the only one.)

That floor was a ceiling for the minorities trapped below it, and the cracks that allowed some minorities to rise above it terrified whites who feared they’d slip through it.

Laws and customs and traditions and practices that kept minorities at arm’s length were the spackling that plugged those cracks.

Police and law enforcement and the judicial and penal systems were part of those plugs.

Minorities were treated more harshly, and penalized more severely, that whites who committed similar crimes.

Whites justified this by saying minorities were, by nature or nurture, more dangerous…more violent…more criminal than mainstream (read “white”) culture, and as such were inherently deserving of such treatment.

A white college student caught with a gram of cocaine would likely get A Very Strong Talking To by the judge and perhaps even have to perform some token community service, but a ghetto kid with a joint?

Five to ten.

But as whites excluded more and more people from their group -- their own children and grandchildren from matings with non-whites -- the number and voice of minorities grew.

#BlackLivesMatter quite literally and explicitly means “Black lives matter as much as all other lives” but the white community couldn’t have that.

First they deliberately lied, and said #BlackLivesMatter meant “only black lives matter’.

I’ve said elsewhere that some people project so much they should really pay union dues to IATSE. #BlackLivesMatter is a response to the “only white lives matter” attitude found among too many people in law enforcement and the judicial system.

Second, whites claimed #BlackLivesMatter was anti-police (no, it only calls for the police to treat all persons with the same degree of courtesy and respect).

They framed that fake anti-police stance as a desire among the African-American community to wreak harm and havoc on innocent whites (though, as noted elsewhere, how innocent are you if you help maintain a system that harms others for your benefit?).

Nobody ever posted #AllLivesMatter or anything like it prior to #BlackLivesMatter making its first appearance, yet the sentiment found in #BlackLivesMatter can be traced back to the earliest calls for racial justice in this land.

Finally, whites promoted #BlueLivesMatter, a completely bogus straw man argument that places the lives and safety of the police above those of common citizens.

Whitey, please…

Being a police officer is a stressful and dangerous job -- though far from the most dangerous job in America (you wanna risk your life on a daily basis, become a roofer).

Being a police officer isn’t even among the top ten most dangerous jobs in America -- and most law enforcement on the job deaths are the result of traffic accidents (not surprising considering how much time the average officer spends on the road).

Being a police officer means one is entrusted with an awesome and terrible responsibility: The authority to carry a lethal weapon and to use it against anyone the officer deems to be a clear and present danger to the lives of others.

That is absolutely an authority police officers should have…

…but not all police officers today are worthy of that responsibility.

There is nothing wrong or outrageous about African-American and other minority communities insisting the country’s police officers treat all people they encounter with the same courtesy and respect.

There will be people of all races and genders and ages who will respond to the police with defiance, perhaps up to and including armed resistance.

Fine, that’s why we give the police their authority to carry and use a weapon.

But they need to approach every situation based on what the person is doing at that moment and not whether whether they think or they fear the person may do them harm.

We are employing them -- in every sense of the word -- to put their lives on the line, and to risk their safety in order to preserve the public safety.

And most times, this means waiting until you know what the person you’re dealing with intends to do before acting yourself.

Frankly, if you’re inclined to shoot someone because you’re afraid they might do something, police work is not the career for you.

If unarmed, unresisting whites were treated as callously at so many unarmed and unresisting minorities are, if police gunned down a 12 year old white child without warning while playing in a public park the way they killed Tamir Rice, the white people in this country would go berserk and demand systemic changes top to bottom.

Which brings us to Donald Trump.

If Obama was the homeopathic placebo that white people thought would give them the “Get Out Of Racism FREE” card they longed to have, Trump was to be their purge to drive all the toxins they perceived out of the system and to restore them to their previous lost status.

Make American Great Again was their motto.

And yet when you asked them what that meant, it never referred to real measurable metrics such as changes in purchasing power, increases in productivity, spiraling health care costs, etc.

It always came back to re-establishing a mythical golden social order, where whites felt safe and secure in their (disguised) middle and working class status, and never feared dropping below the concrete floor that held so many others down.

Several years ago I wrote about the fast approaching year 2048.

That’s the year the census bureau projects the number of people identified as “white” Americans will drop to 49.99%.

The year the white majority vanishes…

…replaced by one large minority…

…but a minority nonetheless.

Knowing this day approaches, we will see more and more acting out by white people.

Uglier and uglier.

Sicker and sicker.

Deadlier and deadlier.

In a perverse way, we are lucky to have Trump now.

A competent racist demagogue could do far more damage.

He will taint the white political waters for at least a decade.

And that will shave white majority status ever narrower.

Remember, don’t feel sorry for whites; they are causing this by excluding their own descendants.

What they do to their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will eventually be visited upon their own community.

The day they fear will finally arrive.

They won’t be anything special.

They’ll just be like everybody else.

E pluribus unum = “Out of the many, one.”

Maybe that will finally come about when there is no longer an arbitrary racial barrier to divide us by class.

* Well, post-WWII era Hollywood; the real golden era ran from the end of WWI to the start of WWII.

#race relations #white privilege #white supremacy #politics #government #Lena Horne #Barack Obama #Donald Trump #ethics #America #American values #BlackLivesMatter

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millicentthecat · 6 years

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Why The Last Jedi is a Reactionary Propaganda Film

I've been waiting for my thoughts to coalesce (and for the "spoiler" window to pass) to make a unifying analysis of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. This is not a position piece on whether you should or should not enjoy the movie. It is not any kind of call to action. It is only an analysis on how The Last Jedi works as a propaganda film. It’s my personal interpretation based on my experience with assembling message. This post is tagged "tlj critical" and "discourse" in hopes that will assist people in finding or blocking the content they wish to read.

To begin:

As important as diversity in representation is, so too is balanced programming of message. Programming message involves building value by presenting the very ideologies and mechanisms which sustain paradigms of injustice. Will these be established as inescapable, natural, desirable, or effective? The Last Jedi (TLJ henceforth) promotes integration with these ideologies and mechanisms. It does not promote Resistance.

There are three central messages repeating in TLJ. They are:

1. Respect and trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy

2. Girls like guys who Join (the military)

3. It is the work/role of women to be caretakers and educators (for men)

1. Respect and trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy

After The Force Awakens, my understanding of Poe Dameron's character was that he was designed as a classic rogue-individualist pilot--a hotheaded "flyboy," as it were. This was not the fanon interpretation, which is understandable; The Force Awakens gave us a lot of poetic material to take in different directions. I felt my interpretation was valid as it was supported by the visual dictionary (which calls Poe a rogue, I believe) and a line in The Force Awakens novelization about how some people are inherently more important than others.

In short, Poe Dameron was an individual who trusted his own instincts more than others and didn't believe in always playing nice. In TLJ, this manifests in his relationship with a new character: Vice Admiral Holdo. Now one of the only things we know FOR SURE about Poe Dameron is that he has no problem taking orders from women, respecting a female General, and trusting her experience. This is demonstrated by his relationship to Leia, who he knows. Holdo is a stranger who Poe has never met. She is not just a woman, but an unknown woman. EVEN SO, Poe is willing to trust her (at first) by sharing his assessment of the situation--essentially, submitting what he knows for her consideration, sharing his thoughts. She responds to this by withholding information, reminding him of his recent demotion, and calling him names. She responded to his gesture of openness and respect with domination and authority.

This is well within her right, as established by both in-universe and our-universe rules of institutional hierarchy. Poe, however, does not blindly trust authority figures OR institutional hierarchy more than his own instincts. It's actually pretty unusual for a protagonist in this universe to do that, for reasons.

Later, General Leia reveals to both Poe and the audience that Holdo had information she was not willing to share. She is strongly moralized as having been "right" about her plan: Poe takes his reprimand from Leia like a boy accepting a scolding. Holdo is martyred and established as an example of strong leadership. Her decision to withhold information from her subordinate is never highlighted (by a narrative authority or third party, such as Leia) as a mistake. In our society, the rules of hierarchy dictate that "superiors" do not have to share what they have with "inferiors" or treat them with respect. Those with more power are not beholden to those with less. Poe is reprimanded for challenging that.

I was almost willing to overlook this deliberately moralized messaging as a botched attempt at a feminist moment before encountering the reviews about TLJ. In general, there are a large number of reviews for this film which insinuate that most of the people who dislike this film are white male bigots, threatened by the presence of women. (a, b , c , d , e , f , g , h) . This is not my experience. The other thing many reviews point to is how Feminist this film is (as a selling point.) It is an eerily unanimous opinion in mainstream, corporate media that Poe mistrusted Holdo because of her femininity--not her behaviors. On social media where unpaid people are speaking, many young women are challenging this. The shouting-down of women's opinions by accusing us of misogyny is a separate topic, but I did want to call attention to the discrepancy between the corporate media response and the social media response. To me this is evidence of a deliberate misdirection.

Another story arc which enforces the position that we should trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy is in the reestablishment of the Jedi Order, via Luke, Yoda's Force Ghost, and, more significantly, Rey. Now, much has been written (on this blog, and in many more prestigious place and by better known writers. See Tom Carson's "Jedi Uber Alles," for instance) in the way of criticism of the Jedi. The child abducting, the mind control, the over-extension of executive powers, the militarized cult status, the extermination of the Sith race, the monopolization of the Force; their crimes go on and on. Moreover these are not just mistakes the Jedi made--crimes secondary to their nature--but rather these are the very nature of what their institution stood for. The Jedi are not "the Light." They are a specific religion with specific, inherently problematic practices and ideologies.

The Last Jedi is literally a movie about how it's ok that there are going to be more Jedi.

Luke's not on board with that, at first. Master Yoda (from beyond the grave) reasserts the divine right of the Jedi to rule, as badly and indefinitely as they like. Because even their failure is valuable. Try try again, one supposes. Whatever happened to, "there is no try?" Oh yes, I remember. The laws of the privileged do not apply to them.

Last but not least, the character most overtly challenge institutional hierarchy in TLJ is Kylo Ren, when he kills Supreme Leader Snoke. This move is not specifically negatively moralized (unless you read Kylo as the villain, which I prefer to) but it also very clearly does not result in a positive or progressive change for Kylo. At the end of the film, he is miserable; his coup changed nothing.

2. Girls like guys who Join (the military)

"It's all a machine, brother," slurs an alcoholic loner-character known as "Don't Join," sometime after dropping the news on us that Good Guys and Bad Guys buy their weapons from the same arms dealer. His general sense of hopelessness rubs off on Finn, who grows in his story arc from being willing to Unjoin, himself (as a deserter) to throwing himself into a suicide run for the Resistance. What stops Finn from a kamikaze end is Rose: she saves him. For the young viewer who agrees with DJ and sees machinery in war and capitalism, this suicide run represents the realistic (and popular trope) outcome of "joining." War leads to death. Capitalism leads to death. Our generation knows this and we ask, as many before have asked, "why should I be a hero? I'll just end up dead!"

The Last Jedi does what every great work of propaganda targeting young men does. It gives a reason. Why be a hero? Because girls, that's why.

Before this pact is made, however, there needs to be a little softening-of-the-way--a little grooming. The word "hero" has been deconstructed in the language enough that people know to associate it with self sacrifice. We are wary of heros. The Last Jedi substitutes the word "leader" to mean what hero once meant: a person in power whose sacrifices are gratified with moral rightness in the narrative. This subverts any counter-programming people were able to apply towards "heroic" stories. Leadership is presented as an inherently positive and desirable quality, linked to selflessness, sacrifice, martyrdom, and rewarded with female attention.

This same re-programming wordplay is employed in Rose Tico's call to action: "not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love!" Question: if the behaviors and outcome are the same, does the mental engineering matter? Is a Rose by any other name still a Rose?

Is war still war if you call it love?

At this point I also want to call attention to the fact that there is AGAIN very little opportunity in this film where to SEE the First Order committing atrocities: abducting kids, repressing a labor uprising, etc etc. The First Order is never called fascist (nor, if I recall, are they referred to as an actual nation.) Their politics aren't even alluded to. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the film implies it doesn't matter which side you join, but I think there's definitely an argument that being involves with one side or the other is lauded more highly than staying neutral.

Worth mentioning: "Girls like guys who Join" is also the message of Luke's story arc. Both Rey and Leia wanted Luke to rejoin the arena. Rey even expresses a willingness to get closer to Kylo--while he is acting like a Joiner. The minute he makes it clear that he wants no part in either side of the conflict (No Jedi, No Sith, no ties to the past, etc) Rey's trust is broken. She leaves. Her rejection IMMEDIATELY follows his insistence on leaving tribal war in the past. It does not correspond with any immediacy to his acts of violence, nor to his stubborn declaration that she "will be the one to turn."

A brief note. Army enrollment messaging is a necessary and functional part of maintaining an imperial state. The in-text discourse positions an offensive/insurgent military organization against a defensive military organization, during combat. "Join up" is therefore an aggressively interventionist and arguably imperialist position.

3. It is the work/role of women to be caretakers and educators (for men)

This is one of the oldest motifs in storytelling, so when I say it's conservative I mean really, really conservative. Traditional gender roles and traditional family values are just that: extremely traditional. Many people find comfort in them and are extremely threatened by their breakdown. For this reason, storytellers are authorized to hand-wave or sexualize an inordinate amount of violence toward women in order to keep paradigms of labor as gendered as possible.

First of all, there are literal feminine-coded creatures on the island of Ahch-to called "caretakers." These aliens watch over the island and look after the hutts where Luke Skywalker has taken up residence.

Second of all, Holdo's arc with Poe and Rose's arc with Finn are full of nods to the idea that women must teach and lead men. Men (who are inherently dogs, apparently) will speak over us, desert us, aim guns at us, and otherwise challenge us, and it is our duty to keep them in line. This is to be expected. Flyboys will be flyboys.

Third, it is Rey's sacred duty to prepare Luke to return to the arena of battle. When Luke fails to step into that role, she turns to Kylo Ren. Rey and Leia both possess Force-related powers. Both spend most of their time directing these powers to trying to save, protect, or heal male warriors around them. When they do fight, rather than act themselves as subjects, they punish men who objectify them inappropriately as a corrective measure.

To be fair, Admiral Holdo and Paige Tico both act directly against the enemy. They also both have close mentor relationships with other women. However, Paige and Holdo both die in the course of the film.

A final personal note: in my opinion, there are many ways socially problematic and coercive content offers comfort to a population where uncomfortable traditions feel like the only option. However, this way of life is not the only option, and this media is not comforting to everyone.

#tlj critical #the last jedi #discourse #star wars #rey star wars #poe dameron #meta #amilyn holdo #kylo ren #luke skywalker #rose tico #paige tico #hating star wars like a star wars fan #contributing to the critical community i guess #star wars: it got wars in it #a paper by me

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