#this has been THE most accurate representation of my aesthetic so far | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ode-to-spring · 2 years

Text

hello!! ive seen a lot about the recent discourse on sumeru and all it's characters, most especially kusanali nowadays, and felt the need to clear some things up for my own peace of mind. though i should put a disclaimer that i'm in no way from any of the countries or cultures sumeru was originaly intended to represent, though i am a POC who knows what colorism, orientalism, and blatant lack of representation feels like. if anyone from the real cultures finds something wrong in whatever i say, please point it out and educate me so i can adjust! I might not be in a place to speak and have a very little platform, but I promise you, a few minutes of research and a little empathy can go a very long way.

cw for the topics i mentioned above (orientalism, colorism, subtle racism, etc etc.) very long discussion utc!

A common excuse I see people making for aspects of Kusanali's design (her skin color, her size, etc.) is that she's allegedly based off of Kusanali Jataka, from a Buddhist collection of poems as a fairy living in a clump of grass. This much is true, she very much is named after that, and the nature-esque inspiration matches up. However, that changes when many fans on tiktok, twitter, etc. have been claiming the original poem to mention that Kusanali Jataka had "skin as pale as the light of the moon."

This specific description pertains to an entirely different diety, one going all the way to Hinduism backgrounds. She who that quote was originally used for is known as Sarswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge, wisdom, art, speech, music, aesthetics, and learning. For the record, here is what common portrayals of her look like, as well as the description of her appearance:

See? Sound familiar? To compare, here is what a portrayal of Kusanali Jataka looks like:

These two very separate dieties were definitely mixed up, most likely in a way to simply excuse how utterly far away the dendro archon looks from the real life people her country is meant to represent. Previously we've had Zhongli and Ei, a dragon accurate to real Chinese myths, and a samurai with cultural ties even to her name, her titles, and other various inspirations such as from the Vision Hunt Decree. Yunjin proves that Hoyoverse is capable of making accurate and in depth research of real life cultural aspects. Kusanali, however, has no obvious cultural background to her design except her name and perhaps the quote of "Let great and small." Other than that? You could've told me that she's just another kid from Mondstadt and I'd believe you entirely.

It's one thing to like a characters design, but another thing to entirely erase the problems there are with representation, among other things. The problem in her is not that she has a child model, it's that she, as Sumeru's archon, is meant to represent their whole country, but at the same time she has no indications of references to SWANA or ME culture what so ever.

To add onto that, the argument of "but im from this race and im pale" is not valid at all, because just because you or your family or friends are not, doesn't mean the rest of your people don't either. In my country, we were taught as kids to bathe with some kind of papaya whitening soap, not to stay in the sun too long or we'll get tanned, that we need go "stay indoors more to get whiter," and I'm sure this isn't only a problem in mine. The few times that the people of these underrepresented cultures get a chance at the spotlight, the very least Hoyoverse can do when they'll make truckloads of money from them either way is to do it right. They deserve that much.

Hoyoverse is a multi million dollar company that is perfectly capable of making designs that aren't stereotypical and all lightskin if not paper white. They honestly dug their own grave by making the exact mistake many have made before when it comes to representation specifically in these regions, such as Aladdin, where they threw many different and diverse cultures together and thought it would end up nicely without either five different things happening at once, or an entirely whitewashed version of everything. They should not be able to cherrypick and make money out of whatever bits of these cultures they want only to leave out the outward appearances of the people that they belong to. That is colorism.

I am making this post to at least try to raise awareness on the misinformation going around about Kusanali, as well as shed light on how condescending all the pale and at most light brown characters feel as a POC. That said, however, I can't speak for the people from South Asia/North Africa/Middle East on this issue, and therefore if you have time I'm *begging* you to listen to what they have to say. If you're from those cultures and don't have any problems with Sumeru, thats okay! But it doesn't mean that everyone else doesn't either. If you're white or from a different culture and are therefore unaffected by all of this? If you want to ignore, don't say a word. Don't shut the voices of the POC that should be in the spotlight in the first place. But if you want to help? Do your research. Uplift the voices of those who are affected. Listen to what they have to say. Orientalism and colorism aren't easy topics to be brushed off easily, and they have every right to be reacting in opposition to what Hoyoverse currently has to offer.

If you're interested in what I've just mentioned, here are a few links I've found of people from these cultures that you should consider checking out ::

https://twitter.com/dorobor1/status/1553151372308135938?t=QfJI9jXKDVvPO86eqGgyGw&s=19

https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSR2pcbVC/?k=1

https://twitter.com/dailynahida/status/1538609206621790209?t=JRPUQ5Z8kn_nJJ2McShbag&s=19

https://twitter.com/Altochameleon/status/1553623114650509313?t=nDhSJyZ167HqP_eR4byqEg&s=19

And many more! So many SWANA & ME people are speaking up about this but get drowned out in all the arguing when they are the ones in the right. The goal isn't to speak over them, it's to let their words be heard. So please, stop the unnecessary ignorance and disrespect in every aspect of all that's going on with the discourse going around about this topic. It isn't hard to be respectful, it isn't hard to research, it isn't hard to be decent human beings.

https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSR2pT61E/?k=1

https://twitter.com/Bitanees/status/1562903344553013252?t=CyBbIxBG3IFGWM98bZYADw&s=19

#genshin impact #genshin impact sumeru #genshin sumeru #genshin kusanali #genshin impact kusanali #genshin nahida #genshin impact nahida #genshin tighnari #genshin impact tighnari #genshin cyno #genshin impact cyno #genshin dehya #genshin impacy dehya #genshin nilou #genshin impact nilou

91 notes · View notes

quillsmora · 1 year

Note

Hopefully it's okay to ask you a question because I'm wondering do you know why Gamora hasn't been included in the vol 3 merch? I ran across some stuff a while ago and when she wasn't included I assumed it was just a one off incident. But I just ran across some other merch and she's still absent. So I'm not sure if they are waiting for the movie to create merch for her or what

Firstly, it's always okay to ask me questions about this stuff! I love talking about film marketing (I did study this stuff for 2 years after all). Always feel free to send me asks about anything!

As for your question here's my honest answer: I'm not entirely sure. There are a few logical conclusions though.

Spoilers. Historically the first wave of MCU merch is very clean when it comes to the events of the movie, only featuring characters we know will be in it and vague aesthetics that align with the plot. So far the main advertisements and merch for Vol 3 have featured the Guardians in their comic-accurate group suits, which we haven't seen Gamora in. She might end up getting that suit in the movie, but we have no idea and that would be a major spoiler, so it's easier to leave her out of cereal box promotions and toy box art to keep that unified aesthetic.

Along the same lines as spoilers but deserving of their own point is the LEGO sets. LEGO sets are 50/50 when it comes to being accurate to the events of the movie because again, spoilers. The Endgame sets they released to go along with the movie had absolutely nothing to do with the actual plot because sets get leaked so often and Disney didn't want the plot of their biggest superhero movie ever to be ruined. The Wakanda Forever and Multiverse of Madness sets were also pretty vague if I remember correctly. It's easiest to leave Gamora out of sets like the Guardians HQ or the Bowie because while she might actually be in those scenes, we won't know until the movie comes out (we can assume she'll be on the Bowie at one point based on that shot of her pulling out a knife but it's not official). Since the LEGO sets and toy lines release weeks before the movies, it's again easier to exclude Gamora from these first waves of merch.

The historically bad representation of Gamora on merch already. Outside of figures like Funko Pops and Marvel Legends, it's always been nearly impossible to find officially licensed merch of just Gamora, especially cute good looking merch. This has also been an issue with most of the MCU's female heroes but it's definitely gotten better these past few years. Unfortunately due to Gamora's role in Vol 3 being pretty secretive, that positive change doesn't get to apply to her this first wave.

So basically TL;DR, don't stress about this too much. We're still 2 months out from the movie's release and a month away from promo and press starting. Yes, it sucks that so far Gamora isn't being featured in anything outside of posters and trailers, and yes it's valid to be upset and frustrated with that. But remember that there's still a whole other wave of merch to come after the movie's release, and Zoe Saldaña is still second-billed. She and Chris Pratt were the last two (humans) to wrap the movie. James Gunn wouldn't have brought Gamora back if he didn't want to. If you're still feeling uneasy or worried (which I totally get!) @enigma731 has some great posts about why Gamora will be fine.

Sorry this is so damn long, I kinda got carried away lol. But yeah I do wish there was at least like a Funko Pop or something and find it ridiculous that Kraglin of all people is getting more merch than the female lead, but I'm personally not getting too worried right now because we still have two months until the movie. It's not looking completely terrible right now. (Trust me, I was a Star Wars sequels stan during 2019 TROS press. That movie's plot was leaked via an official German Burger King ad. If it ever gets that bad for Vol 3 you will definitely hear about it from me lol).

#ask #anon #gamora #gotg vol 3 #vol 3 press

7 notes · View notes

7r0773r · 9 months

Text

What Are You Looking At? The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art by Will Gompertz

Duchamp redefined what art was and could be. Sure, it still included painting and sculpture, but they were simply two media among countless others for communicating an artist's idea. It is Duchamp who is to blame for the whole "is it art?" debate, which of course is exactly what he intended. As far as he was concerned, the role in society of an artist was akin to that of a philosopher; it didn't even matter if he or she could paint or draw. An artist's job was not to give aesthetic pleasure—designers could do that; it was to step back from the world and attempt to make sense or comment on it through the presentation of ideas that had no functional purpose other than themselves. His interpretation of art was taken to its extreme with the performance art of people such as Joseph Beuys in the late 1950s and 60s, who became not only the creators of the idea but the medium for it as well. (The Fountain, p. 10)

***

[Van Gogh] said, "I want to get to the point where people say of my work, 'That man feels deeply.'" (Post-Impressionism, p. 58)

***

From a few meters away some of [Van Gogh's] later paintings start to take on a three-dimensional quality. Move a bit closer and you can see that Van Gogh has shoveled great lumps of brightly colored oils on to his Canvas. He's caked on the paint like a drag queen on a Saturday night, and then shaped it, not using a brush, but with his palette knife and fingers. The technique wasn't new. Rembrandt and Velázquez had both used impasto. But in Van Gogh's hands its effects became more pronounced and dramatic. He didn't want the paint simply to depict part of the picture, but to be part of the picture. Where the Impressionists had sought to expose the truth by painting what they saw with rigorous objectivity, Van Gogh wanted to go further and expose deeper truths about the human condition. So he took a subjective approach, painting not just what he saw, but how he felt about what he saw. He started to distort his images to convey his emotions, exaggerating for effect like a caricaturing cartoonist. He would paint a mature olive tree and emphasize its age by remorselessly twisting the trunk and disfiguring the branches until it looked like a gnarled old lady; wise but cruelly misshapen by time. He would then add those large clumps of oil paint to accentuate the effect, turning a two-dimensional picture into a 3-D epic: a painting into a sculpture. Van Gogh wrote to Theo, referring to a mutual friend who was questioning his move away from accurate representation: "Tell Serret that I should be desperate if my figures were right ... tell him that I have a longing to make such incorrectness, such deviations, remodelings, changes in reality, so that they may become, well lies, if you want—but truer than the literal truth." And in so doing he inspired one of the most significant and enduring art movements of the twentieth century: Expressionism. (Post-Impressionism, pp. 60-61)

***

Maybe it's because of the time he has spent in Hollywood that Hockney feels so compelled to discuss the negative effects that he feels the camera has had on art. He directs a damning finger at the one-eyed monster in all its guises: photography, film and television. He believes it is the camera that has caused many of today's artists to forsake figurative art, having decided that a single mechanical lens can capture reality better than any painter or sculptor. "But they're wrong," he told me. "A camera cannot see what a human can see, there is always something missing." If Cézanne were alive, he would have been nodding vigorously in agreement, pointing out that a photograph documents a split second in time that happens to have been caught on a camera. Whereas a landscape painting, portrait or still life might appear to be a moment immortalized in a single image, but it is in fact the culmination of days, weeks and in the case of many artists (Cézanne, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Hockney), years of looking at a single subject. It is the result of vast quantities of stored information, experience, jottings and spatial study that has eventually appeared in the colors, composition and atmosphere of a final finished artwork. (Cézanne, pp. 79-80)

***

The point Cézanne is making, which he had discovered for himself when seeing "nature as no one has seen it before," was that we don't really see detail when looking at a landscape, we see shapes. Cézanne started to reduce land, buildings, trees, mountains and even people to a series of geometric forms. A field would become a green rectangle, a house would be depicted as a brown cube box, and a large rock would take on the shape of a ball. You can see the technique in [Mont Sainte-Victoire], which is really little more than a stack of shapes. It was a radical and revolutionary approach that had many traditional art lovers scratching their heads. Maurice Denis (1870-1943), a young French artist, tried to explain by saying that a painting could be judged on criteria other than the subject it depicts. He said, "Remember that a painting, before it is a warhorse, a nude woman or some anecdote or other, is essentially a flat surface covered in colors arranged in a certain order."

Twenty-five years later Cézanne's analytical approach to representation based around reducing visual details to geometric shapes would lead to its logical conclusion: total abstraction. Artists in Russia, Germany, Italy, France, Holland and eventually America (in the shape of the Abstract Expressionists) would start to make art that consisted of fat, monochromatic geometric planes: squares, circles, triangles and rhomboids. For some, the shapes were an allusion to the known world (a yellow circle for the sun, a blue rectangle for the sea or sky); for others the assembly of squares and triangles was nothing more than a formal design. In such cases the artist was asking for his or her work to be appraised on the basis of Maurice Denis's philosophical statement, above. It is quite astonishing to think that the hermit-like Cézanne, exiled in Aix, away from the avant-garde in Paris, would have such a profound effect on twentieth-century art. Even more surprising, then, to find out that Cézanne still wasn't finished.

There was one more logical progression that he felt was needed to achieve his aim of turning "Impressionism into something more solid and enduring, like the art of the museums." It was to take his idea of simplifying a landscape into groups of interconnecting shapes and move it one step further: to introduce something approaching a strict grid system. Or, as he put it rather more lyrically: "The parallel to the horizon gives breadth, whether it is a section of nature or, if you prefer, of the show which Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus (omnipotent, eternal father God) spreads out before our eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth." (Cézanne, pp. 87-88)

***

Braque has continued with Cézanne's subdued palette of pale browns and greens. Not this time, though, as an homage, but out of necessity. He realized, as did Picasso, that only by using a muted palette could he successfully blend multiple viewpoints of the same subject on a single canvas—a variety of bright colors would be impossible to configure for the artist and would present us with an indecipherable mess. Instead, they devised a technique where a straight line would mark a change of view, while subtle tonal shading would demonstrate to the viewer that a transition was taking place. The added benefit of this approach was an overall design that was balanced and coherent.

This is an important aspect of Cubism. For the first time, art was being produced whereby the canvas was no longer pretending to be a window—an instrument of illusion—but was being presented as an object itself. Picasso called it "pure painting," meaning that the viewer was to judge the picture on the quality of the design (color, line and form), and not on the quality of an illusory deception. The most important thing now was the lyrical and rhythmic pleasure to be enjoyed by the eye as it roamed the angular shapes laid out before it on the canvas. (Cubism, pp. 126-27)

***

One unconventional option for taking a non-musical approach to abstract art would be to abandon the notion of a subject—physical or imaginary—altogether. I know, it sounds daft. After all, how can you depict nothing?

The answer is, you can't. But you could make an artwork that is focused on the physical properties of the work itself. Instead of attempting to depict real life—landscapes, people, objects—its purpose could be an examination of the color, tone, weight and texture of paint (or whatever materials have been used to create the artwork); and the sense of movement, space and balance of the composition. Art that rejects the pre-existing and aims to create a new world order.

To do that would require removing the element of anecdote from art, which seemed like a preposterous idea. Art is a visual language; description and depiction is its job. A painting or sculpture without allusion would be like a book without a story or a play without a plot. Even the abstract art of Kandinsky and Delaunay offered the viewer some aspect of narrative, either in the form of musical symbolism and biblical allegory (Kandinsky) or a tangible starting point such as the color wheel (Delaunay). To focus purely on the technical and material aspects of an artwork and its relation to life, the universe and everything would necessitate a comprehensive re-evaluation of the role of art, and the expectations of the viewer. It would mean breaking with the artistic tradition of allusion that dates back to prehistoric cave paintings. And for that to happen would require a very particular set of circumstances.

Poppies, we know, grow in disturbed ground. Go to the fields of northern France, where the gruesome battles of the First World War were fought, and, if it is high summer, you will see an effervescent red glow like a morning mist hovering over the ground. It comes from the millions of poppies that now live on that land, the soil of which was plowed by bombs and enriched with the flesh and blood of the dead.

Calamitous upheavals and seismic events also have a tendency to foster great art. It is no coincidence that modern art emerged from France, a country that had been embroiled in revolution and war. Or that this next big break from tradition—the abandonment of representation—would happen in a country similarly populated by an avant-garde intelligentsia that was caught up in the civil unrest being stoked by rebellious-minded leaders. (Suprematism/Constructivism, pp. 164-65)

***

[Gropius] also insisted that fine-art students descend from their ivory tower and get down and dirty with the artisans, stating that "there is no such thing as professional art ... the artist is an exalted craftsman. Let us raise [sic] the arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us ... create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form." This is an echo of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk: a total work of art where all art forms come together to realize one glorious, life-affirming entity.

The great composer considered music to be the highest form of human creative endeavor, and reasoned that it was therefore the natural environment in which to attempt to produce a Gesamtkunstwerk. Gropius thought differently. He argued that architecture was the most important art form, saying that "the ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building." Hence the name Bauhaus, which is German for "building house" or "house for building." (Bauhaus, p. 206)

***

[Kahlo] liked [Duchamp] very much, unlike the rest of the Surrealist crowd, an opinion she proffered with typical directness, saying Duchamp was "the only one who has his feet on the earth among this whole bunch of coo-coo, lunatic sons of bitches of the Surrealists." (Surrealism, p. 260)

***

Rothko had said that his art constituted a "simple expression of the complex thought," which is as good a way as any to explain Abstract Expressionism. (Abstract Expressionism, p. 285)

***

[Beuys'] eccentric lectures, debates and performances became renowned among critics and art-world insiders for their sense of energy, imagination and chaos. In one of his performance art "actions" called I Like America and America Likes Me (I974), Beuys imprisoned himself in a cage for a week with only a coyote for company. Quite strange. But not as strange as the performance for which he is most readily remembered: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), which is one of those events I dearly wish I had been around to attend.

Beuys sat quietly on a chair in the corner of the Galerie Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf; his head was covered in honey and a generous sprinkling of gold leaf. In his arms he held a dead hare that he stared at fixedly. After a while he stood up and walked around the room looking at the paintings on the wall. From time to time he would hold the dead hare up and show it a picture, and then whisper inaudibly into one of its ears. Sometimes he would break off and sit down again, but at no point did he address or acknowledge the audience. This went on for three hours.

The audience was transfixed. Beuys later noted that he had captured their imagination, saying, "This must be because everyone... recognizes the problem of explaining things, particularly where art and creative work are concerned." Maybe. I would have thought they were just baffled and amused. Beuys was an animal lover who thought that even dead animals have "more powers of intuition than some human beings with their stubborn rationality." His view was that explaining things to a dead animal "conveys a sense of secrecy of the world." Beuys's performance art—all performance art—was not limited to his actions and ideas, but also encompassed the audience's response. It was due as much to their own awkwardness as Beuys's interventions, which shifted them out of their usual semi-oblivious mind-sets and into a state of vivid self-awareness and heightened perception. The "art" in his "performance" was a joint venture. (Conceptualism/Fluxus/Arte Povera/Performance Art, pp. 327-28)

***

Untitled (1972) is an open, polished copper box, measuring just under a meter in height and a little over a meter and a half in width. Judd has painted the inner base with his favorite cadmium red enamel. And, er . . . that's it. Untitled symbolizes nothing and suggests nothing. It is a copper box with a red inner base. But then it is a work of art. So what's its purpose? The answer is to simply be seen, enjoyed and judged purely on its aesthetic and material terms: how it looks and the way it makes you feel. There's no requirement to "interpret" the work—there is no hidden meaning to look for. Which, to my mind, makes it rather liberating. For once there are no tricks or specialist knowledge required, just a decision to be made: do you like it or not? (Minimalism, pp. 337-38)

#book quotes #will gompertz

0 notes

cindymoon · 3 years

Note

Did it ever occur to anyone that Wanda’s Roma background in the comics was BUILT on racist stereotypes? Similarly to M’Baku but also several others. And maybe that’s why the show runners stepped away from that..?

okay, so i think what we have here is someone who skimmed the original post in question (paragraph 2) and likely didn’t ready any of the links attached because that first message has been addressed already... but for anyone else in the same boat:

from gavia baker-whitelaw’s article:

Wanda and Pietro's Romani heritage was canon for decades (including in their non-mutant backstory), although this depiction often had problematic undertones. Wanda is literally a mysterious foreign witch, a damaging stereotype that acquired more nuance in later comics. But instead of updating Wanda and Pietro as modern Jewish/Romani superheroes (much like how Black Panther's charismatic M'Baku started out as a villain named "Man-Ape"), Disney whitewashed them. This casting choice was divisive in 2013, when The Atlantic highlighted the negative connotations of casting a white blonde actress as Scarlet Witch. Roma people are a marginalized ethnic minority, and Disney chose to erase their presence from the MCU.

...This rewrite was rather tone-deaf, because it involved Wanda and Pietro volunteering for neo-Nazi experiments. In the comics, their original parents were Holocaust survivors. Whedon also ignored the most obvious solution to Wanda and Pietro's non-mutant backstory: Django and Marya Maximoff, their Romani parents from the comics.

white washing characters is never the best solution. it doesn’t address the issue in so much as it just sweeps it under the rug. as well as perpetuating the idea that white is some unproblematic neutral that ppl can just default to. like can you imagine if in an attempt to “fix” how m’baku is portrayed in the comics, they just...put a white guy in the role? you can’t just remove a characters racial or ethnic background. no one is saying that her comic background hasn’t been problematic, but this isn’t the way to remedy that.

@scarlet--wiccan has an amazing post about the erasure of this whole family’s ethnic identity in the fox x-men films (x).

@villyns also has a good post outlining some examples of the mcu white washing rather than actually fixing the problem (x).

and here’s a decent article on white washing in media and why it’s a problem (x), quote from this article below:

Making a movie is not an easy feat; there are many things to take into account and even more people that you have to please, but there are also standards and morals to uphold. Whitewashing, blackface, brownface or yellowface is not just about denying jobs to minority actors, appropriating the stories of these groups, perpetuating stereotypes or keeping them invisible, it is about undermining their value as human beings and turning them into stepping stones, props, for white artists.

as for the second part. i think that’s entirely possible, actually. it’s done a lot to characters, where they won’t explicitly state their ethnicity but give them attributes from one (often stereotypes) and make them a caricature without making it, like i said, explicit. take the concept of jewish-coded villains in media. no one from disney has ever said that mother gothel in tangled is jewish, but it’s been pointed out by everyone that she’s jewish coded through stereotypes, ones specifically often used for “evil” witch-type characters, which is no coincidence: large, hooked nose, curly hair, greedy, etc. edit: hollywood uses coding like this often for racial/ethnic groups and the lgbtq+ community.

the maximoffs in the mcu and xmcu have never been explicitly made romani, with disney going so far as to change their parents romani names (django and marya) to oleg and irina. the name changes were unnecessary, except to distance the maximoffs from their original romani identity. the mcu changed their origins stories and cast non-romani actors to portray the maximoffs, and considering they went as far as to remove their jewish heritage as i mentioned before, it’s not a stretch that this is all an attempt to veil their romani background too. while they often joke about stealing and fortune tellers and poverty (the wv halloween episode really put it all in one place, but they’ve been doing it forever in the xmcu and mcu), i wouldn’t say this is an attempt to make them romani as much as it is to use a romani-esque caricature, to use it as a sort of “aesthetic” for the twins without acknowledging that it’s an ethnicity. the aspects they choose to keep are often either negative or painted in a negative light. i think the fact that el*zabeth ols*en continuously uses the g-slur to talk about wanda and costume design, speaks to that.

and even if the mcu came out and said, “oh, our wanda is romani,” that wouldn’t change the fact that she’s played by a non-romani actress (who continues to use anti-romani slurs, despite knowing she shouldn’t) and that so far, they have not explicitly stated in the mcu that she is.

from gavia baker-whitelaw’s article:

Wanda and Pietro's whitewashing feels like an attempt to "neutralize" them. It frames their ethnicity as a problem to be avoided, rather than an opportunity to celebrate an under-represented group. This also meant that Marvel could cast famous white actors instead of sourcing an unknown Romani actor, during a period when the MCU was visibly uninterested in racial diversity.

But Marvel Studios wanted to have its cake and eat it, too. While Wanda is now white and Sokovian, her role isn't completely divorced from its Romani origins. It can't be, because everything in the MCU is informed by the comics. That's how we end up with El*zabeth Ols*n describing her Age of Ultron costume as "kind of this g*psy, vagabond feel"—terms that usually wouldn't come to mind for a simple black minidress and maroon jacket. Wanda's Romani heritage remains visible through veiled references and superficial costume choices, sidestepping any hint of meaningful representation.

from jessica reidy’s article:

Today, some Roma do call themselves witches, and serve as healers and spell-casters in a community, but make no mistake, being a witch is a job like any other. I was trained by my grandmother, I studied hard, I started a business, and I take bookings in my Google calendar. This is the context that most people miss when creating (or, in this case, adapting) Romani witch characters like Wanda Maximoff, and while the Scarlet Witch has plenty of magic, she does not need to fall into the stereotype, nor have her identity erased.

Representation matters. Wanda’s Romani ethnicity has been well-stated in the comic books, sometimes capturing the discrimination and violence that Roma face, and other times falling flat and stereotypical. Marvel also owes us, as Roma are often rendered as mentally unstable thieves, such as Dr. Doom, Wanda and Pietro’s community, and Wanda herself, and the entertainment giant capitalizes off of these stereotypes, reinforcing them all the while.

Every opportunity we get for accurate and positive representation is essential to us because it shapes the way people understand us.

linking the post i made again, because it has a list of articles and posts i’d recommend really taking the time to look through and engaging with them, as well as following folks like jessica reidy and @scarlet--wiccan on social media for more info from romani folks.

#anon #b.inbox #hope this clears some things up for u #anti wandavision

675 notes · View notes

impostoradult · 4 years

Text

Media Market Research (and why its undermining all the things you love)

Trying to understand what is dysfunctional about Hollywood is an epic task, and the answers are like the stars – arguably infinite. Hollywood is dysfunctional for literally more reasons than I could count.

But market research plays a fairly heavy role in its dysfunction (IMO) and the time has finally come for me to add my professional two cents about this issue. (This rant of mine has been building for a while, FYI. Hence why it is so...comprehensive. There is a tl;dr section towards the bottom, if you want the high level summary)

*** For the last 4+ years I’ve worked in the field of market research, almost exclusively with major media makers like Warner Bros., NBCU, AMC/BBCA, Viacom, FOX (before Disney acquired them), A+E, etc. (this past year I quit the job where I was doing this work for a variety of reasons, many of which will become clear as you keep reading, but I am still listed as a consultant on the company website): https://www.kresnickaresearch.com/who/ (Rachel)

And just for comparison, here is a Halloween selfie I took 4 years ago and posted on my blog, so you can see I am who I say I am.

I know a fair amount about how market research on major media franchises is conducted and how it influences production, and a lot of these choices can also be at least somewhat tied back to the massive flaws in the market research industry and its impact. *** First, at the highest level, you need to understand market research in general is not well-conducted much of the time. Even the people doing a reasonably good job at it are VERY limited in doing it well because of financial constraints (clients don’t want to spend more than they have to), time constraints (clients want everything done as fast as humanely possible) and just the inherent problems within the industry that are decades old and difficult to fix. For example, all market research ‘screens’ participants to make sure they qualify to participate (whether it is a mass survey, a focus group, a one-on-one interview, etc.). So, we screen people based on demographics like race, gender, age, household income, to get representative samples. But people are also screened based on their consumption habits. You don’t want to bring someone into a focus group about reality TV if they don’t watch reality TV. They aren’t going to have anything useful to say.

However, a lot of the people who participate in market research have made a ‘side-gig’ out of it and they know how to finesse the process. Basically, they’ve learned how to lie to get into studies that they aren’t a good match for because most market research is paid, and they want the money. So, a lot of TV and film market research is being done on people who don’t actually (or at least don’t regularly) watch those shows or movies or whatever but have learned how to lie well enough in these screening processes to make it through. And because of the aforementioned time and money issue, clients don’t want to spend the time or money to actually find GOOD participants. They just accept that as an inevitable part of the market research process and decide not to let it bother them too much. So, a fair number of the people representing YOU as a media consumer are people who may not be watching Supernatural (for example) at all or who watch a rerun occasionally on TNT but haven’t been watching consistently or with ANY amount of investment whatsoever. You can see why that creates very skewed data. But that’s just the tip of the skewed iceberg. *** Second, media market research is conducted in line with the norms of market research more broadly, and this is a huge problem because media is a very atypical product. How people engage with media is far more complex and in depth than how they engage with a pair of jeans, a car, or a coffee maker. There are only so many things that matter to people when it comes to liking or not liking a coffee maker, for example. Is it easy/intuitive to use? How much space does it take it on my counter? How expensive is it? Does it brew the coffee well? Maybe does it match my décor/kitchen aesthetic? Can I make my preferred brand of coffee in it? The things you as a consumer are going to care about when it comes to a coffee maker are limited, fairly easy to anticipate in advance, and also easy to interpret (usually). How people mentally and emotionally approach MEDIA? Whole other universe of thing. Infinitely more complex. And yet it is studied (more or less) as if it is also a coffee maker. This is one of the many reasons I decided to leave the media market research field despite my desire to have some ability to positively influence the process. As so often seems to be the case, I fought the law and the law won. I could never make the other people I worked with in the industry understand that the questions they were asking were not all that useful a lot of the time and they weren’t getting to the heart of the matter. They were just following industry standards because they didn’t know any better and none of them want to admit they don’t REALLY know what they’re doing. Which leads me to point 3. *** Most of the people doing this research don’t have any expertise in media or storytelling specifically. They are typically trained as social scientists in the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, or math/statistics. And many of them do not have any kind of specialization or education in media/storytelling beyond the English classes they took in high school and the one Media Studies course they took as an elective in college. Most of them have a very unsophisticated understanding of narrative structure, thematics, tropes, subtext, etc. They mainly think in terms of genres at the VERY broadest level. Also, not infrequently, they don’t watch or have much knowledge of the shows they are supposed to be doing research on, beyond what they’ve read on IMDb or Wikipedia or what is generally common knowledge. Unless they by chance happen to watch the shows themselves (which often they don’t) they often know very little about the shows they are crafting these questions about. Again, partly because they think it is like the coffee maker, and you don’t need to understand it in any depth to research it. (I know this must sound insane to you as avid media consumers, but that is the general attitude among those who do market research) There is such a lack of sophistication in how people in the business side of the industry understand media and storytelling. Most of them are either MBAs or social scientists and their training has not prepared them to examine fictional works with the kind of depth that people in the Humanities (who are specifically trained to study texts) have. Somehow, despite the fact that the Humanities is all about understanding texts, that is the one discipline they make almost no use of in the business side of Hollywood. And boy howdy does it show. *** Point 4 – average consumers CANNOT ARTICULATE WHY THEY LIKE THINGS. Particularly media things. I know this sounds condescending, but it is my honest observation. It is unbelievably hard to get people to have enough self-awareness to explain why they actually like things, especially things as mentally and emotionally complex as media. What typically happens when you ask people why they like a TV show or movie, for example? They will tell you what they most NOTICE about the TV show or movie, or what is distinctive to them about it (which may or may not have anything to do with what they actually LIKE about it). They will say things like “I like the genre”, “I think it’s funny”, “The car chases are exciting”, “I want to see the detective solve the puzzle.” Sometimes you can get them to talk about what they find relatable about it, if you push them a little. But often they leave it at either the level of literal identity (young black woman), basic personality traits (she’s a social butterfly and so am I) or situations they’ve personally experienced (I relate to this story of a man losing his father to cancer because I lost a close family member to cancer). But the vast, vast, vast majority of them can’t go to the deeper level of: a) Why X representation of a young black woman feels accurate/authentic/relatable and Y representation doesn’t b) Why it matters to me that X,Y,Z aspects of my personality, identity, experience get reflected in media whereas I don’t really care about seeing A,B,C aspects of my personality, identity, or experience reflected in media c) How and why they are relating to characters when they can’t see the literal connection between their identity/experience and the character’s identity/experience. (For example, many people have argued that women often relate to Dean Winchester because a lot of his struggles and past negative experiences are more stereotypical of women – being forced to raise a younger sibling on behalf of an actual parent, being seen and treated as beautiful/sexually desirable but vacuous/unintelligent, his body being treated as an instrument for a more powerful group to quite literally possess, etc. Part of the reason Supernatural has always been such a mystery/problem for the CW and Warner Bros is they could never crack the code at this level. Never.) Part of the reason they can’t crack these codes is average people CANNOT give you that kind of feedback in a survey or a focus group, or even an in-depth interview (much of the time). They just don’t have the self-awareness or the vocabulary to get it at that level. Let alone asking them to articulate why Game of Thrones is compelling to them in an era where wealth disparity is creating a ruling class that is fundamentally incompetent at maintaining a just/functional society, which is especially concerning at this particular moment, given the existential threat we face due to climate change. And the truth is, that IS part of what people – even average people – are responding to in Game of Thrones. But what they’ll tell you when you do market research on it is: they like the dragons, they like the violence, they relate to Tyrion Lannister being a smart mouth, maybe they’ll say they like the moral ambiguity of many of the conflicts (if they are more sophisticated than average). But the ‘Dean Winchester is heavily female coded despite his veneer of ultra-masculinity’ or the ‘Game of Thrones is a prescient metaphor for the current political dynamics and fissures of modern western society’ is the level you ACTUALLY need to get to. And most market research can’t get you that because the people ASKING the questions don’t know what to ask to get to this level, and most of the respondents couldn’t give you the answers even IF you were asking them the right questions (which usually you are not) And I’m not saying average people are dumb because they can’t do this. But it requires practice, it requires giving the matter a great deal of in-depth thought, and most people just don’t care enough about it to do that while taking a market research survey. (I know this is going to feel counter-intuitive to people on Tumblr. But you have to remember, you are NOT average media consumers. You are highly atypical media consumers who have far more self-awareness and a much more sophisticated engagement with media than the average person watching TV. If you didn’t, you probably wouldn’t be here talking about it in the first place) Point 4.1 – People also lie/misrepresent their own experiences to market researchers because they want to maintain certain self-narratives. You have no idea how many people would get disqualified from our surveys for saying they watched less than 5 hours of TV a week. And sure, that might actually be true for a few of them. But if you watch TV with any regularity at all (which most people in modern America do) you probably watch more than 5 hours a week. The problem is, people think it makes them sound lazy to say they watch 15-20 hours a week, even though that’s about 2-3 hours a day (which actually isn’t THAT high). People lie and misrepresent their behaviors, thoughts and feelings because it can be socially uncomfortable to admit you do what you actually do or feel how you actually feel, even in the context of an anonymous survey, let alone a focus group or a one-on-one interview. People want to make themselves look good to THEMSELVES and to the researchers asking them questions. But that makes the market research data on media (and lots of other things) very questionable. For example, one finding we saw more than once in the surveys I was involved in conducting was people would radically downplay how much the romance elements of a story mattered to them, even large portions of female respondents. When we would ask people in surveys what parts of the story they were most invested in, romances ALWAYS came out among the lowest ranked elements. And yet, any passing familiarity with fandom would tell you that finding is just WRONG. It’s wrong. People are just flat out lying about how much that matters to them because of the negative connotations we have around being invested in romance. And never mind the issue of erotic/sexual content. (I don’t mean sexual identity here, I mean sexy content). The only people who will occasionally cop to wanting the erotic fan service is young men (and even they are hesitant to do so in market research) and women frequently REFUSE to admit that stuff in market research, or they radically downplay how much it matters to them and in what ways. There is still so much stigma towards women expressing sexuality in that way. Not to mention, you have to fight tooth and nail to even include question about erotic/sexual content because oftentimes the clients don’t even want to go there at all, partly because it is awkward for everyone involved to sit around crafting market research questions to interrogate what makes people hot and bothered. That’s socially awkward for the researchers doing the research and the businesspeople who have to sit in rooms and listen to presentations about why more women find Spock sexier than Kirk. (Which was a real thing that happened with the original Star Trek, and the network couldn’t figure out why) Aside from people not have enough deeper level self-awareness to get at what they really like about media content, they also will lie or misrepresent certain things to you because they are trying to maintain certain self-narratives and are socially performing that version of themselves to researchers. *** Point 5 – Qualitative data is way more useful for understanding people’s relationships to media. However, quantitative data is way more valued and relied upon both due to larger market research industry standards and because quantitative data is just seen as harder/more factual than qualitative data. A lot of media market research involves gathering both qualitative and quantitative data and reporting jointly on both. (Sometimes you only do one or the other, depending on your objectives, but doing both is considered ‘standard’ and higher quality). However, quantitative data is heavily prioritized in reporting and when there is a conflict between what they see in qualitative versus quantitative data, the quant data is usually relied upon to be the more accurate of the two. This is understandable to an extent, because quantitative surveys usually involve responses from a couple thousand participants, whereas qualitative data involves typically a few dozen participants at most, depending on whether you did focus groups, individual interviews, or ‘diaries’/ethnography. The larger sample is considered more reliable and more reflective of ‘the audience’ as a whole. However, quantitative surveys usually have the flattest, least nuanced data, and they can only ever reflect what questions and choices people in the survey were given. In something like focus groups or individual interviews or ethnographies, you still structure what you ask people, but they can go “off script.” They can say things you never anticipated (as a researcher) and can explain themselves and their answers with more depth. In a survey, participants can only “say” what they survey lets them say based on the questions and question responses that are pre-baked for them. And as I’ve already explained, a lot of times these quantitative surveys are written by people with no expertise in media, fiction, or textual analysis, and so they often are asking very basic, not very useful questions. In sum, the data that is the most relied upon is the least informative, least nuanced data. It is also the MOST likely to reflect the responses of people who don’t actually qualify for the research but have become good at scamming the system to make extra money. With qualitative research, they are usually a little more careful screening people (poorly qualified participants still make it through, but not as often as with mass surveys, where I suspect a good 35% of participants, at least, probably do not actually qualify for the research and are just working the system).

Most commonly, when market research gets reported to business decision-makers, it highlights the quantitative data, and uses the qualitative data to simply ‘color in’ the quantitative data. Give it a face, so to speak. Qualitative data is usually supplemental to quant data and used more to make the reports ‘fun’ and ‘warm’ because graphs and charts and stats by themselves are boring to look at in a meeting. (I’m not making this up, I can’t tell you how many times I was told to make adjustments on how things were reported on because they didn’t want to bore people in the meeting). (Sub-point – it is also worth noting that you can’t report on anything that doesn’t fit easily on a power point slide and isn’t easily digestible to any random person who might pick it up and read it. The amount of times I was told to simplify points and dumb things down so it could be made ‘digestible’ for a business audience, I can’t even tell you. It was soul crushing and another reason I stopped doing this job full time. I had to make things VERY dumb for these business audiences, which often meant losing a lot of the point I was actually trying to make) Point 5.1 – Because of the way that representative sampling works, quantitative data can be very misleading, particularly in understanding audience/fandom sentiments about media. As I’m sure most of you know, sampling is typically designed to be representative of the population, broadly speaking. So, unless a media company is specifically out to understand LGBTQ consumers or Hispanic/Latinx consumers, it will typically sample using census data as a template and represent populations that way. Roughly 50/50 male/female. Roughly even numbers in different age brackets, roughly representative samplings of the racial make-up of the country, etc. (FYI, they do often include a non-binary option in the gender category these days, but it usually ends up being like 5 people out of 2000, which is not enough of a sample to get statistical significance for them as a distinct group) There is a good reason to do this, even when a show or movie has a disproportionately female audience, or young audience. Because they need enough sample in all of the “breaks” (gender, race, age, household income, etc.) to be able to make statistically sound statements about each subgroup. If you only have 35 African American people in your sample of 1000, you can’t make any statistically sound statements about that African American cohort. The sample is just too small. So, they force minimums/quotas in a lot of the samples, to ensure they can make statistically sound statements about all the subgroups they care about. They use ratings data to understand what their audience make up actually is. (Which also has major failings, but I’ll leave that alone for the minute) With market research, they are not usually looking to proportionately represent their audience, or their fandom; they are looking to have data they can break in the ways they want to break it and still have statistically significant subgroups represented. But that means that when you report on the data as a whole sample – which you often do – it can be very skewed towards groups who don’t make up as large a portion of the show’s actual audience, or even if they do, they don’t tend to be the most invested, loyal, active fans. Men get weighted equally to women, even when women make up 65% of the audience, and 80% of the active fandom. Granted, they DO break the data by gender, and race, and age, etc. and if there are major differences in how women versus men respond, or younger people versus older people, they want to know that...sometimes. But here’s where things get complex. So, if you are doing a sample of Supernatural viewers. And you do the standard (US census-based) sampling on a group of 2000 respondents (a pretty normal sample size in market research). ~1000 are going to be female. But with something they call “interlocking quotas” the female sample is going to be representative of the other groupings to a degree. So, the female sample will have roughly equal numbers of all the age brackets (13-17, 18-24, 25-34, etc.). And it will have roughly 10% non-heterosexual respondents, and so on. They do this to ensure that these breaks aren’t too conflated with each other. (For example, if your female sample is mostly younger and your male sample is mostly older, how do you know whether it is the gender or the age that is creating differences in their responses? You don’t. So, you have to make sure that all the individual breaks (gender, race, age) have a good mix of the other breaks within them, so groups aren’t getting conflated) But what that means is, Supernatural, whose core fandom is (at a conservative guess) 65% younger, queer, women, gets represented in a lot of statistical market research sampling as maybe 50-100 people, in a 2000-person survey. 50-100 people can barely move the needle on anything in a 2000-person survey. Furthermore, usually in the analysis of data like this, you don’t go beyond looking at 2 breaks simultaneously. So you may look at young female respondents as a group, or high income male respondents, or older white respondents, but you rarely do more than 2 breaks combined. And the reason for that is, by the time you get down to 3 breaks or more (young, Hispanic, women) you usually don’t have enough sample to make statistically significant claims. (It also just takes longer to do those analyses and as I explained in the beginning, they are always rushing this stuff). To do several breaks at a time you’d have to get MUCH larger samples, and that’s too expensive for them. And again, I want to stress, this type of sampling isn’t intended to sinisterly erase anyone. Kind of the opposite. It is intended to make sure most groups have enough representation in the data that you can make sound claims about them on the subgroup level. The problem is that it can create a very skewed sense of their overall audience sentiment when they take the data at ‘face value’ so to speak, and don’t weight segments based on viewership proportion, or fandom engagement, etc. Point 5.2 – Which leads me to my next point, which is that fandom activity that doesn’t have a dollar amount attached to it doesn’t make you a ‘valuable’ segment in their minds. One of the breaks they ALWAYS ask for in data like this is high income people, and people who spend a lot of MONEY on their media consumption. And they do prioritize those people’s responses and data quite a bit. And guess what – young women aren’t usually high-income earners, and although some of them are high spenders on media, high spending on media and media related merch skews toward higher income people just because they HAVE more disposable income. Older white men are usually the highest income earners (absolutely no surprise) and they are more likely in a lot of cases to report spending a lot on the media they care about. Having expendable income makes you more important in the eyes of people doing market research than if you’ve spent every day for the last 10 years blogging excessively about Supernatural. They don’t (really) care about how much you care. They care about how much money you can generate for them. And given that young audiences don’t watch TV live anymore, and they give all their (minimal) expendable income to Netflix and Hulu, you with your Supernatural blog and your 101 essays about Destiel is all but meaningless to many of them (from a business standpoint) Now, some of them kind of understand that online fandom matters to the degree that fandom spreads. Fandom creates fandom. But if the fandom you are helping to create is other young, queer women with minimal income who only watch Supernatural via Netflix, well, that’s of very limited value to them as well. I don’t want to suggest they don’t care about you at ALL. Nor do I want to suggest that the “they” we are talking about is even a cohesive “they.” Different people in the industry have different approaches to thinking about fandom, consumer engagement and strategy, market research and how it ought to be understood/used, and so on. They aren’t a monolith. BUT, they are, at the end of the day, a business trying to make money. And they are never going to place the value of your blogging ahead of the concrete income you can generate for them. (Also, highly related to my point about people lying, men are more likely to SAY they have higher incomes than they do, because it’s an ego thing for them. And women are more likely to downplay how much money they spend on ‘frivolous’ things like fandom because of the social judgement involved. Some of the money gender disparity you see in media market research is real, but some of it is being generated by the gender norms people are falsely enacting in market research– men being breadwinners, women wanting to avoid the stereotype of being frivolous with money) *** In sum/tl;dr: Point 1 – Market research in general is not well conducted because of a variety of constraints including time, money, and the historical norms of how the industry operates (e.g., there being a large subsection of almost professionalized respondents who know how to game the system for the financial incentives) Point 2 – Media is a highly atypical kind of product being studied more or less as if it were equivalent to a coffeemaker or a pair of jeans. Point 3 – Most of the people studying media consumption in the market research field have no expertise or background in media, film, narrative, storytelling, etc. They are primarily people who were trained as social scientists and statisticians, and they aren’t well equipped to research media properties and people’s deeper emotional attachment and meaning-making processes related to media properties. Point 4(etc.) – Average consumers typically don’t have enough self-awareness or the vocabulary to explain the deep, underlying reasons they like pieces of media. Furthermore, when participating in market research, people lie and misrepresent their thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses for a variety of reasons including social awkwardness and preserving certain self-narratives like “I’m above caring about dumb, low-brow things like romance.” Point 5 (etc.) – Quantitative data is treated as way more meaningful, valuable, and ‘accurate’ than qualitative data, and this is a particular problem with media market research because of how varied and complex people’s reactions to media can be. Also, the nature of statistical sampling, and how it is done, can massively misrepresent audience sentiments toward media and fail to apprehend deeper fandom sentiments and dynamics. There is also a strong bias towards the responses of high income/high spending segments, which tend to be older and male and white. Side but important point – Research reports are written to be as entertaining and digestible as possible, which sounds nice in theory, but in practice it often means you lose much of the substance you are trying to communicate for the sake of not boring people or making them feel stupid/out of their depth. (Because god forbid you make some high-level corporate suit feel stupid) *** What can be done about this? Well, the most primary thing I would recommend is for you to participate in market research, particularly if you are American (there’s a lot of American bias in researching these properties, even when they have large international fanbases). However, some international market research is done and I recommend looking into local resources for participation, where ever you are. If you are American, there are now several market research apps you can download to your smart phone and participate in paid market research through (typically paid via PayPal). Things like dscout and Surveys On the Go. And I know there are more. You should also look into becoming panelists for focus groups, particularly if you live near a large metropolitan area (another bias in market research). Just Google it and you should be able to figure it out fairly easily. Again, it is PAID, and your perspective will carry a lot more weight when it is communicated via a focus group or a dscout project, versus when it is shouted on Twitter. However, that’s merely a Band-Aid on the bigger issue, which I consider to be the fact that businesspeople think the Humanities is garbage, even when they make their living off it. There is virtually no respect for the expertise of fictional textual analysis, or how it could help Hollywood make better content. And I don’t know what the fix is for that. I spent 4 years of my life trying to get these people to understand what the Humanities has to offer them, and I got shouted down and dismissed so many times I stopped banging my head against that wall. I gave up. They don’t listen, mostly because conceding to the value of deep-reading textual analysis as a way to make better content would threaten the whole system of how they do business. And I mean that literally. So many people’s jobs, from the market researchers to the corporate strategists to the marketing departments to the writers/creatives to the C-level executives, would have to radically shift both their thinking and their modes of business operation and the inertia of ‘that’s the way it’s always been done’ is JUST SO POWERFUL. I have no earthly idea how to stop that train, let alone shift it to an entirely different track. BTW, if you want the deeper level of analysis of why I can’t stop rewatching Moneyball now that it’s been added to Netflix, the above paragraph should give you a good hint

#market research #Hollywood #media studies

657 notes · View notes

somnianus · 3 years

Text

On Chinese and Eastern Dramatic Acting vs Western

Part 1 Part 2

Mostly in ref to the Untamed/Word of Honor, but applies to a lot of East Asian works-

I’ve been getting the sense that people I know from the west (also being Asian-American myself) often interpret Chinese/Japanese/Korean drama and theatre to be too corny/cheesy/over-acted. A quick search on some internet forums confirms this. Maybe it’s because I used to watch a lot of C-dramas when I was a kid (Legend of the Condor Heroes/Return of C Heroes/Journey to the West/The Reincarnated Princess/etc), I personally did not notice that the acting was over the top.

I don’t really speak for the quality of acting of these actors because I barely follow them in their careers, but I do know that some of them are immature actors or don’t have much formal training (which may cause the cheesiness above). However, Eastern dramatic acting in general does seem like a common complaint, so I decided to look into it - this is all coming from someone who JUST recently got back into watching C-dramas btw, doing my own research so don’t mind me if there’s some incorrect things down here, I am by NO means at all an expert in drama and theater (lol):

^Villains are often depicted with very exaggerated facial expressions (Above, Xue Yang, The Untamed)

Part 1

1. Chinese concept of mo vs western equivalent of “mimesis” or “imitation”

From this, an excellent chapter on Chinese theatrical concepts vs Western concepts.

Mo plays a significant part in traditional Chinese theatre, usually held to be antithetical to the realism of Western theatre because of its emphasis on theatricality.

Mo means mimesis or imitation, but in a very different sense from the Western concept. One of the first Chinese scholars to use this term, Fu Sinian, used it to compare Western theatre to Chinese theatre:

Presenting a real event and performing an entertaining show are not compatible. The former emphasizes imitation (yige zhong mofang^b); the latter stresses spontaneity and entertainment. The former performance produces a lifelike image; the latter has nothing to produce. The former puts emphasis on the plot; the latter puts emphasis on theatricality. Therefore they are completely contradictory to one another.

This guy actually goes onto critique Chinese theater, saying it should be more like Western realism, so that there will “be no singing, and the acting will imitate people’s real gestures.” However! Other Chinese critics tried to approach Western vs traditional Chinese drama as two DIFFERENT but still valid forms of art. For example, Yu Shangyuan (1927) said western performance is “writing realistically” (xie shi) and chinese performance as “writing suggestively” (xie yi). Western dramas really rely on an accurate/semi-accurate representation of life and realism. Traditional Chinese drama and acting relied on the “symbolic and imaginative.”

Then what is mo? It is the emotional display, the emotional revelation, that is shown on stage. Starting from the Yuan dynasty, the Chinese drama was thought to be a continuation of poetry rather than its own independent stage art.

Poetry is where the intent of the heart goes. Lying in the heart, it is “intent”; when uttered in words, it is “poetry.” When an emotion stirs inside, one expresses it in words; finding this inadequate, one sighs over it; not content with this, one sings it in poetry; still not satisfied, one unconsciously dances with one’s hands and feet. [anonymous, 1975, from Shi Daxu 200 BCE]

Chinese drama with dancing and singing, was the most expressive product of poetry. The importance of mo cannot be stressed enough - it is the measure by which traditional Chinese drama was judged, how well this drama make you feel? Love, pain, loss, guilt, happiness? Plot becomes something that doesn’t matter as much (more on that later).

^Beijing/Peking Opera - highly stylized, emotive, “unrealistic” performances

To emphasize how central and important this concept is, it’s thought that a good Chinese playwright never fails to “seize a highly dramatic scene to stage an elaborate presentation of an emotional state.”

Love is of source unknown, yet it grows ever deeper. The living may die of it, by its power the dead live again. [Peony Pavilion, Mu dan ting]

This quote really shows how important it was to show these emotions on stage, to inspire the audience to feel deeply. Chinese critics believed that the best part about drama was how efficient it is to display emotion. Playwrights should “depict extreme bitterness, extreme happiness, extreme silliness, and extreme sobriety; imitate these feelings to the utmost (miao mo jin xing^p).”

Such performances are not necessarily accurately mimicking reality, but they are obtained through the “revelation” of a character’s internal emotional world.

2. Mo vs the depiction of reality or theatrical truth

The Chinese concept of aesthetic truth relates a lot to theatrical truth. In a lot of traditional Chinese art, painting, poetry, etc, aesthetic truth is not empirical, and doesn’t have to be accurate to life, or realistic. It’s a “truth that lies beyond mere superficial likeness.”

To the Chinese artist, an accurate resemblance between art and reality is not only superficial but often distorting. Chinese artists hold a dialectical view on the “form” (xing) and the “spirit” or “content” (shen) of an artistic object. According to them, xing and shen are not always complementary. On the contrary, they often stand in opposition to one another. (referenced in the chapter above)

Traditional Chinese artists would rather represent the object with the wish that their representation matches its spirit, or abstract identity, than its actual form because a “photographic image is a shallow image.” It’s easy to draw a picture of something realistically, but it’s much harder and more satisfying to depict its nature, its feeling, its spirit.

This also naturally affects theater and dramatic performances.

Dramatic writing can be divided into two types: “a painting-like work” or a “transformed work,” in which the latter has higher artistic value because it reaches more towards the essence of dramatic object. Realistic imitations are fine, but they’re not really enough to reveal the mo or true feelings of something.

In addition, traditional Chinese dramatists believe that “all dramas are nothing but allegories. One need not ask about their origins in actual life.” You might be able to see, then, that these older playwrights and critics really fancied the overdramatic depictions of emotions.

a. The Chinese notion of theatrical truth/aesthetic truth vs European

Onto what we, as part of the Western audience, are more used to:

For Italian neoclassical critics, the pleasure of a drama hinges on how accurate, how realistic, the depiction is. Castelvetro, the leading Italian Neo-Classical critic and creator of the concept of “the three unities,” claims thus:

We cannot imagine a king who did not exist, nor attribute any action to him.

Another Italian critic, Robortellus, said that a creative/imaginative story with no “verisimilitude” (truthfulness, in this context, realism) is less appealing than one that imitates a real-life event:

Thus if a tragic plot contained an action which did not really take place and was not true, but was represented by the poet himself in accordance with verisimiltude, it would perhaps move the souls of the auditors, but certainly less.

So basically, it’s fundamentally the opposite of Chinese theater. Italian dramatic works prized being realistic, being properly adapted from reality and real events. Chinese dramatic works, however, enjoyed the emphasis on heartfelt emotional demonstrations, or mo. Even in critical writings, the word “truth” is used, but it is usually used to modify the word “heart” or “emotion.” It is very concerned with the internal, the truthfulness of heartfelt emotional expression.

Taken these contexts, you can see why the Chinese stage/dramas are wholly “unreal” as Tao-Ching Hsu puts it. Everything, the makeup, the costumes, the props, is expressive and suggestive rather than imitative.

b. Bejing/Peking Opera, jingju

A famous example is the Beijing/Peking Opera, jingju. The makeup and costumes themselves are fantastical representations. The colors and patterns suggest different moods, temperaments, characters, and even changes in emotions. Actors would make distinct movements to depict distinct emotions with varying levels of energy. The stage itself may be sparse, because it is not as important as the expression of emotion and drama.

The stage is sparse not because of the lack of technology or funding, but because it leaves room for the actor themselves to fully express their internal thinking/feeling/emotions. Characters can cross hundreds of miles in a few steps or may take the whole stage to cross a supposed road. This representation looks “unreal” to a realistic-minded audience, but it is very genuine to a Chinese audience.

Summary (so far)

This crucial understanding of the concept of mo (the emotional revelation), and the way traditional Chinese drama depicts life and stories, informs how their modern works are also portrayed. Coming from a Western dramatic background, where realism and plot are the most important aspects of a work, it can be very confusing, right? Even Chinese scholars began to judge their own dramatic works through a Western lens.

How does this traditional background affect modern Chinese dramas and works? I think it still has a very large effect, even though much of Western ideals about dramatic works have been heavily integrated into modern Chinese dramas.

Part 2: On Theatricality and how it transfers into Chinese Cinema

#cdramas #theater #acting style #beijing opera #the untamed #word of honor #kdramas #jdramas #theatricality #east asian cinema

122 notes · View notes

citrina-posts · 4 years

Text

Avatar: Cultural Appreciation or Appropriation?

I love Avatar: the Last Airbender. Obviously I do, because I run a fan blog on it. But make no mistake: it is a show built upon cultural appropriation. And you know what? For the longest time, as an Asian-American kid, I never saw it that way.

There are plenty of reasons why I never realized this as a kid, but I’ve narrowed it down to a few reasons. One is that I was desperate to watch a show with characters that looked like me in it that wasn’t anime (nothing wrong with anime, it’s just not my thing). Another is that I am East Asian (I have Taiwanese and Korean ancestry) and in general, despite being the outward “bad guys”, the East Asian cultural aspects of Avatar are respected far more than South Asian, Middle Eastern, and other influences. A third is that it’s easy to dismiss the negative parts of a show you really like, so I kind of ignored the issue for a while. I’m going to explain my own perspective on these reasons, and why I think we need to have a nuanced discussion about it. This is pretty long, so if you want to keep reading, it’s under the cut.

Obviously, the leadership behind ATLA was mostly white. We all know the co-creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino (colloquially known as Bryke) are white. So were most of the other episodic directors and writers, like Aaron Ehasz, Lauren Montgomery, and Joaquim Dos Santos. This does not mean they were unable to treat Asian cultures with respect, and I honestly do believe that they tried their best! But it does mean they have certain blinders, certain perceptions of what is interesting and enjoyable to watch. Avatar was applauded in its time for being based mostly on Asian and Native American cultures, but one has to wonder: how much of that choice was based on actual respect for these people, and how much was based on what they considered to be “interesting”, “quirky”, or “exotic”?

The aesthetic of the show, with its bending styles based on various martial arts forms, written language all in Chinese text, and characters all decked out in the latest Han dynasty fashions, is obviously directly derivative of Asian cultures. Fine. That’s great! They hired real martial artists to copy the bending styles accurately, had an actual Chinese calligrapher do all the lettering, and clearly did their research on what clothing, hair, and makeup looked like. The animation studios were in South Korea, so Korean animators were the ones who did the work. Overall, this is looking more like appreciation for a beautiful culture, and that’s exactly what we want in a rapidly diversifying world of media.

But there’s always going to be some cherry-picking, because it’s inevitable. What’s easy to animate, what appeals to modern American audiences, and what is practical for the world all come to mind as reasons. It’s just that… they kinda lump cultures together weirdly. Song from Book 2 (that girl whose ostrich-horse Zuko steals) wears a hanbok, a traditionally Korean outfit. It’s immediately recognizable as a hanbok, and these dresses are exclusive to Korea. Are we meant to assume that this little corner of the mostly Chinese Earth Kingdom is Korea? Because otherwise, it’s just treated as another little corner of the Earth Kingdom. Korea isn’t part of China. It’s its own country with its own culture, history, and language. Other aspects of Korean culture are ignored, possibly because there wasn’t time for it, but also probably because the creators thought the hanbok was cute and therefore they could just stick it in somewhere. But this is a pretty minor issue in the grand scheme of things (super minor, compared to some other things which I will discuss later on).

It’s not the lack of research that’s the issue. It’s not even the lack of consideration. But any Asian-American can tell you: it’s all too easy for the Asian kids to get lumped together, to become pan-Asian. To become the equivalent of the Earth Kingdom, a mass of Asians without specific borders or national identities. It’s just sort of uncomfortable for someone with that experience to watch a show that does that and then gets praised for being so sensitive about it. I don’t want you to think I’m from China or Vietnam or Japan; not because there’s anything wrong with them, but because I’m not! How would a French person like to be called British? It would really piss them off. Yet this happens all the time to Asian-Americans and we are expected to go along with it. And… we kind of do, because we’ve been taught to.

1. Growing Up Asian-American

I grew up in the early to mid-2000s, the era of High School Musical and Hannah Montana and iCarly, the era of Spongebob and The Amazing World of Gumball and Fairly Odd Parents. So I didn’t really see a ton of Asian characters onscreen in popular shows (not anime) that I could talk about with my white friends at school. One exception I recall was London from Suite Life, who was hardly a role model and was mostly played up for laughs more than actual nuance. Shows for adults weren’t exactly up to par back then either, with characters like the painfully stereotypical Raj from Big Bang Theory being one of the era that comes to mind.

So I was so grateful, so happy, to see characters that looked like me in Avatar when I first watched it. Look! I could dress up as Azula for Halloween and not Mulan for the third time! Nice! I didn’t question it. These were Asian characters who actually looked Asian and did cool stuff like shoot fireballs and throw knives and were allowed to have depth and character development. This was the first reason why I never questioned this cultural appropriation. I was simply happy to get any representation at all. This is not the same for others, though.

2. My Own Biases

Obviously, one can only truly speak for what they experience in their own life. I am East Asian and that is arguably the only culture that is treated with great depth in Avatar.

I don’t speak for South Asians, but I’ve certainly seen many people criticize Guru Pathik, the only character who is explicitly South Asian (and rightly so. He’s a stereotype played up for laughs and the whole thing with chakras is in my opinion one of the biggest plotholes in the show). They’ve also discussed how Avatar: The Last Airbender lifts heavily from Hinduism (with chakras, the word Avatar itself, and the Eye of Shiva used by Combustion Man to blow things up). Others have expressed how they feel the sandbenders, who are portrayed as immoral thieves who deviously kidnap Appa for money, are a direct insult to Middle Eastern and North African cultures. People have noted that it makes no sense that a culture based on Inuit and other Native groups like the Water Tribe would become industrialized as they did in the North & South comics, since these are people that historically (and in modern day!) opposed extreme industrialization. The Air Nomads, based on the Tibetan people, are weirdly homogeneous in their Buddhist-inspired orange robes and hyperspiritual lifestyle. So too have Southeast Asians commented on the Foggy Swamp characters, whose lifestyles are made fun of as being dirty and somehow inferior. The list goes on.

These things, unlike the elaborate and highly researched elements of East Asian culture, were not treated with respect and are therefore cultural appropriation. As a kid, I had the privilege of not noticing these things. Now I do.

White privilege is real, but every person has privileges of some kind, and in this case, I was in the wrong for not realizing that. Yes, I was a kid; but it took a long time for me to see that not everyone’s culture was respected the way mine was. They weren’t considered *aesthetic* enough, and therefore weren’t worth researching and accurately portraying to the creators. It’s easy for a lot of East Asians to argue, “No! I’ve experienced racism! I’m not privileged!” News flash: I’ve experienced racism too. But I’ve also experienced privilege. If white people can take their privilege for granted, so too can other races. Shocking, I know. And I know now how my privilege blinded me to the fact that not everybody felt the same euphoria I did seeing characters that looked like them onscreen. Not if they were a narrow and offensive portrayal of their race. There are enough good-guy Asian characters that Fire Lord Ozai is allowed to be evil; but can you imagine if he was the only one?

3. What It Does Right

This is sounding really down on Avatar, which I don’t want to do. It’s a great show with a lot of fantastic themes that don’t show up a lot in kids’ media. It isn’t superficial or sugarcoating in its portrayal of the impacts of war, imperialism, colonialism, disability, and sexism, just to name a few. There are characters like Katara, a brown girl allowed to get angry but is not defined by it. There are characters like Aang, who is the complete opposite of toxic masculinity. There are characters like Toph, who is widely known as a great example of how to write a disabled character.

But all of these good things sort of masked the issues with the show. It’s easy to sweep an issue under the rug when there’s so many great things to stack on top and keep it down. Alternatively, one little problem in a show seems to make-or-break media for some people. Cancel culture is the most obvious example of this gone too far. Celebrity says one ignorant thing? Boom, cancelled. But… kind of not really, and also, they’re now terrified of saying anything at all because their apologies are mocked and their future decisions are scrutinized. It encourages a closed system of creators writing only what they know for fear of straying too far out of their lane. Avatar does do a lot of great things, and I think it would be silly and immature to say that its cultural appropriation invalidates all of these things. At the same time, this issue is an issue that should be addressed. Criticizing one part of the show doesn’t mean that the other parts of it aren’t good, or that you shouldn’t be a fan.

If Avatar’s cultural appropriation does make you uncomfortable enough to stop watching, go for it. Stop watching. No single show appeals to every single person. At the same time, if you’re a massive fan, take a sec (honestly, if you’ve made it this far, you’ve taken many secs) to check your own privilege, and think about how the blurred line between cultural appreciation (of East Asia) and appropriation (basically everybody else) formed. Is it because we as viewers were also captivated by the aesthetic and overall story, and so forgive the more problematic aspects? Is it because we’ve been conditioned so fully into never expecting rep that when we get it, we cling to it?

I’m no media critic or expert on race, cultural appropriation, or anything of the sort. I’m just an Asian-American teenager who hopes that her own opinion can be put out there into the world, and maybe resonate with someone else. I hope that it’s given you new insight into why Avatar: The Last Airbender is a show with both cultural appropriation and appreciation, and why these things coexist. Thank you for reading!

#this deleted idk why #so here is me reposting it #atla #avatar #avatar the last airbender #cultural appropriation #meta #atla meta #racism

787 notes · View notes

dannychoo · 2 years

Photo

While most of us take the action of walking for granted, there are some of us who can't walk or need devices to help us walk. I have spinal hernia which causes sciatica - the type where not even crutches can help me walk. At its worst, I'm usually at home and crawl on the floor to get around as I did like a baby ;-) If I need to visit the hospital for treatment, I need to do it in a wheelchair. I've never tried using crutches until recently when my wife had to use them for a couple of months after knee surgery to repair a torn meniscus. I was curious how one got about on them and tried them out. While it looks easy from afar, using them is a different story. Alan has been working on a design since last year but the designs never worked out until our collection of medical devices started to take on a certain aesthetic. While they may not be an accurate representation of all crutches - I think they look pretty decent ;-) The Crutches for Smart Doll are free to new or existing Smart Doll owners who rely on crutches for mobility. There is no need to add them to cart - just make a purchase of other goodies and leave your one-liner story with the order and we will put them in for free. At this moment in time, we can only provide one set for free per household. Do note that we cant send them out on their own - we can provide them for free because we ask that you allow us to put them in with your new order. As with all our 3D printed products, do expect support studs on the surface - we do the bare minimum to remove them, but you will need to sand down the surfaces if you want them super smooth. We need a few more weeks for production before we can start putting them in orders. And yes - I have been working on a wheelchair design for many years but so far none have turned out with production scalability or portability. Today's model is Timeless Cocoa - eye and wig color is not final. #tokyo #smartdoll #anime #manga #doll #fashion #3dprinting #fashiondoll #design #madeinjapan #japan (at Mirai Store Tokyo) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca_kAGirfBk/?utm_medium=tumblr

#tokyo #smartdoll #anime #manga #doll #fashion #3dprinting #fashiondoll #design #madeinjapan #japan

10 notes · View notes

lions-arch-chronicle · 4 years

Photo

Mild Spoiler Warnings for LWS5 No Quarter

Image ID for stories below read more

Title: Smashing, bashing Dragonbash returns

“Tyrians held the first Dragon Bash after Zhaitan’s defeat—an expression of relief and joy at beating impossible odds,” a statement by Arena Net reads. “With Jormag’s influence on the rise, it’s more important than ever to commemorate your victories with an annual party!”

Dragonbash has returned to Hoelbrak once again to bring joy and hope to the citizens of Tyria.

Fan-favorite events return to the Norn home city such as the hologram stampede, moa races, and the ever-popular and ever potentially fatal dragon arena.

“It wouldn’t be a proper celebration without your attendance. Join me in Hoelbrak for another moot for the ages! There will be tests of strength, racing, food, song, and most importantly—ale,” said Knut Whitebear.

I’ll see you there. Unless, of course, you don’t enjoy the fun.”

This year introduces new items to players that include the unique Holographic

Dragon Shoulder as well as holographic representations of the first generation of legendary weapons in the Imbued Holographic weapons set.

The moa races this year sparked a bit of controversy with allegations that one racer, Mystic Forgery, had experimental rockets strapped to its torso in an attempt to propel the moa forward. According to Photo Editor Dexsia Truthseeker, Mystic Forgery also had roughly 30 Superior Runes of Speed hidden within its feathers, a clear violation of the rules. After officials and Knut Whitebear were called to mediate the rockets were ruled as an unfair advantage to the other moas and the extra equipment was removed.

Dragonbash organizers also want to remind The Commander and other participants that while Zhaitaffy is a sugary, delicious, chewy treat it is not meant to be consumed in quantities of over 1000 pieces at a time, and doing so may cause intestinal harm and a sugar rush followed by an intense sugar crash.

Organizers also asked us to remind all participants that rollerbeetle racing is not for children, or sylvari, under 5 years of age because of the dangers that the highspeed races present. They recommend that families and participants who fall outside of this age range instead participate in spectating the races from a safe distance or hitting dragon pinatas located around Hoelbrak.

We here at the Lion’s Arch Chronicle wish you all a safe and happy Dragonbash!

Title: United Legions brace themselves against Dominion forces (spoiler warnings for lws5)

The newest shocking turn in the battle against the elder dragons has brought the charr to outright civil war with the defection of Imperator Bangar Ruinbringer and his followers creating the Dominion forces. Currently, a savage battle rages in the Drizzlewood Coast pitting charr against charr as more members of the United Legions allegedly defect to the Dominion.

According to the latest intel, the negotiations with the newly promoted Tribune Ryland Steelcatcher have failed due to the unexpected arrival of Pact Marshal Logan Thackeray and Lady Kasmeer Meade as reinforcements to the United Legions during the parlay.

The area has been split into two major battlefields with a seemingly neutral zone in the center. The situation is changing hourly but at the time of publication the United Legions control, Petraj Overlook, Vloxen Mine, and Port Cascadia. While the Dominion forces control Fort Defiance, Leadfoot Village, Wolf’s Crossing, and Lighthouse Point.

Editors Note: As the situation is changing rapidly this information is subject to change and may be inaccurate, we have reported the information as accurately as we could at the time of publication.

The former pact commander has allegedly aligned themselves with the United Legions, and have been helping to turn the tide in this brutal civil war that so far seems to have no end in sight.

The coverage of this story is ongoing and will be updated as new information is revealed.

Title: Lion’s Arch sees increase in fountain related accidents

I recently went on a tour of Lion’s Arch, and we came across the most beautiful fountain near the Trader’s forum. Our tour guide made a point to let us know that it’s where most of the accidents happen on the tour. An amazing 80%!! Obviously this had to be wrong because there were two quaggans having a good ole time playing in the fountain. I thought, “what the heck” and started playing along. Let me tell you I had the best time until I fell flat on my face after one of those little fellas told me I was too big for the fountain! Lesson of the day: Listen to your tour guide! Or wear non-slip shoes…

Editors Note: The Lion’s Arch Tour Guide asked us to remind everyone that those statistics are not a joke and that everyone should have listened to her when new Lion’s Arch was under construction because this all could have been avoided in the first place. The Lion guard has also asked us to remind everyone that this should not be attempted and that what our staff writer did was ill advised and could lead to serious injury.

Title: Opinion Article, About the Birds of Tyria

There are all kinds of amazing birds of Tyria! The most superior bird of all is the Ascalonian Quail. It is clear because they are compact and have ornamental feathers to show off their superiority to the rest of the birds of Tyria. I’ve heard many people say Griffins are the superior bird of Tyria but I am here to say that those folks are wrong. Griffins aren’t even birds!! They have four legs! All birds I’ve ever seen have 2 legs! Griffins in fact are arachnids! They have 6 limbs! I mean look at them! That’s not a bird! Some could argue that Moas are the superior bird, but alas they are too tall to hold in your hand! You can’t even carry them in your pocket! Owls are pretty cool! I even hear some people have them to help them fight. However, that’s too aggressive for most folks, unlike the small quail of Ascalon! Why not Hawks you ask? Their beaks and claws are very sharp! Great for hunting, or stabbing holes into your arms or eyes. Crows are pretty neat, they have the whole goth aesthetic going, but they don’t have the super rad head ornaments like quail do. And Griffins hardly have any of the benefits of these other birds, because they aren’t even birds! In conclusion, Ascalonian Quail are the best birds in Tyria and Griffins are abominations.

Title: Lion’s Arch Chronicle welcomes new staff writers

The Lion’s Arch Chronicle proudly would like to introduce our two newest members to our staff, Freepaw Kittyblog and Consultant Teekay they reached out to us after the publishing of our first issue.

Kittyblog will be covering local attractions and places to see when visiting your travel destinations, as well as being promoted to being the head of local advertisement while she travels.

“Hi there! I’m Freepaw Kittyblog! I’m a char who grew up in Divinity’s Reach,” Kittypaw said when asked for a statement. “I love visiting new places and I hope to one day make a living as a travel blogger!”

Our second newest member is Consultant Teekay they are well versed in all manner of research and have a knack for finding the deep truths that no one had thought to look for yet. They will be covering and either proving or debunking the latest rumors that are floating around Tyria, a true light at the end of the tunnel.

“Greetings readers! I’m Consultant Teekay, a fun loving, truth telling columnist from Rata Sum,” said the Consultant in her statement. “I’ve traveled Tyria in search of secrets big and small, but secrets are no fun if we can’t share them! And that’s exactly what I intend to do!

We are proud to have these additions to our team and hope that you enjoy the stories that they will be writing in the near future.

End ID

#Lion's Arch Chronicle #guild wars 2 #gw2 #lws5 spoilers

100 notes · View notes

batmanisagatewaydrug · 4 years

Text

book blogging #3: is this book, you know... gay?

I’ve been vaguely aware of Jen Wang’s The Prince and the Dressmaker for some time, and had the vague understanding that it fit somewhere in the genre of “warm and fuzzy queer coming of age graphic novels” that seems to be happily proliferating these days, and while I’m very much a fan of that development as a whole, I wasn’t in any particular rush to seek it out.

then the pandemic happened, everything closed, my reading started to consist mostly of whatever my friends can lend me, etc. we’ve had this conversation before.

textually, no explicit identities are ever claimed in this graphic novel; no one uses the words “transgender” or “gay” or “bisexual” or “queer.” that’s understandable, especially is a pseudo-historical setting like this one when those words weren’t have been used or understood the way they are today, although Wang is hardly trying to write historical accurate fiction and time period is deliberately vague. it’s a fairly significant plot point that Paris’ first department store is opening up over the course of the story, and in the real world that occurred in 1852. however, the titular prince is Prince Sebastian of Belgium, and since absolutely no such prince existed in 1852, it seems that this story is taking place in an aesthetically pleasing alternate history. neat!

unfortunately, like many fictional worlds, this one isn’t exempt from real world ideas about gender, and Prince Sebastian is very, very worried about what will happen if anyone discovers that he, the sole heir to the Belgian throne, really enjoys wearing dresses. the only people he trusts with his secret are a faithful servant and Frances, the dressmaker who catches Sebastian’s eye with a particularly daring and controversial design. to boil down the plot very small, Frances becomes Sebastian’s secret designer, constructing avant-garde costumes for him to wear out on the town under the alias Lady Crystallia.

so, how are we - the worldly queer readers of 2020, with our nuanced understanding of the many ways gender, gender presentation, and sexuality can interact - meant to understand Sebastian?

right off the bat, I think it’s fair to say he’s certainly not meant to be a representation of a trans girl coming into her identity. Sebastian’s doesn’t seem bothered by being a boy, only by the limitations that societal expectations have placed upon his wardrobe. he is certainly happier and more confident when he’s dressed up in wig and heels and introducing himself as Crystallia, but that primarily seems to come from being able to shed the expectations usually placed upon him and being permitted to dress as he likes. one gets the impression that Sebastian would be perfectly happy to use his real name and he/him pronouns while wearing his dresses, if only he didn’t have to worry about someone learning his secret.

it seems most accurate to say that Sebastian could most accurately be compared to a baby drag queen, which made it extra surprising that (spoiler alert!) he ends up having feelings for a girl.

more specifically, he ends up developing feelings for Frances, and she likes him back, and they have some truly adorable little moments of falling in love. by the end I was really rooting for these kids to overcome their inevitable third act misunderstanding and get back together. and even as I was rooting for them, I was wondering: wait, so is this gay at all?

despite Sebastian fitting many tropes often associated with young gay men - he loves traditionally feminine clothing, he doesn’t relate to his father’s love of sports or like physical labor, he’s extremely nervous about his parents expectations that he will find a wife - he never actually shows any particular interest in men or, indeed, anyone but Frances. while that certainly doesn’t rule out that he could be bi or pan or an asexual who experiences romantic attraction, going purely by what’s on the page it doesn’t seem implausible that Sebastian is... a straight, cisgender teenage boy who happens to really like wearing dresses. I’m not saying that’s definitively what he is - I think there’s a strong case for Sebastian being genderfluid or nonbinary - but there’s also no categorical proof that he’s not.

what about Frances? while Sebastian initially tries to hide his identity from her, including that he’s a boy, she finds out the truth before their first meeting is over, meaning she’s under no false impressions about who exactly she’s falling in love with. the first time we get a hint of blossoming romance is a classic scene of Frances watching her crush while he’s unaware, then catching herself staring and looking away while blushing. this happens to take place while Sebastian has his long red wig on, lovingly brushing out his hair, looking pretty femme. later on the two of them spend a night together that is clearly a date, complete with an adorably awkward goodnight, all of which takes place while Sebastian fully presenting as male. truthfully, none of this tells us anything about Frances’ orientation(s) either, except that external presentation is absolutely no hurdle for her.

so this could, quite feasibly, be a cisgender, heterosexual couple, with nothing in the text to either strictly confirm or refute it. if you’re looking for canon LGBT rep, you might be a bit disappointed. but is the book queer?

there is a difference, after all, especially if we go looking for queerness in the academic sense, the kind that’s less concerned with exactly quantifying identity and is much more interested in playing around to see exactly how far ideas of gender and sexuality can be warped, distorted, and otherwise used like so much Play-Doh. at very least, there’s an absolute treasure trove of gender nonconformity on Sebastian’s end, which I don’t think exactly needs spelling out. Frances is a more subtle rebel for falling in love with Sebastian in all his skirts and glitter; without going too far down the gender theory rabbit hole, heterosexuality is traditionally construed as an attraction between masculine and feminine opposites.

obviously I’m not coming at you to argue that Sebastian as a cis, straight boychild who likes dresses is more radical than a Sebastian who is explicitly not-straight or not-cisgender. but as someone who personally doesn’t jive well with the impulse to neatly label each and every facet of identity, there’s something about this very sweet book that hits like a breath of fresh air. sure, Sebastian worries about being known as a boy who wears dresses, but he never seems to worry about what his clothing preferences mean for his own gender or sexuality. likewise, Frances has a lot of concerns about the pressures of keeping secrets and trying to build her own career, but she’s spectacularly untroubled by the implications of having a crush on someone with such a wildly fluctuating gender presentation.

Frances and Sebastian know what they like - wearing/making spectacular dresses, and each other - and don’t worry about the rest, and I think there’s something really simply but powerfully sweet in that ability to simply embrace and explore what makes them happy without spiraling into an existential crisis about it. the problem is always external, always in the form of outsiders who don’t understand, never grappling for internal understanding. thematically that’s all pretty queer, so my ultimate grade is this: if nothing else, this book is one hell of an ally, and I think it has a lot of potential to resonate with folks across a wide variety of queer identities. it certainly made my heart all warm and tingly :)

#bookblr

36 notes · View notes

kytcordell · 4 years

Text

Why Do I Create?

Compulsion

I cannot stop creating.

In fact, I’ve tried--multiple times. There have been so many occasions on which the frustration and self-loathing associated with creative pursuits was psychologically crippling to the point where I did try and stop. But I never stopped inventing stories in my mind. I never stopped creating characters. I never stopped following artists I liked, basking in distant envy at the skills I believed I could never attain.

It has taken me a lifetime to really distill the true reason behind why I create. As much I would like to say that I’ve “always just loved drawing and expressing myself,” this simply wouldn’t be true nor an accurate representation of the relationship I have with art. At this point, I’m not sure if the word “passion” or “love” quite captures why I create. I would describe it more as a feverish need--a compulsion. I actually don’t even quite see myself as the “owner” of my works or ideas, but rather, as the vessel which serves them. Every ounce effort I put toward creative endeavors is a means of honing myself into a more suitable vehicle for delivering ideas into being.

For most of my life, I had an extremely pathological and maladaptive sense of self that resulted from nearly 26 years of physical and psychological abuse. It took me a long time to even recognize that what happened to me was in fact abuse. I used to shy away from the word because it seemed too self-pitying and dramatic. It still sometimes feels that way, despite the fact I objectively know that if anyone (let alone a parent) ever pulled a knife on me now, I would call the police without a second thought.

I won’t go too much into the details of what happened because it isn’t really worth delving into. But I was essentially raised as if I were an investment fund and not a person. My entire purpose was to be useful so my mother could stop having responsibilities of any kind. I was not raised with own personal well-being and future stability in mind. This meant that a non-lucrative career was unacceptable. My art was ever only appreciated in the context of bragging rights or winning awards. This of course, manifested in my relationship with creative pursuits.

Narcissism

My adolescent motivations for drawing were fueled mostly by pure, unadulterated narcissism.

I drew semi-seriously throughout high school. By that, I mean I quickly figured out what kinds of skills were considered impressive for that age group and did well at shows and competitions. I wanted to feel superior and adored at any cost, and while I embodied the external talking points of “being humble, always learning, etc.” deep down, I clung to the idea that I was better than everyone else. I couldn’t handle critique emotionally, despite acting receptive. I was completely consumed by the idea of being some kind of perfect, “talented” golden child.

I managed to get very good at copying photos and rendering, while neglecting all the skills that contribute to being able to design characters or draw from imagination. I didn’t really pursue art with any real level of personalized focus. I just liked feeling like I was better than people and knew more than the other kids. Honestly, every single aspect of my life revolved around this mentality.

I held onto the idea of “being good” as a trophy because that was the only mode of thought that my psyche could accept. It was easier to embrace narcissism and even just accept being a shallow social climber than to face the far more harrowing truth:

That I was afraid I’d never have the skills to manifest my ideas.

In fact, I talked myself into believing for ages that I didn’t care that much about my ideas. They would never amount to anything. And having self-indulgent, non-utilitarian attachments to my stories and OCs felt like a weakness. I needed to rationalize my own shortcomings with a guise of indifference.

Revererence

I stopped drawing for about seven years after high school. And even during high school, I didn’t do anything that remotely resembles the kind of ‘grind’ that I’ve put myself through the last 2.5 years. Frankly, I’m amazed I got as far as I did even with being a human copy machine that produced lifeless 1:1 images of candles. With each year I passed, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the fact I always knew deep down--I just wasn’t that good. I mean, I was pretty good for a guy in high school. But my holistic sense of composition, invention, and execution was near non-existent. I went through a few attempts of returning to art, only to be so overwhelmed with my own incompetence that I would just go back to the “I don’t care that much about art” script I had gotten so good at conning myself into.

It was not until I had a complete mental breakdown due to my psychotic cunt of a mother threatening my safety and sanity that my long-con finally broke. I had a moment where I just accepted that I had no fundamentals, my skills were trash, and most of all--I was not okay with them being trash. From that point, I started desperately seeking out resources and practicing to improve. Receiving criticism (while I really appreciated it objectively) was psychologically devastating to me. Every single imperfection was a reminder of “lost time” and the years I had spent lying to myself.

It wasn’t until I discovered Loomis, Hampton, Draw-a-Box, Proko, and many other reputable art resources that I managed to start hitting the pavement and making the kind of gains I wanted. I drew sometimes for 12-16 hours a day even while I was homeless and living on a friend’s couch due to having to flee my home at the time. Through all of this, I shed all my notions of “being talented” or needing to delude myself into feeling like I was good. No, I was dogshit and I needed to do something about. I think the biggest hurdle people face when trying to get good at anything is accepting that they are bad. You cannot improve until you fully and wholeheartedly accept that you have problems that need fixing.

I went from approaching things from a place of narcissism to a place of reverence. A lot of what instilled this change in me was observing people that I admire. Those that are highly competent (in any craft) tend to be realistic and humble about their shortcomings. The very process of attaining mastery forces you to realize that there is an infinite scale of improvement. This isn’t to say that people who are good can’t also get full of themselves. But at least among the individuals I gravitate towards, there is a general sense of reverence and genuine modesty. On the other hand, people who are mediocre frequently have very large egos. Unfortunately, there is a lot egotistical, irrational, whiny-bitch anti-progress behavior that is prevalent in art circles. I realized just how cancerous conceit and ego could be. It had destroyed my progress for years and I was watching complete hacks insist they were gods atop mount stupid. It was truly the Dunning-Krueger effect in action.

Many of the people I encountered in the art community early on were pretty mediocre and had a terrible sense of fundamentals. Again, this would be fine if they didn’t insist on acting like experts on the topic. (Plenty of people draw for fun and don’t care about being good and there is nothing wrong with purely pursuing something for leisure.) However, I unfortunately ran into quite a few extremely petty people had no idea of how to actually get good at anything, and were annoyed at the fact I had prioritized working on fundamentals. People that I engaged in good faith soon attempted to derail conversations and questions I had about technique and improvement. Crabs in a bucket bullshit, really.

Anyone knows me also knows that I have no tolerance for bullshit or “UwU bitches” making “it’s my style” excuses for being technically incompetent. (Which isn’t to say accuracy is always more important than style, but using “style” or “aesthetic” as an excuse for a lack of skill or competence is extremely common among mediocre artists). Likewise, I also encountered people who manifested narcissism in the opposite direction. The opposite of the “it’s muh style” camp were people who endlessly liked to talk about theoretical technical knowledge. Sometimes they were good at one skillset or another, but generally lack any kind of concept or actual artistic vision. It was like they had lost sight of expression goals in favor of shit talking and dropping advanced art vocabulary.

I realized that no amount of shit-talk, posturing, or external validation was going to make me good at art. I always knew that, but watching people descend into the abyss of self-sabotage just reminded me what was at stake. I would rather never “feel” like I was superior than run the risk of delusional overconfidence. Likewise, I broke out of the trap of thinking technical skill could somehow compensate for a lack of good ideas or artistic vision. Nothing matters more than the clarity of expression, and skill is but a conduit for said expression. I would rather feel eternally small and striving for a forlorn dream than run the risk of being 10 years down the road cranking out trashy, vapid content while thinking I’m some kind of omnipotent art god.

I draw because I cannot stop. It’s like being touched by fire that you cannot quell or erase. I work to improve because I want to depict my stories and characters with the finesse, nuance, and artistry that I admire in so many others. I truly feel there is no point in pursuing art seriously if you do not have a voice, a “vision” for why you create. Looking back, the motivation that kept me going through the hardest struggles was the desire to succeed in communicating my stories and concepts. I am but an acolyte eternally striving for even a brief glimpse of an ephemeral muse.

#Art #Art Philosophy #Why I Draw #Personal

8 notes · View notes

tlbodine · 5 years

Text

The Wendigo is Not What You Think

There’s been a recent flurry of discussion surrounding the Wendigo -- what it is, how it appears in fiction, and whether non-Native creators should even be using it in their stories. This post is dedicated to @halfbloodlycan, who brought the discourse to my attention.

Once you begin teasing apart the modern depictions of this controversial monster, an interesting pattern emerges -- namely, that what pop culture generally thinks of as the “wendigo” is a figure and aesthetic that has almost nothing in common with its Native American roots...but a whole lot in common with European Folklore.

What Is A Wendigo?

The Algonquian Peoples, a cluster of tribes indigenous to the region of the Great Lakes and Eastern Seaboard of Canada and the northern U.S., are the origin of Wendigo mythology. For them, the Wendigo (also "windigo" or "Witigo" and similar variations) is a malevolent spirit. It is connected to winter by way of cold, desolation, and selfishness. It is a spirit of destruction and environmental decay. It is pure evil, and the kind of thing that people in the culture don't like to talk about openly for fear of inviting its attention.

Individual people can turn into the Wendigo (or be possessed by one, depending on the flavor of the story), sometimes through dreams or curses but most commonly through engaging in cannibalism. Considering the long, harsh winters in the region, it makes sense that the cultural mythology would address the cannibalism taboo.

For some, the possession of the Wendigo spirit is a very real thing, not just a story told around the campfire. So-called "wendigo psychosis" has been described as a "culture-bound" mental illness where an individual is overcome with a desire to eat people and the certainty that he or she has been possessed by a Wendigo or is turning into a Wendigo. Obviously, it was white people encountering the phenomenon who thought to call it "psychosis," and there's some debate surrounding the whole concept from a psychological, historical, and anthropological standpoint which I won't get into here -- but the important point here is that the Algonquian people take this very seriously. (1) (2)

(If you're interested in this angle, you might want to read about the history of Zhauwuno-geezhigo-gaubow (or Jack Fiddler), a shaman who was known as something of a Wendigo hunter. I'd also recommend the novel Bone White by Ronald Malfi as a pretty good example of how these themes can be explored without being too culturally appropriative or disrespectful.)

Wendigo Depictions in Pop Culture

Show of hands: How many of you reading this right now first heard of the Wendigo in the Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book?

That certainly was my first encounter with the tale. It was one of my favorite stories in the book as a little kid. It tells about a rich man who goes hunting deep in the wilderness, where people rarely go. He finds a guide who desperately needs the money and agrees to go, but the guide is nervous throughout the night as the wind howls outside until he at last bursts outside and takes off running. His tracks can be found in the snow, farther and farther apart as though running at great speed before abruptly ending. The idea being that he was being dragged along by a wind-borne spirit that eventually picked him up and swept him away.

Schwartz references the story as a summer camp tale well-known in the Northeastern U.S., collected from a professor who heard it in the 1930s. He also credits Algernon Blackwood with writing a literary treatment of the tale -- and indeed, Blackwood's 1910 novella "The Wendigo" has been highly influential in the modern concept of the story.(3) His Wendigo would even go on to find a place in Cthulhu Mythos thanks to August Derleth.

Never mind, of course, that no part of Blackwood's story has anything in common with the traditional Wendigo myth. It seems pretty obvious to me that he likely heard reference of a Northern monster called a "windigo," made a mental association with "wind," and came up with the monster for his story.

And so would begin a long history of white people re-imagining the sacred (and deeply frightening) folklore of Native people into...well, something else.

Through the intervening decades, adaptations show up in multiple places. Stephen King's Pet Sematary uses it as a possible explanation for the dark magic of the cemetery's resurrectionist powers. A yeti-like version appears as a monster in Marvel Comics to serve as a villain against the Hulk. Versions show up in popular TV shows like Supernatural and Hannibal. There's even, inexplicably, a Christmas episode of Duck Tales featuring a watered-down Wendigo.

Where Did The Antlered Zombie-Deer-Man Come From?

In its native mythology, the Wendigo is sometimes described as a giant with a heart of ice. It is sometimes skeletal and emaciated, and sometimes deformed. It may be missing its lips and toes (like frostbite). (4)

So why, when most contemporary (white) people think of Wendigo, is the first image that comes to mind something like this?

Well...perhaps we can thank a filmmaker named Larry Fessenden, who appears to be the first person to popularize an antlered Wendigo monster. (5) His 2001 film (titled, creatively enough, Wendigo) very briefly features a sort of skeletal deer-monster. He’d re-visit the design concept in his 2006 film, The Last Winter. Reportedly, Fessenden was inspired by a story he’d heard in his childhood involving deer-monsters in the frozen north, which he connected in his mind to the Algernon Blackwood story.

A very similar design would show up in the tabletop game Pathfinder, where the “zombie deer-man” aesthetic was fully developed and would go on to spawn all sorts of fan-art and imitation. (6) The Pathfinder variant does draw on actual Wendigo mythology -- tying it back to themes of privation, greed, and cannibalism -- but the design itself is completely removed from Native folklore.

Interestingly, there are creatures in Native folklore that take the shape of deer-people -- the ijiraq or tariaksuq, shape-shifting spirits that sometimes take on the shape of caribou and sometimes appear in Inuit art in the form of man-caribou hybrids (7). Frustratingly, the ijiraq are also part of Pathfinder, which can make it a bit hard to find authentic representations vs pop culture reimaginings. But it’s very possible that someone hearing vague stories of northern Native American tribes encountering evil deer-spirits could get attached to the Wendigo, despite the tribes in question being culturally distinct and living on opposite sides of the continent.

That “wendigo” is such an easy word to say in English probably has a whole lot to do with why it gets appropriated so much, and why so many unrelated things get smashed in with it.

I Love the Aesthetic But Don’t Want to Be Disrespectful, What Do I Do?

Plundering folklore for creature design is a tried-and-true part of how art develops, and mythology has been re-interpreted and adapted countless times into new stories -- that’s how the whole mythology thing works.

But when it comes to Native American mythology, it’s a good idea to apply a light touch. As I’ve talked about before, Native representation in modern media is severely lacking. Modern Native people are the survivors of centuries of literal and cultural genocide, and a good chunk of their heritage, language, and stories have been lost to history because white people forcibly indoctrinated Native children into assimilating. So when those stories get taken, poorly adapted, and sent back out into the public consciousness as make-believe movie monsters, it really is an act of erasure and violence, no matter the intentions of the person doing it. (8)

So, like...maybe don’t do that?

I won’t say that non-Native people can’t be interested in Wendigo stories or tell stories inspired by the myth. But if you’re going to do it, either do it respectfully and with a great deal of research to get it accurate...or use the inspiration to tell a different type of story that doesn’t directly appropriate or over-write the mythology (see above: my recommendation for Bone White).

But if your real interest is in the “wendigocore” aesthetic -- an ancient and powerful forest protector, malevolent but fiercely protective of nature, imagery of deer and death and decay -- I have some good news: None of those things are really tied uniquely to Native American mythology, nor do they have anything in common with the real Wendigo.

Where they do have a longstanding mythic framework? Europe.

Europeans have had a long-standing fascination with deer, goats, and horned/antlered forest figures. Mythology of white stags and wild hunts, deer as fairy cattle, Pan, Baphomet, Cernunnos, Herne the Hunter, Black Phillip and depictions of Satan -- the imagery shows up again and again throughout Greek, Roman, and British myth. (9)

Of course, some of these images and figures are themselves the product of cultural appropriation, ancient religions and deities stolen, plundered, demonized and erased by Christian influences. But their collective existence has been a part of “white” culture for centuries, and is probably a big part of the reason why the idea of a mysterious antlered forest-god has stuck so swiftly and firmly in our minds, going so far as to latch on to a very different myth. (Something similar has happened to modern Jersey Devil design interpretations. Deer skulls with their tangle of magnificent antlers are just too striking of a visual to resist).

Seriously. There are so, so many deer-related myths throughout the world’s history -- if aesthetic is what you’re after, why limit yourself to an (inaccurate) Wendigo interpretation? (10)

So here’s my action plan for you, fellow white person:

Stop referring to anything with antlers as a Wendigo, especially when it’s very clearly meant to be its own thing (the Beast in Over the Garden Wall, Ainsworth in Magus Bride)

Stop “reimagining” the mythology of people whose culture has already been targeted by a systematic erasure and genocide

Come up with a new, easy-to-say, awesome name for “rotting deer man, spirit of the forest” and develop a mythology for it that doesn’t center on cannibalism

We can handle that, right?

This deep dive is supported by Ko-Fi donations. If you’d like to see more content, please drop a tip in my tip jar. Ko-fi.com/A57355UN

NOTES:

1 - https://io9.gizmodo.com/wendigo-psychosis-the-probably-fake-disease-that-turns-5946814

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendigo#Wendigo_psychosis

3 - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10897/10897-h/10897-h.htm

4 - https://www.legendsofamerica.com/mn-wendigo/

5- https://www.reddit.com/r/Cryptozoology/comments/8wu2nq/wendigo_brief_history_of_the_modern_antlers_and/

6 - https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Wendigo

7 - https://www.mythicalcreaturescatalogue.com/single-post/2017/12/06/Ijiraq

8 - https://www.backstoryradio.org/blog/the-mythology-and-misrepresentation-of-the-windigo/

9 - https://www.terriwindling.com/blog/2014/12/the-folklore-of-goats.html

10 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_in_mythology

#horror #folklore #mythology #deep dive #wendigo #cultural appropriation #monster design #creature design #long post #if you need a place to channel your deerman aesthetic #may I suggest huntokar from welcome to nightvale #100% fictional #100% awesome

181 notes · View notes

flodaya · 4 years

Note

i don’t know if you do rankings but if you do would you mind ranking the skams and saying your favourite character in each? (i’ve just started following you and just wanted to know your thoughts) :) x

of course, I did a lot of rankings a few weeks ago, I love ranking stuff, it’s so personal and I get to appreciate my faves and drag the stuff I don’t like dshvhsj

1. druck - so technically i think skam españa is better written, but druck just is closer to my heart for some reason, it’s probably a combination of how I’ve build my account on this remake and also because my native language is german and that always just kind of adds another layer to the story imo. I love the characters, druck definitely has most of my favourite characters, their dynamics are amazing and I love how druck managed to connect the boy and girl squad. favourite character: matteo florenzi

2. skam españa - like I said, it’s the best written skam imo, their messages are always so thoughtful, their girl squad is supportive and feels so warm and welcoming. they really care so much about their audience and about accurate representation and it feels like they do their research properly. favourite character: joana bianchi

3. skam austin - solid writing, compelling characters, amazing changes. i definitely didn’t like as many characters in this one as in many other versions but I love morally grey characters, and I still appreciate their stories and growth, yet i am incapable of choosing one favourite character: jo valencia and shay dixon

4. skam - season 1 and 3 were amazing, literally ground breaking and I love rewatching them, season 2 and 4 were really really weak and didn’t do either of the mains nor the side characters any justice. favourite character: isak valtersen

5. skam nl - it’s so pretty and the cast has natural chemistry, the writing is really weak though if you really pay attention and are not blinded by aesthetic shots and beautiful scenery. favourite character: isa keijser

6. skam france - the telenovela remake, it’s dramatic and there is always something happening, I personally like to watch it ironically, just how I enjoy watching pretty little liars or elite, it’s fun but can’t be taken too seriously. favourite character: imane bakhellal

7. I don’t even want to say anything about wtfock lol y’all know my complaints, if not just go here. season 2 was alright though, at least considering how bad it could have been favourite character: oh boy... either they are underdeveloped or they did something i just can’t get past lol so I think my favourite is yasmina, she seems sweet so far

I can’t rank skam italia because I’ve only seen s2 and parts of s1, so I don’t really have a proper opinion, I just know I don’t like the aesthetic at all and the writing of s2 was very weak imo

#skam rankings #ask #my posts

16 notes · View notes

theparanormalperiodical · 4 years

Text

A Brief History Of Transphobia In Horror Movies Feat. A Small Window Into The Reality Of Being Trans Cause Let’s Face It It’s Way Scarier Than Any Horror Film

It combined the eerie atmosphere of supernatural horror with the twists and turns of a psychological thriller - by all means An Incident In Ghostland (2018) was a great film.

It drove an innovative plot around tight bends of classic horror tropes and brought us skidding back to the ultimate psychological horror ending: we never really know what’s real and what’s not.

But this film should’ve crashed within the first 15 minutes.

And all that should be left in the wreck is a lipstick in the shade ‘Harlot Red’.

We already know that the struggle for trans rights - let alone with trans representation in the media - is a worthy fight. It has not been helped by the horror genre.

It’s time to change that.

It began with Buffalo Bill.

“Would you f—k me? I’d f—k me.”

It’s one of the most iconic horror films that have been put on the silver screen. But the thing is, when people were walking out of the first screenings of The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, they were traumatised by the disgusting acts Hannibal Lecter would commit on-screen.

They were not protesting Lecter’s former patient as they swiped on makeup, tucked their genitals between their legs, and paraded their desired body in the mirror. This quick pre-murder ritual is the most prominent portrayal of transgender identities, even if - as Lecter says - they are not trans.

From the scenes in the film to the pages of the novel it’s based on, we see Buffalo Bill’s gender dysphoria, but Lecter instead suggests their apparent trans-ness is rooted in something else - something far more sinister, something that never actually gets explained.

All we know is they want to create a ‘woman suit’ by murdering women and skinning their bodies.

Buffalo Bill thus brought to light a portrayal of gender dysphoria that claimed those that were questioning their gender identity were obsessed by gender.

So obsessed, in fact, they would go to extreme lengths to fulfill their desires by killing women and taking their ‘parts’ for themself.

This is also explored in another horror classic: Psycho (1960).

This film defined the horror genre, and put the slasher on the map. And if slasher films weren’t guilty enough for their portrayal of women, they further followed the J.K. Rowling school of thought and gave trans women a new separate character-arc.

Norman Bates is yet another horror icon known for dressing as a different gender, and then killing women. Whether they’re doing so to protect their identity or to keep the memory of their mother alive, we see another man don a wig, pull on a dress, and whip out a weapon of their choice.

The only difference is that Norman does become his mother (and thus a woman) on a permanent basis - only when he is officially declared insane and institutionalised.

The more deranged they become, the more crimes they commit, the more of a woman they become. By officially crossing the gender lines, they officially become monsters.

“But weren’t Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill based on a true story?”

Ed Gein was a serial killer who murdered countless women, mutilated their bodies, and used their body parts to create various household furniture and items of clothing. But it was Gein’s creation of a ‘woman suit’ that would allow them to crawl into their beloved mother’s skin which confirmed that they were the original inspiration behind these movie villains.

Despite debate on whether Gein was in fact transgender, a majority believe via police evidence and interviews that they would identify as trans by modern standards.

This brings us to an important point:

To an extent, these films portray trans peoples accurately. Funnily enough, trans people are actually people (shock horror). This means that they can in fact be murderers.

But what these films don’t get right is that they all portray trans people as exactly the same. Like, exactly the same. As in they could at least have tried to be a bit more imaginative.

So, when I was watching An Incident In Ghostland one Sunday evening, I was reminded of the same trope yet again. Well, not reminded, per se. ‘Smacked in the face’ is probably a better phrase to use.

But thankfully, Ghostland did throw in something different.

They chuck in a character that belongs in some found-footage haunted asylum movie!

*Slams laptop shut*

In Ghostland we see two sisters get stalked, held captive, and sexually assaulted and raped by a mentally impaired man and a trans woman. But despite the dominance of the scenes involving the torture, assault, and rape of the women, I want to focus here on the decor of the house they were held captive in.

The house was full of hundreds of vintage dolls.

From the striking image used on the movie poster to the garish aesthetic one can only imagine was inspired by Annabelle, dolls that are painted, dressed, and positioned for use by the woman and the man is central to the plot.

Its the dressing of the sisters in traditional feminine outfits and the application of doll-like makeup to join the other dolls in the house which fits the trope we just can’t escape from.

(No matter how fast we run.)

The Candy Truck Woman, as she is also known, dedicates herself to the process of holding their victims captive and making these women into traditionally feminine objects. It’s the process of creating extreme femininity that defines her role.

Well, that and the portrayal of her trans identity which only goes as emphasising her masculine features. This is embodied by the death of the villain:

Her wig gently slips off her head just before her corpse slumps to the floor.

This suggests that her trans identity is intrinsically linked to her crimes. When she dies, the girls are finally free from her control, and the doll facade ends. She too is apart of the facade. She is reduced to being a bloke in a wig.

The only redeeming feature of this movie?

She is correctly gendered by the credits as the Candy Truck Woman.

*flips through notes*

Yep, that is literally it.

So, why are trans people - specifically trans women - given such roles in the horror genre?

It’s been 60 years.

It’s been 60 years since Psycho earnt its status as the ultimate horror film. But still, to this day, we are presented with horrific portrayals of trans women. It isn’t their acts that define them, however.

If Buffalo Bill was murdering women and comfortable with their gender identity, it would just be another tragic tale of a brutal act. Buffalo Bill is horrifying because they dress like a woman and then commit the acts.

Unfortunately, this link ultimately suggests that those that identify as trans either are or can become mentally unhinged. From there it’s a short trip to becoming obsessed with gender and whoops they’re cold-blooded killers!

And for the uninformed, this almost appears to follow basic logic.

Take me as an example - I’m a cisgender woman.

Because I am not trans, I do not know what it is like to feel like I was born in the wrong body. It’s hard to understand how it is to be trans when one is not. However, just because I don’t fully understand it because I have not experienced it does not mean trans feelings, experiences, and rights do not matter.

To many, this lack of understanding - especially in past eras when being trans was labelled with far more outdated terms and concepts like ‘transvestites’ - can feel uncomfortable. This is what horror preys on.

You don’t always need a jumpscare to be afraid.

You don’t actually require a demonic nun to keep you from turning the lights out.

By simply being presented with something we don’t quite get, by just seeing something that doesn’t quite click in our brains, we are immediately made uncomfortable.

And that can make us afraid instinctively.

The only way to overcome this fear is, well, to face it! Ultimately, this can be reduced back to the lack of representation and awareness of trans issues and trans rights.

It’s time to talk about Insidious (2010).

Outdated tropes are just that - they are outdated.

They belong back in decades gone by. They no longer make sense in our society.

But the problem with the demonisation of trans women is that it is still shipped out via the big screen. And Ghostland is not the only offender.

Insidious will always be one of my favourite horror universes. And yet it was the first to show me how the horror genre is still propagating the same image of trans women.

One of the most iconic monsters in the franchise is that of Parker Crane, the spirit of a serial killer who was forced to adopt a female identity by his mother as a child. Her abusive actions result in him murdering innocent women while dressed as a woman.

Sure, Insidious pins his murderous actions less on their gender identity and more on the abusive actions of his mother, but the fact is it’s the same story of a man dressing up as a woman and killing women.

And even the finer details of The Bride in Black’s story are replicated in other movies tapping into the same trope.

Sleepaway Camp (1983) features a similar character to Parker Crane. At the twist ending, we realise that the serial killer is Angela, a supposedly innocent girl at the camp. How do we know this?

Because Angela is revealed to have a penis. And, of course, that means she has to be batshit crazy and a killer.

*eye roll*

Angela was assigned male at birth, and their abusive parents forced them to dress like a girl, just like Parker. But yet again we stumble into another damaging forced narrative that demonises trans women:

As they had a troubled childhood, they were trans. And as they were trans, they were thus a dangerous person.

The filmmakers drive this home further by the final image closing the film: all we see is their female face embodying clear mental instability and their male body. It is meant to be disturbing, it is meant to be shocking. Pull out the pencil, connect the dots, and here we are.

What we see is upsetting, and that means trans people must be, too.

She is yet another ‘bloke in a wig’.

And if that wasn’t enough, Angela also provides us with the final segue into an LGBT-wide problem with the entire film industry.

(Mmhmm, it gets worse.)

Movie plot twists have always been praised, pulled apart, and memified via #edgy humour - they are the lifeblood of the film industry. And pumping through its veins is an eternal struggle to properly represent the LGBT community.

One of the ways that this occurs is that LGBT characters often feature as plot twists. They are there to shock us, to surprise us, to be the punchlines of the jokes.

Gay people are the shock twist when they turn down another character’s advances citing “they just don’t swing that way”. And trans people are the shock twist when they are revealed to be murders.

It’s a simple formula which ignores the fundamental complexity of humanity - and it’s this search for simplicity which stops the fight for equality in its tracks every time. We have to accept that people have experiences beyond our own, and these experiences are complicated and new and confusing and uncomfortable.

But they are real.

And they matter.

Only by addressing this complexity and listening to these real stories can we realise that it’s okay to be wrong and it’s okay to better ourselves via learning.

Okay, fine - so everything’s terrible.

Yes. And it gets worse.

Trans women in horror always follow the aesthetic presented by the concept of the monstrous-feminine, a concept erected by Barbara Creed:

Female monsters are abject beings that are a compilation of all the disgusting parts of being a woman.

You know, like periods and leg hair.

The films called out in this article follow this closely, but present this via extreme contrast between the male and female body. By confirming that they are abject and out-of-place beings, the trans women thus become the ready-made female horror monster - the alternative to the Final Girl.

They’re the Blair Witch, they’re the alien from Alien; but in some bittersweet way, they’re finally seen as the women they are.

However.

This portrayal isn’t exclusive to the horror genre. It’s not even restricted to the big screen.

Horror might have it wrong, but we can do our part to do things right. We need to learn, listen, and discuss how it really is to be trans.

Here are just 6 facts to start the conversation:

Trans women are not destined to be murderers. In fact, there is a day dedicated to those killed by transphobia - the Transgender Day of Remembrance (20th November).

A project dedicated to monitoring the murders of transgender people began in April 2009 due to the significance of transphobic-motivated violence (The Trans Murder Monitoring Project).

Last year was the second deadliest year for trans people on record (The Trans Murder Monitoring Project).

At least 48% of trans people fear using public toilets due to fear of discrimination and harassment (Huffington Post).

At least a third of trans students in higher education have received negative comments or experienced negative behaviour from staff in 2018 (Stonewall).

45% of trans people between the ages of 11 and 19 attempted to commit suicide in 2018 (Stonewall.)

In 2019, at least 26 transgender people were murder with some of the cases clearly inspired by anti-trans bias. Most of the victims were transgender women of colour. (This fact came from @macaronimarine)

If you’ve got a fact or you’ve got an experience to share, I’d love it if you could add it. And if you haven’t completely given up on the horror genre, why not follow this blog and join me for a weekly article on horror films and the paranormal?

I also post a new real ghost story everyday!

Got a ghost story to share? DM me to feature on my archive of real ghost stories.

7 notes · View notes

floa12 · 4 years

Text

A rant about representation

I recently saw a post on Marvel's Hero Project and I think it's incredible how Marvel (and Disney) have been integrating representation into a lot of their Disney+ content. Marvel's Hero Project is really cool because each episode focuses on a member of the youth that is a real life hero and stands up for really great causes. They've got kids fighting for lgtbq+ rights and kids advocating for disabilities and the homeless, but one thing they don't have is a Muslim kid. Now that isn't to say that in later episodes they won't have one, but as a Muslim and full time hijabi (a Muslim woman who covers her hair with a headscarf and wears modest clothes that covers most of her body) it's getting increasingly frustrating for all these TV shows and movies to get applauded for representation when I rarely, if ever, see any positive Muslim representation. Now I'm mostly gonna be touching on representation of Hijabi woman because I feel that is the most prominent and most easily recognizable image of a Muslim person to the general media.

First, I want to talk about a couple examples of representation that have really got me going (bad and good). I'm gonna start with Halo from Young Justice, mostly because I did a post about how much I appreciated her and am low key regretting it. Obviously they fucked that up and I can't put into words how disappointing it was to see her character lose sight of being Muslim (not that they made it very important to begin with) but I mean I guess I was blind sighted by the fact that she was a hijabi when really that was the only give away that she was Muslim at all. On the other side of the spectrum we have Kamala Khan, who is everyone's go to Muslim representation. I myself am a fan of Ms.Marvel but I can't help but find fault with her representation. I don't want to take away the fact that she's a Pakistani American practicing Muslim but I do want to point out that the fact that she's Muslim isn't really super vital to her story plots. It's a lot about her inhuman abilities and genes. This is a small detail to have a problem with, especially considering people are reading her comics to see a superhero in action and not the domestic day to day problems of a Muslim girl. Really I guess my biggest issue with her is that she doesn't wear a headscarf. I know this is something I'm sure will bug a lot of people that I'm picking on, because after all any representation is better than no representation, but it's the fact that being Muslim is something that she is known for and yet she doesn't fit the image of a Muslim woman in a way that most people would recognize. I'm not invalidating any of my non hijabi sisters, I'm just saying it's a lot easier to recognize a Muslim in a crowd if they're wearing a hijab, so to have a character that is Muslim and not have her look like someone anyone person would immediately recognize as Muslim is a little :/. Both these characters also to wildy different degrees help check off the representation box without having a lot of evidence to support it. (Please don't misunderstand this as hate for Kamala, I love her and am super proud of her as a character, I just think there should be more characters and done better.)

Getting away from animated/cartoon characters I want to talk about Ramy, a sitcom on Hulu, and Amira on Druck, part of Skam. Ramy is this sitcom on Hulu that revolves around a young Muslim Egyptian man and the struggles he encounters while trying to reconnect with his faith of Islam. I love this show and encourage people to check it out because it's created by Ramy Youssef who also stars in it. It's a wonderful show that is super relatable for young Muslim people who struggle with being part of American society and practicing their faith, also it's fucking funny. The show also has serious episodes about his sister and mother and how much a double standard can exist in some Muslim households. I know a lot of conservative Muslims who would HATE this show because it constantly shows Ramy sinning. But I love this show because it's relatable and real and in the end Ramy tries his best (more or less) to be a good Muslim. It shows you the inside of some Muslim practices like Ramadan that a lot of people might be ignorant about. Now before I talk about Amira I just want to say I'm not the most informed on Druck or Skam and the only things I really know for sure is that they do a lot in the way of positive representation. I just wanted to touch on Amira really quick because from what I've seen of her I'm in love. Just from a purely aesthetic point of view the way she fucking wraps her scarves and wears her clothes in the MOST fashionable ways while staying modest and covering her body is a breathe of fresh air (also I'm super jelly). Her arc also shows her struggle with falling for someone who isn't as strong in their beliefs as she is and how that strengthens instead of weakens her. She stays true to being a Muslim and learns how to integrate that aspect of herself into her social life. Imane from Skam is also a great example as well because she is not a full time hijabi and they show how much being Muslim means to her and how much she identifies as such and makes sure people know. It's also a great side to see because it shows her interested in dating a non Muslim and how she naviagtes that and it's lovely. I really love seeing these characters because they show me that despite there being so little representation for Muslims some people are coming around and they're proof that we're getting there...really fucking slowly.

This summer I was fortunate enough to intern at Cartoon Network in Atlanta and I got to attend an event that hosted one of the PR members involved with Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. Something he really wanted to hear about from the young audience (all highschoolers) was things that they loved about Cartoon Network but also things they could improve on. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people complained that CN lost the subtle edgy humour that was brought by their early 2000s shows, but what really stuck out to me is when a close friend of mine stood up and told him that while Cartoon Network was doing a great job on representation, they were far from perfect because full representation wasn't accomplished until every kid who tuned in could see a version of themselves on TV. I think it's amazing that we have shows that include LGBT couples like in Steven Universe and I love ALL the forms of representation we get in Craig of the Creek, but everytime I see them pump out a new show I get dissapointed to see the lack of Muslim characters. Now that isn't to say I don't get excited everytime I watch We Bare Bears or Craig of the Creek and I see a hijabi in the background, but obviously that is far from real representation. Of course I'm not criticizing CN only (they just are farther ahead than Disney and other channel's in my opinion), I'm waiting for Netflix to release a show where I get to see a hijabi woman who practices Islam and is proud of her religion and I can't help but wonder when seeing a practicing Muslim on TV will be trendy and cool and mainstream. Anyways this got long and I guess I'm just sad that representation of any group of minorities isn't where I hoped it would be in 2020.

tldr: the Muslim representation that we get is far from enough and in a lot of cases can hardly qualify as completely accurate representation and I'm tired of it.

edit: I forgot about Imane from Skam!!

41 notes · View notes