#when the nz govt decided to send cops in

[ignitesthestxrs]

there's something about the way people talk about john gaius (incl the way the author writes him) that is like. so absent of any connection to te ao māori that it's really discomforting. like even in posts that acknowledge him as not being white, they still talk about him like a white, american leftist guy in a way that makes it clear people just AREN'T perceiving him as a māori man from aotearoa.

and it's just really serves to hammer home how powerful and pervasive whiteness and american hegemony is. because TLT is probably the single most Kiwi series in years to explode on the global stage, and all the things i find fraught about it as a pākehā woman reading a series by a pākehā author are illegible to a greater fandom of americans discoursing about whether or not memes are a valid way of portraying queer love.

idk the part of my brain that lights up every time i see a capital Z printed somewhere because of the New Zealand Mentioned??? instinct will always be proud of these books and muir. but i find myself caught in this midpoint of excitement and validation over my culture finding a place on the global stage, frustration at how kiwi humour and means of conveying emotion is misinterpreted or declared facile by an international audience, frustrated also by how that international audience runs the characters in this book through a filter of american whiteness before it bothers to interpret them, and ESPECIALLY frustrated by how muir has done a pretty middling job of portraying te ao māori and the māoriness of her characters, but tht conversation doesn't circulate in the same way* because a big part of the audience doesn't even realise the conversation is there to be had.

which is not to say that muir has done a huge glaring racism that non-kiwis haven't noticed or anything, but rather that there are very definitely things that she has done well, things that she has done poorly, things that she didn't think about in the first book that she has tacked on or expanded upon in the later books, that are all worthy of discussion and critique that can't happen when the popular posts that float past my dash are about how this indigenous man is 'guy who won't shut up about having gone to oxford'

*to be clear here, i'm not saying these conversations have never happened, just that in terms of like, ambient posts that float round my very dykey dash, the discussions and meta that circulate on this the lesbian social media, are overwhelmingly stripped of any connection to aotearoa in general, let alone te ao māori in specific. and because of the nature of american internet hegemony this just,,,isn't noticed, because how does a fish know it's in the ocean u know? i have seen discussions along these lines come up, and it's there if i specifically go looking for it, but it's not present in the bulk of tlt content that has its own circulatory life and i jut find that grim and a part of why the fandom is difficult to engage with.

#tlt #the locked tomb #i don't really have an answer lmao this is more #an expression of frustration and discomfort #over the way posts about john gaius seem to have very little connection to the background muir actually gave him #like you cant describe him as an educated leftist bisexual man #without INCLUDING that he is māori #that has an impact! that has weight and importance! #that is a background to every decision he makes #from the meat wall to the nuke to his relationship with the earth #and it also has weight and importance in the decisions that muir makes in writing him #it is not a neutral decision that he's known as john gaius lmao #it's not a neutral decision that the empire is explicitly of roman/latin extraction #it's not even neutral that this is a book about necromancy #it's certainly not a neutral fucking decision that john was at one point a māori man living in the bush #when the nz govt decided to send cops in #like that is a thing that happens here! that is a reference to nz cultural and political events that informs john's character and actions #and with the nature of who john is in the story #informs the narrative as a whole #and i think the tiresome part of this experience is that #in general #americans are not well positioned to understand that something might be being written from outside their experience as a default #like obviously many many americans in online leftist & queer spaces are willing to learn and take on new information #but so much of the conversation starts from a place of having to explain that forests exist to fish