Talking About Stuff On The Interwebz

On Watchmen

I had so much love for this show! Too bad its not going to get a second season, at least not according to the showrunner, which makes me only mildly upset, because really, its better to go out on top, then to dribble off in shame. Lindhelof says that what we saw is all of the story, and he doesn’t have any ideas for a second season, although he has given HBO his blessing to continue the show without him. I would prefer that the show simply end now, to  introducing a new and mediocre showrunner, for the second season anyway, which is the problem that American Gods has run into.

American Gods  should have just stopped at season one, with Bryan Fuller who, no matter which shows he works on, is just really hard to top. The same thing happened with ST:Discovery. On the other hand, if HBO  wanted to bring in Fuller, for a second season of Watchmen, I would be totally on board with that. The show is so rich, I just know he’d do some awesome work with it, but as it stands HBO isn’t looking at a second season right now, and the show has not been renewed.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-incendiary-aims-of-hbos-watchmen

 

https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/hbo-watchmen-hooded-justice-costume/

https://www.slashfilm.com/watchmen-and-race/

https://themuse.jezebel.com/god-is-black-and-nobody-batted-an-eye-1840460304

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On Black Film

The first link is a list of 84 films that starred or were directed by women of color.

The second link is an article about why Black art and film criticism requires diversity. Because really the only people who can cogently discuss aspects of the culture that are represented in art, are Black people. Its not that white people don’t have opinions, its just their opinions carry less weight because most of them just don’t know enough about Black culture, to be able to speak on it, with any clarity.

And finally, a video on why we need to make more movies about Black people just being happy, and living our lives, without some criminal or racial crisis involved.

https://www.indiewire.com/t/directors/

https://wearyourvoicemag.com/entertainment-culture/all-black-art-deserves-valid-critique

 

http://blackyouthproject.com/waiting-wakanda-black-joy-film-epic-resistance/

 

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On Horror

Here are a number of opinion posts from The Artifice, on the subject of Horror and its themes. I’m going to urge everyone to visit the site, as it contains some of the best film writing and criticism on the internet. There’s not a lot of diversity, the people there pretty much stay in their lane, and are not professional writers for the most part, but its far better than a lot of the Bro’tube videos about pop culture.

https://the-artifice.com/wrong-turn-2003/

 

https://the-artifice.com/maternal-horror-films-dysfunctional-mother/

 

https://the-artifice.com/silence-horror/

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And from Medium.com

I can’t link to Medium articles here ,but here are some titles and authors to look for, should you give the place a visit. And be sure to check out my last post about Horror movies set in the suburbs.

Recently, Stephen King weighed in on the issue of diversity at the Oscars. (There isn’t any.) Considering that this is the same man who insisted on putting at least one magical negro in every single one of his earlier novels, (and a couple of his more recent ones, too), he really should have just kept his opinion to himself. In all fairness though, after he had the situation explained to him, he did backtrack a little bit on his statement.

Stephen King Needs More Black Friends

As decades of his Black characters show, one tone-deaf tweet is the least of his problems

Scott Woods

Also:

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/stephen-kings-super-duper-magical-negroes/

https://constantreaders.org/home/dick-hallorann-mike-hanlon-it-the-shining-magical-negro-stephen-king-blk-stg

One thing that is deeply funny about this topic, at least for me, is that I actually have met, what I like to call, “Magical Negroes” in my own life. Several times, Black people have shown up to help me with some issue, and then afterwards they disappeared for me to never see or hear from them ever again.

I was practicing for my driving test one day, in an empty parking lot near my house, and some guy (who was, as King would probably say, “four sheets to the wind”) came along to teach me how to parallel park, and how to back into a parking space. This went on for a while, and he was incredibly helpful, for someone who was very probably drunk. I went home afterward, but I never saw that man in my neighborhood again, although to be honest, I’d never seen him before the event either, and I’m reasonably familiar with the people in my neighborhood. This has happened to me several times in my life. Strangers who show up, help me do something, and then disappear, and well… I have questions!

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On this subject, I said in another post, that this is what fandom has devolved to, at this point, where media consumers have become so toxic, that they think they can just harass the actors they don’t like, off social media, since it worked in a few cases. But I have to ask, what do any of these campaigns gain from  this? Although such people are incredibly loud, there simply aren’t enough of them, in population size, to affect the bottom lines of any of the corporations these actors work for. Their fleeting victories, sending actors off social media, and downvoting movies on Rotten Tomatoes, and Netflix, are just that. Fleeting, and ultimately unimportant.

Not only have they engaged in harassing movie actors, they have harassed other fans who simply don’t agree with them, (which is separate from the racism and misogyny that normally goes on in fandom). The vast majority of people (and this is just the ones who watch these movies), know nothing about what’s going on, what these people have been doing (beyond what’s been reported in mainstream media), or even why its being done.

These “fans” have accomplished nothing, but have become so used to bullying actors off the internet, that they were really surprised that Boyega didn’t leave, and they most certainly believe they are more influential than they actually are. In fact, like the strong Black man he claimed to be, he stood his ground, took no shit, and clapped right back at them, so that now the White women who started this beef with him, by personally @ing him, on his Twitter account, are  now whining that he is hurting them, somehow! It’s all perfectly batshit, and also completely useless. He still has a career. He’s still going to be working, and now that he no longer under contract with Disney, he can say what he wants on social media, with a freedom he didn’t have before.

I asked Nicole (the writer) if I could have her permission to post an excerpt from her Tumblr blog here, and she kindly gave consent. If you’re not familiar with the complete White Feminism Racefail of 2020,  here’s a decent rundown of those events.

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John Boyega and the Racism of Fandom

A look into the harassment John Boyega has faced at the hands of rabid Star Wars fans

Nicole M

Everything came to a head not just with John’s post about how he felt about Reylo, but he posted a video on his Instagram. In the video, it shows Boyega responding to his harassment by attacking the responses. Instead of realizing they were wrong, many Reylos started to accuse him of bullying them. It didn’t matter if they were the ones who replied to John with racist, degrading comments and it also didn’t matter that the comments they made were public: they couldn’t be held responsible. it’s John’s fault for not taking abuse silently. Some people are so upset about this, they’re already planning smear campaigns for his upcoming movies.

It’s A Black Thang II (On Tumblr)

This was an old post that somehow got switched to another blog! But theres no such thing as an out of date laugh, (although I could be wrong about that.) Well, I hope it brings smiles to your day, your week, your month, or even your year.

 

 

Man, we just don’t get good Star Trek meta, like this, anymore…

vulcandroid

i will never be over the fact that during first contact a human offered their hand to a vulcan and the vulcan was just like “wow humans are fucking wild” and took it

 

roachpatrol

Humanity’s first contact with Vulcans was some guy going “I’m down to fuck.”

Vulcans’ first contact with Humans was an emphatic “Sure.”

 

lilian-cho

@sineala

star-lord

#iiiiiiiiiiiiii mean vulcans had been watching humans for a long time#they knew the significance of a handshake but still#they had to find some fast and loose ambassador#willing to fuckin make out with a human for the sake of not offending them on first contact#lmao#star trek

give me the story of this fast and loose vulcan

 

moonsofavalon

“sir…these…these humans…they greet each other by…” *glances around before furtively whispering* “byclasping hands…”

*prolonged silence* “oh my…”

“sir…sir how will we make first contact with them? surely we…we cannot refuse this handclasping ritual, they will take it as an insult, but what vulcan would agree to such a distasteful and uncomfortable ritual??”

*several pensive moments later* “contact the vulcan high command and tell them to send us kuvak. i once saw that crazy son of a bitch arm wrestle a klingon, he’ll put his hands on anything”

 

evilminji

Elsewhere, w/ kuvak: “….my day has come.”

 

lierdumoa

The vulcan who made first contact with humans is named Solkar guys. Y’all just be makin’ up names for characters that already have names.

Bonus: here’s a screencap of Solkar doing the “my body is ready” pose right before he shakes Zefram Cochrane’s hand:

adreadfulidea

 

I swear Vulcans only come in two types and they are “distant xenophobes” or “horny on main for humanity”. Also apparently this guy is Spock’s great-grandfather and frankly that explains everything.

Source: lycanthropiste st

 

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Black Hogwarts was tending several months ago. Yes, this is still funny as hell! (Number five is my favorite, and check out The Sortin’ Durag.)

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Tumblr would not be Tumblr without calling out racism in fandom, and we have to keep explaining this multiple times cuz, as my Mom used to say, ya’ll hard-headed, and you don’t listen!

lj-writes

Carrying the fandom load

It does get tiring at times staying conscious of bigoted tropes in fandom, deciding not to support racist art, wondering if a quote is appropriative of Jewish experiences, discarding a homophobic fanwork idea, and more.

So as a Fandom Old I can see why some fans long for the “good old days.” Back then anything went! Total creative freedom! We were wild and unfettered! None of these long-winded discussions, we just went and did it and did not give a single fuck!

Except freedom wasn’t for everyone, was it? You only had that total freedom if you were unaffected by fandom’s racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, ableism, and a host of other bigotries that are a reflection of the world we live in.

Fandom was never the carefree, escapist enterprise some of us like to think it was. It’s just that minority fans were bearing the load of others’ freedom in silence. Too often, fans who were marginalized in real life could not escape to fandom because fandom would uncritically celebrate their oppression and trauma. And if they dared to speak about it they were bullied and shouted down into silence, into leaving.

I speak in the past tense but this is still ongoing, obviously. Fans of marginalized identities are a little more vocal now, but are facing a sustained and vicious backlash that accuses them of being “bullies” and starting “discourse” and “drama” and of “virtue signalling.”

It’s not about discourse or virtue, though. It’s about fans being told that they are not welcome unless they bite their tongues, grin, and go along with a thousand stings and slaps in the very spaces they go to have fun. It’s about fans having to watch characters who look like them be constantly erased and demonized. It’s about fans having to spend endless amounts of time and energy educating other fans about their oppression when all they’d like to do is unwind after a long day made longer by those very issues.

It’s not about virtue. It’s about people.

The thing is, fans who criticize minority fans and their allies for “discourse” aren’t angry about the fact that fandom puts these psychological burdens on minority fans. They’re mad about having to share a tiny little part of the burden minority fans, most visibly Black women, have been carrying for too long. In the minds of these “discourse”-critical fans the burden of considering the impact of fandom and fanworks is not theirs to bear. It is the lot of fans who are not them, “others,” to pay the cost for the majority’s creative freedom. The very suggestion that the load exists, and worse, that all of fandom should share in it so marginalized fans don’t carry it so disproportionately, is enough to make a lot of fans uncomfortable. I know, because I feel that discomfort at times, too.

The thing is, the load of thinking about marginalization in fandom spaces was always mine to bear. It’s every fan’s responsibility to be conscious of how they create and consume fanwork so that they don’t hurt other fans, so fandom can be inclusive and fun for everyone.

No, it’s not pleasant. It’s not fun to always watch yourself and second guess your choices, to fall short anyway and be called out and confront the fact that you have so many unconscious biases and have hurt others. I get it. I do. I want to think of myself as a good person. I don’t like admitting to wrongdoing. I hate challenging myself. I don’t want to think about this hard stuff. I just want to have fun!

But think about how much LESS fun it is when it’s your own humanity on the line. Many marginalized fans don’t have the luxury of just letting go and having fun, not when they always have to brace themselves for the next psychological assault.

These fans have been carrying this fandom burden and are punished for saying it’s too heavy. If you’re feeling a little less feather light in fannish activities than you used to, that’s a good sign! It means you’re starting to carry, in a very small measure, the fandom load of consciousness. It’s something you should be carrying as part of a community, and chances are it’s still not nearly as heavy a load as many marginalized fans are still made to bear.

A community joins together, watches out for its members, shares in the good and the bad. If some members are asked to bear the costs of others’ fun and either stay silent about it or leave, then the promise of community rings pretty hollow, doesn’t it? Sometimes discomfort is a good thing, and if my small discomfort means I am sharing in a tiny measure of my rightful load in fandom spaces, then it is a very good thing indeed.

 

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I think I may have posted this here before, and its definitely not funny, but at the same time, its the funniest shit I have ever encountered. People who are so incredibly pressed about having all those “icky” Brown and Black men in their favorite media, so incredibly adamant that the only valid type of “ship, is between two White men, that they are willing to Photoshop them out, for their White faves.

Wow!

 stitchmediamix

So I’m writing something about how characters and actors of color are literally cut out of images in order to center white characters/actors (usually for shipping purposes) and I’d like to be able to actually link to examples of instances where that’s happened.

I’ve got an image of John and Daisy where John has been replaced by Driver (courtesy of @xprincessrey ’s recent post in the fandom racism tag) and SEVERAL images where Iris West has been erased and replaced by Caitlin that I referenced in my presentation on the misogynoir directed towards her.

I need more examples though and I honestly don’t know how to find what I’m looking for. And… I’m really bad at finding images on the internet.

So if you have collected any receipts on this particular fandom phenomenon where fans cut out characters/actors of color from images in order to focus on a white character or ship, please let me know. I’ll link to your post on the subject if you’ve made one and give you credit for finding the images that I use if you want it.

I need examples of:

• Anthony Mackie being cut out of press images for either Winter Soldier or Civil War
• Scott/Tyler Posey being cut out of Teen Wolf press images or scenes in the show
• Photo manips where Finn/John Boyega has been replaced by Kylo/Adam
• Any other fandom that cut characters of color out in this way!

I’m writing a thing and I’m working on the header image already but I’d like more examples because man… People need to know that this is a thing that happens and pictures help drive the whole thing in.

(Also, unfortunately I have no idea how y’all  can submit straight up images to me because I don’t use tumblr submit for several reasons, BUT you can always DM me images on twitter or use Tumblr IM if you don’t have links  to images, but want to send them to me anyway.)

If you can share this with your followers, that’d be awesome.

elandrialore

R3ylo manips

Original photoshoot with John and Daisy

St3r3k manip

Original promo image

St3r3k manip

Original image of Tyler Posey, Crystal Reed, and Tyler Hoechlin

St3r3k manip

Original image of Tyler Posey and Dylan O’Brien

St3r3k manip

Original image with Tyler Posey and Dylan O’Brien

kyberfox

@stitchmediamix

Here’s a video of Finn getting cut out not just of his own confession scene – a character defining moment for him – and Kylo being inserted, he’s also replaced in the hug he and Rey shares. x, x

The OP of that then made a gif set of some of the scene they’d cut where they replace Finn with Kylo because they were so proud of their work. x

And here Kylo is edited in instead of Finn in the scene where Rey gives Finn a “wow he looks good” look at Jakku. x

uprisingofcolor

@stitchmediamix

Here’s an entire gif set of Jake Pentecost getting cut out of his own trailer to center his white co star.

Oh, and here’s OP’s Response to @kyberfox calling them out (X), they take it about as well as you’d expect. This happened a day or so(?) after the trailer dropped, just for a frame of reference.

diversehighfantasy

The Doctor Who series 3 “Fix It”:

Here, they didn’t erase Martha Jones entirely, they made her a third wheel in a series the fandom felt Rose was rightfully entitled to. IMO this is as much of an in-your-face “fuck you” to Martha as pretending she didn’t exist.

Britchell. This is a more obscure ship, but it relentlessly erased, sidelined and minimized one of my favorite characters, Annie Sawyer of Being Human (UK) for being romantically involved with Mitchell, played by Aidan Turner, who also played Kili in The Hobbit. Britchell was a crossover between Mitchell and another character played by the actor who played Kili’s brother Fili in The Hobbit. Anyway. Britchell is the biggest ship in the Being Human fandom to this day.

Annie x Mitchell: http://reyesbidal.tumblr.com/post/53885860951

Britchell (in a nutchell):

nerdsagainstfandomracism

In Shadowhunters Jalec and Clalec shippers always use Malec scenes for their manips in order to erase Magnus. Here’s an example of a Clalec manip (x). I stay away from their tags and blacklist Jalecs and Clalecs on sight, but pretty sure Google has plenty of more examples. Luke is constantly excluded from the group fanarts, fan videos, etc.

Also, Rickylers in TWD always try to erase Michonne from her own narrative.

Source: stitchmediamix fandom racismracism in fandom Erasure ShippingLong Post white prioritization ReblogMod P.

 

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Tag me! I’m Blacktose Intolerant!

anonymous asked:

so you’re jamaican and not regular black?

yourbigsisnissi answered:

What the hell is regular black?

adreamdeferred

diet black.

 

jiahpleasechill 

black lite.

 

onlyblackgirl

Gluten Free Black.

 

jader-rr

90 calorie black

 

d0t-d0t 

vegan black

 

neelion

Reduced fat Black

 

augustxiv

2% Black

 

leelaamaj

artificial black flavor

 

lovesex-xo-dreams 

Fat free black

 

thickadenabowlaoatmeal 

Multigrain black

 

tigzdanigz  

Soy black

 

roachpatrol

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Black People!

 

egypcianheart

Y’all get on my nerves!

 

heir-n-reign

Skim Black

 

dynastylnoire

Black with chia seeds

 

return-of-foreverr

Black with sugar

 

clarknokent

Black on the rocks

 

awkwardassbitch 

New and Improved Black taste

 

pkbrown93

Black & mild

 

iwritealllday

Black Zero

 

lifeofchristinaa

Dairy free black

 

allsmilesontheoutside

Sugar-Free Black

 

recognise-me-recognise-yourself

Histamine free black

 

lajackash

Venti Soy Black w/ extra caramel

 

kingxcbk

100% Organic Black

 

earlgrey95

Free range black

 

kingxcbk

Raspberry Infused Black

 

waistbeadgang

GMO Free Black

 

kingxcbk

From farm to table Black

 

facelesskinkyblackguyblog

Blacktose intolerant

 

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Tweets from Satan!

Curatorial vs. Transformative Fandom

The basic definition of the two is fandom that is practiced in one of two ways by either collecting information about the source material, or transforming/changing the source material to best interact with it. Sometimes there is a degree of overlap, but the motivations for the overlap tend to differ. Male fans generally engage in curatorial fandom, where the degree of fandom is noted by how many details of the source material can be collected and/or memorized, from figurines, to dialogue, to plot details. There is sometimes quantification involved such as rankings and listings. See those YouTube videos and posts that list episodes in a series from best to worst, or movies in a franchise. Curatorial fandom does not require intimate engagement with the material. One example is the movie Endgame, where male fans got caught up on attempting to parse how the Time travel worked in the movie, while female fans on Tumblr wrote meta-analysis about the different character’s psychology and emotions.

Transformative fandom, as primarily practiced by women, involves a deep interaction with the source material, along with the collection of details for transforming the source material into something else, usually something that resonates with that particular fan, such as cosplay, fan art, fan fiction, and meta- analysis.

This is not a hard and fast rule, as there can be some degree of overlap. There are plenty of men involved in cosplay, fan art, and meta-analysis, and there are plenty of women who memorize dialogue, and collect information about their favorite shows.

Transformative fandom seeks to change the source material to reflect its needs, or analyse the source material for why those needs aren’t being  met, and how it could. One of the tenets of Curatorial fandom is that it doesn’t question the source material, simply accepting it. Having not been the primary audience for much of the source material of many fandoms, Transformative fandom this is mostly, but not exclusively, engaged in by PoC, LGBTQ, and White women.

 

It has been speculated that one of the reasons white male fans have been reacting in fandom the way they have is that Curatorial fandom is in opposition to Transformative fandom, which seeks to change the canon source material, thereby making the collection of facts and figures obsolete or irrelevant. Such men have defined their fandomhood, sometimes their very identities, by the amount of knowledge they possess about their particular fandom, and in their minds, Transformative fandom seeks to arbitrarily, and unnecessarily, change it. So, beyond the idea that they are no longer the audience for the material (something which is not ever going to change) is the false idea that female fans are taking the material and making random changes to it in the form of fanfiction and fan art. Helping matters along is that Speculative and Fantastic fiction is becoming more diverse, with creators changing the canon sources themselves by changing characters to women (Thor), stating the sexual orientations of older characters (Iceman), or making other characters PoC (Candace Patton as Iris West.)

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Curative_Fandom

Curative fandom is all about knowledge. It’s about making sure that everything is lined up and in order, knowing how it works, and finding out which one is the best. What is the Doctor Who canon? Who is the best Doctor? How do Weeping Angels work? Etc etc. Curative fandom is p. much the norm on reddit, especially r/gallifrey. Transformative fandom is about change. Let’s write fic! Let’s make art! Let’s make a fan vid! Let’s cosplay! Let’s somehow change the text.

 

Transformative fandom seeks to interact on an emotional level with the source material. It wants to question it, and work within it, which is why so much of it centers on characters and relationships between the  characters, while taking place in different environments. I know plenty of people consider Coffee Shop AUs to be cliche, but it is a way for female fans to self insert, while analyzing the characters, by changing the environment in which the story takes place. It is not about removing dramatic impetus from the source, but understanding who the characters are, how they interact, and giving themselves the happy endings that so much of the source material in Fantastic fiction disdains. Its also a way for marginalized people to imagine themselves in source material in which they are not represented. The Mary Sue, the Self  Insert, and Shipping, are all attempts by Transformative fandom to interact personally  with the source material.

If Curatorial fans ,who are well represented in the source material, imagine themselves as being one of the characters in it, then Transformative fans like to imagine interacting with the characters in it. Its not so much that they want to be Buffy, or Willow, but self inserting as a friend of Buffy, gives such fans a way to express their love and affection for any of the other characters she may interact with in the show, like Spike, Anya, or Giles. Or putting themselves in the situations the characters encounter. many of the tropes of fan fiction come from female fans imagining what they would do if they found themselves within the source material, like defeating the villain, having love affairs , or offering comfort when their favorite characters are in pain.

https://www.vox.com/2016/6/2/11531406/why-were-terrified-fanfiction-teen-girls

My preferred explanation is the idea that the vast majority of what we watch is from the male perspective – authored, directed, and filmed by men, and mostly straight white men at that. Fan fiction gives women and other marginalised groups the chance to subvert that perspective, to fracture a story and recast it in her own way. … It often feels as if there isn’t much space for difference in the dominant cultural narratives; in fandom, by design, there’s space for all.

 

Another issue is the devaluation of women’s interests and hobbies. Because Transformative fandom is mostly engaged in by women, there is a tendency to disregard it, along with its problems. There is also a certain level of mockery and disgust, whereas the same level of disgust is not aimed at, for example, men’s sports fandoms, which can be far more violent. Narratives aimed at a female audience, or interests and hobbies of women and other marginalized people are often disregarded, the way movies aimed at Black audiences were often disregarded or considered of no importance by White audiences. Don’t believe me?  Name the top three favorite films in the Black community. From before 2000!

What is not often discussed, and this is where devaluation comes in, is that Transformative fandom also has its contingent of harassment and bigotry,   but because its women, its less obvious than the harassment engaged in by Curatorial fans,  dismissed as not being important, and mocked as fans just being  crazy. Bigotry in Transformative fandom changes source material that may actually be progressive, to reflect the mainstream status quo, by erasing women of color from canon relationships, or abusing Black male characters, by writing them  into slavefic. When WoC  question and/or  analyse the source for racism and misogynoir, they are often harassed, gaslighted, or shouted down by White female fans. When Gay fans question the fetishizing of mlm characters in fandom, they are often treated the same. There are plenty of white women fans harassing WoC actresses, who happen to be paired with White men in the source material, like the still ongoing harassment campaign against Candace Patton, from The Flash.This is not the type of bad fandom behavior that gets covered in mainstream media, which attributes such harassment only to White men, and as a result, the public tends to think that White women are innocent of it. They are not. They simply have different motivations.

https://newrepublic.com/article/137489/women-color-price-fandom-can-high

The attacks on her character range from obvious bigotry referring to her as a monkey to more subtle remarks about how the two love interests don’t “look good together”. Look through Tumblr, Twitter, or even the recaps on popular sites and you’ll find an inordinate amount of hate toward Iris for things other white female characters get a pass for. 

There were plenty of White female fans denigrating Kelly Marie Tran, and her character, before she deleted her Instagram account. The only difference was their behavior wasn’t in the public eye, because they were not attacking the actress directly. They were attacking her fans instead, or engaging in transformative media, in the form of tweets, essays, and fanfiction that erased and/or vilified her character. This is typical in Transformative fandom, where White women deliberately fail to understand, or choose to ignore, intersectional feminism, in favor of uplifting white female characters, while diminishing WoC in both fandom and the narrative.

https://stitchmediamix.com/2018/09/19/what-fandom-racism-looks-like-only-33-words-in-a-trailer/

Hell, did y’all see how the Agent Carter fandom demanded that WOC support a show where we weren’t even vaguely represented – all in the name of feminism – and then blame us for the show doing poorly in its second season? (Or, Tamora Pierce wading in with a totally wrong and racist interjection about 1940s New York must have looked like and what Black people would’ve done in that time period.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about Curatorial fandom behaving badly, while ignoring that Transformative fandom often behaves just as badly, but because the perpetrators are White women, who tend to be more subtle in their practice of it, whose interests and hobbies tend to be devalued,  and who have traditionally always been seen as innocent of bigoted and racist behavior, this gets  ignored by the mainstream.

Now, this isn’t to say that one form of fandom is better or worse than the other. They are both simply differing ways of being a fan. But that is not to say that Curatorial fandom doesn’t have issues. We’ve already talked about how bigotry and racism from Curatorial fans is covered in mainstream media, but one other issue is that sometimes curatorial fandom does not go beyond collecting information about the source material, and has a tendency to lack depth. Fans may not ask questions, or seek to think any deeper about it beyond simply knowing it in detail, or ranking it from best to worst. That can lead to a certain amount of shallowness , and we’ve already seen that it can lead to gatekeeping, where members of a particular fandom feel a need to test newer fans on their knowledge about it, before being permitted to enjoy that fandom. Since they practice fandom in a  Curatorial style, , a lack of knowledge, in their minds, means that someone isn’t a real fan.

Another side effect of Transformative fandom is that fans can get so caught up in their imaginary version of the source material (known as head canon) that they  bully and harass others who don’t believe as they do. They will attack other fans, thereby keeping the harassment in-house. This accounts for the many “shipping wars” that are bizarre and puzzling to outsiders, like what happened in the Supernatural fandom, when certain fans became convinced that their imaginary relationship, between Dean Winchester and the Angel Castiel, (called Destiel) was actually a canon relationship being kept from them by the creators. It got to the point where such fans were also  harassing the actors, their wives, and the writers, by making fanciful claims about the real life actors relationships with each other and their wives, and bullying those fans who refuted these beliefs.

 

https://scadconnector.com/2018/04/10/fascination-and-frustration-an-analysis-of-fan-fiction/

Fan fiction is written by people who watch a show or a movie, or read a book, and look at what they are given and think, but what if this happened?

Although there are differences in how fandom is practiced, there is a great deal of overlap in type, and no way of performing fandom is better than another. Both styles of fandom have significant drawbacks, especially when practiced carelessly, by forgetting that other types of fans exist,  acting and thinking without regard to other members of the fandom, or even the creators.  These are just different ways of enjoying the narrative, and most people engage in at least a little bit of both kinds of fandom. But when people feel threatened by, for example, changes in the source material, or by other fans (sometimes other marginalized fans) who refute their ideas about the source material, the kind of behavior we see is usually based on this  divide.

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/ready-player-one-marvel-and-the-cure-for-curative-fandom

All we have to do to open up curative fandom is incorporate a little more of Column B, shifting the curative focus from “catalog everything in the collection” to “what’s the most interesting thing in here?” By leaning harder into the curatorial roots of curative fandom, Marvel’s hit upon the solution to it.

Or, to put it another way—Ready Player One feels like the past. Black Panther feels like the future.

 

**This is just my attempt to understand why some fans behave so badly, and yet still refer  to themselves as fans, because one of the first things I did was question whether or not these people were real fans, and these essays somewhat answer my question. My definition of fandom wasn’t wrong, it just needed to be expanded to include different performances of it, and that a lot of the behavior we see coming out of fandom is due, at its foundation, to this difference in thinking. This is not to give these people an out for their bad behavior, or an excuse, but for me to understand the psychology behind why people do what they do in fandom, and pass along some of that understanding.

 

 

 

 

What Fandom Racism Looks Like – When White Characters (Somehow) Aren’t White

Let’s keep this short and salty: did y’all know that there are people – thankfully a minority in their respective fandoms – that will claim a white male character or actor isn’t white for some reason or another. Well, if you didn’t know before reading that sentence, I’m willing to be that you’ve figured out […]

via What Fandom Racism Looks Like – When White Characters (Somehow) Aren’t White — Stitch’s Media Mix

Stitch is considered something of an expert on the subject of fandom racism dynamics, since this is something she has intensely studied. I never argue with her findings, but I am constantly surprised by the ways in which fandom seeks to revert to a certain status quo. What I’d  like to do  is build on this by  tying fandom racism back to how its been learned from the source material,  and fan’s understanding of how racism works, through the material they’ve been consuming, because their performance of  these forms of racism  don’t exist in a vacuum. White people (all races really) have been unconsciously inundated with decades of racist messaging in American films, books, and TV,   and  fandom often becomes nothing more than  the act of regurgitating what was consumed, especially if these things have never been critically examined.

I don’t think we can fight against how fandom racism is performed without acknowledgment, or understanding, of how its performance is tied to the decades old, racist narratives in Popular media.

There’s also a new angle to this as well. Since the source material being consumed has become more diverse and inclusive than ever, what I’ve been witnessing, is  fans trying to  bend these narratives to fit their world view – worldviews that have been informed by years of racist narratives. This is just as much an attempt to keep things the way they’ve always been, and they are no less different, from  the harassment campaigns against PoC actors, in an attempt to center Whiteness in Geek media, and reassert the status quo of PoC, and other marginalized groups, on the fringe of narratives that center White characters. This is what such fans are used to, and this is what they twist these stories to reflect. This particular form of fandom racism is often engaged in (but not necessarily exclusive to) White women in fandom, while the more public and aggressive forms of racism are usually engaged in by White men.

I’m going to reiterate that the reason fandom acts this way is that fandom isn’t the slightest bit progressive or woke. In fact, its fairly conservative, and quite a lot of them are thoroughly unimaginative, as well, as the participants do nothing but reproduce the same narratives they’ve seen over, and over, and over, from the  source material (and sometimes other parts of fandom, which accounts for the sheer numbers of coffee shop AUs in fanfiction), – narratives that have been overwhelmingly written, and helmed, by straight white men, who themselves have only the most rudimentary idea of what its like to be a member of a marginalized group.

That’s another reason I’m against racial allegories in fiction, especially the ones referenced above by Stitch. Such narratives do nothing to further dialogue, or deepen understanding of racial issues, because the writers of these narratives do not live, or understand, race in any personal capacity.  All fans get out of these stories is a foundational understanding that “racism is bad”. The Handmaid’s Tale, Zootopia, The Gifted, Teen Wolf, and Bright, are bad racial allegories because they get the depiction of racism wrong, have suspect intentions, borrow the oppression of Poc, while not including them, or  take little to no account of the systemic and institutionalized nature of racism, often showing it as a problem of individuals simply not liking some people.

Contrast those stories to Jordan Peel’s discussion of racism in the movie Get Out, or the music video, This Is America, by Childish Gambino, or the discussions surrounding the movie Black Panther. The understanding of racism is  different when written by those who have  actual knowledge of the subject, something which most fans of the media listed above,  do not have, so all they can do is reproduce the media they’ve been given, and can only  approach these subjects in their meta and fictions with  the performative wokeness  that they are engaging in now.

Tumblr Discussions A Go Go

I love images of Black women in armor, as you can see, I used to have one as my avatar so:

Here! Have a DeviantArt page full of nothing but images of Black men and women in armor:

Basira- Wisdom by Othon Nikolaidis

 

 

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Probably one of the funniest phrases I’ve ever seen on the internet is “Its the Goatpocalypse!” It’s then followed by the actual reasons this neighborhood has been taken over by goats, which is almost as funny as the images themselves.

Goat Rentals!

If this happened in our neighborhood, half the residents would be having a complete shitfit while cursing their torn up lawns, and the other half, (probably all the women and children), would be running outside to pet the goats. (A smaller, more pragmatic, contingent would be trying to herd the goats into their garages to milk them.)

The goatpocalypse is upon us. (via KTVBJoe)

 morathor

Updates have since come on this subject; we now know where the goats came from and I gotta tell you, it is better than you could possibly imagine.  See.

These goats got loose from a goat rental service.

You may be thinking, who rents a goat?  Who rents a hundred goats?  What are they for?

They’re for eating.

Specifically, they’re for eating unwanted, flammable vegetation that can contribute to the spread of wildfires.  Some people whose property tends to grow such vegetation, keep their own goats.  But for some people it works out better to just rent some goats.

So.

These are Professional Eating Goats.  They are trained to thoroughly and methodically scour an area of plantlife.  And they came to the suburbs.

And they did their jobs.

I’m so proud of them.

 

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*Tumblr users discuss exactly why Brooklyn 99, a show I absolutely love despite my general dislike of cop shows, and my awareness that the show is, in fact, a form of propaganda. Now, this was not the argument I made for its being propaganda, but this person does a fine job of  outlining the  different reasons why it might be considered such. This is not to say you can’t enjoy this show, even if it is. What critics of Pop Culture are actually trying to do is get people to be more mindful of what they’re consuming, not destroy their enjoyment.

Originally posted by donniefuckassdarko

So, as I have been briefly visiting some of the B99 tumblrs I see showing up in the notes, I’ve discovered that the tumblr algorithms keep directing me over and over to posts about the question, “Is Brooklyn Nine-Nine just propaganda for cops?”

I have some thoughts about that which I will put below the cut tag. The short story:

1) Any show with cops as protagonists unavoidably becomes cop propaganda.

2) Brooklyn Nine-Nine is overtly idealistic, whereas most cop shows at least pretend to be realistic.

3) At this point in American history, idealist cop propaganda may actually be socially useful, in part because it counterbalances the social effect of realistic cop propaganda.

I could go on about this topic for a long time but I will try to keep it short.

* The position of protagonist is so powerful and the desire to identify with the protagonist is so strong that whoever you put in that role becomes the person that the viewers will attach themselves to and sympathize with. This is true whether the protagonist is good or evil. If your protagonist is a serial killer, the fans identify with and sympathize with the serial killer. If your protagonist is a chemistry teacher gone bad, they will sympathize with the chemistry teacher gone bad *no matter how bad he goes.* It doesn’t matter who you put at the center of the narrative, people identify and empathize with that person. This is why it’s so important that white men are losing their lock on the position of protagonist (and why so many white male viewers are freaking the fuck out over that).

+( Except when, as has not been pointed out here, that primary character is a man of color, in which case, White viewers are quick to vilify them as villains, while giving White male villains, in the same narrative, a pass.)

* In general, crime fiction tends to idealize the detective and more specifically the police procedural tends to idealize the police. Even in the hard-boiled genre where the detective is a deeply flawed antihero, this still happens (see point #1).

* I grew up during the heyday of the “gritty” cop show, which attempted to change this by offering a more realistic depiction of American policing (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, etc.). “Gritty” basically meant more violence, more drugs, and more unethical behavior from the police. You started to see storylines for main characters who were abusing their powers, corrupt, addicted to police brutality. If this was intended as a critique that might motivate people to demand social change, that is definitely not what happened. Instead, this bad cop behavior became the norm, and eventually, the cool and the good. If the protagonist is doing it, then it must be cool. Dirty cops, cops who use excessive force, cops who lie about the excessive force they’re using–all of that was rehabilitated because the cop is, by definition, for most viewers, the ‘good guy’ and if the ‘good guy’ is doing bad things there must be some reasonable/sympathetic explanation for that. Then after 9/11 torture became A-OK for ‘good guys’ to do and that was very bad for the police procedural but I’m not going down that rabbit hole right now.

+(What people don’t take into account is that the people who are cops now also grew up watching all this gritty cop imagery as well.)

* So the “gritty realism” cop drama just became another kind of cop propaganda. A bad kind, to my mind. It got people used to the idea that cops don’t have to obey the laws, that it’s OK to mistreat people as long as you ‘know’ they’re criminals, and that if they steal a little blow or get paid off by the occasional mobster, that’s OK because they do a hard job and they have to deal with the pressure and anyway they’ll eventually be punished for it and that will be tragic and we will feel bad for them.

+(This can be traced as far back as the gritty cop films of the 70s/80s,  like Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and The French Connection, and even in comedies like Beverly Hills Cop,  where the police routinely break the rules of law, and get rewarded for it, because they caught the bad guys. We have an entire generation of Americans who grew up watching countless hours of  such plots, and they have not stopped making these movies either.

But I want people to notice the similarity of the tropes in these movies to the constant refrain from apologists of police brutality. Many of their excuses for why the police kill unarmed Black people sound they can be taken directly from the excuses the cops use, in some of the movies.)

* “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” is a comedy and not just in the ha-ha-funny sense of the word. It’s comic in a more old-fashioned sense in that it takes place in a world that is, essentially, good and happy and full of fellowship and community. This is precisely why, when you contrast the world of the Nine-Nine with what we know about the actual NYPD, it can seem grotesque (as symbolized by the GIF I opened with, where happy Gina rocks out obliviously as violence and chaos erupt around her).

* But. What is valuable to me about B99 in the context of cop shows is that it has rejected the “gritty realism” definition of a good cop. On B99, a corrupt cop is a bad cop; a bigoted cop is a bad cop; a cop who plants evidence is a bad cop; a cop who’s addicted to excessive force and illegal activity is a disordered and deranged cop (Adrian Pimento). These bad cops are sometimes people’s friends, partners, or idols; but they are not given a pass for that reason, and they are not given protagonist status. They are, or become, antagonists and they are eventually expelled from the Nine-Nine (Pimento is a bit of an outlier, but Diaz does eventually kick him to the curb). The protagonists, meanwhile, are committed to being ‘good cops’–which means following the law, treating people with respect (even if they show up in superhero garb), and being honest.

I think this is deliberate on the part of the show’s creators, and I think they’re deliberately satirizing a lot of the ‘bad cops are cool’ tropes that have become part of the genre. B99 is like what would the Adam West Batman would have been if it had been done after the whole Dark Knight franchise thing instead of before. I mean this is B99′s version of torturing a suspect:

Originally posted by marquiis-de-la-baguette

And as Jake points out, it never works.

* This is demonstrated in one of my favorite Charles & Rosa bits. In the S4 episode “The Overmining,” after Rosa discovers that their foot massage parlor is most likely a front for some criminal enterprise, she and Charles have a scene in the briefing room where they discuss what they’re going to do about it. Rosa enlists Charles in the development an elaborate fantasy in which she invents a justification for leaving the foot massage parlor alone. They are briefly enraptured by this collaboration; it’s one of their most charming interactions. But once they reach the end of it, they both look at each other in silence. Then Rosa says, “we’re gonna have to do our stupid jobs,” and Charles says, “Yeah, let me get my stupid gun.” It’s a minor point in a B-plot, but it’s very revealing about the show as a whole. This place hasn’t tried to corrupt them; nobody’s offering them money; only they are aware of the ‘bribe’ that they are considering offering themselves; the chances that they would get ‘caught’ are almost nil. But they still can’t do it; and what’s more, the audience wouldn’t let them do it because the audience knows on some level that even this trivial act of police corruption is unthinkable for Rosa and Boyle. Because they’re good cops, even though at this moment they’re pissed off about it.

* Is that propaganda? Well, it’s propaganda for the idea that cops should be good (brave, honest, and just). Not that cops are good (which is the message sent by traditional police prodecurals in the Law & Order vein) or that cops are brave but can’t be expected to be honest and just (which is the message sent by “gritty realism” cop shows). But that they should be, and that maybe under the right conditions they could be. And in the context of art, that’s what idealism is: a representation of how things *should* be.

* Idealism’s social effects are complicated and some of them are starkly negative. White Americans, for instance, tend to idealize institutions like the police and the courts, and to be resistant to the idea that said institutions perpetuate inequality. That kind of idealism is a function of privilege: if you’ve never been wrongfully accused or convicted, then you can go on for quite a long time believing that nobody else ever has been. On the other hand, idealism is also ultimately the only foundation for progressive politics or for ideas like honesty and justice. This is a central preoccupation of “The Good Place”: in a world without idealism, how can people be good? The only motivation for being good that is not in some way corrupt has to be based on an idealistic belief in *something*–even if it’s just your idealized beloved.

* So, if you believe that policing can never be good–if you, for instance, think that developing a full-time police force is where modern society went wrong, and that social progress depends on dismantling ours–then yes, B99 is part of the problem. B99 uncritically accepts the necessity for a police force and there is no examination of the ways in which even good cops can negatively impact society as a whole. For instance, it’s always accepted that more arrests=good. That’s the metric Holt and everyone else use to determine whether a detective is good at their job: how many people do you arrest and how many of those do you clear. The consequences of the fact that the Santiago/Peralta bet given them both an incentive to arrest people they might not otherwise arrest are not examined. The idea that*fewer* arrests might be desirable is a bridge too far for the characters and the show. In fact, in the B99 universe it’s a problem when crime rates drop because the Nine-Nine is threatened with closure. By getting us so invested in the preservation of the 99th precinct, B99 does get us attached to the idea that we can’t do without the police. To that extent, it is cop propaganda.

* But if you believe that the police must exist but that they should be just and honest, then B99 is part of the solution–because it challenges the idealization of bad policing that has been a trend in US popular culture since at least the 1980s.

 

@@

*This discussion about the different ways men and women perform fandom was very enlightening. I had been trying to put my finger on why fandoms that were predominantly male were different from fandoms made up of mostly women, and I think this writer hits it on the head.

What isn’t mentioned here however, is that female fandom is  also very relationship motivated. What intrigues women in fandom is not the minutiae of the world building so much as it is the characters and their relationships to each other. It’s the reason why shipping is such a huge deal for female fandom, and why we engage in the creation of meta as much as we do. That is something that is less of a priority for men.

Women want to be a part of those worlds in a different way than male geeks, who often imagine themselves in that world as powerful, mastering the technology of that space, or solving that world’s problems. Women prefer to imagine themselves as having relationships to and interacting with the other characters, (although everyone engages in some degree of self-insertion.)

But it is this different approach to fandom that helps to explain some of the gatekeeping of male fans.

gingerjuju;

I just don’t understand where this concept of ‘fake geek girls’ came from. Like, AT ALL.

Cus when I look for fandom related stuff like 90% of the fan art and the fanfiction and the meta, zines, comics, etc. Like 90% of the shit that I’ve seen is created by women & girls.

And all that stuff take’s a lot of work and research and critical analysis and staring at reference photos for hours.

We are literally the most well versed and invested group in the fandom. So, like, What the fuck boys? You mad you can’t keep up?

 

scifigrl47

I saw an argument, and I can’t find it now, but it totally made sense, that there’s a gender split in fandom. Male fandom tends to be a curator fandom; male fandom collects, organizes, and memorizes facts and figures. Male fandom tends to be KEEPERS of the canon; the fandom places great weight on those who have the biggest collection, the deepest knowledge of obscure subjects, the first appearances, creators, character interactions.

Female fandom is creative. Females create fanart, cosplay, fanwritings. Female fandom ALTERS canon, for the simple reason that canon does not serve female fandom. In order for it to fit the ‘outsider’ (female, queer, POC), the canon must be attacked and rebuilt, and that takes creation.

“Male” fandom devalues this contribution to fandom, because it is not the ‘right’ kind of fandom. “Girls only cosplay for attention, they’re not REAL fans!” “Fanfiction is full of stupid Mary Sues, girls only do it so they can make out with the main character!” “I, a male artist, have done this pin-up work and can put it in my portfolio! You, a female artist, have drawn stupid fanart, and it’s not appropriate to use as a professional reference!”

In the mind of people who decry the ‘fake geek girl,’ this fandom is not as worthy. It damages, or in their mind, destroys the canon. What is the point of memorizing every possible romantic entanglement of heterosexual white Danny Rand if someone turns around and creates a fanwork depicting him as a bisexual female of Asian descent (thus subverting Rand’s creepy ‘white savior’ origins)? When Danny Rand becomes Dani Rand, their power is lessened. What is important to them ceases to be the focus of the discussion. Creation and curatorship can work in tandom, but typically, in fandom, they are on opposite poles.

This is not to say that there aren’t brilliant male cosplayers or smashing female trivia experts, this is to say that the need of the individual fan is met with opposing concepts: In order for me to find myself in comics, I need to make that space for myself, and that is a creative force. Het white cis males are more likely to do anything possible to defend and preserve the canon because the canon is built to cater to them

 

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And for the serious, more informative part of this post:

This is a list of tropes about Asian women, and that  first trope  is probably the reason I had such an averse reaction to the Elektra character in Daredevil. For me she was a classic example of The Dragon Lady, being of course, beautiful, evil and mysterious, who seduces Matt and tries to corrupt him. This is especially obvious when she was contrasted against the blonde, wholesome, and virginal, Karen, who is supposed to be good for him. The article also outlines how these stereotypes are harmful to Asian women in the real world.

Oh, yeah don’t forget this kinda newish trope, the rebellious Asian woman with the colorful hair: as seen on the TV show Minority Report, and the movies The Wolverine, Deadpool 2, and Pacific Rim!

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/asian-women-colorful-hair-trope-problem

 thisisnotjapan

Recently, a friend and I were talking about growing up Asian American in predominantly white neighborhoods and schools, and she told me that when she was in fifth grade, boys teased her on the playground by saying that she had a “sideways vagina.”

This has happened to me, too – and I’m sure to so many other Asian girls.

From racist humor in mid-1800s brothels to today’s playground jokes, the race and gender identity of Asian women is seen as so foreign, so “alien,” that our vaginas magically defy biology.

Throughout my life, I’ve received unwanted comments and questions about my body, specifically my anatomy, including being harassed on the street with calls like, “Ni hao,” “Konichiwa,” “Are you Chinese, Japanese, or Korean,” and recently, “Hi Ling Ling.”

On top of that, in my dating history, I was expected to be more quiet and less assertive.

The hyper-sexualization and fetishization of East Asian women is problematic – I am not “lucky” that my race and gender is imagined as sexy and exotic, that Asian women “all so beautiful.”

Or that, an image search of “Asian women” pulls up excessive pictures of women posing in lingerie.

Racial fetishes are about objectification, fetishizing an entire group of people – in this case Asian women, means reducing them down to stereotypes instead of recognizing their full personhood.

Beyond just personal preferences or “having a type,” racial fetishes project desired personality and behavior onto an entire racial or ethnic group.

The fetishization of Asian women even has a name, “yellow fever” – as if the obsession with Asian women were also a disease.

When my identity as an “Asian woman” becomes the only thing that’s important to someone in an interaction, that’s a problem.

This is different from an interracial partnership where all partners are equally respected. Fetishizing someone’s race and gender means not caring about someone as an individual.

So, where did the fetishization and objectification come from? How did Asian women get the hypersexualized stereotypes of being docile and submissive or being dangerous and seductive?

While today, some people might think of fetishes and sexual stereotypes as “not a big deal,” the history behind these tropes is rooted in violence and war, which get oppressively reimagined by mainstream media and entertainment.

Below are five ways East Asian women became fetishized and how that fetishization horribly impacts our lives.

1. Mainstream Media Creates the Submissive ‘Lotus Blossom’ and Evil ‘Dragon Lady’ Stereotypes

“[S]mall, weak, submissive and erotically alluring…She’s fun, you see, and so uncomplicated. She doesn’t go to assertiveness-training classes, insist on being treated like a person, fret about career moves…” —Tony Rivers, “Oriental Girls”, Gentleman’s Quarterly, 1990

Growing up, Lucy Liu was one of the only East Asian women I saw on TV and in movies. It was her, the Yellow Power Ranger (Thuy Trang), and Mulan.

For me, Liu is badass – both for being one of the only Asian American actresses in mainstream Hollywood and also for playing roles that literally kick ass.

However, many of her roles throughout the 90s and early 2000s, such as Ling Woo on Ally McBeal or as O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, were also ones that showed Asian women as beautifully evil, aggressive, and also mysterious.

Asian women are often stereotyped as either the dangerously cunning “Dragon Lady” that seduces White men, leading to their inevitable downfall, or as the submissive “Lotus Blossom.”

Both are meant to be demeaning and demonizing.

While there are exceptions, for the most part, mainstream media has created one dimensional, sexualized representations of Asian women that have affected the way they’re perceived by others.

Chinese actress Anna May Wong, the first Asian American actress to be internationally famous in the 1920s, was often cast in stereotypical supporting roles – and passed over for leading roles of Asian characters, which were given to white actresses in yellowface.

One of her most recognized characters was the demure, respectful Lotus Flower in The Toll of the Sea.The demure, subservient, and delicate “Lotus Blossom” stereotype is intended to cast Asian women as “less than,” both in terms of race and gender.

These stereotypes are seriously harmful. In the US, up to 61% of Asian women experience physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner during her lifetime.

Being docile is specifically about being deferent and obedient, especially to the authority of men.

As our race, gender, and sexuality become ruled by Western and male fantasy, in order to serve men sexually, Asian women must both be “feminine” and “heterosexual” and also either submissive and/or hypersexual.

These double stereotypes of “Lotus Blossom” and “Dragon Lady” reflect the ways that Asian women become transformed into either a sexual servant or embodied as a sexual adventure.

https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/asian-woman-fetishes-hurtful/

For The Weekend: On Diversity

 

Criticism

*This is an idea, that I spoke about some time ago, that is slowly starting to gain some traction, after it was widely dispersed that the vast majority of film critics are White men, and after the actresses of Oceans 8 spoke out on why they felt their movie received lukewarm reviews. I have been saying that we need more reviewers of color because more and more movies, books, and TV shows are being released that are not specifically created for White audiences, and I think it’s important that we hear from reviewers who are members of the audiences at which this type of media is aimed, not just White men.

https://variety.com/video/brie-larson-crystal-lucy-awards-critics/

 “[Audiences] are not allowed enough chances to read public discourse on these films by the people that the films were made for. I do not need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work for him about ‘[A] Wrinkle in Time.’ It wasn’t made for him. I want to know what it meant to women of color, to biracial women, to teen women of color, to teens that are biracial.”

Black Mirror and Critical Diversity

https://tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/black-mirror-and-critical-diversity/

The Problem with White Critics

https://wordpress.com/post/tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/73012

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rootbeergoddess

See I think A Wrinkle in Time just proves we need more female critics and more critics of color because…okay, let me see if I can explain this.

I saw the latest Blade Runner movie and I was bored to tears yet on the movies subreddit, everyone said I either didn’t get it or didn’t give the movie a chance. And when I gave my reasons as to why I didn’t like the movie, I was called close-minded. The movie wasn’t just dull but it had this creepy obsession with women yet didn’t respect women in any way and I found it ironic that a movie all about women and their rights to reproduce had the main character be a male. But obviously, I’m not smart enough to understand this movie.

Now with Wrinkle in Time, I enjoyed this movie and I do honestly feel like a lot of white, male critics are tearing the movie apart because they don’t get it or don’t try to get it. There is also a lot of callous talk concerning this movie.

“Oh, it’s too emotional! It’s too focused on self love!”

How…how are those bad things!?

Like I’m sorry but I am tired of every movie that is dark and gritty being hailed as something thought provoking and deep. Not every single piece of entertainment has to be depressing 24/7. I’ve also noticed that when it comes to movies that are dumb fun, if it doesn’t feature a man, it’s torn apart too. I liked Maleficent. It’s fun but if I like it, I’m an idiot apparently.

What I’m getting to is this. The job of the critic is to tell people if they would like a piece of media or if they would enjoy it. I’m able to see a movie and sometimes say, “This movie was not meant for me but someone else might like it.” I feel like a vast majority of today’s critics can’t do that and I think it’s important that critics be made up of more than just white dudes.

 

@@

*In some ways I agree with the following article. But my point is not that straight, white, 40 year old, men don’t have anything at all to say about films not aimed at them, like A Wrinkle In Time, (which is aimed at bi-racial teenage girls), but that they don’t have anything, of real authentic relevance, to say to any of the bi-racial teenage girls who are going to see the movie, or read the reviews. As a straight white man, there are certain aspects of authenticity, in a movie not aimed at him, that he’s simply not going  to see, and therefor speak about, and his viewpoint shouldn’t be the only one expressed about a film.

This isn’t about whether or not a movie is good or bad, or whether or not White men can  see a movie. Movies are meant to be seen, and are for whoever will go see them, but a bi-racial teenager may have specific insights into A Wrinkle In Time, which is directly aimed at her as its audience. What did she get out it? Did the movie accomplish its goal for her?

We need more diverse film critics because I do want to know what someone of Mexican descent thinks about Coco,  what women think about Wonder Woman, and what a Black person thinks of Black Panther and Luke Cage. Its not that white men have no insight about movies they are not the audience for, but that their insight might be somewhat limited, because they’re not part of the group, or culture.

At the same time I can also acknowledge there are plenty of movies that are aimed at straight, White guys, that they may have insight into, that I just don’t have, like Fight Club, and Taxi Driver. I’ve seen those movies, and can comment on them from a film school essay point of view, but I’m not a a part of the group those films are specifically aimed at. There are things about being a straight White guy that I just don’t know about. I can see the thematic aspects of those movies, but I can’t say a whole lot about their authenticity, and what messages I get from them may be completely different than what the creator intended, (although arguably, I can probably do a better job of it, than any white guy, on movies aimed at women, black people, and Latinx).

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-film-criticism-diversity-20180620-htmlstory.html

@@

Publishing:

Last year, an author named Lionel Shriver went on a public rant about diversity in publishing. She has since doubled down on her views, which has prompted a scathing response form the author, Hanif Kureishi. And once again this backlash against diversity in publishing is entirely predictable, according to Samuel R. Delaney, (and can also be applied to many areas of media that seek to branch out to different audiences). I will reprint this link as many times as I have to to make my point:

http://www.nyrsf.com/racism-and-science-fiction-.html

As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight force—until, say, black writers start to number thirteen, fifteen, twenty percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and prejudice here as in any other field.

Penguin’s response:

:https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/penguin-publishers-diversity-inclusion-scheme-writers-queer-lgbtq-race-class-disability-women-a8393796.html

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/11/publisher-defends-diversity-drive-after-lionel-shrivers-attack

 

Kureishi’s response:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/15/diversity-publishing-culture-minority-writers-penguin

The British creativity I grew up with – in pop, fashion, poetry, the visual arts and the novel – has almost always come from outside the mainstream: from clubs, gay subcultures, the working class and from the street. Many of the instigators may have been white, but they were not from the middle class – a class that lacks, in my experience, the imagination, fearlessness and talent to be truly subversive.

 

Movies

 

 

*An article on how the current crop of horror movies  are a reflection of America’s greatest fears, and always have been. I spoke on this briefly, when I reviewed the Bodysnatchers movies, and how each iteration was a reflection of America’s greatest fears, during the time in which they were made. 

https://tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-1956-vs-all-the-rest/

https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/12/21/13737476/horror-movies-2016-invasion

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/why-sci-fi-keeps-imagining-the-enslavement-of-white-people/361173/

But it’s worth remembering that in sci-fi, the future actually isn’t safe or sterile at all. On the contrary, with its alien invasions, evil empires, authoritarian dystopia, and new lands discovered and pacified, the genre can look as much like the past as the future. In particular, sci-fi is often obsessed with colonialism and imperial adventure, the kind that made the British Empire an empire and that still sustains America’s might worldwide.

TV

There was a long discussion, on Tumblr,  of what constitutes police propaganda, because some people were confused, and wanted to disregard Brooklyn 99 as propaganda, based solely on the idea that  the show was progressive and enjoyable. My argument, and the argument of many others was, this is exactly the reasons why the show is a form of  propaganda for law enforcement.  My argument was that it was the impact of the show, and not the writers intentions which make it propaganda.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/05/18/brooklyn_nine_nine_s_fantasy_world_doesn_t_stop_me_from_loving_it_video.html

 It’s a well-crafted fantasy, with hardly any discernible connection to current cultural attitudes about law enforcement. On the surface, the show is really not so different from that subway ad. Does the fact that I love one and feel displeasure for the other make me a hypocrite?

http://actualmermaid.tumblr.com/post/171424206289/what-is-propaganda

thewellofastarael

@adhighdefinition​

I don’t want to be That Person ™ who adds meaningless noise to discourse, but…

Who in the world thinks that B99 is police propaganda?

Police propaganda is shows like SWAT (which I enjoy immensely, except for the preachiness) or Blue Bloods or NCIS LA, in which law enforcement is glorified and the main characters can do no harm.

B99 focuses on cops, yes, and addresses cop-related issues, yes. But it never portrays policing as anything other than a normal profession, or the characters as more moral than anyone else. You could change the setting to an amusement park or a college or a law firm and the basic setup would stay the same.

Recently in B99, Jake tells Captain Holt that he’s not ready to come back to work, because he has a “little voice in his head saying, ‘but what if [the suspect] innocent’.” And Holt tells him that the voice is a strength. Jake shouldn’t think lightly of throwing people behind bars or accusing them of crimes. It’s a serious matter. “I wish more cops thought that way,” says Holt.

HOW IS THAT PROPAGANDA????

 

lkeke35

Actually the argument you just made for why it isn’t propaganda is exactly why the show is propaganda The series does not show the Brooklyn 99 crew as just regular citizens. The main characters are glorified as being more progressive than the police actually are,  occasionally shown to do no wrong, and when they do wrong, they  correct their mistakes by the end of an episode.

So it actually is. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love this show and all it’s characters, but that’s what makes it propaganda. Any cop show that is set up for you to think of the characters as likable, dutiful, and most importantly “good” is propaganda. I think the creators  intent is to be funny, with great characters, and tackle a couple of  social issues, but it is still propaganda, not because, not just because of their intent, but because of the effect of the series in this particular social landscape.

The “effect” is that you end up liking these very liberal, open minded, “woke” cops,  and in real life, cops are generally very conservative. Also, the police are employees of the state, so ANY show that makes us feel some type of way about them (good or bad) automatically makes the show (even unintentionally) political, making it propaganda.

So yes, as wonderful and lovable as the characters are, as nice as they are,   that is the reason that it qualifies as propaganda. Technically, even if all the cops on the show were evil and corrupt, it would still be propaganda, because the net “effect” is that you watch this show, and feel some type of way about the state-run, political entity of law enforcement.  The side effect is that the show makes the police look good, and makes you feel good about them.

Just because it’s a comedy doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an effect on the net accumulation  of people’s thinking about the police. In the end ,it’s not about the “intention” of the creators. It’s about the “effect” the show has in the landscape of television, along with the 15-20 other cop shows airing at the time.

Brooklyn 99 qualifies.

 

Source:thewellofastarael

Fandom

Once again, we need to discuss the racism that has heavily infested the fandom. Why? Because its  merely a reflection of the everyday microaggressions and racism that White people practice on the daily. I’m also going to argue that this racism is informed by decades of television viewing in which White audiences were never given any alternative narratives about PoC, women, and gender, and sexual orientation.

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Race_and_Fandom#Racism_in_Slash_Fandom

Race and ethnicity has been an issue in the canons of fannish source texts for almost as long as fandom has been around. Because most entertainment is created and produced by white males, particularly in Hollywood, it tends to reflect the mindset and experiences of the majority of its creators.

 

http://www.blackenterprise.com/the-power-of-black-women-in-fandom/

As a black women who are fans of black female characters, we are constantly reminded how much hate there is for black women and how voraciously people in fandoms dig for reasons to justify it. Oftentimes white female characters are lauded for doing the same things that white fan bases hate black female characters for.

http://www.vulture.com/2018/06/kelly-marie-tran-star-wars-hollywood-enabled-toxicity.html

The lack of ethnic and gender diversity in the first three films is an original sin that allows toxic fans to point to the Original Trilogy the way gun nuts point to the Second Amendment. There’s no productive argument to be had when anti-inclusivity extremism is at play. These people want what they want, and they’re not disappearing.

 

Weekend Reading: The Fandoms Ain’t Alright

This has definitely caught me in my feels this week as I learned that Kelly Marie Tran was, very possibly, driven from the only social media site she has engaged with, Instagram, since being cast as Rose Tico in the latest Star Wars film. She received so much racist and sexist hate, that she deleted all her posts, and shut down her page. I’m saddened by this, because I was really enjoying following   her actor’s journey on Tumblr, and she seemed incredibly happy to be a part of the franchise. Joining the Star Wars franchise, as a principle player, was supposed to be a happy, and momentous, occasion for her, and a bunch of assholes spoiled it! She seemed like such a positive person, so bubbly, and pleasant,and she just wanted to share some of her happiness. I was interested in her journey to stardom, and planned to follow her career.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-persecution-of-kelly-marie-tran-how-star-wars-fandom-became-overrun-by-alt-right-trolls

So how did a breakout role in an incredibly influential film end in fear and self-censorship? For anyone who’s been following recent trends within the Star Wars fandom, this outcome would actually be fairly predictable; in fact, given the racism, misogyny, and general toxicity that’s built up around the franchise, it’s impressive that Tran was able to last this long. Like so many other assholes, bigoted Star Wars fans have recently become emboldened, emerging from the chrysalises of racist Reddit threads as ubiquitous, bullshit-spouting butterflies. 

And now, like Leslie Jones, and Daisy Ridley before her, she’s decided she has simply had enough of the constant racist abuse, and  the Star Wars fandom is just too toxic for her. This is what “fandom “has come to, people harassing and abusing the creators of the content they claim to love. This goes against the very definition of what “fandom” is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom

Fandom is a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of empathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest. Fans typically are interested in even minor details of the object(s) of their fandom and spend a significant portion of their time and energy involved with their interest, often as a part of a social network with particular practices (a fandom); this is what differentiates “fannish” (fandom-affiliated) fans from those with only a casual interest.

This isn’t just about criticizing Star Wars, or disliking her character. No matter how much certain media sites try to play it down by mentioning that other Star Wars actors have been harassed out of acting altogether (Jake Lloyd, Hayden Christensen ), they must acknowledge that her harassment included the triple vectors of  racism, sexism, and fat shaming. This wasn’t about calling her being a bad actress and is  the  the exact same thing that happened to Leslie Jones for daring to appear in a movie.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/why-was-leslie-jones-targeted-trolls-n638291

And no, this isn’t just the Star Wars fandom. This is a much larger issue than Kelly Marie Tran and its about time the mainstream media looked closely at it. Every type of fandom has this same toxic element within, from books (check out the Goodreads bullies from the early 2000’s, and the SadPuppy Brigade in Science fiction), movies (Leslie Jones’ retreat from Twitter, and the  attempted tanking of Black Panther on Rotten Tomatoes), games (see Gamergate, and the term “Swatting”, which has already cost the life of one man), and television (see the racist harassment of Candace Patton of The Flash,  the erasure of characters of color, in media in which they are the primary characters, like Teen Wolf, and there was The Rick and Morty Schezuan Sauce Debacle last year).

The common denominator of all this toxicity is primarily straight, White, and male. White male geeks are showing their whole ass, in every sphere of geekdom, as they always have, but now this news has finally made its way into mainstream media, which has long ignored what goes on in fandom circles. How did things go so terribly wrong? Did this happen because being a geek has gone mainstream and attracted unsavory elements? Was geekdom always like this? And if not, what caused the behavior change? People are   thinking about this now  because this is a larger issue beyond Kelly Marie Tran, and The Guardian pulls no punches when it comes to naming exactly what this issue is:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jun/07/kelly-marie-tran-rose-why-are-some-star-wars-fans-so-toxic

These males – and it is males – feel they have ownership over a piece of entertainment: that geekdom is their safe space, theirs alone, and the newfound mass popularity of the genre is bringing a lot of casuals into their hitherto predominantly straight, white, male dojo. Diversity isn’t what some of them want. Which is bizarre, considering the benefits of diversity are what quite a lot of sci-fi is actually about. But it’s not what these people believe they paid for, and therefore see themselves of having part-ownership of. The sense of entitlement is staggering.

I can’t even say its just White fanboys who are responsible because there is just as significant a contingent of White women, who are as toxic, “misogynoiristic”, racist, and  delusional in their fandom, as the White fanboys, who insist that these creations are ruining their childhoods, by being inclusive of gender and race. For example, check out the ‘shipping behavior surrounding Reylo, JohnLock, and Destiel.

White female fans have  attacked Candace Patton, the women of the MCU, the actress wives of the stars of Supernatural and Sherlock. Why? Because they believe these real life women stand in the way of their OTP (One true pairing.) These are the same women who think they’re being progressive because they ‘ship two White male characters, while ignoring the half dozen actually canon, gay characters of color, in movies like Moonlight, and TV shows like Teen Wolf, and Shadowhunters.

Female fans were so incensed at the character, Sharon, from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, that they harassed, and attacked the actress, and started a Twitter campaign insisting that Captain America have a boyfriend. (Never mind that Steve Rogers has NEVER  even been hinted at as being gay, anywhere in the comics, or the MCU.) (For the record, I’m not against gay characters. I  don’t want canon straight characters being changed to gay in the source material, although I will headcanon them as gay in fanfiction. I would prefer creating media with actual  gay characters, of which there are plenty, that I’d love to see in movies.)

White male fanboys have even attacked Star Trek, for having too much  diversity, and social justice messages! They claim that is not what they’ve watched the show for and  I have to question whether they’ve EVER watched the show, because diversity, and social issues was the entire foundation around which the franchise was created. What the Hell have they been watching?!!!

I’ve tried to figure why these fandoms have become more toxic, and there are several articles that point to things like, the anonymity of the internet, and the feelings of entitlement that fans may have towards the source material, the actors, and characters. All of that is true, but those are just a couple of  elements in  the toxic stew that so many fandoms have become.

Not all toxic fandom has a racial component, because those fandoms without a significant portion of marginalized members can be just as toxic as the ones that do. But it cannot be denied that when there’s a significant number of PoC, and women, in the source material, there’s also a definite racial component to the backlash. I fear this will only get worse, as people who were previously marginalized as creators, actors, and fans, keep making significant inroads into Pop culture. I see that I’m going to have to pull out Samuel R. Delany’s essay again:

http://www.nyrsf.com/racism-and-science-fiction-.html

As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight force—until, say, black writers start to number thirteen, fifteen, twenty percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and prejudice here as in any other field.                                                           ——Samuel R. Delaney

And I believe that this is what’s happening here. White fanboys are having a full on meltdown, as the Pop culture they use to claim entirely for themselves, has begun  broadening  its fanbase, by appealing to women and minorities. Not only that, but a significant portion of fandom has been infiltrated by people who are not actually fans at all. The loose coalition of the Alt-Right, and White Nationalists, for example, who see all this as yet another opportunity to harass women, and PoC, are simply jumping on the bandwagon.

And yes, I think this behavior in fandom is directly tied to the behavior of White men behaving badly in the rest of the culture, from mass shootings, to car attacks, to violent marches. They have caused controversy in every field, including the fields of  History, and Science, as they attempt to change historical, and scientific narratives to fit their White racial agenda. There is an all out attack on every part of American culture.

https://www.publicmedievalist.com/race-racism-middle-ages-toc/

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-rising-anxiety-white-america/

But I generally believe there is more racism in fandom, not because there are more racists in fandom, but because there are more races in fandom. Not because the business of entertainment cares so much about these groups, but because we have all been exceptionally clear about letting them know we will no longer be giving them our money for products that refuse to include us, (and they’ve also seen they can make serious  bank by appealing to us, i.e. Black Panther,  The Fast and The Furious, Star Wars.) Even some White fans have claimed to be tired of only seeing White men onscreen, and have been clamoring for more diversity.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/fantasy-writer-n-k-jemisin-explains-why-theres-more-ra-1586220859

She begins by explaining that racism has become a bigger issue in fandom lately, partly because people of color are becoming more powerful as creators in the publishing industry. And that means the backlash is going to be stronger.

But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how many temper tantrums, and meltdowns White men have, though. Once “fans” start reacting this badly, they’ve already lost whatever war they think they are a part of. The business of entertainment has made so much money from appealing to people like me, that I don’t think they have any plans to go back to the way things once were, of only appealing to the demographic of: White men ages 18-35. (There’s also the side effect of fans and creators watching this behavior, and doubling down in their fight against racism, homophobia, and sexism, as they don’t want to be associated with such rabid behavior.)

Further Reading:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/doctor-who-backlash-exposed-the-irony-of-men-who-dont-want-women-in-fandom_us_596f642ce4b0000eb1978720

http://minervamag.com/2016/01/when-fandom-goes-wrong/

https://splinternews.com/fandom-isn-t-broken-it-s-just-not-only-for-white-dudes-1793857254

Racism, Misogyny & Death Threats: How Star Wars Fans Turned to the Dark Side

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/2/16840170/swatting-death-call-duty-toxic-fandom

https://filmschoolrejects.com/star-wars-fandom-is-broken/

http://talynnkel.com/blog/2017/10/9/your-fandom-is-racist

Racism, Misogyny & Death Threats: How Star Wars Fans Turned to the Dark Side

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/star-wars-fandom-toxicity-problem

https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/05/30/fandom-is-broken

http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/star-wars-has-a-white-male-fandom-problem

https://www.inverse.com/article/31867-star-trek-discovery-racism-sexism-reddit-youtube-trailer

*Twitter Reactions

It seems I wasn’t the only person who felt some type of way about what happened to Kelly. A lot of people came out in support of her, including her co-stars and the director.

 

*And yeah, I’m not leaving White women out of this either. There are a ton of white women writing fanfiction, and meta essays, that seek to erase, and diminish, characters of color  from their own narratives.

 

*And Finally

When it comes to WoC in fandom:

(link to twitter thread)

https://newrepublic.com/article/137489/women-color-price-fandom-can-high

 If you’ve been involved in the dedicated fandoms of comics, science fiction, and fantasy as a black woman for any length of time you’ve undoubtedly had to face a degree of racism and sexism that such tweets are rooted in. It doesn’t matter if you’re an actress or a journalist, a screenwriter or a director, the price of visibility for black women in geek properties feels too high.

Why Star Wars Fans Are The Worse Fans Ever…

Its not just Star Wars fandoms, though. We spend a lot of time on Tumblr shaking our damn heads over how shitty some of these fandoms behave towards characters they claim to like, and explaining why its not a good idea for people to do and say racist shit about them.

“Do they even know how to Fan?”

The Star Wars Fandom is, on occasion, a complete shitstorm of every awful racist behavior seen in every fandom ever. This is not to condemn those legitimate fans who genuinely love the franchise, and are not engaging in any of these shenanigans, let me make that clear. Hell, I’m a Star Wars fan! Been one since the first movie. But what I do not want to do, is  have anything do with the Star Wars fandom, in general, whose behavior, from the time of the announcement of Finn as a lead character, has been universally awful, racist, and thoroughly nasty, not just towards other fans, but towards the characters, the actors, and even the show’s creators.

As a general rule I do not engage in shipping of various characters. Not because I don’t think it’s a legitimate activity. It’s just that I almost never think about it, and when I do,  I rarely ever go beyond whatever canon pairing is present. Its simply not my priority when consuming media.  Some of the fans, however,  have taken shipping Rey and Kylo to such a  delusional level of behavior, you wouldn’t believe it.  From death threats to the creators, to cropping characters out of cast photos and posting them online, and harassing the actors on Twitter.

I was in the Supernatural fandom when the Destiel shipping started to ramp up, (it has since died down somewhat, thanks to the show no longer queerbaiting the characters), and saw every one of these behaviors  listed here, , within that fandom.

https://www.thewrap.com/12-times-fandom-has-gone-horribly-wrong-from-one-direction-to-dragon-age-photos/

Star Wars fandom is not the only one engaging in harassment of the actors and other fans. This happens in all the largest fandoms. A lot of the problem seems to be a toxic combination of celebrity worship, racism, and entitlement to the stories being consumed, and people not knowing how to be fans, along with internet anonymity. Somewhere along the way, people forgot that fandom involves loving and respecting the characters, and actors, and that this is supposed to be fun.

http://epicstream.com/features/8-Times-Internet-Fandom-Crossed-The-Line-With-Creators-and-Actors

This behavior tends to have  the worst repercussions for fans of color. Fandom becomes a “safe space” for White fans, at our expense. Part of the problem is the use and writing of meta. You have a lot of people writing so-called, think-pieces about these shows. Unfortunately, a lot  of these are written by people who have seen meta,  think they know what it is, and how to do it, but  have never had an analytical thought in their life.

This is not something exclusive to White male fans either. There are plenty of White women out there writing slavefic about Black Panther, cropping Finn out of photos with Rey, writing racist meta on why Michonne, and Uhura, and Iris West should die, or  remain unloved and alone, and harassing Candice Patton with pornographic, and racist memes on Twitter.

meta

1. Meta means about the thing itself. It’s seeing the thing from a higher perspective instead of from within the thing, like being self-aware.

The Reylo faction of the Star Wars fandom  regularly engages in every single one of the behaviors listed in the above articles. How is this fandom? How does this show a person’s love for a show, or character, or even an actor? Fandom has become so toxic in some places that even the mainstream news media have gotten wind of it, and they’re usually oblivious to such things. (We won’t get into how mainstream media has  aided and abetted the  racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes that make toxic fandom possible.)

@@

The Reylo fandom are those people whose priority is shipping Rey and Kylo Ren from the Star Wars movies. Although many people are opposed to this relationship because it’s seen as romanticizing abuse, and as an erasure of Finn from his own narrative, its the behavior surrounding the ship, that seems to be causing the most consternation among fans of color. My general attitude is like whatever ships you like, but don’t delude yourself that it’s going to happen. Don’t delude yourself about what type of character you’re stanning for, and for fuck’s sake, stop make up bullshit excuses for what you’re doing because you feel some type of way about liking the villain.

JUST OWN IT!!!

 

A List of Things Reylos Have Done

rootbeergoddess

 Okay, this will be the last Reylo post I make today but since they want to act like they’re innocent, I’m just going to make a short list of the things they have done.

• Harassed Daisy Ridley for posting a picture of Finn and Rey holding hands
• Spammed unrelated Star Wars tags with Reylo content
• Sent racist messages to various Finn fans
• Erase Poe to make Kylo part of the new trio
• Cropped Dev Patel and John Boyega out of pictures only to replace them with Adam Driver
• Made racist Native American AUs and a racist Black Lives Matter story
• Made a really gross and disturbing mental patient AU
• Have tried time and time again to erase the relationship Finn has with Rey
• Have posted Reylo content in the Beauty and the Beast tags as well as the Dark Crystal tags
• Crosstag on a daily basis
• Made Rose’s line about the things we love about Rey and Kylo
• Made a Handmaid’s AU

This list will surely get longer.

 

 reylo-more-like-reyno

 Adding to this:

• Organized, promoted, and held a “Cousin Ben Week” dedicated to creating content where Rey and Kylo were cousins in a romantic relationship, purely for the fetishization of incestuous relationships.
• When some Reylos came forward with concerns about “Cousin Ben Week” they were silenced by other Reylos and told to get out of the fandom if they were bothered
• Harassed antis after antis posted stories about being bullied by shippers before becoming antis, called many antis “victim-blamers” for sharing such stories
• Bullied antis after antis posted selfies to spread positivity in the anti community
• Made up a fake Crepe story to shit on antis
• Harassed Pablo Hidalgo about if Kylo is a virgin or not
• Have called Finn/John Boyega racial slurs including “coal boy” and said he looks 40.
• Have sexually harassed a Kylo Ren actor at a Disney theme park.
• There are scattered incidents of Kylo Ren and Rey cosplayers being harassed bt Reylos as well.

xprincessrey

 Also adding made Orient Express about their ship when it came out with Daisy as one of the leads ( where character was half of a interracial couple )

And recently Made the song “Rewrite The Stars ” a song about interracial couple facing racist miscegenation in the 1800s sing how they can rewrite the stars so they don’t have to deal with the racism

 

hanorganaas

 Posted a story where Leia died and Han married Rey only to have Kylo steal his father’s bride from his own dad.

 

nutheadgee

 Used the Holocaust experience as a sob story to try and mine sympathy and got mad when actual Jewish people told to not do that because anti semetism.

Called myself and other black fans nazis, KKK equivalents and racists because I said they don’t experience racism and should STFU about anti blackness.

Sent some select black finnreys pictures of black people being hanged and/or lynched.

Claim to “call out racism” in their little circlejerk echo chamber and in the same breath turn around and say how us blackies are mean and racist when we tell them how nasty they are.

Shit talk on our posts all day while blocking us because they are too pussy to have us respond to them directly.

heartlessbrujx

-Told other reylos to reblog an anti minors post because they expressed being triggered by reylo blogger interaction

-Weaponized cope shipping reylos against anti survivors

-Made a sexual assault reylo video

-Sent porn to underage antis simply for not liking the pairing

-Compared me, a Mexican, to Trump for not liking their pairing

-suicide baiting antis for calling Adam Driver ugly

-Said islamophobia wasn’t real and Muslims uncomfortable with Adam were the “real racists”

-Drawn Finn with wide lips and black skin

-Take FinnRey lines to promo their mayo pairing

-Called FinnRey shippers the “real racists” for not shipping FinnRose

-Reduce Poe to a sexy player and refuse to admit the racist undertones in that stereotype

-Demonize Finn as a black man for taking Rey’s hand “against her will” yet praise Kylo for kidnapping and torturing her simply because Kylo is white

 

angelsaxis

 -sexually harassed me in the comments of a fic I wrote and then claimed that I was the one doing the harrassing just for responding

-made an entire theory on how every instance of Kylo/the FO being violent and angry was ACTUALLY super romantic and about Rey losing her virginity

-compare Adam being called ugly to anti blackness and other forms of racism

 

inkstorrn

• Harassed a minor for “””doxxing”” them when said minor hadn’t actually done anything wrong
• Continuously harassed various antis about their ship being canon starting in January 2016 when there was not even a hint of that being true
• Constantly call antis “scum” and insinuate that we’re all a hivemind and/or 12 years old and “just don’t know better”
• Instead of informing antis about a rapist in the community, turned it into an antis vs shippers situation, and spread misinfo about a popular blogger
• Continuously jump onto properly tagged posts to gang up on the op
• Insinuate that antis tell people to die and/or harass shippers without providing any proof

badships

 Gonna add to this too

• Wrote gross incest stories on anti posts
• Used that stupid “anne” insult and then used the “it’s a meme” line on trans/nb antis who said it made them uncomfortable/dysphoric (im one of those trans people)
• Compared black people to purple aliens when called out on a whitewashed finnrey edit
• Compared finnrey/finnrey shippers to hitler
• White shippers continue to speak over POC about what is and isn’t racist
• Said I have no right to speak on racism because I’m not fully black
• Refered to my race as a “half breed”
• Sent themselves racial slurs on anon and then tried to accuse me and a few other antis, wouldn’t provide proof that it was me or said antis

 

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My question about this one is, what are White women in fandom supposed to do when The Becky Sue is the example they get from the source material? White racial resentment is  a factor in how fans respond to the media they consume. In one episode of The Walking Dead, a White character named Enid dressed down a WoC on the show. (In  a more recent episode, she tried to do this again to Michonne.) Some fans objected to this, seeing  in this scene, the writers taking the opportunity to express their own real life racial resentment through a white character.

I didn’t see that particular scene, so I can’t say, but I have noticed a trend, in genre media, of White writers putting their own racially coded words into the mouths of Black characters, too many PoC characters being abused and/or  mistreated in the narrative by White female characters, or writing Black characters (especially Black women) to be virulent (allegorical) racists, and xenophobes.

As far as what Tumblr thinks:

 On White Prioritization

 

The dominant ideas in any culture will reflect the ideas of the most powerful, those who control the means of disseminating those ideas for if there is to be social order the less powerful must come to accept the ideas of the most powerful as the correct and right ideas. This is effected via a process of ideological indoctrination. The principal institutions responsible for the spread of the dominant ideology are the media, the educational system, the religious institutions and ordinary popular cultural fare such as movies, music, jokes and seemingly innocent play.

The dominant culture of the US was formed to give preference to and propagate the white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy, a sociopolitical system in which cisgender, heterosexual white men hold social dominance at the expense of subordinating racial minorities, transgender individuals, non-heterosexual sexual orientations, and women.”

Part and parcel to these interconnected systems of oppression are racist cultural messages that present whites as whole human beings while pathologizing blackness and regarding non-whites as inferior. These ideas become entrenched in our subconscious and infiltrate our social attitudes developed through the socialization process.

 White-centeredness is a deeply-rooted aspect of U.S. culture. White-centeredness denotes the centrality of white representation that permeates every facet of our dominant culture. It upholds as “normal” and “expected” the ubiquity of language, ideas, prejudices, preferences, values, social mores, and worldviews established by the white perspective.

https://theestablishment.co/on-white-supremacy-and-the-nature-of-norms-d9d041b21ea5

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 The Becky Sue

This is a bit of a rant, sorry for any gratuitous swearing.

I know there’s the term ‘Mary Sue’, but I feel like there should be a ‘Becky Sue’, because both in fiction and life, white women are made out to always be the one who is right, the one who needs protecting, etc. There’s white privilege, and I feel that when a white woman against a PoC is involved, the privilege is taken to an even higher level because white women are always seen as the innocent ones.

I feel that the worst kind of Becky Sue in fandom and fiction are the ones that write stories where PoC only exist to fucking bow down to them and be there only to accomplish whatever goal they have. Like a PoC man sees a white woman at the beginning of a fic and is like–

‘Omg, it’s a white woman and she’s the prettiest most precious woman I’ve ever seen and I know absolutely nothing about her, but this is love at first sight and I’m going to marry her as soon as possible. Nothing else matters. Not my family or my identity, nothing. I’m just here to please/worship the ground of Becky Sue.’

It’s fucking nauseating. Then they have the Becky Sue writers who make their Becky Sue characters complete disgusting bitches to PoC, and when they get called out for it, they’ll be like: ‘Oh em gee, you’re misguided, you’re a drama queen. Like, just don’t read my story and let me have my fantasy of shitting all over PoC in peace.’

And then there’s the Becky Sue writers who write kind, intelligent PoC out-of-character (because if there’s a kind PoC character, white people have to knock them down a few pegs though shitty writing, jokes, or white-washing) then when this is pointed out they’ll be like, ‘Omg, not everyone sees everything the way you do. I don’t care about the source material, I just want to treat PoC like trash.’

Then, there’s the Becky Sues that will make up excuses for their racism and microaggressions with fake (or real) excuses like: ‘Oh em gee. I have depression let me write whatever I want.’ Or, ‘Oh em gee. I have Stigmata and a hang nail so you can’t criticize me.’ Or, when all else fails, just resort to name calling and flipping the situation around (white women’s favorite tactic) to where they say the big bad PoC is being a ‘troll’ or ‘mean’, or a dick, asshole, etc. And they’re the victim of harassment.

Or, another Becky Sue will come along and be like, ‘Omg, your Becky Sue character and her shitty treatment of PoC is the best thing I’ve ever read! This is better than any novel I’ve ever read! You’re the greatest writer ever! Like, your Becky Sue is SOOO down to earth!’

Or, they’ll be like: ‘Oh em gee, pointing out my racism is a personal attack. Becky Sues unite! Take down the big bad PoC!’

Just because you have depression or whatever, that doesn’t give you the right to be a fucking racist, and to treat PoC characters like trash. It doesn’t exempt you from being called out or criticized either. If you can’t write (or draw) PoC without being gross, racist garbage. STOP – FUCKING – WRITING – ABOUT THEM, if you’re that fragile to criticism. (I guess white women compare themselves to porcelain because they’re fragile and crack at the tiniest thing–I guess their evil ways is also one thing that makes their looks crack at an earlier age too. *pettyTM*)

I think that white people who are adamant about writing PoC like that are TRYING to antagonize PoC. And may karma just kick them in the fucking ass, please.

Plenty of PoC deal with both depression and OPPRESSION on a daily basis. And do most white people care? Here’s a tiny hint…HELL, FUCKING, NO.

Representation and the things you write do have an effect on others. Don’t try to make excuses or pretend that it doesn’t.

Can PoC writer’s/fanfic writers and artist start tagging their work as ‘PoC writer’, ‘PoC artist’? Or ‘Black writer,’ etc., etc.

I’m so drained of navigating through klandom’s filth, and having to handle white people (many who claim to be “progressive”) with kid gloves for every little thing because they can’t take discussions about anything that isn’t about glorifying everything they do, or anything that takes the focus off their white world.

submitted by  anon on FANDOMS HATE PEOPLE OF COLOR

 

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On White Feminism in Fandom Spaces

*(This is what happened in the Agent Carter and Wonder Woman  fandoms.)

http://blackyouthproject.com/feminist-triumph-action-thrillers-always-white-women/

http://time.com/4599585/hollywood-female-action-heroes/

RANT: Video Game Fandoms and White Women

FANDOMS HATE PEOPLE OF COLOR

For me, nothing is worse than having to sift through content in video game fandoms and forums that have predominantly white women. Especially when those fandoms have PoC characters. At least when white men are racist they, most of the time, don’t try to hide it, so you can know what to avoid better.

It’s so easy for white women to get away with microaggressions, colorism, and covert racism because it is extremely rare, that another white woman will care enough to call them out. (Or, the white women that docare, will just get treated like shit by the white women that don’t.)

And it’s pretty pointless for PoC to call them out because on a forum controlled by white women, you’ll just easily get banned, topic will get locked, or they’ll gang up and gaslight the PoC player most likely saying: ‘such-and-such is just a fictional character or pixels’, ‘it’s just a video game’, etc.

They don’t care how PoC are treated in entertainment, or fictional worlds, nor the real world.

Only the comfort of the white woman matters, in fiction, or the real world.

These quotes from MLK Jr. and Malcolm X below could not be more TRUE. (And either though they’re talking about Black Americans, the same can be said of just about any PoC living in the USA):

MLK Jr.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

Malcolm X

The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political “football game” that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.

The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the “smiling” fox.

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From: FANDOMS HATE PEOPLE OF COLOR

I mainly wanted to rant about the white women that swear they love a PoC character, yet they do the following:

1. They will not shut up about how they don’t think the PoC character is physically attractive. I’ve seen this a lot with dark brown-skinned PoC. Like they could be the most gorgeous PoC character, but because they don’t fit these white women’swhite supremacist beauty standards, they’re not “attractive”. (Definition of white supremacy: ‘the belief that white people are superior to those of all other races…’ that includes beauty standards.) Of course, they’ll hide their covert racism and colorism with vague statements like, ‘Oh, this [PoC] character has ‘less interesting looks’ than everyone else, or ‘isn’t flashy’. I think they’re just mad that brown and black people can still look like this when they are almost 60-years-old.
2. Because they don’t like how a PoC has dark brown skin, they useany white-washed fan art they can find to use on the forums they frequent. And might make up some completely asinine excuse as to why they use it. Like, ‘I like how this art brings out their personality’. Why don’t you just use the OFFICIAL fucking artwork instead then? The OFFICIAL artwork doesn’t “bring out their personality” enough?
3. They refuse to acknowledge the character’s existence and identity as a PoC. Because in white people land, ‘Everybody is treated equal.’
4. When you call them out–as always…as fucking always–no matter how friendly… no matter how saccharinely kind, no matter how much you fucking bend over in politeness and sensitivity… They play the fucking victim. 9 times out of 10 this shit happens. Call them out even for the SIMPLEST of remedial things like NOT SUPPORTING white-washing, and suddenly they have every fucking physical and mental ailment in the world, and they can’t be held accountable for their words/actions. Then, they’ll virtue signal the fuck out of any PoC character saying ‘Oh, isn’t so-and-so beautiful, I mean, I DON’T LIKE THEM, but man! Isn’t that other PoC character that doesn’t have dark skin beautiful all of a sudden?’

Then, they go back to supporting white-washed art and doing and saying all the fucked up shit they’ve been doing. Because they do not give a single fuck about PoC. PoC are just an entertainment and distraction to them, both in the fictional world and real world.

Virtue-signalling white women that don’t like PoC, especially the dark brown-skinned ones. Just stop. Go find a white character to “obsess” and “fave” over and call it a day. Find a white character that fits your definition of what a ‘total package’ (great looks and personality) should be, and leave PoC characters the fuck alone.

Fuck your feigning innocence and ignorance. And fuck your superiority complex, microaggressions, and your shallow, vapid, privileged white mind. Dark-skinned PoC characters, and people, are out of this fucking universe, ethereal, and beyond gorgeous to the highest degree possible in this existence. Fuck you.

Furthermore, the white women that do the things mentioned above, you don’t “love” any PoC character if you do these things. You wouldn’t know what love, respect, and treating a dark-skinned PoC character with humanity and dignity was if it bit you in the ass. For you, these characters are your flavor of the month/year distraction and entertainment.  *Where you can gleefully unload all your microaggressions and racism onto them that you wish you could do to PoC face-to-face in the real world. 

(*Boldened by me.)

For PoC fans who experience this shit in real life–to have to put up with racism in the realms of books, video games, and other media too, where they’re just trying to get away from the world FOR A SECOND, but they can’t because of white supremacy, it’s PERSONAL.

Fuck you if you do these things. You’re utterly disgusting at how smug you are, knowing you won’t get criticized for your covert racism in your white dominated and controlled forums. And no one is impressed by your virtue-signalling. Doing that, and then continuing to do racist, disrespectful shit, is beyond nauseating. You’re only earning PoC’s contempt, not our respect. (Not that you care, because we’re below you, right?!) We’re not stupid, or less intelligent than white people, like you gaslight yourselves to believe.

White people know EXACTLY what they’re doing. The majority just don’t care. And will NEVER care. All PoC fans can do, I think: is love, support, and respect PoC characters (in anyway you wish through, art, writing, posts, etc.) and hope that in the future, that REAL love is what will override all the hatred, ignorance, and bigotry of a white supremacist society. I hope karma is real.

When it comes to fandom, or anything else, practically the entire world is white people’s ‘safe space’.

@@

 

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On Finn And Sacrifice

http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the-last-jedis-message-to-people-of-color-you-dont-have-to-be-the-sacrifice

stitchmediamix

“I really like Finn, but I thought him sacrificing himself would be a really touching end to his character arc.”

A) You’re wrong. So wrong.

B) If you claim to like a character, but then you’re all for him making an absolutely pointless self sacrifice… You don’t like that character nearly as much as you think you do

 

adeptarcanist

Okay hang on, I’m all with you on A, but you *can* like a character and still think that them having a heartbreaking death scene would be awesome.

 

stitchmediamix

Perhaps I should have been clearer about the fact that this is really about how fandom treats Finn BECAUSE he’s a black character in my original post.

Because fandom has, historically, been full of people who swear they love black characters but can only see them getting an honorable death or making a sacrifice (primarily for white characters).

Fandom doesn’t look at white male characters and decide that they should totally have a sweet send off after sacrificing themselves. They don’t.

That dubious honor is largely only bestowed upon characters of color – predominantly Black characters when they’re present.

(I’m on my way out the door and on mobile so I can’t be handy dandy with links, but if you’re not getting where I’m coming from about Finn’s treatment and why wanting him to sacrifice himself is a negative sign, please go through my “fandom racism” and my “the star wars discourse” for how he’s been treated in fandom.)

 

mikeymagee

^This entire phenomenon is examined at length in Toni Morrison’s Playing In the Dark. In which she pretty much states that in the American literary consciousness, Black people are used (while also denied agency) and once their usefulness has ended, they’re discarded with no forethought/consideration for the Black person/character.

According to Morrison, this is basically the building block of the American literary identity (which has strong parallels to slavery, and the modern prison industrial complex).

“These images of impenetrable whiteness need contextualizing to explain their extraordinary power, pattern, and consistency. Because they appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete control, these images of blinding whiteness seem to function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness –a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts if American literature with fear and longing. This haunting, a darkness from which our early literature seemed unable to extricate itself, suggests the complex and contradictory situation in which American writers found themselves during the formative years of the nation’s literature” (Morrison 33).

Basically Blackness is alright, as long as it serves whiteness. Anything outside of that is pushing the boundaries. Which is why so much of fandom’s treatment of Finn is him either making Rey  and Kyle look better by comparison, or having Finn “die nobly” so Rey/Kyle/everyone else can save the galaxy.

And it doesn’t just stop at Star Wars, it’s pretty much present in all forms of media. I mean, there’s a reason we have a “Black guy dies first”  trope.

Morrison also noted elsewhere in her book that the entire white literary identity (and by extension the cinematic identity) is dependent on Black subjugation. If Black people aren’t subordinate to the White identity, then where does that leave White people? There was a reason people were more pissed about John’s face being in the TFA trailer for five seconds, far more than anyone else’s, including Rey’s.

@@

On Iris West and Fandom

Candice Patton, who has played the role of Iris West on The Flash for the past four seasons, has had to deal with racist idiots complaining that she has the audacity to not be a white, red-haired woman. Sorry Karen Gillan was busy.

https://www.themarysue.com/candice-patton-racist-trolls/

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And finally:

On The Fandom Community

lj-writes

Carrying the fandom load

It does get tiring at times staying conscious of bigoted tropes in fandom, deciding not to support racist art, wondering if a quote is appropriative of Jewish experiences, discarding a homophobic fanwork idea, and more.

So as a Fandom Old I can see why some fans long for the “good old days.” Back then anything went! Total creative freedom! We were wild and unfettered! None of these long-winded discussions, we just went and did it and did not give a single fuck!

Except freedom wasn’t for everyone, was it? You only had that total freedom if you were unaffected by fandom’s racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, ableism, and a host of other bigotries that are a reflection of the world we live in.

Fandom was never the carefree, escapist enterprise some of us like to think it was. It’s just that minority fans were bearing the load of others’ freedom in silence. Too often, fans who were marginalized in real life could not escape to fandom because fandom would uncritically celebrate their oppression and trauma. And if they dared to speak about it they were bullied and shouted down into silence, into leaving.

I speak in the past tense but this is still ongoing, obviously. Fans of marginalized identities are a little more vocal now, but are facing a sustained and vicious backlash that accuses them of being “bullies” and starting “discourse” and “drama” and of “virtue signalling.”

It’s not about discourse or virtue, though. It’s about fans being told that they are not welcome unless they bite their tongues, grin, and go along with a thousand stings and slaps in the very spaces they go to have fun. It’s about fans having to watch characters who look like them be constantly erased and demonized. It’s about fans having to spend endless amounts of time and energy educating other fans about their oppression when all they’d like to do is unwind after a long day made longer by those very issues.

It’s not about virtue. It’s about people.

The thing is, fans who criticize minority fans and their allies for “discourse” aren’t angry about the fact that fandom puts these psychological burdens on minority fans. They’re mad about having to share a tiny little part of the burden minority fans, most visibly Black women, have been carrying for too long. In the minds of these “discourse”-critical fans the burden of considering the impact of fandom and fanworks is not theirs to bear. It is the lot of fans who are not them, “others,” to pay the cost for the majority’s creative freedom. The very suggestion that the load exists, and worse, that all of fandom should share in it so marginalized fans don’t carry it so disproportionately, is enough to make a lot of fans uncomfortable. I know, because I feel that discomfort at times, too.

The thing is, the load of thinking about marginalization in fandom spaces was always mine to bear. It’s every fan’s responsibility to be conscious of how they create and consume fanwork so that they don’t hurt other fans, so fandom can be inclusive and fun for everyone.

No, it’s not pleasant. It’s not fun to always watch yourself and second guess your choices, to fall short anyway and be called out and confront the fact that you have so many unconscious biases and have hurt others. I get it. I do. I want to think of myself as a good person. I don’t like admitting to wrongdoing. I hate challenging myself. I don’t want to think about this hard stuff. I just want to have fun!

But think about how much LESS fun it is when it’s your own humanity on the line. Many marginalized fans don’t have the luxury of just letting go and having fun, not when they always have to brace themselves for the next psychological assault.

These fans have been carrying this fandom burden and are punished for saying it’s too heavy. If you’re feeling a little less feather light in fannish activities than you used to, that’s a good sign! It means you’re starting to carry, in a very small measure, the fandom load of consciousness. It’s something you should be carrying as part of a community, and chances are it’s still not nearly as heavy a load as many marginalized fans are still made to bear.

A community joins together, watches out for its members, shares in the good and the bad. If some members are asked to bear the costs of others’ fun and either stay silent about it or leave, then the promise of community rings pretty hollow, doesn’t it? Sometimes discomfort is a good thing, and if my small discomfort means I am sharing in a tiny measure of my rightful load in fandom spaces, then it is a very good thing indeed.

From the Halls of Tumblr

I stumbled across this website that rates movies according to diversity and inclusion. I’m not entirely sure I agree with some of the grades. I think this website is a lot stricter in its qualifications than I am, but I found it interesting:

 https://www.mediaversityreviews.com/tv-reviews

 @@

I laughed at this waaay harder than I should have. I’m still laughing at it!

 

 vulcandroid

i will never be over the fact that during first contact a human offered their hand to a vulcan and the vulcan was just like “wow humans are fucking wild” and took it

 

roachpatrol

Humanity’s first contact with Vulcans was some guy going “I’m down to fuck.”

Vulcans’ first contact with Humans was an emphatic “Sure.”

 

star-lord

#iiiiiiiiiiiiii mean vulcans had been watching humans for a long time#they knew the significance of a handshake but still#they had to find some fast and loose ambassador#willing to fuckin make out with a human for the sake of not offending them on first contact#lmao#star trek

give me the story of this fast and loose vulcan

 

moonsofavalon

“sir…these…these humans…they greet each other by…” *glances around before furtively whispering* “byclasping hands…”

*prolonged silence* “oh my…”

“sir…sir how will we make first contact with them? surely we…we cannot refuse this handclasping ritual, they will take it as an insult, but what vulcan would agree to such a distasteful and uncomfortable ritual??”

*several pensive moments later* “contact the vulcan high command and tell them to send us kuvak. i once saw that crazy son of a bitch arm wrestle a klingon, he’ll put his hands on anything”

 

evilminji

Elsewhere, w/ kuvak: “….my day has come.”

 

lierdumoa

The vulcan who made first contact with humans is named Solkar guys. Y’all just be makin’ up names for characters that already have names.

Bonus: here’s a screencap of Solkar doing the “my body is ready” pose right before he shakes Zefram Cochrane’s hand:

adreadfulidea

I swear Vulcans only come in two types and they are “distant xenophobes” or “horny on main for humanity”. Also apparently this guy is Spock’s great-grandfather and frankly that explains everything.

 

Source: lycanthropiste st

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For some reason, this was totally a thing about a week ago on Twitter. I have no idea how this got started or why. It’s said that J. K. Rowling thoroughly enjoyed it though.

I think it was the “Sortin’ Du-rag” tweet that  had me cough-spittin’ at work!

Black Hogwarts

http://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/a15070314/black-hogwarts-twitter/

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lj-writes  what that fandom lifestyle is SUPPOSED to be about, and how fans who consider themselves allies, Do The Work:

lj-writes

Carrying the fandom load

It does get tiring at times staying conscious of bigoted tropes in fandom, deciding not to support racist art, wondering if a quote is appropriative of Jewish experiences, discarding a homophobic fanwork idea, and more.

So as a Fandom Old I can see why some fans long for the “good old days.” Back then anything went! Total creative freedom! We were wild and unfettered! None of these long-winded discussions, we just went and did it and did not give a single fuck!

Except freedom wasn’t for everyone, was it? You only had that total freedom if you were unaffected by fandom’s racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, ableism, and a host of other bigotries that are a reflection of the world we live in.

Fandom was never the carefree, escapist enterprise some of us like to think it was. It’s just that minority fans were bearing the load of others’ freedom in silence. Too often, fans who were marginalized in real life could not escape to fandom because fandom would uncritically celebrate their oppression and trauma. And if they dared to speak about it they were bullied and shouted down into silence, into leaving.

I speak in the past tense but this is still ongoing, obviously. Fans of marginalized identities are a little more vocal now, but are facing a sustained and vicious backlash that accuses them of being “bullies” and starting “discourse” and “drama” and of “virtue signalling.”

It’s not about discourse or virtue, though. It’s about fans being told that they are not welcome unless they bite their tongues, grin, and go along with a thousand stings and slaps in the very spaces they go to have fun. It’s about fans having to watch characters who look like them be constantly erased and demonized. It’s about fans having to spend endless amounts of time and energy educating other fans about their oppression when all they’d like to do is unwind after a long day made longer by those very issues.

It’s not about virtue. It’s about people.

The thing is, fans who criticize minority fans and their allies for “discourse” aren’t angry about the fact that fandom puts these psychological burdens on minority fans. They’re mad about having to share a tiny little part of the burden minority fans, most visibly Black women, have been carrying for too long. In the minds of these “discourse”-critical fans the burden of considering the impact of fandom and fanworks is not theirs to bear. It is the lot of fans who are not them, “others,” to pay the cost for the majority’s creative freedom. The very suggestion that the load exists, and worse, that all of fandom should share in it so marginalized fans don’t carry it so disproportionately, is enough to make a lot of fans uncomfortable. I know, because I feel that discomfort at times, too.

The thing is, the load of thinking about marginalization in fandom spaces was always mine to bear. It’s every fan’s responsibility to be conscious of how they create and consume fanwork so that they don’t hurt other fans, so fandom can be inclusive and fun for everyone.

No, it’s not pleasant. It’s not fun to always watch yourself and second guess your choices, to fall short anyway and be called out and confront the fact that you have so many unconscious biases and have hurt others. I get it. I do. I want to think of myself as a good person. I don’t like admitting to wrongdoing. I hate challenging myself. I don’t want to think about this hard stuff. I just want to have fun!

But think about how much LESS fun it is when it’s your own humanity on the line. Many marginalized fans don’t have the luxury of just letting go and having fun, not when they always have to brace themselves for the next psychological assault.

These fans have been carrying this fandom burden and are punished for saying it’s too heavy. If you’re feeling a little less feather light in fannish activities than you used to, that’s a good sign! It means you’re starting to carry, in a very small measure, the fandom load of consciousness. It’s something you should be carrying as part of a community, and chances are it’s still not nearly as heavy a load as many marginalized fans are still made to bear.

A community joins together, watches out for its members, shares in the good and the bad. If some members are asked to bear the costs of others’ fun and either stay silent about it or leave, then the promise of community rings pretty hollow, doesn’t it? Sometimes discomfort is a good thing, and if my small discomfort means I am sharing in a tiny measure of my rightful load in fandom spaces, then it is a very good thing indeed.

 

@@

I’m not a huge advocate for violence, but some of the racist wankery that various fandoms get up to,  just makes me want to give some people a very sharp pinch, with tweezers,  Sometimes several. I mean seriously! I didn’t even know this was a thing. You have got waaay too much time on your hands, and a massive hate-boner, if you are cutting PoC out of their own photos, to prop up your non-canon,  white male ship.

 stitchmediamix

So I’m writing something about how characters and actors of color are literally cut out of images in order to center white characters/actors (usually for shipping purposes) and I’d like to be able to actually link to examples of instances where that’s happened.

I’ve got an image of John and Daisy where John has been replaced by Driver (courtesy of @xprincessrey ’s recent post in the fandom racism tag) and SEVERAL images where Iris West has been erased and replaced by Caitlin that I referenced in my presentation on the misogynoir directed towards her.

I need more examples though and I honestly don’t know how to find what I’m looking for. And… I’m really bad at finding images on the internet.

So if you have collected any receipts on this particular fandom phenomenon where fans cut out characters/actors of color from images in order to focus on a white character or ship, please let me know. I’ll link to your post on the subject if you’ve made one and give you credit for finding the images that I use if you want it.

I need examples of:

• Anthony Mackie being cut out of press images for either Winter Soldier or Civil War
• Scott/Tyler Posey being cut out of Teen Wolf press images or scenes in the show
• Photo manips where Finn/John Boyega has been replaced by Kylo/Adam
• Any other fandom that cut characters of color out in this way!

I’m writing a thing and I’m working on the header image already but I’d like more examples because man… People need to know that this is a thing that happens and pictures help drive the whole thing in.

(Also, unfortunately I have no idea how y’all  can submit straight up images to me because I don’t use tumblr submit for several reasons, BUT you can always DM me images on twitter or use Tumblr IM if you don’t have links  to images, but want to send them to me anyway.)

If you can share this with your followers, that’d be awesome.

 

elandrialore

R3ylo manips

Original photoshoot with John and Daisy

St3r3k manip

Original promo image

St3r3k manip

Original image of Tyler Posey, Crystal Reed, and Tyler Hoechlin

St3r3k manip

Original image of Tyler Posey and Dylan O’Brien

St3r3k manip

Original image with Tyler Posey and Dylan O’Brien

kyberfox

 

@stitchmediamix

Here’s a video of Finn getting cut out not just of his own confession scene – a character defining moment for him – and Kylo being inserted, he’s also replaced in the hug he and Rey shares. x, x

The OP of that then made a gif set of some of the scene they’d cut where they replace Finn with Kylo because they were so proud of their work. x

And here Kylo is edited in instead of Finn in the scene where Rey gives Finn a “wow he looks good” look at Jakku. x

uprisingofcolor

 

@stitchmediamix

Here’s an entire gif set of Jake Pentecost getting cut out of his own trailer to center his white co star.

Oh, and here’s OP’s Response to @kyberfox calling them out (X), they take it about as well as you’d expect. This happened a day or so(?) after the trailer dropped, just for a frame of reference.

 

diversehighfantasy

The Doctor Who series 3 “Fix It”:

Here, they didn’t erase Martha Jones entirely, they made her a third wheel in a series the fandom felt Rose was rightfully entitled to. IMO this is as much of an in-your-face “fuck you” to Martha as pretending she didn’t exist.

Britchell. This is a more obscure ship, but it relentlessly erased, sidelined and minimized one of my favorite characters, Annie Sawyer of Being Human (UK) for being romantically involved with Mitchell, played by Aidan Turner, who also played Kili in The Hobbit. Britchell was a crossover between Mitchell and another character played by the actor who played Kili’s brother Fili in The Hobbit. Anyway. Britchell is the biggest ship in the Being Human fandom to this day.

Annie x Mitchell: http://reyesbidal.tumblr.com/post/53885860951

Britchell (in a nutchell):

 

nerdsagainstfandomracism

 

In Shadowhunters Jalec and Clalec shippers always use Malec scenes for their manips in order to erase Magnus. Here’s an example of a Clalec manip (x). I stay away from their tags and blacklist Jalecs and Clalecs on sight, but pretty sure Google has plenty of more examples. Luke is constantly excluded from the group fanarts, fan videos, etc.

Also, Rickylers in TWD always try to erase Michonne from her own narrative.

 

Source: stitchmediamix fandom racismracism in fandom Erasure ShippingLong Post white prioritization ReblogMod P.

@@

Here’s a review of Black Lightning, written from another perspective.

blacknerdproblems

This week, the new CW show Black Lightning will introduce another Black superhero — rather, Black superheroes — who will thankfully diversify the current ranks of primarily white TV and movie heroes, but it also raises the question: How will the show address its blackness?

With Black Lightning and Black Panther on the way, we’re finally seeing Black heroes represented on both the small screen and the big screen, and with the amount of publicity they deserve. But for Black people around America — and perhaps around the world — these heroes represent more than just the newest installment of a money-making machine built on franchises. These heroes bring familiar faces — faces that resemble their own — to a universe full of magic, superpowers, superhuman feats and abilities.

Blackness in the Media

But how, exactly, do these heroes represent “blackness”? And what, exactly, is “blackness”? This question is never asked of TV shows, movies, or books that feature white heroes. In writing programs or conferences, you’ll encounter panels and workshops in which people discuss how one may write characters of color with sensitivity. In other words, “How can I make it clear that this character is Black without being offensive?” But it’s more than just an issue of figuring out how to avoid your run-of-the-mill racist language. It’s determining if a character of color needs to be defined by their race.

Because whiteness is our country’s default racial lens, if race isn’t mentioned in a story’s narrative, most people will assume a character is white (take, for example, the “Black Hermione” internet debate). White characters are never characterized by their whiteness unless it serves the plot. So many times, however, Black characters or characters of color are defined by their race. “Black” isn’t a character type, nor is it a personality. And yet, because blackness falls so outside of the norm in common thought, it becomes the defining characteristic of a protagonist.

Read on here. [x]

@@

I could not resist putting definitions next to some of these. (Mine are in bold type.)

anonymous asked:

so you’re jamaican and not regular black?

yourbigsisnissi

What the hell is regular black?

 

adreamdeferred

diet black. (a skinny black person)

 

jiahpleasechill 

black lite.   (a bi-racial Black person)

 

onlyblackgirl

Gluten Free Black. (a black person with Celiac’s disease)

 

jader-rr

90 calorie black  (a black person with anorexia?)

 

d0t-d0t 

vegan black

 

neelion

Reduced fat Black (a black person on a diet)

 

augustxiv

2% Black

 

leelaamaj 

artificial black flavor (Rachel Dolezal)

 

lovesex-xo-dreams 

Fat free black

 

thickadenabowlaoatmeal

Multigrain black

 

tigzdanigz 

Soy black  (an Asian person pretending to be black)

 

roachpatrol

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Black People!

 

heir-n-reign

Skim Black

 

dynastylnoire

Black with chia seeds  (I don’t even know!)

 

return-of-foreverr

Black with sugar (a gay black person)

 

clarknokent

Black on the rocks (pretty much everybody)

 

awkwardassbitch

New and Improved Black taste

 

pkbrown93

Black & mild  (Tuvok)

 

iwritealllday

Black Zero  (a black person who is tired of your shit)

 

lifeofchristinaa

Dairy free black  (a black person who is lactose intolerant/me)

 

allsmilesontheoutside

Sugar-Free Black  (a black person with diabetes?)

 

recognise-me-recognise-yourself

Histamine free black  (a black person with allergies)

 

lajackash

Venti Soy Black w/ extra caramel    (a black person standing in line atStarbucks)

 

kingxcbk

100% Organic Black  (a black person who forgot to put on deodorant that morning)

 

earlgrey95

Free range black  (just roaming the streets for no reason)

 

kingxcbk

Raspberry Infused Black (they just drank the blue raspberry kool aid)

 

waistbeadgang

GMO Free Black

 

kingxcbk

From farm to table Black

 

facelesskinkyblackguyblog

Blacktose intolerant

@@

I did not know that Satan had his own Twitter feed:

Weekend Linkspam (12/18/17)

Social Justice

On White People Behaving Badly

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/civil-wars/articles/2017-12-14/roy-moore-donald-trump-and-white-women-voting-for-misogyny

http://www.marieclaire.com/career-advice/a14104684/sexual-harassment-assault-in-science-field/

The Epidemic Of White Male Terrorism And Its Connection To White Privilege

Antifa Activists As The Truest Defenders Of Free Speech

 

Readings From Brotha Wolf

Brotha Wolf has been covering the issues of media depiction of Black Americans for several years now. It’s always been my belief that the news media always has been directly complicit in the racist beliefs of White people. It disseminates sterotypes and reinforces prejudices, which is why PoC fight so hard to say that Representation Matters, Black Lives Matter, and yes, Pop Culture Matters.

When we argue that fandom is racist, lacks empathy for Black characters, and that White fandom has no other template from which to imagine fictional narratives of Black people, this is what we’re talking about. When White people insist we don’t belong in fantasy settings, historical settings, or even futuristic settings, our depictions in the news media as present day criminals is behind some of those beliefs.

https://brothawolf.wordpress.com/2017/12/19/article-new-study-finds-news-outlets-promote-false-negative-portrayals-of-black-families-that-dont-match-reality/

https://brothawolf.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/is-the-news-media-racially-biased/

https://brothawolf.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/crime-in-black-and-white/

https://brothawolf.wordpress.com/2015/10/17/black-folks-in-the-white-news-media/

https://brothawolf.wordpress.com/2017/11/08/what-about-white-on-white-crime-and-white-terrorism/

 

Johnny Silvercloud

Deleting Your Bulls*** When We Call You Out is a White Privilege Flex

White Privileged: Shut Your Selectively-Pacifist, Pontificating Ass Up

Dear White America: This is Your Mess.

 

Fandom and Racism

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/star-wars-fandom-toxicity-problem?altdesign=socialux&utm_expid=.oW2L-b3SQF-m5a-dPEU77g.1&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

https://mubi.com/lists/sci-fi-as-race-allegory

https://theestablishment.co/your-fandom-is-racist-and-so-are-you-638c5200b15b

http://professorshih.blogspot.com/2017/12/if-you-cant-say-unqualified-say.html

Why Does the Black Panther Casting Call Cause White Butt-Hurt?

New Year’s Reading (Writing)

Writer’s Resources & Encouragement

 Here’s some advice and encouragement on writing people of color, from Tumblr:

fictionwritingtips

Characters of Color: Things Every Writer Should Know

I am a white author, and along with many other white authors I know, I worry about stereotyping characters or talking about a subject I don’t feel I have the right to. First off, we all need to get over the fear of misrepresentation or stereotyping and focus on doing our research. Obviously, every writer does not know the experience of EVERY race, culture, or sexuality, etc. However, as writers of any color, we are still capable of sharing these experiences through characters that might not be exactly like us. We shouldn’t exclude characters just because we don’t fully understand. We should do our job and learn more about them, so that these characters can have greater representation in fiction.

We all go through very similar experiences as human beings and we all have fears, hopes, dreams, and goals in some way or another. Acting like we can’t grasp a human experience because we’re not the same skin color is ridiculous. Sure, there are aspects of life that we only experience as a reflection of our skin color and our lives can be drastically different, but as writers we get into the heads of ALL different people. We spend time researching. We spend time trying to understand. Our curiosity and creativity IS what makes us writers. So, don’t be afraid to include characters that aren’t exactly like you because YOU DO IT ALL THE TIME AND YOU DON’T EVEN REALIZE IT.

 

Being afraid of “getting it wrong” might be a general fear, but you can’t let that stop you. If anything it should force you to do as much research as possible in order to get it right. It’s very hard to write a character wrong unless you are disrespectful of their experience, you don’t care, or you don’t take the time to understand something.  And writing characters of color or characters that don’t share your background doesn’t mean knowing everything about their history since the dawn of time because you’re still writing within the context of your story. You need to make them real and you need to develop them, just like any other character.

There are so many opportunities to move beyond your “standard main character” and start writing more underrepresented characters. It’s a shame that this is something we have to discuss all the time, but as writers, we can break the cycle.

-Kris Noel

@@

This is just a general guideline for how NOT to write stereotypical Black characters. I should note that sometimes, depending on what you’re writing, a stereotype may be unavoidable, but sometimes that can be mitigated by giving the character a great deal of complexity and depth, if it’s a primary character. Best not try this with secondary or side characters. At any rate you should probably get what’s known as sensitivity readers, people from the racial backgrounds in question, who can point out if you’re being offensive.

I need to point out that you need to do your research on racial stereotypes. If you don’t know what they are, then you don’t to avoid using  them, and  considering yourself not racist isn’t enough. We all receive subtle racial messaging we are unaware of, on the daily.

Oh, and AAVE means African American Vernacular English (Slang). Just have them speak standard English because, unless you’re in the culture (or grew up speaking it), you’re definitely going to get the use of the words wrong. What’s interesting is that those of us who speak AAVE can always spot a fake, and can even tell what generation and/or geography a person is from, based on what AAVE they’re using. It’s just like any other language you don’t know. If you don’t know it, don’t try it.

How to write fic for Black characters: a guide for non-Black fans

eshusplayground

1. Don’t characterize a Black character as sassy or thuggish, especially when the character in question is can be described in literally ten thousand other ways..
2. Don’t describe Black characters as chocolate, coffee, or any sort of food item.
3. Don’t highlight the race of Black characters (ie, “the dark man” or “the brown woman”) if you don’t highlight the race of white characters.
4. Think very carefully about that antebellum slavery or Jim Crow AU fic as a backdrop for your romance.
5. If you’re not fluent with AAVE, don’t use it to try to look cool or edgy. You look corny as hell.
6. Don’t use Black characters as a prop for the non-Black characters you’re actually interested in.
7. Keep “unpopular opinions” about racism, Black Lives Matter, and other issues pertinent to Black folks out the mouths of Black characters. We know what the fuck you’re doing with that and need to stop.
8. Don’t assume a Black character likes or hates a certain food, music, or piece of pop culture.
9. You can make a Black character’s race pertinent without doing it like this.
10. Be extremely careful about insinuating that one or more of a Black character’s physical features are dirty, unclean, or ugly.

Feel free to add more.

 

@@

As I said, if you want to avoid racism in your work, its not enough to just think of yourself as colorblind. The problem with being colorblind is you don’t see the stereotypes you’re engaging in either. You have to actively think about the use and placement of race within the narrative.

Writing without racism: its more than “what”, its also “how”.

phoenix-ace

 

Its great that people are asking, “how can we write fantasy worlds without racism?”  Escapism in fantasy is almost impossible for marginalized people, because we’re usually the only ones who have to accept the same bigotries in-text as we do in real life, because its tied to someone’s “escapism”.  For them, we either have a lower place in society that they can openly exploit, or we shouldn’t exist at all.  We need to deal with abuse in order for them to accept that fantasy world as a viable setting.  But I have an issue with just leaving it at “lets keep racist text out of the stories”.

See, the problem with making worlds where there is no racism is that so many people haven’t quite figured out how to do that right. Its like they take this idea of “colorblind racism’ here no one sees skin color, hence its just  “coincidence” that all the black people are subservient, or that all the Asian women are submissive and tiny.

Some examples (using my context as a mixed black person who identifies as black in most settings):

• They’ll make a world where no one ever utters a single racial slur but still will use the same anti-blackness we see in real life (i.e. whenever they make us mammies or sacrificial lambs, using terms like “dirty” or “demonic” to describe our appearance a la Lord of the Rings, etc.)

•   Or they’ll make sure that no one ever says “people color should be slaves” but lo and behold, that’s pretty much all you see.  (Like in Exodus, or the earlier seasons of Game of Thrones).  And we’re the only ones who HAVE to take THAT subservient role or else we’re “ruining the accuracy”. And when you call it out they say, “well that what you all were” but they won’t get why that’s just as bad as if they’d just admitted, “Hey, this is pretty racist” from the start.

• Or (taking from what I said up there) they’ll make people who look black, and are from a culture obviously based on black people, but still claim they aren’t black, because they would rather divorce blackness from their world, instead of admitting we can be complex characters who can carry complex stories (because they still haven’t unpacked their own problematic ideas about black people)

• Or worse still, they’ll make an entire world based off of a culture belonging to a group of people who they won’t even include.  I.e. the whole issue with Firefly and Serenity, and again Exodus.

• Or we’ll be turned into white people with special powers or pointy ears.  Racism becomes, “hey this girl has red hair instead of blond hair lets exclude her”.  Meanwhile since there’s “no real racism” they claim there’s no need for “real” people of color (i.e. the problem with Dragon Age).

• Or they’ll do some “colorblind” setting where everyone is mixed, but well all be reminded that only Aryan features are seen as “rare” and “special” an they’ll treat the rest of our features (i.e. brown skin, ark eyes, dark hair, etc. ) as “meh”.

Your worlds aren’t “racism free” just because make sure no one says the n-word.

Unless you really make an effort to think critically about these things (which includes trying to avoid: dehumanizing marginalized people, failing to include them as a part of the storyline unless the story “calls for it”, reducing them down to “inspiration porn” or metaphors, making them interchangeable, using fictional creatures in order to representation them, while making all humans white by default, etc.) then you run the risk of just being all talk.

 

@@

Here’s another reason to actively think about the subject of race when writing (or even not writing) your work. Just because the world you’re writing about is colorblind, does not mean that you, or your readers,  are. You and your audience exist in a  universe where race is a factor, and you will bring that into your work, no matter how well-intentioned you believe yourself to be.

@ other white authors:

iamatinyowl

If you do not mention your characters being specifically non-white? Your white readers will view them ALL as canonically white.

It is our responsibility to make it very, very clear that our characters are POC.

Just look at the horrifically racist Hermione debacle. She is canonically described as having big hair and dark skin. And yet, the white supremacists in the fandom are ripping apart any person who canons her as black. Despite the fact that a Black Hermione makes her being called slurs, and her commitment to SPEW SO much more significant and powerful.

We NEED to specifically and explicitly state that our characters are not white. We also need to make one million times sure (I’m talking aggressive paid and volunteer editing from any marginalized group you don’t belong to) that we are not enforcing racist stereotypes or damaging marginalized people.

POC representation by white authors doesn’t fucking matter unless theyre respectful, reoccurring, diverse, realistic, and humanized characters.

Even if you’re writing a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel where humanity doesn’t care about race anymore (yikes), you need to think long and hard about why the “skin colour doesn’t matter” villain who betrays them all just happens to be Black.

 

Fanfiction

Here are one person’s thoughts on the nature, purpose, and importance of fanfiction. I have observed that any popular media that appeals to, or is created by women, is often denigrated by men, and fanfiction, since it’s primarily created and consumed by women, is not exempt from this. Its part of the general attitude of degrading anything that women do (cooking), or create (fanfiction),  or consume (romance novels), in an attempt to elevate the work of male creators and consumers.  

inkandcayenne

tywinning asked you:
2012-08-09 03:37

As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?

I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.

Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else.  Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.“  He was the original Gary Stu).  Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic.  In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck.  Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot–although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF–and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic.  Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school.  And Spenser!  Don’t even get me started on Spenser.

Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion.  Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome.  (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.)  People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of?  There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man!  (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.)

I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship–barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real–and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history.  First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place.  And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together).  And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn.  And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you.  Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing.  And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work–to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time.  A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well).

What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later.  Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them.  If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say.

I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more.  I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not–and I know how snobbish this sounds–particularly well-written.  That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”–there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose.  That’s why fic is awesome–it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling.  But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing.  There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago.

But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists.  Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist.  (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)

Source: inkandcayenne

@@

Writing with Color on Tumblr is a great resource for writing characters of other races,  ethnicities, and cultures. if you have any questions about how to write a certain character they have the advice for it. They can also provide resources for  sensitivity readers, and volunteer editors, of  your work.

 

http://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/Recommendations

 

 

Tumblr Weekend Reading

Its been a whole minute since I made a Tumblr post, so here, have some interesting thoughts, memes, and photos, that came across my  dashboard:

Yes, I am lactose intolerant, although I am to understand that I have a fairly mild case. I can eat some dairy items like yogurt, ice cream, and cheese, without  wishing I would die, but a glass of chocolate milk would probably send me to the hospital, with excruciating abdominal pain.  But for real though, most cases of lactose intolerance just end in lots of farting.

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This is funny because this was sort of my thoughts while watching this movie. Earth, and the aliens, are basically a bunch of drama queens.

dragon-in-a-fez

I know we’re always talking about how Pacific Rim embraces the ridiculousness of the human race because “just build a giant robot to punch them in the face” is probably the most full-on human bullshit response we could have thought of to an invasion of giant aliens, but can we pause and also consider that the aliens are basically doing the same thing

like they wanted to invade us and their first thought about how to do so was “let’s genetically engineer giant fucking monsters that will crawl out of the depths of the ocean and trample cities”

Pacific Rim is just the story of two species that on a scale from 1 to 10 respond to every problem with a 17

 

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The mildly annoying fighting styles of female action characters. I think Charlize Theron, and a couple of others, are leading this charge to make female fight scenes more realistic to how a woman might actually kick some ass. Most filmmakers try to give women pretty, ballet -like, fighting styles, and I don’t mind that a whole lot, but they need to know it’s okay to show women getting down and dirty, when they fight, too. This is why I loved the movie Kill Bill, because it showcased a variety of women vs. women fighting styles.

rainbow-femme

So whenever i would watch movies and see The Badass Female Character fighting in various ways, something about it always bugged me. I just assumed it was internalized misogyny that made me dislike characters like black widow and Tauriel and tried to make myself like them.

Then I was rewatching Mad Max Fury Road the other day and I noticed that nothing bothered me about watching Furiosa fight and I realized the problem wasn’t watching women fight in movies that got on my nerves.

Watching the stereotypical Badass Female Character she always has these effortless moves and a cocky, sexy smirk on her face as everything is easy. Watching Furiosa, she grunted and bared her teeth. Her fighting was hard and it took effort and it hurt like fighting is supposed to. For once her fighting style wasn’t supposed to seduce the audience it was to be effective.

I wasn’t disliking these characters because they were women I was disliking that their fighting was meant to remind me they were women. High heels and shapely outfits and not showing effort or discomfort because it’s more attractive to effortlessly lift a long leather clad leg over your head rather than rugby tackle someone.

It’s the same with the Wonder Woman movie too. Fighting is hard and it takes effort, blocking bombs and bullets with a shield makes her grimace and bare her teeth with the effort it takes. She’s not flip kicking bombs she’s yelling and straining, not because she’s weak or bad at fighting but because that’s what it would be like.

I really hope we’re moving into an era of women having fighting styles designed for realism and not how hot it looks for the men in the audience.

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I’d say the answer to this is yes. America has long been obsessed with the Black female body, while trying to pretend it’s not, and here’s why:

Is Society Fascinated with Black Women’s Body Types?

blackfeminisms

Colonialism introduced Europe as the cultural/aesthetic authority on values including beauty. While doctors in ancient times warned against obesity, diet culture began in the 1800s. Weight turned into a cultural status marker that considered fat to be negative. Whiteness as the epitome of beauty imposes a standard that devalues body types by race, gender, shape, size, and color. Society teaches women to deal with fatness through exercise. Nevertheless, Black feminists see Blackness as the site of resistance to the standards.

Society interprets Blackness as indicative of moral, sexual, and racial pollution. For example, a society threatened by Black women’s reproductive capabilities, 19^th century Europe likened Black women to prostitutes through the controlling image of the Black Venus, which characterized her as the perpetual prostitute. Society discouraged coupling between Black women and White men through “blood discourses”  that projected the fear of Blackness onto mixed-race children. Some sociologists remarked on this phenomena with  Meghan Markle.

Society treats Black women’s bodies as a danger to social order. On the one hand, they might displace white women as the archetypical love and sex object. On the other, they threatened the patriarchal order of worker by having the status of worker and woman.

Society robs fat Black women of their sexual agency 

Sociologist Shirley Anne Tatediscusses how we can read the iconic Venus statue as a fat Black woman. This perspective reveals which Black women’s’ bodies society reads as fat and how they represent them. Tate embraces an ‘alter/native’ view of Black women to highlight the multiplicity of body politics around Black womanhood. Society treats Black women’s bodies as other to white women’s and does so by making their forms hypervisible. This process simultaneously renders the whiteness of other women’s bodies invisible. As a result, Shirley Anne Tate argues this perspective: “enable[s] us to see that there is a corporeality of white class (Bourdieu, 1988) and gender with thinness as its epitome” (Tate 2015: 80).

The Mammy portrays Black women as undesirable sexually and desirable for service work. The Mammy symbolizes the status of a domestic servant to a white woman through her girth and dark skin. This controlling image reinforces the perception that white women were superior.  For example, Hattie McDaniel played a Mammy figure in Gone With the Wind. The UK has a similar portrayal Black women as “Big Mama. Fat Black women live in a society that paints them as undesirable and worthy of disgust. These beliefs divided fat Black women into domestic and care workers and thin white women into the domestic and care overseers.

Society ridicules Black women for their fatness

In the UK racist humor often revolves around fat Black women. In the 19th century White men dressed in drag to mimic Black women for racist ridicule, making fun of the notion of a desire for this body through minstrelsy. Far from being just a joke, racist humor has more sinister implications:

“Humour is not a harmless or benign form of communication. Rather, ‘racist humour, jokes may act as a type of coping mechanism for the racist, in the form of a palliative because the effects of joking allow for the expression, reinforcement and denial of racism’ (Weaver, 2011: 12). “ (Tate 2015: 91).

Additionally, Some White women performed minstrels too. Originally, minstrels arose from white racial fear of Black men. Minstrelsy thus demonstrates simultaneous racial aversion and desire.  Fatness and Blackness place Black women outside of beauty.Rhetoric in the U.S. frames Black women in terms of discipline, relegation, marginalization, imprisonment, and segregation away from white life, comfort, embodiment, and being. Treating Black women’s body as inferior meant colonial labor and gender roles placed Black women in the lowest rung of the social order.

Society treats muscular Black women with dark skin with fear

Whenever the former First Lady chose to wear a sleeveless outfit, some members of White society reacted to Michelle Obama’s muscular arms:

The struggle over Michelle Obama’s ‘right to (bear) bare arms’ shows that the USA is far from being post-race as the respectable femininity of the First Lady is judged by white, middle/upper-class privilege which insists on lack of musculature on women (Tate 2012:93).

Shirley Anne Tate argues Michelle Obama’s body defines norms of white upper/middle-class respectability. Her very presence creates a space of resistance that represents a deviation from the somatic norms of the U.S. First Lady. As a result, she endured a constant surveillance of her body, viewed as an outsider. Therefore, this fascination transforms her into the Black First Lady.

Why do people fetishize muscular Black women?

Black women’s muscle as a spectacle dates back to racist pseudoscience of the 18^th/19^th  century. Shirley Anne Tate describes Black women’s bodies as a site of fascination.  A person compares themselves and others to a norm. As a viewer, a person extends their own bodies through their gaze. They interpret others through points on their body like their face, muscles, or skin. Comparison of one’s body parts to another leads a person to determine how close or different one’s body is to others:

Inassimilability or extension into the other does not mean that fasci- nation ceases. Fascination continues in the desire to find out the why of assimilation and the untranslatability of the body. Why can’t I be like her? Why do I want to be like her? What have I become? Is my becoming accompanied by fear, disgust, contempt? Fascination makes us look at ourselves first and foremost, at our very lives, to find out why we are fascinated by bodies/body parts. It is in the exchange between bodies, in the matching and untranslatability that we can begin to know ourselves, begin to understand our fascination as a pull to knowing the other, to get behind the façade that is the skin to ‘the real them’ beneath (Tate 2012: 94).

Fascination leads to a desire to find out why a woman’s body does not conform to the norm. However, narcissism motivates this fascination. Hence, people recenter themselves as they gaze upon others’ bodies to construct a sense of self. Therefore, the incorporeality of fascination makes it a fluid, simultaneous process of becoming and unbecoming through comparison to others.

How does fascination with Black women turn into fear?

Fascination is a multisensory experience that has varying degrees of effect and affect, motivated thus making the gaze a result of both desire and disgust. Therefore, fascination compels a response on the part of a viewer as it occurs not only through the senses but also through imaginings.

As a result, people pursue a means to satisfy their fascination. For example, this fascination extends to dark-skinned Black women who have muscular bodies. This affects interpersonal interactions across racial lines. Stereotypes about Black women motivate people to approach them with a feeling of insecurity or a desire to avoid her at all costs. So when Black woman’s bodies get policed in this manner, they are cast as evil and transgressive to indicate they fall outside the norms of appropriate ways of life.

Tate writes that “once it is set outside the norm it remains as it is cast, an unknowable hyper-known, knowledge of which remains within the colonial stereotype.”  White people project their fear of getting displaced in society’s racial hierarchy onto Black women through a racialization process that involves creating zones of containment by labeling her a source of fear.

How is fearing Black women racist?

Groups use fear to maintain racial regimes through the restriction of the movement of others’ bodies. Additionally, they expand their own movement. However, this involves a “racial regime of visible whiteness [that] must be kept in place to ensure that the borders of whiteness are kept firm.”Furthermore, this produces a fear of racial mixing. Rather than mix interracial, they develop resemblances through what Tate names racialized aesthetic profiling:

So expert surveillance is set up of Black women’s bodies, noses, lips, hair, skin colour, breasts, bottoms and muscles so as to mark difference and develop racialized aesthetic profiling. Racialized aesthetic profiling means that fear can be materialized in all Black women’s bodies irre- spective of who they are. This ensures the continuation, circulation and amplification of fear of the Black woman’s body as she begins to move outside of the borders established through the phenotype and stereotype (Tate 2012: 98).

One such Black woman who suffers this fascination is Serena Williams.  Serena, in particular, embraced a “girly” sports aesthetic, which contradicted social norms about appropriate muscularity for women. Yet, society characterizes women with darker skin as undesirable. Serena faces derogatory comments for posing as feminine. Nevertheless, muscular Black women experience fetishization just as fat and slim women experience hypersexualization.

Race and the sociology of emotions

The white affective matrix confers and questions womanhood as the view Black women’s bodies with varying degrees of adoration and disgust. As a result, Black women experience different treatment based on their body type.

The post Is Society Fascinated with Black Women’s Body Types?appeared first on Blackfeminisms.com.
from Is Society Fascinated with Black Women’s Body Types?

 

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These affirmations of allyship are exactly my sentiments too. I want LGBTQ people, Non-Black PoC, people with disabilities, everyone to experience all the same emotions I experience when I think of the movie Black Panther. I am deeply, and profoundly happy for Jewish female representation in Wonder Woman, Black gay men in Moonlight, Queer Latinas in Brooklyn 99, and Asians in Crazy Rich Asians, even though I’m none of those things. Everyone deserves to see themselves beautifully represented on a movie screen.

 deadletterpoets

Maybe I’m not the right person to say this as a black man but,

I hope the success of Wonder Woman doesn’t just mean more women are directing superhero movies, but are given the chance to direct/write movies from the many other franchises that exist like Mission Impossible, Transformers, Star Wars, Anything in this Dark Universe Universal is doing, a big budget Monster movie with Godzilla and King Kong, James Bond, I heard they are rebooting Resident Evil let’s let a talent woman director like Jennifer Kent with her horror background tackle that, Terminator (cause they just won’t ever let that go), Alien, Fast and Furious, and so many other I can’t even name them all. Or you know give them a big budget to adapt a popular book like Ava DuVernay is currently doing with A Wrinkle in Time, or let them have their own stories we need more original voices, or let them build their own unique franchises. And if they fail, let them try again cause lord knows even the best male directors and writers fail at times and they are still given multiple chances. We all should celebrate Wonder Woman’s success, but know it’s not the end of a long journey to true equality for women in Hollywood.

yumearashi

Maybe I’m not the right person to say this as a white woman but,

I hope that Black Panther is a *smashing* success and that it leads to not only more POC directing superhero movies, but also being given the chance to direct/write movies from the many other existing franchises and adaptations.  Plus, let them have their own stories and build their own unique franchises, we need their voices. And if they fail, let them try again cause lord knows even the best white directors and writers fail at times and they are still given multiple chances. Hopefully we’ll all be able to celebrate Black Panther’s success, but even if it breaks every box office record, it won’t be the end of a long journey to true equality for POC in Hollywood.

( @deadletterpoets – thank you for being an amazing ally)

 

daughter-of-rowan

Maybe I’m not the right person to say this as a black woman, but

I hope that Crazy, Rich Asians is a roaring success. I hope it leads to doing away with the whitewashing of Asians in Asian properties (I’m talking to you, Netflix: White Light in Death Note? NO!). I would love to see Asians being able to break out of the “smart Asian friend” and “inspiring immigrant story” roles. I want to see Asian representation in CBMs. I want to see more than Japanese, Chinese, and Indian people as doctors, lawyers, shop owners, and financiers on the way up. And while we’re at it: Pacific Islanders are not replacements for Asians, and they don’t just play football and dance. Representation matters, and it has to be more than what makes Hollywood comfortable.

 

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From the comments on this one, I’d say the answer is a resounding YES!!!! Yes, White people, do indeed, get tired of looking at White people onscreen sometimes, and are just as hungry for new perspectives on old stories, as PoC.

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This pretty much was the permanent oven setting in our house. Hell, it was a major source of anxiety for me to turn the oven to 375 degrees, that first time.

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This conversation started out talking about how terrifying angels are, and then went in the direction of the  running commentary, on Tumblr, about how murderously dangerous is the wildlife in Australia.

Anonymous asked:

What do angels actually look like per the bible?

revelation19 answered:

Well, according to Ezekiel 1 they might look something like this…

According to Daniel 10 something like this…

According to Isaiah 6…

In Ezekiel 10…

Again in Ezekiel 10…

 

Basically, when the people writing Scripture tried to describe what they saw when they saw an angel… they run into the end of their imagination… they can never quite seem to fully explain it because they had trouble even comprehending what they saw, let alone being able to describe it to someone else.

 

musiqchild007

revelation19

Yeah, that’s usually how people responded to seeing them in the Bible…

 

the-unreadable-book

There’s a good reason why angels’ standard greeting is ‘Do not be afraid’.

 

glitterbomb-goblinking

I used to listen to this radio show and one thing I remember because it was so funny was a Christmas special where an angel showed up to tell the shepherds about the birth of Christ.  The conversations went:

Angel: “FEAR NOT.”

Shepherds: *screaming*

Angel: “I SAID FEAR NOT.”

Shepherds: *screaming LOUDER*

Angel: “WHAT PART OF FEAR NOT ARE YOU NOT UNDERSTANDING?”

 

 cameoamalthea

So demons are fallen angels but they don’t look scary because they’re fallen, that’s just what all angels look like…

Maybe that’s why so many Christians see visions of Saints or the Virgin Mary instead…like Jesus is all…no, no see being human made me realize sending Angels might not be the best idea. I don’t know if humans can handle this. So I’m gonna just send mom

 

mathblr

I’M GONNA JUST SEND MOM

 

veronica-rich

God: The humans are scared.

Mary: Fine. I’m on it.

 

 upallnightogetloki

Jesus: It’s either Mom or the thousand eyed flaming wheel, Dad, do you really think the humans are gonna be chill with that when they’re terrified of spiders already?

God: Hey now, some of those spiders eat birds.

Jesus: …Dad…

God: …To be fair, Australian wildlife was my dark creation phase.

 

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I touched on this in an earlier post, about Hollywood treating Nazis like a story prompt for the past fifty years, in everything from comedies, to action movies, has led to Americans seriously diminishing their influence, obscuring their crimes, and complacency, with their ideas. 

 kendrasaunders

never forget that narratives that follow “what if the nazis won” are never for those of us who faced their terror- they are for tourists to our suffering, people who wish to be saviors. no jew every gets to succeed alone in a story where nazis win- we, rromas, lgbt people, and disabled people are shunted to the sidelines, in an eternal genocide from which we cannot escape. they forget the persecution that we still face- to them, to the tourists, this is clever. to them, we are helpless. we cannot fight nazis, that’s why they won.

this is a false retelling of history, and YES, in ALL CASES, it is a glorification of nazis. they DIDN’T win because they COULDN’T. and to my jewish, rroma, lgbt, and disabled followers, they lost because WE FOUGHT. We closed camps with our riots. We killed nazis. We scalped them. Our stories aren’t told because every tourist wants to act like they would Stop The Nazis- WE were doing it LONG before anyone came to our aid.

Don’t let people fool you into thinking you are helpless. Don’t let narratives that put white, straight, able-bodied and able-minded characters at the forefront make you think you need them.

Superman was originally created as a gollum- A character of jewish magic who protects us. He is not Christ, he is not Goy, he is not Theirs. We are our own protectors. We are a community, a family, and a riot.  You don’t not have to accept the idea that the Nazis could’ve won. Because the only thing Nazis are good at is dying. And the only thing a person who writes this storyline is good at is violence.

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A call out post on fandoms faux-progressivism. I think I wrote about how fandom isn’t nearly as imaginative, in its treatment of characters, as they like to believe they are, and that the vast majority merely reproduce the same racist and stereotypical narratives they’ve seen in popular media, since its inception. They just don’t have enough imagination to create anything outside of the boxes that have been created for them to play in.

Many of them are in the business of upholding the status quo, too. And far too many think being progressive is just writing about two white men, having sex, or holding hands, and that’s as far as they need to go to be considered woke. Anytime fandom ignores canon gay relationships of PoC, in a show or movie,  my argument is that their insistence on slashing every white man who merely wanders into the orbit of another for longer than a minute or two, amounts to nothing more than a straight girl fetish, which parallels the straight male  obsession with lesbians.

We are supposed to be the most progressive and transformative community in pop-culture.

We who…

• Hyper-focus on white, male characters
• Contort these male characters into heteronormativity
• Marginalize and erase characters of color
• Write out women and replace them with men, especially in shipping
• Attack women for “getting in the way” of our preferred ships
• Hold female characters to higher standards than male characters
• Hold characters of color to higher standards than white characters
• Latch onto any single excuse to marginalize female characters
• Utilize any single excuse to demonize characters of color
• Put women on pedestals and act as if we’re doing them a favor
• Justify white and male abuses or dismiss them as “mistakes”
• Use actual mistakes to denigrate female and non-white characters
• Romanticize white, male pain and mental illness
• Expect female characters to perform all the emotional labor
• Expect characters of color to be perfectly mentally healthy forever
• Expect everyone to subsume their own mental health for the white males’
• Dismiss the traumas and experiences of characters of color
• Minimize the achievements of female characters

And then we wonder why mainstream media is so regressive, especially compared to us. We all talk as if mainstream media creators are behind the times.

They’re not.

Fandom likes to imagine itself as being progressive because of all the slash – a mechanism of progress which conveniently boils down to extra attention on overwhelmingly male (and overwhelmingly white) characters. This form of progress is one which takes a minor deviation from the social norm (homosexuality), only to end up ultimately supporting or even amplifying the status quo, by virtue of over-focusing on male characters (and over-representing white ones in the process).

Strip back that gay window dressing, though, and you’ll see that at best, fandom is just as socially stagnant as mainstream media and mainstream culture – or even worse, by virtue of engaging in media that overwhelmingly sidelines several other marginalized groups in order to prop up one.

Professional women have long known the old adage, “Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought of half as good.” What no one seems to realize is that fandom is still doing exactly the same thing.

We expect female characters to be twice as good for half the acclaim, we expect characters of color to be three times as good for a third of the acclaim, and we let white, male characters be only a quarter as good for four times the acclaim.

Mainstream media is keeping up with the times and with social progress just fine, it’s us who’ve deluded ourselves into believing that we, as a community, are more progressive than we actually are.

nyxelestia

It’s been a while, but since this post just got a bunch of notes recently, I figure this is as good a time as any to add on some more thoughts.

Comparative Progressivism

Historically speaking, fandom has been progressive when compared to mainstream media. What most people don’t realize is just how little that’s really saying. When mainstream media is built on white male heteronormative power fantasy, it’s easy for any “alternative” depiction to come off as progressive.

A world where most of the women are fag-hags is certainly progressive compared to a world where most of the women are walking sex toys. That does not mean we should settle for this as a good depiction of women, or the marginalization of female characters.

Same goes for race. A character of color who is not a stereotype while supporting a white character is certainly better than a world where characters of color are stereotypes who are subsumed by white characters. That does not mean we should accept these as good representation of POC, or settle for their marginalization – or ignore their demonization as racism rears its ugly head, anew, in fandom.

And quite frankly, for a community where the overwhelming majority of our stories are based on mlm relationships, it speaks a lot to our internal attitudes and beliefs that we still, even after decades of existence, continue to write gay relationships as straight relationships with different genitals. The subtle heteronormativity that permeates the gay relationship tropes of fandom are astounding, and sometimes reek of internalized misogyny.

We Are All Joss Whedon

Joss Whedon was once considered tremendously feminist, and hailed as a paragon and idol of feminism in mainstream media. But contemporary analysis of his works shows that feminism was often a shroud covering some serious fetishization and occasional bursts of downright misogyny – and somewhat more disconcerting is the fact that more and more, his current works demonstrate that he hasn’t progressed forward from this much, if at all.

Fandom is the same.

We have long prided ourselves upon a history of progressivism and being transformative. It certainly was, back in era of Star Trek slash in an era where homosexuality was still illegal in many parts of America and the world. Fandom was truly transgressive when it wrote content that challenged such a deeply entrenched status quo. Even the most misogynistic and heteronormative portrayal of a gay relationship was transgressive against the staunch heteronormativity of mid-20th century mainstream media.

“Was.”

Because we’re still writing a lot of our fics on that model. Take a look at how many people debate hotly on who in a gay pairing is “the top” and “the bottom”. They are rarely ever discussing the hypotheticals of which male finds a certain sex position/act physically pleasurable. They’re asking, which one is the penetrative and active partner, and which is the receptive and passive partner. They’re asking which one is the “dominant” and which one is the “submissive” partner (with terms like ‘power bottom’ still relying on those baselines). They’re asking, “which one is the man and which one is the woman”. *( And often engaging in racialized transphobia and homophobia, by casting any people of color in inter-racial relationships, as the “top”, who is often described as bigger, and more muscular looking, than their slighter, more feminine/ effeminate same sex partner. This goes for both mlm, and wlw, relationships.

Meanwhile, actual female characters are rarely more than props to the men’s emotional health and personal narrative. A lot of them are written as little more than a fag hag or a “Straight BFF”.

We’ve gone from characters of color being walking stereotypes in the white characters’ narrative, to characters of color being either obstacles or non-existent in the white characters’ narratives. We don’t expect characters of color to literally serve the white characters while saying “yes, massa” all the time, now – but we still expect characters of color to to subsume themselves to white characters, with white characters’ feelings coming ahead of their own mental and physical health, their safety, and sometimes even their lives. Characters of color who have the audacity to act with a fraction of the self-absorption that is routine for white characters are castigated for being irresponsible and selfish.

This is if they’re even included at all. Ranging from marginalization to outright demonization, fandom constantly sidelines characters of color. Some fandoms have the unique anti-honor of being more racist – more sociall conservative, more prejudiced, and sometimes even more bigoted – than the mainstream media source material. Think about that for a minute. Mainstream media is finally moving forward and fandom is staying right where it is.

Fandom Wants the 1960s Back

Fandom can talk about feminism and progressivism all it wants. The reality of the true desires of fandom as a collective and as a community are expressed in its fanworks – not only in what is created in the first place, but which works become popular and get attention…and which ones don’t.

Fandom wants a world where white men are still front and center of everyone’s attention, where women are kickass but their stories aren’t that interesting, and where POC don’t need any care or attention.

Peel back the white mlm fetishization, and fandom hasn’t budged more than an inch since the first slashy Star Trek zines. Joss Whedon’s got nothing on us.

Interesting Tumblr Posts

Here, have some trailers:

*I did enjoy The Punisher parts of Daredevil’s second season, so I was interested when it was announced that he’d be receiving his own show. This looks worth a watch. Hopefully the show will be coherent and consistent.

https://youtu.be/lIY6zFL95hE

*I have never been a Tomb Raider fan. I’ve always thought of her as just a sexier version of Indiana Jones, and I’m not a particular fan of him either, although I’ve watched all the films. I don’t hate either of them. I’m largely indifferent to them, so fan would be a strong word.  I didn’t play the games, or watch the movies.

This looks interesting because it doesn’t actually appear to be about tomb raiding, but about putting something back in a tomb, and it also stars Daniel Wu, from Into the Badlands as the seeming voice of reason.

https://youtu.be/8ndhidEmUbI

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* I love Galaxy Quest, and this person is right. I do just sort of lump this show in with the  rest of Star Trek. Its such a faithful parody of the original source material that ‘s not mean or demeaning to it, and its genuinely funny, too. Of course Guy is a big reason for that. He says exactly the kind of shit we’d say if we were in these situations:

quasi-normalcy

I love the way that Star Trek fans just accept that Galaxy Quest is part of the film franchise.

not-in-front-of-the-klingons

Galaxy Quest is what i imagine people would be like if star trek suddenly became real tomorrow.

frompawntoqueen

Galaxy Quest was voted the 7th best Star Trek movie out of 13

 

blackmelange

“Intelligence is knowing that Galaxy Quest is not a Star Trek movie.
Wisdom is knowing Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek movie.”

And I think that says a lot about the Star Trek fandom, really.

 

Source:quasi-normalcy

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*I love these posts on Fantasy armor for female characters. Often the armor is just the dumbest, most ludicrous looking shit one could possibly imagine. Most of it is just metal lingerie, and in some cases just metal pasties. I mean, nobody’s fucking shoulders, or knees, needs that much protection. I often want to inform the creators that a) women’s boobs just don’t work like that, b) those need protection too, because they’re a delicate part of a woman’s anatomy, and if something hits them, they hurt like a muthafucka,  and c) what the fuck!!!

Another thing I hate when men draw women, in any kind of uniform, is what I like to call boob-socks. Just special pockets on an outfit that are specially fitted for a woman’s boobs. This is especially prevalent in comic books.

If you want to see more of this type of critique visit Bikini Armor Battle Damage’s website, where they also discuss media that gets women’s armor right.

bikiniarmorbattledamagerebloggedbikiniarmorbattledamage

wantstobelieve

brb shaking my head forever

 

bikiniarmorbattledamage

Time to bring this back, with a few examples proving that this parody is NOT a gross over-exaggeration of actual stuff we see in pop media:

 

The ‘Boobplate’: 

[x] [x] [x]

The ‘Boobplate+’ (A.K.A. boob window): 

[x] [x] [x]

The ‘What’s the Fucking Point’: 

[x] [x] [x]

It truly is impossible to properly satirize female sexualization. How do you even ridicule pure ridiculousness?

And that’s without even touching “warrior woman” costumes that bear no pretense of resembling armor of any kind.

~Ozzie

Source:wantstobelieve

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*This is something rarely discussed in fandom. How older characters of color are desexualized and “mammified” in fandom narratives, and sometimes made to seem older than they actually are, to keep from having to ship them with their White faves of the same age range. So older White male characters get the sexy older man treatment, but never with the nearest man of color who is anywhere close to their age. As for shipping them with a younger man of color, you can forget about it. At least some of this has to do with White women’s fetish for older men, just not if they happen to be Black.

I think its interesting that Coulson is being shipped with a woman of color, though. Although that could have something to do with the idea that fandom likes to think of Daisy as White, rather than half Chinese as the actress herself identifies. I find it interesting because one of the easiest relationships to ship in the CW is Stein and Jax, but I just don’t see it in the numbers.

For the record, I totally shipped Rupert Giles with Joyce Summers, and Rupert Giles with Ethan Rayne, when I watched Buffy. Later, I liked to ship him with Spike, but found shipping him with Xander or Willow kinda icky. When it comes to Shadowhunters, I love the combo of Luke Garroway and Magnus Bane, though.

eastasiansonwesternscreen

Racialized ageism and fandom

The age of the white male character is never the problem for shipping in fandoms. The age of the white actor is never the stopping point for him being viewed as “sexy” and “desirable”. The white guys in their 60s are seen as “hot” and “shipworthy”. The age gap between the older white guy and the character he’s shipped with at the moment is never the issue.

Look all over the fandoms: Clark Gregg (62), Peter Capaldi (59), Norman Reedus (48), Colin Firth (57), Rory McCann (48)… etc. etc. are in their late 40s – early 60s. Yet their characters are seen as sexually desirable and worthy of shipping not only with the characters, who are within their own age frame, but also with much younger characters:

• 1682 Works in Phil Coulson/Skye | Daisy Johnson 
• 2145 Works in Twelfth Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald 
• 1954 Works in Daryl Dixon/Beth Greene 
• 4312 Works in Harry Hart | Galahad/Gary “Eggsy” Unwin 
• 2148 Works in Sandor Clegane/Sansa Stark

Fandoms are not caging these older white male characters within the frames of a “desexualized parental figure” trope. In fact, “an older white guy x younger [usually also white] character” is a hugely popular shipping trope.

Yet, things differ drastically when the male character isn’t white (or seen as white – eg. Wentworth Miller’s Captain Cold), especially when the male character is dark-skinned. These male characters of color, who are over their 40s, are almost always invisible for fandom shipping.

For example – Joe West from The Flash. Jesse L. Martin is 48. He’s the same age as Norman Reedus, Rory McCann, he’s about a decade younger than Clark Gregg, Peter Capaldi or Colin Firth. And yet, he’s mostly seen as an “unshippable parental figure”.

Samuel L. Jackson has prominent roles in numerous popular franchises, that have big presence in fandoms with rich shipping content – Star Wars, MCU, Kingsman… Yet, his characters are always left out of the shipping pool in these fandoms – Mace Windu is ignored; Nick Fury is seen as the “dad” figure of the avengers; and Valentine is seen as nothing more than a funny villain, even though, fandoms do love white male villains. SLJ was 51 when Mace Windu first appeared on screen, he was in his early 60s when the MCU franchise started out, SLJ is only few years older than Clark Gregg.

Or take Stacker Pentecost from Pacific Rim, played by Idris Elba. Idris Elba. Idris was 41 when PR came out. And yet, the fandom had collectively decided that the only ship suitable for a “parental figure” like Stacker is Herc Hansen. Max Martini is two years older than Idris, and yet:

• 392 Works in Chuck Hansen/Hercules Hansen  vs. 3 Works in Chuck Hansen/Stacker Pentecost 
• 152 Works in Raleigh Becket/Hercules Hansen vs. 10 Works in Raleigh Becket/Stacker Pentecost
• 52 Works in Hercules Hansen/Mako Mori

Worth noting that the incest father/son ship with Hansens is more popular than Hercules Hansen/Stacker Pentecost, which only has 288 works in total. Raleigh had more on-screen connection with Stacker than he had with Herc; Chuck and Stacker died together while trying to save the world. Together in Death is a hugely popular shipping trope all across fandoms, for example Enjolras/Grantaire from Les Misérables had 3 seconds of total screen time together in the movie, and they have ~9k of fics on AO3 alone…

Another one is Luke Garroway from the Shadowhunters, played by Isaiah Mustafa (43). Have you seen Isaiah? Yeah, I know. And yet, he is also seen almost as some “grandpa” figure of the group. Often people use his age as an excuse of excluding him from most fanon activities involving the main group of characters – shipping, group fanvids, group edits etc. The only ships involving Luke that are accepted and supported by the fandom are with Jocelyn and Maryse. And I often see people in tags saying that any other ships with Luke are “creepy” and “uncomfortable” because he’s the “dad” of the group. I agree about the creepy factor with, say Clary and Simon… but others? – Not so much.

And, yeah, I would’ve agreed with this fandom “activism” if it wasn’t so hypocritical. Remember Rupert Giles from BTVS? Who also was the “father figure” of the Scooby Gang? Anthony Head was 43 at the start of the show and 49 when it ended. And yet, I don’t remember BTVS fandom excluding Giles at every turn because of his age:

• 645 Works in Rupert Giles/Buffy Summers 
• 351 Works in Rupert Giles/Ethan Rayne
• 254 Works in Rupert Giles/Xander Harris
• 182 Works in Rupert Giles/Wesley Wyndam-Pryce 
• 155 Works in Rupert Giles/Joyce Summers
  
• 67 Works in Rupert Giles/Faith Lehane
  

Compare to Luke’s ships:

• 185 Works in Jocelyn Fairchild/Luke Garroway
• 19 Works in Luke Garroway/Maryse Lightwood 
• 6 Works in Luke Garroway/Alaric Rodriguez 
• 4 Works in Luke Garroway/Valentine Morgenstern 
• 4 Works in Magnus Bane/Luke Garroway
• 2 Works in Luke Garroway/Alec Lightwood

Speaking of Shadowhunters, people also often try to put Magnus in the same “father figure” frames – anti-Malec (J@lecs, Cl@lecs etc.) people, who ship Alec with everything white that moves, always try to insinuate that Magnus is borderline a pedophile because he’s dating Alec. Regularly I see posts in Magnus’ tags saying that shipping Magnus with Clary, Jace, Simon or Maia is “creepy” because he’s basically their “dad”. Magnus is not their dad and (so far) never considered himself to be their parental figure. I guess he did say something like that about Clary in the books, but the show had an AU storyline in 1×10, where Magnus first met Clary in that episode, and didn’t have any kind of connection to her prior. AU!Jace even thought that Clary was cheating on him with AU!Magnus. So, even with Clary there are canon possibilities of avoiding the “unhealthy” factor for the ship within fanon.

After all, I don’t see the Torcwood fandom acting as if Jack Harkness (an immortal who lived through ages and generations) is some unshippable “dad” figure, who can’t be shipped with other members of the team. I haven’t seen people there saying that Jack is a “creep” for dating Ianto (just for the record: the age gap between John and Gareth is 14 years vs. 5 years between Matt and Harry).

I’m not suggesting that people need to start shipping Luke or Magnus with the younger characters, what I am saying is that, had Luke and Magnus been portrayed by white actors, people wouldn’t have been putting them in the frames of “parental figures” of the group as much. And yeah, I love the dad!Luke and dad!Magnus headcanons as much as the next person, but let’s also be honest that we’re not living in a vacuum, the race can’t be taken out of the equation.

These are just a few examples, but this is happening all across fandoms. And not just with MoC – take Shirley Bennett from Community. Yvette Nicole Brown is of the same age as is Joel McHale – they’re both 45 now and were in their late 30s when the show first aired. And yet, both the show and the fandom treated Shirley as if she was some “grandma” and Chevy Chase’ peer (who was in his late 60s back then).

 

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*I haven’t been watching this Fear the Walking Dead ,despite its diversity of characters, because one Walking Dead show is enough for me, but I liked this particular meta.

poc-in-media

‘Fear the Walking Dead: Passage’ Did What No Thriller Could: Empower Two Lead WoC

As some of you may know by now, I am a fan of The Walking Dead. Unpopular opinion, but I think Fear the Walking Dead is one of the greatest things to come from it (I can hear the gasps already). I can’t stress it enough, but unlike TWD, its racial inclusiveness was something that had me hooked and reeled from the very beginning. My wishes were fulfilled when FTWD premiered because for the first time, I was able to look at a popular franchise with a Native lead and Latinx main characters. It’s partially one of the reasons I’m surprised when advocates for diversity prefer the original. Other characters of color were introduced, but I still felt something was missing—what I really wanted was a Black girl. As I mentioned before, when I began to realize the absence of black women in certain genres I wanted them everywhere as a challenge for writers, especially with all the sacrificial negresses going around. At this point, we were into the second season and I still hadn’t seen one, so I promised to remain patient until it did. Finally, Fear the Walking Dead: Passage happened.

If you’d like to watch Passage, a 13 minute web series before reading, click here.

Keep reading

 

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*Okay, I’m definitely going to be watching The Exorcist show in October. I left off watching it because it wasn’t holding my attention as tightly as I wanted. But I like John Cho, and he is right in that its highly unusual to see an Asian American character in this type of venue. I’ve watched a lot of Asian horror movies, so why are they absent absent from American horror movies, and shows.

 

asamnetwork

The Exorcist: How John Cho is changing American horror

[John Cho will] do whatever he can to help the push for Asian-American representation. It’s one reason he joined the second season of The Exorcist… “I had not seen Asian faces in American horror, and it kind of tickled me to want to change that visual vocabulary a bit,” he says. “I thought it would be, I don’t know, intrusive to have my face in it…”

“What I’ve been thinking about lately is how to tell stories that are specifically Asian-American but aren’t necessarily about being Asian-American as much,” he explains. “I’m looking at the totality of things.”(x)

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*I find Haka fascinating and terrifying, but I think that’s the point.. I would watch these all day. I’m glad Maori culture is getting some international recognition through these different sports groups, too. Even Beyonce got one when she visited new Zealand, which just made my heart hurt, I was so proud. 

semperannoying

https://youtu.be/xI6TRTBZUMM

2nd 1st Farewell Their Fallen Comrades With A Huge Haka

Haka is used throughout New Zealand by many, not only Māori, to demonstrate their collective thoughts. There is a haka for each of the Services, as well as the Defence Force. Units with the NZ Army have their own haka. This video shows the soldiers of 2/1 RNZIR Battalion performing their Unit haka, powerfully acknowledging the lives and feats of their fallen comrades as they come onto the Unit’s parade ground. It is also an emotive farewell for they will leave via the waharoa (the carved entrance way) for the very last time.

Haka –sometimes termed a posture dance could also be described as a chant with actions. There are various forms of haka; some with weapons some without, some have set actions others may be ‘free style.’ Haka is used by Māori (indigenous people of New Zealand) for a myriad of reasons; to challenge or express defiance or contempt, to demonstrate approval or appreciation, to encourage or to discourage, to acknowledge feats and achievements, to welcome, to farewell, as an expression of pride, happiness or sorrow. There is almost no inappropriate occasion for haka; it is an outward display of inner thoughts and emotions. Within the context of an occasion it is abundantly clear which emotion is being expressed.

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*I was always under the impression that women couldn’t do the Haka, or that they had their own special ones or something. But watching this gave me life:

Women’s Haka

https://youtu.be/uzg4rJJNX30

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*Its officially Latinx/Hispanic Celebration Month and I came across this post on Latina in Superhero shows. There are a lot more than this is the SciFi genre but I think this is just for superheroes:

Source:dcwomenofcolor

dcwomenofcolor

Latinx Heritage Month

↪ Characters in DC Shows’ Main Cast

✪ Lynda Carter as Diana Prince / Wonder Woman (Wonder Woman S1-3) 

✪ Angélica Celaya as Zed Martin (Constantine S1)

✪ Victoria Cartagena as Renee Montoya (Gotham S1) 

✪ Zabryna Guevara as Sarah Essen (Gotham S1-2) 

✪ Aimee Garcia as Ella Lopez (Lucifer S2-)

Honorable Mention – Recurring Characters:

– Michelle Veintimilla & Camila Perez as Bridgit Pike / Firefly (Gotham S2-3)
– Briana Venskus as Agent Vasquez (Supergirl S1-2)
– Jessica Camacho as Cindy Reynolds (The Flash S3)
– Odette Annable as Samantha March / Reign (Supergirl S3)

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*Yes, this clown vs. mime discussion has been sorely needed. People keep confusing the two, and really, mimes are just waaay, waay creepier than clowns, imo.

enigma-boi

Okay, I’ve had it

I see people posting videos of clown-mime and clown-jester hybrids and cooing about how “pretty” and “cool” they are, but this is NOT HEALTHY OR SAFE CLOWN HUSBANDRY! In fact, it’s downright dangerous for both you and your clown!

Clowns, Mimes and Jesters may be related, yes, but their genetics are quite different and mixing their genes together have an adverse effect on your clown when they come at odds with one another, causing a host of genetic health problems like giganticism, heart problems, higher rates of cancer, organ failure, bone degradation and neurological defects.

They’re also more aggressive, territorial, unfriendly and destructive than non clown hybrids. You’re super cool clown x mime hybrid is gonna more satisfied with attacking you than making invisible balloon animals.

Not to mention the process of making a clown hybrid in the first place, considering that Clowns, Mimes and Jesters are natural enemies of each other! Your clowns/mimes/jesters are more likely to maul each other than fuck each other!

 

enigma-boi

People only breed clown hybrids because they are seen as “cool” and “exotic” and cost a lot of money, they’re a status symbol with unique patterns, and the clowns suffer for it.

If you still have your heart set on a clown-hybrid, there are actually some breeds out there, like the Venetian Diamondcheek Juggler and the Parish Mockfool, that are bred specifically for their mime and jesteresque markings and are perfectly healthy, perfectly happy clowns.

Clowns shouldn’t suffer for human aestheticism.

Source:enigma-boi

 *So October is almost here, and I will be forgoing my little pop culture essays to concentrate on reviews, reviews, and more reviews. Halloween is coming and I have a list of movies I want to review, like The Mist, and Let the Right One In vs. it’s American counterpart. Its also the real start of pilot season, so I’m going to be busy with a few of those, and I want to round that out with a series of posts/reviews of Hannibal the series.

Yes, I did watch the first two episodes of Star Trek Discovery and I’ll let you know what I think by the end of the week. I know a lot of you guys either don’t have cable, or don’t want to sign up for a streaming channel just to watch one show, but I’m a die-hard Star Trek fan who  managed to sit through the mess that was Enterprise. I don’t know if I’ll keep paying for it. The show would have to be very, very compelling (which it was) to get me to keep paying to see it, at basically 5.99 per episode.

ETA: I just unsubscribed to CBS. I can always wait for the release of the dvd.

More Tumblr Discussions For Your Weekend

*Recently Munroe Bergdorf, a transgender DJ and model, was fired from her position at L’Oreal, for some statements she made about the foundations of  American and British racism. Statements that were taken entirely out of context by the British newrag, The Daily Mail.

Here’s her full statement:

There’s a great irony involved in a company attempting to make money off token efforts at diversity, firing one of its spokespeople for speaking out against racism, out of fear of what bigoted White people might think about the company. (In other words, performative allyship for money.) Then again, its L’Oréal, and I never put much stock in their efforts at diversity in the first place, or in the efforts of most businesses that try to attract my dollar this way. This is a company, that for decade, didn’t seem to want dark skinned people buying any of their skin careproducts, since they didn’t care to make any products for them, so I’m not surprised that they’ve issued a statement saying that Bergdorf does not represent the views of their company.

Well, where’s the lie?

 

And the response:

L’Oréal’s recent layoff sends a telling message about white supremacy

Anthony J. Williams

Looking back, makeup brands have strategically shut out women of color since their inception, particularly women with darker skin tones. This is not news, nor should it come as a surprise, as film was also built for white people. So in an effort to “champion diversity,” and potentially even make up for years of anti-Blackness, L’Oréal Paris casts a Black woman in their YoursTruly True Match diversity campaign.

Where they took a “risk” on her braids, they were rewarded by the potential of kudos by hiring a Black woman who is perceived as not “too Black” due to her lighter complexion. We know by now that dark skinned Black women are villainized, even when they’re FLOTUS. Where they took a risk in hiring a Black woman for a historically white company, the benefit was the accolades they would receive from GLAAD and mainstream media for hiring a Black trans woman, as opposed to a Black cis woman.

Tumblr Discussions #62

*I love the character Finn, (from Star Wars 7), and I’m always here for some Finn love, in the form of Meta-analysis on this character. There are so many people out there ready to dump on the only Black lead character in a Star Wars movie. There are White people harshing on Finn because he’s too Black and Black people hatin’ on him because he’s not Black enough. This analysis gets it just right.

lj-writes

Finn’s subversive decency

Choosing to be kind is not choosing to be passive. It’s choosing to end the cycle of abuse… . It’s a courageous act in itself.

-Melissa Grey on Cinderella

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*Of all the arguments occurring on Tumblr, the ones I find most intriguing, are the ones about Fandom. There are a lot of those. It seems to be very young people’s way of ironing out all the rules and regulations involved in being  “real fans”. This one is a discussion of exactly what slash fanfiction is, and what purpose it serves.

stitchmediamix organafinn

i can’t believe y’all made me write this

halfhardtorock:

steflovessamwilson:

arkynn:

markdoesstuff:

poseysprostate:

There’s a piece of meta going around that’s basically saying that mlm should have greater authority on what kinds of content should be produced from the slash community and I think that’s such a huge load of bullshit?  Slash isn’t, and was never about mlm.  Mlm are not the subjects of slash and yaoi works, they’ve always been proxies for the expression of women’s sexual/romantic fantasies.

This is not a bad thing and isn’t a thing that should be changed.

Yes, increasing amounts of men are becoming content creators for slash and yes, there are more stories about healthy and realistic relationships between men but there will always be works that contain tropes that appeal to women?  The failings of individual women to make a distinction between a fictional mlm as a sexual proxy and a real mlm is not the responsibility of the slash fandom?

Take the case of male pornographers producing lesbian porn for straight male consumers.  Does the idea of wlw arguing that these works do not depict realistic wlw relationships make sense?  Clearly not because that genre is not about depicting actual wlw and actual wlw culture.  If wlw create pornography for wlw then they’re really shifting into a different genre.  Although the subjects are technically the same (as in women are portraying these proxies) they are participating in conceptually distinct genres with different audiences.

And with increasing amounts of women consuming works relating to mlm sex, there’s been financial incentive for gay pornography studios to produce more naturalistic, relationship focused movies.  Certain JGV works and Western studios like Cockyboys have increasing numbers of female fans.  If you imagine a progression on this theme and we eventually have a pornography studio produced by women, producing content for women, using men having m-m sex, would and should women be given authority over the content and themes of all gay pornography?

In the fantasy industry, there are creators, there are consumers, and there are the characters and entities that mediate the fantasy – the subjects.  In BL, yaoi, and most slash, these aren’t mlm.  They’re proxies.  There is no genre requirement that they know anything about a mlm lifestyle or mlm culture or anything like that.  In bara, gay interest films, and in an increasing amount of general works, yeah they’re mlm.  They’re created for mlm to identify with.  That’s great!  There is no reasonable need to demand for the former genres to change because they aren’t about mlm.  A misunderstanding of this point only serves to further demonize women in their own spaces.

I pretty much ignore all the ridiculous discourse I see on this hellhole of a site these days but this is so Bad that I had to comment

This is supremely creepy, and viewing queer or gay or mlm as “proxies” is dehumanizing and weird and I can’t believe there is discourse defending this terrible idea. This is Bad, you should feel Bad, and no. You cannot absolve yourself of harmful representation just because it’s a different genre or because the intent of said genre is not for the consumption of mlm. Also: plenty of us queer and gay men write and read slash for our own purposes and this ignores that. And fetishization. And a million other things!!!

Also: COCKYBOYS. ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS. THAT IS THE SITE YOU REFERENCED???? Oh my god.

“The failings of individual women to make a distinction between a fictional mlm as a sexual proxy and a real mlm is not the responsibility of the slash fandom?”

This is on the same level as folks arguing about how they can “separate fiction from reality” whenever someone critiques a popular show and/or ship that depicts abuse or bigotry.

Also, “Mlm are not the subjects of slash and yaoi works” – the word you may be looking for is “audience”. Mlm are the literal subjects of the fanfiction. They are the focus, they are the characters driving the story. That makes them the subjects.

“Slash isn’t, and was never about mlm. Mlm are not the subject of slash and yaoi works, they’ve always been proxies for the expression of women’s sexual/romantic fantasies.”

THIS IS LITERALLY THE DEFINITION OF FETISHISING. Viewing members of a marginalized group as proxies for your sexual fantasies is WHAT THE PROBLEM IS. This is VERY MUCH SO a bad thing and this post is disgusting.

“Take the case of male pornographers producing lesbian porn for straight male consumers. Does the idea of wlw arguing that these works do not depict realistic wlw relationships make sense?”

Yes?

When lesbians have such few accessible products of their own and are highly fetishized by straight male-produced lesbian porn, this critique is valid.

When wlw can’t even find their own products because 98% of lesbian porn is made for the straight male gaze, thats a problem.

When some of the states where wlw have the least rights and experience the most violence have the highest number of lesbian porn searches on pornhub, this criticism matters.

The overwhelming amount of fetishistic lesbian porn made for the straight male gaze is a problem and critiquing this fetish, the way it dehumanizes wlw and asking for actual, inoffensive, non-fetishistic portrayals of wlw sexuality is valid.

Also this was a shit comparison in a lot of ways because wlw deal with objectification in a way white cis dudes do not.

OP needs to step back and just rethink all the crap they just spewed under the guise of wanting to be all about/exploring women’s sexuality.

Fetishizing queer people is never okay (and there’s a difference between writing about/being invested queer male characters and fetishizing them and fandom largely hasn’t figured out how to find that difference…)

*Finally someone did make a list of the rules and regulations of writing fanfiction:

thespoonslobeliastole:

glumshoe:

glumshoe:

Everyone’s familiar with “Rule 34 of the Internet: there is porn of any conceivable subject”.

Is there also a rule that states that fandom abhors a vacuum of sexually available slim white men to ship with each other, and any piece of media that doesn’t include at least two will invent them?

Should a piece of popular media include one (1) thin white boy, failure to include another thin white boy to ship him with will result in the most popular ships in a particular fandom…

1.) importing another thin white boy from an unrelated piece of media to pair him with, regardless of reciprocated canon relationships with female characters…

2.) interpreting a non-human character as a thin white boy, even a much, much older antagonist…

3.) shipping the thin white character with himself…

Related: if a fandom DOES include at least two thin white boys, but neither of them are lead characters, they will become the most popular ship in that fandom, preferred over non-white lead male characters who display affection towards one another….

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*This is an interesting little meta on White people’s peculiar ideas about PoC and  European history. I am reminded that most people’s ideas about History come largely from TV shows and movies, and that even if they do read History books, those rarely mention race. Even so, most White people consider Whiteness the default, so the assumption is that there were no PoC present, and that apparently we did not come into existence until slavery.

abbiehollowdays dangercupcakemurdericing

On performing race and performing authenticity

dangercupcakemurdericing:

There are two important things to know before I begin this post. I am a black person with white parents and I belong to a medieval reenactment organization.

I suppose the other thing you need to know is that within this organization, which is mainly white, even more so than the general US population, there is a subset of white people who try to re-create the culture and costume of predominantly nonwhite cultures, even though the organization is technically focused on Western Europe.

Simultaneously there is another subset of people who feel that people of color who are involved in the organization, such as myself, should only portray ourselves as foreign visitors to Western cultures because anything else would be unrealistic. This is laughably untrue of course, but it certainly is a thought process some people have, to the point where they find my portrayal which actually is more plausible than most of the “I was kidnapped by Rromani people, sold to a sultan’s harem and then I ended up in Japan which is why I can wear a kimono” kind of back stories you hear.

But regardless if you dig deep enough on the Internet you find people complaining about how people color participating is ruining their immersion. Which I would’ve thought something that would’ve ruined their immersion would be people from completely different centuries spread across large geographic regions interacting with each other, but you can’t really expect logic from racists.

Anyway because of this I try to be as scrupulous with my research as possible, but honestly I like the subversion of taking this whitewashed history and smearing my blackness across it. Because I’m not making up a fiction actually, any more than any of the rest of the people involved in the organization are, the woman I portray is very much a person who could have existed and if that’s disquieting I want people to think about why that is disquieting to them.

Why is the myth of the lily white Europe only recently invaded by foreign barbarians so popular? Why is it impossible to imagine intercultural exchange that didn’t rest on a system of modern racial domination? I want my presence to make them question what they think they know and how they have to envision history to be comfortable with the present.

I know that some of the people of color involved envision that the person portraying as a white person, but I spent enough of my life being paved over with white bricks that I didn’t feel the need to do that and something I do for fun and I think it is disingenuous anyway, given all the sidestepping we do from the exactness of history.

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*Okay, there isn’t anything I needed to add to this, I just wanted to preserve this because of Bigskydreaming’s EPIC clapback on the laziness, and lack of imagination, of writers who use shitty excuses for not writing PoC into any of their narratives. 

bigskydreaming:

solvola:

bizarrolord:

hijadepavlov:

When will racists stop crying “censorship” every time audiences demand that creators produce better content if we’re expected to buy it?

We are not the fucking government, we aren’t throwing anyone in jail for being a talentless racist shitstain. We are exercising our right to free speech by calling a racist creator “racist”, just like the racist creator is exercising their right to free speech by publishing their shitty ass work.

Unfortunately, many times a creator’s work is personal first and what sells later.

And I think that unfairly smearing someone as “racist” when there’s a decent reason they might not be writing characters of color (such as the “write what you know” maxim applied to a white author who may not want to give offense when writing a non-white character because they don’t know enough about the experiences of being non-white to write a character like that well).

I personally always thought that this wasn’t about diversity and representation at all. It was about fannish entitlement hidden behind a cloak of progressiveness. (Further confirmed by people who keep asking for diverse characters constantly nitpicking the ones they do get because they’re essentially not Mary Sues/Gary Stus/wish-fulfillment characters.)

Well, judging from the trends, it looks like bigotry sells, so that’s not it. We just don’t want to give our money to someone who’s insufferably insensitive and clearly hasn’t read a single article on any social issue (other than conservative conspiracy theories about the next liberal boogeyman and the dooms of socialism, I guess), and if anti-SJW tripe isn’t censorship, then neither is this.

Your point in the second paragraph seems to be incomplete, but if you were going to say that “unfairly smearing someone as racist” is akin to censorship (maybe because it might affect sales, I dunno), once more with feeling, that’s not what censorship is – and I even dare you to give me a single example of someone or something being “unfairly smeared as racist”, because chances are that accusation is wholly pertinent, but people just don’t understand enough about the subject of racism to get why it’s pertinent – thus being more a problem of lack of research done (a very common ailment these days) than unfair accusations of racism with no base or substance.

Whenever someone or their work is accused of bigotry, the knee-jerk reaction is always to go on the defensive, on the denial, and bring up intent, when none of those things matter for what’s in question. Someone or something is racist when it aligns with white supremacist or nationalist beliefs, when it validates or is conducive to unjust racial dynamics or stereotypes against non-white people, when it instigates or nurtures negative beliefs and attitudes, hostile sentiment and normalized or even desirable violence towards non-white people – and all of this will happen if something is set up to do so regardless of intent. That’s why there’s that expression “intent isn’t magic”, because intent will not prevent the consequences of unintentional bigotry no matter how clear it might’ve been.

Lastly, as for your two more fandom and creativity-oriented points: I don’t think “writing what you know” is a good excuse, quite frankly, because it discourages people from doing their research and from getting out of their bubble, leading to precisely the kind of unfair and unrealistic homogeneous lack of diversity that media in general is well known for, from stories to characters to casting. It’s lazy, it’s unoriginal, it’s overdone, and it’s entirely unhelpful to various sizeable chunks of people in your audience. If you’re a white, cis, straight, non-disabled male author, “writing what you know” will alienate non-white people, women, LGBT people, and disabled people in your audience from your work entirely, at least as far as identification and relatability go. If that’s what’s desirable, then I think I must have missed the memo, because the artistic paradigm of reaching audiences as far and wide as possible must have changed while I was sleeping.

If you use that excuse to justify not writing diversity, then people will hold you accountability for being lazy and backwards, and under free speech, people have every right to do so, just as you are allowed to retort or not even listen.

Regarding fandom entitlement, to keep it short, I think fandom entitlement looks like fans harassing actors and producers because their abusive ship wasn’t made canon. I think it looks like fans sending death or rape threats to actors of color and female actors (or both at the same time) because they weren’t happy to see an interracial canon couple on screen. I think it looks like fandom being in uproar every time someone dares say something remotely critical even when it’s pertinent. I think “only positivity always, no criticism/“hate” ever” looks like fandom entitlement, too. I think harboring abusers, violent bigots, rapists, and pedophiles in the name of “fandom positivity” looks quite like it also.

To me, fandom entitlement definitely doesn’t look like fans expecting media created last year or this year to be sufficiently diverse and progressive, it doesn’t look like fans expecting their existence to be acknowledged and portrayed respectfully and in a constructive manner, and it also doesn’t look like fans being critical of any attempts at diversity that end up doing more harm than good, or no good at all, because they were written by someone who “wrote what they knew” and didn’t go and do their damn research.

To add on real quick, falling back on the ‘write what you know’ maxim is bullshit, because since time immemorial, audiences, publishers and Hollywood have been perfectly comfortable expecting black writers to write white characters. Its not actually about writing what you want first, and what sells later, because for marginalized writers, the issue before them has ALWAYS been when sitting down to begin a book or a screenplay, they have to ask themselves – are they going to write what they know, are they going to represent themselves in their own work, or are the chances of such a work getting published so slim that they’re better off writing about white characters whose experiences don’t reflect theirs at all, etc.

Death to the write what you know misinterpretation, because it is bullshit and it has always been bullshit. First off, that quote has NEVER been justification for confining your creative output to the narrow margin of what you have personally experienced in life. It is about building your story or your characters around a core foundation of something that resonates with you and your experiences, something you have intimate knowledge of and can build from in terms of mood, its about passion and forming a connection with your work and through it laying down a road for readers to connect with you and your underlying reasons for writing something. It is THEMATIC, not SUPERFICIAL.

If write what you know were as sacrosanct as people would like to pretend in conversations like this, entire genres of fiction would not exist. Fantasy would not exist. Science fiction would not exist. Mystery novels would solely be the province of retired cops and detectives. Only veterans would write military adventures. Medical and political thrillers? Only doctors and politicians, thanks. You would need two masters degrees and a doctorate in historical fields of study to even be able to pitch something set a thousand years ago. And forget about including characters of a different gender, class, or educational background than your own!

Fuck off. That has never been what write what you know means, AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT. Write what you know means when penning a story about a boy wizard discovering magic and adventure and an impossible destiny no one can relate to, ground it in emotions people CAN identify with, imbue him with feelings of loneliness and neglect and a desperate yearning to be wanted and loved and appreciated that you can channel directly from your own soul onto the paper for people to pick up on and use as their grounding rod while venturing into your imagined world that holds very little similarity to anything anyone knows from the real world, other than the emotions that underpin everything in it.

Write what you know means when writing a script about a boy on a distant desert planet beneath two sons discovering his inner power as he sets off on a quest to destroy an imperialistic tyrant, center that story around archetypal narrative structures and themes that have resonated with audiences since the beginning of time – the simple farmboy who rises to greatness, fathers and sons, family honor, redemption and sins of the father, etc, etc.

Write what you know is a guideline, unless you are writing a goddamn autobiography you are expected and even encouraged to use what you know as a baseline template you step outside of to pull other experiences that AREN’T yours closer to, using your actual experiences to connect audiences to the parts of the story that neither you or them can automatically connect to because they are FICTIONAL EXPERIENCES.

If you’re not actually writing a goddamn autobiography, write what you know is not actually a computer function that copies and pastes your life directly onto the page and punishes any deviation from that material with a slap on the wrist and career ruination. No reader in the history of reading has ever put down a science fiction adventure with a disappointed frown and a ‘whoa whoa whoa, I thought I was buying a book by an actual intergalactic space captain who know what the hell he was talking about when repelling pirates trying to take his ship but this dude is just a fucking librarian from Sacramento? Hell no, I am addressing this in my one star review and telling all my friends not to try this author, he is a FRAUD.’

Write what you know didn’t stop Tolkien from reinventing the fantasy genre with the adventures of four foot tall hairy barefoot badasses trekking across a landscape of walking trees and talking eagles to throw a magic ring into a volcano. Yet somehow, it seems to bar stories about black Chosen Ones slaying dragons in medieval inspired settings because that’s unrealistic, black kids don’t fit in fictional settings like that.

Write what you know doesn’t stop fans from becoming ‘fluent’ in made up languages like Elvish and Klingon, but three lines of Spanish in a story somehow pulls them right out of it.

Write what you know doesn’t stop schoolteachers from googling espionage and military jargon and researching the most obscure factoids of crimes and serial killers and the lives of famous spies or historical military figures and going on to write bestselling crime or spy or political thrillers. Yet somehow it seems to block any attempts to put similar work and research and attention to detail into anything related to non-white characters, lives or experiences like the second google realizes they’re asking about something non-white it clutches its pearls and refuses to divulge anything but a 404 Error Not Found screen.

Okay, so I lied, I didn’t add on anything real quick, but let me just sum up real fast.

In conclusion: fuck your write what you know. It has never stopped white writers from writing beyond the boundaries of their experiences, researching the crap out of shit they know nothing about, or kept white readers from identifying with characters they can not possibly have anything in common with other than underlying thematic connections, on account of, y’know, NOT BEING FOUR FOOT TALL HAIRY BAREFOOT HOBBITS FROM MIDDLE FUCKING EARTH.

Writers have always been able to write characters who have different life experiences than them.

Readers have always been able to connect with characters who have different life experiences than them.

Refusing to write about non-white characters? Refusing to read about non-white characters?

It’s not because you can’t. It’s not because it wouldn’t be authentic. It’s not because some magical rule of writing prohibits you and you’ll lose your writing card for daring to venture outside your margin of personal life experiences.

It’s for one reason and one reason only.

YOU. JUST. DON’T. WANT. TO.

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*I just liked this:

What “Ghetto” Names Really Mean

robregal:

feministsmadefromfire:

“Tinashe” –  Means “God is with us” in Shona ( An African language spoken by nearly 80 percent of people in Zimbabwe.)

“Lakeisha” – A Swahili name meaning “favorite one.”

“Ashanti” –  Name of a powerful African empire in West Africa.

“Tanisha” – Hausa of West Africa name meaning “born on Monday.”

“Zola” – Means “quiet, tranquil” in Zulu.

“Amandla” –  Zulu and Xhosa word meaning “power”. The word was a popular rallying cry in the days of resistance against Apartheid.

“Zendaya” – Means “ To Give Thanks” in Shona

“Latonia” –  A Latin name. Latonia was the mother of Diana in Roman mythology.

“Lulu” – Swahili and Muslim name meaning “pearl” or “precious.”

“Ciara” –  Means “dark-haired” in Irish Gaelic

“Lateefah” – A North African name meaning “gentle and pleasant.”

“Mercedes” – Means “Gracious gifts/Benefits) in Spanish

“Kaya” –  Ghanaian name meaning “stay and don’t go back.”

“Amara” –  The Swahili word amara, meaning “urgent business.” Also the Hindu name meaning “immortal.”

“Shanika” – African Bantu name, meaning “young one from the wilderness.

“Zuri” – Means “beautiful” in Swahili.

“Onika” – Word of African origin meaning “warrior.”

JUST BECAUSE A NAME SOUNDS DIFFERENT DOES NOT MEAN IT’S “RATCHET” OR “GHETTO” THEY HAVE BEAUTIFUL MEANINGS.

DON’T BE IGNORANT, LEARN.

Reblog every time it hits the dash.

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*I hope this is a real movie, and not people just trolling me. If so, I’m here for it!

entertainingtheidea:

Watch the official trailer for J.D. Dillard’s sci-fi drama Sleight, out in U.S. theaters on April 7th.

The story follows a young street magician (played by Collateral Beauty’s Jacob Latimore) who is left to care for his little sister after their parents passing and turns to illegal activities to keep a roof over their heads. When he gets in too deep, his sister is kidnapped and he is forced to use his magic and brilliant mind to save her.

Seychelle Gabriel, Dulé Hill, SNL’s Sasheer Zamata, and Storm Reid (who will soon lead the cast of Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time) are co-starring.

 

And some Introvert thoughts: