namirastar

[namirastar]

Teaching theatre to middle schoolers make you say stuff like “yes, Viola from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is kind of like Shrek in some ways.”

[namirastar]

First ape to go to the watering hole with a container and put some of the water in it so that they could drink more later without returning to the watering hole must have been lauded as a fucking genius.

[namirastar]

Charmander Line

I'll be honest. I straight rip this from Kumo Desu (Give it a read. It's good trust me. Trust.)

Here are some of my favorites from their Monster Encyclopedia. (They're all my favorites but stfu).

[namirastar]

something I’ve seen in various fandoms now is young artists will draw flip phones with cracked screens. But in my experience, I have never met someone whose flip phone had a screen crack. Those screens were more like something on a calculator or a nintendo ds than like a smartphone. I was a klutz, and my first phone broke because the front half and back half came apart. Like you’d mayyyyybe see it on some of the later flip phones that only had large screens on the front because smartphones had already made them popular, but it was still way more rare.

If you wanna give a character a flip phone and show they’re clumsy, they’re more likely to have the paint scratched like hell or parts of the plastic chipped off. No more phone charms because the plastic loop broke. If the screen is broken, it would sooner not turn on anymore before the screen would have a crack in it.

[namirastar]

i don’t care what anyone says, the “multiple floating weapons controlled by telepathy/whatever” is, has been, and always will be cool as shit

[namirastar]

so many of the "i only use chat gpt for ___" excuses are concerning because people use it in place of learning basic, valuable skills.

you don't need chat gpt to write professional sounding emails for you, there are many many guides on the internet and with a bit of practise you can learn to write them yourself. a very important skill for a professional to have, and some of the basic rules will carry over into irl conversations!

you don't need chat gpt to be a "more detailed search engine", because you're robbing yourself of the chance to learn how to find and filter information on the internet and evaluate the credibility of sources. which is a VITAL skill. plus, chat gpt is notorious for being wrong?

if you use it to write essays, you're taking away your ability to hone your research skills, your writing skills, your critical thinking skills. your ability to create persuasive arguments!

and for most of the other reasons people use chat gpt, there are non-ai websites for that! for maths, wolfram alpha. for figuring out what you can cook with the ingredients you have there's supercook and the like. for creating routines, there's about a million apps!

whatever you "only" use chatgpt for i promise there are better websites out there that you don't have to worry will produce complete bullshit???? and destroy the environment???

[namirastar]

so many of the "i only use chat gpt for ___" excuses are concerning because people use it in place of learning basic, valuable skills.

you don't need chat gpt to write professional sounding emails for you, there are many many guides on the internet and with a bit of practise you can learn to write them yourself. a very important skill for a professional to have, and some of the basic rules will carry over into irl conversations!

you don't need chat gpt to be a "more detailed search engine", because you're robbing yourself of the chance to learn how to find and filter information on the internet and evaluate the credibility of sources. which is a VITAL skill. plus, chat gpt is notorious for being wrong?

if you use it to write essays, you're taking away your ability to hone your research skills, your writing skills, your critical thinking skills. your ability to create persuasive arguments!

and for most of the other reasons people use chat gpt, there are non-ai websites for that! for maths, wolfram alpha. for figuring out what you can cook with the ingredients you have there's supercook and the like. for creating routines, there's about a million apps!

whatever you "only" use chatgpt for i promise there are better websites out there that you don't have to worry will produce complete bullshit???? and destroy the environment???

[namirastar]

When you’re on a phone call with a help line or professional service and realize that both you AND the person on the other end are hating this phone call. Sorry bro do you wanna leave the call center and go prance in a field of daisies with me?

[namirastar]

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[namirastar]

do y’all remember before direct messages tumblr had a dumbass ask limit of 10 per hour and communication was impossible until they introduced dumbass fan mail and we were basically sending telegraphs back in forth trying to communicate those were…dark times

[namirastar]

when it comes to consciousness raising you can spend time telling someone “crazy” is a slur or you can spend time explaining that what looks like “care” or “cure” or “mercy” to them is actually eugenics or abuse. one of these projects has to precede the other and i bet you can guess which one i would prioritize

[namirastar]

“Elon didn’t mean to sieg heil, he’s just autistic”

Do you guys remember when Kanye said he was gonna go “death con” on all the Jews? Do you remember how his apologists said he was just off his bipolar meds? Do you remember that he doubled down, said he didn’t actually have bipolar, and he had been misdiagnosed by a Jew doctor? Do you remember he proceeded to meet with prominent white supremacists and told infowars he was a Nazi who loved Hitler?

Nobody ever believes the Jews the first time, even though our culture has spent literally thousands of years learning the warning signs. We know what we’re looking at. It’s two consecutive Nazi salutes on a white supremacist’s inauguration day. You can downplay it all you want, but this coal mine’s canary isn’t coming back to life.

[namirastar]

“Elon didn’t mean to sieg heil, he’s just autistic”

Do you guys remember when Kanye said he was gonna go “death con” on all the Jews? Do you remember how his apologists said he was just off his bipolar meds? Do you remember that he doubled down, said he didn’t actually have bipolar, and he had been misdiagnosed by a Jew doctor? Do you remember he proceeded to meet with prominent white supremacists and told infowars he was a Nazi who loved Hitler?

Nobody ever believes the Jews the first time, even though our culture has spent literally thousands of years learning the warning signs. We know what we’re looking at. It’s two consecutive Nazi salutes on a white supremacist’s inauguration day. You can downplay it all you want, but this coal mine’s canary isn’t coming back to life.

[namirastar]

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

[namirastar]