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uboat53 · 2 years ago

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There's been a lot of talk about the turmoil over the new judicial "reforms" that were just enacted in Israel, but what I haven't seen a lot of is an explanation how the Israeli far-right is enacting one of the most terrible lessons of the Holocaust.

Let me explain, SHORT RANT (TM) time.

INTRODUCTION

The Holocaust was one of the worst crimes of the 20th century, executed against the Jews among other races and peoples (including, but not limited to, the Romani, the handicapped, and LGBT people). One thing that can be learned, though, is how various forms of governance affected the outcomes.

WHERE WAS THE FINAL SOLUTION MOST EFFECTIVE?

The Final Solution, the extermination of Jews, among others, was carried out by the Third Reich, the Nazi Regime of Germany, which ruled between 1933 and 1945. One might expect, therefore, that Germany itself would see the highest percentage of Jews killed, but one would be wrong.

In fact, Germany saw 70% of its early 1940s population of Jews killed. This is a high number, but it's significantly lower than the 90% of Poland's pre-war Jewish population or the approximately 90% of the pre-war Balkan Jewish population who were killed.

Meanwhile, if you look west, you see much lower numbers. Only a 22% of France's pre-war Jewish population, 27% of Belgium's, 24% of Luxembourg's, and 1%-2% of Denmark's were killed by 1945. [1]

WHAT EXPLAINS THIS?

If you look carefully, one pattern becomes clear. Regions which were governed as Reichskommissariat [2], effectively under military rule, have much higher death rates among their Jewish population while areas which were effectively managed under nominal civilian governance, often as puppet states, have lower death rates.

This has a strong relationship to the rule of law. The law under Nazi rule may have been perverse, but the processes and procedures required in order to enforce that law provided important protections for the people who lived under it.

In the Reichkommissariat regions, there was no law or procedure to stand in the way of the Final Solution. Rather than having to work through the judicial process to corral and then export Jews to concentration camps, SS soldiers were simply able to go house to house, village to village, and murder Jews as they came across them; a much more efficient method that made it more difficult for Jews to escape and sympathizers to help them.

SO, ISRAEL?

Yep, Israel, the country formed in the wake of the Holocaust with the cry of "never again!" Yet Israel has always been split between its identities as a liberal democracy, promising freedom and equality for all, and its status as a state explicitly for the Jewish people. It has also grappled with, and continues to grapple with one particular problem in its founding; that there were already people on the land that they wanted.

Today, all of those struggles also exist with a continuing drive among Israelis of the far-right to colonize and conquer the occupied territory of the West Bank and expel or otherwise drive off the existing population of Palestinians.

THE ULTIMATE JEWISH SPLIT

Many of you probably already know that I am Jewish, by birth though not religion. As such, and because I'm also German, I was raised with an intimate awareness of the Holocaust and, in Jewish spaces, this event is still much discussed. Once you engage in that discussion, however, it can quickly become clear that there is a huge split between two different groups of Jews; those that believe that the Holocaust was wrong because genocide is wrong, and those who believe that the Holocaust was wrong because it happened to the Jews.

I think it's fair to say that those differing views of morality would drastically change how you approach the history of the Holocaust. Someone who believes that genocide is definitively wrong in all cases would only study the Nazis in order to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust while someone who believes that it was only wrong because it happened to them might be willing to study their tactics in order to use them on others.

THE RULE OF LAW

What we're seeing in Israel is a wholesale effort by the far-right religious and settler movements to dismantle the rule of law [3]. Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, is going along with this because he believes it will allow him to avoid accountability for the numerous crimes he's been accused of, but the far-right political parties he's allied with have been very clear that they believe that the rule of law is preventing them from carrying out what any reasonable person would agree are atrocities.

They've learned from the Holocaust in the worst possible way, and every Jew should be horrified.

[1], [2], [3]

#jewish #politics #israel #international politics #holocaust #short rant (tm)

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lag1995-fics · 4 years ago

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Hi!! May I request a dadneto fic of them calling each other dad and son for the first time? 🥰

Of course my love I’m a total sucker for dadneto. ❤️❤️❤️ I hope you enjoy

Dad.

Summary: Peter didn’t need a dad and he was sure Erik didn’t want a loser like him for a son. His father had already had the perfect family and had them snatched from him. Peter like he usually is was wrong.

Warnings: Peter has low self worth and anxiety. There’s a bit of angst but nothing heart wrenching. I don’t even think I cursed this time but I might have.

Pairing: there isn’t one just some good old fashioned father, son bonding. Maybe Cherik if you squint and turn your head to the left.

Words: 1408

Masterlist

Rules

——————————————————————————

Peter had been avoiding Erik like the plague since the older mutant had moved into the school to help with construction. Peter may be twenty seven but telling someone they missed out on twenty seven years of their child’s life wasn’t an easy thing to do. Peter knew if he couldn’t tell the man at the end of the world then it probably wasn’t going to happen.

His issue was he had already opened his fat mouth to Raven who kept trying to trap them in a room alone together. She had even gotten Charles in on it. Sure Erik had a right to know he had another child but it shouldn’t be Peter's responsibility to inform the man he had a child much less adult twins. His mother had really dropped the ball on that one.

Peter was content to just continue living his life as if everything was the same as always. He didn’t need a dad, he was a grown ass man at this point. He was afraid the information would only make Erik even more depressed. He had seen a picture of Nina in his snooping and he had determined that the tiny girl was everything he wasn’t.

She was beautiful with a tiny freckled nose and big blue eyes. She couldn’t be a loser like her big brother who up until a couple of months ago had still been living in his mother’s basement. Why would Erik want someone like him in his life much less as a son.

“Peter you’re spiraling” The professor's voice echoed through his head and Peter groaned frustrated. He pounded on his ear like he had water caught inside.

“Peter you should tell him I can be there with you if you’d like” The professor's meddling voice came again causing Peter to lose that round of Ms. Pac-Man.

“You see Professor, I would do that but I know he doesn’t want a loser basement dweller for a kid.” Peter shot back turning up his music even louder letting the voice of his generation sweep over him. David Bowie was a king and nobody could tell him otherwise.

“Peter, you aren’t a loser, you took on Apocalypse by yourself and lived to tell about it, rather loudly I might add. You also are starting a teaching position here in the fall. You are such a good kind hearted person don’t degrade yourself that way.” Charles scolded. This was an ongoing argument between the two men and it never seemed to change his mind.

“I mean, is a P.E. Teacher even a real teacher Professor?” Peter asked.

“Physical Education is a very important role in children’s lives”Charles retorted to the unconvinced twenty-something. Peter could feel the frustration bubbling up inside him. He jerked in surprise when his watch that was laying on the side table forgotten began to vibrate. He snatched it clasping it around his wrist taking deep even breaths just trying to calm down.

So he inherited more than just the x-gene from his father. He had a secondary mutation, that was just great. He would have to be even more cautious than he already was. He knew Raven would try to trigger this in front of Erik if she found out. Which she would with her brother being a freaking mind reader.

***

“I need all staff members to my office for a staff meeting” Charles' voice echoed loudly in his head. He zipped to the office finding that Charles and Erik were already there. He should have taken his time and the tension could be cut with a knife.

“Peter, how are you? I haven’t seen you around much” Erik greeted the silver haired mutant politely.

“Oh you know I’ve just been around” Peter waved him off and he could feel the professor’s eyes burning into him like Scott’s lasers.

“Peter did you know that Erik will be staying on a our new foreign language professor?” Charles asked and Peter could once again feel the frustration start to bubble up.

“Really? I thought the government gave you an island or something?” Peter asked pointedly, ignoring the professor’s smug grin.

“Well I decided that I should stay, one thing apocalypse was right about was mutants needing to stick together” Erik explained and Peter was suddenly regretting taking this job.

“Isn’t it delightful Erik is fluent in so many languages German, Russian, French, Spanish, and even Polish. Peter isn’t your mother originally from the Ukraine?” Peter wanted to glare at the older man but couldn’t...not without giving himself away at least.

“No she’s originally from Poland she moved to the Ukraine after being liberated with my ciotka” Peter bit out unknowingly feeding Erik valuable information.

“You are Jewish?” Peter wanted to run, he supposed he had Jewish blood he had known his father was Jewish.

“Romani” Peter answered shortly, trying to hint that he didn’t want to talk about it. He also wasn’t technically lying to be Jewish your mother technically had to be Jewish.

“And your last name is Maximoff?” Peter could feel the anxiety build up in his throat cursing his seventeen year old self for dropping the fact that his mother quote “knew someone who could control metal”.

Erik began staring hard at the boy taking in his features. He began to see a resemblance to Magda, his ex wife. He tried to explain it away he was probably Marya’s child, but how likely was it that Marya would give birth to a child with a mutation. He knew that Django and her husband didn’t have any mutation that he knew about.

Erik’s calculating gaze only served to push Peter that much closer to an anxiety attack. He could feel his already swift heart rate pick up even faster with his emotions. He could feel the cool metal of the watch hum and he fought the anxiety. The last thing Peter needed was to give Erik another clue. Controlling metal would be like a neon sign yelling I’m your son.

“Your mother was her name Marya or Magda?” Erik asked, still studying the nervous man. With his mother’s name all the metal in the professor’s office began to hum and vibrate. Peter began internally cussing as Erik’s eyes went wide. He started to bolt out the door but was held in place by his watch and the zipper on his jacket.

“Peter” was all Erik could say and suddenly Peter began to wonder if the professor hadn’t called the staff meeting and only let him and Erik know. That was something he should have expected from Raven not the professor. It seemed being a meddling meddler ran in their family.

“Uh yeah?” He nervously rubbed the back of his neck trying to get the metal in the room to stop vibrating.

“Your mother, her name was Magda” Erik remarked, it was a statement not a question. He couldn’t help but wish the Wanda was here with him. She had always been the smarter twin.

“Ummm yeah” he confessed. Erik’s face looked like a cross between anguish and pure joy. Anguish that he had missed so much of his child’s life and joy that he had been reunited with said child. This was Anya’s baby brother and Nina’s elder brother. Erik knew that he would protect Peter with all of his might from now on. Erik would not waste another moment.

“My son” Erik’s voice was thick with emotion as he started down his adult child. Peter went to look at Charles for help but cursed when he saw that the wheelchair bound man had excused himself without Peter or Erik noticing.

Erik staggered forward wrapping his arms around the man and Peter melted. Peter may not have needed a father but that wasn’t to say he didn’t want one. He had always craved male companionship, he had always looked forward to visiting his aunt and uncle as a child. This was different though this man was his father, something his uncle Django tried to be for him but never really could. Erik’s hug was warm and safe and strong and he suddenly felt like he was fifteen years old again.

“Dad,” he muttered, finally squeezing the older man back fighting back tears. He had thought Erik would be angry, that he would think that Peter was trying to replace Nina. Erik wasn’t angry though, Erik was relieved he had his family. His family might not be whole but at least he had part of it.

“You have my mother’s eyes” Erik informed him, as he pulled back to further examine Peter’s face. Peter had always thought that his eyes were a dull brown, he had always wished they were bright like his mother and sister’s were. He supposed this was better, if he had his grandmother's eyes that meant that a part of her lived on.

Peter knew that he needed to inform Erik of Wanda, but that could wait a few more moments. For now all Peter wanted to do was soak in his father’s acceptance and love at least for a moment

Thank you please feel free to request.

#evan peters #dadneto #peter maximoff #quicksilver #ralph bohner #wanda and pietro #xmen #fanfiction #xmen apocalypse #x men fanfiction #dadneto fanfic #erik lehnsherr #erik Lehnsherr fanfiction #peter maximoff fanfiction #metallokinetic!peter maximoff #request

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moontheoretist · 3 years ago

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Wanda was an adult in AoU, please stop infantilizing her.

I swear if I once again see someone claiming that Wanda was a teenager while joining Hydra I will scream at the top of my lungs. I know most of the people, me included, didn’t know about Yugoslavia and NATO bombings and just didn’t realize that Wanda’s backstory is based on real-world events (Nato bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999, unrest in Kosovo, probably both in 2004 and 2008), but goddammit, how much you have to be hard-pressed to see someone as a minor simply because they vaguely look like one? You know, young adults wear clothes like Wanda did in that movie? You know a lot of people have baby faces? You know there are very short fucking adults too? You know a lot of people over 25 are confused by people twice their age to be kids (Tony, Clint), because to them, they look young, and they have no idea how to gauge ages of people 20+. You also know that Steve Rogers, age 20+, calls himself “a kid from Brooklyn” and you believe him when he says Wanda is a kid, while she was nearly my age in AoU (I am 27 as of 2021), and the only reason why she seems as a kid a lot is that MCU never cared about portraying her well and because they infantilize her a lot by letting men around her call her a kid and define how she should feel and act.

She was 24 or 25 when joining Nazis, and I didn’t even need WandaVision to confirm it to me, to know that. She may initially think they were joining SHIELD, but after SHIELD fell, and after she got her powers, there is no reason to believe, she wasn’t aware and didn’t tell Pietro, especially considering that Pietro in tie-in comics was suspicious of the branch of SHIELD they were joining. So she would definitely tell him, and then they both stayed. Maybe they thought Hydra can help them fulfill their goal and planned to leave them afterwards or even destroy them afterwards. I dunno, it’s never stated anywhere. Anyway, they stayed with the Nazis, which they knew were Nazis, because if anybody knew who Hydra was, slavic people would be one of the groups who had classes at school about it, and no matter how much your country was bombed, at some point it would rebuilt, and you would go back to school and go to university, because in most slavic countries higher education is free. Thy would probably have to find jobs at some point too, because they would need money to buy things, like clothes and pay for the place they were staying at, but otherwise they should be able to study and go to protests in 2013 to protest against Americans in their country. And ok, as much as I hate America barging into countries as they please, I must highlight that a lot of “protect my country” rhetoric is inherently nationalist and borders on nazism and fascism. Especially in slavic countries, which are like a breeding grounds for that type of shit, despite the fact we were all targeted by Nazis as much as Romani, Jewish, gay, disabled etc. people and should know better, we often use the same rhetoric in order to protect our country or get justice for it. My country does it all the time when it comes to WWII to the point of rewriting history itself. So even when they had a right to want to kick out Americans, the rhetoric was rooted not only in trauma, but also in xenophobia and nationalism, which was masked as patriotism. The tie-in comic is very vague about the whole circumstances around the protests. We know the slogans which twins say, but we do not know the exact situation behind it, so we can’t compare the slogans to something tangible. We dunno if American military was just staying in their country too long, and they were angry at them due to how they fucked them up already in 1999 and wanted them gone, or they were doing more harm and hurt Sokovia even more after that. It is not shown. As far as I know their slogans could be an exaggeration to drive the point home that America is responsible for all the wars that ever hurt Sokovia, while there was no war happening at the time. (And because I know what the war which hurt the twins is based on I can see why they would hate Americans specifically, but I don’t believe that America in MCU was responsible for that war as the war was internal and America just got involved with their trigger-happy hands and zero remorse about murdering civilians by dropping bombs on their heads).

So they were radicalized, and they would need to be deradicalized to get proper redemption, and MCU didn’t do that. They allowed Wanda and Pietro to save one Korean train and a bunch of slavic people (their brethren, which automatically doesn’t count, because nationalists would always save their own and never care about the suffering of people from the other nations), but it didn’t erase all the people they endangered or killed by letting Hulk loose on Johannesburg or by joining Ultron. They fought against Ultron later, but they were never shown to actually repay somehow the bad they did before that. It is all off-screen. Or, in Pietro’s case, he died.

(RIP Pietro, the slavic man, who was killed, because Hollywood thinks that dying is redemption).

And then Wanda accidentally blows a building, because Steve has PTSD and froze during battle and shouldn’t even be there in the first place, not to mention leading a squad with how much traumatized and not fit for duty he is, and Wanda is not properly trained for that type of situation, and she gets all the burnt, because she had to pick Steve’s slack, and it backfired on her. She was horrified and then Mr Perfect told her she cannot care about every life they “cannot save”, even thought it was an accident which happened, because of him. And then she stayed at the compound. We dunno if she knew she had to stay there and why, or she didn’t. We dunno if Tony ordered her to stay for her own good, or let Vision tell her that people are mad, and she should stay. We dunno any of that, but we know she cared about the people she killed and then Hawkeye came and mocked her for doing the right thing and removing herself from the situation for the time being and egged her to “prove to them” that she is not the monster they think, to join Steve’s side and fight, and she did. And then she became the fugitive, because she listened to two buffoons, from which one has PTSD, is traumatized, shouldn’t make any leadership decisions, who then lost the love of his life and thought he will lose Bucky too and got obsessed with saving Bucky at all cost becoming even more compromised than he already was, and the second one who also is traumatized, but is also trigger-happy enough to abandon everything, leave his family and go help Captain America when he calls to arms.

I hate AoU for doing slavic people dirty, but AoU is probably the only movie in which Wanda’s decisions are her own and nobody else is fueling them by egging her on to do something. She was the leader in their twin enhanced squad. She was the one who was leading Pietro, while Pietro played the supporting brother role, despite having a lot of rage he wanted to unleash. He listened to his sister, and then when he was gone, Wanda fell into a pattern of being infantilized and guided by others. Specifically Steve and Clint, who half the time either didn’t let her make her own choices or somehow influenced her decisions by saying some shit.

Edit: 30.10.2021

[Also to the people who claim that Tony is so horrible because he attacked Bucky. First: He punched Steve first, and then Bucky and Tony turned towards each other literally at the same time, so it’s hard to say if Tony was aiming at Bucky first, or Bucky locked his gun on him first and Tony was just reacting to it. Second: Steve in this whole movie is also reacting to trauma. He just lost Peggy, the one of two people he actually had in this world from his previous life, because SHIELD helped him not to create meaningful bonds with others by allowing him to join fight after fight with barely any evaluation after he was defrosted. They never show in the movies that Steve was to some kind of therapy, therefore it is void and doesn’t exist, and we know SHIELD is fucked up even without HYDRA, so assuming they did that on purpose is not a stretch. Natasha in MCU is very much still in her Red Room phase if you ask me, so she barely can make connections, just like Steve, Clint being the only exception, because he freed her from her involuntary trafficking/enslavement. And then when Steve met Sam - the only sensible guy who could help Steve move on, Bucky very conveniently dropped from the sky thanks to what Steve never actually moved on with his life and still believes that the friendships he made in the current timeline will never be as strong and meaningful to him as the ones he had in 1940′s. Anyway, coming back to my point: Steve’s first reaction after losing Peggy was going on a rampage to save Bucky at all cost. It is a trauma response to losing someone and feeling that he is alone. The exact same trauma response Tony had when he realized that Steve betrayed him, just like any other person Tony ever known. The difference is that Tony has this reaction at the end of the movie and in a very vulnerable position, while Steve’s reaction spans a whole movie and is somehow egged by the Power Broker - that’s why I say it is better if Agent Carter was the Power Broker all along because despite being kicked out of CIA, she only gained since the Avengers broke apart - so every decision he makes in that movie is automatically compromised in one way or another (either because SHIELD neglected to help him acclimate with the future, so he didn’t get what Accords are about, or because he felt that Bucky is in danger, not to mention he didn’t really listen to higher ups even in the 40s, so you could also blame USA military for allowing a guy who broke the rules to be rewarded for it and let loose with a hit squad of people he personally picked), while Tony, despite also suffering from PTSD and trauma, does fairly well until the end of the fucking movie. I dunno if Tony goes to therapy or smth, but he just went on a break with Pepper. He may have been devastated all this time and still made more good calls than bad calls (bad being: taking Peter to the fight out of desperation, because he didn’t have people, and he wanted someone who could deescalate the fight if it came to it, and he didn’t have anybody like that in the roster), so excuse me if I don’t take “Tony is evil because he attacked Bucky” argument seriously.]

#mcu fandom critical #wanda maximoff #pietro maximoff #ultron #wanda maximoff critical #mcu steve rogers critical #steve rogers critical #clint barton critical

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scarlet--wiccan · 4 years ago

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Hey, since the maximoffs are generally white-passing (though not always and “passing” is a complicated thing) in the comics, do you think it’s rude/unnecessary to confront someone for making very pale art of them? If I did it I’d try to be nicer about it than I would if they were just blatantly whitewashing a visibly brown or black character, but I see a lot of artist who I feel like might not know and I really wonder if it’s worth it. Do you have any thoughts?

That's complicated. It's not a misrepresentation of the characters in the way that, for instance, a blonde Wanda or a tall, muscular Billy would be.

I can't reasonably fault anybody, fanartist or canon illustrator, for drawing characters on-model.

That said, in the last few years there has been an ongoing conversation in this fandom, at least here on tumblr, about who the Maximoffs are, and the ways in which their general representation is lacking. It's become more common to draw the characters with darker skin or more apparently ethnic features. If you're a fan of Wanda, or Pietro, or any iteration of Young Avengers, it's pretty hard to avoid that conversation, so it's easy to point fingers at anybody who seems to be ignorant to, or is intentionally ignoring, that trend. If I'm reading your message correctly, you seem to be asking if that trend represents a truer, more valid version of the characters that we should all adhere to, and if it is necessarily problematic to do otherwise.

I'm of two minds. On the one hand, I believe that disrupting the representation of all Roma people as white-passing, or even interchangeable with white Europeans, is crucial. Setting aside the fact that the diaspora intersects with just about every racial group, not just white people, the broad whitewashing of Roma communities in media erases our origins and occludes the fact that the mistreatment of Roma people is a race issue. On a wider scale, I believe that this manufactured ignorance contributes to systemic antiromanyism, but within the sphere of pop culture, specifically, it allows people to get away with obviously racist art and writing, and it's why Romani history and identity are viewed as disposable whenever people adapt these comics for the screen.

On the other hand, I'm deeply frustrated by the tokenization and co-opting of Roma identity that this fandom performs. This may sound hypocritical, considering how much of my blog revolves around my edits, but I see a lot of folks on tumblr who draw brown Wandas, make fancasts with Romani actors, and, like me, photoshop comic book panels, but not a lot of people who demonstrate any understanding of antiromanyism, or better yet, material allyship. In everybody's haste to earn diversity points, they've produced a lot of unintentionally racist content. I've seen a lot of cultural tourism, inappropriately co-opted activist work, and even virtual brownfacing in the form of RP accounts. No one, myself included, should feel entitled to dictate what a true or valid image of Wanda looks like, but especially not a community of people who think that having a folder of Hiba Abouk gifs and a Wikipedia list of common chib phrases makes it okay to racefake for your MCU roleplay.

Anyways, when it comes to fanart, you're going to have to rely on your own subjective judgement, and try to think about more specific issues than "whitewashing" because these characters just don't fit into that idea. Content that's derived from the movies is complicit in erasure. Content that is derived from the comics, but which applies lighter and straighter hair to Billy or Wanda is complicit in eurocentric standards, and the trend of gradually lightwashing characters of color, and even white Jewish characters. Content which employs racist stereotypes is not better than canon "white-passing" depictions. Cultural appropriation is still cultural appropriation, even if the character you're drawing is a member of that culture. Many popular writers and artists have a history of ignoring or shutting down dialogues about representation, even harassing people like me.

Hopefully, thinking about that stuff gives you a more clear idea of what to look out for, what's worthy of confrontation, and how to articulate your problems with a specific person or their content.

I know this ran longer than was strictly necessary, but I wanted to roll your message together with a similar question about whitewashing:

The Maximoffs weren't conceived, written, or designed in such a way as to be intentionally whitewashed, at least not originally-- their background was established via a retcon, at least a decade after their first appearance. Up until that point, they were generic, apparently white, Central Europeans. The fact that they are treated as interchangeably white and Roma is both product and perpetuation of the broad whitewashing of European Romani that I described earlier. Nobody's going out of their way to make sure the twins always have at least one white ancestor in order to justify "whitewashing" them, rather, nobody has ever truly envisioned them as people of color in the first place.

People will perform all kinds of mental gymnastics in order to minimize the Maximoffs' ancestry, or come up with reasons why it makes the most sense for them to look white-- invoking Erik as the father; dredging up the short-lived Robert Frank retcon; or, for Billy and Tommy, claiming that their resurrection somehow erased their genetic and ancestral ties to Wanda, even though the text implies the very opposite. I'll let you in on a secret, though-- these characters aren't real people, and their stories aren't immutable truths. If anybody, fans, writers, or artists, is making leaps of logic to avoid making comics more inclusive, it's not because their hands are tied by the unbreakable chains of canon, it's because they don't want comics to be more inclusive.

Also, I could be off the mark here, but I don't think I am-- Sinti people are Roma. Different parts of the diaspora have different names for themselves, but are all part of the same larger population. It's mostly a regional thing, as I understand. If you want my opinion, it doesn't matter what version of the story you go with-- whether Magda, Marya or Natalya is their birthmother, Marya and Django raised them. They have direct Roma ancestry either way, and they were raised by a Roma family. It's hard to say exactly where in the world the Maximoffs lived, or what specific label they might have identified with, but the twins would likely identify with the community they were raised in, be that Sinti or Servitka or Kalerash or whatever else. If I'm being honest I don't think that distinction is relevant for non-Roma to make.

I've said this before, but I don't really care what the characters look like, and I'm not interested in playing identity politics with fictional stories that were created by and for American gadje. Obviously, I love these characters as a fan, and I do have my own vision, no pun intended, of who they are and how I'd like to see them represented, but I worry that these conversations are unproductive. I hope you guys understand that I'm not out here trying to canonize an arbitrary idea of what Jewish Romani people look like. American superhero media has a long history of exploiting, misrepresenting, and erasing Romani history. I want more people to understand that, and understand the material consequences it has, and think about how comics, American culture, and art in general can deconstruct this specific mechanism of racism. It's not about any one character's identity, and it's not about my creative vision.

#bee text #wanda maximoff #pietro maximoff #billy kaplan #tommy shepherd #robintext

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vjestyca · 6 years ago

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/can/ I use an Indian actress though? like would that be ethically correct in a way too or

again, not quite my place to say, but i think i’ve seen some people use indian actresses as romani people ancestors were discovered to originate from northern india (i think?). i have seen people use indian actresses for wanda maximoff, like priyanka chopra, deepika padukone, alia bhatt, and shraddha kapoor.

so i guess that, yes? you could?

#[ if someone who is romani or jewish says otherwise ]#[ id say listen to them ]#[ but from what ive seen people have used indian actresses for the maximoffs ]#cant hear you over my internal monologue | tai answers. ]#Anonymous

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bromantically · 4 years ago

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fav characters: will graham, richie tozier, zuko, hiro hamada, jonathan sims

fav songs: see through by the band CAMINO, blame and final hour by bastille, no children by the mountain goats, backflip by the front bottoms

psychoanalyze me

ur very cynical and u associate urself with a lot of typically "scary" or "unliked" things because u enjoy the solidarity of finding the ability to love something a lot of people dont (im biased here but this experience is strongly related to ur queerness + being romani and jewish)

u see urself as a very mean and unlikeable person to those around u and even tho u will say u dont care about if people like u or not, i think to a degree u feel very alone in many instances. u feel very unlike most people around u and as a result of ur identity uve had to become able to response to people without being gentle or patient with them because otherwise ur talked over or ignored

that being said tho, u care so very much about the people uve let into ur life. people who gain ur trust mean the world to u and u likely have difficulty expressing it to them but u care about them SO much. its very difficult to make it into the list of ppl u genuinely trust but when someone does, theyre very special to u. theyre ur very own found family :)

also im biased since i already know u are, but ur autistic and u have adhd on account of richie, zuko and hiro primarily (also will but im p sure u latched onto will bc he said hes autistic + struggles w impulses)

#friend asks #bean answers #beanomancy #q word #i have more thoughts tbh but i dont wanan go on for too long #these tell me a lot about what uve had to go through in ur life....#ur stronger than any us marine tbh #also i think maybe u have some struggles irt abandonment #it showed mostly through ur songs and hiro #also zuko...

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weaselbeaselpants · 4 years ago

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That Krispy Cat: A Warning, part 3

The last of the images cause I don’t want this bitch on my computer anymore.

Knowing tumblr I kept the images hidden JUUUUST in case no one reads the fine print and can’t tell I’m being critical of this and gets me in trouble.

VVV ((Just in case you thought the JewishGriffon piece assured everyone that Crispy couldn’t POSSIBLY hate people of color, some of her earliest Nazi art had her character Klaus beating up Amigo Bear. She also made Amigo into a liberal strawman. )) VVV

((Dialogue to one of her TROLLARIOUS pictures that featured Amigo:

Amigo Bear: *muttering* "Your leader was a !@#$% little #@%^!@$^*!, you fascist feather duster..." General Klaus: "Fräulein, Ich vant you to cover your ears und shut your eyes as tight as you can." Crispy: "How come, General?" General Klaus: "Klaus ist about to say und do very bad sings zhat he does not vant his little Edelweiß to see or hear." Crispy: "Alrighty!" General Klaus: "WHO SAID ZHAT ABOUT DER FÜHRER? WER DIE FICK GESAGT? WHO'S ZUH SCHLEIMIG LITTLE COMMUNIST-SCHEISS SCHWANZLUTSCHER DOWN ZHERE, WHO JUST SIGNED HIS OWN DEATH VARRANT? NIEMAND?! GOTTVERDAMMT STALIN SAID IT! HERVORRAGEND! VHICH VUN OF YOU VANTS TO BE ZUH FIRST TO FIND OUT ZUH HARD VAY VHY MEIN FEINDE CALLED MIR DER BUTCHER BIRD?" ))

^^^ ((BUTOPHERARTISGOODSOYOUCAN’TCOMPLAIN

also the disc. for this pic before it was deleted had a ‘joke’ about cooking Jews in ovens. Oh and yes, that IS Hitler she’s giving that ugly ass cupcake too.))

^^^ (( - Thanks dA I never would have known I had a notifications unless eclipse blah -

This is one of her rants about how #Triggered she is that Starlight be compared to the Nazis when she runs a communist cult. Because A) that’s the real problem here and B) I too get upset when people say my OC is based on Jeffrey Dahmer when he’s so CLEARLY based on Ed Gein, Bwwwaaaah D> D> D> !)) ^^^

VVV ((Ugly art of her friend’s awful OCs.)) ^^^

VVV ((Crispy showing off why no one wants to be a patriot in our country.)) VVV

((FYI, Crisp, that attitude will make the Hamilton fans stronger so just keep that SJW-flinging coming you little SJW.

WHAT?! Social Justice is a broad term and as Crispy’s plainly demonstrated, you can circle it around and make a majority-class sound like the real underprivledged if you have enough fancy frou frou know-how and furries. Also, if a Social Justice Warrior constitutes someone who takes their cause soooo seriously that they’re annoying/petting/cruel/stupid about it....idk I think Crispy qualified.))

^^^ ((Crispy and her friend muse about what other races occupy the world of MLP in her headcanon. This, more than any other dA disc. and picture shows you her brand of “Segregationist-Nationalism is OKAY” thinking, cuz the art of these different races isn’t super offensive or cruel and neither are the characters. BUT if you scratch under the surface you’ll find that Crispy really likes these different people staying in their place and not in “someone else’s” country.

THEN, this same kind of thinking is used to convince you any mix of cultures is just cultural appropriation, again acting like she and her Nazi-stans are the only ones standing up to actual bigotry.)) VVV

^^^ ((Crispy makes the world a worse place by bringing up actual decent points; like how Americans dress Thanksgiving up as progressive and for the natives when we all know that’s not true...all to better her worldview.

fyi, GET OUT whenever you see a selfproclaimed Nazi fawn over Native Americans, because: Nazi Germany had a deep fascination with American Indians and used their struggles about their land being taken away from them to justify their eugenic genocide.)) ^^^

^^^ (( Crispy laughing it up on Furaffinity how she couldn’t be banned from her Furaffinity and then mysteriously never using her site there wowie.)) ^^^

^^^ (( Crispy complaining about SOPA cause her freedom of speech and blahblahblah.

Freedom of Speech is important. Unfortunately what people like Crispy don’t understand or care for is there’s no freedom of consequence. )) vvv

VVV ((LOL Joseph Mengele was such a stinkah let’s tell blithe jokes about him. At least WE AREN’T LIKE HIM!!!)) VVVV

VVV ((Early onset eugenic BS from her Spyro stuff that would be easy to miss if you didn’t know what this woman was talking about)) VVV

((Crispy admitting she thinks gays are pointless cuz they don’t reproduce but apparently loves them anyway. Also big shock Crispy’s seen Hetalia.)) VVV

VVV ((Crispy probably wanting Weeaboos to attack her cuz aren’t Japan’s animations so laaaaaaazy?!!?!? GUUdd think’ I’m a naziaboo! Germany’s never made any shitty animation evah. You know what, I lied. She doesn’t deserve Hetalia. She just doesn’t.)) VVVV

VVV ((Crispy dragging Brazil down with her as the apparent “Best South American Country”. Yikes.)) VVV

VVV ((More “it’s trolling ergo it’s not harmful” shit. Bulgarians probably do deserve their own Care Bears, but they certainly don’t want yours Crispy.)) VVV

VVV ((Disc. for her Richard Spencer bear art)) VVV

------

I know, I know...this isn’t what you wanted to read today, guys. I know it’s offensive and I’m sorry if it made you ill. I also know I’m putting my own blog under fire by showing these images here but I think that should say something about dA’s bad policies that this art gets a filter slapped on it and nothing more when the artist is blatantly pro-fascist.

Crispy resonates with me so much - and no it’s not cause I DARED to be “triggered”.

It’s because, for one, she was talented. I MEAN I HAVE EYES! That’s some nicely drawn digital stuff I’m not gonna deny. She had some cool rewrites and sequel ideas that, had it come from someone else I would have eaten up and faved to hell and back onceupona2012. But I didn’t, where a ton of MLP and furry fans did because they undervalued their own talents and would say “well it’s pretty who cares about the message?”

Unlike so many commercial+published artists, it’s REALLY hard to separate the art from the artist here because the artist is so connected and a part of her art and storytelling. If you fav her art, even if you didn’t like her, that was telling Crispy she’d won. It’s so defeating to have other artists say their gonna ignore their gut for the sake of prettypretty-Don-Bluth style art. And yes, that stigma DOES affect my view on 2D purists btw.

Crispy was so holier than thou’, and that attitude also was appealing to dA folks, not to mention her knowledge of art history by the time she dropped off the radar. Crispy was the kind of person who’d make long, detailed, justified rants against the design and color choices in Hazbin Hotel and then a bunch of antis would eat her redesigns up only to learn the awful truth later and embarrass themselves cuz they were so taken up by the craft they didn’t know they were reblogging a fucking Nazi.

Not to underplay Viv’s wrongdoings of course, but I’m sorry; the two aren’t comparable on the problematic artist meter. THAT’S HOW BAD CRISPY WAS.

If this somehow was just a faze and she’s come to her senses or doesn’t really think this shite she preaches...I don’t care. She said some vile shit and fuck no I’m not forgiving her. It’s like KenDraw or Shadman. You’ve changed your life around and realized you’ve done/drawn nasty shit that’s done real harm? Cool....I’m still not talking or ever promoting you, ya dingbat. You ain’t no Roman Polanski or Doug Tennaple. You’re a singular internet artist and any support of the project has to go to you - and you suck!

ThisCrispyKat was a wakeup call that showed me these people not only still exist but will be allowed to get away with it. I was very touchy bout this kind of thing back in the day. Fuck, I STILL AM TOUCHY. The rabbit holes I found thanks to Crispy opened up to reveal communities where people think my hair color’s going extinct. People would detail how much they wanted to rape me - a natural blonde - and kill my friends and family for not looking like me. That they want to jerk off in my naturally curly hair and see me in glowy German princess gowns preparing them dinner.

Crispy and other Nazistans would look at me; a blond-haired blue eyed Polish/German American woman and think I need to be “fixed” because I DARE to repeat propaganda that the Nazis were bad. They’d call me a traitor for thinking that celebrating the Nazi party ISN’T German pride.

HOW DARE YOU TELL ME THAT’S GERMAN PRIDE! I’LL SHOW YOU GERMAN PRIDE YOU EGOSTROKING-LIMPDICKED ATTENTION WHORES.

People like Crispy make it 1000x harder to actually show interest in German things. Because I AM interested in German shit btw.

Like for real: it’s a country I’d love to visit one day (at least the black forest, which is where my mom’s fam comes from). I love German art and German fairytales slap. I really do want to explore my heritage through art and stuff.

But guess what? Much as Crispy would argue to the contrary I DO know my WWII history and beyond and FUCK YOU if you honestly think jerking it to cuddly Nazi-furs is empowering or just “showing your interest in history”. Take your own advice and read a god-damn book.

TL;DR: I DO NOT have to be proud of Nazis to enjoy German culture and if you think otherwise, FUCK YOU. It’s a slap in the face to everyone even if you are ‘just trolling’ and it in no way values actual German’s feeling on the matter. It’s annoying how people undervalue real people just for the sake of fan art.

The Nazis were evil. They were racist, eugenic-genocidal idiots who killed over six million Jewish people, Romani, Slavs, Jehovahs Witnesses, disabled people, Poles, homosexuals and prisoners of war. They would have killed my dad’s side of the family if they were in Poland at the time. They made bullshit tanks that killed the people making them and didn’t work on the battlefield. Their leader was a fat, farting one-testicaled bastard who preferred animals to people.

They ruined everything for everyone and then took the easy way out, leaving the Germans that were left in the hands of the also-genocidal Soviets and Americans. Germany is still paying their war debts and now, 70-80 years later everyone else wants to laugh off this dark period of history with memes and forget what they did, and as such, are forgetting the victims of the genocide.

I have 0 tolerance for Nazi things for the sake of HUMANITY, let alone the individual groups they target. I don’t have to have German ancestry or know a single Jewish person to tell you any of this. It’s fucking history.

Eat shit.

#tw: nazi #tw: neonazi #tw: swastika #tw: antisemitism #cultural appropriation #kimba the white lion #thiscrispykat #altright #classic spyro #My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #balto #animals of farthing wood

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dragonofnevarra · 5 years ago

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Omfg, I think the solavellan lore purist blocked me. I'm not sure if they (I don't know their pronouns so if someone knows better, let me know) blocked anyone else who interacted with that post but it does make me wish I could ask them:

Why does it bother you so much? Frankly, I'm a lore Frankenstein. I heavily believe in throwing out racist or frankly just really shoddy worldbuilding out of an otherwise alright canon. I believe in patching lore where it needs to be patched. I find lore purity to be needlessly (for lack of better word) prudish. But I don't make long-winded posts attacking lore purists.

We all exist in this community and have opinions on this hugely problematic piece of media. We all have our own opinions and headcanons and ways of connecting with the franchise. So why does it embitter you to know that some people aren't lore purist?

But, more importantly, why this piece of lore in particular? This piece of lore, that pushes the idea of "breeding out" a race, particularly when most interspecies offspring in our world are infertile, making a high likelihood that half-elves would be, too. When the writers don't call them half-elves, but elf-blooded, which forcibly pulls in the semantics used primarily by racists to discuss biracial people.

Yeah, elves aren't real. But when the authors have explicitly told us that they're directly based on indigenous peoples, jewish people, and the romani? When they use imagery and iconograohy that is meant to show those connections to outsiders who don't fall into those groups? And then they write that elves have to stick to their own if they want their children to look like them, that elves are selfish or unhelpful towards non-elves, that elves are regularly killed for sport and enslaved, that city elves don't feel connected to their Dalish cousins and shirk the culture, etc, it says terrible things about what the writers think of those peoples from which they're drawing inspiration.

So, again, why was this the piece of lore you choose to defend?

#Dragon age #Da elves #Dalish elves #Da lore #Half-elves #Elf-blooded

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dalishious · 2 years ago

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I may have this all wrong, but is it just me or does there seem to be this trend in the (Dalish positive spaces of) fandom, where city elves' culture is seen as "less" of a culture than the Dalish's and less connected to the Dales (Not helped by the source material)? As an example, recently some people were talking about how an elf PC would feel about Orlais being so huge because they took over the Dales and the only ones anybody brought up were Mahariel and Lavellan, as if Tabris and Surana would somehow have less of a connection to the Dales, which idk feels a little odd, given how clearly inspired the city elves are from the Jewish and Romani peoples.

Obviously the Dalish do have more information about a lot of things! And I'm not denying that! But there's this lingering implication that happens when people talk about city/circle elves that, as an example, none of them could believe in the Elvhen gods without being Dalish because otherwise it would be cultural appropriation somehow despite it being just as much their culture as the Dalish's?

I could be reading into this incorrectly, (social cues and reading between the lines is not my forte) hence why I wanted to run it by someone else, but it sits with me very uncomfortably given their real life counterparts

A few thinks to unpack here...

While it's true that city elves and Dalish elves have developed individual aspects of culture based on their surroundings, they are still all of the same people. This opinion in-game is argued between different characters, but I firmly stand on the side of those who favour a unified elven identity. And if someone were to argue that because their cultures are different, well, the same could be said of individual Dalish clans--and yet no one argues that the Dalish are not grouped together because of that.

Subsequently, city elves have just as much a right to claim their ancestors of the Dales as the Dalish do.

The only reason most city elves are Andrastian is because it's illegal for them to worship the Elven Pantheon, at least publicly. But this doesn't stop some elves from doing so! For example, the quest "Flowers for Senna" in DA:I has you place flowers on the grave of a deceased partner for a widowed elf who recites "may your ashes be gathered by Falon'Din," and says to Lavellan, "You are Dalish? My Senna and I, we kept to the old ways as we could, though I know we are as children to you." This is not cultural appropriation because you cannot appropriate your own culture, and I reiterate: city or Dalish, they are all elves and they all have the same ancestors.

#ask #city elves

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eldunea · 5 years ago

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headcanon dump on pokéverse lotor’s grandpa ezra because i love this man with my whole soul

(this post refers to @aeshmedai‘s unova. this post also operates with an alternate history of wwii.)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

ezra was born in the 1920s, eldest son of the sincline family and next in line to becoming court alchemist. when he was a kid and young adult he was a major ass. he was born with pretty much everything--wealth, striking good looks, intelligence, talent, inheritance to the position of the harmonias’ court alchemist--except, that is, common sense. he was also born in a country where racism and other forms of discrimination didn’t exist, and didn’t want to think about the world outside unova’s borders because it was a hellish cesspool and he preferred to just exist in his utopian bubble where there were next to no problems. he was stuck-up and fairly ignorant--also lazy because his extreme intelligence meant everything came easily to him K-12. two things kicked his ass eventually though: one of them was college. the other was his future wife and lotor’s grandmother, malaea.

malaea was a native alolan student. this was still in the early-mid 1900s, when many parts of alolan culture were still outlawed. ezra saw her and was lovestruck at first sight--she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen and when he saw how smart she was he fell in love with her even further…she was legit the only person he’d ever met who he thought might be smarter than him and that made him crush hard. but malaea, even though she liked how (book) smart he was, was constantly annoyed by the cavalier attitude he had toward the real world’s problems. any time she brought up the problems facing the real world, his response was pretty much “don’t worry, unova’s going to fix that” and her response to that was always “THEN HOW COME THEY HAVEN’T FIXED IT ALREADY?!”

they split over a conversation about the upcoming world war ii. malaea was worried there’d be a war and that fascist germany would start conquering countries. and ezra was just saying the same “don’t worry, it’ll be fine! unova’s going to stop them and this will all be over before you know it.” (narrator vc: it was not, in fact, over before he knew it.) he went on about how he had relatives in the army who would never let this injustice stand, how unbeatable unova’s knights were in battle and how if germany’s leader tried to pull anything she would quickly find her head crushed between the jaws of unova’s royal dragons. and that was it, malaea finally had enough.

she yelled at him asking him how he could be so blind, and so stupidly patriotic. she said she felt like unova wasn’t actually as great as everyone said it was, because if it was so great at saving people, how come the world still had so many problems? and if unova couldn’t solve what was going on in so many other parts of the world, what guaranteed the possibility that unova could stop germany? ezra just told her she ought to shut up and be more grateful to the country that protected people like her because without unova, she’d never be able to live in a place where racism didn’t exist. malaea stood up and left, telling him she never wanted to speak to him again.

things slowly got worse and worse after she left. he started out as a lazy fuck when he first went to college because he thought due to his genius intelligence he could just breeze through his coursework and spend the rest of the time partying, getting drunk, playing hooky, performing as a coordinator and doing dumb stunts with his pokémon……until he failed out of college. his father not only kicked him out of the house and told him to get a job, he also removed ezra from the succession to the court alchemist position. he did not know where the heck to even start getting his life together because he had never truly learned how to be an adult--which is part of what drove him to join the army.

when the war came, it was at this point of his life that he had an awakening. he had felt so secure in the knowledge that unova was going to stop the rise of fascism and halt the crimes being done to jews and romani in europe that he hadn’t fully comprehended the fact that they would have to do something drastic to stop it. he had spent all his life idolizing unova because he thought it could save the world from any disaster, but he had never even attempted to wrap his head around the fact that in order to save the world you have to get off your ass and actually save it. so he finally did it. he got off his ass. he vowed to help save the suffering peoples of europe. and he enlisted.

he came back from the war a changed man. no longer was he this arrogant, pretentious little boy who wanted to just ignore all problems that didn’t directly affect him. on the battlefield and in the liberation of concentration camps, he had seen the horrors of the world…and most importantly, he had seen firsthand that unova was not in fact guaranteed to prevent all those horrors from happening. everything he thought he knew about himself and the world was completely shattered over the course of six long years 1939 - 1945, and he wrote about it in a memoir that left out not a single detail.

malaea read his memoir, shocked that someone as immature as him had chosen to fight--and she was truly moved by the transformation that he had gone through. she got ahold of him and told him she was glad he’d grown so much, and that she wished to be friends again. ezra, who had loved her all this time (and even had said so in his memoir), was overjoyed. he didn’t expect anything from her romantically; he was just glad to be in her company again. as it so happened, the two of them fell in love. they married soon after reuniting, and had three beautiful daughters--the youngest of which was honerva, lotor’s mother.

while he was writing his memoir and reuniting with malaea, ezra began questioning where to take his life next. he had always “wanted to” be court alchemist, but the war made him question whether he actually wanted to be an alchemist or whether he was only attracted to the prestige and the trappings of the position. after going back to school (and not being a lazy little bitch while studying), he decided to major in psychology. he had felt the effects of the war in himself and seen it in others, whether they were fellow soldiers or concentration camp survivors that he had helped rescue, so now he saw his life’s path as helping them through their traumas. to the shock of everyone in his family, he refused the position of court alchemist and went on to become a therapist specializing in PTSD trauma. he is now one of the world’s leading experts on the topic, having written many books and papers on the topic that have been translated into multiple languages, and having given lectures all over the globe.

OTHER NOTES

his heritage is german jewish (ashkenazi), specifically prussian. and he is very white-passing, with blond hair and blue eyes.

no one is sure how high his IQ is, because he has received the maximum score on each IQ test that he has taken. however, it is estimated to be at least 180.

he speaks seven languages: english, unovan, hebrew, yiddish, german, japanese and alolan.

in the army he rose to the rank of sergeant, and he won a medal of valor. he still has his old military uniform and his old gun, and he treasures them greatly.

he is honestly just? so good? so pure?? like help this may be the first genuinely good--not morally grey or otherwise fucked up--character i’ve written and might possibly maintain an interest in. he is 100% the wholesome influence that pokéverse lotor needs in his life like g o d i’m so glad i retconned his death because now i can write him being the good bean he is and AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

despite being 99 wholeass years old, he’s still physically young, and he will be for a while--as will some members of his family. this was because during wwii he was exposed to xerneas’ energy from a divine weapon crafted by the cult of valhallor (the pokémon universe’s version of the nazis). he often says that it’s such a great irony that the cult, which wanted to kill all jewish people, ended up extending the life of a jewish man and his family by potentially hundreds of years.

as mentioned earlier, he was a coordinator in his youth. he was trained in ballet and originally did a lot of appeals in the beauty and smart categories, but while he was in college for the second time, he found his true calling in cool/tough. outside of unova, everyone in those categories underestimated him in his debut, calling him a namby pamby pretty boy……until he fucking brought out his guns. most people in his position would have cut their hair and abused steroids to get bigger and look tougher, but he never did because he had a brand to maintain: he became known as the pretty boy who played with guns like it was no shit.

nowadays he doesn’t go onstage like at all, but he is pretty outspoken about harmful trends in the coordinating community--such as the trend of cool- and tough-specializing coordinators being total assholes in order to cultivate a persona.

#npc. || EZRA SINCLINE #headcanon. || EZRA

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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years ago

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Marvel Cinematic Universe: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, once.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Seven (30.43% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Sixteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Significantly flawed, and well-known in fandom for it. Unpopular opinion? I still think it’s better than the first Avengers film.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Natasha and Laura pass in a single-line trade. It’s sooo close to not counting.

Female characters:

Natasha Romanoff.

Wanda Maximoff.

Maria Hill.

Helen Cho.

Peggy Carter.

Laura Barton.

FRIDAY.

Male characters:

Tony Stark.

Steve Rogers.

JARVIS.

Thor.

Clint Barton.

Strucker.

Pietro Maximoff.

Bruce Banner.

Ultron.

Sam Wilson.

James Rhodes.

Ulysses Klaue.

Heimdall.

Nick Fury.

Erik Selvig.

Vision.

OTHER NOTES:

Everyone talking about Strucker like we already know who he is...

The “Shit!”/”Language!” gag was funnier before they hung a lantern on it. Not least because it takes almost a full minute before Tony harks back to it (fifty seconds, actually. I checked). If you’re gonna make a Thing out of it, you gotta follow up immediately, not after fifty seconds of cutting around to different character intros and action shots and a whole lot of other dialogue.

Urrgghh, ok, I’m going to break my standing rule about not discussing source material, because we gotta acknowledge the colossal wrongness of re-writing the Maximoff twins - canonically Jewish Romani - as willing volunteers in a Nazi science experiment. It gets worse the more you think about it. There are a few things about this movie which generated significant negative outcry, and this incredibly offensive decision is one of them.

Tony and Thor fighting over who has a better girlfriend does have a certain charm to it. If you’re gonna have a testosterone-off, it might as well be about how great your partner is.

I got a zero out of ten on this out-of-nowhere forced romance crap with Natasha and Bruce. We’ll come back to this later.

“I will be reinstituting Prima Nocta,” Tony declares, as he prepares to lift Thor’s hammer and thereby theoretically take charge of the Nine Realms. Primae noctis (believed to in fact be a myth) refers to a supposed Dark-Ages law that granted lords the ‘right’ to take the virginity of any newlywed peasant woman who lived on their land. So, this is a wonderful little rape joke from Tony (or, y’know, not so little, since primae noctis in reality would make Tony a serial rapist). Ha ha ha ha. Hilarious. Good one.

I’m really mad about the parts here that are total garbage, because mostly, the revels sequence has a nice low-key quality to it, good solid team dynamics.

I can’t fucking believe that they played the ‘and then Bruce falls with his face in Natasha’s cleavage!’ gag. I cannot believe it. Is this a disgusting frat-boy comedy from the nineties?

Honestly, Tony, just shut up and admit that you KNEW from the get-go that it was wrong to try and make Ultron happen (that is why you kept it secret from everyone else to begin with); don’t try to defend the decision now that you’ve got a ‘murderbot’ on your hands. Take responsibility for a bad choice instead of talking shit about how you had to and everyone else is just too short-sighted, damn it!

Andy Serkis is delightful.

The Iron Man/Hulk fight absolutely KILLS the momentum of this film. It goes for way the fuck too long (eight minutes) and has no narrative significance at all. Pro tip for action scenes: they should always be driving the story somewhere. You can pull off eighty minutes of action so long as your plot is advancing alongside/within it.

Also, Iron Man causes a huge amount of additional damage during this fight, in the service of the aforementioned pointless action. His efforts to minimise Hulk’s effects are extremely poor, and calling in his relief organisation to clean up after the fact does not negate that.

Gotta love that throwing a wife and kids at Hawkeye at the same time as we suddenly start pushing this Natasha/Bruce thing. That’s not transparent at all. I also understand this to be a major deviation from Clint’s identity in the comics, and very unpopular with fans for that reason, but regardless; reinventing him as a family man to reset the romantic blather after baiting fans with the possibility of Clint/Natasha in the first Avengers movie is such a shitty move. I was not invested in the ship myself and would have loved to have them reinforce the just-friends relationship between Hawkeye and Black Widow, because there are not enough platonic friendships between compatible men and women in fiction, but 'they’re not interested in each other because they’re busy with someone else!’ is a weak reinforcement indeed. Less forced romances, and definitely less token wifey who exists for no other Goddamn reason at all. This comes out of nowhere, and not in a clever-surprise kind of way.

“You still think you’re the only monster on the team?” Natasha says, after telling Bruce about her sterilisation. This earned a HUGE backlash, and for good reason - despite all arguments about how what Natasha meant was that her being raised to be an assassin makes her a monster, the direct implication of her words as they are phrased and as the discussion is structured is that her inability to have children makes her monstrous, and that’s deeply offensive. It’s also completely in keeping with a narrative which is often played out against women, in which their value as people is attributed directly to their ability to produce offspring, so it’s not even like this outrageous implication of monstrosity - the corruption of what it means to be female! - is that unusual. It’s awful, but not unusual. Add on the fact that 1) Natasha’s nightmare-flashes specifically foregrounded her sterilisation over all other details of her training, supporting the idea that she believes that it’s what makes her irredeemable (instead of, y’know, all the murdering and stuff), and 2) this is Joss Whedon’s work and he is OBSESSED with highlighting the womanhood of his female characters and treating it like their defining trait while also variously punishing them for it, and you’ve got every reason to interpret this terrible fucking line as exactly the heinous thing it (presumably, unwittingly) seems to be.

Steve ripping a log in half with his bare hands is the funniest thing in this whole movie.

Thor’s brief side-adventure with Erik Selvig is pretty out-of-place. He just...goes for a swim in a convenient magic pond that Selvig chances to know about. Seems normal.

Ultron is full of such boring, empty rhetoric. Reminds me of Loki in The Avengers, with all that sound-and-fury.

I love Paul Bettany.

Man, they sure do find Natasha instantly. It’s almost like making a damsel-in-distress of her who needs to be rescued by the team was completely meaningless...

Breaking my no-BTS rule (since I already have done for this movie at this point) because it’s well-known how Joss Whedon ordered Elizabeth Olsen not to show exertion or ‘ugly emotion’ on her face in this film, because God forbid she compromise her attractiveness by being human. Joss Whedon is not human; he’s fucking trash.

The final fight sure does just, y’know, get to a point where it ends. They really did not ratchet up the tension over the course of the Sokovia conflict, it just goes along until it stops (also, they say Sokovia is a country, but then they never call the city anything else, it’s just Sokovia. Is the city conveniently named after the country (very confusing), or is it a city-country, like The Vatican? I kinda assume it’s option three, which is that no one bothered to care because it’s just some fake European placeholder anyway and we’re not supposed to notice such a dumb oversight).

“I was born yesterday.” This is the best quip in this whole thinks-it-is-way-wittier-than-it-is movie.

Helen Cho deserved better than to be a prop rapidly dismissed and then just trotted past at the end for an ‘oh, she survived, btw’.

Back when I reviewed the first Avengers movie, I said that I considered that film to be heavily overrated, so maybe it’s not such a surprise that I actually like this one better. The two primary problems I had with that first film were the overly simplistic plot, and the fact that most of the characters were OOC compared to previous films, and this movie does do better on both scores, so I feel more engaged by it, and less annoyed. That said...this movie has still got a lot of problems, and those include iffy characterisation and a plot with various holes, nonsensical complications, and conveniently ignored or smoothed-down dynamics. When I say I like this movie better than the first one, I mean just that: I like this better. That does not mean I am here to sing its praises.

The tacked-on romance is part of the problem - for Clint as well as Natasha (but especially for Natasha). After Hawkeye was so heavily under-used in the first film (and his slightly-ambiguous relationship with Black Widow was the only human element that made him a character instead of a prop), Age of Ultron attempts to compensate by giving Clint a personal life, in the form of a magically-appearing heavily-pregnant wife and a pair of nameless children. The function of this family appears to be 1) to give Clint a reason to not be interested in Natasha, and 2) to ‘humanise’ him by giving him something to fight for and get home to, because we all know nothing legitimises a character quite like some otherwise-irrelevant dependents. Want a man to seem lovable and important? Give him a pregnant wife. That’s what women are for, anyway, right? To enhance a man’s story? In this case, to provide a man whose purpose in the story has been contested with insta-personality, because ‘he’s secretly a family man, ooh, twist!’ is way better than having to spend time on giving him something to do in the plot that is actually meaningful in some way. Great logic. Makes Hawkeye super dynamic, right?

Natasha, unsurprisingly, is hit much, much harder. As the only female avenger and one of only two prominent female characters in a cast which has seven-to-nine male characters of equal or greater importance/screen time (YMMV on whether or not you think Fury and Vision count for that list), the pressure is already on for Natasha to be served up a quality narrative, because if she doesn’t get one, well...she doesn’t have six-to-eight alternative characters to pull the weight for her gender. The best solve for this problem would be to avoid the ‘Token Woman’ cliche in the first place, but since we missed that boat...not having the personal story of your only primary female character revolve completely around her womanhood and her catering to heteronormative expectations of a love interest would have been a good choice. This weird, forced, chemistry-free thing with Bruce Banner? Was the worst thing they could have used to define Natasha’s presence in the film. It sticks out like a sore thumb every time they have an awkward interaction, and it leads in to that atrocious ‘monstrous infertility’ element (though that particular egregious mistake could have been included with or without a romantic blunder, it...probably wouldn’t be, and we’d all be the better off). Even the Hulk-whisperer part of the relationship - while not awful on its own with all the unnecessary romance and Unresolved Sexual Not-Tension removed - serves to highlight Natasha’s female-ness by making her the soft maternal figure for the team, because God forbid one of the other male members of the team be asked to ASMR-speak to the Hulk while delicately caressing his hand. If Natasha’s presence in the first Avengers film leaned too heavily on her gender identity as a defining trait (and it did), this movie doesn’t fix that problem at all: it doubles down on it.

The good news for most of the excess of male characters is, they by-and-large don’t feel as OOC as they did in the first film. The boorish romantic entanglement aside, Bruce Banner is still a naturalistic character highlight (all credit to Mark Ruffalo, who probably doesn’t know how to turn in a bad performance in the first place), and Thor’s dialogue is way less ridiculous this time ‘round, so he lands a lot closer to his personality from previous films simply by virtue of sounding like the same guy (unfortunately, the plot does not have the faintest idea what it wants to do with him as a character). Steve Rogers is still being written as if being Captain America is his character, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of his identity, albeit one which conveniently allows him to behave in a stereotypical self-righteously bland manner, thus avoiding the need for any nuance in his perspective or actions. This borderline fanfic-flamer ‘Captain America is my least favourite character so I’m going to write him as a boring stick-in-the-mud and then hopefully no one else will like him either!’ approach doesn’t grate quite as badly as it did in the first Avengers, and it can’t cancel out the innate level-headed charm of Chris Evans, so as disappointing as the bias is, it’s still a better balance here than it was last time. The one character who is not so flatteringly handled, however? Also happens to be the one who was arguably handled best last time, and unfortunately, he’s the one who is essentially treated as the ‘lead’.

The big problem for Tony Stark is that this movie is not interested in digging in to the pathos of any character, it’s all-flash-no-substance on that front, and Tony really, really needed a less heavy-handed slathering of ‘afraid of what might come (feat. messiah complex)’ to motivate his actions and reactions in this film, because without any exploration he’s basically just a billionaire kid playing with matches. If this were an Iron Man film (either the first or third one, anyway), we’d get into some tasty deconstruction of Tony’s mental state and confront his hubris, etc, and - crucially, most crucial of all, it’s a mainstay of all his past stories in the MCU - Tony would own up to his mistakes, listen to the advice of those around him, and take contrite steps toward fixing the problem not just in the direct sense of ‘beating the bad guy’, but also in the personal and emotional sense of working on his own flaws and making amends with the people he hurt along the way. This movie offers none of that. To begin with, Tony’s ‘I know best and I will not be taking any questions’ approach to creating Ultron feels like a significant step backwards in his character development so far (Iron Man 3 was specifically about addressing his PTSD and associated tumultuous emotions surrounding the fear of imminent alien invasion, so his reactionary and secretive behaviour in this film feels particularly out-of-touch with a mental reality Tony has been explicitly working on for the past couple of years); Tony is actively aware that it’s a bad call and thus hides it from the other Avengers until it’s too late, and then he’s bizarrely unrepentant about his mistake. Worst of all, he actually attempts to repeat that mistake, only worse, late in the film (the fact that his idiotic ‘mad scientist’ pep talk actually convinces Bruce to help him again is the weakest character moment for Bruce outside of the aforementioned romance crap). The plot rewards Tony’s second, far worse mistake, in the creation of Vision, who turns out to be ‘worthy of wielding Thor’s Hammer’ and whatnot and conveniently provides every necessary skill to defeat Ultron in a deus ex machina so overt you could use it as a textbook example, so even though Tony had absolutely no way of knowing that he’d get a good result this time and almost every reason to believe he’d just compound the existing problem, his reckless disregard for the literal safety of the planet is treated like a good thing because it happens to work out this time, and they just kinda sweep under the rug the fact that Tony is playing God (and being uncharacteristically stupid and selfish about it - in other films, Tony is normally only reckless with his own safety, and it’s when his actions spill out into unintended consequences for others that he realises the error of his ways and cues up a positive learning curve; it’s what makes him palatable). At the end of the film, once Ultron is gone and Tony has thrown some dispassionate wads of cash into ‘relief efforts’, he strolls and quips and eventually drives off into the sunset in his expensive car, with nary a mention of, I dunno, maybe a little guilty conscience? Maybe a hint of having learned a valuable lesson? The closest he gets is just suggesting that it might be time he retires from Avenging, but neither he nor anyone else lets on that there’s a need for serious self-reflection. The Tony Stark in this movie is the nightmarish male-fantasy version of the character, the playboy with the cool tech and no limits who does whatever he wants and then...literally rides off into the sunset in the end, no muss, no fuss. He’s kinda like a complete reversion to his original self, pre-Iron Man, frittering money around and designing weapons of mass destruction while convincing himself he’s bringing peace to the world one explosion at a time, but that Tony has no business here, seven years of character development down the track.

While we’re talking iffy characterisation, we should also segue into plot, and that’s something we can do easily enough by looking at our villain, Ultron. Calling Ultron an actual character feels...ambitious. He’s a CGI robot full of empty rhetoric and, you guessed it, more of those quips that this movie has in place of any meaningful dialogue. I’d call him self-fellating, but he ain’t got nothing to fellate, so instead he just blathers a lot in a manner that sounds vaguely poetically intelligent but is, upon a moment’s consideration, just vapid nonsense (much like Loki in the first Avengers, as noted above, but at least Loki had the benefit of a flesh-and-blood actor delivering his lines with conviction; James Spader does solid work as the voice of Ultron, but trying to make a CGI robot who spouts a school-kid’s attempt at edgy philosophy sound like a genuine menace is an uphill battle). Speaking of genuine menace, I assume the reason the film is called Age of Ultron is because A Couple of Days of Ultron Causing Disturbances in a Handful of Specific Locations was too much. For all the big talk (and there is..so much), Ultron doesn’t get up to all that much trouble, most notably in the sense that he apparently has his code all over the internet and yet he doesn’t bother stirring up a single ounce of chaos with that ungodly power. Why bother including this as an element of the character if it achieves zero story? Is it purely to make Ultron seem ~unstoppable~ because he keeps downloading into new robots? Because it didn’t really land, y’all. They try to play it like a big victory for the good guys when Vision burns Ultron out of the ‘net, but in context it’s meaningless because he didn’t do anything while he was there. Pretty much everything about Ultron was all talk, little to no action - even a whole bunch of the trouble he did cause happened off-screen, with Maria Hill just popping in to let us know that ‘there are reports of metal men stealing shit’. Cheers, cool. And you know, Ultron makes a song and dance about how he’s going to save the world by ‘ending the Avengers’, but then he...does not pursue that at all. He tries to make himself a pretty body, the Avengers thwart him, and then he enacts a doomsday machine to destroy all life on Earth. Like every other aspect of the character, the whole ‘end the Avengers’ schtick is just white noise, there’s no meaning in it. Ultron is just a same-old-same ‘What if Artificial Intelligence wants to WIPE US OUT?!’ cliche, and maybe that’s what he was in the comics too, I don’t know, but it’s the job of the film to tell that story in a dynamic way, and they had two and a half hours to do it. And yet.

There should be more to this than a nondescript placeholder villain concept and a series of action set pieces that just kinda happen until they stop. At least the first Avengers had some variety in each of its action sequences, using the location and the different skills and weapons of its antagonists, whereas this one is just ‘there are robots and the good guys punched and shot them until they were all broken, the end’. Even making the city fly in the end doesn’t actually make it interesting, not least because the characters spend most of their time running around the (weirdly, perfectly stable) streets not having to deal with any consequences of being up in the air anyway, and the doomsday device is too nebulous to ratchet up any real tension about figuring out how to deal with it. The conflicts with the Maximoff twins have at least some spark of life in them, but the characters themselves are treated to an over-simplified and very contrived narrative arc that uses what they do and what they know more as plot devices than as details of actual people’s lives, leading to a cheap death for Pietro so that Wanda will be distracted enough to abandon the big ol’ doomsday button, and it’s just all so convenient. There’s no heart in any of it, and it makes the moments that try to have heart all the more embarrassing and out-of-place (don’t even get me started on what a prescribed attempt at tugging the heart-strings it is to have Hawkeye name his magnificently well-timed newborn after Pietro, because DAMN). When I said I liked this movie better than the first Avengers, I meant just that: I like this better. That’s not to suggest that it is significantly better in any sense, because it isn’t, and I can’t even argue that this one has a better story, because honestly, it doesn’t. The first film made more sense, it was just less interesting to watch, and the things about it that were contrived were contrived in different ways. The first film was weaker and more irritating on character, and character is always the most important part of a story for me, so as annoyed as I am by the major character blunders in Age of Ultron, I’m still not as annoyed as I was after The Avengers. That is damning with the faintest of praise; this is just not a particularly good movie, it makes a poor use of its cast at the best of times, delivers a sub-par action extravaganza, and the script is not half as witty as it gleefully convinces itself that it is. It comes as no surprise, I’m sure, that I am very glad a certain writer/director departed the franchise after disappointing everyone with this outing. I say I like this better than the first Avengers, but gee, it’s a close call.

#Avengers: Age of Ultron #Marvel Cinematic Universe #Bechdel Test #female representation #MCU #Age of Ultron #Avengers

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radiqueer · 6 years ago

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jesus christ I'm sorry but as someone who lives in a country severely affected by the holocaust there is NO comparison between how nazis treated lgbtq people and romani/jewish people, and the level of trauma it inflicted on both communities. there isn't. jewish kids have nightmares about it, it's a constant shadow over our communities, people have lost entire parts of their family trees to it. the closest for lgbtq people is aids, but there is no FUCKING comparison.

not to mention that I'm disabled and would have died bc of the nazis. but I cannot compare that to the pain the shoah has inflicted on my jewish community, especially with holocaust deniers still cheerfully on the news and internet and claiming israel or us profited from it. how DARE you say we're perpetrating holocaust denial by talking about our trauma and saying that you cannot compare the two. how DARE you.

one. if you’re talking about the post I reblogged, I suggest you take it up with op (@intersex-ionality, sorry to @ you but this is maybe about your post and if you want to ignore this that’s fine by me) instead of me, I really don’t see what you stand to gain by shouting at me and frankly I would much rather you didn’t shout at op either. even from a fairly uninformed perspective though it seems to me that you’re prioritizing your trauma and your perspective over that of other Jewish people and then shouting at random non-Jewish people (am I allowed to refer to myself as a goyim?) when they seek to learn about perspectives that aren’t yours, which is a little disingenuous and unjust imo.

if it’s about the intergenerational trauma post - fuck off. with all politeness, no single group gets to lay claim to a certain type of trauma; not when wars and genocides have happened to MANY groups in recent and otherwise history. if you’re going to attempt to tell me that black people don’t have intergenerational trauma from slavery, or that Native American people don’t have intergenerational trauma from the way colonizers treated them, I am going to laugh in your face first and call you a racist second, because that is in fact what you are. you don’t get to deny the oppression and trauma that other groups have because you belong to a few oppressed groups yourself. no one gets to do that.

now, I’ve spoken to @butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway (who I reblogged that post from) quite a bit in DMs, and by and large I’ve found that they have interesting, nuanced takes on things - in addition to generally being an awesome person. I trust her perspectives on things. for many years I’ve taken what I read from Jewish bloggers I follow on tumblr to be The Whole Truth, and that he contradicts it and corrects it when I have questions is very valuable to me. they have a consistent commitment to intersectionality and nuance that shows in the way she talks about things, and I trust that perspective FAR MORE than I trust you, random anon.

#urgh sorry about all the @s responding to this post is like....optional if you don't want to please don't bother #everyone seems to be getting this hatemail recently and anons are literally?#trolling people's notes I guess?#wtaf #holocaust tw #intergenerational trauma #genocide tw #slavery tw #anon

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postmodernmulticoloredcloak · 6 years ago

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Just realized tumblr is celebrating John Mulaney for saying the same thing you said two years ago and got so much doxxing for, how we suddenly have to worry about Nazis again and wtf. People on this website are loonier than loon.

Yeah, well, it was one or two months after Trump was elected and people were angry and scared, and it’s way easier to unload that frustration on a random stranger on the internet whose random post we can misinterpret to say the opposite thing that they meant to say, than to pick on Trump. I was hurt because I was just expressing the same fear and frustration by just rambling on my blog and instead I got accused of being exactly what I loathe. But I understand the place they were coming from, you know?

It’s pretty obvious that when people, especially shitty cowardly people like most Nazis are, realize that their shitty views are less taboo to the point that someone like them is elected to something like the presidency of the US, or as de facto leader of the government in Italy, they get bolder.

In Italy, there has been a sudden and dramatic increase in violence (verbal, physical, etc) against minorities, especially Black people and Romani people, since this government started. People who was racist before but felt it was taboo to express those ‘politically incorrect’ things... now feel legitimated to act on those racist views. People now know that a certain kind of language and expressions are “okay” because, duh, we elected a person who talks like that, it means that the majority of the country doesn’t have a problem with that. Look at what happened in Brazil right as soon as Bolsonaro was elected. France was obviously never free of antisemitism because when has Europe ever? But a lot of Jewish people have started feeling especially unsafe and considering leaving the country over recent years.

Racism and homophobia obviously existed before the Trump presidency or the Lega government because otherwise where did Trump of Salvini or Bolsonaro come from? It’s not like the king gave them their office, people voted for them. But now Nazis are emboldened because they feel supported by the people in power and by the fact that a large portion of the population shares their views enough to vote for those people.

Nazis are not a danger if everyone else shuns and rejects them. They’re just vermin. Nazis are a danger when the same crap they believe in gets normalized. I’m not scared of some dudes with a shaved head and black shirts. I’m more scared of all the “I’m not racist but” people. I’m more scared of the nice ladies and gentlemen who go to mass every week but agree with people who say that gay men should be sentenced to death. I’m more scared of how almost every person I know is genuinely convinced that the Nazi-supported stereotypes against Romani people are true facts.

But as long as we have decent government run by decent people, and by that I mean: governors who respect the rule of law and the constitutional state, we’re mostly safe. When these people - Trump, Salvini and all the like - start undermining the constitutional state and the basis of democracy, then - and this is what it means that suddenly Nazis are an issue when these people get elected - minorities are no longer safe, liberties are no longer safe, democracy is no longer safe.

And meanwhile kids bully other kids because they absorb the idea that it’s okay now.

#nazi cw #antisemitism cw #racism cw #homophobia cw #anon

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eruditetyro · 6 years ago

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i was wondering if you could explain more about how line dancing/the electric slide is fascist? im not disagreeing with you or anything i just don't understand and would like to know more

Sure! i’ve been writing essays all day and i’m not the most lucid or persuasive currently but basically this is a longrunning thing between me and my dad, who like me is very anti fascism, and it does hold some water when you hold it up to the light, or however that saying goes, so this is how the electric slide is fascist:

So. First we need to start with a definition of fascism-- this is the one my dad gave my 11 year old brother at the breakfast table last weekend: the word fascism comes from the word fasces, which is a latin word that means a bundle of sticks tied together with an axe blade. (link is to the wikipedia page about that! all links go to wikipedia unless otherwise marked) it’s generally seen as a symbol of collective power! or it was before the nazis (well, mussolini actually) took it. the nazis did a lot of shit to perfectly good symbols. anyway. A bundle of sticks is much harder to break than one stick alone. fascism, as a political movement/ideology/what-have-you, takes this idea of making society into a bundle of sticks that cannot be broken, and does this by clearly defining which sticks they think are allowed in the bundle, which are not, and the ones who are not are ostracized/murdered/you-get-the-idea. part of this includes strongly regimenting society-- all sticks must be straight, a certain width, fit nicely together in a bundle, etc. all people must abide by the regimentation of society which is dictated by those in power, and anything which does not fit those norms is punished. we see this in nazi germany-- leaders of political opposition, gay people, and people deemed “asocial” faced camps and death along with jewish people, (and also sinti and romani people who are often forgotten) who were the outgroup nazis specifically did not want in their society and defined themselves as not including. also catholics btw. that’s the basics.

historically, within fascist nazi germany, many methods were used to keep all the nice aryan (white, german, not jewish or polish or sinti/roma or slavic or disabled or or or etc) boys and girls in line, and to make them devout supporters of the regime who would snitch on their parents (not wikipedia) and believed they were born to die for germany/hitler and all that shit. the hitler youth was an organization that was tasked primarily with this. it was kind of like girl/boy scouts in the US today, except it was simultaneously an ideological indoctrination machine, and i’m pretty sure they didn’t sell cookies or popcorn. they were the only youth organization which was allowed to exist in nazi germany--- being part of a church youth group, if that was your thing, was literally a crime and had to be done in secret. but why would you want to-- the hitler youth did plenty of fun activities, and all your friends were in it anyway, and also starting in 1936 it was mandatory by law that you be a part of it. they did fun things like wear uniforms and march in time and snitch on anyone who wasn’t following the rules.

types of music and art that were not deemed acceptable were outlawed. anything that was not what everyone else was doing was outlawed. everyone was part of the german people, a great monolith, all stepping in time, suppressing free action and thought, suppressing individualism, suppressing creativity and spontaneity, with the goal of a totalitarian state “in which the individual has no rights outside the common interest.”

needless to say, as a queer person who likes to make art and stuff, also as someone who likes my jewish and brown and trans and other friends who would have been persecuted under national socialism, as someone who wholeheartedly believes that they and all other people are entitled to the same basic rights and protections i’m entitled to, i’m kind of against the whole thing.

what’s the electric slide? a bunch of people, all a great monolith, all stepping in time in a way to facilitate some feeling of togetherness, unity, and ostracization of those who did not participate. it suppresses the creativity, spontaneity and individualism that ought to be present on a social dance floor. the electric slide is fascist. thanks for your time and let me know if you have any more questions

sources: my dad grew up in cold war germany with a dad who was part of the nazi party and a mom who was a part of the hitler youth (everyone was, it was literally illegal not to be), and i’ve also done my own research into all this stuff, i was literally at the museum about national socialism in munich on the third of january of this year. and i got a fellowship to research stuff about germany in the 1930s last summer. so when i say the electric slide is fascist my friends leave me alone and stop trying to get me to do it. and i like that, because the electric slide is boring and it sucks. and it’s fascist. if you want more links to stuff about specific details hit me up

other things that can be argued to be fascist and your history teacher will have a hard time arguing back: the pledge of allegiance, school uniforms, the cupid shuffle, etc

#Anonymous

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