#And yes I know they resemble racial stereotypes

[unforeseen-idiot]

Gungans are cool

I feel like every major Star Wars fan has some little things they just love. With a world that big and expansive it just makes sense. And for me it’s the Gungans. These amphibians jus have a really cool world, with the underwater cities, energy based weapons, and cool varying designs. Fine Jar-Jar was stupid I admit that, but I’ve always loved Boss Nass and his sheer power and strange mannerisms. Plus Captain Tarpals was awesome. I would have really liked to see more of this race and maybe what their culture could have been beyond just military.

[photonflight]

🌺Caribbean Representation Through my Apprentice 🌺

Asks open for this article btw.

Why do this?

Growing up in the Caribbean, I never saw myself in media, nor did I see anyone representative of myself in popular media. I’m Trinidadian- but representation for Caribbean people has usually been limited to Jamaican. Jamaica has a beautiful culture, but like the other Caribbean islands, their culture is different.

This is why Dominique is Trinidadian coded, and mixed race (over 90% of Trinidadian people are BIPOC or mixed race). I wanted to feel seen and represented, and I wanted other Caribbean (especially Trinidadian BIPOC) women and girls like myself to feel properly represented by her. I wanted to show us that we CAN exist in fantasy worlds and be portrayed in a way that’s neither stereotypical nor offensive.

Many times in the media, whenever there’s a Caribbean character included (which is a very rare occurrence) they are given a Jamaican accent by default even when they’re not Jamaican, which has resulted in many people believing that there is one collective Caribbean accent (as a Trinidadian person I can’t begin to tell you how many non-Caribbean people have addressed me with “yea mon”.)

As a matter of fact the islands have their own different languages. Trinidadians speak Trinidad Creole, not Jamaican Patois.

A few examples I can think of would be

Ajay Chase- Apex Legends (Haitian, but has a Jamaican accent)

George- Metal Gear Rising (Guyanese, but has a poor Guyanese accent which sounds more Jamaican, and the vernacular he speaks with is more (stereotypically) Jamaican than Guyanese)

Sebastian- Disney’s adaptation of The Little Mermaid (Tobagonian (btw the country I’m from is called Trinidad and Tobago 🇹🇹) but has a stereotypical Jamaican accent)

Haitians speak Kweyol, not Jamaican Patois.

Guyanese people speak Guyanese Creole, not Jamaican Patois.

Tobagonians speak Trinidad and Tobago Creole, not Jamaican Patois.

These are all different languages entirely.

Additionally, no Caribbean people were included in the creation of OR the voicing of these “Caribbean” characters.

How is Domi different?

In short? Domi is a Caribbean, mixed WOC with a Caribbean mixed WOC Experience created by a Caribbean, mixed WOC

In long?🤣 read below

Origin

Domi is a Trinidadian-coded apprentice. While her country of origin, which isn’t Vesuvia, does not parallel the real Trinidad and Tobago, she has certain experiences that are common with Trinidadians who are like she is, is canonically confirmed to have an accurate and inoffensive Northwestern Trinidad accent, and her main outfit is colored after the national flag of Trinidad and Tobago 🇹🇹.

Experience

In BIPOC societies like Trinidad and Tobago, there are two interconnected experiences that stand out. Colorism, Featurism and Fetishization AND Identity Crisis

Colorism, Featurism and Fetishization

The term Colorism refers to prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group.

Naturally then, as a result of colorism those with lighter skin tones are elevated within that group. A group which in Domi’s case makes up the entire society.

Featurism refers to the elevation of somebody’s features due to their proximity to whiteness and then results in the Fetishization of people who do have said features within the same ethnic group.

Domi grew up in a society that praised features and skin complexions by their proximity to whiteness, with an older sister who encompasses everything the society praised.

While Domi resembles her father, her sister Scarlet (named after the Scarlet Ibis, the National bird of Trinidad and Tobago) looks like their mother.

While Domi and her sister are both mixed BIPOC (and of course we come in different colors, shapes and sizes), Domi has darker skin than her sister does (though she is still of a light complexion) darker eyes, and darker curlier hair.

Her sister has fairer skin, blue eyes and straight dark hair.

Therefore within a society like this, it is natural that it is her sister that would’ve been elevated and praised for her beauty over Domi.

This has impacted her in various ways from a very young age, pushing her to overwork herself to be perfect at everything to make up for her lack of beauty, and as a child would constantly use glamor to give herself “better hair” and “nice eyes” (terms that result from the fetishization of certain features within BIPOC societies.)

Domi and Scarlet ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Identity Crisis

As is the case with many BIPOC who belong to families where many different ethnicities combine, Domi experiences an identity crisis.

Many Caribbean BIPOC ask themselves

-what am I?

-who am I?

-where do I fit in/belong?

-who do I identify with?

And I know that this is the case for many non-Caribbean mixed people as well. It’s not an isolated incident although this post deals specifically with the Caribbean experience.

Domi also deals with not feeling as though she fits in with either side, not being enough like her mother’s side (mixed Asian, dragon) and also not being enough like her father’s side (mixed Black and White, human).

Dealing with this causes her to question where she belongs, and second guess meeting new people for fear of what they’ll think of her.

Does Domi look like me?

Yes. The arcana IS a self insert game and people that look like us don’t appear very often regardless. Her appearance and specific ethnicity is inspired by me, as well as is the coding of her nationality (which of course is shared with 1.4M people)

However, her experiences, though loosely based on mine, are not isolated and were not based on my own so much as it was based on that of other mixed WOC I personally know and wanted them to feel heard.

Me vs My Apprentice 🌺 you can see where the inspiration starts and also stops🤣

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Explains Bones - Part 4.1

(These are all under the KyidylBones tag.)

Sorry for the pause in this series....it’s difficult to produce these when I don’t have my meds and I ran out.  But I refilled them, so now we continue! 

Anyway, today we’re covering something that is, if possible, even more complex and thorny than sex determination: race determination.  

Ethical Statement: Race is not a biological reality.  Now, hear me out before you run away.  Race isn’t a biological reality, but that doesn’t make it *not real*.  Race absolutely is real and effects how society interacts with an individual.  But between these two statements, which gives you more information about a person: 

“I’m white.” 

“I’m white and I live in 21st century America.” 

The second, obviously.  Because skin color tells us virtually nothing about an individual.  Ethnicity - where they’re from, what social groups they might have interacted with, how society might have treated them, etc. - is a lot more valuable than knowing the color of their skin.  HOWEVER.  And this is a big however.  However, in a modern person’s understanding there is a lot of crossover between race and ethnicity.  And, in fact, as with sex, when a set of remains is being evaluated for identification we must at least attempt to identify the race because that’s how they’ll be categorized in the missing persons’ database.  And identifying race in archaeological remains helps us track human social interaction and migration because ethnicity doesn’t really survive intact outside of grave goods (and those may or may not be present.).  And, yes, if you’re wondering, DNA tests can confirm a lot of the data that we attempt to glean anatomically but for the most part we don’t have the money to do DNA tests on remains, or they don’t have anything surviving that has intact DNA (you can have a nearly complete set of remains and not have any DNA because damage to the outside surface of the bone and/or teeth causes damage to the DNA inside it and causes it to break down.). 

So since race isn’t a biological reality but it is a social reality, it’s helpful to attempt to determine the race of the individual in question.  And, obviously, that’s before you even take into account that people interbreed all the time.  So how can we begin to do this with any degree of accuracy, since the classifications are social and not biological? 

Short answer: we can’t, but we try anyway because of the reasons I mentioned above.  And there’s something that I should have added to the post about sexing a skeleton but I didn’t because I’m human and I make mistakes sometimes: we don’t ever refer to a set of remains as definitively X sex or definitively X race (well, we do when we’re with other scientists who have an understanding of what I’m about to say for brevity’s sake.), we say “this individual has _____ features consistent with or indicative ______ race/sex.” Sometimes the features are very stereotypical and we’re fairly certain that they definitely are X race or sex, but other times they’re not.  And the markers that we use are based on averages, so obviously within those averages there’s a huge amount of variation - that’s why we use so many different markers.  So like with any science, it’s good to remember that there’s always room for change and that it’s all theories.  

Also if you want to do some reading on it, you’ll see that these determinations are still hotly debated among anthropologists because we are well aware of how racist and shitty it all is and we hate that we have to engage in it but at the same time it’s important for the reasons I mentioned above, so we’re always trying to find new ways that are more accurate and less racist.  

Categories

Essentially, we have a list of anatomical features that tend to be similar in geographic regions and we go through these features and grade them according to which race category we think they most closely match.  There are three, sometimes four, categories: 

Caucasoid/White/European depending on what reference you’re using.  

Black/African (Outdated term: Negroid. We all hate it but it’s in the literature, especially older stuff, and if you do any reading you’ll run into it.)

Asian (Outdated term: mongoloid. Same as above.) - This includes Native Americans because their anatomy is so similar to Asians, especially eastern asians, that it’s well-nigh impossible to distinguish without a DNA test.  Mostly we know based on the context the remains are found in.  

Aboriginal - This is specifically for indigenous pacific groups, especially in Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand. In this lab we use the indigenous name.).  They have some interesting anatomical differences that are only found in that area of the world.  Obviously it’s not going to be as used in the rest of the world tho so it’s often not covered.  Plus their biggest differences are brow bone size and tooth size so while it’s different it’s not AS different as the other three categories.  

So as we go through the markers, we add them to these groups and then at the end average them out to see which one the remains most resemble.  

The Anatomy

There are a lot of markers of race on remains, and more are being studied all the time, so I’m going to cover the most common ones in the interest of length.  Also, pretty much all race markers are on the skull, so I’m not really going to get into the rest of the skeleton, even tho there ARE markers on the post-cranial (means exactly what you’d think: not skull.) skeleton.  And like with physics ignoring friction for the sake of illustration, we’re going to ignore cultural changes to the bones ala the slavic squat and pathologies.  We’re gonna start in on the bone pics in a hot second, so time for a cut.  

I went back and forth on the most concise, easy to understand way of doing this and it took me a bit to figure it out, but I think it’s going to be like this: I’m going to tell you what we look for generally, and then give specific examples in each category as we go through race by race.  So, there are a lot of things that can indicate race in a skeleton, but I’m only going to cover the easiest to digest.  Understand though that there’s a lot of smaller indiciations.  Like with sex, these are graded on a scale in relationship to how stereotypical they are of a given feature.  And, unlike with sex, it’s much easier for the opinion and biases of the examiner to alter the results because a lot of these comes down to “what shape is this thing and which shape is it closest to”.  This is, of course, subjective.  The ones I’m going to cover are: 

Eye orbit shape and sharpness. 

Prognathism (the amount that the “muzzle” area of the face sticks out.  Eg., how flat is or isn’t a face?)

Nasal shape

Nasal sill (this is the bit that sticks out at the bottom of your septum, and the “floor” of your nose/top of your maxilla in your nose.

Nasal bridge

Unique racial features.  

First, I’m gonna use some screenies from my ipad to be very specific about the area of the skull I’m talking about here.  These all were taken by me in essential skeleton and edited.  

Eye orbit shape: 

I think this one is one of the more accessible things to understand without a skull in your hand.  If you think of the way that people look IRL, there are physical features that tend to be more common in various populations, and that translates to the skull (and in case you’re wondering: no, white is not treated as the baseline here, but you’ll see.).  Here it’s the shape of the eye socket.  

Eye socket sharpness: 

When you hold a skull in your hand, if you run your finger over the part of the eye socket between the lines (really, the whole edge, but the effect is more pronounced at the bottom and on the lateral edges), it’s sharper on some races than on others.  Again - this is a skeletal marker of physical features that you can see in a living person.  I’m not going to point this out in the example skulls because you won’t be able to see or feel it in the images, but it’s a pretty easy to understand way of adding another racial marker to your tools.  

Prognathism: 

So the easiest way to understand this is twofold.  First, how far does the chin stick out in relationship to the top of the nose? This shows how far the face protruded in life.  Here you can see the angle is 88 (although honestly i’ve never known anyone to measure this - I’m using it to illustrate the point.), and I only know that because the ruler tool I used to draw the lines told me so, lol.  The easiest way to see this is to look at the curve of the profile like I’ve illustrated with the green line.  

Nasal Shape: 

The shape of the nasal opening varies between racial groups.  We look at the height and width from the places I’ve illustrated above.  Sometimes we also look at the shape of the sort of upside down heart area I’ve outlined, because human variation means that you’ve gotta have a couple of ways of doing things.  

The Nasal Sill gets two images cause it has two parts: 

The top one has a landmark called the anterior nasal spine highlighted (honestly I think of it like the pointy nose thing).  The degree to which it sticks out  varies by race.  It is part of the maxilla, and together with the two portions of the maxilla that i’ve circled forms the nasal sill.  A lot of textbooks refer to the nasal sill as having a “height”.  I found this confusing and I found the pictures confusing too, so I’m gonna try a different tactic with you guys.  So first of all, you can feel some of these bones in your face.  Pinch the bottom of your septum where it meets your upper lip and wiggle it.  Feel how there’s a harder bit under the cartilage? That’s the pointy nose thing...er, nasal spine.  Now - and this is a little gross but it’s ok I won’t tell anyone - if you feel down into the bottom of your nasal passages you can feel where this blends into your maxilla.  The cartilage rises up and that forms your nasal passage.  On a dead person, that cartilage isn’t there.  So the hard bone that you feel there is all we have.  Well, the angle at which that slopes deeper into the nasal passage varies by race (because nose shape varies by race).  In some individuals, the anterior edge of that opening is sharp and lifted, forming a sort of dip in the area I’ve circled above.  This is the nasal gutter.  And if you google that, you will be hard-pressed to find anything that explains it with any clarity, especially because you don’t have a skull in your hand.  But it’s one of those things that’s useful to know because it can be really distinct and easy to see the differences in.  

The Nasal Bridge: 

Because the shape of the nose changes the bones all around it, another indicator is what I’ve shown here.  The angle of the curve of that red line, and the length of the blue line.  That’s basically the length of the nasal bones.  You can also tell with the shape of them, and the shape of the place where they connect to the frontal (the suture that connects them to the brow bone.), but I’m not going to cover that.  We have enough nose things.  

I’m going to cover unique features when I get into the examples of different races.  You might be thinking that this is a lot of attention paid to the eyes and nose, and you’d be right, because although there are distinct differences in mouth shape and size they don’t translate to the bone.  And, fun fact, the most accurate indicator of race is actually teeth - but we’ll cover that in the entry on teeth.  But for now, I’m going to stop here and split that into its own post because this one is long and picture-heavy.  So come back in a couple hours after I’ve finished and posted that one.  

[thenonbinarydetective]

Talking about the Old Books

Let’s talk about the old books for a second. I know everyone’s tired of me talking about them, but this is important. It’s about the racism that’s there.

Yes these were edited for racism back around the Civil Rights Movement. Basically to show there support, from what I’ve read most of it seemed to be more Mildred Wirt Benson’s and Leslie McFarlane’s doing and I’m guessing any of the younger people who worked there. I only say that because a lot of Harriet’s behavior (as she was the one who was possibly doing the worst with this) was described kinda like Grandma racism, if you know what I mean? When you’re grandma says something racist that probably wasn’t considered racist when she was younger. That sort of thing. Although her thing was calling (even innocent characters), such things as “Nefarious coloreds” or Nancy rejecting someone who was going to interview to temporarily replace Hannah because she was black. (Also two others for being Irish and Scottish respectively). Forgive me for saying that, but those were actually published.

Considering the timing was late 50s early 60s, they were edited to suit that eras meaning of being not racist. So wording or the scene that I mentioned above and similar like it are left in the 30s version. Most notably what was gone was the racial profiling and stereotyping of darker skin people (mostly black) as criminals or connection to crime in some way (criminal past, criminal present, possible criminal future). This also applied to other nationalities too, I guess they just wanted to cover all of the bases even if it wasn’t POC. Also that if a POC (or nonAmerican) was a criminal in a mystery, that the Hardy Boys or Nancy had to meet someone who was the same ethnicity as the criminals so they weren’t say all of those people were bad.

Personally, and you’re free to disagree, knowing both a bit about the 30s and 50s/60s versions I feel that the dialogue between describing the criminals became a bit more ambiguous in the edited so that it doesn’t look like they’re only describing POC. Cause I’ve heard people (who know more about the 30s version) say that with most of the descriptions, you’d probably only imagine a POC. Although, idk if this was just me, I don’t really do that with the 50s/60s versions because plenty do have descriptions that can fit white people as well as POC. This isn’t defending it, just my observation.

It makes sense that there are things that either didn’t age well, tone-deaf, or racist to some degree. It’s an old series, this is bound to happen. It’s important to acknowledge both the time this came out, without ignoring the racism that’s there. I’m not excusing the older parts of either property at all by saying this. I also don’t know why they weren’t further edited in later prints, probably money. It’s also acknowledging what is considered racist now is different than what was considered racist back then. Times change and ideas change. Sometimes those ideas are bad and offensive. Such as the multiple accounts of blackface, brownface, yellowface, and redface that do exist in the books still. Again IDK why those are still there.

There’s more things than expected when criticizing the ugly parts of the past. Later books are free from this, except that book where they kinda defended the Confederates. That wasn’t a good choice. Anyway, most of this comes down to age. Both series are older than all of my grandparents, one of them only being a few months but that counts. There’s going to be some problematic elements that slip through the cracks.

Not to sidetrack at the last minute, but criticizing this is slightly different to something newer that has stereotyped or villainized POC. The older books are not excused in their actions, and if it were possible to edit them again I would endorse that but that would probably be difficult. The concept of race and racism have changed over time, so the things we know are wrong now are different than how they were in the past. We know that the stereotyping and criminalization of POC(specifically black and darker-skin people of color) is wrong, POC being in positions of servitude with low-pay is bad even when a bad person is doing it, we know that having a cult that visually resembles the KKK is bad (i think the only reason it stayed is because it’s technically not the KKK, it’s not that effective), and whatever else is there. Age plays a factor into this, because modern media is usually criticized for doing any of the things I mentioned above. Last time, age doesn’t pardon the actions, it creates a reason to why they may be there.

Also this is more general and not specifically about Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, but you can like things that have problematic elements to them. You just shouldn’t ignore other people’s reasons for disliking something because of those problematic elements because you like it and that because you like it those things don’t become nonexistent. Take it into consideration when you examine the media you take in and any possible biases you may have.

Regarding all that I’ve said, this topic should be discussed more within the fandom, especially since not all of us are white and if we want to be the open fandom we are then we shouldn’t ignore it or brush it aside because we think we can’t talk about it. It’s a sensitive subject, which makes it more important to do research on it and talk about it. Just cause we like to think the racism in Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys is in the past, doesn’t mean that it actually is. We should always keep learning so we don’t hurt others with our ignorance.

[girlofmanyfandoms]

Advocates

A/n: So, I feel bad for not posting lately, here’s my AU where I take a slightly different take on the Keeper of the Lost Cities series. A few changes that I’m trying to make: more friendship-based, no love triangle, probably more gay, more racially diverse cast (without any harmful stereotypes). I’ll try to stay true to each character’s personality!

I’ll also take this time to say there’s stuff I haven’t released yet, so tell me if you want me to release those!

Disclaimer: This is in no way hating on Shannon’s series, I just wanna see where the story would go if we took a slightly different approach!

Warnings: I didn’t edit this at all-

Word count: 2868

Tag list:  @everyonehasthoughts @imaramennoodle @bookwyrminspiration @holesinmyfalseconfidence @percabetn @an-absolute-travesty @linhammon-roll-bromance101 @linhamon-roll @holesinmyfalseconfidence @linhamon2 @a-lonely-tatertot @loverofallthingssmart

Let me know if you want to be added or if I forgot to tag you!

“Uh, no boys, she’s sitting with me.”

Jensi raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong with her sitting here, Marella?”

“Nothing! I just need to pull her to the side for some girl talk.” Marella pulled Sophie’s sleeve, navigating across the cafeteria to an empty booth in the corner. Sitting down and adjusting herself, she extended a hand. “Marella Redek. No nicknames. I know the ins and outs of everything around here.”

“Sophie Foster,” Sophie introduced, shaking her hand, though her response came out as a murmur. She brushed her hair out of her face, trying to shrink as small as possible. “But I’m sure you knew that.”

Marella nodded. “You must’ve caused the Council a lot of trouble if you’ve gotten your way into Level Two right after being with humans. What was it like, by the way?”

“Pretty normal, I guess. Well, not for me, I was a highschool senior at 12, and my parents wanted me to attend community college instead of an Ivy League. Even the newspapers were talking about it, and that ticked my parents off big time.”

“What?”

“I know, crazy, right?” Sophie started digging into her lunch. “Why would the news choose a story about a child over actual breaking news?”

“No, I meant those words you used. A high school, college, a new paper? What do they mean?”

“Oh, that’s right! Those are more human terms, sorry,” Sophie apologized. “There are levels of human school: Preschool, which is usually ages 1 to 4, elementary school is from ages 5 to 10, middle school is ages 11 to 13, high school is ages 14 to 17, and college is at least four years, and gives you the certification you need to get a good paying job. Newspapers are just mini books made completely of paper that tell you what’s going on in the world.”

“Oh,” Marella said, looking off into the distance. “I guess I never really thought that human school would be so different from Foxfire. We just have these levels, and then the elite levels. What was your human family like?”

Sophie tugged out an eyelash, which didn’t go unnoticed on Marella’s end. “U-um-“

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be pushing you so much on your first day. I should be helping you adjust.” She toyed with her food. “So, how’s our world been for you so far?”

“A little overwhelming,” Sophie admitted. “I don’t feel half as glamorous as anything around me. We don’t exactly have crystal houses and fancy ball gowns in San Diego.”

“You don’t?” Marella shook her head vigorously. “Right. Sorry. Let’s get back on track. Anything you think you’ll need to know that I can help you with?”

Sophie clutched her knees, now rolled up into a ball. This Marella girl was a bit intense at first, but maybe she wasn’t so bad. After all, she had saved her from sitting with some yes-boys. The declared leader of them seemed friendly, but a little too hyper. No, she decided, Marella wasn’t half bad. “I don’t know. Anything really, you know best.”

“Alright, then. This place is sort of a maze, try to find someone with a similar schedule to you so you can walk together until you know your way around. You know Stina Heks?”

Sophie shivered and nodded, thinking back to seeing her raging through the halls screaming about someone making her bald. She could’ve sworn she heard her say “Disney,” too.

“Stay away from her. Stereotypical bully, not afraid of fighting dirty. The Vackers, Keefe Sencen, and their little bubble are all the buzz. They’re pretty nice, and Sencen’s a bit of a flirt, but if you don’t like attention, maybe steer clear from them.”

Sophie let out a bitter laugh. “Easier said than done. The Vackers are the ones who found me. Fitz brought me here, Alden sent him out to find me, and Della helped me get ready for Foxfire.” Sophie paused to pull out another eyelash. “I don’t think Biana likes me much.

Marella’s eyes widened in shock as she leaned back and blew out a breath.

“Is that bad?” Sophie was panicking a bit now. What had she screwed up now?

“Well, it’s not good for your social status, that’s for sure.” Marella started slicing her food, which resembled Jello. “If you’re on her bad side, you’ll want to stay away from Maruca, too. They’re best friends.”

“Great,” Sophie sighed. One day in and she already had a long list of people to avoid. “Anything else I should know about?”

“Oh, yeah, but I’ll stick to school stuff. Your most difficult subjects are gonna be Elementalism and Alchemy.”

“I can help with that,” a boy called, sliding next to Sophie in the booth and placing his tray down. “Dex Dizznee, by the way.”

“Sophie Foster.” She grinned a bit. Edaline had gone without her to the apothecary and mentioned the “Disneys.” This must’ve been who Stina was shouting at. “I saw what you did to Stina earlier. Wicked move.”

“Finally, someone understands the genius! She deserved it, too, after what a pain she was last year. That’s where the alchemy comes in handy.”

Marella rolled her eyes, and Dex leaned back casually. “Don’t act like you don’t think she deserved it Marella. You know she did.”

“Ok, it was kind of satisfying seeing her run around like that-“

“Yes!”

“-but don’t take it as a sign that I’ll join in. I have a reputation to protect.”

Dex snorted. “Yeah, as the gossip girl.”

“I don’t gossip, I have connections,” she corrected.

“Whatever you say madam,” Dex relented jokingly. “What about you, Soph? Got anything you could build a reputation for?”

“Not really,” she expressed. “I don’t want the spotlight. I just want to make it by here.”

Marella took a bite of her lunch and scoffed. “Good luck with that.”

“Tell you what, my next class is Multispecesial Studies, I can walk you to Alchemy,” Dex offered.

“Really? That would be great, thank you!”

“No problem. It’s hard making it by for people like us.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Marella chugged down her lushberry juice.

“We’re different, special.”

“So, outcasts?” Sophie rested her head in her hand and stirred her drink nonchalantly, taking in the view of the cafeteria. It was remarkably pristine and clean, its white walls with blue accents not showing a hint of grime. With the barstools at tables all around the center and the booths to the side, it looked like every diner’s dream.

“No, not outcasts. Think more sideline supporters.”

“So, advocates,” Sophie helped. “I don’t really see that, but maybe one day. Right now I just want to pass.”

“Well you can’t do that on an empty stomach,” Marella chided playfully. “Eat up. Lady Galvin is a stickler for accuracy.”

————

Fantastic. Sophie had only been there one day and she had already ruined her Alchemy teacher’s favorite cloak. Marella was right, Alchemy was tough. She’d have to take Dex up on his offer. She wandered through the halls, trying to find the way to her next class, P.E. She strolled like this for a few more minutes before a snobby voice called to her from down the hall.

“Lost, new kid?”

Sophie winced. Great. The number one person on her People To Avoid list had already found a way into her world. She attempted to speed walk, but the clacking of leveled boots followed quickly, and she was spun around with a harsh push.

Stina laughed, and for a 12 year old elven child, it sounded quite maniacal. “Why so frightened? I don’t bite. Much.”

Somehow Sophie sincerely doubted that. There had to be some fangs behind that evil smirk. But maybe she could play it cool with this demon in disguise.

“I’m not frightened, just lost. Do you think you could point me to P.E.? I don’t want to be late on my first day.” Sophie held her breath, hoping she came off as casual.

“My pleasure,” Stina grinned a sickeningly sweet smile. “In fact, I’ll walk you there. Wouldn’t want our newest prodigy to miss class because of some weak instructions, now would we?”

“No, of course not.”

Stina linked their arms, acting as if they were old pals going on a walk in the park to catch up. It was silent except for the shuffling of their shoes, so Sophie made sure she was hyper aware of her surroundings, trying to memorize the numbers on each locker and how they connected to the twisting, winding paths of the school.

At this point, she was sure Stina planned to do something crazy to her, like stuff her in a locker or hide her body, so she had to think fast. Luckily, this was her specialty.

“Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry,” Sophie began, stopping abruptly. Stina stumbled a bit, but regained her composure in seconds. “I forgot something at my locker! Oh, I’m so sorry, but Edaline told me I’d need what was in my locker. You go ahead, I shouldn’t keep you from your class! Don’t worry, I’ll find my way to Phys Ed.”

Sophie speed walked away, leaving Stina in the dust. Once she rounded the corner, she took off, speeding through corridors and halls until she ran out of breath. Giving up, she rested her head against the wall, trying to clear her head when she was forced to her feet and slammed into a locker. There was a click, and through the slits, Sophie could see Stina’s eyes crinkled in smugness and satisfaction. Yet through all of this, the only thing Sophie was thinking of was, That was pretty lame on a scale of bullying-ness.

“Good luck getting out of there, Foster,” she remarked. “Now, you get comfortable, I have some business to attend to.”

“Gonna go sharpen your claws?” Sophie snapped.

“No, newbie, I’m going to put the princess of Everglen in her place. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you updated!”

And with that, Stina clacked away, her footsteps receding and the silence finding its way to creep back in.

________

Sophie had no way of telling time. This she had learned when she realized she had in fact left something in her locker: her Imparter and the Ruewen crest. She let out an audible groan of frustration, and tried to occupy herself with her temporary home. There were books about unicorn breeding on the shelf above her, to which Sophie wrinkled her nose. Next, there was a box of animal pins, glittering and shiny, and she was very tempted to stuff a few in her pocket, but she restrained herself. She took to examining the pictures on the door with what little light she had and realized, to her disdain, that this was Stina’s locker.

Sophie shivered in disgust and tried patting herself out and getting the Stina vibes off of her.

“Well, if I’m going to be stuck here, I might as well take advantage of it,” she decided. Sophie put all of her energy into memorizing the photo album beside her, and wound up with some lovely photos of baby Stina, along with some other cherished memories. She was scanning through Stina’s diary and chuckling to herself at her inevitable revenge when yelling came from around the corner. Sophie dropped the journal and shuffled forward a bit, peering through the slits. This could be her saving.

“MESS WITH BIANA ONE MORE TIME-” Maruca had her pinned to the wall and looked ready to murder her, but Stina remained unfazed.

“Relax, duchess, you might be the heir soon,” Stina responded coolly.

That was the breaking point. Maruca opened her locker, which was, unfortunately, next to the one Sophie was trapped in, and slammed it shut.

“Maruca!” Sophie yelled, but Stina rattled in her locker, and shouted curses over her, both to insult Maruca and to put an end to Sophie’s escape plan.

Maruca was quick to exit, and soon enough it was just Stina and Sophie, trapped in their lockers, trying to determine the other person’s next move.

“Do you happen to know how to break down locker doors?” Stina commented dryly.

“Would I still be here if I did?”

“Fair.”

“You got a hairpin?” Sophie asked. “Or some thin piece of metal you can slide in between the crack of our lockers? I might be able to break out of mine by picking the lock.”

“And what about me? Gonna leave me here to rot while you run free?” She harrumphed. “I don’t think so. If I’m suffering you suffer with me.”

“I’ll get you out too, just answer the question and slide the metal through the crack.”

Stina huffed, but Sophie heard the sound of metal on metal scratch as something hit her foot. “My family crest. Do not scratch it.”

“You got it.” Sophie used her fingernails to get a little bit of extra room before sliding the crest through the door. She maneuvered it a bit, and the door let out a click as it swung open. Sophie fell forward face first, but sat up and whooped in victory.

Stina cleared her throat. “I’m still here.”

“Oh, I know,” Sophie poked smugly. “But if I’m going to break you outta there, you’re going to owe me a favor.”

“I do NOT-“

“Fine, then stay there. And spend all day, heck, maybe even until tomorrow, stuck in that cramped locker with no food or water whatsoever.” Sophie began to stroll away slowly, biding for time just in case Stina changed her mind about the offer.

“Fine,” she grumbled. “Just get me out.”

Sophie cheered to herself silently and crouched down in front of the locker and got to work. Stina was peering through the slits in the locker, and for a moment they felt each other’s breath on their faces and they met eyes before glaring at each other and backing up a bit. The door swung open, and Stina came crashing down onto Sophie.

Stina pushed herself off of her quickly, seeming very flustered. She reached out a hand to Sophie, which she took. Stina shook Sophie’s hand off of hers.

“I need my family crest,” she said, looking off to the side uncomfortably.

“Oh,” Sophie frowned, unsure why she felt a little disappointed. Probably because my back hurts and I was just refused the little she could have given as thanks, she thought. “Right. Take it.”

Stina’s fingers brushed against Sophie’s as she took it back and pinned it onto her cloak once more. “Well.” Stina lifted her nose upon in the air, regaining her haughty facade. “Until we meet again, Foster.”

“Yeah, Sophie nodded, getting back to her feet. Once Stina was out of earshot, she muttered, “Hopefully that’s never.”

Sophie dusted herself off, finally registering her circumstances. She was late for class, and she looked disheveled. Stina had just walked off, leaving her lost, confused, and just waiting for a punishment of her lifetime. Sighing, she walked along the edges of a pyramid.

“Ms. Foster,” a cold voice crowed from behind her.

Sophie recognized that voice. Dame Alina. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Is there a particular reason that you’re not in class right now?”

“Uh-“

“Incoming!” a boy screamed from the top of his lungs, a bunch of verminions on his tail. Alina shrieked and ran into a neighboring hall for shelter. Sophie took this as an opportunity to find her way out of this maze and escape Alina’s grasp. She followed the boy until they reached the Healing Center, where he hid until the verminions passed by. Sophie stopped. She could go in and ask whatever medic was present for directions, but the thought of going anywhere near a doctor made her sick to the stomach.

“Can I help you, new girl?”

Sophie jumped. The boy she had been following was right in front of her, and she instinctively slunk back.

“Chill, I won’t hurt you. The name’s Keefe, but you can call me-“

“Sorry Keefe, but I’m really late for class, do you know where P.E. Is?”

He furrowed his eyebrows and massaged his neck, looking a bit hurt. “Uh, yeah, take a left after the next three halls.”

“Thank you!” Sophie bolted to class and arrived there out of breath.

“Sophie! Just in time for us to start splotching,” Dex waved her over. “It’s easy, you just use your telekinesis to move this marble into the other person. If you succeed, it bursts and you get a paint splotch on you.”

“Great,” she muttered. “You won’t believe what I’ve just gone through.”

“Tell me at the end of class. We’re gonna need all of our focus for this.”

“Alright,” she sighed. She couldn’t be upset, seeing Dex that excited lifted her mood just a bit. And that was just the boost she needed.

________

This was it. It was down to her and Fitz for the Splotching Champion title. Sophie gathered her concentration. She could not mess this up.

The splotcher was thrown in between them, and Sophie gave it her all. The marble exploded with a loud boom, and they were both thrown into opposite sides of the room. Sophie saw nothing but the green paint, and then darkness.

[allthefilmsiveseenforfree]

Candyman (1992)

All I know about Candyman is that I saw the movie cover innumerable times at Blockbuster as a child and it ALWAYS freaked me out. I think bees are involved? And a hook, and maybe a mirror? And the great Tony Todd, whom I know better from the Final Destination films, and whose voice is one of the all-time great voices in horror or anywhere else. With the new Jordan Peele-produced Candyman coming out this year (maybe...if, you know, movies ever come out again during the apocalypse), I wanted to watch the original for the first time, so I’d have an idea of what I was getting into. 

Basically a couple of grad students, Helen and Bernadette (Virginia Madsen and Kasi Lemmons), are studying local urban legends and folklore in Chicago when they find out about the legend of Candyman (Tony Todd), a murderous spirit that haunts the projects in Cabrini Green and the poor black folks who live there. As Helen digs deeper into the mystery, strange things start happening to her until she finally is forced to confront Candyman face-to-face and then things REALLY go off the rails. So is this a slasher movie filled with racial tension, the precursor to more cerebral horror fare like Get Out or Midsommar? Or is this more Eddie Murphy Vampire in Brooklyn 90s ridiculousness? Well...

Much more the former than the latter. There’s a lot of stuff going on here, and not all the ingredients in the smoothie work well together. There’s a lot of good - strong performances, some great set pieces, and some truly tense, nerve-wracking sequences. My 7-year-old self was definitely right to be super freaked out by that VHS cover.

Some thoughts:

Ok this Philip Glass soundtrack is already really unsettling and weird in a great way. It turns out the soundtrack is one of the elements that really makes this film memorable and stand out from typical slasher schlock.

Ah, it’s based on a story by Clive Barker, ok so this is gonna be violent and sexual and uncomfortable, got it. [Ed. note: this assessment was pretty accurate.]

I don’t understand in what universe you want to like, play a Bloody Mary type game when you’re about to have sex. Is that what turns some people on? I’m not here to kinkshame anyone, but I just feel like there are other ways to court a bit of danger during sex that don’t involve invoking a murderous mirror spirit. 

I am loving these oversized sweaters. Was any decade better for oversized sweaters than the 90s?

The set design is really incredible - this derelict building in the Cabrini Green projects is eerie, there’s an oppressive presence and an abandoned feeling to it all at the same time. And Wife pointed out that man, people really loved painting walls pink in the 90s, you just don’t see that kind of pink anymore. This movie has a really rich feel to it, like all the decisions were made with real craft and care. I can definitely see how this had ripple effects on other atmospheric horror, especially in urban settings, later down the road.

I can’t help but feel like our white woman protagonist is a tourist in a world she doesn’t understand. That sense of not belonging is a big part of the horror here, and at first I was very uncomfortable that this was playing into racist stereotypes of the young blonde white woman being threatened by all the big bad black people. But instead, the film humanizes and offers an air of protectiveness over the residents of Cabrini Green, and in many ways it is Helen who is shown to be the dangerous and harmful outsider.

The jump scares are real, and very effective.

Um what grad student has business cards tho, c’mon now.

Ah yes, the Clive Barker of it all arriving right on time with this completely unasked for child mutilation. 

I love Jake (DeJuan Guy) and his incredulousness. He’s a pretty fantastic and emotive child actor. 

Can I just say, Helen is really really out of Trevor’s (Xander Berkeley) league. I don't know what she sees in him. And it skeeves me out that he’s a professor and she’s a grad student because, although it’s never explicitly spelled out, I would bet a million dollars that she was his student. 

Man, Candyman looking fly as hell with that fur trimmed coat and those shiny black shoes. “Be my victim” ok, Tony Todd, ok, I’m on board!

OH NO THERE IS GRAPHIC VIOLENCE TO A DOG. IT’S VERY GRAPHIC AND SUDDEN AND UPSETTING EVEN THOUGH IT’S FAKE LOOKING.

There’s also a lot of tasteful sideboob if you’re into that sort of thing.

You know, grad school was a stressful time for me, but at least I can say I was never woke up covered in blood and was accused of murder. 

This dramatic motherfucker flying out the window backwards. Between this and the outfit, Candyman is extra AF.

I can’t get over how much Virginia Madsen resembles Gillian Anderson in early X-Files days. It’s similar facial structure and those big eyes, sure, but a lot of it is this hair as well. As any millenial lesbian can tell you, Gillian Anderson in early X-Files days was Very Important to our cause, so uh, I’m pretty into Helen’s whole vibe honestly. 

At first I thought this was going to be about racial symbolism and Candyman being a physical embodiment of the horrors inflicted upon the black community in urban environments, but thigs get muddy with this whole murder plot and framing of Helen as this victim of some supernatural conspiracy theory, and I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to take from it? But damn, this is compelling and stressful. 

OK but if she’s been in the hospital for a month, then this baby has been in this dirty ass room for a month with only a dramatic hook spectre man taking care of him? What did he feed baby Anthony?? I happen to know that he’s covered in bees and babies can’t eat honey. 

Why do they have a giant paperclip on their wall as decoration?

The actor who plays Trevor, Xander Berkeley, is so burned in my memory as the foster dad from Terminator 2 that I keep expecting him to make the same dumb face while he’s covered in blood (because let’s face it, I’m expecting EVERYONE to die in this movie, and he’s been particularly shitty) and ope time almost ran out but there it is! 1991/1992 were the glory days for this guy dying bloody in movies. 

Did I Cry? No, but I was VERY distressed about that dog :(

Overall, I can definitely see why this has entered the cult classic pantheon. Strong central performances from Virginia Madsen and Tony Todd carry a lot of this film, but there are elements that I’m still confused about, mainly due to a muddled and overstuffed plot. The racial injustice and lynching feels like rich material to draw from but then why is the belief in Candyman yielding the murders of other black people living in Cabrini Green? I would think the vengeance would be on the heads of the folks who actually did the lynching. Why did he have to kidnap the baby? Was it for leverage to get Helen to do what he wanted? Surely someone she had a stronger personal connection to - Bernadette, probably - would have been a wiser choice? And if, instead, this is all some Dracula-esque plot to reconnect with the reincarnated spirit of his long lost love, what on earth was all this other bullshit about? It’s a movie that works best when you don’t ask too many questions about it, and the soundtrack and visuals - especially that mouthful of bees - are ones that are going to stick in my memory for a long time. 

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[forestwater87]

Would you want Gwen and David to become a couple at the end of CampCamp? And adopt Max as well? Cuz' I do...

Gwenvid becoming canon is one of those things I simultaneously love and feel is unnecessary. The show will never let it be as pure and fluffy (or emo) as the fans will make it, anyway, and there is no force on earth that will stop me from shipping this ship with every ounce of my shriveled little heart, so I’m kinda ambivalent on the whole thing. (Besides, I know at least one of the showrunners is not at all into it, so I don’t see it happening no matter how much we may want it to. As long as they keep giving us little ship nuggets we can read way too much into, I’ll be good.)

Also I’m not convinced CC is the kind of show that needs an end, so “at the end” is one of those things that … eh, whatever. It’s an endless summer existing outside of time. Does it ever have to end, as long as they keep having new ideas?

As for the other part of this question … oh, boy. Anon, you did not ask me to go the fuck off on this question, but I gotta because I’ve been holding all this inside for literal years, and I don’t even care that this will make me hemorrhage followers because I’ve been very good and very quiet about it for a long-ass time and I just gotta –

I fucking hate Dad//vid.

And you know? I didn’t used to. My feelings, much like those regarding Cute Waitress, went from “how cute!” to “eh, not my thing but whatever,” and now we’ve circled all the way around to my entire soul lighting on rage-fire every time it’s mentioned, and just … I hate it so much … it’s just …

I feel like this deserves an explanation. And I think the people who’ve already blocked me or whatever aren’t going to read it, so let’s put it under a cut just for the sake of scrolling. But here’s the cliffs notes version:

1. It’s #NotAllDad//vid. There are some iterations of it I don’t hate, and even quite like.

2. David adopting Max, as a general concept, blows. There are exceptions – see #1 – but 99 times out of 100 I hate it with all of my hate. (The short reasons why: David is baby and Forest has Issues, it’s kiiiiinda racist?, and it’s lazy, boring, and way overdone.) 

3. The fandom will not fucking chill about it – at the expense of all other explorations of David and Max’s relationship. And that makes me highkey annoyed.

That being said, anyone who’s worried my blog will become a cesspool of dad//vid hate, please don’t be concerned. This is like lancing a boil of something (I’m bad at metaphors). All the garbage pours out in one massive textblock, and then I go back to being more or less chill about the whole thing. We’re dealing with years of repression here. Shit’s gonna be a lot more intense than it needs to be, and then we’ll settle back down to our regularly-scheduled CC fluff times.

I’m hoping this doesn’t make the fandom hate me forever … but given #3 up there, I’m pretty dang scared it will.

(And hey, I don’t want Cute Waitress to explode in a pit of fire and snakes anymore, so maybe my opinion on dad//vid will change eventually too. Always hold out hope, right?) 

1. #NotAllDad//vid

Like I said, I didn’t used to totally despise the whole Dad//vid thing. Like, I love the idea of David having been a counselor for so long that he just has ingrained Dad Instincts (see S4E14 for the most recent example of this). David as the Dad Friend? Good shit. David as the mother/father hen of his little cabal of campers? Very good shit. Nonliteral interpretations of dad//vid are usually really cute and fun and have some solid basis in canon, and I’m all about it.

Even some of the more literal David-adopts-Max AUs aren’t … the worst. Some of my friends have written versions of it that are original or at least were at the time and really compelling, and usually they found a way of skirting past the majority of the issues in #2. It can be done well.

It just … usually … isn’t.

And for that we gotta see #2.

2. David-Adopts-Max Sucks as a Concept

There is nothing good about the idea of David adopting Max, at least based on what we’ve currently seen in canon. 

(Yes, I am aware that I should couch statements like that with “in my opinion” and “with exceptions” and the like, but that’s a lot of work for this and a bunch of the stuff I’m gonna say in a second, so please just assume for the purposes of everything I put on this blog that it’s in my opinion. I’m not out here dropping Cold Hard Facts about Camp Camp of all things; I’m just spewing my feelings. 

I have lots of feelings.)

I don’t really have a cute little opening segment for this, so let’s skip the hors d’oeuvres and hop right into the meat of it:

David is Way Too Young to be a Father (According to Forest, Who Has Massive Emotional Baggage About These Things)

David is 24 goddamn years old. You know who shouldn’t be put in constant legal charge of a 10-year-old? Someone who is only 14 years older than him. If he’d had Max the old-fashioned way he would be too young to go on 16 and Pregnant. 

That is too fucking young.

I know that some people become parents that young, and even younger. I’m not saying your experiences are bad or invalid. I’m just saying, from the standpoint of being 26, that if one of my two-years-younger friends told me they were adopting a kid they knew from work, I would tell them they were fucking bonkers and to hand that child over to a grown-up immediately. This is especially true of David, who has remarkable emotional maturity but is also mentally about 8 years old. Gwen is the adult at that camp, and David is such a baby. 

Please don’t give the baby a baby.

Also, I’m terrified of having children. I never plan to, I’ve only recently accepted the fact that I don’t have to (grew up religious; it was kinda a whole thing), and get knee-jerk defensive over the idea of anyone my age or younger having children. It freaks me out, and that’s not a good or right emotional reaction to have but it’s mine, and I lowkey panic every time I think of David having children because if he should have a child at 24 then I’m already late.

Yes, I get the feeling that I’m running behind. For something I don’t actually want, ever. In comparison to a fictional character. Whose fatherhood decisions are not even remotely canon.

TL;DR I have issues and my other arguments are decidedly more valid than this one

So How About That Racism, Huh?

I know this has been a matter of some debate in the CC fandom for a while now … but you know what? It’s not nearly enough of a debate. People should absolutely be talking more about the potential problematique aspects of having a way too young white kid take a child from his immigrant parents on some pretty shoddy evidence (which I’ll address in the next section). There’s some White Savior stuff going on there, some negatively-stereotyping-poc-and-immigrant parents going on there … I’m not saying these should completely disqualify any dad//vid AUs or speculation or anything, but it should absolutely be much more of a conversation than it currently is.

(This is why one of the few David-adopts-Max concepts I like is one in which his parents have died. Not only is it more interesting – again, see the next bit – but it neatly sidesteps some potential gross stereotyping, and that’s just always rad.)

I feel like the common counterargument to this is that there are not-great parents of color and not-great immigrant parents IRL, so wouldn’t it be dishonest not to portray that in fiction as well? 

I mean … I dunno. 

I’m not here to tell anyone how to write the One Pure Dad//vid AU or anything. But I will say that I don’t think most people in love with this concept have done anything resembling due diligence in considering how best to sensitively portray the complicated familial, racial, and other implications of this particular AU or concept.

Besides, it’s not real life. It’s fiction, which means any decisions are being made deliberately. It’s a choice to depict Max’s parents as abusive and neglectful monsters who immigrated to America to give their son a better life but that’s for the next section, and it’s not inherently a bad choice, but it’s one that should be made thoughtfully, with an eye to the history of negative stereotypes that already run rampant in fiction. That’s just part of the writing process, and not one that should be shunted aside because it’s more work and less dramatic than creating the biggest of big bads for David to make grand speeches at and/or punch in the face.

Just Not Very Interesting (And Done to Death)

Regarding the overdone thing: Reading a David-adopts-Max AU most of the time is just like reading every other David-adopts-Max AU; I’m pretty sure I could put all these fics on transparencies, overlay them on top of one another, and still have a legible story because they differ so little.

Now to be clear: This – along with the rest of my points in this section – are about personal taste. Some people love reading the same story over and over again, and it brings immense comfort to them. That’s okay, and you shouldn’t feel bad about reading (or writing) these stories and not wanting to break your back trying to find a new angle for it. Cringe culture is canceled, and my personal tastes should not dictate the fandom. You do you.

That being said, I’m also allowed to be so bored by almost all of these fics that I nearly fall asleep scrolling the AO3 feed.

And the frustrating thing is, it would take so little to make it different. All it would take is asking: what if it wasn’t that simple? What if his parents aren’t all bad? What if they’re trying their best, but aren’t able for whatever reason to care for Max the way he needs to be? (I’m thinking Deja’s mom from This Is Us, for a cool example.) What if they later come to regret whatever behavior is making them so sucky, and reconcile in some fashion with their son? What if David and/or Max have fundamentally misread the situation, due to being on the outside and a kid, respectively, and it turns out his parents are actually making the best decisions they can in this situation and David doesn’t need to literally become Max’s dad, but integrates into the family in another way? (Seriously, even “what if they’re dead instead of evil?” would blow my mind in terms of originality. It’s been done, but not nearly enough.)

So that’s the overdone thing out of the way. What about lazy and boring?

It just seems to me that, based on the evidence we’ve been given in the show, there are infinitely more nuanced and creative alternatives to “Max’s parents are canonically abusive and neglectful and deserve to have their child ripped away from them by the guy who sees him at his job like 2-3 months out of the year.” I, in fact, refuse to believe Max’s parents are bad people based on the current evidence, and won’t do so unless canon forces me to see no other option.

Because as of right now, I just don’t buy it.

Didn’t show up to Parents’ Day: Well, we know they immigrated from India to escape “menial labor” (S1E4), and we know capitalism stomps all over the kind of people stuck doing menial labor, so what if they were unable to get away from work or they’d be fired? Hell, what if they couldn’t afford it for whatever reason – car broke down, they don’t have a phone or were out of data, they got hurt or sick or something came up that was interpreted by a small child as a lack of interest because he’s been shown that he doesn’t fully understand either adults’ motivations (all of S1) or the complexities of living in adult society, though he thinks he does (S1E4)?

Didn’t give him an activity: What if their grasp of English isn’t great? It’s a damn hard language to learn, and I sure as hell couldn’t pick up a second language if I was working to the bone to support my family. I’m exhausted trying to get through my 5 minutes of French on Duolingo, and I have a relatively cushy job and the benefit of an owl harassing me every few hours. Maybe they looked at the absurd camp activities and assumed they were misreading something, so they handed it over to their son (who is clearly fluent) to pick something he likes. Maybe they wanted to give him some responsibility and a sense of autonomy in deciding what he wanted to do for the summer, and he was so annoyed at being sent off to camp that he refused to do it and interpreted their hands-off nature as not caring. Maybe they were tired and just told him to pick something and it’s as simple as that, because parents are allowed to be exhausted sometimes. Just strikes me as pretty bizarre that they’d bother sending their son to a summer camp (and those things aren’t cheap, even one as not-awesome as Camp Campbell) but not be invested enough to give him the activity. Saving all year to scrape together enough money for a summer camp, sure, but filling out one line on a piece of paper? Pfft, who has time for that bullshit? 

(I recognize that assuming they’re poor based on a single line about “menial labor” might seem like a bit of a stretch to some people. But honestly, to me it’s no more of a stretch than assuming that they hate or don’t care about their son, or any of the other wild theories thrown around about Max’s parents all the dang time. At least this one is relatively new.) 

Sent him a sweatshirt and a short note: Again, maybe their written English isn’t great. Some people are better at a spoken language than a written one. Or maybe they didn’t have enough time to write a long note, or they knew Max wouldn’t read it (he doesn’t seem like the type to be all that into long emotional letters). Regardless, they knew to send him something he’d like that would likely be worn down by constant wear at camp. And sweatshirts aren’t cheap. Neither is mailing a package. Just seems like a surprising amount of effort to go to if they don’t care about or love him.

Sent him to Camp Campbell for the summer: Let’s say they’re poor, based on the evidence we have. It makes sense to assume that they work relatively “unskilled” jobs, or are in school, or both. Because those jobs don’t offer benefits or a lot of money, we can also reasonably assume that they either work multiple jobs, long hours, or both. They probably don’t have family in the area or even the country, and it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect neighbors or friends to take their son in all day, every day, all summer so he’s not home alone while they’re at work (especially considering he’s not all that easy to get along with). He’s familiar with the city (S3E11), so we can assume he’s grown up in an urban environment, which means he’s probably to some extent a latchkey kid. Sending him to a summer camp would get him out of the city, around people his own age, where he’d be supervised and kept busy while his parents are at work until school starts. Camps are expensive, but I imagine Camp Campbell might be the best they can afford, and they’d assume it’s better than him sitting in an empty apartment all day.

Max’s insistence they don’t care: He’s … ten years old. Not only has he made it clear that he assumes the worst of most people, including adults, but it’s also relatively common for kids whose parents worked a lot while they were growing up to interpret that busyness as a lack of interest in them. It’s hard to understand things like expenses or financial security as a kid and view it as “my parents are never around and so they don’t love me.” Hopefully when he’s older he’d appreciate everything they’ve sacrificed for him, but at 10 years old it’s expected he’d feel neglected.

I’m just saying, maybe a borderline emotionally unstable child isn’t the most reliable source, is all.

This isn’t rock solid, I realize; I’ve made a lot of leaps of logic and assumptions extrapolating from what we’ve been given. But I don’t see it as any less plausible than his parents hating him or whatever the prevailing fan theories are, and more importantly: it’s a fuck of a lot more interesting (yes, yes, in my opinion). I think adding nuance and sympathy to Max’s parents will always end up more interesting than “good David vs evil parents.”

Of course, we’re in a bit of a limbo since we don’t know necessarily where RT is going to take this. There is every chance they’re going to drop the bomb that Max’s parents are literally as bad as everyone has made them out to be – and worse. Maybe they’re actually Xemug. Fuck if I know. And if that happens, I’m gonna call it out for being the cheapest and least-interesting of the possible options. Bad, lazy writing that pits pure good against pure evil is always gonna suck, even if it comes from the writers of one of my favorite shows.

I really, really hope they don’t go with that (to finally, I guess, answer Anon’s question fully). And I’m pretty forgiving when it comes to things people hate CC for: Dolph doesn’t bother me, most of the problematic episodes don’t bother me (that pee one is still pretty rough though), but if they go the “Max’s parents are the devil and that is why Max is the way he is” route, I’m gonna … well, just be so profoundly disappointed that the showrunners could’ve done something interesting and decided instead to go for the lowest-hanging fruit, that’s all.

FINALLY:

3. This Fucking Fandom

So here’s the thing. Dad//vid is unique among the “ships” in the fandom in that it is deliberately placed as “the anti-Max//vid.” And I understand why that was done, and I appreciate it holding up that particular vanguard; max//vid has no place in dad//vid, and vice versa. 

But the problem with dad//vid being set up as the not-max//vid is that everything that isn’t dad//vid is suddenly viewed as “max//vid-lite.” Even when that makes literally zero sense.

See, even when I was briefly into dad//vid in its very literal “David adopts Max from Max’s evil parents” form, what I was really drawn to was the idea of David being Max’s older brother. Back when the fandom was like 100 fics on AO3, I had started planning out this long plot involving David taking on a brotherly role to this kid I thought really needed one. Admittedly I’m just a sucker for sibling relationships, but from the beginning I’ve been all about this brotherly bond, and so when a popular artist came up with the term “bro//vid” and it started gaining traction, I was all over that noise. There was finally a version of this relationship that wasn’t either “Max and David fucking” or “David literally adopts Max and becomes his literal father,” and I couldn’t be more excited.

And then … I found out that apparently “bro//vid” was becoming synonymous with “max//vid but secretly.” And … man, it really sucked to suddenly be treated like I was supporting pedophilia because I didn’t like the idea of David-adopts-Max as much as the whole big brother thing. I can’t even imagine how much it must suck if your favorite iteration of Max and David is something along the lines of mentor/friendship, without some sort of buffer of “well they’re basically (or literally) related.” Because if “these two as brothers” is max//vid-lite, then I can’t fucking imagine what that would be called.

And even when it’s not specifically about max//vid, it just keeps cropping up. I posted about the Season 4 premiere and expressed how much I saw a cute, brotherly relationship between David and Max, and someone immediately replied saying that they thought it was more like father-son. Which … yeah, fine, I don’t care if you see it like father-son, go nuts, but I am getting really sick of the fact that father-son is the only acceptable “ship” and everything must lean in that direction, no exceptions. (I know, it’s not a ship technically, but I don’t know what else to call it. Don’t read anything weird into me calling it that.)

I don’t think “please just let me enjoy these two and their relationship dynamic without making it pedophilia or insisting David adopt Max from his terrible evil parents” is that tough an ask. 

Or at least, it really shouldn’t be. But somehow it … kind of is.

And that sucks.

(Also, I hate the whole “Max is David’s favorite camper” thing. It’s not technically tied to dad//vid, but it does often come hand-in-hand with that and it just irks me to no end. If David has such blatant favorites, he is terrible at his job and kind of a douchebag. I think he gravitates towards the camper(s) who need attention the most, because he likes feeling like he’s made a difference, but I don’t think David would just straight-up pick a favorite like that, not when he has a full camp of kids who need him. Just saying.)

[glowyelfboyfriend]

How did they ruin elven lore? I’m sorry, but I don’t know much about the games as other people

I didn’t call this blog ‘Elf Salt’ for nothing

-cracks knuckles-

I have a number of issues with how bioware handled elves in Dragon Age and they all interject to create this terrible mess of a mishandled race allegory that should never have happened. The frustrating thing for me is that most of the fandom is content to kinda just skip past these discussions but as someone who is first nations it actually hits real close to home for me.

Anyways...

Elves in dragon age are very clearly ‘inspired by’ if not completely based on racial experiences and history of Jewish, Roma and Indigenous peoples. (I can only speak to first nations knowledge so its what I will discuss the most).  Historically in Thedas the Elves lived across most of the land and were more or less the dominant race (I’ll get back to that later...). After a massive war they were nearly completed wiped out and enslaved by the Tevinter nation that defeated them. Elven culture was absolutely wiped from Thedas, language and history was completely lost, their cities and holy lands were either destroyed completely or overtaken by the people who know enslaved them.

Their experience as slaves has them widely stripped of any of their culture, their language, they are not permitted to learn how to read and are considered more akin to animals than to other humanoid races (sound familiar to American history?). In other parts of Thedas slavery had ended but elves were only permitted to live on designated chunks of land such as The Dales (does that sound familiar? Hm?) until the human authority decided they shouldn’t be allowed to have it anymore since they didn’t follow their christian-inspired religion, thus swooping in to wipe them out again and remove land promised to them.

In modern Thedas, Elves are still kept as slaves in Tevinter and are kept under such tight authority and law in other kingdoms that they are not much better off. In Denerim it is illegal for elves to own weapons. Elves are stuck living in alienages (which resemble both ghettos AND reservations) where there is no work, they are routinely abused/harassed/raped/murdered by humans (and have literally no legal standing to defend themselves as its illegal for an elf to assault a human whereas there are no laws protecting them) and the alienage is routinely locked up so the city guards can completely wipe out the elves living there. 

There are Dalish elves who attempt to recobble together their culture and history, traveling nomadically with the constant danger of humans deciding to try and attack them (this includes templars, city guards and country folk btw). They contend with constant fearmongering that they are doing evil and malicious things for their traditional religion as well as stereotypes of them being thieves (sound familiar???)   

So here is the thing, up to this point, this is just world flavor and world building. There are critics who find the inclusion of these stereotypes and the ways in which they are represented to be an issue in and of itself. I don’t disgree but its not my actual issue. I think fantasy settings can be an eye-opening and cathartic practice, it can give people who don’t experience those racial themes or hardships a chance to roleplay and maybe understand it a little bit more. As someone who is first nations I find getting to play a Dalish elf in Origins and taking people to task for their balant racism and save the world to be incredibly satisfying. 

The issue is.... once you created a fantasy world where this sort of racism exists you need to be EXTREMELY careful with how you use it. And while I think the writers of this series are talented and did the best they could with the limitations of ‘video game’ I think there were some GRAVE errors, particularily in Inquisition and Trespasser that completely ruined any goodwill they had. 

In Inquisition it felt as if they wanted to try and retcon the race issues they had established, or else had completely forgotten that those race issues were based on real-life issues. The two elf companions you get are, frankly, extremely anti-elf. You have Sera who has tons of internalized racism, which in itself is a really interesting concept to explore, except there is no character arc or closure for this. If you romance her as a Dalish elf you never have a chance to bring her around to stop hating on her race and culture, instead she insists you give up your racial identiy and heritage. Solas... oh gods where do I even begin? To keep it short, Solas’ entire point in the plot seems to be to completely undermine and ridicule elves and all the world building the game devs made. He refers to Dalish as ‘children’ and even mocks city elves, both of which are just coping with racial injustices/slavery/genocide over a couple hundred year history. 

If you play Inquisition as any race other than an Elf you will be presented a picture of elves as nothing more than stupid, misguided, shameful people that take what they have for granted and want ‘more’. Which... let me tell you... as a person who is first nations... that is insanely close to what racist pricks think of us today. Painting indigenous religion as ‘savage’ or ‘primiative’ and infantilizing those who follow it, shutting down people who are trying to find some justice for generations of abuse and trauma all while lifting up characters who are willing to throw their fellows under the bus....... its a narrative that is present in modern day real life race issues. This is all presented as Fact with no solution, no exploration, just ‘how things are’. And I think that’s extremely misguided of the writers, and I wonder when they forgot that these themes were based on real life.

Finally, we get to the cherry on top - Trespasser. Before this game we had humans being widely dismissive of elven religion, but in a way where it was clear that they were just ignorant of a religion outside of their own. In this game they decided to take the history of the elves, their culture and religion and completely tear it apart.

It’s revealed that the Gods elves worship are actually not gods but were just Really Powerful Mages. It turns out the facial tattoos (which is totally a reference to indigenous tattoo practices my dudes) that were devotional to these gods were in fact just slave markings because elves enslaved their own race, and Tevinter had never actually taken them down in war - the elves just destroyed themselves.

I shouldn’t have to describe why taking the most oppressed race in the world of Thedas and undoing their culture/religion and history is a shitty move. I shouldn’t have to, especially with the context of the CLEAR real-world parallels. But everyone seems to miss out on how disgusting this really is.

From my own experience, I have heard this shit about my own heritage and people. I have heard white people say that the injustices first nations people faced ‘wasn’t so bad’ because they were ‘already’ killing and enslaving each other. I have read books written by white ‘researchers’ from only a hundred years ago trying to imply the wrong meanings on sacred tattoos and culture. I have heard these arguments to defend colonialism and genocide. 

If you don’t have these real-life experiences, or you decided to play as something other than a dalish elf who might give a shit about their entire history/culture/family/beliefs/identity you will not notice this. It’ll just be an interesting ‘twist’ and I hate it. I hate that dismantling the ONE THING this systematically oppressed, enslaved and genocided culture had to cling onto has been used for a cheap ‘twist’.

Will they do something interesting with it in the next game? I don’t know, maybe. But kicking down and making elves be the sacrifice for something so identity-destroying is just... its bad. It was a bad choice. You know they wouldn’t do that with Andrastianism, they wouldn’t come out and be like ‘Oh the Maker was actually just some guy who enslaved humans for his own benefit’, and you know why. 

The issue is taking ‘inspiration’ for your fantasy world racial pain and then tossing it aside for shallow twists. Yes, its a fantasy video game, but as someone who IS affected by these REAL-WORLD ISSUES I felt completely betrayed and gutted by my fave escape telling me that my in-game equivalent was a fucking dumbass for believing in the culture of their heritage.

[alifeenrouteblog]

i want this bitch's life: my obsession with lifestyle bloggers

Full disclosure: I took this title from The Cut's series, I Like This Bitch's Life.

My high school was all-girls and Catholic. Throughout my freshman year, I was fixated on a group of senior girls. People called them The Barbies or The Tan Clan. Most of them were blonde. But they were all tan and beautiful. Even in school uniforms, they were fashion forward. They had UGG boots before I knew what they were. On free dress days, they sported Juicy Couture sweat suits before anyone else. They were so beautiful. They didn’t wear make up and their hair was always in a perfect messy bun. All of which just impressed upon me how much more beautiful they were.

I loved them. Quietly and from afar. I could not tell my friends because a lot of them were their sisters or knew them from grade school. They did not share my infatuation. I found out their screen names and looked at their AIM profile. I stared at them when I passed them down the hall, taking note of their new handbags. They were so perfect. I wanted to be them.

Flash forward to 2015. I joined Instagram, late to the game, and did not really understand how to use it until late 2016. This is when I found lifestyle bloggers. It took me awhile to understand who these women were. I started following them because one of their beautiful photos was recommended to me.

At first, I didn’t get it. But I slowly started to realize these women were a part of an elusive club, much like my Tan Clan. But instead of seeing them in the cafeteria, I watch their lives through a series of high quality photos of their perfect kids, gorgeous homes, exquisite outfits, and an unbelievable amount of beautiful travel. Supplemented with the periodic #ad post.

I follow about two dozen women, who identify as lifestyle bloggers. The term lifestyle blogger is ambiguous and almost anyone with a blog can identify as one. But who I am talking about today are the women with followers amounting somewhere between half a million to over one million. They post perfectly curated photos of their daily life: their families, vacations, outfits, and other things that are mostly mundane from anyone else.

They are all different and I’m not here to make any generalizations about all women bloggers or lifestyle bloggers. For the most part, they grew their strong following by starting as something more specific, i.e. hairstyle tips, mommy life, or photos of their toddler take naps with their new puppy went viral. But they’ve all evolved.

When I’m in bed late at night, I stare at their gorgeous photos on Instagram, long after I’ve double tapped. Most often their posts feature themselves. The women are always white, beautiful, thin, and have perfect skin. When they show off a new outfit, it always looks good on them and I always like it – even if it is not my style. I find myself admiring their fit bodies in bikinis, then I look to my right at my night stand and see my glass of wine and the clean plate from whatever I just binge ate.

They are always married. The younger ones are engaged. Their husbands are always very handsome. If I have found out their husband’s profession, it is always a professional and prestigious job, like finance or doctor. When I find this out, I take a big gulp of my wine thinking about how the only men who seem interested in me quit college because he “makes so much money at his serving job/selling weed”.

Usually they have kids, if not, they will soon. And their kids are gorgeous. Blonde and tan babies in diapers at the beach. I don’t even want kids but this shit is freaking cute. The aesthetic is too much to hate.

Something else they all have in common: they travel a lot. Weekend trips to Hawaii with their husband and three kids. Two weeks in Australia with the whole fam. Couples getaway to Paris. Japan. Europe. Jamaica. They can afford to go anywhere. I have traveled a lot the past couple years, so I don’t know want to sound like I am bitter and jealous because I’m not. I want them to travel – travel more, please! I want to see more photos. I love gazing at their family photos, they look so happy. The scenery is beautiful and she looks great in a bikini or a beach maxi dress, holding a baby on her hip, all of them ankle deep in the ocean.

The women I’m talking about are not posting photos of anything resembling my life. They aren’t posting day drinking pics, or making jokes about being broke, or mention anything about their love life other than their “perfect hubby”. I can’t relate to their family life, and I only aspire to pieces of it, but I love looking at it.

All of the photos, the babies, the beaches, the hairstyles, along with strategic branding, creates beautiful imagery. This is why I love these women so much. Most of the time they are not selling me anything. They don’t do “unboxing” or “hauls”. They might have started out blogging about organization or makeup tricks, but they don’t do that anymore. Their content is purely for my eyeball’s pleasure. Their #ad or #partner posts are sparse and always done well. I can never tell it’s an advertisement unless I read the whole caption. They are legitimately showing me their beautiful lives.

Only 2% of the time do I stop to think, who took this photo? This type of thinking pulls me out of the fantasy I fall into when I look at their feeds. Their lives are magical and I don’t want to know how they pull it off.

While I appreciate the veil they provide for me, I know these photos and captions are their jobs. They work hard. I am often impressed with a women’s hustle, strategic vision, and passion. They started with a simple blog, years ago, and grew it. Like the blogger who got her start doing hairstyles on YouTube, after six years, she has launched her own hair extension line, which I know is doing very well because the product line expands every month. She is crushing it. And of course, I look at her Instagram stories updating me on the new stuff she’s launching, with no intention of buying her extensions.

Other times, I’m confused at how/why they make money doing what they do. Their pics are fine. But they don’t post much on their blog anymore. And it wasn’t anything super interesting. Generic takes on food, family, fun. I’m hating a little. Don’t get me wrong though, I thought a lot about this. Some of these blogs are just not interesting enough to deserve the kind of partnerships they are getting, in my opinion.

Most of the lady lifestyle bloggers I stumble upon are truly impressive to me. Yes, their photographs and seemingly perfect lives are great. They also just have a hustle and entrepreneurial spirit I don’t see in a lot of women I know. They work hard to expand their brand.

And they make a lot of money. This is not hard to figure out based on their lifestyle. Companies pay handsomely to #partner with. They don’t worry about money like I do. I know they don’t share the same anxiety I have when I hand over the gas station attendant my credit card to buy cigarettes. One because I know they don’t smoke (their skin is too good) and two, because they don’t worry about their credit limit when buying a $7 product.

 Either way, I look with some envy. But the envy does not come from hate or anger. At least not focused on her. It’s on me. I’m mad at myself for not having a successful business. I’m mad at myself for not getting into this game earlier. For jumping around careers. For not being successful at all. Luckily, I shut that part of me off and continue to scroll, getting to more pics of floral bouquets on top of a Pottery Barn dining room table that costs as much as one year of my grad school tuition.

I envy everything I see that they have. Except the kids. But I envy the joy and stability they find in having kids and how it adds to the image of the perfect life. I want that. I want their bodies. I want their husbands. I want their outfits and make-up. I want their houses. I want their vacations. Yes, I travel, but I want their trips. I want their photographs of the trips. I want their money! I want their lives. More than I’d like to admit.

Why though? I so clearly don’t fit that life. I’m kind of a mess. Clearly, I can’t land a dude like they can. I definitely don’t have their bodies. I don’t want kids. I blog about depression and figuring out what I am supposed to do with my life. I drink too much. Their lives are so clearly not me.

Sometimes, I wonder if I torture myself going on deep dives into their lives. Why am I so obsessed with them? Do I secretly want that life? Do I secretly believe deep down I don’t deserve it? Do I just like to see that life like the other one million people who follow them?

I don’t know. I don’t have the answer. Just like I can’t answer why I was obsessed with the Tan Clan 15 years ago. Except back then, I can probably attribute most of it to teenage pressure to conform to beauty and popularity. But maybe now I’m facing the same thing. I am still aspiring to be thin, beautiful, rich, and perfect. Don’t get me wrong. I love myself and my life. But I am realistic about feeling self-doubt and not always feeling confident compared to our society’s standards.

I know that these women are problematic and can perpetuate racial/gender stereotypes that are not helpful/terrible. I also know that they can be kind and loving, to their families and the world, and advocates for humanitarian causes. I know that their images can tell women all sorts of shitty things, (be skinnier, richer, a mom, more successful and a mom). But I also know that they can be inspiring to women aspiring to be entrepreneurs or working moms. I could go on and on.

Am I going to continue to follow these women’s lives? No. Do I like their pictures? Yes. Do I want to be mindful of how it impacts me? Yes.

Like anything else in life, it’s not black and white.

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

Tintin in the 21st Century

It’s weird that Tintin is only really known in continental Europe, and obscure as hell in the UK, because it was localised extremely well - so much so that it really confused me as a kid when, in The Black Island, Tintin takes a ferry over to Britain. If he tends to be knocking about in Brussels pre-adventure, I certainly didn’t notice.

What tends to get emphasised about Tintin these days is the racism - as in this Robert Brockway column - and yes, Tintin in the Congo comes off like Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden crossed with those episodes of Looney Tunes that they won’t broadcast any more, but Herge himself disavowed that one as being basically early installment weirdness. There is a good deal of fairly iffy content in some of the others, including, in Shooting Star, a scheming Jewish financier serving as antagonist (which to be fair, Herge wrote while living under Nazi occupation, and later edited), but none of this was key to the comic’s appeal.

What I’m criticising specifically here is Brockway’s assertion that “Nobody knows how to deal with the racism. [Modern adaptations] keep trying to whitewash it -- pun so totally intended, friend-o -- and every time they do, they act surprised that the property has lost all its magic”, an assertion he illustrates entirely with excerpts from Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in the Land of Soviets (an even earlier work than Congo and an anti-communist tract in which Tintin is a prick to everyone in Russia). I’m well aware that this all may come off as a white European trying desperately to salvage one of his Boy’s Own mighty-whitey heroes from the dustbin of history, but look at the following excerpts:

(The next panel is Tintin breaking this awful man’s cane. There’s a lot of instances like this throughout the series, where someone’s being a dick to a POC, and Tintin lets them have it. Yes, it’s robbing the POC of agency in favour of Tintin as mightiest of whities, you could call it racist, but it’s not quite a Klan march, is it?)

Certainly they’re depicting racism, but is anyone really looking at those and getting the impression that the author endorses Native Americans being thrown off their land? Or that the author agrees with the stereotypes he’s calling people stupid for believing? (The stereotypical Chinaman picture serves as a bit of a brick joke when, later on, Thomson and Thompson attempt to blend in.) Those last two excerpts are from The Blue Lotus, often held up along with Tintin in Tibet as a rebuttal to the charges of racism laid against Herge (largely because of Chang, based on one of Herge’s life-long friends). Ironically, The Blue Lotus was criticised for racism against the Japanese: the villain, Mitsuhirato (that’s him in the last panel) is a pug-nosed, buck-toothed opium trafficker who commits seppuku after the climax, so it’s a fair cop, although The Blue Lotus depicting Imperial Japan as authoritarian warmongers claiming more and more of Manchuria on flimsy pretexts has perhaps been vindicated by history.

Brockway’s column describes Tintin as ‘a racist Indiana Jones...for kids’, and this is basically accurate, although I think it’s debatable whether Tintin is more Indiana Jones or James Bond. (Last Crusade, apparently, began life as Spielberg’s Tintin fan script.) You could easily go with both - the crucial points are the globe-trotting, the intrigue, and Tintin’s own indomitable capability. To paraphrase another Cracked columnist, the weird thing about Tintin is that he was awesome. He looks like a cherub but will happily get mixed up in, and win, a fistfight or gunfight any day. He’s about 19 and already has a nemesis - a Greek nemesis. Despite being half a boy, and despite being a journalist who never writes anything, he’s self-sufficient in every way, and as physically capable as a man twice his size - which can flow back into the mighty whitey stuff in some fairly unfortunate ways:

but then again, take the racial dynamic out of that page (or, if you prefer, focus more on the white colonialists bossing about the South Asian guys) and it’s pretty standard protagonisty stuff.

The series is ‘for kids’ in that Tintin is your classic boy hero - given his trusty dog companion, it’s a lot like one of The Famous Five aged a few years and got a real job - and a lot of the humour is generally accessible, slapstick stuff - there’s a bit in Tintin in Tibet where Captain Haddock spends about three pages bumping into people and tripping over. Then, out of nowhere, an international arms dealer will plant opium in Tintin’s luggage to get him banged up by the cops. Seriously, most of the villains are gun-runners, opium smugglers, or both - there’s nothing too graphic, no Trainspotting-style illustrations of the full horror of the global opiate trade, but still, heavy stuff for a comic book. Particularly considering the great costumed comic heroes never even touched the subject of drugs until around the ‘80s, and an endless stream of edutainment telling kids to hey, just say no, man.

One crucial difference between Tintin and Indiana Jones/James Bond is the series’s utter sexlessness. Female figures, on the rare occasion they show up at all, are either damsels in distress, desexualised mother-types, or both. This aspect of the series has drawn its share of Freudian analysis over the years, and, due to Tintin’s best friend and roommate being salty seaman Captain Haddock, came in for a bit of ribbing in the bootleg Tintin in Thailand. If you were to put James Bond into that machine from Red Dwarf that splits things into their good and evil selves, you’d end up with Tintin and Sterling Archer. 

Really, Tintin’s closer to a modernist-era Hitchcock protagonist, who gets swept up in events and has sufficient pluck to see them through, and while I forget which way round the inspiration came, The Black Island bears a striking resemblance to Hitch’s The 39 Steps. To stick with The Black Island a moment - being half-Scottish, it was always a family favourite - I’d just like to present the first page in full:

Take note, any film or narrative that wants me to spend fifteen minutes with idiots, because that’s how you kick off an adventure. There’s your wholesome protagonist out for a walk with his dog, and there’s your bad dudes up to bad shit. Tintin spends the night in hospital, then proceeds to walk off the bullet going after the guys - who, it turns out, are some conspicuously German forgers operating in Britain, in 1938. Again, there’s nothing too graphic, but perhaps that’s bending the definition of the word for a work that involves the protagonist stepping in a bear trap, nearly being consigned to a Nazi asylum, getting knocked out during a gunfight with a White Russian when his bullets smash some bottles of chloroform, and then getting caught in a house fire (all this, incidentally, happens in one sequence of five pages or so).

To return to The Blue Lotus, one of Tintin’s allies in that, Mr Wang Chen-yee, more-or-less fits the bill for @thathopeyetlives and @raggedjackscarlet‘s idea of a mirror-universe Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which Bizarro Frank-N-Furter comes to represent the good side of traditionalism, the idea that ‘here is something worth believing in, if you dare to’:

Yeah, he’s a stereotype - you know it, I know it - he’s that specific kind of East Asian man they invented the word ‘venerable’ for, and the fact that at no point in The Blue Lotus does he use kung fu to devastating effect just makes you more certain he’s a master of it. But crucially, he seems like - as with Speedy Gonzales - the kind of stereotype the people it depicts could really get behind.

Mr Wang is the leader of The Sons of the Dragon, a secret society - and a robust, active secret society at that, much closer to the mafia than to the Freemasons (or, if you like, closer to the classic Freemasons than the modern Freemasons). Tintin first meets him after having been kidnapped and smuggled back into China, on his orders - and Mr Wang is hoping that Tintin will help them to fight opium smuggling. How perfect is that for a secret society? There’s your completely justified underdog, there’s something you can believe in, or at least you could before world governments introduced some anti-drugs boilerplate and fucked everything up for everyone.

There was a very mild religious grounding to Tintin - it didn’t come up a lot, but to be fair these were still the days when religion and a moral core were thought of as basically one and the same. It wasn’t lessons in theology like Linus in Peanuts, it was a more general use of universally recognisable icons, a lot closer to how Baikinman was elevated to go-to antagonist symbol in Japan - here’s the villains of Tintin and the Broken Ear being literally dragged off to hell:

Here’s Tintin invoking heaven’s name to try and stop the villain from capping himself (luckily, his gun’s been switched for a joke one):

And here’s Snowy grappling with his alcohol problem via his good and evil selves:

(That’s not a joke. Snowy’s taste for hard liquor was a recurring theme, at one point leading to Tintin spanking him as punishment for getting drunk in the Himalayas and nearly going over a waterfall - both content which I suspect simply wouldn’t fly today in the face of the animal rights lobby, at least not in a children’s book.)

Interestingly, this isn’t limited to Christian theology - here’s Snowy again, this time envisioning Tintin’s wrath by having him wield Zeus-style thunderbolts:

And a Buddhist monk levitating while in a prophetic trance:

Similarly, bona fide magic makes some semi-regular appearances in the series. In Cigars of the Pharaoh, Tintin is temporarily hypnotised with one glance from a fakir, but the most audacious depiction of this comes in The Seven Crystal Balls/Prisoners of the Sun, in which ball lightning attacks the gang, causing Professor Calculus to levitate, and it turns out the neo-Incas have been using what are essentially voodoo dolls to torment the explorers who looted their temple - this is particularly jarring in Prisoners of the Sun, contrasted as it is with Tintin’s little yay-science moment of getting out of his own execution by exploiting his knowledge of an upcoming solar eclipse.

In a way, all this magic and the various acts of god were an extension of the deus ex machinas that were a staple of the series from the start. Tintin in America is probably the worst offender in this regard, with the most ridiculous moment being a toss-up between the time the meatpackers go on strike and turn off the machinery seconds before gangsters throw him into it, and the time he gets chained to a barbell and thrown in a lake, only to discover the barbell’s inexplicably been switched with the wooden barbell of a crooked strongman.

Come the later adventures, though, the deus ex machinas would take a slightly different form to the literal intervention of god:

That’s not out of context, that’s not an idle aside - in Flight 714, the second-to-last complete comic, the gang gets out of a tight spot (an erupting volcano-cum-ancient ruin, no less!) when literal fucking aliens turn up to save the day and cart off the baddies. And, unlike most narratives of that ilk, they get out of it with definitive proof of extraterrestrial contact - Professor Calculus brings back a bit of metal composed of an alloy that does not exist on earth, although this is played off as a product of his cloth-eared eccentricity.

Even with the time difference, you’d probably say there’s surely a bit of a leap between the wholesome-but gritty early exploits of Tintin, where he’s running around after forgers and smugglers, and where he’s literally encountering aliens. Fortunately, there was an adventure that bridged that gap very nicely:

And you may well gather from that adorably kitsch rocket that this went down long before the actual moon landings - but despite this, Herge had done his research, he didn’t have the place turn out to be composed of cheddar like Wallace and Gromit’s A Grand Day Out, he depicted space travel and lunar survival reasonably accurately. A lot of people credit the white expanses of Tintin in Tibet as Herge’s masterpiece, but man, the inky blackness of Explorers is surely its underdog brother:

The final adventure, Tintin and Alph-Art, exists only as concept art and various bootleg versions. It features some genuinely radical departures from the established norm - a black Jamaican artist gets to have a heroic moment of his own, rather than just being acted upon by white people, and Tintin plans a date with an actual human woman. So the series obviously had come a long way from the days of publishing a version of Heart of Darkness where Kurtz is the good guy. And to go back to where we started - it’s not like we had to write off Bugs Bunny because of all the times he blacked up, right?

[magzoso-tech]

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/the-silicon-six-spread-propaganda-its-time-to-regulate-social-media-sites/

The 'Silicon Six' Spread Propaganda. It's Time to Regulate Social Media Sites.

I get it: I’m one of the last people you’d expect to hear warning about the danger of conspiracies and lies. I’ve built a career on pushing the limits of propriety and good taste. I portrayed Borat, the first fake news journalist, along with satirical characters such as Ali G, a wannabe gangster, and Bruno, a gay fashion reporter from Austria. Some critics have said my comedy risks reinforcing old racial and religious stereotypes.

I admit that most of my comedy over the years has been pretty juvenile. However, when Borat was able to get an entire bar in Arizona to sing “throw the Jew down the well,” it revealed people’s indifference to anti-Semitism. When, as Bruno, I started kissing a man in a cage fight in Arkansas and nearly started a riot, it showed the violent potential of homophobia. And when, disguised as an ultra-woke developer, I proposed building a mosque in one rural community, prompting a resident to proudly admit, “I am racist, against Muslims,” it showed a wide acceptance of Islamophobia.

The ugliness my jokes help reveal is why I’m so worried about our pluralistic democracies. Demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream, fueled in part by President Donald Trump, who has spread such paranoid lies more than 1,700 times to his 67 million Twitter followers. It’s as if the Age of Reason – the era of evidential argument – is ending, and now knowledge is delegitimised and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which thrives on shared lies, is on the march. Hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities.

All this hate and violence actually has something in common: It’s being facilitated by a handful of Internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media platforms reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify content that keeps users engaged – stories that appeal to our baser instincts and trigger outrage and fear. That’s why fake news outperforms real news on social media; studies show that lies spread faster than truth.

On the Internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC, and the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.

When I, as Ali G, asked the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, “What woz it like to walk on de sun?” the joke worked, because we, the audience, shared the same facts. If you believe the moon landing was a hoax, the joke was not funny.

When Borat got that bar in Arizona to agree that “Jews control everybody’s money and never give it back,” the joke worked because the rest of us knew that the depiction of Jews as miserly is a conspiracy theory originating in the Middle Ages.

Social media platforms make it easier for people who share the same false premises to find one another, and then the technology acts as an accelerant for toxic thinking. When conspiracies take hold, it’s easier for hate groups to recruit, easier for foreign intelligence agencies to interfere in our elections and easier for a country like Myanmar to commit genocide against the Rohingya.

Yes, social media companies have taken some steps to reduce hate and conspiracies on their platforms. Yet these steps have been mostly superficial, and the next 12 months could be pivotal: British voters will go to the polls next month while online conspiracists promote the despicable theory of “great replacement” that white Christians are being deliberately replaced by Muslim immigrants. Americans will vote for president while trolls and bots perpetuate the disgusting lie of a “Hispanic invasion.” And after years of YouTube videos calling climate change a “hoax,” the United States is on track, a year from now, to formally withdraw from the Paris agreement.

Unfortunately, the executive of these platforms don’t appear interested in a close look at how they’re spreading hate, conspiracies and lies. Look at the speech Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg delivered last month that warned against new laws and regulations on companies like his.

Zuckerberg tried to portray the issue as one involving “choices” around “free expression.” But freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Facebook alone already counts about a third of the world’s population among its users. Social media platforms should not give bigots and paedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target victims.

Zuckerberg claimed that new limits on social media would “pull back on free expression.” This is utter nonsense. The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law” abridging freedom of speech, but this does not apply to private businesses. If a neo-Nazi comes goose-stepping into a restaurant and starts threatening other customers and saying he wants to kill Jews, would the restaurant owner be required to serve him an elegant eight-course meal? Of course not. The restaurant owner has every legal right, and, indeed, a moral obligation, to kick the Nazi out. So do Internet companies.

Zuckerberg seemed to equate regulation of companies like his to the actions of “the most repressive societies.” This, from one of the six people who run the companies that decide what information so much of the world sees: Zuckerberg at Facebook; Sundar Pichai at Google; Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google’s parent company, Alphabet; Brin’s ex-sister-in-law, Susan Wojcicki, at YouTube; and Jack Dorsey at Twitter. These super-rich “Silicon Six” care more about boosting their share price than about protecting democracy. This is ideological imperialism – six unelected individuals in Silicon Valley imposing their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government and acting like they’re above the reach of law. Surely, instead of letting the Silicon Six decide the fate of the world order, our democratically elected representatives should have at least some say.

Zuckerberg speaks of welcoming a “diversity of ideas,” and last year, he gave us an example. He said he found posts denying the Holocaust “deeply offensive,” but he didn’t think Facebook should take them down “because I think there are things that different people get wrong.” This is madness. The Holocaust is a historical fact, and those who deny it aim to encourage another one. There’s no benefit in pretending that “the Holocaust is a hoax” is simply a “thing” that “different people get wrong.” Zuckerberg says that “people should decide what is credible, not tech companies.” But two-thirds of millennials say they haven’t even heard of Auschwitz. How are they supposed to know what’s “credible”? How are they supposed to know that the lie is a lie?

When it comes to removing content, Zuckerberg asked, “where do you draw the line?” Yes, that can be difficult, but here’s what he’s really saying: Removing lies and conspiracies is just too expensive.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter are unthinkably rich, and they have the best engineers in the world. They could fix these problems if they wanted to. Twitter could deploy an algorithm to remove more white supremacist hate speech, but they reportedly haven’t because it would eject some very prominent politicians. Facebook could hire enough monitors to actually monitor, work closely with groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP and purge deliberate lies from their platforms.

But they won’t, because their entire business model relies on generating more engagement, and nothing generates more engagement than lies, fear and outrage.

These companies pretend they’re something bigger, or nobler, but what they really are is the largest publishers in history – after all, they make their money on advertising, just like other publishers. They should abide by basic standards and practices just like the ones that apply to newspapers, magazines, television and movies. I’ve had scenes in my movies cut or truncated to abide by those standards. Surely companies that publish material to billions of people should have to abide by basic standards just like film and television studios do.

Zuckerberg said social media companies should “live up to their responsibilities,” but he’s totally silent about what should happen when they don’t. By now, it’s pretty clear that they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. In other industries, you can be sued for the harm you cause: Publishers can be sued for libel; people can be sued for defamation. I’ve been sued many times. But social media companies are almost completely protected from liability for the content their users post – no matter how indecent – by Section 230 of, get ready for it, the Communications Decency Act.

That immunity has warped their whole worldview. Take political ads. Fortunately, Twitter finally banned them, and Google says it will make changes, too. But if you pay Facebook, it will run any “political” ad you want, even if it’s a lie. It’ll even help you micro-target those lies to users for maximum effect. Under this twisted logic, if Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Adolf Hitler to post 30-second ads on his “solution” to the “Jewish problem.” Here’s a good way for Facebook to “live up to” its responsibilities: Start fact-checking political ads before running them, stop micro-targeted lies immediately, and when ads are false, don’t publish them.

Section 230 was amended last year so that tech companies can be held responsible for paedophiles who use their sites to target children. Let’s also hold them responsible for users who advocate for the mass murder of children because of their race or religion. And maybe fines are not enough. Maybe it’s time for Congress to tell Zuckerberg and his fellow CEOs: You already allowed one foreign power to interfere in US elections; you already facilitated one genocide; do it again and you go to prison.

In the end, we have to decide what kind of world we want. Zuckerberg claims his main goal is to “uphold as wide a definition of freedom of expression as possible.” Yet our freedoms are not only an end in themselves, but they’re also a means to another end – to our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And today these rights are threatened by hate, conspiracies and lies.

A pluralistic democratic society should make sure that people are not targeted, not harassed and not murdered because of who they are, where they come from, who they love or how they pray. If we do that – if we prioritize truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference and experts over ignoramuses – maybe we have a chance of stopping the greatest propaganda machine in history. We can save democracy. We can still have a place for free speech and free expression.

And, most important, my jokes will still work.

© The Washington Post 2019

[ask-artsy-oncie]

Disney and their Representation of Animated Latin@s, in response to people getting in an internet fist-fight over Coco

I’ve had some very choice words for Disney in regards to their representation of Latin@s ever since I was 14 and actually started thinking about it with a conscious mind.

As my sidebar states, I am half-Salvadoran (from my father’s side) and half-French (from my mother’s side). When I was 14, the 3D remastered release of Beauty and the Beast was in theaters, and I went to go see it with a friend, who is full Mexican. It is her favorite Disney Princess movie, so by the end of it, as we were exiting the theater, I made some stupid joke, something about being French and therefore being more like Belle than she was. It was all in good nature, of course, nothing to be taken seriously, but it got me thinking. When I got home that day, I asked my mother why, if there’s a French princess, there isn’t a Latina princess, too. What she said to me in response is still burned into my mind today, and continues to inspire me as an artist.

She said to me, “Because unless you go out and make one, yourself, Pocahontas is the best you’re going to get.”

Unfortunately, in this year of 2017, I feel like this is still true, today.

If you’re a die-hard defender of Disney, you may not like me after reading this. I want to emphasize that I don’t hate Disney as a company, and I don’t (at all) hate all the movies I’m going to bring up in this post, but I do think Disney has some serious flaws when it comes to racial representation. Yes, other companies do, as well, and the animation industry as a whole is very White-washed. But Disney is the massive giant of a company that looms over all of them, it has the most influence, and enjoys flaunting off how inclusive it is, when, in this case, that is far from the truth. This is an unpleasant conversation to be had, but it’s important and needs to be addressed.

vvvv More under the cut vvvv

I should really go in chronological order, but since I opened up with the princess talk I might as well start off with Elena.

I do want to make a note of something before we really dive deep into things. I want to say that I’m going to only be looking at Renaissance Disney onward, which excludes The Three Caballeros. This is because it’s mostly going to focus on representation that affects children currently, and not only is The Three Caballeros a product of its time (1944) (much like Speedy Gonzales, I might add, who me and many other Latin@s have no issue with, personally, but is a harmful stereotype, nonetheless), but not many children are exposed to it, anymore. That would be like expecting millennials to have been exposed to Charlie Chaplin when we were little. I cannot dissect this piece of media, neither positively nor negatively, without being unfair to Disney as a company today. Ever since its Renaissance, however, Disney HAS pushed and continues to push and revive and market all its successes since the Renaissance began with The Little Mermaid, so everything from that movie onward is fair game.

Now, about Elena...

I will admit to having not watched Elena of Avalor. I hardly watch TV anymore as it is, and that actually ties into the real point I want to make about Elena. I cannot argue against or praise Elena of Avalor for its content (though in the commercials I’ve seen promoting the show, I couldn’t help but notice that there are characters who mispronounce her name as the more English-sounding “Elaina”, which is offensive in its own right), but I don’t plan to, because for its content to really matter, it has to have been seen. No, instead, I don’t count Elena of Avalor as true Latin@ representation purely because of her inaccessibility. Elena may be officially the first Latina Disney princess, but she is treated so poorly that she may as well not exist.

I’ve already mentioned that I don’t watch TV much, any more. That’s not just a personal thing, that’s actually a pretty accepted trend. I’m not kidding, if you still think that TV is going to eventually stomp out the popularity of the internet, I can’t help you. Animated movies, though, they’re still a very widely viewed form of media, and Disney animated movies still continue to get billions upon billions of dollars in box-office (Disney/Pixar owns four of the top five highest grossing box-office movies), that doesn’t even count DVD/Blu-Ray/Digital sales after the movie is released for home viewing. If Disney really wanted to make Elena this new Disney princess to stand alongside all the others (which seems to be the plan, considering she’s on the official Disney Princess website, though this website seems a little poorly kept, seeing as it has yet to include Moana, and multiple titles and profiles, including ones for Frozen, which Disney can’t get enough of, seem to be missing from the main page.) they would have given her a full-length film with high-budget animation.

That’s not what we get. Instead, Elena gets a television cartoon series (which is a step-up from her originally announced side role on Sophia the First, another children’s cartoon series, granted) that, according to the aforementioned Disney Princess website, airs at 7:30 PM.

Also known as: The recommended bedtime for most young children.

This piles on a few factors as to why Elena of Avalor becomes inaccessible to many children who would benefit from seeing a Latin@ princess (Latin@ children). I cannot tell you the amount of White people I have seen look at Elena and oogle over her because “she’s representation!”

Sorry to sound like a bitter tumblr user, but please, I ask that you check your privilege. 

In order for someone to regularly view Elena of Avalor AND give it ratings that show Disney that people are watching and that Elena is profitable, they must:

-Own a TV

-Have a Television Service Provider (TSP) 

-Have Disney Channel or Disney Junior (which are premium paid channels)

-Consider letting their child stay up past the recommended bedtime just to watch TV, and that’s only if they know Elena will be on at that time. We are assuming this is the average parent who doesn’t actively check Disney-dot-com to see if there’s a new Disney Princess.

To see the newest Disney Animated film, they must

-Have access to the local movie theater (transportation)

-Have money for movie tickets.

Disney has treated Elena the way many TV networks (back when we were kids and TV was still widely popular) would treat a program that they eventually want to get rid of, by putting it in a time slot they know most people can’t watch it at and blaming the bad ratings on its unpopularity before removing it entirely. Disney will most likely keep airing Elena because it’s good press, they look like inclusionists by doing so, but Elena has her own “inaccessible little time slot”, which happens to include a poorly chosen air time (why could she not be a Saturday morning cartoon?) as well as the fact that she’s on TV at all, as opposed to the silver screen.

I have to say, that for the while that I worked at Toys R Us, it was rather heartwarming to see Latin@ children buying Elena dolls and accessories, it truly was, but that’s of the children who bought Elena merchandise, period. The sad truth that non-Latin@ (or ignorant Latin@) Disney fans have to face is, most Latin@ children recognize Peppa Pig before they recognize Elena. No kidding, they go absolutely rabid over Peppa Pig. This is because Peppa Pig airs on public-access television in the morning, and is accessible for the very reasons Elena of Avalor is inaccessible. And, truth-be-told, even more Latin@ children recognize and buy Frozen merchandise at Toys R Us, because they need neither a TV nor a TSP to have seen Frozen. Disney, by touting the fact that they now have a Latina princess while refusing to give her a spotlight on the silver screen, shows its (very large) Latin@ following that really, all they care about is the pat on the back that they get for having representation. To them, it doesn’t have to be good representation.

(Side note, does anyone want to rant with me over the fact that the Face Character for Elena at Disneyland, instead of saying “cheese” or even just saying “queso”, just spouts out a random Latin American food when you take a picture with her? She tried to get my sister to say “pan dulce” with her. If that ain’t the classic “stereotyping Latin@s based on the food we eat” then I don’t know what is.)

Alright, now let’s head back to the Renaissance: The Emperor’s New Groove

I don’t really have a problem with this movie. There’s not a lot I can really complain about it, representation-wise. Mostly, I’d like to tell you what makes it so great so I can later contrast it, in terms of concepts, to Coco (and, oh, boy, will I get to Coco). What makes Emperor’s New Groove such a terrific example of “how to treat a Latin@ animated movie” are as follows:

-It doesn’t take place in Mexico (instead in pre-colonial South America)

-Just the fact that it’s pre-colonial and recognizes that there was a civilization in Central and South America before Spain marched its way on in

-It acknowledges the culture it’s portraying outside of the holidays said culture celebrates

-Despite the fact that its title bares resemblance to the Hans Christian Anderson fair tale, it is more-or-less an original story with little influence from European fairy tales (though it does strike conceptual similarities with Caliph Stork, a German fairy tale) 

I really do like Emperor’s New Groove as a piece of Latin@ representation from Disney. But, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suffer from the very fatal flaw of casting White actors to voice colored characters. Other than Yzma’s VA, Eartha Kitt, none of the other voice actors are people of color. I mean, I love David Spade, but, having been so famous for his place in a comedy duo with the late Chris Farley, he was about as type-casted for Kuzco’s role as Anna Kendrick was type-casted to play as princess Poppy in Dreamworks’s Trolls. As in, there was none. (Ironically, he and Anna Kendrick are type-casted for rather similar personalities). Not to say that David Spade didn’t do a great job, but there was very little keeping Disney from grabbing an aspiring Latin@ voice actor, other than the draw that Spade’s name gave to the movie (and even that wasn’t much, as this movie has a really small box-office profit by Disney standards, it was even beat by Bolt and Chicken Little, which are commonly hated Disney movies). And that’s just the lead role, that doesn’t account for, again, 99% of the voice actors being White. 

This isn’t even a Disney-exclusive issue, either. Dreamworks’s The Road to El Dorado, which came out the same year, which is also conceptually a great Latin@ movie (despite the leading characters being Spaniards), also suffers from casting much of its colored characters with White VAs. At the very least, the leading lady was voiced by a Latina, but that’s a super small step in the right direction.

This is, of course, a trend we’re just only beginning to see the end of, with movies like Big Hero 6 (I’m getting to that, by the way) and Moana giving more attention to VAs of color, so I may have to chalk Emperor’s New Grove up as another product of its time, but this is definitely something that needs to end as soon as possible.

Of course, though, the Emperor’s New Groove is still not a Disney princess movie, as much as we love to joke about Kuzco being a Disney princess, so, as good as this movie is, I’m not changing my argument about there being no real Latina Disney princess, yet.

Unfortunately, due to its poor box office, this movie kind of faded into obscurity in terms of marketing. Of course, people of my generation remember it fondly and reference it frequently, but Disney didn’t treat it all that very well. (It got a TV series, but so did literally every Renaissance Disney film that they could manage. It wasn’t some special treatment.)

I think I’ve said all I can about this movie.

Now, I wanna talk a little about ham-handed representation that is: Honey Lemon.

Honey’s a sweet girl, really, she is, and I don’t dislike her as a character. In fact, I’m super glad that Disney gave us women in science in Big Hero 6. Honey and Gogo are wonderful inspirations and role models for young girls, but that doesn’t excuse Disney from the fact that Honey isn’t a good example of Latin@ representation. And I’m not talking about her looks. She looks pretty Latina, while still keeping physical features from her comic book counterpart. No, instead, Honey is an example of unnecessarily changing a colored character’s race to another marginalized race, purely to be able to say that they have a Latin@ in this movie.

Honey Lemon, who in the comics bares the legal name Aiko Miyazaki (Honey Lemon was only her super hero name), was originally a Japanese science student. And her race-change isn’t a unique case for this movie, either, as the all-Japanese cast of the comics was changed to a more mixed-race cast for the movie. While it looks good on Disney’s part to do this, it wasn’t necessary at all, and they could have very well had a main cast comprised entirely of Japanese people. Hell, Disney, this movie takes place in San Francisco, and a Japanese-meshed “San Fransokyo” at that. Have you been to the Bay Area? It wouldn’t have been unrealistic at all to have a main cast (of just five human characters, mind you) that was only made up of Asians.

What Honey Lemon (as well as Wasabi) represents in reality is the idea that marginalized races are interchangeable. There is nothing inherently Latin@ about Honey Lemon, and despite the fact that her voice actor is Latina, I can’t help but feel like her accent feels forced at times, as if the directors were trying to get her to “sound more Latina” so she could become more marketable. Diversity is a wonderful thing, but because changing the races of these characters was, again, just so unnecessary considering the source material, it’s just another way of Disney showing us that people of color are exploitable, so long as they can get more “progressive points” for the more races they choose to portray. Honey didn’t feel like a gift, what she (and Wasabi) felt like was Disney’s desperate grab for a medal and praise.

Again, I don’t hate Big Hero 6 by any means, but you can’t pretend it’s representation. Its diversity is disingenuous and serves only to be a crowd-pleaser.

Alright, now we’re getting to the big boy, the elephant in the room. You thought this post was already super long? Get ready to delve into Pixar’s Coco.

By now, you’ve probably either seen or heard of Coco’s teaser trailer. This movie isn’t even out, yet, but, as per the norm, it is anything but free from internet speculation and criticism.

I do want to start by saying that, no, this movie isn’t going to be a total nuke to Latin@ representation. Its been flaunted as having an all-Latin@ cast, and that’s amazing, that’s something that we should have had all along. It’s something that not even Jorge R. Gutierrez’s The Book of Life (I’m getting to that, okay?) can tout due to Channing Tatum’s role as Joaquin Madragón and Ron Perlman’s role as Xibalba. Not to mention that, yes, it is another main-stream animated movie featuring Latin@ culture, and, technically, we Latin@s should be thankful for it. But, not so fast: if the LGBTQIAP community is allowed to openly criticize and not accept LeFou’s sexual orientation as proper representation in Disney’s live action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, then why should Latin@s blindly accept every bone that’s thrown our way without thinking critically about the media that we consume, and its origins?

It’s no secret that Coco is being compared to The Book of Life in terms of concept, character design, set design, prop design, and even composition (the way certain scenes are shot). 

(via @kristoffbjorgman, but I got this via @pan-pizza ‘s blog, he is a Latino Youtuber who seems to have a very strong opinion about Coco.)

But should we be so quick as to call it a rip-off? Well, that’s up for debate. Though the composition of some of the scenes does look disturbingly similar, I don’t think conclusions should be jumped to in either argument. Firstly, much of what makes this movie feel like such a “rip-off” are its Latin@ elements and aesthetics (the imagery of the guitar, the marigolds, the select colors used, even the grandmother’s wicker wheelchair, which was compared to Anita Sánchez’s) and exist more because of the movie’s setting than some kind of copyright conspiracy.

Coco also seems like it will be more focused on just familial love than The Book of Life’s messages on romantic, familial, platonic, and even self love. That doesn’t really make it less, it’s good to see Disney and Pixar moving towards the trend of familial love. But plot-wise, that also makes it dissimilar to The Book of Life. The trailer for Coco also shows the young protagonist, Miguel, falling into the land of the dead by means of curiosity, rather than the desperation to follow his poisoned love interest, as Manolo Sánchez does.

Conceptually, though, one cannot argue one way or another whether this movie had taken ideas directly from The Book of Life. The point brought up that, if Coco began production in 2013, then it couldn’t possibly have taken from The Book of Life, which was released in 2014, is deeply flawed, and the reason why this point is flawed is the very reason that Coco becomes problematic. The Book of Life does not exist in a vacuum, and was not always intended to be produced by Reel FX from the moment of it’s creation. Jorge R. Gutierrez pitched this movie over and over to multiple animation studios, including Disney, for over a decade before it was accepted by Reel FX. He was turned down from everywhere else, again, including Disney.

This is also not the first time Gutierrez was turned down by Disney, as he also pitched a show for Disney Channel called Carmen Got Expelled, which never got greenlit.

I really just cannot even begin to explain how much having a tall, curly-haired girl, much less protagonist, in a TV show would have meant to me as a kid.

Incidentally, it’s interesting that the show that Jorge R. Gutierrez did end up working on for Disney, as the lead character designer, was not made by him and had absolutely no references to Latin@ culture within said character designs. (Not that I’d expect there to be in a Canadian-created show, but it is so very interesting that this is all they allowed Gutierrez to work with)

But, tangent aside, it is within the realm of possibility that Disney did take ideas from a failed pitch, assuming it would go nowhere with anyone else, when Lee Unkrich wanted to make a Dia de los Muertos film.

But there’s something more to say about the mere idea that Coco could be ripped off from The Book of Life. And that is 

that it doesn’t matter if it’s a rip-off or not.

People really seem to be having a lot of fun pointing fingers and trying to start some kind of studio war because two movies look similar. What’s happening because of this is that it alienates and divides fans who believe that there is ripping off going on, and fans who feel the need to defend Disney, into an “us vs. them” mentality. It becomes an argument about whether someone stole from someone else, and that’s something no one can really prove or disprove unless this was a widespread press-statement from Pixar admitting their theft. It’s a pointless argument that’s only going to end in hurt feelings and it does not matter.

There is something that does matter, though, something far more problematic and impacting to any artist of color looking to create something for mainstream media, and that is the comparison between the origins of The Book of Life, which is used purely as an example in this case, and the origins of Coco.

As mentioned earlier, Jorge R. Gutierrez and The Book of Life was rejected from multiple animation studios. Why is that? What was the reason he was given to defend keeping such an interesting, fresh concept from being created? Oh yeah.

Gutierrez was told that there was no audience for that kind of movie, that “no one wants to watch a Mexican movie”.

This was what held off The Book of Life from mainstream media for over a decade. The thought that nobody wants, or cares about, a movie that takes place in Mexico, about Mexicans and their culture. This was what was told to a Mexican artist and creator, who poured not only his heart and soul, but also his culture and life experiences, into his work.

This also just doesn’t make any sense, considering the very large Latin@ following Disney has. It’s not like we need another White princess, even back in the 2000′s.

Or maybe it was just that Disney didn’t want to add a Latin@ creator to their payroll?

Because, fast forward a decade, and the “sugar skull” aesthetic has become rampantly popular among White Americans, mostly attracting middle-aged, White, stay-at-home moms who like to feel “cultured” yet have nothing to do, and teenage White girls who also think it’s cute to wear Native American head dresses as accessories. Don’t believe me? Look at the kind of merchandise it’s found on:

(Thaneeya McArdle is White, by the way, you’d think they’d let Latin@ artists create art books portraying their holiday and culture, but this is another example of my eventual point.)

(Michael’s literally just caters to middle-aged, stay at home White moms with nothing to do. I worked there for over a year, I’d know)

(Oh yeah, Hot Topic is a huge (arguably the biggest) offender, and they market the holiday as if it were something edgy or emo, to attract their demographic, when that’s nothing to do with the holiday, at all. Literally, just google image “sugar skull hot topic” and prepare to be disgusted.)

(And don’t think I’m leaving Party City out of the fun!)

I don’t think I have to say that this is cultural appropriation, but I will. This just adds to treating us like a costume, treating our culture and Dia de los Muertos as some kind of marketable fashion, even more so that what they did to Cinco de Mayo. They are not celebrating us or our culture, just using us as some kind of accessory, all while they want us out of the United States and stereotype us as lazy, criminals, and un-assimilated (should I bring up the fact that Trump won among white people on a racist platform that targeted Latin@s?)

During this time, Pixar employee Lee Unkrich, a White man, took a trip to Mexico, viewed Mexico from a tourist’s perspective, and decided to make a film about Mexico.

And it got approved immediately.

This is what I’m talking about. The origins of Coco represent a very real racist mentality that is still present in the animation industry. It is still an incredibly White-dominated industry (as even the director of Coco, who is a woman, is still White. Come on, Disney, even Dreamworks got a Chinese woman to direct Kung Fu Pandas 2 and 3) and that they still only want stories from marginalized cultures so long as White people tell them, and they are not stories for White people to tell. It is almost impossible to tell them correctly and do them justice, and you only shut out artists from said cultures who could tell the same story a million times better. And this goes without saying, but not everything is about White people and for White people. Sometimes it’s time to sit down and shut up and just listen. This is a problem in the industry that we still need to climb our way out of, and people should be thinking about this rather than whether Coco was a rip-off or not.

I’d argue that it was ripped from the hands of Latin@ artists.

I do want to bring to light that Jorge R. Gutierrez is rooting for Coco as a movie. It makes sense, of course, there are many Latin@s working on it, and it’d be damning to us for Disney to look at Coco as unsuccessful and then just say “well I guess there really was no audience for that”. But that doesn’t stop me from criticizing it and its origin, same as, again, it doesn’t stop us queer people from criticizing LeFou’s sexuality at the risk of Disney saying “well, I guess people just don’t want to see gay characters”. I genuinely do not think that I can sit through Coco and enjoy it, just because I know of why it exists in the first place. I’d love to enjoy and support it, but animation is also the industry I strive to be in, it is my life goal, and look at the way they treat creators like me.

This isn’t the only thing that bothers me about it, conceptually, either. Coco is the second mainstream Latin@ movie in a long time, and what do they decide to make it about? Dia de los Muertos. Between that and the wave of sugar skull aesthetics becoming so popular, I believe that Dia de los Muertos is now officially the only thing that White people care about regarding Latin@s (other than our food and booze, of course, but we all know what happens when you try to make an animated film about food.)

Going back to what made The Emperor’s new Groove and even The Road to El Dorado so great, there are so many more aspects of Latin@ culture that could be delved into, expanded upon, shown to the world outside of just one Latin@ holiday, especially if you go back to pre-colonial Latin America. The Book of Life can be about Dia de los Muertos because, first of all, it was created by a Mexican person who does not view his own culture as just an aesthetic or accessory, but also because it was the first of its kind to do so in mainstream media, and I’m not saying this because it came out in 2014 in contrast to Coco’s release date of 2018, I’m saying this because it was a concept for a decade prior. There was nothing like it at the time of its conception. But now we’ve heard this song and dance number, before. There’s more to Latin@ culture than Dia de los Muertos, just like there’s more to White American culture than Christmas. Coco, is, again, capitalizing on the aesthetic and appeal of Dia de los Muertos more than it cares about telling a Latin@ story. If it cared about telling a Latin@ story, it would have had a Latin@ director, and it also wouldn’t have tried to copyright Dia de los Muertos. Yes. This is an actual thing that happened, that Disney tried (and failed) to do. If you’re ever in doubt over how little Disney actually cares about Latin@ culture outside of its marketability to White Americans, just take a look at what they’ve already tried to do. Coco exists because Disney wants to market a Latin@ story to White American audiences.

Disney/Pixar is a behemoth of a company. They can afford (and afford to accept) directors and artists from Latin America to tell a Latin@ story, because if there really is no audience for that, and they tank in box office, they still have billions upon billions of dollars to fall back on. But they don’t want to, they clearly don’t want to. I think that the comparisons to The Book of Life are funny to a degree, but it’s so distracting to the real issue at hand.

In short, we need to think more about the media we consume and who influences it and why.

TL;DR: Disney has a strong history of poor, or poorly handled Latin@ representation, it doesn’t matter if Coco is a rip-off of The Book of Life, because what matters is the racism in the animation industry that kept The Book of Life from existing for a long time, and that allowed Coco to exist in the first place. It’s important to critically analyze media and its creators.

[lindyhunt]

Everything That Upset the Internet This Week

What is the web-o-sphere angry about this week? A kiss that can’t be racist, a sweater that is and an emoji for your menstrual cycle. Here’s everything you need to know:

Michelle Rodriguez Says Liam Neeson’s Kissing Proves He’s Not Racist

THE STORY: Earlier this week, the Independent published an interview with Liam Neeson in which he admits to race-based revenge. He shares that, 40 years ago, he responded to the rape of a close friend by walking around with a weapon, looking for any “black bastard” to murder.

Fast and the Furious star Michelle Rodriguez, who worked with Neeson on Steve McQueen’s Widows, is one of the few industry insiders who has come to Neeson’s defense over the disturbing anecdote. “It’s all fuckin’ bullshit. Liam Neeson is not a racist,” Rodriguez said at the amfAR Gala, according to Vanity Fair. “Dude, have you watched Widows? His tongue was so far down Viola Davis’s throat. You can’t call him a racist ever. Racists don’t make out with the race that they hate, especially in the way he does with his tongue—so deep down her throat. I don’t care how good of an actor you are. It’s all bullshit. Ignore it. He’s not a racist. He’s a loving man. It’s all lies.”

THE REACTION:

But on a serious note, who wants to remind Michelle Rodriguez that white slave owners used to rape and have children with slaves and still….idk….advocated for and participated in the very racist concept of slavery?

— sai (@Saisailu97) February 7, 2019

Here’s where Michelle Rodriguez says Liam Neeson isn’t racist because he shoved his tongue down Viola Davis’ throat (ew!)—as part of his job… which is *acting*.

And even if it weren’t, yanno, part of his job, you can’t kiss your way out of racism. https://t.co/7opcUsNMJu pic.twitter.com/LH6ElQF85u

— Imani Gandy (@AngryBlackLady) February 7, 2019

If making out with people made you an ally of their liberation then straight men would be the biggest feminists on earth. https://t.co/UGWtFHAojC

— Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) February 7, 2019

RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE RAGE: As Twitter was quick to call out, whom or how one kisses can’t indicate prejudice—be it race-based, gender-based or otherwise. If Rodriguez wanted to defend Neeson from the backlash he’s facing (which she entirely has the right to do), there are more thoughtful routes she could have taken. For example, soccer star John Barnes, who applauded Neeson for his honesty on Sky News, wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian:

“The idea of someone stalking the streets seeking out any “black bastard” to murder is inherently abhorrent and racist. However, it seems that for most people, rather than this being a jumping-off point to start a conversation, it is where the conversation ends. He did say those things so there is no defense. Many are happy to ignore the fact he was admitting to a shameful, backward way of thinking, which he now knows is wrong. Unfortunately, this approach does nothing to address the conscious or unconscious bias that many, if not all of us, feel. By only condemning Neeson’s candid admission we lose an opportunity to explore the causes and effects of racial bias that are so pervasive today.”

Granted, Rodriguez’s statement came from a party, not a carefully constructed and edited piece of writing.

Gucci Pulls Wool Sweater Accused of Resembling Blackface

THE STORY: Gucci began selling a black balaclava-type turtleneck sweater with a red-lined hole for the wearer’s mouth.

THE REACTION:

We have ONE month to celebrate the history of African Americans. Feb. 2019: Multiple accounts of politicians wearing blackface. And now news Gucci was selling a $890 blackface sweater. We are a nation desperately in need of diversity training. #gucci #BlackHistoryMonth pic.twitter.com/tHXEAP2pjN

— Michelle Singletary (@SingletaryM) February 7, 2019

I am a @Gucci fan, and I was going to buy a jacquard cardigan because it’s a forever piece, but until they and other luxury brands hire some people of color to consider the imagery of items like the “blackface” balaclava sweater (Randy Jackson voice) its a no for me dawg! https://t.co/Ln9vHbhBVN

— KLD (@karyndeshields) February 7, 2019

It’s 2019, when are we going to stop using stereotypes etc as marketing tactics?

As a Marketer/advertisier, there is a team responsible for checking stuff like this. But the problem is: if no one sees a problem with it on the team. @gucci you’re dead wrong. https://t.co/6V9w8X6KPB

— 和 明呀 (@miamohill) February 6, 2019

RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE RAGE: It’s extremely hard to believe nobody at Gucci noticed the similarity between their $890 sweater and the recently pulled Prada keychain. Like Prada, Gucci was quick to apologize and pull the product. “Gucci deeply apologizes for the offense caused by the wool balaclava jumper,” the brand’s statement began. “We can confirm that the item has been immediately removed from our online store and physical stores.”

The statement continues: “We consider diversity to be a fundamental value to be fully upheld, respected, and at the forefront of every decision we make. We are fully committed to increasing diversity throughout our organization and turning this incident into a powerful learning moment for the Gucci team and beyond.”

It’s interesting that instead of apologizing for their ignorant lapse in judgment, Gucci apologizes for the “offense caused.” A note for the next luxury brand that causes backlash: when you make a hurtful mistake, you’re supposed to apologize for your actions, not for someone else’s reaction.

There’s Going to be a Period Emoji

THE STORY: The Unicode Consortium has confirmed a blood drop-shaped emoji will be a part of an upcoming emoji drop. The news of the menstrual positive e-sticker comes after 55,000 people called for a period emoji in a campaign led by global girl’s rights charity Plan International UK.

THE REACTION:

Seriously? Is this really what people were clamoring for? What's next? A menopause emoji? An erectile dysfunction emoji? A bladder control emoji? What in the blue hell…

"A new 'period emoji' is coming soon to keyboards worldwide" https://t.co/jfXX1ciii5

— Crazy Train (@csonkaguy) February 8, 2019

why THE FUCK are they making a period emoji that is not cute

— ⚯͛ (@MarchToTheSiris) February 6, 2019

This is unnecessary… and disgusting #PeriodEmoji

— miss dean (@missdean254) February 6, 2019

RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE RAGE: Yes, it’s a small step towards eliminating shame around menstruation—but it’s a meaningful step. And, considering these tweets, the need for normalization is still very necessary. “The inclusion of an emoji which can express what 800 million women around the world are experiencing every month is a huge step towards normalizing periods and smashing the stigma which surrounds them,” said Lucy Russell, head of girls rights and youth at Plan International UK. “For years we’ve obsessively silenced and euphemized periods. As experts in girls’ rights, we know that this has a negative impact on girls; girls feel embarrassed to talk about their periods, they’re missing out, and they can suffer health implications as a consequence.”

Yes, the blood drop is pretty generic—but the eggplant and the maple leaf have multiple meanings, too. Emoji is a rapidly growing global language, and hopefully, this cute little blood drop will help in starting global conversations.

[jessicakehoe]

Everything That Upset the Internet This Week

What is the web-o-sphere angry about this week? A kiss that can’t be racist, a sweater that is and an emoji for your menstrual cycle. Here’s everything you need to know:

Michelle Rodriguez Says Liam Neeson’s Kissing Proves He’s Not Racist

THE STORY: Earlier this week, the Independent published an interview with Liam Neeson in which he admits to race-based revenge. He shares that, 40 years ago, he responded to the rape of a close friend by walking around with a weapon, looking for any “black bastard” to murder.

Fast and the Furious star Michelle Rodriguez, who worked with Neeson on Steve McQueen’s Widows, is one of the few industry insiders who has come to Neeson’s defense over the disturbing anecdote. “It’s all fuckin’ bullshit. Liam Neeson is not a racist,” Rodriguez said at the amfAR Gala, according to Vanity Fair. “Dude, have you watched Widows? His tongue was so far down Viola Davis’s throat. You can’t call him a racist ever. Racists don’t make out with the race that they hate, especially in the way he does with his tongue—so deep down her throat. I don’t care how good of an actor you are. It’s all bullshit. Ignore it. He’s not a racist. He’s a loving man. It’s all lies.”

THE REACTION:

But on a serious note, who wants to remind Michelle Rodriguez that white slave owners used to rape and have children with slaves and still….idk….advocated for and participated in the very racist concept of slavery?

— sai (@Saisailu97) February 7, 2019

Here’s where Michelle Rodriguez says Liam Neeson isn’t racist because he shoved his tongue down Viola Davis’ throat (ew!)—as part of his job… which is *acting*.

And even if it weren’t, yanno, part of his job, you can’t kiss your way out of racism. https://t.co/7opcUsNMJu pic.twitter.com/LH6ElQF85u

— Imani Gandy (@AngryBlackLady) February 7, 2019

If making out with people made you an ally of their liberation then straight men would be the biggest feminists on earth. https://t.co/UGWtFHAojC

— Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) February 7, 2019

RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE RAGE: As Twitter was quick to call out, whom or how one kisses can’t indicate prejudice—be it race-based, gender-based or otherwise. If Rodriguez wanted to defend Neeson from the backlash he’s facing (which she entirely has the right to do), there are more thoughtful routes she could have taken. For example, soccer star John Barnes, who applauded Neeson for his honesty on Sky News, wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian:

“The idea of someone stalking the streets seeking out any “black bastard” to murder is inherently abhorrent and racist. However, it seems that for most people, rather than this being a jumping-off point to start a conversation, it is where the conversation ends. He did say those things so there is no defense. Many are happy to ignore the fact he was admitting to a shameful, backward way of thinking, which he now knows is wrong. Unfortunately, this approach does nothing to address the conscious or unconscious bias that many, if not all of us, feel. By only condemning Neeson’s candid admission we lose an opportunity to explore the causes and effects of racial bias that are so pervasive today.”

Granted, Rodriguez’s statement came from a party, not a carefully constructed and edited piece of writing.

Gucci Pulls Wool Sweater Accused of Resembling Blackface

THE STORY: Gucci began selling a black balaclava-type turtleneck sweater with a red-lined hole for the wearer’s mouth.

THE REACTION:

We have ONE month to celebrate the history of African Americans. Feb. 2019: Multiple accounts of politicians wearing blackface. And now news Gucci was selling a $890 blackface sweater. We are a nation desperately in need of diversity training. #gucci #BlackHistoryMonth pic.twitter.com/tHXEAP2pjN

— Michelle Singletary (@SingletaryM) February 7, 2019

I am a @Gucci fan, and I was going to buy a jacquard cardigan because it’s a forever piece, but until they and other luxury brands hire some people of color to consider the imagery of items like the “blackface” balaclava sweater (Randy Jackson voice) its a no for me dawg! https://t.co/Ln9vHbhBVN

— KLD (@karyndeshields) February 7, 2019

It’s 2019, when are we going to stop using stereotypes etc as marketing tactics?

As a Marketer/advertisier, there is a team responsible for checking stuff like this. But the problem is: if no one sees a problem with it on the team. @gucci you’re dead wrong. https://t.co/6V9w8X6KPB

— 和 明呀 (@miamohill) February 6, 2019

RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE RAGE: It’s extremely hard to believe nobody at Gucci noticed the similarity between their $890 sweater and the recently pulled Prada keychain. Like Prada, Gucci was quick to apologize and pull the product. “Gucci deeply apologizes for the offense caused by the wool balaclava jumper,” the brand’s statement began. “We can confirm that the item has been immediately removed from our online store and physical stores.”

The statement continues: “We consider diversity to be a fundamental value to be fully upheld, respected, and at the forefront of every decision we make. We are fully committed to increasing diversity throughout our organization and turning this incident into a powerful learning moment for the Gucci team and beyond.”

It’s interesting that instead of apologizing for their ignorant lapse in judgment, Gucci apologizes for the “offense caused.” A note for the next luxury brand that causes backlash: when you make a hurtful mistake, you’re supposed to apologize for your actions, not for someone else’s reaction.

There’s Going to be a Period Emoji

THE STORY: The Unicode Consortium has confirmed a blood drop-shaped emoji will be a part of an upcoming emoji drop. The news of the menstrual positive e-sticker comes after 55,000 people called for a period emoji in a campaign led by global girl’s rights charity Plan International UK.

THE REACTION:

Seriously? Is this really what people were clamoring for? What's next? A menopause emoji? An erectile dysfunction emoji? A bladder control emoji? What in the blue hell…

"A new 'period emoji' is coming soon to keyboards worldwide" https://t.co/jfXX1ciii5

— Crazy Train (@csonkaguy) February 8, 2019

why THE FUCK are they making a period emoji that is not cute

— ⚯͛ (@MarchToTheSiris) February 6, 2019

This is unnecessary… and disgusting #PeriodEmoji

— miss dean (@missdean254) February 6, 2019

RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE RAGE: Yes, it’s a small step towards eliminating shame around menstruation—but it’s a meaningful step. And, considering these tweets, the need for normalization is still very necessary. “The inclusion of an emoji which can express what 800 million women around the world are experiencing every month is a huge step towards normalizing periods and smashing the stigma which surrounds them,” said Lucy Russell, head of girls rights and youth at Plan International UK. “For years we’ve obsessively silenced and euphemized periods. As experts in girls’ rights, we know that this has a negative impact on girls; girls feel embarrassed to talk about their periods, they’re missing out, and they can suffer health implications as a consequence.”

Yes, the blood drop is pretty generic—but the eggplant and the maple leaf have multiple meanings, too. Emoji is a rapidly growing global language, and hopefully, this cute little blood drop will help in starting global conversations.

The post Everything That Upset the Internet This Week appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

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