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creatingblackcharacters · 26 days ago

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“The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth” - Violence, Violent Imagery & Black Horror

TRIGGER WARNING: mentions of death, violence, blood, hate crimes, antiblackness, police violence, rape

Note! I am going to be speaking from a Black American point of view, as my identity informs my experience. That said, antiblackness itself is international. The idea of my Blackness as a threat, as a source of fear and violence to repress and to destroy, is something every Black person in the world that has ever dealt with white supremacy has experienced.

There are two things, I think, that are important to note as we start this conversation.

One: there is a long history of violence towards Black bodies that is due to our dehumanization. People do not care for the killing of a mouse in the way they care about a human. But if you think the people you are dealing with are not people, but animals- more particularly, pests, something distasteful- then you will be able to rationalize treating them as such.

Two: even though we live in a time period where that overt belief of Blackness as inhuman is less likely, we must recognize that there are centuries of belief behind this concept; centuries of arguments and actions that cement in our minds that a certain amount of violence towards Blackness is normal. That subconscious belief you may hold is steeped in centuries of effort to convince you of it without even questioning it. And because of this very real re-enforcement of desensitization, naturally another place this will manifest itself is in how we tell and comprehend stories.

There are also three points I'm about to make first- not the only three that can ever be made, but the ones that stand out the most to me when we talk about violence with Black characters:

One: Your Black readers may experience that scene you wrote differently than you meant anyone to, just because our history may change our perspective on what’s happening.

Two: The idea that Black characters and people deserve the pain they are experiencing.

Three: The disbelief or dismissal of the pain of Black characters and people.

You Better Start Believing In Ghost Stories- You’re In One

I don’t need to tell Black viewers scary fairytales of sadists, body snatchers and noncoincidental disappearances, cannibals, monsters appearing in the night, and dystopian, unjust systems that bury people alive- real life suffices! We recognize the symbolism because we’ve seen real demons.

Some real examples of familiar, terrifying stories that feel like drama, but are real experiences:

12 Years a Slave: “This is no fiction, no exaggeration. If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture. I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana.” – Solomon Northup

When They See Us: I can’t get myself to watch When They See Us, because I learned about the actual trial of the Central Park Five- now the Exonerated Five- in my undergrad program. Five teen Black and brown boys, subjected to racist and cruel policing and vilification in the media- from Donald Trump calling for their deaths in the newspaper, to being imprisoned under what the Clintons deemed a generation of “superpredators” during a “tough on crime” administration. And as audacious as it is to say, as Solomon Northup explained, they were fortunate. The average Black person funneled into the prison system doesn’t get the opportunity to make it back out redeemed or exonerated, because the system is designed to capture and keep them there regardless of their innocence or guilt. Their lives are irreparably changed; they are forever trapped.

Jasper, Texas: Learning about the vicious, gruesome murder of James Byrd Jr, was horrific- and that was just the movie. No matter how “community comes together” everyone tells that story, the reality is that there are people who will beat you, drag you chained down a gravel road for three miles as your body shreds away until you are decapitated, and leave your mangled body in front of a Black church to send a message… Because you’re Black and they hate you. To date I am scared when I’m walking and I see trucks passing me, and don’t let them have the American or the Confederate flag on them. Even Ahmaud Arbery, all he was doing was jogging in his hometown, and white men from out of town decided he should be murdered for that.

Do you want to know what all of these men and boys, from 1841 to 2020, had in common? What they did to warrant what happened to them? Being outside while Black. Some might call it “wrong place wrong time”, but the reality is that there is no “right place”. Sonya Massey, Breonna Taylor- murdered inside their home. Where else can you be, if the danger has every right to barge inside? There is no “safe”.

It is already Frightening to live while Black- not because being Black is inherently frightening, but because our society has made it horrific to do so. But that leads into my next point:

“They Shouldn’t Have Resisted”

Think of all the videos of assaulted and murdered Black people from police violence. If you can stomach going into the comments- which I don’t, anymore- you’ll see this classic comment of hate in the thousands, twisting your stomach into knots:

“if they obeyed the officer, if they didn’t resist, this wouldn’t have happened”

Another way our punitive society normalizes itself is via the idea of respectability politics; the idea that “if you are Good, if you do what you are Supposed to do, you will not be hurt- I will not have to hurt you”. Therefore, if my people are always suffering violence, it must be because we are Bad. And in a society that is already less gracious to Black people, that is more likely to think we are less human, that we are innately bad and must earn the right to be exceptional… the use of excessive violence towards me must be the natural outcome. “If your people weren’t more likely to be criminals, there wouldn’t be the need to be suspicious of you”- that is the way our society has taught us to frame these interactions, placing the blame for our own victimization on us.

Sidebar: I would highly suggest reading The New Jim Crow, written in 2010 by Michelle Alexander, to see how this mentality helps tie into large scale criminalization and mass incarceration, and how the cycle is purposely perpetuated.

You have to constantly be aware of how you look, walk and talk- and even then, that won’t be enough to save you if the time comes. The turning point for me, personally, was the murder of Sandra Bland. If she could be educated, beautiful, a beacon of her community, be everything a “Good” Black person is supposed to be… and still be murdered via police violence, they can kill any of us. And that’s a very terrifying thought- that anything at any point can be the reason for your death, and it will be validated because someone thinks you shouldn’t have “been that way”. And that way has far less to do with what you did, than it does who you are. Being “that way” is Black.

My point is, if this belief is so normalized in real life about violence on Black bodies- that somehow, we must have done something to deserve this- what makes you think that this belief does not affect how you comprehend Black people suffering in stories?

Hippocratic Oath

Human experimentation? Vivisection? Organ stealing? Begging for medicine? Dramatically bleeding out? Not trusting just anyone to see that you are hurt, because they might take advantage? All very real fears. The idea that pain is normal for Black people is especially rampant in the healthcare field, where ideas like our melanin making our skin thick enough to feel less pain (no), an overblown fear of ‘drug misuse’, and believing we are overexaggerating our pain makes many Black people being unwilling to trust the healthcare system. And it comes down to this thought:

If you think that I feel less pain, you will allow me to suffer long before you believe that I am in pain.

I was psychologically spiraling I was in so much pain after my wisdom teeth removal, and my surgeon was more concerned about “addiction to the medication”. Only because Hot Chocolate’s mom is a nurse, did I get an effective medicine schedule. My mother ended up with jaw rot because her surgeon outright claimed that she didn’t believe that she was in more than the ‘healing’ pain after her wisdom teeth were removed. She also has a gigantic, macabre (and awesome fr) scar on her stomach from a c-section she received after four days of labor attempting to have me… all because she was too poor and too Black to afford better doctors who wouldn’t have dismissed her struggles to push.

As a major example of dismissed Black pain: let’s discuss the mortality rate of Black women during childbirth, as well as the likelihood of our children to die. When we say “they will let you bleed to death”, we mean it.

“Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States — 69.9 per 100,000 live births for 2021, almost three times the rate for white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Black babies are more likely to die, and also far more likely to be born prematurely, setting the stage for health issues that could follow them through their lives.”

Even gynecology roots in dismissal (and taking brutal advantage of) Black women's pain:

“The history of this particular medical branch … it begins on a slave farm in Alabama,” Owens said. “The advancement of obstetrics and gynecology had such an intimate relationship with slavery, and was literally built on the wounds of Black women.” Reproductive surgeries that were experimental at the time, like cesarean sections, were commonly performed on enslaved Black women. Physicians like the once-heralded J. Marion Sims, an Alabama doctor many call the “father of gynecology,” performed torturous surgical experiments on enslaved Black women in the 1840s without anesthesia. And well after the abolition of slavery, hospitals performed unnecessary hysterectomies on Black women, and eugenics programs sterilized them.”

If you think Black characters are not in pain, or that they’re overexaggerating, you’re more likely to be okay with them suffering more in comparison to those whose pain you take more seriously- to those you believe.

What’s My Point?

My point is that whatever terrifying scene you think you’re writing, whatever violent whump scenario you think you’re about to put your Black characters through, there’s a chance it has probably happened and was treated as nonimportant (damn shame, right?) And when those terrifying scenes are both written and read, the way their suffering will be felt depends on how much you as a reader care, how much you believe they are suffering.

There’s a joke amongst readers of color that many dystopian tales are tales of “what happened if white people experienced things that the rest of us have already been put through?” Think concepts like alien invasion and mass eradication of the existing population- you may think of that as an action flick, meanwhile peoples globally have suffered colonization for centuries. The Handmaid’s Tale- forced birthing and raising of “someone else’s” children, always subject to sexual harassment by the Master while subject to hate from the Mistress- that’s just being a Mammy.

There’s nothing wrong with having Black characters be violent or deal with violence, especially in a story where every character is going through shit. That is not the problem! What I am trying to tell you, though, is to be aware that certain violent imagery is going to evoke familiarity in Black viewers. And if I as a Black viewer see my very real traumas treated as entertainment fodder- or worse, dismissed- by the narrative and other viewers, I will probably not want to consume that piece of media anymore. I will also question the intentions and the beliefs of the people who treat said traumas so callously. Now, if that’s not something you care about, that’s on you! But for people who do care, it is something we need to make sure we are catching before we do it.

“So I just can’t write anything?!”

Stop that. There are plenty of examples of stories containing horror and violence with Black characters. There’s an entire genre of us telling our own stories, using the same violence as symbolism. I’m not telling you “no” (least not always). I’m telling you to take some consideration when you write the things that you do. There’s nothing wrong about writing your Black characters being violent or experiencing violence. But there is a difference between making it narratively relevant, and thoughtlessly using them as a “spook”, a stereotypical scary Black person, or a punching bag, especially in a way that may invoke certain trauma.

The Black Guy Dies First

The joke is that we never survive these horror movies because we either wouldn’t be there to begin with, or because we would make better decisions and the narrative can’t have that. But the reality is just that a lot of writers find Black characters- Black people- expendable in comparison to their white counterparts, and it shows. More of a “here, damn” sort of character, not worth investment and easy to shrug off. The book itself I haven’t read, just because it’s pretty new, but I’m looking forward to doing so. But from the summaries, it goes into horror media history and how Black characters have fared in these stories, as well as how that connects to the society those characters were written in. I.e., a thorough version of this lesson.

Instead, I wrote an entire list of questions you could possibly ask yourself involving violence or villainy involving a Black character. Feel free to print it and put it on your wall where you write if you have to! I cannot stress enough that asking yourself questions like these are good both for your creation and just… being less antiblack in general when you consume media.

Black Horror/Black Thriller

We, too, have turned our violent experiences into stories. I continue to highly suggest watching our films and reading our stories to see how we convey our fear, our terror, our violence and our pain. There are plenty of stories that work- Get Out, The Angry Black Girl and her Monster, Candyman, Lovecraft Country (the show) and Nanny are some examples. There’s even a blog by the co-writer of The Black Guy Dies First who runs BlackHorrorMovies where he reviews horror movies from throughout the decades.

Desiree Evans has a great essay, We Need Black Horror More Than Ever, that gets into why this genre is so creative and effective, that I think says what I have to say better than I could.

“Even before Peele, Black horror had a rich literary lineage going back to the folklore of Africa and its Diaspora. Stories of haints, witches, curses, and magic of all kinds can be found in the folktales collected by author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and in the folktales retold by acclaimed children’s book author Virginia Hamilton. One of my earliest childhood literary memories is being entranced by Hamilton’s The House of Dies Drear and Patricia McKissack’s children’s book classic The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural, both examples of the ways Black authors have tapped into Black history along with our rich ghostlore.” “Black horror can be clever and subversive, allowing Black writers to move against racist tropes, to reconfigure who stands at the center of a story, and to shift the focus from the dominant narrative to that which is hidden, submerged. To ask: what happens when the group that was Othered, gets to tell their side of the story?”

For on the nose simplicity, I’m going to use hood classic Tales From The Hood (1994) as an example of how violence can be integrated into Black horror tales. Tales From The Hood is like… The Twilight Zone by Black people. Messages discussing issues in our community, done through a mystical twist. Free on Tubi! If you want to stop here before some spoilers, it’s an hour and a half. A great time!

In the first story, a Black political activist is murdered by the cops. The scene is reflective of the real-world efforts to discredit and even murder activists speaking out against police violence, as well as the types of things done to criminalize Black citizens for capture. The song Strange Fruit plays in the background, to drive the point home that this is a lynching.

The second story deals with a Black little boy experiencing abuse in the home, drawing a green monster to show his teacher why he’s covered in wounds and is lashing out at school.

The fourth story is about a gangbanger who undergoes “behavioral modification” to be released from prison early. Think of the classic scene from A Clockwork Orange. He must watch as imagery of the Klan and of happy whites lynching Black bodies (real-life pictures and video, mind you!) play into his mind alongside gang violence.

Isn’t Violence Stereotypical or antiblack?

That last story from Tales From The Hood leads into a good point. It can be! But it does not have to be! Violence is a human experience. By suggesting we don’t experience it or commit it, you would be denying everything I’ve just spoken about. We don’t have to be racist to write our Black characters in violent situations. We also don’t have to comprehend those situations through a racist lens.

Even experiences that seem “stereotypical” do not have to be comprehended that way. I get a LOT of questions about if something is stereotypical, and my response is always that it depends on the writing!!! You could give me a harmless prompt and it becomes the most racist story ever once you leave my inbox. But you could give me a “stereotypical” prompt and it be genuine writing.

Let’s take the movie Juice for example. Juice in my honest to God opinion becomes a thriller about halfway in. On its surface, Juice looks like bad Black boys shooting and cursing and doing things they aren’t supposed to be doing! Incredibly stereotypical- violent young thugs. You might think, “you shouldn’t write something like this- you’re telling everyone this is what your community is like”. First- there’s that respectability politics again! Just because something is not a “respectable” story does not mean it doesn’t need to be told!

But if we’re actually paying attention, what we’re looking at is four young boys dealing with their environment in different ways. All four of them originally stick together to feel power amongst their brotherhood as they all act tough and discover their own identities. They are not perfect, but they are still kids. In this environment, to be tough, to be strong, you do the things that they are doing. You run from cops, you steal from stores, you mess with all the girls and talk shit and wave weapons. That’s what makes you “big”. That’s what gives you the “juice”- and the “juice” can make you untouchable.

I want to focus particularly on Bishop, yes, played by Tupac. Bishop, the antagonist of Juice, is particularly powerless, angry, and scared of the world around him. He puts on a big front of bravado, yelling, cursing, and talking big because he’s tired of being afraid, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it otherwise. So when he gets access to a gun- to power- he quickly spirals out of control. His response to his fear is to wave around a tool that makes him feel stronger, that stops the things that scare him from scaring him.

Now, that is not a unique tale! That is a tale that any race could write about, particularly young white men with gun violence! If you ever cared for Fairuza Balk’s character in The Craft, it is a similar fall from grace. But because it is on a young, Black man in the hood, audiences are less likely to empathize with Bishop. And granted, Bishop is unhinged! But many a white character has been, and is not shoved into a stereotype that white people cannot escape from!

Now would I be comfortable if a nonblack person attempted to write a narrative like Juice? Yes, because I’d worry about the tendency to lose the messaging and just fall into stereotype outright. But it can be done! The story can be told!

“But if Black violence bad, why rap?”

The short answer:

“In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds, and in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.”

Marwhan Makhoul, Palestinian Poet

First, rap is not “only violence and misogyny”. Step your understanding of the genre up; there are plenty of options outside of the mainstream that don’t discuss those things. Second, every genre of music has mainstream popular songs about vice and sin. The idea that Black rappers have to be held to a higher standard is yet another example of how we are seen as inherently bad and must prove ourselves good. We could speak about nothing but drugs and alcohol and 1) there would still be white artists who do the very same and 2) we would still deserve to be treated like humans.

That said, many- not all- rappers rap about violence for the same reason Billy Joel wrote We Didn’t Start the Fire, the same reason Homer first spoke The Iliad- because they have something to say about it! They stand in a long tradition of people using poetry and rhythm to tell stories. Rap is an art of storytelling!

Rap is often used as an expression of frustration and righteous anger against a system built to keep us trapped within it. I’m not allowed to be angry? Why wouldn’t I be angry? Anger is a protective emotion, often when one feels helpless. Young Black people also began to reclaim and glorify the violence they lived in within their music, to take pride in their survival and in their success in a world that otherwise wanted them to fail. If I think the world fights against me no matter what I do, I’d rather live in pride than in shame with a bent head. Is it right? Maybe, maybe not. But if you don’t want them to rap about violence, why not alleviate the things leading to the violence in their environment?

Whether you choose to listen to their words, because the delivery scares you- and trust, angry Black men scared the music industry and society- doesn’t make the story any less valid!

Conclusion

I am going to drop a classic by Slick Rick called Children’s Story. I think listening to it- and I mean genuinely listening- summarizes what I’ve said here about how Black creators can tell stories, even violent ones, and how even the delivery through Blackness can change how you perceive them. Please take the time to listen before continuing.

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I’ve been alive for 28 years and have known this song my whole life, and it just hit me tonight: not once is the kid in this story identified as Black! My perception of this story was completely altered by my own experiences, who told the story, and how it was told.

That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You can tell stories of violence that involve Black characters. I love and adore a good hurt/comfort myself! But you need to be cognizant of your audience and how they’ll perceive the story you’re telling, and that includes the types of imagery you include. It’s not effective catharsis via hurt/comfort for the audience if your Black readers are being completely left out of the comfort. “I wrote this for myself” that’s cool, but… if you wrote racism for yourself, and you’re willing to admit that to yourself, that’s on you. I’d like to think that’s not your intention! You can write these stories of woe and pain without mistreating your Black characters- but that requires knowing and acknowledging when and how you’re doing that!

@afropiscesism makes a solid point in this post: our horror stories are not just fairytales full of amorphous boogiemen meant to teach lessons. Racial violence is very real, very alive, and we cannot act like the things we write can be dismissed outright as “oh well it’s not real”. Sure, those characters aren’t real. But the way you feel about Black bodies and violence is, and often it can slip into your writing as a pattern without you even realizing it. Be willing to get uncomfortable and check yourself on this as you write, as well as noticing it in other works!

If you’re constantly thinking “I would never do this”, you’ll never stop yourself when you inevitably do! If you know what violent imagery can be evoked, you can utilize it or avoid it altogether- but only if you’re willing to get honest about it. You might not intend to do any of this, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t change the pattern, because as always, it’s the thought that counts, but the action that delivers!

#creatingblackcharacters #long post #writing #writing black characters #black character design #black history #media history

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piratecaptainscaptainpirates · 1 year ago

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We all know OFMD has been tremendously healing to watch when you're queer, but it's honestly just amazing to see as a person of color, too. I am so, so used to characters of color being the only non-White cast member, or stereotypes, or being told that "hey, x Disney character is Black now, aren't you happy about that?"

And OFMD has so many characters of color that are allowed to be complex and nuanced. I'm almost never able to enjoy historical fiction because of how the genre often treats characters of color, but OFMDs characters of color feel like real people who I know in my family and community. Olu isn't a big scary Black man, he's so sweet and practical and a little bit awkward around his crush. Frenchie is comically superstitious and able to pull off an awesome con. Roach loves piratical violence but he also makes lovely assortments of tapas and is delightfully offended when Stede insults his cooking. Jim is allowed to be cool and mysterious and a little bit goofy. Fang is so precious I smile every time I think about him. And don't even get me started on how amazing it is to see an indigenous Jewish man as a romantic lead!

One of the worst things about historical fiction, for me at least, is how all the characters of color are almost always there just for trauma porn. It so often feels like Black characters especially are just there for White audiences to feel bad for. But in OFMD, anti-racism and anti-colonialism are baked into the narrative. Racism exists, but we always get the last laugh, whether that's by knifing a racist through the hand or setting a boat of rich racist assholes on fire.

It encourages me to feel like I can ask for more from other TV shows. I don't have to just roll my eyes and put up with yet another historical drama where the only Black character's arc revolves around the trauma of slavery. It's so refreshing to see. I can't wait for more of it in season two!

#ofmd #it's a good show guys

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grecoromanyaoi · 8 months ago

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helloo since we're on the topic: top historical fiction (or adjacent) ? can be any time period I just really love your taste in shows/games/etc and am always on the lookout for history inspired media !

thank you!!! im rly glad im like. inspiring other ppl to engage w things im insane abt hudofajsdfdassfsad. anyways. i will probably expand that list bc i literally forgot every single thing i ever read. also i havent watched that many movies so far

ancient times: i havent really watched a lot of movies/series set in ancient times so far :(

rome HBO (2005-2007) (tv series) - OF COURSE. i personally think its one of the best series ever made. they combine political, miliatry history with the lives of every day people in an incredible way. they never let you once engage with the series through modern lenses. according to my teacher (a historian, archeologist & self described 'romaphile') its incredibly historically accurate, mostly the clothing, set designs, characterization, military practices, etc. except for the things they straight up made up, of course.

i really enjoyed gladiator (2000), i think its a masterpiece.

prince of egypt (1998) i guess?

all the asterix movies of course, all the animated ones and most of the live actions. but i wouldnt really call it historical fiction

ok i havent actually finished watching it for now but sebastiane (1976) - an erotic, x rated, gay interpretation of the martyrdom of st sebastian. its in latin also.

wait i cant believe i forgor about assassin's creed odyssey - so far the only one ive played. its so fun and incredibly immersive visually. especially pour moi who cries into the pillow about how ill never experience the ancient world. also you can b a faggot which is always fun. i have things to say about their portrayal of same-sex sexuality and slavery in classical greece but i get why they did that considering its supposed to like. appeal to a lot of people, and a more "historically accurate" portrayal (for example of pederasty or how common slavery was etc.) would b v difficult for a lot of their target audience. alas.

medieval and early modern era:

the name of the rose (1986) - my medieval history teacher literally showed us bits of this movie to teach us about monasteries and monks fhdosiasdjasd.

the borgias (2011-2013) - incredibly messy, lots of political intrigue, and so so fun to watch. about the history of the borgia family. filled to the brim with drama.

the three musketeers (1993) - my favorite adaptation, also coincidentally the one i grew up on. casting tim curry as richelieu was genius. he slays so hard.

i also like bbc's the musketeers (2014-2016) - a neat little series. very fun and entertaining to watch.

outlaw king (2018) - like i dont think most ppl heard of this movie. its about robert the bruce's fight to reclaim the throne of scotland. starring chris pine

vikings (2013-2020) - its fun. i havent watched the entire series tho. dont expect anything resembling historical accuracy

the northman (2022) - you will see something resembling historical accuracy

mihai viteazul (michael the brave) (1971) - a fun movie. very much romanian propaganda tho.

1670 (2023-) - such a fun series!!! incredible cast, shows respect to the actual history and the lives of historical people. really cute and funny.

caravaggio (1986) - a biopic about caravaggio.

wait i also forgor about pentiment - an intriguing, immersive, and incredibly beautiful video game! it has a lot of 'the name of the rose' vibes, with it being a medieval murder mystery taking place in a monastery. its incredibly touching and made me cry, and in the last few years i very rarely cry. also im 99% sure its an indie game? go support the creators!

vaguely-medieval/early modern fantasy:

mirror mirror (2012) - a retelling of snow white. a very fun movie imo, with incredible costume design. julia roberts plays the evil queen and she SLAYS. armie hammer is unfortunately in that movie.

stardust (2007) - one of my fave movies growing up. more modern-inspired but still.

the green knight (2021) - controversial i know but i actually loved this movie! i liked it both as a standalone movie but moreso as a 21st century adaptation to sir gawain and the green knight.

galavant (2015-2016) - !!!!!!! one of the most series ever! they manage to tackle such difficult concepts and conversations with a hilarious wit. so fun to watch. i listen to a lot of the songs still, and rewatch every once in a while.

disenchantment (2018-2023) - very fun to watch, especially the first season.

i also really liked the novel uprooted by naomi novik. its a polish-inspired fantasy.

modern era:

killers of the flower moon (2023) - of course. a masterpiece

aferim! (2015) - a romanian movie set in 19th century wallachia, about two officers, a father and son, who were sent by a nobleman to retrieve an escaped enslaved romani man. a lot of the people in the comments were calling the movie humorous and funny, maybe im missing smth (as im watching with subtitles n dont understand the original language) but it was a very difficult watch for me??

the handmaiden (2016) - need i say more

black sails (2014-2017) - a prequel to the famous novel 'treasure island'. not an easy series to watch. incredibly good.

the favourite (2018) - need i say more pt 2

the rabbi's cat (le chat du rabbin) (2011) - animated movie set in early 20th century algeria. a rabbi's cat learns to talk overnight.

the nice guys (2016) - a fun murder mystery set in the 1970s

o brother, where art thou (2000) - a retelling of the odyssey set in the southern us in the 1930s

victor/victoria (1982) - set in early 20th century paris. julie andrews pretends to be a man and takes on a job as a drag queen. extremely fun, extremely gay movie.

lady chatterley's lover (2022) - very much porn for moms but it was a nice watch imo

amulet (2020) - set in like. idk. sometime in the 20th century. this is a horror movie, deals a lot with misogyny, sa, and so on. i really like it, personally. a lot of people, mostly weird men, dont tho.

the great (2020-2023) - i have mixed feelings about this show. on the one hand, its really fun to watch. on the other hand, its basically ofmd for girls who have public mental breakdowns whenever someone claims corsets were oppressive. and theyre so weird about russians, jesus christ.

disses:

domina (2021-) - i just couldnt get into it, esp since i tried right after finishing rome hbo. it was kind of silly, and not in a good way. takes itself wayyyy to seriously.

i didnt like spartacus (2010-2013) - the dialogue was almost grotesque and the editing, especially the transitions, straight up killed me

damsel (2024) - holy fuck what a trainwreck of a movie. absolute waste of angela basset and robin wright. the only good thing were the costumes.

lancelot du lac (1974) - i just didnt like it at all. couldnt get into it. i guess it was way too french and artsy fartsy for me. a movie that was trying to say both too little and too much at the same time.

i didnt rly like bram stoker's dracula (1992) - i mean. it was a fine movie. it was definitely not the godfather. the movie itself was meh. the visuals tho? absolutely stunning

#asks #anon #mine*#slavery ment #sa ment

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olderthannetfic · 7 months ago

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https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/748370073567313920/i-think-for-me-one-of-the-big-stumbling-blocks-i

People in the replies are jumping to a lot of really obnoxious conclusions about anon that really just ultimately illustrate anon’s point.

There’s all this stuff that is *assuming* anon is pro censorship when they never say anything like that (and in fact, i thought they suggested the opposite). They’re talking about how sex positivity and anti-anti attitudes get weaponized or misused in some fandom spaces to make people feel like it’s wrong for them to be squeamish and want to *personally* avoid men who are really vocal about their love of lolicon and slavery isekai, because guys who are that vocal about it have in their experience, tended to have that reflect real world attitudes.

I think it’s good to point out that plenty of people like these things privately and you’ll never know, and it’s the being super vocal about it around uninterested people that’s the red flag here. But people just assuming that anon holds every attitude they associate with some stereotypical anti, and that their message indicates some thinking to BE CAREFUL! about… really just proves their point that a lot of people have a bad tendency to only see this in terms of how things work in their particular corner of fandom, and don’t recognize how what can mean one thing in one, primarily female and queer space, doesn’t necessarily translate well to a space with a lot of entitled cis dudes. Assuming that personal discomfort with certain kinds of fiction automatically translates into being pro censorship (what) when that person said nothing else to indicate that, is one such assumption.

(Also one person was trying to suggest it was racist of anon to “single out hentai”… maybe the reason they mentioned hentai is because they’re *specifically* talking about anime fandom?!?)

Idk, it doesn’t help proshippers if we can’t see anything except via the narrow lens of pro vs anti fights on Tumblr and AO3, be able to advocate our positions. We are aware of how fandom blinders can blinker people in the opposite direction—antis who don’t recognize that rhetoric that they think is just all about shipping is also used by right wing activists to advocate banning books and drag shows—but it’s true in both directions.

Being uncomfortable with a lot of “sex positivity” rhetoric because you’ve mostly seen it used to tell you you’re wrong to be uncomfortable with dudes who are super outspoken and pushy about their porn habits is a really common experience for lefty women IME, both outside of fandom and in fandom spaces with more cis dudes. Most women I’ve met like that are vocally anti censorship, it’s about being able to take charge of their personal boundaries and not have them shamed. Proshippers pushing them away by loading more unhelpful and inaccurate judgments on them aren’t helping them and are just shrinking their movement, making it more likely it’ll be dismissed as just “very online fandom drama” (and if you’re that clueless, are they wrong, really?)

Also it’s just helpful to better understand why some people might find your enemies’ arguments more initially compelling than they should be.

"Sexual liberation means sex with me specifically" was a plague in the 70s from what I hear, and I'm sure it has been a thing forever.

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wangxianficfinder · 1 year ago

Text

WangXian in space

~*~

won’t take the easy road by twigofwillow (T, 47k, wangxian, JC & WWX & JYL, WWX & WQ, space au, yearning, found family, complicated family feels, ghosts, food, teacher WWX)

💖 symmetry by bleuett (M, 44k, WangXian, Space, Science Fiction, Happy Ending, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Holding Hands, Blow Jobs, Hand Feeding, Cultivation in Space, Yearning, Reunions, Hurt/Comfort, Family Feels, Canon-Typical Violence, Minor Injuries, Grief/Mourning, Unconventional Time Travel, Burial Mounds)

circles by bleuett (M, 21k, WangXian, Space, Sunshot Campaign, Time Travel, kind of, Grief/Mourning, Getting Together, Angst with a Happy Ending, Intimacy, Reunions, Slight Body Modification, Canon-Typical Violence, Minor Injuries, Unconventional Time Travel)

fly me home by bleuett (M, 16k, WangXian, Space, Science Fiction, Friends to Lovers, Idiots in Love, Fluff and Humor, Light Angst, Pining, Getting Together, Happy Ending, Major Character Injury, but everyone’s okay!)

the best good thing by almostsophie1 (T, 12k, WangXian, Space, Post-Apocalypse, Touch-Starved, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Hurt/Comfort)

The Return Of the (Yiling) Sith by Zephyr (ZephyrAndTheSilverfish) (T, 23k, wangxian, SL/XXC, SL & A-Q & XXC, star wars au, hurt/comfort, the force, kidnapping, pining)

I will be chasing a starlight by feyburner, sundiscus (E, 71k, WangXian, Star Trek Fusion, Vulcan LWJ, Slow Burn, Friends to Lovers, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Eventual Smut, Angst with a Happy Ending, Pon Farr, Mind Meld, Fuck Or Die, Anal Sex, Hurt/Comfort)

Cut Him Out in Little Stars by ChaoticAndrogynous (E, 69k, WangXian, Canon-Typical Violence, Grief/Mourning, Existential Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Memory Loss, Dementia (referenced), Suicidal Thoughts, Battlefield Surgery, Blood and Injury, Immortality, Loneliness, Isolation, Explicit Sexual Content, Oral Sex, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Consensual Non-Consent, Bondage, Top/Bottom Versatile | Switch WangXian (mentioned))

Stars bring us apart (Stars pull us together) by Sixlayerhouse (sixlayerhouse) (E, 124k, WangXian, ChengSang, Hurt/Comfort, (Vaguely) Star Trek AU, Psychological Trauma, PTSD, Body modifications, Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Recovery, married!wangxian)

it calls to those Series by Shializaro (T, 7k, WangXian, Time Travel, POV Outsider, POV Alternating, LWJ Has Feelings, Make LWJ Cry Agenda, Good Sibling JC, JC is So Done, Angst and Humor)

In Imitation of Life by travelingneuritis (E, 70k, wangxian, modern cultivation, scifi au, android WWX, tone: neon seedy, rich people are bored and terrible, post-apocalyptoc landscape, happy ending, smut, severe major characger injury, time loss)

there is no limited dimensions by Stratisphyre (M, 104k, WangXian, NieLan, MianQing, WN/Other(s), Star Trek Fusion, Slow Burn, Friends to Lovers, Assumed Character Death, Minor Character Death, Tags on Each Chapter, references to non-con, references to canonical slavery, (The Orion Syndicate is just really bad okay?), bizarre space mpreg, Implied Future Pairings, Implied NHS/Others, POV Multiple, Accidental Child Acquisition, Found Family)

Waiting for the light (our tender sentiments, unfolding) by lamusadelils (T, 9k, wangxian, modern cultivation, space au, scifi au, engineer Lan Wangji, astrobotanist Wei Wuxian, Illnesses, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gardens & Gardening, but in SPACE!)

the wind on another star by Reverie (cl410) (M, 20k, WIP, WangXian, Canon Divergence, Space, a space drama!, Post-Sunshot Campaign, Reunions, some murder, some sketchy science, Space Battles, Politics, Genius WWX, BAMF WWX)

the place where you are by BlackWiresOnHerHead (T, 34k, WangXian, Space, two found families for the price of one, food as a love language, Yearning, Science Fiction, prickly shipmates to friends to lovers, Cyborg WN, cisswapped juniors)

Captain of Questionable Starfleet Practices by warmporridge (G, 6k, WangXian, Star Trek Fusion, But you dont need knowledge of star trek to read this!!, Science Fiction, One Shot Collection, vulcan!lwj, Captain!WWX, Canonical Character Death, aka wwx dies for like 2 minutes, Tribbles (Star Trek))

I'm feeling very still by deliciousblizzardshark (M, 8k, WangXian, Science Fiction, Inspired by Passengers (2016), But much less problematic, granted it's a low bar, Isolation, Engineering, Cryostasis, mild stalking, mild obsession, Mental Health Issues, Cloud Recesses is now a spaceship)

The Betazoid Wedding Conversation by starandrea (T, 4k, WangXian, Star Trek Fusion, Vulcan LWJ, Love Confessions, First Kiss)

I need my space by deliciousblizzardshark (T, 6k, WangXian, Modern AU, Astronauts, Getting Together, First Kiss, Implied Sexual Content, trapped together, Roommates, kind of, They share a very small spacecraft so that counts right, Soft WangXian, No Angst)

Sailing the Endless Sea by Rainewritesfanfics (G, 1k, WangXian, Pre-Relationship, Space, Homesickness, Science Fiction, Mild Hurt/Comfort)

root your love a little deeper by DrPanda99 (T, 7k, WangXian, Space, mild body horror, Hanahaki Disease, but turning into a tree, Angst with a Happy Ending, Love Confessions, Curses)

dropped from the sky by awenswords (G, 5k, WangXian, Science Fiction, Farmer WWX, pilot lwj, Developing Relationship, Developing Friendships, Pre-Relationship, Space Opera, Farm/Ranch)

tell me your whole life by phnelt (T, 8k, WangXian, Noir, Robots & Androids, Space, it's a space noir!, robot wwx, hacker lwj, Brief Violence, Memory Loss)

& again tomorrow by bleuett (T, 1k, WangXian, Space, Yearning, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending)

a well-intentioned proposition by bosbie (T, 1k, WangXian, Science Fiction, Space, Humor, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Android LWJ, Miscommunication, oblivious lwj)

water, and the open sky by el_em_en_oh_pee (T, 20k, WangXian, Future, Space, Science Fiction, Cultivation in Space, Science Fantasy, Lighthouses, Water, plankton is the new radish, Redemption, alien dinosaurs, split lip kisses)

back to your door by fruitys (M, 8k, WangXian, Space, Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining, Reunions, Getting Back Together, Hand Jobs, yearning across time AND planets, gardener wei ying... gardener wei ying in space…, he is a plant scientist)

The Terminus of Gravity by feralhypertext (M, 28k, WangXian, Space, Canon-Typical Violence, Interplanetary Travel, Epistolary, (by way of transmissions instead of letters))

hurricane by gdgdbaby (E, 5k, WangXian, Star Trek Fusion, Pon Farr, Alien Biology, Porn with Feelings, Yuletide Treat)

That Time Wei Wuxian Fell In Love With His First Officer And Didn't Even Realize by seungchxn (E, 9k, WangXian, Star Trek Fusion, Captain WWX, First Officer LWJ, Vulcan Mind Melds, Vulcan Kisses, Fluff and Smut, Anal Sex, Anal Fingering, Hand Jobs, Hand & Finger Kink, Alien Biology, Mutual Pining, First Time, First Kiss, Falling In Love, True Love, Soulmates, Accidental Marriage, Unrequited Love, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Oblivious WWX, WWX is a Little Shit, WWX is Bad at Feelings, Possessive LWJ, LWJ is Whipped, LWJ is a Panicked Gay, The Inherent Eroticism of Holding Hands)

and i'll burn with the fire of ten million stars by Lirazel (M, 11k, WangXian, Star Trek Fusion, you do not have to be familiar with star trek to read this, Pon Farr, (of course), but it's induced by a rare microbe so really, it's Sex Pollen, Dubious Consent, half-vulcan science officer!lwj, chaotic engineering disaster gremlin!wwx, the inherent eroticism of vulcan finger-touching, vers!wangxian because that's the only thing i believe in)

the red dark shifting by typefortydeductions (E, 15k, WangXian, Star Trek Fusion, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Ambiguous/Open Ending, But it will be ok, PTSD, Nightmares, Getting Together, Mutual Pining, Mild Gore, Tarsus IV, mentions of medical procedures)

On The Way To The Stars by kuro (T, 11k, WangXian, Star Trek Fusion, Science Fiction, Road Trips, Fake Marriage, Pining, Fluff, Separations, Wedding Rings, Modern AU)

My Home Is Your Body by phnelt (E, 15k, WangXian, Star Trek Voyager AU, vulcan lwj, betazoid wwx, Telepathy, imzadi is like t'hy'la except for betazoids, eventually explicit, first chapter is T rated, former borg drone wn, former maquis wwx, starfleet lwj)

first contact by AlfAlfAlfAlfAlf, tardigradeschool (T, 18k, WangXian, XiYao, hinted at NieYao, Star Trek Fusion, Science Fiction, Androids, Canon-Typical Violence, mild body horror, due to androids, Android LWJ, Android LXC, First Meetings, Pre-Relationship, Engineer WWX, Betazoid MY, Ambiguous/Open Ending)

spinning with the stars above by tardigradeschool (G, 7k, WangXian, Star Trek Fusion, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, PTSD, Tarsus IV, Pre-Relationship, Mutual Pining, Panic Attacks, Fluff, Friends to Lovers)

won't you let me know you now by tardigradeschool (T, 12k, WangXian, Star Trek Fusion, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Mutual Pining, Telepathy, Vulcan Mind Melds, Pre-Relationship, very background 3zun, Protective Siblings, Friends to Lovers)

and i knew that somehow, i could find my way back by daltoneering (E, 14k, WangXian, Science Fiction, Getting Together, Mutual Pining, Light Angst, Friends to Lovers, Spaceship captain LWJ, Emotional Sex, very light background nielan)

two colours for everything by kakikaeru (M, 8k, WangXian, Space, Off-screen Character Death, war-related injury, and subsequent rehabilitation, prisoner of war type mistreatment)

134340 by silverclaw (M, 18k, WangXian, Space, Space Opera, Heavy Angst, Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Closure, Parallel Universes, Coco the robot, LWJ accidentally adopting creatures as he goes, LWJ also has a nose ring, The following are SPOILER tags, there are two lwjs and one of them dies, wwx mourning lwj, Hopeful Ending, in terms of closure and healing, parallel!lwj and wwx form a bond, mentions of captivity, dystopian themes)

orbital decay by defractum (nyargles) (T, 14k, WangXian, Science Fiction, Space, Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining, Happy Ending, Cultivation AU, Body Horror)

Duel of the Twins by Theladyofravenclaw (T, 71k, WIP, WangXian, XuanLi, JC & WWX, Star Wars Setting, Science Fiction, each chapter is intended to be a whole movie within a trilogy, Canon-Typical Violence, Mild Gore, mild body horror, Mentions of Suicide, But only in passing, please take that major character death warning seriously, Angst with a Happy Ending, Yúnmèng Siblings Feels, Twin Prides of Yúnmèng Angst, Dismemberment)

We Wish You A Logical Christmas by little_ogre (M, 9k, WangXian, Star Trek AU, Mutual Pining, Happy Ending, Going to Vulcan for Christmas, WWX is Vulcan, LWJ is human, what could go wrong, Pon Farr)

among the stars by plonk (E, 61k, WangXian, Space, Science Fiction, Firefly Setting, Courtesan WWX, Courtesan LWJ)

And I Think It's Gonna Be a Long, Long, Time by sketchyscribbles (M, 21k, WangXian, ChengSang, XuanLi, Science Fiction, the martian!au, Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Mutual Pining, wwx attempting the impossible, Happy Ending, Minor Violence, minor 3zun, Minor Injuries, Outer Space)

change by antebunny (G, 16k, WangXian, WWX & JYL, LWJ & LXC, Star Wars Fusion, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Fluff, Telepathy, because...the Force, Non-Graphic Violence, The Power of Love™, BAMF WWX, JYL is a queen, wwx is a little shit)

Circlet of Death by cinder1013 (E, 20k, WangXian, XiYao, MingYu, Star Wars Fusion, scum, Villainy, Pirates, I make up Jedi stuff, Gender Fluid Character, Genderfluid MXY, Misgendering, BAMF JYL, Tantric Sex, Badass QS, Sexual Violence, Anal Sex, Wedding Night)

Among Us by misbehavingvigilante (E, 50k, WangXian, Among Us (Video Game) Setting, Alien Sex, Breeding, Eggpreg, Tentacles, Consensual Non-Consent, Dubious Consent, They're both into it but yeah, Cannibalism, The dove is dead but in the Addams Family type of way)

one hundred, twenty thousand, thirty million Series by Mikkeneko (T/M, 160k, WIP, WangXian, Non-Linear Narrative, Space AU, Science Fiction, Cybernetics, WWX's memory issues, Politics, Xianxia IN SPACE!, stranded in space, in a broken spacesuit, Flashbacks)

~*~

I'd like to thank @the-marathon-continues-nip for letting us know about their space collection. We definitely wouldn't have as many fics on this comp otherwise. We really appreciate it! Thank you ~ - Mod C

~*~

#Wangxian Fic Rec #The Untamed #wangxian #MDZS #wangxianficfinder compilation post #long post #space au #space compilation

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witsserviceablesubstitute · 4 months ago

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If nothing else, Dragon Age 2 is a story being told by Varric Tethras (pulp novelist, businessman, and self professed liar), while being interrogated by the Chantry secret police, while also trying to exonerate himself and the best friend he loves...

It could be true, some of it could be true, none of it could be true. Likely it is only half of the picture and the story and its players are Varric's Cassandra friendly version. There's room for so many interpretations of DA2 that I wonder how anyone comes to a single truth about the story and its characters at all?

Anyway, I've been thinking about a post that said taking a side strictly for or against Anders misses the point and I agree. However, I think because DA2 is too structuralist in its approach to the characters, players clung more to a humanistic reading of them. Ideally a story balances both but it didn't in DA2 and so the characters feel puppeted by a thesis that could be alienating at times. I mean, Anders isn't 'right' but he is more right then the story and the general response to his character allows him to be and so anyone with a grasp on the metaphors the DA mages represent, from religious and political persecution of queerness to authoritarian imprisonment, are going to see any attempt to justify the continued abuse of them as awful. They'll also cling harder to the character who represents resistance to *gestures at all that narrative mess*. Same with Fenris. Who is the bluntest fictional embodying of slavery ever. Right to the heart, really. Of course people cling to Fenris. Especially in an American story. (And then they pitted them against each other...)

As for characterization, though, they're assholes. I love them. I get them. I'd like them even if they were worse (and the criticism does tend to exaggerate how bad they are). They are in pain and have a lot of room for growth but they are assholes. Yet they're also flawless to me and that there's my point. The story didn't utilise them as it should, didn't think about them as much beyond being a blunt tool for the plot and so the players who felt the metaphors, who identified with their pain, plucked them away, filled them in, and shielded them from a narrative and public they felt misused or misunderstood them and by extension the people and issues they represent.

We're always saying here that representation is important but this is the reason why. This is the power it has and the pain it can cause when fumbled. This is why there was such a strongly divisive response to Anders— you had one side gleefully feeling justified killing him and all he represents and the other side feeling horror at how all he represents was handled and wanting to save him. This is why there's still Anders vs. Fenris drama years later despite them being mirrors, the story reduced them to being a mouthpiece for and against mages when the plot itself is about the rights of mages. It's a bit impossible to talk about the narrative of DA2 without talking about Anders and Fenris.

So I get it but on the other hand DA2 is a story being told under duress by an unreliable narrator. All the characters could be the way they are because Varric needs them to be in order to satisfy the magic fearing religious government. I think that could be a really interesting conversation to have too.

#varric tethras #dragon age 2 #da2 #dragon age spoilers #dragon age #anders da2 #fenris da2 #navel gazing #storytelling in games #cassandra pentaghast

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elbiotipo · 8 months ago

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Someone in the notes on your post about food in fantasy mentioned connection between at least early modern production of sugar and colonialism and slavery, and while I 100% agree that it's something that should be known, I think that if you want to have lighthearted fantasy setting there are definitely ways to work around this.

Like sugar is also produced from sugar beet. I don't know could it be done without modern equipment (production started at the very end of 18th century so while industrial equipment was primitive it was), but like you may do something with it, like some wizards developing production technology.

In the same vein, crop exchange in the Old World was mostly peaceful, or at least it wasn't due to slavery. Like rice was already grown in Egypt in 1000 BCE and made its way to Spain by 7th century CE. Bananas were grown in Turkey by 15th century CE. And tons of agricultural goods come from West Asia both ways. What I am trying to say is that if your world has equivalent of Americas your Europeans* could have just acquired potatoes and corn without colonization (because they were more ethical than irl or because they didn't have resources for conquest or because American nations were strong enough to stop them). Like potatoes and such are just crops, sailors could have picked them as a supplies and then someone decided to grow them at home.

This is like a suggestion specifically if you want to have a world for costume drama without dealing with heavy themes. I would suggest describing it specifically to point that out, and I can't say that it's very politically aware but definitely not worse than "they just have it" or "yes there are overseas colonies but pay it no mind".

*Because that's usually the case in examples that are discussed, from what I heard East Asian fantasy set in East Asia also suffers from this for the same reason, but I didn't read enough of it to say

Let me say you make real good points and I broadly agree with you. I do think the history of colonialism and where our foods came from is important (I do research that so no doubt). And I also agree that sometimes, those themes are too difficult to board properly, especially in a lighthearted story.

However, in fiction, it's not so much that I want people to do more "clean" ways of getting those crops. Many people told me "well, what if they get it through trade, or what if they got it through magical portals and such" my point is not that you find a "colonialist free" way to have potatoes in your setting, my point is that every crop in real life has a history behind them, and when you place them in your setting, I think you should consider that. Not only because you will learn about real life and its history, but also because of the storytelling potential.

I mean, I do have "worldbuilding fundamentalist" in my bio, and I think even if you don't sketch the entire world, you should at least know where your heroes are. Much of modern fantasy loves to adopt the "medieval" aesthetic, while in fact presenting a world with widespread trade, urbanization, a growing artisan class, etc. (I've done a longer rant about it here). Those things aren't just aesthetic choices, they are different societies that have different dynamics and they do affect the kind of plots and characters you might make on them.

I don't think fantasy should shy away from exploring themes such as imperialism and colonialism, trade and politics, intercultural contact and social change. One reason why I'm so insistent with the theme of crops and trade is that it's because it's emblematic of those issues. Sure, you don't want to explain the potatoes or chocolate in your setting, whatever. Don't you WANT to, though? Don't you want to explore beyond the pseudo-medieval aesthetic, and explore what an American or African -inspired setting might look like? Of course, you could and should also make your own new settings, but exploring actual history, geography, biology (at the broadest term, natural history) will make you a better worldbuilder and a better writer, AND also let you learn more about the world.

Sorry if this rant is a bit unfocused, just woke up from a nap after some wine, but this is why I'm so insistent with the stories that can arise just by considering the crops in your setting. Imagine what else can you write.

#worldbuilding #fantasy #writing #biotipo worldbuilding

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drjacquescoulardeau · 7 months ago

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THE INDO-EUROPEAN BIG BANG

Xavier Rouard searches and researches the linguistic world, scientific research of course, for the origin, the cradle, the homeland, or the motherland, of Indo-European. He is not the only one in the world, but he goes against practically all the others by positioning this linguistic nursery in Central Asia based on a Eurasian or trans-Eurasian language or languages. But precisely Eurasian languages only came into existence from the moment when syntactic-analytic Indo-Iranian languages left the Iranian plateau where they had stationed themselves when they arrived from Black Africa, some 40,000 years ago, or BCE, not much difference here. They had to go through the Ice Age first and finally get on the move after this climate event probably around 15,000 BCE, some east to the southern Asian continent, with Pakistan and India, others west down into Mesopotamia and from there to Europe. These people, on both side, encountered people who spoke other languages, Turkic agglutinative languages, and isolating Sino-Tibetan languages, mostly. These languages had integrated the Denisovans and their own language(s). Thes encountered people were hybrid Homo Sapiens with a varying proportion of Denisovan DNA in Central Asia, and the same in Mesopotamia with a varying proportion od Neanderthalensis DNA. When they reached Europe, the population was essentially of Turkic language and origin with a varying level of hybridization with European Homo Neanderthalensis. It is such encounters that generated or engendered the various Indo-European or Indo-Aryan languages

My approach is phylogenetic and thus it is absolutely impossible for me not to take into consideration the migrations and geographic, hence social, cultural and linguistic movements of these populations. That’s the basic principle of Joseph Greenberg who considered that all these migrations had only one matrix or melting pot that produced the emergence of human articulated language on the basis of what these emerging Homo Sapiens inherited from the other Hominins from which they were descending.

But Joseph Greenberg and his disciples encountered a problem: in all language you should find a certain number of words whose “roots” are universal and stable in meaning. These are the roots coming from Black Africa before any migration out of Black Africa. The problem is then that it does not enable any topology of languages. So, they, Greenberg and his disciples, tried to introduce “grammatical” or “syntactic” words, but even so it does go that far.

To get somewhere you have to ask the question about the phylogeny of articulated language(s), and there you only find three articulations in a precise order: root-languages (by the way vastly ignored by Xavier Rouard), Isolating character languages, and agglutinative as well as synthetic-analytic languages according to the migrations out of Black Africa. If you do not consider this phylogeny, then you put all sorts of languages together in the melting pot and you let things happen all by themselves. In my approach, languages are in contact thanks to the contacts established among the various communities speaking different languages, with exchanges, borrowings and communication. But finding out that words are vastly common among the languages of this Central Asian area does not prove anything. It is just the proper way languages works at the level of words.

60% of English words are of French origin. That does not make English a Romance language because the syntax of English is definitely Germanic, and this makes English a Germanic language. That’s why a language can borrow words from another language because the syntax is not changed. Syntactic changes can only come from the phylogenic evolution of the concerned language, within the phylogeny of its linguistic family, within the phylogeny of language as a human competence.

Welcome and enter the debate.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2024

14 Pages

Languages and Linguistics, * Black/African Diaspora, * Indo-European Studies, * Human origins (Anthropology), * Phylogeny

#poetry #music #linguistics #science fiction #history #slavery #drama

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anxresi · 9 months ago

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Humor me for a moment, as I post about something other than Miraculous.

I've been REALLY looking forward to the Netflix live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. The original animated series is arguably one of the most narratively complex, imaginatively structured, ambitiously pioneering shows of it's era... as well as being hella entertaining and funny to boot. Surely, after the unmitigated disaster which was the 2010 movie, they couldn't screw this up...

Oh. Well, it's safe to say, they found a way.

Look. No-one LIKES sexism. Just like no decent person likes any kind of prejudice, whether it be against religion, race, sexuality etc.

But by IGNORING THE SUBJECT entirely in a fictional premise, you end up losing a lot of interesting story possibilities. Like, if Sokka isn't 'sexist' like he was in the first season of the show, what exactly is half his character arc? It was all about accepting women as equals and realising they were capable of doing anything men can do... heck, he even fell in love with a warrior woman!

How DARE they try to keep these 'difficult' topics out of shows be fear they might 'offend' anyone. Even if they're portrayed negatively now, apparently to show any character flaw along these kind of prejudicial lines is seen as a no-go area and the subjects aren't even broached. Even if they develop past these unsavory traits later! It's too much, guys.

To me, this is as bad as those modern historical dramas set in the 19th century or before where they pretend slavery was practically non-existent and women could do whatever they wanted to. WRONG. Insultingly so. You can have all the expensive costumes and period detail you like, but if your production is that anachronistic, than my interest level is 0%.

Basically, if they're not willing to take any risks with the material, this sounds like nothing more than a bland approximation of everything that made the cartoon good. I'll probably give it a miss now thanks, unless someone on here can convince me otherwise.

It's not that I'm DESPERATE to be Sokka be rude to the ladies, it's more what the decision to remove that key element of his personality represents and it's something I feel VERY strongly against as a form of patronising and cowardly bowdlerization.

This post on Reddit sums up my feelings nicely...

That's it. Thanks for reading!! :)

#avatar #avatar the last airbender #sokka #the last airbender #netflix

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rjalker · 2 months ago

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@walks-the-ages yeah turns out I've just spent four hours trying to find an interview that has since been deleted -.-

So now it only exists on the wayback machine.

____

In her series of novellas, The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells offers us a glimpse into the far future; one with accessible space travel across the galaxy, incredible technology, drones, sentient robots, human-AI constructs and, of course, humans. It is an exciting universe, but also one where key aspects of society, such as work, travel, and even justice are largely controlled by interplanetary companies and corporations. Despite its space-age setting, this reality feels as familiar as ours in many ways.

Wells introduces us to this world from an unexpected perspective: a part-human, part-robot construct who calls itself Murderbot. The Company created Murderbot for a single job: the security of the Company’s clients. It is one of many SecUnits who are rented out for for-profit and non-profit space missions as contracted security providers, governed by company policy, and a governor module that observes and controls its actions. The story opens after our narrator has hacked its governor model, gaining free will and the ability to use its own judgement, especially when its clients refuse to use theirs. With this newfound freedom, it is mostly minding its own business and downloading its favourite TV dramas.

At the Brookfield Institute, our research and foresight work has identified some of the present-day signals explored in this fictional far-future, including AI rights, human augmentation, and technological fear. In this interview, we talked to Martha Wells about how we got to this version of the future, the nature of work in an era of drones and embodied AI, and the role of capitalism in creating it. We also touch on personhood, responsibility, and the potential for sci-fi to be a vehicle for empathy and perspective, especially for policymakers.

iana: A lot of the world that you’ve created for The Murderbot Diaries is a very familiar space. Even though it operates in an intergalactic and much more technologically advanced society, a lot feels familiar from data mining, to dependence on feeds for entertainment, finding work, or security. Could you tell our readers more about Murderbot’s story? And whether this story is happening in our future?

Martha: The story is basically about a person who is a partially human, partially a machine construct. These people are created by corporations, primarily for security purposes and they’re rented out, and classified as equipment. They have restrictions on their behaviour; they cannot go more than 100 meters from the clients they are rented to, and their governor modules can kill them if they do not obey orders. So it’s slavery. The way of getting around the idea of enslaving humans is by claiming that they are not human, when actually they may not be human, but they are people. The story is that Murderbot, who is a Security Unit (SecUnit) has managed to hack its governor module and no longer has to obey orders. But it really doesn’t know what else to do, so it has been downloading media and entertainment feeds, and just kind of doing its job and trying not to get caught. In the first story, All System’s Red, it has come to like the group of scientists that it’s protecting on a planetary survey. And it has ended up having to reveal that it is free [from its governor module and company oversight] in order to save them.

I do imagine it being our very far future. It is far enough that people have forgotten Earth, or it is just a note in the history books. Our future in space has been co-opted by corporations for their own purposes and this has gotten worse and worse over time. You have an entire sector of the inhabited galaxy now controlled by different corporations.

Diana: In several cases, these corporations have adopted the role of governments from justice to accountability. They also broadly control the terms of work, where people can find jobs, where they can’t. You mentioned slavery, but there’s also indentured work in this world. How does Murderbot’s world reflect on our own world’s issues regarding the corporate control and nature of work?

Martha: It was me being afraid of what I saw coming, which is unions becoming less and less powerful and less and less able to protect people, and corporations becoming more powerful and more able to do whatever they wanted, and gaining status. The idea of a corporation that has the same rights to the person when it is so much more powerful than an individual person.

In the story, it is very much like right now where you have people who manage to stay independent, and are able to negotiate for contracts on their own and able to work like consultants but also people that, through whatever misfortune end up having to take really bad deals and end up basically as indentured slavery on in really terrible jobs that are very dangerous or are set for for certain time limits. There’s a section in the third story in the series in which a group of people have had to sell themselves for contract labour and are not really sure what that means yet but they know it is going to be really bad.

[In our world] we are seeing fast food places now suddenly stop paying people in actual currency and start paying them with gift cards that basically give the company back half their salary in fees, and companies further eroding workers’ rights. Trying to think of things that can happen to people that have not already happened now, in our world, is hard.

Diana: In the case of one of the characters, Dr Mensah, and her team, they come from Preservation, a free planet, and they are not as beholden to corporate rule and corporate rules, even though they do have to interact with them. How did they get there? And how could we maybe shift towards that future in our world?

Martha: The story is told from Murderbot’s perspective, so the only thing it really knows at the beginning is the Corporation Rim, plus what it has seen on entertainment shows. There are a bunch of other governments that actually function as governments, by the people and for the people, but they are much less powerful than the Corporation Rim and most of them are scattered around outside it. Preservation is one of those independent government systems. How they got there is explained a bit more in the later novel Network Effect. They were basically an abandoned colony that was rescued [and relocated] to a planet that they could settle that would be viable for them. They grew out of a culture that had been under corporate authority and did not want to go back to that, that wanted independence.

How we get there is by controlling our interaction with corporations and not letting them get a foothold on the resources and other things we need to be independent. There’s nothing wrong with a small company that makes food or other things we need. We potentially need those for our society to work but it is not the only way to live. You can have a more egalitarian society, where these interactions are controlled, where the individual rights of each person are more important than corporate rights.

Diana: The Murderbot Diaries can be read as a criticism of capitalism. Preservation is the only society in the book that doesn’t seem fully dysfunctional, where justice is possible and there is no contractual slavery. Do you see the books as a criticism of capitalism and did you set out to explore this or did it emerge from the signals we’re seeing now?

Martha: I did not set out to explore it, but in creating the kind of world and the situation Murderbot is in, that is what came out of it. That kind of unrestrained capitalism that dehumanizes people and uses them as objects is really the only kind of world that could produce this character.

Diana: We were talking before about basic rights and humanity and I wanted to explore those themes a little bit more. Particularly in Corporation Rim, humans seemed to have outsourced violence, security, justice, and safety, but they still need humans for certain jobs. One of my favorite quotes, and I’m paraphrasing, but the main character says “I like the humans in the (entertainment) feeds much better, but we can’t have one without the other.” What do you think about the things that they, in the Murderbot world, and we, in our world, put value on what humans can or should do?

Martha: A lot of the work they outsource to bots would be almost impossible for humans to do. The big cargo bots and the haulers move things a lot more efficiently than humans could and they can also work outside the space station to move cargo from ship to ship. You can have a human operator inside but it would be incredibly dangerous and not very productive. The things that they are not outsourcing (to bots) is scientific research; the development of their media, storytelling, acting, music, writing, all the artistic work involved in entertainment, anything involving creativity. Murderbot makes this point, which you mentioned, that it is humans who create the entertainment feeds, and humans who invented the cubicles that SecUnits use to repair themselves. The bots in the story are not at the level where they could duplicate that creativity or the ability to take the information gathered by the bots during research and use it to inform theories about what is going on and what it means.

Diana: Related to that. I think science fiction is a really good tool, particularly when it’s in a world where there’s space travel and planetary settlements, to heighten our awareness as readers of the human dependence, current and future, on technology, particularly when that technology is sentient.I was wondering what do you think our biggest blind spots and opportunities are when it comes to technology as we are now. What do we get wrong about AI?

Martha: Currently, we’re a world away from developing and sentient AI, if that’s even possible I wouldn’t want to say it’s not possible because so many things we have now we wouldn’t have thought possible. I think we are having trouble right now with how the technology is misused and how it can be potentially misused. I think [we are] very behind in legislation and forming rules and laws about how it cannot be used, like to take in this information and basically tailor it to influence people on a large scale. I’m not particularly an AI expert, so I’m looking at it as a layman but that’s my primary concern.

There is a show called Better Off Ted that came out several years ago about a big evil corporation and there’s a bit where they have the elevator designed to operate without buttons. So it recognizes people and takes you where you need to to go. But it doesn’t recognize Black people, the Black executives and scientists who work there. So they can’t get anywhere in the elevator. And it’s a metaphor but it’s also a way that shows how AI right now is not any better than the people who program it and the people who feed the information in.

Diana: A lot of Murderbot’s transformation does deal with discovering what guilt is and responsibility is, so I was very curious about that kind of distinction, the responsibility of being human versus not. As a human you have certain responsibilities, you have certain accountabilities, and as a bot, or as a piece of equipment, you’re not accountable, the company that owns you is. The line between the times when Muderbot was responsible for certain acts and the times when it wasn’t is invisible to most of the world, much like the fact that it is or isn’t a human. How do you envision that conflict of responsibility for actions of a technology that makes decisions. In the case of our real world, they’re not sentient, But I think it’s an interesting parallel: when do you assign that responsibility?

Martha: If they’re not sentient, like in our world, then it’s the people who programmed it that have the responsibility. They should be checking to see that the program or AI was learning, like the case of the driverless car that hit someone because it didn’t know that a bicycle wasn’t something you could hit. It’s a big simplification of what happened, but it was the responsibility of the programmers who should have been looking at a range of things for it to react to and to make sure it could be accurate, there should have been more testing to be sure that there was no gap in these reactions. I don’t understand why a driverless car wouldn’t stop at any motion in front of it. When a human is driving, you’re looking for movement. My foot is going to the brake before my brain even fully processes that. When it is not sentient it is definitely the fault of the person who programmed it. And if it’s a sentient being that has to be programmed with information, I’m still inclined to think it’s the person who programmed it who is responsible, who told it it didn’t have to stop for bicycles.

At some point, there was somebody who decided it was okay to hit bicycles or decided that it was okay not to fully test. It always comes back to a person or a corporation. It’s that old adage: garbage in, garbage out.

Diana: On the idea of responsibility and intelligence, I listened to one of your previous interviews with the Modern War Institute podcast. You touched on the situation from Star Trek that really struck me about how a low, high, or different intelligence doesn’t make anyone less human or less of a person. From the story, it’s fairly obvious that Murderbot is a person in almost all the usual senses. I wondered if you could elaborate a bit more on this sense of personhood and the different intelligences that you explore.

Martha: It’s a really complex question. The Star Trek episode I referenced is about animals and what we’re dealing with now is that it is in our best interest to treat animals like things. But when you’re talking about something that has a very complex decision-making process…. I think the thing that Star Trek is also talking about is the idea that they keep setting a bar, e.g, “an animal can’t do this therefore it is not like a person”. And then they’ll find animals that can do that and suddenly the bar will be raised. The case is always decided in our favor, no matter what the evidence is.

I could see that happening with actually burgeoning sentient machine intelligence. “A machine can’t do this, therefore it is not a person.” As long as something benefits us, we’ll always try to make it keep making it a thing and not something whose feelings and wants and agenda need to be taken into consideration.

Diana: I want to take a bit of a step back and jump into our last and most open-ended question. In the series, you tackle various issues that we’re confronting now with respect to workforces, companies, humanity, etc. What do you think the role of science fiction could be or should be in policymaking and in preparing for a potential wide shift of societal norms as we look into the far future?

Martha: I think it lets us look at these possibilities. When you’re reading them, you experience them through the point of view of the characters. That’s a more real experience for our brain than just thinking what might or might not happen. You’re getting all these different viewpoints from different people, and different types of people, that let you see the problem from different angles. It’s kind of like any fiction, it’s what we do when we read storybooks when we’re children, and why we read dystopias. It’s looking at worst case scenarios and seeing how people survived them and building empathy and stretching that to scenarios that we wouldn’t see in contemporary literary fiction but we might actually be coming toward in the future. What does a planet-wide disaster look like? How do people deal with it? Those kinds of questions.

Diana: I think what you mentioned about seeing something and almost living something through a character’s point of view makes a lot more sense to our brain. In a lot of ways, we have empathy as we step into the shoes of those characters. In addition to that, a lot of your work has interesting world-building. I read the Cloud Roads series, as well as the Murderbot series. And just as Murderbot feels familiar, the world also feels familiar. How do you think that world-building exercises could also help policymaking?

Martha: I guess it’s just constructing these different places and looking at how everything fits together. The Cloud Roads series is fantasy, and a kind of science fantasy where they are using biological technology and magical technology but it all kind of fits together into these systems. I think world-building makes you realize, even if you’re using magic, everything has to fit together. There has to be a reason why this happens or a purpose for it. Or it’s a thing that happens and people use it for a purpose and you have to look at how the world functions and get one that doesn’t have to feel super realistic, but it should feel like a complete functioning system. I think that’s where the sense of verisimilitude comes in.

Diana: That’s all of the questions I have, but I wanted to see if you have anything you wanted to add or any other books or any inspiration you used in building this world that you might recommend to our readers, other than Network Effect of course [the latest book in the Murderbots series].

Martha: For exploring different worlds, I really love Ann Leckie. NK Jemisin for looking at a system that became corrupted or was intentionally corrupted and all the terrible ways it spiraled out. I didn’t have a lot of non-fiction that inspired the Murderbot Series. It came from reading science fiction all my life and from my experience in programming and working in computer software and writing database software and dealing with people. A lot of people who have social anxiety or autism have related to Murderbot. The way it relates to the world feels really familiar to them.

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imagine saying that your robot characters are just more advanced generative AI but are still fundamentally incapable of any genuine creativity on their own. Imagine saying that when the entire premise of the series is that these robots are people who deserve freedom.

The things that they are not outsourcing (to bots) is scientific research; the development of their media, storytelling, acting, music, writing, all the artistic work involved in entertainment, anything involving creativity. Murderbot makes this point, which you mentioned, that it is humans who create the entertainment feeds, and humans who invented the cubicles that SecUnits use to repair themselves. The bots in the story are not at the level where they could duplicate that creativity or the ability to take the information gathered by the bots during research and use it to inform theories about what is going on and what it means.

Martha Wells is obsessed with creating castes of people who are inherently incapable of creativity. Why does she keep doing this.

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