#but after those cgi ndns last week on top of everything else???

[princessnijireiki]

hi i have been looking for ppl speaking critically~ about ag since it aired and finally!! from ep one i was already feeling uncomfortable that this is a white man writing for white ppl but and actually planned to quit after ep 2 but then in ep 3 there were gay middle eastern ppl and i was !!! i need to see them representation!! but like im egyptian and watching the ep i was literally going "ok i get what u (hope to say/mean) that but this is still not right" the names neil picked for (1/?)

the dead woman’s son feels off? (and like i looked it up later and it wasnt even an egyptian actress? at least it was someone middle eastern but we are not interchangeable) + how they pronounced some things (the easiest being teta and anubis) esp as an egyptian ™ and like a couple of other things but its ok i was ready to pull through for salim/jin but then the white jesus comment and im back to :/// (2/3)

and ended up complaining to anyone who would listen. ahhh its like u said it really shows they never consult anyone?? and its hilarious how much credit neil is getting for this when he basically does the bare bones? (and not even correct @ that) umm sorry for the long rant i guess i dont really have a point with these questions ye have a good day (3/3)

tbh!!! I have a LOT of issues with/about neil gaiman in general, and as for the showrunners, I’m not familiar with a lot of their work because it’s so white– like I liked “dead like me” (brian fuller), but mostly watched for jasmine guy tbh; and I’ve heard good things about “logan” & “alien: covenant” (michael green), but I sort of expect that stuff to be extremely white once I get to watch them, too. :/

(long post so I’m snipping it!)

like the whole thing is very white centered & white gaze on the nonwhite chars, and feels SUPER off bc of it, and even then, the nonwhite narratives so far really are bit side pieces of information, sideplots to the main narrative… and based on spoilers I won’t go into here, they aren’t gonna get better with it, even though, like, there is MORE THAN ENOUGH REASON for them to shift gears off of a narrow white focus. barring major rewrites I don’t have any hope or faith will happen, they just won’t.

particularly bc that would risk alienating aspects of a white audience… when everybody else is supposed to be okay with being alienated / is an okay studio risk to alienate EVEN IF the thought has even occurred to those folks that poc alienation is like a THING. or even that audiences who don’t view this white centered stuff as Universal exist to begin with.

but anyway yeah like… I’m not egyptian & my family’s not north african & I don’t speak arabic at ALL, so outside of the dead woman’s accent sounding very forced to me, I thought it might have just been bc it was bad dialogue.

that said, my dad is muslim, and all the diff. sides of my family are v. spiritual people, so… once you grasp the concept of djinn & like what they are in their nature and how they interact with humans (when they do) & WHAT they do… and like especially not going with the p. overtly christian™ thing of “so that means x is good/angels/god/jesus, y are bad/demonic,” bc mr. wednesday & mr. world are v. much that 🙄🙄🙄… the whole way the narrative has been constructed makes NO fucking sense at all.

and the same goes for other deities & spirits, like it’s so literalist white christian-culture secular faith = power bullshit (which like… is so white christian missionary culture it’s sick… you need the Most believers in order for your faith/magic/gods to have meaning or power??? it’s gotta be a battle??? I cannot overstate this, but: ew) that you lose all nuance & cultural context to stuff….. I love the “angry gets shit done” monologue, too, but anansi feels like a white-ass take on anansi. it feels wrong.

and so like I didn’t want to overstep too much with the djinn thing bc like!!! my dad converted when I was a teenager, so it’s not MY cultural bg/upbringing to speak over/for people about… but a lot of fans’ response feels REALLY “arabian nights” fetishistic and super duper white (a lot of which is the show’s fault!!! like “I don’t grant wishes” that’s not… what defines a djinni… particularly once selim said dude was specifically an ifrit, like that’s not how that works… it’s a very white way to look at religion wtf), and like…

it’s off target. the whole franchise is off target.

even/especially for the jesus thing. like the idea that not only faith = sth that can be accumulated & used as wealth/power (again!!! ew!!! and tbh a LOT of christians/secular christian-culture folks do buy into that v. much despite like hating on the catholic church & the vatican for being overt with it, and will decry other convert-hungry cultures/practices as cult-like while v. insistently pushing the One True Path To God via Jesus Christ), but that interpretation trumps all in terms of both history & institutional faith… so long as it means there’s a racial angle that can be utilized to still funnel those deviations into said One True Path… is deeply fucking weird. particularly bc syncretism was/has always been a combination tool of imposed christian faith mixing with indigenous & enslaved diasporas worldwide attempting to save some part of themselves from literal cultural genocide.

like my info was bad that mr. world was jesus (when he’s really a textbook version of Evil Loki rather than, like, actual “canon” loki, based on nordic texts), but if we’re going “each interpretation of ‘jesus’ exists even if an actual historical jesus doesn’t + those interpretations are gonna be p. racist,” power-hungry self-righteous greedy warmonger & One True Path/”get with the new gods’ program” dictator-y white jesus is sth white folks really need to own up to. even though, like, that’s a manifestation of culture + institution & has LITERALLY NOTHING TO DO with a REAL, angry antifa palestinian jewish jesus of nazareth who narrowly escaped institutional genocide in infancy & was brutally murdered for radicalism and NOT bowing to the “might makes right” power structure of his time.

like… the white/mexican/etc. jesus comment is bad, that all those jesuses appear and are validated or wtfever is bad… institutional christendom getting a free pass even while it’s imposed on others (including like in how other gods/spirits are being depicted) is bad… and it’s utterly un-self-aware. like ppl think it’s really funny & purely rhetorical when there are real people still being crushed by white jesus and the need to have made xyz other “jesuses,” bc it’s not “the nightmare before christmas” out here, these concepts have a body count.

even the way the ancient egyptian pantheon is being handled feels odd, too. partly bc I think a lot of ppl outside of faith or cultural practices w. a lot of orthodoxy or ritual don’t tend to think of religions that do have those things beyond those superficial levels… like the weighing of the hearts seems like anubis’s end all be all. and I haven’t done a WHOLE lot of reading on the ancient egyptian pantheon in quite some time (I have a bunch of books downloaded on my computer, I just haven’t read them yet), but there was more to that. and gaiman knows better. he has (had??? idk) a long running comic, “sandman,” with an anthropomorphized death & a lot of conceptual stuff abt being a psychopomp… and idk if michael green has done much with that sort of grim-reaper-as-an-entity concept, but fuller has as well, more than once.

and even if it’s gonna be a sort of “returning library books” fancy bureaucratic process without any other weight or significance to it… anubis’s role could v. much be fleshed out as a WHOLE CHARACTER, like mr. wednesday (bc odin was also a sort of death deity!!!), but he isn’t. like there’s no religious or historical research… but there’s also barely any writing, either. he’s there to be spooky and do spooky ritual stuff, and that’s it.

(same with thoth / mr. ibis??? why is he here??? legal arbitration & scribe work in the underworld is part of his deal, but like… it’s a trip bc he’s literally just there as Recognizably Egyptian Set Dressing to set an “ancient egypt = death” mood, but not ammit, who really technically ought to make an appearance, or even babi, who imo fits the laura moon subplot to a goddamn tee, or osiris. but your average white person, even your average “mythology nerd” white person– bc that almost always means either greco-roman, possibly nordic/slavic, or their particular ethnicity– has no idea how to navigate who those figures are & what they represent outside of their visual trappings. like you get tumblr poetry about stripper aphrodite and chain smoker apollo or w/e, but amputee osiris would confuse them without being green & without the upper egyptian crown.)

and like a lot of ppl also tend not to think of “dead” religions in a way that contextualizes what they would be as living faiths, which (between that & your standard-issue orientalism) is like why a lot of ancient deities get used solely as either exotic decoration value, or get really christian allegories shoved onto them for no reason.

NONE of which gets into how the ancient egyptian pantheon WAS actually an evolving pantheon… like instead of white/mexican/etc. jesus… that pantheon did encompass several sects, branches, cults of worship, etc., across MULTIPLE dynastic eras, multiple racial & ethnic identities & combinations of leadership, and like diff. regions with racially/ethnically distinct populations & faith practices…

like amun ≠ amun-ra ≠ ra ≠ ra-horakhty ≠ horus ≠ atum-horakhty ≠ atum ≠ khepri, either… but wikipedia is too much damn work, I guess!!

[ also, slight segue, but re: casting, I agree 100%. like to indulge & go off topic a little bit, I’m really stoked for the new “mummy” film, bc sofia boutella is a north african actress actually getting to play a north african role, even though she’s algerian vs. egyptian; which also means, like, the egyptian char in question was cast with an actual north african actress, vs. someone Ambiguously Brown (or white but who can carry off brownface… like imhotep in the 1999+ “mummy” films), or the casting direction team pulling that “all MENASA performers are interchangeable” thing a lot of white media does…

and like I’m black american, but it’s weird seeing ppl praise “american gods” for its diversity/casting black actors to play african figures… bc it’s ahistorical when you talk abt egypt to say all africans = a certain kind of black, per the definition of what “black” is/looks like in a modern american context… and to claim that any depiction of egypt without that kind of blackness in it is racist. like it is utterly insensitive & imposes a v. american pov of the black/african diaspora(s) onto cultures/sets of peoples w. their own histories & self-definitions. like… that’s not how that works + even if it was, “american gods” FOR SURE could’ve hired black/darkskinned north africans for those roles if they’d wanted to, or really cared at all about those characters beyond ~AESTHETIC. ]

so like, it’s incredibly fucking weird. it’s so weird and alienating to watch. they’re props. all the nonwhite deities and spirits so far… are props. they’re all being used as props or interstitials between white scenes, while these white characters get to be whole characters.

and the show/book is already fake-deep with its “religious” narratives… but it stands out as even more shallow once you show all these chars outside of “white” pantheons (including, weirdly, the shallow multiple racist-stereotype jesuses!!!) are really there for exotic flavor/texture & either for white chars’ benefit or as like sidequest monsters for white chars to beat.

so yeah!!! I responded with an even longer rant lol, but I hope you have a good day, too. :)