#but also just like... the racism from white fans in general

[realestsmiggles]

Sigh.. Another TCC related rant 🙏 a lot shorter but just some quick stuff I wanted to talk about

(Really just about the people on the app and in the community)

Making friends who are also tcc is so hard it's either cornballs, edgelords, or the most senstive people on earth. Like one how are you gonna be THIS sensitive about such little things when you're on the worse part of the internet. Or people who will be rude asf and then get mad cause someone's mean to them, like man up and grow a pair. How can you be surprised that there's bad people in a community based around mass killers and shooters? It just never makes sense.

But edgelords actually URK me to my core, like I'm so sorry but your ass is NOT Eric... I know I talk about columposers a ton but they just make me super mad. We don't need anymore school shootings, it's not a competition and you're just making a fool out of yourself. I think Columbine and couple other shootings were all we needed and to get past but there's just more and more each year. Its always by some edgelord found their dads gun and just so happens to know what Columbine is. And like I've said before their manifestos are all the same some fuckin "They're all gonna feel my wrath 👿"

No they aren't... you're gonna end up injuring two people and then just shooting yourself, shut up. Sometimes the shootings aren't just Columbine based and some are caused by serious illness but I feel like we should get those checked out before anything. Like if your child is clearly showing signs that somethings wrong then I don't know, maybe talk to them? Take them to a doctor? Call someone? Many shootings could be avoided this way or just simply putting metal detectors inside schools that face a lot of threat. Now I know that me just saying this won't do anything for the world and this is just me ranting.

On the same topics of edgelords I also hate two specific people, first one is the like cannibal97 guy or whatever his name is. The guy whose convinced he's Eric and people in his anon sections who are like "ohemgee you make me wet >_<" WHAT. Excuse me.

And he's always flirting with them, if someone (an anon may I add) starts flirting with you and you are 17 and older then don't respond. Because you might be talking to a minor or someone much younger than you, because I know a lot of people are 13-14 and it's weird if they're talking to a 17-19 year old. Then there's the argument of "Well the younger person sent it and/or it was anonymous,". Yes but you (a 17-19 year old AKA a grown adult with basic thinking skills) shouldn't reply because it was probably anonymous for a reason, maybe because they didn't want you to know their age.

The second person is the Dylann roof fan who's user is 88aryan-2 and she's a white girl and says the n word and just seems like a rude person in general. Like you are not Dylann's top gal buddy 🙏. He's not gonna be released from prision and shown your rainbow dash tumblr account and suddenly say "Wow!! She's just like me fr! Maybe I should talk to her!" This is not a drama show, this is Tumblr out of all places.

Now I don't mind Dylann roof fans because most of them talk about the fact that he's a bad person which is good but when you're just acting like him it's just kind of cringe. I feel weird when someone on here says the n-word because you can never fact check if they're actually black (this is coming from a white guy, I don't have much room to talk)

In general I just don't like a lot of people on here or in this community because most are rude or just bad people or just straight up hard to talk to and be around. Of course there's awesome and kind people on this app and I love talking to people who are like actually nice people and understand where I'm coming from. But it's always the people who only think racism and Columbine are the only funny things. I know I'm kind of a boring person but some of these people actually have the personalities of dried Mac n cheese. Please get an orginal or just better personality, find a cool game or a fun hobbie or better friends, maybe just find friends in general.

[jyndor]

atla fans can be pretty orientalist ngl like TEXTBOOK orientalist.

like okay I know I know the original show is so good but it isn't perfect and there is PLENTY of room for improvement. plenty. we all knew this at the time, back when it was airing and then there was that long break between books 2 and 3. like we all knew it was great but also had its problems. idk why fans from the original run act like this show is perfect.

one of the biggest problems has always been how white the writers room was. how the creators, especially bryke, were profiting by selling the aesthetics of various asian and indigenous peoples to a us american audience.

this is how you get the borderline weird anti-indigenous focus on sexism and misogyny in the water tribes without much exploration of how sexism and misogyny impacted other groups. like actually I'm GLAD that it's toned down but still present in the live action show because sokka was mostly around women and girls for a lot of his teen years. why would HE be so over the top sexist? like in comparison with anyone else, it makes no sense. unless of course you think about it through the lens of how white colonizers tend to think of indigenous peoples - backwards.

I think it's interesting that this show is mostly being worked on by Asian and indigenous people and so many fans never even wanted to give it a chance. I know, I know- I remember the film too. but from the jump, fans have been so quick to dismiss EVERY little detail* or leak without even seeing it first.

bryke are a big part of the story, I know. but they are not all of the people who were behind it. it seems to me that a lot of the fans of this show are weirdly protective of these two white guys who decided to part from the show. they weren't forced out, they left. and yes I'm biased because I saw just how shitty they treated fans of zutara (largely girls and VERY, VERY diverse) at literal conventions, how they egged on some toxic bullying from other parts of the fanbase to the point that frankly it's never really worth engaging in non-zutara fan spaces because people are so reactive and weird about even the mention of zutara. and then these same assholes will make comparisons to reylos as if zutara fans EVER harassed poc fans and especially actors. but whatever, that's my bias. but I can respect that they also created this amazing show that I've loved for half of my life.

I still see it as a good thing that the people working on this show come from the cultures bryke and nickelodeon profited off of without giving anything back.

so I guess my question to white fans is this: if you haven't watched yet because you are mad about bryke or some of the changes you've heard about or whatever, why do you not trust people from the cultures atla draws upon to adapt this story? are you just here to consume exotic aesthetics? why are bryke the only people who can sell those aesthetics to you?

*btw I'm not talking about the sokka casting shit, that's different and should be criticized. Also Albert Kim was the showrunner of Sleepy Hollow and was complicit in racist treatment of Nicole Beharie so he is not someone I trust very much. also there are definitely critiques I have of the show but it's not bad, not even remotely. it's worth watching.

[ganondoodle]

got this reblog on one of my posts were i talked about being anxious about the future of the zelda series after totk and-

i even went back and unblocked them just to check my own post and check twice what they meant exactly- but i still dont know how they got to these conclusions

i never said i 'want a good uwu ganondorf' (bc that would mean hes aligned with hyrule bc thats how goodness works!!!!11!1!!!), i also dont think of any of the zeldas as 'whores' (seriously, where did that come from?? neither me nor the addition of someone agreeing with me said anything like that??? did they think bc the addition called tloz misogynistic means we think zelda is a whore????? huh???)

its also funny how they say they want zelda to stay a simple fairytale rather than have 'people like me' bc .. one point i talked about in the og post was how the evil arab thing VS good white people media likes to do so much is so normalized here that its simply seen as a simple harmless fairytale trope instead of a big underlying issue in general media and the writers might not even realize it (which is worse) bc the most 'generic' appeal is to people who dont think of it as a problem in the first place, because it is so normalized

(huh, i wonder about what kind of person that part was about .. hmmmm)

(ALSO funny they mention princess hilda as nuanced villain ... like ... wow they are so nuanced about purple haired people!!- like guess why we want a nuanced/less badly/less flat written ganondorf and what he, in particular, has not in common with other villains! its not his hair color! .... or was that point supposed to mean .. look we have one female character that is a villain, its not misogynistic! idk honestly)

(and the classic, "you just call it this/dont like it bc its not what you wanted !!!!!!!2!"1!112!!")

also funny how its 'never gonna be progressive enough' like asking for the franchise to maybe put a little more thought and nuance into their white divine right vs evil desert man simulator instead of making it worse is already asking too much

(i dont know what the last point has to do with anything??)

(also yes totk is racist, like most if not all of the franchise and a alot of other media as well, shocker- you can still like it though, i and plenty of other people are still fans of it, we just wish they did a little more with their stuff and maybe not make the racism problem WORSE)

(also yes the hyrule monarchy is also evil :))) )

(and also not so secretly so either :)) )

[androdetective]

As a poc, I have a complicated relationship to vbros. On one hand, the world is really immersive and the characters can be really great, on the other hand it is a very white show and has a racism problem. Many of the white characters have done racist things when characters have gotten punished or killed for less. There's also barely any side characters of color. And even then, many jokes get made at them regarding their races, because they're not seen as the norm. Also because it's an adult swim show made by white guys.

Off the top of my head, there are 4 side characters of color (Orpheus, Jefferson, Kano, and Dr Z). If we want to be generous, we could include Al. Maybe even Triana with her being biracial, albeit entirely passing as white. Even with those characters, Orpheus became whitewashed over the years.

However, ironically enough, he's the best written character of color. He's a very nice, multifaceted character. He's even become a fan favorite. He's also had no racist comments made towards him in the show. Which was a pleasant surprise. Especially since he lived on the compound with Rusty of all people. As happy as I am with that, it feels off because why did they spare only him but not others? I'm not sure if his race was ever figured out as the writers. It never got brought up, unlike other characters. I won't lie, that gives me a feeling they didn't write him as a brown man in mind. If they did write him with that in mind, he probably would've been written worse. It feels like they could only relate to him and made his character good by thinking he's white like them. Hell, they even projected their weird breakup feelings onto him.

With Jefferson, his character is a mixed bag. He's a cool character and very capable. He's a solid character, all things considered. It's just that he gets racist jokes thrown his way. And just, the show has one black side character, and they can't even act right. Why is racism, the hatred and otherness of one's entire existence, so funny. I noticed that each episode except one that he was in had at least one antiblack joke. That's an insane ratio. The worst joke was in the Halloween episode, where he was at the party. They specifically made his character open the door to a side character, red mantle, doing blackface. It was to make a shitty reference to some niche movie and just oh my god, can you stop being shitty white nerds for a second? People who think shit like this is funny makes me want to project years of racial trauma into their brains so that they could finally Get It. Again, this is the best black character they have, but they to make him go through cheap antiblack jokes.

At least with Kano and Dr Z their skin tones stopped being yellow. The other times we see characters of color are when they're background characters. They're either there to make a scene feel full or they're labor workers. The worst is when they were what I'd describe as background antagonists. One-off antagonists that aren't really villain villains. Moreso regular criminals. These tend to be depicted as black and latino. This was more common in early seasons and stopped happening over time. Which obviously great albeit bare fucking minimum, still doesn't change that it happened.

For a world that critiques the old mentalities from previous generations and even specifically denounces generational toxic masculinity. They don't say shit about the blatant racism of the Johnny Quest times they parody. And the times they try to, it's just showing racism and doing nothing about it. Princess Tinyfeet is the worst example of this. She's a blatant racial stereotype. Who for whatever reason, used to be married to Sgt Hatred, an American soldier. And Sgt Hatred is a whole can of worms.

With Dr Z who was apart of the Quest era, at least they tried to give him a character. The thing I will say is that he's voiced by a white guy (Publick) doing a stereotypical vaguely Eastern Asian accent. Something I wished when watching the show was for Dr Z to mention the old racist era he lived through, and maybe even how the present is still rough. The toxic masculinity of the era got mentioned, so why not that too. It would've been so obvious too.

I won't lie, a part of me is glad they didn't try to handle the racism because it would've been a horrible train wreck. I can get why they didn't delve too into it, they're white after all. I just wish there were more poc in the team and sensitivity writers because they were desperately needed. But for a show that can't even handle white women, I'm not surprised they can't handle people of color. For a show whose best thing they were able to tackle was toxic masculinity, I find it ironic how misogynistic they still were. Like quick, why were the side effects of misogyny that affect you 🫵 handled the best.

The thing is, if they did try to critique the racism, they'd alienate the audience, and it'd also be strangely hypocritical of them. Venture Bros'/Adult Swim's main audience is white cishet men. The ones least affected by bigotry. They're able to laugh at bigoted jokes, and they're the most marketable people. White guys will appeal to other white guys. In the early 2000s, white creators were able to get away with much more. Not because it was alright but because it was easier for them to shut down minorities calling them out. Despite how "normal" it was, that doesn't change how that fed into a very toxic, bigoted culture. Despite today still being hellish for minorities, it was even worse just a couple of years ago.

Venture Bros obviously did not invent racism/bigotry. The show is very much a product of their time and environment. And whenever I think about that, it feels draining. Especially having had to live through the 2000s. The show can be amazing when it wants to be. There's so much potential and a lot of charm and character. I really enjoy it, and that's why I'm so critical of it. Not only because I want it to be better but because I want something better for fans of color. We barely get anything, and the least we should get are characters that look like us and are respected. Just like their white counterparts. It's like, how am I supposed to feel when Sgt Hatred gets redeemed and made a main character before we got a character of color that didn't face racist jokes/got whitewashed. Or even before we got a female character whose existence didn't hinge on their relationship to a man. Obviously, the show doesn't hate people of color. They've tried to better over time, which again great. But it barely felt like they respected poc enough.

With the movie, despite its own problems (not helped by Adult Swim screwing them over), you could tell they were trying. And it was really appreciated. Jefferson had a big spotlight, and there weren't jokes against him. We even got to know a bit more about him. It was genuinely his best. Ignoring Orpheus still looking like he's in a perpetual state of winter, that aspect of the movie was alright.

I'm very glad to see fans who are critical of these aspects. It makes me more happy seeing them vouch for poc. However, there's still a large majority that ignores or even excuses the racism. Unsurprisingly, these tend to be the white dude bro fans. But I've seen even the more liberal fans excuse/ignore stuff. The fanbase is very white, just like a lot of other fanbases. I can get why a supportive white person feels they wouldn't be best to call out the show's shit. I just wish they'd mention it more with a simple "oh there's xyz in this episode and it wasn't alright." Something as simple as that carries a lot of power in very white environments. Also, of course, uplift other fans of color, especially when they talk about or face racism. Things as simple as that make me breathe sighs of relief. It personally encourages me to interact with communities more.

I'm unsure of how to close this off. This feels like a topic you could talk about all day. All I wish is for things to be better, you know? Hopefully this all makes sense. I just wrote shit off the top of my head. I'd love to hear thoughts expanding or adding on to stuff. Really hope this reaches the right people

[elumish]

If you are interested in examining, broadening, or diversifying the media that you read, write, and engage with, I think one of the most important things to recognize is that you can have legitimate feelings based in reality that are also bigoted or discriminatory.

I was talking to my parents this weekend about Republican voters, and one of the things that I was saying is that there are a lot of people whose political views reflect a social and economic insecurity based in a loss of jobs, lower purchasing power and a diminished ability to do things like buy a house or provide for a family compared to their parents' or grandparents' generation, a relative loss of political power compared to fifty or a hundred years ago, and a preference for people saying that they can bring us back to the world of a few generations ago where someone like that would have relatively more power in the world.

That relative loss of social, economic, and political power is real for some people (as a percentage of representation in state legislatures, Congress, and the White House, white people and especially white men do have objectively less say in government than 50 years ago). But it also can't be disentangled from racism and misogyny, where that loss of power is seen as an unbalancing of a previously equal (or at least preferable) scale rather than something inching closer to proportionate political representation and economic opportunities.

You see this with TERFs, too, in a different direction--it is a reality that women are more likely to be sexually assaulted by a man rather than another woman, and changes must be made to society to reduce rates of sexual assault. But it's also inextricably tied to bigotry and discrimination, both with the (incorrect) belief that trans women are actually men and with the belief that sex segregation is what will keep women safe (among other things).

What does this have to do with you?

A lot of the reasons I see people giving for not engaging with female characters or characters of color, or characters with other marginalized identities, are similarly based in some level of reality while still ultimately having racist or sexist or otherwise biased underpinnings to them.

It's true that there are social and political power disparities between men and women and that many M/F stories involve those, whether intentionally or not--but a refusal to engage with anything but M/M stories because you want to avoid those disparities indicates both an inability to picture a story where those disparities are not present/relevant and the viewpoint that M/M stories are inherently neutral (and so lacking those power issues) while F/F are inherently not neutral.

It's true that many female characters and characters of color are underdeveloped or not characterized well in canon, but the overwhelming fan engagement with underdeveloped white male characters indicates that white male characters are seen as neutral or blank canvases while female characters and/or characters of color are seen as just bad characters who it's not worth engaging with.

It's true that people often connect better with characters with similar traits to them, but a refusal to write or engage with most/all characters of color because of an inability to connect emotionally with them indicates a feeling that POC are inherently emotionally different from white people in a way that makes them impossible to relate to emotionally for white people.

My point here is not to shame anyone who holds these beliefs or says these things. We are all (including me) in the process of identifying and actively untangling and discarding our own internal biases (or at least we should be), and the first step to that is looking at your own actions and really trying to figure them out. This is hard and takes years or decades, because we are in a society where beliefs like these are pervasive.

So if you are interested in doing that, I recommend looking at reasons that you've given (if only just to yourself) for what characters and what types of stories you read/write/engage with and really sitting with them.

Identify what it is that's really the problem, and then try to find stories that do something different. Do you not like female-led romances because there might be a risk of pregnancy? Try some stories where there's no pregnancy. Are you uncomfortable reading one that describes certain body parts? Try a closed door story. Try a new genre. Try a different author. Try something you're not sure you'll like. Try something new.

You can do this with writing, too. Try writing a M/F story, or a F/F story, or a story with no romance at all. Try writing a story focused on a non-white character. Try fleshing out a female character who you think is underdeveloped in canon, if you write fanfiction. You might find that you enjoy it far more than you thought you would, once you let yourself write it the way you want.

[txttletale]

can you elaborate on the reasons ? what criticisms do you disagree with?

criticisms i disagree with:

"they character assassinated jane" amiguita there was no character to assisnate.

"they character assassinated dirk" dirk is at his most interesting and likeable ever and is just about the only redeeming thing about these

"they were just written to spite the fans" if true tht would have been Epic, and Based. but they very obviously werent

"its too violent and sexual for cheap shock humour" did you. read homestuck, the web comic? what were you Expecting... also like it or not the sexual content isnt just random or gratuitous it is obviously trying to be a conclusion to the whoel coming-of-age theme of homestuck as a work.

"so-and-so is out of character" homestuck characters are malleable little dolls that can be rearranged to suit the narrative at a whim. this is true about all fictional characters ofc but it is like explicitly textually metaphysically true in homestuck

my criticisms:

the heavy-handed political messaging is fucking tedious and awful and so profoundly of its time in a bad way. its clearly a reaction to trump but it doesnt have anything interesting to say about him or fascism or racism or anything, really, except, um. Cheeto in the white house?. the whole Evil Jane plot is too stupid and contrived for the sake of the satire to take seriously but also its awful satire written by liberals who think fascism as invented in 2016 by the orange man

god can we fucking talk about how fucking embarassing the obama shit is. jesus fucking christ. for a start it's a callback to a running jhoke in homestuck that is straight up just super racist. and they decide to pivot from the joke being 'its funny that theres a black president', which is good, but they pivot it to 'obama seems so heroic and magical now that we're stuck with the Orange Man', which, admittedly, is better than Being Racist, but also sucks shit. he killed people amiguitas.

'post-canon' is cheap bullshit. like, the work makes a big deal about tryng to talk about What Canon Is, without ever acknowledging the concept of, like, IP law. claiming to just be a non-canon continuation like any other when it's made by people with the Official Exclusive Legal Rights just feels hollow and detooths any liberatory/deconstructive potential there. unironically my opinion of it would go up like tenfold if it had been actually published in AO3 instead of just joking about it.

in general i think that all of the attempt to deconstruct fiction or storytelling is rooted in a really weird and flawed model of storytelling. a lot of it seems to be taking an extremely long route to writing something bad on purpose and then saying 'see, if you wrote something like this, it would be bad'. Okay. i like deconstructive collapsing narrative shit in e.g. if on a winter's night a traveller because i think calvino has trenchant and interesting insights about literature and storytelling. i do think hussie also has those but they essentially dropped and explored all of them in homestuck and the epilogues just seem like an attempt to connect ohomstuck's disparate and contradictory approaches to Narrative into one overarching schemata and then crtiique that schemata, which i think is a doomed project that results in little of interest to me.

[funktrolls]

Hai yes it's me Manolo or call me Manny :] I'm a trans man , he/they pronouns , aroace , black ( & Dominican 🇩🇴 )

🌟 Interests 🌟

If it wasn't obvious I got a hyperfixation on Trolls, now for 5 years 😋 but I also like a bunch of other stuff too! I'm a huge fan of Yugo Limbo , especially Great God Grove & Smile For Me.

And a bunch of random stuff everywhere like Kingdom Hearts, The Book of Life, Maya & the Three, Nintendo stuff in general , Steven Universe, Black Butler literally only cuz i love Grell Sutcliff, etc etc

🚫Do NOT Interact if:

🤢You are proship, dead dove, comship, all that bullshit basically if you romanticize and or sexualize inc*st, p*dophilia and r*pe, fictional or not, stay the hell away from me. I have a #blocklist tag of ppl like that in the Trolls fandom in case it comes in handy for other people. I DO NOT SUPPORT HARRASSMENT. It's for blocking ONLY.

🤢you are Transphobic , truscum ( if they still even exist lol ) , terfs, or dont support neopronouns and neogenders

🤢you are racist, talk down to people of color who bring up racial issues, believe racism against white people exists, or thinks "blackwashing" exists

🤢you use A.I. Things like A.I image creators and character A.Is are currently destroying the planet, stop using a.i. Even for shitposts. Just stop using it.

⭐️My other socials:

-@brozone.bsky.social on BlueSky

-@KINGP0PPY on twitter

-@celestfunk on Instagram ( not really active )

Also my art tag on here is #manolo.art

[ree-dee-art]

Honestly, I must admit that I'm not too fond of fan artists changing/headcanoning Harry and James to be as desi/dark skinned. I personally think the Dursleys are far more despicable due to hating on someone not because of skin color/racial prejudice(because then they would've no doubt hated Kingsley), but because someone is not their definition of 'normal'/ looks & acts not to their standards. It's already stretching it with race changing Hermione and making her a big target of wizard prejudice on muggles. And it also kills the prejudice Lily faced, because she's still fair skinned.

Initially, I was just going to respond to this by encouraging anon to go touch some grass.

However, I feel somewhat compelled to respond, because there is just so much to unpack in this single nonsensical message.

Firstly, I honestly don't get a whole lot of asks or messages in general, so receiving this one out of the blue was a bit wild for me. The nature of fandom itself allows for and embraces a plethora of different interpretations and headcanons for any given character. In many ways, this is the beauty of fandom--to take a beloved character and ask "what if?" I have no problem with someone having a different interpretation of a character from my own. What confuses me is this person's method for expressing their opinion. Why are you anonymously sending this to a stranger? Why not make a text post on your own blog about it? Like...what is your goal here, anon? I'm an artist who draws what I enjoy, and sometimes I share these drawings in the hopes that someone else might enjoy them too. Not your vibe? Not my problem. Go find some white Harry artwork to appreciate, there's plenty out there. Were you hoping I would change my own interpretation and headcanon of Harry or Hermione to fit your own? Lol, tough luck. No one is stopping you from drawing your own pictures.

All of that aside, your reasoning for your preference of having characters like James, Harry, and Hermione not be POC is incredibly confusing to me. You said you believe the Dursleys are "far more despicable" for hating Harry not because of skin color but because he didn't match their "definition of normal." I have a few follow-up questions regarding this (wildly inane imo) take:

1. Does this mean you believe the Dursleys hypothetically also hating Harry because of the color of his skin is in some way less despicable than them hating him because he can do magic?

2. What exactly do you think racism is, if not "hating someone because they don't match your definition of 'normal?'"

3. How does Hermione being black and muggleborn erase the discrimination Lily faced for also being muggleborn? Do you know that intersectionaily exists?

Some of the most interesting creations I've encountered in the HP fandom (fics and art) explore the complexities in the intersections between racial discrimination, white supremacy, and pureblood fanaticism. And there truly is so much to explore in these themes (for example: ways in which Harry could have been separated not only from his loving family, but also a part of his culture. It also allows for interesting and more complex ways for Harry and Hermione to bond and relate to each other in their friendship, etc).

For me, more diversity within these characters (whether it be race, queerness, or anything else) allows for much richer storytelling and much more interesting characters. If that's not your jam, then perhaps my work isn't for you.

However, I will say--this message is very much giving "only white characters and muggle discrimination allowed!!!" and I encourage you to ask yourself why that is the only context for these characters you feel comfortable with.

But seriously, go touch some grass.

[maquet591]

We need to talk about the Watcher "fans".

These are the top comments on Shane’s IG post. Just look at the number of likes.

“Steven Lim is a greedy, manipulative evil CEO that twists his white co-founder's hands and forces the said co-founder into his will!!!” – this narrative is being prevalent in this fandom since April 19. People harassed him all across social media on every platform. People wrote nasty comments not only to his social media accounts but also to his wife and friends.

People made a Change.org hilariously dumb petitions to have him leave the CEO post.

People gleefully demonize and tear down his reputation. Twist his words out of context in to something vile. Weaponize the years old inside jokes his friends made on camera.

“This is not racism!!!” they say. “These are just the facts!!!”

No they aren’t. And here’s why:

because this

is the same as this:

Covert racism in language, or coded racism, is the deployment of common stereotypes or tropes to elucidate a racially charged idea. Rather than expressly perpetuating racist tropes, covert linguistic racism is seen as rational or "common sense", and many are not aware of its impact.

Racial stereotypes. Racial or cultural stereotyping refers to generalizing a group based on a simplified set of norms, behaviors, or characteristics.

The Yellow Peril (also the Yellow Terror, the Yellow Menace and the Yellow Specter) is a racist color metaphor that depicts the peoples of East and Southeast Asia[a] as an existential danger to the Western world.

Fu Manchu is a fictional character created by Arthur Ward, a music hall writer and journalist in London in the early 1900s. Writing under the pseudonym Sax Rohmer, Ward had absolutely no knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese people – but his invention of a Chinese supervillain struck a chord in Victorian Britain and became a smash hit.

Fu Manchu was the original fictional Asian villain, a trope which became embedded in popular culture and Western psyche spawning spin-offs, spoofs, pop songs, video games and even consumer goods. But how damaging is Fu Manchu and how much can he tell us about modern Asian racism?

Ward wrote Fu Manchu as the personification of the so-called Yellow Peril threat: exotic, alien and inhuman, a mastermind boasting degrees from top universities. Using sinister powers to control minds, he aimed to undermine Western civilisation.

"This led to the idea that the Chinese were deceiving – they weren't being honest, they weren't revealing who they really are as people. This spawned into stories of Chinese as cheats and liars and deceitful – never giving you the truth, always fabricating."

Seven Lim being labeled as “greedy” “evil” and “manipulative” (of his white co-founder) is rooted in Anti-Asian racism. Whether people admit it or not.

Racism is not always derogatory slurs or white hoods. Racism is also casual micro-aggressions and putting people of color in the metaphorical boxes of harmful stereotypes. Racism is twisting the narrative and shaping it into a vile stereotype straight from the 19th century.

Also, let's not forget that people are happy to jump on Ryan in the similar way for the same reasons.

[sepublic]

What’s further absurd about Camila being more of a mom to Hunter than Luz in fanon is that. Camila and Hunter have two(2) solo interactions across the entire show and it’s Hunter kneeling to Camila to say thanks and her telling him not to do that, and then her pulling him out of the water. Thats it, the scenes transition to Hunter and Gus talking or the group worrying about Hunter. But then we see Camila interact with Luz at the end of the episode, in fact she has MULTIPLE interactions with Luz that episode and in general!!!

Meanwhile Darius is right there, he was mean to Hunter once, but he made up for it in the same episode by validating Hunter, looking out for him, giving him a way to talk to his new friends! He worries about Hunter in Hollow Mind. When the kids reunite with their parents, Hunter has nobody until Darius shows up.

And if y’all can forgive Eda for being immature with King a few times in S1, you can do the same for Darius. If you can forgive Alador’s abuse and neglect towards his kids by embracing their forgiveness, Darius is nothing. Darius is basically the only adult to actually talk to Hunter directly besides you know who and Eda, but that was twice and she was making fun of him the first time. Raine also showed concern but I barely see that dynamic.

It’s insane because it’s not enough that Hunter needs love from an adult for these people, they need it to be Camila’s love specifically!!! Despite Luz’s entire arc and the show in general being kicked off from Luz feeling like her mother didn’t love her enough by sending her to that reality check camp. Oh, Hunter needs someone kind for him because of trauma? Luz also has trauma, S3 has her go on a thinly-veiled suicidal rant.

Istfg I see Camila and Hunter more than I see Camila and Amity, and at least Amity is basically her daughter in law, plus it’s Amity getting away from her two abusive white parents. Meanwhile people denying Darius are demonizing him for being a black man who was mean once.

He’s not even Luz’s brother, and I’m sure part of the insistence of Camila as Hunter’s mom is an extension of that; Except the ‘Siblings’ dynamic between Luz and Hunter is inaccurate and exaggerated, esp in favor of Luz and King or Vee! We see so much fanart and fanfic of Camila just hanging out with Hunter even casually without angst, but not her own blood daughter.

Like yeah maybe it’s fun to explore the two-month period in the human realm and how Camila was the only adult these kids had; But people continue to hype her up as Hunter’s mom in settings outside of that timeframe!!! We see Luz come out to her mom and everything, we have her being raised by her mother! And Camila taking care of Hunter would not suck so hard if Luz wasn’t completely overshadowed, if Hunter wasn’t everywhere and inserted into everything! With fans insisting Hunter’s a Noceda and NEEDS to be in group photos like that, insisting on joint custody as if Luz and Camila don’t have that much of a relationship with Hunter to begin with and Darius is sufficient, crying about how he deserved more in the finale! Boohoo.

I’m gonna be real here, Hunter fans are the weakest link in this fandom despite being the most prevalent at this rate. They’ll rather make up stuff for him to talk about than acknowledge other characters, or even take other characters’ moments to give to him; Like remember when Luz had a nightmare sequence where she was dressed in Belos’ clothes and felt the weight of everyone’s accusations, and then some fanartist made a piece of that happening to Hunter instead??? I have to see Camila hugging Hunter while he wields String Bean, who is Luz’s Palisman when Waffles is right there without a confirmed creation date, so they could’ve easily been shortly after the finale!!!

It is SUCH an admission of envy and unconscious racism that y’all need to take traits and moments that belong to other characters and give it to your white boy to enjoy them, instead of enjoying these characteristics with the characters they actually belong to! And don’t make this about you and how you personally aren’t consciously racist or whatever, because this is about a group trend and PoC should not have to bear the burden of screening every individual of guilt. And yeah it is racist, hell it’s basically the Mammy archetype where a WoC is expected to prioritize her white charge over her own child.

And don’t even try to argue you’re innocent because you’re a PoC, PoC are just as capable of white favoritism and I speak from experience! For chrissakes everyone we’re snappy about this because being gentle about it has never worked for PoC. If you feel upset by this than actually do something about it and learn instead of wallowing in self pity or even denying it.

[wetsocksinbed]

shit people need to hear about COD:

Ghost isn’t some broken uwu boy. Infantilising assault victims is demeaning and disrespectful

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, König is extremely overrated for a character that only appears as a playable operator and not as anything in the campaign

You’re allowed to ship whoever you want, it’s a free world, but throwing a tantrum when people say they don’t ship GhostSoap or Korangi, and calling them homophobic (I’ve seen this too many times at this point) is disgusting and you’re essentially stereotyping us LGBTQ individuals as aggressive and pushy when it comes to queer ships. The characters of Ghost and Soap are canonically coded to be like brothers, and you need to stop thinking that a headcannon is the same as real cannon

Stop replacing Gaz with König, it’s giving ✨racism✨

Alex, König, Farah, Alejandro, Rudy and Horangi are not part of TF141, stop including them in it?????

König and Ghost are canonically enemies and wouldn’t have each other on speed dial just tag your fics as OOC at this point

the entirety of the Call of Duty franchise was coded for straight white “alpha male” boys who live in their mothers basements, stop acting like it’s anything more than that. You won’t find the representation you’re looking for in it and honestly with the way it’s headed at the moment, I don’t think you ever will

we can tell if you’ve never played the games based on how you write the fics. You don’t have to be a game fan or player, but at least do your research on the characters you’re writing about before you hit “post”

Makarov and Graves are terrible people and shouldn’t be idolised. Before you tag me with your “let people do what they want” let me remind you that Graves is canonically racist. @mockerycrow made a good post about why Makarov is a shit person and I recommend you read it

All of the characters have their flaws. Ghost, Soap, Gaz, Price, they all have done bad things. Price is known to commit war crimes if it means getting the mission done

König having social anxiety doesn’t mean he’s a broken husk. You can function completely fine with the disorder if you can find a way to distance yourself from who you are as a person. Say, like, constantly wearing a mask? I promise you that the Austrian soldier wouldn’t be a sobbing mess because he got looked at funny

Also, he is only obsessed over because of his mask and the weird obsession people on this app have with infantilising people with trauma and mental illnesses (see first paragraph regarding Ghost)

The way some of the fans obsess over the actors is uncomfortable and genuinely creepy. It’s like this generation thinks that anything behind a screen isn’t real and can’t feel anything. They’re people who act. They’re not the characters you play.

feel free to add more to this, I’m tired and sick and wanted to rant

notes:

don’t attack me with the “yeah but not me” shit. Obviously I don’t mean everyone.

this doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the games the way you want, it just means don’t fucking police it and gatekeep it and expect everyone to accept your interpretation of it

[ironyscleverer]

Good Omens Book Racism

This essay was originally a reblog of this post, but I’ve decided to make it a post of its own so it’s a little easier to read.

***

Rather than diving straight into examples from the text, I want to take the time to explain my intentions/goals for this little essay. Sorry if it's boring, but I do think it's important.

First, I want to clarify that I'm not just taking the opportunity to dogpile on NG by calling him racist. The people who commented that TP was equally responsible were 100% correct! Rather, I hope that now that we know NG isn't a good guy for other reasons, people will be more receiptive to my critiques of the book without jumping to the authors' defense.

I also want to note that I believe every instance I reference in this essay is not in the show. Someone in production clearly recognized that the book didn't age well, and quietly removed the bad bits without a word or a guilty speech. I think this is part of the reason why the fandom hasn't really addressed these moments; the show cut a lot of the racism, cynicism, and generally icky bits. The overall the tone of the newer content is very different and much sweeter. Personally, I prefer it this way!

Most importantly, though, I think a lot of people reading this might wonder--why talk about racism in a book that's 30 years old and has a modern adaptation that fixes almost every problem? Isn't it normal for old books to be a bit suspect? Why go through the effort of bringing it up?

The answer is that it's less about the book more about the fandom; the fact of the book being racist isn't the problem--I fully understand that it's 30+ years old. But the fandom is alive and well, and the lack of discussion is what feels weird to me. I was disturbed by the book when I first read it, and finding nobody online who felt the same way was a bit isolating. I had to wonder if other fans didn’t notice any racism, didn’t remember, or just didn’t care. By talking about racism, by making it clear that yes, we notice and we remember, i think we can make the fandom a more welcoming and inclusive space.

So really, my only goal for this essay is for it to exist; I want it to be out there so that if someone else, like me, goes looking for online acknowledgment of racism in the book, this will be there for them to find.

I think you get the point. Let's move on to the actual substance.

I’ve selected three specific passages from the book for us to examine, as well as a few other moments that I’ll describe, but won’t directly quote. Let’s start with the most obvious (to me) example of racism, which takes place on the whaling ship:

“The captain drummed his fingers on the console. He was afraid that he might soon be conducting his own research project to find out what happened to a statistically small sample of whaler captains who came back without a factory ship full of research material. He wondered what they did to you. Maybe they locked you in a room with a harpoon gun and expected you to do the honorable thing.”

To be clear, associating Japanese people with honor and ritual suicide is a racist stereotype. Writing a Japanese character this way is racist, full stop. Later, the navigator also refers to the captain as "honorable sir." This is probably in reference to the different levels of politeness that exist in the Japanese language. However, frankly, I'm mixed Japanese, and seeing any white person using the word "honor" in reference to Asian people makes my skin crawl. Even ATLA is on thin fkn ice (although the fact that it's literally just Zuko helps a lot).

This passage is the most clear-cut example I can find of racism in that it fits into the framework of "author makes x joke, which feeds into y racist stereotype." However, there are other moments that may not directly do this, but definitely are sus enough to make you think "why tf would you say that." For example, this is how the narrator describes Aziraphale when he drives Anathama home:

“As soon as the car had stopped he had the back door open and was bowing like an aged retainer welcoming the young massa back to the old plantation.”

I can't even begin to logic my way through whether this is technically racist or not. I'm still back at wondering why on EARTH would anyone choose to write this description. It’s just repulsive. Purely based on how I feel reading it, and how I feel imagining a white man writing it, I'm gonna go with yes, this is racist.

Another example of a similar variety would be this moment, when Crowley is trying to get to Tadfield:

“It's all out of control. Heaven and Hell aren't running things any more, it's like the whole planet is a Third World country that's finally got the Bomb…”

Again. Racist? Maybe? It shows a dismissive attitude toward "the third world," which I suppose isn’t explicitly non-white, but mostly it’s just weird and uncomfortable. It's less about the actual offense and more about the...why did the author write that.

There are more such moments throughout the book that I could mention, such as the half-assed attempts at AAVE and Caribbean dialect (I think Haitian? it's when Azi is searching for a host). There’s also that whole affair with Madam Tracy and her Geronimo character. I assume that one is meant to reflect badly on her, but in the back of my mind there’s still the knowledge that the authors chose to put it there.

After a point, all these individual moments start to blend together, and the possible motivations and excuses become less convincing. Maybe on a case-by-case they can be written off as characterization or irreverent humor, but in the aggregate they’re just unpleasant. Again, my overwhelming thought is just, "Why?"

Ultimately, that question, "why would the author write that" is at the center of my critique of the book. More specifically, the question is "why do these authors, given their identities, feel comfortable writing the things that they do?" In this case, it's clear the authors, as cishet white British men, thought these kinds of racial comments were funny and didn't have the social consciousness to know better. It belies a kind of arrogance, audacity and frankly entitlement that only people with their social standing tend to possess.

Anyway, that’s all I have for now. I hope this was enlightening for some people. I just wanted to provide a little bit of perspective, and maybe reassure some other fans that have recognized these things, but haven't seen them discussed online before. To them I'd say: don't worry, you're not the only one.

[tangibletechnomancy]

The (Personal) Is (Political)

~7 hours, Dall-E 3 via Bing Image Creator, generated under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

Or, Dear Microsoft and OpenAI: Your Filters Can't Stop Me From Saying Things: An interactive exercise in why all art is political and game of Spot The Symbols

A rare piece I consider Fully Finished simply as a jpeg, though I may do something physical with it regardless. "Director commentary" below, but I strongly encourage you to go over this and analyze it yourself before clicking through, then see how much your reading aligns with my intent.

Elements I told the model to add and a brief (...or at least inexhaustive) overview of why:

Anime style and character figures - Frequently associated with commercial "low" art and consumer culture, in East Asia and the English-speaking world alike, albeit in different ways - justly or otherwise. There is frequently an element of racism to the denigration of anime styles in the west; nearly any American artist who has taken formal illustration classes can tell you a story of being told that anime style will only hinder them, that no one will hire them if they see anime, or even being graded more harshly and scrutinized for potential anime-esque elements if they like anime or imply that they may like anime - including just by being Asian and young. On the other hand, it is true that there is a commercial strategy of "slap an anime girl on it and it will sell". The passion fans feel for these characters is genuine - and it is very, very exploitable. In fact, this commercialization puts anime styles in particular in a very contentious position when it comes to AI discussions!

Dark-skinned boy with platinum and pink [and blue] hair - Racism and colorism! They're a thing, no matter how much the worst people in the world want you to think they're long over and "critical race theory" is the work of evil anti-American terrorists! I chose his appearance because I knew that unless I was incredibly lucky, I would have to fight with this model for multiple hours to get satisfactory results on this point in particular - and indeed I did. It was an interesting experience - what didn't surprise me was how much work it took me to get a skin color darker than medium-dark tan; what did surprise me was that the hair color was very difficult to get right. In anime art, for dark skin to be matched with light hair and eyes is common enough to be...pretty problematic. Bing Image Creator/Dall-E, on the other hand, swings completely in the opposite direction and struggles with the concept of giving dark-skinned characters any hair color OTHER than black, demanding pretty specific phrasing to get it right even 70% of the time. (I might cynically call this yet another illustration against the pervasive copy-paste myth...) There is also much to say about the hair texture and facial features - while I was pleased to see that more results than I expected gave me textured hair and/or box braids without me asking for it, those were still very much in the minority, and I never saw any deviation from the typical anime facial structures meant to illustrate Asian and white characters. Not even once!

Pink and blue color palette - Our subject is transgender. Bias self-check time: did you make that association as quickly as you would with a light-skinned character, or even Sylveon?

Long hair, cute clothes, lots of accessories - Styling while transmasc is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation, doubly so if you're not white. In many locations, the medical establishment and mainstream attitude demands total conformity to the dominant culture's standard conventional masculinity, or else "revoking your man card" isn't just a joke meant to uphold the idea that men are "better" than women, but a very real threat. In many queer communities, especially online, transmascs are expected to always be cute femboys who love pink (while transfems are frequently degraded and seen as threats for being butch), and being Just Some Guy is viewed as inherently a sign of assimilationism at best and abusiveness at worst. It is an eternal tug-of-war where "cuteness" and ornamentation are both demanded and banned at the same time. Black and brown people are often hypermasculinized and denied the opportunity to even be "cute" in the first place, regardless of gender. Long hair and how gender is read into it is extremely culture-dependent; no matter what it means to you, if anything, the dominant culture wherever you are will read it as it likes.

Trophies and medals - For one, the trans sports Disk Horse has set feminism back by nearly 50 years; I'm barely a Real History-Remembering Adult and yet I clearly remember a time when the feminist claim about gender in sports was predominantly "hey, it's pretty fucked up that sports are segregated by sex rather than weight class or similar measures, especially when women's sports are usually paid much less and given weirdly oversexualized uniforms," but then a few loud living embodiments of turds in the punch bowl realized that might mean treating trans people fairly and now it's super common for self-proclaimed feminists - mostly white ones - to claim that the strongest woman will still never measure up to the weakest man and this is totally a feminist statement because they totally want to PROTECT women (with invasive medical screenings on girls as young as 12 to prove they're Really Women if they perform too well, of course). For two, Black and brown people are stereotyped as being innately more sporty, physically strong, and, again, Masculine(TM) than others, which frequently intersects with item 1...and if you think it only affects trans women, I am sorry my friend but it is so much worse and more extensive than you think.

Hearts - They mean many things. Love. Happiness. Cuteness. Social media engagement?

TikTok - A platform widely known and hated around these parts for its arcane and deeply regressive algorithm; I felt it deserved to be name/layout/logodropped for reasons that, if they're not clear already, should become so in the final paragraph.

Computers, cameras and cell phones - My initial specification was that one of the phones should be on Instagram and another on TikTok, which the model instead chose to interpret as putting a TikTok sticker on the laptop, but sure, okay. They're ubiquitous in the modern day, for better and for worse. For all the debate over whether phones and social media are Good For Us or Bad For Us, the fact of the matter is, they seem to be a net positive-to-neutral, whose impacts depend on the person - but they do still have major drawbacks. The internet is a platform for conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and dangerous hoaxes to spread farther than ever before. Social media culture leaves many people feeling like we're always being watched and every waking moment of our lives must be Perfect - and in some senses, we are always being watched these days. Digital privacy is eroding by the day, already being used to enforce all the most unjust laws on the books, which leads to-

Pigs - I wrote the prompt with the intention that it would just be a sticker on the laptop, but instead it chose to put them everywhere, and given that I wanted to make a somewhat stealthy statement about surveillance, especially of the marginalized...thanks for that, Dall-E! ;)

Alligators - A counter to the pigs; a short-lived antifascist symbol after...this.

Details I did not intend but love anyway:

The blue in the hair - I only prompted for platinum and pink in the hair, but the overall color palette description "bled" over here anyway, completing the trans flag, making it even more blatant, and thus even more effective as a bias self-check.

The Macbook - I only specified a laptop. Hilariously ironic, to me, that a service provided through Bing interpreted "laptop" as "Macbook" nearly every time. In my recent history, 22 out of 24 attempts show, specifically, a Macbook. Microsoft v. OpenAI divorce arc when? ;) But also, let us not forget Apple's role in the ever-worsening sanitization of the internet. A Macbook with a TikTok sticker (or, well, a Tiikok sticker - recognizable enough) - I can think of little more emblematic of one of the main things I was complaining about, and it was a happy accident. Or perhaps an unhappy one, considering what it may imply about Apple's grip on culture and communications.

Which brings me to my process:

Generated over ~7 hours with Dall-E 3 through Bing Image Creator - The most powerful free tool out there for txt2img these days, as well as a nightmare of filters and what may be the most disgustingly, cloyingly impersonal toxic positivity I've ever witnessed from a tool. It wants to be Art(TM), yet it wants to ban Politics(TM); two things which are very much incompatible - and so, I wanted to make A Controversial Statement using only the most unflaggable, innocuous elements imaginable, no matter how long it took.

All art is political. All life is political. All our "defaults" are cultural, and therefore political. Anything whatsoever can be a symbol.

If you want all art to be a substance-free "look at the pretty picture :)" - it doesn't matter how much you filter, buddy, you've got a big storm coming.

[utilitycaster]

Thank you for writing up that post about the engagement of the alleged themes in campaign 3. I've seen the argument for them and honestly that plus some of the C3 stuff has almost made me feel weird playing a cleric in this setting. The implications just are so unfortunate if it really is the angle they're going for?

Hi anon,

So I have two thoughts on this. The first is that like...it's actually really difficult to make a story set in a fantasy world that deals with racism and colonialism because you have to develop fantasy racism and colonialism, which is a really fucking unpleasant headspace to exist in! And then, if you do, you have what I alluded to in tags on a different post today, where you will get people up in arms about how D&D or an actual play show or a fantasy work depicts orcs or goblins as racist or antisemitic stereotypes and then it's crickets when it comes to any real-world support of black or Jewish people. Chuck Klosterman said sci fi is philosophy for stupid people, and I disagree, but I do think speculative fiction is frequently sociology, anthropology, and geopolitics for stupid people, particularly if it's a setting with a lot of magic and fantasy races vs say, works like Butler's Patternist series, or a lot of Latin American magical realism, or (girl who just finished Disco Elysium voice) Disco Elysium, where there's a lot more grounding in our reality. I think this post covers the concept of real vs mythic, and I think the Critical Role stuff with the gods is in the realm of the mythic and people are trying to force it into a very human narrative. And yeah, the implications are really unfortunate if you do.

I think it's worth noting that a lot of high-profile (and beloved) TTRPG/AP projects from actual people from colonized cultures imagine a world in which they were never colonized (I am far from an expert but just off the top of my head: Coyote and Crow; Into the Motherlands; Desiquest; Islands of Sina Una) rather than make a story where a bunch of mostly white characters explain how they are the victims of colonization from two separate sources and only really focus on the one that's way less obvious and true but don't worry they're GONNA FIX IT, maybe, idk, should we open this door? I just don't know! golly gee this is tough!

The second related thought is just that D&D isn't a game that is well-suited to dismantling complex political structures either on a narrative or literal level and also it's pretend so you can do what you want forever. I mean don't call other people slurs while playing it but if we're talking in-world? I genuinely think that people who are unabashed murderhobos in D&D are often perfectly fine, generous, and lovely people in real life, and a lot of people who are like "I unionized the goblins! We're playing non-combat D&D! I de-escalate every situation" are often the sort of person to claim it's ableist to suggest that perhaps you should try to use reusable shopping bags. Like, are you living your values in your real life and capable of critical thought? then who cares if your D&D character is kind of a dick, or the show you are watching doesn't align perfectly with what you believe? And I find people who get overly hung up on how good and virtuous they are for their media consumption tend to be compensating for a lack, or at best a deep insecurity, about how they comport themselves in their real life.

so anyway yeah if the cast actually is like "yes i see this as a decolonialist work" I am going to have Thoughts and Pretty Harsh Critiques but to grant the CR cast the benefit of the doubt here, I think it's just...a mythic, epic scale story that draws from interesting sources (creation myths, the idea of a world created as an envious reflection by a sealed hunger) and didn't come together very well. I cannot extend that same benefit of the doubt to those fans who have argued otherwise, however.

[diaphin93]

The worst is that those Edelgard haters are bigoted ( misogyny is a very important part of it, but there's also so much casual racism, ableism and queerphobia, but I'm sure you've seen this better than I did :/ ) but they often believe themselves to not be, and so many of them try to make them like they're actually the one fighting bigotry.

For example, Edelgard has the biggest queer fanbase out of all the house leader and appear outside of the fire emblem fandom in sapphic online space ( hell she even had an irl drag performance ). But they can't really acknowledge that, because that would make them look bad.

So they pretend that actually the huge majority of Edelgard fan are straight men... But to pretend that, they have to play with reality. Edeleth is getting reposted really often in yuri reddit community ? That's because those community are actually all straight men fetishizing wlw. Edelgard is the only canonical bi lord? That's because they wanted to attract those straight men fetishizing wlw, so it's actually terrible male-gazey represention. Edelgard fanfiction are by the HUGE majority written by sapphic women? They'll conveniently only attack the one man that got his F!Edeleth fanfic popular. That guy actually has mostly sapphic and often trans reader? They don't mention it. He often talk about his own queer headcanon or analysis himself? They'll make shitty post on how those hcs or analysis are actually queerphobic.

And that's the same for sexism, racism and ableism. Edelgard is a character made for white straight men, so she's bad for minorities despite her own traits diverging from the norm: she's an acceptable target when you pretend to be against bigotry. Her fans are all white straight men, so they're acceptable target when you pretend to be against bigotry. ( And funnily enough, they never acknowledge when a non-negligible part of the fandom they're in, like Dimitri and Rhea, are full of straight white men )

But that's the problem, the huge logical issues they try so hard to bury, is that we're not actually white straight men. It's so alienating to have them talk about the bad white straight fans of Edelgard, while at the interacting with people like us. Like, did any of your detractors even ever genuinely acknowledged when you, a woman, accused them of incel like behavior without immediately scoffing at the accusation? Did they ever acknowledge that uncomfortable place of minorities in the Edelgard discourse, like they do so often with Rhea or Dimitri to portray themselves as fighter against bigotry?

They erase minorities in the fandom, but they pretend to fight for them.

And the worst is that they don't even really fight against bigotry in the fandom at all. There's so many racist, queerphobe, ableist, misogynist in part of the fandom like the Blue Lions. Hell some of them are very openly conservative or far-right! But they'll never attack those.

Even in the Edelgard community, where we do have small group of vocal straight white bigoted men like in Reddit... They don't actually do anything to them! Those guys are often just as busy fighting F!Edeleth and sapphic women in the community as they are engaged in the discourse. And the Edelgard haters, well, they don't like F!Edeleth and honestly they don't like sapphic women who like Edelgard either, so they have no interest in fighting them. Because they don't actually care about bigotry, they just want to shit on the character they dislike, not so rarely for bigoted reason on their own.

Hey, thanks for the message and sorry that I'm replying so late, started to write this up and then got distracted alot. And I feel you. I think many aspects of this whole Edelgard discourse and fandom Drama surrounding it are very symptomatic with issues in fandom in general, that can often be very hostile towards lesbians and sapphics in particular, due to the strong androcentrism that is visible across Fandoms. I think FE3H in this way represents somewhat of a microcosm of Fandom in on itself, due to the fact that Edelgard early on established herself as a fav of Sapphic and Yuri-centric communities inside Fandom, her most favored ships being w/w with m/w ships always being somewhat of a niche.

Like, Edelgards strong presence in the fandom as well as the preference of sapphic relationships surrounding her is quite an anomaly inside fandom which isn't very often seen and in my opinion the result of a perfect storm. I think what partially plays into it is probably t he way 3 Houses is structured, with the eponymous 3 Houses front and center and a chose your own Lord approach, which creats very much a faction system with this game and with it, encourages the development of communities centered around supporting their chosen Lord and House inside the broader fandom of 3 Houses. And the Black Eagles are just perfectly set up to draw out a strong sapphic and yuri fanbase for itself. There is naturally Edelgard as the central female Lord of the game herself, but I think what cemented it is having Dorothea next to her. Both of them are not only part of the, sadly rather small, cast of confirmed and unambigiously canonical queer characters with the ability to marry either Byleth, they also are themselves written in a way that would naturally draw sapphic audiences. Edelgard alone already fits right into typical tastes of both sapphic audiences and the more decicated fandom, being a canonically queer woman who serves as the central protagonist of her playable route and not only subverts traditional writing with her dominant, brunt and guarded personality, but also acts as a morally nuanced character with motivations strongly centered around the revolution against an oppressive religious institution and a heavy hitting backstory centered around themes of loss of abuse, loss of bodily autonomy and societal vilification. It doesn't hurt that her initial students uniform also strongly invokes an association to Utena if you look at her, even if it may happen unconsciously, who stands as one of the definitive icons of queer women and sapphic centric story telling inside japanese media. Her role is also close to the villainess genre, which is highly centered around a critical lense on the way female character usually are vilified and reclaiming them as empowered feminist symbols, often through the heroine subverting the predetermined narrative that sets them up against each other and chosing female solidarity and companionship with the villainess, which is basically the plot of the Black Eagles Route. The Narrative tries you to force siding against Edelgard and only through claiming authority and deepening their bond to Edelgard, can they defy it and side with her. With Dorothea, we probably have the most feminist character in the history of Fire Emblem, whose themes center highly around objectification and misogyny she faced in what hs implicitely a clearly patriachal society.

Both of them also have strong supports with the other two female members of the Black Eagles, whose personal themes go deep into patriachal abuse, misogyny and anxiety as well as xenophobia, imperialism and the loss of autonomy, both on a personal and national level. Them having these strong bonds with other women, but also female characters outside the Black Eagles, like Edelgard with Lysithea and Dorothea through their shared Paralogie with Ingrid, even if the laters support line is sadly cut short, creats an in short ideal set up a strong w/w centric community around the Black Eagles. With the Black Lions, with its extreme androcentrism, focus on male bonds and traditional Bishonen Design, drawing the traditional Yaoi but also het crowd, we have also a male supporting class who have strong queer subtext with each other, while also drawing in more non-conventional m/m shippers. Especially Ferdibert, due to Huberts more striking non-Bishonen features.

Sorry for the deranged long tangent and going so much offtopic, but I think it was interesting to go a bit into the factors that in my opinion lead to Edelgard and the Black Eagles having an by far above average w/w representation and appeal against the typical trend we see in more general non-female or sapphic centered media. And honestly, I think this is part of where the hatred comes from, because Edelgard and the Black Eagles just tick every box, but in a game that also features your typical straight white heterosexual with yaoi-bait possible Protagonist that draws Fandom attention, to which she stands in opposition. So it invokes hostility and ire, because it ultimately reveals the very centrist to conservative milktoast comforts of Fandoms that try to present themselves as bastions of progressive values and queer representation, when alot of m/m is less than an authentic representation of queerness and most often written around the comfort and gratification of a mostly cishet and in the case of western fandom also very white audience (look at how for example the m/m fandom on the Blue Lions side shuns Dimidue in favor of Dimilix, despite a much more tender relationship that can be read as romantic by the former). So they need to recontextualize Edelgard and her Fandom as actually not queer, as rightwing and reactionary but also engaging in the tactic of it being at one hand oppressively powerful and hostile but on the other hand also a niche delusional group that misreads the entire story. It is all to justify their own more conservative or centrist comfort zones and androcentrism, against a queer feminist Icon.

Though I think especially on Tumblr, what also goes into it is this need to recontextualize fandom into activism. We see this alot with m/m fandoms for example, where, what is male on male stories written not for a queer audience but for cishetero female consumption first and foremost, is treated as the forefront of gay activism. I mean, we saw it with the whole SuleMio vs Destiel Drama here, didn't we? Where bitter Destiel fans expressed the view that their Supernatural ship was actually a major influence in the push for queer representation and acceptance, up to claiming yuri gundam from japan owes everything to some male-centered buffy rip-off that featured less explicit queer representation than its predecessor did at the turn of the millenium. In 3 Houses, we also see this as treating opposition to Edelgard as some form of activism, framing her goals as imperialist or outright colonialist in nature and making the divine whiter than white dragon people who are the immortal progeny of a dragon goddess into a representation of every real marginalized ethnic group on earth...in a game that eschews racial allegories in favor of actually depicting xenophobia, colonialism and genocide against human PoC characters. Many of these arguments actually reveal how Edelgards detractors are basically just performative progressive activists focussing their advocacy on wars against fictional european-inspired powers inside a game, while also clearly just repeating leftist words that they picked up without an understanding of their contemporary political context. Again offtopic, but using terms such as imperialism in its contemporary political context or even worse, colonialism, for wars of conquest and ideals between fictional nations inspired by medieval european kingdoms and empires is asinine.

As you also hinted at Captain Flash, I think there is also a hugh double standart towards male yuri fans which bothers me. First off is blanked hostility and accusations of fetishization towards these groups always linked by transphobic collateral, due to how many closeted sapphic transfems first explore their identity and sexuality through the safe confines of w/w fiction and especially Yuri and this kind of rhetoric will inevitably damage eggs. Secondly is it hypocritical as it often comes from white cisheterosexual women who center their media consumption around the blatant objectification and fetishization of male queerness, with the Yaoi Genre having a shit ton of homophobic, heteronormative, misogynist and transphobic baggage. It also shows a clear lack of knowledge and insight into the culture surrounding Yuri in general, with these kinds of detractors usually projecting issues inside the yaoi community onto yuri. Yuri, as a genre, just never had a split between male and female creators that queer male japanese fiction had, which was traditionally seperated into the female dominated yaoi and the male lead bara or gay comics genre. Sapphic women were always a driving presence both as creators and consumers of the Yuri genre and are very well capable of policing fandoms against fetishizing misogynistic influences. It doesn't even fit into consumption trends, gooners, to name them very bluntly, don't engage with fanfiction, yuri asa broader yuri or shipping discourse, they are much more pragmatic in getting off and just straight up jump into porn.

I think its especially nefarious if we look at the queer community surrounding Edelgard. I mean, Monica at this point could be a transbian icon, because I have seen so many trans women strongly identify with her and build their fandom identity around her, because they can immerse themselves so deeply into her love and appreciation for Edelgard due to her being such an important comfort character for them. Edelgards most passionate fans are often also among the most vulnerable people inside this fandom, who feel inspired and comforted by her. Hell, even Captain Flash, who is often heavily slandered by Edelcritical crowds for the crime of writing a f!Edeleth fanfic often expressed in his authors notes how important and comforting Edelgard is to him, due to his own history of trauma and health issues.

Though I will also say, I'm against the idea of pushing the entire Blue Lions Fandom under the Bus and villify all of them. And even if I did just write some accusatory shit against Yaoi Fans, there is no understatement that in this case I talk about problematic trends I noticed inside the broader fandom discourse as well as the subsection of Yaoi Fans who engage over and over again in hostility against lesbians. At this point, I don't really think the people you complain about, which bother me alot myself, are really a majority of Blue Lions and Dimitri Fans, they are just very loud, pushy and aggressive and are good in talking as if they have any authority (look for example at this asshole who goes into his large somewhat orientalist and overall just stretching interpretations of the games supposedly deep buddhist themes and characterizes Edelgard as some evil seductress due to his own misogyny and media illiteracy). We shouldn't forget that Dimitri for many is just as much of a comfort character and inspiration as Edelgard is for her fans, due to his themes of trauma, mental illness, redemption and forgiveness which resonate strongly with them and their lived situation. I also think the very loud edelcrit community really worked towards poisening the waters and radicalize discourse, but overall I would personally assume that the majority of Dimitri Fans can understand and appreciate Edelgard as what she is in the confines of his route, a well-intentioned antagonist who in their point of view goies to far in her ambitions and whose ideals are irreconcilable with Dimitris. Which is true from the point of view AM operates on, just as Dimitri for an Edelgard Fan represents a good man who has fallen victim to the System and its manipulators Edelgard fights against. Theirs is a conflict of opposing ideals and perspective and I would say its where the game manages to execute its themes of connections and outreach as well as differing perspectives the best. Like, normal Blue Lions Fans ultimately agree with what Edelgard wants to archieve, because their reading is that Dimitri wants to archieve the same, they personally prefer his approach and road towards that goal. I think this is a point where people should be able to have fun with heated discussions but ultimately agree to disagree, its a very subjective matter ultimately.

Actually, I would say the worst detractors and most toxic individuals of the community are probably the church of seiros fans and the "Rhea did nothing wrong" crowd. Like, they can be among Dimitri, Claude or Rhea Fans, but those are usually those who try to force their own rather reactionary interpretations onto the community and engage often in rather racist, religious apologetics and pro-eugenics as well as pro-feudalism talking points and have this weird disdain for humans and human autonomy & liberation, as if they really immerse themselves mostly into the fantasy of being from some superior race, lol. Most of them have rather twisted and messed up interpretations of the world and the story which they are adamant about and usually they build their interpretation of the game around what they want it to be, namely being very pro-theocracy, anti-liberation and espousing the idea that humans need divine immortal beings to lead them, as well as often also being super Pro-Crest. I mean, one of the most infamous Edelcrit Fanfics is basically just full on pro-theocracy, pro-feudalism and pro-eugenics. Usually they have a strong hate boner against Hopes because it really ruins their personal headcanons of what the game is, lol. And I think many of them seem to have strongly jumped to the Engage bandwagon, which is closer to what they want out of 3 Houses, playing the idea of a divine dragon ruler straight and justified feudal bloodlines straight.

But yeah, I think I went into quite a few tangents here, I hope it doesn't bother you. If you have any more asks you can hit me up. Ultimately, I call them out when they engage in Incel and Misogynist behavior and otherwise just clown on these trolls. Its also just sad in a way, because its clear, that they constructed this idea of what they think the game is in their heads and everything that came out after te initial release of the game contradicts it.

[professorcalculusstanaccount]

hi! loving your art. I was watching your awesome stories/gifs and I was wondering: how did Chang develop his feelings for Tintin? Did he discover them before or after him? How did he react and why? (English is not my first language so if you see a grammatical mistake, I'm sorry. Also, sorry if so many questions made you feel like you were in a philosophy exam)

Thank you so much! As a contrast to the rest of the Marlinspike team I'm writing Chang as someone who makes friends and develops crushes pretty easily!

I imagine he's had a crush on Tintin for some time, possibly from when they first met. He's been at the mercy of his circumstances for most of his life until that point - Tintin basically makes him feel capable of doing stuff.

He's pretty heartbroken after the Blue Lotus. Tintin doesn't contact him for years. Chang is struggling to adjust to his new family and is failing at school, having missed out on a good education for a few years prior. Until Tibet he feels pretty hopeless, he will never live up to the time when he took down a drug ring.

His near death experience in Tibet shakes him out of this rut. He starts to travel and take up hobbies like dance and photography. Didi trains him in some basic martial arts. Tintin makes an effort to actually stay in touch this time. Chang has some abandonment issues as he's frequently lost people throughout his life, so he's someone who's willing to give people second chances, even if they've hurt him badly. Chang thinks he's well over his crush on Tintin when he comes around to Belgium for his studies, but falls for him again very quickly!

Unlike Tintin, Chang is a lot more comfortable with who he is. He's used to being the odd one out and has generally low expectations for himself, so just goes with the flow.

Below I talk a little with how I'm going about writing him and the historical context surrounding this, cw for mentions of racism (sinophobia) and queerphobia:

I'm writing Chang as bi, I thought it would be interesting to explore as Asian men were perceived differently in the 30s compared to today. While Asian men in the West are currently heavily desexualised in the early 20th century they were stereotyped as predatory and deviant. In London a lot of Chinese immigrants were male dockworkers, so when they married white women there was a lot of fearmongering about predatory and disloyal Chinese men.

A lot of depictions of Asian men in Western media reflected these stereotypes (and often used queercoding to push the idea of Asian men being animalistic seducers - General Henry Chang in Shanghai Express (1932) was written to be bisexual while posing as a threat to the white leads). Some examples off the top of my head include Hishuru Tori from The Cheat (1915) and The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). Novels frequently depicted Chinese drug lords with borderline supernatural powers in manipulation.

On the other hand I've noticed how fans frequently depict Chang as someone who's submissive, demure and soft, which ignores how ridiculously brave and proactive he is in canon (stealing documents from police officers, charging into a man immediately after getting shot at by a machine gun, I could go on!). It's a common example of Fandom Racism (not accusing anyone specifically, it's just a trend I've noticed.)

When writing Chang I'm kinda reckoning with two different eras. From a contemporary angle I'm writing him as a love interest, which as an Asian guy I rarely see in media today. I also gotta consider his own time and context, how he would navigate being a queer Chinese guy, and how that would affect his relationship with others and himself.