#but just having family from the Middle East is enough to be stereotyped tbh

[fudgetunblr]

My gydo is one of the kindest people I know. He loves my teta so much even when she drives him insane, he won’t let anyone say anything bad about her ever.

He used to come to my theater shows in high school and no matter the quality he’d always tell me that we did a good job.

When I accidentally got a flat tire and literally everyone else was busy my Amo came to my aid and helped me call a tow-truck. While we sat and waited we ate breakfast and just chatted.

My other Amo used to always compliment my flowery pants when people thought they looked ugly. He’s always appreciated my strange fashion when others haven’t.

One of my biggest supporters in life is my Baba. He took me to see Dan and Phil with my friends when I was 14, and even if he didn’t understand shit, he did it because he knew that it was important to me. We still sing the Internet is here together to this day.

The only person who loves my cat more than me is him. During the summer he brings her watermelon on a tiny plate because he knows she loves it.

My brothers (although not actually born in the Middle East) can drive me crazy, but at the end of the day I know they got my back. My older brother called me when he got his braces off to tell me. My younger brother always calls when he’s on his way out to have someone to chat with. They joke and they tease but if I ever feel bad, they’re always there to cheer me up.

And I have so many more examples.

Arab men / Middle Eastern men (depending on how you define Arabs) are not the stereotypes you see on tv. All the men in my life have shaped me just as much as the women have. Seeing them get dehumanised is disheartening. They are human beings, with human feelings and flaws and identities. It feels important to share tiny positive snippets of my own family, just silly things that seem insignificant but that just showcases humanity.

Every single person in Palestine deserves to live because every single person there is a human being with their own story and their own past. They all deserve a future. They are not stereotypes, they arw human beings. Again, they are not stereotypes, THEY ARE HUMAN BEINGS!

The way people perceive Arab men is truly disgusting. If you “need proof” Arab men are not barbaric wife beaters, look no further than the Palestinian men who were literally shot by Israel trying to get food for their starving families.

[the-everqueen]

why i disliked “the traitor baru cormorant”

so...recently i read Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant. i bought it thinking, Cool, an insightful fantasy series for me to get into while i wait to hear whether i passed my qualifying exams! i have some time before the semester starts! 

and then i absolutely hated it and spent every minute cataloguing what i thought Dickinson got wrong.

...uh, if you want to get the tl;dr of the liveblog i gave the gf, here’s the top three reasons i disliked this book:

1) not a fan of the “strong female character” trope

yes, Baru doesn’t sling around a sword or shoot arrows better than Anyone In The Whole World. but Dickinson IMMEDIATELY tells us (not shows, tells) that she’s good at math, she’s clever at picking apart strategic scenarios, she’s a savant. (tbh, i don’t love how he shows this, either, with the standard child-prodigy-who-catches-the-attention-of-a-powerful-adult trope.) in Dickinson’s crafted world, her math skills aren’t entirely unusual: women (for...some reason?) are stereotyped as being good at calculations, despite also being aligned with hysteria and too many emotions. this bothers me more than it’s probably supposed to, because the sexism in this novel doesn’t really seem to follow an internal logic. i guess it’s so we can have a woman as the protagonist? also...hoo boy...her “savant” characterization bothers me because...she’s heavily coded as South East Asian (...maaaybe Philippines or Native Hawaii, but as i’ll get to later, Dickinson doesn’t make a huge distinction). uh...model minority stereotypes anyone? yes, within the text, plenty of people associated with the Empire comment that it’s impressive someone of her background got into a position of power so young. at the same time, i’m sure that sounds familiar to so many Asian-identified people! the constant tightrope of being expected to perform to a certain (white, Western) standard while also being Othered. mostly this bothers me because Baru is also characterized as...a sellout for the Empire. sure, her stated goal is to undo the Empire from within, but [MAJOR SPOILERS] in the end it appears that her actual goal was to attain enough power that the Empire would let her be a benevolent dictator over her home island? and it’s only after a major PERSONAL betrayal that she revises this plan? [END SPOILERS] Baru also assimilates without much pain or sacrifice. she hardly ever thinks about her parents or her childhood home. she willingly strips herself of cultural signifiers and adapts to Empire norms (apart from being a closeted lesbian, which...yeah, i’ll get to that, too). and it’s not that Dickinson doesn’t TRY to make her a nuanced character, but...to me, it feels so painfully obvious that this is not his experience. it feels almost...voyeuristic. 

...much like his descriptions of wlw desire!

2) we get it, you read Foucault

the categories of sexual deviance are based entirely on a Western Victorian-era medical discourse around non-heterosexual forms of desire, but Dickinson ignores the network of sociocultural, religious, and historical contexts that contributed to that specific kind of discourse. he uses the terms “tribadism” and “sodomy” but those ideas CANNOT EXIST outside a Euro-American Christian context. yes, a huge part of the 19th century involved the pathologization of sexual and romantic desire (or lack thereof). but that in turn goes back to a history of medicine that relied on the “scientific method” as a means of studying and dissecting the human body--and that method in itself is a product of Enlightenment thinking. Theorist Sylvia Wynter (whomst everyone should read, imho) discusses how the Enlightenment attempted to make the Human (represented by a cisgender, heteronormative, white man) an agent of the State economy. every categorization of so-called deviance goes back to white supremacist attempts to define themselves as ‘human’ against a nonwhite, non-Christian Other. and IN TURN that was ultimately founded on anti-Black, anti-Indigenous racism. at this point it’s a meme in academic circles to mention Foucault, because so many scholars don’t go any further in engaging with his ideas or acknowledge their limits. but SERIOUSLY. Dickinson crafts the Masquerade as this psuedo-scientific empire that’s furthering erasure of native cultures, but...where did these ideas come from? who created them? what was the justification that gave them power? [MINOR SPOILER] blaming the Empire’s ideology on a handful of people behind the Mask who crafted this entire system makes me...uncomfortable, to say the least. part of what gives imperialism its power is that a lot of ordinary people buy in to its ideas, because it aligns with dominant belief systems or gives them some sense of advantage. 

also speaking of cultural erasure...

3) culture is more than set dressing

again, to reiterate: Baru does NOT think back to her childhood home for longer than a couple passing sentences at various points in the narrative. but even though the early chapters literally take place on her home island, i don’t get a sense of...lived experience. this is true of ALL of the fantasy analogues Dickinson has created in his Empire. i felt uncomfortably aware of the real world counterparts that Dickinson was drawing inspiration from. at the same time...there are basically no details to really breathe life into these various fantasy cultures. i HATE the trope of “fantasy Asia” or “fantasy Africa” or “fantasy Middle East” that’s rampant among white male sff writers. Dickinson does not get points from me for basically just expanding that to “fantasy South East Asia,” “fantasy Mongolia,” “fantasy South America,” and... “fantasy Africa,” plus some European cultures crammed in there. he’s VERY OBVIOUSLY drawing on those languages for names, but otherwise there’s no real sense of their religious practices, the nuances of their cultures, the differences between those cultures (besides physiological, which...oh god). part of that is probably supposed to be justified by “well, the Empire just erased it!!!” but that’s not an excuse imho. 

also...in making the Empire the ultimate signifier of the evils of imperialism...Dickinson kind of leans into the “noble savage” stereotype. Baru’s home island is portrayed as this idyllic environment where no one is shamed for who they love and gender doesn’t determine destiny and there are no major conflicts. (there is a minor nod to some infighting, but this is mostly a “weakness” that the Masquerade uses as an excuse to obliterate a whole tribe.) Dickinson justifies young Baru’s immediate assimilation as her attempt to figure out the Masquerade’s power from within, but given that the Masquerade presumably killed one of her dads and her mom maybe advocates a guerilla resistance...it’s weird that Baru basically abandons her family without a second thought. yeah, i get that she’s a kid when the Masquerade takes over the island, but...that’s still a hugely traumatic experience! the layers of trauma and conditioning and violence that go into this level of colonization are almost entirely externalized. 

(later it’s implied that Baru might qualify as a psychopath, and tbh that feels like an excuse for why we haven’t gotten any sense of her inner world, not to mention kind of offensive.) 

this isn’t exhaustive but...

it’s not that i don’t think white people shouldn’t ever address POC experiences in their books. just...if your entire trilogy is going to revolve around IMPERIALISM IS BAD, ACTUALLY, maybe you should contribute to the discourse that Black, Brown, and Indigenous authors have already done. reading this book made me so, so angry. i did not feel represented! i felt like i was being talked down to, both on a critical theory level AND on a craft level. there are SO MANY books by actual BIPOC and minority authors that have done this better. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy and her current Cities series. Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy. Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House remains one of the more powerful novels i’ve read on how The System Is Out To Destroy You, That Is The Point. (Bardugo is non-practicing Spanish and Moroccan Jewish on one side of her family, and her character Alex is mixed and comes from a Jewish background!) 

...

there’s not really a point to this. i get a lot of people have raved about this book. good for them. if that’s you, no judgment. i’m not trying to argue IF YOU LIKED THIS YOU ARE PROBLEMATIC. i’m just kind of enraged that a white dude wrote about a Brown lesbian under a colonial empire and that THIS Brown lesbian under a colonial empire couldn’t even get behind the representation. also kind of annoyed that it’s the Empire of Masks and Dickinson either hasn’t read Fanon or didn’t see fit to slip in a Fanon reference, which like. missed opportunity. 

[mcrmadness]

4, 11, 18 & 26 for the non american ask^^

Thanks! :D

4. favourite dish specific for your country?

Does rye bread count? You just can't get the perfect type of rye bread from anywhere else than from Finland, and I think also Estonia loves their rye bread? There's probably some dark breads in Scandinavia too but I feel like they might be a bit sweeter, which is not my favorite. (They also had rye bread in Poland when I visited there, and it was fine but not like the one I've got used to here :D)

The typical, good Finnish rye bread is almost or only 100% rye and it's slightly sour. I usually eat only rye bread that is 100% rye because the wheat there is totally pointless and if it's not wholegrain, it's just... basically same as putting sugar in the bread, (the wheat there) has absolutely no nutritional value.

***

11. favourite native writer/poet?

Hmm. I don't like poems in any language and apparently this is something I've had since I was a little kid because I always took some Finnish poetry books from the bookshelf (my mom loves poems, especially this author's) and yeeted it to somewhere in the room............. I just didn't like having it in the bookshelf at all XD

I also haven't really read any books from Finnish authors. I don't think we have THAT big of a scene, it's quite difficult to be any kind of artist in Finland cos you have to do so much work for that and it still might not be enough. I guess most here do several things, or write a book as a sidejob because it might be impossible to make a living with that. The first and latest book written by a Finn (Antti Holma) was this autobiography by someone who started as an actor, but doesn't even live in Finland anymore because this country just doesn't offer him suitable work anymore, and he can still write occassionally when living abroad. I liked the book tho, but I don't know if I he is the best answer for this when his books are literally the only two books written by a Finn that I have read.

I own more of non-fiction by Finns, but mainly those are just horse related books, e.g. about the history of Finnhorse, or horse training books from an animal trainer Tuire Kaimio, and her books were my first touch to "natural horsemanship" when I was 13.

Also, Finland of course has a long history of writers, there's lots of big names and altho I like reading, I'm so bad at reading books people label as classics. I haven't read any of those books that "every Finn has read". Like, no... I'm not interested in most of the topics, I even hated Kalevala (our natural epic) at school because I hate poems so much that I was crying blood (also from my ears) whenever I had to hear those super annoying Kalevala rhymes.

***

The rest of the stuff under the cut.

18. do you speak with a dialect of your native language?

Yes!!! I'm from the East Finland and from an area where there is no particular dialect but it's like a mixture of all the Eastern dialects, and there's lots of variety already within the area of my municipality (the other end speaks slightly differently than the other end, and I live here in the middle :D). So this is really a mix of Savonian, South- and North-Karelian and I think something might come here from the Central Finland too.

I'm also extremely fond of dialects and my paternal grandma was from South Osthrobothnian, very close to the West coast, and I just recently talked about it with my mom and she said that altho my grandma lived and also died here in the East (and I was born here and have lived my whole life here so far), she absolutely hated the Savonian dialect and always said that she's not going to start talking in it EVER XD And she didn't! She always talked in her South Ostrobothnian dialect and altho I don't really remember much of that - I was 13 when she died - I guess it still is so strongly in my genes because every time I hear that dialect somewhere, I just feel like I had gone home and I feel so warm inside! Also I relate so strongly to the stereotype of West Finnish people, they're said to be very reliable and honest, and I'm a nice mixture of that AND the Savonian stereotypes too. ("A cunning Savonian", for example, lol. Apparently it has something to do with the dialect/worrisome nature of us and we not really giving straight answers, even if it wasn't even actually LYING - there's also a saying that "When a Savonian is speaking, the listener is in charge.")

That's also why I have, unintentionally, adopted lots of the Ostrobothnian dialect into how I speak, so my personal dialect is not only what people here normally speak, but also has lots of features from the Ostrobothnian dialects.

When I write online, I often clean up my dialect a bit because this Eastern dialect is actually really, really strong. I love how it (also) sounds, it has this very relaxed sound to it, like there's no worries in the world? I love it. So when I write, I write a bit closer to the common spoken Finnish, but when I start speaking... my dialect gets very strong again. Sometimes, if I'm nervous, I go more into the cleaner version because this dialect is also very noticeable and usually whenever I speak it somewhere else, people will comment on it because West Finns often find it so funny or cute sounding - or the opposite, some find it extremely obnoxious and wish no one would speak in it :D Actually if I see anyone commenting how annoying the dialect is, I start talking or writing in it even more strongly on purpose XD

Another funny thing I have noticed about how I speak is that, well, in Finnish the 1st pronoun is "minä", most people say "mä", but in my dialect it's "mie". I have always found that fun to say, but I have never liked writing it. Whenever I did comics or wrote stories/fanfiction in Finnish, I always wrote "mä". I just could not hear "mie" with them. But lately I have noticed that when I want to talk about me in a written form, like a comment on youtube, writing "mie" will give away immediately that I'm from the East and the dialect will piss off people. Sometimes they even come to comment to me something racist about Russia altho I have no connections to Russia? My whole family tree is from Finland, I might even have some roots in Germany, actually. So I very often have now replaced that with "ite" when I write - it comes from the word "itse" which, well, it's easiest to translate into German as it means "selbst". So basically I say "I myself...", but I use it like a pronoun because you can do that in Finnish, and it gives me the opportunity to avoid using "mie" and sounding "childhish", but still I have a pronoun there. Fortunately in Finnish you can also leave out the 1st and 2nd pronouns but when I add "ite" there, it kinda just emphasizes the verb even more.

Omfg I love languages and linguistics and dialects so much, I could just keep going about Finnish dialects and mine but I could imagine it being very difficult to comprehend if you don't have any existing knowledge over Finnish overall! :D

***

26. does your nationality get portrayed in Hollywood/American media? what do you think about the portrayal?

Very rarely, currently I can't remember any that would have not had Finnish people working with it. Usually Finland is not really known in the US, I think not everyone even in Europe know what or where is Finland even, so usually any time this country gets mentioned somewhere, everyone goes crazy.

There's probably not a single video on youtube without at least one comment going "Suomi mainittu, torilla tavataan!" if Finland has been mentioned in the video. That phrase means "Finland mentioned, let's meet at the market place!" I even use this tag in Tumblr whenever I see some random post with lots of notes and someone mentions Finland (and the someone is not Finnish themselves).

Actually, now I just remembered something! In The X-Files there has been a mention a few times! I don't remember anything else but this one episode about a chess player boy, and Scully says "Helsinki syndrome", which is an alternative/old name for "Stockholm syndrome" :D Always have to throw a party after that line XD (Jk :D)

There's also this one time when Conan O'Brien made fun of Finns on tv, and he got a bunch of angry letters from Finns and he actually apologized on tv :D Then, I don't remember if it was before or after that, he noticed he actually looks a lot like Tarja Halonen, who was our president at the time, and he made some jokes about that and in the end he actually visited Finland and even met with her, a few times :D That was HUUUUGE for us Finns XD I remember watching the episode of his visit to Finland with my family lmao.

Now I also remembered something else... SO TYPICAL OF ME :DDD ...also typical of me to forget it right after remembering it. Wtf was it again? Oh yeah! I watched lots of Jackass and Viva La Bam when I was a teenager, and it was so exciting to see how excited Bam Margera was over Finland, because he was really into Finnish (metal) music. He even once made a movie, which wasn't that interesting tbh, called "Where the F* is Santa?" and it was kinda sweet of him how he got so angry every time someone said Santa Claus comes from the North Pole, because he knew he comes from Rovaniemi, Finland instead, and he tried so hard to pronounce the name correctly and corrected everyone who thought Santa doesn't come from Finland :DD

Okay I think this is ENOUGH ::D