#but literally her entire character fits all the Asian stereotypes the point is that those stereotypes are given depth

[cologona]

The person with the most stunted growth in the bat clan has got to be Cassandra. She spent 9 years homeless on the streets, during which she likely had to learn how money worked and what was okay to eat all on her own. Seeing as how Cain was willing to shoot Cass enough times that she no longer flinched, I really think his focus was far more on developing her skill than keeping her in peak health condition. David Cain is the kind of fucked up where he’d put Cass through “hunger resistance training” but also always have breakfast lunch and dinner prepared for her otherwise. I don’t think she’d see food she couldn’t eat until she left him.

Anyways, the tallest Cassandra I can accept is 5’3”. The tallest.

[swingjazzbear]

Trope x3!

For every “Trope” I get, I will post a TV trope for my muse.

"Arabian Nights" Days / Foreign Fanservice

The most obvious one. There is quite literally the story called 1001 Arabian Nights and I have talked about it on a more serious tone in my headcanons. Adonis' entire archetype, from his origins, to how odd his repetition of meat is, to how he gives gifts or express himself feels... foreign. Like out of another plane of existence. Adonis is both described to be coming up from awful, otherworldly, untouchable which could not be caused by OUR modern world poverty, with a mother disabled from her humanitarian work on the frontline. Yet, he is also coming from a very powerful family from his home country which it is implied his father is actually the top head of, and is then presented with arabian prince apparels... which like. It is inconsistent even in an Arabian Night situation. You cannot be dirt poor and hungry AND an arabian prince.

I do not know what was going on there. I do not know if just like the ainu situation the writers with next to no research wanted to subvert the arabian prince narrative (because in east asian tv arabian princes the harmful stereotype is that they are pervert with large egos, insane amount of magical wealth, ugly and violent) and wanted to subvert that on Adonis but keeping the romantic fantasy (a rich hot arabian prince)... like Adonis sounds actually traumatized from his sisters' treatment, how they'd steal food from him while they were in a situation of famine, but then he is very well emotionally adjusted from what sounds like a really healthy parental relationship... not that both are mutually exclusive but to a CERTAIN degree kinda yeah?! So I could see... big house great clothes but food supplies transport is cut due to the war? Which is still so weird because usually those things yes hit the upper ups but to this level it is more on the civilian level...

Is it problematic? Yes. Is it kind of just like all the other characters who are based on out-there archetypes? Yes. Is it still problematic then because it is a more sensitive subject on minorities? Yes. Also HE prefers those romantic fantasies than writing integrities point at the ainu Amagi brothers. Do I still love Adonis? Absolutely. Do I enjoy the twist to the archetype they do with time the same way they do with the other characters of doing a bit of subversion on those archetypes? Yes.

tl;dr he is a fantastic, handsome and beautiful puzzle to reclaim I love him. I give him the logistic thought he deserves.

Clueless Chick-Magnet

Adonis is told repeatedly how attractive he is. Either from how his sisters seem to dote and tease him (and him not reading well into not straightforward feelings think it is straight up bullying, they do too it's a whole nuance) or from other characters in the idols cast.

However, Adonis sees himself as lacking good looks or talent. He sees himself as boring and below average. From having been bullied all his life, he does not see his own appeal. He is told to be handsome, strong, muscular and that his unabashed kindness is VERY attractive and how he does not realize how much people flock around him. He is BLIND. He cannot register how ENDEARING he iiiis...

ADONIS IS HOT. The sexiness is one of the main appeal of UNDEAD and Adonis definitely fits the bill. He has solid and visible muscles in every right place, more so than other characters the same way Kuro does as all others have leaner builds, his hair are very well styled (by his sister!), his sense of style is proper yet still trendy, his voice is sultry and deep and is tall... he's perfect and he cannot see it gdi...!

And it breaks my heart by the way.

Mistaken Declaration of Love

Adonis ALSO says things that are very straightforwardly affectionate, which tends to make others flustered in some way, such as Anzu and Kaoru. He does not think about the implications of his choice of words which can be taken as in a romantic way, when he does not think about labels, only the love and affection he feels in the moment. Adonis does not think much about his attraction, just if he feels it or not, and will express it as everyone should not how much they are appreciated.

He is, in the most obvious case, very No Homo™ with Souma. Complimenting him endlessly on his skills, appearance and talent. He will accompany him beyond what most friends would do, climbing rock mountains on his own to bring Souma supplies during his training, making sure is safe during said training and probably prepping the camp where he stayed during this time as no one could contact Souma. His other close friend who he is quite devoted to is Koga, who is Also The Dense Type™. So really it's adorable but oh my god.

[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. 

[plainvanillapotato]

Quarantine diaries: its still may 22 2020.

Continuation of my “the 100 diaries” cuz y’all asked for it

Season 1. Ep. 2 Earth Skills

These kids sure have some stamina for people who have been stuck on a space blob all of their life. Ok wait imagine if instead of all these super attractive and fit actors we got the space people from wall-E who barely walk to save their lives. Now that is realistic.

Some bones. Mystery. Intrigue. Clearly not a human skull tho.

*hears jasper screaming* yes lets run toward the danger. I know I know be the hero and save the guy but if we’re living by the “do whatever the hell we want” rule then you bet your ass that I’m not gonna be the hero

Also how did jasper not die cuz really it looked like an instant kill

Side note: I’ve just realized where I recognize Clarke’s mom. She’s that aunt in the game plan.

Thelonious… really? These character names are all over the place. I mean you have regular names like Finn and Abby but then you jump to thelonious and Bellamy?! But who am I to judge? I live in a universe where Elon Musk's kid is named X Æ A-12.

Aww wells...such a nice guy! Did he really just bury those two people all by himself? Like no one else saw him and didn’t offer to help him. But I guess as these are some angsty teens who only care about themselves

Wait...wells also stripped them of their clothes kinda gross but you gotta do what you gotta do

Wow first appearance of a shirtless Bellamy. He’s hot

So I really don’t like this Murphy character. It does not help that the jacket that his wearing, the shoulder pad looks like one of those spiky balls I used to play with as a kid. Ill insert some images to prove this. Like I swear to god I bet that the costume design people straight up cut one of them spiky balls and just slapped that on the jacket

Lol I was really worried there for a moment thinking that Bellamy would actually stop that fight between wells and Murphy. Bellamy is chaotic neutral/evil giving wells a knife for a fair fight

Grounders. I wonder if they had a discussion on what they should call the people that survived on earth cuz i feel like there’s a better name for them but idk what. Also does that mean that the 100 and the ark people are called ‘spacers’

Clarke is being very anal about these wristbands like I understand her reasoning but it’s annoying me rn

This show shows more politics than I thought it would. It’s interesting how the kids take on the traits and characteristic of their parents

Wooow this show is really going with the smart Asian stereotype. Like you’re literally keeping Monty from saving his best friend because his brain is too valuable. please tell me there is more to monty than his brains

Clarke really be out here negging Finn AND Bellamy into a suicide mission to find jasper

Also I find it fascinating that one of the main reasons that Bellamy is the leader of these spacers is because he has a gun. Is this supposed to be reflective of real life?

I watch this show with subtitles on and… they spell Adam as ATOM. Like what? I literally had to look it up on IMDb to see if that was an error but nope it wasn’t

Bellamy is a very possessive big brother. Like I know its out of love but its a bit much and kinda anti-feminist like he treats octavia like a doll

Who is this raven character cuz i really don’t be needing another subplot

“Lockup has been quarantined. There’s some kind of a virus” …. CORONAVIRUS?! Is this show the parallel universe everyone is talking about

For a girl who had very limited social interaction, octavia is very confident flirting. Like for real, she flirts with boys better than I do. Possible the most unrealistic part of the show so far

Are they really setting up a thing between Clarke and Finn like keep it in your pants guys? It’s been like 2 days.  Fuck they are making finn and Clarke a thing. And i bet its that troupe where he’s a free spirit and she’s all uptight and he teaches her how to let loose

Also back to my Star Wars parallel, I think I’ve figured it out. Clarke is Rey. Wells is Finn (the guy friend that loves the main girl but she only sees him as a friend). Finn is Poe (the careless fun guy that contrasts the oh so serious main girl). And Bellamy is Kylo ren (the ‘antagonist’ that actually has a heart). Like guys the friend zone relationship between wells and Clarke is VERY finn and Rey like. Then there’s this scene where it seems like Bellamy is trying to turn wells against finn almost like kylo ren trying to turn someone to the dark side. i know rn its finn and clarke but there are strong reylo vibez between bellamy and clarke 

Now there’s atom and octavia jesus this girl moves faster through boys than i have in my entire life but i guess since she lived under the floor for much of her life she has a lot to make up for.

I find it very American who these spacers think that because they have a gun that they are safe.

They really put jasper, titties out, up there in a tree

You know how Bellamy said that he would do anything to get clarke’s wristband even if that means cutting off her hand so that the arc doesn’t come down….he really could have just let her die when she fell into that pit. But I get it plot and to show that Bellamy isn’t all evil. Also very intense eye contact between Clarke and Bellamy.

So this council meeting...ngl i kinda side with Kane especially with that violent table slap

Yess wells you kill that mutant animal thingy. The “now she sees you” yeah Bellamy no shit. Ofc Clarke is gonna notice wells shooting and killing that animal right in front of her. 

Are they really gonna eat that radioactive animal????? I’m serious when i say i want to straight up vomit thinking about eating that. Guess that its a good thing that i don’t live in this universe. Side note it looks like one of those mutant beast that was in the first hunger games movie.

Oh fuck...raven is finn’s girlfriend. Ofc she is

The scene where finn takes the food without cutting off his wristband and Murphy is like no you ain’t special but then finn is like ��i thought there were no rules” cut to Murphy’s face is just like “but he’s got a point tho” then finn just walks off with the music blaring like that was the most badass thing ever (the time stamp for this scene is 39:39)….this show is too much

Bellamy really hung atom for kissing his sister…..no just no this is no okay but I’m kind of too invested to stop watching

Oooo a grounder. Does that mask have any functional purposes? Or like is it purely for intimidation

this was murphy’s face when Finn said that there were no rules. 

[bloodfcst-a]

alright, so. i beat remake last weekend, but i didn’t want to come out with my newfound yufi information + meta right off the bat. i think this is an appropriate time to do so now, though. naturally, i’ll tag as spoilers, but if you need anything else, let me know.

also, my verdict? i am so glad i went into this blind, without any hype or expectations or people from fandom whining about it. yet again, i am so happy + i had an incredibly joyous experience.  this game fed me + also took over my life in a way i’ve not been possessed in some time so like......... good for it.

also no, i truly don’t miss hearing everyone’s hullabaloo +  i don’t wanna hear ur complaints of “ it didn’t say when part 2 is ” so like miss me with that. 

also warning: if u didn’t know already, fandom is WILD towards y.uffie for some reason and i also addressed that, so like if you’re from vii fandom u might seriously wanna read this bc... it’ll be pertinent to u understanding my feelings behind it.  i did address some questionable topics like the underaged oversexual portrayal + beastality that’s popular for her and i am NOT HERE FOR IT so if u came for that................. issa no from me dawg. when i say unbearable.... i mean it. fandom grossed me out. y’all wild.

anyway. thoughts below !

some things that were CONFIRMED for me were:

> midgar is lax around its anti-wutai rhetoric in its most important parts ( namely, hq, wall market, and avalanche ). for propaganda’s sake among the common people, it stands to create a united front. but in consumerism & in strength, they consider the wutai equals just as anyone else. 

see: tseng in the turks; madam m in wall market; the supplier for avalanche.

i would even argue that sector 5 / wall market is the safest place in midgar for wutaians, given don corneo’s obvious fetishism ( and that really............. isn’t saying a lot ).

i’m not going to entertain that it’s an “ admiration for culture and architecture ” in true weeaboo fashion given that of all positions he could give madam m to hold, her duties are to screen women that would be appealing to his aesthetic and to run a massage parlor where the highest bidder gets to have a happy ending. she is literally the “ asian parlors are actually fronts for brothels ” stereotype except in this sex trade, all women go to don corneo. i will have no apologists in this house. 

i have more developing thoughts on madam m like how she might be doing the sex trafficking part in her own self-interest / as a type of self-preservation, like the don might say “ well if u don’t want to be a wife then u better find some for me ” but... 1) this isn’t the post for that and 2) that logic does not explain why chocobo sam and andrea rhodea are also apart of the ring. but in my opinion, you can tell she’s not crazy about it bc as soon as aerith mentions it to her she becomes so wildly upset that she breaks character. i don’t think she’s a sell out. i think she’s an exploited and fetishized woman in a tough place, and i feel for her.

despite this, it’s clear that because of his obvious ‘ preference ’ they’re [ wutaians ] held at a higher standard ( i.e., he doesn’t dispose of madam m immediately like he does with every other woman who is unfortunate enough to meet him ), so i’m willing to go out on a limb and say despite the high amount of shinra foot traffic that goes through wall market ( and we know this bc everybody who is everybody from SOLDIERS to Turks go to honeybee inn ), a wutaian would probably be fine there.

> wutai is the strongest world power by natural means. without SOLDIER s & g programs, midgar’s biggest claim to fame is to reach first-world status as a metropolis by siphoning mako via its reactors. without its reactors, the whole town would either be: 1) slums, like below the plate; or 2) as common as every other area in the nearby vicinity ( i.e., kalm, costa del sol, nibelheim ). by siphoning mako energy, midgar truly is unnatural, so... hm... 

corel could have been a contender ‘cause they use fossil fuels ( and look at how successful gold saucer is! ), but the failed reactor really threw them out the loop. costa del sol + icicle inn are both partially shin-ra owned / managed, so i’m not counting them.

> infiltrating midgar / shinra isn’t difficult. nor is navigating throughout the sectors. while there is the mention of the ID scan on the trains, we see this is not applicable on foot ( freely able to walk through sectors 5, 6, 7, and 8 as party; jessie + co are able to go above the plate to go to her parents’ house despite already being listed as AVALANCHE and that their fake IDs had already expired ). given that yufi entirely travels on foot because of her airsickness / motion sickness, she’d be undetectable. also note that the first 59 floors of shinra hq by stairwell are not monitored... and neither was the front door, so she could easily sneak in whenever the need called for it.

> established multiple points of contact between rufus + yufi ( and by extension, the turks + yufi ). i’m really going into this in the next section ‘cause... their dynamic became so much more interesting. but we already know that at minimum, there was contact bc she had the phs rufus had provided to godo + was using it to communicate with zack for treasure.... but let me hold off on this bc there’s one more thing i want to add here.

regarding the turks: it’s established that even if a person is someone of interest to shin-ra, they won’t necessarily act on attacking or abducting immediately ( see: aerith ). we already know they’ve known yufi since she was a child, and if they’re working with rufus they’d know what she looked like as she aged, so the excuse of “ she looks different than when they worked with her in wutai ” is out the window. it’s more than likely that they’re enabling her to continue her business with rufus + have probably assisted her with not being caught. 

> yufi’s clothes are absolutely normal for her age. it always annoyed me that somehow tifa’s clothing was like considered “ impractical but acceptable ” because she’s a legal adult and because cishet men were too drawn to the boobies to complain. but then yufi was either like HELLA sexualized as a minor ( the amount of ecchi / hentai that exists of underage y.uffie despite there being of-age content [ i.e., her portrayals in advent children + dirge of cerberus ] is.......................................... ridonk ) OR she was like hella slut-shamed and i’m out here like.... hello??? what kinda anti-wutai rhetoric is this? anyway. i’d like to call attention to kyrie, who looks like she’s wearing like 60% of y.uffie’s dirge of cerberus outfit. if anything, this only reinforces that yufi’s fashion choices are.......... legit normal, age appropriate, and anyone who wants to argue otherwise can shut the fuck up.

if you’re really gonna ask “ how come her shorts are unbuttoned ” like go check your privilege. the short answer is probably that rufus stole all of her damn belts to make into his coat. the long answer is that a youth traveling the world SOLO she is probably slim on money to be frequently shopping for clothes ? and the clothes that are available in the slums vs on the plate are probably not great quality ( idk if y’all have ever shopped at a freesized open market before but like... buttons pop off INSTANTLY sometimes and those seams will tear if u stretch the wrong way. like fast fashion but like........ hella wild ). she could find better clothes above the plate, but given the anti-wutai rhetoric up there... probably not a wise choice. 

since you’re looking at her outfit anyway.. can i bring your attention to her sweater, and have you note that it’s made of the same material as cloud’s? i.e., she’s wearing shin-ra/SOLDIER brand quality? ( need further proof that it’s SOLDIER? zack and angeal wear the same one ) probably gotten from either a trip to hq or........ someone on the inside............ but obviously cropped to fit her. she might’ve even had it for some time. now let’s keep looking.... i’m willing to bet the latter, and here’s why! ( prepare for galaxy brain time )

now for standard SOLDIERS, they’re assigned colors. we know third class / infantrymen are blue; second class are burgundy / red ( think kunsel ); and black / dark blue for first class. don’t nobody wear green.... in this whole damn universe.... as a main character.... except child y.uffie. HMMMMM. here’s the sweater again to compare. 

i’m just saying.

now, the ideas INTRODUCED to me were:

> there is only one AVALANCHE, but it is splintered into different factions.

now i always wondered like, how come they just picked up the name AVALANCHE when it was established already. like idk i don’t think people would be like “ ah yes we’re the n.azis and we’re different than the other ones, but we wanna evoke the same fear ” u know what i mean?? usually u would carry the same ideology... but it was always so apparent that barret held different views and goals than elfe, so i was always so confused.

but not anymore. now it’s established that they’re the same group, begun in midgar + just carrying out different methods of “ fuckin’ shit up for the shin-ra ” over the last 10 years, spreading the word about the danger of reactors + it’s suckin’ up the lifeblood of the planet to anyone who would hear. now that makes sense. in the same chapter that this is established, however, they also claim...

> yufi as a benefactor to AVALANCHE.

now this shit had me like AAAAAAAAH. now there is no damn way you and i played the same game if u didn’t see this. they literally say “ AVALANCHE is being provided weapons by someone to fuck shit up, in return for all the materia in midgar. ”

who would want all the materia in midgar? HMMMMMMMMM.

> with that point established, let’s go back to rufus + yufi having multiple points of contact. so i already introduced the idea that rufus clearly has to have contact with yufi bc he’s the one spouting all the secrets to shinra treasure via the PHS. and yufi has claimed ownership of the phone by literally labeling it as “ treasure princess ” so there is no question that he thinks he’s talking to godo versus yufi. 

but we also know that rufus is the person behind AVALANCHE. my man has TIME on house arrest, obviously. we also know that he’s on house arrest in junon, not midgar. now, if he’s out here giving them logistics like places to go to spout their rhetoric, and yufi is providing weapons ( remember, wutai is the strongest power by natural means, and apparently hq is free real estate to explore, so she’s got multiple ways to provide gear without it being an inconvenience to her ), so it’s.........pretty obvious to say that the way she would go in connection to AVALANCHE would be through rufus. also, remember she has bad blood with AVALANCHE because of their actions in wutai, so... she’s not gonna be keen about them anyway. it seems much more practical for someone who already views them ( and tbh, lots of people ) as tools ( rufus vc: “ i own you ” ) to accomplish one’s tasks to help her connect with meeting her own goals ( “ all the materia in midgar ” ).

this would also explain why yufi is found hanging outside junon.

if you opted to grab her outside nibelheim... you might argue that it’s because nibelheim is obviously suspicious + truly the evidence at how shady shin-ra is, given the whole place was rebuilt + is filled with actors to hide the fact that the whole place burned to the ground + was once the site of jenova + currently remains the site as hojo’s secondary lab + other secret, vincent valentine with the protomateria slumbering. she could have been tipped off by rufus as “ there’s another treasure here ” but like... there’s no way she would have known it was vincent. even zack is like “ idk wtf is happening here so i’mma leave this alone. ”

also, i love that rufus uses “ heir to the throne ” verbage, which is so akin to yufi also being “ heir to the throne ” & look at them: spiteful children rebelling against their useless ass dads to create new world order + to destroy the old shin-ra company.  i love that for them.

so in conclusion........ this game FED ME. god i wanna play it again and again. i beat it on normal and got everything except 1 treasure and 1 task from chadley. i also need to do all the combat simulators. but given i did what i could in.... 3.5 days, i’m not too upset by it. this game has so much replay value and... i can say i’m glad i bought it twice.

g.amestop give me my freaking shinra badge i’ve damn well earned it.

oh and two more things going forward:

> nanaki continues to sound old as hell. which duh, given advent children. but u know how they established him as a young teen in the og + so it made sense for y.uffie and nanaki to be friends ‘cause they were mentally the same age? i don’t...... see how that works now. 

also.....y’all could have missed me with this shit already but STOP SHIPPING HIM WITH YUFI. NOW UR ONLY ARGUMENT IS GONE. STOP. i saw some art of nanaki & y.uffie fucking in the tags + floating around google and i was like....... WHY!!! and then there’s also weird hybrid art like what if they had a kid or something and i just........  STOP.

i have flashbacks of when i first started writing on tumblr + how i was bombarded by furries wanting to fuck bc of this. like deadass king dedede from kirby. later on i also saw sonic & even alligators ( not an alligator man.... tho i did see king k. rool + donkey kong as well........ i hated y’all for a hot minute ). it’s not even “ monster fucking ” it’s bestiality and I’M BEGGING YOU TO STOP. y’all can truly MISS ME WITH THIS.

however, u know, bigby wolf + everyone from castlevania could easily get it. stardust platinum where ya at. if i had to pick it would be....... more humanoid than a penguin or a “ lab rat dog ” u feel? 

> i am not crazy about y.uffentine. look. i know it exists. i know it was big bc fandom was like “ optional character ship ftw! ” + then dirge of cerberus came out and y’all went wild ( to be fair, i get it, it was the only ship outside of NANAKI and BEING KIDNAPPED/ASSAULTED BY SHINRA SOLDIERS AS A CHILD that people could feasibly comprehend for y.uffie for some reason............................................................... it was an actually “ NORMAL ” person........ ) but like. i’m sorry. it’s not doin it for me. i’ve seen like two other y.uffie blogs out here that actually stick to canon so like if u want your y.uffentine that bad, like maybe ask them. but please don’t ask me. 

ok i’m done for real now! thanks for reading !

[swampgallows]

Final thoughts on Bright under cut (contains spoilers)

As far as a mainstream film I can imagine a lot of people not being on board with it. Urban fantasy as a genre is pretty niche as it is which is essentially why more urban fantasy probably hasn’t been made. It’s hard to balance the concept of magic with the reality of technology. In my opinion Bright had a bit of The Dark Knight syndrome, I guess; I personally thought The Dark Knight was insufferable and hokey as hell, saved solely by Heath Ledger’s Joker which, I think if it were a less-than-stellar performance, would have shown the film’s true colors. I can’t go too dark in the realm of superheroes or fantasy because it’s ultimately a very lighthearted thing, and it has to take root in reality for it to pull off darkness well. So, to me, The Dark Knight felt like just an everyday crime drama/action film a la James Bond or Bourne Identity but with two technicolor off-the-wall characters thrown in. Solely Two-Face could have kept it in the realm of being believable (something like American Psycho, a man going off the rails), but having the Joker and Christian Bale’s hilarious throaty Batman just swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. Like, it’s dudes in spandex and literal clown makeup; Ledger’s portrayal of such a concept as disturbing rather than admirable (as we tend to view costumed vigilantes within the superhero genre) is what saved the film. 

So I’m getting a bit of that with Bright. Telling a story of discrimination with fantasy races as if we live in a post-racist society is clumsy at best and violent at worst. Jakoby’s story is essentially that of the “whitewashed” POC straddled between worlds: not orc enough for other orcs (not “blooded”, clan-less, round-toothed) but not human enough to fit in with humans. I’m watching this as a white woman, so while I might identify with orcs in fantasy as their being outcasts, how a person of color relates to this story can vastly differ. Orcs as a construction of white fantasy (Western, European, however you want to phrase it) are riddled with racist undertones (and sometimes overtones) as it is, so in the context of the real world you can end up with some echo chamber racism in a setting like Bright’s. Orcs predominantly portrayed as gangsters living in the hood, shown as existing only in seedy or “ghetto” type environments with almost clownish stereotypical baggy clothing, jerseys, and chains, was heinously tone deaf. And the “cuerpo” jeers of the Altamira gangsters just felt like the writing of someone who believes in “trickle down racism”, that oppressed groups can be “racist” against one another rather than all subject to the ruling class. Additionally, it seemed like a shoddy way for the writer to absolve himself by saying “see, orcs are even LOWER than humans. Even dark-skinned humans! Because Will Smith is black and he’s a successful cop and also here is a latino and an asian cop...who is a WOMAN, and also he has a WHITE WIFE RACISM IS OVER”

I’m still reeling from just watching the film so I’m still in a bit of the afterglow of just having a movie MADE in this genre. And with an orc as a MAIN character, not off to the side or played for laughs as a dopey peon, etc., it made me very happy. But “positive orcish representation” only puts points in the fun meter and has no actual validity or importance; the real world representation lodged quite a wedge in my suspension of disbelief. It was hard to go along for the ride seeing actual places in L.A. that I visit in reality (like... was that rolling shot of all the tents on San Julian Street necessary?) being treated like props for “orcish oppression”. It’s hard to summarize my feelings on this particular subject, but ultimately this is not the time or era to be making a buddy cop film, truly, and the trope of the cookie cutter thug is tiresome. But that’s probably why I don’t watch these kinds of movies to begin with: the expectations are low, the story is the same, and it’s just a vehicle for shoot-outs, car chases, and combat scenes. 

Women in this movie were nonexistent. Just accessories or one-dimensional plot devices. And that incestuous “sister” shit always gets to me; I dunno about you, but I’ve never stroked my sister’s face and hair and given her nose kisses while straddling her. Who the fuck is that for? Tikka was rolling around like a damn e-tard half the time, completely nonverbal and helpless, fridged-but-not-really, and pretty much just inconsequential. Did not pass the Bechdel test.

I wish more of a backstory had been fleshed out. We heard a lot about the Shield of Light but we never saw them in action. We were told stories about “what happened 2,000 years ago” but there weren’t even flashbacks or any residual effect of those except the existence of the wand. And where is the wand now? How do we know it’s safe? How do we actually know the steel-blue-haired elf man who apparently had no name except that he was the “Magic Fed” elf can keep it safe and that he doesn’t want to bring about the Darklord? How do we know the Darklord was real? There were apparently “fanatics” but if it was that influential of an event, would there not be more evidence? We have human artifacts that are tens of thousands of years old; 2,000 years is nothing in comparison to Niaux cave paintings or Sumerian cuneiform. 

If this movie was trying to be Shadowrun in terms of urban fantasy, then it failed to understand what even I, with only passing exposure to it, know: it’s for nerds, and nerds love knowing shit. That means the more background information and minutiae, the better. Having a superficial story driven by tropes or special effects rather than by fantasy means it will ultimately flop. We live in the here and now; so focus on what we don’t have! There were little things: elves like shopping, orcs have great sense of smell and remote understanding of human facial expressions, and fairies are apparently... pests? But beyond that, the story was just about a bunch of people. The point was supposed to be “orcs are people too”, which is a shit benchmark, really, when the people going in to a movie about urban fantasy have already accepted this tacitly. The whole point is that they are “people too”, but they’re different. Nobody is interested in aliens because they’re gung-ho about meeting tunicates from another atmosphere; we want to meet people: conscious, sentient beings who think like us but are not us, who have their own culture and behaviors and mannerisms and so on. That is part of the huge appeal of orcs, to me. They’re everything I’m not, but of course I see them as sentient people; not better or worse, but different.

So, really, the “message” of this movie is lost on everyone: its stereotypes are insensitive to actual oppressed groups and its bullying of the humanoids we came to see is disheartening, insulting, and annoying for those who are already initiated with the genre. They should be working side by side because that’s what we came to see, not spending two solid hours treating the fantasy races like shit just for a shitty “human after all” sentiment. Where’s Bright 2 so I can watch a human and orc getting taco cart burritos together, elves and orcs and humans all moshing at an underground metal show, and Ward and Jakoby actually solving some real shit together instead of Ward making his partner a punching bag?

Bright missed a lot of very major opportunities to bring urban fantasy to life. Hellboy II’s single scene in the troll marketplace provided more magical backdrop than Bright’s entire running time (a statement I am unintentionally echoing from a film critic on rottentomatoes; but let it be known that Hellboy II is one of my favorite films purely for the perfect urban fantasy themes, a genre I felt at home in before I even knew there was such a thing). That being said, it was still a lot of fun and it’s definitely worth a watch if you’re even vaguely into orcs or the urban fantasy genre, and also I will protect Nicholas Jakoby with my life. 

[marcomardon]

heyy so i know that it wasnt your post but i was hoping could elaborate on the legends part of that post about negative points about dctv. english isnt my first language (and im a little lazy) but i really want to fully understand it. " yes, you can enjoy legends, but yes you should also acknowledge ....within five minutes (they don’t even mention Jax’s chronic pain anymore)."

yeah sure thing, hopefully i can expand on this well enough:

…it’s been incredibly antiblack,…

2x04, “abominations” was on all accounts, a white man’s attempt to show the viewers what racism was like, and pretend that it’s over now so we should feel… good? they put the two black mains (the only characters of colour as series regulars on the show) undercover by having a historically important black man killed so one of the mains could impersonate him while the other pretended to be a slave.

(i will give this episode 1 thing and it is jax saying “I get it might be difficult for you to understand this, but I’ve been black my entire life, Grey. And honestly, I can’t think of a time period we could go to where I wouldn’t face some sort of racism.”)

2x16, “doomworld” was specifically antiblack because of amaya’s death. this episode aired at a time when the flash was going through a season-long plot to save iris, and having two WOC mains dying to affect everyone else on their show is uh…. fridging. where female characters are often killed, maimed, or otherwise assaulted for male characters to feel anger, sadness, emotions at all, or to be motivated to go after the “villain” of the story. in this case, we have leonard freezing and shattering amaya, in the most literal sense dctv has ever gotten with the term “fridging” – all because the writers and producers wanted us to be able to feel how mick and leonard’s partnership was unable to be fixed. they wanted “real consequences” for that episode and the way to do it is … kill the black woman. i guess. after she spent most of the episode brainwashed by damien darhk and had to be ‘saved’ from her brainwashing from sara and nate.

one might argue that almost everyone died in the doomworld universe, but amaya was the only one to die in the actual episode “doomworld” and her death was about her being mick’s friend. compare it to ray’s death – he had his heart ripped out by eobard because ray is too trusting. it fits him. he has a big heart. we even saw it. he got a death 100% about him. amaya did not. 

…aired an episode chock full of anti-Asian specific racism,…

2x03, “shogun”, was uh… i’m not sure how to describe this one so i’m mostly sourcing from other people here, but this review by a japanese viewer is the best way to explain, here’s her summary:

In grotesquely stereotypical White Saviour fashion, Nate has a fling with Masako Yamashiro who is engaged to marry the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu.

Ray’s suit is stolen and he does a nonsensical stereotypical “sensei” montage trying to push Nate to embrace and understand his new metahuman abilities.

The team arrives later on to help them fight the shogun and his samurai, all while making tacky quips about ninjas because the mispronounced Japanese by supposedly Japanese characters just wasn’t enough to fill up the offensive quota.

Ray and Nate have to make the sacrifice of destroying Ray’s suit to defeat the shogun and of course Nate undermines Masako’s opportunity to be the hero because it’s a White Saviour trope episode, after all.

and as ari said best, “the writers watched three whole episodes of naruto before writing this episode”

honestly the singular good thing about this episode was that they hired an asian director, kevin tancharoen, aka the love of my life, but there’s only so much he can do with a shitty script. at least the episode looked visually amazing. 

(let me know if you need more on this point since i’m pasting from other people here)

…erased a Jewish man’s identity,…

i’m not 100% sure if bette means martin stein or ray palmer so let’s talk about both.

martin stein, in his 8 appearances in the flash before moving over to legends of tomorrow, mentioned his faith in at least half of those. he has now been in 33 legends of tomorrow episodes + flash again for the “invasion!” crossover + kinda “duet” and hasn’t mentioned it once. he participated in a christmas dinner with the team, we’ve seen his wife clarissa in various forms, and now lily and still no mention. i’d have to look closer at the set of his office on the waverider for anything in the background, but i doubt there’s anything. the closest we’ve seen is mick congratulating him on now having a daughter with “mazel tov” in 2x10. 

ray is a little trickier and i had lenny rewrite my explanation here but dctv is all about showing characters like felicity, martin, and rory, with big references to holidays, their menorahs, the torah, and less about showing smaller references like dropping yiddish into a conversation or their quirks about keeping kosher. since we don’t have any of them (except snapper carr on supergirl) with these small references, we just see generic characters, who everyone assumes to be agnostic. the few pieces of evidence i think we have for ray being jewish are donna smoak’s excitement over he and felicity dating, and that he and martin are the most educated people on the waverider, with how judaism places a strong value on education. so when ray plans a christmas dinner, it’s not earned as an ironically jewish act, it’s just white guy.

….and fixed someone’s disability within five minutes…

nate heywood’s backstory was that his parents more or less had him in a bubble, because they were afraid his hemophilia would cause him to die. hemophilia is a disorder that interrupts the body’s ability to clot blood, which is how people normally stop bleeding from even small cuts or bruises. if you have hemophilia, if you start bleeding inside your body, then you are in serious danger.  

basically, it was the writers’ attempt to give a character an excuse for not having had as exciting of a life as the rest of the characters have had, and a reason why developing steel powers to protect his skin would be personally relevant to him. 

what would have been more interesting is if he kept the hemophilia and gained the steel powers anyway, as a first and more solid line of defense than his skin was, preventing him from bleeding at all. if i was in his situation with hemophilia and suddenly gained steel powers i literally would not turn them off for fear of … sara with knives, probably, and any small accident near her meaning not being able to stop bleeding. but you know, ray’s super serum cured his hemophilia, since there is no current real world cure for it at all. this is not the first time we’ve seen miracle cures on dctv though, with… felicity. malcolm. leonard. hartley. charles mcnider. probably more. 

…(they don’t even mention Jax’s chronic pain anymore).

the last time we heard about jax’s chronic pain, his torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), was 1x05 when he had to run across the prison yard. he was limping after he got there, and limping when he got back on the ship. we’ve seen jax run a few times with no negative results, implying gideon fixed jax’s pain, i guess, yet another miracle cure. 

people with things like deafness (like me!), or blindness, or chronic pain, or hemophilia, or missing limbs, or partial paralysis very very rarely have positive representation on screen, and here dctv is, curing everyone. especially for ailments and disabilities that don’t have cures, or are even part of people’s identities. we’re seeing characters go through a healing process that we will never have (or don’t want), and the writers just keep writing more “miracle cure” situations. “how tragic, look, we fixed their problems perfectly” for nate’s hemophilia or leonard’s missing hand or “look at this assistive technology that makes their lives 100% perfectly back to normal” for malcolm’s hand, felicity’s spine, charles’s vision, and hartley’s tinnitus, and not often showing the struggles even with the technology.it’s the disability equivalent of the white hero complex.

if anyone wants to add anything or correct me please do since i am not black, asian, or jewish, nor do i specifically have hemophilia or chronic pain. 

[amplesalty]

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

A not so random review...

What’s this, content outside of the periods of October or December? Well, I guess you could call this striking while the iron is hot-ish, and trying to keep the ball rolling after I actually made it through a whole October for once. That and this is laying the groundwork for something a little further down the line.

Summarizing this as ‘the Indian dude from Van Wilder and the Asian dude from American Pie’ almost feels a little lazy but I think that’s literally how it was advertised at the time. Apparently John Cho’s character in Pie is who we have to thank for the popularization of the term ‘MILF’. As for Kal Penn, I had totally forgotten he’d worked under President Obama for like nearly two years.

It’s Cho I’m more familiar with though, primarilly down to his turn on the short lived TV show Off Centre that I would watch in the early 2000’s when it aired in the middle of the night on a Friday/Saturday and I had nothing better to do. That show was notable for having a lot of people from American Pie working on it and doing cameos. That and having Brit Sean Maguire in it for some reason. I think watching Cho on there is how I came to watch this because Chau rules, it says so on the wall. He was on FlashForward too, I keep referencing that. He’s arguably the more succesful of the duo, doing the new Star Treks over the past decade or so and he had that movie Searching last year which I think got a lot of buzz due to him being the lead and that was a first for an Asian-American actor. That and it takes place entirely over computer and phone screens so that’s a bit of a unique presentation. Kinda like Unfriended being done over Skype.

There’s a bit of an odd couple situation going on between Harold and Kumar, Harold being a more repressed, law abiding type (apart from the rampant weed use) and Kumar being the more outgoing, messy type who will shave his pubic hair in your room because you have the full length mirror and wont see any problem in that. After getting high, the pair have a craving for some White Castle and this starts our whole whacky adventure.

An adventure that wont include their stoner neighbours who would prefer to stay home and watch ‘The Gift’ because they get to see a topless Katie Holmes. Dude, it’s 2004, I’m pretty sure you can just look at them online by now. They later describe her tits as the opposite of the Holocaust which is certainly an interesting description. Try that as a chat up line, I’m sure it will end well. Their neighbours being David Krumholtz, notable for his role in Numb3rs or, more pertinent to this blog, the lead elf in The Santa Clause. Then there’s Eddie Kaye Thomas who was also in American Pie and Off Centre, I feel like he kinda fell off the face of the earth after that though.

They serve as an early example of the cameos that this movie will through at you, which I suppose is fitting for a road trip movie, the story is just passing through all these locations so you get a brief look at these new characters before moving on. But there’s a ton of them in here, so many recognisable people from Fredd Willard, Ryan Reynolds, Christopher Meloni and…ugh, Jamie Kennedy. We’ll save the most prominent one though…

I wasn’t really feeling this at first, mostly because it takes a while for anything of interest to happen. Like, one of their early stops is Princeton because they’re trying to score more weed but most of the time is spent with Harold and this really boring group of nerds that seem to idolise him. Kumar hits it off with these two British chicks but we then get a prolonged sequence of fart jokes with them in the toilet playing ‘Battleshits’. I have no clue on how the mechanics of this game work, I guess it’s just whoever gets the loudest fart scores as a hit?

Things pick up when the movie starts embracing absurdity, like when Harold gets bitten by a racoon so they have to go to the hospital and Kumar swipes his Dad’s security pass so they can go steal medical marijuana. Only, they both get ushered into the operating theatre to operate on a guy who’s been shot.

Or the mechanic called Freakshow who has all sorts of boils over his face and a cuckoldry relationship with his wife who he invites our two heroes to have sex with.

Speaking of sex, they also happen to pick up a very horny Neil Patrick Harris who isn’t interested in their talk of White Castle and wants to go get laid at the strip club instead. The wikipedia page for the movie describes NPH as playing ‘a fictionalized version of himself’, would that be the part where he’s off his tits on ecstasy or the part where he’s attracted to women?

For all of it’s cameos, there’s almost an anti-cameo in the form of this cop who writes Harold a ticket for jay walking for taking like a step out into the road at 2am with no cars around. He just looks recognisable in some way but I can’t see that the actor has done anything of note. Maybe it’s just because he looks like a low rent Ron Burgundy.

The movie suddenly decides to develop some social commentary here with this heavy handed display of racial profiling where the police arrest an African-American man for a shooting in spite of the fact he’s at sleeping at the time. They’re processing him in his pajamas and night mask for God’s sake!

This does bring us the dream sequence of Kumar having a love affair with a big bag of weed though. You know the type, the slow motion running into each others arms? Well this goes a step further by having him fuck the bag, get married and then go through this marital strife where he backhands her for making some bad coffee before having to comfort her.

And then the pair get high with a cheetah and ride it around because NPH stole their car. You see what I mean about the absurdity?

Thankfully they do finally make it to White Castle, at about 7am, and indulge in a mammoth order of 30 sliders, 5 french fries and 4 large Cherry Cokes. And that’s just for one of them. Times that order by two and it all comes to $46.75. I know those burgers are only small but they still feels pretty cheap for all that food.

And for as much as this does feel like one big advertisement, they really go the whole hog by having this food seemingly give these characters epiphanies in their lives. Kumar is no longer satisfied with avoiding life, he’s finally going to knuckle down and nail one of those university interviews because as much as a stereotype as it is, there’s probably a lot worse things to be than an Indian doctor. And Harold finally stands up to his jerk boss who dumped all his work on him because those Asians just love crunching numbers.

He even gets the confidence to talk to the hot chick in their apartment building but it sucks that it took him until now to strike up a relationship because she’s going to Amsterdam for the next 10 days. Clearly this calls for another crazy adventure because you can’t just leave things like that for the best part of two weeks, plus you know what’s legal in Holland…only, knowing the title of the next movie, I don’t know if they ever make it that far…

I feel there’s a weird mix of tones with this movie, I think it excels when you have your far out moments of drug related dream sequences or cheetah based road trips but it’s pulled down to reality with these really harsh scenes of just explicit racism and this message of standing up for yourself. Again, knowing the sequel, that whole race thing seems to remain quite a strong focal point of the movie….

[house-of-crows]

Ok, Motherfuckers, let’s do this:

Retroactive diversity isn’t diversity in a meaningful way.

Diversity, for the sake of diversity, isn’t diversity in a meaningful way. 

These are my two main points. 

I am well aware that the canon in question is over 30 years old. I am also aware that, while Gaiman *might* have tried to avoid descriptions of characters, he was not entirely successful in that. Whether by design or flaw, there are descriptions of these characters. 

Retroactive diversity isn’t diversity in a meaningful way. If you do not begin with a diverse cast, from the beginning, and go back and paint over your original characterization; for the sake of diversity; you should also acknowledge that your original was LACKING that diversity. No, white should not be assumed to be the “Default.” No, not everyone is cishet until proven otherwise.... HOWEVER: we also need to acknowledge that the grand majority of people in America ARE cis and het, because that’s how majority works. It doesn’t need to be the entire point of their existence, but a line referencing some part of the general, most common experience of “Diverse” people, IS IMPORTANT. Take, for instance, Damien in Dream Daddy: a single throwaway line in reference to historically accurate binders is enough to tag Damien as transgender, and then we don’t ever have to talk about it again! 

It opens a conversational door, it offers a point of entry to have that conversation, but it also allows the character his privacy, and we don’t get any cringe invasive questions about surgeries and medical history. It’s not needed. Damien is trans and that’s not the most interesting thing about him! If, however, they had NOT given us that doorway into his history, and had said after the fact “BTW~ Damien is totes a transguy~” that wouldn’t fly. {Especially since he’s the most feminine of the available Daddies, but This is not about That.}

Retroactively going back and amending the canon because “well, this is what people want” is a cop out. Either own what you created, admit you made a mistake, or begin again and DO. BETTER. Dumbledore Is Gay was a cop out. It was not a major victory for gay people, nor was it the kind of gesture we really needed. The kind of gesture we really needed was acknowledging some manner of queer-diversity among the second generation! What we NEEDED was an actual secondary or tertiary character in the original series who was dealing with those exact feelings and awakenings that we were. What we got was a publicity stunt, a pat on the head, and “Well, if you look REAL CLOSE between the lines~” 

If you have to state after the fact that a thing is diverse, it wasn’t originally diverse and you need to own your fuck ups and do better next time.

Retroactive diversity isn’t diversity in a meaningful way.

Same with Hermione. No one is saying she couldn’t, shouldn’t or MUST NOT be headcanon’d as black. However: “sort of brown” implies tan, and bushy, frizzy hair does not describe any natural afro I’ve ever seen. {Fluffy? Cloud-ish? Wool-like maybe, depending. But white-girl humidity-frizz DOES NOT, in ANY WORLD, look like a natural afro.} Especially not when the original actress was Emma freakin’ Watson, one of the whitest actresses I know. It would have been a much better, more original, and DIVERSE cast if Rowling had just had the balls to make her ACTUALLY BLACK instead of waiting for fans to bring forward the head canon and pretending it was a thing she’d envisioned from the beginning. 

Diversity, for the sake of diversity, isn’t diversity in a meaningful way.

This is the kind of thing that gives us the Power Rangers, Captain Planet, and similar kids’ cartoon and live-action dramas that do little more than keep up the ILLUSION of diversity to signal their virtue and pretend they’re really pro-diversity and “Open Minded~” It’s how we get “Walking Gay Stereotype” in movies like The Devil Wears Prada, and every other romantic comedy where the lead has a “Gay Best Friend.” It’s how we end up with the “Sassy Black Friend” trope, and the “Smart Asian Bookworm.” It’s how we end up with the “Drunk Irish Bastard” and the “Posh Englishman” or “Cockney Asshole.” 

It’s how we end up with shows and movies that don’t actually celebrate diversity and how it makes us different, but merely bows to social expectation and relies on stereotypes to get there. It does no one any favors, reinforces stereotypes, and does little to actually HELP any given situation.

You know what was GOOD DIVERSITY? THE NEW FUCKIN’ ANNIE! 

Love it or hate it, the original was about a redheaded orphan girl, the one NO ONE WANTED, because Irish Orphans were NOT wanted during the time the original was written. Taking that concept and changing the races to fit the modern idea of “unwanted” was a BRILLIANT move! It got people talking, it showed real diversity, and it was a wonderful update on an old, favorite story. 

You know what was good diversity? THE DARK TOWER.

You know what was good diversity...? All the new stories that are coming out, like Rogue One, who embrace REAL DIVERSITY without relying on stereotypes or “Diversity! : Because We’re Really Not Racist~ {we swear~}” 

You want to know why I’m upset? It’s not because the majority of people I know canon Pepper as a redheaded, freckled, dusty tomboy. It’s because it looks like a massive cop out, diversity for the sake of diversity, without ANY acknowledgement that if you have to TELL PEOPLE your cast is diverse, it wasn’t diverse to begin with. At least have the good grace to say “Hey, I want to do better with the new version of the Thing I Created.”  That’s literally all I want.

[ageeksnerdyworld]

I can’t fucking stand when somebody claims whitewashing when nothing of the sort happened. I literally just saw a series of posts where somebody did this and they might’ve been also claiming that it was racist but I’m not sure.

Bitch listen up!

LISTEN THE FUCK UP!!

Whitewashing is when a non-white ie Black, Asian, Hispanic, etc, etc character is portrayed by a white actor. Or when a non-white character is drawn & colored to be white. That is indeed whitewashing and should be complained about.

BUT!!!

Whitewashing is not, I repeat is not, when a character is drawn and colored exactly the same way they are in canon JUST BECAUSE IT DOESN’T FIT YOUR FUCKING HEADCANNON!!

I saw a post calling out a specific comicbook company, no names shall be named for either parties involved, for whitewashing a character in their animated films. But the character in question has the exact same skin color, hair color, and eye color that they do in the comics. Skin is slightly tan in the comics. And? Slightly tan in the film. Eyes are green in the comics. And? Green in the film. Hair is black in the comics. And? Black in the film.

Where is the whitewashing?

Oh I forgot to mention… The character is part Arab. (Technically speaking Arabic people are in fact Caucasian, white for some of y'all, since there’s actually only three races. Caucasian, Negroid and Mongoloid. But I digress.)

Arabic and Middle Eastern people can fit that above description. Many of them do actually. My uncle, his wife and kids, on my dad’s side do; they’re all tan with light eyes. Even though there’s this image of Arabs as all being tan, brown-eyed, and black haired we don’t all fit that description. I’m half-Arab and half-Italian and I kinda fit the stereotype; hair’s medium brown. But my point still stands. Not everybody fits the stereotypes, ok?

Also this character’s father and mother have blue and green eyes respectively. Both genes are recessive but the color green is more dominate than blue. The way DNA works green eyes would win out every time. Every. Fucking. Time. And thus it makes sense that the character in question has green eyes.

And yet this person chose to claim that the character was whitewashed in the animated film. This person even went so far as to edit screenshots from scenes from the animated films that included the character in question to prove their point.

Newsflash, buddy! That doesn’t mean it’s whitewashing.

Making a black character white is whitewashing. Making a Native American character white is whitewashing. So is making an Asian character white. So is making a Mexican character white. It’s called whitewashing for a reason dude. But…

IT’S NOT WHITEWASHING JUST BECAUSE IT DOESN’T FIT YOUR HEADCANON!!

Let me repeat that real quick.

IT’S NOT WHITEWASHING JUST BECAUSE IT DOESN’T FIT YOUR HEADCANON!!

Some real examples of whitewashing:

The Harry Potter films

J.K. Rowling explicitly describes Hermione Granger as having brown eyes and frizzy hair. Something that is very common amongst black people. The author herself even confirmed this via tweet when a black woman was cast as Hermione in the stage production of The Cursed Child:

“Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair, and very clever. White skin was never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione.”

Explicitly stating that she wasn’t white, and saying that she loves a black version of the character, kinda solidifies it. The films whitewashed her.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Mr. Yunioshi was portrayed by white actor Mickey Rooney.

Mickey Rooney does not only play an Asian man. Rooney wears yellow face for his portrayal and does an overdone accent. He plays a racist stereotype of an Asian man.

So not only is that white-washing but it’s also racist.

21

The movie about card counting was actually based on a real life event. A group of Asian-American students from MIT, Harvard, and Princeton among others, rip off casinos by counting cards. This happened in the 70sThere were a lot of changes from real-life to movie as there always is but the most important is the race changes.

Our lead characters are Jeff Ma, Mike Aponte, and John Chang. Who played the leads in this film?

Jim Sturgess. Jacob Pitts. Kevin Spacey.

Not a single Asian actor played a lead role.

30 Days of Night

That vampire horror flick set in Alaska. This movie is based off a comic mini series btw. Inuit sheriff, who is Inuit in the comic, Eben Oleson is our main character. He’s the sherrif of the town that gets over run by vamps during it’s month-long polar night.

Wait. What was that?

The main character is Inuit.

And who plays him in the movie? Josh Hartnett.

Aloha!

The Hawaiian set rom-com has virtually no Hawaiian people. But the island state has a population that’s 70% non-white. Funny right?

But Emma Stone plays the main character.

A main character who is described as being one-third Hawaiian, one-third Chinese and half Swedish. And Emma Stone? Fits just the Swedish part of that and only by one-fifth.

Death Note

The 2017 upcoming live-action Netflix adaptation of the manga of the same name. (Not an adaptation of the anime… if that makes any difference.) The entire cast of this movie is made up of white actors. All of the characters are Japanese!!

But that’s not all…

The setting is moved to goddamn Seattle, Washington. The main character’s name is changed. In the manga his name is Light Yagami. His last name is one of the most white last names ever; Turner.

That just a few by the way.

And each of those aforementioned movies do in fact whitewash thier characters. But the character I spoke of was never whitewashed. Never once in continuity was this character paled in complexion. His hair was never lightened to be more white. The shape of his eyes was never changed to fit the shape of eyes that white people have. Neither was the shape of his face.

IT’S NOT WHITEWASHING JUST BECAUSE IT DOESN’T FIT YOUR HEADCANON!!

[justaddcolor]

About Death Note

Watched the Netflix Death Note movie and… 😐.

Listen, I tried to just unabashedly like it. There are certainly things to like about it. But some things I couldn’t get past. 

It felt equal parts campy 80s teen movie and survival horror and not in a good way. The film didn’t seem to know what it wanted. Having a teenage romance montage pasted over a literal murder spree does not feel good, and it’s not presented in a way that seems logical. I really wanted to like some of those bits too, because when he brings Mia in on the secret I honestly giggled, but it feels very jarring. At no point does this movie seem to want to be funny, so the violently stereotypical teenage/highschool movie tropes just feel dumb. The movie as a whole felt somewhere between what edgy college freshmen come up with after Philosophy class, and the kind of thing an aspiring school shooter would consider inspirational.

 Like the thought “I hope this doesn’t provoke disenfranchised teenaged murderers” actually crossed my mind. Light felt like an idiot compared to the anime, and sure the movie makes the barest of attempts at labeling him an intelligent kid, but definitely not in any way that makes the ending acceptable. Without spoiling, if you care, they basically pull off the whole “you see, he planned this entire thing!” Which is pretty freaking wild considering Mia was the only reason he hadn’t been caught well before. But ok.

 Ryuk looked cool and Dafoe’s voice acting was great but the whole “don’t trust Ryuk” thing felt way overstated. Mia’s transformation from girlfriend who is weirdly ok with murder to Harley Quinn but not at all likeable also felt kind of “wtf”. Its been a few years since I originally binged the Anime, so my thoughts were along the lines of “Ryuk/the book is making her go mad? Maybe? Or she was always like this??” The movie doesn’t exactly clarify.

The story feels like it can’t stand alone OR in context of the anime, because without that context it’s hella confusing and with it its pretty dumb.

There’s talk of a sequel? And I don’t want to have to watch it but like maybe it’ll be a full story instead of this weird hellishly paced thing. Like we spent so much time watching them fall in…whatever you call a romance based on murder cause it’s not love. Meanwhile I want backstory man. I think the phrase Death God was mentioned once, and not even like “I’m Ryuk, a Death God, meaning…”

Also, the sequence with Watari trying to track down L’s identity honestly what the fuck was that that could’ve been a movie all by itself tbh. You mean to tell me L was raised in basically Black Widow’s red room but for detectives and you want to cut into that with scenes from a high school dance???

Basically, it was a mess, but with potential? LIke honestly, most of my complaints feel more closely tied to the Director and Editor(s)’ choices. Pacing, writing etc. However, Nat was blah at best.

But before I move on, here’s that part where I bring up the whitewashing thing so proceed to your safespace if you gotta.

Is it whitewashing?

Heck yea.

Does that make it unwatchable?

Let’s go with a solid…ehh?

Ok so here’s the thing, making it an “American story” is not a bad thing at it’s core. We do it all the time. Heroes from fiction have been changed to suit a culture for like. Ever. Fine.

The two problems are

1. Like a lot of stories, they’re born of specific regional conditions or cultural histories, and some things will literally get lost in translation if we have to Americanize everything. Shinigami, for example, have a specific place in Japanese culture and religions. Even Light’s perspective on justice may be a product of his origin- Japan has a nearly 100% conviction rate because their legal system basically considers you guilty until proven otherwise. So it’s not that these stories can’t be shared worldwide, its just that sometimes special care needs to be taken. And this movie didn’t even attempt to adapt those things, which I really think wouldve made this whole experience more forgivable. For an American audience they could’ve easily said Ryuk was some kind of demonic manifestation or the Grim Reaper or anything. Instead they just decided most of the audience was familiar with the anime, and therefore in the know. Statistically, that’s probably correct. But nobody wanted the sparknotes version of Death Note, and it’s doubtful that this movie will be able to hold itself up on the benevolence of anime fans. 

2. And arguably the biggest- In America especially, we supposedly pride ourselves as being ethnically diverse. So if that’s the case, its unfair, and even illogical to say that the American everyman that all can relate to must be white.

Specifically I remember watching the first scene of the movie. It serves to introduce the Lead and his moral position. They do this by showing him respond to another student being bullied. That student is, at least at a glance, Asian. Wow. Guess there are Asians in Seattle? Wild.

The only other Asian character is Watari, and I’ve got to say, considering they took the effort to change Light’s name to make him fit his new ethnicity, it looks pretty weird that they left his race alone. Read into that if you want.

And for the record, as much as I like Lakeith Stanfield, no, that’s not better. Erasing Asian characters is not ok just because the actor isn’t white. Spaces should be accessible for actors of all colors. And frankly, when Hollywood does shit like this it just perpetuates the idea that all non-white people are basically interchangeable. Although yes, I liked his acting. I felt uncomfortable just looking at him, and I’m hoping that was the point.

And yes, there are perfectly legitimate reasons to change the ethnicities of actors.

My community college cast a Latinx person for the lead in Raisin in the Sun. That’s due to a legitimate shortage of black talent. Hollywood casting agents do not have that excuse.

Watching the movie I wondered if they might really ride the “disenfranchised white youth with a bad home life” angle, because making a statement about American culture and the excessive number of mass killings would’ve been waay more interesting than the thing I did watch, and statistically would’ve given a great reason for why the lead had to be white other than what basically boils down to “probably unconscious racism”

I’ll be honest the whole film was way better when I imagined if not for the Death Note Light would be attempting to construct pipe bombs for the school’s basement or something. That entitled, self righteous kind of justice? The misdirected teenage rage and angst? Could’ve framed his entire spree much better, especially considering where the movie would’ve ended without that pretty blatant fix it.