#i like the idea of Kyle’s parents being anti authority

[archvillain-fandom]

after kyle’s death, his parents are questioned to see if they knew about his illegal activities. they respond that they’ve known he was the blue freak since he was twelve. when asked why they didn’t report him, beth camden said, “nobody ever asked us,” and daniel camden said, “what are you, a fucking cop?”

[onelastbreath-writes]

On Bruce And Texting:

Author’s Note: Hello and welcome, this is my first properly written fic, originally posted to my AO3, and now that I have finally created a writing blog, it’s here as well. Please enjoy!!  AO3.  Masterlist

Warnings: Hopefully none, its all cute and fluff <3

Summary: Bruce Wayne texts like he's sending correspondences to the Queen, so of course the little monsters he calls children just have to make fun of him! Brats, the lot of them, but he wouldn't have them any other way.

Features: Bruce Wayne/Selina Kyle, all the bats and birds, mentions JL, no crime fighting, only family fluff, jokes and nods to Millennial and GenZ shenanigans.

Word Count: 2.7k

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Billionaire, genius, tech expert, father of many children, and all around up-to-date-with-just-about-everything type of person he may be, it is also a well-known Fact that Bruce Wayne, the Batman(TM) himself, can’t text to save his life.

Whether it’s due to his Very Proper English Upbringing, his inability to be informal via written correspondences of any type, his indifference, or the fact that it bothers his children so much, Bruce Wayne has not and never will text with anything less than perfect grammar, spelling, and formality. If he has not sent you a proper letter (featuring a dedication, indentation for every paragraph, signature, and post-script when applicable), he did, in fact, not send you that text. Informality is not his Batman Way(TM) according to his children... he’s not too sure what that even means, but it makes his young ones laugh so it’s probably fine?  

His oldest children (Richard and Jason) were raised in the time of Change, where computers, internet access, social media, and all things similar were only just being introduced into households en-masse. They were young enough to remember a time without such devices and connectivity (both for very different reasons, of course, but they grew up without the newest technology none-the-less). They could understand his relationship to the digital environment more so than his younger children, but they still tended to poke fun at his ‘texting blunders’ regularly. All his kids somehow ended up as brats. He doesn’t know how this happened. It’s certainly not his fault. He blames the League members, and especially Clark Kent, for their defiant personalities. 

His younger children, whom he loves dearly, like to confuse him as much as they possibly can with their slang, egregious spelling errors, and all-around ‘internet humour’. He doesn’t know what ‘wig’ or ‘worm’ or ‘oof’ or anything means. He has no idea what those dances are, or how they relate to the music that seems to always accompany them, and for the love of all that is good, don’t ask him what he thinks of this or that ‘meme’. What even is a ‘meme’, and should he be more concerned about his kids being obsessed with them? He tries, oh my god, does he try to follow the children’s conversations, but they somehow all learned a language he has no idea how to decrypt. His best response to them once they start speaking in tongues is as follows: smile but not too much, listen to child even though he is deeply confused, and pat child on head or shoulder when they are finished and are looking for assurance.  

He refuses to be a parent who ignores or tunes out his children, so he always makes sure to put down his work, his crossword, his tools, or whatever else is in his hands when a child searches him out for a conversation. But somehow, despite all the time he spends around them and their strange words, when he gets text from them comprised of abbreviations, acronyms, and completely random words, he goes a little cross eyed. He would never tell anyone, but he keeps a running list on his phone about the things they say that he has had to translate in the past. Spilling tea? Speaking the truth, usually to do with gossip. Wow? Multiple possible meanings: either a video game, or someone saying it (different pronunciation depending on context and who sent the text). Stickbug? A nice little prank with no ulterior motives, just for fun. Something along the lines of “this basic bitch Karen at the grocery store who is a dirty rat-licker and is def an anti-vaxxer just took 45 (forty-five) minutes to decide she didn’t actually want that almond milk. I Stan the cashier who had to put up with her. Rad af dude.” roughly translates to “A rude, middle-aged white woman who wasn’t wearing a mask and doesn’t believe in disease control or vaccinating her children wasted a great deal of an essential worker’s time in the checkout line. The cashier was very professional in their dealings with said customer and should be commended on their actions.”  

Given enough time, the internet for searching up new slang words, and occasionally some help from a friend (Alfred, Selina, Lucius, another of his children, etc), Bruce could decode and respond appropriately to most texts. He was quite proud of these achievements, and although he didn’t always like how often his children were on their phones or computers or gaming systems, he was quite proud of how integrated and easily they adapted to the ever-evolving world of electronics. All his kids were gifted in many ways, but their ability to learn, their hunger for knowledge, and their perseverance when exploring new and challenging ideas were always the things that he was most impressed by.  

He could do without their comments though. Yes, surprisingly, he did manage to get girlfriends with his type of texting. No, he doesn’t miss the ‘good old days’ when telegraphs were the main form of long-distance correspondence (how old do these brats think he is?!). And yes, he does know what a “tweet” is, and how to “post” on his social media accounts, and what “sliding into your DMs” is (thanks to a frantic search after a WE employee mentioned it near him). The Wayne children, truly whom and what Bruce considers his pride and joy, are cruel little jerks to him sometimes. His hoard of parenting books fails to mention what one should do when their children gang up on them. Bullying is covered of course, but he can’t really talk to a teacher or his guardian about how his second son calls him an idiot sandwich, or that his third son regularly tries to get him to do something “For The Vine”. His oldest and youngest boys are only slightly better in the bullying him department; Richard and his puppy dog eyes when he wants to do something dangerous or not-Alfred-approved, and Damian and his growing collection of pets because “Mother never let me have them, and I am deprived, and don’t you love me Father?”.  

His only good child is his beautiful daughter Cassandra, the flower of the Wayne clan. She gives him hugs, and pats his hands, and can sit with him and just enjoy the quiet and stillness when his other children are not around. Her language skills are improving by leaps and bounds every day, and her heart and spirit are unparalleled, but her main method of communication is in her movements. Her hands, her posture, her dancing; Bruce couldn’t think of a more graceful, fluid, powerful person if the world depended on it. His amazing little girl doesn't bully him (and if she ever does, he probably deserves it, he trusts her), so he turns to her most of all when it comes to communicating with someone else. She doesn’t let him send anything that is “sketchy” or “wrong words, bad meaning, Dad”. He would give the world to his children, but for Cassandra, he would destroy it and build her an entirely new one.

Social media, especially with his terrible children all having accounts dedicated to making him look like a simpleton, was another rocky terrain he had to navigate on the regular. He had professionals in place at WE to run the company’s many accounts, paid top dollar to help appeal and relate to the masses, but he mostly had to manage his personal accounts himself. And so, @TheRealBruceWayne was one of the greatest struggles in his adult life. Why can’t he just retweet every post from @WE_Offical and leave it at that? People should only want to know about what’s new with the company. What do you mean they want to know more about our family and private lives? That’s unnecessary, and not important to the running of the company, right? Right? Why are you laughing?!

Luckily, most people in his life aren’t so intimately aware of his struggles. He can act and lie all he wants about being “hip” and “woke” and whatever else the kids are saying these days when he’s with the JL or in board meeting intermissions, networking with his associates. The Batman knows all and sees all, Green Lantern, of course he understands how “Tiktok” works. The Batman is a robot without a funny bone in his body, Green Arrow, but I did witness him sigh and say “same” when he knocked his cup of coffee over while on monitor duty once. No matter how badly his darling children call him out, the Justice League would be so much worse. So, it’s one of his most importantly guarded secrets... even more so than his secret identity at this point. Being unmasked in front of every Gotham rogue would be less detrimental to him than his “friends” learning of his utter ineptitude in staying on top of the younger generations’ lingo.  

When questioned why the League doesn’t have a group chat or a forum or anything that they can use to contact each other outside of world ending matters and communicator (”because we’re friends, Batman! Ma and Pa Kent would love to have everyone over for a barbecue!”), the person who dared even mention texting isn’t even given a verbal response. They are just glared at, silently, often for several uninterrupted minutes, frozen in place only able to breathe shallowly in fear of setting off the Bat. “You know why” his glare says, “I’ll eat you, your family, and everything you have ever held dear” the younger members hear. No one makes the mistake of asking about it twice.  

Outside of his children and Alfred, and his small circle of true friends involved in all aspects of his life, there is only one more person Bruce allows to know of his Darkest Secret. Selina. Someone most people would recommend he not be involved with. Catwoman: accomplished thief, distraction, chaos-incarnate most nights, and his significant other. Sharp as a whip (ha) and crafty like no one’s business; he is head-over-heels. On again/Off again and all over the place their long romance has been, but no one has ever challenged him, intrigued him, like this clever, beautiful, amazing woman has. He’s brought his partners around his children before, both for their judgement, and for their worst behaviours to vet out any “unworthy” suitors. He trusts them explicitly to tell him the truth about those he allows into the manor; were they rude about Bruce wanting to have group outings, did they say something about Bruce’s money, did they get angry or shout or make anyone uncomfortable while they were here? If his children even looked slightly unhappy with someone he brought them to meet, that person would not be invited back. Children, he finds, have the best sight when meeting people; no motives other than finding safety and love, no fear of consequences from speaking honestly...  

Selina, or Catwoman, as they had known her first, was someone all of his kids liked without issue right off the bat. She would make puns and play word games with Richard, his first Robin, tiny, still working on his English, able to connect with him over their acrobatic abilities. His second Robin, Jason, skittish and feisty as an alley cat, knew of Catwoman and her daring escapades long before Bruce found him. The young boy had a few heroes, and no one (not even Wonder Woman) could compare to the incredible burglar who bought food and jackets and medicine for the street kids in Crime Alley. She was saintly in his eyes, and to this day, Bruce was still working on convincing Jason he was good enough for Selina. Tim and Cass and Stephanie (basically another daughter to Bruce, she spends so much time with the family) all joined the Wayne clan around the same time and officially met Selina as a friend and partner of his, and in the good graces of his first two sons. Selina, in all her nightly business, and many travels and acquaintances, had met the three independently, helping Tim get home safely back to Drake Manor when he escaped to photograph Batman and Robin in the dank darkness of Gotham when he was just a young boy, spending some time with Cassandra when her despicable father left her alone long enough to recover from his rough treatment, showing her the first scraps of kindness in her short life, and watching over and protecting Stephanie as she followed and sabotaged her father Cluemaster and his criminal activities. There was no need to win them over once they met her civilian identity, she had already gained their favour and acceptance, and they were happy to have her near their new family. Damian, his youngest, his biological son, took the longest to warm up to Selina. He would never fault his little boy for fighting so hard against a woman that was not his birth mother, especially after all the manipulation and cruelty dealt to him by Talia for the first decade of his life. But as he began to learn about his father, these people in his father’s life, and this woman that was Not His Mother but “still okay, I guess”, he grew to see her as acceptable. Her cats definitely helped, he’d say, no one with cats that loyal and happy can be a bad person.  

Selina, the love of his life, he’d admit quietly to himself, was also a dirty traitor and in cahoots with his terrible children. She would say his texting skills were “sweet” and “very gentlemanly” when she was asked by anyone outside the family, and privately to him she would say she thought they were “adorable” and “please don’t ever change, Bruce, I like it.” However, nothing seemed to bring her more joy than his children sending her texts and “Snaps” and “memes” about him to her. Sometimes it was screenshots of the family group chat that they forced him to join, where he would post “To whom it may concern...” and “In regards to...” when he needed to reach all his delinquents in a timely manner. Sometimes it was video clips of him staring at his phone intently, then typing something on his laptop, then him reading and nodding along, and then finally going back and responding to the text he received with a small, pleased smile. And sometimes, when he got too injured or was too incapacitated to text coherently, he’d have his nearest able child transcribe his text to her. Depending on who was texting her for Bruce, she could expect many different things. From Dick, she’d get lots of shorthand and silly emojis, and many, many, winky and crying/laughing faces in brackets depending on what Bruce had made him type. Jason, bless him, used proper English most of the time, but would never write a single word of Bruce’s soliloquy to her, instead she enjoyed the TL;DR version: “hurt again, missing you, come home soon, blah blah blah, sappy gross words here, love you”. Tim would allow speech recognition to run on Bruce’s phone, and just let it go until the man passed out. Stephanie, the little chaos child, would film it and send it to her, including all her muffled laughter and shaky camera shots of Bruce emoting with his available undamaged limbs. Cass, still more versed in physicality and emotive movement, would interpret Bruce’s text into mostly emojis, hearts and happy faces and animals, but would include photos, and phrases that she found important enough to type out for Selina. Damian, forever his Father’s son in any way possible, texts very formally, referring to her or his siblings Bruce mentions by last name only, and lots of “Father requests me to tell you...” and “Kyle, know that Father...”. She adores these kids, and once Bruce recovers enough to text her himself, or she gets back to the Manor, they get to laugh about whatever she was sent this time.  

So, while it’s true that Bruce couldn’t text his way out of a wet paper bag, and his kids are sometimes brats about it, there’s probably a lot of different reasons he doesn’t spend too much time trying to improve his skills. Whether it’s the smiles of his children, the giggles of his significant other, or the warm feeling in his chest when he sees all his important people bonding over him, well, in the end, who’s to say?

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Christmas Special Villains

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

Much like I did for Halloween, I wanted to do a bunch of one-shot or at the very least minor Christmas villains, which presented me with an interesting problem – most Christmas specials don’t really have villains. Usually the main obstacle to overcome in any holiday special is some sort of emotional fault of the main character, a lack of belief in the spirit of the holiday, or something to that effect, and when there is an actual villain, it tends to just be ones from the show at large with a Christmas-related scheme. Like I’m not doing Princess Morbucks or the Kanker sisters for this.

Luckily, There were a few I was sure on, and I managed to scrounge up a few more to deliver five lovingly-wrapped holiday villains. We have:

Mrs. Claus from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy

Ghost Writer from Danny Phantom

Robot Santa from Futurama

Edna Jucation and the Faculty Four from Codename: Kids Next Door

The Woodland Critters from South Park

Here’s the most interesting thing: Despite Christmas stories tending to lean more towards internal conflict and self-reflection, when they do have actual, tangible threats like these, they tend to be honestly and genuinely great. This is in stark contrast to A lot of the villains from the Halloween specials, who tended to just be big scary baddies without much oomph to them.

Actor: Mrs. Claus is portrayed by Carol Kane, an incredibly prolific actress who you may know best as Valerie, the wife of Miracle Max from The Princess Bride. And much like in that film, she manages to be as enjoyable and funny as the guy playing her husband, which is a tall order indeed – in that film it was Billy Crystal, and in the special it’s Gilbert Gottfried.

Ghost Writer is portrayed by Will Arnett of all people. This was post-Gob Bluth but pre-Batman and BoJack, so while not unknown by any stretch it’s definitely weird to go back and see him in a Butch Hartman action cartoon of all places. He does a great job, as to be expected; when has he ever done poorly?

In his first appearance, Robot Santa was voiced by none other than John Goodman. Normally I’d say Goodman would be perfect for the role of Santa, but… this one’s a maniacal robotic serial killer. It’s a wonderfully jarring juxtaposition. After that, John DiMaggio gave Robot Santa a voice for his other appearances, and he does a good job for sure. Obviously he’s no John Goodman, but really, who is?

Edna Jucation is voiced by Candi Milo, and the Faculty Four are played by Dee Bradley Baker and Darran Norris; Baker is the Unintelligible Tutor and Thesaurus Rex, while Norris is Mr. Physically Fitastic and the Human Text. These are all top-tier veteran voice actors, and they do a fine job, but I can’t particularly say they really make any of these characters stand out or be memorable, which is a shame.

As to be expected, the Woodland Critters are voiced by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Big shock there. Even less shocking is that they are perfectly funny as these depraved animals.

Motivation/Goals: Out of all of these, I think it’s really fitting that Mrs. Claus is the one with the best motivation. As the HEAD head vampire in the North Pole, she has turned Santa into a vampire and put a halt on Christmas because she is overworked and exhausted, having to do all the household chores all year while Santa only works one night. It is absolutely, perfectly understandable that she snapped… but apparently this isn’t even the first time, as Santa mentions at the end this has happened on multiple prior occasions. You think he’d treat her better after the second or third time, but then we wouldn’t have a plot.

I’d say that Ghost Writer and the Woodland Critters are tied for the next spot; both of them have solid reasons for doing what they’re doing. Ghost Writer was just a humble author trying to finish a Christmas story in time for Christmas, but unfortunately this caught the eye of the extremely Scroogey Danny Phantom, who absolutely hates Christmas due to traumatic events caused by his family fighting on Christmas in the past. Danny, in a moment of incredible callousness, blasts the poor ghost’s manuscript to bits and then proceeds to rub it in, which drives GW to breaking the annual truce and using his powers to torment Danny by trapping him in a Christmas story where he and everyone else can only speak in rhyme. It’s honestly hard to feel sympathy for Danny here, but GW does take it a bit too far.

The Woodland Critters, on the other hand, are just utterly depraved… but that’s to be expected seeing as they are the creations of Eric Cartman, inhabiting a Christmas story whose sole reason for existing is to make Kyle look like a tool. In the story, they get Kyle knocked up with the Antichrist. You see, there master is Satan, and they want nothing more than for his spawn to be born into the world. They really just exist as a reason for Cartman to rip on Kyle for being a Jew at Christmastime, as Kyle himself points out in their debut episode.

Edna and the Faculty Four are a bit simple and amusing, as is befitting of a gimmicky villain from The world of the KND. They team up with the Delightful Children because Substitute Teacher’s Day is virtually unknown compared to Christmas, the kind of absurd, wacky reason for villainy you’d expect from a world where some of the most feared supervillains include an evil dentist and a vampire who spanks people. Robot Santa is likewise extremely simple, yet effective: every Christmas he flies down to Earth to punish the naughty – which is everyone except Zoidberg. This is due to a programming oversight that left his standards set way too high, so no one can ever measure up. Except Zoidberg. There’s really not much more to him than that, but really, does their need to be?

Final Fate: Mrs. Claus is redeemed at the end of the special thanks to Billy, who helps her understand the true meaning of Christmas and who heals her husband so that he can apologize. Things seem like they might work out for real this time because now Malcolm McDowell’s vampire is around to help with tidying up, so hooray! Happy ending here!

Ghost Writer gets thwarted because Danny picks up an orange; as Ghost Writer never watched Drake & Josh and thus didn’t realize that “door hinge” is an acceptable rhyme, he was unable to continue writing his story and got beat up by Danny and his rogues gallery and then thrown into Walker’s prison for breaking the yearly truce in the Ghost Zone. At least he got to complete his book?

The Woodland Critters go out when Santa comes in and blasts them away with a shotgun… but since they are technically fictional characters, they show up in Imaginationland to cause problems. Still, it’s reassuring to know they can be taken out with simple firearms.

Edna Jucation, the Faculty Four, and Robot Santa really don’t have any canonical final fate; they just get defeated and then go on their merry way. In Robot Santa’s case, he actually showed up quite a few more times after his initial appearance to wreak havoc, but the Faculty Four and Edna were entirely oneshot antagonists.

Final Thoughts & Score: Christmas honestly fares a lot better than Halloween does as far as I can see. The villains tend to be a lot more thematic, or at the very least they have more personality and thematic function. Halloween doesn’t really have any sort of core themes to work off of as opposed to Christmas, which has a lot of reoccurring themes in works based around it. Still, most of these characters just settle on being funny.

Mrs. Claus and the Woodland Critters are the best of the bunch here, and both earn themselves a spot on the Nice List with a 9/10 each. Mrs. Claus is just a lot of fun, mostly because of the fact she has legitimate grievances on top of being a unique twist on the character. Mrs. Claus as a vampire overlord who commands hordes of vampire elves? That’s the sort of creative wackiness that Billy & Mandy delivered on. The Woodland Critters are just funny, plain and simple, acting as the sort of amusing subversion that could be expected of from South Park in its glory days as well as being totally in line with Cartman’s personality. These are the exact sort of original characters I’d expect from a guy who ground up a kid’s parents and made them into chili, what with their blood orgies and ultraviolence. Amusingly enough, they score a point higher than Cartman did in his own Psycho Analysis, which is mostly due to their limited appearances meaning that they stay remarkably consistent, where Cartman tends to be whatever an episode needs to be, be that hero, anti-hero, or villain.

Next up are Ghost Writer and Robot Santa, who both get 7/10. Ghost Writer is a very amusing oneshot, but it’s honestly weird that out of all the Villains from Danny Phantom, he’s the first one I talked about. You’d think it would be Ember or Vlad or something… at any rate, he’s an amusing antagonist, but he’s also one who it’s hard not to view as being in the right, especially since Danny was just a jerk to him completely unprovoked due to his own personal hangups with the holidays. As usual with fun ideas on the show though he was only ever used once, which is a real shame but at the same time understandable; his gimmick really only works with Christmas, so it would have been weird shoehorning him into another episode’s plot. For what he is, he’s fun.

Robot Santa has a similar problem, not really being able to function outside of Christmas specials, but his few appearances leave him as an amusing antagonist who never really overstays his welcome. He’s not as entertaining or engaging as, say, Mom, but he definitely offers some laughs with his hilarious concept and his ridiculous levels of bloodlust. Points t him for helping out the heroes in the first Futurama movie too.

That just leaves us with Edna and the Faculty Four, and the Faculty Four just manage to scrape onto the bottom of the Nice List with a collective 5/10. They don’t really have much character or personality, especially when compared to the heroic Marvel pastiche that is Elfa Strike, but as brief amusing gag villains meant to pay loving tribute to the Fantastic Four, I think they’re decent. Edna is not so lucky; she’s a bit obnoxious, shrill, and doesn’t really correlate to any sort of Marvel character, which is baffling since the entire episode is one big love letter to Marvel comics. Sad to say, but she’s landing smack dab on the Naughty List with a 2/10. She doesn’t even have a cool gimmick!

I suppose that wraps it up for Christmas special villains. Doing something like this is tough, because it really makes you sit back and wonder what sort of Christmas villains you should put on. Obviously I avoided any theatrical film villains, but that did leave one particularly glaring omission of a villain from a holiday special… a big, green, unpleasant omission. He’s a mean one, for sure...

[rabtownsend]

CW for some slurs, and general small-town casual prejudices

sub-tumbling (is that a thing?) this post I just saw claiming that shows like Family Guy and South Park are directly responsible for eroding empathy and instilling alt-right belief structures in young people.

Here’s what I think about that. I’m a leftist. Definitely a socialist. Would not necessarily describe myself as radical. Am a feminist. Am anti-fascist. Am anti-capitalist. Hate libertarianism. Do support trans rights. Do support sex-workers’ rights. And I do have complicated, sometimes contradictory feelings about a lot of things in between any one of those subjects and belief structures.

I can attribute a lot of that to my upbringing, sure. My parents were both Canadian Liberals. Both teachers.

Maybe my mistake - before I even begin - is that when I was young, and I saw the other kids in my small, conservative town calling other kids “stupid jews” and “faggot” - I never had the sense that they actually hated jews or homosexuals. Rather, they had just found some new way to call someone (who, statistically speaking, was probably not jewish or gay) an idiot, in a non-sincere way.

I didn’t see them as being truly hateful toward anyone, just ignorant. And certainly I was bothered that they were so ignorant about the meaning and connotations of those terms. And I was bothered because when I’d asked my father what words like those meant, he had explained how they were used to hurt other people.

So, that was already the context I had before South Park premiered in 1996, when I was 10 years old.

I was not allowed to watch it until I was 12, and only then because my friend Leo watched it (presumably, his dad had watched it, and told my mother it was okay).

But very specifically, the thing about South Park is that the show was always punching up. And here, I have to make a distinction between the show and its characters. The characters you are supposed to identify with, are Stan and Kyle. They are the straight men. So when a character like Eric Cartman - who represents all of the kids I grew up with who called other kids “faggot” or made fun of them for superficial reasons, without truly knowing or understanding the origin or consequence of their words - calls Kyle a stupid jew, you are supposed to be outraged with Kyle, not thinking “this Cartman character is hilarious, and I should behave like him.”

And obviously, a lot of kids I knew, as I went on to high school, had taken Cartman as the role model, rather than the bad example.

Let’s talk about Family Guy for a minute. I have thought episodes of Family Guy were funny. But as it came out a bit later, when I was a bit older, I was more able to see it for what it was (and is still) - a platform for Seth MacFarlane to shit-disturb, and champion what my friends over on Mastodon have amusingly rephrased as “freeze peach,” free speech without consequences.

In Family Guy, Peter Griffin is supposed to be the Cartman character.

Wait, let’s scoot back a second. Both characters are supposed to be the Archie Bunker character. The character you love to hate. The character who says inappropriate things, while the good, but less developed characters react with outrage. You’re not supposed to sympathize with them, but some people - people who still believe what a character portrayed as an idiot/out-of-touch curmudgeon seems to believe - will think they are being catered to.

So, Peter is supposed to be that. Only there are no straight-men on Family Guy - except Lois and Meg. The two women on the show who are physically beaten on screen or constantly verbally abused by the male characters on the show. Punishing them for being straight-man characters, on the rare occasion that they are that. Not to mention that the humour in Family Guy is almost never situational. It is almost always a cut-away joke - a thing which South Park rightly criticizes it for, in the Cartoon Wars episodes.

And knowing that South Park’s use of Cartman as an Archie Bunker type has been misinterpreted, for whatever reason, why have I stuck with it for so long?

At the heart of South Park is satire. Like, real satire, not the “satire” that alt-righters claim to use.

The parents on the show are shown as largely incompetent and driven by impulse/fear. The boys are, by contrast, progressive and wise. Cartman’s offensive behaviour has consequences for him, in ways that Family Guy characters never face consequences. For every scheme he enacts, he is thwarted, either by one of the other boys, or his own folly (in a Seinfeld-esque kind of way). Characters he offends on the show are quick to make him face consequences.

And, unlike Family Guy, South Park’s political leanings are more anarchist than libertarian. While Family Guy’s creators would champion free speech in the name of a racist joke, South Park only champions free speech in the name of valid criticism or in the service of making a moral point.

The underlying theme of many South Park episodes is to think for yourself, or that blindly following authority or acting out of fear is foolish, and has negative consequences.

Stereotypes are used and sometimes stretched to ridiculous proportions on South Park, as a means of demonstrating how stupid and ridiculous it is that we believe or rely on those stereotypes in media.

I won’t say that South Park hasn’t made missteps, but I find it hard to believe that it could train anyone to be anything but a critical thinker with anticapitalist, leftist leanings.

As always, a great deal of media is made with one intention, and misappropriated by ignorant people, who don’t fully comprehend that they are seeing something critical of a certain way of thinking, because comprehending that requires the capacity for abstract thought, which the ignorant, typically, lack.

I could see how Family Guy might encourage alt-right beliefs in young people, because it is edge-lordy, and it champions free speech over good conscience. I don’t know that I’d place the onus on the show so much as on the viewers for failing to make a more discerning choice. After all, one of the most popular shows on television: The Big Bang Theory, routinely mocks higher education, interest in niche subjects, makes a joke out of sexual harassment, and plays with misogyny. And it was propped up by a laugh track it didn’t deserve. The majority of Americans decided it was their favourite show. Far more so than Family Guy or South Park, and definitely since at least the mid 2000s.

I dunno, guys. This just feels like another “video games cause violence” argument, from people who don’t play videogames.

You know what I don’t think? I don’t think eating squid causes peritonitis. I’ve never eaten it. I have no reason to believe that it would cause peritonitis. But I sure don’t like the idea of eating squid, so it sure would be helpful to pretend that I don’t eat it because it might cause peritonitis. If only I were willing to live that kind of lie...

[biofunmy]

‘The Longing for Less’ Gets at the Big Appeal of Minimalism

As a millennial who graduated from college in 2010, in the lingering wake of the financial crisis, the cultural critic Kyle Chayka haltingly admits to being a minimalist, but only “by default.”

When he began writing “The Longing for Less,” he was put off by how minimalism had become commodified — a smug cure-all that countered late-capitalist malaise with self-help books by Marie Kondo and seasonal pilgrimages to The Container Store. His own minimalism was a consequence of living as an underpaid writer in New York: No basements and no closets meant no storage space for stuff.

But those two kinds of minimalism — sleek lifestyle branding and enforced austerity — don’t quite convey the enormousness of the subject Chayka explores in this slender book. Delving into art, architecture, music and philosophy, he wants to learn why the idea of “less is more” keeps resurfacing. He sees it as a shadow to material progress, a reaction to abundance, a manifestation of civilization’s discontents. He remembers growing up in a three-story house with a two-car garage in rural Connecticut and feeling mildly oppressed by “detritus scattered at random all over the place.”

The book itself is like an exercise in decluttering, as Chayka cycles through different ideas in order to find those he wants to keep. An inevitable section on Kondo doesn’t find much to commend in her approach, deeming it a force for homogeneity and, like comparable books in the genre, “an exercise in banality.” For Chayka, Kondo’s method clearly doesn’t spark joy.

More generative for him are the examples of artists who became known as Minimalists even as they disavowed the term. Experiencing their work sharpens his senses; in place of the dull hum of overstimulation, Chayka gains a heightened existential awareness. Walter De Maria’s “The New York Earth Room,” a pile of loose soil that takes up the expanse of a second-floor loft in SoHo, evokes vivid memories of the woods near Chayka’s childhood home. Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes in Marfa, Tex., suggest an “absolute freedom” that the author finds “implacable, aggressive and intimidating.” Chayka is moved when he considers how Agnes Martin created her ghostly grid paintings by paying assiduous attention to each and every line, repeating her actions over and over again, a process as mindful as prayer.

But the vulgarity of the real world keeps threatening to intrude. “Art becomes retail surprisingly quickly,” Chayka writes of Marfa, where Judd’s work turned the remote town into a place where upscale tourists can easily procure a vegan sandwich or a glass of rosé. Driving on the highway nearby, Chayka gets waved through an immigration checkpoint; his Marfa trip in 2018 coincided with the first reports that border guards a mere 60 miles away were separating migrant parents from their children.

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Kyle ChaykaCredit…Gregory Gentert

President Donald Trump, with his steaks and his golf courses and his gilded rooms, is like the anti-minimalist: opulent, ostentatious, overwhelming. Chayka, who mentions Trump at several points in the book, hopes minimalism might provide an antidote or a balm. He compares an exhibit of Martin’s paintings to a “visual spa treatment” after the November 2016 election; he recalls how the new administration’s “reckless enthusiasm” made him want to hide. “I had subconsciously started wearing all-gray clothing,” Chayka writes, as if he were trying to blend into the city’s unnatural landscape of concrete and steel.

What’s most striking about Chayka’s minimalist gestures is how frail they seem next to the larger upheavals that are taking place. And he knows this. Discussing the renunciatory philosophy of the Stoics and Henry David Thoreau, he discerns “a strategy of avoidance, especially in moments when society feels chaotic or catastrophic.” There’s a strain of this in contemporary lifestyle minimalism, which offers self-protection and retreat: “Your bedroom might be cleaner, but the world stays bad.”

The minimalism that Chayka seeks encourages not an escape from the world but a deeper engagement with it. In John Cage’s “4’33”,” silence is “radical and revolutionary,” forcing the audience to pause and actively listen to its surroundings. (When it was first performed in 1952, the setting was an old barn in the woods; the sounds of silence included rustling leaves and drizzling rain.) The music of Julius Eastman presents a kind of ecstatic minimalism — a bid to achieve, as the composer put it, “what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.” In the 1930s, the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki wrote “In Praise of Shadows,” noticing in darkness “a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow.”

Chayka’s journey ends in a rock garden in Kyoto, where serene contemplation contends with jostling visitors. “What I saw,” he writes, “was dramatic simplicity side by side with unruly life.” Reconciliation in a setting like this seems possible. But what happens when life isn’t just “unruly” but something more overwhelming and sinister? Can you reconcile the “dramatic simplicity” of a Donald Judd sculpture with children in cages? Should you even try?

It’s an irreducible tension that’s never quite resolved, because resolution would be beside the point. “The Longing for Less” generates more questions than it answers — which is only appropriate, considering that the “deeper minimalism” Chayka pursues is more about vulnerability than control.

This vulnerability is an inextricable element of the human condition, even if the wealthiest Americans have the resources to erect fortresses around themselves — not necessarily of objects but of infrastructure, building personal safety nets while their fellow citizens scramble to make do. “Up through the 20th century, material accumulation and stability made sense as forms of security,” Chayka writes. “Little of this feels true today.” Tangible goods now cost exceedingly less, and intangible “forms of security” cost exceedingly more.

After all, it’s unlikely that the tchotchkes or the new TV set will toss you into financial straits; it’s the college tuition that will put you into crushing debt, the very real possibility you’ll outlive your meager retirement account, or the medical treatment not covered by insurance. Reading Chayka’s book put me in mind of a longing for less stuff, and a longing for more support.

Sahred From Source link Arts

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September 25, 2015

After Inciting a Race War Against Whites, Jews Are Now Giving Up Their “Whiteness”

http://www.renegadetribune.com/after-inciting-a-race-war-against-whites-jews-are-now-giving-up-their-whiteness/

Kyle Hunt  |  67 Comments  |  September 25, 2015

Jews Are Not White, Regardless of What Jared Taylor Says

Jews have identified as “White” in order to infiltrate, take over, and subvert White Western civilization. However, now that they have achieved incredible power and used government, media, and academia to wage an all-out assault against White people, top jewish leaders are now telling jews to abandon “Whiteness” in order to join in the fight against “racism”. According to them, race is just a social construct, so there really is no issue with jews choosing to be White one day and an oppressed minority (that controls almost everything) the next.

The title of this recent article from the Washington Post really says it all.

Jews in America struggled for decades to become white. Now we must give up whiteness to fight racism.

You should really read the whole article, but here’s a short excerpt for your consideration.

In a flawed and racist society, we Jewish Americans are prospering, reaching the top echelons of privilege and power. With racism and injustice entrenched year after year, generation after generation, we must now ask ourselves: What role do we play in that injustice now that most of us live as white people in America? We must cease to consider ourselves to be part of the social construct of whiteness, despite all the white privilege that America affords us, privilege that eluded many of our parents and grandparents. Starting in this new year of 5776, we must teach our children that we are, in fact, not white, but simply Jewish.

For centuries jews have flip-flopped back and forth, only being White when it suits them. They like to hide behind “Whiteness” in America when their people commit massive crimes, from the recent Wall Street scams that cost us trillions of dollars all the way back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which they dominated. Since jews control our media, you will only see TV shows, movies, books, and articles with an Aryan man whipping his negroes, not the hook-nosed merchant who was the real oppressor, who also enslaved Whites.

Jews also like to claim to be White when they are trying to make real Whites feel guilty for their “White privilege” or when encouraging violence against evil Whitey. A recent example of this was seen when writer Max Benwell supported Bahar Mustafa’s hashtag #KillAllWhiteMen from the perspective of a “White man”, even though he has also written articles about how he’s a jewish man.

Of course it wouldn’t look very good for the jewish cause if he had written “As a jewish man… #KillAllWhiteMen”. It would make the genocidal game a little too obvious.

A similar incident happened recently when Jesse Benn, a jewish author at the Huffington Post, wrote as a White person that we need “White wounding”.

Another good example is the anti-racist anti-White author Tim Wise, who makes loads of shekels talking about White privilege and racism, under the guise that he  himself is a White man, even though he is a jew. He even wrote a book titled White Like Me!

This is similar to the case of Noel Ignatiev, the retired professor who makes it clear that he wants to abolish the White race. He is the publisher of Race Traitor Magazine, but if this jew was actually being a traitor, he would be calling for the extermination of the jewish race. Therefore, he is not a race traitor, but yet another a jew pushing White genocide.

Now let’s take a brief look at how jews work to ingratiate themselves to other “minorities” by distancing themselves from “Whiteness”. As many people already know, the NAACP was founded and run by jews for decades. Jews guided Blacks during the entire “Civil Rights” struggle in order to disenfranchise and destroy White Americans.

Their claims of not being White are nothing new either.

A Times of Israel article from 2014 echoed these sentiments as well, signalling to jews that it is time to jump ship.

Now that White genocide is in full swing, they are also signalling to non-Whites that jews are totally on their side in their struggle against Whitey.

After the justified killing of a violent Black who assaulted a White policeman, rabbis converged on Ferguson to show their solidarity with the Black community, who ended up looting and burning the city. Here’s one such rabbi marching side by side with a “youth”.

Jews say “Black Lives Matter” in America, but don’t hold your breath to ever see such banners in Israel, which is perhaps the most “racist” country in the world. Still, they are somehow able to convince many “minorities” that they really are noble-hearted social justice warriors, in order to form a massive coalition (which includes many Whites) intent on dismantling any vestiges of White civilization.

So who or what are these jews really? Jews overall are a mixed race, which still maintains a strong identity, able to blend into a number of different ethnicities for strategic purposes. Yes, there are some jews who have light skin, but jews are not White!

Again from the Washington Post article:

The brilliance of being Jewish, though, is that we stubbornly refuse to fit into any social construct of power or oppression. We are simply Ivri’im, people from “somewhere else,” people who struggle with God and justice, who demand that the rest of the world does, too, and see every human life as sacred because we are all in the image of God. And the truth is, we have never belonged to one race alone. The Torah tells us that we left Egypt with the “erev rav,” with a mixed multitude of peoples. Around the world there are Jews of color, Asian Jews, Jews of all kinds. The idea that Jews are white is not only ridiculous, it’s offensive to who we really are!

So with that last sentence in mind, I would like to ask Jared Taylor whether or not he still thinks jews are White.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bean6vT-2ms

I would also like to confront Thom Hartmann about this subject, as he ridiculed me on air for saying that jews are not White. Thom was being offensive to jews by calling them White!

https://youtu.be/u8hXW0jDEB8

This cable TV interview came out well before the Times of Israel and Washington Postarticles, so I hope I was able to help force this issue so we could get some clarification.

Let’s not allow jews to play their crypsis game. They need to be clearly identified.

The Jew is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a scoundrel, parasite, swindler, profiteer, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a Jew and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back: “I’ve been found out.” ~ Goebbels

Yes, Juden, we’ve figured out what you’re doing and we’re not going to allow it to continue unchecked.

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