#it feels infantilizing tbqh

[j-esbian]

i dont fucking care if that’s how your mama raised you and you’re just trying to be polite and helpful, STOP FUCKING TAKING THINGS FROM ME especially when i say i don’t need help!!!!

[devilsskettle]

dinner in america is such a “take what you want from it and leave the rest” movie for me because i do think it’s very cute and i can buy into some of the wish fulfillment nature of the story but admittedly there are some parts that really don’t work for me, there are some parts that fall a little flat either in terms of the characters or humor, and the pacing is a bit of a challenge tbh. but it’s unbelievable what the human brain can overcome by virtue of simply Just Liking That Guy

[primowishes]

//There's a lot of fanon stuff for characters that just get on my nerves so bad, and I simply block and move on, but the infantilization of Furina is one of those things that I absolutely cannot stand.

[tomwambsgans]

Shiv and Matsson both call him Gregory in S4 too btw. Shiv while she was threatening him in America Decides and Matsson idr which episode but it was after one of their nights out together and it was “Gregory Peggory”. Shiv I feel probably for infantilization purposes and Matsson as a tease/insult. Roman I couldn’t tell you the reasoning behind that. I’m a little sad they allowed more people than Tom the trait of calling him by his full name but tbf that is how he introduces himself in professional settings.

oh shit yeah you're right.. and actually its all sliding into place now. there's def still something to be analyzed about those moments bc of how rare it is. greg asserting himself to be called Gregory is a defining moment for him as silly as the scene was framed, with us then being able to see who actually, singularly respects him (tom) and if nothing else, the isolated moments of other characters saying it have got to allude to the fact that greg is playing a serious role, that his professional persona is coming into itself, etc. Plus the flavor of irony that you get from shiv and roman when they say it, like they want him to do something for them and have some half conscious notion of this will help convince him - but at the same time they're too obviously mocking the notion of greg being the Real Person he claims to be, and thus do not get him on their side.

matsson is an even more mixed bag, tbqh somewhat similarly to tom's sexually charged razzing from early season one - greg himself says that he was treated "quite abominably" on the night before the election but in a way that he figures he can work with. and i have to think that while matsson does not respect greg as a whole person (and I kinda think he's not capable of respecting anyone that fully), he respects greg's hustle and sees him as a funny little guy that he'll find useful. it's less pretending to respect him even as a joke when he says Gregory and more just twisting the connotations of it entirely, from saint to jester

[humanoidtyphoons]

love and redemption, thus far, feels like a nice blend between ashes of love and love between fairy and devil tbqh, a bit. i mean, maybe less so the latter, but the fluffiness is so nice. but i suppose parallels with dongfang and xuan ji are there there, even if xuan ji is def. more similar personality wise to orchard.

i mean, sure, different strokes with AOL and LAR, bc jin mi is unaware of the unfeeling pill inside of her and so xu feng is also unaware of this as he tries to steal her away, whereas from the start, both xuan ji and si feng know about her senses being removed from her, but idk. it does remind me a little bit of AOL, even tho i kind of hated near everyone by the end (even tho i kind of loved them for being insane, so. ymmv). so but this time around it’s not quite as... idk if infantilizing is the right word, bc jin mi does get character development and it does make sense why she’s so ditzy and silly to begin with, to a ridiculous degree; but xuan ji isn’t quite as incompetent as jin mi at the start, and more like orchard, in a way.

anyway, it’s cute so far!

[armadilllidiumvulgare]

Really really really not a fan of the current zeitgeist of just saying whatever piece of mainstream american media is like a gateway to socialism/communism/whatever vaguely defined leftist belief system when it has even the most broad and basic of humanitarian/egalitarian themes. This insistance that fudamentally escapist and unchallenging feel-good popular fiction is actually woke as fuck and "radicalising" the youth is just soooo fucking infantile and intellectually dishonest and I'm sick of it tbqh. You can just like the stupid fucking TV shows without having to pretend they're somehow a good basis for a political worldview

is it fine to say i think this kind of person should be pulverised by a hydraulic press forced to read a book about socialism

[hostilehospitalbeds]

Ok ok you know what? I'm sick of this fucking condescending infantilizing "read a new book" mentality y'all have. Guess what? I have read MANY other books and I actually love some of them way more than hp (Ask me about the southern reach trilogy!) I'm an adult with varied interests. But Harry Potter still means something to me and I don't care if you think it's stupid. I still think it's a good story with good world-building and I love the characters. I hated jk rowling before you did but I can't just delete hp from my life and more importantly I won't. I'm sure you like things with bigoted creators tbqh I really just see this as another excuse to hate on hp fans that now you can pat yourself on the back and feel self-righteous for!

[moonlitgleek]

"Daenerys Targaryen. I do not seem to be able to separate my feelings towards her story and my feelings towards her." Can you talk more about your problems regarding her story, please?

Um, well, this is not a subject that I like to delve in tbqh. My frustration and aversion to the way GRRM write huge chunks of this story often trips me up and I find myself mostly unable to be as coherent as I’d like to be, and as the subject deserves. I’ll do my best with it but I’d recommend reading @valiantnedspreciouslittlegirl’s post on the subject because it puts into words a lot of what I dislike in Dany’s story.

My problem is that Martin employs a lot of racist tropes in constructing Dany’s story. We’re introduced to Dany as she goes into her marriage to Khal Drogo and experience Dothraki culture, making her the one to shape our view of said culture, aided by Jorah Mormont who serves as her advisor from the very beginning. Not only is there a problem in having our sole view of one of few prominently non-white societies filtered through the eyes of white characters, but the narrative sets Dany up as the white girl coming to civilize and gentle the savage POC, and oh aren’t the Dothraki so savage and uncultured, they do not even have a word for thank you!!!

While the Dothraki culture is definitely one that needs lots of reforms, Martin’s depiction of them in general is deeply racist. He falls back on stereotypes and dehumanizing portrayals to carry the story, reducing them to a monolithic society built on violence, subjugation and sexual submission. He never bothers to flesh them out, he never bothers to give distinction for different characters that isn’t built on brutality (can you tell me what differentiates Irri from Jhiqui, or Aggo fromRakharo fromJhogo, or any of the khals from each other?), he never bothers to give them substance. He stomps all over them because they are mainly set up to contrast Dany’s own views and beliefs, and to bring her to the point where she “births” her dragons. He leaves them undeveloped and then uses that to make them bow down to the white, western-coded, civilized girl that has earned their loyalty to the point of them going against their deeply-believed and upheld social norms because she walked out of a pyre unburned, even though the Dothraki loath witchcraft. Sure Jan.

From the start, Dany’s story relies heavily on the white savior trope which is fundamentally racist. It’s a trope that has a white person descending on a non-white society to reform it and force a societal change that the residents of the region can’t or won’t force . It often goes hand-in-hand with the implication that the white person is doing it ~for the good of the nation they have invaded~. The story of an external white force coming to correct the injustice or the wrong behavior that exists in a non-white society is racist, for it often implies that the non-white society is incapable of reform on its own, that they need the intelligent white person to teach them and show them how civilized people do it, and it’s something that has been frequently used in our real world by imperialist forces to justify their occupation of a region. (Which hits too close for me because Middle-Eastern history is rife with such attempts. When you’re constantly told you’re oppressed and the progressive white people are gonna help you be better, you tend to have a visceral reaction to any fictional work that builds upon the same idea.)

Whether with the Dothraki or in Slaver’s Bay, Dany is the white woman bringing humane reforms to the savage cultures she comes in contact with, she is the enlightenment movement coming to the backwards POC cultures to fix it. This isn’t a defense of either culture because both really need serious reforms, but for that force of change to be the teenage white girl saving the indigenous people has serious racist connotations, not made at all better by Martin infantilizing the slaves that Dany frees by literally having them call her Mother. Because why not.

And the problem is that Dany does not quite fit the trope, she is not an imperialist despite Martin using imperialist writing in her story. She does not fall upon Slaver’s Bay because she wants to take advantage of the resources of the region, neither does she employ empty rhetoric about helping people to mask her imperialist ambitions or starts from a place of believed superiority. She truly cares about the slaves she frees. She is motivated by how powerless she felt herself and wants to spare others that same powerlessness. She respects the cultures she encounters and isn’t out to replace it with her own (implied superior) culture; on the contrary, she tries to preserve it and work within it to make away with the dehumanizing aspects without forcing a complete cultural shift. For me, Dany is a victim of her story because it is the single most racist narrative in the whole series by virtue of how utterly racist the writing is. That’s on Martin, not Dany. But like I said, I deal with how deeply uncomfortable I am with the story by disassociating from it, which affects how I connect to Dany despite my best efforts :/

[him-e]

Hi Claudia. just wondering are you going to talk about american gods? i'm very interested in what you thought about Laura and Mad sweeny. basically i'm interested in your opinion with all of it tbqh!

Sorry for the late reply, I wanted to catch up on the whole season before answering this. 

Laura/Mad Sweeney is one of those cases where the characters are individually good and interesting and all, but you smash them together in the same storyline, link them through the same mission (pursued by each for their individual reasons), add an improbable road trip that makes them care for each other even though they don’t want to, and BAM, they become SO MUCH MORE. their chemistry is weirdly explosive, which is funny because you never saw it coming.

A prayer for Mad Sweeney (a fantastic episode btw) got me hooked on this dynamic, although I’ve liked it since the beginning and had seen gifsets of it even before I caught up on their episodes so I was sort of expecting something interesting. I also have been reading the book as I watched the season—I’m being exceptionally slow, but I’ve read and loved the part about Essie McGowan’s coming to America, and it was a total surprise to see Emily play Essie too, which adds a new layer to Laura’s interactions with Sweeney (it’s SO “I’ve crossed oceans of time to find you”, isn’t it). I don’t know how the whole Laura thing plays out in the book—it is my understanding that she has a much smaller role in the novel, and they expanded it in the show? If so, they made a brilliant decision.

like Laura is SUCH A GOOD CHARACTER OMG?

she starts out as the most boring, sexist, predictable trope on earth. The dead girlfriend. Well, wife. Dead before she even appears on screen in tragic circumstances, so that the male hero can begin his journey while also sympathetically grieving for this terrible loss. How interesting. Did they really cast Emily Browning for this?

then we learn she was actually a cheating, lying bitch who died with another man’s dick in her mouth (her best friend’s husband, no less), while her husband was in jail because of her. THAT’s where we start suspecting there might be more to the trope, even if it’s not pleasant. Suddenly it’s incredibly hard to romanticize the Dead Wife.

but she doesn’t stop there. she literally walks out of the fridge the narrative had seemingly put her in, and comes BACK FROM THE DEAD, not as an ethereal ghost to motivate the Hero, but as a foul-smelling, decaying corpse with superhuman strength and a REALLY BAD ATTITUDE (including towards gods). Who is Very Determined to get her husband back, (also) because he’s apparently the only thing that makes her heart beat (literally). So you have some nice trope-inversion here because suddenly the (Alive) Hero becomes the Dead Wife’s motivating factor, idealized lover AND object of the quest, and she becomes the protagonist of her own storyline.

I mean she gets an entire episode dedicated to her backstory. which isn’t even THAT interesting (except it is, because she is). That’s really cool, even more so since it was a departure from the book itself.

what I like about Laura is that she’s actually a very repulsive person… in a relatable way. She’s selfish. She’s self-destructive (her addiction to the fly-spray is a superb use of foreshadowing). She doesn’t seem to have genuine feelings for anyone, let alone Shadow. She annoyingly calls him “puppy” which is both infantilizing and dehumanizing (esp. for a MoC). On a whim, she decides she wants to be “happy” and that happiness involves for some reason robbing the casino she works in, so she convinces Shadow to rob it for her, and he is arrested. Bottom line, she’s either just a total jerk with little redeeming qualities except being a cat person, or severely depressed (and it’s probably the latter).

She dies because of her self-destructiveness (subverted later, because after spending so much time blaming herself for that, she learns that the car crash wasn’t her fault, but Wednesday’s), is scorned and rejected for her unpleasantness even by the god of the underworld himself, but Mad Sweeney’s lucky coin, unwittingly given to Shadow, brings her back to life. So she comes back with a purpose, and that’s when she starts actually living, ironically. It’s funny because Shadow and Laura are linked through Mad Sweeney’s coin, because that’s what reanimated her, while Laura and Mad Sweeney are linked through Shadow, who is Laura’s purpose and unfinished business on earth, the spiritual reason why she’s alive (and able to physically meet Sweeney in the first place).

You know what else is funny? that Sweeney’s ~heart desire~ (his lucky coin) is ~literally~ IN LAURA’S CHEST. 

It’s her ersatz heart now. HE NEVER MEANT IT TO BE. So he tries to get it back through sheer force and manipulation at first, which is obviously not working because Laura has no problem beating his ass, then decides to help her so he can take her heart, er, his coin, from her chest without killing her. And THEN, ta dah character evolution, he sees her lying on the floor, dead as a doornail, chest open, all he has to do is reach out for his coin and just forget about her… but he puts it back in her chest. OMG? maybe he only needed Laura’s strength to move the truck… but the best romantic sacrifices are those that remain debatable in the eyes of the wider audience (see: Jaime jumping in the bearpit).

I say romantic even though there’s nothing explicitly romantic in their interactions (YET), which of course is why I fell for it. That, and other things (the ~hate at first time~ dynamic, the bickering, the height difference, the ~age~ difference—Sweeney being hundreds of years old— subverted by the fact that the *older* one really is just a whiny teenager, the ~small girl repeatedly kicks big foul-mouthed guy’s ass and is actually one of the few things he’s afraid of~, etc.)

I guess interacting with Laura (and Salim) was an A+++ thing for Sweeney in particular. Like Laura, he also starts out as a slightly opaque character. A minor one, to be honest. he’s huge (a tall leprechaun! LOL!), he’s ginger, he’s angry, he loves brawls, he has a bunch of magic coins. As a supernatural being, he’s not even a truly powerful one. While Laura’s zombie storyline is actually pretty interesting on its own, it would have been super easy to use Sweeney just as a comic relief, but thanks to this sideplot he’s allowed to reveal his softer side and humanity and hopefully have his own identity arc. So fingers crossed that there will be more next season!

[flowisk]

hey i'm here to talk about claptrap again. i love him. anyway what i wanted to ask is why so many people in fandom infantilize him so much? (i once saw someone said "claptrap don't swear you're a baby!") like :/? i mean he.. often talks about mature stuff, but idk (i actually know, that's because he is autistic but still)

man i know i had some debates with myself at first with claptrap, bc like, he’s like, 7 (prob 8 now?) and robot age is weird (and i was interested in the thought of ‘upsettingly mature kids’) but. I don’t see much critical thought/actual debate about that aspect of his character. I had a debate with myself early on bc it’s like… I was mostly thinking about robot ages/how they would line up in comparison to human ones.

Anyway, it seems to me he is definitely intended to be an adult (you wouldn’t make the kind of fucked up sex + booze jokes we get about claptrap otherwise) +  (interestingly, we have a section of Claptastic Voyage that is sort of devoted to his ‘childhood’ and earliest memories, which is just…. super interesting development wise). He’s older than LB and Gortys too, and is the oldest robot we know in series. Actually, since Gortys’ age is confusing (’older than she looks’), I think LB might be the youngest of prominent robots in the series. So if we were going to talk about the robots based on age alone, LB is the ‘babiest’ but isn’t the kind of character who gets infantilized even though I have read some interesting nd meta on him too. (I think this is personally interesting as someone who loves LB tho… Loader bots probably don’t get to live very long and develop, and that’s part of why their ranks have been cut down in the past by Hyperion - that’s another topic for another day)

I feel people really infantilize Claptrap… no matter what you can’t really view him as a baby, and we kind of get two variations of Claptrap… either he’s a baby or he’s annoying and not worth attention. Tbqh I’m happy when people say ‘anything’ positive about him but there’s a lot of… infantilization and… underestimation? of Claptrap as a character, or just… assumptions the dude is happy with whatever when he has clear topics he’s irritated about. Like, even less than an infant, I sometimes feel people go the (bad bastion meta) route and treat him like a dog… Like there’ll be posts about how Claptraps could be great support for people. Like support animals. and it’s like… well. Claptraps are people so… that’s super uncomfortable.

I do feel Claptrap actively has some kind of insecurities as someone who… doesn’t have many close figures in his life. So in BLTPS, with a younger Claptrap, we kind of get some maternal moments with Athena or Janey (even tho he’ll also call Athena hot) bc like… Claptrap doesn’t have people in his life, and is I guess, comparatively younger than them. We also definitely get this abusive parental lean to his relationship with Jack because there’s a few comments about Jack being his dad or Jack referring to himself as Claptrap’s ‘daddy’ and belittling him. None of this makes him younger (Angel is belittled by Jack and treated as a child despite being a young adult), but I do wonder if Claptrap seeking out comforting/nurturing relationships makes him more prone to infantilization… Think there’s a high chance of that being true. He seeks out a parental attention he lacked in his development, which is, something he does as a mentally ill adult in canon I think. (since claptrap has other things going on aside from being autistic there too… definitely a big recurrent theme of neglect in claptrap’s life)I think probably, there’s an in-game issue with infantilizing Claptrap too, and that heavily contributes to it… the game itself does some… hm. kind of weird childish imagery with claptrap at times and… I think it’s because borderlands as a series doesn’t take him too seriously tbqh ._. So even in canon, we sometimes get the… ‘these traits = childish’. So I guess it’s ultimately a combination of … people don’t think very in depth about Claptrap + take some elements at surface value + the game handles him a bit unevenly sometimes.also thanks to @necromin who helped me w some thoughts + contributed some.