#it’s like erasing history

[earthly-ali3n]

i know we all say it as a joke (kind of) but i recently washed my water bottle for the first time since [loud train rushes by] [cars honking] [loud crashing and scraping of metal] [cat screeching] and it really did lose its flavour :(

[accioepiphany]

The bear trying to gaslight me into believing Claire and Carmy’s relationship was all sunshine by putting some never seen before flashbacks where he is suddenly smiling all the time… when the only thing we see season 2 is him miserable and worried and bathed in blue light everytime he is with or thinks about Claire, to the point he even had a panic attack about it????

[casscainmainly]

It's interesting how Batfanon tends to weaponise anger against characters of colour. Damian is either always unjustifiably angry ('feral', 'demon', etc.), or his anger is consistently trivialised as childish/cute. Duke and Cass are on the other end of the spectrum, where they're not even allowed to be angry. They are 'perfect good children', who are perpetually soft and kind. In canon, all three have been justifiably and unjustifiably angry; they've been irrational, they've been righteously mad; and (aside from racist Damian writing) they are angry without being villainised. If our conception of Damian, Cass, or Duke strips them of their right to be angry, then we need to reconsider the way we view characters of colour. Anger is a human emotion - by removing it, or by demonising characters for feeling it, we are dehumanising them.

[deimosatellite]

like idk it just seems actually nefarious to take one of the very few widely known instances of queerness in older history being a symbol to show queer people that we've always existed and aren't alone for CENTURIES and taking away the queerness from it. like. i know some people say that ''the queerness isnt important in the book" which i mean in my opinion i could go off for 10k words in an essay as to how basil's love for dorian is integral to the story BUT EVEN APART from that its really just. having a real explicitly queer character in such an old and widely regarded classic novel is HUGE for queer history and this is just. literally like. its 2024. why are you doing queer erasure to DORIAN GRAY

[armandposting]

I can't think about armand's age/gender dysphoria without wanting to scream for a thousand years. how he's constantly seen as a young boy because he was turned at 17 but by that point even before he's lived a minute as a vampire he already hasn't felt like a boy for years. and all the men who see him this way want to use him like a man without treating him as one. he's constantly saying to their faces that he is a man with wants and desires and feelings and they're like hmm that's nice. not to me though. but not in a way that protects any of the child in him. they're not like, you're a boy and that means you should be kept safe. they're like, you're a boy and that means whatever I do to you is not real. because you're not real and now you're so frozen that no matter what you do you never will be. literally no wonder he has every problem.

[leroibobo]

another mena language post - i wanted to talk about judeo-arabic and clarify a little bit about what "judeo-arabic" means

the basics, for those of you who don't know: arabic, being a language that was spread over a large part of the world and has since evolved into many different forms, has many different things that differentiate certain dialects. languages/dialects can be influenced by languages speakers' ancestors spoke before, by the social structure of where speakers live, by languages they come into contact with, and by gradual evolution in pronunciation. (many letters like evolving into ones that are easier to pronounce - this is why arabic has no "p" sound, it eventually evolved into "f" or "b". the same thing happened in germanic languages to some extent, which is why we say "father" in english and "vader" in german while in romance languages it's some variation of "padre" or "père".) many arabic dialects in particular possess different substratum (obvious, traceable influence from languages people spoke in before shifting to the new one).

arabic, being a language that was spread over a large part of the world and has since evolved into many different forms, has many different regional dialects which are different for the reasons i described in the above paragraph. even though there's modern standard arabic (which is the subject of its own post), people speak regional dialects in real life. on top of that, there's a variety of social influences on different types of arabic, such as whether someone's living in the city or in the country, whether someone's sedentary or a bedouin, and in some cases religion.

in the middle east, religion was historically:

not seen as a personal choice, but as something you're born into and a group you're a part of, kind of like ethnicity;

not generally something governments actively wanted everyone to share one of at the penalty of ostracization due to sticking to your group being the more livable way of life in the area, or later, the benefits of things like imposing extra taxes on people who weren't the "correct" religion/branch (this is far from being a "muslim thing" btw, it's been in the area for a while now, i mean look at the assyrians);

an influential factor in where you lived and who you were more likely to interact with because of those two things. (for example, it wasn't uncommon for most of the people living in one village in the countryside to share one religion/branch of a religion. if your village converted, you converted, too. if they didn't, you didn't, either.)

this means that the influence of religion in different types of arabic is due to people of different religions living in or coming from different places, and who people talked to most often.

for example, in bahrain, most sedentary shia bahrainis' ancestors have lived on the island for a very long time, while most sedentary sunni bahrainis' ancestors immigrated from other places in the gulf and iran in the 18th century. therefore, while they've all interacted and shared different aspects of their dialects including loanwords, there are two "types" of bahraini arabic considered distinctive to sunni and shia bahrainis respectively, regardless of how long ago their ancestors got there. despite the differences being marked by the religion of the speakers, they have nothing to do with religion or contact/lack thereof between bahraini sunni and shia, but with the factors affecting the different dialects i mentioned in the first paragraph which influenced either group.

a similar phenomenon to this in english is class differences in accent in england. nothing in received pronunciation is actually something only rich people can say or unintelligible to poor people, it developed by the class differences influencing where rich and poor english people lived and the different pronunciation/linguistic histories in those places, as well with different classes keeping more to themselves.

the influence of religion on arabic dialects isn't universal and nowhere near as intense as it is with aramaic. some places, especially more cosmopolitan or densely populated places, are less likely to have very noticeable differences or any differences at all. in addition, certain variations of a dialects that may've been influenced by religion in some way (as well as urban dialects) may be standardized through tv/movies/social media or through generally being seen as more "prestigious", making more people who wouldn't have spoken them otherwise more likely to pick it up. (this is why so many arabic speakers can understand egyptian arabic - cairo is like the hollywood of the arabic-speaking world.) this is the case with many if not most countries' official and regional languages/dialects nowadays.

this phenomenon is what "judeo-arabic" refers to generally. like many other jewish diaspora languages, the "jewish" aspect is that it was a specific thing jewish people did to different types of arabic, not that it was isolated, possessed a large enough amount of certain loanwords (though some varieties did have them), or is unintelligible to non-jews. people were generally aware of differences where they existed and navigated between them. (for example, baghdadi jews may've switched to the more prestigious muslim baghdadi dialect when in public.) if you know arabic, listen to this guy speak, you should be able to understand him just fine.

judeo-arabic also often used the hebrew alphabet and some may have been influenced by hebrew syntax and grammar in their spelling. you can also see the use of script for religious identification in persian and urdu using the arabic script, and in english using the latin alphabet. in general, influences of hebrew/aramaic on different types of judeo-arabic aren't consistent. you can read more about that here.

"judeo-arabic" isn't a universal that definitely happened in every arabic-speaking part of the world that had jews in it to the same degrees, but it did definitely exist. some examples:

after the siege of baghdad in 1258, where mongols killed all muslim baghdadis and spared baghdadis of other religions, bedouins from the south gradually resettled the city. this means that the "standard" sedentary dialect in the south is notably bedouin influenced, while dialects in the north are more notably influenced by eastern aramaic. christians and (when they lived there) jews in baghdad have dialects closer to what’s up north. within those, there's specific loans and quirks marking the differences between "christian" and "jewish".

yemenite jews faced some of the most persistent antisemitic persecution in the middle east, so yemeni jewish arabic was more of a city thing and often in the form of passwords/codewords to keep jews safe. jews were usually a lot safer and better-regarded in the countryside, so jewish yemeni arabic was much less of a thing there, and when it was, it was less "serious".

due to the long history of maghrebi immigration to palestine, there's attestation of maghrebi influences in arabic spoken by some palestinian jews with that origin. this was also a thing in cairo to some extent.

(i'd link sources, but most of them are in hebrew, i guess you'll have to trust me on this one??)

still, the phrase "judeo-arabic" is often used with the implication that it was one all encompassing thing (which it wasn't, as you can see), or that jews everywhere had it in some way. many jews who spoke some version of arabic special to their mostly-jewish locale may not have registered it as a specifically "jewish" version of arabic (though they did more often than not). the truth is that research about anything related to middle eastern and north african jews is often sloppy, nonexistent, and often motivated by the desire of the researcher to prove something about israel's colonization of palestine (on either "side" of the issue). this is not me being a centrist about the colonization of palestine, this is me stating that academia is often (even usually) influenced by factors that aren't getting the best and most accurate information about something. i don't think we're going to get anything really "objective" on arabic spoken by jews in that regard for a long while.

for comparison's sake: yiddish is considered a separate language from german due to 19th century yiddishists' efforts to "evolve" yiddish from dialect to language (yiddish-speaking jews were said to speak "corrupted german" historically; on that note sephardim were also said to speak "corrupted spanish"). this was at a time when ethnic nationalism was en vogue in europe and declaring a national language meant declaring your status as a sovereign nation (both metaphorically and literally). for yiddishists to assert that they were speaking a language and not a dialect that intrinsically tied them to germans was to reject the discrimination that they were facing. (besides, german/austrian/swiss jews weren't speaking yiddish (leaving it with the connotation of being the language of those icky ostjuden), yiddish-speaking jews had practically zero other ties to germany/austria/switzerland, and yiddish-speaking jews (let alone the yiddishists) were almost entirely east of germany/austria/switzerland, so it's not like they were pulling this out of their ass.)

whether a jewish person of arabic-speaking descent calls it "arabic", "judeo-arabic", or something like "moroccan"/"syrian"/etc depends on who you're talking to, where they're from (both diaspora origins and today), how old they are, and what they think about zionism. despite "judeo-arabic" being what it's called in academia, on the ground, there's no real strong consensus either way because the social circumstances arabic-speaking jews lived in didn't drive them to form a movement similar to yiddishists. (not because there was no discrimination, but because the political/social/linguistic circumstances were different.) the occupation since made the subject of middle eastern jews’ relation to the middle east a contentious topic considering the political and personal weight behind certain cultural identifiers. the term "judeo-arabic" is modern in comparison - whether it's a distinction dredged up by zionist academics to create separations that didn't really exist or a generally accurate term for a specific linguistic phenomenon is a decision i'll leave you to make.

[starbiology]

The Kingdom of Altador? The Queen has never heard of such a place 😗

[singlecrow]

If your response to "Harry Potter is the creation of a violent transphobe" is "well actually I never liked it anyway" your concern is with your moral defensibility rather than its transphobia

[autismmydearwatson]

It's actually so funny that in Rebels season 3 Ezra goes to so much trouble making sure Thrawn, the guy who is famous for using art for military advantage, doesn't find Atollon by erasing it from the Empires maps, only for Thrawn to find it anyway by studying fucking folk art

[clottedscream]

the discord cooked up a real world setting au so i made some semi-realistic-but-not-really portraits of the museum trio to go with it

[raylangivins]

I like that the better than revenge lyrics are immature and unfeminist. I like that they were written by a teenager and sound like they were written by a teenager. It’s part of the charm!!! It adds such a fun dynamic to listen to them as an adult now because I was once a petty teenage girl too and petty teenage girls should get to express themselves messily and imperfectly and I’m so fond of my stupid younger self, like…that’s my little friend!!! Reject shame, Taylor!!! Let your foolish teenage self speak with her words!!!!

[factsilike]

One of the things I very much hate about modern AUs in MDZS is how the fic writers Americanise everything about the characters until the only thing Asian about them is their name.

[pan-catra]

anyone calling Catra and Adora sisters is actively engaging in lesbophobic rhetoric btw. i can’t believe i have to tell this to my fellow non-hets but maybe don’t reiterate age old anti-lesbian talking points just because you hate a ship.

[rawliverandgoronspice]

One small pet peeve of mine, but I see it popping up often, is the notion that the gerudos are a patriarchy because once in a blue moon a boy is born and is crowned king about it (at least in OoT lore). And that's... not how structural gendered power works, at least as far as I understand it? Otherwise countries all over the world would magically turn into a matriarchy if they elected a woman/the second they would crown a queen; and every little children would suddenly be taught completely different stories about their social roles and their bodies, and all religions would suddenly shift a little in the core tenents of their philosophies, and infrastructure and laws would magically be reshuffled, and, and... and it simply doesn't happen.

So yeah, Ganondorf grew up as king because the idea of kinghood was thought out, upheld and passed down by women, and specifically by his mothers. Ultimately, any real power rests in the cultural consciousness of a majority of women, which shapes all of them, including him. If they had culturally decided their only boy's fate was to be shunned, or a living coat hanger, and Ganondorf was raised on these ideas instead... I mean, he could have revolted, and he probably would have, but he would have still been a subject to a matriarchal ideology. Just because said matriarchal ideology works to his advantage doesn't mean he has control over it.

[da2supremacy]

I know that removing the Valaslin is the overwhelmingly most common choice among the Greater Solavellan but I gotta know...

Is there anyone else out there who doesn't let Solas remove it?

[rushingheadlong]

You know something I don't think I've ever seen people talk about is how Freddie changed the lyrics for Big Spender.

Because in case you don't know, all original versions of the song are sung by women - and it is made very clear that they are singing to men:

The minute you walked in the joint I could see you were a man of distinction A real big spender [....] So let me get right to the point: I don't pop my cork for every man I see Hey, big spender Spend a little time with me

Probably not too surprising, then, that when Queen performed this song in 1974 Freddie had to do a bit of a gender-switch on it:

Though, it would probably be more accurate to say that Freddie made this song gender-neutral because he didn't change it to be about a woman. He eliminated the first use of "man" entirely and then sang "I don't pop my cork for everyone I see" (instead of "every man").

And honestly there's probably a whole dissertation you could write just about those changes alone, but what I really love is when Queen brought the song back in 1986 and Freddie changed the lyrics again:

Because yes he still dropped the first "man" but the "everyone" is changed and Freddie instead sang "every guy" with just the barest hint of a "-rl" sound at the end to give him plausible deniability if anyone asked about it.

So much of Freddie's music speaks to his experiences as a queer man but, because of the nature of the times in which he lived, he couldn't always be directly open about that fact. Most of his love songs are intentionally vague, and he sang about "somebody" or "you" to avoid having to use gendered terms as much as possible.

Freddie singing "I don't pop my cork for every GUYrl I see" wasn't just an adjustment to the original lyrics, it was a specific change from how Freddie had sang it before in order to make it more gay in a way that he could rarely be with his own music, and that is what I adore about this. It's such a little thing, but it gives such a unique insight into how Freddie balanced his sexuality and his stardom, and how the relationship between those two changed over the nearly 12 years between these performances.