#noble savage trope

[jewish-microwave-laser]

And here is the most devastating fact of Frank's posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden: we know what she would have said, because other people have said it, and we don't want to hear it.

The line most often quoted from Frank's diary are her famous words, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart." These words are "inspiring," by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank's hiding place, in her writings, in her "legacy." It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being "truly good at heart" before meeting people who weren't. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren't.

Here's how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank's writings. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.

We know this, because there is no shortage of writings from victims and survivors who chronicled this fact in vivid detail, and none of those documents have achieved anything like Frank's diary's fame. Those that have come close have only done so by observing those same rules of hiding, the ones that insist on polite victims who don't insult their persecutors The work that came closest to achieving Frank's international fame might be Elie Wiesel's Night, a memoir that could be thought of as a continuation of Frank's diary, recounting the tortures of a fifteen-year-old imprisoned in Auschwitz. As the scholar Naomi Seidman has discussed, Wiesel first published his memoir in Yiddish, under the title And the World Was Silent. The Yiddish book told the same story told in Night, but it exploded with rage against his family's murderers and, as the title implies, the entire world whose indifference (or active hatred) made those murders possible. With the help of the French Catholic Nobel laureate François Mauriac, Wiesel later published a French version under the new title La Nuit—a work that repositioned the young survivor's rage into theological angst. After all, what reader would want to hear about how this society had failed, how he was guilty? Better to blame G[-]d. This approach earned Wiesel a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as, years later, selection for Oprah's Book Club, the American epitome of grace. It did not, however, make teenage girls read his book in Japan, the way they read Frank's. For that he would have had to hide much, much more.

from "Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew" in People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn, pp 9–10

[spot-the-antisemitism]

Wow: https://apollos-olives.tumblr.com/post/755225793083392000

An archived version: http://archive.today/2024.08.15-053740/https://www.tumblr.com/apollos-olives/755225793083392000/imagine-how-beautiful-palestine-will-look-when-she?redirect_to=/apollos-olives/755225793083392000/imagine-how-beautiful-palestine-will-look-when-she&source=blog_view_login_wall

love that you archived them and them greenwashing hamas

antisemitic conspiracy theories (Jews ruin the air) meets literal greenwashing of jewish death and eco fascism

[hilacopter]

Who gives a fuck what you feel as if you don't despise arabs and islam.

ah, you got me there anon 😔 you're right, I'm an Islamophobic Arabophobic asshole because I view them as people capable of thinking and making rational decisions instead of what we all know they ACTUALLY are: quirky desert people who drink sand and wear funny clothes and have to kill Israelis because they simply don't know any better!!!/s

in all seriousness I assume you're talking about me condemning Hamas because I literally haven't said anything against Palestinian civilians or civilians of any other Arab country (nor am I here). I'm not against Islam, I'm not against Arabs, I'm against an extremist terrorist group who wants me and my family dead. and it just so happens that this group is Muslim and Arab! You know how ProPals always insist criticism of the Israeli government isn't antisemitic (a true statement I wish they'd actually deliver on)? you're basically applying the opposite of that logic here. criticism of Hamas is Islamophobic because, well, they're Muslims! and not treating every Muslim as perfect human being capable of doing no wrong is Islamophobic, actually. istg the way you people talk about Muslims and Arabs is so utterly dehumanising. ever heard of the noble savage trope?

[frank-o-meter]

An interesting article. Some key points:

Sully is the textbook example of a white savior.

The Na’vi are not portrayed as indigenous peoples. But instead colonialist’s fantasies of what indigenous people are like.

The Na’vi are are the embodiment of the Noble Savage” trope.

While intending to flatter the Na’vi, it patronizes them and depicts them as less than human.

[jewish-microwave-laser]

I eventually came to understand the profound insult inherent in the messages I was receiving, both directly and indirectly, from readers expecting uplifting Jewish literature full of moments of grace—not to me as a novelist, but to my ancestors who endured experiences like those I gave to my characters, and in a sense, to al those who have endured the most atrocious moments of Jewish history. Readers who demand "coherence" from literature about the modern Jewish experience were essentially insisting that Jewish suffering was only worth examining if it provided, in the words of my reader's memorable message, "a service to mankind." In retrospect I am stunned by how long it took me to understand just how hateful this was. Consider, as I only very slowly did, what this demand really entails. Dead Jews are supposed to teach us about the beauty of the world and the wonders of redemption—otherwise, what was the point of killing them in the first place? That's what dead Jews are for! If people were going to read about dead Jews, where was the service to mankind I owed them?

This is far from a fringe attitude among contemporary readers, as just about every bestselling Holocaust novel of our current century makes fantastically clear. Holocaust novels that have sold millions of copies both in the United States and overseas in recent years are all "uplifting," even when they include the odd dead kid. The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a recent international mega-bestseller touted for its "true story," manages to present an Auschwitz that involves a heartwarming romance. Sarah's Key, The Book Thief, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and many other bestsellers, some of which have even become required reading in schools, all involve non-Jewish rescuers who risk or sacrifice their own lives to save hapless Jews, thus inspiring us all. (For the record, the number of actual "righteous Gentiles" officially recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust museum and research center, for their efforts in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust is under 30,000 people, out of a European population at the time of nearly 300 million—or 0.01 percent. Even if we were to assume that the official recognition is an undercount by the factor of a thousand, such people remain essentially a rounding error.) In addition to their wonderful non-Jewish characters, these books are almost invariably populated by the sort of relatable dead Jews whom readers can really get behind: the mostly non-religious, mostly non-Yiddish-speaking ones whom noble people tried to save, and whose deaths therefore teach us something beautiful about our shared and universal humanity, replete with epiphanies and moments of grace. Statistically speaking, this was not the experience of almost any Jews who endured the Holocaust. But for literature in non-Jewish languages, that grim reality is both inconvenient and irrelevant.

from "Fictional Dead Jews" in People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn, pp 79–81

[spot-the-antisemitism]

Helping my vulnerable Palestinian neighbors by sitting by idly while Donald "You’ve got to finish the problem" Trump is running for president! 👍

they said and shot themselves in the chest to martyr themselves for palestine to the horror of their palestinean refugee neighbors who DID NOT WANT THIS

this is ALL white saviorism is as some fiery individuals have demonstrated

[jewish-microwave-laser]

The audio guide humbly speculates about who these people might have been: "She might have been a housewife or a factory worker or a musician..." The idea isn't subtle: this woman could be you. But to make her you, we have to deny that she was actually herself. These musings turn people into metaphors, and it slowly becomes clear to me that this is the goal. Despite doing absolutely everything right, this exhibition is not that different from Human Bodies, full of anonymous dead people pressed into service to teach us something.

At the end of the show, on-screen survivors talk in a loop about how people need to love one another. While listening to this, it occurs to me that I have never read survivor literature in Yiddish—the language spoken by 80 percent of victims—suggesting this idea. In Yiddish, speaking only to other Jews, survivors talk about their murdered families about their destroyed centuries-old communities, about Jewish national independence, about Jewish history, about self-defense, and on rare occasions, about vengeance. Love rarely comes up; why would it? But it comes up here, in this for-profit exhibition. Here it is the ultimate message, the final solution.

That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents antisemitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. It is entirely objectionable. The Holocaust didn't happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented—have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world—the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility.

Then, as now, Jews were cast in the role of civilization's nagging mothers, loathed in life, and loved only once they are safely dead. In the years since I walked through Auschwitz at fifteen, I have become a nagging mother. And I find myself furious, being lectured by this exhibition about love—as if the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor. I do not want my children to be someone else's metaphor. (Of course, they already are.)

from "Blockbuster Dead Jews" in People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn, pp. 190–191

[spot-the-antisemitism]

Saw this today.

Yikes.

“No see being a sad orphan gives you permission to orphan others snd being a survivor of rape lets you rape others”

oh no the racism of no expectations is strong

[jewish-microwave-laser]

btw there is no liberation for palestinians until you're able to understand that they are a nuanced group of people. if you ignore that there are people in palestine who have done horrible things, who have and continue to lie, who genuinely believe some of the most fucked up shit out there; then once all of this is over and the dust settles and there is time to look into the facts of what actually happened during the war, your image of Every Palestinian Ever as the pitiable noble savage will be shattered. you'll lose the motivation to keep all eyes on palestine, and as you move onto other things, palestinians will still be dealing with generations of trauma and poverty and the impossibility of finding a peaceful resolution to everything

i just hope you don't treat them with the same amount of hatred you started treating jews once we stopped being your pet minority on october 7

[spot-the-antisemitism]

Cool Bug Fact: Jewish people (And people from any marginalized group) can rape, they can abuse power, they can be misogynists, they can be pedophiles, they can be racists, they can be transphobes, they can be and do all sorts of horrible things like any other human being. Horrible people can and do come from anywhere, saying otherwise and suggesting that marginalized people can do no evil or that calling a marginalized person that did something bad is inherently bigoted puts marginalized groups in an impossible higher standard that does nothing but othering them and is counterproductive, specially when the victims can and do come from marginalized groups as well✌️ hope this helps besties! 👍

yes but when you ONLY focus on Jews or trans women or whatever when talking about rapists and pedophiles the pattern becomes clear

sorry for burning your strawman

No one is free of doing wrong like you aren't free of being a petty lying bitch for being a gentile

[jewish-microwave-laser]

I've long been uncomfortable with stories of Holocaust rescue, not least because of the painful fact that they are statistically insignificant—as are, for that matter, stories of Holocaust survival. But for me, the unease of these stories runs deeper. When I was twenty-three and just beginning my doctoral work in Yiddish, I barely understood the world I was entering; it was so distant from American culture, where even stories of the Holocaust are expected somehow to have happy endings. In Holocaust literature written in Yiddish, the language of the culture that was successfully destroyed, one doesn't find many musings on the kindness of strangers, because there actually wasn't much of that. Instead one finds the overwhelming reality of the unavenged murder of innocents, along with cries of anguish, rage, and, yes, vengeance. Far more palatable to American audiences are stories of Christian rescuers, because while they have the imprimatur of true stories, they also conveniently follow the familiar arc of fiction, inserting heroes into a reality almost entirely populated by villains and victims.

from "On Rescuing Jews and Others" in People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn, pp 112–113

[spot-the-antisemitism]

Spot the antisemitism in this letter King Charles wrote in 1986

AND spot the orientalism and noble savage trope

Those savages could never understand the bible

arabs are semites/Jews too

happy Dhimmi trope

Askenazi Jews are white and cause antisemitism

ZOG

Charles is acting like Israel and Palestine are still the British Mandate from his childhood and that he can just cow both into submission under European rule and why isn't the US president letting the Jews boss him? Are you mad you have no political power, your Majesty?

[spot-the-antisemitism]

notice not one of them is Palestinean the actual five real palestineans and racefakers? silence

Juju herself? complicated thoughts

oh and get one guy who speaks arabic banned for tag spamming One piece thinking he'll get Hasan Piker fans

People will be like, "We want safety for palestinians!!!!!"

And then mourn the death of a man who raped and harmed Palestinians, simply because he is a part of Hamas so must be good.

[batrogers]

Civilized Or Not

So there’s some common Zelda fanon I wanna talk about, relating to civilization tropes I think some of y’all haven’t really thought about in detail before, and that’s Hyrule (Zelda 1 &2 Link), Wild (BOTW mostly), and Ravio (LbW).

I’m using the Linked Universe names, because that’s where most of it comes up, because these things happen most often where you can contrast the boys with each other. This is often done, quick and dirty, by people assigning “roles” to each without much thought. Ravio’s unfortunately tends to be extremely pervasive outside LU spaces, too.

But, in brief, there is a trend for people to craft these characters in a framework of innocent vs savagery vs trickery that can have some really unfortunate implications I’m not sure many are even aware of. Hopefully I can explain better where these ideas come from, why they’re so easy and appealing, and why we should try to avoid repeating them for more than just the sake of “easy” but also to stop repeating some really nasty historical tropes.

I would start from what’s probably the simplest one to address: the tendency towards a “feral” personification of Wild. This tends to come from two places: Wild’s amnesia, and the collapse of society around him and his lost place in it.

Now, brain damage is complicated. You can lose a range of things to any given injury because of the way information is encoded differently and in different places. You can lose memory and/or skills and/or coordination and/or balance, etc, because it all depends on what got damaged. But in-game a lot of stuff suggests that Link retains things like speech, reading/writing, coordination, and martial skills. None of the people who knew Link prior to his injury suggest he seems changed in any way not attributed to stress and anxiety...

And, more importantly, real people suffer memory loss just like that in the real world. Treating him like he’s become “feral” due to memory loss is cruel to actual people living with brain damage today, and if you go there you should have a good reason for it.

Social collapse is a wide-spread theme in basically every Zelda game. The threat that the Big Bad poses is almost always the destruction of society as it exists: Malladus literally vanishes the infrastructure of New Hyrule in Spirit Tracks; the Twilight turns people into spirits living lives they don’t realize are questionably real in Twilight Princess; Veran freezes the passage of time to force people to work forever in Oracle of Ages. King Daphnes and Ganondorf under the sea vie over the fate of the world above in Wind Waker: keep what’s been made, or start all over again?

In modern culture, people tell a lot of stories about the fragility of civilization and what happens in its absence. You get the range from Lord of the Flies, in which children wrecked on an island attempt (and fail) to recreate civilization on their own, Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” in which Mowgli is treated as reckless and innocent, and a much more obscure piece from the 18th century “Paul et Virginie” (and likely many more I don’t know offhand.) Essentially all of them play with the question of how do people become civilized, and what happens when they do? In Lord of the Flies, the children were civilized and failed to maintain it; in the Jungle Book, the boy wasn’t civilized and innocently interacts with it. In Paul et Virginie, the children were (relatively) uncivilized on the (French colonized) Mauritius, raised by their mothers but when the girl was sent away, she becomes civilized and dies tragically to preserve it.

The two Links most removed from civilization are Hyrule and Wild. Wild “lost” civilization, losing both his memories of it and the structure of it. Making him feral, without manners, and without a place to belong is that kind of Lord of the Flies savagery mixed with Mowgli’s innocent playfulness: there isn’t a structure to adhere to, so he’s a savage. Whereas Hyrule is more like the Paul eg Virginie side: innocent of civilization, he remains pure and sweet and kind, unable to conceive of big concepts like evil or money or so on. Neither position permits them to interact with the civilization that is right there in front of them! Wild can buy a house; he has people who know and care for him. He has social connections and social rights. The world exists, but the fandom does not seem to want him to interact with it in favour of remaining “wild.” In Zelda 2 – a game explicitly set within a decade of Zelda 1 – there are whole towns with trade and a castle and massive structures with on-going life in them... but very few fans seem to ever reach into that story or relate it back to the first. Hyrule, the character, does not exist within Hyrule, the country.

Strangely, Wind Waker does not fall prey to this, I think because the structures are presented as fait accompli: Link wakes up with his grandmother and his sister, he has a defined home, and a society in which you spend the entire game forced to engage with. Zelda 1 & 2 were not sophisticated enough to waste resources on going as in depth in social terms (although such interactions absolutely exist in Zelda 2!) and BOTW leaves such interactions as optional: you can survive the game with minimal social contact... but it’s a choice to play with it that way, not the default. The ways in which this edges onto the noble savage trope, in which “uncivilized” tribes are either innocent or brutish (rather than complex social systems in their own right) is fairly obvious.

There is one other character in Zelda who gets treated to the question of whether he is an innocent, free of civilization and all its rigour... or something else. Ravio, coming from the devastated world of Lorule, can often wind up slotted into the scared, innocent child trope and unfortunately that’s the better position people frequently take. The worse one evokes the Merchant of Venice: the deceitful, Jewish merchant who values money over people’s lives.

Lorule (and Nintedo’s approach towards their humanoid Zelda villains in general) is near-eastern-coded in many ways, down to the fact that Yuga’s outfit is the spitting image of Ottoman dress. Yuga being a depraved bisexual (a common historical trope about Muslim men towards Christian men and boys), and Hilda being deceitful and conspiring against everyone she was once allied to are a backdrop to the ways in which Ravio is a greedy coward. He’s not an evil character in the game; the mechanic of penalizing death without being too severe is interesting and works well! But that doesn’t take away the stereotype, just like it’s not okay Nabooru is pretty explicitly predatory towards child Link in Ocarina of Time, too.

Arab and Jewish stereotypes often converge, because both people's originate from the same region, and both are hostile "Others" to Christian Europe and Nintendo doesn’t have a great track record of their near-Eastern coding in Zelda. It crosses the whole gamut from harem and amazon tropes with the Gerudo to breath-takingly anti-semitic or anti-black (Ganondorf being green, eg. non-human, in various incarnations), all packaged neatly in the ideal of medieval fantasy Europe. The scale would be impressive if it wasn’t so damn awful, but we can at least stop repeating it in our fanworks.

Wild doesn’t have to be feral to be a playful little shit; Hyrule doesn’t have to be pure and innocent to be kind. Ravio doesn’t need to be innocent or scheming, and he shouldn’t place money over Link’s well-being (If you chose to respawn at home, he is consistently only ever concerned for Link! Once you buy the items outright, he promises he'll still be there to take care of you.)

Do better. It’s more interesting that way, and I want to see that variety grow!

[If any of y'all would like me to dig up better sources on any point, I can do so but I didn't want to bog this post down further. I have largely left the anti-arab stuff alone because it's not the biggest issue with Ravio's fanon presence, which is the focus here.]

[gooboogy]

i thought they named the ships Terror and Erebus in the show for the symbolism and drama but the ships were actually called that??? talk about a self fulfilling prophecy lmao??

[northern-passage]

I came across the character Branwen* in my most recent play-through and was curious if she's supposed to be Inuit or not? It was just a bit unclear since she has a chin-stripe tattoo, a Welsh name, and comes from Gael (which I'm under the impression is supposed to be Norse inspired?) Neither the Welsh/Celts or Norse had tattoos like these and the imagery of such comes from the appropriation of Inuit kakiniit. It's unfortunately common, especially in the fantasy genre, think Yasha from Critical Role, and I wouldn't really blame you for not yet knowing better. Misguided or not, it's very damaging since these tattoos are a closed practice, and Inuit have asked us not to use them for non-indigenous characters. Some other cultures have similar tattoos, but these are specifically what are appropriated from in the "Norse aesthetic".

This could be a great opportunity to represent a community that's regularly misrepresentationed and appropriated from in the genre, though! I don't believe you had any ill intentions, if this is a mistake you've made, since you've done really well about a lot of other things so far.

Also, I've done a lot of research on the topic for my own world building and I can try to help if you have any questions!

Here's a list of Inuk creators and artists from my own following (on TikTok specifically):

kadlun

willow.allen

notdayle

shinanova

And fairy.gothparent (not indigenous) has some really educational content on the subject also!

I'm sorry I've misread or misinterpreted anything, and I hope none of this came off as aggressive! I'm just genuinely curious and want to help others do better!

hi :-) no worries, you are not aggressive at all. Branwen is not meant to be Inuit, nor is she meant to be Welsh or Norse. Gael and Adrania are just Fantasy Lands with their own lore & culture-- but with that being said, i am fully aware that the setting for TNP is very much giving medieval Europe, hahahaha. regardless, when i choose names they are mainly just because i like them, so i wouldn't put too much stock in them when reading.

same thing when i designed Branwen, the tattoo was mostly for the aesthetic and because i liked it. i was aware of a few different types of indigenous tattoos (like the Māori tāmoko as well as the Inuit kakiniit) at the time i chose the thick, solid line because i was purposefully trying to avoid conflating it directly with those indigenous tattoos. you're the first person to point this out to me and i appreciate it and it has made me reevaluate my decision to give her such a distinct tattoo. i wanted tattoos to be a big part of Gaelish culture & planned for them to be made with heavy lines & geometry, but in the end a lot of the designs are all over the place (Merry's are way more modern due to basing some of the designs around nautical/sailor tattoos with only a few geometric designs, while Lea's are strictly geometric runes meant for their alchemy)

i absolutely want to avoid misrepresenting these tattoos, especially since it was never my intention for this character to be interpreted as a part of any of the mentioned indigenous groups. this is a good reminder for myself that my work does not exist in a vacuum and regardless of my intentions, the names i choose & the designs i make still reflect my own personal biases and have implications outside of my story.

i appreciate you messaging me and sharing resources. and i always want to encourage people to do so! especially because in my worldbuilding for Gael and Adrania i am pulling inspiration from a lot of different places and a lot of other fantasy media. i've always intended for Adrania to be a "melting pot," with a lot of different influences as in-game cultures converge around their ports & trade routes, but that can also lead to me unintentionally harming real world groups & cultures in my interpretations. as much as i want to "build from scratch" it's just not possible, i will always be influenced by the society i live in, hence me including the tattoo to begin with because you're right, i have seen similar designs in other fantasy media & just didn't think much about it.

going forward i'll most likely just remove that tattoo from Branwen's design, and maybe give her a neck tattoo instead 🤔 just something different to distinguish it from those indigenous designs.