#nothing bad it’s nonsense not discourse

[coffee-at-annies]

Someone pls tell me the hockeyblr kappycule is aware of the current twitter nonsense?

[lizardsfromspace]

So I guess Film Twitter is apoplectic with rage over some people suggesting they have intermissions in long movies. Not over theaters adding one without the director's consent, but like, at the concept of them

...by which I mean, getting mad at disabled people daring to have complaints. There's a lot of "HAHA are you so STUPID you can't go beforehand? You can't HOLD it for three hours?" and implying you don't deserve to experience art if you can't

And, of course, because Film Twitter is a bunch of insular discourse-addled dipshits, they're tying this...to Marvel. Yes, people are only saying they have health conditions that make sitting still for a three hour movie is because...they're Marvel fans mad at Scorsese, or something?

Why is this complaint new? Well, bc runtimes are ballooning to the levels of the old epic filmmaking days of the 50s-70s. And those movies...had intermissions. Multi-act plays have intermissions. Bollywood films have intermissions. Intermissions were literally just abandoned so studios could cram in more screenings, not out of an artistic ideal. But anyone saying "this would make it easy for me to access this film I want to see" needs to be viciously shouted down and called a moronic, lazy child hating on Scorsese bc of "discourse"

I've seen that meme multiple times and Jesus, look at the bizarre disdain for your fellow human beings embedded in it. You dare still bodily exist during a Martin Scorsese movie? You have a disability I don't? Well, I have no problem just peeing beforehand and not buying popcorn or a soda (you should really just sit their quietly until it's done, when you can pull out your phone to log it on Letterboxd), so what's your problem?

Calling people who are into non-blockbuster films "film bros" is mostly untrue, but man, the hardcore Film Twitter types unambiguously check every box. They're certainly dismissive of anyone outside their little box; extremely insulting, in fact, of how anyone who disagrees with them even slightly must be a Marvel-addled hysterical artless moron. Because nothing says "artistic appreciation" like preemptively calling analysis of a movie's choices "discourse" ("Ugh, I can't believe the DISCOURSE about how a movie portraying a morbidly obese man portrays obese people" - what should they talk about, then, if the movie's subject is instantly off the table?) They think the idea that someone out there may have a disability that prevents them from sitting in one place for three and a half hours is a laughable thing made up by the internet; or when people pointed out that a movie only getting one or two screenings a city may be inaccessible to working people, and these bloggers and podcast hosts dunked on the idea that working class people may like art as a hilarious, made-up thing.

I don't know, maaaaaaybe classing the life experiences and complaints of anyone who isn't you as "discourse" and presuming it's made-up kvetching about nothing as a matter of course is bad, cruel nonsense, actually?

[ghostofacrow]

Dune discourse is uniquely annoying because there's a bunch of extremely obvious, in-your-face orientalism perpetuated by the main characters that's being discussed at nauseum and is very easy to dismiss and completely overshadows any actual issues with the movie, like the refusal to use recognisable arabic phrases or the hiring practices. I'll be charitable here and assume that people have a rightfully negative reaction to how those images of white people, particularly Jessica, are used as marketing material, instead of just not getting the point, and with how often concerns like this are overlooked, I can understand why they aren't receptive to "no this thing that media does uncritically all the time is meant to be bad THIS time actually trust me bro just read this 1000 page book".

Seemingly the entire film crew having cold feet about including references to real world anti-colonial movements or just normal Arabic would always be concerning, but especially given the current situation in Palestine and it's all overshadowed by the colonisers in the book acting like colonisers because every other issue is more complicated. Dune, as a text, still believes in noble savages and "hard times create hard men" nonsense. I'm really not coming at this from a "don't criticise the thing I like" angle, but debates about Jessica's outfit have made me learn nothing besides occasionally seeing really cool pictures of real arabic clothing, while reading Haris A. Durrani's dissections of the books and the current adaptation has actually tought me a lot of stuff about both the book and the real world.

If you haven't seen his Dune essays, you can find a collection towards the bottom of this page: https://history.princeton.edu/people/haris-durrani

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization < This blog post isn't specifically about Dune, but it uses the Fremen as an example to discuss the historic origins of the noble savage trope (Acoup is generally a cool history blog, mostly focused on greek and roman history)

I love Dune but it's so problematic, just not for the obvious reason and dissected Frank Herbert's actual politics and the strange intersection of conservatism and anti-colonialism is fascinating. You should criticise Dune, I would just like the criticism to be better, especially because focusing on the thing that is framed as bad in the story gives every chud an easy way to dismiss criticism of the text as bad media literacy

[dutchdread]

Ouch, that's gotta hurt.

Watching Cleriths celebrate NPTK these past weeks, knowing they'll, as always, be proven incorrect has been an exercise in patience. Sometimes it's just clear that you won't be able to convince people of a complex truth when so often discourse is limited to 280 characters. The reason Clerith exists is that people are unable to see the big picture, it survives by people squinting and not seeing the "but" that's located right after every piece of evidence they put forward. This means that you'll often be perceived to be arguing against what is to them the blatantly obvious. It's futile, nuanced argument never wins from emotion, so often you just have to take solace in the idea that "well, it will be fun to see their surprise 4 years from now". So when you get an interview like this, mere weeks after the game releases, which confirms everything that Clotis had been saying about, and had been mocked for, NPTK, you can't help feel a sense of schadenfreude.

Man that's gotta hurt. This is the difference between Clotis and Cleriths. Cleriths don't really like Aerith, because they want to assassinate her character. Rather than a sad tragic tale of a lifetime of love and loss they want to reduce her character to a shallow cliche rom-com about a capricious girl whose fickle affections change by the hour. The fact that the first person Aerith starts developing feelings for after 5 years of pining after Zack is a man who is almost literally channeling Zack becomes a meaningless coincidence in the story. The fact that she knows Cloud for 2 weeks, most of which is also spent pining over Zack is viewed as confirmation of how special their love is. It doesn't matter that Aerith doesn't even know who Cloud is. It doesn't matter that Cloud is shown to very obviously be in love with another woman. It doesn't matter that Cloud is clearly losing his mind. It doesn't matter that Cloud is constantly show as being apathetic towards her advancements. Even them fighting is recontextualized as "good chemistry" just to avoid facing reality. Usually nonsensical romances are seen as bad-writing, but here the cope makes people excuse all the nonsense as "how brilliantly written is this story? They love each other despite it making no sense, now THAT is romance". Zack is called irrelevant, CC is a "ret-con" and can be ignored, ACC is about how romantic it is to want to die to be with someone. The reason Zack is so predominant in Rebirth is in no way connected to Aerith yearning for exactly the bond he's constantly showing to have with her. The contrast with Clouds apathy means nothing, he definitely isn't there to have some sort of pay-off with Aerith in part 3. Nah, he's just there to give Cloud and Aerith his blessing and to F-off. The reason Tifa is silent and heartbroken at the end has nothing to do with her best friend dying and the man she loves losing his mind. The distance between her and Cloud at that moment is totally not used to illustrate the severity of the situation, or to set-up Tifas importance in the events for part 3. Nah, she doesn't get lines because she's just a side character duh!. That is how they think, every single character and story is assassinated, everything happens only to service Cloud and Aeriths romance, even Cloud and Aerith themselves are pushed through the mud. Screw the death of Ifalna, screw the death of Zack, screw the complexity surrounding Clouds Zack shaped psychology, screw Aeriths childhood and desire for real bonds of friendship, screw even the story of Aerith dying and how maybe, JUST MAYBE, the scenes surrounding Aeriths death have SOMETHING to do with the strong emotions surrounding death rather than just being "a cute romance scene uwu". Never have I seen any story interpretation reveal such rampant hatred for a character as Cleriths reveal for Aerith. To them, Aerith is totally the kind of person who would bond with Tifa, hear the very personal and intimate story about the promise shared between her and Cloud, hear that Cloud thinks that Zack is dead, and not 5 minutes later write a story about how "she loves Cloud and they wouldn't need no promises like that other girl". But sure, I'm the one who hates Aerith, not the people who think this is who she is, but me, the person who assumed she'd be less vile than that and that any song she'd write would encompass more than that. I stand up for her character and get mocked, called an Aerith hater, and called "toxic"....and then you get an interview like this. God it feels good to always have all your positions validated by future content. One has to wonder if the people still arguing for Clerith ever sit back and think "wait, the last 100 times I dismissed these peoples arguments I was proven wrong almost immediately, I am constantly having to shift my goalposts while they're just happily sitting there laughing as they consume media about Cloud kissing Tifa, or proclaiming to become her special existence....maybe I am the delusional one...." God I can't wait for part 3, it will be hilarious.

[hussyknee]

it’s rare to find a sinhalese person (online atleast) who is supportive of tamil self-determination. genuine question: among leftist circles in sri lanka, how common is such a stance?

I don't know whether I'm a reliable source to answer this question because I'm very jaded about this in general. A couple of days ago, someone on the Sri Lanka Reddit started up discourse about Maitreyi Ramakrishnan's choice to reject identifying with the country that tried to genocide her people, which I'm still chewing wire about. I'm a very isolated person with a very small social circle of like-minded leftist friends. They're mostly not SinBud and anti SinBud nonsense, but none of them are Tamil and I'm the one who really convinced them about Eelam I think. The people I learned from, who are out there doing the work of building inter-ethnic dialogue and overturning Sinhalese propaganda, might have a more hopeful view.

Thing is, there's no one "leftist" faction here because "left" doesn't mean the same thing as it does in the West. The Rajapaksas' party SLPP is socialist, a legacy of their ancestor the SLFP who was the party aligned with the USSR. They and their voters and their saffron terror acolytes (Buddhist priesthood) are all for public infrastructure they can rob blind and central government they can use to crush minorities, and build on the nationalist fervour of genocidal Sinhalese Buddhism that's served both major parties independence. There's quasi-communists, descendants of the ethnonationalist Marxist JVP that rose in opposition to the class corruption of ethnonationalist USSR-aligned socialist SLFP and enthonationalist US-aligned neoliberal UNP. They've since distanced themselves from their ethnic myopia, possibly due to suffering much of the same state terrorism as minorities via militarisation and policies like the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act. They're the most vocal about the abolition of the executive presidency, the defunding of military and police, and restructuring and executing the long-mismanaged socialist infrastructure. These are usually the working class and university students, but their base has been growing in other demographics too, since we "held our noses and voted" for the Yahapalana government in 2015 and it ended up fucking us over. But despite their sympathy with the suffering of Tamils and Muslims and favouring the devolution of power, most still cling to the idea that Sinhalese majoritarianism is a fair result of democracy.

The kind of pro-LGBT, anti-racist, feminist liberals that would pass muster with the western left otoh, are a minority of urban, English-speaking professionals. Their panacea for enthofascism is voting for the neoliberal party, whose idea of reducing corruption and increasing efficiency is privatizing everything, are against racism because it's bad for tourism, and coasts on the promise of never actively feeding ethnosupremacy, even if they won't do anything about it either. Both these groups hate each other but are equally deeply uncomfortable with if not entirely resistant to the idea that the North and East are Tamil lands colonized by the Sinhalese. Both groups are aware of the corruption and complicity of the Buddhist priesthood and are prepared to do exactly nothing about it.

What I'm trying to say is that Sinhalese Buddhist ethnosupremacy is baked in to the Sri Lankan political fabric. "Left" means jack shit when it comes to whether Tamils have rights, in much the same way that the western left agrees on everything except Palestine. It's a political no man's land everyone tries not to look at.

The fundamental problem is that Sinhalese people who know enough about 1958, 1983, or the full scope of genocide perpetrated against Tamils during the last push of the war, let alone all 26 years of it, are very much in the minority. It takes a particular education to understand that "Sri Lanka" is a post-colonial invention that took over from "Ceylon", which was nothing but a construct for the ease of British administration. As far as I know, this education is confined to activist organizations and whoever followed my sociology program. So my kind of anarchist leftism that calls the war a Tamil genocide with their whole chest and the priesthood saffron terrorists and recognises Eelam is, afaik, vanishingly small.

To be honest, I never really questioned the propaganda and narrative we've been spoon fed myself until I went to Canada when I was 23 to complete my anthro degree (became disabled and dropped out after). One thing that struck me was how racist the Sinhalese diaspora was. I was raised SinBud, my school didn't admit any non-Sinhalese, half my uncles were in the military, but these people that had left the country decades ago still hated Tamils and Muslims in a way that nobody else I knew did. I wondered whether this was what it had been like when it had all started; whether this hatred that seemed to have been preserved in amber was a true taste of what had ignited Black July. Suddenly the attitude of the Tamil diaspora towards the Sri Lankan government and Sinhalese people didn't seem so unreasonable.

Then, later in the same uni term, I went to an art exhibition of a white artist who travelled the world collecting information about their genocides and made art about them, and found a painting depicting Sri Lankan Tamils in 2008. Promptly had a meltdown. Went to the lady and told her tearfully that it was all propaganda, we didn't really hate Tamils, not even my uncles in the army hated Tamils, it was a war, the LTTE had terrorized us for my whole lifetime. Bless the woman, she didn't fight me, just let me cry at her and patted my hand and pretended to take me seriously. This made it easier for me to really think about what I knew once I'd stopped wailing and stamping. It prompted a years-long self-interrogation and fact finding that made me unearth how much brainwashing had been done to us by everyone, from our families to our school textbooks to news media. It's like the air we breathed was propaganda. And I still didn't know a fraction of what life had been like for Tamils (or Muslims) and the scope of atrocities perpetrated by the Sinhalese until I began my Society and Culture degree at the Open University when I was 30. The first year textbooks were only broadstrokes facts, but at last I found out about Gnananth Obeysekera, Prageeth Jeganathan, Stanley Thambaiya, Malithi DeAlwis. Their work on nation-making, ethnicity, historical revisionism, genocide and ethnic conflict and state terrorism...everything I should have been taught as a child. The chapters on the rapes and murders and shelling and war crimes and IDP camps were..indescribable. That was what properly radicalised me about Tamil self-sovereignty, because there's clearly no possible way the Tamil people will ever be safe and safeguarded under a Sinhalese majoritarian government.

I had to drop out of that programme too because of my health. But during the mass protests against the government in 2022, I learned even more about Tamil indigeneity, the extent of JR Jayawardena's crimes, and the persecution of Marxists and victims of the '71 and '89 insurrections. So much of the protests and their encampments were directed and galvanized by social media, that organised online and in-person lectures, teach-outs, and live discussions that anyone and everyone could attend right alongside the protests. I've never seen that kind of truly democratized, free, egalitarian civic education and discourse before. That was the very first time I saw academics, survivors, refugees and human rights activists being given a respectful platform, the masses hearing firsthand accounts from people of the North and East and witnesses of Black July. April to July 2022 was a truly golden bubble of time where I saw people finally start listening, believing, and challenging all their convictions. It was the closest we ever came to realising the hope that things could be different; that we could, as a society, understand how Sinhalese ethnosupremacy had been the black rot killing this country from the first, stop being racist Sinhala-first cunts and actually hold any of these murderers accountable.

Teach us to hope, I guess.

But I suppose it's no small thing that I learned about the Tamil resistance and struggle and taught all my friends about it. I'm sure they're informing their own circles in small ways too. These tendrils are hard to see, but they exist and grow. Especially with the fall of the Rajapaksas and their Bhaiyya contingent, more people can see ethnosupremacy for the grift that it is, and the younger generations are less defensive, more willing to listen and eager for justice and change. So I guess the answer is: not very common, but less uncommon than it used to be.

[qqueenofhades]

I frankly sometimes feel like social media has ultimately given a lot of people the illusion of power, while also causing them to become corrupted in a similar way to traditional forms of power, only without any actual power that goes with it. The similarities in their behavior to the latter is disturbing as hell, ESPECIALLY given the horrid behavior of online types the past few months.

I really can't emphasize enough how much of a constructed and artificial environment social media is, especially these days, and especially the Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, which is still the main avenue by which a lot of people attempt to "do" social justice. Once upon a time, Twitter was a moderately beneficial public communication service because everyone and God was on it and you could therefore get communiques directly from the source, there was a blue-check verification service that actually helped you understand who was real and who was not, and while there were serious and ongoing flaws such as there is when useful public discourse is sacrificed on the Great Altar of Profit, there was at least some attempt to monitor or ban Nazis, white supremacists, bad actors, and eventually Trump himself. All of that changed and/or was directly destroyed when Apartheid Clyde took over and turned it into a revenue-generating service for Russian propaganda, alt-right cranks, bots, and the rest of the Elon Fanclub willing to pay $8 for a meaningless blue checkmark, while trashing the site's guardrails and any other useful features. It basically exists for Elon to fanboy Putin, Trump, white supremacy, his 4chan trolls, and anything else that makes his money (while Mr. Free Speech Absolutist arbitrarily bans anyone who hurts his man-child fee-fees). This is not an unbiased, neutral, or constructive environment to start with. You don't have any certainty about who you're interacting with or who is amplifying your messages, and only a hardcore-radicalized (of whatever persuasion) base of human users remain, while a lot of casual users have left.

As such, if you're basing anything (hypothesis, claim, source, evidence, opinion) on "what everyone on Twitter thinks," that is fatally flawed data to start with. Even at the peak of its popularity, something like 24% of all American adults regularly used Twitter. That still means 76% of the country who doesn't (and the number is larger now as Chucklefuck McGee has continued driving it into the ground). If you're forming your ideas or looking for "what America thinks" just by quoting or relying on the tweets of people who already agree with you, you've done basically nothing and you certainly haven't proved it, you've stunted your own critical thinking skills, and you are selecting from a data source that is already fatally poisoned and limited in any number of ways. Adding to the echo chamber of similar opinions on Twitter is not going to actually influence public policy or make lasting change. Yes, the interns and/or public relations staff of the public figures still on there will probably check the feed every so often and make note of things that come up, but couching it as mindless vitriolic abuse and/or demonstrably nonsensical things is not going to get back to their boss. It will just be ignored and/or given less weight in the limited space available for things that are deemed important enough to actually follow up on/make policy around.

Also, a lot of people saw Trump tweeting insane things at 3am for four years, and somehow decided that was actually how US/American presidential and governmental policy was made, rather than that he was a fucking narcissistic-personality-disorder psychopathic lunatic. But uh, and it should go without saying, it didn't work. Just because Trump posted something absolutely unhinged and announced it was now policy, that doesn't mean it was. Half the time he didn't even do so much as issue an executive order, those can be and regularly are challenged in courts, and so forth, because despite all its flaws, America is not an absolute monarchy where the king can rule by fiat and have it totally done, no questions, the end. That's also why Trump's second term would be even more dangerous than his first. In his first, he was flailing around and yelling on Twitter and not really paying attention to anything. In his second, the administration will be staffed top to bottom with dedicated fascists like the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 people, who have spent the last four years brooding on revenge and drawing up detailed plans to actually co-opt and suborn all the levers, checks, balances, controls, and functions of government directly to Trump's personal will (and/or the outrageously evil people pulling strings behind the scenes, because Trump is now basically a gibbering orange vegetable and the media is still far too beholden to the Biden Old!!! narrative to accurately report this).

In short, another Trump term (God fucking forbid) would be run by the kind of methodical and careful evildoers who know that policy isn't made by tweet, and would act accordingly. That would be much, much harder to remove, counteract, or fix, it would almost certainly lead to the end of American democracy at least for most of our lifetimes, and the repercussions of that would be absolutely terrible. But because we still have people who act like Trump is somehow a preferable option, who think that it's bad that Biden is trying to work through established and long-term channels to make sustainable policy and not just get short-term chuckles from an internet dopamine approval rush, that is the risk we are running from now until November 2024. After that, either way, we'll know for sure: we'll finally have a measure of safety, or we will be comprehensively fucked for generations. We all have the power to influence which of those outcomes come to pass. I suggest we use it.

[sgiandubh]

As usual you to try connect things that have nothing to with Sam and Cait to prove your fantasy. You have zero direct evidence proving relationship, marriage, children with Sam and Cait. ZERO. You are also admitting if people on screen are involved they are terrible actors. Give it up. As Sam again is off on vacation alone next week, beginning traveling for the next 8 weeks alone for various appointments which have nothing to do with Cait

Dear (returning, I suppose) Beauchamp and Fraser Anon,

Unlike other people in this fandom, I do not need to invent aggressive Anons: you provide the material almost on a daily basis, using the same old, same tired arguments. A very primitive harassment technique, indeed, that pushed many reasonable people in the shadows.

Because this is what y'all want. One of yours had the courage and honesty to write it down, just because a fencer (who should have known better) went on to engage with your faction. She got this response:

Note I did not publish the handle of the person who wrote this. I am only discussing people when prompted or when necessary. I usually discuss problems - and this is a big problem.

In other words, 'believe what you want, but verboten to write or discuss or even question'. I think it says a lot about your degree of tolerance and your democratic values. Or lack thereof.

I did not connect anything. I simply posted something and left it on the table for debate.

And now you invite me to 'give it up'. Because I piss off many, many people on both sides of the Great Divide and I am perfectly aware of it. Exactly what you want me to do, of course. Exactly what I am not going to do, Anon.

So, for the last time:

What really pisses you off is that I always did things my own way. Refused to post funeral pics. Refused to endlessly discuss the number of children S and C might have. Refused to disclose (completely against it) and discuss (unless absolutely necessary to do so) legal documents your side always ends up by revealing one way or another. And you do so usually via Anons, because you have no clue of what they really mean and you think you know (and you don't). Oh, and lest I forget: refused to judge C's attitude or behavior towards this fandom. Because Anon, I honestly don't know how I would react (if I were her) with all the bullshit you managed to ventilate their way and/or the brutal pressure under which she is living her life.

For all these reasons and then some more, you have decided I have to leave this fandom. Because this page, notwithstanding its mistakes, annoys the crap out of you. Because it strives to bring up reasonable dialogue, not circular discourse. Because it took upon itself to answer your insults: usually with irony, something that somehow escaped you. Because it managed to prove that when you deal politely with likeminded people, differences between factions of the same community can be put, if only for five minutes, aside. Because it also brought (or tried to) a new, no nonsense perspective informed by who I am and what I do. And because it is read on a daily basis by people who began to feel encouraged and valued simply for who they are: kind people, sharing a similar point of view of a given situation.

So guess what, Anon? I am not going anywhere.

Live with it. I can live with the daily dose, for sure.

I am also absolutely impressed by the illiterate confidence (I am sick and tired to correct your bad grammar and spelling) with which you suggest to be in the know of S's travel agenda or C's whereabouts. I should also hope someone, somewhere, financially rewards your efforts: if not, maybe you should ask them for a raise, or something. You surely are a very, very dedicated troll.

[ckerouac]

I am absolutely fascinated by some of the Bridgerton S3 discourse I've stumbled upon that seems to funnel into one of two arguments.

'Penelope should've married Debling because she'd be rich, left alone, and able to do exactly what she wanted because he'd be gone/dead and that's a win for her because that's what all of us really want!'

'Penelope should've never forgiven Colin for saying he'd never court her because it was cruel and indicative of what he really thought and she deserves better because in real life this happens all the time, especially to fat girls, and he's the worst!'

My friends. My dudes. Y'all.

Are you lost? Did you take a wrong turn in the library and are unsure of how you arrived in the Romance section? Because Bridgerton is not contemporary fiction. It's not even Historical Fiction. It's ROMANCE. Which has its own genre rules and traditions and I can only imagine these bad faith complaints are from someone who thinks everything has to 'defy the genre!' as if the term romance is a dirty word.

If this were contemporary fiction, sure. The HBO limited series of this where Nicole Kidman plays a brooding Portia would have Penelope learning the lesson that she's wrong to wish for a man to complete her and take her doomed husband Debling's money to girlboss her way into a gossip empire while impressing her success on Colin who realizing too late what he let get away. I've read many stories like that, loved a bunch of them. She'd move to NYC and end it overlooking her empire from her glass penthouse. Amazing.

But this is not contemporary fiction.

This is ROMANCE.

And one of the requirements of Romance is the Happily Ever After. Penelope, as our heroine in a Romance story, will get the Happily Ever After that she states she wants. And that is to have a marriage based in love and to have that love be a partner that supports her dreams. Rules of the genre guarantees that that's where we are going to end up. That's not Debling - who offers her support and freedom, but not love. Pen wants love. So she will hold out for love, and will get it.

The other nonsense with Colin who should be punished for saying one cruel thing... The other BIG ASS FANTASY EXPECTATION OF ROMANCE FICTION is that the hero will fuck up and disappoint the heroine and, here's where the romantic fantasy comes in, will recognize his mistake, sincerely apologize to the heroine, and then change his actions. Which he did. Immediately. As soon as he realized his bravado hurt Pen, he parkoured his way through everything standing in his way to apologize and beg her forgiveness.

THAT is the crux on which Romance hinges. In real life, he will make excuses and will insist he did nothing wrong. In Romance, the heroine was correct to hold out for what she wanted. In Romance, the hero recognizes his error and apologizes and changes for her. In Romance, he releases the pretenses he's been holding up because she was right to believe in him and he desires to be the man she wants and deserves. That's the fantasy this genre promises. THAT'S the Happily Ever After. He explicitly says 'you were right' and she gets what she wants.

'That's not how it happens in real life!' is the entire fucking point. Insisting that the heroine should settle or that the heroine should not receive a sincere apology which leads to her getting everything she's dreamed up is just being deliberately genre ignorant.

[lagosbratzdoll]

On Daenerys, Colonisation and Race Discourse within the ASOIAF Fandom

This has been on my mind for a good long while and honestly, as much as I would like to leave discourse in the pits, it has been bugging me intermittently over the past few weeks.

Far too many of you get on here and call people who like the fictional dragon-riding family, neo-Nazis and that sentiment is so prevalent, that white people feel comfortable telling me a black woman that I am a neo-Nazi for rooting for Daenerys Targaryen. I am upholding neo-Nazi power fantasies for wanting to see a little girl live at the end of a story. I am a neo-Nazi for wanting to see the rape survivor have the family she aches for and children with the man (or men) she loves.

Then, those same people go on spiels about how the systemic erasure of those who sing the song of the earth and other old races is not colonialism. That their removal from their home is not displacement but an agreement between two equal parties. The fact that the only place where those who sing the song of the earth exist in the present timeline is north of the wall, surrounded by the bones of their dead, is not a travesty. That the expulsion of the old races from their home isn't that bad and should not be condemned. 

Instead, people argue, completely seriously, that the harm that the First Men and Andals have caused is centuries in the past, so essentially the slate has been wiped clean. The logical leaps that are required to arrive at such a boneheaded conclusion are truly mind-boggling, and those who make such arguments are not good people. 

I am unsure how one could read those books and come away with the impression that the old races do not mourn the loss of their home. I am unsure how one could read The Last of the Giants[1] and Ygritte’s reaction to both the song and Jon’s dismissal of the ethnic cleansing of the giants then believe that the old races and the free folk have moved past their displacement. 

In Westeros, from the Wall to the broken arm of Dorne, they all speak one language despite the fact they are all different ethnicities and they all landed on the shores at different times. That is not the case in Essos, we have been introduced to at least six languages and in A Dance with Dragons, Tyrion notes that the Valyrian spoken in the Free Cities has evolved into nine distinct dialects, and they are well on their way to becoming different languages.

How would a continent as large and diverse as Westeros maintain its hegemony over the people if not for forced assimilation, discriminatory practices and violence? The brutal repression required to keep one house in power for thousands of years is nothing to sniff at. The suppression required to keep the vast majority of Westeros worshipping one (or seven) gods. The systems in place ensure that language does not grow or evolve amongst the highborns at least.

Centuries before Aegon's Landing the maesters were the definitive educational authority and even now centuries after, nothing has changed. The grey rats still decide who learns what and when they learn it. There's one in every highborn home, all correspondence passes through them, they are the healers and the councillors.

The circular logic gets even more blockheaded when you factor in the fact that Daenerys is far from the only white character in the books. She is not the only character who wishes for home. She is not the only character who draws strength from her ancestors, her bloodline and her magical creatures. 

Cersei draws strength from her family’s iconography, and the Stark children (Jon included) all draw strength from their direwolves, their home and their blood. Sansa, Arya and Bran wish to return home and their home was built on the indiscriminate murder and displacement of the indigenous peoples. Their home is built on centuries of rape, murder, exclusionary practices and sexual slavery. 

However, if we give the nonsensical argument that time erases crimes air; the Starks, Lannisters and Tullys are warring to settle personal grievances in the present timeline. As a consequence of that war, thousands (a modest guesstimate) of small folk, minor nobles and even some major ones have been raped, tortured, maimed and killed.

Despite all this, no one writes meta after meta about how Sansa and her siblings must surely die for justice to be had for those who sing the song of the earth, the free folk, the giants and all the old races that fled beyond the wall.  

People write meta about Cersei and how she must die, but those are typically more misogynistic nature. They typically argue that she must die not for the “crime” of being Lannister, but for the “crime” of being Cersei and “ruining” Jamie. 

I would not mind criticisms of Dany and her peace-focused approach to ending slavery because the approach is naïve and she gives the slavers far too much ground. However, she is learning, growing and self-critiquing. At the end of A Dance with Dragons, she has decided to embrace fire and blood, her knight is breaking the false peace which is a necessary step forward.

What I find offensive is people saying that she should have planned better before she abolished slavery. And that the death, violence, and sickness that arises from her quest to eradicate slavery is somehow worse than the death, violence, and sickness that already existed in Slaver’s Bay. 

This argument often downplays the horrific conditions and suffering that exist(ed) under the slave system in Slaver's Bay. Such arguments are often in poor taste and prioritise the lives and comforts of the slavers more than the people they have enslaved.

I would not mind criticisms of Dany if people applied that same critique even-handedly. The same people who believe that Jon and Bran have done much to rectify the evil that their ancestors perpetuated believe that Dany has not done anything to right the wrongs of her ethnic kin. They praise them for the non-existent steps that they have taken, but in the same breath, they condemn Dany for not being able to immediately end the plague that is slavery. 

It is perfectly alright to not like fictional characters, no law requires you to like certain fictional characters over others. However, what is not right is making broad accusations about those who do, it is beyond the pale. It is disgusting, and annoying, and trivialises real-world issues to score cheap points against fictional characters.

Equating the survival of a teenage survivor to the restoration of a fascist house or neo-Nazi power fantasy when such designations do not exist in the world of ice and fire is strange behaviour. Saying that the teenage survivor will eventually be manipulated and raped (again) before ending up dead on her manipulator's blade is also strange behaviour. 

Dismissing the horrors of colonialism, especially when the text shows you that the involved parties are still affected by it, is not normal and often veers into real-world imperialism apologia. While criticism and analysis of characters and their actions are valid and even encouraged, it is essential that we do not resort to sweeping generalisations about other people and that we keep criticisms of characters grounded in the text. 

[1]  

Ooooooh, I am the last of the giants, my people are gone from the earth.

The last of the great mountain giants, who ruled all the world at my birth

Oh, the smallfolk have stolen my forests, they’ve stolen my rivers and hills.

And they’ve built a great wall through my valleys, and fished all the fish from my rills

In stone halls they burn their great fires, in stone halls they forge their sharp spears.

Whilst I walk alone in the mountains, with no true companion but tears.

They hunt me with dogs in the daylight, they hunt me with torches by night.

For these men who are small can never stand tall, whilst giants still walk in the light.

Oooooooh, I am the LAST of the giants, so learn well the words of my song.

For when I am gone the singing will fade, and the silence shall last long and long.

[maingh0st]

I always noticed that Warner guy is always compared to Cardan. Thoughts?

hm, wild. they live in very different categories of characters in my mind haha. I guess on a surface level, they occupy similar spaces narratively: they start out as a more antagonizing figure to the MC, but you can tell that their obsession with the MC is shot-through with attraction. and they eventually become the I Worship My Wife kind of MMCs, which is fun but not exactly uncommon in fiction.

but while Cardan is an individual schoolyard bully who represents something very personal to Jude (he is a living reminder that she does not belong in Elfhame), Warner is an active representative of an oppressive global order that has made Juliette's and countless others' lives Very Bad. the power dynamic is really different, and has to be handled a lot more sensitively. and (in my opinion) I'm... not sure it is.

I think my biggest gripe with Warner as a character (and I am really not trying to start discourse here—people enjoy what they enjoy, whatever; I thought he was hot when I was a teen, too) is that his actions are almost always presented very romantically, and the narrative rarely tells us he's wrong. Juliette is the silly little woman who just doesn't understand, but thank goodness the love interest knows that she does like him, she is attracted to him, and she does want the power he offers her. silly girl, he knows you better than you know yourself! this is not uncommon in fiction; authors seem to think that a male character knowing better than a female character and forcing her to "become powerful" is somehow girlboss feminism (SJM and the "it's your choice" nonsense 🔪)

Warner also demonstrates a frankly concerning level of obsession with Juliette (maybe another reason people try to compare him to Cardan?), going so far as to steal and memorize sections of Juliette's diary, which she feels very violated by (they're her most private, intimate thoughts from a very dark time in her life! holy shit buddy who gave you the right!). but rather than the narrative being like "wow isn't this scary and weird and a total violation of her privacy?" he gets rewarded for Knowing Her So Well and ultimately gets to be her malewife.

Cardan, on the other hand, is wrong. we know he's wrong! the author knows he's wrong! and while the narrative shows us reasons that he is the way he is, it does not use those reasons to justify him. it makes him more understandable, but he still has to apologize and change. Jude is not treated as silly for disliking and mistrusting him; she's absolutely in the right! and Cardan has to realize that he has misunderstood her and both underestimated her (not realizing just how much of a threat she is) and overestimated her (thinking that nothing really hurts her bc she's so tough).

also, Cardan is more fun. there, I said it! Warner is melodramatic and purple proses @ the reader about what a Conflicted Guy he is. Cardan is a slutty little dude with crushing self-confidence issues who gets tricked into the Number One Job He Did Not Want and decides to cope with it by being Very Silly, and then somewhere along the way realizes that he can actually do a good job at it. he oopsies his way into being Elfhame's best king. who's doing it like him?

[nerdy-nonbinary]

More than "Sheer Coincidence": The Antisemitism of Disney's Animated Villains

This is a paper I wrote for a Jewish studies class. It was inspired by a tumblr post, so I thought it was fitting to share here. Most will be under a "read more" link, as it is about 25 pages including the bibliography. Please feel free to ask questions, and enjoy.

_______

On June 19, 2022, Tumblr user fantastic-nonsense published a post about Disney’s 2010 animated film Tangled, and the film’s villain, Mother Gothel, which starts, “*sigh* the ‘Mother Gothel is an anti-semitic caricature’ discourse is going around again.” They argue that, because Mother Gothel’s appearance was based on two non-Jewish women, Gothel’s voice actress Donna Murphy and singer Cher, any claim that Mother Gothel’s large nose or dark, curly hair resemble antisemitic caricatures was simply projection. The goal of Gothel’s design was to make her as visually distinct as possible from Rapunzel, not to make her “look Jewish.” They continue with a question: 

“[I]f Gothel was blonde with a ‘normal’ nose…but literally nothing else about her changed, would you be saying that she’s an anti-semitic stereotype?...All I’m saying is that Gothel (and thus Tangled) is unreasonably linked to those tropes…There is a very distinct difference between being actively anti-semitic and Tangled, which has anti-semitism being projected on it because its villain bears passing similarity to anti-semitic caricatures out of sheer coincidence.”

The user has since deleted the original post, but a reblog remains further arguing their point. In an attempt to defend the film from criticisms of antisemitism, fantastic-nonsense stumbles upon a fundamental conundrum of analyzing villainous characters such as Mother Gothel: Is it possible to create a villainous character that avoids all potential antisemitic pitfalls? And, despite fantastic-nonsense insisting it’s a “sheer coincidence,” why do so many Disney villains have stereotypically Jewish traits?

Unmasking Antisemitism: The Origins of Disney’s Jewish Villains

Jewish people have long been viewed as villainous in various gentile European cultures, a view brought to the United States through colonization. Accusations of blood libel go back to the 12th century and have been noted from eastern Europe to England. Famous authors and playwrights such as Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare indicate a centuries-long trend of villainous characters defined by their Jewishness, and infamous business magnate Henry Ford published accusations of predatory banking practices and fervent Christian hatred in his pamphlet series The International Jew in the early 1920s, before Disney was a studio. With centuries of association between Jews and villainy as a backdrop, there is little surprise that Disney turned to antisemitic tropes in the construction of one of its earliest villains.

The 1933 short Three Little Pigs is remembered as one of the most successful shorts from Disney’s Silly Symphonies series. Not only was the film the source of the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” which became an anthem to “Depression-weary audiences,” but the film was a milestone in character development, versus the characters existing only to serve gags. Walt Disney was so proud of the finished film, he said, “At last we have achieved true personality in a whole picture.” Part of developing the characters’ personalities was creating a menacing villain, an archetype Disney would come to be known for, and the Big Bad Wolf is one of its earliest successes on this front. The film follows the typical narrative of the fairy tale, with a trio of pigs each building their own house, one of straw, one of sticks, and one of brick. We see the Wolf approach them as the first two are frolicking after constructing their flimsy houses, drool pouring from his mouth filled with sharp teeth. While the Wolf is able to simply blow away the straw house, the house of sticks proves to be a bit stronger, and he resorts to trickery, pretending to give up and leave the pigs alone before returning dressed as a sheep and asking for shelter. The pigs sees through this disguise, refuse him entry, and his anger gives him the strength to blow down the house of sticks. When the pigs flee to the house of bricks, the Wolf returns with a new disguise: a Jewish peddler.

Wearing a large brown overcoat, green-tinted glasses and a skullcap, and adorned with a fake beard and long nose, the Wolf knocks on the door of the brick house with a rack of brushes around his neck, proclaiming in a Yiddish accent, “I’m the Fuller Brush man, I’m giving a free sample!” The pig from the brick house, quickly seeing through his tricks, proceeds to hit him with said free sample before pulling a welcome mat from beneath the Wolf’s feet, causing him to land on his face and his false nose to bend 90° towards the sky. The Wolf rips off the disguise in anger, and the short continues.

The association of Jews and the peddling profession arose during the 19th century, as peddling helped facilitate the mass migration of Jews across the globe during that time. Peddling was more accessible to poor immigrant Jews than owning a store, and the freedom of self-employment allowed them to maintain their own schedule and keep Shabbat, unlike factory jobs. As most peddlers did not maintain the job for more than a decade, nor pass it down to their sons, peddlers represented a lack of assimilation, perpetually tying the occupation to otherness, which facilitates the villainization of peddlers through their Jewishness. 

The stock character of the “Jew peddler” quickly entered popular culture, giving all manner of creatives, from commentators to novelists, a new punching bag in their library of cultural symbols. As Hasia Diner describes the figure in her book Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way, “Sinister and shadowy, exotic or absurd, he made a good subject for mockery, with his odd accent, his clothing, his lack of a fixed abode, and his distinctive bodily features: in this milieu, a prominent hooked nose was a sure sign of Jewishness, a long beard a likely trait as well.” 

Director Burt Gillett created a costume for the Disney short’s villain which ticked off every box in the “Jew peddler” playbook. A symbol of “trickery, otherness, and greed,” and pervasively believed to be dishonest, the peddler costume serves not only as a disguise for the Wolf, but to highlight those traits in his villainous hunt of the pigs. Audiences would have had a pre-existing cultural understanding of the Jewish peddler as a costume. Throughout the 19th and into the early parts of the 20th century in the United States, local newspapers reporting on masquerade parties described “Jew peddler” costumes among princesses and pirates. With his two costumes being a play on the phrase “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” and the known manipulative figure of the Jewish peddler, the characterization of the Wolf is clear: He is so manipulative, even his choice in costumes shows off his deviousness.

There is a more intelligent side to the gag of the Jewish peddler costume; not only would the Wolf seem less threatening dressed as a Jewish peddler, but the pigs would assume he kept kosher and didn’t eat pork, easing their worries. Still, the use of antisemitic stereotypes to emphasize the Wolf’s dangerous and manipulative nature has been recognized as offensive, including by the company itself. A 1948 re-release of the short edited the animation to remove the antisemitic costume. The Wolf still dresses as a peddler, but without any Jewish signifiers, maintaining the overcoat but swapping the skullcap and green-tinted glasses for a bowler hat and clear ones, and forgoing the nose and beard altogether. Initially, the original audio was maintained, as the new animation of the wolf still matches the original dialogue, but a new version of the Wolf’s audio was recorded and replaced the Yiddish accent at a later date. Instead of hawking his wares in a Yiddish accent, the Wolf puts on a low, unintelligent-sounding voice and tells the pigs, “I’m working my way through college!” This is the version of the short that is available on Disney+, where no mention is made of the short’s history or the edits that were made to it. Although the Wolf does not have the same notoriety as many of Disney’s villains from feature-length films, he didn’t fall into complete obscurity, making a cameo in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) alongside the pigs, and appearing in the 2002 direct-to-video film Mickey’s House of Villains. 90 years after his first appearance, the Wolf’s legacy resonates in the designs and characterization, which Walt so highly praised, of the villains who came after him.

Hooked-Nosed Hags and Mincing Manipulators: Jewish-coding in 20th Century Disney Films

Disney took its first leap into feature-length animation in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Released only four years after Three Little Pigs, the film displayed a marked improvement in many areas of animation, particularly character design. While previous Disney shorts had largely starred animals, Snow White featured an entirely human or human-like cast. Unable to differentiate between hero and villain by species, designers needed other visual signifiers to indicate a character’s villainy or heroism to the audience. As former Disney character animator Andreas Deja wrote on his blog, where he frequently catalogs stories from Disney’s older films, “[Walt] Disney insisted on strong contrast between good versus evil, and that needed to be clear in the characters' design as well as their acting.” 

In 1749, German philosopher and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote in his play Die Juden (The Jews), “And is it not true, their countenance has something that prejudices one against them? It seems to me as if one could read in their eyes their maliciousness, unscrupulousness, selfishness of character, their deceit and perjury.” For centuries, antisemites have posited that Jews not only are evil, but look evil based on their natural physical appearances. This idea quickly made its way into Disney’s understanding of character design. Although Three Little Pigs’ Wolf is the only villain who takes on an explicitly Jewish appearance, Disney has designed its villains with stereotypically Jewish traits as a visual indicator since its first feature film. This notion of visual signifiers of internal traits is derived from race science, a concept the American government had latched onto with the Dillingham Commission, a Congressional committee analyzing immigration in the United States at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. In the Commission’s Statistical Review of Immigration, published in 1911, the “Hebrew” people were the third-lowest ranked group in the “Caucasian race.” As Jews were considered one of the least desirable groups of white people, common traits amongst them were quickly associated with villains, regardless of their background.

Snow White’s Queen Grimhilde does not have many stereotypically Jewish traits upon first glance. This is essential to the story, as the Queen was previously the “fairest one of all” until her title was taken by Snow White, whose beauty outshone hers even while dressed in rags. Because she is also beautiful, she could not be designed with ugly, villainous, “Jewish” traits. However, when she finds out the Huntsman failed to kill Snow White, she adopts a disguise in order to poison her without being recognized, much like the Wolf in The Three Little Pigs. Her disguise transforms her from a beautiful, regal woman into a decrepit witch, with a massive, hooked nose and deep eye bags, both common traits in antisemitic caricatures, marking her new form as Jewish. Her transformation marks her change into a more active villain role, pursuing Snow White herself instead of sending a henchman to find her. By the end of the film, the Queen’s internal ugliness, through her vanity and envy of Snow White, has physically manifested, showing that she was never really as beautiful as the kind-hearted and button-nosed Snow White.

The contrast between the Aryan features of Disney’s leading ladies and the ugly and Jewish-coded traits of their female villains continued for decades. Cinderella’s stepmother, Lady Tremaine, and her daughters are both drawn with large noses compared to Cinderella, who has a button nose similar to Snow White. Lady Tremaine is given a hooked nose and heavy-lidded eyes, just as Queen Grimhilde had in her disguise. Her less exaggerated appearance befits her more realistic villainy, portraying personal greed and child abuse rather than a magically enhanced poisoning plot. The stepsisters, on the other hand, are given bulbous noses, similarly to Snow White’s seven dwarves, largely indicating ugliness rather than Jewishness. In both cases, their designs are “more reminiscent of 101 Dalmatians male villains Horace and Jasper, rather than typical Disney female features.” All three are given features reminiscent of Disney’s male character designs, compared to Cinderella’s “proper” femininity, which, at this point in Disney’s history, was always white. 

Maleficent and Aurora’s designs in Sleeping Beauty function similarly. Maleficent’s pointed nose, prominent horns, which Jews are often accused of having, and green skin make her appear inhuman compared to Aurora’s upturned nose and blonde hair. Maleficent’s appearance is also juxtaposed against the film’s good fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, who look entirely human aside from their wings. Sleeping Beauty also furthers the concept of appearance reflecting personality, giving the cruel Maleficent an unnatural skin tone, and displaying her most powerful form, a dragon, at the climax of the film. It is important to note that both Maleficent and Queen Grimhilde use magic and potions in their villainy, while their respective princesses do not use magic on their own. Judaism and witchcraft have long been associated in European Christian concepts of witches, and these films both bring that trope into a new world of storytelling.

While Disney’s early female villains were largely coded as Jewish by their designs and the juxtaposition between them and Disney’s respective female lead’s designs meeting Euro-centric standards of beauty, male villains’ coding comes at the nexus of homosexual and Jewish male stereotypes, alongside their designs. In her description of the coverage of Leopold and Loeb’s 1924 murder trial, Sarah Imhoff wrote that “the press coverage did not often explicitly cite their Jewishness because it did not need to. Journalists and commentators were able to convey Jewishness without stating it directly. Certain characteristics—intellectual, physically weak, not fit for manual labor, perverted, and prone to illness and psychiatric imbalance—painted a gendered portrait of a Jewish man even without reference to race or religion.” Many of Disney’s male villains fit such descriptors, indicating their Jewishness to the audience without the religion ever being mentioned. Additionally, these descriptors–particularly “perverted,” which at the time was a euphemism for both religious and sexual deviance-- are often applied to gay men, while homosexuality was treated as its own psychological issue. Both queer and Jewish men are seen as feminine, not meeting the white Christian ideal of a strong, straight, and stable man. With such overlap, queercoding of male characters often coincides, intentionally or not, with Jewish-coding.

The effeminate, mentally unstable villain can be found as early as the 1950s with Peter Pan’s Captain Hook, a willowy man in a plumed hat prone to comedically anxious outbursts, with black, wavy hair and a large nose. Captain Hook is voiced with a British accent, as many of Disney’s male villains do (including Jafar, Scar, and Governor Ratcliffe, whose fitting British accent stands out against John Smith’s strangely American one), which is not typical of Jewish characters in American media. However, “unlike the good characters of the film, who are endowed with physical features more generally identified with Northern European characters, the Captain Hook character would appear to be more Southern or Eastern European…he is the villain, and the writers and artists chose to give him physical characteristics that somehow reflect his villainy.” The author does not mention Jews in his analysis, but the majority of American Jews are descended from Eastern European Jews, and the comparison is bolstered by the non-visible Jewish stereotypes Hook fits as well. Again, Hook’s features are contrasted against Peter Pan and Wendy’s straight, brown hair and upturned noses, matching his implicitly Jewish characteristics with an implicitly Jewish appearance.

The Disney Renaissance, a period from 1989-1999 which saw massive success for Disney and a notable Broadway influence on the films, also saw a barrage of male villains with notable Jewish-coded traits. While Aladdin’s Princess Jasmine has a slightly larger nose compared to her white princess predecessors, Jafar still has much more prominent and hooked nose and heavy-lidded eyes, traits even more prominent in early iterations of his design. Jafar fits many of the descriptors applied to Leopold and Loeb in lieu of calling them Jewish; he is a manipulative magician with a wiry frame, contrasted by Aladdin’s larger build and ability to run and swing around Agrabah to avoid guards, and becomes mad with power after wishing to become a genie himself. Appearance-wise, in addition to the Jewish-coded traits mentioned above, Jafar’s dress-like robe and elaborate headpiece give him a feminine appearance next to Aladdin’s pants and vest, and bare muscular chest, affirming his masculinity. Imhoff notes that, because of Jews’ intelligence and lack of physical prowess, the prevailing stereotype was that “Jews tended not to commit courageous crimes, but rather chose crimes where they did not have to confront their victims directly.” She extrapolates, “Jewish men’s crimes were crimes of intellect, not passion; manipulation, not aggression; outsmarting, not overpowering.” Jafar displays these methods of criminality multiple times, tricking Aladdin into fetching the genie’s lamp from the Cave of Wonders, lying to Jasmine about Aladdin being sentenced to death, and hypnotizing the Sultan with his staff to steal an heirloom jewel. Although Aladdin uses his wits to defeat Jafar by trapping him in the magic lamp, his physical strength both make him more attractive and capable in Jasmine’s eyes than Jafar, who pursues her for political gain.

The Lion King’s Scar is a more prominent example of the juxtaposition between the strong but simple hero and the weak but wily villain. After feminizing himself, proclaiming “I shall practice my curtsy,” when his brother King Mufasa tells him that Simba, Mufasa’s son, will one day be Scar’s king, Scar says, “Well, as far as brains go, I got the lion’s share. But when it comes to brute strength, I’m afraid I’m at the shallow end of the gene pool.” While the heroic Mufasa, and later Simba, are muscular and broad, Scar is drawn almost emaciated, his hips swinging with each step in an effeminate manner. Like Jafar, Scar rarely involves himself directly in his crimes, sending his hyena henchmen to do his dirty work while he devises a plan. While animated lions lack the physical traits associated with Jews, Scar’s strangely dark mane contrasts with Mufasa and Simba’s reddish fur, and the dark circles of fur around his eyes resemble both heavy eyelids and eyeshadow, serving as both a feminizing and Jewish trait. When Scar and Simba fight at the climax of the film, Scar resorts to gaslighting, trying to convince Simba that he is responsible for his father’s death, and tricks, throwing burning ashes into Simba’s face, rather than beating him with brute strength.

Pocahontas’ Governor Ratcliffe fits oddly into the field of simultaneously feminized and Jewish-coded villains. His purple outfit, braided hair, and posh mannerisms make him by far one of Disney’s most effeminate villains, and he is one of the most explicitly money-hungry villains in Disney’s film library, singing lyrics such as “It's mine, mine, mine/For the taking/It's mine, boys/Mine me that gold!” blatantly assigning Ratcliffe the stereotype of the greedy Jew. Yet the historical setting of the film, 17th century Virginia, makes it highly unlikely that Ratcliffe could possibly be Jewish. Still, his overwhelming greed and feminine mannerisms insert Jewish stereotypes into even the most unlikely settings, highlighting the pervasiveness of the stereotypes beyond direct acknowledgements of Judaism.

Although Hercules’ Hades is less feminized than his 90s predecessors, his coding is bolstered by frequent use of Yiddish words in his dialogue, describing Hercules as “the one schlemiel who can louse” up his plan, calling him “The yutz with the horse!” when directing the titans to attack him, and convincing Hercules to fall for his scheme by telling him, “We dance, we kiss, we schmooze, we carry on, we go home happy.” Portrayed as a fast-talking swindler, calling back to the fear of peddlers Disney utilized in Three Little Pigs, Hades follows the trend of having a hooked nose and deep-set eyes, as well as being significantly weaker than Hercules, who is characterized throughout the film by his immense strength and lack of forethought. While Hades nearly succeeds in getting Hercules to kill himself by diving into the River Styx to save Megara, once Hercules achieves godhood and becomes immortal, all it takes is a single punch to knock Hades himself into the river and defeat him.

Both Hades and Jafar also play upon fears of not just homosexuality but sexually deviant heterosexuality in their respective films. While Jewish men were characterized as feminine due to circumcision in the late 19th century, “Jews were not thought to endanger society by their supposed homosexuality but rather by their evil heterosexual drives. […] But while family life was intact among the Jews themselves, it was, so racists asserted, directed against the family life of others.’” While neither Jafar nor Hades express genuine attraction toward their female leads, each interferes with their predestined heterosexual relationship with the male lead. When Jafar fails to retrieve the lamp from Aladdin before he uses it, foiling his plan to become Sultan, his parrot henchman Iago suggests that Jafar marry Jasmine as a means of becoming Sultan instead. Jafar proceeds to brainwash the Sultan into pronouncing him Jasmine’s fiance while she builds a relationship with Aladdin, and nearly succeeds in forcing her to marry him, before Aladdin interrupts his plan. Hades gained leverage over Megara after she made a deal with him for a man who left her, and has her woo Hercules only to sacrifice her, using Hercules’ emotions to manipulate him into nearly killing himself trying to save Megara. In both cases, genuine heterosexuality triumphs over “evil heterosexual drives.” Even with Aladdin’s Arabian-inspired setting and multiple mentions of Allah by the Sultan, conceptions of pure heterosexual love shaped by Christian values save the heroines from deviant, and implicitly Jewish, heterosexuality.

Across decades, genders, and settings, Disney has not only continued to rely on antisemitic stereotypes to communicate villainy through character design, but has developed its villains to incorporate increasingly specific stereotypes that have been applied to Jews for decades, if not centuries.

(Not Her) Mother Knows Best: Mother Gothel and the Blood Libel of Tangled

The 2000s was a time of experimentation for Disney Animation. As the success of the Renaissance began to fade, Disney turned to genres and technologies it hadn’t worked with before. The early 2000s saw an onslaught of films with unprecedented science fiction elements, such as Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, Lilo and Stitch and Meet the Robinsons. Beginning with Dinosaur in 2000, Disney slowly made its way into the field of CGI animation, developing its technology at a rapid pace across films like Chicken Little, Bolt, and the aforementioned Meet the Robinsons. After this decade of experimentation, Disney released a film which combined the musical and princess elements of the Renaissance with the CGI it had been developing, releasing its first CGI princess film: Tangled. A reimagining of the fairytale of Rapunzel, the film has been a topic of discussion since its release for both its villain, Mother Gothel, who embodies a wide variety of traits, both in her design and characterization, that have been negatively associated with Jews; and its story, which bears striking similarity to a long-standing antisemitic canard: blood libel.

Beginning with accusations of using blood in religious rituals in the 12th century, in the 13th century, an additional accusation further vilify Jews: “Jews killed Christian children to obtain their blood, turning ‘ritual murder’ into ‘blood libel’ or ‘ritual cannibalism.’” Jews were not only accused of killing Christian children, but using their bodies for personal gain. Although Tangled forgoes any child killing, its prologue tells a chillingly familiar tale of the kidnapping and exploitation of a beautiful, blonde infant by a dark and curly-haired, crooked-nosed woman, adapting the blood libel narrative for a new audience, just as blood libel narratives have adapted to fit “changing cultural and political climates.”

In developing a story fit for a feature-length movie, Tangled adds magical elements to its narrative absent from the original fairy tale. In the film, a drop of sunlight fell to earth in the form of a flower with incredible healing capabilities. This flower is discovered by Mother Gothel, whom the audience meets as an old woman, who discovers a song which, when sung to the flower, makes her young. Her young appearance incorporates many of the antisemitic archetypes present in previous villains including long, black, curly hair, dark, hooded eyes, and a pointed nose with a bump. Gothel hides the flower to hoard its powers for herself, immediately establishing her as greedy, another common antisemitic trope. When the pregnant queen falls ill, the search party is sent for the mythical flower, hoping it will heal her. It is found, and after drinking a medicine made from it, the queen recovers and gives birth to a healthy girl, Rapunzel, with hair that is inexplicably bright blonde, as both the queen and king have brown hair. Aging and growing desperate, Gothel sneaks into the castle and cuts a lock of Rapunzel’s hair, only to discover that the hair, which has gained the flower’s magic, loses that magic when cut. She decides to kidnap Rapunzel, hiding her away and raising her as her own to continue utilizing the hair’s magic properties.

Many Disney films have utilized the contrast between villains’ and heroes’ character designs to indicate to the audience which role they play, with villains getting Jewish-coded features and heroes largely getting Western European ones. In nearly every way, Rapunzel and Gothel’s designs are completely opposites. Gothel’s frizzy dark hair could never be related to Rapunzel’s blonde, straight, silky mane. Gothel’s eyes are dark and hooded where Rapunzel’s are green and wide. Gothel’s nose is bumpy and hooked where Rapunzel’s is small and turns up. Gothel is curvaceous where Rapunzel is petite. In every way that Rapunzel fits the Aryan ideal, Gothel sits firmly in the category of other, even if both are white. Gothel’s foreign appearance was very intentional by the film’s director. In an interview, co-director Byron Howard said, “So, Gothel is very tall and curvy, she’s very voluptuous, she’s got this very exotic look to her. Even down to that curly hair, we’re trying to say visually that this is not this girl’s mother.” This goal in character design was repeated by him and co-director Nathan Greno in various interviews. 

More than simply creating visual difference between Rapunzel and Mother Gothel, Gothel’s “voluptuous,” “exotic look” plays into the classic trope of the “Beautiful Jewess,” an orientalized beauty who tricks others with her alluring appearance, “‘her beauty conceal[ing] her powers of destruction.’” Gothel gaslights Rapunzel to keep her in her tower, convincing her that her naivete makes the outside world too dangerous for her to live in, and the contrast between Gothel’s curvy and sexualized body and Rapunzel’s petite frame only serves to bolster her claims. It is notable that early iterations of Gothel’s design show her without many of the visually “Jewish” traits she has in her final designs, with straighter hair tied back in a low bun, rather than the large curly hair seen in the film. Several designs have long, but not hooked, noses, and higher collars, avoiding the “Jewish seductress” aspect of her design. Yet these designs were rejected in favor of one influenced by two famous women: Donna Murphy, who voiced Mother Gothel, and Cher. Cher in particular was looked to for being “very exotic and Gothic looking,” playing into the orientalization of the Beautiful Jewess, where “the physical beauty and sensuality of the Jewish woman, her dark hair…were almost always described using orientalizing tropes and characteristics.” Although neither Cher nor Murphy is Jewish, both have the dark, curly hair and large noses associated with Jews, and the choice to base Gothel’s appearance off of them, particularly Cher’s “exotic” beauty, plays directly into pre-existing antisemitic tropes, whether intentionally or not.

Like Queen Grimhilde and Jafar before her, Gothel utilizes a disguise as part of her villainy. However, Gothel’s disguise, her false youth, is constant throughout the film, rather than temporary for one evil act. The Beautiful Jewesses’ “imaginary proximity to seduction, sexuality, theater, and dance, as well as to masquerade and costumes, certainly had just as much to do with their femininity—situated outside of bourgeois gender roles—as with their Jewishness.” Both Gothel’s Jewish features and her sexualized femininity play a role in the manipulative nature of her youthful disguise.

Not only do the narrative similarities to blood libel and the design of Mother Gothel play into antisemitic tropes, but more so than previous evil mother figures in Disney films, Gothel fits the “stereotype of the overbearing, over-involved, suffocating Jewish mother.” While Queen Grimhilde and Lady Tremaine force Snow White and Cinderella, respectively, into servanthood, Gothel pretends to care for Rapunzel, as exemplified in the song “Mother Knows Best.” In addition to warning Rapunzel of the dangers of the world outside her tower, she guilts her for wanting to leave her, singing “Me, I'm just your mother, what do I know?/I only bathed and changed and nursed you/Go ahead and leave me, I deserve it/Let me die alone here, be my guest.” Her overbearing and manipulative parenting strategies were a key part of her character, and of Rapunzel’s, according to Howard and Greno. In an interview with Den of Geek, Greno said, “If it’s a story about a girl who’s stuck in a tower, and we wanted Rapunzel to be a smart character, she’s being manipulated. So, if Mother Gothel was a mean villainess…you’d be like, Why is Rapunzel staying in the tower? You needed to buy that this girl would be there for 18 years. Mother Gothel can’t be mean. She has to be very passive-aggressive,” and Howard added, “Gothel has to be more subtle…than a one-note, domineering mother.” By playing on the loving but overbearing Jewish mother trope, Tangled establishes Gothel as a convincingly threatening and manipulative villain. The movie’s narrative tropes, character designs, and character personalities that play upon antisemitic tropes, make it difficult to deny the antisemitism present in Tangled. 

The Twist Villain; Or, How Every Villain is a Little Bit Jewish

In the 13 years since Tangled’s release, many of the antisemitic tropes that had become staples of Disney’s villainous characters have been absent from its films. This coincides with a trend often referred to as the “twist villain,” where the film presents a fake villain to the audience, only to reveal that a “good” character was secretly the villain the whole time. Villains like King Candy from Wreck-It Ralph, Hans from Frozen, Robert Callahan from Big Hero 6, and Mayor Bellwether from Zootopia all fall under this trope. Because these characters are not meant to be read by the audience as evil based on their design, they lack the Jewish-coded traits like dark, curly hair, hooked noses, and deep-set eyes that have been used to mark villains as evil in the past. Other films, in lieu of a proper villain, opt for a hero’s internal conflict or a non-malicious antagonistic force to drive the story, such as Moana, Frozen II, and Encanto. These new story structures seem to eliminate the antisemitism present in other Disney films. Yet the trend of villains hiding in plain sight, lulling even the audience into a false sense of security before revealing their true colors, also plays into centuries-old antisemitic tropes.

In 19th century German criminal justice literature, “the ‘Jewish crook’ (jüdischer Gauner), a code term for a type of criminal that could apply to non-Jews as well,” was defined by “dangerous criminality masked by an assumed identity—a falsely benign exterior.” Because Disney has created an association between stereotypically Jewish traits and villainy for decades, priming audiences to read such traits as evil, by creating villains who hide their true character from both audiences and other characters, both through their actions and their non-Jewish-coded appearances, the films which use a “twist villain” both reaffirm the visual villainy of such traits and play upon another antisemitic trope.

In many ways, it seems impossible for Disney to create a villain that avoids some antisemitic trope, if avoiding stereotypically Jewish character designs only leads to affirmation of another trope. Unfortunately, it may very well be impossible. As John Appel notes in Jews in American Caricature: 1820–1914, “Jews, too, have been described as penny-pinching misers, cheats and ostentatious consumers, pushy parvenus and clannish separatists, radical unbelievers and Orthodox fanatics, ‘red’ Communists and arch-capitalists, draft evading slackers and cowardly soldiers and, more recently, bloodthirsty Israeli militarist occupiers of peaceful villages.” Whether a villain is stingy or greedy, cowardly or bloodthirsty, oddly insular or the mastermind controlling everything, they fall into a Jewish stereotype. Especially when the concept of Jews being sneaky or able to trick others comes into play, it is nearly impossible to create a villain who doesn’t hit one stereotype or another. Certainly, designs and narrative beats like the ones in Tangled make the Jewish-coding of villains far more obvious, but history’s view of Jews has permanently branded them as villainous. 

That doesn’t mean that every villain is equal. Hans’ duplicity in Frozen does not raise as many alarms as the multi-layered antisemitism in Tangled. Nor does it mean that every Disney film, let alone every piece of fiction influenced by centuries of antisemitism, should be disregarded. But understanding how antisemitism has influenced Disney’s villains, and, by virtue of its films’ success and cultural dominance, impacted how the American public perceives Jews because of these portrayals, these trends can be acknowledged and criticized, instead of being willfully ignored by insisting that 90 years of cinematic history is simply a “sheer coincidence.”

Bibliography

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———. “Deja View: The Huntsman.” Deja View (blog), February 3, 2015. https://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-huntsman.html.

———. “Deja View: The Stepmother.” Deja View (blog), October 1, 2012. https://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-stepmother.html.

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Diner, Hasia. Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way. Yale University Press, 2015. https://web-p-ebscohost-com.remote.slc.edu/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzkzMzA5Ml9fQU41?sid=c8d1f3df-2c0a-4e45-bb29-d0a83e2c8fbb@redis&vid=0&lpid=lp_13&format=EB.

“Disney+ | Video Player.” Accessed February 22, 2023. https://www.disneyplus.com/video/ddc23c92-f7d2-481c-9d71-1332af3a8c4f.

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“Disney Does Diversity: The Social Context of Racial-Ethnic Imagery.” In Cultural Diversity and the U.S. Media. Albany : State University of New York Press, 1998. http://archive.org/details/culturaldiversit0000unse_o7p9.

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Hercules. Walt Disney Pictures, 1997.

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Matteoni, Francesca. “The Jew, the Blood and the Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” Folklore 119, no. 2 (2008): 182–200.

McCulloh, John M. “Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early Dissemination of the Myth.” Speculum 72, no. 3 (1997): 698–740. https://doi.org/10.2307/3040759.

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Pocahontas. Walt Disney Pictures, 1995.

Putnam, Amanda. “Mean Ladies: Transgendered Villains.” In Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality, and Disability, n.d. 2013.

“Rapunzel by the Grimm Brothers: A Comparison of the Versions of 1812 and 1857.” Accessed February 22, 2023. https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm012a.html.

Rowe, Nina. The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Schüler-Springorum, Stefanie. “Gender and the Politics of Anti-Semitism.” AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, 2018.

Schutt, Tatum. “Why Do So Many Disney Villains Look Like Me?” Hey Alma, March 5, 2022. https://www.heyalma.com/why-do-so-many-disney-villains-look-like-me/.

Tangled. Walt Disney Pictures, 2010.

tangledbea. “It’s Bex, Not Bea.” Tumblr. Tumblr (blog). Accessed April 17, 2023. https://tangledbea.tumblr.com/post/687549550733492224/sigh-the-mother-gothel-is-an-anti-semitic.

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[raayllum]

im new to the fandom, so I miss a lot of the discourse (helped ofc by the fact you're kinda the only dp blog I follow), so everytime you mention the s4 backlash I'm like....how in the world could people hate that season or rayllum in it? It doesn't compute for me!

The last ship I was particularly engaged with, has a lot of similarities with rayllum. They were best friends, life partners before they were ever /romantic/ life partners. And they went through a /lot/ of trauma, miscommunication, and being on opposite sides of the same fight, etc etc.

the difference to rayllum was that they never rlly gave each other the grace they need. They also never talked on screen, but unlike rayllum it wasn't because it was the best option for them, it's just that the writers didn't want to include it ever - to the point that when they finally did an episode addressing it, it landed...very flat? Because it was about six seasons in, addressing things as far back as the second season, that they'd apparently never spoken to each other about before (they were tragically engaged when this happened).

Rayllum GENERALLY but especially in s4 have a really special place in my heart, because they feel very realistically messy - but it doesn't feel like it's there so there's some drama to keep audiences hooked. It feels authentic, and is one of those rare cases where it strengthens their relationship. I definitely could buy that rayllum would survive anything that hit their relationship by the end of s3, but getting to actually SEE that and see how much they're willing to work through out of love and respect for each other? Fantastic.

(also like it's such good character development....i am with u in the s4 defense squad. is there a squad? If there is I'm in it)

First off welcome to the fandom and I hope you're having a good time!!

The fact that my blog is mostly discourse free cause while I tag accordingly (fandom nonsense and dragons gets salty for potential blacklisting purposes) I always worry I can dip too far into that on occasion (I do my best not to unless being called out by name, and even then mostly do my best to ignore stuff), but there's not too much discourse within TDP in general — at least not in the Rayllum corner, luckily.

I think that's why the S4 backlash really surprised and threw me for a loop, because my partner and I finished the season at like 7AM on release day and while different than expected, we loved it and thought it was great from the start. Then we went online and people in the fandom who I'd largely always agreed with were having a really hard time with the season and it was disheartening at least to not have many people to talk to about why 1) S4 is TDP's thematically strongest season thus far and that's still true, 2) it's Ezran's best season imo, and 3) it does a lot of things really really well in really interesting ways.

I always try to never come down Too Hard on the s4 backlash just because people are of course entitled to their feelings/opinions then as well as now (even if some people's tunes have definitely changed), but a lot of it did feel sometimes short sighted if not immature.

Like soo many people are still mad that Rayla and Callum broke up in an offscreen graphic novel, when S4 would still be S4 regardless of whether TTM existed and like... if Rayla worrying that she failed (again) and went off on her own (again) to protect Callum was a big logical leap, then that person honestly just wasn't paying attention; there's not much else to say there. I also think it's just a strange choice to assume that Nothing Major would change the second you find out about a timeskip; like, almost everything else is status quo, Rayla being gone is the One Major Change and people couldn't handle that being a Surprise?

Like you said, conflict between a couple is not inherently a bad thing; it can be good and interesting, and this was always a relationship hurdle I think a lot of Rayllums (myself included) expected Rayla and Callum to have to tackle. Not liking how extreme or 'dramatic' it was (ie. season long arc > just a few episodes, or Rayla leaving > just trying to leave) is fair enough, but given that it's rooted in so much of Rayla's character, I'd much rather take a long way around approach that's in depth. I'm also just Glad and Grateful that the show is tackling it and treating it like the issue it is rather than sweeping things under the rug.

The fact that Callum's version of anger wasn't the one people wanted is another issue, but again — his anger went the way I'd always thought it might if he just went through enough trauma, and even if he had yelled at her, I don't think the season would've necessarily gone any different than it did other than them crying more early on. Which I've written and wouldn't have minded, but I also don't dislike the alternative route canon took — of course they were never going to get all variations out there, but Callum is cold as hell and being a bit of a jerk while also being valid and tempering himself because he doesn't want to hurt her anymore than she wants to hurt him (and Callum has always been very very bad at being/staying mad with Rayla or Ezran anyway).

I saw a lot of pushback against Rayllum being 'platonic' (which was annoying as an aromantic person lemme tell you, as though platonic is lesser), being "broken up for no reason" (Rayla being hyper-independent was not a secret and always going to be what threatened to rip them apart; they are also still Visibly and Repeatedly In Love with each other how is that broken up), or that they didn't get to have a Big Feelings Time in S4.

With that in mind, there's a lot that also matters in a relationship beyond just Open Communication, tbh. There's going to be times in life where you're not able to or unwilling to talk about certain things (given that S4 is maybe a week, I think that's reasonable; especially when Rayllum still haven't talked to each other about it as of s5 and no one I saw have an issue in S4 about it has complained about it there) and like... how do you treat each other when you're still mad or confused and haven't talked everything out? Do you still take care of each other, are you still doing your best to be considerate of each other (even if you're also not going to be perfect)? That shit matters just as much if not more as people able to sit down and hash things out.

I think the truth is a lot of the things that pissed people off about S4 would've been true even if the opposite things had happened:

N'than is flat and under developed unlike Ellis → N'than is more developed → why is N'than taking away from screentime for other characters?

The Sunfire plotline feels disconnected from the rest of the story (nvm that Viren's arc from 1x06 onwards doesn't affect any main character again until 3x04) → the Sunfire plot line has more connections to the main cast crammed in → more complaints about pacing and things feeling overly stuffed, as scenes already change from one to the next quite clearly

Callum and Rayla have a big talk sometime between 4x03-4x07 → this doesn't give Callum enough time to be angry / makes him seem unreasonable because he's admitted he was mostly worried but is still not fully letting her in despite her spilling her guts to him (and in what world would Rayla give excuses, again, when she knows he's the one hurting and taking priority in her mind)

S4's humor was bad because there were fart jokes (in one episode) → the crowlord's joke is so much worse than the fart jokes imo and is on par with the walnut joke in 1x06. also 1-2 scenes with jokes that didn't work for you out of 9 whole ass episodes is like. you're just a wuss i'm sorry

The Sunfire plot line is boring → will never not feel like "I just can't connect or be interested in politics and religious disagreements when it's mostly about Black people for Some Reason (racism)" to me tbh

There was no way to please everyone especially after a three year hiatus (because people think, For Some Reason, that how much time it takes for a story to come out should change how that story is written and it really, really doesn't) but yeah. The internet showed their asses and I was Not Impressed lmao

TLDR; a lot of the S4 backlash was "I'm mad this isn't happening now and I'm stressed out/worried that it won't be" as opposed to "this is only a problem if it never happens at all, but I have faith that it will," and I will love S4 forever. The Callum-Viren parallels being ramped up, the theme of duality and moving "doing terrible things for love" to the forefront with multiple characters (Rayla, Terry, Viren, Claudia), seeing Ezran step into his role as king, Callum's arc being shown > told, the set up for the possession plot line, Janaya's engagement and relationship development + Amaya and Janai's independent arcs? Chef's kiss. S4 is my best friend and its Rayllum dynamic is on par with S3 for me, and I am very grateful the fandom's attitude towards s4 and s4 Rayllum is a lot warmer / more reasonable now

When Callum says "unconditionally" in 5x01 and all their stuff in S5 we know and believe it because we've seen them fight and work so hard to come back from some pretty terrible brinks in imperfect ways, and I'll always love s4 for that. The most aspec Rayllum season by far

[taki118]

Some tips for Ace/Aro characters in fandom

I've been seeing this discourse again and I dunno I kinda wanna scream my opinions into the void as an older asexual who just tired of this.

There's this weird thought that if a character is Ace/Aro its like you can't ship the character or do sexy things with them and thats not really true, its entirely dependent on the character and you just need to offer them some more thought/care than you would an Allo character/relationship.

(Also you people saying you can't ship this cause one character is ace/aro and totally not cause it directly competes with your preferred ship I see you you ain't sneaky, trying to act holier than thou nonsense)

So you got an Ace/Aro cannon character and are wondering if it's ok to ship them, well here's a question has the character expressed a strong desire to NOT be in a relationship? If yes then yeah don't ship them. IF however their opinion has not been revealed or if they just seem passive then go right ahead you aren't going against the character and plenty of Ace/Aro people do want partnerships.

Now you might be thinking "Oh so I can just do what I normally do with my ships right?" Mhhmmmmm maybe there are aspects to Ace/Aro relationships that don't differ from Allo relationships but there are more that do. You need to really look at your character and how they approach things much more carefully than you would an Allo if you don't want to erase their Ace/Aro-ness. Example say the character is rather touch adverse you shouldn't then depict them clinging to another character instead show affection in tinier ways or show that they are doing this despite their discomfort for the other character.

Another thing to avoid is focusing too much on the relationship, if you go too hard on the not having an interest before this person it can come off like they "Fixed" their ace/aro-ness and kinda borderlines a fetishy area. Avoid statements like "I never felt this way until you" and go for something more casual like "It doesn't matter to me but you do"

And here's the part people really care about ughhhhh sex. Yes Ace/Aro people can have sex some even want sex so depicting an Ace/Aro character doing sexy things isn't necessarily erasure again so long as you depict it with CARE. Again if the character in question has directly stated they are sex repulsed for all that is holy do NOT have them have sex unless you put in a LOT of work into (aka not for those new to this) But if the character is more disinterested then you can have them do sexy things so long as it doesn't cause like a seismic shift in how they view sex, don't make it "Wow this is amazing I never knew" and lean more towards "It wasn't so bad with you" Again it all comes down to the character themselves so like pay attention.

Also try to avoid the who innocent bean thing like they aren't interested therefor they know NOTHING about sex, like yes it depends on the character but if you do this too much and too like cutesy it can come off like a virgin fetish or infantilizing.

Finally yes you can depict Ace/Aro characters in sexy ways (this is more for Ace characters but I wanna cover my bases with people) but again it depends on the character some aces like to look and feel sexy they just don't like sex and others don't want to be sexualized at all, for others its a case by case bases, again if it is something the character would do or hasn't said anything its fair game.

There's no way this covers everything really what important is just learning about Ace/Aro people and putting just a little more effort in when handling them. You can still have fun with them, still ship them, being Ace/Aro is not the death sentence some in fandom make it out to be, it can even lead to different and fun dynamics you hadn't considered or explored before.

[bitchy-peachy]

[mostly queue operated : 15 posts per day]

Tags of stuff you might want to blacklist under cut as well as other things (check before following me. ):

TAGS

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Things That Will Get A Block

Associating with people that have hurt me and my friends

Content thieves. Art, fanfiction etc. Plagiarism and art reposts without credits to get attention on yourself with other people's work is a no.

People that start fights over literally nothing. People that are overly reactive and see "something bad" in anything and start drama about it.

Homophobic, transphobic etc people get blocked.

Right wing conservashits and western commie shits (which are just as bad as conservatives) get blocked. I grew up in a conservative family and I've heard your kind of nonsense repeatedly. None of you are creative and bring nothing new to your "arguments" so I see no point in searing my damned eyes with your uninspiring stale bullshit.

Racist twats get blocked. I ain't gotta see your dumbass. Nobody does.

Porn bots, empty accounts, business accounts, weird content that gives me ick (poop, diaper and piss play, necrophilia, age play, etc... all which I don't want to see and properly filter. Like I've got weird fictional interests and personal but even I've got my limits and people ain't even tagging it to avoid getting banned in random main tags that has nothing to do with it.)

Even at my married grown hag age I've had guys act inappropriately towards me almost immediately after I made the mistake of following them back. Block, reported. I'm too old for that shit.

Don't waste your time sending me asks or DMs asking for money. Some of you spam this shit to the point of becoming overwhelming. Fuck outta my asks and dms with this. You're obnoxious and its too damn much. Tired of having 30 asks begging for money and dms from fake ass accounts asking me for money cos I made the mistake of thinking they were a legimate follower. Sincerely fuck off and away to my block list.

If I block you for any of these things you'll probably stay blocked forever.

Random Things About Me

[Status: Taken 💍 but we share each other with fictional characters]

[🧿🔮Ecletic Bruja. Some of my stuff is closed practice but I do share generalized info. Just not closed ancestral matters..]

[Horror/Gore movie/book obsessed: I also reblog a lot of dismemberment and innards which explains the #body horror or #tw blood tag.]

[A bit of a classical art snob. I love old art, the darker and more tragic the better. You can find pretty things of this nature as well as fandom fanarts in #art]

[I ain't 100% "politically correct". I can drag both left and right and my politics can fluctuate between center-right or center-left depending the issue. Example: I support the death penalty (as long as there's no reasonable doubt) and abortion. I also support guns but not everyone having them and there being some more restrictions/background checks etc. That was just some examples of my stance on some subjects. (Made bold for emphasis)]

[LGBT+ safe space🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🌈 (if you don't like that gfy]

[I have writer's block on everything sorry]

[Dark Humor galore💀]

[Perverted Humor galore🥵]

[🗡 I will only follow back if I like your content and aren't a shitty p0rn bot or some money begging bullshit. I want actual mutuals to interact with and fangirl with, not a bot or a one post blog that only wants money🗡]

[Hablo Español and can understand spoken/read Deutsch and Portuguese]

[My blog is for me. Don't tell me how to run my shit unless you're a masochist.]

[Account is monitored with statcounter]

[cetaceanhandiwork]

I don’t care about the checkmarks and I’m probably not gonna buy one unless I can think of some really funny way to use it. and to be clear, this post isn’t really about that.

but it was the inspiration for this post, because I saw some interesting secondhand discourse on the topic, which reminded me of this old XKCD episode

but I think there’s a better point to be made in this neighborhood than the sorta gratuitous “take that” approach Munroe used there

which is that if you let yourself get to the point where you see any expenditure of money “for fun” as wicked because there’s children starving in detroit, you have fallen for one of the central lies that money tries to indoctrinate us with: that you can math out everything in terms of +EV and opportunity cost, even things like good and evil.

and the reason you can’t math it out is that:

nobody on planet fucking earth knows enough to actually math out the consequences of an action. nobody has that level of perspective or context.

even if they did, how do you price those consequences against each other? there’s no way to compare one person’s pain to another’s; you’ll getting meaningless results, worse than useless. there’s a reason that we say “there’s no winners in misery poker”.

even if you could compare, how do you add or subtract? how do you do basic arithmetic when we know the hedonic treadmill exists, or that beyond a certain minimum successful care produces over-unity of happiness?

but we think we can anyway. we think we can b/c we live in a world where everything costs money and everyone needs money, where we’ve been trained to think that you can just convert X into a dollar-denominated opportunity cost and compare that way.

but that ain’t how good and evil work, and it ain’t how our hearts work. and it’s a deadly risk, because as soon as you start trying to do that math, you can get your arm twisted into believing that enough money can make something wrong into something right (b/c you can donate it to make something better happen than the bad thing you did). which, to be clear, is nonsense, and it’s the kind of thinking that ate Ana Mardoll (f’rex) alive.

or you start wondering if your existence is somehow a net negative to the world b/c you happen to take prescription meds paid for by medicaid. which, to be clear, is also nonsense and eats people alive every day.

and all this shit erodes your moral sense, your... fuckit, I’m just gonna say your conscience. b/c you keep telling it “no this good thing is bad actually because of the math” or vice versa until you get so much practice at it that nothing feels good anymore, or nothing feels bad anymore. and now you’re entirely off in deep space without even anything to base your busted math on.

I don’t claim to have all the answers. my own mutant ass take on virtue ethics is probably not an effective coda to this post b/c it’s not actually the point. and I’m definitely not saying that you shouldn’t spend your money on good causes. it’s good to care, and it’s good to act on that care! you’ll probably even enjoy it! but that’s not the point either. the point is more that “you should quit your topic X because my topic Y is more important” or “you should give up on real human being Z because my topic Y is more important” are snake oil, because you can’t even do math to those things in the first place without getting yourself irrecoverably, tragically confused.

[damnfandomproblems]

I've compiled several asks regarding Fandom Problem #5754 below:

Anon:

Going outside IS the problem. In fiction, one can pretend that most men aren't fucking terrible. When we step out the front door, we're instantly confronted by how unkind and awful they are.

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Anon:

In my experience, this is almost always drivel from people who are way too bombarded by certain kinds of posts on social media (you're right, they should go outside!). Many of the posts are somewhat insidious because at first glance, they seem to make cogent, obvious points about behaviour that most women need to constantly put up with from men who are socialized like dogs. Like that post by the terf that went "men are so annoying, they always say get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich! but what about men? YOU belong in the fields reaping the wheat!" and then the next post is, "i will as soon as you go to war and die". It's terfs all the way up the chain, but a lot of people instinctively think, "yes that's exactly how silly it is and how it feels!" and they get sucked in. Not a perfect example, but you can sort of see how that nonsense propagates.

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Anon:

I try not to get into the habit of doomscrolling blogs I block because it's a waste of time, but sometimes I get brain worms lol and just have to see how accurate my impression of someone and my justification of blocking them is. And can I just say for someone who says it's silly to believe that good men exist, implying all men are shit people by default, it's real weird that this is the second or third post I found during my brief doomscroll: "I bring a sort of "it's wrong to hate people based on how or where they were born" vibe to political discourse that apparently right wingers and left wingers both don't really like" So which is it?

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Anon:

Jeeze, according to the logic of one of the commenters; even if a man pulled out all the stops to attend rallies, be an activist, called out misogyny and systemic issues, and avoided contributing to as much patriarchal bullshit as possible, and made it his life's mission, it still wouldn't matter? And he would still be a "bad" man? Literally nothing is good enough for this commenter? That's all the evidence I need to throw away that take. Just say you're a radfem and be on your way.

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Anon:

responding to (well, about) the comment that says good men don't exist (lol)... It's WILD how emboldened and out-and-proud some man haters can be, just because they're behind a computer screen, and on a site like tumblr, where peoples' definition of acceptable "left" behavior is killing billionaires and wishing death on bigots. Sorry, but just because other people who are equally misguided are enabling your shitty reductive views, it doesn't mean everyone is going to. And thank GOD I'm seeing sanity in the comments. I'm a woman, I was AFAB, and fuck people who smear an entire gender and/or sex just because it overheats their brain a little too much to exercise nuance. Do you feel informed? Do you feel knowledgeable? Do you feel like you're making a difference? Good for you. With that attitude, you never will.