#nz things

[rowenabean]

I never knew that pohutukawa had a fragrance (soft, spicy-sweet, quiet) until the year I was twenty three and daring set out, away for three months, the entire New Zealand summer, then returning, my first day home and under the last-blooming crimson tree (soft, spicy-sweet, quiet) I caught the barely-there scent of home

[elizabethmasen]

My View Right Now

[asterwild]

PENGUINS. all of them!

(not precisely to scale, but close)

[sixth-light]

Yet another good reminder that even other Anglosphere authors have to basically arm-wrestle US book editors to be allowed to retain any vestige of their own dialect and culture in their writing and this is why lots of people have Opinions about American...everything.

[geraniumsky]

Gotta admit, kinda liking the current Four Square ads

[turnaboutstar]

autistic people when there's collectable things with tv shows with multiple generations of them:

[elizabethmasen]

Autumn my beloved

[fiddleabout]

on the one hand the world is burning and everything is terrible, on the other hand the canadian olympic soccer team got caught spying on the new zealand squad with drones and it has provided me with endless spectacular joy and entertainment for the last eighteen hours

[ignitesthestxrs]

there's something about the way people talk about john gaius (incl the way the author writes him) that is like. so absent of any connection to te ao māori that it's really discomforting. like even in posts that acknowledge him as not being white, they still talk about him like a white, american leftist guy in a way that makes it clear people just AREN'T perceiving him as a māori man from aotearoa.

and it's just really serves to hammer home how powerful and pervasive whiteness and american hegemony is. because TLT is probably the single most Kiwi series in years to explode on the global stage, and all the things i find fraught about it as a pākehā woman reading a series by a pākehā author are illegible to a greater fandom of americans discoursing about whether or not memes are a valid way of portraying queer love.

idk the part of my brain that lights up every time i see a capital Z printed somewhere because of the New Zealand Mentioned??? instinct will always be proud of these books and muir. but i find myself caught in this midpoint of excitement and validation over my culture finding a place on the global stage, frustration at how kiwi humour and means of conveying emotion is misinterpreted or declared facile by an international audience, frustrated also by how that international audience runs the characters in this book through a filter of american whiteness before it bothers to interpret them, and ESPECIALLY frustrated by how muir has done a pretty middling job of portraying te ao māori and the māoriness of her characters, but tht conversation doesn't circulate in the same way* because a big part of the audience doesn't even realise the conversation is there to be had.

which is not to say that muir has done a huge glaring racism that non-kiwis haven't noticed or anything, but rather that there are very definitely things that she has done well, things that she has done poorly, things that she didn't think about in the first book that she has tacked on or expanded upon in the later books, that are all worthy of discussion and critique that can't happen when the popular posts that float past my dash are about how this indigenous man is 'guy who won't shut up about having gone to oxford'

*to be clear here, i'm not saying these conversations have never happened, just that in terms of like, ambient posts that float round my very dykey dash, the discussions and meta that circulate on this the lesbian social media, are overwhelmingly stripped of any connection to aotearoa in general, let alone te ao māori in specific. and because of the nature of american internet hegemony this just,,,isn't noticed, because how does a fish know it's in the ocean u know? i have seen discussions along these lines come up, and it's there if i specifically go looking for it, but it's not present in the bulk of tlt content that has its own circulatory life and i jut find that grim and a part of why the fandom is difficult to engage with.

[kvtnisseverdeen]

stranger things: season two + autumn

[faunandfloraas]

fav skz // Sick as!

[elizabethmasen]

WELLINGTON HAS CABLE CARS???????

[semipreciousartist]

Get a lovingly designed acrylic charm of the taskmaster and his assistant. Fastest wins. Your time starts now.

Preorders are now open for 2-charm connected keychains featuring The Taskmaster and his assistant in their UK and NZ flavors!

Listed via Punk and Precious

Preorders extended to September 23rd!

9/23 will be the final day for preorders before I order the charms