#please feel free to engage w me on this! i'd love to hear ur thoughts & have a dialogue about this

[spocks-kaathyra]

Hello ,

I just wanted to say that reading your posts about Pythas and ASIT in general make me feral in the best way possible. The release of the audiobook has rekindled my insanity for the novel and everything it represents. Sadly I’m a socially awkward wimp, so I don’t really get to share my thoughts on the blorbos, but I swear I have so many takes and thoughts and art about the cardassians, I am literally bursting at the seams with a need to share. So if you ever have any insane ASIT or cardassian thoughts I would be so glad to talk to you about them and share some of my own (words can’t express how nervous asking this makes me, I swear I’m doing my best not to be creepy or weird).

I also want to tell you how amazing your cosplay is, I am so ready to try and recreate this for Halloween as I’ve become the resident freak cosplay enthusiast in my friend group.

Thank you for receiving this monologue, I wish you the best of days fellow Pythas enthusiast.

HI I LOVE YOU it makes me so so happy that u like my Pythas posts hsjkhdkj PLEASE I'd love to hear ur thoughts abt ASIT I'm happy to talk in messages but also u should totally post abt the blorbos!! I am also insanely socially awkward but this is the socially awkward nerds website that's what it's for. I mostly post my Pythas thoughts just for myself and I don't expect anyone to engage w them but then people DO engage w them and I get to have conversations abt my blorbos and it's the most wonderful thing ever. like this!! I love you!! and I would love for there to be more Pythasposters (and ASITposters in general ofc) on this website and I KNOW everyone else in the ASIT fandom would like that too. so. PLEASE post abt the blorbos if u want !!

sorry for the lecture hjkdhlfkj I am just vry excited that someone else loves Pythas as much as I do jdhkfjhk. anyway THATS SO COOL that ur gonna do a Garak cosplay for Halloween I would love to see it when ur done!! or even progress updates!! if ur comfortable sharing ofc. I'm obviously not an expert but if u have any questions abt how I did it then I'm vry vry happy to answer them!! this is gonna be my motivation to finish writing out the prosthetics tutorial today lmao if that's smth you'd find helpful.

anyway THANK U SO MUCH I LOVE U FOR THIS I can't tell u how much you've made my day :))) PLEASE feel free to message me. or I'll message u lol

[fightmeyeats]

Three Years Late to the Party: A Critique of Predator/Prey Metaphors in Zootopia (2016)

I’m not sure why I am writing about Zootopia (2016). Although it was generally received very favorably (as I am writing this it has a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes), it was released over three years ago and  in many ways not a hugely significant film. Even stranger, perhaps, is that I initially intended to discuss Suicide Squad (2016), and then both films at once, and then--realizing I really had no interest in rewatching Suicide Squad, ever in my life if I can help it, I decided to instead discuss only Zootopia. At first glance one may wonder what these two films have in common--one is a children’s animated film which received a good deal of praise, the other a superhero action film which feels like a fever dream poorly cobbled together on iMovie (look, I’m not the only one who feels this way it has a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes). What I see as a common ground and in need of critique is the way both films handle racism and sexism. For the sake of readability I am going to try to keep this as short as I can, and again for the sake of my own sanity I’m going to discuss Zootopia but I’m more than happy to share my perspective on Suicide Squad (I do have a lot to say even without giving it a full rewatch, I just don’t want to launch into a critique when I can’t fully do it justice). In an attempt of brevity I am also going to focus on the implications of the metaphor(s) embodied in the prey/predator dynamic, at the exclusion of any discussion of the implication of the systems represented in the film and the way they shape ideologies of what counts as resolution to discriminatory practices (ie “acceptance” and “within the police force”).

Zootopia is centered around a predator/prey metaphor which encompases both racism and sexism in largely lumpy/uneven ways that ultimately are disengaging from real world race/gender politics and leave the metaphor deeply confused. What I mean by this is that the “prey” dimension seems to be attempting to address sexism as an oversimplified monolith, while the “predator” dimension seems to be addressing racism, again as an oversimplified monolith; thrown into this is the dimension of size, which also seems to be relevant to the characters’ experiences: a large prey animal, for example, seems to return to being coded masculine (perhaps these are the metaphoric white men? the legibility of this is difficult to determine, given the main example of a powerful prey figure is voiced by Idris Elba), as well as the fact that the predator dimension of the metaphor seems to swing back and forth from discussing the way masculinity (again monolithic) is viewed and how people of color are viewed, with no clear demarcation as to why the switch is being made.

In actual feminist discourses the main pitfall of race/gender binary approaches to understanding oppression is that it erases the experiences of women of color, but in the case of pop media it also becomes relevant to acknowledge that it also erases the privileged position of white masculinity. Take, for example, the choice to have Nick Wilde, the main predator character, voiced by a white man, and yet central to the argument of predator victimhood. There is a definite unevenness to the way in which these various metaphors are deployed throughout the film: the mayor, Mr. Lionheart is established as being in a privileged position, and his privilege/pompousness/power are the implicit motive behind the villain’s actions--he is voiced by a white man and it seems that he could be legible as a metaphor for (white) male privilege. At the same time, the disappearance of Emmitt Otterton (who does not have a speaking role) does not seem to be of huge concern: while sympathy is expressed towards his wife, Mrs. Otterton (who is voiced by a Black actress), Judy is ultimately assigned to the investigation because she volunteers for it under conditions which imply that the department is not willing to give the job to someone with more experience, and she does not have access to the full police resources to solve the case; furthermore, her assignment to solve his disappearance in two days is part of a wager, further suggesting that the police are not seriously concerned with his disappearance. All of this parallels a real life disregard for the lives of people of color especially by the police.

The way the news sensationalizes the fact that predators are supposedly going “feral” is also significant in this context: if the biases experienced by predator characters are intended to articulate racism, this could be commentary on the way people of color (and especially Black men) are represented as hyper-violent and a potential danger to white society in the real world. If, however, predators are intended to be privileged male figures like the mayor the suggestion may be that all men are viewed as violent/uncivilized and that this is harmful: a critique of critiquing “toxic masculinity” rather than “toxic masculinities” themself. Let’s break this down a little bit more, as it largely overlooks the ways violence and masculinity are actually intertwined in the Global North: first of all, it maintains an idea of white male victimhood which is initially suggested by Nick Wilde’s real world whiteness by implying that white men are viewed as violent in ways which broadly overlook the way that society hegemonically views men of color to be violent and violent white men to be outliers, despite actual trends suggesting otherwise (consider racism and the war on drugs/imagining of the “super predator,” hegemonic discourses on violence which surround mass shootings/acts of terror and how these shift based off the race/ethnicity of the shooter, the mass incarceration of men of color, the disproportionate nature of police violence and murder enacted on people of color). Secondly, it creates the insinuation that critiques of the way violence often becomes accepted and expected in many kinds of masculinities are more harmful to men than the way stoicism/rugged individualism/violence are so prevalent in masculine “norms.” Thirdly, it disengages with the real harm violent norms can and do cause women.

Part of what makes the dynamics of this metaphor so difficult to follow is that the film starts off from the position that Judy is facing discrimination which she must overcome, and then switches into the new position that Judy herself holds discriminatory beliefs. While there is value to this narrative arc: say we scrap the animal metaphor and Judy is, for example, a middle class white woman overcoming sexism to join the police force who then partners with Nick who is, to stick with the film's casting choices, a poor white man, or, to stick with the metaphor, a Black man, and in the process she realizes that oppression is multifaceted and she herself has internalized prejudices which affect other people’s reality; this could be a useful and important story. But because of the way the world is developed and because the writing is so focused on binary logics, we have a strange world where “prey” animals are discriminated against, but not the large ones, and “predator” animals hold positions of power (despite incompetence), but they also have to navigate discrimination and prejudicial tensions, and these tensions are heightened by attacks intended to heightened these fears, but the attacks are caused because a prey animal is tired of facing discrimination at the hands of the predators.

Let me give two further examples which I think can help clarify my point here: Officer Clawhauser (voiced by a white actor), who is shown to be well meaning and kind, but at the same time holds “soft” discriminatory beliefs towards Judy (although he apologizes when she comments on it) and is, frankly, not very good at his job. Most of his onscreen time at work involves him eating donuts and messing around on his phone; yet when he is fired because he is a predator it becomes a significant moment of compassion on Judy’s part where she realizes she must rethink her bias. Again, if “predator” is understood to be the stand-in for masculinity, we must also reconsider the stakes: why is Clawhauser viewed as being a better fit for the police academy than Judy in the first place? And what are the implications of his no longer being viewed this way? Why is his performance not considered at any point in his employment? Is the way he becomes viewed as a potential threat and is subsequently fired part of a patriarchal paranoid fantasy which is anxious that the integration of women on equal terms in the workplace will lead to a total dialectical switch of positions? And if so, why is this fear being articulated in 2016? On the other hand, if prejudice against predators is a metaphor for racism, it is difficult to understand why he got the job in the first place (he is not framed as being any sort of “diversity” hire in the way that Judy is).

A second example is that towards the end of the film Nick becomes upset, hurt, and angry to discover that Judy carries “Fox Spray” just to be safe; this commentary only holds up if the predator metaphor is one of race/racism rather than gender/sexism. What we, as an audience, have to ask is what the fox spray is intended to represent in the real world: is this a criticism of women carrying mace or other self-protection devices? Surely it cannot be intended to suggest that women need to consider how emotionally “hurtful” it might be for men to realize that women have to take extra precautions because of the legal and social structures which facilitate sexual assault and re-victimize survivors. So is “Fox Spray” the same as “[Racial/Ethnic Group] Spray”? The implications between these two interpretations vary widely, and the messiness of the metaphor leaves this commentary confused.