#racial dynamics in politics

[songofwizardry]

it’s actually such a difficult time to be someone who’s unironically and genuinely and wholeheartedly into space travel, and believes in space for everyone, and thinks it’s bonkers that we have had zero (0) people who aren’t white American men who have set foot on the moon, but also who hates Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. (but also tbh it’s been hard for us Elon Musk hating space nerds out here for a long time.)

like I’m 100% not a fan of this billionaire Katy Perry space tourism… thing, but also. you don’t gotta write off space travel as a concept entirely as always imperialist/the realm of billionaires/pointless/etc. it doesn’t have to be this way come with me and I can show you a better world.

[flintmcgraw]

ive been watching a lot of greys so i know im biased in favour of shondaland ips rn but 10min into the residence and all the staff are black and i already knoooooow this is gonna fuck hard

[tuulikki]

The thing is that the portrayal of Neanderthals as having been inherently grotesque and alien to H. sapiens is something we will never have proof of. But we do have proof that, in different locations and in different populations across time, we all found eachother desirable. We saw eachother and wanted to touch. And the offspring were held by their mothers and raised and had their own offspring in turn.

When you look for the first proof that H. sapiens found Neanderthals repulsive, you have to wait until the Victorian era, when the white masters of empires were busy portraying Neanderthals as stupid, brutish, and (of course) dark-skinned.

In more modern times, we’ve had people arguing that instead of seeing Neanderthals as Benighted Savages, they should instead be seen as Noble Savages, (allegedly) cruelly destroyed and driven from their lands by H. sapiens. Which one of their two you believe says more about your modern political views than it does about ancient H. sapiens.

And, whether we construct Neanderthals as Savage or Noble Savage, the fundamental assumption we project into the unfathomably distant past is still that H. sapiens saw Neanderthals as an Other, with the language we use being almost explicitly that of modern racial dynamics.

But we have no proof of any of that. We have no proof of hostilities. We know we co-existed and we had sex. That’s it.

Humans obviously have sex with some humans and kill others. We also know that, when small groups of humans occupy vast spaces with infrequent contact with others, unique cultures will always form, some more hospitable, some more neophobic/xenophobic. But many cultures of small settlements placed among huge unpeopled landscapes place supreme emphasis on hospitality to strangers. Plus, we fucking love other social animals, as evidenced by how we befriended wolves.

I’m a humourless weirdo and a wet blanket about popular constructions of Neanderthals as “monstrous”, and I freely admit it. But that’s because it’s tied up in legacies of imperialism. Not only that, but it also privileges one culture (yours, mine, modernity’s) as being most human by implicitly assuming we can project it onto people in the past. Since you don’t pretend that all global cultures share exact same values as you do, it doesn’t take more than a few moments’ reflection to realise you can’t do that to the past.

[mortalityplays]

This is a fantastic linguistics paper – the researcher observed the artificiality and social pressure imposed on kids when they're asked to produce language on the spot, so instead had them talk to a rabbit in a room with a tape recorder. He found that when talking organically, without an adult authority figure around, their speech was exponentially more sophisticated, socially fluid, and creative.

As someone in the twitter thread points out, this has obvious implications for situations in which cued language production is used in diagnosis e.g. for autism. I'd add that (while this particular paper's remit is limited to children) it should also make us think about situations where adults are pressured to speak by authority figures: court hearings, police encounters, benefit assessments, asylum interviews, etc. If the presence of power hampers your ability to advocate for yourself, these are all rigged propositions.

Anyway, you can read the whole piece here (taken from a talk on his research, so it's very readable):

e: sorry, I should add the context that this is a language study situated in Hawaii in 1970 so there are also some very significant racial socio-linguistic politics discussed here that might be distressing to read about. I don't want to discount that aspect of the power dynamic studied here either.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

atheism as an opressed minority is the whitest attempt to pretend you are white and opressed I have ever seen in my entire black ass life

Mhm. Like fucking clockwork lmao.

1) I'm neither white nor an atheist. But sure, me calling atheists a religious minority is me pretending I'm white and oppressed.

2) I didn't use the word "oppressed", I just said "religious minority", but since you want to go there, sure let's go there.

There is no single religious affiliation that is as widely regarded as "political suicide" in the U.S. as openly identifying as an atheist, they're one of the most underrepresented groups in the U.S. government and most of the few atheist politicians that have held any political office in the U.S. have only openly come out as such either after the fact or late into their term, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to be elected in the first place.

A 2014 study by the university of Minnesota on social prejudice against atheists found that 42% of respondents characterized atheists a group of people who "didn't agree with [their] vision of american society" and that 44% of respondents wouldn't agree with their child marrying an atheists.

And also, despite the fact that these have been later ruled to be unenforceable, it's still incredibly telling that there are currently seven U.S States whose constitutions try to explicitly ban atheists from holding public office.

Notice how most of these are worded specifically so that you're not banned as long as you believe in ANY God or "supreme being", so it's not even an attempt at discrimination against non-christians in general, but specifically against atheists and other nonbelievers.

This is an uncharacteristically US-centric post of me but let's be real this ask is written in such an aggressively american way (e.g. immediately conflating "atheist" with "white" and implicitly treating U.S. racial dynamics as universal) so I know your yankee ass isn't gonna give a shit if I talk about how e.g. a 2009 survey found atheists to be one of the most openly hated demographic groups in Brazil, or how in several countries being openly atheist is straight-up punishable by the death penalty.

[fursasaida]

This article is from 2022, but it came up in the context of Palestine:

Here are some striking passages, relevant to all colonial aftermaths but certainly also to the forms we see Zionist reaction taking at the moment:

Over the decade I lived in South Africa, I became fascinated by this white minority [i.e. the whole white population post-apartheid as a minority in the country], particularly its members who considered themselves progressive. They reminded me of my liberal peers in America, who had an apparently self-assured enthusiasm about the coming of a so-called majority-minority nation. As with white South Africans who had celebrated the end of apartheid, their enthusiasm often belied, just beneath the surface, a striking degree of fear, bewilderment, disillusionment, and dread.

[...]

Yet these progressives’ response to the end of apartheid was ambivalent. Contemplating South Africa after apartheid, an Economist correspondent observed that “the lives of many whites exude sadness.” The phenomenon perplexed him. In so many ways, white life remained more or less untouched, or had even improved. Despite apartheid’s horrors—and the regime’s violence against those who worked to dismantle it—the ANC encouraged an attitude of forgiveness. It left statues of Afrikaner heroes standing and helped institute the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted amnesty to some perpetrators of apartheid-era political crimes.

But as time wore on, even wealthy white South Africans began to radiate a degree of fear and frustration that did not match any simple economic analysis of their situation. A startling number of formerly anti-apartheid white people began to voice bitter criticisms of post-apartheid society. An Afrikaner poet who did prison time under apartheid for aiding the Black-liberation cause wrote an essay denouncing the new Black-led country as “a sewer of betrayed expectations and thievery, fear and unbridled greed.”

What accounted for this disillusionment? Many white South Africans told me that Black forgiveness felt like a slap on the face. By not acting toward you as you acted toward us, we’re showing you up, white South Africans seemed to hear. You’ll owe us a debt of gratitude forever.

The article goes on to discuss:

"Mau Mau anxiety," or the fear among whites of violent repercussions, and how this shows up in reported vs confirmed crime stats - possibly to the point of false memories of home invasion

A sense of irrelevance and alienation among this white population, leading to another anxiety: "do we still belong here?"

The sublimation of this anxiety into self-identification as a marginalized minority group, featuring such incredible statements as "I wanted to fight for Afrikaners, but I came to think of myself as a ‘liberal internationalist,’ not a white racist...I found such inspiration from the struggles of the Catalonians and the Basques. Even Tibet" and "[Martin Luther] King [Jr.] also fought for a people without much political representation … That’s why I consider him one of my most important forebears and heroes,” from a self-declared liberal environmentalist who also thinks Afrikaaners should take back government control because they are "naturally good" at governance

Some discussion of the dynamics underlying these reactions, particularly the fact that "admitting past sins seem[ed] to become harder even as they receded into history," and US parallels

And finally, in closing:

The Afrikaner journalist Rian Malan, who opposed apartheid, has written that, by most measures, its aftermath went better than almost any white person could have imagined. But, as with most white progressives, his experience of post-1994 South Africa has been complicated. [...]

He just couldn’t forgive Black people for forgiving him. Paradoxically, being left undisturbed served as an ever-present reminder of his guilt, of how wrongly he had treated his maid and other Black people under apartheid. “The Bible was right about a thing or two,” he wrote. “It is infinitely worse to receive than to give, especially if … the gift is mercy.”

[infimace-blog]

Some days I forget how much of my feelings are tied into the racial dynamics of orcs and then I see something like Don't Kill Them All and I want to break someone.

Accidentally clicked on the trailer after foiling YouTube's attempts to foist this on me for several days, and god fucking damn, it's white savior bullshit. Biracial girl raised by the white elven side of her family returns to her savage orcish brethren who definitely aren't supposed to be some kind of racial analogue to try and civilize them. Ignore that the girl and some of the orcs have dreadlocks. The half-orc has to introduce the orcs to such complex concepts as 'don't kill everything' and 'don't mindlessly destroy resources' and 'gathered food can be turned into delicious things like bread'. Who the fuck decided we needed a game about some privileged outsider teaching the 'savages' how to maintain their own land?

It's like the most Euro-centric bits of the Civilization games combined with DnD race politics, complete with the idea that only a half-orc (rather than a full orc) has the civility and intelligence to be a proper protagonist. I've seen so many people acting like we've fully divorced the fantasy concepts of orcs and goblins and the rest from real-world racial issues, and here we have someone recreating The White Man's Burden with orcs from base principles. Have y'all learned nothing from what black and indigenous people have been saying about orcs for years?

[almostempty]

psa clint isn’t joel miller and if you’re flattening him into a joel archetype we need to talk about race again

i’m aware they both wear plaid, have a daughter, battle with grief, and are hot covered in blood and enacting violence

this isn’t a callout i just don’t remember where i saw these specific posts about the red handkerchief and clint as a ‘blue collar’ man. but i know i’ve seen plenty of clint = joel posts floating around. 

AND i wasn’t going to say anything bc i thought i was just being gatekeepy bc i didn’t wanna see clint get the dbf treatment which would be my personal problem and i can happily write about him on my own blog how i want etc etc and i know i don’t have to read anyone else’s takes BUT then i thought about it and once again…it’s always about race…

edit: i apologize for using such a specific example without reaching out to the person that made the post—i could have taken the time to find it before using it as a launching point, that's on me. the handkerchief post wasn’t part of a huge fic or broader take on clint’s character (sorry for the jumpscare).

it did, however, stick out to me as a strong illustration of how important cultural context is. the issue is systemic not interpersonal. the rest of my examples weren't based on any one post—the blue-collar, marlboro man, works-with-his-hands, joel-coded/lana del rey-coded/ethel cain-coded vibes have been everywhere: fics, tags, comments, posts, tiktok edits. i know there’s nuance in fandom culture—tropes, memes like “close enough, welcome back joel/javi,” “____ coded” jokes, music, etc. and if we can understand that level of context for internet culture, we can understand the importance of racial context too, right?

i stand by the rest of what i said and will continue to argue that cultural context matters if you consider yourself an anti-racist reader or writer.* re: the post i saw somewhere about someone having a head canon about clint having a red handkerchief as a snot rag - sorry i forgot where i saw it and this isn’t an attack on whoever wrote that, but an fyi to anyone thinking about him the same way… if you’re writing a latino man in 1987 oakland—especially someone working street-level jobs or tied to criminal economies—and you think a red bandana is just a ‘snot rag,’ you’re missing major context

fyi, in 1987, color politics were not optional if you were a man of color in california. even though bloods (red) and crips (blue) originated in LA, their color codes and the larger gang culture around them were already known across the state. in northern california specifically, norteños (tied to the nuestra familia prison gang) wore red. their rivals, sureños (tied to the mexican mafia), wore blue. 

who cares? well, even though oakland wasn’t dominated by bloods and crips the way LA was (in part due to the black panthers), it had its own street crews, plus a heavy norteño/sureño influence by the mid-80s. even outside organized gangs, the association between red and gang affiliation was strong enough that wearing a red bandana could get you profiled, targeted, or attacked—by cops, by other crews, or by random people trying to read your allegiance.

if you were a latino man in oakland in the 80s—like clint—you wouldn’t carry a red bandana by accident. it would be flagging. even if you weren’t affiliated. as a street smart guy, survival would mean being hyper-aware of how you present yourself, especially in neighborhoods policed by gang dynamics and racial profiling. cops would use color displays like a bandana as probable cause for harassment searches or worse during the height of the ‘war on drugs’ and the crack epidemic. 

characters like clint—latino, working-class, street-adjacent—would have understood the consequences of being read wrong. this doesn’t mean no one ever had cloths, handkerchiefs, or functional rags. it means the color and the way you carried it mattered: what pocket, what visibility, how deliberate it looked.

throwing a red bandana in your pocket wasn’t neutral. it wasn’t folksy. it wasn’t just blue-collar roughness. it was a risk, and survival was about reading the street, not walking through it like color codes didn’t apply to you.

clint wouldn’t casually rock a red bandana like a cowboy. latino men have never had the privilege of being casual about how they're read in public, especially not in a city like oakland, especially not in the 1980s.

re: clint as a ‘blue collar’ character there’s a difference between being ‘blue collar’ and being trapped in criminalized labor. wearing a plaid shirt and working with your hands doesn’t automatically make someone a blue-collar worker in the traditional sense. 

blue collar historically refers to wage labor—construction, manufacturing, trade work—where the worker is paid (poorly) but still operating within the boundaries of legal employment. union jobs. often unionized labor, tied to systems that, at least in theory, protected workers through collective bargaining, benefits, and job security. those protections were never equally available, especially to workers of color, but they existed as part of the larger working-class structure. 

clint’s labor isn’t protected. it isn’t recognized. it’s criminalized. he’s not just a man doing rough work for low pay—he’s disposable labor, surviving in a system that sees him as expendable from the start. calling him ‘blue collar’ erases the fact that he’s not inside the working class safety net. he’s on the outside, paying off debt with violence he didn’t choose.

it carries a specific context of class exploitation, yes, but it’s still different from the kind of criminal coercion characters like clint are caught in.

clint is not a proud working man making an honest living. his entire arc in freaky tales is about being forced into violent labor to pay off inherited debt he had no choice in. he is not rough and gritty because he chose a rugged life. 

he is rough because he was born into a system designed to keep him indebted, desperate, and expendable. he’s not working a blue collar job—he’s surviving in a criminal economy that feeds off people like him, using violence he doesn’t even want to enact just to stay afloat.

flattening clint into a vague ‘marlboro man’ archetype (joel coded)—rough clothes, kind heart, good intentions—it strips away everything sharp and painful about his actual story. it whitewashes the complexity of being a latino man criminalized by birth and survival, not by choice. it reframes his struggle as a generic americana fantasy about working-class virtue, when what’s actually at stake is how structural violence forces people into roles they never asked for.

especially when it’s a latino character, this flattening isn’t neutral. it erases the realities of racialized labor, racialized criminalization, and survival. clint’s tragedy isn’t that he’s a gruff tough guy with a soft interior. his tragedy is that he was forced to become violent in order to pay off a life he was never allowed to own, and he carries that weight without any guarantee of getting free.

you can’t understand clint if you don’t understand that. and if you’re not willing to sit with that discomfort, what you’re writing isn’t really him—it’s just a projection of a character he was never allowed to be.

clint and joel might overlap in aesthetics, being single girl dads, and physical strength—but reducing clint to a copy of joel misses everything that actually defines who he is, and why his story matters.

joel miller is a texas man—a man shaped by frontier mythology, southern survivalism, deep mistrust, and violent individualism. he is, by his own admission, a man whose grief and guilt hollowed him out so badly that even his brother was scared of him. he’s not just traumatized; he’s actively dangerous, closed off, and isolated. his story is about losing his humanity and clawing parts of it back, maybe too late.

clint is not that. clint is an oakland man—east bay, west coast, working-class and criminalized, not because he chose violence but because he was born into debt he could never pay off. he’s an underdog, not an antihero. 

he’s soft with his woman, he lights up under her attention. he’s goofy in the video store with the clerk. he’s not some hardened loner who scares everyone around him. he’s just a man trying to survive a system that was designed to use him up.

when you flatten clint into joel, you’re misreading two characters with different emotional cores and fetishizing the aesthetics of pain and ruggedness while ignoring race, class, place, and survival context.

clint isn't a texas cowboy. he’s not steeped in frontier violence or manifest destiny myths. he’s a west coast underdog who knows every step he takes could get him crushed, and he still tries to protect the people he loves without letting it rot him from the inside out.

the tragedy of joel is that the world took everything from him and he let it turn him into something colder, crueler.

the tragedy of clint is that the world gave him no choice- he says he was born into breaking bones to pay off his father’s debt, and he still tries to hold onto his softness anyway.

if you can’t tell the difference, you’re not seeing clint, you’re just projecting a fetishized joel trope onto another character… 

[wasabi-gumdrop]

essential reading for Kabru lovers and dunmeshi world building enthusiasts

Kabru, impossible mutual understanding & unknowable objects

Despite his concerted and constant efforts to understand other people, it’s established in a few extras that Kabru believes that true mutual understanding between certain different races is impossible. Specifically, between long-lived and short-lived races, and between humans and demi-humans. Partially, we can trace this conviction back to specific hang-ups caused by his life; the trauma of the Utaya disaster, prejudices he carries from his childhood, and his experience of racism among the elves. In this “little” essay, I’m gonna discuss how I think those experiences formed this belief, how it comes out in his actions, and how some of his actions seem to contradict it. The question of whether it’s possible to reach mutual understanding with other living beings despite our differences is one of the core themes of the manga, and I’ll also touch on how this aspect of Kabru’s character links to that.

Seeking understanding

Kabru is a character who devotes a huge amount of time and effort to understanding people, and he is very good at it. In his internal monologue, we can tell how advanced and complex his skills of analysis are. He is able to read a huge amount of information just from looking at people's faces and body language.

People are, to him, what monsters are to Laios. This is something that's been expanded on at length in other, excellent meta. It's the fact that they're foils; it's the fact that Kabru is also very easy to read as autistic, with a special interest which is the opposite and parallel of Laios'. It's something that came out of trauma and alienation, as Laios' special interest in monsters also began as a coping mechanism.

The complicated origin of this "love" for monsters and for people comes through, I think, in the fact that one of the places we see both characters use their fixation is in being very, very good at killing the thing that they love. This also ties into the idea that loving something isn't even remotely mutually exclusive with using it to sustain your own survival; using it for your own purposes; hurting it or killing it. Love can be, and often is, violent, possessive and consumptive. This understanding is part of what makes Kui's depiction of interpersonal relationships so compelling to me.

While Laios fixated on monsters and animals to seek a place of escape, in both his imagination and his self-image, from the humans who he couldn't understand and who couldn't understand him, Kabru seems to have fixated on understanding people in order to navigate the complex, socially marginal places that he has been forced into throughout his life. As an illegitimate child raised by a single mother with an appearance that marked him out as different to the point his father's family wanted to kill him, and a tallman child raised among elves who didn't treat him as fully human and wanted him to perform gratefulness for that treatment – treatment that, after he met Rin at age 9, he certainly always understood could be a lot worse – his ability to work out what people wanted from him, whether they were friendly or hostile or had ulterior motives, wasn’t just an interest. It will have been an essential skill.  

Milsiril, I think, was a flawed parent who tried to do her best by Kabru and did a lot of harm to him despite her best intentions. She may have treated him much better than an average elf would have, but like Otta and Marcille's mother, there are other elves with different outlooks on short-lived races. How would they judge her treatment of him? We don’t have any insight on what it could be, but to be honest, the person’s whose opinion of her I’d be most interested in knowing is Rin’s.

But even if she'd been perfect, living as an trans-racial adoptee in a deeply hierarchical nation with a queen who is a 'staunch traditionalist' who wouldn't even acknowledge the existence of a half-elf like Marcille (according to Cithis) is an experience that would deeply impact anyone.

Elves & Impossible mutual understanding

While Kabru was living with Milsiril - in other words, while living in the Northern Central Continent - he came to believe that "there was no way to achieve mutual understanding with the long-lived races."

This is evident in his political project: he wants short-lived races to have ownership over the dungeon's secrets. Despite his dislike of the Lord of the Island, he's a useful bulwark to stop the elves taking over. Despite his doubts about Laios, Laios needs to be the one to defeat the dungeon, because if he doesn't the elves will take over.

Kabru still carries a deep scar from Utaya, one that was exacerbated by the fact that he never got an answer to any of his questions about what happened or why. This, despite the fact that Milsiril knows about the demon and how it works. Do you think Kabru, with his social perceptiveness that borders on the superhuman, wasn't aware that she knew more than she would tell him?

Given that, the fact that he gets to a place where he "doesn't have any particularly negative feelings about [elves/long-lived species]" .... well, to put it bluntly, I believe that he thinks that's the case, but I kind of doubt it. After all, if he did have resentment, of Milsiril (someone who was his primary provider and caretaker since age six, and who despite her flaws, loves him and who I do think he loves) or of elves (who he has had to play nice with for most of his life, in order to survive, and will still have to play nice with in order to achieve his goals, since they hold all the power) what would that do except hurt him and make his life harder? Kabru is Mr. Pragmatic, so I don't think he'd let himself acknowledge any such feelings he did have. Exactly because he can't acknowledge them, they're well placed to get internalised as beliefs about the Fundamental Unchangeable Nature of the World.

However, these stated beliefs seem to contradict his actions. Despite his belief in the impossibility of forming a mutual understanding, he certainly seems to try to understand long-lived people, just as much as he does short-lived people. There's no noticeable difference between his treatment of Daya & Holm versus Mickbell & Rin that isn't clearly down to their relationship with him. His skills of human analysis were honed and developed while living amongst elves, and as soon as he's alone with Mithrun he immediately sets to understanding him - his interests, his motivations, his needs, and his past.

He treats him considerately and without bias, and despite the fact that Mithrun conquering the dungeon for the elves is both a reenactment of a core part of his childhood trauma and a political disaster for his aims, that doesn't seem to colour his perspective on Mithrun negatively at all.

This is something I find extremely laudable about Kabru, and it's another way he parallels Laios. He seems to understand that people, as a rule, (in Laios' case, he understands this about monsters - and eventually, all living beings) will act in their own interests, and if those interests conflict with yours, might harm you. But that's just their nature, and it's not something that should be held against them; you're also doing the same thing, after all. The crux of Laios' arc is precisely that he has to accept the responsibility of hurting someone else in order to achieve what he wants.

Kabru is deeply concerned with his own morals, what he should and shouldn't do, but mostly in the context of responsibility for the consequences - a responsibility he takes onto himself. He isn't scrupulous about what he needs to do in order to create the outcome he wants, but if he fails to create that outcome, then....

He blames himself to the point of thinking he should die. He doesn't blame Laios, or seem at all angry with him, despite concluding he should have killed him to prevent this outcome. That's because in his eyes, ultimately Laios was going to act according to his own nature, and it's Kabru's fault for not understanding that nature well enough. He's extremely confident in his ability to understand and predict others, (including elves and other long-lived people). Then, where does his conviction that mutual understanding is impossible come from?

Partially, it's the "mutual" part. I'm sure Kabru, who isn't able or willing to deny Otta's insinuation that Milsiril saw him more like a pet than a son, has felt that his full interiority, the depth of his feelings and his ability to grow, act, and think as a fully equal being, was something that the elves around him just couldn't grasp. Because that was their excuse for it, he came to understand this as a gulf between short-lived and long-lived beings, an inevitable difference in outlook caused by their different lifespans.

This experience might be part of what leads to his iconic “fake” behaviour. He trusts his ability to understand others, but if they aren’t able to understand him, then there isn’t any benefit to being honest about his feelings and thoughts. If his attempts to reach mutual understanding with his caretakers were never able to be fulfilled, then it isn’t any wonder that he reacts with such surprise and horror at blurting out his desire to be Laios’ friend.

In his experience, making yourself vulnerable in that way only leads to being hurt. Soothing him, hushing him, lying to him, talking to him like a child that isn’t able to use proper judgement – that’s an inadequate and deeply hurtful way to respond to genuine distress, the desire for autonomy, or disagreement. Ultimately, I think that’s why he comes out on the side of being grateful to Milsiril; because she did equip him with the skills and knowledge he’d need to reach his goal, and let him go.

Though he could understand them, they couldn't understand him. To the extent that was true - which I'm sure it was - it wasn't due to anything about lifespan. It was due to the elves’ racism, and the solipsitic mindset & prejudiced attitude that it caused them to approach him with.

Because, if it needs to be said, the idea that there is an unbreachable gap in understanding between the long-lived and short-lived species is not true. Marcille and Laios have a much greater difference in lifespan than any full elf from any short-lived person, and they’re able to understand each other – maybe not perfectly, but better than many other people who are closer in life-span to them.

That doesn’t mean that I think Kabru is wrong about this, however. Because there’s an interpretation of his statement that is reflected in his actions and is true. When he talks about his problem with elves, it’s not just their attitudes: it’s their power, and what they use it to do. They “explain nothing and take everything”. Though it’s presented in the guise of ‘guiding and protecting’, in fact it’s a simple case of a powerful nation using their military power, wealth, access to resources, and historically stolen land – including the island itself – to protect their own interests and advance their own agenda. That’s why they’d be able to show up, seize the dungeon, and forcibly take Kabru’s party and Laios’ party to the West. If Kabru wants to stop that from happening, or change that status quo, persuasion or a bid to be understood would be completely pointless. Between the political blocs formed by long-lived species and the interests of short-lived species, “mutual understanding”, given their current, unequal terms, would be impossible. This is something that we see reflected in Kabru’s actions; before he asks his questions about the dungeon, he grabs Mithrun as leverage. He never really attempts to persuade the canaries to see his point of view, because that would be pointless: they’re agents of the Northern Central Continent’s monarchy, and will act in its interests regardless of any individual relationship with him.  

I don’t think Kabru sees the different dimensions of this belief of his in quite such clear terms, however, as is evidenced by the other group who he thinks it’s impossible to communicate with.

Demi-Humans & Unknowable Objects

The other place that we see his conviction about the impossibility of mutual understanding is in the kobold extra.

I'm including the whole thing, because I think it's an excellent and clever piece of world-building. Aside from what it says about Kabru, which I'll expand on shortly, what this extra does is deconstruct and call into question the usual "fantasy ontological biology" present in these sort of DnD-like settings. Essentially, the kind of worldbuilding where a race (such as kobolds) can be described as war-like, and that's establishing something essential about their biological nature. That's common to the point that if Kui didn't include this, some people would probably come away thinking that's the case about, e.g., the orcs.

But here, despite what Kabru is saying, the information the reader actually gets is:

the conflict between short-lived humans and demi-humans such as kobolds is mostly over access to material resources that they need to survive.

These resources are scarce because powerful nations, such as the elves, have monopolised them.

Kabru, who has grown up in a place at the centre of these conflicts, ascribes essential, negative traits to a cultural group which was in direct conflict with his own. Communication with this other group is impossible; they aren't people, they're more like objects.

oh yes! just like this conflict between groups of tall-men, a conflict which the reader will immediately interpret as more clearly analogous to real-life racism. Our other protagonists also carry prejudices from growing up in a place where a marginalised group was in conflict with the dominant group over scarce resources. It's definitely impossible to communicate with these people, and you can only kill them.

Woah, when you say it like that, it sounds pretty bad!

But also, nobody walks away having had a realisation or unlearned their prejudices - because they don't have the tools they need to do that work. Yet. I do think, to an extent, it could happen - especially with Kabru, since it's suggested in the epilogue that Melini might become a safe-haven for demi-humans.

To focus in on Kabru, the key here is his statement that you should think of demi-humans as "unknowable objects". Even his extraordinary powers of understanding have seemingly hit a limit. Part of this is just inherited prejudice, and doesn't need to have a complicated psychological explanation, any more than the elves who were prejudiced against him need one.

But also... this is probably somewhat linked to the way demi-humans seem to be considered "pseudo-monsters". They're the place that the strict delineation between the human and the monstrous is permeated. Laios, who is not interested in humans, remembers and is excited by Kuro. Chilchuck and Laios argue over whether it's OK to eat a mermaid. Kabru's prepared to (pretend to) roll with the idea that Laios ate the orcs.

But these are people, aren't they? Of course, this is a social construction, as we see from the fact that in the Eastern Archipelago, the label of "human" is reserved for tallmen, but in most of the rest of the world it depends on some obviously arbirary classification based on number of bones; "demi-humans" aren't in any essential way monstrous, except to an extent in their appearance, and physical location - due to their marginal social status, they're pushed out to live in unsafe places such as dungeons.

Therefore, Kabru's view of demi-humans as fundamentally "other", unable to be understood - monstrous - could be read as akin to abjection, the psychoanalytical concept described by Julia Kristeva. In order to create a bounded, secure superego, that thing which permeates and calls into question the border between self and other, human and animal, life and death, is rejected and pushed to the margin.

“Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a thing.[...] On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.” (Kristeva et al., 1984, p. 11) “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. ” (Kristeva et al., 1984, p. 13) “The pure will be that which conforms to an established taxonomy; the impure, that which unsettles it, establishes intermixture and disorder. [...] the impure will be those that do not confine themselves to one element but point to admixture and confusion.” (Kristeva et al., 1984, p. 107) (discussing food prohibitions in Leviticus)

This is both (due to its affinity with food-loathing and disgust) a very fruitful concept to apply to dunmeshi, and a psychoanalytical theory which I wouldn't exactly cosign as True Facts About Human Psychological Development. You may also know the abject from its utilisation in the classic essay "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine" by Barbara Creed - that's a lot more approachable than Kristeva if anyone's interested.

Key here, though, is that through the symbol of the "demi-human" is embodied a step between "human" and "monster" - and that's a prospect that puts at risk the whole notion of an absolute separation between those two categories in the first place. To Laios, that's something wonderful, and to Kabru, it's terrifying. We can see this principle further embodied in the relationship both characters have with the notion of becoming monstrous.

To Laios, this is transcendent, and represents a renunciation of everything human - in fact, if it didn't, it wouldn't "count".

To Kabru, it's a deeply-held fear, established by his childhood alienation (due to his illegitimacy, his eyes, and perhaps also his neurodivergency), deepened by monster-related trauma and the sense of responsibility and survivors guilt he feels for what happened at Utaya. His identity as a human who is not monstrous is key to his sense of stability and safety; he doesn't want to touch monsters, he doesn't even want to see them.

To acknowledge a kinship, a possibility of similarity between the things he loves (humans) and the things he hates (monsters) would be more than touching them - it would be putting them inside him. We know, quite explicitly, that this notion is triggering to Kabru. He literally has what seems to be a flashback when he's about to eat the harpy omelette.

So he abjects it, classifying the demi-human as fundamentally unlike him - an unknowable object, or an object that he refuses to know. Because in understanding it, he would interject the things he hates and fears into his self, which is already, always under threat by that hated and feared object.

Of course, again, Kabru isn't very good at enacting this refusal in practice. For one, when he chooses between his desires and ingesting the feared object, eating monsters... he eats monsters. Part of this is treating himself badly, the "ends justify the means" mentality. His goal is to destroy all monsters, so if he needs to become monster-like to do that, he will. But part of it is also the other motivation that he didn't even seem to know about until he said it: he wants to become Laios' friend, and to learn from him how a person can like monsters. He wants, at least in some part of him, to reconcile the feared and hated object into something he can understand.

For another:

Kabru can speak the kobold language. In the first place, while this may have been common in Utaya, it also could have been something he chose to learn, an early expression of his interest in understanding and talking to all sorts of people. It isn't the kind of thing you learn if you believe that communication between yourself and the group that speak it is impossible, is it?

It's possible to harbour prejudices against a group while being kind to an individual, and given Kabru has those prejudices regardless of his reasons, that is what he is doing. But also, his treatment of Kuro doesn't reflect a sincerely held belief that he's an "unknowable object" at all. His approach is exactly the same as it is to any other person: an analysis of goal and motive, and an attempt to help if he's sympathetic and their goals align - going out of his way to give language and local knowledge lessons in secret. His conviction that Mickbell and Kuro will truly become friends when they can properly communicate is completely contradictory to any sense of demi-humans as fundamentally different, or impossible to reach mutual understanding with. To me, it seems like this self-protective shield against the corruptive force demi-humans as an idea present to his identity, this abjection, when Kabru is face-to-face with one, just simply can't hold up against his finely honed skill of intellectual empathy. Perhaps because he's autistic, it seems his "empathy" is less an emotional mirror response, and more a set of cognitive skills for analysis of others. That instinctual, emotional empathy might not trigger when presented with a member of an out-group, but if it’s possible for Kabru to turn his cognitive empathy off, we don’t see him do it.

This isn't to say that this prejudice doesn't affect his behaviour. For one, it could negatively impact his judgement of politics and policy, where individual people don't enter into it. For another, I'm not convinced he'd be willing to overlook Mickbell's exploitative relationship with Kuro if Kuro wasn't a kobold. As it is, since both of them are satisfied, he doesn't feel like he needs to intervene, regardless of the fact Mickbell isn't paying Kuro. But if Daya and Holm were in a relationship, and Holm took both Daya's and his own share from their ventures, but only compensated her in living expenses and kept the rest, do you think he'd tolerate it, for example? Even if she said it was OK?

Conclusion

The kelpie chapter establishes that "people can never know what monsters are really thinking." That isn't just true of monsters, though.

True mutual understanding is impossible - between anyone. We can never truly understand another person's heart. This is touched on in, for example, the existence of shapeshifters and dopplegangers. Even a monster that seemed like a perfect copy of a person wouldn’t be that person, and wouldn’t be a satisfactory replacement.

We’re intended, I think, to understand the winged lion's repeated suggestions to just replace people who have been lost with copies as something uncanny, which demonstrates the way that the winged lion never manages to attain a complete understanding of humans. A version of a person who was created to fulfil your memories of them, to be the person who you wanted them to be, would be a terrible, miserable thing.

Disagreeing, coming into conflict, and misunderstanding each other, are essential parts of what it means to be living beings, as fundamental as the need to eat.

The only thing to do is not to take more than you need to eat to survive, and not impose your own desires onto others. To do your best to sincerely communicate your desires, even if they're embarrassing or vulnerable or strange, like Kabru eventually does with Laios; like Laios does, bit by bit, with the people around him; like Marcille does, Chilchuck does, Senshi does... to hope they will accept you, and do your best to understand them in return.

We can re-examine, in that context, Kabru's line about the elves' tendency to "explain nothing and take everything".

They have the power to impose their preferred "menu" onto less powerful groups. And in that context, mutual understanding being impossible just means that they won't give up their power because they're asked nicely. Kabru's goal is to seize the truth that they won't give to him, and to create a situation where they can't take everything. Because he's accurately surmised that nothing about the treatment of short-lived races will change so long as the power imbalance remains. Despite the way he mistakenly ascribes part of that to "long-lived vs short-lived" or "human vs demi-human", the actual gulfs in understanding he identifies are structural, are about power and about access to material resources and safety.

I think he could come to recognise this. Yaad is teaching him political science after all, and while a prince's lessons on political science won't exactly get at much that's radical or invested in the interests and perspectives of the marginalised (Capital is a critique of for a reason after all...) I believe in Kabru's ability to learn critically and get more from a lesson than it was intended to teach.

[floral-ashes]

I was asked why the moral panic around Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was so centred on trans people when there’s no evidence that she’s trans. I thought I’d share my thoughts publicly.

The reason is that, in many ways, transphobia isn’t about trans people, it’s about what trans people mean to ideologies of race and gender. The controversy about the Olympic boxers is linked to rising anxieties about the line between men and women becoming increasingly blurred in contemporary society. These anxieties are fuelled by right-wing movements who see rigid divisions between men and women as critical to maintaining white social, economic, and political control. Because trans people are seen as challenging the justification of gender norms and roles based on biology and reproduction, they’re targets of particularly intense hostility and violence. My colleague Blu Buchanan and I tracked that racial logic a bit more in depth in a truthout essay a few years ago. White supremacist ideologies are heavily invested in rigid gender norms and roles because they see them as necessary to white reproduction.

The moral panic about ‘gender ideology’ is about trans people, yes, but it’s also explicitly about cis men and women not conforming to gender ideals that see men and women as fundamentally different forms of life with different roles in a society organized around the nuclear family. Women have to act and look a certain way to be considered ‘really’ women, much in the way that gay men are deprecated as ‘not real men.’ This moral panic manifests in the disproportionate targeting of racialized women and especially Black women for not conforming to white ideals of femininity. This dynamic is only amplified in the context of elite sports given the pervasive association of athletic ability with masculinity, especially in contact and strength-based sports like boxing as opposed to, say, gymnastics.

[drdemonprince]

what do you think is the answer to dealing with the stereotypical “roommate won’t do dishes bc of trauma/sensory issues”? like sure that’s possible it’s difficult & people should be aware of their needs, but when it begins affecting other people, i feel like someone has to consider other solutions—i.e. using paper plates instead of ones they have to wash. it’s also complicated when racial & gender dynamics come in to play. and then when i think on myself as an autistic white trans guy how can i both recognize where i need support but balance it with not recreating bad dynamics? I’m just not sure how we have these conversations while still validating folks experiences & dismissing their problems. we all deserve help but we also can so easily overly rely on others & burn them out especially if we have privilege over them. disability, especially invisible disabilities often become a shield for white folks & men it feels like to get away with shitty behaviors

I honestly think that a big problem people encounter in navigating such issues is that they make what is ultimately going to have to be a personal negotiation of limits and needs into something that is far more symbolic and abstract. it's almost impossible not to, if you care about social justice issues, and I think there are good intentions when people try to be mindful of how race and gender alongside interplay with this stuff, but in practice a lot of times people use their political ideals as a reason to argue against their own feelings or to not be honest about their feelings. people feel like they don't have the right to say that they cannot do something or need support, or that they're pissed off, in an individual level relationship, because they are treating both themselves and their roommate or partner as a symbol of an entire group. I think a person has to be able to tell their roommate when they are being an asshole. I think a person should just be straight up if doing the dishes is something that's not generally going to happen for them -- in unmasking autism I profile Reese Piper, an autistic sex worker who just straight up tells her prospective roommates that doing the dishes is not something she can do, so then they know what they are getting into and can work around it. honest conversations about what a person is and is not capable of and what they need really can vanquish a lot of so-called weaponized incompetence and other domestic issues long before they occur. but all parties involved have to be operating based on good faith. unfortunately not everyone is, sometimes people use their identities or their roommates guilt around structural oppression in order to pressure them to do things that they cannot do, and conversely it is very common for a white or TME roommate to weaponize anti blackness or transmisogyny against a roommate who speaks up about any inequity and portray them as the aggressive one. but I think before somebody gets way way too much in their own head about how a particular conflict looks or what structural issues might be relevant in the aggregate, they really have to start from a baseline level of self-acceptance and the ability to articulate both which household tasks are hard or impossible for them, and when they are fucking cheesed at their roommate for not doing what seems like their fair share. if you feel like you can't name those things, you're never going to actually have a respectful functioning relationship.

[redvexillum]

PSA: RACISM, BIGOTRY, ENTITLEMENT IN HAZBIN HOTEL FANDOM

CONTENT WARNING: Inflammatory hate speech, White hate, political baiting, gaslighting, racism, death threats

The messages I’ve received and am addressing below contain upsetting and harmful language that has no place in any community. If these topics are distressing to you, please prioritize your well-being and feel free to stop reading here. Thank you for taking care of yourself.

I never imagined I would find myself addressing this, but here we are. This post is regarding my recent story, Stay With Me, which has stirred up unexpected controversy due to my decision to imply the reader’s race as white. I want to clarify that this choice was made purely for plot purposes.

The story is set in 1920s Louisiana, a time and place where racial and class dynamics were deeply significant. This backdrop was essential to the narrative’s themes of tension and forbidden love, as it explores the societal barriers that would have made a relationship between Alastor and the reader virtually impossible. The decision to depict the reader as an upper-class white individual was not arbitrary—it was intentional, aimed at heightening the drama and emotional weight of their story.

I deeply value the Hazbin Hotel fandom and the x-reader community. Writing for this space has brought me immense joy, and I’ve formed wonderful connections with both readers and fellow writers. That’s why receiving such hateful and inflammatory messages has been incredibly disheartening. The accusations of racism, the vitriol, and the twisting of my creative choices into something they were never meant to be—this has shaken me more than I can express.

To the anonymous senders of these messages: I want to make it clear that my work comes from a place of love and passion. My intention has always been to tell compelling stories that explore complex emotions, societal norms, and the human condition—stories that resonate with readers on a deeper level. To reduce my work to a political agenda or an act of prejudice is deeply hurtful and entirely unfounded.

I want to echo sentiments shared by Kit (please check out her explanation here), another writer in the fandom, who also explored the racial and class dynamics between characters. Like them, I am fascinated by the tension and drama that arise from star-crossed love stories, particularly when societal laws and prejudices forbid such relationships. Writing the reader as white in this context wasn’t about excluding or favoring anyone—it was about creating an authentic narrative rooted in the realities of the era.

For those questioning why I made this choice, I ask: if you can suspend disbelief to fall in love with a cannibalistic, asexual deer demon, why is the reader’s race—chosen for specific plot reasons—the line you cannot cross? My goal as a writer is to craft stories that make sense within their own context. The entitlement to demand otherwise, or to impose personal prejudices onto my work, is unfair and unwarranted.

I hate that I’ve had to turn off anonymous asks. Some of the most heartfelt and hilarious messages I’ve received have come from anonymous users, and losing that connection with my readers pains me. But unfortunately, the actions of a loud, hateful minority have left me with no choice. I will not entertain further discourse on this matter after this post.

To those who have supported me, who have read my stories and shared kind words: thank you. Your encouragement is what keeps me going. Writing for this fandom has been a labor of love, and I pour my heart and soul into every piece I create—for free, might I add. It’s devastating to feel that love overshadowed by hostility.

I won’t let this stop me from creating, but I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t made me question my place here. To anyone who feels entitled to tear down what others create out of hatred or spite: I hope you take a moment to reflect on the harm your words can cause.

To my true supporters: I appreciate you more than words can express. Your kindness reminds me why I love writing in the first place. Thank you for standing by me.

[antlerqueer]

ok sorry i posted about this on tiktok but im gonna rant about it on here, too, bc theres only so much one can say on tiktok. S3 clip about TaiVan spoilers below.

someone said that homophobia is such a cheap way to end the taivan relationship and i think that boiling their relationship ending down to homophobia ignores the racial and class dynamics between taivan and how it will affect them outside of the wilderness. there is a reason that van uses the word "respectability" in that clip. i think that there's a lot in taissa's world that she wants to control, and respectability politics do not have room for van palmer.

van is an unapologetic butch lesbian. that means she is working class, she is not going to a private institution and school after this, it probably would only have been a possibility for her with a scholarship. taissa ends up going to an hbcu. van is not going to fit in with her new friends.

taissa is all about staying poised and in a position of power in the public eye. she cannot do that with van, who does not give a shit what other people think at this point, being who she is. taissa will want van to clean up, dress nicer, change how she speaks to fit in with her new classmates who she will perceive to be "better than" van in some aspects.

yes, sure, homophobia will play a role. but we know tai was a womanizer in college, so i think the greater role in respectability there is that she is going to be trying to fit into a more "conservative" (not politically) norm of a well-educated Black woman with her well-educated friends and her high-powered classmates, and van does not fit that and will not change herself to fit that mold.

unlike life in the wilderness, class and race are factors that will begin to gnaw at them. they are both headstrong, and that will be the end of their younger timeline relationship imo. van is not going to change who she is, not after what they went through. taissa just wants to push it behind her and move onward and upward - change who she is based on that experience, instead of incorporating who she became into who she is growing into.

[thehonorablejudgewhitey]

An amazing video about racism at Lumon and its toll on Mr. Milchick. From the channel's creator, Afrodizjha: "In this deep dive, we unpack how Milchick’s character arc reveals the hidden racial dynamics of white-dominated workplaces: the weaponization of “professionalism,” respectability politics, the policing of Black intellect, and the cost of code-switching."

[theotterpenguin]

the performative accusation that shipping zutara (and occasionally this criticism is levied at jinko/zukka) is colonialist apologism has been addressed in some excellent posts, explaining the inaccuracies and problematic implications of this logic far better than i ever could - like this post and this one and this one and this one and this one.

and i know this topic has been talked about to death, but if you could indulge my contribution for a moment, i just find it interesting how this sentiment results from the cognitive dissonance of atla fans being unable to reconcile with the idea of their favorite show's political beliefs not lining up with their own.

atla is a largely philosophical children's show that at its core deals with themes of love, redemption, and destiny vs. free-will. atla examines these themes through an anti-colonalist, anti-imperalist lens that deconstructs the idea of racial divisiveness and the idea that people of different ethnicities are inherently different. this is message is pretty explicitly stated by guru pathik:

Guru Pathik: "The greatest illusion of this world is the illusion of separation. Things you think are separate and different are actually one and the same." Aang: "Like the four nations?" Guru Pathik: "Yes. We are all one people. But we live as if divided."

and also by uncle iroh:

"It is important to draw wisdom from many different places. If you take it from only one place, it becomes rigid and stale. Understanding others, the other elements and the other nations will help you become whole."

this theme is developed across three full seasons, with the crux of this message culminating in zuko's friendships with the gaang - despite coming from different nationalities and different backgrounds, they have all had their own experiences being hurt by the fire nation and work together to take down the oppressive fire nation government. the question of destiny vs. free will is also explored through zuko's character - despite starting off as an antagonist, he develops into a symbolic representation of how the fire nation's oppression hurts its own citizens. he unlearns the fire nation's imperialist propaganda while simultaneously unlearning his father's abuse. rather than following misguided beliefs of what he thought his destiny was as the heir to the throne, instead he forges his own path.

thus, to claim that zuko can never form a deep and meaningful relationship with any of the gaang because of his nationality goes unequivocally against the themes of the show. and a major part of this is because these are fictional characters being used to analyze different theoretical questions within the show and in some cases, are used as symbolic representations of different philosophical ideas - their friendships and their character arcs serve a purpose within the text that cannot be easily transcribed onto real-life dynamics between people.

it's illogical to criticize fans who are choosing to understand atla at the level of the themes that are presented by the text - who are interested in exploring similar philosophical questions brought up by the show through the context of relationships.

if you don't like the themes of forgiveness and redemption that atla explores, your criticism should be aimed at the writing of the show itself rather than other fans. because you are giving far more thought to the "implications" of a close friendship or romantic relationship between someone from an imperalist nation and someone from an oppressed nation than the writers ever did. (and if you fall in this camp of people, i would hope you wouldn't be reblogging fanart of zuko and the gaang together while simultaneously claiming zuko could can never escape the sins of his ancestors and can never form a deep relationship based on trust and intimacy with katara or sokka or jin - because that would just be hypocritical).

and as a side note, people seem to apply this flawed logic to zutara far more than other ships solely because the show spends the most time exploring the complicated nature of fire nation imperalism in the interactions between zuko and katara in the latter half of b3. this is because they've been juxtapositioned against each other and paralleled with aang since the beginning of the show in ways that toph, sokka, and suki are not, who have mostly been used to examine different themes. there simply isn't enough time to explore these complicated themes with all the other characters, even if they theoretically exist in zuko’s dynamics with these characters, so the writers focus the most on zuko's relationships with katara and aang, and these relationships are given far more narrative weight, so have more content to criticize. but zuko and katara also canonically become friends by the end of the show. if you want to discount the existence of their friendship, claiming that it will always be tainted by the fire nation's oppression regardless of what is shown in the text, then you also have to discount zuko's friendships with aang, suki, toph, and sokka - because even if this isn't shown as a permanent barrier to their friendships in the show, it’s also not shown as a permanent barrier to his friendship with katara. if your logic is solely based on the idea that a person's identity in a relationship as a colonizer or a victim is fixed and unchanging regardless of character development, this would apply to zuko's friendships with everyone else as well.