#racist people are writing in the modern times also

[july-19th-club]

it's all fun and games getting letters from watson until you make it to the three gables . what's interesting to me though is not the question of 'did doyle write this one' - i think it's sort of a fan's cop-out to suggest that because this story is so casually racist, it *can't* have been written by doyle. i think it's more worthwhile to look at the number of years between 'the yellow face' (the titular face refers to a blank mask worn by a little girl) - a very sympathetic and respectful, for its day, story, and 'gables' - 'face' was published in 1893 and 'gables' was published 33 years later, in 1926. and this is well into doyle's weirder years, after he's been into spiritualism and wwi has happened and he's old and strange. some of his stories from these years are very fun, and others are...less so. even saying 'sometimes people change and get worse as they age' isn't really it, because there's ugly things in the earlier stories too, just to a lesser degree and without such an obvious degree of humor taken in them. those you might be able to describe as 'a product of their time', an unconscious bias that is not appropriate but also not meant with a serious degree of ill will beyond cultural bigotry. gables is so racist it almost feels out of character, but saying that also feels like an excuse in a way that doesn't sit right with me. so there is no excuse for gables. no grander conspiracy. no justifiable explanation. it's not just unfortunate and distasteful. it's a shame.

[inarmes]

continually infuriated with SC for her portrayals of black people and district 11 and i'm again going to touch on her portrayal of thresh, very specifically how he talks/his speech & some other tidbits. (as a black person, because i fear that has to be made clear.)

let's take a look at these. if you've read my post on my issues with d11, you'll recognize that they were also in that post and explained upon.

it is so redundant to have a black character whom in which is already a stereotype in and of itself to be further stereotypical. thresh is a "physical wonder," made out as if he's more of a beast than a person despite being an outlier & not trained like a career. he's made to seem intimidating and imposing and all around terrifying for someone like katniss, who differs in statute and mass. that's strike one. in most media, black = intimidating. which is not only harmful but just endlessly racist. now, for the extracts above, his speech.

SC has managed to imply a lack of education or a lack of understanding of speech, just from how thresh speaks alone. (“you kill her?” / “i let you go.”) he lacks the typical “did you” or “i'll let you” in both those phrases, with the words shortened to impose the idea that he isn't very grammatical. i don't have to explain to you why that's problematic. we could go through the slavery talk and how black people were discouraged from any level of education when possible, as their jobs were simply to work on the fields/plantations. SC imposes an impression that the people of 11 are not entirely grammatically educated from thresh's speech alone. yes, there's rue in comparison — who seems to speak fine despite being younger than thresh, which is a very specific thing that sticks out. you have thresh being quiet, reserved and only physically imposing. you add his level of speech to it, and it paints a very shitty picture which shows that she doesn't really know what she's doing and she's basing him off of an idea of a black person and not ... an actual black person.

thresh spares katniss, but at the same time acts out in a very brutal sort of violence prior in which is almost primitive with how it's portrayed — he's one of the only tributes that doesn't use a weapon such as a knife, bow, sword, etc. he picks up something from his environment. to me, SC characterizes him as something closer to a caveman, rather than a terrified teenager running on justice and a need to survive. she draws back to the old racist beliefs of black people (and by extension, black men) as being capable of only abhorrent violence, uneducated and worse, near uncivilized. it's a death game, people are going to be out of their usual selves in order to vie for the spot of victor, which is understandable, but it does not look good for him. it just doesn't look like she understood the drawbacks to writing thresh in such a loaded way (loaded being microagressive and heavily stigmatized.)

peeta (equally physically imposing) literally joins the careers, the brainwashed, bloodthirsty bunch of teens that thrive on murder in order to bring glory to their district, but thresh is the significantly physically imposing one and gets to be painted in such a harsh and violent light despite intention and circumstance. yesss. very telling. thresh does one good deed & shows himself to be a thoughtful and understanding person despite his traits and suddenly we all think that means that SC understands how to write a black person positively. nooooo. unfortunately not.

[alicentflorent]

HOTD for me is just like I’m reliving the 100 and being in that fandom. I am in hell

[dykepuffs]

How Do I Make My Fictional Gypsies Not Racist?

(Or, "You can't, sorry, but…")

You want to include some Gypsies in your fantasy setting. Or, you need someone for your main characters to meet, who is an outsider in the eyes of the locals, but who already lives here. Or you need a culture in conflict with your settled people, or who have just arrived out of nowhere. Or, you just like the idea of campfires in the forest and voices raised in song. And you’re about to step straight into a muckpile of cliches and, accidentally, write something racist.

(In this, I am mostly using Gypsy as an endonym of Romany people, who are a subset of the Romani people, alongside Roma, Sinti, Gitano, Romanisael, Kale, etc, but also in the theory of "Gypsying" as proposed by Lex and Percy H, where Romani people are treated with a particular mix of orientalism, criminalisation, racialisation, and othering, that creates "The Gypsy" out of both nomadic peoples as a whole and people with Romani heritage and racialised physical features, languages, and cultural markers)

Enough of my friends play TTRPGs or write fantasy stories that this question comes up a lot - They mention Dungeons and Dragons’ Curse Of Strahd, World Of Darkness’s Gypsies, World Of Darkness’s Ravnos, World of Darkness’s Silent Striders… And they roll their eyes and say “These are all terrible! But how can I do it, you know, without it being racist?”

And their eyes are big and sad and ever so hopeful that I will tell them the secret of how to take the Roma of the real world and place them in a fictional one, whilst both appealing to gorjer stereotypes of Gypsies and not adding to the weight of stereotyping that already crushes us. So, disappointingly, there is no secret.

Gypsies, like every other real-world culture, exist as we do today because of interactions with cultures and geography around us: The living waggon, probably the archetypal thing which gorjer writers want to include in their portrayals of nomads, is a relatively modern invention - Most likely French, and adopted from French Showmen by Romanies, who brought it to Britain. So already, that’s a tradition that only spans a small amount of the time that Gypsies have existed, and only a small number of the full breadth of Romani ways of living. But the reasons that the waggon is what it is are based on the real world - The wheels are tall and iron-rimmed, because although you expect to travel on cobbled, tarmac, or packed-earth roads and for comparatively short distances, it wasn’t rare to have to ford a river in Britain in the late nineteenth century, on country roads. They were drawn by a single horse, and the shape of that horse was determined by a mixture of local breeds - Welsh cobs, fell ponies, various draft breeds - as well as by the aesthetic tastes of the breeders. The stove inside is on the left, so that as you move down a British road, the chimney sticks up into the part where there will be the least overhanging branches, to reduce the chance of hitting it.

So taking a fictional setting that looks like (for example) thirteenth century China (with dragons), and placing a nineteenth century Romanichal family in it will inevitably result in some racist assumptions being made, as the answer to “Why does this culture do this?” becomes “They just do it because I want them to” rather than having a consistent internal logic.

Some stereotypes will always follow nomads - They appear in different forms in different cultures, but they always arise from the settled people's same fears: That the nomads don't share their values, and are fundamentally strangers. Common ones are that we have a secret language to fool outsiders with, that we steal children and disguise them as our own, that our sexual morals are shocking (This one has flipped in the last half century - From the Gypsy Lore Society's talk of the lascivious Romni seductress who will lie with a strange man for a night after a 'gypsy wedding', to today's frenzied talk of 'grabbing' and sexually-conservative early marriages to ensure virginity), that we are supernatural in some way, and that we are more like animals than humans. These are tropes where if you want to address them, you will have to address them as libels - there is no way to casually write a baby-stealing, magical succubus nomad without it backfiring onto real life Roma. (The kind of person who has the skills to write these tropes well, is not the kind of person who is reading this guide.)

It’s too easy to say a list of prescriptive “Do nots”, which might stop you from making the most common pitfalls, but which can end up with your nomads being slightly flat as you dance around the topics that you’re trying to avoid, rather than being a rich culture that feels real in your world.

So, here are some questions to ask, to create your nomadic people, so that they will have a distinctive culture of their own that may (or may not) look anything like real-world Romani people: These aren't the only questions, but they're good starting points to think about before you make anything concrete, and they will hopefully inspire you to ask MORE questions.

First - Why are they nomadic? Nobody moves just to feel the wind in their hair and see a new horizon every morning, no matter what the inspirational poster says. Are they transhumant herders who pay a small rent to graze their flock on the local lord’s land? Are they following migratory herds across common land, being moved on by the cycle of the seasons and the movement of their animals? Are they seasonal workers who follow man-made cycles of labour: Harvests, fairs, religious festivals? Are they refugees fleeing a recent conflict, who will pass through this area and never return? Are they on a regular pilgrimage? Do they travel within the same area predictably, or is their movement governed by something that is hard to predict? How do they see their own movements - Do they think of themselves as being pushed along by some external force, or as choosing to travel? Will they work for and with outsiders, either as employees or as partners, or do they aim to be fully self-sufficient? What other jobs do they do - Their whole society won’t all be involved in one industry, what do their children, elderly, disabled people do with their time, and is it “work”?

If they are totally isolationist - How do they produce the things which need a complex supply chain or large facilities to make? How do they view artefacts from outsiders which come into their possession - Things which have been made with technology that they can’t produce for themselves? (This doesn’t need to be anything about quality of goods, only about complexity - A violin can be made by one artisan working with hand tools, wood, gut and shellac, but an accordion needs presses to make reeds, metal lathes to make screws, complex organic chemistry to make celluloid lacquer, vulcanised rubber, and a thousand other components)

How do they feel about outsiders? How do they buy and sell to outsiders? If it’s seen as taboo, do they do it anyway? Do they speak the same language as the nearby settled people (With what kind of fluency, or bilingualism, or dialect)? Do they intermarry, and how is that viewed when it happens? What stories does this culture tell about why they are a separate people to the nearby settled people? Are those stories true? Do they have a notional “homeland” and do they intend to go there? If so, is it a real place?

What gorjers think of as classic "Gipsy music" is a product of our real-world situation. Guitar from Spain, accordions from the Soviet Union (Which needed modern machining and factories to produce and make accessible to people who weren't rich- and which were in turn encouraged by Soviet authorities preferring the standardised and modern accordion to the folk traditions of the indigenous peoples within the bloc), brass from Western classical traditions, via Balkan folk music, influences from klezmer and jazz and bhangra and polka and our own music traditions (And we influence them too). What are your people's musical influences? Do they make their own instruments or buy them from settled people? How many musical traditions do they have, and what are they all for (Weddings, funerals, storytelling, campfire songs, entertainment...)? Do they have professional musicians, and if so, how do those musicians earn money? Are instrument makers professionals, or do they use improvised and easy-to-make instruments like willow whistles, spoons, washtubs, etc? (Of course the answer can be "A bit of both")

If you're thinking about jobs - How do they work? Are they employed by settled people (How do they feel about them?) Are they self employed but providing services/goods to the settled people? Are they mostly avoidant of settled people other than to buy things that they can't produce themselves? Are they totally isolationist? Is their work mostly subsistence, or do they create a surplus to sell to outsiders? How do they interact with other workers nearby? Who works, and how- Are there 'family businesses', apprentices, children with part time work? Is it considered 'a job' or just part of their way of life? How do they educate their children, and is that considered 'work'? How old are children when they are considered adult, and what markers confer adulthood? What is considered a rite of passage?

When they travel, how do they do it? Do they share ownership of beasts of burden, or each individually have "their horse"? Do families stick together or try to spread out? How does a child begin to live apart from their family, or start their own family? Are their dwellings something that they take with them, or do they find places to stay or build temporary shelter with disposable material? Who shares a dwelling and why? What do they do for privacy, and what do they think privacy is for?

If you're thinking about food - Do they hunt? Herd? Forage? Buy or trade from settled people? Do they travel between places where they've sown crops or managed wildstock in previous years, so that when they arrive there is food already seeded in the landscape? How do they feel about buying food from settled people, and is that common? If it's frowned upon - How much do people do it anyway? How do they preserve food for winter? How much food do they carry with them, compared to how much they plan to buy or forage at their destinations? How is food shared- Communal stores, personal ownership?

Why are they a "separate people" to the settled people? What is their creation myth? Why do they believe that they are nomadic and the other people are settled, and is it correct? Do they look different? Are there legal restrictions on them settling? Are there legal restrictions on them intermixing? Are there cultural reasons why they are a separate people? Where did those reasons come from? How long have they been travelling? How long do they think they've been travelling? Where did they come from? Do they travel mostly within one area and return to the same sites predictably, or are they going to move on again soon and never come back?

And then within that - What about the members of their society who are "unusual" in some way: How does their society treat disabled people? (are they considered disabled, do they have that distinction and how is it applied?) How does their society treat LGBT+ people? What happens to someone who doesn't get married and has no children? What happens to someone who 'leaves'? What happens to young widows and widowers? What happens if someone just 'can't fit in'? What happens to someone who is adopted or married in? What happens to people who are mixed race, and in a fantasy setting to people who are mixed species? What is taboo to them and what will they find shocking if they leave? What is society's attitude to 'difference' of various kinds?

Basically, if you build your nomads from the ground-up, rather than starting from the idea of "I want Gypsies/Buryats/Berbers/Minceiri but with the numbers filed off and not offensive" you can end up with a rich, unique nomadic culture who make sense in your world and don't end up making a rod for the back of real-world cultures.

[writingwithcolor]

Non-offensive Historical terms for Black people in historical fiction

@pleasespellchimerical asked:

So writing historical fiction, with a white POV character. I'm not sure how to address race in the narration. I do have a Black main character, and I feel like it'd feel out of place to have the narrator refer to her as 'Black', that being a more modern term. Not sure how to do this without dipping into common historical terms that are considered racist today. Thoughts on how to handle this delicately, not pull readers out of the narrative? (fwiw, the POV character has a lot of respect for the Black character. The narration should show this)

There are non-offensive terms you can use, even in historical fiction. We can absolutely refer to Black people without slurs, and if slurs is all one can come up with, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. I cannot say which terms are best for your piece without knowing the time period, but hopefully the list below helps.

Historical terms to use for Black people (non-offensive)

African American documented as early as 1782 (documented in an ad in the Pennsylvania Journal). Note the identity isn’t accurate for non-American Black people.

African could refer to African people or “from 1722 as ‘of or pertaining to black Americans.’”

The place of origin could also be used. For example, “a Nigerian woman”

Africo-American documented as early as 1788.

People of Color documented as early as 1796 (with specific contexts, usually mixed people)

Afro American documented as early as 1817, 1831 (depending on source)

Black American documented as early as 1831 

Black was used in Old English to refer to dark-skinned people. Black was not capitalized until recent years, so “She was a young black woman.” would make sense to say, though “She was a young Black woman.” is the better standard today, although not universally adopted. I personally prefer it capitalized. 

Moor was used as early as the late 1400s for North African people, but had a somewhat flexible use where anyone visibly Black / Of African descent or the Afro Diaspora might be referred to or assumed as a Moor. Note, it has other meanings too, such as referring to Muslim people, but that doesn’t mean the person using it is going by the dictionary definition. Not really the way to go today, but okay in a historical setting (in my opinion).

Biracial (1860s), mixed race (1872), multiracial (1903) and multicultural (1940s) are also terms to refer to people of two or more races.

Occupation + description. Throughout history, many people have been referred to as their occupation. For example, the Carpenter, The Baker, the Blacksmith. Here’s an example of how you might go about using occupation and traits to identify a Black character in history. Here’s an example I came up with on the fly.

“You should go by Jerry’s. He’s the best blacksmith this town’s ever seen. Ya know, the real tall, dark-skinned, curly haired fellow. Family’s come here from Liberia.”

Offensive and less-sensitive terms for Black people 

Blacks was used in plural more, but this is generally offensive today (Even writing it gives me **Thee ick*)

Colored was mostly used post-civil war until the mid 20th century, when it became unacceptable. This is not to be conflated with the South African Coloured ethnic group.

Negro/Negroes were also used as early as the 1550s. Capitalization became common in the early 20th century. I'm sure you know it is offensive today, though, admittedly, was not generally seen as such until around the 1960s, when Black replaced it. It does have its contexts, such as the trope “The Magical Negro” but going around using the term or calling someone that today is a lot different. 

Mulatto referred to mixed people, generally Black and white, and is offensive today. 

The N-word, in all its forms, is explicitly a slur, and there is absolutely no need to use it, especially in a casual manner, in your story. We’ve written about handling the N-word and alluding to it “if need be” but there are other ways to show racism and tension without dropping the word willy-nilly.

Deciding what to use, a modern perspective

I’m in favor of authors relying on the less offensive, more acceptable terms. Particularly, authors outside of the race. Seldom use the offensive terms except from actual direct quotes.

You do not have to use those offensive terms or could at least avoid using them in excess. I know quite famous stories do, but that doesn’t mean we have to so eagerly go that route today. Honestly, from teachers to school, and fellow non-Black students, it’s the modern day glee that people seem to get when they “get a chance to say it” that makes it worse and also makes me not want to give people the chance. 

It goes back to historical accuracy only counting the most for an “authentic experience” when it means being able to use offensive terms or exclude BIPOC from stories. We’ve got to ask ourselves why we want to plaster certain words everywhere for the sake of accuracy when there are other just as accurate, acceptable words to use that hurt less people. 

Disclaimer: Opinions may vary on these matters. But just because someone from the group cosigns something by stating they’re not offended by it, doesn’t mean a whole lot of others are okay with it and their perspectives are now invalid! Also, of course, how one handles the use of these words as a Black person has a different connotation and freedom on how they use them.

~Mod Colette

The colonial context

Since no country was mentioned, I’m going to add a bit about the vocabulary surrounding Black people during slavery, especially in the Caribbean. Although, Colette adds, if your Black characters are slaves, this begs the question why we always gotta be slaves.

At the time, there were words used to describe people based on the percentage of Black blood they had. Those are words you may find during your searches but I advise you not to use them. As you will realize if you dive a bit into this system, it looks like a classifying table. At the time, people were trying to lighten their descent and those words were used for some as a sort of rank. Louisiana being French for a time, those expressions were also seen there until the end of the 19th century.

The fractions I use were the number of Black ancestors someone had to have to be called accordingly.

Short-list here :

½ : mûlatre or mulatto

¼ or ⅛ : quarteron or métis (depending on the island, I’m thinking about Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe)

1/16 : mamelouk

¾ : griffe or capre

⅞ : sacatra

In Saint-Domingue, it could go down to 1/64, where people were considered sang-mêlé (mixed blood for literal translation, but “HP and the Half-Blood Prince” is translated “HP et le Prince de Sang-Mêlé” in French, so I guess this is another translation possibility).

-Lydie

Use the 3rd person narrative to your advantage

If you are intent on illustrating historical changes in terminology consider something as simple as showing the contrast between using “black” for first person character narration, but “Black” for 3rd person narrator omniscient.

-Marika

Add a disclaimer

I liked how this was addressed in the new American Girl books it’s set in Harlem in the 1920’s and there’s a paragraph at the beginning that says “this book uses the common language of the time period and it’s not appropriate to use now”

-SK

More reading:

NYT: Use of ‘African-American’ Dates to Nation’s Early Days

The Etymology dictionary - great resource for historical fiction

Wikipedia: Person of Color

[nkjemisin]

Hello! I’ve been seeing a lot about your work on social media lately and would love to read your books. What series do you recommend I start with?

Thanks ☺️

That depends on your taste/interest. I don't really write the same kind of thing from series to series, because I get bored easily and often want to try new subgenres/styles/etc. So I'll just briefly list my series and you can pick the one that appeals the most.

There's the Inheritance Trilogy, (link goes to the first book) my first published novels. A secondary world that has enslaved its own gods deals with the repercussions of that, from the POVs of three mortals. There's an overarching plot arc for all three books -- and there are some side-stories for this trilogy, too -- but each has a different narrator and takes place at different times. First person past tense, if you care about that sort of thing. (I don't, but some people seem weirdly attached to/repulsed by particular persons/tenses, so I'm including that info here.)

Then there's the Dreamblood Duology, which were actually written before the Inheritance books but I couldn't get them published at first because publishing in the 2000s was hella racist, basically. (I know, it hasn't changed much... but that little bit of change was enough for me to break in.) These books are as close to traditional fantasy as I'm probably ever going to get, except that they take place in faux ancient Egypt instead of faux medieval Europe. The story follows priests of the dream goddess as they're forced to deal with a conspiracy that threatens to inflict horrors on their society. Third person past tense for both books.

Next up is the Broken Earth trilogy. That's my experimental one, with first, second, and third-person POVs, present tense, a completely non-Earth world, and some heavy themes. All three books form a single story spanning, oh, forty thousand years or so, but mostly they're centered on one incredibly angry middle-aged mother who is on a roaring rampage of revenge/revolution. Features earthbenders, anti-magic groomers, magic statue people, and the apocalypse (again). Lots of "dark" themes and horror moments (harm to children, systemic bigotry, people-eating bugs, more).

My most recent books are the Great Cities duology. Urban fantasy set in modern-day New York, third person multiple POV ensemble cast. Turns out cities come to life once they hit a certain point, and then they claim a human avatar to represent and protect them. New York turns out to have six. It's also got some very unwanted tourists in the form of Lovecraftian entities that are trying to destroy it, along with reality as we know it. I meant for these to be lighthearted and silly and I think they kind of are, but there are still some notable political elements in them. (I mean, it's set in modern-day New York, and I started them the year Trump got elected, so...) It's lighthearted for me, anyway.

So, pick your poison!

[midniiights-garden]

Modern!Mizu General Headcanons!!

I have so many many ideas for Modern!Mizu omg you don't understand (I wish she was real...)

Ok, so first of all I wanna start out with some HCs about her past and her mother.

I think she probably grew up in rural Japan, her relationship with her mother basically still the same as in the show.

Due to not being exposed to very many foreigners her relationship with her peers was strained because of her blue eyes (ofc. hate discrimination smHHH)

Anyways, although Mizu doesn't have to hide her gender, and I personally headcanon that Modern!Mizu wouldn't hide it, she still has some internalized mysogyny.

This is namely due to the huge issue with sexisim in Japan, sexual harassment and sexualisation of women and so on. Mizu grew up wishing she was a boy because she didn't want to feel like a piece of meat to be eyed up and down and sold.

I HC that she meets the Swordfather when she attempted to run away from home. Probably due to another bullying incident or something.

In my head she actually moves to America or Europe to study something related to craftsmanship or to become a professional martial artist. It makes the most sense in my head at least.

She got into Uni on a scholarship lol. I mean, translated into a modern setting I do think her skill would be enough to warrant a large scholarship.

University was a rough time in the beginning for her due to the many changes that come with moving to a new country, as myself and most other third country kids will know.

Mizu had to juggle learning English, beating racist asshole and school all at the same time.

Due to her reluctance to socialize she also struggles to learn English in the verbal sense. She learned how to read and write in English much faster than to speak it because she had no one practice with. That, and she refused to talk to anyone.

As for how she met Mikio...

Modern!Mizu probably met him because he was a teacher at her Uni.

Long story short when he finds out how she was concieved and how strong he is, well, big strong man gets emasculated and throws a fit and Mizu leaves him (as she should)

And then she realises she's gay lol

I think it'd happen in a pretty similar fashion as to Canon!Mizu but you can look at my headcanons for those if you need them.

I think the main differences between Modern!Mizu and Canon!Mizu would primarily be in how she deals with her rage. Of course, Modern!Mizu isn't allowed the luxury of just stabbing people to get revenge so I believe she may resort to a lot of physical exertion in the gym or just a lot of lashing out towards people in general.

(A/N: Yayayayayya second post for the day!!! As usual, if anyone has any requests or anything feel free to ask!! Happy holidays everyone!!! <3)

[ironyscleverer]

Good Omens Book Racism

This essay was originally a reblog of this post, but I’ve decided to make it a post of its own so it’s a little easier to read.

***

Rather than diving straight into examples from the text, I want to take the time to explain my intentions/goals for this little essay. Sorry if it's boring, but I do think it's important.

First, I want to clarify that I'm not just taking the opportunity to dogpile on NG by calling him racist. The people who commented that TP was equally responsible were 100% correct! Rather, I hope that now that we know NG isn't a good guy for other reasons, people will be more receiptive to my critiques of the book without jumping to the authors' defense.

I also want to note that I believe every instance I reference in this essay is not in the show. Someone in production clearly recognized that the book didn't age well, and quietly removed the bad bits without a word or a guilty speech. I think this is part of the reason why the fandom hasn't really addressed these moments; the show cut a lot of the racism, cynicism, and generally icky bits. The overall the tone of the newer content is very different and much sweeter. Personally, I prefer it this way!

Most importantly, though, I think a lot of people reading this might wonder--why talk about racism in a book that's 30 years old and has a modern adaptation that fixes almost every problem? Isn't it normal for old books to be a bit suspect? Why go through the effort of bringing it up?

The answer is that it's less about the book more about the fandom; the fact of the book being racist isn't the problem--I fully understand that it's 30+ years old. But the fandom is alive and well, and the lack of discussion is what feels weird to me. I was disturbed by the book when I first read it, and finding nobody online who felt the same way was a bit isolating. I had to wonder if other fans didn’t notice any racism, didn’t remember, or just didn’t care. By talking about racism, by making it clear that yes, we notice and we remember, i think we can make the fandom a more welcoming and inclusive space.

So really, my only goal for this essay is for it to exist; I want it to be out there so that if someone else, like me, goes looking for online acknowledgment of racism in the book, this will be there for them to find.

I think you get the point. Let's move on to the actual substance.

I’ve selected three specific passages from the book for us to examine, as well as a few other moments that I’ll describe, but won’t directly quote. Let’s start with the most obvious (to me) example of racism, which takes place on the whaling ship:

“The captain drummed his fingers on the console. He was afraid that he might soon be conducting his own research project to find out what happened to a statistically small sample of whaler captains who came back without a factory ship full of research material. He wondered what they did to you. Maybe they locked you in a room with a harpoon gun and expected you to do the honorable thing.”

To be clear, associating Japanese people with honor and ritual suicide is a racist stereotype. Writing a Japanese character this way is racist, full stop. Later, the navigator also refers to the captain as "honorable sir." This is probably in reference to the different levels of politeness that exist in the Japanese language. However, frankly, I'm mixed Japanese, and seeing any white person using the word "honor" in reference to Asian people makes my skin crawl. Even ATLA is on thin fkn ice (although the fact that it's literally just Zuko helps a lot).

This passage is the most clear-cut example I can find of racism in that it fits into the framework of "author makes x joke, which feeds into y racist stereotype." However, there are other moments that may not directly do this, but definitely are sus enough to make you think "why tf would you say that." For example, this is how the narrator describes Aziraphale when he drives Anathama home:

“As soon as the car had stopped he had the back door open and was bowing like an aged retainer welcoming the young massa back to the old plantation.”

I can't even begin to logic my way through whether this is technically racist or not. I'm still back at wondering why on EARTH would anyone choose to write this description. It’s just repulsive. Purely based on how I feel reading it, and how I feel imagining a white man writing it, I'm gonna go with yes, this is racist.

Another example of a similar variety would be this moment, when Crowley is trying to get to Tadfield:

“It's all out of control. Heaven and Hell aren't running things any more, it's like the whole planet is a Third World country that's finally got the Bomb…”

Again. Racist? Maybe? It shows a dismissive attitude toward "the third world," which I suppose isn’t explicitly non-white, but mostly it’s just weird and uncomfortable. It's less about the actual offense and more about the...why did the author write that.

There are more such moments throughout the book that I could mention, such as the half-assed attempts at AAVE and Caribbean dialect (I think Haitian? it's when Azi is searching for a host). There’s also that whole affair with Madam Tracy and her Geronimo character. I assume that one is meant to reflect badly on her, but in the back of my mind there’s still the knowledge that the authors chose to put it there.

After a point, all these individual moments start to blend together, and the possible motivations and excuses become less convincing. Maybe on a case-by-case they can be written off as characterization or irreverent humor, but in the aggregate they’re just unpleasant. Again, my overwhelming thought is just, "Why?"

Ultimately, that question, "why would the author write that" is at the center of my critique of the book. More specifically, the question is "why do these authors, given their identities, feel comfortable writing the things that they do?" In this case, it's clear the authors, as cishet white British men, thought these kinds of racial comments were funny and didn't have the social consciousness to know better. It belies a kind of arrogance, audacity and frankly entitlement that only people with their social standing tend to possess.

Anyway, that’s all I have for now. I hope this was enlightening for some people. I just wanted to provide a little bit of perspective, and maybe reassure some other fans that have recognized these things, but haven't seen them discussed online before. To them I'd say: don't worry, you're not the only one.

[seat-safety-switch]

Intellectual property is the currency of the modern age. If you’ve got a brand, a mascot, a cute little doodle you did one day while you were bored at work, it is completely essential that your rights as a creator must be protected. Unfortunately, the way that those rights are protected is that you have to sell it to a giant corporation, which jealously hoards it for centuries after your death. Are you gonna get paid, at least? If you’re lucky, I guess.

If you have a regular job, like zookeeper or assassin, it’s unlikely that the bourgeoisie will continue to exploit you after your death. A dead zookeeper is only good for at most one more tiger feeding, for instance. Corporate artists are going to be admired, emulated, and profiteered from until the sun burns out or future executives figure out that they were weirdly and specifically hyper-racist after all.

Ever since there has been a creative industry, there have been rich people milling around the artists, trying to turn the droppings of their diseased minds into trading cards that can be offered to the shadowy beast that is global commerce. Back in medieval times, this was almost a friendly relationship: a rich person would come by, and pay you to make some shit out of marble. Chances are, they’d stop paying you and then have you murdered as you approached completion of the project, which is why artists evolved the ability to procrastinate, but that’s a whole other story.

Nowadays, making copies of something is a lot easier than going out and hiring a bunch of teenagers who can carve a replica of a marble statue. And that’s got the rich-person class in a tizzy. What does it mean to own some cool shit, if the person who made it can just make a bunch of copies of it and give it away for free to whoever asks for it? How can they be expected to derive some genuine, authentic joy from what is basically a selfless act of creative expression, without getting to charge money for it in all perpetuity? These are the questions of our age, but only because the rich people also control the machine that makes all the questions.

What’s the moral of the story, if you are a creative person selling your efforts to an enormous corporation? You have a duty to be super weird. Whatever is wrong with your brain is not wrong with the profiteers’, according to society, which means you have to be a little more creative in your subversive acts. The ideal goal is to render the thing unusable, like a General Motors product, after at most one generation of humanity. Not only are you getting revenge, but you’re helping future generations: they won’t have to write a sequel to your hit franchise, and can instead make weird shit of their own.

[dresshistorynerd]

European history is not white

Someone commented this to a post I reblogged, which message is basically "we shouldn't venerate the Dead White Man HistoryTM and we should elevate other history too, but we still need to learn Dead White Man HistoryTM to understand the world today". It's basically a response to the attitude you sometimes come across in the internet that sees learning about those Dead White MenTM as not worth our time. And this person, who seems to be following this blog because they responded to my reblog, takes it as a personal attack against all white Europeans. For some reason. Well I take these comments as a personal attack against historical understanding.

Firstly, the post clearly didn't say you shouldn't venerate any European history, because not all European history is Dead White Man HistoryTM. Obviously this person thinks European history is white, which is not true, but surely, surely, they know it's not all men? Secondly, what is "west culture"? When did it start? There is not one western culture, not one European culture. The first concept of some shared Europeanness was the Christendom in Middle Ages, but it was not exactly the same as we think of Europe today, because it did not include the pagan areas, but it included a lot of Levant and parts of Central Asia, where there were large Christian areas. And Europe was not "very white" nor was the Christendom. The more modern concept of West was cooked in tandem with race and whiteness during colonial era and Enlightenment, around 17th to 18th centuries. And Europe was certainly not very white then. The western world also includes a lot of colonized areas, so that's obviously not white history. Thirdly, implying that asking white people to apologize for European history (which no one did ask) is as ridiculous as asking black people for African history is... a choice. Black people do exist in a lot of other places than Africa, which white people should be the ones apologizing for, and really white people also have a lot to answer for about African history. Lastly, if you think the quote "anyone who thinks those dead white guys are aspirational is a white supremacist" means you as an European are demanded to apologize for your existence, maybe - as we say in Finland - that dog yelps, which the stick clanks. (I'm sorry I think I'm the funniest person in the world when I poorly translate Finnish sayings into English.)

The thing is, there is no point in European history, when Europe was white, for three reasons. 1) Whiteness was invented in 17th century and is an arbitrary concept that has changed it's meaning through time. 2) Whichever standard you use, historical or current, Europe still has never been all or overwhelmingly white, because whiteness is defined as the in-group of colonialists, and there has always been the internal Other too. In fact the racial hierarchy requires an internal Other. 3) People have always moved around a lot. The Eurasian steppe and the Mediterranean Sea have always been very important routes of migration and trade. I've been meaning to make a post proving exactly that to people like this, since as I've gathered my collection of primary images of clothing, I've also gathered quite a lot of European primary images showing non-white people, so I will use this opportunity to write that post.

So let's start from the beginning. Were the original inhabitants of Europe white? Of course not. The original humans had dark skin so obviously first Europeans had dark skin. Whenever new DNA evidence of dark skinned early Europeans come out (like this study), the inevitable right-wing backlash that follows is so interesting to me. Like what did you think? Do you still believe the racist 17th century theories that white people and people of colour are literally different species? I'm sure these people will implode when they learn that studies (e.g. this) suggest in fact only 10 000 years ago Europeans had dark skin, and even just 5 000 years ago, when Egypt (an many others) was already doing it's civilization thing, Europeans had brown skin (another source). According to the widely accepted theory, around that time 5 000 years ago the Proto-Indo-European language developed in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, which extends from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. These Proto-Indo-Europeans first migrated to Anatolia and then to Europe and Asia. Were they white? Well, they were probably not light skinned (probably had brown skin like the other people living in Europe around that time), the Asian branch of Indo-European peoples (Persians, most Afghans, Bengalis, most Indians, etc.) are certainly not considered white today and a lot of the people today living in that area are Turkic and Mongolic people, who are also not considered white. I think this highlights how nonsensical the concept of race is, but I don't think Proto-Indo-Europeans would have been considered white with any standard.

Around Bronze Age light skin became common among the people in Europe, while in East Asia it had become wide spread earlier. This does not however mark the point when "Europe became white". During the Bronze Age there was a lot of migration back and forth in the Eurasian steppe, and the early civilizations around Mediterranean did a lot of trade between Europe, Africa and Asia, which always means also people settling in different places to establish trading posts and intermarrying. There were several imperial powers that also stretched to multiple continents, like the briefly lived Macedonian Empire that stretched from Greece to Himalayas and Phoenicians from Levant, who didn't built an empire but settled in North Africa, Sicily and Iberia. In Iron Age the Carthaginian Empire, descendants of Phoenician settlers in current Tunisia, build an Empire that spanned most of the western Mediterranean coast. Their army occupying that area included among others Italic people, Gauls, Britons, Greeks and Amazigh people.

Iron Age also of course saw the rise of the Roman Republic, and later empire, but it was preceded by Etruscans, who populated Tuscan, and possibly preceded the Indo-European presence. However, weather through trade and migration with other Mediterraneans or the continuing presence of darker skin tones of the early Europeans, their art quite often depicts darker skin tones too, like seen below in first two images. Roman Empire at it's height spanned from Babylonia to the British Isles. They recruited soldiers from all provinces and intentionally used stationed them in different areas so they wouldn't be too sympathetic to possible rebels or neighboring enemies. Historical sources mention black Nubian soldiers in British Isles for example. They also built a lot of infrastructure around the empire to ensure protection and easy transportation through trade routes inside the empire. During this time Jewish groups also migrated from Levant to both North-Africa and Europe. Rome even had non-European emperors, like Septimius Severus who originated from Levant and was Punic (descendants of Phoenicians) from his father's side, and who was depicted with darker skin (third picture below). Various ethnicities with differing skin tones are represented all over Roman art, like in the fourth picture below from hunting lodge in Sicily.

Eurasian steppe continued to be important source of migration and trade between Europe and Asia. Scythians, Iranic nomadic people, were important for facilitating the trade between East Asia and Europe through the silk road during the Iron Age. They controlled large parts of Eastern Europe ruling over Slavic people and later assimilating to the various Slavic groups after loosing their political standing. Other Iranic steppe nomads, connected to Scythian culture also populated the Eurasian steppe during and after Scythia. During the Migration Period, which happened around and after the time of Western Rome, even more different groups migrated to Europe through the steppe. Huns arrived from east to the Volga region by mid-4th century, and they likely came from the eastern parts of the steppe from Mongolian area. Their origins are unclear and they were either Mongolic, Turkic or Iranic origin, possibly some mix of them. Primary descriptions of them suggests facial features common in East Asia. They were possibly the nomadic steppe people known as Xiongnu in China, which was significant in East and Central Asia from 3rd century BCE to 2nd century CE until they moved towards west. Between 4th and 6th centuries they dominated Eastern and Central Europe and raided Roman Empire contributing to the fall of Western Rome.

After disintegration of the Hun Empire, the Huns assimilated likely to the Turkic arrivals of the second wave of the Migration Period. Turkic people originate likely in southern Siberia and in later Migration period they controlled much of the Eurasian steppe and migrated to Eastern Europe too. A Turkic Avar Khagenate (nation led by a khan) controlled much of Eastern Europe from 6th to 8th century until they were assimilated to the conquering Franks and Bulgars (another Turkic people). The Bulgars established the Bulgarian Empire, which lasted from 7th to 11th in the Balkans. The Bulgars eventually adopted the language and culture of the local Southern Slavic people. The second wave of Migration Period also saw the Moor conquest of Iberia and Sicily. Moors were not a single ethnic group but Arab and various Amazigh Muslims. Their presence in the Iberian peninsula lasted from 8th to 15th century and they controlled Sicily from 9th to 11th century until the Norman conquest. During the Norman rule though, the various religious and ethnic groups (which also included Greeks and Italic people) continued to live in relative harmony and the North-African Muslim presence continued till 13th century. Let's be clear that the Northern Europe was also not white. Vikings also got their hands into the second wave migration action and traveled widely to east and west. Viking crews were not exclusively Scandinavians, but recruited along their travels various other people, as DNA evidence proves. They also traded with Byzantium (when they weren't raiding it) and Turkic people, intermarried and bought slaves, some of which were not white or European. A Muslim traveler even wrote one of the most important accounts of Vikings when encountering them in Volga.

By this point it should already be clear that Medieval Europe was neither white, but there's more. Romani people, who originate from India and speak Indo-Aryan language, arrived around 12th century to Balkans. They continued to migrate through Europe, by 14th century they were in Italy, by 15th century in Germany and by 16h century in Britain and Sweden. Another wave of Romani migration from Persia through North-Africa, arrived in Europe around 15th century. Then there's the Mongol Empire. In 13th century they ruled very briefly a massive portion of the whole Eurasian continent, including the Eastern Europe. After reaching it's largest extent, it quickly disintegrated. The Eurasian Steppe became the Golden Horde, but lost most of the Eastern-Europe, except Pontic-Caspian Steppe. They ruled over Slavs, Circissians, Turkic groups and Finno-Ugric groups till early 15th century. The Mongolian rulers assimilated to the Turkic people, who had been the previous rulers in most of the steppe. These Turkic people of the Golden Horde came to be known as Tatars. Golden Horde eventually split into several Tatar khagenates in 15th century, when the khagenates, except the Crimean Khagenate, were conquered by the Tsardom of Moscovy. Crimean Khagenate was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783. Crusades were a movement from Europe to Levant, but they also meant intermarriage in the the Crusader kingdoms especially between the European and Levant Christians, and some movement back and froth between these kingdoms and Europe, trade and a lot of movement back after the Crusader kingdoms were defeated in 13th century. Generally too trade across the Mediterranean sea was extensive and led to migration and intermarriage.

And here's some example of people of colour in Medieval European art, shown as part of the majority white European societies. First is from a 15th century French manuscript depicting Burgundy court with dark skin courtier and lady in waiting. Second one is from a Flemish manuscript from 15th century of courtiers, including a black courtier, going for a hunt. Third is a 15th century Venetian gondolier with dark skin.

In Renaissance Era Europe was only increasing it's trade and therefore had even more connections outside Europe. The first picture below is Lisbon, which had strong trade relationship with Africa, depicted in late 16th century. People with darker skin tones were part all classes. Second image is an Italian portrait of probably a seamstress from 16th century. Third one is a portrait of one of the personal guards of the Holy Roman Emperor. Fourth image is a portrait of Alessandro de' Medici, duke of Florence, who was noted for his brown complexion, and the modern scholarly theory is that his mother was a (likely brown) Italian peasant woman.

Colonialism begun in the Renaissance Era, but the wide spread colonial extraction and slavery really got going in the 17th century. Racial hierarchy was developed initially to justify the trans-Atlantic slave trade specifically. That's why the early racial essentialism was mostly focused on establishing differences between white Europeans and black Africans. Whiteness was the default, many theories believed humans were originally white and non-whites "degenerated" either through their lives (some believed dark skin was basically a tan or a desease and that everyone was born white) or through history. Originally white people included West-Asians, some Central-Asians, some North-Africans and even sometimes Indigenous Americans in addition to Europeans. The category of white inevitably shrank as more justifications for atrocities of the ever expanding colonial exploitation were required. The colonial exploitation facilitated development of capitalism and the industrial revolution, which led to extreme class inequality and worsening poverty in the European colonial powers. This eventually became an issue for the beneficiaries of colonialism as worker movements and socialism were suddenly very appealing to the working class.

So what did the ruling classes do? Shrink whiteness and give white working classes and middle classes justifications to oppress others. Jews and Roma people had long been common scapegoats and targets of oppression. Their oppression was updated to the modern era and racial categories were built for that purpose. The colonial powers had practiced in their own neighborhoods before starting their colonial projects in earnest and many of those European proto-colonies were developed to the modern colonial model and justified the same way. In 19th century, when racial pseudoscience was reaching it's peak, Slavs, others in Balkan, the Irish (more broadly Celts), Sámi (who had lost their white card very early), Finns, Southern Italians, the Spanish, the Southern French and Greeks all were considered at least not fully white. The Southern Europeans and many Slavs were not even colonized (at least in the modern sense, though with some cases like Greeks it's more complicated than that), but they looked too much and were culturally too similar to other non-white Mediterraneans, and they were generally quite poor. In many of these cases, like Italians, the French and Slavs, it was primarily others belonging in the same group, who were making them into second class citizens. All this is to highlight how very malleable the concept of race is and that it's not at all easy to define the race of historical people.

However, even if we would go with the racial categories of today, Europe was still far from being all white in this period. You had Roma, who certainly are not included in whiteness today, and European Jews, whose whiteness is very conditional, descendants of Moors in Southern Europe and Tatars and Turks in Eastern Europe and Turkey, which today is often not thought of as part of Europe, but historically certainly was. And then colonialism brought even more people into Europe forcibly, in search of work because their home was destroyed or for diplomatic and business reasons. There were then even more people of colour, but they were more segregated from the white society. Black slaves and servants are very much represented in European art from 17th century onward, but these were not the only roles non-white people in Europe were in, which I will use these examples to show. First is a Flemish portrait of Congo's Emissary, Dom Miguel de Castro, 1643. Second is a 1650 portrait of a Moorish Spanish man Juan de Pareja, who was enslaved by the artist as artisanal assistant, but was freed and became a successful artist himself. Third is a 1768 portrait of Ignatius Sancho, a British-African writer and abolitionist, who had escaped slavery as a 20-year-old. Fourth painting is from 1778 of Dido Elizabeth Belle, a British gentlewoman born to a slave mother who was recognized as a legitimate daughter by her father, and her cousin. The fifth portrait is of an unknown woman by (probably) a Swiss painter from late 18th century. Sixth is a 1760s Italian portrait of a young black man.

In late 18th century England abolished slavery in British Isles first, then in early 19th century in the whole British Empire, thanks to the continuous campaign of free Black people and some white allies, notably Quakers. Around the same time slavery was abolished in France (briefly till Napoleon got to power) after the French revolution. This meant there were a lot more free black people in Europe after that. In 18th century the Europeans, British especially, were colonizing Asia as much they could, which meant that in 19th century there started to also be a lot more Asian, especially Indian people in Europe. First picture below is of Thomas Alexander Dumas, who was son of a black slave woman and a white noble French man and became a general in the French revolutionary army. His son was one of the most well-known French authors, Alexander Dumas, who wrote The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Second portrait is of Jean-Baptiste Belley, a Senegalese former slave, who became French revolutionary politician. Third portrait is from 1810 of Dean Mahomed, an Indian-British entrepreneur, who established the first Indian restaurant in London. Forth is Arab-Javanese Romantic painter Saleh Syarif Bustaman, who spend years in Europe. Fifth is a 1862 photo of Sara Forbes Bonnetta, originally named Aina, princess of Edbago clan of Yoruba, who was captured into slavery as a child, but later freed and made Queen Victoria's ward and goddaughter. She married a Nigerian businessman, naval officer and statesman, James Pinson Labulo Davies (sixth picture).

So any guesses on at what point was that "very white Europe" when the "west culture" begun? It kinda seems to me that it never actually existed.

[gatheringbones]

[“Carceral feminists hold that if we could abolish prostitution through criminalising clients and managers, the trafficking of women would end, as there would be no sex trade to traffic them into. As the deputy prime minister of Sweden writes, ‘It is very obvious to us that there is a very clear link between prostitution and trafficking … Without prostitution there would be no trafficking of women.’ This perspective also views prostitution as intrinsically more horrifying than other kinds of work (including work that is ‘low-status’, exploitative, or low-paid), and as such, views attempting to abolish prostitution through criminal law as a worthwhile end in itself. For those who hold these views, defending sex workers’ rights is akin to defending trafficking.

In these conversations, trafficking becomes a battle between good and evil, monstrosity and innocence, replete with heavy-handed imagery of chains, ropes, and cuffs to signify enslavement and descriptors such as nefarious, wicked, villainous, and iniquitous. This ‘evil’ is driven by the aberrance of commercial sex and by anomalous (and distinctly racialised) ‘bad actors’: the individual villain, the pimp, the trafficker. A police officer summarises this approach as: ‘we’ll put all these pimps, all these traffickers in prison … and that’ll solve the problem’. Numerous images associated with modern anti-trafficking campaigns feature a white girl held captive by a Black man: he is a dark hand over her mouth or a looming, shadowy figure behind her.

Fancy-dress ‘pimp costumes’ offer a cartoonishly racist vision of 1970s Black masculinity, while American law-enforcement unashamedly use terms such as ‘gorilla pimp’ and link trafficking to rap music. There is a horror-movie entertainment quality to this at times: tourists can go on ‘sex-trafficking bus tours’ to shudder over locations where they’re told sexual violence has recently occurred (‘perhaps you are wondering where these crimes take place’) or buy an ‘awareness-raising’ sandwich featuring a naked woman with her body marked up as if for a butcher. Conventionally sexy nude women are depicted wrapped in tape or packed under plastic, with labels indicating ‘meat’.

Conversely, the victim is often presented with her ‘girlishness’ emphasised. Young women are styled to look pre-pubescent, in pigtails or hair ribbons, holding teddy bears. This imagery suggests another key preoccupation shared by modern and nineteenth-century anti-trafficking campaigners: innocence. A glance at the names chosen for police operations and NGOs highlights this: Lost Innocence, Saving Innocence, Freedom4Innocence, the Protected Innocence Challenge, Innocents at Risk, Restore Innocence, Rescue Innocence, Innocence for Sale.

For feminists, this preoccupation with feminine ‘innocence’ should be a red flag, not least because it speaks to a prurient interest in young women. Conversely, LGBTQ people, Black people, and deliberate prostitutes are often left out of the category of innocence, and as a result harm against people in these groups becomes less legible as harm. For example, a young Black man may face arrest rather than support; indeed, resources for runaway and homeless youth (whose realities are rather more complex than chains and ropes) were not included in the US Congress’s 2015 reauthorisation of the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act. Anti-trafficking statutes often exclude deliberate prostitutes from the category of people able to seek redress, as to be a ‘legitimate’ trafficking victim requires innocence, and a deliberate prostitute, however harmed, cannot fulfil that requirement.”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

[timeagainreviews]

The Hyperfixations of Steven Moffat

Leading up to the Doctor Who Christmas special, I was surprised to see people expressing indifference toward the prospect of new Doctor Who. There were the usual shitbag “Not my Doctor,” homophobes and racists who add nothing but noise to the background radiation of the fandom. But there were also ride-or-die fans expressing disinterest. And it’s not like I don’t get it. The first season of RTD’s return was a bit jank. For me, it was a marked uptick in quality, but it also felt like it was trying a bit too hard. We’re also coming off the tail end of a Hell Year™, and we’re tired. Honestly, I kind of hate anyone whose biggest problem in the world right now is the Superman trailer. But I also recognise the need for escapism. Which is why a Doctor Who Christmas special and Wallace & Gromit double feature was such a welcome reprieve from Hell Year™. That was my Christmas sorted. And you know what? I had a lovely fucking Christmas.

My greatest takeaway from this double feature was that Wallace is a bit of a menace in his own right, and Moffat is a man with hyperfixations. When I say this, I don’t mean it in a judgemental way (except for Wallace, he should take more care), but rather to highlight what I think is Moffat’s main quality as a writer. Recently Moffat disclosed that he has been diagnosed autistic. As a neurospicy individual myself, I appreciate a good hyperfixation. Let this blog be exhibit A. You give an autistic or ADHD person a hyperfixation, and it’s like a dog with a bone. You can see this in the way Moffat writes about time travel. I’ve mentioned it before, but Moffat writes time travel like a young boy who got hyperfixated and couldn’t stop thinking about the implications of time travel. 

What are some of Moffat’s hyperfixations as a writer? How about names beginning with “Os”? What about women who look like Elon Musk’s mum if she were a burlesque scientist? Or young people who meet older people and become obsessed with them into adulthood? (I’m not gonna get into it, but it’s weird that it happened three times) While some of Moffat’s preoccupations are distinctly Steven, others are more widely shared. I still remember being nervous around a hobo statue my grandmother had in her basement. I used to run past it as though it were going to spring into life the moment I took my eyes off it. I understand Weeping Angels. Fear of the dark gets us the Vashta Nerada. Steven Moffat is a writer whose fixations are at the centre of his work. And part of that work lands him in hotel rooms where he has plenty of time to lie there and think about the room he’s in.

About a month ago, we were given our first taste of “Joy to the World,” with the opening scene of the Doctor going door to door in various locations attempting to deliver a ham and cheese toastie and a pumpkin spice latte. I don’t usually watch scenes ahead of their time, but the costume geek in me really wanted to see the latest variation on what has become the closest thing we’ll get to a signature look for this Doctor. I loved the butterscotch tones with the wide legged trousers. Such an iconic look. This may be one of my favourite costumes Ncuti has worn thus far. However, beyond a glimpse at the new costume, I was curious to see the Fifteenth Doctor with a different companion from Ruby Sunday. I adored Nicola Coughlan as Clare in Derry Girls, so I had to sneak a peak.

It was rare in classic Doctor Who for a Doctor to go into a situation with no companions. The Third Doctor was alone before meeting Liz Shaw. The TARDIS engines had hardly cooled between Leela and Romana. There were also the Eighth Doctor and Grace. But for the most part, there was always a companion bridging the exchange. It’s far more common in modern Doctor Who to see the Doctor without a companion at the beginning of a story. These moments interest me because its a chance to see the Doctor’s vulnerability. With no one to impress, the Doctor feels somehow less confident. The Doctor doesn’t always need a companion to remind him when he’s gone too far, but also to remind him to feel love. Here, we see the Doctor still not used to being on his own. He pops into a hotel lobby for a couple cups of coffee before remembering he only needs the one.

While this is a nice re-introduction to the Doctor’s current emotional state, I was a little disappointed by this being the reason the Doctor was at the Time Hotel in the first place. It’s funny that he steals coffee from hotel lobbies on the reg, but it’s a flimsy device for a story setup. Then again, that is Moffat’s way. During his run on Doctor Who it was always impressed upon us that the TARDIS always took the Doctor where he needed to be. He even reiterates this concept during the Doctor and Anita’s conversation about her sat nav. That’s sort of the Doctor’s whole thing. Go somewhere innocuous on the day when everything went to shit. Henrik’s Department Store operated for years without incident until the Nestine Consciousness showed up and the Doctor had to blow the place up. Besides, how else are you going to draw a guy who time travels and has no need for a home into a time travelling hotel? Those are like the two things he needs the least. So yeah, the Doctor steals coffees like they were TARDISes.

Along with Nicola Coughlan guest starring as Joy, we get an adorable turn from Joel Fry as the charmingly dim Trev Simpkins. While his screentime is minimal, I fell in love with Trev almost immediately. Sadly, Trev wouldn’t be long for this world, but the stars are a completely different story. Having been conscripted by the Doctor to spy on a strange man in the hotel lobby, Trev quickly becomes embroiled in the journey of the mysterious Villengard suitcase by becoming its next host. This is how we’re introduced to Joy Almondo, a young woman staying at the Sandringham Hotel, which is a bit of a flophouse. Once again, we’re reintroduced to another Moffat hyperfixation which is a weird “women be shoppin’” attitude when Joy nervously asks Anita if its obvious that she’s single. I rolled my eyes at that line, and it’s made slightly more egregious when you consider the reason Joy is by herself in this run-down hotel on Christmas Eve. Why would she be thinking of men on the night she’s very clearly mourning the loss of her mum? The brief conversation between her and the fly in her room endears us to her far more than her anxiety about finding a man in this economy.

Ultimately, the Sandringham Hotel proves to be a lot more interesting of a location than the Time Hotel. Which is saying something considering that out of the Time Hotel’s many doors into different periods of time, one of those doors is some kind of Hobbit door. In contrast to the wacky voyeur tourism of the Time Hotel, the Sandringham Hotel was where the emotional core of the story takes place, even if I find Moffat’s conceit about hotels a bit contrived. You see, I can imagine the genesis of this story came from Moffat lying in a hotel room and considering that weird door that won’t open. We’ve all wondered about it. But he loses me a bit with his take on why people stay at such hotels.

Back in 2016, my friend Gary came and visited me from the states. We planned a trip down to London where he could see Abbey Road and then onto Cardiff for the Doctor Who Experience and up to Liverpool to see John Lennon’s house. It was a bare-bones trip over three days that required some sacrifices in train times and accommodations. We needed a good hotel in London, but what was most important was a place to hang our heads for the evening, so we went with cheap. The hotel we ended up with, we lovingly referred to as the Hotel Mos Eisley because it was a wretched hive of scum and villany. The rooms were numbered with a devil-may-care randomness. At the top of the stairs was a slashed canvas depicting Marilyn Monroe. One of her teeth had been blacked out and a swastika was drawn on her forehead. We had to sleep with toilet paper in our ears for fear of roaches. But we met so many characters in this hotel that we remember it as a fond memory of our trip. We still laugh about it to this day. My point being, sometimes a hotel room is just a means to an end. Also, some people are just poor. It’s not that deep, Steven.

I will however concede that this isn’t lost on Steven Moffat. As I said before, a lot of humanity can be found in the mundane setting of the Sandringham. Spoilers for the Bible if you’ve not read it, but that sentiment is reiterated with the humble manger where Mary gives birth to Jesus at the end of this episode. Furthermore, the Doctor was merely making Joy angry in an attempt to wake her out of whatever control the Villengard briefcase has over her. I had read about a week ago that Moffat wanted to bring the Doctor’s meanness back into the character, something which I have been waiting for since Chibnall decided to make the Doctor constantly stoked on life. I’m not going to go back and count the number of times in this blog where I mentioned wishing they would make Jodie scarier, but it was often. The Doctor is an alien and basically a god, it’s nice to be reminded of that on occasion. Eccleston is a good Doctor, but he became a great Doctor when we saw him lose his shit in “Dalek.” Even if it was being mean to save Joy’s life, it was nice to see the manipulative cosmic being we saw in the Seventh and Eleventh Doctors.

The Doctor is forced to go the long way to save Joy in the future by boot strap paradoxing the briefcase code to himself. I really loved this year the Doctor spends with Anita, working side by side at this hotel. As my friend Taryn quipped, they did more to build the Doctor and Anita’s relationship in one episode than they did Thirteen and Yaz’s relationship in three seasons. But in this relationship, I did find a few holes, and I don’t think I’m alone in suspecting they mean something. By now, you’ve probably seen a theory or two about Anita being Mrs Flood, and I’m right there with you. While she seems perfectly nice, there are some moments when Anita feels like she’s either a woman out of time, or not of this world. She didn’t recognise police boxes, which is sort of fair. I mean, here in Glasgow, they’re everywhere. But they are still a relic. She also didn’t know what Auld Lang Syne meant. Once again, fair dos, not everyone does. But growing up in the UK and not knowing who Guy Fawkes was? Very suspicious.

The Doctor stays with Anita for an entire year working side by side at the hotel. It gave shades of “The Lodger,” and “The Power of Three,” watching the Doctor stay in one place for an extended period while using his Doctory technology in service of mundane tasks. It was very charming and Christmassy to see the Doctor in this capacity. It only further drove home my belief that Ncuti Gatwa was a shoe-in for the Doctor. However, my internet addled-brain still laughed when they hinged a large portion of the episode’s emotional core around a hotel cuck chair. Moffat is clearly not suffering from the same brain rot as me. It’s Chibnall and VOR (see: vore) all over again. Moffat may have a lot to say about hotel rooms, but so does the internet. Sometimes, the fact that Doctor Who is made by middle aged Doctor Who nerds is entirely apparent. I suppose it’s what makes the show so wonderfully memeable. 

Trev uses the phrase “Everywhere, all at once,” in this epsiode and I can’t help but feel like Doctor Who is dipping its toe into the metaverse. Last season we had a character called Susan Triad who was played by a woman named Susan Twist. Then the characters dance while singing that there is always a twist at the end. If Anita turns out to be Mrs Flood, then we’ll have a woman named Anita Dobson who plays a character named Anita Flood. I’m not saying this is what is happening, but it can’t be lost on RTD. Then again, Moffat did give us Oswin Oswald at the same time we got Osgood and I’ll be damned if it didn’t feel related back then too. One of the recurring theories I see people returning to is that the Doctor is in the Land of Fiction from “The Mindrobber.” Perhaps they have included the Master of the Land into the Pantheon of Gods. If you watched the trailer for season two, you’ll have noticed the large animated character emerging for the theatre screen. It’s either the deepest Eighth Doctor cut ever (Crooked World represent!) or the walls between fiction and reality are bleeding into one another. What will that mean for the Doctor, a fictional character? Doctor Who may be a staple of British culture, but it also exists in a Britain so foreign to modern Britain because it never went through a phase of Dalekmania. None the less, I sense another shakeup on the horizon.

Speaking of Britains from a foreign reality, how about that COVID-19 representation? I say foreign from reality, because if you were to have watched Doctor Who during the pandemic, you would think that their fictional version of Britain never had to deal with the coronavirus. I’m not going to sit here and call Chibnall gutless for not including the pandemic into the storyline. I imagine it was a choice that required a meeting and they ultimately decided not to address it. If I were to guess, I would imagine they left the pandemic out of the show for two reasons. Firstly, they probably wanted Doctor Who to be a reprieve from death and despair. And secondly, they probably wanted to avoid questions like “Why doesn’t the Doctor just give everyone the cure?” So yeah, they probably did what was best at the time and left it at that. I can appreciate that. I can also appreciate them introducing it to give the Tories a proper bollocking.

I’ve seen some complaints about Joy’s decrying the Tories as her mother gasped her final breaths in the hospital. Some people (see: idiots) thought it was too political and woke. Which, if that’s your takeaway from this episode, I pity you. If anything, the Tories got off light. I have friends who lost their mums to COVID and I was happy to see the show finally address the very real situation we survived. I’m old enough to have lived through monkey pox outbreaks, bird flu, SARS, and mad cow disease. I never met anyone who got those diseases. I’ve had COVID three times. The pandemic was out of control in a way no living human had seen since the 1920s. Doctor Who has often struggled with finding the correct tone when tackling deep issues. But I feel like they nailed it here. Oddly, it being a Christmas story allows it the proper tone to reflect on holidays spent with late loved ones.

It’s rare when I watch an episode of Doctor Who when my closest network of friends and family who watch Doctor Who are all in agreement as to its quality. Usually one of us has a grievance to air. But everyone in my little circle really enjoyed the episode. This is surprising considering the somewhat cheesy ending with Bethlehem (though I did love the idea that the Time Hotel is why there was no room at the inn for Mary and Joseph). Myself and Taryn, both atheists, weren’t bothered in the slightest. My friend Alice, a Christian, wasn’t bothered by it on any religious grounds. It was a sweet moment afforded by the fact that it’s Christmas. Besides, if Baby Jesus isn’t invited to his birthday party, then maybe they’re doing something wrong. Other than the usual chuckleheads, I’ve not seen many people complaining about this episode. I did see that some people were let down by the lack of Silurians. The Silurian hotel manager, Melnak, had led some to believe that this Christmas special was going to be rife with Silurians. I never got this impression as he seemed like a one-off character. In fact, after watching the second episode preview, I thought it was implied that the Villengard briefcase hologram took the form of the dominant species during dinosaur times. It would appear that we were all wrong. Other than that and some of Moffat’s weird “women be shopping” brand of dialogue, it was a very solid episode of Doctor Who.

Along with the quiet moments of reflection, the deep connection between the Doctor and Anita, and Joy’s mourning her mother, we even got some exciting action scenes. We got a Jurassic Park style dinosaur with glowy eyes. We even got an exciting train scene. I love watching Ncuti in that flowing coat. He’s like a superhero in his cape atop that train in an ice storm. It was fun to watch him swinging a grappling hook to open the tomb encasing the starseed. But when the Doctor returns, both Joy and the starseed have ascended the stairs to the wild blue yonder above. While I had hoped for a little bit more of a presence of Villengard, I appreciated that this sentient star had more in mind than death and destruction. Villengard was so far from in control of the situation by that point and I loved that. Because, in reality, they’ve always been pathetic and small-time in the Doctor’s world. They acknowledge and appreciate the shared risk all sentient life takes with their actions. They like to think its the same worry people had when they fired up the Hadron Collider, but it’s closer in nature to corporations killing the environment we all depend on. “The Starseed will bloom and the flesh will rise,” wasn’t a threat, but a prelude to Joy’s ascent into the heavens. What’s more is that Trev and the other carriers of the star case will also live on forever in the sky. Leading the wisemen to Jesus and delivering Joy’s mother to the great beyond. If you think this episode didn’t make me cry, you’d be wrong.

The episode ends, but not before revisiting a couple of familiar faces. We see Ruby waiting by her phone for the Doctor to call, but instead it’s her mum. We can expect to see Ruby again, but probably not right away, which I’m fine with. It will give us time to get to know Varada Sethu as “Belinda Chandra,” a name which excites me on two levels. Is she related to Rani Chandra? And why does she have a different name from Mundy Flynn? Is this an Adeola/Martha cousins thing? Or is an Oswin/Clara different versions of the same person thing? Maybe it’s something more? The important thing is that I’m curious and excited to find out. I expect great things from Doctor Who, and if nothing else, chairs for the TARDIS. The future of Doctor Who feels bright from my perspective, I just wish the rest of the fandom felt the same way. 2025, or Hell Year™ 2.0,  is going to be a rough year for a lot of us. Like I said, I understand the need for escapism. You have my permission to feel good about yourself and to enjoy some Doctor Who next year. Fuck the haters. You have value and you deserve to feel joy.

[nightmare-foundation]

for the choose violence meme: 1, 13, 25

Choose violence meme

1. The character everyone gets wrong

In RWBY- Ozpin tbh. I've seen VASTLY different takes on Oz, everything from "Ozpin has done nothing wrong" (incorrect, a big part of his character is that he HAS made mistakes) to "Ozpin is a zealot and a Light cultist and abused Salem", and honestly both sides drive me up a WALL, the latter moreso than the former. People sometimes take unreliable narrators at their word, or go too far with the 'unreliable narrator' thing and then start assuming even silly things are unreliable (i.e. Qrow saying not many people are religious on modern Remnant. Why would this be unreliable??). I've seen some incredibly stupid takes about Ozpin. One of the ones i hate the most is that he's racist. Don't need to explain the stupidity of that one lol.

And, another thing that I don't really talk about- i think a lot of people are pretty wrong about Salem too. I don't think she abused Oz, or that she's a heartless monster, or that the Grimm turned her into an unfeeling being. She's absolutely cruel, and she's gotten a fuck ton of people killed, but I'm honestly not sure her goal is to destroy the world to commit suicide lol. It feels like the show is building up to reveal that that's not the case, since we haven't actually gotten her goal from HER yet.

And another character a lot of ppl don't understand is Oscar. Like... yes he has a personality?? He's contemplative, sassy, realistic yet optimistic, values individuals, constantly gives people second chances, etc. These are all uniquely Oscar traits. The only things he's gotten from the merge personality-wise seem to be a widening vocabulary and more confidence. He's not a nothing character with no development or no arc, and he's definitely not gonna be taken over by Ozpin.

13. Worst blorbofication

If I'm understanding this right, the worst case of blorbofication I've personally seen in a fandom is probably what the batfandom does to Tim Drake... and honestly a good chunk of the rest of the batfamily, but particularly poor Tim and Jason. Please for all that is holy stop turning them into lonely victims of the rest of the batfamily where no one can understand them. I guarantee you that Dick, the Romani guy who likely grew up poor in a traveling circus, has more in common with Jason than he does with Bruce.

25. Common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

In the RWBY fandom? Probably complaints about the animation and writing. Most of the time the complaints about the writing are only complaints because the person in question completely misunderstood the show. Some criticism I've seen are actually fair, such as talking about the White Fang and the faunus, but others are... just silly, like Jaune being Miles self insert.

About the batfandom- I'd say the constant complaining about batcest. Which like, it's FAIR to complain and dislike it, but also at some points it's just like... just block and filter the tags? And if its untagged (never seen it untagged before), just politely tell the author/poster and leave. I've seen people get EXTREMELY hostile about it?? Like, legitimately wishing death on people, even as a "joke". Like, cmon man, I don't like those ships either but I'm not wanting people dead over fiction 😭 chill out, you (general) sound insane

[creatingblackcharacters2]

How to spot a Stereotype: An Example

Okay, so I talked about this in my Lesson 6 Stereotypes series, but I feel like people haven't quite... Understood what I meant. So I'm doing a mini lesson/application. First, I'd really appreciate it if you take the time to read the links in my posts, because that will provide you the historical and social context necessary. If you lack it, you will never be fully able to understand this. Remember, all I do here is provide the beginning steps. You have to be willing to do the rest!

One thing I constantly emphasize is that it's not the description of a character that (always) reveals an existing stereotype, but the writing! And again, until you grasp why anti-Black stereotypes are what they are, you will continue to be frustrated with how to avoid incorporating them, both in your writing and in your mindset. I'm going to use one stereotype as an example.

The Mammy Stereotype

"[Black woman character] is very fond, doting, and protective. She's like the team mom of the group."

On the surface, people who are worried about this stereotype will worry, because Black readers have long rolled their eyes and said we're tired of seeing this as one of the Only Options for Black women characters. And we are. Here's the disconnect: the attributes are not what we're tired of, but how they were utilized in the writing- often by non-Black writers!

Mammy: put simply, the caricature of the Mammy is the Black nursemaid that would take care of the Master's white children and the Mistress, prioritizing them above the well-being of herself, her own children, and her own community. She is fat and homely (so as not to attract the Master from the Mistress), unthreatening, sweet and subservient.

In other words, the only value she held was to serve white people's needs (and quench their guilt).

While the image of the Mammy herself is a strong imagery that has faded from its specific origin, I would say the modern day fan archetypes that ring of the Mammy stereotype are the Black woman character that "holds the Braincell", the "begrudgingly fond mother of the group", the canon love interest now relegated to the "mommy/mean lesbian" whose feelings are erased altogether, her new role to help the two white characters get together without acknowledgment of her own potential. She has no real story of her own, or as mentioned, has her own story stolen because "it doesn't look good with her in it" (which is its own bag of worms).

Now, people often give these characters motherly (or what society deems motherly) traits: caring, sweet, protective, loving, self sacrificial. Because they want to defensively show that "they're a great person! Nothing bad! I still think they're good! I'm not racist!"

But upon learning of the stereotype, there appears this insecurity- "oh, my Black woman character has these traits, is she playing into this stereotype?" When you get to this question, what you really need to be asking yourself is:

What makes the Mammy a Mammy?

They are a tool, a utility to white people with more power.

They lack autonomy. How they feel is irrelevant, if it does not serve the white person.

Nonthreatening so as to feel "harmless" to white people who bask in her "selfless" care.

They are not allowed to show frustration or upset at their lot or at life; it is seen as a negative attribute because if they are not caring, they have no use (and may now even be considered a threat).

They will also disagree with anyone else, even to the detriment of themselves, to the benefit of the white person. This is considered "selfless", rather than sacrifice (consider that "real" Mammies were originally slaves. They probably hated every single day with the people they "cared" for, but God forbid they speak on it. To white people, they were supposedly so happy and grateful! Smile and nod!)

Notice, out of the things I listed, "strong", "protective", "intelligent", and "caring" (on its own) weren't there! Because those aren't bad attributes for a Black character to have! Why would we ever suggest that?? Why would I be mad that a Black woman was any of those wonderful things to her peers? That's not the issue. The issue is that they are often used in service of usually white characters and their stories. They're a tool of the writer to coddle their white characters, versus a character that has their own inner workings and existence.

Knowing what you know now; things that would make your strong, protective, and caring Black woman character fit the Mammy stereotype can include:

If she is pushed to the side with no autonomy or inner life of her own, as the narrative centers the white characters and their needs.

If she is never shown to have any reason for acting outside of to the benefit of the white characters around her. That's the only time her presence counts.

If her disagreeing with, getting upset with, or refusing (or really, just not being "motherly") the white characters is deemed trashy by the narrative (whereas anyone else receives nuance or reason for their behavior).

If the white characters in the story treat her poorly, and it is treated as a good thing that she "stays calm" without any sort of reflection on her feelings.

You can come up with any sort of setting, plot scenario, and description of your Black woman character. But at the end of the day, what's going to make it the stereotype is how the narrative treats her, which you will only find out by writing it, and then reviewing your own work!

You're going to have to approach any stereotype this way. It's part of the *intent* thing I keep pushing 😅 if you don't intend to write a stereotype, you're going to have to actively understand what it is, which will help you actively avoid it.

[cellarspider]

Spider's Big Prometheus Thing: Index Post

Being a list of all the posts produced in the course of this inexplicable project of mine. This project is now complete, at an unexpectedly extensive thirty entries long.

I swear, I didn't intend for it to go like that, but it was fun to write.

All entries have at least a minimum level of citations for where to start looking for more facts on any subject external to the movie itself, which includes everything from how DNA is sequenced to how Nickolodeon slime is made, and from the comedy in mislabeled portraits of early church fathers to the correct attribution of a cat's contributions to historical linguistics.

Be aware that there's also hidden rambling and bonus facts in the image alt text. A lot of them.

0. Introduction

Setting the scene, including my background, my intent, and where this movie is going.

1. Opening

Expectations, landscapes, and aliens.

Rambles: DNA, whether aliens would have it, and why it doesn't look like a pale bacon ladder.

Alt-text rambles: nano-bubbles.

2. Discovery

The Isle of Skye is gorgeous, the movie attempts to establish its themes, and why it had already got my hackles up. Rambles: how cool ancient and pre-modern peoples were, the implications of humanoid figures in European cave paintings, and misplaced lions. Alt-text rambles: seriously, Skye is just so cool. Erich von Däniken and modern publishing royalties are not.

3. David

We meet the loneliest android, and his fandom of choice. Rambles: I go nuts for a paragraph over Proto-Indo-European. Alt-text rambles: Help me remember a dude's name, that time Ron Perlman saw Sigourney Weaver do something so cool he forgot to act, and a Coronation Street conspiracy theory.

4. Humans (Derogatory)

We meet the human crew, and analyze why they're a mismatch to the movie's established expectations, and what subgenre they fit in most. It isn't the one the movie seems to be aiming for. Rambles: 50s B-movies and their Men Of Science, modern movies and their quietly suffering scientists. Alt-text rambles: inconsistently moist characters, Idris Elba's christmas tree decorations.

5. Pseudoarchaeology (Extremely Derogatory)

We meet Old Man Capitalism, poor logistics, and how the movie began to really lose me through dropping in some racist pseudoscience tropes. Rambles: more logistics (of alien bioengineering), historical art styles, what the world was getting up to in the 600s CE Alt-text rambles: Linguistics, more ranting, the life and extraordinarily ornate death of Kʼinich Janaabʼ Pakal. Rants: the existence of writing, people who don't look like you can still think, stargazing and how conspiracy theorists don't understand it.

6. Roads

Poor firearm safety with Chekhov's Gun, when movies move too fast, atmospheric chemistry, and the moment I began to yearn for blood. Rambles: First contact protocols, why 3% CO₂ won't kill you but it will make you weird, my personal experience digging up a Roman road. Alt-text rambles: the logistics of securing items in moving craft, linguistics, atmospheric science, colorblind-friendly diagram design, swearing about orology, and cursing the crew for their fictional crimes against archaeology. Rants: Why they should've stayed in orbit, and my impassioned defense of historically significant transportation infrastructure.

7. Masking

The bit that made most people realize these characters were idiots. Featuring an attempt at themes. Rambles: NASA's policies on biological contaminants Alt-text rambles: Benedict Wong having nothing to do, helmet design, driving on dusty track, the tiny overlap between archaeological horrors and Minecraft, the CDC's excellent captions on men sneezing. Rants: Nominating a man for the Heinrich Schliemann Archaeology Award, all these people are catching space covid

8. Ghosts

Comparing the Engineers to their series antecedents, and I develop a slight soft spot for the geologist. Rambles: Set design in Alien, how carbon dating works. Alt-text rambles: Adventure games, GET DOWN MISTER PRESIDENT, I get very excited for Dune: Part Two, the archival devotion of people with rare blorbos.

9. Dignity

Personal, professional, social, and media context for the treatment of people's remains. Rambles: Personal experiences around the archaeological discovery of human skeletons, professional codes of ethics, movies that handle dead bodies better by being more crass about it. Alt-text rambles: None, the main text gets full focus this time.

10. Atmosphere

How intertextual imagery is overused, how the one major character arc is developing, and a whole grab bag of miscellaneous shambolic events. Rambles: How tourist-breath can destroy artifacts, and a deleted scene Alt-text rambles: Whether explaining mysteries is always the wrong decision in fantasy, the usefulness of helmets, Mass Effect's loading screens, please someone give me more recommendations for things where Giger creatures aren't all bad, and how cultural variation in gestures can make you look like an asshole. Rants: they aren't done desecrating the dead oh boy it's just gonna get worse

11. Decontamination

How to present an audience with events that make no sense, how to do it eerily, and how Prometheus does this by accident. Rambles: NASA's Apollo 11 quarantine policies Alt-text rambles: How 2001: A Space Odyssey put on a cosmic lightshow, how traditions are faked for political and social power in Midsommar, confusing lab equipment, robot arm safety, the use of camper vans in space exploration, umarell behavior, and robot horror movies. Bonus text rambles: pressurized gas cylinder safety, and how the cargo of one truck apparently tried to join Roscosmos. Rants: Laboratory safety

12. Shocking

Mary Shelly would not be proud of them. Rambles: Which home electrical appliances their tomfoolery is equivalent to. Alt-text rambles: Semiotics and Alien, reuse of props and art department equipment, the cast's inability to look at things, how the first chestburster scene intelligently incorporated spontaneity, and I completely lose my mind over a single computer readout, finding out in the process that the Engineers are close cousins to the common house mouse. Rants: I didn't think that "don't stick electrical plugs in people's ears" would be something that needed to be said, but here we are.

13. Family Tree

A soothing ramble about some of the cool bits of my job. Rambles: How evolution has made some vertebrate blood white or green, how genomes are sequenced, and how to determine the relatedness of species. And more. A lot more. I love my job. It's so cool. Alt-text rambles: How Nickelodeon slime was made, how hecking tiny molecules are, why blue-tongued skinks have blue tongues, my review of Dune: Part Two, how hard I worked to not turn Gene Wilder into a jumpscare, lots of enthusiastic explanations of DNA sequencing techniques, the aesthetics of the machines wot do that for you, how "snip" no longer sounds like a verb to me, and how I started out as a computational scientist.

14. Cheers

David poisons a man, and how his character arc ties into christian-influenced existential dread. Rambles: series continuity, gnostic theology, Ridley Scott's beliefs. Alt-text rambles: How to ruin petri dishes, Vickers' questionably carbon-based existence, the game of Operation, hand doubles in filming, how the funniest possible misidentification of an early church figure is wandering around the internet, the cool genders of suit actors, gnostic Archons, and the Engineers as Sophia. Rants: Holloway seems unaware that archaeologists study dead people, Ridley Scott is his own biggest problem.

15. Unworthy

The movie does something I'm not going to joke about. Don't read this if you're having a bad day. Big content warning for Holocaust imagery.

16. Intimacy

Your asexual commentator grapples with Hollywood's terrible track record on romantic and sexual chemistry. Rambles: Why we don't say an archaic-looking species is "older" than another, how religious scientists do what they do Alt-text rambles: the human family tree, Abbott and Costello, pitcher plant cultivars, the creative possibilities of a Buddhist version of this movie, and Stephen Still's lack of accordions. Rants: I've never been a boyfriend but I'm pretty sure that's not how you do it

17. Threat

Prometheus takes a hard turn into old slasher movie tropes. Rambles: A movie trailer that gave Wee Spider the screaming heebies Alt-text rambles: The age rating of Prometheus, a spontaneous X-Files crossover AU, Pitch Black, how likely it may or may not be that the images in the post will get flagged, critter behavior, insufficient EVA suit design, and the content balancing I take into account when selecting screenshots. Rants: This movie does not seem to know what it is. Alt-text rants: Ditto, focusing on characterization.

18. Flames

"Mac wants the flamethrower!" Rambles: I wandered off in the middle to watch a 40k comedy video, does that count? Alt-text rambles: More content-balancing, what kind of very English critter David appears to be, dune buggy design, Star Wars: The Old Republic is worth your time, Dune: Part Two is worth your time, an extremely long ramble about integration of CG background elements, and Oblivion memes. Alt-text rants: Movie color grading and lighting, undercutting scares.

19. Stars

The movie shows how good it can be when no dialog is involved. Rambles: The movie Contact and how Prometheus could've learned from it. Alt-text rambles: How I estimate large numbers from a still image, a brief Baldur's Gate 3 appearance, the set design and staging of a room made for giants with squishy computers, the use of color to make a cohesive scene, facts about Uranus, visual intimation of threat, VFX wizardry, practical FX wizardry, Michael Fassbender's wordless acting.

20. Expectant

The movie shows how good it can be when character choice is removed from the horror. Rambles: the inspiration and place of chestbursting in Alien movies, the continuing religious symbolism in the movie, the clunky dialog, how to build or undermine tension, and the good blending of practical and CG effects, and how tiny creatures of the ocean manage to be more uncanny than horror critters. Alt-text rambles: reading details the prop department never meant for you to see. Alt-text Rants: the return of the head-exploder and the first sight of actual PPE, slowly mangling a plot point's name until it has been thoroughly folded, spindled, and mutilated.

21. Underdelivered

The movie shows how terrible it can be when horror doesn't build tension. Rambles: Contortionists in horror, hillbilly horror/hixploitation movies. Alt-text rambles: Resident Evil 7, Dead Space and "strategic dismemberment"

22. Hubris

The movie tries to do some themes again Rambles: my ineffable desire to genetically sequence ditch weeds, Left Behind Alt-text rambles: Brad Dourif's commitment to the bit in The Two Towers, nigh-invisible wheelchair product placement, the Fallout series in general and the upcoming show in particular, praise for an epic-length critique of Left Behind, Robert Zemeckis' bizarre quest to mocap everything Rants: This movie does a terrible job representing both religiosity and atheism

23. Informed

Exposition is delivered, and plot points try to knit together. Rambles: The Silent Hill movie, Pacific Rim Alt-text rambles: Pyramid Head's secret unclothed backside, demanding environmental enrichment for scientists, greebling, Tumblr's favorite shitty copper merchant Rants: What could've been done instead of an exposition dump and daddy issues Alt-text rants: these people and their interior design are tempting fate and testing my patience

24. Inscribed

I go rogue and ramble about constructed languages and cuneiform for an entire post. Guest appearances from Klingon pop music and a delightfully eccentric Assyriologist. Rambles: All of it. Alt-text rambles: the self-awareness of conlangers, fingernail length, Schleischer's Fable as a warm-up for the next section, my primary conlang derangement, speculation about whether cuneiform was legible for the blind, my beef with the cowards at Lucasfilm for refusing to use Star Wars' coolest letters, my love for Warframe's Grineer, going into far too much detail about redesigning Prometheus' Engineer script, and finally, the many crocodiles of ancient egyptian hieroglyphs. Rants: None/all of it

25. Judgement

We discuss some of what the movie doesn't. Rambles: Fiction and morality, Blade Runner, biblical allusions the story could've made and doesn't Alt-text rambles: Lance Henriksen's insane career, the paintings of John Martin and a surprise George Washington, Rutger Hauer's effect on Blade Runner, my tentative plans for the next essay series. Rants: Germs, old man makeup. Alt-text Rants: The characters are reading ahead in the script again, the half-assed Engineer writing system continues to hurt me

26. Awoken

I go bananas over PIE. Rambles: fix-it fic for this damned movie, PIE, how to avoid PIE, how to analyze PIE, and my personal alternative to PIE. Alt-text rambles: calculating how long the Engineer's overslept, their potential spiritual kinship to Moominpapa, behind the scenes photos of the suit actors, Prometheus rants in the days of LiveJournal, the game Hades, how hard it personally is to get PIE right, the linguistics nerdery of the Hittite empire, and watermarks. Rants: how the movie fails its premise and hurts my soul with linguistics

27. Shortcomings

The characters, and movie, fail to get their message across to someone bent on their destruction. Rambles: David's confused religious symbolism, Star Trek Alt-text rambles: My desire for fanfic, behind the scenes photos, what other critters the Engineer's suit actor has played, the naming of Australopithecines, crash-proofing a movie set, alien gender, Gandahar and how French animated SF in the 80s was awesome, Scorn and its expert consultation from a cenobite, and Doctor Strangelove. Rants: the assumptions of the human characters, I go from trying to be measured to actively spiting the writer for his take on thoughtful SF Alt-text Rants: Del Toro is the only one who gets me, the movie has forgotten its main character just had a major surgery, one last rant about how terribly unsafe the Prometheus was as a ship, before it becomes definitively not a ship.

28. Momentum

It's the bit where she doesn't turn. Rambles: How to fix the dumbest thing we've seen in a hot minute, Edge of Tomorrow and feeling Tom Cruise's fear, how the dead thing is never really dead in horror. Alt-text rambles: How hard it is to find the most catchy song in We Love Katamari, more behind the scenes pictures of my blorbos, Friday the 13th Part IV, bad braille, and trilobites. Rants: I mean how can you not when the movie forgets how space works? Like, the idea of 3D space as a concept? Also, a particular rock earns my ire, and my ranting about interior designs on ships finally pays off.

29. Dissonance

The ending of the movie, and its tonal incoherency. Rambles: Protagonist-centric morality and lack thereof Alt-text rambles: Star Trek TNG, green blood, caecilian teeth. Rants: shallow christian themes, sequels that could have been, Shaw's confusingly deployed robo-racism Alt-text rants: sequel disappointments, inadvisable post-caesarian activities, how the hell do you fit that much 'burster into one chest, biological plausibility in alien extend-o-mouths

30. Justification

A breakdown of a post-release interview with Ridley Scott, explaining some missing details. Rambles: Gnosticism again, Mesoamerican and European human sacrifice and the exoticization of shared cultural practices, and a hearty book recommendation. Alt-text rambles: Icelandic volcanoes, The Collector (2009), Stephen Speilberg's War of the Worlds and how scaring the shit out of someone isn't necessarily the job of a horror film, the Tollund Man, unique cultural practices, Hello Future Me, and my opinions on what we've seen of Alien: Romulus. Rants: Ancient peoples weren't stupid, an unexamined christian-centric worldview, an unexamined christian-centric worldview, I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGh

[writingwithcolor]

My alternate universe fantasy colonial Hong Kong is more authoritarian and just as racist but less homophobic than in real life, should I change that?

@floatyhands asked:

I’m a Hongkonger working on a magical alternate universe dystopia set in what is basically British colonial Hong Kong in the late 1920s. My main character is a young upper middle-class Eurasian bisexual man.  I plan to keep the colony’s historical racial hierarchy in this universe, but I also want the fantasy quirks to mean that unlike in real life history, homosexuality was either recently decriminalized, or that the laws are barely enforced, because my boy deserves a break. Still, the institutions are quite homophobic, and this relative tolerance might not last. Meanwhile, due to other divergences (e.g. eldritch horrors, also the government’s even worse mishandling of the 1922 Seamen's Strike and the 1925 Canton-Hong Kong Strike), the colonial administration is a lot more authoritarian than it was in real history. This growing authoritarianism is not exclusive to the colony, and is part of a larger global trend in this universe.  I realize these worldbuilding decisions above may whitewash colonialism, or come off as choosing to ignore one colonial oppression in favor of exaggerating another. Is there any advice as to how I can address this issue? (Maybe I could have my character get away by bribing the cops, though institutional corruption is more associated with the 1960s?) Thank you!

Historical Precedent for Imperialistic Gay Rights

There is a recently-published book about this topic that might actually interest you: Racism And The Making of Gay Rights by Laurie Marhoefer (note: I have yet to read it, it’s on my list). It essentially describes how the modern gay rights movement was built from colonialism and imperialism. 

The book covers Magnus Hirschfeld, a German sexologist in the early 1900s, and (one of) his lover(s), Li Shiu Tong, who he met in British Shanghai. Magnus is generally considered to have laid the groundwork for a lot of gay rights, and his research via the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was a target of Nazi book-burnings, but he was working with imperial governments in an era where the British Empire was still everywhere. 

Considering they both ended up speaking to multiple world leaders about natural human sexual variation both in terms of intersex issues and sexual attraction, your time period really isn’t that far off for people beginning to be slightly more open-minded—while also being deeply imperialist in other ways.

The thing about this particular time period is homosexuality as we know it was recently coming into play, starting with the trial of Oscar Wilde and the rise of Nazism. But between those two is a pretty wildly fluctuating gap of attitudes.

Oscar Wilde’s trial is generally considered the period where gay people, specifically men who loved men, started becoming a group to be disliked for disrupting social order. It was very public, very scandalous, and his fall from grace is one of the things that drove so many gay and/or queer men underground. It also helped produce some of the extremely queercoded classical literature of the Victorian and Edwardian eras (ex: Dracula), because so many writers were exploring what it meant to be seen as such negative forces. A lot of people hated Oscar Wilde for bringing the concept to such a public discussion point, when being discreet had been so important.

But come the 1920s, people were beginning to wonder if being gay was that bad, and Mangus Hirschfeld managed to do a world tour of speaking come the 1930s, before all of that was derailed by wwii. He (and/or Li Shiu Tong) were writing papers that were getting published and sent to various health departments about how being gay wasn’t an illness, and more just an “alternative” way of loving others. 

This was also the era of Boston Marriages where wealthy single women lived together as partners (I’m sure there’s an mlm-equivalent but I cannot remember or find it). People were a lot less likely to care if you kept things discreet, so there might be less day to day homophobia than one would expect. Romantic friendships were everywhere, and were considered the ideal—the amount of affection you could express to your same-sex best friend was far above what is socially tolerable now.

Kaz Rowe has a lot of videos with cited bibliographies about various queer disasters [affectionate] of the late 1800s/early 1900s, not to mention a lot of other cultural oddities of the Victorian era (and how many of those attitudes have carried into modern day) so you can start to get the proper terms to look it up for yourself.

I know there’s a certain… mistrust of specifically queer media analysts on YouTube in the current. Well. Plagiarism/fact-creation scandal (if you don’t know about the fact-creation, check out Todd in the Shadows). I recommend Kaz because they have citations on screen and in the description that aren’t whole-cloth ripped off from wikipedia’s citation list (they’ve also been published via Getty Publications, a museum press). 

For audio-preferring people (hi), a video is more accessible than text, and sometimes the exposure to stuff that’s able to pull exact terms can finally get you the resources you need. If text is more accessible, just jump to the description box/transcript and have fun. Consider them and their work a starting place, not a professor. 

There is always a vulnerability in learning things, because we can never outrun our own confirmation bias and we always have limited time to chase down facts and sources—we can only do our best and be open to finding facts that disprove what we researched prior.

Colonialism’s Popularity Problem

Something about colonialism that I’ve rarely discussed is how some colonial empires actually “allow” certain types of “deviance” if that deviance will temporarily serve its ends. Namely, when colonialism needs to expand its territory, either from landing in a new area or having recently messed up and needing to re-charm the population.

By that I mean: if a fascist group is struggling to maintain popularity, it will often conditionally open its doors to all walks of life in order to capture a greater market. It will also pay its spokespeople for the privilege of serving their ends, often very well. Authoritarians know the power of having the token supporter from a marginalized group on payroll: it both opens you up directly to that person’s identity, and sways the moderates towards going “well they allow [person/group] so they can’t be that bad, and I prefer them.”

Like it or not, any marginalized group can have its fascist members, sometimes even masquerading as the progressives. Being marginalized does not automatically equate to not wanting fascism, because people tend to want fascist leaders they agree with instead of democracy and coalition building. People can also think that certain people are exaggerating the horrors of colonialism, because it doesn’t happen to good people, and look, they accept their friends who are good people, so they’re fine. 

A dominant fascist group can absolutely use this to their advantage in order to gain more foot soldiers, which then increases their raw numbers, which puts them in enough power they can stop caring about opening their ranks, and only then do they turn on their “deviant” members. By the time they turn, it’s usually too late, and there’s often a lot of feelings of betrayal because the spokesperson (and those who liked them) thought they were accepted, instead of just used.

You said it yourself that this colonial government is even stricter than the historical equivalent—which could mean it needs some sort of leverage to maintain its popularity. “Allowing” gay people to be some variation of themselves would be an ideal solution to this, but it would come with a bunch of conditions. What those conditions are I couldn’t tell you—that’s for your own imagination, based off what this group’s ideal is, but some suggestions are “follow the traditional dating/friendship norms”, “have their own gender identity slightly to the left of the cis ideal”, and/or “pretend to never actually be dating but everyone knows and pretends to not care so long as they don’t out themselves”—that would signal to the reader that this is deeply conditional and about to all come apart. 

It would, however, mean your poor boy is less likely to get a break, because he would be policed to be the “acceptable kind of gay” that the colonial government is currently tolerating (not unlike the way the States claims to support white cis same-sex couples in the suburbs but not bipoc queer-trans people in polycules). It also provides a more salient angle for this colonial government to come crashing down, if that’s the way this narrative goes.

Colonial governments are often looking for scapegoats; if gay people aren’t the current one, then they’d be offered a lot more freedom just to improve the public image of those in power. You have the opportunity to have the strikers be the current scapegoats, which would take the heat off many other groups—including those hit by homophobia.

In Conclusion

Personally, I’d take a more “gays for Trump” attitude about the colonialism and their apparent “lack” of homophobia—they’re just trying to regain popularity after mishandling a major scandal, and the gay people will be on the outs soon enough.

You could also take the more nuanced approach and see how imperialism shaped modern gay rights and just fast-track that in your time period, to give it the right flavour of imperialism. A lot of BIPOC lgbtqa+ people will tell you the modern gay rights movement is assimilationalist, colonialist, and other flavours of ick, so that angle is viable.

You can also make something that looks more accepting to the modern eye by leaning heavily on romantic friendships that encouraged people waxing poetic for their “best friends”, keeping the “lovers” part deeply on the down low, but is still restrictive and people just don’t talk about it in public unless it’s in euphemisms or among other same-sex-attracted people because there’s nothing wrong with loving your best friend, you just can’t go off and claim you’re a couple like a heterosexual couple is.

Either way, you’re not sanitizing colonialism inherently by having there be less modern-recognized homophobia in this deeply authoritarian setting. You just need to add some guard rails on it so that, sure, your character might be fine if he behaves, but there are still “deviants” that the government will not accept. 

Because that’s, in the end, one of the core tenants that makes a government colonial: its acceptance of groups is frequently based on how closely you follow the rules and police others for not following them, and anyone who isn’t their ideal person will be on the outs eventually. But that doesn’t mean they can’t have a facade of pretending those rules are totally going to include people who are to the left of those ideals, if those people fit in every other ideal, or you’re safe only if you keep it quiet.

~ Leigh