#this should apply to other industries as well tbh

[shuppityduppity]

The thing about game development

is that right now we exist in a space where games are being developed on a 5-10 year cycle. It's not unusual for games to be in development for 6 or 7 years. There was a post talking about this and I was going to reblog off of it but I can't find it so here we are.

And the issue here, right, is that our thoughts on game development-- the trends, the graphics, the tools, the mechanics-- they're all 6 or 7 years "out of date" at this point. The games that are cutting-edge, coming out right now? Those games are built off of mechanics and styles from half a decade ago. Midnight Suns [2022], the Marvel game that is pretty good? It's very bluntly based off of Xcom 2 [2016]'s central design philosophy. (I know it's also based off of Chimera Squad [2020] but that game's mechanics are also from 2016 lol.) That new Suicide Squad game that people are posting pictures of? Many people have already pointed out that it clearly resembles PUBG [2017] and the many, many games (such as Fortnite [2017]) that ape its style. We're literally experiencing the growth of the video game industry through the process of fucking time dilation.

What we really need, see, is a form of game development that takes like... one year. Maybe two. Even the indie sphere's greatest hits are known for taking around 3 years to develop (a better number, but still not a good number). Can you imagine if games iterated off of each other on a yearly basis? We'd see industry growth and design philosophy shifts nearly FIVE TIMES as fast if you think about everything iterating at the same "rate." Can you fucking imagine??

Anyway. I think that you should make a cool little game. Something tiny and niche and awesome that doesn't take you that long to make. Please. I want to play it so badly. Send it to me. Let's make weird flash-like games again. Let's make silly platformers again. Let's make clicker games again.

I'm tired of all this.

[cyberstudious]

hiii, i am also interested in cybersecurity but don't know how to gain skills to start it as a career after graduation next year

Hi! First of all, good luck with your last year before graduation! it can be kinda hectic and kinda scary, but there are lots of good things in store!

The cool thing about cybersecurity (and computer science in general tbh) is that there are lots of opportunities to learn things on your own!

(Brief side note: my recommendations are U.S.-centric, just because that's where I am and where my experience is. The industry may be a bit different if you're in a different country, but lots of things should be the same.)

This got very long, so I'm putting it under a read more. The tl;dr is:

play CTFs

get an entry-level certification (or even just study for one!) - the CompTIA Security+ is a great choice

join or start a cybersecurity club on campus (or join a professional organization like Women in Cybersecurity)

stay up to date with cybersecurity news

learn some skills on your own time: networking, programming, general IT skills, etc.

If anyone wants more information about any of these suggestions, let me know & I'd love to make a separate post about them!

CTFs Capture the Flag games are how I initially got into cybersecurity and they're a fantastic way to practice new skills in a fun, real-world kind of environment. If you've never done one, you absolutely should! Here are a few of my faves:

Cyber FastTrack is my top recommendation. It's only available to current college students in the U.S. (and requires U.S. citizenship), but the challenges are fantastic & they have awesome learning materials. It generally runs October-April each year. I did well in this CTF and got a scholarship for the SANS.edu Undergraduate Certificate in Applied Cybersecurity - that's 4 certifications & nearly $19k of free training. It's ridiculous and I love it. Highly recommend.

CyberStart is the same set of challenges, but you have to pay to access all of it. It also has programs similar to Cyber FastTrack for high school students, high school girls, and UK and Canadian students - check their about page.

picoCTF - I haven't done this one before but it's constantly recommended as a good beginner CTF. It looks like you can practice online at any time, but they also do a yearly high school competition.

OverTheWire Bandit - This site has several different wargames (similar to CTFs) that teach you different topics, but Bandit is the one to start with. It teaches you lots of Linux things & will give you the skills to play the others.

Certifications Certifications are a recommendation or a requirement for many (if not the majority) of cybersecurity jobs. They're not a replacement for experience, but getting one as a student demonstrates that you have the passion and work ethic to pursue cybersecurity on your own. Studying for an entry-level certification is also a fantastic way to get a general understanding of the field and pick up some essential knowledge.

The main one I see recommended is the CompTIA Security+. I studied for this certification very slowly for a long period of time, because I was using it to learn cybersecurity in general. It covers a lot of material but it also goes very in-depth in places. I got this cert because I knew it could get my foot in the door in lots of places, and just telling people that I was studying for it was a way to impress potential employers!

Professor Messer has a ton of fantastic, 100% free training material for the CompTIA certifications. In addition, you can use all the free resources that you have as a student to study for this. I used LinkedIn Learning courses, check if your college or local library give you free access to this.

In addition, there are technically 2 CompTIA certifications you should have before you get the Security+: the A+ and the Network+. The A+ is just general IT knowledge, and you can probably skip it if you're decent with computers. Having a solid understanding of networking is super important, so it's worth going through the material for the Network+ even if you're not going to pay to take the exam.

(Also, taking the Security+ exam while you're a student lets you get the academic discount! I think that saved me $100-$150.)

Clubs and Professional Organizations Join a cybersecurity club at your school if there is one. It's a great way to meet other students interested in the same things and get advice. They may also have tech talks, run CTF events, or have local professionals come and speak. If there's no cybersecurity club at your campus, consider starting one!

You can also join a professional organization. The only one that I know of is Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS), and they do lots of great stuff. Student membership is $20/year, and then you get access to their webinars, a mentorship program, their member community, and student scholarships to the WiCyS conference. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to the conference this past March and it was a really fantastic experience. I was also the president of my campus's student WiCyS chapter! If you're looking to start a cybersecurity club, WiCyS has good support and resources for their student chapters.

Stay Informed About Cybersecurity News Cybersecurity is always evolving, so it's important to have current knowledge of what's happening in the industry. This gives you real-world examples that you can keep in your mind while you're learning new concepts, and it's also a way to impress employers during interviews. These are a few of my favorite sources:

SANS Internet Storm Center StormCast Podcast - 5 minutes of security news every weekday morning

Blogs:

Krebs on Security

Schneier on Security

Malwarebytes Labs

Learn Skills on Your Own Cybersecurity involves working with lots of different technologies. Having solid foundations in these areas will help you a lot:

computer networking (OSI model, ports & protocols, how the internet works, firewalls, etc.)

Linux commands & Windows PowerShell

programming/scripting

cryptography basics

"everyday" security: if you're the IT person for your friends & family, know how to answer questions like:

"How do I set a good password?"

"Should I use a password manager?" (yes.)

"Where should I use MFA?" (everywhere.)

"How do I keep my home network secure?"

"How can I avoid getting scammed?"

This DIY Feminist Cybersecurity Guide is one of my favorites for general security hygiene information.

This got really long (over 1k words! wow!), but I hope it was helpful! Please feel free to send me any more questions you might have, whether specific or broad! I think cybersecurity is a great place to be and I love sharing resources and talking about it!

[inkofamethyst]

July 19, 2024

Restarted the bioinformatics course and ughhhhhhhhhh. The command line is hard. Vim sucks. (read: I am largely unfamiliar with both the command line and vim.) Tbh I might just skip the homeworks because I don't think I'm able to find answer keys for them, meaning I can't check my work. So it goes with a free, youtube-based "class". I might just stick with the theory lessons for now and work with my postdoc in August on application. What I really want is to get a new laptop. Apparently black friday is the best for deals, but I'll see if I can manage to get one before school starts.

Otherwise making decent progress in lab. Doing a lot of histology (sectioning, staining, microscopy) which is going well enough.

I don't think I want to continue with academia after getting my phd. For many reasons. One main one is my mental health. I decided not to pursue theatre professionally because I knew that the requirement to always be a superlative would drain me and because of the lack of job security. Both of these are prominent components of an academic's professional lifestyle. While I know my PI manages a relatively healthy work-life balance and even seems to have a vibrant home life, I fear he may be the exception.

This is fun. Doing my phd at one of the world's top institutions is fulfilling! I am receiving scientific training at a high level. I am interfacing with some of the smartest people I've ever met all the time. I get to dedicate years toward the study of a passion project. I'm even building my financial literacy and managing to put money away. So I don't think it will be a waste.

And it's not like I could never return to academia. A previous mentor of mine has managed it. I could even teach on the side if I got the itch. But the publish-or-perish, soft money insecurity is not for me, I don't think. Weathering attacks on academic freedom and the tenure process is not for me. I think I want something more boring. I think I want a job that is just a job. Maybe even something that actually helps people.

I think my parents are now kind of hoping I'd go all the way, though. I know they'll support me regardless, but every time I've expressed doubts, my mom has told me to stay on the ride for as long as it will have me. Which I agree with to some extent. But I think setting goals and revising them is an important part of life. And it seems I may be revising the ones I set when I applied.

Noticeably cooler as of yesterday. I was so cool last night I was even able to turn off my box fan for the night. Thankful for that.

I'm also thankful for the luck involved in getting into the only program I applied to with more straightforward industrial applications.

[edit: for clarification, i most certainly am not interested in consulting. however. while i reserve the right to look for consulting jobs in the future to get that bag should i deem it necessary, i also believe that others have the right to ridicule me for that decision.]

[missmayhemvr]

something i wanna do this year because ive been thinking deeply about this for a year already is prove that black and indigenous communities arent as poor as portrayed but actually just set up to be exactly like colonized countries and by that i mean sites of intense economic exploitation and extraction and i want to prove that gentrification is just the logics of settler colonialism being applied internally and is also being applied to a significant portion of the global south nations particularly Jamaica and parts of south east asia. as well as the methodology of this process being a key goal of the bretton woods systems after the failures of colonization of direct open colonialism and settler colonialism in asia and africa.

i think i could explain my key points that i would have to prove and show a connection of(tbh most of the points have been proved as separate phenomenon). i think the hard part of this would be proving intent and that predominately black cities and neighborhoods are made into isolated economic zones to the same or similar degree. i think i can prove the isolation by working forward from the mid 1800s and through the examination of a couple reservation economies and the economies of greenwood and tulsa prior to their destruction and also compare the logics of that to the destruction of the economic systems of india and asia. the settler colonial aspect of gentrification is something i honestly believe that any black or hispanic person in the us can speak to very easily, showcasing the numbers i think ill use new york and chicago and atlanta, i should also be able to clearly show that communities of color are primarily affected by this. the bretton woods part is gonna be fucking tough idk how ima start that portion but im likely going to rely on the work of nkrumah and other revolutionary leaders who wrote about the methods of imperialism following WW2.

i wanna do this because i think having this written out on a space like tumblr could actually get those that are lacking to understand why revolutionaries from palestine to turtle island say that its all one struggle and why they say "no one is free till we are all free". its been proven a hundred and one ways that militarily the imperialist learn from each other militarily and work with each other to bomb and destroy and conquer. now its important to understand why they work so hard to keep much of the world ordered the exact way they do economically and why they try so desperately to prevent china from helping the global south from industrializing. and hopefully showcase some of the ways the internal blow back by the imperial core nations is going to intensify until we dismantle the whole system down to the foundation.

wish me luck and if you have a resource i should see, please send it. or even add it to this.

[mosesdumpin]

I've a lot to say about xg in general, but one of the primary things that got me really invested in them despite a pretty long running prejudice against kpop as a distinct industry was their usage of femininity.

Now for the most part my problems with kpop were not really unique to kpop, and could be applied to "pop" music as a genre. What tends to happen is there is some kind of cultural innovation or idea in music and then the pattern gets refined and refined until it dies. This means you get 100 of the same kind of song and artist for a while before anything changes, and kpop specifically is guilty of this in the way American/western pop was pre-00s. In the west, rap and rnb (so... black folks, lets be honest) changed the game and the 00s really began an era of these genres overtaking "pop" as the primary mainstream genre of music. This forces pop to change by either attempting to adapt the genre with rap and rnb (insert rap verses into a pop song, etc) or innovate to compete effectively. RnB influences have definitely stuck around along with trap beats but the "single rap verse" song got stale pretty quick. Kpop didn't really have this same cultural upheaval, arguably because... well... black people are not a foundational cultural touchstone over there. Interestingly, the effects of western blacks echoed to kpop but it was filtered through the American soft power screen. The other main thing that bothers me with kpop idol groups, specifically girl groups, is their use of femininity, as indicated before the break. With some notable sort-of-exceptions, girl groups held a theme of "we are pretty/sexy/cute and can sing" and while this DOESN'T mean that girl groups were just models playing a part, it does mean that their general method of appeal was generally defined as attractiveness. This led the obvious issue of over-sexualizing them and even when the song itself wasn't following that theme, their visuals STILL placed these artists in the femme fatale/damsel role. This isn't... necessarily bad, nor would I say women's sexuality is bad but its very boring as a concept and not for me. In fact I guess I should be clear that these criticisms are not meant to be objective or critical of fans of the pop genre- I absolutely understand (now more than ever, tbh) why people get into kpop. The previous criticisms are simply why I stayed pretty far away. For XG in particular, however, I was immediately attracted to what they seemed to be trying to do. The answer to over-feminization/sexualization of girl groups is NOT to masculinize or veer clear of femininity... or even to try and make a mockery or an ironic stance. The answer was to project the energy that boy groups have really gotten good at projecting while never letting the audience forget that you're a girl group. I don't really know how to explain it specifically and I think I'm a little tired of writing now, but I will add that it helps if the girl group is like... a little gay and XG is... I mean come on if you're an ALPHAZ you have to agree they're like... aT LEAST a little gay?

[laisai]

Honestly go Ukraine

I hope this also shows other Western govts that a sufficiently prepared and armed force in a threatened country can pull off miracles, and thus we should not write them off. We should support them.

💙💛💙💛

[zhongwans]

more wenzhou/LLD brainrot idk what the hell is going on anymore tbh: (PART THREE)

1. Jiangxi's Fire Department (from Zhang Zhehan's hometown) wished Gong Jun a Happy Father's Day on their official weibo. What is the context, you ask? It's likely a reference to one of Gong Jun's many nicknames within the fandom. And yes, the supposed "mother" is exactly who you think it is.

You'd think that after the end of all official promotions for WOH, their chaotic hometown weibo accounts would finally run out of excuses to make all these wild posts, but it's been months now. Apparently, peace was never an option.

2. ElleMen Magazine posted a feature about male celebrities and their "heart-thumping moves". For Gong Jun, they used his interactions with Zhang Zhehan as an example.

"In order to match the height of the other person, he lowers his head and slightly bends down. Just thinking about this picture, one's heart jumps out! For this, we have to cue Gong Jun. Although their height difference is just a few centimeters, he always bows his head everytime he listens to what Zhang-Laoshi has to say,"

"And the whole process is very natural, a completely subconscious reaction. During the recording of the variety show Ace Actress, Zhehan simply tapped Junzi and Junzi automatically lowered his head to listen to him,"

"Let's take a look at how the two usually look at each other. Well, the background music should be: "I smile as soon as I see you! Your elegant demeanor is so wonderful~"

If you have any questions don't even bother asking because nobody knows what the hell is going on.

3. Marie Claire's official weibo accidentally posted a photo of Zhang Zhehan in Gong Jun's supertopic. They realized their mistake half an hour later and corrected it, but it was too late and people were already clowning them in the comments section. #Marie Claire tags wrong supertopic trended on weibo.

People were trolling them nonstop in the comments, helpfully posting pictures of the two and pointing out "This is Gong Jun. This is Zhang Zhehan,"

Hundreds of variations of the same comment flooded the post's comment section. People were also tagging them in posts with the same joke. It seemed that Marie Claire's mistake managed to spawn a new meme.

Finally, to everyone's amusement, Marie Claire deleted their post. People assumed they couldn't take the thousands of people clowning them. Marie Claire, however, came back with a vengeance and straight up posted photos of GJ and ZZH together and captioned it "This is Zhang Zhehan, this is Gong Jun,"

Following the usual timeline of dangai dramas, everyone should be treating these two as "strangers" who should never appear in the same frame by now, but it seems that the brainrot is just too strong for these two.

c-ent industry: "ahahaha actually there are standards in place for things like this-"

everyone else: "YA'LL HEAR SUMN"

4. It seemed that Ifeng Entertainment caught a whiff of the newly spawned meme and decided to join in on the clownery. They tagged Zhang Zhehan's supertopic on a post calling him out for spraying sunscreen over his shades. They attached pictures of him, but one of those pictures was.......not like the rest.

Anyway, rules no longer apply. The brainrot has taken over. Everyone is confused. I'm confused. These people have all gone nuts.

[earlgreytea68]

Heyyyyyy, I bet you were DYING to know stuff about that Google v. Oracle decision, huh?

You may have heard recently about a big deal Supreme Court decision called Google v. Oracle, a litigation that has dragged on for many, many, many years and focuses on Google having copied some pieces of computer programming owned by Oracle and known as APIs. Most of the write-ups I’ve seen about it have focused on its enormous repercussions for the technology sector, which makes sense since it’s a case about computer programming and APIs and other tech-y things.

But the thing about the decision is that it’s a fair use decision. The Supreme Court could have found that the APIs weren’t even protected by copyright. But instead, the Supreme Court used the doctrine of fair use, and this means that the case potentially has ramifications for all fair use situations, including fanfiction!

So, if you don’t know, fair use is a main defense to copyright infringement. Basically, you can use somebody else’s copyrighted work without their permission as long as what you’re doing with it is considered a “fair use.” E.g., you can write a story in somebody else’s fictional universe or draw art of somebody else’s fictional copyrighted characters without their permission as long as your use is a “fair use.”

“What’s a fair use?” is an incredibly complicated question. The long and tortured history of Google v. Oracle illustrates this: a jury found Google’s use was a fair use; an appellate court found that it wasn’t and basically said the jury was wrong; and now the Supreme Court says no, no, the jury was right and the appellate court was wrong. Like, this is not unusual, fair case rulings are historically full of disagreements over the same set of facts. All of the cases reiterate over and over that it’s a question that can’t really be simplified: every fair use depends on the particular circumstances of that use. So, in a way, Google v. Oracle, like every fair use case, is a very specific story about a very specific situation where Google used very specific APIs in a very specific way.

However, while every fair use case is always its own special thing, they all always debate the same four fair use factors (these are written into the law itself as being the bare minimum of what should be considered), and especially what’s known as the first and fourth factors. The first factor is formally “the purpose and character of the alleged fair use,” although over the decades of fair use jurisprudence this has come to be shorthanded as “transformativeness,” and the fourth factor is “effect on the market.”

Most of the energy and verve of a fair use case is usually in the transformativeness analysis; the more transformative your use is, the more likely it is to be fair (this is why AO3’s parent organization is called the Organization for *Transformative* Works – “transformative” is a term of art in copyright law). To “transform” a work, btw, for purposes of copyright fair use doesn’t necessarily mean that you have edited the work somehow; you can copy a work verbatim and still be found transformative if you have added some new commentary to it by placing it in a new context (Google Image Search thumbnails, while being exact reproductions of the image in question, have been found to be fair use because they’re recontextualizing the images for the different purpose of search results). The point is, transformativeness is, like fair use itself, built to be flexible.

Why? Because the purpose of copyright is to promote creativity, and sometimes we promote creativity by giving people a copyright, but sometimes giving someone a copyright that would block someone else’s use is the opposite of promoting creativity; that’s why we need fair use, for THAT, for when letting the copyright holder block the use would cause more harm to the general creative progress than good. Google v. Oracle recommits U.S. copyright to the idea that all this is not about protecting the profits of the copyright monopolist; we need to make sure that copyright functions to keep our society full of as much creativity as possible. Google copied Oracle’s APIs to make new things: create new products, better smartphones, a platform for other programmers to jump in and give us even more new functionality. The APIs themselves were created used preexisting stuff in the first place, so it’s not like anyone was working in a vacuum with a wholly original work. And, in fact, executives had thought that, the more people they could get using the programming, the better off they would be.

Which brings us to the fourth fair use factor, effect on the market (meaning the copyright holder’s market and ability to reap profits from the original work). There’s a lot of tech stuff going on in this part of the opinion but one of the points I find interesting from that discussion is that the court thought that Google’s use of the APIs was not a market substitute for the original programming, meaning that Google used the APIs “on very different devices,” an entirely new mobile platform that was “a very different type of product.”

But also. What I find most interesting in this part is the court’s explicit acknowledgment that sometimes things are good because they are superior, and sometimes things are good because people “are just used to it. They have already learned how to work with it.” Now, this obviously has special resonance in the tech industry (is your smartphone good because it’s the best it could be, or because you’re just really used to the way it’s set up?), but there’s also something interesting being said here about how not all of the value of a copyrighted work belongs *to the copyright holder* but comes *from consumers.* Forgive the long quote but I think the Court’s words are important here:

“This source of Android’s profitability has much to do with third parties’ (say, programmers’) investment in Sun Java programs. It has correspondingly less to do with Sun’s investment in creating the Sun Java API. . . . [G]iven programmers’ investment in learning the Sun Java API, to allow enforcement of Oracle’s copyright here would risk harm to the public. . . . [A]llowing enforcement here would make of the Sun Java API’s declaring code a lock limiting the future creativity of new programs. Oracle alone would hold the key. The result could well prove highly profitable to Oracle . . . . But those profits could well flow from creative improvements, new applications, and new uses developed by users who have learned to work with that interface. To that extent, the lock would interfere with, not further, copyright’s basic creativity objectives.”

This is picking up on reasoning in some older computer cases (like Lotus v. Borland, a First Circuit case from decades ago), but I think it’s so important we got this in a Supreme Court case: if WE bring some value to the copyrighted work through our investment in it, why should the copyright holder get to collect ALL the rewards by locking up further creativity involving that work? Which, incidentally, the Court explicitly notes is to the public detriment because more creativity is good for the public? This is such an important idea to the Supreme Court’s reasoning here that it’s the first part of the fair use test that it decides: that the value of the work at issue here “in significant part derives from the value that those who do not hold copyrights . . . invest of their own time and effort . . . .”

This case is, as we say in the law, distinguishable from fanfiction and fanart. APIs are different from television shows, and this case is very much a decision about technology and computer programming and smartphones and how old law gets applied to new things. Like, fair use is an old doctrine dating from the early nineteenth-century, and here we are figuring out how to apply it to the Android mobile phone platform. That, in and of itself, is pretty cool, and it’s rightly what most of the articles you’ll see out there about this case are focusing on.

But this case isn’t just a technology case; it’s also a fair use case that places itself in the lineage of all the fair use cases we look at when we think about what makes a use fair. And, to that end, this has some interesting things to say, about how much value consumers bring to copyrighted works and where a copyright holder’s rights might have to acknowledge that; about the fact that there are in fact limits to how much a copyright holder can control when it comes to holding the “lock” to future creativity building on what came before; about what part of the market a copyright holder is entitled to and what it isn’t. Think about the analogy you could make here: Given the investment of fans in learning canon, which is what makes the creative work valuable in the first place, allowing enforcement against fanfic or fanart would allow the canon creators to have a lock limiting future creativity, which would be highly profitable to the original creator (or, let’s be real, to Disney lol), but wouldn’t further copyright’s goals of promoting creativity because it would stifle all of that creativity instead. And just like Google with the APIs, what fandom is doing is not a market substitute for the original work: they’re “very different products.”

This is not to say, like, ANYTHING GOES NOW. Like I said, fanfic and fanart are very different from APIs. Fictional works get more protection than a functional work like the APIs at issue in this case. And there’s still a whole thing about commercial vs. non-commercial in fair use analysis which I didn’t really touch here (but which obviously has limits, since it’s not like Google isn’t making tons of money, and their use was a fair use). But this decision could kind of remind a big media world that maybe had forgotten that the copyright monopoly they enjoy is supposed to have the point of encouraging creativity; we grant a copyright because we think people won’t create without a financial incentive. (Tbh, there’s a lot of doubt that that is actually a true thing to believe, given all the free fic and art that gets produced daily, but anyway, it’s what the law decided several centuries ago before the internet was a thing.) Copyright is a balance, between those who hold the copyright and the rest of us, and the rest of us aren’t just passive consumers, we have creative powers of our own, and we might also want to do some cool things. And this case sees that. None of us are starting in a creative vacuum, after all; we’re all in this playground together.

[jooyeone]

I agree wholeheartedly with you on the diet/weight talk. I do think it is something different in Korean culture vs Western culture (also I'm sorry I am saying Western here as a generalization but idk where you/everyone is from). I know asking each other "did you eat" and commenting on weight is a very normal and friendly part of Korean culture from what I've learned when studying the Korean language. Asking "did you eat" is almost the same as "how are you?" And doesn't even require a response. Anywayyyyy all this to say, beyond even the idol culture, asking about weight and commenting on weight is very normal. That being said, I also think it can be very detrimental, especially when applied to idol culture where all their fans, young and old, see them talking about losing weight constantly and rather extreme eating habits as well. The concerning part, as you said, is how casual it is. I thought it was absolutely unsettling to see just how normal it was for all these idols' "diets" to be widespread knowledge - to see people on YouTube recreating/trying them. People are fiercely protective of their idols' behaviors and quick to say "it's not an ED, don't worry" but that in of itself is worrisome bc this way of eating is so normalized it isn't considered an ED. It seems odd to me as well, having learned about the origins of "did you eat" being a common greeting from a time when Koreans were starving due to the war and skipping meals was a sign you were unwell, that idols are now praised for it. Anyway, I'm rambling. All this is to say, I recognize to an extent this is a different culture where talking about weight and meals is incredibly common place, but it's not for a large part of the world and it can be alarming and off putting to hear these things. As someone who struggles a lot with food and has an unhealthy relationship with their body, it was a little triggering for me at times when I got into K-Pop, to constantly hear my idols wish for weight loss when they were already so skinny. It made me want to lose weight even more than I already did, it made me think maybe I should skip meals too. I surely can't be the only one. Idols frequently talk about skipping meals and losing weight but then they tell their fans not to do the same thing, not to copy them, but that's very hypocritical tbh when idol culture encourages fans to buy what their idols buy, wear what their idols wear, style themselves to fit their idols' styles, etc. There's a lot of "copy your idols" push happening but then backtracking when it comes to achieving the same body types. Fine, maybe people can say it's not an ED or toxic for the idols or whatever their opinions are, but they can't deny these things impact their fans. How many times on vlives do we see idols responding to fans almost proudly saying they have skipped meals? Where do people think that mindset comes from?

hi love! i have so little to add to your comment, you said so many things that i wholeheartedly agree with, but you also opened my eyes to quite a few elements i had no idea about! i'll definitely read up a bit more on the "did you eat?" greeting and how that has historically come to be the norm. see, yeah, things like these are reflective of a culture that i know i'm not a part of and i respect the differences, but there is definitely a point within the kpop industry where this is twisted into something actively harfmul, both for the artists and for the fanbase who is constantly told/advertised to look up to them. that's where i wish there was more responsibility involved.

[vegance]

First off, i hate that second source you linked (the one attached to the word environmental). Paywalls are evil.

Otherwise, yeah agriculture in general, especially huge monocultures, is pretty bad environmentally. But that goes for plants and animals, and the former tends to take more extra water used than the latter depending on where its planted (avocados in California? Much too thirsty of a plant).

I do think we need to really change how farming works as a whole, produce less overall but have more small farms, everything should be much more locally sourced and companies like Tyson, Perdue, Del Monte, Monsanto, and Nestle can go die.

I also think we should focus more on farmed seafood (ironically I’m thinking more of freshwater species here) and certainly stop trawling the bottom of the ocean. Only use the kind of nets where you can pull em up and immediately release non target species without much harm (stress would still be inevitable but, eh can’t really not stress em out).

As for the human rights violations and illegal/not really being punished cattle farms in Brazil. Yeah that just requires laws to be enforced and potentially a visit from OSHA/equivalent for the slaughterhouses. And the forced labor is, probably not gonna stop unless its forced to stop because 🙃.

You can do your thing to try to fix stuff, I’m just gonna do my thing. Advocate for reform and local foods. Avoid chicken in general tbh because cornish x shouldn’t exist and that industry needs all sorts of reform (pork too but i rarely have that anyway). Avoid giving those companies known to be absolutely horrid my money (omg it can be annoying to avoid Del Monte sometimes and then Nestle just has so many brands). And avoid non farmed seafood, wild stuff is liable to be full of parasites anyway (personally i just, dont like seafood so that’s easy enough)

Like seriously, we dont need fresh produce available all times of the year. There’s no need to ship stuff all over or to ask for fresh produce (including tropical fruits) in the middle of winter. We have canned versions, we have frozen versions. Those can get us through the winter. (This doesn’t apply to animal products because in theory those can all still be sourced the same regardless of the time of year, but even then they also have ways of being preserved)

And ofc the biggest thing to save the planet. Oil companies need to be held liable for the climate change that’s happening (as well as the other top polluting companies). Cow farts are easy enough for nature to handle if it’s not for all that other bullshit. But it’s hard as an individual to do anything to those companies.

its not a paywall actually. you merely have to sign up (for free). it's science magazine,so no scammy shit and the article is really, really good. i definitely recommend reading it.

i definitely agree with a lot of what you're saying, we don't need fresh strawberries all year round.

but a lot of the things you are saying are addressed in the science article actually. even the best aquaculture is worse environmentally speaking than plant protein, for example. and many methods of killing fish are actually especially cruel.

generally, what you eat is much more important that where it comes from, as transport is only a small fraction of ghg emissions from food.

and the actual IPCC says that a vegan diet has the highest potential for ghg mitigation of all diets (text search for vegan).

that is not to say that it is not possible to eat some meat, eggs and dairy and not deplete planetary resources. but what we are doing right now is not even remotely close to being that.

i personally am not only vegan for myself, but also for the other people, who are not, and to try and make up a little for the environmental destruction that affords me my lifestyle in a high income country.

and all of this doesn't change the fact that animals are sentient beings. they feel pain, stress, and wellbeing. this means that they can suffer. and they do suffer, horrifically. we take their entire lives away, for what? taste preference? if we have another option, then i just think that's wrong. their lives matter more than chicken nuggets, a leather jacket, mozzarella.

[namtanlovesfilm]

Hi Axelle,

I cannot verify the source from where this news came from,..but it is true that to a great extent lobbying works in the BL industry.

I mean,...Glamour & Entertainment industry through out the world is extremely competitive, and ruthless. And BL is no exception to that. And though BL isn't a sub-genre anymore,...it's still evolving. So what applies to other industries, applies to BL as well. Having said that,...news spread fast, and rumours spread even faster in the BL industry.

Now,...

Does Godji have anything to do with the whole fall-out between Mike & TopTap? Because,...it's believed that Godji is one of the influential person in GMMTV, and that she is close to Mike, and did not like the close proximity between Mike & TopTap, that's why the whole fallout.

And since TopTap is almost reduced to a side-character now,...GMMTV is launching Krist and Mike as a couple, trying to mint money out of their popularity.

If this is news to you,...how far do you think it's true?

And,...

Do you think the BL audience will accept Mike & Krist as a BL couple?

xoxo

Arjuna

hi! personally I think it's kinda annoying how people always find a way to blame women for everything lol. at the end of the day, none of us really know what happened, and all we can do is speculate on a situation we don't even have all the facts on. so yes, godji has some influence in gmmtv but I don't believe her to be THAT influent either, she's just overly present in projects bc she's primarily a mc so she's chosen to basically do most lives & events gmmtv have. and I don't believe in the slightest that toptap is getting sidelined, seeing how he's one of gmmtv's biggest actors & people love him. sure, he doesn't have the most front & center projects this year, but we don't know what the future looks like so it means nothing for now. what I believe happened was that mike & toptap fought, because godji is very close to mike she got involved by also unfollowing toptap so sadly people started blaming things on her, and then mike & toptap decided to get on slightly better terms but clearly didn't mend their relationship entirely, causing their ship to die. since both toptap & mike don't have a ship anymore and krist doesn't either bc singto left gmmtv, gmmtv paired krist & mike together (probably to krist's demand who's a huge opportunist.) I really don't think it's that deep tbh, and all the theories about toptap being in love with mike but him rejecting him bc he's with godji... these are all pure speculations that frankly people have gotten out of their asses. so clearly we should let them both do what they want to do, which is move on from their ship. as for whether or not mike & krist will be a successful ship... I have trouble seeing it happen considering half the fandom hates krist's guts, but also I've learned along the years that manage my expectations bc there's always some surprises down the line. we shall see!

xxx

[marimopeace]

there's a limit on how much you can be an isekai intellectual...

a bunch of analyses have been popping up before me all day so i wanted to throw my hat into the ring. all love to ppl who are exercising their creative minds + ppl like geoff here who just talk about these things because of fan interest but i feel like there reaches a point where exploring the "types" of isekai is pointless? i've seen ppl list out the different types of villainess revenge isekai or fantasy mmorpg isekai but eh why fit them all into separate boxes like that?

i think it's easier to think of isekai as a "type" (genre) of itself with only two categories: 1) a focus on isekai (lit. another world) 2) tensei (lit. to be reborn). this allows for a variety of applications and thus tropes that ppl see so many trends of!

with isekai - in another world

you see everything from:

pure fantasy (inuyasha, digimon wait maybe not the best example but in my childhood mind i count digimon as pure fantasy, fushigi yugi)

mmorpg inspired fantasy/adventure (.hack//legend of twilight, sao ugh, log horizon, overlord (LOVE OVERLORD!)

otome game-esque worlds >>> this is where it gets complicated with "villainess routes" since i admit there are multiple villainess tropes but this is why it's nice to not think of this as a "sub-type/genre" bc it frees you from those complications! (the saint's magic power is omnipotent, the white cat's revenge as plotted from the dragon king's lap soso cute!, the savior's book cafe in another world, i'm a villainous daughter so i'm going to keep the last boss wait i can't remember if she's reborn in this one lmaooo see this is why rules make everything hard)

with tensei storylines - being reincarnated/reborn in another world as *insert character/role*

you see...

the same tropes!!

pure fantasy (a returner's magic should be special, reminiscence adonis, the lady and the beast, light and shadow, i can't think of a manga off the top of my head for this ah)

mmorpg inspired fantasy/adventure (so i'm a spider so what i stan kumoko so hard, her majesty's swarm, can't name another off the top of my head ah i hate lists shorter than two things...)

self-insert based games/novels (fiance's observation log of a self-proclaimed villainess, who made me a princess, death is the only ending for the villainess, the villainess wants to marry a commoner, honestly games vs novels are different applications but i'm not in the headspace to try to remember a bunch of both lol)

*insert line break to give random ppl a break from scrolling but tl; dr just enjoy things for what they are no need to micro analyze*

similar variations occur in both genres (if ppl want to be super technical i guess i'm arguing that isekai itself is a massive genre that has the "another world" subgenre and "reincarnation" subgenre tl; dr) so i think it's honestly a huge pain to try to separate all these trends into so many different types of stories. for me personally it's easier to not get overwhelmed by this gigantic umbrella of "isekai" that spans light novels, manhwa, manga, and mobile games by just stripping each story down into its trademark tropes (aka character archetypes, story structures) and slapping "oh this is a person going to a world that's not ours" and "this person gets reborn as blank in another world". none of this "omg this power fantasy is such a this kind of isekai moment" or "there are 14 different types of villainess revenge stories and this series fits into this" bc AH labels! limitations! circle-jerks via ppl trying to compartmentalize everything and sound smart for leaving a comment on story analysis instead of ooh-ahhing over a character's face! dividing things into light novel manga vs manga vs korean manhwa ft. female characters!

the last bit is mainly why i feel frustrated by ppl's insistence to group everything?

the video linked at the beginning of the post (honestly good video essay, i enjoyed it, i just kept thinking in my head the whole time "marimo these are tropes do not take the genre talk literally") has a baby comment thread talking about "korean isekai manhwas" as a genre featuring nothing but reincarnated villainess' and i can't.

like i cannot acknowledge that as a genre of any sort. the energy i felt reading through some of those insights takes me back to 2012 when all yt americans discovered k-pop and deemed all korean music k-pop from then on! (ppl still do this now, yes you are seen and don't talk to me pls i don't like you. k-pop is korean pop music and nothing less and nothing more. take a few seconds and try to parse apart aspects of korean culture instead of slamming everything into a monolithic label that has the letter k and a hyphen.) it feels so odd to see a bunch of young ppl on ig and tiktok acknowledge korean media that happens to be in the form of a webtoon as "oh stories all about young girls becoming villains in stories they made/played" bc it feels so reductive u.u

(positionality disclaimer that i'm praying isn't actually necessary: i am a 3rd-generation korean of japanese descent do not fite me i am exhausted irl of ppl asking for validation/verification bc massive shove off.)

breaking news! korean manhwa...is just as multifaceted as japanese manga...bc how can comics as an art-form not have multiple genres...huh such a shocker?!?! same likely applies to media in other parts of the world like chinese manhwa and french comics--not my place to explain either of those i just know those industries exist bc of wakfu and donghua shows by Tencent.

at the end of the day it's not like analyzing any kind of isekai is wrong--absolutely not!! i think it can be super fun to think about how isekai elements complicate a story (MCs trying to go back home, ppl from the og world, reincarnation plot-twists) or maybe even bash a series for including some kind of other world element when they could have just written a super fun fantasy.

insert marimo's brief ramble that hey you can get sick of truck-kun's hitting disillusioned guys who happen to be super duper smart or girls who happen to be master chefs/craftsmen but transporting a fully-grown being into a fantasy setting is the ultimate cheat code for making mundane modern technology seem cool and overpowered, and being reincarnated as a fully grown person in a world with a pre-made story/game set-up completely bypasses the need for an author to slowly flesh out world-building in a natural progression so isekai is actually a really smart writing tool it's just that there are some series where the author didn't use it well at all and it's cheesy or clearly isekai was misused as a vehicle for character/story development and it was pointless *DEEP BREATH OUT*

in this essay i will argue...lol i am such a culture studies major!! if i were an english major i would be talking all about writing but here i am having a side-tangent about world-building via someone being reborn wow i love this for me (don't get me started on when an author has someone reincarnate as a baby and the story is mostly them having warm fluffy moments with their family--typically father figures--and getting lots of powers i could and would and probably will rant about east asian toxicity)

but anyway am i crazy????? like yes for being passionate about the technical use of a word like genre (i am a scorpio rising let me be fussy pls) but i don't think it's a lot to ask for ppl to not unironically see "villainess revenge isekai" as the definition of korean manhwa.

idk as someone who resonates with why japanese isekai is so popular domestically + why a lot of korean manhwa feat. the same tropes (it's not for great reasons lads it's actually depressing tbh) i'm just starting to feel kind of pained by the generalization and need to separate "cute japanese girl in an otome game"/"japanese boy finds a harem in another world" from "korean girl dies and comes back as a villainess" bc they are just! applications to the same story device!!

recommendations for any who makes it this far down below <3

// also gladly recommend any of the examples i've listed in the above rant as i've read/watched all of them and adore them v much! //

save me princess

super refreshing fantasy manhwa ft. a princess and her ex-boyfriend having to save the world!

the beginning after the end

an AMERICAN web novel turned into a comic (but see it being not korean/japanese doesn't really matter when you just consider isekai as a genre...isn't it nice to not overthink it?) ft. a super-powerful wizard king reincarnated into another world and starting from scratch--gives mushoku tensei vibes but huge twists!

the reason why raeliana ended up at the duke's mansion

love love LOVE this story--read the title and you'll learn how this girl reincarnated as the character raeliana in a book gets married to a duke!

trash of the count's family

such a good novel!! a guy gets reborn as a lazy oaf and he takes the hero of the story under his wing...plot twists come up later on!

this time i will definitely be happy!

v good and refreshing for a shorter series! she's been reborn 3 times and remembers every time the hero's stabbed her in the back, and now she just wants to break up with him!

silver diamond

older manga but v good adventure w intrigue! a boy who loves plants get sucked into a desert world with demonic lizards and a mysterious bodyguard by his side. shonen-ai not BL but wonderful vibes nonetheless + great side characters!

the princess imprints a traitor

adore everything in this from the world (not in that way this society makes me so angry) to the machinations at play and the dynamic between the fl and ml

[horce-divorce]

I am feeling kinda downtrodden today if I'm being tbh... I know I should reach out to a friend or something but idk who really cares to hear about my health problems in detail anymore, and I have some friends who specifically don't like to hear about that... I need to try to find like a peer support group for MALS or just, ppl with rare disorders. cause the more I learn about this shit...

the prognosis is bleak, man. Moreso than my doctor led me to believe. I'm doing shockingly well comparatively but it's going to keep progressing and theres... basically nothing I can do? Even surgery isn't a guarantee at a better quality of life, and despite my best efforts, it's only been getting worse. So are my other issues. There is no going back for me. I've fantasized about it for years, about how I might like to have my own photography business, how I'd like to do transcripts full time bc I'm good at it, how I'd like to work in the cannabis industry, or like any number of weird and fulfilling things i might have liked to do, in that nebulous future where i just. Was used to being disabled and could learn to do stuff i used to again. Going back to college someday. But it's not gonna happen. I'm irreparable. My condition will only worsen and has been already for a long time. Taking care of myself was a full time job even before I was gonna need surgery and constant monitoring of my symptoms and to be dosing myself all day just to live, and now we're there.

I think.... it's time to finally suck it up and apply for disability... more than 10 years I've been trying to prove that Ill Just Learn To Live Like This and insisting I'll figure it out eventually, and I've only gotten worse. I'm not looking forward to the process to begin with, but also, now I'm transitioning, how is that gonna affect things? Is it harder to change your name once you're already on disability, and should I do all that shit first? Or should I just. Apply and deal with shit later. Idk. It's terrifying and I don't know if anyone in my IRL life is prepared to help me emotionally thru this process cus it's gonna be a lot for so many different reasons and like. I'm so scared. :/

I'm looking into finding a therapist primarily about this whole ordeal. But in the meantime I am just. So tired and in so much pain and it's so hard to do the most basic of things right now. I'm having a horrible flare and I get scared every time they get worse, that maybe someday I'll stop getting flares and it will only be bad all the time. I'm still glad for my diagnosis but... it's just so bleak and so painful and I feel like my doctors dropped this bomb on me and then left me completely on my own... so i hope u can all forgive me for depressedposting on main today... I try not to so much these days but being sick really is so much work. And I just wish someone else was as invested in all of this as I have to be. I don't get a choice in dealing w all this and I just feel so alone.

[mountain-man-cumeth]

*holds anonymous microphone in front of you* what do you think of the arcana fandom saying it's racist to fetishize and exaggerate muriel's overall largeness?

lol ok i get these anon hates every once in a while but since this isnt a hate ask ill answer;

i find it racist to assume every artist is undeniably north american and has to abide by their preconceptions of biases.

i find it racist to group up every POC as one unified archetype, aka in muriels case BBC. (big black cock, a notorious tag in every porn site ever)

racist fetishization argument of making him a BIG BOI could apply to muriel if he was african descendant since west had antagonized black people as being savage brutes who’ll steal ur wives. (that is not a universal experience tho, black people suffer from different racist stereotypes in asia and middle east)**

that being said, muriel is asian.

do u know what are the western stereotypes of asian men? well, they aint it chief. 

small size, small dick, submissive, super smart... like cmon im not european nor american and even i know these stereotypes. they are ‘fetishized’ for being cute lil twinks. (no shade to kpop stans, that industry caters to these ideas)

we can group up kazakhs with mongolians in this instance bcs they were under mongol dominion when west feared them profusely and had seen them as that villain dude in disneys mulan so u can say this doesnt apply but if your nation still have these weird misconceptions (mine sure doesnt tbh, i dont even think someone with muriels shade of skin would be considered POC here) its the problem of your people, not every individual ever in the world. if you rightfully see this as a problem then yes you should take steps to resolve it not by attacking artist but by attacking the fascism that systematically  villanizes the ‘other’ in any shape or form.

aight what about kazakh discrimination in russia, china and mongolia, one might ask. and that would be another topic, the history and internal politics of these nations reach back to like 4th century, now idk much about it aside from middle school/high school history classes so its not my place to debate.

**on that note i still wouldnt condone these witch hunts even if i thought muriel fit the bill of a racist stereotype, its disrespectful to the artist to take away just one aspect of their character(such as appearance) and ignore all the rest(body language, mannerisms, personality etc.). sometimes art doesnt have to have a higher meaning, sometimes its just self indulgent, sometimes we have preferences and we depict them on paper its not our responsibility to make someone at the other side of the world feel self righteous. as long as there are asian men, big men and scruffy men there will be art of big scruffy asian men. 

there will be exaggerated depictions of turkish construction workers, syrian beggars, mexican maids, indian scammers... because these people exist, they exist not because of white propaganda but because of white conquest, propaganda is made after, or to justify said conquest. they have different cultures, different stereotypes and you cant just reduce them to one slightly brown skin colour and say COMPUTER INDIAN BAD STEREOTYPE. the world around america is burning and theyre fighting over a loose splinter on their table.

tl,dr: POC isn’t one race.

[bigskydreaming]

Have you seen Linkara's review of The Dark Knight Returns? He goes into why the view of Robin as a soldier, popularized but by no means invented by Miller, is so dangerous.

I have not, but I need to refresh my memory before I go check it out because I’ll either agree with it or be infuriated by it and I can’t remember which just at the moment but would like to before I restart that argument ten years later.

LOL, so like, I knew Linkara yeeears and years ago. We were both regular posters on Gail Simone’s messageboard on CBR like fifteen years ago, maybe longer. Pretty sure we even met in person a couple times at Gail’s annual SDCC breakfast meetups, but not sure. I do know for sure though that he and I were both involved in a three way argument about this very topic with another guy.....I just can not remember if he was the one who agreed with me or the one we were both fighting with about it, LOL. I THINK we were in agreement as while I wasn’t like.....as pro-DC as most YABSers were given that it was Gail’s board and I mostly hung out at the X-boards and just swung by YABS once a week or so BECAUSE I couldn’t stand all the ass-kissing that went on at that board so that DC writers and artists would hang out and post regularly, LOL, like I’m pretty sure I remember Link as being one of the less....vehement of the pro-DC camp.

(Tbh, one of the biggest ways in which I disagreed with Gail on stuff is I UNDERSTOOD her feeling a need to be civil with other DC pros even if she didn’t like them personally, I just....couldn’t manage the same and didn’t feel any desire to try. Like for example, not sure how many people know who Ethan van Sciver is, but he’s a long time high profile DC artist, best known for his GL stuff.....but he used to hang around YABS pretty regularly. EvS is ALSO a haaaaaardcore conservative, Trumpian, and all around terrible person. And he always was.

Like he’d play it civil back then but his opinions were downright hateful on a variety of topics, particularly towards marginalized groups, but he was good at picking just the right moments to half-assedly walk something back the second he took something ‘too far’ - so like, the end result was he said it and everyone saw and remembered, but before anyone could react he’d drop the mea culpa card and be like oh I’m sorry I know that was out of line, I was just caught up in the moment and it’s all good cuz this is all friendly debate anyway right? We’re just talking here.

And he’d pull this crap all the time but because he was a DC pro, people would let him get away with it and warn people off coming down on him so he didn’t feel unwelcome at the board. Now the painfully ironic twist here is that shockingly, totally unexpectedly.....fast forward to about five or six years ago where good old Ethan burns a shit ton of bridges and decides well why not make things a dumpster fire for everyone in my vicinity....and he became the driving force behind a bunch of alt right comic book fans starting their own weak ass version of Gamergate, only called Comicsgate. It never was nearly as....big...as Gamergate was, but it was still ugly. And the thing is, Ethan sicced his sycophants on other industry pros he’d worked with over the years but always disagreed with on politics.....like really let the ugly fly....and most of these pros included Gail as well as a bunch of the other DC professionals from back in the YABS days.

Because thing was....that was literally WHY he’d hung out at YABS so much back then, despite being so far in disagreement with most of the progressive leaning board. He was always just interested in stirring shit up, he never actually had the slightest interest in debate or seeing the other side of anything....he just knew how to play the right cards to get the right people to come to his defense and cool things off rather than run him off, in the name of keeping things civil and such...all so he could start it all up again a couple weeks later.

And this is literally why that kind of thing doesn’t work for me at all. Because he wasn’t really that subtle even then, most people knew all along exactly what he was doing, and letting him get away with shit that would have gotten anyone else banned purely because he was a industry pro just meant that his opportunities to subject anyone in his vicinity to just vile, hateful shit ended up more protected than all the marginalized posters on that board who didn’t come to it to see his shit but had to constantly listen to it anyway because people were more interested in making excuses for him than making it comfortable for everyone else.

And in the end, he ended up turning on the very people who’d protected him from everyone else ripping into his hateful viewpoints with the directness they merited. Which just. Sigh. To me just smacks of a whole lot of unnecessary years spent putting up with his barely veiled bullshit until he didn’t bother even veiling it anymore....even though the reality is NOBODY was ever buying into his veil of it in the first place and we all knew what was right behind it all along. Anyway. Not that it matters LOL, but good old Eth, was one of the primary reasons I decided not to go into comics when I had a couple of opportunities come up, as I decided to focus my efforts on Hollywood at the time instead. Lmao, I figured if I was going to have to keep my mouth shut about coworkers whose opinions I vehemently disagreed with in the name of professionalism, I might as well focus on the profession that would pay me more money to keep that to myself. Look, at least capitalism is useful when ADHD and trying to pretend to be decisive about life choices.)

Long ramble nobody asked for aside, like I said, I can’t remember Link’s take on this particular topic but it’s likely the one I agreed with for the most part. My own take has always been that Miller sucks and if he said it chances are I said he was wrong because he is about everything and my religion is people saying so and by people I mean me. My religion’s also big on self-actualization. Not sure what else, I did just make it up and I think I’ll probably just stop there so I don’t accidentally make it a cult.

But yeah. I mean, maybe it’ll surprise people given how critical I am of the abusive elements of canon, but I’ve never applied the child endangerment/child soldier argument to sidekicks. It’s obviously not that they don’t get hurt in these stories and even traumatized, it’s not that they’re NOT in danger as kids....it’s just why I put such an emphasis on it being their choice to fight crime and be heroes and NOT something that Bruce or any other mentor or parent pushed them into.

Because this is one of the reasons why death of the author more often than not just doesn’t work for me. Authorial intent matters. Readers are always free to interpret a text however they want, regardless of authorial intent....but IF a writer has a specific intent behind a narrative choice, chances are most interpretations that refuse to align themselves with that viewpoint aren’t really all that RELEVANT to the story the writer was trying to tell in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong. Those other interpretations can still exist. They’re allowed to exist. People can abide by them all they want. But if someone’s takeaway from a story is a deliberate choice to read it entirely different from the story the writer intended it to be.....like, their interpretation is all well and good, but it’s not actually at all a RELEVANT commentary on or review of the story the writer was actually writing. They’re not actually saying the writer did a poor job of telling the story or was wrong in how they did it....because they’re not actually talking about the story the writer was actually telling.

Thus their commentary on it exists. But it’s just not that relevant. Because nothing in it even CAN offer an opinion on how else the writer could or should have written that story....because the story they ARE talking about isn’t the story the writer was even interested in writing.

Now, there are some times when authorial intent DOESNT matter. And when criticism of it is entirely fair and earned even if it’s of something the writer didn’t consciously or deliberately write into their story at all. But these things are almost ALWAYS unconscious. Unlike what I was just talking about, where the writer was very consciously writing the story a certain way for a reason, and thus people who aren’t interested in reading the story the way it was written to be read just can’t offer up a commentary that says anything useful or meaningful about the story that was actually written...the flip side of this is when the writer puts things they don’t intend into the text, but still are very much there all the same.

And this sort of thing applies to things like micro aggressions or racism, homophobia, sexism....things where a writer didn’t sit down intending to be offensive or alienate their readers but still put in things that they don’t think to view as offensive due to their own privilege and lack of experience EXPERIENCING the microaggressions that marginalized readers might be all TOO familiar with and thus can’t avoid reading into a passage where the writer might not have INTENDED harm or offense, but delivered it all the same. Because they didn’t think to put it into their story, they weren’t TRYING to....but they didn’t think to avoid putting it in there either, even if it’s because they didn’t know to until it’s pointed out to them that it’s there.

And this also applies to when the writer puts into their story, via whatever viewpoint they’re writing from, things that herald from their own viewpoints, how they view the world, even in terms of unconscious biases or expectations....but things that readers can still interpret as something they vehemently disagree with, even if the narrative seems to condone it. Because a lot of these viewpoints are things where the way they’re written....even just not coming out as clearly not condoning or agreeing it can effectively be read as tacitly condoning it.

So to apply all this to the idea of child sidekicks and child soldiers:

They’re not one and the same, and thus treating them as one and the same or interchangeable is IMO an inherently flawed perspective that doesn’t ever have anything USEFUL or RELEVANT to the stories that most people are trying to tell with child heroes and sidekicks.

With the notable exceptions of Miller, Ennis and certain other writers who by their own admission usually aren’t even trying to write about superheroes but rather deconstructions of the genre as a whole.....the vast majority of comic book writers, even the ones I dislike LOL, aren’t writing about child soldiers when they write characters like the Robins. Because CONSCIOUSLY, with INTENT, they’re already trying to write something completely different:

Child heroes and sidekicks are almost universally written to be child (although to be really fair, for the most part they’re largely teen) empowerment allegories. They’re youth power fantasies.

They’re stories about kids, about teens, getting to be the ones to save the world. About kids who don’t need adults to save them because they save themselves or their friends. Kids saving other people, other kids, grown adults. Stories about child HEROES are written as metaphors of hope for the future and the promise of the younger generations, or power fantasies where kids who feel helpless and powerless in their own lives can read these stories and vicariously imagine through the characters the idea of one day having the power to save themselves or other people, what that would be like, what they’d do with that.

But here’s the important part, and why people interpreting these teen and kid heroes as child soldiers doesn’t really offer relevant commentary to stories that are written to be allegorical youth power fantasies, regardless of authorial intent or death of the author....

And that’s because the key ingredient here, the thing that’s not really up for debate or open to interpretation....is that these stories can ONLY ever be allegorical.

Because like I said before, child heroes and child soldiers are not the same thing. There simply IS NO REAL WORLD EQUIVALENT for child and teen heroes as comic books style them.

And that’s why the fact that with most every child hero in comics, no adult makes them be a hero. They choose that for themselves, it’s almost universally characterized as a self-determination or empowerment moment rather than one of coercion like Miller likes to characterize it. His choice to characterize Bruce essentially drafting Dick as Robin to fight alongside him does nothing to provide commentary on any other superhero story, no matter what he’s told himself or his fans, because his story is the only one where Robin was drafted!

You can’t condemn narrative choices that nobody but you has actually written and then act like you’re saying something about any narrative other than your own fsjsjfshfzgzfhgs.

And you also can’t claim that you’re just seeing in the text something that’s inherently there and the other writers didn’t just see to avoid like I was talking about being a valid critique....because what’s being commented on there isn’t anything that was written unknowingly. Other writers consciously wrote the same things as Miller in terms of a child engaged in all that violence....but they deliberately wrote those moments to be metaphors of a kid that gets to save themselves and other people and CHOSE that, which is inherently opposed to the interpretation of a kid who is ONLY in harm’s way because he was forcibly drafted by a more powerful figure or force who cares neither what he wants or if he gets hurt.

These two ideas are mutually exclusive. They can not coexist in the same narrative because a character can not be powerless and self-empowering about the exact same specific choice. And thus anything that’s said about one of these narratives is inherently unable to say anything that’s relevant about the other....because the other is not written by its writer TO BE the kind of narrative that particular commentary is dissecting. It’s not TRYING to be that narrative, so no review of it can possibly say how flawed it’s execution is of an idea it’s not actually trying to execute.

And the differences between child heroes and child soldiers are not just limited to choosing that or being drafted and these other differences are equally key.

The biggest being that child heroes can not be seen as ‘basically’ the same thing as child soldiers.....UNLESS you are also perceiving adult heroes as basically the same thing as adult soldiers. And not even law enforcement or police or temporarily deputized or whatever else you want to spin it as....SOLDIERS, specifically. You don’t get to bring up something as charged as child soldiers and then get vague with your terminology when the close scrutiny that brings to your analogy stops working in your favor.

If sidekicks are child soldiers then you must in conjunction view adult superheroes as soldiers. And not in the abstract one man war on crime way Miller likes to consider Batman in his attempted deconstruction of superheroes. ACTUAL soldiers. If there’s no room in your comparison for child heroes to differentiate from real world child soldiers, there’s no wiggle room for the adults either.

And again, except for Miller, Ennis and specific others who by their own admissions are not TRYING to view superheroes the same way most other comic writers are, but fail to see that genre conventions are largely interpretive and thus seeing room for different interpretations of superheroes isn’t actually a commentary on how other people see and write those same heroes....like except for these select few, most writers are not writing superhero soldiers unless they’re Captain America or Captain Atom. Yes I know there are other superhero soldiers but let me be pithy. Even those aren’t really the same as their real world equivalents.

See, real soldiers don’t make distinctions about whether or not they’re willing to use guns. Their personal views on killing are not prioritized over whether they’ve been told to use lethal force to accomplish their objective. They have a chain of command. No matter the rationalization, they pledge their loyalty to singular nations and the aims and objectives of those specific nations over the abstract of acting in defense of the whole world.

Now again, maybe that applies to Captain Atom, but for the most part can you say the majority of comic book writers are TRYING to write Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, Wonder Woman etc through that lens? No. So while Miller really thinks he said something when he wrote his Batman with guns, fighting in the Middle East, killing people left and right, none of that actually ‘showed’ people that at the end of the day, Batman is no conceptually different from a real world soldier like. No all he actually did was write his own take on Batman, and said look, he’s a gun toting murderous asshole, huzzah I have deconstructed the modern superhero!

Like. Shut up Miller. Honestly.

But seriously. Superheroes do not have a real world equivalent and neither do child heroes. Even when it comes to nonpowered ones like the Batfam, they’re still deliberately written in a larger than life, four color perspective that requires a suspension of disbelief at the front door. We ALL know and understand that they aren’t a blue print for how to go out and be a real world vigilante. Even real world vigilantes exist. But they don’t look anything like the Batfam and it’s disingenuous to pretend they do for the sake of teh discourse. Nobody honestly believes that there is even the OPTION of going out one day and deciding to become a comic book style vigilante like one of the Batfam. It’s why even they’re termed superheroes despite the lack of superpowers. On a CONCEPTUAL level it’s understood that the stories being told about them require an extrahuman medium. You can not simultaneously write characters according to a mythic scale but then attempt to interpret that very writing on a real world one. It doesn’t work.

Which brings me to my final piece of this pie. Or puzzle. Idk I’ve been doing this response for awhile I forget what this is.

And that is again, the difference between interpreting a story in a way the author probably didn’t intend and understanding when a story isn’t meant to be interpreted in the way you’re trying to.

And this difference is how I can understand and reconcile the idea that it’s not inherently abusive for Bruce to allow his kids to fight crime at all, even though that would inherently be child endangerment in the real world, but at the same time, I can view him as abusive in other ways that don’t make allowances for the differences between real life and comics.

Basically it boils down to: CAN this specific element of a story be duplicated in real life or mirror a real life action or idea? Is there a direct parallel to a real world equivalent at all?

I can view Bruce fighting crime or saving the world alongside a child Robin without viewing that as child endangerment or inherently abusive, even when Robin gets hurt in the process....because there is no real world equivalent to those parts of a story. NO ONE, child or adult, is going out there and doing those things Batman and Robin style. Even the people who dress up in their own real life vigilante personas basically just do niche neighborhood things like walk people home from the bar. And even people doing real life vigilantism in terms of taking out criminals, like, that’s usually more of a personal revenge thing and not one where they’re trying to attract attention via a costumed persona. When you think real world Batman and Robin, nothing comes to mind for a reason.

And thus this says nothing inherently abusive about their dynamic, even according to real life parallels of child endangerment, because it’s not a real scenario. And thus it’s not TRYING to say anything about real life. It’s innately allegorical. It’s power fantasy emphasis on the fantasy.

In contrast, when you have something like Bruce hitting one of his kids.....no matter who the characters are, that specific interaction and the dynamic it presents DOES have a real world equivalent. That’s just parent/child abuse. And thus even if the writer didn’t intend for it to be interpreted that way, it’s still a valid interpretation. If it looks like a parent hitting their child, you can call it a parent hitting a child.

Batman and Robin fighting killer mind controlled plants together? Can’t happen. I’m not going to call it child endangerment when it’s not a realistic scenario and not meant to be, and I’ve already been presented with a valid alternative interpretation of this being a child empowered to help save people alongside his superhero father. There’s no point in condemning a dynamic that CANT be translated to a non allegory in real life.

But Bruce hitting his son? A father no matter how good hearted normally, being affected by extreme stress or grief or something else that makes his behavior take a turn for the worse and reach a point where he physically lashes out even if he never would have in the past? Nothing remotely allegorical about that. That story has too many real world equivalents to dismiss as having nothing to say about abuse in real life. Even if the writer didn’t intend for this to read as abusive because they were thinking of how much worse Dick has been hurt fighting alongside Bruce and never held that against him even though technically it was Bruce letting him get hurt....doesn’t matter. That interpretation still requires viewing through a lens that can’t exist in reality. No kid can ever excuse a parent hitting them by thinking of how much worse they got hurt taking down their local mob together and if he didn’t blame his dad for that cuz he wanted to do it to help people then how can he blame his dad for hurting him in a moment of anger? Umm. Doesn’t track see? They’re not the same thing at all.

Or another one that really bugs....I’ve heard people defend shipping a Robin while underage with an adult by saying if they’re old enough to make the choice to risk their life and have that choice respected, they’re old enough to choose who they want to be with. Umm. No. That’s not just apples and oranges that’s genetically modified grapes and seventeenth century cannonballs.

That logic doesn’t apply because neither of those things is the underage character choosing ANYTHING. They’re fictional. Everything they choose is just what their writer wrote them choosing. But again, one of those choices is one that an underage reader CANT choose in real life and have respected by every adult in their life, and thus will never have a bearing on their life as anything BUT an allegory they have to interpret and translate into something actionable they can apply to their life and choices. The other choice is them being written as presented with an option that’s actually a textbook real life grooming technique and something abusers use to justify the relationship they’re trying to cultivate with a minor by saying aren’t you mature for your age, aren’t you old enough to know what you want or to do this or that in which case you should be old enough to make this choice?

See the difference? Putting on a cape and going out to fight robots? Not directly applicable. Saying yes to the grown man saying he wants to have sex with you and thinks you’re old enough given this other choice you’ve made that highlights your maturity? That’s a choice that can be presented both to a Robin or a real life minor, but a writer justifying that choice for that Robin by saying well he’s already previously made this other choice that has no real life equivalent.....that creates a pretty misleading interpretation to people reading that story and not stopping to think through the distinctions between what KINDS of choices the writer is presenting these characters with and then justifying via their narrative.

And while I haven’t watched the video you’re referencing, anon, I would definitely agree that this is an example of how viewing child heroes as child soldiers is....not great. Aside from being cynical, misusing the idea of death of the author and helping to validate Miller’s choices and thus ego which is NEVER a good look LOL....it also intentionally or not paves the way for putting fictional types and MEANS of harm on an even playing field with real life ones and acting like it’s all one and the same with no distinctions to be drawn. And this doesn’t actually offer anything substantive or constructive about holding characters accountable for reasonable expectations of harm, when the sources of harm have no reasonable equivalent and thus only exist in the medium of being a youth power fantasy in which the child involved is fictional and can’t truly be harmed, with the harm done the second the scene ends and where the character can be back in fighting form the very next scene. Thus the only lingering element there IS the power fantasy.

Nope, all it actually does is muddy the waters in the REVERSE, and make it so it’s actually easier to justify or rationalize types and means of harm that DO have a real world equivalent, but by pointing to examples from a fictional medium and emphasizing the fictional character’s lack of being harmed while de-emphasizing the fact that the writer has full control over depicting this in a solely positive light that doesn’t ALLOW the fictional character any angle from which to voice that this CAN result in harm when not written for fictional characters according to a writer’s specific intent.

And that’s that about that. My opinion: you have it.

[gra-sonas]

I didn’t mean to be “silent”, this just took me much longer to write than I had planned. 

First of all, I’d like to point you in the direction of a very good post @adiwriting​ posted a couple of days ago, that sums things up in a very articulate way, you can find it HERE.

~*~

In short: in his most recent interview with the Pretty Little Wine Moms Podcast, Tyler - who’s playing a character who’s half Native American -  revealed, that he did a DNA test with a company called 23AndMe during the filming of season 1 of Roswell, New Mexico, and he test didn’t detect Native American ancestry, even though his grandmother had told him in 2010, that his paternal grandfather Harold's great grandmother was Cherokee Indian.

Below the cut is a transcript of that part of the interview, my opinion on this whole thing, and I answered a couple of asks I got about it. This is a VERY long post.

I’ve already watched the video of the interview, and it shows, that they edited the interview quite heavily. There are several cuts throughout the episode, and some things that can be heard in the audio version, didn’t make it into the video either. 

TRANSCRIPT [I didn’t transcribe every laugh or random words, but I’ve tried my best to make it as accurate as possible]

LESLEY: Did you audition for any of the other roles on PLL?

TYLER: No, Caleb came in halfway through season one. I remember, it was supposed to be a 4-episode stint, a guest starring role. What’s funny though, I lived right by Warner Brothers [studios], so I would drive […] past Warner Brothers and there was a bill board of Pretty Little Liars before it came out and I was like “I could probably be on a show like that.” So, anyway, I auditioned for Caleb, yeah. I never read for… […] No, I didn’t get the role at first because they were like “we really think he needs to be like really ethnic. We need some ethnic diversity. And I was like—

LESLEY: What are you? You’re like “hello”! Part Native American, i mean.

TYLER: Well, no, I’m actually not. I’m actually not, I found out.

HOLLY: Whaaaat? Yes, you are. We did talk about this.

NIA: I thought you were.

HOLLY: We talked about this on set.

TYLER: Do you know when I found out that I wasn’t is when I got Roswell, my character was also supposed to be Native American, half Native American. And I was like “great”, because the pool was like so small. You know, so this is great, you know. I’m shooting season one of the show and do a 23AndMe [DNA test] and I have literally not even 0.1 % Native American.

HOLLY: That can’t be possible.

NIA: No, no, no, no, let me explain how that works. That’s not right.

HOLLY: Nia has some things to tell you.

NIA: The information - I know these things, every nationality in me—

TYLER: Okay, tell me.

NIA: 23AndMe is pulling from— if you do 23AndMe and then you do… what’s the other one—

LESLEY: AncestryCOM

HOLLY: AncestryCOM

NIA: —they’ll come up different. And the reason they’ll come up different from each other is, they’re pulling from the people they already have in their database. So, if there’s not very many Native American people doing 23AndM—

HOLLY: Which there isn’t.

NIA: —it’s not gonna show up.

TYLER: Oh god.

NIA: Yeah.

[INFO: There’s a clear CUT at this point before the interview continues, they even cut Tyler’s “Oh god” you can hear in the audio from the video. So they must’ve talked about this some more before the official version of the interview continues.]

TYLER: Okay, so this is what happened, going back [to being cast as Caleb]. They said “thank you so much for the read” and I really thought I was gonna get it. Because Gayle Pillsbury [PLL casting director] - I’d never even read for her before - and I went in and auditioned, and her response was literally everything you want in an audition. She like lost her fucking mind and was like “where did you come from?”, you know, that sort of thing. I mean, I’m a TERRIBLE auditioner and I get so unbelievably nervous, so for that to be the response—

LESLEY: Wow.

TYLER: So that response… I was like “oh my gosh”. And you even audition and you’re like “I booked it. I booked it!”, you know what I mean? Even though it’s not up to her, you know, but anyway. Then they told me “thank you so much for the read, it was so good, but we want more ethnic diversity”. They came back to me, I don’t know, three weeks later? And they were like “What is your background?” And I was like “I don’t even know.” I called my dad, he tells me “I don’t even know.” He’s like “Call grandma.”. I call my grandma, she tells me her side and then… My dad’s dad passed away before I was born, I don’t know his side of the family at all. So my grandmother talks about his side of the family and says “You know—“ - it was Harold, Harold was my grandfather’s name - —“Harold’s great grandmother was Cherokee Indian. And I was like “Really?” I was like “This is good!”

WINE MOMS,  LAUGHING: “This is good!”

TYLER: So, then I told casting “I’m Native American.” And so they thought it was enough to cast me as, you know, ‘ethnically ambiguous’ or whatever.

[END TRANSCRIPT]

~*~

I’m not an expert on DNA tests. Nia’s comment that tests from different companies come back with different results bc they pull their data from different gene pools makes sense, but I can’t verify whether that's actually the case. Neither do I know whether her claim that 23AndMe pool lacks Native samples for reference is correct.

If it is, it would mean that 23AndMe DNA tests in general wouldn’t be able to detect Native ancestry in any sample. Maybe a test with a different company would come up with a different result, in any case, it would be a very small percentage, given how many generations are between Tyler and his Native ancestor.

The result of the test is only one piece of the puzzle tho, and not the relevant one.

The question isn’t whether the result indicates that what Tyler’s grandma told him is false. The question is, if one Native ancestor 5 generations back and no tribal affiliation of any kind entitle Tyler to play POC characters. 

The answer is a clear no, and yet he’s been cast as non-white characters (and in one case as an explicitly Native character) twice in his life.

That’s unfortunate at best, and ignorant at worst.

~*~

Tyler auditioned for PLL in 2010 when he was 23, turning 24 that year. Initially he didn’t get the role bc they wanted someone “ethnic”. They called him 3 weeks (!) after the initial rejection and asked about his background, and by talking to his grandma, he found out about this Native ancestor.

2010 was a mere decade ago, but it was also a different time. Discussions about diversity and representation on screen, the question whether it’s okay for male actors to play trans women or if shows should pass the Bechdel test were all topics that weren’t discussed as “aggressively (and I mean that in a very positive way, hammer it home that all these things matter!) as they are discussed today, and structures in the TV and movie industry ignored most of it anyway (still do way too often, lbr).

Looking back, it’s easy to condemn what happened as vigorously as we would condemn it if it happened today, but applying today’s standards to 2010 is still a bit unfair. (I’m not saying that what happened is okay, just that back then the level of awareness for it to be wrong wasn’t the same as it is today).

Sure enough ABC execs were all too happy to accept that minimal partial Native ancestry as “enough” to cast him, probably also because Tyler looked “ethnically ambiguous” to them, whatever that means. (Holly also mentioned that they talked about Tyler’s Native ancestry on the set of PLL, and apparently not a single person pointed out that maybe it was a questionable decision...).

Tyler was trying to get his career started back then, and an opportunity like PLL would be any young actor’s dream. When they told him “you’re ethnic enough, you’ve got the job”, he lacked the tools and the awareness to question their decision, neither did anyone ever question Tyler’s decision to accept the role. It was considered to be “okay” by all sides. Which is a systemic problem.

As far as I know, Caleb’s supposed “ethnically diverse” background was never explored on PLL, so they were just happy he looked “ethnic" but never gave a fuck about actual representation. Welcome to the club of most TV shows ever made. Even in 2020, too many shows and movies still try to pull that shit. The difference is, that nowadays they are called out, and people speak up. 

~*~

Fast forward to 2017 when Tyler got the script for Roswell. 7 years of him believing that this partial Native ancestry made him part Native, not half like Alex Manes, but it probably felt like it was “enough” - it had been enough for PLL after all.

He got cast because he’s a great actor, but also because he supposedly had the required ethnic background. This is also on the studio tbh. I assume he was asked about his background and he must’ve told them the same story (since he didn’t have a DNA test he could’ve shown them), and for The CW “one Cherokee Indian ancestor 5 generations back” was also “Native enough”...

~*~

It’s quite a bit of a mess tbh. Fans have been hit rather hard by this revelation, some are angry, some are disappointed, some feel uncomfortable, some probably don’t know whether how they feel is how they should feel after applying all our new-found 2020 ~wisdom and awareness to the situation.

Opinions on the matter differ. Vastly in some cases. Some people feel betrayed, some have “cancelled” Tyler, for others it’s not ideal but also not that big of a deal. It’s a mixed bag, really. 

As for me: 2010 Tyler gets a pass from me. It was a “different time” with different industry rules in place, and ABC’s higher ups, who should’ve known and done better, didn’t. Neither did anyone in casting, nor his management, colleagues, or anyone in his personal life. And he clearly lacked the experience and awareness to question the decision, or himself for accepting it because it never was questioned! Not even in the years following.

2017 Tyler only gets a partial pass. 2017 wasn’t 2020 and too many things were still not all that different from 2010. He’d been on a show for 7 years where this partial Native ancestry was “enough”. Hence he probably felt like auditioning for the role of Alex was okay, and everyone involved in the casting process thought so, too. 

He never pretended to be Native American to get the role, he never pulled a Scarlett Johansson. However... he probably should’ve questioned a bit harder whether a Native ancestor 5 generations back makes him “Native enough” to play a (half) Native character, or any kind of POC character for that matter.

So yeah, definitely putting some blame on him for the lack of awareness, but I’m also side-eying The CW and whoever was involved in the decision making. 

~*~

What I hope for and expect fromTyler now and in the future is, that he won’t ever allow to be cast as any kind of “ethnic” character ever again.

He’s worked hard and has very much earned the career he’s made. He’s an amazing actor, but the circumstances that gave him the opportunity to have that career are based on racist structures in the TV and movie industry, and he directly profited from a system, that cast him - for all we know a white man - as a man of color. Twice.

Imo Tyler’s well aware of these things now. 2020 in particular should’ve been a pretty good eye-opener. It’s good that he has someone like Jeanine to look up to and learn from (not her job to teach him or take him by the hand or anything, but I think she’s a great example of someone who’s already made a name of herself, and uses her influence to help others, and the way she talks about diversity and elevating marginalized voices is very powerful), and I hope that in the future he’ll use is voice and “weight” as an established actor, to elevate minority voices and push for their stories to be included.

Answered your question in part above already.

It’s important to note that there’s a difference between criticizing someone’s actions, and openly hating and/or dissing them. This is a messy situation, and while Tyler can’t change the past, he has to do better in the future. Saying that doesn’t make me (or anyone else) a hater. Tyler’s amazing, but he’s also not perfect. And he doesn’t have to be. No one’s perfect.

When I look back at my life, dear god, I grew up in a very liberal family, we travelled places, I had access to all the books and education, and still. At 23? I was somewhat anti-feminist and a slightly conservative leaning liberal. Not a bad person per se, but also quite ignorant (compared to today’s standards anyway). Thankfully that’s changed over the years. And it keeps changing. Because getting complacent and thinking “I know it all” is BS. I’m working on myself every day, and I’m still prone to fuck up occasionally bc the system is rigged in my favor, and I might not even be aware of it in that moment. 

I’m not cross with Tyler, because I can’t say for certain I hadn’t done the same if the circumstances had been similar. I’m actually quite sure I had done the same, bc society and the industry made it okay. AND NO ONE EVER QUESTIONED IT! He never claimed more for himself than a Native ancestor 5 generations back, and society at large and the TV/movie industry in particular said “that’s fine, you have that ancestry, you can go for diverse roles”. So in part, he fell victim to a system that pretended it was okay.

With MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movement, that “it’s okay” mentality is finally questioned and challenged, and more and more people speak up whenever someone tries to pull this shit. But it still keeps happening and there’s a lot more work to do. 

No one can claim ignorance anymore, though. And he has to do better in the future.

I feel you, nonnie. It’s a messy situation. Imo it’s most unfortunate that this information came out the way it did. In a heavily edited podcast episode with inexperienced (and dare I say “industry-biased”) moderators. We don’t know what else he said or for how long they talked about this.

The podcast hosts were clearly not the most qualified to handle that kind of revelation. There were no follow-up questions, there was no criticism, and the way the interview was edited, the whole thing was treated as a non-issue and “fun” anecdote. Which doesn’t do Tyler any favors tbh. 

But imo it’s also unfair to condemn him solely on what they decided to release. We don’t know what else he said, whether he expressed remorse or whatnot. I don’t know whether his publicist okayed the interview prior to its release. If they did, he should get a new publicist... 

(I’m not implying he should’ve kept it a “secret”, but as a publicist I would’ve made sure this revelation had been handled differently, and Tyler hadn’t been made to look like he was just laughing it off).

I don’t know Tyler personally, but going by everything I’ve seen from him and know about him, I’m certain he won’t take on another POC role. And even if another DNA test should come up with a different result one day, and a certain percentage of Native ancestry would be found, I’d expect him to handle things differently. And imo that’s something he expects from himself, too. He’s a good man. <3

I don’t think he should, but I’m white, so my opinion on this isn’t really relevant. If Native groups would call for him to step down (which I don’t think they would), I’d support it because THEIR opinion on this actually matters.

One option could be that they do a storyline where it’s revealed that the woman Alex believes to be his mother isn’t his biological mom and it turns out he’s not Native - but that’s probably a far stretch, idk.

If he’d give up the role (which he clearly isn’t doing, considering he’s found out during S1 and is about to begin filming S3), I doubt The CW would recast the role with a native actor btw. Alex’d just be written off the show.

What I hope for is, that he’ll join Jeanine in her efforts to push for more Native and Latinx representation and stories on the show (Jeanine talked about that in her recent IG live with congressman Castro, @lambourngb​ made a post about it), and you can watch the entire IG live here.

Fandom’s a large group of many individual people. There are several people who have addressed this and talk about it. And while not every single person in fandom’s talking about it, it’s not swept under the rug either.

And how does this whole thing make Malex fans (another large group of many individual people) look toxic? Malex fans are not a hive mind. I have seen several Malex fans talk about this, and talk about it critically.

I’m sorry that you’re disappointed, nonnie, I’m just not sure what you expected?