#you know I mean as an upper middle class white American this was the first I’d heard of it

[clownboybebop]

having dutch ancestry is basically meaningless to me, except for every November 25th, when I stick it to those stupid old fucks by celebrating Suriname Independence Day

[rappaccini]

semi-disorganized thoughts on the politics of gwen stacy, as they relate to race and privilege.

alright i've had this thing in the drafts for a minute, and i just want it Out There.

in general when it comes to the major female characters in peter's life, there's room to play around with their interpretations and race.

cindy moon has to be korean and glory grant has to be black because it's written into their characters

mj and betty can be anything, and have been racebent with great success.

felicia hardy can be a lot of things, but some should probably be avoided because if you write it wrong it could turn out offensive.

liz allan has been racebent... but she honestly works better as a white woman given how her character represents the waspy background peter initially wants to enter (mcu liz allan's a weird one, given the vulture twist. since homecoming borrows so much from miles, and tiana toomes was likely inspired by her, mcu liz reads like more of a first draft of tiana than a liz depiction).

gwen... hasn't really been racebent anywhere (unless you count gabi/gabriel o'hara and gayatri singh). and that follows, because she falls more in line with liz allan; this is a character whose whiteness-- or at least, her access to institutional privilege and status as part of that subset of women within society that are considered desirable, protectable and worthy of putting on a pedestal-- is very important.

this is too disorganized to write into like. a proper essay. so have some bulletpoints.

her background:

little is known about gwen-616's family background, apart from that she has relatives on her father's side who live in london (but it's not clear if they're literally british or they're just expats), and her mom's from a german background.

(spiderverse spider-gwen is specifically irish-american)

she had a christian, most likely catholic, background.

gwen-617's father was a cop who met her musician mother at a peace protest, and gwen-65's father is specifically a former street gang member who, like 617, met gwen's artistic mother during a conflict with the police. he helped her police captain father resolve the situation. soon after they became a couple, and he became a cop. so spider-gwen's dad is specifically part of that phenomenon of poor men becoming cops to raise their economic status, and gwen in general is usually the product of a family where law enforcement is considered a tradition (and so is marrying law enforcement; her mother and grandmother both did it).

she isn't generationally wealthy or new-rich. her family is comfortably middle- to upper-middle-class and achieved that status before gwen was born. she grew up without having to worry about money-- with the exception of tuition.

when gwen's mother dies (in 616 it's an unspecified illness; in 65, who knows), there's no mention of medical debt. so the family could afford it, or whatever helen had, they were lucky that it didn't wipe out the family finances.

gwen and her father live in a nice but not luxurious apartment. (and spider-gwen lives in a dated two-story house in peter's middle-class forest hills suburb)

gwen went to standard high, a prestigious prep school where she was classmates with the children of the city's best architects, physicians, business owners and billionaires. since her household's single-income (even before helen stacy died, she was a housewife), and they don't have any generational wealth, she would've had to have been on a scholarship to afford that tuition.

at that school, she's a popular honors student who wins class president, is best friends with the richest boy at school, dates the star quarterback, and laps up all the fancy college scholarships. and when she arrives at college, she leads a group of kids in freezing peter out like a high school mean girl, because he isn't giving her enough attention. so even though gwen wasn't rich, she was comfortably at the top of the high school hierarchy, and maybe even a bit of a bully. to say the quiet part out loud, if gwen had been a woc, everybody would've been giving her shit for needing a scholarship to afford to attend and she would never have gotten that level of acceptance.

she's a scholarship student (again!) at empire state university, where she's a top student in a stem major.

however-- that empire state scholarship isn't framed as a make-it-or-break-it achievement. when gwen's chasing it in high school, she doesn't say she can't enroll if she doesn't get it. so most likely, she could still afford college; she'd have just had a shitload of loans.

(gwen-65 goes to peter's public high school. she gets a scholarship to empire state too, but that's strictly a bullshit handwave of ~your superhero connection got you this made-up scholarship for interdimensional exchange students so you can go here~ that means nothing. for all intents and purposes she's a dropout.)

gwen stacy isn't a wasp, but she's white, anglo-saxon (or irish) and christian, so she's close enough to it to rub elbows with them. she isn't rich, but she knows how to fit in with rich people, and rich people let her get away with it. and she's one strategic marriage or career move away from getting into that social circle.

... her name literally means "white" in welsh.

her appearance:

the one trait that stays consistent throughout all her depictions, moreso than her personality or family background-- and the one trait a lot of men people bother to remember about her-- is that she's a blonde. and blondeness tends to be associated largely with whiteness.

gwen's largely regarded as the 'nice, tame good girl' ... even though in canon, she's a night owl who has a vicious temper, goes out partying often, juggles multiple suitors and is sexually forward. people keep fucking forgetting all that, because something about the way gwen looks makes people keep defaulting to 'innocent.' -- it's that she's a blonde (specifically, a blonde being juxtaposed with a fiery redhead), and people are applying stereotypes about blonde girls being uptight and delicate to gwen.

gwen's a beauty queen. what kind of physical attractiveness do beauty pageants tend to reward?

even the gwens who aren't beauty queens are still regarded as extremely attractive. including spider-gwen, who puts no effort into her appearance, keeps finding herself the target of romantic and sexual attention. this girl is consistently at the top of whatever her society's beauty standard hierarchy is. (and we know that standard more often than not tends to center whiteness.)

spider-gwen's costume? white.

her politics:

gwen's father is vaguely on the left (if he weren't, sam bullit gloating about how captain stacy's daughter endorsing him is an ultraown to the libs wouldn't make sense), but she's... not.

rich boys and men in uniform -- soldiers, cops, football players, (unknowingly, superheroes) -- are the type of guy she prefers to pursue romantically (... likely taking cues from her mother and grandmother, who both married cops). flash thompson goes to fucking vietnam and she thinks it's such a turn-on that she slips him some tongue at the airport right in front of her boyfriend.

she's annoyed and unsympathetic when vietnam war protesters disrupt her education. i don't know if gwen's just that serious about her education or if she genuinely thinks the war's okay, but it's not looking good!

she earnestly participates in her local elections-- and though she ultimately votes and campaigns for the progressive, she does seriously consider publicly endorsing the racist republican with fascist leanings.

she dislikes vigilantes and trusts the police.

she uses "my dad's a cop" as an excuse to get out of being punished and a threat to people she dislikes.

gwen's most prominent relationship was with peter, but she was going out with harry and flash casually at the same time and had dated plenty of guys in high school; she's by no means a blushing virgin who's loyal to Only One Man. gwen has options, and she pursues them.

she and peter had an implicitly sexual relationship, and she and darius leclerc were at least hitting second or third base, so gwen's cool with premarital sex. she consumes porn and even likes messing around in public (fooling around with darius at the public library; even asking peter if he wants to go to an adult theater to watch dirty movies).

gwen references betty friedan and the women's lib movement, and she's a female stem major in the 1960s, so she's a feminist and probably had no intentions of being a housewife... but her feminism starts and ends with herself.

even gwen-1610, the counterculture rocker chick who hates cops, jocks and bullies, and has casual sex, has this personality largely as a response towards her mother leaving her family. it's not that she's political or liberated, it's that she's raging against her parents and acting out to get a reaction. she hasn't applied her sense of disenfranchisement to anyone beyond herself. she's that kind of white punk.

the default gwen stacy is a white feminist who believes in and supports institutional power because she's always benefited from it, occasionally balks against it but only when it affects her, and she's naive at best and indifferent at worst to the ways it could hurt marginalized people -- specifically black people.

the elephant in the room

(... walk with me: given that the stacys get up close and personal with "spider-man" when hobie brown is wearing the costume to help peter throw off suspicion that it's him, and the textually racist sam bullit, a former cop, considers him public enemy #1 in the same issue where his blatantly racist policies are raised... there's a non-zero chance that the police-- including gwen's dad-- during the early 70s, think spider-man is a black guy and that assumption of his race is a contributing factor to their distrust of him. and gwen... agrees.)

look gwen-616 isn't beating the allegations. she was on the fence about voting for a racist cop, she backs the blue, she hates protests, she hates a vigilante that she has good reason to believe is a black guy. the way she's simply... never around randy robertson unless she's with peter, and surrounds herself with only white friends, is also telling too. it's all adding up to gwen being racist.

and the more that modern writers try to slap a band-aid over og gwen's issues with black people, the more visible they get.

gwen-616's relationship with her high school sweetheart darius and earth-8's alternate spider-gwen marrying a miles morales paint a very clear picture that gwen, in her default state, is the kind of white girl who would date or marry a black guy... but only the kind of black guy who's disconnected from his community and assimilating into greater white society to access wealth and power (miles-8, who mysteriously left his family, friends and world forever to live on a world where he's rich and famous), or who has already done this (darius, big man on campus at the rich kid school and son of multimillionaires), and she will make no effort to understand his perspective and stick up for him and his community.

in the case of darius, gwen-616's investigation into a crime lord gets darius's dad into a situation that gets him killed, apologizes for failing him... and proceeds to stan for a racist republican two years later. retconning a romance with darius into her story means gwen learned nothing from that experience and her apology wasn't sincere.

gwen-8 in particular is the kind of white woman who'd marry a black man and have children with him... and make no effort to make sure their biracial kids are connected to the black community they're a part of. (miles's people are nowhere to be found on earth-8-- no presence, no mention, no photos on the wall, nothing. but gwen's half-black kids have photos with their white cop grandpa. that says a lot. and the fact that miles-8 doesn't even seem connected to his community suggests that quality made him even more appealing to gwen-8.)

even spiderverse spider-gwen represents this to her miles, whose interest in her is directly tied to his desire to ditch his dimension for the spider-society, and to leave brooklyn for princeton; atsv miles wants to pull a miles-8.

-> she unintentionally leads him into a situation where he comes under attack for reasons that are racially-coded by her peer group and she doesn't stick up for him. yes, she realizes she made a mistake and resolves to make it up to him, acknowledges that miles's community is important to him, that she has no right to remove him from them, and vows to help him protect them (which is more than gwen-616 ever does for darius or gwen-8 does for her miles)... but he still sees her as that easy way up the social ladder.

-> and gwen returns the favor. she prefers a heteronormative romance with the middle-class straight boy with a nice family who's bound for an ivy league and a bright future, who she barely knows, over the poor queer homeless punk boy who she has a stronger connection with. assimilation into a society (not even hers; any will do) ultimately matters more to her than the actual depth of the relationship. rio and jeff were right to doubt gwen's intentions, because they weren't sincere; deep down, gwen isn't here for miles, she's here for the stable family, accepting community and bright future he has and she thinks if she's his girlfriend, she can obtain those things by association.

-> which, in context: spiderverse spider-gwen's spent six-ish months as a homeless queer runaway who thinks she'll die a violent death at a young age. it follows that she'd badly want a stable situation, and be willing to throw herself at a boy to get it. her motive isn't climbing the social ladder, it's avoiding being shaken off of it. like with comics-spider-gwen, when spiderverse gwen feels adrift and in need of belonging, she goes looking for a romantic relationship with a straight boy who's palatable to society as a survival strategy. she's not desperately in love, she's desperately comphetting.

-> the narrative framing that romance as "look at how different and brave and boundary-breaking we're being!" even though it's fundamentally not, as this is still ultimately the male lead getting a romance plot with the female character who was only placed in the movies to be his future girlfriend, (especially in comparison to what she could have with hobie) positions spiderverse-gwen as... the kind of white girl who rebels against her conservative parents and the status quo she hates by getting a black boyfriend instead of addressing the actual societal problems that are harming her.

especially when you consider miguel is symbolically her foster father (his design and george stacy's are very similar, he has a dead daughter whose name starts with a g, he intervenes in gwen and george's confrontation right as george makes a move to disown her, he's introduced alongside jess, who gwen asks to 'adopt her' and who serves as her mother figure). gwen bringing miles to the society reads like a white girl bringing her black boyfriend home to piss off her conservative dad. and gwen goes looking for miles to further rebel against him.

-> to be fair, gwen's willing to show up for her black boyfriend and his community, which is more than what most of those girls do. and atsv makes a point of showing that gwen seeks a mentor in jess drew and friends in hobie and pav-- they're establishing that gwen is simply the kind of white girl who's drawn to people of color, black people especially, even when romance isn't on the table.

-> but she's still ultimately using miles as a band-aid over insecurities he cannot help her with, she still aims to assimilate into the system instead of finding a way to escape it, and she still won't be an ally until she thinks she can get a boyfriend out of it.

(... can we please unpack how spiderverse gwen has been spending every day with jessica drew and especially spider-punk for months... and yet a couple hours with miles, and the idea that maybe she can date him if she shapes up a little, are what radicalize her in the end? okay babe. i see.)

which makes (comics-)gwen-65's subtextual interest in hobie brown and glory grant, who are queer black punks, all the more interesting; the gwen stacy who's a fully-actualized hero is drawn to people of color as well, and to queer black love interests who won't conform, and not-so-coincidentally learns all on her own to look out for their interests without any expectation of a romantic reward for doing so. her love interests don't lead her to activism, her activism leads her towards her love interests.

-> and as comics-spider-gwen starts to regress in her progress, her romantic interests have switched to harry-and-em jay, and then just em jay. (or that she's probably about to be paired up with miles, the guy who ends up with her supposedly-future-self, gwen-8, who takes far more after gwen-616 in her treatment of black characters. in other words, being with miles will make gwen regress into a much crappier person... because she's using him to get that same comphet security as spiderverse gwen.). not a coincidence.

her status in the narrative (to others)

gwen's role in peter's love interest hierarchy is similar to liz allan's: both are part of love triangles peter faces where he has to choose between an aspirational girlfriend who can give him what he wants materially but doesn't bring out the best in him (gwen and liz) and a girlfriend who cannot give him a gain in status but is in tune with his emotions (mj and betty).

-> in high school, peter (who's strapped for cash and starts his origin story as far more selfish, sexist and profit-driven) is drawn to liz's beauty and wealth, but ends up being pulled towards betty, who is working-class.

-> in college, peter is drawn to gwen's beauty, her stable future as a scientist, and a relationship with her means being accepted by her police chief father (... and therefore, spider-man being accepted by the law enforcement of the city at large)-- or mj, the unpredictable girl who juggles a half dozen jobs to chase a creative passion, and comes from a middle-class background just like his.

-> a relationship with gwen, through her social position, represents entrance into upper-middle-class prosperity, stable white-collar employment, and acceptance into the class that the status quo (the legal system and the cops) will protect. who are the people who tend to occupy this position in society. who do the cops protect. white people.

her role in the spider-man canon as the tragic helpless victimized love interest who's deified after her death... but whose death is never meaningfully prevented from happening again. (how many murdered girls are turned into symbols after their death, as the actual causes of their murders remain unaddressed? what do those girls tend to look like?)

this status relies on her whiteness. if gwen stacy were not a pretty blonde white girl, her murder would've been forgotten quickly because it wouldn't have been considered shocking or tragic, or worthy of obsessing over for decades.

and she wouldn't have been peter's love interest-- or even in the story at all-- if she were not white, because she was created in 1965.

spider-gwen, whose existence is a response to and condemnation of gwen stacy's fridging and reduction to the status of dead girlfriend on a pedestal, would never have been created in the first place if gwen weren't white.

if gwen hadn't been white, miles would never have been shipped with her in the first place because 1) spider-gwen wouldn't have existed. and 2) even if she did somehow, brian michael bendis loves swirl ships. he'd have passed right over her if she weren't white.

and gwen's importance in the spider-man canon [which she only has because she's white] is the entire reason comics miles is interested in her. he's literally told by the universe that the world where he gets the greatest institutional power and acceptance is the world where he has a blonde, blue-eyed white wife with a famous name and some not-so-coincidentally blonde, blue-eyed ambiguous-looking kids.

spiderverse miles is first attracted to her because he feels alone after leaving his community for the first time, and she makes him feel like he belongs at the visions, where he [and the audience] assume she's top of the social hierarchy; the same thing happens again at the spider-society, and both are part of atsv's greater metaphor about how those places are representative of a white-centric society. if gwen were not a white girl, the metaphor would instantly change.

miles likes gwen for multiple reasons (mostly that she's pretty and has powers, and spiderverse miles at least admires her intelligence and competence and enjoys her company), but given that he barely spent any time with her, the biggest one that nobody talks about is that she's a white girl, and he thinks he can speedrun his way to the status and acceptance he wants through a relationship with her. that's remained consistent between the comics and animated movies. the connection is literally skin-deep.

and out of universe... look, there's a reason that gwen and miles keep getting shipbait covers even when they had one regrettable makeout session eight years ago, have never actually dated, are interested in other people, and miles in particular largely dates nonwhite girls. there's a reason that the idea of gwiles has gotten more marketing than the reality of the relationship with a black girl that miles has been in for years. there's a reason editorial won't stop pushing gwen as a love interest, and won't even bother to try with tiana, and that's because they've already decided that the black girl isn't a commercial enough love interest for a mass audience, the white girl is... and that dating her will make miles more marketable too (... because aside from giving people a self-insert, if he has a white girlfriend, his stories will still center white people, and he'll have to prioritize their feelings). no surprise whatsoever that the first time miles made it to the movies, the white writers gave him a white love interest.

gwen's whiteness is the thing that gwiles stans like the most about her. putting aside how most of them have no clue who gwen is on her own and don't even know what her personality's like because her appearance is the most important thing to them, just watch how they talk about miles's other girlfriends and try to count the racist and sexist microaggressions.

and look at the way gwiles stans either completely ignore miles's blackness and how it informs his character or their relationship... or insist that white-ass gwen stacy would somehow speak perfect puerto rican spanish, be able to do miles's hair, and seamlessly fit into his community with no misunderstandings or friction. even spiderverse fans ignore their movie's own canon actually addressing those issues.

either they want the aesthetic image of an interracial relationship without any engagement with the actual challenges of being in an interracial relationship, or they want miles to date a blonde blue-eyed white girl who behaves like an afrolatina girl. okay. i see.

… even look at the way gwemj shippers blatantly ignore that em jay is already in a relationship with glory grant, or that gwen had a crush on her too. not a coincidence that the white f/f ship is getting favored over the interracial ones.

her overall plotline

is that of a privileged white woman who has faith in the system, slowly being failed by it until it kills her.

she's a star student studying to be a scientist, but she's consistently only valued by all her friends for her looks. the reason her boyfriend noticed her in the first place is because she's pretty, and she's valued more for her appearance and politeness than her scientific aptitude or her status as peter's intellectual equal; the only time we ever see her on page is when she's socializing, instead of in the lab. her father cares more about who she's dating than how her grades are. even her professor turns out to be only giving gwen special attention because he wants to fuck her, and he's so obsessed with her that he keeps cloning her after her death for that reason.

she trusts the cops to protect her, but they consistently don't.

she reaches out to a politician who's her dad's old police force friend for protection, but realizes he's only using her.

she trusts her boyfriend to be honest with her, but he never has been since the day they met. she believes she's in control of her relationship with him, but she never was.

her father, both the chief of police and the literal patriarch of her family, dies and leaves her completely alone.

she's ultimately murdered by her friend's dad*, and is put in a position to be murdered because her boyfriend won't be honest with her about the danger he's putting her in yet won't let her go when she makes it clear that she wants out of that situation bad enough to flee the country.

her murder itself strips her of all agency: she's so drugged she has no idea she's even being killed, and all retcons about how awake she was are more about her ~realizing her boyfriend was a hero~ than realizing she's about to die or that she's been lied to by said boyfriend.

*and depending on if you retcon a certain hated plotline or not, gwen's murderer, a wealthy and powerful middle-aged man who is her close friend's dad, may have coerced her, a teenager, into sex (which may have been her first time) and impregnated her. and her murder may in part be a coverup for that crime. look sins past was retconned because its the Fucking Worst, but this is how canon treats her and there are still fans and writers who hold a plotline that is so clearly a sexual assault against her.

(and then her murderer... never really gets punished for it. norman isn't killed, doesn't go to jail, even gets a redemption arc or two. and peter's off making out with her best friend a few issues later, never tries particularly hard to bring gwen back when dozens of other people are resurrected all the time, and whenever she's cloned, it's agreed that those clones don't count and aren't worth preserving. there is no justice for gwen's murder and everyone agrees that we don't need to bring her back anyway but we sure as hell will obsess over how tragic her death is. they like her better dead because if she's alive, they don't have full control over her anymore.)

she's failed by everyone and everything she trusts and cares about. specifically all the white men. her male friends, her boyfriend, her teacher, her father, his coworkers at the police station, her friend's father.

(... and the only people who have not failed her, and have even stuck up for or supported her are mj, sally green, aunt may, hobie brown, and darius leclerc. women and people of color.)

and maybe most importantly: she never gets an opportunity to process any of this or make a choice about it. because she's dead. and every time she's resurrected, it's only to fluff the ego of the guy who got her killed before being quickly killed off again. it's been like this for fifty years and it just doesn't stop.

-> gwen 6160, a version of gwen who gets to grow up to full adulthood and does so without spider-man triggering the collapse of the system around her-- and therefore, gwen still believes in it-- even goes so far as to become co-ceo of oscorp, and marry harry osborn-- a white billionaire who literally has the leader of their totalitarian oligarchal society on call. she has her doubts about the way things are and wants the system to change, but believes she specifically is superior enough to solve things with no consultation or oversight. this character's being primed to either have that arrogance lead to her death or a descent into supervillainy.

-> even spider-gwen has to unlearn her specifically white feminist politics. she needs to have the concept of gentrification being bad explained to her. she initially behaves like a rogue cop and her killing of peter parker is framed as an act of police brutality. the entire point of her initial comics run is gwen realizing that the police, the legal system, the media and society are corrupt and that she has to change her mindset if she's going to be a worthy protector of her city. she has to unlearn girlboss feminism, does so by listening to people of color, and refuses to take advantage of her privilege even when not doing so could get her killed-- when she's incarcerated, she receives a reduced sentence in part because of the optics of a girl with a 'good background' being locked up and she's offered a fully commuted sentence in exchange for becoming a government agent. which she refuses. the origin story of spider-gwen is all about radicalization. i can't get over how smart her creator was for doing that.

-> and as spider-gwen has since regressed back into white feminism, to the point where she's been explicitly called a "girlboss" on-panel, she starts palling around with her dimension's cops again and has not-so-coincidentally begun favoring only her white friends-- first harry and em jay, then only em jay (who she starts to have romantic tension with... even though em jay is already in a relationship with a black girl). and now she's abandoning the world she spent years learning to be a better ally to entirely for an easier one where she has fewer responsibilities and is in closer proximity to the important men who treat her like a romantic object.

the missed potential of gwen stacy's plotline all boils down to lack of agency. she needs to live so she can realize how she's been failed, and decide what to do about it.

if she concludes that the system is bad for her and stands up against it, she stands a chance at breaking the cycle, surviving and becoming a hero, like ghost-spider.

if she doubles down on supporting it, it will corrupt her into a villain.... and probably kill her once she's not useful to it alive anymore.

to bring the subject of this ramble home: the payoff we're waiting for in gwen's narrative is about how a white woman responds to realizing the system she's been raised to trust and uphold is corrupt and broken. you have to reckon with your privilege, how you've been lied to, how the power you thought you had doesn't actually exist, how your special position near the top of the hierarchy has nothing to do with how special you are and everything to do with keeping you close so the people with actual power can use you to replicate the system through another generation, the authority figures in your life are actually useless or harmful and the people you've been taught to fear and push away are actually more like you than the more powerful people you want to identify with. and then you choose to help undo that system to liberate yourself and the other people it's hurting... or you keep believing the lie because you'd rather keep the few privileges it does allow you, become complicit in its continuation and it still eats you up when it's done using you.

spider-gwen already passed this test and become a hero (but may fail it if she ends up with miles). gwen-6160 has failed and become villainous. gwen-616 has never gotten to take it, so her fate's still up in the air.

anyway politically speaking, from right to left, the main gwens go: 6160/hickman ultimate (knowingly complicit in the shadiest shit), 616/original (wobbling on the fence until she loses her balance and gets impaled by it), 1610/bendis ultimate (edgelord who occasionally stumbles onto the right idea), 65b/spiderverse (she's a little confused but she's got the spirit. dump miles and you've got it.), 65a/spider-gwen (the actual radical, pre-spiderverse synergy).

[beardedmrbean]

[Huey Zoomer Anon]

Okay it got community noted but what this elitism

https://x.com/seamus_coughlin/status/1857629211537666253?s=46

“Only people with degree should vote!” What types of degrees? The running jokes about “college educated” people these days is how out of touch they are with the working class

“It seem affordable groceries is more important than women rights!” I remember people on tumblr pointed out the lack of wealth privilege discussion in sjws circles. No I don’t mean line trump vs me a Amazon warehouse worker

I mean more “Upper middle class woman with several college degrees living in a gated community and shitting on poor trailer white kids”

That what I been seeing from the woke

Also just because you have a college degree doesn’t mean you know everything

One thing I been having issues with Sjws when it comes to black struggles (minus my own community bs) I go “wait is your idea of black people based off your pop culture media consumption and sanitized textbooks?”

Oh my family was there during the civil rights movement and lord’s knows the full extent of how the Vietnam war effected my elders as my late grandmother couldn’t have memories of her brother who died in Vietnam because she was too young when he was drafted

The shit you learn in textbooks is a lot of marginalized people families histories wokesters

It like how people were shocked that black Americans were very weary about the Covid vaccines…..there something called pattern recognition

https://youtu.be/rX07mUHFO4s?si=dX-U6Ee1Q1Gk3E5T

I got out of the democratic cult, but idc if it Obama (actually he the first person I realize the wolf in sheep clothing metaphor), Hillary, or Harris

I can seen the devil beyond his new persona= the woke person

Okay it got community noted but what this elitism

It's an abuse tactic, they're trying to emotionally manipulate people that didn't vote the way they wanted them to.

Guessing they think that since it works on leftist types that it will work on not leftist types too. Personally I respond better to not being insulted.

“It seem affordable groceries is more important than women rights!” I remember people on tumblr pointed out the lack of wealth privilege discussion in sjws circles. No I don’t mean line trump vs me a Amazon warehouse worker

Immediate physical needs tend to take the lead, that's human nature. It's not affordable groceries it's being able to feed yourself and your family people are concerned with.

Insulting them for that isn't going to do you any favors in the future.

AOC did a thing where she asked her voters if they also voted for Trump and why, short version of the primary reasons I saw were 'you both care about working people' and 'I wanted something different and harris didn't offer that'

She seemed flummoxed, but the DNC would do well to read the responses and adjust their message accordingly in the future instead of sticking with the old standby of 'call them racist' or any other ist/phobic ect thing they've been running with.

I mean more “Upper middle class woman with several college degrees living in a gated community and shitting on poor trailer white kids” That what I been seeing from the woke Also just because you have a college degree doesn’t mean you know everything

Having that degree just means you have a easier time wrapping your bigotry and hate in fancy words that disguise what they're saying.

Funniest part is they still opt to do things like that tweet.

One thing I been having issues with Sjws when it comes to black struggles (minus my own community bs) I go “wait is your idea of black people based off your pop culture media consumption and sanitized textbooks?”

You already know the answer to that.

Oh my family was there during the civil rights movement and lord’s knows the full extent of how the Vietnam war effected my elders as my late grandmother couldn’t have memories of her brother who died in Vietnam because she was too young when he was drafted

Sadly that draft thing is not uncommon throughout history.

The shit you learn in textbooks is a lot of marginalized people families histories wokesters It like how people were shocked that black Americans were very weary about the Covid vaccines…..there something called pattern recognition

I wasn't surprised, raw numbers had white folks in the US being the peak group refusing or hesitant to get the covid shot, but by %of total population by racial demographic it was black Americans.

'oh how could they do that and refuse this thing that the government says is good for you?'

Tuskegee syphilis experiment ring a bell anyone?

Oh, I could have saved myself a moment if I'd just added that, lol.

I got out of the democratic cult, but idc if it Obama (actually he the first person I realize the wolf in sheep clothing metaphor), Hillary, or Harris I can seen the devil beyond his new persona= the woke person

Still a registered democrat because I never bothered to change to unaffiliated, not that it really matters since I get to vote for who I want to anyhow in pretty much anything but the primaries which are done by party here in CA and also fairly decided by the time they get here.

Both sides are ass, Vermin Supreme 2028!!!!!

[gruesella]

I don't know when it became a common misconception that the Munsters are a bunch of sad conformists trying desperately to fit in bc they're ashamed of their monstrous nature while the Addams are not only aware of how different they are, they are proud of it. Which is really just Addams stans' way of going "neener neener, our fav is better than yours" but misses wholly that the entire joke of both shows was that neither family actually knew they freaked people out; both thought they were normal and kindly treated outsiders like friends. (tho the comics were more satirizing blueblood aristocrats and how creepy the rich are, a point they also miss.)

Under the cut for length and some possibly unpopular takes that need to be said about privilege.

Yes, including the Addams. Gomez as much in the very first episode of the series:

Truant Officer: Mr. Addams, surely you want your children to be like other children? Gomez: But they are!

Just as few people can actually explain how TAF is aware they're not normal, even less can tell me how the Munsters worry about fitting in. Especially because in my experience, people who drag the Munsters have not usually seen many of the episodes, making this claim even more confusing to me. At best I can only guess they mean that episode where everyone but Grandpa is excited to be named "America's Average Family", but that's more because they're hyped to be on a nationally recognized magazine than anything else. Who wouldn't be? There is no evidence the Munsters ever try to fit in with their white picket fence neighbors; they believe THEY are the white picket fence neighbors and do not understand why their friendliness and- in their eyes- harmless customs and hobbies bring out the rudeness in guests or neighbors. Being ordinary is not something they TRY to do; it's something they already think they are. That. Is. The. Joke! They're horror icons but want their kids to get a good education and have nice family dinners every evening! They SHOULD be disturbing and disgusting, but they're nice people with reasonable values!

But the humor in TAF comes from how confident they are that they are THE norm. They are the true Americans and assume everyone must think the way they do. This was and is an accurate attitude from the wealthy elite and even just financially well-off middle class families unaware of life outside their sheltered bubble. This doesn't make the Addams bad people btw, it just means they're naive (and in fairness, so are the Munsters, just for different reasons).

Related to that, I'm going to say something that a lot of people won't agree with but it's true. The Munsters do not "try to be normal" or are "ashamed" of their heritage; what they DO is try to assimilate. I think this is lost on many viewers but the Munsters are a working class immigrant family; frightening appearances aside, they do not meet the status quo. Millions of immigrants, since America was founded, have assimilated. Americans themselves will generally assimilate when they move. This is just a thing those living in a different culture do because it's not seen as correct or considerate to ignore cultural norms of the place you are staying in. More to the point, the Munsters very obviously represent what real life minorities went through in the very racist and xenophobic mid-20th century. They would try to balance their own culture while following what the majority (white, middle or upper class people) or adapt entirely to it... and STILL faced prejudice.

The part you won't like: the Addams meet the status quo FAR more than the Munsters. They are rich, white, straight, closer to their aristocratic status (the Munsters technically have nobility but seemingly left it behind when they immigrated, with Herman dismissing it outright as unimportant in the US), and above all, are normal-looking. Add that to their somewhat condescending pity (and Gomez' disgust) for Aunt Ophelia, who is the black sheep of the family, showing that they DO value some sense of normalcy; it's just different from an average person's. Even thinking the Addams were this edgy, rebellious goth family a lot of their fans think they are, they can afford to be quirky because of their privilege. It is not necessarily bold to "be yourself" when "yourself" is already closer to what society says you should be. I am not saying they don't do anything progressive, they are in ways of course; I'm saying this is a very tone-deaf, first-world outlook that takes for granted the fact that the Munsters as both foreigners and minorities and don't get the luxury of flaunting their MUCH MORE ATYPICAL appearances and culture to WASP America. To say they as a marginalized group are just sad conformists compared to the brave and self-loving Addams who are by contrast easier to swallow with their normal appearances and attractive wealth is... naive to say the least, and an offensive disregard to how privilege works IRL, at worst.

But it's not founded in any of the source material. In truth both families are happy the way they are; that's what makes them funny, because they enjoy abnormal things and don't see that this disturbs their neighbors and ultimately their odd ways aren't harming anyone (usually). IDK how this got lost on so many people's heads but I largely blame the fact that viewers (mainly millennials and zoomers) were weaned on the "I'm not like other girls"-y 1990s Addams remakes without ever seeing the Munsters, and as some of them have based their identity too much on the former and see the latter as a "rival" or "other", they assume the Munsters must operate on the opposite end of the scale, I guess? If that makes sense.

I personally think all of this just boils down to classism and (some) Addams fans- mainly those who are most familiar with the edgy 90s films- having this deep individuality complex which comes out not only in their resentful takes and spiteful jokes about the Munsters, but many other franchises and characters too. Like. there's a reason there's a million Addams memes on r/notlikeothergirls and maybe 2 of Lily. There's a reason most of their insults towards the Munsters are about how "trashy" and "poor" they are (NM that these are counts & countesses living in a freaking mansion in one of the richest states in America with 2 expensive custom made cars, ijbol) and much praise for TAF seems to come from how much cool stuff they have or their old family name. There is obviously a need with a good chunk of their fanbase for the characters they identify way too much with to be more special and cool than any others and I've said for awhile that some fans of the 90s version def have this rich, beautiful goth fantasy projected onto TAF, as seen quite grossly by the racist and body-shaming hate Luis Guzman received for daring to be a pudgy brown guy playing... a pudgy tanned guy.

And as someone who greatly enjoys deep dive analyses on seemingly simple fiction like these shows, I won't begrudge anyone for taking their fav fiction seriously... but if you're going to try to act like the Addams are a complex and philosophically deep franchise who did more for fiction than Munsters and then tell Munster fans "bro it's not that deep" when we point out the Addams' absurd socioeconomic/racial status protecting them from societal judgment or how it's much easier to digest nonconformit with when it's coming from a group who is already Have some perspective is all I am asking and stop being so "how very dare you" with angry blocking/downvoting when you face people who appreciate the Munsters as much as you appreciate the Addams. Like... I enjoy both but I am tired of seeing baseless criticism of the Munsters from people who never analyze TAF to that same degree and NO nuanced takes about either side, or being gaslit when I complain about that hate. (Yes, I've been told it's not a big deal and I am basically the real problem to shoot back against people who have harassed or bullied me or my moots for defending the show... seriously.)

Also, I'm putting this in the Addams' tag and I don't want to hear any griping about how I'm "tagging hate" from fans because I'm not; this is not hating them at all, this is a fandom problem with Addams fans that has gone on way too long and I want people to see it (and there is constantly negative stuff put in the Munsters' tags or spaces as well). If you're just gonna do what I said in the above paragraph, please DNI; I am venting but open to good-faith responses.

[venusstadt]

Introduction

Hi, and welcome to Venusstadt. I’m Jiana, and this is the final part of a two-part series on globalism and its aesthetics throughout the 90s. Today, I’m discussing 90s globalist conceptions of the future, the most popular of which is definitely Y2K.

In the first part—which I HIGHLY recommend watching—I explained what globalism is and how the interconnectedness from new tech AND the sense of being at the ‘end of history’ led to the emergence of various aesthetics as people looked back at the history of humanity and looked forward to a new age.

During my analysis of these aesthetics I also spoke about cultural appropriation and exchange, as well as how white supremacists appropriated neoclassical aesthetics to be racist towards everyone else and establish themselves as “superior,” “civilized,” or “modern,” which is the perfect segue for this adjacent context I’m about to give.

Minimalism: A Brief Interlude

So, 90s minimalism!

Minimalism was not influenced by globalism by any discernible means, save for those minimalisms that were imported predominantly from Japanese culture and based on Buddhism as a part of the New Age movement and how it trickled into general 90s design philosophies.

Elly Parson of Refinery29 mentions that in the 90s, minimalism was more prominent in high-design spaces like rich people’s homes, hotels, storefronts, and luxury fashion rather than the interiors and wardrobes of the average person (Parson). Still, it’s significant, because when we think of minimalism, we harken back to the 90s since it was a response to maximalism in the 80s as I mentioned at the beginning of the last part.

Minimalism has come back around in fashion and design more recently, which has prompted a look at its origins. So I’m sure a lot of you by now know about Adolf Loos, a prominent modernist architect who is also associated with minimalism, who saw excess ornamentation as “savagery” and saw European modernism as “the ultimate answer to all aesthetic problems” (Chayka). Naturally, because of this, any time people give a cultural or sociological critique of minimalism, his name is involved.

Now, associating any ornamentation with the Other is racist, as are the loaded terms “savage” and “degenerate,” which he uses in his infamous essay Ornamentation and Crime (Loos 20).

In his essay, he also distinguishes art like rugs from things like buildings and furniture, which he views as needing to be firmly utilitarian (Loos 24). To him, any decoration of utilitarian things was a sign of cultural devolution and savagery (20). He advocated for more minimal aesthetics in order to reach a timeless look that could survive as civilization marched on (22).

Much of the language used is eugenics-speak, and goes back to the notion of social degradation that was VERY popular in the early 20th century. This was the idea that non-white people and poor white people could spread their “defectiveness” and therefore needed to be kept from mixing their genes with middle- and upper-class Western white folks for the good of civilization (Eugenics Archive Canada, “Degeneracy”).

From this we also get the concept of cultural degradation, which is basically the same thing, except that it hyper focused on the idea that non-Western and lower-class culture could lead to “lowered standards of education and failures of taste-inculcating institutions,” and, again, the demise of Western culture (Wampole).

So, to further summarize, there was a fear among Western white society that the art, music, and aesthetics of people of color and the poor, aka the cultures of the “Other,” could lead to societal and cultural regression, and thus annihilate Western civilization. And these fears were used to create laws and initiatives to both murder the said “Other” and eradicate their cultures—think, for instance, forced sterilization, the American Indian boarding schools, Henry Ford’s anti-Jazz initiatives, Tom Buchanan’s speech in the Great Gatsby, the Nazis entire existence, every US culture war spat since like, the 60s—you get the picture. 

Now, none of this is to say that people are weird eugenicists for liking modernist or minimalist aesthetics. I’m just using this to highlight rhetorics of modernity. As we saw prior, anything ornate or “other” is of the past, while what is “Western” is viewed as progressive, timeless, and more utilitarian.

“Progressive” and “timeless” are the keywords as I move into explaining the next set of aesthetics, which I’m calling the aesthetics of eternity, because that sounds really cool.

Eternity & Anxiety

So in the 90s, the rapidly approaching year 2000 was a big deal, for obvious reasons. A new millennium was on the horizon, which only happens like, once every a thousand years.

Plus it was the end of a technologically accelerated century. The mid-1900s started with inventions like the radio, the car, and the airplane; and by the early- to mid-1990s, people had gotten used to personal computers a la Apple and Microsoft, home video systems, and video game consoles like Atari and Gameboy, on top of previous inventions like photography and film, space rockets, and much, much more (Woollaston).

With all that in mind, people were looking forward to the future, while also being slightly afraid of it, as we see with the Y2K crisis (Wade). This excitement and fear appeared in the future-inspired aesthetics.

Like the global village aesthetics, this section is also split up in two: minimalist eternities and global anxieties.

I use the term minimalist “eternities” for this first portion to bring back the prevalent idea that the less ornamentation or cultural markers there were in design, the more “timeless” it would be.

This is observable in the industrial and sartorial design of a lot of Y2K or the Y2K-esque, like Cyber Corporate or Gen-X Soft Club. These designs are “clean.” They cannot be tied to a specific culture or time-period; it’s like they exist in this vacuous, liminal space. With Cyber Corporate specifically, CARI co-founder Evan Collins notes that it “seemed to be the go-to style to appear contemporary, especially with companies in industries associated with booming fields of the era” (Collins, “Cyber/Gen-X Corporate). And what’s most striking about these images is that they were contemporary and futuristic back then and STILL feel exciting and futuristic now, because of that minimalism.

As you can see, this is intentionally antithetical to the globalist aesthetics, which, because of their multicultural influence, were considered to be of the past.

But obviously the multicultural influence did not disappear altogether. In fact, it in some ways meshed with the futuristic aesthetics. This is especially true when it comes to East Asian cultures, specifically that of Japan.

So, like I said in part one, Western upper- and upper-middle folks were living large in the 1980s (White).

But Japan was also experiencing an economic upswing thanks to their export of tech and cars (White). And, of course, any time a non-Western country starts to have a bit of success, the West gets a bit uneasy. In 1985, Thomas White wrote in the New York Times:

“40 years after the end of World War II, the Japanese are on the move again in one of history’s most brilliant commercial offensives, as they go about dismantling American industry” (White).

Basically, White feared that American economic dominance would be thwarted by Japan due to how much America was importing as opposed to exporting, as well as the rise of companies like Toyota, Sony, Hitachi, Honda, and others (White). These imports especially spelled trouble for the American car industry, which was utterly gutted as people stopped preferring American cars (White).

There was also a fear that Japan’s steady rise would uplift other Asian markets (White). As White states: “Behind Japan (‘the big dragon’ some call it) march the ‘four little dragons’ (Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore) following in its path. And behind loom China and India, desperate as they are to raise their standards of living—at the expense of American standards, if necessary” (White).

The invocation of the dragon is unmistakably Orientalist of course, which brings us to techno-orientalism. With the rise of globalization and interconnectedness that came from it and the aforementioned “need for a new ideology to justify America’s hegemonic status at the end of the Cold War” (Harris) came this new breed of orientalism that was being leveled against Japan and other countries.

The term “techno-orientalism” was first coined by David Morley and Kevin Robins, a portmanteau of technology and Orientalism, which denotes the stereotypical lens by which the West often views the East (Harris). Unlike traditional (Said’s) Orientalism, which relies on stereotypes of the past, techno-orientalism relies on constructions of a future in which the East accomplishes supremacy through technological might (Harris) despite being non-Western and thus “of the past” and “degenerate”. As explained further:

“The techno- of techno-orientalism, then, comes to signal Orientalism’s relationship to economic globalization and to a form of temporal asymmetry: an Asian-ness characterized by the juxtaposition of cultural retrograde with technical hyper-advancement” (Harris).

Now any sort of perceived cultural dominance from a place that is non-Western, as we saw previously in the section about social and cultural degradation, always gives Western countries anxiety. For techno-orientalism, the level of this anxiety honestly depends on where you look, and sometimes it can’t really be described as anxiety but more of your run-of-the-mill cultural appropriation to seem hip or on-trend.

On the actual anxiety side, techno-orientalism is most associated with the cyberpunk genre, which features both technological advancement but is often set in a dystopian world. Now this genre obv. originated in the 80s and not the 90s like some of these other aesthetics, but it remained a prominent mainstay of the 90s and continued into the early 2000s.

For more specific film and storytelling examples of this, see the Japan Takes Over the World page on TV Tropes because I’d really be here all day if I went through all of them. Harris mentions multiple visual hallmarks of the genre, but in this case, these visuals are all unified by being a mix of Asian aesthetics and high-tech milieus. And I don’t believe this was incorporated into general industrial or architectural design, but it was a present in marketing and, to a certain degree, music.

2001: The Global Bubble Bursts

So, what happened to these aesthetics?

Well, like any trend, they faded away thanks to a change in the outside factors that brought them into the spotlight.

For one, in March 2000, the Dot-com bubble burst (Salvucci). This leads to large online companies (like Amazon) losing some of their values and causes smaller online companies to shut down, as well as a slight recession in the early 2000s (Salvucci). I don’t want to go into business and economic jargon so I won’t go too far into this, but think of the Dot-com bubble popping as the 2000s equivalent of the cryptocurrency crash we just had with the collapse of Terra-Luna and FTX. This puts a damper on the whole tech innovation schtick that people had going in the 1990s.

Then the attack on the World Trade Center occurs, which, on top of mounting criticism against globalism in the 90s thanks to the loss of industrial jobs in the U.S., absolutely killed the utopian globalist dream (Schwartz).

These events burst the 90s “cultural bubble” (Williams), and lead many to look back on the decade as frivolous and void of American cultural values.

Writing for the New York Times in November 2001, John Schwartz declared that:

“… the country is experiencing a shift away from the libertarian, individualistic values that were expressed in the celebration of the New Economy and toward more old-fashioned values in the wake of the terrorist attacks” (Schwartz).

This was a direct dig at Gen X, since the 1990s was powered by Gen X’s progressive, entrepreneurial spirits (Gross). We know these individualist values didn’t disappear with 9/11—after all, America was founded on such individualist values, and they would power the rampant Islamophobic sentiment in the wake of the attacks. The ‘libertarian, individualist values’ in question were that, as we know from the original 1990s article that defined them, Gen X were less loyal to specific corporations than they were to the idea that they could job hop and earn more money to support themselves.

Also, not that I’m some tech warrior or anything, but there’s a lot of reference in Schwartz’ article to the leaders of the Dot-com boom being ‘geeks’ and ‘whiz kids.’ Immature high school imagery, of course, but it also alludes to the idea that instead of these geeks winning at capitalism it should be the well-rounded, all-American kids—which, like everything in this video, is a coded concept.

Throughout the 90s, there was a growing nationalist movement in response to globalism, and the people involved were blaming immigration and undocumented immigrants for lost factory jobs that were being outsourced to other countries (Chatzky, McBride, and Sergie). This, along with things like people of color and gay people having rights, was a major factor in the 90s culture wars, the rise in paleo-conservatism, and a desire to “reclaim the United States” that would lead to events like Ruby Ridge and Waco, and then Oklahoma City, and then Columbine, and all the issues we still have today.

After Sept. 11, this nationalist sentiment became more mainstream thanks to the War on Terror. Accordingly, the multicultural and techno-futurist aesthetics of the 90s faded away.

There’s a return of preppy style, which had not been popular since the 1980s—again, a conservative period. This time around the prep style is embodied by stores like Aeropostale and Abercrombie and Fitch, the latter of which relied on images of thin, conventionally attractive models, and all-American (read: white) marketing for its desirability factor (Klayman).

We do see more traditional Orientalist imagery peak in the mid-2000s and fade by the 2010s (Collins, “Millennium Orientalism – Eastern Exoticism”). I don’t know what to make of this: judging by my previous multicultural aesthetic analysis I would call it either some appropriative attempt at peace and anti-war sentiment or at worst super insensitive given that Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Southeast Asian people were being conflated with one another, hate crimed, and labeled terrorists while their cultural aesthetics were being used for funsies. We’d also see some techno-futurist themes in Frutiger Aero (though the techno part was more played down) in line with tech innovations like social media and the launch of the 1st generation iPhone in 2007, but this seems like a nostalgic late Gen-X/Millennial grasp at Y2K.

2020: A Global Re-emergence?

So obviously Y2K is back and has been back for years, though in its current iteration that term refers to a mix of original Y2K, McBling, and some late 2000s stuff we don’t even have a name for yet. The most obvious guess for why these came back is because of the ubiquity of social media websites since they’ve taken over the internet (and because they’ve allowed for such archiving that re-introduced everyone to such aesthetics), especially because of the pandemic.

Evan Collins says that for Global Village Coffeehouse at least, it never came back and never was remembered as part of the general 90s aesthetic. I too thought these global aesthetics would be dead and gone forever since we’re more aware of cultural appropriation nowadays, but someone on TikTok pointed out that now that the U.S. is looking a little not global superpower-ish and other countries and fashion capitals are emerging, there’s a rush of multiculturalism again, at least in the luxury space. So, that could be exciting.

With both aesthetics, I feel like we’re far more skeptical and more culturally aware. There’s not an utter faith in tech or a blithe willingness to borrow from other cultures like there was in the 90s. And though people criticize Gen Z for biting from past aesthetics (as they did with Gen X), I think this is just a side effect of all these cultural materials from the past being available thanks to the Internet and things like the Wayback Machine. As with Gen X, our generation’s main cultural marker is that the interconnectivity and speed we have at our fingertips enables us to run through past aesthetics almost as quickly as we find out about them—but that’s a topic for a future video!

Conclusion 

And that’s all I have for this video. I realized towards the end that this was just a big excuse to talk about globalism, but, again understanding culture is important to understanding design aesthetics, so I hope you all learned something from this video that could help you in that respect.

As always, if you enjoyed this video, give it a like and maybe even click the subscribe button below for more. My channel is still new and I’m testing things out, so any feedback would be appreciated. I can also be found on Twitter and Tumblr. Thanks for watching!

Sources

Chatzky, Andrew, James McBride, and Mohammed Aly Sergie. “NAFTA and the USMCA: Weighing the Impact of North American Trade.” Council on Foreign Relations, 1 July 2020, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/naftas-economic-impact. Accessed 7 April 2023.    

Chayka, Kyle. “The North American Maximalism of Gigi Hadid’s and Drake’s Home Design.” The New Yorker, 5 Aug. 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/dept-of-design/the-north-american-maximalism-of-gigi-hadid-and-drakes-home-design. Accessed 6 April 2023. 

Collins, Evan. “Cyber/Gen-X Corporate.” Are.na, https://www.are.na/evan-collins-1522646491/cyber-gen-x-corporate. Accessed 7 April 2023.

Collins, Evan. “Millennium Orientalism – Eastern Exoticism.” Are.na, https://www.are.na/evan-collins-1522646491/millennium-orientalism-eastern-exoticism. Accessed 7 April 2023.  

Eugenics Archive Canada – Their website seems to be broken now, but here’s a link. http://eugenicsarchive.ca/

Gross, David M, and Sophronia Scott. “Proceeding With Caution.” Time, 16 July 1990, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,970634-9,00.html. Accessed 7 April 2023. 

Harris, Elif. “Orientalism & Technology: A Primer on the Techno-Orientalism Debate.” Elif Notes, 15 March 2023, https://elifnotes.com/techno-orientalism/. Accessed 14 April 2023.

Klayman, Alison, creator. White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch. Second Nature, Aliklay Productions, Cinetic Media, and All3Media America, 2022. 

Loos, Adolf. “Adolf Loos: Ornamentation and Crime.” George Washington University, https://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf. Accessd 6 April 2023. 

Parsons, Elly. “‘90s Interiors Were Eclectic, Fun, & Free. Now They’re Back.” Refinery29, 23 Sept. 2021, https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/90s-interiors-homeware-trend. Accessed 6 April 2023.

Salvucci, Jeremy. “What was the Dot-Com Bubble and Why Did It Burst?” The Street, 12 Jan. 2023, https://www.thestreet.com/dictionary/d/dot-com-bubble-and-burst. Accessed 7 April 2023. 

Wade, Grace. “The Y2K Movement: Its History and Resurgence.” Stitch Fashion, 19 June 2018, https://www.stitchfashion.com/home//the-y2k-movement-its-history-and-resurgence. Accessed 7 April 2023. 

Wampole, Christy. “Can Culture Degenerate?” Aeon, 5 Aug. 2021, https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-cultural-degeneration-has-an-unsavoury-pedigree. Accessed 6 April 2023.

White, Thomas. “The Danger from Japan.” The New York Times Magazine, 28 July 1985, https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/28/magazine/the-danger-from-japan.html. Accessed 14 April 2023. 

Williams, Alex. “2001: When the Internet Was, Um, Over?” New York Times, 8 Oct. 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/style/dot-com-crash-of-2000.html. Accessed 7 April 2023. 

Woollaston, Victoria. “The Best 1980s Gadgets that Defined a Decade.” Pocket-Lint, 20 Feb. 2023, https://www.pocket-lint.com/gadgets/news/147958-12-best-1980s-gadgets-that-defined-a-decade/. Accessed 9 May 2023. 

[greatwyrmgold]

I think part of the problem is that people think of "oppressor" as a kind of person, instead of recognizing "oppression" as a thing people do.

Anyone can do white supremacy. White supremacists, white centrists, well-meaning white radicals, even people of color. A Klansman does white supremacy more and more consciously than most white people, and POC have fewer opportunities and less incentive to do racism than white people, but both of them can be assholes in ways that support white supremacy.

The same goes for misogyny, for ableism, for Islamophobia, for classism, for homophobia and transphobia and other queerphobias, for every form of bigotry. People aren't bigots, actions are bigoted.

But most people talk about bigotry like it's a character trait and not a thing people do. (I personally suspect that's because the terms of discussion are set by people who want to think that not actively thinking certain people are inferior for no good reason means they're Not Bigots, but that's neither here nor there.)

People talk about MLK Jr, they talk about judging people by their character and not their skin color, and contrast that ideal with klansmen who say people with skin colors darker than Pantone 475 are innately inferior. This framing claims that racists are people who make white supremacy a core part of their personality, that non-racists are just people who don't think about skin color when judging people, and there's no room for a gray zone between the two.

That's not just a few outliers, that's how most American media, parents, and teachers describe the Civil Rights movement to kids. And as long as people learn about bigotry that way, they're going to think about all forms of bigotry through that lens until someone teaches them differently.

But teaching them differently is uncomfortable. If they accept your premises, they need to consciously think about statements and actions and even inactions that they used to do thoughtlessly. They might even need to change their behavior, reject conveniences that now feel natural, or at least feel guilty about using their privilege. From the perspective of an upper-middle-class white dude, there is nothing to gain from changing their mind, and not changing their mind is easier in the first place.

This is a serious problem, one which needs to be overcome if we want to make significant progress fighting systemic injustice of any kind. I'll let you know if I think of a solution.

lot of people take the idea they might be an oppressor like it's some kind of curse or marks them or makes them fundamentally irredeemable.

this means whenever someone suggests they might have structural power over some group, rather than being normal about it and going "oh yeah i should be mindful of how i act so i don't abuse that," they take it as a personal attack, and either jump to defending themselves by denying it, or start lashing out.

this makes 99.99999% of all conversations on this website completely fucking unbearable.

[yinlotus]

(original ask was mine) hi i am so sorry I did not mean to get you dragged into the discourse...i really just did want to complain for a minute about the US news cycle, and the fires/smoke hit especially close to home, and i thought you had made some good points so i sent in the ask. (also as an american i felt like i could critique it bc its my country)

I thought your answer was really well thought out like yes we both agree about it being extremely important to help canada & everywhere else that's on fire but you're right, that doesn't mean that people in nyc philly dc boston toronto montreal etc and all over the entire eastern coast of n.america aren't suffering too. my grandma has copd so i know that bad air quality can really be dangerous, especially for vulnerable people or those who cannot stay inside or stay home to work.

anyway again i'm very sorry i liked your answer to my ask and i hope you're not feeling bad about this

Hi Anon!

Aww thank you, but don't worry you don't have to apologize for sending in the ask. They commented on my other post as well so they would've done it regardless. It was annoying sure (my interactions with the other person, not your ask) but it's not worth anymore effort thinking about it.

I liked hearing your critique and thoughts! Heavens know I have plenty about this country that I want to critique. Though, I admit I'm usually more receptive to other Americans criticizing the US than others. From other people it usually tends to sound like "those stupid, white, rich ableist americans always causing problems and ignoring the rest of us" when that doesn’t portray the vast others that live here especially bipoc, disabled people, and anyone not upper middle class or above.

Like you, some of this hit close to home. I used to live in the areas affected more intensely and I have asthma bad enough to need a daily inhaler in addition to the one for emergencies. So, having seen posts completely negating that people would suffer from the air quality and that they should suck it up because Canada is doing worse, struck a nerve with me.

Thank you for asking in the first place! Don't feel afraid to send anything else because of what happened, it wasn't a big deal. 🩵

[multimediablogtori]

Black-Ish Analysis

1. What is the subject of your film, program, or internet/social media selection? Provide a brief summary, describing your selection and how it relates to our course topics, readings, and screenings. 

The tv show Black-ish highlights an upper class black family, their lives, and how they deal with social, personal, and cultural challenges. One of the main characters, Dre, struggles with his black identity, as well as upbringing his family, because he is in the middle of a white neighborhood.  This relates to cultural identity because it follows how he is working to define himself, despite the challenges that come with the world and culture around him, that isn’t necessarily his own.

2. Referring to related and appropriate readings and screenings from the course, describe how your selection represents racial and ethnic identities (and if applicable, intersectionality). In what ways does your selection for each of the journal entries generate a conversation regarding race, ethnicity, and cultural diversity? Include citations! 

Dre tries to create a sense of ethnic identity for his family, in hopes that it will allow them to embrace their background.  They talk about how the parents' childhood was much different than their childrens because of the certain area they are being brought up in. After doing some research about the writer of the show, Kenya Barris, he talks about how it is important to highlight the experiences of Black families in America, as well as discuss the differences in culture between families of different races, as well as in this environment of a predominantly white neighborhood. He talks about how it is important to know that every Black person doesn’t align with certain stereotypes. (Williams, 2014). Hence the name of the show “Black-ish”.

“He knows that, dummy! Look, the boy grew up different from how you did. Just like you grew up different from how I did, and now he is traveling down a road you ain’t never been on before. You ought to be glad Junior has the opportunity to do it his way.” (Season 5, Ep 1). Pops talks about how growing up is different than how they did, and how they have more opportunities for growth based on living the “American Dream.”

3. How does your selection relate to the course readings, screenings and discussions? Reflect upon the representation and circulation of racial and ethnic identities in popular visual culture. Your reflections should be attentive to the intersectionalities of race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, socioeconomic class and gender. 

This topic relates back to the first lesson we talked about in this course, and reading by Richard Dyer and the idea of what it means to be “white” and to identify with your race. Being “white” or studying “whiteness”  is a point of view, and Richard Dyer talks about “whiteness” as a sort of culture, and that we should consider whiteness as well as blackness in order to “make visible what is rendered invisible when viewed as the normative state of existence” (Dyer pg 302). In other words, all people need to try to put themselves in the shoes of other races and ethnicities in order to gather knowledge and understanding of the difficulties as well as experiences that occur from that point of view. This show is exactly that, where you have to think about what it means to be black, and how to identify yourself within a space where it isn’t necessarily easy to be brought back to your roots. 

4. Include images, video, audio, links or other media elements for your selection. Make sure you cite everything you use. 

Williams, B. (2014, August 29). 'Black-ish' Creator Kenya Barris Defines New Show  And Responds to Critics. Retrieved July 12, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/29/black-ish-kenya-barris-critics_n_5737966.html 

Fusco, & Wallis, B. (2003). Only skin deep : changing visions of the American self. International Center of Photography/Harry N. Abrams. Dyer, R. “On the Matter of Whiteness”

Barris, K. (Writer & Director). (2017, January 11). Gap Year (Season 5, Episode 1) [TV series episode]. In K. Barris, J. Groff, A. Anderson, E. B. Dobbins, L. Fishburne, and H. Sugland (Executive Producers), Black-ish. Wilmore Films; Artists First; Cinema Gypsy Productions; ABC Studios.

[beardedmrbean]

Oh yes the hoteps, how the fuck they got together? And why their main base is in Chicago?! Is there a certain kool aid I don’t know about

Also about my ancestry, the thing is I may visit Nigeria if a close friend from they want to come or like for research.

I mean in my black oriented stories, I was slams a hammer so hard in the audience head pointing out the black Americans would see the native Africans as foreigners

Also make passive aggressive comments on the Dahomey.

Actually…I wonder if I could like every talk to a African and expose how bad our education system is telling the us the whole story about the Africa slave kingdoms

I imagine they would have downright shocked that black Americans of all people never learn about the Dahomey until the first women king trailer

Like to me, sorry not taking away the Jewish people struggles, just showing how bad my community knowledge is to our ancestry. Is like a Jewish person never taught what Emperor Hadrian did to ancient Israel.

Then how just about how people like you reveal we did the genetic history of black Americans ancestors with enslaved ancestry and parts we’re from

Why isn’t taught, a huge identity crisis among my community id that we were taught that our pre American ancestors were only slaves.

Of course we aren’t part of those tribes but give us better state of mind…ish

But one thing

Me: So you bitch about the war on drugs and militarization of police the elites did?

Black activists: yep

Me: Had it ever occurred to you that we are taughted a sanitized version of the African slave trade all the way to college while we get hit with the native atrocities and Japanese interment camps stuff in middle school. And how antagonistic we are on average towards African immigrants because we act like toddlers?

BA: nope

Good why am I doing research about our main ancestors more than you

Oh yeah the root thing

https://x.com/copicsquiddo/status/1392364456127221761?s=46

You know with the whole decolonization talks, I notice that the left intentionally leave out black Americans because at the end of the day we are the irreversible result of colonization…unless the left have this dumbass option that modern Yoruba culture is the same as my ancestors were part of-oh my god

So yeah we’re rootless, to where we only have middle upper class people povs of Africa until the 60’s

Also this idea that black people cant cruel as our white slave owners? Oh yeah that never-

*Phone call from the afterlife*

Hello? Oh it Maya Angelou, pointing out that she was RAPED by her mom’s boyfriend as a child and why she was muted for a few years. OW! Oh it Micheal Jackson hitting that high note point out how much of a pos his father was to him and his siblings

Remember that Jackson 5 mini series where they point out the dad was abusive as hell

Got a feel mj and the others did “uncredited” consultants on that series

I heard that mj dad didn’t even GRIEVE or act sad his fucking son was dead. My god, actually I was checking Paris Jackson, she was on an Amazon show called the Swarm where she said her was culturally black. Swarm centered around a serial killer obsessed with a beyonce stand in.

So have the daughter of a man who finger twitch at concert made people faint. Is a good reference

But I read up that MJ mom tried to funraise a documentary after her son death…holy fuck is the MJ we know is a least terrible result of the household he was in?

Um oh yeah, *phone rings* oh Tyler Perry, orphan (wait she was and tp were basically Judas for their higher ups), children of the welfare queens and abusive inner cities parents pointing out the hell they went through

Okay I’m talking about child abuse, but I notice when white, Asian, and Latinos point out their parents and elders shitty actions they are supported

But when black Americans points out that a lot of our parents beat us harder than overseers did to other field ancestors. We need to treat them with kids gloves

Of course not all and we do point out this shit. We need to treat these abusive tactics with kids gloves

“Slavery, racism, and systematic oppression is why!”

Hmmm, why I don’t see Mexicans, Indians, Argentinians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Native Americans, giving their elders who often went through hell too. The same execuses?

Oh yes the hoteps, how the fuck they got together? And why their main base is in Chicago?! Is there a certain kool aid I don’t know about

Splinter from nation of islam, or something like that is my guess. Nailed it

I mean in my black oriented stories, I was slams a hammer so hard in the audience head pointing out the black Americans would see the native Africans as foreigners Also make passive aggressive comments on the Dahomey.

To them here they would be, just like the other way around would work the same, and far more than passive aggressive, but they earned it.

Prev bit and Like to me, sorry not taking away the Jewish people struggles, just showing how bad my community knowledge is to our ancestry. Is like a Jewish person never taught what Emperor Hadrian did to ancient Israel.

I wonder where "ancient" stops applying, that one happened well after Jesus

an·cient ADJECTIVE

belonging to the very distant past and no longer in existence: "the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean"

Suppose that works, nice and vague too. Granted that one doesn't turn up in Christianity so it's not too well known outside of Jewish circles, but they do their own schooling too, pretty much no matter where they are they have 'Jewish School' identity is important to them and all their holy days are confusing to a outsider.

There's a handy chart for us gentiles

Admittedly black Americans were not given the chance to do the same, there was "africatown" technically Plateau, Alabama where former slaves that still remembered home could go to escape Americans, not just white people.

Prev bit+ Of course we aren’t part of those tribes but give us better state of mind…ish

Absolutly be good to learn, sadly the nature of how so many got here y'all are likely to be in the same boat as so many of the rest of us are there, we're all mutts, I'm a european one they'd be african. Might explain some of the pan african stuff honestly, with DNA tests now you can pinpoint though just make sure the company isn't one that will sell your info to the cops or anyone else.

Me: So you bitch about the war on drugs and militarization of police the elites did? Black activists: yep Cont:

It's gonna start sinking in soon enough I think, the information is there and people know where to look now so there will be some folks that are not in the mood to be berated anymore that will begin the education process.

My guess at least.

This sounds familiar, can't just blame white people for that tho, also lots of the kingdoms and what not that did the selling and being sold don't exist anymore, makes it even harder.

Prev and I heard that mj dad didn’t even GRIEVE or act sad his fucking son was dead. My god, actually I was checking Paris Jackson, she was on an Amazon show called the Swarm where she said her was culturally black. Swarm centered around a serial killer obsessed with a beyonce stand in.

joe jackson that was bad ya, same with mya angelou, Tina Turner, and several other people through history, folks need to give up on the race dynamic parts of abuse and just focus on how to help people heal,

Blaming the actual abuser instead of some nebulous concept would be good too. Nice to give the bad guy a name, even if it's Joseph.

Okay I’m talking about child abuse, but I notice when white, Asian, and Latinos point out their parents and elders shitty actions they are supported But when black Americans points out that a lot of our parents beat us harder than overseers did to other field ancestors. We need to treat them with kids gloves

Overseers knew better than to beat the tractor with a baseball bat, one of those things that changed with slavery being abolished is working conditions could actually get worse.

Coal miner talking about the boss telling him to be sure and get the mule out if there's a cave in,

'what about me and the men boss'

'I can hire more men, gotta buy the mule'

“Slavery, racism, and systematic oppression is why!” Hmmm, why I don’t see Mexicans, Indians, Argentinians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Native Americans, giving their elders who often went through hell too. The same execuses?

there's a reason it changed to bipoc from just poc while the lgbt alphabet soup keeps getting longer and more inclusive.

[piraytoro]

Okay, so I haven’t seen any posts (which doesn’t mean they don’t exist!) about racism towards Latine people in Supernatural. I think one post I saw might have mentioned Edgar? But the thing I want to talk about is the Pishtaco (which I know as the Ñakaq). The show called it the “Peruvian fat-sucker,” which is actually the first issue that I take with it. The first thing you need to know is that the Ñakaq are white men. The fact that they made the Ñakaq Latine people is incredibly messed up. Because the thing is that the legend comes from ACTUAL HISTORICAL WHITE COLONIZERS boiling the bodies of indigenous Peruvian people for fat to oil their guns and create a salve to treat their wounds. They literally stole life from Indigenous people (traditionally in Peru fat more than blood is considered a symbol of life—the negative associations of fatness are another WONDERFUL gift from the colonizers—plus they actually had to literally kill them to get it) and the conquistadors used that life force to take other Indigenous lives and to preserve their own lives.

Supernatural literally flips this narrative. Two Peruvian immigrants are shown to be sucking the fat out of wealthy white middle-upper class people. Instead of the conquistadors being parasites, now it is the Native Peruvian people. THEY LITERALLY MADE THEIR ONLY TWO PERUVIAN CHARACTERS (and some of their only Latine characters) P A R A S I T E S. That is so messed up. But even more messed up is that, in doing so, they flipped the script from “white people come to Peru to steal land, livelihoods, and lives from Native peoples” to “Peruvian people come to America to steal white lives and livelihoods.” Sound familiar? This flipping of the script is textbook colonialist rhetoric. And these two “Pishtacos” moved to the US to get AWAY from the Pishtacos back home who kill people, so that they can try to “help people” instead. (Because fat shaming is AWESOME, but that needs to be a different post.) They need to leave their homeland for America to find a “better way.” The implication being that the Peruvian people back in Peru are savages, and in order to stop being savage, you must become American (and buy into both capitalism and fat shaming, which—again—is not a concept endemic to Indigenous Andean peoples). And the woman who can “civilize” (THIS WORD IS LITERALLY USED IN THE EPISODE!) herself is co-owner of the business, while her brother who refuses to assimilate is reduced to a menial job that is literally coded as menial BOTH culturally and by Dean’s reaction to getting assigned that job himself. Hello assimilation narrative!

And then, of course, the Latina woman’s white husband calls her brother a freak (which means he obviously thinks on some level that she’s a freak as well). White boy literally threatens to deport(/kill???) the brother and tells him his sister WANTS HIM TO BE DEPORTED (after all, she is the one who demoted him for not assimilating well enough)! And she ultimately sells him out by putting her white husband over him even though the husband’s already dead! Because the Winchesters are the only people who are allowed to save their sibling-who-is-killing-people and have that be the right thing to do every. damn. time. Family loyalty is the most important thing if you’re white people, but if you’re not white, assimilation should trump everything else. And even then it’s not quite enough, because no matter how much you assimilate you will never actually be white. (Don’t ask me about my generational trauma wrt this lolol.) In Supernatural terms, even if you’re not a killer, you’re still a monster.

The whole thing just reinforces the idea that the very presence of Latine people in the US threatens white American livelihoods (again, traditionally in the Andes fat symbolizes life and health) and lives. Because of course all the clients are white. And overall it basically sends the message that Latine people can’t be successful business owners, or if they are it’s because they’re “cheating” somehow or doing something underhanded literally at the expense of white people. And the bros deport her at the end of the episode, thus signaling that even those Latine immigrants who give in to the pressure to assimilate and even put white people above their own families still don’t belong here and are dangerous because they’re “feeding off the system.” Because that’s the rub—to become “civilized,” you must not only become an American, but a WHITE American, which you can never do. And deporting her is framed as a mercy! Because they didn’t kill her! And the true monsters—the white people who try to enforce cultural assimilation and then reject any efforts as not enough—walk free. The Winchesters are once again protecting the white American way of life.

OH and also they named this episode “The Purge.” And it ends with the killing of one Latine person and the deportation of another. The only two Latine characters in the episode. YEAH.

[bloodbenderz]

humaniterations (dot) net/2014/10/13/an-anarchist-perspective-on-the-red-lotus/ this article from oct 2014 is very dense — truly, a lot to unpack here, but I feel like you would find this piece interesting. I would love it if you shared your thoughts on the points that stood out to you, whether you agree or disagree. you obv don’t have to respond to it tho, but I’m sending it as an ask jic you feel like penning (and sharing) a magnificent essay, as is your wont 💕

article

i know this took me forever 2 answer SORRY but i just checked off all the things on my to do list for the first time in days today so. Essay incoming ladies!

ok im SO glad u sent me this bc it’s so so good. it’s a genuinely thoughtful criticism of the politics in legend of korra (altho i think its sometimes a little mean to korra unnecessarily like there’s no reason to call her a “petulant brat” or say that she throws tantrums but i do understand their point about her being an immature and reactionary hero, which i’ll get back to) and i think the author has a good balance between acknowledging like Yeah the lok writers were american liberals and wrote their show accordingly and Also writing a thorough analysis of lok’s politics that felt relevant and interesting without throwing their hands up and saying this is all useless liberal bullshit (which i will admit that i tend to do).

this article essentially argues that the red lotus antagonists of s3 were right. And that’s not an uncommon opinion i think but this gives it serious weight. Like, everything that zaheer’s gang did was, in context, fully understandable. of course the red lotus would be invested in making sure that the physically and spiritually and politically most powerful person in the world ISNT raised by world leaders and a secret society of elites that’s completely unaccountable to the people! of course the red lotus wants to bring down tyrannical governments and allow communities to form and self govern organically! and the writers dismiss all of that out of hand by 1. consistently framing the red lotus as insane and murderous (korra never actually gives zaheer’s ideas a chance or truly considers integrating them into her own approach) 2. representing the death of the earth queen as not just something that’s not necessarily popular (what was with mako’s bootlicker grandma, i’d love to know) but as something that causes unbelievable violence and chaos in ba sing se (which, like, a lot of history and research will tell you that people in disasters tend towards prosocial behaviors). so the way the story frames each of these characters and ideologies is fascinating because like. if you wanted to write season 3 of legend of korra with zaheer as the protagonist and korra as the antagonist, you wouldn’t actually have to change the sequence of events at all, really. these writers in particular and liberal writers in general LOVE writing morally-gray-but-ultimately-sympathetic characters (like, almost EVERY SINGLE fire nation character in the first series, who were full on violent colonizers but all to a degree were rehabilitated in the eyes of the viewer) but instead of framing the red lotus as good people who are devoted to justice and freedom and sometimes behave cruelly to get where theyre trying to go, they frame them as psychopaths and murderers who have good intentions don’t really understand how to make the world a better place.

and the interesting thing about all this, about the fact that the red lotus acted in most cases exactly as it should have in context and the only reason its relegated to villain status is bc the show is written by liberals, is that the red lotus actually points out really glaring sociopolitical issues in universe! like, watching the show, u think well why the fuck HASN’T korra done anything about the earth queen oppressing her subjects? why DOESN’T korra do anything about the worse than useless republic president? why the hell are so many people living in poverty while our mains live cushy well fed lives? how come earth kingdom land only seems to belong to various monarchs and settler colonists, instead of the people who are actually indigenous to it? the show does not want to answer these questions, because american liberal capitalism literally survives on the reality of oppressive governments and worse than useless presidents and people living in poverty while the middle/upper class eats and indigenous land being stolen. if the show were to answer these questions honestly, the answer would be that the status quo in real life (and the one on the show that mirrors real life) Has To Change.

So they avoid answering these questions honestly in order for the thesis statement to be that the status quo is good. and the only way for the show to escape answering these questions is for them to individualize all these broad social problems down into Good people and Bad people. so while we have obvious bad ones like the earth queen we also have all these capitalists and monarchs and politicians who are actually very nice and lovely people who would never hurt anyone! which is just such an absurd take and it’s liberal propaganda at its best. holding a position of incredible political/economic power in an unjust society is inherently unethical and maintaining that position of power requires violence against the people you have power over. which is literally social justice 101. but there’s literally no normal, average, not-politically-powerful person on the show. so when leftist anarchism is presented and says that destroying systems that enforce extreme power differentials is the only way to bring peace and freedom to all, the show has already set us up to think, hey, fuck you, top cop lin beifong and ford motor ceo asami sato are good people and good people like them exist! and all we have to do to move forward and progress as a society is to make sure we have enough good individuals in enough powerful positions (like zuko as the fire lord ending the war, or wu as the earth king ending the monarchy)! which is of course complete fiction. liberal reform doesn’t work. but by pretending that it could work by saying that the SYSTEM isnt rotten it’s just that the people running it suck and we just need to replace those people, it automatically delegitimizes any radical movements that actually seek to change things.

and that’s the most interesting thing about this article to me is that it posits that the avatar...might actually be a negative presence in the world. the avatar is the exact same thing: it’s a position of immense political and physical power bestowed completely randomly, and depending on the moral character and various actions of who fills that position at any given time, millions of people will or won’t suffer. like kyoshi, who created the fascist dai li, like roku, who refused to remove a genocidal dictator from power, like aang, who facilitated the establishment of a settler colonial state on earth kingdom land. like korra! she’s an incredibly immature avatar and a generally reactionary lead. i’ve talked about this at length before but she never actually gets in touch with the needs of the people. she’s constantly running in elite circles, exposed only to the needs and squabbles of the upper class! how the hell is she supposed to understand the complexities of oppression and privilege when she was raised by a chess club with inordinate amounts of power and associates almost exclusively with politicians and billionaires?? from day 1 we see that she tends to see things in very black and white ways which is FINE if you’re a privileged 17 yr old girl seeing the world for the first time but NOT FINE if you’re the single most powerful person in the world! Yeah, korra thinks the world is probably mostly fine and just needs a little whipping into shape every couple years, because all she has ever known is a mostly fine world! in s1 when mako mentions that he as a homeless impoverished teenager worked for a gang (which is. Not weird. Impoverished people of every background are ALWAYS more likely to resort to socially unacceptable ways of making money) korra is like “you guys are criminals?????!!!!!” she was raised in perfect luxury by a conservative institution and just never developed beyond that. So sure, if the red lotus raised her anarchist, probably a lot would’ve been different/better, but....they didn’t. and korra ended up being a reactionary and conservative avatar who protected monarchs and colonialist politicians. The avatar as a position is completely subject to the whims of whoever is currently the avatar. and not only does that suck for everyone who is not the avatar, not only is it totally unfair to whatever kid who grows up knowing the fate of the world is squarely on their shoulders, but it as a concept is a highly individualist product of the authors’ own western liberal ideas of progress! the idea that one good leader can fix the world (or should even try) based on their own inherent superiority to everyone else is unbelievably flawed and ignores the fact that all real progress is brought about as a result of COMMUNITY work, as a result of normal people working for themselves and their neighbors!

the broader analysis of bending was really interesting to me too, but im honestly not sure i Totally agree with it. the article pretty much accepts the show’s assertion that bending is a privilege (and frankly backs it up much better than the original show did, but whatever), and i don’t think that’s NECESSARILY untrue since it is, like, a physical advantage (the author compares it to, for example, the fact that some people are born athletically gifted and others are born with extreme physical limitations), but i DO think that it discounts the in universe racialization of bending. in any sequel to atla that made sense, bending as a race making fact would have been explored ALONGSIDE the physical advantages it bestows on people. colonialism and its aftermath is generally ignored in this article which is its major weakness i think, especially in conjunction with bending. you can bring up the ideas the author did about individual vs community oriented progress in the avatar universe while safely ignoring the colonialism, but you can’t not bring up race and colonialism when you discuss bending. especially once you get to thinking about how water/earth/airbenders were imprisoned and killed specifically because bending was a physical advantage, and that physical advantage was something that would have given colonized populations a means of resistance and that the fire nation wanted to keep to itself.

i think that’s the best lens thru which to analyze bending tbh! like in the avatar universe bending is a tool that different ethnic groups tend to use in different ways. at its best, bending actually doesn’t represent social power differences (despite representing a physical power difference) because it’s used to represent/maintain community solidarity. like, take the water tribe. katara being the last waterbender, in some way, makes her the last of a part of swt CULTURE. the implication is that when there were a lot of waterbenders in the south, they dedicated their talents to building community and helping their neighbors, because this was something incredibly culturally important and important to the water tribe as a community. the swt as a COLLECTIVE values bending for what it can do for the entire tribe, which counts for basically every other talent a person can have (strength, creativity, etc). the fire nation, by contrast, distorts the community value of bending by racializing it: anyone who bends an element that isn’t fire is inherently NOT fire nation (and therefore inherently inferior) and, because of the physical power that bending confers, anyone who bends an element that isn’t fire is a threat to fire nation hegemony. and in THAT framework of bending, it’s something that intrinsically assigns worth and reifies race in a way that’s conveniently beneficial to the oppressor.

it IS worth talking about how using Element as a way to categorize people reifies nations, borders, and race in a way that is VERY characteristic of white american liberals. i tried to be conscious of that (and the way that elements/bending can act in DIFFERENT ways, depending on cultural context) but i think it’s pretty clear that the writers did intend for element to unequivocally signify nation (and, by extension, race), which is part of why they screwed up mixed families so bad in lok. when they’ve locked themselves into this idea that element=nation=race, they end up with sets of siblings like mako and bolin or kya tenzin and bumi, who all “take” after only one parent based on the element that they bend. which is just completely stupid but very indicative of how the writers actually INTENDED element/bending to be a race making process. and its both fucked up and interesting that the writers display the same framework of race analysis that the canonical antagonists of atla do.

anyway that’s a few thoughts! thank u again for sending the article i really loved it and i had a lot of fun writing this <3

[ofprevioustimes]

everyone who disagrees with me is a white upper class person? lmao i bet you’re from the united states and are barely a shade darker than ivory lmao. you reek of privilege.

enjoy trying to pronounce ‘vamxs a lx playa mis amigxs’ in your white millennial liberal hell you stupid cunt

I honestly don't know which part of this ask is funnier: thinking I'm from the US (probably learned from my comment that it's problematic to call it America, huh?), thinking I am white (like a Karen would be), a liberal, or assuming that being latina means I'm hispanic, which is a dumb as hell assumption, considering that I'm brazilian and my mother language is portuguese.

It does sound like my comment hit home though, bc honestly who else but an upper-middle class first world white girl would waste time with these asks? Here in the real world we have better things to do, Karen.

But you can have a picture of my beautiful, south-american, cinnamon tinted ass, just for you to kiss! BESOS

[gordvendomewhore]

I wanted... to point something out to you about the 'who would vote for trump post'-

Parker is an Asian American-

He's like, one of the ONLY asian kids in school.

hi anon!! thank you for leaving an “ask” (in quotations since you’re not really asking me something lol)!!

(for reference, this is the post anon is referring to)

i wanna say now that this post is meant to be read lightheartedly and that it is written with no malice at all (/gen)!! however, i am about to tear you a new hole

first of all, i am asian LMAOOO first gen vietnamese, baybee 😼🇻🇳

not very obvious since a tumblr blog for a rockstar game isn’t exactly somewhere where you would post about your personal life, but yes i am asian and so i know what it’s like to be asian american.

second of all, parker is not confirmed ANYWHERE to be canonically asian. i headcanon him as asian, a lot of people do!! but the only thing we have to go off of are his straight black hair and his pale skin, features associated with east asia.

but when you compare parker to characters that are confirmed asian, angie ng and mr. oh, there’s notable differences to take note of:

angie and mr. oh have explicitly asian surnames (which hey! no big deal, surname doesn’t always indicate ethnicity)

angie and mr. oh are both voiced by asian voice actors; parker is not

angie and mr. oh’s faces are modeled with features that are distinctively asian; parker lacks that

now, none of that really means anything, because for all we know parker could STILL be asian. hell, i’ll go to my fucking GRAVE saying that he’s asian bc god knows this game needs the representation, but i argue against it in this situation because i know how to distinguish canon from fanon.

and frankly? ethnicity does not change the points i made in that post lmao.

parker is naive and blatantly unaware of what is going on in the world around him lmao. he’s a prep: we can assume he’s at LEAST upper middle class, and so he’s grown up comfortably without having to worry about things like that. he’s influenced by people like DERBY HARRINGTON and listening to his dialogue, it’s obvious his parents aren’t feeding him the most progressive ideologies either.

asian or white or mixed, being a person of color does not automatically indicate that someone is not bigoted. often it does, but with parker it would not given the nature of his character. either way, i know a lot of asian people who LOVE trump.

but in the long run, this really doesn’t matter lmaoooo think what you want anon!! /lh /gen

if you want to argue that he’s asian and wouldn’t ever vote for that walking turd, argue it to your heart’s content. this is just my view on it all as someone who loves bully, loves the preps, loves parker, and is also a politically and socially aware asian american.

if you read all this…thank you LMAO have a nice day yall

[alexa-santi-author]

I have a long enough opinion on this that I needed to wait until I could get to my desktop rather than trying to thumb-type it on my iPad like I usually do. 😂

TL;dr: Being working-class sucked until around the 1950s, so you won't find a lot of historical romances where both partners are working-class, and current authors are using current research to be more inclusive to reflect the actual reality of history.

In general, historical romances don't usually have two working-class characters with jobs who get together. That's partly because, frankly, working conditions were horrific through most of the 18th and 19th centuries and into the 20th. Despite the bill of goods we were sold by the Victorian Era, "old family retainer" servants who stayed with the same family for decades were quite rare, and job-hopping or just getting sick of service work and finding a different job were common. Factories were terrible places to work, where people were maimed or killed on the job pretty frequently, and would have to go to the workhouse in order not to starve. And even people who kept their jobs frequently starved and died young.

I do think that the middle class gets too short shrift in historical romance. There were plenty of successful merchants, lawyers, bankers, etc. who did well for themselves, even if they couldn't afford to build or maintain a Blenheim Palace. Though, frankly, if you made enough money in England, you would eventually marry one of your kids into the aristocracy so they could build their wealth even higher. The famous Sally, Lady Jersey, of Almack's fame, was actually the granddaughter of the banker Robert Coutts and was left his shares when he died. Her grandfather knew that Sally's father was a fortune hunter, which is why she got the money and not her mother or older brother. She was very active on the board of the bank until a few years before she died, all through the Regency Era, and yet we only know about her social life and not her working life thanks to writers like Georgette Heyer.

(You can read my opinion about Heyer here. Shorter me: her "historical accuracy" is greatly overrated.)

Mary Balogh is one of my favorite Regency romance authors, and she does address class issues fairly often. A Matter of Class is the most obvious one, but a favorite of mine is the first book in her Survivors' Club series, The Proposal. The hero is a middle-class man from a family of successful merchants who was given a title thanks to his heroism during the Napoleonic Wars, but he's very ambivalent about it thanks to his PTSD. The heroine is a widow from an aristocratic family. A big part of the conflict in the book is whether or not she's going to be able to accept his middle-class family despite her upbringing.

American historical romances are different since we don't have a hereditary aristocracy, but generally one or both characters are rich if they're located on the East Coast (as with Joanna Shupe's Gilded Age books). If they're located in the West, then one character usually owns a ranch or has another visible means of income like mining rights so, again, they may have to work hard, but it's on their own property for their own benefit and not working for someone else.

And race. Thanks to writers like Georgette Heyer, we have what is now turning out to be an outdated notion that the British aristocracy was lily-white. In fact, you can look at non-fiction books like White Mughals by William Dalrymple and Children of Uncertain Fortune by Daniel Livesay and see that Indian and Black people were, in fact, marrying into the aristocracy as long as they had money and family support. The reason Dido Elizabeth Belle ended up marrying an upper servant was not because of her race. It was because her uncle left her only a small dowry, and she didn't have much social support from her family. In the very first chapter of his book, Livesay finds a mixed-race heiress from Jamaica who married one of the younger sons of the Earl of Fife, because at that time in history, money and family connections mattered more than race. That changed with the Victorian Era when "scientific" racism came in to bolster American slaveowners, but that's a rant for another day.

(That's not to say that bigotry and racism -- often physically violent and gross -- didn't exist in the Georgian and Regency eras. But having lots of money and social support from your white family could mitigate more of it than modern people realize.)

Some writers have been including this reality in their books for decades. I don't think she writes Indian characters nearly as well as she thinks she does (there's a lot of uncomfortable Orientalism), but Mary Jo Putney has had mixed-race Indian heroes and heroines for years, plus at least one mixed-race Chinese heroine. She started that in the 1990s, so it's not like the discussion was never had before Julia Quinn.

With the advent of indie publishing, a lot more Black authors are writing what they like to read, which oftentimes is Regency romance, because it's a fun fantasy world to write in. And a lot of them are now writing Black heroines into that world, because recent research has shown that it's not actually ahistorical to do it.

So, it's changing. I'm writing an interracial Regency novella right now, where the hero is a younger son of a duke who went into the army as his career, and the heroine is the Black daughter of a family that escaped slavery during the War of 1812 and made their way to England, where her father became a successful merchant. There will be a bit of racial tension, but the larger issue will be the class issue: he's an aristocrat, she's middle-class but not rich enough for his family to be happy for them to marry.

Last note: people will sometimes play semantic games and insist that only the actual titleholder counts as part of the aristocracy, so therefore there were no BIPOC who were aristocrats. Not only is that dumb and ahistorical -- the wives and children of titleholders may be legally commoners, but were never considered that socially -- it's not even true now that we know that some Black and Indian women either married into the aristocracy or had their children marry into it. Princes William and Harry both have Indian ancestry thanks to their mother, who had a direct Spencer ancestor who had children with his Indian mistress that later married a Spencer.

your latest review made me curious about regency/historical romances featuring the servants or working class characters, how prevalent are they? any you would recommend?

It's not really prevalent, and there are several reasons why.

a) many (not all) historical romance writers do suffer from classist or elitist streaks, and tbh, a lot of historical romance readers also suffer from this streak. There's historically (get it) been this uplifting of not only the wealth that comes with the elite, but simply the title. Like, a lot of dukes have plots where they don't have any money, and that's not new; but them being dukes keeps them "above" and thus venerated by the genre.

b) there is also a big race problem in historical romance. Think the Julia Quinn "I don't write people of color because people of color don't have happy endings" mentality--she's not the only one with that mindset (and I'm gonna be real, in one of the multiple situations where she made comments like this, Eloisa James was pretty much backing her up right there). Not that people of color were inherently working class at all, but I do think that if we had seen more diversity in general in historical romance from the jump, we would also 100% see more working class people depicted in historical romance.

c) there is, either way, an element of fantasy involved. I work very hard for my money, and I'm living paycheck to paycheck nonetheless. I think that there should be more depictions of working class love in historical romance, but I'd be lying to you if I said I sought out books in which, at the end of the story, money remains a big concern for people. It's very stressful for me, versus relatable; and I don't think I'm alone there. There relatability perhaps comes from money being a concern at the beginning, but for me to feel okay with an HEA, I don't want it to be an active concern at the end. This doesn't mean people need to be SUPER WEALTHY or that it needs to be a huge plot factor. But I think this is why the concept of the "interclass" romance exists, or the person who began working class but has become super rich before the story even began. You can start struggling, but you can't end struggling for a lot of readers.

And this, considering my previous point, goes across the racial divide in historical romance--Beverly Jenkins writers about Black characters in the 1800s, but her heroes often come from wealth, or are at least quite comfortable (and often her heroines are the same). Jeannie Lin writes Tang Dynasty Chinese characters who are often of the extreme upper classes. And I think these choices do an extra layer of work when people are writing about people of color, because there is this idea pushed that all people of color did in the past was suffer under white oppression, which ignores thriving communities, massively expansive eras of history, culture, etc. Beverly Jenkins in particular does great work with exploring the different levels of class in 1800s Black America; Forbidden and Indigo are so compelling on that level. As much as the heroines are "working class", the heroes are both wealthy upon meeting them, influential, etc.

So what you will see a lot of is books with the "working class hero has gotten rich", like Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas. Neither Derek nor Sara are upper class. She's decidedly middle class, though she makes a good living as an author. She doesn't have titled parents, she doesn't come from a grand house, but she does come from "respectable stock" and is well-bred enough for Derek to feel a way about it. Derek comes from the literal gutter and was essentially a sex worker for years before getting rich enough to invest in his own gambling club. His entire identity is wrapped up in him being lower class and considering himself less than Sara--he can't ever truly drop his accent, no matter how hard he works at it. But he is also.... super rich, lol. Her other self made men are similar; Simon Hunt is looked down on by his heroine initially for being poorly bred, but he's much wealthier than her from the jump and is tight with an earl. Evie Jenner and Sebastian St. Vincent flip this, in a sense. Her mom married down when she got with a gambling club owner, but his money makes Evie an heiress and Sebastian is well-bred but poor, so it all works out.

Lorraine Heath does similar stuff--in her Scoundrels of St. James series, you have one hero who grew up impoverished much of his life but was a secret nobleman, Jack Dodger grew up poor but became wealthy, James Swindler grew up on the streets and is now a respected inspector who probably isn't making a ton of money but is comfortable and has friends in high places and doesn't really want for anything. Kerrigan Byrne has several heroes who grew up in the dredges but are now like, criminal masterminds with tons of money.

I feel like Thief of Shadows by Elizabeth Hoyt gets like... close....? Because Winter is a poor schoolmaster, and though his heroine is a society lady, she's also a widow and she would have to give some shit up to be with him, for sure. Hoyt is much more interested in working class people than a lot of writers, imo--The Leopard Prince has a steward hero (but he gets with an heiress), Scandalous Desires has a heroine who also works at the orphanage and her hero is not upper class at all (but he is a rich pirate--I mean, shit does happen there), Sweetest Scoundrel has a heroine who is not poor but is not legitimate either, and a hero who's trying to build his business.

I can't think of many about servants that don't involve the servant getting with someone who is not a servant, lol. Like, a lot of people recommend An Offer from a Gentleman as the classic "servant heroine" romance, and I'll be real, I super dislike that book in general because I find it boring and the hero is a total flop... But also, the heroine gets with Thee Most Idle Riche guy ever (he's a painter! he doesn't even have rent to collect! Anthony is at least sending out strongly worded "the rent is due" reminders, which... look, there are problems with truly upper class heroes, for sure lol) and it's like... okay..... When a "servant/upper class person" romance hits for me, it hits, but I can be a hard sell. I think the one I've liked most was probably The Leopard Prince by Elizabeth Hoyt, and that was again, a steward hero and an heiress heroine.

Anyway, I have a lot of feelings, on to more recs that might scratch the itch:

The Queer Principles of Kit Webb by Cat Sebastian--the book actually examines class a lot, and while one hero is the son of a duke, there are.......... many things explored there. It's also just super romantic and good and I love it.

Glory and the Master of Shadows by Grace Callaway--the heroine is 1/4 Chinese (but it's not really something she can publicly acknowledge for reasons relating to her birth and her parents'... complex past) and the hero is Chinese and came to England as a young man. She's the daughter of a duke, but he obviously does not come from any kind of title or even heritage the English aristocracy will acknowledge, and I found the dynamic in this one super compelling in terms of how the heroine connected with him over their shared cultural backgrounds that he was super in touch with already, while she felt disconnected.

The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen by K.J. Charles--one hero is a minor baron but to be blunt he doesn't have a lot of money and power, while the other hero is "working class", but is a powerful smuggler, so the dynamics examined here are super interesting

A Rogue's Rules for Seduction by Eva Leigh--heroine is upper class but doesn't have a lot of money, hero is working class but his family made a lot of cash when he was young, so he remembers being poor but is not now, but still feels that level of being ostracized

What A Rogue Desires by Caroline Linden--this one has a con artist heroine and a second son hero, who actually has to like... shape the fuck up to be worthy of her, which I liked a lot

Any Duchess Will Do by Tessa Dare--very classic class divide, heroine was a barmaid, hero is a duke

But yeah, honestly, I can't think of any books that have worked for me where both sides are not well off--and I think that's partially on me and my taste, but also on the genre making them not super like... popular, accessible, whatever. Often, when you do see the supporting or "servant" characters getting a love story, it'll be in a novella.

[butcharyastark]

like yeah. jeff bezos is worst of the worst and so are his ilk, and literally none of it matters if they arent stopped wholescale from ruining the planet and killing everyone in the process, but some of the ""leftists"" on here legit talk as if classism isn't a whole separate thing from capitalism on its own. as if it hasnt always existed whether or not capitalism exists--and not to be cynical, but probably always will still exist.

and i know why lmao its because anybody who isnt a ceo of a company wants to point fingers so they can avoid the accountability for their own privilege. but like. you are capable of upholding capitalism and clasissm. i dont care if you hate 9-5 work culture and are always exhausted and want to start a revolution, because if you arent poor, guess what? you have class privilege. it doesnt make capitalism suck less for you, but--here is the main thing--you are not the target.

like even as a poor person myself, i have immense privilege compared to others. my whiteness (a class in itself, post-colonialism) gives me access to resources and class mobility that poor poc simply do not have. being a white american means that even in a worst case scenario, i will not be among the first groups suffering from the planet wide environmental and community devastation--that's black and brown ppl in the global south. i am lucky enough to have a house, and to usually have food, which immediately puts me financially ahead of a significant portion of poor ppl in my own community.

and some ppl on this website who are upper middle and upper class assholes will not even fucking acknowledge that classism as an oppression systems exists regardless of capitalism, and that they have a hand in it.

well, guess what--if you don't acknowledge it, there is no way any of the real big targets and perpetrators of climate change and capitalistic oppression are ever going to be stopped. if you dont have actually solidarity and keep leveraging ur own ability to uphold the system against ppl with less privilege than you.

[friendoftheelves]

People, what is somethings you wish writers knew about your culture, I'll start (I'm English):

If you say British-English I will riot. It's standard English, American English is just the most commonly spoken version of English, being the dominant culture

Nobody cares about sports at Secondary school, I didn't realise my school had sports teams until like year 11 when I saw them leaving and it was just a casual observation

Also Primary school = reception to year 6 or ages 4 to 11, Secondary school = years 7 to 11 or ages 11 to 16, Sixth Form (attached to a secondary school) and college (independent from a secondary school but otherwise same thing) = 16 to 18. Primary school to Secondary school is compulsory, after that you have to attend some form of further education whether that be an apprenticeship or sixth form/college is up to you. It is common to have a compulsory uniform for secondary school and less common for both primary school and sixth form/college. Primary school and sixth form/college uniforms are noteworthy whereas a lack of compulsory uniform in secondary school is noteworthy

American culture is the dominant one, we have watched and read a lot of American media

If you're poor, you live in a council flat and probably have free school meals, "trailer trash" isn't really a thing because trailers just aren't a common occurrence, the only group I can think of that commonly lives in "trailers" is 'gypsy' who are their own community and live in motorhomes. Discrimination against them is common but not in your face, which I will explain in a bit because that is its own point

People care a lot about both rugby and football and if you call it soccer and act all superior about you will make a lot of people mad because British football officially came first and a lot of languages call it something that sounds very close to football in their language and American football is closer to rugby in how it looks to us so it is a very sore point

Also, in case you haven't gathered, Britain is subtly anti-American we had an empire and we are bitter we lost it so seeing America get to where we were is something Britain does not react well to

British culture is all about pretending everything so normal and subduing, ignoring and otherwise refusing to acknowledge what strays from that "normal" so unless we are forced to openly acknowledge it we will not and then we will passive aggressively snipe at it. American culture is all about being in your face, British culture is all about pretending we don't see what's wrong. We refuse to acknowledge we even had an empire

Class is a big deal. The elites in our culture have historically been their own one and this is still seen today. Class divide is what defines us. We have things like the house of commons and the house of lords. Rather than the rich ending up in positions of power due to society falling to prevent their privilege, British culture and actively encourages elite power. There is still discrimination but because of the importance of class divide and the British refusal to acknowledge our own faults, it presents differently. Race is seen as it's own class below working class and there is discrimination between the white classes. The working class are seen as beneath the rich and the rich are seen as 'upperclass tw**s'. The middle class are then seen as traitors and having abandoned the working class because the elite government has purposefully drafted policies to ensure that happens

Also,all of the above applies to English culture. There are three countries in Great Britain and 4 countries in the UK. England, Wales, Scotland and North Ireland and the divide between these countries is clear. Scotland actively hates England, Wales passive aggressively hates us and Ireland is a mess we created (I would suggest waiting for someone who is Irish to explain that because I don't know enough about it and it is an incredibly complicated topic which plays a significant role in politics)

Also we dislike the French, Britain and France are rivals because we have been fighting on and off for centuries but the French are still seen as equals. We dislike them but we will fight alongside them if if comes to it

Also accents are important, because of the class divide, if you have a working class accent you are being discriminated against, if you have a posh accent you will be hated but people will respect your 'authority', no matter how much they hate

Oxbridge is elitist but there are so many other great Unis across the UK

To American media specifically, stop romanticising British culture, I have never seen the academia aesthetic you are portraying and it irritates, we are not just the rich upper class, look at our history people you portray and because of the class divide it hurts to see that as our only representation

Also London is its own thing, Britain does not recognise London as representative of Britain and London does not like everywhere that is London, it is the most diverse and the biggest city in the entirety of England by a large margin, it does not feel like the rest of Britain

On that point, there are many, many other cities and other towns outside of London, please acknowledge them (having never been to a lot of cities I can't explain them to you)

London does have divides within it such as the divide between North and South of the river, the South does not want to be part of London and the North refuses to acknowledge it. The Northern edge of London is also up for debate, for me it is the edge of Zone 3 (on a tube map) and the other side of the North circular by car but for others it might be further in or out so be aware of that. There is also divide between the post codes for example Wood Green and Tottenham, both have the same council (Haringey) but there is a clear divide between them only further emphasises by Haringey having two MPs one for Tottenham (David Lammey) and one for Wood Green and Hornsey. Both Wood Green and Tottenham have bad reps but the Wood Green half of Haringey starts drifting into middle class at its edges with Hornsey being solidly middle class so be aware of the variation in boroughs

And, London has no centre. It is a city that grew with its country and absorbed the surrounding towns. So if you say the centre of London people will assume you mean a specific part in zone 1 but will not know which part you are talking about and will assume you are talking in a generalisation. If they are traveling with you though, they will expect further clarification, don't say the centre and expect me to know where

Also, there is no space between houses in England, they are mostly semi-detached. I once watched an episode of escape to the country where someone tried to find a detached house and just struggled massively. You either have to pay loads of money or be in the middle of nowhere before your house is fully detached and it will still be only the same distance away from another house as the average American house is. We have one of the highest populations in Europe but a small land mass

Going on from that, Britain is definitely European and has a lot of shared culture whilst still obviously being it's own thing (like every single other country) but Britain acts like and will get mad at the suggestion that they are European like any other European country because 'we are entirely seperate and on an island and how can we not have become our own thing' the actual variation is because Rome (contrary to what the school system will teach you) had very little impact on Britain so we aren't as similar to the other Latin speaking countries as is expected, the main reason we are still similar is because of the impact of Norman conquest. Also everyone underestimated the effect of Scandinavian and Germanic culture on Britain because we act like all they did was pillage when in fact they settled down and where embraced by Briton (unlike Rome which did actually pillage and subjugate Britain without being widely accepted) so that's why there is variation. We are very European but not in the way people expect so Britain refuses to acknowledge it

Honestly British culture is a lesson in tolerance versus acceptance. But there is still active discrimination as people of colour and the LGBTQ+ can attest

Also Christianity is baked into Britain to the point that even atheists follow Christian customs without questioning it but significantly less extreme than France which just stops on Sundays (but is acknowledged as a Christian country so you know) and 'pagan' - so, in this case, Celtic, anglosaxon and Norse - culture has effected us being carried down in fairy tales and witchcraft

Some of this will be upsetting to many people as it should be because British culture hurts, it discriminates without acknowledging it and I want people to know that. I want people to see that when they write about it because the alternative is writing about Britain as if it has faults and that would be so much worse. So writers, please bear all of this in mind when talking about Britain, even and especially, the ugly parts

This has been a white, middle class, Londoners, perspective on Britain and no I will not call myself English because the divide between England and London means that being a Londoner rather than just English matters in this context

I would recommend listening to the perspective of Brits from other groups, such as England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, working class, upper class, Brit of colour, non-passing queer folk, Muslim, Hindu, Indian (the largest immigrant group is actually Indian and that's just immigrated in their lifetime rather than born British and Indian), Jewish (especially Jewish I can talk about that on another post but let's just say the Jewish have never been accepted but always been part of Europe) and so on, to get a more comprehensive view of Britain