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When the movie syncs up with the real time events for a few minutes around the collision that’s what life is all about.

Started playing Titanic at 10pm, got notifications on for someone posting the voyage in real time, my Sunday evening is all sorted.

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Started playing Titanic at 10pm, got notifications on for someone posting the voyage in real time, my Sunday evening is all sorted.

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hey, thanks for pushing against that "most korean mothers want their daughters to have their jaws paralysed" post. really shitty thing to read. being on the fannish anglosphere while not being from the us/uk can be wild because often people will just drop these bizarre racist tidbits about your country they got from somewhere cursed and act like they're experts! and meanwhile we actually know a lot about the countries they're from bc imperialism and all. the contrast's painful and it's not a thing that gets often talked about in fandom. so thank you

It was completely infuriating to read and I just couldn’t let it go. You’re completely right too because there is all this talk in fandom about the need to be diligent against racism and yet even that occurs through this Western lens and the massive unspoken xenophobia problem is never acknowledged or taken seriously.

#911 discourse

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“the problem here is not the dogpile” is also a crazy thing to say but whatever

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Okay I said I was going to do it tomorrow but I lied let me just do it now because I have been angry about this for two days and give it up to god after that.

I actually have one more post I am going to make about that whole mess because I am planning to address the person who made the racist comments about Korean culture I mentioned directly, but I’m going to do that tomorrow once I have worked out exactly what I want to say to that individual, and then after that I will put it to bed.

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This is the actual last thing I want to say about this but it’s important. These kinds of generalisations about foreign countries picked up from sources like The Daily Mail and deployed to justify smearing foreign artists are deeply xenophobic and racist and it is absolutely unacceptable to say things like this in any context. Setting aside any question of the validity of the original criticism, if you make these sorts of generalisations about strangers based on xenophobic stereotypes you have picked up from this or that source you are not the good guy and you are not on the side of anti-racism. Since I am also British I will mention that the UK is a deeply racist and misogynistic society and there is no world in which we should be positioning ourselves as more enlightened on these issues than people from other countries based on scaremongering exoticist ideas about their cultures. It’s completely unacceptable and frankly it’s embarrassing. And it’s also shocking that as far as I can tell none of the people in this conversation pushed back on this flagrant racism from @puppyboybuckley in any capacity. None of you are serious people, none of you have any real sense of justice. This was all a xenophobic bullying meltdown born from jealousy that a newcomer to the fandom was gaining mild popularity through posting fanart, and it is completely impossible to believe that any of you care about racism directed at Korean American characters considering the comments you tolerate about Korean culture.

As for @aeraspais’s remarks about “darkskinned Eddie and Aryan Buck fanart” it should be obvious that what she was referring to is racist trends in popular art which fetishises Buck’s whiteness in contrast to Eddie that doesn’t get called out and isn’t mentioned because again this isn’t a serious issue to any of you. It’s just a vector for bullying an international fan off tumblr. And with all that said I’m done, enjoy being miserable, uncreative, and taking your personal hang ups out on complete strangers for the rest of your lives.

love being blocked by @pururing when all i did was reblog a post they're not tagged on to include my tags in a thoughtful expression of my experience as a southeast asian consuming media

⬇️

🤔

anyway, support whoever you want in fandom but this is a very loud example of missing the point by a MILE

#911 discourse

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I actually have one more post I am going to make about that whole mess because I am planning to address the person who made the racist comments about Korean culture I mentioned directly, but I’m going to do that tomorrow once I have worked out exactly what I want to say to that individual, and then after that I will put it to bed.

#just so it doesn’t seem like I am dragging it or ‘one more thing’ing it to death #I just think those statements were so awful it merits direct redress where the person who made them will see

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Some final thoughts on what happened in 9-1-1 fandom recently because I’m not sure if this has been discussed but I think when the initial accusations against pururing were made the assumption on the part of the people making them was that pururing was a white American. I saw some comments about how the alleged whitewashing was a product of “them” (as in, presumably, racist white fans) not seeing Jee-Yun as human, which of course makes no sense when referring to a Korean character if you know the art in question was drawn by a Korean person.

I think this is really disturbing because it speaks not just to how many people didn’t take the time to look into the allegations once they were made, but that the people making them hadn’t even done their due diligence by looking at pururing’s blog, considering the unusual syntax used in their posts and their request for clarification when the complaint was put to them, the fact that some of the art actually had Korean Hangul on it, and other factors and realised in all likelihood this was not a white person maliciously erasing Jee-Yun’s racial identity but someone from another country and culture who was attempting to express genuine love for these characters. Then once informed of the artist’s nationality, because people were too proud to admit they overstepped, then came all the strange statements and generalisations about Korea and Koreans in order to justify the original accusatory tone and failure to approach pururing in good faith.

9-1-1 is an American network show so I suppose there is less of an expectation of contact with fans from outside the West than there would be in a fandom based on a manga, c-drama, kpop group, or other international media. That said, as @aeraspais pointed out, American media is exported globally and it is not remotely unusual for popular shows and movies to attract fans from all over the world. So ironically (or maybe it’s to be expected) the Americans and Europeans leading the charge on this turned out to be the ones who were not able to see past the borders of their own experience and to recognise the full humanity and cultural identity of someone who is not from the West, and who ultimately spoke of her attraction to Western media as an extension of her enjoyment of cultures outside of her own. In a sense I suppose the accusation that pururing did not see Jee-Yun as fully human was entirely an act of projection that many of the people involved will probably never recognise, and maybe reflects a certain amount of neurosis about Maddie’s whiteness within her ethnically blended family from her white fans.

Anyway, I guess what I wanted to say is that you cannot assume everyone in fandom is either American, Canadian, British, or maybe Australian (all functionally varieties of “American lite” in these conversations) just as you should not assume that everyone in fandom is white regardless of their nationality. Context clues are important, open mindedness is important, approaching people as individuals rather than ideas is important. And if you find yourself saying things implying that the culture of the country you grew up in is more racially enlightened or socially progressive than one you don’t have any personal contact with, it’s time to step back and ask yourself if you’re the one being narrow-minded and in need of a perspective adjustment.

#this is also for myself #because i too am limited by my own perspective and experiences #i’ve just been processing this for the past couple of days and reflecting on my own attitudes as well #911 discourse

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Everyone knows you can see Arnold Schwarzenegger’s dick in The Terminator but did you also know you can also see Robert Patrick’s dick in some versions of Terminator 2 because they hired a VFX team to digitally remove it and they did not do a very good job.

#it’s probably been fixed in recent versions but i just learned this from the commentary on an old blu-ray #and was like huh yeah you can see it

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I deserve more credit for not picking stupid fights on the internet than a nice person who doesn't pick fights does, because I have an unpleasant personality and it's harder for me

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thank you for your measured and articulate response to the whole debacle with that artist being criticized.

it also really gave me the icks that for many people it basically seemed to devolve into "people of asian descent just can't be lighter skinned than white americans/europeans".

The tone of the discourse was really off-putting and people involved seemed so convinced they were right they weren’t able to see the undertones of some of what they were implying. The apology from that one account starting off with some odd remarks about Korean vs. Chinese ethnicity and implying that maybe Korean people can be fairer than white people but Chinese people can’t was also really strange. It was obvious none of this was happening in good faith but I think it’s also an issue that a group of largely-white Europeans and Americans were speaking with undue confidence on considering the nuances. Like the history of non-white people being portrayed as darker in art than they are, and the negative racial implications of that which can be problematic as well… if I wanted to operate in the kind of bad faith the people criticising her were I did sort of wonder if for some of them the real issue wasn’t that Jee-Yun was being depicted as inappropriately fair but that Maddie wasn’t being depicted as light enough to convey her status as a white woman, and it was Maddie’s whiteness that was really the priority considering all the comments about Jee-Yun’s complexion vs. Maddie’s specifically.

Anyway, I don’t like bullying and I happened to see this so I wanted to add my thoughts to what @aeraspais and others had said about it. I’m glad some people agree and don’t think I was speaking too out of turn myself. ♡

#911 discourse

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one of the funniest pieces of film trivia I have ever read

#ira militant the terminator #the main villain being an amoral murdering cop trying to kill a child not being an issue jskjsj

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being self-taught in any type of practice will eventually lead to you having to seek out formal learning resources to bridge what you think is a trivial knowledge gap and realizing that you've been operating similarly to that french guy who went about his daily life unknowingly missing 90% of his brain

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It’s still really shocking to me that amid all this I saw people saying things like this:

Just completely out of line speculations about a country and culture the British person who wrote this has no personal familiarity with, scaremongering about how Korean mothers essentially mutilate their daughters, in order to justify smearing this unsuspecting artist as inherently racist by dint of her nationality and ethnicity and create a pretext for her harassment. I mean this is just a shockingly racist and xenophobic thing to say and makes the hostility to non-Westerners and Koreans specifically so overt. Not to mention the fact that beauty standards in a country like Korea would not derive from a desire to look Caucasian and the idea that they do is itself a white Western chauvinist attitude.

So yeah I think you are both completely right that this particular meltdown is an expression of Western chauvinism that the people involved are unlikely to reflect on. Because the assumption that everyone should have complete familiarity with the norms of American culture and not be given any grace or benefit of the doubt (while at the same time Westerners feel entitled to speak authoritatively on cultures they know very little about) is so baked in they don’t even see it as a problem and can’t understand the limitations of their perspective.

Okay, I need to get this off my chest and say that some people in this fandom needs a serious reality check.

You're not the savior you think you are. No one is going to give you a gold medal or relieve your consciousness, or pat you on the back. This isn't the way to validate your 'woke'ness or proving you're a good person. This shouldn't be the only accomplishment in your life.

You're lacking empathy and common sense for the sake of getting some brownie points on this stupid site and causing damage, thinking a half ass apology will fix it and go on with your day.

Are you suspecting something? Talk with that person first, then listen and try to understand. Find some solid, undeniable proof. Don't just make a callout post online and block the person or play the victim. Guess what? Sometimes you're in the wrong, or sometimes there is no one in the wrong to begin with, and it's just a difference of opinions (this goes for fandom's different ideas on characters/matters, not discriminatory subjects).

Some of you are going so far to the point of accusing people of color for something you don't even understand or have the right to speak to begin with, bandwagoning on the subject without making sure of it to save your faces, and then backtrack. You look like a clown and your unwillingness to understand cultural differences shows your entitlement.

I'm not saying people of color can't be racist/ableist/discriminatory in general, what I'm saying is know your place. Don't accuse people so easily. Think before you act. This place isn't yours only and you're not as pure as you want to be. The world doesn't revolve around you. Get a fucking grip.

#911 discourse

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So, in principle I'm in support of a movement to discourage or limit the use of generative AI trained on stolen data in filmmaking and the arts more generally, especially as it relates to the preservation of jobs, but I have some questions about the terms of the CREDO 23 stamp, especially point two which states:

Minimal CGI and VFX have been used on this film. It has been applied only to fix minor flaws or to create minor effects.

I simply don't understand what this has to do with the labour concerns related to generative AI use, and there are several barriers to implementation. VFX and CG in particular are not lesser or more impure or inauthentic art forms compared to skills like costuming, puppetry, or other in camera work. They're created by human artists who often represent the largest contingent working on a given movie, and who are overwhelmingly not represented by a union and routinely under-credited by the studios they work for — a practice which feels encouraged by stipulations like this.

Not to mention from a labour standpoint, this would exclude VFX-heavy films like Avatar or Planet of the Apes which employ thousands of people in costuming, prop making, production design, etc. before anyone even steps foot in a mocap volume let alone before final VFX are applied and which are unfortunate outliers in terms of crediting and acknowledging their reliance on visual effects in addition to these other departments.

In terms of implementation, how do you even define a "minor effect"? VFX is used extensively on all modern movies for things like set extensions (which finds its precursor in matte paintings, dating all the way back to the earliest movies), removing wires associated with stunt work, placing things such as planes and cars which are too expensive to hire or logistically unfeasible into a shot, fixing costume malfunctions, and dozens of other uses in addition to the flashier effects seen in action and science fiction movies.

The conflation of generative AI with VFX feels incredibly unfair to the thousands of working artists painstakingly creating effects in the movies and shows we all watch; not to mention, the ubiquity of VFX in modern filmmaking makes this an impossible standard for the majority of productions to meet, before even getting to the question of how these terms are even defined. I don't think any anti-gen AI measures will be successful until those in the movement can acknowledge the distinction between generative AI models and the labour issues associated with them and the art of VFX which has been integral to filmmaking since its inception (just go watch Georges Méliès' Le voyage dans la lune if you don't believe me).

Credo23 in Teen News.

#vfx

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SYD and RICHIE + personal space

#the bear #sydrichie

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This whole situation is really concerning to me because when I first learned about it the first thing I did was visit the artist’s blog and it was immediately apparent to me from syntax, and from the fact that she had to ask for clarification and confirmation of what the complaint was, that she was not a native speaker of English. That others didn’t do this and just jumped on a bandwagon of accusations in the name of “standing up against racism” is a serious issue.

I feel really bad for this Korean artist who just wanted to share fanart of characters they liked from an American series and was exposed in this way to the self-righteous brigading of Western fandom. It’s difficult enough to navigate a dogpile however ‘legitimate’ when you’re already aware of this feature of Western fandom and speak English fluently. Imagine trying to understand Western perceptions of race and colourism as well as the fact that it is a part of the culture of Western fandoms to turn what should be private conversations into public shamings all over a cartoon you drew of an Asian toddler who was clearly represented as Asian all while people are in your DMs accusing you of racism and publicly insinuating that since Korean beauty standards tend to favour fairer skin therefore Korea is an inherently racist society and everyone in it is racist — which is itself a xenophobic generalisation not to mention pretty rich coming from a gaggle of Europeans and Americans unable to approach someone from an East Asian country in anything resembling good faith.

Now from what I can tell this artist has been successfully run out of the fandom, and here are the handwringing apologies and the mealy-mouthed acknowledgement that maybe you could have handled it better. If it were me I would never feel welcome in the fandom again and this would probably affect my enjoyment of the show not to mention my willingness to participate in Western fandom spaces again. Maybe next time those involved will try exercising a little bit of good faith and approaching artists privately with questions about their art style and motivations rather than whipping people into a frenzy and expecting a degree of perfection from their targets that they would never demand from themselves.

Hey all!

If you're seeing this post, it's likely you saw another post of mine yesterday regarding @pururing and their art.

It's led to a lot of discussion around art and perception and culture. This artist is Korean and is portraying a Korean character. They're pulling from their experiences as best they can in doing so. You can read here about how their history and culture affects their art and the choices they make.

The character in question is played by real people, however, with Chinese parents, and many people took issue with her skin being portrayed in the art as even lighter than Maddie's and approached them to discuss it. Some of that can be seen publicly on their blog. Some of it took place in private DMs.

When discussing it, things were said and misinterpreted as this artist saying that not only is Jee lighter than her parents, but she's going to get lighter as she gets older. You can see an entire discussion about that here by reading this thread.

I want to publicly apologize to that artist for this. We should have given them more grace and asked for clarification instead of taking it in the worst way possible and then sharing that interpretation. I was wrong.

I don't think any common ground is going to be reached between either side regarding perception and how Jee should be colored, however. And I discuss that a bit more here.

I advise everyone who saw yesterday's post or is seeing today's to make their own minds up with all of the information available to you.

And for the love of everything, no matter what decision you make, do NOT attack this artist! Leave them alone!

If you choose to disengage, do so quietly with the block button or with filters, and if you choose not to, that's entirely up to you.

#911 discourse