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normal-thoughts-official · 3 years

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Why was Lorenzo such a jealous bitch nd why does this fandom treat him like he's a good person😑

okay so i know that this is a rethorical question but i've actually thought about this a lot so i'll take my crack at answering this - WHY is lorenzo such a jealous bitch?

the only thing he's said about why he hates magnus - that i remember of, at least - is the line "he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. his fame is not based on talent, it's all nepotism"

now, anyone who knows anything at all about magnus knows that not a single fucking word of this is true. magnus was born poor in a recently colonized country under a lot of oppression, there was no damn silver spoon in his mouth, and after that he was thoroughly abused by his demon father. his fame is also absolutely based on talent - he invented portals, for fuck's sake! and the "nepotism" comment barely makes sense. i assume he means it's just that magnus' power is all due to the fact that his father is demon royalty, which makes magnus more powerful than most warlocks

so, that explains what lorenzo is jealous of - magnus' power and prestige among warlocks (such as having been HWoB for decades) - but not what the fuck lorenzo's deal is (i mean, we've met plenty of other warlocks in the show, many of which weren't really fans of magnus, but no one other than lorenzo has this idea that magnus doesn't deserve his fame), or why magnus (because while like, yes, magnus is very powerful, i assume he's not the only son of a prince of hell, considering asmodeus is not the only prince of hell and these guys get on the loose, like, weekly. and lorenzo is obviously OBSESSED with him, he deliberately went out of his way and abused his power as HWoB several times specifically to antagonize him, and also, you know, TRIED TO KILL HIM)

lorenzo talks about magnus almost as if magnus took something from him. it's not just that magnus is powerful and that he supposedly doesn't deserve it, lorenzo obviously feels as if antagonizing magnus is some sort of vengeance. i know plenty of jealous people, but going as far as forbidding anyone other than himself from giving magnus a magic transfusion, specifically saying that if it went wrong he wouldn't help, and then refusing to take back the magic when he KNEW perfectly well that would kill him, is to me very obviously a thought out plan TO kill magnus. lorenzo had been hoping from the start that magnus' body would reject his magic and the transfusion would kill him - why else would he specifically say, the second he agreed to the transfusion, that if it went wrong magnus would be on his own?

and it's not like lorenzo even gains anything from that, other than killing magnus. and humiliating him, which lorenzo has said explicitly was something he wanted to do (i believe the term he used was "breaking his spirit", but potato potatoh). if it was about magnus' position of power, he already had that - lorenzo literally already had the HWoB position. if it was about magnus' magic, he had already lost it. lorenzo had absolutely NOTHING to gain from magnus, so his personal vendetta against him doesn't even make sense from JUST a jealousy standpoint. he had already "won" over magnus. the only explanation is that he wanted some kind of revenge

but revenge from what? well, we know that magnus and lorenzo don't like each other, but magnus never really TOOK anything from lorenzo. considering how he wouldn't miss an opportunity to talk about how much he hated him, i think lorenzo would have brought it up if that had been the case. and magnus is just not the kind of person to pull the rug from under other people's feet - look no further than the whole show for evidence of that. he literally puts the others above himself at all times (which is unhealthy but that's another story and something i've talked about plenty of times already)

so why does lorenzo feel so much resentment towards magnus? why does he act as if magnus' power took something that was rightfully his?

i think lorenzo feels that he was entitled to be the most powerful, to have the most prestige, to be above magnus, and he resented magnus because that was simply not true

why?

let's go back to the only thing we know about lorenzo's backstory - the baby painting. yes, it's a huge meme, but think about that for a second. lorenzo has a huge ass painting of himself as a baby that he displays proudly in his home and that's, like, his #1 stop at the house tour. the baby painting. "needless to say, being born in spain during the siglo de oro was quite the experience". is the first thing he said

let's make this abundantly clear: this line makes it canon that lorenzo is a colonizer. the siglo de oro ("golden century" in spanish) started (roughly) in 1492, year of the """""discovery""""" of the americas, and ended (roughly) in 1659, the year when spain signed a treaty and lost a bunch of their territories to france (link to source). altho the term is usually used to refer to the boom of the arts in spain, it's obvious, just from these historical landmarks, that the siglo de oro is about colonization. it's about the fact that at the time spain was at its peak colonial power, and could afford to exploit what later became third world countries, and put part of that money (in fact, the literal gold they were stealing from latin american countries) into arts and other luxuries (because in the renaissance portraits were a luxury item and a symbol of status - link to source) for the ultra rich that benefited from colonization

so, lorenzo is not only a colonizer, but he's a part of the elite. the fact that his family could afford to have a painting of him as a BABY (portraits were almost exclusively adult portraits, and usually of the whole family, unless you were even richer than the rich. and even then individual portraits were usually to celebrate important achievements such as a marriage or acquisition of state - a baby being born doesn't qualify, especially because at the time most babies died not long after birth anyway), and a HUGE painting on top of that, shows that they were just. loaded in an incomprehensible way. im talking jeff bezos level of riches. they were the elite of the biggest colonial empire of their century. so, ironically, lorenzo was born with a silver spoon in his mouth - everything that he had, he was born having, and he specifically had because it was being stolen due to a dramatically violent process of genocide and slavery, that he believed to be entitled to simply because he was born a spaniard/white. that is all canon, because in the shverse mundane history is the same as in real life. EVERYONE who was born in the colonial elites was taught that they were entitled to shit from other countries, that they were superior not only to other ppls but also to their own people - let's not forget that this was way before the advent of republics, those were monarchies. the ppl who were part of the elite straight up believed they were superior to others by virtue of god

"woah woah woah but lorenzo is played by javier muñoz who's brown" yeah, which is unfortunate, but he is still canonically a colonizer. first off, because it's not like they wanted someone to be lorenzo and were looking for brown people - they were looking for someone javier could play because he's a bigshot broadway actor who was also a fan of the show, and then they picked lorenzo. probably because the sh showrunners don't fucking know the difference between a latino and a spaniard. or maybe they do, but they thought, "eh, close enough". either way, lorenzo is a spaniard, and he was born a colonizer - ergo, he is white, regardless of what race his actor is, regardless of even what he looks like. there are plenty of white spaniards with similar skin tones to lorenzo, because what today is spain used to be a territory occupied by middle eastern ppl, and there was mixing. what makes whiteness is not skin tone, it's context, and the context of being a literal colonizer directly benefitting of the oppression of black and brown people is as white as it gets

so, to recap: lorenzo was born a white colonizer, and he was RAISED believing that everything he had, he was entitled to. he was entitled to it by virtue of god, because he was born a part of the rich elite in the richest colonial power in the world, and he had access to everything he could possibly want. and he wasn't just entitled to riches and power - which he still has, look at his fucking mansion, dude - but specifically to superiority to his peers. especially black and brown people, the source of his riches, the people who owe him the wealth he takes from them

and then he joins the warlock world, and not only is he not royalty (because presumably he is the son of a regular demon, not too high up in the hierarchy) but some brown guy is. and this guy is in a position of power over him (high warlock) and he is better than him (at magic, specifically, but also at everything including being a human being, but lorenzo doesn't care about that). and lorenzo is fucking livid, because he believes himself to be entitled to be the best, entitled to be treated as a superior, entitled to admiration and to servitude, especially from people like magnus (let's not forget that the philippines - colonized by spain during the siglo de oro - are right next to indonesia [link]). instead, magnus is, politically speaking, his superior

and it's not like it even means much because the high warlock position is implied to be kind of like, the mayor, and it's not like magnus ever abused his power (unlike some people - and sidenote, i think this backstory is also why lorenzo was so comfortable using his power to antagonize magnus: because he was raised in a context where political power was pretty much boundless and politics and the personal feelings of the ruler were not separated). so in practice its really just that if lorenzo had a problem, he could go to magnus, and if magnus made a decision that referred to all warlocks, lorenzo was supposed to follow it. it's nowhere near like, actual subservience. but it's way too much for someone who was raised to be entitled to the level that lorenzo was

so that's why he has this feeling that magnus took something from him - because in his head, everything magnus has, lorenzo should be entitled to. because in his head, any and all power rightfully belongs to him, and if magnus has it, then it has been stolen. and that might not even be conscious of his part or whatever, altho i doubt lorenzo doesn't think in explicitly racist terms at least in private, but that had been ingrained into his head for centuries on end. if it's still ingrained into the heads of white spaniards born TODAY, imagine one who was actually born at the fucking height of racist exploitation

so. yeah. that's why lorenzo is such a jealous bitch. that's why he hates magnus so much - because he feels that magnus having anything at all lorenzo doesn't is theft, and ironically, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but believes that he earnt what he has whereas magnus didn't. it's not just jealousy, it's a profound feeling of racist vendetta, and i'm sure the sh writers didn't mean it that way, they were just writing a big villain to bring malec together, but death of the author, baby! and this explanation actually makes sense without having to change anything in canon, so, i feel very comfortable saying that's why lorenzo behaves the way he does

THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT THE BOOKS

#ask #anonymous #sh #shadowhunters #anti lorenzo rey #meta

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whatthefuckistevvs · 4 years

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thank y’all for enabling me

Okay so there are so many things i hate about the movie,

1) Woody entire character was basically tossed just beacuse he saw bo again, and also becomes a huge narcissist asshole

I’ve seen a lot of ppl say that of course he was going to stay with Bo, they were forever lovers? partners? idk, whatever. However, woody spent 3 movies saying how having a child is the most important thing in the world- hell! 3 movies and a lot of short stories that talks about HOW. HAVING. A. KID. IS. IMPORTANT. Woody abandoned the opportunity to beome an Icon to millions of childrens in the museum because whats the point? a child is important

So, to Woody, nothing matters but being there with your child.

The entirity of the first movie was Woody coping with the fact that He may not be the Favorite Toy Anymore, but htat’s ok- Andy still loves him. Toy Story 2 was also about that- he was worried that he wasnt going to be loved anymore because Andy was going to grow up at one point, and hell the first part of hte movie was himt errified Andy was going to abandon him because he was broken. But! his character arc in 1 and 2 is the fact that he realizes that even if andy doesnt play with him 24/7, he is STILL loved, to the point that in 3, Andy was going to take him to college, which proves that YES, andy did love him even if he was like 19 and wasnt playing with him.

Woody entire arc is about how children will love him even if he is not the favorite

...And yet at the start of the movie, he is antsy that he hasnt been played with like 3 times in a week

Im sorry?

Im sorry?????

He is obsessed with Forky, because he is trying to live through him. Its... did you forget the last 20 years? This is literally the plot of the first movie, except Woody is a giant dick that is like “WELL, she doesnt play with me every single minute, so im gonna fuck off with Bo”

It feels so fucking outo f character. Like hell, at one point he tried to CONVINCE Bo to get back with him, and she considered it to! for that to suddenly be like “haha nvmd” is like... it feels so fucking cheap.

He is also a huge asshole because he just. decided to leave. No one kneww hat was going on apart from Buzz (which i will touch upon later). Like how do you think Rex felt? how do you think slinky felt? Jesse? Like your best friend eer, your family, suddenly ditches you... because they arent number one anymore? You, who are used to not being number one, and are ok with this, will never see your friend ever again because he couldnt handle not being the spotlight for once.

Ok.

2) Buzz was made stupid.

We know that the gimmick of every movie is that Buzz changes, or something happens to him. The first one, buzz not knowing he was a toy wa the thing. In the second one, Buzz is replacde by another buzz who does not know he is a toy. In the third one, he gets switched to his spaniard settings. So i was wondering whta they would do with the fourth one.

Buzz is a smart guy. He may not be too socially aware, but he isnt stupid. Yet the gimmick in this one is “haha, buzz is too stupid to know whta thought is! so he relies on the pre-set phrases in his button”

what??? that felt so... out of the blue? like Buzz is smart. Buzz has had thoughts before. I dont understand why they decided to make the gimmick this time around “he is literally so stupid he doesnt know what a thought is”

Its insulting.

3) What was up with the chicken and the bunny???

These carnival toys really wanted to be owned by a child, which cute! i can get into that. But... suddenly they dont? Woody almost got them killed, and they’re like “WELL, NVMD THAT, FUCK THAT” which just makes me feel that no one in this goddamn movie has any actual drive to do anything.

Bo seems to want to go back to having a child, then she doesnt. Woody seems to want to do so too, but also doesnt. Then the chick and bunny want to, but then dont. Like- does any1 want to do anything? But to be fair they just threw out 3 movies worth of character to have their stupid shitty spinoff ending.

4) Its the plot of the first movie, except Woody is even bigger ashole

Toy Story 1 was about a toy who used to be the favorite of his kid, but then another toy appeared, and he has to cope with the fact that he is not hte favorite anymore

...sounds familiar?

its literally the plot of hte first one, but the fact that Woody cannot seem to even FUCKING wait to get hte spotlight again is bothering me a lot. Like- i dont even think a month passed. Bonnie didn’t seem to age at all, which at htat age a difference between 1 year is Huge. At most, a goddamn week or so must have happened between Forky and Bonnie- she is still inj the same class, the same grade... she looks literallyt he same and there were no birthdays. Like a goddamn week passed and Woody couldnt even fucking wait to see what happened? He was oh so “ohhh noooo she doesnt play with me anymore” that its like he completley forgot the lessons he learned in 1 and 2

5) Forky????

What makes a toy, anyways? According tot his movie, as long as a child plays with it, its a toy. Which ok, i can get behind htat

Except they didn’t even Bother really explaining it or exploring it. Its more like, oh, it happened, i guess... like i thought it was going to talk about how “children magic turns everything to life” or whatever but no???

like they didnt even bother exploring it.

6) i hate this movie

EDIT: A FINAL THOUGHT:

honestly i really like the idea of lost toys, carnival toys, and hell the puppets in the pawn shop were amazing. it was really cool. These people have really goodi deas in terms of toys and how to behave

I feel like they want to explore these kind of ideas of toys in the world but they had to drag the toy story characters into it for some reason, so they completely erased their personalities to try to make an excuse of Why they should Be there.

Its really bad. Like these ideas are GOOD, and i think maybe the same universe with a fresh set of characters would make more sense than making woody an asshole to go through it.

Ok that’s it rant over

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normal-thoughts-official · 4 years

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anyway so a friend asked me why i don’t consider that just because a sh character has an actor of color, it means that they’re a character of color, and i think that explaining that to them i managed to get my point across quite nicely so i’m putting this here too in case anyone cares about my views on this

usually whatever race the actor is the character is, that mostly works

but it doesnt for sh because they hired a lot of actors of color for characters who are explicitly supposed to be white, and written as such. not just from the books but just like, for the story to work

Lorenzo is the most obvious example of that, Javier is latino but Lorenzo is explicitly white in show canon ("needless to say, being born in spain during the siglo de oro was quite the experience"; he's not only a spaniard, but explicitly a spaniard who was born at the height of the colonization and exploitation of the Americas and directly benefitted from it. his riches and influence are all the direct result of colonization. not only is he white, he is a literal colonizer and he's directly involved in the historic exploitation of latino and african ppl. so obviously Lorenzo is not latino, even if Javier is). but that logic applies to a lot of the charactes

take izzy for example. izzy wasn’t written as a latina woman, she was written as a white woman. i think that becomes particularly clear in the r*zzy plotline, and how the show writing treats it

recapitulating: izzy goes after the vampires, looking for a bite. they almost kill her. raphael sweeps in and saves her, and tells her to go away and sweat it out. in an attempt to show his empathy, he mentions that he’s handled addiction before, that he’s been addicted to human blood. izzy then slits her wrist and shoves it in raphael’s face, clearly seeing how this affects him. he still tries to tell her no, but she pushes him anyway. finally, he caves in and ends up drinking her blood. later, that same theme continues, with raphael not wanting to take izzy’s blood, and izzy triggering his addiction on purpose to make him. at one point, she threatened him with a sword to get him to drink her blood

so far so good, yes? but then we see the way that the writing treats this plotline, and it doesn’t add up

alec sees them and punches the shit out of raphael, up until magnus stops him. later, when he leaves, magnus talks to raphael and all but scolds him for what he’s doing (“let’s see if you still think that when you’re not getting high”) without even learning the full story. in fact, the fact that izzy was the one who triggered raphael’s addiction (repeatedly) is never brought up again. when izzy talks about it with simon, later, he’s all worried and tells her to stay away from raphael. and none of this is never questioned by any of the writing. we never see raphael getting any support, except for magnus taking him into his home again. we don’t see him struggling with his own addiction and his issues. we only see izzy, and in that process, raphael is unquestioningly framed as the villain, as the one who “lured” and got her addicted, despite the fact that this is objectively not true

this doesn’t make any sense at all, unless you take into account that izzy was supposed to be a white woman

and then we see what’s going on. obviously, sexy vampire who lures the unsuspecting mundane woman stereotypes also play into this, sure. all the scenes with blood drinking are weirdly sexualized; the first time that raphael bites izzy’s wrist, she moans and kind of leans back against the car and he’s over her body and it looks every bit like some sort of “sexual predator taking advantage of poor woman” painting, or trope, or whatever. but that’s also- well, a stereotype that’s used with white women

because women of color aren’t typically painted as the victims of luring and using and abusing. on the contrary, they are usually painted as the ones who lure the men in, the ones who are “intoxicating”, exotic, dangerous, irresistible, the femme fatale stereotype, etc

white women are the ones who are helpless and need to be protected by everyone, who are used and abused and taken by men (particularly moc, let’s not forget the historical use of “protecting white women from predators” as an excuse to increase policing and repression in neighborhoods of color, as well as the lynching and murdering of moc). white women are the ones who are unsuspectingly lured into a drug addiction and then used, needing to be later saved be everyone. white women are victims, and moc are predators. latino men in particular are also drug dealers and criminals and gang leaders. sounds familiar? yeah

so when izzy was being written - when this entire plotline was being written - she was written as a white woman. it doesn’t make sense otherwise. it doesn’t work otherwise. the entire plotline relies on racial tropes and stereotypes, and the writing lays that in so thick and naturalizes the narrative that izzy is being used so much that almost the entire fandom buys that idea, and never talks about how izzy used and triggered and abused raphael, and frequently writes him, if not as the culpable one, at the very least as co-responsible for her suffering. never as the victim, despite that being, through any objective lenses, what he is

so i think it’s indisputable that izzy was written as a white woman, that even as the writers knew that emeraude was playing izzy, they were still imagining a white woman as they wrote her. they weren’t thinking about that when they hired emeraude to play her (in fact, emeraude was chosen to play izzy because izzy is supposed to have “exotic beauty”), otherwise alec (and robert and max) wouldn’t be white. it doesn’t WORK

which gets us to: why are there so many actors of color playing characters who were originally white, and who were explicitly written as such, in sh?

i think the main reason sh had so many actors of color playing white characters is because it's cheaper

actors of color, particularly immigrants, can get lower salaries because they dont have the same opportunities as other actors. for the same price you could get a bad white actor, you can get a reasonable actor of color, but most studios choose the white actor anyway. sh hired many actors of color because then they could get better actors for a lesser price, and it fit the whole "woke, there is rep in it" vibe the show was going for

that's my two cents, of course. i dont have proof of that but i think its highly likely that's what happened.

so that puts the racial relations in this particular fandom in a unique perspective. because the characters are white and that shows in writing, but due to the fact that the actors ARENT, the fandom still sees them with racial bias, so it's a loose and complicated intersection. i’ve seen plenty of racist depictions of izzy in fandom, so much so that i got triggered by the way she’s written as a sexual object for white people, the way she’s written as servicing in ships with white women and men and her pain and abuse is fetishized, among other things

so it’s a very complicated and particular situation, but as a whole, for these characters, the racism comes from the fandom, not from the writing. because they are written as white, i consider them white, but that doesn’t mean that the fandom treatment of them can’t be influenced by racist views and stereotypes.

in short: in the sh universe, they are white, but to the viewers, they might not be, so they’re still subjected to racist treatment in fandom. there’s a disparity between their race in-universe and outside of it, and that creates unique intersections and views and writing of these characters

(this doesn’t apply to every character who was originally white and played by an actor of color; luke, for example, isn’t explicitly written as white at any point, so i consider him black. but izzy, lorenzo, maryse, camille, and others, were written as white, so i consider them white)

(besides, white actors play poc all the time, so why the fuck not have it be the other way around for once)

and look i mean obviously it's perfectly valid to hc those characters as poc and write them as such, especially in aus, but to me that’s that, a hc (well except for Lorenzo because hc-ning him as a poc when he explicitly was their oppressor historically is frankly disrespectful, and I'm not saying that because i dont like him, im saying that because thats how i see it), and not a fact in the writing & story

and that’s my take basically

#this is long and useless but oh well #sh #discourse #anti izzy lightwood #kinda #not really but a little bit

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