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Happy Valentine's Day, everybody! I wrote a short retrospective about the history of Romani representation in Marvel comics to commemorate the release of Scarlet Witch & Quicksilver, which is on sale today, 2/14. I do want to remind everyone that the BDS movement has called for a cultural boycott of Disney and Marvel products, as both entities are financially and politically complicit in the genocide of Palestine. Spend your money smartly and ethically, and get involved in local actions . Vive Palestine, et Opre Roma!

🖤🤍💚❤️

This article was written as supplement to my interview on the lastest episode of Romanistan! It's out now on Spotify or Apple, and you can support Romanistan on Ko-Fi or Patreon.

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we need to bring back inviting people over for cake and coffee. my grandma used to do that all the time and I think it's a lost art

#my family still do this lmao

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white pilots be aiming planes into mountains, and nobody asks what was up with white pilots, but Black pilots are out here error free, and asswipes got something to say smfh.

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Steak and Eggs with Chimichurri (x)

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sometimes im like "wow holy shit im being really fucking annoying. i should stop talking" and then i pull out my magic 8 ball and it says "youve always been annoying and your friends chose to talk you anyways. youll be fine" and im like wow thanks magic 8 ball. and then the ogre attacks me

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I liked it but, I don't think it was handled that well. The Toas were more expensive compared to the price point they were at in the start of the franchise which made it harder for kids to get the main characters. Bionicle used to have the advantage of being the cheap action figure line but that was gone.

Fiction was a bit of an over correction with trying to simplify as much as possible, the protectors had no names and without names how would people be attached to them as characters?

The villains were also not really all that great a bunch of skull villains the only 2 good villains were Umarak, and Makuta but he was already a redux of the OG villain so does G2 get the credit for their incarnation? lol

Basically it was great to see Bionicle back and set wise almost all of the sets were leagues above their previous counterparts. Story wise it wasn't great and the price increases hurt it in the end.

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Reblog and write in the tags which characters you liked at first, but their stans have made you dislike or hate them.

#Cyclops from X-men #he was one of my favourites but man his stans are so ANNOYING

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For the Sabretooth and Wolverine question, the two characters are already two sides of the same coin and have a shared backstory together through the weapon x program and the military. Adding a family relationship on top of that feels like hammering the same things in instead of bringing anything new to the table. If this was revealed before weapon x and everything else, maybe maybe it would have been neat but that's not the case and god knows how stupid it would be to pretend 40 to 50 years of published stories never happened and retcon all of it because you suddenly want an OG concept included that completely contradicts decades of storylines. Marvel did lots of that in past five years and I'm done with them and their creative bankruptcy

For the mutant group question, I'm on the fence. Like the idea, didn't like the execution. Needs genuine reworking. Seen fans say the names were weird and too supernatural, I got confused at that cuz we already got some power sets that border on supernatural already (magic, weather control, lycanthropy, vampirism, possession, reality bending, ...) and most powers have foreign names (they're compound words from either Latin or Greek on average and English is a Germanic language).

Yeah I get that point of view, personally I always liked them as brothers. But the Weapon X connection is more of a later thing compared to the original idea of them being family members. Hey decades of stories being discarded is something Marvel does on the regular! that wouldn't stop them.

Yeah what they need is an actual story that maps it out but I don't think anyone currently writing at Marvel is interested in that.

#Maz answers #X-Men

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Believe it or not those takes mostly came from within those communities from what I've witnessed because some people don't consider those they discriminate against (that are clearly part of the community) as part of the community to begin with so, by their logic, what they do doesn't count as discrimination

Well if thats the case then they aren't people anyone should listen to lmao

#Maz answers

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babygirl u are not familiar with the status of jews who lived in what is now israel between Literal Ancient Israeli Kingdoms and 1948 and it shows. look up what Dhimmi means and reference the list of anti jewish massacres and pogroms throughout the middle east since literally the year Zero AD. maybe pay special attention to the absolutely barbaric way muslims treated anyone who wasnt muslim!! how do u think arabic became the lingua franca of the entire middle east? btw palestine is a made up term that became popular in the 60s to refer to the erstwhile syrians and jordanians who got assmad that jews dared to return to our homeland and establish a state. i know u are Irritated that jews are no longer stateless beggars with zero international bargaining power and zero recourse when our Ever So Gracious Hosts decided to kill and rape and torture us for the crime of being jewish. u will get over it lol, am yisrael chai

Yawn. I've heard all this Zio propaganda before.

Hey if the Middle East is sooooo bad and anti semitic then surely you wouldn't want to live there right? Why not live with your new pals the Europeans I'm sure they've been much kinder to Jewish people historically. After all it's not like they almost wiped Jewish people out or anything right?

Can you tell me how they treated Non Muslims I'm curious how do you feel about how people treat those that aren't part of their in group? Did they send in their storm troopers to destroy their homes? Did they steal from them? Did they reduce the amount of food they could get and starve them to death? If they did and you believe that's bad then thanks for proving our point about it being wrong for anyone to do that to a population.

You're so good at using the "You're just mad that Jews will no longer be stateless beggars let me just ignore the continued Jewish presence in Palestine and feed into the narrative that Jews were no longer welcome there also this totally means we get to make Palestinian stateless beggars!" I'm guessing eventually you'll be okay with Palestinians taking over Israel after they've lived through the narrative of Jewish expulsion and they get their right of return. Like it's just a matter of time for oppressed groups to go ahead and take a piece of land and create apartheid states? Lol

Ah yes the "Palestine didn't even exist as a name until whatever decade I decide" yeah that why we got coins and passports and maps that contain that word from the early 20th century and before?

You can keep talking the "Iz it because we iz Jewish" defence but all you're doing is associating the crimes of Israel with Judaism which really is what Antisemites would do.

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From my experience with the fandom, most of the folks I've seen who don't like the mutant group idea introduced in the 2000s (a majority) was because of the weird names given to them and because "creating distinctions between those mutant groups and other mutants is just gonna inject discrimination amongst mutants who are already a discriminated group in Marvel so what ? there's gonna be discrimination amongst THE discriminated fictional group ? doesn't make sense"

When I heard this the first time, I came to the conclusion that those who said and truly believed this are both oblivious to the world AND to the X-Men lore

Discrimination is possible within real minority groups : If we have to use X-Men as a race allegory, there are people who'd turn their backs on long time friends or their own family members if they chose to have an interracial relationship (how many mutant villains look down on humans and any relationship with them that goes beyond stick necessity or play things ? A LOT). If we have to use X-Men as a disability allegory, there have been documented cases of deaf people completely turning their backs on other deaf people who chose to get cochlear implants or other hearing aids (sounds a lot like the Cure storyline doesn't it?). If we have to use X-Men as an LGBTQ+ allegory, the amount of erasure bisexual and asexual folks get from the entire community is a sight to behold (human looking mutants vs very mutated ones, mutants with a passive barely noticeable mutant ability Vs those with a very powerful one, ...).

We've already seen mutants getting discriminated against by other mutants before the 2000s : Telepaths aren't trusted in general because "they will invade your privacy and read your mind whenever it pleases them", Kitty Pryde was uncomfortable around Kurt Wagner just because of his appearance and didn't get close to him until way later into knowing him, the Morlocks went after the mutants from above and many normal looking mutants look down on the Morlocks, Fabian Cortez doesn't value mutants with physical mutations, Apocalypse kills those he consider weak and useless due to their mutations, ...

And even after the 2000s, we had other things that would count as discrimination with Toad getting a low paying job as school janitor even tho he is scientifically gifted enough to teach there, mutant students getting bullied by other mutant students, the entire omega level label that makes some mutants feel like everyone should owe them something or they should look down on others weaker than them, ...

"Mutants discriminating against other mutants because of labels or powerset" is not a new idea, it's always been there because mutants are just like people : They don't inherently like other mutants just because they're also mutants or agree with each other on everything

There's a reason why the greatest and trickiest villains of the X-Men franchise are not the humans but the mutants who use their powers for evil, personal gain and conquest and are ready to throw their own kind under the bus to reach said goals.

Exactly anon you really countered that line of ignorance well. Its so obvious at times X-men readers and writers are really sheltered people. I'm assuming most of the ones that have takes like this are cishet white people or just really ignorant about how discriminiation works.

#Maz answers #X-Men

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What's distressing, but also important to understand, about JK Rowling hitting the "Denying trans people were targeted in the Holocaust" point is that it's kind of the last stop before she just goes full alt-right weirdo.

Joanne is denying the Holocaust (if a group was targeted, denying they were targeted is Holocaust denial) and that's going to lead to pushback from historians and experts. But Joanne is too deep in to believe what anyone who disagrees with her says, so she's just going to dismiss what those historians and experts tell her. And once she's disbelieving them about that one thing, well it's just a tiny step to start disbelieving them about other things.

This isn't by accident either, transphobic circles are swarming with far right agitators, ready to use hatred of trans people as an in to recruit people into their causes. They have handbooks for this sort of thing and they are, unfortunately, good at it. I suspect Joanne will be spouting coded versions of Great Replacement stuff by the end of the summer.

This is not a plea to try and pull Joanne out. She's too deep in, and even if she wasn't, she's already demonstrated an inability to examine her own prejudices, an unwillingness to hear criticism and a weakness to flattery. She is perfect recruitment bait for people who know what they're doing, and my impression is she's surrounded herself with people like that.

No, this is to understand two things: First is to use her as an example, to understand how a well meaning liberal can chase their own prejudices down a very dark rabbit hole. We are none of us immune to propaganda and even if we can't change what's happened to her, we can at least use it to protect ourselves.

And second is to understand that one of the main reasons you can't pull Joanne out of the transphobic pipeline is cause she is the pipeline now. She is the transphobic banner bearer now, she is funneling money and attention to these groups, she is their most famous celebrity and she is helping recruit people. Being able to show people how far she's gone, how deep into the right wing rabbit hole she's going, is important to help other people who still think she just "Had some concerns" know where her path leads.