#and asian adults being seen as younger then their white counterparts | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

blackstarising · 3 years

Text

coming back to this post i made again to elaborate - especially as the ted lasso fandom is discussing sam/rebecca and fandom racism in general. there are takes that are important to make that i had failed to previously, but there's also a growing amount of takes that i have to, As A Black Person™, respectfully disagree with.

tl;dr for the essay below sam being infantilized and the sam/rebecca relationship are not the same issue and discussing the former one doesn't mean excusing the latter. and we've reached the glen of the Dark Forest where we sit down and talk about fandom racism.

i should have elaborated this in my last post about sam/rebecca, but i didn't. i'll say it now - i personally don't support sam and rebecca getting together for real. i believe what people are saying is entirely correct, even though sam is an adult legally, he and rebecca are, at the very least, two wildly different stages of life. for americans, he's at the equivalent of being a junior in college. there are things he hasn't gotten the chance to experience and there are areas he needs to grow in. when i was younger, i didn't understand the significance of these age gaps, i just thought it would be fine if it was legal, but as someone who is now a little older than sam in universe, i understand fully. we can't downplay this. whether or not you think sam works for rebecca or not, even despite the gender inversion of the Older Man Younger Woman trope, whether or not he is a legal adult, i don't think at this point in time, their relationship would work. i think it's an interesting narrative device, but i don't want to see it play out in reality.

that being said!

what's worrying me is that two discussions are being conflated here that shouldn't be. sam having agency and being a little more grown™ than he's perceived to be does not suddenly make his relationship with rebecca justified. i had decided to bring it up because sam was being brought into the spotlight again and i was starting to realizing that his infantilization was more common than i felt comfortable with.

sam's infantilization (and i will continue to call it that), is a microaggression. it's is in the range of microaggressions that i would categorize as 'fandom overcompensation'. we have a prominent character of color that exhibits traits that aren't stereotypical, and we don't want to appear racist or stereotypical, so we lean hard in the other direction. they're not aggressive, they're a Sweet Baby, they're not world weary, they're now a little naive. they're not cold and distant, they're so nice and sweet that there's no one that wouldn't want approach them, and yeah, on their face, these new traits are a departure and, on their face, they seem they look really good.

but at a certain point, it reaches an inflection point, and, like the aftertaste of a diet coke, that alleged sweetness veers into something a lot less sweet. it veers into a lack of agency for the character. it veers into an innocence that appears to indicate that the person can't even take care of themselves. it veers into a one-dimensional characterization that doesn't allow for any depth or negative emotion.

it's not kind anymore. it's not a nice departure from negative stereotypes. it's not compensating for anything.

it's patronizing.

it is important that we emphasize that characters of color are more than the toxic stereotypes we lay on them, yes, but we make a mistake in thinking that the solution is overcorrection. for one thing, people of color can usually tell. don't get it twisted, it's actually pretty obvious. for another, it just shifts from one dimension to another. people of color are still supposed to be Only One Character Trait while white people can contain multitudes. ted, who is pretty much as pollyanna as they come, can be at once innocent and naive and deep and troubled and funny and scared. jamie can be a prick and sexy and also lonely and also a victim of abuse. sam, however, even though he was bullied (by jamie, no less), is thousands of miles away from home, and has led a protest on his team, is usually just characterized as human sunshine with much less acknowledgement of any other traits beyond that.

and that's why i cringe when fandom calls sam a Sweet Baby Boy without any sense of irony. is that all we're taking away? after all this time? even for a comedy, sam has received a substantive of screen time over two whole seasons, and we've seen a range of emotions from him. so as a black person it's hurtful that it's boiled down to Sweet Baby Boy.

that's the problem. we need to subvert stereotypes, but more importantly, we need to understand that people of color are not props, or pieces of cardboard for their white counterparts. they are full and actualized and have agency in their own right and they can have other emotions than Angry and Mean or Sweet and Bubbly without any nuance between the two. i think the show actually does a relatively good job of giving sam depth (relatively, always room for improvement, mind you), especially holding it in tension with his youth, but the fandom, i worry, does not.

it's the same reason why finn from star wars started out as the next male protagonist in the sequel trilogy but by the third movie was just running around yelling for REY!! it's the same reason why when people make Phase 4 Is the Phase For Therapy gifsets for the mcu and show wanda maximoff, loki, and bucky barnes crying and being sad but purposefully exclude sam wilson who had an entire show to tell us how difficult his life is, because people find out if pee oh sees are also complex, they'll tell the church.

and the reason why i picked up on this very early on is because i am an organic, certified fresh, 100% homegrown, non-gmo, a little ashy, indigenous sub saharan African black person. the ghanaian tribes i'm descended from have told me so, my black ass parents have told me so, and the nurses at the hospital in [insert asian country here] that started freaking out about how curly my hair was as my mother was mid pushing me out told me so!

and this stuff has real life implications. listen: being patronized as a black person sucks. do you know how many times i was patted on the back for doing quite honestly, the bare minimum in school? do you know how many times i was told how 'well spoken' or 'eloquent' i was because i just happen to have a white accent or use three syllable words? do you know how many times i've been cooed over by white women who couldn't get over how sweet i was just because i wasn't confrontational or rude like they wrongly expected me to be?

that's why they're called microaggressions. it's not a cross on your lawn or having the n-word spat in your face, but it cuts you down little by little until you're completely drained.

so that's the nuance. that's the subversion. the overcompensation is not a good thing. and people of color (and i suspect, even white people) have picked up on, in general, the different ways fandom treats sam and dani and even nate. what all of these discussions are converging on is fandom racism, which is not the diet form of racism, but another place for racism to reveal itself. and yeah, it's uncomfortable. it can seem out of left field. you may want to defend yourself. you may want to explain it away. but let me tap the sign on the proverbial bus:

if you are a white person, or a person of color who is not part of that racial group, even, you do not get to decide what is not racist for someone. full stop. there are no exceptions. there is no exit clause for you. there is no 'but, actually-'. that right wasn't even yours to cede or waive.

(it's also important to note that people of color also have the right to disagree on whether something is racist, but that doesn't necessarily negate the racism - it just means there's more to discuss and they can still leave with different interpretations)

people don't just whip out accusations of racism like a blue eyes white dragon in a yu-gi-oh duel. it's not fun for us. it's not something we like to do to muzzle people we don't want to engage with. and we're not concerned with making someone feel bad or ashamed. we're exposing something painful that we have to live with and, even worse, process literally everything we experience through. we can't turn it off. we can't be 'less sensitive' or 'less nitpicky'. we are literally the primary resources, we are the proverbial wikipedia articles with 3,000 sources when it comes to racism. who else would know more than us?

what 2020 has shown us very clearly is that racism is systemic. it's not always a bunch of Evil White Men rubbing their hands together in a dark room wondering how they're going to use the 'n-word' today. it's systemic. it's the way you call that one neighborhood 'sketchy'. it's how you use 'ratchet' and 'ghetto' when describing something bad. it's how you implicitly the assume the intelligence of your friend of color. it's the way you turned up your nose and your friend's food and bullied them for it in middle school but go to restaurants run by white people who have 'uplifted' it with inauthentic ingredients. it's telling someone how Well Spoken and Eloquent they are even though you've both gone to the same schools and work at the same workplace. it's the way you look down at some people of color for having a different body type than you because they've been redlined to neighborhoods where certain foods and resources are inaccessible, and yet mock up the racial features that appeal to you either through makeup or plastic surgery.

it's how when a person of color behaves badly, they're irredeemable, but a white person performing the same act or something similar is 'having a bad day' or 'isn't normally like this' or 'has room to grow' and we can't 'wait for their redemption arc', and yes, i'm not going to cover it in detail in this post but yes this is very much about nate. other people have also brought up the nuances in his arc and compared them to other white characters so i won't do it here.

these behaviors and reactions aren't planned. they aren't orchestrated. they're quite literally unconscious because they've been lovingly baked into western society for centuries. you can't wake up and be rid of it. whether you intended it or not, it can still be racist.

and it's actually quite hurtful and unfair to imply that concerns about racism in the TL fandom are unfounded or lacking any depth or simply meant to be sensational because you simply don't agree with it. i wish it was different, but it doesn't work that way. i'm not raising this up to 'call out' or shame people, but i'm adding to this discussion because, through how we talk about sam, and even dani and nate, i'm yet again seeing a pattern that has shortchanged people of color and made them feel unwelcome in fandom for far too long.

coach beard said it best: we need to do better.

#ted lasso #sam obisanya #ted lasso spoilers #fandom racism

316 notes · View notes

huntypastellance · 6 years

Note

I'm sorry I'm trying to figure out what the frick "Shaladins" are? I tried scrolling through the tag and I'm still really confused and you are one fo the main people I see posting in the tag? Can you please explain to me what exactly is going down rn and what exactly a Shaladin is?

I gotta set up a glossary page for the vld fandom too at this point. Half my inbox is literally “what does X mean?”.

Too many terms being slung around……

Anyway:

Shaladin: any shipper who ships Shiro with one of the other paladins* (Keith, Lance, Hunk or Pidge).

*Allura’s in a weird grey area because she was considered to be Space Mom & an adult up until her VA confirmed that she was a teenager. The Shiro/Allura shippers are heavily split between Shallurantis (antis who make excuses to ship it despite Allura being an “underaged teenager”), Shitllurans (a subset of shallurantis who are the worst of the worst & turned on any shaladins who tried to help them after Allura’s “age reveal” happened & Shallura became a “problematic ship”) & the actual Shallura shippers.

Anti: self-proclaimed name for fans who use social justice terms & a facade of fighting against online abuse/predators all so their favorite ship can win a ship war. Often harasses the staff of the canon or encourages harassment of the staff. Never calls out the abusive maniacs in their own community even if they commit actual crimes. Favors an overly fluffy sparkly pastel aesthetic for their blogs, trashy memes & sucking up to minor celebrities completely unrelated to the canon’s production in order to boost their own ship. Basically a fujoshi stereotype who accuses other shippers of being fujoshi stereotypes & refuses to acknowledge that they themselves are fujoshi stereotypes. Accuses other people of sexualizing minors while they themselves consume/create porn of their own ship (even if the characters are minors).

Klantis: antis who specifically ship Keith/Lance, aka Klance. They manage to keep their ship at its #1 spot on Fandometrics by spamming Klance & crosstagging it everywhere. Every time a rival ship creeps up the rankings, they double down on the spam & start a new wave of anti-ship harassment to discourage those shippers.

Leakira: AU made by klantis after s7 dropped & they realized that Klance would not be canon. It’s a “re-write” of Voltron where the supporters for Leakira actually believe that they can buy all the rights to Voltron in just 10 years. There is no plot or story, just an “lgbtq+ poc” version of the Voltron characters where they are “extra” POC & have “extra” POC names (Leandro for Lance & Akira for Keith). Broganes & Shiro/Adam are also things that feature in this AU & Pidge is “re-imagined” to be Jewish so she’s “more ethnic”, despite the fans accusing her Jewish voice actress to be a “white d*ke”. Shiro is re-named to be Hachiko & is now Keith/Akira’s adopted father & the only “straight” characters are the villains & the parents (because this is literally a strawman caricature of how life works). Akira & Leandro have nothing in common with Keith & Lance other than color themes & similar jokes. Their polar opposite personalities & relationship to their canon counterparts is another sign that klantis never truly cared about the characters or Voltron’s story in the first place.

Broganes: An AU where Shiro is Keith’s adoptive brother/father/uncle despite them having 2 entirely different families in canon. Named because of early fanon where Keith is Japanese & has the surname “Kogane” like in previous iterations of Voltron. Often buys into racist stereotypes regarding Asians & generic sitcom tropes regarding sibling relationships. Most often used to get Shiro away from Keith as a romantic interest so Keith can be shipped with Lance. Allura was paired with Shiro as “space mom”, but was later replaced with Adam. Keith is often characterized as a whiny emo younger brother who is bratty towards exasperated big brother Shiro & they pull pranks on each other (usually taken from lame Vines). They are also shown to be relatively uncaring of each other & distant, so that Lance can easily worm his way into Keith’s life as a boyfriend. AU first created by a 14 year old girl who’s obsessed with her sister, based the AU off of her idealized romanticized relationship with her sister & used to draw fanart for a R-18 Nitro+Chiral BL game (a company famous for games with gore, rape, bestialiaity, mechaphilia & general mindfuckery).

Dirty Laundry: the most popular & overrated Klance fic on ao3, often lauded to be the peak of Klance fics by klance shippers. Its popularity stemmed from popular klantis boosting it on their blogs only to shred it apart when DL’s Lance’s autistic brother appeared in it. The klantis ripped it apart for being racist, ableist, sexist, etc. & the author orphaned the fic after completing it due to the harassment she was getting from both sides (as shippers hated it too because of how hard the klance shippers were pushing it). Most infamous for a scene at the end where Keith & Lance danced to the song Gasolina, literally the least romantic song you could ever dance to. Popularized many of the tropes commonly seen in Klance fics. Was written before Lance was revealed to be Cuban, so DL has Mexican Lance instead.

There are more terms to be added, but I’ll make a proper page for it & add them later.

#vld discourse #voltron discourse #pro-shaladin #vld s7 spoilers #vld spoilers #tribute #Anonymous #le@kira

124 notes · View notes

zeroviraluniverse-blog · 6 years

Text

Movie smash 'Frozen' heats up Broadway

Visit Now - http://zeroviral.com/movie-smash-frozen-heats-up-broadway/

Movie smash 'Frozen' heats up Broadway

Broadway veteran Caissie Levy sings the signature tune “Let It Go” as Elsa in “Frozen.”(Photo: Andrew Eccles)

NEW YORK – The curtain goes up and the opening number of the new Broadway musical Frozen kicks off with little Disney princesses Anna and Elsa on stage in front of a packed house. Backstage at the St. James Theatre, their grown-up counterparts are letting loose for an audience of two.

The second-floor dressing room of Caissie Levy, who plays ice queen Elsa (she of the empowerment anthem Let It Go), is the location of a nightly dance party co-starring her theatrical partner Patti Murin, aka Elsa’s vivacious, loving younger sister, Anna. Since they don’t have to come out right away, the two use the first 10 minutes of Frozen to bust a few moves to the downstairs show tune.

“Sometimes there’s some jumping on the couch, sometimes there are some ballet moves that are truly heinous that no one should ever witness,” Levy says, laughing. “It’s always done in our nude undergarments, which are really unattractive: a whole lot of Spanx and tights, and we don’t look cute at all.”

Patti Murin connected with Anna after seeing the movie “Frozen” for the first time. (Photo: Andrew Eccles)

It’s all business and belting once the Broadway veterans inhabit their characters in Disney’s next big musical extravaganza, now in previews (the show opens March 22). Producers could have done a note-for-note staging of the 2013 Oscar-winning animated movie and been just fine, financially: The film spawned a cultural phenomenon that continues to this day.

Fans at Disney World wait hours to meet Anna and Elsa or to get on the Frozen Ever After ride. They can buy a litany of stuff — from hoodies to toothbrushes — featuring the sisters or that lovable goofball snowman, Olaf, and they’re probably already planning to visit their nearest cinemas on Nov. 27, 2019, for Frozen 2.

The movie’s creative team has devised a musical that honors and also adds to Frozen‘s legacy while making it more socially relevant than ever. Songwriting couple Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez crafted 12 new tunes for the show, and movie director Jennifer Lee wrote the book, which expands Anna and Elsa’s backstory.

Add theatrical director Michael Grandage, who “has taken this story that people think is for little kids because of the branding, and he’s made it this very rich, Shakespearean, lush adult story,” says Anderson-Lopez. “There are some stunningly beautiful, sophisticated things going on on that stage.”

Elsa (Caissie Levy) deals with inner turmoil as she’s crowned queen of Arendelle in “Frozen.'” (Photo: Deen van Meer)

Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, Frozen at its warm heart is about a pair of sisters who grow up in isolation and find their way back to each other. Due to an accident involving Elsa’s ice powers, she’s kept apart from her sibling for much of their childhood, even as they each harbor a yearning to be close to one another.

After their parents die, Elsa is crowned queen of the kingdom of Arendelle. And after a lifetime of keeping her snowy abilities bottled up, she accidentally lets them loose and turns Arendelle into an icicle. Elsa leaves Arendelle on a mission of self-discovery, while Anna hooks up with hunky ice deliveryman Kristoff (played in the musical by Jelani Alladin) and Olaf (singing puppeteer Greg Hildreth) to find her sister.

Murin, a New York native who’s done Xanadu and Lysistrata Jones on Broadway, is a “Disney kid” who connected with Anna when she saw Frozen in a movie theater five years ago.

“Anna was the first one where I was like, ‘Oh, that’s totally my princess,’ ” Murin says. “She doesn’t quite have the poise that a lot of the other Disney heroines have. She is a true heroine. With others, it’s a lot of women waiting around for men to come and kiss them. And she doesn’t.”

Levy says she was also an early adopter of the Frozen franchise, taking in a screening with her girlfriends and thinking it would be “a perfect musical.”

The most glaring difference between Frozen and many of Levy’s other Broadway productions, including Hairspray, Hair, Les Miserables and Ghost the Musical, is the lack of a romantic love interest. “It’s colored the entire experience in a different shade,” Levy says. “It’s been a really cool thing to explore as a woman and as an actor to be doing a show that centers around the love of two sisters. My love interest in the show is Patti, my sister, and what that tells the world is it’s a really exciting time to be doing a show that’s not about a man.”

That non-romantic take on true love hit a nerve with women when the movie came out, Murin adds, and now with the Me Too and Time’s Up movements, “it’s re-establishing that, but it also explores the complex relationships of sisters and women with each other. It’s not the easiest relationship. We have not been raised as of yet in society to fully support other women, so we’re figuring it out how to do it ourselves.”

Disney is showing its progressive side with another of Frozen‘s core dynamics: In the movie, Kristoff is a blond white guy who falls for Anna (and vice versa), and in the musical it’s Broadway rookie Alladin, an African-American Brooklynite.

Patti Murin and Jelani Alladin share a laugh doing rehearsals of the musical “Frozen.” (Photo: Marc Brenner)

Alladin wanted to bring an emotional quality to Kristoff. “Someone called me an action figure the other day (but) to then have these moments in Act 2 where he opens up — you see the warmth, the tenderness, the heart. He’s not afraid to go there and be that vulnerable person for Anna.”

Not everybody was a fan at first. During a pre-Broadway run in Denver last year, Alladin received hate mail regarding his race and the on-stage interracial romance. (African-American actor James Brown III plays Anna and Elsa’s father in the Broadway production, while Asian-American actress Ann Sanders is their mother.)

“I had to take a moment to say, ‘You know what, if this is what being a pioneer in this type of thing has to be and what I have to deal with, I will deal with it,’ ” Alladin says. But toward the end of their Denver days, he says, “People didn’t say, ‘Oh, there’s a black man playing Kristoff.’ When I came on stage, they just saw Kristoff.”

Greg Hildreth sings and mans the Olaf puppet, playing the lovable snowman in “Frozen” on Broadway. (Photo: Andrew Eccles)

Kristoff and Anna get a new duet, What Do You Know About Love?, and Elsa sings both the interior monologue Dangerous to Dream in the first act and another pop anthem, Monster, in the second. Some other new tunes raise the status of supporting players.

Hans of the Southern Isles is sung by Hans (John Riddle), the handsome prince who catches Anna’s eye early in the show. (The tune “really establishes him as a hero,” Lopez says, though anybody who’s seen the movie knows that’s not quite the case.)

The Lopezes, meanwhile, are hard at work on the soundtrack for Frozen 2. “Yeah, it’s Frozen for breakfast, Frozen for lunch, Frozen for dinner,” Lopez chuckles. “We’re pretty excited and love where the story’s going.”

Anna (Patti Murin) falls hard for Hans (John Riddle) in the musical “Frozen.” (Photo: Deen van Meer)

They just won their second original-song Oscar for Remember Me from Pixar’s Coco, but they’ll be hard-pressed to top the cultural impact of Let It Go. The Oscar-winning Elsa anthem is, unsurprisingly, the biggest in the musical as it ends the first act.

At a recent industry performance, with the Broadway casts of Aladdin and The Lion King in the house, a buzz starts as soon as the familiar opening piano notes signal Elsa’s appearance. Little girls shush each other so they can hear, then everybody erupts in cheers once Elsa literally lets her hair down and closes with the iconic line, “The cold never bothered me anyway.”

It’s Levy’s favorite part of the show. “It’s such a nice turn for the character to go from spending most of the first act in fear and anxiety to then just letting herself be who she is and celebrating it,” says the actress.

“Frozen” actresses Caissie Levy (left) and Patti Murin play sisters in the musical and have grown close off stage as well. (Photo: Jenny Anderson)

Levy finishes the first act alone, but at curtain call her stage sister is back to give her a hug.

“It’s our moment to be like, ‘OK, another one down. We survived,’ ” Murin says. “It’s not an easy show for either of us. … She has a lot of the expectation put upon her for people who loved the film. When we both get to the end of it and we’re in one piece and no one’s been injured, it’s a daily celebration.”

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2pjgt54

#Broadway #frozen #heats #movie #smash #News #Random News

0 notes