#and it's not right for the fandom to erase that legacy and culture

[kratioed]

EDIT UPDATE 3/5/2024: Angrboða doesn't need Sigyn's identity as an anchor. Merging her with Sigyn not only outright dismisses Angrboða's character/identity as a Jötunn opposed to the Æsir, there's little to no evidences that suggests Angrboða and Sigyn ever being the same person in the Eddas.

The fusion of Freya and "Frigg" made sense because there is a hypothesis whether Frigg and Freyja are the same Goddess in Norse Mythology. Same thing with Kratos being "Fárbauti" as there's little to no information about Fárbauti himself and is only mentioned as the father of Loki in kennings.

The belief that Sigyn is identical to Angrboða (as well as Váli and Narfi being the same entities as Fenrir and Jörmungandr) doesn’t become more reliable just because it's from the GOW’s wiki community, especially when the source stems only from a fandom site. While Santa Monica uses creative liberties to suit their narrative, it doesn't change the fact they included accurate depictions in their games from myths they choose.

It's true we had limited information about Angrboða and Sigyn. They're pretty much left to be vague and are primarily known as Loki's lovers in Norse Mythology, but at least each had their own titles/kennings that set them apart as distinct characters, let alone the fact that Angrboða is identified as a pure Jötunn while Sigyn is categorized as an Æsir.

And another thing: Santa Monica may not have intended it- but Giants are written as Indigenous with their own culture. Giants were known as artisans due to their precognition, crafting murals and shrines as a way to document their prophecies. They even have their own native language...and coincidentally, Odin and the majority of the Æsir were depicted as colonizers in GOW.

It's possible that Giants' names originated from their respective ethnicities. Odin's use of Freya's "pet name" to separate her Vanir heritage indicate that "Frigg" is most likely originated from Asgard, similar to "Sigyn." So, why would Angrboða want to align herself with the same oppressors (like Odin & Thor) who prosecuted her people? Considering they indirectly contributed her parents' death along with Grýla's grief.

It wouldn't make any sense for her to merge with Sigyn, especially after the confrontation with Grýla. Angrboða was raised to believe that she would be alone and forgotten; just a minor character with no significance whatsoever in Loki's story- a character that everyone assumed was only going to meet her tragic end and be easily overlooked. We can look at Norse Mythology to see the difference; where Angrboða's fate remains unknown or theorized to be dead, while Sigyn is renowned for assisting Loki during his punishment.

Now that she's getting a head start on her personal journey of self-discovery, just imagine how poetic it would be in the end if Angrboða created a legacy. She's remembered not only for her part in Loki's story, but throughout the history of Jötunheim. Even if we entertain the idea of their merge, Angrboða (a Jötunn) having a second identity where she's remembered as "Sigyn" (a Asgard name) but not her ethnic name is just...no. Fusing her with an Æsir figure would discard if not outright erase her identity as a Jötunn, but ignores her opposition to Æsir oppression.

Angrboða should be allowed to stand as her own character. Just imagine her and Atreus rising to leadership in Jötunheim as they restore its realm and culture. Perhaps in the future, she could earn herself a new title (besides "Mother of Monsters") that resonates across the Nine (or Eight) Realms like Laufey the Just!

And if "Sigyn" were to exist, then she should have appear in any of the Jötnar shrines/murals, especially during Ragnarök. Luckily, Ragnarök marks the final chapter of the Norse saga, and soon be moving on to another pantheon. It's probably for the best to leave Sigyn alone in her rightful place within the Norse Mythos.

TL;DR: Let Angrboða be her own character. She's perfect the way she is without Sigyn's identity.

#Kratioed Speaks #Norse Mythology #Angrboða #Sigyn #God of War #Angrboda #God of War: Ragnarök #God of War: Ragnarok #God of War Ragnarök #God of War Ragnarok #gow #gow Angrboda #gow Ragnarök #gow Ragnarok #gowr

[lord-squiggletits]

Do you think there's an element that's important to Megatron that gets neglected a lot? Either by fanon or some Canon writers, whichever continuity you prefer, etc.

Also, if I'm bothering you, don't be afraid to say so. I figured a couple conversation starters about a thing you like would be appreciated.

Once upon a time I would've been chomping at the bit to list all the things I don't like about fanon Megatron, but tbh I don't feel like I've read "enough" fanfic and fanon takes about him to be able to paint the whole Megatron fanbase with a wide brush. I mean, I could, but I don't want to generalize too much and erase the variety of opinions people probably have about him, right? And the thing is that per AO3 statistics, the vast, VAST majority of fanfics in general are just one-shots that aren't meant to be super in-depth explorations of canon, and lord knows that Megatron is such a weighty character that it would take an entire novel-length story to "get him right." So take everything I say below with a healthy heaping of salt.

I guess one thing that I don't like about IDW1 Megatron's portrayal in fanon is that a lot of his fans pretty much water down his flaws. People kind of write him as if he's an unadulterated hero who had no bad policies whatsoever-- and before someone gets on about me about "you're saying fighting oppression with violence is bad???", I'm talking about the multiple other really bad practices Megatron had with his leadership and the ways he treated the Decepticons like:

Forcing people to get reformatted in order to suit his strategic agendas and experimenting on people's alt modes to try and forcibly create combiners. Anti-functionism who?

Wanting to create an empire with himself as the sole head of state which is antithetical to the whole idea of freedom

Not allowing any religious worship whatsoever within the Decepticons (even a "cult with only one member" was hunted down by the DJD, and per Tarn's words Megatron only wants himself to be worshipped)

The entire fucking existence of the DJD in general

The first thing he did upon taking control of Iacon (Autocracy) being to round up, imprison, and execute political dissidents

Creating a "might makes right" culture in the Decepticons that leads to a lot of power grabbing, unnecessary brutality, and infighting

The technoism and colonization of organics that no one wants to talk about when they try to say "the Autobots are just as bad as the Decepticons" (no they are not lmao)

Completely leaving behind the Decepticons languishing in ghettos and faced with constant discrimination in favor of fucking off on a quest to find the Knights of Cybertron for the sake of his personal "legacy" as if the Decepticons weren't literally the most important legacy his entire life was formed around

I guess I don't blame IDW Megatron fans for acting as if Megatron is the best option Cybertron ever had and he was write about anything, because JRO literally writes Megatron as the best thing Cybertron ever had and the whole universe isn't much better off without him than it is with him, but I think that says less about JRO and more about fandom's inability to comprehend nuance-- the morally gray character has to either be stanned and "he did nothing wrong"-ified or he has to be a complete bastard with no redeemable qualities whatsoever. I'd rather hang around with Megatron fans than Megatron haters, but tbh the whitewashing of Megatron's personality is so annoying sometimes and I say that BECAUSE I like Megatron a good amount.

Especially when people bash IDW OP for doing things that were much less worse than what Megatron did ahaha I've literally stopped going into OP's tags and reading MegOP fic and generally engaging with the fandom because I'm so tired of IDW OP bashing coming up without warning/prompting and bland/generic OP fanfic characterizations from Megatron stans who seem perfectly fine with everything Megatron did.

I'm not saying "you're not allowed to enjoy your problematic fave unless you write a disclaimer about how bad he is," I'm just saying that fandom interpretations of Megatron rarely feel as interesting or fleshed out as the actual, real canon version of him, and sometimes people write about Megatron in a way that feels like it comes at the cost of other characters who are also cool and full of nuance.

#squiggle answers #this ask is old it came in when i was feeling sad one time #but i had to think upon my answer for a bit #a bit of salt here but ah well it's my opinion i think i did alright with this

[comradekatara]

A little rant , but I hate how the majority of the fandom treats Katara especially in regards to her mothers death/trauma. How the most viral memes/skits about Katara are her hysterically yelling at the other characters about how they would never understand her pain and then have the rest of the gaang "shut her up" by saying how worse their traumas are . And then people in the comments get mad at Katara as if she actually did that in the show and that it isn't some overused, poorly written, ooc joke. I know it sounds really specific but I mean memes like these:

(Those are like the least bad examples i could find ) Its like people purposefully misinterpret her actions and words just to slander her character. It is also thinly veiled colourism, racism and misogyny because the hate would be nearly non-existent if she was a light skinned dude.

Sorry for the very long ask.

i've honestly..... never seen memes/"jokes" like this before, but i've seen enough people complaining about them that i'm sure that they do exist. and i've seen enough other gross racist/misogynistic mischaracterizations of katara's character that i'm just as weary and disheartened as you are, even if it's over slightly different subject matter. but it's all fucking horrible, honestly. i hate it here!!!!! anyway let's unpack this:

the one time in the show that katara remotely acts as if losing her mother is worse than the genocide of aang's people is during "the southern raiders," when she lashes out at both aang and sokka, and she does say some pretty horrible things to them. i'm not gonna deny that her comments to the both of them weren't cruel, but if the audience cannot bring themselves to empathize with this deeply traumatized fourteen year old girl lashing out from a place of deep seated grief and rage over the highly personal murder of her mother that she witnessed as a child, then i really don't know what to say. yeah, she does owe both of them an apology, and yes, she does have a tendency to view the world through a highly personal lens and make things about herself, but she's a teenage girl who grew up in a devastating war, being told she was the chosen one, who had to carry her tribe's entire culture and the legacy of her mother especially, who sacrificed her life for katara, the last waterbender in the southern water tribe. reducing katara's trauma to "dead mother" as if the context surrounding her death isn't crucial to understanding katara's trauma is, frankly, idiotic.

not to mention that katara is also a victim of genocide! yes, aang lost his entire people, and his spatiotemporal displacement is unimaginably devastating, but katara understands what it is like to have to bear the weight of one's entire culture alone, and she and aang empathize with each other over this burden. i think that people who act as if katara (and sokka) are not also genocide victims simply do not understand what genocide is. most genocides do not "extinct an entire race" (to quote that tweet), but rather ""only"" kill off most of the population, and destroy the culture of its people, erasing a legacy, history, and possible future. the fact that the fire nation went after waterbenders specifically is no accident, because their bending is integral not only in their fighting and healing capabilities, but also as an artform endemic to their culture. yes, katara still has family members and a (small) community, however devastated by the fire nation, whereas aang has no one left (well, he has appa, momo, and arguably bumi, even though he's not an air nomad, but yeah...), but acting as if she is some otherwise privileged girl who just happened to lose her mother ignores her entire circumstance and the entire foundation of her character.

and finally, you're absolutely right that "the hate would be nonexistent if she were a light-skinned dude" because we can see this clearly in zuko, who is blatantly constructed as her foil. katara can be self-absored, petty, melodramatic, headstrong, impulsive, rash, myopic, naive, vengeful, and cruel, but a) so is zuko and b) he does far worse things throughout the show, and yet is criticized for his egregious flaws far less. they are deliberate parallels, one personality placed in two extremely different circumstances. they are mirrors who can bring out the worst in each other ("the southern raiders") or the best in each other ("sozin's comet") and understanding this aspect of their dynamic is crucial to understanding both their characters respectively. not only that, but they are treated with the exact same weight by the narrative, as deuteragonists to aang's protagonist, who are both absolutely crucial to the story. but fans seem to care far more about zuko (or if they do care about katara, it's in terms of her relationship to either him or aang) than they do katara. even though they are the same person.... except katara happens to be a brown teenage girl. whoops !

#lavender-rosa #asks #katara #analysis #hot takes #aang&katara #katara&zuko #like. she lost her mom BECAUSE of genocide wtf is wrong w people. like. in the head #every day i see an atla take that makes me want to go on a murder spree #and 99% of the time it is due to a mischaracterization of katara #either by acting as if she is flawless and beyond reproach #or acting as if she is some irredeemable monster #actually she is just a very normal teenage girl . you fucking weirdos

[peonycats]

it seems really strange to me that headcanoning Yao to be more morally grey than he is in canon is called “be(ing) racist” because most of the ppl who I know who produce that kind of china content are of chinese descent?

like, there is definitely a pattern in fandom where a non-western country is often portrayed antagonistically/villainously in conflict with a western country, who is portrayed as more “innocent” or at least more in the right. This usually happens when the non western country intrudes upon the main ship, usually a western country x western country pairing (See India @ Englandxeveryone, Cuba @ CanadaxPrussia, etc) 

...But Yao really doesn’t really get that treatment a lot of the time? Maybe he’s out there destroying your precious rusame, but that’s pretty rare, he’s usually either left out of the romantic shenanigans entirely, or even more rarely, part of the rusamechu thruple  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I agree that making yao “just” to be a power-hungry asshole who bullies everyone erases so much of nuance- he’s a cheerful old man who has silly hobbies and likes eating food and collecting novelty trinkets and does taichi in the park in the morning!!! but like...

I’m gonna speak a lil bit abt my experiences on being a chinese person who loves china- I use yao to talk about/express my complicated personal feelings on diaspora, legacy, imperialism, cultural supremacy, westernization, family, history, power, culture, gender roles, etc etc, and that often means delving into his darker side because.... china’s history, hell, china’s modern day state, is dark, man. And that’s a lens a lot of chinese ppl/Han people/huaren take towards him because we’re closer to that complexity. These are all things you can’t avoid if you want to take a more serious historical/sociocultural lens on his character, and that’s perfectly fine if you don’t want to! you are 100% allowed not to want that kinda content, hell yeah, you know what you what you want!

But I think it’s rather.... limiting to call this more cynical take on a character inherently racist? To ask for it to end? Of course, certain interpretations can be fueled by prejudice and harmful stereotypes, and it’s important to talk abt those, but I don’t think “not thinking of yao as a very light-hearted character” falls under this. 

#one chinese person's take wooooo #at the end of the day u have every right not to like certain interpretations yo #hws china #hetalia headcanons #hetalia

[fandom-pardes]

Christian normativity and Lovecraft Country

Reposted from my personal blog.

Here’s something you need to wrap your head around. If you were brought up in an environment dominated by Christian culture, Christian norms have shaped the way you conceptualize how the world works, human nature, ethics, religion (even the term religion is Christian-normative), and so on.

It doesn’t matter if you actively practice or believe. IMO, unless you deliberately and consistently expose yourself to different frameworks, you are generally operating from a Christian lens. That’s just how socialization works.

In the case of media and media criticism, the Christian framework shows up in a deeply puritanical streak where good and evil are not actions and choices, but states of being. When a character does something beneficial, it’s because they are good. If they do something harmful, it’s because they are bad.

It also shows up in the ways that fandom discourse seems preoccupied with whether a character’s thoughts, feelings, or actions are morally justified or not, as opposed to understanding where those thoughts, feelings, and actions come from.

Consider Montrose. He does some horrible stuff in this show, and many viewers were upset by the way the narrative went out of its way to explore where those horrific actions come from rather than condemn him for them. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here thinking, “Of course he does that, considering what his experiences have taught him.” But at the time the show was airing, if I’d expressed that openly, I’d have gotten a lot of, “Why are you trying to justify all the bad things Montrose has done?”

*smh*

In Lovecraft Country, the Christian normativity also shows up in the way it tries to shoehorn the plot (especially the finale) into a typical Good vs. Evil (or God vs. Satan—more on this in a bit) narrative even though the characters themselves are too complex for that. Then the show Goes There with the hamfisted way it links Tic with Jesus, all the way down to his martyred blood being the source of salvation, and Christina with Satan or the Antichrist, a morally corrupt enemy of goodness/God who tempts humans to embrace forbidden knowledge (magic) and forbidden pleasures (non-cishet sex).

(IMO, the show did Christina a disservice by making her the ultimate villain because she’s a lot more fun as a wild card. Also, her character is more akin to the tricksters of myth and folklore than the villains of contemporary media. /tangent)

Then there’s the way that, in the US, the legacy of slavery, and later Jim Crow, is seen as a kind of Original Sin, which the show reinforces rather than challenges. In very simplistic terms, Original Sin means that you are automatically morally corrupt from birth, and nothing you do can undo that except faith in Jesus. In other words, you are born bad and condemned to damnation unless you think, feel, and believe the right thing.

This insinuation of Original Sin is most pronounced with how the narrative frames Christina and how viewers respond to her. I’ve seen a lot of people judge her for having the “wrong” thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and attitudes, using that as an argument against her capacity to change and grow. Even the ways she helps and empowers others become automatically suspect because of this “taint.”

*siiiiigh*

Y’all, you have to understand how weird this looks to my Jewish self.

Imagine this rich heiress who kills a bunch of Nazis. She does it for her own reasons that aren’t the least bit altruistic. That’s still fewer Nazis for me to worry about. We can argue about her motives when there are no more Nazis. But for now: Thanks, lady!

But the way some viewers would have it, I’m supposed to be like…

Me: “I know you killed all these Nazis, but do you really care about my people?”

Her: “No.”

Me: “You horrible person! If you don’t care, don’t bother killing any Nazis at all!”

Haha. OK. Sure, Jan.

I’m not gonna go down the rabbit hole of Jewish ethics and moral development, but to summarize Jewish ethics while standing on one foot, the important thing is the Do The Thing. Even though it’s ideal to Do The Thing for the right reasons, whatever it takes to get you to Do The Thing is valid (some conditions about Doing The Other Things apply). Good intentions don’t absolve people of wrongdoing, nor do ulterior motives erase the good that people do.

Furthermore, sin is not a state of being in Jewish tradition. It’s an action or behavior akin to an arrow missing its target. Our job is to fix what we can and try again, failing better until we hit our target.

So Christina crashing her car into truckload of racists matters. Giving Leti enough money to pay for a house matters. Sharing magical secrets with Tic and Ruby matters. Keeping her promise not to harm Leti matters.

Now, if I really wanna get Jewish about this, I’d argue that Christina’s deep yearning for human connection, for family and for love, is what can give her the drive to learn better* and do better. This may strike some with deeply ingrained Christian norms as selfish, or at the very least, self-interested. However, Jewish tradition encourages us to perform mitzvot and other good deeds using both our yetzer hatov (our “good” impulse—think the Freudian** superego) and our yetzer hara (our “evil” impulse—think the Freudian id). Our job is not to suppress or deny the part that wants things for ourselves, but to refine it and channel it toward constructive purposes.

I think that’s about it.

Happy Hanukkah!

*Moral development through learning and study is a hallmark of Jewish ethics. No one is born knowing right from wrong. It has to be taught and cultivated.

**Freud was Jewish, BTW.

#lovecraft country meta #fandom meta #cultural christianity #christina braithwhite #montrose freeman

[rickriordanfandam]

opinions on riordanverse ; my edition

a lot of people have been doing this so i decided why not right. probably gna lose some followers or smth but anyways. pls respect my opinions! if u disagree, thats fine, but please be polite. unless any of my opinions strikes u as morally wrong then pls point it out to me respectfully. thanks!

- i actually liked drew. im so sorry to everyone who hates her but full offence, why. think about it this way ok, first of all drew became hc because silena died. silena was the traitor, the one who betrayed chb, yet after she died campers celebrated her as a hero? and then drew suddenly has to replace her and live up to idk that legacy she left behind,, when all of a sudden this girl named piper swoops in and takes her place. idk abt u but i wld be salty abt that too. not only that, but as an asian, the chances of drew having faced racism/bullying as a child is pretty high (she studies at brooklyn academy). which means that when she finds out shes a demigod, and arrives at chb where most of the campers are white (this is an assumption btw), she’d obviously be scared of being bullied for her skin color right?? so the first thing she wld do before the campers get to bully her is to bully them before they can do so. (sentence structure here is wack i apologize) ofc this might not even have happened, drew could have had a perfect childhood && was a b1tch for no reason, BUT EVEN THEN HER ROLE AS A BULLY WAS PRETTY VITAL BECAUSE THAT FURTHER SHOWED THE CONTRAST BETWEEN HER AND PIPER,, HIGHLIGHTING PIPER AS A HERO//GOOD CHARACTER,, AND THEREFORE MAKING READERS LIKE PIPER MORE. anyway stop hating on drew please. ALSO WHY IS THIS SO LONGA SDFJHG

- jason isnt bland, the fandom just kinda erased his backstory (thanks to @pjohoo-memes for the phrasing lol)

- reynabeth wouldnt have lasted/would have broken up several times. idk i just see them as two extremely powerful characters who have firm opinions and will definitely clash at some point. in a platonic relationship,, i can see them as really good friends but as lovers? idk i just think theyll break up

- PIPABETH

- i dont really like jercy,, i see them as better friends than lovers. also idt jason and percy were that close..?

- the dam and not my type jokes are srsly cringey and were never funny. ik that seems hypocritical since my username literally makes use of the dam joke but honestly i dont actually like the joke. its not funny to me and has never been funny

- the seven were not best friends. they definitely argued,, and honestly probably werent as close as the fandom makes them seem. like ure dumped with 6 other people, out of which u only know a few. my introverted ass would have jumped off the argo 2 quicker than leo valdez could bomb camp jupiter up. also leo was a dick to frank. so what if frank is bigger sized?? thats not a valid reason to tease him

- the fandom needs to stop hating on octavian while worshipping luke. if u hate luke and u say u hate octavian too, then okay. but if u tell me ure a luke stan but u despise octavian?? imma disagree w u. luke was worse than octavian im sorry. first of all, octavian being a dick was kinda justified. hes been after the praetor position for so long, and everyone keeps saying to “wait for jason” when suddenly this dude, whos a son of NEPTUNE (neptune wasnt liked much by romans), and the camp decides to make him praetor?? dude i would be pissed off big time. and then afterwards, he finds out that greek demigods are real and the dude they made praetor is greek. AND THEN GREEK DEMIGODS COME TO CJ AND ONE OF THEM BOMB IT UP?? octavian has been told all his life that greeks are scum and this dude called leo valdez attacks cj. sure it was an accident, but did octavian know that? no. so it was honestly justified that he was such a salty prick im just saying. also some of yall be hating on octavian for cutting a teddy bear open and thats the funniest shit ive ever heard i swear 

- luke didnt go to elysium

- travis and connor stoll r way too underrated. the two have been head counselors of the hermes cabin since luke was revealed as a traitor, can u imagine the stress? luke, the person they probably looked up to as a brother, betrayed them. and they didnt even have time to process this when they were  thrown the roles of being hcs. that would have been so stressful and i would probably have broken down if i were them. the stoll brothers taking turns to wake up at ungodly hours because a new camper is crying and homesick and terrified, the stoll brothers having to comfort and take care of new campers, having to deal with the amount of people in that cramped space because not enough campers are being claimed fast enough. having to resolve issues between campers in the hermes cabin all the time. the stolls arent just comedic relief, and we need to stop treating them as such

- tratie shldve been canon idc idc

- demigods of the demeter cabin arent talked about enough and i love the fact that meg was demeters kid. like she isnt the child of one of the big three yet shes so powerful.

- we need to hype clarisse up more her character arc was phucking amazing 

- rachel is overhated. sis found out greek gods exist and regularly come down to earth to fuck around and went “ok cool”. queen shit behavior methinks

- the floor 19 crew of mcga is srsly underrated. like do u even remember halfborn gunderson, mallory keen, tj, etc??? bc i feel like we only remember samirah, magnus, alex, and sometimes blitz and hearthstone

- sadie (tkc) was kinda annoying at first. i like her more now tho but i rmb not liking her for a phat while

- tkc and mcga need more love

- carter kane and jason grace arent boring. theyre just really sweet boys who are too good for this world and yes yes yes 

- hazel and frank (especially frank) need to be hyped up more. i hardly ever see anything about them. also yall seem to forget that frank was literally made praetor and that even hecate admired hazel and was willing to fight beside her because of how powerful she was

- frazels age gap is kinda sketch but i still think theyre really cute

- nico definitely had trauma from going to tartarus on his own

- GROVER IS PERCYS BEST FRIEND

- annabeth isnt smarter than leo but neither is leo smarter than annabeth. ive seen a lot of discussions about who is smarter and heres my hot take on it: neither. theyre equally smart, just in different ways. leos a genius mathematically speaking. he has no issues solving math problems meant for people much, much older than him. annabeth on the otherhand, is great at strategies etc. she can make an army of 1000 more powerful than the enemy, even if theyre outnumbered. so in my opinion, both are equally as smart//u cant compare their intelligence, because their talents lie in two different areas.

- while i do agree rick riordan isnt a god and that hes bound to make mistakes,, AND that hes given us a lot of representation,, if the representation offends the people its sposed to represent, then theres a problem. im talking about piper as a poc and wearing feathers in her hair. im not a poc, so i cant speak for them on whether or not its wrong, because i dont know either. HOWEVER, i have seen multiple posts BY pocs talking about how they didnt really like rick’s representation of piper, and thats an issue. pocs have been and are still oppressed and discriminated against by many. as a white cis man, we cant really blame him for not knowing (tho he could have done a research,, asked some pocs,, idk), but by representing pocs in that manner, hes influencing impressionable kids/teens into thinking “oh pocs wear feathers in their hair all the time” etc, which isnt true. the pjo/hoo series is extremely successful, and kids who read the books will probably start forming inaccurate opinions on pocs. the amount of fan art that depicts piper with feathers in her hair dont help either. “but rick said so in the books, so its canon” yeah well rick isnt a god and he can get some things wrong at times. im not saying we should cancel him, im saying we should start educating ourselves and not spread false info like pocs wearing feathers in their hair all the time. also that snake song shit where she sang Summertime was just- yeah. bc heres the thing you can be racist, and still include minorities, but portray them in a racist way. And even then, ignorance isn't a thing to admire. Getting those facts wrong still has a major impact. It continues to perpetuate racist stereotypes.

“ With the feather thing, I looked it up myself; it takes less than five minutes to figure out that Cherokees don't braid feathers into their hair. I didn't grow up in the country where my parents are from. I have many other first/second generation American friends who have also been through that, with a bit of a disconnect from their culture. But something that most of us have in common is that when we didn't know something, and when our parents weren't that big of a help, we looked it up. We sought out resources online and through other people from our culture to be able to connect more with where we came from. Some of that took a Google search. So I find it hard to believe that Piper, a girl who Rick's trying to portray as someone who is attempting to connect with her culture and is totally against racist stereotypes, wouldn't know that eagle feathers aren't supposed to be braided into your hair casually. She may be disconnected from her culture, but she's also shown to want to connect back to it. Piper wouldn't be casually braiding feathers into her hair while also telling off people for being racist. It makes no sense.” - reddit thread (down below) 

for those of yall who wanna know more please please read this, it has a lot of things i wanna add in here : https://www.reddit.com/r/camphalfblood/comments/gy3gl2/piper_mcleans_portrayal_is_innacurate/ 

as well as https://finding-my-culture.tumblr.com/post/189422373260/maxie-ratties-and-cattie-finding-my-culture 

i will be posting screenshots of these in future posts so if ure viewing this on ig and u dont have tumblr,, dont worry 

- the fact that most of the strong female characters in the series refuse to be “girly”, and ngl i dont really like that. just because ure girly doesnt mean u cant be strong. 

- piper would have been a great way for him to start making the strong characters act girlier, but instead he went with the “I’m not like other girls” trope which is quite obnoxious to hear constantly, and I don’t think it’s necessarily great for younger girls to read that idea growing up.  the closest we've ever had to a strong female character who was also into "girly" things was Silena. when I was younger I admired Piper's "I'm not like other girls" thing, but then I got older and realized that the whole mentality of "not like other girls" is super obnoxious, and a little bit toxic

i have a heck load more that i cant rmb rn but yeah feel free to add more 

#riodanverse opinions #frank zhang #hazel levesque #leo valdez #piper mclean #jason grace #percy jackson #annabeth chase #grover underwood #tkc #the kane chronicles #mcga #magnus chase #magnus chase and the gods of asgard #pjo #pjato #hoo #Heroes of Olympus #the seven #octavian #luke castellan #meg mcaffrey #apollo #trials of apoll #travis stoll #connor stoll

[firelxdykatara]

unquestionably-queer replied to your post “I mean, since we're at it, could you maybe talk about the double...”

i agree w a lot of this!! i dont want to speak out of turn but from what ive heard from indigenous women (which im not) the problem isnt the ship itself but its representation ig? basically my understanding is that in fanfic n what not katara is often stripped of her autonomy and relocated and Thats what people have problems with? i think youre right just bc zuko and sokka and are close and age and its Gay doesnt suddenly make it not vaguely racist (for lack of better terms)

That is a perfectly fair and valid criticism of the corners in fandom in which that happens. However, at that point, it’s an issue with racism in general in fandoms at large--and, I promise you, this is not an issue that’s exclusive to Zutara. I can only speak for my own experience, of course, but the Zutara discord server of which I am part has a lot of poc as well as queer people (including some queer poc!!!), some of whom are indigenous, and so when people call the entire fandom ‘white, straight, and racist’ (which is effectively what happens when they say that just shipping zk is racist/heteronormative, regardless of like, context), it not only erases all of us and our contributions to the fandom, but it also like... ignores the fact that those fics and metas are soooo not the norm.

Like, I’ve lost count of how many ‘fire lady Katara’ metas take into account how much of her culture she would bring with her to the Fire Nation. Everything from spectacular fanart designing clothing that incorporates her own culture with her husbands, to having her called Lady of the Moon rather than Fire Lady, to having their courtship extend over the years she spent as an ambassador and making so many changes for the better to the nation she would eventually marry into.

I almost never see meta or fanart where Katara marries Zuko and then completely assimilates and abandons her culture. But you know where I do see Katara stripped of her autonomy, made an accessory of her husband, denied agency, and having her legacy completely erased to the point where if you hadn’t watched AtLA you’d have no idea why she’d be well known at all except for who she married?

Canon.

That’s what the comics and LoK did to Katara, so I really don’t understand how these things get flung at the Zutara fandom as if we haven’t been fighting back against that future for her for years. The Northern and Southern Water Tribes went into a full blown civil war and Katara didn’t lift a finger to try and use her political clout or just her fierce passion and love for her people to knock some sense into them. Her son and his entire family were kidnapped by zealots and threatened with death and she didn’t even try to help the rescue effort. I get that LoK wasn’t the Gaang’s story, but AtLA wasn’t the White Lotus’ story either, and those old ass men got to kick ass and take names all over the place, so don’t hand me that ‘Katara was too old’ crap. She was, what, eighty something? Bumi was 112 in AtLA!!!

Sorry, I didn’t mean to go off on an LoK rant, but my ultimate point is, it doesn’t make sense to me to come after zutara shippers when, by and large, we wish canon had done better by Katara and that is reflected in much of our fanworks and metas. Does this mean there won’t be racist shlock in our fandom??? Of course not! Because racism is insidious and no fandom is free from it, so of course if there are works that perpetuate harmful ideals it’s perfectly fine to talk about them and ask that the people involved do better in the future, or just avoid those who refuse to change. But slamming an entire fandom for the actions of a few, while ignoring the fact that their preferred ship pulls from the same exact fanbase (and I’m sorry, but white gays are no less racist than white straights, that’s just a fact), is hypocritical in the extreme.

Tl;dr: people in glass houses really shouldn’t throw stones.

#unquestionably-queer #atla #zutara #katara #zuko #atla fandom salt #just covering my bases

[haich-slash-cee]

Is the print publishing world picking up online/fandom terms? How they are using them? How do we feel about this?

So this is... attention-getting, for folks who like to follow publishing and meta stuff.

https://twitter.com/sapphicxrey/status/1215065948677443584

https://twitter.com/TorDotComPub/status/1233391556750647299

(2nd tweet -- TW, mentions of non-con)

Are we seeing the beginnings of book publishers directly borrowing from online/fandom culture in promoting their books? How do we feel about these examples?

More below cut.

Exhibit #1: screenshots of Bonds of Brass promo from Jan 8 2020. (Which is probably going to have reactions of “haha, cute” at most.)

Transcript of blurb: 

“If you like... 

forbidden romances, “there’s only one bed”, cityships, weaponized umbrellas, powersuits, secret princes, best friends, best friends PINING, fake dating between PINING best friends, tactical streaking, the minivan of starships, cigar-chomping cyborg ladies, scary empress moms, galactic-level bisexual disasters, LEGACY (WHAT IS A LEGACY?), rooftop hopping, golden trios, rumblin’ drums, bootleg fireworks, BIG SPACE BATTLES PEW PEW, a surprisingly functional public transit system, mob trouble, one hell of a pilot, the inherent DRAMA of empire, a nice interlude in a river, smoking a joint that’s been on the floor, sick stunts, slick grifts, hiding in a dumpster, or any combination of the above,

 Then you might like 

BONDS OF BRASS”

The Twitter responses seem to be generally enthusiastic. (And also, “FinnPoe! FinnPoe!”)

Personally, I’m intrigued from a meta-view of “oh so that’s definitely pulling from online world and fanfiction world, interesting. I wonder how much fanfiction culture is starting to influence print book culture and promotion.” Maybe I’ve got some questions like, “Ok so moneymaking companies such as Penguin are now using culture developed by the not-moneymaking-world of fanfiction? How do we feel about this?” Anyway, the book looks cute, I’m interested enough and I might get it from the library.

I suspect many people’s reactions are along the lines of “hm, interesting”, “sounds like a lark”, or “haha they’re using AO3 tags as promo”, etc. 

Exhibit #2, screenshots of DOCILE promo, from Feb 28 2020 (today is March 1 2020), and screenshots of Twitter responses so far:

(*CW, non-con discussion)

Tweet transcript:

“DOCILE by @KMSzpara:  

-Dubcon/Noncon 

-Dramatic Trillionaire Content 

-BDSM and then some more BDSM and then a lot more BDSM

 -Hurt/comfort and hurt/no comfort

 -Cinnamon roll of steel 

-The most scandalous kink: love 

-Courtroom, bedroom, & Preakness drama

[Tor book website link]”

So this is getting mixed reactions on Twitter. All dozen or so reactions, so far. Here’s text transcripts and bio info from repliers, below. I’m being a little obsessive, mostly to show that there’s a mix of queer, book-ish people in the replies (including the author).)

Noncon is nonconsentual sex, rape. Even in fandom it's a content tag, not a promotional term. I can't imagine being a rape survivor and seeing this come across my TL. -- @WriteSomeGood [queer rainbow] [Cis queer homemaker, aspiring author, maker of incredible cinnamon buns. She/her] [has a Tumblr page]

I’m not a survivor but it was an instant “no thank you” from me. And I was sincerely looking forward to this prior to. This is the most immediately off-putting marketing push I’ve seen for a book in a long damn time. -- @AGAWilmot [Author, editor, artist. Co-EIC of @anathemaspec. @SFU alum. The Death Scene Artist/W&W 2018. Ace/enby. They/them. Horror is my comfort food.]

Whichever intern wrote this tweet, deserves a full time job. With benefits. -- @simeontsanev [Aspiring writer, post-aspiring musician, and overall geek  He/Him /[queer rainbow]/ To the world we dream about, and the one we live in now! http://simeontsanev.com]

Idk why everyone thinks it’s always an intern writing copy and not a team comprised of extremely skilled social media experts, editors, publicists and marketers, and their assistants  I worked on those tags with my editor and a good friend!! -- @KMSzpara [Kellan. [queer rainbow]  Speculative fiction writer. Queer agenda.  Hugo & Nebula finalist.  DOCILE 3/3/20 from Tor Dot Com Publishing.  He/him.  Rep @suddenlyjen] *The author, bio page and twitter page.

this is CUTE! -- @MSSciarappa  [queer rainbow] I do books. he/him.

I am Extremely Ready for this content thank u -- @JessicaBCooper [Journo ☽ Writer of faerie, villain fuckery & cruel desires ☽ Lestat & Loki's love child ☽ Aleksander Morozova's side-hoe ☽ Rep'd by Kate Testerman @ktliterary]

I’m listening -- @MerynLobb [Government worker. Weightlifter. Nihilist. Aspiring cult leader. Avid user of words, often bad ones. #AMM R6 Mentee. she/her]

Soon! Soon!! -- @castrophony [Geek. Gamer. Cosplayer. Bibliophile. Scientist. She/Her.]

[happy reaction gif] -- @TorDotComPub [Providing a home for writers to tell SFF stories in exactly the number of words they choose. All our titles are available globally in print and DRM-free ebook.]

[throwing stuff in dumpster, unhappy reaction gif] -- @cursedgravy  [name's xavi, im a transman and i like to daydream about making content] 

For more context, here’s the blurb from the author website. Below is the blurb from the publisher’s site:

“Docile

K.M. Szpara

K. M. Szpara's Docile is a science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power, a challenging tour de force that at turns seduces and startles.

There is no consent under capitalism.

To be a Docile is to be kept, body and soul, for the uses of the owner of your contract. To be a Docile is to forget, to disappear, to hide inside your body from the horrors of your service. To be a Docile is to sell yourself to pay your parents' debts and buy your children's future.

Elisha Wilder’s family has been ruined by debt, handed down to them from previous generations. His mother never recovered from the Dociline she took during her term as a Docile, so when Elisha decides to try and erase the family’s debt himself, he swears he will never take the drug that took his mother from him.

Too bad his contract has been purchased by Alexander Bishop III, whose ultra-rich family is the brains (and money) behind Dociline and the entire Office of Debt Resolution. When Elisha refuses Dociline, Alex refuses to believe that his family’s crowning achievement could have any negative side effects—and is determined to turn Elisha into the perfect Docile without it.

Content warning: Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape and sexual abuse.”

So that’s a lot of info and reactions.

Personally: at first glance, I absently skimmed the tweet and “hurt/comfort” popped out, and I was like “What? Mainstream publishing is cool with this now? I was wondering if ‘hurt/comfort’ would one day become commonly used in publishing [related post]. But this is way sooner than I thought.” And then I read the rest of of the tweet and thought, “Wait, what?” 

And then I started reading through the tweet replies and thought, “OK, at the risk of getting a bunch of Tumblr drama, I want to bring this to the whump community and see how people feel."

As for myself, one of my squicks is non-con, and I’m not really interested in hurt/no comfort. So just from the tweet, I know the book is not for me. The official blurbs confirmed that. In this sense, this is like skimming Ao3 tags on a fic and saying “pass” on a story.

However, I have questions about the specific promotion of the book. So the official blurbs are pretty standard. What about that tweet, which Tor (and the author, who helped put it together) put out? Because I think an official publisher’s Tweet comes with different context than Ao3 tags.

First, the different internet spaces. You can filter tags on Ao3 and Tumblr. I know you can mute words on Twitter, but is that the same thing? Also, would people be expecting these tags on Twitter? Compared to Ao3 or Tumblr or Tumblr Whump spaces?

Within the Tumblr Whump community, from what I’ve browsed, the community attitude (guidelines?) seem to be “Write and discuss what you want. Be sure to tag it, use content warnings, or otherwise clearly communicate if you have things that may be triggering. Respect people’s squicks/triggers. Walk away from what you don’t like.” Like, tumblr whump has a very specific culture of trying to balance discourse/stories about potentially very dark stuff, but also wanting to make sure the IRL people and Tumblr users are okay. There’s always posts going around about how to do this, are we doing this in the right way, ethics, so on. Also -- and people can correct me -- the whump tumblr space might be where tags are content warnings for people to stay away, and also what people might actively look for. So if any space is going to discuss if this promotional tweet checks out, I feel like it’s this space. 

Also, to note again, Tor Tweets are in the money-official-publisher-world, not unpaid-tumblr-people or unpaid-fanfiction-fandom-world.

Maybe I just want to ask, “Hey those first two tweet responses, does they have a point? Tor using ‘noncon’ as official promotion? On Twitter?” I mean, I’ve previously written, “The CW and TW tags that Ao3 writers use, I really wish those were used with published books as well.” But somehow, the Tor tweet was not quite what I was expecting. Maybe for reasons similar to that first tweet response. (I guess one could debate if a tweet is really promotion or just information... you know what someone can correct me, but I’m gonna say that a Tor.com tweet is promotion, compared to information like Ao3, and that tweet was there for promotion.)

Those tags operate within specific Ao3 and Tumblr cultures and infrastructure. I don’t hang around Twitter for whump stuff, IDK what the culture is. Anyway, does dropping these tags into a promotional tweet from Tor.... translate?

The tweet is evidently gathering the people who are there for it, and the people who aren’t there for it are quickly realizing that they are not there for it. But personally, the Tor website blurb does a better job at that, using writing that I’d expect from a publisher for communicating fictional non-con situations. (Maybe the blurb content warnings are what I wanted more of, when I said I wished for CW and TW in books.)

Anyway, there’s no huge drama about that Docile book promo on Twitter, as far as I can tell. So this is a niche thing, right now. But. The promo for Bonds of Brass and for Docile might be the beginnings of a trend of well-known book publishers borrowing from online writing / fandom culture and terminology in order to promote or categorize their books. These two promos might set a precedent or have other significance.

So if anyone has discourse on the tweets or potential future trends... 

#meta #discourse #publishing #bonds of brass #Docile #publishers #future trends #maybe #non-con #trigger warnings #content warnings #fanfiction #ao3 #tumblr #whump #hurt/comfort #hurt/no comfort #books

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Read: Jeannette Ng's Campbell Award acceptance speech, in which she correctly identifies Campbell as a fascist and expresses solidarity with Hong Kong protesters

Last weekend, Jeanette Ng won the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2019 Hugo Awards at the Dublin Worldcon; Ng's acceptance speech calls Campbell, one of the field's most influential editors, a "fascist" and expresses solidarity with the Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters.

I am a past recipient of the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer (2000) as well as a recipient of the John W Campbell Memorial Award (2009). I believe I'm the only person to have won both of the Campbells, which, I think, gives me unique license to comment on Ng's remarks, which have been met with a mixed reception from the field.

I think she was right -- and seemly -- to make her remarks. There's plenty of evidence that Campbell's views were odious and deplorable. For example, Heinlein apologists like to claim (probably correctly) that his terrible, racist, authoritarian, eugenics-inflected yellow  peril novel Sixth Column was effectively a commission from Campbell (Heinlein based the novel on one of Campbell's stories). This seems to have been par for the course for JWC, who liked to micro-manage his writers: Campbell also leaned hard on Tom Godwin to kill the girl in "Cold Equations" in order to turn his story into a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life.

So when Ng held Campbell "responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists," she was factually correct.

Not just factually correct: also correct to be saying this now. Science fiction (like many other institutions) is having a reckoning with its past and its present. We're trying to figure out what to do about the long reach that the terrible ideas of flawed people (mostly men) had on our fields. We're trying to reconcile the legacies of flawed people whose good deeds and good art live alongside their cruel, damaging treatment of women. These men were not aberrations: they were following an example set from the very top and running through fandom, to the great detriment of many of the people who came to fandom for safety and sanctuary and community.

It's not a coincidence that one of the first organized manifestations of white nationalism as a cultural phenomenon was within fandom, and while fandom came together to firmly repudiate its white nationalist wing, these assholes weren't (all) entryists who showed up to stir trouble in someone else's community. The call (to hijack the Hugo award) was coming from inside the house: these guys had been around forever, and we'd let them get away with it, in the name of "tolerance" even as these guys were chasing women, queer people, and racialized people out of the field.

Those same Nazis went on to join Gamergate, then take up on /r/The_Donald, and they were part of the vanguard of the movement that put a boorish, white supremacist grifter into the White House.

The connection between the tales we tell about ourselves and our past and futures have a real, direct outcome on the future we arrive at. White supremacist folklore, including the ecofascist doctrine that says we can only avert climate change by murdering all the brown people, comes straight out of sf folklore, where it's completely standard for every disaster to be swiftly followed by an underclass mob descending on their social betters to eat and/or rape them (never mind the actual way that disasters go down).

When Ng took the mic and told the truth about his legacy, she wasn't downplaying his importance: she was acknowledging it. Campbell's odious ideas matter because he was important, a giant in the field who left an enduring mark on it. No one disagrees about that. What we want to talk about today is what that mark is, and what it means.

Scalzi points out:

There are still people in our community who knew Campbell personally, and many many others one step removed, who idolize and respect the writers Campbell took under his wing. And there are people — and once again I raise my hand — who are in the field because the way Campbell shaped it as a place where they could thrive. Many if not most of these folks know about his flaws, but even so it’s hard to see someone with no allegiance to him, either personally or professionally, point them out both forcefully and unapologetically. They see Campbell and his legacy abstractly, and also as an obstacle to be overcome. That’s deeply uncomfortable.

He's not wrong, and the people who counted Campbell as a friend are legitimately sad to confront the full meaning of his legacy. I feel for them. It's hard to reconcile the mensch who was there for you and treated his dog with kindness and doted on his kids with the guy who alienated and hurt people with his cruel dogma.

Here's the thing: neither one of those facets of Campbell cancel the other one out. Just as it's not true that any amount of good deeds done for some people can repair the harms he visited on others; it's also true that none of those harms cancel out the kindnesses he did for the people he was kind to.

Life is not a ledger. Your sins can't be paid off through good deeds. Your good deeds are not cancelled by your sins. Your sins and your good deeds live alongside one another. They coexist in superposition.

You (and I) can (and should) atone for our misdeeds. We can (and should) apologize for them to the people we've wronged. We should do those things, not because they will erase our misdeeds, but because the only thing worse than being really wrong is not learning to be better.

People are flawed vessels. The circumstances around us -- our social norms and institutions -- can be structured to bring out our worst natures or our best. We can invite Isaac Asimov to our cons to deliver a lecture on "The Power of Posterior Pinching" in which he literally advises men on how to grope the women in attendance, or we can create and enforce a Code of Conduct that would bounce anyone, up to and including the Con Chair and the Guest of Honor, who tried a stunt like that.

We, collectively, through our norms and institutions, create the circumstances that favor sociopathy or generosity. Sweeping bad conduct under the rug isn't just cruel to the people who were victimized by that conduct: it's also a disservice to the flawed vessels who are struggling with their own contradictions and base urges. Create an environment where it's normal to do things that -- in 10 or 20 years -- will result in your expulsion from your community is not a kindness to anyone.

There are shitty dudes out there today whose path to shitty dudehood got started when they watched Isaac Asimov deliver a tutorial on how to grope women without their consent and figured that the chuckling approval of all their peers meant that whatever doubts the might have had were probably misplaced. Those dudes don't get a pass because they learned from a bad example set by their community and its leaders -- but they might have been diverted from their path to shitty dudehood if they'd had better examples. They might not have scarred and hurt countless women on their way from the larval stage of shittiness to full-blown shitlord, and they themselves might have been spared their eventual fate, of being disliked and excluded from a community they joined in search of comradeship and mutual aid. The friends of those shitty dudes might not have to wrestle with their role in enabling the harm those shitty dudes wrought.

Jeannette Ng's speech was exactly the speech our field needs to hear. And the fact that she devoted the bulk of it to solidarity with the Hong Kong protesters is especially significant, because of the growing importance of Chinese audiences and fandom in sf, which exposes writers to potential career retaliation from an important translation market. There is a group of (excellent, devoted) Chinese fans who have been making noises about a Chinese Worldcon for years, and speeches like Ng's have to make you wonder: if that ever comes to pass, will she be able to get a visa to attend?

Back when the misogynist/white supremacist wing of SF started to publicly organize to purge the field of the wrong kind of fan and the wrong kind of writer, they were talking about people like Ng. I think that this is ample evidence that she is in exactly the right place, at the right time, saying the right thing.

https://boingboing.net/2019/08/20/needed-saying.html

[duchessofostergotlands]

I’m honestly not trying to be mean or anything. I just wanted to say that I understand that Meghan is now a British Royal and she represents you. But, as a Black Woman who has dealt with people, specifically white, try to erase my heritage and culture. It makes me feel a certain way when you or anybody in this fandom get mad when Meghan shows her American roots. It sometimes feels like you’re trying to erase who she is. I’m sorry if this comes off rude I honestly don’t mean to.

Hey :) You don’t sound rude at all, please don’t worry about that! You’re very respectful and polite while still making your point!

I want to start by saying that this is something common to royals who aren’t black. Marie is French but a Danish royal and is currently experiencing criticism for not doing enough for Denmark and choosing to live in France instead. Silvia is German-Brazilian but living in Sweden, Mary is Australian but living in Denmark, Maxima is Argentinian but living in the Netherlands, the Duchess of Gloucester is Danish but living in the UK and of course Philip isn’t British either, he’s Greek/Danish. And they have the same expectations that they put the country that pays them first. However, I can appreciate that even if the actual thing itself is fair, the impact may not be. I understand- that’s probably not the right word because I can’t understand it on a personal level- that there is a different connotation for Meghan as a mixed race American woman because there is that legacy of people having their identities forcibly removed. 

The difficulty is that being a royal is a job and the requirements for that job haven’t changed for centuries, they agree to it willingly: we pay them to represent us and the US doesn’t so it’s unfair that they get this free representation. While people- including the royals themselves- like to pretend they’re just a sweet family they are important parts of our government and so to take taxpayer funds and not use them for the intended purposes is a small scale abuse of public funding. I don’t hold Meghan solely responsible. If anything, it’s more understandable for her as she is actually from the US but Harry isn’t and he’s one half of that account and one half of their household. 

Ultimately I think that it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to entirely forget their roots and who they are. I wouldn’t expect that of anyone but as you point out it has a different weight to it with Meghan because of that cultural legacy amongst the African diaspora. I think a good way to frame it is to think about what she can do instead of thinking of it as what she can’t do. I wrote this in a previous post and stick by it:

I’ll try to think about it more positively and offer some suggestions of things that I think would be a good way to meet her job description without forgetting her home entirely. I know there are a lot of exchange programmes for UK and US students which I think is something that would align really well with the ACU work she’s starting now. Note: The Duchess of Gloucester has honoured her roots by doing a scholarship programme for the Anglo-Danish Society which links England and Denmark. Young Leaders UK is cited on the US Embassy in London’s website, it’s a project which links British rising talents with the US. She could go to the National Museum of Scotland to see the Declaration of Arbroath which was a model for the US Declaration of Independence. It would be cool if she became Chancellor of the University of Glasgow as there were a lot of US figures studying there including James McCune Smith who was refused a place in a US university because he was black and whose degree from Glasgow made him the first African-American to have a medical degree! There are loads of clubs in the UK for female US citizens she could get involved in. There’s an American Museum in the UK.

I also thought the baseball game was good as it is a US sport with US teams playing but it benefited one of Harry’s charities and it took place in London. Cultural exchange or international relations means she can honour both countries without picking one above another. It’s also perfectly possible for them to occasionally do a US reference a couple of times a year or have one patronage out of a few dozen be for the US (Mary has an Australian patronage, I believe) but right now it’s every month without fail so I think that also would be a better tactic. Basically it isn’t that I want her to give up who she is- some people may but I don’t- it’s just understanding how they express it

#ask #anon #this was not meant to be this long lol #meghan markle #british royal family #prince harry

[brooklynislandgirl]

I saw something on my dash and I feel the need to respond. I am not @ the person who wrote it because she is a lovely person who is just expressing her opinion, and mine of course drastically differs. It isn’t a call out post so much as a...different view which is necessary.

~*~ JJ Abrams: Is great at beginnings. He is very strong at creating an introduction but the man couldn’t follow through if he were given a map, a compass, a sherpa and put inside a wet paper bag. Plot bunnies have never been wrangled and in depth character work is not his strong suit. An excellent example of this is both Lost and the Star Trek series, another fandom that I have lived in practically all of my life.

Rian Johnson: Never heard about him before TLJ and I am absolutely certain I don’t want to have anything else to do with any of his work. Strong Character dynamics was touted as his strong suit and from what I saw in TLJ, there was more character dynamics in Seasame Street. As for Experimental Works, the key word is experimental, and sometimes the experiment fails. As for Original plots, well...there wasn’t anything original. I saw this movie twice over growing up and done better than what he did.

George Lucas: Great at coming up with a verse, phenomenal vision and desire to bring back/recreate the action-adventure series of the past and dropped us into the middle of a vibrant and intriguing world. Yes, the dialogue was occasionally clunky but forgivable. The FATHER of modern special effects, and it makes me wonder what would have happened if they HAD used his ideas and outlines for the Sequel Trilogy, rather than having his contributions scrapped. Just remember kids, if it wasn’t for George, we wouldn’t HAVE Star Wars. {Or Indiana Jones, Or American Graffiti or.....}

~*~

As for ‘people need to stop acting as if Star Wars is this award-worthy fanchise’, uhm shall we not mention the 7 Academy Awards, 8 Saturn Awards, the Baftas, the Nebulas, the People’s Choice Awards, and the LA Film Critic awards won by the original trilogy, or the 5 Oscar Nominations of the Prequel Trilogy? Cause I mean I can pretend they don’t exist, but that doesn’t mean that they will be miraculously erased from reality.

Yes, the Franchise IS about Space Wizards and light sabers and princesses and pirates, but it is also a mythological treatise for a modern age, an in depth attempt to recreate both the nostalgia of past media and based on cultural/psychological archetypes far exceeding JUST being movies. And whether or not that was George’s intention, it has taken a life of its own and has now influenced at least 3 generations of human beings. Possibly more. 

The ST is far less developed, yes. Because no one cared. They only had to scavenge the best bits of the OT and PT and paste them together in whatever pseudo-order they could make fit, and added in things that made absolutely NO SENSE when they couldn’t. Specifically most of Luke’s “characterisation”, Rose-whomeverthehellshewas, and I mean to answer this I would have to write an entire other post. Was it boring? Yes. Was it Cookie-Cutter, you could say so, with a few minor exceptions, and if those were MY cookies, I’d have thrown them out. Oh. Wait. I DID.

I would also like to point out that a good 3/4ths of the novels if not more were written to cover the galazy AFTER Return of the Jedi. Any one or more of those stories would have been far better to adapt that what the ST trilogy has given us.  As for “The ST takes place over less than 1 year” and “TLJ specifically occurs in a period of less than 24 hrs” in regards to the PT and OT:

Attack of the Clones takes place over 6 days, in film. Revenge of the Sith takes place over the course of 5 days in which I don’t think Anakin really gets any sleep at all.

We must assume that all the films therefore occur within a week or less. Slivers of important events. We don’t get to see Anakin being trained over Ten years. We don’t see Luke going and training in the dark side before he appears on Jabba’s barge, and yet these things happened.

~*~

Bunny, no no no. Rey is NOT just Luke as a female with abandonment issues. Luke didn’t know how to use a light-saber when he first saw one. He didn’t know how to use the Force, and had to be trained by Kenobi and Yoda. Rey...didn’t need anything. Neither did Finn, actually. Luke was a good guy, yes, but he had his doubts, his fears, his learning period. Go back and watch the films. Anakin was really good at piloting, he was phenomenal at combat, but he had no social graces, he didn’t ‘people’ well, he struggled with abandonment {both his own and leaving his mother}, the flaws were very real and painfully so.

Anakin and Luke both had to undergo the Hero’s Journey, like Frodo and Siegmund and really, pretty much name any fantasy character that has ever been written. Rey has everything handed to her on a platter, doesn’t have any growth or struggle or really makes any choices of her own. She might have been a great character had she been handled with any degree of forethought or sincerity. Alas, we will never know.

If you’re going to quote George, quote him right, he specifically says “Twelve year olds” which is the age of the kids I work with on a daily basis and they do not have simple moralistic wold views. They have the seeds for very complex thought and I am often amazed by their ability to understand and expand on ideas in ways I hadn’t even imagined.

And maybe if you want to see black-and-white morality in Star Wars, that’s fine but it isn’t really the whole point. If it was... Anakin would never have fallen to the Dark side. He would have started there. Luke would never have left Yoda on Degobah to rescue his friends because that was NOT the right thing to do. The films are about choices, write or wrong, made by people in desperate situations. It is about how those choices shaped their history, how it made them into the people they are, but ultimately, they are about how important hope is, and how even someone who has made very bad choices, can ultimately find their way back.

Star Wars, the movies, is about Anakin and his Legacy.

And archetypes? They are the definition of depth, which is why they cross cultural/religious/gender norms. They are universal ideas that can be transitioned across but not changed from their fundamental existence.

TLDR: The Sequel Trilogy really is glorified bad fanfic and is trying to erase it’s legacy so that the Mouse can make money. We all know the Star Wars film series was really “The Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker” and how bout we all stop pissing on that. If the past must die then let them have their dignity.

#Lord Mercy. #I had to. And I have no regrets.

[vampire-himbos-of-santa-perdita]

What are your thoughts on jk Rowling and how she treats her fandom. Like how in the new fantastic beasts movie, she’s not addressing how the film erases dumbledores sexuality.

Ho boy do I have a LOT of thoughts on JK Rowling and how she’s marketed herself and the HP verse lately… 

She said she would never return to the Harry Potter universe after Deathly Hallows. She said that. For years! And then when she did, it’s with the half-baked Cursed Child (which is only accessible to people in London and New York now who can afford to pay for not just one, but two theatre tickets) and 7 entire Fantastic Beast movies. The whole thing stinks of selling out. In bookstores (especially in London), they have an entire shelf dedicated to Harry Potter paraphernalia alone. Which is cool if you don’t think too hard about just how much unnecessary stuff is being churned out by Warner Brothers and Bloomsbury for the sake of making $$$. She doesn’t need all this at this point. She’s made her buck, she’s got her legacy. Her publishers just happen to know that Harry Potter is still their largest money maker to date, so they keep throwing themselves behind it, beating a dead horse. (I could go ON about the publishing side of things, but I won’t.)

Literally, Fantastic Beasts doesn’t have to be 7 whole movies. The smart thing to do would be to have one single Fantastic Beasts movie, which followed all of Newt’s beasts, and not gotten into the whole Grindlewald nonsense. Then, the next movie doesn’t have to be a Fantastic Beasts sequel. It can be Quidditch Through the Ages, or Hogwarts, a History, which could’ve been about the Hogwarts founders. Or… you know, if you’re gonna give us a prequel, give us the marauders. That’s what we all want. And yet…

All of her tone-deaf diverse “inclusivity” is pretty transparently bullshit at this point. The whole “Dumbledore is gay!” thing was cute at the time, but she’s proven to only stand up for diverse characters after the fact, without any attempts of putting it in canon while writing the thing. Her perspective also smacks of “well, I have my token gay in Dumbledore, so why bother with anyone else???” As seen when an interview asked her about another potentially gay character (I’m about 75% sure it was Charlie they mentioned, but I can’t find the video clip), and her response was “Dumbledore’s gay”. But then of course when it comes time to put her money where her mouth is, no? You’re NOT gonna give us any literal backstory between Dumbledore and Grindlewald, whom you heavily implied had a relationship? It’s right there. The opportunity was handed to her, and she and Warner Brothers aren’t even gonna take it, especially in this day and age.

And of course, that leads me to Johnny Depp, who was one of my favourite actors as a teen. My favourite movie of all time is Sweeney Todd, so this is particularly irksome for me. There is clear evidence that he abused Amber Heard and JK Rowling, whose entire notion of the Harry Potter series hinges on the coming of age of a horrifically abused protagonist, refuses to even entertain the background of an actor she helped handpick??? To play a villain??? That’s fucked up and I’m upset the only person in the entire franchise who has stood up against it is Daniel Radcliffe. Do better, Jo. 

The whole Native American cultural appropriation for Ilvermorny and the American magical system is pretty gross. I get that she’s British, and therefore pretty separated from the concept of America’s history, but considering her country colonized numerous countries in the name of Imperialism and displaced the natives who were there first, her privilege is showing and it’s not cute.

I will never forgive her for regretting putting Ron and Hermione together. 

I will also never forgive her for being so dismissive of Draco’s fans, who have been calling for a redemption for him for ages now. I feel like maybe he finally got it in the Cursed Child (but I mean, how will I ever know because what’s THAT? Cursed Child whomst???) but I mean, her passive aggressive note on Draco in Pottermore basically said the fangirls love a bad boy and tend to coddle him, but he is not a good dude. Which is… rude, to say the least when he is a much more complex character.

She’s always romanticizing Snape and Dumbledore who are… quite possibly next to the Dursleys, Voldemort, and Umbridge, the most emotionally abusive and manipulative characters in the series??? She’s allowed to favour them for being complex characters, but she never talks about their more problematic aspects, and if I were in her position, I’d be talking about how morally complicated they are all the time. The fact that she doesn’t is a red flag for me.

Anyway… JK Rowling is the reason I’m a writer today. Prisoner of Azkaban is the reason Time, Regardless even exists and I’m continually disappointed with the way she’s been treating her fans and the HP franchise lately.

#great question #i could go on FOR HOURS about the Choices JK's been making lately #I'm Very Upset #hp #jk rowling #Anonymous #somebody picked up on my dig on an author who previously refused to return to her series universe #and then did #Plot twist: I wasn't actually talking about JK Rowling #but she's a close second #;)

[scifimagpie]

The World Belongs to You: On the Sunset of White Supremacy

Hello hello!

On a whim, I found myself working on a short story today. There was a contest for a podcast I love, I Don't Even Own a Television, and I decided to actually take a shot at it.

(On a related note, I know that for those of us on slender budgets, rationing out meds is sometimes required - but take your meds, everyone. It's good for you, and good for your creativity.)

For the story, I found myself thinking about a positive comment or two one of the hosts made about Sun-Ra. As a different friend of mine has been inspired by the seminal poet and musician's work for some time, and has been tracing his effects on Afrofuturist literature, Sun-Ra's been on my mind. That and the ridiculous prompt soon blossomed into a tongue-in-cheek skewering of nostalgia-bait. The story itself featured three Black characters trying to run maintenance checks on habitat craft while asteroid-mining on the belts around Saturn, and ended with Tasia, the main character, happily considering her future in the infinite space around her.

While penning the vignette, I got to thinking about an awkward topic I've been wanting to blog about for a while. As a white person - never a good way to start a sentence, but bear with me - I think about white supremacy and injustice issues a lot. Accepting my place in that system and the place of people who look like me can be thorny.

So - how do those of us who are white emotionally cope with the historical and present burden of accepting that our ancestors and relatives were and still do wreak havoc and enact violence on so many others?

The Evil Empire

Maybe it's a little silly, but one of the ways I have reconciled with this is by thinking of it in Star Wars terms. Obviously, this fandom is full of toxicity, and it's pretty illustrative in this instance.

Being white, particularly in the post-European cultural mishmash of North America, means being the inheritors of the benefits of colonialism. That stolen land and wealth was given to us. And sure, our lives can be hard in different ways - but in others, in fundamental ways, we have been cushioned.

More so, culturally speaking, white people still dominate in both American and Canadian culture, and in terms of representation. Sure, we're nominally a majority, but if you're reading my blog, you are probably also aware of how disproportionate that representation has favoured us, or at least, people like me (since you, dear reader, may not be white).

But in order to deconstruct that hegemony, those of us who are white have to let go of that heritage.

Imagine, if you will, being born into the Empire in Star Wars and developing Rebel sympathies. Admitting that everything around you is basically wrong can leave one with a heavy heart, but the only way to fix the world and culture is to face and internalize this fact.

The Sunset of the Elves

Here's the thing - it's okay to have mixed feelings about that, and to be like, "wait a minute, is this evil? Has my culture, my country, have my ancestors perpetrated and enabled evil?"

Seeing evil as a verb rather than a state of being, the short answer to that question is "probably, yes."

While that's rough thing to accept and process - nobody wants, truly, to think of themselves as bad - it also means that we have a chance to gracefully fade. I'm editing a project that deals with white supremacists and racists right now, and seeing things from inside that has given me a surprising empathy for them. However, as both the author and myself agree, violence and fear are not the way to protect that legacy.

For one thing, Black people and other people of colour aren't particularly out to destroy all remnants of European cultural heritage, and more specifically, of whiteness. But - those of us born white should do that for them.

It's not that I'm saying we ought to destroy every celebration, or that things like pagan traditions should be forgotten, but we absolutely have to let them become less prominent and make room in culture for the expressions of others. And maybe there's a tiny bit of romance to playing our part in letting the sun go down on evil, and watching others flourish. While the elves are not conventionally evil in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, the metaphor of transition still works decently, at least for my mindset.

And maybe it's okay for the empire, and us, its children, to recede and fade a little. We've dominated so much for so long - to the detriment of our own compassion and humanity, because that dominance came about through no natural means; only violence and control. (And I reject the proposition that violence and control are a "natural" way to live or some mark of triumph among a species that is, by evolution and fate, as pro-social and inclined to altruism as humans are.)

Shown: just one of the cultural groups I didn't even know about until a couple weeks ago.

But what do we get in exchange?

Selfishly speaking - as most of this post is - it can be hard to let go of power. But we are still allowed to witness and, when invited, participate in the joy of others.

The problem with whiteness - not merely European-ness, but whiteness, the construct - is that it is inherently restrictive. For those unfamiliar with its precedent, whiteness is an artificial invention devised by slavers to distinguish themselves from enslaved people. Specifically:

"The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America."

Let that sink in for a moment. Whiteness has erased European cultural heritages, flattened out shared heritage - for after all, if one is to benefit from whiteness, one must supuress and avoid any sharing or serious investment in other cultures, be they Indigenous, Asian, Black, or anything else - and only dabble with them, not engage.

The fight for equality

Even more perniciously, letting ourselves fear the safety and sanctity of whiteness - an artificial construct, as with racism in general - keeps us divided from other oppressed people and even just our neighbours. If we fear, hate, or deride others, why would we invite them to our table, or show compassion for them, or help them out?

We are stronger together. The world we live in, and the world of the future, will continue to be beautiful and diverse and amazing. And within that word, "diversity", there are more colours and shades and cracks and crevices than we can even understand. Multiculturalism doesn't mean a weird, indistinct melting pot - it means that people with thousands of years of history in their own rights can come together, share, discuss, and create new things. It means that people can live in different places, and come up with new foods, and that nobody ever has to be bored again.

I'm not sure how to express just how beautiful humanity is, or how many different ideas and histories and experiences there are in the world.

It's truly a matter of going from a monochromatic view of the world to full-colour. It's dizzying, and wonderful, and sometimes even painful - but there's so much to share and enjoy. And yes, there are still points of friction, because rejoicing in our shared humanity and differences doesn't mean we can forget the legacy of all this pain and violence - but the future is, and can be, so bright.

As I said to one of my friends this afternoon, "the future belongs to you."

*** Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and their cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and nightmares, as well as social justice issues. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Catch up with Michelle's news on the mailing list. Her books are available on Amazon, and she is also active on Medium, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and the original blog.

#diversity #whiteness #racism #multiculturalism #hegemony #inequality #essay