But speaking of Hero aca, I think it does feel like the discrimination thing got changed, because openly attacking "mutants" was reserved for the klan expy in the one chapter and it was even mentioned that they were a dieing breed of bigots. I think having the country side be more racist makes sense, but once you make them attack kids and try to kill them it gets a bit too much. Maybe I'm ignorant, but I don't think lynchings of foreigners take place in japanese villages often.
I didn’t think it was changed--at least, not entirely.
If there was any change, it was a change of focus from “being Quirkless is like being marginalized” to “having a heteromorphic Quirk makes you a target for violence and prejudice.”
It’s not that either focus is bad necessarily. And it’s not as if the “having a heteromorphic Quirk makes you the subject of prejudice and ridicule” was not already implicit in the manga and the English dub (more on that in a moment).
And before I get any further into this discussion--which I’ll put under “Read More” due to length but also content warnings--there will be discussions about bigotry, disablism, racism, antisemitism, and homophobia, including personal experiences I’ve had contending with bigotry. Plus, a content warning for mentions of war, genocide, lynchings, anti-Black violence and Nazis. This is going to be a lot of rambling.
When My Hero Academia started, what got my attention first was, “Oh, so this is a world where anyone can look like anyone and have any body type or any size or power--and you are accepted and get to live!”
And yes, that thought was me missing the giant neon-flashing sign where Izuku’s first line of narration was that this was a world where people were not created equally. But that was why I thought, “Oh, a world where you can have any body type, size, power, or appearance and be accepted”: because Izuku was showing a world where, yes, there are people as large as Mount Lady, but the size of UA and its entrances accommodates anyone of that size*; and yes, someone like Ojiro can have his clothes customized anywhere (a point brought up again much later with Deternat); but when you don’t have a Quirk, now you are in the minority, and rather than being seen as a party that doesn’t need regulation for your power set, you are subjected to abuse and ridicule because not only are you different and outside the norms of medicine and day to day living, but you lack abilities that others have that they are willing to use to better their life, whether as Pro Hero, a Villain, or just in the privacy of their home.
(*There are at least two glaring omissions I’m making when mentioning Mount Lady and the accommodations at UA: more on that in a moment as well.)
I thought MHA was going to be about “here is a metaphor for disability, and how that discrimination persists even when people get more abilities.” And seeing the storyline for All Might, being born Quirkless, losing his Quirk, and more than all of that suffering from organ loss and a shortened lifespan, as well as the inability to do the things he used to do--all of that fed into my reading of MHA as a disability allegory. It’s not like it isn’t there--it’s just more complicated than that, and my fixation on that detail had me overlook what the series was setting up early on with regard to discrimination based on appearance.
And it is that appearance-based discrimination in MHA, and while I don’t find it unrealistic or unbelievable or not applicable to our current situation, I do think that it’s a less realistic story and a less complicated one because it reduces discrimination to fear of appearances we haven’t encountered before--whereas a lot of discrimination in our world is more about how appearances, race, ethnicity, and cultures were made to be feared not only for being unfamiliar but because people attached so much bigotry, hate, prejudices, and baseless assumptions in order to make sense of their changing world.
For example, I don’t think that cases of white supremacist bigotry emerge solely out of “this person looks different from me”: it’s a bigotry created out of hatred for that person, and a hatred born out of fear, yes, but fear because something is not matching this silly person’s narrow understanding of the world. It is systematic, after centuries of idiots who looked at people who looked different than them--and made up excuses to back up what they wanted to do. “I want to enslave someone--so I’ll just enslave them, then make up reasons to justify that I am enslaving because of this interpretation of the Christian bible, or this racist assumption that I claim is actually proven by science and anthropology, or this supposedly enlightened argument.”
I don’t get that same realistic or believable complexity in MHA. It is, “This person looks different, therefore let’s discriminate against them.” Horikoshi got closer when just having the villagers fearful that Shoji can spread something by touch to the child--but when nearly every human being has a Quirk (and even some non-human animals), and you just assume the non-human looking people have those kind of Quirks and not, say, Overhaul or Shigaraki, that’s a stretch for me. It does demonstrate the flaw in these bigots’ arguments, and it is sadly realistic that there bigots just that fucking dumb. But my point is that there are also just as many people who hide that stupidity by pretending, “No, no, science or religion or human studies prove that my bigotry is actually logical, moral, and correct!” I don’t get that with Shoji’s story. I get narrowminded, bigoted, ignorant people out in the boondocks; I don’t see MHA showing how that kind of bigotry persists even in “educated” circles.
(Those people are not educated, hence the air-quotes: they’re just dumb motherfuckers who think their PhD makes them an authority on a topic. Motherfucker, I have a PhD in literature--that just means an institution gave me a PhD, just like some institution gave that dumb motherfucker a degree. Getting the degree doesn’t mean either of it necessarily earned it, or that our opinions are reasonable enough, not without having more experts challenge our points of view in peer-review. And not when there are studies beyond my field where someone else is better adept at speaking to that topic than I am. It’d be like me saying, “I’m a doctor, so I can perform surgery”: no, I can give a lecture on Frankenstein, I can’t literally be Dr. Stein!)
So, if you wanted a quick and easy fix to this: don’t have an arc where they say that such anti-heteromorph bigotry is primarily in the rural areas.
Forgive my limited scope, living almost all of my life in the United States and never going outside of it or Canada--that means I’m not a fair enough person to remark as well as I want to about racial and political topics in Japan. But from where I sit in the United States, having grown up and lived in primarily urban and suburban areas--hell no, bigotry isn’t primarily in the rural United States, it’s fucking part of the United States, across all parts of the country. In my college and grad school years, I wasn’t called “faggot” by homophobes in some rural area--that was in major urban cities. I didn’t see the Confederate flag just in rural areas--I had to see that fucking flag flown through by rednecks in my urban neighborhood high school, by rednecks who weren’t even attending my high school, not only because they were racist sacks of shit but because they saw that one assistant principal was a Black man (who went to Tuskegee University), and one assistant principal was a white woman, and they decided to “own” them by putting up that emblem of bigotry to stick to anyone who wasn’t white and a man.
And that’s not even getting into having a family member around my age as a kid whose parents condoned him not only having the Confederate flag but the fucking Nazi swastika--thank fucking Christ my parents were like, “Oh, hell no, those people are no longer family, and our kid is not hanging out with a fucking Nazi.”
(I write all of this, and I sadly realize how much groundwork was set up long before 2016 had people voting for a fucking orange Nazi for the White House.)
It is obvious in MHA that this anti-heteromorph prejudice does extend to the urban areas. The manga sort of acknowledges that. Sure, Mineta didn’t mean anything when he said Shoji looked like an octopus--but he still said it, maybe out of admiration or fetishizing, both of which can be dimensions of prejudice. Pony may be from the United States and maybe kind of country in her demeanor--but she still made that remark to Shoji when she got to UA. In the English dub, I was so happy how the anime was handling just how much the characters accepted each other regardless their appearance--and then they have Jiro calling Tokoyami a “bird-brain,” which, at the time, no, that doesn’t fit her character or this setting at all--but in retrospect, after seeing the anti-heteromorph hostilities, and what happens to Jiro and Tokoyami in the fight against All For One, sure, fine, whatever, let that stupid remark stay in. (If that was not just in the English dub but in the original Japanese, I better hear Jiro apologize for that remark.)
But so far that is a lot of rambling on my part, so let me get back to your actual questions:
You point out how the anti-heteromorph attitude in the manga was reserved largely for the Klan expy in that one chapter. As I said before, this is built upon a bit more to show systematic oppression of heteromorphs in both the main manga and in the Vigilantes spinoff: size, shape, lack of standardized clothing (although immediate alterations are available for, say, Ojiro, and from Detnerat), Mount Lady largely stuck in the country in school due to her giant Quirk (and then causing property damage, losing money, losing insurance coverage due to her Quirk...), Todoroki’s awful remark to the dog-headed police chief. It is definitely ramped up in starts and stops--until Horikoshi throws in so much of it right at this chapter that, rather than feeling like a logical build up, comes across as hitting the gas to rush to all of this new information.
It’s not even like those details, like the historical events that one PLF heteromorph is shouting, were brought up in the light novels, the films, the video games, encyclopedias, Horikoshi’s end-of-volume notes--you know, places that aren’t quite the main story, but you could excuse as, “It was brought up before, you just had to look for it.” It was there, I did look for it, I mentioned a lot of it--but this is a rush of a story that does not seem as well structured as it could be. Maybe the anime could fix that in adaptation…except they did cut Spinner and those Klan expies from the MLA arc, so who knows.
And I already know how I would have revised this arc to make all of this work better:
Have Shoji and Koda face off against Spinner during the war arc--that starts the ball rolling on all the anti-heteromorph stuff and building up an actual link between these characters that wasn’t established until now in the manga
Have Spinner in the war arc make an unintentionally splashy presence in that fight that indeed gets attention from heteromorphs
Have Skeptic notice that--and seize upon it
Do _not_ have All For One take over Shigaraki [not just yet, anyway] and instead operate in the shadows and approach Spinner in secret
Have All For One say he wants Shigaraki to stand on his own feet, not on his “father’s” laurels--but that he wants Spinner to watch out for his “boy”
Have All For One say that Spinner just needs more confidence (public speaking skills, charisma)--and power, and that’s when he gives him those Quirks, not just to make him more confident and more powerful, but to protect those he cares about, like Shigaraki, and those like him, who are also heteromorphs
Have the new Quirks initially work out really well for Spinner: he’s more charismatic, more confident, more powerful, inspiring heteromorphs with actual persuasive arguments (even if the results are going to be unethical and horrendous) and logical arguments (including that, yes, sometimes you do break laws and fight back to protect and enforce civil rights)
But as we have with Nagant and Gigantomachia, show that All For One always has an ulterior motive, and that this deal with the devil turns Spinner into that barely cognizant brute who is now easily led around by All For One, Skeptic, and their enablers
You get all that you deserve in this arc: actually confronting bigotry and how, to protect civil rights, sometimes people do break laws. (Not “stampeding an entire medical ward” break laws or “kill a bunch of people” break laws--good God, no, Spinner’s actions are not fucking justifiable in this arc.)
And you aren’t having All For One already subsuming Shigaraki--you save that for later and have Spinner actually convinced that he is here to protect his friend (seriously, how do you see what All For One is doing to Shigaraki and think, “Sure, I trust this guy to give me Quirks”?).
And you let Spinner actually show he has what it takes to be a leader, if someone just gave him a chance--before you take that all away from him and make it tragic.
(And yes, my plot points are ripping off the Colonel Jupiter arc from Spectacular Spider-man.)
Back to your question: you point out how it was already mentioned that anti-heteromorph bigots were a dying breed. I hope my responses point out how that rhetoric doesn’t quite hold up. It depends on what we mean. The PLF person shouting that argument can point to Shoji’s experience as one example: it was confined to the rural areas. And Shoji pretty much said the same thing. But what about Koda? We saw how his parents were treated--were they also in a rural environment when that happened? And while out-and-out bigotry may not be obvious, I hope my remarks about our real lives for many of us in the United States show that out-and-out bigotry doesn’t mean systematic bigotry (lack of resources, moving people out of neighborhoods because you don’t want them there, disablist civil engineering) and more covert forms of bigotry don’t still persist. The Klan and Neo-Nazis have disappeared and reappeared numerous times--because bigotry persisted, just not always in obvious ways (and now are out in the open again and now going by the name “the Republican Party”).
You point out that it makes sense about bigotry being more persistent in the rural areas: I agree. I may have pointed out how the Confederate flag is flown far outside of the Confederacy, even up in the North, but it makes sense, whether because it’s actually happening or it’s believable, that when you have rural areas, where it is typically harder to get access to infrastructure (not just schools and Internet but also basic means), you lack education and you foster fear and anger that leads to scapegoating, superstition, paranoia, and then bigotry.
I wish I could say that attacking a kid like Shoji and trying to kill him seems like a bit too much--but we know how many young people have been the victims of violence, due to someone seeing their appearance and thinking, regardless how young they are, that that person is a threat. (For all my talk earlier about how “appearances are not the start or end of bigotry,” yeah, I also can’t ignore how many evil dumb motherfuckers have seen a Black child, thought that Black child was a threat, and were using appearances to confirm their biases to justify violence upon a freaking child.)
So, again, I’m here in the United States, reading a comic by a Japanese creator and set in Japan--but it is also a far distant future of Japan, and it is not as if Japan, like the United States, has not committed atrocities against marginalized people on the basis of their appearance, culture, race, and religion, whether by war or by systematic oppression. And Horikoshi knows this: there is a reason he changed the name of All For One’s doctor.
But what I don’t know is what Horikoshi is thinking with Shoji, and whether there is a historical analogue to this, too. Like I said a moment ago, given the history of anti-Black racism, where indeed Black children and teens were lynched, I can find that horrifically believable. And given Rock Lock’s presence in this arc, that choice of including that character in this fight seems to be to emphasize that there is a racialized reading. (And, as a white person, I don’t know how to write Rock Lock’s presence here: I see arguments positing that maybe you have Rock Lock admit he understands this kind of bigotry--but that risks making the comparison too one-to-one, as well as having one of the few Black characters in your story taking on this task. And I’ve read arguments theorizing, “Maybe racism has ended by this point in MHA,” which--nah, if these fuckers are hating on heteromorphs, I’m not optimistic that human progress has moved beyond racism.) I just don’t know where Horikoshi is going with it, and while I see a common link there, reading far more into it risks doing a disservice to interpreting MHA and a disservice to discussing real-world tragedies and injustices and a disservice to the lives of actual people.
0 notes
I got the majority of this information from the YouTuber Annamarie Forcino's video "The Alarming "Gnome Hunting" Trend No One's Talking About". (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pf0bZOMuVFs)
This post is to help spread this information.
Please be aware:
• If you come across anything with the term "gnome hunting" or anything listed below online, block and report the account immediately. If you come across it offline, covertly and safely get the absolute fuck out of there. Warn others.
• Keep yourself safe. As with any bullshit like this these people may be violent. The wearing of tactical gear and the use of the word hunting when talking about a group of human beings is not peaceful or respectful of life. Exercise caution. Especially if you are in a group the groups they're in target.
• This is mostly on TikTok, DO NOT SEARCH FOR IT ON SITES WITH THE ALGORITHM. This will drive engagement and help it spread. If you come across it block and report it but do not search it.
The term "gnome hunting" is being used by antisemitists/neonazis/white supremacists to refer to themselves, they themselves being the "hunters" and those they target, Jews, being the "gnomes" and is a way for them to talk in code.
Things to watch out for with this specific wave of antisemitic bullshit are but are not limited to:
"join the hunt" = join us.
"millions wear the hats" millions = the Jews, hats = the Jewish Yarmulke/Kippah (a Jewish head covering). This phrase refers to Jewish people in general. When they use this phrase they are talking about Jews.
"kike" a slur against those of Jewish descent and or those who are practicing Judaism.
"88" H is the 8th letter of the alphabet. 88 = hh = "hail hitler".
"⚡⚡" "ᛋᛋ" "ϟϟ" Two lightning bolt emojis, two Greek letter ᛋ's, or two lighting bolt symbols side by side = the nazi ss. The nazi ss flag is two lighting bolt symbols side by side.
"Z" or "z" The English letter Z/z is used by russian nazis against Ukrainians who are being murdered by and suffering war crimes at the hands of russian nazis since the current russian dictator putin invaded Ukraine. Has unfortunately spread and is being used by nazis in other countries. The symbol has similarities to the wolfsangel.
"Ƶ" The wolfsangel. An ancient runic symbol believed to have been capable of warding off wolves, appropriated by nazi organizations in nazi Germany. Still used by white supremacists/nazis today.
(Cannot find a symbol for this.) The sunwheel, sonnenrad, or black sun. A symbol from old Norse and old Celtic culture. Also appropriated by nazis, still used by neonazis today.
"schizopost" "schizoposting" Used by neonazis when they use neurodivergence/mental illness (they do not struggle with) as an excuse for their bullshit. Ex: saying "I'm insane" "I'm schizophrenic" "me and the boys being schizophrenic" in the same post about "gnome hunting" or with any relation to nazi/white supremacists ideology.
890 notes
·
View notes
Ok so ... Today's absolutely fucking batshit post that I had to read with my own two eyes
We all know Mohamed Hadid is a foaming at the mouth antisemite but this is a new level.
Let's start with the caption:
1. The implication all Jews are American? Insane, untrue, erasing all Jewish history in Israel which dates back to before the Arabization of the middle east.
2. No one has a single percent of Semite in them because Semite is not a race, it's an obsolete term for a family of languages (including both Hebrew and Arabic) however I need to specify that "Antisemitism" was coined as a term specifically about Jew hate. That's what it means, it's actually nothing to do with the language Hebrew at all, it was an attempt to sciencify "judenhass" and make it sound acceptable.
Now to the post itself:
3. If you demand an end to colonialism, boy have I got something to explain about why the official language of Morocco, a country the width of a continent away from the Arabian Peninsula is Moroccan Arabic... Or to be honest, the reason that Arabs are the main demographic anywhere outside the Arabian Peninsula where they originally came from. I understand that peoples migrate but that involves moving from one place to another, not expanding our and literally colonising everything around you. The Arab conquests of the MENA region are a well documented part of history...
4. Demanding a ceasefire is all well and good but we are all aware that we will never be going back to the status quo of before - which frankly is all a ceasefire with no actual work done to rebuild and move towards peace will do. A ceasefire neccestiates thought on what happens next. This is not to say people shouldn't be advocating for an cease to the fighting, they should, this all needs to end. What people have to also do is also be discussing what happens next. The old status quo was unsustainable, and with the mounting evidence that Gazans who worked in Israel helped with the planning of Black Saturday, we will never again see the relations between the people in southern Israel and those in Gaza go "back to normal".
I would love a ceasefire but we need to talk about what happens next in the same conversation. To ignore that is at best naïve and at worst, willfully ignorant because just stopping and Israel withdrawing will do nothing to help rebuild because we all know that everyone will lose interest if that happens, as has happened over and over again.
5. It's well known that Jews are indigenous to Israel and the ancient kingdom of Judea. It's literally in the etymology of the world. Now, obviously multiple groups can be indiginous to one area, but length of time residing there is not a marker of indiginunity, it's literally a childlike playground tactic. Straight up rewriting history... We all know how bad that is.
Mohamed Hadid has over a million followers. His daughters have a total of 130 million. They can post misinformation and almost ten times the number of Jews who exist in the world will see it. This is so dangerous and frankly this level of deranged lying on the internet does not nothing to help end the war, it just puts Jews outside of Israel more at risk. We are being murdered in the streets, in our places of work and everyone is cheering it on.
The irony of people applauding the murder of Jews calling us neo-nazis is not lost on me and it's unreal that we aren't even allowed to stand up to it. Let's be very blunt here, if you are justifying the slaughter of Jews, who's the real nazi?
An additional Edit:
There will never be a ceasefire without release of the hostages and bodies kidnapped into Gaza. Like it's so stupid to think otherwise. Especially with Hamas currently refusing to give a list of who is still alive (they said they couldn't give a list until they knew the terms of a ceasefire which clearly means they COULD do it, but they are choosing not to)
73 notes
·
View notes