#non rebloggable bc i forgot to make it so

[kawaiijohn]

With what happened in Mississippi last night I know I'm gonna see people hit it with "well it's tornado season so we're used to this shit, it's not a big deal!" and "who cares it's a red state lol"

1. Most tornado seasons have small spin up twisters and not monsters so clearly defined on radar they are textbook examples of a supercell, plus most tornado season twisters don't track on the ground for almost 100 miles.

These were night tornadoes, which are the most dangerous kind, and the largest tornado of the night was wide enough to wipe a few towns off the map completely.

2. Mississippi and Alabama are two of the most vulnerable states to tornadoes, and not the kind you see in tornado alley. They get obscured by forests and hills on top of being rain wrapped, making them hard to see. Especially at night.

3. Both states have a large black population, and both states have large amounts of people under the poverty line living in mobile homes or homes without basements. People under the poverty line are more likely to be disabled or not have reliable transportation on top of living in homes not of sound construction.

4. Many of the towns hit were smaller, rural towns. Some don't have good internet or cell service. Some don't even have tornado sirens.

5. Both states are red because of voter suppression and jerrymandering. You should take this into consideration before writing off an entire state's worth of people who are suffering a natural disaster outside of their control.

6. Actually you should never celebrate or be ambivalent to an entire state or population of people suffering from a natural disaster. There's no correlation between natural disasters and how "good" a person or group is. Thinking like this is for jackasses and will rot your brain.

So idk what to tell you but maybe you should fucking care about other people who are hurting and going to be hurting for a long time. Some of these people may have had their lives completely ruined and lost all they had. Some towns may never recover and simply vanish off the map.

There's been over 20 fatalities already and the sun only rose an hour or so ago.

edit: made this post while i was half asleep, and i am going to clarify here;

point 3 is being made as such: don't fucking clown on an entire states worth of people.

the south isn't just white racist hicks or whatever people like to stereotype it as, there's a lot of different people who just happen to live there, including a large population of minorities living in one of the poorest areas of the damn country.

and even if it were just white racist hicks or whatever the fuck, you still shouldn't clown on a state or minimize human suffering

to the person who added "you're saying if the state was all white this wouldn't have happened?" you are a fucking moron taking this post in the worst faith I have ever seen.

natural disasters don't work that way and it would have happened if the conditions were favorable for strong tornadoes anyways, despite location.

my wording wasn't the best due to me having just woken up and being full of emotions i couldn't process, not everyone is good at words and I am sorry if I'm being a jackass here.

But the point stands: DON'T BE A JACKASS ABOUT AN ENTIRE GROUP OF PEOPLE JUST BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE WHERE THEY ARE FROM.

#dantes vibe corner #irl stuff #weather stuff #severe weather #tornado #non rebloggable bc i forgot to make it so

[philosopherking1887]

I also forgot to mention that TW, a ~man of color~ wrote a movie where a white colonizer (ODIN) was PRAISED, UPLIFTED, & CELEBRATED BY THE NARRATIVE AND OUR PROTAGONIST. TW even made sure Thor got an eyepatch at the end as symbolic emulation. A man of color made THAT MOVIE, and they're stanning? Because he's brown?? By their own logic, TW suffers from internalized racism bc he wrote that shit, and anyone who likes the movie is racist/has internalized racism. Not my black ass. Fuck that movie.

I’m so sorry that it’s taken me so long to answer this… I had to get through a mountain of grading in a hurry because I have stupid grading anxiety so I procrastinate, which makes everything worse because I have to do it all at once instead of spreading it out.

I found the post where I talk about how benevolent racism is part of the reason people aren’t allowed to criticize Ragnarok or Taika Waititi. Even if there are genuine, serious problems with the work of a POC—not just the characterization mess or the complete unlikability of the main characters (I gotta majorly side-eye the people who find Ragnarok!Thor “relatable”), but the Social Justice-y problems that you would think they would take seriously (the stereotypically queer-coded villains; the implicit slut-shaming of Loki; the toxic masculinity all over the place; the one-line dismissal of Jane Foster, a brilliant female scientist, to be replaced by a woman who is considered more powerful and therefore “more Thor’s equal” because she can beat people up)—you’re not allowed to point them out, especially if you’re white, because all criticism of a POC constitutes racism.

Honestly, this kind of reminds me of the standard Leftist line that westerners are not allowed to condemn human rights abuses in non-western countries, especially formerly colonized countries, because (A) western countries aren’t perfect (duh) and (B) everything that’s wrong in formerly colonized countries is to be blamed on European colonialism. It seems to me that (B) is extraordinarily patronizing: it’s like they’re saying that victims of colonialism (always people of color) can’t be held responsible for anything because they can’t be expected to know better, almost as if they’re children whose wrongdoing is always to be blamed on the adults’ bad parenting.

I also found the post where I discussed how Loki’s story could (and should) have fit in with the (purported) anti-colonialism message. And there’s another post from someone else that’s been in my drafts folder for a while because I wanted to say something about it but I never seem to have time, which is very relevant. The OP is gushing about how Ragnarok is this groundbreaking, subversive critique of colonialism… but then someone with American indigenous heritage reblogs to add that Loki is also a victim of colonialism and makes the comparison with Native American/ First Nations children who were taken from their parents and adopted out to white parents or indoctrinated in abusive boarding schools. That essay was presented not as a criticism of Ragnarok—which the reblogger seemed to think had sufficiently dealt with Loki’s trauma in the “fictional retelling of his relationship with Odin” presented in Loki’s play about himself—but as a rebuttal to the claim in a “literary review” of Ragnarok (which falls all over itself to hail TR as “the coolest, slickest, funniest indictment of white supremacy that you’re likely to see for a long, long time”) that Loki has no relationship to Asgard’s imperialist past and is just “a character who doesn’t care as long as he gets his.”

Interestingly, the reviewer added a note in response to criticism of that characterization saying that he “personally really like[s] the character” and acknowledges “his complicated, and often tragic, backstory of otherness and biculturalism,” but insists that that “do[es] not make him NOT fundamentally power hungry.” Which… kind of wasn’t the point of the criticism? It was that in a rundown of how the various characters were related to the history of imperialism, all he said about Loki was that he “doesn’t care as long as he gets his.” Whether or not Loki can rightly be characterized as “fundamentally power-hungry” is a complicated question and depends on how sincere you think his “I never wanted the throne” protestation was and how much you think conquering Earth was his idea as opposed to Thanos’s.

But the fact that the reviewer had to be reminded of Loki’s connection with Asgardian imperialism—as a victim of it, not just as a beneficiary—points to a basic problem with Loki’s depiction in Ragnarok, which is obviously what was freshest in the writer’s mind (and I doubt he had rewatched the other movies recently): that despite its claims to provide a comprehensive critique of colonialism (and no, it wasn’t being subtle), it was so intent on ridiculing Loki and minimizing all of his problems that it had to downplay or dismiss any respect in which he could be considered a victim of colonialism. That would have made Loki sympathetic, which the movie wanted to avoid at all costs.

It is completely baffling to me that Thor turns to Odin’s Force ghost for strength and guidance and this is not problematized at all. If Ragnarok was trying to make anti-colonialism its theme, that scene seems like it should have been from a different movie. I wonder if that came from the aspect of the movie whose message was (in the words of an interview with Waititi, which I found screenshotted in this post, and which I presume is a paraphrase of something he said) that “a home is still a home, however you may feel about its inhabitants.” This message is presented in the context of TW’s insistence that Loki needs to “put away his childish fixations” and “put into perspective his petty family squabbles.” Let’s just think about that for a second: in a movie that is supposed to be an indictment of colonialism, a stolen child being lied to about his heritage and indoctrinated with racist beliefs about his own people is a “petty family squabble” and his resentment about it is a “childish fixation.”

#ofwickedlight #thor ragnarok criticism #colonialism #imperialism #loki meta #thor ragnarok meta #anti taika waititi #benevolent racism