#rrcrit

[tsigililimclean]

just an fyi depicting piper in like turquoise jewelry and other pan-ndn aesthetics isn't any better than rick having her wear random feathers in her hair, it's still using stereotypical bullshit that has zero correlation with her actual culture

#i want to see her in copper and pearls and shells and clay beads and bone carvings #piper mclean #hoo #tsiwoniha #rrcrit #more fandom crit but

[inmydrcams]

I just personally think rick r.iordan shouldn’t get to write even one more word on aphrodite until he acknowledges that she has her origins as a war goddess 

#reading the house of hades. #rrcrit

[oh-hush-its-perfect]

i feel like a lot of people forget that rick riordan didn't always write middle-grade books. he wrote murder mysteries way before pjo was conceived. he switched his target demographic once, and he can do it again. he changes his audience ever-so-slightly for each book anyway. like, sea of monsters and battle of the labyrinth were in the same series but appealed to two different audiences. mcga was decidedly not for ages 7-10, given the sheer amount of violence and the fact that the characters occasionally lightly swear (i.e. "damn," "jackass," "bastard") and reference real issues (cultural erasure, police brutality, ableism, islamophobia, transphobia, etc.). i'm not saying he should have shifted his target demographic while writing tsats, but i'm saying it's plausible that he could have, and fans who thought he would aren't exactly delusional.

#but there are way bigger problems than the book being immature that the rrcrit community has with that book anyway #convenient that some people aren't noticing those critiques #rick riordan books #tsats #the sun and the star #rrverse #rr crit #riordanverse #riordan crit #rrverse fandom crit #fandom critical

[mazharking]

there must be a tag like rrcrit but for the witcher, right? i need to get with the HATERS

[mahoushojoe]

being egyptian and reading the kane chronicles is so wild because it says that the egyptian gods migrate to wherever the center of western civilization is, implying that ancient egypt was a western civilization or that egypt's a was, and not an is. like why is this non-white civilization which manifests today in a real life country supposedly a western civilization but the actual people whose heritage is tied to that civilization are excluded from it? why is a white british woman (a WHITE BRITISH WOMAN!) the living incarnation of isis - the mother of egypt? there's no cultural nuance. there's no consideration. the image of the egyptian mother, through isis or otherwise, is something so fucking important in egyptian culture, and to have it represented by a british woman - a descendant of those who bastardized and stole our heritage- is just insane to me. perhaps an interesting analysis of post colonial egypt in a meta sense, but that's for egyptian artists to dissect, not riordan. and that's only one thing. egypt - the actual egypt from which everything in the series originates) in that series is so mocked. i remember at some point sadie and walt are walking through egypt and mock the fact that since the arabic language has no "p", they pronounce pepsi as bebsi. no respect. the very foundation of this series is based in racism, in colonial thinking, and, ultimately, white supremacy. why is zia, the only actual egyptian in the main cast, so irrelevant? so quiet and without agency? in a meta way, she's like egypt itself. i just wanted to bring this to light since a lot of rr crit focuses on the racism and homophobia present in pjo and hoo and mcga and toa- perfectly valid criticisms that are well deserved - but barely anyone talks about the inherent colonialist and racist foundations of the entirety of the kane chronicles, which is why i wanted to bring it to light. enjoy the series if you want, i'm not saying you're not allowed, but as long as we're criticizing riordan, let's criticize everything.

#tkc #the kane chronicles #rrcrit #rick riordan #rick riordan critical #pjo critical #hoo critical #mcga critical #tkc critical #sadie kane #zia rashid #idk im just rambling abt things that bother me

[pussyd0n]

No one:

Rick: Piper is a POC y'all

Also Rick : AND Pipers eyes look like THIS . Isn't that WONDERFUL ?

#rrcrit #percy jackson #pjo #apollo #nico di angelo #will solace #hoo #solangelo #leo valdez #toa #piper mcclean #cherokee representation gone horribly wrong #poc representation gone wrong #the heroes of olympus #incorrect heroes of olympus #heroes of olympus headcanon #percy jackson and the heroes of olympus

[lunarrumor]

hm i am so sorry aphrodite, everyone here knows that you would never force your child into a comphet relationship or encourage her in any way to date a guy so clearly in love with his boy best friend

#hera would #aphrodite? never #its like her job to know how people feel #she would look at piper and be like.... babe you don't have to get in a relationship with him #just find a nice girl and you'll be fine i promise <3 #and then nudge jason towards leo like >.> #hera would definitely put someone in an unhappy relationship though #that's like /her/ whole job #rrverse #aphrodite #piper mclean #rrcrit #jshbfujhb i guess #im just saying the way rick wrote aphrodite was. #wrong

[oceanics]

has rick ever addressed the racism in his books?

i don’t think he has, no! as a matter of fact, it seems like he usually shies away from criticism,  and i don’t think he’s ever acknowledged any, whether that is wrt to racism or homophobia.

it’s even rumored that he left tumblr after he felt “pressured” by fans who “pushed” their hc of reyna as a lesbian onto him, but i dont remember much about that particular spiel.

#i had drifted away from the fandom when it happened so i only found out about it second hand #so idk much about it #but Rumor Has It #answered #rrcrit #Anonymous

[anoptimisticpessimist21]

no but there’s this headcanon that Percy isn’t white and like... people are allowed to have their own imaginings but I have a reason to keep him white in the show. Percy ‘glowing green eyes’ Jackson would then be another in the long list of Rick Riordans PoC characters whose eye colour is ‘anything but brown’ and as an Indian girl it is okay that Percy is white. 

#thank you for coming to my ted talk #percy jackson #rrcrit i guess

[howelljenkins]

Confession: I followed you and another blog on the same day (back in the height of the rrcrit posts) and I follow several their blogs /and/ several of yours now so I am easily confused and there is a decent bit of "wait x is y???" before I realize it's not x it's z

i’m so interested to see who you follow who is so similar to me that you mix us up 

#answered #anonymous #askgame

[tsigililimclean]

oh g-d piper is gonna be in the solangelo book, you better not say anymore racist shit old man 🔪

#PLEASE #i want to enjoy . gay piper moments ): #piper mclean #hoo #tsiwoniha #rrcrit #eh kinda

[inmydrcams]

aphrodite: is a warrior goddess heavily associated with the greek god of war and whose cult derives from astarte, a war goddess, and who is at the start of one of the most important events in greek mythology which happens to be a war

rick: her kids can’t fight 

#rrcrit #ch; aphrodite #( ;; we don't vibe with fanon )

[oh-hush-its-perfect]

I'm pretty sure it's been said before but having Hearth be emotionally unexpressive is pretty silly, considering how much of sign language depends on facial expression. Like, one of the first things that ASL users will tell you is that your facial expression is crucial to emphasizing tone and emotion. Some signs REQUIRE certain facial expressions in order to make sense.

I get what RR was trying to do with Hearth in making a victim of abuse so accustomed to punishment for emotion that he no longer expresses himself, but it kind of falls flat and seems like RR just didn't properly understand how sign language functions. It would have been cool if Hearth had a mini-arc of becoming more visually expressive, but we just... didn't get that.

#mcga #magnus chase #magnus chase and the gods of asgard #mcatgoa #hearthstone mcga #hearth mcga #hearthstone alderman #rrcrit #rr critical #rr crit

[mahoushojoe]

hmmmmmm thinking about zia rashid

first of all...holy shit, why is her name zia? there is not a single person in egypt named zia. zia is supposedly a girl born in a rural village in upper egypt. zia is just. not a name she would have. it's not egyptian. as far as i know it's not even middle eastern. like, sometimes people really nitpick stuff when criticizing these things online but this really isn't a nitpick, like. just common sense! common sense and respect for the culture and heritage you're exploiting for your cash cow franchise. the bare minimum. you didn't even have to deeply research Common Girl Names In Upper Egypt. You could have just named her, like, Sara or something, and it would have worked just fine.

like the reason the name is such a big deal is that zia is one of like, two egyptians in a series ABOUT egypt, and yet she's just...not. she doesn't feel egyptian. through her we know nothing about egyptian culture. her name is a Not Like Other Girls name. we don't know whether she's muslim or coptic. she's the Egyptian Rep but she's just Not Egyptian, and the fact that she has the personality of a piece of cardboard doesn't help. it feels like egyptian characters are often purposely distanced from being egyptian in media like this because a) the writers don't want to put in the effort to research and b) it would force them to confront the colonial implications of the media they're writing.

her village is like, comically orientalist- rick could have looked at a map of egypt and known that absolutely nowhere in egypt do they have places named in formal arabic like that. it's called village of the red sand, right? it's given this long mysterious sounding formal arabic name as a result, and just... it's not how egyptian place names works and it's also not how any place name would work, period. a more realistic thing would be if rick had put in the work to at least get an IDEA of the egyptian dialect of arabic -better yet, the UPPER egyptian dialect. Like if the village was called Raml Ahmar it would have been like. Believable. Grounded. And like, in Zia's childhood, supposedly this entire village gets like eaten by sand or something, and... there. Nobody notices. Like if something like that happened in the US it would be a huge deal and everyone would know about it, but since egypt is this like, Desert Of Mystery, things like this just happen and nobody cares I guess.

zia herself isn't even in the books like 60% of the time. like she's either a puppet or like, in a magical coma or something, and when she IS there she's this like Quiet Strong Girl Of Few Words so she doesn't really have a personality beyond being a #girlboss. she is very open to going on dates with a boy and KISSING him at some point even though a girl from upper egypt wouldn't be caught DEAD publically doing those kinds of things, culturally speaking. on that note, zia doesn't know what a mall is. egypt has malls. zia lives in cairo iirc and cairo does, in fact, have several LARGE malls. so all this converges to show zia as this Mysterious Girl From The Third World(tm) and again, as mentioned before, to distance her from her being egyptian.

so like these all seem like nitpicky details, but they all converge to send a message: rick does not care about egyptian culture enough to research it. since the people of modern egypt are poor and brown and all the cool ancient stuff can be conveniently stolen and whitewashed, egypt has no value to him besides being an occasional setting. and it rubs salt in the already gaping colonial wound left by the british and the french and the ottomans and whoever else took a chunk out of us and left us to bleed- which is: exploit egypt for the artifacts and degrade and disrespect the rest.

i'm gonna be honest- i wasn't expecting perfect egyptian rep from a white american man and i wasn't looking for it from him either. but what grates on me is disrespect. what grates on me is laziness. tkc is probably gonna be a lot of kids' introduction to egypt and this is the message it leaves in their head; this is the mindset, that egypt is worthless and only the ancient artifacts are worth taking seriously. and then that devolves into the way tourists and expats arrive here asking to be treated like royalty and treating the locals like shit and paying them pennies. it devolves into museums refusing to give us OUR artifacts that they LOOTED during imperialism. it devolves into the microaggressions i face on the internet every day, where I cannot talk about the serious problems this country faces every day without some annoying american making a king tut reference or whatever. tkc isn't the reason behind all of this, it's far from the only media that has ever done this, it's not even the worst offender. but it feels bad to constantly see the blatant disrespect people have for you and your heritage and it feels bad to constantlyq have it relegated to a joke pop culture reference and it feels bad to be constantly spoken over.

again: im not waiting for representation from riordan or his ilk. i don't need his crumbs. but the disappointment i felt when reading about zia was real, and so was my irritation at her characterization and the way it's supposed to represent me.

tl;dr when you write a book about a colonized and exploited country and people, please afford them a little fucking respect. the bare fucking minimum. this is why i'm not at all excited for the upcoming tkc adaptation and for my own sake i won't be engaging in it, although i dread the upcoming pop culture wave that will happen as a result.

#tkc #the kane chronicles #zia rashid #egypt #rrcrit #rr crit #rick riordan #rick riordan critical #tkc crit #tkc critical #there better not be derailments and other foolishness in the notes i SWEAR to god

[pussyd0n]

Never mind this blog will probably turn into a rrcrit blog when 'Daughter of the Deep' is released

#because i don't think Rick *can* do Desi representation correctly when he fucked up the Cherokee representation #desi #not pjo #future daughter of the deep blog #hzjsksk #dw im not leaving yet #but meh #what else is left to see ? #im feeling emotional #help #i might cry