feotakahari

Hot take: the reason almost every modern adaptation of The Island of Doctor Moreau does "people turning into warped animals" is that "animals turning into warped people" was a metaphor for "black people turning into warped white people." Modern stories assume the target audience isn't racist enough to be scared of that. (There's still The Album of Doctor Moreau, but that's the same joke as the lab-engineered boy band in Gravity Falls.)

Additional hot take: this is also why The Planet of the Apes doesn't hit anymore. If you read the original book, "apes rise up and overthrow humanity, but aren't smart enough to build a functional society" is blatantly "black people rise up and overthrow white people, but aren't smart enough to build a functional society."

The super-psychics are called Errans, but I found a single lore entry calling them Aryans. I'm not sure if this is a spoiler, an autocorrect, or a red flag.

People like to say “haha, white supremacists are ugly!” But I think it’s more damning that white supremacists are people. I just saw a photo of a white supremacist leader, and he’s a perfectly ordinary-looking person I might have had as a coworker. You’re not a seven-foot-tall slab of muscle; what are you acting all superior for?

Reading a Pathfinder fic, and it does a good job of establishing how tribalism, religious conflict, and totalitarian governments lead to some races being viewed as “the bad ones” despite none being inherently evil.

Reading the reference materials it links to, and this shit sounds obscenely racist. “This volume offers an indispensable analysis of the most vicious killers of all – orcs. Born and bred for war, they are an awful, brutish, violent species and, despite their constant infighting and backstabbing, their horde armies remain a dire threat to all races.”

If you’re arguing about whether someone is a grifter or a believer in white supremacy, you need to pin down what “belief” means for a white supremacist. It’s apparently pretty nebulous.

On the one hand, this show is . . . probably racist? I really don't like what they're doing with the black best friend, to say nothing of the "ethnic" superheroes like the black disco dancers or the vain, flamboyant Latin American.

On the other hand, this show is the tone I want from superhero media, and after shit like Capes or Dispatch, I am willing to forgive a lot of sins as long as the superheroes aren't depressing.

Read an article about ten great black women in anime. I remembered Sister Krone, and I was surprised they could find ten black women in anime who weren’t stereotypes. Then Sister Krone was on the list. Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel.

A lot of my thoughts on intent in fiction come down to You Don’t Fucking Know That.

There was this short cartoon called Lava where the two volcanoes in love with each other were modeled on the voice actors. People thought the male volcano was ugly, and they argued that this reinforced how fiction keeps pairing ugly men with pretty women. Then other people pointed out “no, the voice actor just looks that way.” The people who thought it was sexism Didn’t Fucking Know That.

And honestly, I seem to be really bad at Knowing That. I’ve been repeatedly informed that I completely misinterpreted what the author was trying to say. So unless something is, like, Turner Diaries level of obviously bigoted, I’d rather approach it in terms of the setting and characters. I can Know That about the story, even if I can’t Know That about the author.

You could call this willful ignorance, but to some extent it’s willful disrespect. If the author said something stupid, I don’t want to give them the dignity of acknowledging it. I just want to salvage what parts I can, because I think authors die best when they’re murdered. After all, “that is not dead which can eternal lie,” and I think modern authors have done a decent job of murdering Lovecraft.

This is why I keep referencing Zootopia, because it refuses to let you Know That. Most of the characters don’t consistently map to a single out-of-universe demographic (mafia stereotypes notwithstanding), so you usually have to take it from an in-universe perspective and evaluate it without considering what you already Know about some real-world issue. So obviously, Tumblr decided it was trying to be about anti-black racism, and judged it as a failure because it didn’t map to that. Even when I’m writing about something inspired by a real issue, I want it to be defined by the events within the story itself, because I think it’s better writing when you don’t want or expect readers to Know That.

Just saw a person being xenophobic to immigrants on the grounds that “these people are more xenophobic than you.”