Comments | goddess32585: I can tell this will be awesome.

goddess32585

I can tell this will be awesome.

Jan 19, 2009 14:30

So, while we were at mystery hunt*, the internet exploded, about race and literature and cultural appropriation. This discussion actually started early last week, and I'd been following it intermittently, but apparently in the last day or two it's taken rather a turn for the worse. I have some scattered thoughts.

( some of these words have been percolating for a year or more. long, obviously. )

Comments 7

(The comment has been removed)

goddess32585 January 23 2009, 00:01:34 UTC

Identity is, apparently, what one's 20s are for figuring out. Sounds like you're taking some interesting steps towards yours.

baniszew January 19 2009, 22:40:14 UTC

Revisiting old media is weird. I've been watching a lot of 80s cartoons recently, and in general I still enjoy them. But the other day, She-Ra had a big, "you're doing it wrong" moment. They stick a moral into each episode to make the show seem more like a valuable moral guide and less like a vehicle for selling merchandise, and so they stuck in a racism plot. Except they didn't want to make it overtly a racism plot, so they had some story about humans squabbling with trolls. This might have worked fine if the group of humans had multiracial, but the human cast of the show is Entirely White. I was pretty floored by the level of Fail the producers reached in trying to teach kids that racism is bad when they went and invented a tribe of trolls to stand in for people of color.

If only it were easier to keep the good parts of old media to share with future generations while keeping out the bad parts.

goddess32585 January 22 2009, 23:55:11 UTC

If only it were easier to keep the good parts of old media to share with future generations while keeping out the bad parts.

Bigotry: like 80s fashion, in ur media, makin u look dated! Also, it's not like trolls hadn't stood in for scary Primitives since, um, Tolkien (one of these years I should really engage with some primary sources and figure out if he made that association up, or just embroidered it with shiny thread.)

I carefully avoided a protracted discussion of the ethics of various flavours of remix culture, it's definitely a murky space. And lord knows I always wince at the "religious carnival" episode of B5 - oh, JMS, you self-consciously egalitarian, atheist fella, you.

marydell January 20 2009, 16:17:02 UTC

pnh did delete his LJ, and my comments with it, so now I can't get my cookie, damnit.

medievalist also deleted her LJ.

In both cases, I think it's too bad; I'd rather see people keep working toward understanding what's really being said, and bridging gaps and whatnot, even if it involves a lot of flailing and ass display.

goddess32585 January 22 2009, 23:46:29 UTC

Yeah, this post is actually trying to be tangential to recent goings-on, and primarily a trial of, oh, actually writing on LJ again after ~a year of avoiding it. And seeing what happens when I actually address all those issues I tend to avoid. (*crickets*, apparently.)

Anyway, to further flog the analogy, I think it might be time for us to start swapping recipes and baking ourselves some damn cookies.

annag January 22 2009, 03:07:30 UTC

...so why don't we talk about it, for fuck's sake?

because that w/could be complicated and take up much time and effort.
then again, it could be argued, what better have we to do?

goddess32585 January 22 2009, 23:43:19 UTC

Lord knows, we wouldn't want to do anything complicated.

(Anti-oppression: not actually rocket science, motherfuckers.)