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we need to invent a way to explain how deep running and pervasive and subliminal racism and antiblackness is without immediately sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist

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maybe its because i have zero undertale nostalgia and thus no prior affection for these characters but we've gotta kill deltarune asgore

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actually nah i wanna emphasize this in its own post. people would rather believe that the weird route is about the player forcibly "correcting" noelle into a straight girl than accept that kris is just a nonbinary protagonist and not a boy. and this is coming from queer people who spout the theory in the name of defending lesbians. we are never getting out.

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im 18 now. yay.

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when your cisgender friend is being a loser and wont play in the active construction zone with you so you call her out but then aquaman shows up to defend cisgender rights

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I think the big issue with the mutant metaphor or other such attempts at allegory for diverse characters in the modern day is that you can now tell stories about racism with black people. It isn't the 60s anymore where the comics code authority was very cautious about that kind of thing. You can put gay people in a comic. Scott Summers does not need to experience fictionalised racism anymore, you can actually center on the people with those experiences. And as we do get more stories by black authors and by queer authors, both those about oppression and those that are not, it becomes increasingly ludicrous that the mutant metaphor actually has any use, particularly when it increasingly becomes treated as the only axis of oppression that matters with intersectional characters.

These kinds of metaphors and analogies had their use in a time where the kinds of stories you could tell were more regulated, but it is the year 2025 and I do not need to see Rogue go like "Wow, I can't believe they made a MUTANTPHOBIC HORROR MOVIE 😱😱😱" as if this is the first and worst time this has ever happened. I find it really obnoxious but equally I don't really know how they could fix it. Like, the metaphor has served its purpose. We can move on now. But the iconography of the characters remain and you can't really separate it from them, even when it becomes ever more unwieldy in a post-comics code authority comic book world.

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i shit talk x readers a lot but thats because i hate that they pretend theyre for a general audience while actually mostly being aimed at a very specific type of white cishet women. in contrast to this, i think selfshippers who just straight up draw and write about only themselves with a character are kind of awesome

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here's the thing about the "almost every (white) kid goes thru a racist phase" logic

while you were doing that you were using it to dehumanize and harass POC. i went to elementary school from about 2002-2011 and other students called my mother the hard R to my face. any attempts i made to push back or defend my family was met with punishment by the white teachers and principle.

i went to highschool from 2011-2014 and while reading "american classics" in school had to sit there while the 20+ white kids in my english class were chomping at the bit to be the ones who read the foulest most racist lines aloud and the teacher saying "it's just the language that was used back then"

and so while you, white person, were on your "learning journey" you were perpetuating violence and hatred over and over, and doing it with a smile and a giggle while people like me and my family are expected to just put up with it and then forgive you when you "learn it was wrong". i was harassed by most of my school's gay-straight alliance for posting on my private facebook account that i was tired of only seeing YA movies with "sad white kids" (in regards the the john greene adaptations coming out at the time).

and after all that you expect us to just wipe the slate clean and trust you? no fucking way.

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i genuinely do not trust people who talk about stuff like "the left's obsession with moral purity" or refer to "puritanism" as some kind of coherent framework for understanding anything politically or an actual political force, it's so deeply unserious and disconnected from materialism it's like liberal baby's first time trying to talk about politics except most of the time it's someone in their 40s saying this stuff and it's either because palestinian americans didn't want to vote for someone who actively supported the mass murder of their family members or some stupid online-only fandom discourse that doesn't matter at all even a little bit

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why does antiblackness have to be like a stepping stone for everybody lol. like do all ur “edgy phases” have to be about hating minorities? my edgy phase consisted of reading naruto fanfic where Sakura joined the akatsuki..

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What do you find patriotic about the themes of In Stars and Time?

Yayayay thank you for this question anon! I have SO MANY THOUGHTS!!!

I hope this won't get too long sorry in advance for the whole huge essay heh

I think first we need to get into what patriotism actually is. Because what some seem to propose is that it is only “supporting the political interests of a country you're a citizen of” which is not actually true or “glorifying it to the point of warping into nationalism and chauvinism”, which is extrremely untrue and frankly bonkers??? No, patriotism is love for your country, for your nation, for your people. And by extension, for your culture, your language, your history (loving means admitting to the dark sides of it btw), your home, all of it. It doesn't mean your national food, music, etc. have to be your favorite in the world, but it does mean you find value in them, you want to preserve and remember them, you want what’s best for them. (I love my brother. He gets on my nerves so much i wanna strangle him sometimes. You get the idea) so sorry if it's all obvious to you but i thought it needed to be clarified just in case

ISAT as a whole but especially Odile, Siffrin, and the King’s character arcs pose a question: how much of yourself is influenced by your origins? This topic is explored in many various forms, woven into the flesh of the narrative, ever-present (the differences and customs between countries a recurring topic in the party’s conversations, for example). The cultural exploration is often what drives the plot forward.

(Also the use of national religions is so great, it adds a yet another perspective to the problem, but it’s a whole nother can of worms for a whole nother day!)

While the Country is used mainly as the vehicle for themes of loss and loneliness, the so-called "Homesickness" (“Mal du Pays”),

its national aspect is never undermined. This is, among other themes, a story about being denied the connection to your roots, after all. If you think about it, the whole plot happened because of it, is undivorceable from it, and arguably serves to show how horrible such a thing might be.

This is also a brilliant way to explore what being a “country” means - it's not just about some territorial politics or conservative history classes. It's the whole environment you grow in as a human being.

The King and Siffrin are juxtaposed here as narrative foils, the King acting as a fallen Siffrin: now this is especially interesting, because in every other story like this i'd expect the King to be a chauvinist. But… surprisingly, he’s not. He is a patriot, in a sense. He does love his country and he does love Vaugarde, his actions are not motivated by a political self-righteousness, they are motivated by a love warped into obsession by fear. Don’t get me wrong, he is an irredeemable villain, but he’s as much a victim here. He isn’t condemned by the narrative. He gets his wish granted in the end (wishcraft and the Universe? add it to the aforementioned can of worms, not today but boy do i have things to say), he gets to remember his homeland. He gets justice, both in the form of punishment and compensation.

Siffrin nearly ends up like him, but doesn’t - not because he decides to abandon and forget his country forever! but because in being loved by his family he finds strength to conquer the fear of losing everything again. It’s a fine line, but i think insertdisc5 navigated it masterfully. Check out how Sif's internal monologue changes in regards to the Island. He has a history of running away from the painful things and thus not working on his massive trauma (one could make a case that the rewinds when he remembered his past weren't actually caused by the Universe but by him but again, worms. in a can.). But now in act 6 he finally stops looking away:

and you might even imagine a fondness in his eyes.

By the way, here's a tiny personal digression: i 100% believe that there are some nationalities that will inevitably be hit harder by this narrative than others - one of those being Polish. Which i happen to be! Now lemme tell you, at some point in act 3 i thought: "huh. i, too, am from a country that disappeared once". But it didn't really disappear now, did it. So then i thought, what if it had, and i were the only one left and i, too, couldn't remember anything? And then my heart weeped, and i grieved inside a little, and made a fanart, and didn't feel better afterwards. Yay!

But you know what? There's a cool quote from Shang-Chi saying: "you are a product of all who came before you" - and your own unique characteristics, one should add after Odile. Your past, and i mean the generations upon generations before you as well, is a part of who you are, whether you like it or not. We see it in Siffrin. No matter how the wishcraft tries to erase it, it can't. Because one way or another, he will remember. He will love the stars and know basic astronomy, he will be able to use wishcraft, he will dress in his ethnic clothes, he will love malanga and cheese samosas, he will instinctively swear in his language. It's a part of him:

And maybe that's what's actually the most patriotic aspect of ISAT's narrative - that you can't erase it. As much as you try, you will never be able to fully succeed. Because there are people who love it, still. Even if they will never remember it. After all:

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while im generally all for including more diversity in reimaginings of majority white stories, i think there are a lot of pitfalls that are very easy to stumble into wrt making canonically white villains who have done awful things into characters of color, because you run the risk of pulling on various racist caricatures and negative racial stereotypes. because there are a lot of racial stereotypes based on casting people of color as various kinds of bogeymen who do awful things... which in some cases are rather like the things the villains in some stories do. and making these villains into characters of color can be pretty gross even unintentionally, especially when the white villain in question has a story arc that is predicated by their whiteness in canon. which is not to say that white villains can never be reimagined as characters of color, but rather that doing so requires attention and care and respect. which is not always the case, i find,

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like just making up random reasons to defend a contrary opinion does not make you smart, a visionary, or correct. ai is a labor issue, poverty issue, environmental issue, intellectual property issue, etc etc etc and trying to downplay that just makes u look dumb

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Friends

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If I were Toby fox I’d have a character ask Kris ‘what are your pronouns’ then the player has to choose between ‘they/them’ and ‘they/them’

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every time a fandom dumbs down a very interesting nurodivergent character to “stupid dumb dumb child infant who’s smol and innocent and needs protection bc he’s just a baby” an angel fucking dies btw

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kris and noelle discuss critically acclaimed fps game half dead 2, their missing siblings, and obscure human musicians like claude debussy