#I honestly love how the Brazilians but forever in particular

[the-crimson]

It’s really sad watching the evolution of the fandom’s perception of the Brazilians cuz I remember when they first joined and the Brazilian members of the fandom were happy that the streamers weren’t being criticized for their energetic and loud nature but now, that is exactly what is happening :/

Like I’ll admit I was harsh on Forever and Cellbit during the second debate because there was a disconnect in philosophy between the two sides of the debate and that frustrated me and I took bbh’s side because I understood his pov the best - but it never even occurred to me that they were “being too loud” or “taking over the debate” like????

These two are incredibly passionate about making the server a better and more fun place. Do I think they are playing into the federations hands? Yes, but so is everyone participating in the election, even the anarchists. Do I think they were being overbearing or talking over other people? No, they werent. At least not any more than everyone else?

This seems to be another evolution of the growing toxicity in the fan base. wasn’t it like last week when the fandom was tearing into the French for both being too into the lore and not into it enough depending on the member?

This is just the dsmp all over again T_T

[cat-mentality]

Honestly I feel like Philza and Fit need to keep cool about the kidnapping of his children. They need to act as blase as they can about this whole thing- They have gone through this before, their kids got kidnapped and they come back as even if they were cracked they are fine! It was fine in the end.

The Brazilian and the French, and even the new members, are unfamiliar with this particular panic, this is the first time their kids have gone missing, they are losing it, but the older residents? Oh no they have felt it all before.

They need to keep calm. They need to stay focused.

How can Fit break down when Pac looks like he will shatter at any minute? When he is shaking, eyes perpetually full of tears as everything he loves is taken from him?

How can Foolish sinks into panic over Leo being gone while Vegetta is away (he is so lonely, so fucking lonely) when Bad is drowning? He knows his friend, he knows how much he loves not only his son but all the children, Foolish knows Bad needs him to keep sane.

How can Philza just break down when Tubbo is looking at him with wide eyes full of panic, when the kid is just desperately trying to explain what happened and beg forgiveness at the same time? He can't break down when Tubbo is clearly doing it already.

Fit an Philza know loss.

They know war.

They know loneliness.

They know hardship.

And they cannot allow themselves to break down because breaking down would be admitting that things are truly lost. That their children are gone and this time they are not coming back.

They are not screaming at the heavens, they are not destroying everything, they are not running around with no clue to follow, they are not drowning on their despair.

Because they can't.

And so they remain optimistic.

Fit reminds everyone that this happened before, because he needs them to stop bringing up the terrible scenarios. Ramon is his light, Ramon is everything Fit has in this life and nothing and no one matters to him more than his baby boy and he cannot allow himself to entertain the idea that Ramon is gone.

Philza insists that Tubbo stop apologizing, maybe a part of him wants Tubbo to stop bringing it up because there is a part of him that is angry, who wants to ask why he didn't keep a closer eye on them, why he let them go with Forever and didn't check on them himself, why didn't he say anything before, maybe Philza swallow those words and those feelings because he knows where they come from- Cucurucho is not there for him to rage at, is not a target he can truly direct his anger at, but Tubbo is. And Philza refuses to let the Federation twist him into a monster like them. It just make it all so much more real, so much more terrible.

If they break.... if they break who knows if they will ever be able to put themselves back together.

If there will be anything left at all.

[landofanimes]

I got tagged by @real-life-senshi​! RULES: Answer 21 questions and tag 21 blogs you’d like to get to know better.

Me? getting tagged? XD Cool! :) Ok, here we go!

—

Nickname: I use “Arukas“ online because that’s how you write “Sakura“ backwards XD Yes, Sakura as in CardCaptor Sakura - my childhood fave :) There was this anime magazine I used to read where one of the editors used a character's name backwards as an alias so I tried that and it spelled something readable, so here we are. I’m a girl, by the way, in case people haven’t guessed XD Currently on my 20s.

Star Sign: I’m an Aries. I feel like half of the description of Aries fits me well, half has nothing to do with me. I don’t believe in Astrology but I find it a fun concept! Go, rams! XD I love the Aries Saints in Saint Seiya by the way, I love its unique neat legacy ^^ If Ophiuchus counted, though, apparently I would be a Pisces!  

Height: 1.70m (5′7′‘)

Last film I saw: I’ve recently watched How to Train Your Dragon 3! If we’re talking live-action, I finally watched Kingsman 2. I honestly can’t remember the last anime film I saw though ^^’ I gotta get back to those. Oh, I did watch Digimon Tri 6 XD Though it’s been months ahaha

Favorite musician: Oh, that’s hard. I do like some musicians/bands (Brazilian and English-speaking) but I don’t really follow their stuff. Like, I don’t actively search for new music, but if I like what I listen somewhere (radio, a party, etc) I take those specific songs I heard XD I like pop. Some rock songs. Idk. Ballet is also cool. I do listen to a lot of soundtracks though, instrumental or not (that includes musicals, movies, tv series, anime...also lots of disney). I occasionally sing soundtracks to myself when no one’s around

Song Stuck In My Head: Recently, for some reason, Beauty School Dropout from Grease and Glad You Came - or at least Glee’s versions of that XD. 

Other Blogs: @lands-of-fantasy​. Basically where I post everything I like that is not anime?? XD About movies and tv series, I mean. And books. Mostly live action, but it also features some Disney/Dreamworks and a bit of animated/comics superhero stuff. In fact it has quite a lot of superhero stuff lol why does Marvel and DC produce so much content at once?? I’m only one person!

Do I Get Asks: Sadly, almost never! 

Blogs following: Currently 16. Yeah, I don’t follow many blogs... Partially because I don’t want to overwhelm my dash and partially because I try to avoid spoilers. Though I do occasionally check on some I don’t follow! There are 2 or 3 I actually check frequently and regularly, but don’t follow them officially cause they post A LOT, including things I’m not interested in. 

What I’m Wearing: ? Shorts and a t-shirt.

Dream job: Hell if I know! If only God would send me a sign 

Dream Trip: I would love to go to England! And Italy. And Japan! Maybe Egypt? Also several Disneylands, lol. I did go to Disney once though, which was a Dream Trip of mine, so yay!!!

Play any instruments: Nope

Languages: Portuguese and English

Favorite foods: If we’re talking about real food, I love Feijoada (it’s a black beans meal). Also Cuscuz (which is corn based). And meat in general! We eat a lot of beef in Brazil. If we’re talking those caloric wonders, I can’t resist cheeseburgers nor french fries! Also pizza, of course. Snack wise, I’m weak for chocolate cookies.

Random facts:

Fantasy is my favorite genre in media. Give me magic. Mythical creatures and races. Also far away lands. And good old sword-fighting! Medieval settings are cool. Supernatural beings are also welcome.

If I’m watching something and it doesn’t feature anything fantastical or at least some sword-fighting at all, it’s probably a romance. Maybe a musical, though not as often. Then again musicals are kinda fantastic in their own way!

Since I was tagged by a fellow Moonie and I do post/reblog a lot of Sailor Moon here:

I grew up with the 90′s anime. In 2013 I read the manga and got into the old musicals. And then I watched PGSM! Then came the new musicals and crystal. I enjoy each and every iteration, though in varying degrees of course. I pick the things I like the most in each version and take those as canon XD

I usually watch the subbed versions of foreign live action movies/series. Animation wise, however, I always aim for the dubs XD As an anime fan, however, I obviously have to resort to subtitles cause sometimes there’s simply no dub version!

Favorite songs:

I don’t even know, dude

Some sera myu faves that come to mind, in no particular order:

La Soldier / FIRE / Can’t Be Soldiers of Love Forever / Chasing After You / See Me, It’s Our Era / Brand New World / Tuxedo Mission / Tuxedo Loyal /  Amazon Kara Circus Dan ga Yatte Kita / Choubi! Uranus to Neptune

Music of The Spheres / Line Up! 5 Ladies of the White Moon / Sky of Jewels / Also the last part of Light of Destruction (Decline and Rebirth) gives me chills!!

Some animes that have amazing soundtracks:

Inu-yasha

Tsubasa Chronicles

Saint Seiya

Lost Canvas

Fullmetal Alchemist (both of them)

Also Digimon’s openings and Brave Heart. CardCaptor Sakura, Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z music will always hold a place in my heart too (man, it’s been eons ever since I watched any DBZ...) 

***

Tagging: As if I knew who to tag XD I also don’t interact much, I’m shy :P Oh wait @teresartwork​ tags me, so there you go! if you want to, of course. If not that’s cool too :)

[briefhistorybriefhistory]

Looks Like Frida: The Problem with the Frida Barbie

Recently, Mattel produced a new range of Barbie dolls. The range, designed to represent inspiring women, features dolls based on athletes, artists, scientists and film directors, amongst other professions. In the glossy publicity images, nestled snugly between Amelia Earhart and Katherine Johnson, sits a doll with flowers on her dark up-do, a few stray hairs between her brows suggesting her iconic monobrow.

Amelia Earhart, Frida Kahlo and Katherine Johnson as Barbie dolls 

Of course, Mattel is striving to keep its profit margins healthy in a struggling industry of toy manufacturing. The corporation is also trying to deflect years of criticism around the Barbie franchise and the hideously unrealistic proportions of the Barbie body. Unsurprisingly, the Frida doll has drawn a huge amount of criticism.

A lot of this criticism comes from feminist circles, where the idea of a Frida doll, softened and sculpted into a vaguely ethnic Barbie mould, has been thoroughly rejected. And that criticism has a lot of merit. Frida has become a feminist icon, inspiring generations with her fearless exploration of femininity, the body and the self.

But western feminist thought cannot completely contain the entire argument as to why the Frida Kahlo Barbie not only disrespects her memory, but also the politics in which she very deliberately placed herself. While it is fine to discuss the way Kahlo would have likely abhorred the unrealistic body proportions of her little plastic representation, it is also important to discuss how Kahlo, and her legacy, have become distilled down into a toothless symbol of generic resistance, stripped of her ethnic heritage until she becomes a universal catch-all for womanhood, performed as fridge magnets, phone cases and tote bags.

Frida as a symbol

Firstly, we must look at how Fridamania became as it was. Although Kahlo enjoyed a relatively successful career in her lifetime, it wasn’t until after she died that she began to be lauded as an international feminist symbol. After a biography was published by 1983 by Hayden Herrera, Kahlo shot from artist to celebrity. Her work underwent a massive revival and during the 1980s and 1990s, the price of her work skyrocketed. In fact, it wasn’t only her artwork which shot up in value - in November 2000, at a Sotheby's Latin American art auction in New York, a box of Kahlo memorabilia, including ribbons, photographs and dried flowers, sold for over $55,000 USD. At exhibitions of her work, you will find not only the usual memorabilia of postcards, posters or t-shirts. Now, the ranges of Frida-inspired products include jewellery, cosmetics and cookbooks. A quick search on Google reveals depictions of Kahlo on nail varnish bottles, back packs and even, bizarrely, as a Daft Punk fan.

Whoever made this, turn on your location. I just want to talk. 

Kahlo was even the subject of a 2003 biopic, Frida, perhaps the nail that sealed the coffin - we can no longer differentiate between Kahlo’s work and the enthralling drama of her life. In Devouring Frida: Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo, 1999, Margaret Lindauer writes, 

'the drama of her life has become zealously coupled with her paintings. Indeed, there often is little distinction between Kahlo and her paintings, which converge into a single entity, Frida's-life-and-art.'

Of course, it is natural in some ways to want to relate the life of an artist to their work - it is an established technique of literary and art criticism. But to solely interpret Kahlo’s art through her life is to do a great injustice to her work and reduces it to the story of a single woman, as opposed to recognising it as a rich tapestry which draws upon a vivid cultural and political landscape.

To truly understand the essentialism of Kahlo, we have to look at the wider view of how artists from outside the traditionally narrow scope of the Western art canon - in particular, Latin American artists - have been interpreted.

Looks like Frida

Gerardo Mosquera wrote in his 1992 essay, The Marco Polo Syndrome, Some Problems Around Art and Eurocentrism,

Third World artists are constantly asked to display their identity, to be fantastic, to look like no one else or to look like Frida... The relatively high prices achieved by Latin American art at the great auctions have been assigned to painters who satisfy the expectations of a more or less stereotyped Latin-Americanicity, able to fulfil the new demand for exoticism at the centres. As a consequence, Rivera is valued well above Orozco, Remedios Varo more than Torres García, and Botero considerably more than Reverón.

By this, Mosquera means that the Western art world - and the Western art market - demands a sort of twisted “authenticity” from artists from outside of its narrow scope. These artists must be completely unique or must fit into an already established, comfortable, understandable mould, shaped by artists like Kahlo who have been accepted into the canon (in a narrow, binding way, something that we’ll return to later). Where those artists do not comply with this, they are undervalued and held to be “derivative” of Western practice.

This was horribly exemplified by Jean Fisher, who, in her essay The Syncretic Turn, Cross-Cultural Practises in the Age of Multiculturalism, 1996, wrote about the posthumous retrospective of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica at the Witte de With in Rotterdam in 1992. European art critics were heard to remark that, while they recognised Oiticica's conceptual thinking, it was “inauthentic” - his practise was just a reflection of Euroamerican practice, and therefore was not “Brazilian” enough.

Hélio Oiticica’s Grand Nucleus Grande Núcleo, 1960–66

Kahlo as a brand

Unlike poor Oiticica, Kahlo has remained as the commercially and critically acceptable face of Latin American art, and much of this is due to the Kahlo brand and the way that her identity was boiled down. The essentialism of Frida Kahlo allowed her to be turned into a non-threatening and marketable product. In Isabel Molina-Guzman’s 2010 book, Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media, the author writes:

Central to mainstream media representations of Latinidad is the production of ethnic authenticity, of an authentic ethnic or panethnic identity often grounded in familiar and marketable characteristics. Furthermore, media produced by U.S. ethnic and racial minorities equally depend on a mode of 'strategic essentialism' to produce authenticity.

Molina-Guzman was writing specifically about the film Frida, but her words are applicable too to the mass-branding of Kahlo. “Strategic essentialism” here refers to a strategy which is discussed in post-colonial theory where oppressed groups simplify their mass identity, even when there are vast differences between members of the group, in order to achieve certain goals. However, as Molina-Guzman writes, this same tactic is also used by the creators of the film - and the wider art market and media - in order to create the kind of “authentic” identity that was not granted to Hélio Oiticica. The producers and director of the film created a very specific interpretation of Mexican identity in order to create a piece of media which is commercially viable in the Western world. Molina-Guzman writes:

the characterization of Kahlo as an anti-establishment, defiant rule-breaker remains consistently romanticized within global popular culture—making her an alluring and profitable multicultural and political icon for contemporary audiences invested in multicultural identity politics.

This essentialism of Kahlo’s identity is applicable not just to the biographical film made about her, but also to the way that Kahlo is now interpreted by the Western art world as a whole, and by the audiences hungry for a taste of non-threatening ethnic glamour.

Frida as generic radicalism

This essentialism of Kahlo, and therefore the distillation of the Mexican identity into a marketable product, is of course something that can - and has been - exploited by the free market in order to make profit. Not only can one buy countless Frida-inspired products, but one can now also use them to signal a type of political affiliation which says very little at all, a politics which has been watered down by capitalism into easy to swallow, vague ideas of non-conformity. These politics have little to nothing left of Frida’s revolutionary spirit.

Do you want to suggest - but not too radically - a half-hearted idea of individualism? Why not use the Frida Kahlo emoji pack (the creator of which, Sam Cantor, by the way, said: “Frida was just perfect for the project. She conveyed her emotions so honestly and openly in her work. What better artist to translate into emoji, which we use to express emotion today?”)? Like Theresa May, do you want to project an image that of feminism, of loving and protecting women, while actively working to destroy the support systems which have helped to provide women with a basic standard of living? Why not wear a bracelet with her self portraits on it as you rally your troops to further dismantle the welfare state?

Honestly, I have no idea what emotion this is supposed to convey. 

The image of Frida Kahlo has become so generic now that Oriana Baddeley, in her essay Reflecting on Kahlo: Mirrors, Masquerade and the Politics of Identification, wrote:

By the end of the twentieth century Kahlo's signature mono-brow had become recognisable to a mass audience outside of those interested in Mexican art history or Surrealism. Her self-portraits appeared on fashionable clothing and accessories. The face of Frida was used with the same regularity, and often with a shared symbolism, as images of Che Guevara or Bob Marley, so that her art and her appearance were forever confused in the public imagination. By buying into this Frida, the consumer can declare a non-specific radicalism, an acceptable declaration of nonconformity. As one contemporary website sales line puts it: 'Give your vehicle the revolutionary spirit with a Frida Kahlo car window decal.'

The image of Kahlo has become so distorted that we can no longer differentiate between Kahlo, the revolutionary Marxist artist, and the Barbie doll wearing a red shawl as a subtle nod towards her ethnicity.

Frida Kahlo’s politics

Of course, there is another reason why Kahlo would have likely hated the legacy which has resulted in the doll. While the world has not dwelled heavily on Kahlo’s politics, she was a communist, her politics and world view heavily influenced by Marx. She was a member of the Mexican Communist Party, although left when her husband, Diego Rivera, was expelled. At her funeral, her casket was draped with a red flag as mourners sang The Internationale.

Her 1954 painting, Marxism Will Give Health to the Ill, depicts the disembodied head of Karl Marx floating above her, his god-like hands gently embracing her as she casts off her crutches and walks unaided. The painting, a metaphor for her belief that Marxism could heal the world, shows the strangling of a bald eagle, neatly dividing the image into good versus evil, the power of the people versus the imperialism of the powerful state.  

Marxism Will Give Health to the Ill, 1954

In order to truly do justice to Kahlo’s work, we must never forget the politics which shaped her worldview and influenced her art. Part of this is about rejecting the vapid representations of her which have been so readily commercialised - the fashionable t-shirts, the twee cookbooks and, yes, the doll. But we must also remember that Kahlo’s identity was not a tool to be used to signal our own radicalness or gender politics. We must remember that it is not useful to pick or choose from her rich, complex identity the parts which best support our own agendas. As Kahlo wrote in her diary, she was:

Always revolutionary, never dead, never useless