#and also i think i talked about this before how i’m biracial and he basically would always talk about how unfortunate it was that i was so | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rhys-ravenfeather · 2 years

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On being biracial, and the weird perception it can give you, as well as other people.

I believe I’ve mentioned a couple times before that I am biracial/mixed-race--I have a white father and black mother.

I look white, even though I’m technically not.

If I’m being totally honest, I’m not really sure what I am--I grew up in the tropics, went to school with mostly black/Hispanic kids, and my brother and I were two of the only ‘white’ kids in our primary school. It was really surreal--a lot of times as a kid I’d look at my hands and see how fair my skin was, compared to pretty much everyone around me, including my family members, and just feel like I stuck out, and I didn’t really ‘belong’ where I was (though that was also partly because Belize was a tiny, hot, humid country full of ignorant, and often uber religious), people.

I’ve seen media with mixed-race characters, even MAIN characters, and that’s awesome! I made a post some time back talking about how I love seeing mixed-race characters in media!

But I don’t think I’ve seen any who look like me.

Granted, genetics and skin color are a funny thing, I’ve seen stories of real life interracial couples having one white baby, and one black one. And it’s not like I’ve seen EVERY piece of media that happens to have mixed-race characters, maybe there is one out there that I simply don’t know about.

But from my experience, it kind of feels like most people’s idea of a mixed-race person with black and white parents is specifically someone with brown, or brownish, skin. This isn’t me trying to whine about ‘I’m being discriminated against for my fair skin!’ or anything like that, all of this is simply just my personal experiences, and observations.

Though I have been discriminated against, and abused. By one of my teachers, no less.

The worst teacher I ever had as a kid was a math teacher named Ms. Martinez, who seemed to love beating me, with a CANE, simply over stupid things, like getting my problems wrong. It was bad enough to leave bruises, and my parents NOTICED. Years later, my brother informed me that during a job, he overheard Martinez talking about how basically she hated everyone who wasn’t black. Granted, I’m not entirely sure if that’s the reason she targeted me, but again, I was one of the only ‘white’ kids at school; the evidence is pretty damning.

Speaking of my brother, last weekend we had a talk where he told me about an ex-coworker he had who said she ‘didn’t want any mixed-race kids’ with their boss. Certainly gives me some extra insight into that one post about people’s views on interracial relationships in general...

It also suddenly hit me a year or two ago that I have passing privilege, when a friend admitted to me that she didn’t go to church with me when we went to school in Florida because she was scared of the racism she saw around us.

Racism that I never saw or experienced, simply because I look white.

...to be honest, I’m not really sure what point I was trying to make with this. I’ve just...lived with a lot of weird experiences that are just, well, mixed.

#rhys-ravenfeather signing on #rhys rambles #seriously though--when my brother told me about that lady i couldn't help but be like: -___-#mixedheritage #mixedpeople #tw: child abuse mention #tw: racism mention

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swanlake1998 · 3 years

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Article: The Unbearable Whiteness of Ballet

Date: April 22, 2021

By: Chloe Angyal

In an exclusive excerpt from her new book Turning Pointe, contributing editor Chloe Angyal lays out the ways that white supremacy is embedded in ballet's most basic foundations.

Wilmara Manuel and her 11-year-old daughter, Sasha, were at the world finals of a ballet competition, the Youth America Grand Prix, in 2015 when it happened. Shortly before the competition began, the young dancers were on the performance stage with their parents, warming up and preparing to dance the solos they’d been rehearsing for months.

As Wilmara, who is Black and originally from Haiti, and Sasha, who is biracial, stood there, a young white dancer looked around the stage, checking out the competition. “And her eyes land on Sasha,” Wilmara remembers, “and I saw her look [Sasha] up and down, and then look at her mom.

“And her mom said, ‘Don’t worry. They’re never really good anyway.’ ”

Wilmara did her best to contain her shock. Sasha didn’t hear what the white mom had said, and Wilmara wasn’t about to tell her, because “that’s not the thing I want to discuss 10 minutes before she takes the stage.” But Sasha could sense that something was amiss. “Just the look on my face, she was like, ‘What? What happened? What did she say?’ ” Wilmara brushed her daughter off.

Don’t worry. They’re never really good anyway. An entire worldview of white resentment of Black progress and excellence passed quietly from mother to child in just seven words.

That white mother could not fathom that Sasha, a biracial child with a Black mother, might be really good—as in very good, or truly good—at a traditionally white art form at which her child was presumably also quite proficient. She could not imagine that Sasha might deserve to be at that competition, might have qualified on her merit—her talent and skill and persistence—rather than because of what she might consider a misguided or even unjust attempt to diversify ballet by lowering standards. They’re not really good, but they are allowed to be here. In this space that is rightfully yours, in this art form that is rightfully yours. They’re never as good as the white girls, a sweeping generalization that grants no individuality, no humanity, to any nonwhite dancer. They’re all the same, and they never deserve to be here. But don’t worry. Your excellence is a given. You belong here, while their presence is conditional or even ill-gotten.

A few minutes later, Sasha took the stage and performed her solo. She ended up placing ahead of that white dancer.

From then on, Wilmara traveled with Sasha to every competition, paying the additional travel costs to make sure that, if something like that ever happened again, she’d be there to support her daughter.

“That has stuck with me,” she says. “And it’s one of the reasons I make the sacrifice and I go with her everywhere. Even if there are others going, I feel like I need to be around should comments like that pop up. I just don’t feel like I can take that chance, you know? And what cracks me up is that . . . she doesn’t even look as dark as I do, which makes me feel like, ‘Oh my God, if you were darker, like, what else?’ ”

Sasha grew up in a suburb of Indianapolis and is now 16. She trains at the Royal Ballet School in London, an exclusive training ground that serves as a feeder school for the Royal Ballet. It’s widely acknowledged to be one of the best ballet schools in the world.

Wilmara says that people often express their surprise at the quality of Sasha’s training and technique. “Oh wow, you’re really good,” Wilmara says by way of example. “Where do you train? Have you been dancing for a long time?” She says that while she tries to give these white people the benefit of the doubt, she knows what they usually mean, and she’d prefer they just come out and say it: “I’m surprised you’re that good. You’re Black and you’re dancing and you’re good.”

Now that Sasha is a little older, Wilmara talks to her about the racist assumptions embedded in those surprised comments. “You know she’s asking because she doesn’t think a person of your color can do this,” she’s told Sasha, who now “gets it when she hears that tone of voice.”

And, she says, she’s been frank with her daughter about the kind of resistance she should expect from the overwhelmingly white ballet establishment if she keeps excelling—which she shows every sign of doing.

It’s moms who do the bulk of the work of ballet parenting: the sewing of costumes, the schedule keeping for rehearsals and recitals. And when you’re a ballet mom to a dancer of color, there’s an even higher price to pay.

“Not everybody’s gonna be thrilled,” Wilmara says, paraphrasing her conversations with Sasha. “Even if you’re not a dancer of color, it’s cutthroat. And on top of that, you are a dancer of color, and so that poses another threat in some ways. So you have to be mindful of your things and what you are doing, and know what things are okay, and [pay attention to] when you are uncomfortable.”

This emotional labor, the work of helping young dancers understand what “that tone of voice” means and why it’s being used—or the work of deciding whether to tell your child about the racist remark you just overheard or absorb it yourself and shield them from it—is a part of parenting not demanded of mothers of white dancers.

Then there’s the payment in time and money required of Wilmara to make sure that Sasha’s ballet experience is as fair and worry-free as possible. Once, at a competition, Wilmara forgot to color in the “nude” pale pink straps on one of Sasha’s competition costumes. Wilmara scrambled to find brown foundation because none of the vendors at the competition had a leotard in Sasha’s skin color.

“Come on, people, you are here,” Wilmara remembers thinking. “There may not be that many [dancers of color], but they are all here and you should be able to bring various shades of nude leos.”

Succeeding in ballet, or even just surviving, requires extra talent, extra work, extra resilience, and extra sacrifices from dancers of color, especially Black and brown dancers, and their parents. White ballet moms might have to talk to their white daughters about how cutthroat ballet is. But they don’t need to issue additional warnings about how a white girl’s success will be received by that cutthroat culture, because almost all the successful girls and women in ballet are white.

“They’ve had to grow up a lot faster,” Wilmara says of Black and brown ballet dancers. “I think the ballet world makes you grow up a lot faster, but on top of that,” there are the “extra hurdles that other dancers don’t have to think about.” There are the overtly racist comments backstage before a performance and the subtly racist “compliments” after. There is time spent frantically searching for the right leotard or adapting the default pink leotard. There is the knowledge, internalized first by parents and then by their kids, that if you make it over all those hurdles your success will be viewed with suspicion and resentment—that ballet does not have a “diversity” problem; it has a white supremacy problem.

“Our kids,” Wilmara says, “are thinking about this and thinking about it early on.”

The organizing principle of ballet—of training, of performance, of making a ballet body—is control. Control of your rigid torso while your foot shoots upward from the hip in a battement. Control of a silent and compliant class of otherwise giggly 9-year-old girls. “The traditional and classical Europeanist aesthetic for the dancing body is dominated and ruled by the erect spine,” wrote dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild in her landmark book The Black Dancing Body. “Verticality is a prime value, with the torso held erect, knees straight, body in vertical alignment. . . . The torso is held still.”

It all demands control. Control of your smiling face as your feet scream in your pointe shoes at the end of a long pas de deux. Control of your weight, of your turnout, of your stretched and strengthened feet that now arch into a shape no ordinary foot can make. “The ballet audience, attuned and habituated to view control as a prime value, applaud its display and are embarrassed when it isn’t fulfilled,” Gottschild wrote.

Discipline, order, adherence to strict and unquestioned rules. That’s what ballet is. When Gottschild asked Seán Curran, a white dancer and choreographer who performed with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, what he pictured when he thought of white dance or white dancing bodies, he said, “Upright. . . . For some reason, ‘proper’ stuck in the head a bit, something that is built and made and constructed rather than is free or flows.” A body that is rigid, obedient, and disciplined, remade from something natural and unruly into something refined and well behaved. Proper. “Whiteness,” Curran said, “values precision and unison.”

Curran’s assessment identifies a central underlying prejudice of white supremacy: the belief that people of color, and their bodies, are wild. Uncivilized, animalistic, subhuman. That white people—who, by contrast, are assumed to be organized and civilized—have both a right and a responsibility to tame that which is untamed and impose order, precision, and unison on it. To suppress and control that which is savage; to press it into something that approaches whiteness but will never be truly white and thus never truly equal.

This is the logic that underpinned white colonization and American slavery. It is also the logic that makes racial segregation possible: that which is pure and organized must be kept separate from that which is profane and undisciplined. And central to this worldview is the idea that the work of white supremacy is unending, not because white supremacy is flawed, but because the very people it seeks to suppress are inherently inferior, naturally incapable of complying. Because of some inborn lack—of will, of understanding, of discipline—people of color will never fully obey, never properly assimilate, never be redeemed by whiteness. In this way, white supremacy perpetuates itself, justifying both its worldview and the permanent need for its existence.

It’s little wonder, then, that ballet—with its fixation on control, discipline, and uprightness—wraps itself so neatly around whiteness. It makes sense that white Americans, reared on the belief that whiteness is synonymous with order and refinement, also believe that people of color have no place, or a limited place, or a conditional place, in classical ballet.

Furthermore, it is easy to see how the ideal ballet body—so controlled, so upright—is everything that white supremacy imagines a Black body is not. And because of deeply ingrained American cultural associations with musculature, loose movement, brute force, and untamed sexuality, the Black body is believed to be everything a ballet body is not permitted to be.

“When we talk about the ballerina,” says Theresa Ruth Howard, a former dancer and a teacher, diversity strategist, and the founder and curator of the digital ballet history archive Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet (MoBBallet), “we’re talking about the ideal, our stereotype of the desirable woman, and that is reserved for white women.”

Howard has made a career of helping the people who run ballet companies and schools to examine their ideas about what makes for a “good” ballet body, asking them to question their biases about the inherent fitness of white bodies and unfitness of other bodies, especially Black bodies. She says that long-standing racist tropes about Black women’s bodies make Blackness and ballerinas seem antithetical.

“You have the trope of either the jezebel, the mammy, or the workhorse of the Black woman,” which are incompatible with desirability, fragility, and sexual purity, the ideal of white womanhood at the heart of the ballerina’s appeal.

“She’s desired. It’s the epitome of beauty, of grace, of elegance, and these are not adjectives that are assigned to Black women,” Howard says. “Especially not darker-skinned Black women. This is why the closer you look to the white European aesthetic as a Black woman, the better chance you have at occupying that role. Especially at a higher level.”

Despite the long tradition of Latin American dancers carving out successful professional careers in the U.S. and the enormous success of Misty Copeland—a light-skinned Black dancer whose ascent to the pinnacle of American ballet was a watershed moment for Black dancers and audiences alike—the archetypal ballerina is still a pale-skinned white woman with slender limbs, negligible breasts and hips, and long, sleek hair. In the American cultural imagination, the ballerina is still white.

George Balanchine famously said that “ballet is woman,” but that’s not the whole truth. Ballet is white woman, or, perhaps more precisely, white womanhood. Ballet is a stronghold of white womanhood, a place where whiteness is the default and white femininity reigns supreme.

#article #ballet #chloe angyal #marie claire #racism #anti black racism

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queercomichoarder · 4 years

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A Guide to Portraying Damian Wayne in Fanfics/art

As told by me, someone who is half Arab and half Korean. (Obviously, I don’t speak for all biracial Arab people out there and there will be some differences.) I’m doing this because I’m really tired of seeing discourse on his portrayal in fan shit.

Illustrating Facial Features (Also keep in mind that Bruce is white, and Damian most likely inherited some of his traits too.):

1. Nose: My nose is a mix of my parents. It’s not exactly hooked, but it’s also not flat.

2. Eyelashes: They’re really long. When I was 4 some lady asked my mom if they were real (I think she thought they were extensions??)

3. Eyebrows; Arab people have really thick eyebrows, and that shit grows back quickly. To put things into perspective, I had to start plucking in the 4th grade. Unless Damian takes his hair hygiene very seriously, he’s probably going to have a bit of a unibrow growing in.

4. Facial hair: Depending how old you consider Damian to be (I know DC updated it recently), he’s probably going to have a bit of facial hair. I had a lot of peach fuzz in middle school and I can only imagine how much worse it is for him, because he had testosterone and can’t wax his lip.

5. Skin tone: Because I am half Korean, I have a lighter complexion than my Arab family members. Damian is half-white, so he’s probably pretty light-skinned. (Note: I have half-white, half-Arab, cousins. One looks super pale and the other has brown skin. It’s a spectrum.)

6. Hair: My hair is wavy, but most of the curls are gone after I use a brush. Damian has spikey hair in the comics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it looked a little curlier before he gets ready for the day.

Food

I’ve read a few headcanons that Alfred tries to incorporate food from Damian’s heritage into his cooking and I love it. I can’t speak on Chinese cuisine, but here’s a list of food that I’ve been introduced to by people on my Arab side.

1. Baklava: God tier. You have not lived until you’ve tried it. It’s a flaky pastry with pistachios and honey. Usually cut up into little squares. I live in a part of the US with a low Arab population, so it’s almost impossible to find a store that sells it (And since Damian is living in Gotham...). It’s also incredibly difficult to make from scratch, but it’s the best dessert ever so we suffer through anyway. One time I shared some with my white friends and they devoured the entire pan (which... same).

2. Chicken Biryani: Technically an Indian dish, but it’s served a lot in my family so I’m including it. It’s chicken and rice, but like with a lot of spices, which is great until you bite into a cardamom pod.

3. Naan: It’s flatbread and a staple food. IT IS NOT THE SAME THING AS PITA. In my not-so-humble opinion, it’s the best flatbread ever and I will fight people on it.

4. Lentil soup: Exactly what it sounds like. It’s a comfort food.

5. Falafel, Hummus, Kabab, & Shwarma: More well known than some of the other stuff. In basically any Mediterranean restaurant. Falafel is a pain in the ass to make and anyone who says that it’s easy isn’t human.

Language

I can only speak English, so I can’t really talk much about the dialect Damian would use. That being said, there are A LOT of Arabic dialects. If you’re like me and don’t speak Arabic, please do research before you write it. Also don’t use google translate. It’s not good.

If you’re writing Damian as being fluent in multiple Arabic dialects, keep in mind that there is no formula to when he speaks which dialect. My grandparents speak multiple languages fluently and will sometimes change what language they’re talking in mid-sentence. Like from English, to Farsi, to Hindi, to Arabic, back to English. They don’t do on purpose. They don’t do it when they’re feeling specific emotions. It’s just how they think. Also, whoever they’re talking to is left with like 5% of what they were trying to say.

Relationship with his Ethnic Background

One bad part about being biracial is feeling like you’re not good enough for either side of your family. Damian is white, Arab, and Chinese, which probably wasn’t an issue for him in the League of Shadows. When he left, however, he would have definitely taken notice to the way different people treat him. There’s probably a lot of buried feelings about how he feels alien in comparison with his dad. Not to mention the way Gotham’s news outlets would choose to portray him (after all, he is a Wayne).

Anyway, I hope this helps some people out. Don’t forget to be kind to one another. It’s tricky to write/draw things you aren’t familiar with.

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cloveroctobers · 4 years

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SHEA BUTTER BABY | S. James

Requested by: @theshyprincess “Can I get a spencer James getting married and smut biracial if I’m not bothering you I really like your writing”

A/N: decided to do this in hc form, hope that’s cool? And it’s been my thing lately anyways lol. Hope you like this one! I also hope I channeled Spencer well 🙃

WARNINGS: light smut + some curse words ofc!

We all know Spencer takes the world on his shoulders; when his finds you, you become his world

You meet freshman year in university, specifically on the football field and decided to invite him to a sorority party because what’s the best way to start off your freshman year? A little party never hurt nobody

Except it did, things got rowdy resulting with a huge ass knot on your forehead and losing consciousness for a few minutes

You expected Spencer to dip like any other asshole dude would have but you were shocked that he actually came to your aid and walked you back to your dorm even tho you had a “big ass egg” growing from your forehead

You could laugh about it a little then, but more so now

He actually asked for your number before you departed, even tho you thought you majorly screwed whatever this was up but he wanted to see you again and you were more than happy to oblige

It was instant friendship with a touch of flirtations but you knew that he recently got out of some heartbreak from his senior year of high school and you had no choice but to respect that he wasn’t looking for a relationship right now

Day by day you became the best of friends spending majority of your time together while also getting to know each other’s outside friends and family, you became each other’s family

It was end of sophomore year where Spencer decided he wanted to give it a go but it was your turn to be leery since you watched him go through some girls but he never flaunted that in front of you, yet you always knew

You didn’t want to be his last option

“You could never be that, y/n. You’re so much more than what you think I think of you.”

Words of affirmation is definitely Spencer’s love language and he had no problem saying how he felt about you

He openly admitted that he was confused at first, trying to fight with his inner self on taking your friendship into the love zone. He’s always gone the friendship route first before it turned into romance—well maybe not with Kia but his past two relationships he did

He was not only confused but nervous and you made him work a little bit to get a date from you but you didn’t hold out for too long since you felt Spencer was your person

You took things slow but you still felt like friends except now you held onto each other a little longer and touches seem to burn now but you liked it, really liked it

Senior year is when he proposes, he’s actually the second out of his group of friends back home to get engaged...JJ was the first and actually went through with the marriage after one drunken night in vegas with some girl who was studying physical therapy

Sure it’s only been two years but like your grandmother always says, “when you feel a pull in your heart whenever they’re not around, they’re the one baby.” And your grandparents got married only after knowing each other for four months. Every love is different

You were a sappy mess and Spencer found it humorous while slipping the ring on and embracing you, “we not doing that. Save it until the wedding, huh?”

And he gets a few nice whacks to the chest but he can take it ofc as he’s kissing you so gently

It’s a private moment and you wouldn’t have it any other way

A year and a few months after you graduate, Spencer gets drafted into the NFL and you’re still searching for a job you majored in

You’re both living apart with you going back to your hometown in Arizona and Spencer in Cali. Things aren’t easy but you’ve been planning your wedding and it feels like Spencer is just saying he’s okay with everything which is frustrating. You don’t want to do this alone and you need to find a place to live together, you didn’t want to live with Spencer’s mom and brother as much as you loved them. You were both adults and needed to take the wheel

Yet it always felt like Spencer was busy planning on putting further distance between you since he was secure in his career and you just felt stuck

That caused a riff between you two but Spencer didn’t like that silent treatment bs. You were gonna talk to him one way or another

Once you get through it, which you definitely do!! it’s pure heaven and you couldn’t be happier

You get married at a banquet hall

You both have a lot friends and family that’ve invited

Your best friends + sibs are your best men, bridesmaids, maid of honor

Spencer leaves a chair open for his dad up front with his mom and brother 🥲

Initially you were going to have your guests pick whatever seat they wanted and just have your immediate family have the front areas but you knew that would probably end up hectic with the strong personalities you had within your friend and family group so you kept it traditional. Your family/friends on one side and spence’s family/friends on the other

Memorable wedding, you were gorgeous and he was so handsome. You loved when Spencer got dressed up, it did something to you and you couldn’t wait for your honeymoon

It wouldn’t be anything over the top like The Bakers tried to gift you with, you just wanted something simple but nice with the man you loved

You were going to Palm Springs the next morning!!! Spending the night in the hotel

You were going to hold out even longer until the night you reached your honeymoon destination 😌

Spencer wanted the both of you to write your own vows and you sure didn’t know how you would compete with this guy. Spencer James always had a way with words!!!

He ofc had you a sobbing mess again but you knew it was never about out-showing the other

when you seal your marriage with a kiss, his hands rest securely on your hips with your hand cradling his jaw and you’re all smiles as the hall fills with cheers

“I love you, Mrs. James.” He’s got that smirk of a smile on his lips and love in his eyes

“As do I, Mr. James.” And you can’t wipe the smile from your own lips even if you tried

One thing you both know how to do is party so the reception goes on for awhile, until about 3 am even tho you both have to be on the road by 10 or a little later since check in isn’t until early afternoon

You’re both so giddy you can hardly sleep but you eventually do, you in your dress + Spencer in his dress shirt but he’s lost the tie and loosened his pants

Since Palm Springs is a 2 hr drive you’re reminiscing on how you basically taught Spencer how to drive and look at how far he’s come now with the rental you’re both using for 4 days and 3 nights

“so it’s my fault you don’t know how to instruct?” Which leads to harmless bickering over spencer’s road trip playlist

it’s been agreed that you each had an hour to play your playlists then for the left over minutes you’d listen to the radio once you got to your destination

your airbnb is REAL colorful and modern, not exactly your tastes but nonetheless it was your getaway from home. You were used to the desert while spencer? Not so much

“the hell was that?” Spencer is dodging and weaving especially if they fly

“looks like fire ants.” keep your distance.” “Why do you know what that is?” “I get stuck watching discovery channel with my dad when I can’t sleep and he’s always up. I saw one episode about them and we don’t want to mess with those bastards.”

you don’t do much with the rest of your day there, just enjoying each other’s company in the air bnb

You decide to shower while Spencer is ordering y’all your dinner from grubhub and deciding what you’re going to watch on firestick that you bought with you

you tend to take long showers so you’re just about done rubbing shea butter into your skin when Spencer announces that the food is here through the door

when you step out you’re on a mission with your silk robe, bustier, and garter

although you kept your own values of saving yourself until marriage—while Spencer was way more experienced you didn’t feel as nervous to get intimate with the man of your dreams

but that changed the moment his set his eyes on you

“what’s this?” He smirks, popping a fry into his mouth

You’re playing coy as your skin shines, leaning over to steal one of his fries. “My pajamas.”

He’s amused but definitely turned on, “oh aight, so that’s just the norm for you now?”

“I could change.” You pointed back to the where the bathroom sat

“I ain’t say all that, Mrs. James.” Spencer blinks then lifts his head upwards, “c’mere.”

And you move to sit on his lap with excitement even tho you think you hide it pretty well. You’ve always pictured how this would be and you knew from stories from your cousins and friends that half of them didn’t have the most romantic experience...

You didn’t need the rose petals and candles but you knew Spencer was a romantic at heart, plus you had plenty of time to see what was up his sleeve and knew this wouldn’t be the only time as of tonight. You were hoping!!!

“Are we starting dinner?” You ask, wrapping an arm across his shoulders but his eyes are set only on you

“I’m hungry for somethin’ else right now,” his nose presses against your beating throat, “and it just walked in here, looking good enough for this appetite.”

Now he’s kissing on your neck and when he gets to that sweet spot behind your ear he’s got the confirmation he needs but he needs to hear you say it. And he asks with his eyes which you reply with a dip of your head

Now he’s got his hands underneath your thighs, locking your legs around his waist for you and he’s off to your temporary bedroom

He’s always so gentle with you, even when he’s laying you down on this bed

“I promise the next time we do this, I’ll make the place look special for you.” He says into your neck and your nod as you feel the weight of him against you

You’re gasping for breath before he’s been fully touched you yet, “we still have the tub and a couple of days.”

He breathes out a laugh, “that we do. That we do.” Before your lips are brought back together

You know you are loved with the way Spencer touches you and speaks to you even in your most intimate moment

He builds you up before he gives himself all to you. It’s something you heard about, SEEN and knew it was crucial but you didn’t want to put too much logic in this moment. You don’t think you can even think straignt with the way you’re on fire for Spencer rn

And he’s know that but he needs you to be patient, he knows how to take his time. And he should know what he’s doing...he does

He��s seeing what your body likes, he’s watching his face even when you begin to whine for him

He knows when you’re truly ready even when you’re begging

He gives you your first climax with his mouth and you know you need more because you knew how much you loved his lips but you loved them even more now

“even better than I imagined,” he says with a lick of his lips from below before pressing a kiss on your abdomen and you’re still seeing stars

“you okay up there?” He asks. He’s always seeking reassurance from you. That’s too important to him, you’re too important to him

You have to say it as your vision slowly starts to splat back to normal, “I need you i-in— but there’s heat pooling in your cheeks. You’re a bit shy now as you’re getting in your head wondering how you must have sounded or looked in that moment of your first climax but it didn’t seem as if Spencer was disappointed. He seemed just as happy to please

He knows what you need. He worked with your body up to this moment

So he’s kissing up your body, slow and soft. He looks into your eyes before he glances over to grab his wallet from the night stand to grab protection

you didn’t think this far ahead but part of you wanted to know if there was a difference without, ofc you knew the risks without and you had forever to try so you made no comment about the choice to use protection

You wanted to do the honors, and so you did

You were surely in awe to be this close and personal with something you get to have for a lifetime

“Careful, something might fly in there.”

You can’t help but you roll your eyes and snort as Spencer places a kiss to your cheek before he reaches up to lock your hands together and up over your head, your wedding bands contrasting against the bright orange walls and your shea butter skin

“I’m ready.” You whisper, your eyes shifting from Spencer’s deep brown eyes to where your bodies would connect

Spencer hums as he keeps his eyes on yours before lining up, he has to free one of his hands to guide

and your mouth falls open with a slight arch in your back

He doesn’t move right away, he needs to be sure

when you lock both legs around his hips, tugging him closer than close to you, fully allowing him in your space, you then squeeze your hands tighter together, never wanting to let go

Spencer James was all you ever needed and you were more than thrilled to continue this journey of life with him

#all american #all american season 3 #Spencer James #Spencer James x reader #all american x reader #all american fanfic #all american fan fiction #all american hcs #all american cw #daniel ezra

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dearamericaroyaldiaries · 3 years

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Get In Losers. We’re Going Witch Hunting

I Walk in Dread- 1691(-1692), Deliverance Trembly

By Lisa Rowe Fraustino

Don’t judge the picture. Google had no images that I felt comfortable using license wise so I took a (bad) picture of my copy.

Age of Protagonist: 12

#ReadingThoughts

-Before I even start I am digging the Puritan names. First Remember Patience and now Deliverance (and I would come to find ANOTHER MEM!!).

-My edition looses points or not having a ribbon even though it’s hardcover. This negatively impacts my reading experience for Reasons.

-Hold it. Is her uncles’ name really Razor Strap? I know Puritans were big on using random phrases from the Bible for their naming, but is that really a phrase in the Bible? Also, Sister Mem had me confused it was Mem from the last book for a hot second.

-SO do Mem and Deliverance just live with their uncle? Just the three of them? (The answer I quickly found was yes.)

-I appreciate the lesson on town politics. That's important for the Salem area in 1692ish.

-I am confused by what’s happening with the year. Why is it Dec 31, 1691, then Jan. 1, 1691, and then Jan. 2, 1691/2. There is a bullshit explanation in the about the author section. If you’re worried about Accuracy when it comes to the Julian vs Gregorian calendar, put something in the text. You’re average grade schooler isn’t going to jump to that . If I remember correctly, there’s something about the Gregorian calendar differing from the Julian calendar in the Anastasia book that is handled better. Liv explains other things to the reader, why not this?

-Why is a 12 year old more responsible than a 17 year old? Especially in 1692. Mem should at least have a higher opinion of herself in the family hierarchy and be preparing to keep her own house as a wife.

-Again, I feel Mem should be more mature than Liv.

-Liv can use her sister’s boy-craziness to her advantage. Mem is willing to shovel shit if there are attractive members of the opposite sex in the vicinity.

-Allergies=Witchcraft. That explains so much about me and my life. Though I suppose it makes sense from a 17th century Puritan POV.

-Mem wants to be a stepmom to 9 kids all of whom are most likely closer to her age than she would be to the potential husband? The last part might not be a big concern in the time period but good gracious that’s too many kids for my liking.

-Age update- some of the kids would be older than her or her age.

-I feel the average target reader would need an explanation of what “God’s Elect” means. Most 12 year olds don’t have a strong grasp on post-Reformation Protestant Theology.

-Poor Liv. She wants to fit un but is failing spectacularly.

-Is Liv going to be among the accused? She’s not on the best of terms with the accusers and has been or will be associated with at least three people who were accused and killed.

- They used the strong trick for loose teeth in the 17th century? I have no evidence or data to argue one side or the other but I am suspicious. Somewhat amused, but suspicious.

-I find the tithing man hilarious. I want a stick with a fuzzy rabbit foot on one end and a knob for whacking people on the other. Also, he deserved getting thumped back by the one guy,

-I am calling bullshit on Goody Corey sniffing out only girl scent. Either it’s a bit or she’s a witch, not her husband. (Spoilers: He’s accused and refuses to confess so the town can’t take his land and is pressed to death while trying to get a confession. Post reading note: I totally forgot/didn’t know that Goody Corey was also accused and killed.)

-I don’t know really anything about the real Goody Corey, but she seems like a stand-in for an enlightened modern person, above the provincial notions of witchcraft and the commonplace racism toward Amer Indians. I’m not saying everyone thought they were the devil, but a majority thought that they were superior to the indigenous peoples of the American colonies.

-Mr. Cooper’s letter is too vague! We need deets!

-Because this is told through Livs’ eyes everyone asking about their uncle and checking in on them comes off as invasive and nosy but as an adult, a twelve year old and a seventeen year old have been left on a farm by themselves for almost two months at this point is an issue. Is he ever coming back?

-WHAT!? Goody Corey has a bi-racial son born when she was estranged from her first husband? Prepare for a wikipedia tangent because I had to a a google to corroborate this. Wikepedia backs this up but what it doesn’t back up is the timeline. I read her as in her 40s or 50s in the book. According to wikepedia (don’t judge me, it’s good for basic facts and a starting point) she was 72ish in 1692 and this biracial son was her first child who would have been 50ish at this point and was born before Martha Corey was ever married. *End Tangent* Good for her though if she did indeed five her husband an earful after Liv left.

-Hold on. Mr. Cooper wants to talk to Uncle Razor Strap about Mem marrying Darcy, not him. Mem is gonna be devastated.

-Would electricity have been a concept a) known in 1692 and b) be well enough known that a random 12 year old in the colonies with little formal schooling would be comfortable enough using the phrase “electrical lightning.” No, I will not be googling this. Googling historical facts is one thing, googling sciencey things is another thing entirely,

-Did the girls hear the stories and then claim to have witnessed ZYX or did they independently corroborate the stories? One is much less suspect than the other.

-At this point I wonder will we ever meet Uncle Razor Strap? Is he dead? Is he trying to get back to Salem? Is he abandoning them?

-I feel the leap to “Am I a witch?” after having a weird dream about nursing a baby Sarah Goode is sensible as someone who has been about to call the Vatican several times when their period was late. In those cases clearly the only explanation was pregnancy, even when physically impossible just as being a witch is Livs’ conclusion here.

-Hopefully the girls can just get out of the Salem area soon and the landlord giving them to the end of the month is a neat enough excuse.

-So Mem thinks that Goody Corey is a witch but is okay with Liv going over there?

-How scary it would be to worry that the one family member you have in the area, who should be protecting you because you’re 12, might accuse you of witchcraft.

-I am delighted the the horse can act as a chaperone. Really? Okay.

-How does the horse give permission to whisk a fainted person into the house? It’s a horse.

-So now Mem is forcing Liv to read her diary to her. Rude.

Thoughts on the Afterward

Meh. Mem marries Darcy but dies young so Liv gets her man. They return to Salem. They don’t go West like they talked about. Liv has a gagillion great grands. No one ever fount her journal. Meh. I’m happy she was happy and all but meh.

Overall Thoughts After Reading

It took almost 200 pages to get through four months. I think I just don’t care for the author. I should have liked this book. It ticks multiple boxes that should be my jam but something about it just... is a no for me. Maybe it’s because I have zero nostalgia for this book. It took me about 4.5 months to get through this book and finding it boring is one of them. No one seems like a well rounded character who has any growth. Last book Mem had a whole arc where she came to terms with losing her mother but this time Liv didn’t really seem to change or grow.

I had high hopes. This book came out right as I was aging out of Dear America but I remember the hype around it on the Scholastic website. (Yes I was a wee nerd who hung out on the Scholastic website.) Sadly I was disappointed.

Also, we nope out of the actual trials. The first trial wasn’t held until JUNE. The book ends on April 30. Yes, we get to see the initial hysteria and flurry of accusations and arrests, but this was just the beginning. This seems like a cop-out.

Rating: 3/10 Sisterly Cat-Fights

Other contenders included False Accusations (this one seemed unfair because while I believe no one who was accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Hysteria was actually practicing witchcraft, I can’t say with confidence that the accusers were all lying. They may have believed honestly that they were afflicted by witches so calling them false accusations seem disingenuous.) and Bible Verses because Puritans. In the end, I had to honor the brutal way Mem and Live went after each other. Apparently in addition to being sickly, Mem was also small because how else could a 12 year old take her 17 year old sister like that.

#Dear America #Read with me #Puritans #History #Historical #Deliverance Trembly #Salem Witch Hysteria #Salem Witch Trials #I get minorly sweary again. At this point just accept it.

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richincolor · 3 years

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SomeThoughts about Netflix's Shadow & Bone

This past Friday, the highly anticipated Shadow and Bone series premiered on Netflix and fans of the Grishaverse all over the world logged in to watch their favs come to life. There was much discussion of the inclusion of numerous characters from throughout the Grishaverse and that diversity was a focus in the casting of the show, especially Jessie Mei Li who is biracial, therefore changing the main character’s ethnicity to biracial Shu Han. Unfortunately, that decision didn’t pay off to well due to the showrunner’s handling of Alina’s ethnicity. Twitter blew up as people shared their hurt and warned others about what to expect.

I had planned to watch the show and happened to see one such warning before I watched the series so I was prepared. I watched a couple of episodes, then called it a night. The next morning I was unsettled and reached out to my fellow contributors here on Rich in Color. No one had seen it yet, but Jessica said she was planning to as well. As we chatted, I felt that our conversation should be shared with our readers, so Jessica and I decided to write our thoughts down and have a conversation after she watched a few episodes herself.

Oh, and spoilers abound!

First off, before we dive into this conversation: Have you read the Grishaverse series? How much did you know about the story going in?

K. Imani: As everyone knows I love fantasy so I’m open to reading all sorts of fantasy books. I read the Shadow & Bone series a few years ago and enjoyed it. When the Six of Crows duology came out I read those too and actually enjoyed those better than the original series. Why - more diversity? It also expanded the world and the different perspectives of “Grisha” like folk from other cultures. It was very clear from the writing that Bardugo realized her first series was very lacking in diversity and worked hard to change it. I actually re-read both series during quarantine, so I had a fair idea of what the Netflix series would be about.

Jessica: I’ve actually never read a single Grishaverse book! I know, shocking. I only knew two things about the series going into the show: 1) Six of Crows is a heist book? 2) Ben Barnes is a person who exists.

The cast announcement for any show is always so exciting, and Shadow and Bone was no different. How did you feel about the casting -- before and after you watched the show? What did you think was done well, and what did you think could be improved?

K. Imani: Before watching the show I was actually a bit confused about some of the casting choices. I didn’t understand why 3 of the main Six of Crows characters were in the show and I honestly did not make the connection to Alina and Mal being biracial. Knowing that the Grishaverse is “Russian-based” and knowing that some ethnic Mongolians are considered Russian I just found it cool that the show cast a person who didn’t fit a Russian stereotype. Oh boy was I way off! Overall I was pleased with the casting and think all the actors did a great job. I liked the few changes they did make with casting actors of colors for other roles to round out the diversity of the world.

Bringing it back to Mal, I was confused as to if he was supposed to be coded as biracial. I missed the reference in the show, but I did read somewhere that he was supposed to be as well and that is what bonded him to Alina. If that’s the case, then how come Alina was the only person to experience racism? That thought continues to sit on my heart because it shows that the writers did not really think through how they wanted to express racism and included it for the wrong reasons.

Jessica: My reaction was basically, “I’m happy that other people seem happy!” since again, I had no context for the show. Casting on Netflix shows often seems to be a case of “cool, this is some exciting casting… but definitely could be better and even more intentional.”

K. Imani: “More intentional” That is the word right there! Making a story more diverse is wonderful and fully reflects the world we live in, however if you just randomly do it without thinking it through it comes off as insensitive. I know Leigh Bardugo used this show as an opportunity to make her story better (and I do not begrudge her of that fact) but when one doesn’t think it through, the criticism that is being expressed is a direct result.

Jessica: Sidenote -- I ended up watching a booktube video titled “Darker Jesper, Fat Nina, Shadow and Bone Casting Thoughts” on booktube channel Chronicles of Noria about the casting. Highly recommend checking it out. I also recommend this profile on Jessie Mei Li, who talks about being gender nonconforming.

Did any changes in the Netflix adaptation stick out to you? Were there changes you liked or disliked?

K. Imani: My favorite part of the adaptation is how well the show runners included the Six of Crows characters into the narrative. The storyline completely worked for me and connected the two stories together. I really enjoyed the Arken storyline (and the character tbh) as it was used to flesh out the world of the Grishaverse, which made the series much more interesting. I also liked the change of making Ivan and Fedyor a couple instead of just Darkling’s henchmen as it humanized them and actually made me like Ivan because they were so cute together. Though how that will come into play after the events of Episode 8 will be interesting. I’m a sucker for the Enemies to Lover trope so I loved that Nina’s & Matthia’s story of how they came together was included here. In either Six of Crows or Crooked Kingdom (I don’t remember), it was told as a flashback, but I loved that it was moved here as their “origin story”, so to speak, and how it connects to the events of the Alina timeline.

What I didn’t like...the casual racism. It really bothered me and left me sad the next morning. For example, a certain poster shown in the first episode had me physically cringe and I was upset that 1) the production designers even created it and 2) no one, at no point, said that was a bad idea? Come on! It was horrible to see and I can imagine the hurt an AAPI would experience seeing that. And then, it got worse. Racial slurs thrown around a couple of times in the first couple of episodes to show that Alina is an outsider. They were jarring and took me out of the narrative. Having read the books I knew there was tension between the Ravkans and Shu Han, so I could understand what the show runners were trying to do, but it was actually never explained in show, hence making the racism feel random and just there for shock value.

Jessica: I saw tweets going around alluding to the racism Alina (and other characters to a less frequent extent) faced, so I braced myself for it. I’m only a few episodes in, and the instances so far were brief… but it just didn’t feel right. The foundation for this portrayal of racism wasn’t laid properly. And if the work of laying the foundation and really digging into what it means for the overall worldbuilding doesn’t happen… then why include it at all? Especially if it might be painful for certain viewers? I’m sure harm wasn’t the intent, but that’s the impact. Why not leave it out and let the show be escapism?

K. Imani: Jessica, the eyes comment took me out, not gonna lie. I audibly screamed. Anyone who has experienced a racist comment based on their looks felt that in their gut which is horrible when watching a show for escapism.

Jessica: Yeah, the eyes and rice-eater comments were especially frustrating. On top of it being a reminder of the racism Asians experience daily… it doesn’t make much sense. Like, canonically, do people in Ravka not eat rice? An American’s conception of racism isn’t necessarily going to make sense in a (Imperial Russia-inspired) fantasy world. But maybe I’m missing something since I didn’t read the original books.

And the eyes comment… whoof. When I was a kid, other kids would make fun of my eyes and ask me to, like, count seagulls because surely, I couldn’t see out of my eyes… And the other kids were also Asian! Internalized racism is so real. It’s disappointing that Shadow and Bone would include this experience as, I don’t know, discrimination flavor text. Surely there were better ways to portray discrimination that made sense within the Grishaverse…

Ellen Oh really said it so well: “If a writer is going to show racism against Asians, it's important to balance it with the beauty of all that makes us Asian also.” Where is the balance? Where is the nuance? Even if Alina’s Shu Han mother isn’t alive, couldn’t Alina have had a treasured Shu Han pendant? Just spitballing here. There were so many possibilities.

K. Imani: Exactly. I agree with Ellen and unfortunately there is no balance. That’s what makes it so hurtful. The focus is on how bad it is that she’s biracial and how bad the Shu Hans are for no specific reason. Because Alina is an orphan and grew up in Ravka, she unfortunately has no connection to Shu Han culture (or at least what is shown on screen) so all that she identifies as is Ravkan who just happens to look like a Shu Han person, but she doesn’t exhibit any pride in being Shu Han. Her ethnicity is just another obstacle to overcome which is all the more cringeworthy and why having Alina be biracial just to be biracial without thinking it through ended up being so problematic. Having her be biracial and using casual racism as an “obstacle” that she has to overcome is such a shallow interpretation of racism and shows the writers didn’t do the work to really think about the why the racism exists.

In addition to talking about what was done well and what went wrong or felt off about certain representation, it’s important to look at the “how.” How did this happen?

Jessica: I read on Twitter that one of the show writers is Korean and biracial -- which is awesome! I was really heartened to hear that. But at the same time, this highlights how important it is to have multiple marginalized voices in the room who can speak with some level of expertise. I don’t know the decision-making process that went into including this sort of surface-level, simplistic version of real world racism, but I wonder if anyone, at any point, said “is there a more nuanced and original way to portray this?” or “how will this affect Asian viewers?” Did someone bring it up, and they were overruled? What happened?

This absolutely isn’t a judgment on the Asian writers or staff on the show. When I’ve done collaborative writing, there were times I caught an issue and said “we need to be more sensitive about this” -- and there were other times when my teammates pointed out something I didn’t notice. It happens! That’s why it’s so important to have multiple marginalized perspectives when creating something -- especially when it’s a work as impactful and far-reaching as a Netflix show. Placing the burden of complex, nuanced representation on one, or a scant handful, of marginalized creators is just not going to work… and it’s not fair to the creators, either.

Frankly, this is a problem in so many industries -- film, publishing, games... there are so many “diverse” shows, games, etc with all-white or majority white teams. Good, nuanced representation can only happen when BIPOC / marginalized creators are the majority and have power behind-the-scenes. (This is why I’m really excited to watch the show Rutherford Falls -- half the writers room are Indigenous writers, as is the co-creator!)

K. Imani: Exactly! It’s great that one of the writers is biracial and Korean, but if she’s the only one how much input did she really have? I’m by no means knocking her experience but, say for example, that particular poster in the first episode. No one else behind the scenes found it problematic? There are many steps to a production process and that poster, if there had been more diverse voices present on the production staff instead of just 1 writer, would have been flagged as a huge problem and redone. The poster was supposed to be a “short cut” to show Ravkan/Shu Han tension but instead it came off as so profoundly racist and unnecessary. There are many other non-racist ways to explore the tensions between the two countries that could have been explored instead of just jumping to racism. And...as someone on Twitter pointed out, we never see the tension between the Ravkans and the Shu Han, but we openly see fighting between the Ravkans and the Fjierdans, so why were they not vilified to the same extent?

Jessica: Right. I’m definitely not saying racism can’t be portrayed in fantasy ever. But if you’re going to do it, make it make sense within the world. Don’t just use it as shorthand for “this character is Other.” I mean, experiencing racism isn’t what makes me Asian…

K. Imani: Boom! I’m going to repeat that for the people in the back...experiencing racism is not what makes a person Asian or Black, and if you are going to have racism in a work of art, be sure to provide balance to show all the other aspects of a person of color’s life.

Since we’re talking creators behind-the-scenes… which YA fantasy books by Asian authors do you think would make great Netflix shows or movies?

Jessica: I’ve got a list about a mile long, but I’ve cut it down to my top four:

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

Forest of a Thousand Lanterns by Julie C. Dao

The Tiger at Midnight by Swati Teerdhala

The Epic Crush of Genie Lo by F.C. Yee

You’re welcome, Netflix execs who are totally reading this blog. Hop to it!

K. Imani: I second the Tiger at Midnight series! I loved the first two books and can’t wait for the conclusion in June. While not YA, the City of Brass series would make an excellent Netflix series. Anything Maurene Goo writes would be fun rom-coms (because we need those too!).

Jessica: I mean, with To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before complete… Netflix clearly needs to start adapting Maurene Goo’s books.

K. Imani: Yes, the people demand it! I don’t care which book, just grab one of them and get the production started.

On a final note, I do want to say that despite the criticism the show rightly deserves, there was much about the show that was enjoyable. The storytelling was strong and moved at a good pace, the costuming was on point, special effects worked seamlessly into the narrative, and even small touches such as how the Grishas used their small science was visually interesting. Book adaptations are always hard to pull off well and the Shadow and Bone production team did a good job overall. Their intention towards adding more diversity is a step in the right direction, but just didn’t do enough. Let’s hope they learn from their mistakes and improve for season 2.

#shadow and bone

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janiedean · 3 years

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Wait they fucked the SPN ending for Walker? How? And now the show is more conservative than the original, which was headlined by known conservative dumbass Chuck Norris? Ugh

tldr (I can attest in the sense that I did watch the very last episode and with everything I've seen until now...... it holds up)

basically from what it seems like they pushed so that the finale ep was sam focused so it would make ppl idk stick with jared and they didn't give dean time to shine or a basic excuse of a storyline at all before the dumbest death he could have had and jensen's obviously pissed

like... can imagine why he would be

also like nothing happened in that ep is2g I watched it live while it was happening and it was all..... filler? like I swear even the fillerest filler episode for any show I've watched had more stuff happening in it than the spn series finale which... was... bad

and like I remember walker promos airing every ten seconds when the ep was airing sssoooo

anyway apparently the cw got heavy on walker promoting and shit and got both jensen & misha shafted which like... I mean misha was def in vancouver for the finale but he wasn't in the ep and jensen spends 15 years playing dean for that?

and like now idk if the background rumors re jared not opposing any of that and basically screwing them over because it was convenient for his new show are true or not but if he is like... ofc jensen is pissed off

anyway like as stated I'm catching up on the whole thing now and with that in mind the finale looked like 'okay we wanted to do a thing but you execs told us that we couldn't and we had to do this this and that so we're going to do it in a way that sucks ass on purpose but that delivers what you wanted' even moreso than it did in the beginning like... it's not bad in the way any other bad finale I watched is bc AT LEAST SOMETHING HAPPENED IN THE OTHERS LITERALLY NOTHING HAPPENED IN THIS ONE I'm still trying to wrap my head around it tbh

NOW with this in mind I'mma gonna say what I told @emilysnora when the first walker casting stuff came out but basically

the remake has jared being walker blah blah and honestly I'm not even pronouncing myself on the whole 'I got the idea when reading the interview with the ICE policeman who felt conflicted abt putting kids in cages' because it's not my place to but honestly as your resident white european person it's... really... I mean the nicest I can say it's that it's a very privileged way of looking at it and he probably didn't mean it to be a racist thing buuuuuttt thaaat kind of iiiiisssss so there's that and on top of that we have that it's him plus: - hispanic partner in the force - gay brother who's like AN ATTORNEY FOR THE STATE so like... right wing gay dude? okay - his wife was dead before the entire shebang began so hello fridging before the plot even starts - I gave a quick look at the main cast and like there's one biracial dude plus lindsey morgan and they're the only two nonwhite ppl in the entire main cast (idk about the recurring but I'm talking about the MAINS) add to that the... background premise it's really not as progressive as it looks like honestly

now not to be like your resident person who's like BUT THE REP but like if y'all gonna do a show in 2021 about ppl in texas doing that job having to deal with keeping children in cages or latin american immigrants having all white ppl in the main cast except two of them is like.... kind of... not exactly what I'd do in this time and age

now with the premise that as stated I hate chuck norris's politics and I don't thing great of him as a person or anything else so like pls don't take this as chuck norris endorsement or anything

my grandfather used to be obsessed with it same as like apparently 90% of italian grandfathers bc everyone I know had at least one who loved that show so like I've seen my fair share of it back in the day and to my best recollection - basically no one was presuming it was like.... there to make a political statement it was basically chuck norris roundhouse kicking bad dudes coming from whichever background and saving the day the end but - walker himself had native american ancestry bc he was raised after his parents' death by his uncle who was played by floyd westerman who was like a prominent NA actor so like technically you had the lead who had NA ancestry himself plus there was like actual NA actors having a relevant role which like... bros not to be that asshole but last time I saw that in pseudo mainstream tv in the last ten years it was on a netflix show that lasted one season so make of that what you will, also there were at least two other NA supportive chars from the reservation they all came from like one was the sheriff and the other was a spiritual leader or smth but anyway it had three NA chars played by NA actors - walker's police partner/bff was black - he had the ongoing willtheywon'tthey romance with the district attorney or smth but she didn't get fridged actually she lasted the entire show but anyway like... there was no 'ah he had a wife who DIED BEFORE THE SHOW EVEN STARTED' plotline - in the last two seasons they had rookie rangers showing up and like I went to check on wikipedia to be sure but the girl is half filipina which again not a category that gets exactly much rep on american tv - there was a recurring dude who helped them out in cases but was from another police branch who was def latino (don't remember the background sorry but he def was) also like walker was a vietnam vet which imvho would be an improvement over 'I was undercover for eleven months and my wife died :((((' when it comes to give your main like.... a srs background but anyway the point was that new walker in between the mains has like two nonwhite ppl and if I look at the recurrings it looks like there's four ppl who are latin* but three of them are undocumented immigrants so like... bro there's some typecasting going on I see, old walker had NA/black/hispanic/filipino people in the main/supporting cast and none of them was like... typecast in the sense that they were all cops except two of the NA ones so it's not like they went out of their way to typecast and like obv og walker wasn't making the whole thing a political statement but looking at it...... it's still way more progressive than whatever the new one wants to be

yes even if chuck norris was headlining it

and I mean... again when you manage to reboot a show starring chuck norris of all ppl and you manage to make it less progressive than the og while thinking you're being progressive while rebooting it I mean as we say here ask yourself a few questions and give yourself a few answers, also like the entire point of og walker was crack where he kicks ppl and says doing drugs is bad, I honestly don't get why the fuck they had to reboot it instead of like having the guts to say we wanna do an original thing, bc like in order to say hey I wanna do a show about a conflicted cop on the texas border you really can just make it an original thing and own it not go like I'M REBOOTING WALKER TEXAS RANGER ROUNDHOUSE KICK CENTRAL EXTRAORDINAIRE but that's my two cents make of that what you will

#anonymous #ask post #sorry for the infodump i just watched a LOT of wtr back in the day #i'm here to provide the info for everyone who wasn't fortunate enough to experience 90s television #truly something™#i mean idt this was a hill anyone should have died on #esp when then THEY FUCK UP A 15YO RUNNING SERIES FOR THAT

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thejudgingtrash · 4 years

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Last but not least: PJO hot takes part IV!

Alright my dudes. I think we’re still in this game for one final round. Anyway here’s wonderwall. And Part 1//Part 2//Part 3!

Percy had actually knowledge about the Greek myths. He didn’t waddle in blindly. Where did y’all even get that?

The new possible Irish myth saga will be PJO 3.0 aka Magnus Chase 2.0 aka The Kane Chronicles 1.2.

Riordan already got the names of gods of that possible saga wrong

Riordan‘s Asian characters only know bitch or bland mode, huh

Stop babying Annabeth for fucks sake. Seriously

How the fuck did Sally afford several private schools for Percy when they were poor as fuck? I guess Gabe had to have a some somewhat decent job but then again playing poker/being a gambler and stealing from your stepson ain’t a cute move

Hazel should’ve been Thanatos‘ kid. To break the classic 12 Olympian mold (yeah Hades/Pluto technically isn’t one but he’s still team major gods) and also to throw the damned Hitler/Pluto aesthetics away

Did any of the kids break their limps or get permanently disabled at some point? Or do they just... die (and mostly stay dead)? I forgot

Where can the kids at Camp Half-Blood actually sneak off to fuck? Percy is legit the only one to claim his own shit as his love bunker. The rest is just fucked I guess or has first hand traumatic pre-college experiences

”Percy cursed“. Literally why, Riordan. Let the kid say fuck. He has earned the rights to do so a long time ago

Did I mention that people lack of basic reading skills in earlier takes? Anyway. Here’s another reminder!

Tbh the gods are egotistical fucks and have killed people for the fuck of it. I don’t see Poseidon being even close to okay with Sally marrying Gabe or Paul

I still don’t understand why Frazel is a thing

Most of you don’t understand how movie production works but that’s okay. Just know that everything inside your head will never be realized and there will be drastic cuts and additions to the books (again)

The electronics not working thing doesn’t even make any goddamn sense? Hermes is the god of the Internet. Does this mean that demigods can use the web just fine but simply can’t call each other? This really came back to bite Riordan in the ass now did it? Wouldn’t it make more sense to use old means of communication once you’re trying to reach more important/godly people or electronics fail in an accute situation?

Turning everyone heteroflexible creates the image that you’re simply liking a character for the fact that they are LGBTQ and not the character itself, just saying. More representation sure, but that itself isn’t a personality trait and shouldn’t be the main focus of a character unless it’s really defining in the story line (Nico‘s arc partially for example)

Tbh, HOO should’ve been aged up mentor Percabeth protecting CHB, with the rest of the gang fucking up Greece with aged Reyna + Nico perhaps. I might post an outline on that AU someday (someone should remind me about that tho)

On one hand you have in depth discussions and people diving into the matter and talking about every nook and cranny and on the other hand people are more then just fine with stereotyping and deflecting. Whut. Okay

Why are people shipping the lie that is Jasper/Jasiper

Stop romanticizing the gods

Dark!Percy is just a cheap way for you to turn Percy into an overpowered asshole and that’s that tea

Being in a relationship isn’t a personality trait, my dear shippers

Riordan‘s timeline is off because the coke rush didn’t last that long

The wasted potential of everything past PJO makes me want to cry

Percy’s fatal flaw isn’t stupid, Riordan just didn’t flesh it out properly which is why there were no real repercussions. A fatal flaw is supposed to be hindering you and not a compliment

The fact that adult people still can’t take jokes about their favorite characters is fucking insane part II

Why the fuck did the Stolls get tossed aside? Bruh. The potential? The stigma as a Hermes kid? They trying to redeem their cabins honor? Imagine one of them as a prophecy kid in HOO (and they’d switch and swap to confuse everyone)? Yes??

Every single one of you that essentially is team poc!Percy because he had a rough upbringing deserves to get slapped. Poverty, abuse, a single parent, etc. doesn’t equate to being poc?!?!? Smells racist just saying

Turning Hazel into Nico‘s sister was cheap af

Stop romanticizing and down playing the myth aspect. Tragedy is essential and will haunt demigods. Thank you, next

Also stop babying Percy

Let’s be honest none of those fuckers make it to college

Annabeth Chase is fucking WHITE part II. She’s not biracial, she’s not ”exotic“, she’s certainly not fucking black. She’s white with a little hint of a tan. That still makes her white. Do you really want to turn her into Ariana Grande 2.0? A fucking botched orange? This is your Annabeth aesthetic? Artists get it fucking right unless you state that you portray her as [spraytan headcanon] which is still fucking cheap let’s be real. Orange Annabeth isn’t part of the kulture

Regardless of the reception of the PJO movies, I’ll never forgive you people for letting Logan Lerman aka the OG white boy™ flop. Throw Tom “lipless but okay booty“ Holland and Timothée ”I missed a few meals“ Chalamet the fuck away!

Tbh a less romanticized version of the camps would’ve been more interesting. I’m still put off by CJ (and also the fact that CHB is a summer camp), but had there been more fights and actual deaths that had happened around the camps due to training, etc. you would’ve understood immediately why demigods dipped before the age of 18. The antithetical nature of sweet summer camp and people dying left and right would’ve been amplified

Did Reyna at some point in time even have the time to breath with all of the shit that went down? Her life is simply 24/7 stressful. I get that she wanted to bounce and no longer be in a tiring and demanding position but the hunters ain’t it sis

It’s okay to admit that fanon artwork or fanfics don’t deserve the webspace they are wasting. But phrase that probably in a nicer way

PJO Calypso wasn’t annoying. HOO & TOA Calypso on the other hand...

Alex Pettyfer would’ve been a better Luke Castellan but Jake Abel did an okay job

Percy isn’t an idiot. You are one for believing so

Riordan corrected the stance that Muslims don’t shower during Ramadan (literally how in the fuck did he come up with that in the first place?!) in upcoming MC books. Can he use the same energy to rewrite HOO tho??

Luke’s portrayals in SoM and TTC were straight up trash

Historically accurate PJO would’ve been everything

Monsters can detect demigods by smell. Camo wouldn’t do jack shit ffs

Jason is still bland and making jokes/pointing that out is more than okay

Omfg accept the fact that characters can have multiple facets all good and bad. Reducing them to one specific trait makes them boring and bland. Also it stereotypes

Getting mad over the fact that Clarisse has a boyfriend is still fucking insane

Not everyone needs to be a fanfic writer or an artist, a theorist or someone that analyzes everything phrase by phrase. As long as you’re in the fandom to enjoy works & discussions and remain on the saner side of the spectrum you’re good. You’re valid. Don’t forget that.

Not wanting to stay in a fandom and merely enjoying some of the fruits/benefits as in art/fics/headcanons is also super valid

PJO Reddit, Tumblr, IG and Twitter are a cesspool of chaotic mess and straight up trash but Tumblr > Reddit >>>>>> IG >>>>>> Twitter

Tbh: just try to enjoy a decent book series. It’s all not that deep

#pjo #annabeth chase #percy jackson and the olympians #percy jackson #heroes of olympus #jason grace #hazel levesque #piper mclean #frank zhang #luke castellan #nico di angelo #reyna ramirez arellano #hoo #toa #pjo hot takes

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carols-review-box · 4 years

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My Thoughts on Ginny & Georgia: Season 1

These are my thoughts.

Right off the bat, I want to address that this is, by no means, a comprehensive review. I’m not even sure if it can be called a review. These are just my thoughts on the show, and it may or may not cover everything (in fact, it most certainly won’t cover everything), and I’ll try my best to write it out in an organized manner, but I can’t make promises. (Though, in all fairness, this is just a blog for my own entertainment, and I don’t expect anyone to actually read it.)

Now, moving on. Ginny & Georgia, season 1. Where do I begin?

First Impressions

I first encountered Ginny & Georgia on Netflix when the website decided to auto play its trailer while I was scrolling through it. I watched--almost begrudgingly-- a short, 1 minute clip of Ginny complaining to her teacher about how all the books on the curriculum were written by white men. While I understand where Ginny was coming from, and while I understand that a lot of high school literature is written by authors who sometimes are not representative of their audience, Ginny’s introduction just came off as obnoxious and annoying. I thought, “Imagine moving to a new school, and that’s the first thing you say to the teacher.” I rolled my eyes, wrote the show off as another try-hard feminist woke piece (or something like that), and didn’t think I’d watch it.

Well, at some point, I obviously decided to give the show a try. And by the middle of the first episode, I was actually really surprised when Ginny didn’t turn out to be insufferable in the beginning. I say in the beginning-- because her character really slides downhill past a certain point.

Plot

Throughout the entire show, I was probably a thousand times more interested in Georgia’s plot than Ginny’s.

It makes sense-- Ginny’s plot is... well, pretty much a generic teen soap opera that I’ve seen hundreds of times before. There are some unique themes to her story that I’ve rarely seen portrayed in other shows, like her experience as a biracial person, but other than that, it seems to be your run-of-the-mill drama.

On the other hand, Georgia’s plot is fresher. I haven’t personally seen any black-widow narratives (if Georgia could be called that), so I was intrigued and curious by how her story would play out. Not to mention, I liked Georgia’s love interests far better than Ginny’s, but maybe that’s just my personal taste.

In comparing these two plots, I do feel like the writers did Ginny wrong. Georgia is given an interesting storyline with a relevant backstory and plot points that actually make sense, whereas Ginny’s story is mediocre, we rarely get to see her side of the past, and half the stuff that goes down in her life is either unrealistic and overdramatized or it just makes no damn sense.

Characters

I could probably talk a great deal about the characters in this show. I have the most to say about Ginny (75% of it is criticism, honestly), so I’ll dedicate an entire section to her later. For now, I’ll start with these characters:

Georgia: Georgia, oh Georgia. To put it simply, Georgia is a psychopath hidden behind a large smile and a buzzing Southern accent. For the first 5 episodes, I was so fooled by her act (and her beauty) that I forgot she’s a literal murderer and most likely not a good human being. But I guess that’s, in part, what makes her very interesting to watch.

Hunter: I literally felt nothing but a mixture of boredom and pity whenever Hunter was on screen. For the first 8 episodes, he is just an extraordinarily boring character-- and his boringness is used as a justification by Ginny to cheat on him (that’s where the pity part comes in). I enjoyed how how he got more character in the ending episodes, and I could understand his struggles when he fought with Ginny (in that scene). But if he wasn’t dating Ginny, then he would’ve been a completely forgettable character.

Marcus: Marcus ALWAYS looks like he’s high. I don’t think there’s a single scene in the show where he doesn’t look like he just smoked something. He also has little personality, other than being the “bad boy.” I guess his hotness makes up for it, or something?

Maxine: While I enjoy Max overall, I think she can be really annoying, talkative and insensitive at times. Emphasis on the last part, because she does this irritating thing where she says something racist, and then asks if she just said something racist.

Abby: Out of the friend group, I feel like Abby is the most dramatic without being overdramatic. She experiences things that a regular teenager would. However, she can be a bad friend at times, and I don’t like how the characters gives her a pass on some questionable choices she makes.

Paul: I like Paul. It is a little bit hypocritical of me to say Paul is a good character when he basically has the same exact personality as Hunter, but I’m going to say it: He’s a good character.

Zion: Zion is smooth, and I enjoy his little wisdom bits with Ginny. But he was introduced too late into the show, and I can’t see him being a good fit for Georgia.

Joe: I love Joe. Just like some of the other characters, he is kind of plain. Kind of vanilla, daresay boring, but for some reason, I love him. Maybe it’s because of his adorable connection with Georgia. Maybe it’s because he offers some much-needed comedic relief in this overdramatized show. Maybe it’s because he has attractive qualities, like running a “successful” business, or maybe he’s just my type. For many, many episodes, I wanted Georgia to get together with Joe the most.

Austin: I forgot Austin existed for half the time. Like, I know the kid stabbed someone, but in the grand scheme of things, he’s just so forgettable.

Character: Ginny

Ginny. Ah, where do I even begin with Ginny?

First, I’m just going to say this: I know the writers intended to depict a biracial person’s experience in America through Ginny. I’m not biracial myself, and I don’t fully understand the issues that biracial people go through, so I’m not going to comment too much on how the authors managed to fuck up. I say “how” and not “if,” because a lot of biracial people have said that Ginny & Georgia is kind of a bad example of their life, and also because even I can see the problems with the show from a mile away.

Getting that out of the way, I’ll start with Ginny’s overall character.

One would think that a character who is depicted as-- for a lack of better words-- as “woke,”... as in, a character who is supposed to have better moral values than others (the definition comes from the word’s general connotative interpretation from leftist media), would be a good human being. But time and time again, we see that Ginny is everything but.

These are my biggest issues with Ginny’s character:

1) She acts like she’s better than everyone else, but also like she’s super oppressed. I know these two personality traits aren’t mutually exclusive, but they’re not a good combination either.

2) She thinks she’s the only person in the entire town who has real issues. Other characters confront her about this, and she eventually mellows down, but it’s astounding to me the amount of people she had to offend before she got the point.

3) She can be really ungrateful and rude towards her mom. I know Georgia is not a perfect mother-- not even close-- and she can be genuinely crazy at times, but Ginny is very rarely appreciative of her mom’s efforts.

4) Despite Ginny’s intelligence, she is not smart. She commits a bunch of dumb mistakes. Now, some of these can be attributed to her just being a teenager-- like having unprotected sex, sending nudes, being peer pressured into stealing, etc. Whereas other choices-- most notably cheating on her boyfriend-- are just a product of her shitty personality.

5) There is a really bad implication concerning Ginny’s views on race. I can probably talk a lot about race in this show, but true to my word, I’ll keep this short and talk about the one thing that really bothered me: Ginny ignores the black kids. There’s a line in the show where Ginny says she’s too white for the black folks and too black for the white folks... and she uses this to justify never having any friends or not fitting in. But when she gets to Wellsbury, she’s accepted by everyone, including black people, yet she chooses to ignore them. She only sits with them near the end of the show when her friend group kicks her out. And she looks miserable.

Ginny likes to complain a lot about her white side, but all things considered, I think she has an issue with her black side instead. I don’t know if this is representative of the biracial experience, but I imagine this can’t be a good thing to portray on screen.

I know it’s crazy of me to say this right after I just ripped Ginny apart. However, despite everything, I actually like Ginny as a character. Do I like her as much as I like Georgia or Joe? No, but she swings more good than bad. What can I say? She’s entertaining (in the same way that Cheryl from Riverdale is entertaining). She’s at least somewhat relatable, and I wouldn’t have watched the entire season if I truly found her to be unbearable.

That being said, Ginny does have a lot of potential to grow, and I sincerely hope the writers do her better in the next season.

Themes

*At some point in the future, I may add more to this section.

Family: Despite a significant portion of this show being terribly unrealistic, I appreciate the show’s overall depiction of family and separation. For one, the show represents families who aren’t stereotypically nuclear. Our main protagonists are a single mother-daughter combo. The Bakers next door have a deaf father and a mother who doesn’t fit into a perfect mold. There’s a biracial family (Hunter) who connects far more with their American side than their Taiwanese-- so much that Hunter and his sister don’t even speak a lick of Mandarin. The small details and nuances which are added into the show makes them far more representative of the general American population.

Conversations: This show gives conversations that are far overdue in media. While Hunter and Ginny’s fight scene is 98% pure cringe, the remaining 2% of it is an important reminder on being biracial (or a person of color) in America. Many of us struggle with our racial identity, and it’s unproductive to compare who has it worse.

Overall + Rating

To me, the first season of Ginny & Georgia is a 6.5/10. (Five being the average; so this would be a little better than average). While it showed a lot of potential at the beginning, the show eventually devolved to nothing more than a standard melodrama-- even on Georgia’s part. It tried hard to be another Gilmore Girls but ended up falling quite short. I am looking forward to its second season though; and hopefully, it’s much better than the first.

#shows #netflix #7 #ginny and georgia #ginny & georgia #ginny&georgia

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lonelier-version-of-you · 3 years

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what would be your dream au where this storyline had been done right? like what would the key moments or scenes be?

Ohh boy anon you have opened a can of worms here. It’s a can of what I personally think are very good worms, but it’s a can of worms nonetheless. I have put so much thought into how I wish this SL had gone.

OK. My number 1 priority for this AU version of the storyline that was actually done right: the abuser is NOT Sahira’s dad.

In fact, Sahira isn’t involved with the storyline at all. Or if it absolutely must overlap with her return (which is a story I wanted to happen, just... not like this, and I think it should’ve been completely separate from this one), she’s supporting Henrik (perhaps in a similar sort of role to the one Fletch took a couple of weeks ago). But I think it’s easier if she’s just not involved at all.

Instead, we’re introduced to a new childhood friend of Henrik’s (à la when Rox and John came in as “Henrik’s university friends” even though he’d never mentioned them before). The name or gender doesn’t really matter, but for this post, I’ll assume it’s a woman and call her Stacey just to make things easier.

Stacey could be introduced shortly before the storyline as a new staff member, or come in when her dad - let’s call him Richard - is brought in. That doesn’t really matter either, though I’m leaning towards the idea of her coming in to see her dad and being introduced then. Oh, and obviously, Richard is white because fuck this weird “men of colour are evil” racial stereotyping, and also it’s far more plausible for him to have got away with abusing his pupils all these years if he’s white. (Stacey is probably also white, though she could also be biracial so long as it was her mother who was a POC. The important part is for Henrik’s abuser to be white - and in this case, since it sounds like Henrik went to an all-boys private school, there probably would have been mostly male teachers so it’s most likely for it to have been a man who abused him, so that’s why I’m still keeping it as the dad of his childhood friend.)

Also, in this hypothetical verse (hey, you said my dream AU, I can go as far-out as I want), COVID wasn’t a thing and therefore the show still has hour-long episodes and this storyline can actually get the screentime it deserves.

Some other significant changes are that the Cameron storyline would finish before the Henrik storyline started, and Jac would still be on the show.

So. The scenes/plot points I would keep the same:

- S22E40, the beginning of the storyline, would have played out exactly the same except the abuser isn’t Reyhan. Honestly, this was a good episode and a good introduction to the storyline, my only qualm is the Reyhan aspect. Definitely keeping the “you were always my special boy” scene - that was brilliant(ly terrifying).

- The scene in S22E44 where Henrik confronts Reyhan about the abuse would have stayed the same, except, again, it wouldn’t have been Reyhan. I love this scene. Absolutely love it. It’s incredibly well done, and it is incredibly powerful on a disability/autism level. I could not get rid of it in a million years.

- I would keep the fundamentals of how the abuse went pretty much the same, although I would have been more explicit about Henrik having had a crush on Richard than the show has been so far about his having had a crush on Reyhan (because I want them to stop dancing around Henrik’s queerness). But the whole thing of a teenaged Henrik, not having fully come to grips with his bisexuality yet, being groomed, thinking he was having a consensual relationship, then realising much later it was abuse? Yeah, it works, we can keep that.

Things that would be different:

- The storyline would have been announced in advance.

- Henrik would actually have a social circle and friends there to support him. He would be in a steady relationship with Carole, who would support him. In my dream Holby, Roxanna never died, so she’s there. Sacha is more involved in the whole situation instead of being so caught up in Dom’s storyline.

Jac definitely still needs to be there, and as another anon said a while back, she should have had a scene with Henrik about them both being rape survivors along the lines of that scene she had with Guy Self in S18E46 about them both having abusive mothers.

If the storyline overlapped with Sahira’s return at all, then as earlier stated, she’d also be there to support Henrik - regardless of how he may have treated her in the past, she knows no one deserves this, and as a mother she’s horrified at the thought of such a thing happening to a child.

- Not only would we have had a scene with Jac and Henrik talking about everything, but we would have had one with Dom and Henrik too. There is a wonderful parallel in the idea of Dom being there to support Henrik through having to face his abuser again, just like Henrik was there for Dom through everything with Isaac.

- Henrik would have gone to the police and reported Richard of his own free will, not because he was forced to.

- Henrik would have been given the chance to open up to other people (at least Jac and possibly Sacha; I think he wouldn’t say anything to anyone other than them until later) about what happened to him before having to say anything to his abuser’s daughter.

We can still keep the plot point of Henrik noticing his abuser trying to get time alone with his grandson, being horrified and shouting at him to stay away from the child, leading to a confrontation where his abuser’s daughter is like “why would you assume such a thing about my father?!” and Henrik says “because he did it to me”. Stacey, however, would listen to Henrik and take his words into consideration, rather than going into kneejerk “omg you’re a liar” mode. She’s torn between her love for her dad and what she’s now learned from Henrik, but she doesn’t straight up deny that abuse happened - she just has complicated feelings about how to deal with it.

- Rather than another allegation being made that Henrik’s abuser’s daughter doesn’t believe, a few other victims would come forward after Henrik reported Richard. One of these victims would be, just like in canon, a boy who was abused very recently... and he happens to be autistic. There would be parallels drawn between this boy and Henrik - the show’s already done this with the comments about them both being “odd”, I’d just make it less subtle by actually introducing him for an episode and explicitly stating that he’s autistic - which make it very clear to anyone who hadn’t already figured it out that Henrik is autistic too, just undiagnosed, and Richard took advantage of both of their isolation from their peers and difficulty with reading people’s intentions.

- Richard would face actual justice, instead of just dying and basically getting away with it the way Reyhan’s gonna do.

- Henrik’s queerness would be addressed more clearly, and the fact that the trauma from the abuse made it harder for him to admit his feelings for Gaskell would be mentioned.

- All of this would lead into a longer-term storyline exploring Henrik’s mental health and his trauma.

#Holby City #Henrik Hanssen #asks #anons #henrik csa storyline #long post #tw;sexual abuse #tw;csa #tw;rape #holby city spoilers #you know. since i mentioned that reyhan's gonna die

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thedreadvampy · 4 years

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So this was sent to me by @atiredpan weeks ago when the White Jon conversation was very live and I'm posting it (belatedly) with their blessing (they didn't want to put it up publicly and have it seem like an attack which I really very much appreciate but wouldn't have minded) and I percolated for a few days and then got very busy for a few weeks. Response follows.

So I feel weird about how I'm responding to this stuff, I'm launching rapidly into taking about/explaining my own experience in a way I'm worried maybe comes across as a direct comparison. It kind of feels like I'm talking in a way that's like brushing off your experience and saying OK BUT HERE'S WHY I'M RIGHT and that's not what I'm trying to do, it's just that there's not much I can usefully add to what you've said - you know your experience better than I do, and I'm not gonna go around trying to read into it or reexplain it. So I'm going to talk about where I am/have been coming from, but not with the intention of countering your points, all of which I think really resonate.

First off, the post where I was like "Jon is white and if you disagree you're Wrong" was, unreservedly, just a shitty post and I'm not suprised it upset a lot of people. I'm really very sorry about that, it was thoughtlessly written and pretty stupidly posted.

I totally get that my whiteness has fed into how I hced Jon (and as I think I've said before I saw Jon a certain way well before I engaged with any fanworks, just as you did). There's a lot of reasons I imagined Jon as white from pretty early on, a non-negligible one of which was like...That's Jonny. This is a podcast by Jonny, about a character with the same name and mannerisms as Jonny, and Jonny is extremely white. It would have felt weird, when I was listening to TMA as a Friend Podcast, to stick a brown face onto what at least appeared at the time to basically be a self-insert character of my white friend. Now that's a really personal thing informed less by the story and more by the circumstances under which I've interacted with it, but it certainly laid a baseline. I didn't really have a clear mental picture of Jon (or most of the characters) for a looooooong time (for an artist I'm really not a very visual thinker) but I had a few sort of mental sketches (Jon is short white balding and awkward, Martin is tall biracial and scruffy Basira is fat and somali Melanie is my friend from work etc) which I developed a long time before I encountered fanworks.

I saw the alienation you mentioned and I connected it to class and gender, not race, because I’ve met a lot of cis men, white and otherwise, who interpolate trauma, class insecurity, insecurity about their own abilities, and so on into withdrawal, denial and snappiness. So for me I had an interpretation of that element of his personality which was pretty much race-neutral, and then I had these existing cues leading me to assuming he was white (largely that Jonny is white, but also wee stuff in the story that...it’s not like anything substantial enough to remember, let alone justify, but there were certainly interactions that pinged whiteness for me personally)

There are actually iirc a few throwaway references to Jon being promoted above more qualified candidates throughout (or at least I thought I knew that before s5), but the time I decided I thought White Jon was an obvious conclusion was of course the conversation where Sasha expresses frustration about it. and the context of that conclusion (at least as far as I can see) wasn't "people of colour can only exist in subservient positions/defined by oppression" but was informed by two things that were going on with my life around the time that episode aired

I had been having several conversations with friends of mine (and largely friends of Jonny's) who work in London in the museums/archiving sector and who are the only women of colour in whole departments or even whole museums, and who experience so little career mobility compared to their less-qualified white counterparts (we're talking about women graduating top of their class at Oxbridge with anthropology or library science masters and stellar original research, with a decade or more of impeccable work experience and acting up, being left in internship and low-grade positions, while white men who "fit the culture" but have 0 museums experience sail into upper management positions and then stay there until they retire). So I'd come almost directly from these conversations into what to me sounded like exactly the same gripe in TMA.

I'd been at that point working for about a year and a half on co-coordinating the anti-oppression committee in my workplace, which was a very Good Progressive Activist Charity with Good Lefty Principles, and over the course of experience sharing and discussions both with colleagues of colour and along lines of wealth, disability, class etc, I was very much confronted with the realisation of how much 'being adequately qualified' meant different things for middle-class good-university white men vs much more highly skilled and hardworking women of colour or people of different class and wealth backgrounds. Obviously I'd known that before in principle, but not really having been in Salaried Workplaces (as opposed to like. service and retail hourlies) I hadn’t got so up close and personal with it. So that was also very fresh in my mind, this like...big substantial experience of how Good, Well-Meaning, Caring, Thoughtful, Woke white men just........did not need to think about this. at all. and were startled and discomforted to face it. and that this was also true of most white middle-class women. and these conversations were really carved down the middle between white middle-class European women saying ‘this is such a surprise when we have such an equitable hiring policy and diverse staff, that there’s this gender gap’ and women of colour in the room wearily saying ‘yeah, there’s a gender gap, there’s always a gender gap and it is always a racialised gender gap’ so yeah I was definitely thinking about the intersection between being passed over at work because of gender and because of race.

The point about Tim is interesting because I think for me what’s getting lost is that I don’t think Jon is entitled as like...a Character Trait. He’s not like...Toxic Masculinity Man. He is very anxious about boundaries and about his own capacity to do harm. But it has to be pointed out to him where he’s doing harm. He doesn’t notice where he’s been unfairly advantaged, and that’s to me much more reflective of most people’s relationship to white or male entitlement.

As I say, that exchange with Tim and Sasha cemented the Jon Is White hc in my head specifically because it was so reflective of conversations I had had with women of colour working in similar workplaces, about white men, usually about white men they generally liked or at least didn’t have beef with beyond their unfair advantages.

It seems odd to me to frame ‘bitching about your boss on your friend’s behalf to make her feel better’ as more similar to white entitlement/white privilege than any of that tbh? That’s just...being friends with someone?

Anyway I recognise that it’s not white entitlement to accept a job. Obviously it’s not, it’s just sensible under the circumstances, you get lucky and you grab it. For me my sense of Jon as white-because-of-this is not “he took a job he shouldn’t have taken,” it’s more about his obliviousness to the impact he has on others, and also primarily how people react to him. The interaction between Sasha and Tim is saturated with the of course it would be him I mentioned above, but even before that he walks through the world not expecting to have to think about anything but his conscious decisions, and he’s caught aback when people see him as out of place or as having power above his station.

I think it’s impossible to extricate ‘this is where my head was at’ from that interpretation, and also like obviously my own whiteness is a big factor. And not just my own personal whiteness but the place I grew up (which was 98.3% white) and the world which reflects back whiteness. So this is in no way intended as a bolshy This Is The Correct Headcanon the way my Bad Post was bc examining it I’m like...yeah I mean this is about how I personally interpreted this based on where I was at at the time. But I do feel like there’s some communication gap in what it is about this unqualified promotion thing that pinged me - it’s not that All Bosses Must Be White And All Brown People Must Be Downtrod, it’s something quite specific about the tone and tenor of the interactions around the getting-a-job.

But also? Idk. Kind of unrelatedly, and people obviously should feel free to disagree with me on this, it feels kind of off to frame this as defaulting to a white Jon? I sort of think that my idea of Jon as white is very much not ‘white until proven otherwise’ - part of the reason for my original strident tone was that I felt that I was being expected to drop a headcanon I had for specific reasons and default to the fanon version of Jon without actually having any reason other than ‘this is how the community thinks he should look,’ and without really understanding anything about what that means, and while obviously defaulting to a non-white headcanon isn’t like...entrenched in the way that defaulting to a white headcanon is, it does seem to me like this is perhaps part of why white fans slap brown skin onto a character without thinking into what that means or why they’re doing it.

The thing I’m struggling with as regards my personal headcanon here is that I could decide to only ever draw Jon as Fanon Jon, but it wouldn’t be because I had strong reasons to see him that way, it wouldn’t be the same as why you see Jon as brown, or why I see like...Melanie as Indian, it would literally be Default To Standard in a way it isn’t for you. And I don’t feel that I have Defaulted To Whiteness, or where I have it is for reasons specifically to do with Jon (I visualised Jon as white because I visualised him as Jonny, who is white), not because I think every character is White Until Proven Otherwise. Like, my reasons for understanding Jon as white may be bad reasons, but they are reasons, not post-hoc excuses (I can’t like...prove that. but I know it to be true at least on a conscious level). I didn’t go Oh Jon Is White Because Everyone Is Unless I Have Reason To Think They Aren’t, Hooray, Here Is A Post-Hoc Justification For Why It Isn’t Racist To Think That. So while I am totally on board with the idea that it may be shitty, harmful or poorly thought through to hc Jon as white, I’m not sure I can fully see it in myself as being default. But I do understand that that isn’t necessarily what came across in my original short post.

Honestly, the reason I took issue with Fanon Jon and Fanon Martin in such a bolshy way in the first place was that I didn’t get why these characters were universally seen as Asian and white, respectively, and had such strong and consistent fanon images, when none of the other characters did, and when I was seeing people drawing people like Sasha and Melanie and Tim as white way more when in my mind there was no reason to assume they were white. On an emotional level I guess I think either there’s Fanon As Lore, or there’s no fanon (and I prefer the latter) and my discomfort came from the place that the one character I absolutely saw as coded as white in the core cast had this one really specific Ambiguously Brown Fanon Look (which from what I’d seen at the time didn’t seem to be like...backed with anything or coming from any personal interpretation for most of the white fans I was seeing on like Twitter and Tumblr) but white headcanons are everywhere for characters like Melanie or Sasha or Georgie, who seemed to me to be unambiguously people of colour, or characters like Tim or Martin (who could perfectly reasonably be people of colour and who I hc as Rroma and biracial respectively)? I don’t know, it’s difficult to express, but I find it frustrating.

#tma #White Jon #idk sorry to post this so separate from the rest of the conversation I have been Busy

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johannas-motivational-insults · 4 years

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I for one was seething while Ms assh... Weaver basically confirmed to her designed punching bag that she keeps her around because she's a decent emotional support for Adora, so... wanna go even deeper and stab the reader s'more?

Oh I love stabbing the reader. And I love this scene so I’ll do the whole fuckin’ thing. (Commentary is bolded.)

This scene really is heartbreaking. It was easy for me to write, though, because Catra and (Shadow) Weaver have a very particular dynamic that I vibe with. It's such a pivotal scene for Catra too, because it confirms her fears that her success would be met with pushback and that Weaver really doesn’t love her or care about her at all. It makes her feel dehumanized both in the sense of being treated as subhuman and being treated as a tool. Something to be kept around only so long as it’s useful, discarded the second it’s not. This is the moment when she learns for certain just how little she means to Weaver and it’s painful to read.

*Content Warning for abuse*

The sound of keys in the front door makes Catra frown in confusion as she unloads the last of her books. No one is ever home this early. Even when Weaver doesn’t have any sponsored clubs or other teacher bullshit to deal with, 3:15 is the earliest she ever gets home.

But Catra’s always had sensitive ears, and those are definitely Ms. Weaver’s footsteps crossing the floor. When the woman pokes her head into the kitchen, no doubt to investigate the smell, Catra gives her a jerky nod. “Went to work after all?”

“No, I had some errands to run,” Weaver replies flatly. “Lying around all day like a lazy sack of meat doesn’t come naturally to me.”

Me @ Weaver:

Bitch she’s baking cookies, she’s clearly not lying around all day. Why you gotta be like that?

“Yeah, me neither,” mutters Catra, deflecting the obvious implication.

“I have something for you,” says Weaver, and Catra can’t help but look up in surprise. Weaver tosses her something and she instinctively moves to catch it. Just before it hits her hands, she realizes what it is and her stomach drops. Fingering the rough edges of the rolled up newspaper, she tries to breathe steadily as she forces her eyes up to meet Weaver’s. (Oh gotta love that trauma response.) The woman looks more unimpressed than predatory right now, but Catra knows better than anyone how that can change at the drop of a hat.

“Looks like your little ploy paid off,” she remarks.

Sighing, Catra sets the paper down on the table. “I told you, it wasn’t a ploy. Just a play.”

“I see. And I suppose the fact that this article was written by a close friend of yours is a complete coincidence.”

LOL clearly Weaver knows nothing about Entrapta if she thinks she could be bribed into writing something she doesn’t believe.

“I had nothing to do with that,” Catra denies swiftly. When Weaver’s expression doesn’t change, she insists, “Really, I swear.”

Weaver’s head tips the slightest bit, that familiar predatory tinge seeping into her eyes and voice. “And why should I believe you?”

Catra huffs, arms crossing defensively over her chest. “Why would I do something I know would get me in trouble?”

“I don’t know, Catra, you tell me,” says Weaver, slowly closing the gap between them. “It’s not as though you’ve been doing that your entire life.”

Me @ Weaver:

Like okay, it’s kinda true. But still.

Tensing more with every step Weaver takes, Catra raises her hands innocently, trying and failing not to shift her weight to her back foot. Not to give ground or show her fear. (This is making me super uncomfortable so I’m probably just gonna keep memeing at you all. Yes, I am aware that this is my fault. No, I am not sorry.) “Look, Entrapta has really strong opinions, and they’re always backed up with facts. I couldn’t just plant the idea in her head to write something like this.”

“Facts, you say?” muses Weaver. She reaches past Catra in a very deliberate show of invading her space, and Catra can’t help but suck a quick breath in through her teeth. But Weaver doesn’t touch her. All she does is pick up the paper and turn it over in her hands as though she is deep in thought. Then the motion stops, her eyes snapping up sharply. “So you agree with her.”

Weaver @ Catra:

“That’s not what I said,” protests Catra, her exasperation showing through her tenuous attempts at staying calm. “Stats are facts, not who deserves what awards or whatever. It’s not like I even care about that.”

Weaver shakes her head, her chuckle positively dripping with condescension. “Oh, now I know you’re lying.”

She is. She really is. And the fact that Weaver knows how much Catra cares and wants praise and approval and still denies her that makes me want to slap a bitch.

Also I just realized how closely this scene parallels the one in 1x04 and that actually wasn’t intentional but I’ll take it, clearly I’ve got the spirit of their relationship down.

“No, I-”

The newspaper smacks Catra across the cheek and she yelps in shock and pain, hand flying to her mouth.

It shouldn’t be a shock, not after 14 years of this shit. It still is, every time.

Ugh, ow.

“Enough of your lip,” hisses Weaver. “You know better than to contradict me.”

Hate is not a strong enough word for how I feel about this woman. Unfortunately there are too many people just like her. I’ve noticed the audience particularly hates this incarnation of Shadow Weaver and I think it’s because when she’s stripped of her magic the tactics she’s left with are far too familiar. I feel the same way.

Catra’s tongue swipes along her stinging lip, checking for blood. It comes back clean, but the lack of physical damage does nothing to calm the quiet rage boiling up inside of her. Weaver has never treated her with an ounce of respect, and now she has the gall to hit her with a rolled up newspaper like she’s a fucking animal. Subhuman. (I mean this feeling comes straight out of Demons but with Catra being human in this au it’s... not worse, definitely not, but it hits differently.) Catra’s fists clench and her chest puffs out as she straightens up to her full height (even if it’s nothing on Weaver).

“Do not touch me,” growls Catra, her voice low and dangerous in a way few people have ever heard it. “I’m an adult, that’s officially illegal now.”

Oh, you sweet summer child.

“Oh, you want to talk about the law?” counters Weaver, sounding far too calm in comparison. It just makes Catra angrier. And maybe a little scared. Somehow Weaver always makes her feel out of control, which never ceases to remind her who is in control. (Oof.) “I am under no obligation to let you live here, Catra, let alone at a significant discount. I do that out of the kindness of my heart. (LOL the what now?) Would you rather I throw you out in the streets like the stray you are?”

Yay for another insinuation that Catra is an animal. Nice going, Weaver.

Also, that is one of the meanest fucking lines I’ve ever written for Shadow Weaver and that’s saying something.

Those words hit Catra right in the gut, a blow far more painful than any physical one. They trigger a flood of other words that always seem to find her, stick to her no matter how she tries to slough them off, prove them wrong. Stray, nuisance, brat, worthless, unwanted, unloved...

But she was loved once. She was.

Oh boy, get ready for PAIN. So I wasn’t orginally planning to write this flashback but then I got a Very Bad Idea and I love torturing my readers (and myself) so this happened.

Kneeling in front of the open door, Papi opened his arms for a goodbye hug. When Catra stepped into them, she felt his smile against the side of her head. “Te amo, mija.”

“Yo también te amo, Papi,” said Catra, tiny arms tightening around his neck with a proud grin. He hadn’t taught her that one, she’d pieced it together on her own.

Papi chuckled in surprise and approval, ruffling her wild hair. “You’re a genius, little one. You know that?”

“Yep!” she answered, beaming with the completely earnest confidence only a precocious three year-old can muster.

Baby Catra’s behavior may be slightly inspired by my highly intelligent four year-old niece, who is also biracial with a multilingual father.

A couple playful taps of the horn from the driveway interrupted them, making Papi chuckle once again. Pulling away enough to look Catra in the eye, he winked conspiratorially. “Better not keep Mommy waiting. You know how she is.”

Catra shook her head soberly in agreement. Mommy was notoriously impatient, a speed demon on the road. Catra loved driving with her, laughing like a maniac from the backseat whenever she’d swerve and cuss out the idiots in her way. Those cackles never failed to make Mommy shoot Catra a smile in the rearview mirror, her transitory rage melting away in an instant at the sound. Still, it was never good being on the receiving end of that impatience.

(Catra’s mother is not at all inspired by my sister, however. She drives like a fucking granny.)

Papi quickly pecked Catra on the cheek before standing and waving goodbye, giving an appreciative nod to the babysitter as he pulled the door shut behind him.

He didn’t close it loudly or anything, but no sound is louder in Catra’s nightmares. She never saw either of them again.

“Answer me, Catra,” Ms. Weaver demands sternly.

That was what she had. And this is where she ended up.

Yeah, no wonder this version of Catra just assumes anything good in her life will be taken away. In some ways it might be worse than being Adora starting with nothing, because not only does Adora not remember what she lost in infancy (which wasn’t great to begin with), she has been steadily moving up in the world since. Catra’s had the opposite trajectory.

Suddenly noticing the tears rolling down her cheeks, Catra swipes them away with the back of her hand. Her throat hurts too much to swallow, so she doesn’t even bother trying to settle her voice. Her weakness is already on full display, anyway. Shaking her head, she whispers hoarsely, “No, Ms. Weaver.”

“Good,” Weaver says with finality as Catra sniffles, blinking back more tears. “You still live under my roof, and you will abide by my rules or face the consequences, just like anyone else.”

Oh boy, that’s a little too close for comfort. Again with this version of SW feeling especially despicable to the audience because it’s so familiar.

Just like anyone else. Sure.

Yeah you’re right Catra, go off.

As Weaver starts toward her room, Catra half-heartedly tosses a hand with an empty, resigned sigh. “What rules did I break this time?”

Weaver turns back, her expression dangerous, but Catra can’t muster the enthusiasm for fear anymore. Her eyes are still burning, voice tight with emotion as she confesses, “I’ve tried, Ms. Weaver. I-” Her voice cracks and she shakes her head, pinching her brow in shame. “I never wanted you to hate me.”

brb crying in the club

K but honestly the helplessness here is just heartbreaking. And it’s just like in canon. We saw, Catra did try to be a good soldier and make Shadow Weaver like her, but it was a lost cause. I mean I didn’t pull this dialogue directly from 2x06 but it’s a similar flavor for sure.

When Catra dares to look back up she finds that Weaver’s expression has softened slightly, though she still looks annoyed. “I never said I hate you,” she says, the uncharacteristic gentleness catching Catra off guard. “You’re just more trouble than you’re worth most of the time.”

It shouldn’t be a comfort. But it is, anyway. It is. Catra sniffles again, dipping her head to wipe her eyes on her shoulders.

The fact that this is a comforting answer to Catra is so fucked up and tragic but so befitting of their relationship.

“Though I will admit, you do have a way with Adora,” concedes Weaver, her tone very nearly impressed. “Not everyone can handle someone like that and keep them on task. I’ve had plenty come through my classroom.”

Wow, so we’re just being casually ableist now? Nice.

My thoughts exactly, Catra.

...Ableist and pragmatic.

Catra snorts under her breath, shaking her head as her eyes fall to the floor. How did she never put this together before? “That’s why you’re letting me stay.”

This truly is a gut punch moment. She thought maybe Weaver actually had a bit of affection for her or was invested in her future after all (which tracks for Catra because she is mean to the people she likes) and that’s why she let her stay, but no. As usual, it’s all about Adora. That is not going to bode well for the resentment moving forward.

“She does badly with her routine being disrupted, and she’s come to rely on you,” states Weaver, tipping her head in acknowledgement.

“Plus she’d hate you if you kicked me out,” Catra adds pointedly.

Weaver smiles, all teeth. “It is better for everyone this way, wouldn’t you say?”

Better for you, you mean.

“Sure,” mutters Catra. When that response earns her a look, she corrects herself. “Yes, Ms. Weaver.”

Eyes narrowed into slits, Weaver warns her, “Make no mistake, Catra. Adora would manage if you left us. If your behavioral issues begin to outweigh your usefulness, I reserve the right to evict you.” She cocks an expectant eyebrow. “Am I understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” mumbles Catra.

Poor Catra, I just...

“I care very much about Adora, and I won’t have you dragging her down with you.”

“I remember,” Catra says numbly, picking at her nails and avoiding Weaver’s gaze.

Ooooooooooof. Why do I insist on hurting myself so much with all these canon parallels?

Studying her intently for a moment, Weaver concludes, “Yes, I’m sure you do.” Then she turns and leaves without another word.

Well that was lovely. Anybody else want to reach through the screen and throttle a bitch? ‘Cause I sure do.

This scene doesn’t cause an immediate reaction on Catra’s part but it definitely moves her to a place where she’s very aware of her role and how useless it is to try to change it (at least in this house), and that makes everything a little more volatile. She’s not at a breaking point yet but she’s getting closer, it certainly takes the wind out of her sails a bit. She will recover in the short term because she is Catra and her stubbornness makes her very resilient, but it weighs her down and eventually she is going to snap. Y’all will love that, I’m sure. ;)

#ask games #director's commentary #spop #catradora #fanfic #hail mary #writing #asks #anon #catra and shadow weaver

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kingbuckley · 4 years

Text

Okay I know I said I was gone but I talked to my friend abt this and I’m gonna talk about Ryan again if this is triggering for you keep scrolling

I found the transcript of his live and I read it and I have more thoughts but it basically boils down to this

I agreed with a lot of what he said in the beginning and while I absolutely condemn using slurs I understand the inclination to protect your family. I don’t know his gf/wife whatever I don’t care about her and her insta makes me very uncomfortable so I don’t wanna talk about her but I think Ryan is just a dumbass honestly. I don’t think he’s intentionally trying to hurt anyone. Does he hardbor some racist sentiments? Yes. We all do. It’s how we are raised no matter where you are from. The goal is unlearning those and having remorse for them and seeking to better yourself.

I’m trying to be very careful about how I phrase this because I want it understood that I don’t like what he said and it makes me very uncomfortable that he thinks that way, and I think he was stupid for saying that in this climate. I also think he needs to re-examine himself and his relationship with race and educate himself about this topic before he talks about it again, and when he does he needs to apologise without shifting the blame onto people who were hurt by what he said, and that’s important going forward.

That being said I think Ryan is not a bad person. I think he’s misguided and uneducated and he hasn’t spent much time around people who challenge his views but he ultimately has the right idea. He spent a lot of time in the beginning of his live talking about black lives matter and most of what he said I agree with, and he was pretty clear about not condoning all lives matter and wanting to shed light on black stories, which is positive

This is all still very fresh, and as long as he’s being attacked he’s going to be defensive and incapable of seeking out resources to educate himself. I understand people are upset, and especially to black people, I will not ignore what you feel. If you do not want to support him anymore that is your choice and you were the ones he hurt with his statements so I will not be upset with you about that and you should continue to express your feelings on the matter however you see fit.

To non black people I say this: examine your own privilege. As a teenager I used to use slurs that I would never ever even consider using now because I was uneducated and didn’t understand the weight they carried in the way I do now as an adult. Not everyone has had the opportunity to experience things first hand the way I have, and while I hate that he believes he is above this issue, I also know that he was most likely not given the opportunity to understand that he is not. This is his opportunity. This is where he must learn from himself and from others and I hope he will do so.

I will still be watching the show. I love the show, and the fandom, and buddie, and Eddie, and I will not punish the writers, the cast, the show runners, myself, or you, for something he said. And because I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, I will wait to see his calmer reaction once things have settled before I pass judgement on him as a person.

I also urge everyone to remember that celebrities are not our friends, but they are people. People who are very publicly tried for their sins on a constant basis. People are allowed to make mistakes and grow, and we are all lucky we do not have to do so in the public eye. I was hurt but what he said. I want him to learn from it. And if he does, I will accept that. We are too quick to pass judgement on people who have very little opportunity to edit themselves, especially in a live stream.

This post is a mess honestly I hope you understand what I’m saying and where I’m coming from on this. And again to black people reading this you have the right to pass your own judgments, and I would not dream of taking it from you. But as a biracial, half Hispanic, I empathise with Ryan. Our community in particular has a very odd view of race that is often contradictory, and I have tried very hard to train myself out of that way of thinking. I would like to give Ryan the opportunity to do the same.

Here’s the transcript of the live if anyone is interested:

#this is just an insane stream of conciousness #the tldr on it is: im still doing buddie first kiss week and im not gonna stop watching the show even though ryan is a dumbass #i dont want him fired i want him to learn from his mistakes and be better #so #anyways this is so so long if you actually get through it please dont yell at me #the great ryan debate

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ramblings-of-a-mad-cat · 4 years

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So, new data Of Lilianne!

— I Think I Never mentioned What wand type She has, but I Think Without a Doubt The Second One Is Made Of Yew, so I Was reading Of The meaning and etc Of The Woods and The yew Is Made for funerals and iniation so seeing that She has Lost so Many People I Think Is fitting and The core Of This wand Is Hippogriff feather because I really think She Would give The wand The respect it Think It deserves

— Given The Many duels and Creatures She needs to Fight in the game She has Many scars around her body so She always have This bandages with her, Chiara and Pomfrey tried to dissapear Them with Magic but She doesn't really like the “Magic out” Of things so She refuses The help.

— Ah! This Is important, her relationship with Merula Is different because Of a Important Event, so it deviates Of The canon Of The Patronus Quest but Lilianne couldn't conjure her Patronus because She tried to use specifically a memory Of Jacob The problem Is Jacob not only gives her happiness but also triggers negative Emotions. But Merula could and She... surprisingly saved Lilianne from The dementors, Like Lilianne did The same for her in The Ice Vault but She Never expected Merula Of All People to save her. This caused that Lilianne for The First Time thinked “Hey, maybe She's not that bad” and as Someone who grew up with The Thought Of “Bad People stays as Bad people” She really had a conflict. But After that, she's a Little More forgiving Of Snyde, They still not Friends and still Hate how much They remind Them to their negative traits but They're no longer “enemies” but also Can't consider Them as friends, they just see The Other as “Respectable rival” and well, They both try to be less mean to eachother Little steps after All.

— I Think I Said The Lanusse are latinos but I never really Said Of where part of Latinoamérica are They, They're Ecuatorians

—When Lilianne is overwhelmed starts to speak in spanish because She Can't really find The Perfect Words in English, I Like to think Rowan Would learn spanish just for her and try comfort her speaking in her Language

— Her Father was an Artisan, he Would make her Different crafts for her Birthday and She really Likes seeing him Work, She started doing crafts with her own hands because She wants to remember him

— Like Liz, She doesn't Like eating meat, so She's More Of Vegetarian

— Ben reminds her Of Jacob, She's easily worried about him because She fears losing him like her brother

— Her animagus form Is a Crow, really, The simbology Of death Never leaves her alone. Is just Like Remus with His wolf imagery

— Her First Boggart still being Jacob, but now everything that happened now This Will transform in a Corpse Of Someone She cares about

— She's still a bit Of a jerk, but After The Death Of Rowan She learned that She has to be less “Full Of herself” and Grow Up, but Given The type Of person She was Before nobody in The circle really trust her to be The leader that's Why They already want to go on with their Lives and If Is possible, Forget They were part Of This “Lanusse mess” at All.

(Going under the cut to save our beloved scrollers the space)

I seriously dig wands that have unique cores, even though I know the three “supreme” cores that Ollivander uses are supposed to be...well, supreme. The best ones. To that I say, nonsense! The Elder Wand has a thestral hair for it’s core, and hippogriffs are one of my favorite potterverse creatures, so I dig that! One of my head-canons for Aurelie is that her wand core is an Abraxan feather. As far as wand wood goes, Yew is incredibly cool. Gail has Aspen, and Luca has Rowan. (Oh yes, I really did that.)

I can give some mad respect points to Lilianne for not wanting her scars to go away. It’s the same reason Zuko couldn’t lose his scar, the same reason Elphaba had to stay green. It’s a part of who she is. Harry couldn’t lose his lightning bolt either! (Oh god, am I agreeing with Dumbledore? Never tell anyone this happened...)

I really dig what you added in for the Patronus Quest, holy heck. Because I basically had the inversion happen in my fic where Luca gave Merula a pep talk from her breakdown and she was able to create her shield patronus. Seriously, I think it’s honestly a good thing if characters sometimes don’t know how. They stress again and again in the books that the Patronus Charm is highly advanced and challenging magic. Especially for a Hogwarts student. Harry learning it at thirteen was remarkable. As for my twins, (it’s funny, I recently got tagged in a post about this, I need to answer that) their Patronuses (Patroni?) are still under consideration. I’m not altogether sure if both of them can cast a Patronus. In the interests of fairness and realism, I’m going to say that one of them is an Animagus, the other can cast a Patronus. Just don’t know which is which yet.

That’s so cool! As for the Fawleys’ heritage, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. All I know is that they’re biracial, and one of their parents is white, the other being middle-eastern, though which exact country is still undecided. I also don’t know which parent is which, mostly because I have yet to decide, even now, what Nina Fawley’s maiden name is or what family she was a part of. Other details I know is that Luca is lactose intolerant, Gail is dyslexic, and the Fawley family is Jewish. Or perhaps the Khannas are. Or both. Basically. HPHM just needs to have at least one of its’ families be Jewish and have that come up in the next holiday quest. I am waiting, Jam City.

Luca and Gail are in so many ways, defined by their relationship to Jacob. Luca adores him and idealizes him. Gail cannot stand him. This shapes very much who the twins spend time with primarily. Then again, Gail was raised by Rakepick, so she’s got a bunch of other familial trauma to work through. Her relationship to Merula, like Luca’s, can reflect that of her relationship to Jacob. Also, can I just say that I really dig the Crow Animagus form? I’ve really been into the symbolism of crows lately, and trying to integrate that into my own work. They’re just a lot of fun!

Rowan’s death kind of changed us all, didn’t it? I feel so bad for Lilianne that she genuinely grows as a person after it happens but no one can forget what has come before, and they’re all probably pretty shaken too, so they don’t trust her. That’s devastating, I shan’t lie. Meanwhile, Luca was absolutely broken by Rowan’s death. (Between that, the Portrait Vault, and Y6CH45...my poor baby is spiraling.) and Gail was equally sent into shock, but not just by Rowan’s death specifically. But also because Rakepick tried to kill Ben. For so many reasons, that throws her.

#Hogwarts Mystery OC #HPHM Headcanons

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