I do think Blazing Saddles handled its one depiction of native americans very poorly, and the full extent of its representation of chinese workers on the railroad is they were literally just there. not even one single speaking line. unclear if this is worse or better than the redface.
it's fucking phenomenal at lampooning antiblack racism though. extremely blatant, extremely funny satire, which is constantly and loudly saying "racism is the philosophy of the terminally stupid at best and morally depraved at worst, and we should all be pointing and laughing at them 24/7"
plus the main character is a heroic black man who has to navigate a whole lot of bullshit but is constantly smirking at the extraordinarily stupid racists and inviting the audience into the joke. the one heroic white character is a guy who was suicidally depressed until he met the protagonist and they just instantly became buds, and he's firmly in a supporting role the whole time and happy to be there. the protagonist saves the day with the help of his black friends from the railroad, and uses the position of power he was given to uplift not only those friends, but all the railroad workers of other minorities too, in an explicit show of solidarity.
anyone saying "Blazing Saddles is racist" had better be talking about its treatment of non-black minorities. it had better not be such superficial takes as "oh but they say the n-word all the time" or "they have nazis and the kkk in there!" because goddamn if that's the full extent of your critique I very seriously suggest you read up on media analysis. there is too much going over your head, you need to learn to recognize satire.
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Demon Shen Jiu is such a fun idea though.
Especially if he himself doesn't know. Like imagine, Yue Qi finds this abandoned baby and the baby is REALLY OBVIOUSLY not human. But this also enables Shen Jiu to survive being abandoned at such a young age -- a human baby would die without adequate nutrition or care, but demons are a little more resilient. Baby Demon SJ has a way more forgiving digestive system and can move under his own power from a much earlier age. By the time he's a year old he's hunting his own rodents and small birds, and has to be stopped from biting and mauling anyone he doesn't like. Which is most people. Qi-ge develops amazing reflexes.
Why do the slavers tolerate a demon baby hanging around? Maybe it's really not all that uncommon. Demons come across the borderlands from time to time, and are as liable to abandon their kids or die or etc as anyone else. It's maybe an open secret among slavers that demon-blooded kids are a better investment, even, because they can survive for longer on less. The only downside is if they don't ever look human enough to pass as human, because that limits potential buyers, but that's only relevant when the slavers are trying to sell them. For the purposes of having a network of street kids stealing and grifting and spying and etc, it's fine. A lot of the slavers themselves started out as demon-blooded street kids with no other options.
But in SJ's case, he pretty quickly starts passing as human. Mostly because he's quite strong, and he's convinced that he's the same as his Qi-ge, so he makes himself the same. Makes his hands look the same and his teeth look the same and etc. It's largely subconscious, and once he starts doing it, it becomes automatic. SJ forgets that he's a demon in the way that most people don't retain their earliest childhood memories -- although he remembers that some of the slavers were demons.
Then of course there's the question of why didn't the Cang Qiong cultivators notice?
A few options. One is that whatever kind of demon SJ is, it's really good at mimicking humans. Another is that he's only part demon, and like Luo Binghe, fully capable of handling both kinds of cultivation. So once he starts learning spiritual cultivation, even from a heretic like Wu Yanzi, he doesn't seem different from any other recruit with a patchy education on the subject. Anything else odd about him could be easily attributed to his exposure to Wu Yanzi and his wicked practices.
Although full demon SJ is a fascinating idea. (Also, it could contribute to all those qi deviations -- he's trying to cultivate AND "fake" human cultivation at the same time, I doubt Qing Jing's techniques are totally compatible with everything going on there even without the psychological turmoil.) Like I'd imagine Airplane wrote that SJ was abandoned on the streets as a baby, and the system was like "hmm he probably wouldn't survive that?" and then in some nine billionth wife arc, Airplane also creates a variety of demon that can fully pass as human (for some identity conflict with a prospective wife), even to the point of fooling human cultivators and demon-detecting tools. So the system just ties these two disparate pieces of world-building together in order to patch a critical plothole (Airplane doesn't know anything about babies). Which has the side effect that Shang Qinghua doesn't even know that SJ became a demon!
And SJ himself doesn't know. The only person who knows is Yue Qi.
Obviously this wouldn't come up much in PIDW, but it could be pretty funny in the SVSSS timeline. YQY just sitting there through the whole Luo Binghe being a half-demon reveal, wondering if he should say something. Subsequently being the most absolutely chill about the whole demon reveal thing anyway. Like he's definitely not upset that Luo Binghe is a demon, or part demon, and the multiple people who try to make a point about it just run afoul of his impenetrable smile and get nowhere.
Then eventually Yue Qingyuan decides that he should probably tell Bingqiu that Shen Qingqiu is a demon. For like, safety purposes if nothing else. He's kept the secret so long also for safety purposes (even if someone put Shen Qingqiu under a truth compulsion he wouldn't be able to admit to being a demon, because he himself doesn't know!), and he's done tons of stuff to prevent anyone ever finding out (although Xiao Jiu is so talented that he didn't have to do much), but Luo Binghe is the demon emperor. That changes things. If Shen Qingqiu is going to be visiting the demon kingdoms regularly then there's a chance something could reveal the truth unexpectedly, and that would probably be worse.
So Yue Qingyuan sits down and has a very serious discussion with Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe about how Shen Qingqiu is actually a demon, was just the cutest little demon baby in fact, here he drew a picture from memory of what Xiao Jiu used to look like before he learned to look more human, and also how a lot of slave kids and slavers and people who fall through the cracks in society have demon ancestry, some more recent than others, and Shen Qingqiu always retained a certain discomfort around his own kind because of the adult slavers who sold him off, and etc etc.
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More random Nimona headcanons
Bal is one of those people who isn’t allergic to anything except one random medication that no one uses
Ambrosius calls him a lucky bastard every time it’s brought up because he’s allergic to everything
His allergy list is at least three pages long and he doesn’t remember a single thing on that list
Whenever they go out to eat Bal has to remind him “No you can’t eat that it has olives” “Not that either love it’s got lemon” and so on
Most of his allergic reactions are pretty tame so he’ll eat it anyway
And it gives Bal and Nimona so much fucking anxiety
One time Bal walked in on Nimona chasing Ambrosius around the kitchen yelling “Spit out the carrots Nemesis you don’t even like them that much!!”
Whenever he eats alone he refers to it as a game of Russian roulette
Bal refers to it as the reason he has high blood pressure
Because Bal and Ambrosius grew up in the limelight (for very different reasons) there are a million pictures of them through the years
And they use those videos to bully the hell out of each other
Bal can quote the video from the beginning of the movie not because it was an important moment in his childhood
But because Ambrosius will quote it at the most random times throughout the day
Bal will do something small like kill a bug or chase out an animal that Nimona brought in
And he’ll hear Ambrosius mumble “I’m here to slay monsters and protect our kingdom”
He was a little worried Nimona would react badly to this habit but he started joining in
One time he killed a spider and Ambrosius asks “Are you slaying monsters moonbeam?” Nimona yells from the other room “I’m so proud of him he’s truly protecting our kingdom”
There are a million photos of baby Ambrosius on the internet
And Bal made a PowerPoint presentation ranking their cuteness factor out of 10 (100 was the lowest score he got and it was a picture of him with the ugliest bowl cut you’ve ever seen)
And made Ambrosius sit through it
That was the most loved and mortified he had felt in a long time
Nimona uses low-quality pictures of them as reaction photos
There have been times when Nimona asks “Can we eat out tonight” and Bal tells her no and she sends him this
He’ll text back “Is that my fucking wanted poster?!”
She asked Ambrosius if there was any ice cream left and he said no he expected her to call him and complain he didn’t expect this
He calls her yelling “When the fuck did that happen?!”
And she hangs up immediately to let Bal deal with it
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