#not sure about someone being allowed to have prejudice but yes thats part of human nature i guess

[foxx-queen]

i keep thinking about the datamined conversation between halsin and minthara and what gets me about it is that if you side with halsin and turn minthara away, thats objectively the bad choice.

like at this point, you've rescued minthara from moonrise. you know now that she was being controlled to act against her will. you've gone to the trouble of rescuing her from her tormentors, and you've experienced what it felt like as they tried to destroy her mind. you know what will happen to her if you turn her away. and if you do, you're willingly condemning her to that fate. you've essentially allowed her to experience freedom, to regain her sense of self, only to tear that away from her again.

whereas if you side with minthara, and halsin leaves, that's the only consequence he experiences. that he's not a companion anymore. at this point, we've saved the grove, we've saved him, and we've lifted the shadow curse. we've helped him achieve what hes been hoping to do for over a century. leaving your party won't see him lose his free will. he can return to the grove and live his life.

the choice is essentially either condemn someone to a fate worse than death, knowing exactly what that entails vs not letting someone travel with you anymore. its pretty clear cut to me.

its just interesting to me that they've switched the morality of it around given that minthara is considered the 'evil' companion by so many.

[saintprivateer]

I understand the ideas behind the zemenipearls post but can we not just have a nice fictional world? It’s not like the Kerch are made out to be a great nation of saintly people, it’s all fantasy for a reason. I won’t get started on their posts about my girl Nina and my dude Nikolai 😒

Okay... there’s a lot of ground to cover here so boot up cowhand I wrote a LOT

No matter how unlike-this-world a fantasy universe seems, it was still crafted by a real human who IS a part of this world. And humans put their own beliefs and experiences into their stories as the foundation for how ideal/ not-ideal they want the au to be. We use the environment around us as a stepping stone for our stories, and this DOUBLES if the author is saying “This World Is Not Like Ours At All”. The question authors answer of “What exactly is this au not like?” Rounds back to the place we are trying to distance ourselves from, because that is what this au is “not like.” And most often, authors craft these fantasy universes and bring the reader into a whole new world only to go back to a REAL theme of “This World Is Actually More Like Yours Than You Think.” Because that’s usually the entire point. We like fantasy because we want to see our nature mirrored in worlds unlike ours. We love that people can fly and cast spells, but we REALLY love when they’re as human as us in behavior/interests/ actions.

All that’s to say: you can’t actually write a racism-free world if you’ve never experienced a racism-free world. The ideals we want to portray will still be flawed and not 100% ideal, because the notion we have OF this ideal is fundamentally flawed. ESPECIALLY if we are still unlearning our own fallacies to these ideals. Grishaverse has anti-blackness threaded in the pages because there is anti-blackness on Earth and anti-black fallacies in the ideals Leigh Bardugo has internalized (like any other white person). If we can acknowledge the argument that meanings can be found in stories/art whether it was intended or not, then we have to acknowledge Leigh Bardugo wrote in her own prejudice or anti-black ideals into the grishaverse, whether intended or not. She wanted to write a story removed from the racism we know, and that in of itself isn’t a bad thing to imagine. But she still wrote tropes actively harmful to the minorities they represent.

“Why do you have to look for patterns that aren’t there and nitpick on characters? Why does everything have to be about race? Isn’t it enough that our heroes are TRYING to be good?”

When people say this, they usually mean “Why are you putting this in my face? We (the group not affected) were all doing fine until you decided to be grumpy about something, and I don’t want my ideals soiled by your criticisms.”

Imagine seeing the person who’s supposed to represent you and your identity be repeatedly trashed, ignored, dumbed down, dismissed, killed off, etc etc in canon and in the fandom, and when you finally get the courage to bring it up, the entirety of people not affected silence and threaten you for rocking their boat. You really can’t imagine how that actually feels unless you’ve felt it. When you write off the consistently abusive treatment of a community of people in a book as an inconvenient—and thus invalid— topic that “ruins” the characters or plots you want to root for, you’re acknowledging the privilege you have in being able to look the other way when these patterns have been brought to your attention.

There’s a lot you might not catch when you aren’t a part of the communities affected. If someone is gracious enough to extend their emotional and intellectual labor to point it out to you despite the all the gaslighting and harassment they face, the LEAST you can do is have an open mind and release the defenses and previous ideals you’ve cultivated for the characters you love. Black fans don’t owe it to you to spell it out, but they sometimes do! Despite how white fans treat them in return.

You said “it’s not like the Kerch are made out to be a nation of great saintly people.” Great! So we agree everyone should be praised and criticized accordingly? And when it’s pointed out that a character exhibits bigotry we can acknowledge that as a part of the environment they’ve lived in and thus a trait of themselves?

You can enjoy any universe or the characters that come with it in full capacity, and no one is asking you to discard stories entirely because of the mistakes. Nikolai meant and means a lot to me because of the ideals that I crafted in my head from 16 up. He’s a comfort character! He was my vision of a masc-presenting adventurer who got by with wit and charm and aesthetics. The people who love him see something of themselves in him, or someone they love. But he’s still a product of his environment. Just because I don’t want that to be true doesn’t make it untrue. Ravka is fantasy Russia but .*•*~more idealistic*.~*. This doesn’t take away the fact that the foundation is...still Russia. He’s still a privileged white king thats actively oppressing minorities in the story by upholding the kingship as it is, and if he continues the path he’s on, he’s not much better than his heritage. I love Nina to death but she’s still the jarhead kid in your algebra class ready to fight anyone who says her country merits basic criticism. The kingdom of Ravka would need to be entirely dismantled and recreated. Nikolai might seem more progressive than the kings before him, but he’s got a lot to be reprimanded for, and rebuilding can’t even start until he acknowledges and unlearns that. Which...he hasn’t, not fully, and there’s no written proof of him doing so as of now.

Before I made myself research more I got just as defensive of him and others. I’m sure I’ll get defensive over another story and have to relearn everything all over again. It’s a process and you have to check yourself all the time. But it’s a step towards the ideals we want to actually live in. If I want to imagine Nikolai a better man, I have to start from the scraps I’m given.

So yes!! You’re allowed to draw up your own themes and ideals from the stories and reimagine the characters to fit a narrative that makes your heart happy. But it won’t change the reality of the canon universe. Zemenipearls enjoyed the grishaverse so much she made a fan account for it, participates in fan-led events that celebrate the characters (and sometimes leads those events herself), commissions artists to make fanart, and has ongoing works that delve into the expansive universe that better represents her and what she wants for black characters in fantasy. And she STILL gets shit for imploring a conversation about what we all want to ignore away. Why would she put so much energy into this if she didn’t care or believe in this story too? If you also care about grishaverse that much, shouldn’t we be willing to uplift and reimagine by starting where the work needs it most?

Okay I’ve said a LOT SORRY HHHHH BUT TO WRAP UP: Ignoring a fictional character’s faults or repercussions is one thing, and I’m not about to waste energy on making people hold characters in a book accountable. We all see how people treat the Darkling.

But when you participate in or ignore the bullying and threatening that happens to REAL people, when people JUSTIFY that shit as if it merits denying a person their humanity, THATS the actual harm being done. (Not saying you’ve done that, but the mindset I’m seeing here is what feeds into that compliance.)

If we have the energy to protect and coddle our fictional white boys and let them burn the sandbox down, I KNOW we have energy to respect and protect black fans who have just as much say in how they see the story or how they reimagine it. If you have the energy to accept/tolerate the stuff alarkling fans promote, I KNOW you have the energy to put your pride away and acknowledge fallacies in your own ideals for characters. And regardless!!! of whether you “agree” with the criticisms or not, does that mean the person who spoke up about the issue deserves to be harassed?

I’m gonna ask the white ya majority reading this to be humble and open your hearts up to change the way you do for fictional edgy white dudes. Y’all have the SPIRIT but then it funnels into the WRONG IDEAS!!! PLEASE use your heads you’d be unstoppable if you used your privilege to amplify the ones who need amplifying. I promise Cardan BlackBerry and Alesksxxander Marigold aren’t gonna be disappointed in you 😔🙏

[ethelbertpaul444-blog]

6 Modern Countries With Shockingly Backwards Views

Racism and prejudice are as American as apple pie and mass shootings. We like to think that some of those foreign countries we incessantly make fun of might be more refined neighbourhoods. What could possibly be wrong with a nation that yields its citizens universal healthcare and paid parental leave? Well, if you happen to belong to one of the minority groups those countries have arbitrarily chosen to hate, you’re about to find out. 6 In Japan, Some Common Professions Are Goal As Subhuman Garbage collectors are criminally underappreciated everywhere, but Japan takes it to the next position. Sure, you might have a few strong messages if your bin goes skipped, but Japanese sanitation laborers are ostracized simply for subsisting. They — along with other “unclean” works, like butchers and morticians — are categorized as burakumin . Shintoism and Buddhism consider them spiritually tainted, which left them at the bottom of the social totem pole for centuries. They’re sometimes called hinin ( literally “nonhuman” ), and the period for the lowest burakumin , eta , is translated into “abundance of filth.” A 19th-century legal document declares that any eta who committed a crime could be killed freely by samurai, because “an eta is worth one-seventh of an ordinary person.” You ever had someone whip out a calculator and calculate your worth mathematically? It’s hurtful.( We had some harsh math teachers .) Utagawa Kuniyoshi At least the school board took our surface on that “expulsion via samurai” debacle. div > Read Next 6 Things Hollywood Always Gets Wrong About Being A Teenager Despite many attempted alleviates, sexism against burakumin and their descendants persists. Burakumin are shunned by civilization and often forced to live in their own communities, which are inundated with hate forward. Indices of burakumin communities and calls originated circulating in the ‘7 0s and were soon proscribed, but some of those schedules have lived to this day, and people use them to screen everything from possible employees to future in-laws. Hinder in mind, they’re not just checking to see if ( breath ) their daughter is wedding a garbage man. Anyone who has ever been relevant to one is off-limits. That’s about 50 percent of the Japanese population. It’s like an part person of Emily Gilmores. Things are coming a bit better. One high-profile buraku activist does beings are contacting “the organizations activities” about discrimination more, and hate discussion constitutions are starting to be enforced. But to this day, if a buraku is asked what they do for a living, it’s common to lie — not out of pity, but to protect their own children. Nesnad/ Wikimedia Commons Which may have gotten much easier, since one industry is very open to burakumin : the Yakuza. Hug your local sanitation worker. 5 In Germany, Racist Stereotypes of Asians Are( Literally) Reinforced After gale up with some serious egg on its front thanks to that entire Holocaust thing, Germany became a quite progressive place. Today, culture and education is influenced by various categories of all-inclusive programs suited to its multicultural citizenship, about 20 percent of whom are foreign-born. One radical that isn’t quite so well-represented? East Asians. It’s hard to get an accurate count, since about half of Germany’s two million “Asian” citizens are from the Countries of the middle east( which is indeed part of Asia, but still ), but there are at most one million Asian-Germans in a country of 82 million people. Having apparently figured “what they can’t look won’t hurt ’em, ” Germany has become very cool with “re making fun of” Asians. In happening, they give out apportions for it. Exclusively, for this, an ad for a Wagner concert by Japanese conductor Kent Nagano. Scholz& Friends Berlin All the pomp and culture of the concert as reimagined by a morning zoo DJ. div > Yes, that’s Richard Wagner himself reimagined as your least-favorite uncle. This ad would provoke a tsunami of pique in the U.S ., but Germans predominantly didn’t maintenance. The one group of beings that did, a Berlin advertising organization called the Art Directors Club, awarded the ad a gold prize that time. Their spokesman said the ad “[ is] attractiveness and odd and presents openness and multiculturalism, ” and announced it “an excellent posting that goes beyond cultures to constitute a great work and that extremely strikingly and succinctly demonstrates Asian culture.” We’re gonna hazard a guess that the Art Directors Club doesn’t include a lot of Asians. 4 All Jews Are Welcome In Israel( Except Ethiopians ) div> In 1977, Israel decided to bring over 56,000 Jews from Ethiopia, and then gave them like a trendy domesticated that turned out to be more labour than they’d negotiated for. Thirty-five years after they were forced into ghettos and isolated from mainstream Israeli life, numerous canvas experienced Ethiopian Jews were dead last-place on the roster of desirable employees — 75 percent of non-immigrant Israelis wouldn’t allow their children to marry one, and fewer than 50 percentage reinforced mixed classrooms. Oh, and in 2016, Israel’s top police official said that it’s natural for police to be more suspicious of Ethiopian Jews ,~ ATAGEND as their “community is statistically involved in atrocity more than others.” Sound familiar? div > In 1996, it was discovered that all the blood Ethiopian Jews bequeathed to Magen David Adom( Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross) was calmly destroyed ,~ ATAGEND for fear of HIV infection. Blood donation has been a hot-button issue for Ethiopian Jews ever since. They were only granted permission to donate blood without restrictions in 2017 . It gets worse. A 2012 film revealed that Ethiopian Jewish gals were forced to make contraceptives if they wanted to keep their healthcare. Some didn’t even know what they were being given. As a reaction, Ethiopian immigrants’ birth rate fell by half in one decade. You’d think that, as a beings, Israelis would be a little less pleasant with the relevant recommendations of eugenics. Benny Voodoo/ Wikimedia Commons Proving once again the almost infinite dominance of humans to not read a damn thing from their experiences. 3 In The UK, Poles Are Viewed As Job-Taking “Vermin” We’ve all heard foolish gags about the Polish for reasonableness we never quite understood, but they’re deadly serious in the UK. A 2014 examine reported that 81 percentage of UK Poles digested physical or oral insult, or knew somebody who had. In 2013, 585 beings were arrested for hate crimes against the Polish. This outburst of antagonism seems to stem from Poland’s entrance into the EU in 2004, after which Poles began immigrating to the UK en masse — though not quite as massively as the tabloids would have you believe. The Sun formerly claimed that an entire Polish metropolitan up and moved to the UK. The metropoli indicted, likely on the grounds that anyone who’s ever been to a city council session knows how hard it is to get an part township to do anything, much less physically uproot. This paranoia about foreign workers infiltrating the country and making everyone’s positions is at least in part what contributed significantly to Brexit. After the vote, laminated placards that speak “Leave the EU/ No more Polish vermin” were found in Cambridgeshire. div > Laminated, “theyre saying”! That means they were super serious . Kathleen Gaynor Youve gotta be genuinely committed to jingoistic hatred to take that shit to a print shop. 2 South Korea Has A Gravely Shambled Up View Of People With Dark Skin Until lately, racism was an tacit way of life in South Korea. Biracial prototypes were called “mongrels, ” the 200,000 children of “marriage migrants” were often treated as second-class citizens, and a scandalou number of businesses can still legally refuse to serve natives. In South Korean media, black people face the same various kinds of stereotypes you’d expect from a Civil-War-era KKK pamphlet. We kid you not TAGEND Via Jezebel American culture exports arent always something to take pride in. div > We’re not plucking obscure content from the ‘7 0s. This was on state-run Tv as of 2017 TAGEND MBC Yeolum Entertainment SBS Entertainment So to recap, thats a shot at black people, Native Americans, and Polynesians in a single outfit. Like a Swiss horde knife of racism. section > Anti-discrimination monies designed to ease the abundant casual racism have recently been introduced, and the person lastly aimed obligatory HIV-screening policy for foreign-born works in 2017. The UN likewise requested that the person stop using prejudiced words like “pure” and “mixed” blood back in 2007. So, you are familiar, that’s something. 1 Concentration Camps Still Exist … For The Roma In Italy The Roma have traditionally not been well-liked by, well, anybody. But they’ve been frighteningly suppressed in Europe, and lately. The Czech Republic forcibly fumigated Roma until 2007, France evicted over 10,000 Roma from their agreements in 2013, Swedish police were found to have a secret register of 4,000( predominantly Roma) refers the same year, and Denmark cleared out 25 Roma tents in 2 months, after making them illegal in 2017. It seems like an unnecessarily large-scale fuss over the working group that doesn’t even crack 2 percent of the European population. div > But that’s all good-for-nothing compared to Italy. In 2008, Silvio Berlusconi’s government declared that the fact that there is Roma colonizations( one one-quarter of a percent of the population) constituted a state of emergency, and henceforth required that all Roma be fingerprinted and ejected from their settlements into “nomad camps.” What do you think the likelihoods are that those tents were in breathtaking Tuscan villas? Surprise: They were filthy, vermin-infested shanties, lacking in even the most basic services. This was -AOK with the person or persons of Italy, 86 percentage of whom have an unfavorable view of Roma ,~ ATAGEND as well as with the courts, who affirmed discrimination against Roma acceptable “because they are thieves.” Again, this seems like a number of countries that should be a bit more attentive of xenophobia-based roundups, but hey, as long as the civilizes run on time. Kent Nagano is really fairly the conductor, give it a listen . i > b> Support Cracked’s journalism with a trip to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you . i > b> For more, check out 5 Shocking Laws Modern Countries Had Until A Few Years Ago and 5 Shockingly Progressive Program From Insane Dictatorships . i > b> It would be a shame if you didn’t follow us on Facebook . i > b> Read more: http :// www.cracked.com/ article_2 5483 _6-modern-countries-with-shockingly-backwards-views. html http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/06/08/6-modern-countries-with-shockingly-backwards-views/