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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If you were to write Lila would you keep her being a con artist criminal with multiple identities but hinted at/revealed it earlier than S5 or would you cut that part down of her character entirely ?
It would really depend on how much space I had to fill. Gabriel is not the kind of villain that you can draw out forever. His story needs to have a clearly planned ending right from the start. In fact, I think they drew him out at least a season too long. So, if I also had to fill eight seasons, I could see myself going the Lila route. I'd just make a few changes. Off the top off my head, here's how I'd handle serious villain Lila as opposed to what canon wrote, which is petty school bully Lila who is entirely unbelievable as a serious villain.
First of all, Lila wouldn't be introduced at the end of season one. While her and Gabriel probably need to have some overlap, that's way too soon. In my version, she shows up at the start of season four and she'd be heavily toned down. We'd know that something was off about her, we may even keep the liar thing, but it would be a lot more subtle. Lies like, "Ladybug rescued me" and "I got to go backstage at a Jagged Stone concert" instead of "Ladybug is my bff" and "Jagged Stone wrote a song about me." Her goal would no longer be gaining peons, but instead gaining true close friends who like and trust her. The reason for this is that Lila is replacing Optigami as Mayura's last sentimonster.
See, season three ended with all those identity reveals and most of the revealed identities are in the same class. That's curious, so it makes perfect sense for Nathalie and Gabriel to want someone undercover in Adrien's class, but they can't do it. So Nathalie makes a sentikid of her own, gives her the power of manipulation, and sends her off to try to find Ladybug and/or Chat Noir by whatever means necessary.
This would give a clear reason for Gabriel to trust Lila, a clear reason for Lila to know all about the miraculous, and a clear reason for Lila to hate Ladybug. In this version, I wouldn't do Nathalie's lackluster redemption. Instead, Nathalie stays bad right up to her death. Perhaps her last act is getting the butterfly to her daughter and ordering her to get revenge on Ladybug and Chat Noir should Gabriel fail. After all, Gabriel can't wield more than six miraculous at once, so it makes sense for him to send Nathalie off with at least one of them while he enacts his master plan just in case it fails.
That's just one potential path to take. I also like the idea of having Lila be someone who came to Paris in order to find the miraculous, but who has no ties to the Agrestes. That would require some pretty big changes to her character, though, as I can't see that type of character caring about things like dating Adrien or being a model or all the other crap that has nothing to do with gaining a miraculous and everything to do with popularity and social clout. Lila canonically doesn't know that Gabriel even has a miraculous until the final of season four, so she basically just lucked into finding one instead of doing anything logical to find it because this show has no clue how to actually write smart, clever characters.
In summary, I'm totally fine with complex, master-manipulator Lila, it's just hard to figure out the best way to make her work when we don't know anything about her backstory or motivation. The version proposed above is just the best I can do to fit her into the role canon placed her in. A role I could easily see later seasons flat out ignoring.
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I think it's interesting that - in order to make his "free-thinking Jedi" characters hold any semblance of rationality in their arguments - Dave Filoni needs to resort to artificially dehumanizing the other Jedi and painting them all with the same "we dogmatically worship protocol" brush.
He does this with Huyang in the recent Ahsoka episode.
"Lolz he's so narrow-minded, preachy and by-the-book, unable to think outside the box, just like the Jedi in the Prequels."
My first reaction was being amused at the fact that Filoni had to resort to making the Jedi Order's ideals and rules be embodied by a literal machine for his anti-Jedi headcanon to start making sense.
But then I remembered: Huyang isn't just any droid.
In The Clone Wars, he had a sassy personality, he had a pep in his step, he had a sense of humor...
This character was human in his behavior, he was fun and whimsical.
But now he's been reduced to, I dunno, "Jedi C-3PO"? Basically?
"Ha! He's blunt and unsympathetic because he's a droid, but it's funny because the Jedi were the same, they were training themselves to be tactless, emotionless droids."
And Filoni does this with Mace Windu too, in Tales of the Jedi.
Mace, who brought a lightsaber to the throat of a planetary leader to defend the endangered Zillo Beast...
... and who went waaay past his mandate by mischievously sneaking around Bardottan authorities and breaking into the Queen's quarters because he felt something bad was afoot...
... was reduced to being an almost droid-like, rule-parotting, protocol purist who sticks to his instructions (and is implied to be willing to let a murder go unsolved so he can get a promotion).
I mentioned this at the end of my first post on Luke in The Last Jedi... while changes in personality do happen overtime and can be explained in-universe... if you don't show us that progression and evolution and just leave us without that context, that'll break the suspension of disbelief, for your audience.
Here, we have two characters with a different (almost caricatural) personality than the one they were originally shown to have.
Now... we could resort to headcanons, to make it all fit together.
We could justify Huyang's tone shift 'cause "Order 66 changed him". And we could make explanations about TotJ's Mace:
Being younger and thus more ambitious and a stickler for the rules, and only really becoming more flexible after getting his seat on the Council and gaining more maturity.
Being such a teacher's pet in the episode because we're seeing him through the eyes of a notorious unreliable narrator, Dooku.
There'd be nothing wrong with opting to go with either of those headcanons to cope with this. After all, Star Wars is meant to help you get creative.
But the problem I encounter is that:
Filoni has an anti-Jedi bias, so the above headcanons clearly wouldn't really track with his intended narrative.
We'd be jumping through hoops to extrapolate and fill in what is, essentially, inconsistent characterization, manufactured to make Ahsoka and Dooku shine under a better light.
And that sours whatever headcanon I come up with.
Edit:
Also, yeah, as folks have been saying in the tags... wtf is "Jedi protocol"? The term isn't ever mentioned in the movies, I skimmed through dialog transcripts of TCW, never saw it there.
So it's almost as if - if Filoni wasn't draining characters like Mace and Huyang of all humanity and nuance - his point about "the Jedi were too detached and lost their way, but not free-thinkers like Qui-Gon, Dooku and Ahsoka" wouldn't really hold much water.
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