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majorbaby · 2 years

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hello I would like to hear your thoughts on himbo trapper

Thank you for the question! it's a long one: TL;DR: I don’t hate himbo Trapper, sometimes I even enjoy it, but I think it’s a shallow interpretation and I’m a bit defensive of him because I think there’s plenty of evidence in the source to support a reading of him as being intelligent. Also I blabbed on about some of the other popular fanon characterizations of him that I see as being similarly flat.

On its face, i’m a fan of the himbo trapper concept and i see where it comes from:

He can’t play solitaire

Hawkeye: “You big, dumb strong silent types”

And imo, the strongest piece of evidence: when it comes to shenanigans/schemes, if he’s not the straight brawn to hawkeye’s brain (requiem for a lightweight), it’s always the case that hawkeye that comes up with the plan and trapper who helps him execute it - too many examples to name because this is practically every single episode they appear in

And for fun, I’m fine with the stereotype because on the whole, it’s meant to be a positive thing. We have women to thank for taking a masculinized version of the term ‘bimbo’ - which has always been a pejorative hurled at women who are conventionally hot and therefore ‘stupid’, sexually promiscuous or just enticing to men - and immediately elevating it to the point where it’s not just seen as positive, it’s seen as highly desirable. A himbo will treat you right and won’t manipulate you, while also being a hot piece of ass - imo Trapper fits some of that criteria on screen but tbf, he’s also cheating on his wife and I think we’re meant to assume that she’s unaware of that, which I think is somewhat manipulative of him. Idk, I don’t have enough information about that.

But there’s a few pieces of his characterization that are in direct conflict with the himbo archetype - as a society I think we value STEM a lot, so there’s this general idea that people in the medical field are ‘smarter’ than your average person but at the same time fatphobia, racism, ableism and misogyny are still rampant in medical settings leading to entire populations receiving sub-par care so… I don’t think you must accept that doctor = an intellectual in general. There’s different ways to be smart! Your having gone to medical school clearly doesn’t exempt you from being a critical consumer of all the medical texts you’ve read and being able to situate them in a socio-economic and political context when providing care.

All of this to preface my saying that: he’s a surgeon. He’s at least intelligent enough in one way to be a surgeon and a good one at that, while recognizing that that isn’t the only thing I’m basing my argument on.

He’s emotionally intelligent:

In Ceasefire he has the opportunity to gloat about his being right about there being no end to the conflict after having been openly doubtful the whole episode, but he knows that it’s not the time and he even encourages Hawkeye to remain optimistic – a truly brainrot-inducing moment (affectionate) if there ever was one

Operation Noselift he’s just as earnest as Hawkeye trying to get Private Someguy (id remember his name) to accept himself as he is without going under the knife

Check-up don’t even talk to me about Check-up!!! Trapper could’ve accepted “you let me lean on you” as is. I mean, I think they both know what Hawkeye means by that and so do we the audience but I think his “What?” is making space for Hawkeye to be Hawkeye and spill his guts about his feelings because that is what Hawkeye needs; he does the same with Margaret, albeit while she is drunk off her ass, later on in the episode which is a nice moment for them because she reveals something (she’s playing house with Frank because he’s around) that I don’t think she’s ready to accept for herself, but Trapper listens to her.

Bombed which gave me Trapper/Margaret brainrot, yeah he starts off hitting on her but he stops when she asks him too and he still picks up that she needs comfort, makes her laugh and reassures her that he’s coming from a good place. That is what I get from his suggestion that they cuddle and I think Margaret does too because she accepts.

Kim - we learn he can be emotionally vulnerable even with his wife who, up til this point, is represented as something of a thorn in his side at worst, an ambiguous off-screen figure at best.

These are some of the examples that stand out to me but there are many examples of his good bedside manner and empathy that he freely extends to one-off characters like Young-Hi and George.

He’s pretty much toe-to-toe with Hawkeye in terms of witty dialogue, it’s just that he doesn’t often get the last word nor the spotlight. The role of the Trapper character is that of a follower to Hawkeye��s lead in their comedic and heroic scenes. Like if he comes off as being not quite as smart as Hawkeye (which I wouldn’t say is the case) then I think it’s a matter of their being deuteragonist and protagonist respectively, and the show playing up the ‘best surgeon in the army’ angle for Hawkeye in part as a way to save him from being disciplined for insubordination multiple times.

And finally, I think it’s worth mentioning that at the onset of American involvement in the Korean War, the American public was generally supportive. That support eroded over time but I do think that the American government, in the 50s and also to this day, goes to significant lengths to circulate pro-war propaganda and convince its citizens that war is only way. During the Gelbart years (S1-4) there was strong, consistent anti-military messaging that extended to critique of traditional masculinity in general – this frequently manifests in how Trapper and Hawkeye are positioned on moral high ground vs. Frank, Margaret and the military. So like, Trapper was a part of all that. He was, at the very least, in league with the popular ACAB Hawkeye, Queer Hawkeye and general Rabble Rouser Hawkeye that are favourites of the fandom – I think it takes a certain degree of intelligence, whether emotional or intellectual, to resist and undermine state propaganda, especially at your own personal expense. And I’m giving that to Trapper because he was around when the show was aware of itself being specifically anti-US-imperialism, rather than just generally anti-war or even anti-death later on - which isn’t ‘less smart’ it’s just more vague and there’s less of a specific effort made by the state to brainwash citizens into thinking otherwise. There is a moment where Trapper appears to betray his moral and political (i’m using ‘political’ very loosely here) leanings when he goes to (presumably) kill the soldier in Radar’s Report but that is by far the exception not the rule and furthermore I’m not saying that people who are duped by the state and/or corporate entities into buying into the cycle of violence are “stupid” but I do think you have to actively fight against such indoctrination and one of the ways of doing that, aside from just being a compassionate person, is by learning to think critically for yourself. And I’m assuming Trapper has done one or both because he is as consistent as Hawkeye is in living those values. It helps that they have good chemistry and they’re bored and sticking it to the army is fun for them but imo they go pretty far sometimes just ‘for fun’.

So, Trapper is a technically competent surgeon, is emotionally intelligent and has come to reject some of the values that are pretty well ingrained in the society he’s grown up in. I don’t hate himbo trapper but I don’t think he’s stupid. Far from it.

Here are my less objective thoughts on the himbo trapper phenomenon and also have some straightforward trapper defense squad messaging: I’m generally interested in pointing out trends in fandom, although I admit that my tolerance for content I don’t vibe with has lessened significantly the more time I’ve been active in mash fandom (we’re coming up on one year of straight obsession) – but from what I can remember about the popular, general portrayals of Trapper in fandom that I don’t see as having much footing in the canon: he’s a himbo, he broke Hawkeye’s heart, he’s homophobic (HATE), he’s hypersexual, he can be violent, he ‘doesn’t do feelings’, he’s not good with words… everyone is entitled to their opinion but the more I reflect on Trapper, the more I watch his episodes, the more I’ve come to question a lot of these interpretations. I’ve already talked about him being a himbo, I’m not convinced he broke Hawkeye’s heart any more than Kyung-Soon or Carlye and I am certain it’s not intended to be a romantic breakup, he’s in league with Hawkeye in George – I’m not telling you what you can and can’t indulge in but, yk Hawkeye actually has a line to the effect of ‘i live with two dudes don’t call me a fairy’ and that’s got way more of a no-homo vibe to it than anything Trapper ever says.

He’s not any more sexual than Hawkeye is, not even because he has a big dick. Hawkeye and BJ both throw punches at some point and I also wouldn’t argue that that makes them ‘violent’ in general, but Trapper who doesn’t do it at all is the violent one. There are plenty of ways to be vulnerable and forthcoming and emotional without spilling your guts and anyway anyone could read as repressed when you hold them up next to Hawkeye Pierce. An emotionally repressed man could not extend an olive branch to Frank Burns nor could he write his wife an earnest letter in the hopes that he will be able to adopt and raise an orphan child nor could he be shown to have such a clear investment in outcomes during the episodes where there’s no clear, tangible goal to Hawkeye’s schemes.

This has turned into a critique of some of the more uncharitable interpretations of the character, on the list of which ‘himbo’ isn’t really all that bad. But I still think it flattens his character somewhat, like all these other interpretations do, and I can easily pick out a few examples of his canonical portrayal which challenge it. So while I’m not denouncing it completely because I think it can be fun and in the grand scheme of things, people can like whatever they want to like, I am sometimes inclined to gently push back on it.

#it just so happens to be #trapper tuesday #but i let myself really sink my teeth into this as a reward for shipping a huge product on time #trapper john mcintyre #mash #meta #trapper meta #majorbaby.txt #replies

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christinabarrett-readinglog · 1 year

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“Identity Crisis - All You Need to Know About Identity Crisis” page 13

It says “it is normal to want to hang on to your parents” as “the child in you.”

One of the biggest things in the world is about when younger people are pulled in to people a good age to be their parents.

It’s actually a big desire of mine that’s been already pulled out and can’t be hidden and cultivated totally in private like before.

I wonder if other people have the same desire and why people think I shouldn’t have it if it doesn’t have to do with any unforeseen complications to do with my entire Reese on my mom side.

I think even older adults have this desire, and that’s why the very old is people always dreaming and then some of them you see them decaying much later on maybe towards 95.

If you want to be famous, it’s not always great. I guess if you are offering attention, people will magnet to you. However, they expect you to actually go through with your signals. Racism is big now, and, whether or not you know it, it affects the cycle and building blocks of life, for everyone and yourself, in some way. Especially the most highly regarded individuals and types of people always have it as a big motivation in their life for some miraculous reasons. I guess they just don’t know then other races have high self-esteem and just want to talk to white people as well, and then mixed race people want to be accepted as the highest race.

Yeah, I remember I’ve always felt a poll to my parents, but they died from illness over four years and two years later my grandma who talk to me more than anyone else. I’ve sort of let go because I am technically an adult as at age 18 starting college, so. I think it’s just cool in the right thing to do and I already did it, too, I mean be an adult at 18 and not feel any ties like I am still a dependent. I thought life would be fine, but I didn’t like that. I missed out earlier in life like it was my fault, and this book actually talks about that. It says that everyone’s looking at you or whatever something like that. If you’re interested your face supposedly stops growing at age 35 I think. I think your brain starts growing at five. I moved from Fort Lauderdale by Miami when I was five starting kindergarten. I felt really confused. I honestly don’t know if it’s because the teacher was African-American, but she didn’t “mess me up.” we moved to north eastern Florida to Jacksonville a big city, maybe the second biggest city in Florida, though Fort Lauderdale is probably the most popular and best. That’s actually where the hospital I was born in is.

I have big hopes well, if I had my dream come true before I die I was hoping that I could get love from someone who seem like a parent to me. I wish someone would pick me up and carry me around and it would be fun if they did it a lot for anyone. It’s actually a big joke in Cleveland that we’d all have “mothers.” That’s so funny and one reason I moved back here, the humor in this area. You know that life for us in generation X or whatever was going around chasing after baby boomers. Ha ha ha.

You’re wondering about appealing to some of you wondering about the baby boomers feel good or maybe it’s just interesting and stimulating and good to sort out and not have to confront face on. You should prepare and not just go in blindly. You might be ready in a lot of ways, but you know you can do better or maybe not worry too much or something but you should probably check yourself if you are not worrying and still stressed. You shouldn’t expect too much but you should work on making it the ideal as reality may be for your kids! That’s best.

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bamf-jaskier · 4 years

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Hello ! So i know you've talked about racism in the witcher fandom before and i have a question. When reading fics i am struck by the fact that very little fics portray Triss as a woman of color, as she appears in the show and an overwhelming amount portray her as a red head. So my question is this: is it racism or just a general dislike of the show and another sign that fans seem to think that the witcher 3 is the best ?

It’s racism. I am not going to sugarcoat it or say it’s because fans just “prefer” game Triss. They prefer her because of their implicit bias. There is a post about choosing to right in the Netflix Verse but keep Game Triss Here. If there is a fic that is set in the Netflix Verse and uses Jaskier instead of Dandelion, describes Geralt with no beard and as, well, Henry Cavill, and even sometimes, if you are lucky, uses Anya Chalotra as Yennefer but then uses Game Triss? That is making the specific choice to exclude a black character which if most of the fic is set in the Netflix verse, that is a very specific choice rooted in racism, whether on accident or on purpose.

While the game was popular, the fandom didn’t rise-up or become mainstream on Tumblr until the tv show came out. If you want evidence of that, just go look at Tumblr’s 2020 review. They had an entire section for The Witcher, it was #13 on the top 20 things tagged on Tumblr in 2020, Geraskier was the 4th most popular ship out of 100 (Yenralt didn’t even make the list), Jaskier was the 3rd most popular character, Geralt was the 5th, Yennefer was the 24th (yeah there’s a problem here too).

And if you want even MORE evidence of this, here’s tumblr’s year in review for 2019 JUST for video games, not even overall things or fandom. The Witcher isn’t even in the top 50. It also wasn’t on Tumblr year in review in 2018, 2017, or 2016. Before 2020, The Witcher never made it into these lists, the tv show made the fandom we see now.

As well let’s look at some of the fanfiction stats from AO3. 11,805 out of 21,208, aka 56% of Witcher fanfiction is explicitly tagged as the Netflix series. However, I know that many fans like to just use The Witcher - All Media Types tag and not the show one (I know I use that) so let’s look at timeline as well. 18,900 out of 21,208, aka 89% of ALL Witcher fanfiction was written after the show was released. Even if you have tried your gosh-darn best to avoid it, the trope and fandom from the Netflix series have seeped into most people’s perception of The Witcher. So again, re-stating my point, using all the Netflix characters in fanfiction BUT Triss, is anti-blackness, plain and simple.

And a lot of fans online have used the excuse, they aren’t racist, they just don’t think she looks like the character. They say things like “it’s the same thing people said when Daniel Craig was cast as James Bond”...but it’s not. When you say a Black woman doesn’t “look right” for a role you are saying black people have no place in your story. Re-evaluate yourself when you makes those comments and think about the company you are keeping. Because you are keeping company with literal racists who use the same phrases and have the same opinions as you.

A post about some of the backlash actor’s faced here:

Here’s an article about the harassment

Now a Reddit thread about Triss would look better with straight hair

More Reddit

But “Oh” you say, that’s just specific to Reddit, Tumblr would NEVER be racist.

Well here’s a fun collection of posts!

An Artist who draws Racist Caricatures of Triss

A post about how people refuse to talk about fandom racism

How fandom racism isn’t just fiction vs reality

A post about shipping trends being racist (and people harassing OP in the chat)

blank-slate characters and the racial bias they deal with

Specifically a post about Yenralt and Racism (think about those Tumblr ranking while reading this...)

Another post about people refusing to talk about fandom racism

I just gave a few examples but look through the blogs of anyone whose been talking about fandom racism and you will see so many posts and examples.

The Witcher fandom has a racism problem. It’s not just Yennefer or shipping Yenralt. It extends to how the fandom treats Netflix Triss as I have talked about here, it extends to how there’s practically no content or more specifically, engagement for characters of color. It’s about how the fandom keeps pushing POC out to the point where people I love are leaving the fandom because they aren’t welcome here.

If you aren’t willing to listen to POC when they tell you something is racist, when they tell you something is wrong. Fuck off.

I encourage everyone if they haven’t to read the article Who Actually Gets to “Escape” Into Fandom?

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lizzybeth1986 · 3 years

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Is it just me, or is QB having some racist and sexist undertones? I honestly don't understand what this book is supposed to be. Also, why do people want Poppy to be an LI? Am I missing something important here? Is it secretly a masterpiece exposing American nepotism and hierarchy?

(Note: I believe this ask may or may not have been a continuation to this one, since I got both at the same time)

TW: talk about racism

So sorry for the delay in responding to this one, Anon! I'd been working on my essay project so this one took a little time.

I honestly think the point of Queen B as a story was really nothing more than a "Mean Girls" type look into High School. That's literally supposed to be the appeal, IMO. There's a rank newcomer, who comes to a posh school, and has to beat the most popular girls to get to the top. And honestly I've been told the story seemed to be written more for the #BadGirl MC than the #GoodGirl one.

Which is why the storyline they wrote for Zoey, and the way they approached it too, was very much out of line. It wasn't just that Zoey was subject to an attack after the reveal that she'd be subjected to racial profiling, or that a character that both the writers and a lot of the fandom loved was actively encouraging this racist attack on her. It was that if Zoey's story had any value to her writers...they wouldn't just push that forward with a paltry line from Zoey's mouth about how Belvoire was more classist than racist. They would BUILD UP to that. They would have us explore what she has to go through in her public life in multiple ways, make a distinction between what she faces as a result of not being from old money and what she faces as a black girl, and actually work in focusing the section following Bacchanalia, on her, not on the MC's desire to treat her as her walking talking closet.

(ETA: @thefirstcourtesan also tells me that Zoey and Poppy were pitted against each other financially as well - eg. A diamond option where you could only choose between the two. So romanticizing Poppy would also lead to Zoey being hit financially. I can't even put into words how fucking shady and insidious that is)

One thing that I did like though was that Zoey stood her ground after that event, and the MC had to really work to get her back even as a friend. Zoey knew her worth. She knew she deserved better than the paltry apologies and excuses the MC was putting on the table. Not many MCs have had to put in that level of effort esp when they act shitty themselves (TRR MC, hello?). Plus I thought that scene with the Professor where they can advise the MC to be honest about the hurt she caused rather than making excuses or explaining was very well done (even though at the time I felt the pivot to their relationship was too soon for my liking, but that's maybe just me).

Again...this is advice from someone who is no longer playing, so there may be not much value to it - but I'd suggest we keep observing how Zoey gets treated and whether they allow Poppy more space than her. Just because a female LI seems to have a few good scenes in one book doesn't mean the team has 100% changed their views or how they choose to write the character. Very often in the greater scheme of things, the stuff we loved so much are really crumbs tossed before the team goes back to the status quo. I've seen my fair share of LIs who'd been treated nicely for a diamond scene or two/a chapter or two, before their teams gave them worse treatment than usual. And unfortunately I'm sure they might do the same to Zoey, especially in the light of that Q&A from the team where two of them have mentioned Poppy as a favourite character, and no one seemed to find much worth talking about with Zoey besides her clothes. It never bodes well when the writers' interviews themselves sideline their prominent black female character to highlight their fave white/nonblack WOC one.

This is a thing I keep coming back to when I talk about Creator's Pets in PB's books - the "favourite" character who gets the lion's share of attention, writing and plot, tends to overwhelmingly be white, or exoticizable brown. And the writing itself is deliberately skewed in their favour, which results in other characters - who are maybe even more valuable to the story and more interesting to boot - losing out even before they get developed.

What may happen to Zoey in the future narratively, has also happened to other WOC (notably black but there is at least one dark-skinned Asian woman in this list) who are official LIs. It's one of the major reasons I hate "Make _____ an LI" campaigns because there are occasions (and this was one) where to do that the fandom would have to actively ignore the female LI that was THERE. Sure, some may come up with the excuse that they were frustrated by the lack of attention on Zoey, but I've seen people go gaga over white women who were even more poorly written lmao. You want fair treatment for female LIs? Then maybe learn not to ignore the ones they're presenting first.

#ask me #ask lizzy #zoey wades #tw: mentions of racism

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ye4gerismarchives · 3 years

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what happens when mikasa, your agent and close friend, decides to set you up on a blind date?

an: feeling embarrassed because i didn’t get any requests (YET) for my royal romance event. so, i’m gonna pretend i got one…from me! jk y’all, i’m not petty like that but i’m just gonna assume that maybe there was a little confusion. here’s a “sample”. if you’re feeling this, feel free to hit my inbox!

tags: prince!jean, actress!reader, black! reader, fem!reader, modern au, racism

“Another one, Mikasa? Really?”

“Y/N, it’ll work! You’ll like this guy!”

Mikasa said that every time and each time that lie just became worse. You were an actress on a network show. You had finally achieved your goal. You were happy and didn’t really care if you became Hollywood famous because you love what you do. Ever since you announced to Mikasa that you were happy with where you were at, she’s been setting up you on blind dates. She thinks she’s a matchmaker because she bagged her childhood friend and popular wannabe rapper- Eren Yeager. You always joked that she didn’t bag anything other than a desperate white boy but you were still happy for her.

To Mikasa, that meant “I want a boyfriend- NOW”. You know who she set you up with the first time? This psycho named Floch. Floch was fine…He had a nice body and this beautiful red hair but that should have been a red flag. You and Floch stayed together for maybe 2 and a half years and during that time, you realized how crazy he was. We not even going to go into detail about that.

The next person you met was Onyankopon, a man from the Ashanti region of Ghana. He was nice but he was too closed off for your likening. Personally, you felt like you scared him off.

Mikasa had crossed the line when she offered to give you the number of her older cousin, Levi. The man looked 13 but was actually in his 40s.

Disappointed, Mikasa gave up on finding you a partner and you never went to search for one yourself. Seeing how excited she was gave you hope.

“Ok…I’ll go on this date for you and this is the last one! If it goes wrong, Mikasa, I’m firing you!”

“Mikasa is setting me up on another date. I love her, Connie, but she’s a little crazy. You know the type of people she’s set me up with?”

Connie was helping his best friend, His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince of Paridis. Or in other words Jean. Kirstein the was family name but he rarely used it.

“I thought Colt was a nice guy…” Connie said quietly. Colt was a nice guy. Jean had been with so many people (thanks Mikasa) but Colt felt like the one. After Marley and Paradis figured out their issues, the people slowly came together as one. Colt was a Marleyian soldier who came to Paradis frequently. Somehow, he met Mikasa and ended up with Jean. After months of dating, the press started writing articles about Jean’s private life and added false narratives about him. This was normal but it was worse this time. There were some things said about his relationship with Colt that put both their lives in danger. Jean would receive a letter telling him that Colt had died. There was no cause of death noted and to this day, Jean still doesn’t know. He likes to believe that Colt was still alive. Maybe he was forced to stop seeing him.

Noticing his silence, Connie opens his mouth again. “I think this will work. Obviously, whoever it is, they won’t replace Colt but Mikasa sounds really eager about this whole thing. Just be nice, Jean. No one will ever replace Colt but you have to let it go.”

Jean sighed. He hated those three little words but he needed to let Colt go. “I’ll try my best.”

Jean had gotten to the restaurant first. Mikasa had a reservation prepared for him and his date. Jean had worn a black suit with a white button up shirt that wasn’t completely buttoned up. He took off his suit jacket to seem casual. However, without his date here, he felt cold.

It took you ten minutes to get to the restaurant and you felt so embarrassed. You were never late- this was Mikasa’s fault. She was fussing about your hair and your outfit. “It’s just a date!” “Yeah, a date I set up. You will not embarrass me tonight!”

You checked in with a waiter and they led you to the back of the restaurant. The waiter left quickly without saying anything. They didn’t offer you any menu- so you thought that was strange. When you got a good look at your date, you put the piece together.

“Oh shoot,” you say before curtsying, “Your Royal Highness.”

“H-hey, don’t be so loud about it.” Jean gets up from his seat and lightly lifts you up from your curtsy. “I’m so sorry, I was late. Mikasa, she-“

“It’s alright. You’ve told me everything I need to know. Let’s sit down.”

Jean snakes an arm around your waist and you feel your face get hot. He leads you to what is supposed to be your seat. He lets go of your waist to pull your chair for you. “Thank you,” you say sheepishly. Jean smiles at you as you sit. “Of course,” he responds.

Jean sits down before opening his mouth again. “You can just call me Jean. This is a private affair- you don’t need to use titles or anything.” You feel even more embarrassed. “O-oh! Again, I’m sorry, Your- I mean, Jean.”

It felt weird to call the CROWN PRINCE, YOUR NEXT KING, by his birth name. “Did Mikasa screw you over too? Or is this your first experience with Mikasa the self-made Matchmaker?” Jean asks. You could see that he was trying to make you comfortable.

“Unfortunately, I’ve known Mikasa my whole life. She’s screwed up a lot of things but dating has to be the worse. It’s all her boyfriend’s, Eren, fault though. He’s gotten into her head.”

‘I’ll have to thank Eren,’ Jean thought to himself. You were beautiful. He had never seen anyone like you before. He was used to seeing people like him- white and…just white. Jean hoped his thoughts weren’t weird but he liked that you looked different and you seem different. His previous dates were over the top but you were just trying to be yourself. He liked that.

18 months later, you were engaged to Jean. Your first date was successful. Jean couldn’t stop thinking about you and wanted to see you all the time. However, you tried playing hard to get. You didn’t want to seem desperate.

Jean clearly won you over and now you were his fiancée. It came with consequences however.

‘Actress Y/N L/N’s exotic DNA will RUIN the royal family.’

‘Jean’s girl grew up around gang activity. Let’s hope she won’t steal anything during their “engagement”.’

‘Y/N’s not the proper girl she wants you to believe she is.’

It hurt so much. You and Jean managed to keep your relationship a secret until the engagement. Because you were so happy with him, you didn’t think about the negatives.

During the engagement, Jean’s family did their best to protect you by offering counseling and even denouncing tabloids. Those befits went away when you got married.

Despite your high positions, it was you and Jean against the world. Jean was well aware of this and was willing to sacrifice everything if it ensured your happiness and safety.

#black!reader #jean kirstein x reader #jean x black!reader #aot x black! reader #aot x reader

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grxceblqckthxrn · 4 years

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TDA characters as types of tiktokers

y’all KNOW i’m bored when i’m doing this shit lmao

i’ll get around to doing the other TSC characters eventually TDA was just the first to come to mind also if you’re not actively on tiktok some of what i say might not make sense ahaha

also i named some tiktokers who yall can use for reference for some of them and from what i’ve seen they’re all fairly unproblematic so you should check them out!!

EMMA CARSTAIRS

okay so she’s DEFINITELY super popular and she uses her platform for good

she’s really funny and a lot of her audios go viral posts videos of her dancing saying that she cant dance but she’s actually really good at it

6M followers and growing fast

hypes up her boyfriend’s account ALL the time

calls out misogynistic/racist tiktokers through duets and KEEPS THEIR TAG IN THE CAPTION

she is not afraid of starting drama lmao

occasionally hops on POV and transition trends but its usually satire

emma can’t act for shit lmao

super active on tiktok and has a spam account

people are always asking her to drop the skin care routine but she doesn’t have one??

*pushes Zara down* “and no one’s gonna help her?? WOW some world we live in”

JULIAN BLACKTHORN

there’s no way he doesnt have an art account lmao

a lot of his paintings go viral but 90% of his comments are 14 year old girls thirsting over him

yall know that pottery guy on tiktok?? the cute one?? (i searched up his account just for this post he’s @/daxnewman769) that’s the best way to describe him

literally all the famous tiktokers commission him

probably has like 4M followers lmao

will occasionally make about how respecting women doesn’t make you a “simp”

doesn’t get into tiktok drama tho

posts candid videos of emma and all his jealous 14 year old fans get so pressed but he shuts down anyone who says anything bad about her

sometimes does painting or drawing tutorials and he’s really good at teaching stuff lmao

CRISTINA ROSALES

omg okay so like yall know those really pretty girls on tiktok who are literal models and are always dropping tips on how to frame your face for pictures and best clothes and poses and whatever ( @/ameliezilber is the first person that came to mind as an example)

thats her

alot of her content is just for the aesthetic

BLING EFFECT

GRWM’s all the time

10 step skin care routine

GOOD VIBES

has a pretty decent following?? like at least 2 million

has a spam but it’s exactly the same as her main lol

also calls out problematic tiktokers but not by name

her entire account is full of body positivity and does a bunch of stuff on loving yourself

sometimes does POVs and all the comments are like “@ netflix hire her rn”

sometimes posts crack videos with emma and cute vids with mark and kieran

MARK BLACKTHORN

does a lot of reaction videos and duets

a lot of his videos go viral but he doesn’t have a huge following like maybe 800k

everyone still knows him

gets at least twenty “are you wearing only one contact” comment about his eyes every post

he’s really funny without even realizing it

sometimes goes inactive for weeks at a time and just forgets that tiktok exists lmao

shows off kieran and cristina ALL THE MF TIME AND EVERYONE IS SO JEALOUS LIKE HOW ARE ALL OF THEM HOT

KIERAN

doesnt have a tiktok lmao sorry

but shows up so much on mark’s and cristina’s that a lot of people know who he is

DIANA WRAYBURN

unironically does POVs but is actually good at them??

lots of videos talking about the struggles of minorities like LGBTQ+ and POC and women

posts a lot of those vidoes that are like “what to do if you ever get kidnapped” “red flags in relationships” “most powerful parts of the body” etc

probably has like 500k followers

at the end of the day she doesn’t really use tiktok that much tho ahaha

LIVVY BLACKTHORN:

does a little bit of everything??

posts dance videos sometimes

omg her transitions are SO good

everyone is in love with her and she has to remind them that she’s a minor (i’m just a kid plays aggressively in the background)

posts videos that are just vibes?? like her skating at night, dancing in traffic with dru/her friends, walking through the city at night etc

lots of lip syncing videos to whatever sounds are popular and all her comments are like “i wish i looked like this” “guess im not eating today” and she gets so upset :((

she wants everyone to know that they’re perfect the way they are!!

also posts POVs sometimes and she’s not that bad at them ahaha

probably has like 1 million followers

doesn’t even need a spam just posts everything on her main

shouts out her sibilings accounts all the time

overall just great energy

TY BLACKTHORN

never posts his face on his main but he does on his spam

yall know those accounts that post fun facts or psychology facts?? his is like that except he talks to explain them and everyone finds his voice SO calming

he posts a lot of content of animals and everyone is in AWE with how good he is with them

his username is probably theanimalwhisperer or something djkfskjd

every single time he posts Kit on his account all the comments are like “OOH ICU” and “SHIP” and “ASK HIM OUT ALREADY”

he gives 0 shits about popularity on tiktok he’s just posting for fun because he likes teaching people about his interests

so he has like maybe 500k followers

lots of philosophical questions that has everyone questioning their existence

ugh i love him

KIT HERONDALE

be honest this is what y’all were waiting for

yall know those unproblematic ppl that everyone refers to as the “king(s) of tiktok”???

yeah thats him

SO FUNNY

LIKE HIS CONTENT IS GENUINELY HILARIOUS

lots of sarcasm and satire

think @/adamkindacool ?? (one of my favourite tiktokers lmao)

does reaction videos for those “pov: im the annoying hot cheeto girl sitting next to you in math class” videos

dark humor (not like rude humor but actual dark humor)

like “i put the baby in the oven and the pizza in the bed” type of jokes back when those were a thing

has like 4M followers but almost every single one of his posts go viral so he’s gaining fast

lots of pranks

starts a bunch of trends

any video he posts of Mina goes viral

sometimes he posts some really weird stuff that has everyone laughing so hard irl (@/benoftheweek)

he NEVER thirst traps but still gets a lot of those weird sexual fairy comments on his posts (iykyk)

TO BE CLEAR I MEAN THE FAIRY EMOJI ONES NOTHING TO DO WITH HIM BEING FAE

reacts to the comments with a video of him just staring at the screen with the “oh to see without my eyes” or “im just sixteen” audio going on in the background which only encourages them to make more weird comments

anyways everyone loves him

any of his povs are pure jokes meant to make fun of pov’ers

posts maybe one serious tiktok every 5 months that talks about being respectful and using your platform for good

“i miss old tiktok”

posts a lot of random videos of Ty where, again, all the comments are shipping them except even more so on his account because everyone can see his heart eyes for Ty

collabs with Dru a lot and does a bunch of duets of her videos

everyone loves him bye

DRU BLACKTHORN

SO many memes

she deletes any hate in her comments bc she honestly doesnt care to respond to them and doesn’t need that kind of negativity in her life

but one time she got a “the f in women stands for funny” comment and she WENT OFF

does really dark povs sometimes that are really interesting

CLOWN MAKEUP + SCARY CLOWN TIKTOKS ( think @/avani ‘s clown make up posts

REALLY good at makeup and sometimes gets julian to do scary makeup on her for tiktoks and povs (like those ones with stitches over the mouth or skin peeling off)

huge ally!! posts a lot about minorities struggles and white privilege, and acknowledges hers

does movie reviews and stuff sometimes

“types of” videos

pulls a lot of pranks on her sibilings with livvy and sometimes with Kit

lots of body positivity + self love

calls out back-handed compliments

also has a lot of content like Livvy’s of just vibing in LA

julian and emma and mark go off at anyone who sexualize her in the comments

probably has like 650k followers

posts a couple of times a week

BONUS:

JAIME ROSALES

lots of skateboarding videos idk he just gives me that vibe

doesn’t post that often but is super popular

like maybe 1.5M followers

really passionate about systematic racism

HATES all those privileged white boys using the “this is america” audio to pretend they’re oppressed ( this is a may 2020 thing so it probably wont make sense to anyone who sees this after lmao)

POSTS A LOT OF THIRST TRAPS LMAO

also posts lots of videos that’s just him yelling about stuff but they’re really entertaining to watch ( like that guy sebastian @/sauceyogranny)

everyone thinks he’s super hot he always shows up in those “hottest boys on tiktok” videos except sometimes he’s just the token POC boy and it makes him mad :(

DIEGO ROSALES

HIS ACCOUNT IS SO PRACTICAL LMAO

lots of tips

“what to do if you’re trapped in the desert” “what to do if you’re kidnapped and stuck in the trunk”

doesnt reply to comments EVER unless it’s to clarify a point he made in the video or answer a question

has like 200k

okay thats it lmao im done bye this took me like an hour to make

i’ll get to all the other characters from the other series’ eventually

also if yall are wondering abt the lack of f*ckbois in this post they’re coming dw

TMI CHARACTERS AS TYPES OF TIKTOKERS

TID CHARACTERS AS TYPES OF TIKTOKERS

TLH CHARACTERS AS TYPES OF TIKTOKERS

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thewickedmerman · 4 years

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Zendaya STILL Can’t Act

First of all, I do NOT dislike Zendaya. She is a kind and genuine person that truly has a good heart and is the type of person that more celebrities should be like. I may not be a fan of her due to her not really being that talented, but I have a lot of respect for her as a person (Unless she does something in the future). So before any of you immature Zendaya fans come after me, just remember that you’re just making her look bad because you’re acting like a bunch of immature, annoying babies that can’t accept different opinions.

Anyway, just because she is a good person, that doesn’t mean she can’t be criticized for her work. I’m sorry, but she is NOT a good actress! Before any of you start bringing up her Emmy win, you realize that those don’t mean anything because they have been accused of being rigged and acting more as a popularity contest rather than a contest of TRUE talent, right? Some are even arguing that this year they were trying to avoid being accused of racism with the BLM movement by having most of the winners be black. I don’t agree with that because, apart from Zendaya, all the winners that are black truly did deserve their awards because they are amazingly talented people. However, if the Emmys were truly legit, Lana Parrilla would’ve been nominated and won an award for Best Supporting Actress in Once Upon a Time and Bella Thorne should’ve won an Emmy for her performance in the TV movie, Perfect High. Zendaya is a popular celebrity but popular doesn’t mean she has talent. It’s like how a lot of kids in school that are popular aren’t popular because they are a nice person that people like. Popularity isn’t always deserved. I mean, look at how Viola FREAKING Davis, the most talented actress EVER, didn’t get a nomination this year, despite receiving and winning a lot of Emmy’s over the years. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure colorism played a part there as well, but Zendaya is NO WHERE near the level of an Emmy worthy actress and did not deserve to win against the likes of the other nominations that are FAR more talented, versatile, and experienced.

However, let me explain the flaws of her acting. I’ll be fair and pretend that I acknowledge the bullshit argument that Disney Channel acting is supposed to over-the-top and bad as a “legit” argument, because critiquing that nonsense is a subject for another post on another day. Lets focus on her acting in things outside of Disney Channel. Well, her acting still sucks. While she was over-the-top in Disney Channel, she takes a new extreme by being absolutely emotionless. I know people are gonna say that her reason for acting like that in Euphoria and Spiderman is that it’s part of her character. Okay, while I think she still performs those type of characters poorly, I will be fair and accept that for now. However, what about her performance in something like The Greatest Showman?

What was her excuse in The Greatest Showman? She wasn’t playing a Daria knock-off or a drug addict there. She was playing a character that required a lot of emotion in order to make the audience feel for her struggle. I won’t mention how her being white passing (And YES, she is white passing because she’s going to be staring in a movie called A White Lie about a woman who was white passing and pretended to be white in order to attend college, so she admits she’s white passing) made her miscast for the part. I will just be talking about how bad her acting was. Ignoring the scene where she’s crying by Phillip’s bedside (Which admittedly was really good), her performance is always so wooden and emotionless. She goes around with a blank look on her face most of the time with the occasional smile and confused look on her face. Her line delivery is almost always so flat, she’s always monotone unless she’s singing, she sounds like she’s reading her lines off cue cards, and sometimes she says her lines in a hammy tone.

I’ll describe some examples of her bad acting in the movie, since I can’t show clips due to how Youtube is always taking videos down that are clips from movies. When she asks if they were all invited to see the Queen, she says it with absolutely no emotion. She comes off as though she doesn’t care and I don’t mean doesn’t care as in acting like she doesn’t care so that she doesn’t come off as vulnerable; it’s more like she just doesn’t care like how a kid in a school play just doesn’t care and is putting in no effort at all. And the way she makes a pause in the middle of the sentence makes it come off even worse. “Are we all... invited?” Come on! Put in some effort!

Another example being when Phillip touches her hand during Jenny Lind’s performance. Zendaya just has a blank look on her face and all she does is take a breath. This should be an emotional moment for Anne. The man she... loves? I mean, the character and the romance are so underwritten that it’s hard to tell how she feels about him at this point. Anyway, the man the loves finally does something to display his affection for her in public, so she should be having a surprised look on her face that grows into a smile and trying to hold back tears of joy. Unfortunately, all she’s doing is just acting the way she did before he touched her hand. We don’t see how she feels about finally holding his hand or even him touching her finger with his. At that moment, she should show some slight hope but also skepticism by brushing it off as him give trying to make her happy by doing the bare minimum, which would transition to emotional happiness as he holds her entire hand. But all we get is a slight deep breath and the same blank look she always had. When he took his hand away from her after people are whispering about them, this should be a moment where she looks shocked, as well as hurt that she let her guard down because she let him make her believe that he truly cared about her enough that there was a glimmer of hope for their love. But she just looks at him with a blank and emotionless look on her face. She’s not displaying all the many emotions that the character should be feeling. When she walks away, she doesn’t look hurt but rather looks like someone who just tooted a little. What made her or the director think she was doing a good job there? Where is the emotion? The complexity? The depth? She showed about as much emotion as the characters in that terrible “live-action” remake of The Lion King.

Another scene being where she’s at the theatre, which she ruined with her performance. The way she talks to the ticket man was so wooden and robotic. She should’ve came off as someone who was clearly trying not to be scared but you can tell that she is. Why? Because she is a black woman (Or rather is supposed to look like one) and is out of her element because someone that isn’t white wouldn’t normally be in a prestigious place like the theatre (Unless you were white passing like her, but the movie is still trying to ignore that she’s only slightly darker than Zac Efron). She should be frightening about how people will treat her but trying to be brave because of how she wants to experience this world that is like a fantasy in her mind. She’s just emotionless as always. When she sees Phillip, she should be shocked and upset because he tricked her but also is willing to be seen in public with her among all of the people from his high class world. But she just gives a blank look. When she’s looking up at the staircase leading to the theatre, she should be having a lot of emotions welling up because of how she always wanted to go to the theatre, most likely since she was a child. Now it was finally happening and what does she do? Just gives a blank expression again after biting her lips. That doesn’t come off as a young woman that is finally going to have an experience she’s always dreamed of happening. It comes off as being indifferent, especially with her monotone line delivery of “I’ve always wanted to go to the theatre.” SHOW SOME EMOTION! Imagine how bad a Cinderella movie would be if that was Cinderella’s reaction to being at the palace.

When she and Phillip run into his parents, she should be doing more than just having a blank expression on her face. She should be showing some fear because of how it felt like nothing could go wrong, but then it does. She’s being referred to as “the help” and being seen with her is considered a bigger disgrace than being associated with Barnum, who was considered to be trash to begin with. She is also giving up on her dream of going to the theatre by just leaving and doesn’t show any emotion. All of this should be having her full of emotions that she’s embarrassed that she let break through. She should be having a few tears escape, a quivering lip, and her voice whimpering and cracking as she’s running away after having a childhood dream crushed. What does she do instead? Just casually leave with a blank look on her face. She doesn’t even come off as someone trying to leave before someone sees her cry. It comes off more as just being indifferent and the speed she’s running isn’t out of desperation to leave because she was hurt but more like a “Oh! I didn’t realize how late it was. I gotta go before I’m late for being early to curfew.” It ruins the moment. She can’t even run properly in a scene! How bad at acting do you have to be to mess up running?

I won’t go into the problems of her acting in Rewrite the Stars because I covered that pretty well in my review of the movie, so I’ll just provide a link to it.

My Review of The Greatest Showman

She may be able to get away with this when she’s in Spiderman and Euphoria, but that doesn’t work for every character. It shows that she is really a one trick pony when it comes to acting. She’s not versatile and doesn’t have a wide range. Her acting is just going around with a blank look on her face with a monotone delivery, even when it doesn’t work for the scene. Until she can prove she can act outside of the types of characters she plays in Spiderman and Euphoria (And even then I think she plays the deadpan character type very poorly), she still isn’t a good actress. Maybe she’ll be able to prove herself in her movie A White Lie. I want her to improve and I wanted to love her in Euphoria but she just felt more like she was going through the motions. Playing a deadpan character isn’t as easy as people think. You need to be able to have just the right amount of being emotionless and still deliver the dry wit with a bit of smugness and sass instead of just being bored. A deadpan character is a lot more complex a character to pull off than people think. You need more than just being emotionless, monotone, and breathing to pull it off. The body language matters, which Zendaya doesn’t try to add to her characters and is just her going through the motions instead of becoming the character. In Spiderman she comes off as a stoner rather than a Daria type character, which you’d think would work in Euphoria but she really doesn’t portray that. And her eyes don’t portray Michelle as snarky, smart, introverted, or skeptical but rather just either having her eyes look relaxed or squinting like the sun is in her eyes. She feels more stiff and wooden than is necessary for the character. The emotional scenes feel half-assed. The door scene made me cringe because her voice was more whiny than desperate and and her face when she was begging felt more like she was constipated or something. I actually kind of laughed at how insanely flat her performance was in that scene, despite people praising it.

Something that is critical with a deadpan character is that, while they do have to be limited in their facial expressions, they still need to have their eyes be able to portray something. For example, Daria Morgendorffer’s eyes always showed how annoyed she was with the stupidity of her surroundings and wanted nothing to do with it (I can relate) and Raven from Teen Titans had her eyes show how she has a snarky nature and can’t express her emotions like others because her powers are dangerously driven by emotions, as well as her having a bit of mystery behind her that we learn more about in season 4. And before you say that they are animated characters so it’s easier to have them appear like that, there are actresses that manage to do that as well. Lana Parrilla managed to portray that as The Evil Queen/season 1 Mayor Mills where her facial emotions were more reserved but she managed to show how menacing she was with the look of her eyes. She made you happy that looks couldn’t kill. There was also Danai Gurira’s performance as Michonne from The Walking Dead (A show that I am NOT a fan of AT ALL) where the character had a deadpan attitude but also managed to show how serious she is with her eyes and body language instead of just having a vacant look in her eyes and uninspired body language like Zendaya did in Euphoria.

Before you say she is playing a drug addict and that’s how they act, first of all, I’ve sadly had some drug addict family members and they still didn’t have a vacant look in their eyes like she did. Her eyes were just wide open and relaxed rather than in a daze from the drugs. Secondly, and I know I shouldn’t be comparing them, but Bella Thorne has played a drug addict in Perfect High and on the show Tales in the episode “XO Tour Lif3” where she managed to come off as a genuine addict that is in a daze but still comes off as human. You can see her struggles and emotional turmoil in her facial expressions, voice, and body language that make it more believable that her character felt that she needed to turn to drugs for comfort and escape from her issues. When her character is high or drunk, she is so convincing to the point that it is flawless. Zendaya’s performance in Euphoria is just so hallow and lifeless. It also really makes me sad that Zendaya got an Emmy win at her age when Bella, who has been busting her ass in the acting business MUCH longer than Zendaya (Who didn’t start acting seriously until Shake it Up) and has dreamed of winning Oscars and Emmys, despite people saying that she would never make it as an actress because of her dyslexia and has to work extra hard just to be able to read a damn script doesn’t have even one Emmy nomination (Let alone a win). Bella is the one who has been acting since she was six-years-old! She has even shown she can play the deadpan character better in her movies Amityville: The Awakening (Mediocre movie, though) and I Still See You than Zendaya ever did in Euphoria and the Spiderman movies.

Anyway, I gave Euphoria a chance and viewed it with an open-mind that REALLY wanted to like Zendaya’s performance but she fell flat and showed that acting isn’t her strong suit. If she gets better in the future, that’s great and I wish her all the luck in the world. But I’m tired of her getting praise that isn’t deserved or earned, especially when there are actresses that are far more deserving and have worked a lot longer and harder than her but still don’t get their recognition. She has a good singing voice, is decent at modeling, and her strong suit is dancing but she’s not phenomenal at any of these things. She doesn’t deserve to be called a Queen when she doesn’t have the talent that is required to earn that title. Maybe she’d be at her best if she was exclusively a talkshow host. People mainly love her for her personality and having her own talkshow would be able to make that aspect of her truly shine.

I have also learned, thanks to following the AWESOME @angelicdiamondbabys that Zendaya’s new role in a movie called Dune was something that is based in Middle Eastern culture. So not only is Zendaya contributing to gingerism by taking redhead roles (Gingerism is a thing and it even a problem with white people that are non-redheads, so look up gingerism and educate yourselves) and taking the role of a full-blooded black woman in The Greatest Showman, but NOW she is taking roles from Middle Eastern actresses? But of course people are sitting on this because it’s Zendaya and people fancast her as every brown character even if it’s not racially correct! I don’t know much about Dune or the situation, so I can’t really say anything about that. But still, this might show that Zendaya isn’t as nice and mature as she appears to be. However, I still can’t say much on this.

And before you say that I’m a white guy, so I can’t have an opinion on Zendaya or call me a racist, my new friend angelicadiamondbabys is a full-blooded black woman who also shares my views on Zendaya. So take a look at her page and be warned, she is brutally honest, which makes her awesome, so if you don’t have a thick skin, be warned lol.

This is just my opinion. Be respectful.

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beastars-takes · 5 years

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Zootopia Takes: Darker’s Not Better

The Shock Collar Draft

So, it sounds like people are largely positive on me doing some Zootopia posts on this blog, and I wanted to talk about this tweet I saw the other day:

I’ll punt on explaining why Beastars isn’t “Dark Zootopia”--that’s a great topic for another post. But I would like to talk about why this popular yet stridently uninformed tweet is so, so wrong. Why the shock collar draft was not better, actually.

And obviously, I’m not writing several pages in reply to a single tweet--this is a take that’s been around since the movie came out, that the “original version was better.” It’s been wrong the whole time.

Let’s talk about why!

Part 1: “Because Disney”

Let’s start with this--the assumption that the film’s creators wanted to make this shock collar story and “Disney” told them to change it.

That’s not how it works.

I try to keep stuff about me out of these posts as much as possible, but just for a bit of background, I’ve worked in the animation industry for about half a decade. I know people at Disney. I have a reasonable idea of how things are there.

There is this misconception about creative industries that they’re constantly this pitched battle of wills between creative auteurs trying to make incredible art and ignorant corporate suits trying to repress them.

That can happen, especially in dysfunctional studios (and boy could I tell some stories) but Walt Disney Animation Studios is not dysfunctional. It’s one of the most autonomous and well-treated parts of the Disney Company.

The director of Zootopia, Byron Howard, isn’t an edgelord. He made Bolt and Tangled. He knows what his audience is, and he’s responsible enough not to spend a year (and millions of dollars in budget) developing a grimdark Don Bluth story that leadership would never approve. It wouldn’t just be a waste of time--he would be endangering the livelihoods of the hundreds of people working under him. Meanwhile, Disney Animation’s corporate leadership trusts their talent. They don’t generally interfere with story development because they don’t need to. Because they employ people like Byron Howard.

Howard and the other creative leads of Zootopia have said a dozen times, in interviews and documentaries, that they gave up on the shock collar idea because it wasn’t working. They’ve explained their reasoning in detail. Maybe they’re leaving out some of the story, but in general? I believe them.

But Beastars Takes, you say, maybe even if Disney didn’t force them to back away from this darker version, it still would have been better?

Part 2: Why Shock Collars Seem Good

I will say this--I completely sympathize with people who see these storyboards and scenes from earlier versions of the movie and think “this seems amazing.” It does! A lot of these drawings and shots are heartbreakingly good, in isolation.

I love these boards. They make me want to cry. I literally have this drawing framed on my wall. Believe me, I get it.

But the only reason we care this much about this alternative draft of Zootopia is that the Zootopia we got made us love this world and these characters. You know what actually made me cry?

Oh, yeah.

So let’s set aside the astonishing hubris of insisting Zootopia’s story team abandoned the “good” version of the story, when the “bad version” is the most critically-acclaimed Disney animated feature in the past SIXTY YEARS.

“But Beastars Takes!” I hear you say. “Critics are idiots and just because something’s popular doesn’t make it good!”

Fair enough. Let’s talk about why the real movie is better.

Part 3: The Message (it is, in fact, like a jungle sometimes)

This type of thing is always hard to discuss, in the main--a lot of people don’t want to feel criticized or “called out” by the entertainment they consume, and they don’t want to be asked to think about their moral responsibilities. But it’s hard to deny that Zootopia is a movie with a strong point of view. Everything else--the characters, the worldbuilding, the plot, grows out from the movie’s central statement about bias.

And the movie we got, with no shock collars, makes that statement far more effectively.

To dive into the full scope of Zootopia’s worldview and politics (warts and all) would be a whole post on its own, so I’ll just summarize the key point of relevance here:

Zootopia's moral message is that you, the viewer, need to confront your own biases. Not yell at someone else. No matter how much of a good or progressive person you consider yourself to be--if you want to stand against prejudice you have to start with yourself.

That’s a tough sell! For that message to land, we need to see ourselves in the protagonist.

Judy’s a good person! She argues with her dad about foxes. She knows predators aren’t all dangerous. She’s not speciesist. Right?

Ah fuck.

Let’s fast-forward to the pivotal scene of this movie. In an unfortunate but inevitable confluence of circumstances, Judy’s own biases and prejudiced assumptions come out, and she shits the bad.

Nick, who’s already bared his soul to her (against his better instincts), is heartbroken. But not as heartbroken as he is a minute later when he tries to confront her about what she’s said, and she makes this face:

Whaaaat? Come on, Nick. I’m a good person. Why are you giving me a hard time?

People like to complain about this scene. That it’s a hackneyed “misunderstanding” trope that could be easily resolved with a discussion. They’re wrong. Nick tries to have a discussion. She blows him off.

This isn’t Judy acting out of character, this is her character. Someone who identifies as Not A Racist, and hasn’t given the issue any more thought. This is not only completely believable characterization (who hasn’t seen someone react this way when you told them they hurt you?) it’s the film’s central thesis!

Yes, Nick somewhat provokes her into reaching for her “fox spray,” and her own trauma factors in there, but she’s already made her fatal mistake before that happens.

(As an aside, people also make the criticism that the movie unrealistically deflects responsibility for racism onto Bellwether and her plot. It doesn’t. All the key expressions of prejudice in the film--Judy’s encounter with Gideon, her parents’ warnings, the elephant in the ice cream shop, Judy’s early encounters with Bogo, Judy's views on race science--exist largely outside of Bellwether’s influence. She is a demagogue who inflames existing tensions, she didn’t invent them. Bogo literally says “the world has always been broken.”)

So, anyway. But we love Judy. She’s an angel. She also kinda sucks! She’s proudly unprejudiced, and when her own prejudice is pointed out to her she argues and doesn’t take it seriously. This is bad, but it’s also a very human reaction. It’s one most of us have probably been guilty of at one point or another.

Look at Zootopia’s society, too--it’s shiny and cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic. Anyone can be anything, on paper. But scratch too deep beneath the surface and there’s a lot of pain and resentment here, things nobody respectable would say in public but come out behind closed doors, or among family, when nobody’s watching. It’s entirely recognizable--at least to me, someone who lives in a large liberal city in the United States. Like Byron Howard.

Wow, this place is a paradise!

Wait, what’s a “NIMBY”?

Part 4: Why Shock Collars Are Bad

So, with the film’s conceit established, let’s circle back to the shock collar idea. Like I said, it’s heartbreaking. It’s dramatic. It’s affective.

It also teaches us nothing.

If I see a movie where predator animals are subjected to 24/7 electroshock therapy, I don’t think “wow, this makes me want to think about how I could do better by the people around me.” I think “damn that shit’s crazy lmao. that’d be fucked up if that happened.” At a stretch, it reminds me of something like the Jim Crow era, or the Shoah. You know, stuff in the Past. Stuff we’ve all decided couldn’t ever happen again, so why worry about it?

The directors have said this exact thing, just politely. “It didn’t feel contemporary,” they say in pressers. That’s what it means.

If anything, the shock collar draft reifies the mindset that Zootopia is trying to reject--it shows us that discrimination is blatant, and dramatic, and flagrantly cruel, and impossible to miss.

And...that’s not true. If you only look for bias at its most malicious and evil, you’re going to miss the other 95 percent.

The messaging of this “darker version” is--ironically--less mature, less insightful, less intelligent. Less useful. Darker’s not better.

Part 5: Why Shock Collars Are Still Bad

So what if you don’t care about the message? What if you have no interest in self-reflection, or critical analysis (why are you reading this blog then lmao)? What if you just really want to hear a fun story about talking animals?

Well, this is trickier, because the remaining reasons are pretty subjective and emotional.

The creators have said that the shock collar version didn’t work because the viewers hated the cruel world they’d created. They agreed with Nick--the city was beyond saving. They didn’t want to save it.

The creators have said that Judy was hard to sympathize with, not being able to recognize the shock collars for the obvious cruelty they were.

Fuck you, Judy!

But we haven’t seen the draft copies. We haven’t watched the animatics. We have to take their word for it. Anyone who’s sufficiently invested in this story is going to say “well, I disagree with them.” It doesn’t matter to them that they haven’t seen the draft and the filmmakers have. The movie they’ve imagined is great and nobody is going to convince them otherwise.

But the fact remains that the shock collar movie, as written, did not work. And, if behind the scenes material is to be believed, it continued to not work after months and months of story doctoring.

There’s even been a webcomic made out of the dystopian version of Zootopia. It’s clever and creative and well-written and entertaining and...it kind of falls apart. The creator, after more than a little shit-talk directed at Disney, abandoned the story before reaching the conclusion, but even before then the seams were beginning to show. How do you take a society that’s okay with electrocuting cute animals and bring it to a point of cathartic redemption? You can’t, really. The story doesn’t work.

Does that mean people shouldn’t make fanworks out of the cut material? That they shouldn’t be inspired and excited by it? Hell no. This drawing is cute as hell. The ideas are compelling.

But I suppose what I’d ask of you all is--if you’re weighing the hot takes of art students on Twitter against the explanations of veteran filmmakers, consider that the latter group might actually know what they’re talking about.

See you next time!

#zootopia #zootropolis #zoomania #zootopia takes #judy hopps #nick wilde #disney #chief bogo #byron howard

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luckycheesefoodie321 · 4 years

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Idk I see mixed feelings about WW84...(spoilers + long post)

I’m about the same... some bits felt a bit slow... idk some of the action didnt feel as sharp and powerful, maybe just a bit too smooth? Idk maybe that’s just me being desensitised to how OP Wonder Woman is... it’s not necessarily a bad thing, just didn’t capture the same wow factor as the first time we saw her get to work...

some of it was a bit goofy looking, like the flying scene, that was kinda funny to watch, but yknow I get it... moment of peace for her to finally reconcile with losing Steve a second time but this time actually letting him go...and so finally figuring out the one gap she had that he had occupied...

Some questionable choices as well... that scene where they use a bomb to save those four kids...I’ve heard it echoes a very real life tragedy that apparently Gal Gadot has expressed support for? Cant say for certain on the matter since I don’t know enough but just wanna put that info out there... also that one bit with the “middle eastern” man with a rifle wishing for more nuclear weapons...necessary? I don’t think so? The Irish thing too? Idk if they’re trying to call out people’s racism or endorse it but just something to note down...

What they definitely got right was the emotional chemistry between Diana and Steve, and using Pedro Pascal’s tried and true struggling dad with a lot of feelings acting so well... even if I feel it wasn’t that earned, kinda shoe-horning his backstory towards the end there... Pedro Pascal is sublime at ringing out those emotions, so maybe that’s why I couldn’t really connect with him as the over-the-top bad guy, but I suppose that could’ve been intentional? He had effectively whitewashed himself to try to get ahead in the world after dealing with an abusive home life and general indoctrinated bigotry and racism at school... an experience many people of colour face and are forced to go through... I genuinely did not recognise him when we see him on the TV the first time so props to the makeup/wardrobe team for that subtle costuming decision...

As for Steve and Diana...man just the way they kept brushing their hands across each other’s hair and faces and body after that initial passionate kiss, and just delighting in each other’s presence as they walk along the (Washington monument pond thing?) really made me feel how much they adore and missed each other... and the little walk through the city with Steve discovering the 80s and Diana indulging him and letting him explore and look around in wonder AND THE DRESS UP MONTAGE... way to reverse the first movie...

Really loved how equal they are in protecting each other... Steve is confident in Diana’s strength and lets her fight but is prepared to back her up and is always tying up any loose ends or protecting her blind side... and when her strength had clearly weakened, he doesn’t hesitate to support her and she’s readily reaching for him for help... that part where Steve is acting like a blocker for Diana and shoving through the rioting streets was a nice scene...

Also Diana almost exclusively in pant suits? Heck yeah...

OH BUT MAN... that second goodbye between them but this time Diana actively letting go? That hit hard... Diana just wanting to be a little selfish for once and keep him and find a different way... but then Steve saying “I’m already gone” bc his physical body was gone, and he’s already died once. He was literally borrowing someone elses body and time. Y’all I can’t. And you don’t even see him disappear or say his “I love you” to Diana because she needed to rip herself away from him in order to revoke her wish... and the feral screams of anguish as she ran away? So good.

Barbara/Barbra having a very typical “loner wishes to be like someone she admires/popular and it turning against her because of her greed” type of arc but it wasn’t really resolved at the end though nice touch to see that she just quietly revoked her wish off screen and we just see her human again... gotta love that they just let Kristen Wiig go from super cute to super hot throughout the film until she became a leopard... lol but she was the walking embodiment of the “take the glasses off she was beautiful all along” trope XD

I wonder what that dude thought he did while the whole world was going to shit? Did he just get thrown back into his body when Steve left? Or did he wake up back in his apartment where Steve had come to in the first place to really reverse the effects?

OH shout out to that one guy and his cows who wanted a farm...

OH AND THE OG WONDER WOMAN LYNDA CARTER MAKING AN APPEARANCE AS THE FIRST GOLDEN WARRIOR LADY WHO WAS CONSIDERED THEIR FIRST STRONGEST WARRIOR... friggen pass that torch babey

Anyway yeah I’m done...

#Wonder Woman 1984 #ww84 #spoilers #movies #dceu #dc comics #Wonder Woman #gal gadot #Chris pine #Pedro pascal #kristen wiig #linda carter

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bangwoolofbangtan · 4 years

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TIME

ENTERTAINER of the year

BTS

[Time magazine BTS interview ]

It’s late October, and Suga is sitting on a couch strumming a guitar. His feet are bare, his long hair falling over his eyes. He noodles around, testing out chords and muttering softly to himself, silver hoop earrings glinting in the light. “I just started learning a few months ago,” he says. It’s an intimate moment, the kind you’d spend with a new crush in a college dorm room while they confess rock-star ambitions. But Suga is one-seventh of the Korean pop band BTS, which means I’m just one of millions of fans watching, savoring the moment.

BTS isn’t just the biggest K-pop act on the charts. They’ve become the biggest band in the world—full stop. Between releasing multiple albums, breaking every type of record and appearing in these extemporaneous livestreams in 2020, BTS ascended to the zenith of pop stardom. And they did it in a year defined by setbacks, one in which the world hit pause and everyone struggled to maintain their connections. Other celebrities tried to leverage this year’s challenges; most failed. (Remember that star-studded “Imagine” video?) But BTS’s bonds to their international fan base, called ARMY, deepened amid the pandemic, a global racial reckoning and worldwide shutdowns. “There are times when I’m still taken aback by all the unimaginable things that are happening,” Suga tells TIME later. “But I ask myself, Who’s going to do this, if not us?”

Today, K-pop is a multibillion-dollar business, but for decades the gatekeepers of the music world—the Western radio moguls, media outlets and number-crunchers—treated it as a novelty. BTS hits the expected high notes of traditional K-pop: sharp outfits, crisp choreography and dazzling videos. But they’ve matched that superstar shine with a surprising level of honesty about the hard work that goes into it. BTS meets the demands of Top 40’s authenticity era without sacrificing any of the gloss that’s made K-pop a cultural force. It doesn’t hurt that their songs are irresistible: polished confections that are dense with hooks and sit comfortably on any mainstream playlist.

BTS is not the first Korean act to establish a secure foothold in the West, yet their outsize success today is indicative of a sea change in the inner workings of fandom and how music is consumed. From propelling their label to a $7.5 billion IPO valuation to inspiring fans to match their $1 million donation to Black Lives Matter, BTS is a case study in music-industry dominance through human connection. Once Suga masters the guitar, there won’t be much left for them to conquer.

In an alternate universe where COVID-19 didn’t exist, BTS’s 2020 would likely have looked much like the years that came before. The group got its start in 2010, after K-pop mastermind and Big Hit Entertainment founder Bang Si-hyuk recruited RM, 26, from Seoul’s underground rap scene. He was soon joined by Jin, 28; Suga, 27; J-Hope, 26; Jimin, 25; V, 24; and Jung Kook, 23, selected for their dancing, rapping and singing talents.

But unlike their peers, BTS had an antiestablishment streak, both in their activism and in the way they contributed to their songwriting and production—which was then rare in K-pop, although that’s started to change. In BTS’s debut 2013 single, “No More Dream,” they critiqued Korean social pressures, like the high expectations placed on schoolkids. They have been open about their own challenges with mental health and spoken publicly about their support for LGBTQ+ rights. (Same-sex marriage is still not legally recognized in South Korea.) And they’ve modeled a form of gentler, more neutral masculinity, whether dyeing their hair pastel shades or draping their arms lovingly over one another. All this has made them unique not just in K-pop but also in the global pop marketplace.

In March, BTS was prepping for a global tour. Instead, they stayed in Seoul to wait out the pandemic. For the group, life didn’t feel too different: “We always spend 30 days a month together, 10 hours a day,” Jin says. But with their plans upended, they had to pivot. In August, BTS dropped an English-language single, “Dynamite,” that topped the charts in the U.S.—a first for an all-Korean act. With their latest album this year, Be, they’ve become the first band in history to debut a song and album at No. 1 on Billboard’s charts in the same week. “We never expected that we would release another album,” says RM. “Life is a trade-off.”

Their triumphs this year weren’t just about the music. In October, they put on perhaps the biggest virtual ticketed show of all time, selling nearly a million tickets to the two-night event. Their management company went public in Korea, turning Bang into a billionaire and each of the members into millionaires, a rarity in an industry where the spoils often go to the distributors, not the creators. And they were finally rewarded with a Grammy nomination. On YouTube, where their Big Hit Labels is one of the top 10 most subscribed music accounts (with over 13 billion views by this year), their only real competition is themselves, says YouTube’s music-trends manager Kevin Meenan. The “Dynamite” video racked up 101 million views in under 24 hours, a first for the platform. “They’ve beaten all their own records,” he says.

Not that the glory comes without drawbacks: namely, lack of free time. It’s nearing midnight in Seoul in late November, and BTS, sans Suga, who’s recovering from shoulder surgery, are fitting in another interview—this time, just with me. V, Jimin and J-Hope spontaneously burst into song as they discuss Jin’s upcoming birthday. “Love, love, love,” they harmonize, making good use of the Beatles’ chorus, turning to their bandmate and crossing their fingers in the Korean version of the heart symbol.

Comparisons to that epoch-defining group are inevitable. “What’s different is that we’re seven, and we also dance,” says V. “It’s kind of like a cliché when big boy bands are coming up: ‘Oh, there’s another Beatles!’” says RM. I’ve interviewed BTS five times, and in every interaction, they are polite to a fault. But by now they must be weary of revisiting these comparisons, just as they must be tired of explaining their success. RM says it’s a mix of luck, timing and mood. “I’m not 100% sure,” he says.

They’ve matured into smart celebrities: focused and cautious, they’re both more ready for the questions and more hesitant to make big statements. When you ask BTS about their landmark year, for once they’re not exactly chipper; J-Hope wryly calls it a “roller coaster.” “Sh-t happens,” says RM. “It was a year that we struggled a lot,” says Jimin. Usually a showman, on this point he seems more introspective than usual. “We might look like we’re doing well on the outside with the numbers, but we do go through a hard time ourselves,” he says. For a group whose purpose is truly defined by their fans, the lack of human interaction has been stifling. Still, they’ve made it a point to represent optimism. “I always wanted to become an artist that can provide comfort, relief and positive energy to people,” says J-Hope. “That intent harmonized with the sincerity of our group and led us to who we are today.”

In an era marked by so much anguish and cynicism, BTS has stayed true to their message of kindness, connection and self-acceptance. That’s the foundation of their relationship with their fans. South Korean philosopher and author Dr. Jiyoung Lee describes the passion of BTS’s fandom as a phenomenon called “horizontality,” a mutual exchange between artists and their fans. As opposed to top-down instruction from an icon to their followers, BTS has built a true community. “Us and our fans are a great influence on each other,” says J-Hope. “We learn through the process of making music and receiving feedback.” The BTS fandom isn’t just about ensuring the band’s primacy—it’s also about extending the band’s message of positivity into the world. “BTS and ARMY are a symbol of change in zeitgeist, not just of generational change,” says Lee.

And in June, BTS became a symbol of youth activism worldwide after they donated $1 million to the Black Lives Matter movement amid major protests in the U.S. (They have a long track record of supporting initiatives like UNICEF and school programs.) BTS says now it was simply in support of human rights. “That was not politics. It was related to racism,” Jin says. “We believe everyone deserves to be respected. That’s why we made that decision.”

That proved meaningful for fans like Yassin Adam, 20, an ARMY from Georgia who runs popular BTS social media accounts sharing news and updates, and who is Black. “It will bring more awareness to this issue people like me face in this country,” he says. “I see myself in them, or at least a version of myself.” In May and June, a broad coalition of K-pop fans made headlines for interfering with a police app and buying out tickets for a Trump campaign rally, depleting the in-person attendance. Later that summer, ARMY’s grassroots fundraising effort matched BTS’s $1 million donation to Black Lives Matter within 24 hours.

For 28-year-old Nicole Santero, who is Asian American, their success in the U.S. is also a triumph of representation: “I never really saw people like myself on such a mainstream stage,” Santero says. She’s writing her doctoral dissertation on the culture of BTS fandom, and she runs a popular Twitter account that analyzes and shares BTS data. “Anytime I’m awake, I’m doing something related to BTS,” she says. “This is a deeper kind of love.”

Devotion like that is a point of pride for BTS, particularly in a year when so much has felt uncertain. “We’re not sure if we’ve actually earned respect,” RM says. “But one thing for sure is that [people] feel like, O.K., this is not just some kind of a syndrome, a phenomenon.” He searches for the right words. “These little boys from Korea are doing this.” —With reporting by Aria Chen/Hong Kong; Mariah Espada/Washington; Sangsuk Sylvia Kang and Kat Moon/New York

FASHION CREDITS

RM: Jacket, shirt, pants and shoes HERMES; SUGA: Jacket, shirt and necklace CELINE. Pants GIVENCHY. Shoes LOUIS VUITTON; Jung Kook: Jacket, shirt, pants and shoes FENDI; J-Hope: Jacket, shirt, pants and shoes LOUIS VUITTON. Necklace HERMES; Jin: Suit, knit top and shoes BALENCIAGA; Jimin: Jacket, silk shirt, pants and shoes CELINE; V: Suit, shirt and shoes ALEXANDER McQUEEN. Tie THOM BROWNE.

#bts #kim taehyung #bts update #kim namjoon #park jimin #kim seokjin #jeon jungkook #jung hoseok #min yoongi #bts time magazine #bts time 2020 #bts time #bts entertainer of the year #bts interview #bts time photoshoot #bts photoshoot #bts group photo #bts achievements #bts article

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justamusicpodcast · 4 years

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Episode 6 out today!

We’re talking about Blues music

Transcript under the cut

Sup, I’m Laura Cousineau and welcome to Just A Music Podcast, where I, Laura Cousineau, tell you about some music history, how it relates to the world around us, and hopefully, introduce you to some new tunes. This show is theoretically for everyone but I will swear and when it comes down to it and sometimes we may need to talk about some sensitive topics so ur weeuns might wanna sit this one out.

And boi unless you’ve had that talk with ur kids about systemic racism you might wanna let them sit this one out because we’re gonna be touching on a bunch of terrible racist shit this week Because we’re gonna be talking about the Blues and various different type of blues musics. I’m actually really excited to talk about it too because blues, as you guys will find out in the future is kinda the basis for a lot of other, what one might consider more modern, genres of American popular musics. So this one’s gonna be important for ur earholes and ur brainholes. Just like last time I will be airing a sensitive content warning for some graphic descriptions of violence and I will put the time stamps in the description for y’all for when that starts and ends.

First though, I wanna issue an apology for being away so long, I tend to work on this podcast in my free time, and currently I’ve had none of that what so ever. It just so happened that October worked out this year that it was thanksgiving and my birthday and then a bunch of big projects due then Halloween and now I’m working on my fucking thesis proposal, I’m actually recording this episode at 1:35 am on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, so needless to say all this in combination with trying to deal with my depression hasn’t been a cake walk but we’re making it work. I will likely run up against a similar time issue during the first couple weeks of December because that’s when all my final papers are due. After that thought I should have smooth sailing for about a month. I wanted to make sure I had an episode out this week because as I think… well everyone… is aware the American election took place this week and understandably people were stressed as shit about that. So I think we could all use a little music right now.

Ok so Like all fuckin things we need to know where blues came from. Now blues is actually a lot older than a lot of people are gonna be expecting, like really damn old. Like pretty much everything in academia (and I mean EVERYTHING, at least in the humanities), the dates are contested, but it seems that the blues, or at least what began as the blues, started in and around the 1860s. For those who didn’t listen to last week’s episode on slave songs, spirituals, and gospel, or just those who don’t know their American history too too well, the 1860s marks a very important time for black people, many of which at that time had been enslaved, because in 1865 the thirteenth amendment was amended into the American constitution. For those who aren’t aware, the thirteenth amendment as stated by the national archives of the United States of America reads as such: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Now this of course was fantastic news of course! And for some people, this might be where you think oppression in the Americas ends for Black people but you would be incredibly wrong! Because this is the period where we see the start of a phenomenon referred to as sharecropping. Sharecropping or crop sharing as it’s known otherwise is considered part of what we historians sometimes refer to as the Jim Crow economy of the American South after the civil war. But what is Jim crow economy, what did it come from, why is it bad, why is sharecropping bad, how does any of this relate to the blues? Well lucky for u lil turnips imma tell ya.

Jim Crow culture is something that I imagine most North Americans will have even the most basic knowledge of but for those that don’t the name Jim Crow as applied to economy, laws, and any other part of American culture during these time periods refers to sets of crazy fucking racist laws written and unwritten that kept black people subjugated under the whims of the government as well as their fellow white countrymen. The term Jim crow itself is reference to a song often featured in the supremely racist minstrel shows of the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s referred to as “Jump Jim Crow” in which a white man in black-face sings in a parody centric dialect about the life of a charicaturishly uneducated back-woodsy Black man named, you fuckin guessed it, Jim Crow. The significance of the Crow being that it was a pejorative term for black individuals which can actually dated back to the early mid 1700s. Now I wanna preface the excerpt of it with the fact that I’m uncomfortable listening to this, I understand if others are too. The thing is that acknowledging these uncomfortable things and knowing about them is necessary in order to understand the type of historical impact that they had. “So laura, you must obviously support statues being raised to commemorate things like slavery and secessionism!” Absolutely not. Where statues and monuments exist to praise the efforts of individuals, the listening to and learning about songs in a teaching context like this very podcast are meant to educate. Statues commemorating culture surrounding one of the worst atrocities to have taken place on American soil should never have been erected in the first place let alone celebrated. One is meant to celebrate while the other is to educate because one is a historical primary source that lets us think critically about the history, the other is a tertiary celebration. The purpose of listening to a clip like this is then to educate and understand a piece of actually history, not to replicate and enjoy. The version of the song that I have is sung without the charicaturish accent but uses the original words but with all that in mind here’s a bit of Jump Jim Crow:

In terms of laws I’m sure just about everyone knows separate drinking fountains and schools but this really permeated pretty much every sphere of life for Black peoples especially those in the south. I say especially those in the south but not exclusively those in the south because racial segregation, although not as supported by law but more socially, also existed in the Northern States as well as in Canada. Anecdotally, my mother grew up in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio, she remembers going into Cleveland when she was a kid when Cleveland was still a very racially segregated city, Black peoples lived in, shopped in, and attended schools in certain areas of the city and white people in other’s. My grandmother who was also raised in the area even remembers Black people having separate lunch counters if any at all in some of the larger department stores in the area.

It might also be handy when I mention the south to actually talk about what the south and particularly the deep south is for y’all outside of America. So when we talk about the south we are talking about a geographically bounded area just not the area that one might think of by looking at a map because where you might be thinking like ah just take the country and cut it in half, and the bottom half is the south that wouldn’t be correct. So, from the United States Census Bureau itself the south we’re talking about is Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Now some who live in the surrounding areas such as Kansas might also consider themselves as being from the “south” somewhat culturally but those states previously listed as the official ones. When we talk about the DEEP SOUTH however, that range closes a little more, and that would mainly just include Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and sometimes Texas and Florida due to their involvement as part of the confederate states of America, meaning states that were on the south side of the civil war.

Also briefly just so we’re clear, again this is for those people who didn’t receive the best education on Slavery and the Civil War in general but to be clear, the civil war was fought over primarily states rights to use and perpetuate slavery. The common narrative you hear a lot in protests by those on the right, who would like to uphold the institutions set out by their forefathers in the creation of the abominable act, is that the civil war was primarily fought over states rights. What they then so often forget to elaborate is that those rights were perceived as the right to govern themselves independently so that they may still be able to employ slave labour in the operation of their economies and also to expand further westward to continue and be able to use slavery out in those areas as well.

The reason that we hear about these Jim Crow laws particularly in the South is because where the Northern states and Canada did have (and still continues to have) some violent racist issues, the Jim Crow south was specifically really bad. And I mean fucking abominable. Though Black people were free from being directly owned, society at large and all it’s trappings found new ways to oppress them. This started with Black Codes which were individual state law codes that dictated where Black peoples could move, for how long they could stay, restricted their rights to vote (or made it extremely difficult to vote via poll taxes, literacy tests, etc), as well as where they could work, and in some cases even if their children could be taken away from them on the basis labour needs. So I really can’t drive home the point enough of how much life sucked for Black peoples under Jim Crow laws and economy in the southern states, to call it any less than abominable would seem to understate it in a major way. In the 1880s Jim Crow laws hadn’t started to be rolled into large southern cities yet so many Black peoples were inclined to move into them because life was actually slightly easier for a short while. White people being offended and upset at this, because “how dare a black person just try to live their lives in my good white pure Christian neighborhood,” then fully supported Jim crow laws being rolled out to remove them from areas where white people would normally interact with them. This included but was not limited to, barring them from public parks entirely, having entirely different theaters at one point and then segregated theaters after a while with separate entrances based on your race, restaurants, bus and train stations, water fountains, restrooms, most building entrances in general, elevators, amusement park ticket windows, public schools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails, elderly care homes and even fucking cemeteries. Of course being treated as diseased subhuman parasites is never enough for the racism machine that is the public conscious at this time so there was also a lot of violence both systematic and grassroots that accompanied this era.

And here’s where I’m going to have to issue a sensitive content warning because I’m about to describe some truly heinous shit in a whole second. So by violence, I mean very public and very culturally accepted violence, similar to what we’re seeing more and more of in the states again. As many will know now in the light of the many many many police shootings of unarmed, unthreatening black people in the states, the police traditionally haven’t been on the side of black citizens. This is due to a number of reasons, for one, on the most basic of levels the police serve to protect the interests of those in power, in our case that means the property and lives of middle to upper class (mostly) white Americans. The natural extension of this is that many police forces in the states, especially in Southern states started out as slave catching forces bringing back runaway enslaved people to their owners. So as time progressed and Black peoples became a “free” population this still meant protecting mainly middle to upper class white people from the “threat” of black people. This was enforced in a number of ways, such as arresting black individuals found breaking these rules, framing black people for crimes committed by others and arresting them for population suppression, and turning a blind eye to the grassroots violence perpetrated by non-black citizens, which very often were white citizens. An example of just straight up police brutality can be found in the case of Isaac Woodard JR. who was viciously beaten by police only hours after being honorably discharged from the fucking military on February 12 1946. The bus driver driving Woodard and some of his fellow soldiers called the police after Woodard asked the bus driver if there might be time for him to use the restroom as they approached a rest stop. When the police arrived, the bus driver accused Woodard of drinking in the back of the bus and he was hauled off, dragged into an alley and beaten with nighsticks. That night he was thrown in the town jail, by morning he had been beaten so severely he was left permanently blind in both eyes.

And that grassroots violence is just as nasty, really fucking nasty. The violence could be perpetrated for things as small as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, entering a white neighbourhood, “talking back to” the wrong person. Since black men have always been are still to some degree subject to the stereotype that they are all sex incensed monsters, being left alone in a room with a white woman could be enough to incite violence against them. In the Mississippi delta during the season where share cropping debts were settled up, there was a sharp uptick in violence against and killings of black people. If you were white, because let’s be real here some white people definitely were on the side of their oppressed countrymen, you could be hung on the basis of being an N-word lover, which could range from being found to being in a romantic/sexual relationship with a person of colour, to just being fucking friends with them. The violence was often varied too, where kidnapping and hanging someone either with or without brutalizing them first (also known as a lynching) is the form most commonly associated with Jim Crow era violence less extreme but still horrible harassment could perpetuate in any form. Mississippi had the highest amount of lynchings from 1882-1968 with 581. You might think that is a low number but first, similarily to when we were talking about slavery in the last episode, 1 lynching is too fucking many, and secondly these are only the ones that were officially recorded. Since lynchings didn’t always happen in broad daylight and since law enforcement really didn’t care about Black individuals, there were almost certainly more that happened that just never were recorded. Georgia was second with 531, and Texas was third with 493. 79% of lynching happened in the South. So as I said before though, lynching was not the only form though, beatings were also entirely all too common forms of violence perpetrated against blackf people to make them scared and thus more compliant. A good example of this is the case of Emmet Till a 14 year old boy who made the mistake of playfully flirting with a white woman, who was beaten nearly to death, had one of his eyes gouged out, was then shot in the head, and tied to some cotton mill equipment before his body was thrown in a river. This wasn’t even that long ago, the beating happened on the 28th of August 1955.

THE next parts are also gonna be not great but there wont be anymore descriptions of graphic violence, so I’m calling an end to the sensitive content warning. So the then how does sharecropping play into all this and what does it have to do with the blues (we’re getting there babes I promise.) So as I explained previously, sharecropping was a part of the Jim Crow economic era. It was part of the era of reconstruction meaning the period of rebuilding after the civil war. How it worked was that let’s say for a second, come with me into the theater of the mind for a second, take a seat, close your eyes, take a deep breath, Ok so lets imagine for a second you’re a farmer in the south, the civil war has kinda left you in a spot, if you’re black, you’re starting off without an awful lot, you don’t have any generational wealth you don’t have property likely aside from maybe a relatively small plot of land (but this was uncommon,) you probably didn’t have much if any equipment because that would have been way too expensive, and the land you may have had may have been of shitty quality. So what could you do to earn yourself a living?! Well you would go to a landowner, and ask him rather kindly if you might be able to work the land they lived on in exchange for some of the profits of the crops that you would produce. The landowner would provide you with the tools, seed, housing, land, store credits at local shops in order to subsist offa for food and other supplies and sometimes a mule in order to help you work the land seeing as motorized machinery was still few and far between in the united states at this point. The issue of this system is that how much you receive for you labour, the cut that you actually get from selling crops, that you grew with ur own backbreaking labour, is more or less decided by your landowner. And as I mentioned last episode, those who’ve ever had to rely on the benevolence of a boss for any period of time knows that this shit ain’t gonna cut it. So often you would end up underpaid, underfed, and in a debt hole that lasted as long as you did. If it sounds like legal slavery that’s kinda because it was. You would basically remain in indentured servitude to the landowner for as long as you were a part of this system. Like don’t get me wrong there were people who managed to not be a part of it but it was an incredibly largescale problem.

It’s important to note that this wasn’t just a black phenomenon either, white tenants of sharecroppers existed and in incredibly large numbers as well. By 1900, 36 percent of all white farmers in Mississippi were either tenant farmers or sharecroppers (by comparison, 85 percent of all black farmers in 1900 did not own the land they farmed). This all sucks for various reasons but like partially because there was this whole other plan proposed that after the war, all the land that had been seized from slave owners would have been divvied up to the newly freed slave populations. It was colloquially known as the 40 acres and a mule plan but yeah unfortunately never happened cause fuckin president Andrew Johnson was like ”WELL AKSHULLY SWEATY I THINK THE LAND SHOULD GO BACK TO SLAVE OWNERS BECAUSE UHHHHHH” AND THEN IT DID AND THEN WE ENDED UP WITH SHARE CROPPING. But anyway that’s sharecropping. And of course I could go onto describe how all of this still affects black people in the united states and how the effects of systematic racism are still being felt generations later but… we’re gonna save that for a different episode. FOR NOW THOUGH, WHY IS THIS ALL IMPORTANT, WHY DID I TAKE ROUGHLY 3000 WORDS TO TELL YOU GUYS ABOUT THE HORRORS OF RECONSTRUCTION ERA SOUTH!? Well because we’re talking about the blues, and what does it mean when you have the blues, it means that you’re sad as hell, given all that I’ve just described to you is it no wonder that the blues emerged as the soundtrack to the lives these people lived?

So then what is blues? Well as I mentioned last time, blues sort of develops out of the field holler/spiritual tradition. A fair amount of field hollers, a type of work song that enslaved peoples would sing in fields while they were doing their work, were about regular ass things for regular ass peoples; this dude stole my girl, im gonna find me a girl to love, life sucks and im gonna sing about it, life doesn’t suck so much but I’m still gonna sing about it. Blues then tended to explore more themes related to the sadder points of those stories but in similar ways and styles. So where did blues come from specifically, what makes it a different genre than a field holler or a spiritual, and that’s a great question so let’s get in it.

Let’s say for a second you went through a real shitty period in your life, you significant other named steve dumped you, your pet armadillo, also named steve, died, ur mom (also coincidentally named steve) has taken away your showering privileges, you’ve forgotten how to speak ur native language and to top it all off you just burnt your gotdamn mac and cheese. You spiral into a deep situational depression that lasts quite a little while. During this time you listen to one album on repeat just over and over again, you know it all inside out and backwards and diagonal, you know every instrumental part by heart, you’ve got the lyrics tattooed on your ass, the whole 9 yards. And then you start working your way out of it, slowly but steadily the days start getting brighter, you move out of your abusive mother’s house, you find a new partner or get comfortable being single, you appropriately morn the loss of ur pet armadillo, hell you even learn to make a better mac and cheese, things aren’t all fixed, and life isn’t breezes and cakes but it is ever so slightly easier than it was before, at least you have ur freedom right? BUT NOW, everytime you listen to one of those songs from that album it mentally brings you back to the way things used to be and it’s not great. Well that’s kinda what happened with blues music but, ya know, infinitely worse. Essentially, black people wanted a new sound to accompany this new life and so they fuckin made it and it’s great.

The similarities of blues to field hollers and spirituals are relatively easy enough to hear if you know where to look which isn’t really surprising given that blues is the evolution of it. For example the basic structure stayed pretty similar, simple rhyming schemes, simple harmonies, melismatic vocal structures in places, and many times the lyrics were often very similar to those forms before them. But it goes even further than that! Most of the early blues melodies were directly derived from their spiritual predecessors. So for some comparison here’s some songs, first one is gonna be a field holler, next one is gonna be a spiritual, and then the last one is gonna be a blues song mmk? And here we go:

AND ACTUALLY YOU KNOW WHAT WAIT, JUST CAUSE IM FUCKIN, OOO BABE, OK, SO WHEN I WAS RESARCHING THIS FUCKING EPISODE I WAS TRYING TO FIND GOOD AUDIO CLIPS TO USE, AND LEMME TELL YA MAN YOU WOULDN’T THINK SPIRITUALS WOULD FUCKIN EXIST OUTSIDE THE LIBRARY OF FUCKING CONGRESS CAUSE APPARENTLY THEY HAVE A GODDAMN STRANGLEHOLD ON ALL BLACK SPIRITUALS EVER RECORDED BY THE LOMAX’S. The thing is is that fuckin copyright at least in the states is supposed to run out 75 years after the death of the recorder or fucking owner of the rights, which it certainly has been for Alan Fucking Lomax BUT NOOOOOOO, I HAVE TO NEARLY PURCHASE A GODDAMN CD IN ORDER TO GET YOU GUYS A FUCKING ACCURATE REPRESENTATION OF MUSIC THAT CAME OUT LIKE 100 YEARS AGO. To be clear I refuse to buy anything for this podcast other than my recording equipment, but man researching this podcast is big joab hours, god just keeps fuckin testing me. Just slap my ass and call me a pickle, ok, rage is over, time for songs:

These freed populations wanted a new music, a music that fit their current situation better, that didn’t rely on the imagery of the past in order to get across the situation they were in. And so that’s what blues did, it was a new sound for a new era and even more importantly it was a sound entirely their own. Whereas field hollers and various other types of music sung by enslaved peoples were by definition their invention, many of them still borrowed heavily from the dominant cultures of their oppressors, and so in creating blues what they had was something they could 100% call their own. Even if they didn’t own the land they worked/lived on, and had few rights to the crops they sewed and reaped, they did have blues, and that’s something beautiful.

But when does it become a thing, like when does blues start becoming a thing? And that’s a hard part. Like any cultural phenomenon it’s hard to fuckin say, there’s some accounts that say 1865 like the fuckin second the civil war ended, then there’s some that attribute it to the 1920s. Most of the sources I’ve looked at put it around 1890-1910. It originates unsurprisingly in and around the Mississippi Delta Region and East Texas where you have a lot of farmland and thus a lot of poor folks just trying to scratch out a living for themselves. AND SO THE BLUES BECOMES A THING AND IT’S COOL AS HELL AND IT DEVELOPS IN SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS! And I’m sorry that I’m not gonna get enough time to do every subgenre of blues, but we’re gonna look at 3 of the big regions or subgenres of blues.

So blues first of all have all those things that I mentioned before simple rhyming schemes, like ABAB or ABCC, simple harmonies, Call and response is definitely a thing that still happens in this specific style, but then they also have blues notes, for those who missed the last episode, blues notes are notes within a standard scale that are ��bent” (or at least that’s how they were initially described.) These notes are lowered by a semitone making the overall colour of the sound a bit darker and more… emotional, sad? Like we ascribe emotions to the way things sound and that might be western centric, I’m actually gonna have to look into it later, but for western listeners we’re gonna read the emotion in these tones as sad. So the notes specifically are lowered the 3rd 5th and 7th degrees of a regular scale. I’m going to play you guys an example of blues scale in just a second but the guy playing the example is using the pentatonic version of the scale meaning only 5 notes of it.

In terms of instruments the most standard you’re going to find in any blues band is at it’s most basic one guitar and a person singing. You could even make an argument that just singing could be blues if you’re using a blues scale but usually there will at least a guitar and one dude singing. The rest of the intstruments are gonna depend on the region you’re playing from. So remember the moaning thing I mentioned last time? The moaning style vocals? Not pioneered by but made popular by a man that went by Blind Lemon Jefferson? This one:

Well he falls under the Mississippi/Texas type of blues which we’re gonna call texasippi. It differs from other types of blues in the united states for a couple reasons but one of them is that moaning style of vocals, in other parts of the country the style where the blues vocals function similarly to other styles of singing, clean and clear, no moaning. Another cool thing that texasippi blues also does is they incorporate a lot of metal into the way they play their guitars. Not like the heavy screamy kind that’s come to be MY fave, but like actual metal objects! How they incorporate this is through the strings of the guitar specifically causing a little extra twangy buzzing when the strings resonate but also a sort of pleasing screech when they’re shifted up and down the strings like this:

but what did they use to make this sound? Well just about anything small enough and metal you could thread between the strings or held against them while playing, this coulda been bottle caps, pocket knives, silverware. Remember, we’re still talking about a type of music that was very much being played by people without very much or no money, so you’re using what you can to make it. Nowadays you can purchase wee cylanders made of glass or metal that go over ur fingers that you press up against the strings to create the desired effect. In addition to this, something that’s pretty regional to the blues in this area is the harmonica. I’m assuming most of you know about the harmonica and have heard it but for those who don’t, the harmonica is a squanky reed instrument that you play with your mouth. I would tell you the physics of how it works but fuck if I ever studied physics. Basically when you blow in it, it vibrates the reed and makes a note depending on the holes you blow into, and when you suck air in it, it makes other sounds! They can be very very large or very very small thus changing how low or high the sound is respectively. They were invented somewhere in the early 1800s in Germany we think and they sound something like this:

How were harmonicas introduced into blues music? Well turns out, much like some of the other instruments we’ll see in a hot minute, harmonicas were often carried by soldiers during the American civil war, even President Abraham Lincoln himself was reported to have carried a harmonica with him in his coat pocket and would play it as he “found it comforting.” Thing about the harmonica was that it was relatively easy to make and it was extremely cheap to buy in comparison to other instruments at the time, even better was that you really didn’t need lessons to figure out how to make it sound good. So during the reconstruction period, as industrialization rapidized in America, and harmonicas became more available, and previous soldiers reminisced about the songs they heard played in their camps during the civil war, more and more people started picking up the harmonica. And so poor southern americans were able to incorporate the instrument into this new music they were developing like this:

Also I would big time recommend just watching the video for that song, dudes just sittin there legit just suckin on his harmonica at some point, that’s what I fucking call dedication bud. The cool part about blues from the texasippi way is then during the great migration, the phenomenon that I mentioned last episode, where black southerners just start heading northwards, is that the blues travels with them too. Just briefly on the great migration, remember all the shitty stuff I discussed earlier, the lack of work, sharecropping, lynching and what have you? That’s why the great migration takes place. Basically black people all around the south are going jesus fucking christ shit sucks let’s get out of here and find somewhere better to be, and so they do, and about 6 MILLION Black Americans head north to where it’s… better. I mean there’s definitely still racism and all sorts of jim crow era laws and practices up north but it is still some degree better than the south. So this great migration is how texasippi blues music then comes to be transplanted into Chicago, and turns into Chicago blues.

“BUT LAURA” YOU SAY, UR HANDS CLENCHED INTO FISTS AT UR SIDES, “IF TEXASIPPI BLUES IS THE SAME AS THE ONES IN CHICAGO THEN HOW’RE THEY DIFFERENT!?” YOU CRY WITH TEARS FORMING AT THE SIDES OF YOUR EYES. And you’re right b, they are the same so why are they different? Well ya gotta remember that time does funny stuff to music similarly as it does with language and just abut anything else, things change over time, AND, things get invented over time. And time as we’re moving into now is like 30s and 40s era. So in the case of Chicago blues we get the additives of the piano, which has been around for some time but people are now just being able to put into their blues music due to becoming more financially stable, BUT WE ALSO GET THE COOL NEW INVENTION OF THE ELECTRIC GUITAR. Now there is some speculation over the invention of most things throughout history, for example, y’all might be familiar of Thomas Edison not actually inventing the lightbulb and being a bit of a dick about things, so when I talk about inventors of things, unless otherwise stated, please take it with some amount of a grain of salt. So Paul H Tutmarc may have been the first person to invent the first electric guitar when he managed, by some feat of science, which I will not explain because science is for wizards and freeks and while I am both of those I am not at all qualified or able to explain it, but essentially he managed to electrify a Hawaiian guitar! He supposedly invented this sometime in the 1930s. Here’s an example of what that sounds like:

Very Spongebobby… spongeboblike…spongebobesque… so EITHERWAY the electric guitar, as well as the electric bass is invented and so those are then infused into Chicago blues. In some cases you will also get the addition of drums and saxophone, but it is the electrified elements as well as the piano that really characterize the biggest difference between Chicago blues and texasippi blues. Overall, it sounds like this:

Something you also probably heard in there was just the level of intensity, the volume or what I’m gonna call the perceived volume, is louder. Whereas the songs of the texasippi blues is a little softer, quieter, very much just dude and his guitar volume, Chicago blues is gonna sound a little louder and a little more intense at most times. This is due to blues clubs becoming a big thing during this time period. And why shouldn’t they? In diaspora communities, that is communities consisting of people from a similar ethnic or national background, you often get patterns of similar settlement. So in our case, when Black Americans started moving northward, they would often settle in similar communities or move into similar communities based off of their ethnicity. Afterall you wanna be able to live in places where people understand your experience. There’s also the element of racism of course, homeowners associations making it hard for Black folk to move into white neighbourhoods and of course school segregation which didn’t end until the 1954. So while in some cases there was def an element of wanting to feel safe in a community of people who understand you, there’s also a big ol element of racism as there pretty much always is when we talk about anything. Seriously ur gonna be surprised at how far reaching and fucking just convoluted and stupid racism is, especially when we get into like Europeans being racist against other Europeans. So since we have all these people moving up north they need to be entertained, we all need entertainment after-all, but lo and behold! They can’t go to white clubs in a lot of cases because fucking racism (unless you are a performer in which case sometimes you can go to white clubs but only to perform, I’m gonna get more into that when we have our jazz episode.) So we start having blues clubs and because they’re a club and there’s drinking and talking and what not, often these songs tend to be a little louder or more rowdy to compensate.

On the other end of the country we also have my favorite flavour of blues which is the New Orleans blues. I’m definitely 100 percent biased when I say this but why does everything in New Orleans just sound better? If I had to guess it’s the multiculturalism and thus people bringing in tonnes of different ideas, but it’s hard to quantify awesome so we’re just gonna leave it there. BUT YEAH so we have texasippi blues that travels down the river (cause things rarely travel up a river) and hits New Orleans. But again, if we’re talking about the same style of blues then what makes it different? A lot hunny, a lot. So as we talked about in our last episode there’s a lot of different cultural elements at play in Louisianna culminating in some cool ass musical styles and changes. It’s also absolutely something we’re gonna talk about when we go back and do the Jazz episode cause lord knows New Orleans jazz is just as fuckin hot and dangerous (like serious lemme just go fuckin hangout with you guys down there, that’s all I want, musical tour of louisianna) I will say though that the line between jazz and blues does tend to get a little blurry though when we’re talking about New Orleans Blues so just hold onto ur femurs there yall and strap in.

So New orleans blues is different from other types of blues again by incorporating horns and piano into the music, most notably this will be the trumpet cause trumpets after the civil war just kinda leached out into the general public and since people got used to them in that capacity they became sorta naturally engrained into the soundscape of the music of the area. “but laura doesn’t Chicago also have horns?!” and ur right man they absolutely do, but there’s even more. So where texasippi blues relies on a rather standard rhythms in most cases, the New Orleans Blues scene takes from some of that different heritage and combines Caribbean inspired or based rhythms. We can find a good example of the inspiration for those rhythms in another genre of music that was popular at the same time, Calypso. Calypso is a genre of music which we will look more in depth in the future but just really generally for now it is popular in the Caribbean as well as certain parts, South America (particularly Venezuela), Mexico, and of course New Orleans during this time. It is usually up-beat and relies a lot on emphasizing the offbeat, and these are all things that we hear being incorporated into New Orleans blues during the time. So when we hear blues from New Orleans, one of the things we can usually use to tell the difference is merely just the upbeat tempo of things and slightly more rhythmically complex manner in which it existed. In fact Blues in New Orleans was so fuckin different it actually started what we know of as R&B or rhythm and blues which sounds like this:

Just a quick detour, I fuckin love like, blues and jazz names. The Man I played just there was Roy Brown but man the names really take off on occasion my personal favorite being Guitar Slim Jr., but we also got Fats domino (sometimes just known as fats, or the fat man), we god fuckin Professor Longhair, we got a dude who just goes by the name sugar boy, like… guys…. What happened to nicknames like that, I wanna walk around and when people see me comin at a distance they just point and go oh lord here comes swamp papa, like, that’s livin man, I dunno what to tell you but that’s absolutely livin.

Anyhow, what ur gonna notice, or maybe you didn’t notice but I’m gonna tell you and you can go back and notice is that blues, (along with jazz but we’re gonna get to that) as it goes on and evolves starts sounding a lot like early rock and roll music, and that doesn’t happen by coincidence. Also you’re probably noticing that blues at least as far as it goes for the Chicago variety and the New Orleans variety we talked about, sound a hell of a lot like Jazz and again we’ll get more into the specifics later. The thing is when we talk about invention, whether it be music, or physical things, or even sometimes schools of thought and ideas is that things get borrowed and changed and moulded into something else by other people. Hell the phenomenon of something being invented in multiple different places at the same time is so common enough that it even has a name, it’s called multiple discovery. Generally people in North America prefer a more black and white “this thing was developed at this time and this place by this person because definitive reason definitive reason definitive reason.” Because we have this weird sense of individuality and crediting individuals with discovery as opposed to a group or the society itself as maybe it should more rightly be. This means that in our endless want to categorize and systematize and ize all these things, particularly things like music, it gets sorta difficult to discern what is what and why and how. Of course we’ve already seen this with spirituals and gospel, and now we’ve seen it with blues/jazz/and early rock.

I just wanted to bring it up sooner than later because, especially as we move into more modern north American Genres, and honestly genres from various other places throughout the world. I wanted to bring this up now before we go any further in this podcast because as we get into more modern genres and hell maybe even with this episode I imagine I might get some rather angry mail from elitests who will smash their foreheads on the keyboard in absolute blind fuckin dismay and rage accusing me of putting the wrong genre lables on the wrong songs. The thing is though, like most art, or definitions in life, things are salient. Just because music fits one genre doesn’t mean it only fits within that genre, in the case of the Rhythm and Blues song by Roy brown that I played earlier, while it is definitely Rhythm and Blues there’s also gonna be other people who strongly consider that Rock and Roll. And that’s alright! Music doesn’t have to rigidly fit into one genre, we give things genre titles or group things into genres to help more easily understand their histories and identify other things that sound like it! All music is going to have variation, and in the case of rhythm and blues, a style of blues that very much informs early rock, you’re going to have cross roads like that. So instead of getting defensive, maybe take some time to think about how cool it is that music exists on an ever evolving spectrum.

So with that, that’s all for just a music podcast this week, I hope you’ve heard something new, and I hope you’ve heard something that you like. If you haven’t there’s always next time where we’re actually gonna do something a little different. Next time we’re gonna look at the Minstrel show which I’m subtitling right now, “why we don’t wear black face.” In the meantime, though if one of y’all would like to suggest a topic I would love nothing more than to answer your musical questions or talk about topics that interest you guys in music. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

List of Music: Jump Jim Crow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjIXWRG09Qk

Belton Sutherland's field holler (1978) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CPJwt14d5E&list=PLAyuUbD3Cdhxx__cTlFDrkxxKiYllrYwJ&index=2

Wash Dennis & Charlie Sims - Lead Me To The Rock - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmPqmLovNms&list=PLAyuUbD3Cdhxx__cTlFDrkxxKiYllrYwJ&index=4

Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell - How Long Has That Evening Train Been Gone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEw0ek2BhJE

Blind Lemon Jefferson – Black Snake Moan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3yd-c91ww8

Mississippi Fred McDowell - You gotta move - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtlVSedpIRU&feature=emb_logo

Red River Valley -Traditional - Harmonica solo by Kyong H. Lee - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKM4bn4kS-0

Sonny Boy Williamson - Keep it to Yourself - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtRxJDb3vlw

Paul Tutmarc performs - My Tane - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUOms5y6cmI

Buddy Guy - First Time I Met The Blues - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1jruvTBleY

Roy Brown - Mighty Mighty Man - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhp8jMykAVg

Technical Clip I used: PianoPig (on youtube) - Minor Pentatonic vs Blues Scale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwz0b-At1ys

#music #music podcast #podcast #just a music podcast #music history

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molusca · 4 years

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she apologized for how she handled the situation and apologized for brushing off someone's honest criticisms as hate. what more is she meant to do? throw herself onto a pyre? is she not allowed to feel lousy that this whole thing blew up in her face? because she's an adult and she made a mistake, she's not allowed to be sad or stressed? she's still an imperfect human. apologizing immediately usually means people are still sensitive to their own hurt of being called out because it's fresh and on their mind so it tends to slip into their apology, but if she had waited any longer to compose herself, you guys would probably have an issue with how long she took. also, in aaaaaallll of this, I've have yet to once see what exactly about her work is so problematic? I've read her fic and I personally can't see anything wrong, although I will admit that yes, I'm a white ciswoman but I'd like to think I'm aware of negative tropes. but the only thing touted is "it made an mlm uncomfortable" but HOW??? honestly, I want to know! if anything so I can avoid doing the same thing! how is anyone meant to learn when you're not bringing up these points as often as you're explicitly laying out the problems in her apology and whatnot. I've seen 6 posts about how shit the apology was and for why and I've not once seen the original comment detailing why the fic was problematic, and I've been looking on twit, tumblr, insta, and ao3. if it's been deleted, why isn't anyone stating again and again what's wrong? also, if someone is making fic/art you don't like, don't. interact. with. it. there's tons of stuff on ao3 and twit that I don't like, some of it that I think is disgusting (do you know how many fics there are with keith/kosmos?) and I just scroll past it cause it can't hurt me if I don't read it. there's one artist that's pretty popular on Twitter and I personally really hate they way they draw klance but it's all over my tl. I respect that person's art style and creativeness and keep on moving. other people enjoy it, good for them. and if I start reading something and get surprised with something I dont like, I leave! find people who write things you like and stop engaging with creators who's things you don't like, as far as I know no one is holding a gun to your head making you read problematic fic. also for as much as you rag on her for the words she used to apologize, you don't seem to be considering your own words when offering criticism. if Taylor mistook the person's words as hate, couldn't it have been because the way he worded the complaint was done hatefully? lastly, no one, absolutely no one, is required to talk about world issues when they're running a fandom account,no matter how "big" they are. we all know what's going on in the world, we're surrounded by sad and stressful stories practically 24/7 and if someone isn't, they're probably curating their social feeds to be that way (like you should do when it come to kl content creators you don't like). people sending hate in Taylor's defense are in the wrong I agree, and this isn't hate its critism its a discussion, but Taylor isn't responsible for, how many people did you say? 16k on twit? even if she said hey guys stop, you think they would? she's can't control all those people and expecting her to is nonsense. I see so many younger fans expecting perfection in their fandoms and that just isn't going to happen. yes we should be striving to be better but no one is ever going to be perfect. not you, not me, not the mlm person, not Taylor, not anyone on any side of this argument. the only way to avoid this kind of circular dog piling and hate sending is to better curate your fandom experience by ignore those you have issues with.- 🦛

she apologized for how she handled the situation and apologized for brushing off someone's honest criticisms as hate. what more is she meant to do?

im pretty sure i said its good that she realizes she handled it poorly. but she makes the whole apology about this, doesnt directly talk about the issues and i know someone went to her to talk about it. also, it took her a day to say something about it so it wasnt exactly immediate (in the sense people had already stopped talking about it but that doesnt mean they werent still bothered). the apology was directed at mlm, and i havent seen one saying it felt genuine. of couse she can be hurt but when you apologize to a marginalized group the focus shouldnt be your feelings, but the feelings of the ones you have hurt.

I've have yet to once see what exactly about her work is so problematic?

she admits to be projecting on lance. so she makes him very femine and keith very masculine. and ok, gay couples like that do exist, but she is a woman projecting in this situation so this bothers people. putting mlm in this position is a harmful steriotype, bc it feels very heterosexual. this is a trope, it unfortunately happens a lot and its harmful. women need to be aware of what they are representing when drawing/writing mlm because well, real mlm are going to see it, and no one likes to feel like a fetish to others. and its not our place to question if the criticism is right or wrong when we are not mlm, so if you read this and think “but thats not a problem thats not a fetish etc” well, its not your place to judge that. theres more to it and you probably could get a better answer from a mlm sorry.

if someone is making fic/art you don't like, don't. interact. with. it. there's tons of stuff on ao3 and twit that I don't like, some of it that I think is disgusting (do you know how many fics there are with keith/kosmos?) and I just scroll past it cause it can't hurt me if I don't read it.

please, lets not compare a minority pointing out harmful tropes with. something fucking illegal.

as you said, you are a cis woman, of course its not going to hurt you in this case. but if people are making harmful content its not a simple matter of “dont interact with it” because they will still be promoting it, other people are going to read it, and media influences how we see minorities so of course people will not like when they see bad portrayal of them. also, tumblr sucks so even if you want to just “dont interact with it” its hard because even after blocking you can still cross the content of someone. not sure how it works on twitter but anyway this discussion started on tumblr and tumblr doesnt stop people who were bothered by her to avoid her by blocking.

if Taylor mistook the person's words as hate, couldn't it have been because the way he worded the complaint was done hatefully?

i think she deleted the ask by now, but i dont remember the ask being hateful. i remember someone asking if she was a fujoshi, and another person mentioned that mlm didnt like the way she portrayals klance. i dont remember it being hateful. but again, she apologized for handling it badly. its just that she stops there.

no one, absolutely no one, is required to talk about world issues when they're running a fandom account,no matter how "big" they are. we all know what's going on in the world, we're surrounded by sad and stressful stories practically 24/7 and if someone isn't, they're probably curating their social feeds to be that way

ignoring world issues is a privilege. if someone is able to turn off from all the problems in the world, its a privilige. yes no one should talk aobut it all the time thats not even healthy, but to never talk about it is a privilege. thats what black people are saying, they cant just turn off from racism, so yes they are going to expect white people to do something. online honestly i cant do shit, i dont think anything i reblog here does a difference and i do what i can in my own country, but she has a plataform that could help bring awareness. again, its a privilege to be able to curate your social media to be a perfect happy place.

even if she said hey guys stop, you think they would? she's can't control all those people and expecting her to is nonsense.

maybe they wouldnt, but if people were doing this type of thing in my name, in my defense, i would at least say something about it idk. she cant control them but she makes nothing to show that she disagrees or look for the people being harassed to say something about it.

the only way to avoid this kind of circular dog piling and hate sending is to better curate your fandom experience by ignore those you have issues with.

when it comes to simple things like “i prefer taller lance and i dont like taller keith” yeah, its fine to ignore people who draw taller keith and move on with your life or something like that. but we are talking about mlm, a real group of people, being upset for being portrayed in a harmful and steriotype way. its everywhere in fandom, and in real life. they cant escape from real life, and then they come to fandom where everyone wants some escapism and have to deal with more issues. its tiring

#well. good morning #anon

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