also of note because im paranoid of how people like to use things against me and have used things against me in the past -- i very deliberately do not and have not deleted posts of mine within the past 5ish years with incorrect or poorly worded takes because i prefer to have documentation of my own wrongdoings and missteps as opposed to acting like a flawless Understander Of Politic.

old posts of mine that contradict new ones are, in fact, just that: contradictions. and they lay a path forward for my further understanding of the world i find myself in. i like to be corrected. i enjoy debate and critique and this is one of the many ways i engage in it. i am a passionate advocate of moving through discomfort with my "past selves" and their poorly articulated, often centrist/liberalist, opinions. even if that past self existed two hours ago.

take that as you will. i will always be reading and exploring and learning with my community and my city. i appreciate those who participated with meaningful discussions and additions to my anger.

love Black people with the same passion you feel when you see injustice against us. bye bye for now

im not going to lie this shit has taken a lot out if me and now people are accusing me of racefaking despite 15 years of social media evidence to the contrary so i will be logging of for the time being.

take care of yourselves. dont start stupid shit in the replies of my posts.

what?

accussing me of racefaking and misgendering me? im not a woman. im a biracial Black nonbinary person.

i understand that my existence as a biracial person does give me certain privileges that unambiguously Black people do not have, but having a Black woman OC as my pfp does not = racefaking -- i've regularly stated that she is an oc and not me for years now

read your criticism and have a genuine question about your thoughts on the branding scene. i completely understand how max's branding is inherently tied to a racist history, and it always will be, but i dont feel like the scene itself was written with that bias/intent. thaddeus also gets branded in later episodes and it's implied to happen to every aspirant upon their promotion. at what point in writing are black characters morally barred from specific story points because of their similarities to a history that's not directly related? sort of similar with barb, at what point can black characters not do bad things at all, especially in a story where there are near a dozen non-black characters who do worse things? also considering it's implied (at least, i understood it as) she's sticking to vault-tec to protect her family?

I am not in the best position to comment on this, because I am not black. I will do my best to add what I can, but this is a space for others to chime in.

Barb is interesting because she's essentially become the person who did the most heinous crime in the entire setting- by far and away worse than anything anyone has ever done. There really aren't white characters who did worse things- because all the crimes of Caesar or the Enclave or whoever else pale in comparison to being the one who literally set into motion the total annihilation of all nations on Earth.

The issue is they've created a setting that is, as presented, colorblind. Race is invisible to the writers, who did not consider it meaningfully while producing the show- as is often the case with white creatives putting characters of color into their stories. This is not inherently bad- many great scifi stories feature a largely colorblind setting. Look at the relative inclusivity of star trek as an example.

The thing that makes Fallout different from Star Trek however is that this is a show that is intensely concerned with depicting the specific brand of nationalistic American politics of the 1950s and the Cold War- and they've reproduced that system for the show but with a black woman at the head. That's where the issue comes up.

This was a system that had racism baked into it by design. It still does. American Nationalism and corporate violence are built on racism against black people and other minorities. And this show desperately wants to depict these things, but they've decided to put a black woman at the head of them. They're depicting systems that are, by their nature, violently racist- but they've decided to portray them as being run by a black housewife.

Fallout 3 does a similar thing with how it depicts every major slaver as a black person. Eulogy Jones, the slave buyer at Paradise Falls, the head slaver in the Abe Lincoln memorial, Ashur in The Pitt. Hell Mothership Zeta adds in a black woman from the wasteland and even SHE'S revealed to have been a slaver. This is something Bethesda consistently does- depicting ideologies and practices with a deep history of racialized violence- and then showing black people at the head of them, seemingly to try to skirt around actually addressing racism meaningfully in their stories. (I use Fallout 3 as an example but Fallout 4 does many of these same things.)

Thaddeus does also get branded, and he does also get treated to the same demeaning servanthood as Maximus. The difference, quite frankly, is that Thaddeus is white. There are just some things that are straight up inappropriate to depict happening to black characters. Never before this series has the Brotherhood ever done brandings- and yet this show opens with it in the first episode and introduces this brand new jarring concept with the visceral image of a black man being branded by faceless fascist cultists.

It's also important to note that even if they didn't intend the scene as racist, it still is. Like I don't think the scriptwriter sat down and said "oh I'm gonna do a racism" cuz intent just doesn't matter here. The scene was intended as a way of showing the severity of the brotherhood- but it also thoughtlessly reproduces images of historic black violence.

@orange-coloredsky I know you've been talking about this stuff all day, and your initial posts about the antiblack racism in the series were what prompted me to write my thoughts today- which is what this ask is in response to. I was curious if you have any other input with all this.

I'd also be more than happy to have any additional input from people better suited to answer these questions.

its not fucking KOSA censorship to ask the majority white fanbase to question why the majority white creators of a MASSIVE fucking franchise have an obsession with showing very specific kinds of racial violence and dehumanization against Black people, particularly Black men. but yeah. whatever. enjoy your franchise slop whitey

please, anyone who reblogs this post from now on -- this addition is important.

my post was originally written out of frustration with the normalization of depicting acts of physical violence against Black men in media -- which did not at all take into consideration the realities of how misogynoir and violence against Black women in media are either hidden away/ignored or in real life are spurred on even by minor/side roles being represented by Black women in gaming. my language centering "especially" Black men was sloppy and not warranted.

thank you for taking the time & energy to write this out.

its not fucking KOSA censorship to ask the majority white fanbase to question why the majority white creators of a MASSIVE fucking franchise have an obsession with showing very specific kinds of racial violence and dehumanization against Black people, particularly Black men. but yeah. whatever. enjoy your franchise slop whitey

I am sorry.

I enjoyed the show, I didn't analyze it critically when I should have and actively recommended it.

I realize the error of my ways and feel guilty.

Do you have any recommendations for good media in place of it?

The thing is that engaging with media isn't activism and engaging with more "ethical" media doesn't make for a better worldview. It's fundamentally impossible to purify your soul by consuming art, and the idea of purity in that way is already missing the forest for the trees.

Fallout New Vegas, along with 1 and 2, are games I love deeply. But New Vegas has horrendous problems with racism- specifically anti indigenous racism. 2 has some awful tonal problems and some downright horrifically aged humor.

The thing is, despite these works not being perfect- I still find tremendous value in them. The show, for all I have said about the ways it makes me deeply uncomfortable, is still quite often an engaging piece of art: an impressive passion project of thousands of creators and writers and filmmakers coming together to make something they believed in.

While I find the show's narratives quite troubling- I am also enraptured by the ways they're often presented. It is a show that is stylish and interesting and I think most people watching it don't notice these things.

Media analysis isn't a means of solving the ills of the world- because making media less problematic wouldn't solve any of the underlying biases that the society that PRODUCES this media has. Works like these are a branch of the tree, not a root. I'm pointing these things out as a way of countering some of these narratives- but also with the hope that it will help people notice these narratives in other places.

I'm not telling you that you can't like the show, or that liking the show makes you a bad person. I don't like it personally- and I'm wary of much of what the show is saying- but ultimately it is just a piece of art, and it should be understood as part of the current cultural landscape- created to turn a profit and entertain audiences. It is a product of its time and its culture and should be understood as such.

The things present in the show that we find offensive stem from the society that produced it- and must be understood as systemic problems and not one-off failings of the Fallout show team (not to say they are innocent, just that their particular wrongdoings are part of a larger issue.)

There are things far more important than the fallout show being problematic. Save the energy for other fights. There are a lot of people who need help right now. Take this as a learning lesson, and look out for these things in the world around you- not just on TV and in movies.

I hope this doesn't come off as rude or dismissive, and I hope it gives you something to think on.

[ID: a black and white sketch of the Sole Survivor and X6-88 from Fallout 4. Sole is an older Black woman with a face & neck tattoo, wearing a du-rag on her head. She is smiling and looking at X6, who stands behind her, covering his face and nearly doubling over with laughter. End ID]

draw your favorite Black characters happy and smiling TODAY ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

oh im so tired and exhausted. x6-88 smiling and laughing at whisper's horrible jokes as they head to salem to get this season's fresh produce ..... glory & preston share lunch and discuss partnering up with local railroad-allied communes to create a support network for synths who need help finding a place to live since the dismantling....... beautiful gnc Black man gen3 dima relaxing with his partners that he loves on an island thats finally at peace and they watch the sun disappear over the horizon... my life is calm and normal and im normal and calm

anyways if you want to read a Black fallout fanfic writer's very short and unorganized reimagining of the story from the lens of a Black woman character read a mirror is harder to hold. Black love and joy and interiority and complexity above all

literally some of you are so fucking obsessed with "pushing boundaries" and "just asking questions" that you dont realize the boundaries your pushing arent boundaries but completely normalized things and the questions youre asking are fucking awful

nonblack people can write Black villains once they learn uh. i dont know . i changed my mind fuck you. can you write something the fuck else

nonblack people can write Black villains once they learn uh. i dont know . i changed my mind fuck you. can you write something the fuck else

bethesda owes me $30000 for antiracism training their consumer base

starting first off with: it does not matter the "intention" of the people depicting racist stereotypes or acts in media or art -- racist depictions are racist depictions. end of. the idea that "intent" somehow changes the racist-ness of an act or image is ignorant of the causes & reality of racism: it is not simply bad people doing bad things, but rather a systemic and societal othering of anyone who falls outside of the category of "white". the "intent" behind a white production team deciding to show a Black man getting branded (and not only getting branded, but refusing any aid to lessen/brace for the pain -- which perpetuates another stereotype based around Black peoples' and darker skinned peoples' higher pain tolerance... which is an actual pseudoscientific myth that kills people around the world.) does not matter to me, a Black person having to witness the pointless, racist absurdity of the scene. nor does it matter to white supremacist chuds who clap and cheer at depictions of violence against racialized minorities.

bethesda is not uniquely antiblack, but they do have a long track record of representing Black characters in horrible, horrible ways. which also adds to why maximus' treatment is exceptionally worse, even in comparison to the white man thaddeus who also is made to be subjugated and brutalized. im not saying if this was a unique situation of antiblackness on behalf of the team i'd be less affected, its just infuriating to know that this team is getting away with pushing out gutwrenchingly racist content for years. see the examples above -- as well as

- X6-88 being an emotionless, obsessively violent, literally De-Humanized servant to either the player character (in a majority-white male demographic) or a fascist dictator

- Glory, the sole named Black female character in the whole of fo4, who is triply-marginalized by in universe standards (a woman, Black, and a synth) who gets murdered by the hypermasculine technofash race-supremacists in the Brotherhood or by her own former-oppressors in the Institute. no matter what ending you take.

[ID: a screenshot of the anonymous ask. it reads: " At what point in writing are Black characters morally barred from specific story points because of their similarities to a history that is not directly related? Sort of similar barb, at what point can Black characters not to bad things at all, especially when there are near a dozen non-black characters who do worse things?" End ID.]

this question is fucking baffling to me because Black characters are consistently exposed to violence, dehumanization, ridicule, demonization etc in media. It Is The Norm. its wild to think that somehow asking for less of this is a "challenge" to the world of art, or some sort of slippery slope into silencing of artistic expressions. standing on some artistically moral high ground on a topic one clearly does not have much knowledge of, and then asking a nonblack person to speak on this kind of turns my stomach. violence against Black and Black-coded characters in media is the norm. all bethamazon had to do was see the cut of maximus getting branded and realize "hey this is fucked and not anything we've done in any previous titles. maybe we should scrap this plot point, and replace it with something else." to the part on "similarities to a history not directly related", i direct you to the bell hooks quote i recently posted (hyperlink isnt working but i'll get on that). art is political. images and especially images of identities outside of the white cultural hegemony are going to be steeped in the author's preconceived notions of said identity, and consumers of that image willingly or unwillingly add that image to their understanding of that identity, if the consumer is not aware of and willing to cognitively challenge these images. bell hooks is not the only cultural critic to point this out, just the one i happen to be reading a lot of currently.

i know looking at works of fiction in a political/"moral" light is a Hot Fandom Topic but i cant stress enough how any handwringing about "purity culture" and "censorship" is a false flag being raised to shut down any sort of critical thinking on behalf of nonblack fans when it comes to the treatment of Black characters in media. the standard of dehumanization and abuse of Black people in images, fictional and not, has been the standard for CENTURIES. white creators have gotten away with incorrect and stereotypical depictions of Black characters since they started designing advertisements for the slave trade. and the reactions of white and nonblack spectators for years have been shoulder shrugging or "its just an image"-ing if not outright support and acceptance of these images. it is not revolutionary, pushing barriers, or exploring new artistic ground to be cruel and violent towards one's Black characters. in fact, the exact opposite is true.

i wont lie, unless the original asker wants to come off anon and pay me for the hour i spent articulating this oh so nicely as to not seem like a scary Black person who hates white people and makes them sad when i teach them antiblack racism is systemic and appears in art as frequently as it does anywhere else, im not saying any more on this topic. thank you op for your response and for tagging me. genuinely. i hope even people who tend to generally agree with me still learned something from this

read your criticism and have a genuine question about your thoughts on the branding scene. i completely understand how max's branding is inherently tied to a racist history, and it always will be, but i dont feel like the scene itself was written with that bias/intent. thaddeus also gets branded in later episodes and it's implied to happen to every aspirant upon their promotion. at what point in writing are black characters morally barred from specific story points because of their similarities to a history that's not directly related? sort of similar with barb, at what point can black characters not do bad things at all, especially in a story where there are near a dozen non-black characters who do worse things? also considering it's implied (at least, i understood it as) she's sticking to vault-tec to protect her family?

I am not in the best position to comment on this, because I am not black. I will do my best to add what I can, but this is a space for others to chime in.

Barb is interesting because she's essentially become the person who did the most heinous crime in the entire setting- by far and away worse than anything anyone has ever done. There really aren't white characters who did worse things- because all the crimes of Caesar or the Enclave or whoever else pale in comparison to being the one who literally set into motion the total annihilation of all nations on Earth.

The issue is they've created a setting that is, as presented, colorblind. Race is invisible to the writers, who did not consider it meaningfully while producing the show- as is often the case with white creatives putting characters of color into their stories. This is not inherently bad- many great scifi stories feature a largely colorblind setting. Look at the relative inclusivity of star trek as an example.

The thing that makes Fallout different from Star Trek however is that this is a show that is intensely concerned with depicting the specific brand of nationalistic American politics of the 1950s and the Cold War- and they've reproduced that system for the show but with a black woman at the head. That's where the issue comes up.

This was a system that had racism baked into it by design. It still does. American Nationalism and corporate violence are built on racism against black people and other minorities. And this show desperately wants to depict these things, but they've decided to put a black woman at the head of them. They're depicting systems that are, by their nature, violently racist- but they've decided to portray them as being run by a black housewife.

Fallout 3 does a similar thing with how it depicts every major slaver as a black person. Eulogy Jones, the slave buyer at Paradise Falls, the head slaver in the Abe Lincoln memorial, Ashur in The Pitt. Hell Mothership Zeta adds in a black woman from the wasteland and even SHE'S revealed to have been a slaver. This is something Bethesda consistently does- depicting ideologies and practices with a deep history of racialized violence- and then showing black people at the head of them, seemingly to try to skirt around actually addressing racism meaningfully in their stories. (I use Fallout 3 as an example but Fallout 4 does many of these same things.)

Thaddeus does also get branded, and he does also get treated to the same demeaning servanthood as Maximus. The difference, quite frankly, is that Thaddeus is white. There are just some things that are straight up inappropriate to depict happening to black characters. Never before this series has the Brotherhood ever done brandings- and yet this show opens with it in the first episode and introduces this brand new jarring concept with the visceral image of a black man being branded by faceless fascist cultists.

It's also important to note that even if they didn't intend the scene as racist, it still is. Like I don't think the scriptwriter sat down and said "oh I'm gonna do a racism" cuz intent just doesn't matter here. The scene was intended as a way of showing the severity of the brotherhood- but it also thoughtlessly reproduces images of historic black violence.

@orange-coloredsky I know you've been talking about this stuff all day, and your initial posts about the antiblack racism in the series were what prompted me to write my thoughts today- which is what this ask is in response to. I was curious if you have any other input with all this.

I'd also be more than happy to have any additional input from people better suited to answer these questions.

a development team that looks like this could not possibly have any preconceived biases against Black people. noooo way. its just a mistake that all of the Black people in fo4 are slaves or named after fascist colonizers or murdered or stereotypical conspiracy freaks. there is no way that the reality of this team is reflected in the art they create over and over and over and over and over and over and

bethesda owes me $30000 for antiracism training their consumer base

I'm sorry to the like half of this site's political userbase but sooner rather than later you're going to have to step away from tv shows, fanfics, fiction and flawed instinct as sources for a theoretical basis. You can't properly talk about, say, the Cuban revolution without first understanding the ideological and practical context that informed the decisions of the communist party of Cuba (that means reading Marx, Lenin, a communist work on colonialism such as Eduardo Galeno's Open Veins, historiography and statistics on the events preceding and succeeding the revolution that isn't written with ink and paper paid for by the CIA). The Hunger Games, Les Mis and Hamilton aren't substitutes because 1: they aren't real and anything can happen in fiction 2: they haven't influenced any real life revolutionary movements and 3: they are literary works made for enjoyment, not a political analysis.

I know the "kindness is revolutionary" pseudopunk eat the rich one big union type of person thinks pure political theory is elitist and/or boring because why engage with the source material yourself when Abigail Thorn, Jacob Geller and Vaush are right there to tell you what they thought of the source material (which is still political theory in most cases, unless it isn't, but how would you be able to tell?) so you can absorb it like a baby bird unable to chew their own food. Nobody who has both read the theory and applied it irl is ever going to take you seriously if all you can do is regurgitate what your vaguely progressive history or social studies high school teacher told you about decolonization.

oh my beloved fellow tumblr you will lvoe my past 10 posts

a development team that looks like this could not possibly have any preconceived biases against Black people. noooo way. its just a mistake that all of the Black people in fo4 are slaves or named after fascist colonizers or murdered or stereotypical conspiracy freaks. there is no way that the reality of this team is reflected in the art they create over and over and over and over and over and over and