Part of recuperating social justice within media is that the media is almost never intersectional, instead opting to deal with one of the intersecting systems of oppression. Race, gender, class, etc.

By choosing to deal with an individual system, the protagonist/antagonist duality means that there are always heroes and villains. Blacks vs whites. Women vs men. Gays vs straights. Poor vs rich. The issue with this is that it kills solidarity, separating the intersectional struggles into individual ones with individual perpetrators (the whites, the men, the straights) rather than the actual perpetrators (the ruling class who made their family wealth through colonialism and exploitation of everyone outside of the ruling class).

These single issue depictions perpetuate infighting within the ranks of the non-ruling class. A film that celebrates women against patriarchy gets read as misandry by indoctrinated men. A film that celebrates black and brown lives againsts white supremacy gets read as reverse racism by indoctrinated whites. A film that celebrates queer liberation against cisheteronormativity gets read as the gay agenda by indoctrinated cishets. A film that celebrates the working class against the wealthy gets read as Socialism (derogatory) by indoctrinated middle class. And I say "indoctrinated" in the sense that they have been socialized not to question why they have gifted privilege within the social hierarchies they have been placed in, and how that hierachical placement, in the middle between the ruling class and the most exploited at the bottom, means that they are an enforcing buffer that keeps the systems working and the ruling class safe from retribution.

All this isn't to say that films that tackle social issues are some kind of cointelpro psyop, controlled by Big Media (with all the anti-semetic connotations that kind of conspiracy thinking brings), but the point is that by not addressing the intersectional nature of the true struggle, these single issue stories are always going to alienate potential allies by seperating all victims within the underclass into warring tribes. The way we can use this media as a tool in our own favour is to use them collectively as a curriculum, and provide the intersectional context to hopefully break the indoctrination that is keeping solidarity from growing.

The elephant in the room: Rita's Gender

In manga ch12 and ep38, Rita is referred to with female pronouns. ch12 has a little girl call Rita お姉ちゃん (big sister) and ep38 has Minnogan call them 彼女 (she/her). This is canon text.

My argument proposed Rita does not bother correcting people who misgender them. Because their time is too valuable for that. Not that they don't mind, merely as King, they are above letting mere words hurt them.

In the manga, Rita certainly reacts more strongly to being told 'you look like a bad guy' than interested in picking a fight with a little girl. The girl first called to both of them and only Morfonia answered.

For ep38, there's no denial Idol Rita is dressed feminine so naturally Minnogan is led to think that way. Rita has no cause to oppose them or risk breaking their cover and lose his trust. To equate, another major villain, Kamejim, also identify Rita as male in considering them for Himeno's spouse.

My personal interpretation is, as opposed to a troubled age, Rita simply instinctively sacrificed everything personal in name of neutrality, for duty and country, including their gender. It's not like they identify as one thing or another, it's they don't identify with anything but King of Gokkan. Regardless of gender, it does not affect their competence to perform the duty of a sovereign. On a character level, it's more fitting for this person to identify as gender neutral, but I also don't think gender is a big part of their identity.

It's still a meaningful step we receive in Rita a messy but strong female character, it's just the difference how big the step is to have them also represent non-binary/trans people. It is the doylist symbolism they hold, and the authorial intention that I cannot put down.

I looked up "rita gender" on jp tweet and I get the impression they don't think today's episode is firm enough even for those who wished for it to confrim Rita is a girl. And their viewpoints is varied too, Rita's gender can also be "undisclosed" or "(just) Rita". So I feel better there. I overreacted.

All intents and purposes I might just be wishful thinking and they decided on making Rita a girl the moment Yuzuki was cast. Mah, it's been a good 37 weeks.

In the end, Rita's setting is "undisclosed gender". Truthfully I never expected Toei to keep a 37-episode streak, not only never referred to them with female pronouns, to making them more neutral in Chapter 2's styling, and even gave us episode 36.

Say, what about the occassional offscreen use of "she"? In their position, what would you ask Yuzuki/mass media to refer to Rita without official confirmation? The audition criteria are never made known to even Yuzuki herself now we're nearing the show's end. It's understandable she took to the character as the same gender as herself. The production crew doesn't share everything with the cast. Practically, gender issues is, not a safe topic to say the least, Yuzuki's own awareness, and whether higher-ups allow her to say anything about it, is another story. Again, businesses have no obligation to endanger their profit. Pretend Toei has the guts to come out and say Rita is non-binary from the beginning (which they kinda did sneakily), they will be accused of political correctness and using Rita as a gimmick, let alone the PTA complaints. If they stay silent, the same group is gonna say they are cowards. Why not just focus on making a good show and a popular/profitable character?

Under all that, lies the practical factors of Janpese grammar and where Janpanese society stands among conservative to progressive. It's a very complicated issue with histories to consider and I'm surely not the best person to ask as a non-native. But I guess the gist is, it's still not mainstream, so the media stick to the existent language when the official sources never said otherwise.

Another point is, I don't think too much people have the concept of "tiered canon" or "proximity to sources". I'm talking about throwing out EVERY website/interview, just looking at the show, there has been no concrete evidence what gender Rita is. While episodic costumes are feminine, the script consistently refers to them with neutral/masculine language. So you can make an argument for both sides really.

So I would like to end by parroting this excellent argument: may I remind you that cross-dressing is also a sentai tradition?

I've been seeing a lot more pushback against the "yes all men" / "kill the men" / etc. stuff and I think it's a good thing even though that talk never actually bothered me.

I think in general when you start opening your eyes to big societal issues and injustices and stuff it can really easily cause you to swing a bit hard in the other way or to draw the line too strongly.

I went the feminist route a bit ahead of the curve so my friends rolled their eyes at me some, they didn't even agree that some of the problems I was talking about existed let alone that they were things we were complicit to. This was almost twenty years ago, and now I'm still friends with most of them and we're all on the same page. The ones I'm not friends with anymore aren't friends with the rest of the group either, because we all realized they're... not good people.

But as right as I was in general, I also went too hard in some ways. I felt like I could never watch anything that was problematic which isn't realistic, I found myself listening to some pretty wild shit that was based in reality but taken so far off the deep end that it was absurd.

A similar thing, though way more minor, happened when I fully committed to being an atheist. Yeah, you know the type I'm talking about. That one ended when I realized how many of the big mainstream "look I'm an atheist" types were total assholes, and moved over to the more reasonable ones that also gave a shit about social justice.

My point is, I think this was a normal thing even if it wasn't a good thing, and I think it served a purpose. People were starting to wake up to some of the patriarchal shit that was going on, to some of the unfair ways our society treats everyone based on gender, and they went a little hard against men as a group. It didn't bother me, because I get it. Nobody wants to tack on a bunch of disclaimers, plus the people they were talking to didn't really understand the patriarchy stuff, and it was just... easier... to use those terms.

But longer term, it's not a healthy way to deal with stuff or to grow as a society. Just like I'd rather see people talking about some problematic media they enjoy by discussing what makes the good parts good as well as what makes the bad parts bad, as opposed to just shouting that if you watch Buffy you're a bad person.

Also keep in mind it's easy to judge everything off of what you know now, but if you're in your twenties or younger I promise you have no idea how different it was in the 2000s when a lot of this was first beginning to change. The conversations you can have now couldn't have happened then, the hyperbole was needed in a lot of cases to get people to even talk about the problems. So yeah, that's all. The man hate was a part of growth, and leaving it behind to take a more nuanced view of things where we can talk about sexism and gender disparity in a more productive way is also growth.

And people are individuals, so these different stages will be playing out over and over on a smaller level all the time in addition to the larger trends and that's okay too. If you know someone that's a bit rabid on some issue, especially an issue of societal injustice, have some patience with them and know it's probably because they are just fully grasping how fucked up some stuff is.

I don't want to be all "hello random stranger, I think your art is cool please give me advice", but I saw your webtoons post and I'd like to ask where/how you'd recommend putting webcomics on the web? For me and also for my friend who does have a comic on webtoon.

Hi! you're good, I don't mind talking about this at all haha

Before Webtoon got to be a thing the usual procedure for making a comic was to start out posting pages on your social media for a while so you could test the waters before making the jump to a dedicated site. That way you could build up a little bit of a reader base on an existing platform who would be interested enough to make the extra click, maybe start generating some revenue to pay for the real site, but also you got the chance to see if you even want to make comics without dumping too much time and effort into a site. I posted Kidd Commander pages on deviantart (now deleted) and its tumblr blog for about six months before I decided to change over, but to be honest if it's just a hobby or it suits you you can keep doing that forever if you want.

Personally, I think if your comic is important to you (and ESPECIALLY if you're getting income from it) I would strongly suggest making a home for it that you own. Make your own website and funnel people to it from social media. I know that's a tall order for a lot of reasons, but if you really can't do it, Drunk Duck is fairly reliable option that even lets you customize your vanity links and such. It's also not a terrible idea to MIRROR your comic on other sites as long as you have at least one independent place, although the quality of your reader base varies wildly between locations. There's your answer from Me Personally, but I wanna talk about why I'm so adamant about this so people reading this can make more informed decisions maybe.

Hosting and making your own website is always the safest thing you can do for a project. I don't know how well-known this is outside of the webcomics community but an issue we have come up every few years is that The Current Aggregate Site, like tapas or webtoon or even patreon, gets big enough that they decide to throw queer/marginalized voices under the bus for the sake of advertising. The biggest one I recall was Tapastic leaving a lot of queer creators in the lurch because their (then new) rules about smut pinged queer content too, as these rules tend to. If you'd built up your comic's following and community on this website it could all just disappear, you lost your archive and your comic's following and had to start over. Patreon has been tightening its policy on 'indecent media' for years too. Even tumblr, arguably the best social site for hosting a comic rn, is unstable because the site is so glitchy and unstable. I had a friend have to painstakingly rearrange their archive because a tumblr update jumbled all the pages overnight, and that's small compared to getting your blog randomly deleted. Webtoon already DEEPLY disrespects comics as a medium and has no love for small creators, given they make most of their ad money from Scandalous Content I don't know what their Moment will look like but I assure you it'll happen like it does everywhere. There's that saying about how if a service is free then you're the product; if you establish your webcomic in a place you don't own they can take that product away at any time. Along those lines, you're also tied to their ship if it ever goes down.

Webcomics has always been a medium for voices that are unwelcome in the mainstream, and that means we need to be careful about who we throw our lot in with because all these companies WILL sell us out when they get the chance. We cannot rely on them to take care of us. It's incredibly difficult to build a following, and building it in a place that could disappear as rules change over time pivots neatly into a hostage situation. Getting people to visit an independent site is definitely more difficult! But I've always been able to rest much easier whenever these periodic upheavals happen because my community has a place to reconvene and my archive is safe no matter what I post. The quality OF that community is also much higher since everybody is actively choosing to be there, I'm not just borrowing people who happen to be on an unrelated site anyway, and honestly not having to tailor my comic's story around a company's guidelines fucking rules lmao

Webcomics is a bizarre landscape these days and I'm certainly no authority on what every individual should do. Maybe your friend is just posting for fun and webtoon works for them! There's nothing wrong with using tumblr indefinitely if you're comfortable with that! Everyone's different. But if you're serious and want to have the most control over your work, try to own it all the way down. I hope some of this was helpful! Best of luck with your comics!

Watching Stuff Day 1 - 7/7/2023 - Current Streak: 1

I've been meaning to make myself watch more movies/shows lately since I've found that I haven't really seen all that many compared to my peers and want to broaden my horizons with media. I'm bad at keeping up streaks for goals I set for myself though (this isn't the first time I've tried to do this), and figure if I make this somewhat public then I'm more likely to hold myself accountable. So I'm aiming to both watch a movie/show-pilot I haven't seen yet and write about it here. I've done 2 years at tech school for animation and am majoring in animation when I start college, so I'm probably going to look slightly more into animated productions so I get more familiarity with media that I might end up being asked to use as reference for work in the future. So if you have any recommendations for shows/movies (especially animated ones), please feel free to send them to me! Don't think anything is too mainstream to recommend. I was very sheltered with what media I could watch as a kid which caused me to still not be too adventurous with what genres and media I watch/read now, so even if something is super popular, there's a decent chance I haven't seen it.

Now onto the actual show this first post is about. I decided to see the two-episode premiere of the new animated Superman show, My Adventures with Superman. I haven't seen many super hero shows/movies and only one of them I saw had Superman, so I went in not knowing much other than what I knew from cultural osmosis and a few video essays I had as background noise for work.

I ended up enjoying it quite a bit! I really liked the anime inspired artsyle used for it and the character designs. The animation itself did seem a bit choppy at times but that could've just been some sort of connectivity issue on my end. It does mix in some 3D elements at times for stuff like giant robots and cars. I generally don't mind that much when shows do that, those kind of things can be particularly tedious and time consuming to do in 2D. I just wish they had used a shader that matched the shading style of the 2D elements more, it felt a bit off to me.

As for the show's writing, I really like the work done for the characters and character dynamics. I think they did a good job setting up Clark as someone who can't help but help and support the people around him even before he becomes Superman and setting up his struggles with not knowing where he came from and what his background was before the life he's lived on Earth.

I also liked his dynamic with Lois. They had some cute scenes together and I thought it was interesting how they contrasted their characters by showing that Clark is trying his best to appear normal in his everyday life while Lois wants to be someone extraordinary. It seems like they could do really interesting stuff with that as things go on and the characters start to potentially come into more conflict regarding their investigation into Superman. I also liked the mini character arc Lois had at the beginning with learning to not just rope people into her schemes and to put trust into her new colleagues rather than trying to manipulate them. I think it was a neat way to establish her character while also providing tension for the fate of the group before the characters decide to make-up and stick together in the end.

I don't know how accurate Jimmy is to the source material, but I really liked his character here too! I think him being a conspiracy/outlandish theorist guy gives him an interesting angle as part of their investigative trio and as a comedic character. I do wish he got more of an arc here like Clark and Lois did, but I understand why the pilot episodes would want to focus more on those two characters though.

I also liked the villain they had for these first two episodes. I think they did a good job establishing her character and character flaws. She was shown to be smart and competent by setting up back-up plans like the bombs in the sewers and she was shown to be a capable physical threat because of the tech and combat skills she possesed. However, they also wrote her as arrogant at some points (lines like "yes, I am the smartest person here!" as a retort to what another character said) which makes her defeat more satisfying because her defeat was only possible because of her over-confidence. Her tech/electric attacks seemed to be doing a good job of harming Superman, and if she had kept some distance from him, she might've been able to beat him or at least stun him for a bit so she could try to get away. She could've also potentially bluffed by saying she could also detonate the bombs she placed with the tech she had on her to create a sort of hostage situation in order to make Superman let her get away. But since she was arrogant about her own abilities, she fought him head on and allowed him to get close enough to remove the power core of her suit. I think it would be interesting to see her as a recurring character since they've set-up these character flaws and she could eventually learn to better analyze the options and power she has in situations in order to become a more competent antagonist or potentially a strong circumstantial ally to the heroes against the shady organization that abducted her at the end. I also like how they made tech/weapon dealing and dispersal a part of her character because It also acts as a way to naturally explain how even small-time villains Superman will have to deal with in the future can have high tech weaponry and be a threat.

Some other small stuff I liked but didn't find a way to fit naturally into all that:

I like how Clark's mom made adjustments to his suit. Seems kind of symbolic of how Clark's Kryptonian parents made him and sent him to Earth (made the suit and gave it to Clark) but it was his Earth parents that raised him to be the person he is (added onto to the suit and made it the suit it is now)

I liked the kid's newspaper/intel group. I thought it was cute and funny and hope it continues to show up.

Overall, I really enjoyed it despite not having much knowledge of the source material. Really liked the artstyle and character writing. I'll probably keep watching it as it comes out.

For my next thing I'll watch, I think I'll watch the Nimona movie that recently came out. I've heard good things about it, and read the graphic novel back in middle school, so I'm definitely interested in seeing it. After that I'll probably do something older so I'm not just watching recent and newly on-going things. If you happen to stumble upon this and have any other recommendations for movies/shows, feel free to message me about them.

More Future Talk

Welcome back to my blog here on Tumblr! The blog rolls along with a new and exciting week of content. Today I will be taking a look at the following news story:

NFT Comic Books: The Promise, the Peril, and What The Future Actually Holds

By Jex Exmundo

From: https://nftnow.com/culture/nft-comic-books-and-the-open-future-of-storytelling/

I’m really interested in discussing the future this week. This is my second future focused post for the week and it’s a good one.

NFT storytelling from independent artists may present some issues for fans in the future. The first issue is likely to be confusion. According to Jex Exmundo (2022), “Case in point, let’s look at My Immortal — a piece of Harry Potter fanfiction so universally disliked that some have even speculated it to be an overly elaborate piece of satire lampooning the worst of what fanfiction had to offer. If J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World featured a similar structure to decentralized NFT franchises, then My Immortal would be recognized as actual canon within the franchise. In the real world, this piece did little to diminish the success of the Harry Potter franchise. From a certain subset of the Potterhead community, it may have even added to it. The same can’t be said if the work was actually recognized as a canon entry into the series. Just look at how quickly Game of Thrones seemingly disappeared overnight from the mainstream conversation following the broadly negative reception its final season received.” The decentralized nature of blockchain ledgers and NFTs allow anyone to create content. This will create confusion as to which works are actually consider canon and which are not. (Wikipedia defines canon as “the material accepted as officially part of the story in an individual universe of that story by its fan base”) Without a clear declaration of canon in the blockchain, consumers will be confused by the overwhelming possibilities of story generation.

This is especially true when considering the possibility of the destruction of the original physical comic book. Without the original work, fans may be left wondering if that work has been removed from canon. This is a complex situation worth monitoring in the coming years.

The other future outcome to monitor is the people versus profit aspect of comics. According to Exmundo (2022), “Creativity takes the backseat to profit,” Elf said about his experiences working in traditional media. “It’s the non-creative people at the top who make the final creative decisions. The antidote is to invert that model. What if [the fans and creators] actually got to sit in the creative driver’s seat? What kind of amazing product would you get from that model?” NFTs and blockchain represent the vast potential of a free and open marketplace of ideas. Gatekeepers and intermediaries are no longer a part of the equation. Moving forward, major comic publishers must keep this in mind in order to avoid alienating the intended audiences. The future is still uncertain. However, all parties involved have the opportunity to build something special from the ground up and create a fan-first community.

Be sure to check back here each week for my latest blog entries to stay up to date with the happenings in the industry. Also be sure to visit https://newhouse.syr.edu/ for more information about how you can get involved in this industry

Buyers Like Cool Products - But Certainly not for Long

Cool. Also the word is usually, well, "cool". Many of us seem to enjoy "cool" stuff. And we are very mindful "cool people" who usually have the most current "cool stuff". Generally there are plenty involving examples of "cool" in sale that will make a lot of retailers drool; "if only we had assumed of that, very well they mutter. For instance, certain brands of pocket notebooks are usually "cool". They may cost ten times the price associated with a regular notebook. Although an ordinary notebook computer is so, effectively, "ordinary". It does not have the feel of a branded edition, nor the handy little elastic hook, nor the out signal how the provider of the laptop is "cool". In the same way, smartphones were exceptionally "cool" when these people first came out; then came pill devices. Other cool products include robotic vacuum cleaners, for instance, or automated garden mowing machines. Although there is the problem with great products; coolness does not last. Consider the "laser mouse" as an example. The initial optical mice regarding computers were labelled as "cool" products by design magazines. If you got a mouse emanating a bright red light you had been amazing. But now, such mice are all over the place - who loves you? When smartphones first of all was released they have been cool; now almost everyone has one particular they are not necessarily cool by any means. Likewise, it was as soon as cool to have an Music player instead of a CD player. Now individuals ask "what's a CD? " because digital music is definitely omnipresent - so much so it is not necessarily cool any additional. Coolness is temporary. And therein is placed What is Depressive Disorders for business owners. In the event you create a cool item you are pushing you to have in order to line up one other cool product to follow along with it a small while later. You can see this particular with each touch screen phone manufacturer trying in order to out-do each other together with new models and new "cool" capabilities each year. However, at heart, this is still some sort of phone. Yet , in case they only got their old unit on sale this would not be noticed as "cool" in addition to sales would drop. The only approach to keep offering when you invent something cool is definitely to think of anything else cool. Coolness puts you on a never-stopping treadmill. You need to keep on proceeding and going in addition to going. Otherwise your own products lose their particular cool factor, product sales drop and people migrate to some thing which does experience coolness. What you really need to sell is things that is not amazing. What is suitable for long-term success instructions and probably higher profitability - is usually "evergreen" stuff. Products that people constantly need sell effectively - and so they can certainly have high success because you do not need to be able to reinvest so much into an R&D budget inventing some thing cool. Evergreen items exist in a wide range associated with markets - discover paper and writing instruments in office supplies, saucepans and cutlery in kitchen equipment, or calculators inside of schools supplies. Presently there are also classic services like product sales training or business presentation skills consultancy : a smaller amount cool as compared to courses in sociable media, but much more likely to last a long time. Research through Penn State University confirms that coolness only lasts while long as the product does not get into the mainstream. That would suggest if you want to sell more and make probably the most income you need to focus on that well known, avoiding coolness because all of that does is definitely keep you on that will product invention treadmill machine. Graham Jones may help business people understand the particular behaviour of these on the web customers and offers proper advice, workshops, teaching and conference speaking on the issue. Get his 7 days a week newsletter delivered every Saturday - Sign Up Here

Hi :) If it's not too much trouble, could you please share your take on why they'd continue the Adventure brand after tri. was such a flop? (and a tangent: what does "dark history" even mean?). We got Kizuna, the reboot, and a 02 movie. Logically, it doesn't really make sense they'd keep investing in it.

This is a thorny topic, and I'd like to reiterate that although I've ended up making more posts related to this series and the discourse surrounding it recently (probably because it's even more on the mind now that another movie is on the horizon and a lot of people are apprehensive for various reasons), I do not want this blog to be making a brand out of being critical of this series. I’m writing this here and in public because I figured that there is a certain degree I need to clarify what I mean about audience reception/climate and how it might impact current or future works, and I’m admittedly also more than a little upset that I occasionally see Western fanbase criticisms of the series getting dismissed by people claiming that the only people mad about it are dramamongering or ignorant Westerners (which could not be further from the truth). However, this is mainly to address this and to answer your question, and is not intended to try and change anyone's existing opinion or impression of the series as much as it's me trying to explain (from my own personal reading of the situation) what practically went down with critical reception in real life; no more, no less.

The short summary of the matter is:

The series was a moderate financial success (albeit with some caveats; see the long version for details) and definitely outstripped a lot of prior attempts to revive the franchise;

However, the overall Japanese fanbase-side critical backlash from tri. was extremely and viciously negative to the point where even acknowledging the series too much could easily result in controversy;

Kizuna’s production and the PR surrounding it very obviously have this in mind with a lot of apparent “damage control” elements.

The long version is below.

Note that while I try to be diligent about citing my sources so people understand that I’m not just making things up wholesale, I’m deliberately refraining from linking certain things here this time, both because some of the things mentioned have some pretty crude things written there -- it’s not something I feel comfortable directing people to regardless of what language it’s in -- and because I don’t want to recklessly link things on social media and cause anyone to go after or harass the people involved. For the links that have been provided, please still be warned that some of them don’t really link to particularly pleasant things.

I am not writing the following information to suggest that anyone should agree or disagree with the sentiments being described. I know people tend to take "a lot of people like/hate this" as a signal of implication "it is correct to like/hate this" when it's not (and I especially dislike the idea of implying that Japanese fanbase opinions are the only correct ones). There's a reason I focus on "critical reception being this way" (because it influences marketing decisions and future direction) rather than how much this should impact one's personal feelings; this is coming from myself as someone who is shamelessly proud of liking many things that had bad critical reception, were financial failures, or are disliked by many. As I point out near the end, the situation also does seem to be changing for the better in more recent years as well.

Also, to be clear, I'm a single person who's observing everything best I can from my end, I have no affiliations with staff nor do I claim to, and as much as I'm capable of reading Japanese and thus reading a lot of people's impressions, I'm ultimately still another “outsider” looking in. These are my impressions from my observation of fan communal spaces, following artists and reading comments on social media and art posting websites, and results from social media searches. In the end, I know as much as anyone else about what happened, so this is just my two cents based on all of my personal observations.

A fanbase is a fanbase regardless of what part of the world you're from. There are people who love it and are shameless about saying so. There are people who have mixed feelings or at least aren't on extreme ends of the spectrum (as always, the loudest ones are always the most visible, but it's not always easy to claim they're the predominant percentage of the fanbase). That happens everywhere, and I still find that on every end I've seen. However, if I'm talking about my impressions and everything I’ve encountered, I will say that the overall Japanese reaction to tri. comes off as significantly more violently negative on average than the Western one, which is unusual because often it's the other way around. (I personally feel less so because the opinions are that fundamentally different and more so because we're honestly kind of loud and in-your-face people; otherwise, humans are mostly the same everywhere, and more often than not people feel roughly the same about everything if they’re given the same information to work with.)

This is not something I can say lightly, and thus would not say if I didn’t really get this impression, but...we're talking "casually looking up movie reviews for Kizuna have an overwhelming amount of people casually citing any acknowledgment of tri. elements as a negative element", or the fact that even communal wikis for "general" fandoms like Pixiv and Aniwota don't tend to hold back in being vicious about it (as of this writing, Pixiv's wiki refuses to consider it in the same timeline as Adventure, accusing it of being "a series that claims to be a sequel set three years after 02 but is in fact something different"). Again, there are people who openly enjoy it and actively advocate for it (and Pixiv even warns people to not lord over others about it condescendingly because of the fact that such people do exist), and this is also more of a reflection of “the hardcore fanbase on the Internet” and not necessarily the mainstream (after all, there are quite a few other Digimon works where the critical reception varies very heavily between the two). Nevertheless, the take-home is that the reputation is overall negative among the Internet fanbase to the point that this is the kind of sentiment you run into without trying all that hard.

I think, generally speaking, if we're just talking about why a lot of people resent the series, the reasons aren't that different from those on the Western side. However, that issue of "dark history" (黒歴史): there's a certain degree of demand from the more violently negative side of the fanbase that's, in a sense, asking official to treat it as a disgrace and never acknowledge it ever again, hence why Kizuna doing so much as borrowing things from it rather than rejecting it outright is still sometimes treated like it’s committing a sin. So it's somewhat close in spirit to a retcon movement, which is unusual because no other Digimon series gets this (not even 02; that was definitely a thing on the Western end, but while I'm sure there are people who hate it that much on their end too, I've never really seen it gain enough momentum for anyone to take it seriously). If anyone ever tells you that Japanese fanbases are nice to everything, either they don't know Japanese, are being willfully ignorant, or are lying to you, because there is such thing as drama in those areas, and in my experience, I've seen things get really nasty when things are sufficiently pushed over the edge, and if a fanbase wants to have drama, it will have drama. This happens to be one of those times.

(If you think this is extreme, please know that I also think so too, so I hope you really understand that me describing this sentiment does not mean I am personally endorsing it. Also, let me reiterate that the loudest section of the fanbase is not necessarily the predominant one; after all, as someone who’s been watching reactions to 02 over the years, I myself can attest that its hatedom has historically made it sound more despised than it actually is in practice.)

My impression is that the primary core sentiment behind why the series so much as existing and being validated is considered such an offense (rather than, say, just saying "wow, that writing was bad" and moving on) is heavily tied to the release circumstances the series came out in during 2015-2018, and the idea that "this series disrespected Adventure, and also disrespected the fanbase.” (I mean, really, regardless of what part of the world you’re from, sequels and adaptations tend to be held to a higher bar of expectation than standalone works, because they’re expected to do them justice.) A list of complaints I’ve come across a lot while reading through the above:

The Japanese fanbase is pretty good at recordkeeping when it comes to Adventure universe lore, partially because they got a lot of extra materials that weren’t localized, but also partially because adherence to it seems to generally be more Serious Business to them than it is elsewhere. For instance, “according to Adventure episode 45, ‘the one who wishes for stability’ (Homeostasis) only started choosing children in 1995, and therefore there can be no Chosen Children before 1995” is taken with such gravity that this, not anything to do with evolutions or timeline issues, is the main reason Hurricane Touchdown’s canonicity was disputed in that arena (because Wallace implies that he met his partners before 1995). It’s a huge reason the question of Kizuna also potentially not complying to lore came to the forefront, because tri. so flagrantly contradicts it so much that this issue became very high on the evaluation checklist. In practice, Kizuna actually goes against Adventure/02 very little, so the reason tri. in particular comes under fire for this is that it does it so blatantly there were theories as early as Part 1 that this series must take place in a parallel universe or something, and as soon as it became clear it didn’t, the resulting sentiment was “wow, you seriously thought nobody would notice?” (thus “disrespecting the audience”).

A lot of the characterization incongruity is extremely obvious when you’re following only the Japanese version, partially because it didn’t have certain localization-induced characterization changes (you are significantly less likely to notice a disparity with Mimi if you’re working off the American English dub where they actually did make her likely to step on others’ toes and be condescending, whereas in Japanese the disparity is jarring and hard to miss) and partially due to some things lost in translation (Mimi improperly using rough language on elders is much easier to spot as incongruity if you’re familiar with the language). Because it’s so difficult to miss, and honestly feels like a lot of strange writing decisions you’d make only if you really had no concept of what on earth happened in the original series, it only contributes to the idea that they were handling Adventure carelessly and disrespectfully without paying attention to what the series was even about (that, or worse, they didn’t care).

02 is generally well-liked there! It’s controversial no matter where you go, but as I said earlier, there was no way a retcon movement would have ever been taken seriously, and the predominant sentiment is that, even if you’re not a huge fan of it, its place in canon (even the epilogue) should be respected. So not only flagrantly going against 02-introduced lore but also doing that to a certain quartet is seen as malicious, and you don’t have as much of the converse discourse celebrating murdering the 02 quartet (yeah, that’s a thing that happened here) or accusing people with complaints of “just being salty because they like 02″ as nearly as much of a factor; I did see it happen, or at least dismissals akin to “well it’s Adventure targeted anyway,” but they were much less frequent. The issue with the 02 quartet is usually the first major one brought up, and there’s a lot of complaints even among those who don’t care for 02 as much that the way they went about it was inhumane and hypocritical, especially when killing Imperialdramon is fine but killing Meicoomon is a sin. Also, again, “you seriously think nobody will see a problem with how this doesn’t make sense?”

I think even those who are fans of the series generally agree with this, but part of the reason the actual real-life time this series went on is an important factor is that the PR campaign for this series was godawful. Nine months of clicking on an egg on a website pretending like audience participation meant something when in actuality it was blatantly obvious it was just a smokescreen to reveal info whenever they were ready? This resulted in a chain effect where even more innocuous/defensible things were viewed in a suspicious or negative light (for instance, "the scam of selling the fake Kaiser's goggles knowing Ken fans would buy it only to reveal that it's not him anyway"), and a bunch of progressively out-of-touch-with-the-fanbase statements and poor choices led to more sentiment “yeah, you’re just insulting the fanbase at this point,” and a general erosion of trust in official overall.

On top of that, the choice of release format to have it spread out as six movies over three years seems to have exacerbated the backlash to get much worse than it would have been otherwise, especially since one of the major grievances with the series is that how it basically strung people along, building up more and more unanswered questions before it became apparent it was never going to answer them anyway. So when you’re getting that frustrated feeling over three whole years, it feels like three years of prolonged torture, and it becomes much harder to forgive for the fallout than if you’d just marathoned the entire thing at once.

For those who are really into the Digimon (i.e. species) lore and null canon, while I’m not particularly well-versed in that side of the fanbase, it seems tri. fell afoul of them too for having inaccurately portrayed (at one point, mislabeled) special attacks and poorly done battle choreography, along with the treatment of Digimon in general (infantilized Digimon characterization, general lack of Digimon characters in general, very flippant treatment of the Digital World in Parts 3-5). If you say you’re going to “reboot” the Digital World and not address the entire can of worms that comes with basically damaging an entire civilization of Digimon, as you can imagine, a lot of people who actually really care about that are going to be pissed, and the emerging sentiment is “you’re billing this as a Digimon work, but you don’t even care about the monsters that make up this franchise.”

The director does not have a very positive reputation among those who know his work (beyond just Digimon), and in general there was a lot of suspicion around the fact they decided to get a guy whose career has primarily been built on harem and fanservice anime to direct a sequel to a children’s series. Add to that a ton of increasingly unnerving statements about how he intended to make the series “mature” in comparison to its predecessor (basically, an implication that Adventure and 02 were happy happy joy series where nothing bad ever happened) and descriptions of Adventure that implied a very, very poor grasp of anything that happened in it: inaccurate descriptions of their characters, poor awareness of 02′s place in the narrative, outright saying in Febri that he saw the Digimon as like perpetual kindergartners even after evolving, and generally such a flippant attitude that it drove home the idea that the director of an Adventure sequel had no respect for Adventure, made this series just to maliciously dunk on it for supposedly being immature, and has such a poor grasp of what it even was that it’s possible he may not have seen it in the first place (or if he did, clearly skimmed it to the extent he understood it poorly to pretty disturbing levels). As of this writing, Aniwota Wiki directly cites him as a major reason for the backlash.

In general, consensus seems to be that the most positively received aspect of the series (story-wise) was Part 3 (mostly its ending, but some are more amenable to the Takeru and Patamon drama), and the worst vitriol goes towards Parts 2 (for the blatantly contradictory portrayal of Mimi and Jou and the hypocritical killing of Imperialdramon) and 4 (basically the “point of no return” where even more optimistic people started getting really turned off). This is also what I suspect is behind the numbers on the infamous DigiPoll (although the percentage difference is admittedly low enough to fall within margin of error). However, there was suspicion about the series even from Part 1, with one prominent fanartist openly stating that it felt more like meeting a ton of new people than it did reuniting with anyone they knew.

So with all of that on the table: how did this affect official? The thing is that when I say “violently negative”, I mean that also entailed spamming official with said violently negative social media comments. While this is speculation, I am fairly certain that official must have realized how bad this was getting as early as between Parts 4 and 5, because that’s where a lot of really suspicious things started happening behind the scenes; while I imagine the anime series itself was now too far in to really do anything about it, one of the most visible producers suddenly vanished from the producer lineup and was replaced by Kinoshita Yousuke, who ended up being the only member of tri. staff shared with Kizuna (and, in general, the fact that not a single member of staff otherwise was retained kind of says a lot). Once the series ended in 2018 and the franchise slowly moved into Kizuna-related things, you might notice that tri.-branded merch production almost entirely screeched to a halt and official has been very touchy about acknowledging it too deeply; it’s not that they don’t, but it’s kind of an awfully low amount for what you’d think would be warranted for a series that’s supposed to be a full entry in the big-name Adventure brand.

The reason is, simply, that if they do acknowledge it too much, people will get pissed at them. That’s presumably why the tri. stage play (made during that interim period between Parts 4 and 5 and even branded with the title itself) and Kizuna are really hesitant to be too aggressive about tri. references; it’s not necessarily that official wants to blot it out of history like the most extreme opinions would like them to, but even being too enthusiastic about affirming it will also get them backlash, especially if the things they affirm are contradictory to Adventure or 02. And considering even the small references they did put in still got them criticism for “affirming” tri. too much, you can easily see that the backlash would have been much harder if they’d attempted more than that; staying as close as possible to Adventure and 02 and trying to deal with tri. elements only when they’re comparatively inoffensive was pretty much the “safe” thing to do in this scenario (especially since fully denying tri. would most certainly upset the people who did like the series, and if you have to ask me, I personally think this would have been a pretty crude thing to have done right after the series had just finished). Even interviews taken after the fact often involve quickly disclaiming involvement with the series, or, if they have to bring up something about it, discussing the less controversial aspects like the art (while the character designs were still controversial, it’s at least at the point where some fanartists will still be willing to make use of them even if they dislike the series, albeit often with prominent disclaimers) or the more well-received parts of Part 3; Kizuna was very conspicuously marketed as a standalone movie, even if it shared the point of “the Adventure kids, but older” that tri. had.

(Incidentally, the tri. stage play has generally been met with a good reputation and was received well even among people who were upset with the anime, so it was well-understood that they had no relation. In fact, said stage play is probably even better received than Kizuna, although that’s not too surprising given the controversial territory Kizuna goes into, making the stage play feel very play-it-safe in comparison.)

So, if we’re going to talk about Kizuna in particular: tri. was, to some degree, a moderate financial success, in the sense that it made quite a bit of money and did a lot to raise awareness of the Digimon brand still continuing...however, if you actually look at the sales figures for tri., they go down every movie; part of it was probably because of the progressively higher “hurdle” to get into a series midway, but consider that Gundam Unicorn (a movie series which tri.’s format was often compared to) had its sales go up per movie thanks to word of mouth and hype. So while tri. does seem to have gotten enough money to help sustain the franchise at first, the trade-off was an extremely livid fanbase that had shattered faith in the brand and in official, and so while continuing the Adventure brand might still be profitable, there was no way they were going to get away with continuing to do this lest everything eventually crash and burn.

Hence, if you look at the way Kizuna was produced and advertised, you can see a lot of it is blatantly geared at addressing a lot of the woes aimed at tri.: instead of the staff that had virtually no affiliation with Toei, the main members of staff announced were either from the original series (Seki and Yamatoya) or openly childhood fans, the 02 quartet was made into a huge advertising point as a dramatic DigiFes reveal (and character profies that tie into the 02 epilogue careers prominently part of the advertising from day one), and they even seemed to acknowledge the burnout on the original Adventure group by advertising it so heavily as “the last adventure of Taichi and his friends”, so you can see that there’s a huge sentiment of “damage control” with it. How successful that was...is debatable, since opinions have been all over the board; quite a few people were naturally so livid at what happened with tri. that Kizuna was just opening more of the wound, but there were also people who liked it much better and were willing to acknowledge it (with varying levels of enthusiasm, some simply saying “it was thankfully okay,” and some outright loving it), and there was a general sentiment even among those who disliked both that they at least understood what Kizuna was going for and that it didn’t feel as inherently disrespectful. (Of course, there are people who loved tri. and hated Kizuna, and there are people who loved both, too.)

Moreover, Kizuna actually has a slightly different target audience from tri.; there’s a pretty big difference between an OVA and a theatrical movie, and, quite simply, Kizuna was made under the assumption that a lot of people watching it may not have even seen tri. in the first place. An average of 11% of the country watched Adventure and 02, but the number of people who watched tri. is much smaller, in part due to the fact that its “theater” screenings were only very limited screenings compared to Kizuna being shown in theaters in Japan and worldwide, and in part due to the fact that watching six parts over three years is a pretty huge commitment for someone who may barely remember Digimon as anything beyond a show they watched as a kid, and may be liable to just fall off partway through because they simply just forgot. (Which also probably wasn’t helped by the infamously negative reputation, something that definitely wouldn’t encourage someone already on the fence.) And that’s yet another reason Kizuna couldn’t make too many concrete tri. references; being a theatrical movie, it needs to have as wide appeal as possible, and couldn’t risk locking out an audience that had a very high likelihood of not having seen it, much less to the end -- it may have somewhat been informed by tri.’s moderate financial success and precedent, but it ultimately was made for the original Adventure and 02 audience more than anything else.

I would say that, generally, while Kizuna is “controversial” for sure, reception towards the movie seems to be more positive than negative, it won over a large chunk of people who were burned out by tri., and it clearly seems to have been received well enough that it’s still being cashed in on a year after its release. The sheer existence of the upcoming 02-based movie is also probably a sign of Kizuna’s financial and critical success; Kinoshita confirmed at DigiFes 2020 that nothing was in production at the time, and stated shortly after the movie’s announcement that work on it had just started. So the decision to make it seems to have been made after eyeing Kizuna’s reception, and, moreover, the movie was initially advertised from the get-go with Kizuna’s director and writer (Taguchi and Yamatoya), meaning those two have curried enough goodwill from the fanbase that this can be used to promote the movie. (If not, you would think that having and advertising Seki would be the bigger priority.) While this is my own sentiment, I am personally doubtful official would have even considered 02 something remotely profitable enough on its own to cash in on if it weren’t for this entire sequence of events of 02′s snubbing in tri. revealing how much of a fanbase it had (especially with the sheer degree of “suspicious overcompensation” Kizuna had with its copious use of the 02 quartet and it tagging a remix of the first 02 ED on the Hanareteitemo single, followed by the drama CD and character songs), followed by Kizuna having success in advertising with them so heavily. Given all of the events between 2015 and now, it’s a bit ironic to see that 02 has now become basically the last resort to be able to continue anything in the original Adventure universe without getting too many people upset at them about it.

The bright side coming out of all of this is that, while it’s still a bit early to tell, now that we’re three years out from tri. finishing up and with Kizuna in the game, it seems there’s a possibility for things improving around tri.’s reception as well. Since a lot of the worst heated points of backlash against it have a very “you had to have been there” element (related to the PR, release schedule, and staff comments), those coming in “late” don’t have as much reason to be as pissed at it; I’ve seen at least one case of a fanartist getting back into the franchise because of Kizuna hype, watching tri. to catch up, casually criticizing it on Twitter, and moving on with their life, presumably because marathoning the whole thing being generally aware of what’ll happen in it and knowing Kizuna is coming after anyway gives you a lot less reason to be angry to the point of holding an outright grudge. Basically, even if you don’t like it, it’s much easier to actually go “yeah, didn’t like that,” not worry too much about it, and move on. Likewise, I personally get the impression that official has been starting to get a little more confident about digging up elements related to it. Unfortunately, a fairly recent tweet promoting the series getting put on streaming services still got quite a few angry comments implying that they should be deleting the scourge from the Internet instead, so there’s still a long way to go, but hopefully the following years will see things improve further...

In regards to the reboot, I -- and I think a lot of people will agree with me -- have a bit of a hard time reading what exact audience it’s trying to appeal to; we have a few hints from official that they want parents to watch it with their children, and that it may have been a necessary ploy in order to secure their original timeslot. So basically, the Adventure branding gets parents who grew up with the original series to be interested in it and to show it to their kids, and convinces Fuji TV that it might be profitable. But as most people have figured by now, the series has a completely different philosophy and writing style -- I mean, the interview itself functionally admits it’s here to be more action-oriented and to have its own identity -- and the target audience is more the kids than anything else. As for the Internet fanbase of veterans, most people have been critical of its character writing and pacing, but other than a few stragglers who are still really pissed, it hasn’t attracted all that much vitriol, probably because in the end it’s an alternate universe, it doesn’t have any obligation to adhere to anything from the original even if it uses the branding, and it’s clearly still doing its job of being a kids’ show for kids who never saw the original series nor 02, so an attempt to call it “disrespectful” to the original doesn’t have much to stand on. A good number of people who are bored of it decided it wasn’t interesting to them and dropped it without incident, while other people are generally just enjoying it for being fun, and the huge amount of Digimon franchise fanservice with underrepresented Digimon and high fidelity to null canon lore is really pleasing the side of the fanbase that’s into that (I mean, Digimon World Golemon is really deep in), so at the very least, there’s not a lot to be super-upset about.

The main things that turned me off of conversion for now were

1. I have alot of shit on my plate and am low income as a result so finding a place that will help might be hard because locally there really aren't any synagogues around

2. The synagogue I did find locally was uhhh...... Hhhhh. Their web page had a huge section about Israel in a positive light..

I love the religion, I love certain values it holds however I refuse to align with anyone who justifies colonialism and bloodshed against another group of people while ignoring past bloodshed done onto themselves. It makes 0 sense to me and is highly hypocritical.

Hypocrisy was one of the reasons I hated Christianity so much. Constantly causing bloodshed, huge present and past history of colonialism, huge present day history of wanting people like me who are gay or trans dead and in the ground.

the difference with Christianity is that there isn't even a present day persecution or justified worry of safety despite the fact that I've seen jack chick esque evangelical fuckers unironically act like they're holocaust survivors whenever a pride parade happens within 1 mile of them.

It makes me sad, I don't see the point in colonizing or maiming a group of people who should be your equals.

It's racist at best, dangerous and actively contributing to more death and violence at worst.

The thing is there isn't really a "point." It creates its own point. Real actionable Zionist sentiment was basically non-existent until the rise of European nationalism. It's literally the exact same brand of nationalism that gave birth to fascist Italy and other great failures of modernity. And when "Israel" was a proto-state basically its entire existence was contingent upon its continued usefulness to Britain as a tool of control over India through the Suez. Zionist claims to the land are super shaky at best and straight up revisionist at worst. Post-facto Israel has tried to give itself legitimacy through fearmongering, genocide, and forging alliances with other imperialist powers. It's doing what America did (and is doing) but it's happening in the age of mass media and we are all watching colonial revisionism happen in real time.

If you are letting the prevalence of Zionism keep you from Judaism, I would say you should keep thinking about it. If you treat Judaism as too thoroughly engulfed in Zionism, you do the work of Zionists for them--you legitimize their claim that Judaism is Zionism is Israel. You legitimize the idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism which is incidentally exactly how my local rabbis have been fucking me over since June. You are of course totally within your rights not to convert to a religion that doesn't work for you, but I hope you rethink the implication that converting to Judaism is akin to aligning with Zionism.

And yeah, Zionist hypocrisy is a systematic issue within American Jewish institutions in a feedback loop with Jewish populations. Any institutional apparatus is going to have systematic issues that reflect the dominant discourse of the greater cultural framework--mainstream Jewish institutions are going to, both by the nature of maintaining relevancy in America and by the natures of fearmongering and cultural amnesia, have a vested interest in participating in capitalism, imperialism, racism... You are not going to find mainstream insitutions that don't perpetuate them. That's why they're dominant. You are no more aligning yourself with Zionism by going to a synagogue than you are aligning yourself with capitalism by shopping at Wal-Mart. Anything you meaningfully do in public is in some way going to be "problematic" on some level because public space is designed to keep itself alive by those values.

It's exhausting to make yourself never come close to anyone or anything bad at all--refusing to associate with anyone with a problematic ideology is a doomed enterprise. I've been there. A lot of Zionist sentiment is implanted in people's minds with lifelong propaganda and destructive mind control techniques, and it's important to recognize that. That doesn't mean Zionist adults don't have a responsibility to unlearn it, but I think it's possible to have compassion for people who do try to do their best with improving themselves. Most people you meet want to be good and don't want to be willfully ignorant. I try to think about how difficult it is to convince the average well-meaning white American of the merits of decolonization/land back. Most well-meaning Zionist Jews are going to feel the same way about Israel--actual systematic justice and decolonization are not in their lexicons. Decolonization is hidden behind thought-stopping techniques that they have been inundated with from day 1. But most people do have a basic sense of goodness and are willing to sacrifice something for it. Most people are willing to give ground for the sake of human decency. The only way I can survive talking to people I know are Zionists is by understanding that we both want the world to be a better place and if I dwell on the specifics of how I perceive them to be evil, the possibility of us having a working relationship and any hope at productive dialogue drops to zero.

You don't have to be patient with Zionists or Zionist institutions. You don't have to forgive them. You don't even have to be compassionate. But you do need to understand, intellectually, that imposed cognitive dissonance is a very powerful tool of mind control (and I'm not talking about woo-woo shit I'm extrapolating from cult research and personal experience) and that the pathos of Zionism isn't supposed to be logical. Fear trumps hypocrisy. Fatigue trumps informed consent. Charisma trumps logic. Any bigoted ideology is going to fall apart under logical scrutiny, and that's why the only battleground for maintaining bigotry is necessarily charismatic and emotional.

We haven't yet, of course, acknowledged that there are also tons of anti-Zionist Jews and that the concept isn't absurd or fringe, no matter what the dominant Zionist discourse says. It's important for us not to let Zionists be the stewards of Judaism--Zionists do not OWN Judaism. Just like the most Orthodox of Jews also don't OWN Judaism. Judaism is only what you make it to be, and if you leave it alone because you are too worried about Zionism, that is all Judaism is ever going to be for you. Of course, you still have to contend with Zionism, and if you actually are interested in being a Jew, you would have to find a way not to let it kill your Judaism. I've come close (ish) to giving up on Judaism a couple of times because of Israel and Zionism, but I'm glad I haven't. I've stuck it out long enough to give myself to tools I need to separate the two and see the situation with more clarity.

2020's finally over. Can we not go into 2021 pacifying texturism w "It's just hair" tho?

It was "just hair" until Black Women started exercising the freedom to discover the unique needs & maintenance beneficial to our hair. Then as soon as non black women got wind of it & the nerve to lurk on platforms the natural hair community was uprising thru, nowadays you've got all these non black women bandwagoning & hashtagging literally everything under the sun w/ this fake ass inclusiveness, advocacy, relatability & support for textured hair. Like all women have suffered oppression around wearing their real hair 😒. Like all races of women have been socially targeted in blatant discriminations against their hair texture, complexion, & how acceptable they are or are not together. I hate the "All Hair (Matters/Is Beautiful/Is 'Good Hair')" clout bc it talks over & totally overwrites the foundational issue around hair & toxic femininity that, at its misogynoir core, has always been that textured hair is unprofessional, unkempt, unmanageable, & ugly. Colorism also erases the initial creators of the movement — which were Monoracial Brown & Dark Skinned Black Women; put some respek onnat, period. Straight hair is not oppressed; wavy hair is not oppressed; all hair is not oppressed. Black hair is. This "all hair is good hair" bullshit is so monotonous & inconsiderate bc its almost like a passive aggressive refusal to acknowledge what antiblackness imposed on Black Women alone. None of you non black know what it's like in depth to be the descendants of a race of ppl who's features, traits & harmless existence have always been insulted, hated & envied by the whole world. Esp not all at once. That is something totally unique to us inflicted & imposed by everyone else since the beginning of time. So why be out here chasing clout under tags & movements & in spaces you are no real part of? Why wanna be a part of the Black Girl Experience that bad? Yall have identities in everything outside of us. Why vulture off of this like you even have reasons to be there? We were investing in ourselves & trying to teach generations of Monoracial Black People how to manage their hair texture & develop cathartic habits thru self care. Nb ppl ruined that.

Looser hair textures have omnipresent representation & acceptance all, over, the, world. There is no lack of being seen, romanticized or exemplified for having texture 1a-3b hair; esp on the prevalent basis around colorism we see regularly on social media & on tv. Yet what remains of the community as it stands is today the furthest thing from textured or Black at all. At this point we owe the decline (if not death) of the natural hair community to the parasitic latching of non black women, the infiltration of "pick me's" & antiblackness generally — but I still be feeling like even that's not direct enough. We're talking ab something authentic & wholesome for Monoracial Black Women created by us for us being straight up sabotaged by races of women the cause was totally irrelevant to & in regard of. Bc that's how cosmetic industries have been towards us for centuries. Bc we were always excluded & thought of least & last. By other women. By all other women; don't get it twisted. So we set out on figuring ourselves out. Doing research on our own. Incorporating self care & beneficial habits in our lives to nourish & feel better ab ourselves & disprove the racist shit non black cultures & ppl either ignorantly surmise, make up or project ab Black Girls. That includes Black Men too in case yall thought yall were safe. Yall are some of the most toxic & prevalent faces behind colorism, antiblackness & misogynoir among black ppl specifically.

But anyhow. At first a lot of the initiation of the vulturing in the nhc light skinned women were the face of. Esp w the clout around having 4c hair amongst the beige-est, most ambiguously or straight up non black individuals, good lord. Then it went mainstream for huwight ppl, whom enevitably invited themselves, & following were the masses of non black women looking to pillage for themselves while the community was being swallowed by the crowdedness & irrelevant content being put out there (specifically on YouTube, Twitter & Instagram) by "hair gurus" of the light skinned, biracial or non black texture 1a-3b variety. Hair gurus who literally may as well've fallen from the sky & met social media stardom overnight based on their hair texture & complexion alone they're so brand new. Hair gurus who aren't even in the community for legitimately informative reasons or purposes unionized in Blackness. They're whole natural hair niche be — as a favorite natural of mine put it — manipulating textured hair into a sort of submission to appear or behave like looser textures do. They'll swear by 'game changer' products they both mention & only use like once & insist you should invest in a $30 8oz. bottle of clarifying shampoo or a $35 cowash if you want your hair to behave & look like theirs. Again, mind you, these types of individuals casually claim having texture 4 hair when they're anything but, just for the attention it brings from both ppl who will gullibly follow their every word & who know what kind of scamming to look for & won't.

If it's "just hair", how come so many of you that are non black are riding the wave? If it's just hair, why have so many of you found refuge in using the hashtags & participating/contributing uninvited? How come so many ran to get a seat at the table w Black Women only to kick them to the side the more popular it became if its just hair? How come nobody was calling it natural hair before Black Women created the nhc & started growing their own? Why was there no natural hair community before Black Women coined it, reminder, for ourselves? If it's just hair, how come so many ran to youtube to begin w to start channels for their own non-textured journeys? If its just hair, why is the nhc so damn obsessed w defining curls & length than overall health & gradual growth? If its just hair, why are white girls anywhere near this? Yall are the most out of place of anyone, honestly. Even if you're curly. Why do light skinned girls get to both represent textured hair & "good hair"? How does that even make sense? Thats just putting monoracial black girls in isolated boxes they're not even allowed to be symbols of or in. If its just hair, why's it so unheard of to see the roles of Black female characters in just ab anything played by actual Black Women? If its just hair, why have so many non or partially Black women worked in ignorant succession to water down & essentially wash out the Monoracial Black Women vital to the community's relevance at all? I really do not get the involvement of non black women in this movement at all — esp when culturally you have no reason to call your hair natural. There are no & have never been prejudice notions around having or growing texture 1a-3b hair. There's nothing oppressive ab it, either. Yall have gotta stop w that. You've already made a mockery of something that was supposed to be beautiful by making yourselves comfortable in & hijacking our space itfp. Theres far too much misrepresentation of textured hair to keep up w now. This is why i say the nhc (as well as culture vulturing generally) has just become nbwoc copying white women copying light skinned women copying Black Women, bc the audacity is unreal.

Its not just hair tho. To those it applies to, yall proved that the minute Black Women started going public w their growth journeys. The minute conversations ab "shrinkage this & 4c that" broadened & went mainstream. Yall couldn't move all at once fast enough when you realized you weren't as special as you thought & had always been told — esp w melanin at its modern value. Now all yall either "natural", seeking black men for either casual sex or cultural infiltration via fetishised reproduction, certain you have texture 4 hair or know the best tips for a DIY silk press 🤭😂 yall can't sit w us. You don't belong here. I'm calling yall out on allll the bs around this "All Hair Matters" garbage, cus yall are now sputtering the same shit while literally wearing your own non black hair in black styles. Be consistent. Make some fucking sense. I don't wanna be part of this fake ass girl squad propaganda that says every other woman never looked at Black Women's hair like it was bottomest of the barrel, foh. We're not on the same team & yall know it.

i meant white/western audiences are slow to understanding the subtext rather than asian fandoms, when i was a kid i remember most asian countries didnt even have "kiss scenes" in movies or dramas, for us the "subtext" was normal for straight couples too (I've seen a few white folks think cql is a story abt 2 straight friends). the issues with the poor production and it has shit production coz of the budget but the drama wasnt supposed to be a big hit. also like how u just made it the "idol drama"  as if most kdramas and cdramas arent full of idols. I mostly agree with ur cql fandom hate too but to me it seems like u sometimes just want to prove that cql is worse than it is just coz the fans it brought in. I dont blame u either, I've seen some shit metas and the cql fans who hate the novel and call the writer homophobic are also funny. What makes me irritated is that the amount of hate cql gets on here is equal to the amount of hate novel gets, when the drama made alot of things possible for asian LGBTQ audiences. This is the first drama that my gay asian friend (who isnt out) watched with his parents and got them to fall for all the ppl and support the couple. Novels have our imagination in them but dramas need to make a lot of ppl happy and also keep censorship at bay. for me personally cql seems like it made it possible for alot of closeted kids be comfortable talking abt a gay couple with their parents, as novels are limited to a fandom. (Like I've not read a single harry potter book but I've watched 4 of the movies 😚)

I'm not trying to attack u but I'm trying to tell u that just coz the drama brought in a shit ton of weirdos in the fandom it still helped alot more ppl than u can imagine...

Hi anon, 

One thing where we seem to be of a different opinion is that criticising cql as a work of fiction, or highlighting the political economic context surrounding it, in no way negates what it can mean for people. I personally consider that these are completely different matters. These things often have nothing to do with the inherent quality of a thing, or even how good “queer rep” it is--they are relative to people’s specific and personal experiences, or a particular moment in the media landscape. All the things she said holds special meaning to me because it was the first time I got to see two women kiss on tv and it felt revelatory. I vividly remember sitting cross-legged right in front of the tv and refusing to come eat until the end of the music videos--at a time when I could not articulate why I was so fascinated by it. I know that this song is still meaningful for a lot of queer people my age, even if many people hate it for being a straight gaze fantasy. Regardless of what it personally means to me, I’m not going to argue that the music video is a masterpiece, or be blind to the reason why the kiss was included in that music video. CQL is very meaningful to your gay closeted friend, and allowed him to discuss wangxian as a gay couple with his parents, and that’s absolutely great. But I personally think it’s a little bit far-fetched to suppose that the same couldn’t have been said of any other live adaptations of a danmei novel who didn’t shoehorn in a het romance: if the timing had been different, perhaps the first drama with romantic subtext between two male characters he would have seen with his parents would have been Guardians, or the incoming adaptation of TGCF. Hell, H2O was so popular that they might have just watched that one together as well, even if the subtext “romance” is between two side characters. 

Let me be clear as well that I am not trying to argue that MDZS is this groundbreaking piece of fiction wrt “gay rights” or queer representation in China that changes minds and sways public opinion. It’s one of many danmei novels--it just is one that has a lot of literary merit. I simply think it’s disingenuous when people in the western fandom claim that a subtext romance is better “representation” than a canon gay couple who get their happily ever after. CQL is more impactful because it is mainstream, but it does not mean the representation it offers is inherently better. It is also ridiculous sometimes because the hurdles faced by a danmei authors vs the government-backed media giants who benefit financially from putting out censored version of their stories is just..... not something that should be ignored in my opinion.

Asian audiences being more used to romance depicted through subtext does not, at least in my opinion, negate the power of heteronormativity or compulsory heteronormativity to influence readings of that subtext by a portion of the audience. Chinese people are absolutely creative and innovative in the ways in which they manage to circumvent censorship, but a webseries financed by a media giant is not going to be a transgressive attempt to pull the wool over the censors’ eyes--at the end of the day it needs to be a safe investment. 

You seem to suggest that I am hard on CQL for being an idol drama but do not bring the same criticisms to other idol dramas. I find this weird because it’s not like I’ve ever praised an idol drama, and I know I haven’t because I simply don’t think they are competent works of fiction (although sometimes the camera work and editing is at least competent, compared to cql where the production quality is kind of poor). The closest I’ve come to doing that is praising My Mister, which is not in any way an idol drama, but which I suppose features an idol (IU) in the cast. When I said the first jdrama I watched was Hana Yori Dango, that was not an endorsement of how good it was--because honestly it’s one hot mess barely held together by the chemistry between the two leads--it was just a statement of fact. 

I am very critical and judgemental, I’ll give you that, but I don’t think that equates to “hate”. Yes, most of my discussions of CQL sprout from existing discussions within the fandom. But most of my posts indirectly reference or respond to something I saw. What’s the difference between me addressing a common novel fanon and me addressing a common opinion on cql’s virtues? 

TLDR; a work of fiction being significant to people is something to recognise but it should not preclude being able to discuss that work critically, especially wrt how it executes its story since the inherent quality of the work as art has no direct correlation with its impact, be it on individuals or on a specific media landscape. Moreover, the impact of a work on queer people or on the social perception of queer people is not inherently proportional to how “good queer rep” it is: it has usually more to do with the context (ie people don’t remember Brokeback Mountain because it was the best movie with a gay love story ever made until then--there was more at play). 

Rest In Peace ~ Sushant Singh Rajput

Hey guys, I was going into a spiral thinking about SSR and everything he went through and I needed somewhere to write my feelings down. There’s so much noise about this on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, I didn’t want to add to the noise, bashing and overall negativity, so found this to be the best place. I’m sorry in advance if I offend anyone. This is going to be very long. 

Sushant Singh Rajput the Actor and Human:

I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t his biggest fan, not by a long shot. I watched him in Pavitra Rishta every now and then because my mum was obsessed with that show and I used to be confused as to why everyone was obsessed with Manav and Archana - I was 12 years old when the show started and just felt it was another saas-bahu serial. However, to this day it amazes me how Manav and Archana were able to capture their audience for three consecutive years when their story was another saas-bahu serial. It was obviously the actors portraying them, and it takes a lot to grab someone’s attention and keep it on yourself. SSR had that energy. I remember then he came onto Jhalak Dikhlaa Jaa, I watched that show quite religiously because of my love for dance, and was bowled over by how good of a dancer he was. He had perfect lines, and his posture was amazing, I was in awe every time he danced. I remember that in that show he proposed to his then-gf in the cutest way possible, a proposal that is etched into my mind till this day. 

He then left his daily soap, for a career in Bollywood, it was a very risky, bold move because it is a well known fact - Tellywood actors, are rarely able to make good careers in Bollywood. Most of them become irrelevant after their first or second movie. But man was everyone wrong about Sushant. I didn’t watch Kai Po Che, but I remember the buzz around it at the time, everyone was talking about it, and it was one of the biggest movies of that year. He then did Shuddh Desi Romance - a movie I was inclined to watch because he was in it, I was slowly turning into a fan, but I didn’t get the chance to watch it. Then came PK. When PK’s trailer was launched, SSR’s cameo was kept a secret, I remember I was in the theatre and he came onto the screen and absolutely owned it. His performance as Sarfaraz won me over, and a smile still comes to my face when I remember him in the song “chaar kadam”. SSR had an amazing screen presence, he knew how to keep the audience’s attention on himself and a lot of the time you would forget this Sushant Singh Rajput, in fact you would only think of him as his character. The brilliance in his craft was the ability to become his characters completely, to the point you think of them as a real person. The next movie I watched of his was MS Dhoni - a movie that became a sensation. Everyone who went to the movie as Dhoni fans, came back as Sushant’s fan. He deserved that and more. You could see his hardwork, his passion and his dedication in everything he did. I remember when the trailer for Raabta dropped, I was super excited two of my favourite actors - Sushant and Kriti had come together. At that point I started watching more interviews of him and got to know him a little from what he portrayed as a person. Raabta flopped at the box office, however, personally I enjoyed it and I was amazed at the chemistry he had with Kriti Sanon. In Kedarnath, I was so excited that Sara Ali Khan was doing her debut with him, and man both did not disappoint. Kedarnath was an amazing movie and Sushant portrayed his character with utmost conviction. Chichore was the last movie I watched of his and I absolutely loved the movie and him in it. The themes and overall message of that movie hit deep, and it was intelligently made, with comedy mixed with the darker themes, but not taking away from the main message they were trying to convey. Overall, even though I wasn’t a fan of him at the start of his career, he had won me over. 

I also started adoring him as a person. His love for physics and astronomy; his eyes full of curiosity and enthusiasm towards the great unknowns. He didn’t finish his engineering degree, but the childlike wonder he had towards science made me excited as a scientist myself. He showed everyone that he had a brilliant mind and I’ve said this before and I’ll said it again, actors who are educated and well-spoken make me respect them more, they have a different way of thinking, they are eloquent and they show how much education can do for a person. SSR had all of these qualities. I could hear him speak for hours at a time. His instagram posts were always so deep and meaningful, it would make me thing differently, and his 50 things bucket list inspired me to no end. Especially how much he wanted to do for other people and how much he wanted to grow as a person. He also had an infectious smile, his smile used to make his fans smile and it takes a big person to do that. 

SSR’s Death: 

I was doing an assignment when one of my friend’s had sent me the news. I thought it was a hoax at first, but then I googled him, and it was true - Sushant Singh Rajput had committed suicide. Honestly, I’ve been distraught since then, I cried multiple times, and I can’t stop thinking about him, the pain he must’ve felt in order to take this decision, and whenever I saw his sisters or dad I cried even more, the sadness and despair I felt would be nothing compared to theirs, especially because his death was preventable. I’ve never been depressed, I’ve had my fair share of panic attacks and anxiety but I don’t know what depression is. I only know what I’ve studied, that people who are depressed have physiologically different brains to people who are not, they have decreased levels of oxytocin and serotonin, and that they have less grey matter. I’ve also been told that this causes them to not be able to function, they sleep too much, become unable to socialise, and their brain starts to turn them against themselves. However, I believe that there is always an underlying cause of depression. There are triggers for depression, a person doesn’t become depressed over nothing. I know everyone wants to know the trigger; why did he take such a drastic step, but he didn’t leave a note. He left with silence. I know it is difficult, but I feel that we should respect that, however, we should not let him die in vain. 

But I’m going to be real here IT IS NOT OUR PLACE AS THE GENERAL PUBLIC/AUDIENCE OR FANS TO GO ONTO OTHER CELEBRITIES TWITTERS/FB/IG AND CALL THEM MURDERERS. How dare we think that we can blame other people for someone’s death. I don’t care how these people treated him while he was alive, let them mourn him in peace. His death has taught me one thing, not one person is toxic, not one industry is toxic, all of us are. The person who is now checking up on every single person that they usually would not care for because of guilt, the girl shouting all over my timeline that Karan Johar, Deepika Padukone and Alia Bhatt murdered SSR, the boy screaming that x person didn’t post about his death they wouldn’t be affected by this or they don’t care. Every single person. Everyone needs to stop with raging on social media. They need to take a step back and breathe, and mourn and let others mourn. 

My take on Nepotism and Bollywood: 

Here’s the crux of the issue. Bollywood. I’m your average desi girl, I’ve grown up watching bollywood, being obsessed with it. To the point that at a certain time I only watched Bollywood. Then the whole nepotism scandal hit. I remember thinking to myself then, what’s the big deal? Also did people really not think about this until an actress had to come speak about it on national television? Did no one realise that Bollywood has been preferring starkids over other talents for decades? I used to think that yeah, Bollywood has nepotism, but where does nepotism not exist. The truth is nepotism exists everywhere. A doctor’s child becomes a doctor. A business man’s child becomes a businessman etc. But here’s the thing, the doctor’s child has to work towards becoming a doctor, he/she has to go through the same steps that other non-doctor children have to do. The only advantage they get is, that their parents might be able to help prepare them for what’s coming, and it’s not like every doctor has doctor parents, both people get equal opportunity. The child of a doctor just has more insight. However, in Bollywood, there is no equal ground, it isn’t as if a starkid only has it easy to get their first movie. Nope, they sign their second or third movie before their first one releases. Take Sara Ali Khan for example, she had already signed Simmba, before Kedarnath had released. Now take Anushka Sharma, she didn’t get her second movie two years after the release of her first one. Nepotism does exist, it will exist, but in other industries, the people who aren’t a product of it are still able to get promoted, to do good work and receive equal opportunity. However, in Bollywood this is not the case. It has never been the case. This needs to change. This needs to desperately change. Especially because nepotism didn’t use to be as bad, as the products of nepotism were still talented, but now, they are not, and SSR’s death can bring this change, because Bollywood is losing it’s credibility, and as I consider Bollywood my own, my home, I want it to do better. Actors who come from non-film backgrounds and television deserve to share space in mainstream cinema with those who do come from film backgrounds. 

Where From Here

In the past couple of years, we’ve become a horrible society. We pretend to like people when we meet them, and then bitch about them behind their back. We also think that whatever comes to our heads we can say to whatever celebrity the way we want because them being public figures is an open invitation for us to say hurtful things to them which normally we would not say if we meet them in person. We are the people who cry about nepotism, and then when a movie doesn’t have a big star in it we go “we’ll watch it at home, if we have time, why waste money going to the cinema”. We are the same people who cry about mental health issues and to raise awareness, when we think its absolutely fine to give a celebrity death threats because of a comment they made. We are also those people who cry about how SSR was treated unfairly, when we had a chance to go see his movies but didn’t. Who gave us this authority to be able to judge? Who gave us the right? If we won’t talk to other people with such disrespect in real life, why can we over the internet? WE. NEED. TO. DO. BETTER. AS. A. SOCIETY. 

We need to stop shaming people, we need to support artists that aren’t star kids, but also support star kids. They don’t deserve the hate they get either. It isn’t completely their fault that they are given more opportunity. It’s our fault too. We are the ones who make them successful. Directors know that they could sell more tickets with Ranbir Kapoor on the poster than Sushant Singh Rajput, even if Sushant Singh Rajput is a better artist. We need to support both talents. We need to show filmmakers as an audience, that both artists should be given equal opportunity. That the only thing nepotism should do for a starkid is just give them insight on what a life of an actor is like. That is all. They should also go to auditions, they should also be accepted or rejected based on talent. And for the love of god, we need to stop getting celebrities to judge other celebrities based on acting skills and sex appeal. it’s 2020, we can do better. 

Also to anyone who’s having any sort of dark thoughts. Please, I beg of you talk to someone. There is someone who loves you; your parents, siblings, teachers, friends, family, that brown guy in your dms. And if you truly don’t know anyone that you can talk to, talk to a therapist on a free hotline. My inbox is also always open if you want to chat. 

To Sushant Singh Rajput - I will miss seeing you at the movies, your smile and your interviews, and how much of an inspiration you were to me. I hope you are at peace now, and finally found happiness. 

For anyone who read this - thank you for reading my absolute ramble and I hope I made sense 

Here’s a dumb joke to make you hopefully smile a little, or at least roll your eyes: What do you call bacteria found in Agra? Agraculture - does this even make sense. IDK. All I want to say is, that I’ve been an absolute dukhi aatma for the past couple of days, and now its time to smile, and look at some positives. 

Could you expand a bit on the "death of expertise"? It's something I think about A LOT as an artist, because there are so many problems with people who think it isn't a real job, and the severe undercutting of prices that happens because people think hobbyists and professionals are the same. At the same time, I also really want people to feel free to be able to make art if they want, with no gatekeeping or elitism, and I usually spin myself in circles mentally thinking about it. So.

I have been secretly hoping someone would ask this question, nonny. Bless you. I have a lot (a LOT) of thoughts on this topic, which I will try to keep somewhat concise and presented in a semi-organized fashion, but yes.

I can mostly speak about this in regard to academia, especially the bad, bad, BAD takes in my field (history) that have dominated the news in recent weeks and which constitute most of the recent posts on my blog. (I know, I know, Old Man Yells At Cloud when attempting to educate the internet on actual history, but I gotta do SOMETHING.) But this isn’t a new phenemenon, and is linked to the avalanche of “fake news” that we’ve all heard about and experienced in the last few years, especially in the run-up and then after the election of You Know Who, who has made fake news his personal brand (if not in the way he thinks). It also has to do with the way Americans persistently misunderstand the concept of free speech as “I should be able to say whatever I want and nobody can correct or criticize me,” which ties into the poisonous extreme-libertarian ethos of “I can do what I want with no regard for others and nobody can correct me,” which has seeped its way into the American mainstream and is basically the center of the modern Republican party. (Basically: all for me, all the time, and caring about others is a weak liberal pussy thing to do.)

This, however, is not just an issue of partisan politics, because the left is just as guilty, even if its efforts take a different shape. One of the reason I got so utterly exasperated with strident online leftists, especially around primary season and the hardcore breed of Bernie Bros, is just that they don’t do anything except shout loud and incorrect information on the internet (and then transmogrify that into a twisted ideology of moral purity which makes a sin out of actually voting for a flawed candidate, even if the alternative is Donald Goddamn Trump). I can’t count how many people from both sides of the right/left divide get their political information from like-minded people on social media, and never bother to experience or verify or venture outside their comforting bubbles that will only provide them with “facts” that they already know. Social media has done a lot of good things, sure, but it’s also made it unprecedently easy to just say whatever insane bullshit you want, have it go viral, and then have you treated as an authority on the topic or someone whose voice “has to be included” out of some absurd principle of both-siderism. This is also a tenet of the mainstream corporate media: “both sides” have to be included, to create the illusion of “objectivity,” and to keep the largest number of paying subscribers happy. (Yes, of course this has deep, deep roots in the collapse of late-stage capitalism.) Even if one side is absolutely batshit crazy, the rules of this distorted social contract stipulate that their proposals and their flaws have to be treated as equal with the others, and if you point out that they are batshit crazy, you have to qualify with some criticism of the other side.

This is where you get white people posting “Neo-Nazis and Black Lives Matter are the same!!!1” on facebook. They are a) often racist, let’s be real, and b) have been force-fed a constant narrative where Both Sides Are Equally Bad. Even if one is a historical system of violent oppression that has made a good go at total racial and ethnic genocide and rests on hatred, and the other is the response to not just that but the centuries of systemic and small-scale racism that has been built up every day, the white people of the world insist on treating them as morally equivalent (related to a superior notion that Violence is Always Bad, which.... uh... have you even seen constant and overwhelming state-sponsored violence the West dishes out? But it’s only bad when the other side does it. Especially if those people can be at all labeled “fanatics.”)

I have complained many, many times, and will probably complain many times more, about how hard it is to deconstruct people’s absolutely ingrained ideas of history and the past. History is a very fragile thing; it’s really only equivalent to the length of a human lifespan, and sometimes not even that. It’s what people want to remember and what is convenient for them to remember, which is why we still have some living Holocaust survivors and yet a growing movement of Holocaust denial, among other extremist conspiracy theories (9/11, Sandy Hook, chemtrails, flat-earthing, etc etc). There is likewise no organized effort to teach honest history in Western public schools, not least since the West likes its self-appointed role as guardians of freedom and liberty and democracy in the world and doesn’t really want anyone digging into all that messy slavery and genocide and imperialism and colonialism business. As a result, you have deliberately under- or un-educated citizens, who have had a couple of courses on American/British/etc history in grade school focusing on the greatest-hit reel, and all from an overwhelmingly triumphalist white perspective. You have to like history, from what you get out of it in public school, to want to go on to study it as a career, while knowing that there are few jobs available, universities are cutting or shuttering humanities departments, and you’ll never make much money. There is... not a whole lot of outside incentive there.

I’ve written before about how the humanities are always the first targeted, and the first defunded, and the first to be labeled as “worthless degrees,” because a) they are less valuable to late-stage capitalism and its emphasis on Material Production, and b) they often focus on teaching students the critical thinking skills that critique and challenge that dominant system. There’s a reason that there is a stereotype of artists as social revolutionaries: they have often taken a look around, gone, “Hey, what the hell is this?” and tried to do something about it, because the creative and free-thinking impulse helps to cultivate the tools necessary to question what has become received and dominant wisdom. Of course, that can then be taken too far into the “I’ll create my own reality and reject absolutely everything that doesn’t fit that narrative,” and we end up at something like the current death of expertise.

This year is particularly fertile for these kinds of misinformation efforts: a plague without a vaccine or a known cure, an election year in a turbulently polarized country, race unrest in a deeply racist country spreading to other racist countries around the world and the challenging of a particularly important system (white supremacy), etc etc. People are scared and defensive and reactive, and in that case, they’re especially less motivated to challenge or want to encounter information that scares them. They need their pre-set beliefs to comfort them or provide steadiness in a rocky and uncertain world, and (thanks once again to social media) it’s easy to launch blistering ad hominem attacks on people who disagree with you, who are categorized as a faceless evil mass and who you will never have to meet or negotiate with in real life. This is the environment in which all the world’s distinguished scientists, who have spent decades studying infectious diseases, have to fight for airtime and authority (and often lose) over random conspiracy theorists who make a YouTube video. The public has been trained to see them as “both the same” and then accept which side they like the best, regardless of actual factual or real-world qualifications. They just assume the maniac on YouTube is just as trustworthy as the scientists with PhDs from real universities.

Obviously, academia is racist, elitist, classist, sexist, on and on. Most human institutions are. But training people to see all academics as the enemy is not the answer. You’ve seen the Online Left (tm) also do this constantly, where they attack “the establishment” for never talking about anything, or academics for supposedly erasing and covering up all of non-white history, while apparently never bothering to open a book or familiarize themselves with a single piece of research that actual historians are working on. You may have noticed that historians have been leading the charge against the “don’t erase history!!!1″ defenders of racist monuments, and explaining in stinging detail exactly why this is neither preserving history or being truthful about it. Tumblr likes to confuse the mechanism that has created the history and the people who are studying and analyzing that history, and lump them together as one mass of Evil And Lying To You. Academics are here because we want to critically examine the world and tell you things about it that our nonsense system has required years and years of effort, thousands of dollars in tuition, and other gatekeeping barriers to learn. You can just ask one of us. We’re here, we usually love to talk, and we’re a lot cheaper. I think that’s pretty cool.

As a historian, I have been trained in a certain skill set: finding, reading, analyzing, using, and criticizing primary sources, ditto for secondary sources, academic form and style, technical skills like languages, paleography, presentation, familiarity with the professional mechanisms for reviewing and sharing work (journals, conferences, peer review, etc), and how to assemble this all into an extended piece of work and to use it in conversation with other historians. That means my expertise in history outweighs some rando who rolls up with an unsourced or misleading Twitter thread. If a professor has been handed a carefully crafted essay and then a piece of paper scribbled with crayon, she is not obliged to treat them as essentially the same or having the same critical weight, even if the essay has flaws. One has made an effort to follow the rules of the game, and the other is... well, I did read a few like that when teaching undergraduates. They did not get the same grade.

This also means that my expertise is not universal. I might know something about adjacent subjects that I’ve also studied, like political science or English or whatever, but someone who is a career academic with a degree directly in that field will know more than me. I should listen to them, even if I should retain my independent ability and critical thinking skillset. And I definitely should not be listened to over people whose field of expertise is in a completely different realm. Take the recent rocket launch, for example. I’m guessing that nobody thought some bum who walked in off the street to Kennedy Space Center should be listened to in preference of the actual scientists with degrees and experience at NASA and knowledge of math and orbital mechanics and whatever else you need to get a rocket into orbit. I definitely can’t speak on that and I wouldn’t do it anyway, so it’s frustrating to see it happen with history. Everybody “knows” things about history that inevitably turn out to be wildly wrong, and seem to assume that they can do the same kind of job or state their conclusions with just as much authority. (Nobody seems to listen to the scientists on global warming or coronavirus either, because their information is actively inconvenient for our entrenched way of life and people don’t want to change.) Once again, my point here is not to be a snobbish elitist looking down at The Little People, but to remark that if there’s someone in a field who has, you know, actually studied that subject and is speaking from that place of authority, maybe we can do better than “well, I saw a YouTube video and liked it better, so there.” (Americans hate authority and don’t trust smart people, which  is a related problem and goes back far beyond Trump, but there you are.)

As for art: it’s funny how people devalue it constantly until they need it to survive. Ask anyone how they spent their time in lockdown. Did they listen to music? Did they watch movies or TV? Did they read a book? Did they look at photography or pictures? Did they try to learn a skill, like drawing or writing or painting, and realize it was hard? Did they have a preference for the art that was better, more professionally produced, had more awareness of the rules of its craft, and therefore was more enjoyable to consume? If anyone wants to tell anyone that art is worthless, I invite you to challenge them on the spot to go without all of the above items during the (inevitable, at this rate) second coronavirus lockdown. No music. No films. No books. Not even a video or a meme or anything else that has been made for fun, for creativity, or anything outside the basic demands of Compensated Economic Production. It’s then that you’ll discover that, just as with the underpaid essential workers who suffered the most, we know these jobs need to get done. We just still don’t want to pay anyone fairly for doing them, due to our twisted late-capitalist idea of “value.”

Anyway, since this has gotten long enough and I should probably wrap up: as you say, the difference between “professional” and “hobbyist” has been almost completely erased, so that people think the opinion of one is as good as the other, or in your case, that the hobbyist should present their work for free or refuse to be seen as a professional entitled to fair compensation for their skill. That has larger and more insidious effects in a global marketplace of ideas that has been almost entirely reduced to who can say their opinion the loudest to the largest group of people. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but at least I can try to point it out and to avoid being part of it, and to recognize where I need to speak and where I need to shut up. My job, and that of every single white person in America right now, is to shut up and let black people (and Native people, and Latinx people, and Muslim people, and etc...) tell me what it’s really like to live here with that identity. I have obviously done a ton of research on the subject and consider myself reasonably educated, but here’s the thing: my expertise still doesn’t outweigh theirs, no matter what degrees they have or don’t have. I then am required to boost their ideas, views, experiences, and needs, rather than writing them over or erasing them, and to try to explain to people how the roots of these ideas interlock and interact where I can. That is -- hopefully -- putting my history expertise to use in a good way to support what they’re saying, rather than silence it. I try, at any rate, and I am constantly conscious of learning to do better.

I hope that was helpful for you. Thanks for letting me talk about it.

I literally get into this funk every year around this time and for years I’ve been blaming RWBY (derogatory) hiatus because, hey, it’s natural to hit a funk when something you’re really invested in is no longer available! Last year I hit this funk in December, when it became apparent that cRWBY (derogatory) had gotten so bad at show vs tell that they were showing and telling two entirely different stories, and the bad one was the one that was taking over.

And then I kind of just... got stuck. While I have definitely been fannish over things, that RWBY hyperfixation (derogatory) was the last time I had a real, hardcore hyperfixation. All of my real intense hyperfixes since then have been RWBY related (Hallmarks, DTLS, the Santa au that I need to finish) as I pendulum wildly between moods about the source, and everything else I’ve tried to hyperfix on in the past year has fizzled almost immediately. Even my own work doesn’t excite me as much as it should, at least not for long.

It’s easy to blame this on RWBY- if cRWBY hadn’t shit the bed with their writing, I could have been excited about the new season and probably gotten to enjoy it with my buds this year like every year since volume three.

But it’s not just cause of that. Part of it is that I resolved, apparently more seriously than I realized, to only engage with new media if it has an mlm lead. (Media I was already into was exempt, and I did loosen this up somewhat for background watching that I was not intended to become invested in, because I do need to actually engage with stories on some level.) 

I actually did encounter some media with mlm leads in the past year, but all of it was disappointing on some level- TAZ, which had been suggested to me for years on the premise of having a fat, gay wizard who dates the Grim Reaper, turned out to not only take forever to establish that fact at all, it barely had an impact on the story until the last act, Justin got to bury any exploration of Taako’s sexuality under Taako’s unwillingness to air his business, and every instance of the guy who made him describing Taako’s figure made it pretty clear that he envisioned Taako as thin. Don’t mistake this as me not liking Taako, or dissing Justin- there are other factors involved that I recognize, and don’t hold against him. But that doesn’t change that the resulting product was still what it was, and definitely not what I had been promised. And that’s just one example.

(For the record, this is a big reason I refuse to watch Kipo right now. There’s other reasons, but “you guys keep recommending me things that are a huge disappointment” is one of them. No offense.)

I also have a friend who keeps recommending my AP’s with mlm leads, which is great, but my brain shut down on engaging with AP’s after all of that nonsense with c*r, and the one that I did try to engage with, the mlm character I was promised was... again, not what I was promised. (The end of season one also had a pair the spares hetfest with the parents, which also put me off of season two, which I was assured was when the character did become what I was promised.)

I also found some gay romance novels, which was nice, but I also noticed as I began to look for them that they were all written by female authors, with a female gaze in mind, and that just got depressing.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I actually have no problem with m/m fiction being written by and for female audiences. The issue is that when you’re a gay man and your only option for stories about gay men are written by and for the consumption of women, instead of feeling good, you just kinda start to feel sad. When characters like you are always shunted to being side characters, it stings. It’s not fair. It hurts. And when they are main characters, it’s always for either mainstream hetero or female gaze consumption, and that’s not fun either.

(I have my theories about why this is the situation, but I’m not going into it here on Tumble. Also, if anyone tries to fucking derail this point with any other group that faces this issue you’re getting blocked. I am aware that mlm are not the only ones who experience this, but this is the group I belong to and am currently talking about.)

Of course, there’s also the fact that when I do find mlm content with mlm as the target audience, there’s also a measure of... hmm... how should I put this? The distinct feeling that the men in question would call me a slur in Taco Bell.

Now, this past year has been a nightmare hellscape for a lot of reasons, and a definite factor in my failure to hyperfixate properly also ties into world events, as well as the fact that I quit my job last year and my current job situation is bleak (only working one or two days a week for the foreseeable future). Aaaaaand there’s some homelife stuff going on that, again, I’m not getting into on the Tumbles. Just suffice it to say that there’s a lot that I’m not talking about, and the reason I’m talking about the parts I am talking about so much is that I don’t actually like sharing personal life stuff on a website where the community as a whole has made it repeatedly clear that they don’t consider posters to actually have any ownership over their posts, and where a post or comment can still haunt you years later because no one knows how to just let things die.

So, yeah. The funk that I’m currently in is pretty typical and literally hits every year around this time, but it’s hitting harder this year because it’s building onto a funk that I never quite left behind the last time.

Anyway. Sorry I’ve been so checked out lately. I hope y’all still like me even while I’m boring.

Week 7: Public Health Campaign

All of us as a human always worried about the health condition of our mind and body every day as well as the wellness of our loved one. We as a human always try to anticipate the illness from destroying our health before going into the worse state of the illness and we would pay extra to keep us healthy and even do a check-up regularly with the doctor or buy medicines. This why public health campaign is important for all of us to be aware of since it can be beneficial for us to use it as information on how to prevent and tackle the disease with proper action. Before discussing the main issue of a public health campaign, we need to understand what is the purpose of it and what it does for us?

What is Public Health Campaign?

Public Health Campaign is a way to raise awareness and to understand about critical health issues and mobilize support as an action to support people with sickness or illness (WHO, 2020). This will improve the health knowledge, attitude, skills, and behaviour of individuals, groups, and communities. The purpose of this is to influence the health of individuals and communities to live a healthy lifestyle as well as the living and working environment that also influences their health.

Why is Public Health Campaign important?

According to Georgia (2020), Public Health Campaign can improve the health status of individuals, families, communities, states, and the nation. Besides, it can also enhance the quality of life for all people and reduces premature death. By focusing on prevention, it can reduce the cost for people when they want to spend on medical treatment.

Is social media useful in spreading Information on COVID-19 in Malaysia or your home country?

In my opinion, social media help me keep tracking the spread of COVID-19 in my home country in Indonesia because I can utilize it to prevent me from going to places where it has a high rate of infected people that visit the places. As indicated by Garza (2020), social media can help the authorities to take fast measure to blockade certain area with a high cluster of infected people that gather in one place because people can share and report at the same time on social media so the authorities can respond to the report. Social media such as Facebook or Twitter become a place where people gather to discuss the coronavirus outbreak that happens in different place and time. 

Unfortunately, social media has never been used to discuss the previous major outbreak. With the real-time information at our fingertip, we can use it to make a smart decision but at the same time, it also makes us anxious about what’s to come as many experts say. It is proven that social media can help many people who are isolated from one another by sharing each other with useful information and tips during the pandemic.

However, social media can also promote other health issues besides COVID-19 such as World Heart Day, CDC’s Tips for Former Smokers, ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, etc (Howard, 2018). By utilizing a cross-section platform, public health entities will be able to combat fake news, rumors, and encourage people to share their feedback and engage by sharing the information with others.

On the other hand, the rate of media consumption in Indonesia is reaching the highest during the COVID-19 pandemic. The media includes TV and mobile phones which is clearly stated that the TV viewership news program is going up 25% and the viewership on kids' audience reaches the highest rating at 16.2%. Indonesia people use mobile phones to purchase vitamin and supplement products to boost their immune system and prevent them from getting infected with COVID-19 which contributes more than IDR20 billion of total digital ad spending. With the increase of COVID-19 cases, health issues are becoming a major concern of the public. Hence, many industries especially related to vitamins and medicines product want to catch the opportunity to increase their sale by increasing advertising spots in electronic media such as social media and TV (Tam, 2020).

Social media can also be a place where people share fake news and conspiracy theories as this happen mostly in Indonesia which was related to spread information that says COVID-19 is not harmful as we thought and it was shared by a famous singer named Jerinx. Jerinx tweeted that “Come on Indonesia, stop being a coward. This virus is not as dangerous as your perception that has been shaped by the mainstream media. Go to the streets. Demand the government to return life to normal and be a dignified people once more. Independence! Or die!”.

Indonesian users quickly responded with their opinion in regards to his dangerous idea and some have also criticized his seeming misplaced crusade against the “global elite” (Sheany 2020).

In conclusion, I am as an Indonesian always has a principle whenever there is information that I stumble upon, I will check the validity of the news or information before putting the trust in it and even sharing it with my families and friends. Fake news is the enemy of many since it can lead people to destruction and make to do bad things so it is best for all of us to check the validity of the information before trusting it.

Stay safe and positive my fellow comrades whenever you are!

Comment down below your opinion regarding this topic :D

Reference: 

WHO 2020, Health campaigns, viewed 22 October, 2020, <https://www.who.int/communicating-for-health/functions/campaigns/en/>.

Garza, A 2020, How Social Media Is Shaping Our Fears of — And Response to — the Coronavirus, viewed 23 October, 2020, <https://time.com/5802802/social-media-coronavirus/>.

Georgia 2020, What is Health Promotion? - College of Public Health UGA, viewed 22 October, 2020, <https://publichealth.uga.edu/departments/health-promotion-behavior/what-is-health-promotion/#:~:text=Health%20promotion%20reduces%20premature%20deaths,would%20spend%20on%20medical%20treatment.>.

Howard, A 2018, 10 Effective Public Health Social Media Campaigns, viewed 23 October, 2020, <https://strategicsocialmedialab.com/10-effective-public-health-social-media-campaigns/>.

Sheany 2020, On social media, Indonesians fight back against dangerous COVID-19 conspiracy theories | Coconuts Bali, viewed 24 October, 2020, <https://coconuts.co/bali/features/on-social-media-indonesians-fight-back-against-dangerous-covid-19-conspiracy-theories/>.

Tam, N 2020, Covid-19 and its impact on the media consumption trend, viewed 24 October, 2020, <https://www.nielsen.com/id/en/press-releases/2020/covid-19-and-its-impact-on-the-media-consumption-trend/>.

Clients Like Cool Products - But Not for Long

Cool. Even the word is definitely, well, "cool". All of us seem to like "cool" stuff. In addition to we are very mindful "cool people" who often have the most up-to-date "cool stuff". Right now there are plenty involving examples of "cool" upon sale which make a lot of retailers drool; "if only there were assumed of that, very well they mutter. As an example, certain brands involving pocket notebooks are usually "cool". They can cost ten periods the price regarding an ordinary notebook. But an ordinary notebook computer is so, properly, "ordinary". It will not have the feel involving a branded version, nor the handy little elastic loop, nor the external signal how the service provider of the notebook is "cool". Similarly, What is Depressive Disorders were remarkably "cool" when they will first came out there; then came pill devices. Other amazing products include robotic vacuum cleaners, as an example, or automated garden mowing machines. Yet there is a new problem with great products; coolness would not last. Consider the particular "laser mouse" as an example. The initial optical mice intended for computers were classed as "cool" goods by design magazines. If you got a mouse emanating a bright red light you were great. But now, such mice are almost everywhere - who cares about you? When smartphones very first turned out they had been cool; now practically everyone has one particular they are not really cool at all. Similarly, it was once cool to have got an Mp3player rather of a COMPACT DISC player. Now people ask "what's a CD? " mainly because digital music is usually omnipresent - thus much so not necessarily cool any even more. Coolness is short-term. And therein is situated an issue for enterprise owners. If you invent a cool item you are driving you to have to be able to line up another cool product to follow along with it a short while later. An individual can see this specific with each smart phone manufacturer trying to out-do each other along with new models in addition to new "cool" features each year. However, at heart, it is still a phone. Nevertheless , in case they only had their old type on sale this would no longer be viewed as "cool" plus sales would decline. The only method to keep offering when you create something cool is usually to come up with a thing else cool. Greatness puts you on a never-stopping treadmill. You will need to keep on heading and going and even going. Otherwise your own products lose their very own cool factor, revenue drop and men and women migrate to some thing which does need coolness. What an individual really need to be able to sell is things that is simply not amazing. What is great for long-term success - and probably larger profitability - is usually "evergreen" stuff. Products that people often need sell effectively - and they also can easily have high earnings because you carry out not need to be able to reinvest so a lot into an R&D budget inventing a thing cool. Evergreen items exist in many of markets - there's paper and writing instruments in office products, saucepans and cutlery in kitchen equipment, or calculators found in schools supplies. There are also classics services like revenue training or presentation skills consultancy - a smaller amount cool compared to courses in sociable media, but significantly more likely to last for many years. Research through Penn State University confirms that coolness only lasts while long as the product does not get into the mainstream. Of which would suggest if you need to sell more and even make by far the most profits you need in order to pay attention to that popular, avoiding coolness because everything that does is keep you on of which product invention home treadmill. Graham Jones helps to company owners understand the particular behaviour with their on-line customers and offers proper advice, workshops, education and conference talking on the subject matter. Get his regular newsletter delivered every single Saturday - Signal Up Here