I think when your favorite character from a show that's main focus is diversity, acceptance and the experiences of minority groups is the white colonizers that's a red flag.

conversations about representation have always felt so navel-gazing to me, in part because those conversations tend to remain at the level of individual characters. the focus is on representing individuals as meaningful examples of the groups they belong to - to have “good” representation is to see some component(s) of your social identity reflected back at you by a character without those being the only traits of those characters. To measure representation you first look to see if there are visual or descriptive markers of identity - skin colour, gender, sexual attraction, ability - and then, once that evidence is established, one looks at how characters interact with and contribute to the narrative. does this gay character have a romantic partner? does this black character have interiority not related to their relationship to white characters? is this woman character motivated by something other than a desire to impress men? The goal is to avoid stereotypes, to be an anti-stereotype.

And so you ‘solve’ representation through the adequate presence of these characters. But I think this is an inherently individualistic and anti-liberatory way to approach representation, because it views minorities as individuals who can be cut from the social fabric of real life and transported into different fictional universes while leaving their identities fully intact. The presence of a disabled character does not also require the inclusion of structural ableism in the narrative, their individual presence is enough to represent disability. And so their presence in the narrative seems to emerge from nowhere - you don’t judge representation by looking at how the narrative represents and thinks about historical structures of race, gender, ability, you judge it by the amount of characters who contain those social markers. It means social identity exists primarily within the individual. There is no historical perspective given to characters, no acknowledgement of the fact that identity is dialectic and socially mediated. to paraphrase Gramsci, history impresses upon you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory, and I think when discussing representation, people judge the quality of representation by those traces - race, gender, ability, sexuality, religion, etc - but ignores the inventory, the origins of those things, the social processes that produce race, produce gender, constantly and everyday. And so you get these characters that feel dislocated, alien to themselves and other people, because they express an identity that appears to have no origin point in the fictional world, no social backing. They are essentialised to what they “are” deep down inside. Characters are not made racial, not made gendered, not made disabled by the universe they exist in, they simply “are” those things.

And if narratives do tackle those histories, they tend to represent them primarily through misery. You know a character is gay because they get called slurs. You see a black character experience racism. You recognise a character is a woman by the fact that she is sexually assaulted. The history of their identities is represented as individual acts of violence or trauma, as if misogyny or racism are narrative objects themselves that occasionally collide with the characters to remind the audience that the authors take history very seriously. If an author is especially serious, they will get individual sensitivity readers to confirm or deny the authenticity of the social identity being expressed on the page; much less often you will hear of authors who rigorously consult, for example, books like Orientalism to ensure the structure of their work is not reproducing Western (and ultimately racist) conclusions about the world they are creating. Representational politics begins (and frequently ends) at the level of the individual. And so you get queer characters who endure homophobia or transphobia, but whose ultimate wish is to enter into a monogamous marriage and reproduce the social unit of the nuclear family, or the black character who finally finds community in a group of all white people that aren’t racist to their face. That’s not tackling history, that’s just allowing these character to be momentarily exempt from it. the historical norms and hegemonies present in the narrative are disconnected from the characters themselves. this is why you can have “good representation” in stories that are fundamentally racist or misogynistic or heteronormative (see: ofmd). If representation is only housed in your characters, if you view representation as a discrete trait that you can add more or less of, you are not thinking about the social identities that you are representing in a systemic way - you are, in effect, producing tokens.

And I think that sense of dislocation is part of what motivates people to cringe away from stories primarily billed as having “a diverse cast” or filled with “queer characters” or whatever, even when they are otherwise desperate for those things (excluding from this discussion the people who dislike the mere appearance of characters who are not strong white men, a perspective that is not worth entertaining). I do not want to watch stories that smash characters and identities together like barbie dolls, that treat race or gender as something to “tackle” in a B plot or a “police brutality episode” like you get in a show like Brooklyn 99. I do not want a character creation screen. Identity should, ideally, be part of the structure of the narrative, not a thing you merely choose to “include.” Which is much more difficult, of course - it requires a robust political imagination, but it’s a problem that is possible to solve.

The new Velma show seems to neatly fall into this trend of tv shows (paramount heathers, leaked powerpuff girls script) that want to seem progressive by having a diverse cast, while simultaneously wanting to preserve that same edgy, punch-down comedy style found in 'centrist' or conservative media. They want the praise for having female, queer, and characters of colour while still retaining an audience made up of mainly edgy white men laughing at how ridiculous ‘the minorities’ are behaving. It’s a punch-down comedy wolf in progressive sheep clothing.

The fundamental flaw in this logic is that show runners assume the audience that would enjoy this humour will see past that supposedly progressive façade… and that often doesn’t happen. A lot of these specific edgy types see diversity as a red flag and immediately presume some type of agenda. It’s almost like seeing a minority participate in the joke (even though they’re still very much the punchline) zaps all the humour out of it or they can’t understand that the joke is still for them if it isn’t said by someone that looks exactly like them. And because they (especially, but not only, cishet white men) recognise all the jokes from things they like, but don’t find them funny anymore, the only reasonable explanation they have is that diversity is bad and makes it unfunny, instead of realising their inherent inability to recognise and relate to any character that isn’t a white man.

Meanwhile, an audience that would appreciate a diverse cast does recognise the comedy for what it is: cheap jokes made at their expense. At most there are occasional jabs thrown in at the white and/or male characters which often don’t relate to these identities in any fundamental or even realistic way. So you have this show that constantly uses their minority characters as punchlines and only includes vaguely progressive, but ultimately pretty universally accepted, messaging hoping progressive audiences will be enamoured with the occasional ‘girlboss moment™️’, while not noticing that vast amounts of regressive ideals.

In the end neither audience feels appealed to and the show is a massive failure. While it might be satisfying to see that these conservative audiences are too blinded by, let’s be honest here, identity politics to recognise something that is clearly made for them, ultimately all that is remembered is that ‘the comedy show featuring a lot of diversity’ failed. And it becomes harder for people who actually want to make media with, and especially for, minorities have a harder time getting any funding. Shows like these are a lose lose situation when it comes to furthering diversity in the media landscape and it’s increasingly frustrating to see this happen again and again.

I cannot imagine growing up in today's online climate, with how pronounced the paranoia and performative mindsets over media consumption are.

I watched so many movies and read so many books as a kid. It must be exhausting, having to stop prior to seeing any kind of media and checking if it is somehow "okay" to consume, and okay to share the fact you've consumed it with your peers. Imagine the mental stress that would cause, especially because according to this whole purity culture panic, the main punishment for looking at the wrong media is ostracism.

Humans are not built to handle ostracism well. We're social animals because we die if we're alone, so being ostracized has an enormous psychological impact on us. So the stakes here are ludicrously high. And for what? Whether someone enjoys the Saw franchise, or reads Lolita, or finds the Lannister's relationship fascinating, or has a rape kink?

The pressure to find ways to account for your missteps, to prove you're not as "dirty" as people think you are, is absurdly intense as well. And it is always there. Posting online means you can be seen anytime by anyone, so the sense of accountability is high. The sad thing is, accountability means a dozen different things to a dozen different people. So even if you tie yourself into knots trying to be "good" and "morally superior", at some point, someone is going to point out how you, too, are a "degenerate" like everyone else, just because you didn't meet their strict standards. And at that point it won't matter if you "aren't really a bad person". They won't care, just like you didn't care. They will still attack you. It's really only a matter of time.

And if you don't think it will happen to you, well, that's what everyone else thought too.

I'm so sorry

But in the alternate timeline where Bruce dies in the alley, Martha becomes the joker and Thomas becomes Batman... what if the joker-ication process of Martha is a slow thing. They all mourn the loss of Bruce in their own ways while blaming themselves. Alfred blaming himself for not being there to fight the dude off before anything happens to anyone. Thomas blaming himself for taking Bruce to the theatre. Martha blaming herself for suggesting a nice walk home.

Overtime Martha gets more confrontational towards the two, "THIS IS YOUR FAULT FOR TAKING US TO THE STUPID SHOW! YOU LAZED ABOUT WHILE MY BABY WAS DYING!"

The words getting more harsh until Alfred confronts her in the kitchen saying it's no one's fault and they should work on comforting each other instead of tearing each other apart.

Martha laughs and slowly the laugh gets more psychotic before she takes the knife she was using and stabs him with it.

Thomas finds Martha laughing over Alfred's body, his blood smeared over her face in the shape of a bloody smile and he screams.

They're both broken.

Hi!! Thank you for the ask, first of all. Sadly, everything that has to do with the joker in a story-focused way (aka where I have to put a lot of energy into) Is a bore hazard for me.

todays award for 'man what the fuck' goes to reddit for making me see pr0/-ship discourse in goddamn 2023. thought we were past that but i guess not

10/10 manga for pulling a “we’ll defeat you with the power of friendship!!” “That’s… incredibly ignorant of you. I’m significantly more powerful, whether or not you have friends won’t impact this fight”

I'm pretty avidly against cancel culture from the perspective of those mindsets reoccurring in daily interpersonal relationships and the damage it has on mental health, definitions of justice and social cohesion, but sometimes I take a step back from that and think that "wow. even against men in power, this is very counterproductive."

hear me out.

largely, cancel culture was kind of birthed as its own separated practise at the same sort of Internet time period as the #MeToo movement first gained traction, and the original intentions of this was to hold dangerous men in power accountable and to deplatform them. I could go on a whole separate ramble about accountability, justice and deplatforming, but that's not the point of this post. at its core at the beginning, cancel culture was held with good intention to hold bad, powerful, rich people accountable.

right?

but there's irony in this. because what cancel culture has degenerated into has become a much more concerning, damaging issue, mainly to friendship circles, community cohesion and minority groups. these powerful, dangerous men that this movement was originally supposed to be against, aka, the 1% of wealth, the people behind media censorship, the CEOs of social media and people in government, for example, have very cleverly over the past 5 or 6 years(ish) drip fed subtle, psychological techniques to take this notion of cancel culture and use it to pit communities against each other. they have successfully turned the collective internet's attention away from them and towards each other.

at the end of the day, these aren't left vs right issues, although that's what these people would have you believe. this should be all of us vs them. the small but dangerously powerful statistical minority.

isn't it fucked up? isn't it fucked up that we are all so caught up in these echo chambers carefully constructed by those who wish to distract us that we have forgotten the main issues? isn't it fucked up that we're more focused on digging up dirt and harassing our neighbours, our friends, our community members, instead of actually bothering to fight for the justice we claim to desire?

and the most damning of it all, is that every post, every tweet in an argumentative thread, every reblog that spreads doxxing information about a teenager who said a slur once, every comment on a post trying to cancel a minority who has simply made a human mistake, is money in the pockets of those controlling this. the evil, twisted people that we should be putting our efforts into fighting against are profiting off of the movement that was supposed to take them down.

so, above the sociopolitical and interpersonal reasons I can't abide cancel culture, this is most significant to me. how deeply counterproductive it is.

the powerful men turn us against each other over the shield of computer screens and keyboards, we fall into mass echo chamber delusion and pick fights and cancel campaigns against each other, and they sit back and watch in delight that the long term coercion they've had over the media's dynamic is finally paying off. literally paying off.

so stop wasting what you think is activism on old tweets from one of your old high school buddies where they said something shitty. stop wasting this energy on taking down the people on the same societal standing as you. stop letting yourself get so enraged over somebody having a conflicting opinion to you, and start channelling that anger into the shit that the far left actually stands for: revolution.

because cancel culture isn't left. it just isn't. it isn't activism.

that's what the powerful, dangerous people in power would like you to think.

that thing wherein you're reading something and just KNOW

"this person has completely forgotten that the characters here live in Japan/Korea/China/Russia"

and is, instead, writing like an American.

more and more often, I find myself falling in love with media for the potential it has to be good, not for what it actually is. That desire for something to be better leads me to create new details, new concepts and imagery to tie everything together into an actual theme, a real story.

I think that is ultimately the premise of fandom, taking something that is OK or even great and modifying it so its almost perfect. Rarely do you see media that is almost perfect develop a huge fandom, because there is so little to improve.

I love creating, I love seeing what others create, but also, there is something to say about watching a film or a TV series or reading a book that is so close to perfection that makes you want to sit in silence and reflect for a while. Something about experiencing a story that moves you in a way that makes words meaningless. Something that is beyond description, something that needs to be experienced to be understood.

I wish there was more of this. More stories that were created for the sake of telling a story and moving the audience, instead of created for the sake of making a profit. I wish we could fall in love with more stories for what they are, instead of what they could be.

Like idk some of you are very miserable and have a need to feel like you’re morally correct to dislike something instead of just being normal and disliking it because you just Don’t Like It

god that post really turned some wheels tonight lmfao. being in therapy with a main complaint of "growing up in the inner cult circle of a megachurch" is just the gift of complex and unfortunate feelings that keeps on giving

i’m so tired of media made by people who benefit from The System (tm) more than not that essentially says without said system, we would all fall into chaos and brutality and blah blah man is the worst beast without those “civilizing” guardrails blah blah blah 

BEHOLDE. MASKS PEOPLE IN THEIR GLORY

That format up there is Name - Pronouns - Exact Division - Broader Magical Term - Species

Silly silly shenanigans! They are one of the trios ever I love their friendship so much

frankly I am obsessed

Woahhhh

and. lastly

I love how Rosemary and Charley actually have wings and fly accordingly but Philliam is naturally a floating disembodied skull. And the best part is that’s NOT what Charley is surprised about

I am going to be working on their official ref sheets complete with colours soon!! Might even throw in a photo of the actual irl mask on the sheet :0

Please expect more of these sillies!!

"Stop making this all about you" well we wouldn't have to if you included us in the first fucking place. It's not all about you either.

Thinking about how in popular media you cannot be of colour and be queer, not be queer and fat, not be fat and neurodivergent, not be neurodivergent and be non Christian, not be non Christian and-