even KURUK was done so dirty by natla too - you know, going it alone in the spirit world was probably his greatest regret (though at least his animal guide was probably with him)

yeah my friend pointed out that the way roku was portrayed as uncharacteristically playful and charming while kuruk was just kind of flat and serious was not only mischaracterizing both of them in a way where if they had just reversed their personalities it would have made sense (what are they, zukka??) but indicative of anti-native racism by playing into the stoic native leader/elder trope even though that’s truly not what kuruk is at all, whereas roku is kind of the sage old asian man mentor, but you know, they do think to subvert THAT. no offense to ken leung and danny pudi who are innocent but this show was largely made by the most annoying asian americans, and it shows, such as in the fact that a single fire nation boat looks 100x better than the entire northern water tribe, or the fact that they uh. idk. cast a white guy to play sokka and didn’t even give a shit. justice for kuruk but also justice for every single water tribe character truly

There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it signifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.

Orientalism by Edward Said

Things other countries might not know about Australian elections:

Voting is compulsory. The punishment for not voting is a $20 fine. There is no punishment for vandalising your vote, handing in a blank ballot, or just showing up , having you name crossed off and leaving again.

However, if you don't enrol to vote when you turn 18, our data systems aren't sophisticated enough to catch you.

The two largest parties are the Liberal Party and Labor party. There are also other parties and independent candidates.

Because we have compulsory voting, the major parties tend to aim to appeal to undecided centrallist voters. People with fixed political beliefs (most people) are kind of taken for granted. This is very boring but it keeps our politics from getting as polarised as other countries where parties aren't just trying to win over voters but also to motivate their bases to come out and vote.

Voting happens mostly at schools and community centres.

Parties send volunteers to hang out at polling places and try convince people to vote their way. But things stay pretty polite because Australians find enthusiasm to be suspect.

Once you cross a certain line to enter the poling place those people have to leave you alone.

Schools and charities will sell things like homemade cakes and BBQ sausages in bread as a fundraiser.

The sausages are called 'democracy sausages' and taste just slightly of democracy.

You can also do a postal vote and vote in the days before election day at certain places.

Hope this helps.

black sails ending possibility #72: whether or not silver successfully 'unmakes' flint doesnt matter because it turns out that after spending a decade in asylums and prison camps thomas has also gotten radicalized as fuck and immediately reverses all of silver's efforts

really weird thing ive noticed lately re: hermits getting critiqued for stuff theyve said or done is that as soon as someone holds a shit opinion (even if it's just them being stupid, or a centrist, or saying a bad word without knowing what it means, or whatever) people immediately seem to flock to the 'this guy should die' 'kys' 'why are we giving this person a platform' rhetoric and like. that's not how meaningful change is made?

like, yeah, if one of my beloved CCs posted a tweet or video tomorrow about how much they hate gay people, or believe in conservative ideals, or they just said a bunch of slurs or whatever (these are hyperbolic examples obviously) then yeah, fuck them, they should go rot. but like, having some dumb takes, or saying bad things in the past, doesn't = evil terrible person...

idk, i feel like we can critique content creators without getting so insane about it. like, shit, there are things some of my favourites do that i don't like, but theyre not even really worth bringing up tbh. unless its something actually important, i feel like it just creates more drama out of nothing and all these assholes come crawling out of the woodwork to tell everyone how much they hate that creator. or find their content boring anyway so clearly they have no real merit to anyone.

more of an explanation of what i mean in the tags but yeah.

I like the jotun horn jewelry/decoration thing but i think it wouldnt be like. Gold. Bc where are they getting gold from? Where are they mining it and smelting it and stuff? Idk why. It just doesnt compute in my brain, it doesnt seem to fit their whole thing and mentslly i csnt imagine the place having a ton of gold thst didnt get ripped away when they lost the war. Even though aesthetically i get that it looks nice.

I don’t even mind Jotunheim naturally having a lot of gold *in the past*, (or whenever) I just don’t like the way people use it as an orientalism-vibe literary device. There’s often no explanation given for the gold either, especially in a post-colonised world unless there’s a note on ‘this is ALL the gold Jotunheim had left and LOKI has it bc he needs to look pretty (and like a woman)’

people fawning over the environmentalist themes in tolkien’s work has always made me deeply uneasy but I could never articulate why, and reading orientalism is clarifying a lot of that for me lol

i just saw a post saying dune should never have been written bc it's so orientalist and while it is orientalist i resent that post for neglecting to mention all the other desert cultures it appropriates.

Ifalna @holyguardian and Glenn

I do Wonder how All of it's led To where we are now ? I do Think sometimes What have I done To make you be mine?

didn't want to put this rant in the tags of that last post but honestly i feel like a lot of people hate toshiro disproportionately compared to what he actually did in-story. and if we're being real it's most likely because of racism

As I promised,

New political compass just dropped

On the vertical axis: WISE vs FOOLISH in the Biblical sense

On the horizontal axis: NEUROTYPICAL VS MENTALLY ILL

Examples:

You get the idea I hope

🔫

watching lots of videos abt horror in my free time and i noticed smth interesting. american horror very much follows the "if you do bad things/make irrational decisions, you will get hurt" rule, while japanese horror tends to not care about who the victim of the monster is - you can be a perfect person who's never done anything wrong, you can do everything in your power to avoid the monster, but you'll still get hurt

i think it's an interesting thing to study. I'd love to hear abt horror in other places around the world and what sort of rules they follow, and compare and try to figure out where they came from

i may be wrong, but it's easy to assume that the american rule of horror - do bad things and bad things will happen to you - is very christian. there's other things like leftovers from the hays code (like having sex means you'll die later, for example) but these are usually more abt specific actions, while i'm talking more generally now. i think it's affected by the whole fear of hell, obviously - if you do things right, you get to go to heaven, you get to escape the torment. and even non-christians are affected by these ideas bc this is just what american culture is like.

i can't speculate much abt the japanese rule (or rather, the lack of rules in that regard) bc i'm not as exposed to japanese culture and history as i am to american culture, but i will say, on a personal level, this is way more scary to me 😳 for obvious reasons.

also ngl it can get annoying to hear american youtubers try to analyze japanese horror and fight for their life to find Wrong things the protagonists do in order to justify their torment. i swear they end up demonizing the most mundane shit 😭

eastern bloc gal here. I get what you mean (I'm atheist and about as spiritual as a rock so this is a wildly different perspective) but I did feel like I was missing a bunch of cultural references because my parents weren't willing to teach me any of it. so I chose to go to a religious school (on purpose. out of my own free will) and boy was it a mistake. So many bigotted people (not everyone ofc but the outstanding majority) with the vilest takes you've ever heard, and I swear even I'm more familiar with the Bible than some of them, they just parrot things back that no one has ever said. and overall they're not even the majority but they're getting louder and somehow the whole country has this image of a good Christian country while almost half the population isn't even religious. I think this turned into a rant. I AM SORRY feel free to ignore

Noo don't apologize this is so real!! My parents sent me to a fucking evangelical elementary school—not because they're religious but bc all the state schools had a reputation for lacking teachers back in the late 00s. That evangelical school was right next to an 800yo church and I thought the building was really cool! But in over four years of attendance, bible study and church assembly I never even *remotely* vibed with the religion because I couldn't take anything away from it. They took all the holidays I loved and removed the best ("heathen") parts and also said that Pokémon is Satan's work. Lol. Way to turn kids away from your faith I guess.

Lacking that sort of cultural touchstone because your parents aren't connected to it because your grandparents never taught them because your great-grandparents abandoned it is kinda weird. Like being brought up irreligiously is great but in the end you're still "culturally Christian" and the actual Christians in your country suddenly expect you to stick up for that shit?? They start talking about Christian values like it's supposed to be a big part of your national identity and yeah then some loud (sometimes even regional) minority says that certain women shouldn't be allowed to cover their hair because I guess that's only cool when Christian nuns do it. Idk man the whiplash is crazy. Almost as crazy as ppl claiming that a whole nation is defined by a thinning religion lmao

the fun thing about the word thug is that it is like three times over racially charged

Once the veneer of fantasy is stripped off, the setting terrestrialized, and the orcs recognized as human, then, all the classic themes of Western racist thought become immediately visible. Tolkien’s aesthetic judgment on Mongols and orcs simply repeats Meiners’ aesthetic classification of races, and the even earlier medieval hierarchy: “The figure prized in medieval romances corresponded to Greek statuary, physiognomy was important, and a ‘skin of dazzling whiteness’ exemplified true beauty. Such beauty symbolized goodness, while blackness, small stature, and an ill-proportioned body meant ugliness and evil.” Similarly, twentieth-century German racists would contrast Aryans and dark “ape-men.” Blacks themselves, of course, had traditionally been seen in racist thought as close to apes, and possibly even prone to couplings with orangutans. In keeping with the foregoing, Tolkien describes an orc as “a short crook-legged creature, very broad and with long arms that hung almost to the ground” (TT, 62), while at the siege of Helm’s Deep, we are told, the orcs “sprang up [the ladders] like apes in the dark forests of the South” (TT, 178). The pure-blooded orcs’ fear of the sun also has its precedent in one German anthropologist’s contrast of a diurnal Aryan and a nocturnal non-Aryan race.

Charles W. Mills from “The Wretched of Middle‐Earth: An Orkish Manifesto” (2022)