When you picture ancient Mesopotamians, are they white? Because they should be.

Assyrian Christians are called that for a reason.

Your demand for representation of your ethnicity in a setting whose climate does not produce your phenotype, is pretty much reducible to this:

“I have read a few historical magic texts, like curse tablets, so let me tell you all about how every culture understands magic.”

Yeah so this is why the anthropologists know how physicists felt, when that electrical engineer claimed to have refuted relativity.

I just saw a white Karen claiming real-world magic has no rules. I guess the people who study this stuff for a living just hallucinated contamination, microcosm recapitulating macrocosm, counterclockwise as unlucky, the evil eye and gift poison—and the fact that if you break taboo you can gain the power to harm and control others.

I am begging historians to run their interpretations of prior cultures past the anthropology department. This shit isn’t even darkly amusing any more. “The Norse must not have had menstrual taboos, they had a childbirth god.” Korea has both. “The Aztecs didn’t practice cannibalism, they had enough food not to need it.” All their linguistic relatives do it as ritual or social control.

So like do people who look down on precolonial (Subsaharan) African architecture not understand that you’re limited by how good your stone is? Just like how yeah, Kyiv at the time the Mongols sacked it, by no means the gleaming City of Tomorrow even by 13th century standards, had three times the population of Timbuktu or Great Zembabwe at their heights—but there is a reason Ukraine grew grain for all of the Soviet Union and a big chunk of the rest of of the Warsaw Pact, and almost all African cultures were primarily pastoralists instead of farmers. Most of Africa is a hard place to live.

People who write Mummy movies take note: Egyptians did not believe in reincarnation. That part of Hermeticism comes from the Greek influence. (The astrology is Mesopotamian, and it’s the duality and the high ethical standard that come from Egypt.)

Hot take, occasioned by how apparently Uruha Rushia secretly got married in 2021, two years after debuting with Hololive: it isn’t the idols that shouldn’t marry, it’s the fans, if you’re gonna be like that. Who ever heard of worshipers who hold themselves free to marry demanding their idol stay celibate?

Love all the science fiction where humans are indomitable. So, like, hey, why’s your story in English? Why’s that language spoken in Britain, and not in the Anglia Peninsula in northwest Germany that gives it its name—what became of the Britons and their language? And what’s with all the French words? I mean since humans never submit and all.

“This fictional culture has a complicated understanding of identity, so they don’t have pronouns!”

Yeah um there isn’t anything all that unusual about the Japanese or Malay understanding of identity—they are not noted for having bizarre epistemology—but guess what part of speech they haven’t got, except for “this” and “that” (Japanese also has “yonder”).

Actually yeah that zombie thing made me notice, a lot of discourse about black diaspora culture appears to think that black people were created in a lab (presumably by reverse-Yakub, with a goatee) to be white people’s slaves, in the Early Modern Period. That virtually everything in their culture comes from something immeasurably older, in Africa or Europe, or some mix of the two, is apparently inconceivable: their entire identity is reduced to slavery.

“This fantasy culture is matriarchal, so they list your matronymic or mother’s surname first.”

Ah yes, noted matriarchy fucking Portugal.

Also that’s how we describe horse pedigrees (“X out of Y by Z”), so it is entirely possible that female lineage is listed first because women are literal breeding stock. (Not quite that bad, but China used to use a matrilineal surname system based on which of a powerful man’s many wives your mother was.)

“This thing isn’t really Slavic, it originates in Central Asia.”

Oh, like Slavs did? The Balto-Slavic urheimat is in western Iran.

Most Slavs didn’t get to Europe till Islam was already a thing. Bohemia is named for a Celtic tribe and what’s now Poland was Germanic, probably Gothic, in Roman times (same might go even for Ukraine, not sure about that one). The entire South Slavic region was Greek or spoke things like Illyrian that might be related to Albanian.

No but I’m sure it’s just a coincidence Polish nobles wore caftans and single-edged curved swords.

I noticed something.

In Avatar, the only things presented as having value are male gender roles. Sure there’s the thing with Toph and makeup—but that’s meaningless. At no point do any of the girls show any pride in doing women’s work: only in being pretty. Not in cooking or sewing, which, you may not have heard, make life possible in preindustrial societies.

No, the only thing particularly valuable in this setting is fighting—men’s work, done by the people who can get killed without jeopardizing the next generation. Again, menopause exists: if your analysis of gender does not take that into account, it’s automatically invalid. And the men are presented as hoarding men’s work to themselves, rather than it being their work and women having their own, different but equally valuable, way of contributing to the community. (I mean I guess it’s a war story, but “feeding the fighters before they set off/after they return” is a Thing in war stories.)

This brand of feminism is like if an agrarian movement despised farming.

This show is what happens when you let W.E.I.R.D. people try to ape anime after having seen a very few big-name works.

Just had a braindead halfwit troll trying to criticize my thing about demanding representation of your ethnicity in climates that don’t produce your phenotype. Well I’m sorry, Parteigenosse Gyssling, but the fact is that if we’re making a movie about Africa it’s not going to be about “Aryan” blonds—and if we’re making a movie about Germany, it’s not going to have many Subsaharan blacks. Ditto fantasy counterparts.

Sorry if that confused you, perhaps you should learn real anthropology instead of the party-approved Ahnenerbe.

Although the core “Pacific Islander” cultures are Austronesian, the Papuan cultures at the south end and the Japonic cultures at the north one are also recognizably in the same cultural sphere.

Basically anything Japan has over continental East Asia (like it being less socially acceptable to lie to advance your in-group) is definably traceable to Japan having that history as a Pacific Island chiefdom-network—the thing usually called feudalism. (European feudalism is also a chiefdom, of course; just generally chiefdoms are a deeply underrated middle ground between tribal anarchy and the absolutism of a full-fledged state. In fact everything good about liberalism is basically leavening the state with elements of feudalism—most of the Bill of Rights is Common Law rights all freemen had from, like, Alfred the Great and Charlemagne.)

So what do people who claim the appearance of goblins in most media is based on antisemitic tropes, do with the fact Azeris apply the exact same tropes to Armenians?

Why it’s almost like there is a very common way to caricature a “Caucasian” ethnicity that you don’t like. Just like how the “side parted hair, buck teeth, big glasses” stereotype of the Japanese is used in Japanese media as visual shorthand for an asshole boss or school administrator.

PSA: “vassal” means “subordinate nobleman”. For a lot of the medieval period, what we call “chivalry” was often called “vassalage”: acts of exemplary knightly service.

“Vassal states” are more usually tributary states. The flow of goods is the other way, between vassals and tributaries: the liege gives a gift—the fief—to the vassal, in exchange for the promise of military aid. That’s what makes them a vassal.