I like ideas, nerd culture, creative art and ads, puns, memes and lulz, political cartoons, trying new food, books, and jokes in bad taste.
Ask me questions? I like to pretend my brutal honesty is refreshing.
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Could this look good on me? Minus the blond because that just doesn’t work well with Asian hair.
Source: the-unfeminine-female
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Oppression of punks in Indonesia.
Is this a real thing?
Source: maskdeuh
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When my mom’s out in public, she sends me pictures of lesbians she sees.
Jesus I envy that relationship.
this is like the time when my mum took me bra shopping and the girl measuring me up was a lesbian and my mum said to me “i’ll go take a walk around the shop so you can talk to this nice young girl” and gave me a look as if to say “chat her up”.
My mum tries to push me towards cute possibly gay girls and then disappears. She did it in Primark once and I found her hiding behind a pile of knickers, watching me.
i love all of your moms
My mom would probably do this if I let her…
Source: disregardwomen
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Comedian Tim Minchin sings his rational love song “If I didn’t have you”
This pretty much sums up how I feel about the concept of soul mates.
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haha well then
Source: laurapancakes
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Sara is just the most adorable
Source: upfrontupshot
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Racism is not in your intent. Your intent is immaterial in how racist your actions are. This isn’t about you BEING a racist. It’s about you DOING A THING that is racist. Your intent doesn’t change it. Your ignorance of its meaning doesn’t change it. It’s got nothing to do with you as a person and everything to do with the meaning of your action in the context of sociocultural history.
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D-fucking-minus: A Plea For No Circlejerking
My friend Brandon’s response to the White Savior-esque GoT finale.
Also, it should be noted that he’s a VERY vocal social justice advocate who studies critical theory etc.
(A Response tohttp://aamerrahman.tumblr.com/post/52770211665/game-of-tropes-racefail-spoilers)
[Be warned, this is a really long one: TL;DR You need an unacceptably inadequate concept of race and race history to make a critique like that.]
Did Aamer Rahman actually watch Game of Thrones, or does he sincerely believe that Dany’s story is “essentially, a liberal white woman who goes around saving and civilising brown people”—“a neocon wet dream. She is Laura Bush”?
Permit me open with the final sequence of “Mhysa,” Sunday’s finale: Dany and her army stand outside the gates. She expresses concern: “People learn to love their chains.”
Well that is some fucked up shit right off the bat! Repeating the old white supremacist trope that slaves aren’t psychologically mature enough for freedom and will stand by their cages like a dumb animal, unable to take up their liberty. That’s a “racefail,” damn straight.
Except we *immediately* cut to the city gates emptying. If that’s not a performative irony, if that doesn’t immediately suggest that what Dany has just said is bullshit, then I don’t know what WOULD illustrate it.
Oh, maybe this part: when her “black friend” Missandei, as Rahman defines her (pause: does Rahman mistake this show for “The Princess and the Frog”?)—when Missandei announces Dany as “their liberator” to whom the Ghiscari-speaking Yunkish owe their fealty, Dany SHUTS HER DOWN with this wonderful self-empowerment reminder:
“You do not owe me your freedom. I cannot give it to you. Your freedom is not mine to give. It belongs to you and you alone. If you want it back you must take it for yourselves. Each and every one of you.”
White savior complex, MY ASS. (Series end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? More likely.) Since even a *casual reading* of these scenes shows Rahman is full of poocaca, he, wisely, refuses to acknowledge they exist.
Before I go on—and let me be clear, what you just read was the WARM-UP—it’s worth considering why I am so livid and willing to defend a multimillion-dollar epic production, and its white characters, *against* a white supremacist critique of it. I mean, really, I’m about to spend a whole lot of words trying to convince you, dear reader, to take this show terribly, terribly seriously, and that Rahman is really, really wrong, and that’s, like, important to know. Why?
‘Cuz Rahman brought a knife to a gunfight. That may help him sleep at night knowing he’s got that under the pillow to protect himself, but I’m in this game to win it, and I won’t beat bullets with glorified cutlery. Or did Rahman forget that you win the game or you die? (If you read that as flippant then you’re not half as serious as you should be—unless when you preach “survival,” you belittle the seriousness of fighting for your life.) That is what I mean when I condemn his pseudo-critique as a “circle-jerk”: it may make him and his feel better and safer, but I won’t be caught in this firefight with my pants down.
So, yeah, maybe that distinction between conquest and liberation is the writers “getting off the hook,” as Rahman writes. If it is, gimme more! That’s what we call subverting the trope: The Game of Tropes (as he titles his post) just *undid* his expectations. Or wasn’t he watching? Seriously, if this kind of highschool-level essay bullshitting is a work of solidarity, then we should all start learning from Jason Derulo:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ESdn0MuJWQ.
Like I said though, that’s the warm up. Practice is over, let’s really break it down:
I understand the wish to read Dany as a liberal, I promise I do, I did right through the destruction of Astapor and the Unsullied rebellion (hopefully Rahman can forgive me acknowledging their agency). I groaned obnoxiously when I watched it and people shot me dirty looks. I *get it.* But the show doesn’t allow for that reading anymore.
Not when the Unsullied are under no compulsion to follow her, and can run Astapor themselves now, if they want to (they’ve certainly got the necessary military security and sudden influx of capital, read: all the riches of Astapor). Not when Grey Worm is willing to reclaim a slur as his own name. (S3E5). Not when, before the invasion of Yunkai, it’s Grey Worm’s opinion—not Jorrah’s, not Selmy’s—that Dany turns to when she needs to know whether or not Daario is trustworthy. (S3E9)
Full. Of. *Shit.*
Besides, the Dany Rahman’s invented is a straw(wo)man: He remembers she’s a rape survivor, right? He remembers that she’s survived family abuse, right? He remembers she survived the *murder of her entire family except herself and her abusive brother, right?* He remembers that’s she’s been traded around as property, right?
But details, right? She’s an “entitled brat!”
Ignorant, ignorant, ignorant.
(As an aside: It is a weird, weird thing to compare “royal authority” with “brattish entitlement.” *That* is bringing a knife to a gunfight! Does he seriously think that calling the heart of empire “entitlement” makes for a damning critique of empire?? You wanna talk neocons, but you fling “entitled” at the people you disagree with as if that *means* anything? What, exactly, has there by now been in Dany’s character development to suggest that she’s got even the faintest idea of the problem of empire? Is he mad that she ISN’T the Messiah figure he’s been waiting for? And check your male privilege, man! Or does he think men of color don’t have that even when they’re critiquing (fictional) white women? gaaaaawwdddd)
It’s just a TV show, right, we don’t have to think about it, right? Why discuss disability (Bran’s paralysis, Tyrion’s dwarfism and alcoholism, Jojen Reed’s epilepsy), why talk about religious warfare (the Seven versus the Old Gods versus the Lord of Light versus the Drowned God of the Ironborn versus the nonbelievers (Davos, for one) versus versus versus) or why bring up class, why mention nationality…? Does he think we don’t have to engage with the ACTUAL race dynamics in this show? (Of course not: It’s whiteness vs. POC, wham bam done.) Remember how, in this same episode, how Varys tries to convince Shea to leave by reminding her that she will forever be other in Westeros: “We only have one name to them—the last name,” that “We learn their language but we’ll never be their countrymen”? No? Those don’t sound like some post-colonial truisms to him? Does Rahman think these don’t go *double* for the Targaryens? Did he forget that this WHOLE SERIES is premised on the expulsion of the foreign occupiers, on the attempt of the Northerners to break away from the South, of the Free Folk to “light the biggest fire the North has ever seen” and tear down The Wall? What about the foreigners like Melisandre, who come from “The Shadow Lands?” Or does he really believe in a monotonic, ahistorical, eternal essence of whiteness that simply can’t account for the corpse mountains this series has been piling up for three years…?
But the most egregious racefail in this dangerous circlejerk, is when Rahman wants to talk about aliens and Others—he opens with a dubious Klingon/Dothraki comparison (I don’t even watch Star Trek but even I know that’s not who the Klingons are in that universe)—now we come to my little climax—the biggest racefail is when he wants to talk aliens and Others and he FORGETS THE NON-HUMANS IN THE SHOW.
Those include the Children of the Forest—the dark skinned children of the forest, who worshipped the Old Gods that the Northerners adopted (after slaughtering them all) and who possessed the magic of greensight that Bran and Jojen also possess—the Giants we saw among the Free Folk of the North, and the—wait for it, wait for it—
WHITE WALKERS.
Oh SHIT, that’s RIGHT, the GREATEST THREAT TO WESTEROS ARE CODED AS WHITE! Aw, *whoops*. But, like, whatever, you know? That’s just the writers tryna get off the hook. The subversion of “black = darkness”—because it’s the White Walkers who are aligned with death here, it’s the White Walkers who threaten “the night which will swallow the dawn”—like, who cares, you know? I’m sure we can just unproblematically transfer Western conventions to this work with nooooo slippage, because fantasy is just about repeating yourself with slightly different words!
It’s not, like, as if the virtue of fantasy (and sci-fi), if they have one at all, is that they’re not bound to the existing theory of knowledge. (Unless you wanna go all Foucault on me and insist that there’s no way to think outside the restrictions of your historical moment, but Rahman’s analysis is pretty stridently anti-Foucauldian—he has a happy, silly, baseless binary which is never wrong and never troubled, so I’mma guess we don’t believe “power comes from below”). It’s not like fantasy possesses, and more importantly *GoT* possesses, the ability to explore /worlds that are not,/ that you don’t *actually have to follow the LOTR formula!*
“You can dress it up as fantasy, but we know who you’re talking about.”
Which is exactly the failure: Rahman doesn’t get it. He doesn’t even *begin* to get it. His reading is what I would expect from a mid-level high school analysis: Everything is a symbol for something else, and the whole game is to just “uncover” who is who: In Animal Farm, the horse is the proletariat, the pigs are the capitalists, and here’s the peasantry, and the intelligentsia, and and and…
He has NO IDEA who GoT is talking about. Not the first g’damn clue.
So if you want to analyze, like an adult might, the end of Mhysa, then you need to remember Varys’ riddle:
“Power is a curious thing…Three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man. Between them stands a common sellsword. Each great man bids the sellsword kill the other two. Who lives, who dies? Power resides where men believe it resides; it’s a trick, a shadow on the wall, and a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” (S2E3).
Power comes from below, and if you haven’t noticed, then you haven’t been paying attention. (For an intelligent approach to GoT’s politics, see:http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137360/charli-carpenter/game-of-thrones-as-theory)
In conclusion: All of the above illustrate one of the defining characteristics of A Game of Thrones (or “A Song Of Ice and Fire” for those of you who read the books—I don’t): It doesn’t offer a perspective of unqualified morality. (Though god knows what’s going to happen with the Lord of Light, seeing as he’s the only god shown to have had any power—except, of course, for Death itself: Valar morghulis. [And IIRC, the Faceless Men’s religion—Arya’s Murder Friend from Harrenhall, who only called himself “a man”—began as a slave rebellion against the Valyrians which seems to persist quite successfully to this day, no?])
The brilliance of GOT, that, is that it does not have a vision it is willing to sell you. No perspective is privileged; indeed, GRRM seems committed more to act breaks which undercut our characterizations of a given lead, to deny the kind of easy morality Rahman is hawking here (“It’s overtly and uncomplicatedly white supremacist and so it’s “sad to be familiar with [it].””)
So, yeah, I’m glad we can both agree that white supremacy is bad, but with bullshit analyses like this, Rahman locates himself as part of the problem, not the solution. Whoop-dee-doo.
TL;DR Rahman invokes a strawman, and sends a paper tiger to attack it.
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“during battle, she may also give herself some health tips.”
Source: rustybuckett
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