#exotification
[[so ever since Shafiq appeared in the Sacred Twenty-Eight list on Pottermore it’s become a growingly-popular last name in fanfic, but there are some uses of Shafiq that kind of make me wince, even if unfairly.
The most jarring ones are the names where Shafiq is paired with a very bog-standard Anglo name - say Bob Shafiq or Jane Shafiq. Because the Potterverse isn’t white-washed enough as it is? I often have to check myself when I see this happen because my own name is an English word (Tiara) and there are Anglo names that travel (Daniel, Sara), but even within my family tree that’s fairly unusual.
The other extreme of this is picking very Arabic names and setting the characters as being from the Middle East. Yes, Shafiq is from Arab origin, but names travel! It’s a common-ish Muslim name, and Islam has a lot of roots outside the Middle East - hell there are a lot more Muslims in Asia than Arabia. A lot of Africa is Muslim, Bosnia and surrounding Central Asia/Eastern Europe esque countries are Muslim, and there’s all the converts and enclaves and intermarriages etc etc etc.
I’ve seen Bangladeshi Shafiqs and Malay Shafiqs (as well as variations on the spelling, such as Shafik and Syafiq) and I’m sure that there are Shafiqs of all sorts of ethnicities. I would love to see a lot more diversity not just in the naming, but also in the origin stories of these characters. How about, say, a Ali Shafiq, Malay wizard from Singapore? Or a Siti Nurain Shafiq from Jakarta? Or an Afroz Shafiq from the East Indian diaspora based in Kenya? Or or or…
So many possibilities for names, let’s look outside the bog standard!]]
Smitecharacter design principles in two images… men are weird, over the top mixes of power/macho physiques and armor so ridiculous you’d need cybernetics to hold it up… women ridiculous outfits that show off they have hips and tits. (This is actually one of Nemesis’s better skins)
No, really. That’s basically their entire brand. This is the background image for their site, for their game about battling gods and pantheons.
Then if you don’t buy in immediately and want to look at what they got… here’s your first two gods on the roster…. Zeus and the Morrigan.¹
And yes, they’re treating the gods currently worshipped by actual Hindu people today with the same irreverence as for… characters who… at best are at least as much creative license by writers as they are myth (Arthurian figures and Sun Wukong) ²
So, when people try to pretend that stuff like this is okay because it’s based on immodest pagan gods etc, rest assured… if it was about that, you’d know.
- wincenworks
More on Smitehere
¹ This one is particularly bizarre since they have the Morrigan and Cú Chulainn, but do not have the horny/female empowerment queen Celtic (warrior) goddess icon (Queen) Medb, who’s name may mean “she who intoxicates”.
² They’ve actually gone a step worse than this and decided that the actual religion of roughly 1.35 billion people alive today with… an 80s toy ad…
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So, despite having made no grand claims of being for everyone, it seems King of Fighters XV is going to have a playable black woman before Overwatchdoes.
Her costume is clearly a trainwreck which can be summarized best as “As fashion: Yes. For combat: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!?” As such, while I would love to rant about every aspect of this costume… I feel there’s some more important bullshit that needs to be called out here.
Unsurprisingly for a series where a signature feature was the ability to blast the front off a female character’s top, there’s… there’s… a lot going on here, not the least of which is ultra-spiritual psychic from Mali is named… Dolores, teamed up for a full contact tournament with a foreign mercenary and a (probably) underage girl and has “interview” answers like this:
So baffling amount of exotification and a bafflingly impractical outfit who seems much more inspired by Bayonetta than anything relating to black culture - making attacks mostly through dance moves and summoning mud instead of magical hair… even though her hair does seem… magical.
All of which is to say… this is all rather secondary to what’s going on in the background…
Nothing about this is okay.
- wincenworks
King’s commentary generated via The Death Generator
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Way back in my senior year of high school, my friends and I took full advantage of our senior year freedom to go see The Forbidden Kingdom in theaters several times. As far as we were concerned, The Forbidden Kingdom was the long-awaited team-up of Asian action stars Jackie Chan and Jet Li—it didn’t matter to us that the plot included some white guy as the main protagonist. In fact, we were pretty happy about it—we thought the white protagonist would make the movie much more attractive to Americans and thus make more money at the box office, thereby proving that Asians could sell movies. And to be fair, The Forbidden Kingdom did rank #1 at the box office in its opening weekend. But nearly a full decade later, it’s pretty apparent that The Forbidden Kingdom’s flaws in 2008 are the same flaws that Hollywood still has today.
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Coming soon: STICKERS! Mixed people are exotified all the the time, so we decided to flip the whole thing on its head and have some fun with it. Here’s our take on a giraffe-lion and rat-pigeon. More animals and sassy quotes to come! Huge <3 to our Contributing Art Director Hugo Estrada for the amazing designs!
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