#lindsay ellis

I’m going to dispense a bunch of advice that I wish both I had heard when I was younger and on the internet, and that I think younguns on the internet could benefit from hearing.

mustlearntoadult:

sir, that’s my emotional support 1hr 49min video essay

plxviophile:

doug walker should be driven offline, not lindsay

Seriously people, if you hated on Lindsay pointing out the fact that…”Avatar: The Last Airbender” has become so influential that even the most powerful entertainment conglomerate on Earth wants a piece of its audience, the jokes Douglas Darien Walker told in his “review” of “Sailor Moon” (Magical Girl Squad Robo Dance Yes, my beloathed…and he also misrepresented Japanese culture immensely) would probably make you want to bludgeon that man to death with a sock full of rocks. 

@cynicalclassicist​ @cwonicdepwession​ @dachi-chan25​ @whencartoonsruletheworld​ @ladiesofwinterfell​ @flightsofwonder​ 

Big media franchises like Harry Potter and Star Wars are more than just entertainment.  They become a sort of language.  If you aren’t familiar with those properties, you’re going to miss the meaning of so many memes, jokes, and metaphors that you will seriously suffer comprehension problems.  This extends to workplace and educational contexts; maybe your biology teacher is using the metaphor of “pensieve” to talk about memory storage engrams in the brain, or maybe your peers are using Palpatine or Voldemort to deconstruct political rhetoric.  Even if you have enough familiarity with the series to pick up on basic references, you’re going to miss things - conversations, connections, allusions.  Language is a TOOL, and it is subject to biases (the English language, for example, contains a lot of sexism and outdated gender constructs) but you can’t fully abstain from it without crippling yourself socially, economically, and psychologically.

Lindsay Ellis recently made a hottake video about the controversy around J.K. Rowling’s transphobic tweets.  She presented the conclusion that, if you really care about transphobia as a social problem, you have no choice but to resist contributing to Rowling’s accumulation of power, and this is best done by resolving not to consume harry potter.  While I agree that it is probably best to avoid spending money on harry potter products, I think simply choosing not to consume that media or discuss it online damages the power of readers more than it damages Rowling’s power.  Ideas are tools we can take from problematic sources and use for subversive purposes.

If we teach our children not to consume problematic media, we wall them off from the knowledge of our species, our history, our growth.  If we teach them to consume media critically, we give them some tools against the biases they are sure to absorb just by living in an unjust society and using our languages.