marvel is lazy as fuck for choosing Xhosa as the language
Well John Kani who played T’Chaka is from South Africa and speaks Xhosa so when he took on the role he brought that with him and taught Chadwick how to speak it. So they more so follows his wishes. Don’t see why you have such an issue
Y’all be mad at everything.
Lazy?? If I spoke Xhosa, I’d be offended as hell if someone considered the cast “lazy” for learning it.
Yess for a clicking languange!!
One thing im not looking forward to is how great this movie is gonna be, but due to the hype how many people are just waiting to pick it apart and find issue in the TINIEST, most insignificant details… I’m over it already.
Ok, like, picking Xhosa really isn’t that trivial a detail. Xhosa is spoken in South Africa whilst Wakanda has consistently been placed in East Africa (somewhere between Uganda and Ethiopia) by the MCU.
That’s some 6000km.
Other places similarly far away are China and Ireland.
This is symptomatic of a much more general problem with black panther where it presents a vision of Wakanda a utopian nation with cultural touchstones taken from across one of the most diverse continents I’m the world; cultural touchstones that have no business existing next to each other and someone who recognises the importance of one will probably not recognise it in any of the others. This blending of the myriad of African cultures into one single “Africa” is part of the legacy of imperialism which has always treated such distinctions as trivial.
As@metsew has pointed out, across most of Africa (with some notable exceptions such as South Africa), most Africans identify far more strongly with finely grained ethnic labels than they do with race so, from that pov, speaking Xhosa as Wakandan ought not be any less shocking than them speaking Irish or Mandarin.
This film is a big and important step forwar for African-Americans, but it is a continuation of a long history of imperialism for Africa
It’s cultural imperialism. At least someone says it who isn’t myself.
The MCU films actually give us a good alternative model to compare to in Sokovia.
Now we’ve not seen it in as much detail as we see Wakanda in Black Panther, but what we do see contrasts quite well.
Sokovia is placed with a similar level of vagueness, being somewhere between the western border of Slovakia and the northwest of the black sea in Ukraine. They write in Cyrillic (some people online are saying the Serbian variant rather than the more plausible Ukrainian or Belarusian variants, which would be a little off, but I didn’t actually see any of the Serbian characters so I’m not sure how accurate that is) and speak a Slavic language. Their flag uses the panslavic colours (albeit rotated from their usual horizontal configuration) with a crowned eagle. The architecture, dress, and customs of the Sokovians appear to all be consistent with a post-soviet Eastern European country.
The biggest incongruity there is in using the Serbian alphabet (if they actually are) which depending on the exact placement of the country is at most 1000km away (remember, Wakanda is 6000km from any significant Xhosa population). That same distance could get you from Sokovia to Xi'an in China or to Mumbai in India.
A Sokovia portraying Eurasia similarly to how Wakanda portrays Africa could have people in salwar kameezes watching Turkish wrestling, be speaking Tundra Nenets whilst doing vodka shots over fish and chips all in a Venetian Palazzo. I mean, it’s all Eurasia right so who’s going to sweat the little differences between those cultures?
If you’re going “but that’s different, those cultures are completely different and the people with those cultures are of different races” I’ve got some news for you: Africa is at least as culturally diverse as Eurasia and race was socially constructed deliberately to lump all of Africa into one group that could all be dismissed as primitive.
Black panther is an important film and I am excited to see it, but these sorts of apologia for its (major) flaws serve no-one and continue the very harmful legacy of non-Africans ignoring the many, many differences between various African peoples.
As ever, all media is flawed. That doesn’t mean you have to entirely disregard it, just acknowledge those flaws and engage critically with the work rather than glossing over and/or ignoring them
also, i keep thinking about that artist who lost an arm and she made self-portraits and of course they depicted herself without an arm, and people were like why do you keep marking art about the loss of your arm, and she was like i don’t. i’m making art about myself and i only have one arm.
while a lot of people write poetry about their own pain, sometimes personal poetry is just a reflection of who they are, and who they are is shaped by traumatic events and other things that youmay find upsetting.
Okay, granted, it’s been a while since I’ve seen “all trans readers like one kind of fic, and no trans readers ever like another kind of fic, so it is Transphobia when you write the Wrong Kind.”
…but it hasn’tbeen that long since I’ve seen someone quietly wonder if they’re a Bad Trans Person for having preferences.
So it’s never a bad time to say: different people have different needs, and it’s okay to be fulfilled by different kinds of stories!
(heck, the sameperson might have different needs at different points in their own life, and that’s okay too)
Insider is creating a database to track queer representation in children’s cartoons. I searched through it a bit and it’s pretty cool. I wished it had some links to sources of confirmation to some of them and I’m not sure exactly how accurate it is, but it seems accurate enough at first glance. You can check it out yourself if you want.
Many of the interviewees are also aro-spec, and there is quite the variation of aces interviewed. This is a nice read and I just want to let y'all know that it is possible to be heard on a large public platform.
I’ve gotten a few asks requesting some research resources for writing characters who have Bipolar Disorder. I don’t have Bipolar, nor am I a mental health professional, but I have found some helpful resources from people who experience it in order to get you started.
Please let me know if you have any reading recommendations, and if you’d like to share your experiences!
Also note: apologies I haven’t been able to answer asks the way I used to, as adult life and grad school keep me rigorously occupied. But I always appreciate the people who take the time to write to me!
Putting in a plug for Maria Bamford, a comedian with Bipolar. She keeps bootleg stuff off youtube, but her entire catalog is on Spotify and I cannot recommend her enough. Here’s a clip from a Comedy Central special.
Seconding the rec for Carrie Fisher. She died right around the time I was first getting diagnosed myself and is still a huge comfort.
I have a diagnosis of Bipolar Type II myself and am glad to be a resource for questions as well.
“just not seeing enough people talking about carl clemons-hopkins, the first out nonbinary actor to be nominated for an emmy, and the nonbinary flag gown they wore last night”
since it’s almost the holiday season, just a PSA: stop drawing jewish people celebrating christmas!
drawing them celebrating hanukah is much more respectful and i promise that it isn’t difficult! you could draw them lighting the menorah, playing dreidel, or even opening their hanukah presents! stay safe everyone, and & happy holidays!
actually, let me elaborate!
if you’re goyische, i would reccomend drawing a menorah that looks like this! this menorah is kosher, because the shamash [central candle] is more offset than the other candles, traditionally being HIGHER or lower. (if you’re jewish - go wild! have fun with your menorahs! once i saw a dinosaur menorah!)
this is a dreidel! dreidel is a game where people usually gamble gelt (chocolate coins) with each other. the dreidel is a spinning top, and depending on if it lands on nun, gimmel, hay, or shin, you can either get or lose gelt!
a quick little reminder from your two mods, these are some easy places to start with!
“They look like Ainu people,” my grandma had commented as I showed her Princess Mononoke. I had never heard of the Ainu people before. I asked her who the Ainu are, and she said, “they’re like Japanese Indians,” meaning Native Americans. “Mountain people.”
After we finished the movie I immediately went to Google to look up the Ainu. My grandma was right, on some level. The pictures I saw of their garments, their houses, their salmon culture, their faces… it all reminded me so much of the tribal culture I grew up around in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.
I told my mom what my grandma had said about the Ainu, and my mom said, “oh yeah. Grandma is Ainu.” Whaaaaaaaat? Apparently at one point my grandma had gone back to Hokkaido to visit family, and she brought back all of these unusual souvenirs. Wood carved bears and wood carved bearded people, a mirror with a wood carved woman’s face, and other little things that had always been a part of our household. The little knickknacks that are never questioned, but are some how just kind of always there. I didn’t know that they had come from Japan, and I certainly didn’t know they were Ainu souvenirs.
Of course, my mom didn’t have the internet at her disposal in the 70s, and at the time misunderstood what it meant to be Ainu. She assumed that Ainu was a general term for people from Hokkaido, as opposed to a specific ethnic group. My grandma denied being Ainu, having grown up Wajin, but my grandpa seemed to suspect otherwise. “Sayuri, I don’t know why you deny your heratige. Of course you’re Ainu, look at your big mountain feet!” my grandpa would tease.
The more I read about the Ainu and their history, and the more I looked into my own family history, the more questions that had always nagged at my family seemed to be answered. The question of why we were always so different.
This whole journey started with a movie. Prince Ashitaka is Emishi, and there’s a lot of complicated history about the relation between Ainu and Emishi, but the point is would I have ever learned learned anything about my family background if this culture had never shown up on screen?
People who see themselves and their culture represented all the time take for granted what that can mean. For some people, it’s literally life changing.
Representation is great, and it can be really useful and cool to see other people like you in media. As a person who grew up with white parents in a white neighborhood in a predominately white area of the country, I definitely grew up with sort of a warped view of myself. When I watch Asian media, I can see features like mine and I feel less like a pariah. I absolutely understand how nice it is just to see people who look like you, and how it can be very encouraging to see other people finding them attractive, admirable, etc.
However, that all said, it’s also important that we are able to relate to others who don’t share our skin color or our religion or our gender. It’s important that we can see characters who don’t look like us or don’t act like us, and that we are able to like them or find them relatable.
More important than having a token character that reflects our outer features, is that we are able to realize that the human experience, that emotions and struggles, are relatable. We all live life, we all struggle to be good people, and we all do our best to find fulfillment in what we do.
I don’t need a character to be autistic or Asian or adopted or trans or all of the above to be relatable to me. In fact, I’d personally prefer that my escapism not mirror my life. I want to see characters that have depth and complexity, and I want to be able to enjoy them whether or not they look like me.
look i’m as absolutely against homophobic tropes as the next person, probably even more so, but like. at the end of the day if every gay character has to be wholesome and unproblematic in order to be a good character gay media is gonna get really bland really fast
i don’t just want “good gay characters/representation” i want a full spectrum of gay characters that encompass even a fraction of the thousands of diverse and complex straight characters in fiction
A new study from the University of Southern California finds there has been no change in the number of Black movie directors in the past 10 years and Disney is at the back of the pack.
So what is Disney’s problem? The real loss here is that diversity improves quality. Even when minorities and their lives are the subject of a cartoon, representations of race can be disappointing.
Maybe because they just haven’t had any directors that happen to be black be a better candidate than a director that happened to be white?
That could very well be down to the fact that there’s a lot less black people in the US than other races.
0 actually doesn’t reflect the US population.
I realize we’re in the age of “alternative facts” but
wait no we are not those are just lies
0really doesn’t reflect the US population and there are NOT many fewer black people in the U.S., and that definitely isn’t the direction we’re going in
Any way you cut it, ZERO is not a number of directors justifiable by anything other than racism
Everybody go watch “I Put the Bi in Bitter” in celebration of Bi Visibility! It’s a really cool show featuring bi women of color, a fabulous Asian lesbian, stable relationships between both bi/bi couples and gay/bi couples, and a whole lotta queer inside jokes! Season 3 comes out only three days after Bi Visibility Day. And the episodes are all really short so you don’t need a lot of extra time to watch it!
Season 3 came out today and you can watch it here on Youtube! And here are season oneandseason two. Go support #ownvoices and great representation of bi & gay women of color by checking it out. <3 Make sure to comment to show your love & support – it’ll boost the algorithm and share the stories of the marginalized peoples they’re representing.
Everybody go watch “I Put the Bi in Bitter” in celebration of Bi Visibility! It’s a really cool show featuring bi women of color, a fabulous Asian lesbian, stable relationships between both bi/bi couples and gay/bi couples, and a whole lotta queer inside jokes! Season 3 comes out only three days after Bi Visibility Day. And the episodes are all really short so you don’t need a lot of extra time to watch it!
