The U.S. Navy has been polluting Hawaii’s lands and waters for years. Most recently, it leaked more than 1,000 gallons of raw sewage near Honolulu. Just days before that, Hawaii’s Health Department had fined the Navy more than $8 million dollars for committing hundreds of safety violations. As Trisha Kehaulani Watson, Vice President of Hawaiian social and environmental justice organization ‘Āina Momona put it, “it’s incredibly important that there is accountability and that accountability begins with the Navy assuming responsibility for the actions and the situations they’ve created.
How to stan the white guy with minimal contribution to fandom's racism problem
Look, I get it. You're obsessed with the white guy. Maybe two of them together. And maybe your series has one or more main Black characters or Asian characters or a brown Latino star. You're here because of the irresistible pull of that white guy (or two), who is fascinating beyond belief. His acting is above anything anyone has ever seen. When you write about him, the words just pour out.
This is a fan-centered space so I feel confident in saying — we've all been there. I'm not going to lie and say I've never been invested in white characters. There's nothing innately wrong with liking white characters (that would be silly).
But when it comes to the characters of color in your chosen media, you have a choice.
You're unmoved by the Black major characters and find them unrelatable? Ok. If you're not able to keep that to yourself, prepare for a discussion about the empathy gap. Because we literally do not need content about your inability to relate to CoC if the intention is for it to stand as some kind of undebatable truth about the inferiority of CoC.
And then there are the deflections. At the first mention of sidelining CoC it comes like clockwork: They're poorly written! The acting is sub par! The character is just not interesting! It's got nothing to do with race!
Except when it happens over and over and over again, it does. It just does.
I can't count how many times a conversation on Reddit or the Jedi Council Forum (or anywhere, really) started out about Finn and became all about Kylo Ren five replies in. Just today I saw the same thing on Tumblr, a post about the poor treatment of Lucas from Stranger Things, and in the comments people were talking about Billy and his trauma.
If you stan the white guy(s) and don't want to be perceived as part of fandom's racism problem, do not hijack threads about CoC. Not every conversation has to center your guy. Conversations that center Black characters, and I can't stress this enough, do not take anything away from your white fave(s). Nothing at all. It's not a competition.
Stop making excuses about why you don't like the Black character. No one really cares until you start tearing them down with excuses. Don't come up with meta about how the Black hero is a villain, actually, and the white bad guy is a tortured sweet baby who represents all of the forgotten children of the world. It's not clever, it's not good or interesting meta, it's transparent empathy gap racism.
And, again, that will be discuseed. You can't believe in "maximum inclusion" and draw the line at discussing racism. Responding to racism is not breaking the fandom social contract. It's a long established part of fandom by now.
It really shouldn't bother white guy stans so much to see a Black character in a major role in genre media to the point where they feel the need to aggressively dismiss them and their fans. Not doing that, at least, should be easy. Not doing that means that maybe that fandom critical post about racism isn't about you.
It's not about white guy characters or even their inevitable popularity. It's about fan behavior toward characters and fans of color, whether it's on Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit or AO3.
Michael began his career as the singer for Wham!, along with former schoolmate Andrew Ridgeley, in the early 1980s. The group had hits with “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “Careless Whisper,” and the enduring “Last Christmas.” And throughout his career, he’s always been unfailingly sex positive – before it was cool.
Gifs: BeeTheArtist
I had a dream that my family picked me up from polar expeditions-themed poetry class and took me to see hornblower: the musical at the national opera. mesmerised by this beautiful conjured world
In the midst of that amazing time in my life came the worst, and that was when my friends just started dropping dead. They were sick today and dead tomorrow. And when you would go to the hospital to look for you friend they would be out in the hallway on a gurney pushed up against a wall dying for help, dying for love, dying to be saved. And some of them with that sign on their gurney that said "do not touch". And they suffered, and people wanted to act like they weren't good people, kind people, wonderful people, somebody's son, somebody's daughter, somebody. // SHERYL LEE RALPH receiving the Human Rights Campaign's National Ally for Equality Award 2022. (x)
man i hate the allure of a good grilled cheese. you make one and eat it and its so good and perfect, maybe a little bland but in a good way and you instantly think “man that was a really good grilled cheese, im not entirely full yet, maybe i’ll have another…” dont do it. don’t even think about it. it’s the opposite of oreos. you make your second grilled cheese and 3 bites into it you’re so overwhelmed by the monotony. “this isnt nearly as good as the last one” despite being practically identical. The grilled cheese is a sacred food, it must be eaten hot, and quick. A second one only allows you to stew in the memories of the past (your previous cheese) and your nostalgia clouds your mind, creating an epic fail bite in your newest creation of dairy and grain. Show some restraint.
I have taken “do not make a second grilled cheese” as law and I need you to understand that it has improved my life so much.
horror art is fun, but i can also in a dreamcore art work
(every window is unik like a... dream)
Just realized that the reason I love making friends on tumblr is because it’s exactly how you make friends on the playground as a six year old. No, I don’t know their name but they love mermaids too and built this awesome sand castle. No, I don’t know their age but their imaginary cheetah is friends with mine. You like this show? You like this character?? You can sing the theme song really loud??? Here is a flower crown. Here is a juice box. You can share my time and I might never see you again but part of you stays in my soul forever. In my mind we’re still on the swing set and the sky is blue and nothing will ever be wrong again.
This is god-tier sociological analysis.
Birds I have seen, according to autocorrect.
oh and don't even get me STARTED on the scene w the guidance counselor trying to help miles be more palatable to ivy league schools
here they are, miles and his parents having this argument and after maybe twenty seconds she immediately throws out the "son of an immigrant from a struggling family" template
and both miles mom and dad oppose to it because. its really not true. and thats not who miles is. this guidance counselor says she wants to "know" miles but she doesn't. she just wants to know what elements of miles background will pander to universities.
I loved that it called out that specific toxic pattern inherent to those institutions AND I loved that it tied into the underlying theme in the movie about how tragedy doesn't define you
tragedy is not who you are. ur circumstances do not define you. you define you. simple as that.
Something about this wave of puritanical evangelism in a progressive hat that's gripping the zeitgeist currently recently caught my attention and I think I've figured it out.
I kept seeing advertisements on Instagram about that movie Corsage, about Empress Elisabeth of Austria. The mini-trailer features Vicky Krieps, who plays Elisabeth, being tightly laced into a corset, demanding it be tighter while maids look concerned.
This is par for the course. Empress Elisabeth was famed for her obsession with her looks and her documented fear of fatness that caused both her orthorexia and her chasing an ever-thinner look. I'd be surprised if that wasn't depicted at all.
And yet there were tons of people in the comments bitching about how the movie was "depicting unsafe corseting practices" and "can't you people get anything about this stuff right?"
It gave me pause. Maybe not everyone knew about Empress Sisi. So I responded to one commenter, "but it's truthful. She really did corset like this."
And the response I got was, "Well, they're making it look like a good thing! People won't know!"
And it clicked. It suddenly made absolute sense.
The idea that depiction is equal to endorsement and encouragement is what is currently in the popular belief system.
Empress Elisabeth was well-documented as going through a well-made leather corset every few weeks because she tightlaced so severely. Her thinnest recorded waist size was 16 inches. She frantically kept herself at 110 pounds on a 5'8 frame. She would fast for days and barely ate when she wasn't fasting. She had herself sewn into her goddamn clothes just to look as thin as possible. You cannot simply overlook this when making historical fiction of her, just like you couldn't overlook Winston Churchill's rampant drinking if you wrote things about him. It is intrinsic to her identity and if you remove it you remove something very fundamental.
And because the trailer depicts this facet of her life, everyone decided that the filmmakers were condoning and even encouraging this practice in real life.
Because they cannot conceive of something just existing. Even in fiction, a depiction of something negative must be proof that the creator thinks it's a good thing. Why else would it be there?
And it was such an enlightening look into how people think. It makes so much more sense.
History, and Sisi's dangerous tightlacing, be damned.
We've been losing power due to winter storms lately so my partner 3D printed me a tealight "to fill in for tumblr when you're offline"
anyway this should be official merch imo
If you're wondering why I will not leave this site and why I love it so much: after this went around, I got a message from Tumblr asking if they could make it official merch and then they did. It went live yesterday I think, and it's even prettier and better than this original design (they definitely put work into it which was very exciting).
But I want to say something else. They asked for suggestions on where to get these made, and I gave them the names of a few mass production companies, but I also gave them the name of my small local guys. I didn't expect them to go there, it's probably more expensive to use a smaller local shop, but I know it would mean more to them. And I was immediately told they'd check in with them, and then that's just what happened.
They went with my little guys.
So if you're wondering about the price, it's because Tumblr staff just... Listened and cared. They listened to the people who said they wanted one of these, and then they not only asked me but listened to the answer when I suggested supporting a business local to me. That's invaluable to me.
drinking game: take a shot everytime terfs use 4chan/incel language (i.e using the term "moids" to refer to other human beings) casually exposing the absolute rancid culture of the places they inhabit
do not btw! you will die of alcohol poisoning!
