Arboreal
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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.
(via passionfruitbowls)
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A spectacular sight 1225m (4019 ft) beneath the waves off Baja California as EVNautilus encounter the amazing Halitrephes maasi jelly.
This is beautiful but if I saw a glowing eye coming at me in the water I would scream and drown immediately
If that’s not a HEY LOOKIT ME AIR-BREATHERS AIN’T I GORGEOUS shot, I don’t know what is.
(via laplupludetuvida)
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not joking I would kind of like to brutally murder whoever thought it was a good idea to take away clicking on a person’s name to see their reblog and make it borderline impossible to get to the original version of a post without spending ten minutes scrolling with ctrl f
Helpful tip:
If you have the post date option turned on you can click the date and it will take it to the original post like before. It’s annoying, unintuitive, and harder to click but it should work on mobile or desktop
this is the most ridiculous possible workaround thank you SO much tumblr user suffusionofyellow for sharing
Works on mobile too!!
(via providing-leverage)
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I Hate an Accidental Summoning When I’m Just Trying to Crochet/Knit
(via swingsetindecember)
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Humanity has finally reached the stars and found out why no one had contacted us. The universe is in a sad state. As such, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, and many othe charities go intergalactic.
The thing the recruiters don’t tell you about space battles is that you die slowly.
Ships don’t blow up cleanly in flashes and sparks. Oh, if you’re in the engine room, you’ll probably die instantly, but away from that? In the computer core, or the communications hub? You just lose power. And have to sit, air going stale and room slowly cooling, while you wait to find out if the battle is won or lost.
If it’s lost, nobody comes for you.
It had been about half a day (that’s a Raithar day, probably a bit shorter than yours) and Kvala and I were pretty sure we had lost. Kvala was injured, Traav and I were dehydrated and exhausted, and Louv was dead, hit by shrapnel when the conduits blew.
Most fleets give you something, of course. For Raithari, it’s essence of windgrass. I looked at the vial.
“It’s too soon,” Traav said.
Kvala gestured negation, shakily. She had been burned when conduits blew, and her feathers were charred, and her leftmost eye was bubbly and blind now. Even if we were rescued, she probably wouldn’t survive. “You know we’re losing the war.”
They couldn’t deny that. “It doesn’t mean we lost the battle.”
“Doesn’t it? The Chreee have better technology. Better resources. And they have their warrior code. They don’t care if they die.”
“We can’t give up!” Traav protested. They were young, a young and reckless thar who had listened to a recruiting officer and still believed scraps of what they had been told. “Any heartbeat now—”
There was a clunk. Something had docked with our fragment of the ship.
“You see?!” Traav crowed triumphantly.
Kvala exchanged glances with me. The Chreee never bothered to hunt down survivors. What was the point, after all?
The Aushkune did.
There weren’t supposed to be Aushkune here. They were supposed to hide in nebulas.
But if there were—
If there were, we were too late. The windgrass couldn’t possibly destroy our nervous systems in time to stop the corpse-reviving implants, and once you were implanted, it was over—or it would never be over, depending on how you looked at it and whether Aushkune drones were aware of anything—
Footsteps.
Bipedal. The Aushkune were supposed to be bipedal.
And then the blast door opened, and a figure stood in it. My first thought was, robot? That’s almost worse than Aushkune … But no, it was a being in some sort of suit.
Who wore suits?
“Friendly contact,” the suit’s sound system blared, as the being moved over to Kvala. “Urgent treatment. Evacuation.”
“Who are you?” Kvala struggled upright.
Despite the primitive suit, the blocky being was using up-to-date medical scanners. “Low frequency right angle shape,” it explained—or maybe didn’t explain. Two more figures came into the room and put Kvala firmly onto a stretcher.
“You’re with the Chreee, aren’t you?” Kvala was not at all happy to be on a stretcher.
“Not Chreee,” the sound system said. “You Man. Soil Starship Nichols.” The being hesitated. “Rescue Chreee as well. On ship. Will separate.”
“You what?” I said faintly. Who would do that?
“Oath,” the being explained.
“What kind of oath? To what deity?”
The shoulders of the being moved up and down. “Several different. Also none. For me, none. Just—oath.”
I exchanged glances with Traav, who looked as unsettled as I was. I had never, ever heard of groups cooperating when they couldn’t even swear to or by the same power.
The being scanned me. “Have water,” it said. “Recommend.”
Raithari have fast metabolisms. I could—would—die of thirst quickly, and painfully.
“Where will you take us,” Traav asked, “after you give us water?”
“Raithari to Raithar. Chreee to Chreeeholm.”
“Chreeeholm would kill them for failing,” Traav remarked.
The being hesitated, and then said, “War news sometimes bad. Sometimes lie.”
We had learned long ago not to believe the recruiting officers, but what did that have to do with anything?
“And you—what?” I asked. “Just fly around looking for battles and rescuing victims?”
The being seemed to consider this. “Best invention of soil,” it said finally.
Most of what it was saying didn’t make any sense. Did it worship soil? But it had said that it had sworn to no deity …
Madness.
On the other hand—war was a deliberate, rational act by deliberate, rational people, and I wanted no more of it. So why not embrace madness and see what happened?
“Soil Starship—Rrikkol?” I asked, stumbling over the word.
“Yes. Soil Starship Nichols.”
I followed the being in the suit.
Took me well over a minute to realize “low frequency right angle shape” was Red Cross.
This whole thing is brilliant with translation stuff.
(via darkshrimpemotions)
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Avon with Basket by Jonathan Guy Gladding
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“Indeed, when he applied to become an astronaut, he failed on the first attempt. Part of the test featured the famous Rorschach ink-blots psychiatric exam. “I leafed through a whole series of them, and then the last one was a blank sheet of paper, pure white, eight by 10,” he once recalled. “I was asked what I could see. And I said, ‘Well, of course, that’s 11 polar bears fornicating in a snow bank.’ And I could see the examiner’s eyes kind of tighten. He didn’t think that was funny.””
(via obaewankenope)
