oh, shit
wheres the video of the Danish news reporter and the car falling into the lake behind him and he goes “Oh!… shit. Okay.”
No, seriously though, in Norse mythology this was the fist sign of Ragnarok, aka the Final Godly Beatdown Warmageddon.
are we finally getting a REAL apocalypse I’m getting real tired of being let down
(Source: veliseraptor, via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
drst:
drst:
A couple weeks ago The Mary Sue announced they weren’t going to cover “Game of Thrones” any more after yet another female character being brutally raped. The thread is still being invaded by trolls periodically, and there are more than 12,000 comments on the article, which is a site record and probably an internet record. (12K comments because a single website said “We’re not going to recap or promote this show any more.” Baffling.)
Tons of trolls have thrown out the “but THINGS WERE JUST LIKE THAT BACK THEN!” argument ad nauseum. Which is total bullshit, of course. Now with the season finale of “Outlander” (which, spoiler, also included rape) the trolls are coming back.
I just want to ask, why is it whenever producers/directors/writers want to demonstrate “gritty historic realism” it’s ALWAYS RAPE? It’s always sexual violence toward women/girls.
You know what would be gritty historic realism? Dysentery. GoT has battles and armies marching all over the place. You want to show “what things were like back then”? Why aren’t we seeing 500 guys by the side of a road puking and shitting their guts out from drinking contaminated water while the rest of the army straggles along trying to keep going? Or a village getting wiped out by cholera? Or typhus, polio or plague epidemics?
You want to show what it was like back then for women? Show a woman dying of sepsis from an infection she caught while giving birth. Show a woman coping with ruptured ovarian cysts with nobody know what it is. Breast cancer that the audience will recognize immediately but the characters think is some mark of the devil or some shit.
But no, it’s always rape. And we all know why that is. Because these douchecanoes that do this, though they’ll deny it, think rape is sexy. Because they can’t make a modern set story where women get raped in every god damned episode without being called monsters. So they use “but but historical realism!” to cover their sexism (see “Mad Men”) and misogyny. Then they tell us “That’s just how it was back then!” with the clear implication “Shut the fuck up bitch, because that could be you and you should be thanking me that it’s not.”
Can we propose a rule for “realistic” historical fiction/fantasy? Twelve graphic cases of dysentery for every one graphic rape?
^^ I like this idea.
You know, they could deny that they find rape sexy, and they might even believe their own denials. But the point is that they clearly don’t think of rape as something distasteful enough and disgusting enough to omit.
And you know what, I’m not even gonna insist on the dysentery. Just this: if you’re going to include rape on the basis of historical accuracy, none of your female characters are allowed to have shaved legs or armpits. And all of your characters have to have terrible teeth – yellowed and worn and crooked, because nobody’s getting braces or regular visits to the dentist – with at least a few teeth blackened or missing for every character over the age of thirty.
Of course, if your reaction to blackened teeth and hairy armpits is “ugh, no, sure it might be historically accurate but it’s gross, nobody’s going to want to watch that" and you don’t have the exact same reaction to rape, you might want to think about why that is.
Not to mention that some of the societies portrayed, or inspiring similar fantasy settings, actually had STRONGER protections against and consequences for rape than the ones we live in today.
Accounts from Vikings’ contemporaries recount a lot of raiding, but not a single case of rape. Viking law didn’t treat rape as a property crime, and the penalty for it was outlawry, which was essentially a death sentence. Medieval English law prescribed that rapists be castrated and blinded. And the sagas contain vanishingly few references to rape (and violence against women is usually followed with comeuppance–often death–for the perpetrator).
TL;DR: History wasn’t one giant rape-fest, and in fact, members of the cultures high fantasy is usually based on may have actually been more disapproving of rape than we are today (imagine trying to pass a bill making rape a capital offense today!).
These writers include rape because they like writing about rape, not because history dictates it.
brief quibble: poor people in pre-industrial societies had much better teeth than poor people today, because they didn’t eat or drink refined sugars, only fruit sugars and the occasional bit of honey. european peasants would have crooked teeth, by hollywood standards, but by and large white and healthy teeth, even into old age. peasant girls would have had very nice smiles.
and very hairy armpits.
While we’re at it, can we expand this rule to every “gritty”, “realistic” fiction thing? Because post-apocalyptic fiction does this exact nonsense too.
(via ailleee)
[video]
“ohhh would you look at that, my pawns found jesus and now they’re all bishops”
“so i realize it looks like i’m putting a thimble on the board but actually my rooks have been using their downtime to build another rook, one that’s better, stronger, faster—”
“hey welcome back. while you left to get a snack, those six pieces you’d captured slipped their guards, tunneled to safety and emerged right in the middle of your royal palace.”
“oof, looks like you’ve got my king cornered…maybe this is a good time to mention that shortly before we started playing, my pawns and knights revolted and instituted a representative democracy. feel free to kill the puppet ruler that was the one remaining vestige of our tyranny, you cringing servant of the crown. vive la revolution!”
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
Let’s be real
people will accept you saying the word they in the singular form up until they know you’re talking about someone who’s trans or nb or intersex. Like the number of times I’ve said they to my parents that I’m hanging out with someone and refer to them as them (I basically use it for most cases now) with them not raising an eye is incredible and I thought that they’d just accepted it.
But nah, I’m going out with my translady friend and I call them they and THAT’S when the jokes and the purposeful misunderstanding come in.
And I’ve seen this in dozens of other cases. So let’s be honest: opposition to they/them pronouns has shit to do with grammar. It’s entirely about policing people’s pronouns.
(Source: gayasscommie, via littlestartopaz)
When I explain cultural misappropriation to children, I use the example of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
It’s effective because especially for children, who don’t have enough historical context to understand much of the concept, you can still fully grasp the idea.
There was nothing wrong with Jack seeing the beauty and differences in Christmas town, it’s when he tried to take what is unique about Christmas town away from those it originally belonged to without understanding the full context of Christmas things is when everything went wrong.
When Jack tries to get the folk of Halloween town to make Christmas gifts for children, etc., children understand that the Halloween town folk do not have the full context for the objects they are making, and they are able to see that the direct repercussions and consequences are very harmful.
what i like about this is the implication that if jack had taken the time to understand christmas town, bringing christmas to halloween town would not have been harmful. that’s how it works, folks. cultural sharing is GOOD, it’s only misappropriation when it’s done in ignorance and disrespect.
There’s an interesting level here in that Jack tried to understand Christmas town. He could see the magic while he was there, and he did try to explain it that way to citizens of Halloween town. But they weren’t interested in the kind of life he was describing, so he started “rebranding” Christmas so that it was not like Christmas but was like Halloween. The people of Halloween town, never having actually encountered Christmas, have no way of knowing that what they’re being told about Christmas and “Sandy Claws” is inaccurate. Jack also tried to study Christmas and its culture, though he couldn’t quite get it; eventually, he literally decides to take it for himself, even as he knows it’s not really for him. He started out feeling sad the others in Halloween town didn’t ‘get it,’ but he then decided it’s not important to fully ‘get it’ but instead to have it.
So it’s not just accidentally removing things form their context; he has intentionally disregard the meaning of the rituals he purports to be recreating, making them more fun for the recreaters but not like what the rituals are supposed to be and without the related significance.
This is the best way to conceptualize the wrong way to share culture I have ever seen and I think I finally get where people are coming from when they talk about “cultural appropriation.”
(via littlestartopaz)
internet jokes come and go but bad fanfiction is eternal
you may even say bad fanfiction is
immortal
no
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
[video]
I REWATCHED THE MOVIE AND I COULDN’T RESIST
(via clockwork-mockingbird)
Stop Islam?! yeah, Stop Islam from being stereotyped and misunderstood by Islamophobic and ignorant racists.
(via academicfeminist)