I wonder….
British Memes Gothic
- There is a Nandos on every street. They are all cheeky. You do not know what makes them cheeky. Each houses a garrison of lads. You do not want to enter, but you cannot resist a cheeky Nandos. The smell of banter and peri peri overwhelms you.
- A meerkat is trying to sell you insurance. You have forgotten what the insurance is for. All that matters is the comparison. If you are good and do not protest, the meerkat promises, you will get a free meerkat toy.
- Freddos are too expensive. No-one you know remembers a time when they were the right price. You stare at the sweet shelf, lost in the glamour of the Pick’n’mix and the little chocolate frogs.
- The DFS sale is now on. It is always now on. Has it ever been off? No matter. It is now on. If you hurry, you can get a year of interest-free payments.
- Jamie Oliver is on the television. Jamie Oliver is in your school. Jamie Oliver is in your kitchen, cooking an eight-course banquet in 30 minutes. It’s full of big flavours. He always has enough herbs. You do not ask where he gets them from. You can only be thankful it’s Jamie Oliver and not Heston Blumenthal.
- Everyone watched Dick and Dom when they were a child, no matter their age. Do they age? Where have they gone? What was the nature of their bungalow? Are they of the same deathless kindred as Bruce Forsyth? You suspect Graham Norton may also be involved.
- There are four candles. Everyone you mention them to thinks you’re talking about utensils.
- A car races past you. Behind the wheel is a man screaming about POWER. This is the worst day… in the world.
- When you sleep, you can hear Stephen Fry behind your eyelids, asking you about the significance of the march hare to the Aztecs. You say that they worshipped them. Klaxons blare from all around.
Don’t you get lonely?
Alan Tracy to John Tracy.
That’s only what the entire fandom has been asking since the bloody 60s! (via thumblrbirdsarego)
John’s reaction was essentially, “No, I hate people.”
(via artisticrainey-stuff)
John: *what he basically said* whatever do you mean? People are all around me!
John: *what he really meant* leave me alone I’m playing with a hologram of the world get back to work.
(via thundergirl007)
This is a jar full of major characters
Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories.
We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls.
Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left.
This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left.
And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left.
And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right.
Until these are the bowls.
Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other.
This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?
You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl.
This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?
When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference.
This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.
The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss.
This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world.
I mean, imagine your party guests arrive
Oh my god they are adorable!
And they see their bowls
But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.
I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?
But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat.
And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant.
And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.
*goes off to eat her chocolate covered raisins, which are no longer metaphors just snacks*
