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*
no one ever says that Rome needed help from aliens to build their empire
#l laughed for days when i found out that #ancient egyptians used water to reduce friction and move blocks for distances #and that this was literally DEPICTED ON THEIR HIEROGLYPHICS #but ~western archaeologists~ #thought that the pouring of water depicted ~superstitious rituals~ #jfc
As an archeology major, I can vouch for this being absolutely true:
Any time we see something we don’t understand, we mark it down as ritual purposes. It’s actually a catch-all euphemism for “We have absolutely no clue what these people were doing here yet so until we work it out we’ll pretend it was something to do with their religion.”
And yeah, sometimes it is a white people thing. When white people went into Canada the natives introduced them to the delights of maple syrup. The white people asked “Well, how did you ever work out this sap was edible and delicious.”
The native people responded, “Oh, well, Squirrel showed us.”
White people: Hahahaha They’re off on that totem animal spirit guide thing again.
It wasn’t until this century that scientists actually observed squirrels in that area cutting holes in sugar maples, waiting for the sap to crystallize, and eating it.
The native people were actually being literal and the white people thought they were being metaphorical. Sigh.