Category: Uncategorized

semitics:

The thing that I hate about atheism as a movement is that it doesn’t just want to critique the hegemony of Western Christianity, it wants to kill spirituality. There is no joy, there is nothing about it that isn’t founded in a pessimism that sees itself as so self-important that it cannot exist outside of destruction. The face of atheism is a white male disgruntled ex-Christian who decided that if he can’t find joy in religion, then nobody else can. There’s a leftover missionary sensibility to “enlighten” people to atheism that exposes itself as racist, antisemitic, and islamophobic, that’s ultimately not unlike the dominance exerted through colonial Christianity

Every butthurt atheist on this thread who’s going #NotAllAtheists and whining about how this isn’t them needs to shut up and learn to read. OP specifically said atheism AS A MOVEMENT, that is the New Atheist/anti-theist assholes who spend all their time shitting on religions and religious people. Not all atheists are part of that movement; I hope most of us aren’t and we are by and large nice and reasonable people, though you’re certainly making me doubt that last part. If it’s not about you then it’s not about you, like Jesus H. Christ get over yourselves.

reasons i think harry potter is indian

shakspaeree:

  • harry could be anglicised form of hari, which is another name for the indian god vishnu who reincarnates on earth to restore justice
  • potter could be anglicised potdar or potluri
  • the night he died, james was making pretty-colored lights for harry 31 october 1981 was deepavali, the indian festival of lights
  • fleamont potter making money through potions after coming from india as a first gen. immigrant
  • fleamont potter made hair potions which was really just charmed coconut oil
  • people would notice harry’s green eyes all the time if he was half desi
  • when harry has visions through voldemorts eyes that he always distances himself using voldemort’s whiteness or how pale the hand was or something to that effect
  • unlikely couple james and lily potter prophesied to have a world-saving baby is literally the motif of the indian epic kumarasambhava
  • harry flying on buckbeak is god vishnu on garuda iconography
  • i am indian
  • and i like harry potter
  • he’s my sweet sunflower child

This puts the Dursleys’ abuse of Harry in a whole new light, not to mention their refusal to treat Harry as a member of the family. Like, I can totally imagine Dudley and his buddies chasing him and calling him slurs.

I was wondering why I couldn’t get past the first season. I couldn’t put my finger on why it was inferior to ATLA, but I just didn’t like it as much. I thought it might have been the steampunk thing that was putting me off, but I actually thought the technological advancements were interesting, so I knew in the back of my head it was something else.

If you’re looking for more validation, see also this critical video by Lily Orchard (link). It’s a 1.5 hour vid but I linked a time stamp that has a minute-long rundown of the main points. If you have enough interest, time, and vitriol I recommend the full thing, I found it interesting and illuminating.

I’m curious on your opinion of LoK. What’s your issue with it?

  • Book 1 was so ineptly written that it was fully possible to dismiss non-bender oppression as a thing that never existed and was made up to wipe out benders–and that’s how large sections of the fandom took it, in fact.
  • And look, Fantastic Racism in general is very easy to get wrong (looking at you, X-Men, Zootopia, too many others to name…) but LoK is particularly egregious in implying that movements for equality are essentially largescale frauds, especially when the writing is inconsistent enough to imply in places that discrimination against non-benders is in fact a problem that exists.
  • Abrupt fix-it at the last moment in Book 1. We’re not even allowed to experience the full tragedy of lost bending (and like, bending isn’t real so why are we supposed to care again?), that consequence has to be taken away by divine intervention because Korra was sad.
  • Speaking of Korra, we don’t get to watch her struggle and work her ass off the way we saw Aang or even Roku do in the brief flashbacks we got. She comes pre-equipped with water, earth, and fire at the age of five, and never even has to grow into the spiritual values of Airbending. She had her other three elements taken away and Airbending abruptly came to her because she needed it in her desperate hour. She doesn’t grow through work or by trying, but by being put in danger and pain. Looking back, this substitution of female suffering for hard work and organic development foreshadowed her end of Book 3-Book 4 trauma storyline.
  • As a tangent, and because I need more people to piss off apparently, this replacement of suffering for work is strongly reminiscent of Rey in the new Star Wars. Both Korra and Rey are willing to work hard, but that’s not how they actually make the most dramatic gains. Either they’re born with their prodigious talents or the work they did put in happens off screen. Their most meaningful gains come from being violated in some way by male characters, by being kidnapped, having their powers stripped, being poisoned, tied up…
  • I mean this is just a thinly veiled version of rape as a heroine origin story, where the thing that makes a woman truly powerful is not the hard work she puts in but the fact that some man treated her like an object.
  • Why are creators afraid to let women struggle? Why do we have to be born prodigies who are violated into our destinies? Yes, trauma and the way we face up to it can make us stronger, and I don’t want to take away from anyone who felt empowered by Korra’s or Rey’s stories. But when I see three seasons dedicated lovingly to Aang working to master the four elements, then Korra just getting it within a season because she had her bending stripped after being physically held down, I’m going to be just a little salty at the different ways male and female protagonists are treated.
  • Raava and Batu were bullshit concepts that used the trappings of yin and yang to express a stark good-evil duality. If you don’t understand what yin and yang are then stop distorting the fuck out of the imagery. And for that matter it’s pretty iffy to impose a very Christian struggle between cosmic good and evil on a universe built on Asian cultures and mythologies.
  • This show doesn’t even know what it wants to be. Book 2 took a complex and interesting story of a civil war between literal brothers and a moral/political debate about military interventionism, and made it into a kaiju slugfest. While the slugfest was entertaining, what the hell happened to that earlier story? It’s like Book 1 all over again, they avoided actually dealing with the political storyline they set up early in the season by shunting it aside to magic punching.
  • Bolin’s abuse was played for laughs. I will never not be mad about this. Because male victims of abuse are not already ridiculed enough in real life, right? Fuck whoever thought this was a good or okay idea.
  • Speaking of abuse, the Water Tribe brothers from Book 1 (not to be confused with the Water Tribe brothers from Book 2) dying by murder-suicide was horrifying. Hey it’s not like victims of parental abuse already feel broken and unworthy to live, let’s totally validate that by endorsing the position that the only way they have to go is death.
  • The brothers’ fate is such a far cry from the empowering storylines Zuko and even more minor characters like Mai and Ty Lee got escaping and recovering from their own abuse, it’s insulting for them to even exist in the same franchise.
  • And yeah, lots of abuse victims are assholes! But Azula was 10,000x more memorable and better written than the asshole brothers ever were, and what’s more, hers was not the only abuse victim narrative in her show–she worked as another perspective of abuse victims precisely because Zuko and the others had very different stories. LoK doesn’t have any such nuance. Just blow them up because that’s all they’re good for and we shall never mention them again.
  • Asami, Bolin, and Mako could have been replaced by sock puppets for all the development they got in the show. They had potential but were so massively underused while the story spent all its energy changing tracks mid-season and lurching all over the place trying to be everything. Why not do something with the characters you already have.
  • This show has a really big fucking underlying problem with class. The supposedly good people, Korra, Tenzin, Lin, Su-yin, Iroh II and so on are essentially aristocrats, sons and daughters of heroes and world leaders who, in the case of Korra and Tenzin, have entire organizations dedicated to serving and helping them. Their servants and the orphans they graciously take in, on the other hand, are either invisible or become traitors and Big Bads.
  • I mean while I squeed at Korrasami, I get cynical about it at times and wonder if what really made Asami the endgame mate for Korra and not Mako was that Asami is the daughter of a rich industrialist who inherited everything from her dickish dad, while Mako is an orphan who grew up on the streets.
  • Even among the underdeveloped trio of Asami, Mako, and Bolin, it’s clearly Asami who did the best in terms of character development at least toward the end, reconciling with her asshole would-be murderer dad, while Mako and Bolin’s far more interesting mixed heritage family was swept under the rug.
  • Speaking of which, MAKO WAS TOTALLY IN THE RIGHT FOR SNITCHING KORRA’S AWFUL INTERVENTIONIST PLAN TO THE PRESIDENT AND YOU CAN FIGHT ME ON THIS. Both Korra and Iroh II can get fucked for acting like the New Republic was their fucking property and casually trying to plunge it into war. Fuck that noise and fuck those entitled brats.
  • Too bad the showrunners were too cowardly to follow up on this actually interesting political and interpersonal conflict, but inconsistency and lack of follow-through are pretty much LoK’s calling cards so what else is new.

lj-writes:

lj-writes:

People who like a work and are open to criticism about it are awesome.

So are people who don’t like a work and can acknowledge its good points, and more to the point are not assholes to people who do like it.

And, conversely, if you go from liking a work to dismissing valid and well-founded criticism of it, and–even more seriously–brushing people aside when they tell you they were hurt by it, you’re being an asshole.