Virgo // 25 // INTP // Cornell alum // writing disaster. Blog of all trades, but mostly MCU, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, DBH, CCS, YA novels and Yu-Gi-Oh stuff. NSFW posts have tags. I write orignal stuff and fanfics; for the latter see my Fics links. When I'm not puttering about on here, I'm writing two books at once. RIP.
My blog theme in the first year of being on tumblr: carefully chosen font, ‘professional’ style, high quality neutral images with “deep” meanings like the ocean and sunrises. My blog theme after 4 years of being on tumblr:
I have had 3 mineral posts flagged as adult content today. They contained a tourmaline, a muscovite, and a galena. On Friday I had 3 fossil posts flagged as adult content, including a fossil fish, a fossil tooth from a mastodon, and a Tyrannosaur vertebrae. I’ve submitted appeals for each. This has been getting worse over the past month, apparently most of geology content is now only for adults.
Apparently you can’t get your rocks off on Tumblr anymore.
i am contractually obligated to congratulate you on this reply
Hey guys. My son’s doing a fundraiser for the American Heart Association. Please consider donating. It’s a little personal for us because his cousin was born with holes in his heart, and thankfully they healed on their own after about eight years. Any amount is appreciated.
Pretty convenient that a lot of American students never learn that Einstein was a Jew who came to America and started the nuclear research after fleeing from the Nazis and having most of his research lost in the book burnings.
Or how much of his life and work was shaped by his autism, like how it was his biggest asset because it allowed him to think differently, but also his biggest hurtle because of all the abuse he received in school from teachers who labeled him as a dunce and told him he was stupid because of his disability. Which he proved wrong by discovering the theory of relativity because of his autism instead of in spite of it.
EVEN THOUGH THOSE ARE THE TWO MOST RELEVANT DETAILS OF HIS LIFE THAT EXPLAIN HOW AND WHY HE DID ALMOST EVERYTHING HE DID. But nah, Im sure diversity wasn’t relevant enough to be important in this situation.
Its almost like we have a biased school system that censors the accomplishments of marginalized groups to stop them from realizing that people like them have accomplished things.
He taught at Lincoln University after he was told black students couldn’t attend his lectures at other colleges and universities.
Article quote: “In 1946, Einstein, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist traveled to Lincoln University where he gave a speech in which he called racism “a disease of white people,” and added, “I do not intend to be quiet about it.” Lincoln was the first school in the United States to grant college degrees to blacks.”
STOP HAVING WHITE VOICE ACTORS PLAYING NON-WHITE ROLES
stop depriving non-white actors opportunities to act and get recognized!
Voice actors often don’t know who they’re reading for or what franchise they’re in (that’s what the strike was recently about, so they’d know whether they were in a small first time game or the 4th installment of a major franchise, if they were replacing a beloved voice actor, etc.) so please don’t harass the actors, until recently they legally didn’t have the right to know who they were reading for and were usually not told until months or even years later.
Definitely go after casting, directors, and studios executives. Those are the people making the decisions.
They still don’t have the right to know. They got fucking nothing out of that strike. They can know the code name (which might be a serial number or whatever) and if it’s a sequel. That’s it. That’s the extent of the “transparency” they won from the strike.
As a perfect example of this controversy, if you haven’t looked up interviews surrounding Laura Bailey as Nadine Ross, it’s worth it.
Laura Bailey herself explained that when she auditioned for the role, she was given no information about what the character looked like. It was only after she was hired and arrived for recording that she was shown concept art and discovered the character was a WOC. She was uncomfortable about the situation.
Meanwhile, Neil Druckmann revealedthat they were already working on concept art of the character when they hired Laura Bailey. They finalized the character’s design as a WOC after they’d hired a white voice actress, so that was a conscious decision. He was also very flippant about the situation as a whole.
Like people above have said: Yes, whitewashed casting is a legitimate and real issue. But unlike actors in film and stage, voice actors are often totally blind to what they’re auditioning for. They get fucked by NDAs and legal red tape bullshit. Go after the casting directors and execs and high-position game devs that knowingly make these decisions.
Also, VAs aren’t highed for their appearances. they’re hired for their voices.
Plenty of black VAs voice white, asian, etc. and other non-black characters. Same goes for asian VAs voicing characters are are non-asian, etc. because they aren’t hired based on appearances, they’re hired purely based on their voice and ability to act through it.
While yes, VAs are often screwed over by NDAs, character appearances often aren’t released until everything is finalized down to who is voicing them because of the fact that releasing it early, can screw over the company, character designers, etc. and VAs typically don’t sign NDAs until after they are signed to be on the show because you can’t really make people who are just auditioning sign an NDA to not release the appearance or other things about a character.
Theory: fandom drama is inversely proportional to the perceived purity of the original media. Purity in this context is measured by a combination of innocent characters, childlike associations and/or a younger intended audience, and how hashtag Representational - in the sense of being elevated as Perfect And Above Criticism because the creators make a genuine, positive effort towards diversity* - the material is. The more “pure” the source material is seen as being, the uglier the fandom debates surrounding it.
This seeming paradox, I would speculate, exists because any headcanon, interpretation or fan reaction which deviates from the supposedly “pure” intent of the original media is seen as sullying that purity. Pure things get put on pedestals where the very act of critiquing them, even mildly, is seen as debasement by a vocal percentage of fans. This is why, for example, the Check Please, Voltron: Legendary Defender and Steven Universe fandoms turned toxic so quickly: because the original stories and characters were seen as inherently pure for various reasons (compared to something like, say, Supernatural), the act of critiquing them, engaging in adult fanworks about them or discussing the darker, more complex themes that arguably underlay the source material or which are the native speculative fulcrum of AUs was viewed as a corruption of innocence, even if people didn’t explicitly phrase it in those terms to themselves.
This has lead to a weird type of Madonna/Whore dichotomy in how certain fans perceive other fans or fanworks in these contexts: there can be no complexity or ambiguity, as something is either perfect or poisonous - an issue that turns into a cataclysmic spiral of accusations and backbiting when proponents of a particular Madonna position inevitably realise that actually, they aren’t all in perfect agreement with each other about every minute aspect of the canon. This, in turn, is why watching fandom meltdowns is like watching religious communities fracture in microcosm, and why so many people end up agnostic or apostate in the face of fanaticism.
*Note: well-meaning diversity is a factor, not because it’s inherently controversial or troublesome, but because, at this particular moment in time, it’s still such a new and comparatively unusual thing for popular media to incorporate that reactions to such stories tend to evoke powerful fan reactions. If you belong to a marginalised group and are unused to seeing yourself positively portrayed in stories, you might well be fiercely protective of the one character or story you feel does you justice; while conversely, another person of the same marginalisation who dislikes the same portrayal might be fiercely vehement in their critique of it. The real problem here is that, because some groups are still so desperately underrepresented across the board, the few stories addressing those issues and/or identities take on a disproportionate significance to the audience and, as such, are frequently held to higher creative standards than stories which never tried at all. In this context, the expectation that a single story, or even a small number of stories, should somehow be all things to all fans, is not recognised as a literal impossibility, but is rather held up by frustrated individuals as proof that the story has failed, or isn’t really as positively diverse as claimed, because it lacks X element.
