Like I enjoy a Laika post as much as next person who grew up on tumblr but it is palpable how this western hyperfixation with her is often born out of some belief that what she experienced was a unique act of evil soviet cruelty that must be counteracted by empathetic western veneration. As if the US didn’t basically put like eleventeen unnamed laikas in a blender in service of their part of the space race 😭
as the person who coined the phrase "patron saint of one-way trips" which is so often used in reference to laika, particularly on social media (+ an eastern european whose parents and grandparents lived through soviet occupation myself), i want to make it very clear that i never saw laika as emblematic of uniquely soviet cruelty or needing western veneration to be valuable, and i understand intimately that i only know her name because she was valued enough by those who sacrificed her not to be forgotten in the first place. i named her such as a representative of all the animals (and people!) sacrificed in the name of 'progress' and ideological conflicts that they had no advocacy in and/or were actively oppressed and had violence inflicted on them by, but i'm sorry that a not very well thought out moment of sentimentality has led to this kind of interpretation becoming typical. i can hardly control how my art is interpreted and used by others, but for what responsibility i do bear in putting it out into the world, i apologise. it's really not the sort of impact i'd like to have on the historical and sociopolitical narrative. i sincerely regret that it has been.
