This animation is 2 years old at this point but I'll share it here anyway. I think the Zoroark theory is cute, but I stand on the middle ground anyway!
OP disabled reblogs as I was in the middle of writing an extremely long reply and I'd usually let it go but some of these reblogs are spreading active disinformation about the X-Men and y’all know how I feel about that
The idea that Charles Xavier is based on MLK and that Magneto is based on Malcolm X is straight up urban myth.
As originally written by Stan Lee, the X-Men comics have basically nothing to do with social justice or prejudice. The idea of mutants as an oppressed class wasn't introduced until Chris Claremont's run started in 1975, and Claremont has explicitly stated that Professor X and Magneto were based on Israeli political leaders David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin.
As written by Claremont, Charles Xavier is at best deeply misguided, if well-intentioned. He is careless with the safety and feelings of those under his leadership, he is overbearing and hubristic, and he's utterly convinced that he always knows best, to the point of frequently manipulating his students. Magneto, meanwhile, becomes deeply sympathetic, and grows out of his trauma-based revenge spree to become genuinely caring and compassionate.
Comics throughout the 90s and 2000s would continue to paint Professor X as a manipulative jerk, while Magneto would regress and often take on a “realizing he's just as bad as the Nazis" role in his stories. It's around this time that the original FOX X-Men movies came out with wildly different interpretations of the characters and popularized the MLK / Malcolm X idea, with Stan Lee pulling a characteristic, "Totally, that was my idea the whole time, wasn't it genius" shtick.
All of that to say- @shofarsogood’s assessment of the characters is comic-accurate. I have never said, and I am not saying here, that movie adaptations shouldn't deviate from the comics in order to tell interesting and dynamic stories with people from different backgrounds. But I think we all have to be open and honest about those changes from the beginning. Because otherwise you're pulling from source material where your MLK stand-in is brainwashing children or shooting them in the face, while your Malcolm X stand-in is volunteering himself to the authorities to stand trial because he regrets the violent crimes he's committed.
hi bajoran workers since tomorrow is the first day of pride month all provably gay bajorans can have a 5 minute break and two extra crackers with lunch as long as you make a government approved statement to the federation saying that cardassia and specifically me gul dukat loves gay and pronouns as much as star fleet. okay goodbye.
I was a little confused by Never Let Go (2024) so I looked up some articles and Reddit threads about it and like
no one mentioned the alien??
(spoilers for Never Let Go)
like that is very clearly a reptilian. It's not even a standard reptilian where there could be some room for interpretation, they made it look like a scaly Grey as though to make it even more obvious that the Evil is an alien from space.
Reptilians are evil alien infiltrators who disguise as humans, often with literal human skin/flesh costumes over their real bodies, to manipulate us so we'll be weak and defenseless when they take over. Reptilians are said to control the upper echelons of society with their powerful psionic abilities, bending politics and economics to their will; as you might have guessed, it's strongly associated with (if not originating in) antisemitic conspiracy theories. The most archetypical and least racist depiction of reptilians I've seen is on the TV show V.
This lore is evident in Never Let Go: the Evil uses hallucinations and illusions to control the family's minds and manipulate their relationships. Mama's parents and partner were "Evils", but not anyone else. The Evil calls out Mama for hiding "what you are". Mama says she brought the Evil to the forest with her and that she lied to the boys about its nature, but kills herself before she can explain more. The Evil-as-Mama says she's more herself than she ever was while alive.
And when this Evil appears as Mama, it's with her real body. Not a hallucination or specter, her actual body rises from the ground and a reptilian alien emerges from it. Mama already had the Evil inside her the whole time, and it appears as a separate individual from the Evil controlling Sam. The boys can see and hear the Evil even while they're on the rope or in the house, before Sam is actually infected by the Evil parasite, indicating that it's already inside them, too.
Mama's entire lifestyle revolves around keeping herself and her blood relatives isolated from society, and she tells them it's for their own safety, but it's not--she's protecting the rest of the world from them. My hypothesis is that the reptilians were indeed in the process of taking over human society, as she claims, but she herself is a renegade alien/infectee rather than a human. The surviving Evil wants her and her sons dead because she's a traitor.
I'm still confused as to how the house and ropes keep the Evil at bay, but it does have some resonance with the idea of alien abduction: they're always either indoors or tied down.
I've heard some criticism of Turning Red is that kids of all different ethnicities get along, which would be great but, like most critiques of this movie, isn't true. The most visibly diverse groups--Mei's circle and Tyler's birthday party attendants--actually imply more tension behind the scenes.
Mei and her friends may look like a stereotypical feel-good multiracial clique at first glance, but they're all girls from marginalized ethnicities with the model minority stigma: Chinese, Korean, Indian, and Jewish. Adult viewers can see what these girls have in common and how they may have been excluded by other children. Out of all of them, Mei's mother consistently singles out White-passing Miriam as the "bad influence," which (in my opinion) shows clear discrimination because Miriam doesn't really act out any more than the other girls.
Mei also doesn't have any male friends, which are usually forced into kid content to combat sexism or enforce the creators' belief that the audience won't identify with opposite-sex characters. Real children typically separate themselves into single-gender cliques in early puberty, intensifying gender socialization as their identities develop*; it would be unrealistic for boys to be included in the group, again showing research and thought put into the characters and their relationships.
Meanwhile Tyler, a biracial boy, is usually seen on his own outside school-structured activities, and can only get other children to come to his birthday party by enlisting Mei's crowd-pleasing panda. It's unclear how many of his guests are actually friends with him, or each other. Despite being Asian (as well as Black) himself, Tyler calls Mei's temple "creepy" and criticizes her family, and few, if any, other students react. He's last seen attending the concert alone, again.
*this also applies to transgender children, whose attempts to join groups of their real rather than perceived gender can be an early indicator
fanartists who redesign Tuunbaq to look "scarier" by making it a mostly-normal polar bear with dozens of severed tongues as its main or only monstrous feature
have you considered
that Netsilik shamanism is not the real horror in this story? that there are thematic reasons why Tuunbaq looks like a fat old White man instead of an amalgation of Indigenous culture and indigenous wildlife?
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
2087
jacobvanloon
snowghoul
vaporwave
blakekathryn
romaincrisis
titsay
