i grew up around muslims, i am also trans and leftist.
people in every queer and trans community i go to set an expectation: i should ofrever abandon my muslim past, i should explicitly stop associating yourself with it whatsoever, you either get to be queer or you either get to be raised-muslim.
in reality, there's no such expectation for christianity, and none of them are ready to dismantle their "inner christian" in their heads as much as they expect be to dismantle my "inner muslim"
none fo them get to admit how most first world countries are culturally christian, because christianity is "default" to them, as well as first world, as well as white.
me having a complicated relationship with islam doesn't mean i absolutely despise every piece of it. it means i distanced myself from ummah, but won't hear islamic criticism from non ex muslims at all, because you expect us to dismantle "our inner muslims" in ways you aren't ready to dismantle imperialism and racism in you.
your expectation is us "acting white", you don't want us unless we're that, which means you don't want us at all.
a lot of people claiming to want to uplift brown queer voices and such don't procced to do anything meaningful for them, or for brown people at all. it's just virtue signaling, homonationalism. you'd only care of brown people being queer, and you want the "brown" part of it gone as much as possible.
a lot of people say they want the leftist agenda to stop being us centric and imperialist, but then it's just pretending to care about it. you already made is so little and unhearable you'd have to get out of your way to seek for us speaking. then you'd not seek or if you find us, you will just pass by. hoping someone else would amplify the voice you took from us? and that someone else would hope for that too, so what?
you want us only when we agree with everything usa says about us, you want us until our lives don't put you into too much discomfort. when they put you into too much discomfort, you don't ask why, you'll restore the comfort by banishing us again. your tolerability of us is so intricately conditional, to meet those a third worlder has to build themselves into a first worlder mindset. this is your (inter)nationalism hey.
anyway, islamophobia hurt me more than islam did. now what
A lot of queer usamericans and brits really think deep down that they are inherently more evolved and progressive than other cultures for not speaking a language with grammatical genders and for having estabilished gender neutral pronouns. Just an excuse to act chauvinistic and spread xenophobia and racism under a "progressive" banner.
The Sexy Anti Russian Orientalism of Heated Rivalry
Since Mark Carney is trending, mostly for admitting the liberal “rules based order” of freedom, human rights and democracy has always been a western fiction and he’s shocked that after all the raping and pillaging of weaker countries Canada participates in with US-led empire the American leopard is still planning on eating his country’s face, now’s a good time to talk about the Canadian government funded project, Heated Rivalry.
This TikTok’er is extending her critique of BBC’s Merlin to ask questions of western media in general, and specifically interrogating viewers’ reluctance to engage with everything but the deeper, structural subtext of a show, opting instead to fixate on the superficial aesthetics - camera language, colour palettes, sex scenes, identity representation.
The answer is to be found in the fact that lifelong indoctrination into liberal and more recently neoliberal philosophy means blanket acceptance of a raft of crimes against the majority of humanity by the imperial west, has been so naturalised as to become the water the fish are swimming in. We accept them not only because they confirm our existing biases but also because the subjugation of large swathes of the Global South is the source of exorbitant material wealth and privilege in the imperial north.
i know it’s cringe but i had to talk abt it #fyp #fandom #leftist #bbcmerlin #merlin
Some friends and I have been asking these same questions about Heated Rivalry - everyone’s talking about whether the copious sex scenes are gratuitous but no-one is mentioning the avalanche of homononationalism and queer imperialism, which is the very point of why the Canadian Government wanted to invest in this show. What are the aesthetics, the representation, the messages really in service of?
Samantha Youssef takes our avoidance of the structural load-bearing work the narrative is subtly doing, one step further by educating us why we should be more aware of the intention behind funders of first and second cinema. We all need to pay much more attention to the ideas embedded under the literal text which is the real goal of the production - *shaping our world view*, not the queer romance that’s sold on the surface.
The fact that viewers of western filmmaking have been trained in specific, often anti-humane and usually anti-collectivist ways to consume media is precisely why film productions like Heated Rivalry bear far more scrutiny than we typically give fictional queer works.
In Heated Rivalry we’re so busy rooting for the four key individuals, the “Russia bad” narrative doesn’t even need prior explanation, or even logic for that matter, to implant securely in our brains that Russia is the villain of the gay hockey show.
We see that Ilya has negative feelings about his Russian family and his status as a bi-sexual man in Russia while ignoring that the other two professional hockey players are both not out to their friends and family either even though they’re not backwards or primitive Russians. We’re supposed to get that the discovery of someone like Ilya having gay sex in Russia could be a life and death matter for him there yet ignore that it’s Ilya who has actually had gay sex in Russia as a vulnerable teenager while in the enlightened Canada Shane had never. We see Scott having a panic attack that strangers might suspect he’s not straight, despite not having a law against homosexual propaganda on the books in either Canada or the US but we’re encouraged to conveniently forget that’s because homophobia is a global phenomenon and doesn’t need a law for public discovery of one’s sexuality to ruin the career of any high-profile professional, which is why in 2026 most still guard that information carefully wherever they’re from.
Shane isn’t white, in a notoriously racist Canadian society, but we never see any racial or sexual animosity directed towards his Asianness, instead all the homophobic, identity-based aggressions in Heated Rivalry are directed solely to Ilya, whether he’s in Russia or in North America, as the only character deserving of homophobic violence in the entire series - I wonder why.
All these contradictions and more have to be memory-holed by already primed viewers, to maintain the orientalist fiction of “Russia bad” that Western Europe has woven about Russia for 200 years; it becomes critical at this present moment when Canada and its fellow NATO gang members have catastrophically lost their proxy war against Russia using Ukraine.
This isn’t internationalism. It’s queer imperialism dressed up as “solidarity” all aimed at winning the psychological warfare for hearts and minds, over a lost war carefully orchestrated by the U.S.-led west for more than a decade between Russia and Ukraine. A high stakes operation involving regime change colour revolutions; two USAID/NED-engineered coups; billions of dollars spent on political, ideological and military subversion; 1.4 million Ukrainians dead and a Ukrainian population left bereft at how they explicitly voted for a President who would be neutral (not join NATO) and make peace with Russia, but got the exact opposite. Someone has done a post with resources on the origins of the ongoing Russia/Ukraine conflict in a more detailed dive here:
Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It's where your interests connect you with your
These factual and illogical atrocities under cover of a rainbow flag are employed to hijack our natural human empathy for marginalised people and underdog nations to intensify enmity and hatred, not for the NATO countries Canada is supporting multiple genocides alongside - but Russia, in an attempt to make gains in psychological warfare they’ve been unable to make in military warfare against a meticulously manufactured enemy.
Here’s an excellent historical summary of Europe’s long goal to isolate, invade and Balkanise, in order to degrade Russia’s development and sovereignty which started way before its communism revolution and goes all the way back to Napoleon:
Europe has repeatedly rejected peace with Russia at moments when a negotiated settlement was available, and those rejections have proven pro
Why the ultimate target of this current western onslaught on Russia is China is a topic for another long post. In that one we’ll look at why China has been gatekeeping its information and media space from nefarious transatlantic ideological incursions and what that’s got to with Danmei onscreen adaptations in particular.
So very disheartening seeing how USAmerican centric any queer pride conversations are. I know so much about Stone Wall and American LGBTQ rights activists, and a lot of Americans know nothing about mine (Simon Nkoli, Bev Ditsie, etc). A lot of the time people seem surprised that my country (South Africa) even has queer rights, even though it legalised same sex marriage before the US (2006 as opposed to the US's 2015) and has enshrined the rights of transgender and intersex people in the constitution.
The presence of problems does not negate the existence of queer South Africans. It makes me feel cheated that celebrations of queer African pride (not just South Africa but the whole continent too) are painted over with conversations of just how terrible it is for so many queer people, and the violence we can face. We know that. Everyone knows that. Every LGBTQ person world over, is aware of the pain they might face.
Why are Americans allowed their queer joy but we must stand and feel ashamed of the people who hate us but share our nationality?
The anti-communist homonationalists seem to disdain progress for queer rights in Cuba and any socialist or anti-imperialist country because it contradicts their argument about the supposed inherent homophobia of those countries
In the case of Fidel or Che's prejudice in the 1950s and 1960s, they equate interpersonal and individual homophobic prejudice to state policies of persecution that did not exist in the manner they are represented as*, and use outdated remarks from an internationally prejudiced time period to apply judgements to the entire development of the revolution even up to the present day
And so, when a country like Cuba makes massive strides in queer rights; indeed, when the state becomes a protector of queer people, and Fidel renounces his past remarks, this does not exist to the homonationalists
Where legal progress exists, it is supposedly only a pretense to hide the abuses of the totalitarian dictatorship, because a socialist or anti-imperialist country can never really care about queer people like the pure, progressive Western state. Never mind that US presidents aren't apologising for the brutal state-sanctioned abuse of queer (especially when non-white and/or working class) communities that occurred throughout the 20th century. Lavender Scare, what's that?
Homonationalists are perfectly happy to condone and encourage the mass slaughter of imperialised populations through sanctions and warfare, because those populations have not earnt the right to humanity in the eyes of the homonationalist. Never mind the fact that their existence inherently disqualifies them; that whether homophobic or progressive, there is nothing a socialist or anti-imperialist state can do "right"
*homophobic policies did exist in Cuba through the 60s and 70s, it would be foolish to pretend otherwise and to do so would be an injustice to their massive efforts for progress. But Cuba is represented as if it was a police state for gay people, and it was not this way. They had inherited a homophobic legacy and revolutionary institutions were sometimes weaponised to abuse queer people― yet the Cuban people have worked tirelessly for their progress and it should be celebrated
Designs/headcanons for (any/all of) the international union of nationalists? (So Authright, Conservative, Homofash, or technically moderate lee cause this is post Centricide) /nf
also thanks again for answering my other ask! :3
Okii bye!!
HI YES hello have my freaks. ill rb with modlee and christcon later/tomorrow :D
