#weightlessribbons

[warmcoals]

Reading k6bd I'm imagining the polycule just continuing to vacuum up more and more people like a divine katamari until it's just yisun again

yknow what. i hate it but it’s funny. ill allow it

[apocalyptic-mailman]

weightlessribbons

  how WOULD anti-civ deal with medication and...

I don’t think that the question was about how we’d treat each other, but about whether modern medications many people depend on could be feasibly fabricated without industrialized manufacturing

check one of the other questions! I touched on it

[takebacktheyuri]

I hope this isn't presumptuous of me to say, but I think your art and your art style are pretty

It’s... not presumptuous to have an opinion, and that makes me happy <3

[leviathan-supersystem]

Isn't any form of government hierarchical? That is, a person in government has more power than a person outside government?

well, some definitions of “government” define the term widely enough that any form of governance, including stateless forms, counts as “government,” but if i understand you to mean in the sense of government=state, then yeah, any form of state separate from the people is inherently hierarchical, and i am against it.

which arguably makes me an anarchist, but since i believe we should have direct democratic council forums with a nested structure similar to democratic centralism, a lot of anarchists would argue that’s too regimented and state-like, and thus i’m not a true anarchist.

and arguably, they have a point, generally when someone hears the word “anarchy” they think of something more structureless than that.

[punlich]

Have you played the visual novel "We Know the Devil"? Queer creators, satanism, very gay. A+

I have a hard time focusing on visual novels. They’re in that weird nether space between novel (that uses purely my imagination for the visuals) and movies/video games (that uses purely the animation software or cinematography for the visuals) and it throws off the ways I focus on and enjoy both types of media.

I’ll check it out though

[leviathan-supersystem]

Have you played the visual novel "We Know the Devil"? Satanism, very gay, A+

not yet! thanks for the recommendation tho, i’ll check it out!

[asynca]

I think you've mentioned that writing a web serial is different from writing a novel (that is published non-serially). Does that affect how you write UMS and FaB?

Very much so. A novel takes planning, too - but the thing about a web serial is that I have a very limited capacity to go back and change details once the chapter is posted. That means I need to be very certain about what details need to go into which chapter and when. It takes a lot more heavy planning (and I’ve talked about my Plot Files before). 

Some other stuff:

I can’t change the pacing once it’s written, so I need to plan that beforehand

Each chapter needs to have a coherent theme and a little mini-story by itself and can’t rely too much on other chapters for that

Each chapter needs to leave readers wanting more so that their desire to continue reading persists over an entire week

I need to remind readers what happened several chapters ago because it may have been months ago they read that detail

Web serials tend to be structured a little differently and have story ‘arcs’, several themes and be a bit longer than the traditional novel. 

I love writing like this, though :)

[queertoonqueertoons]

On Vaatu, Violence, and Voice Acting

weightlessribbons asked:

You’ve mentioned before the importance of having diversity in media, not only with regard to characters but also the content creators (actors, etc). The necessity of diverse actors is easily understood, as an actor’s ethnicity is clearly observed and makes a clear narrative difference. However, when it comes to voice actors or other content creators whose ethnicities are not clearly reflected in the material, the necessity is less obvious. What makes it important? Does ethnicity tangibly and predictably affect performance? Is it industry’s moral responsibility to enforce diversity in the staff? Or is it simply a creative boon to have a diverse staff?

So this is a really great series of questions, and one that I think an analysis of the character and casting of Vaatu might be instrumental in unpacking.  You ask specifically about the significance of casting decisions, what affect these voice actors have on audiences’s understanding of race, and the moral obligation of creative teams to incorporate diversity in their productions. And with when-extremes-meet’s blessing, I’ll try my best to break those three parts down as best I can, using Judith Butler’s Frames of War and the documentary Mickey Mouse Monopoly as guides.  

Before diving into this argument though, I want to first introduce Jonathan Adams.  He is best known for his role as Henry Walker on American Dreams, but has also been a successful voice actor, whose filmography includes but is not limited to Osmosis Jones, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, and The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.  Total, he has 70 credits listed on his IMDb page, with several projects currently in development.  One of those projects includes The Legend of Korra, but instead of playing the hero, he plays the villain, and not just any villain but Vaatu, the source of all evil in the Avatar universe.

Now, I’m all for diversity in voice casting.  In fact, I have been extremely critical of The Legend of Korra for casting white people in the roles of Asian and indigenous characters, but something about positioning the voice of a black man as the root of all evil seemed more than a little problematic. Especially when one considers Adams is the only black voice actor cast in a reoccurring role for the entirety of both LOK and ATLA. That’s right. Black voices in the series are nearly completely absent from the Avatar universe save for a few lines by Serena Williams as the Fire Sage in Book 2.

Even the beloved Master Piandao, drawn with dark skin and based on the real life Sifu Kisu of Moroccan-descent, is voiced by Robert Hammond Patrick Jr.  Even the one black human character in the whole universe is voiced by a white man.  This is devastatingly problematic, and I’m afraid there’s really no way to unpack it without being incredibly critical of the casting issues throughout the Avatar franchise.  However, I am determined to keep this focused on Vaatu, as a longer essay is already in the works on this topic.  

So let’s talk about why Vaatu sounds evil.  Let’s talk about how socially we have demonized black men in our culture, to the point that when a police officer says a black man was “running at me like a demon” we are not surprised that he uses lethal force to stop him.  Let’s talk about how historically black voice actors have played more villains than heroes.  Let’s talk about what exactly these problematic practices in voice casting means for us as a culture.

In Butler’s essay, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography” she states that a “recognizable human is formed and maintained over and against what cannot be named or regarded as the human.”  What she’s talking is that the media constructs an “Other” against which we define ourselves as not being.  In this essay, Butler is specifically focusing on the ways in which American media has constructed the “Arab identity” as specifically not American.  So in order for one to identify as American, then they cannot be Arab, and in this way the media helped to dehumanize the Arab population and erase the actual existence of Arab Americans.  Butler calls this type of framing an “act of violence,” meaning that it results in a loss, in this case the loss of being seen as human.  And with dehumanization comes a lack of empathy.

So what does this have to do with voice acting in children’s media?  Kids’ shows aren’t exactly being saturated with violent images of dead bodies, after all.  But there is without a doubt a violence within the framing of our beloved cartoons.  We frame the voices of black men and women as villains, and the few times there are people of color as heroes we have often cast white voice actors in those roles.  This is a dangerous cycle of association and assimilation that cannot go unchecked, and we as fans should demand more.  It’s not enough just to draw people of color, you have to also cast people of color in those roles.  But children can’t tell the difference, right?  They just see cartoon characters, they don’t associate the voices with any particular race.  Wrong.

I offer the anecdote of Jacqueline Maloney of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University from the incredibly powerful documentary Mickey Mouse Monopoly:

JACQUELINE MALONEY: I have a girlfriend who, she’s a white woman and her son is about three, and she came to me one day really disturbed and said that she had been coming back from shopping and that her son said, “Mommy, Mommy, the hyenas, the hyenas,” and she looked up and she said there was a group of black children on the carousel and playing. And she said but when you had your back turned to them, they did, they sounded just like, the sound, the voicing, the laughing of the hyenas. And she could not move her son away from the attachment of the sound to the image of hyenas in The Lion King. And she said, and further, he had made the association that they were bad. Then she started to shift in her assessment of what I was saying to her, but also what kinds of images she was allowing her son to see without having conversation.

The documentary Mickey Mouse Monopoly, “analyzes Disney’s cultural pedagogy, examines its corporate power, and explores its vast influence on our global culture,” and serves as a critique of the ways in which these cartoons have shaped problematic images of race and gender within young children.  Sadly Maloney’s account is echoed through the documentary by other scholars talking about their own personal experience with these images and questions.  One person even points out that Simba, the African hero of the Lion King, is voiced by a white man, despite having two black voice actors play his parents.  

But white voice actors can’t help that they had the best voice for the part!  What if no POC voice actors auditioned? All this harkens back to the privilege problem within the industry itself.  As I’ve already outlined in a previous essay, many POC voice actors are not even able to gain access to the auditions because the casting call doesn’t specifically say their race.  Even if something is not specified, their agent will not send them to the audition because the assumption is that they are looking for a white voice actor because that is the standard default for our culture.  And as Steven Universe has demonstrated there is certainly no lack of talented POC voice actors (source for picture below).

I’ll end with the irony that The Legend of Korra was actually awarded for casting in 2013 at the Emmy’s.  Now, don't get me wrong, Korra is fabulous for a lot of reasons and problematic for just as many, but this serious misjudgment on the part of casting has left a really sour taste in my mouth about the whole series. I will love Korra, I will cherish her journey, but I cannot let go of the fact that the children will learn to associate the strength of a queer, woman of color with a white woman’s voice.  Because as talented and supportive as Janet Varney is (and trust me, I really admire her), I can’t let go of the potential that role could have been for a POC voice actress.  Not just for her career but for our culture, and if that’s not a moral obligation on the part of creators then I’m not sure what is.

All I have to say is thank goodness for Garnet and Estelle.  They are both gems as far as I’m concerned.