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#mad about it – @tangleofrainbows on Tumblr
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tangle of rainbows

@tangleofrainbows / tangleofrainbows.tumblr.com

just an enby in new york . . . agender, 29, it/itself
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ableism:

you can reserve a space on the train for your bicycle in the default online booking form.

to get a wheelchair space, i have to book the ticket then exchange several emails with the railway company, as if the concept of wheelchairs is entirely new to them. sometimes there’s no email address and they try to insist i call them, which is inaccessible to so many people. then they demand i show up half an hour early, at which point they typically act as if they’ve never heard of you or they have a wheelchair ready because no one told them i have my own. when i arrive at my destination, i cross my fingers that anyone has bothered to call ahead for someone to get the ramp out, and usually have to resort to asking another passenger to flag down a member of staff. i leave long after all the other passengers and crew. and don’t even get me started on airplanes.

now apply this principle to literally everything.

oh and the only reason i have to do any of this is because they didn’t build the trains to be level with the platforms. i only need their “assistance” (literally just a ramp) because they didn’t factor me in in the first place. all that effort, MY effort, for “help” i shouldn’t need.

being disabled is so much WORK. contacting everywhere you might go in advance to find out if it’s accessible, then you get there and “oh there’s just a few steps” or you have to call them on some number so they can get the one guy who has the key to the rickety elevator but oh wait he’s on vacation, or they’re using the disabled toilet as a storage closet. everything i do comes with layers of effort that abled people can’t even imagine (i know, i used to be one).

now bear in mind that on a good day i have like 25% of the energy of an average person my age. i need most of that to, you know, eat and so forth. so having to spend half my energy dealing with this type of bullshit renders so much of the world inaccessible to me, because i often physically cannot jump through all these fucking hoops to like… enter a building or get on a train.

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melonkollie

if cis women can bulk up and wear baggy pants and crop their hair short and go without makeup or shaving their pits/legs/anywhere else, co-opt traditionally ‘masculine’ behaviors, and still be viewed as women–even praised for how very feminist they are in doing so–then so can trans women. that’s it. end of.

and if cis men who love fashion and florals and pink, and wear dresses and makeup and love to bake, can be comfortable in their masculinity and praised as revolutionary for doing so, then–you guessed it–so can trans men. that’s it. end of.

not one single person on earth has any right to dictate how anyone else pilots their respective flesh suits. not one single person on earth has any right to claim someone is ‘faking’ their gender or performing a gender incorrectly when gender is arbitrary as hell as-is.

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it’s 2016, callout culture has gone on for more than long enough now, let it die, it’s time

callout for this post wtf is “callout culture”

callout culture is falling out with someone and digging through their archive to compile a list of things they said five years ago to turn total strangers against them

callout culture is reblogging a callout post for a total stranger made by a total stranger out of a misplaced sense of moral righteousness

callout culture is overusing the word ‘problematic’ to the point where saying something out of ignorance thirty years ago is placed on the same level as assaulting children

callout culture is expecting people to disclose deeply personal information pertaining to their mental health, experience of abuse and other incredibly sensitive subjects before engaging in a discussion with total strangers

callout culture is bombarding people with accusatory messages as soon as a celebrity or tv show they like fucks up, as if it was their fault or they can do anything about it and as if it’s possible for anyone or anything to be perfect enough to be deemed worthy of fandom by those standards

callout culture is refusing to give people room to fuck up and then grow and learn and to acknowledge that people and media mean a lot to people for an enormous variety of reasons and expecting people to be able to (and to want to) just cut all emotional ties they have with something or someone when they fuck up is unreasonable and unrealistic

callout culture is claiming to stand for social justice, but driving young teenagers to the point of suicide because maintaining a sense of ideological purity is seen as preferable to remembering that we all used to be ignorant on various issues and educating those who just didn’t know any better

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dailydot

Two days ago, author J.K. Rowling released a new story, Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, on her blog Pottermore. Controversy soon followed, as Rowling immediately faced backlash over the alleged misrepresentation of Native culture in a story that draws from real Colonial Massachusetts history.

Source: dailydot.com
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prokopetz

Nobody’s going to deny that, as it’s conventionally depicted, Middle-Earth - the setting of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - is awfully monochrome. In art, basically everybody is drawn as white, and all major depictions in film have used white actors.

When this state of affairs is questioned, the defences typically revolve around “accuracy”, which can mean one of two things: fidelity to the source material, and the internal consistency of the setting. Being concerned primarily with languages and mythology, Tolkien left few clear descriptions of what the peoples of Middle-Earth actually look like, so in this case, arguments in favour of the status quo more often rest on setting consistency.

Of course, we need hold ourselves neither to fidelity nor to consistency - the author’s dead, and we can do what we want. However, what if I told you that there’s a reasonable argument to be made from that very standpoint of setting consistency that Aragorn - the one character you’d most expect to be depicted as a white dude - really ought to be portrayed as Middle Eastern and/or North African?

First, consider the framing device of Tolkien’s work. The central conceit of The Lord of the Rings - one retroactively extended to The Hobbit, and thereafter to later works - is that Tolkien himself is not the story’s author, but a mere translator of writings left behind by Bilbo, Frodo and other major characters. Similarly, Middle-Earth itself is positioned not as a fictional realm, but as the actual prehistory of our own world. As such, the languages and mythologies that Tolkien created were intended not merely to resemble their modern counterparts, but to stand as plausible ancestors for them.

Now, Aragorn is the king of a tribe or nation of people called the Dúnedain. Let’s take a closer look at them in the context of that prehistoric connection.

If the Dúnedain were meant to be the forebears of Western Europeans, we’d expect their language, Adûnaic, to exhibit signs of Germanic (or possibly Italic) derivation - but that’s not what we actually see. Instead, both the phonology and the general word-structure of Adûnaic seem to be of primarily Semitic derivation, i.e., the predominant language family throughout the Middle East and much of North Africa. Indeed, while relatively little Adûnaic vocabulary is present in Tolkien’s extant writings, some of the words we do know seem to be borrowed directly from classical Hebrew - a curious choice if the “men of the West” were intended to represent the ancestors of the Germanic peoples.

Additionally, the Dúnedain are descended from the survivors of the lost island of Númenor, which Tolkien had intended as an explicit analogue of Atlantis. Alone, this doesn’t give us much to go on - unless one happens to know that, in the legendarium from which Tolkien drew his inspirations, the Kingdoms of Egypt were alleged to be remnant colonies of Atlantis. This connection is explicitly reflected in the strong Egyptian influence upon Tolkien’s descriptions of Númenorean funereal customs. We thus have both linguistic and cultural/mythological ties linking the survivors of Númenor to North Africa.

Now, I’m not going to claim that Tolkien actually envisioned the Dúnedain as North African; he was almost certainly picturing white folks. However, when modern fans argue that Aragorn and his kin must be depicted as white as a matter of setting consistency, rather than one of mere authorial preference, strong arguments can be made that this need not be the case; i.e., that depicting the Dúnedain in a manner that would be racialised as Middle Eastern and/or North African by modern standards is, in fact, entirely consistent with the source material, ethnolinguistically speaking. Furthermore, whether they agreed with these arguments or not, any serious Tolkien scholar would at least be aware of them.

In other words, if some dude claims that obviously everyone in Tolkien is white and acts like the very notion of depicting them otherwise is some outlandish novelty, you’ve got yourself a fake geek boy.

(As an aside, if we turn our consideration to the Easterlings, the human allies of Sauron who have traditionally been depicted in art as Middle Eastern on no stronger evidence than the fact that they’re baddies from the East, a similar process of analysis suggests that they’d more reasonably be racialised as Slavic in modern terms. Taken together with the preceding discussion, an argument can be made that not only is the conventional racialisation of Tolkien’s human nations in contemporary art unsupported by the source material, we may well have it precisely backwards!)

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medievalpoc

Which is, the only reason for every character in LotR to be white is that the author, adapter, filmmaker, or artist wants them to be.

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