idgaf about the actual discourse surrounding it (so don’t come in my inbox explaining the plot . IDC) but a trip to see a dune gifset of white people in sci-fi couture hijab outfits and then scrolling and seeing first hand accounts of human rights violations the US and england and canada are condoning against palestinians. like THAT being the hollywood blockbuster of the moment is like…okay 👍. satire dead etc etc
"Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice."
Edward W. Said, Orientalism.
Orientalism is the worst its been since the 1800's. Palestinians are not your OCs, your props, your narrative devices, we're not your saviours, we're not your models, we're not your objects.
Go fucking read Edward Said's Orientalism. We already hashed this shit out!!! And by we I literally mean Palestinian scholars specifically!!!!
And the audiobook! (Youtube, 9.5hrs long)
"Jesus Christ of Nazareth is a powerful swami whom westerners revere with incredible sacredness and respect."
"One can think of Christ as a sort of Bodhisattva who resides in a western form of the pure-lands called Heaven."
"This western form of Buddhism known as Christianity arose from a western form of Brahmanism known as Judaism."
"Western form of Brahmanism known as Judaism"
Me, an Indian Jew:
overwatch is a silly piece of shit on its best days but its continued insistence that magic is real but only in japan is especially hysterical
hanzo and genji have haunted their hodgepodge of a narrative since 2016 with unambiguously magic powers in a soft-SF setting that went out of its way to conceptualise bogus technology like hard-light and biotics in order to fit its weirdness into some kind of "science" category. the fact they then didn't extend that consideration to hanzo and genji? they just left them as is? as witches? as fate-touched human vessels of ancient dragon spirits?? if genji wasn't a cyborg they could feasibly be minor sekiro bosses and that's weird dude!! and then kiriko gets released?? and these people had all the years in between ow1 and ow2 to find a way to hand-wave whatever weird shamanistic magic they accidentally let get into the game, and instead they make the only other japanese character a fucking spirit vessel as well. they doubled down. magic IS REAL in overwatch but ONLY on the BEAUTIFUL ISLANDS OF JAPAN, and no it's never ever going to be addressed because overwatch has as much coherent story as a themed puzzle page on the back of a kids cereal box. hysterical.
this also extends to the ability to wall climb
overwatch said if you are japanese you can do the following:
forgetting the fact that being a buddhist also gives you magic powers
zenyatta is specifically a civilian chassis but he can become invulnerable and throw balls at you
the point of overwatch is to say shinto-buddhism is the only correct religion i think
Anyone talking about 'curses' and 'letting curses out if you open things' on the Pyramid post, but also y'know Ancient Egypt in general?
Thanks for perpetuating Orientalist othering! That's pretty racist of you!
The only time I felt that was an appropriate joke was when they were gonna open the black sarcophagus they found flooded with sewer water. There's no way THAT wasn't cursed and should never be opened.
Otherwise, she's right.
It wasn't an appropriate joke then, either, tbh. That was genuinely one of the worst times to be an Egyptologist, because everyone was caught up in 'oooooh spoooooooky cuuuuuurse of the sarcophagus' that they didn't listen to any explanation of why what they were seeing was nothing out of the ordinary.
If this sarcophagus had been found anywhere else, people would have laughed about poop skeletons and never mentioned curses. I think people need to ask themselves just why that is.
How much of it do you take as Orientalism versus generic "it's bad to disturb the dead/places of the dead" that we find in most cultures?
I understand there's the whole association with "curses" and Egypt because of our erstwhile 1920s/1930s graverobbers and journalists, but wondering where that intersects with discussion about, say, finding a "spooky" Roman or Celtic burial in the UK.
(Interesting to learn that stuff about the sarcophagus! Thanks for sharing it!)
Most of it. There's a specific 'flavour' of this behaviour that comes alongside dealing with finding anything in Ancient Egypt. It's never just with tombs when it comes to Egypt. It's with every single artefact we dig up from pots and cookery stuff, to papyri and statues, has multiple comments or articles about how it should be put back because it's cursed. Meanwhile, a giant mosaic is uncovered in Rutland and no one bats an eye. Uncover Roman burials in York and everyone says 'oh wow I wonder what these people were like?' Discover two skeletons entwined in a burial in Rome and everyone romanticises them as lovers. There's an effort to show what these things actually are, and how they functioned, which you don't get with discoveries from Egypt.
There is also significantly less push back and pantomime for the discovery Roman and Celtic burials in the UK than there is for literally anything coming out of Egypt. The Roman little girl who was found when archaeologists surveyed a building site of what would eventually be the Gherkin in London? I've posted about that, and the responses I got were all about how sad they were that she was found all alone. If you google her, you get lots of sites telling you about her and what happened to her after she was discovered. Contrast that with the two bits of information I've posted about discoveries in Egypt in the last week. The new intact Book of the Dead? More than half the comments/tags were 'put it back it's cursed'. The new tunnel discovered in the Pyramid? Many tags are 'don't go in there it's cursed' or 'don't unleash the curse on this world' Even going back to the sarcophagus mentioned above; if you google that then your results are overwhelmingly 'look at this spooky black coffin' or 'mysterious coffin that might curse us all has been found'
The occasional 'spooky celtic burial' comment is absolutely nothing compared to the overwhelming amount of bullshit I have dealt with regarding any archaeological find from Ancient Egypt.
the racism/orientalism/antisemitism/homophobia/general “fear of the other” in dracula is such an integral part of the text and i feel like you are missing so much of what dracula is about if you are not picking up on those overtones. i love dracula a lot but i don’t think there is any use in ignoring those aspects of it or pretending they don’t exist - in fact, i think that would show a very shallow understanding of the text. i don’t have any resentment towards ppl who are reading dracula daily and making silly little joke posts about their friend jonathan harker, i love to make those jokes as well, but i do hope that the experience of reading this novel helps some people understand the sheer xenophobia and bigotry that is at the heart of this novel and lots of other iconic horror fiction. i’ve learned not to underestimate the obliviousness of white gentiles but i hope people realize it is not random that count dracula has nebulous eastern ancestry and his plan is to take over england like i hope that does not go over your guys heads.
funniest part of this post taking off is ppl in the tags being like “ok but i really doubt that ppl are not noticing the bigotry when it’s such a core part of the text” and other ppl being like “wow i never even noticed these ideas in the story” like……do NOT underestimate the obliviousness of white gentiles
Whenever a wise guide in a fantasy show tells the hero they have to “let go of attachments” to be a hero I just want to smack them in their stupid face because our love for others is what drives us to do good you stupid fucking mentor figure.
you can just say the Jedi order
This is because it’s badly used generally as “do not love others” instead of “love without possession”. An example, is a parent nurturing their child and loving them, and then said child leaving their home to follow their own path. That’s a form of letting go of attachments. Otherwise, it’d be the parent being unsopportive of things that could drive the child away and encouraging instead things that make the child remain in their house. Same thing goes to others forms of love.
Attachments are not love, attachments are unhealthy.
The answer to “let go of attachments” isn’t not loving anyone. That’s actually still attachments. Is still understanding that the only way to love someone is by possessing them. The true answer is loving and letting go if necessary.
Wise Old Master saying stuff like that in movies is that most glaring example of the West a) being fascinated by the East and b) not understanding a single thing about it.
You get it, thank you!
Edward Said, Orientalism (via beyondvictoriana)
The Oracle by artist Giles Ketting.
4000 years ago, a learned Egyptian scribe penned this advice: ‘Do not be proud because you are wise! Consult with the ignorant as with the learned! Perfect speech is more hidden than malachite, yet it is found with the maidservants at the millstones’. While wisdom may be found in unexpected places, unfortunately ignorance may be also. I was disappointed last week when the BBC and the Guardian published articles that inaccurately dismissed hieroglyphs as a more primitive form of writing than emojis.
An excellent write up on how Media and Academics alike are inherently snobbish and dismissive of an entire language, purely because it isn’t written in a form that is immediately understandable. As the author says:
“In the 21st century, I’d hope we can begin to move beyond the colonialist attitudes and Orientalism that have often dismissed ancient Egypt and other cultures as primitive and inferior to Classical civilisations. However, even when Egypt’s achievements have been admired, some scholars have tried to whitewash its people and culture, for example arguing that Egyptian civilisation could only have been founded by invaders from Mesopotamia (read Europeans). It’s about time that we gave the ancient Egyptians credit for their achievements and learned a bit more about them–in their own words.”
The Ancient Egyptians were every bit the philosophical and poetic civilisation as their counterparts, and it’s time this was recognised.
Where did this horror movie thing of mummies walking come from was it just some racist weird western notion to further exotify Egypt?? Did anyone actually believe this before The Mummy (the really old version) came out in the 20’s?
Buckle up, y’all, I wrote my thesis on this so I actually know the answer to it. Please take a moment to prepare yourself for white people being even grosser than you thought we were. No, grosser. NO, grosser than that. Okay, you’re ready.
Of course, many cultures have myths about the dead rising up, but the mummy occupies a really unique place in the Western imagination. As far as we can tell, Western anxieties about Egyptian mummies didn’t appear until until the Early Modern period of European history. During this time, Europeans had some…interesting ideas about medicine. Some of these ideas involved straight-up fucking cannibalism. Yep! Mummy parts were crumbled up and used as tinctures or ingested, most frequently to stanch internal bleeding. It wasn’t until people began to realize that eating other humans might contribute to the spread of disease that the practice died out. It’s very probable that fears & anxieties about Egyptian mummies specifically came from their association with disease.
Egyptian mummies continued to be used as raw material up to and throughout the 19th century; they were used to make paint pigment and paper, and some people claim they were also used as fertilizer and fuel. (The last part is almost certainly not true, because the “fuel” thing comes from a Mark Twain joke that subsequent writers took seriously.) They were also the subject of Pettigrew’s famous mummy demonstrations, in which a greasy amateur scientist and showman unrolled mummies in front of London high society. They were ALSO taken into people’s private homes and treated as curios - having looted artifacts was considered a sign of refinement and good personal curatorship.
Despite treating mummies as objects and resources, the Victorians must have known on some level that desecrating corpses was not 100% okay, because it’s around this time that we start to see mummy fictions.
Including Victorian mummy erotica.
Mummy fictions in the 19th century mostly focused on romantic conquest of the mummy, but there was an element of horror in them too; in these fictions (including ones by Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others) we see a lot of fear & anxiety about the mystical powers of the mummy, which I’m pretty sure comes from Englishmen feeling vaguely guilty about having dead people in their houses. (Not guilty enough to put them back, though!) EDIT: if you’re wondering where, specifically, the idea of mummies walking is from, it’s from these stories.
As mummy romance fell out of vogue, the accompanying horror element stayed. When the tomb of Tutankhamun was opened in 1922 and a series of unfortunate events conspired to make people believe in a curse, Western anxieties about the mummy skyrocketed, and birthed the mummy-horror tradition we see today.
Of course, all of this history IS absolutely rooted in racism and exotification; as I said in my thesis:
It is tempting to dismiss the use and abuse of mummified bodies as a quirk of history, an unusual and unrepeatable phase of Western culture. However, to do so would be to dismiss years of imperialism, of colonialist thought, in which people of “the Orient” - a category in which Egypt was definitively included - existed in the Western imagination as curios, commodities, and curiosities, not as human beings.
This concludes the super long answer that no one asked for or wanted. If you take away anything from this, I hope it’s that if you’re European, your great-great-great grandfather was probably a cannibal and your great-grandma was probably into mummy porn. Sweet dreams!
