Banal Adventures

ally-wonderland:

I sincerely believe that every white hetcis dude ‘feminist’ writer in North America needs to take a long look at Hayao Miyazaki and the films and characters he makes as examples of how to properly be a feminist-identified man writing female characters.

There’s never a question of “Is this going to pass the Bechdel Test” in his films.  The stories he creates, the characters he writes, and how they grow and change in their narratives don’t have the Joss Whedon Action Girl or the Strong Independent Woman tropes, they are nuanced, diverse, flawed characters.

I just

Hayao Miyazaki is one of my favourite writers he just does things so well I like Ghibli movies a lot that’s it that’s the post.

theprofessorstrikesagain:

The biggest complaint I’m seeing about Benedict being cast in this movie is that the character he plays was a man of color in the Original Series.

People are complaining that J.J Abrams isn’t being true to to the character. They complain about authenticity and not keeping the character as close…

I think the problem with Benedict’s casting is much less about breaking up the dichotomy of brown = bad and white = good and more about the whitewashing and homogenizing endemic to Hollywood. 

The thing about Khan is that he isn’t a classic “bad brown” character. That mold is completely based on stereotype: craven, sneaky, unattractive, with unbridled lusts, in all ways an unpleasant person and the embodiment of human slime. Khan is very different: the first of a master race, a man chosen to be made superior to all humanity, immensely strong and clever and intelligent, who gets the better of his enemies through manipulation and cleverness rather than sneaking and skulking. The fact that he was written as an Indian man (Khan Noonien Singh) and played by a Hispanic man is incredibly significant here: that a person whose ethnicity is currently looked down upon as inferior is in fact literally superior in almost every respect to our (white) heroes Spock and Kirk means that his role bucks racist stereotyping. 

I agree that often roles that typecast POC as antagonists are extremely problematic and racist. However, the type of role is very important, as well as what esteem the protagonist(s) hold that character in. Racist portrayals show the POC as less than, lower than, worse than; valuable ones show the POC as equal to or better than our protagonists, a worthy opponent rather than a nuisance to be rid of.