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Posts tagged: children

snoozingcat:

sometime I just think about how easy it would be to market superheroes toward little girls and I am filled with rage

like do these people not realize how fucking easy this shit would be

there’s the dazzler she’s like a popstar and a superhero do you know how many 4-12 year old girls would dig that shit

there’s the wasp and her superpowers are seriously like zapping jerks, flying, and being cuter than everybody else. also she’s a famous fashion designer. and she’s better than you. (like she shrinks and stuff too but mainly her power is being better than you)

she-hulk is like this nerdy chick with the power to get bigger and greener and be spontaneously tougher than everybody in the vicinity like I don’t even know a little girl who wouldn’t slit someone’s throat for the ability to be stronger than all the boys when they pissed her off

little girl likes magic? scarlet witch

little girl likes science? invisible woman

little girl likes spies? black widow

little girl likes aliens? karolina dean

little girl likes bionic arms? misty knight

little girl likes flying horses? wow. guess who has one of those? valkyrie. valkyrie does.

My point is that’s it’s so fucking easy so chop-chop, Marvel, get on it. Seriously, I went ten years of my life thinking superheroes were boys. That’s ten years of you not profiting off of my inability to refrain from buying even the crappiest merchandise you offer if it has a character I love on it. Little girls are an enormous market; they will buy all your shit if you just suggest to them that maybe they’d like to.

or you could just keep on not profiting when you could be making money selling literally any object that has enough space to plaster a female superhero’s face on it. that’s cool too.

fishingboatproceeds:

undocumentedny:

theysayimpsychodiaries:

beyonceremix:

Chimamanda Adichie - The Danger of a Single Story (TED Talks 2009)

Tell me again, what did you say about representation not being important?

This gifset goes perfectly with an article I just read. This is why media representation is so important. Because it brainwashes our children to not even see themselves in their OWN stories.

Just read Adichie’s new novel Americanah, which I highly recommend. Great book, and not too much weather in it.

My 5-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.

The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.)

But my daughter was determined. She liked the story pretty well so far, but Bilbo was definitely a girl. So would I please start reading the book the right way? I hesitated. I imagined Tolkien spinning in his grave. I imagined mean letters from his testy estate. I imagined the story getting as lost in gender distinctions as dwarves in the Mirkwood.

Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be. And you know what? The switch was easy. Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender—and neither does anyone else.

resurrecttheliving:

ghost-y:

alaskanferaligatr:

vivvav:

kokorooji:

eren-jaegars-butt:

petrichoriousparalian:

inuchi:

I don’t want it; I don’t need it.

this scene is even more creepy when you realize Spirited Away was a metaphor for the sex industry in Japan

oh

oh

OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE!

NO IT WASN’T, YOU JACKASSES!

“Totoro’s about dead girls!”

“Spirited Away is about sex!”

You know what I hear?

“Maybe if I make up something that sounds smart, people will think I’m smart, even if it’s a complete fucking lie!

Hayao Miyazaki is a man of values. He’s a man who believes in the innocence of childhood and has a wonderful imagination. He believes in simplicity, kindness, the beauty of nature, and the old ways. He draws on these beliefs and his personal experiences when he makes movies.

Spirited Away was made for some friends of Miyazaki’s. Specifically, the ten-year-old daughters of some friends he invited to stay at his vacation home. It’s fairly common for Miyazaki to decide that he’s going to make movies targeted at a specific age group. Ponyo is for five-year-olds. Spirited Away is meant for ten-year-old girls, but enjoyed by a much wider audience.

I repeat, SPIRITED AWAY WAS MADE FOR TEN-YEAR-OLD GIRLS.

The bathhouse? Not a brothel. Based on a bathhouse in his home town, which he thought was a place of mystery and wonder when he was a kid. That scene where the bathhouse staff has to clean the polluted river spirit? Based on Miyazaki’s own experiences of a town coming together to clean up a river. This scene? It’s about Chihiro not being greedy, because Chihiro is a positive role-model for ten-year-old girls.

The themes of Spirited Away are courage, strength of character, and individuality. ESPECIALLY individuality. That thing where Yubaba takes away peoples’ names and changes their species? That’s her taking away their individuality. Chihiro’s parents are now pigs, not people. Haku’s name has been shortened so he forgets who he is. When Yubaba changes Chihiro’s name, the only Kanji she leaves spell out “Sen”, the Japanese word for “one thousand”, meaning Chihiro is just another pawn of Yubaba’s, not her own person.

You want to seem cool and intelligent? Talk about the movie’s actual themes. Don’t make up this shock-value bullshit for attention.

You stupid motherfuckers.

FUCKING THANK YOU.  I get so fucking sick of this shit, stupid motherfuckers trying to pervert movies by claiming there’s dark twisted themes in films where they don’t exist.  How about discussing how Chihiro was offered gold and turned it down because she needed to help Haku instead?  She turned down a ton of gold to save a friend.  THAT’S SOME PRETTY NOBLE SHIT RIGHT THERE, instead of the fucking brothel lies.

Why isn’t anything ever good enough as it already is? 

Depth is one thing, and searching for hidden meaning is fantastic. I love analysis. But trying to find depth by making every goddamn thing a product of your cynicism just gets really fucking old.

Why do we take imaginative worlds and stories and act like all the magic and wonder in them is a result of some sort of mental problem? Why do we take stories about innocence and always turn them into stories about the loss of it? Why do we inject bad into everything good?

Also, I remember reading that Miyazaki himself really dislikes when people make his movies darker than they actually are. He was legitimately upset about the spread of the rumor that My Neighbor Totoro was all a big allegory for death. Conjecture is one thing, but when you change the ENTIRE point of a movie and then spread that like it’s a fact, I feel you’re disrespecting the original work and you should stop.

Okay I appreciate the defense of Miyazaki here, because I think it’s pretty obvious that this movie can be taken at face value and have a lot of layers and depth when it’s just a movie for children, about childhood. 

ON THE OTHER HAND, I think it’s okay to interpret this movie as having some sexual metaphors AS LONG AS YOU DON’T IMPLY AUTHORIAL INTENT. Someone can see a certain facet of movie that was not intentionally placed there by the creators. That’s okay. I’m going to write about this a lot, but Spirited Away is such a good examlpe because the themes and lessons are SO universal.

The more universal a theme is, the more places you can apply it. When a greedy charater is throwing out gold while demanding, “I’M HUNGRY, MORE!” and the hero refuses whilst everyone else scrambles to obey, well, there’s a lot of scenarios in which that is a valuable, meaningful lesson. Seeing it as a metaphor for sexual appetites and the sex trade is perfectly valid, and in fact a kind of cool way to look at it. You can also understand it to be about modern corporate and/or consumer culture. That doesn’t mean that it was made to be about that or that more face-value interpretations are not correct. It’s just a cool way to apply the universal message in this scene.

The thing is people don’t just it read this a metaphor for greed and overlay sexual trade on it. People think that the movie itself was ABOUT the sex trade. See?

And it doesn’t even fit with the rest of the movie, or take into account what happens with No Face after this scene, anything that happens with Haku, or much else in the movie. I actually think it is a rather cheap and sloppy reading - reading sex into things is kind of the default, I think. But it is a pretty lazy understanding of the culture around bath houses, the culture around prostitution in Japan, especially more traditionally, given the setting the movie uses, and generally what roles and messages Yokai and animal spirits serve culturally and in folklore. It’s like saying "Alice in Wonderland is about drugs” and leaving it at that. Yes, you can read that into the text, but it does the symbolism and messages an injustice, I think. A message of appetite and greed that is supposed to be a kind of universal instruction for children, about gluttony and bullying and pollution shouldn’t be reduced to or condensed to a kind of sexual greed. I think it is definitely interesting, on a kind of meta level, to see how easy it is to read a much more adult kind of greed and gluttony, and by extension violence and abuse into a metaphor built for children to discuss taking only what one needs and being kind and helpful. That’s a very interesting and telling reflection on human nature, sure - but I don’t see how it is at all useful to read into the text itself? Why make it about explicitly sexual exploitation when the rest of the movie doesn’t really lend itself to that reading, while a reading of general greed and exploitation allows us to form a more complete narrative? Even one that works across texts into other Miyazaki movies?