Cross-Leggèd Defiance

because look, the hero's journey is an artifice of like peak colonial knowledge production methodologies! sketchy sourcing of myths? check. sketchy interpretation of myths? check. developing a totalizing framework to sort and categorize all of these myths, using a framework that is distinctly specific to your worldview? check! these are classic bad ethnographic research / hideously out of date and racist anthropological research methods that would rightly be pilloried by scholarship today. hell, this bastard relies on the golden fucking bough to source some of his myths. the golden bough!!! the ur-text for like, peak armchair anthropology and all that entailed in the 19th century - the grotesquely racist theorizing about the inherent natures of certain cultures, of cultural 'evolution' that placed europe at the zenith of 'civilization', the sorting of real living people and cultures into 'primitive' people who could be compared to historic 'primitive' people of europe, the fucking eugenics and phrenology. and yet, the hero's journey is constantly used as a lens of analysis in fandom and frankly in popular culture. is it not fucking time we got rid of it once and for fucking all? why the fuck are we using a form of narrative analysis that is based on extremely faulty scholarship and downright misinterpretation to argue that all stories have to follow a certain specific shape?

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y’all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

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