Fananarama

You spoiled, entitled, ungrateful little brat! You have everything handed to you on a silver platter and you squander it. You’re given the world and you can’t appreciate it because you haven’t had to work for anything! So now you’ve decided that the one thing you want is my daughter, my child, mine. What I made. What I created. You could talk about what a great lay she is and try to get a response from me all you want. But guess what? I am actually quite literally above your pay grade, which means that I know that you believe that you are in love with her, as wrong as you may be. 

As white people, we are used to representations of ourselves crowding the covers of magazines, crowning the posters of newly released films. The good guys are white, we have learned, after eons of our faces being plastered under cowboy hats and in impeccable Bond suits. White men are Superman, we have learned. White men are Ethan Hunt and Neo and white men are hobbits. Bad men, we have learned, are black. They’re gang bangers and thugs and talk loud and sometimes deliver funny lines where we laugh at their Otherness. Black men aren’t heroes, we learn. Our imagination and subconscious are so saturated with white supremacist notions of goodness, beauty, and heroism, that when confronted head-on with an image of a black man who is brilliant and kind and normal and who saves the day, we transform into robotic versions of ourselves: Does… not… compute. Hero… must be… white. It’s this line of thinking that turned Disney’s Princess Tiana into an animal for 95 percent of the movie. The collective white imagination had difficulty imagining a black girl as a princess… and so she became a frog.

So what we have here in Ms. Savage’s post is an expression of concern about the rise of “gratuitous” diversity… framed by a call for more straight white men. And what we have in Mr. Davidson’s call for “minority”** characters who genuinely represent their own background is… the very gratuitous superficiality that he claims he doesn’t espouse. Because, well, he only demands that “minority” characters justify their existence in a given narrative. Only women and people of color (etc.) risk being less-than-genuine for appearing alongside dragons and spaceships without reason. There has to be a point, see, whenever people like me pop up in fiction. We’re there only to “expand our experience and knowledge”, to educate; we can’t just be kicking around for the same reasons white men would be. I mean, really: if we’re not doing something black (or gay or Jewish or whatever), why are we even there? Because, amirite, God knows we’re not marketable. - See more at: http://nkjemisin.com/2013/12/concern-trolling-and-gratuitous-diversity/#sthash.aFx1j1qx.dpuf

Plans for slave galleys calculated the difference between kidnapped females and males only as one of volume occupied on board: five females were allotted the same cargo space as four males…Once ships landed…cane fields continued the dehumanization and/as unwomaning begun at sea…For one, females were employed in cane gangs in equal or higher numbers than males, performing the same tasks but living up to five years longer. But West Indian planters’s strategy of “buying rather than breeding” - working slaves to death - also meant that pregnant workers received no differential treatment, and slave motherhood was not a way for females to become women. Conscripted to cut cane even in the ninth month of pregnancy, most enslaved females never gave birth at all due to miscarriages, amenorrhea and abortions….To justify this treatment of kidnapped Africans as neuter work units, imperial narratives insisted that ungendering preceded slavery…and that something in the [Black] race’s physical makeup made its members’ animal sexual differences incapable of adding up to recognizable, desired femininity….[they] saw African females not only as beasts but as beasts of burden, noting that their “masculine physique” matched males’ in “enduring toil, hardships and privations” - proving the sexes EQUALLY fit for slavery”

On the one hand--I think this is brilliantly done, as infectious as the original song, and a great evocation of the fun that shippers have in fandoms.

We need to tweet the writers and ask if Abbie is just Ichabod’s “sidekick” now, as in tonight.

Wait a min

A lot has been made of Ichabod's various flaws thanks to the last ep