Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof

take yasmina’s skin being significantly lightened from her concept art. it’s inheriently malicious to lighten an arab’s skin because colorism is an oppressive structure in our society. due to colorism, the predominant view is that we’re all “exotically tan” instead of properly brown which only serves to harm those with darker skin. she was the only camper who experienced this change. darius remained dark-skin throughout concerting, kenji stayed about the same, and sammy arguably got darker. this is something that ONLY impacted an arab character.

take the debatableness of her ethnicity. a core part of our dehumanization is us “all being the same” (and by being the same, all of, say, “isis” crimes are arab crimes. we can’t be individuals). people who aren’t a part of our ethnic groups don’t understand that we WANT to be differentiated. a kurd and palestinian don’t want to be mistaken for each other. hell, a lot of kurds or assyrians don’t even want to be called “arab”. if you can’t definitively say what ethnicity an “arab” character is, you’ve done orientalism. you’ve flattened our existence. and to make matters worse, yaz is based on her creator’s levantine heritage but has a south asian voice actor. this is arguably far more racist because it plays into the other orientalist trope that south asians and west asians are interchangeable. we are as interchange as nahuas and ojibwe people. our history has overlap due to geography and trade but we are DISTINCT. we deserve both experiences to be highlighted and historically this doesn’t happen in the west. I don’t fault kausar for taking arab roles (this isn’t her first time doing so) due to the limited options for brown people BUT I will absolutely fault white people who see no issues in this kind of orientalism. *and IF yaz is meant to be south asian due to kasaur, that’s even worse because it means they saw the creator pitch a lebanese-inspired character and thought any brown will do, implicitly erasing already rare arab representation

and then you have things such as the dubai location where it becomes abundantly clear that the writing room straight up didn’t research it. they didn’t know what accent soyona spoke in (VERY important! arabic is so diverse that it’s arguably several different languages with a common alphabet). they didn’t know dubai has a massive slavery problem due to oil dictators making deals with foreigners (most residents are actually human trafficking victims serving rich foreigners like soyona). dubai was not chosen as intentional critique for such a barbaric city. it was chosen because they bought its marketing and fell for the propaganda.

every detail is so abundantly for the white gaze, not us. even details that don’t make it in. like yaz being from missouri. it is already extremely rare for us to live in the USA (we’re actually far more likely to be in LatAm. waves hand to my own diverse family history) but missouri?? there are two major arab hubs in the midwest and those are chicago and detroit. any minor research will tell you that missouri has functionally no arab population. the most relatable experience to an arab immigrant is being from or around a major city.

and of all the immigrant campers, yaz is the only one without mentions of her culture. unless you count “kebabs” which are americanized enough to be “acceptable”. sammy mentions her abuela and gets to speak spanish. kenji is given a canonical explanation to why he’s disconnected from his japanese heritage. yaz is given… a last name that is completely made up. they didn’t even do enough research to know that the proper name is fadoul not fadoulA. her favorite food is relatable to white people (pizza) and she doesn’t ever mention a jiddi/teta. yaz is so assimilated to whiteness that her ethnicity is relegated to a wiki fun fact. it’s like these shows are afraid that properly representing us will cause white viewers to get too confused. our ethnicity is so inherently othering and violent that you can only represent us if we’re white people with brown names

Per wikipedia:

The Titanic was made of steel, presumably to resist corrosion (i mean. thats why boats are made of steel i assume) but even when iron/steel rusts people did not expect to find like. decomposition. bacteria are EATING the titanic.

and there's wood furniture from the titanic that isn't decaying. hell, there are wood ships at the bottom of the ocean that archaeologists study. so the expectation people have for the titanic is not that the steel would decompose at the bottom of the ocean. Even in 100 years, since there are much more ancient preserved wooden ships iirc.

The sister ship HMHS Britannic is still perfectly preserved because of the way it sank, and partly in due to the coral that has grown around it keeping the structure in tact I believe was the reason.