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she got burned at the stake for wearing men's clothes, she was a teenage warrior protecting her country with whole patriarchal systems against her, show some fucking respect

Wohoo! New video essay.

100 years of Little Women movies, Laurie has not been played by a brown skin actor.

In the book Laurie has brown skin, curly black hair, a long nose, nice teeth, and little hands and feet. He is the same size as Jo making him equal to her. When he asks Jo to dance he makes a little French bow.

For the 1880 edition of Little Women Louisa´s publisher demanded she makes changes to the books. Little Women was a huge hit and publishers want to make money. Now all of Laurie´s foreign features were removed because they were not suitable for a romantic suitor. He became more handsome, with no mention of the colour of his skin and he is taller than Jo, making him superior to her.

The original description of Laurie, was later on restored to the novel, but for some reason this "romanticsed (white) version of him still appears in the films.

19th Century Racism

This is not in my video essay, but these are thougths I have for future episodes. The racism against Italians was very strong during the time Little Women was written. I have been reading some famous 19th century children/young adult books lately with some pretty awful stereotyping.

Little Lord Fauntleroy

This book was written by Frances Hodgson Burnett, writer of Little Princess and Secret Garden. Strory tells about a young American boy, who becames a sole heir of an English Lord. This book was suuuuper popular in the 19th century.

There is a conwoman in the story, who tries to proof that Fauntleroy is not to real lord but her son is. The reason they give for woman's lunacy, her quick temper and tendency to lie, is that she is Italian.

Kilmeny Of The Orchard

A book written by Lucy Maud Montgomery, writer of Anne of Green Gables. This was a book I thought was very romantic when I was a teen. Now I don't really like it, to be honest. It tells about a mute girl called Kilmeny and she likes to play her violin in an orchard owned by her relatives. Then one day Eric Marshall enters the garden and falls in love with Kilmeny  This is how he is described "one of those men regarding whom less-favoured mortals are tempted to wonder why all the gifts of fortune should be showered on one individual". The villain of the story is a gardener called Neil and he is in love with Kilmeny and eventually tries to kill Eric in jealous rage.

In the end of the book Neil gets arrested, and and they say that he is a murderer and a dangerous man because he is Italian.

Neil is not Neil's birth name. We don't know what it is. He was an orphan, an outsider, he was raised by Kilmeny's relatives but no one took care of him. I actually feel really bad for Neal when I read the book, yes he is violent and almost becomes a killer, but honestly, Kilmeny's family has always neglected him and abused him.

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Obviosly, I have not read every 19th century children's book under the sun, but these are few examples where I have come across racism against Italians.

Little Women definitely turns this around, because Laurie's Italian side, is shown very much a positive thing. It is something poetic, romantic and exciting, for Laurie himself and the March sisters.

Born at Concord, July, 1840. Died in Paris, December, 1879.

Almost 10 years after the publication of Good Wives, May Alcott fell in love in London. He was a Swiss named Ernest Nieriker. Like I said in my previous post, May would speak so fondly of him in her letter to home, that when the couple got engaged, the family already expected it. When Ernest was called to work in Paris, they decided to elope to avoid separation. Sounds familiar? Just wait. Ernest was a violinist who ultimately decided to continue with his father’s business. He always supported and admired May’s artistic career and never ever represented an obstacle to her. He was a true partner to her and made her the happiest woman in the world. They also have a daughter named after her sister Louisa, lovingly called “Lulu”.

Our boy Leo has only gone and written an Encyclical Letter.

“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.“

It’s mind blowing to me that the pope also shares my thoughts about being human in a digital age that increasingly detaches us from our humanity and is dumbing us down:

“Without careful attention, an educational system lacking in a love for truth may emerge, in which an incessant flow of information replaces the essential exercise of research, reflection and discernment. As knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented, it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought.”

Honestly, I think people massively oversimplify the political coding of the Death Eaters by immediately jumping to “they’re literally Nazis,” because that’s not really how fascism works as a historical phenomenon, nor is it how the books actually frame them. They absolutely borrow aesthetics and rhetoric from fascist movements —blood purity discourse, authoritarianism, persecution of minorities, political terror, cults of violence, etc.— but they function much more like a supremacist terrorist cult built around a charismatic leader than like an actual coherent fascist state apparatus.

And honestly, despite Rowling’s intentions being fairly obvious, if what she truly wanted was to create a movement directly paralleling Nazism, then she probably should have researched totalitarian movements a bit more deeply, because what she actually ended up writing resembles European nationalist terrorist groups far more than a fascist regime in the historical sense.

People also constantly confuse nationalism with fascism when they are not automatically the same thing. Fascism is an entire political, social, and military structure supported by large sectors of the population who are alienated and mobilised through populist propaganda, mass identity-building, and institutional control. That’s not really what happens with Voldemort and the Death Eaters at all. Voldemort and his followers are ultimately still a minority faction operating largely through fear, infiltration, and terrorism rather than mass social mobilisation. More importantly, they don’t even seem particularly interested in creating a genuinely “new” political or social order in the fascist revolutionary sense. Their goal is much more conservative and reactionary: preserving the supremacy, status, and privileges of a specific social minority within wizarding society. That is a very different political dynamic.

I think Rowling was given a lot of importance and relevance because she presents a character like Hermione, who is part of the main trio and is a character with her own agency. That’s something that wasn’t very common in children’s fantasy novels, especially because we know perfectly well that the most well-known fantasy novels tend to have female characters whose only goal is to get a boyfriend, and in the end their boyfriend becomes more important than they are and we could talk about an endless list of those. But the problem is that Rowling hates women —she hates women who aren’t like her, to be more soecific— and she clearly is a woman who has a deep need for male validation, and her projection of what a “valid” woman or a “valid” teenage girl is has a lot to do with her own self-image. She often says that Hermione is a kind of parody of herself, and she confesses that when she was in school she didn’t have many friends, because since she was very smart and got very good grades and the teachers loved her, the rest of the kids —not kids, but girls— were very jealous of her. And it’s like: no, J.K. Rowling, I’m so sorry, but you were an unbearable jerk and you didn’t know how to make female friends, and that’s the problem you have.

Likewise, she projects herself onto Lily Potter, because Lily is that image of the Madonna, the almighty mother who can do everything, who gives her life for her son, that image of the ultimate woman, as if the paradigm of femininity is Lily, who embodies a female stereotype based on the Virgin Mary and the woman sacrificed for her offspring, who is so good, so holy, and so pure that she is capable of fixing men and making them change their paths of perdition.

All the women she portrays positively in her books are sexist and patriarchal stereotypes, and one of the things that most reinforces this idea is that precisely the women she criticises through the narrative —the women who are constantly punished by the narrative— are women who escape the validation of the male gaze through which she constructs her “valid” female characters. I mean, her valid female characters are always Pick-Me Girls, Manic Pixie Dream Girls, or “I’m not like the other girls.” They’re all stereotypes validated by the male gaze, the typical girls you see in indie movies made by nerdy guys who clearly hate the popular girl because she’s never going to look at them in her fucking life, so they invent an entire narrative about what the “cool girl” is.

So we have Hermione, who is not like the other girls because she’s very smart and reads books and doesn’t read gossip magazines or spend all day talking about boys because that would be too much for a teenager, God forbid. Then we have Ginny Weasley, who is basically a nobody who doesn’t matter for five whole books, but suddenly becomes some kind of sexual icon, but a sexual icon seen from a male-sexuality perspective, because she is the stereotype of the “Girl Bro” Basically: the girl who is hot as hell but at the same time behaves like a guy, does guy things, likes guy things, talks like a guy and is always surrounded by guys because she fits the male fantasy of the girl who is really your bro, has the same personality traits as an average male stereotype, but she’s gorgeous and super hot and everyone wants to fuck her, but in the end you get to fuck her. She’s the typical girl that guys addicted to video games and hentai would jerk off to.

Then we have Luna, who is a bit of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but at the same time, for example, Ginny treats her like a fucking pet, so she doesn’t actually get much agency.

And then we have the adult women: to be a “valid” adult woman in Rowling’s world you have to be a mother and give everything up for your husband. Tonks is an Auror, she’s totally independent, she’s cool, she does her own thing and suddenly she falls in love with Lupin, loses absolutely all her personality, and on top of that she’s able to forgive him after he gets her pregnant and then leaves. But sure, let’s understand the poor guy, because we women are caregivers above all, and we are nurses. So well, the poor man has mental health problems, we’ll help him.

We have Fleur, who could have been a woman with her own agency, she’s the only girl chosen for the Triwizard Tournament. By the way, of all the participants in the Triwizard Tournament she’s the only woman, and she’s the one who loses all the trials, because of course J.K. Rowling was never going to let a woman succeed at tasks designed for men, not ever. And on top of that, the other girls hate her for being pretty and for being French — which, okay, I understand hating her for being French, I am the first to hate the French — but they hate her for being beautiful and for not fitting into that dynamic where girls can only be cool through male validation. It’s insane. And she only proves she is worthy as a woman when her husband is disfigured and she says, “No, no, I love him just the same.” Like, what? When she says “Above all, I am a wife,” that’s when she becomes valid within the story.

The rest of the women are mothers. Molly Weasley has only one role: to be a mother. An unbearable mother, but a mother. Narcissa Malfoy gets redemption in the narrative because before being an elitist she is a mother, and that’s why the story forgives her. Lily, what can we even say about Lily that hasn’t been said already? She feels straight out of the Holy Bible. It’s vomit-inducing. All of them achieve their validity as women through marriage and children.

And then we have the women who don’t have children, who are constantly portrayed as horrible women. Aunt Marge doesn’t have children and on top of that Rowling gives her masculine physical attributes, because of course for Rowling bad women have to be ugly as well. Then Umbridge doesn’t have children, terrible person. Rita Skeeter doesn’t have children, terrible person. The only people she spares who don’t have children are those who perform maternal roles. For example, Madam Pomfrey has no children, but she’s a nurse. McGonagall has no children but she is a maternal figure because she is a teacher. But then, for example, we have Bellatrix Lestrange, who of course not only doesn’t have children, but is also a soldier, and on top of that she’s married but devoted to another man, all the worst things a woman could be. Not having children, having ambitions in life other than being a good wife and mother, and treating your husband like a trophy while loving another man, so she has not only to be a villiam but also A PSYCHYATRIZED ONE lmao.

Sorry if I think your wife’s situation is way more fucked up, considering she didn’t want that marriage either, but unlike you she has to spend her life confined to a house wondering whether she’ll manage to survive childbirth. Forgive me if I don’t feel sorry for you when you treat her like garbage because you take your resentment out on her and become a terrible husband despite knowing she depends entirely on you. Forgive me if I don’t care that you can’t be sexually free in the 18th century when your wife isn’t sexually free either, except unlike you she also isn’t socially free, politically free, or personally free. You can go to brothels and sleep with whoever the hell you want; she can’t even leave the house without being judged and causing a scandal. You do not make me feel sorry for you.

Happy Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month!

We’re marking May with a JSTOR Daily roundup bringing together stories on history, culture, migration, art, and everyday life. These pieces draw on scholarship to offer context and insight into the lives and experiences of communities with roots in Asia and the Pacific.

You’ll find pieces on Thai American communities in Los Angeles, the legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Filipino and Japanese American experiences shaped by labor and migration, Vietnamese migration and policy, and Native Hawaiian education and culture. There are also pieces on Pacific Islander histories and cultural expression, alongside work on music, literature, and food shaping identity across generations.

See the full roundup.

Also Katniss 5 pages earlier with her “friend”:

Katniss 4 pages later with her “friend”:

**12/19 ZIP!**

**(About creating romantic characters)**

The two co-starred in last year's drama *Pending Train*, where they played survival partners in a futuristic world. This time, they take on the roles of lovers.

**Aks:** The hardest part is definitely feeling shy!

**Aks:** Going from comrades to lovers, the sense of closeness is honestly a bit embarrassing at first!

**Moka:** I get it! It’s like that awkward feeling, a little ticklish even.

**(Even during breaks on set, the two seemed to exude a date-like vibe. When holding a camera…)**

**Moka:** Hurry up and take it! It’s embarrassing! (laughs)

**(When interacting with Moka, Aks paid special attention to…)**

**Aks:** Like asking where she went to eat or starting with finding her good points.

**Moka:** That’s true~

**Aks:** When considering how to evoke deep emotions, I would first focus on finding her many strengths. Then, when acting, I would connect that “this is what liking someone feels like” emotion to the character.

**Moka:** It feels like I’m seeing a whole new side of Akaso san!

**Staff:** It’s true, you wouldn’t have that kind of expression if you didn’t feel love.

**Aks:** So embarrassing~

**Aks:** But as a person, I really like her!

**Moka:** Thanks~ 🫰 Thanks~ 🫰