Empurress of this Feral Cat Colony

benrey in the corner:

great chief returns depicts a bunch of savage, violent tribalistic warriors who are framed as Needing To Modernize and the process of doing so involves destroying sacred sites. this is INCREDIBLY fucking bad for how it dehumanizes and erases their culture and frames them as in Need Of Enlightenment. fuck GCR. it's also mesoamerica for some reason. and also the men are full anthros but the women are conventionally attractive kemonomimi. about the only upside is that we get Flint, the first woman in Arknights to have both dark skin and dark hair.

operation originium dust, walk in the dust, and Fire Within The Sand show us a version of sargon that is considerably more sympathetic to its inhabitants, and in both cases the Columbians are heavily involved in WHY things have gone to shit. but it flattens the perspective of the people living there to mostly just victims struggling to survive; their culture is implied but we don't really get the impression they have anything to LIVE for, and this kind of reductive depiction of africa and the middle east is also really common. the vouivre alliance as depicted in Records of Originium Blacksteel falls into this category as well.

ideal city doesn't really focus much on acahualla but it DOES give us flint's operator record, which actively rebuts the points originally brought up by great chief returns. flint and chiave's gang actively exploit the racist beliefs of the "civilized" sargonians looking to exploit their new alliance with durin. it's a really neat story... but it's also undercut by the fact that we keep cutting back to acahualla with the goofy dumbass crocodile-men being played for laughs.

Tales Within The Sand is ANOTHER mixed bag but one of the things that stuck out to me was that we finally got a focus on both the happiness and culture people had; we got a vibe for what ordinary life was like. sure, the lords ameer are exploitative, but that's kinda just what Terra is LIKE. but the individual nodes have festivals, food, and loads of other little joys. kestrel joins flint in our list of dark-skinned/haired women.

Adventure That Cannot Wait For The Sun and Medjehtiqedti Bound are kinda notable because... we FINALLY get to see the "civilized" sargon that Inam comes from. like, it's a modern sargonian city, no-one is fucked over by constant war, no-one is engaged in mindless violence against each other for shits and giggles. the relationship between egypt and both the rest of africa and the middle is fairly complex and i'm not gonna pretend i can speak for their perspective. but despite the clusterfuck of their relationship with minos, AND the mess that comes of arknights geopolitics mostly being inspired by the early 20th century but making the egypt analogue ottoman AND pharaonic (resulting in a version of egypt that can neither engage with the modern muslim experience OR the experience of colonialism under the british that characterizes the early 20th century particularly with regards to the denial of heritage egyptomania resulted in)... It's A Really Fucking Nice City. it's modern, it's clean, it's peaceful. it is finally the context Arknights has been implying since the story started - Sargon Is Just Another Part Of Terra, with intercity net and plumbing and gay nepo baby catgirls.

it is absolutely something that needs to be criticized, and i think arknights unwillingness RETCON is one of its major weaknesses esp. with stuff like Saluzzo's first name and Acahualla, but we can see a clear trajectory here where HG seems to be learning and improving. so like. we absolutely SHOULD keep criticizing the depictions of both sargon and minos.

go out and fuck someone you aren’t attracted to because a stranger on tumblr said to

go out and date someone you aren’t attracted to because a stranger on tumblr said to

You’re Not Allowed To Be Gay Anymore

what this post DOES mean

if you just ‘prefer’ to avoid majority black areas of your city

if you just ‘prefer’ to read, write, think, and talk about men

if you just ‘prefer’ to socialize with people you (perceive as) your assigned birth sex

if you just ‘prefer’ to exclusively watch white-directed movies, read white-written books, listen to white-authored music

if you just unconsciously perceive men as more authoritative/competent and ‘prefer’ to be spoken to by them

I just remembered that this was a thing that was HILARIOUS in 2006 and apparently that was ten years ago now.

Old people: join with me in remembering how funny we found this on LiveJournal.

Young people: look at this lolrus, it’s so happy, it has a bucket.

part of my role is going to people and gently saying "hey please stop taking photos of people without their consent. that can be dangerous for the people in the photos and you were asked not to at the start of the rally/march" and I have had people threaten to punch me over it so........

just stop taking photos. I don't care if they're "just for you" or if you "plan to redact them" you have no idea what situation someone is in and your photos will never be secure. if you want to take a photo just ask people in it first.

and of course they're always like "well what about those people taking photos" and I explain that "those people are known to our community and know who does and doesn't want a photo. people have already consented or not consented at past events to that person's photos and they know this" or "thanks for pointing that out I will talk to them too because they also should not be taking photos." this also, of course, does not solve the conflict and they continue taking photos anyways.

I have my own tactics for stopping photos when someone refuses that don't involve smashing cameras but they tend to escalate things anyways.