DEAD + ALIVE

Genderbends are great at revealing just how few women there are in media

I saw a genderbent version of a large cast of characters (10+) from a video game im not familiar with but I can tell immediately that out of all these characters, there are only like two women, because the genderbent version has far more women than Usual, which is more obvious that having only very few. It reminds me of a story about a dungeon master running a module who notices that there was only 1 female npc in a town, and decided to genderbend the whole town. Almost every npc the players encountered was a woman, and they became suspicious that something had happened to all the men, a conclusion they never would have come to if the dm hadn't genderswapped all the npcs.

I've noticed in recent years that, at least within mainstream usamerican culture, the sympathetic petty criminal archetype has largely fallen out of favor. you still have plenty of stories of noble nights, benevolent aristocrats, sympathetic mercenaries, but the idea of a thief with a heart of gold is increasingly rare. often petty criminals are just used as uncomplicated cannon fodder, so the protagonist has something human-shaped that they can kill or mutilate without remorse. you see this with dnd players often. the wicked king or the cruel dragon can be reasoned with, but a highway bandit robbing caravans to eat is perfectly fine to torture to death with sorcery

this is no less common outside of fantasy, either. god knows how many books, films, games, about sympathetic soldiers, police, even mercenaries. sometimes they try to reckon with the inherent violence and cruelty of these careers, but they rarely have the fangs for a message sharper than "sometimes good people have to do bad things." but a thief? a mugger? god forbid, a drug dealer? uncomplicatedly evil vermin, all. again, just used as cannon fodder, purely to provide something human-shaped to hate and brutalize without conscience

there is an obvious racial angle to this, as people grow more leery towards "those people are evil and inhuman because they look different," the message shifts to "those people are evil and inhuman because they are criminals," paired with heavily biased (and significantly more publicized) criminalization of racial minorities to achieve the same goal of publicly condoned repression and violence

What are you reading rn, why are you reading it, and what format are you reading it in (physical book, ereader, on your phone etc)

I hear being kind is punk but is it ska? Is being kind ska? I don't care about being kind unless it's ska.

why do we always bash girls for poisoning their family with arsenic but never question if the family had bad vibes? or was unpleasant to be around?

Come to think of it, it really is insane that my entire country is burning alive and literally no one in the rest of the world cares. Thousands of Indians are dying every day from the heat, it's 45+ degrees in multiple areas, the government couldn't give two fucks, we're getting severe warnings and red alerts, and not a soul outside of South Asia is speaking about it because why would you ever care about brown people