The Høneybun Supreme

Julius Caesar’s two most famous assassins, Brutus and Cassius, were the son and son-in-law, respectively, of a Roman noblewoman named Servilia. And Servilia and Caesar were fucking. Not just a one off thing, either. They were having an affair for literally decades. Everyone knew it. Why did everyone know? Well, one time Caesar and Cato, who was Servilia’s brother, were having a debate (catfight) in the Senate and a servant came in and passed Caesar a note. Cato jumps up, all indignant, and announces that Caesar is committing treason right in the middle of the Senate. See that treasonous note he just got handed? (Like I said, it was a catfight.) And Caesar is like, well Cato, here’s the treasonous note, how about we read it aloud to the Senate, huh? It was a love letter from Servilia. And that’s the story of how Caesar made Cato stand there and listen to the sexts Cato’s sister sent Caesar get read aloud in front of the whole Senate.

So Brutus’s great-grandfather was named Quintus Servilius Caepio and he was a completely shit person generally and got two entire armies massacred because he was an elitist shithead and wouldn’t work with someone he thought was low-class but anyway. He was on campaign and he captured this huge hoard of gold at this town called Tolosa and sent it back to the Roman treasury. But then the caravan carrying the gold was hijacked by bandits and it all disappeared. Surprise! Caepio hired the bandits himself and stole all the gold. People were (understandably) pissed.

I was actually wrong in the tags, it wasn’t Brutus’s grandfather, it was his great-uncle. Anyway, so Roman citizens were allowed to vote, but the other Italians, who made up like half of the Roman armies, weren’t technically citizens and couldn’t vote. Which annoyed them. So Brutus’s great-uncle, Marcus Livius Drusus, basically got all the Italians to swear an oath that they would do whatever he said if he could get them citizenship. And he almost managed it. Only historical example I can think of of someone trying to take over a country by expanding democracy. Drusus got assassinated pretty fucking fast.

And then there’s Cato, which, don’t get me fucking started. The dude tore out his own intestines with his bare hands because he hate Caesar so much. I am not fucking joking.

So Caesar fucked everything. Everything. This wasn’t a secret or anything. The dude (probably) fucked the King of Bithynia when he was like 20 and the king was like 80. He made a habit of seducing the wives of his political enemies just to be an asshole. When he held a triumphal march through Rome, his soldiers chanted “Home we bring the bald whore-monger, Romans lock you wives away.” Caesar was basically the embodiment of Big Dick Energy and he made sure everyone knew it.

So Clodia was like the tabloid sensation of her day. She had lots of affairs, maybe killed her husband, and then she got involved with this guy Caelius. Eventually they broke up, so Clodia got Caelius prosecuted for attempted murder. You know, like you do. I don’t have time to get into all the juicy details, but let’s just say it involved accusations of incest, gleeful slut-shaming, and Cicero’s wife being bizarrely jealous.

As for Antony and Curio, they were friends and Cicero at one point (after Curio was dead, if I remember correctly) accused Antony of having had an affair with Curio when they were young men. It’s not clear if this is true, because on the one hand, it’s totally believable (if Caesar was the embodiment of Big Dick Energy, Antony was the embodiment of just Big Dick. Like, he had a really big dick and he liked to show it off to everyone) but on the other hand, Cicero hated Antony and was talking all kinds of shit about him at the time, so who the fuck knows.

Anyone with a name that starts with a “Z”, ends with an “i”, and isn’t some kind of Italian pasta, IS SERIOUS

cobra starship

neon trees

metro station

3OH3

taio cruz

owl city

far east movement

ne-yo

onerepublic

lady antebellum

shinedown

daughtry

the fray

kings of leon

theory of a deadman

skillet

rob thomas

Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories. 

We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls. 

Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left. 

This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left. 

And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left. 

And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right. 

Until these are the bowls. 

Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other. 

This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl. 

This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference. 

This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.

The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss. 

This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world. 

I mean, imagine your party guests arrive

Oh my god they are adorable!

And they see their bowls

But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.

I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?

But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat. 

And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant. 

And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.

I have this one white friend.

And - [mocking] I have this one white friend, I’m not racist. And like - where was I even going with this? [laughs] She’s not even my friend, she’s just someone I know. Okay, whatever, ‘kay, so this one white person that I know - [under breath] (I know a lot, my entire town is white.) Anyway, um, one day, she comes up to me, and she’s like,

“Jenny, what are you?” and, you know, that’s like white person talk for like, [sarcastic mocking] “what FUCKING country do you come from? Like obviously you’re not from here.”  And I’m like, “um, I’m Chinese.”

And she’s like “What? You’re Chinese?”

And I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t know why that’s so much of a surprise.”

And she’s like “Well, I thought you said you were Asian.”

And - [deep breath] [pause] there was a moment, a good minute and a half, where I left my body and ascended onto another plane, and I screamed into the abyss of that plane [pause] because she did not know that Asian and Chinese are… I, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t even… you know, whatever.

So, return to my body, from the [pause] other plane of existence in which I scream. A lot. And I tell her: “You know, China, China, you see, the country that I’m from, is a part of Asia.”

And she’s like, “Where’s Asia?”

[whispers] She asked me. Where Asia is.

And I say, “Well, Asia consists of, you know..” and I list the different Asian countries and she’s like “Whaat?”

And I’m like [sarcastically] it’s, it’s this thing, you know, that you learn about in like third grade geography. It’s a continent! And she’s like “A continent?”

And I’m like “Yes.”

And she goes, “so it’s not a country?”

I’m like, “No.”

And she’s like “What’s the difference?”

And I’m like [deep breath] “America, you see, has like North, Central, South, so like, take somewhere from Canada; they are North American but they’re also Canadian…”

And she’s like “I don’t understand.”

I cannot believe this isn’t porn