Actor in Training

right wingers: who cares, it’s just Michigan! America comes first!

11 year old: Michigan is in America

right wingers:

heres an example

and it also gives you the hex code values for them too its p neat !

darcy doesn’t sing a single note even during conversations where everyone else is singing at him that is until the argument following his first attempt at proposing to lizzy where you can see his restraint fall away

his first big solo is the letter he writes her

gelsey bell is mary and the unofficial narrator and she sits down at her piano to describe whats going on but before she can ever reveal her feelings on the matter, starting with that gelsey bell scream, mr bennet comes over and does the whole ‘that’s nice dear but give someone else a turn’

mr wickham has this huge ballad about how darcy ruined his life and its super melodramatic and touching

mr collins proposal to lizzy is an absolute bop that he gets so into he forgets for a moment what he’s doing he’s just owning the stage

wickham has a song where he’s trying to seduce lydia but she’s not even listening she’s just monologuing about how excited she is to get laid

during darcy’s second proposal he keeps hesitating waiting for lizzy to interrupt him like she has done every time before but she doesn’t say anything until he’s finished

at the end mary sits down at the piano and right where she’d usually be interrupted, kitty joins her and harmonises

 jane and bingley have the adorable upbeat romantic duet which is just them being super polite like ‘oh so nice to have you here’ ‘so nice to be here’ interspersed with their inner monologue which is just them being like fucking jesus I’m so in love

the bingley sisters probably have a really cool mean solo

lady catherine has this terrifying disney villain song in the garden

“Oh, my burqa was of lovely silk and I was so glad I made petticoats out of it!”

Zohra with her husband Kameshwar Sehgal in 1945.

“What actually makes brings out your beauty is the radiance of being content and you can only be content when you are employed in something you love.”

“You see me now when I am old and ugly, in fact you should have seen me earlier — when I was young and ugly!”

Zohra at her 100th birthday was quietly humming “Abhi To Main Jawan Hoon” (I am still young) by poet Hafeez Jullundhri, as she attacked the huge cake.

Great question! This has been a hot topic and the point is not to make artists and authors scared to depict cultures (and genders and sexual orientations) not their own, but to make sure that they’re doing it respectfully. That’s the real difference between Cultural Appropriation & Cultural Appreciation. 

A good question here is to ask yourself WHY you want to paint black girls & Han China. Do you feel strongly about showing more diverse characters? Are you making a statement about cultural clash? Is it important to the narrative you’re building? Or is it a mashup of cool shit just bc it seems cool to you? That’s not a bad place to start but you need to dig deeper.

Here’s a quick checklist of things to ask yourself:

—Have you done research into the origins and meaning of the cultural symbols you are referencing? If the answer is “I just thought it looked cool” then go do some more research. 

—Are you representing something sacred in that culture in a superficial or sexualized or fetishized way that is disrespectful to members of that culture?

—Are you profiting from using references and styles that the original culture is being discriminated for? In other words, are you getting away with something because you’re white that an asian or black or hispanic person would be punished for?

The point is not to stop white/cis/heterosexual folks from painting or writing diverse cultures, gender expressions, and sexual orientations — we’ll never get anywhere with making art and media more diverse if we leave it only to the members of that minority to do so. The point is to aim for “imaginative engagement” — I love this quote by Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie: ‘‘The moment you say a male American writer can’t write about a female Pakistani, you are saying, Don’t tell those stories. Worse, you’re saying: As an American male you can’t understand a Pakistani woman. She is enigmatic, inscrutable, unknowable. She’s other. Leave her and her nation to its Otherness. Write them out of your history.’’

The answer, as with many things, is Research & Respect.

Here’s some starter resources:

NYTimes: Is Cultural Appropriation Always Wrong?

Everyday Feminism: The Difference Between Cultural Exchange and Cultural Appropriation

Bustle: 7 Things You Might Not Realize Are Cultural Appropriation That Are

—Agent KillFee

P.S. There’s not a lot of specific material on this in illustration, but Art Directors are constantly talking about it, both the topic of how to get more diverse artists hired as well as making sure artists are depicting minority experiences with the utmost respect. White illustrators who have been doing a great job of depicting diverse characters in a white-dominated field (SciFi/Fantasy) that you can look at are Greg Ruth, Tommy Arnold, & David Palumbo. Maybe we’ll have to suggest it as a topic to Muddy Colors.

here have some more nonsense.