One of the crazier things about antisemitism is how bad most people are at spotting it. Like. Something can feature every antisemitic stereotype/dogwhistle/etc at once & if it doesn't explicitly say I Hate Jews 🗣 most people will just go "huh? Whuh?" if you point it out

The other day I offhandedly mentioned that the umbrella academy (netflix. Also the comics but I digress) is antisemitic and I got someone in my notes saying "tua got antisemitic later ?? I stopped watching after the first two seasons" . Brother the first two seasons' main villainous entity is a secret Yiddish speaking organization of lizard people who snatch babies to bring the apocalypse which they refer to with the word cabal in season 2. Like tbf there's a degree of subtlety through most of s1 until the finale (baby snatching lizard people reveal) but after that I don't know how you could miss it

Like I'll admit as a teenager who was kind of stupid I didn't think much of the light sprinkling of Yiddish words in the villain's dialogue especially because she does similarly with French, etc, but oh my god. Girl. The baby snatching lizard people

Being a fan of any sort of fantasty/sci-fi type fiction is always an excersize in being aware that what some people see as a wacky fantastic concept, other people view as a version how they think the world actually works. Like with Orcs. "What if there was a group of people who were all stupid, cruel, and dangerous. Imagine the sort of person who sees nothing wrong with killing people just to take their stuff, that lives to do violence against the innocent. Imagine this was biologically innate to this group, such that you could visually recognize a member of this group and know these things were true about them." Like, okay, that's fantastical worldbuilding shortcut to bring you to the point where you can enact some entertaining heroic violence without needing to spend time justifying it, occupying a similar space to "What if space aliens invaded and tried to kill us all" or "What if there was A Dracula". But there is a very real subset of people who will read that and see it as a fantastical reflection of their very real worldview. "Ah yes, in THIS fantastical setting, one of the groups of biologically inferior people who are ontologically evil and should be exterminated are called Orcs!" Antisemitism can be especially weird with this dynamic, partially because it is an extremely versatile prejudice, and partially because a lot of it sounds so absolutely batshit that it can be hard to believe that it's reflecting something people actually believe. It's like "Huh, this work features a group of people that are All Greedy" "Well, that's extremely general. Nobody likes greedy people, that isn't inheriently antisemetic" "Hey, this work features a group of hollow earth lizard people who disguise themselves as humans to secretly control the world, they steal babies for their blood and control all the major corporations and governments" "Well, that is extremely bizzare and specific. That's just a wacky fantastical concept and cannot represent anything anybody actually thinks".

Yeah literally. I personally experienced a lot of that second one earlier in my Learning About Antisemitism; so much of the conspiracy shit is so bizarre and nonsensical you'd never think to connect it with antisemitism unless you're either jewish yourself or already the type of person who thinks Jews Control The World or whatever. Once you realize that type of shit has a tendency to Secretly Mean Jewish People a lot of other things click into place and now You are the bearer of the curse (explaining this to other people)

The thing about the lizard-people-conspiracy specifically, the reason it's able to be a Relevant Prejudice despite being so fucking absurd to anybody outside it, is because it's structured such that plenty of people can buy into different parts of it, and then fundamentally end up at the same place as far as actions they want to take, even if they don't agree on the details of the conspiracy. There's a guy who thinks that jews are literally secretly blood drinking lizard people who run a vast conspiracy to control the world. There's a guy who thinks it's absurd to imagine lizard people, but he DOES think that Jews steal babies for their blood and secretly control the world. There's a guy who scoffs at all the blood stuff, that's ridiculous, but he does think that there is a secret group of powerful jews who control the world. There's a guy who thinks it's absurd to imagine any sort of actual organized shadowy conspiracy that bosses around governments and CEOs, but he does think that Jews hold a disproportionate amount of influence and use it to help each other out to the detriment of anybody else. All these guys hold different beliefs and vehemently disagree with each other, but they're all driven to act on their beliefs in roughly similar ways.

Listen. I'm a dyke. But. Why would you draw this of a character who's a literal child abuser?

the way the dinosaurs were here for like 180 million years and we're just like ughhh rip to the monsters. now onto the main story of planet earth humanity. btw we're 3 seconds old