‘but luke and leia were supposed to be a couple and they made them siblings!!1!’
listen my guy… anh was created as a standalone film. there were never any plans to create another movie, let alone expand it into a trilogy. lucas kind of thought it was gonna bomb lol.
therefore, when esb went into production, there was no plan whatsoever, lucasfilm had a blank slate. they had room to do whatever they wanted–including making luke and leia related. but tfa was created as the introduction to a laid-out trilogy. rian johnson even collaborated with jj during the production of tfa to make sure that episode seven and eight would line up. everything that happened in tfa was put there knowing exactly where the story was headed.
case in point: stop using ‘bUt LUKe anD leIA!!111!’ to dismiss finnrey
thank u
lol if i never have to see that fucking terrible ass nonsensical argument again
luke/leia was not an intentional bait and switch. literally them being sibs was a retcon and esb was one million percent han/leia from moment one, much like tfa is one million percent finnrey, and if you somehow don’t see that it is because you are bad at watching movies.
furthermore there was pretty much nothing regarding romance in anh except for the expectation of luke/leia bcs of their narrative positions and han like winking at leia once.
so to try to take the super obviously romantic relationship between finn and rey that is the FUCKING EMOTIONAL CENTER of the entire FILM and say that not only is it going to be retconned for no reason bcs the original trilogy happened under completely and entirely different circumstances, but it’s equivalent to the negligible romance shit that was in anh is just
!?!?1/1?!?/1
you’re trying way too hard and you need to fucking stop
like fucking seriously STOP LOOKING FOR THE TWEEST like star wars as if obligated to have one
darth vader being luke and leia’s father is literally the only such twist in the history of star wars made entirely possible BECAUSE of the production circumstances of the original trilogy, i.e. unexpected success of a standalone film
star wars is not subtle. it never has been. stop pretending that they’re trying to make you ferret out obscure clues and deliberately mislead you with red herrings that take up an entire film just for the Surprise
France’s politicians and community leaders have criticised the “intolerable” violence against Paris’ Jewish community, after a pro-Palestinian rally led to the vandalizing and looting of Jewish businesses and the burning of cars.
please please please spread this around, please speak up about this, please let everyone know that this is not okay, please please please protect my people from a second kristallnacht, please
Listen. I love my followers and my mutuals dearly. You know how occasionally I post something like ‘every Jew on this site has a list in their head of who reblogs what and who ignores posts about Jews’? I’m talking about this shit. I have been seeing things on my dash about the situation of Jews in France for over a year, but it’s coming from other Jews 99% of the time. Please stop ignoring this. This is literally history repeating itself and we can’t be the only ones calling it out again.
Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.
Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:
chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).
(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y’all.)
famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”
for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.
ALSO IMPORTANT:
SWAG
I am absolutely ashamed to admit I had NO idea Dumas was black.
daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman
he invaded egypt
the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”
then napoleon showed up
napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus
the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”
this did not make napoleon happy
in fact it made him jealous
napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud
Jeremy Tiang Peak white privilege: an American history professor criticises my play, which is set in 18th Century China, for not mentioning America. US (2016) [Source]
There are not enough plays about Chinese history. We need more. This one, as an example, tells you a lot about family life and the deplorable positions of women in China who are not concubines or royals. They have no rights at all in an era where, particularly in the United States and England, feminism was starting to thrive…
It was during this time, too, that America began to trade with China. Following the American Revolution, the U.S. made Samuel Shaw, a retired Continental Army officer, its first China Consul. He arrived in China in 1784, set up offices and began to participate in trade with China, mainly involving China’s vast tea production. Some more of this story should have been told in the play.
Also worth noting that HLM (imo one of the greatest novels in human history, not just China) is a semi-autobiographical novel based on the author’s childhood in the Yongzheng reign, aka the 1730s. BEFORE THE UNITED STATES WAS EVEN A COUNTRY! We don’t know for sure who exactly Cao Xueqin was (we have it narrowed down to a couple of guys in the Cao family), but he probably died in the 1760s, before the Declaration of Independence was even written!
And this is not even to get started on the utter BS of “[Women in China] have no rights at all in an era where, particularly in the United States and England, feminism was starting to thrive.” This is just incorrect. It’s incorrect about women in Chinese history (which I can expand more on if people want), and about Chinese vs American history at the time, and equally importantly, it’s incorrect about the world of the novel, where nearly all the women are educated, highly literate, and have a fair degree of freedom inside the household.
I don’t expect every reviewer of a play or movie to have read the original work, or to know the historical context of the work they’re reviewing. But if you’re going to criticize the historical accuracy of something, at least get it right!
Anyway, the real moral of this story is that you should all read 紅樓夢, preferably the David Hawkes/ John Minford Story of the Stone translation, because it is one of the great achievements of human literature.
To keep this pure, stay OUT of the comments section on any articles about this precious baby being the Gerber baby…
Her name is isla and she’s from Troy, Michigan and the babies were judged based on how happy they looked in their pictures and isla’s parents revived $50,000 and they plan on donating some to charity and the rest will pay off debts and be saved for the future isla is going to be the gerber baby spokesmodel for the year please be sure to support her and her future http://wgntv.com/2016/01/28/meet-isla-the-adorable-new-gerber-baby-contest-winner/ -mod g
Oh my god she’s so cute. I’m not good enough to look at her. She is so pure.
In the middle of a controversy over white actor Joseph Fiennes’ new role as Michael Jackson in an upcoming British TV movie, who better to hear from than the King of Pop himself? In 1993, Jackson explained his vitiligo and his pride in being black. That didn’t stop Fiennes from coming up with an excuse for his casting.
“[Jackson] was probably closer to my color than his original color.”
Really, Fiennes? That is your defense of your being cast to play a black man? How gross can you get?
It’s blackface, I don’t care if they even lighten Fiennes’ skin. Michael was eviscerated over a condition he could not control. Even after his autopsy confirmed that he was telling the truth about his vitiligo, people still don’t get it. He was Black. He NEVER passed as white, was never treated like a white person, and he never tried to pass. He is not interchangeable with a white person because he had a condition he was open about but was denied by the media.
thanks to the recent casting of white actor Joseph Fiennes as Michael Jackson i’m gonna say this once again:
Michael Jackson was BLACK
he was proud to be black and continuously said so throughout his life
he supported black communities, attended black pride events, wrote songs/spoke out against police brutality/institutional racism, and explicitly stated to Oprah that he would not want a white actor to portray him because he was a black American
mj suffered from vitiligo as confirmed by his official autopsy report and thus underwent a gradual depigmentation of his skin
a white man playing him IS white washing
do not see this movie, do not support this movie, and let your outrage be known
Please everyone reblog this, this is really important.
Teenager from India invents device that can convert breath to speech
A high school student from India has invented a device that can convert a person’s breath into speech, to give millions of people around the world suffering from speech impediment a ‘voice’ for the first time.
Sixteen-year-old Arsh Shah Dilbagi has developed a new technology called ‘TALK’, which is a cheap and portable device to help people who are physically incapable of speaking express themselves. Right now, 1.4 percent of the world’s population has very limited or no speech, due to conditions such as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), locked-in syndrome (LIS), Encephalopathy (SEM), Parkinson’s disease, and paralysis.
His name is Arsh Shah Dilbagi and he’s 16 years old. Gettin tired of sensationalized “mystery baby from a country where people are brown does a science thing!” articles. Use peoples names, don’t act so surprised when people of color are geniuses.
myblog 