When I was a child, I read a Boondocks strip starring Jar Jar Binks. Unsure of what the joke was, because the strip had him talking exactly like he did in the movie, I asked my father. He explained that the joke was that many people viewed Jar Jar Binks as a racist stereotype. I was very confused and asked him what he meant.
The next day, my dad sat me down and had me watch a movie starring Stepin Fetchit, as well as an episode of Amos n Andy, and several blackface minstrel performances. The common thread in all of them was that at least one character had an identical voice, identical body language, and near-identical mannerisms to Jar Jar Binks.
Some of them even added “-sa” as a suffix to seemingly random words. When I asked my dad why they kept doing that, my dad told me to notice who they were talking to when they said “yessa” or “nosa” or “mesa” or “yousa.” As it turns out, they only seemed to do this when talking to a white man, and they weren’t saying “-sa,” they were saying “sir.”
I wish I could find the clips my dad showed me again, because they’re pretty damning, but all I can do is give you the Boondocks strip that originally piqued my interest by combining blackface minstrels’ mannerisms with Jar Jar’s mannerisms and demonstrating that they are indistinguishable from one another:
Note: Both George Lucas and Ahmed Best, the actor who played Jar Jar Binks have claimed Jar Jar isn’t a racist caricature. On a related note, George Lucas and Ahmed Best are capable of being wrong.
Yeah I doubt he intended it but intent here is subsumed by the result
It may have been unconsciously racist, but it was not coincidentally racist. The odds that George Lucas independently invented a character that is identical to a blackface stock character are about the same that someone would write a song that is word-for-word and note-for-note identical to Bohemian Rhapsody without ever having heard it.
Like, even if we assume that it was totally unintentional, the best-case scenario is that they heard Bohemian Rhapsody, forgot it, and then unwittingly pulled it from their subconscious, believing it to be an original composition, and the worst-case is that they were jut hoping nobody would notice their song is just Bohemian Rhapsody.
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my dream is to become a knight and go to rescue a princess. there is a dragon guarding the castle. she yells no men allowed! I take off my helmet. “I am no man!” the dragon let’s me in. I find the princess. she asks me what took so long. I say “the systemic oppression of women kept me from achieving the rank of knight sooner, my princess.” she laughs. I became a knight for her. she knows this because we were lovers before she was trapped in this castle. she told her dragon friend to whisk her away so that she wouldn’t have to marry a man. she left me a letter that said “become a knight and come find me my love. only then can we be wed.” this is because of the law where if you rescue a princess from a dragon castle you get to marry her. I ask “how am I supposed to find her?” I flip the letter over. it says: “I went to the castle where we first banged.” I know exactly where to go. because it’s my castle. I am the queen of the neighboring kingdom. also a knight. also sexy. we get married. we unite the kingdoms. we both carry swords at all times.
And that’s my lesbian fantasy.
Wait so were you just locked out of your own castle for years while you tried to become a knight.
No my lesbian moms tended to the kingdom while I was gone. They ruled in my stead
my wife was residing in a castle outside the capital that me and my mothers used to spend summers in
I have more than 1 castle. Possibly more than 5
harry potter is FAKE
set in the 90s but there were 0 (zero) chokers or butterfly clips explain to me This
“Parvati scowled and removed a large ornamental butterfly from the end of her plait” (pg. 247, The Goblet of Fire)
I want to imagine that some fan got so heated over this post that they literally went through every single book, page by page, until they found something to fire back with.
List of bullshit I pulled in high school
- My yearbook photo was a picture of some random baby off of Google I photoshopped my 17 year-old self’s head onto. It made it in.
- Slipped a video titled “hot busty lesbian porn” into the personal folders of everyone in my computer class, which after they all crowded around to see what it was, turned out to be the video for Never Gonna Give You Up (it was 2007, so not yet a worn out joke). Thanks to them (like idiots) deciding to swarm a computer with sound, the computer lab filled up with cheesy ‘80s pop and the sound of me laughing so hard I ended up on the floor clutching my stomach.
- Figured out that the school board internet filters blocked based on words and URLs, so I bypassed them simply by pinging their IP addresses, giving me free reign to Youtube and wherever else I felt like going to. I abused this power, and the fact I luckily had one of the computers with built-in speakers, to blast copious amounts of death metal all class.
- Formed an air band called Minotaur Lizards whose career peak was “playing” a montage of classic rock songs during a school presentation.
- Acted out the mock trial that made up the final for our senior year Law class as head prosecutor, wearing no shirt, no socks, a Dead Kennedys t-shirt, and shorts. Somehow got 10/10 for “appropriateness of dress” by being so utterly wrong that the teacher considered me to have looped back around.
- Made sure that the yearbook contained the words “Harry Potter erotica”, and nobody realized until it had already gone to print.
- Did accounting for some of the pot dealers in my year and ended up taking a good cash bonus home after my suggested “baked sale” hit it big.
- Managed to get out of gym class the last two years on the promise to teachers that if I kept a friend, who was in a wheelchair and one of the above-mentioned dealers, occupied and out of trouble, I could skimp on doing class for non-test days and eke out a 75%.
- Turned in so many bullshit essays and “I was bored on this vocabulary test so I write it all in haiku” results that teachers would be disappointed if I turned in ‘normal effort’ work.
- Found out someone I really disliked hated my laugh, and dialed up how totally hilarious I found Cool Runnings so much that my laughter got him into a hissy fit that ended with his suspension.
- Figured out the school’s weak exits where one could slip through without being noticed, and began selling this information to people once our school cut its truancy officer for budget reasons.
- Managed to send through enough filthily-worded Valentine’s Day candygrams with the help of a friend on the inside that there were no candygrams the next year.
- Did most of my work for my last year on a single piece of paper I’d just fold up and stick back in my pocket out of general laziness and my lack of need for notes. Math teacher kept poking fun at it, which led to an escalating war of attrition that ended when I handed in a test written on a corn tortilla.
- Was voted Most Unique in what is most certainly the last flattering time that award was given in the school’s history
A child born 08.08.08 is 8 today.
listen i know nothing about les mis but i feel like all of the ABC being named “jean” or something is an incredible headcanon, partially because everyone ive known has always gotten along really well with anyone who’s shared their name. also imagine going up to someone and asking “oh hey do you know combeferre and his friends?” and them just responding, “oh yes… the jeans.”
…so, I don’t know if that was an intentional pun, but let it be known that in french ‘Jean’ and ‘gens’ are pronounced the same. Jean is, as we known, a common first name. ‘Gens’ means ‘people.’ So when you say ‘ah oui, les Jeans’ it comes out ‘oh yes, the people’ which is possibly the most Symbolic pun you could make.
I met a couple Australians this weekend and they introduced me to what is possibly the greatest phrase in the English language. Apparently, a common response to a wide variety of questions is “I’m not here to fuck spiders”. It means “I’m already doing that” or “Obviously, yeah”. So like, example usage:
At the bar with a friend.
Friend: do you want to get a beer?
Me: well, I’m not here to fuck spiders.ive literally never heard someone say that what fuckin australians did you meet
mate those Australians introduced you to the grand Australian tradition of fucking with foreigners and making them believe anything about Australia
this is seriously a thing australians do, like, automatically. someone will say something that is complete bullshit in front of a foreigner and everyone will instantly jump on board and confirm it. like it’s some kind of built-in reflex.
my step-dad actually convinced my mom that there were no trains in australia. and he didn’t end this conversation with a ‘just kidding’ or anything like that. he just let her think that for years until we moved here and she saw a train and was like DAMN IT KEVIN!!!!!
but did victor frankenstein actually have a phd
no one’s answered my question
THIS MOTHERFUCKER WAS AN UNDERGRAD
IMAGINE HEARING ABOUT THE DUDEBRO LIVING NEXT TO U IN THE DORMS “yah dave dropped out cuz he built a fucking person”
victor frankenstein was a little bITCH and he had no degree at all, he was at college for like, a year and then he was like “lol these bitches ain’t got nothing on me” and he just got an apartment and stopped going to school so he could build a person. i don’t think he even formally dropped out, he just kind of disappeared and nobody even questioned it because that’s what you expect when some cocky asshole comes to class like “i know more than everyone in this school and one day i’m going to prove it by ending dEATH ITSELF”
fucking bullshit victor, come home and eat some goddamn soup you wussass teenager
fucking trashass motherfucker 19 year old sin machine
go get ur liver pecked by birds u mess of a human being
i am never going to let the world forget that victor frankenstein spent 90% of the novel moping instead of doing literally anything else. actual quote from emo kid victor frankenstein “my only solace was silence – deep, dark, deathlike silence” like HOW EXTRA
You’d almost think Mary Shelly was taking inspiration from someone she knew….
Leave Lord Byron alone
Lord Byron deserves what he gets and he knows it
you know, it strikes me
if Steven Universe is a queer coming of age story
(which isn’t the only thing it is, but I think it’s pretty inarguably a big part of what it is)
it’s a millennial queer coming of age story
and that means a post AIDS pandemic queer coming of age story
like, the parallels aren’t perfect – a war and a virulent disease aren’t the same thing – but they’re there
the slowly building understanding of how much the previous generation has lost, starting with the individuals who would have been closest to you, and moving out until you realize it was most of a culture that was lost. Looking for your people and finding vast memorials to the dead. Knowing you have so much greater safety and social stability now, but also being aware of how quickly that could be taken away
but also like
knowing it’s difficult and risky to reach out to people still caught behind the lines of the conservative establishment, and doing it anyway, because they deserve the support of community too. reexamining what that community is, and including people who might not fit the previous generation’s ideas of who their compatriots were
allowing yourself to mourn and honor the dead but still keep moving forward
Rebecca openly identified as a bisexual woman and talked about how the inclusion of the LGBT themes in the show come from her experiences and how important it is for LGBT kids to be able to hear these stories and be validated in ways they often aren’t. She wants to let kids with similar experiences and identities that they exist and are valid
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