fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2795 ]

[ SECRET POST #2795 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2795 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[Law & Order: Criminal Intent]

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03.

[Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers]

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04.

[Jeeves and Wooster]

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05.

[Yahtzee/Zero Punctuation]

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06.

[Markiplier]

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07.

[Jackie Chan Adventures]

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08.

[The Parent Trap]

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09.

[Alexander]

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10.

[Starsky and Hutch]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 012 secrets from Secret Submission Post #399.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Used to have to wash plates and stuff when in the girl scouts and no hot water around, so I hear you. At least you don't have to hang them on a clothes line to dry?

Exactly. On a purely technical level, it's just Gaiman trying to avoid the cliche of "Shadow examined his features in the mirror, his olive-dark skin and and sunken eyes blah blah blah". There's only so many ways to tell people what your character looks like. You can tell them directly, have the character see themselves, or see how other characters see the character. This is what Gaiman chose. Not only it is a deliberate choice, it's also a scene that performs multiple functions... which really, all scenes should do if you do them properly.

So saying that it's not about race? Yeeeeahhh, no. It is. It's not only about race, but it's silly to behave like Gaiman meant it to be about xyz and just happened to have race as the topic.

Clearly, Gaiman should have been more clear, because just bringing up race over and over again isn't enough. If someone is not white, you need to make it very, very explicit (but assuming whiteness does not indicate that the default = white, totally).

/cgl/ even though I don't cosplay or wear lolita, /co/, /cm/, /y/, sometimes /ck/ and /an/.

I think you'll find that American Gods is set in the U.S., and the main character is American.

Okay, but the problem is that you are just assuming "white" until proven otherwise.

Yes, there's one blackface scene (in Swing Time), which is a little cringeworthy, but was apparently Fred Astaire's tribute to a black dancer who had influenced his style, so there was no mean-spiritedness behind it.

I agree with your opinion. I love Fred Astaire's movies so, so much. The man was a genius with choreography and Ginger Rogers was a fine partner for him.

I think I could forgive someone for thinking he is white.

So, you think it's okay to just assume that someone is white until proven otherwise?

But... he didn't? He left plenty of details in the text for people to pick up on race if they were reading carefully. That's why lots of people did pick up on it. He also didn't get pissy. His reply is very diplomatic considering he's responding to someone questioning him about his own book when they haven't read it very carefully. He doesn't tell them they'we wrong or that they're dumb, he simply says that this assumption might call for some self-examination (which is true) and that they might get further clarification if they read the book again, but more carefully this time (which is also true).

Gaiman hardly pulled an Anne Rice here.

(And yeah, I'm an SA, but it's because it took me a few minutes to figure out what really bothered me about this. Feel free to delete my first comment, case)

Withholding in the sense that Shadow is the POV character but doesn't seem to self-identify by race, which reinforces the validity of the first thing he said about it.

And I'm not being angry or defensive - I said elsewhere I think OP has a good point that I'm still thinking over. At the same time, I think the book's handling of race is rather weirdly indirect and seems to come out of a school of thought (which I've encountered in some writing workshops, pretty much always from white people) that a character's race shouldn't be mentioned directly. More recently I've seen the argument made by POC bloggers that writers who include POC characters should make those identities explicit & unmistakable. I find it interesting to see what approach Gaiman used in this book (which is almost 15 yrs old at this point BTW) and I'm not a huge fan of it. But that's a matter of interpretation & personal preference. I love this book & Gaiman's work overall, I just personally find this part frustrating.

Many people also missed that Prue and Cinna in 'The Hunger Games' were black.

I would be happy to fuck this particular youtuber. But he needs to talk the whole time.

I definitely had something important missing from my worldview as a kid - I'm not white, my family isn't white, I didn't even come up in a white neightborhood, and still I managed always to imagine nonwhite characters as white. You know Cassie, from Animorphs? I imagined her as white until the book 4 cover showed her as black, even though the text explicitly described her as black (it didn't make a song and dance out of it, which was necessary for me back then). I'm much better about that now (I saw Shadow as mixed on the first read), but white-as-default in Western culture is so powerful that I try to give people some slack for making that mistake. I mean, so long as they don't get tetchy about it like in the "lol I didn't see it so it must not have been there" comment in the secret.

Edited 2014-08-29 03:28 (UTC)

College isn't your only chance to learn a third language, though? It's weird, because your responses seem to indicate you think that after graduation, you've blown your chance at expanding your knowledge. You won't be. Smart people learn new things all their lives.

On a more practical level, you need to ask yourself whether or not it's worth another X number of years' tuition. I mean, is there NO OTHER WAY to learn, say, French without staying in school longer? Have you looked into community college courses, books, audio tapes, Rosetta stone, private tutor, whatever? Because just about any of those options will be cheaper than tuition.

ITT: people assuming characters are white unless explicitly told otherwise and thinking that's not indicative of a worldview that positions "white" as the default.

This. The community college near me has an excellent, excellent Spanish program, for example. They also have regular meetings on campus where people practice their conversational skills, dedicated teachers, school trips you can take AND it's a hell of a lot cheaper.

??? How is Gaiman the one at fault here? Yeah, fuck that guy, writing PoC, what a bastard!

+1

Mine gets super greasy and disgusting if I don't, plus it tangles into a huge knot because I have naturally curly hair.

DA

I haven't seen those eps for years, but I always interpreted Hutch's increasing meanness - and what he did in Starsky vs Hutch - to be expressions of him having this slow, depressive breakdown where he's questioning the meaning of his life and the meaning of his friendship with Starsky. I see what he did in SvsH as essentially self-desructive behaviour. You can also add in him having this years long gay/ 'Oh shit I'm in love with my partner' freakout if you're on that side of the fence...

Either way, it makes for fantastic fanfic that tries to explain then fix their relationship in season 4.

Yep, me too.

But why should it be a detail we have to read for carefully & look for clues? If Shadow does actually have a consciousness if his own racial identity that differs from what he tells the guard, why does it never come up in his own viewpoint? That's an authorial choice & it's a perfectly valid one but I'm not sure it accomplishes anything that helps the story.

Those are all the reasons I watch him, too, OP, nothing shallow about it. If it was about the games, I'd go find Let's Plays with no dialogue or facecams (which I do for certain games). I'll watch Markiplier doing just about anything, dancing with fish (he does that), punching watermelons (he does that, too), doesn't matter.

Urgh. Well thank's for the info. It seems like I don't have a really good option, but at least now I know so I know what my options are?

ayrt

Yeah, I saw SvH as pretty self-destructive too. As if he was just so sick of himself/his job/his life he wanted to force Starsky to get lost and let him self-destruct in peace, because he couldn't do that properly if Starsky was still his friend.

I try to headcanon it as sympathetically as possible though - that he was afraid that if he crashed and burned, he'd drag Starsky down with him, so on some subconscious level he felt he had to push Starsky away from him to keep him safe.

(I love that you like to theorize detailed-ly about these things too, anon! :P)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

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[ SECRET POST #2795 ]

Re: Kitchens and whatnot

Re: OK, I actually opened the book

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Re: What 4chan boards do you frequent?

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Re: College

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Re: College

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Re: How often do you shampoo/condition your hair?

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Re: How often do you shampoo/condition your hair?

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Re: Health insurance question?

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