This is a map of Asia. North Americans, you may notice this map is not solely comprised of Japan, Korea, China and Thailand. People in the UK, you may notice India is not a continent. That is, if those of you who generalize entire continents can even pinpoint India on a map. Indians are Asian, gasp! And not all brown skinned people are Indian, also, gasp! There are an alarming amount of people, of all ages, from all backgrounds, who seem to be unable to process this.
I’m ethnically Asian. Since Asia is an extremely large continent, I could be from any number of countries. I am neither from India, China, Korea, Japan or Pakistan, yet not so surprisingly, I am still Asian.
Yes, there are commonalities across regions, through the conflation of cultures, colonialism, globalization, transnationalism and movement of diasporas. Sometimes these are all the same thing. Rickshaws, rice and curry can be found across the continent. But let’s not overgeneralize. You can also find Buddhists, Catholics, Muslims and Hindus across Asia. Cantonese Speaking Chinese Muslims! English Speaking Indian Jews!
No, we are not all the same. Orientalism? (Please look up Edward Said for basic concepts) No thank you.
Geography, people. It’s important.
This pops up on my dash every so often. I reblog it again, not just because I wrote it, but because nothing has changed since I first posted this.
What’s cool about Iran is that it falls in 3 different regions of Asia so depending on what part of Iran you’re in, you can kind of get culture shocked a bit. The central and western part of the country is West Asia, the north east is Central Asia, and the southeast is in South Asia.
To the folks wondering about Russia being included, I want to mention that the cultural debates and angst about that has been going on for CENTURIES. While France has been pretty fetishized all the way back from Peter the Great, there is no question that we are not Europe, even with that influence showing really obviously in historical seats of power like St. Petersburg. Nonetheless, the whole country was under control of the Mongols (The Golden Horde) from roughly 1242 to 1480, and that left an enormous Mongolian and Tatar heritage that remains to this day. The ancient Scythians are huge in the cultural imagination as well. And besides… look at the Russians who are outside the standard “Kievan Rus” phenotype (which most folks assume is how all Russians look.)
Here are three of the 30 distinct ethnic groups in Siberia alone:
Buryat grandfather, photo by Alexander Newby
Evenk children, photo by Evgenia Arbugaeva
Young Yakut couple, photographer unknown
boom
AS SOMEONE WITH NORTHERN IRANIAN (AZERBAIJANI)/RUSSIAN/ HAZARA-PERSIAN/ UYGHUR-CHINESE ANCESTRY THIS IS SUCH A BEAUTIFUL POST
And that’s why sometimes you’ll see a person with curly black hair, pale skin, and hazel-green eyes (my grand-father’s sister) who turn out to be Chinese. Mad recessive genes game at play, I swear. Mongols, they really got around.
Here’s an infograph breaking down most of the lightsabers used in the Star Wars films, The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. Props to HalloweenCostumes and David Rosencrance for putting this together. Here’s a link if you want read more about it.
In the dog world, humans are elves that routinely live to be 500+ years old.
“They live so long…but the good ones still bond with us for our entire lives.”
“These immortals are so kind we must be good friends to them”
My heart wtf
Not gonna lie, this fucked me up a bit.
POV Fantasy slice of life book when?
“Now I am old. The fur around my muzzle is grey and my joints ache when we walk together. Yet she remains unchanged, her hair still glossy, her skin still fresh, her step still sprightly. Time doesn’t touch her and yet I love her still.”
So: occasionally, people find it weird that Arwen’s visit to Lothlórien lasted for Aragorn’s entire upbringing—some twenty years. The Rivendell folk don’t talk about it. It’s not a big deal.
I don’t actually take any issue with it, myself. These are Elves. What are twenty years to them? A nice vacation, apparently. Seems legit.
But that leads to an actually happy thought:
I am 100% convinced that, in times of peace during those early centuries, Elrond would have visited Elros in Númenor. But if Arwen’s trips are anything to judge by, it wouldn’t be a few weeks, or a few months. Elrond quite possibly spent decades chilling around in Númenor.
I mean, I’ve been shrieking about how Elrond considers his children Númenórean. From that, it follows—or precedes—that he considers himself Númenórean. That makes the most sense if he actually spent, you know, some time living there.
Perhaps, in a way, Númenor was his home, too.
age 11: worry about internet people finding me in real life
now: worry about people in real life finding me on the internet
for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’
jerry is here
my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”
When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “’Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”
I was done for the day.
This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.
I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”
I did not find my husband in this way.
In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”
“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.
The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)
Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.
I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English.
When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.
“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”
“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”
Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG
My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…
I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.
That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.
Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.
I love those stories so much…
Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.
She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.
American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)
Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)
that’s hilarious
I am officially screamlaughing at my desk from that last one OH MY
Gaston really is the most terrifying Disney villain because he could be anyone in the world.
Later he convinces the whole town to set up his wedding with the knowledge that the would-be bride would be thrown into it. Everyone finds his creepy-ass tactics as cute and “boys will be boys” esque. So yeah, he is terrifying.
Yeah, the truly scary thing about Beauty and the Beast isn’t that Gaston exists, but that society fucking loves him. People who deride the movie by saying it’s about Stockholm Syndrome are ignoring that it’s actually about the various ways that truly decent people get othered by society. People don’t trust the Beast because of the way he looks, which only feeds his anger issues and pushes him further away. Gaston isn’t the only one who criticizes Belle for being bookish, either; the whole town says there must be something wrong with her. And her father gets carted off to a mental asylum for being just a little eccentric.
Howard Ashman, who collaborated on the film’s score and had a huge influence on the movie’s story and themes, was a gay man who died of AIDS shortly after work on the film was completed. If you watch the film with that in mind, the message of it becomes clear. Gaston demonstrates that bullies are rewarded and beloved by society as long as they possess a certain set of characteristics, while nice people who don’t are ostracized. The love story between Belle and the Beast is about them finding solace in each other after society rejects them both.
Notice how the Beast reacts when the whole town comes for him. He’s not angry, he’s sad. He’s tired. And he almost gives up because he has nothing to live for. But then he sees that Belle has come back for him, and suddenly he does. In the original fairy tale, the Beast asks Belle to marry him every night, and the spell is broken when she accepts. In the Disney movie, he waits for her to love him, because he cannot love himself. That’s how badly being ostracized from society and told that you’re a monster all your life can fuck with your head and make you stop seeing yourself as human.
Society rewards the bullies because we’ve been brought up to believe that their victims don’t belong. That if someone doesn’t fit in, then they have to be put in their place, or destroyed. And this movie demonstrates that this line of thinking is wrong. It’s so much deeper than a standard “be yourself” message, and that’s why it’s one of my favorite Disney movies.
Yeah okay, that might have been the intended message of the movie, but the Beast is literally an abuser, he literally abuses and imprisons Belle, she tries to escape (as many abuse victims do) and ends up back with him because it’s just too scary out there without her abuser whose violence protects her.
It’s literally textbook abuse, textbook stockholm syndrome, and it’s great if you can find positive messages in that movie but please don’t hand-wave the abuse that Belle endures or the fact that her happy ending is literally her reward for loving her abuser and choosing to stay – and her reward is no longer being terrified and imprisoned.
Please don’t ignore the damaging messages in that film just because you want to talk about one of the better ones – how many young children have seen, will see Belle terrified of a controlling person with an explosive temper and zero self-control, and then see that if you just love someone like that enough they’ll turn into a kind and gentle prince?
This story might have been great if the Beast hadn’t been written as abusive. Or if he had been and Belle had succeeded in leaving. Or if her staying with him was read as tragic. But as it stands, we’re supposed to think it’s romantic that this young woman fell in love with a cruel and terrifying person who imprisoned and controlled her.
We hear too many stories like that already and if you justify the Beast’s abuse of Belle because others have rejected him, or because it’s somehow her job to love her abuser because he can’t love himself, guess what, you’re supporting one of the more popular narratives that real-life abusers use to control their victims.
No.
I’m sorry but you’re wrong.
Belle did not fall in love with her abuser.
I will not deny that Beast was abusive in the beginning. He was downright beastly. And Belle hated him. And feared him. And was disgusted by him.
And it’s only then that Belle starts to care about him.
Leading to them slowly developing a friendship and eventually “something more”.
Leading to one of the most beautiful Disney moments:
But even then, when her father is shown in the woods, Beast tells her to go and Belle goes!
She only comes back, not because “it’s just too scary out there without her abuser whose violence protects her” (that’s just ludicrous!) but because she genuinely cares about the man that the Beast became. (And she despised the monster that Gaston had become.)
The point of the story is that, over a period of time, the ‘monster’ became humanized and the ‘human’ became a monster.
YES. MOTHER. FUCKING. THIS.
I have gotten so sick and tired of people diminishing Belle’s personal power and the importance of her story by saying she only stayed with the Beast because of “Stockholm syndrome.”
This movie starts with Gaston and the Beast having basically the same entitled attitude towards the world: they feel they’re OWED whatever they want because they’re somehow superior. Belle is the catalyst and the lynchpin, and the difference in the characters of the two men becomes blatantly obvious in how they react to not getting what they want from Belle.
Gaston sulks and pouts and tries to force her to marry him, to the point that he convinces the entire village to help him plan a shotgun wedding with an unwilling bride, institutionalize her father, and even storm a castle to murder an unknown “monster,” still with the idea that with no Beast, Belle will be “his.” The most telling thing is that despite how much Gaston claims to want Belle, the moment she publicly rejects him (”He’s no monster, Gaston! YOU are!”), he immediately dismisses her as crazy and locks her in a cellar while he goes off to kill the person she actually cares about.
Beast sulks and pouts…and then makes significant changes to his behavior and his manners, both to show Belle that he cares for her and that he CAN be a better man. He changes both FOR Belle and BECAUSE of her. He pays attention to what she says, what she doesn’t like, and what makes her happy. And she’s not afraid to tell him, in no uncertain terms, exactly what he’s doing wrong.
“If you’d hold still, it wouldn’t hurt as much!” “Well, if you hadn’t run away, this wouldn’t have happened!” “If you hadn’t FRIGHTENED ME, I wouldn’t have run away!” “…..Well, YOU shouldn’t have been in the west wing!” “Well, you should learn to control your temper!”
This is not the behavior of a woman too afraid of the Beast to leave and too cowed by abuse to stand up for herself. The Beast literally shouts in her face, and she barely flinches. This is a woman in full control of her life and completely able to make her own choices. If the Beast hadn’t changed, if he’d acted like Gaston instead of demonstrating radical self-improvement, if she thought for one second that her life was truly in danger, she would have left and never come back.
She’s spent the better part of her adult life standing up to and actively shutting down an overbearing and physically intimidating man who shows immediately and repeatedly that he has no respect for her wishes or her personal space. She is not going to back down just because someone growls and blusters at her, no matter how big his teeth are.
Belle is a force to be reckoned with.
And the message here is not, “If you love someone enough, you can fix them.”
The message here is, “If they actually love you, they won’t be abusive.”
I know this is long and all, but I want to at least emphasize that last part:
“If they actually love you, they won’t be abusive.”
Talking about a movie or not, that’s huge. It’s something I certainly wish I learned much sooner
Also, Belle doesn’t stay with the Beast after the wolf attack because
“it’s just too scary out there without her abuser whose violence protects her,” she stays because he got hurt saving her life and while the only reason her life was even in danger to begin with was because he flipped his shit (a fact which she is not afraid to confront him with), she’s willing to allow him enough grace to help him in turn instead of leaving him freezing and bleeding in the middle of the woods. Because Belle is not just brave and smart, she’s also noble–noble enough to take her father’s place in captivity because she’s younger and healthier and can survive it, and noble enough to walk back into the lion’s den to help someone who needs her, even if he’s done little to deserve it up until that point.
Belle is nobody’s victim. She is the hero of her own damn story and deserves your respect.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I love you all so much.
The Beast was an entitled brat when he was younger, it’s true – turning away the ‘old woman’ when it would have been no imposition whatsoever to let her stay was a cruel and selfish thing to do. And he was incredibly bitter – understandably so – at his punishment and isolation. It’s worth noting that his servants suffered a similar punishment and isolation while having done nothing to deserve it and were not nearly as bitter – though their apparent inability to stand up to him didn’t help his development. He then imprisoned another old person who sought shelter with him when, again, it was no skin off his nose to let Maurice recuperate for the night. The Beast could easily have been the villain of the film, no doubt about that, and many viewers would have defended him and blamed it on his past traumas in a way that makes the townsfolk’s adulation of Gaston despite his clear assholery feel very familiar.
But he didn’t – the moment he realized he had someone who made him want to actually behave better for her, he did so. The Beast is important precisely because he wasn’t ‘a truly decent person othered by society’ until he became one. Because he saw Belle, realized she was a nice person and thought to himself “I want to be like that. I want to make her happy, even if it means I lose my one chance at regaining my normal life”. Gaston, on the other hand, saw Belle and thought to himself “I want her, because I deserve the best”. As was said above, the issue is not that you can love your abuser into changing, it’s that if that person actually loves you, they will make a real effort to change for your sake – and they won’t give up at the first backslide either. There are addicts who turn their lives around when they realize it will cost them the person or people that matter more to them than the thing they’re addicted to. Just because love doesn’t always redeem, doesn’t mean it never can. But it has to be the offender’s love for the person they wronged that redeems the offender, not the other way around.
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