2022-02-17 9:06:27 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

mmmmalo:

> mmmmalo:

> > Disclaimer: between Deep Impact and afro motifs in One Piece the spin of my race-dar has been giving me swirly eyes recently, so take this with a grain of salt and some prayers but like

> > In the Epilogues they had Gamzee using ‘ninja’ as a sugar free n-word right. And I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe that had always been the case, but the matter had just remained subtle until that point. So it became (hypothetically??) funny that Striders were self-described ninjas, like as a supplement to their rapper schtick. And then I see lime-bloods’s post about Dave killing the crow with a slip of the tongue and thought man, what if ‘ninja sword’ (or rather, ‘ninjas-word’?) was a mutation of ‘n-word’ and Dave involuntarily launching it at a crow (a crow!) that was stealing his shit was like. Oh No I Did A Slur. “No one must ever know about this” indeed Dave

> > So, humoring that

> > Also in the context of Rose’s fear of drowning mingling with racial motifs (Chaos Dunk), Kanaya’s description of the “Antagonism Ninja Vice Grip Pinching [Rose’s] Larynx” becomes quite cheeky

> (Wrt the previous disclaimer: 1. the cataclysmic tidal wave in Deep Impact is a metaphor for the horror of having a BLACK PRESIDENT, 2. One Piece has a series of boss fights where Luffy gets possessed by the spirit of black liberation and punches slavers, he wears an AFRO and gets powered by “SHADOWS” and confronts SONG OF THE SOUTH REFERENCES, it’s a whole thing)

> Homestuck though: someone brought up how the Ninja Sword thing might have to do with Caliborn’s name being treated as an obscenity, what with his named being derived from Excalibur, legendary sword. This made sense to me, though I didn’t know what to make of it. Then it occurred to me: What if the same applies to ‘Calliope’, whose name is supposed to function as anathema to Caliborn? The whole image of Caliborn breaking free from his chains on the fucking Planet of the Apes, that’s black liberation imagery, isn’t it? So Roxy screaming CALLIOPE CALLIOPE CALLIOPE to put him back in his place becomes…. slur hurling? In addition to being scifi dead-naming. Something supposed to put the wrongly liberated back in their place, as it were. Putting the Bunny Back in the Box as a repressive impulse. I’m inclined towards this because it would nicely prefigure Roxy taking out the black-coded Condy with the NINJA SWORD.

> (Though since Meenah is initially presented as Roxy’s doppelganger, aiming the Ninja Sword at Condy would also carry an air of Roxy aiming at herself? So is it instead/also a gesture at re-integration, Roxy taking on her own blackness along with the ‘slavery’ entailed by her implicit assumption of the Handmaid’s curse? Hm)