Tag Archives: Dawn of Justice

pop break: racism and screen painting

I’m a little tired of death right now.  It’s been kind of a lot.

About movies. And race.

Marvel and DC both did Civil War type films. Yes you know. Yes yes. I’m slow at pop culture, okay?

It was kind of funny to me what different paths they took to end up in roughly the same place.

Marvel:

Racist? What? No no no! I’m not racist! In fact, my best friend is black!  And my frenemy’s best friend is black! 

Why don’t my black best friend super heroes ever get their own origin stories or even just non-origin movies where they are the title character and main protagonist?

Uuuuh…. Hey look! I have THREE black best friends!  And my third black best friend just learned a valuable lesson by watching my white super heroes grapple with their problems! Isn’t that cool?!  Even when white heroes are acting like moronic pieces of shit, they are teaching black people how to exist and black people would be lost without them!

 

DC:

Black people don’t exist.

Abuse survivors who question GOD are EVIL. Evil!! Evil MONSTERS who want to destroy the world and unleash MONSTERS on the world and who are all secretly EVIL and stuff. Especially if they like BOOKS and LIBRARIES and clearly have some kind of mental illness that keeps them from SPEAKING clearly. Because people who love books and the mentally ill are EVIL.

And the mastermind behind mysterious conspiracies is probably JEWISH cause their parent was nearly killed in the HOLOCAUST.

We’re renaming ourselves Budweiser for the summer.

 

 

My vote goes to Marvel for at least pretending.

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The fun doesn’t end there of course. This is Budweiser- I mean America! We couldn’t limit our racism to just one or two movies in a genre created to give children heroes to look up to and heroism to emulate.

I love X-men Apocalypse so much.  And I loved Guardians of the Galaxy. Don’t get me wrong. But can we address the blueface please? EDIT: and greenface too!

In Guardians of the Galaxy, you had an entire universe filled with aliens species who looked like humans, which was speciest as fuck but we don’t know any aliens yet, so I’ll let that go. But what was with the fact that they all looked like WHITE humans?  I mean with the exception of the one black dude who was evil, clearly some one else’s minion and not in charge of his own destiny, and who had like one line.

And it wasn’t even like they all were supposed to be a single species. To give the impression of diversity, they painted their actors a bunch of colors. Like green.

But the facial structures, speech patterns, and futuristic hairstyles were all obviously of European descent.

Let that sink in.

We had an entire, diverse, universe filled with colored people- and all of them were white people with their skin painted.

EDIT: It was pointed out to me that Dave Babtista and Zoe Saldana are “mixed race”. I was happy to learn this fact and the names of these actors as I didn’t know them and did this rant without researching. But being the emotional basket case that I am, I reserve the right to still feel disgusted. Sort of- oppositely.

This is so much better! (sarc) We put the POC in so much face paint (digital or otherwise) that to the sad ignorant eyes of a white person they LOOKED white.

But the white main character and the aliens played by white humans didn’t need any makeup to be presentable?

Separate Phenomena.  Green Face.

Green is so much more acceptable in the Marvel-verse than… you know…

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Which is sort of what made it morbidly funny in X-men Apocalypse when Marvel had a bunch of straight white superheroes on a personal journey to accept their true identities… as straight white people with blue paint on their still clearly European facial structures.

I’m mean, what the fuck?

The mutants who joined the Big Bad were- DRUM ROLL

the black one

the asian looking one

the gay looking one

And THE JEWISH ONE. Who survived the HOLOCAUST. And is CONSPIRING. To destroy the WORLD.

God!  What the FUCK?  WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

None of THOSE people ever had to struggle with their real identities vs their perception by the wider population! Oh no! It was JUST white people!

And in true Marvel-is-a-friendly-dog-who-knows-they-shouldn’t-pee-on-the-rug-but-does-anyway fashion, the Team Bad mutants were sort of emotionally manipulated into joining the Big Bad.  And in the end mostly joined Team Good-

After learning valuable lessons from white people.

In face paint.

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Some days I really hate people. And I’m not particularly thrilled with earth.

But there’s nowhere else that has shwarama.