I’ve got mixed feelings about making fun of Lorde, y’know?
Because there are legitimate criticisms to be had of her songs/messages (like this), and there are ‘white people have no rhythm’ jokes, which are totally harmless.
But there are a lot of white folks making fun of her appearance (which is weird because, like, have you seen you?). A lot of men, especially. Most of these people are older than her. She’s seventeen. If you’re not coming from a place of mocking the euro-centric beauty standards she embodies (which the white people mocking her definitely aren’t), then you’re coming from a place of misogyny- “She’s not pretty (and women are required to be pretty)”
And most of the jokes center around the way she moves, uses facial expressions, and emotes. And let me tell you something: If you look at Lorde and see ‘odd’ movement, that is because you are trained to only accept allistic physical mannerisms. The way Lorde rocks and contorts her body, struggles to find the ‘right’ facial expressions, and physically interacts with other people are all autistic/neurodivergent traits. I’m not saying Lorde is autistic, because I have no clue if she is or not, but I’m saying that she moves like a lot of us move, and to make fun of her for that is to say that only allistic movement/physical carriage is acceptable.
tl;dr: If you’re making fun of Lorde, you should really think about what place you’re coming from, because a lot of the time it’s either misogyny or ableism
The lengths the media goes to coddle white male entitlement by deflecting the discussion to pretty much anything else is just… ugh
So many things wrong with this ABC Barbara Walters interview with the father of elliot rodgers, I don’t even know where to start. Calling that fucker’s misogyny and racism “mental illness”, making an advertisement for that interview that puts all sorts of words including “autism” but leaving out “misogyny”, “white male entitlement”, and “racism”. Because you know… who wants to highlight the actual issues! And then asking the murderer’s father “did you know he was sick?” Fucking hell how about we leave that sympathy for the actual victims of that crime?
That misogynistic, racist filth elliot rodgers got this sympathetic interview and Mike Brown is being called a “thug”?
male nerds:
girls only like superhero movies because the actors are hot!
male nerds:
i dont watch anime for the fanservice but just fyi its actually PLOT RELEVANT for these school girls to get naked
Male gamers:
This is just fine, so shut up! What's important isn't the character's gender, it's the story they are in! Who cares about the characters' genders? Stop trying to ruin other people's fun!
Hyrule Warriors:
*10 playable characters, 8 of them are women*
Male gamers:
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?!?! There are too many girls in this game! What about us, the male fans? Why the female fans have more options? Women aren't interesting, if you don't include more men in the game then the story will become boring!
I want to see people defending Asuka on my dash, the same way they defend Shinji.
She literally has just as much hurt and depression and anxiety in her life, she saw her mother die too, she had her father abandon her too, and she didn’t even get invited back by him to pilot a robot, like with Shinji and Gendo.
But while I see all kinds of posts about Shinji I’ve seen so little for her. Yes she’s cruel to so many people, but everyone is able to blissfully ignore Shinji’s faults.
(I’m not including your name because I’d rather not draw unnecessary attention to you.)
People do not love Asuka. Perhaps you survive in a small microcosm of tumblr wherein everyone loves and fiercely defends female characters, but from what I’ve seen in my forays throughout the greater Evangelion fandom, people usually respond to Asuka in two different ways.
They sexualise the everloving fuck out of her (which is probably where you’re getting the “everyone loves her!” bit. No, they don’t love her. They think she’s hot, the way that most men treat female characters, which is a far cry from defending Asuka and actually understanding her).
They call her a b*tch
In the most popular works/depictions of Asuka, she’s reduced to a generic tsundere waifu who longs for Shinji’s dickari (I’m looking at you, ReTake, but also at the general trend). In other depictions, she’s typically villainised, particularly in kawo/shin works and doujin, if she’s present or relevant at all.
I agree that Shinji needs defending, but holy hell, I’ve seen people make Shinji out to be some kind of defenceless angel. Just like Asuka, he’s done some shit. Both he and Asuka are in the position of the abuser and in the position of the abused, as most people in reality are. Simplifying Shinji into a truly wide-eyed innocent naive kid who has never done anything and simplifying Asuka into a not-really-abrasive kid who doesn’t have severe issues in of herself is fucking bullshit (thanks, Rebuild of Evangelion).
I’ve seen so much defence of Shinji. I’ve seen people defending Shinji for choking Asuka (because she was being a b*tch to him! It’s not as if she was, you know, rightfully calling him out on his bullshit behaviour) and defending Shinji for sexualising Rei, Asuka, and Misato and being angry at them that they’re “keeping things ambiguous behind smiles”(because he’s “just a normal kid” or, worse yet, because he’s “gay and boo hoo my gay angel couldn’t possibly do anything”). And so on and so forth.
What happens with Shinji is that people tend to defend him for the misogynistic shit and then trash him for the depression/mental illness shit. Well, guess what? Asuka is also depressed and suffers from mental illness. But just like how tumblr is quick to defend depression and anxiety whilst being extremely ableist to the “Bad Cr*zies”, people defend Shinji for his quiet depression and avoidant personaity disorder and anxiety issues even as they laugh at and bash Asuka for being unable to handle Arael or desiring recognition or having a breakdown about not being number one or wanting Kaji’s attention or, you know, all of her histrionic personality disorder.
Fuckin’ hell, even in the 90s, before the internet was really a thing, there was a website called the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Shinji Ikari” or something like that where the entire fucking website was run by Evangelion fans who would write novels defending Shinji without ever once considering Asuka. One of the most common defences of Shinji was that it didn’t matter what he did to Asuka because Asuka had been a b*tch to him. Did you know that at one showing of End of Evangelion people started clapping - fucking clapping - when Shinji choked Asuka? Hmm? I wonder why.
I understand if you dislike Asuka because she has legitimately done Some Stuff. But in the same vein you should dislike Shinji. After all, the Evangelion characters weren’t designed to be likeable. What grinds me down is that if Asuka were male, then you know for a fact that “he” would be a fan favourite and everyone would defend “him” for being a douchebag because “no his mother is dead and he’s just poor and misunderstood!”
But they don’t. They either destroy her by turning her into a sextoy or they call her out on being abusive even whilst they turn around and praise Shinji to hell and back. Maybe you haven’t seen the Asuka hate, but I have, first-hand, and it is horrendous.
I’m glad that you’ve been sheltered from the Asuka hate, but no, Asuka (and Rei, and Misato) need so much more defence. Does Shinji need defence? Sure. But I haven’t actually seen someone unironically call Shinji whiny or a crybaby or any of that shit in years. You know what I have seen, even on fucking tumblr dot com?
Also the thing with her dad? Are you serious? Her dad abandoned her mother after her mother went insane due to the Contact Experiments and had an affair with her mother’s doctor, whom he later married (which was heavily implied in the anime and fucking confirmed in interviews and supplementary material).
Why the fuck do you think that Asuka literally says
when she’s running back to inform her mother that she’s been selected to be a pilot (oh, yeah, because at such a young age she was already fucking terrified about failure and having to provide with her family while Shinji was off having a normal life, which he describes as content, with his teacher) only to discover her mother’s freshly dead body awaiting her at home?
Asuka then essentially had to forge out on her own because her father barely took care of her beyond the superficial and Asuka clearly never forgave him for abandoning herself and her mother. By contrast Shinji “witnessed” his mother’s death but not in the bloody, traumatic, “have fun cleaning up your mother’s dead body” kind of way and seems to barely remember the death, whereas Asuka recalls the funeral sharply enough that she had to repress the memories deep down and still they emerge to cut into her. Shinji spent the next decade living a peaceful life as Asuka battled to be the best of the best to become a pilot, because that’s all she’s ever been of worth to anyone.
Asuka’s perfectly right in her complaint that Shinji and Rei simply got in because Gendo wanted them to. By contrast, Asuka earned her way in over her entire life, struggling and forcing herself to succeed, and placing her entire worth on being number fucking one. Do you know the stress that that places on people?
Shinji’s traumatic past is far less traumatic than Asuka’s. [mic drop] [exits stage left, pursued by bear]
