Originally posted as a thread on Twitter January 18, 2019.
I saw a tweet that I’m… not gonna touch but:
Escapism in fic and fandom is great, but as a Black person, I find it impossible to escape into fandoms and fanworks that treat Black people (fictional and real) as burdens to be left on the side of the road and complained about.
I’d love for fandom to be a space where I can leave isms behind and just focus on the squee but as a Black person?
FANDOM WON’T LET ME.
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Today I have the absolute honor of talking with Eva Marie, the creator of Reverie: The Album, a work of fannish love that’s currently taking backers over on Kickstarter! I absolutely adore Eva Marie as a creator, a fellow fan, and someone who makes absolutely gorgeous music so if you’re looking for a new and cool opportunity to get fannish, check out our interview and then go head on over to her Kickstarter to become a backer!
Stitch: Eva Marie! Would you mind introducing yourself for my readers?
Eva Marie: Hi everyone, thanks for having me! I’m Eva, a singer-songwriter and composer in my mid-20s. I listen to almost every genre of music, but my specialty is R&B pop with hip hop vibes. When I’m not working, I’m watching anime, golden age Disney films, or old cartoons. I’ve been in online fandom since I was 14 years old. Over ten years later, I’m still a huge nerd! Nice to meet you.
Read More »Title: Uh Oh
Artist: (G) I-DLE
Setting:
The first setting of the music video – and the part worth clocking and commenting on for me – is a part of a strip mall that looks like something you’d see in the United States with English signs for a tattoo parlor, a corner store or bodega (the store on the right), and a pawn shop (trust me on that one). If I went outside right now, those three things are probably right close to each other in my own neighborhood. They are not anywhere near where any member of (G)I-DLE calls home because of where these businesses are located.
The use of the corner store/strip mall as a locale for the video is to ping viewers’ brains into going “ah, yes, they’re in ‘the hood’ and so this song is authentic”. You see similar attempts to situate Korean (and Korean American) artists accordingly in older videos like CL’s Hello Bitches or Dumbfoundead’s “Mijangwon” where the setting has its own very loud character.
Sound:
Described as belonging to “the boom bap hip hop genre” both the music and visuals of “Uh Oh” were put together to evoke this sense of authenticity in hip hop that always makes my teeth itch. I do think that (G)I-DLE – and Soyeon in particular in the group – are really talented and make interesting and innovative music that their peers aren’t always doing. Like 4Minute before them, this is a hip-hop oriented group and that means a lot of their song stylings lean heavily on things like “boom bap” hip hop or trap or whatever they think will catch an audience that knows them but isn’t familiar with hip hop outside of them.
Styling:
Clothing wise, the young women of (G)I-DLE are all wearing clothing meant to make you think they’re hip hop. Whatever hip hop actually means to them. From them on down to the back up dancers, this is a really good example of “hood cosplay” specifically because it’s the clothing and hairstyles in context. On their own, in a montage of the girls hanging out at an indoor mall or playing laser tag or something… the outfits would literally not have the context of “we’re basically cosplaying folks who live in ~the hood~” and you could handwave away some of that.
Also, at one point Yuqi does have what looks like bantu knots in her hair and even if we reset the video so it was entirely in the desert or they were floating in outer space… I have to say that that doesn’t help.
In an article from Soompi about the music video release, (G) I-dle’s Soyeon is quoted as saying:
Read More »“I didn’t necessarily plan to make ’90s-style music when I started working on the song, but I wanted to do hip hop. So I thought about what kind of hip hop would be unique to (G)I-DLE and not too cliché, and I thought of boom bap hip hop.”
This was originally posted on my Tumblr in 2018 shortly before the Black Panther film came out and three years into my time running Stitch’s Media Mix!
This is totally for funsies thanks to a darling pal on twitter, so here’s me trying my hand at a type of fandom racism bingo.
The different bingo bits read (in no particular order):
This lowkey makes me want to do a “fandom racism drinking game” too but I think we’d all die of alcohol poisoning within a few minutes of scrolling through ao3.
I’m no stranger to having deeply critical views on a fandom in a moment when said fandom is publicly Going Through It on Main.
After all, I made a point of poking hard at Rey/Kylo fandom’s embarrassing public death throes and how it poured tons of hatred in John Boyega as a result of not getting catered to with a happy ending for their Pasty Prince Charming.
However, there’s a difference between me roasting a racist fandom that continues to dismiss and harass Black people they think are “opposite” to its goals on my small website… and someone randomly using their platform on a massive site like The Mary Sue to launch a dismissive and condescending attack at a fandom trying to make sense of a Bad Ending.
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Chapter thirty-one opens with a death. (Sort of!)
Francis’ in fact.
He’s why Rachel is in this mess once more – yes, she alsohas poor risk assessment and self-preservation instincts but I will give her a pass for now – so I’m not playing my tiny violin for him just yet. Especially because the reason why Francis is dead-in-the-moment is because Rachel reacted before thinking and swung him in front of her. He took a curse from a ley line witch that was meant for her and, to Rachel’s senses, he died as a result.
Read More »You can leave a nickname or anon when you ask your question and I won’t be collecting emails or anything like that!
As always, I’m only eligible to be nominated for awards related to fan writing (because my fiction writing is… sporadic and also super NSFW when I do post it). If you were so inclined to nominate me for something – like the Hugo Award for Fan Writer or any similar award – here’s what you could nominate me for!
I’m a fan writer because I’m a fan writing about fandom – maybe not fandoms you think about on the regular, but spaces that need coverage that strays from solely celebratory. My writing primarily focuses on queerness and/or race in media/fandom spaces and I document and push back at established narratives about the supposed progressive spaces and what fandom is actually like when you’re in the thick of it.
As of this point in 2020, I posted 101 pieces on my site for a total of 185,232k words. These pieces covered antiblackness in transformative fandom, Korean pop/hip hop fandom, how a popular Tor release missed the mood of 2020, music reviews, the Star Wars fandom’s endless awfulness… and so much more. I uploaded a handful of videos to my YouTube channel, recorded and posted like nine podcast episodes, wrote for I-D and Teen Vogue, and pissed a lot of racists off in fandom just for pointing out the facts of fandom.
2020 has been tough, but I have put out some of my best work so far despite all the wild shit I’ve been through and it’d be cool if folks recognized that, you know?
Read More »Last installment, we dove into BTS’ debut single “No More Dream“!
Title: 눈누난나 (NUNU NANA)
Artist: Jessi
Setting:
The main recognizable settings for “Nunu Nana” are a restaurant kitchen doing double duty as a gambling den, what looks like a loading dock behind a set of shops with plenty of room for a red convertible to serve as the main focus, a building under construction and used for money laundering, and a music show stage.
The car itself is a really notable set piece for me because you have three moments where It’s a huge hip hop focus: in the beginning where Jessi’s on the car and a dancer is throwing her back out in front of it, where Jessi is twerking on it after washing the hood, and then the end when she and Hyori are hanging around and in it.
It feels like calling back to video vixen visuals only Jessi is, across the video, both the star the vixen dances for and the vixen herself and while that could be good… with Jessi, it’s… just kind of funny to me.
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“Well if there were more well-written characters of color, I’d focus on them,” is a recurring excuse for the way content is unfairly weighted towards white characters in Western media fandoms.
I have heard it used for over a decade and it’s an excuse used to successfully argue that the thing stopping them from caring about Black/brown people in their shows is… quality and quantity.
Back when we were hearing the first rumblings of rumors for Pacific Rim Uprising’s John Boyega connection, my friend Holly over at DiverseHighFantasy posted on Tumblr that:
The post on Tumblr currently has over fourteen thousand notes and considering how from the jump people were insulting Holly, accusing her of “a homophobic microaggression”, saying “let women like things”… .it probably hasn’t gotten much better. From John Boyega’s interviews and how he talked about why he wanted to be a producer – this film was his production company’s first outing – we knew that the film was going to probably have a diverse cast of characters.
Read More »Everyone’s writing such good content and I can’t actually bring myself to wait until December to share some of the stuff I’ve read since the last Link Lineup post! So bonus links for all!
After all, it was a white woman feigning outrage (that she later admitted was a lie) that killed Emmet Till in the first place. But while white readers ordered so many books about white privilege during the summer of Black Lives Matter protests over the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that they created a shortage, the majority of books about women’s anger often depict all women’s anger as being equal, a force for good and never a tool used to silence and punish others; they largely ignore the slew of white women having meltdowns at the sight of non-white people having barbeques, enjoying swimming pools, or birdwatching that abound on the internet. Perhaps that’s because the idea that white women’s anger is, has been, and continues to be a source of terror for a lot of marginalized people is simply not something white women, even “good” white women who marched for Floyd and Taylor, are particularly interested in buying.
I think it’s been interesting how I have constantly been accused of anger – when I am at best mildly annoyed and deeply inconvenienced – by white people who are angry that I exist and that I write what I do.
Read More »Did you catch the first two installments of my Music Video Anatomy series last month? I covered Epik High’s epic ode to hating the haters “Born Hater” and the H1GHR Music collab for the TELÉFONO Remix!
Title: No More Dream
Artist: BTS
Setting:
There are a couple main settings for No More Dream. At points across the video they’re on a school bus. At others, they’re in an alley in front of it. At the start of the video, they get off the school bus into skatepark with a skatepark with a quaint neighborhood theme and then a skatepark with classroom… themes.
One thing I like noting within Music Video Anatomy is when a hip hop video doesn’t go with expected settings. With “No More Dream” you can tell that there’s a goal for there to be some clear hip hop connection but then, as you can see on the Behind the Screen site’s entry on the No More Dream music video, there are a lot of nods to what’s basically alt culture that isn’t related to hip hop in the US? Which is pretty cool.
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When we last left the lovely losers in Dead Witch Walking, Rachel was bleeding out and a demon sent her back to the church she lives at with Ivy and Jenks. As Rachel is literally moments away from dying, of course Ivy and Nick feel the need to get into a pissing match over her.
Ivy’s all “how could you let her get hurt, I knew I couldn’t trust you” (which… is valid) while Nick is a smug fuck that’s like “You’re not her mom and also you’re totally trying to hunt her. I’m gonna tell her”.
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Across Hanguk Hip Hop, Myoung-Sun Song seeks to answer several pressing questions about Korean hip hop – made by and for Koreans in Korea for the most part – and one of the ones that has stuck with me is simple, but pointed:
What is real or original about Hanguk hip hop? (6)
It’s a question that I’ve never been able to let go of as I listen to Korean artists, read translated interviews they’ve done, and watched a really large amount of music videos and live performances from a wide range of Korean artists.
It’s a question that has no real easy answer to me.
Why?
Because, if you watch Korean hip hop music videos or even the idol rappers work with their groups or forays into solo work, a lot of it sounds and looks like the stuff I’d be able to listen to on MTV or BET if they still played music videos. A ton of it looks like stuff I listened to in my teens.
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Just now (like at 9:49PM) I got a comment moderation email from D_Moze’s comment on Why White Supremacy Can No Longer Provide Cover for White Academics by Robin Anne Reid that read:
I was there for Racefail ’09 and every word you say is a filthy lie. Racefail was a couple of grifters and anklebiting anonymous trolls attacking established authors with false accusations of racism, and people like you — people who’ve never contributed a thing but hatred — made bank off of it. Shame on you.
And I since I don’t want to have Robin subject to replying to this nonsense – and I didn’t approve the comment anyway – I decided to take one for the team and reply briefly to this “feedback” so you could see that you were seen… and found frustrating.
D_Moze… In case you missed it, we are in the middle of a pandemic, seeing racist upheaval everywhere, the US still doesn’t have another president called officially, and some of us are poor because of a bunch of those things.
I can’t believe that this is what you decided to do with your time!
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