Stitch in Teen Vogue: Netflix’s “Ginny & Georgia” Plays Oppression Olympics — But Nobody Wins

Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia is a messy show with a first half that’s packed full to the brim with racist microaggressions — and that wouldn’t be a bad thing if the show actually engaged with most of them.

What Ginny & Georgia gets right: the mother-daughter relationship, dealing with trauma (poorly, as a person), how tough it is to be the new girl in town, the MYSTERIES.

What Ginny & Georgia gets wrong: the racism. It literally does not know how to handle the thing it manages to build most of its series around.

If you saw the video of Hunter and Ginny’s exchange going across Twitter and were uncomfortable with the nonsense on display, check out my article to see how this is just part of a pattern across the series.

And then come shout with me.

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Stitch Has THOUGHTS on that DKDK TV Video on BLM, Cultural Appropriation, and… Racial Slurs

For those of y’all that like MP3 versions of things~

The DKDKTV video that I’m talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugFtZpctMbQ

Transcript

So, I started watching Korean’s Honest Drunk Opinions on Black Lives Matter, Dreads and the N-word with a Black American on YouTube.

This is Daniel – Danny from DKDKTV. And so it has this introduction where he’s like talking to Mike, who is the black American.

And it’s like, the introduction already rubs me the wrong way, because it’s like, “should Koreans be expected to educate themselves” and it’s like Koreans aren’t infants.

Y’all need to stop infantilizing yourselves and your peers because y’all aren’t babies. Like, we should all be expected to educate ourselves about cultural sensitivities about complicated subjects.

Like if you’re going to have a platform, especially like DKDKTV does you should definitely be expected educate yourself and those guys really haven’t across the years. It’s been very like this – they have yet to do a video on blackness specifically and like anti blackness that hasn’t been kind of like shit.

And like when they brought it up in the past like when with Amber they called Amber’s like moments of anti blackness about the cops harassing that black man in the California train station. They call it a mistake her saying that he deserved what happened to him. And so these aren’t – these aren’t people that I really want talking about race, anti blackness, whatever, in general, but especially if at least one of the two is coming into it from this position of like we shouldn’t really be expected to care and like and like their their past has just been not great.

And so like, we are not even a minute in and I’m like *heavy sigh*

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Stitch Watches Watchmen

Note: This isn’t a full review(in fact, I primarily focus on the first episode) because I don’t have the time for it right now! If you want to talk about specific parts of the show, drop me a comment and we’ll chat about some serious spoilers!


HBO’s Watchmen series leaves me just as unsettled as the end of Jordan Peele’s Us did.

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[Stitch Answers Feedback] What Can Non-Black Fans Do?


The text, from a screenshot of a really cool message I received, reads:

hi stitch! im a regular reader of your site, and i wanted to ask a question that im unsure if you’ve addressed so far or not. having grown up on tumblr from 2011 onward, i definitely feel you hit the nail on the head about the “blank slates ghost” and migratory slash fandom always hyperfocusing on white men. it’s really telling how ships like stucky (while i personally enjoy it) can completely overshadow and create hostility toward steve/sam; i had a friend who got routinely vagued and harassed for that exact thing. but what im wondering is, on the flipside, how can white and nbpoc interact w black characters in ships without being creepy abd voyeuristic? i liked your post about the finnpoe racist fics where finn is always hyper-big and sexualized, that kind of demonstrated some stuff Not to do, but i wonder if there’s more nuance to it? should we accept that black fans will sideye/be more wary of nonblack people getting involved in the slash scene for black characters, or are there more dedicated steps we can take to openly be supportive and non-fetishistic? thanks for reading this even if you dont have much time to answer!!!

I got this message in my inbox a few days ago, but since the email address attached to it looks like it’ll bounce back if I email them back and this is a topic I’m sure many of y’all have been wondering about… I decided to make public! I hope that my anonymous reader sees this and knows that I’m grateful to them for being a longtime reader and for sending this message!

There are two real questions being asked here and I’m going to try my best at tackling them in clear and relatively concise ways.

Now, to the answer(s):

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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse and Miles Morales: Spider-Man: When Authenticity Matters

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COPYRIGHT: © 2018 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

INT. MILES’ APARTMENT – BEDROOM MILES MORALES draws HOME-MADE STREET ART NAME-TAGS at a desk, headphones on, singing along to a song he’s too young for (”Sunflower”), but he doesn’t quite know the words yet.

It’s no secret that part of what launched Into the Spider-Verse into the stratosphere and gained it tons of love from critics and audiences alike was how, for an animated movie starring superheroes and a cartoon pig from another dimension, real and relatable a film it was.

Spider-Man is one of the most relatable superheroes out there and when he’s not relatable, you know he’s not being written well. Even in the recent Spider-Man video games, little and large things alike serve to make you feel like you get insight into Peter Parker’s familiar life. Sure, he’s a superhero that swings across the skyline saving folks from all kinds of crime, but he’s also a nerd who loves his aunt and gets distracted by cool weird things and makes bad jokes.

Peter has had decades of being written to be relatable. Recently, he almost always feels like an authentic example of a millennial trying to make it work in New York.

Miles… hasn’t exactly had that.

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[Stitch Elsewhere] Luke Cage review @ Strange Horizons

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Marvel’s Luke Cage looks at trauma from an intersectional point of view—one which doesn’t center whiteness or stereotypes of Black masculinity.

After eight years, fourteen feature-length films, and four separate television series, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has finally managed to place a Black man front and center in his own narrative. Luke Cage, a character previously seen as a supporting character in the first season of the Netflix-exclusive series Marvel’s Jessica Jones, is the first Black character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to star in their own series rather than remain a poorly-fleshed out sidekick to a white character.

Marvel’s Luke Cage is one of the only series out on television today that provides a close and realistic look at what it means to be a Black person in a world of superheroes. The series’ significant focus on agency, trauma, power, and personhood as they relate to Black bodies—as well as its portrayal of powerful, multi-faceted Black women like Mariah Stokes, Misty Knight, and Claire Temple—puts it above and beyond the very white superhero television and film franchises that dominate the media.

I wrote this piece on Marvel’s Luke Cage series for Strange Horizons and I’m really proud of it!

I got to talk a lot about the role power and agency play in the series, how Jessica Jones really had issues with antiblackness, and how Luke Cage matters as significant representation both to us in the real world and within the MCU.

I’m really grateful that Strange Horizons gave me the chance to write this piece and I think that if you read nothing else from me, that you should read this because a lot of work went into it and I feel that it comprehensively covers the things that Luke Cage did right and how important the show is.

Read the post here on the Strange Horizons website!

A Political Stitch

Note: if it’s not clear (but it should be), this is a celebration of my identity and my Blackness because February is Black History Month and it’s taken me this long to put my thoughts together.


“I didn’t know you were so… political,” my supervisor says to me on September 11, 2015.

It’s not a compliment.

What it is is a rebuke about the discussion I’d been having (mostly with myself) as I collected information about the Iran Deal and US interference in that part of Asia for a friend’s project. Because apparently, talking about the fact that the United States needs to get out of that part of Asia and stop interfering the way its done for like sixty years is problematic. My voicing that the Iran Deal was a good step forward to all of this was apparently disrespectful on September 11th.

I disagreed then and I disagree now, but what stuck with me was the idea that I suddenly became political that day.

Not when I spoke to one of my coworkers about her focus on making fun of AAVE or when I pointedly shut my office door on a discussion of who had it worst throughout history. Or not even when I spoke about my (a)sexuality with these people I thought were also my friends.

I was apolitical until what I was saying was too much to ignore.Read More »