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darling;

@bougainvilea / bougainvilea.tumblr.com

i want to love and be loved
aya // 26 // she // naarm // jewish // ts
tracking #ayastag
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renthony

The history of the Disney company is so fucking fascinating and complicated that I could spend the rest of my life studying it.

I hate the company. I love the media. I want it to burn. I was profoundly shaped as a person by some of the art its workers have produced. It's evil. It's beautiful. It's an eldritch horrorterror personified as a charismatic mouse. It's a nightmarish example of capitalist hell. It destroys as much as it creates. It's a flaming trainwreck. I can't look away.

It's the goddamn Elephant's Foot of media studies.

It’s honestly fits perfectly with who Walt ultimately was. A brilliantly intelligent manipulator terrified of the inevitability of loss yet incapable of costing himself as he lashed out at his friends and workers over basic workers rights, driven to obsession over a theoretical town where he was basically a pleasant Uncle dictator who could determine the lives of his citizens right down to what appliances they use.

Look, you can do what you want, but Disney as a company has wormed its way into everything, and as someone whose JOB is researching and analyzing media, Disney is incredibly important. Evil in many ways, but important. Disney studies are so wrapped up in the history of American film and television that you just straight-up cannot study the field without studying Disney.

Hell, even if you're studying more broadly than just American media. The cross-pollination of Disney and anime is massive. Osamu Tezuka, the Father of Manga, was famously inspired by Disney movies in his own art, to the point where it's discussed on his Wikipedia page.

That's not even getting into the fact that the company buys up everything it can get its hands on, the fact that the theme parks are deeply wrapped up in the economies and politics of the cities they're in, and the fact that Disney is a big enough entity to be a major political force in the USA. Hell, American copyright law is so twisted up in Disney's bullshit that you can't separate them. You HAVE TO talk about Disney if you're talking about US copyright law.

"Just find other media" is such a holier-than-thou response to a post that's about the field of media studies. YOU don't have to be invested in anything you don't want to be, but to respond "just find other media" on a post about my field of work is...quite irritating, actually.

This is my field. I don't need to "just find other media." I am quite familiar with plenty of other media, thank you.

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log6

the Columbia University arrests are worse than they seem. They're arresting protesting students for trespassing. It goes without saying students cannot meaningfully "trespass" in the common areas of a university they attend. So Columbia University has suspended all student protestors from their institution, in the process revoking their access to housing, their belongings, and most crucially damaging their academic futures. We are witnessing full scale silencing and removal of anyone of conscience from the next generation of academia.

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voyagerprobe

Buckle up, European and Foreigner Tumblypoos, because I'm about to learn you a thing about AMERICA.

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You see these delectable motherflippers? These are called STATES. You stupid foreigners might not be able to wrap your head around this, but basically they're administrative subdivisions of the country.

And here's the thing: They are totally heckin' different from each other! For instance, New York:

Looks TOTALLY DIFFERENT from Kansas:

And they both look TOTALLY different from California!

So before you make fun of an American for not knowing where tiny third-world countries like "Check Republic" or "South Korea" are, maybe think about how much we have to learn about the unique regional differences in our OWN country. Maybe you should think about AMERICA more.

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As a kid, when your parents are poor, you're poor. If they don't have money, that means none of you have money. But if someone's parents are rich, that doesn't necessarily mean the kid is. Sometimes rich peoples' kids aren't rich kids, they're just some rich freak's exotic pets that can talk but aren't allowed to.

That’s… not how class works

OK, so- my partner was adopted by a rich woman when he was a baby. She's from a prominent family, practically royalty where we're from. She certainly had the means to send him to fancy private school, give him good food, nice clothes/toys, premium healthcare... she chose not to. According to her he was lucky to be "adopted out of poverty" at all and should have been content with what she deigned to give him. And she reminded him of this constantly, all through his childhood.

She dangled the promise of uni in exchange for good behavior and good grades- with terms and conditions, of course. And filling her laundry list of demands was something like pulling teeth whilst jumping through hoops. In the end, did he get to go to uni? Of course not. (And certainly being queer/trans on top of it all did not help things whatsoever).

He cut her off after high school, and when I met him a year ago he had been working as (the equivalent of) an UberEats driver for a living for the last few years, including through the pandemic. (Sixteen hours a day for the equivalent of $6 (six) USD, not including the gas for his shitty rundown scooter; caught COVID twice, suffers from chronic fatigue to this day).

And to this day he still has to be selective about which of our ~leftist anarcho-commie~ friends he divulges this part of his background to- cos all they hear is "raised rich" and then suddenly he's not One of Them because "well teeeeechncially :^) you're from the oppressing class...". Like.... shit, man!

Social rules don't mean shit when it comes to abusive parents. Even rich ones.

Probably especially rich ones.

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roach-works

people are totally on board with the concept of "sufficiently rich people are above the law, and this is bad" but refuse to connect that to the concept of "this also includes laws that protect children from abuse and exploitation"

like we understand "the ruling classes get and maintain their wealth through cruel exploitation of those less powerful" and we can't wrap our heads around "a lifetime of this cruel and merciless behavior being valorized by your peers probably doesn't predispose you to suddenly changing gears once you have a helplessly dependent child that's totally under your control."

like yeah the rich are our enemies in this ongoing class war, absolutely, it's an Us or Them situation to save the planet. but if you don't give a shit about saving the enemy's children too, i don't think very highly of your motivation or your methods.

A fun fact: my mom was in the upper middle class as a teen/child. She moved out the day she turned eighteen bc her father was horribly abusive. she had NO ACCESS to the income her parents had.

But her parents' income was still counted when she tried to get help from the government for her college classes.

Financial abuse is a thing. Financial abuse is a thing people use against their KIDS TOO. like, someone can be the spouse of a rich person and not have ANY real access to that money bc their name isn't on anything and they're not given a card or money.

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lanthir

When I was in college, I lost count of how many people I knew on campus who had to drop out because their parents found out they were queer and withdrew financial support.

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