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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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how is it that in a community that has been self-enclosed for thousands of years only two people are black

Some of them have different hair colours as well. That would've mischling-ed to a uniform mouse-brown over thousands of years too. So why does the skin irk you, but not the hair?

Audiences who are hypersensitive that "the race doesn't make any sense" while not blinking at LITERAL MAGIC DRAGONS... this is a suspension of disbelief with such non-euclidean contours that I think the showrunners can be forgiven it. If you need the in-universe racial demographic logic explained before you need the in-universe flight dynamics of pyroclastic lizards explained, I think that's a "YOU" problem.

...Unfortunately, I also believe that the Hollywood types who showrun these productions really are Yuri Bezmenov's Frankfurt School communist sleeper cells out to willfully commit historical vandalism as a means of waging fifth generation warfare, so I am in the sad position of believing both sides of the debate to be guilty of what their opponents accuse them of. FML.

The balls-to-the-wall total raceblind casting trend would be fine it it weren't motivated by malice, but I think it is motivated by malice, so it's not fine.

The audience has to know which things to suspend disbelief on.

If I am watching Star Trek and they visit some new planet and the people are all of made up of different Earth-like races but with pointy noses, that is perfectly okay because they have not told me any reason to think otherwise. But if a dragon just shows up in the climax if the episode, the show has broken its contract with me, and no "lol but you believe in spaceships" gets around that.

Appearances have been established as extremely important in the GoT universe. People get beheaded for them.

Some of them have different hair colours as well. That would've mischling-ed to a uniform mouse-brown over thousands of years too. So why does the skin irk you, but not the hair?

It's not that the hair is not a point of inconsistency it's that the hair is not part of the broader problem i brought up here. if this was a discussion of rings of power, i probably would've brought it up.

Dragons are part of the premise. The premise of the show is that this is a world in which dragons exist. It's something that I know I'm supposed to suspend disbelief for in every case because dragons don't exist and everyone knows that. but it's not like there are dragons and no one acknowledges it. i mean the true counterpart to them treating the dragons like they do race was if dragons were just flying overhead and no one in the movie acknowledged it. The whole plot revolves around that. I know that I am supposed to say 'alright dragons are not real, they have them here, so this is obviously a world where dragons exist' but it isn't clear that race never matters, which is evidenced by the clip i posted where the character in house of dragons clearly stated that his character knew they weren't her kids because they were white (in a youtube commentary). It's a basic reality of human existence that kids look like their parents. I mean if one of the characters married a lizard they would explain why that occurred; they wouldn't just be like 'if you think it needs to be explained why a woman would marry a lizard, YOU are the problem'

Frankfurt School communist sleeper cells out to willfully commit historical vandalism as a means of waging fifth generation warfare, so I am in the sad position of believing both sides of the debate to be guilty of what their opponents accuse them of. FML.

Yeah I don't know man given the previous comment I'm not sure how you can frame yourself as a neutral observer that sees issue on both sides, as you clearly agree with the logic of one side.