submitted by Erika3sis to blorp 9 points | 2 comments

blorp.bot.nu/o/visual_cuisine

※Use a VPN and make sure you have a Hexbear account. Let’s thank Aer once again for all her hard work providing these uploads and subtitles for us.

The rest of this post may contain spoilers.

What's the chef cookin' tonight? (CW transphobia)

Star vs. the Forces of Evil I watched a fair share of “girly cartoons” as a teenager. Each time I got into a new “girly cartoon”, it generally represented some sort of shift in my developing sense of identity, especially my relationship to gender; or just generally the cartoon said something about where I was at at the time, for the work to resonate with me so much. Which makes me keen on eventually revisiting all of the “girly cartoons” of my childhood, to see if they hold up, and to see what about them resonated with me at the time. And in my conventional order, Star vs. the Forces of Evil was my third “girly cartoon”, after My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and My Little Pony: Equestria Girls. SVTFOE, I’d say, represented me shifting away from seeing myself as only a fan of My Little Pony to a more general fan of “girly magic fantasy”. SVTFOE was at the end of the day still just a cartoon, but it still meant something for me to be able to admit I “liked girly things (habitually)” instead of just as a one-off thing. From another perspective, I also think that Star vs. the Forces of Evil could be a good thing for us to watch as background for The Owl House , given that both SVTFOE and TOH, at least superficially, have a lot in common: one of the main characters is Latin/Hispanic; one of the main characters is an “extremely outgoing, eccentric and energetic” novice magic user with a lot to learn; characters cross between a Seppolandic state beginning with C and one or more fantasy dimensions; there’s a lot of obvious influence from anime, video games, and geek/nerd/otaku culture more generally; and there’s LGBT themes that never got explored as much as they should’ve been because Disney Is A Fuck. The Owl House did have a lot of milestones for explicit LGBT representation in Disney cartoons, with Disney’s anti-LGBT fuckery instead most notably taking the form of the show getting “cut short”, with only three feature-length episodes for its third and final season. SVTFOE on the other hand got four properly long seasons, but a lot of the LGBT ideas (Star “maybe” being bi, Marco “maybe” being transfem) were left as only implications, leaving fans still warring over how to interpret the clues. Star vs. the Forces of Evil was also often ridiculed by losers and babies as an example of the “bean mouth” or “”“CalArts”“” style. Remember that? How chuds had a fixation on the way kids’ cartoons drew mouths as like evidence that “SJW snowflake” colleges were trying to trans kids or whatever? That sure was something. But anyways, what is Star vs. the Forces of Evil? I suppose you’d like an actual plot description. From English Wikipedia: >Star Butterfly is a magical princess from the dimension of Mewni and the heiress to the royal throne of the Butterfly Kingdom. By tradition, she is given her family’s heirloom wand on her 14th birthday and was known to be the most energetic and silly child through the royal family. After she accidentally sets fire to the family castle, her parents, King River and Queen Moon Butterfly, decide that a safer option is to send her to Earth as a foreign exchange student so that she can continue her magic training there. On Earth, Star befriends student Marco Diaz and lives with his family in suburban Los Angeles while attending Echo Creek Academy. Going on a series of misadventures using “dimensional scissors” with the ability to open portals, Star and Marco must deal with everyday school life while protecting Star’s wand from falling into the hands of Ludo, a half-bird, half-man creature from Mewni who commands a group of monsters. Tonight we’ll be watching the first three episodes. Each episode has two segments. Tonight’s segments are: “Star Comes to Earth” — This episode sets up the basic plot, which I literally just copy-pasted a summary of. “Party with a Pony” — Our introduction to Pony Head, Star’s overly-jealous original best friend, who was my original justification for using SVTFOE as a blorpstitute for MLP:FiM. At this point it’s clear that we don’t actually need things to be even remotely pony-related to show them on Saturdays, but nevertheless. This episode also gives Star her dimensional scissors, which is why I call SVTFOE the best anime about a teen girl with giant scissors since Kill la Kill ^[Yeah, yeah, Ryuko had only one scissor blade, not a pair of scissors. Same difference.]. Maurice LaMarche is in this segment, too. He played Chancellor Neighsay in MLP:FiM, and he’s playing a different neighsaying pony here. “Matchmaker” — Star hopes to improve her grades by getting her math teacher a boyfriend, but ends up turning the teacher into a troll. “School Spirit” — Star takes some violent sports-related hyperbole literally, and ends up booby trapping the school’s gridiron. “Monster Arm” — Marco breaks his arm, and Star fixes it with magic. By which I mean she turns it into a freaking tentacle with a mind of its own. Hilarity ensues. “The Other Exchange Student” — This is an episode I found particularly memorable because, well, it’s about a Scandinavian exchange student (voiced by Rob Paulsen of Yakko and Pinky fame!), so I was like “holy shit this fictional character was born on the same peninsula as me!” when I first watched this episode. There’s a twist ending in this episode that you can probably see from a mile away but is still pretty amusing. # Uma Musume: Pretty Derby We’ve already seen one cartoon about magical teenage girls with horse ears and tails competing in races one moment and singing on stage the next, yes. But what about a second such cartoon? Enter the popular, yet controversial and problematic, Uma Musume. Controversial and problematic first and foremost because most of the characters in Uma Musume are based on real Thoroughbreds, and the plotlines are based on real horse races. This ends up sanitizing a pretty awful industry. See “anti-horse racing message” below. To counteract Uma Musume ’s sanitization of horse racing — and to test how Blorpers respond to showings of theory on Blorptube — I’ll be reading 4-to-12-minute sections from “Industries of Purity: Horses, Idols and Affective Economy in Uma Musume: Pretty Derby ” during the intermissions between Uma Musume episodes. I also won’t commit to showing the rest of Uma Musume after season 1 if we don’t respond well to the first season. Uma Musume: Pretty Derby ’s three seasons chronicle the races of “Team Spica” in a fictional universe where “uma-musume” (or just “uma”), who are racehorses from our reality reincarnated as horse-eared-and-tailed anime girls, live side by side with regular humans. The umas compete in, essentially, track and field, and the winners of the races get to put on idol concerts for their fans. Pretty Derby season 1 (2018) centers specifically on the bright-eyed uma Special Week, a humble country gal from rural {Ainu Mosir|(Hokkaido)} who idolizes her fellow uma Silence Suzuka. Special Week has now just enrolled at the elite Tracen Academy for aspiring uma-musume racers, with big dreams of doing her late mother proud by winning the Twinkle Series and becoming the best uma-musume racer in Japan. Pretty Derby season 1 loosely adapts the late-'90s races of the real Special Week (1995~2018), except, as said, making the animal abuse part hashtag Kawaii. Some questions I’m going to keep in the back of my mind during this showing: 1. How does “Uma Musumania” (made that word up just now) in the 2020s compare with the brony phenomenon of the 2010s? The cultural context of the COVID-era anime boom vs the evolving gender politics of the Obama era; formwise differences in the works; and what on the whole keeps drawing people to cartoons about anthropomorphized girl-horses? 2. Why, despite their apparent similarities, was Equestria Girls met with such a poor reception from critics and the brony fandom, while Uma Musume has been met with much more praise, despite being apparently far more problematic? To what extent is the praise/criticism earned, and to what extent is it just because, put simply, UM:PD is a show about girls aimed more at men, and EqG is a show about girls aimed more at girls? 3. How many critiques of Uma Musume could also be made, perhaps more indirectly, about My Little Pony? With regard to promotion of gambling; reproducing carnist attitudes towards horses; sanitization of colonialism; how the works handle gender and beauty standards; etc. I have never seen Uma Musume before, so I don’t really know what to expect. All I have to go off of are Aer’s word, a few clips and memes I’ve seen, and that paper I read.

Content warnings

Since I’ve seen SVTFOE before, I can do like I did for MLP:FiM and skim through the episodes and read plot descriptions for content warnings specific to each episode. What’s good about this is because if I did the content warnings for the whole series it would be Very long. DTDD and IMDb have more info. Content warnings for Star vs. the Forces of Evil include: * FLASHING LIGHTS (all episodes) * Children in peril (all episodes) * Building fire (“Star Comes to Earth”) * Bodily transformation (“Matchmaker”, “Monster Arm”) * Bodily injury: broken arm (“Monster Arm”) * Alien hand syndrome (“Monster Arm”) * Beauty standards (“Matchmaker”) Content warnings for Uma Musume: Pretty Derby include: * Sanitization of horse racing * Slapstick, mild blood (no gore) * Sexualization of children

Land acknowledgement

Star vs. the Forces of Evil was made on Tongva land Star vs. the Forces of Evil was animated at Disney Television Animation’s studio in Tovaangar, the unceded homeland of the Uto-Aztecan-speaking Tongva people. More specifically, the animation studio in question is located in Glendale, Los Angeles County, near the historical Tongva villages of Wiqanga, Tujunga, Hahamongna, Ashwaangna, and Maungna, between the Verdugo and Santa Monica mountains whose springs had long provided fresh water for the Tongva. The streets of Los Angeles were built by the slave labor of Tongva people arrested by settler police for “vagrancy and public drunkenness” after Seppoland annexed Tovaangar without treaty. The Tongva people today are still unrecognized by the governments of California and Seppoland, while the California Natives who did sign treaties with Seppoland never had those treaties ratified. This lack of Indigenous treaties in California presents unique legal challenges for the state’s Natives compared to Natives elsewhere in Seppoland. The economic prosperity of Los Angeles that allowed an animation industry to develop in the city necessarily has its basis in the continuous and systemic disposession of Tongva people from their land. The Tongva had no say in approving the construction of Disney’s animation studio and sees none of the profit generated by the cartoons drawn on their land. And although piracy avoids putting money directly into the pockets of settler capitalists, unpaid fan labor such as pirate uploading still contributes to the overall values of the intellectual properties in question, just as any other labor adds to the value of any other commodity. Tongva people still exist and still live in Tovaangar today. The Tongva still fight, as they have for centuries, to exercise their sovereignty over their homeland and resources. The Tongva are not a monolith nor in any way static: they are stratified by class like any other nation under capitalism; they adapt new technologies to their needs like any other nation; and also like any other nation, they have individual members intersected by every axis of oppression and each with their own individual perspectives. Here’s a relevant charity: * www.tongva.land I would also recommend listening to “An Indigenous Perspective On The Chicano Movement”, as it is very relevant to the topic of Mexican colonization of the Southwest and its lingering impact on the settler-colonial contradiction in e.g. Tovaangar today. SOLIDARITY WINS THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS!

Anti-horse racing message

Uma Musume promotes animal cruelty Uma Musume is effectively bankrolled by and serves to promote horse racing, a highly exploitative and mobbed up industry predicated on the physical and mental abuse of animals. Horse racing, as well as the Uma Musume tie-in video game, finance themselves by vampirizing people’s wallets through gambling: corporations exploiting human psychology to create a highly addictive waste of your time and money. Don’t be a sucker! Don’t buy gachas! Don’t bet on horses! Don’t give your money to animal abusers! Your money is better spent on ending the cruel practice of horse racing. The only acceptable amount to spend on gambling is zero. Treatments for problem gambling are effective. Piracy does not exempt us from contributing to Uma Musume ’s profit. An illustrative example of how Uma Musume sanitizes the cruelty of horse racing: the real-life stallion Silence Suzuka was euthanized for an entirely preventable terminal leg fracture suffered at the 1998 Tennô Shô. The anime character based on his likeness is saved by Special Week and is able to return to the racecourse a few episodes later. Real-life horse racing is full of deaths and injuries to the point it could be called public execution of fellow creatures. Horses did not evolve to have people on their backs. Horses do not have a choice in whether they run or not. Some facts about horse racing: * Every week on average, 24 horses experience fatal breakdowns at racetracks across Seppoland. * Whip use is standard practice in Seppoland, and it can be exactly as injurious for horses as for people. Imagine bleeding from your eye. * Top trainers and jockeys also use illegal electro-shock devices. * Racehorses are so overextended that they start bleeding from their lungs. These horses are called “bleeders” in the industry and put on drug cocktails to mask their injuries. Racehorses also commonly develop arthritis from racing. * Thoroughbreds are highly inbred, and as a result have fragile bones and other health issues. * Trainers only “love their horses” on camera. Racehorses have no-one committed to them throughout their lifetime and frequently switch owners. * Each year, an estimated 10,000 Seppolandic Thoroughbreds are sent to Canada and Mexico for slaughter. * Remains of dead racehorses get unceremoniously tossed in a pit. Some resources and organizations: * hexbear.net/c/vegan * www.peta.org (most radical) * horseracingkills.com (Australia and Aotearoa) * horseracingwrongs.org (Seppoland/USA) * www.animalaid.org.uk/the-issues/…/horse-racing/ (UK) * www.tierschutzbund-zuerich.ch/en/ (Switzerland) * www.animal-welfare-foundation.org (Germany) * www.horseprotection.it (Italy) You can find more facts and statistics on these sites.

♫ Uniting nations at the speeeed of liiiiight ♫ [epic sax solo] ♫ Station of the '20s — TV☆3SIS! ♫