... further developed thoughts on why 5.19 bothered me

Apr 27, 2010 20:29

No idea whether anyone still cares at this point, but I went and commented all over missyjack's interesting meta post so I might as well post it here, and my previous comments were just initial reactions. So I guess this is just for completeness.

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amonitrate April 29 2010, 00:38:44 UTC
I hadn't even caught that, good observation.

Like, I'm not a huge stickler when it comes to reinterpreting legends and myths or even religions, but in order to effectively reinterpret I think you need to have some background in them to begin with, if that makes sense.

The stuff with Christianity doesn't bother me a lot, because it's the dominant religion in this country and it's not like anyone is going to confuse what they're doing on SPN as anything but a riff on Revelations, you know? There's a long history of that, like the movie "The Prophecy," etc. And it's less problematic to skewer or play with the tropes of your own culture, whether you're christian or not, you're still in a monotheistic, judeo-christian dominated culture.

But like you said, "pillaging the exotic is bad." Because unless you're very careful and aware, it's easy to trip over some pretty nasty histories of how white western culture has treated the Other, you know? Even if you are careful and aware it can still be totally problematic to appropriate the gods and mythos of other cultures.

I mean, we had this discussion a year or two ago, with the whole cultural appropriation/race fail conversation in LJ. It's not a new idea. In fact, I probably wouldn't have recognized the problems with this episode as well if not for reading a lot of those posts.

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Even white people know a little bit about other cultures, show! deiseach April 29 2010, 22:52:47 UTC
"I hadn't even caught that, good observation."

Thanks :-)

Thing is, I oaught that because all my life I've been interested in folklore and mythology and comparative religions, so I know an image of Kali when one is staring me in the face. But how many people do know one deity from another?

That's why I'm wavering between unintentional cluelessness (just find some nice scary monster pictures for the five seconds we need them, after all who's going to notice?) and deliberate lack of concern (ah, who cares if Ganesha is a benevolent deity? not our audience!) on the part of the show.

I imagine they think that the vast majority of the audience neither know nor care one way or the other, but on the other hand, after five seasons, they blinking well should know their audience and that hey, there are a lot of SF/Fantasy/Horror fans out there who *do* recognise Persian minatures on sight and know a bit about world pantheons.

Myself, I blame Penguin books' childrens imprint, Puffin, for influencing me at an early age with a collection of folk tales including excerpts from the Ramayana which made me fall in love with Hanuman at the age of ten or so. If they'd messed with my monkey god*, I would be very, very angry :-)

*Also my other monkey god Sun Wukong (blame children's version of Arthur Waley's translation of "Journey to the West" in my local library) or my collection of smith gods that I am in no way obsessive about, such as Hephaestus, Vulcan, Wayland, and Aule ;-)

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Re: Even white people know a little bit about other cultures, show! amonitrate April 29 2010, 23:18:58 UTC
I'm not sure unintentional cluelessness and deliberate lack of concern can't go hand in hand:)

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