The fact that Aloy is a white (conventionally attractive, skinny, able-bodied, young) woman who goes around disparaging tradition and culture and wrecking people's religions in the name of saving the world all while carrying around a (justified in universe) complex about her own genetic superiority, it, uh.

It bad.

Hot take: Macy's death isn't the "woman in refrigerator" trope.

It's the "indestructible Black person getting killed off by something frankly pathetic because the writers said so" one.

I posit that the "white woman being aggressive (in a racist/classist way) toward other people" (that is, being a Karen) phenomenon is a cross between the trashed bathroom concept and the "cis white gay guy who is angry that he's ALMOST at the top of the heap" brand of conservative.

I can explain my reasoning but not tonight.

Went down a rabbit hole of reading about racial theory (mostly bad racial theory) and mostly, I want to howl from the frustration of seeing people apply modern US ideas about race to historic societies that had completely different ideas on the matter.

In Pillars 2, one of the factions is headed by a Director Castol, who works with slavers to expand the slave trade. This is one of the facts that his rival, Governor Alvari, brings up to discredit him.

Alvari opposes slavery, and yet if she becomes leader (by your actions, for the record), she will implement a system of brutal labor that looks very much like sharecropping and the prison-industrial complex.

Looking back on my childhood, my mother sure did covertly teach me a whole bunch of nationalism and imperialism for our ethnicity.

All while insisting that I wasn't allowed to consider myself part of that ethnicity - I was born in and had citizenship of another country (which... I also wasn't allowed to consider myself part of according to her), I was too far removed, my cultural knowledge wasn't good enough.

Fucking yikes. I was a budding nationalist in my early teens, and one of my siblings is a full-blown nationalist now. And my mother shrugs and blames my father - ignoring that my sibling picked up her brand of nationalism.

(Yes, my parents have two different types of ethnic nationalism, this... yeah.)

Every time the Olympics makes up racist and sexist and gender essentialist reasons to ban Black women from sports, a bunch of people go out and rightly call them out it, but incorrectly refer to it as transphobia/cissexism.

It's honestly really... othering? Yes, the Olympic commission neither knows nor cares about the difference between transness and intersexuality. Yes, the medical establishment defined gendered characteristics based on white men and women, and People of Color not fitting into them and being punished for it is a feature, not a bug. Yes, all these binaries are made up to begin with.

It's still skeevy, in my opinion, to erase the fact that these women are *cis/ipso intersex* and call them trans.

Trans/intersex solidarity looks like a lot of things, but sure as hell not like white (yes they're almost always white) trans people calling "transphobia" on misogynoir.

Today I am thinking of the fact that for my father, moving from our home country to the US was moving from a place where he was part of the dominant ethnic group to one where he was a second class white immigrant.

Whereas for my mother, it was going from a place where she was a brown Other (no matter how hard she tried to hide it) to one where she was... a second class white immigrant.

He moved down, she moved up, just by moving to a different continent.

And my mother made efforts to assimilate, a bit, file off the public bits of her heritage, changed her name and tried to drop her accent, and acknowledged that she would be staying here for the rest of her life... while my father grouchily refused any sort of Americanization.

Us: "Yes, hello, we are a Proper White Heteronormative Couple, just looking for a nice white picket fence to make our own!"