a lot of “authority figures” that are responsible for making you feel like shit throughout your life are overgrown kids in adult bodies. idk about you, but i’m not listening to a bitch with the emotional intelligence of an 8 year old. regardless of who they are - coworker/boss, parent, teacher - i don’t care. it’s not happening 😂
So Harriet has shown on screen that she is terrified of living a mediocre life on the shadow of her clone mother and that speaks so well to people of color’s pressure into fitting into white definition of success and societal approval and so many things about Harriet’s plot lines reflect that
Harriet is constantly trying to appease Joan and try to sound as friendly and passive as possible.
And then when Harriet makes the slight criticism toward Joan, Joan throws a pity party and Harriet needs to back away for JOAN’s feelings, it feels really implicit how Harriet is trying to live up to white approval, by making a show that would get hollywood’s attention, casting the hot white couple of the school, by TWISTING herself backwards just to please a white woman’s sensibilities.
And as a result Joan just completely disregards Harriet’s art and makes it her own, and makes it way more whitewashed, and set on medieval times for some reason? (You could argue it’s bc Joan of Arc’s real life) but also! The fact that so many art that’s met with prestige is white and old and European, Joan understands these things are “meaningful and deep” but that is only meaningful to a specific set of ppl, as opposed to Harriet’s wide-appeal show. Joan is convinced she’s on a moral high ground but the way she communicates is mainly through a white person’s biases when creating art.
“I know I’m the clone of Harriet Tubman, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have fun silly stories too!”
Harriet genuinely likes the story she made and how silly and fun she is, but she lives in the shadow of an important social figure and is terrified of failing that image.
Many poc and specially black and brown ppl feel pressured into making their experiences and prejudice they face part of their art, that every black character on something set on the past is either a slave or non-existant, that art of color has to be about pain and tragedy that can spell out our suffering to a white audience, Harriet here wants to escape from the pressures from being a clone but also from being a black artist in 2023 in general.
The conflict between Harriet and Joan’s white womanhood is great bc it shows how Joan lets her feelings and desire to make a “meaningful” musical that is just a bunch of edgy stuff and white people is so well written, specially because it brings to question why do we make art at all? And how does one decide what kinda art they wanna make? Does making something black and white and dreary make it automatically more meaningful and therefore superior to a musical about twister? The answer to the last one is no, and I love how this episode showed these cool discussions.
And I haven’t even touched on the song about white guy confidence, because I think that was a plot b where that theme was the most apparent, and I wanted to show how the same theme of white privilege shows up in the plot a, Cleo, Carver, Sacagawea and Confucius also aim to get a white audience’s approval, that is what these characters all struggle with and it is an ungoing war called living through high school as a person of color
I’m so glad that Across the Spiderverse came out when it did because everything that makes it amazing could never be replicated by AI. You think AI could have done that? You think midjourney could have invented new animation tools for one specific character? You think chatgpt could have written that script? Don’t make me fucking laugh
Guys, if you read on AO3 please try to create an account. So many of us writers are going to be forced to lock down our fics to registered users out of necessity to help keep AI away, and it kills us because we don’t want to stop any of you from reading.
AO3 is invite only. So if you know an AO3 user, ask if they have an invitation to give you (we’re given invite codes to share with others who want to join) because that’s an easy way to get in. If you don’t know someone you can ask, this is AO3’s instructions for requesting one from them…
I know this seems like an extra step and maybe you don’t think you need it and can just read from people who haven’t locked their fics. But this isn’t just about you as the reader. If you enjoy fics and you want to keep them coming, this is how you support your favorite writers! If our stats and comments plummet, I guarantee writing is going to start going down as well. Nobody wants that! So please consider making an account and signal boosting this as well! 🙏🏻
**NOTE: AO3 indicates (as of today) there’s 48k some people in the queue for invites and they’re sending out about 5k per day. That’s not a bad wait at all!!**
