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Nobody nose what happened that night, I’m being sirius

As a history student, the most ridiculous thing that tumblr social justice warriors ever made up is “cultural appropriation”. If you only had mild historical knowledge of any cultural exchange that took place before colonialism (the ultimate times of evil oppression besides the third Reich) you’d realize that what you consider your culture is probably just a mashup out of thousands ancient cultural aspects from many different cultures. “Culture” itself is an umbrella term for basically anything that might be associated with a certain group of people - and it is both fluid and highly subjective. Your political system has been culturally appropriated from somewhere once, and so has your educational system, your economical system, your religion and your language. If you want to get mad about cultural appropriation, how about you start with those monumental cultural appropriations before complaining about white girls wearing dreads?

So here’s the thing. Yes, there are some strong female characters in video games. But the existence of a few is not the same thing as full representation. To quote a study of video game magazines (yes, I know that the magazines are not the same as the games themselves, but this is what I’ve found so far)(x), “The ratio of male (360) to female (119) video game characters was about 3 to 1.” . In addition, “ A content analysis of images of video game characters from top-selling American gaming magazines showed male characters (83%) are more likely than female characters (62%) to be portrayed as aggressive. Female characters are more likely than male characters to be portrayed as sexualized (60% versus 1%), scantily clad (39% versus 8%) and as showing a mix of sex and aggression (39 versus 1%).” In addition, another study (x) suggested that playing as a sexualized video game character meant that “ Female self-efficacy was negatively affected.”

Female Characters in Videogames... debunking a myth

It's time to brush aside the oft regurgitated myth that strong female leads in videogames are and have always been nonexistent or relegated to background or ...

Damn… regardless of where we fall in this debate, this is some damn good work. I am thoroughly impressed.

Scientist 1: *Performs first successful open-heart surgery*

Scientist 2: Damn, Daniel!

Trying for two hours to come up with a science joke that somehow involves “Damn Daniel.”

Watch: Emma Watson and Malala Yousafzai talk equality, her journey and the one thing U.S. politics needs.

being a female means needing to see 10 different doctors to get a proper diagnosis because they always think you’re exaggerating and/or lying

This is by no means an original take, and I probably did not spend as much time as I should have editing the writing into being a coherent take, but:

In an awful lot of movies, Steve Rogers would have been right.

(Or, well, treated-as-right by the narrative, at least; in some of those movies many, many people would have died for his idealism, but this wouldn’t have been treated as wrong.)

When faced with this sort of explicit trolley problem, there are two main messages in pop culture: either you should never pull the level (you might kill a named character) or you should find a way to save everyone. For instance, take The Last Jedi: the narrative treats it as correct that Rose stopped Finn from sacrificing his life, not because his plan wouldn’t have worked, but more-or-less because we don’t trade lives. (Other examples: every fucking YA novel ever. ‘You can choose between your significant other... or saving the world.’ ‘Bye, world.’)

(She is absolutely trading lives, just not in the direction that, you know, saves people.)

(This is not to say that characters never trade off lives! The really obvious example here is that most movies are totally fine with killing the villain to protect innocents, although I’m pretty sure the message is generally closer to “the lives of villains don’t matter” than “pull the lever.” Characters will also sometimes do things like choose which of multiple locations to go to, which is generally understood in their narratives to be trading off lives at least a little. But when there’s this sort of explicit setup, the correct answer as portrayed in the narrative is almost never “pull the lever.”)

Now, I actually can think of counterexamples -- Wrath of Khan is very clear that you should pull the lever, for instance, and since I brought up The Last Jedi earlier I might as well mention Holdo’s choice at the end. But in said counterexamples, the person making the choice is almost always choosing to kill themself, not another person, and they usually would have died anyway.

But when characters are faced with the explicit choice of killing someone, maybe multiple someones, or letting far more people die, the treated-as-correct choice is almost never to kill them. 

And I’m glad that we have a movie where that’s not the case.

PSA for everyone seeing civil war early: PLEASE DO NOT SPOIL CIVIL WAR FOR ANYONE!!!!! If not for their sake, for your own, because if you start spreading civil war spoilers on this website you will most likely not survive the experience.

567. To make a horcrux, you have to give up one part of your body. That's why Voldemort doesn't have a nose.