Zendaya and the Art of Multiverse Maintenance
Description
[Note: originally posted on Chadnet. This is a repost, which you may have seen in other channels.]
</picture>I took a break from my next novel to write this, so the editing is slapdash and the tone is conversational and the format is slatestarcodex-style untitled outline because the callback to that style flatters midwits and subconsciously tells you this is a serious thinkpiece despite the fact that it’s a long rambling rant about whatever happened on Twitter as I wrote it. Also and despite all appearances this is a review of the movie Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
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I.
There's a strain of thought you can easily locate by googling for phrases lexically adjacent to "tumblr caused wokeness" in which young ladies wax logorrheic about their personal experience of learning social justice rhetoric from tumblr in the early tens. This genre of article is melodramatic, overly personal (like most things women write) and relies entirely on anecdote. Nonetheless, it paints an accurate picture of an important moment in internet culture.
That moment was defined by a tumblr called Your Fave is Problematic. We all remember that word problematic and how it was associated with thick-rimmed eyeglasses, fat girls with neon hair dye, shrill accusations of made up prejudices like ableism and so on. The tumblroid style in media politics is to look at some popular movie or song or tv show and elucidate all the ways that the seemingly unobjectionable aesthetic and narrative choices are secretly laden with implicit fascism, racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, transphobia, ableism, colorism, fat-phobia, ageism, and all of my other favorite things. If a male is white and handsome and compliments a girl on her figure, then that’s problematic because it reinforces the idea that white men are desirable and that it’s good for women to be skinny and that men are allowed to see women as objects and so on ad nauseum. This discourse is so fractally stupid that we won’t comment on it further, lest we get diverted.
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