Posted In: comic
Saturday is the final day for the Modest Medusa face masks kickstarter. We’re finally 100% funded. Thank you all so much! The kickstarter ends Saturday evening. We have a single stretch goal that I hope we can meet. If we reach $2350 we’ll unlock a Glados Medusa face mask design. I priced this goal as low as I could, and I hope we can reach it. You can check out the Kickstarter here. Thank you so much for your support!
I mean we don’t strictly *know* that Yeld pirates wouldn’t share their Lego. Has anybody asked?
Carlos might, but I’m absolutely sure that Carlos wouldn’t.
Carlos has morals. Carlos doesn’t.
It’s too bad Carlos is no longer around to make peace between them
They seem to get along pretty well though. They may actually be brothers.
True, true…maybe the late Carlos was the instigator who drove a wedge between them and Carlos and Carlos get along way better without him?
hold on gotta go update TVtropes with all this totally canonical information
Will this explanation segue into leggo my eggo?
if it really is the modern day now, someone her age DID grow up on toothless pirate material that indicates an innocuous lifestyle.. I love it.
CGP Grey released two informative videos on “How to be a pirate” this week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YFeE1eDlD0 (Captain Edition)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0fAznO1wA8 (Quartermaster Edition)
Both are a fun and informative watch, and should clear up any misunderstandings about how pirates work(ed)… 🙂
I enjoyed both of these
My first thought when I saw the last panel was “This is some ‘Jake and the Neverland Pirates’ level of stupid from Marah…”
…I didn’t know someone could confuse a minister for a priest.
Also, Marah didn’t know what pirates do? How… innocent <D
Oh, I looked in the dictionary. My bad. English is not my native language, so I only know “minister” as in “Justice Minister”, “Prime Minister”, “Defense Minister”, etcetera, which, as far as I know, have nothing to do with religion.
In English at least its a common term for religious leader. I thought that was more universal, but I guess not,
American English IS my first language, but I still read this as “Prime Minister” at first. probably because Mara just mentioned a President.
In many Christian denominations, ‘Minister’ can be a term for a member of the clergy who leads a congregation. It seems like a fairly natural mistake to make, especially for an American.
Growing up Baptist, the primary term was “Pastor” with “Minister” coming up once in awhile.
“Priest” was a Catholic thing, and therefore “bad”
No they don’t. That’s how Legless Lego Legolas Lost his Legs.
Ha
ah, the classic sea shanty, “Leggo My Legolas Leg, Oh!” ♫
♫Do what you want ’cause a pirate is free, you are a pirate! ♪
Remember: LEGO is essentially IKEA for juniors. And the Vikings brought us IKEA.
It is admittedly very weird how heroic Disney has made us think, about a group of career murderers, rapists, and thieves.
Really makes one wonder if Disney has the power to do that to other, indefensibly horrible groups in history?
https://www.dw.com/image/4258295_7.jpg
Theres a novel called Hyperion that I really love. Its set in the far future, and one of the characters is a writer. His publisher makes an off hand remark about reprinting Mein Kamph for like its 300th anniversary, and when the writer asks what that is the publisher describes it as a work by a little known 20th century author with fringe opinions.
I always found that interesting. Part of me hopes that we learn lessons from the racism and atrocities that we have to face as a civilization, and that we never forget them. But part of me also hopes that we’ll get to a point where all of that is a distant memory, and a lesson we don’t NEED to remember any more.
Maybe someday.
I really think, quite honestly, that the key to moving beyond racism is to forget it.
That’s an easily distort-able statement, so please allow me to clarify it.
I certainly DON’T mean ignoring everything that’s happening now, or the crimes of living people who still need to face justice for the crimes they have committed, and who are currently being allowed to continue doing awful things using their favourite excuse.
What I mean, is raising the next generation, to have no concept of this fictional human notion we call “race”. It would just be an idea they were never introduced to, to subcategorize human beings and label them on basis of a range of skin tones, hair colours, traditional region of origin, etc.
My parents ALMOST managed it. I distinctly remember that until about age 8 or so, no one, no adult in my hearing, had ever taught me to consider myself as “white”. I had a best friend in grades 3-4 (until we moved and I changed schools) named Conrad, who had some natural advantages playing hide-and-seek in dimly lit areas… until you walked past him, and he smiled. I’m not playing the “I once had a black friend” card, I’m saying that despite the fact that there were very few black people in our particular neighborhood, and that school (at that time) and that Conrad was the only black student in our class, I NEVER ONCE, in the entire two years I attended that school, heard an adult refer to Conrad as “the black kid” (or any less polite variation). He was always referred to by name, like everyone else.
If I had to explain how the concept of “race” was introduced to me, it would be the abundance of PSAs horseshoed into every single cartoon aired in the ’80s; all those anti-racisim messages and morals insisting that we shouldn’t be racist or sexist or discriminate based on religion… which then forced a 7-8 year old me to go find my parents and get them to explain what the heck the TV was talking about.
I learned nearly all my common stereotypes before adulthood from TV commercial PSAs, and cartoon episodes clumsily written around a moral message, trying to teach kids not to believe stereotypes. I would have never heard of them otherwise.
It’s worth mentioning that I’m Canadian, and that something like 80% of our TV content in those days came to us from the USA. Those PSAs weren’t even intended for me.
I met a woman from New York, as a co-worker in a call-center (a lesbian who’d moved north to a country where she could legally marry her partner) who was very… quintessentially “New York”, thick Italian-esque accent and mannerisms and all. From her I learned for the first time that “spics” was a slang term for people of Hispanic (mainly Mexican) origin. I’d never heard the word before, and I was 28 years old.
She asked me what we called Italians up here in Canada?
“We… call them Italians, I guess.”
“No, but when you wanna be rude to them!”
“Why would we want to do that?”
” (A full minute of utterly flustered and baffled noises that I can’t transcribe… but it was funny as hell to watch!) ”
Yeah… my parents ALMOST managed to raise a child with no concept of “race”, or its derivative, racism. I wonder a lot how many years I could have gone with no grasp of this concept without the intrusion of US-based media and culture. My entire formative years?
So close, so very close. Makes it seem like racism could disappear entirely within… two generations at most… if only we’d stop teaching our children everything about it.
Not that that would help the generation living right in the middle of it, but later on, I think that’s the step we would have to take to eradicate it completely.
I can see the merit in what your saying, but I also know that most people just don’t have that luxury. My siblings and I couldn’t not learn about race, because we were singled out on the first day of school, and some parents in our community wouldn’t allow us to play with their kids. And sometimes other grownups would call our Mom things that we didn’t understand.
I think it would be very nice to get to a point where race was just unimportant, and racism was just a memory. Its a real aspiration. But I think we’re not close to that yet, or close to the point where we can choose not to teach our kids about it. At least here in the US. I think sheltering kids from these discussions has teh danger to produce adults who dn’t understand how ingrained racism is in our society, and how they are often unwillingly complicit in that racism, despite their desires.
But building a post-racism society is certainly an inspirational goal.
You and I as white people, Hinoron, do not get to decide the best way to dismantle racism and white supremacy.
We just don’t.
We are insulated enough from the real, brutally violent effects of racism to be able to entertain such naive and ultimately harmful notions as “moving beyond” and “not seeing color.” Your childhood story just confirms for me that you were sheltered from–as Jake says, had the luxury of not having to learn–about the real violence that other people, othwer *children* experienced on the regular. My childhood experience wasn’t much different. I had a lot to learn as an adult, and I’m still learning it now in middle age.
If I had it to do over again, I would have started learning (and UNlearning) much, much earlier, so that I could be doing more meaningful work aiding my Black Indigenous and POC friends in the struggle for liberation, instead of playing catchup at the most crucial point in my lifetime.
As I said it’s not up to us to decide how to dismantle white supremacy. My best practice and understanding, from listening and learning from BIPOC, is that acknowledgi (both the realness of the problem and our complicity in it), exposing, and fighting tooth and nail, with deference to BIPOC, especially black, leadership, is 1000x more useful than sweeping it under the rug.
Collective forgetting, and the liberal beleif that we’re “past all that”, is what got us where we are now.
Agreed.
Did she seriously think that’s what pirates in her world were like? And how come they don’t sell her into slavery or something? Also It seemed to me that pirates like these ones were more good aligned and represented an unofficial resistance group.
She probably never gave it a second thought. I remember being a kid and suddenly realizing that cowboys were a real thing, and not just made up for tv.
Yeah but that representation of cowboys wasn’t too accurate anyway, so it’s more like half madeup for tv.
Uh huh. Thats how everything is, I guess.
You guys kidnap, murder, and steal?
I thought you guys just illegally distributed copies of various media.
Well, technically speaking, that also qualifies as stealing…
But only due to a misuse of language, stealing the way thieves and robbers do is the process of taking something away from somebody else. In the case of media piracy the only thing lost is potential future gain. It’s really not the same thing.
Wait. You’re telling me Marah has never seen a Pirates of the Caribbean movie or played The Secret of Monkey Island™?!
What kind of pirate-free life has she led. No kinda life, sez I! Yaarrrr~