Oh, I swore, I SWORE I wouldn’t blog about celebrities ever again. But. Amanda Fucking Palmer, seriously. So ~edgy~! So ~quirky~! So ~unique~!
(Btw, I’m no fan of AFP. All I know is:
1) she was 1/2 of the Dresden Dolls duo *yaaaawn*
2) her occupation on the internets is being a bratty drama queen, and
3) she doesn’t use capitalisation DIE DIE DIE)
Anyway, AFP’s new artsy!edgy!unique! project involves ficational conjoined twins, Evelyn and Evelyn who:
Exploited by child porn industry! So ~*crazy*~ right? Completely blew my mind, really.
The story is: 1) offensive, 2) exploitative, 3) uses some really offensive tropes, like egdy! neo-Victiorian circus freakery stuff. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that disabled people are not amused.
Also, AFP and her partner will be performing in crip drag. CRIP DRAG WTF is wrong with humanity AFP WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU SRSLY!1111.
AFP’s reaction to the lack of amusement is full of fail, persecution complex and offended edginess:
that is, the blog represents the feelings of some of those
who are disabled in some waysthough i’m glad the internet gives them a place to share and vent,
i hope they get beyond it, and have (imho) a better lifesad they haven’t realised that everyone is disabled in their own ways.
part of the human condition.
some ‘worse’ than others. (emphasis mine)
~*flounce*~ ~*flounce*~ ~*flounce*~
‘Cause we’re all part of one huge disabled family! That is also black! and gay! and AFP totes understands how it is to be disabled and all that weird stuff, guys.
Up to this point, this was like standard AFP drama. I just harrumpfed and decided to move on. Until this:
She’s so egdy, see! SO EGDY!1111!!! Dare I say, even, hardcore?
At this point, I should think, it was time to realise that something was wrong with ~*AFP*~ and not bloody 846 e-mails from disabled feminists? But, AFP had none of it! Not afraid of controversy and painful backlash, standing up to feminist bullies, only she had the courage to staunchly uphold the status quo by saying exactly what everybody was thinking anyway, namely, that one doesn’t have to care about disabled feminists.
(It’s, like, the Law of Dogpile: when one person disagrees with you, you can have a discussion. When a whole bunch of disabled feminists disagrees, maybe it’s time to step away from the internets and invest in a mail-order degree in self-awareness? I mean, if Ken Ham could get one…(1))
Also, hypocrisy much? In her original post, AFP writes:
But when real disabled people dared to speak up they were swiftly “*~removed from the mental periphery*~”. Because almost-human-beings are only useful as long as they can be exploited in order that AFP be provided with cheap opportunities of further self-aggrandisement. Classy, really classy.
Disabled people: only have voices when AFP and other nitwits say it’s OK.
What she reminds me of is Aya Matsuura in this song, but without any of the glittery pink cuteness of the original:
2. A hipster scumbag in Melbourne is running a social experiment in pretending to be homeless, taking away resources from people who really need them and being a class A douchebag. Also, his mum come to help defend him on the internets, which is a whole new level of fail in itself. Creme de la creme of douchebaggery:
Uh-huh.
Cute! He hasn’t got any substance abuse problems unlike the regular homeless people, see?
Classy!
Hipster scum is hipster scum QED.
DIAF DIAF DIAF DIAF DIAF DIAF.
Of course, he is also raising money for charity, so this makes lying and taking away resources from people who actually need them totes OK.
DIAF DIAF DIAF DIAF DIAF DIAF DIAF.
(1) Not surprisingly, his wasn’t in self-awareness, though.
That Aya Matsuura struck me as the most depressing thing I’ve seen in a long time.
I meant that Aya Matsuura video, I didn’t mean to call her a thing!
I know you wouldn’t ^^;
Btw:
1. This is children’s stuff! (Un)fortunately? She might be, like, 16 in this vid? I don’t remember.
2. I’ve accumulated an entire tag bundle of similar stuff. For the, um, planet!
Your post has been added to a linkspam round-up.
I guess with Japanese pop culture I’m used to such childishness being par for the course in things marketed to adults. And it’s still a creepily backboneless ideal for girls. I don’t know…
And way to go in dredging up all this ugliness from Amanda Palmer. I figured out on my own that she was more pretentious and lacking in restraint than she was talented but I do love a handful of her songs and so this is a bummer.
Huh. This is, I think, a problem lots of Western people have. This because in our pop culture everything is more or less “serious”. I mean, when you watch soap operas, or films, or read the more lowbrow stuff, you expect all this stuff to get the mimesis part right, as in, people to behave like “real” people, make gestures like real people could, speak the way real people do and so on.
This is not the case in Japan. Stuff like acting in soap operas is highly conventionalised; the funny faces Western people tend to associate with the Japanese hardly ever can be occur in real life. Even something as taken-for-granted as language in Japanese pop culture is completely artificial, as in, no one speaks like that IRL. There’s a fascinating book, which, in my opinion, absolutely should be translated into Western languages, because it deals with those misconceptions, titled Virtual Japanese. It analyses several “languages” of “types” you can observe in soap operas, mangas and stuff. For instance, there’s the thing called “Roojin no kotoba” that is “language of old people”. It’s a little strange reinterpretation of the Osaka/Kyoto dialect that is normally used by old people in soap operas/mangas/other lowbrow stuff. It originated in the late Edo period, when the cultural centre shifted from Osaka/Kyoto to Edo itself; the older generation would thus speak the dialect that was considered more elegant when they were young, that is, the Kyoto/osaka dialect, the younger generation would use the Edo dialect. The late Edo period writers of lighter, more entertaining fiction noticed the shift, and the linguistic difference was used to build stereotyped, typical and “simplified” characters more easily; the technique is in fact still in use. A similar explanation can be found for most of the role-specific types of “language”.
The Japanese, while often not exactly aware of the origins of each of the “languages”, are perfectly aware they do not constitute a model for one’s speech in any way, just as the funny faces the actors make should not be imitated IRL and so on. It’s all very conventionalised and interesting ^^;
I might make a post about it one day.
Also, we shouldn’t forget the context; Aya Matsuura should be compared with other teenage idols, like Hannah Montana or Wonder Girls (Korean), in which case Matsuura wins totally, because sexualising children = EW ^^;;;;
I must say she shocked me a bit. This is maybe the second drama she caused online? This time, as well as the last time, the moment she made a response to the fan outrage, she only made things much mich worse. Also, what kind of a talent would excuse this sort of arrogance? Also, where is her PR team with gags and mamacles? Bizarre, just bizarre.
(I feel bad about people feeling bad about liking her music though. Just because she’s a bad person, it doesn’t mean her music must be tainted by association – well, apart from the EE project, because, srsly o_O)
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