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It's cool to me how droids are people, because that means the torture sphere from ANH is a really mean and nasty person.
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Dec 25, 2016 05:46
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Neo Rasa posted:Maul and Dooku needed to be one character. Why? That would be a very incoherent and confused character, given that Maul is pure Id and Dooku is pure Ego. Maul is the undirected, childish rage of Vader; Dooku is the posturing, egoistic political ideology of Vader; and Grievous is the cowardly, pathetic, half-man/half-machine part of Vader. All three are lesser harbingers of the greater, wholly represented Darth Vader that is to come. By inflating these secondary villains' roles beyond what they deserve, it would merely serve to diminish Vader himself, and distract from the central focus of the prequels, which is not on external icons of overwhelming evil, but on representations of the heroes' own internal flaws, which appear one after the other, another one rising up as soon as the last is "defeated", building to a crescendo and leading up to the moment of Vader's ultimate reveal. The story of the prequels would be ill-served by adding a plot-line involving a personal grudge match with a recurring Darth Vader-type character, who would threaten to overwhelm the focus and thrust of the story. Once again, just because that''s how the OT did things, doesn't meant that's how the PT should have done things. You certainly don't have to like it, but no, it didn't "need" to be the way you wanted it to be. turn left hillary!! noo posted:Also I don't know about Anakin love scenes, but the battle droids are frequently almost as funny as Hondo, and their voices are pitch perfect. My seven-year-old niece does the thing where she talks into a fan to sound like, not just any robot, but specifically the battle droids. The mooks of Star Wars have always been semi-comedic buffoons. The battle droids are more pronounced in that trait, but that's because there needs to be an even greater degree of levity in the proceedings in order to counterbalance the increased degree of violence with which they're dispatched by the heroes. The battle droids are the perfect solution to the problem of somehow needing to show the Jedi slicing up enemies with lightsabers in a way that isn't too intense for children. If you want to understand the true depth of the problem this represents, just watch Luke during the sail barge battle during ROTJ. All he does is swing his lightsaber around like a baseball bat without visibly hitting anybody, as the extras fling themselves over the sides of the railings in a supremely unconvincing fashion. For a series focusing on the Jedi in their prime, you need mooks who look like people but are more than a few degrees removed from being actual people, and you need to make everything pertaining to the violence at least slightly ridiculous. I know this is just inviting all kinds of morally appalled academic arguments about droid personhood and desensitization to violence, but after a certain point you have to recognize this is a children's space action-adventure series with laser swords, and making the bad guys buffoonish robots who you can cut apart without getting an R-rating is just part of the harmless fun. People need to lighten up once in a while, IMO.
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Dec 25, 2016 05:56
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sinking belle posted:It's cool to me how droids are people, because that means the torture sphere from ANH is a really mean and nasty person. I think it begs the question, does he enjoy his job or does he hate that his entire conception was for this one deplorable act?
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Dec 25, 2016 06:12
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Merry Christmas, you filthy animals. Enjoy this festive Yule Log video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVJzibVS2YM
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Dec 25, 2016 06:14
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Detective No. 27 posted:I think it begs the question, does he enjoy his job or does he hate that his entire conception was for this one deplorable act? Ehh, it's a livin'.
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Dec 25, 2016 06:15
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Mecha Gojira posted:Ehh, it's a livin'. The new Flintstones comics explicitly portray the appliance animals as self-aware and hating their existence as slaves. Edit: Gonz posted:Merry Christmas, you filthy animals. Lmao. Detective No. 27 fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Dec 25, 2016 |
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Dec 25, 2016 06:17
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Schwarzwald posted:Nerd tribalism is miserable.
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Dec 25, 2016 06:31
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Cnut the Great posted:Why? That would be a very incoherent and confused character, given that Maul is pure Id and Dooku is pure Ego. Maul is the undirected, childish rage of Vader; Dooku is the posturing, egoistic political ideology of Vader; and Grievous is the cowardly, pathetic, half-man/half-machine part of Vader. All three are lesser harbingers of the greater, wholly represented Darth Vader that is to come. By inflating these secondary villains' roles beyond what they deserve, it would merely serve to diminish Vader himself, and distract from the central focus of the prequels, which is not on external icons of overwhelming evil, but on representations of the heroes' own internal flaws, which appear one after the other, another one rising up as soon as the last is "defeated", building to a crescendo and leading up to the moment of Vader's ultimate reveal. It also hints what would have happened if Luke would have killed his father in RotJ. Each villain killed just paves the way for the next, greater villain.
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Dec 25, 2016 06:36
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Star War thread is the dark tower series and SMG is the gunslinger.
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Dec 25, 2016 06:43
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The most worthwhile use of these threads is to read only a few posters' post history in them. Excuse my bitterness--I foolishly read the last 60 pages straight through.
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Dec 25, 2016 06:45
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sinking belle posted:It's cool to me how droids are people, because that means the torture sphere from ANH is a really mean and nasty person. 
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Dec 25, 2016 06:47
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Detective No. 27 posted:I think it begs the question, does he enjoy his job or does he hate that his entire conception was for this one deplorable act? "We seem to be made to make others suffer. It's our lot in life."  e: also i'm just going to spring my own trap and link this fanfic which i think is relevant to this discussion http://archiveofourown.org/works/7173134 ungulateman fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Dec 25, 2016 |
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Dec 25, 2016 06:50
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Odoyle posted:I think my favorite part of Rogue One was when my dad gasped at the Peter Cushing ghola on the screen right there in front of us. And then on the way out of the movie when my sister says, "That was pretty cool how they got Leia in there at the end. The CGI was pretty good!" and didn't mention Tarkin at all. She never even questioned the veracity of that performance during the show, and only afterward did she kinda rationally wonder how that actor could possibly still be young enough to reprise that role, unless they got a real good lookalike, etc. I did wonder about that, like if a portion of finding fault with the Cushing scenes was dissonance because we know the man has been dead for 22 years. Like would someone who never saw A New Hope or heard people talking about the digital work still hit as much of the uncanny valley.
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Dec 25, 2016 08:19
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:I did wonder about that, like if a portion of finding fault with the Cushing scenes was dissonance because we know the man has been dead for 22 years. Like would someone who never saw A New Hope or heard people talking about the digital work still hit as much of the uncanny valley. It's probably to do with a whole combination of things such as how good a view they had, picture quality (IMAX, etc). There's also a chance that people who are more used to CGI characters (video gamers, artists, whatnot) are more used to seeing CGI faces and may have a better time telling what's real and what's CGI.
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Dec 25, 2016 09:51
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Mecha Gojira posted:Ehh, it's a livin'. I would think if it was asked it would act like the American Sergeants who were trying to get information from random guys picked up off the street in Baghdad and dumped into Abu Graib Prison. "Just following orders" and trying to avoid Vader from destroying it for failure.
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Dec 25, 2016 12:17
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Or, just like G0T0, he is just a spiteful ball of hate.
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Dec 25, 2016 13:38
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Sunny Side Up posted:The most worthwhile use of these threads is to read only a few posters' post history in them. Good to know! Thank you so much for your contribution. I will be adding you to my "only a few posters' post history" read list.
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Dec 25, 2016 14:36
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Comstar posted:I would think if it was asked it would act like the American Sergeants who were trying to get information from random guys picked up off the street in Baghdad and dumped into Abu Graib Prison. "Just following orders" and trying to avoid Vader from destroying it for failure. I made the Flintstones joke, but some droids are just straight up sadists. See Jabba's Droid torture chamber. RIP terrified gonk droid.
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Dec 25, 2016 17:23
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Finally saw rogue one aaaaaand I dunno? The grey morality was different but I'm not sure it was better than black and white good and evil, it looked cool but nothing felt important, the characters were well realized but all doomed to die. Carrie Fisher had her heart attack right around the time the cg Carrie showed up, which was weird. It's the best star wars prequel film? I'm really not sure what to think of it or say about it, it is a star wars and it exists.
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Dec 25, 2016 18:19
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I'm going to see R1 again in a few hours, but first (and just for fun!) I'm watching Episode 1 with the Rifftrax. I forgot how many racist aliens there are in this movie.
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Dec 25, 2016 19:11
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its all nice on rice posted:I'm going to see R1 again in a few hours, but first (and just for fun!) I'm watching Episode 1 with the Rifftrax. I forgot how many racist aliens there are in this movie. Which ones are racist? I guess the humans on Naboo were pretty racist but are they aliens?
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Dec 25, 2016 19:25
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UmOk posted:Which ones are racist? I guess the humans on Naboo were pretty racist but are they aliens? Pretty sure Sebulba is a human hating sleemo.
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Dec 25, 2016 19:27
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its all nice on rice posted:I'm going to see R1 again in a few hours, but first (and just for fun!) I'm watching Episode 1 with the Rifftrax. I forgot how many racist aliens there are in this movie. Watto is constantly compared to Jewish people, but whenever I hear him speak, I'm only ever reminded me of this guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G2roIBXypc Also, the neimodian voice actors were of Asian descent and are as racist as blind guy and heavy gunner guy from Rogue One (re: not at all).
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Dec 25, 2016 19:28
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I'm sorry, but the voices sound like a complete caricature. Nute Gunray is voiced by a white guy born in England: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141324/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t20 I've seen Watto compared to both a money grubbing Jewish and Arab individual, but they both have very similar stereotypes in that regard. He's also voiced by a Scott. It's like a family guy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnREBX8TJRY Jar-Jar is a bit of a stretch, but I can see people reaching to compare him to a bumbling, African American sidekick, considering his character was played and voiced by a black guy. I don't buy that one, though. He's just a terrible character.
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Dec 25, 2016 20:10
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its all nice on rice posted:I'm going to see R1 again in a few hours, but first (and just for fun!) I'm watching Episode 1 with the Rifftrax. I forgot how many racist aliens there are in this movie. I rewatched the PT and TPM is a rough go. More than any other of the Star Wars movies, it feels tailor made for children. I honestly felt embarrassed watching it.
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Dec 25, 2016 20:52
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TPM is seriously the biggest hurdle anytime I consider doing a Star Wars marathon. Even starting with The Phantom Edit, I keep holding out for the Podrace and the Duel of the Fates climax to pull me through the viewings.
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Dec 25, 2016 21:02
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Ahmed Best intentionally played Jar Jar with attributes common to old minstrel shows, as a way of reinforcing the overall point of the character (which is that the people we judge as lesser beings—"pathetic life forms," as Obi-Wan put it—actually do have intrinsic value and that our sense of superiority is false). We've gone over this before in the thread (I recommend Bongo Bill's posts on the subject), but basically what happens in The Phantom Menace is that the heroes make a bunch of superficial judgments that end up biting them in the rear end later on. So they look at Nute Gunray and assume he's some conniving mastermind, kind of like old Yellow Peril villains. In fact, he's just a toady who's in way over his head. But because of this misperception, when we get to the end of the movie, the good guys believe they've foiled the evil plot and have secured peace in their time. On Tatooine, they encounter Watto, who kind of resembles a Shylock-style Jewish stereotype. The heroes assume that he's exactly that: a greedy usurer trying to bilk them out of their money. That's why Qui-Gon is so ready to mind-control the guy. But it turns out that Watto's not like that at all. He's just the owner of a grimy junk shop and a gambling addict, and he's a slave-owner mostly because that's how life works in a lovely place like Tatooine. Watto actually gets a kind of sympathetic portrayal, particularly in AOTC, because the point the movies are making is that the institutions are failing. The Republic and their Jedi enforcers don't care about a shithole like Tatooine because nobody wants to stir up trouble with the Hutts. Literally everyone else in the main cast hates Jar Jar. They all think he's a useless pile of poo poo, and the only one who shows an ounce of faith in him is Qui-Gon. In the end, he's the guy who provides Amidala with her key insight: if she and her people can just give up their ridiculous snobbishness towards the Gungans, their two peoples would make natural allies against the Trade Federation's oppression. She didn't have to waste all her time running from her homeworld, because the reinforcements she needed would have come over from right next door if she had only thought to ask. This theme extends to the rest of the cast, too. Little Anakin really is a wonderfully kind boy with a strong sense of justice, but the Jedi view him mainly as a weapon, rather than as a human being with real emotional needs and desires. Darth Maul is merely an avatar of raw vengefulness, but the Jedi Order reads too much into him, so they worry for the next decade that the Sith will destroy them from without. And then, at the end of the movie literally called "The Unseen Threat," the real villain gets almost everything he ever wanted and he throws himself a parade. Zoran fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Dec 25, 2016 |
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Dec 25, 2016 21:08
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its all nice on rice posted:I'm sorry, but the voices sound like a complete caricature. Nute Gunray is voiced by a white guy born in England: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141324/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t20 Haha. That guy may have been born in England but he is certainly not white.
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Dec 25, 2016 21:10
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AndyElusive posted:TPM is seriously the biggest hurdle anytime I consider doing a Star Wars marathon. Yeah I'll concede The Phantom Edit is a notable improvement. The movie moves at a decent clip and Jar Jar is rightfully excised from large chunks of the movie.
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Dec 25, 2016 21:16
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2016/12/25/please-come-home-mark-hamill-sends-christmas-wish-carrie-fisher/95840242/ Some good news today: Carrie Fisher confirmed stable!
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Dec 25, 2016 21:50
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Zoran posted:Ahmed Best intentionally played Jar Jar with attributes common to old minstrel shows, as a way of reinforcing the overall point of the character (which is that the people we judge as lesser beings—"pathetic life forms," as Obi-Wan put it—actually do have intrinsic value and that our sense of superiority is false). Yeah but Jar jar talks funny so he's a pointless character
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Dec 25, 2016 22:38
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White nerds explain away racism ITT because of course they do.
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Dec 25, 2016 22:50
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sean10mm posted:White nerds explain away racism ITT because of course they do. I found Zoran's take on it much more reasonable than your blanket statement. I get that "it's racist" is scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for excuses to prequel hate, but still. MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Dec 25, 2016 |
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Dec 25, 2016 23:25
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sean10mm posted:White nerds explain away racism ITT because of course they do. Before I ever heard anything like Zoran's post on the internet, My Korean Friend(tm) said the same sorts of things. As has Ahmed Best--does either of that make the interpretations of art ok? Serious question
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Dec 25, 2016 23:26
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sean10mm posted:White nerds explain away racism ITT because of course they do. I'm not white. We had this conversation already. I pointed out that minorities are more used to broken English since most grow up with family members speaking like that and are not as quick to jump at dog whistle racism, and for my observation I got white sheltered goons making fun of my family members which was nice and childish. It's all good though. You guys are making America great again and for that we thank you. Merry Christmas.
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Dec 25, 2016 23:30
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ruddiger posted:I'm not white. We had this conversation already. I pointed out that minorities are more used to broken English since most grow up with family members speaking like that and are not as quick to jump at dog whistle racism, and for my observation I got white sheltered goons making fun of my family members which was nice and childish. You tried to use your grandmother to silence everyone else as the official voice of all minorities. You think your opinions are the end of all POCs thought. Grow up. As for jar jar https://youtu.be/EeDWwyEE9WE
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Dec 25, 2016 23:46
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Except that's not how black people walk. It's how cartoon characters walk. Though, admittedly early cartoons drew a lot from, you guessed it, minstrel performances. What I'm saying is beloved Disney icon Goofy is as racist if not more than Jar Jar Binks.
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Dec 25, 2016 23:58
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The phantom menace is the reason trump won
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Dec 26, 2016 00:06
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temple posted:You tried to use your grandmother to silence everyone else as the official voice of all minorities. You think your opinions are the end of all POCs thought. Grow up. No he didn't. He drew upon his anecdotal frame of reference to reject a superficial reading of Jar-Jar's portrayal as implicitly negative and "subhuman." The fact that you are unable to distinguish Ahmed Best - who in his own words has categorically defended his performance as subversive, agreeing with Lucas - and his subjective experience from this ornamental presentation of black filmmakers specifically satirizing Blaxploitation, proves the point that you are not actually interested in performance, perception, or social justice. Rather, you just want to be assured that you are "in" on the joke, rather than read visual information and interrogating the political themes of the films, which are overt and omnipresent. Mecha Gojira posted:Except that's not how black people walk. It's how cartoon characters walk. Though, admittedly early cartoons drew a lot from, you guessed it, minstrel performances. Here's the thing, though: Virtually nobody ever complains about Goofy clearly being a descendent of Stepin Fetchit, because through economic and cultural mimesis, he became "masked" as white. Goofy started out as a yokel and hick - but he became a modern, commuting white collar father in the '50s. He had no limitations, experienced no Civil Rights movement. Unlike blackface minstrelsy and coon cartoons, he does not signify what whiteness is not, but rather exists as a neutral projection of the white supremacist, middle-class imaginary, sheltered from political crisis. Jar-Jar, on the other hand, reverses this paradigm. Instead of a blackface-descendent character becoming progressively "masked" as white - "passing," we could say - Best is portraying an alien cartoon character who is "masked" by unalloyed signifiers of the poor, the immigrant, the uneducated, the refugee. That's what Jar-Jar is, after all.
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Dec 26, 2016 00:08
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sean10mm posted:White nerds explain away racism ITT because of course they do. That's racist.
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Dec 26, 2016 00:13
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