Archivist Jason Scott works for the Internet Archive and runs a separate unaffiliated project, Archive Team, which is dedicated to preserving dying or endangered websites. So when Tumblr announced that it was banning all NSFW content from the site on Dec. 3, the team had a mere two weeks to save as much content as they could before the Dec. 17 ban began.
But apparently, Tumblr wasn’t happy with the Archive Team’s plans. According to a tweet from Scott, Tumblr “mass IP-banned entire swarths of @archiveteam volunteers and warrior instances” on Dec. 15, mere days before the ban.
Stormtroopers aren’t scary. En masse, they represent the power of the Galactic Empire, offering ranks of gleaming white cannon fodder to overwhelm the enemy through sheer force of numbers. But on an individual basis, they’re comically useless.
Despite their often slapstick role during fight scenes, stormtroopers are an effective symbol of authoritarian violence: an image of rigid conformity, with a shared identity forged in propaganda and fear. Stormtroopers live under constant surveillance, facing punishment for any expression of individuality.
You can’t discuss stormtroopers without digging into this political subtext, which makes their popularity doubly intriguing. In other fandoms, dressing up as the fascistic villains would earn you the side-eye. Getting a Dark Mark tattoo because you love Harry Potter? Yikes. Wearing a Hydra T-shirt as a Marvel fan? That literally happened at a neo-Nazi rally last year. But even the most progressive of Star Wars fans seem chill with stormtrooper merch and costumes. With help from a Star Wars costume designer and some experts in the field, we decided to find out why.
As Monty Python once put it, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. In Aquaman’s case, the sword is a magic trident and the woman is a sea monster voiced by Julie Andrews, but the point still stands. Maybe it’s time for the kingdom of Atlantis to embrace democracy.
Aquaman is much more fun than Batman v. Superman or Justice League, but in order for the plot to make sense, you have to buy into the divine right of patriarchal monarchy. But perhaps this is too lofty a criticism for a mermaid action movie involving a submarine heist, a bongo-playing octopus, and Pitbull covering Toto’s “Africa” on the soundtrack.
Tumblr isn’t the only social media platform cracking down on NSFW content. Earlier this week, Facebook users uncovered a new set of community standards that outright ban discussing “sexual preference,” “sexual roles,” “breasts,” and “buttocks” on the site.
On Oct. 15, Facebook’s community standards outlined a new section explaining what content counts as “sexual solicitation” on the service, according to PC Mag. While Facebook had already banned “engaging in sexual solicitation,” the new guidelines target “implicit” solicitation, such as “vague suggestive statements,” “mention of sexual roles,” and most troubling of all, stating one’s “sexual preference.” In short, outing oneself as queer could be banned for being “suggestive” content.
Thanks to Tumblr’s new content rules, we know some people are planning to leave the platform. If you’re interested in following our coverage elsewhere, you can find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, or subscribe to our geek culture newsletter.
While the NSFW ban hurts marginalized folks looking to make a livelihood, or those just wanting get off, other legitimately harmful and hateful content continues to exist on the platform. A quick Tumblr search for the term “Nazi” brings up dozens of blogs run by fascists. In essence, Tumblr is sending a dangerous message to the world: Nazism isn’t as offensive as sex workers. Nazism isn’t as offensive as kink. Nazism isn’t as offensive as queer erotic art.
A lot of people are reporting that non-explicit LGBTQ content is being flagged as sensitive material on Tumblr. This has been a problem on other platforms too, including YouTube, where some LGBTQ vloggers noticed that their videos were demonetized if they used words like “transgender.”
Since these decisions are usually made by an algorithm rather than a human being, it’s often hard to see why LGBTQ content gets flagged as NSFW – although the underlying reason is, of course, homophobia and transphobia. Sometimes LGBTQ content is automatically perceived as unsuitable for children, while some sites penalize keywords like “lesbian” because they’re used to tag porn.
This actually happened on Tumblr before, when the site unilaterally blocked 29 tags from app searches in 2013, including words like “lesbian,” “gay” and “transgender.” Tumblr is popular among LGBTQ bloggers, including teens who use the site to find their own community, so this kind of censorship may cut vulnerable people off from their support network.
Netflix has settled a $50 million lawsuit with the Satanic Temple over the use of a Baphomet statue in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina that the temple says closely resembles its copyrighted design.
Lucien Greaves, the co-founder of the Satanic Temple, tweeted last month that the Temple was “taking legal action regarding #TheChillingAdventuresofSabrina appropriating our copyrighted monument design to promote their asinine Satanic Panic fiction,” two days after the show was released on Netflix.
When you compare Nagini and Leta Lestrange’s roles to the Goldstein sisters, there’s a clear difference. The white women struggle with romantic and political problems, while the women of color are lonely figures beset by suffering and dehumanization. Their stories are peppered with racist tropes, and they don’t find love like Tina and Queenie. They’re even styled differently, with Nagini and Leta both wearing slinky femme fatale dresses while the Goldstein sisters (and most other witches) wear suits and overcoats.
The final nail in the coffin for Fantastic Beasts’ political allegory is when Grindelwald namedrops the Holocaust.
Conjuring a vision of the future, he claims that if the muggles continue without magical interference, they’ll start World War II. It’s a twisted version of the “Would you kill baby Hitler?” argument. We don’t know if Grindelwald could prevent WWII, but it creates a scenario where, if the good guys win, they’re potentially fighting for the Holocaust to happen. As well as being wildly offensive, this ties into Rowling’s unpleasant view of muggles.
While Rowling paints a sympathetic picture of muggle-born wizards, the only muggles we know personally are the Dursleys (who are small-minded bullies), Voldemort’s father (the victim of a love potion), Credence’s abusive adoptive mother, and Jacob Kowalski (a nice but ineffectual buffoon). We never meet a heroic or impressive muggle. Combine this with Grindelwald’s assertions about WWII, and these movies suggest that muggles aren’t equal to wizards. They effectively imply that Grindelwald was right all along.
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