this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
619 points (96.0% liked)

Comic Strips

23491 readers
2304 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

Rules
  1. πŸ˜‡ Be Nice!

    • Treat others with respect and dignity. Friendly banter is okay, as long as it is mutual; keyword: friendly.
  2. 🏘️ Community Standards

    • Comics should be a full story, from start to finish, in one post.
    • Posts should be safe and enjoyable by the majority of community members, both here on lemmy.world and other instances.
    • Any comic that would qualify as raunchy, lewd, or otherwise draw unwanted attention by nosy coworkers, spouses, or family members should be tagged as NSFW.
    • Moderators have final say on what and what does not qualify as appropriate. Use common sense, and if need be, err on the side of caution.
  3. 🧬 Keep it Real

    • Comics should be made and posted by real human beans, not by automated means like bots or AI. This is not the community for that sort of thing.
  4. πŸ“½οΈ Credit Where Credit is Due

    • Comics should include the original attribution to the artist(s) involved, and be unmodified. Bonus points if you include a link back to their website. When in doubt, use a reverse image search to try to find the original version. Repeat offenders will have their posts removed, be temporarily banned from posting, or if all else fails, be permanently banned from posting.
    • Attributions include, but are not limited to, watermarks, links, or other text or imagery that artists add to their comics to use for identification purposes. If you find a comic without any such markings, it would be a good idea to see if you can find an original version. If one cannot be found, say so and ask the community for help!
  5. πŸ“‹ Post Formatting

    • Post an image, gallery, or link to a specific comic hosted on another site; e.g., the author's website.
    • Meta posts about the community should be tagged with [Meta] either at the beginning or the end of the post title.
    • When linking to a comic hosted on another site, ensure the link is to the comic itself and not just to the website; e.g.,
      βœ… Correct: https://xkcd.com/386/
      ❌ Incorrect: https://xkcd.com/
  6. πŸ“¬ Post Frequency/SPAM

    • Each user (regardless of instance) may post up to five (5 πŸ–) comics a day. This can be any combination of personal comics you have written yourself, or other author's comics. Any comics exceeding five (5 πŸ–) will be removed.
  7. πŸ΄β€β˜ οΈ Internationalization (i18n)

    • Non-English posts are welcome. Please tag the post title with the original language, and include an English translation in the body of the post; e.g.,
      SΓ­, por favor [Spanish/EspaΓ±ol]
  8. 🍿 Moderation

    • We are human, just like most everybody else on Lemmy. If you feel a moderation decision was made in error, you are welcome to reach out to anybody on the moderation team for clarification. Keep in mind that moderation decisions may be final.
    • When reporting posts and/or comments, quote which rule is being broken, and why you feel it broke the rules.
Banned Artists

The following artists are banned from the community.

  1. Jago
  2. Stonetoss

It should be noted that when you make reports, it is your responsibility to provide rational reasoning why something should be removed. Saying it simply breaks community rules is not always good enough.

Web Accessibility

Note: This is not a rule, but a helpful suggestion.

When posting images, you should strive to add alt-text for screen readers to use to describe the image you're posting:

Another helpful thing to do is to provide a transcription of the text in your images, as well as brief descriptions of what's going on. (example)

Web of Links

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] MudMan@fedia.io 1 points 1 year ago

You are absolutely exoticising European traditions as having ancient histories compared to American ones. You're just not doing it consciously, or on purpose. Ironically, you seem to be doing it because... well, that's an American cultural tradition inherited from colonialism.

Okay, let me get specific, because otherwise we're not gonna get anywhere. Since we started with Christmas. Hey, did you ever hear about that Dutch controversy about that traditional black slave-like figure portrayed by some dude in blackface that is now deemed racist and sometimes defended by Dutch racists as being traditional and innocent? Yeah, that's 19th century stuff. The taboo of blackface is purely an American thing that is getting exported now, which is part of the controversy.

The Dutch also generate the idea of St Nicholas as "Sinterklaas", which is recognizable worldwide in its American form. The Dutch guy comes from Spain in early December to leave gifts instead. In Spain, curiously, they didn't use to have a Santa equivalent, but they did do the "arriving in a parade" bit about the Three Wise Men in January. That tradition? 19th century as well, even if the story itself is in the bible. And then that got semi-replaced by good old Santa. But not the one coming from the Netherlands, just US Santa, largely imported to Spain via Coca-Cola ads and American movies in the late 20th century.

Meanwhile, in Germany and Italy they didn't have any medieval Christmas traditions at all because "Germany" and "Italy" didn't actually exist as a country until the 19th century. Most of what you think about "traditions" from those places are local stuff that then got repackaged and branded at the national level after that point.

The reason you don't think about it that way is probably that the US is a colony and I supposed US racists liked bragging about their ancient European heritage and American exceptionalists liked bragging about how new and modern American ideals are. But obviously a lot of the perception of that heritage, from the US version of national stereotypes to the uniquely American versions of imported celebrations is itself purely American culture.

And then the rest of the world learns about it through cultural imperialism. I'm not American, and I know about Thanksgiving, and Paul Revere, and western mythos and St Paddy's day (but the American one, not the Irish one) and Cinco de Mayo and Juneteenth and Black Friday is a thing here now even if we don't have a Thanksgiving day to go with it. There are local rappers here and the country went through a rockabilly phase in music at one point. Obviously most of the cinema in theatres is American and has been for the better part of a century.

Culture isn't culture because it's old. Culture is of the moment, it refers to the assumptions and habits and traditions the people who are alive today have. It takes one generation to create a cultural tradition, or to lose it. The US has had an iron grip on a significant portion of all the media and messaging that gets distributed worldwide for far longer than that. The mythos of ancient culture and its amputation from colonial territories is, itself, American cultural heritage, developed during the beginnings of nationalism along with nation-states and weaponized in revolutionary times across the world.

Man, we've gotten so far away from topic, but I do find this very interesting so I'm not mad about it.