Sounds like you would appreciate this show: Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs.
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It’s interesting that you’re focused on the Christianity thingy, something May used in all his novels and mostly ignored by me (probably ignorance, religion was never a big part of my environment and when I read the books I was too young to recognize it as problematic). The bigger issue is painting Indians as noble savages, holistic understandig of nature and honourful, when not misled by Whites (in May’s case mostly by French and Britons). The image is distorted, I’m not sure if the misconception does more harm not good.
PS: I tried to find a good translation for “eins mit der Natur” and realised that WP has a rather article about Native Americans in German popular culture.
I agree. My incredulity was at such a job being included in a series called ‘summer fun’. No matter how much pride people have in their work, I can’t see being a hotel housekeeper as being ‘fun’.
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That’s a complaint that I don’t get. I can see the objections to the stereotypical depictions and especially how those violate American norms.
But any hint of social realism doesn’t seem to be acceptable either. Why is it necessary or even desirable to erase so many working class occupations from the world of child’s play? Do we have to enforce some sort of Barbie idyll full of people driving their convertibles to their jobs as Dr. Ballerina Astronaut? That’s not the world most of those children live in and they know it. Where is the harm in allowing them to play real world?
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No it’s not racist. You calling it racist is already you projecting your cultural history on us. You see a behaviour which in your culture was practiced by racists, people who had actual people chained up in the shed out back, but those don’t have the same connotation in our culture. If transposed to your culture you would have every reason to view it through your terrible history, which is probably why you took Sinterklaas and turned it into Santa Claus, with the elves and such. Don’t however presume to look at us through your lens and say that because you with your history cannot preserve this tradition in its original form that therefor it must be objectively terrible for every culture. This is something older and more widespread than your culture’s bullshit baggage.
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This vagabond-cop thing is another interesting example of Americans imposing their own bias on things. They take their recent history of police brutality and impose it on a product with a completely different background. In continental Europe at least there is a history of the vagabond being a hero, who stands up to figures of authority. This goes at least as far back as Tijl Uylenspiegel in Belgium and Germany. Another example being the Belgian comic Robert En Bertrand about " happy go lucky vagrants who have adventuress while evading a cop who continually pursues them. Where one culture sees a victim, another may see an independent spirit.
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I’m quite happy that I’m not a vagabond between ~ 1850 and 1930 (afaik the time the pickelhaube was used by the police) and I’m quite sure that they received more harm then good by the gendarmery. But I don’t like the black-and-white worldview stated in the article: For me it’s not clear that the guy with the funky hat was busted by the police.
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I picked the Christianity example because it is fairly overt rather than implied - if I had chosen a more subtle theme to illustrate my problem with it then we could wrangle for weeks over how much was really there, how much was only in the imagination of the over-sensitive reader, whether it was a problem anyway… In any case, I agree. The problem is the racial essentialism that runs throughout his work, whether or not May depicts a particular people in a positive or negative light.
The translation you were looking for is easier than you think - we would just say ‘one with nature’ exactly as you do in German!
I ought also to add that I think that there are many qualities to love about May’s books - I don’t mean to condemn him entirely by any stretch of the imagination.
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Where I come from we don’t call him Santa Claus, so you speak of projecting but you’ve projected a completely different cultural identity onto me. In any case, I can assure you that Dutch colonialism is not a figment of my imagination (you have colonies now, for heaven’s sake - where do you think they came from?) and sadly it involved all of the unpleasantness you just evoked. Stereotypes like Zwarte Piet serve to justify it.
Reality continues to be real, regardless of whether you choose to accept it - and plenty of people from other ethnic backgrounds in the Netherlands have pointed out how this particular case is offensive to them. Why be a dick about it? First make him green or something. Then give him a name that isn’t ‘Blackie McBlackblack’. It would be so easy.
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You’re in luck! They have it for legos:
http://raster.art.pl/gallery/artists/libera/libera_lego.htm
Maybe Playmobil will follow suit soon. Don’t want to fall behind Lego!
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impossible, the topic will be closed in one day : )
I don't mean to condemn [May] entirely by any stretch of the imaginationI never thought so, and we're dangerously near the topic/off-topic boundery. After all, we're discussing cultural bias here, not some adventure fiction author.
That’s a pretty clear misrepresentation of what happened. I guess if you sponsor ‘Lego Artists’ then some of them are going to turn out to be dicks.
In any case, Playmobil is Lego’s idiot cousin. Apart from Lego seeming to get out of the floating ship game, I think they win on all fronts. I am concerned by the creep of violent themes and more obviously gendered sets, but I guess that this is partly due to the movie tie-in strategy they’ve adopted, and partly due to the continued tendency for people not to buy building stuff for girls. I seem to remember my sister being given an early iteration of this - Paradiso - in the early 90s. It was kind of holiday resort themed with buildings in white, grey and pink and (I may be mistaken) figures with moulded facial features and little boobs.
Picaresque exists in English language literature, too. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer might be considered part of the genre.
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Yeah, I think that article is rather shrill.
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If that’s really the problem, the boy’s aunt (who bought the toy) almost certainly had the option of returning the product for a full refund.
Now, if you don’t think that’s the solution, you are possibly thinking of a different problem other than the one you stated.
Well yeah, there’s also the problem of minders of other children unwittingly letting them play with it.
Including cleaners in a series of Summer Fun could be read as highly educational, as the reality is that most summer fun is made possible by people working behind the scene. Maybe the cleaner should have the symbolic slave collar, as the vast majority of workers in the hospitality industry are illegal immigrants working in quasi enslaved circumstances. A great starter for an insightful discussion with the children, just before going on holiday?
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I don’t think that’s a fair characterization. The focus is just very different. Of course there is next to nothing to construct, but at least for some of us there is more to the world than engineering. From the start Playmobil has always been built around the figures (which it had earlier than Lego.) It’s all about the interactions of people in certain settings. The inanimate objects are just sets and props.
Let’s take the aforementioned maid set. If you want to play “Hotel” or anything similar and you are more interested in the human interactions than the bricks and mortar, then a character like that adds richness and complexity to the system. The low level of STEM and violence may be uncomfortably close to a doll house though.
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As the sort of unofficial “no, playmobil is not the devil” advocate around here, albeit a tired-of-the-exact-same-discussion-every-time one, let me just say it’s nice you have an opinion, but a lot of people around the world would disagree. Playmobil is a de facto design classic and the fact that it’s essentially unchanged since it was invented in the 70s in a market that’s almost brutally centered on fads, pop culture tie-ins and the latest holiday season must-haves shows how much new generations of boys and girls around the world somehow keep enjoying those cheery, noseless, beer-can-shaped-handed little bastards.
It’s perfectly fine for you (and any number of Outraged American Moms of the Week) not to like it. There are other experiences, viewpoints and cultures out there.
As for violent themes and gendered sets, I guess I can copy and paste my response from some three identical threads ago, because the response hasn’t changed.
Continuing the discussion from Playmobil's political incorrectness:
The pastry and firefighter thing above was a reference to this specific bit of Lego gender segregation:
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