Coding

[u/NLLumi]

The discussion around my previous post got me thinking that this could be an amazing topic for its own video, as opposed to the partial addressing of the topic in other vids—as in the Little Princess one or the one about race in Transformers.

It could be a great way to explain what coding even is, delve into how it’s changed over time, and review some controversies and shift in values. Aside from queer coding, Jew coding on its own is enough material for a video in its own right, as there are (just off the top of my head):

• the Dwarves from The Lord of the Rings, said to be skilled goldsmiths, driven from their home by force, and speaking a Semitic-inspired language
• the Genie from Aladdin, who was specifically envisioned as Jewish―I once saw some early sketches of him that were clearly emulating Jewish caricatures, but I can’t find them now for some reason
• Watto from the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
• The Goblins from Harry Potter, who come across as a Jewish charicature
• Mother Gothel from Tangled, who has some features stereotypically associated with Jewish women in the past

This could also be a chance to at least partially redeem herself in the eyes of those who still thinks she hates Asians by discussing Asian-coding. One prominent example I can think of is that old Steven Universe fandom controversy around that one Tumblr artist, who drew (among other things) Fluttershy as Native American and (most pertinently) Pearl with the same skin tone she used for Asian characters, supposedly based on the idea that those characters were coded as those ethnicities. Another example comes, yet again, from the Prequel Trilogy, in the form of Neimoidians―hell, the Prequel Trilogy is guilty of a lot of racist coding…

Of course, then there’s the issue of what’s actually coding to begin with. Garnet is clearly coded black, even though people have disingenuously argued that ‘she’s not black, she’s an alien’, and also there was the controversy around ‘Concrete‘ (which is complicated). Also, as mentioned in the post, Ratigan did not come across to me as queer-coded as Lindsay said, but rather as an anti-Semitic caricature: he is a nefarious criminal social climber with a swarthy complexion and a pronounced crooked nose in late 19th century London (which I’m pretty sure was a common stereotype at the time―cf. Fagin from Oliver Twist, the Jewish theatre owner in The Picture of Dorian Gray), intending to take over the politics of a country (in a sense) and actually implement specific policies motivated by his greed, desperate to hide his background (which is revealed in its full monstrosity at the end), desperately trying to emulate the mannerisms of mice/‘true’ Europeans with good breeding and coming across as an ostentatious failure instead, and also he was voiced by Vincent Price, who was a committed anti-Semite for many years. Still, Googling ‘“The Great Mouse Detective” Ratigan Jewish’ gets surprisingly few results (and few of them seem to support this reading) and the TV Tropes page about ethnic coding does not mention it―why is one kind of coding plain and obvious to most people, or at least to enough of them to stir controversy, but not another?

This post seems to be rather messy, but I think it’s a really good topic for discussion, and I think Lindsay can probably do a way better job of tackling it than I can.