Star vs. the Forces of Evil

We continue this classic from my childhood. Plot description from English Wikipedia:

Star Butterfly is a magical princess from the dimension of Mewni and the heiress to the royal throne of the Butterfly Kingdom. By tradition, she is given her family’s heirloom wand on her 14th birthday and was known to be the most energetic and silly child through the royal family. After she accidentally sets fire to the family castle, her parents, King River and Queen Moon Butterfly, decide that a safer option is to send her to Earth as a foreign exchange student so that she can continue her magic training there. On Earth, Star befriends student Marco Diaz and lives with his family in suburban Los Angeles while attending Echo Creek Academy. Going on a series of misadventures using “dimensional scissors” with the ability to open portals, Star and Marco must deal with everyday school life while protecting Star’s wand from falling into the hands of Ludo, a half-bird, half-man creature from Mewni who commands a group of monsters.

Tonight’s segments are:

“Cheer Up, Star” — Star and Marco, whose names form a suspiciously good portmanteau, end up trapped in a tool shed together. In this case because the titular Forces of Evil have them surrounded, and Marco needs to fashion a weapon to fight them off, but setting that aside……… a boy and a girl being trapped in a tool shed together is a romance anime trope, is it not? Star is down in the dumps because things haven’t worked out with her latest crush and Marco has to cheer her up. Hence the title.

“Quest Buy” — Star and Marco visit the labyrinthine Magical Not Best Buy to buy a wand charger before Star’s wand dies foooooreeeeveeeer… Sheesh, and I thought the magic spheres in Ojamajo Doremi were bad!

“Diaz Family Vacation” — Star takes the Diazes to her home world of Mewni, and things don’t go to plan.

“Brittney’s Party” — Star and Marco crash Brittney Wong’s birthday party bus. Hilarity ensues. And also carsickness.

“Mewberty” — Like a cross between MLP:FiM S2E10 “Secret of My Excess” and Maria Holic, and perhaps also In The Heart of Kunoichi Tsubaki, Star experiences Magical Not Puberty. Magical Not Puberty, or “mewberty” if you prefer, involves Star getting hearts all over her body whenever she’s near boys. This eventually causes her to transform into a giant butterfly creature that kidnaps boys. — This episode also serves as our introduction to Glossaryck, who I think of as SVTFOE’s answer to Discord, except far less powerful. He’s basically just a guide that lives in an instruction book. Glossaryck is voiced by Jeffrey Tambor until the end of season 3, when he was replaced (presumably) due to Tambor being accused of sexual misconduct by several trans women. Fun!

“Pixtopia” — Star, Marco and friends are forced to work in the mines of the pixie dimension to pay off their Magical Not Phone Bill debts.

Uma Musume: Pretty Derby

We also continue this show I’ve never seen before, which Cuban called a “less creative Equestria Girls” and somebody else called “somebody’s fetish”. So on the whole, the Uma Musume: Pretty Derby series premiere two weeks ago was perhaps a bit of a rough start. But we still had a good enough time, so I’m looking forward to continuing.

Uma Musume: Pretty Derby’s three seasons chronicle the races of “Team Spica” in a fictional universe where “uma-musume” (or just “uma”), who are racehorses from our reality reincarnated as horse-eared-and-tailed anime girls, live side by side with regular humans. The umas compete in, essentially, track and field, and the winners of the races get to put on idol concerts for their fans. Pretty Derby season 1 (2018) centers specifically on the bright-eyed uma Special Week, a humble country gal from rural Ainu Mosir(Hokkaido) who idolizes her fellow uma Silence Suzuka. Special Week has now just enrolled at the elite Tracen Academy for aspiring uma-musume racers, with big dreams of doing her late mother proud by winning the Twinkle Series and becoming the best uma-musume racer in Japan.

Pretty Derby season 1 loosely adapts the late-'90s races of the real Thoroughbred stallion Special Week (1995~2018). Which is to say that the show sanitizes the awful industry of horse racing. To counteract this sanitization, I’ll be showing an anti-horse racing PSA (see “anti-horse racing message” below) and I’ll also read a section from “Industries of Purity: Horses, Idols and Affective Economy in Uma Musume: Pretty Derby” during the intermission between tonight’s episodes.

Content warnings for Star vs. the Forces of Evil include:

• FLASHING LIGHTS (all episodes)
• Children in peril (all episodes)
• Claustrophobia (Cheer Up, Star)
• Vomit (Brittney’s Party)
• Bodily transformation (Mewberty)
• Child labor (Pixtopia)

See also DTDD and IMDb.

Content warnings for Uma Musume: Pretty Derby include:

• Sanitization of horse racing
• Slapstick, mild blood (no gore)
• Inappropriate groping of children by an adult
• Sexualization of children otherwise

Star vs. the Forces of Evil was made on Tongva land

Star vs. the Forces of Evil was animated at Disney Television Animation’s studio in Tovaangar, the unceded homeland of the Uto-Aztecan-speaking Tongva people. More specifically, the animation studio in question is located in Glendale, Los Angeles County, near the historical Tongva villages of Wiqanga, Tujunga, Hahamongna, Ashwaangna, and Maungna, between the Verdugo and Santa Monica mountains whose springs had long provided fresh water for the Tongva.

The streets of Los Angeles were built by the slave labor of Tongva people arrested by settler police for “vagrancy and public drunkenness” after Seppoland annexed Tovaangar without treaty. The Tongva people today are still unrecognized by the governments of California and Seppoland, while the California Natives who did sign treaties with Seppoland never had those treaties ratified. This lack of Indigenous treaties in California presents unique legal challenges for the state’s Natives compared to Natives elsewhere in Seppoland.

The economic prosperity of Los Angeles that allowed an animation industry to develop in the city necessarily has its basis in the continuous and systemic disposession of Tongva people from their land. The Tongva had no say in approving the construction of Disney’s animation studio and sees none of the profit generated by the cartoons drawn on their land. And although piracy avoids putting money directly into the pockets of settler capitalists, unpaid fan labor such as pirate uploading still contributes to the overall values of the intellectual properties in question, just as any other labor adds to the value of any other commodity.

Tongva people still exist and still live in Tovaangar today. The Tongva still fight, as they have for centuries, to exercise their sovereignty over their homeland and resources. The Tongva are not a monolith nor in any way static: they are stratified by class like any other nation under capitalism; they adapt new technologies to their needs like any other nation; and also like any other nation, they have individual members intersected by every axis of oppression and each with their own individual perspectives.

Here’s a relevant charity:

• https://www.tongva.land/

I would also recommend listening to “An Indigenous Perspective On The Chicano Movement”, as it is very relevant to the topic of Mexican colonization of the Southwest and its lingering impact on the settler-colonial contradiction in e.g. Tovaangar today.

SOLIDARITY WINS THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS!

Uma Musume promotes animal cruelty

Uma Musume is effectively bankrolled by and serves to promote horse racing, a highly exploitative and mobbed up industry predicated on the physical and mental abuse of animals. Horse racing, as well as the Uma Musume tie-in video game, finance themselves by vampirizing people’s wallets through gambling: corporations exploiting human psychology to create a highly addictive waste of your time and money. Don’t be a sucker! Don’t buy gachas! Don’t bet on horses! Don’t give your money to animal abusers! Your money is better spent on ending the cruel practice of horse racing. The only acceptable amount to spend on gambling is zero. Treatments for problem gambling are effective.

Piracy does not exempt us from contributing to Uma Musume’s profit.

An illustrative example of how Uma Musume sanitizes the cruelty of horse racing: the real-life stallion Silence Suzuka was euthanized for an entirely preventable terminal leg fracture suffered at the 1998 Tennô Shô. The anime character based on his likeness is saved by Special Week and is able to return to the racecourse a few episodes later. Real-life horse racing is full of deaths and injuries to the point it could be called public execution of fellow creatures. Horses did not evolve to have people on their backs. Horses do not have a choice in whether they run or not.

Some facts about horse racing:

• Every week on average, 24 horses experience fatal breakdowns at racetracks across Seppoland.
• Whip use is standard practice in Seppoland, and it can be exactly as injurious for horses as for people. Imagine bleeding from your eye.
• Top trainers and jockeys also use illegal electro-shock devices.
• Racehorses are so overextended that they start bleeding from their lungs. These horses are called “bleeders” in the industry and put on drug cocktails to mask their injuries. Racehorses also commonly develop arthritis from racing.
• Thoroughbreds are highly inbred, and as a result have fragile bones and other health issues.
• Trainers only “love their horses” on camera. Racehorses have no-one committed to them throughout their lifetime and frequently switch owners.
• Each year, an estimated 10,000 Seppolandic Thoroughbreds are sent to Canada and Mexico for slaughter.
• Remains of dead racehorses get unceremoniously tossed in a pit.

Some resources and organizations:

• https://hexbear.net/c/vegan
• https://www.peta.org/ (most radical)
• https://horseracingkills.com/ (Australia and Aotearoa)
• https://horseracingwrongs.org/ (Seppoland/USA)
• https://www.animalaid.org.uk/the-issues/our-campaigns/horse-racing/ (UK)
• https://www.tierschutzbund-zuerich.ch/en/ (Switzerland)
• http://www.animal-welfare-foundation.org/ (Germany)
• https://www.horseprotection.it/ (Italy)

You can find more facts and statistics on these sites.