I don’t understand what’s Jewish about mother gothel… she has a typical Disney face doesn’t she? Is it the curly hair..? I mean her nose and everything else seem normal?
I’m sorry, I’m just trying to figure it out, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.
dark curly hair - long hooked nose - darker complexion than the blond blue eyed heroine 9and really the rest of the cast - portrayed as greedy and evil.
Lisa Edelstein is Jewish. As are Idina Menzel and Amy Winehouse, both of whom I have seen compared in looks to Gothel. Gothel’s design is a pretty clear caricature of ethnically Jewish women.
This is a pretty good contrast between Rapunzel and Gothel. Rapunzel has the “typical Disney face”:
Here’s a more close up look at her features.
The hooked nose becomes even more pronounced as she becomes “eviler.”
If you wanted to claim that there was noting out of the ordinary for Disney animation when it came to Gothel’s features, you would have to find at least one Disney princess or heroine with similar characteristics (long hooked nose and dark curly hair, etc).
But here is what we have is -
small noses that turn up at the end:
wide, flatter noses (though cheers to Disney for not putting button noses on their characters of color, although Esmerelda’s clothing design deserves another essay on Rromani stereotypes and there are some major issues with Pocahontas as well)
And then a few misc noses (again, props for Jasmine’s nose not being a button):
Apart from just the design of Gothel, there’s also the whole: “obviously ‘other’ (read Jewish) woman kidnaps the pretty blonde (read: gentile) kid to use her for ritualistic/magical purposes”
Like that right there on top ofthe aesthetic Jewish-coding is what pushed the antisemitic caricature over the top for me. It harkens back to antisemitic blood libel that claimed that Jews stole gentile children for all manner of nefarious reasons. Even when Gothel is in “mother” role to Rapunzel, she’s is shown as nagging and passive aggressive, both antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish women.
There is no one thing that makes her an antisemitic caricature, but the design, plus the storyline she plays out, plus her characterization cement the overall character as antisemitic.
Jew-coding a villain is not in itself always antisemitic when there are also Jewish coded heroes. Rapunzel does not have that.
Having a villain steal a baby for magical/ritualistic reasons is not always antisemitic as long as the villain is not Jew-coded. Rapunzel fails this as well.
Having a nagging and passive aggressive mother character is not antisemitic provided that she is not, again, coded as Jewish. Rapunzel fails once again.
Hope this helps.
EDIT: @ariminak pointed out that some of my wording made it sound like Gothel’s features only stereotypically caricatured Ashkenazi women when in fact that is not the case. I changed the language to remove that phrasing and make it clear that any ethnically Jewish women can be affected by this type of aesthetic trope. If you reblogged the old version, could you please delete it and reblog this one instead.
Spread this version so people recognize that this stuff harms all Jewish women.
omfg can y’all chill the fuck out, any race can be portrayed as hero or villain, it’s a fucking kids movie not a political statement
So I’m guessing you’re white and a gentile. As such, you’ve more than likely grown up looking at tv and movies and fairytales and seeing your face in those of the heroes.
Jewish people don’t get that. When we are portrayed in live action, our characters are more often than not whitewashed and in other media, our features are used and caricaturized to create “evil looking” villains.
You don’t see it because you’ve been ingrained with the idea that “ethnic” features are just “how you make a character look evil.” You don’t look at Gothel and see your mother. You don’t see yourself and your people. You don’t see decades of propaganda aimed at fostering hate against you and ultimately seeking to destroy you.
So really, you need to chill the fuck out and stop telling marginalized people to stop talking about the tools of our own marginalization.
Let’s play a game I like to call: Movie Villain or Antisemitic Propaganda:
Many “evil witch” tropes were built on European antisemitic stereotypes, not just in appearance but in the storylines they play out as well. Greediness, stealing children, killing children, hunger for power, etc. Every time a movie villain design uses stereotyped Jewish features to communicate “evilness” to an audience, they perpetuate the marginalization of the people they are using.
One big issue I have is that Gothel’s didn’t start out as the antisemitic caricature that made it to screen. Much of the early concept art has a more dark romanticism feel.
They changed the original design. Presumably to make Gothel more “other” from the good characters in the movie. At some point, a decision was made that dark curly hair and a hooked nose wound better convey their villain.
It really doesn’t matter if any of this was intentional, I’d actually bet that it wasn’t. However, antisemitic tropes are so engrained in our societies that people like you, even when confronted with a step by step break down of what it is, feel comfortable thinking that there’s nothing wrong with it and mocking those calling it out as if we are overreacting.
You seem to have completely ignored the majority of my post. It is the character design, plus the characterization, plus the story line that mirrors blood libel that makes Gothel an antisemitic character. It’s not just about someone of a certain race or ethnicity being a villain. It’s about how stereotypes of a certain ethnic group are understood as “villainous” due to villains being repeatedly coded as Jewish over decades of film and tv.
And contrary to your naive belief, all media is political to some extent. Every time a historically present minority is not included in film (ex: lily-white Harlem in Fantastical Beasts) or when a minority character is whitewashed, or when the “ethnic” features of a minority are used almost universally to portray bad guys, it is a political and social issue. When you never see yourselves as the people who play the hero or even see your people existing in a portrayal of a place where they should be, it is not benign.
it’s an intersection of “blood libel”, the referencing of nameless, mysterious ‘elites’, (read: the new world order, a “shadowy group of jews”) and the implication that jewish people are inhuman. for more specification/examples of antisemitic dogwhistles check this and other sources, and please be aware of this when you consume your media.
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Yesterday, my tiny peanut brain conjured up a thought:
You can study anything. Anything. I have been envisioning myself in a certain direction for so long, that I seem to have forgotten that nothing is set in stone.
It’s such a mundane realisation, but also so freeing.
If youre over the age of 20 and lost all your teen years to mental illness and never got to be normal, or have healthy relationships, went down the wrong path or diddnt have the right nurturing support from BOTH your parents and now you have to sort of catch up on your life whether thats getting your license, getting your GED, starting college, fixing your mental health, or starting things you told yourself to start or try again and again no matter what it is, and trying to fight to live and accomplish shit you FEEL you should have accomplished as a teenager but diddnt have the capacity or insight to care about due to mental illness.
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do you ever just think how men are allowed to look like shit at every second of the day. teenage boys are just allowed to have acne, old men are just allowed to have wrinkles. men can just go outside as they are and be attractive, women do it and they’re ‘sporting a natural look’
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i’m very wary of the idea of “avoiding other people’s negativity”
if by “people’s negativity” you mean their projecting or attempting to transfer their own suffering onto others, or constant catastrophizing, then yeah, that’s usually best avoided
but if when you say that you avoid other people’s negativity you mean their normal expressions of grief, anger, and fear, or narratives of their own suffering, then what you’re doing is avoiding their full humanity, and likely your own as well
