Black Nerd Problems

by William Evans

  And Mufasa one of the realest to ever do it, I get that. Mufasa was like every Black parent who had gained the respect of his neighborhood and workplace but still couldn’t keep his son from doing some dumb shit. Man, that scene when they walking back from the elephant graveyard with Mufasa way in front and Simba and Nala way in back reminded your boy of many a ride home when I was sitting in the back of the Dodge, silent as fuck, watching steam rising off my pop’s head. But even Mufasa was gentle when he proved the point and wrestled away that anger with his cub. Then Mufasa was like, “Simba… Look at the stars. The great kings of the past look down on us from those stars. Whenever you feeling cocky, just remember these cats was the real deal and therefore exposing how garbage you really are.”

  For real, man, Simba was the son of the king. This dude ain’t have no chores, stayed getting into shit and never taking responsibility for his actions. Basically Simba is the lion version of privilege and affluenza. I know Scar set that shit up to merk Mufasa, but Simba was the catalyst, man. Scar was like the dude in Carlito’s Way, offering Guajiro a Coke in the cooler like, “Nah, man, it’s just in the bottom, you just have to reach down for it.” Sheeeeyet. Simba straight up fell for the Wu, the 36 Chambers, and the Gambinos.

  Y’all gonna have to give me a moment, I don’t think I’ve ever written about the death of Mufasa. I know it messes with the whole story, but Mufasa ain’t have to go out like that, man. I mean, this is Disney, ayebody’s mom gets buried before the intro credits hit, but dead Disney dads? That hits different for the brand. How you gonna give us Hamlet where we actually liked the king before he got rocked? You can’t be killin’ heroes and grand patriarchs like that on-screen, fam. Nah, Optimus Prime did that, so hopefully, you won’t have to go through that. The hood might never forgive Disney for putting Mufasa out on the street, dead as all hell in the canyon like that. Also, when’s the last time Disney just made you watch a dead body for, like, five minutes. I’m like, gotdamn, get my man Mufasa a white sheet or some shit.

  Yes, I’m still salty about Simba bouncing like that. I get that dude fled the hyenas because they were about to have a lion two piece and a biscuit. But when Simba came to see his pop’s not breathing, he gotta own that shit. Dude fled the Pride Lands like he had warrants. Involuntary manslaughter, to be clear. You know how Malia Obama took a gap year? Simba basically took a gap adolescence and left the hood in tatters. Simba wasn’t concerned what was going down with his mom? Nala? He left Nala behind like Princess Leia chained up in the Cantina with Scar the Hutt. His mom a widow and a captive now. She had to be thinking about her son leaving her behind like, “But fuck me though, right?”

  Scar basically brought crack to the hood in his absence, but Simba out here singing “no worries” with two stoners backpacking across Europe. So Nala having to come find his ass is the “we ran out of money, can you wire us some cash, but the butler gotta show up themselves to take your ass home” phase. He hit grown-up Nala with “Hakuna matata” and Nala hit him with “If you don’t get that punk-ass free love bullshit the fuck up out my face, lion… Lions in the hood dying and you out here quoting a gotdamn meerkat? The fuck happened to you?” Dude needed guidance from his dead father just to get off his ass, fam. Mufasa was like, “Remember who you are.” And I’m like, yeah, Simba ’bout to remember he a punk ass that dipped out on his fam over some survivor’s guilt shit.

  Here’s a list of the best Disney heroes:

  1. Mulan

  2. Aladdin

  3. Moana

  4. Elsa

  24. The mice in Cinderella

  48. Lilo

  136. Mulan’s daddy’s sword

  …

  …

  …

  378. Simba

  I’m sure y’all want to give credit to Simba for coming back and claiming the kingdom, but he could’ve overpowered Scar’s weak ass a lot earlier, like when he grew his big-boy paws, plus the Pride Lands was looking like Walter White’s old home after folks found out he was Heisenberg since he been gone. I’m not saying Simba can’t live, man, he just shouldn’t be out here enjoying all this birthright and privilege at the expense of the realest lion in these streets getting 86’d in the middle of the plains like that. Then all the animals in the kingdom bowed to him like nothing changed! Like he didn’t leave them on Dune with the sandworms and shit for years. Y’all need to look into some representative government, man. I don’t think this is workin’ for the everyday animals of the Pride Lands. Just remember that the next time “Circle of Life” start knockin’ on your TV, you ain’t got to take that knee for Simba’s coronation, man. He ain’t earned it, fam.

  Raising the Avatar: No One Woman of Color Should Have All Them Haters

  WILLIAM EVANS, aka Korra’s Earthbending Second Cousin on Her Mama’s Side

  I DON’T ARGUE with strangers on the internet anymore. I know, there are rules to this fake discourse shit and I’m breaking them. But I can’t summon the care like I used to. I’m old, I blame my knees. But there’s a giant asterisk next to that statement for what I just can’t let go unchecked in my corners of the interwebs. I will still fight people who:

  Use the wrong Black celebrity photo in a tweet because they think we all look alike

  Claim that they got bullied because they liked nerdy stuff when there’s an 80 percent chance they were a gatekeeper and elicited their own scorn

  Throw dirt on Avatar Korra’s name

  I could maybe tolerate the first two, but Korra slander is nonnegotiable. Yeah, I know, The Last Airbender is a superior animated show. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but we ain’t got time. Yes, you love you a lovable pacifist in Aang cuz cute and cuddly dudes that avoid conflict even when the fate of the world is at stake is your happy place. It’s okay, I once tried to convince myself that Jay Electronica had a better verse on “Control” than Kendrick Lamar. We’re all allowed to be wrong from time to time. Here’s what’s important though, my benders. Korra never stopped fighting for y’all. The fight was for her too, make no mistake. But she never dodged a fight and never bended herself toward an ambiguous verdict. You gotta respect it.

  For me personally, there are two eras of The Legend of Korra: before the birth of my daughter and after.

  BEFORE

  If you’re a fan of the Avatar universe and not just an old-guard patriarch that enjoys animated shows, then enjoying Korra should be a no-brainer. The Avatar is immensely powerful, brash. Cocky and stubborn. But still wide-eyed and susceptible to wonder. Still open to experiences and people different than her. A driving force of wanting to defend the helpless with a sense of moral justice. I just described one of the most common archetypes of an all-powerful protagonist in your favorite fiction story. Except Avatar Korra is a teenaged girl and no one girl should have all that power. Am I right? Who the fuck she think she is? All this bending without permission.

  There are only two arguments against the character that is Korra (leaving the third one out cuz we not giving homophobic fans more air than this aside), but they are pretty easily debunked. If you don’t like Korra because she is cocky as hell, I’d like to remind people that Korra knew she was the Avatar as a toddler because she could bend three elements from the jump, as opposed to the electoral college having to come inform her. A lot of y’all use every Twitter meme possible to post a picture of yourself next to a benign accomplishment. The hell do you think you would do as a five-year-old bending three elements? The people that hate Korra for this reason are the people that want to humble twenty-seven-year-old $100M athletes who pretend their abilities are ho-hum. Come on now.

  The second is about her “losing” the Avatar line. Which is a thing. Written into the show. Kind of like how Aang sacrificed the Avatar state so he could come defend Katara and end up getting his shit rocked. But him being healed was a thing. Written into a show. Y’all gotta learn plots, man.

  My point for all of that being, um, sexism? We don’t grade men characters with the same scruti
ny. The unlikable political woman clause. This is important, but important for me personally. Mostly because I have a daughter.

  AFTER

  When my daughter was five or six, our TV options were pretty predictable. Bubble Guppies. Dora the Explorer. Pretty much anything in the Nick Jr. or Disney Junior catalog. On a lazy weekend, desperate to climb out of the sing-along toddler hellscape, I gambled that she might like The Legend of Korra. I put it on without telling her anything about it, but the fact that it was a cartoon with a young girl for the main character was enough to get us started and hold her attention.

  But it worked. At the time, book three of Korra had just begun, so I was in full Korra fandom. But something changed after that weekend. Over the course of ten days, the three of us watched the entirety of books one and two (my wife seeing book two for the first time, but already being a fan of the first one). I probably would’ve stopped after however far into the catalog we traveled on that first day, but suddenly, my daughter’s typical requests for Doc McStuffins or Pocoyo (excellent animation if you’re not hip) were replaced with “Daddy, I want to watch Korra. Daddy, what happened to Korra?” What kind of father would I be to deny her that?

  There was a practical hypothesis for why she wanted to keep watching Korra. Maybe it was the new shiny thing. Maybe it was much more than that. For people that shrug their shoulders or roll their eyes when it comes to representation on TV, my daughter is a pretty good test study. She will watch or indulge just about anything that is aimed at her age demographic, but she consistently veers toward characters that look closer to people of color, like Dora or Princess Elena. You know, people that look like her. She had all Doc McStuffins everything, but the reality is almost all kids had all Doc McStuffins everything at the time because she’s that great. But there’s a big difference between the lovable pigtailed girl who can talk to her toys and the confident, boastful teenager/young adult who harnesses all the physical power in the world, but has to learn how to navigate the world diplomatically. I want Doc to be my daughter’s best friend. I want Korra to be the woman my daughter aspires to.

  With a series’ worth of recaps and more, I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve spent close to forty thousand words on The Legend of Korra and the character of Avatar Korra already. This isn’t a chapter (exclusively) about how awesome Korra is (to paraphrase Bolin, I already know how awesome Korra is… she’s awesome). This is a chapter about how my daughter once tackled me, kneeled on my chest, and yelled, “I’m the Avatar, you gotta deal with it!” This is a chapter about her looking over my shoulder while I was editing a Legend of Korra recap and then asking me to put her hair in three ponytails and roll her sleeves up past her shoulders to show her muscles like Korra does. My daughter didn’t just want to do the things that Korra did on TV because she was a superhero, just like the way that boys run around showing their open palm to people after watching Iron Man. She sees herself in Korra in a fashion she hasn’t with other characters on TV before.

  It’s been a joke among my friends for a while, but I often feel like I’m raising the Avatar. My daughter is smart and gifted in her physical attributes. She already seems to be good at about everything we throw at her. She’s also bossy, headstrong, and impulsive. What she will be allowed to have, which Korra was allowed to have (and most TV characters don’t), is a real emotional arc that charts maturity and resourcefulness. I really look forward to years down the road, where I might have the opportunity to revisit The Legend of Korra with my daughter when she can understand many of the more mature themes at work in the show, the likes of which manage to elude its critics from time to time as well.

  Characters like Avatar Korra are a bridge between the cute and cuddly Doc McStuffins and the complicated young adult characters like Elida from Vagrant Queen. Korra is a character that can remind my daughter of her own power and also of the way the world will react to her. I heard a boy at school tell my daughter that she was better at playing dodgeball than him only because she had “big girl muscles.” I know, we ain’t got time to unpack all of that.

  And before you ask: yes, yes he was.

  But her response was that Korra has muscles too. And it’s possible she would’ve had another example to reach for quickly and with so much validation behind it, but I’m not entirely sure.

  And that’s the point about representation. It isn’t always about us putting up billboards that say, “We need people of color represented because we want people of color represented.” It’s often about how those marks of validation sit in our subconscious, or how we avoid talking ourselves out of the gifts that people would seek to weaponize against us.

  The Legend of Korra has run its course as far as new episodes go, and despite all the ways that Nickelodeon tried to cripple its own product, it wrapped up the series on its own terms and in the most beautiful way possible as Korra and Asami walked off into the sunset (or spirit realm, if you will) together. But my connection to that world, that vision of maturation and rebirth and that untouchable protagonist, is something that won’t fade away so easily for me. When my daughter was much younger we emulated Korra in so many ways. In the bath, we splashed each other and called it waterbending. When spring rolled around, we planted the garden and dug into the earth like badger moles. This was her lesson in earthbending. A few years later, when the winter snows came, she wanted to help me prep the fireplace. When I let her light it and the soft whoosh came from the new fire, she surprised me when she said, “You finally let me firebend!” Whistling, or airbending, is taking the longest. Like Korra, it doesn’t really fit her personality much, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to master it. So we’re working on it, still. Daughters deserve to have all the available tools at their disposal. The world depends on it.

  You Can’t Win When Escapism Won’t Let You Escape

  OMAR HOLMON, aka Harry Houdini’s WiFi Password

  KNOW THE GREAT thing about being a nerd? When the world gets crazy, there’s an avenue of different media you can use to escape it. Pick your pop culture poison. Video games, comic books, movies, television, novels—there’s a plethora to choose from in order to get away and recharge. I’m currently saying this as a Black male and writing this on June 11, 2020. Nearly three months after police kicked in the door on Breonna Taylor, Black EMT, and killed her in her own home while she was sleeping. Two weeks after George Floyd, a Black man, had an officer kneeling on his neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, leading to his death. There was no video of what happened to Breonna, but there was of what happened to George. As I type, protests are occurring not only all over the United States of America but the world as well, to declare that Black Lives Matter during a global pandemic.

  Lemme run that again: around the entire world there are rallies, protests, and marches declaring that Black women, trans women, men, trans men, and children matter while COVID-19 is pulling a 28 Weeks Later. Racism is so bad it got folks out to protest during a whole pandemic. The entire world is saying, “Stop killing Black folks.” I don’t exaggerate when I say I never thought I’d live to see this in my time. And yet, there’s an entire section of those in power that don’t get the message (or don’t want to get it), saying, “But…” Meanwhile, Twitter becomes the new CNN, a thread of police brutality happening in real time with more than four hundred–plus videos of police brutality at these peaceful protests. I sat there going through the computer screen looking glass, viewing all of these videos for hours on end, night after night. About a day or two later, Will asked me what I was doing amid everything going on. I told ’em about the rabbit hole I was going down. Upon hearing it, he said, “Man, that doesn’t sound like self-care to me,” and he was right. It wasn’t. But that’s where the works of fiction I mentioned before come in tho, right? Ehhhhh…

  Wanna know the rough thing about being a Black nerd? Sometimes you see art imitate life so well that it captures the Black experience in America by accident. The very experience that you turned to fiction
to escape from for a moment gets thrown right back in your face inadvertently. The best example of this is Jonathan Hickman’s writing in Avengers, vol. 5, #37, where the Fantastic Four’s Mister Fantastic’s daughter, Valeria, gives him a note containing advice for a problem he’s facing. The note said, “You can’t win. Time to start figuring out how not to lose.” I read that quote seven years ago, back in 2013. To this day, I’m still hard-pressed to find another quote that so perfectly describes the Black experience in America to me. I’m not trying to summarize the Black experience down to one key phrase, especially one that sounds so bleak. But it really do be like that living in this country, man. This is a capitalistic society. Capitalism really only exists when ya have someone to shit on. Black folks been the ones taking that hit repeatedly. This, along with racism, contributes to a reality where we can’t win, and even though we didn’t have any part in creating this system of oppression, the onus is on Black folk to figure out how not to lose. All of which is to say, I hate it here. Still, I don’t want to leave this country—not because leaving means they win, but because I was born here. I’d rather be here helping with the progress toward ways where we don’t lose completely.

  Still, there comes a time when you gotta step back and disconnect from what’s goin’ on. Rightfully so too, because escapism isn’t a bad thing. You’re giving yourself time to get better or just freedom. The problem is it’s hard to do that James Harden step-back from race-related issues when you see instances of art imitating life and you’re Black 24/7/365. When you’re a Black nerd, there’s certain things that you can read or see that resonate so much that once again, it snaps you out of what was supposed to be an escape and right back into what you were trying to escape from.