Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Jun 16, 2020 17:47:42 GMT
And it goes without saying that I do not literally believe that the specific acquittance of hers that she was referring to is cerebrally-impaired. It was a hyperbole to point out that some people are clearly unable to properly contextualise things. In this specific case, a father of children that fails in seeing what Lost in the andes really is about, with an attitude that goes dangerously close to functional illitteracy, since clearly there is only one Souther American depicted in that story- the guy that gives the ducks directions - and all the square headed people is a totally different narrative matter.
And anyway, I think the case of Matilda's friend is much stronger than you make it sound. The square people aren't meant to be any specific realistic Southern American people to ever have existed, but obviously neither are they Europeans, and (unlike the Menehunes or arguably Indians) neither are they seriously presented as nonhuman. They're very much based on the stereotype of an isolated ‘virgin’ tribe, discovered by one noble white explorer (Rhett Butler EDIT: Rhutt Betler, actually. What can I say? Neither the original nor Barks's version actually sound like the names of real people to me, so I forgot which one was the "real" one.) who obviously completely overturned everything about their way of life by sheer example. The trope is of course being used in service of an unrelated point, rather than as a racist or otherwise patronizing caricature of a specific human population from the real world. But it still smacks of an uncomfortable attitude of white Americans of the time towards ‘dem indigenous populations’.
In Lost in the Andes, the trope is divorced enough from any real-world applications that it doesn't bother me, as it doesn't bother you or Matilda. But if someone notices its unsavory origins I can't say they're seeing things. And if they can't unsee those unsavory origins, that's too bad for them, but it's fair enough. I'll take vanilla, and you can too!