telegantmess:nezua:oceanmythos:I love Rikki Tikki Tavi. This fierce-as-hell mongoose got washed away
telegantmess:nezua:oceanmythos:I love Rikki Tikki Tavi. This fierce-as-hell mongoose got washed away from his home by a monsoon, and instead of having the attitude of “Fuck this, I quit,” he decides to protect his new English family from two deadly cobras that threaten the family’s lives because, hey, they’re fucking cobras. I want to wake up every day with a spirit as brazen as Rikki’s. If I ever get into a life-or-death battle, my first response will be: “It’s mongoose time, bitch. Let’s do this.”This movie marked me deeply as a child. http://www.flickr.com/photos/nezua/2594866943/I used to think the cobras from this story lived under my bed. I would tuck my limbs as far away from the edge as possible so they couldn’t bite me.As much as I loved this movie during my childhood, knowing the source author makes me wonder about the intent in it when Kipling wrote it.(Image description: an animated still of a mongoose getting in the face of a scared looking cobra)Yep, count me among the Rikki Tikki Tavified. I remember the intensity of the final confrontation with the cobras, knowing it was a fight to the death, and Rikki Tikki Tavi’s victorious emergence from the den. I was mesmerized as a child by his fearless fighting spirit, which has probably influenced my whole approach to life. I think it helped me decide, as a little kid, that I liked fighting the racists and haters who tried to come at me, regardless of size or strength. It was a survival mechanism which served me well.Many years later, I revisited Kipling and re-interpreted most of his work as racist colonialist fantasy, including Rikki Tikki Tavi. I worked for years extracting the subtle racism from my mind which I’d absorbed growing up in white society and from white media; but I didn’t extract the positive things I got out of it, like Rikki Tikki Tavi’s fighting spirit. I pulled the nuggets I wanted to keep out of their racist contexts and reframed them in my mind in a re-imagined anti-racist context, along with a mental footnote about the rejection of their original racist frameworks. This was some of the early introspective heavy lifting of the anti-racist journey for me. -- source link