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Rihanna and A$AP Rocky Welcome Second Child

Babe, wake up. A new Fenty baby just dropped!

There's no couple doing it quite like Rihanna and A$AP Rocky, who leveraged their powers for good and combined forces to become the ultimate power couple. After a long-lasting friendship and professional relationship, the two made it official in 2020 and have been serving goals and fab looks ever since. In January 2022, Rihanna debuted her first pregnancy by standing next to A$AP sporting an iconic, open-belly pink floor duster parka and baggy jeans.

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Culture Feature

Is the Official Rickroll Video Being Sold as an NFT?

Are we about to lose an essential piece of early Internet culture?

By: Brandon Nagy/Shutterstock

Since the early days of the Internet, culture has been accelerating exponentially.

Each year, more data is created than the year before. More images, videos, articles are pumped into the ether daily than at any time in history, and the rate of growth shows no sign of stopping, with 2020 seeing roughly twice as much data creation as 2018.

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TV

Can We Please Stop Casting Bland White Guys as Lead Characters?

Netflix's "Daybreak" features its blandest character

Netflix's new series, Daybreak, sells itself as a post-apocalyptic teenage Rashomon (the Japanese classic told in divergent perspectives), with a sequence of characters in the trailer each claiming to be the real protagonist.

At its best, the show does capture some of this appeal. It almost makes up for the lack of believable dialogue, compelling world-building, or competent portrayal of youth culture by having a diverse array of vibrant characters—like Wesley Fist, the gay black samurai whose story is narrated by Wu Tang's RZA. But ultimately, the claim that these characters have equal weight is undermined by the show's insistent focus on Colin Ford as "just Josh."

He's the bland white guy at the center of the story, because that's something Netflix thinks we need. Prior to the apocalypse, he was just a C-student, a recent transfer from Toronto who claimed to only like food from The Cheesecake Factory. He's continually mistaken for "tennis Josh, little Josh with the big truck, gay Josh, and other gay Josh," to which his friends respond that he's "just Josh." His love interest, Sam Dean (a deliberate nod to Colin Ford's stint on Supernatural?) describes him as "terrifically uncomplicated."

After the bombs drop and all the adults are wiped out, Josh's wilderness skills make him a hot commodity, but it all just reads as an excuse to cast the blandest possible white guy and force all the more interesting characters into orbit around him.

As a bland white boy myself, can we please just stop?

There's no need to plaster on a confused approximation of wokeness (no, Daybreak, you can't say "Todd Altman self-identifies his gender as a seahorse" in a hip, accepting way…) and qualify your main character's bland whiteness by saying "but he's supposed to be boring!" What you can do is skip all that by ditching the bland white guy character in the first place.

While Sam Dean—a blonde, sex-positive Pollyanna with an English accent and a heavy dose of damsel in distress—is a shade more interesting than "just Josh," they could both be removed from the show without losing much value. But nope. Daybreak makes them the center of the whole world.

I mean, there's a turf war for control of hellscape-LA, with cliquish tribes—a la The Warriors—all vying for power. That's pretty fun. And, oh boy! There are even a handful of novel, dynamic characters who are engaging enough to warrant a focus in that unfolding war. Yay! But no. The show insists that Josh's quest to rescue Sam is the really important story.

Why? Josh just sucks. He feels bad that, pre-apocalypse, he called Sam a sl*t, and he wants to save her so he can win her back. Why should we root for that? He called her a sl*t because she's too cool for him—and she's barely cool. He's the blandest flavor of cottage cheese in a toxic-masculine shell. Even if Colin Ford delivered a stellar performance, it's hard to see how this sh*tty character would be salvageable, let alone worthy of the central role. And Colin Ford is faaaar from stellar...

So, Netflix. Do better. You seem to have the freedom to green-light whatever you want, so why keep centering your stories on the same lame characters? Why is a WASPy half-nerd white guy still the default? Speaking on behalf of us all, even we're bored of us by now.

CULTURE

Why Celebrities Like Anime

Face it, weebs: "Dragon Ball Z" is mainstream.

Anime

Photo by Gracia Dharma on Unsplash

Once upon a time, wearing a graphic tee with an image of a beefed up, spikey-haired anime boy was considered lame. Now, it's legit streetwear.

Over the past few years, anime has grown from a hyper-niche, oftentimes derided interest in the West to a medium just on the border of mainstream. Along the anime boom in fashion, Hollywood studios have been scrambling to buy the licenses to every anime franchise they can. But that doesn't mean anime is new to Hollywood––some celebrities have been vocal about their love of anime for years.

Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan has publicly touted his anime preferences for ages. Kanye West is a big anime fan, too, citing Akira as one of his greatest creative influences. His music video for "Stronger" stands in testament, featuring imagery ripped directly from the classic anime film.

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