resurrecttheliving:
Those photosets comparing The Prince of Egypt and Loki in Thor/The Avengers (over here:
http://tawmmm.tumblr.com/tagged/poe), reminded me of a discussion I had a few weeks ago on one of my Facebook statuses about a literary and historical trope that doesn’t often get discussed. Originally, it was about this news story:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/08/14/158773637/leader-of-anti-semitic-party-in-hungary-discovers-hes-jewish about a neo-Nazi discovering that he was Jewish, and then I realized this is a bigger pattern (Loki actually did get mentioned in the FB comments). I wanted to write about it a little and maybe get some reaction from the Loki fangirls over here on Tumblr.
I’m going to call it the Secret Jew, but though that’s a bit misleading, because it brings to mind the people who hid their heritage in the Inquisition or the Holocaust. The Secret Jew is in fact one step, or one generation, removed from those people - a Secret Jew is someone whose heritage is so hated and persecuted that it was hidden even from themselves, usually by a parent figure who wanted to protect them. So they grow up privileged, as part of the majority. Usually, they buy into the mythology of the given culture and believe positive things about themselves as the majority and negative about the “others” as the minority. The Secret Jew is someone who doesn’t even know they are an other, whose identity is secret from themselves and that’s one of the weirdest, most fascinating ideas ever.
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*claps* I was thinking about this for a while now, you just summed it up PERFECTLY. And with many more examples than I would have thought of. Now I must go reblog that gifset…
