#and why Bad Man are just cartoonishly horrible

[mixelation]

Idk if you have watched she hulk but I wanna know, do you think they sexualized her a lot. I can’t help but think that

i think once you accept that she-hulk as a concept is supposed be an otherwise conventionally hot giant green woman (be she a mediocre cgi lady or a comic book lady), she's not really.... more sexualized than any other woman in the MCU? like i think you could argue making a "female hulk" a ten foot woman with perfectly coiffed hair and a ""yoga body"" and luscious carefully cgi'd eyelashes is like. you know, goes into that shitty "all females of the humanoid fantasy species are Sexy, even though the men are not" trope, which I'm not a big fan of. but i kind of like jennifer walters mostly scuttling around in an oversized suit and/or her PJs, and i did kind of dig she-hulk's first big "fight" being NOT a bunch of black widow-style sexy flying take-downs, but rather a ridiculous sibling wrestling match with hulk (i may have also been drinking with my own sibling when i watched it lmao).

like there IS an entire episode about how men on a dating website think she's hotter as she-hulk than as jennifer, but that was mostly played as social commentary (not necessarily GOOD social commentary, mind you), followed by an episode where she's forced to trot out all her dates in front of a judge, which I have mixed feelings about. and i guess there's a comedic bit where she twerks? so i'm not saying she's NOT sexualized, just that it doesn't really feel super egregious compared to some other media

#a lot of the ''feminist commentary'' in she-hulk is like.... just characters saying on-the-nose things rather than #an actual exploration of being a woman in a male-dominated field #which is why jennifer says hollow girl power-y things but there are several female characters #who exist to be jokes about how vapid and obsessed with appearances can be #and why Bad Man are just cartoonishly horrible #idk i think this show would improve a lot if it leaned more into being a zany comedy #*women can be #hmm tumblr not letting me rearrange by tags anymore. oh well #anyway: i think leaning in more as a comedy about characters who happen to have superpowers would help with someone the thematic problems #like why is jennifer having a disappointing dating life such a big plot point? #the focus on this would feel less like 'oh.... she's a woman and that's what woman like!!' if this show was FULLY #a slice of life comedy set in the mcu #also her fourth wall breaks are almost all really jarring because she doesn't do them often enough and i FORGET she can lmao

[ofallthingsnasty]

This is highly unlikely to happen BUT imagine the show Wife Swap (old american reality show from the early 2000s). I never saw a single episode and don’t intend to but the premise is simple (and really weird lmao): two wives from vastly different families swap households for a while. Shenanigans ensue.

Anyways, there is not a chance in hell Crocodile would let his basement wife anywhere near Doflamingo, but imagine some devil fruit fuckery swaps basement wife and the family pet temporarily. Everyone, except for Doflamingo maybe, will be having a really hard time until wife and pet can be located and brought back to their proper places

Oh, anon if only you knew - the German version was a huge part of my tween years, mainly because of one specific meme that came out of it (Frauentausch-Andreas)💀 The thought is so fucking funny, though. Idk what it is about dark content with a crack-treated-seriously twist, but it makes me laugh.

tw. crack treated seriously, noncon (only for Doffy), basement wife is fat + fem, family pet is gn as always

Oh my god, call that basement wife's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. You thought your cartoonishly evil pseudo-husband was bad? Hah, you know absolutely nothing, you stupid little thing. When Doflamingo scrapes you out of the crate instead of his little bipedal dog, he's confused - but he can put two and two together, and quickly at that. Obviously, you're not some assassin (really, what kind of strategy is that? Killing one of his family, making the body disapear and then wait for him to appear? Hilariously bad, honestly), not some spy and you really, really aren't the one who's supposed to sit in that cage. And when you start crying the moment he asks you what the hell you're doing here, he knows this isn't intentional. At all. Another once-over, a look at your weird little outfit, at the clunky stone on your hand and it clicks - he only knows one man with a similar taste in clothing and jewelry. Would you look at that, it's Crocodile's well-kept (and apparently not-so-little) secret. Reality can be stranger than fiction, huh? He's real nice after that epiphany. Too nice. Sits you down with a cup of tea like you're old friends, seats himself across from you, legs perched on the table while he smiles. Chats. Laughs. Acts overly familiar. It's bizarre to witness - but he's trying to glean what exactly you, the little teary-eyed butterball you are, offer Crocodile over him. Really, he's a little hurt: you're drab and soggy and soft in more ways than one, you cower and snivel in front of him like some beaten dog. The only fact that saves you from being mind-numbingly boring is that you're immensely valuable to Crocodile - and it makes ideas pop up in his head. He really likes the way you're stunned into silence when he suddenly uses his powers to immobilize you, right as you're in the middle of talking. And he gets why Crocodile keeps you around when you're bent over the table and he fucks you until you're just a sobbing mess. It's at least a little different from his usual endeavours and he takes his sweet time with you, leaves some evidence for the other man to discover later on. Once the mix-up is solved, Doflamingo hands you back dressed entirely in pink and with a thousand yard stare in your eyes. Will ask Crocodile about you every time he sees him from then on, a shit-eating grin on his face while the other almost loses it.

On the other hand, family pet does pretty well, considering the circumstances. I'd even argue it's the best you've been in years - because someone is treating you like an actual person, for once. Even if they aren't being kind. Crocodile is wary, of course - every single member of Doflamingo's posse is not to be taken lightly - but he also knows you. The fucking bird dragged you into official meetings enough for you to be a familiar face to him. He's furious, seething, beyond angry - but it's not necessarily directed at you. Doflamingo has to be behind all of this, he's sure of it, and you're just the collateral. (Admittedly, weird collateral, as you're the apple of Doflamingo's eye, always kept on his arm, cooed at, just treated like some ghoulish human pet, but who knows how the bird works? He sure as hell doesn't.) He'll probaby try to squeeze some information out of you (and when that doesn't help, he'll just plop you into a seastone cage and try to solve the mystery on his own. Yeah, he almost killed you minutes before - but then again, maybe you're worth something? He can always get rid of you later, maybe you do still have some value... He's feeling a lot of emotions, give him a minute.) Really, it's not that bad. You've been through worse. When everything is cleared up, I think he'd even let you take a bath and feed you a proper meal (on a plate!! A plate! Not a bowl!) before he'll trade you back in for his weirdly apathetic looking wife...

#tw.noncon #honestly crocodile just goes through the stages of grief while you're sitting in a corner. slow blinking at him. bc even if he ends you #- you have learned that your life isn't your own anymore anyway jdkdk poor family pet reader... #/crocodile #/doflamingo #/one piece

[imminent-danger-came]

tbh you are so real for talking about the misogyny targeted to mei & other women in the lmk fandom. in general its like people only value mei as: a: the wingman to some basic mlm ship or b: macaque 2.0. its honestly crazy how so many male side characters overshadow her in the fanbase despite not even having a FRACTION of her screen time. idk chat i feel like the reason people dont care about mei but care about some random male side/background character is less because they're inherently more likeable but because some of you view women as inherently less likable. and everyone is always like "mei is so girlboss pussy cunt slay shes the only reason theyre still alive because she keeps them safe from their silly boy shennanigans shes their ultimate wingman shes so badass shes their lesbian best friend i totally paid attention to her when i watched this show LOL" and even ignoring the obvious misogyny here (ie. how people reduce her to being the male characters babysitter) its like... okay... i know mei is cool & badass already... could you name literally ANY other character trait she has. like people just value her as being "the braincell" who can get red son and mk together or something stupid and its like are we having fun still is this still fun. literally every day i go into the mei tag its like "look at mei shes red sons wifey and shes vaguely in the background of this drawing of red son and mk staring into each others eyes #trafficlighttrio am i right oh look shes macaques niece now this post is about ao lie why is it in the mei tag"

and thats literally JUST talking about mei and it doesnt even begin to cover the other female characters. chang'e constantly gets reduced to being red sons aunt/mom/big sister despite them like. not having any actual interactions in the show. lady bone demon constantly gets overshadowed by her minion who has like 2 seconds of screen time, or she gets made into a cartoonishly abusive madwoman who people call lady bitch demon. just in general people act like shes a horrible person for like. being a villain. liks yeah the trying to destroy everything was bad but also she was an antagonist and thats what antagonists do LOL. spider queen gets completely ignored. princess iron fan gets made into a cartoonishly abusive mother so that way red son can have a poor angsty backstory and some male character (usually nezha, macaque, swk) can take care of him.

(also theres just a great deal of ethnocentrism in the lmk fanbase? like im white so take what İ say here with a grain of salt but so many people will misconstrue aspects of chinese culture for their own personal hcs. people will say male characters are transfem or nonbinary while completely ignoring the time period/culture their from where thats the norm. like yippee youve implied that an east asian man is feminine/emasculine because he has long hair. how do you not see the negative connotations with this. people also turn pif (& lbd to an extent) into a dragon lady which obviously has negative racial connotations lol.)

anyway this is where my unhinged rambling ends have a good day have a good night İ had more to say here but İ reached the text limit. İ dont see a lot of people talk about the misogyny thats prevalent in the lmk fanbase so İm glad youre pointing it out lol.

Yeah, I totally hear you. The lmk fandom has plenty of issues with misogyny and, like you said, ethnocentrism. It's definitely something worth having a discussion about, along with these issues in fandom as a whole.

#you seriously hit the nail on the head anon #(feel free to rant more! I appreciated reading yer thoughts) #tbh I think it's the purity culture like #If LBD and SQ were men. They'd be so popular it's not even funny #But because they're women. And women can't be flawed #(or their flaws are harder to justify- unlike a male character like Wukong. So they're a ''bitch'') #But don't worry! There's one girl character we can girlbossify and ignore all of those pesky flaws and characteristics!!! #I'm so sorry Mei #You're not a support character for spicynoodles to me #you're literally so insane about MK it's not even funny #she's going to become my fav character out of spite on god #when she was like ''what's the point of having power if you won't use it?'' #and azure was like ''i did not sacrifice everything to be an idle deity'' #And 1x03 was about her using her family sword (her power) to protect her house #And Azure used his sword (his power) to protect the world #And when Mei modeled her sword after Azure's (and now he's dead) #and when- *gets shot* #also Mei doesn't even have the fucking braincell #None of them have the braincell #They're all dummies. They're all scrambling around doing their god damn best #A main theme is the fact that no one knows what they're doing. Like #idk #lmk #lego monkie kid #torment nexus #asks #anon #lmk Mei

[the-owl-tree]

WC seems oddly afraid of having a character genuinely have blind faith in a system and then slowly but surely breaking out of it instead of just inmediately knowing something is off. Back in AVOS when Violetshine was with Darktail's group, she was a kid, following what was basically her adopted sister, she'd never had a stable homelife to compare the mess she was in, and yet she just simply knew that something was wrong and off. It's bland and makes the characters flat

The Kin are so comically evil I can't blame her lol but I do agree! I feel like it's a waste on both accounts: playing the Kin as cartoonishly bad makes it impossible to NOT understand why everyone isn't immediately suspicious of them.

I'm actually super soft on Violet and Darktail getting along, like I think it would be interesting if she had to reckon with the fact that someone she thought she could trust, that said he cared about her and understand what she was going through, was actually doing horrible things. But man, even without that, Violet realizing slowly shit is NOT right would've been better than immediate "this is bad" senses.

#deer rambles #the kin dont make enough sense and that's because darktail needs to manipulate more #i need to see him preying on clan weakness #but also violet and dark big brother dynamic #darktail genuinely being hurt when she tries to drug him #do you feel me?????

[crimeronan]

god i know i keep half-tongue-in-cheek saying that my dad is literally belos owlhouse but. i've apparently gotten a little desensitized to Just How Bad He Is (because i have ESCAPED, YAY) & so today has been a delightful adventure.

i wrote an AITA post from his POV about stuff that happened several years ago, bc i was curious about how bad he'd get dragged - i updated the timeline but the Only fact i changed was the reason for his Woes (i blamed COVID economic struggles, which actually makes him a Hero compared to the truth. the truth being so ugly i'm not gonna detail it here good god).

i kept it true to POV by only using things that he actually did say to me at the time about why he was doing the things that he was doing, & blocking out all the relevant info about why the wronged party (me) was so upset, & having him praise his daughter (me) and go "i love her so much :) she's so smart and independent and i would never hurt her :)", & having him half-assedly admit he might've sounded unreasonable/angry/malicious, in a way that was clearly supposed to earn Good Dad points for being so Willing To Admit Imperfections, despite a continued constant doubling-down refusal to answer questions about actual important shit or fix anything ever.

cannot emphasize enough that this was not a fictionalized/embellished/creative POV. the only points of fiction were 1) my dad did not write these things on reddit, he said them to me in real life word for word instead and 2) this happened many years ago, not like... yesterday.

anyway the thread blew up and the commenters were all so kind and genuinely worried for me (as in, the daughter) and offering so much help that i hopped on a diff account to be my past self so i could reassure people i'm okay & had a plan in motion for gettin' the hell outta dodge. because i felt REALLY BAD that they didn't know i..... did in fact get out. people were so nice it made me actually fucking cry jesus CHRIST. i had in fact perhaps forgotten that these things were all as bad and worrying as they were

now. this is all a very serious and harrowing-sounding prelude to the actual point of this post, which is. a bullet list of some of my FAVORITE FUCKING RESPONSES. revel in these with me i had so much fucking fun. i have taken DOZENS AND DOZENS of screenshots to peruse whenever i need a healthy dose of Perspective

here they r:

you are CARTOONISHLY EVIL?

HOLY ABUSE BATMAN

DO BETTER. RIGHT NOW.

did you even listen to yourself writing this. HOW

there's something seriously wrong with you. like on an intrinsic unfixable level

hey this happened to me too! my parent died and i had a party about it btw

your daughter is never going to speak to you again after this

(note from the future: yeah)

you're going to act confused and sad when she goes no-contact aren't you

(NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: HE SURE FUCKING IS)

i think you are creating your own problems and then getting mad at them. maybe instead you could not do that

is this ragebait. i can't imagine anyone this horrible actually existing

this isn't ragebait. i can tell this isn't ragebait because I Know This Kind Of Man So Intimately

you are the asshole on literally so many levels i'm going to write a 15 paragraph response line-by-line dissecting everything wrong with you

are you aware that you're lying or are you literally this incapable of 2 seconds of honest self-reflection

i need to donate to a gofundme for your daughter right now immediately

(note from the future: i am not going to scam people by pretending a long-done sitch is a current emergency on gofundme. have no fear.)

wow. okay i'm gonna go hug my mom and thank her for not being you

you are Actually Literally Empirically the Actual Literal Worst Parent who has Actually Literally Ever Existed

HOW FUCKING DARE YOU????

WHO DO YOU FUCKING THINK YOU ARE.

I AM A 57-YEAR-OLD MOM OF FOUR ADULT CHILDREN AND THE MERE THOUGHT OF DOING ANY OF THE THINGS YOU HAVE DONE HERE MAKES ME PHYSICALLY NAUSEOUS

these vibes are so skeevy. leave her the fuck alone????

along with ASTONISHINGLY accurate inferences about exactly what was happening with the daughter (me) in all the missing missing reasons & like..... exactly how the situation was So Much More Ugly And Horrifying than an innocently confused i'm-so-well-intentioned dad-POV post would have you believe.

so. anyway. that was literally the most validating experience i've ever had in my entire life. i know i've said he's a bad guy before but i also always forget just how far beyond the pale he is. like wow that was. that was not a normal average human experience to have growing up huh.

IN CONCLUSION.

if you guys are ever wondering why i am the way that i am about, like........ anything....... everything....... whatever......

just remember.

i was raised by belos owlhouse.

#long post #you are allowed to laugh. this is very funny and i'm having a wonderful time healing so far away from him #CARTOONISHLY EVIL they said. the post wasn't even about any of the actual active abuse or trauma. yall. #cartoonishly evil. yeah. #when youre in the middle of something you stop noticing how bad it is after a while (see also: the current physical diseases) #but nobody will shock your system with a truth bomb like an angry mob of worried redditors. cartoonishly evil. GOD. #abuse ig #i dunno what other tags this needs. just roll in this moment with me.

[rileys-battlecats]

Man,

Wrentail's character is just something I love, he is horrible in a very mundane, unfeeling, callous way.

He looks at Mudpaw, a cat that is only still alive because Wrentail decided to save him as a kit, and is just like "kid's a pussy (pun intended), let me toughen him up." and puts him through horrible training without feeling anything. Yet at the same time it doesn't seem like Wrentail is out to make Mudpaw's life horrible or is targeting him, it's just that this is the only teaching method he knows. He is callous and doesn't seem to know or care about how this is affecting Mudpaw.

At the same time, when push comes to shove, he clearly has a basic sense of right and wrong. Not letting a kit die isn't exactly a exceptional test of morality, but it shows that Wrentail knows doing so would be wrong, same with saving Mudpaw from falling. He does both without hesitation or ulterior motive. Wrentail isn't evil or deranged, but he can ignore his own conscience when it suits him.

Also, love his design, the contrast between his colorful pelt and permanent grumpiness speaks to me. WHY COULDN'T YOU JUST MAKE HIM A BROWN TABBY LIKE EVERY OTHER BAD CAT IN WARRIORS!!! Now I'm invested :(

YES THIS. He is a very mundane evil. Not mundane in that his abuse was unremarkable, not at all, but mundane in a way that is just... the way some people are. I've said it before on this blog, but I try to portray Wrentail in a realistic way. I don't want him to be cartoonishly evil, because real people aren't like that. Real people have multiple sides to them, and they can be terrible and abusive while also doing good deeds in other areas. This most certainly doesn't absolve them of the terrible things they've done, but it can muddy the water if you're only looking for someone who is pure evil. That's why I portray Wrentail doing good things as well; real abusers hardly ever seem like abusers from the outside.

tbh I've gotten a few comments on the youtube videos that have mistaken these good deeds as a form of redemption for wrentail. This is absolutely not the case. Wrentail's good deeds do not cancel out his bad ones. Him saving Mudpaw at the falls? Sure, Mudpaw instigated the fight but wrentail is the adult here; as a fully grown warrior, he should be fully capable of handling an out of control apprentice. Real teachers have to handle situations with students who are being violent, and they absolutely are not allowed to allow students to harm others or themselves (source: several college classes on classroom management and personal experience in classrooms). It was the bare minimum that he pull mudpaw up from the falls. And he did! He did it without hesitation! But that hardly means he's a shining beacon of moral good. Saving Mudpaw as a kitten? Literally it would have been illegal if he didn't. Once again, he shows a bit of emotion in the situation, he's swayed by a tiny kitten being in need, but it's still the bare minimum of what he should do for that kit.

Doing these things was good, to be sure. He's saved mudpaw's life twice. But it is absolutely not a reflection of him "secretly being a good person" or whatever. anyway I know those sorts of comments are likely made by people who don't have as much life experience or are just on the younger side, but it's kinda disheartening to see people misinterpreting those actions as me saying "oh actually he was secretly a good guy!" when that couldn't be further from the truth of what I'm trying to say. Black and white morality doesn't work here, good actions do not always equal good person.

And just because he's chosen to be harmful and abusive to Mudpaw, doesn't mean he's pure, abject evil. Wrentail wouldn't go out of his way to hurt Mudpaw if he weren't his mentor. It just so happens that he was put into that position of authority over this specific cat he had something against, and because he could hurt mudpaw, he did. He had the opportunity, and he took it. He could have just as easily asked for Larkstar to assign Mudpaw to another warrior, but he didn't, because it gave him the excuse and the room to hurt someone he thought deserved it.

Man, I really love the concept behind the designs I made for Wrentail and Mudpaw specifically. Wrentail isn't supposed to look evil, that's the point! He blends in with normal clan society. I specifically altered their designs after a while, making Wrentail softer and more rounded and Mudpaw angular and sharp-edged, to reflect the other characters' impressions of them. It is really funny though how many evil wc characters are big dark brown tabbies HAHA

#ask #mudpaw #wrentail #mudlore #this is an essay and a half sorry #I just have a lot to say about the portrayal of Wrentail's whole.... deal #he's the worst but he's the worst in a nuanced way #also sorry about the mini rant in the middle there about people misinterpreting things in the yt comments #those sorts of comments are very very few they just stick in my head #and I never wanna come at someone in the comments for how they interpret the video you know? #it's visual story telling it's MADE for interpretation #but some interpretations are uh. misinformed. to say the least

[ultraericthered]

WTC Higurashi Trivia

I actually originally designed Irie’s true identity as that of a ruthless, final boss-like demon of a man. I envisioned a scene where he pulls out Satoshi’s brain encased in formalin in front of Satoko and says “Look, you finally meet again...” However, the setting was changed and he became a missionary of maids. I was aiming for a disconnect where the maid man becomes the cruel final boss. When Irie was set up as the final boss, Takano was planned to be in what is now Nomura’s position. However, when Irie told Satoko about having Satoshi’s brain encased in formalin, BT-san got angry and said, “Irie’s such a kind person, but that’s too horrible!” So we made various changes, and Takano-san was promoted to the final boss. As a result, she gave such a wondrous performance.

--- Ryukishi07

I’m of two minds to this news...

1. We could’ve gotten evil mad scientist Dr. Irie!?! Dammit, I have always wanted to see that done somewhere, as Irie’s already one of the prime antagonistic forces in the story given all that the Irie Clinic is concealing (with he himself just an unwitting pawn in some bigger, behind-the-scenes government/military conspiracy games) and he’s got just as much potential for villainy as Takano, Okonogi, and even Ooishi. The idea that he was initially concieved as a Colonel Muska type character whose pleasant, patient and kindly persona would be a ruse for a vile, ruthless “demon of a man” only makes the concept sound cooler to me - like a literal case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, which would embody all the thematic ideas behind Hinamizawa Syndrome.

2. Based on BT’s objection, it sounds like it wasn’t thought through very well by Ryukishi07 and came off like cheap shock value horror for its own sake, with Irie’s true inner evil being so outlandish and cartoonishly over-the-top malicious and mean-spirited that it made Irie feel like a bad Surprise Villain and a lesser character for it. The whole idea of him having Satoshi’s brain encased in formalin...why? To what end? Plus, his pedo tendencies are offputting as is, and this would’ve taken them to the most generic and expected conclusion - he’s just a predator and does sick experiments on all the children he befriends, treats, and coaches. Ultimately, Takano makes a much better direct mastermind/Big Bad/final boss than Irie would’ve.

So with that said, there are three ways to make Evil Dr. Irie work:

- Switch Takano and Irie’s intended roles. Takano plays the role she ended up playing, but the vague and engimatic Nomura is replaced by Dr. Irie as the true mastermind who sponsors Takano’s atrocities.

- Have Dr. Irie as a willing co-conspirator with Takano, the brains to Okonogi’s brawn. He’s not keen on the idea of having to harm any of the kids, but he fiercely believes he’s doing what’s right for mankind. Unlike the above and below, this Irie would still be redeemable.

- Do one of many side-story loops that has Irie succumbing to Hinamizawa Syndrome and hijacking the conspiracy from Takano.

#When They Cry #Higurashi #higurashi no naku koro ni #Dr. Irie #Kyosuke Irie #Miyo Takano #ryukishi07 #trivia #what could have been

[mdhwrites]

One of the problems that ive noticed with TOH is its odd morality. By this i mean it has a very specific way of redeeming its characters, i dont have a word for it other than scapegoating.

For Amity, it was 'yes i am pretty horrible... but look! its my parents fault i ditched Willow! and look how horrible Boscha is! focus on that so i can be redeemed.'

For Lilith, it was 'yes i tried to murder a child and cursed my sister... but look! its Belos' fault for being so evil and manipulative! i deserve redemption now!'

For Alador, it was 'yes i went along with my childs abuse for years and even had a semi active role at some points.... but look! my wife is suddenly cartoonishly evil and i cant be blamed for anything all of a sudden!'

For Hunter, it was 'yes im working with a horrible man and i do anything he says, even killing innocent endangered creatures...! But look! my evil uncle Belos was abusing me so i cant be all bad!.'

Ok you probably get the point. when you notice it it becomes actively impossible to ignore and instead of wanting to explore motivations and actual growth, the show just shoves the blame onto someone else and everyone eats it up. Heck, ive seen Boscha be characterised as or called an actual S//ual Ab/ser in this fandom. Shes a Fourteen year old spoiled bully. not satan reinincarnated.

*screams bloody murder at the Boscha stuff* What sucks is I've seen and heard about those too. Actually, between seasons 1 and 2, people were so adamant about Odalia being more evil than Belos that it made me do a whole blog about the complexity of high society characters and the Blight Family's potential. All of which went to waste... As a note, if you read that blog and go "I want THAT Blight family," A: Little Miss Rich Witch and B: I have a 300k word TOH fic that has that Blight family. Getting back on track though... I agree. Just kind of in general. It's actually something I somewhat touched on in my Raine blog that some characters will feel like they exist in order to help others with their 'arcs'. Willow is the most blatant of these because it took until SEASON 3 to get an episode that's supposedly about her to ACTUALLY be about her. Before then, every episode that is supposedly hers is just used to push another character's arc forward. In S1 it's Amity every time. In S2 it's Hunter. It's part of why she never is doing anything with plants or magic, the things you think she might from the beginning, but other interests that keep getting tacked onto her so that she's doing something these other characters can interact with. And it's really bad because it's blatant that she doesn't have a plan for her or arc because she only exists when she can push another character forward. But calling these 'arcs' also feels incredibly disingenuous when you look at the larger scale of TOH. I mean, how long do any of those depictions EXIST before being replaced by "Going soft on me Blight?" "Mad but Sad Boy," "Cool Aunt Lilith" etc.? I mean... by the time each of those lines happens, the character is already a good person. Period. And questionably for any real reason in the cases of Hunter and Lilith, as neither really do much self reflection and all it seems to take with Hunter is "Pretty girl mad at me." Yes it's more complicated than that but if they'll simplify a child soldier becoming a good character to ONE PERSON SHOWED ME KINDNESS and BAM instant good guy, I'll simplify what the fuck happened. It causes them to feel like... Well, second introductions to the characters. Versions of them that just don't have the backstory and bad deeds of the past one. That's why phrase I use "Your arc seems more dramatic if the character starts OUT OF CHARACTER," straight up calls them OOC. Because by the time their 'arc' is finished, they feel like an entirely different character. Not only that but the show will work HARD like you pointed out to make you just... forget about the character's canonical history. Replace it with enough excuses or contradictory information and can you really judge them? Yes. Yes I can. Because they still did those things. I can just judge the show as a bad writer too then.

#TOH #Rambles

[hauntedhookah]

an event from exactly 1 year ago that i wrote down hastily as to not forget

29 palms is a marine base and everyone at the Virginian was a Marine. we hung around the jukebox and a man asks us what song we’d like to hear, i tell him luchenbach texas and he asks, testing me, who sings it? waylon and willie and the boys of course.

we earnestly lied to the marines about all parts of our identity, it didn’t feel safe in the beginning to tell the truth about our age and where we grew up, where we went to school. but i’ve otherwise never been so honest in a conversation my entire life.

our two now companions at the bar were stark opposities of each other, cartoonishly different: one tall round faced man without a care in the world and the other small and furrow-browed. they approached us to complain about being in the marines, i can’t imagine that i could ever prompt that conversation otherwise. i asked in all my naivete what if you rebelled? you can't, you go to the brick (i found out this is a horrible prison for marines, i shared my disgust with this concept).

i asked why did you join? both men expressed it was to get a medal of honor. “we would die for it”. i asked, is it worth it? and they said, you're asking questions that are too real. the brooding man kept saying you're being so honest, you're being so honest.

why did you join? to prove that I'm a man, he said. i said there are other ways to prove that you're a man. he was stumped, taken a back. staring into the horizon. he asked, as a woman what do you find attractive in a man? I find attractive when a man is confident/sure of himself without thinking too much about what's going on around him. 

what do you actually think of the military? am I an idiot? he asked. i think we are all forced to do things we don't want to to do for reasons we don't understand, i told him. the brooding man was telling me you're too smart, you're too smart for your own good. you're just too cool. he was not trying to flatter me, he was genuinely surprised that i could be that way. something to do with me being a woman.

i asked, what would you be doing if you weren't doing this right now? (they couldn't leave because they would be put in the military jail). babyface pennsyltucky man, the brooding man’s companion, said he loves to cook. so much joy in his eyes. i turned back to brooding man and told him, i don't know if this will land for you but when you asked me what it takes to be a man, it's being passionate about something and following through with. he didn’t say anything to that. 

at the end of the night to top it all off, babyface asked what my lastname was and i thought to myself this is going somewhere bad. finally they will call me some slur, or say something about the middle east. to my great surprise (and delight) he asked if i was armenian before i said anything. 25% of my friends are armenian, he said. i lost my entire mind, a marine from pennsyltucky in the middle of the desert asked me in a bar if i was armenian-- he said when i walked in he knew i was immediately. 

at the end of the night the skeptical brooding man was very sad, having a cigarrette, i'll never see you guys again. skeptical man said it's hard to be honest and open up, i said didn't it feel good in there? and pennsyltucky yelled it feels amazing!!

they held onto our car before we left, leaning over it. they didn’t want us to leave. both left our conversation unwell. i remembered only later that i had eaten a tiny bit of mushroom that day

[technoturian]

I'm having a lot of feelings about The Brotherhood of Steel and how I hope the show does them justice. I keep seeing takes like "Why are the Brotherhood in there I HATE the Brotherhood they're BAD ACTUALLY" and like... Yes? That's the point?

I will admit my feelings on the Brotherhood are very much informed by how I played Fallout 4 the first time:

Here's this woman, she's living in an idyllic little house in an idyllic little neighborhood with her family. Her world is destroyed and she's sent to an unimaginable hell world. All she wants is her kid. All she wants is safety. The first person she meets is on the game's tracks; Preston Garvey. He presents himself as a good person, but he's just as lost as she is. He lets her know he's all alone out here and even though he can go with her, I never take him. He needs to stay in the neighborhood and look after the others.

The tracks end and it's open world. I could go straight to Diamond City and maybe if I had, maybe having Nick and Piper on my side before I met Danse would've changed how everything about the Brotherhood worked for me. But that's not how it went down. I'm running around, making sure I don't miss anything. And there's a call on the radio. It's urgent. So I go after it. And the first quest I run into on my own is Fire Support, Paladin Danse's intro quest.

So here's this woman, she's living in a nightmare. Nobody at her back. She's been fighting for her life for hours straight. And she feels powerless. She feels unmoored. In her regular life she was a lawyer married to a soldier; she was used to order, comfortable with the idea of rule of law. There is nothing resembling order here. And then here is this knight in shining power armor telling her this isn't hell she's stuck in, it's a fight and it's one his side is going to win. There's a certainty to the Brotherhood of Steel that is terrifying to normal, well-adjusted people but is probably comforting to someone who is already as terrified as they can get. The BoS are harsh but they're honest and upfront about their intentions. They're sure of themselves. They have goals and plans. They're not just winging it. That's security. That's power.

Now my PC doesn't know anything about synths, she doesn't know anything about supermutants, and she's just met her first ghouls in a bunch of ferals. Nothing they're saying about non-humans seems wrong at this point. They legitimately sound like violent, deadly monsters.

And then she goes to Diamond City and she meets an amazing mechanical man. She meets a plucky reporter who cares about the truth. And she has people who have her back in a way that makes the "support" the Brotherhood offers feel a lot less personal. And the more she finds out about this world she lives in now, the more she realizes the Brotherhood's way isn't something she can go along with. And she was almost in too deep before she found out. *I* knew I would never ultimately side with the Brotherhood, but it was very easy to justify why my character would stick with them as long as she did. She wanted them to be what they think they are.

And that's why I kind of love them. When everything is going horribly wrong who doesn't want someone who holds out a hand and says, "I know how to fix this and I have the power to do it." You have all of these cartoonishly violent raiders and craven killers and they're so horrific that they actually succeed at making people like the Brotherhood look reasonable. When you're in a world of dragons you want a sword. And that's why I think the BoS, done right, have potential to make for the most compelling storyline. Order in chaos. They're such an enticing trap.

#Fallout #Brotherhood of Steel #BoS #Meta

[drunkengodsofslaughter]

i meant to send this earlier when you reblogged the jopper hate post but my internet cut out. so you don't really have to answer this

i absolutely agree with jopper being awful, i don't get why people ship Joyce, a woman who escaped her violent ex and has probably ptsd from it with the man who can't regulate his anger and snaps almost immediatly. the way he screamed at her in s3 was horrible and i don't get why this ship is so popular.

what also gets me are the people (esp b/lers) who hate Ted and think he would hatecrime Mike if he were to come out, but in the same breath think Hopper would be very understanding towards Will. first of all he is a conservative cop and second he couldn't even be empathatic towards El in s2, who was a girl he knew about how much she was abused her entire life. he never tried to sit down and listen and care, he provides food and shelter and thought this is enough and El is being ungrateful or reckless. why do you think he would be supportive when Will comes out? maybe he changed his ways after being in the gulag, i'm not saying people can't get better, but as for rn we don't have any proof Hopper would be better than Ted when it comes to being an accepting person.

how i see it, Hopper and Ted are kinda the same, they are both neglectful towards their kids. both see themselves as providers but fail at the interpersonal level. Ted is mostly passive and Hopper too violent. Both men are a product of toxic masculinity in the 80s.(tho i would prefer Ted over Hopper any time because at least he wouldn't yell at me 24/7.) the only good father figures are Charles Sinclair (people need to hype up the Sinclairs more) and Bob Newby.

Bob was perfect for Joyce, he was patient with the kids, esp Jonathan and very kind. he was understanding and Joyce deserves someone who gives her peace instead of ending with someone like Hopper who resembled her ex in terms of violent behavior.

i would ship jopper, if not for s3 where they made Hopper cartoonishly aggressive and played it of as funny banter with Joyce. he kinda learned his lesson in the end of s2 with El after she run away. if they would have continued with his arc of getting his anger under control instead of doing a 180, i could get behind. because again Joyce deserves peace and a man who isn't violent after she rescued herself and her kids from her abusive ex.

it is totally fine that you did this now and dw i’m answering! and sorry about your internet.

legit jopper is soo popular and god hopper in season 3 is just sooo bad. he’s really just awful! and yeah like joyce had an abusive relationship with lonnie. i legit love her with bob so much like they’re everything to me

bylers are super weird about that ngl. like how is it that the parent (ted) who is just chill is the one who’s throwing out mike for being gay which mike in canon isn’t! like the way everyone wants a hypothetical thing with this when it’s not even canon that mike is gay. he just isn’t! also idk why everyone wants hopper to be will’s dadesque parent when like at first hopper did not care that the kid was missing idjdjdjdb. legit everything about that like i do think hopper and el’s bond is something special to me but the way he so easily threatens el with the lab is actually scary cuz arguably that’s what he’s trying to prevent but then he so easily uses it as an excuse to get el in like. you didn’t mention this but like yeah! THAT LAST LINE IN THIS PARAGRAPH EATS!

god i so agree about this entire paragraph! we love bob and charles sinclair legit they need to hype up charles more! and yeah both ted and hopper are a product of their time! legit bob was so perfect joyce they’re just sooo cutie 🥰 i will never forget that bob learned about all of this and just jumped right into it. like he’s just so special

god so much of jopper just gets ruined because of how hopper was in season 3! yeah like he learned at the end of season 2 with el and then they kinda just reset that for some reason. agreed about that last point

#answeres asks

[cvm-jpfilm]

Mizoguchi - The Life of Oharu

I think I liked Ugetsu because the plot, theme, and social commentary tied well together, that I was supposed to be mad and learn why things are this way. This movie might be the opposite, I was just mad. It tried to one up itself every step of the way, taunting the viewer by saying "want to see how her life gets worse?" No, I don't. I don't particularly enjoy tragedies that are just a sob fest or were the consequences for one's actions are a life sentence of misery. It was just so comical that I couldn't feel bad or get attached to the film. Matsudaira grows weak from too much sex? Her one nice husband is mugged and dies? This is cartoonishly blunt. But that's just my opinion on the narrative of the film. As far as Mizoguchi goes, it is still a technically and cinematically impressive movie, with astounding camera work on the long shots. My critique from the Ugetsu still remains though in that he overuses pan and one-shot, one-scene too much. It really didn't need to be over 2 hours long.

I think The Life of Oharu critiques not only the horrible circumstances of women in Japan, it also critiques traditional ideas of love, marriage, and sex.

Just like Ugetsu, Mizoguchi places an important focus on the plight of women in Japan, but it is not just through the protagonist. Certainly, Oharu leads a horrible life plagued by the cruelty of an oppressive patriarchal society, but she was not the only one struggling. All throughout the film, you get to see women in all parts of society experience hardship. There's Oharu's mother who cannot speak against her husband's disregard for their daughter, Mitsudaira's wife is cuckolded (don't think that's the right word) by a concubine, courtesans that must smile and obey their patrons, Jihei's wife is forced to mask her appearance in fear of her husband, and streetwalkers, beggars, and prostitutes that must survive with any money possible. Society is full of women, and Mizoguchi takes careful time exploring how at each level varying circumstances outside of their control lead many women to their current troubled conditions. In what I believe culminates this theme of unspoken women suffering without a say in the matter is in this scene, where Oharu is being audited by her son's council for her past occupations as courtesan and prostitute. Her back is facing the camera, preventing us from identifying her at all, and we can clearly see a room full of men, young and old, judging Oharu for doing what she had to do. In this scene, Oharu is not just herself, but women in Mizoguchi's time in general, forced to be judged and silenced by a patriarchal society without a say in the matter.

But I don't think Mizoguchi is just judging men or a patriarchal system in this movie, but also antiquated or traditional forms of love, marriage, and sex. In this movie, the marriages are all calculated, prearranged, or unbalanced. To love sincerely is a mistake, for a woman should be grateful and wait to be proposed to by a man of equal or higher status. Love is, after all, either a classist badge of approval or synonymous with sex according to the men in this movie. The men seek sexual encounters, but denying advances is disgraceful and a woman doing sex work for a wage is the lowest fate imaginable. The sincere expressions of these concepts are punished thoroughly in this movie, like in the scene below where Oharu's only loving husband dies immediately. The corrupt portrayal of these awful men and their greed serve to critique these antiquated views of relationships.

[shmegmilton]

Was there anything good about Hamilton the musical? My mother brought me tickets to go to it in the Summer and I want to know if I'm going to hate all of it.

Is Hamilton bad from a musical standpoint? (Nope.)

    Oh, don’t get me wrong, Anon--when I went to see Hamilton live, I had the same thought & I THOROUGHLY enjoyed it. The set design, comedic timing, & choreography (particularly the utilization of the spinning platform) are all incredible. And the songs, of course, are mostly certifiable bops. Most of them. I would say 40 out of 45. It’s not like “Guns & Ships” or “Room Where It Happens” weren’t amazing songs on the soundtrack, but the choreography really adds to the experience, & in the case of songs like “The Reynolds Pamphlet” or “Washington on Your Side” turns it into something really funny. Don’t take your eyes off the stage for a section, honestly.

The only weak-point of the music was, to be honest, whenever Hamilton was on stage; I used to think it was just a “Lin Manuel Miranda problem” because his flow is honestly... weird. I can’t really explain it--I’m a hip-hop dancer & there’s just something wrong with it--but even the man I saw performing as Hamilton couldn’t salvage it.

I assume it’s just a product of how Lin Manuel wrote his parts in the musical, since he admits that he can’t sing (& therefore would rather not) so there’s this weird juxtaposition sometimes where his part sounds really out of place, even when all the actors in a scene are “talk-singing.” (I don’t know, chime in, does anyone else feel me on that?)

The actors are all great as well, the performances & how they work off each other & the comedic timing are all fantastic, like I said. I like a good Broadway show. As a hip hop fan as we, the use of sampling is so insane.

The songs are also partially structured using actual quotes and other things that characters were known for saying or doing, so it’s impressive, all things considered.

---

Is Hamilton Bad from a Historical (Absolutely)

The real annoyance with the Hamilton musical (& why I would assume I’d hate it) is that it’s based off a biography; “Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow”, specifically. It’s a compelling read, but an embarrassingly awful biography.

-

    It’s less of a biography on Hamilton’s life & more of a intentionally misleading fluff piece where Hamilton is painted as this heroic, selfless visionary who is wrongfully slandered, which is infuriating on its own but it’s at the expense of painting everyone else around him who slightly inconveniences or holds him accountable for his actions, as the villains.

     Some of these people ARE villains, don’t get me wrong (for example, [HERE] is a list of legitimately monstrous things Jefferson is guilty of), but none of the actual horrible things these people did ever come up, it’s all about what THEY did to Hamilton... which usually just amounts to stupid shit like... forcing “him to admit he cheated on his wife,” or “being a battered housewife begging him for help & monetary assistance,” or, (I kid you not) “his wife being too pregnant for Hamilton to have sex with, so he decided he had to cheat,” which is a legitimate argument that Chernow tries to make.

Alexander Hamilton in real life had a hairline temper & the decorum of a child; he pushed away nearly every ally in his party he had & after Washington died he essentially had no political power. None of this is brought up the play, though--or if he is, it’s brought up in a way that intentionally makes you feel bad for him. It’s gross.

The “Pro-Immigrant” Message

     LMM is the son of 1st generation immigrants, & as such decided that a “pro immigrant” message was appropriate for the play. After all, Hamilton was an immigrant, right? It’s perfect because it’s something character would believe in, right? Uh... wrong.

Hamilton was the type of immigrant to “close the door behind him,” so to speak. He worked exclusively for the bourgeois & his party (The Federalist Party) was historically anti-immigrant. 

He himself used a lot of rhetoric that is popular today among xenophobes; he didn’t like immigrants because he wanted to “preserve American culture.”  He also assumed that the French Revolution was just “meaningless rioting” with no real goal (the “Revolution”, we’re not talking about the “Reign of Terror”) and expressed no real interest in helping refugees.

(Don’t get me wrong, having a message like this obviously isn’t a bad thing, it’s just makes it tone-deaf and bizarre watching it from the perspective of someone who knows this.)

-

Aaron Burr was an Afterthought. 

     The most confusing thing about the play is how Burr is portrayed. On one hand, he is presented as the villain (he does shoot him, after all) whose opening lines of each song by essentially calling Hamilton a bunch of names. From Hamilton’s perspective, he sings about how Burr is an opportunist who doesn’t have any political beliefs (which is a [LIE], by the way.)

On the other hand, he his presented as a tragic character; he is given songs like “Wait For It” & “Dear Theodosia” to humanize him, he even almost got a tear-jerker of a song after his wife died & he’s singing a reprise to his daughter through his tears, which was ultimately cut for time... (I’ll leave it [HERE] because it’s legitimately beautiful.) These are two very conflicting ways to present a character, but after looking into it a bit more I realized...

      --it’s out of place because the sympathetic Burr portrayal was written as a an afterthought. 

By some crazy chance, LMM lived in the same complex as Antonio Burr, a distant descendant (I believe he’s a descendant of Burr’s cousin?) Antonio was adamant about defending Burr and correcting a lot of LMM’s misconceptions (because, as I said, the Chernow book paints Burr as cartoonishly evil.) So, Antonio convinced LMM to spend more time in the play humanizing Burr.

It was Antonio’s idea, not LMM’s.

This post is already pretty long so [HERE] is a post I made more in-depth about why Burr’s portrayal is super dishonest (for example, he was actually pro-immigration, whereas the play has him mocking Hamilton for it).

Overall

    TL;DR, Hamilton isn’t that bad... as long as you turn your brain off. I personally just pretend that the musical is about Burr instead of Hamilton (“his enemies destroyed his rep, America forgot him,” describes him pretty well.)

I’m sure that you will enjoy yourself, don’t let my complaining dissuade you! (God knows that the actors appreciate the ticket sales right now.)

#Alexander Hamilton #Aaron Burr #Hamilton #Ron Chernow #AmRev #long post //

[alphabees-writes]

Glee - S1 E1 (Pilot)

Is it a smart idea to rewatch glee again? No.

Am I going to do it anyway? You bet your sweet bippy I am!

Am I going to liveblog my garbage monkey brain thoughts along the way even though nobody asked for it? Hell yeah.

Here goes!

Wow. The first frame of this entire show is literally of a woman who looks like she’s about 10 years above the natural lifespan of a Cheerio. Then again, I’m sure Sue’s not above holding back her best recruits for multiple years because Ohio high schools are apparently just Like That™

I also never notice this opening song was a remix of Keep Me Hangin On, wow. That’s actually kind of interesting foreshadowing of sorts, like, kind of smart. I’m glad I’m watching the part of Glee that was kind of smart.

This scene also doesn’t feature any of the Unholy Trinity as far as I can see. Are they a JV squad? Am I putting too much thought into this?

Sign #1 That Mr Schuester Is An Asshole: Really, my guy? Driving around with your muffler dragging on the ground so bad it’s making sparks? That’s not very Road Safety of you. Fuck off. 

Sign #2 That Mr Schuester Is An Asshole: Wow, there’s going to be a lot of these, huh? Anyway, anybody with working eyes would clearly see how scared Kurt is right now. “Making some new friends Kurt?” Fuck off. 

KURT. FIRST SIGHTING OF THE BOY. What a delight. But also, not a delight, because he’s being bullied and he deserves better. Look at his outfit. Iconic from day fucking one. 

Finn, you’re a himbo. What’re you doing with these assholes?

Puck’s first line in the whole series is “It’s hammer time!” What a fucking dork? Who made this boy popular. 

DO MORE THAN TAKE HIS COAT, FINN. LET HIM GOOOOO!!!

I paused while they were tossing Kurt in the dumpster and, wow, got the most hilarious frame where the guy who isn’t Puck is getting a meticulously polished boot to the face. Netflix let me take screenshots, you coward.

The first shot of Quinn... My wlw bones are shaking.

Why would they use that photo for Lillian Adler...? WHO WAS BORN IN 1937, MIGHT I ADD. THAT’S NOT A REAL YEAR. 

It’s weird to see Mr Schue actually speaking competent Spanish. Why did they veto that later? The ONE likeable thing about him was his competence as a school teacher, and they really threw it out the window huh?

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THE MEMBERS OF SANDY RYERSON’S GLEE CLUB??? This kid seems to really like singing. Also, welcome to the beginning of Ryerson being annoying as all hell.

Oh my gosh, the background choir stuff. This show really had style back in the day!!!

R A C H E L B E R R Y Y O U R M A K E U P ! ! !

Ken Tanaka walked so incels could run.

Jane Lynch you beauty. You absolutely impeccable beauty. 

“Since when are cheerleaders performers?” Uh... Emma...? I get that Sue’s going ham on her budget but, like, be nice to the students? They perform their butts off!

Sue really just BRAGGED about having an iPhone. I was 9 when this came out. Why do I feel old...

Sign #3 That Mr Schuester Is An Asshole: He hears his coworker, presumably of several years, just got fired and doesn’t even ask why. He just jumps on the glee club like a frog on hot asphalt. 

He really wants to Make The Glee Club Great Again, huh? 

MySpace was really a thing, huh? And why does this grown-ass male teacher know so much about the students having them?

I know nothing about actual American schools, but I do know that they sure as shit don’t work like this. Why does a club have to win EVERY competition to be considered an asset?

Mr Shoe really lying awake at night half-naked next to his wife thinking about the glee club already? Yeah sounds about right. Also, of course you’d think up Nude Erections for a name, you asshole. Put some clothes on.

R E S P E C T MERCEDES YES!!!

Brad the piano player was really here from day ONE... Icon.

Cellophane, Mr Cellophane... Yes Kurt bby you killed it. 

Chris Colfer looks so YOUNG here!!! 

The hair fix... I C O N I C !

Tina really wrote her stutter down, huh? And nobody ever saw through it? Amazing. 

The goth Tina look, too... Perfect... Never change...

Say what you want about Rachel Berry being generally insufferable, but I really fucking feel it when she sings On My Own. The monologue kind of kills The Drama of it, but they really solidly established her character by layering them. She really is a gold star right now.

The first-ever on-screen slushie!

The way she walks down that hall. My God you can just see how terrible she is to be around.

Never forget Rachel staring at photos of her with two men who turned out to not be her dads. Who are they? What are their stories? We’ll never know.

God, I love this stupid scene of Quinn, Santana, and a bunch of Cheerios cartoonishly typing hate comments on Rachel’s MySpace video and laughing like knock-off Disney villains. 

I like watching season 1 Artie because season 1 Artie was a good character. Mostly. And he KILLED Sit Down, You’re Rocking The Boat. Rachel wasn’t asking for a male lead who could keep up with her vocally, she was being straight up ableist and that’s a fact. I love Cory, but Kevin McHale was always a better singer.

Mercedes picking up and spinning Rachel for this little routine is something I never really appreciated before, it’s cute even though they don’t like each other yet!

I really don’t get why Rachel says they suck. Yeah, sure, she’s gunning for a solo, but the vocals were solid there. The choreo was just a little janky, possibly because it’s their first EVER rehearsal?

“There is NOTHING ironic about show choir!” Incredible.

How long did it take Mr Shoe to find Rachel out on the bleachers? Did he search the whole school first?

ARTIE! CAN! KEEP! UP! WITH! YOU! VOCALLY!

I never understood Rachel quitting so soon. How long was she in the old glee club for? Surely they were never popular either?

Ah, the first “My hands are tied” for the series. Mr Figgins is a garbage principal. 

Not going to advise the principal against referring to Artie as a cripple, William Shoestir? Alright. 

How did the Schuester marriage last as long as it has? Do Will and Terri’s insufferable personalities just cancel one another out?

Sandy Ryerson really just openly brags about cheating the system for medical marijuana and dealing it? 

Matt Morrison 100% has lip fillers. Nobody’s smile curls like that naturally.

“Terri and I are trying to get pregnant” What a weird way to phrase it. What is it, a race? Who’s going to get knocked up first!

A FIFTH OF BEETHOVEN, HOW I’VE MISSED YOU... The sound design of this show at this point is just... *Chef hand kiss*

“What you’re doing right now is called blurring the lines” Oh just wait until season 4, Sue... Just you wait.

WHY is Mr Schuester so ridiculously sweaty? I didn’t need to think about that?

EVERYONE on the football team is 30.

William Schuester you can’t just watCH TEENAGE STUDENTS SING IN THE SHOWER YOU ARE A TEACHER WHERE DID YOU GET YOUR LICENSE?! 

Hearing Cory sing this always makes me emotional. What a talent!

Sign #4 That Mr Schuester Is An Asshole: I don’t think I need to say why using the weed to blackmail Finn is a shitty thing to do, do I?

“I’ll pee in a cup! ...I’ll pee...” I love Cory’s delivery. 

PRIORITY #1: HELP THE KIDS Oh season 1... I love you so.

Mr Schue you WISH you were anything like Finn Hudson. You never will be.

Ah... Finn’s first monologue. He’s such a sweetheart. AND SO IS CAROLE. Carole is a queen I will stan forever. YOU THROW THAT MILK BB!!!

All Finn wants to do is make his mom proud. What a sweetheart. Mr Schue you do NOT deserve him.

These POV shots really enhance things, why the fuck did they stop using them?

Subtly having Kurt look at Finn in the same shot as Rachel was a nice touch indeed!

RACHEL WAS REALLY DOWN WITH ROLLING ARTIE RIGHT OFF THE STAGE HUH?

Terri’s a straight up hoarder, huh? Like a raccoon but instead of collecting edible garbage, it’s monogrammed garbage.

Surely you can’t just... BECOME an accountant, right? You need some serious qualifications for that right?

Also say what you want about how insufferable Terri is but her actress is ridiculously talented and absolutely steals every scene she’s in.

Now the background choir is doing Soul Bossa Nova and I am L I V I N G why didn’t they keep that motif!!! It was so ICONIC!

I don’t need my prostate removed. RIP Carole Hudson but I’m different :/

NO MEANS NO, KEN! TAKE THE L AND MOVE ON! Way to take out the fact that a girl won’t date you on everybody else around you! Toxic bastard. The absolute stench of melodrama on this bastard is noxious.

I was going to ask why Rachel didn’t know about Finn and Quinn if they’d already been together for 4 months, but then I remembered gossiping requires friends...

“Terri rides me. Hard. And I’ve always appreciated it!” Why don’t we talk about how this line sounds more. Why doesn’t Emma bat an eye at it oh my god

HERE COMES VOCAL ADRENALINE!!! And Jesse St. James is nowhere to be seen. How convenient. Also, they’re all 30. I’m sensing a pattern.

Sorry VA, all songs popularised my Amy Winehouse legally belong to Santana Lopez

Puck, if you were stupid enough to fall for the prostate excuse, that’s on you. Or maybe it’s on the education system...

You can do better that Mr Schue, kids. Don’t mourn him.

Ok, what the fuck is this scene where he’s filling out the job app to become an accountant? There’s a dude in the row in front off him just throwing crisps around? What is this place?? Why are you here sir??? 

“Accounting is sexy” shut up you horrible married man

The Cheerios sure did have straight ponytails for like, one episode, huh?

Finn is such a good boy. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is, and saving Artie from that portapotty is his first step to figuring it out.

This shot of Finn just wheeling Artie out of there... Ugh. My HEART.

KURT WHAT ARE THOSE LAYERS? SWEATER SHIRT SWEATER? HELLO???

Pee balloons. Nailing the lawn furniture to the roof. Finn, you’re better than that!!! Stop your dudebros. 

They really had Artie be a guitar player, and a pretty good one at that, but they never mentioned it again? Artie had such potential SMH. (Also, Netflix subtitles are telling me it’s Arty, but I categorically refuse to spell it that way.)

Whyyyyy didn’t he go to KURT for the costumes as well? Look at his outfit, Finn. He clearly wants in on that job. 

Will Schuester really is just desperately clinging to his glory days in high school. I’d feel bad for him if he wasn’t such a creep about it. 

Emma, meaningfully: Do you know who that is? That’s you, Will... [FRANTIC DISCO MUSIC IN THE BACKGROUND]

I find it hilarious how the audio of Don’t Stop Believin’ just DOES NOT match the characters except for the solos... Also wow, autotune city. Am I awful for genuinely not liking this cover? 

I like watching them perform it though. Kurt’s adorable little shimmy... Rachel and Tina smiling at each other like that... Everybody having a blast... I’m here for it

LOOK AT MY BABIES TILTING THOSE MIC STANDS...

Ok the way Rachel and Finn look at each other here is making me FEEL

I know Puck’s about to join anyway but WHY is he there watching... Just to have a mysterious bad boy moment? Lol you dramatic bastard

Please let them win nationals without you, Will.

So, yeah! There’s that! Those are my thoughts and feelings, basic though they may be. Episode one is fantastic, the kids are fantastic, and William Schuester can suck a toe. 

#Glee #Glee seasson 1 #Rosie watches things and then says things about the thing

[wahbegan]

So You’re New to H.P. Lovecraft

Where to start? How will I know what stories grab me?? Well, come along, my friends as I give you some of his most well-known and beloved stories, REDNOTES EDITION 

Dagon: The ocean is scary as fuck, fish are even scarier, and the idea of giant fish people makes me just about shit my pants. The Temple: You know that story about some sailors kidnapping Dionysus and he makes them all go crazy and jump overboard and then turn into dolphins? Yeah that but with cartoonishly evil Germans on a submarine. Fucking Huns! The Lurking Fear: The....(checks notes)...ooh I’m running out of minorities....uhh...the...Dutch are subhuman inbred cannibals? The Dutch? Is that right? That can’t be right. No, yeah, wait, says right here. Dutch...subhuman, inbred cannibals. Huh. The Call of Cthulhu: What if all people of color were insane and in a global cult to evil gooey Gods who live at the bottom of the ocean and also probably drove my mom crazy Cool Air: WebMD, my upstairs roommate lives in a literal fridge, bathes in embalming fluid, and never eats, drinks, or breathes. Should I be concerned? The Colour Out of Space: Eerily prescient (if exaggerated) description of the effects of radiation poisoning offset by HILARIOUSLY stupid-ass ideas about how color works Pickman’s Model: Your buddy turns out to be really good at painting hyper-realistic monsters cause they come into his studio and model for him. You should have guessed, honestly. Nyarlathotep: Okay, hear me out: I’m pretty sure Nikola Tesla is literally Satan. The Shadow Over Innsmouth: Okay, you know what, fish people are SO scary that the scariest thing i could EVER think of is the idea of one fucking my mom, and rather than talk to my therapist about why that’s a recurring anxiety of mine, I’m gonna use it to write a parable about miscegenation. This story will age incredibly well. The Rats in the Walls: Racist-as-fuck Southern slave-owner returns to his old family Priory in England to get in touch with his lordly Anglo-Saxon roots, discovers his family were horrible cannibalistic monsters who farmed people like cattle, and takes an immediate, screaming nosedive into primitive, frothing, raving, flesh-eating insanity. Wait, am I approaching something resembling self-awareness about my horrible racial views? Yuck, better call the cat N*****-Man to even it out The Music of Erich Zann: Crazy old guy in a creepy old room in a creepy old house plays creepy music at a window to appease ?????? (remember to figure this out later!) The Dunwich Horror: Hillbillies are creepy and gross and fuck their sisters and also probably the monsters that drove my mother crazy At the Mountains of Madness: These are my OCs The Elder Things they’re super badass and can bio-engineer new species and fly through space and punch out Cthulhu and do all this crazy shit and they accidentally shit out humans because we’re a stupid cosmic mistake, man and also they made blob monsters to help them build shit who became sentient and unhappy with being slaves so they revolted and killed them all. Will this come across as a weird, gooier precursor to the whole robot ethical dilemma, or just racist again? I’ll worry about it later. Side note: Antarctica scary and bad The Whisperer in Darkness: If someone invites you to experience a new culture, they’re probably going to rip your brain out and stick it in a jar and also they’re fungus aliens from Pluto The Haunter of the Dark: Shockingly, fucking with cult shit in abandoned creepy rooms in abandoned creepy churches after remaining staggeringly oblivious to the obviously terrified locals who are clearly trying to steer you away is NOT a good idea. Who knew?

Now remember, if it don’t use the words gibbous, squamous, rugose, eldritch, gibbering, gelatinous, batrachian, noxious, or polypous, it ain’t Lovecraft. Have fun! And keep a dictionary from at least a hundred years ago handy, as well as a puke bucket for when you get to the extremely racist passages

#H.P. Lovecraft

[ryanmeft]

The Hate U Give Movies-at-Home Review

If progressive values demands that each group of people get their own versions of movies which have commonly been made about white people for decades, The Hate U Give, based on a popular book by Angie Thomas, is an important step for African Americans: their very own overwrought drama. You might also recognize this sub-genre as “Oscar Bait”, though it has lost much of its power there in the last five years. They were always about Great Big Events, starring Larger Than Life Characters, full of Grand Speeches and Important Moments. The Great Big Event this movie focuses on is Black Lives Matter, though it isn’t called that. The good guys are clear, the bad guy is obvious and obviously evil, the dialogue is meant to sound good in isolated sound bytes rather than to be believable, and it does indeed have plenty of Important Moments.

If it is so cliche, then, and it is, why does it work as often as it does? It must be the performances. The movie centers initially on the life of Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg), a teenage girl who is too smart for her working class neighborhood but too, well, black to really be accepted at her upscale High School. Her father Maverick (Russell Hornsby) did time taking the fall for drug lord King (Anthony Mackie), who let him out of the life and bought him a store in return. He is fierce with the need to impress on her and her brothers (Lamar Johnson and TJ Wright) that they should not expect anything from the white community. Her mother Lisa (Regina Hall) tries to soften the message and impress on her that the world will give her a place if she tries hard enough. Then her childhood friend and first crush Khalil (Algee Smith) is shot and killed by a trigger happy white police officer for reaching for a brush.

The movie is clearly meant to mirror the events surrounding the shooting of St. Louis teen Michael Brown and the subsequent rise of Black Lives Matter. It is unapologetic in its views of relations between cops and black people. In the universe of the film, there is no cop anywhere who cares about black people, even the black ones. White people in general not only don’t understand, but misunderstand in an incredibly simple and stupid way; Starr’s friend Hailey (Sabrina Carpenter) seems to exist to be given all the dumbest arguments ever made by a white person to justify the shooting of a black one, and she is almost cartoonishly evil about it, not so much a character as a repository for dumb online comments. Starr’s officer uncle Carlos, who helped raise her while her father was in prison, is also reduced to the role of an opinion cipher, as his primary purpose is a scene in which he admits he would shoot a black man with less cause than a white one. The hilariously named April Ofrah (Issa Rae) is an activist lawyer whose only goal is to expose police violence against black people, and who wants to use the fact that Starr witnessed Khalil’s shooting to the advantage of the cause.

My job is to decide whether all this blatant politicizing harms the movie. No…and yes. It does not harm it in the sense that the messages are well delivered structurally. But Starr and her family are immensely engaging characters dealing with serious and complex problems, and this is often interrupted so the film can tell you more or less directly what it thinks. She wants to ensure Khalil’s legacy means something, but does not want to endanger her family by drawing attention to the fact he worked for King. This is a serious conundrum, though it is also the kind of thing movies usually dismiss with unrealistically ease. Stenberg offers up a star-making performance, and even the most politically motivated lines she is given sound sincere and heartfelt when she says them. Hornsby and Hall capture the pains and strains of a couple who recognize their world will always be dangerous, but who also don’t want to control their children. A key role is Riverdale’s K.J. Apa as Starr’s boyfriend Chris, and the only sympathetic white person the film has. Given film’s history with the shamefully lazy Token Black Guy trope, this feels like a sort of creative justice, even if it hurts the story.

Mackie, Carpenter and Rae’s roles are more of a stumbling block. Mackie is given zero redeeming qualities, and exists primarily to give the movie a black villain in an attempt to avoid having an all-white rogues gallery. I would have preferred they didn’t. Mackie is an excellent actor, and the message that it doesn’t take a white person to hurt a black neighborhood is received, but King himself is one note, the kind of person who sets fire to a store with kids inside just because his quota of damsels tied to railroad tracks is a little behind that month. Carpenter’s faithless friend is likewise one-note, the sort of Draco Malfoy-esque stereotype that producers make deliberately horrible so that we feel no conflict when they get the crap beat out of them. Perhaps the most off-putting character is Rae’s. Ofrah (seriously, that name) is so clearly manipulating the feelings of a minor child to serve her own goals that it borders on abusive. The film, however, never explores this, preferring to take a rather slimy character and force her into the role of an unquestioned hero.

Where Audrey Wells’ screenplay and George Tillman Jr.’s direction score a direct hit is in Starr’s family and social life. I’ve rarely seen a group of actors more convincingly communicate that they are blood, in fact or in spirit. An opening scene in which Maverick teaches his children, when younger, how not to get shot by police left my mind quiet; it is incredibly well done because it is a social message second and a man showing real concern for his kids first. From the scene in which Khalil and Starr meet at a party to the shooting is as skillful a bit of character work as I have seen in 2018, as Stenberg and Smith share the kinds of conversations that can only happen when you have known someone a very long time, and his death spiked my emotions and arrested my logic, particularly as the cop simply watches him bleed out. Starr’s inner monologue is entirely free of the movie’s political purpose, and only discusses the events as she sees them, in the ways that affect her. I normally don’t care for narration, but in this case it helps to emotionally ground events that sometimes seem more sermon than story.

The era when a blatantly message-oriented melodrama like this one earned all the awards is long gone, and many other films in the past few years have portrayed the struggle of being black in America with more effective stories and less preaching. The movie is worth watching not to get told how the world is, but to see the dynamics of a family struggling through personal events that demand to become public. It may not be great, but it is effective.

Verdict: Recommended

Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.

Must-See

Highly Recommended

Recommended

Average

Not Recommended

Avoid like the Plague

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#the hate u give #movies #amandla stenberg #anthony mackie