wxs and arm wrestling part one: nene
tsukasa vs nene- hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby. tsukasa will express surprise at her strength while she struggles to get his arm to budge 💀 the worst part is that he's genuine, he didn't expect to put effort in LMAO. he boasts 'even with more training, ofc u cant beat me 😏', then proceeds to prolong the match by keeping his arm still. she gets so miffed and tries even harder LMAO. she doesn't win though bc tsukasa gets tired and ends it faster than she can process. he brags at the end despite doing nothing
emu vs nene - hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby part 2. emu cheerily confirms that nene did get stronger, and there's only a brief struggle before she pins nene's arm down. she's very encouraging that she hopes nene gets big and buff!!!
rui vs nene- hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby part 3. nene feels like she's pushing against steel. she gets to look as he leans his annoyingly smug face on his other hand, barely breaking out a sweat. he's a mix of emu's genuine encouraging words and tsukasa's irritating lack of response. he wins after she goes 'just end it 😒'
nene's like 'idk what you guys expected....' and sits off to the side. she finds that she enjoys watching the other three arm wrestle rather than doing it herself
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Restorative or Transformative?: Homoerotic Subtext, The Closet, and Ciphers in Pop Culture. The nature of commercial art is that it’s sometimes bad and inconsistent. Notably it’s also misogynistic. One way in which audiences try to reconcile massive plot holes or gaps in character motivation is by reading secrets or hidden information into a plot.
Commonly, male characters are interpreted as closeted gay or bisexual to reconcile the absence of women from commercial narratives with the generally stunted and poorly-written male characters that form the focus on said texts. This reading has become especially common among a non-heterosexual milieu. Rather than transforming the original text into some radically different new form, this closeted interpretation seeks to make the original text stand on its own as a story rather than a Swiss cheese of dumb writing decisions.
This interpretation only works for a specific type of pop, usually genre fiction. Any story in which tortured male leads eschew women in favour of male-male bonds (because female characters are constantly killed off, written sparsely, or written out, because the production team keeps casting their male buddies, because actors demand to keep having scenes with their bros, whatever) can become a sounder structure if you put one of them in a closet.
The gay interpretation is the natural consequence of shoddy misogynistic writing from ventures like Supernatural, Naruto, all the biggest hits. It’s also the natural consequence of more benignly misogynistic writing like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Lord of the Rings, where women aren’t necessarily rejected but are simply absent from the worlds of the protagonists. When the emotional crux of the story falls on male-male interactions, this reads as romantic because society at large priorities (definitively heterosexual) romance as the pinnacle of human connection. Two forces are in conflict, the primacy of heterosexuality (read as: romance) and the primacy of men.
Anyway. All that is to say that the typical gay or bisexual reading of male characters in pop fiction comes from a very real place. But, in some places, that’s the default interpretation. Angst, insecurity, secrets, double lives, fatigue, disappointment, restrained passion, stunted personal growth, anyone living in the closet can tell you that it impacts and defines your whole life to know that you live in a way fundamentally incompatible with The Proper Way that life is structured around down to tax law and superstore prices (which assume a heterosexual nuclear family unit). Characters in fiction also tend to have personal problems because that makes them interesting and tasty.
If you’ve grown up on stories with the specific type of misogyny that can be papered over with a closeted interpretation of the male leads, carrying this interpretation over to any male character will make sense more often than not. Even a bit of angst or insecurity? Well of course that makes sense if a character is closeted.
Except that’s hurt a normal part of fiction, and sometimes the closeted interpretation takes away from the point of a character. If a male character is on another axis of marginalization, the closeted interpretation imposed by the slash reading community downplays or trivializes the effects of that marginalization in the plot by overwriting it with another type of marginalization. Alternately, sometimes a character’s heterosexuality is a part of the story. There are some sorts of critiques or investigations of misogyny or masculinity that don’t work if the character has an ‘opt out’ of the cisheteropatriarchal perspective. Not that gay/bisexual men aren’t except from misogyny, but misogyny masculinity and heterosexuality are so tightly linked that it sort of defeats the point if you interpret that character outside of heterosexuality.
All that is to say—the closet interpretation is a quick and easy spice to apply to the weaker parts of action-adventure genre fiction to make it taste better. It draws from a large enough sample of art that it’s pretty widely applicable. Because of that, it’s part of some people’s [my] default interpretation package just because the semi-dull macho show at least gets less dull if you imagine there’s a reason for there to be no girls besides simple hatred. That then forms its own problem where the interpretation that works with your average genre work gets then blanket-applied to all genre works and obscures the places where the closet interpretation doesn’t fix the work, and actually makes it less interesting.
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Finally decided to indulge in the Siuan/Moiraine meta I've been wanting to write for ages now, musing on the differences in psychology ensuing from their significantly different arcs within the book and show and why Siuan's actions at season 2's apex are entirely in psychological sync with her show portrayal, even if they swerve wildly from the books.
Let's start with some Siuan back-story context. In the books, Tear was undeniably an unfriendly city for those with the One Power. But that translated, in practical terms, to Aes Sedai keeping their stays there brief, and girls who could touch The Source being quickly bustled off to the Tower. There were no Aes Sedai advisers, as in other kingdoms etc., but neither was there the virulent hostility of the show.
Siuan left Tear quickly in the books—the first day she was discovered to have the Power, but only because a sister was traveling through and didn't wish to delay returning to The Tower for such pesky things as sentimental goodbyes. Was that harsh? Absolutely. But the world of the books is exceedingly harsh in some respects, giving girls little to no choice about becoming Sisters, should they be discovered harboring abilities. (Much of Nynaeve's back-story involved hiding her powers precisely because she didn't fancy being ripped from The Two Rivers.)
Siuan faces a much different harshness in the show. The show doesn't do a great job explaining this, but The Dragon's Fang, which is etched onto Siuan's door before her house is unceremoniously torched, is a sign of immense contempt for Dark Friends. Within show Tear, a wary mistrust of Aes Sedai has curdled into something much more dangerous. All use of The Power is suspect, because if men's half was tainted, there's nothing to say women won't go suddenly mad, too.
It's worth remembering as well here that book Siuan was roughly fifteen when she went to The Tower. Now, I'm totally blind, and audio description doesn't give me an age for tiny show-Siuan, but if she's anywhere near puberty, I'll eat my metaphorical hat. And instead of being shepherded to The Tower, she had to flee for her life.
In her family's only means of support, I might ad. Book Siuan was by no means well-to-do, but she was firmly in the middling ranks of the working poor. Show Siuan's family are on the fucking destitution brink y'all. And she took her father's livelihood. Dying destitute ain’t fuckin pretty.
Siuan is not a stupid kid, and she clearly adores the shit out of her papa. The first thing that little girl did the millisecond she got any privileges? Wrote to her papa.
And more than likely, Berden never wrote back. It wouldn't take her long to figure out what'd happened. Moiraine is at great pains to tell Alana Jenny was not "her" support dog, and we laugh it off as oh, look at Moiraine being all adorably prim. Which in one sense, it totally is. But I'd almost guarantee you there's a deeper layer there: it wasn't "hers"; it was "theirs" because once Siuan found out her beloved papa was dead, they both needed something to cuddle.
This may seem like somewhat of a digression, but I'm maundering on because in the books yes, Dark Friends are evil. But they're evil because they caused a terrible cataclysm many thousands of years ago that killed lots of people, and they wanna do it again. There's no personal skin in the game for our beloved ladies, except they get thrust into the job through a convergence of some very complicated circumstances—I'd recommend any show-only watchers read "New Spring" because while I love almost all the changes the show has made ferociously, the way Siuan and Moiraine undertake the search is vastly more plausible as presented by Jordan there.
For Siuan in the show, by contrast, Dark Friend has _very personal ramifications. Dark Friends caused the corrosive mistrust that got her papa _killed! And Moiraine, better than _anyone, knows how that broke her.
And she _knows full well she could be deposed simply for having a relationship with Moiraine. The sensible thing to keep all the awful people from committing terrible crimes that will reverberate down the centuries to impact a little girl just as she was impacted would be to keep both their noses clean. And yet, she loves Moiraine so much that she'll take that risk to maintain not only an alliance about Rand, but a romantic relationship which could, realistically, be discovered much more easily.
And now, Moiraine, the woman who parroted back her beloved father's words of farewell about how Siuan was as clever as a pike and strong as the tides seemingly willfully lied; seemingly became a _Dark _Friend. Even her admonition that Lanfear is "too strong" must bring up so many awful questions: just how long have they been working together for her to know that? Because from Siuan's perspective, what it looks like is Lanfear coming in, guns blazing, to save her accomplice, Moiraine.
When Siuan says that there are rules and they have to abide by them, it's reflecting profoundly deep fears—not only about what Rand could do, but the kind of hatred toward those with The Power it could foster. For twenty years, she's put those fears aside. And now it appears that her going against Tower Law has lost her Moiraine to the Forsaken, and made terrible outcomes nigh on inevitable. And people are really confused about why she looks beaten?
Hell, from her perspective, forget Lanfear's entrance. The very fact Moiraine seemingly lied to her and is now talking about love must seem such a cruel mockery: laughing at Siuan's weakness; just as, perhaps, she was laughing at her with that parting comment in The Tower: an Amyrlin Seat still so swayed by what her papa told her so many years ago. (Yeah, we know it was as close as she could come to an I love you, but how the hell is Siuan supposed to know that, given everything?) This was not willful emotional abuse on someone she knew to be acting in good faith, but a reaction to the person she loved enough to risk the fucking Amyrlin Seat for becoming a monster!
Do I wish they'd picked _any other direction for their relationship? Yes, yes I damn well do. There was plenty to play with for angst factor by having the coup go down as it does in the books: Moiraine not being there to save her when all Siuan wanted was more time together, for one thing. Moiraine needlessly obfuscating in front of Siuan and the other Sisters in S1, when Leandrin already knew! about the Two Rivers folk. Thinking she was being canny, when all she did was get herself pointlessly exiled so she couldn't protect Siuan? Quite enough of an angst sandwich, thanks ever so, without this new development. But! if they were going to include this, Siuan reacted precisely as I would expect her to, given the context I've outlined above, not in some madly ooc fashion worthy of the tags descending into emotional abuse discourse.
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people really need to consider the annoyed responses to ep 5 from old/book fans perspective to understand why the annoyance exists
First IWTV Adaptation: the one with Cruise and Pitt. Overall a decent movie but throughout the whole thing they’re basically screaming NO HOMO, even when you get to the bits with Armand and Louis where it’s just blatantly homo. (ALSO WHAT THEY DID TO ARMAND’S HAIR...RIP....)
Second TVC Adaptation: Queen of the Damned. Absolutely horrendous. A complete clusterfuck. GOOD SOUNDTRACK THOUGH. The most heinous crime ofc is how they NO HOMO’D every queer character from the storyline. Nicki? He’s just a random lady Lestat met once. Armand? Louis? Practically non-existent. In fact, the romance scene between Louis and Lestat is replaced with a woman.
Current TV Adaptation: OH MY GOD THEY’RE FINALLY GAY!........wait but one of them is a husbandbeater now?? Are you fucking kidding me!
We’ve been waiting for like 20 yrs for an adaptation that isn’t “no homo”, but when we finally get it, it’s not just a bit messy or toxic like the books, it outright has one of them beating and SAing the other one almost to death. (vampires drinking from other vampires is a sexual act in-universe)
It’s weird to me how people aren’t seeing the problem here. A canon queer couple that’s existed for like 40 years finally gets to exist on screen, but the interpretation is of one of them (who is the protagonist of the whole series no less lol) just being an outright blatant violent spousal beater.
Like ofc we’re annoyed? Media has been no-homoing us for decades and when they finally decide to be outright gay with the story, it’s only to make this 40 yr old neglected pairing into something that no one in their right mind can support.
also it really feels like society, the media runners, and the fandom are saying “if we’re going to make the gay ship canon it needs to be as violently abusive as possible because gays just like that lol”
and lots of people saying “vampires just like that!! horror just like that!” but all I’m hearing is “gay men are incapable of not beating each other up.”
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thinking about horror film au marauders.. (tw. lotta gore)
lily the nerdy, bossy character that comes out with a giant axe and brutally beats up the killer/s to the shock of every other character
peter is either the bargaining character that tries to bargain and give the killer/s what they want just as he's about to die. or the character secretly on the killer's side that's revealed at the end
definitely giving wolfstar the making out whilst a killer is in their house/car/woods
mary, dorcas, remus, and lily all turning to each other wondering which of them is gonna die first, when they realise they're basically in a horror film cause of the black character dying first trope (i watched the blackening yesterday and the tagline "we can't all die first" gave me this hc. very good film. highly recommend)
sirius is the resident horror film expert that tells them what the killer usually does next (im imagining someone dying and everyone is just screaming over the dying body and sirius is also screaming but then adds in "this is exactly like that scene in wrong turn!"
the screamers are probably mary, remus, and james. not a definite though. i can see it being other people.
marlene gets the most jump scare scenes and emmeline gets the most hearing creaking and footsteps
james is the best at fighting but absolutely hates blood. feel like there needs to be a scene where he's like punching a masked killer and is doing SO WELL. and he gets the killer on the ground and is about to pull the mask off when the killer pulls out a knife and stabs at his hands and chest and shit. and he just screams and backs away staring at his blood until he faints.
as marlene dies, she clutches dorcas' hand and whispers "the lesbians never get a happy ending. apart from fear street... why couldn’t this be like fear street?"
the final girl HAS to be mary. ofc.
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