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mwaaaah ! In these trying times.

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mwaaaah ! In these trying times.

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mwaaaah ! In these trying times.

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endless discourse cycle of "not doing drugs is pathetic loser behaviour" -> "making fun of people for not doing drugs is high school bully behaviour" would be resolved instantly if ppl simply recognised that doing drugs is like anorexia in that both are socially encouraged but only until you cross the line into disabled and/or unemployable

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so trans people should just be allowed to murder whoever they want?

your brain could revolve inside a peanut shell for a thousand years without touching the sides

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First thing you see after you zoom in is how you die

How you dying 👀

#........ ?? beast mode sex ??? #...................... #what a way to go

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as you may know, reading tumblr posts about Dean Winchester is an experience surprisingly akin to auditing classes on gender performance and masculinity at a graduate level media studies program. at least if you read enough of them.

which unfortunately I have! and now I have some thoughts.

see, there are character archetypes that crop up over and over again, and particularly often in 90s and 00s genre TV shows. I am vastly oversimplifying, but let’s boil them down to the Three Main Kinds Of Dudes you are most likely to see in these shows.

Let’s start with the Guy Who’s Not Cool, And Knows It. he’s all over the place: he’s Xander on Buffy, and later Wesley. he’s Julian Bashir, Rodney McKay, Seth Cohen and (at least early on) Alec Hardison. he’s usually not the main character, but he’s up there in the main credits.

and he’s textually, overtly anxious about his masculinity. this is something that other characters comment on, and sometimes he admits to it himself. his long-term character arc is — at least in part — about resolving that anxiety, confronting it and growing past it over time.

(he’s also, often, a self-insert for the guys in the writer’s room. but we don’t have time to unpack all of that.)

our second category is a bit more of a grab bag, because in some ways it covers all the guys who don’t fit into categories 1 or 3. but, broadly, we can call him the Guy Who Doesn’t Need To Make A Big Deal Out Of It. he’s the guy who comes across as quietly secure in his masculinity, who has nothing to prove on that front and whose story doesn’t need to be about proving it. Sometimes he functions as a foil for the Anxious Guy, sometimes he’s just quietly ticking along in the parts of the story that aren’t about Proving anybody’s Manliness. He’s Giles and Oz and Gunn, Eliot Spencer, Ronon Dex, Benjamin Sisko.

and then there’s the Cool Guy.

the Cool Guy is a main character, or he has top billing in an ensemble cast. the Cool Guy is a walking, talking grab-bag of heroic mannerisms. He’s tough and strong and he doesn’t talk about his feelings. he’s a ladykiller. he’s a flirt. he has the popular imagination version of Captain Kirk’s personality, and the popular imagination version of Han Solo’s sex appeal. he kills bad guys and drops a witty one-liner afterwards. he can fly a plane, or a spaceship, or drive a cool car or ride a motorcycle. he walks away from explosions without flinching. he’s not doing this ironically. he’s not performing. he’s just Cool.

as written, he has the depth of a cardboard standee.

but he’s played by an actor who’s, you know, a real human person, and wants his character to have some kind of interiority. so this weird alchemy happens, over and over again.

here’s the thing about that grab-bag of Cool Guy traits and mannerisms: there are real men, in real life, who do most of those things. and most of them probably aren’t overcompensating for anything! but also? none of them have the whole grab-bag. They have, like, two at most.

no one does all of them unless they’re doing them on purpose — unless they’re putting on a performance. but the Cool Guy as written isn’t performing. and the actor playing him has to embody that impossible character while giving him some kind of depth.

So what happens? Dean Winchester. John Sheppard. All the Cool Guys who are meant, textually, to be Effortlessly Performing Masculinity... and subtextually read as desperately overcompensating for their queerness.

whoops!

and somehow tv writer’s rooms keep doing this! they think that if they just pile on more Cool Guy traits, they’ll make the performance convincing, when they’re actually just undermining him more and more.

(sometimes the Cool Guy isn’t even meant to be heroic! the writers of Smallville tried, as far as I can tell, to make Lex Luthor come across as a suave, worldly, sophisticated ladykiller. what they got was a man who makes way-too-intense eye contact with a buff farm boy while suggestively drinking fancy bottled water.)

(also I didn’t watch Teen Wolf but I am given to understand that Derek falls in this category? and Stiles is for sure an archetypical Anxious Guy.)

the thing about the Anxious Guy is that because his anxious masculinity is textual, it can be addressed and resolved in the text. Because the Cool Guy is not textually performing, not textually anxious, he just has to keep on being that guy without the text ever acknowledging that there’s anything weird about it. and all the while the subtext is screaming that this! man! is! trying! too! hard!

and we as viewers with eyes in our heads can see that tension, between what’s said and what’s shown, and tbh most of the time the simplest and most obvious way to resolve it is to say “ah. okay. that man is Not Straight.”

so that’s why Dean Winchesters keep happening. thank u for coming to my ted talk.

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oh my god

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militarized police in armored trucks, counterterrorism, SWAT and SRG units (nyc’s strategic response group) raided the columbia campus earlier today, beat and arrested students, and broke in through the window of hinds hall. press was removed from campus, police are blocking off peoples access to surrounding apartments

as i type this hundreds of police are raiding the ccny encampment only 20 blocks away. mass arrests reported, people being taken away in buses. separate from arrests earlier today at ccny where people were pepper sprayed

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women will do Anything to get within eating range of a block of cheese 😂🧀

#hmmm. is that so?? #maybe ill just leave this here then #🪤

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we must imagine sisyphus transitioning

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The computer, which is widely used for playing solitaire[1], calculating large prime numbers[2][3], finding gay hook-ups[4], and organizing political extremism[5][6][7],

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I like to imagine that in any atla modern au, aang still, for some reason, finds a reason to beat ozai’s ass

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Part 2

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I can’t get over the fact that Dick fucking Cheney said, basically, that Trump is too evil of a dude for him to get behind.

That’s like… fuck, idk… that’s like Dick Cheney saying a politician is too fucking evil for him to work with. The dude who famously shot a dude in the face and the dude apologized to him. That fucking guy.