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justanisabelakinnie · 2 years

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Fandom Lesbophobia

No but the way fandom treats lesbianism, whether canon lesbian characters or characters headcanoned as lesbians, or ships involving lesbians(whether canon or fanon) is fucking whack.

Whenever a female character is canonically confirmed to be a lesbian, “fans” will always go the whole nine yards in trying to prove that the character is bi; they’ll always headcanon the character as bi and ship them with men. If you politely tell them that the character is a lesbian they’ll snap at you and call you biphobic or say there’s no proof of that or that “everyone can have their headcanons regardless” not when it’s actively erasing a canon sexuality being represented, ya dipshits. I can’t think of a single gay female character I’ve seen that hasn’t been called bi or even straight or had their sexuality dismissed by being shipped with men: Apple White, Tomoyo Daidouji, Robin Buckley, Amity Blight, Velma Dinkley, the list goes on and on.

Even when the character isn’t canonically a lesbian but is headcanoned as such people seem super against it and will be super bothered by it for some reason. Like they’ll always ask you “why” you hc the character as a lesbian and say “but she could be bi!” And yeah, she could, but what’s so wrong with me seeing her as a lesbian? Why not just make your own post about the character being bi? And then they’ll go on to derail your post by talking about how much they ship the female character with a man. Why are you so offended at the possibility of a female character not being attracted to men? Why do all women have to be available to men, even in fiction?

Imo people seem to hate lesbian headcanons the most, even compared to other headcanons. It’s as if a female character being unattracted to men completely intimidates them and/or is something they can’t comprehend, whether it’s canon or not. Just looking at the Encanto TikTok, when it comes to queer headcanons, fans on there seem to hate the lesbian Isabela one the most. And no, I’m not talking about Colombians who don’t want the message of the movie to be erased, I’m talking about people who simply don’t like the headcanon because they are homophobic/lesbophobic. Maybe it’s just me being an Isabela simp and looking at more content of Isabela and since I’m a lesbian the headcanon I tend to look at the most is Isabela being a lesbian as well(especially since I also have the headcanon myself), but I see it all the time, even more so than hatred for Mirabel being bi or Camilo being genderfluid even though the latter is possibly the most baseless.

Like I am so sick of people getting mad at others for headcanoning Isabela as a lesbian and using Bubo as an excuse even though his character is a rough draft and not canon. And it’s funny as well because most people don’t even like Bubo. Bring him up to an Encanto fan and they’ll instantly say they dislike him. But suddenly you want him to be with Isabela because it’s still better than Isabela being a lesbian. I even saw someone’s account receive death threats, attacks, and hatred just because they headcanoned Isabela as a lesbian, and it culminated in them taking down all their Isabela lesbian content and uploading an apology video instead, and all the comments were saying “it’s okay I forgive you now that you understand” WHAT?! So you only feel bad that she received hate because she no longer has the headcanon? It’s fine for her to receive death threats as long as she does have it though because she deserves it for thinking a fictional fucking female character isn’t attracted to men. Fucking sickening.

Don’t even get me started on how much more popular slash generally is compared to femslash. Because as we all know if a relationship doesn’t have men at its center then it’s not worth paying attention to and not to mention people will attack you for having the ship all the time as well. Even if it is canon don’t think that will stop fandom from tearing the ship apart and pairing one or both characters with boys. Alternatively very often slash pairers will only ship f/f ships to get them out of the way of their slash ship, and I’ve seen a lot of fics while looking for a femslash pair that I want that are tagged as such but only have that relationship in the background/as secondary. And the main and “foreground” ship is always an m/m ship every. single. time. This post goes into it in more detail so that I don’t have to, but the point is made that it’s so upsetting because this all directly stems from centering of men in society as well as fandom. idk it just frustrates me. And I wish this was acknowledged more.

TLDR: I’m tired, please just respect lesbian characters more in fiction and let people have their lesbian headcanons and ships, that is all. Lesbians deserve better.

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susiephone · 5 months

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So glad to see a fellow Tally/Shay shipper in the tag. Their relationship is just so good. Its such a gigantic mess. I felt so seen with my messy, queer, neurodivergent teenage female friendships, even if I needed until a reread two years ago until I acknowledged this this feels extremely queer and that is okay because I am queer too. Until then, all the female friendships I read were always just harmonic and nice and only ever threatened by boys, not these codependent, jealous messes.

The idea to center a YA dystopia around two girls who are deep friends with each other and maybe in love but are pitted against each other by the dystopian system (read: patriarchy, read: beauty culture) again and again is just absolutely amazing. I mean, there is a more traditional love triangle too, and its even well written enough to not drag down the series, unlike in most YA dystopias, but its not the center. At least not for me. For me, Tally and Shay are.

I could go on about them because I have thoughts (see: all the fanart and fics I have either already published or wait to publish until the trailer for the movie comes out), but the ask is already pretty long

first of all - i'm so sorry, i saw this message and fully intended to reply later that day i was like "oh i'll get to this after dinner!"

anyway! i was really struck by HOW different the love triangle in uglies is compared to other YA (especially YA dystopia). like the fact that tally doesn't definitively end up with either of them, and that neither boy turns evil (or at least antagonistic), and that both guys were good for her in their own way. but i especially loved that they both took a backseat to her friendship with shay, since that was by far the most interesting relationship in the whole thing

i'm cautiously optimistic about the movie (assuming it even happens). i personally think it'd work better as a series, but, well, after the shadow and bone debacle, i'm weary to trust any streaming service to actually follow through. i'm a bit worried about how mainstream actors who are all gorgeous anyway will be able to play the characters, and how they'll handle stuff like the specials' body modifications without looking silly (obviously there has to be an element of uncanny valley there, but i do worry it could look corny if they don't have a very good makeup artist).

i'm also VERY worried they'll make both tally and shay white. my personal hc is that tally is white and shay is asian, but tally could be any ethnicity, and shay was imo pretty clearly a woman of color. though i wouldn't be surprised if the movie cuts the parts that indicate that the pretty committee's standards are super racist- i wouldn't be surprised if they cut the themes of self-harm, too. (though tbh i'm of two minds about how that was portrayed in the books; i see what they were going for, but i do agree with some criticism i've seen that it could've been handled better.) any YA adaptation is bound to have some of its edge taken out. like the hunger games movies were pretty damn edgy in some aspects, but they're downright sanitized compared to the books.

one thing's for sure. if a movie happens and if they portray the tally/shay relationship at all competently, there will be an influx of shippers. i can see the angsty lyrics edits now.

#tallysgreatestfan #uglies #tally x shay #shay x tally

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eremosjournal · 6 months

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by Luz

As a society, we like to blame individual people for their actions, rather than systems for what they create. For example, everywhere we look we see the Church obsessed with the question, “Why are so many young people leaving the church?,” but rarely do we see the Church asking, “What is the Church doing that is pushing young people away?”

13 reasons why^

People who whole-heartedly love one another cannot get married in the Catholic church because they are gay.

LGBTQ+ youth are taught they are allowed to have "thoughts of desire", but any "homosexual act" would be a sin. Oh and btw, it comes with going to hell.

Have you seen the movie “Boy Erased”? About kids who are forced to ‘therapy’ their gayness away in a church program? It’s surrounds an Evangelical Christian church, not Catholic, but let’s be real: same fucked up stuff happening there with the whole “leave the homosexual lifestyle” message.

Should all 13 reasons be about queerness or do I need to calm down? Am I being too loud? Hey, ‘shade never made anybody less gaayyyyyyyy’ (lyrics courtesy of TSwift).

They don’t have donuts for the 5pm youth masses. You ever seen a teenager at 9 am mass who wanted to be there? Me neither.

Young adult groups are advertised as follows: “Eighteen to forty-five year olds, come hither!” Talk about the worst marketing tactic in the world. Like hello, ever heard of choosing a target audience? I know when I was eighteen I didn't want to go to a youth event and have “Glenda” there. That is how old forty-five year olds seemed to me when I was eighteen.

As a young girl I was taught about modesty, taught to make sure I didn’t “tempt” the boys with my body or wear revealing clothes since the boys “biologically can’t help themselves” and are “visual learners”. How about we visualize rape culture as a result of all this bullshit of teaching boys to be entitled to girls’ and women’s bodies? Or all bodies for that matter since we are being gender inclusive, unlike the church.

FrFr, I don’t expect the Church to change all of the above, I am simply answering the question of why the church is pushing people away. Anyway, number 8 is simply due to all the hate.

It’s boring listening to older white men in leadership roles, esp. when we know women would kill it up there preaching.

The shame game is strong in a lot of homilies: wouldn’t you want people to feel better after hearing the word of God, rather than worse? Gen Z doesn’t need any more exposure to darkness, there’s enough trauma in their internet-centered lives.

The “if you have sex before marriage and get pregnant” to “give the baby up for adoption” pipeline.

Virginity narratives.

The pews usually don’t have cushions for young, bony behinds. Ouch.

#deconstruction #exvangelical #deconvert #ex catholic #excatholic #exchristian #post christian #ex christian #catholic #post catholic

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qqueenofhades · 2 years

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WE HAVE BEEN SO BLESSED BY THE KENOBI SERIES, Star Wars redeemed!! That is all, I'm going back to crying over Anakin / Obi Wan now BYE ILY

I AM SO SHOOK, I AM A HEAP OF SHOOK, I AM A SHAKING HEAP OF SHOOK BECAUSE, BECAUSE, BECAUSE

/SOBS AGGRESSIVELY

Like... this whole series.... I was not prepared in the LEAST? I swore off anything else SW-related after the sequel trilogy (I didn't even watch TLJ and ROS because TFA left me so fucking furious), I took a long time to want to watch Mandalorian even when everyone was cooing over Baby Yoda, and I was NOT expecting to be thrown for SUCH A LOOP by Kenobi but here we are???

Lots of other people have produced far more eloquent and intelligent meta than I can right now, but I am SHOCKED at how well this entire series understood the assignment. I just reblogged another meta about it.... but it is genuinely dark, traumatic, filled with grief and horror, and focused around the unbearable necessity of somehow finding a way to fight and survive when you've lost everything that made you into yourself and that you used to believe in. But at the same time, it's incredibly tender, beautiful, lovely, devastating, and ultimately uplifting. It's focused so deeply on love -- love for the source material, love for the fans, love for the characters, the love that the characters share in all its various forms -- and therefore, it's the utter antithesis of the "Everything is Bad Now Lol" ham-handed grimdark of the sequel trilogy, which ruined beloved relationships, plots, and characters just because.... well, Things Are Bad Now. Even when it tried to be redemptive, it totally missed the point, because it was cliche, perfunctory, disrespectful, and badly plotted (if it was even plotted at all). It borrowed Star Wars names and characters, but it didn't GET any of it. It had no love or respect for the source material or its messages or its core themes and what the story has always been about, and it made you feel stupid for investing your time and emotion in this fictional universe at all. It was just so BAD.

And then... Kenobi. Where you see familiar actors returning to their beloved characters and BEING ALLOWED TO RESPECT THEM? When they play them with so much love and obvious joy to be part of the story?? It doesn't massively change anything, narratively speaking. We know that ANH takes place nine years later and therefore we're aware of where everyone is going to have to end up. But what an astonishing coda to Revenge of the Sith, which is by far the darkest and most emotionally violent of the prequel movies. To show Obi-Wan's journey from the depths of the dark into the Ben Kenobi wise-old-hermit who's ready, by the time he meets Luke as an adult, to guide him toward his destiny. It fills in the emotional blanks with such gentle mastery and it makes you actually FEEL everything that the prequels wanted you to, but weren't adept enough to pull off, thanks to their clunky writing and directing. It's fanservice, but in a way that makes you HAPPY to be a fan, even while it's pulling your heart out and eating it in front of you. And that is hard to do!

And Obi-Wan and Anakin.... GOD. I'm so unwell over them, and all the choices that were made throughout the show. I recently wrote this meta about how Obi-Wan himself takes every toxic-masculinity trope and throws it straight out the window. He's non-confrontational and gentle and required to provide fatherly care for a little girl and spends his time being sad about losing his male life partner, and the narrative places that love at the CENTER OF THE ENTIRE STORY.... I am Shook. Maybe it's because I'm a middle-aged sad queer person, but watching the gentle, delicate queer subtext in a story about a middle-aged sad person (familial or brotherly or queerplatonic or romantic or whatever, however you care to read it, all interpretations of their relationship are valid to me at this point as long as you acknowledge that they loved each other more than anything and in some ways still do) is really getting to me, all right. Anakin was the center of Obi-Wan's WHOLE WORLD and even now, when he finally sees Anakin's burned face.... he gazes at him with a desperate little smile because somehow he's seeing his love again, and then cries and cries and apologizes to him for everything and is utterly unable to even try to finish him off. Obi-Wan climbs out of the pit (both metaphorical and literal) by drawing on his LOVE for Luke, Leia, and Anakin, and that's why any idea that Luke would later tell anyone to reject their feelings and attachments is just.... wrong. In Star Wars, love always saves the day and is always the right choice, unless it's the toxic, possessive love that caused Anakin's downfall in ROTS. The fact that it was honored and cherished so deeply by the acting, directing, and writing for Obi-Wan and Anakin is just.... ack.

Seeing how much Obi-Wan loves Luke and Leia, both for being the last remnant of Anakin and Padme and also for themselves, has also made the original trilogy hurt so much more (especially when you consider that Luke rescues Leia on the Death Star and she doesn't even get to see Ben again properly before Vader kills him! DON'T SPEAK TO ME). Also: REVA!! Moses Ingram killed it the whole time, and the parallels to Vader, her conflict, and her ultimate rejection of the dark side of the Force, bringing Luke back to his family and crying about how she was unable to avenge hers -- only for Obi-Wan to tell her gently that it was the right choice and help her to her feet and tell her that she's free....

/PAUSE FOR MORE AGGRESSIVE SOBBING

And like... the small things! How much Joel Edgerton sounds like Uncle Owen in the original trilogy! Beru being ready to fuck a bitch up if they lay a single hand on Luke! Little Leia being absolutely perfect in every way (oh how I wish Carrie Fisher could have seen her). All the hugs between Obi-Wan and Leia and the way he tells her about her parents and it's clear how much love he still has for both of them! QUI-GON JINN JUST CHILLING IN THE DESERT AS A FORCE GHOST WAITING FOR OBI-WAN!!! (WHEN I TELL YOU I SCREAMED!) LEIA DRESSED LIKE A JEDI AND REUNITED WITH BAIL AND BREHA AND SHE CAN'T HAVE A BLASTER BECAUSE YOU KNOW SHE WOULD RUN OUT AND SHOOT PALPATINE IN THE GODDAMN FACE AND THEN WE WOULDN'T HAVE AN OT, OOPS --

In short, this series was so wonderful, so authentic, so deeply heartfelt, so utterly willing to embrace love and hope and redemption as the ultimate message of its source material, so respectful of its fans and its characters, and I am going to cry forever over it. Farewell.

#terribletinkereroftaldorei #ask #star wars #sw meta #kenobi #kenobi spoilers #obi wan x anakin #i just have a lot of feelings

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wonkyreads · 1 year

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I used to write reviews here instead of just Goodreads. I’m hoping to going back to that, but to be honest, I moved last year and don’t have space for my books. This means I stopped taking pictures for the BPCs, so I stopped taking pictures of my recent reads, so posting here felt pointless. I like ranting here, though. Next year, I will attempt to keep that up.

For this year, take an end of the year top worst and best. (And keep in mind these are obviously just my opinions! This list also doesn’t reflect the books I DNF’d because I don’t consider them read personally.)

Top 10 Worst Reads of 2022

10. The Themis Files by Sylvain Neuvel

- So this is a sci-fi trilogy where a girl accidentally discovers a giant mecha hand buried deep underground and grows up to be a scientist and studies/digs up all of these mecha pieces. The first book is genuinely good, but the arguments and plot lines the author decided to take with the rest of the series progressively pissed me off more and more, though. Not a bad series, just ultimately not one I enjoyed.

9. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

- I feel I’m gonna piss a fair amount of people off with this one, but it won’t be the last time in this list. With how popular this book is online I don’t feel the need to explain what the plot here is. The writing of this book was beautiful, definitely, it was the content I couldn’t stand. I’m a fan of angst. This was not angst. This was throwing a shelf’s worth of terrible things into a sack and shaking it up to see what happened. This was actively attempting to make people feel things in a way that felt so over the top and transparent that I found myself hardly caring at all. To me, this reeks of romanticizing queer trauma and just trauma in general. I’m just not here for it. Show me redemption or healing, they’re harder to write anyway since it seemed all Yanagihara cared about was the mechanics behind the story and not the story itself.

8. The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini

- This book is kind of a modern classic and it’s just… I’m not sure how I was supposed to sympathize with the main character. This is the story of Amir and Hassan, two boys in Afghanistan in the 70’s. Hassan’s father works for Amir’s, but the book spends a large amount of time trying to guilt you into feeling bad for Amir, our main character. That’s kind of the whole plot (without spoilers) as I remember it if I’m being honest. The writing was fine and I’ve liked Hosseini’s books in the past, I just disliked the main character so much it kind of ruined everything. I disliked feeling guilty for not liking him. It all kind of got in the way of the message for me.

7. The Bodyguard by Katherine Center

- Hannah’s a bodyguard and Jake’s a down-to-earth movie star who seems to have a stalker problem. I adore the concept, but I think my main problem with this book is that I hyped it up for myself and told myself I’d love it. That and the premise felt like a promise of some kind of danger and by the time anything actually dangerous happened it was so ridiculous I laughed at it. It’s the over-the-top kind of romance I tend to not like, though. I fully admit to skimming the epilogue because I also kind of hate romance novels that do that.

6. We Are the Brennans by Tracey Lange

- Sunday Brennan gets into a drunk driving accident and then must swallow her pride and move back to New York where her large Irish Catholic family pretends they don’t need her either. This book is about family secrets, but all I really remember about it is that it did this really bad, gimmicky thing where every chapter ended with the same exact sentence, usually dialogue, that the next chapter began with. When it’s done a couple times to show that we’re in the same scene we just left only in a different perspective, or better yet the two perspectives don’t hear the dialogue the same way, it’s fine. But it was every single chapter. Every one of them. I’m also super picky about domestic drama books like this. Hard pass for me.

5. A History of Wild Places by Shae Earnshaw

- Honestly, I’m not sure how to some this up without spoilers so I’ll just say it’s a cult-y mystery told in multiple time lines. This is the second book I’ve read by Earnshaw and both were promising starts with disappointing developments for me. For me, the book was too predictable to be satisfying and, worse, often it felt like the most boring option was constantly being chosen. The concept was originally very promising, but the closer I got to the end and realized the twist wasn’t going to be fun or interesting, the more reading the book started to feel like a chore.

4. There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins

- Oof. I don’t know how I picked this book up and didn’t expect it to be a teen slasher. I’ll watch a slasher any day of the week (including the movie made from this book), but reading them is kind of boring. You know the tropes, so when they’re followed it’s anticlimactic. I also found some of the character interactions hard to believe, which didn’t help raise my opinion any. I’m just harsh on thrillers and any books involving “small towns.”

3. Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo

- When his BFF Eddie, and definitely not his boyfriend, dies of apparent suicide, Andrew moves into Eddie’s old house with Eddie’s friends to find proof that Eddie’d been killed. There’s also some supernatural stuff and dark academia themes. This is another opinion I feel will make enemies, and it’s one I’ve actually posted here before. I read this book so early in the year that I’ve forgotten most of the specifics about it. What I remember disliking the most, though, was along the same lines as A Little Life. So much felt like it was just there to romanticize queer pain and what was left outside of that was a disappointingly slow mystery that didn’t really surprise or scare me. I think the conversations this book attempted to have were interesting, I just also think it failed to pull it all off. I didn’t believe or feel these characters. I didn’t care for how much it read like Ronan (of The Raven Boys) fanfic. I was consistently annoyed with smart characters avoiding the plot line or making idiotic choices. Also, I’m still traumatized by how obsessed literally everyone was with Eddie, I’m genuinely avoiding books using that name now. All around, absolutely wasn’t for me.

2. Dating Dr. Dil by Nisha Sharma

- Romance is not my genre. Romance that is so over-the-top crazy unrealistic is super not my genre. This book follows Kareena and Dr. Dil in a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. Kareena is supposed to get married before her younger sister and her family is pressuring her, also her dad is selling her childhood home. Dr. Dil hosts a TV show and wants to raise money for his community clinic. I disliked Dr. Dil so, so much and Kareena was so inconsistent. The book felt so unedited and contradictory that I was constantly annoyed with it. The balance between show and tell was nonexistent; you can’t tell me what these characters are and not back it up and expect me to like them or believe them. People’s reactions were crazy over-the-top sometimes and if I have to ask of people actually act like that in real life, I’m already frustrated. I adore The Taming of the Shrew. I could watch 10 Things I Hate About You on repeat. I wanted to love this book so, so badly and was so utterly disappointed in what I got.

And last, but certainly least:

1. Verity by Colleen Hoover

- Verity was one of my most recent reads (I, regrettably, listened to it while icing sugar cookies for Christmas) and it follows Lowen attempting to write the end to a book series she’s never read before by snooping through the original authors memoir manuscripts. Or something. I have never read a Colleen Hoover book before and bought this one through audible years ago because everyone seemed to love it so much. This book has a 4.4 rating on Goodreads. I would just like to know how. Honestly. Talk about unbelievable characters! There were so many unnecessary gratuitous sex scenes in this book and just.. laughable suspense. A lot of the “twists” in this book were so predictable, but I do have a few questions; namely, how the fuck did Jeremy’s milquetoast ass get two women to become so obsessed with him so fast? Also, do people actually think like Lowen does? Holy shit. No really, I have SO many questions and I’m fairly certain none of them are the kind Hoover intended for me to have. I could go on for hours but I’m attempting to avoid spoilers and also it’s a fairly loved book and I don’t want to verge into the territory of yucking someone’s yum or anything, I just genuinely don’t understand. 4.4! Jesus Christ!

#booklr #top 10 worst #my reviews #the Themis files Sylvain nuevel #a little life hanya yanigihara #the kite runner Khalid Hosseini #the bodyguard Katherine center #we are the Brennans Tracey Lange #a history of wild places Shae Earnshaw #there’s someone inside your house Stephanie Perkins #summer sons Lee Mandelo #dating dr Dil Nisha sharma #verity colleen hoover

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lycan-bytez-genuine-corner · 9 months

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Watched Barbie.

* It wears it's brand of corporate backed feminism on it's sleeve while deconstructing what that means

* It's really empowering for all, with it's main plot being killer for young girls and women, and it's B plot being wonderful for queer and men.

* I really liked the fact that the movie straight up points out how contradictory standards for women are. You have to be powerful but you also have to respectful to the disrespectful, you have to have a career but also be available for everyone at all times, you have to be a mom but your kids can't be you whole life, etc etc. You can't just be a person, you have to be perfect and exemplary, you have to be highly skilled but also not show up men, and I really love that so much of the film is just telling the audience to be themselves because these standards aren't just flawed, they're impossible and unhealthy for you and for others. This movie isn't hiding it's stance against the ridiculously unfair social structures in Western society, specifically more aimed at places like the US, EU, UK. I can't state how happy I am with how the movie handled these topics.

* Lots of small jabs at corporations and corporate structure alongside the idea that men can empower women when they hold all the power in a corporate setting. Like you're saying the right thing but your position is lacking authenticity because you lack the lived experiences of a woman. It doesn't say men can't be allies, but it really does try to highlight how true empowerment comes from authenticity and diversity, not assumptions and old school thought processes.

* Really shocked at how succint they handled the idea of patriarchy and it's many harms against women and just women existing, alongside the less talked about harm towards men in the B plot. I know I'm speaking from a position of privilege but it felt good to see a movie cover a thing that actively made me depressed in my teens, especially since it might help a young guy who goes to the movie for his little sister might help internalize that you're not evil for just being a man and that the social standard for what a "Man" is, is just as much of a prison as it is a way to move up in the world with it being more important to just be "You" than to just be the social standard of "Manliness."

* it has some of the best action choreography I've seen in years

* very funny movie and I laughed loudly in the theater

* lots of casting of conventionally unattractive actors, especially in terms of women. I really enjoyed all the old women, all the POC, I loved every second of how much screen real estate spent on making sure people feel included and front and center: If a scene is happening, they don't shove people in the back for "Perfect" women or "Perfect" Kens all up front, it's a shared space. I really, really, really want more normal people just in movies.

* Gay Ken makes an appearance alongside Barbie's pregnant friend and that weird puberty friend

* Existential dread surrounding existence, for kids! It's really well done, jokes aside

* I love how good the movie looked and sounded

* this is really dumb given that I'm a cis man but I felt really seen given how much I struggle with masculinity and being gay. This movies B plot with Ken would have been inspiring to a young me in terms of not trying to be the "Man" but just be "Lycan Bytez."

* I don't think I've seen a movie do so good at highlighting the plight of women so well in it's A plot.

* I really liked how focused and good the messages in the A, B and C plot was.

* I want to buy a depression Barbie now, thanks for the marketing on it.

10/10 I might have cried quite a bit. I didn't think a Barbie movie would be able to talk so well about the human experience in my life and the lives of loved ones.

#movie #barbie #review

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valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn · 2 years

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"It's been a year since the show came out, get over it and go away." Fans that eagerly waited for something, especially for years, only to be massively let down by it don't just get over it and go away. Mass Effect fans have been hating on and making fun of the Mass Effect 3 endings (along with certain new characters) for ten years. Hell, ten years and I'm still bitter about what Mass Effect 3 did to my favorite squadmate and love interest. One year is nothing.

I find the whole thing to be so weird. If you still love a movie you saw 10 years ago and you talk about it now, they're okay with it. But if a movie you watched around the same time you hated for whatever reason and you still hate it 10 years later they claim it's wrong.

So it's not the fact that you still think about a movie or series long after its release, it's that they think it's wrong to dislike something whereas liking it is deemed better, it becomes a moral stance for them to support media and they refuse to approach any of it critically. They psychoanalyze whoever criticizes something and the worst part is that they try to silence them by sending hate anons or using their "otherness" against them.

And also it's all amazingly performative. I remember right before the release of Ms Marvel the MCU subreddit was a hellhole: anyone who dared say they didn't feel particularly interested in the series was met with accusations of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, they were told they were wrong and the only "righteous" thing to do was watch at least the first few episodes - and they were all so sure that not watching was an act of bigotry.

Who benefits from that? Marvel and Disney, two big af corporations. These fans are not so stupid that they think they're helping Pakistani women by watching the series, they just want the medal, the social status, etc. So conversely if you dare skip that then it must mean you're a bad person.

There's a lot of toxic positivity in this but I also think big studios take advantage of the current social climate, it's no coincidence that they will try and use the women or POC or queer characters to spread conservative messages (a black woman is the head of the TVA, Loki is humiliated in the episode following his "coming out", Steve is antifa but they changed him completely in EG then sent him back, Carter is a nazi sympathizer but she's framed as feminist, etc). They know what they're doing.

Lastly yeah, if you've loved a character for over a decade you're bound to care about what the directors and writers do to him, especially when they have hyped his series for a long time only to let us all down with a show that didn't even center him.

So no, don't shut up. There's NO difference whatsoever between a positive opinion and a negative, you're no better person for liking everything and you don't become the Grinch for talking about stuff you don't like, and please for the love of everything let's differentiate between critique - hatred - negativity, they're not the same.

#fandom wank

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magicalink · 3 months

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Hi, I just wanted to say that I love your blog because of your writing, your fic reblogs and your feminist reblogs 💜 It has a lot of things that I like, it makes me feel like I'm not alone in my opinions and that maybe I can find someone that shares them and my interests! You don't need to post this if you don't want to, but thank you for your blog (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)⁠❤

Omg, this has to be one of the best messages I ever received! 😭

Honestly I get some shit and hate thrown at me for being feminist, as any feminist does, especially in this blog that is focused on erotic content because of the nature of the majority of the community 💀 So receiving messages of other women and girls who also enjoy videogames and erotic fanfics while also having feminist ideas makes me feel finally not alone 💜

It means the world to me, truly. Because in feminist environments I always feel like I will get called a pervert for liking Genshin and writing smut about it, but in gamer and fanfic environments I get called a prude or a feminazi/transphobe for not complying to the gender ideology that dominates the field (and politics all around the world except for China and Russia) So I'm always caught in the middle. I'm a person who cares a lot about politics, economy, but fundamentally about human rights and especially the human rights of women who are trampled all the time. (Shout out to WDI for making a manifesto of women's sex based rights that is slowly getting support and being signed by women all over the world despite having the queer lobby trying to crush it down with the full force of the political machine they move) But I'm also a person who enjoys having hobbies, like any other. And those hobbies include videogames, reading, writing, and this blog is the space I reserve for that. But of course we people are a whole so my writing and this blog reflect the things I'm most interested in, that's why it's centered around of heterosexual and bisexual female main characters and their desires and turmoils regarding men, misogyny, masculinity, shame, desire of freedom, etc. In some fics like Better Find Husbandos the mc is deeply traumathized because before arriving in Teyvat, she lived in a misogynystic world like ours, and it's reflected on her thoughts about men and sex. In others like Catboys in the house, the main character lives in a mathriarcal society that doesn't oppress men, somewhat like the Barbie movie, and the conflict is placed in other things while her relationships with men are pure comfort, and this is a way of escapism. Assembled Love is a bit in between, the setting is in a world like ours, but it won't depict explicit forms of abuse like Better Find Husbandos will, the main character will suffer sexism at school but not its extreme and more violent ways.

I'm working a lot on my blog this new year and preparing a special post talking about why I started this blog, which has everything to do with this, with my struggle with sex, with being female in this pathriarcal world that I started suffering from a very young age. Of my journey from the deepest depths of internalized misogyny to the battle I'm fighting against it nowadays.

I was scared to reblog feminist content in this blog at first but I decided to stay true to myself. And what a pleasant surprise when I found other Genshin fans reblogging it as well! It was so worth taking the risk and face my fears. I found that very much the same as it happened to me, when other people read feminist takes well explained they find out they completely agree with them, that it was just that the media was painting feminism as something horrible without even letting them know what it really was about, because they know that when women are allowed to discover what it really is about, we dive right in! 💜 I used to hate feminism as a kid because I was completely misled about what it was about, like the majority of women out there. I found it on accident, and I feel it's so unfair I wasn't exposed to it as a kid before the damage to my mind was done. I feel I found it really late, at like 20, but the worst part is that other women find it even later and some women are completely deprived of it. It only changed my life for the better. It's painful, no doubt, to realize the injustice and abuse I and all women are subjected everywhere, as Andrea Dworkin said:

Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.

It is as if our oppression were cast in lava eons ago and now it is granite, and each individual woman is buried inside the stone. Women try to survive inside the stone, buried in it. Women say, I like this stone, its weight is not too heavy for me.

Women defend the stone by saying that it protects them from rain and wind and fire. Women say, all I have ever known is this stone, what is there without it?

And it is a brutal agony. But I find it worth it because even if being conscious of it makes me feel powerless and depressed, when I compare my life now to how it was when I had no clue what was going on, I see it's much better. Being unaware of the oppression didn't make it disappear, it made me even more anxious and depressed because I didn't understand what was going on, I thought I was doing something wrong, I thought it was my fault, I hated myself, I hated my body. Nothing changed my life more than one day at like 18 finally realizing that the problem wasn't my body but society, and that was like 2 years before discovering feminism. Like, REAL feminism, as Andrea Dworkin said, "not the fun kind". When I discovered that women before me had the same ideas I had been having centuries ago, that the could articulate them way better than I did, that they wrote lots of books about it, that there was an entire movement that was discretely and deliberatedly HID from me that I only found it on accident by finally daring to talk with other women on tge internet about my traumatizing experiences was MINDBLOWING. Yes, it made me FURIOUS that I had been kept away from thia treasure my whole life. But I also felt relief in the sense that I finally felt that I was not alone. I had never been alone. It is like Simone de Beauvoir expresses in The Second Sex, very academically but overall saying that women are raised to be loyal to men and to hate other women and be wary of them like they are the competence so that we don't recognize ourselves as a social class and we are unable to lead a revolution. We are raised to think that we are alone. Helpless. That the other women are bad, are shallow, are inferior, are competence, thst "the worst enemy of a woman is another woman" instead of the men that oppress us, so that we turn our backs on other women and seek safety and protection from a man because it feels it's inevitable, it's the only way. But it turned out, it was just another lie in the wall. I was not alone. And that, along with discovering that there were words to describe what was being done to me: for example, discovering the term "gaslighting" changed my life because I had a ruthless male bully during hisghschool that made me feel like I was crazy, a bad person, humilliated me in front of everyone, spread rumors about me and made me look like the bad guy, etc, and I could never describe the twisted mind games he played with me, no one believed he bullied me because he never punched me or groped me. If I had known what he was doing I wouldn't have spent my teenage years wondering WHY I felt something was wrong and feeling like I couldn't articulate my feelings and experiences with words.

But I'm not alone, so THANKS A MILLION FOR THIS MESSAGE!

I genuinely love you 💜

#magical asks #magical life #magical women

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spidderboy · 2 years

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encanto is a great movie, great music and representation <3

#being diff #fit in #but what has bothered me is grown ppl on the internet thirsting over Camilo #a 15 y/o #and centering the whole message of the movie to queerness...#eliminating the whole point of the storyline and reducing it to something completely different...#its ok if you resonated to it bc of and not being able to but I hate the erasure of the actual message #shut up luisa

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whyqueerbaitingisbad · 3 years

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movies & shows

cracks knuckles* alright this is going to be more of a rant than an analysis because i’m basing this on both my research, but also how it felt to personally be baited by these shows. there are obviously more pieces of bad (almost every horror movie) and good ones but these are the ones i’ve watched.

please keep in mind that i am but one queer and everyone has different opinions.

Supernatural (CW) 2005

This show is 15 years old and just ended. From season 5 till 15, there has been tension between two of the lead characters. They were constantly shipped together and not only did the entire fandom know about this ship but so did almost all of Tumblr. On top of that, the actors and show runners knew about it as well. Which is why it makes it ridiculous that it was constantly pushed aside while the romantic coding kept happening, even after show runners dismissed it as being intentional. The Destiel (Dean x Cas) case has been going on for years, and as the show came to its end, many fans had hope. But N O P E. Instead, we got a love confession from Cas where Dean looked like he was near constipated and the Cas was killed and sent into a fiery place that was not hell but s u p e r h e l l.

… w hy.

Sherlock (BBC) 2010

Just like Supernatural, this show was renown on Tumblr for not only how good it was, but its hinting at a potential relationship between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. But again, like Supernatural, the intentional tension between the two characters was denied by producers. This caused an uproar within the fandom, and even left some people believing that, after the last season aired, it had been a joke and the producers were hiding a “secret, unaired season” because they had felt so robbed by this show that had implied something and denied it.

The 100 (CW) 2014

We got lesbians. We got background gays. We were happy. Then, all of a sudden, one of them is killed for no reason. Did it advance the plot? No. Was she fighting and died in battle? lol no. She was doing literally nothing and got shot and died. And then the producers kept bringing her back once a season in the form of a ghost or illusion because why? Because she was a fan favourite queer character. ✨bury your gays and sparingly bring them back for profit anyone?✨

Voltron: Legendary Defender (Netflix) 2016

*deep breathe* This one is a special disaster. Not only was there romantic tension and romantically coded scenes for 7 seasons, but producers, voice actors and artists working on the show repeatedly said “don’t worry klance (Keith x Lance) shippers, you’ll be happy”

. … w h e r e??? You code one of their scenes with a sunset in the background while they talk about love and then one of them goes on a date with someone who has declined his advances for 7 seasons but now in season 8 decides to do a full 180. Not only that, but you announce at a Comic Con (a convention) that a character is gay and has a fiancé, only to kill off the fiancé and never make it explicit in the show except at the last second of the last episode where he marries a no name character.

Personally, i’d like to say a big fuck you to the show that strung me along for 2 years and never stopped saying we’d be happy to then pull the rug out from under us and call us crazy for thinking anything from the past 8 seasons was intentional.

Scooby-Doo (2002)

While not being outwardly queerbaiting, this movie’s filmmaker has just revealed some shocking news, which wasn’t at all shocking to the gays who had watched this movie over the years. In July of 2020, James Gunn, the filmmaker of Scooby-Doo, revealed in a podcast that, initially, Velma was explicitly gay in his script, but then the studio watered it down until it became nothing. This isn’t an example of baiting as much as it is changing a character’s initial design to “better fit an audience”. The worst part of all this is that with Velma’s character having been written with a l i t t l e queer subtext, people had been theorizing about if since the movie came out, but were always yelled at by the internet for “imagining something that isn’t there”. But now, even with it being said that the initial point was for her to be gay, people have no objections to still refusing to accept it. Why?? So we can’t get the subtext gays OR the confirmed gays?? Make it make sense.

Brooklyn 99 (NBC) 2013

To have the queer characters firstly introduced without mentioning their sexualities and have it brought up naturally was so goddamn nice to see, because no one does a big deal about it unless they ask for that. This show is amazing in general but the way they show their queer characters is *chefs kiss*.

She-ra and the Princesses of Power (Netflix) 2018

This. Show. My heart SOARS. It's just a remake of an old show so absolutely nothing was ever expected, but then it was sprinkled in and ENDED WITH A BANG. And it was so beautiful and real to see the struggle of two friends who care for each other and want to be together but have different visions of the world fall in love. And they also had characters with disabilities, a non-binary character and jUST SUCH A GOOD SHOW.

Kipo and The Age of Wonderbeasts (Netflix) 2020

This is a case where you go into it not expecting anything and are BLOWN AWAY by the bare minimum. And not because it’s bad!! It's mind blowing because this is the simple representation we need!! Not something over the top, but an every day relationship. It’s just two boys falling in love and going on dates and being nervous around each other, yet i was so stunned. Because it’s not shown enough. I should not be this excited over something that should be this normal. 10/10 though this show is so good for all kinds of representation.

Steven Universe (Cartoon Network) 2013

This show did so much for queer representation with its general message of loving everyone and loving who you want. Especially since it was aired on Cartoon Network, a channel for kids, it was able to help normalize something so looked down upon in some circles. It made it easy to watch for s o m e people because it's a cartoon but it's so beautiful to see these ladies so in love with each other, both platonically and romantically and we see them have a family dynamic that isn’t a “nuclear family”. Rebecca Sugar (creator) really said “lemme just break all stereotypes real quick”.

Adventure Time (Cartoon Network) 2010

It's the “knowing a fanbase shipped something so hard that the creators made it canon” for me. This relationship had been theorized by fans for years, but it had never been explicit in the show. When the finale episode came out and the two shared a kiss, it was a moment of celebration. The producer of the show said that it had not really been planned but when the episode was being made, the choice of what happened was given to one of the artists (bless your soul Hanna K. Nyströmthe). And as the show releases little bonus episodes, its latest was centered around Marceline and Bubblegum and their relationship. AND WE LOVE TO SEE OUR DOMESTIC LESBIANS BEING HAPPY AND IN LOVE.

Yuri on Ice!!! (anime) 2016

The fact that an A N I M E gave us a love story between two men is mind boggling and it makes me so happy!! Especially because it's a Japanese show and they’re very conservative about these things just makes it more emotional. The creators said they wanted to make the anime take place in a world where gay/straight isn’t a thing, it’s just love (ladies, you’re going to make me cry). So as the weekly episodes came out and fans start speculating, THEY GAVE US THE LAST FEW EPISODES FULL OF ROMANCE AND EMOTIONAL SCENES BETWEEN THE TWO AND THEN THEY GET R I N GS?!???!! You watch for the figure skating, you stay for the figure skaters that are in love.

Shadowhunters (Freeform) 2016

*insert me being frustrated that the actors are straight so we can move on from that disappointment*

This show really said “let’s name a whole episode after this couple because they deserve it”. But seriously, they gave us two characters whose entire plot does not center around their sexualities while still showing us the differences in a relationship between someone experienced and someone new at this. They were both powerful and amazing characters apart from each other, with their own story lines and goals but they loved each other so much omgs. SO MUCH.

It was so great to watch.

Love, Simon (2018)

There’s a lot of disagreement on whether this movie is good representation or not. However, we need to take into consideration that this was Hollywood’s first movie with a main character that was gay, where the story’s focus was on Simon’s love story. The biggest problem, for me at least, was that the actor playing Simon is a straight man and not queer. My problem is not with him, but the fact that there are other actors that are gay and that could have played Simon just as well. (the love interested was however played by a queer actor so ✨progress✨)

All in all, this movie does represent what a lot of queer kids have to go through: being outed at school, how they then come out, the bullying and doubt they go through.

The book is also really good.

Call Me By Your Name (2018)

This movie is so aesthetically pleasing and was able to capture the confusion and heartbreak felt by a boy who’s struggling with his own feelings towards a man. His inner conflict and joy and l o v e he feels but doesn’t know how to deal with is so well communicated through the screen and just breaks your heart because it feels so real.

But again, they could’ve gotten gay actors to play gay characters…

through having this list here, i want to show you that it’s not hard for creators to give good queer representation. the LGBTQ+ community isn’t asking for much, we just want to be well represented on screen as just a regular character, not some token queer kid there for the diversity points. having been exposed to so much queerbaiting and just not seeing any representation on screen, i always get over-excited when i see a queer character, and that’s not how it should be. it should be a normal thing, something you can find in most pieces of media, just like there’s a straight white cisgender person in everything.

and they seriously need to start casting queer actors for queer characters...

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letterboxd · 3 years

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How I Letterboxd #9: Julie Collette.

Christmas movie lover Julie Collette tells Jack Moulton all about her seasonal movie habits, the best big screen Santa Claus of all time, disability visibility in festive films, and some of the weirder holiday picks.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: when Letterboxd members turn to the Neverending Christmas List to help plan their Christmas movie viewing. Arrange it by highest rated, arrange it by newest release, or by popularity—any which way, there’s something for everyone, from corny TCM romances to obscure seasonal horrors.

Created six years ago by Canadian member Julie Collette, the list runs to more than 4,300 titles, and contains the word ‘Christmas’ 1,837 times at last count. Julie and her husband are die-hard Letterboxd fans, having allegedly used the platform every day for the past nine years. She’s logged every film she’s seen in theaters since 1996.

A message from John McClane in ‘Die Hard’ (1988).

What inspired your Neverending Christmas List? Can you please explain the minimum requirement for eligibility? My husband had told me about a list on Letterboxd of Every Horror Film Made from 1895–Present and that gave me the idea to start the neverending Christmas list. My eligibility rules are not strict at all. It can be a film that centers on or around Christmas time. Even New Year’s counts in my book—as long as there’s a moment in the film that has a Christmas song, a Christmas scene, or Christmas decorations. Die Hard is definitely a Christmas film. First of all, it takes place on Christmas Eve at an office Christmas party. There’s that great note that John McClane sends to Hans Gruber on a dead guy’s shirt: “Now I have a machine gun, ho-ho-ho.” Now that’s Christmas! There are a couple of titles that test my relaxed requirements. Examples would be Psycho—there are a few Christmas decorations at the beginning [and Bryan Fuller agrees]—and the documentary Beauty Day by Canadian director Jay Cheel, which has Christmas lights at the end.

And what percentage of the films have you seen? As of right now, I've watched 20 percent—that’s 882 of the 4,322 films on the list. I’ve got a lot of homework to do. Here’s a few hidden gems I recommend: Mon oncle Antoine, Holiday Affair, Remember the Night, Olivia, On the Twelfth Day…, Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas and One Christmas, which is Katherine Hepburn’s last role.

David Bowie and Bing Crosby sing ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ in ‘Bing Crosby’s Merrie Old Christmas’ (1977).

When does your Christmas movie viewing season start? I usually start mid-November to try to keep up with the TV rom-coms because they start to air even before Hallowe’en. This year on Hallowe’en night we rewatched The Night of the Hunter and I had forgotten that there was a sequence that was set at Christmas time. It was a perfect segue between Hallowe’en and Christmas, so I started November 1st. As far as how I pick what to watch, I go through my list and randomly pick some. I try to watch as many first-time watches and mix up the genres. But the closer I get to Christmas, the more I want to watch my favorites—for the most part I go with the flow. Christmas Day is usually a day of family time, but I try to sneak in one favorite if I can.

What was the first Christmas film that got you into all of this? I’ve always loved Christmas and growing up I watched the yearly airings of vintage Christmas cartoons and A Muppet Family Christmas. When Home Alone came out it was an instant obsession, then Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was just as good. Even now it’s our yearly tradition for my husband and I to watch the Home Alones while we decorate the Christmas tree.

If not Home Alone, what is your all-time favorite Christmas film? It’s a Wonderful Life is up there for me. Partly because growing up I watched it every Christmas Eve and kind of forced my dad to watch it with me. I think he secretly didn’t mind. As a kid, I didn’t dwell on the sad parts of the story, I just wanted to go to that candy shop and run in Bedford Falls like George in that beautiful thick fake snow. Now as an adult, I appreciate the story about a small town coming together to support a man at his lowest of lows more. Jimmy Stewart is amazing as George Bailey and we can all see ourselves at some point in his journey in the film. The chemistry and comedic timing between Stewart and Donna Reed is one of the best. Every time they sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, I always get a bit misty-eyed.

メリークリスマス Japanese style, in ‘Tokyo Godfathers’ (2003).

What have you noticed about the ways in which Christmas films have changed over the years? In classic Christmas storytelling, there are a lot more religion-centered ones like The Bishop’s Wife and It’s a Wonderful Life. The ’80s and ’90s were about the blockbusters that the whole family could enjoy; Batman Returns, Home Alone, and The Santa Clause. The last twenty years have brought us a lot of different movies, but I do find that the start of the 2000s had a better crop of Christmas movies; Love Actually, Elf, Tokyo Godfathers, Far from Heaven, Bridget Jones’s Diary, About a Boy and so many more. The last decade has been saturated by the rom-coms of Hallmark, Lifetime and their imitators, but from the last five years, a few stand out that could be destined to become Christmas classics: Carol, Little Women and The Night Before.

The best, most rewatched Christmas stories tend to be remade. Do you have a classic Christmas story that you always love, no matter who’s telling it? Hands down Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. From my favorite—Scrooge—to The Muppet Christmas Carol, to Scrooged. Growing up, I had the book of Mickey’s Christmas Carol and I loved the cartoon adaptation. I love to see the different actors’ excitement and elation at the end when Scrooge wakes up on Christmas Day. My ultimate favorite is Alistair Sim in 1951’s Scrooge. He’s so jubilant asking the maid what day it is and wishing himself Merry Christmas in the mirror. It’s a bit darker than others. When I was a kid, the intro with Jacob Marley and the build-up of the chains scared me, but I couldn’t stop watching. Patrick Stewart’s Ebenezer [in the 1999 TV movie] is also great for his relief that he survived the journey through time. What an actor! An honorable mention to The Shop Around the Corner, In the Good Old Summertime and You’ve Got Mail, which are all based on [the 1937 Hungarian play Parfumerie by Miklós László].

A Christmas Treat in ‘Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square’ (2020).

Treat Williams stars in not one but two of this season’s films (who knew he could sing?!). Which actors bring that special spark to festive films for you? Yes, and boy can he sing! Another actor who can sing and puts me straight in the Christmas mood is Bing Crosby. Those classic songs in White Christmas and Holiday Inn are favorites of mine. Jimmy Stewart is an obvious one. He has that charm that’s perfect for Christmas movies, especially in The Shop Around the Corner.

What’s your guiltiest pleasure on the list? Why do we love cheesy movies so much?! Every year I watch TCM’s Classic Christmas marathon [but I also watch] the Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas rom-coms. For me, I love them partly because there’s always a happy ending. I love to see all the decorations and all the cute small towns—some I wish existed so I could visit them because they’re so darn cute! Another reason I love them is the nostalgia, as some of the better ones star TV actors from the ’90s and ’00s like Candice Cameron Bure, Lacey Chabert, Jonathan Bennett, Adrian Grenier, Mario Lopez, Alicia Witt, Alison Sweeney and so many others.

One of the other great Christmas-themed lists on Letterboxd is the one about Christmas movie posters with white heterosexual couples wearing red and green—though many members pride themselves on having seen none of them. I like those movies because I can zone out and enjoy the predictable Christmas ride. However, like other Letterboxd members, I know that these aren’t Oscar-caliber films—though some are better than others! I’m glad that the powers that make these movies are starting to be more inclusive with more POC and LGTBQ+ characters. As a wheelchair user with a physical disability, I was happy to see that Lifetime has an upcoming one called Christmas Ever After, starring Ali Stroker.

Ali Stroker finds love in ‘Christmas Ever After’ (2020).

Indeed, our Make the Yuletide Gay list is an attempt to highlight queer festive films, but the pickings have been slim. Yes, very slim. There’s been queer characters in Christmas films but it’s your stereotypical gay friend or something like that. This year I feel there’s a shift in the air to be more inclusive. My favorites this year so far have been the star-filled lesbi-rom-com Happiest Season, The Christmas House—featuring a landmark first gay couple in a Hallmark festive film, Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square and Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey—with Ricky Martin! I’m looking forward to checking out A New York Christmas Wedding, The Christmas Setup and Dashing in December.

What is the scariest Christmas film that your horror-loving husband has made you watch? The best one is Black Christmas. I love that it’s female-centered and ahead of its time in their portrayals. The killer’s POV really gets me into it and still to this day puts me on edge, so much so that an ornament fell off our tree while watching it this year and it freaked me out!

Also, should we be watching The Nightmare Before Christmas on Hallowe’en or on Christmas? I watch The Nightmare Before Christmas on both holidays so you get the best of both worlds—the ghoulishness of Hallowe’en and the merriment of Christmas!

What other films on your list show Christmas in an unusual light? The first weird one that popped to mind is The Star Wars Holiday Special. That was weird! Also, from what I’ve watched I would say Eyes Wide Shut, The Ref and 3 Godfathers are not your usual Christmas films. I do have quite a few on the list I have to watch that seem weird and unusual like Elves, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

[Editor’s note: Previous How I Letterboxd interviewee Dave Vis urges you not to watch Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny under any circumstances.]

Which actor is the quintessential Santa Claus? For me, it’s the Santa in Miracle on 34th Street, played by Edmund Gwenn. He truly embodied the part in the way he plays Kris Kringle. The gentleness and innocence he shows throughout the film is magical. It’s no wonder he won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his performance.

Gunn Wållgren in ‘Fanny and Alexander’ (1982).

Of course, so many films in the Christmas canon are American films. What are some of the best Christmas films from around the world? This question makes me realize I haven’t watched enough Christmas movies from around the world. With that being said here’s a few; A Christmas Tale from France, A Child’s Christmas in Wales from the UK, Tokyo Godfathers from Japan and Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander from Sweden. Mon oncle Antoine is a great Canadian film set in a small mining village during Christmas. It reminded me of the stories my mom and grandma talked about their Christmas traditions in their small village.

Are there any overrated classics you want to protest? I didn’t watch A Christmas Story growing up, so when I finally did watch it as an adult, I didn’t connect with it. The iconic scenes are funny and all, but it’s just okay. Now I’ll be on my hubby’s naughty list!

Does the film marathon continue through that purgatory week between Christmas and New Year? Do you have any film-related traditions to ring in the New Year? It does continue during that week to a certain extent. Some years after Christmas I’m done and what I haven’t watched goes to the following year but other years I can watch a few more and not feel overwhelmed. On New Year’s we have no traditions per se, but this year we might do a Tarantino marathon.

Christmas season is also synonymous with awards season. You keep track of a lot of Academy Awards history. How are you feeling about the awards season this year? First off, like many others, I haven’t even set foot in a theater this year and that is sad. I hope that the theater-going experience is not irreparably damaged. One good thing that came from the pandemic is film festivals streamed online and we were fortunate to watch some great titles from TIFF from the comfort of our home in September. I saw Nomadland, and it’s going to be a frontrunner for many of the main categories. I hope Regina King’s One Night in Miami gets some love. Miranda July’s Kajillionaire script is so unique—Evan Rachel Wood and Richard Jenkins should be contenders. I haven’t watched a lot of docs yet but Boys State stands out. I’m also eager to see First Cow, Minari, Ammonite, The Truffle Hunters, Soul, Mank, The Father and Promising Young Woman.

This Christmas is going to be weird for a lot of people. What’s one film you’d recommend for a guaranteed happiness injection? Weird indeed. If I have to pick just one it would be John Favreau’s Elf. Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf instantly brings a smile to my face. You can feel his joy for Christmas from start to finish. From the classic claymation, to New York City at Christmas, to eating all that sugar, to that hilarious scene with Peter Dinklage—it’s Christmas gold!

And finally, are there some other Letterboxd members you recommend we follow? Emily, Flurryheaven, Guyzo997, Peter Spencer, Michael Dean, Brent Vanhomwegen, Ara Hiddleston and also some more Christmas lists.

#letterboxd #how i letterboxd #letterboxd community #letterboxd culture #letterboxd members #christmas #christmas films #christmas movies #holiday movies #holiday films #jack moulton

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nerdygaymormon · 4 years

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I think I might be polysexual. I am really confused and struggling, and I don’t feel comfortable “coming out” enough to find resources. I don’t intend to date anyone I can’t get sealed to, and I want to be obedient. How much can I embrace this part of me? Can I get a flag or wear the colors? Can I be active in or apart of the LGBT community? Is researching possible sexualities etc. putting too much power in my temptations? What, if anything, do I need to share with a bishop or mission pres.?

You’re doing just fine. It’s normal to have questions. Being queer makes church things complex for us that are simple for non-queer members.

________

You don’t have to come out if you don’t want to. There may come a time when you feel ready to come out and that also is good. it is your choice. The mormonandgay website says “Sharing those feelings with a trusted confidant can be liberating and healing.“ In other words, it’s okay with the Church if you come out and it may be a positive experience, but not required.

________

As a polysexual you have some flexibility in dating, and if you only choose to date people with whom you can be sealed, that’s a perfectly fine choice. You are not required to do more than you’re comfortable doing. When you get older, if you decide you would like to explore dating a wider range of people, that is your choice and you should feel no pressure to do that or to not do that.

________

As far as embracing this part of you, it’s up to you. The mormonandgay website says it’s fine to adopt a sexual orientation label to describe yourself (like polysexual). You can also get a flag and wear the colors.

You also can be active in the LGBT community and be a Church member in good standing. 39% of LGBT youth are active in a religion.

Perhaps your school has a GSA club you could participate in. There may be an LGBTQ resource center where you could volunteer.

You can go to a Pride celebration (you may be more comfortable going to a Pride parade in a smaller city as those tend to be less wild).

On meetup.com you can find all sorts of LGBTQ groups, many of which are simply an opportunity to socialize, such as to go to a movie or an art fest together, or go get brunch once a month.

If you don’t embrace this as a part of yourself, you’ll always be at war with yourself. Part of embracing this is recognizing it is not a choice you made. This isn’t a punishment. This doesn’t mean you’re defective or that there’s something wrong with you.

These feelings & attractions aren’t going away but are part of how you experience the world. This will affect the way you love, who you find attractive, how you socialize, and so on, it is interwoven into all the major aspects of your life. Learn to love yourself, be kind to yourself.

My orientation brought me nothing but trouble and sadness until I accepted that I’m gay and this is how God made me and I don’t have the power to change it. God must want me this way. Since then, being gay has gone from being a curse in my life to also being a source of blessings & happiness.

________

Researching sexualities and other aspects of queer identities is very possible. One safe way to do this is do an internet search for “polysexual resources” or “lgbtq resources”. Then choose to only click on links to safe spaces, such as a university, or lgbt-friendly spaces such as PFLAG, or a state LGBT center.

This link is to the Family Acceptance Project’s pamphlet for LDS families and it is excellent, although I’m not sure polysexual is specifically included, but the general principles still apply to you.

Listen Learn & Love is a website by Richard Ostler. He’s a former bishop who has made loving LGBT Mormons his ministry. He does a podcast (I’m on episode #151), has many resources available. It’s a safe space to learn about other people’s experiences & journeys. http://www.listenlearnandlove.org/papa-ostler-fb-posts

________

My biggest piece of advice is get some LGBTQIA+ friends, even better if they’re also LDS because they’ll get you in a way no one else does.

You can do a search on Tumblr for #queerstake and read posts and see if anyone looks like a person you might message. Twitter has an active core of queer members that centers on the Church schools in Provo & Rexburg. Look for my friend CalvinJBurke and see who reacts to his tweets, that’ll be a good starting place.

Affirmation is the oldest organization for LDS/post-LDS LGBTQ+ individuals. They have multiple Facebook pages for different situations. I’m in the Affirmation Prepare group which is for active LDS LGBT people. They also have a group for teens and a group for bi,pan,queer+ (this includes poly). Look through their list of groups and you may find several to check out. You can easily leave the groups if they don’t work for you.

________

As for putting power into your temptations, I would take that to mean things that make it easy to cross the line. I think that includes being alone for an extended period with someone who might accept your romantic advances. I don’t think being in public places, being with a group, looking at resources at reputable websites is going to cause a problem.

________

As for a bishop or mission president, you don’t have to tell them that you’re poly, or queer or anything like that. They will ask about your worthiness, this means your actions. If you aren’t having sex with anyone, then there’s nothing to confess.

When the time comes to apply for a mission, if you think living with and having a deep relationship with someone of the same gender will be too much for you, you can always request a service mission. There are many interesting opportunities opening up beyond a proselyting mission. How to bring that up to the stake president is up to you, but he’s the only one who needs to know your preference before he submits your mission application.

You have to decide if you trust your bishop or mission president enough to tell them. It can be hard to tell. When any LGBTQ topic comes up, how do they react, what do they say? Trust your gut, it’s usually a good guide to this sort of thing.

________

As I said at the beginning, church & faith becomes a lot more complex if you are queer.

If you hear things at church that don’t sit right with you, don’t ignore them. Think about how they fit with these questions:

Does that sound like me, do I resemble that remark? (especially if they’re talking about queer people)

Does this sound like the God that I know?

Does this fit with the two great commandments to love God, love ourselves and love each other?

If what’s being said fails those questions, you can dismiss it.

When you hear negative messages at church (or anywhere else), push back against them, even if it’s just in your thoughts. Come up with a positive sentence to replace each negative one.

You also can politely ask someone what their source is or where they heard that, it’s a way to ask people to not spout off their opinions as fact or gospel.

________

You got this!

It’s okay to mess up and be awkward and all those things, it’s part of learning and going forward. Don’t be harsh on yourself. Everybody does things that make them cringe when they think back on them, but hardly anyone else remembers those, they’re too busy remembering their own cringe moments.

There are some people who will think your orientation is a problem or a sin,They’re right, it’s THEIR problem.

Developing your talents, taking care of yourself, becoming the best version of you is a gift, both to yourself and to others. A healthy, happy, and whole you is good for you and has a lot more capacity to contribute to others.

Lots of love to you!

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gbbyloo · 4 years

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VOGUE IS NOT FOR YOU: DECIDING WHOM WE GIVE OUR ART TO

“I began voguing as a sixteen year old high school student.

Still struggling with what it meant to be gay and Black, learning of the ballroom scene both relieved me and ignited within me whole new passions. It had never occurred to me that I could be openly queer without sacrificing my Blackness. It had never occurred to me that whole communities, whole traditions, whole histories existed that were Black, queer, Brown, femme, trans, poor, working all at once. My original interest in vogue, therefore, grew from the deep desire to be all parts of myself authentically and simultaneously.

Learning to vogue was learning that the embodied knowledge of my multiple oppressed identities had always informed one another. Once I understood this within my own body, I learned to see it in my family, my community and the larger social structures that governed my life.

At least once a week, someone sends me an article or video of voguing appearing on a European runway, in an upscale art gallery, or a new music video by a pop artist, and asks me what I think. The inquiry always revolves around the ethical use of vogue: Were the dancers named and given credit? Did the artist properly compensate the voguers she worked with? Who is in the audience consuming the dance form? Ultimately, the question is, can voguing be appropriately appropriated?

My answer is always the same: No, it can’t. Appropriation is always a form of coercion, and that coercion is born out of white supremacy. Here is what I mean:

There is a deep history of white supremacy in the ballroom scene. Much of it was controversially documented in the cult classic Paris Is Burning. The film’s thesis is ultimately that trans/queer people of color are doomed to their own depraved outsiderness, and while their yearning for acceptance by the mainstream is futile, it is, at least, flashy. While the movie itself is a white supremacist document (and its conclusions about the ballroom scene tainted by its white cis director), its very existence uncovers something real: There is a real issue of our community finding its value in its consumption by other, more privileged communities.

Vogue is blowing up in new ways in European dance studios, in suburban recreational centers, in movies and music videos. As has long been the case, voguers often don’t see themselves as successful, don’t feel they can be taken seriously as dancers until they are able to teach, perform or be featured on one of these platforms. The internalized message is clear: Voguing at a ball is the starting point, but voguing for the elite is the mark of success.

This mentality results in the disinvestment in poor and working queer communities for the sake of teaching vogue in spaces that never created or shaped it, but that are fascinated by it, and have the resources to consume it. Instead of expert voguers taking pride in passing on their knowledge to the young oppressed people most in need of it, new generations of our community are abandoned for the notoriety of white, wealthy, straight, cis patronage. Opportunities for mentorship, empowerment and intergenerational solidarity are lost, and the alternative only serves to further make the plight of our communities invisible—obscuring homelessness, poverty, state violence and police brutality behind the glossy sheen of commercial spectacle.

And yes, even when artists of color appropriate our art form, white supremacy is still at play. Beyonce, Kelly Rowland, Jennifer Lopez, Estelle, Janelle Monae, Lil Mama, and FKA Twigs have as much to do with our exploitation as Madonna, Lady Gaga and Jennie Livingston. For philosophy aside, our cultural cameos in these (corporate) artists’ work have done nothing—do nothing—to illuminate our histories of struggle, nor to combat the structures that generate our need for resistance in the first place. Cis people, straight people, wealthy people, even those who share some of our other oppressed identities, still desecrate our art and our community when they objectify our aesthetic, without taking on accountability for the ways they benefit from the violence we face at the hands of the systems that are cutting their checks.” - Benji Hart author of article ‘VOGUE IS NOT FOR YOU: DECIDING WHOM WE GIVE OUR ART TO’

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straightouttagershwin · 4 years

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Breaking Legs, Crushing Dreams

Witches, haunted opera houses, small-town diners, the founding fathers, and a magical Scottish town. These unusual topics are dazzling Broadway musicals loved by thousands. Musicals are a brilliant show of song, dance, and story that almost everyone can relate to. Every theatre kid has a role they would do anything to play. Unfortunately, casting bias based on race, gender, or sexuality, could make it difficult . In the past, most characters could be played by straight, white, cisgender actors. In today’s theatre world, that is being challenged. Why should there be a “basic” type of actor, and why should they get all of the parts? When people see themselves represented, it matters. It is especially important in youth development. Casting people of color, LGBTQ+ actors, and gender swapping, can change lives. A recent challenge to the status quo is the historical hip-hop musical, Hamilton. Casting a black man as George Washington, an Asian woman as Eliza Hamilton, and a Puerto Rican man as Alexander Hamilton himself, shocked audiences everywhere and opened up eyes to the possibilities of casting shows.

Ten years ago, a black man playing George Washington was unheard of. Why did modern day genius, Lin-Manuel Miranda, decide to challenge that? To tell “...the story of America then, told by America now.” What exactly does that mean though? Miranda wanted to tell the almost unbelievable story of America’s creation. But he wanted to tell it through the mouths of the immigrants the country was built on (Quiñónez). The founding fathers were young, rebellious, and brave. They went against their king to fight for freedom and justice for all, but to them, “all” was all white men. Through Hamilton, the people left out of “all men were created equal” get a chance to tell the story. The good, the bad, and everything inbewtween. Black men get to tell the story of soldiers fighting for the abolition of slavery, Latinx, Asian, and Black women have the opportunity to pay respects to some of the first feminists, and continue to spread the message of equality to the next generation.

The characters in Hamilton are all based on real people. Because of this, there is debate about whether there should be a line between fantasy and reality in casting. A popular example is Wicked. The story takes place before the events in The Wizard of Oz and includes many of the same characters. Wicked has been on Broadway for 16 years. This year, the first woman of color portrayed the deuteragonist, Glinda. Why did it take so long for this to happen? It’s unlikely that is was malicious. The casting directors did not sit in their offices and throw every woman of color’s headshot in the garbage. It is also quite unlikely that it was completely by chance. The reason was most likely somewhere in the middle. In 2003, Kristin Chenoweth originated the role of Glinda. Chenoweth is tiny, blonde, and white. This description was used in casting every Glinda after her, and very rarely changed. As stated in the Wicked Wiki page, there have been 32 Glindas on Broadway. 32, and only one was a woman of color. So when it did change, people noticed. Brittney Johnson made history in January 2019. She became the first woman of color to play Glinda on Broadway. She made headlines in the theatre community, and made hearts swell, as she gushed about how much it meant to be playing the character. In an Instagram post, the actress told about her excitement, “My hope and prayer is that people see my story and have faith that they can achieve their dreams too. Nothing is impossible! And no dream is too big.” The dream she speaks of, is crashing through the stigma of a white woman playing a beloved character. Through this, she shows kids, adults, and everyone in between, that they too can bring a character to life.

Aside from race, there are several other factors that could cause someone to not get a role in a show. Gender is a debated trait in modern theatre. Should characters be able to be gender swapped? Most argue that there are some roles that can be gender swapped, and some that cannot. And some believe that all characters should be cast as written. A recent example of gender swapping in a professional role is the character Old Joe in Waitress. Up until late 2018, the role was for a man, and played by one. In December 2018, the writers and directors decided to change that. When beloved actress June Squibb came to see the show, the creative team got an idea. They immediately decided to change the role to Old Josie, and cast Squibb in the part. “In this moment of time, it seems like a wonderful brush stroke to make the owner a woman-a strong, savvy business woman who is trying to help another woman find her footing.” says book writer, Jessie Nelson. Old Josie was loved by audiences and actors everywhere. But would the same love go to other characters?

In the recent past, I acted in a production of The Little Mermaid. A friend of mine tried out for Ursula, and had a shot at the role, except that this friend is a boy. He has the vocal range, the acting skills, and everything else necessary to play the character. But unfortunately, he wasn’t considered for the role. There are a lot of possible reasons for this. The conservative town, the young audience, or the views of the casting team, but it all comes down to the same reason. Our brains are trained to think that boys should play boys and girls should play girls. But is that even a factor here? The casting of mythical creatures has always been interesting to me. They’re fake, so there’s no reason for people to put any restrictions on who can play them.

Religion is another casting factor in theatre. Most of the characters in the famous show, The Fiddler on the Roof are Jewish. Does this mean they should only be played by those of Jewish faith? In most cases, religion isn’t an issue in casting. But when it comes to religions that have been discriminated against, there are arguments. Religions such as Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism are the most argued about. Because the people of these religions have been treated so poorly and given so little chance to be represented, when a character identifies as one of them, it’s important. Some argue that a person not of these religions should not play characters that are, because the young people of the religion deserve to see someone like them, playing someone like them. This is especially important for hijabi characters. Women who wear the traditional headdresses are tormented in public, have their hijabs ripped off, and are mocked and laughed at for their choice. So to put a random actress in a hijab for a show, seems wrong to those who undergo the discrimination every day.

Although America is supposed to be a haven for people of all backgrounds, racism is still a frequent issue. The iconic retelling of star crossed lovers, West Side Story, has been subject to a lot of whitewashing. To whitewash is to cast a white actor in a person of color’s role. In the 1961 film version of the show, the lead female character, Maria, a Puerto Rican girl, is played by Natalie Wood, a Russian woman. This casting, though common in it’s time, was offensive to the entire Latin community. Essentially telling them that their actresses were not good enough to play the character. However, the show is getting another chance. Set to be released in 2020, Steven Speilberg’s remake of West Side Story stars Rachel Zegler, a Colombian teenager, ready to take on the world as Maria. Zegler has spoken out several times about how important representation is. Millions of fans are awaiting seeing a true Latin Maria on the silver screen.

Sexuality is becoming a more and more important factor in casting every day. Recently, the Tony winning show, The Prom, has been in talks to become a movie. The show centers around two girls who want to go to prom together as a couple, but the school administration shuts down the prom in retaliation. Young queer kids everywhere were thrilled when the movie was announced. They were less thrilled when the casting possibilities were announced. When it was announced that Ariana Grande would be playing the main character, Alyssa Greene, fans were not happy. In the Broadway show, Alyssa was played by a queer woman of color, and as far as we know, Grande is neither. Casting LGBTQ+ actors as LGBTQ+ characters is extremely important to the audience. If a character is “straight-washed” it takes away part of the identity the original actor brought to the stage. It also takes a role from an actor that could play it with more honesty, emotion, and feeling, because they have shared experiences with the character.

Kelli Jolly has been involved in theatre for a long time. From growing up a dancer and actress, to choreographing shows, to becoming the president of a theatre organization, she pretty much lives and breathes it. When asked how casting has changed in her time in the theatre, Jolly said that it has changed a lot. “Directors are casting in creative ways to bring a story to life in a different way than the story has been portrayed in the past. It is exciting to watch different versions of the same play or musical with non-traditional casting.” Those like Jolly, who have theatre in every part of their lives, are excited to see change and creativity in shows. They are also excited to watch what the new generation of actors tell the same stories, in a whole new way. A group of 16 actors, directors, and stage managers were asked if (aside from characters that are written with a specific race, sexuality, or religious belief) casting should be blind, and 94% said yes. The world is changing, and theatre is changing with it.

Casting should be based on talent first. Casting an actor that does not deserve the role is wrong, no matter their race, gender, or religion. Characters can and should morph as the times change. Aiming to be more inclusive and to better represent the world around them. But if a character is a certain way for a reason, the actor should reflect that. Seeing yourself represented in media is important. Having diverse actors can help make that a reality for more people.

Works Cited

Fierberg, Ruthie. “Why Sara Bareilles, Diane Paulus, and Jessie Nelson Changed Waitress' Old Joe to Josie.” Playbill, PLAYBILL INC., 18 Nov. 2018, www.playbill.com/article/why-sara-bareilles-diane-paulus-and-jessie-nelson-changed-waitress-old-joe-to-josie.

Person, and ProfilePage. “Brittney Johnson on Instagram: ‘My Heart Is Bursting with Gratitude. Thank You, Thank You! God Is so Good! I Am so Humbled to Be the First Black Glinda and Honored to...".” Instagram, www.instagram.com/p/BsgWkRehCVo/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=dlfix.

Rogo, Paula. “This Actress Just Made History As First Black Woman To Play Glinda In Broadway's 'Wicked'.” Essence, Essence, 14 Jan. 2019, www.essence.com/entertainment/this-actress-just-made-history-as-first-black-woman-to-play-glinda-in-broadways-wicked/.

Samberg, Joel. “Fiddler on the Roof.” My Jewish Learning, My Jewish Learning, 6 Jan. 2004, www.myjewishlearning.com/article/fiddler-on-the-roof/.

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jgroffdaily · 5 years

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[This article appears in the September 16, 2019, issue of New York Magazine.]

Within minutes of my meeting Jonathan Groff, he asks if I would like a slice of cherry pie, and then, only a short time later, if I would like to be eaten by a giant plant. The first I readily accept because Groff and the rest of the cast of Little Shop of Horrors have thoroughly analyzed the desserts they picked up for a bus ride down from New York to the suburban Philadelphia puppet studio where they’re rehearsing for the day, and they’ve all concluded it’s the best option. The idea of being eaten by a plant seems a little less palatable, considering the contortions involved in entering the hippopotamus-esque maw of the man-eating Audrey II, which is operated by several puppeteers, and because I’m not sure if Groff is making a serious offer. I learn quickly that he is always offering you things, and those offers are always serious.

The puppet in question represents the largest form of Audrey II, a sassy carnivorous horticultural oddity that convinces Seymour, an awkward flower-shop assistant, to commit murder in the pursuit of fame, fortune, and a suburban life with the original Audrey, a human who works with him. The day I visit, Groff, playing the misfit Seymour (despite good looks that actor Christian Borle, who plays the maniacal dentist, Orin, describes as “scrumptious”), and his castmates are climbing inside Audrey II one by one, figuring out how each of them will die. Wearing a hat from Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s “On the Run II” tour, Groff jumps inside wielding a floppy machete, which is so un-aerodynamic it keeps getting stuck in Audrey II’s lips. Groff suggests a real machete prop would be sturdier, and they try substituting an umbrella, which flies out more cleanly. Michael Mayer, the director, says with satisfaction, “It’s a belch!”

Staging this revival of Little Shop is “illegal fun,” as Groff puts it. The original ran from 1982 to 1987 but never transferred to Broadway, at the insistence of writer-lyricist Howard Ashman, who wanted to preserve the show’s off-kilter spirit in a smaller space. Ashman and composer Alan Menken would go on to fill the Disney Renaissance — which consisted of films like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast — with the Marie’s Crisis–ready melodies and queer subversions you can already hear in Little Shop (Ashman died of aids-related complications in 1991). Despite a Broadway staging that kicked off in 2003, this version is staying put at the Westside Theatre Off Broadway in hopes of preserving the quirky spirit of the original. There’s a lot of laughter in rehearsal as well as dress codes like a “kimono Wednesday,” which Mayer enforces by handing me a spare kimono when I drop in that day.

I can’t imagine anyone who is consistently involved in or adjacent to homicide having a better time. In addition to playing a murderously nice guy in Little Shop, Groff stars in Netflix’s David Fincher–produced drama Mindhunter, playing an FBI agent who interviews serial killers; the show is based on the real work of John Douglas, who was one of the first criminal profilers. Considering he’s no big fan of true crime, Groff is somewhat confused about how he became a poster boy for gore and mutilation, though he’s enjoying the texts from friends who point out that even when he does musical comedy, there’s a dark edge involved. A few days after we meet in Philadelphia, we’re talking over breakfast at the cozy Grey Dog in Chelsea, where he insists on paying for everything, picking up all the water and utensils, and getting up from the table to refill my coffee cup when it’s empty.

Groff signed up to star in Little Shop this spring after careful consideration, by which I mean he got the offer and then listened to the original cast recording on repeat for a whole weekend. He’d never played Seymour before, unlike the majority of white male theater actors, but he had positive memories of seeing the first performance of the 2003 Broadway version just after high school, when he was rehearsing the role of Rolf in a non-Equity tour of The Sound of Music. “I wanted to make sure that I’m bleeding for it eight times a week,” he says, which is his measure for doing musicals; he wants to make sure he won’t get bored with the material. Even now, when I assume he might want a break from it during rehearsals, Groff still has the album on repeat. “I never went to college, and I’m not educated, really, so I couldn’t say, like, intellectually why that is,” he says. “When I listened to it, it shot through my heart.”

There’s a clue, however, in the way he remembers obsessing over the film version of the show as a seventh-grader, standing in his kitchen with the song “Skid Row” on repeat — specifically when Seymour sings, “Someone show me a way to get outta here.” It was an appealing message to a closeted kid whom Groff describes as just “a sweaty, uncomfortable person with a secret that was so deep-rooted I wasn’t even flirting with the idea of being myself.” With a little distance from that version of himself (the child of a phys-ed teacher and a horse trainer, growing up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and occasionally having to clean stables on the weekends), Groff recalls the kinds of tells that seem obvious in retrospect, like, say, listening to “Skid Row” on repeat. Or developing an obsession with I Love Lucy, which he still watches before going to bed. Or dancing along to the Donna Reed’s Dinner Party album when his parents weren’t home. There’s a similar longing in Little Shop, which has the queerest kind of perspective on its central couple, as Audrey and Seymour imagine an unreachable, heteronormative life away from skid row and where she looks “like Donna Reed.”

If there’s a murderous kinship between Little Shop and Mindhunter, it extends to the shows’ shared skepticism about that white-picket-fence-style normalcy. Holden, Groff’s profiler character, is a cardboard cutout of a man with a girlfriend who introduces him to 1970s-style sexual liberation, but he is ultimately more fascinated with the deviancy of the killers he’s interviewing. To play him, Groff shuts down his charisma, amassing such emptiness between his angular jaw and his eyebrows that you wonder if he’ll slip into deviancy himself. It’s a performance of square, even sinister straightness that feels close to the best-little-boy performances of closeted queer men, though what seems to thrill Holden most in the show are his interviews with killers. “Sexuality is so complicated, and the people I’ve ended up working with who have cast me in straight parts are interested in looking at things in a complicated way,” Groff says, noting that he feels the argument about whether gay actors can play straight, or vice versa, has gotten “sillier” as time goes on. “Being out and gay and being myself, it allowed me to find people that weren’t closed-minded.”

Groff came out when he was 23, without directly consulting his agent, after he’d become an idol to the nation’s theater teens of Facebook by starring as the sexy, rebellious, tousle-haired Melchior in Spring Awakening. “I was so compartmentalized,” he says, “singing about sex but then not talking about it.” He remains thankful for the way Mayer, who also directed that show, choreographed the explicit sex between himself and Lea Michele’s Wendla clinically, without asking them about their own experiences. He hadn’t spent too much time worrying about the aftereffects of coming out on his career, which were more limiting in 2009 than they are now. “I did think I might not be seen as a romantic lead, but ultimately I was okay with that,” he says, explaining that he was in love at the time and didn’t want to hide it. “At 23, I’d rather just have a real romantic relationship than pretend to have one with a girl.”

Several years after coming out, Groff booked a leading role in HBO’s Looking, a comedy-drama about gay men in San Francisco, which he calls one of the most fulfilling roles he’s had. The series ran for two seasons and got a wrap-up movie but never quite found a viewership, even among queer audiences, instead receiving, as he puts it, “a total mixed bag of very extreme reactions.” Some of that was because people just didn’t like the show — which was often slower, more interior, and whiter and fitter than people may have wanted — and some of it was because it was “carrying a lot of weight; there wasn’t a lot of specifically gay content on a major cable network.” To Groff, making the show opened him up to the possibility of using material from his own experience in his work. Among the cast and crew, “we would talk about stories about PrEP and uncut dicks and monogamy,” he recalls, among “so many stories about anal douching,” and those anecdotes would make their way into the scripts. He was used to a sort of “closeted training of the mind” to abstract himself from his own experience. Looking taught him he could use it.

Recently, Groff has developed an ability to end up near the center of cultural sensations. He stepped in for Brian d’Arcy James as Hamilton’s fey Britpop version of King George III midway through the show’s Off Broadway run. It was a somewhat ideal gig, given that he was onstage for only about nine minutes a night, performed crowd-pleasing kiss-off songs, met Beyoncé, earned a Tony nomination, and got a lot of reading done backstage. This fall, he’s in Disney’s sequel to Frozen, where he returns to play Princess Anna’s rugged (at a Disney-appropriate level) love interest, Kristoff. In the first movie, while Idina Menzel’s Elsa got the vocal-cord shattering “Let It Go,” Groff sang only a few lines of melody between Kristoff and his reindeer, Sven. This time around, he’s putting his Broadway training to use with a full-length solo. It’s the second one he recorded for the movie, since the writers had one idea for a Kristoff piece (“a jam”) but then canned that song while promising Groff they’d write something different, which he didn’t quite believe. “Then they fucking wrote that other song,” he says, characteristically effusive. “I was like, Wow, and the animation of the song is so brilliant.”

As personable as Groff is and as successful as he has become — and as beloved, especially among theater fans and people like my mother — there’s a point at which he maintains a certain distance, in what feels like a way to stem his own impulses. He doesn’t use any social media, though he did consider it when Looking was struggling, before he realized “I’d have to be good at it and want to do it, and I don’t.” He has never thrown himself a birthday party, because the impulse to make sure everyone’s having a good time would stress him out too much. In behavior that reminds me of both a secret agent and Kim Kardashian, he regularly goes through and deletes all his texts after responding to each of them. “I want to make sure I get back to everyone,” he says, holding his iPhone up in front of me to reveal the remarkably few surviving messages.

Before Groff gets up to leave breakfast and travel to rehearsal by way of the single-speed bicycle he rides around Manhattan, we end up talking about the larger trajectory of his career. Considering that he’s scaling down for a revival run of a musical Off Broadway, was he ever the kind of actor who thought of his work as building up to something? A big film? A franchise? “I think I gave that up when I came out of the closet,” he says. “I gave up the idea that there was an end goal or ideal or some kind of dream to work toward.” An image appears in my mind of the life Audrey sings about in Little Shop, a place that’s comfortable, traditional, and expected, somewhere that’s green. “When I moved to New York, what I wanted was to be on Broadway. That happened and then I came out, and it’s sort of been anybody’s guess since then,” Groff says. “I like when something makes me cry or I can’t stop listening to it. Okay, I want to do that.”

Little Shop of Horrors is in previews and opens October 17 at Westside Theatre Upstairs. Buy tickets here.

#jonathan groff #interview

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