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suits-of-woe · 5 years

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Top 5 Edmund moments? Thank you!

Thank you! I can literally never talk about him enough and honestly it was hard to pick just 5 but honestly if I’d written any more even about these ones tumblr probably would have been broken by the sheer word count so here we go.

(edit: forgot to tag @princess-of-france if you’re interested)

1. “Call by the trumpet: he that dares approach / On him, on you, who not? I will maintain / My truth and honor firmly.” AND “In wisdom I should ask thy name / But…What safe and nicely I might well delay / By rule of knighthood, I distain and spurn.” aka The Duel

I don’t actually know if I’ve ever talked about this but I think this is one of the most likable in Edmund moments in the play. Reasons I love it:

a. He is SO ready to fight. This is what I was talking about when I said Edmund is such an impulsive disaster compared to other villains he often gets compared with, he doesn’t hesitate here, he’s ready to go. And you can’t convince me he couldn’t have found a way out of this – Albany’s all like “I dismissed all the soldiers so now there’s no one to fight for you” but like? This is the same Edmund who got a random captain to agree to kill the literal ex-king and his daughter (who’s also a queen!) basically just by telling him to man up; you can’t convince me Edmund couldn’t find a single champion willing to fight this super poor and sketchy-looking guy for him. But instead he’s all in, he gets into a fight or flight situation and his brain just goes FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT and he does it without a second thought. Amazing.

b. He really doesn’t care about status at all. Like sure it’s all well and good to dismiss social distinctions when you’re a bastard and have been disinherited for it but this scene shows it’s not just opportunism – Edmund SO believes in what he’s been advocating the entire play. He doesn’t care who he’s fighting, even now that he’s risen to the top, he knows the rules of knighthood don’t mean shit. He’s taken everything with the justification that if you can manage to take it then you deserve it and he doesn’t abandon that philosophy here, he sticks to it, even though it ends up costing him everything. How is that not so admirable? Am I actually supposed to not love him or?

c. I LOVE the fact that he clearly could not believe less in the idea of trial by combat. This is a me thing but it honestly makes me so happy. He’s lying through his teeth here with zero remorse, he’s 100% happy to let his innocence be decided in a fight all because he clearly thinks there is no divine intervention here. In his head there’s no reason why fighting for a just cause should have any impact on who wins, and even though the text goes against him on that idea…it’s still great. Because it’s not that he doesn’t have a conscience, he SO does as I’ll talk about later, but it’s not tied at all to to spirituality or the idea that he’s going to be cosmically punished for his actions. It’s all him, and I think that makes it so much more powerful.

2. “I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.” aka The Best Speech

*gasps of shock* Wow who would’ve guessed? But yeah. This is THE defining Edmund moment for me. (I put the other one first bc I’ve said all this stuff before so I don’t care if it gets hidden under a cut, but yeah, this is #1) Like I love it because it’s one of the few moments in Shakespeare that aligns with my irl beliefs without being cartoonishly evil, but also like, it’s more than that, this speech is just SO GOOD. It’s about the FREE WILL okay, it’s about the fact that he takes FULL responsibility for his actions, that’s my SHIT. But it’s also what makes him a villain because he has no delusions at all about what he’s doing, he knows it’s wrong and he still does it but like…I’m still so obsessed. And other things too, like the pointed, razor-sharp references to adultery are everything, I’d love to see this whole speech done as just a scathing and furious condemnation of Gloucester too…okay this is gonna turn into a whole essay if not careful but basically YEAH BEST SPEECH.

3. “Yet Edmund was belov’d.” AND “Some good I mean to do / Despite of mine own nature.” aka The Repentance

Anyone crying yet? I sure am. I had to include both of these quotes here bc “Yet Edmund was belov’d” is definitely another all-time fave but also it’s less of a moment and more just the one line and also I can’t justify not including the WHOLE CULMINATION OF HIS CHARACTER so yeah. Like okay though, sometimes I forget just how radical this moment is, but like!!! This is almost entirely unique in the canon. A villain who actually goes back and changes his mind and his heart and tries to make it right. But it’s not just that, it’s the way he does it, like I’ve been saying. It’s not because he thinks the gods are watching; it’s because he’s listening to Edgar talking about what he and Gloucester went through together and then he finds out that Goneril and Regan died for him and suddenly he remembers that there is love in the world and he was loved despite everything and just because it’s too late for him doesn’t mean it has to be too late for everyone and AHHHHHH. And he’s still pushing back against the limits set for himself while he’s doing it, he starts off the play rejecting the idea that the stars have any influence on his nature, but here he’s even rejecting that, defying the fact that he has to be one thing, he’s still fucking up his idea of the status quo even as he does this one last beautiful good thing. Just…holy shit.

4. “Yours in the ranks of death.” aka I Had To Pick At Least One Sexy One Cause I’m Too Sad

So this wouldn’t be an Edmund post if I didn’t talk about how hot he is. So yeah. This scene. Honestly this is maybe more of an iconic Goneril moment than an Edmund moment because she’s doing almost all the heavy-lifting dialogue-wise but still. I talked about this way more in that one post about how Edmund is lowkey a sub but the power dynamics in this scene okay, the tension. I’ve seen this scene done anywhere from a decently quick kiss to a full-on sex scene – the potential to get really intense is there. And I just love Edmund for it, he’s really out here, sleeping with a princess, making out with her on her husband’s doorstep – ICONIC. The BDE is just through the roof. Also for that line specifically I love how it comes back in 5.3 with “I was contracted to them both: all three / Now marry in an instant” akdlhglkhglaksdg. This is the peak Sexy Bastard moment.

5. “Now gods, stand up for bastards!” aka The Invention of Bastard Energy

Idk how Edmund’s most famous soliloquy is just making the bottom of this list, but I think I spend so much time defining my entire life around his second one and giggling at “Both????” in his third that I sometimes neglect this one a little. But it is That Good – it’s up there with the most iconic character intros in the canon. It’s everything. It’s so GREAT and VILLAINOUS like you get “Well then, legitimate Edgar, I must have your land” and all the set-up for him in all his smug evil glory and it’s HEARTBREAKING with the repetition of “Why brand they us / With base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base? Base?” like you can just hear how often those words have been thrown at him, how much they hurt and it’s SUBVERSIVE like we get Edmund’s whole philosophy here and we see he could give two shits about birth and status and he’s ready to turn the world on its head. My only complaint with this moment (or with any of these moments) is if Shakespeare really wanted me to dislike Edmund then he frankly did a terrible job.

#mine #asks #edmund #king lear

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blakelywintersfield · 5 years

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what do you think about cancel culture?

So it took me a while to answer this ask ‘cause I have... a lot to say about the subject.

There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to cancel culture. Its roots I like to believe are well intended -- a means to alert vulnerable groups about individuals that have a history of hurting them. But people have taken it... way too far.

I think it’s important to hold people accountable for their actions. There’s a lot of people who get away with horrible things, simply because they produce likeable material (makeup, music, movies, entertainment, etc.). People like Jeffree Star, PewDiePie, and Kat Von D have gotten away with their horrific treatment of others for years because people enjoy their content -- and two out of three of them still are wildly successful. What pushes people over the limit? Often times it’s a matter of what white people take major issue in. In Kat’s case, being anti-vax. Is being anti-vax bad? Hell yeah it is. As someone who’s immuno-compromised it literally could lead to an early, painful, slow death for me. And don’t get me wrong, I wanna die, but not from something that takes months of suffering. But people blatantly ignored her other awful acts -- such as her antisemitic actions (telling her former boss to “burn in hell jewbag” (sic) in the form of writing on a photo she left for him and drawing a Nazi symbol on it), complacency in victim blaming (her neo-Nazi husband blames his daughter’s rape on his daughter), denying and viciously responding to criticisms about her pedophilic makeup names (”Underage Red”, “Lolita”, second not in reference to the Japanese style but the book), and actively killing her pets (she killed one cat by leaving a house full of burning candles -- cat knocked down the candles, house went up in flames, cat died; she also was found forcing a vegan diet onto her cats -- I’m unsure if this has continued but I believe one of her cats died from it). All of these are huge reasons to “cancel” her -- to boycott her products. But people didn’t actively hate her until she came out as anti-vax, something that effects the majority. And that’s part of the issue with cancel culture: people pick and choose what’s acceptable depending on how badly it effects them personally.

Let’s focus on the other two mentioned: Jeffree and Felix. Jeffree has a very, very, veryyyyy long past of being a racist piece of shit. Not even lowkey ignorant white person racist (i.e. ”I didn’t know making fun of AAE and viewing dreadlocks as trashy was racist”). I’m talking straight up using the n-slur, with the hard -er too, towards a black woman. And this was recent, too. There just haven’t been any physical references beforehand, only personal accounts. But people have defended him -- and still defend him -- on these actions, because he apologized. But then he’ll do it again a month later. And there’ll be definitive proof of it. He’ll keep doing it over, and over, and over again. And people will continue to excuse him because he keeps apologizing! That’s not how apologies work! As someone who’s been abused, apologies mean nothing if you don’t actively work on fixing what you’re apologizing for!! My abusers would apologize and then do the exact same thing again so many times that I lost count long ago! And of course, Shane Dawson hasn’t helped because he’s head over heels for the guy, so he’s been using his popularity to try and clear his name -- which is ironic, considering he’s been under fire for being racist in the past too. The only difference is he actually cleaned his act up, until now, of course. Because now, instead of creating racist content himself, he’s defending a chronically racist shitbag. And people continue to defend him, because his shitty actions effects mainly black women -- a minority in comparison to the amount of white people in the states. Jeffree continues to be wildly successful because his problematic behavior only effects a minority, and that’s... not okay.

Felix has a very similar history to Jeffree, but with antisemitism, and in my opinion he’s even worse because he’ll apologize then do something nice like donate to a charity. And that would be fantastic if he wouldn’t continue to do antisemitic things like actively support white supremacists. People continue to defend him because he does charitable things, but I constantly remind people that abusive people aren’t abusive 24/7 -- that’s literally how they get away with abuse. They abuse, then take you out for a fancy date, kiss you gently and tell you how beautiful you are. Then they do something abusive. It’s an endless cycle. And that’s honestly what Felix does. Apologize, do something really fucking nice, and then repeat his shitty action. And he has other extremely influential people defend him -- it’s why I had to stop following JackSepticEye and Markiplier. They continuously vouched for him. They continuously defended him. And they did it in the form of saying “he’s a really good person, I know him personally, he’s really fucking sweet and nice”. That’s what people say about the partner of someone really close to me! Their friends defend them all the time, but they’ve never seen how they treat my friend. They don’t know about how they are in a relationship. And that’s all we ever hear about abusers. No one wants to accept that their longtime friend is shitty. But Mark and Sean contribute to the toxic ideology of “defend your friends to the end”. And it disenfranchises those effected because 1) they’re not Jewish, they have absolutely no say in the matter, and 2) they’re abusing their popularity to keep their friend from being properly criticized. I don’t think either of them are shitty people, per se, but they’re being extremely toxic by not letting their friend see that they’re a repeat offender and need to either work on their shit or face the music. Mark and Sean both have the power to make Felix change if they just give him the ultimatum of “us or this”.

But I digress. The main issue highlighted here is that people who actually do bad things and continue to do bad things aren’t being held accountable because people don’t care to acknowledge what doesn’t directly effect them. This is the first main issue with cancel culture.

Let’s focus on another man under scrutiny: John Lennon. Now, let me put out there for disclaimer purposes that this man is far from perfect and has problematic parts to him as well. He’s done some shitty things. But cancel culture looooooooves to dig at this man. To put it crudely, they really enjoy beating this dead... man. And mainly over one really bad thing he did, which was hit his wife. However, people love to 1) over-exaggerate it, and 2) completely ignore how he handled the aftermath. Cancel culture often refers to him as a “wife beater”, as though this were a chronic habit or that he severely brutalized his wife. But they conveniently ignore that he apologized, both to her and publicly, taught himself about domestic abuse and spoke up for women’s rights, and even wrote multiple songs about how he fucked up and he shouldn’t be excuse for what he did. And, most importantly, his wife forgave him. The victim in this situation forgave him, and people still dig into this one thing and use it as their reason to hate him and his band to this day. Genuine criticism of him and what he’s done have gone to the wayside because of this one fact with no context, and it’s a huge phenomena because people, for whatever reason, love to hate popular things. Like I said, he’s done shitty things! He wasn’t perfect! But to use one issue that was literally resolved to hate him is just a lazy excuse to hate what’s popular, and that comes to our second issue with cancel culture: people want to hate what’s popular and will go to any lengths to excuse their hatred, even if issues that have been resolved.

The last main issue I have is that cancel culture is often set up in very black and white terms. Person does bad thing, they’re bad, end of discussion. But that’s... not how life works. Not at all. I know religion isn’t universal, especially Christianity, but there’s one point in Christianity that is universal: humans are flawed. No human being to have ever existed is perfect. And with the rise of technology and social media, a lot of mistakes have a permanent proof out there. Be it through tweets, tumblr or Facebook posts, Instagram or Snapchat stories, whatever it is, there is proof. And people like to take it way too far.

For example... well, I’ll use myself. There’s good things to not being tumblr famous, and I’m blessed with that, because I used to be a major shithead. Well. Okay, I still am, but I was bigoted, uninformed, and had a lot of internalized issues. For anyone that doesn’t know, I was raised in a conservative Christian household where my father was Southern Baptist and my mother had been raised Catholic (her personal religious views are much more lax though, thankfully). Both came from small towns in Illinois and Missouri respectively, and their parents, the same. I was aggressively homophobic and transphobic (ironic, eh?), covertly racist and sexist, and just overall a really shitty person. And while I didn’t join tumblr until after I’d finally started to grow, a lot of people on here are younger -- some even lying about their age and joining before they’re 13. And like me, many of these kids are in close-minded households. And for the longest time I refused to listen to other people because of the good ol’ backfire effect, but once I began to accept I was wrong, I learned. Of course I still have learning to do -- I always do. I always will. And that’s okay. But if I were 12 year old me on tumblr today, I would, well. I would’ve probably killed myself by now, because of all the bullying and hate for being a shithead child. A shithead, yes. But a child. Someone that’s going to be ignorant to a lot of things because they haven’t been alive for as long. And not everyone has informed parents that make it a point to teach them. Adults are a little harder to forgive, I’ll admit, but children have a lot more potential to learn and grow, and we often treat them just like adults.

The final issue with cancel culture is that it gives no room for improvement and no assumption of someone’s innocence. While it hurts to be on the victim end, we as a whole are obligated to correct the issue. I personally would like it to be those not effected doing that (i.e. someone making a transphobic comment having other cis people explain why it’s transphobic and isn’t okay), but regardless, we need to assume innocent until guilty with these kinds of things. It’s not easy, sure, but if I had been on tumblr while I was a shitty kid parroting my dad’s awful world views, cancel culture would’ve labeled me a piece of shit with no chance of redemption, and if I didn’t kill myself there’s no fucking way in hell I would’ve learned, because that kind of treatment would’ve stuck with me and made it harder for me to listen to the other side’s reasoning, even if they were right. We need to approach people in a manner of calm education, instead of ready to kill. In no way am I saying this is an easy thing to do, but unless they’ve refused to open themselves up in any way whatsoever, immediately chalking someone up as a lost cause is just... counter-productive. We have to acknowledge that people are flawed, and can learn and grow. We need to give people space to improve. It’s not all or nothing.

All in all, cancel culture has a good base, but its execution has become irrational and a means to justify hating those that really don’t deserve it, while turning a blind eye to those that actually are problematic. There’s a lot to be improved on.

#ask #long post #cancel culture #this is not an invite for discouse on anyone mentioned in this post #seriously i don't want to hear it #especially felix stans #Anonymous

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