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lee-scribbles-and-doodles · 3 years

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My Top Ten Overlooked Movies With Female Leads In No Particular Order

Note: When you see this emoji (⚠️) I will be talking about things people may find triggering, which are spoilery more often then not. I mention things that I think may count as triggers so that people with them will be aware before going in to watch any of these.

Edited: 3/16/21

Hanna (2011)

So, before I get into why you should watch this movie, I just want to take a moment to say why it's near and dear to my heart. Growing up as a queer kid in the early 2000s, seeing portrayals of people like or similar to myself on anything was rare at best. It was mostly in more "adult" movies or shows that my parents would occasionally let me watch with them that I'd see any lgbtq+ rep at all. Often times they were either walking stereotypes, designed to be buried, evil, or all three.

Then here comes this PG-13 action thriller with a wonderfully written main female lead who, at the time, was close to my age, and who got to kiss another girl (her very first friend, Sophie) on screen in an extremely tender and heartwarming scene. To say the least, it was a life changing moment for me personally.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, Hanna is a suspenseful movie about a child super-soldier named, you guessed it, Hanna (played by Saoirse Ronan) and her adoptive (?) father Erik Heller (played by Eric Bana) exiting the snowy and isolated wilderness of their home and taking on the shadowy CIA operative, Marissa Wiegler (played by Cate Blanchette) who wants Erik dead and Hanna for herself for mysterious reasons.

It also has an amazing soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers, great action scenes, and it has an over arching fairytale motif, which I'm always a sucker for.

⚠️ Mild blood effects, some painful looking strikes, various character deaths, and child endangerment all feature in this film. However, given its PG-13 rating, a majority of viewers are presumably able to handle this one. Still, be aware of these going in.

Sidenote: It's recently gotten a TV adaptation on Amazon TV, although I have not watched it, and do not know if Hanna and Sophie's romantic/semi-romantic relationship has transferred over.

A Simple Favor

A Simple Favor is a "black-comedy mystery thriller" centered entirely around the relationship between two mothers, the reclusive, rich, mysterious, and regal Emily (played by Blake Lively), and the local recently widowed but plucky mommy blogger, Stephanie (played by Anna Kendrick). When Emily suddenly goes missing, Stephanie takes it upon herself to find out what happened to her new best friend.

It's a fantastic and entertaining movie throughout, with fun, flawed and interesting characters. The relationship between the two female leads is also implied to be at least somewhat romantic in nature, and they even share a kiss.

⚠️ The only major warnings I can think of is that the movie contains an instance of incest and one of the main plotlines revolves around child abuse, although both of these potentially triggering topics are not connected to each other, so there is thankfully no csa going on.

Edit: I legitimately forgot there was drug use in this movie until now. So, yeah, if that's a trigger, be careful of that.

I Am Mother

I became mildly obsessed with this movie when it came out. I Am Mother is a sci-fi film that centers entirely around a cast of two woman, and a female-adjacent robot who is brought to life on screen with absolutely amazing practical effects.

The plot is such, after an extinction-level event, a lone robot known only as Mother tasks herself with replenishing the human race via artifical means. She begins with the film's main protagonist, Daughter. Years go by as Mother raises her human child and the two prepare for Daughter's first sibling (a brother) to be born. However, on Daughter's 16th birthday, the arrival of an outsider known only as Woman shakes Daughter's entire world view. She begins to question Mother's very nature, as well as what's really going on outside the bunker she and her caretaker call home.

⚠️ This movie features child endangerment and reference to child death.

Lilo and Stitch

When I decided to add a single Disney film to this list I initially thought it was going to be hard but almost immediately my brain went to Lilo and Stitch, and specifically about the relationship between Lilo and Nani.

On the surface, this film is about a lonely little girl accidentally adopting a fugitive alien creature as a "dog," but underneath that the story is also about two orphaned sisters and the older sister's attempts to not let social services tear them apart by stepping up as the younger sister's primary guardian. Despite its seemingly goofy premise, Lilo and Stitch has a very emotional and thoughtful center. It's little wonder how this movie managed to spawn an entire franchise.

Despite the franchise it spawned (or possibly because of it), I often find that Lilo and Stitch is overlooked and many people only remember it for the "little girl adopts an alien as a pet" portion of its plot, and I very rarely see it on people's top 10 Disney lists.

⚠️ This movie could be potentially triggering to people who were separated from their siblings or other family members due to social service intervention. There's also a bit of child endangerment, including a scene where Lilo and Stitch both almost drown.

Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind

Unlike the above entry, I did struggle a little bit with picking a single Studio Ghibli film. Most media of the Ghibli catalogue have strong, well-written, unique, and interesting female leads so selecting just one seemed like quite the task.

However, I eventually settled on this particular film. In recent months, Princess Nausicaä has become my absolute favorite Ghibli protagonist and I'm absolutely enchanted by the world she lives in.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world overun by giant insects and under threat of a toxic forest and its poisoness spores, Nausicaä must try to protect the Valley of the Wind from invaders as she also tries to understand the science behind the toxic forest and attempts to bridge the gap between the insects and the humans.

For those who have never seen the film, I think Nausicaä's personality can best be described as being similar to OT Luke Skywalker. Both are caring, compassionate, and gentle souls who are able to see the best in nearly anyone or anything. She's an absolutely enthralling protagonist and after rewatching the film again for the first time in well over a decade she has easily become one of my all time favorite protagonists.

Whenever I see people talk about Ghibli films, they rarely mention this one, and when they do mention it, it's often in passing. In my opinion it's a must watch.

⚠️ This movie contains some blood, and the folks who either don't like insects or who have entomophobia may not appreciate the giant bugs running about throughout the movie. (Although most insects do not directly relate to real life bugs, and are fantasy creatures).

A Silent Voice

A Silent Voice is an animated movie adaptation of a manga of the same name. While I've never had the pleasure to read the manga, the movie is phenomenal. It covers topics such a bullying, living in the world with a disability, the desire for atonement, social anxiety, and depression in a well thought out manner that ties itself together through the progression of the relationship between its two leads, Shoya and Shouko. It's also beautifully animated. Although very popular among anime viewers, I've noticed that it's often overlooked by people who watch little to no anime. So I suppose this is me urging non-anime viewers to give this film a chance.

⚠️ As mentioned above, the movie deals with bullying, anxiety, and depression (with this last one including suicidal thoughts and behaviour). If discussion of those topics are triggering to you, than you may want to proceed with caution or skip this movie all together.

In This Corner of The World

Another manga adaptation, this one taking place during WWII-era Japan. In This Corner of The World follows the life of a civilian Japanese woman, Suzu Urano, as she navigates simply living and her new marriage as the wartime invades nearly all aspects of everyday life. I think this movie is a good representation of what it must be like to be living as civilian in a country at war where the fight is sometimes fought on one's own soil. It was also an interesting look into pre-50s Japanese culture in my opinion. It's also beautifully animated featuring an art style I don't see often.

Despite it being well known among anime fans, I never really see it be brought up, even among said anime fans themselves.

Side note: I've seen many WWII dramas centering around civilians but they've almost always been about American or UK civilians. This was the first movie I'd seen that features the perspective of a Japanese civilain.

⚠️ Features the death of a child and limb loss. There's also a disturbing scene featuring a victim of one of the atomic bombs near the end.

Wolf Children: Ame and Yuki

This film follows Hana, a Japan-native woman who fell in love with a magical shape-shifting wolf-man, and her trials with raising their children, who can also magically shape-shift into wolves, on her own. It's a very heartfelt movie about a mother's love and the struggles of doing right by your children when you have limited resources to actively guide and care for them. All the characters feel unique and alive in my opinion. Also, the animation is so good that my sister and I initially mistook it for a Ghibli film.

Again, like the previous two anime entries, I don't see it ever brought up outside of anime circles.

⚠️ There's some child endangerment present in the film, although none of it is the fault of Hana as far as I can remember.

Roman Holiday

Roman Holiday is about the fictional Princess Ann (played by Audrey Hepburn), who while on a whirlwind tour of Europe, finally reaches her breaking point over having her entire life be one big schedule and all her words and actions being rehearsed. In the spur of the moment, she runs away in hopes of experiencing what life is like for other women. Unfortunately, she was previously given a sedative, meaning she doesn't get too far before it takes effect. Fortunately, she is found by the kind reporter Joe Bradley (played by Gregory Peck). Believing her to be drunk and unable to get an address from her (because she has none) he ends up taking her home for safety's sake and allows her to sleep off her suppose drunken stupor. The next day, he realizes who she is, and decides to take her on a fun sight seeing trip across Rome in hopes of getting the big scoop. Along the way, they begin to fall for each other.

This is my favorite black and white, old romance film. I think the relationship between the main characters is absolutely beautiful and I have a lot of fun watching it.

⚠️ I'm not entirely sure what kind of warning this film would need. However, it was released in 1953, so values dissonance will probably be at play for many viewers to at least some extent. For example, early in the film Ann is given sedation drugs by her doctor for her behavior, something that is very unlikely to happen today. Also, Mr Bradley deciding to take Ann home to keep her safe rather than call the police or an ambulance is a very pre-90s decision in my opinion.

#hanna 2011 #a simple favor #i am mother #lilo and stitch #nausicaä of the valley of the wind #a silent voice #in this corner of the world #wolf chilren ame and yuki #wolf children #roman holiday #black and white film #anime #disney #studio ghibli #movie recs #top 10

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mismashedsocks · 4 years

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so riordan made a half assed lame excuse on his lazy/racist writing on piper yesterday and on top of that he made another one on samirah and i’m muslim so i am going to talk about it

damn i’m so sorry these people have been pushing you past your comfort zone about your wildly popular racist caricatures of minorities that have great impact on your young, impressionable target audience. while its fine that if he takes a break for his mental health he still needs to deal with these problems you can’t just take a break and hope they go away.

why does he think everyone is bullying him. if they talked in all caps, cussed at you, or didn’t stop bothering you, i’m sorry they’re just trying to get you to realize how racist your books are, which you keep refusing to believe. i can believe that a few of them were doing it for attention, but it couldn’t be the majority. and my god, god forbid people want you to write your books the way you preferred, without racist stereotypes. 🙈

you can set your boundaries but you keep ignoring the people, you don’t listen. like you put yourself out there as a writer you are open to criticism

why does he keep doing this to seem like the good guy. you give excuses and don’t do anything and just say that its up to you, you can think whatever you want 🥰🥰. like its such an obvious excuse not to take any action.

i’m sorry but no matter how many muslims you’ve interacted with you haven’t gotten the full experience and last time i checked teachers aren’t the kids best friends soo uhm. anyways the rest of it is just him telling his experience with muslimah students so its just there.

so uhm you just said your students ‘unwillingly’ become an ambassador to everyone she knew’. and then you went to talk to them about islam to make sure you were TEACHING THEM YOUR SOURCE MATERIAL CORRECTLY. i’m sorry imagine. these are kids not some scholars you go to consult. there are so many muslims all over the internet and youtube sharing their experiences for you to access on how to ‘represent their experience’ correctly. you’re the teacher here. picture this:as a muslilm, i teach at a public school and while teaching about Christianity in class, no i would double check or some dumb shit with the students. like educate yourself i’m sorry. anyways apparently he blames his mistakes on himself then goes on to deny he ever made any mistakes i can’t.

so this is a blatant lie. 99% of muslims i’ve met have never read all of sahih bukhari and sahih muslim. usually only scholars do that when they are studying islam for YEARS. and FIVE different interpretations of the quran on top of that. ok so sahih bukhari is 9 books that are over 300 pages each and sahih musilm is 7 volumes with also about 300+ pages each. and then the english versions of the quran are 600 pages. and he claims he read five of them. i’m so sorry but no he didn’t. he writes books so fast and he released mcga around the time toa was being released almost one book per year so he did not have a lot of spare time. the rest ig i can let slide. also and if he did do all of that why does he make so many mistakes in writing samirah. and even IF you accept his excuses reading ALL of this source material is great for teaching your class or whatever but not for writing a modern day muslim. you don’t need to lie to us rick ❤️

most of this is just describing what she’s like but his writing did also add in the model minority, smart kid trope. like no they don’t have to be a terrorist or a A+ student who is the best at everything. there is a middle ground to their personality.

i actually used to love his rep in sam. that’s how i got into the series. i saw a hijabi girl on his website. i got excited and read all of his books. i loved piper, leo, hazel, percy, annabeth, sadie, carter, nico, everyone. now that i look back i was younger and didn’t see anything wrong with it back then. its great that he tried to portray minorities but he did it so badly and now is just denying the faults that his now older readers are trying to tell him.

hey, uhm didn’t you read all of sahih bukhari and muslim? hmm i didn’t think so. anyways the way he dealt with it honestly wasn’t that bad. but the whole ‘whoops’. like why does he keep portraying himself as the innocent old white man just trying his best.

honestly how he wrote samirah as a hijabi was the dumbest thing i’ve ever read. its is totally fine if she wasn’t hijabi, many muslim girls aren’t, and that is their choice. but he decided to make her like a weird middle ground. it was so lazy and inconsistent. in the first book she says she wears it when she needs to, like in situations like going to the masjid. this was fine, since many muslim girls do that. then in the next books she wears it all the time except when she’s in valhalla for some reason. hijabi girls take of their scarves when they’re at home or with family, but making her claim the entirety of vallhalla as her family. that was just demeaning and stupid to me. it takes away its value. and i fucking hated that last sentence. for hijabis, their hijab is important and not a toy or weapon or a MAGIC ITEM. and then on top of that she would have to take it of to hide. he could’ve made it anything else. her hijab isn’t some token item istg.

i love how he admits that they are a big problem and abusive and usually engage with child marriages. i’m relatively he doesn’t understand what the people even meant by it. the practice is a problem that isn’t supposed to be seen in a nice light. the only possible way it could be slightly ok is that if ADULTS agree they 100% do not want to choose who they want to get married to and let their parents choose, and both sides agree. samirah was a child and he decided to make her wedding life decided since the age of 12. and it was ok because amir was conventionally attractive and she loved him. WHAT IF SHE DIDNT. this literally is a dangerous arranged marriage. and arranged marriages are not ok, and mostly perpetuated by victims of it who will end up passing it down their family lines. my parents got an arranged marriage and I HAVE NEVER SEEN THEM DISPLAY ANY SIGNS OF AFFECTION. arranged marriages are not a trope that your can turn around to be a quirky personality trait for your characters.

i’m sorry that’s not how arranged marriages work. most likely if she said something her grandparents would have shut her done and continued with the marriage, as that is what you usually happens. do not portray the small amount of consented, ‘happy’ arranged marriages as the majority. it is a huge problem that many desi/middle eastern cultures are trying to erase. even on top of that he writes situations where she’s going to be in trouble for acting up and ‘jeopardizing the marriage agreement’ and that her grandparents think she’s ‘lucky that she could get the fadlan family to agree to marry their son to her’. these statements are often used in forced and dangerous marriages, so don’t try and justify your actions. if you wanted to show traditional customs in a positive light, there are so many richer parts of samirah’s culture you could’ve focused on and you chose arranged marriage. 😻 all you’ve done is given parents and authority figures a westernized resource to justify arranged and forced marriages, especially with the minimal explanation on how the marriage isn’t forced in the actual books. and yes, your books do condone child marriage samirah is clearly deemed into this marriage ever since the young age of 12. she lived her life knowing she would marry amir. no one has only one crush throughout their life. imagine how she would’ve grown up. sorry you only consider opinions that align with those in you mind.

i’m going to be honest i did like that one scene it was written nicely and accurately but the explanation he gives just ruins the entire thing. the way he just if this strikes you as islamophobic, or samirah as a hurtful, uhm no explanation i just disagree 😽. the way you wrote her is a hurtful stereotype sorry you can’t see it.

oops, you did. too bad you don’t want to do anything about it.

why do you think people are painting you in a negative light, so many of your characters are written on hurtful and negative stereotypes. people aren’t painting it that way, you need to calm down w your ego and listen. dang i’m sorry your best is giving half-assed excuses and not actually doing anything. i’m even more sorry people are mad that a highly privileged author that has a lot of influence is done talking about his racist depictions of minorities in his books.

dang must be lucky to take a break from the social media, imagine what all the minorities you wrote about have to go with everyday weather they are on social media or not. people aren’t bullying you this is valid criticism you refuse to listen to.

fuck you

obviously these are my opinions do not judge every muslim based on what i’ve said come to me if you have a problem with it

anyways support jewish, muslim, black, brown, asian, hispanic, indigenous, lgbtq+, disabled, and other minority authors and creators.

#anti rr #fuck him at this point #samirah al abbas #she deserved so much better #i probably made so many spelling mistakes smh #long post #mcga #rr crit

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mimzy-writing-online · 4 years

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What did the moment you realized/affirmed that losing your sight didn't mean losing all the things you've used to reading (ie social media/movies/books)? If you had to deal with it, that is, I've only recently followed you and might have missed something. I'm rather near sighted and my great grandmother (who raised my mom) was blind due to glaucoma not being treatable at the time. I got glasses at 9 thought I've been terribly near sighted since forever. So as a kid I used to think about maybe going blind a lot and I try to be conscious about blindness as much as I can. Reading and writing is such a major part of my life, I know I won't lose it should I lose my sight, but it's still made me hyper aware of accessibility in regards to sight.

So, I was usually okay with my vision loss as it happened. I certainly had bad days and breakdowns, but for the most part I was emotionally okay. I think a huge part of that was that I had exposure to blindness in media that wasn’t all bad rep, starting from when I was a kid:

1. My 4th grade language arts textbook had a short non-fiction story about a high school girl who was blind and what kind of changes she made, like having a cane and putting braille labels on everything. She still went to high school, had friends. There was a photo that was edited to be blurry in what I hope was a way similar to what she experienced. There was something incredible about it because to me she was just a normal person who saw differently, but her life was normal. Whoever wrote that short story did a good job if that was my takeaway at nine years old.

2. There were a few books I read around that age with disabled characters, including Of Sound Mind ( M C is hearing but his whole family is Deaf) and Things Unseen ( M C wakes up one morning invisible. While trying to solve the how and why of that he visits the library and physically runs into a blind girl. They start talking, he thinks she’s cute, it’s a romance. Cute story. I can’t remember if the girl was homeschooled or did special education, but part of her education was listening to audio books at the public library in pre-audible times. She also had a cane. I don’t remember much beyond that on accuracy)

Having books available to me as a kid with prominent disabled characters or stories about real blind people did normalize it for me

Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of bad rep I found too, but it was easier to look at it and say, “I don’t think that’s quite right” because I had some good rep in there too.

3. At the school I attended from 7-9th grade, there was a girl a year or two older than me who was blind and I would see her every day between classes. I remember she had a cane one year, and then a black lab guide dog the next year. She also had a teachers aide going to classes with her. I remember she was in one of the advanced choir groups, but how I knew that was because in 6th grade my school took a field trip to that school to prepare us for middle school and we saw a choir performance which involved the girls singing and dancing, and after the performance my friend told me that one of the girls was blind and had a cane. (I was very nearsighted as a kid, I could not have seen that from where I was sitting)

I remember my thought process at that point, and it wasn’t “oh, so blind people can dance too.” It was, “oh, she must have worked hard to get the dancing right.”

4. There was a boy in my 9th grade English class who was blind, also had a cane and a teachers aide. I was too shy to talk to anyone, but I remember thinking he had chill vibes and that he was funny. He was one of the easier kids in that class to talk to.

That’s all the exposure I think I had before my vision loss symptoms began, which was when I was 17, though I had no way of knowing how serious those symptoms were going to become until I was in my twenties.

A big thing for comfortably transitioning (emotionally) with my vision loss was Molly Burke, who began her YouTube channel in 2015. I think I found her channel in the summer or fall of 2016, right as my symptoms began to evolve from “inconvenient” to painful, concerning, and difficult to deal with. She’s only a year older than me and while she came across more closed off and introverted in the early part of her YouTube career, she was incredibly personal and relatable. She had a career, she had lived alone in a big city, she traveled for work, and was incredibly independent.

But more importantly, she was independent because of the blindness life skills she had spent her life learning. O&M, Braille, using screen readers on her laptop and phone, shopping and picking her own outfits with a combination of touch and communicating with a sighted loved one. Having a set routine for everything, including makeup. She had her shit down because she’d practiced at it. So, reasonably, I could get my shit together if I took the time to learn how too.

Individual moments are harder to come by, but here is a distinct one:

-My first time using a cane was life changing because I wasn’t scared of my next two steps anymore and I could walk on my own again. The first moment of walking independently without anxiety was its own high, because I had taken a small part of my life and independence back.

For an essay, I would write: Through the internet, I found the disability community and blind role models who were living independent, happy lives because of the adapted life skills they learned.

I found my blind role models through the internet and studied what skills and changes they’d made to their lives and incorporated them into mine.

(kind of a spin off on that, but it gave me the following sentences)

This meant reaching out to schools for the blind, and

(which isn’t the prettiest sentence, but you’re looking at the first draft and my thought process. I pick the best bits and move forward with that. This whole process is me getting all my thoughts out and finding the most important details and translating them into something concise and simple)

#college applications #mimzy things #Anonymous

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mimixeu · 3 years

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TV TROPES ⸺ eutask number five. ➥ click the read more to proceed.

EVERYONE HAS STANDARDS : mimi has a big reputation for taking things to the next level. she’s mischievous, loud, and somewhat of a prankster, and while it’s all in good fun, there are some things that even she won’t do. for example, she tends to not bother people who she knows cannot handle her teasing ( i.e. people who are too nice or way too innocent ), preferring to stick to those who are of equal footing to her but are easy to agitate or quick to rile up. even she wouldn’t prank a child or the elderly without good reason, or go so far as to cause serious physical pain and injury to her ( often unwilling ) victim. she might be a troublemaker but she’s not completely without morals.

REBELLIOUS SPIRIT : authority is mimi’s least favourite word and she very much makes a point of letting the whole world know how she feels about it. the minute you put down any sort of rule or regulation in front of her, you know she’ll be heading in the opposite direction. simply put, mimi does not fare well with responsibility. aside from handing out free smoothies to her friends when she has a shift at berry bliss, mimi simply refuses to attend ra meetings ( much to their chagrin ), and, in the past, turned down quests and ignored advice on how to hone her abilities, just to get back at her father. on top of that, she’s dropped out of several majors in the last five years and has a tendency to skip classes that don’t pique her interest. what can she say ? she’s a slacker, get used to it.

DEADPAN SNARKER : while people may often mistake her for being all brawn and no brain thanks to the rep that ares house has made for itself in the past, mimi never fails to make a witty comeback, regardless of the situation. she has a habit of mumbling comments under her breath or just loud enough for the person beside her to hear. most of the time, she says them to get a reaction from the people around her, whether to make them laugh or press all their buttons, but she can never resist the opportunity to make banter with someone. if she roasts you, it usually means that she cares.

NOBODY CALLS ME “ CHICKEN ” ! : be it the ares in her blood or her stubborn attitude, but if you goad mimi into a challenge, she will always try to one - up you. she’s a very competitive person by nature, and it’s perhaps one of the few ways she has taken after her father. many of her childhood years were spent at the local arcade with her cousin, trying to beat kids who were double her size and older than her in age in a game of tekken or street fighter. she takes bets very seriously and absolutely despises losing. while she often makes out that she cares very little, she will go the extra mile it if means she will win.

( note : this trope is subverted when you take into consideration her view on quests. )

WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS : if there’s one thing mimi knows in life, it’s the disappointment that comes with keeping your hopes up. she’s used to losing the things that makes her happy, people she loves or has befriended, and as a result, she now makes sure to steer them in the opposite direction before they even get the chance to let her down. the vast majority of her relationships are kept on the surface, preferring acquaintances over the company of close friends. it’s not healthy in the slightest and she knows that, but it’s the only thing she really knows, and in her eyes it’s easier and far more humane than watching the same cycle repeat itself for the hundredth time. it’s probably the only time her odikinesis has ever come in handy for her, even if she hates herself for it once the storm has died down.

THE NAPOLEON : at five foot three, mimi sits just below the average height. her eyeline usually meets people’s shoulders, and she frequently has to climb on top of furniture in order to reach things that are out of her height. one might liken her to a terrier in the sense that she is small but incredibly bold, often using her height to her advantage when people get in her way or annoy her. she’s scrappy, and certainly has good reason to let her rage get the better of her ( plus, you know, the literal fury bubbling beneath the surface that she inherited from her dearest father ). however, contrary to popular belief and in spite of her brazenness, mimi has quite the laidback personality and it usually takes a lot for actual anger to be incited.

HIDDEN HEART OF GOLD : not a lot of people get to see the softer side to mimi’s personality. she keeps it well hidden behind a maze of walls that she’s slowly been putting up over the years, and tends to push people away when she feels they are getting too close. that being said, it does make its appearance from time to time. beneath her loud exterior, are some very genuine and heartfelt emotions. though she’s reckless and somewhat abrasive at times, mimi is also quite loyal and tends to put her friends’ feelings way above her own. if she loves you, she’ll never push you too hard or too far, and even though she may not always show it, she does form attachments to people very easily. once you have her heart, it’s yours forever.

I AM NOT MY FATHER : to be compared to her father is the absolute insult. ever since she learned of her heritage, mimi has hated her father with the greatest of passions and has even gone so far as to tell him to his face. he is to be blamed for every bad thing that has happened to her, for her childhood loneliness, for her instability when it comes to relationships and her family’s judgment in her lack of ambition. and while other siblings may have decided to prove their dissimilarities by trying to be better than ares, mimi has seemingly taken the other direction. she’s often seen as lazy, blasé, irresponsible, and she’s quite proud of the fact. if it separates herself from her blood then she’s more than happy to be the local ares let - down.

#eutask #eutropes #𝕗𝕦𝕣𝕪 𝕞𝕒𝕜𝕖𝕥𝕙 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕨𝕠𝕞𝕒𝕟 ♡ headcanons.#𝕗𝕦𝕣𝕪 𝕞𝕒𝕜𝕖𝕥𝕙 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕨𝕠𝕞𝕒𝕟 ♡ edits.#the way the writing took longer than the actual edit itself

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brw · 3 years

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Reed Richards or Luke Cage.

alright so my. knowledge on mr cage is Kinda Vague™ but i'll say this! he should go back to wearing the shirt w/ the v-neck he CANNOT just be wandering around in a yellow t-shirt HE DESERVES BETTER. deserves to dress sexier he just literally looks like some guy. he seems pretty cool tho i mean like ANYONE who beats up dr doom especially just because he didn't pay him his money is A+. a king tbh. should be called a dilf more often. way more of a dilf then pietro or whoever you guys are just blind 💕

and now. for dr reed <3

first impression - obviously i had heard of him he seemed vaguely interesting but it wasn't until i heard more abt him being autistic-coded when i was like "OH????" because autistic rep is few and far between and while i had vague plans to read some ff stuff it always felt intimidating but that was what rlly inspired me to do it and i do not regret it.

impression now - he's. brilliant tbh. he IS autistic i will die on this hill. he's one of the most powerful marvel characters not because of his actual powers but because anyone and everyone is eligible to be part of his polycule <3 is married to susan fucking storm so points immediately for that. bi ace energy. he really is a good character n is really sweet and loving w/ his kids and i. love him dearly. hope he's having a good day. he deserves it. he's one of those characters who i block all the Haters™ for. i just. do not have the energy <3 he's a good boy.

favourite moment - HHHHHHH there are loads but i think. my favourite may be the marvel knights 4 #5 & #28 (i think those are the ones but i can't quite remember jjejjerjr) where he. talks someone down from suicide and then sits with them when they're dying. it's just such a kind clear show of compassion and care and he obviously cares about people so much and it just. fucking gets me every time 🥺🥺

idea for a story - tbh i would really like a story where he gets diagnosed w/ asd. because it is super hard and difficult and it's a unique situation to get diagnosed at an older age. and it's not rlly talked about? and i think it's important to see an older man get diagnosed, one who's married and has children n now has this whole other aspect that he didn't know existed. and then for someone with as many friends/family as reed he would have to like. "come out" about it and i personally think it would be super interesting and important to see. tbh i'd much prefer that then a retcon like "he was diagnosed at age 8" or whatever. i just feel like seeing a journey of self-discovery n the difficulties that come with being older and getting diagnosed deserve to be seen n reed is a good candidate for it.

unpopular opinion - he's not any worse or any more "abusive" then magneto or scott summers and this isn't to say you have to like him but when you call one out but not the other... weird 🤨 and tbh while some criticisms are valid enough a lot of it is straight up just regurgitated ableism like "oh he's emotionless tho and doesn't love his wife and sees his kids as an experiment and is robotic" like oh ok you have no issue dehumanising ppl for autistic traits and low empathy cool cool.

favourite relationship - HMMMM it's difficult to say because there's. so many. but tbh... i think atm my favourite relationship that he has is the one with his son. its just... he tries so hard to be a good father to his son, he reads him stories at night and let's him help and he loves his son so much and is so scared of him getting hurt and. it's just. ow 🥺 he's such a good caring father who wants to be better then his dad and its BREAKING an abusive cycle and trying his best to be the father he didn't have... n w/ valeria too, because she's extraordinary and smarter then her dad like he was but he's actually a good dad, when nathaniel never was. so it's. 🥺 he's so good w/ his kids man.

favourite headcanon - uh no prizes for guessing but that he's autistic (which is barely a headcanon nwjwjrjt). BUT ALSO! that he's asexual. and i know its "bad rep" for an autistic person to be asexual but as an autistic on the ace spectrum... it fits him alright. leave me alone <3

send me a character!

#ask games} answers #💛💛💛#I DON'T KNOW AN AWFUL LOT ABT MR CAGE BUT. HE SEEMS COOL. THE FEW ISSUES I READ OF HIS 90S SERIES WERE... ODD BUT COOL #the-tsar-unanswerable #ch: i believe we endure

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makomori · 4 years

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TWO | FAMILIARITY (Brand New Story)

Ushijima Wakatoshi x OC

Nishimura Yua has to take her nephew to his first rep practice with the Tohoku Tigers at Shiratorizawa Academy. Ushijima Wakatoshi is filling in for the assistant coach on said team.

She's recovering from a nasty breakup and he's reeling from a stunning finals loss against the Jackals.

Yua's drawn to his composure and honesty.

Wakatoshi finds her warmth and tenacity intriguing.

It's the start of a Brand New Story; can they heal from past hurts and endure new challenges in order to help each other trust and love again?

CHAPTERS

ONE | NEW TERRITORY

Length: 2.8k words

Yua's well-earned vacation starts with breakfast at her favourite cousin's house. But her habit of being early brings her face-to-face with a certain left-handed wing spiker.

If you don't like where you are, change it. | Jim Rohn

SATURDAY, 7:33 A.M.

I could get used to this.

Nishimura Yua fully intended to go into Tetsuya’s house to have breakfast. But she was currently leaning against the roof of her car, chin resting comfortably between her hands. The sun was out, a light, crisp breeze swept through the ends of her long, ink-black hair. And the temperature was steady at a cool, but comfortable fourteen degrees Celsius. All signs to the start of a good vacation.

Oh, I could definitely get used to this.

It was hard to describe spring in Sendai. “Beautiful" wasn’t enough to describe how beautiful the city really was. She had as few weeks off until the renovations at Peak 1’s new event management office were finished. A picnic in Mikamine was definitely in order; Amaya would join her in a heartbeat. Or they take a trip to Shiroishi with the kids. Yua loved how quiet it was along the riverside.

After everything that happened in Tokyo, she needed peace in her life right now.

Yua shook her head; it was too early for her mind wander into unsavoury places. Tetsu asked her to grab some eggs because he was making her favourite— scrambled eggs with furikake and rice. Her stomach groaned loudly at the thought, so she locked her car, snatched her bags, and quickly made her way to her cousin’s compact, but welcoming suburban home. As soon as she let herself in, the familiar sounds of fish being grilled, and the warm scent of rice threatened to overwhelm her senses.

“Ojama shimasu!” She called out as she hastily put on a pair of slippers. Tetsu had always been an excellent home cook, and she was happy that she’d get to eat his cooking more often. She wished Amaya could’ve joined them, but she was on a business trip and wouldn’t be back until Monday.

“You’re late,” her cousin teased when he saw her come in. He was still sporting his Dragonball pjs, but his shift at Sendai City Hospital didn’t start until nine, and it was just past seven-thirty now. “I was just about to send out a search party.” He was trying not to laugh because he knew that she always arrived at least a half hour early for anything.

“Well, I was gonna break the door down at seven, but I feel like you would’ve given me shit about it,” Yua huffed as she handed him the eggs. While he deftly cracked a few into a new pan, she moved to the counter to start chopping vegetables. But Tetsu’s right hand shot out and protectively covered the chopping board and its contents.

Before she could protest, he pointed at the dinner table and scolded, “You’re on vacation and I’m treating you to breakfast. Now, sit.”

Yua gaped at him for a few seconds. As one of the Event Directors at Peak 1, she was usually the one giving out instructions, not taking them. But Tetsu was right. She was on vacation, and she made Tetsu promise to remind her to relax.

But that was easier said because she was used to always having a hand in things, even if it was something as simple as helping with breakfast. Kazuki, as a joke, said she was a control freak when they first met. Ironically, it ended up being one of the main reasons they broke up a month ago. This was one of the few times she saw one of her greatest strengths as something negative.

And she still didn’t know how to feel about it.

A gentle nudge from Tetsu brought her back to reality. “You’ll need a good breakfast to deal with the twins later. Natsuko and Sayuri don’t know you’re babysitting, so they’re gonna freak out when they come back from their sleepover.”

Yua pulled out a chair and made herself comfortable. No point in dwelling on past mistakes now. “They’re growing up so fast,” she whined. “I can’t believe they’re eleven now. And Rui’s starting high school in two years!” She sometimes forgot that Tetsu was thirty-six, eight years older than her. He had always been fitness nut, and still somehow managed to be a dad and full-time nurse.

Her cousin laughed and flipped the now-scrambled eggs in the air with ease. “I can’t believe it either. I saw more white hairs pop up the other day, but Amaya says they make me look distinguished.” Yua’s eyes flicked to the back of his head and was surprised when she saw silver peppering his black, low fade. Silver also made an appearance in the beard lining his defined jaw.

“You’re getting old,” Yua ribbed, taking satisfaction at the dark scowl he shot back at her. “Good thing I stopped by Ishiiya last night. These should make you feel much better.” She pulled a tray of chocolate rolls out of her bag and presented them triumphantly on the table.

“Fuck, you got the large ones, too,” Tetsu groaned. “Hide those. I don’t stand a chance against the kids if they find them.”

“Don’t worry,” Yua soothed. “These are just for you and Amaya. I bought apple and custard buns for the little monsters.”

Tetsu’s relieved sigh brought a smile to her face. If he was still fighting over sweets with his kids, he wouldn’t feel old until they were grown and had kids of their own. Ten minutes later, breakfast was ready. In addition to the grilled fish, furikake, and rice, Tetsu had made sunomono and ensured a generous amount of nori was right beside her.

“Itadakimasu!”

The endless gurgling in Yua’s stomach was finally soothed a few plates later. Despite not seeing each other for nearly a year, the two of them spoke and laughed as if they’d seen each other the day before. Tetsu was an only child and lived just a few streets away when they were in Osaki, so he immediately took on the big brother role when she was born.

When he was in high school, he was never embarrassed when she came around and always made time for her, even when he was with his friends. A big part of why she volunteered to move to Sendai and help set up the new office was because Tetsu and Amaya lived only a short drive from her apartment. Plus, her parents and childhood home were now less than an hour’s drive north. It felt so good to be close to home and to people who loved her.

“Thanks again for taking Rui to his first practice with the Tigers. He’s been talking about it nonstop for the last few weeks.”

Yua popped another nori piece into her mouth. “Oh, hush. You know I’d do anything for you and Amaya. And I love Rui-kun to pieces.” They had helped her out countless times in the last few years, so this was the least she could do for them. “I still can’t believe it’s hosted by the Shiratorizawa Academy. Tak is so proud of him.”

“I’m pretty sure Saitou-sensei coached Tak while he was at Shiratorizawa,” Tetsu said with a wide grin. “He said that Rui has the potential to become a great outside wing spiker.”

“Looks like you have a baby ace on your hands,” Yua laughed. Rui was currently at Chidoriyama Junior High. But if he was already noticed by a coach at Shiratorizawa, the chances of him getting into the academy had already increased.

“Rui’s had his eyes set on Shiratorizawa ever since he saw Tak play,” Tetsu chuckled. He started to gather the empty plates and didn’t protest when Yua moved to help. The look she gave him left no room for argument. “I’d be scared shitless for their entrance exams, but Rui’s way smarter than I ever was at his age.”

“Tak said they were brutal but making the volleyball team was worth it.” It was the first time she’d seen her younger brother want something so badly and put in all he had to achieve it. He took that work ethic with him when he graduated and now, he was the starting middle blocker on the men’s team at Waseda University in Tokyo. She knew that Rui could go down that same path if he worked hard and continued to love the game.

“Ugh, tell me again why I decided to switch with Ryo-kun and take the early shift?” Tetsu yawned and tried to sit back down, but Yua pulled him up and shooed him toward the stairs.

“Because you have three lovely children, a beautiful wife, and freeloading cousin to feed, that’s why!”

“The freeloading cousin can afford to feed herself,” he snickered as he grudgingly started up the stairs.

“Nuh uh! I just went through a breakup; everyone should be feeding me.”

“Yua-chan? Yua-chan, wake up!”

Yua groaned and wondered who was ruining the best nap she’d ever taken in her life. Maybe it was just a dream. She tried to chase the blissful weightless of sleep, but it quickly fled her grasp. Her eyes blinked open and she saw a Rui standing over her, a toothy grin on his youthful face. He looked almost exactly like Tetsu with angles defining his features, but his eyes were soft like Amaya’s. She returned his grin and sat up from the bed in the spare room, working the odd kinks from her neck slowly.

Rui was wearing his red Chidoriyama tracksuit, and a yellow and blue volleyball was tucked under his right arm. Suddenly, Yua remembered why she was at Tetsu’s house in the first place.

“Rui-kun, what time is it?” She asked, her breath hitching in her throat. Had she overslept? That was one of her greatest fears. Damn, she forgot to set an extra alarm—

“It’s 11:25. I was gonna wake up you earlier, but it looked like you were having a good nap.” The laughter in his voice was evident, but he also sympathized with her because he felt the same after a long practice.

Yua heaved a sigh of relief. Thank goodness. She’d feel terrible if Rui were late to his first practice because of something she did. “You’re right, I was having a good nap. But thank you for letting me sleep.”

“Kaa-san always lets me sleep after practice,” Rui replied, taking a seat beside her. “She says it’ll help me grow.”

“I guess she’s right because you’re taller than me already,” Yua teased. It looks like he’d grown almost two inches since the last time she saw him.

“Well, you’re not that tall anyway, Yua-chan.” The laughter was back in his voice. He was definitely Tetsu’s son.

“You’re sounding more like your dad every day,” She pouted as she ruffled his thick black hair. “He always gave me a hard time about my height.”

Rui was so happy when he heard that Yua-chan moved to Sendai. He never got to see her because Tokyo was far, even by train. She and Tak-kun had always treated him and his sisters like siblings and they took them to the best places whenever they did come to visit.

Yua checked her phone. 11:28. Shiratorizawa was only twenty minutes away by car. It was early, but she wondered if Rui wanted to go early to check things out and get a head start on warming up. The coaches and managers were usually there to set everything up, anyway.

“Rui-kun, I know it’s early, but do you want to leave n—”

Her nephew cut her off by jumping to his feet. “I’ve got my bags by the door already!” Before she could answer, he hurried to the door and down the stairs. She smiled. Tetsu wasn’t exaggerating when he said Rui was excited for practice.

Half an hour later, they pulled into Shiratorizawa Academy. Yua had forgotten how big the place actually was. But she had visited enough to remember how to get to the office and the main gymnasium. She was worried that the office assistant wouldn’t let them in, but fortunately, one of the coaches had already arrived and was setting everything ready for practice.

Yua could feel Rui’s excitement build with each hurried step they took towards the main The grip on her hand grew firmer as the sharp, repetitive thud of a volleyball hitting the wall reached their ears. His pace quickened and she matched it so her shoulder wouldn’t be ripped out of its socket.

“Someone’s doing a wall spikes drill!” He all but squealed just before he dragged her through the doors. “Coach Hayate made us do that yesterday!”

Yua grinned at his energy; it reminded her of Tak when he started playing. “Tak hated that drill until he learned how to snap his wrist down properly,” she chuckled. “He almost drove mom crazy because he’d practice outside against the kitchen for hours.”

But Rui had barely heard her. He had tossed his duffel onto the floor and begun rummaging through it quickly, muttering something she couldn’t quite hear. Not wanting to disturb him, Yua checked her watch. 11:58. Practice didn’t start until 1, and she still hoped that they weren’t imposing by being this early.

Punctuality was a hard habit to break since being an event planner repeatedly taught her that there was no such thing as “too early”. She had witnessed several events almost derail despite everyone arriving early and trying to account for any surprises. It never hurt to be on the slightly paranoid side.

Yua quickly found the source of the steady THUD, THUD-THUD, they heard on the way in. At the back of the spacious gym, a man was diligently performing a wall spikes drill just like Rui had said. He wore black shorts and a white, long-sleeved shirt. Yua could tell that he was tall, but that was no surprise as most players were close to six feet and over.

What did surprise her was his technique. Even from this distance, she noted that his movements were effortless and precise; habits that could only be honed through hours and hours of practice. As the ball bounced toward the man, he cranked his left arm back and paused for a breath before a hard and fast overhead swing sent the ball hurling back to the wall to start the endless cycle again. Yua wasn’t a player by any means, but she knew enough about volleyball to understand this man’s skill was something special.

No doubt he was a wing spiker.

That surprised Yua even more. There were very few lefties in any sport, and she only knew of one volleyball player who made a name for himself playing southpaw. As she eyed him more closely, she thought his features and bearing seemed familiar, but she wouldn’t be able to discover more until he turned around.

She saw the net, posts, and antennas laying haphazardly on the ground nearby; he must have started to set up for practice before deciding to warm up instead. Besides, it was easier to set up with two people. He’d most likely accept her offer to help if she extended it.

As Yua considered more options, she was reminded about how much she missed going to Tak’s games. The Waseda campus was only a twenty-minute train ride from her apartment, but she could barely find time for even herself in the last six months because of the back-to-back events she had to plan and execute for Peak 1. Anything social had to take the unfortunate backseat. She always made sure to watch replays of his games, though. It made her heart clench every time she thought about it, because she was his biggest fan other than mom and dad.

Yua shook her head, opting not to give her guilt a chance to creep in. There was enough of that to deal with in her other relationships. She crossed her arms and went into planning mode. Eyeing the man again, it was safe to say that he was either the head coach or, at least, an assistant coach. Ideally, the net had to be up and level before the rest of players and coaching staff arrived, so he’d definitely benefit if she offered to help him.

Plus, she could introduce Rui and ask if he’d be willing to pepper with him or practice a drill before everything started. Yes, that could work. It was a win-win situation. Tetsu probably knew the other coach’s name, but she forgot to ask him before he left this morning. Ah! She turned back to Rui, hoping that he’d be able to help, but her brow furrowed when she saw him gaping at the man on the other side of the gym.

“Rui-kun?” He instinctively reached for her and she closed her hand over his, hoping to provide him with some reassurance.

“Yua-chan…” His normally strong voice was timid, so she could barely hear it above the ball’s constant thudding.

“Sweetheart, what’s the matter?”

He swallowed, trying to find his voice again. He turned to her, his brown eyes blown wide with awe and realization.

“T-that’s Ushijima Wakatoshi."

#mywriting #ushijima wakatoshi #wakatoshi ushijima #ushiwaka #ushijima x oc #ushiwaka x oc #ushijima #wakatoshi #haikyuulovestory

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baby-pigtails · 4 years

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Kiddo Sites/Apps!

Hi hi! I always see a lot of posts recommending sites and apps for age regressors but a lot of the time they’re the same things, so I thought I’d make my own! All the sites and apps on here are free, don’t worry! (Some may have ads or in-app purchase, though!) It’s under the cut cause I tried to include some preview pictures which made it kinda long! If anyone would like to add more or have me add more, just let me know! Have fun and stay safe during this time of quarantine and social distancing!

WEBSITES

- DisneyClips

This is probably my FAVOURITE site for when I’m regressed! It’s made by Disney fans for Disney fans, and is updated with new activites pretty often! It has a bunch of safe and fun games, quizzes, coloring pages, and even things like analysis charts for kiddos whose special interest or hyperfixation is Disney! It has dress up games that are super-duper easy and cute, and I love them because their style looks like it could come right out of the film it’s from! Like the dresses and everything, and they stick to each princess’s style while making different dresses from the original ones! It’s crazy!!

-PBS Kids

A classic but awesome site!! You can watch all sorts of episodes for free, you don’t have to put in an email or anything! There are even games and episodes from shows that have long since gone off the air!

-American Girl

Don’t be fooled by the site’s title, this site is for everyone! If you’re familiar with the American Girl characters, there’s lots of dress up and themed games, and if you’re not familiar with the characters, don’t worry cause there’s still super cute games like pet grooming and, my favourite, Coconut’s Safari! I linked to the games page, but there’s quizzes and polls, too!

-Webkinz

I’m sure a lot of you know about Webkinz already, but it hasn’t gone anywhere even after all these years! It’s one of my favourite sites, and it’s free to play now! For people unfamiliar with Webkinz, it’s a virtual world where you can raise a pet, decorate rooms, and collect all sorts of objects, food, and clothing! You can play this one online, with their new desktop app, or with their mobile app! (I will warn you, though, the mobile app does not have that much stuff on it)

-Poptropica

Poptropica has been around for a while too, but it’s changed a lot in recent years! You can play it online and there’s also an app. This one is probably for older kiddos, though - it has a lot of puzzles and requires a lot of thinking at times, so if you’re looking for a relaxing game this probably isn’t it.

-Poptropica

APPS

- Habitica

Habitica is a super-duper easy habit tracker/reminder app! I use it to remind me to take my meds, shower, brush my teeth, things like that! But you put in your habits and to-do list so you can personalize it! Usually I don’t like apps like this because they offer no incentive but Habitica turns it into an RPG like Dungeons and Dragons!! So you can level up and get equipment and even pets! What I love about it, too, is that if you ever have any question, their FAQ is super clear and easy to understand, which makes it ideal for autistic kids like me!

- Cookie Run

Cookie Run is an oldie but a goldie! It’s a running platformer game where you can collect lots of cute cookies and their pets and learn their stories! Plus there’s canon LGBTQ+ rep with some of the cookie heroes! Cookie Run has a lot of bright colours and fast movement though, so it might not be the best game for kiddos with seizures or sensory issues!

- My Tamagotchi Forever

Super cute revamp of tamagotchi!! Your pets don’t run away or anything in this one, haha! You can decorate your town and your house with coins you earn from simple minigames, and you can dress up your tamagotchis in different outfits and fill out their scrapbooks and collect them all! I really liked this app, definitely one of my favorites :)

- Hello Kitty Lunchbox

Super simple “cooking” game! Again, this is a super easy, no hassle game and is good for really young kiddos. You get to make a lunch for Hello Kitty and decorate it, along with her lunchbox before “eating” your meal. But again, I wanna stress this one is super simple and some kids may get bored of it.

-Pocket Ponies

A My Little Pony version of the classic ball shooter game. You aim to hit enemies with your balls, and eventually charge up your ponies so they can perform their special action. You get to collect My Little Pony characters and each one has a different ability.

-Hello Kitty Music Party

This one’s more of an idle tapper game. It wants you to tap on your screen along with the beat of the music, but even if you don’t tap with the beat you can still get rewards! It has a couple cutesy pop songs in the app, but it can also access your music library on your device so you can tap with whatever you want! The app itself doesn’t offer much instruction but it’s fairly simple to figure out. But like the other Hello Kitty game, it can grow boring quickly for some kids, which is why it became an idle game for me.

-Disney TsumTsum

This one is kind of like Bejeweled or Candy Crush - you connect little Disney characters to make them “pop!” You get to collect a bunch of different characters and each character has a special ability.

YOUTUBE CHANNELS

-RescueHero’s Nostalgia Zone

A lesser known channel but it’s one of my favorites! It’s a gameplay channel, but pretty much every video is old video games like TV plug and plays, leapster/leap frog games, or CD-ROM games from the 2000s. It’s an active channel, too, and tends to upload every week or so! From what I can tell, there’s no voiceover and their videos are just simple, nostalgic gameplay.

-Shirley Curry

This one’s a little weird but it’s very wholesome - it’s a grandma in her 80′s(?) who loves to play video games! She mostly plays games for older kiddos like Skyrim, but her videos are very calming and she’s very cute in the way she comments on games. She’s super sweet to her viewers and calls them her grandkids, and usuaslly responds in comments. Her videos are also easy videos to listen to in the background, too.

-pstoyreviews

I don’t watch a lot of toy channels because a lot of the time they’re over the top and super corny or just... really weird, but this channel is run by two people (I think they are a couple but I’m not sure) named Shannon and Paul, and they’re very casual about their videos (despite the corny thumbnails, lol). Anyway, they mostly do blind bag openings for trinkets and toys that are currently on the shelves - things like Tokidoki, LOL Dolls, Shopkins, minifigures, things like that. It’s a very good channel if you like those cutesy sorts of things but don’t have the money to get them yourself! To my knowledge they’re not really sponsored, so there’s no encouraging you to buy a product or anything like that. Like I said, they’re very casual and do talk during the videos but they talk a little slow and there’s no background music, so they are very easy to understand! I believe Shannon also has a doll-specific channel, too, if you’re into that.

-nana825763

Better known as piropito, this channel is well known for its really cute and wholesome Minecraft gameplay that you can start watching here. This is a Japanese channel, but he captions his own videos, so don’t worry! Anyway, his goal was to figure out everything in Minecraft with absolutely no cheats or searching the web for information or anything like that. That’s really the only thing I’d recommend on this channel, however, and do be careful because they do have some horror game playthroughs on there so stay safe!

-Sesame Street

Not much to explain here! It’s Sesame Street, and they post clips of the show, songs, and sometimes even full episodes.

#goodness this took forever #kidcore #nostalgia #agere #chire #piggy tales #I feel like these are all kind of girly too so if anyone would like boyish' ones let me know!

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korra-the-red-lion · 4 years

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Let’s Talk About Cartoons.

Hey people, Korra is back with yet another long post, so be prepared.

Recently, I’ve found myself watching more cartoons again. So I just wanted to talk about some stuff on cartoons. So, the one thing I need you to keep in mind while reading this post is that these shows made be enjoyed by all audiences, the targeted age range is children. Children between the ages of 8-12 most of the time. So yeah, keep that thought.

I love Avatar, Korra (my username sake lol) Voltron, She-Ra and so many others. I would say these shows are some of the ones aimed at a bit of an older audience. But I also enjoy the Owl House, W.I.T.C.H., Ben 10, the Loud House, and others. I would say these shows are roughly aimed at that 8-10 range. What is it about these shows that I love? Hmm, there are many different reasons for as to why. But there are a few things that come to mind. Good representation, dark topics dealt with in a mature way, funny and lovable characters, silly buffer episodes, and endings that fit the show.

Voltron Legendary Defender had its issues, but I’m not focusing on that just yet. What the show did well is having a group of diverse characters. Lance, Hunk, Shiro, Allura are all PoC. Most of the characters in the show are in fact PoC, which is really awesome to see. The show dealt with themes of loneliness, war, colonization, loss, and found family. I think for the most part, everything was well done. Was the queer rep done pretty poorly? Yup, I think it’s fair to say it was. But it doesn’t outweigh the other things the show dealt with in a great way. Keith saying “I love you” to Shiro in a completely platonic way was SO IMPORTANT. Men saying I love you and crying and hugging and being able to be emotional and still considered strong is something that still needs to be normalized. It’s still one of the few shows I’ve seen this happen, and since the show is considered to be aimed at “boys” makes it even more important to me.

I could go on for days about how amazing the queer rep in She-Ra is. Adora and Catra was teased and I was worried for a little there that it was going to happen, but then IT DID. THEY KISSED. But not only that, we saw Scorpia have a crush on Catra, Mermista had a crush on She-Ra, Perfuma showed interest in both Bow and Scorpia. Seahawk is such a bi disaster. Double Trouble was one of the first non-binary characters I’ve seen on not just kid’s tv, but in all of tv. Queerness was the norm for She-Ra, it was more strange that Hordak was straight. Now, She-Ra also dealt with themes of identity, abuse, war, love, loss, and more. She-Ra isn’t perfect, but damn it is one of my favourite shows I’ve watched in a while. It’s really amazing.

There’s a reason why Avatar and Korra have a legacy. ATLA holds up. I just finished my rewatch and it still holds up. Are there some stinkers in s1? Yeah, haha. The Great Divide is a pretty rough episode to get through. But these two shows were things I watched growing up. I was the targeted age when Avatar first aired. The themes of abuse, colonization, genocide of a culture, misogyny, and like a billion other topics are addressed in such a mature way, but in a way that kids can understand without it being spoon-fed to them. Master Pakku is such jerk and it’s clear that people know this. The show doesn’t shy away from the damage caused by the Fire Nation. The Legend of Korra has a bit more of darker tone and mature themes, and I feel like they’re dealt with really well. And let’s not forgot that all characters are PoC and and Korrasami was a canon couple, the first of the time. Also, please remember that Korrasami was a BREAKTHROUGH FOR LGBTQA diversity for kid’s television. Respect, big respect.

Kipo and Owl House are two new shows I just started and I’m really enjoying them a lot. The Owl House s1 was so good and I loved all those goofballs. I think I would die for Eda, and Amity is such a dork. Kipo has been really fun and it’s got a great diverse cast of characters, hope it gets a s3! I’m enjoying the Dragon Prince as well, though I do find myself not enjoying it as much as some others are.

Now, after all that has been said. It’s okay to dislike an aspect of a show, or point out the flaws. But at the end of the day, it is aimed at kids. I’ve had people say to me “it’s aimed at kids but they know the audience are adults” and “kids aren’t watching this stuff, they’ve got other stuff to watch.” Yo, that attitude needs to stop please. Kids are watching this stuff. My younger siblings watched all those shows mentioned above, most of them before I even heard of them. My youngest sister LOVES Kipo, she thinks it’s amazing. All media has flaws. It’s silly to think that it doesn’t. Even ATLA has it’s issues, but they’re not large enough to take away from the show. We as the older audience need to stop gatekeeping and acting as if children aren’t watching, because they are. So remember when pointing out the flaw or tearing into something for whatever reason, maybe take a step back for a minute. Shows aimed at kids, regardless, have more constrictions. There are jerks out there who think kids shouldn’t have LGBTQA characters, people who think shows shouldn’t deal with heavy topics, that silly buffer episodes ruin the show for them.

You love these shows, but remember that kids out there do too. Themes that we are used to seeing are so much more nuanced and mature, because they have to be able to showcase it in a way that a kid may understand it, but not in a horrific Game of Thrones style gorefest. Themes that kids should see. I can’t imagine the emotional impact Catra and Adora finally leaving their abuser had. Or Zuko standing up to his father. Or Luz’s mother not understanding her quirkiness. Or so. much. more.

So yeah, I love cartoons. So do my siblings. Love them for everything they are, and be critical of them for sure, but don’t ruin it for the ones that it’s aimed at. Those kids are going to grow up and be amazing humans, and they’re going to create even more awesome things they wished they had when they were young. Remember that.

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marshmallowprotection · 4 years

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Oh my gosh she would definitely refuse to acccept her and Saeyoung being similar. Because as much as they would get along in some aspects, she's also very hotheaded and sometimes Saeyoung would definitely remind her of one her coworkers (who i came up with like two weeks before i got into mysme, so when i saw how Seven was i was like :0)

Jeth-TEN is similar only to Saeyoung's mischievious/sadistic side; Jeth doesn't have some depressing backstory, and its not a mask (though that's not to say he cant be serious or that he's shallow... i think u get what i mean). Jeth is also a lot more... shark-like, if you will. That's how I like to describe his grin, at least; whilst with Saeyoung, I prefer "wolfish." Jeth is bit more intense and pushy with his antics, still a bit of a prankster but mostly just likes to mess with people verbally. He isn't Rigby's typical partner, but they pair up here and there and, well, he has a reputation.

As does she. A reputation at her agency for excelling. She also has a rep for being serious, because she is a bit more serious at her job. And, amongst the medical staff, a reputation for refusing treatment, but i'll touch on that later. She even dresses semi-formal whenever she goes in and isn't doing action-based field work or training. But its reminiscent of Suit Saeran's style; ya know, the chain? Formal suits (you'll never see her in a dress, skirt, or heels) with an edgy flare.

Her agency's primary goal is assisting those with powers. Her sector focuses more on the youth. Soemtimes, they have to remove the kid(s) from their home situation -- which can be for a few reasons, such as the family is abusive, or the child's power is too out of control -- and stay in the care center of the agency, where they are well taken care of and trained to control their powers and utilize them efficiently and safely.

Vasyl and Amara both went through this, and they both ended up under the care of Rigby's parents.

Rigby is, as Hughes, another coworker, likes to call her, a "jack of all trades." She hates that term, but it's kinda true. When she was young, her parents weren't only training her to control her powers, but they also taught her the basics for pretty much everything they knew, and then at a certain age, she was allowed to pick a few favourites, which they then focused more on, although they still gave occasional lessons on other skills (such as dancing, but there's no way in hell she's ever telling anyone that she knows how to dance lmao). They wanted her to have a lot of options when she got older.

Hacking/info gathering, general investigation (which is when she gets paired with Jeth), infiltration (including undercover), rescue, and when needed, trainer. Her main/"official" ones tho are the hacking and rescue.

Also, hardly anyone uses their real names there. She smushed her last name to get "Nova."

Hdbdhsvsj the dynamic between Vasyl and Rigby is adorable, but i also love the dynamic between Jeth and Nova. Like- look at this:

"A gut feeling, huh? Are you sure it's not just the tacos?"

"I don't eat tacos."

Jeth gasped loudly, as thought she had offended some revered figure. "You've never had a taco?" he exclaimed.

"I've had a couple. But I don't like them." She parked the car along the curb.

"You're insane! How can you not like tacos?"

"How can you not like ice cream?"

"Ice cream is f--king disgusting."

"Oh, my days." Nova unbuckled and opened the door. "I- I refuse to hear such blasphemy."

Also, insults:

She shook her head. "Are you sure you weren't dropped as a baby?"

He opened his mouth, but Nova continued.

"Oh, wait, we already established that when you decided mixing strawberries and barbecue sauce was the best thing ever."

He grinned. "You should try it~. It's delicious!"

"Not for a million USD." They stopped before a door. "Something definitely went wrong during the development of your tastebuds. And your brain."

"Agent Nova, why must you be so cruel?"

"Because your presence is a truth serum."

I live for banter tbh lmao.

Oh, and about her brother. She does her best to make sure he doesnt adopt that self-sacrificing behaviour -- call her a hypocrite; she's well aware. Alfhough, she's only that way with certain people, but still.

[417]

I am thriving on this banter. It's made me laugh so hard. It's about the chaos all the time. I think that's kind of hilarious that you struck gold and then found that another game struck gold. You can't go in the wrong direction when it comes to some wild cat.

These are just screaming what we all want in a friendship. Someone to call you out and bop you on the head for being a little shit. It's simply as it should be. Just a little something about chaos mixed in with the rationality can be really fun to play around with. You said tacos. Now you gotta sing the Jaehee Spicy Taco song.

I do love a woman with a flare for style and that's WHAT WE'RE THRIVING ON. I would like to be her friend the more that I learn about her and her universe, NGL.

It's good that the two of them have a sibling relationship where they can be honest with each other about this sort of thing and have a good laugh about it... or a playful shove to the shoulder as a reminder to lighten up and work on how hard and intense one is. It's good to want to care about your family but always remember that you can put yourself first sometimes! Easier said than it is done... that girl is asking for trouble but she's thriving. My condolences to her brother who deals with that daily.

#mod kait #ask #417 anon #oc #cmc

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iwanthermidnightz · 4 years

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“Not a shot. Not a single chance. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”

Taylor Swift — who, at 30, has reached a Zen state of cheerful realism — laughs as she leans into a pillow she’s placed over her crossed legs inside her suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, leaning further still into her infinitesimal odds of winning a Golden Globe, which will zero out when she heads down to the televised ball in a few hours.

Never mind whether or not the tune she co-wrote, “Beautiful Ghosts,” might actually have been worthy of a trophy for best original song (or shortlisted for an Oscar, which it was not). Since the Globe nominations were revealed, voters could hardly have been immune to how quickly the film it’s a part of, “Cats,” in which she also co-stars, became a whipping boy for jokes about costly Hollywood miscalculations and creative disasters. Not that you’ll hear Swift utter a discouraging word about it all. “I’m happy to be here, happy to be nominated, and I had a really great time working on that weird-ass movie,” she declares. “I’m not gonna retroactively decide that it wasn’t the best experience. I never would have met Andrew Lloyd Webber or gotten to see how he works, and now he’s my buddy. I got to work with the sickest dancers and performers. No complaints.”

If this leads you to believe that the pop superstar is in the business of sugarcoating things, consider her other new movie — a vastly more significant documentary that presents Swift not just sans digital fur but without a whole lot of the varnish of the celebrity-industrial complex. The Netflix-produced “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana” has a prestige slot as the Jan. 23 opening night gala premiere of the Sundance Film Festival before it reaches the world as a day-and-date theatrical release and potential streaming monster on Jan. 31.

The doc spends much of its opening act juxtaposing the joys of creation with the aggravations of global stardom — the grist of many a pop doc, if rendered in especially intimate detail — before taking a more provocative turn in its last reel to focus more tightly on how and why Swift became a political animal. It’s the story of an earnest young woman with a self-described “good girl” fixation working through her last remaining fears of being shamed as she comes to embrace her claws, and her causes.

Given that the film portrays how gradually, and sometimes reluctantly, Swift came to place herself into service as a social commentator, “Miss Americana” is a portrait of the birth of an activist. Director Lana Wilson sets the movie up so that it pivots on a couple of big letdowns for its subject. The first comes early in the film, and early in the morning, when Swift’s publicist calls to update her on how many of the top three Grammy categories her 2017 album “Reputation” is nominated for: zilch. She’s clearly bummed about the record’s brushoff by the awards’ nominating committee, as just about anyone who’d previously won album of the year twice would be, and determinedly tells her rep that she’s just going to make a better record.

But she suffers what feels like a more meaningful blow toward the end of the film. In the fall of 2018, Swift finally comes out of the closet politically to intervene on behalf of Democrats in a midterm election in her home state of Tennessee. As the Washington Post put it, this announcement “fell like a hammer across the Trump-worshipping subforums of the far-right Internet, where people had convinced themselves… that the world-famous pop star was a secret MAGA fan.” Donald Trump goes on camera to smirk that he now likes Swift’s music a little less. The singer is successful in enlisting tens of thousands of young people to register to vote, but her senatorial candidate of choice, Democrat Phil Bredesen, loses to Republican Marsha Blackburn, whom she’d called out as a flagrant enemy of feminism and gay rights.

“Definitely, that was a bigger disappointment for me,” Swift says, pitting the midterm snub against the Grammy snub. “I think what’s going on out in the world is bigger than who gets a prize at the party.”

It was not always thus for Swift — as the detractors who dragged her for staying quiet during the last presidential election eagerly pointed out. If you had to pick the most embarrassing or regrettable moment in “Miss Americana,” it might be the TV clip from “The Late Show With David Letterman” in which the host brings up politics and gets Swift to essentially advocate the “Shut up and sing” mantra. As the studio audience roars approval of her vow to stay apolitical, Letterman gives her what now looks like history’s most dated fist bump.

Thinking back on it, Swift is incredulous. “Every time I didn’t speak up about politics as a young person, I was applauded for it,” she says. “It was wild. I said, ‘I’m a 22-year-old girl — people don’t want to hear what I have to say about politics.’ And people would just be like, ‘Yeahhhhh!’”

At that point, Swift was already starting to record isolated pop tracks, taking baby steps that would soon turn into full strides away from her initial genre. But whether she had designs on switching lanes or not, the lesson of the Dixie Chicks’ forced exile after Natalie Maines’ comment against then-President George W. Bush had branded itself onto her brain at an earlier age, when she’d just planted her young-teen flag in Nashville and overheard a lot of the lamentations of older Music Row songwriters about how the Chicks had thrown it all away.

“I saw how one comment ended such a powerful reign, and it terrified me,” says Swift. “These days, with social media, people can be so mad about something one day and then forget what they were mad about a couple weeks later. That’s fake outrage. But what happened to the Dixie Chicks was real outrage. I registered it — that you’re always one comment away from being done being able to make music.”

Maybe the most transfixing scene in “Miss Americana” is one where Swift argues with her father and other members of her team about the statement she’s about to release coming out against Blackburn and — it’s clear from her references to White House opposition to the Equality Act — Donald Trump too. The comments were so spontaneous that Wilson wasn’t there to film the moment, but the director had asked people to turn on the camera if anything interesting transpired, and here it most certainly did.

“For 12 years, we’ve not got involved in politics or religion,” an unnamed associate says to Swift, suggesting that going down the road of standing against a president as well as Republican gubernatorial and Senate candidates could have the effect of halving her audience on tour. Her father chimes in: “I’ve read the entire [statement] and … right now, I’m terrified. I’m the guy that went out and bought armored cars.”

“I needed to get to a point where I was ready, able and willing to call out bullshit rather than just smiling my way through it.” TAYLOR SWIFT

But Swift is adamant about pressing the button to send a nearly internet-breaking Instagram post, saying that Blackburn has voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act as well as LGBTQ-friendly bills: “I can’t see another commercial [with] her disguising these policies behind the words ‘Tennessee Christian values.’ I live in Tennessee. I am Christian. That’s not what we stand for.” Pushing back tears, she laments not having come out against Trump two years earlier, “but I can’t change that. … I need to be on the right side of history. … Dad, I need you to forgive me for doing it, because I’m doing it.”

Says Swift now, “This was a situation where, from a humanity perspective, and from what my moral compass was telling me I needed to do, I knew I was right, and I really didn’t care about repercussions.” She understands why she faced such heated opposition in the room: “My dad is terrified of threats against my safety and my life, and he has to see how many stalkers we deal with on a daily basis, and know that this is his kid. It’s where he comes from.”

Swift was recently announced as the recipient of a Vanguard Award from GLAAD, and she name-checked the org in her basher-bashing single “You Need to Calm Down,” which was released as one of the teaser tracks for last fall’s more outwardly directed and socially conscious “Lover” album. Part of her politicization, she says, is feeling it would be hypocritical to hang out with her gay friends while leaving them to their own devices politically. In the film, she says, “I think it is so frilly and spineless of me to stand onstage and go ‘Happy Pride Month, you guys,’ and then not say this, when someone’s literally coming for their neck.”

A year and a half later, she elaborates: “To celebrate but not advocate felt wrong for me. Using my voice to try to advocate was the only choice to make. Because I’ve talked about equality and sung about it in songs like ‘Welcome to New York,’ but we are at a point where human rights are being violated. When you’re saying that certain people can be kicked out of a restaurant because of who they love or how they identify, and these are actual policies that certain politicians vocally stand behind, and they disguise them as family values, that is sinister. So, so dark.”

Her increasing alignment with the LGBTQ community wasn’t the only thing raising her consciousness to a breaking — i.e., speaking — point. So did the sexual assault trial in which judgment was rendered that she had been groped by a DJ in a backstage photo op (for financial restitution, Swift had asked for $1).

Her experience with the trial was crucial, she says, in finding herself “needing to speak up about beliefs I’d always had, because it felt like an opportunity to shed light on what those trials are like. I experienced it as a person with extreme privilege, so I can only imagine what it’s like when you don’t have that. And I think one theme that ended up emerging in the film is what happens when you are not just a people pleaser but someone who’s always been respectful of authority figures, doing what you were supposed to do, being polite at all costs. I still think it’s important to be polite, but not at all costs,” she says. “Not when you’re being pushed beyond your limits, and not when people are walking all over you. I needed to get to a point where I was ready, able and willing to call out bulls— rather than just smiling my way through it.”

That came into play when Kanye West stepped into her life and publicly shamed her a second time. In the video Kim Kardashian released in 2016, you can hear the people-pleasing Swift on the other end of the line sheepishly thanking him for letting her know about the “Me and Taylor might still have sex” line he plans to include about her in a song — only to regret it later when the eventual track also includes the claim “Why? I made that bitch famous.” The boast, of course, referred back to the moment when he interrupted her and stole her spotlight at the MTV VMAs six years earlier as she was in the middle of an acceptance speech. West’s is not a name that ever publicly escapes Swift’s lips, so it might be surprising to fans that these events are recapped in “Miss Americana,” although Swift says the filmic decisions were all up to the director, who explains that Swift’s reaction to the episode was important to include.

“With the 2009 VMAs, it surprised me that when she talked about how the whole crowd was booing, she thought that they were booing her, and how devastating that was,” says Wilson. “That was something I hadn’t thought about or heard before, and made it much more relatable and understandable to anyone.”

“I see the movie as looking at the flip side of being America’s sweetheart.” LANA WILSON, DIRECTOR OF “TAYLOR SWIFT: MISS AMERICANA”

Swift acknowledges how formative both incidents have been in her life, for ill and good. “As a teenager who had only been in country music, attending my very first pop awards show,” she says now, “somebody stood up and sent me the message: ‘You are not respected here. You shouldn’t be here on this stage.’ That message was received, and it burrowed into my psyche more than anyone knew. … That can push you one of two ways: I could have just curled up and decided I’m never going to one of those events ever again, or it could make me work harder than anyone expects me to, and try things no one expected, and crave that respect — and hopefully one day get it.

“But then when that person who sparked all of those feelings comes back into your life, as he did in 2015, and I felt like I finally got that respect (from West), but then soon realized that for him it was about him creating some revisionist history where he was right all along, and it was correct, right and decent for him to get up and do that to a teenage girl…” She sighs. “I understand why Lana put it in.”

Adds the woman who started her recent “Lover” album with a West-allusive romp that’s pointedly called “I Forgot That You Existed”: “I don’t think too hard about this stuff now.”

What’s not in the film is any mention of her other most famous nemeses — Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta of Big Machine Records, with whom she’s scrapped publicly for several months. “The Big Machine stuff happened pretty late in our process,” says Wilson. “We weren’t that far from picture lock. But there’s also not much to say that isn’t publicly known. I feel like Taylor’s put the story out there in her own words already, and it’s been widely covered. I was interested in telling the story that hadn’t been told before, that would be surprising and emotionally powerful to audiences whether they were music industry people or not.”

Still, the way Swift has been willing to stand up politically for others parallels the manner in which she stood up for herself in regard to Braun, et al., at the recent Billboard Women in Music Awards, where she gave an altogether blistering speech, naming names and taking no prisoners, going after the men who now control her six-album Big Machine back catalog. Certainly Swift was aware that, along with supporters, there were many friends and business associates of Braun among the VIPs in the Hollywood Palladium who would not be pleased with what this very reformed people-pleaser had to say.

One thing everyone who was in the room agrees on is that you could hear a pin drop as Swift used the speech to get even bolder about the meat of these disputes. Some would say it’s because they were riveted by her boldness in speaking truth to power, others because they just felt uncomfortable. Says one fellow honoree who works in a high position in the industry (and who’s worked with some high-profile Braun clients): “People were excited for her at the beginning of the speech. But once she started going in a negative direction at an event that is supposed to be celebrating accomplishments and rah-rah for women, I felt it fell flat with a good portion of the room, because it wasn’t the appropriate place to be saying it.”

Wasn’t it intimidating for Swift, knowing she might be polarizing an auditorium full of the most powerful people in the business? “Well, I do sleep well at night knowing that I’m right,” she responds, “and knowing that in 10 years it will have been a good thing that I spoke about artists’ rights to their art, and that we bring up conversations like: Should record deals maybe be for a shorter term, or how are we really helping artists if we’re not giving them the first right of refusal to purchase their work if they want to?”

“Obviously, anytime you’re standing up against or for anything, you’re never going to receive unanimous praise. But that’s what forces you to be brave. And that’s what’s different about the way I live my life now.” (Braun’s camp did not respond to a request for comment.)

One thing Taylor Swift can’t bend to her determined will is her family’s health. She revealed a few years ago that her mother, Andrea, a beloved figure among the thousands of fans who’ve met her at road shows, is battling breast cancer. Swift addressed the uncertainty of that struggle in an anguished song on her latest album, “Soon You’ll Get Better.” Many who view “Miss Americana” will look for signs of how her mom is doing. The subject comes up in a section of the film that includes a relatively light-hearted scene in in which it’s shown that one of Andrea Swift’s ways of saying “eff you” to cancer recently was to break the mold and bring a canine — her “cancer dog” — into a famously feline-friendly family.

The real answer may come in Swift’s touring activity for “Lover.” Whereas typically she’d spend nine months in the year after an album release on the road, she plans to limit herself to four stadium dates in America this summer and a trip around the festival circuit in Europe. This may not be 100% for personal reasons: “I wanted to be able to perform in places that I hadn’t performed in as much, and to do things I hadn’t done before, like Glastonbury,” she says. “I feel like I haven’t done festivals, really, since early in my career — they’re fun and bring people together in a really cool way. But I also wanted to be able to work as much as I can handle right now, with everything that’s going on at home. And I wanted to figure out a way that I could do both those things.”

Is being able to be there for her mother the main concern? “Yeah, that’s it. That’s the reason,” she says. “I mean, we don’t know what is going to happen. We don’t know what treatment we’re going to choose. It just was the decision to make at the time, for right now, for what’s going on.”

In her case, it’s as if her manager had taken seriously ill as well as the person she’s always been closest to, all at once. “Everyone loves their mom; everyone’s got an important mom,” she allows. “But for me, she’s really the guiding force. Almost every decision I make, I talk to her about it first. So obviously it was a really big deal to ever speak about her illness.” During filming, when Andrea’s breast cancer had returned for a second time, “she was going through chemo, and that’s a hard enough thing for a person to go through.” Then it got harder. Speaking about this latest development publicly for the first time, Swift quietly reveals: “While she was going through treatment, they found a brain tumor. And the symptoms of what a person goes through when they have a brain tumor is nothing like what we’ve ever been through with her cancer before. So it’s just been a really hard time for us as a family.”

Compared with that, nearly any other topic the movie might address would pale. But it finds weightiness in addressing other kinds of unhealthiness, like the physical expectations that are placed on women in general and celebrity women specifically, Swift being no exception. In this department, she has her own heroines. “I love people like Jameela Jamil, because he way she speaks about body image, it’s almost like she speaks in a hook. Women are held to such a ridiculous standard of beauty, and we’re seeing so much on social media that makes us feel like we are less than, or we’re not what we should be, that you kind of need a mantra to repeat in your head when you start to have unhealthy thoughts. I swear the way Jameela speaks is like lyrics — it gets stuck in my head and it calms me down.”

Swift’s collaborator in this messaging, Wilson, was on a list of potential directors Netflix gave her when she expressed interest in possibly doing a documentary to follow the concert special that premiered on the service just over a year ago. You could discern a feminist message, if you chose to, in the fact that Swift chose a director most well known for a documentary about abortion providers, “After Tiller.” Swift says she was most impressed, though, that Wilson’s docs look for nuance and subtlety in addressing subjects that do lend themselves to soapboxes, and their first conversation was about their mutual desire to avoid “propaganda” in any form.

If there’s a feminist agenda in “Miss Americana,” Wilson and Swift wanted it to emerge naturally, although the director admits it was pretty blatant from the outset, given that she set up the film (which is co-produced by Morgan Neville, the director’s “sounding board”) with an all-female crew. Or nearly all-female, says Wilson, laughing, “I will say that we did always have male production assistants, because I like trying to show people that men can fetch coffee for women.”

Adds Wilson, “When I started filming, it was before she’d come out politically. She knew that she was coming out of a very dark period, and wanted collaborate on something that captured what she was going through and that was really raw and honest and emotionally intimate.” The political awakening, the director says, “was a profound decision for her to make. In that, I saw this feminist coming of age story that I personally connected with, and that I really think women and girls around the world will see themselves in.”

“The bigger your career gets, the more you struggle with the idea that a lot of people see you the same way they see an iPhone or a Starbucks.” TAYLOR SWIFT

The film borrows its title from a song on the “Lover” album, “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” that’s maybe the one fully allegorical song Swift has ever released — and, in its fashion, is a great protest song. The entire lyric is a metaphor for how Swift grew up as an unblinking patriot and has had to reluctantly leave behind her naiveté in the age of Trump. Her partner on that track, as well as other message songs like “You Need to Calm Down” and “The Man,” was a co-writer and co-producer new to her stable of collaborators this time around, Joel Little.

With the song “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” although the lyrics are cloaked in metaphor, “We like to think it was a very clear statement,” Little says. “There are lots of little hidden messages within that song that are all pointing toward the way that she thinks and feels about politics and the United States. I love that it uses a lot of classic Taylor Swift imagery, in terms of the songwriting topics of high school and cheerleaders, as a clever nod to what she’s done in the past, but tied in with a heavy political message.”

“Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince” doesn’t actually appear in the documentary, but the director says the film’s title is understood by fans as an obvious reference to political themes in the number. “Even if you don’t know the song,” Wilson says, “I see the movie as looking at the flip side of being America’s sweetheart, so I like how the title evokes that too.”

The doc doesn’t lack for its own protest songs though. In the wake of her midterm disappointment, Swift is seen writing an anthem for millennials who might have come away disillusioned with the political process. That previously unheard song, “Only the Young,” is seen being demo-ed before it plays in full over the end credits; it’ll be released as a digital single in conjunction with the doc. Key lyric: ““You did all that you could do / The game was rigged, the ref got tricked/ The wrong ones think they’re right / We were outnumbered — this time.”

“One thing I think is amazing about her,” says Wilson, “is that she goes to the studio and to songwriting as a place to process what she’s going through. I loved how, when she got the Grammy news (about “Reputation”), this isn’t someone who’s going to feel sorry for herself or say ‘That wasn’t right.’ She’s like, ‘Okay, I’m going to work even harder.’ You see her strength of character in that moment when she gets that news. And then with the election results, I loved how she channeled so many of her thoughts and feelings into ‘Only the Young.’ It was a great way to kind of show how stuff that happens in her life goes directly into the songs; you get to witness that in both cases.

So is the film aimed at satisfying the fan base or teasing the unconvinced hordes who might dial it up as a free stream? “I think it’s a little bit of both,” Swift says. “I chose Netflix because it’s a very vast, accessible medium to people who are just like, ‘Hey, what’s this? I’m bored.’ I love that, because I do so many things that cater specifically to fans that like my music, I think it’s important to put yourself out there to people who don’t care at all about you.”

In the wake of the last round of Kanye-gate, stung by the backlash of those who took his side, Swift took a three-year break from interviews. The mantra of her 2017 album “Reputation” and subsequent tour was “No explanations.” But her Beyoncé-style press blackout was a passing phase. With “Lover” and now, especially, the documentary, she could hardly be more about the explanations. Although this interview is the only one she currently plans to do about the documentary, it’s clear that she’s come back into a season of openness, and that she considers it her natural habitat.

“I really like the whole discussion around music. And during ‘Reputation,’ it never felt like it was ever going to be about music, no matter what I said or did,” she says. “I approach albums differently, in how I want to show them to the world or what I feel comfortable with at that time in my life.” Being more transparent “feels great with this album. I really feel like I could just keep making stuff — it’s that vibe right now. I don’t think I’ve ever written this much. That’s exhibited in ‘Lover’ having the most songs that I’ve ever had on an album” (18, to be exact). “But even after I made the album, I kept writing and going in the studio. That’s a new thing I’ve experienced this time around. That openness kind of feels like you finally got the lid off a jar you’ve been working at for years.”

Cipher-dom never could have stood for long for someone who’s established herself as one of the most accomplished confessional singer-songwriters in pop history. “I don’t really operate very well as an enigma,” she says. “It’s not fulfilling to me. It works really well in a lot of pop careers, but I think that it makes me feel completely unable to do what I had gotten in this to do, which is to communicate to people. I live for the feeling of standing on a stage and saying, ‘I feel this way,’ and the crowd responding with ‘We do too!’ And me being like, ‘Really?’ And they’re like, ‘Yes!’”

Swift believes talking things up again isn’t a form of giving in to narcissism — it’s a way of warding off commodification.

“The bigger your career gets, the more you struggle with the idea that a lot of people see you the same way they see an iPhone or a Starbucks,” she muses. “They’ve been inundated with your name in the media, and you become a brand. That’s inevitable for me, but I do think that it’s really necessary to feel like I can still communicate with people. And as a songwriter, it’s really important to still feel human and process things in a human way. The through line of all that is humanity, and reaching out and talking to people and having them see things that aren’t cute.

#swift finally comes out of the closet politically.... yes they REALLY wrote that

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svartalfhild · 4 years

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I have been thinking a lot lately about the sort of person I am, the sort of person I would like to be, and why I’ve turned out the way that I have. Long post incoming. (Sorry, mobile folks.)

I’ve recently had a lot of old memories from when I was growing up resurface and give new context to the things I do now. I tend to think of myself as being a very timid and self-critical person, and that’s often the case, but I have these moments where I’m not. Those moments can manifest in all kinds of wild ways. Most often, they are born from anger. Moments when I get mouthy or lash out because I’ve been pushed over the edge. Moments when I become stone cold because my sympathy has run out. I don’t like being that way. I’m scared to let my anger out ever because I’ve done so many awful things with it in the past, and I don’t want to become my father.

But at the same time, those moments are among the rare occasions when my anxiety shuts down, and briefly, I get to feel something like confidence. I stop analyzing and take action for once. I realize there are appropriate times to be angry and appropriate ways to express anger, but I’m always afraid that if I let myself be angry at the right times, my anger will also come out at the wrong times. There’s a time and a place to be a stone cold bitch, and I don’t trust myself to know when that is.

So I prefer to always be kind. I prefer to win people’s respect by being soft rather than assertive, because trying to be excessively nice has always come with a much, much lower risk of hurting people. It’s more important to me that I should do no harm than it is to avoid getting stepped on. I don’t always succeed at being sufficiently nice, but I try so hard.

Looking back on my childhood, I think that has a lot to do with my trauma and with the big mistakes that I’ve made in my life.

When I was a child...I wasn’t very good at being soft. I was not a sweet child. I was isolated and lived in a strict “intellectual” household under the thumb of my father’s constant rage, which made me selfish, cold, deceitful, and arrogant in ways children usually aren’t. Sure, I generally absorbed all the moral ideas of my supposedly progressive-minded parents about basic decency, but that wasn’t nearly enough. They taught me nothing about how to actually interact with people, and as an undiagnosed autistic girl, it was extremely difficult to learn on my own. Hell, I didn’t even really know that it was worth trying to learn. I wasn’t a complete gremlin; I was quiet, so the adults generally thought of me as nice and well-mannered, but my peers saw the stone cold bitch.

There were times, albeit rare ones, when I did pick the right moment to be That Bitch. At the age of like 7, I kicked an older boy really hard in the shin and yelled at him for bullying another girl because he wouldn’t stop and the teachers weren’t doing anything about it. When I was 10, I sat on the bus near a bunch of rowdy boys so they’d make the mistake of trying to harass me instead of creeping on a girl who lived two doors down from me. They were not prepared for my willingness to be extremely mean to them. When I was 12, I got a double feature of people touching my ponytail and them not being prepared for Real Bitch Hours. The girls who sat behind me in history got a blunt ass “don’t touch me”, and I did not back down when they got offended. The boys who sat behind me in math got rather graphic descriptions of the damage I would do to their balls if they didn’t leave me alone, and they reacted with a surprising amount of horror (which was rather satisfying to me), especially if I fixed them long enough with what they coined my “murder stare”. Unfortunately, the latter experience later became a spectacle as they asked me to recount my graphic description to their friends and earned me a rep as a misandrist, but it had at least persuaded them not to touch me.

Sadly, these occasions are the only ones I can recall of having spoken up in anger as a child and having been entirely justified in doing so. Most of the time, my assholery wasn’t righteous, it was just callous. I quite frankly deserved much of my bad reputation and subsequent lack of friends. I often wonder at what point I made the decision to start caring. I think perhaps I started to realize how bad I was at the onset of my teens, because that’s when I had to start atoning for some seriously messed up shit and I’d lost the few friends that I’d had. But I don’t think I truly began to grasp the importance of kindness until my late teens, when I learned that I wasn’t just a “sheltered” kid; I was an abuse victim, and that came with all kinds of realizations about my own behaviour. I didn’t want to be an abuser. I didn’t want to inflict what I’d been through on others. So I started to try to do better.

The thing is, I was not at all equipped for that. I had a rough couple of years trying to reconcile my desire to be a different person with accepting the way my brain is wired. I’d just learned that I’m asexual and autistic and all these other terms I could finally use to describe who I am. I had trouble figuring out what parts I should be proud of, what parts I shouldn’t, and how to appropriately express all of that.

I still don’t know when exactly my empathy switch flipped, but at some point, as I was transitioning from high school to college, all that empathy I’d repressed since forever came flooding out in excess, and I’ve struggled with regulating it from then on. I went from wondering if there was something wrong with me because the best I could manage was general compassion to just not being able to stop the empathy train.

Anyway, it seems like all that led me to being afraid of myself and to trying to accomplish things by being as soft as I can, as a way to atone for my mistakes, as a way to avoid becoming my father, and as a recognition of the importance of being kind. That’s helped me in a lot of ways, and I hope that it’s made life better for the people I interact with, but the thing is, it’s not always what’s needed. Being deferent and accommodating has its drawbacks. I have trouble getting people to take me seriously, and I often find myself stuck in awful situations because I couldn’t bring myself to assert my boundaries or rock the boat in any way.

I need to find a balance between the stone cold bitch and the Giving Tree. Once again, I find myself lacking the necessary tools to achieve that. I think I’d need to be in therapy and living away from my family to get there. The best I can do right now is aim for “looks like she’ll kill you, but is actually a cinnamon roll”. That won’t make me more confident or assertive when I need to be, but at least people might take me a little more seriously.

Anyway, thanks for slogging through my little personal essay. I just needed to organize some thoughts I’ve been having for a while.

#personal

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saltyaro · 5 years

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You know, I’ve been replaying the Ace Attorney games lately. At first I was bored and out of nowhere, I redid Dual destinies just because I hadn’t in a long time. Which led me to play the first game again (mainly for the Edgeworth case I love it so much tbh) and I’m now replaying Spirit of justice.

And...I can’t help but absolutely love those games because. It’s just so easy to hc everyone - and bu that I mean absolutely everyone important - as arospec! In canon, Phoenix does have one (1) romantic relationship at one point but I’d like to point out that one crush in your life does not make you alloromantic. Given the context I’d say either greyro or heteronormativity? I guess he can’t really be demiro but he could also be recipro (with the context again. Recipro does sound particularly consistent though). He doesn’t have any other romantic stuff even hinted at him! Pearls wants to believe Maya and him are dating but it always makes them 100% uncomfortable (the age gap people. Also, siblings dynamic). Pearls is kinda brainwashed by TV but hasn’t ever expressed interest in romance for herself, even her older self.

Edgeworth doesn’t have any interest in romance either. And I know he’s often shipped with Phoenix (I learnt about that quite recently actually-) but...even outside of my “I’ll make everyone aro if I can” motto, I...never shipped them romantically, even before I learnt of aromanticism. I like their dynamic, and how it’s implied Edgeworth opened up more (to everyone) after his trauma got relieved a bit. I want him to act like a stupid kid around his friends. Like, I can acknowledge Phoenix and him have a special bond, but someone special doesn’t mean it’s romantic and. Edgey’s emotional development got stopped after he parted with Pheonix and Larry so there’s that to consider too. This is the kind of bond of trust that can’t be broken and I find it beautiful, but I’m also pretty sure it would be unhealthy to only rely on one person, regardless of the nature of the relationship.

Apollo? Doesn’t have a romantic subplot. I guess there’s Junie who’s got a thing for him but he doesn’t reciprocate - and I relate to him not even being aware of it lmao. He’s so oblivious around romance, if he’s not arospec who is.

Athena? No romance in her life. She’s a lot like Phoenix (in her past trauma and her reason for doing the things she does) and I love her. Also, if someone ships her romantically with Simon, then I hate that person and will steal their bed. They’re like siblings and have like, a 10 years gap.

Trucy is the sun and doesn’t know what romance is. She’d use it as a magic trick and burn it/make it disappear into her magic panties (actually please do that Trucy, I beg of you).

Well, I could also mention like, Gavin, I guess he’s just a flirt but I don’t think it really means anything, romantic-attraction-wise. He’s also too cool to be straight to i’m going to make him aro. Though I don’t have a consistent HC for him outside of “not straight” if I’m being honest.

And it’s not even like romance doesn’t exist in the AA universe! Larry’s the straightest guy to ever straight (he’s harmless but outside of that...) and the cases often have romantic subplots and all. Well, not *that* often, and it’s generally the cause for murder but still. It’s a thing, it exists. Also we have a canon WLW in Dual Destinies and she’s one of the rare romance-havers not to be a culprit! She’s not the best, like she def has anger issues, but it’s all explained and understandable. She also loves her brother very much and deserves good things and therapy.

ALSO

I really, really love the dynamic of Phoenix’s found family? You have Maya, Trucy, and Pearls (and I guess Athena and Apollo are part of it too but they arrive later and have less interactions so). Pearls is Maya’s cousin, but otherwise, no one has any blood relationship in their little family. No romance needed. Phoenix adopted Trucy (and is apparently doing a great job) and babysits Pealrs and Maya. They’re all free of doing whatever they want, and they know they’re always going to come back together. It’s a found family but, not the “nuclear family” way, you know? Maya definitely isn’t acting as Trucy’s mother, and more like Phoenix’s sister I guess (Trucy and Maya do lack canon interaction but I always felt like said interactions were implied). I love their little family and the freedom in it. It’s just so healthy.

The last thing, not aro related, but still great and why I love those games-

Mental illness. I’m not saying it’s great rep, I don’t think it is, but...it’s just, so refreshing that you have characters with mental illnesses and issues that aren’t bad people. They aren’t the culprits, and, like in real life, are more likely to be victims. The diagnostic is never given in the game, but Edgeworth’s trauma? Not mocked. He definitely has PTSD, and, his fear of earthquakes? Wondered about, but not mocked. I guess that’s part of the reason I always go back to his case in the first game: to hear someone you care about, someone you trust, tell you: “I believe in you. I know your mind has been lying to you the whole time, and I’m here to say it’s okay. Those are just lies. Even when you stop believing in yourself, I’ll still believe in you.” That’s just so powerful, I can’t help but feel emotional every time. Add to that the fact that this bond isn’t romantic and. Yeah.

For Athena’s trauma, it’s the way it’s displayed I really love. Her game is much more recent, and it shows. She just blacks out when her PTSD gets triggered and no one shames her for that. Even though no one knows what’s happening inside her head for the longest time. She needs to be brought back to her senses, to be grounded. It’s not like she gets to have therapy on screen or anything, no character really gets a lot of time off the courtroom anyway, but given the context, I found she was treated in a very sensitive way.

The last example I can think of, is a character with DID. I say DID, but I doubt that’s good rep, and that’s probably not the way people with DID experience life, but that’s what’s said in the game so...Anyway, they’re a witness and, if you know how AA games work, the real culprit is *always* a witness. And you know how in pop culture, people with multiple personalities are often treated as villain, with the “hidden personality” no one knows about, not even the person, and this hidden personality is a murderer? I was sooo afraid the game was going to go that way. They even did hint at it, with giving the character the “hidden personality”. Except, the “hidden personality”, much like all of the other people of the system, is...100% harmless. And just that was so refreshing. Which goes to say a lot about the state of the rep for mental diversity. I don’t know the reality of experiencing DID, but in the game the witness interacts with themselves, and everyone in the court speaks to each individual differently, and the witness isn’t treated as delusional.

Those characters are accused wrongly of murder, when in reality they haven’t hurt a fly. And exonerating them is key to solving the case at hand. I don’t know who’s responsible for that, but I’m extremely grateful to them. To explicitly have your main character, the character you’re playing, clear the name of the mentally ill characters? It’s a blessing and not something you would expect from a game that named one of its recurring characters “Larry Butz”.

Anyway, I guess I am kinda trying to convince some of you to play those games (and goof about it with me) in this post. Even though it wasn’t my initial intent. If all of this isn’t enough to convince you - play those games for the awful puns. The characters’ names are terrible. Also I know I mentioned romance existing but weirdly enough it wasn’t annoying? Probably because it’s actually downplayed a lot. It’s only relevant as a plot device and it’s just like. Stated. Not dwelved deeper into. Those games are great for when you’re romance tired.

#my post #fandom #aro hc #long post #I can't believe I'm getting back into AA #when i'm already in the middle of getting back into saint seiya #i'm going to seriously lack time with school #oops I know this is an aro blog but I'm way too passionate #and had nowhere to speak about it #though I'm sure this not-aro part will resonate with some of you!#hope you don't mind i just get really excited about those games at least once a year

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morebedsidebooks · 5 years

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LGBTQ+ Characters in Comics from the 20th century I like

It’s June, Pride is here and rainbow colours are everywhere. So, I figured I’d be a little retrospective and share a short list of LGBTQ+ characters in comics from the 20th century I have a soft spot for. I’ve organized these by date of the characters first appearing but, happily most are still having stories written about them today.

Let’s start with three ladies from DC:

Catwoman

Catwoman, specifically Selina Kyle has been around comics for a long time, nearly as long as the turbulence of her relationship with Batman. Though, Bruce isn’t they only character she has involved herself with over the years. I’ve got my share of comics featuring this fierce lady of many lives and antiheroine, including part of the New 52 run by Genevieve Valentine a few years back where her bisexuality was acknowledged as canon. Though, it was the film adaptation Batman Returns in 1992 with Michelle Pfieffer that blew me away when I was young. And remains, I think the most iconic Catwoman costume, which you can see in 4K now. Hear her roar.

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman is another longstanding character and probably the most popular female superhero. I had comics as a child with Diana along with watching the sometimes campy 1970s TV series with Lynda Carter. Perhaps even more interesting than the Amazonian warrior herself is the passions of one of her creators William Marston and the themes of those earliest comics. (I’d suggest the book Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peters Comics 1941-1948.) And of course, also the controversy over a strong heroine standing on her own sparked by Fredic Wertham in Seduction of the Innocent.

Poison Ivy

Poison Ivy, or Pamela Isely with her sexual agency and connection to the Green, who admittedly may go about fighting for the environment as well as for women or children in the wrong way sometimes, is my top female character from American comics period. After again some rough treatment in comics recently, I wrote this year about her origins since 1966. Most people these days probably can’t think of Ivy without Harley, since it’s been 20 years since their first meeting in comics (longer for other mediums) but, these gals have a relationship that isn’t monogamous and has had it’s on again off again points too. (And note to DC maybe get it together on just how you define it since you waffle a bit hmm?)

Taku and Venomm

Black Panther was one of the few Marvel comics characters whose stories I’ve wound up reading. (My mum had this thing against some comics and one of my older brothers mainly passed on DC issues to me.) The Jungle Action installments written by Don McGregor are to this day still memorable. And part of that should be due also to Taku and Venomm (Horatio Walters), the latter first appearing in the “Panther’s Rage” arc. Though, it would take time for the open acknowledgement of this example of early gay characters in comics. Sexuality outside the heterosexual among other topics was taboo in the 1970s yet, McGregor managed with a collection of artists to bring a vision of Wakanda focusing largely on its black inhabitants and difficult social issues in the world to publication.

Juli Bauernfeind

I read The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio about boys at a German boarding school when I was 21. Juli was a character I connected to and the story had a profound effect on me. And I bawled my eyes out. It still makes me cry and is still one of the best comics I’ve ever come across. I reviewed the English edition a few years back. As well as wrote a post on the French bisexual author Roger Peyrefitte whose novel was adapted into a film which inspired Hagio.

John Constantine

Full of politics, call it dark with a dose of nihilism but, Hellblazer with John Constantine is just damn good. Sometimes the world is awful, people are awful, you’re awful and well yeah everything is going to hell. Constantine is pretty much dreadful for the women he’s often involved with, or well anybody really. It was in the early 90s readers were first clued into the history of his love life made up of girlfriends and boyfriends. And can we fail to recall the later S. W. Manor from Ashes & Dust: In the City of Angels, one of the most visceral takes thru a character that is basically a stand in for Bruce Wayne, and his twisted relationship with John? I’m not. It’s been a strange trip over the years some adaptations really glossing over his sexuality. Though of late handling this aspect of his character appears to have gotten better.

Stormer and Kimber

The madcap Jem and the Holograms was one of my favourite cartoons as a child in the 80s. I even had some of the dolls and cassette tapes. Stormer aka Mary Phillips part of the Misfits was the rock star I loved the most. Dedicated to music and actually quite sweet with the optimum blue hair. I had to try the colour myself. The episode where she teams up with Kimber after both have differences with their respective bandmates is a classic. So, it was truly outrageous when the series was revived in 2015 in comic book form by Kelly Thompson and Sophie Campbell, and the Stormer and Kimber relationship that had been brewing came fully out for fans. (Btw the comic also added a new character, Blaze who is a trans woman and girlfriend of Misfit’s fan Clash.)

Ash Lynx and Eiji Okamura

It’s been interesting to experience Banana Fish by Akimi Yoshida in different ways from first encountering the comic when I was a teenager, picking it up again in my twenties, and yet again the animated TV series last year. I wrote about the comic and first few episodes of the 2018 adaptation when it was airing. Though, I haven’t posted much more on it because there’s a tiny percentage of its fandom I want to avoid, as well as 30+ years on the series is still— pain. This one is a tragedy folks. However, it also has a beautiful healing love story and touched on a variety of hot button issues that are sadly still relevant today. My love for these two teen characters in a gritty USA will live forever.

Chihaya and Kagetsuya

I’ve written before how the sci-fi title Earthian was what introduced and endeared respect for m/m comics from Japan for me. The art style of Yun Kouga has changed a bit over the years, nevertheless still stands out from the crowd. And Earthian with a taboo love between androgynous male angels remains my favourite of her work.

Michiru Kaiô and Haruka Tennô

Sailor Moon has become a multimedia sensation and is beloved around the world. Many kids and even adults of all sorts in the 90s will remember it in one form or another and cite it as an influence for pursuing careers in all sorts of creative fields. Along with countless fans recognizing or discovering something of themselves in the characters. There are several different characters for rep in the series. But particularly for me Michiru and Haruka were an opportunity in a very anti-LGBTQ+ climate (their relationship was even refashioned as being cousins when brought out in English for the first time) to nevertheless see such a loving, positive relationship.

Tomoyo Daidôji

Love is a theme the creative team CLAMP revisits and revisits and Cardcaptor Sakura is the magical girl comic series with a theme on all different forms. It is one of the first all ages titles from Japan that I will recommend to people. (Despite fyi containing a whopping four student-teacher relationships. Not the purpose of this post to go into right now though.) The best friend to Sakura, Tomoyo is one of my favourite characters. Always supportive, maybe a bit alarming popping out of bushes or other spots with her camera at the ready to catch either Sakura’s everyday life or battles, and possessing boundless fashion sense. (Btw, there are other characters in the series that are or could be interpreted as examples for my list as well. Sakura among them.)

Isabella Yamamoto

Paradise Kiss by Ai Yazawa, a sequel of sorts to one of the huge girls’ comics titles of the 1990s Gokinjo Monogatari, introduced a group of teenagers on the verge of graduating, some with an idea of what to do with their lives and others questioning the path they’ve so far taken. Isabella from an affluent background but, who struggled for acceptance from her family or nearly anyone until she was gifted a handmade dress by her childhood friend George (who is Bi btw), studies pattern drafting at the same art school as Gokinjo Monogatari. The most mature of the main cast, refined, always listening and offering a cup of tea, she achieves her dream career and self-actualization in fashion. Since I have a degree in fashion design, I have to agree that clothes are so much more than just something we wear.

#lgbtq characters #comics #catwoman #wonder woman #poison ivy #taku #venomm #juli bauernfeind #john constantine #stormer #kimber benton #ash lynx #eiji okumura #chihaya #kagetsuya #michiru kaiô #haruka tennô #tomoyo daidôji #isabella yamamoto

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flying-elliska · 5 years

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What are the important bisexual characters that you said helped you? I am having a hard time finding good bi representation in which they aren’t considered promiscuous or unstable

Hiya anon ! What a quality question, thank you ! Here’s another mini essay about bi rep lmao. If there are some that I forgot please tell me ! And to everyone, tell me about the bi characters who made an impact on your life, I’d love to know !!!!

Okay so.

- When I answered the anon and talked about the characters that helped me come to terms with my sexuality, I talked about two in particular. Jack Harkness from Torchwood is depicted as very promiscuous, and somewhat instable. He still meant a lot to me because a) him sleeping around was never that much of a problem, it was because he was from the future, where things were different, which I thought was refreshing and b) his instability was because of the weight of being an immortal hero. Also fanon!Dean Winchester from SPN, as an older, more macho, emotionally witholding, badass dude written as bi meant a lot to me, but he doesn’t really avoid that stereotype either. But at least they were heroes. However, I can understand wanting bi characters that actually don’t fit that stereotype, because bi people irl aren’t all like that, even if there is nothing wrong per se about sleeping with a lot of different people, or having mental issues to struggle with. And that was a while ago and now we have more and more cool characters ! Such as :

- Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn Nine-Nine. One of the best portrayals of bisexuality on TV imho. She didn’t start out as bi, she was this tough, cool, scary but with a heart of gold cop who had a lot of other plotlines before. But then, since they saw that a lot of wlw got this vibe from her, were really into her, and the actress came out as bi herself, they decided to use this. So it was super organic, and the way they introduced the subject was true to Rosa herself ; she’s a super private person, she doesn’t like anybody knowing about her life (it’s actually a running joke and Rosa Diaz has been implied to not even be her real name). But then she is dating a woman, and struggles with her parents not understanding and her coworkers find out, help her and support her. Her gay captain is there for her in his typical stoic but hilarious way. They organize game night with her when her parents won’t anymore. We see her crushing on women and dating, but it is treated exactly as the other character’s love life, they never make a big deal out of it. She isn’t the token queer character. She says outright she is bisexual and there is a specific point about her mom not understanding it’s not a phase and thinking she’ll end up with a man anyway, which #relatable. The focus is on the team as found family. Also right now she’s dating a butch woman, which is awesome since they are so underrepresented on TV and I hope we see more of her. That show really is my comfort show, it’s still bloodly hilarious and it really transcends the format to say some really deep woke stuff too, but never in a way that feels on the nose. Everyone should watch it tbh.

- Korrasami ! Oh my god, I was so blown away when they got together. They’re two characters from the animated series Legend of Korra, they start out as rivals in love who have feelings for the same guy, but as they have to fight baddies together, they become bestest of friends, and both fall out of love with the guy. Then in season 3 and 4, their relationship becomes central to the show, as Asami stands by Korra through some really tough shit. Also, they’re both ultra badass and fight really well together. A lot of fans started reading their chemistry as romantic, but we’d never thought they’d actually go there. But the show ends with them walking into the ‘sunset’ (well, the spirit lands) together, holding hands. Now, it was never completely explicit on the show BUT they were dealing with a lot of censure from the networks and you have to be willingly obtuse not to read it as romantic. And after that the creators drew them on dates, and there is a comic series in which they are shown kissing, talking about their feelings, introducing each other to their families, etc. It made me feel so validated when it happened, and I just adore the whole ‘love triangle ditches the middle one and fall in gay love with each other’ trope. (is it a trope yet ? it should be.) It’s still a kids show at its core, but it has amazing depth and deals with some very deep shit. Korra starts off as a bit annoying but she has a really cool development, she’s a girl character we need more of - brave, dynamic but also brash and reckless and action driven in ways that are almost always exclusively shown for boys. And Asami is a more typical girly girl but she’s also a brilliant engineer and has a spine of steel and she’s also very slyly funny. They’re amazing. And the comics are super cute.

- Now there are a lot of characters who are bi/pan that I love, and are good characters in themselves, but their arcs do intersect in some ways with promiscuity and mental instability. I’m thinking about Even from Skam and all his remake variants, Magnus Bane from Shadowhunters, several characters from Black Sails, Sarah Lance and Constantine from Legends of Tomorrow, Eleanor Shellstrop from the Good Place, Bo from Lost Girl, Ilana from Broad City, Joe McMillan from Halt and Catch Fire, God/Chuck from Supernatural (lmaooooo), several characters on Penny Dreadful, or in a totally different category, Vilanelle from Killing Eve or Hannibal from the series (who are hella bad guys but it’s never linked to their sexuality, and are also incredibly compelling to watch.)

And even though these characters taken individually, I would argue, are good rep because they’re complex and layered and interesting and never one-dimensional (and watching them feels incredibly empowering at times)....it’s still a trend. I feel like when writing a character that is attracted to multiple genders, there is always this sort of...tangle of tropes that writers default to, unconsciously. Some negative and some positive. It used to be this trope of bis being villainous, instable, jealous, flaky, immature, perverted, manipulative, cheaters, amoral, greey, etc...and then it evolved into something of a reclaiming and subverting this trope. So now you feel like the Bi Character kind of has to be badass, glamorous, seductive, often superpowered or extraordinary in other ways.. And they also for multiple reasons (they’re immortal, they’re sensitive artist souls, they’re from the future, they’re psycho, they’re exccentric comic relief, they’re daring adventurers and pioneers) don’t care about social norms which allows them to sleep and fall in love with whomever. And so they tend to have those super busy romantic/sexual histories and very troubled backstories. In the past it was a bad thing, now it’s often presented as this positive, enlightened or at least fun and badass thing. They’re heroic, with big hearts, a tremendous lust for life and a cool rebellious attitude. They’re complex, dramatic, tortured. Which can be super cool, too.

But it would be nice to have more ‘normal’ bi characters. I mean, boring bisexuals need to see themselves represented too ! Our sexualities don’t give us super powers. At the same time, it is true that bisexual ppl have higher rates of mental illness, which deserves to be explored, but it would be nice if it was actually articulated and not just part of this trope. But still. We need rep, I think, that is more grounded and varied. So I think that’s also why I read a lot of fanfic. (I was really into the idea of bi Steve Rogers for a long time, partly also because he’s both very mentally resilient, kinda boring in a good way, and very unexperienced in terms of sex/romance, which is pretty much the opposite of the trope)

- I think books, and YA in general, are a good place to find these ‘normal bis’ characters. I’m thinking in particular of Leah from Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli (from the same book series that gave us the ‘Love, Simon’ movie) which is a super sweet coming of age/romance story about a super normal teenager who just happens to be also into girls (esp her best friend) and is loud and funny and very lovable and has zero doubts about being bi. You also have Adam Parrish from the Raven Cycle, another one of my forever faves ; he has an abusive family so PTSD from that but it never feels tropey, and it’s completely detached from his sexuality. He has magic powers, too. But his character feels completely opposite to the trope. He’s hardworking, somewhat withholding, prickly (and sometimes awkward), ambitious, determined, down to earth, and has a beautiful love story with another boy. And also Jane, from Jane Unlimited by Kristin Cashore, also really cool ; she’s a nerdy, smart girl who is actually inspired by Jane Eyre who has cool adventures in a weird house where we can follow her on different paths depending on the choices she makes, several of which are love stories. And finally the main character from The Seven Husbands from Evelyn Hugo, kinda fits the trope yeahhh since she’s a super glam actress who well, has seven husbands but it’s a pretty clever deconstruction since it turns out (slight spoilers) that Evelyn is actually through most of her life faithful in heart to the same person and the rest is mostly out of necessity, and her story feels very real and raw and down to earth.

- I don’t go there yet but I really want to check out Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Schitt’s Creek which I have read have very good bi rep. And I want to catch up on Orphan Black (Cosima and Delphine both don’t have exact labels but they’re multi-gender attracted and they’re this cool couple of scientists in a relationship that gets a happy ending). I will never forgive what they did to Lexa so I stopped watching but I do think that Clarke Griffin from The 100 is very good bi rep. Alexia from Skam France, meanwhile, is a bit of a boundary case for me because, even though she’s presented as the ‘weird one’ from the group, very colorful and liberated and exccentric, she’s still a very normal teen who’s happy and comfortable in her own skin, which is awesome.

- Disclaimer, I included characters in here that are also pan/omnisexual or don’t have a label but are attracted to several genders, for the purpose of this discussion i don’t think the difference is all that relevant at least to me (i mostly identify as bi for the sake of simplicity but tbh i could also fit under pan so i feel represented by all those characters). But I understand the importance of characters that state their identities more clearly and with pride.

- So in conclusion : there is nothing wrong with having a sexually active life or struggling mentally (even tho that one is not fun). And I do love all my badass casanova time travelling super powered bis.

But we need more bi characters that don’t fit that trope. We need bi characters in children’s shows, or that don’t have more than one relationship, or that don’t have a relationship at all, to break the tendency to always show bisexual ppl as overly sexual. We need bi characters in committed relationships to break this idea that bi characters are bound to cheat or can’t be satisified with only one person. We need bi characters that are mentally stable and successful and happy, to show that it’s possible. We need bi characters that are boring, bookish, nerdy, ordinary, clumsy, not particularly seductive, socially awkward, rule-sticklers, etc...to show that bi people are not all party animals, or doing it for attention, or to be wild, rebellious and socially progressive. It’s just a sexuality, it doesn’t say anything about your personality. Even though there are some correlations with MI or being bi might bring you in contact with more progressive ideas and to see life a bit differently, there is nothing automatic about it.

- In conclusion, reading testimonies from real people also helped me a lot. It’s a very dated but I got the book “ Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out “ when I was struggling with my own sexuality and it helped a lot, to read that even back then (1991) you had all sorts of regular ppl claiming to be bi and that it was not a phase or a fad or whatever.

#bisexuality #bi rep #media representation #bi pride #lgbt #bi characters

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mavrustheunskooled · 5 years

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Why is Bare: A Pop Opera not as super popular as Dear Evan Hansen or Be More Chill? The fandom loves LGBT rep (which Bare has) and the songs are amazing and I think B:APO is actually superior to both of those. Thoughts? I mean the musical fandom tends to try to find LGBT characters even when they aren't stated, so why do you think Bare is not as popular?

this is a very interesting question and I am hopefully going to do it justice by analyzing Fandom, Musical Writing, and Many Other Things I’m Super Passionate About

the short: many factors and a lot of luck

the unnecessarily long:

(opening disclaimer: I love dear evan hansen and be more chill, and I’m not upset that they’re popular musicals because I feel that they’re popular for a reason. anything that sounds like an insult in the following response isn’t such because I truly enjoy both of those musicals a lot)

(another disclaimer: spoilers for bare, DEH, and BMC, also mentions of homophobia)

on paper, bare seems like the exact sort of musical that would be popular. bare the musical (cursed as it is) has a cast of super popular actors like Barrett Wilbert Weed, Gerard Canonico, Taylor Trensch, Alice Lee, Alex Wyse, a high quality bootleg exists of the 2013 LA cast, it’s got LGBT+ rep, complex women characters… and yet it’s got a tiny fan base. Why?

first let’s look at why dear evan hansen and be more chill are popular. I’m more well versed in bmc, so let’s look at its history (disclaimer: I’m estimating dates but this is roughly the timeline)

the original bmc run was in 2015 I believe. they recorded a soundtrack, everything was fine, and they closed. in 2017, people began discovering the soundtrack in hoards. specifically, they were discovering one song: Michael in the bathroom. that’s even how I learned about the show- I heard that song and had to look up the rest of the soundtrack. and in February of 2019, they’ll start previews on broadway because the fandom was revived

why this song? I think a ton of fame comes from talent, yes, but also from luck. I think bmc was lucky that Michael in the bathroom, a great song, was discovered as the great song that it is. I also think the fame came because that song is super relatable. as someone with pretty bad anxiety, that song really touched me because I’ve definitely spent parties hiding in the bathroom and avoiding everyone and wishing I was dead because I’m so overwhelmed with anxiety. it’s relatable, so people flocked to it.

this made me pause to think “what is bare’s hook song” my first thought was a quiet night at home if we want a song in the same vein as MITB, but that song isn’t as hype as MITB (and fandoms don’t care about fem characters as much as it cares about masc characters). my next thought was are you there because I think it’s a bop and a relatable “pls someone help” kind of song, but I don’t know which song everyone could relate to as much as everyone could relate to MITB

and speaking of relatable content- that’s where the DEH connection comes in. dear evan hansen is similarly relatable, although it takes that to an extreme given what Evan does as a result of his anxiety. Michael and Evan are relatable characters, even if you don’t condone everything they do (and if you condone everything Evan does, we have much to talk about)

but doesn’t bare have relatable characters?? absolutely !! there’s Peter, a closeted gay kid who wants to come out, and Jason, someone who acts tough but is secretly very insecure, and Nadia, with her body image issues, and Ivy, who people won’t take seriously because they’ve decided they already know her, and so many other complex characters. so why are they left behind?

let’s look at bare’s history:

bare was originally written in the 90s (I want to say 1999, but I could be wrong) the performance most people consider the quintessential bare performance was in 2004 with Michael Arden, John Hill, Jenna Leigh Green, etc.

if you compare this to DEH and BMC, the first issue is clear. DEH was hugely popular around 2016. BMC began to grow in popularity in 2017. these are very, very new shows. 20 years doesn’t sound like a lot, but in our current age where time seems to pass so quickly which each new fad, bare seems like an older musical, and a lot of people aren’t the biggest fan of older musicals. and they don’t have to be !! but it’s a personal preference of some people that could affect how they view bare as a potential musical to be a fan of

in terms of the music of bare, it’s definitely catchy, but it’s not like a pop song. (again, no shade at DEH and BMC because those aren’t jukebox musicals or anything). bare is simply not as easy to listen to as DEH and BMC are in my opinion (and it’s not the most complicated thing ever either, but holy cow its lyrics are smart and I have to throw that in here)

now let’s look at reasons why people may not want to watch bare. while it is great that it has canon gay characters, compelling women characters, and is very cleverly written it also has issues that can be turn-offs to people. this includes:

-bury your gays

-gay-guy-cheats-on-boyfriend-with-girl trope

-gay-guy-gets-outed trope

-and potentially other homophobic tropes

I’m not shaming bare for perpetuating these tropes because it was written 20 years ago, and lgbt+ people are allowed to enjoy media in spite of its perpetuation of negative tropes, but for some people these things are enough to turn them away. and I don’t blame them! I watched bare the musical before I watched bare a pop opera, and when Jason I died I closed out of YouTube without finishing the show because I was so Sick of bury your gays.

I am aware that there are reasons Jason died at the end of bare (they’re making a statement about how homophobia kills, particularly how homophobic religious people can have an awful affect on young religious gay people), but there comes a time when “reasons for a gay character to die” is just too much. sometimes, you just want the gay character to live, and I completely respect that notion because I felt the exact same way when I watched bare the musical. I remember when I first watched bare the musical I wrote a thread about how as a Romeo and Juliet adaptation, bare follows some things closely (like death at the end) while avoiding other extremes (Romeo running off to another country) and I thus felt the death was unnecessary. if someone else feels similarly about being sick of gay characters dying, they have every right to not want to watch bare

that’s enough on why someone might not want to watch bare. let’s get back to bare vs DEH and BMC

I also think a big aspect of fandoms is shipping. the fetishization of MLM (and consequently ignoring fem characters completely, along with focusing solely on white men for their shipping and ignoring men of color) is a huge problem in fandoms that I could talk about forever, but for the sake of this response, I’ll keep it a bit shorter

DEH and BMC profit heavily off of shipping in terms of gaining popularity. people love Evan x Connor (and other ships but that’s the main one I see), and people love Jeremy x Michael (and others). so why then do people not care about bare, a show with a canon relationship between 2 basic white men, which is their ultimate goal?

I think people like the idea of these mlm ships more than canon content. if there’s canon, it’s harder for them to make a variety of ships because it feels like everything else has to rotate around the canon without touching it (which is where the bare fandom gets Matt x Lucas because they’re the closest they have to 2 basic men- I can write my criticism of them another time though)

I’ve also seen posts saying that things with canon lgbt+ characters sometimes have smaller fandoms because there is no need for lgbt+ theorizing- it’s right there, and if you want lgbt+ content, watch the thing. I don’t necessarily agree with this for myself (I’ll reblog every pilgrim’s hands gifset I see) but I can definitely see how other people might think this way

failing to hype up stuff with lgbt+ characters can have a negative impact. BMC is the prime example of how a show can be revived by its passionate fan base. if people aren’t talking about bare, it’s not going to spread like other shows do

this is kind of all over the place but anyway- I want to talk about characters more. one thing DEH and BMC have are great, complex characters that are very easy to boil down to a fandom’s favorite stereotypes. I am absolutely not saying DEH and BMC have simple characters because I think all of them have layers; however, fandoms do love to go “this is precious cinnamon roll who can do no wrong and this is evil awful terrible irredeemable person” and it’s a bit difficult to do that with bare.

you can say Peter is your perfect son, but he does try to force Jason out before he’s ready. you can say Ivy is the evil seductress trying to tear apart your gay babies, but I will physically fight you. there aren’t any black-and-white good or bad bare characters (except Father Flynn- hate him), which doesn’t fit in line with the way fandoms function. sweeping generalizations about the current state of society based on the internet are exhausting and bad, but we do live in an age where everything must either be perfect or evil, and you can’t do that with bare. no one “did nothing wrong uwu” and that’s what fandoms Want

(note: they will excuse wrong actions, such as everything wrong Connor Murphy has ever done, if the character is played by a mildly attractive guy they want to ship with another mildly attractive guy)

another point that I don’t have fully fleshed out thoughts on enough to devote too much time to is the integration of parents into the shows. in both DEH and BMC, the parents get redemption arcs. in bare, Claire does say she love Peter at the end, but she’s much less of a sympathetic character than Mr. Heere or Heidi (that’s her name right- Evan’s mom) or the Murphys. when I was younger, I wasn’t allowed to watch anything that painted parents, or adults in general, in a negative light, but maybe that’s not a universal experience

this is getting way too long and it probably has more thought put into it than what was necessary, so I’ll try to close this quickly

I think, first off, that DEH and BMC completely deserve the hype that they have received. they’ve got compelling stories, interesting characters, and fantastic soundtracks. I also think that luck factors heavily into them getting what they deserve. there are plenty of great shows, like bare and the boy who danced on air and spies are forever and probably more that I’m not thinking of, that have great music and characters and story that, out of sheer chance, don’t get the chance they should have been given. there is no bulleted list someone can follow and at the end they’ll be on broadway with an armful of tonys; is the luck of the draw, and bare has not been afforded that chance

I’ll end with some reasons why anyone who happened to read this but might not be a bare fan should listen to or watch bare:

- it is an amazingly clever show; every time I watch it or listen to it, I realize another moment of foreshadowing or a line I originally brushed off was actually very significant or there’s another recurring motif/theme in the music

- it’s full of bops (go listen to you and I or are you there or portrait of a girl)

- canon gay characters in a canon gay relationship

- 3 dimensional fem characters that actively criticize stereotypes

- it’s about a religious gay boy who grapples with his religion and his sexuality and how those two things can coexist

- it is Very Very Good

in conclusion: bare is very good and deserves attention xx

#this is all over the place but I tried #idk if this is what you wanted but it's what you got ldkfjdlsjfk #I Love analyzing stuff like this- this is my dream ask ldkfjlskf #ask #bluejaye91 #bare a pop opera #dear evan hansen #be more chill #it's after 5 tags that stuff doesn't show up in main tags right?#bc I'm tagging for myself and not for everyone but who knows if everyone will see it anyway ldkjfdlf #rambles

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