#pre-code films are so much fun

[hotvintagepoll]

Propaganda

Barbara Stanwyck (Ball of Fire, The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity)—I hope someone else has submitted better propaganda than I because I don't want my girl's prospects to rest on me just yelling PLEASE VOTE FOR MY TERRIBLE HOT GIRLFRIEND. She is a delight in everything! She is often a sexy jerk! (It's most of the plot of Baby Face!) Even when she plays a "good girl" (as an example, Christmas in Connecticut, which more people should see) she's still kind of a jerk and I love her for it! She won't take men's shit and she sure wouldn't take mine!

Mae Clarke (The Public Enemy, Frankenstein)—she was in frankenstein. which i think is neat

This is round 1 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

Mae Clarke propaganda:

Barbara Stanwyck propaganda:

"THE queen of screwball comedies. I adore her, I'd kill for her, I will cry if she's not gonna win this poll."

"listen ok she had awful politics she was a mccarthyist right wing wacko BUT she's so incredibly hot that i've deluded myself into believing i could fix her. if you see her onscreen she carries herself in a way that's just so effortlessly sexy AND she has just a stunning face. imo she was at her hottest in the 1940s but even as early as the late 1920s she had a rly captivating screen presence and just a beautiful face, and then post-1950 she was just irresistibly milfy so really she was just always incredibly hot. she was also an incredibly talented actress who was equally stellar in melodrama, film noir, and unhinged screwball comedy. the blonde wig they made her wear in double indemnity is notoriously silly looking but she still looks sexy in it so that's gotta count for something. i've watched so many terrible movies just for a chance at seeing her that i think her estate should be paying me damages."

"Not often thought of for her sultriness, Barbara Stanwyck was incredible in that she could actually choose to be hot if the role called for it, and then have a glow-down to look ordinary for another role. She wasn't the most beautiful or effervescent, but damn did she have rizz. Watch her with Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire teaching him about "yum-yum" or with Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve whispering huskily into his ear."

"THE leading lady of the golden age of hollywood. One of the only actresses to work independent of a studio, making short-term contracts that enabled her to make movies wherever she wanted. She had so much range, and could act in basically any genre. She's been rumored to be a lesbian literally since she was active in Hollywood; most notable is the rumor that she had a long time on-and-off relationship with famously bi Joan Crawford, her "best friend" for decades (They lived right next door to one another). She also lived with Helen Ferguson, her "live-in publicist" for many years. She was the quintessential femme fatale in Double Indemnity, and really pushed sexual boundaries in her pre-code films like Baby Face, and the famous screwball The Lady Eve, where she plays basically a downlow domme. Allegedly, when a journalist asked her if she was a lesbian, she straight up threw him out of her house. She even played a lesbian in Walk on the Wild Side"

"She is always the smartest woman in the room. Watching her play Henry Fonda like a befuddled fiddle in The Lady Eve was a highlight of my life. Femme fatale in Double Indemnity, comedy queen in Ball of Fire. She can do anything."

"She was part of my gay awakening"

"SHE'S A PRE-CODE QUEEN. She did everything, drama, comedy. The most beautiful woman in the world to watch weep. Beg for to step on you with those legs. Fun Babs story: Ginger Rogers was offered the role in Ball of Fire but said, “Oh, I would never play that part, she’s too common.” So they called Barbara Stanwyck and they said “We offered this to Ginger Rogers but she’s turned it down, would you be interested?” And she read the script and she said; “You bet! I LOVE playing common broads.” (Source: https://misstanwyck.tumblr.com/post/72996544180/barbara-stanwyck-photographed-for-ball-of-fire)"

#mae clarke #barbara stanwyck #hotvintagepoll #ladies 1 #fuck that old woman #Youtube

[pennyserenade]

i’m aware i have a wide range of individuals from many fandoms here, but i believe there’s a cary grant movie for everyone, so here are my recommendations:

for the x-files fans who enjoy the film noir energy: notorious (suspense, tension, the best chemistry you ever did see between two people aside from mulder & scully)

for the x-files fans who enjoy episodes like bad blood: arsenic & old lace (do NOT look anything up about this film before you see it. go into it with zero ideas about what’s going to happen and you’ll have so much fun), bringing up baby

for the x-files fans who love fox mulder because he is impassioned and stubborn and always getting himself into trouble: talk of the town, north by northwest, suspicion

for the javier peña lovers: people will talk (i know you love a good man who’s trying to protect a woman), north by northwest (i also know you love a man who can’t seem to stop getting himself into bad situations)

for dieter bravo lovers: the awful truth, the philadelphia story, his girl friday (all part of what i lovingly refer to as the cary grant ‘husband to ex-husband to husband again’ universe. what is dieter bravo not, if a man that annoys you so bad you divorce him but then charms you again so you remarry him?)

the hunger games fans: the eagle and the hawk (this is what they call a pre-code film, which means it was allowed to be a bit more like the films we have today. it’s deeply sad but incredibly powerful movie about the dangers of war and it what it does to people), holiday (much less serious but very anti-rich people), the talk of the town (i know you all love a good rebel)

#misc. #recs. #HAPPY BIRTHDAY CARY GRANT #there’s quite literally no one like him. so much of his filmography is fantastic and expands to almost every genre #if there’s a specific character or vibe you’re looking for and it’s not mentioned here just ask and i will find one for you ! #or any old hollywood movie really. there’s so many good ones that i think people miss out on

[ribcageteeth]

I forgot to ask. 14, 63, 49, 50, 43, 38.

Oh gosh let's see...

14) favorite "controversial" horror film

Maniac. Yes yes, it's horribly violent and grimy and it makes you feel like you want to have a shower once it's done, that's the point and it makes it extremely well, but also it has a super incredible Tom Savini head explosion, and I'm such a slut for that. Kinda like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer without any wildly inaccurate "true story" claims, so it gets to go way way over the top with it!

63) favorite 70s horror film

Deep Red! It's a murder mystery, it's inexplicably supernatural, it's having an interesting conversation about gender with itself, it's full of creative kills and bright strawberry red fake blood, it's legitimately creepy, it's brilliantly shot... I could go on, I love that movie.

49) favorite horror film score/soundtrack

Candyman. That score gives me chills, and I think it perfectly highlights the dark romantic themes of the movie. Philip Glass really looked at this script and said "Ohh I get it, he's a Dracula" and he was SO RIGHT. Second place definitely goes to Suspiria though, that one also has an incredible score, and I will occasionally just sit and listen to it.

50) favorite horror film that takes place during your favorite season/time of year/holiday

Ginger Snaps! I don't know how it isn't more acknowledged as a halloween movie, that's the whole reason she gets away with being a wolf at the end! The climax happens at a halloween party! Also, unrelated, this movie has one of my favorite Horror Movie Moms I've ever seen, I think she's so funny and she steals every scene she's in.

43) favorite black and white horror film

Ok, I'm torn here between The Invisible Man, and The Bad Seed. On the one hand, The Invisible Man is a pre-code technical marvel with groundbreaking hand-done painstaking effects that still hold up to this day, and it's high-camp and hilarious. Jack Griffon is a chaotic bastardous gremlin of a man and I love him so much. On the other hand, The Bad Seed is a very fun example of an early stage-to-film adaptation in a post-code era that, upon conforming to film standards of the time, becomes even more high-camp and hilarious than the original production. Rhoda Penmark is a manipulative conniving murderous genius nine-year-old and I love her so much. Also. Oh my god. If you haven't seen The Bad Seed. The hays code dictated that you had to kill your villain in the end, no matter what, and you will never in a million years guess how they do it here.

38) favorite horror film that you physically own

Phone. It's a Korean film from 2002 and it freaks me oooooooout!! It's about a journalist who has to go into hiding after she writes a reputation-ruining piece about a sex scandal, and the guy involved starts sending threatening phonecalls. And she just. happens to hide out in the worst possible place for this. I saw it on xfinity's horror channel way back in the day, and once I started growing my dvd collection as an adult, I sought it out specifically.

Thanks so much for the ask! This was fun!

[renthony]

I was at a comic show today and saw a box of "Golden Age- Pre-Code" horror and romance comics. It made me think of that cool internet stranger and their essays. It was interesting to stop and think about the media that existed *before* the Comics Code Authority (not sure how directly related that is to the Hays Code, but certainly tangential.) That not only did it, ya know, exist, but that for genres like horror and romance it was the "Golden Age". History isn't a linear of more prudish to less prudish. Which is obvious when you actually think about it, of course, but not the default assumption. I didn't look through them since it was hot and crowded in that particular corner, but it was interesting to see! So thanks for writing about media history, it makes hobbies related to media consumption much more interesting.

Oh wow, thanks for thinking of me, that's so flattering! <3

I've never been super knowledgeable about comics (for some reason my brain just doesn't like to process long comic pages very easily), but I've been learning more about the Comics Code Authority lately. Several of my sources for the Hays Code project are general texts about American censorship, so bits and pieces of that history show up in my reading, and it seems like just as much of a fascinating rabbit hole as the rest of it. I'm pretty excited to learn more about it and see what kind of parallels there might be to my film research.

God, media studies is fun. Often kinda stressful, but still, it feeds my little former-anthropology-student brain like nothing else.

[powderblueblood]

I want your writing administered into me intravenously. You nail fun, snappy dialogue and lines like a total pro but what hits me the hardest are lines like this.

"She's a cold front, but she laughs like a lightning strike. I feel like thunder, powerless to do anything but roll after her"

Like???? that's a crazy beautiful line how dare you! I want to hear every single thought that goes through your mind when you sit down to write. You're one of my favourite writers I've come across on here and I feel like I want to ask you a million questions about writing and how you developed your style. One ticket for the powder origin story please

uUuAUAUggghh you're SO SWEET THANK YOU

this honestly means so much to me because i notoriously peddle in the genre of Having a Laugh so when the emotional bits i write ALSO resonate that's a moment most pleasing to me in my career <333333

origin story?? oh my gosh WELL, i'm not a fic writer by trade, i used to write a lot of roleplay (hence the obsession with dialogue and original characters l o l) but i take direct and heinous influence from a lot of the art that i consume. like, top three characters that i go back to in terms of they talk good off the top of my head-- lorelai gilmore from gilmore girls, boyd crowder from justified, the drag queen katya zamolodchikova (who is... very much a real person but you get what i mean). every line a poem. every frame a painting. you know the vibes.

i'm a big fan of films from the pre-code era (1930s-40s, before the censorship heavy hays code was introduced) and that influences a lot of the way i write. i got into it from trying to studying that fast-paced way they talk in gilmore girls 8 million years ago and read that amy sherman palladino was matching the pace of like, screwball comedies and borscht belt comedians and that shit makes my brain fizz like an alka seltzer, i love it. things that are short should be punchy and things that are long-winded should have dedicated rhythm. steady like a train, sharp like a razor quoth reese witherspoon from walk the line. that's the GOAL anyway!

also movies from the 70s, 80s, 90s! i realize that this answer is becoming more and more a cacophonous yell of DAMN BUT I LOVE THAT DIALOGUE but damn! i love that dialogue! my thing about a lot of modern productions is they don't do dialogue like they used to and i wish they did! my dialogue style informs my narration so much (i think especially as regards eddie in hellfire & ice, when i write from his pov it's so different from lacy's).

thank you so much for asking this and sorry about how carried away i got LOL i love this shit i really. really love this shit

#powder room talk #Anonymous #the autism juuuuumped out on this one whoops #writing

[esteemed-excellency]

@eddie-dearest I had to add your tags because that's exactly what I asked myself when I started thinking about the character. I didn't plan a backstory or characterisation, I started playing because the alternative history concept of the game seemed intriguing and I wanted to explore what it had to offer in terms of writing. I played a lot of storylines just to see how the plot would proceed and I was immediately hooked by the mystery (this was around 2013). Hiram's characterisation is mainly based on the choices I made in game, and he turned out to be quite a mess, but in a fun chaotic way.

The rest of the post is under the cut because it got a little long.

After some years I started thinking about what kind of character would have made those choices and I elaborated a first concept for an oc, but I never thought that much about it. Around 2017 I deleted my old mail, completely forgetting it was linked to my game account so I had to start everything again, which was kind of a relief given all the new game dynamics that were added to the early game, and this time I had the character ready. I got some of my friends into the game too and we made a group chat (The Paramount Polycule started as the chat name lol) and that was the starting point for headcanons and characterisation development.

I love history and the 19th century is particularly interesting to me in terms of societal changes, a hyphen between the ancient regime and the contemporary 20th century ideologies (with all the good and bad implications that this entails), and technological advances. The process of change and how people react and adapt to it is what really intrigues me, and it's what got me into the game in the first place, and what prompted the background for the character. Hiram is fascinated by change and he loves to keep up with the times, I don't think he ever felt left behind by history. If he feels there's something he can't understand he dives head first into it until he figures it out. He approaches challenges like puzzles or games and he's still capable of wonder, even after a good dose of corruption arc.

Speaking of corruption arcs, I'm a tragedy enjoyer, other than a chaotic shenanigans appreciator, and I like when the narrative borders on horror. Gothic fiction with its specific motifs is one of my favourite genres, and another reason I started playing the game. I especially appreciate the theme of a place being haunted by itself and its history and/or moving through history haunted by what it was/what it is/what it could be, so you can see why Fallen London is so compelling to me. I also like themes of faustian bargains and that's why my character is Like That.

In terms of general vibes and aesthetic I love late 19th and early 20th century fashion, and I wanted Hiram to have the look of some actor from the 20s/30s interpreting a late 19th century character as an excuse to mix up multiple decades of fashion. The devils are anachronistic and fashion in Fallen London is so interesting to speculate. Pre code Hollywood and and pre nazi european cinema have the perfect aesthetic for me, and I got particularly inspired by the drama of austrian operetta films, hence the Anton Walbrook and Ronal Colman faceclaims. On a more personal note, I just projected some gender as I always do when I design a character. I like earlier 19th century fashion too, and that's why I made him so dandyish.

To end the post, here's a non-comprehensive list of medias that inspired Hiram's vibes and aesthetic:

the general concept of penny dreadfuls

À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans: not the protagonist, but the circling pointlessness of the plot, the aesthetic of the house, and the spiralling

whatever happens when you mix the late wave of english Romanticism with the Decadent movement

Doctor Faustus by Thomas Marlowe: that's like, thee bluebrint, and Hiram appreciates the irony

Tales from the Vienna Woods by Johann Strauss II

Delirium Waltz by Josef Strauss

Enemies to Lovers by Joshua Kyan Aalampour

Mr. Malum by The Dear Hunter: mandatory dramatic song, this is Hiram's playlist if anyone wants more music

Maskerade (1933): main faceclaim movie, the promo pics with Paula Wessely and Anton Walbrook dancing are inspo for the Quiet Deviless and Hiram (plot is extremely melodramatic if anyone is interested)

Gaslight (1940) and The Red Shoes (1948): Anton Walbrook goes insane with expressions

The Devil to Pay (1930): Ronald Colman is the other faceclaim actor, he has a funny dog in this movies, inspo for Sugarplum

The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo (1935): just the general fancy vibes, a suitcase full of money, and the iconic moustache look

#this got a little long and it might be all over the place but I have so many medias in my head when I think about the 19th century #and I'm sure I forgot something important but the main vibes are all here #hiram lore #and also my lore too #I am once again about to go to sleep so if there are some typos it's too late to care I'm posting this #backstory #this is more about my backstory but it still goes in the tag

[allysah]

list 5 topics you could talk about for an hour without preparing any material (i have reason to yap now).

james “jimmy” stewart.

jimmy is just like. that guy for me. i could probably go on an hours long tirade about him, his films, his characters, his relationships, his military experience, his ptsd, his politics, etc. without interruption. right now i'm specifically thinking of his relationship with henry fonda (who deserves his own honorable mention) which OH MY GOD is one of the best hollywood friendships to date. orson welles said they were either having the hottest affair in hollywood or were the straightest men alive. he realized they were the latter... anyways that leads me into:

old/classic hollywood + its underground queer scene and the hays code.

first of all just old hollywood in general i can go hours and hours about because i just love so many of the actors and actresses. leslie howard and gregory peck are other honorable mentions in that category. however, the queer folks will always be my favorite <3 people like farley granger and marlene dietrich come to mind as well as cary grant and his biwife energy. but just all of the queer undertones from then i just appreciate so, so much. also the HAYS CODE... when i get you... i've seen so many pre-code movies which are just incredible and whenever they put that damn code in place everything got boring... unless they fixed the subtext so then you have films like rope (1948) which is such a good gay film like wtf?? old hollywood is a gem and if you avoid black + white movies or just older movies in general you SUCK!!

franklin expedition.

i've written academic essays about this damn expedition and i had no sources at all. just my mind and a dream. for two years my only thoughts for a future career was becoming a franklin expedition researcher who worked in the arctic. of course that's not gonna work?? okay but these dumb mfers were some of my favorite people on this earth like COMMANDER JAMES FITZJAMES was a real person who walked this earth and i never even got close to touching him. this is sickening. captain francis crozier is ALIVE and WELL on king william island you just cannot see him. i think i will genuinely throw up if they ever find crozier's captain log on the hms terror. the desolation and sickness is just like. eye clawingly scary and i could never fathom what truly went down on that island. i feel so so bad for the cold boys and i love them so, so much.

fallout lore

here’s where i start geekin about shit. FALLOUT IS SO FUCKING GOOD I DONT CARE WHAT ANYONE SAYS. 3, 4 and new vegas are top tier games (yes nostalgia is clouding my head but idc) i also love 1 and 2 but genuinely cannot play a turn based game like that. okay but the entire plot of new vegas is such a top tier storyline and it’s just such a fun silly game and is like made perfectly for gay trans autistic people i love it. 4 is just The Game you play it doesn’t matter you just end up there and it’s always fun idc what the haters say PRESTON GARVEY MINUTEMEN #1!!! 3 is there. BUT ITS SO BAD ITS GOOD LIKE COME ON ITS ALMOST ENDEARING GOING BACK IN THOSE SUBWAY TUNNELS AND GETTING LOST FOR 30 MINUTES!! these games are the only reason i know the layouts of nevada, washington, d.c., and boston. thank you for the geography lesson AND the history lesson fallout. i love you.

civil war politics and battles

ok this is my latest fixation and one that came out of ABSOLUTELY no where. i literally told myself years ago to never become a civil war buff because it's so stupid and only old men like it but here we are. i for real blame this on david straithairn's portrayal of william h seward because otherwise i would NOT care (sorry ddl, i love you still). also atun-shei films and his humongous catalogue of videos. but oh my godddd i'm so obsessed with these annoying fuckers i hate them ALL. lincoln and seward are just an absolute class-act together and whenever i watched gettysburg (1993) it was just over for me. jeff daniels and c thomas howell when I CATCH YOU (I Want You)!!! it's just all so interesting i love seeing how these men ticked. it's like a zoo exhibition but with random dead racist white guys. (i also had like a 5 minute discussion about lincoln being racist today after i gave a book talk on team of rivals in my college comp. absolute all-timer)

HONORABLE MENTIONS!!!

rms titanic. film in general (i have memorized a shit load of the letterboxd catalogue and I WILL not shut up about my favorite films and directors). classic literature. us presidents. history in general. musical theatre. how arthur morgan is the best fictional character ever written period.

TAGGED BY: @rmstitanics (THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME YAP AND BASICALLY JUST RANT. SORRY!)

TAGGING: @brainandnarfunkel + no one in particular, but know if you see this i want you to… and i know you want to yap as well… :)

#me #thank u callie i had to air out the vibe i’m giving for this blog #these history hyperfixations better last me at least through college #if not my whole career (becoming a teacher) #just like my pa….

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 1/3/2023

VERY pleasing to me that the year starts and ends on a Sunday

mack doesn't know what a calendar is

listening

first song of the year: doja cat's say so (snakehips remix). just a pretty little soap bubble of a song. this is not to say it's insubstantial, bc i do think that doja cat is one of the harder hitters when it comes to production values, just that it's about a soft, ephemeral moment. in an interview i cannot locate she once said "if my songs make you get up and dance i've done my job" and this is very much a staple on my dishwashing playlist

i've stolen lyrics for a fic (no punches left to roll with) and plan to continue mining this song for fic and chapter titles. stay tuned

-

reading

hat tip to @blysse-and-blunder for reblogging a post about a buckwild academic plagiarism case. here's a short version, here's the long play by play with a bonkers twist in i think part 4.

unrelated: if RetractionWatch ever got real funding and wasn't constantly creaking along on a literal shoestring budget, they're in the top five of orgs i would like to work for. this would require me to be actually connected and qualified tho

-

watching

kicked off the sixth year of starting a new-to-me black and white movie at about ten forty/eleven PM on new year's eve, so i come into the new year watching something good. very important: it has to be a movie i have not seen but i already know i will love. previous years have been: sunset boulevard, yojimbo, the thin man, it happened one night, and bringing up baby. i am predisposed to noir and screwball comedies, but it is very funny that yojimbo kicked off the Cowboy Year and i simply have never looked back. i am reluctant to watch a cowboy movie as the first movie of the year bc they are so wildly varying in quality and i find most black-and-white american westerns afflicted with the hays code. do pre-code westerns exist? yeah. do i want to watch them? no.

this year was The Big Sleep (1946, Hawks), one of The film noirs. films noir?

can we bring back inexplicable nightclub scene where the female lead is singing something or performing a dance routine for funsies

more importantly, must a murder mystery be "good" or "comprehensible" or "a successful adaptation of the original novel's core plot"? is it not enough to see two tops, bogart and bacall, flirt at each other for the entire runtime?

pbatengf gb gur guerr (3) crbcyr jub jvyy fyvat guvf vagb ebg13 h trg fbzr Yber: qrfcvgr jevgvat frireny svpgvbany guerrfbzrf v qb abg yvxr gurz vey. v jbhyq znxr na rkprcgvba urer

-

playing

pokémon. we'll see if my opinion changes, bc i have some scheduled medical funtimes over the weekend where i will be lying around and waiting a lot, but i currently don't feel like grinding enough to beat the final boss. got all the way down into the crater! met the final boss! can't be bothered otherwise and i have the bad habit of stopping a game the instant it stops being fun, which is why i have never seen the fallout endgame bc after i unlock all the settlements and decorate them i'm like well! job's done, game's over.

i further can't be bothered to get screenshots off my switch at this moment so look at dragalge who i am really vibing with lately. very shaped. poison/dragon/water moves all in one creature is very helpful

-

making

password manager: i am changing every fucking password i have bc of the lastpass breach :) bitwarden has slightly fewer quality of life features but the free tier more than supports my needs. neither of my siblings uses a password manager aside from the built in chrome and apple ones (upside down smiley face emoji) so we'll save that battle and that family plan purchase for another day.

planner talk: i am outsourcing a greater portion of my brain to the planner as the post-covid fog continues and at this point i honestly think i would rather someone have unfettered access to my journal than unfettered access to my planner. the planner is where most of the living happens. (pro tip: preload birthdays into that thing and then write a reminder a month out to actually find and send off a birthday gift/card/what have you. this makes me feel extremely put together, but there not very many people i actually buy gifts for)

thoughtful gift talk: a related pro tip, if you find whimsical but slightly generic objets d’art at thrift stores and cannot quite justify them for yourself, try throwing them in a big box for those gifts you have previously written yourself reminders about. love a trinket box or a container of some sort to put a slightly more personalized gift in. eg these rabbit glass...lidded trinket dishes? idk they have a proper name but they're rabbit versions of the milk glass hen-on-nest dishes that used to be really popular during the depression. pen and cat for scale

these will probably go off to my sister for her birthday, holding some monogrammed earrings and a cat toy for her cat fern.

i suppose the "generic box of cool stuff but not so cool that you will mourn its loss" could also work for hostess or housewarming gifts if that is a situation that frequently happens to you. i feel a little bit like im showing my hand by sharing these aging tumblr population tips bc i had to derive them all from first principles but there is no need for YOU, gentle reader, to reinvent the wheel along with me.

#tuesday again #tuesday again no problem #gif heavy for no particular reason

[panicroomsammy]

13.14.15.

I’m doing these about Supernatural because I have so many thoughts about it right now!

13 - Unpopular opinion about XXX character?

This isn’t really an unpopular opinion among my circle of mutuals but Sam Winchester is not a dom and Dean Winchester is not a sub, and I think assigning them these roles indicates a superficial understanding of the show’s themes surrounding sexual assault. For Dean, most of his “queer coding” pre season eight is really just him being implied to have been a SA victim, but the combination of him playing it off like it’s nothing and fans being uncomfortable engaging with those themes makes it go unnoticed. Dean being used as bait is not queer coding no matter how much he acts like he’s fine with it - if looking harmless and pretty so your father can catch evil men doing something bad is a metaphor for anything it is a metaphor for sexual abuse. So when people make him a sub based on things he does/says about these kind of situations I find it very frustrating. If anything I would think that his history of trauma with men would make him feel the need to be in control if he ever had sex with a man consensually.

Sam on the other hand, while I do understand that some people see him repeatedly being deprived of bodily autonomy and control in other areas of life so they think he would want to be in control during sex (the thing that I think applies to Dean but that many ignore in regards to Dean - Samgirls are more open to exploring these themes which I appreciate), I do not think he would be this way with Dean. We repeatedly see the opposite in their canon non sexual dynamic. When Dean hits Sam more often than not Sam does not fight back. Sam repeatedly is forced to apologize and say Dean was right when Dean was clearly in the wrong. Whenever Sam tries to leave he always comes crawling back to Dean and apologizes for leaving. I know some people like to subvert tropes, but when I like a pairing from a show it is because I want to see their exact canon dynamic plus sex. I just don’t see the canon dynamic between Sam and Dean translating to Sam being a dom in this particular relationship.

14 answered separately because this post would be so long otherwise lol

15 - Unpopular opinion about the manga/show?

Supernatural isn’t bad. I mean, sure, the quality of the writing declined over time as it changed from being made because someone had a story they wanted to tell to a story being told because people want to make money, but it really isn’t that bad. The first two seasons are two really good seasons of television. The rest of the show does a decent job of sticking to its themes. The camera work and editing are fucking phenomenal but we never talk about how good Supernatural is at creative camera stuff because we don’t talk about the show’s strong points. The found footage kind of episodes are so fun and well done. The episodes where they deal with small spaces are so visually interesting and the camera work is incredible at conveying claustrophobic feelings that give those episodes a stronger horror - and especially gothic horror - overtone. The way that they film the characters from the point of view of whatever they’re hunting that is watching them works to create an unsettling horror vibe while also giving the audience clues as to what the monster is (or at other times misleading the audience before a big reveal). All of this is genuinely well done but we don’t talk about it enough because of the “spn bad” mentality.

(I have had this in my drafts forever and just remembered to post it)

#sa mention

[bedtimestoriesforbrokengirls]

This... Is BGNN

Things you might want to know, for Mar 23, 2023:

‘Choke Me Daddy:’ The Dangerous Truth About Breath Play Memes — If this were a “how to do breath play safely” piece —or even a “can breath play be done safely?” piece— it would be unremarkable. But it’s really just a carefully phrased clutching or pearls, with its journalistic sensibility established in its opening anecdote about how people don’t always mean the things they say online. That’s some keen insight, folks.

Low-rise denim shorts a poor choice for early spring wear — Depends on who’s wearing them.

Ai Weiwei’s Lego Version of Monet’s Water Lilies

Sex Worker-Led Payment Platform Shuts Down After Being Cut Off by Processor — If cryptocurrency can’t work for sex workers and erotica creators, then it’s utterly pointless.

Sex on the beach: pressures of extreme polygamy may be driving southern elephant seals to early death — It’s tough out there for an elephant seal pimp.

David Lynch knew how to make moments go viral before ‘going viral’ was a thing — He’s always known that art makes the biggest impact when it has a life outside the frame… when it infects the viewer and turns them into a semi-conscious collaborator. So… yeah.

Feral Hogs Are the Worst Invasive Species You've Never Thought About — You don’t have to convince me, buddy.

You’re Thinking About ‘Life’ All Wrong

Are Roblox’s new AI coding and art tools the future of game development? — This is genius on the part of the Roblox people. They’ve already made great strides toward turning game development into a casual activity, and generative AI will smooth the process even more.

Adobe made an AI image generator — and says it didn’t steal artists’ work to do it — The good: Adobe has trained their model using rights-cleared sources, so you can’t be sued for using their generated images. The less-good: I feel like the results should be viewed more like customizable clip art than some kind of human/machine collaborative painting… ultimately, Adobe owns the copyright to anything the model spits out. Even if they choose not to assert those rights… they have them.

Nick Lachey Ordered to Attend Alcoholics Anonymous, Anger Management After Altercation — Love is blind, like Nick’s rage.

How the Cinematography in ‘It Follows’ Trains You To Be Paranoid — We need to watch this on the stream… it’s a remarkable film.

Giant whale sinks 44-foot boat, sailors rescued — Whales are assholes.

'Pretty Baby' docuseries looks at Brooke Shields' controversial young fame — My older cousin somehow managed to get me into Blue Lagoon with her when I was a pre-teen… no telling how much flirting she had to do with the ticket-taker to pull that off.

ChatGPT comes for radio — Radio’s been dead for a long, long time, and ChatGPT is made up of the lifeless, stitched-together scraps of human existence. So it’s Frankenstein’s monster coming for a zombie.

Butters from South Park is getting the hero edit on TikTok — Let’s get this straight, motherfuckers: Butters is a hero everywhere, not just on TikTok.

★ It’s Game Over on Vocal Deepfakes — Yeah, as of now, audio recordings are no more reliable than signatures on a piece of paper or a pinky-promise.

Dancers Sue 7M Films Claiming Owner Runs a ‘Cult’ — I’ve gotta tell you, this feels like the least-fun sort of cult I can imagine. And I can imagine a lot of things about cults.

Amazon layoffs will shut down camera review site DPReview.com after 25 years — Amazon is demonstrating a shocking disregard here for an irreplaceable source of information.

#news

[titleleaf]

fifty ways to leave! SOOOO legit. Please regale us.

yessss I loved writing this fic but it feels like it's been ten thousand years so thank you for letting me revisit it

"fifty ways to leave", Taxi Driver (1976), Iris Steensma & Travis Bickle postcanon spectral gen written for Yuletide 2020

One thing I wanted to deal with in this fic is the film's uneasy conclusion with Iris being returned to her parents -- while being sexually exploited by Sport and witnessing violent crime is obviously a pretty awful state of affairs, there's plenty of stuff back at home that fucks kids up too, and I didn't like the thought that her right path in life necessarily meant going back to a settled socially-acceptable life. At the same time, older now, she's still stuck making compromises, selling a tacky fantasy, and being subordinated to dipshit men -- getting a shitty boring office job means forcing herself into a role she doesn't like much, both closeting herself as a queer woman and kind of doing workplace drag just to get through the door to interview. I wanted to write about Iris turned loose back in the urban wild without another person controlling her and trying to figure out how she wants to live.

I love writing fic about characters whose actors have work spanning decades where it's especially tempting to imagine those characters growing up/spanning time periods -- I just realized thanks to photos and shit I am now able to visualize Jodie Foster circa 1982-3 (with much nicer swingier hair than I have written Iris with in this fic) and it's so fun.

I love, love, love ghost stories and especially vanishing-hitchhiker-type stories of a living person sharing time and space with someone who couldn't possibly be there -- a phantom cabbie is just that turned inside out and I had fun trying to figure out the kind of visual signifiers that would flag to Iris that she's out of place even before she recognizes Travis. She's left with this tangible, physical record of their encounter, Travis' jacket as this object that's gotten dislodged from linear time, and in addition to continuing the vanishing-hitchhiker riff

Rereading now I think I also wanted to do some stuff with the physical residues of smoky, sooty, jizz-stained early-70s New York -- scent is a really powerful trigger for memories both good and bad and I know in my heart that both Travis Bickle and his taxi absolutely reek. Iris is as merciless to her own parents and upbringing in this fic as Travis is sentimental toward his own, but it's taken her this long to get that perspective on both of them and on Travis himself now that she's encountering him in the metaphorical flesh again. And I guess a ghost is another kind of residue??? Idk man.

If this fic has a sibling in the stuff I've written it's my fic for The Stand, "deep red bells" -- it's set in a no-Captain-Trips (or at least pre-Captain Trips) timeline where Nadine is trying to put together the information she can about this awful demon lover who's still pursuing her even a universe away, whose presence she can identify by its residues even if she can't find Flagg himself. If that's more about chasing ghosts this fic is just about Iris kind of living with them, and with the lack of satisfying conclusion and emotional resolution that a lot of people just end up living with. Iris in this fic is going to end up living to be like 85 and living an incredibly varied and rich life (idk what she'll end up doing -- feminist organizer, writer, artist, complicated person and incredible dresser and haunted urban waif) but she'll be carrying around the memories of this wildly unsettled, ambivalent experience and at times they'll be unbearably vivid even as they get more chronologically remote.

The title is because I cannot think about Paul Simon without laughing.

...I just realized that having Iris be raised Catholic opposite Travis Bickle's Schrader-given Presbyterian-coding gives them the same religious backgrounds as my own parents. I am going to try and avoid thinking about wtf this means about me psychologically.

#ska writes a thing

[lizardgimpking]

Book Review: Aliens vs Predator: Ultimate Prey (Various Authors)

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I’m a huge fan of the ‘Alien‘ franchise, and also a big fan of the ‘Predator’ series. Their famously crossed over butting of heads has led to some...decidedly mixed cinematic offerings, and a whole bunch of games, books and comics that vary from fantastic (Fire and Stone) to indisputable guilty pleasures (A v P v Judge Dredd). I must admit I’ve never read a AvP novel before this anthology offering, although I’ve dipped my toes into the written world of the ‘Alien’ franchise several times in recent years (The two Alex White novels are excellent). This collection of short stories seemed like a fun way to see how these two franchises merged in writing...and, well, indeed it was!

Featuring 15 stories from 16 authors, this is a pretty robust little anthology book. One thing I really appreciated was the consistency in length. There’s a little give either side, but pretty much every installment in this book runs for around 30 pages. That’s just the right amount to make for a solid day’s reading, which means you can comfortably work your way through the book at a nice clip of one story a day, with no need to pause in the middle of each one. You can obviously read more, or indeed less, but I found the pacing of each story to be just right for a fun daily excursion into the AvP universe.

As with any anthology collection, there’s ups and downs in terms of quality. It’s hard to feature so many authors, all dabbling in the same playground, without encountering some lackluster offerings along the way. There’s no utterly unreadable stories in the book, especially since none particularly outstay their welcome, but there are some rather uninspired concepts and iffy characterisation going on here. I won’t call out any of my least favourites, but needless to say there’s about 3 or 4 that just felt completely bland and/or more than a little goofy in premise and execution. There’s also a frequent lean towards including ‘female’ Predators in the mix, which whilst not the worst thing ever, did rub me the wrong way a little. I personally consider the Predator species as something of a gender ambiguous design, but several of the stories use the female body template designed for the game ‘Predator: Hunting Grounds’, which means they have breast armour and a generally smaller, curvier figure. That’s not to say they don’t still kick ass, and it’s also not to say that several of the stories don’t use the concept of female warriors/hunters in thematically interesting ways, I just prefer the idea that the basic Predators we’ve met in the films aren’t necessarily male or female, or...we at least can’t tell. Not every two-legged fictional species needs to conform to human body standards.

My favourite story is definitely ‘The Hotel Mariposa‘ by David Barnett, which pairs Aliens and Predators with a ‘haunted’, reality distorting hotel, where a group of amateur ghost hunters get caught up in the chaos of both the hotel’s influence, but also the two warring factions within. It’s a really creative and fun idea, pairing shades of ‘The Shining’ with AvP in a way that seems insane, but ultimately really works. I would love to see that concept, or something similar explored more in a full novel. This anthology really works best when it’s pairing these franchises with interesting concepts and time periods. Or at the very least, interesting portrayals of its creatures...particularly the Predators themselves, which are obviously intelligent beings with a known honour code. When they’re made into characters themselves, with internal thought processes and relationships with the human protagonists, rather than just being big beefy monsters, that’s when things feel especially engaging. I could’ve done with less of the ‘hoomans’ kinda internal dialogue, but I did tend to enjoy the stories with Predators as characters more than the ones with them as generic killers. Included of note in this anthology book are follow-ups to both the movie ‘Predators’ and the novel ‘Aliens Phalanx’, the latter of which even written by the original novels author; Scott Sigler. Whilst the ‘Predators’ continuation is a little lacking, I really enjoyed the ‘Phalanx’ sequel, and it’s interesting to see what was once just an Aliens story weave in Predator mythology in ways that work surprisingly well and open the door for another continuation, short or long-form, in the future.

All in all, this is a mixed bag, as all anthologies are. But none of the stories are complete duds, and those that are a little lacking are never unending, thanks to the rather nice ‘tight 30 pages’ format of the novel. It’s worth getting through some of the duds to enjoy the highlights, because there’s some really fun reads here. If you’re a fan of these franchises, particularly combined? This one’s a fun read, and definitely worth a look.

Read it or Leave it : Read It.

Reading Next (Dead Ground by M.W. Craven)

#The Stickman #Alien #Predator #Aliens #Aliens vs Predator #AvP #Novel #Anthology #Scott Sigler #Titan Books #Sci-Fi #Horror #Review #Book #The Shining

[disappointingyet]

Design For Living

Director Ernst Lubitsch Stars Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, Fredric March USA 1933 Language English, French 1hr 33mins Black & white

Dear boy, you can’t possibly be telling me Gary Cooper is in a Noel Coward picture

Ninotchka

Director Ernst Lubitsch Stars Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas USA 1939 Language English, a tiny bit of Russian and French 1hr 50mins Black & white

Garbo laughs! Stalin doesn’t!

Many of my favourite films are Hollywood comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s. Ernst Lubitsch is regarded by critics as one the best directors of the era* and he specialised in comedies but I haven’t seen many of his films and those I had seen had watched hadn’t sold me on his genius. In particular, The Shop Around The Corner, which I saw on the big screen, left me underwhelmed. But it seemed like time to give him another go…

The attention-grabbing thing about Design For Living is that it is a Noel Coward adaptation starring Gary Cooper. Slow-talking cowboy Gary Cooper? Yeah, that one. Gary Cooper as a Cubist painter living in a Parisian garret and involved in unconventional sexual arrangements? Uh-huh. In a comedy? Yep. 

It’s apparently a very loose Coward adaptation (I’ve never seen the play) but his spirit remains, even if all the characters are now American. George (Cooper) and his playwright chum Tom (Fredric March) meet Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), who does art for an ad agency – ie, unlike them, she has a real income – on a train. Soon, and unknown to George and Tom, she’s carrying on with both men.

Ah, yes, something important to say: this is what is known as a pre-Code movie – one made before Hollywood’s system of self-censorship (which lasted until the 1960s) kicked in. 

Anyway, the guys rumble what’s going on and tell Gilda she has to make a decision: But instead of choosing one of them, she moves in to sort them out on the condition that there will be no sex… What are the odds that that will stick? 

If an Americanised Noel Coward  play sounds like a classic Hollywood monstrosity, it turns out that this film is pretty funny and still a bit daring. And Cooper could do comedy: he’s opposite Barbara Stanwyck in Ball Of Fire, a Howard Hawks screwball classic from 1940 in which he plays a linguistics professor researching slang. My assumption is that Cary Grant must have been first choice for that film but Cooper is good, and he and March and Hopkins are an appealing trio (or maybe throuple?) in Design For Living.

Ninotchka is much more famous movie and one I’m 95% sure** I saw as a kid. The tagline was ‘Garbo laughs!’ – this was a big deal. I feel that Greta Garbo is somewhere between those old-time movie stars who are almost completely forgotten – Sonja Henie, for instance – and those who have endured more clearly, say Marlene Dietrich. Even if you’ve never seen a Dietrich movie – and let’s be honest, most people alive have not seen a Dietrich movie – there's a reasonable chance you have some sense of what she looked and sounded like, if only from parodies and drag queens. Garbo, on the other hand, seems like just a name now. 

Considering she’s playing the title character, Garbo takes a while to turn up in Ninotchka. We’re in Paris again and a trio of Soviet officials are in town to sell some jewels. News of this mission reaches the Russian Grand Duchess (Ina Claire) who was the former (or, in her view, still rightful) owner of the jewels and she sends her boyfriend Leon (Melvyn Douglas), a French count, to try to retrieve the stuff or at least put a spoke in the Soviet plans. Pretty soon, he has the three officials thoroughly seduced by Western decadence. So Moscow sends a much more hardline comrade to sort things out… and that’s of course Ninotchka.

The broad strokes of this kind of hardened yet naive Bolshevik were familiar until at least the 1980s: she’s baffled by fun, she asks the Count’s butler why he subjects himself to the indignity of being a servant and the old man turns out to be far more conservative than the count etc.

 But the film is smarter than that (and Garbo was a huge star known for dramatic roles.) So we get nuance – for instance, we learn that Ninotchka had been a frontline soldier in the wars that followed the revolution, something not possible in the US until this century as far as I can tell. I don’t think the film is disapproving of this. 

The film’s take on the USSR is fascinating. It was claimed by many Western Communists and other apologists for Stalin (so-called fellow travellers) that it was impossible to know how oppressive the regime had become until the death of Stalin (1953) or even the invasion of Hungary (1956) – but this mainstream Hollywood comedy from 1939 has a clear idea. 

‘The latest mass trials were a great success,’ reports Ninotchka. ‘There are going to be fewer but better Russians.’ That’s a pretty brutal joke even now, but kind of astonishing at the time. The working assumption is that anyone who has messed up and has to return to the USSR will be shot. The scene of a Moscow parade shows Stalin’s cult of personality in full effect. The Russians are in Paris as a part of a programme to flog off Tsarist-era treasures to feed a starving people. 

Ah, but this was anti-Communist propaganda, so they would have said all those things, wouldn’t they? But American anti-Communist propaganda, by and large, didn’t work like this. It wanted to show that the USSR was powerful, dangerous, its agents insidious, not (for instance) easy to derail with champagne and cigarette girls. Anti-Communists were constantly warning everyone to be on their guard (and, during the Cold War, waved through absurd defence spending). This film, instead, is suggesting that people like fun and anyone in a position to compare the two will decide that the decadent West is simply a better time than Marxist-Leninism.

There are three writers credited with the screenplay (although apparently Lubitsch also did some of the work): Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch. Reisch I know nothing about, but Brackett and Wilder wrote Ball Of Fire (mentioned earlier) and Sunset Boulevard together, among many other films, before Wilder went on to an even better partnership with IAL Diamond. Pretty much any film Wilder worked on will have some great lines, and this is no exception. (‘A Russian! I love Russians! Comrade, I've been fascinated by your five-year plan for the last fifteen years.’)

Ninotchka is a terrific movie – silly when it needs to be but often extremely smart, funny but also quite tough in its way. It does so many interesting things, like holding off on bringing on its star, and the politics are super-interesting. So, yes, I'm starting to understand why Lubitsch mattered.

*One time and one time only I was invited to the Christmas party of Sight And Sound, the most serious-minded non-academic film magazine there is. My main memory of the evening is lurking uselessly on the edge of an intense conversation about Lubitsch, knowing I had nothing to add. 

**The tiny bit of doubt is because the story was reworked as a Fred Astaire-Cyd Charisse musical called Silk Stockings. I may well have seen that too, but my memory is of a black & white film, not a musical – so Ninotchka. 

#ernst lubitsch #billy wilder #greta garbo #ninotchka

[finsterhund]

Fucking loved Ghostbusters Frozen Empire.

And it really fucking felt like somebody in the writers room really had a finger on the pulse of my specific brand of mental and MY GOD. SHIT JUST KEPT COMPOUNDING.

Because of this I am completely unable to tell if it was objectively a good fucking movie or it just was hardwired to takeover my brain by trojan horsing itself into being fine-tuned to be the sort of thing my brain craves above all else. When people talk about "pandering" in film I feel there was a constant attempt to pander my autism specifically in this movie in just barely a tasteful way. It just barely towed the line. So much shit kept cropping up.

I got fucking jumpscared by the exact word-for-word joke a friend made like in 2016 with pretty much the exact same lead up that disarmed me so that I choked on a bus and for some reason that being in the movie really sent me over the edge. Isn't even that fucking funny on its own but the fact that its the same fucking line (I won't spoil it. You will probably figure it out lol) made it that much more surreal I guess. I was stifling giggles in the damn theater.

There was also a joke about hypothetically eating children which happened with a new character that I was already starting to really like.

Yeah there's a guy with pyrokinesis and he is just so fun and cute I loved him so much. Scrunkly territory.

I refuse to go into context. Watching this movie without context is the perfect litmus test to determine if you could survive me in person. I don't know how in the hell this even works just it is.

Villain hot. (and would hate being called that) Other than this you get no context. Camera focuses on his eyes glowing and his claws a lot. Really they were doing that and the entire time :eyes:

Okay I will give one spoiler. I just can't not talk about this

SPENGLER'S GRANDDAUGHTER PLATED THE COMPONENTS OF HER PROTON PACK IN BRONZE BECAUSE THE ANCIENT PRE-SUMER DILF GUY IS VULNERABLE TO COPPER ALLOYS AND FIRE AND ITS SHOWN. ON SCREEN. WE GET TO SEE NEURODIVERGENT CODED SCIENTIST KID MELT DOWN SCRAP BRASS AND PLATE THE COMPONENTS USING A CONVENTIONAL COOKING SET UP. RED ALERT. BRASS. PLATED. PROTON PACK.

There is so many more things.

Maybe I will ramble on about this later when it's not a new release.

#text post #long post #spoilers

[thorgans-guide-to-thedas]

Do you think the Chasind were influenced by Mongolia as well?

So there's two different breakdowns I could do for this: what WE running the blog think the Chasind could be influenced from, and what the evidence in the Bioware lore (BL) presents to us. I want to stress again that we are NOT cultural experts , but we try and research and provide accurate information as much as we can.

This got REALLY long so I'm dropping it below the cut

The way our funny little group interprets and pulls inspiration from cultures in Thedas is basically just a blueprint or a road map. You'll see in some of the posts and definitely in things as we continue to post them that we use a lot of vague language when describing people. We want to avoid force-fitting players into certain roles or making people feel that "oh, well this region is inspired by this culture, so I guess I'll have to play that". Thorgan's Guide aims to spread out more opportunities for players to see themselves in this world and feel safe as they play.

So, right now, we are looking at the Chasind as a mixture of different cultures coming from early-colonial America and the Caribbean. That doesn't mean that Mongolian influence can't be added, and that is where we want there to be freedom for everyone playing the game.

Our drafts for Avvar/Frostback Basin cultures have definitely pin-pointed cultural inspiration from Inuit/Sami/Mongolian cultures, so even in our silly little home-brewed re-imagining, the geographical locations of the Frostback and the Kocari wilds are not far from each other, and it would totally work and would definitely be worth exploring for us. But I want to stress this again: our homebrew isn't meant to be law and we want everyone to have fun with it.

As for Bioware evidence, I have so many issues with it. My interpretation of the BL around Chasind features a lot of negative stereotypes associated with "uncivilized cultures," which basically translates to non-eurocentric. There is already a blatant lack of diverse ethnicities in the BL, but if I were to name a few cultures that were meant to be non-white representations, they all have antagonistic qualities to them - Chasind included. Tumblr user @dalishious talks a lot about how Bioware codes their people and cultures based on what suits them and how this can be damaging to real-world people [1]. (Dalishious' resources and research into this matter is a wealth of information, and I would highly recommend checking out their other work).

The Chasind are described as barbaric and "primitive at best". Based on pre-existing stereotypes of Mongolian culture (keyword stereotypes), it follows a similar pattern. With many minority cultures, they are placed into the ideas of "nomadic" and "simple", having technology seen as under-advanced in the face of Western civilization - so this, in its own twisted way, falls into the category. We are encouraged to see the Chasind as simple-minded and aggressive, told that they raid the swampland and cause harm and strike fear. Many brown-skinned cultures are subject to similar treatment depicting brutal warriors and merciless attacks, and of course, the antagonistic coding of Thedas cultures fits the Chasind into this role.

One thing that stuck out was the line "some Chasind are reputedly so barbaric that they even consume the flesh of the dead." The cannibalism stereotype was present in almost every dark-skinned representation at some point in time, using the "disgust" or "savagery" of the practice to separate civilized from uncivilized [2] [3]. Though appearing across the globe, these stereotypes intensified in mainstream media and specifically in films involving South American, Caribbean, and Pacific Islander cultures [4] [5].

In another line, we see "Chasind are known to decorate their hair with pierced copper coins; these are tied into the ends of their braids." This in itself is vague and, in reality, could reference dozens of different cultures around the globe. Many Slavic cultures had hair accessories and braids, but so did many African regions. It does not help that the Bioware games choose to darken the Chasind skin in their depictions. This usually leads our mind into thinking that they are meant to portray a certain culture or people based on our inherent beliefs and subconscious biases.

Bioware's writing is confusing at best and utterly racist at worst. Most of their regions are either blatantly European or a melting pot of so many minority cultures boiled down that you can hardly tell where the original inspiration came from. Is it Mongolian, Slavic, African, or something else altogether? I don't even think Bioware knows this. Just looking at the wiki page makes my head spin at how many contradicting and overlapping things there are in Chasind culture and how many elements they've taken from all over the place. All I can really say on the matter is that the wiki is doing a lot of harm with it.

From Thorgan's Guide, we totally encourage the addition of cultures to the game, and if the Chasind have Mongolian influence for the players, awesome! From the Bioware standpoint, Mongolian cultures were another target of stereotyping and "othering", not only from the Western world but from China as well, and it is completely possible that those cultural elements could be reflected back in Bioware's ignorant writing.

I may have gotten a bit carried away in writing and completely BLASTING negative stereotyping. Hopefully, this was still an interesting take on it all and at least kinda makes sense.

Here are the sources if anyone wants them:

[1] Dalishious. (2019). Coding Does Not Inherently Equate to Representation. (Source)

[2] Pyleyev, M. (2016). How the Feeling of Disgust Went From Life-Saving to Dangerous. (Video)

[3] Selvam, A. (2018). ‘Black Panther’ Challenges a Bogus Food Stereotype. (Source)

[4] Moore, R. B. (1973). Carib "Cannibalism": A Study in Anthropological Stereotyping. (Source)

[5] Conklin, B. A. (1997). Consuming Images: Representations of Cannibalism on the Amazonian Frontier. (Source)

#answer #chasind #reimagining thedas #thorgans guide to thedas #world of thedas #dragon age ttrpg #dragon age tabletop

[paypant]