It kind of fucks me up to see some people come out of watching RGU having absorbed absolutely nothing of what the show has to say about patriarchy, misogyny, & queerphobia, outside of "men bad, lesbian good." Which like.....sure, I guess? in the absolute barest sense, I suppose RGU is partially about that.
But if this show's thesis were really as simple as "lesbian good," then Juri & her role as an antagonist on the mini patriarchy that is the Student Council would simply not exist at all. Juri would've won all the duels, kicked Akio in the nuts, freed Anthy, & ridden away into the sunset with Shiori in her arms before Utena even showed up if that were the case. But she obviously didn't do any of that despite being a lesbian, so there must be something more complicated at work here.
A lot of RGU's narrative is dedicated to deconstructing binary social systems & the ways in which they harm those trying to and/or being forced to fit within one of two narrow boxes; man vs woman, adult vs child, princess vs witch, prince vs devil, special vs not special, romantic vs platonic, etc. So for someone to watch all of that beautiful complexity, only to filter it through yet another essentialist binary...sucks, to say the least.
Cadillac El Camino Concept, 1954. A GM Motorama show car previewing many styling features that appeared on production Cadillacs throughout the 1950s including quad headlights, the shape of the tail-fins and bullet tipped bumpers. It was finished in silver-gray with a brushed stainless-steel roof. The El Camino name was later used on generations of Chevrolet pick-ups. El Camino is short for the Spanish el camino real, the Royal Highway, alias Californian Highway 101.
sometime in the spring of this year i kept encountering the idea on other social media that chinese is impossible to learn for europeans, that it's too difficult, that no westerner can learn or truly understand it, and in combination with a mainland friend visiting and telling me the ancient chinese etymology of some basic characters (and the 白人饭 Lunch of Suffering meme) i got fed up/enchanted and did the extremely mentally healthy thing of teaching myself basic mandarin, through about ~april to july. at some points in may i remember coming home from work, scribbling characters in my mandarin notebook over and over, doing chores, going to sleep, and repeating the cycle. a taiwanese friend on here helped out with a lot (it's much, much easier if you have chinese friends to help you, however, i am really not about traditional, although i admit it's more beautiful) and baptized me with a chinese name.
i don't know mandarin, and at this point a lot of the characters i'd learned have faded from memory, but i insist that it's not actually difficult to learn chinese (up to a point— maybe HSK 3 or 4 is where it gets really difficult). in fact, learning chinese is really, really fun.
the difficulty lies in the fact that you have to do it every single day for at least an hour, probably for more (i spent pretty much all my free time on it, but there was something not normal going on with me then). you'd think, isn't that the case for every language? yet i don't remember doing daily french like that, and i consider some aspects of french conjugation/russian grammar much more difficult than what chinese throws at you at similar difficulty levels (good luck with motion verbs, non-slavic speakers). i found learning characters to be very, very easy. they're all distinct. if you learn them together with their etymology, looking at ancient chinese and how they developed along with associated idioms, it's endlessly rewarding. at least in the early levels, there's a bit of a system to how characters and words come together and increase in complexity—sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's cute. it's a breath of fresh air to start reading even basic sentences and idioms in a language so entirely different from anything you've experienced before. many people say speaking chinese is easier than reading/writing: in my experience, that's false. i barely started getting a grasp on the tonal system (my goal was to get to HSK 1 solely through written chinese); i remember listening to the same 2 minute audio clip of two people exchanging phone numbers for half an hour or something once before getting everything right. people say "chinese doesn't have grammar" but that's not true, because otherwise it won't be a language at all, though you don't have to learn any conjugations, declensions, etc. at HSK 1-2 you just throw a modifier/particle into a sentence and you're good to go.
the other main difficulty besides tones is that imo chinese culture is borderline impenetrable if you want to have a genuine stab at it (but for this you don't, necessarily, need to learn mandarin). you can learn HSK 1-2 in a few months or a semester, but it will take you years to genuinely understand the cultural context—there truly is no context clue or familiar idea you can latch on to, as opposed to when learning a european language/history, or even turkish, arabic, persian; there is nothing in common here, and if you guess, you'll probably wind up wrong. it all makes me think of how many journalists/experts get russia wrong: i now firmly do not believe a word of what people write about asia unless i find the author knows the language
that you dont need to study everyday to be "productive" or "studyblr". You are allowed to have entire days for yourself. Not more toxic productivity aka driving yourself to burn-out
Hi everyone, the Dean Winchester brainrot got to be too much and so I decided to actually create a "course" where we can discuss Dean. We will cover his trauma, his parentification, his smarts, and everything in between. There will be a loose structure, guided by me, but I foresee that we will veer off the Syllabus often. We will be using evidence from on screen canon to fuel our claims as well as discussing our own headcanons/speculations that are backed up with canon evidence. Class is tentatively scheduled to begin in February and will be offered on Saturday's on Discord. But I may host a get to know you sort of thing earlier than February to get everyone hyped up!! Please fill out the form below if you want to join in! This is open to all!!!
alright besties, I have a presentation for a class tomorrow on bodily representation in media, and I'm gonna talk about Skin (spn 1x06). I'm trying to create a good Dean studies-esque analysis of the episode and why the shifter chose dean as a target for this. I have some thoughts and some posts already saved for how I want to talk about this, but I'd love it if y'all sent me your favorite theories or just put them in the comments/reblogs. it would really help, thanks a ton :)
Some week-old Sergeant Tibbs art studies from a special movie I love, 101 Dalmatians! Figured I share these eventually; easily one of my favorite underrated characters.
today in insane anti-intellectualism: I just saw a post about how aspiring healthcare practitioners shouldn't take classes in biology and chemistry because those subjects are useless and bad. ????