So a while ago in the stream chat, the “Nursey has two moms” headcanon came up, and N was like, “That’s wild. I mean, it’s always been that Nursey’s dad is white and his mom is black, but okay.” (That’s paraphrased.) And obviously his parents have never appeared or even really been mentioned in canon, so headcanon away with the 2-4 moms, etc., but I’ve been thinking about how the more canon-based version of his family could give us the character we see enter Samwell as a frog.
Reblogging for @flaminganakin‘s brilliant tags. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Anakin’s fatal flaw wasn’t his anger or his pride or his love for Padme. It was his deference. Luke is a good man because he refuses to compromise his morality just because some one else told him his should. Anakin fails as a good man specifically because he repeatedly compromises on things he knows are wrong. He gives in to his mother and Qui-Gon’s urging to leave Tatooine. He gives in to Obi-Wan’s orders to forget his dreams and his mother. He gives in over and over and over during the Clone Wars until, by the time of RotS, he no longer even knows how to listen to his own moral compass. As Vader, he is exactly the man the Jedi told him to be: unquestioningly obedient to authority with no attachments except the Force.
Luke is the exact opposite. He rejects the teachers of his ‘wise masters’ and insists, outright and without shame, on doing things his way. And he succeeds where they failed. Not by being a good solider (good soldiers fallow orders), but by being a good man.
“Anakin’s fatal flaw wasn’t his anger or his pride or his love for Padme. It was his deference.”
Funny how it’s Luke’s attachment and love for his friends (and later his love for his father, though he was corrupted) that saved the day. And funny how it’s Anakin’s continual sacrifice of those attachments (his mother, his wife) that leads him to complete mental instability.
This is from Dead Poets Society: “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” The Jedi are so wrapped up in their notions of spiritual purity that they become completely dissociated from their own morality, and they see the Force as an end unto itself, rather than a force (hah) for good.
Example 1: slavery’s still a thing in the Republic? Even though it’s illegal? Should we do something about that? … Nah, better to not get involved. What the fuck?
The Jedi think they’ve figured out the meaning of life, but they’ve completely neglected the purpose. Spiritual excellence becomes divorced from moral excellence in a way that is completely arbitrary and therefore inherently unstable.
this is all to say, FUCK YOU YODA
i think we’re about to see this moral borne out with the third trilogy. rey is going to be like “hey teach, show me how to hit things. no, i’ll decide what to hit, thanks.” the jedi way is irrelevant; her own conscience will be her guide.
scrappy desert kid versus jedi philosophy, three ways.
can you imagine reading the entire comic and coming away from it like, here is my cool rose lalonde meta! she had a good caring mom who was never neglectful and was just being a drama queen. the end
i really do love all lalondes and looking at homestuck’s most clear-cut discussion on addiction unsympathetically is really shallow regardless, but the effects growing up with someone who was a good person but a bad mom had on rose are consistently downplayed every time they’re brought up?
like, when she’s talking about how she always understood her mom was also a sister figure before she knew about ectobiology but that her maternal responsibilities were “displaced” rose blames herself for being too immature, she thinks it’s her fault for being a kid and wanting a mother figure at all, and that’s only reaffirmed! from there on out her relationship with her mom is used as a foil to dave’s abusive childhood. i think that could have been really well done if she was portrayed with…literally any sympathy when that came up? in dave and dirk’s convo she’s basically called ungrateful for having pent-up frustration towards her guardian when his was much worse, and again there’s nothing at all to refute that! i don’t think dave’s a bad person for having those feelings at all, or that mom didn’t care about her, or that bro absolutely was worse, but it still sort of stings that her internalized guilt / sense of responsibility for her emotionally neglectful upbringing is upheld as correct.
even when roxy came directly into play rose’s first instinct is to ask john to tell roxy she’s “sorry for being a shitty daughter,” because she still thinks that entire dynamic was her fault! and then when she and roxy meet they hug and hang out and it’s really sweet but that baggage is still never really worked out or acknowledged. that’s one of many loose threads in hs, ofc, but the way that it’s suggesting that rose’s resolution was just to be kind and open towards this new Second Chance with someone like her mom sort of makes it worse than the other instances where issues went untouched imo! i love rose and roxy and i want them to be close and sweet but the lack of baggage affirms that rose’s anger was dare i say Invalid, that it was her responsibility alone to Atone for having complicated feelings about her mom, and that it was correct for her to conclude that she was being overdramatic and constructing something out of a problem that didn’t exist. so that’s fun and cute
Okay, so it’s even the small things. The way she eats the ice cream. She just eats it. No coy lick or self-conscious taste. There’s no male gaze here. No oral/sexual pleasure of the viewer. Just she eats the ice cream and it’s the kind of sloppy big bite of someone who is not self-conscious of eating, who hasn’t been trained from birth to think about how she looks as she does everything, even eating. Hasn’t spent her life being told that her purpose is in being attractive, even as she does a vital daily thing like eating. Doesn’t have a voice in her head saying, oh but ice cream, it’s kind of fatty, and what will people think.
She’s just, wow, this thing is delicious, I think it’s great, the person who makes it deserves to be told how great their skill is. How great their actions that have lead to this product are. Even in this she demonstrates valuing people by their actions and abilities and choices and who they are, not what they look like.
Fuck. This is agency. And the fact that is so rare and startling and obvious to me, the fact that Diana Prince eating ice cream moves me so much is So Terrible and makes me despair for our civilization and (nearly) all media produced before this.
And during the shot when she takes the first bite, Steve is reaching his arm out to pay the ice cream seller. That movement is much bigger and more eye-catching than Diana eating the ice cream. This scene normalizes females eating on screen (which shouldn’t have fucking been a problem in the first place), through both subverting the erotic eating trope and allowing women to eat and enjoy whatever they want without feeling self-conscious. Kudos to Patty Jenkins.
Yes! Excellent point!
And even more, Steve isn’t looking at Diana as she eats. A big part of the male gaze is that the default POV of films is generally that of the straight, white, male viewer. And generally Steve would be the stand in for that default gaze, but he doesn’t even look at her! He doesn’t buy it for her so he can watch. And he doesn’t even pull some Nice Guy bullshit like, I did something nice for you now do something nice for me, even as a vague joke or subtext. He isn’t trying to get anything out it. He just thinks she’s probably never had it and might enjoy it. It’s about her enjoyment, not his. Despite everything trying to tell us that women feed appetites but aren’t meant to have any of their own.
Apparently I am never going to get over Diana Prince eating ice cream.
Yes, all this. But I’d like to mention that IN ADDITION to that, there’s also the overt humor of the moment that could have been gross too but wasn’t.
The ice cream seller offers her the ice cream but Diana is not familiar with the concept of ‘goods for money’ so they could have made a big joke about it with Steve basically giving her an immediate ‘lesson’ about how she can’t just TAKE the ice cream and how you’re supposed to pay for it.
That’s basically how introducing a character from an Utopian society to a capitalist world always works. And that’s always the joke ‘oh look how silly and uneducated this person is, doesn’t even know they have to pay for stuff!’.
But here though Diana does take the ice cream without planning to pay (because yes, she doesn’t know that she’s supposed to) Steve doesn’t make it into a ‘big deal’, he just reaches over and pays.
And so the scene flawlessly skips over any need to publicly shame or embarrass Diana and we can just focus on how adorable Diana is when eating ice cream for the first time in her life.
there are many things i love about harry potter. the changeling narrative (there’s an unseen and enchanted world folded around the visible, and it’s been waiting for you to step over that threshold and take up the place that was always yours), wonderful characters, intricate plotting, the breadth and depth of detail, the twists and wit and imagination, its abiding belief in love and hope and sacrifice.
(and one of the best allegories for depression i’ve ever read—a tattered hungry ghoul with no face, only a mouth that feeds on every good thing you can feel or remember until you’re cold and hollow and despairing.)
but after seven books showing how the complacency and secrecy and prejudice and schisms and stagnation and corruption and ignorance of the wizarding world allowed Voldemort to rise to power not once but twice, the idea that the bereaved and war-scarred children who bore the burden of another generation’s mistakes and hatreds would want a return to the status quo seemed like a betrayal. i hated that ending. i’m still bitter about it.
it’s strange—i can’t think of another fictional universe so at odds with itself. the world JKR shows us is insular, isolated; it looks down upon and shuns those who are different or “inferior” (Muggles, squibs, goblins); it never experiments or innovates or interrogates its own magic; it asks so few questions of the world. and yet in this story the best thing you can be is a seeker: the narrative is full of puzzles and puns and secrets and codes and mazes and dreams and unseen doorways and passages; hidden things running alongside or underneath; arcana and riddles in the margins, wonders to be found by the reach of your mind.
it’s a world that’s pathologically traditional and leery of change: it lacks diversity, reveres ancient things and old ways, uses antiquated technology and spells in Latin, and is steeped in nostalgia for a bygone postwar Britain that was no utopia. and yet the books themselves are about the process of growing up and questioning received wisdom: learning that adults are fallible, adults can be cruel and hateful and manipulative and weak, authority is often malevolent and deceitful, paternalism and “the greater good” are corrupt, the old ways should be overthrown. it promised so much; then seemed to surrender, back down.
harry potter has, on the one hand, a love of wonder and curiosity and knowledge and stories hidden within stories; and on the other, a streak of weird and anarchic humour, of unpredictability and absurdism and surprise. all that i love about it comes from that. so i still feel deep fondness toward the books—but i’m more interested in how its readers can take what it offers and dream in the gaps and redraw its geographies and invent other magics and cut out what’s rotten and mend what’s broken and give voice to the things that were voiceless, and find better, braver conclusions.
i think andrew hussie is a master class case study in author anonymity
like, who even gives a shit about death of the author when the author barely exists metatextually anyway? his public friends are all people associated with or who worked at one point on homestuck, his social media reveals nothing about him personally, and the only pieces of personal information he discloses are pieces of disjointed, unrelated, or “is he joking?” type material. i know he’s a sagittarius but i don’t know if he has parents. i know he has a giant blue horse dildo somewhere in his home, but i don’t know which state he lives in.
nobody within the past 500-600 years of literature has managed to write something as big as homestuck and remain as secretive as he has. most authors are tempted by the fame offered to them via their work and immediately flood their audience with personal disclosure, try to make themselves celebrities. not hussie. hussie wrote one of the biggest pieces of internet literature in history and stayed completely off the map for all of it.
I had a very interesting discussion about theater and film the other day. My parents and I were talking about Little Shop of Horrors and, specifically, about the ending of the musical versus the ending of the (1986) movie. In the musical, the story ends with the main characters getting eaten by the plant and everybody dying. The movie was originally going to end the same way, but audience reactions were so negative that they were forced to shoot a happy ending where the plant is destroyed and the main characters survive. Frank Oz, who directed the movie, later said something I think is very interesting:
I learned a lesson: in a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow — in a movie, they don’t come out for a bow, they’re dead. They’re gone and so the audience lost the people they loved, as opposed to the theater audience where they knew the two people who played Audrey and Seymour were still alive. They loved those people, and they hated us for it.
That’s a real gem of a thought in and of itself, a really interesting consequence of the fact that theater is alive in a way that film isn’t. A stage play always ends with a tangible reminder that it’s all just fiction, just a performance, and this serves to gently return the audience to the real world. Movies don’t have that, which really changes the way you’re affected by the story’s conclusion. Neat!
But here’s what’s really cool: I asked my dad (who is a dramaturge) what he had to say about it, and he pointed out that there is actually an equivalent technique in film: the blooper reel. When a movie plays bloopers while the credits are rolling, it’s accomplishing the exact same thing: it reminds you that the characters are actually just played by actors, who are alive and well and probably having a lot of fun, even if the fictional characters suffered. How cool is that!?
Now I’m really fascinated by the possibility of using bloopers to lessen the impact of a tragic ending in a tragicomedy…
THEY WERE MISSING FOR FUCKING YEARS OMG, THIS ALWAYS UPSETS ME SO MUCH
I always see the discussion that many days, months, years have passed during this story.
I present to you a different idea.
There’s several themes behind Spirited Away: Capitalism’s effect on Japan, Environmental issues, and notably, Chihiro’s coming of age story.
From what I know, the idea of time passing differently in spirit worlds, is more based on western stories of the fae.
But something more common in Japanese folklore is spirit trickery/deception. Or more accurately. What you see, isn’t always what’s actually there.
Chihiro starts this story as a young child, before her coming-of-age arc, that more or less forces her to become ‘an adult’. More accurately. The challenges she faces makes her mature as a person.
What’s the most common thing in folklore? Children see what’s actually there.
when i heard there’s only one wizarding school in america, i laughed incredulously, and i know i’m not the only one. one school for the whole huge country? obviously brits don’t have any idea how big america is! cue derisive anecdotes about visitors who thought they could visit hollywood as a day trip from new york.
but recently something’s occurred to me: what if ilvermorny IS the only ‘wizarding school’ in america, with ‘wizarding school’ being defined as a wizard-only establishment where they teach nothing but magic?
aside from how unprepared that leaves kids for the rest of life, there just isn’t the population density to support wizard-exclusive pocket-universe enclaves anywhere but the east coast and possibly los angeles. even chicago is more spread out than that, and when it comes to mid-size cities like minneapolis and st. louis, forgeddaboudit. not even wizards would choose to live crammed cheek by jowl on quaintly crooked pedestrian-only streets when they could have a three-bedroom prairie-style on a wooded half-acre in edina.
so i’m thinking, yeah, ok, most american magicals don’t send their kids to wizard school. kids go to regular school and have wizarding clubs and retreats and summer camps instead. gives new meaning to “one time at band camp.”
the pureblood prejudice never developed in america? well, of course not, no one but the hamptons set goes even a single day without interacting with muggles. most of your friends are going to be muggles. there aren’t enough magical jobs for everyone, so most people’s coworkers will be muggles. except we wouldn’t call them muggles, of course, and certainly not ‘no-maj’ – that sounds like something that was said for a while by one particular new york jet set clique in the 1920′s and got written down in an english etiquette book as ‘what americans say’. we’d probably call them ‘mundanes’ or ‘normals’ if we called them anything at all.
the stuff about wand permits and other odd regulations makes sense for a small bureaucracy that doesn’t really understand why it can’t control things the way european magical governments do. it’s kind of a cargo cult legislation. probably most americans don’t even use a wand most of the time. european wand-focused magic might be the Done Thing among the WASP contingent, but everyone else undoubtedly knows at least something about navajo healing ritual, haitian voodoo, lakota dance magic, chinese feng-shui warding techniques, etcetera. taking away a person’s wand doesn’t take away their magic. you can’t say ‘corn pollen permit’ with a straight face and they sell chalk at the corner store.
i expect american wizards look at the hogwarts set as kind of a weird sect with weird restrictions and weird costumes. like the amish, but instead of furniture and quilts, they export clueless young men.
if I lick your brain will I gain your creativity?
i don’t know but it’s worth a try
also no one else will be able to eat it because it’s got your germs on it, which will be handy if zombies
this has always pretty much been my whole exact understanding of the hp universe
i also figured a lot of american magic is in english instead of the pseudo greek/latin British spells since, unlike British schools, most Americans never study those, so our spells are like ‘Fire’, ‘Unlock", “Magic Missile’
also american wands have gun grips or are baseball bats
when i was a kid i made a wand out of a piece of copper pipe with brass end caps, and carried it around with me for most of a year; i know a lot of kids who had walking sticks from summer camp or hiking, and pretended they were magic. hell, i bet a lot of wizard kids learn to cast with a #2 pencil, just from idly messing around.
also, spells based on superhero powers: definitely a thing.
imagine some baddie trying to AK someone and getting hit by SHAZAM in return.
american wizards learn how to do spider-man webbing out of wands the way kids learn to do that one S symbol
source: remember those dumb/racist comics ron had in his room? that’s all they got. britwizards don’t know a single spider-man
spells based on d&d too, i bet. and not nearly as much distinction between ‘dark arts’ and the rest, largely because a lot of the nonwhite arts got classified as Ebil Scary Bad by anglos, and the rest of america wasn’t having it. in louisiana, knowing the voodoo lady can raise the dead just speaks to the high quality of her marching powder.
florida wizards can use pool noodles as wands
not a single british wizard has ever returned from florida
dude florida is just one big messy cryptid zone, the ‘florida man’ phenomenon is real and ‘hold my beer’ is a very powerful spell
edit: ok, wizarding america IS silly, just not the way rowling thought
“Diverse media is treated with a harsher lens than everything else” Probably because we’re assuming if you took the time to include us you’d do the bare minimum which is treat characters like us with respect and how dare we be upset when that doesn’t happen
True, but in a capitalistic-driven world like ours where media’s success is measured in revenue rather than it’s cultural importance, how we engage diverse media is literally a deciding factor of if we’ll get more.
And what type of media is it affects this even further.
TV shows and movies do not have a history of reacting to outcry or criticism by re-engaging and trying to fix it, they have a history of going “oh, right, no one wants [minority] in the focus, got it” and then shelf the project and go back to “white boy wonder #3000″ and his cookie cutter story that’s guaranteed to bring in money.
Videogames have a better reaction to critical commentary about their handling of diversity, hilariously enough. This is why we had things like Gamer Gate. Because the industry is willing to listen, much to the disdain and distaste of some of its fanbase.
I get it, though. White, straight, cis people have this pool of stories and if something is not to their liking, they can complain about it and go find another one they like better, because statistically, someone out there has tackled that specific take in a story. But if you’re in a minority and the movie/game/comic/THING you got is the only one you’ve got you want it to be everything. You feel it has to do everything perfectly, on every aspect. Because you don’t have anything else.
I sincerely believe that our engagement – critical and political – with diverse media needs to radically change, however. Because our own reactions to imperfect representations of ourselves – and let’s be honest, they’re ALL imperfect representations of ourselves, someone might find them suitable and someone might find them offensive, and we’re back with trying to make ONE THING that will satisfy ALL THE THINGS FOR EVERYONE EVER – don’t encourage people to try again and do better next time. This hyper critical culture in our own communities, that also has slowly been bled out of rational or structured long term planning, has resulted on people dogpiling anything that is even remotely “problematic” and decrying it as the Absolute Worst, thus demanding it be boycotted and as far removed from everything as possible. You’re not allowed to discuss the things diverse media did right, on penalty of being told you’re supporting everything they did wrong. You’re not allowed to say “Okay, it’s not FOR EVERYONE or ALL THE THINGS, but you know what, it’s doing THIS ONE THING really well”, because then you’re a traitor and must be destroyed.
I’ve seen people stirring in the Asian and Latino camps that Black Panther is not a big deal, because there aren’t any Asian or Latino people in the front and center of the movie.
I’ve seen people hissing that Wonder Woman should be boycotted because it’s an all-white imperialistic fantasy.
Look, guys. This approach to media betrays a simple misunderstanding of what Diverse Media is. Diverse Media is not the search for The One, you know, The One Good Book/Movie/Series/Game/Comic. Diverse Media is a road towards becoming Media, without qualifiers. It’s not about finding The One and stopping, because nothing will ever represent us that well ever again. It’s the constant road we’re paving, one step at the time, to reach the point where we too will be able to wrinkle our nose at any given piece of media and then shrug and go look for something else, like white, straight, cis people do today, with that same confidence that we WILL find something else, for whatever the reason, because we’re no longer genre pieces.
Be critical of Diverse Media, by all means. But be critical while you support it. Be critical while you scream at the top of your lungs that you want More of it.
And for the love of anything holy, please learn to engage media without that fucking Purity Culture filter bullshit that’s just ruining everything for everyone around you.
just moving along like everyone else 