elloratic - Tumblr blog

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DIZZY TRAILER RELEASED SHE LOOKS SO GOOD. Sol calls her queen and she calls him a very polite version of father. You can watch it here: https://x.com/ArcSystemWorksU/status/1839127974274281836

She releases October 31st. Rest of the stream was survey results (ORDER SOL 7TH PLACE LET'S GOOOOOOOO), Chipp's getting a new move, 3v3 beta test 2, and season 5 is going to add 2 new maps. There were some other smaller details, but this is all the big/fun stuff.

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joey batey did not write "you're not a coward cause you cower; you're brave because they broke you, yet broken, still you breathe" (x) to be known as the toss a coin to your witcher guy

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ive worn heart shaped glasses for almost 4 years and they are just like my Thing and i love them so much and so often people will say shit like Oh Id Love To Wear Something Like That But I Could Never Pull It Off and like... babe no one can theyre heart shaped glasses u dont wear them to look flattering or stylish or whatever u wear them to make ur soul happy

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The thing about alexithymia is you're always playing detective to figure out what the fuck is going on with your own mood. I thought everything was completely fine and chill in my life but I had heart palpitations yesterday, had to suppress the urge to physically yell at my chickens when they were being annoying, and just impulse bought 20 cherry ripes on the internet so SOMETHING is happening. Do I have any fucking idea what? No. But at some point I'm going to get 20 cherry ripes and be like. Why did I think I needed these.

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bro i LOVE indigenous fusion music i love it when indigenous people take traditional practices and language and apply them in new cool ways i love the slow decay and decolonisation of the modern music industry

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Queer as in an "identity is fluid and descriptors can be imprecise so I prefer a more general term" sort of way but also queer in a "What are you, a cop?" sort of way.

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Disability will have you thinking shit like “I’m not even that disabled. I can manage as long as I limit myself to very specific careers, never go shopping for more than an hour or two at a time, keep my plans open so I can cancel and stay in if need be, and only go out a few nights per week at the most”

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And why? Cultural norms? Personal schedule? “Cause I’m always late to everything”?

Bonus points: Region and/or ethnicity?

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Grace Ling Spring 2025 Ready-To-Wear

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There are a lot of things about Taskmaster that feel very... culturally British. That mixture of extreme silliness with occasionally very dark humour for example.

Or the particular tone of affectionate bullying and the way it's (mostly) taken in good humour. (And expected to be taken in good humour, even when it hits a nerve. Something that caused quite a bit of bad blood between the Brits and the Germans in my former workplace, because we generally don't shrug off insults that easily.)

But I think one difference is sort of... simmering under the surface in ways that aren't immediately obvious to international audiences (and makes me wish I was still writing uni papers, because it would be a GOLDMINE), is how much of the humour is based on the British class system.

I mean, the basic premise of "tyrannical taskmaster makes people jump through arbitrary hoops for his favour and then belittles them for doing so" is already something only an audience with a slightly monarchical bend would accept unquestioningly. Add to that the way the Taskmaster/Assistant relationship is set up... Let's just say it fetishises a social dynamic that doesn't exist in quite the same way elsewhere.

Which I think may partially explain why so many people seem to be oblivious to the D/s undertones. -- Of course it's often kink-blindness on the part of non-kinky people, but I strongly suspect it's helped along by the cultural perception of what constitutes an acceptable power differential acting as a buffer to seeing anything off about it. The threshold for when it becomes weird is different.

Now, I think (and since I'm not British, do correct me if I have it wrong!) a key part of what makes the basic premise funny to British audiences (and differently from how it's funny to international ones) is the way cultural expectations of power vs submission are subverted.

Purely based on accent? Alex is the posh one. By miles. And Greg -- very pointedly! -- doesn't do the matching Fauxbridge that most viewers would probably expect from someone presented in a position of authority (or even just a "neutral" BBC accent). It seems bizarre from a foreign point of view, but I've found that this kind of discrepancy immediately and viscerally registers with Brits. (It's uncanny how little it takes, too -- ask your favourite non-TM-aware English person to just listen to the different ways they say "taskmaster" and they will extrapolate things you cannot even imagine.) Instead of just the regional connotation, there are always implications of class and social status to an accent that are absolutely baffling to the unaware.

Add the fact that Greg Davies is from Wales, and a lot of English people have a weird colonial superiority complex towards Welsh people to this day... It's enough to make all these obvious gestures of devoted subservience from Alex very unexpected and therefore funny.

(Also notice how it adds interesting layers to Katherine Ryan buying Greg a fake lordship title? And makes it funnier in a way she may not even have fully been aware of herself, being Canadian? It's delightfully irreverent and pokes fun at the whole system.)

My guess is that this is also why the studio audience's reaction to linguistics-based jokes is always so strong. Lets take the recurring bit about Alex correcting Greg's grammar. To an international audience, the main joke is that Alex is a nerd and cares too much about grammar, with maybe a side of him being a smartarse towards his boss in a potentially ill-advised way. But to a British audience, the level of audacious insubordination implied there? Much stronger. Wildly offensive thing to do. (And a level of arrogance that is extra hilarious coming from someone shown to be sleeping in a dog bed.)

The same mechanism also puts Alex's snide little asides towards contestants with regional or "urban" accents into perspective. Offensive dick move on his part? Oh yes, extremely. But the audience is very much not supposed to be on his side in this. He's being a bigoted little bully, and either the contestants get to humiliate him in retaliation (it's certainly not a coincidence that the Welsh and Irish contestants are generally the ones having the most fun putting him in his place) or Greg calls him out on it in the studio. In a society in which Alex's brand of micro-aggression is still incredibly commonplace and accent discrimination a widely accepted default, it's actually very cathartic to see it openly acknowledged and condemned.

I mean Tumblr obviously loves Alex, because he's cute and funny and we love the Greg/Alex D/s thing (I'm definitely guilty of this as well), but we have to remember that -- in the context of the show's premise -- his character is supposed to be pathetic and ridiculous, so when Greg does the "next to me a man who once told me while drunk that he thinks regional accents are inversely correlated to intelligence" intro thing, we're meant to see it as an asshole opinion that is actually unacceptable to hold and no one in their right mind would openly admit to. So Greg is humiliating Alex by (supposedly) exposing him as someone who would spout that kind of opinion. (Same as the jokes about Alex's misogyny. I see people criticise these jokes all the time, but I think that's because they refuse to understand how the underlying mechanism actually works and take them at face value as the real Alex's actual opinion, rather than something deliberately assigned to his in-show character to make a point about them being terrible.)

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when the objectively bad person has traumatic and honestly reasonable reasons for why theyre like that but it doesnt excuse their actions and only serves to make them more tragic as a character

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rejection sensitivity is so fucking lame. like boo hoo look at me i felt mildly ignored for 30 seconds and already started planning my own funeral liKE BITCH CHILL it was never that serious

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this poem is about being nonbinary.