sambargestuff

[sambargestuff]

30+ year old women are the backbone of this website

[sambargestuff]

the kissy kissy <3

www.sarahcosico.bigcartel.com

[sambargestuff]

There is a prima facie case for discrimination in contravention of the provincial human rights legislation in Quebec in this action. The legislation's 14 prohibited grounds for discrimination include "gender identity or gender expression."

Transgender inmates in provincial detention will be incarcerated according to their anatomical sex, not their gender identity, Quebec’s public security minister said Wednesday. François Bonnardel said in a statement the measure is to ensure the safety of all inmates.

Continue reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[sambargestuff]

[sambargestuff]

There's a member of the Andor Critical crowd at Dorkside of the Force, isn't there?

Mehwish Mahmood, if you're on Tumblr, we hear you, we see you, and we love you. Welcome home.

[sambargestuff]

okay fine since today is star wars day inside my brain, here are my summed up thoughts about andor season 2:

there are two glaring problems with this season that i think contributes to making it a weak work of art overall. the first is that it is trying to answer questions that don't need answering. do we really need an answer to why saw has a face mask in rogue one? do we need to know about how cassian comes to collect intel about the death star outside of the in media res beginning to rogue one? do we need to know where rebellions are built on hope as a line comes from? do we need an explanation for intra-rebellion tensions? do we need to know why or how the rebellion decided to use yavin as a base? do we need an explanation for where luthen has gone by rogue one? do we need to "close" the loop on dedra and luthen and "explain" their respective fates? do we need to "close" the loop on dr. gorst's fate, of all the people? i don't believe so, not if you want a crisp and cogent story.

all this information is stuff that we already fill in ourselves, to some extent, with various assumptions. "how does cassian end up collecting intel on the death star" -> you assume that the rebellion has been working on this for some time and at last a source has confirmed the existence of the project. "why are there intra-rebellion tensions" -> you assume that this is a natural byproduct of having multiple stakeholders with differing politics in a room. "why is the rebellion using yavin as a base" -> a reasonable viewer would assume this is because the rebellion has looked for abandoned planets to use (as they would have assumed in 1977 when watching a new hope). "why is gold squadron taking mon mothma after cassian rescues her" -> anyone would assume its just an opsec thing. "why isn't luthen mentioned in later films" -> you assume that he continues doing spy work for the rebellion, which by definition is not going to be mentioned! "how do we close the loop on dedra" -> does it need to be closed? her search for axis featured in exactly one episode at the start and then suddenly is returned in the final episodic arc, which creates a sense of complete disjuncture, bc ghorman would ideally seem to be more important to her.

the second issue, is that luthen and kleya are foregrounded in ways that creates an uneasy narrative tension regarding who precisely the protagonist of the series is. ostensibly we are following cassian's narrative - but cassian's motivation remains murky to us and cassian sort of moves from one event to the other, with no sense of a bigger picture that he's working towards; no sense of the stakes of what he's working towards. on the other hand, this is very clear where luthen and kleya are concerned: they have clearly articulated narrative stakes, clearly articulated narrative tensions and clearly communicated motivations that propel them and allow them to be agents of action, rather than individuals who sort of drift from thing to thing, but without some grand and overarching sense of purpose and meaning.

when you put this together, you have a show where the first and last episodic arcs are functionally deadweight, and a section in the middle that is genuinely moving, but filled with tiny baffling moments that go nowhere or feel outright spiteful. saw's speech to wilmon is moving, until you realise a deeply politically motivated character, with every reason to be driven by paranoia, is being recaricatured as a fucking drug addict. dr gorst's death is just like a random thing that is shoved in and has functionally no effect on bix whatsoever. the bits about gold squadron and the alleged intra-rebellion fighting just feel straight up mean-spirited and push us towards a sympathy for luthen being ill-used that is simply not earned at all because nothing of him being forced out is actually shown. the episodes barely flow one into the other, especially where cassian is concerned - in fact his story feels the most episodic, v. say, dedra & syril who have narrative continuity from episodes 1 - 9 via ghorman and each other. things that should be dwelt on have more narrative weight (e.g. tay kolma's death) pass us by rapidly.

i usually come down on defending "telling" as an equally valid method of storytelling as "showing", but the problem with this season is we are told a lot of things - and the things that ought to be shown, or told a lot more explicitly, are shown only briefly (e.g. tay kolma's death). we are told that it is imperative for cassian to assassinate dedra because she's hunting luthen - we are shown dedra being almost entirely absorbed in the planning of the ghorman genocide. we are told that luthen has been iced out of the rebellion - we are not shown that, just presented with a couple of senators and rebel leaders who look unreasonable by comparison. we are told that luthen has founded the rebellion - we are not really shown this in any meaningful way, except for the coordination that he does in s1. we are told a lot about how people are genius spies or agents while - and this is what gets me - there is zero narrative consistency on their operational manTM rules. (a recapper on vulture observed this, so its not just me: but the abrupt shifts between deployment of spy rules (e.g. code words, pass phrases) and then nothing whatsoever in ways that seem near random)

all of it just makes for a very disjointed, random and uneven season! my objections to s1 andor were largely from a political framework and my own readings of rogue one as a text; but it was a deeply coherent season, with some very specific ideas that it was working with, and a narrative flow that ran through its episodes, even amongst its episodic arcs. andor s2 straight up has something that looks slick on top, but when you put the thing together as a whole, its pretty disjointed, random and unmemorable.

and once you put andor s2 against andor s1, some of the uglier racial aspects of andor s1 start coming to the fore. if maarva's speech and exhortation to forget his sister because his homeworld is dead/destroyed is not enough to motivate cassian to join the rebellion, then maarva's kidnapping of cassian also begins to look a lot more suspect because the emotional resolution of their relationship is undermined/disappeared from the narrative when the season opens with cassian wanting to quit the rebellion (multiple times). everything to do with poor saw, especially the narrative undermining of him as one of star wars' most staunchly politically vociferous characters and the repositioning of him as fundamentally insane, instead of integrating him into the show and its action. everything to do with poor bix's arc - the way she veers from being an object of instructive brown suffering for a white audience, to a DARE advertisement, to the good wife keeping the home fires running. cinta being yet another object of instructive brown suffering for a white audience, when the white audience is even embedded within the audience in both vel and the ghormans. the overall positioning in the final arc of bail organa as irrational for demanding military discipline, versus luthen who has built all of this and sacrificed everything for it (in general the repositioning of bail as out of touch with the reality of what the rebellion entails in terms of sacrifice), and who therefore is important enough to warrant a total violation of every opsec standard put in place to protect the rebels against outside interference. cassian essentially getting reset every three episodes, going back to a "will he won't he" type thing about joining the rebellion, when the end of s1 ended on a note that suggested he definitively had chosen the rebellion.

hold all of this against the internal consistency and three dimensionality with which luthen, kleya, dedra, syril, lonni and mon mothma are written and it all looks very stark. even the bit white characters (assorted ISB officers; the ghormans) get a decent level of consistency across the entirety of the twelve episodes, while characters of colour are chopped up and repurposed and reset at will, as long as it serves whatever obscure narrative point the writers are attempting to drive home. which again, makes for deeply incoherent watching & undermines any meaningful establishment of narrative stakes.

all through this season, i could not, for the life of me, figure out what the stakes were. the stakes of s1 were simple: will cassian join the rebellion? what will it take to make him do so? and so everything we watch him experience answers that question: he has a taste of the rebel's life, he witnesses multiple instances of extreme oppression/injustice (narkina, the displacement of the aldhanis), he tastes imperial occupation, he decides to become a rebel. i cannot do a similar neat summation for s2. the death star connection is ever-present, but no meaningful connection is made between ghorman and the final arc. cassian himself doesn't seem particularly interested in the matter of "intelligence" gathering as a field agent, so much as Doing Things. the whole thing is very style over substance!

[sambargestuff]

Fix-it week day 6 ☆ how they live after the war

HAPPY BEACH TIMES

Ref image:

[sambargestuff]

i am sad to report that andor season 2 has reverted to star wars' natural state: mid

[sambargestuff]

**chef's kiss**

ngl I am a little annoyed with how the good faith response to criticism from fans who liked the show is often "i get why you didn't like that but canon is what you make it! You can pick and choose!"

like, I get it, and I plan to, and if nothing else it's a much more mature response than I've got from other people, but it really doesn't address my two biggest issue with the show at all:

Yes, I can ignore that it ever happened to characters that I like, but the show is still out there with all those odd misogynist and racist messages in the writing and casting unadressed. And at best, it is reinforcing a bunch of industry stereotypes, and it's not unique in that of course - but with the way the show is being lauded rn, I'm genuinely worried that a lot of people are seeing harmful things they believe to be true given the stamp of "revolutionary and progressive, actually". People are falling for the virtue signalling, and it's not a push in a good direction. To be fair, I've often got this comment when I was criticising narrative decisions that were at least somewhat removed from those issues... but idk stuff like the changed backstory and the removal of Bodhi and Jyn from the larger narrative is still part of that problem.

There was already so much potential in the backstories that were implied in the movie and the supplemental publications (which were canon for half a decade, so anyone wanting to argue with me about how "Gilroy didn't have to use your headcanons, grow up" can shut up right away, thank you). And not only is it a huge bummer that we didn't see any of that explored, and not only is it extremely annoying that Andor and Rogue One do not add up to a satisfying whole - it also means we will now never get any of these stories outside of fandom. Had Andor not been made, or been deemed (correctly) too expensive and disappeared into a drawer, Disney would not have resisted the urge to make more money off these characters forever. And if a show had been deemed too expensive, or not buzzy enough - we might have had a novel, or even a series of novels, and the characters might have shown up in other franchises. And yeah, we can still have these stories in fandom, and that's great... but this means that these stories will now only ever reach the people already searching for the crumbs. Stories like the one known former Separatist on the Rebellion's side, stories of the one good guy who was thoroughly broken down into doing whatever people told him to for that same, much less unambiguously good Rebellion? The one story of a soldier and a cog in the machine for whom breaking away from a bad system was actually hard, and not just an easy choice he made in the opening act of his first movie? That will not be a part of Star Wars in the public eye - maybe never. And much as I love and support fanworks (which almost always offer something better than the canon stuff if you know where to look!), I think it's legitimate to be angry at the decisions that were made here. Star Wars already told every conceivable version of a Han Solo-esque storyline. There was so much narrative and political interest that was lost here.

No criticism of the show is attacking the community any individual person built connecting to someone else over how they liked it. And the show had its moments, and a lot of people worked very hard on it (and others wouldn't even watch a two-hour film to prepare).

But I still think at the end of it all, it's legitimate to say that between what was canon before and could have been turned into a show or a novel and what we got in the end, I think we got a very short end of the stick. And "you can just ignore it" doesn't help with that. It's about the iffy messages and the lost potential, it's not a lack of ability to compartmentalise when I write my next fic or read someone else's. I'm not complaining because I think I have to delete all my fics and bookmarks because they're not canon anymore. Hell, I've been ignoring a canon ending to write fic for years - why stop now?

I'm complaining because there was so much potential here, and instead we got a show that is so murky in its supposed "progressive revolution" that right-wing pundits and mainstream progressive media alike try to claim it for their own views, with a story that is far less satisfying and cohesive than the one we already had.

[sambargestuff]

literary kinsey scale time

i’m just curious what mix of fiction and nonfiction the average tumblrina is consuming

[sambargestuff]

ETA: Didn't notice the line about it being a YA novel. No. I wouldn't read it because I don't have to read YA novels anymore.

Spin this wheel first and then this wheel second to generate the title of a YA fantasy novel!

(If the second wheel lands on an option ending with a plus sign, spin it again)

Share what you got!

[sambargestuff]

Christofascism is given media double standard.

[sambargestuff]

you're the only one who understands me mr strobbery

[sambargestuff]

She manipulated him and lied to him and then hid his child from him. It is so toxic. I'm not the least bit sad that it ended. I'm sad that we had to watch it.

"You don't see the backstory of Bix when she is so young, but you see that everything is taken away from Cassian. And when we find him in Ferrix, she's everything." - Diego Luna

[sambargestuff]

Adria Arjona and Alan Tudyk are going to be on. The Emmy PR campaign is on overdrive.

Diego will be hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live! next week!

[sambargestuff]

suddenly the rebellion is real for you. i've been in this fight since i was 32 years old