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It’s kind of crazy how there’s a whole sequence in Final Reckoning where Tom Cruise is kind of presenting to James Cameron if you know what I mean, like just flirting with him in front of the entire world.

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Long post of your thoughts on Rebirth still incoming on here or nah?

Yeah probably I’ve just been super depressed lately but I still want to get round to it. I had this weird thing where I was like I need to play it a couple of times so I can really absorb the story and organise my thoughts and then I ended up getting the platinum but still felt like I hadn’t done that because my hard mode playthrough was so broken up with doing side quests and getting accessories and stuff for difficult fights lol. So I will probably do another straight playthrough to refresh my memory on everything and then hopefully just write out a long post about it.

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Losing my mind at the idea of sitting on tumblr criticising Jane Fonda who has certainly done more than most of the people who would deign to take issue with her over this

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JESSICA ALBA as Max Guevera in Dark Angel 1.01

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DARK ANGEL 2000-2002 ↳ origins of omegaverse

+ and of course

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I think constantly about this viral tweet that is actually about top gun

research shows there’s going to be a detonation of mission impossible yaoiposting come May of this year because the new movie is coming out and there’s a gay forehead touch in it. Possibly large enough to replicate the yaoi James Bond posting that was popular a few years ago but the magnitude is still unconfirmed. Reports from the front are on-going. the presence of a skinny white British guy is likely an aggravating factor

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I’m gonna go soooo crazy if Better Man doesn’t get a best VFX nomination and frankly it deserves to win

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This is insane.

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I feel like in 2025 I would like to spend more time on tumblr and less time on other places but I think the reason I don’t is that I always feel like I’ve been my most embarrassing and worst self on here, so it feels a bit humiliating thinking about trying to come back and be more normal. But maybe I can do it a little at a time.

Anyway, I’m going to be in London for a couple of days but maybe when I get home I’ll write a long post about my thoughts on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth because I have been mulling it over quite a lot.

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My mum would google this.

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I finally started playing ffvii rebirth and I have many, many issues with this game and its changes to basic characterisation and other things but... the clerith got me I'm so sorry.

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like it is kind of funny how many people believe that gladiator 2 is trying and failing to be a retread of the first or a pure exercise in nostalgia when it felt very clear to me that it is much more of a commentary on the themes of the first one and makes a lot of choices to explicitly repudiate or undermine the ideas of the first, and it took some idiot youtube grifter to go in with the mindset that ridley scott has a "woke" agenda to be able to identify what it was actually doing.

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I am watching this video now and it’s solidifying my belief that gladiiator is a superior film to the first one because I actually agree with a lot of his analysis of their respective themes and what the sequel is trying to achieve relative to the first one it’s just that he’s extremely tilted about all of it and I think it fucking rocks that ridley scott did this

I had some right-wing grifter video recommended to me on YouTube that was like "Gladiator 2 hates masculinity!!1" and despite not knowing a lot about the movie and only seeing the trailer I was like... what? That entire trailer mainly featured men. I heard the main female lead's role was severely reduced. Like how on earth can they say a movie about men is somehow demonizing men or masculinity?

it’s bonkers lol. I don’t even know what their argument for that could be, there’s like two female characters in the movie and a third who like you said shot scenes but did not make the theatrical edit. I guess the only thing they could complain about is that they show women participating in a battle towards the beginning of the movie but I still don’t get how you could fill like a whole video complaining about just that.

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I had some right-wing grifter video recommended to me on YouTube that was like "Gladiator 2 hates masculinity!!1" and despite not knowing a lot about the movie and only seeing the trailer I was like... what? That entire trailer mainly featured men. I heard the main female lead's role was severely reduced. Like how on earth can they say a movie about men is somehow demonizing men or masculinity?

it’s bonkers lol. I don’t even know what their argument for that could be, there’s like two female characters in the movie and a third who like you said shot scenes but did not make the theatrical edit. I guess the only thing they could complain about is that they show women participating in a battle towards the beginning of the movie but I still don’t get how you could fill like a whole video complaining about just that.

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I normally ignore right-wing culture war stuff regarding new movies because it’s never especially deep and is very arbitrary and stupid but there is something how weird they’re being about gladiiator that makes it impossible to look away. it’s like yes this is mostly racism, and on top of that they all feel a sense of ownership over “the roman empire” but then you get these funny little twists like they’re mad because pedro pascal is in it, so it’s also about star wars. and then you have the fact that it is kind of a less conservative film than the first one (or is at least attempting to be) and is explicitly criticising some of the ideas of the first as well as the american empire and the whole concept of rome worship — but none of them have the intellectual ability to even identify that this bothers them beyond general grousing.

I guess maybe this is because I haven’t been looking but it’s the complaints that I’m not seeing that makes it all so much more ridiculous than usual, like ridley scott called trump a moron a few years ago but they’re not complaining about that. and then you have people reacting to this like “why do they hate this film when the main character is a masculine white guy which is what they want” and it’s like yeah but he’s sort of the wrong kind of masculine white guy, like he isn’t given maximus’s larger than life qualities, the fantasy doesn’t hit right for them, and the movie surrounding him despite being entirely about men is kind of like a weird distortion of all the stuff they fetishise so even if you read it as a conservative picture (and it has many conservative elements and some glaring flaws in its messaging) it’s not the right kind anyway. and it’s extremely cynical. so all that’s left for them to enjoy is the violence. of course they don’t like it. and it isn’t even like avatar which is a very straightforward allegory that they just decide to invert and say the evil colonising military are actually the good guys, it kind of defies their ability to twist and ‘reclaim’. it all just feels especially pathetic this time, somehow even more pathetic than when they do it about children’s movies.

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I feel like Gladiator 2 is the first movie I’ve ever seen where almost every criticism or complaint I’ve seen people make about it is a feature to me lol. Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal lack the screen presence of Russell Crowe? That actually works to the story’s advantage. Screenplay is a mess? I was entertained by its goofy moments. I just loved it. I completely get why other people hated it or found it underwhelming but for me, it was great.

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The way it kind of turns the ideas of the first movie on their head was so engaging to me I’ve seen a lot of people criticising the screenplay and I get it but I enjoyed it, it totally reframed and complicated the first one’s overall heroic narrative. The first one totally believes in Roman ideals of strength and honour as embodied by Maximus and Marcus Aurelius and the second is so much more agnostic about those things. The first film is about a Roman hero who through his exertions in the arena can redeem the whole Roman Empire which has been perverted by Commodus, and the second challenges almost every aspect of that narrative and the idea that Rome can even be redeemed. It’s not perfect and I think it flinches at the end in service of traditional blockbuster requirements for storytelling and heroism but idk I loved it.

Gladiator 2 is in some ways one of the dumbest films I have seen in a while but I loved it so much it’s actually embarrassing and I wouldn’t change a single one of its silly soap opera-esque revelations for the world. I was entertained, and I loved its extremely thinly-veiled anti-US imperialism allegory.