#I mean tldr they were racist and super antisemitic and like

[cruelsister-moved2]

met a neopagan in the wild today and it was a psychically disturbing experience im feeling psychically disturbed is all I can say. my psyche is disturbed

[nihilisticvaginas]

Idk hot take I guess but I think we have GOT to stop giving fascists the entirety of the English language. Every couple of weeks/months I'll see a new completely innocuous phrase like the semi-recent "every day I wake up and notice things" or the more popular "reject modernity-embrace tradition/RETVRN". In any case, a funny new meme is created by shitbags, and after a while a few lefties will declare that it's actually the meme of the enemy and all leftists need to stop using it and a new purity test is added to the increasingly long list of "things you cannot touch". And idk.... it seems incredibly counterproductive to keep giving these people super-secret code language that only fascists or unsuspecting newbs up the pipeline can use. We can reclaim slurs but we can't co-opt a funny meme or a whole ass aesthetic?? (When the whole point of a meme is to spread, evolve, and change) I don't want nazis to have innocent phrases or soft ball memes to recruit people with. That's literally part of their play book. The vaporwave aesthetic and laser eyes Joe Biden naturally breached containment until a bunch of libs were memeing the shit out of it and guess what happened? The fascists DROPPED IT. It became so normie and cringe that they didn't want to play with it anymore. So what if we just took their shit? Make their own content so watered down, unpalatable, and removed from original meaning that Facebook moms post it next to minions.

And before the "piss on the poor" reading comprehension crowd storms into my inbox, I'm not suggesting we memeify racist or antisemitic characters. I am literally talking about strategically selecting the stealth "newcomer friendly" stuff that they bait people with. If all that they ever routinely have is the most extreme vile memes that are typically hidden until you're further down the pipeline then how are they going to reach the general public?

TLDR I don't think we can stop fascists with the digital equivalent of hunger strikes and peaceful protests yall. I think this is one cat I'm in favor of declawing before they can reach the fitness bros, the crunchy moms, the bullied student, etc.

I'm open to debate, but please keep it on topic and keep it productive. I do understand how sideways this can go if done incorrectly. I respect a lot of the people saying "DON'T USE THIS MEME" but I just can't get on board with letting nazis build an ever expanding dictionary that we can't do anything about besides chastise our comrades.

[jennifersbod]

ooh i forgot to ask you but what did you think about chapter 2??

asdfghjkl i have Feelings™ and i’m making this public to see if other feels the same because rn i feel kinda lonely in my criticisms (anyway doron ily and feel free to dm me if you wanted this to be a private convo asdfghj). that said, i still really loved the movie as a whole, and i feel like it did hit the most important parts of the book in a mostly satisfying way. this answer is gonna be spoiler-heavy so like anyone reading this who doesn’t want spoilers can yeet themselves now.

starting with cons because i like saving the best things for last:

bev’s cycle of abuse storyline NEVER getting fully resolved. in the book tom has a super satisfying death and the movie completely ignored the entire thing. this felt messy/problematic as most abuse survivors will know that abusers tend to track their victims. knowing he’s still out there, if i were bev, would leave me forever nervous.

also bev’s being psychic from the deadlights (???) and saying they’ll all die if they don’t help is a moralistic cop out because it changes their basic motivations from love and goodness and light to just being scared they’re all going to die (meaning they didn’t fully conquer their fear or overcome it because they’d die anyway). (wouldn’t this also mean that richie became psychic after his run-in with the deadlights in the third act?? who knows because it wasn’t fleshed out any further)

eddie’s being used as comic relief. i laughed with everyone else when angel of the morning came on but like where’d it come from, y’all??? if anything paul bunyun should’ve been the comic relief scare.

mike’s parents being crackheads and dying in a fire (i know they did this in the first film too and it pissed me off just as much then). mike and his relationship with his father at his death bed was such a HUGE part of the book for me and they scrapped it completely for a racist trope AND robbed us of a black spot scene and the giant bird

barely anything of stan before he yeeted himself off the board. just like as a jew, i loved how the book handled the antisemitism of derry and the world at large. if handled correctly, it could’ve been super timely and relevant, but nope.

they left out don talking to the cops after adrian

henry bowers’s whole subplot was rushed and honestly could’ve been left out completely if they were just going to do it wrong like that

audra, where tf is audra

ALL THE CGI was laughable- mrs. kersh was honestly ruined for me with that last bit of cgi. it’s something that so easily could’ve been accomplished with practical effects (it’s basically the same makeup they could’ve copied from the bathtub scene in the shining), but this is a problem that’s pretty pervasive in the genre right now that andy falls into way too much

this is kind of a more arguable one, but leaving out the turtle and 'He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts’

amy adams not being cast over jessica chastain only because i really miss sharp objects and sofia/amy playing the same character

i also wish they’d gone into ben’s whole architect thing more and included how he’d subconsciously replicated part of the derry library in one of his buildings

the ending being so small in scale, like, the book had a bigger scope of the town and i missed that (also IT’s eggs)

i’m sure i have more but that feels like a lot so imma stop there

tldr; i have petty opinions on what they should’ve kept from the book and the look of the cgi

pros!!!

bill hader, BILL HADER, BILL HADER- an actor i’ve loved and believe in since his snl days a decade ago playing a character i’ve always related to and loved from a book i read a decade ago is more than i ever could’ve asked for and he stole the movie #hader2020

the expansion of richie’s sexuality. never explicit in the book, but a wonderfully worthwhile storyline in the film that hader and wolfhard both absolutely kill

THE BIRD PUZZLE !!!!

stan’s death being portrayed the way it was and not being used for shock value in the least!!! and andy bean in general!!!

xavier dolan as adrian was heartbreaking and he made me cry (people have mixed feelings about it being included in the movie but it’s important to recognize that it was based on a true story that largely inspired the book’s themes)

all the eddie x richie content… even 2 months ago i could never see this happening even though i’ve shipped it since i read the book and i’m still in shock tbh. the hammock scene was the cutest fucking thing i’ve ever seen in my entire life and i want it to play on my gravestone.

james ransone was perfect casting and i love him with all my heart, he played it perfectly and somehow made reddie mutual when the script didn’t make it fully clear

the scene transitions were gorgeous and almost made up for the shoddy cgi

STEPHEN KING’S CAMEO bitch give me $300

“ayooo silver away!!” being included

eddie getting stabbed in the face and still criticizing bower’s mullet and people still think he’s straight

 the “here’s johnny” moment

tHE BRIDGE

the turtle in ben’s classroom !!!

richie’s going to temple for stan !!!

benverly endgame!!!

my favorite addition was honestly the pomeranian and richie and eddie fawning over it (dog dads au pls)

i could literally mention every loser’s interaction with each other but this post would get even longer so yeah no

kiss me, fatboy

beep beep richie even if it was only really once

beverly smashing the mirror when ben is being carved up isn’t talked about enough but i loved that moment

the losers not forgetting each other was a welcome change from the book for me personally and i’m glad to see a stephen king adaptation somehow make the ending lighter than the book’s

i feel like most of the pros have been touched on at length on this website so i don’t want to list anymore and end up being repetitive, but i did adore the movie and i think it’s unlikely anyone would’ve made a version that would satisfy me more so i’m really thankful we got what we got.

[actuallyyangxiaolong]

So this morning during my political theory class, I learned about Locke and his ideas about government and found myself agreeing with a lot of his points and marveling at the way in which his theories shaped our current political systems and climate. And then, in my gender studies class, I learned that he believed that people of color (and black people specifically) (racism tw:) were the result of human beings mating with chimps. As anyone who spends a lot of time in the morally black and white tumblr space does, I freaked out about the opinions that I had held of Locke just an hour earlier and spoke to my professor.

Effectively, what she had to say (and what everyone on this site needs to hear) is that there is a lot of room for morally grey attitudes when dealing with historical figures (in fact it is a necessity). In pretty much every single instance of a historical figure, they are unbearably bigoted in one way or another because they are a product of their time. At this time, all of the prevailing theories about race by scientists and experts (despite it being a social construct) were the most racist bullshit unimaginable, but because these people were relatively educated for their time and were supposed to be the experts, their ideas were taken at face value. People had no real cause to discount experts in an era in which education was limited and society was highly stratified, so they sort of just agreed with whatever the prevailing ideas of the era were and that was that. (after all, most of us likely would not argue if we thought a scientific study was wrong, because we tend to believe in science unconditionally).

My professor also said that we can acknowledge how the bigotry of an era might have shaped their ideas, without discounting the good aspects of a historical figure’s ideas and actions. For instance, I noticed that Locke, in a two-sentence throwaway line, justified slavery despite the fact that his entire book is about the freedoms of life, liberty, and property (property in this instance being anything that you put labor into acquiring). Of course, slavery is absolutely antithetical to that, and anyone who was writing these theories about government and our inherent liberties today would look at slavery and know that it is an absolute abomination against all of these ideas. And yet, he found a way to justify completely contradictory ideas because the racism of the era was so entrenched that it somehow made sense to say the exact opposite of what he theoretically stood for. This theme is present in a lot of the writings and ideas of historical figures, and the further back in history you go, the harder it is to find anything that we would consider morally right.

You do have to acknowledge the ways in which the standard bigotry of a time may have influenced someone’s works (for instance, I doubt that he was thinking about black people when he wrote dozens upon dozens of pages about equality and having the right to life and freedom, nor white people when he wrote about slavery), however you can acknowledge the good parts of what they did and the way that it positively shaped history and even our current society. For instance, his ideas about the separation of powers and tyranny being bad (surprisingly not a belief held by everyone in his era) and that we all have fundamental rights by virtue of being born are really good and incredibly influential, while obviously, the racism was terrible. This can be applied to every influential person (Justinian's code was really influential and a lot of it was amazing, but the antisemitism was terrible. Luther’s complaints against the Catholic church and the massive way in which the protestant reformation shaped the world was also incredibly important and influential and meaningful to a lot of people, but the antisemitism and sexism was again horrific. Napoleon and Oscar Wilde and Mary Wollstonecraft were all super influential people who did some good stuff but who were also characterized by the bigotry of their time, etc.).

So, you really can’t apply your own morals to historical figures and completely discount their ideas and actions based on that, because there must always be nuance and the knowledge that their ideas may have been influenced by the prejudice of the era. While we could not justify many historical attitudes today, these people had no reason to question the entrenched ideas or go against convention (hell, even I had no cause to question my bigoted ideas until I found tumblr). We are all products of our time, our experiences, our family, and those who influence us, and historical figures are no different, but that does not mean that anything that happened before the year 1990 has no merit or that it was inherently 100% garbage just because the people who came up with ideas were impacted by their prejudices.

TLDR-  Tumblr’s black and white morality cannot be applied to any field of study and cannot be applied to the real world. There is always nuance.