#I think every former pony kids weakness

[vanya-mortis]

oh no...

ponies......

my one weakness.............

Based on @cherrifire's designs because I love them - Thank you Cherri for the inspo :-)

Individual sketches (and alt eye colors cause I couldn't decide) below

I only gave these flats, so if anyone wants to give them real colors please feel free! Just tag me so I can see :-)

[popculturebuffet]

Star Vs Tom Luictor Retrospective Detour: Skooled!

                                         Dedicated to Jessica Walter                                                     1941- 2021

Welcome back all you still mourning people to Prince of Wishful Thinking, my Tom Lucitor Retrospective... or at least a detour from it as I need to cover the Meteora arc to cover Divide/Conquer properly. When we last left off with Star she and Tom were going closer, but both are taking a break this time. We’ll get back to them in April... oh will we get back to them in april.  For now we’re back to Meteora who I forgot was ABSENT for a while. not forever, but while her parantege, the cover up related to her and all of that has been vitally important, Meteora herself vanished after Monster Party and hasn’t been seen till now. But i’ts a good storytelling engine.. it ratchets up tension for her inevitable return, and gives us time to find out what happened with her and let that sink in.. granted i’td also be the last time it sunk in but I can dunk on the series decline later... I still have season 4 episodes to cover after all. So join me under the cut as we get the welcomed Return of Henious, an unexpected hero.. and Ponyhead because this series clearly hasn’t hurt me enough. And as usual for my Star Vs Reviews, i’d like to thank one of my Best Friends @jess-the-vampire for her insight on this episode. It’s always welcome and she always manages to find something I didn’t think of . 

So we open at Saint O’s with Ponyhead returning to the school, having previously run it post rebellion before leaving because.. I don’t know. She probably got tired of being a leader, and out of universe they needed her to be around star more. Look the series has far more important things it never explained and never will, not explaining why a recklessly irresponsible asshole left a position of authority and responsibility I can let slide. 

She’s come for brunch but things have changed... the school is still a warm, free environment for princesses to better themselves and party hardy, no longer an oppressive brainwashing gulag run by someone who as it turned out was horribly brainwashed herself.. it’s just now it actually has rules and structure. 

It now also has an actual leader, Princess Patty Arms who showed up in the school’s previous appearance this season here and.. that’s it. I think she showed up in the background of the original st o’s episode. And it’s a shame because she’s a really fascinating character. No really she’s calm, dosen’t take Pony’s shit, and while a brunch exam SEEMS like a waste of time... it really isn’t. A good meal can loosen up a dignitary and some rulers have sticks up their keisters about things like this, so being able to do it just right can win them over. It’s still a touch ridiculous but given the world of star is a touch ridiculous to start with, it works. 

Pony naturally leaves in a rage over this especially when no one backs her up.. but soon the School has bigger issues and we get to why we’re actually here: Meteora is back. And while she has changed, now having grown larger and stronger, easily scaling the wall, she still wants payback and we get a damn fine battle sequence as the princesses all unite against their former tormentor. It’s also sad in hindsight.. because as Jess pointed out to me almost NONE of these characters show up again. And I only added the almost because Penelope is in there. They all seem interesting, the setting of ST O’s itself is interesting, and the idea of a school for princesses of various types is a cool idea. I’ts something the show could’ve come back to to see how they bounce back from this attack.. but like most cool background elements in the show they forget about it. It was intresting to see the schools slow evolution from horrible nightmare to princess ran utopia and like many things coming up it feels like a lost opportunity. 

That being said the fight is awesome, with Meteora proving to be a juggernaut in strength and outplanning her enimies, having brought an overide switch for the robots (Patty reprogrammed them to work for the school) and having them throw their hearts/ power sources as bombs. It’s a damn fine sequence as she finds way after way to keep going, with a now restored rasticore helping them simply portal in.

Pony meanwhile.. is hiding , as Patty find sout when she finds her, and Pony assumes this is about her... though for once i’ts not JUST ego.. but because she was one of the two who started the uprising at the school in the first place and THE person who tossed her out. We also get a nice character moment as while Pony tells patti she still hates her.. she puts the princess behind her when Meteora approaches. She may be a selfish twit whose massively unlikeable.. but she has a good heart.. and not just the one she keeps in a jar she got from one of her boyfriends. 

But Meteora has more important buisness and finds her way to the depths of St. O’s.. where we meet the Schools namesake and her adopted mother a robot played by tress macneile.. another thing the series never bothered to care about as where did these robots come from and why? 

Turns out Meteora came to find out her own personal history, with the remote from before used to find the real dirt.. and what we find .. is heartbreaking as we slowly journey back through Meteora’s childhoods as Henious.. and it’s fucking heart breaking with Tress voicing her younger versions, hence why I didn’t use this as the jessica tribute as while walter’s good in the episode, she isn’t given much. 

We see her as a teen, forced to hide her tail and insulted over it by her mother.. and it only gets worse as when her cheeks glow as a kid St. O tries to wash them off and we get the poor child desperately begging that “she can be better”

We do finally get the answers Meteora saught as we see Shastacan dropping off the baby meteora, calling her “Henious”.. which St. O took as her name. Proving the spiderbites minus penelope’s dickishness is indeed genetic and why I have no sympathy for the prick getting eaten later... and hopefully globgor will do an encor with penepople’s parents. Here’s hoping. 

So Meteora now knows she’s the rightful queen, and decides to go take it back.. though Pony does try to stand up for her friends... and while we don’t see it hte next episode confirms she got her horn ripped the fuck off. And this horribly traumatic injury.. is magically fixed via 3d printing next time we see her after an episode grappling iwth it instead of having pony deal with not having a horn, or her prostetic not giving her magic powers again. Because this show again really likes to leave good ideas out to rot in the sun like that  package of hamburger I left out in the sun yesterday. And I actually had a reason there: I need a lot of Racoons for an elaborate scheme involving a map to tex cruz’s house, a used apache helicopter and a bulk order of tiny parachutes. 

We do get some payoff to things though, as Henious comes on to rasticore who not so politely rejects her for being nuts.. before it’s revealed Gemini, her loyal servant is also a robot and she uses his heart to blow up rasticore and take the arm with her... which is ALSO never brought up again. Seriously this episode is so full of loose ends i’m suprised it just dosen’t end with Zuko asking his dad about his mother. Gemini’s death is genuinely tragic as his last words are “If you wanted my heart.. all you had to do.. was assssskkkkk”. God damn. So with that Meteora heads out to reclaim her birthright.. no matter the cost. 

Final Thoughts on Skooled!: This one is decent.. but like the last episode I covered, the lack of payoff off for almost anything here, excluding the Meteora plotline and the Pony thing which instead got a BAD payoff, is really starting to rear it’s ugly head as the series greatest weakness. Yes bigger than the romance plot. And given that romance plot after this season can be best discribed as...

The show just.. forgets a good chunk of things happened to keeep things chugging along. It sets UP plots, what happens to st o’s from here, buff frog and a small caravan of monsters leaving forever, the message from shastacan, who built the st o’s robots, and on and on.. but it never PAYS them off. It dosen’t care to. It just does things so the plot can move but never bothers to think about the fucking consequences. It just gets more and more irrtating to think about as other shows throughly DO: Amphibia has the fact the characters get into shenanigans become a commented on running gag and something they grow past, and everything that happens matters. Every episode of Owl House builds on the foundation of the previous episodes. OK Ko dosen’t forget one episode had the characters not be able to turn back into humans and implies their wearing human costumes for the rest of the series. Which is fucking weird, but it was their memory. My point is other shows around the same time or right after didn’t magically forget things happened for convience sake. While it’s OKAY to loose some things in the shuffle, it happens to the best of us, it’s not okay to do it SO fucking often and with no clear care for the audiences desire for payoff. The show just ignores what plot points, like the huge cliffhanger of Star telling marco how she felt at the end of season 2, it dosen’t care about till it needs them and ignores the ones it never does. You can’t just.. bring shit up like it’s important and then try and forget it ever happened. People remember stuff, we are NOT stupid. KIDS are not stupid. When I was younger I REMEMBERED things that happened on KND, Danny Phantom, Xiaolin Showdown, TMNT 2003, because those shows, which are from decades ago, knew I would and trusted even if I missed something and was thrown off i’d tune in for the quality. 

And in an age of streaming and more story based tv you can’t just.. ask kids to act like something they saw didn’t happen because your fucking lazy and frankly YOU never should have. Kids deserve better, my niblings deserve better and frankly the adults your clearly also writing for.. deserve better. This episode is eh, but the problems it represents are so fucking worse. 

Next time on tom. If you thought I got angry towards the end of this one, just you wait. Next time i’ts Booth Buddies. Yeah.. yeah that one. Stay tuned.

[dukeofriven]

Let Boys Love Girl Things

For a deeply depressed, angry, and vitriolic bisexual 20-something who stumbled out of a toxic 2-year intensive college program confused as fuck about his gender and hurting everyone around him, it is with no exaggeration that I say My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic’s low-key stakes, warmth, humour, kindness, and utter lack of cynical irony was my first step on the road not only to recovery but coming even sort of close to having an accord with my identity. So I quite frankly I am exhausted that I have spent nine years being judged on the behaviour of a fandom group from 4chan. Nine years ago there was a gross perpetuation of toxic masculinity where men were ridiculed en-masse for liking a “girl’s show,” a campaign of derision that only intensified as the worst elements of 4chan gave everyone the evidence they seemed to want to justify their snap-judgement that boys liking girls shows was fundamentally weird, gross, and worthy of censure. We like to clap ourselves on the back for how woke we are now. There’s no discourse that says it is “skeevy” that men enjoy She-Ra, and petulant MRAs on Reddit getting upset about the show’s new ‘feminist’ agenda is considered to be representative of nothing other than petulant MRAs on Reddit, not the She-Ra fandom as a whole. Steven Universe is triumphed everywhere as a victory for better masculinity - without anyone ever noting that Steven would love every single moment of My Little Pony: FiM. He’d cry at the wedding, and he’d weep at the destruction of the library, and he’d think the Storm King was an effective villain while Connie rolled her eyes and tried and failed to point-out the weak characterization. Steven would cheer and cry every time a villain was redeemed through the power of love and friendship. Because he’s Steven, and he loves schmaltz, and it’s okay for a boy to like schmaltz. If we truly believe that, as we say we do, it’s time let the habit of shaming boys who liked a cartoon show go. It’s been a decade. Yes: MLP: FiM had a disgusting contingent of its fandom. You know what other franchise has that problem? A little film series you might have heard of called Star Wars. A contingent of Star Wars fandom was so racist it drove actors of colour off of twitter because it piled hate upon them. It was so misogynistic that somebody out there recut the entirety of The Last Jedi so that men save the day and all the women get reduced to bit parts. And yet if I see a Star Wars avatar my first assumption generally isn’t “oh you like Star Wars, so you must therefore be a misogynistic racist.” Because statistically speaking, you aren’t - just like, statistically speaking, the men who liked My Little Pony weren’t 4chan users. Not that most people bothered to find that out, because - shockingly - the worst elements had loud voices and got all the press, and the standard we applied to them was so entrenched in patriarchy that none of us wanted to accept that men could like the girls show without it being some gross violation of the proper order. I’m tired of that. The show’s been on nine years - long enough that kids who grew up watching it are old enough to start entering “The Discourse Space,” and what kind of example do we want to set for them that a show that might have meant so much to them growing up is given a defacto label of deviancy? ”Adult males like this show about the little kiddie ponies - that’s so creepy.” There’s a point I want to make here that I think really needs to be said so I am going to make it large

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a show for children; it is not a show about children.

What do I mean by this? Adventure Time is the story of Finn, a 12-year-old. Steven Universe is a show about Steven Universe, a 12-year-old. Ok K.O. is a show about K.O. a 6-11 year-old. Avatar: The Last Airbender is about a group of kids aged 11-14. She-Ra is a show about Adora who is… 16-ish? 17? And so on.

MLP:FiM is a show about 20-somethings. It’s a show about a grad student, a small business owner, a baker, a farmer, an environmental technician, a… trust fund baby?*... and, later, a former dictator. Yes, there are some kid characters, but the primary cast are all young adults who’ve reached adulthood and found themselves having to learn over and over again all sorts of shit they really ought to have known by now but don’t. It is, in short, a story about Millennials: an entire generation who reached adulthood not knowing what that meant or how to cope. Every time you laugh at the characters and go “how do they not know this [obvious thing that is obvious to adults]” you do so while watching a children’s cartoon rather than paying your taxes because you’re still not sure how to do that properly and are just low-key freaking out about it and hoping the problem goes away on its own. I speak from experience. The list in endless: we might ridicule the ponies ignorance at social graces, but i’ve been on this hellsite long enough that I’m pretty sure most of you are social-anxious neurotics who cock-up just as often and just as spectacularly as any pony on the show.

I’ve grown up in-sync with these characters. I’ve seen them go from floundering at 20 to sorta getting their act together and coming to grips with adult life as they reach 30. I’ve seen them become successful, get new jobs, start new careers. There have been episodes about how to deal with parents who embarrass you, how to get your parents to understand that you’re an adult now and want to be treated that way. There str stories about how to handle deadbeat older brothers who won’t stop mooching off your emotional labour, and how to mourn parents who’ve died. There are also stories about the byzantine nature of school regulation. (If next season is all about Twilight Sparkle reforming the Equestrian tax code it will be entirely in keeping with the adult-life-trend the show has been on for a while.)

My point with all this is that the “liking the kid’s show” narrative is disingenuous in the way it frames fans as creepy. To get tu quoque about it all I could raise my hand and point at all you adults gushing about all these kid protagonists in your favourite cartoon shows and go “Isn’t that CREEPY and GROSS you DEVIANTS” and on and on and on.

But I won’t.

Because it was never really about that, was it? It’s never been about that.

It was, at first, about what it was and wasn’t okay for boys - for men - to like. As a kid who’d been mercilessly bullied for being even the tiniest bit effeminate, openly embracing the fact that I liked this show about the colourful cartoon ponies felt like painting a target on my back. As for the boys younger than me - the boys still in high school in 2010 and 2011 who openly embraced this show? Braver than any US marine. When this all started it was about policing what was ‘appropriate’ for boys - nobody gave the adult Transformers fandom the same kind of shit, I assure you. It was about patriarchy - and how unwilling we all were to let go of it, no matter how progressive we told ourselves we were. Just like any moral panic, it developed a far more disturbing tone of disapprobation because if a handful of fans on 4chan were creepy than surely all the fandom was creepy. I’ve had plenty of fun mail in my inbox as people with cartoon avatars told me my opinion was invalid because I had an avatar from a different cartoon show. If I had an MP avatar that made me a “brony,” which made me a creepy MRA edgelord. Never mind that I don’t even use the term, and haven’t since… well, since the grossest elements of 4chan got it tattooed on their phalluses and trumpeted it to the heavens as the calling card of their misogyny.

There was a moment, I think, back in the halcyon days of 2010 and 2011 where we could have taken this another way. Where, socially, the rise of boys watching ‘the girl’s show’ was treated as a breakthrough, as a paradigm shift, as something to be celebrated and nurtured instead of something to revile like an anti-homosexual PSA from the 1950s. “Can’t let the adult men near that children’s show, who knows what might happen. They might repeat the trends that all fandoms have done for decades upon decades - the horror!”

We could have been better - but we weren’t. We mocked, and clutched our pearls, and looked appalled, and in doing so we fed the trolls all the ammunition they’d ever need to turn themselves into The Poor Oppressed Babies who just wanted to be left alone to watch their ponies and belittle women in peace. So the gender-questioning bi boy trying to feel good about himself got rounded-up with the usual 4chan suspects because we both enjoyed the same television program.

Patriarchy is not an external force with its boot upon our necks: it is a collaborative social effort, reinforced both consciously and sub-consciously every day. The internet of the early 2010s was a very different place, and the decisions we made then still live with us today. If we want to stop the perpetuation of toxic masculinity, we have to ourselves cease to perpetuate it. There’s an entire generation of queer boys and non-binary boys and non-bro cis-boys - the kind who cry and care and give a shit about kindness - who have grown up on Steven Universe and Adventure Time and yes, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. These are boys who deserve to have a better place prepared for them than I had, one that isn’t still littered by the baggage of all the dumb stupid crap from 2010 and 2011.

It’s time to let the ghost of Toxic 4chan Fandoms Past go already, and let this show about cartoon ponies be free to entertain and delight without incurring a moral inquisition. Life is so bad right now, the news is so dire. Curl up with My Little pony: Friendship is Magic and let all its goodness, and kindness, and laughter, and caring carry you away and remind you that we can still tell stories about worlds in which those virtues are treasured. Let the show stand on its actual merits, and not the cultural lodestones of long-gone reprobates. And stop granting the phantoms of 4chan the power to say anything meaningful in 2019.

_________________ *Serious question: what does Fluttershy do for a living? Like, as her job? For most of the series? She’s the only one who doesn’t have a meaningful career, and after meeting her enabling parents you just know she’s been living off pre-existing savings for years (she’s thrifty like that).

[Note: this post was originally posted in this thread. It has since been re-edited and slightly modified.]

[mlpdestinyverse]

“Paralyzed”

Sometimes you lose yourself. It's okay to reach out and have someone help find you again.

Feat: Skychaser, Rhea

Story and Description Under The Cut

“...how are you doing, Sky?” The question broke what had been a comfortable silence between Skychaser and the only other pony in the room. Like any other day, Skychaser was helping with cleaning up the Cutie Mark Sanctuary’s dance studio after their last class. He had been performing the task mindlessly, his tired, worn mind drifting, before Miss Rhea had spoken up. Skychaser resisted the urge to wince at the question - any and all variations of it, really. He settled on his usual half-honest response, not bothering to look at the mare as he answered. Instead he lifted a chair up to place on top of a table. “I’m okay. Just tired.” He could hear her tone behind him as she too moved chairs around, friendly and gentle. “Aah, another restless night, dear?” “Yeah…” With that, Sky let the conversation drop. There wasn’t anything else to say about the topic. And he wasn’t in the mood for small talk, anyway. As soon as he was done, he was ready to curl up in bed and will himself to drift off. Any other day, Rhea would have left it at that. Today, however, was different. “Is there anything keeping you up...?” Sky turned to look at his dance instructing partner, who was straightening up papers on a desk. Although the continued conversation was unexpected, the answer was one he had already given numerous times before. “I just couldn’t fall asleep. That’s all.” “Oh…” Sky picked up a few candy wrappers some children had dropped during the snack break. Just as he dropped them into the trash, Rhea’s voice reached his ears once more. “I haven’t seen Monochrome around lately.” Skychaser stilled. If Rhea had noticed, there was no evidence of it as she casually continued. “They usually drop by to see you at least once a week. Are they doing okay?” Sky slowly turned and finally met Rhea’s blue gaze. He now noticed there was something strange about the way she was looking at him. Though patient and quiet as she awaited his answer, there was something almost...watchful about her. Sky’s gaze flicked to one side. “...I don’t know. They’re probably just busy.” “...are you sure?” Skychaser tensed, suddenly feeling unsettled. Looking back at Rhea, she now appeared hesitant, her eyebrows drawn in. “Scootaloo mentioned that they’ve been acting a bit strange…” It was Rhea’s turn to glance away. “And since...you’ve been acting a little strange lately, I thought…” Skychaser forced himself to swallow down his guilt and lingering frustration. It had been two weeks since he had seen the other pegasus’s face. It was safe to say Monochrome was officially avoiding him. And who could blame them? Sky was miserable to be around. Though for Skychaser, after the way Monochrome had pushed him, he wasn’t in the mood to see his datemate any time soon either - if they could even consider themselves datemates anymore. He was pretty sure after everything he had said, everything between them was officially fucked up. Whether he wanted to believe it was better this way, or if this only deepened his anguish, he couldn’t tell. Stupidly indecisive as always. Skychaser shrugged at Rhea, going back to avoiding her gaze. “How should I know? I haven’t seen them.” “Right…” Sky watched as Rhea stared at the floor, as if deliberating something. What was once a pleasant silence earlier had quickly become uncomfortable. Skychaser shifted tensely, glancing around the room to find something to escape the conversation. But from the looks of it, the two of them had finished cleaning up. Before he could excuse himself to his room, the older mare broke the silence one more time. “Skychaser...I think we need to talk.” ….if that alone didn’t raise his stress levels- “...about what?” Sky eyed Rhea warily. There was a different look in her eye. Something...determined. Something that made him feel uneasy, as well as stiff and guarded. “I didn’t want to push things, dear...I know you have your boundaries, and I try to trust that if anything was ever wrong, you’d come to me. Or somepony, eventually.” She frowned worriedly. “But...you’ve been tired and behaving differently for almost a whole month now. And I...I almost feel like it’s getting worse.” Skychaser’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?” That came out a bit more curt than he had meant it to. Rhea noticed. “You’re...never this irritable. Or...detached.” She nervously rubbed her foreleg. “You haven’t been like this in a long time.” Since he first came to the Sanctuary seven years ago, he noted. Her expression saddened, with traces of regret.  “I just feel like something’s happened and I managed to stay blind to it...even kids from our classes have noticed something. They’re worried about you.” His chest clenched. Rainy Daze and Caramello. Rhea didn’t need to say their names for him to know she was indirectly speaking of them. Great...he had stooped so low that even children were wasting their time worrying about him. “They should stop worrying then. I’m fine-” “No, you’re not.” Skychaser was honestly a bit startled by the firmness of Rhea’s voice. She stared at him hard, though her concern was still evident. “You keep brushing this off, Skychaser, but I know something’s wrong. There’s something you’re not telling me.” Rhea began stepping towards him. In response, he began to back up. She stopped a few feet away, her eyebrows narrowed back anxiously. “Please, just talk to me. If something’s happened, let me help you.” A familiar hollowness returned to Skychaser’s chest, his eyes darkening. ‘You can’t help me. No one can help me. There’s no helping this.’ “There’s nothing to talk about.” Rhea’s expression fell. “Skychaser-” “PLEASE, just-!” Sky let out a frustrated growl, roughly pushing his mane back with a hoof. His heart was beating fast in his chest, stress and frustration starting to build again. “Drop it! We’re done here.” He turned, hoping to walk away. But to his dismay, Rhea’s heavier hoofsteps started up again. “I can’t do that Sky! Not this time.” She spoke with a strange urgency. Skychaser turned and was greeted by a face filled with alarm and something unreadable.  “I’ve left you alone for years. I wanted you to talk to me when you were ready, and for awhile I thought you were okay. I thought that maybe you had left everything behind you. But at this rate…” She trailed off, and Skychaser stiffened. What was she getting at? “...you were hesitant about delivering those fliers. Weren’t you?” The pegasus felt himself go rigid. Rhea stared at her hooves as she pressed on. She was focused as she recalled her memory. “You...you read the list of the places you needed to go. And I saw you stop smiling. I didn’t think to ask. You went anyway. But I haven’t seen you smile like you used to since.” There it was. That flurry of clashing and confusing emotions. Everything that he had felt on that particular day, alongside his developing fear and panic. Why couldn’t he have hid this better? He didn’t want this. He didn’t want her to know and be burdened by his sheer patheticness.   “Rhea…” Skychaser began, trying to force out any shake to his voice as he, once again, tried to turn away “We’re done.” Something began to edge Rhea’s voice. Something close to panic. “I should have said something. Something reminded you of your past-” “It doesn’t matter!” Skychaser could hear his own voice begin to raise. He shut his eyes tight, gritting his teeth. Why couldn’t she drop this? “STOP-” “-and now it’s weighing on you! I understand, Skychaser. We can talk about it! I know what this is like-” Something in Sky snapped. He whirled around quickly, his orange eyes blazing as he lifted his hooves and slammed them on the floor. “YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING!” he shouted, unleashing every bit of pent up fury and fear within him. “SHUT UP, JUST-” He faltered. Rhea’s body had gone rigid as she practically stumbled backwards from his outburst. Reading her face, he noticed how her single visible blue eye’s pupil had dilated, and yet appeared unfocused. To say he was taken aback by the reaction was an understatement, and it was quickly followed by concern as the mare’s breathing quickened. He knew that reaction. He had known her for years, and though it was rare, sometimes Rhea got like this when something reminded her of- Skychaser’s stomach bottomed out, and he finally recognized one emotion in her blue orb; Fear. She was afraid of him. He had reminded her of...him. The one who had given her her scars. Skychaser had never felt so motified. He struggled to speak, his voice barely above a whisper. “Rhea…?” He watched as she began breathing harshly and deeply, rapidly blinking her eye as if to refocus. And when she did, when her eye managed to meet his and her breathing had evened out into shaky breaths? Her expression twisted. His chest lurched at the sight of her pain-filled eye misting up. She inhaled deeply, and as she spoke, her voice quivered with desperation. In almost a watery plea; “Sky, I feel like I’m losing you. Please.” Skychaser felt his legs grow weak beneath him. In an insant, every bit of anger he had felt washed away. Shame took its place. Alongside regret. “I’m sorry…” he weakly whispered, standing there helplessly. But the more he stared at Rhea, the more he realized how much he had hurt her, and the more he realized what his emotions were doing to him.

When had he regressed back to his former self...? To the Skychaser who had done nothing but hurt everyone around him? Here he was, harming the one pony who had endlessly believed in him. Even now. He was the worst...he was truly the worst. All at once his shame overpowered anything and everything else. He saw Rhea’s eye widen before he felt the tears falling down his cheeks. He felt her arms envelop him before he registered that he was sobbing. “Fuck...oh G-God, I’m sorry.” He clung to her tightly and buried his face into her shoulder. It was almost as if a hysterical part of him feared she would see his pathetic red, tear-stained face and realize he wasn’t worth it anymore. “ I’m s-sorry...I-I’m so s-sorry.” He hiccuped, repeating his apologies over and over until they devolved into weak croaks inbetween stutters and shuddery breaths. Rhea held him close, stroking his head. “Shh, it’s okay...it’s okay.” Sky shook his head. It wasn’t okay. He was clearly not okay. He forced an inhale, attempting to calm his sobs. “I thought I-I was over this,” he struggled out. After seven long years, Rhea wasn’t the only one who had thought he had moved on. Yet seeing his old family was all it took to make him fall apart. “I d-don’t know what’s w-wrong with me. I don’t know why I f-feel like this-” “There’s nothing wrong with you.” Rhea murmured firmly, yet kindly. She nuzzled her muzzle into his mane. “You’re trying to heal. That’s all... it’s not that easy.” Skychaser’s body trembled. For once, he was afraid of himself. “I don’t know what to d-do. I-I…” he squeezed his eyes closed. He knew his brain had come up with...darker solutions. Thoughts he repeatedly fought against. Remembering only caused his throat to tighten more, his voice lowering into a whisper. “I don’t...” “Hey,” Rhea whispered, her voice soft and gentle. She shifted to rest her cheek against his head. His eyes fluttered back open, and he quieted down to listen. “No matter how alone you feel right now...I’m here.” She continued to stroke his head soothingly, and Skychaser welcomed the warmth. “I’m not going anywhere.” Something about those words struck him. Another sob shook him in response, and soon Rhea was gently rocking him back and forth. “I love you so very much, Sky.” Her quiet voice shook with emotion, each word carrying her sincerity. “Whatever’s happening, we’ll get through this together. We’ll figure something out. I promise.” The smaller stallion could only nod weakly, pressing himself as close to the older mare as possible. Was this what a mother’s comfort felt like? Skychaser’s eyelids fell again. Except this time, it was with some semblance of peace.

"When did I become so numb? When did I lose myself? All the words that leave my tongue Feel like they came from someone else I'm paralyzed. Where are my feelings? I no longer feel things I know I should I'm paralyzed. Where is the real me? I'm lost and it kills me inside I'm p a r a l y z e d."

-"Paralyzed" by NF

Sky will finally get the help he needs. But first...there's somepony he owes an apology to.

[mastcomm]

Brad Pitt and the Beauty Trap

The meaning of Brad Pitt — as actor, star and supreme visual fetish — can be traced to the moment in the 1991 film “Thelma & Louise” when the camera pans up from his bare chest to his face like a caress. William Bradley Pitt was born 1963, but Brad Pitt sprung forth in that 13-second ode to eroticized male beauty, initiating a closely watched career and life, dozens of movies, and libraries of delirious exaltations, drooling gossip and porny magazine layouts.

The delirium has resumed with Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” in which Pitt plays the Pitt-perfect role of Cliff Booth, a seasoned stunt man and coolest of cats. Everything about Cliff looks so good, so effortlessly smooth, whether he’s behind the wheel of a Coupe de Ville or strolling across a dusty wasteland. The novelist Walter Kirn once wrote that Robert Redford “stands for the [movie] industry itself, somehow, in all its California dreaminess.” In “Once Upon a Time,” Tarantino recasts that idea-ideal with Cliff, exploiting Pitt’s looks and charm to create another sun-kissed, golden and very white California dream.

So of course Tarantino being Tarantino has Cliff-Pitt doff his shirt, in a scene that both nods to the actor’s foundational “Thelma & Louise” display and offers another effusive paean to masculine beauty. It’s a hot day; Cliff is scarcely working. So he grabs his tools and a beer and scrambles on a roof to fix an antenna, wearing pretty much what Pitt first wears in “Thelma & Louise.” Then Cliff strips off his Hawaiian shirt and the Champion tee underneath it and once again, Brad Pitt stands bare-chested, soaring above both Hollywood and our gaze, the already porous line between actor and character blurring delectably further.

On Feb. 9, Oscar night, our gaze will again fix on Pitt, who has been nominated for best supporting actor for his role in “Once Upon a Time.” It’s nice that his peers bothered because they’ve been reluctant to honor him in the past. Despite his years of service and critically praised roles, Pitt has won just one Oscar: a best picture statuette for helping produce “12 Years a Slave.” As an actor, he has been nominated three previous times: once for supporting (“12 Monkeys”) and twice for lead (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Moneyball”). As a reminder, Rami Malek, Eddie Redmayne and Roberto Benigni have all won best actor.

The academy hasn’t been alone in undervaluing Pitt. Beauty can be a trap as much as a benediction, including for men. Some of his earlier choices didn’t help, like “Legends of the Fall,” a risible dud that turns him into a golden sex pony. And neither did hyperventilating journalists: “A body like a Bruce Weber pinup,” one cooed in 1991. Four years later, panting tongue presumably in cheek, People wrote that “you wanted to ride bareback down the slopes of his hair.” Pitt himself fed the slavering by posing for outlets that eagerly indulged their soft-core reveries, like his 1994 Rolling Stone cover for “Interview With the Vampire,” where he stares at the camera like a Fabio-ed Kurt Cobain.

Critics could be unkind (guilty), but as the bad movies gave way to good, the notices improved. Soon, it became a favorite cliché to write that he was a character actor trapped in the body of a star (guilty again). Some of this, I think, stems from a suspicion of beauty, that it can’t be trusted, is “merely” superficial and silly, which makes the beautiful one also superficial and maybe even worthy of contempt that can lurk under obsession. There’s nothing new about how we punish beauty. The history of movies is filled with the victims of this malignant love-to-love and love-to-hate dynamic, not all of them women.

Once established, though, the star persona can become a received idea, not just a mask, and tough to dislodge. Pitt’s early success was often framed as a fairy tale about a Missouri kid who “for no apparent reason,” as one writer put it, came to Hollywood and fast became the next big thing. (Cue the James Dean comparisons, of which there were many.) Pitt studied acting in Los Angeles, including with the well-regarded Roy London, but the labor of performing isn’t sexy. It also doesn’t fit with the canard that stars can’t act. But there’s more to acting than the Method, telegraphed anguish and dropping (or adding) pounds, and while Pitt can go big — he’s played Achilles and a serial killer — he has a gift for understatement.

Pitt should have been nominated this year for best actor for his delicate, deep work in James Gray’s “Ad Astra,” a meditation on the unbearable weight of masculinity set largely in outer space. The film was praised as was Pitt’s turn, but neither found awards momentum. The performance was too good and certainly too subtle and interiorized for the academy. It has a historic weakness for showboating — the more suffering the better — which is why Joaquin Phoenix (often otherwise worthy) and his jutting rib cage in “Joker” seem like a lock. But Pitt has time. It took seven nominations for Paul Newman to win best actor; Redford has been nominated only once for acting (he lost).

Like Newman and Redford, Pitt has always seemed born to the screen, a natural. He has a palpable physical ease about him that seems inseparable from his looks, that silkiness that seems, at least in part, to come from waking up every day and going through life as a beautiful person. This isn’t to say that good-looking people don’t have the same issues, the neuroses and awkwardness that plague us mortals. But Pitt has always moved with the absolute surety you see in some beautiful people (and dancers), the casualness of movement that expresses more than mere confidence, but a sublime lack of self-consciousness and self-doubt about taking up space, something not everyone shares. This isn’t swagger; this is flow.

How actors walk, strut, slink and just stand signifies, though perhaps not as much as it once did, before filmmakers started focusing more on talking heads, which scale down better on the small screen. Sean Connery’s predatory prowl helped define James Bond. Sidney Poitier’s perfect posture, how he held his head and moved alongside white actors, announced a profound shift in the cinematic representation of race. Pitt spends a lot of time behind the wheel in “Once Upon a Time,” but he’s a great walker (even while wearing Cliff’s moccasins) and when Cliff realizes that it’s time to leave the dangerous Spahn ranch, the actor’s ramrod carriage, purposeful stride and tensed swing of his arms convey a man prepared for battle.

Over his three-decade career, Pitt has played a range of roles: soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, vampire, thief. Among the most indelible is the phantasmagoric street fighter Tyler Durden — another great mover, with another of Pitt’s career-defining torsos — from David Fincher’s “Fight Club” (1999). The film turns on warring halves, a presumptive beta (Edward Norton) and his alpha twin (Pitt), who confront consumerism, postmodern anomie and that cult known as masculinity. Whether its critique lands has been much debated (that’s a no), but what remains beyond doubt is how Pitt, with his bloodied face and sculpted physique, became an emblem of contemporary masculinity and its contradictions.

In the years since “Fight Club,” the film has been embraced without irony and apparently without humor by men’s rights partisans. I wonder if they think Tyler is hot, and what exactly they see when they look at his body. Movies have always banked on the audience’s love of male violence. Throughout their history, they have exploited male beauty, tapping the passion it inspires. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant,” said, well, Cary Grant.

But the beautiful man can make us nervous, partly because he complicates gender norms. George Clooney is more than a pretty face, more than one writer has insisted. Yes, but he is also pretty. Some of this anxiety reeks of gay panic and misogyny.

Pitt has alternately rejected and embraced the dreamboat role, though he seems consistently game when asked to play that part in photo spreads; maybe because he knows it so well, he is also adept at sending it up. Part of what works in “Fight Club” is the aggressively performative quality that he brings to Tyler Durden, who from his strut to his red leather jacket and blood-colored sunglasses conveys both a swaggering masculine ideal and its absurd lad-magazine excesses. He’s a dreamboat for guys. Because while Tyler has a female lover-antagonist (Helena Bonham Carter), his main relationships are with other men, including his doppelgänger and the dudes who flock to the fight club, hysterical and shouting.

“Fight Club” demonstrated Pitt’s talents as a wingman, an ability to smoothly fall in step with a male co-star or trail in the other man’s shadow, which he does in “Once Upon a Time” as well as the three “Ocean’s” movies, playing Rosalind Russell to Clooney’s Cary Grant. Unlike some of his male peers, Pitt has always seemed equally comfortable sharing the screen with leading women, including former life partners, Juliette Lewis (in “Kalifornia”) and Angelina Jolie (“By the Sea”); he is also one of the few contemporary male stars whose persona has been, at least in part, constituted by the famous women in his life.

In an American cinema that has been dominated for decades by male characters who roam in packs or walk mean streets alone, it seems worth underscoring just how female-friendly Pitt reads onscreen and off. This goes back to his breakout role in “Thelma & Louise,” in which he plays a very intentional object of female desire called J.D. It was Geena Davis, who plays Thelma, who advocated that he be cast (over Clooney, among others), though the director, Ridley Scott, soon understood what Pitt was bringing to his brief yet pivotal role: For Thelma and J.D.’s sex scene, Scott, a visual perfectionist with an enduring love of glistening wet surfaces, sprayed Evian water on Pitt’s chest to give it sheen.

Pitt’s big scene takes place on a quiet night midway through the film. Coming in from the rain, J.D. knocks on Thelma’s motel door, brags about robbing stores and pleasures her in bed. (Later, he steals her and Louise’s bankroll.) The next morning, a still-disheveled Thelma tells Louise about her night with J.D., “I finally understand what all the fuss is about” — her face lit with a wild smile — “it’s just like a whole ’nother ballgame!” One of the things that the film’s detractors never grasped is that “Thelma & Louise” isn’t about female deviance or women ostensibly acting like men, but female pleasure and the liberation of body and soul. J.D. rips off Thelma and pushes her toward criminality. He also helps free her.

Soon before they have sex, J.D. (bare-chested, as he should be) takes out the portable hair dryer that he’s tucked into his waistband and waves it around like a gun, giving outlaw pointers to Thelma. The mixture of messages — the feminized dryer, the phallic gun — creates a seemingly dissonant pileup of signification that mixes male and female, desire and danger, laughter and heartache. This dissonance is crucial to the film and to the persona Pitt would develop, partly because it tempers beauty, making it approachable, funny, human. “That scene, right there,” Scott said later, “is the beginning of Brad Pitt! Bingo!” Scott was wrong; Pitt’s entire performance was the beginning — and the camera’s love, the jackpot.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/brad-pitt-and-the-beauty-trap/

[mastcomm]

Brad Pitt and the Beauty Trap

The meaning of Brad Pitt — as actor, star and supreme visual fetish — can be traced to the moment in the 1991 film “Thelma & Louise” when the camera pans up from his bare chest to his face like a caress. William Bradley Pitt was born 1963, but Brad Pitt sprung forth in that 13-second ode to eroticized male beauty, initiating a closely watched career and life, dozens of movies, and libraries of delirious exaltations, drooling gossip and porny magazine layouts.

The delirium has resumed with Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” in which Pitt plays the Pitt-perfect role of Cliff Booth, a seasoned stunt man and coolest of cats. Everything about Cliff looks so good, so effortlessly smooth, whether he’s behind the wheel of a Coupe de Ville or strolling across a dusty wasteland. The novelist Walter Kirn once wrote that Robert Redford “stands for the [movie] industry itself, somehow, in all its California dreaminess.” In “Once Upon a Time,” Tarantino recasts that idea-ideal with Cliff, exploiting Pitt’s looks and charm to create another sun-kissed, golden and very white California dream.

So of course Tarantino being Tarantino has Cliff-Pitt doff his shirt, in a scene that both nods to the actor’s foundational “Thelma & Louise” display and offers another effusive paean to masculine beauty. It’s a hot day; Cliff is scarcely working. So he grabs his tools and a beer and scrambles on a roof to fix an antenna, wearing pretty much what Pitt first wears in “Thelma & Louise.” Then Cliff strips off his Hawaiian shirt and the Champion tee underneath it and once again, Brad Pitt stands bare-chested, soaring above both Hollywood and our gaze, the already porous line between actor and character blurring delectably further.

On Feb. 9, Oscar night, our gaze will again fix on Pitt, who has been nominated for best supporting actor for his role in “Once Upon a Time.” It’s nice that his peers bothered because they’ve been reluctant to honor him in the past. Despite his years of service and critically praised roles, Pitt has won just one Oscar: a best picture statuette for helping produce “12 Years a Slave.” As an actor, he has been nominated three previous times: once for supporting (“12 Monkeys”) and twice for lead (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Moneyball”). As a reminder, Rami Malek, Eddie Redmayne and Roberto Benigni have all won best actor.

The academy hasn’t been alone in undervaluing Pitt. Beauty can be a trap as much as a benediction, including for men. Some of his earlier choices didn’t help, like “Legends of the Fall,” a risible dud that turns him into a golden sex pony. And neither did hyperventilating journalists: “A body like a Bruce Weber pinup,” one cooed in 1991. Four years later, panting tongue presumably in cheek, People wrote that “you wanted to ride bareback down the slopes of his hair.” Pitt himself fed the slavering by posing for outlets that eagerly indulged their soft-core reveries, like his 1994 Rolling Stone cover for “Interview With the Vampire,” where he stares at the camera like a Fabio-ed Kurt Cobain.

Critics could be unkind (guilty), but as the bad movies gave way to good, the notices improved. Soon, it became a favorite cliché to write that he was a character actor trapped in the body of a star (guilty again). Some of this, I think, stems from a suspicion of beauty, that it can’t be trusted, is “merely” superficial and silly, which makes the beautiful one also superficial and maybe even worthy of contempt that can lurk under obsession. There’s nothing new about how we punish beauty. The history of movies is filled with the victims of this malignant love-to-love and love-to-hate dynamic, not all of them women.

Once established, though, the star persona can become a received idea, not just a mask, and tough to dislodge. Pitt’s early success was often framed as a fairy tale about a Missouri kid who “for no apparent reason,” as one writer put it, came to Hollywood and fast became the next big thing. (Cue the James Dean comparisons, of which there were many.) Pitt studied acting in Los Angeles, including with the well-regarded Roy London, but the labor of performing isn’t sexy. It also doesn’t fit with the canard that stars can’t act. But there’s more to acting than the Method, telegraphed anguish and dropping (or adding) pounds, and while Pitt can go big — he’s played Achilles and a serial killer — he has a gift for understatement.

Pitt should have been nominated this year for best actor for his delicate, deep work in James Gray’s “Ad Astra,” a meditation on the unbearable weight of masculinity set largely in outer space. The film was praised as was Pitt’s turn, but neither found awards momentum. The performance was too good and certainly too subtle and interiorized for the academy. It has a historic weakness for showboating — the more suffering the better — which is why Joaquin Phoenix (often otherwise worthy) and his jutting rib cage in “Joker” seem like a lock. But Pitt has time. It took seven nominations for Paul Newman to win best actor; Redford has been nominated only once for acting (he lost).

Like Newman and Redford, Pitt has always seemed born to the screen, a natural. He has a palpable physical ease about him that seems inseparable from his looks, that silkiness that seems, at least in part, to come from waking up every day and going through life as a beautiful person. This isn’t to say that good-looking people don’t have the same issues, the neuroses and awkwardness that plague us mortals. But Pitt has always moved with the absolute surety you see in some beautiful people (and dancers), the casualness of movement that expresses more than mere confidence, but a sublime lack of self-consciousness and self-doubt about taking up space, something not everyone shares. This isn’t swagger; this is flow.

How actors walk, strut, slink and just stand signifies, though perhaps not as much as it once did, before filmmakers started focusing more on talking heads, which scale down better on the small screen. Sean Connery’s predatory prowl helped define James Bond. Sidney Poitier’s perfect posture, how he held his head and moved alongside white actors, announced a profound shift in the cinematic representation of race. Pitt spends a lot of time behind the wheel in “Once Upon a Time,” but he’s a great walker (even while wearing Cliff’s moccasins) and when Cliff realizes that it’s time to leave the dangerous Spahn ranch, the actor’s ramrod carriage, purposeful stride and tensed swing of his arms convey a man prepared for battle.

Over his three-decade career, Pitt has played a range of roles: soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, vampire, thief. Among the most indelible is the phantasmagoric street fighter Tyler Durden — another great mover, with another of Pitt’s career-defining torsos — from David Fincher’s “Fight Club” (1999). The film turns on warring halves, a presumptive beta (Edward Norton) and his alpha twin (Pitt), who confront consumerism, postmodern anomie and that cult known as masculinity. Whether its critique lands has been much debated (that’s a no), but what remains beyond doubt is how Pitt, with his bloodied face and sculpted physique, became an emblem of contemporary masculinity and its contradictions.

In the years since “Fight Club,” the film has been embraced without irony and apparently without humor by men’s rights partisans. I wonder if they think Tyler is hot, and what exactly they see when they look at his body. Movies have always banked on the audience’s love of male violence. Throughout their history, they have exploited male beauty, tapping the passion it inspires. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant,” said, well, Cary Grant.

But the beautiful man can make us nervous, partly because he complicates gender norms. George Clooney is more than a pretty face, more than one writer has insisted. Yes, but he is also pretty. Some of this anxiety reeks of gay panic and misogyny.

Pitt has alternately rejected and embraced the dreamboat role, though he seems consistently game when asked to play that part in photo spreads; maybe because he knows it so well, he is also adept at sending it up. Part of what works in “Fight Club” is the aggressively performative quality that he brings to Tyler Durden, who from his strut to his red leather jacket and blood-colored sunglasses conveys both a swaggering masculine ideal and its absurd lad-magazine excesses. He’s a dreamboat for guys. Because while Tyler has a female lover-antagonist (Helena Bonham Carter), his main relationships are with other men, including his doppelgänger and the dudes who flock to the fight club, hysterical and shouting.

“Fight Club” demonstrated Pitt’s talents as a wingman, an ability to smoothly fall in step with a male co-star or trail in the other man’s shadow, which he does in “Once Upon a Time” as well as the three “Ocean’s” movies, playing Rosalind Russell to Clooney’s Cary Grant. Unlike some of his male peers, Pitt has always seemed equally comfortable sharing the screen with leading women, including former life partners, Juliette Lewis (in “Kalifornia”) and Angelina Jolie (“By the Sea”); he is also one of the few contemporary male stars whose persona has been, at least in part, constituted by the famous women in his life.

In an American cinema that has been dominated for decades by male characters who roam in packs or walk mean streets alone, it seems worth underscoring just how female-friendly Pitt reads onscreen and off. This goes back to his breakout role in “Thelma & Louise,” in which he plays a very intentional object of female desire called J.D. It was Geena Davis, who plays Thelma, who advocated that he be cast (over Clooney, among others), though the director, Ridley Scott, soon understood what Pitt was bringing to his brief yet pivotal role: For Thelma and J.D.’s sex scene, Scott, a visual perfectionist with an enduring love of glistening wet surfaces, sprayed Evian water on Pitt’s chest to give it sheen.

Pitt’s big scene takes place on a quiet night midway through the film. Coming in from the rain, J.D. knocks on Thelma’s motel door, brags about robbing stores and pleasures her in bed. (Later, he steals her and Louise’s bankroll.) The next morning, a still-disheveled Thelma tells Louise about her night with J.D., “I finally understand what all the fuss is about” — her face lit with a wild smile — “it’s just like a whole ’nother ballgame!” One of the things that the film’s detractors never grasped is that “Thelma & Louise” isn’t about female deviance or women ostensibly acting like men, but female pleasure and the liberation of body and soul. J.D. rips off Thelma and pushes her toward criminality. He also helps free her.

Soon before they have sex, J.D. (bare-chested, as he should be) takes out the portable hair dryer that he’s tucked into his waistband and waves it around like a gun, giving outlaw pointers to Thelma. The mixture of messages — the feminized dryer, the phallic gun — creates a seemingly dissonant pileup of signification that mixes male and female, desire and danger, laughter and heartache. This dissonance is crucial to the film and to the persona Pitt would develop, partly because it tempers beauty, making it approachable, funny, human. “That scene, right there,” Scott said later, “is the beginning of Brad Pitt! Bingo!” Scott was wrong; Pitt’s entire performance was the beginning — and the camera’s love, the jackpot.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/brad-pitt-and-the-beauty-trap/