#They were normie puritans

[ludoka]

*Gasp* Henry Jekyll from Monster High became a monster to escape the suffocating human society!

[pro-sipper]

I definitely agree with "fiction affects reality" in the sense it can introduce new ideas and concepts to an audience that never considered or heard of them. What I take issue from puritans drawing the conclusion of "oh so this means someone reading an incest fic will make them want to kiss their sister" is that they only ever think about how it can make someone do bad things but never positive things. In fact, if they think about how fiction can motivate someone to do good things, their argument would fall apart quickly when they realize how often this isn't the case in reality. There's so much popular fiction out there you can find radical, far-left themes inside of so if fiction really was this powerful mind control device that puritans act like it is, all the normies who watched stuff like Gundam or Squid Game or Chicken Run or Hunger Games would have become radicalized anti-war vegan anti-capitalists but they didn't. While there are people out there where that absolutely was the case, that was entirely on those peoples' own ability to see those themes and agree with them. You can also find bigots in fandoms for media with positively portrayed women, queer, and BIPOC characters. I could drag a raging homophobe into a movie theatre to see every action movie with a positively gay character in there, he's still going to walk out as a homophobe. The reality is, fiction can never make you learn something you refuse to learn.

...and people are absolutely not looking at ship art, reading AO3 smut, or playing morally bankrupt eroges with the intention to learn something, nor expect that these things were made with the purpose to educate.

Exactly!! Such a good point about how they only expect fiction to affect things on a 1:1 level if it's something negative.

I'm sure it's been said before but overall positive and light shows like My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic or Steven Universe have so many good messages that are delivered in an appropriate way for even kids to understand and yet their fandoms are notorious for being full of hate and arguing. If a show was all about the power of friendship and fiction affects reality so severely, surely their fandoms would be the happiest places on earth?? No? Maybe because that's not how things work...

Hopefully one days antis will understand. If they even want to at this point.

[echofromtheabyss]

Part of the headspin brainfuck of today's current zeitgeist, for me, is how horny Christian culture seems now that we only have Puriteens, "Everyone Is Beautiful And Nobody Is Horny," and media products that are formulated to sell in markets with far more puritanical viewpoints. We have done a bizarre-ass pivot to where some Christians are now defending the (fertile) horniness of Christian life as a contrast to the (literal) sterility of secular life, not only is it fun to have kids, it's fun to MAKE kids! Fucking your spouse is how you get kids! Something must be wrong with you if you DON'T want to fuck! Hearing gay life described as sterile is a weird vibe shift from hearing it described as oversexed. And to be fair I definitely hear the latter more often but I hear the former enough and never used to hear that before. It's actually giving me a bit of insight into how horny Greatest and Silent Generation normies really were. And insight into the idea that Twentian romantic heteronormativity, wasn't at all at odds with the Sexual Revolution, not really. It actually sprang from the same culture, and was propped up by the same economic and infrastructural and social conditions. Flower children weren't angry at their parents for being prudes. They were angry at them for being hypocrites. But all the same, I still feel like there is vibe shift going on with what was formerly the less *comparatively* horny culture. To the point that I ALMOST can easily imagine the Fosterites from "Stranger in a Strange Land" happening at some point.

[problematicbyler]

i think people misunderstood me a little with the other ask lol. by saying "this stuff didn't happen in harry potter fandom" i meant no one was judging people for engaging in smut content. not that i know of anyway. i myself have read so many harry x ginny smut that holy water cannot save me lmao

on the byler tag some uers like to offer many creative variations of the word creep to refer to us, some of them being "we watched them grow up" (i can see why this can make some ppl uncomfy and i respect that as long as you don't force your personal opininon as the correct and only one) "these are teenagers you are sexualizing when you're an adult"

those things also apply to harry potter but i never came across anyone trying to cancel people the same way puritan bylers do.

I know what you meant, Nonnie!! We were just responding to the fact that another Byler somewhere in the tag did in fact argue that sexualizing teen characters didn't happen in other fandoms such as HP/PJO/etc when it very clearly did.

Not to be like *shakes fist* kids these days but I do think the anti mindset is a much more recent thing. If I'm correct in my fandom history, it really broke out with Sheith vs Klance in the Voltron days. But it's also just younger folks who don't know how to be in fandom, or folks who are mostly normies delving into Ao3 and then being surprised when the website for "freaks" has freaky shit on it. Or folks who are used to algorithms that put things on their feed instead of them having to curate their own feeds. It doesn't help that Stranger Things is a lot of people's first real fandoms.

IDK, it's a lot of factors, probably. I grew up in the Supernatural fandom where a large portion of fans were Wincest shippers and I learned very early how to filter tags, what ship-and-let-ship was, don't like don't read etc. I don't feel like many in the Byler fandom have really learned those things.

[numbknee]

Why do you think Kyman gets so much hate? I can understand some things about what people don’t like about it but some of the things they say, the harassment is so out of pocket. Especially on Tik Tok! It is like a battle ground out there and they all will shoot you down immediately if you SAY anything. I just wanna love Kyman without it seeming like a punishment 😭😭

Dude I totally feel you. It's so much easier to live and let live so I don't understand how these ppl have the energy to be so aggressively hurtful all the time. This has been said before ad nauseum but for god's sake, it's JUST a fucking tv show. I'm too old for this shit.

(longer explanation under the cut! like... extremely long lol I'm so sorry my thoughts about this have been building up for a while 😅)

I think the extremely aggressive kyman hate is a symptom of growing poor media literacy and the larger "purity culture" trend that's been present online for a while now. It's very reminiscent of American Evangelicalism or Puritanism, where members of the church have to follow a very specific set of rules for behaving and thinking and if you deviate from those rules in the slightest, you're shot down immediately by the community and shamed for being sinful and blasphemous, all to keep you on the "righteous path" and avoid burning in hell for eternity. This is why so many puritanical christians in the US hate themselves for doing what most of the world sees as normal behavior, and simultaneously force that self-hating worldview onto others to "save" them. (For example see this video by FD Signifier on youtube explaining how hardcore religious ppl/conservatives are doomed to be bad in bed because they see sex as "evil" when in reality it's a normal part of human behavior 😬 It's long but very good).

Though, it's important to note that ppl who think this way may not even be christian themselves, but the behavior is so pervasive in american culture that you absorb it even if you're not a puritanical christian. (for example, to quote Ian Danskin, athiests may think "I don't believe in god, but the god I don't believe in is Jehovah). Tons of the first generation of white USAmericans were exiled British puritans who were kicked out of their home country for essentially being self-righteous assholes and trying to force their shit worldview on everyone else lmao. And I think because so many online spaces are so USAmerican-centric, people from all over the world have started adopting that purity culture as well.

Now, South Park is extremely popular (duh). It's been around for decades so it has a ton of fans both old and new. Unfortunately a lot of new fans, especially young people, follow the show for very different reasons than the average normie/not-terminally-online viewer does. They take the characters out of their original context, use them like dolls to make their own stories and fan content, and ignore all the other blatantly controversial shit that's been going on in the show since day 1 (which is why so many exclusively make blasé creek fanworks imo). They want to keep their thoughts "pure" and only engage with content that's approved by the puritanical online community

It's extremely fitting but also sad that Cartman is the scapegoat for everything wrong with South Park, both in the show and in the real world. Either ppl don't want to acknowledge he exists, or ppl latch onto him and project all of that puritanical hatred toward him or anyone that likes his character. Hell, even I'M guilty of this kind of thinking before I watched the show and understood Cartman's character better.

Kyman in particular is a target BECAUSE it involves Cartman, but also because people boil it down to shipping a nazi with a jew which, at the surface level, seems horrible! But if you've ever actually WATCHED the goddamn show, you know that is an extremely reductive and inaccurate interpretation of their characters. It's horribly poor media literacy. These ppl CANNOT seem to comprehend that you can enjoy watching a character who's a "bad person" without condoning their actions, and that enjoying the shipping dynamic of such characters DOES NOT make you a bad person by proxy.

A huge role of fiction as media is to explore ideas that may be harmful in the real world in a safe way because... *gasp* it's imaginary!! It makes you think and experience emotions you may not have the opportunity for otherwise! However, in the eyes of puritans, the fact you're even thinking about something like that makes you a sinner. It's a thought crime, which is why they consider us mentally "sick" for shipping kyman. So, they send hate at the drop of a hat and publicly vilify kyman shippers to reinforce that behavior with each other, all to say "Hey look at me!!! I'm a Good Person! see how much of a Good Person I am??? I'm gonna go to HEAVEN, and YOU'RE going to HELL". Like I said before, it's not that they necessarily believe in heaven or hell, but that's the general root of the behavior. It's performative puritan dog-piling. Also, because they haven't even fucking watched the whole show, they conveniently ignore all the other horrible shit the show portrays because random kyman shippers online are easy targets while Matt & Trey are gajillionaires who are essentially un-cancellable for things they do on the show at this point because, to quote Trey: For anyone to go up and go "Did you see this thing on South Park? That was really offensive" someone's gonna be like "Dude shut up 😒 that's just South Park".

Geez man this got super fucking long lmao. But my advice is to please take care of yourself because, and this super cliché to say, but FUCK the haters dude 🖕🖕🖕 You're engaging with media that brings you joy and exploring interesting ideas with a community of awesome artists/writers/meta-analysts and more. This is supposed to be FUN!! Anyone who tries to take that away from you or shame you into stopping is a fucking immature, holier-than-thou asshole who needs to get a fucking life. The block button is your friend, so use it early and often. You have the power to curate your own online space, and you shouldn't subject yourself to dealing with these dickheads (this is a big reason why I don't have a tiktok lol)

Good luck dude, and keep on shipping kyman 😎🤘❤️💚

[crooked-empire]

For me, the fnaf fandom is kinda ruined tbh

Oh, hun, I second that.

For me what ruined the fnaf fandom were the adults that kept shaming kids for making cringe stuff.

Happened the same to Bendy, but to the Bendy fandom it was that shitty ass movement of "save Bendy" where a bunch of wanna be puritans were heavily against NSFW, I was there, I saw that crap, even with canonical adults they were bitchy about it. That crap was wild.

But in a general sense? Fandoms are often ruined by grown ass adults shaming kids, especially on youtube, then teenagers see that and get afraid of being bullied as well, so they start bullying kids, then kids start bullying each other. Happened sooo much in rhe fnaf fandom around 2014-2021, that also happened to Undertale, I remember the videos of people making cringe compilations of videos made by kids and basically showing it for the world to see, and BAM kid gets bullied off the internet for making a cringey oc.

TL;DR: almost all fandoms were ruined, honey, especially post pandemic after the normies joined without a drop of fandom etiquette.

[olderthannetfic]

'Omegaverse is a hate-letter to men, is a revenge' anon here.

'Do they mean it as a compliment or as an insult to a/b/o? And what exactly do they use to back it up? Anon, I need more context, I WANT to know how unhinged some people’s opinions are.'

Answering this.

Long story short, someone on some group shared a video of a dude who clearly never interacted with fandom in all his incel life 'explaining' what Omegaverse was. As you can guess, since the reaction to fandom-y stuff from normies is always the same, this dude only repeated the words 'wtf' 'this is cursed' 'a genre for 12 years-old girls on wattpad haha' 'gross ew cursed gross' 'men can't get pregnant haha gross wtf' 'girls on wattpad love this and therefore is cringe lmao cursed' 'gay shit bad'.

I, of course, after having the misfortune to listening to that dude, decided to check the comments. I thought 'surely people will just laugh how wrong this dude got Omegaverse'. Oh, since when was I so naïve? I keep forgetting Omegaverse is still a niche, somehow. All the comments were 'haha yeah Omegaverse so gross, ew'. But... a comment was so peculiar. The 'Omegaverse is a hate-letter to men' one.

The thought process was: 'this dude made a shitty video explaining how gross Omegaverse is' > 'women (girls on wattpad) made this genre where men get pregnant and suffer and are raped and and everything is icky icky ew' > 'thus I have concluded Omegaverse is a hate-letter to men'. Pretty sure this isn't a compliment. (I'm having trouble imagining a hypothetical case where 'hate-letter to men' is considered a compliment –unless I include radfem bullshit, but why would I include that? As if the discourse surrounding Omegaverse wasn't full of radfem bullshit already with all those anti-sex puritans... Oops, not gonna derail this.) Some people responded to the comment standing and applauding, such a great thinker of thinkering! The Fandom Socrates!

I blocked everyone on that post. And now that I think of it, it'd be good if I spam some Omegaverse in that group. As a treat.

--

[sabakos]

At risk of lowering the rent even more, what are your thoughts on sh-

no, I shan't say...

Shipping discourse simply didn't exist when I was a teenager. I don't believe that society has changed significantly, this is just the direct result of boring normie children being on the internet now; when I was a teenager, my peers who would have been "antis" either weren't allowed to go on the internet or were afraid to so. But since everyone is online now, all of the annoying little puritans are running around the internets trying to enforce their christian virtues on everyone else.

I think you should be as mean to them as possible :)

[antiradqueer]

radqueers will have a whole discriminated community telling them to cut the shit and still think they're the ones right.

like... babe okay popular opinion doesn't necessarily means correct but if EVERYONE of a community is telling you that what you're doing is fucked up ... maybe rethink that

nah (/sar) because apparently were all n*zi, christian, terf, triple k, anti-sex, normie, "puritans" for calling out ableism, racism, xenophobia, cultural appropriation, transphobia, queerphobia, grooming, abuse, actual nazi and abuse supporters and so.. so fucking much more

[anotherdayforchaosfay]

I watched the Wednesday series on Netflix. Small notes: it does get bloody, but not gorey or overdone. Pet death is present, namely a pet scorpion.

I'm white and not always aware of how racism is present in films or shows, so take this bit with a grain of salt. There are several characters who who are POC, and they're now shown as the stereotypes I often see. It feels like the racism was replaced with Normie vs Outcasr, though there isn't a solid boundary because some characters form relationships across it. The racist religious zealots commonly referred to as pilgrims (Puritans) are very much present because they founded the town. There's an entire park carnival thing open year round that's sort of a cosplay LARP reenactment thing. I found that part especially weird.

Very in-character, perfect actors for Morticia and Gomez, though their frequent makeout sessions were, IMHO, uncomfortable to watch. The movies had the right dosage, but this had them acting like horny teenagers. I'm not too fond of who they chose to play Uncle Fester, nor how they wrote his character, but I'm partial to the original series and films.

Very Nancy Drew with spooky tossed in. One of the very few shows/films that held my attention so well I didn't get any handsewing done. I like a good mystery, especially when even I sit there pondering it, trying to fit thr pieces together.

Wednesday is very much a teenager, complete with the impulse control teenagers tend to have, which is to say there is very little. She jumps to conclusions and acts on them immediately without stepping back to see the big picture. Impatient, arrogant, blah blah blah. She does get on my nerves, but she does round out and experience character growth. That's something I always appreciate seeing. Flat characters are boring.

Several characters die, and several deaths are violent, but you don't see them as they happen. Only the before and after. The first episode is the only one I found to have any real gore. I watch a lot of horror movies, and gore is something I cannot handle. They don't get too realistic and keep it at a PG-13 level.

It's a fun series with a fantastic cliffhanger. If you have any questions regarding specific things, just ask. This is also a safe series to watch for those who have a difficult time with unreality. Think Supernatural minus the constant violence, annoying flat characters, rinse and repeat storyline, fewer cliches and what cliches are there are fully embraced, and better music.

[grandhotelabyss]

I think you mentioned you were "goth* in highschool - do you mean that in some general sense of being a gloomy artst kid or is the hollywood depcition actually a real thing, mascara and all?

I mean I dressed in black, read (and disseminated) Sandman, listened to The Cure and The Smiths, and hung around with other goth kids, though I had friends in other subcultures too, including normies, who weren't called that in those years, when the unmarked category was still unmarked. I don't remember any mascara; there was some glitter. I was not (and am not) gloomy by temperament, hence my attraction to the glitter, but the prevailing subculture when I was in high school was hippie revivalism. There was an enormous normie-hippie overlap; it was also the period of the Dave Matthews Band, Blues Traveler, and hacky sacks. I thought this was soft-minded and sentimental and so preferred a slightly edgier styling. (I published an anonymous anti-hippie poem—someone else wrote it, not me—as the first piece in one of the editions of the high-school lit mag I edited, to some controversy. "You're hateful," I remember it concluding, "You're no individual." I also remember one of the more beautiful "dirty hippie" girls—we called them dirty hippies—just shaking her head sadly at me, her dark hair swaying near her waist.) Still, I was more on the side of what this very website would eventually label "soft goth" in my aesthetics. I didn't get called down to the principal's office for a talk the day after Columbine the way the real hardcore goth kids were. Nobody thought I was particularly "dark," and I wasn't, and I'm not. Later goth style got tangled up in emo, but the first emos in my high school were in the class just below mine, the class of 2001, and they were clearly coming out of the punk ethos. I've always thought punk was, in its deliberately ugly puritanism, about 100 times worse than hippie, and I remember discussing what the word "emo" even meant in about the year 2000. I later did listen to some of the bands—Sunny Day Real Estate holds up; The Anniversary was pretty good, too—but these were more separate things in my time.

[archer3-13]

Degenerate ? Isn't that how people get called when they say they ship Rhealeth because of mommy kinks rather then 3 houses never explaining how Sitri was made ?

thats mostly because their moralistic puritans and or looking for an excuse to call 'shame' on rhealeth shipping, but outside of those weirdos daddy and mommy kinks are i would tentatively guess one of the more common kinda kinks that 'normies' as it were consider passably acceptable to have as a kink. sugar daddy wouldn't be a thing if people didnt get some sexual thrill/amusement from it as a term and practice after all.

[polyamoryprincess]

I saw this post argument and because my brain is fucked, I scrolled through for WAY too long. And the same thing is proven every time I see shit like this, so this is also a PSA.

Basically this person came onto a post and unprompted talked about monogamy being more common place than polyamory. Something technically factual. But people know when there’s a dog whistle blower among them and were quick to confront them.

Then this person turned it into a “natural” vs “unnatural” argument very quickly. They still kept to a “logical” perspective, one that would either resonate with people who put stock in what we’re “made” to do or will seem like just a differing but ultimately harmless opinion. But as we all know, bringing in what someone believes is “natural” vs “unnatural” is just a gateway to bigotry and puritanical garbage. They are very adamant that they aren’t saying polyamorous people don’t exist and aren’t being a bigot. They’re just doubling down on their fact that there are more monogamous people in the world.

It takes like a handful of interactions later for him to just mask off say polyamory is just people messing around and are too childish to do what the whole rest of the world is doing and just commit to someone. This is their new fact.

But by this point there’s been like 20 variations of them saying they’re just saying there are more monogamous people and about 80 stupid other side things.

And someone who has no idea how to recognize this stuff, hasn’t seen the change in argument, and is coming in with what they think is good faith decides to both sides it or back up who they think is an innocent logical person being dog piled and ends up supporting a bigot without noticing they’ve already blatantly admitted to being a bigot.

It’s literally the play book for bigots to bring ignorant people into their worldview and I’ve seen it work constantly. The people who fall for this are always people who are trying to play at being an ally while being convinced the community they’re supporting is just being hysterical over nothing when in reality it’s an oppressed group recognizing the dog whistles and tactics used by bigots and reacting to it while ignorant people are oblivious. (That does sometimes include people who are apart of said oppressed group.)

I get people want to be that perfectly neutral person that can think like a normie but stands up for the freaks and downtrodden, but that’s probably not what’s happening. You’re probably just agreeing with a bigot and infantilizing an already oppressed group while they’re trying to tell someone to fuck off.

Analyze your biases, check out people’s bios before responding, be wary, and shut the fuck up more often than not. Not every opinion you have is a good or complete one. (And not every dog piled person is being attacked in bad faith.)

[half-giant]

So I finished that new Wednesday TV show, and I have thoughts about it. But, in short: it wasn’t bad, just disappointing. Spoilers throughout this post if you care.

I’ll start with what I liked:

The casting, particularly for the Addams themselves, was fantastic. Luis Guzmán played Gomez, and was practically on par with Raul Julia. I can see him doing the Mamushka. Catherine Zeta-Jones is a lovely Morticia. She’s a little more lighthearted than I expected, but she makes it feel authentic. And Fred Armisen makes for a both creepy and kooky Uncle Fester.

And the other cast were fun as well. You can tell they had a good time making the show. They come across as a little Riverdaley at times, but that comes down to the writing (which I’ll be getting to).

And I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about Jenna Ortega as Wednesday. She is THE highlight of the show, delivering her lines perfectly, and capturing the feel of a girl from a family of lovable psychopaths. Even when everything else seemed bad, I enjoyed her as Wednesday.

Also Thing. I don’t think this counts as casting, but Thing was done very well. Incredibly expressive given that Thing is just a hand. I think my favorite moment was in episode one when he curls down two of his fingers to simulate bending the knee in submission.

The set design and costuming were also done very well. The school uniforms gave a cohesive aesthetic to most of the cast, while still allowing characterization through the minor customization of done by individuals. The scenes were mostly kept to a few key sets: Wednesday and Enid’s room, The Conservatory (where all two or three classes we see are held), The Weathervane (a café), and Principal Weems office, as well as the woods. And those sets look very pretty, as are the one or two off sets, even if they’re less complex.

The quips, for the most part, were actually funny, and the show let itself sit in emotional moments without feeling a need to undercut them. That’s a low bar to clear, sure, but I’ve seen enough Marvel movies that it feels refreshing.

The moment in particular that most impressed me was when Thing was stabbed and Wednesday thought he was dead. She’s on the verge of tears (we know she hasn’t cried since her pet was killed as a child) and Uncle Fester is shocking him to try to resuscitate him or something. Here she tries to make a quip, but it doesn’t come off as funny. It comes off like a scared girl who’s afraid of losing her friend, who’s afraid it’s already too late. (I don’t know whether this was something the writers intended or just something Ortega interpreted herself, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt given how well it turned out)

Now onto the stuff I thought wasn’t so good. Which I think I shall divide into questions I asked multiple times while watching:

Why do they call themselves that? The show makes it clear pretty early on that in this world vampires, werewolves, and all sorts of other monsters not only exist but are known by the world at large. Nevermore Academy is a place for all those freaks and weirdos (affectionate) to gather. And they call them “outcasts”, which is used as a technical term and comes off a bit stilted (particularly when Wednesday has a psychic vision where a bunch of New England puritans say it).

It’s much weirder, however, when everyone who isn’t an outcast is called a “normie.” Now, if this were a thing the students used it wouldn’t be so bad (and for the 3/4 of an episode it’s used that way I liked it), but it seems to also be the technical term (it’s used by the principal, the mayor, and the sheriff). I feel like I’m 16 again the number of times I heard normie used. I would rather die than be 16 again.

Why weren’t they in college? This is a question I have for most every show set in a high school, and Wednesday fails to give a satisfactory answer. The characters seem to spend more time out of class than in it. They are constantly off campus. One of the characters, Tyler (who I presume is also in high school), seems to spend every moment not at home working at the local cafe, morning and evening.

Why are the Addams family so adverse to murder? Wednesday seems appalled by the idea her father could be a murderer. And her Mother is appalled that Wednesday believes her father is a murderer. Tied into this, in a flashback, we see Gomez get his ass handed to him by some rando (not actually a rando but he kinda is) and seem unable to fight. Morticia too, seemed to not understand how to hold a sword, despite being the captain of the fencing team.

In The Addams Family (1991), Morticia and Gomez discuss meeting at Gomez’s cousin’s funeral when he was “Still a suspect.” Then in Addams Family Values, Gomez accidentally cooks a stripper in a cake for his brother’s bachelor party. It’s pretty sexist, but it shows the family’s attitude towards manslaughter and murder. Nonchalance.

And in Wednesday, they have this attitude 90% of the time, but then actual murder happens and suddenly it’s “Your father is innocent.” I wish he had murdered that dude, it would have been cooler.

Wait, why did no one comment on the bad guys (One of whom is an actual Puritan witchhunter) using magic? Isn’t that, like, super hypocritical? Asking this question almost worries me that I’m asking to have my hand held and be spoonfed my morality, but I honestly don’t think the writers even realized the contradiction here. I figured someone would have said even a throw-away line about this. But no, everyone just accepts that the bad guys use magic. I’m not surprised the bad guys are hypocrites, but you’d think that someone would at least use that to make a point.

If Wednesday is so woke, why does she act like the cops are the good guys? This could be better phrased as “Why isn’t this show subversive when it clearly wants to be?” I actually think I have a good answer for this one, Tim Burton. He likes the aesthetics of transgression, but doesn’t actually like transgressing. His characters look like freaks but aren’t. The word for this where I came from is poser.

Wednesday works as a detective and constantly tries to collaborate with the sheriff despite knowing that he hates her, thinks her father is a murderer, and also doesn’t want her around. The end of the season shows that he’s corrupt (he at the very least suspected his son was a monster), but she insists on doing it through proper channels or whatever.

In addition, the show uses “woke” language a lot, and it makes me cringe every time. I don’t mind that it wants to be woke, I’m not some chud. In fact I encourage it. You might even call me a feminist. The problem with Wednesday (2022)’s language is that it merely comes across like early 2010′s pop feminism, without actually saying anything. A character says “There’s no patriarchy in the [bee]hive.” I think that sentence alone encompasses everything I mean.

Do you think this could have used a rewrite? That’s a bad way to use my framing device, but I don’t know how else to say it. A lot of the show has good ideas, but it needs rewritten to actually be good. Whether this is a dialogue, or characters, or plotting, or just factual information. We establish that Wednesday is smart. I like this a lot. I love it when a girl gets to be smart in media. I wish she sounded smart. I wish anyone sounded smart. No one sounds stupid luckily, but there wasn’t enough time spent refining the script. Instead we just get glimpses of what it could have been. Maybe I have too high a standard for TV, or media in general ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Most importantly, why wasn’t it gay? I was properly queerbaited by the marketing for this show, and I want to complain about how ungay this show is. Despite making a poster for the show with the text “Wednesgay,” there are only two queer characters in the show. They are the mothers of Eugene and are in maybe three scenes with maybe 10 lines between the two of them. This damn show promised me a gay Wednesday Addams, and instead I got her stuck in the world’s shittiest love triangle between the guy we’re supposed to think is the murderer and the actual murderer (who are both the most CW characters in the show). For that alone I must give this show a 0/10.

I will watch season two but I will be frowning and shaking my head throughout.

[daisiesonafield-blog]

Your trusty Venice anon here! Just walked out of the first screening so there will be some spoilers ahead. Let me start by saying that applause was very tepid, and what I found odd is that it started several seconds after the title card, like someone remembered that we were supposed to applaud. Not a great sign.

Outside, what I mostly heard was confusion. People asking each other what the ending was and just going over some plot points that were confusing. I saw one girl vehemently go after Olivia and calling her a fake feminist, and one guy commented “the normies are going to love it” which I found very funny. Also lots of people commenting on Harry’s accent and him being British in the film, and mocking how that is explained in the story.

Now, my two cents on the film. It LOOKS great, starts out sleek and compelling, but then it folds onto itself and the last act is just very weak in my opinion. Lots of plot holes and things that aren’t really explained properly. Also Alice’s descent into madness is kind of repetitive and the pacing is off in the middle half. Poor Florence carries the whole damn thing and it pains me to say that one of the weakest things about the film is Harry. He is not bad per say but just somehow blank? I don’t know how to explain it but it’s like his alien charm doesn’t translate well? It’s like he’s out of focus (not literally of course) and his character is just sort of blank when it really should be the center of it all. Also, his look for the “real life” scenes is really something, the internet is going to go nuts. In general, i feel like his star power is much less than what anyone anticipated, and is completely wiped out by Florence’s. Just one last thing even though I might think of more stuff later on, those notorious sex scenes are among the least sexy I’ve seen. Not sure if it’s because that is clearly the first time that man has had his head or his hands between a woman’s legs or because their chemistry is a bit off, but they feel rushed and performative, like they were put there just to be able to say they are. Come to think of it, the whole film kind of feels like that.

Dear lovely Venice anon!

Thank you for coming back! Apologies for taking so long to post these, timezones and all.

Honestly, what Olivia has been trying to portray this movie as, and what this movie is actually like are entirely different things. I think she is so full of herself, and so obsessed with sex, making everything "sexy", and pushing that dated "edgy" 2000s over sexualization of women, that she is unable to actually go beyond it to explain her own movie. Her narrative for promotion is entirely disconnected from what she is actually promoting.

About the alleged sex scene she was denied to include in the trailer: I think she was lying. Again, to continue her disconnected sex campaign. Everyone who saw the test screenings of the movie said that the only 2 sex scenes are the ones that *are* in the trailer. There is no additional sex scene that didn't get to be in the trailer. She lied in order to push her sex campaign and be edgy. That was her whole point in that interview. Saying that society are puritans and don't want to see female pleasure or women enjoying sex. And she proved her point by bringing up this non-existent sex scene that's not even in the final cut of the movie. All of this, again, has nothing to do with the movie. It's just the only thing her brain thinks of at all times.

I'm sad that Harry may be getting the worst of it in reviews. I hope critics and the public can see the poor direction he got from Olivia, and how that translated into this "blank" performance next to Florence's.

Also, Olivia was there? I thought she would only be at the later screening? Who called her a fake feminist? A fan, a journalist or rando person?

Thank you so much for coming back and telling us your experience! If you have more details, please do let us know!

[because-its-eurovision]

Wait so what happened between Finnish people and Lordi? This is the first I'm hearing about their reputation being trashed there :0

This is going to be one of my thousand-word essay answers, so strap in.

I also did not know how badly they were treated during the years following Esc until Yle published this article in May 2021. It is in Finnish and I can’t be bothered to translate the whole thing, but the article consists of our previous representatives Lordi (2006), Hanna Pakarinen (2007), Kuunkuiskaajat (2010), Paradise Oskar (2011) and Sandhja (2016) telling about their Esc experiences and how the Finnish public and music industry treated them during and after that (spoiler alert: it wasn’t great). The article was linked to the Finnish Esc forum and I remember us all being very shocked and upset because it was the first time we actually heard about the negativity and hatred Lordi experienced. I do think most of us just assumed their hype went away quietly. What follows is based on my own memories of the time as well as what the band has told publicly.

I remember the 2006-2007 being full on Lordi craze. Their merch and albums being sold at supermarkets. Lordi Cola, Lordi candy. Lordi themed restaurant in Rovaniemi. Celebrations, awards, statues. Squares and buildings named after them, their faces in credit cards and postage stamps. The Arockalypse being the most sold album of 2006, selling triple platinum. In Emma Gaala Lordi won Band of the Year, Song of the Year and Export of the Year, Hard Rock Hallelujah was the most played song of the year, everywhere you went you saw kids wearing Lordi shirts (...sounds familiar?😶)

The way I see it is that by just participating in the national selection, let alone Esc, Lordi had lost all the credibility they had left in the eyes of rock/metal puritans, selling themselves and whatnot because Eurovision a cringefest as we know. I don’t know if music based subcultures are as gatekeepy and stick-in-their-ass level of humourless as they used to be in the mid-to-late 00′s but I pray to satan they are not because that time was ROUGH and I think it might have something to do with what happened to Lordi. 

During those years I spent a lot of time hanging on metalhead and goth discussion forums (because social media wasn’t a thing yet) and I remember it being exactly oh you like this band? name their every song kinda tiring stuff. People arguing about genres and if some band was heavy metal, heavy rock or just metal, or if you could be a goth if you rode a bicycle (??) or listened to anything else besides Joy Division, or if you had the right to wear a band shirt if you couldn’t name all the members, or that if your favorite song from a band was a big hit were you considered a poser, or could a goth person like Nightmare Before Christmas merch or was it too emo, and so on and so forth, and everything was super serious. I remember people even throwing a fit when Children of Bodom wore Hawaii shirts in promo pics.🤦‍♀️So considering the attitudes of the era and the fact that Lordi had been a divisive artist already (can’t take anyone seriously if they wear a costume or are in character) long before Esc, it is in a way no wonder that the music puritans turned their backs on them. Goes without saying how ridiculous that is imo, but anyway.

Normies, aka not fans of the contest or the band beforehand, on the other hand jumped on the Esc boat for the year when Finland was the reigning champion. Our stupid little nation LOVES competing and being champions, so much so that we have a habit of inventing our own ridiculous contests just to win. Like, everyone wanted to get tickets to the live shows in Helsinki, more people joined the Finnish OGAE than ever before, everyone bought the Esc album of 2007 and so on.

And then when the glitter had settled, our hosting year was over and we didn’t do so hot at 2007 & 2008 Escs despite sending “heavy” entries, I guess that normies just returned to their default attitude towards Eurovision which is viewing it as embarassing, pointless, glittery, gay, good-for-nothing waste of time and money in which none of the music can be taken seriously because it’s Eurovision and thus by default shit. 

In the article I linked at the beginning Mr. Lordi tells how performing abroad and in Finland was like night and day. During the Deadache tour 2009 they sold out arenas in Central Europe but couldn’t sell even half the tickets to a club in Finland. Finnish audience spit at them, yelled obscenities, showed middle fingers, asked the band to play quieter or play the eurovision song. Like, I have no idea why you would buy a ticket and go to someone’s show just to be a dick. Teräsbetoni (Esc 2008) has also told in the interviews that at one point they had a group guys in the front row at their shows who just kept yelling GAY during the whole gig 😑

In conclusion: Finnish people got Eurovision hangover from the ridiculous Lordi craze of 2006-2007 and then moved on. Meanwhile Lordi had lost both their original fanbase and failed to gain a new one as the ESC hype went away, that’s how I see it at least.

I could go on a full length tangent about how the BC fever gives me not-so-positive flashbacks to Lordi graze, but I’m too tired for that. What I want to point out though is that I’m not that worried about BC getting the Lordi treatment for two reasons: they weren’t big before Esc so they had practically nothing to lose, and they didn’t win (THANK GOD). Niko & Joel have also brought up this in interviews which makes me admire how smart they actually are for always having known what should be the next move for the band. I also want to believe that Eurovision has changed from the campiest times (2000-2010) to more serious direction and simultaneously gained back the ability to produce global hits and stars again (Måneskin, Duncan Laurence, Rosa Linn) which is something we haven’t really seen since 1988. As a side note I’m really glad to see some of that bleeding into our national selection as well, because before BC and Bess the last time someone became successful thanks to our Eurovision NF and not despite was in 1989.

As @reunalordi importantly pointed out in their tags, this is/was what happened to Lordi’s popularity in Finland specifically. They still have a big fanbase abroad afaik and if someone knows more about their popularity/success nowadays, please do correct me <3