#and I think a lot of discourse I’ve seen about the movie about whether it glamourizes Oppenheimer or not

[gothic-chicanery]

I just realized if I want to write about Oppenheimer for my final paper for my west class I probably have to rewatch it and it is So Damn Long. I’m also writing about it in comparison to a production I saw of Doctor atomic (the Oppenheimer opera (yes there’s an Oppenheimer opera)) but that will be a little bit easier bc I’m pretty sure no footage exists of that production so like at least I don’t have to rewatch that

[animebw]

Short Reflection: Chainsaw Man

I have never seen anything quite like Chainsaw Man.

I’m not talking about the show itself, to be clear. I’ve seen plenty of anime, manga, shows, movies, and video games that share similar DNA with Tatsuki Fujimoto’s breakout smash hit. What I mean is, I have never seen anything take over the anime community in the way that Chainsaw Man has. This manga was so staggeringly popular that it shot straight to the top of Anilist’s most popular manga rankings and stays there to this day. Most of the time an anime adaptation brings new attention to its source material, but Chainsaw Man was already the biggest goddamn thing in the otaku community before we even got a single teaser trailer for the anime. Everyone was talking about it, everyone (well, mostly everyone) was praising it, everyone was discussing it to such an extent that for once, waiting for the anime to release before checking it out felt like the hipster choice. As long as I’ve been a part of this community, nothing, and I mean nothing, has reached the silver screen with as much pre-release hype and anticipation as Chainsaw Man. No other anime has made its way into a world where its presence already casts so long a shadow.

And that’s kind of a problem.

See, I’ve been an anime fan long enough to know that a lot of times, anime fans are the fucking worst. Either they’re overly critical of every little detail because they’re looking for excuses to hate a show, or they blind themselves so utterly to a show’s faults that they steamroll over everyone else’s attempts to criticize it with blind fanboyism. And the colossal pedigree of Chainsaw Man was going to make the anime a lightningrod for both of those extremes on a scale we’ve never seen before. On the one hand you’ll have the blind zealots who hype the show up to an absurd degree that nothing could possibly live up to. On the other hand you’ll have the people so turned off by the first people that they’ll look for any excuse to call the show terrible- or even worse: mid. And on yet another hand, you’ll have the fanboys who are so slavishly devoted to the manga and Fujimoto’s vision specifically that they’ll pick apart every last change the anime makes with the kind of noxious incel entitlement rarely seen outside the Snydercut weirdos. And finally, you’ll have the newcomers, the people who haven’t read the manga and are coming to the anime with fresh eyes, who will be so exhausted by the shit-flinging that their opinion on the show itself will be lost amid the toxic sludge of the discourse surrounding it. How can anyone manage to just watch the damn show and appreciate it on its own merits with all that going on around them?

But when all is said and done, none of that nonsense matters. The discourse doesn’t matter, the toxicity of certain fans and haters doesn’t matter, and most of all- and I don’t care how angry this makes you- the manga doesn’t matter. Chainsaw Man the anime is not an advertisement for its source material or a greatest hits compilation that only exists to pander to fanboys; it’s a wholly complete work in and of itself. It’s a show you should be able to pick up and watch without engaging in any of the madness surrounding it. And that’s why I’m here today: to cut through all the noise and take this anime entirely on its own terms. I haven’t read the manga, and I’m mostly unspoiled, so I think my perspective will be clearer than most people who’ve already spend upwards of two years marinating in Denji’s Bizarre Adventure and the culture surrounding it. All I care about is whether or not Chainsaw Man, the anime, is an engaging, entertaining, and worthwhile experience all on its own. Because at the end of the day, that will determine its success, not how well it copies its source material or jerks off the already converted.

Cool? Cool. Let’s dive in.

Our story is set in the modern day, mostly the same as our world except for the fact that devils are real and walk among us, threatening humanity. Times are tough, most people live in fear, and the Public Safety Bureau tasked with keeping the threat of devils at bay can only do so much. And then there’s Denji, one of no doubt countless young people lost and adrift in this confusing, terrifying world, doing dirty jobs and selling his organs just to get by. At age sixteen, Denji has never had any semblance of a normal, comfortable life, to the point that something as simple as jam on toast feels like a luxury to him. But all that changes when an unexpected betrayal ends up with him dead... only to come back to life with the power of the Chainsaw Devil fused into his heart. Yes, just like the show’s title says, Denji can transform into a man made of chainsaws, a cackling maniac capable of ripping through flesh and bone like a one-man industrial slaughterhouse. And that power puts him on the radar of Public Safety, who see great potential in his ability to take on a devil’s powers without becoming a devil himself. Thus, he’s drafted into the front lines of those who track down and slaughter the infernal beasts, tasked with using his power to fight back against devilkind without going so out of control that he needs to be put down himself. And if he behaves himself like a good little boy, he might just get that life of plenty that always seemed so far out of his reach.

Is it the most unique premise in the world? Not really. But in execution, there are so many specific details that make this world and these characters come alive. You can practically feel the existential ennui dripping off everyone, the knowledge that they’ve living in a fucked-up world and just gotta do their best to make it day to day with the simple pleasures they can afford. For as raucous and chaotic as the action gets, the most powerful moments in this show are often the quietest. A character goes about his morning in the silence of a sky barely lit with dawn. Two characters in the same car speak volumes in the space between their words. Some of the most heartbreaking sequences involve characters just... sinking into the quiet of night, trying to go about their business unruffled while the weight of their regrets and trauma weighs invisibly down on them. In a world where so many big action shows are allergic to just letting moments breathe, Chainsaw Man is a soothing balm that remembers even the biggest, loudest fireworks showers are nothing without the calm before the storm.

But it’s certainly not only doom and gloom. In fact, one of the biggest delights I had with Chainsaw Man is just how uproariously funny it can be. The off-kilter cast of characters all have such distinct personalities, and watching everyone’s unique flavor of fucked-up bounce off each other leads to some moments that left me cackling. And Fujimoto has a real knack for drawing laughs with an unexpected moment of ultraviolence or gross-out humor right when you least expect it. The world of Chainsaw Man is more than a little bit unhinged, and that’s just as capable of being piss-your-pants funny as it is bleak and uncompromising. Life, after all, is composed of multitudes, sometimes barely separated by a moment’s notice before peace breaks into war or war gets smacked on the cheek for being a bad boy and cowed back into peace. That unpredictability ensures that even in its slower moments, this show is never boring to watch. And it makes every victory, however small, hit that much harder, knowing just how much the slightest step up means in a world this uncompromising.

But if you asked me to define the core of Chainsaw Man? The thing that makes it so interesting to think about and separates it from all its similar peers? Well, I have one idea. An idea that so few of the people I’ve seen discussing this show seem to really notice, but lies at the heart of basically everything this show is trying to say:

Chainsaw Man has some thoughts about sex.

See, Denji’s lived such a deprived life that he’s only just now started considering what would leave him fulfilled on every level, not just physically. Now that he’s finally got a regular source of food and water and shelter, his brain’s finally free to start climbing up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and start thinking about what else would make his life feel complete. And because he’s a repressed teenage boy, his first line of thinking is that he wants to touch some titty. Something that he achieves pretty speedily thanks to a bargain with the show’s best character (Bow before Power, mortals, you do not deserve her), only to find out that, well... it’s just boobs. That’s literally all it is. Which isn’t just hilarious because it sends him into a brief manic spiral, but also because it prods at one of anime’s longest and most infamous traditions of fanservice. Anime puts so much stock in boobs, spends so much effort getting its audience to drool over fictional bazongas, that it becomes easy to attach a near religious significance to them. But at the end of they day? They’re literally just boobs. Just sacks of yellow fat attached to a person’s chest. And while it might be fun or pleasurable to cop a feel or two, your life won’t suddenly turn itself around just because of it. Cheap sexual gratification the likes of which anime so often indulges in, Chainsaw Man seems to say, is nothing but an empty distraction from what’s actually making you unhappy. And if you want to actually find happiness, then you’re gonna have to put a lot more work in that a couple squeezes of some random mammary glands.

And that’s far from the only way Denji’s relationships with women and femininity are charged with deeper meaning. He actually has a very interesting relationship with sexuality, one that he doesn’t really seem aware of himself. He’s surrounded by women he considers attractive and lusts after them, but he’s got enough emotional intelligence to keep his hornier thoughts to himself and not be gross about it. Yet the promise of sexual favors from his female co-workers is often the biggest motivator in getting him off his ass and into the fray. And it’s... deeply uncomfortable, watching this sixteen-year-old throw himself into pursuing adult women who, even at the best of times, don’t have his best interests at heart. Like, let’s be clear here, Denji is a kid. A kid on the older side who was probably forced to grow up too fast, but a kid nonetheless. And it’s clear he doesn’t have anywhere near the maturity to be comfortably involved with anyone, let alone someone close to twice his age. But because most of the adults surrounding him aren’t exactly stable themselves, there’s no one around to tell him how badly he’s risking getting seriously hurt- or worse- by putting so much stock in sex. And because he’s too much of a dumb teenager to recognize the warning signs, he has no idea just how dangerous his relationship with his mommy dommy boss Makima is becoming.

The thing is, though... I don’t know how to feel about all this. Sure, the story knows Makima is bad news, at least, and it doesn’t shy away from how predatory her actions toward Denji are (side note, Makima is fucking terrifying and I can’t wait to find out what her deal is). But what about Himeno? You know, the adult woman who tries to have sex with Denji while he’s drunk? Because unlike Makina, Himeno’s resolutely in the good guys’ camp, and nothing really much comes of her- and I cannot stress enough- trying to fuck a child. They acknowledge it in a throwaway line the morning after (”You can get thrown in jail for doing something like that.”) and then everyone moves on. And I can’t help but feel like the show’s trying to have its cake and eat it too. Like it’s trying to tell a genuinely affecting story about a stunted teenager grappling with unhealthy sexuality but also indulge in the fantasy of hot dommy mommies being all hot and dommy at the same time. And when I think about how absurdly popular this series has already become, I worry that this kind of wink-wink pandering is part of the reason why. Like it’s selling a kink with juuuust enough plausible deniability to pretend it’s actually “subverting” it so its fanbase can pretend it’s totally smarter and more mature than other shonen when it’s really just selling the same shit with an air of superiority. Or maybe all the barking Makima simps just completely missed the point and everything will make sense down the line. We’ll have to wait and see.

What I don’t have to wait and see, thankfully, is just how goddamn motherfucking amazing this show looks.

Yes, you don’t need me to tell you that Chainsaw Man is one of the most astounding feats of animation ever put to television. But I’m saying it anyway, because it cannot be overstated enough. This. Show. Looks. Fucking. INSANE. Not just the sheer level of detail in the animation, but the cinematic sweep of the camera, the precision of every edit, the orgasmic fluidity of the bone-crunching action and subtle character moments alike. Bodies shred and rip apart with raucous glee, characters barrel through the city with enough velocity to tear the skin off your face, a subtle shift of a hand or change of expression conveys fathoms of meaning, and the camera draws you into these spaces until you feel like you can taste the blood on the walls and feel the muggy air rustle through your sweat-soaked undershirt. A single episode of Chainsaw Man has more animation and cinematic verve than most TV anime manage in their entire runs. It genuinely feels like you’re watching a movie, that’s how high quality it is. And no, not even the occasionally awkward CG modeling on the devils and the man of saws and chains himself takes away from that sense of awe. Hell, most of the time the CG is fantastically integrated with the 2D elements! What, you’re gonna complain that your divinely blessed shonen adaptation looks like a goddamn movie only 99% of the time? While most non-shonen and non-isekai are lucky to get even a tenth as much? Do you entitled fucking babies even realize how lucky you are? Or what, do you want Mappa’s animators to work themselves even more to death to fulfill your perfect vision? Some people don’t deserve good adaptations, I swear to god.

So, is Chainsaw Man the second coming of Jesus? Of course not. But it is a gloriously gruesome splatterhouse spectacle with some of the most jaw-dropping action ever put to screen and some of the most impeccable care put into making its smaller, simpler moments feel just as momentous as every severed limb and shower of blood. It’s a show that swept me away with sheer confidence the likes of which you almost never see, confidence only matched by the raw passion and talent of the artists bringing its incredible sights and sounds to life. Time will tell if the story truly is as incredible as manga readers have hyped it up to be, or if it’s merely a very good foundation upon which all this deliriously entertaining carnage can be built. But you know what? Even if it’s the latter, it can still hold its head up proudly as one of the finest pieces of sheer entertainment this year in anime had to offer- and considering the competition, that’s saying a lot. So when all is said and done, I give Chainsaw Man’s first season a score of:

8.5/10

Fingers crossed that season 2 doesn’t take too long! Unless it means letting Mappa animators fucking rest already, in which case, take as long as you fucking want. Give them five years of paid vacation, I don’t care, they’ve more than earned the break.

[cosmicgalaxy22]

So, I’ve seen a lot of discourse around the Fnaf movie and I thought I’d give my own thoughts on the movie and talk about a few things.

//Spoilers for the Fnaf movie!! If you haven’t seen it and don’t want spoilers, please avoid this!! (And maybe come back later if you have)//

I went to go see the movie on the 25th, the first night it came out and I enjoyed it. 6/10. I liked a lot of things in the movie. William Afton, Spring Bonnie, the animatronics, the costumes, the set, the designs, and the music. That was all incredible. Some of the scenes were amazing and I loved them so much. To name a few: Spring Bonnies scene and Williams reveal, just the animatronics scenes, the 8 bit digital intro, the spring lock scene.

But I was feeling a little bummed about the change in lore and there was some of the aspects of the movie that I wasn’t sure about and whether I liked them or not. I liked the movie but I didn’t think it was groundbreaking or amazing. I wasn’t sure I loved it.

But I had time to mull it over and decided that I was wrong. I realised the reason why I hadn’t liked the movie so much was because I was so stuck on the lore change and wanting the movie to be exactly the same as the game. I had gone to see the movie with that expectation and no wonder I felt bummed, because that’s what I was focused on. That’s where I went wrong.

So I decided to out those thoughts out of the way. Now I knew how the movie was going to go and that it didn’t follow the lore so closely, I decided to try and welcome the new changes.

With this in mind, I decided to watch it again and my opinion did change. Before I had just liked it. This time I loved it! A 9/10, amazing! The jumps scares and scare factor still didn’t scare me, but I don’t care, because to me, Fnaf was only ever scary when I was a kid, now I realise that I don’t get scared easily by things like that anymore, so I wasn’t expecting to be scared this time around. And I don’t mind the lack of real gore, because Fnaf was never really all that gorey anyway, so I don’t know why people were expecting it.

The lore changes, I actually began to like. Because I realised that in the first game anyway, what the first movie was mostly about with some aspects of the others, the game never stated a link between Michael Schmidt and Michael Afton, that came later and I think that’s what people forget about. Even if it doesn’t turn out that Williams is Mikes dad, I don’t think it really makes much of a difference except for the familial aspect.

The use of Abbie was great, I liked her.

Things that I wasn’t so sure about in the movie the first time around, I actually like now.

I wasn’t very fond of Vanessa at first and her use, the first time around, but I like her more and I like that William is now her dad. Vanessa is a great addition to the cast and new lore and it gives her a motivation if a security breach movie is ever made, that her father messed her up so much that she ended up just like him in the end.

The somewhat wholesome fort scene. I know that’s causing a lot of hate towards the movie, because people believe that the animatronics need to be scary and that’s that. But people forget that the animatronics are haunted by kids. Literal children! Thinking that way makes the scene more bittersweet in a way and a little eerie and sad, than just wholesome. I also love how they keep bringing up that fact that they are kids throughout the movie. That after each death and murder from then, you are reminded that these are just kids, which actually adds to the scary factor of the deaths because they are done by actual kids! It also makes them sad and heartbreaking because William had messed them up so much that this is what’s normal for them.

The repeated dream scenes were a little annoying at first, but now I get it. It showcases the desperation of Mike to find out what happened. That each time, he’s desperate to find out who took his brother, to change what happened. It’s shows just how messed up Mike was from loosing Garrett.

Now another scenes I’ve seen that had caused a lot of dislike, is the final nail in the coffin for William, the picture scene. At first I kind of thought it was a cop out, a cheap and easy idea. But combined with my thinking and seeing the movie again, I think it was actually done in the best way. Many times in the movie, it is stated that children communicate through pictures (I’m not sure why people keep saying it came out of nowhere, because it’s literally said about 3 times!) and to bring it up yet again! The animatronics are kids! The way the picture of Spring Bonnie and the kids holding hands is ripped off the wall and replaced by Abbies picture of Spring Bonnie killing the kid’s, the way the animatronics remember their deaths and how it was William that killed them is actually an amazing scene and I really really like it (the echoed screams of the children are actually chilling). In this scene it’s not just Mike isn’t just finding out the truth about what happens to his brother, the kids are too.

I think what holds a lot of people back from liking the movie is because they are so stuck on the complete original lore and the changes that have been made. You’ve just got to let that go and welcome the changes, because there was never any promises that the movie was going to be the same as the game and the first game had been out for more than a decade, so of course Scott probably had some thoughts and wanted to change some things. It’s like looking back at an old drawing you’ve made and think of all the things you could have done differently. And the confirmation of having a movie was so long ago, that people will have had secure expectations for the movie and opinions of how they’d imagined it to be and how they wanted it to go. And none of the movie adaptations of games that I’ve seen, ever are exactly like the games. Sonic wasn’t. Mario wasn’t. Detective Pikachu wasn’t. And that’s completely okay, because they don’t have to be and just because they aren’t, doesn’t make the movies bad.

I love both Sonic movies and am so excited for the third. I love the Mario movie. I love Detective Pikachu. And now I love the Fnaf movie. All because of their changes and the mixture of the original lore.

I’m not saying you have to like the Fnaf movie. You can have your own opinions. But if the changes from the lore is what’s holding you back from liking it. Don’t let it. Because you are just holding yourself back from something you’d might actually come to like. Accept the changes and give it another try and you may find that you like that more than you’d thought.

So yeah, that’s my very long review/rant/ whatever this is (it’s literally over a thousand words, jeez. Guess that’s what I get for being a fanfic writer). It’s probably somewhat messy as it’s just a word vomit, straight from my mind to the here.

I hope this can maybe change some of your minds about the movie. If not, that’s okay too.

I am excited for the next one as I hear that it’s already been confirmed as they’ve made enough money from the first to continue. And I might watch the movie a third time before it leaves the cinemas ;)

[cinemorg]

Barbie (2023)

This movie has made like half a billion dollars in its first week so odds are good that you've seen it, but in case you haven’t seen it, let’s get the plot synopsis out of the way (SPOILERS):

Margot Robbie plays Stereotypical Barbie, the tall blonde pretty skinny Barbie in a world of other Barbies who are slightly different (most notably Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon)). Ryan Gosling plays Ken, surrounded by a few other Kens led by Simu Liu, and Allan (Michael Cera), a perpetually uncomfortable friend of Ken’s who seems to love the man deeply while also being very annoyed by him much of the time (don’t say Greta Gerwig knows nothing about male friendships).

During a girls’ night dance party, Stereotypical Barbie starts to have some unexpected and unprecedented thoughts about death, and wakes up the next morning to find that nothing in her home in Barbie Land is working the way it should. She seeks counsel from Weird Barbie, who tells her that she needs to go to the real world and find the girl her doll avatar belongs to and get her to stop thinking about stuff. That’s Gloria (America Ferrera), a somewhat timid woman with a murky career at Mattel and a caustic teenage daughter named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt). So Barbie sets out to find Gloria, while Ken tags along and discovers the wonders of patriarchy. After a lot of zaniness, confusion, and pictures of horses, Stereotypical Barbie exiles herself from Barbie Land and joins forces with Gloria and Sasha to visit a gynecologist.

I debated with myself for a little while whether to try to approach this movie, because although I really enjoyed it, it’s very obviously not made for me and there’s no way I can understand it in the way someone who grew up playing with Barbie can understand it. It’s a story about what it means to grow out of the childish fantasies represented by Barbie and all of her friends and professions, and begin to confront the reality that there is no valid culturally approved femininity (or masculinity) to grow into anymore, which is a difficult situation that the Barbie concept simultaneously encourages, laments, ignores, and helped to create. I can speak to Ken’s bullshit here, but to some extent the interplay between Stereotypical Barbie, Gloria, Sasha, the CEO of Mattel (Will Ferrell), Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), and the world at large is unknowable to me because they are based on experiences and fantasies I’ve never had, stories about myself I’ve never been told. But in the end I decided I wanted to try, because the discourse around this thing has become so muddy and stupid it’s threatening to overtake the merit of the film itself, which is a real shame.

Obviously there is nothing to the right-wing idea that the movie is too feminist or anti-man, and those criticisms can be dismissed without a second thought. Right-wing commentators like to pretend that they’ve never actually met a man in real life, but the rest of us have, and we know that most men would, if given the opportunity, be absolutely thrilled to take up residence in a big stupid mansion and call it the Mojo Dojo Casa House. Every cis-het man wants to wear obnoxious clothes, sing songs with his friends, and cry. Not up for debate, sorry. As for the too-feminist angle, the primary goal of the women in this story seems to be to feel like they’re not doing everything wrong every minute of every day. If you oppose that, get fucked!

I’ve also seen a lot of pretzel-knot-logic thinkpieces and social media posts deliberating with excruciating self-consciousness whether Barbie is feminist enough, whether it’s too capitalist, whether it really understands itself. This is third-wave feminism masquerading as something modern in a time when even fourth-wave feminism is sunsetting. All of these concerns come second, and a distant second at that, to whether it’s a fun, clever movie that you can have a good time watching with your friends and helps you feel good about yourself. We don’t have time anymore for tedious, labored games of “Should I Be Enjoying This?”

More about that: Greta Gerwig’s real triumph here is not that she managed to get Mattel to produce a movie that’s openly critical of its product (while also selling it), or that she created something that can be easily imagined to be infuriating to bigots, or even just that she made a lot of money for a lot of people; it’s that she managed to use a plastic fantasy land to make an engaging movie about the lived experiences of multiple generations of American women where everyone is kind of stupid and cringe in equal measure, but each character comes out looking like some kind of hero if you think about them for long enough. That’s the triumph because that’s real life.

There’s an effort here to release us from the prison of constantly asking ourselves whether we are feminist enough, or too capitalist, or if we understand ourselves, by more or less taking the position that to an extent these questions are nonsensical to ask about your personal experience as someone who is growing and developing in a world that you didn’t create and can’t control. I’m sure there are plenty of Mattel products floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. You probably also played with a Weird Barbie when you were a kid. These things aren’t really spiritually related, and shouldn’t be. When Gloria, someone who lives an unremarkable life but spends her free time drawing pictures of Crippling Shame Barbie, delivers her tired (though still not wrong) speech about the contradictory expectations put on women in American society and then gets brutally shot down trying to pitch an “Ordinary Barbie” to the Mattel CEO, that’s not supposed to be the moment that ties the whole film’s message together; that’s a woman who has yet to learn that there can be no ordinary Barbie because there are no ordinary women. She is still growing, as is her daughter, as is Barbie, as are we all, and all this bone-headed discussion about whether Greta Gerwig has accomplished these granular yet amorphous feminist-labeled goals only serves to suppress that realistic and compassionate ideal in favor of yet another set of impossible-to-meet standards.

That said, I want to bring this back to Barbie visiting her gynecologist for the first time. Gerwig herself has said in interviews that her own memories of feeling ashamed of her body inspired her to include that scene, because she wanted girls in the audience to see Barbie happily taking care of herself and know that it wasn’t something that needed to be hidden. It also seems to be an important line in that much is made earlier in the movie of Barbie having no vagina (in one scene she says plainly to a group of wolf-whistling construction workers, “You should know that I don’t have a vagina.”), but here she is confirming that not only does she have one now that she’s transitioned to the real world, she has a human one that needs maintenance. She is real now. She is herself, whatever that might be. And as intent as some seem to be on robbing this movie of its authenticity, the singular characteristic of Gerwig’s Barbie that shines through is that for all of its silliness, it’s a genuine film with genuine heart, and that’s what it wants for its audience. Be genuine people, or do the best you can. Forget the rest.

P.S. I know I’m ignoring Ken’s storyline, which is a huge part of the movie. Suffice to say that Ken’s self-worth is completely tied up in getting a woman’s attention, and when that doesn’t work he tries to heal his wounds by fully investing in patriarchy, which also doesn’t work. So then he has to try getting a life. Tale as old as time.

[non-un-topo]

The Old Guard and Non-Toxic Masculinity

I’ve wanted to talk about this for ages and was inspired by this excellent post about Joe and non-toxic masculinity and a wonderful anon who indulged me! (Like, months ago! Sorry for the delay) Started writing this before Tales Through Time came out but now I feel like it’s a bit more relevant / important to discuss. I’ll be talking almost exclusively about the movie canon, as it subverts a lot of male action hero tropes. I’m going to have sections for each of the main men in TOG (sans Lykon because he is not on screen long enough for me to be able to closely examine his character).

First, some brief background and theory:

Of the most famous and well-known theorizers of masculinity (among subjects like race and racism, Blackness, whiteness, and feminism), bell hooks says that masculinity is different from maleness. She defines masculinity as more of a performance of patriarchal dominance, with socially constructed ideals of how a man should behave in relation to himself and others / what it means to be a man. Maleness she defines as simply male identity. So, one can love maleness and men without loving masculinity. But, and this is my addition, masculinity is not always toxic masculinity.

A short spiel on toxic-masculinity: as said above, hooks argues that masculinity is a performance, and in essence, a survival strategy for being a man in a patriarchal society. It is toxic because it not only harms others as it dominates and oppresses, but it prevents men from being their authentic selves (often with severe negative impacts on their mental health, self-esteem, and relationships).

Non-toxic masculinity, then, is the embodiment of traditionally (socially constructed) masculine characteristics and behaviours, minus the harmful ideals that patriarchy demands. (A disclaimer: There’s certainly a lot to say about this topic and a lot to unpack about whether masculinity is always harmful and to whom, but this post is about TOG not a university paper, so I’ll pack it up)

Joe

Once again, I’m going to point to this post that talks specifically about Joe and non-toxic masculinity because op really hit all the points.

Op talked about how Joe shows vulnerability and I think that’s a really important point when trying to understand his relationship to masculinity. I’m going to talk about Joe’s relationship to his emotions and the way he displays them.

To start, when he’s mocked for his relationship with Nicky, he doesn’t respond in anger (different from the comics so let’s only focus on Marwan’s lovely Joe) but instead launches into possibly the most romantic and heartfelt speech I’ve ever heard onscreen. So much has been said about this scene, so I’ll keep it short, but I think it’s important to examine Joe’s relationship to anger and aggression as it’s something that merits a lot of discourse. From the limited amount of screentime he has in the movie, it does seem that Joe is a little quick to anger sometimes, but his anger is never irrational or uncontrollable. Anger and aggression are associated with toxic masculinity because they are used as forms of power or oppression, and are often hyperbolic. Joe’s anger, when he does get angry in the movie, comes from a place of hurt or pain. Also betrayal, protectiveness, and fear.

The anger and aggression that toxic masculinity permeates comes from a place of not being in-tune with one’s emotions, not being allowed to feel what one wants to or should feel. Joe is clearly extremely in-tune with his emotions and, importantly, it shows through not only his anger at Booker’s deep betrayal, but his tears and his laughter. I’ve seen many people refer to Joe as wearing his heart on his sleeve, and I think that would be correct! He’s not guarded because he has no reason to be. He is very open in the ways that he loves, and he has a lot of love (see; bear hugs, winking, grinning, laughing, soft touches to Andy and Nicky, cracking jokes in tense times).

Finally, looking at Joe, he does clearly embody a lot of traditionally masculine characteristics. He’s tall and muscular, has a beard, speaks loudly and openly, (the post above talked about his body language and the way he takes up space), and he fights both hand-to-hand and with weapons. He is all of these things, but none of these characteristics exist at the expense of himself or his team. If anything, some of these characteristics make his bond stronger with his team (see; fighting the good fight and protecting Andy after she loses her immortality). So, while Joe embodies many things that would be associated as masculine, in no way is he toxic.

(Although I don’t get involved in discourse, it is important to mention that many of Joe’s traits (like his anger or physical appearance) often get twisted by racial bias. To focus only on the “angry” side of Joe’s emotions is a complete disservice to his character and all his wonderful complexities that Gina and Marwan worked incredibly hard to portray)

Nicky

Similar to Joe, Nicky also embodies a number of traditionally masculine characteristics, those being his appearance, the fact that he fights (hand-to-hand and with weapons), and the fact that he is also rather outspoken about his opinions. I don’t want to simply compare him to Joe, since they’re both separate characters (and I don’t want to perpetuate the idea that they’re opposites to each other), but I will say that Nicky is different from Joe in the sense that he is rather reserved, at least, in relation to Joe and his open emotions.

Nicky is reserved, but not in an unhealthy way. He’s not bottled up. He clearly understands his emotions as well as Joe, he just has a slightly different way of showing them. Mostly, Nicky shows his emotions by doing, which is also quite a traditionally masculine trait (I mean, if we’re thinking in oldschool societal binaries, men are usually expected to do while women are expected to withhold or submit). He shows his love and support through actions. Interestingly, though, the way he chooses to do this manifests as a role that is (arguably) not traditionally masculine. He’s the self-appointed caregiver.

Nicky is also deeply sympathetic, something that men are encouraged not to be. Toxic masculinity demands that men think competitively, and to disregard others’ emotions, but when Nicky thinks of others he thinks of them as a part of a group or bigger picture. Not in competition with each other, but as a system that works together. He sympathizes with Nile’s fear and loneliness when they first dream of her, already seeing her as part of their group, and this becomes his motivation for finding her right away.

The only times he gets visibly angry in the movie is from a place of protectiveness. He’s protective throughout the movie but not in a way that underestimates the abilities of his teammates or is always aggressive (see; taking a bullet for Andy, helping Nile out of the car when she needs it). I mentioned in some tags recently that, as we’re all extremely aware, action genre tends to associate heroism with male aggression (like, yes, kill the enemy, but what of the people you’re trying to protect? It’s here where toxic masculinity comes into play. When the thing that defines a male character’s strength and heroism is his proficiency to kill/maim). In the two scenes we see Nicky “lash out” (when Merrick stabs Joe and when Nicky tells Joe to “leave it”, if that counts) besides in the middle of battle, it’s very clear his aggression is triggered by a need to protect those he loves, both from immediate physical danger and emotional harm.

(To state the obvious: Joe and Nicky both embody a trait that is almost never seen alongside positive portrayals of masculine men: They’re both gay and in a very healthy and happy relationship. Many posts have been written about their relationship specifically, so I will leave it to them and their wonderful words!)

Booker

I think, and I’m leaping ahead here, Booker embodies slightly more of the toxic side of masculinity. It is a little more complicated than that, though, and I’m aware I am still coming at some of these issues very simplistically.

It could be argued that Booker is a selfish character, as a lot of his actions certainly line up with that theory. He goes behind the team’s back and betrays them, puts them all in danger for a cause that only he truly wants. But Booker’s motivation for his betrayal is because he wants to put an end to not only his immortality, but Andy’s. He cares for her. He sees her becoming weary and resentful of the world, so he tries to take matters into his own hands and help.

I think to claim that Booker is selfish is... not entirely inaccurate, but it’s missing so much. I think his “selfishness” comes from a place of internal pain, possibly even self-hatred. He hates that he outlived his children, he is cynical and at the same time pessimistic when it comes to the team’s destiny/purpose. And he attempts to (treat? Stunt?) these feelings with alcohol (*I will not explore his relation to substance abuse in-depth here because it’s really an extremely complicated and sensitive topic and I don’t believe I have the knowledge nor experience to do it justice).

We see Booker cry openly in the movie when he speaks to Nile in the cave, so we can assume he’s not entirely guarded or intent on repressing his emotions. Rather, I think he does things with the intention of helping himself and the others, but the result is always that it makes things worse (see; drinking when he feels down and giving Andy alcohol at the same time, thereby unintentionally enabling her, trying and failing to get the team to stay on track and find Copley because he believes the end result (loss of immortality) will benefit all of them, or at least himself and Andy).

I think he is a victim of his own toxic masculinity. He falls victim to self-hatred and cynicism while still believing he ought to do something himself to actualize something that he believes will put an end to his own (and Andy’s assumed) suffering. But it’s his actions (rash, and motivated by the wrong reasons) that lead to him destroying his closest relationships and, almost ironically, causing more suffering as opposed to less.

Bonus: Copley

Copley embodies some toxic and non-toxic masculine characteristics. I would say his most explicitly non-toxic masculine trait is that he is clearly emotionally vulnerable and open. This is both a good and bad thing. He’s in-tune with his emotions, but he is irresponsible with the power he has and how it hurts people. Copley is complicated because his heart is in the right place but he fails to see how he harms. His complicity (or rather, his culpability) in the harm caused to the immortals relates to toxic masculinity in regards to the power he has over others. Although his motivation for handing the immortals off to Merrick was to do good, to bring the end of disease, he was wrong to appoint himself the gift-giver (see; Nile’s “It wasn’t your gift to give”). I think (and this could be a reach but why else do we analyze things if not to reach a little?), that Copley suffers from a slightly inflated sense of self-importance, which is something that is often encouraged of men.

I think he turns it around in the end, though, by agreeing to work for the team, which is why he embodies a mix of toxic and non-toxic masculine traits. He once thought he knew best, but changed when he realized how much harm he was causing.

-

All in all, I love the way these male characters are written because their dynamics are so rarely seen in movies in general, let alone big budget action films, and it’s so, so important. We get to see differing types of non-toxic masculinity, prioritizing love and caregiving above violence, as well as some of the damage that can be caused by toxic masculinity to others and the self, while not feminizing or making a joke out of these characters. We get to actually see masculinity and maleness in a positive light, severed from the harmful and normalized images of masculinity we usually see. But above all, we’ve got some really excellent characters with realistic, complex personalities.

[vaspider]

I have a question, and you seem to be very good at explaining things. My understanding is that transfemme/transwoman/femme? are all the same, and mean someone who was assigned male at birth, and currently identifies as transgender. And the same for transmasc/transman/masc. Just, yknow, the other way around. Is that correct? Or am I getting my terminology wrong? I've always been kinda shakey on that, but wasn't sure who to ask without seeming rude, or like I was mocking them.

"Femme" is a word with multiple meanings. It can mean:

"Woman" - since it's just the word 'woman' in French, and this is where all of the other meanings come from.

"A femme lesbian, that is, someone who fits the 'femme' dynamic or presentation within a butch/femme relationship, or simply on their own." - This is regardless of actual gender, pronouns, cis, trans, whatever. Butch and femme in this context come to us from Polari, which is a theater cant from the UK commonly used by Travellers, theater people, sex workers, and queer folx (and all the intersections thereof). The butch/femme dynamic in lesbian (and gay!) relationships and communities goes back at least seventy-five years. This has way more context to it than I can cover in this, but, like, if you look at movies like Paris Is Burning or read any of the older lesbian zines, you'll see many many examples.

"A transfeminine person, that is, someone who was assigned male at birth and is moving in a feminine direction with their transition, or presents feminine rather than masculine OR a person who presents feminine regardless of gender." - 'Femme' is often used as a catch-all term for anyone who is "femme of center" when discussing gendered issues. This can include cis women, femme non-binary people regardless of gender at birth, binary trans women, and many other varieties as well.

You'll sometimes see "women and femmes" used to describe who belongs in a particular space, but this is falling out of favor, thankfully, as it was often used as a low-key misgendering of AFAB non-binary people and trans men. What people usually meant by that is "people with vaginas and also trans women I guess," and it ended up with a sort of 'woman lite' implication for the word 'non-binary' and excluding non-binary people who didn't present feminine enough (usually meaning 'they have a dick and are non-binary'). The whole phrase is a mess and I'm glad we're moving more toward talking about "marginalized genders."

My wording on this may not be perfect, and it may not match every single use of femme as other people understand it -- and I'm sure I've forgotten some usages of it. The point is that it's a contextual word. What it means often depends on the conversation at hand, who's having the conversation, what community they're part of (whether that's the lesbian community, the queer community, the trans community, what region or country they're from... ), etc. If you're confused by someone's use of 'femme' contextually, it doesn't hurt to ask for more information. (Though I would avoid saying things like 'define femme' bc that's often the sort of thing that TERFs and the baby-TERF exclusionists do, and you may come off unintentionally as one of them. Asking 'hey, I know this word has lots of contextual different meanings, would you mind clarifying for me' is probably better.)

That's one thing, honestly, I think we need to get a lot better at as a community -- and here I know I'm going on a tangent -- recognizing that a lot of our words are contextual, lots of them don't have single, fixed, universally-recognized meanings, that the US isn't the single defining experience of queerness and other countries use other terms which are as correct as ours, and that even regionally there are lots of different terms or slightly different definitions. This sort of dogmatic 'there is absolutely only one definition, and it's mine, and I'm going to redefine your experience and your identity if it doesn't fit my definition' is something I've seen far too much of lately, especially from younger queer folx.

I know it's like, really tempting to want to have singular rigid definitions for every word, but that doesn't fit people's experiences of gender or sexuality, and the trend I've seen toward literally telling people "you are not X, your experience doesn't fit X, you are Y," is some nasty-ass stuff and it really needs to stop. I've seen it most often with younger lesbians telling older (in some cases decades older) lesbians "you're wrong, you're bisexual/pansexual, you're not a lesbian," but I've also seen it with gender, people telling others what their gender is, and that's the shit that TERFs and other transphobes do, we can't be doing that to each other.

Anyway, femme means a lot of things, depending on context. Ask people if you're not sure. And before I hit post on this, let me make clear that I don't tolerate discourse around whether butch and femme are "lesbian exclusive" terms. They are not, they never have been, and if someone comes into my notes trying to start that old bullshit up again, they will not get the serotonin of a reply from me. They will get blocked without response.

[ingravinoveritas]

Have you seen the gayest show on tv ever? Our Flag Means Death?

Gay pirate rom-com.

I would literally kill everyone on earth to see David and Michael in a show like that or Aziraphale and Crowley be that open and in love.

Anyways, it is on HBOMax and the last two episodes drop next week. Watch it and thank me later.

So, I’ve recently received these two asks about Our Flag Means Death, and between these messages and seeing my social media feeds blowing up about this show seemingly out of nowhere, I thought I would take the time to watch it (which I now have, all 10 episodes) and write about the show and my thoughts on all the discourse that’s popped up.

Before I get into the meat of my analysis, standard disclaimer that what follows are my opinions. What I think is by no means gospel, and I absolutely encourage folks to watch the show themselves and form their own opinions. At the same time, I was also very hesitant to watch the show initially, and I hope people understand that just because lots of GO fans or people you follow are watching the show and becoming fans, it doesn’t mean you have to, too. So if you don’t want to watch it, that is totally okay, and if you do want to watch it, that is okay, too.

All that being said, let me first list the things that I did like about OFMD, in no particular order (**Note: Spoilers for OFMD may follow, so read at your own discretion):

- Loved Ewen Bremner as Mr. Buttons, because I was immediately like “HI SPUD!” and let’s face it, Mr. Buttons is pretty much what Spud would be like if he were an 18th century pirate, albeit with less heroin and more cannibalistic tendencies. Bless.

- Loved the relationship between Lucius and Black Pete, and how the latter carved a new finger for the former after he lost his, and the depth of emotion from Pete when he was giving it to him (”I’m used to death, but, um...not your death”).

- Loved that Mary didn’t even blink or blanch when Stede said, “Ed. His name is Ed” after she asked the name of the person Stede had found who makes him happy, and that she was so supportive of him even after all they’d been through. 

-  Taika Waititi’s entire goth daddy pirate aesthetic as Blackbeard/Ed gave me life. The whole look was very Michael Sheen as Lucian from Underworld on the high seas and normally I am not here for a giant beard, but when he shaved it off in a later episode, I was nearly bereft.

- And yes, the burgeoning relationship between Stede and Ed was and is adorable, but something about which I continue to have somewhat mixed feelings (more on that in a minute).

Overall, Our Flag Means Death was a cute show (if a bit gory at times) and enjoyable on its own. But where I start to struggle is with the repeated comparisons to Good Omens (and especially to comparisons between Michael/David and Rhys/Taika, which is what I think I have the most problem with). And here’s why.

When I become specifically, intensely interested in something, whether it’s a movie or a band or a TV show--and this may have to do with my being autistic or just who I am--I am only interested in That Thing. For the past three years, Good Omens and Michael and David have had my heart, and so my initial hesitation in watching OFMD stemmed from seeing what I perceived as fans jumping on this bandwagon and rushing to replace Aziraphale and Crowley with Stede and Ed.

Now, I am aware this is not the case for most people. I know a lot of folks are filling the void between now and when season 2 of GO comes out, and this doesn’t make them love GO any less. But for me, there is something very special and unique about Good Omens and the characters of Aziraphale and Crowley and what they have all meant to me personally. So when I started seeing the comparisons between GO and OFMD, I wasn’t sure how to feel. What I mainly feel now, however, is that the comparisons do a disservice to both Stede/Ed and Aziraphale/Crowley, because while these relationships may seem similar on the surface, underneath they are very different.

The number one thing I have seen folks talking about on social media is the kiss between Stede and Ed in episode 9 of OFMD. I did think the kiss was sweet, but also a bit stiff--and not because of it being a first kiss. In talking about this, I think we have to mention acting and chemistry, both of which hugely influence how a relationship reads on screen, and Rhys and Taika do indeed have chemistry in the show. But when I saw them kiss, what I immediately saw was the acting. When I see Michael and David together, I see them being. It’s the difference between acting chemistry vs. people chemistry, embodying Aziraphale and Crowley from the inside out, as opposed to from the outside in, and having that relationship informed by the powerful bond between Michael and David off-screen.

So when I saw that kiss, I couldn’t help thinking that a kiss between Aziraphale and Crowley would be completely different from the kiss between Stede and Ed. (For many reasons, which would necessitate a longer discussion about representation and Michael/David (especially Michael’s) fearlessness and entire lack of hesitation in playing queer roles and the parts of him those roles represent.) But mainly because that chemistry and connection between Rhys and Taika doesn’t hold a candle to the chemistry and connection between Michael and David. And the presence of a kiss between Stede and Ed does not automatically mean they have romantic chemistry in the same way that Aziraphale and Crowley do, despite the absence of a kiss between them.

This is also the reason why I had to do a double-take when I saw a post here on Tumblr putting Michael and Georgia/David’s Twitter interaction side-by-side with one of Taika and Rhys’ and saying it had the same vibes:

For me, these two examples could not be more disparate. Again, it’s that thing where on the surface there appears to be a similarity, but when you look closely, there is a difference. Right off the bat, Taika qualifies his tweet by using the phrase “onscreen crush,” thereby drawing a clear line between him and the character of Ed/Blackbeard. But for the past three years, Michael has done nothing but the complete opposite, entirely blurring the line between him and Aziraphale, saying how David is very easy to fall in love with, calling David his lover, directly referencing fanfic by saying it is about he and David having sex, and countless other examples I have chronicled on my blog. (This isn’t even getting into how David has reciprocated outside of social media, albeit in his more reserved, David Tennant-y way.)

To go back to the example above, in contrast to Rhys and Taika’s exchange, the “other wife” comment--along with Michael’s response--is referencing something that has nothing to do with anything onscreen. We saw the first reference on Georgia’s birthday, and the tweet above continued it. But these references (#MugGate 2020, the use of the phrase “other partner” prior to “other wife” becoming a thing) have been going on for TWO YEARS now, so there is a history to this and a very high probability that it’s alluding to so much more than we even know about. So it seems like that takes things far beyond the realm of one very specific, narrowly-defined Twitter exchange, and is for me the reason why they are so completely different/not in the same realm.

All of the above being said, watching OFMD made me think of many things, but in particular, it made me think of season 2 of GO, and what could be in store/what I hope is in store. I know I have said previously that I am okay with Aziraphale and Crowley kissing or not kissing, and while watching OFMD has certainly tipped the scales in favor of “kissing,” what I hope is that that chemistry between Michael and David will be utilized to maximum effect, in whatever form that may take.

I hope Neil will see what they’ve brought to Aziraphale and Crowley in the first season and not let it go to waste, because the chemistry between Michael and David is truly a once-in-a-lifetime find. Like you, @blueberrysconematurity, I would also love to see Aziraphale and Crowley being that open--or at least being open in the way that is right for them--and putting to rest any of the absurdly still-lingering doubts about the love that is between them.

I hope that we can acknowledge and respect that there is room for all sort of queer representation in the media landscape, and that though there may be parallels, the relationships between Aziraphale/Crowley and Stede/Ed are not completely alike, nor should they have to be, to be viewed as representation.

And I hope that, for the sake of both Good Omens and Our Flag Means Death and the creators and cast who worked so hard to make these shows happen, the comparisons will eventually die down. I feel they shouldn’t be compared, but rather appreciated for the individual, unique shows that they are, with two relationships that are worth celebrating without casting them in each other’s shadow.    

So those are my thoughts on OFMD, and I hope this post helps some folks out who have been wondering about the show. Thanks for writing in! xx

[tobi-smp]

Regarding your tags on the post about the misuse of trauma-dumping--I don't disagree with you, but what are your thoughts about the accusation of abuse apologism--or worse, threats of abuse itself--sent to people who do like Dream, including other abuse survivors? Isn't that also silencing, just in the other direction? It just seems like a messy situation overall, with shit behavior on all sides.

context: [Link]

I'm gonna be real with you anon, these two things are not comparable for very important reasons.

the situation with dream and tommy is what it is because they presented an abusive relationship with enough authenticity and nuance that people who've experienced these things in real life have been able to see their experiences reflected back and represented in a way that they haven't seen before in popular media. I've seen my c-ptsd in tommy in ways that I just Haven't seen in movies or tv.

[Links that go into more detail: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4 and summaries of dream's treatment and affect on tommy in all of the exile streams under "A Comprehensive Analysis of the Exile arc": Link]

"trauma dumping" as a term isn't exactly rigidly defined, but it's essentially the practice of suddenly oversharing about trauma at random in a way that can be toxic to the people around you. this means going into detail about something horrific that you've experienced without giving someone time or space to consent to seeing that information, which can be triggering or draining. it seems more appropriate (to me) to define it as a pattern of behavior, rather than a one-off, but it can be useful in talking about isolated interactions anyhow.

what people are accusing of being "trauma dumping" is what I've already done in this post, mentioning the fact that you have trauma at all and how it affects your relationship with this piece of media. this is blatantly misusing the term specifically to shame people out of speaking up about why it can be harmful to other fans who are survivors to make light of the canonical abuse (or worse, which I won't get into).

it's a silencing tactic because it's essentially weaponizing someone's trauma against them through what's more or less a lie so that the accuser doesn't Have to acknowledge what's already in the text of the story they're consuming and talking about.

the problem with abuse apologia in the fandom can't be summed up with "people have started blatantly misusing a term seemingly at random to try to get what they want."

this is going to sound harsh but anyone can spread abuse apologia whether they mean to or not, whether they themselves are a trauma survivor or not. in the same way that being lgbt+ doesn't stop people from being able to spread queerphobia or ideas that contribute or stem from queerphobia.

the problem is not in that people Like dream, it's that there are people who actively excuse his actions or actively try to blame those actions on tommy. people who say and Believe that tommy "got what he deserved," people who try to argue that tommy Provoked dream, who say that dream was only doing what he had to because tommy was Clearly the cause of everyone's problems on the server (which is, of course, the logic that dream used to justify his own abuse and attempted murder), etc.

these are all real things that I see Frequently and Have Seen for months. not just in fringe sections of the fandom but front and center on twitter, youtube, reddit, and of course floating around here on tumblr. and I've personally seen much worse, but I won't be getting into that right now.

of course people should make the distinction between apologia spread for a fictional character and apologia spread about real people (or people you personally know) because it Is absolutely different. but it's important to point out regardless of whether it's fictional or not because it's being posted publicly where people who Do see themselves and their trauma in tommy can see it and be hurt by it.

tommy provoked dream by being annoying and argumentative in the prison? and what if someone has a loud personality and has been punished for it by their abuser? how do you think They'd feel if someone looks at behavior that reflects them and say that the person who got hurt deserved to be because of that?

it's not the same because it's true. a Lot of the things said about tommy and his experiences are extremely uncomfortable and hurtful to read from the perspective of someone who can relate to his situation. which is problematic when his "situation" is canonical trauma and abuse. and its important to point out that the things being said mirror real life abuse apologia because the things being said are reaching and hurting real life abuse survivors.

pointing out that your words can have an impact on traumatized people because the subject matter you're talking about already deals with themes of trauma and abuse is not a silencing tactic Because It Is The Truth. if someone pointing out the reality of a situation makes your argument fall apart (to the point that you have to try to deflect through lying) then maybe there's something wrong with your argument.

there's nothing wrong with Liking dream, I like dream's character, the problem is when you try to paint him as justified or in the right when it comes to tommy (or tubbo, or ranboo, or wilbur, or-). I don't think people are right when they try to call people outright abusers over blockman discourse, but I can also say that that's just something that I haven't seen. I absolutely believe that it happens (discourse just is that way) but I mean that I don't think that it's common in the same way that the abuse apologia is, or even the misuse of the term "trauma dumping."

so comparing the two situations and calling them The Same just feels, Gross.

[five-rivers]

I'm new to the danny Phandom and i was wondering if you could give me some pointers to navigate? General vibe of the phandom? Do we acknowledge the movie thing and all "secret identity/revealed" fics take place in that nebulous space before the movie or does it not exit and we don't talk abt it

(2/2) follow up to my previous ask, i've really only seen canon from stove-is-on-fire and the associated fic

Stove is certainly a good place to start!  Their art is so nice.  Canon is dead to us anyway.  

But?  Movie?  What are you talking about?

More seriously, most of us like to pretend Phantom Planet doesn’t exist.  99% of DP phanphic should be tagged cannon divergence just for that, but... we don’t.  Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure I’ve ever actually seen a phic get tagged with canon divergence.  The most I’ve seen is just the alternate universe tag.  

Going backwards, I’d say our general vibe is pretty friendly.  At least here on tumblr.  I don’t think I’ve ever really seen someone being outright mean before and I’ve been here a couple of years.  Even though we have a lot of fanon, we’re pretty accepting and respectful of all headcanons.  There’s very little we take as actually absolute.  I mean, we’re split on whether Danny’s alive, dead, half-dead (whatever that means), or simply dead inside, like every other teen.

But we’re also sort of high-key lawful-chaotic.  As in, we currently have a planned, scheduled, sh*tposting contest which takes place behind a virtual Denny’s.  With brackets.  If it happens this year, it’ll be the third year.  

Further evidence: The only discourse we regularly have is food discourse.  Occasionally we will make parody blogs to impersonate each other.  We trend every year on the anniversary of the first episode air date because of the Dannypocalypse (aka we paste a cursed screenshot of Danny’s face onto everything).  We phrequently replace leading ‘f’s with ‘ph’s (I started doing this as a joke, but sometimes I read a word and can’t tell the difference).

Speaking of events, we have a lot.  Currently, we’re in the midst of our Secret Santa event, which we call either the Christmas Truce or the Holiday Truce after a in-universe event in the show.  I think the next big event is the Phight Club (aforementioned sh*tposting contest), then we have the Phic Phight (we split into teams and write phanphic at each other to see who can do the most), the Dannypocalypse, Dannymay (month-long prompt calendar challenge), and Ectober (another prompt calendar, but there are like three of them done by three different people; the one I do is the one week one).  Occasionally someone will make a new one out of nowhere, but I believe that all of these have taken place at least twice and their creators/hosts are still active.  

Blogs you should check out:

@lexosaurus:  Unofficial cult leader.  Cause of most phandom chaos, but also highly involved in planning events.  Blog is made of jokes.  Phics are high-grade angst.  Truly, an enigma.  

@reallydumbdannyphantomaus:  Also called Bug.  Not 100% sure why.  The source of many jokes.  Exactly What It Says On The Tin.  

@ceciliaspen:  Exceptional art.  Mostly DP, but her OCs and original comic look great.  

@coffeecakecafe:  Same.  Her headcanons and redesigns are super cool, too.  

@gally-hin-phantom:  Nice, soft, cute art.  Also runs the @danphan-trading-board.

@ecto-american:  Involved in a lot of phandom events.  Excellent phics.  

@bibliophilea:  Just...  Super nice?  Is one of the Phic Phight mods.  

@dannyphandump:  This is Tali.  Seems to be involved in everything, somehow.  I see them all the time.  

@kinglazrus:  Everyone’s aunt.  

@guardianrex:  Curates cool meta, headcanon, and speculation posts.  

@dp-marvel94:  Good running library of phics.  Also has some super cool phics about the Danny clones.  

There are others I should probably tag, but this is who I can think of at the moment.  

I hope this helps!  Welcome to the phandom!  You aren’t getting back out.  

[soul-dwelling]

Have you heard something about Ohkubo being racist? I saw some twitter links, which due to personal reasons I cant check for myself, but otherwise couldnt find anything on.

Shared September 18, 2021

I've sat on this question for a long time, and yet my answer will still be incomplete. As I am white, I want to be aware of the white privilege I have, and I anticipate I am going to give a response that fails to address certain topics and concerns--and is just going to be flat-out wrong in a lot of parts. I anticipate I will get things wrong below, I don't like that, but I want to be open to reading more and figuring out what I'm getting wrong so I can fix what I get wrong. And I want to learn from any responses I receive--so I encourage any responses, and I will read and consider them.

At the time when I received this question, I was not aware of any Twitter links regarding accusations of Ohkubo being racist. Despite being a huge fan of Soul Eater, this was something I was unaware of, and I was purposefully ignoring--because I was ignoring any discourse around Fire Force, not around Ohkubo or Soul Eater in general. While I have followed what Soul Eater stuff is out there, I have purposefully avoided a lot of Fire Force content since the anime was announced--including muting any Fire Force stuff on Twitter. While I do not regret avoiding Fire Force stuff (there is only so much annoyance I can take from that franchise), I do regret overlooking this discussion around racism in Ohkubo’s works, I regret that, and I apologize for overlooking it right now--and in the past.

Because I have overlooked racist elements in Ohkubo’s prior works, including in Soul Eater, including on this very blog. I don’t think apologizing is enough, and I am determining what steps I can take to handle this better--and that starts with acknowledging the racist elements in his works. I think some have unfortunate implications that need to be debated.

For example, one Twitter remark I read asked why the South American meister had to be Enrique instead of a human. (And, I anticipate, how that leads to its own set of unfortunate implications, associating being from South America to being a monkey, regardless Tezca, his visual conceit, and his powers being derived from, not South American cultures only or exactly, but from Aztec and indigenous Mexican cultures.) I don’t think adding Enrique as a meister is bad, when the joke works; I think adding Enrique, and not more South American human characters, is a problem, and when your one South American meister is a non-human animal, when no other meister in the series, especially of a Death Scythe, has been a non-human animal, this is going to stick out and be offensive. I have seen and written stories with animals as meisters to weapon partners; it is a great idea, having Enrique be that character is great, but it is a missed opportunity that erases a spot where a person of South American could have been. Having Tezca as one such South American person helps, but again, this is a missed opportunity.

As an aside, this also opens up unfortunate implications to having Black Star being mistaken by Liz as a monkey, given headcanon I’ve seen from fans about Black Star’s identity with regard to Japanese ethnicities and the fact that Black Star does have dark skin.

And another set of Twitter remarks focused on the stylized designs to the band playing at the DWMA Anniversary Party (and here). Regardless whether stylization was used on white characters in that scene, the stylization on the Black characters who were performing in the band is drawing upon a history of racist images (the lips on drummer and cellist) and is racist. I’ll get to this later, but I agree with this remark that it’s bizarre that Ohkubo did this despite what he has done well with inclusiveness amongst his cast. And like I’ll also say later, it’s like me sitting here thinking “How could he do so well at writing a girl lead like Maka in an action series, then fail so badly writing Tamaki in his follow-up series?” My pathetic answer is that no creator is perfect, they make mistakes--and it becomes infuriating when they screw up so badly and don’t seem to learn from that screw-up, don’t show regret, don’t fix what they broke, and don’t improve. I’ve ranted enough here on this blog that I don’t think Ohkubo has grown with his audience: I think he keeps making the same immature mistakes (immature in terms of his craft, immature as well in terms of his humor).

And since I did bring up the monkey remarks about Enrique and Black Star, there are the major sets of discourse around racism in Ohkubo’s works, that being Maka referring to Sid, who is Black, as a gorilla (not to mention “thuggish”), and Shinra in Fire Force referring to Charon, who has dark skin, as a gorilla.

Regardless the excuses made (“racism in Japan is not the same as racism elsewhere”--which, no, fuck that, people globally including in Japan know the racist associations made where being Black or brown is associated by racists with non-human primates), I don’t get why no one, from Ohkubo to his editors to distributors to audiences including me, do not say more about this racist detail.

And I don’t get why no editor or localization staff bothered to change it. I have not sat through the Fire Force dub, but I hope someone working at localization changed the line. (It’s one thing to change a subtitled line and avoid something offensive at the cost of accuracy in translation, including accurately translating content even when it’s awful, or else you’re just covering up for the awfulness in the original work. But it’s another thing to not revise the line for dubbing, when you should have more flexibility in that kind of adaptation.)

(And that’s not getting into casting white actors as Black characters in the Soul Eater dub, but I hope I can address that another time with more depth should Soul Eater ever get a continuation or a re-dub...which, given how enough of the original dub cast have fucked over their careers and revealed their abusiveness and toxic bullshit in their personal lives, either a new anime or a new dub sounds good right about now.)

The responses to this criticism have been to rightly point out that Ohkubo does include numerous varied portrayals of Black characters (also here and here and here), drawing upon Black identities from the United States and Africa, especially for characters like Kilik and Ogun. But, me personally, pointing out what is done well does not negate what is done badly. (And yes, just because I think Maka Albarn is a great representation of a girl character in shonen doesn’t negate how Ohkubo fucked up with Chapter 113 and all of Tamaki in Fire Force).

As a creator, you’re supposed to fix what you did wrong, you don’t distract from what you did wrong by doing something else well later. You fix the character in front of you, not only make new characters and let that distract the audience from what you did wrong. You fix Sid (which, for me, means some potential adjustments to character design and not calling him a freaking gorilla); you don’t distract by creating Kilik and Ogun. You fix Tamaki (give her more to do, don’t make every joke around fanservice, stop fucking sexualizing a 17-year-old); you don’t distract by pointing to Maka or Maki. That’d be like me excusing something I did wrong in one set of responsibilities by asking you to look at something good I did: that doesn’t fix what I did wrong by mistake. Asking people to “leave the medium” is not helping: this is a debate, you get to watch something, you get to decide for yourself whether you think something is racist or misread, I’m not up for gatekeeping people to block them from either criticizing something or enjoying something.

And while your enjoyment of something can reflect on your values (if you keep liking jokes calling Sid a gorilla, what does that say about you?), I said “can,” not “does,” it is by context and debate (you can enjoy slasher movies without being a serial killer, etc).

I wish I had something more meaningful to say, and I don’t like that I don’t. I want to be a better ally, but just being aware that there are racist elements to this series, and just stating awareness, is not sufficient for me. It’s one reason why my focus is on uplifting fan content that does far better at handling inclusiveness and representation in this series. But my focus has been on representations of gender in the series--and that is my fault for not doing more to focus on representations of race and ethnicity, and I wish my apology would be enough, and it’s not, so I’m trying to figure out what I can do that is better. I will read feedback to do better.

[elliesgaymachete]

Re: the Mario discourse but also the ongoing “can you PLEASE just cast voice actors in animated films” debate

I LOVE animation but it’s happened so much in the last 5-10 years or so that I’m watching an animated movie and I immediately recognize the voice of a main character. Even if I don’t know off the top of my head who it is, I know it’s SOMEONE. And I look it up either during the movie or after the movie but I’m always like of COURSE. I KNEW it was someone. And idk it just takes me out of the film because all I can hear is this person. A good example of this is The Lego Movie because it’s also chr*s pr*tt. He’s a well known guy with a recognizable voice so it’s all you can hear

I’m not saying no live action actors are capable of voice acting, but oftentimes they rely on their physical performance or costumes or makeup to distinguish a character so when you take that away and all you can hear is their voice it just sounds the fuckin same all the time. Sure there’s emotion behind it and they are acting, but not well for the medium.

I’ve seen the comparison of live action actors trying theatre or vice versa, which is a good comparison, but not all actors can switch between mediums. It’s TOUGH. It’s a COMPLETELY different acting style and anyone who thinks it’s easy clearly knows nothing about acting. If live action actors want to try their hand at VO they should at least try to understand the new medium

Theatre actors are trained to act for the STAGE. Movie stars are trained to act for the SCREEN. Voice actors are trained to ACT with their VOICES. Whether their method is accents or dialects or something else, they actually embody a new character in simply their voice that, even if you recognize someone’s voice, you hear the character first, and THEN the person.

A good example of this for me personally is Travis Willingham. I knew him first from Critical Role but for those of you who don’t (even though I am like at least 75% a critical role blog lmao) he does a lot of VO for video games and dubs for anime, etc. He does have a deep/booming voice so is often cast as like a big buff/tough guy, but that’s not always the case!

When I first watched Fullmetal Alchemist I was told Travis Willingham was in the dub and I thought that was cool but I never heard his voice and about halfway through the show my friend asked me about Travis and I was like “hm, I’m not sure if I’ve met his character yet” and they looked at me like I was crazy

So I looked it up and it wasn’t until then that I realized he voiced Roy Mustang, aka one of the main characters who had been in nearly every episode of the show! It wasn’t his usual typecast and it was a while ago so he was much younger when he did the role, so once I realized THAT was him, I started to hear it when I listened but it still blew my mind. I didn’t recognize his voice AT ALL because I only heard the character, not the actor

That’s how a good animated production SHOULD treat its casting! Get someone who will make sure the audience hears the character first, not someone who’s voice just brings recognizable star power

[checkmatein3moves]

Hello! What are the RO's favorite social media platforms (and why)?

considering i've only partially thought about the specifics of popular social media in oracle (so far all i have is that the main one, scry, is like if you combined the connection aspect of linkedin, the nosy aspect of facebook, the forum aspect of reddit and like, the vapid news aspect of any tabloid) then for this i'll just do what they would like if they used social media in this time and universe

hebe: mainly on art twitter. posts her art on tumblr too but prefers the exposure of twitter. gets into her fair share of arguments over people reposting without credit and blatantly misinterpreting her favourite characters. complains about the toxic people but likes commissioning other artists to support them and deep diving into constructive criticisms. uses facebook solely to share pictures of her brother's dogs or to shade her sister. posts on instagram with windo and MC a lot, has an aesthetic theme

windo: goes on reddit but specifically the redditships/tifu/aita realm, occasionally the nosleep type subreddits. gets sucked in. sometimes posts in them so people can laugh at the stupid things he's done, e.g. TIFU by offering to hang a priceless painting for a friend. decided to improvise when i realised i didn't know what i was doing. gives advice on the relationship posts. knows there's a lot of fake posts but operates on the suspension of disbelief to connect with strangers. also has an instagram w/ a mixture of goofy, friendship and fashion posts, and a work twitter to give commentary on political articles

sailor: a finsta to scroll meme instagrams. they actually laugh out loud at some of the bad jokes they come across. doesn't have tiktok so they can sit on their high horse in disdain for it but has seen millions in the reels tab anyway. never posts or comments, just likes. they send the MC memes but not through dms or anything, literally will get up and show them irl if they find something they think they'd laugh at like a cat bringing you a dead mouse. don't really do public social media profiles because they value their privacy.

jelly: their finsta that they just post bullshit on. they have like 3 followers and all their posts are like a slew of every thought that pops into their head at 2am. their celebrity crushes, things that made them laugh for 5 mins for no reason, their take on soulmates, on fictional characters, nostalgia posts, dog pics, them listening to one direction, 5 selfies in a row of different angles, drunk posts. their public social medias are all very put together and well curated tho. pretty pics and makeup #ads on insta. eloquent linkedin. no facebook

twenty: barely uses any. dislikes seeing too many opinions that he didn't ask for. had a phase where he used to troll scammers (and sometimes just random people to be a menace) on habbo hotel. wouldn't admit it but he likes taking uquizzes. what kind of emo are u. what horror movie trope would u be. what colour would u be. 9/10 he’s not even happy about the results but he just goes :/ and moves onto the next one. has seen like 5 total tiktoks and only knows what a tiktoker is because jelly has explained it

noir: doomscrolls on various sites, mostly twitter and douban. hates these sites with a passion but continues to consume all the depressing content anyway as just one of many shitty habits. had a sadboy tumblr (because OF COURSE HE DID) in his teens that is semi-common knowledge but old enough news that it’s not really something people bring up to tease him about. black and white big gifs with text, angsty textposts, classics like that. pretends to care about his linkedin but god if it’s not the most boring thing ever to him. posts view pics on insta 

honey: honestly probably normal twitter. her dn is just honey and her @ is something generic and she shares her opinions on condiments and mundane things like that. not really interested in discourse or fandom spaces and is not the most up to date in meme culture. she’s busy a lot, so she doesn’t have much time to spend online. watches those calming asmr baking videos on youtube. in her teens i think she would’ve been a fan of acoustic cover channels. had a facebook when she was younger but deactivated it because she never used it

jareth: his secret letterboxd. actually reviews movies impartially and passionately. nobody would ever guess it was him. not a mega popular account, but pretty credible. likes to take advantage of the fact he’s not taken too seriously by certain demographics, so he shares his more comprehensive opinions anonymously. gets genuinely irritated by most troll reviews. some are funny enough to let slide. he had a wattpad once but NOBODY knows nor will they ever know because he would die of embarrassment if that came out. sometimes says annoying shit on twitter but nothing too controversial or topical

ludo: it’s not really a social media but like......ebay. he can scroll ebay for hours whether he’s window shopping or actually wants to buy something. likes to look in the antique section especially. the habit started because he grew up with barely any money and used to curiously browse the kind of obscure stuff rich collectors liked to buy, but by the time he had income of his own (albeit not that much) he’d kind of convinced himself that he understood why people wanted this junk. now it’s like an addiction. he also has a twitter that’s more clued into memes and references but is still pretty mundane. 

monty: her instagram is very well curated. meticulous, even, with selfies, fashion, meals, more ‘relatable’ backstage pictures, etc. it’s definitely a little too perfect but she’s proud of her aesthetic eye, and her public image isn’t fake so much as presented in a way that she gets to keep her personal things to herself. is the kind of celebrity to do instagram lives just to make her fans happy. made a youtube channel due to popular demand but doesn’t really have a clear plan for it, so it’s mostly just q&a where she talks about her favourite characters, funny set anecdotes and her met gala looks. jareth appears on it sometimes to talk about their drama greenwood creek and he suggests meme reviews and things like that

[egoat]

marvel study

I’ve been rewatching the Marvel movies, not just out of a fit of profound insanity, but out of an interest in wrestling with exactly what they are, and what’s wrong with them. Their “reputation” has been sinking through online circles like a lead balloon, with a general consensus gathering around the essay Martin Scorsese published in the New York Times back in 2019. In that essay, he highlights the major problem being that these movies, and particularly their ever presence, is regularly dominating the market to the extent that cinema owners don’t want to show alternative and independent fare. This problem has only dramatically worsened since then, with Disney having the resources to weather an endless pandemic and continue to produce movies that may or may not be safe to see in theaters, where their competition has been so scarce that they now stay in theaters for sometimes over 6 months, long enough to bridge the gap until the next one, shattering nearly entirely the illusion of free choice. In that time, “discourse” has continued to chew on the issue of these movies, which always have huge budgets and always deliver financially, but are always the same, and are indeed such whales as to be bullying nearly all other cinema out of existence. This has produced the argument that they are simply “junk food”, which I would agree with - they aren’t really meant to be judged as though they’re groundbreaking art, and it’s fine that they’re “samey” and commercial. Of course, it’s easy to enjoy McDonald’s if you don’t have to work at McDonald’s. I’m not going to pretend as though I have an answer to the issues of consumption under capitalism, though I think most people have come around to the cynical acceptance stage of their lives and realized that their personal choices don’t make a difference, but I digress - what about the movies themselves? Whether they’re trash or art or not, what exactly is going on in them — because, to be frank, Hollywood has generally produced “trash”, regularly, since the inception of the medium, sometimes great, sometimes offensive, sometimes weird or fascinating or simply engaging. I’ve seen the weird diehard nerd accounts that float up to the surface when a lot of people make fun of them and may or may not be real people posit that this “wave” of Marvel movies is going to be remembered as great genre classics 50 years from now. Clearly there’s a degree of cultural disconnect here worth investigating.

To start with, I’m not against comic book movies really at all — I like comic books, their material, their characters, and I’m probably one of the few people actually interested to see what is done in an adaptation with certain ideas. I’ve watched all of these shitty movies and been variably entertained or bored by them or genuinely impressed by some of their more weird and sci-fi influences (I think the Peter Dinklage section in Infinity War is probably the best, whereas everything that happens in Endgame is probably the worst). If you’re against the very principle at this point, I don’t blame you, though I’m probably not going to say anything that interests you. “Iron Man” began with a novel concept — take more or less the performance Robert Downey Jr. did in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, sub in some worse but passable Bendis-esque dialogue, glue it together with some pretty rote Saturday morning cartoon villain and CGI action sequence, and ship it with a recognizable brand name that people might be interested in seeing. It’s pretty easy to look back at the early movies especially and cringe, with them being influenced heavily by the now ubiquitous Favreau and/or Whedon school of filmmaking — quippy, simple, straight-to-the-point dialogue with jokes that will please families and incels, peppered with a lot of sci-fi references and in-jokes that don’t really matter. This embryonic stage of Marvel movie development does interest me though, because it contains a lot of interesting ideas that later get filtered out by raw efficiency - dipping into multiple genres for influence and pacing for example.

While on the topic of “Iron Man”, I could address Marvel’s “politics”. Since it is true that these movies take money directly from the U.S. Defense budget, I don’t think there’s that much argument to be made. The depiction of Captain America driving out Hydra, a supposed secret white nationalist parasite that has infiltrated every section of the American deep security state would sort of be interesting, and probably a lot more liberals would have co-opted it as meaning something had the movie come out two years later, except that that movie rarely even remotely addresses the fact that Hydra are Nazis. It’s only interested in the “spy movie” to crib a few style points and surface-level references — in true Favreau’s can of references fashion, it wants to put in Robert Redford to remind you of his much better spy movies like Spy Games, but it doesn’t want to critically engage with any of the ideas that spy movies concern themselves with, like the problems and paranoia endemic to a surveillance state, the disconnect between deep state administration and democratic governance, and the issues of politically conflicting agendas. You can’t really blame any of these movies for this mistake, though, and I’m sure even reading that I sounded like a cunt, because these movies really wouldn’t have time to do any of that stuff if they tried.

By The Winter Soldier, Marvel movies had fully cut out their own “inefficiencies”, and their pacing had become much like a rollercoaster - less like an “emotional rollercoaster” as people generally use the phrase, but much more like being on a literal rollercoaster. Moments of levity (always humor, and always more or less the same kind of humor - either a too-cute quip back and forth, or the naturalistic conversational kind that would actually be funny given more time to breathe) only exist to provide a brief amount of regulated runway between plot development (exposition) or CGI’d action sequences that are overlong and are nauseating and confusing to watch. By this point, these movies have no true “drag time”, merely the illusion of downtime provided in utilitarian bursts. It’s a nightmare of Whedon-esque wall-to-wall dialogue, a parade of noise. Simply watching the movie and trying to keep the rhythm of it is fine, until the second you are unglued from it, and you realize what it is doing and how it is doing. This is where the critique that Brian Jordan Alvarez mentioned in one stand-up bit is most prescient - “I feel like I missed whatever context there was to justify everything that happens on screen”. I didn’t initially relate to this, being happy to nod along to what was going on on the screen, and doubly contented that whatever little I knew about comics was filling in the gaps of what mattered in the story, but I did more and more the more I watched these movies, and the more they gained in speed over time.

I want to go back to Iron Man for a second, specifically Iron Man 3. Iron Man 3 is still firmly in what I’d say is the “standard definition era” of these movies, before the pacing’s speed increased and the budget given to the CGI increased to the point of being limitless. It still follows the same basic formula, a CGI villain to fit a CGI action sequence, but it does seem to want to genuinely differentiate itself in some ways. It adds at least a degree of novelty to the action by removing the Iron Man suits as consistently as it can from every action sequence, and tries its best to complete a character arc with Tony Stark in what limited time its given to, giving what I would say is a genuinely decent depiction of anxiety in the process. It utilizes its actors for more than a quick shot of their faces in a layer of CGI or an under-a-minute “heartwarming” sequence, and despite being loathed at the time (at least as I remember it) for inducing Marvel fatigue and also having a character named “The Mandarin”, it was, I believe, a very good example of how a movie can succeed within this “structure”. At this point, these movies still have a lot in common with the X-Men movies of the earlier 2000s that they hearken from (with the CGI in Iron Man 3 being especially similarly). While those movies weren’t always seen as great, they never attracted as much of either the attention or ire that Marvel movies now get, despite being fundamentally similar in most ways. Why is that? It could be just the cultural and financial weight of the Marvel-Disney mega-corporation, but I choose to believe the answer is more structural.

X-Men generally takes a more traditional approach to its characters, not unlike (the successful earlier) DC Movies try to tend to do, depicting them as having outsized, larger-than-life personalities that have naturalistic qualities but still are supposedly imposing forces. There was some 4chan post I pretty distinctly remember about this distinction — it had a Rob Liefeld-drawn Civil War-era Captain America as its image, and bemoaned the fact that in comics, comic book characters are near forces of nature, that their impact is felt, whereas in Marvel movies, characters are reduced to having pretty much the same, light-hearted, quippy personality, which makes it feel as though nothing they’re doing really has any stakes. Even though this guy was pretty clearly some kind of freak right-wing chud, I couldn’t help but see his point - when Chris Hemsworth walks out of the room in the MCU’s Civil War after nearly killing Iron Man, I suspect there is supposed to be some kind of emotional weight in that moment that just isn’t there as assigned by the dramatic score. When the moment is more or less taken back 10 minutes later in another jokey sequence, I don’t think anyone is surprised. Captain America is just some guy, Iron Man is just some guy, and Marvel’s gambit on making Civil War interesting in the space of one movie length largely did not work, because these movies give characters, conflicts, and personalities no time to breathe under the unrelenting weight of their pacing and their formulaic structure. The central conflict of there being consequences to superhero behavior provides a particularly jarring disconnect as you’re suddenly supposed to feel torn seeing the hidden casualties in the different angles of sequences that were absolutely just full of nonsense explosions and comedic back-and-forths at the time. In X-Men, the conflict between Magneto and Professor X is perhaps a little rote, but is always significantly felt and at least partially explored from the perspectives of multiple characters throughout the films. In Civil War, I think I could count the lines of dialogue given to the “discussion” about the central point of difference that divides the characters prior to their overlong action sequence fight, and even the characters themselves sound tired of “discussing it” during that brief time, quickly snapping to slightly-more-pointed jokes in the process. Pacing is again the core of the problem, the black hole at the center of these movies, draining away even the chance of their attempts at greater complexity succeeding.

That all said, I still watch these movies, and enjoy them, and even defend them. Why, if they’re supposed cultural heat-death and meaningless and lack substance? Well, I do genuinely find them entertaining, and I am interested in their source material and how they adapt them. I think the newest Doctor Strange movie was really good, and I think Sam Raimi did a lot to try to counterbalance the still-existing pacing issue in that film, and make both a genuinely interesting conflict (well, debatable) and genuinely good and dynamic action in the process. Getting to the fun, sci-fi concepts can be the “point” — I think a lot of comic book fans are actually more interested in Marvel movies now that they approach the territory of the more modern runs, dealing directly with alternate universes, and bizarre clashes between aliens and gods and whatever else. All of this is probably much to the chagrin of the rest of human civilization who is completely exhausted of these films bullying the rest of cinema out of theaters. Would it be best if Disney could simply be written out of existence, preferably by some application of anti-trust law? Yes. Is it an ethical issue to keep watching these films? Probably, but only in so much as like, eating meat is, which is to say, I don’t know, don’t think about it so hard, nothing matters anyway, who cares. In the meantime, I hope whoever’s really in charge of this shit, the cryogenic Eisner-brain puppeting Kevin Feige, will at least allow their directors more basic creative control over these properties, because I still think there is a lot of creative potential for these things to be interesting. By the way, all the TV shows on Disney+ that they made are really bad. Okay, thanks for reading my essay.

[neongoth94]

Oscars 2022

It’s that time of year again where people choose to have needless discourses rather than healthy discussions about what should or shouldn’t be considered the best movies of the year. 

That’s right! It’s the Oscars! A night full of cringe and facepalming!

I know most people don’t care and think it’s all pointless, but I can’t help myself… I watch it every year. And while I don’t believe their nominations should dictate what movies you’re supposed to like, I still appreciate the Oscars for highlighting many films that I think most people would’ve ended up overlooking. 

This year, I actually managed to watch and rank almost all the nominations. Only ones I’ve missed out on was Coming 2 America, Four Good Days, and No Time to Die. 

Anyway, I wanna take some time to ramble and give my thoughts on who or what should win each category. And I’ll be going in the order seen above, starting with…

Actor in a Leading Role 

Andrew Garfield was simply phenomenal in Tick, Tick… Boom. He had a lot to work with for his performance, whether it was with any of the more joyous, emotional, or musical scenes. Benedict Cumberbatch was excellent, too. As was Denzel Washington. Will Smith was fine, though at times, he didn’t have a lot of range to work with. And Javier Bardem as Desi Arnez just felt like a weird casting choice.

Actor in a Supporting Role 

Troy Kotsur in CODA, because his performance felt so genuine and down-to-earth. He was truly the heart and soul of the film. Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee were also great in their respective roles. Ciarán Hinds did fine, but it wasn’t too memorable for me. And J.K. Simmons was unfortunately given little to work with.

Actress in a Leading Role 

Olivia Coleman’s performance in The Lost Daughter was one that I grew to love over time. It’s quiet and subtle, but you can feel the strong emotions that are trying to be suppressed. Honestly, the same could be said for Kristen Stewart’s performance, which was just as outstanding. Penélope Cruz also did very well. Nicole Kidman was fine, even if it was just a Lucille Ball impression. And Jessica Chastain, while entertaining to watch, was perhaps a little over-the-top.

Actress in a Supporting Role 

While I have no complaints about any of the other nominees here, Kirsten Dunst in The Power of the Dog stood out to me the most. The emotional weight of her character was portrayed very well in her performance. Jessie Buckley was also quite great, as it seemed like quite a challenge playing a younger version of Coleman’s character. Ariana DeRose, Judi Dench, and Aunjanue Ellis were also pretty good. Really, I’d have no major complaints if any of these nominees win.

Animated Feature Film 

The Mitchells vs. the Machines absolutely deserve this honor. The fun and relatable charisma of this movie was so impossible for me to resist. Though like always, Disney always has the upper-hand because… well, they’re Disney. Don’t get me wrong, though. Encanto was a great movie, and I wouldn’t mind seeing it win. Luca was fun and cute too. Then there’s Raya and the Last Dragon, which I don’t remember a lot of. And the least likely to win is Flee, which is a shame cause it’s actually a really good movie! But I’ll get more into that later.

Cinematography 

This should definitely go to Dune. The creative technical innovations used to bring this world to life is just incredible. Power of the Dog and The Tragedy of Macbeth were also quite impressive in their own ways, one being more grounded and the other being more stylized. West Side Story and Nightmare Alley were quite spectacular as well, even though it did feel like they had a lot of digital polishing.

Costume Design 

Believe it or not, I’m actually rooting for Cruella! That movie may have been messy, but what a fabulous mess it was! Cyrano, Dune and the other nominations had some good costumes too. But they never really stood out to me compared to similar styles from other films.

Directing 

After thinking long about this one, I may have to go with Jane Campion. Managing to be slow and subtle while tense and brooding, I think she did a masterful job with Power of the Dog. Ryusuke Hamaguchi was just as incredible directing Drive My Car. And Steven Speilberg’s films are always a treat to watch, with West Side Story being no exception. Paul Thomas Anderson did fine with Licorice Pizza, even if the film was rather episodic. And Kenneth Branagh made some interesting stylistic choices for Belfast, some of which worked, while others didn’t.

Documentary (Feature) 

Flee is definitely my favorite here. Thematically relevant to many of today's recent events, the use of animation to hide the identity of a refugee narrator as he tells his story of survival works very well. Ascension is also quite a unique one that I feel is just as relevant, as it deals with productivity and consumerism within different social classes. Attica and Writing with Fire are also well-made documentaries that I can easily recommend if the subjects interest you. And Summer of Soul, while fine, unfortunately did not appeal to me much. Sorry, but I’m just not that into concert films.

Documentary (Short Subject) 

I really found myself enjoying Audible. It was very well-made and had a hopeful message that really resonated with me. The Queen of Basketball was fine, even if a little standard. Three Songs for Benazir was unfortunately quite boring and didn’t really go anywhere. Lead Me Home was awfully exploitative with its subject, focusing more on style over substance. And When We were Bullies was just so fucking pointless and tone-deaf.

Film Editing 

I’m going with Tick, Tick… Boom for this one. It was probably the most playful and unique compared to the other nominations. Dune and Power of the Dog also had good editing. King Richard wasn’t anything that remarkable. And Don’t Look Up?! Why the fuck is that nominated?!

International Feature Film 

The Worst Person in the World is truly the best film in this or any other category! As someone in her late-20s who’s feeling quite lost, I connected with this film so much! Drive My Car, which will be the likely winner, was also quite impactful for me. And as I already said about Flee a few categories ago, I loved it. The Hand of God I liked fine, though I did lose interest during the third act. And Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom was okay, but also pretty dull and predictable. 

Still with me? Don’t worry, we’re over halfway through now…

Makeup and Hairstyling 

It should go to Dune. It not only stood out a lot more to me than the costuming, it also added a lot to each of the characters. The makeup for Coming 2 America was also really well-done, even though I’m only going by the clips I’ve seen. Cruella was fine, but nothing as cool as the costumes. And the prosthetic makeup for The Eyes of Tammy Faye and House of Gucci were just not unconvincing at all. 

Music (Original Score) 

Jonny Greenwood’s score for Power of the Dog was truly the best one. So strange and atmospheric. The other nominations all pretty much did their job well. At worst, Don’t Look Up was probably the least memorable despite its jazzy vibe.

Music (Original Song) 

No Time to Die by Billie Eilish was my favorite here. Though to be honest, they’re all pretty forgettable. 

Production Design 

Tragedy of Macbeth definitely deserves some high marks for its incredible look. While credit could easily be shared with its cinematography, I felt like the design and settings were characters themselves. Nightmare Alley also had an immensely beautiful aesthetic. No complaints about the other nominations, as they each had their own unique mise-en-scène.

Short Film (Animated) 

Bestia was my favorite of this bunch, but due to the controversial subject and extremely graphic scenes, it’s hard for me to really recommend it. And I highly doubt the Academy would be brave enough to choose this one as the winner. I also really liked the darkly comic Affairs of the Art. However, Robin Robin was super adorable, so I can totally see it winning as it’s the most family-friendly. Boxballet didn’t appeal to me much. And The Windshield Wiper was visually outstanding, but WOW that ending was fucking pretentious.

Short Film (Live Action) 

Ala Kachuu: Take and Run might be my favorite here. It made for quite a tense and frustrating thriller. The Long Goodbye was a kind of a surprise, in which after a horrific sequence, Riz Ahmed directly addresses the viewers with some brutal honesty. Both of those shorts were quite shockingly effective in what they were trying to get across. Just as distressing, but far more satirically fun, was Please Hold. As for The Dress, it started off fine enough before devolving into some pointless shock value. And On My Mind just felt clichéd.

Sound 

Dune, just because of the otherworldly nature of the soundscape. The other nominees were fine, but nothing really stood out.

Visual Effects 

Again, Dune really deserves a lot of the technical awards. It’s amazing how seamless the visual effects look, and on such a grand scale too. No Time to Die was also really impressive, at least judging from the clips I’ve seen. And I wouldn’t be too upset if Spider-Man won, cause that de-aging effect on Alfred Molina was really top-notch. Otherwise, it was just a lot of the typical Marvel blue-screen effects, which can also be said for Shang-Chi. But God, why is Free Guy even here?

Writing (Adapted Screenplay) 

Knowing nothing about the original source materials, I’m going with whatever I felt best represented its themes and ideas through both its story and characters. And for me, that was the beautifully moving and the profoundly epic, Drive My Car. 

Writing (Original Screenplay) 

Once again, I’m choosing the screenplay that I felt best showcased what it had to offer. To me, that was The Worst Person in the World, which not only made me laugh, but it also made me stop and think things over. This truly is my absolute favorite out of all the nominations.

And now for the big one…

Best Picture 

Taking into account my own personal taste and what the Academy will likely vote for… The Power of the Dog. It really is a great film that examines that feeling of suppressed longing. And while I wouldn’t hype this up as the best film of the year, it is definitely my favorite of this main category.

Now with that said, let’s go through the other nominees, from my favorite to least favorite…

Drive My Car, a film some would argue is truly the best of the year, which I can agree with in some respects. Nightmare Alley, a Guillermo del Toro movie that I feel will be overlooked as time passes, but is still a fantastically thrilling noir. West Side Story, a grand retelling of the classic musical that Spielberg manages to make fresh. CODA, a sweet and light-hearted story that, even if it doesn’t challenge, still brings a smile. Dune, a first half to a larger story that is hopefully worth the ambition. Licorice Pizza, a fun-fueled Paul Thomas Anderson movie that may not win everyone over due to its episodic structure. Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical feature that, while admirable, doesn’t strike the right emotions. King Richard, a standard sports drama biopic that’s neither good nor bad, simply following the typical formula. And finally, Don’t Look Up, a divisively messy satire with an obvious metaphor that only manages to bring some good performances.

And those are my thoughts. If you actually made it this far, thank you for bearing with me. And remember, these awards technically don’t really matter. You can like whatever movie you like. I just hope people at least take the time to appreciate the hard work that goes into them.

Until next year… Maybe… We’ll see...

[bogkeep]

hmmmmmmmmmm maybe i’ll write an Introspective Musing Post about my relationship to religion and their depiction in stories because i’ve pondering about this topic lately

so for those who are reading this and DON’T know what’s been going on...  there’s this webcomic i fell in love with some years ago, about six years actually, that depicts a post-apocalyptic fantasy/horror adventure set in the nordic countries. it had, and has still, some very uncomfortable flaws regarding racial representation, and the creator has historically not dealt very well with criticism towards it. it’s a whole Thing. my relationship with this comic has fluctuated a lot, since there are a lot of elements in it i DO love and i still feel very nostalgic about, and like idk i felt like i trust my skills in critical thinking enough to keep reading. aaand then the creator went a teensy bit off the deep end created a whole minicomic which is like... a lukewarm social media dystopia where christians are oppressed (and also everyone is a cute bunny, including our lord and saviour jesus christ). which is already tonedeaf enough considering there are religious people who DO get prosecuted for their faith, like, that’s an actual reality for a lot of people - but as far as i can tell, usually not christians. and then there’s an afterword that’s like, “anyway i got recently converted and realized i’m a disgusting human being full of sin who doesn’t deserve redemption but jesus loves me so i’ll be fine!! remember to repent for your sins xoxo” and a bunch of other stuff and IT’S KIND OF REALLY CONCERNING i have, uh, been habitually looking at the reactions to and discussions around this, maybe it’s not very self care of me but there’s a lot of overwhelming things rn and it’s fantastically distracting, yknow? like, overall this situation is fairly reminiscent of the whole jkr thing. creator of a series that is Fairly Beloved, does something hurtful, handles backlash in a weird way, a lot of people start taking distance from Beloved Series or find ways to enjoy it on their own terms, creator later reveals to have been fully radicalized and releases a whole manifesto, and any and all criticism gets framed as harassment and proving them right. of course, one of them is a super rich person with a LOT of media power and a topic that is a lot more destructive in our current zeitgeist, and the other is an independent webcomic creator, so it’s  not the same situation. just similar vibez ya feel as a result of this, i have been Thinking. and just this feels like some sort of defeat like god dammit she got me i AM thinking about the topic she wrote about!!! i should dismiss the whole thing!!! but thinking about topics is probably a good thing so hey lets go. me, i’m agnostic. i understand that this is a ‘lazy’ position to take, but it’s what works for me. i simply do not vibe with organized religion, personally. (i had the wikipedia page for ‘chaos magic’ open in a tab for several weeks, if that helps.) i was raised by atheists in a majorly atheist culture. christian atheist, i should specify. norway has been mostly and historically lutheran, and religion has usually been a private and personal thing. it turns out the teacher i had in 7th grade was mormon, but i ONLY found out because he showed up in a tv series discussing religious groups in norway later, and he was honestly one of the best teachers i have ever had - he reignited the whole class’ interest in science, math, and dungeons and dragons. it was a real “wait WHAT” moment for my teenage self. i think i was briefly converted to christianity by my friend when i was like 7, who grew up in a christian family (i visited them a couple times and always forgot they do prayers before dinner. oops!), but like, she ALSO made me believe she was the guardian of a secret magic orb that controls the entire world and if i told anybody the world would burn down in 3 seconds. i only suspected something was off when one day the Orb ran on batteries, and another day the Orb had to be plugged in to charge. in my defense i really wanted to be part of a cool fantasy plot. i had no idea how to be a christian beyond “uuuuh believe in god i guess” so it just faded away on its own. when i met this friend several years later, she was no longer christian. i think every childhood friend of mine who grew up in a christian family, was no longer christian when they grew up. most notably my closest internet friend whose family was catholic - she had several siblings, and each of them took a wildly different path, from hippie treehugger to laveyan satanist or something in that area. (i joined them for a sermon in a church when they visited my town. my phone went off during it because i had forgotten to silence it. oops!) ((i also really liked their mother’s interpretation of purgatory. she explained it as a bath, not fire. i like that.)) i have never had any personal negative experiences with christianity, despite being openly queer/gay/trans. the only time someone has directly told me i’m going to hell was some guy who saw me wearing a hoodie on norway’s constitution day. yeah i still remember that you bastard i’ve sworn to be spiteful about it till the day i die!! i’ve actually had much more insufferable interactions with the obnoxious kind of atheists - like yes yes i agree with you on a lot but that doesn’t diminish your ability to be an absolute hypocrite, it turns out? i remember going to see the movie ‘noah’ with a friend who had recently discovered reddit atheism and it was just really exhausting to discuss it with her. one of these Obnoxious Atheists is my Own Mother. which is a little strange, honestly, because she LOVES visiting churches for the Aesthetic and Architecture. we cannot go anywhere without having to stop by a pretty church to Admire and Explore. I’VE BEEN IN SO MANY CHURCHES FOR AN ATHEIST RAISED NON-CHRISTIAN. i’ve been to the vatican TWICE (i genuinely don’t even know how much of my extended family is christian. up north in the tiny village i come from, i believe my uncle is the churchkeeper, and it’s the only building in the area that did not get burnt down by the the nazis during ww2 - mostly because soldiers needed a place to sleep. still don’t know whether or not said uncle believes or not, because hey, it’s Personal) i think my biggest personal relationship to religion, and christianity specifically, has been academic. yeah, we learned a brief synopsis of world religions at school (and i remember the class used to be called ‘christianity, religion, and ethics’ and got changed to ‘religion, beliefs, and ethics’ which is cool. it was probably a big discourse but i was a teen who didnt care), but also my bachelor degree is in art history, specifically western art history because it’s a vast sprawling topic and they had to distill it as best they could SIGHS. western art history is deeply entangled with the history of the church, and i think the most i’ve ever learnt about christianity is through these classes (one of my professors wrote an article about how jesus can be interpreted as queer which i Deeply Appreciate). i also specifically tried to diversify my academic input by picking classes such as ‘depiction of muslims and jewish people in western medieval art’ and ‘art and religion’ when i was an exchange student in canada, along with 101 classes in anthropology and archaeology. because i think human diversity and culture is very cool and i want to absorb that knowledge as best as i can. i think my exchange semester in canada was the most religiously diverse space have ever been in, to be honest. now as an adult i have more christian friends again, but friends who chose it for themselves, and who practice in ways that sound good and healthy, like a place of solace and community for them. the vast majority of my friends are queer too, yknow?? i’ve known too many people who have seen these identities as fated opposites, but they aren’t, they’re just parts of who people are. it’s like... i genuinely love people having their faiths and beliefs so much. i love people finding that space where they belong and feel safe in. i love people having communities and heritages and connections. i deeply respect and admire opening up that space for faith within any other communities, like... if i’m going to listen to a podcast about scepticism and cults, i am not going to listen to it if it’s just an excuse to bash religion. i think the search for truth needs to be compassionate, always. you can acknowledge that crystals are cool and make people happy AND that multi level marketing schemes are deeply harmful and prey on people in vulnerable situaitons. YOU KNOW???? so now’s when i bring up Apocalypse Comic again. one of the things i really did like about it was, ironically, how it handled religion. in its setting, people have returned to old gods, and their magic drew power from their religion. characters from different regions had different beliefs and sources. in the first arc, they meet the spirit of a lutheran pastor, who ends up helping them with her powers. it was treated as, in the creators own words, ‘just another mythology’. and honestly? i love that. it was one of the nicest depictions i’ve seen of christianity in fiction, and as something that could coexist with other faiths. I Vibe With That. and then, uh, then... bunny dystopia comic. it just... it just straight up tells you christianity is literally the only way to..?? be a good person??? i guess?? i’m still kind of struggling to parse what exactly it wanted to say. the evil social media overlord bird tells you the bible makes you a DANGEROUS FREETHINKER, but the comic also treats rewriting the bible or finding your own way to faith as something,, Bad. The Bible Must Remain Unsullied. Never Criticize The Bible. also, doing good things just for social media clout is bad and selfish. you should do good things so you don’t burn in hell instead. is that the message? it reads a lot like the comic creator already had the idea for the comic, but only got the urge to make it after she was converted and needed to spread the good word. you do you i guess!! i understand that she’s new to this and probably Going Through Something, and this is just a step on her journey. but the absolute self-loathing she described in her afterword... it does not sound good. i’m just some agnostic kid so what do i know, but i do not think that kind of self-flagellating is a kind faith to have for yourself. i might not ever have been properly religious, but you know what i AM familiar with? a brain wired for ocd and intrusive thoughts. for a lot of my life i’ve struggled with my own kind of purity complex. i’ve had this really strange sensitivity for things that felt ‘tainted’. i’ve experienced having to remove more and more words from my vocabulary because they were Bad and i did not want to sully my sentences. it stacked, too - if a word turned out to be an euphemism for something, i could never feel comfortable saying it again. i still struggle a bit with these things, but i have confronted these things within myself. i’ve had to make myself comfortable with imperfection and ‘tainted’ things and accept that these are just, arbitrary categories my mind made up. maybe that’s the reason i can’t do organized religion even if i found one that fit for me - just like diets can trigger disordered eating, i think it would carve some bad brainpaths for me. so yeah i’m worried i guess! i’m worried when people think it’s so good that she finally found the correct faith even if it’s causing all this self-hate. is there really not a better way? or are they just trusting she’ll find it? and yeah it’s none of my concern, it’s like, i worry for jkr too but i do not want her within miles of my trans self thANKS. so like, i DO enjoy media that explores faith and what it means for you. my favourite band is the oh hellos, which DOES draw on faith and the songwriter’s experience with it. because of my religious iliteracy most of it has flown over my head for years and i’m like “oh hey this is gay” and then only later realize it was about god all along Probably. i like what they’ve done with the place. also, stormlight archive - i had NO idea sanderson was mormon, the way he writes his characters, many of whom actively discuss religion and their relationship to it. i love that about the books, honestly. Media That Explores Religion In A Complex And Compassionate Way... we like that i’ve been thinking about my own stories too, and how i might want to explore faith in them. most of my settings are based on magic and it’s like, what role does religion have in a world where gods are real and makes u magic. in sparrow spellcaster’s story, xe creates? summons? an old god - brings them to life out of the idea of them. it’s a story about hubris, mostly. then there’s iphimery, the story where i am actively fleshing out a pantheon. there’s no doubt the gods are real in the fantasy version of iphimery, they are the source of magic and sustain themselves on slivers of humanity in exchange. but in the modern version, where they are mostly forgotten? that’s some room for me to explore, i think. especially the character of timian, who comes from a smaller town and moves to a large and diverse city. in the fantasy story, the guardian deity chooses his sister as a vessel. in the modern setting, that does not happen, and i don’t yet know what does, but i really want timian to be someone who struggles with his identity - his faith, his sexuality, the expectations cast upon him by his hometown... i’m sure it’s a cliché story retold through a million gay characters but i want to do it too okay. i want to see him carve out his own way of existing within the world because i care him and want to see him thrive!!! alrighty i THINK that’s all i wanted to write. thanks if you read all of this, and if you didn’t that’s super cool have a nice day !

[twopoppies]

I’m sure you’re over the Holivia discourse, so I apologize for bringing it to you. I just see a lot of it happening on your page and it made me curious for your opinion. I have been a Larrie for about 8 years and align with your opinions on essentially everything—but I actually really like Olivia and have done for years. I see a lot of criticism and eye rolling over her behavior in this situation and I guess I just don’t agree with it as I think she is a really wonderful woman. But I still think this entire thing is a complete farce. My question is: is it okay for both Harry and Olivia to come out of this with my respect as individuals, even though I disagree with the entire situation? Or am I missing something about why her character is being called so heavily into question through this? Sorry again to dump this on you!

Hi love. I think what people seem to be really taking issue with is how hard she’s pushing the stunt, how phony everything is, how thirsty for attention she seems (to the point of her team sending in blinds praising her to the heavens, asking what skincare she uses etc). Furthermore, what I’ve seen people disappointed with is that her feminist “boss bitch” persona seems manufactured. So, because many people were so excited to have Harry working with a female director on a female centered movie, the fact that it’s instead turned into a circus about who that director is sleeping with, feels like a major let down.

At the end of the day, it’s the film industry and this seems to be the way some people play the game. Harry has agreed to play it, but other than those two days of pap photos, he has distanced himself as much as possible so far, so I think people are less annoyed at him right now. We’ll see whether that continues.