#anything on this topic makes me rant

[hopepaigeturner]

God yes. I hate girlboss Cinderella. People keep complaining about, Hollywood hears and then they wonder where Amazon Prime Cinderella came from.

Also, Cinderelmo and Hey! Cinderella is more mature than it.

You got it! Oh boy oh boy, that Amazon cinderella...

Honestly, beside it getting the classic 'hollywood' spin, the biggest crime of that movie was to have the comedic chops of Romesh Ragnathan, Doc Brown and James frikkin Acaster...and somehow make them unfunny.

How do you make James Acaster funny? His entire comedic persona causes people to cackle.

Oof.

But, yes, you are so right, a classic esample of the 'girlboss' makeover.

I could do a whole post about that film, but instead I really recommend you check out this Youtube Video:

'Quriky' main character that comes off quite cringe.

Shoved in one-liner feminist statements with no thoughtful embedding in the story. No real thoughtful overarching message other than. Yay! Women can do stuff!

Literally no reason why she gets a fairy godmother. No kind act, thoughful act, or even selfless act precedes this. That is not to say that one needs to be good to be helped, but it completely gets rid of all agency that Cinderella has in forging her own escape/happily ever after.

There could be a lot mroe said on this topic but i would really recommend watching Modern Gurlz Youtube Video on this adaptation.

Ugggh, hollywood 'girl bossification' of stuff is just...

[leniisreallycool]

"Belphie was stuck in the attic for years!" "No he was up there for decades!"

bitch he was stuck in the attic for a few months at most. Lucifer sealed him there immediately before choosing MC for the exchange program (a week or two at most). If it had been years or decades since Belphie was locked up, MC couldn't have been in the exchange program because they would have been old or even dead.

Also, Solomon and the angels arrived in the Devildom the same day as MC. They left on the same day which means exactly one year would have been the day MC arrived. Which means the demons sent to the human world and the Celestial Realm also left the same day. Belphie disappearing years before the program officially started would have been extremely suspicious and Lucifer's lie would have fallen apart immediately

[toytulini]

me, stupidly and weirdly resistant to listening to audio books vs reading a physical book for no real reason: man i wish there was a way to like, read a book while i crochet like i do with tv shows and movies and podcasts

[daz4i]

how and why is there discourse about whether or not certain queer identities exist/if people should be allowed(???) to use them. why is "people know their own identity better than you ever could, and they're the only one who get a say on what they are" such a tough concept to grasp

i think if you find yourself offended by the label someone uses (especially if they're a stranger) or think it invalidates your own, it's a good idea to look inside yourself and question why that may be. more often than not, it's a result of insecurity or uncertainty of your own identity (or many other things, but i won't make a whole list here). whatever reason it is, until you resolve it, you shouldn't take it out on people for having an identity you don't understand

many have said it before but it's worth saying over and over. infighting only helps our oppressors. conservatives don't care if you're a cis gay or a xenogender aegosexual aplatonic lesbian, they hate all of us either way. trying to fit in by going for people who are easier targets for them isn't gonna help you, it'll just alienate you from your own community, and you're never gonna please them. the momentary rush you get from hearing you're not like "one of /those/ gay people" is not worth it and is gonna do more harm in the long run, i assure you

also, it is important to me to say this, but having some less than nice kneejerk reaction caused by confusion about an identity you don't understand doesn't mean you're a bad person or anything. as long as you aren't mean to that person, and you take a second to think smth along the lines of "wait a minute, this isn't any of my business" after having said reaction, you're good 👍 a lot of reflexive reactions we have to things are ingrained into us simply by. well. living in a society 🤡 and you're not terrible for having those thoughts. it's your actions that matter, and your second thought (the "wait, why did i just think that?") is more defining of your actual character and morals than your reflex. i know that having thoughts like this, even tho they're unwanted, can very easily make one spiral, so it's important to me that whoever needs to hear this knows this doesn't make you a bad person 🙏 you're good, keep taking actions to be good, accept other people even if you don't understand them, and you're on the right track :)

[triglycercule]

i want to headcanon the mtt having absolutely terrible hygiene and struggling to keep themselves clean (this MAY... just QUITE POSSIBLY.... only in the SLIGHTEST bit be projection) but i think it would be too gross and man EVEN I dont wanna think about that

also killer canonically smells good and i actually really LIKE that idea so oh shit there goes that idea out the window. horror and dust youre my only hope please let me make you smell bad for reasons you won't understand

[broke-on-books]

☕

The live action Scooby-Doo movies?

I did not see this ask until RIGHT now (first time on desktop since crab day, second time since Nov 5 2020 [which was DOUBLY experience since I got my phone taken the same day]) so I'm going to assume this ask got eaten on mobile because tumblr, HOWEVER you poked a bear with this ask anon (as I'm sure you knew when asking) SO without further ado: my Scooby Doo live action opinions

So when you say 'live action Scooby-Doo movies' I'm assuming you're talking about the James Gunn films, starting with Scooby-Doo (2002) followed by Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, just due to like, generally popularity and also the fact that I have actually seen those films. However shoot another ask if you wanted me to include Curse of the Lake Monster in this (because I will if anyone cares and turn this into a live-action scooby dissertation, i'd just need to like. watch the movie first) But anyways where I'm going with this is that this post is about the Gunn movies aka the ones with SMG, Freddie Prinze Jr., Linda Cardellini, and ofc our #1 man, Matthew Lilliard.

Okay so my take on these movies is... complicated. I wouldn't say it's as complicated as my feelings towards SDMI, because I watched the live actions way less as a kid and generally care less about them, but still no matter how much shit I throw at these two movies there are parts that I generally like (even love) that stops me from totally condemning them wholesale. Like the fact that these movies are FUNNY! There's so many moments from this duology that are just beyond iconic "like, that's one of my favorite names!" the whole thing with Scooby in the dress at the airport, ET. CETERA (like I can go on!)

The Gunn movies are genuinely SO fun and I can 100% see and understand how they've stood so well in the public view as a representation of Scooby. HOWEVER, this is where you start to see my problems with them. For the general American, (because that is the audience I'm familiar with) ESPECIALLY millennials and younger, who happen to make up the majority of both people on this site AND people I talk about Scooby with in real life, these movies, and the elements they introduced as "quintessential scooby tropes" are the base of their understanding of the Scooby franchise, along with likely some miscellaneous WAY episodes and maybe SDMI.

Which is where I get pissed off. In the pushing of the narrative of "breaking away" from the Scooby norm, Gunn basically invents (aka totally makes up) an idea of what classic era Scooby was like, cementing an idea of classic Scooby into the public mind that is totally disingenuous and just straight up false. For example, in attempting to portray Daphne as having taken strides to be seen more seriously in solving mysteries and defending herself, it pushes the narrative that in the classic era she WASN'T taken seriously, and only existed as a damsel-in-distress prop of a character, which is just not true??? Like yes, Daphne is clumsy, that's a part of her character, and her friends (because, fun fact, the gang ARE friends) joke about it sometimes because that's what friends DO. Framing that in some kind of sexist "that's all she does" lens is just total bull, especially as gang members fall into secret passageways/get lost etc. in WAY ALL THE DAMN TIME because that's how the plot functions! Like are we calling Velma ditzy for losing her glasses every other episode? Of course not, and Fred falls into passageways all the time, not to MENTION Shaggy and Scooby and all they get up to. Also one last thing on the topic of Daphne, like this idea of her mystery solving skills not being respected by the gang is just so supremely bullshit it amazes me sometimes, especially when she was the LEADER (or leader adjacent) through pretty much all of her appearances in the 1980s [Not that James Gunn could look at '80s era Scooby without spitting on it, but I digress]

AND THIS IS JUST DAPHNE! Like the perceptions pushed towards Fred (and Velma, but mostly Fred) through these movies are just as bad! Like okay, with Fred---In these movies Fred is just an asshole. I hate Gunn Movies!Fred. I mean yeah he can be funny but it's almost always so mean! Almost nothing makes me madder than a mean Fred by the way. If he's putting other gang members down (even halfway, like with his whole "dorky chicks like you turn me on too" line, which... ew) then to me something has gone very, very, VERY, wrong in your basic understanding of Frederick Herman Jones as a character. Like he's the cheerleader! He puts himself in between his friends and danger! He loves nets, and traps, and Elvis impressions, and wrestling, and the trapeze, and cars, and most of all he LOVES sharing the things he loves with his friends! (Sometimes to a bit of an extreme. No one wants to hear about your net facts, Fred) And the live action movies just don't understand that at all. And I know there's maybe something to say I suppose in that some of those aspects of his characterization hadn't been "established yet" by the time "Scooby-Doo" came out in 2002. But it's there if you look. For Fred Jones, being the leader means being the caretaker, (he's the Mom friend what can I say) and any version where he's cruel and arrogant and just DOESN'T CARE about his friends in the way he's shown to in the Gunn movies is just so far from Fred to me it's not even funny. And what makes it even worse for me is that this (or at least something similar) is the idea of Fred that has really spread to the popular culture. Just the "leader", the jock that makes the rules, the one that [insert X adaptation here] finally gave a personality and made interesting (something that has been said more times than I can count for pretty much every gang member, save Shaggy and Scooby).

And I haven't even touched on Velma, and how they gave her a bit of a early 2000s smart superiority girl complex against Daphne, plus the whole makeover thing and etc. etc. The Gunn Movies are pretty much what would happen if you took someone who hadn't seen Scooby since they were 7 years old (and honestly had a pretty negative outlook against it then) and tried to "fix" it, only his memory was so bad he just made up problems (and threw in a good helping of early 2000s style sexism with it) convincing pretty much the entirety of the popular culture that said problems exist and that Gunn was absolutely brilliant for fixing them (and then bringing up said "problems" whenever anyone wants to talk about Scooby) and this entire rant has been without even fucking MENTIONING what is probably the reason you, anonymous tumblr user sent this ask in the first place, to I, Swishy "Scrappy Doo Redemption Arc" Broke-on-books (dot tumblr dot com), which is his HIGHLY SUCESSFUL and utterly sadistic character assassination of my number one man, Scrappy Doo.

And I am going to try my damnedest here not to get totally into my highly passionate opinions over what James Gunn did to Scrappy in the first of his Scooby movies and how thoroughly it has pissed me the fuck off because I have been writing this post for over an hour now and if we start to really get into my feelings on this topic it will certainly be a couple of hours more but like. That Fucking Bitch. I give James Gunn personally a solid eighty-five percent of the blame for making my life as a Scrappy Doo fan UTTERLY unbearable with this stupid fucking movie alone, and just his Scrappy crimes would honestly be enough for me to say that I hate this movie, not even considering the numerous Scooby crimes I've been talking about here for the past million paragraphs, but the part about this movie that makes me the MOST mad the most pissed off is that it's actually a good fucking movie. James Gunn wrote two hilarious and entertaining movies that have become beloved in the popular culture for their successes in that arena, while at the same time pissing all over the core themes and messages of the franchise of which it was based, that of friendship.

TLDR; The Live Action Scooby Doo movies (written by James Gunn) are highly entertaining and fun pieces of media to watch, and are widely loved by the general public and looked at with fondness and nostalgia because of that. However, as a hardcore Scooby Doo fan (writing that phrase sounds so ridiculous but oh well) the existence of these movies and their impact on the popular culture can be extremely frustrating (despite any personal nostalgia said fan may have) due to their spreading of a misinformed picture of what "typical Scooby Doo" looks like. This picture is especially frustrating due to the fabrication or exaggeration of problems present in classic Scooby (such as sexism in regards to the girls), as well as giving more ammunition to other problems in Scooby fandom (such as oversexualization, and sexualization in general, which no one wants to see in regards to their children's cartoons, like HONESTLY.) Discussions of sexism and sexualization in Scooby (both of which ARE present and are issues, although not at their worst in WAY) can often lead to an overlooking of the issues that are very present and clear in WAY and have continued since then with far too little resistance (I'm 100% talking about the racism here) HOWEVER that topic deserves at least a dozen posts of its own that I am no way informed or qualified enough to even begin to think about writing. The Gunn Movies are frustrating to many longtime Scooby fans because of these reasons, but for me, and fellow Scrappy Doo fans there is also the added aspect of the demonization of Scrappy Doo in the live action movies and the affects that has had on the popular culture as well, making it uniquely inhospitable to like or enjoy the character of Scrappy. End post.

[the-abyssal-system]

Singlets stop talking about systems as if you’re an expert because you follow some on tumblr challenge (also warning the tags here are a huge rant so feel free to ignore that)

[sevenangrybees]

Sometimes things bother me

[cappucosmico]

since god's worst weed adventure my brain just feels Worse at processing things. which is unfortunate, bc my brain has notoriously already been bad at processing things

[musical-chick-13]

It's also just so incredibly frustrating because people will take any example of a (usually male) character being horrible as some sort of "proof" that they're mentally ill (which, hmm, interesting that your automatic explanation for "why do they choose to treat other people horribly" is "they have a mental illness that just Makes Them Act Like That"), but there is no kind of nuanced or critical discussion of media that ACTUALLY (for ill or for good) tries to depict mental illness, and you try to recommend media that handles it well (that might even be good for other, completely unrelated reasons!!) and people just ignore you.

[filmcel]

and it makes me sad reading my old writing to see how depressed and sad i was and how i’m doing better but schools in the way of me doing better bc all it does is stress me out and make me suicidal 🤗🤗🤗

[beesholmes]

.

[loregoddess]

Ok I'm curious, could you elaborate on art school education when you have the time?

Mainly because my friend went to art high school and feels she wasted all the years there while I've been self-teaching myself for a few months by just messing around, so I was wondering just how different the two approaches are :0

Oh, I have lots and lots of thoughts on art education. I do feel that I need to preface this with the whole "my experience is not universal", bc all my feelings about art and art education stem from my own experiences of being self-taught and then getting actual formal college degrees in art.

The shortest version of my long rant, under the cut, is that there isn't a superior way to learn art. With art education, you run the risk of getting bad teachers who don't teach the subject well, and you can also run into teachers who aren't open-minded about approaches to art that differ too much from their own--the flipside, of course, is that there are sometimes amazing teachers who can challenge you to try new things you'd never had thought of on your own, or who have already made a lot of mistakes that they can tell you about so you don't have to make them yourself. With being self-taught, you have to figure out everything on your own, and sifting through online tutorials or reading books can be difficult to find "actually useful and well-explained" advice, but you do also get the freedom of doing literally whatever you want and really focusing what you learn based on what you're actually interested in. Each has it's pros and cons, but neither is technically better or worse, per se, although education of any sort comes down a lot to each person's situation in life, as not everyone has access to education or even the tools for making art.

For the long, long expansion of my thoughts and some of my personal experiences with art education specifically...

In short, I'm technically entirely self-taught, despite holding two different art degrees. Aside from some feedback I got from my 8th grade art teacher (who had agreed to look at my hobby art in her own spare time outside of class), I basically taught myself to draw entirely on my own, using various "how to draw" books, online tutorials, and just a lot of general experimentation and continued drawing on my own. Which meant I made a lot of mistakes, or didn't try out certain things, or got frustrated bc I couldn't figure out how to do something, but overall I had a lot of fun. The actual art classes I took in middle and high school? Well, I took a life drawing class in high school that taught me how to draw from life, a skill I never would have acquired on my own bc the process for learning that skill requires a lot of patience, and personally, I find life drawing to be extremely boring. My high school art teacher was also allowing blatant copyright infringements to occur in her class, which was something I learned years later when taking a media law class in college to learn about copyright law specifically, so I guess I learned what to not do as a teacher if I manage to become one, but I didn't learn a whole lot of actual art skills or even really improve my art in any significant way. I never actually learned anything like the elements of art and how to use them, or color theory, or any of that, in class or even on my own, but because I was constantly looking at lots of art online, and making art on my own and experimenting with new things, I ended up learning all of the "essentials of art" intuitively, sort of like how children learn the grammar of whichever language(s) they grow up speaking without learning the actual formal grammar of the language. Which I think a lot of artists actually do as they continue to make art, even if they don't realize it.

Anyhow, moving on. I personally really enjoyed my undergrad illustration degree. Now, to be fair, if someone was willing to pay me to attend college for the rest of my life as my actual career, that is what I would do bc I love learning, and I love the challenge presented by college courses. But do I feel like I learned anything new about art in those classes? Yes and no. I took a lot of art history classes bc I had never had any art history before college, and found I loved the topic a lot. The life drawing classes I was required to take felt like a waste of time bc I already had that skill from the one high school class, and I spent most of those classes fighting the teachers about why we should have less nude models (bc nudes are super easy to draw from life, but clothing is very, very difficult, and I wanted to learn how to draw clothing as a challenge bc I was bored in those classes). I spent one class teaching the entire class how to use Photoshop bc the teacher's method was absolute BS and I could do everything faster and easier than what we were being taught bc I had been using the program for years (the teacher even joked about how I had hijacked the class, to which I'm still not sure was meant to be friendly or malicious). The "Anatomy for the Artist" class I took was one of the most useful classes I've ever taken, and really helped me with drawing not only humans, but anything with a skeleton and muscles, since the teacher's approach made it so I learned the skill of using actual real-life anatomy as a means of creating art from the knowledge of anatomy (and I lucked out for this class bc I had an adjunct who was there to cover the actual teacher who was on sabbatical, and from what I heard from classmates I would have learned nothing from the usual teacher's approach to the class; I hope the teacher I did have found a good stable job bc she was amazing). Most of the actual core illustration classes helped me improve my art a great deal, but not bc they taught me anything--more so, it was that I had to create a lot of art for them, and find creative solutions to the challenges the projects would present (there were lots of "illustrate this abstract concept without using x, y, or z imagery" or "create an illustration within these specific parameters" which really required me to think about how to plan and go about completing the final project). Somehow, the actual "foundations classes" that I took--where I was supposed to learn things like design theory, the elements and principles of art, color theory, etc.--well, let's just say the teacher was on his way to retirement, and didn't teach any of that really well, so I still ended up going through my undergrad more or less on intuition and the art skills I had cultivated on my own. Mostly, college art classes were useful in helping me to improve my art, not because I learned new things (although I did learn some new things), but rather because I needed to make lots and lots of art in a relatively short time, and making art constantly is the fastest way to improve.

That all said, I still never really got the point of things that I kept seeing or hearing as common art advice. For example: "Use references." Okay? What does that mean? What does that look like? How do I do that? I was never taught that once, and it was only partway through college that I figured out that people meant "look at a photo of a real person to figure out a pose or something" and not "learn about the subject you're trying to draw so you have an understanding of that subject that allows you to draw it from your imagination how you want". And honestly the former advice is useful but...only useful to a point, so I'm kinda glad I never learned it bc it would have stunted my development and presented a roadblock. In either case, I was never taught how to use a ref or what "use a ref" meant in my formal art education, and by the time I figured it out on my own, my repertoire of art skills made the advice moot.

So what's all the long and short of this? Is art education a sham and useless? Well, not entirely, but maybe sort of. It really comes down to which teachers are teaching the subject, and how they do it. I only had a handful of art teachers who were really able to get me to think about art differently and push me to learn more and improve. But I also had a friend in my undergrad class who had never drawn in his life and he found most of the classes super useful bc he wasn't coming in being self-taught and already drawing. We were at different places in our art journeys, and so we got different things out of the college classes.

I do feel overall that the focus of my college classes was more productive than the lack of focus from my high school classes. Would I tell everyone who wants to get better at art to go to art school? Hell no. I got a degree in art because I love it, and because I had hoped to work as a video game concept artist (for which one does need at least a BFA to get hired by most companies). Of course, by the end of my degree I had figured out the video game industry in America was absolutely not a place I wanted to be working for my own health, but my frustrations with how my art education had been structured, paired with the fact that I spent a few classes actually teaching my classmates things, made me think I might make an okay art teacher. But even my wanting to be an art teacher still comes from a place of deep love for art. For those who just want to take up art as a hobby, self-taught is fine, and sometimes it will be better than getting stuck with a bad teacher who'll crush the enjoyment of art. Yes, I think a well-structured art course could help someone learn art and become confident in their art, which is part of the reason I want to try teaching it (esp. bc it took me years to learn some things that a good teacher would have just like, covered in a core class), but like...self-taught or school-taught, there isn't a superior way to learn art. They're both just very different approaches.

[the-gayest-sky-kid]

my brother keeps being a bitch on purpose and it's really not helping

[nebulaleaf]

heehee hoo hoo procrastinating things so i rant here

[itwasmagic]

i refuse to spend money to go ad free but i hate you blaze i hate you blaze i hate you blaze i hate you blaze i ha—