#bc I'm getting a pixie and I want to make sure everyone knows that girls can have short hair

[charmixpower]

Girl’s day out in Magix City?

Hi! Lets do this again!

I cannot believe I fell asleep 😭 I'm so sorry

Ok so as far as how this happened, 80% sure that Stella got bored and decided to drag everyone outside with her (The other 20% is would be Aisha wanting to go out rkwnenw)

These are all for different girls nights out? Starting from s1 jfnw

I like to imagine that Magix, as a planet, is a bit of a tourist trap. It's the capital of the Magic Dimension, it's the one place with a magical core that didn't have any form of life capable of fairy/witch transformations develop on it (the pixies we're always just kinda there), and it's at the center of the dimension

It probably has a bunch of to tourist trap stuff, a bunch of tourist trap stuff that Bloom is utterly enamored by

Stella brought her there because she thought Bloom would like and and she was right

Tecna staunchly refuses to let Bloom anything from these overpriced predatory businesses

Musa and Flora have already been to most of them, when they first came to magix, so they constantly make chit chat with Bloom

(Aisha has been visiting the Magix weekly to see the pixies at this point, so she's vv unimpressed by most of the stuff she's already seen and heard about from the pixies, but this event would happen sometime in s1 so she's probably not here)

Obviously Stella drags everyone to a mall at least once!

Set during s2, for Aisha bonding

Stella, Tecna and Musa are going crazy in the make-up store

Stella has gotten Tecna into make up at this point and she's going mad with power

You know those ultra weird and complicated makeup looks that no one would wear? Tecna is currently planning out 27 of those

Musa really wants to practice some intense make up looks for future performances (recalling her mother's old make-up looks when on stage)

She doesn't want it to be as intense as a proper opera look but she's always been enamored with the way her mother looked while singing

Stella....Stella.

Actually weirdly enough Stella tends to lean towards natural looks, but she wants to own 50 bottles of her signature lipgloss and is very picky about what looks good on her

Bloom is wandering around lost and confused at all the make up bc lord knows she's never worn that much before, Aisha is right next to her because she's never had to buy her own make up before....all she owns is lip stick/gloss and other basics

Flora is very nicely showing them around. Flora has definitely tried to make her own make up before so she'd know a lot

Lord have mercy when they go clothing shopping

They all have wildly different styles and would absolutely not shop at the same places for they are completely uninterested in eachother's styles, but they always, ALWAYS, have opinions on whatever their friends pick out

What I'm saying is that they come in like a title wave competely taking over their area of the store for who ever is shopping in that perticualr place. Cheers and jeers are offered for every outfit they see

They make a half circle and everyone just calls out what they think of what ever the current victim is picking out

They are very lucky they haven't been kicked out for being rowdy

Stella knows everyone there so they know she's just like that LMAO

Tecna shops at every place they go too, because no where sells distinctively Zenith stuff

Stella watches in amazement as the random clothing items Tecna buys all end up matching her aesthetic perfectly when together. She is taking notes

They're a menace every where else too

Musa buys some new speakers to subject Alfea to, accidentally interrogating the poor sales people about the specs

Tecna keeps having to go "I don't work here lady" in any tech shop she enters in. Like yes she knows about how all of these work, but you can't just demand she tell you because she's from Zenith?? Thats rude!

....Tecna gets into a screaming match with a rude customer

Stella is completely and utterly lost in the sauce of MALL

Bloom wander around a craft store forever without actually buying anything, because she already has pastels she barely uses she can't buy more but these ones are so pretty—

Flora slightly (very) agressively interrogates managers about their stores policy on off setting pollution and deforestation and taking care of nature

Aisha tries to get everyone to get some sport equipment so they can all go to the beach together and surf, and everyone tries to explain that they would instantly wipe out if they ever tried to do sports ball

I think right before a the Eraklyon ball, Stella would decide it's a girl's day out so they can spend all day getting prettied up before they have to get dressed. Manicures and pedicures, hair dresser, make up artist. All the fun stuff, all agressively comped by Stella.

I can see them jokingly argue about what they're wearing and doing with their hair. Esp Stella and Musa who have completely opposite tastes

Tecna and Flora are also teasing eachother about their opposite tastes. Well I mean Flora is teasing Tecna and Tecna is missing half of the joke. They wouldn't argue

Bloom: *goes for an outfit Stella would wear at like 13*

Aisha: we need to stop her from buying that empire flower dress, for her own good

Stella: absolutely not. She's happy, and she looks like a little princess

Musa: please let us stop her

Flora: die by my plants

Later

Some rando: *insults Bloom's dress*

Musa and Aisha: HOW FUCKING DARE YOU HER DRESS IS BEAUTIFUL AND ILL FIGHT YOU

Musa puts her hair down, and Stella goes wild (Musa is much like me in hating when her hair is down and always keeping it up unless it's an event that's worth taking her hair down. She also has a undercut and it sucks when you can't see it)

Stella tries to get Musa a super girly hairstyle, with curling iron, and Musa throws something at her

Aisha and Flora are the only one with a plan. Aisha because she was raised a princess, and Flora because she knows what she wants and isn't easily distracted like some people

Speaking of some people, Stella keeps getting distracted

She doesn't know if she wants to wear something in orange or blue and keeps fluttering between gowns

(I know she wears her princess ball dress, but Stella would never repeat outfits when at important events)

Tecna has just gotten into fashion last year and going crazy with the options. She is concidering...she is concidering....she is concidering

Stella and Tecna end up helping eachother, Flora and Bloom end up helping eachother, and Aisha and Musa end up helping eachother

Stella and Tecna are going bright and diva, Tecna offering technical prowess to keep track of everything they've seen, Stella helping her pick out things that make her happy and look flattering

Aisha is helping Musa style herself in something elegant, eye catching, and not overwhelming with her royal training. Musa helps her pick between colors XD. I can also see Aisha only really dressing modern because she was constantly stuffed into traditional gowns, and seeing Musa mix traditional and modern in a way that makes her happy (with some gentle and non expectant encouragement from Musa) Aisha picks out a couple things she missed (maybe the headband crown thing? Idk if she'd wear an actual crown bc she still hasn't had a conversation about the whole "completely stifling me for the entire time I lived under you. Did you know I was good at sports?? I didn't till I ran away!" But that thing looks really cool, and I can see Aisha wanting to wear something like it again. Keeps the hair out of your face when you kick ass and is stylish!)

Flora isn't much helping Bloom as she is encouraging her to pick what she wants. Flora and Bloom are mostly just throwing compliments back and forth at eachother

Musa: I wonder how we should accessorize

Stella and Flora running in from another room: DID SOMEONE SAY ACCESSORIZE?!

Flora putting decorative hair clips in Stella and Musa's hair: uwu

Stella putting headbands on Tecna and Bloom: uwu

They hit like every dress shop in Magixs....then go to their own planets to shop too

Tecna:

Musa:

Musa: your gonna fall

Tecna: my balance is perfect

Tecna: *wobbles out in the heels Stella picked out*

Stella vows to design a bunch of dresses for the next time they go to a ball like this...set up ^^

Maybe she designs Bloom's dress. Everyone thinks its ugly but Bloom, and Stella has never felt more accomplished

Musa, looking between a natural make up look and a intense make up look that looks like her mom's old make-up: FUCK

Musa probably ends up carrying Bloom around halfway through nfkskdke, they are a menace to these shops but Stella leaves big tips so no one ever bothers her

The whole time they're all showering eachother in jabs and compliments

Stella is determined to compliment everyone at least 20 times every hour

After Tecna gets herself sorted, she goes around helping everyone make keep track of their outfits nskwkwjw

Maybe after s3? Or just after the first movie Stella takes everyone to a spa

They deserve it, spa day, the entire fucking dimension nearly died again. They stopped it. If she doesn't get a break now she's actually going to lose it

I've never been to a spa before, so I can't ramble for multiple paragraphs about what they'd do but I can tell you that Musa, Tecna, and Bloom have never even done a face mask, Flora constantly treats herself to homemade spa days, Aisha has been to something like a spa as a princess but had never been to normal one, Stella...do I even need to say it? She probably has spa days marked on her calendar

[sunflowerchester]

please tell me what you thought!! I'm not worried about spoilers, i already know what happened, i'm gonna see it in a few days and i'm so psyched! tell me all your thoughts please!!!

I am so charged up about this movie I don’t even know where to fucking start!!! I guess I’ll start with my initial Twitter rant bc GODDDAAAAMMMMNNNN!

Here’s some non-spoilery things about the movie for those who don’t want to be spoiled:

Mother! is a horror movie for every woman whose pain was ever used & romanticized to further a man’s personal growth.

Mother! is a horror movie for women who have invested and fallen in love with a selfish man.

Mother! is a horror movie for women who feel the constant suffocating entitlement of the patriarchy.

Mother! is a horror movie for women who feel they’ve been constantly taken advantage of and are demonized for daring to speak up about it.

Mother! is a horror movie version of The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. (And I said this BEFORE I saw this tweet by the director 😍)

Mother! is a horror movie for any woman who was only valued as a cure for a man’s pain instead of valued as a full, human person.

Mother! is a horror movie for women who were treated like IRL manic pixie dream girls and then tossed aside like garbage. 

Also I found it able to tap into horrors of being a woman that were subtle and specific in a slightly Get Out kind of way, imho. I felt very understood in many ways even as I was being horrified by what I was seeing. 

Below are some spoilery things:

The movie opens with a woman burning, a tear falling down her face, and then her turning to ash. Javier Bardem sets a gem stone on a stand and then a beautiful home surrounded by nature appears out of the ashes. I knew as soon as Javier Bardem’s character sat that gem on the mantel and the scene turned to Jennifer Lawrence appearing out of the ashes in bed that that is where the movie would end, and it would end with another girl in her place. 

AND IT DID. For a bit there at the end, I was wondering where it was headed because of the chaos, and I nearly forgot about the gem itself, but then we ended right where I expected. What I didn’t forsee was what the gem was made of: it was the last thing that Bardem’s character could squeeze out of his previous lover before she turned to ash, something beautiful that he could put on display before he started it all over again with someone new. 

GOD-FUCKING-DAMN

This movie is about a woman who gives all of herself (physically, literally, spiritually, emotionally, horrifically) to a man because she loves him, because it is expected, because she thinks he will view it as love, and it is never enough. He never stops taking from her, not even when there are literal mobs in their home tearing the physical house apart, stealing their belongings. At one point an actual war spills into their house and she barely escapes with the life of herself and the child she is about to give birth to. When she begs her husband to send these people away, he refuses because they stroke his ego. 

I don’t think the chaos of the previous 10 minutes of the film before she asks this question nor her struggle through them were literal but rather a representation of how it feels to be in her position, where she’s tried everything to be enough for this man for as long as she has been with him, rebuilt his house by hand, made it a home, served all his guests and fans without complaint, and even carried his child. She finally started believing with her pregnancy that she was going to win him over and be with just him, that this would be the key to finally meeting that standard of enough, but that was never who he was ever going to be for her, even as a father. And when she realizes, at 8 months pregnant, that his true love is still himself, his writing, and his fans, despite his child growing in her womb, she felt her world slip. The insanity of the the wars, the executions, the mobs in the house weren’t real but that’s how it felt. Her world was crumbling and she’d never regain any control again. 

In the end he even invites his fans to hold their baby and the baby ends up dying. It’s horrific and disgusting, and what does he say to her? He tells her that it can be something beautiful and encourages her to forgive, that there is nothing more beautiful than forgiveness, so they must. As if she doesn’t have rights to feeling ugliness in the face of losing her child. I felt suffocated myself by this immediately invalidation of even the most understandable and vulnerable of feelings. 

There are other moments like this throughout the movie where Jennifer Lawrence’s character is trying to speak up and voice her needs but it’s like shouting into a pillow as she asks politely and reasonably. No one listens or seems to care, especially not her husband. He seems to only placate her lovingly when he can tell she needs to feel he’s heard her, but he never really does or cares to try to actually listen to her. This last time, when she is weeping about her son being murdered by the people he allowed into their house, is the last straw and she calls the people around her what they are: MURDERERS. And because she finally yells and screams at them, they beat the everloving shit out of her and call her names like whore and bitch and cunt, etc etc. 

So she makes her way down to the furnace and burns the fucker down. GIRL YES BURN THAT BITCH TO THE GROUND.

And yet after the explosion that incinerates it all, guess who is intact and who is charred to the bone. Javier Barden, completely complete, carries Jennifer Lawrence, a burned, scaley version of herself, through the rubble of the house. She can’t understand how he is able to do this when she and everything she built is destroyed. 

She asks, “What are you?” He replies, “I am life.” She asks, ”What am I?” He replies, “You are home.”

You don’t have to be sexualized to still be objectified and if this isn’t exactly the damaging dynamic in so many male/female relationships, I don’t know what is. He is what life is and she is where he gets to live. Does she have her own life, her own plans, her own goals, her own space? It doesn’t matter, she exists to house him. 

She asks, “Where are you taking me?”He replies, “To the beginning.”

He lays her on the charred bed and tells her there is one more thing he needs from her. She says she has nothing left to give. He says that isn’t true, he wants her love. She relents. “Take it.” He digs physically into her abdomen and pulls something bloody and charred out. Jennifer Lawrence’s character turns to ash and the mess in Javier Bardem’s character’s hands turns into a gem. He marvels at how beautiful a thing it is, the only thing left of his lover. He doesn’t grieve that she is nothing but a pile of ash now, he sets the gem up where the old one once sat and the opening scene repeats with a new girl waking in their bed, signifying that this is what this man does to women and what he will continue to do. He doesn’t learn his lesson or change because he doesn’t value the women he is with enough to see their pain as destruction. Instead, he only sees it for how it can benefit him.

She is ash. He is whole. A parasite going from woman to woman. 

To me, one of the scariest elements of this movie is that Javier Bardem’s character himself isn’t really that scary, he’s not a horror. He’s even sweet sometimes, albeit neglectful af. What’s smart and unfortunately really relatbale about this is it makes him seem like (if not a good guy at least) an okay guy. He’s not evil. She doesn’t befall this horrible fate because he is malicious. It’s a Nice Guy who just wants to Create something Beautiful. But in the process he fucking destroys and sucks the entire life out of the woman he is supposed to love with no remorse at all. There are so many fucking men out there who do this very thing to every woman they are with, emotionally and mentally. Sometimes physically, too, but that’s easier to pinpoint. The horror of Javier Bardem in Mother! is that he could be and really kind of is many of the men we will come in contact with. 

(Bro I know I’ve fallen in love with and had this done to me by one ALREADY)

My thoughts on how this movie has been received:

What blows my MIND is that large groups of people DO NOT GET this movie and I think it’s because it is largely and almost exclusively a fundamental female experience. There are whole hot takes and think pieces trying to figure out HMMM WHAT IS THIS MOVIE ABOUT???? when like…to me, it was obvious and direct in my opinion. I’m not trying to be a bitch about it, like I’m smarter than everyone. I understand that I get it because it’s for me, it’s about a female perspective, but to say it’s about nothing is ASININE. Which many of them are saying. 

If you don’t like the way this movie told its story, that’s fine and fair. We all have different tastes. But if you don’t get the message and therefore want to criticize what it’s trying to say because you think it was pointless, maybe THINK AGAIN. It didn’t fail because you PERSONALLY don’t get it. It maybe just means that there are other experiences in this world and you’re lucky enough to have never had to understand what this movie is saying, the feelings it evokes in many viewers, or the horrors it represents for them. And most likely never will.  If the movie is just not for you I GET THAT bc damn it was rough, IT WAS HARD, it was awful. But it wasn’t about nothing. If you didn’t see the point, be thankful.

There were some think pieces analyzing it and coming to the conclusion that it was about global warming and the Catholic church, which there was definitely some imagery for but that for SURE was not the POINT. If you thought Mother! was just about taking on the Catholic Church while identifying the other ‘weird’ stuff in it as just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ you MAY be ignoring the literal title character of the movie & her entire emotional journey throughout the whole thing. 

Which, SHOCKER, is like… the point of the entire movie. 

Good job I GUESS. But you still missed point by proving it. 

I mean, I get it, make it about whatever resonates with you, but it is undeniably about a fundamentally female experience. No wonder it’s being overlooked. "Gee what could this movie entitled ‘Mother!’ be about? Should we look at the mother character in the movie?? OR HOW ABOUT we just dive into the symbolism surrounding the woman instead while ignoring her completely.“ 👍🏻

To me it seemed any side-symbolism in that movie was to promote the dynamic of her giving all she was & him feeding off of it. Including any messianic imagery. As a smart, smart friend of mine said, “Men will of course deify themselves all the time.” That’s EXACTLY what the religious imagery was about, about Javier Bardem’s character living out his desire to be a god to his fans for his own ego, so deep that he let them devour his own child. It was about the church but it was only in service TO EMPHASIZE HOW HE CONSUMES HER AND WHAT SHE HAS GIVEN. Like… LORD help me. (No pun intended.)

I cannot believe a horror film about a female experience is so baffling for people to understand when we’re half the people out there. “WHAT IS IT ABOUT?????” It’s about what she’s showing you it’s about. PAY ATTENTION!! 

But how poetic (ew gross) that many people who don’t get it write it off. It’s the same reason so often women are not believed and their experiences are questioned. No wonder women feel LIKE NO ONE LISTENS.

It’s like there are people looking directly at this movie screen and seeing a blank black box for 75% of it. And here I am screaming into a pillow.

This is not to say that Mother! doesn’t take on many things, it does. There is a lot to unpack and it would be unfair of me to say there is only one way to read it. Of course there isn’t, and many parts are going to resonate with different people for different reasons. With that being said, though, to anyone trying to make the point of this movie about anything other than the experience of the female lead character, remember the gemstone and the burning woman at the beginning of the film, and then at the end. It is bookended this way for a reason. This is about the pattern of a man and how it affects the women he chooses to be with. This is about a woman who loves a selfish man who unapologetically lives selfishly and what it does to her to be in his life. 

It’s metaphors, it’s symbolism, obviously it’s hyperbolic, but it’s still REAL👏🏻AS👏🏻FUCK👏🏻.

[alongcamepolyblog]

I'm a queer woman, whose dated mostly cishet dudes my life. After coming out, I've dated a few girls (even having a few non-monogamous relationships) but I'm finding myself falling for a cishet monogamous dude that I *surprise* am reeeeeeally into. Am I a bad queer for having these feelings, and am I an even worse person for being confused on where I lie on the monogamous/non-monogamous spectrum?

Oh, honey. The very short and very firm answers I have for you, for both of your questions, are no, and no, not at all. 

It’s Pride month, and there are lots of things floating about about queerness. Equinox has a horrible joke of an ad campaign about the ABCs of LGBTQ+, and they kick off the video with “ally” (gag me) – erasing asexuals from the queer community completely – and then lumping in kink and S&M as if those things are inherently queer, or all queers are kinky. This is the entirety of my reaction to that:

NYC Pride is supposedly going to be televised this year, because everyone wants to get in on queerness as spectacle. But the problem with marginalized identities being perceived through the lens of a dominant [read: white supremacist, cissexist, heteronormative, patriarchal] narrative (i.e., white cishets with money who like glitter and dislike the history that is the Stonewall Riots being led by Black and Latina trans women) is that the dominant narrative fucks us up. From adolescence (or even earlier if you’re Black or POC), and continuously. 

What I’m getting from you letter is mostly that you don’t feel queer enough. “Not queer enough” is just another version of “not enough” and, in my experience, at the root of every “not enough” – especially for someone who lives within one or more marginalized identities – is how we’re not shaping up to some distant, inauthentic ideal (which is *always* seen through the lens of whiteness).

What does “queer enough” look like, to you? Take a moment and really think about it. What are the narratives that you’re bringing to “queer enough” that have you stuck in the position of feeling like you’re falling short?

I’m also a queer woman who for a long time dated mostly cishet dudes all my life, and when I was stewing in my ‘not enough’ feelings, they usually had to do with my femmeness, and how I was worried about being read. (This is called internalized femmephobia.) My response was to cut off all my hair (and then, ridiculously, have a lot of feelings about being read as too butch/“too gay”; read: “too much.” We truly cannot win.) I got a tattoo of a Sailor Jerry mermaid rocking a pixie cut and reading a book with her boobs out to telegraph to the world that I LIKE GIRLS. I later got an undercut, a septum piercing; all markings of things that I thought would make me more “visibly queer.” (And maybe it did, but now I’m also Brooklyn-adjacent, so I look pretty much like everyone else. Oh well.) 

But here’s the thing with visibility that I think is important to note: My bbqueer striving to be “visibly queer” was a privilege, even as it was causing me anxiety and feelings of not enough-ness; trans folks, and BIPOC folks, queer and straight, struggle with hypervisibility in ways that my light skinned, cisgender ass generally does not, and it is important to me to state that plainly.

Did any of the things I did to establish my queer chick street cred actually make me any queerer? No. You know what does make me queer? 

The fact that I’ve always felt a little odd my whole life, and it wasn’t until I found my queerness that some part of that began to ease. My intense relationships with female friends that crashed and burned in startling ways, which I now realized were warped and stuck in a pressure-cooker by the queerness that I didn’t have words for, since I was raised so steeped in Catholicism and heteronormativity. The fact that I’ve had to fight to recognize my queerness; the fact that my parents made me stop watching Xena for “the violence” when I have a sneaking suspicion I probably was made to stop watching it for the gayness (and I don’t say that to criticize my parents at all – I don’t even think that was something that consciously registered for them; that is part of my queerness too). The fact that my dad tried to make me stop watching Buffy when Willow came out as gay – he TRIED lol – and I literally told him over my dead body. The fact that Willow came out as gay and it still took me an additional ten years to realize that I’m bisexual, bc lol, where are all the bi girls on TV??? Where are the bi girls who look like me? (Here’s one.)

I understand your angst, though. As queer women, we’re so often told that our sexuality is contingent on who we’re with. My doctors have treated me that way – when I have male partners, I’m straight, and when I have female partners, I’m gay. When I come out about being non-monogamous, I’m pretty sure all they see is a neon-sign over my head that, depending on the doctor, reads “HIGH RISK” at best, and “SLUT” at worst. These are messages that we have to deal with every day. It is so, so rare to find a place and a community that validates who you are, exactly as you are.

And the queer community isn’t exempt from that, either! I had a girlfriend who identified as a lesbian who had a problem with me having sex with dudes. I had a girlfriend who identified as poly who hated the idea of me having other partners, so she asked me to be in a closed triad with her and her husband – and then the two of them, jointly, decided to dump me, in part because seeing him with me scared the crap out of her. 

Our world is imperfect, and our communities reflect that. It takes strength and resilience and the deepest, fiercest love for who you know yourself to be to fight that. It can be exhausting, and sometimes we don’t always win these battles with “not enough,” because our society is not structured to encourage or even allow us to love ourselves. And I’m sorry for that, and I am sending you all of my love, not just because it’s June and it’s Pride month, but always, because you deserve so much better than this.

With regard to where you stand on the spectrum of monogamy and non-monogamy – fuck that scale. You are where you are, and how you do relationships is your business, and your partner(s)’ business, and anyone on the outside looking in can go fuck themselves. Maybe you’re feeling more monogamous right now – cool. Maybe you’re just super deep in New Relationship Energy with this exciting new person – that’s also fine! Either of these things or neither of them can be true, or one of them can be true sometimes, or they can both be true at least half the time, and the only thing that means is that’s where you are at right now, and where you are right now in your dating life is not a comment on how ‘good’ of a queer you are. You don’t have to be good. You just have to be yourself.The most important thing I ever learned about queerness was last summer at the LAMBDA Writers Workshop. My teacher was Benjamin Alire Saenz, and the first thing he asked us to do was to write about what scared us most in the world. I wrote about not being enough – not queer enough, not Latina enough, not good enough at non-monogamy, not enough of a writer. Not enough, not enough, not enough. He said to us, “Queer is an identity that is entirely self-defined” – and your ability to do that, to be who you are, all of who you are, and say fuck you to the cishets who want queerness to look the way they want to consume it, and a similar buzz off to the queers who would suggest your queerness is not queer enough because of who you’re with – is not only an act of resistance, but also the best gift you could give yourself, and a gift you have always deserved.

Happy Pride, love.