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cksmart-world · 9 months

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SMART BOMB

The Completely Unnecessary News Analysis

By Christopher Smart

January 9, 2024

GOV. “SMILEYFACE” COX TRAMPLING OUT EVIL DIVERSITY

In a stunning and heroic reversal Utah Gov. Spencer “Smileyface” Cox came out against decency (DEI) because, he said, it's “bordering on EVIL.” The move is nothing short of brave because in years past he has hailed decency (DEI) as a way to bring people together. “It's about kindness and love for our fellow travelers.” But that was then — now he's calling for universities to “disempower DEI bureaucrats, responsible to no one, who have turned campuses to laughingstocks.” Laughingstocks for god's sake! This, of course, has nothing to do with the presidents of M.I.T., Harvard and University of Pennsylvania getting skinned alive before the special congressional inquisition regarding the blatant elitism of colleges and the DEI movement to put minorities and queers in charge of just about everything. The Republican Party is sick of pandering to people who advance only due to their female gender, color, and gender identity. Now, the GOP is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. This DEI stuff is even worse than CRT (critical race theory), where small white children are taught to hate themselves. Sure, disemboweling people at televised congressional hearings is never pretty but we have an election coming up and a democracy to defend — at least until Trump is elected.

GET YOUR ASHES SPREAD ON THE MOON — FOR REAL

People can get hung up on where their ashes should be spread after cremation. Some folks just say things for conversation sake, like: “I want my ashes spread on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland.” Strangely enough, people really do get their ashes dumped at Disneyland. It requires something like an E Ticket. Other popular places folks get their ashes spread include Yellowstone, Glacier National Park and the Grand Canyon. And now — you guessed it — you can get you ashes spread or dumped, as the case may be, on the moon. United Launch Alliance in conjunction with Astrobotic are planning to launch ashes to the moon, despite objections from the Navajo Nation that it flies in the face of their spirituality. “Máíí’ Hosh,” as the moon is called in Navajo, is their spiritual guide and protector. The tribe has protested to NASA, but the space agency apparently has no jurisdiction over lunar ash spreading. Regulations seem to be sorely lacking up there. Imagine you're a Navajo and you seek guidance on your journey of self discovery only to look up and know that white man has messed everything up again. The CEO of the space-ashes project put it this way: “We do not and never have let religious beliefs dictate humanity's space efforts." Well, there goes the neighborhood.

VIDEO: GOD GAVE US TRUMP

God is looking down on the Earth as the video opens with this narration: "On June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, 'I need a caretaker.' So God gave us Trump." No Wilson, we are not making this up. It's something North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un would produce to remind his countrymen how great he is. "God said, 'I need someone to wake up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight... So God made Trump." It could be a skit on Saturday Night Live. But this is no joke — it goes on for another 2 minutes and would make Moses blush. "I need someone… who can make money from the tar of the sand [and] turn liquid to gold.” At a rally in Madison City, Iowa, last week, God's caretaker said this: “I could tell you about the elevators on an [aircraft] carrier and they decided not to use hydraulic like the John Deere tractor, they decided to use magnets... to lift up the elevators with seven planes.” he said to the crowd. “Now all I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets. Why didn’t they use John Deere... Do you like John Deere? I like John Deere.” God really does work in mysterious ways.

Post script — That's going to do it for another frigid week here at Smart Bomb where we keep track of the chill factor so you don't have to. Don't worry, spring is only four or five months away. Speaking of chilling, Republicans are very good at bending the English language to their benefit. “Tax and spend liberals.” “Let's go Brandon.” “Stop the Steal.” Here's are the newest words to go through the GOP's twisted connotation machine: diversity, equity and inclusion. Who could have predicted that “diversity” would become a nasty word. Of course, we've known for a long time that the Republican Party is not a hotbed of diversity. But now they're saying it out loud. It's the Civil Rights Movement in reverse. And their habitual projection seems to be at work: “DEI is just another name for racism.” Translation — if you support diversity you are a racist. Next we may see folks in white robes and conical hats burning crosses. Two steps forward and one step back. Or is it one step forward and two back. “This is the beginning of the end for DEI in America’s institutions,”said conservative activist Chris Rufo. Here at Smart Bomb we prefer a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

Hey Wilson, how about you and the guys in the band serve up something upbeat that we can sing and dance to. You know, a nice, little ditty to put us in a good mood so we can face the rest of January. We've got the Wolf Moon coming up a little later this month, so take it away:

Well, it's a marvelous night for a Moondance With the stars up above in your eyes A fantabulous night to make romance 'Neath the cover of January skies And all the leaves on the trees are falling To the sound of the breezes that blow And I'm trying to please to the calling Of your heart-strings that play soft and low And all the night's magic seems to whisper and hush And all the soft moonlight seems to shine in your blush Well, I wanna make love to you tonight I can't wait 'til the morning has come And I know that the time is just right And straight into my arms you will run And when you come my heart will be waiting To make sure that you're never alone There and then all my dreams will come true, dear There and then I will make you my own And every time I touch you, you just tremble inside And I know how much you want me that you can't hide One more Moondance with you in the moonlight On a magic night In the moonlight On a magic night Can't I just have one more dance with you my love

(Moondance — Van Morrison)

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ikeameatballspoisonedme · 1 year

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Been thinking about DE politics. You don't see it cuz I cannot put it into words so I only post the old men yaoi. I will sound very dumb so be aware. Revachol Revolution is very similar to Indonesia. Communist takeover then it all crumbling down. People from old regime were killed, but after communism fell the communists were massacred by the Coalition. Similar to 1966 genocide.

Where Revachol diverged from Indonesia however is a horrifying fascist dictator. It seems like what happened in Revachol mirrored post-USSR countries: westernization, moralist group, hyperinflation, poverty. All those things of course happened in Indonesia, but Revachol didn't have a leading figure that made sure any semblance of leftism is squashed systematically. Marxism still runs deep within Revachol. Town's belong to the union. Joyce admitted that she's a bourgeois. Within Soeharto's regime all or those shit are systematically censored. Unions are weakened. Etc etc. And then after Suharto fell everyone searched for new identity to latch on. With communism literally wiped out, only one thing remains. Religious fascism come to the rescue!

I am speaking for this as someone privileged and currently is in STEM major. My experience is different from those in universities more oriented in political science. They definitely have the DE commie reading club and probably more exposed to grassroots movement. STEM's political leaning tends to be more... apolitical. Clueless about shit outside of the populism. Moralist. Things that DE fucking hates. Maybe I should get better friends, but I can assure you that I'm the only communist in my class (consists of like 40 people so not much, but my exclusion feels more intense). I'm not a communist either at the same time. I rarely read books, I don't understand the theory. Maybe I should continue reading Das Kapital. Guess I'm just a person leaning to the left, but communist is easier to say cuz people irl will see me as a communist SJW anyway. When my friends go to shalat I avoid them, saying that I prefer doing it at home when in reality I don't like shalat. It reminded me of how their perfect God is punishing queer people like me. Anyway. My point is, I do not see my country being particularly communist anytime soon. People are poisoned to religious fascism. I wish I could see the hope of DE, as terrible as Revachol is people there still remembered communism as something. My country has destroyed it all systematically. Thanks to religion.

I saw the anti-LGBT Canada protest. Most of them are Muslims. I just feel, broken. Indonesia used to have a Muslim communist figures, before they were killed or exiled. Tan Malaka, for example. I cannot say for certain that being a Muslim communist will erase the prejudice against queer people, but I know for certain that none of these people are left leaning. Muslim communists (actual communist, not people that just happen to hate Ridwan Kamil. those people are pieces of queerphobic shit.) I met online are cool and they do support queer people. Thing is, the people in those anti-LGBT protests represent the majority of my country. Hateful, bigoted fucks. I'm happy for Muslim queer out there I love y'all, but in my experience I cannot sholat without thinking that people that do this routine hate my existence. The staff at my internship, I love them they're so kind, but they also said Cocomelon is LGBT propaganda because one of the video has 2 dads. I prayed with those people. It sickens me. I cannot do anything about it either. So all I can do to denounce this irl is to just stop shalat altogether. Quit Islam in private. I still wear hijab, I liked it because I don't get to comb my hair, but I do wish that I still can show my hypothetical blue hair without shame from people that knows me. I want to wear cool cargo shorts. I... found out that I hate dress actually, but cargo shorts? Baby that's my shit, but I cannot wear them.

Okay this is why I stick to old man yaoi. I have so much thoughts but at the end they came out as a jumbled mess. I didn't even talk about DE at the end. Kim Kitsuragi kiss time

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femsolid · 3 years

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"I've had someone saying they would rather kill me than Hitler," says 24-year-old Jennie*. "They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a room with me and Hitler. That was so bizarrely violent, just because I won't have sex with trans women." (...) One of the lesbian women I spoke to, 24-year-old Amy*, told me she experienced verbal abuse from her own girlfriend, a bisexual woman who wanted them to have a threesome with a trans woman. When Amy explained her reasons for not wanting to, her girlfriend became angry. "The first thing she called me was transphobic," Amy said. "She immediately jumped to make me feel guilty about not wanting to sleep with someone." Soon afterwards Amy and her girlfriend split up. "I remember she was extremely shocked and angry, and claimed my views were extremist propaganda and inciting violence towards the trans community, as well as comparing me to far-right groups," she said. (...) Another lesbian woman, 26-year-old Chloe*, said she felt so pressured she ended up having penetrative sex with a trans woman at university after repeatedly explaining she was not interested. They lived near each other in halls of residence. Chloe had been drinking alcohol and does not think she could have given proper consent. "I felt very bad for hating every moment, because the idea is we are attracted to gender rather than sex, and I did not feel that, and I felt bad for feeling like that," she said. (...) "I thought I would be called a transphobe or that it would be wrong of me to turn down a trans woman who wanted to exchange nude pictures," one wrote. "Young women feel pressured to sleep with trans women 'to prove I am not a terf'." One woman reported being targeted in an online group. "I was told that homosexuality doesn't exist and I owed it to my trans sisters to unlearn my 'genital confusion' so I can enjoy letting them penetrate me," she wrote. (...) Another reported a trans woman physically forcing her to have sex after they went on a date. "[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them]," she wrote. "I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a 'woman' even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me." (...) Ani, who is 30, told the BBC she is concerned for the generation of lesbians who are now in their teens. "What we are seeing is a regression where once again young lesbians are being told 'How do you know you don't like dick if you haven't tried it?'" she said. "We get told we should be looking beyond genitals and should accept that someone says they are a woman, and that's not what homosexuality is." Ani believes these kind of messages are confusing for young lesbians. "I remember being a teenager in the closet and trying desperately to be straight, and that was hard enough," she said. "I can't imagine what it would have been like, if I'd finally come to terms with the fact I was gay, to then be faced with the idea that some male bodies are not male so they must be lesbian, and having to contend with that as well." Ani says she gets contacted on Twitter by young lesbians who do not know how to exit a relationship with a trans woman."They tried to do the right thing and they gave them a chance, and realised that they are a lesbian and they didn't want to be with someone with a male body, and the concept of transphobia and bigotry is used as an emotional weapon, that you can't leave because otherwise you're a transphobe," she said. Like others who have voiced their concerns, Ani has received abuse online. "I've been incited to kill myself, I've had rape threats," she said. However, she says she is determined to keep speaking out. (...)

#lesbian #homophobia #rape #trans

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dotthings · 2 years

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It's funny how certain people will continue to post weirdo conspiracy theories about fandom "grifters" (that don't exist) and claim an entire server full of meta nerds and memes and theories with channels for different tv shows and properties from spn to star wars to dc and cute pet photos and yelling about pierogies are some sinister cult here to destroy fandom as if there's nothing odd about their behavior, nothing unsettling about this hate fixation, or the way they continue to lie and lie and lie.

I will be referring to this individual as The Fake TFW Stan from now on just for clarity (A back story: poses as TFW/J2M fan, insidiously backhands Jensen, claims to care about Cas but diminishes him at every opportunity, as actually a bitter Sam/Jared stan who claims to multiship but reinforces a bunch of brosonly type bs, claims to be a multishipper, but undermines Destiel at every opportunity because he's salty that Sastiel isn't the big ship instead, smarmily and passive aggressively continues to imply that Jensen is anti-Destiel, and is actually an exceedingly bitter anti who is pissed at spn but won't admit it, as he plays heavily with fake politeness). And FYI, people in this fandom with experience directly in, or understanding of, how the media industry works, and a lot of experience analyzing media and tv story structure and have been to a few rodeos, who got their series finale predictions borked due to external factors such as queer censorship and covid restrictions and butchering that resulted in a script draft full of [OMITTED] yet were right time and again about so many things again and again and continue to be right now and have been accurately with their fingers on the pulse on things that landed us right where things are today with the SPN universe and the Jensen long con are not sinister meanies and frauds trying to trick you. It's FANS. Informed fans. Media literate fans. Who got screwed over by the same systemic problems that impacted the writers room.

While the Fake TFW Stan keeps flopping his arms around squawking on about conspiracies fandom cults and grifters that don't exist and keeps getting things wrong. And doesn't know when it's time to shut up and stop their ceaseless hate campaign or attempts to make everyone think they are in the know and some kind of special authority. While they keep being wrong and will NOT STOP THEIR ENDLESS HATE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE ADMIN OF A SERVER AND A BUNCH OF META NERDS.

This person is baffling. Their blog often has some good in it, they do put in effort and they make transcriptions and find things and could do a lot of good but instead they choose...to be a mess. Their twitter is more drama free so they retain more credibility there. Their tumblr audience, note, has dwindled down to Misha haters. People who like those posts, I use as a "who to block" guide." This is just beyond bizarre at this point.

WE'RE A BUNCH OF META WRITERS WILL YOU LEAVE US TF ALONE ALREADY.

Buddy, this is a Wendy's, what are you doing, etc.

#mildew #WTF IS FAKE TFW STAN'S PROBLEM

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canmom · 3 years

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Since I feel like they are generally sort of up your alley, I'll ask for your thoughts on Flip Flappers and really any other 3Hz anime you feel are worth commenting upon :3

ehehe sure! I had the pleasure of watching Flip Flappers at the house of @mogsk and @schizsune. Fascinating anime thematically, lots of splendid creative animation (not surprisingly it got the sakugablog treatment, though by liborek rather than kvin, who's laser-focused on the visual aspects). actually it seems like the anime blogosphere had such a field day with this series that there's a website just to compile everything that people wrote. It's definitely dense enough that I need to watch it again and read more of the writing about it to fully appreciate all that it does! But I'll do my best.

Anyway, in keeping with the format:

don’t watch period | drop if not interested within 2-3 episodes | give it a go, could be your thing | 5 star recommendation [this is a weird scale. i don't think there are many truly universal recs lol. but there are some things about flifla which may not be to a given reader's taste]

So let's preface this with a brief description of what this show even is for people who aren't familiar (obvs you are :p ).

Flip Flappers is an original anime directed by Kiyotaka Oshiyama, his first series director job after impressing with Space Dandy episode 18 and previously working on Ghibli projects and Dennou Coil. On the most surface level, it's about the relationship between two girls - at the outset, the seemingly demure schoolgirl Cocona and the wildly energetic Papika who suddenly appears in her life. They are together able to enter a realm known as 'Pure Illusion' - essentially a series of dream worlds which, it soon becomes apparent, represent the internal worlds of various characters around them. They do this under the stern control of an organisation called FlipFlap, opposed by a kind of cult called Asclepius.

All we really learn for a good while is that both are competing for mysterious objects called 'Amorphous', the conditions for which vary a lot with each world. To this end, we go through a variety of settings and tones - one episode may be an action spectacle in a Mad Max-like desert, another a mystery-horror. Generally speaking these wildly disparate settings are driven primarily by the emotional arc: Cocona figuring out what kind of lesbian homosexual she is going to define herself as.

The anime asks a fair bit of the viewer to figure out what it's doing beyond the gorgeous animation. Large periods of time pass between episodes which typically throw us in in media res, and we need to pick up on relations between characters and how they evolve through implication a lot of the time. It's v much a director's show with a lot of information conveyed by storyboarding and imagery, as Emily Rand expounds.

It assumes quite a lot of literacy with anime - episodes will pastiche a class-S yuri anime or a Kanada school super robot show, and of course the whole structure of the show is full of big nods to Evangelion, which really set the tone for 'psychoanalytic anime'. It's also packed full of allusions to philosophy of mind and psychoanalysis, both overt and structural. e.g. there's a rabbit-like creature called Uexküll after the scientist who coined the term 'umwelt', and the girls' route to Pure Illusion is a sparse cupboard called the Thomasson, which is a pretty obscure one examined in this post.

As such, psychoanalysis and ~queerness~ are the angles taken by the existing longer-form critical analysis, such as this video by zeria, who ranks it as their favourite anime:

youtube

In it, they argue that while absolutely about psychosexual development, the series represents essentially a critique of the overly narrow theories of Freud and Jung and is, going off the invocation of 'assemblages', a bit more Deleuzian in its outlook. Which is admittedly kind of the reading that you'd expect someone like Zeria to make, but they make a pretty good case.

Anyway, if I ever run FliFla on Animation Night, I might try and dig a bit more into all of this. Let's quickly run down the questions though...

fav characters: i'll be kinda basic with this one, but probably Papika; just plain fun to watch her antics lol. i admit most of the satellite characters feel more like symbolic instruments than people.

least fav characters: the pervy robot Bu-chan, even if the Kanada School episode inside his mind was fun, and he has his narrative functions, this was definitely the element that most made me sigh

fav relationship: given this show is all about developing one particular relationship, there's not a lot of options outside of cocona/papika here!

fav moment: probably the episode where we see like a dozen different interpretations of Papika and how she might relate to Cocona was the one that most sticks in my mind?

headcanons/theories: I'd have to watch it again with fresh eyes to see if there's anything beyond what's like, very overt in the text. apologies that i can't give more here. it doesn't really feel like a show very invested in 'worldbuilding' in any case.

unpopular opinion: maaan. the discussion of what amount of sexuality is 'necessary' to its themes and what is 'unnecessary' fanservice by 'perverts' makes me feel like i have bees in my head and open the safe where we keep the word 'libidinal'. i don't think i have an opinion fully baked enough to state here though.

how’d you find it: admittedly, bc of the context i watched it, with a big gap in time before when we watched the first half and when i got to see the second, it was kind of disjointed which made it harder to follow than it should be. still, i was extremely impressed by the animation and creativity and thematic ambition. i can see the criticism of pacing problems, and this probably has a lot to do with the production running increasingly behind schedule and almost collapsing towards the end, a problem rather endemic to anime - it didn't hit FliFla nearly as hard as its spiritual successor Wonder Egg Priority at least. overall it's still very good and i'd like to watch it again - maybe on an Animation Night to come.

random thoughts: the hyper-angular huge eye character designs (by Takashi Kojima, also the chief sakkan) are fascinating - they feel like they're pushing an extreme of anime design principles, which certainly gives the show a unique flavour.

I feel regretful I can't go much deeper than this but I think I'd basically have to do another rewatch and a lot of poking-through-essay-writing to get into the real meat of it!

As far as other work by Studio 3Hz, I regret to say I haven't seen any! I do like their parent studio Kinema Citrus's work a lot though so I definitely ought to check out more if they have a defined style, and it's cool to see a studio making original work as much as adaptations. Recs are welcome ^^

#anime #flip flappers #ask meme #solicit bryn's anime opinions

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adamsvanrhijn · 4 years

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not to be very annoying, but do you happen to know any good books/resources about lgbt slang/identities in victorian/edwardian/etc england? (i mean, things such as lesbians calling each other "toms" and the like). don't worry if you don't know any, but i just figured i'd ask since this was kinda in your Area Of Interest so you might know some off the top of your head.

the not annoying at all but this is a more complex question than at first glance hahaha

TL;DR: there are many types of queer language / we have way more info about men, who have their own lexicon / this era is widely seen as the era in which the concept of identity is actually coming into play / books list at the end, scroll down til you reach bolded text if you don’t want my commentary.

so when you’re looking at mid 19th - interwar lgbt communities, whether in europe or the uk or the usa it doesn’t really matter bc this is quite universal, you’ve got at least three registers, for lack of an easier word:

how self-identified homosexual, inverted, queer, abnormal etc men (henceforth gay men) speak with each other

how self-identified “” women (henceforth lesbian women) speak with each other

interactions between these groups

these naturally intersect with other socioeconomic class factors.

back to england specifically:

despite legal considerations gay men have the most agency and ability to move around and therefore are more likely to interact with each other and form communities. so now you have additional registers:

upper middle / upper class

middle / lower middle / working class (more registers here but nobody asked me and i promise i will give you recs soon)

again, interactions between them

the latter category has limited applications; most of them have to do with prostitution or casual sex and tend to be about categorizing people in terms of what sex acts they participate in. (this is universally true of most forms of gay slang and/or their origins for obvious reasons) think locker room talk. OR, we’re looking at cross class relationships and how other people view members of cross class relationships. not to generalize bc there are other things than this but what is best documented here is the upper class pov of these interactions

for the first category there is much less slang & unique community language, when you look at letters and works of literature etc etc people are picking and choosing from both medical/psychiatric terminology, which is developing rapidly from the 1860s on, and like, classical works; you get a lot of alluding to things. artistic communities (bloomsbury group, natalie clifford barney’s harem in paris and what have you) meanwhile are sort of all over the map. but bc this isn’t Polite Society talk, most of the sources for this kind of language tend to be limited in scope. which is true for all subculture language really but like in this case, authors of the day who are writing what they know are we think giving a pretty accurate picture of what their actual communities were like... but it’s put through a filter for publication.

by the 20th century urban working class gay men in certain circles are using polari, a subcultural lexicon which came from mid/late 19th century theatre and music hall slang, which came from fairground cant, seafaring , labor slang, Yiddish, cockney, theatre slang, fishmarkets, French, Italian, underground crime rings literally i could go on and there’s lots of debate about this. it’s turn of the century when it comes to be used very widely within the gay community, and while its origins are in london it made it to other uk urban centres fairly quickly. this lasted well into the latter half of the 20th century and is the base for a lot of community slang today, which leads me to

lesbian women, who also used polari, albeit to a lesser extent. these were primarily lesbians who were also in the 3rd camp above - ones who are involved in the community and interacting w/ gay men regularly. (”straight women who work in theatre” is another category of woman polari speakers haha but performance slang went thru many changes and eventually things got p separate so you had fairground & theatre cant and gay subculture slang having similar roots but very distinct in usage)

for lesbian communities the same thing as w gay men applies for the upper classes just to a lesser degree due to the relative lack of a community experienced by women

but a very important point here is that, ESPECIALLY during the victorian period, less so moving into the 20th century, intimate relationships between women are viewed very, very differently than those between men - male relationships have hard and fast boundaries of what is and isnt acceptable, those of women do not.

the development of identity w/ sexuality for women i think in many ways had a lot more to do with women who expressed their gender differently than women who had intimate exclusive relationships w/ other women

anyway the point is there unfortunately is no like comprehensive text for All Queer Language at this point in time, nor for the development of sexual identity, and the nature of this field (linguistics + history + sociology about queer stuff) means that a lot of the good work is in academic articles which i do NOT know off the top of my head. :-( but here’s some stuff !!

LIST OF THE ACTUAL BOOKS SORRY ABOUT ALL THAT

ok so these are all nonfiction, mostly academic nonfiction, but i want to stress that contemporary literature is a REALLY good way to get a (often rose tinted but not always) look into subculture and there are many novels that play with and/or poke at the ongoing development of sexual identity, especially in edwardia, especially especially in the 1920s, so if youve got endless time to read on your hands it is absolutely worth poking around there.

i have a list in the works of 1920s literature that has lgbt stuff in it and i realise thats a bit late for you but even so!!

also: compilations of letters, memoirs, etc are like super super invaluable

anyway ive bolded the most important ones:

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. 1990. University of California Press. [required lgbt theory reading, literally the foundation for soooo much]

Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. 2007. Princeton University Press.

Robb, Graham. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. 2003. [this is like, functionally prerequisite reading for any gay male stuff for the 19th century & robb is an excellent popular historian who also has an actual academic background]

Rupp, Leila J. Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women. 2008. NYU Press.

Russett, Cynthia. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. 1989. Harvard University Press. [touches on things but is not About sexuality/identity]

these are both already on my downton abbey research list but they both discuss language thruout and identity very thoroughly:

Brady, Sean. Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913. 2005. Palgrave Macmillan.

David, Hugh. On Queer Street: A Social History of British Homosexuality 1895-1995. 1997. HarperCollins.

for polari, see basically everything paul baker’s done. the 2019 might be the most accessible but i havent read it yet:

Baker, Paul. Fantabulosa: A dictionary of Polari & gay slang. 2002. London: Continuum.

Baker, Paul. Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men (Routledge Studies in Linguistics). 2002. London: Routledge.

Baker, Paul. Fantabulosa! The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language. 2019. London: Reaktion.

while it predates the era youre asking about, this book is good reading that leads up to the changes of the victorian era in sexual morality & how that affects identity and language:

Donoghue, Emma. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801. 1995. HarperCollins.

also i hate to do this but like. foucault lol. obviously not focused on britain but very much focused on the development of identity and sexuality.

ive been working on this for like three straight hours im gonna go eat lunch now

#da resources #community culture tag

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the-cookie-of-doom · 4 years

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Good morning! Whats your favorite show/movie? Who are your favorite characters? Why do you like them so much? Also!! Did you have a good sleep?

Okay so I was a film major for a while, and I have opinions.

Penny Dreadful

I love this show. Like, so much. I adore it. I can not get enough of that show. Just all of the imagery, and the fantastic writing and acting. The episode intro alone is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Eva Green is a goddess and I love everything she’s been in. The take on classic horror stories is So Good, and it actually became the inspiration for my Gay Frankenstein story! (Started as a stitch AU, and then went completely OC after I had Ideas) but the show itself is so intimate? I think it’s largely that the period they’re in, everything was so repressed and restricted. So when the characters break out of those moments, it’s more meaningful. And the love-hate relationship between Ms. Ives and Malcolm in season one? Exquisite. I could literally write essay’s about this show, but I’ll restrain myself and just say: it’s the best ensemble show I’ve ever seen. The characters come together, but they also each have their own distinct lives that sometimes intersect, but in s2 especially, are quite separate. They are constant with one another like ensemble shows usually portray. Also gothic horror and romance? My absolute favorite.

Anything by Guillermo del Toro

This man Owns My Entire Soul. I’m not even joking, everything he writes and directs is perfection. Crimson Peak is probably my favorite (I have a stitch AU for this too ;) ) because again, Gothic horror and romance. I’m a slut for that shit. Also Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain? Delightful casting. I think it’s obvious by now that I love tragic relationships, so their dynamic is *chef’s kiss* amazing. they’re so damaged. And this quote right here is one of the BEST things I’ve ever read:

“But the horror... The horror was for love. The things we do for love like this are ugly, mad, full of sweat and regret. This love burns you and maims you and twists you inside out. It is a monstrous love and it makes monsters of us all.”

Engrave that on my headstone, please?? I’ve got a sort-of Dorian Gray AU (it’s delightful) that’s basically built on this entire premise. Mitch makes the mistake of falling in love with Stiles, and does many terrible things because of it. Mostly to himself, at least.

I think my love of Crimson Peak is very closely tied with The Shape of Water. another beautiful movie, I could wax poetic about this forever. it was beautifully written, and such an artistic movie. I love the way it was filmed, and the set design, and all of the subtle imagery. Such as Elisa’s apartment being cast in cooler tones, it always felt very damp and had evidence of water damage, compared to Giles’, a mirror image of her own, in more warm tones. This is another one I could (and have) write essays about. There is so much packed into this movie, from the themes on toxic masculinity and entitlement, to the conversation on queerness and race and disability, and how all the various relationships are portrayed. Like. there is so much to pick apart in this movie.

Aside from that, ofc Hell Boy deserves an honorable mention because i grew up on those movies. I’m pretty sure the Golden Army especially is responsible for who I am today, given all the lore on the fae in that universe. Wow, that explains so much about me... Also one of my first WoW characters was an elf named Nuala xD I still have her, too, and it’s been like 12 years lol

Near-Future Sci-Fi

Sci-fi is one of my favorite genres, I am a huge nerd for theoretical and astrophysics. But my favorite kind of sci-fi is the stuff that still takes place on Earth, rather than epic battles in space. Ex Machina and Annihilation are at the top of that list. Alex Garland is another writer/director that I love. He has the same kind of approach as del Toro, where he puts a lot of fine details into his work. And I love that it’s very cerebral; there are so many layers to Ex Machina. My English 101 prof actually refused to analyze it in class when I suggested it to him, because he didn’t think my class could. Basically handle? Dissecting that movie? Because a lot of it comes across as very surface level, but in some cases when you look deeper, it’s actually suggesting the opposite of what you might think at first glance. (And he was right, my fellow students were awful. I miss that class though, it was one of my favorites T_T Mr. Ryder was an awesome dude and super chill.)

Morgan is another good example. As you can see, I fucking love androids lol. Which brings me to another of my all time favorite movies: Cloud Atlas. I could literally watch this movie endlessly, I love it so much. The acting, the writing, the filming, all of it is top notch. And one thing they did in the movie that didn’t come across in the book, was reusing the same actors through the different eras in the book. That was just so neat, because it really encapsulates how connected these souls are, as we follow the threads of their story throughout time. If you haven’t seen the movie, I can’t recommend it enough.

Another one I always think of alongside Cloud Atlas, even though they aren’t related at all, is Predestination. It’s a great movie that explores the idea of fate and free will in a really clever way, utilizes time travel in a very organized way that I think was neat (think Umbrella Academy. They even use briefcases! As you can see, I love sci-fi bureaucracy, it’s fun. In fact The Bureau is another movie I enjoyed) and the main character is actually, explicitly trans, which was cool. You basically get to see the entire story of their life, and I don’t want to spoil anything, but it’s just. So good. Mindfuckery galore.

Shoot, and I almost forgot! Arrival! That is one of the best movies, and another one I could watch nonstop. It focuses on mathematics and linguistics and I swear to god, I almost altered my entire college course because of this movie. Amy Addams is brilliant, Jeremy Renner is so soft and nerdy, and again, it has an amazing take on time travel. I am very particular about how time is handled in Sci-fi, and this portrayal was one of my favorite. (Most of my physics studies have been dedicated to the theory of time, so like. Strong Opinions.)

Fantasy

Stardust! It wasn’t until Good Omens can out that I realized Neil Gaiman is responsible for most of the stories I loved as a kid lol, and I had no idea he wrote stardust! But that is such a beautiful movie (I have a Stardust AU lol) and it’s definitely one of my comfort movies. Captain Shakespeare is one of the best characters ever, bless Robert de Niro. I would die for him. Fun fact, i had no idea Ipswitch was a real place until like. 2019. I 100% thought it was made up for the movie 😂

Alongside Stardust, I’ve always loved The Golden Compass. It’s fantasy, but also with that old-timey steampunk science feel, which is so fun and surprisingly difficult to find!

Mortal Engines also has the same kind of feel, and it was such an epic movie in every sense of the word. I’m a little sad that after all the work that went into it, it didn’t get a dedicated following or fan base, because I feel there’s so much potential in it. But at the same time, fandom tends to gather around media that has plenty of flaws for us to repair with gold, and there wasn’t much room for that in Mortal Engines.

I’m going to put Jupiter Ascending here even though it technically fits with the sci-fi, because that section is long as fuck and also this movie has such a fantastic feel. Mila Kunis? beautiful. The CGI? beautiful. Eddy Redmayne? One of the best villain portrayals i’ve ever seen. The whole oedipal vibe he had was immaculate, as was their portrayal of reincarnation, and just. The world building. GOD. I get so weak for through world building. Also the fkn intergalactic bureaucracy when they’re basically at the space DMV? One of my all time favorite scenes in movie history.

Horror

I have very little room in my life for horror. As I said, I have strong movie opinions, especially when it comes to horror movies. I don’t like how most of them rely on cheap jump scares and overused gore and gratuitous rape scenes, instead of, y'know, actual good writing.

Which is EXACTLY why I adore It: Chapter 1 & 2. It has none of those things, but still manages to be so terrifying. They are my favorite horror movies, and I’m saying this as someone who has genuine childhood trauma bc of the novel. Like. I couldn’t shower/take baths alone until I was almost 10 T_T When I was 6-7 and saw kids play by storm drains, I would run over screaming about how Pennywise was going to get them. Like, I had issues man. I was terrified to see the first one, and wouldn’t go until I could go with my best friend after she had already seen it, so she could warn me when something scary was about to happen 😂

And, one of my favorite aspects of the movie, and the thing that gave me Mad Respect for Any Muschietti? The way he filmed Bev and her father. They have a character who is literally being molested, but they never once have to show it. And yet their interactions are still so viscerally upsetting to watch. Sexploitation puts me off of most horror, and the fact that Muschietti doesn’t use it here, even when it would be actually somewhat justified? *chef’s kiss*. I love him.

I love horror as a concept, I’m just really picky about it because I expect the writing to be good. I don’t like short cuts. But in a lot of cases, even if I don’t enjoy the movie itself, I love to watch analysis videos on youtube! I love to see the philosophy and symbolism in different horror movies, even if i don’t like to watch the movies themselves. It’s a fun hobby.

Misc.

Then in general, some other stuff I love in no particular order:

The Internship (Bless Dylan, Stuart is such a bitch and I love him)

American Assassin (ofc. The writing itself is eh, but Mitch is my man)

Dylan’s episode of Weird City. (I actually have a lot of feelings about this one. Jordan Peele is another amazing writer/director, I really need to catch up on his works.)

Dorian Gray (*chef’s kiss*)

Rogue One (Makes me cry every time)

WARCRAFT (Obviously this is a fav. It made me so happy, words cannot express.)

Coraline and most other stop motion animation. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for that.

Literally anything associated with Tim Burton. Fun fact, when I was 12 and in middle school, I planned to decorate my future house inspired by tim burton. Like, i had Plans.

Most adaptations of Alice in Wonderland!

So! this got long as fuck! But you said you like that kind of thing lol 😂 I had kinda Eh sleep since I was up so late lmao, and I kept waking up (as usual, rip). And I’m so mad I go up for nothing! The dude I was supposed to show my listing to never showed, and is refusing to answer my calls >_> It’s been 2 hours now, and I still haven’t heard from him. But whatever, I already have a full price cash offer on the house so who cares. And that means I can play WoW all day, now!

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bananaofswifts · 5 years

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IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.” Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?” Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

#taylor swift #vogue #article

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hakuryuu · 4 years

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PLEASE I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW (EITHER-OR!) NEW OR RONAH’S ANSWERS FOR THE WHOLE MEME YOU POSTED

NEW 1. How would you (or they) describe their gender, without using standard binary terms?: new would describe her gender as the color the sky gets right before the sunrise gets started in the summer

 2. Are they religious?: no…..sort of…….religion is hard one bc gods like Canonically Exist in this world and she Knows This And Believes In Them but she’s not particularly spiritual and doesn’t have one god she’s particularly devoted to AND because of the memory thing she only like vaguely knows that the gods exist at all so sjdflkjs 

3. What social media platforms would they use (if in a world where those existed) and what would they use them for? Bonus: What would they get cancelled for?: new would probably have an instagram but not use it very much, she’d maybe post pictures of stuff now and again and she likes to follow people who make cool things but i think she would mostly make an instagram account and then forget about it (bonus: paz and caramel are BIG on twitter)

 4. Do they have any weird scars, and how did they get them?: she has a bunch of regular accumulated life-living scars from like scratches and bug bites and falls and stuff, but nothing really weird except for that she doesn’t remember how she got a lot of them 

5. What crime are they most likely to be arrested for?: loitering U__U 

6. Ok, what crime are they most likely to have actually committed?: trespassing 

7. If the one prison phone call thing was real, who would they call?: paz w/o hesitation (paz is the richest and will probably show up with caramel and run anyway)

 8. Do they collect anything? What do they collect?: she collects little trinkets and things! usually small emotionally relevant items that are from or remind her of experiences she’s had (her haircutting knife, that portrait of run in her bag, the small bells off her dress, etc)

 9. Who would they platonically marry for tax benefits?: PAZ……. 

10. What superstition/paranormal entity/conspiracy theory do they believe is 100% real, whether or not they admit it?: i can’t think of anything like this for new im sorryyyyy i’ll come back to this one

 11. What’s something embarrassing they did as a child/teenager?: [REDACTED DUE TO MEMORY LOSS] 

12. What’s something embarrassing they probably did yesterday?: walked up to someone without looking directly at them, assumed they were run, started talking to them, and then realized that they were just a random stranger and not run 

13. What hobby did they try once and give up on? Why?: jewelry-making! she wanted to make more fun earrings and stuff for herself and her friends but she doesn’t have access to many of the right tools for it and the stuff she managed to put together didn’t look how she wanted it to so she just stuck with weaving as a hobby

 14. What niche topic do they get incredibly pedantic about?: SJKDGLF THANKS TO HER LIKE WEEK OF RESEARCH AT THE PIPER TOWN LIBRARY THAT ONE TIME SHE KNOWS SO MUCH ABOUT OLD RICH FAMILIES ON PANSIA…..paz will make some offhand comment about a family the mahaleys work at and new will be like. eyes emoji 

15. What’s their favorite food to make?: she loves apple cinnamon oatmeal and loves to make it from scratch ;__; 

16. What do you think this character’s worst decision was? What does this character think their worst decision was?: New Has Done Nothing Wrong In Her LIFE (SHE thinks her worst decision was agreeing to abandon caramel and run & go with paz when paz left them, even though they ended up turning back pretty quickly)

 17. Is there anything you wish the writers had done differently with this character? Why?: I WOULD HAVE LOVED TO SEE THE WRITER GIVE HER SOME MORE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT IN THE SECOND HALF OF FMFY, I THINK THAT SHE AND ALL OF THE CHARACTERS COULD HAVE REALLY BENEFITTED FROM EXPLORING THOSE NEW WEIRD DYNAMICS BEFORE THE CLIMAX OF THE BOOK, 

18. What character from another work do you think they’d get along really well with?: within my own works (elise nano extended universe) i think that she would get along with maimou from ttsp (he’s that kind of friendly that would put her at ease and draw her out of her shyness somewhat i think), and outside of my own works i have this vague sense that she might get along with charlotte’s oc io?

 19. What character from another work would be their mortal enemy?: not mortal enemy but i think that she and turnadot from lamsm would be at odds because of the like difference in approach they have to everything that’s happening to them and the difference of experience… oh iro i think would get frustrated at her easily i think

 20. What’s a headcanon you’ve always wanted to share but none of these ask memes ever ask you about it?: I Am Constantly Sharing All My Headcanons And No One Can Stop Me

---

RONAH 1. How would you (or they) describe their gender, without using standard binary terms?: you know when you light a fire in the snow at night and the light is orange and the shadows are this bright blue? that color 

2. Are they religious?: yes! they’re a big believer in the moon and the cycle (ironically….. :( )

 3. What social media platforms would they use (if in a world where those existed) and what would they use them for? Bonus: What would they get cancelled for?: gjsdlgjsf i really feel like the closest they have to a social media presence is like. a goodreads account. and then they show up in the background of thrip’s tiktoks sometimes and their brothers reference them in tweets and raiv’s instagram has a lot of selfies with them

 4. Do they have any weird scars, and how did they get them?: the only weird scar they have is one on their thigh where they accidentally cut themself mid-switch between elf and wolf forms and it took forever to heal and it’s BRIGHT red

 5. What crime are they most likely to be arrested for?: grim answer: being a wolf shifter

 6. Ok, what crime are they most likely to have actually committed?: accessory to murder U___U

 7. If the one prison phone call thing was real, who would they call?: they’d want to call raiv, but they would call laithe (they would consider calling bliss “walked barefoot across the country to get out of a witchcraft trial” parvo and then immediately decide against it)

 8. Do they collect anything? What do they collect?: they have a modest storybook/folktale book collection, just a small shelf of their favorites, but they aren’t really the collecting type

 9. Who would they platonically marry for tax benefits?: they would (queer)platonically marry bliss for tax benefits, although honestly bliss is getting the benefit because it means they never have to do taxes again because ronah will do them

 10. What superstition/paranormal entity/conspiracy theory do they believe is 100% real, whether or not they admit it?: probably one that they’re kind of embarrassed about but still believe deep down that lonaih and unaech (wolf shifter folk story cornerstones) are still alive and out there somewhere somehow

 11. What’s something embarrassing they did as a child/teenager?: they were VERY into performing songs and plays and stuff when they were younger, which is something that they feel kind of silly and embarrassed about now (but they still love to tell stories) 

12. What’s something embarrassing they probably did yesterday?: walked around the corner and saw themself in a mirror and scared themself 

13. What hobby did they try once and give up on? Why?: music, because it was impractical…. :( 

14. What niche topic do they get incredibly pedantic about?: LITERALLY EVERYTHING, THATS LIKE THEIR JOB, I LOVE THEM

 15. What’s their favorite food to make?: do you remember that braid of pesto bread iro was briefly eating in the beginning of lle? you might not because i suddenly can’t remember if you read the whole thing or just the kavi chapter, BUT ronah learned how to make that because it’s both iro and thrip’s favorite food

 16. What do you think this character’s worst decision was? What does this character think their worst decision was?: i personally think that the decision to actively assist their family in a scheme to murder a moon goddess for revenge isn’t the BEST idea they’ve ever had. ronah thinks their worst decision was leaving raiv behind 

17. Is there anything you wish the writers had done differently with this character? Why?: it would be cool if the writer had. written the last three to five chapters of the book they’re in. i think that would have been neat .

18. What character from another work do you think they’d get along really well with?: i think that they and kavi would bond over a love of family and stories!! w/i my own works i kind of like to think that they would get along with farfara from tayl. sonia from ttsp would also remind them of their family, and i think they’d like her for that

 19. What character from another work would be their mortal enemy?: this is niche but the bounty hunter from see me through would hate them

 20. What’s a headcanon you’ve always wanted to share but none of these ask memes ever ask you about it?: they used to dye their hair when they were younger!

#long post #CANT MAKE THE READMORE WORK!! RIP #ask #bardcharms #I LOVE UUUUUUU #find me find you tag #long limb ellipse tag #ask meme

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illgiveyoumygavichal · 4 years

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I don’t know why I wrote this, or why I wrote so much. Gomen.

So I just re-watched The Scene while I’m actually awake and coherent and I blasted the volume with my headset so I could hear every little thing and while it’s pretty clear they were filmed separately(?) from a writers point of view, the dialogue and reactions made sense --- not the ‘all gays go to super-hell’-bit... there’s no excusing that, but it was foreshadowed a long while ago (hence why I’m not 100% surprised that The Scene even happened since it was obvious that the character in questions’ ‘moment of true happiness’ would be a confession the moment the deal was made. I still think they’ll end on a ‘reset the universe back to point A to prevent point B’-type to just be like... well you already know the story so even if it’s ending, it’s not really ending but going on and on and on in a paradox because the whole show is convoluted what with the time-travel and parallel universes and other dimensions and shit.

Not my point, I started rambling. Uh... Click the ‘read more’ for more? Gods, I can’t believe this is what spurred a real-ass post from me...

If anyone wants to discuss this, please do. But don’t be an ass about it please, I’m just here to have a discussion.

Anyways, Jensen’s acting was flat. Like he wasn’t into the script at all. Like he totally believed that this went completely against the character he’s supposed to play - and he’s not really wrong, but you can see this a lot in movies and tv shows where the actors disagree with the writing and direction that it’s reflected in their performance.

While this scene in particular seems like the actors were shot apart and chopped together, I think they were both very much in the know about the script. Misha gave it his all, you could hear him thanking the audience for watching his performance. His in-character confession was just as much his ‘thank you’ and it shows - but while his whole speech was likely one good take (probably after a long day, especially since every one working on this show had to work around covid-19 safety procedures) Jensen’s was probably multiple takes, with the good shots being chosen and patched together to make him seem a least a little like he isn’t completely refusing the script.

As for the characters and the writing, it worked. Now I’m no expert in homosexual relationships but I’m very queer, as is my s/o, so I’m gonna try to not stick my foot in my mouth for this part. While homophobia is in no way acceptable, it’s understandable why Jensen isn’t into this particular pairing: The fandom shoved it down his throat, down the producers throats, until it was made canon. One thing that sucks the life out of creators is self-entitled fans. Yeah it’s nice to show your support and love of a content, but you shouldn’t be shoving your ideals for the content into the creators faces. It’s just uncouth.

Rambled again, sorry.

Cas’ speech was wonderful. He clarified his love for Dean by leveling his love for everyone and everything first, and then showing how his love for Dean was stronger than those - but stronger because of them. This way, in describing the care and love he has, Cas can be sure Dean understands that his love for him is a different kind of love without worrying about Dean being confused about his meaning when he’s already gone. Sorry I’m trying to figure out how to word this.

An example for clarification: A tells B they love them, but then they leave/die/whatever, and without clarification B might assume that it was a familial/platonic love - like saying you love your parent/sibling/friend. However, if A prefaced with a confirmation of familial love to B and then confessed their love for B, there is a better chance for understanding.

And from the way we see Dean shut down after the Empty takes Cas and Billie, completely ignoring Sam’s calls (which, after what he just learned from Billie as well as knowing Sam is in pain from losing Eileen - and everyone - is abnormal) in addition to not really moving from where he was thrown and burying his face - while SOBBING - I think it’s safe to assume he understood Cas’ confession as something more than family. Like, we’ve seen them ‘lose’ Cas before and Dean wasn’t as broken up about it as he was this time. Sure he was angry, but he’s always angry - but this time he isn’t angry.

Additionally, Dean didn’t outright reject Cas. He said “Don’t do this, Cas.” Which could easily be interpreted as ‘how fucking dare you confess to me when you’re about to die, thus immediately breaking my heart’ - which, if you’re really reaching for straws, could be a ‘wow, so my feelings would’ve been reciprocated if I actually had the balls to confess - not that it matters because apparently if I did confess you’d literally be so happy you would die.’ Ultimately, it’s a lose-lose-lose situation.

To add on to Sam’s phone call, when we see him hang up after leaving the silo we could assume he first tried calling Cas and then called Dean meaning that since Cas was taken, Dean sat there disassociating and trying to figure out wtf just happened when Sam snapped him back to reality - thus interrupting his compartmentalizing and forcing him to feel, because Dean hates feelings.

And yeah, the whole ‘Bury your Gays’ trope is shitty, but this is Supernatural: a horror-drama tv show where People Die and unfortunately, because most of the characters that die are side characters, the queers die mostly because they’re side characters and side characters are expendable. It fucking sucks, especially now that they are using LGBTQIA+ to boost their views at the END OF THE SERIES. Honestly, would be more acceptable to have it be a thing a few seasons ago, but they also have to work with the actors to even produce the show - and if the staring actor isn’t comfortable with certain themes, they can’t really force him without the show crashing and burning - which, in good old capitalism, a little homophobia to conserve their money-maker is normal. I don’t even know where I’m going with this.

Luckily, this is Supernatural, and Supernatural doesn’t like leaving people dead - even at the end of the series. There are a few possible endings they could go with, but through speculation there could be more without noticing.

A) Chuck taunts the brothers, probably tortures them more just ‘cause, before simply ending everything.

B) Amara somehow takes over Chuck - or they properly combine and suddenly remember why they made everything.

C) The boys give up and accept their fate.

D) The boys don’t give up and go out fighting.

E) Somehow they negotiate with Chuck and exchange themselves for everyone else.

F) Chuck hits the reset button, and this time he’ll make the boys more controllable.

G) The boys kill Chuck, but in the sudden power imbalance, the universe eliminates all supernatural beings and just create a mundane world - whether the boys are part of the world or not is up in the air.

H) Everyone is in the Empty now cause there’s no place left to exist but the Empty - since for some reason the Empty is more limbo than purgatory, but it makes sense.

I) The Empty is piiiiiissssssssed that Chuck suddenly made everything stop existing and then eats Chuck because Chuck will be loud making new things - or because Chuck will be a threat to the Empty... or he just wont let the Empty sleep. God what even is the Empty? Like, really, shouldn’t they be all-powerful - moreso than Chuck - since, without God there is nothing and without anything existing wouldn’t everything/nothing be Empty?

J) Empty eats Chuck 2020 - and the show ends just like that.

K) Chuck, to prevent being eaten by the Empty, brings everything back to put some cushion between him and the Empty - or gets the boys to kill the Empty in exchange for their world back sans God. (Their own little playpen that they can do whatever they want with.)

L) Dean kills Chuck with Death’s Scythe.

M) Sam and Dean somehow kill Chuck and in the power imbalance, replace him. (I’ve had this theory - unspoken though - before where Dean becomes head honcho in Heaven or Hell and Sam takes the other spot, no luck on this one yet.)

Either way, two episodes left to find out what the fuck is going on.

Next episode will be dramatic and sad as Sam, Dean and Jack reconvene - probably with Sam and Jack stopping Dean from giving up. Also, Jack will probably get dusted too - I’m surprised he didn’t go at the end there.

HONESTLY by the title of the episode, I think option K if more likely... but Chuck will probably be like... yeah here take it idgaf anymore. The road home will be very epilogue-y with flashbacks and shit to tie everything up and be all ‘They lived happily ever after.’

I don’t even know anymore... why can I write this much over a stupid show but not for like... a book or something.

#wtf #spn #theories #review #destiel #i guess #what is wrong with me #imagine writing 1.5k words #about a show that's about to end #feel free to interact

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tenbees · 4 years

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1. Why exactly do you think that so many non-lesbians (bisexuals, non-goldstars, trans-identified men--whatever) are so hellbent on trying to call themselves lesbians? What's the appeal? I've tried to figure it out myself and every explanation I come up with falls short somehow. I guess they all have different reasons - obviously it's a fetish thing with the straight men - but it's hard for me to wrap my mind around it all. Why do they want to be us so badly while simultaneously hating

2. us (real lesbians)? What benefits do they get from (falsely) calling themselves lesbians? Whatever "benefits" or "cred" they're getting is coming from a very niche place because it's not like wider society gives a fuck about lesbians. Why are non-goldstars so afraid of calling themselves bi? Sorry to throw a million question marks at you lol. I'm just kind of thinking out loud and am curious if you have any theories! Thanks!

it’s baffling to me too. i do have some theories, but there’s so much... deliberate self-delusion and lying that i would never do and even with the theories it’s hard to believe that people would actually go through so much effort and double think to lie about their sexualities.

i think some people want to be a victim and that the validation comes from wider society hating gay people and not from a more niche source like... actual gay people. they want something to blame their suffering/bad mental health/bad behavior (not that they’d ever admit there are toddlers that behave better than them) on and being the abused underdog gives them a superiority complex. identity politics have really encouraged this mentality that Only race, sexuality, gender, etc give ‘valid’ suffering, so people with tendencies towards disordered behavior (not to sound like an armchair psychologist lol) latch onto them so that their words are automatically given more power in certain spaces. and people telling them that they literally aren’t gay only adds to their victim mentality and self-righteousness.

this bleeds into the whole subculture that’s been made around being gay and how iced coffee, being bad at math, being stupid, not being able to drive, etc is gay. people will act shocked when someone who has a certain tumblr/twitter-esque personality and interests isn’t gay or bi, even though they have literally nothing to do with your sexuality. a lot of queer people are honestly just incels/social rejects and will play up their same sex attraction to find like-minded people online or in their college’s lgbt organization. because if you’re really into, like, dnd, it, steven universe, and moomin..... where else are you gonna find people with those interests? it’s a self-perpetuating cycle of people calling themselves queer to fit into the culture, which means other people have to call themselves queer to fit into the culture.

a lot of people also view lesbianism as a phase--whether or not they consciously believe it or not--and when they decide not to pursue men anymore they’ll call themselves gay to prove to themselves how serious they are about their deliberate disinterest in men--see, i’m even a lesbian!--rather than as a label that describes the state of never having been interested in men. i guess just saying ‘i’m bi but just got out of a bad m/f relationship and only want to date women’ doesn’t sound as finite or like as big of a fuck you to your ex boyfriend. the word lesbian is aspirational for the many bi women who’ve built a culture around hating that they’re attracted to men and for the ngs who say that they hated every sexual interaction they’ve had with men, that they were repulsed by the men they had sex with, etc. calling themselves lesbians gives them a definite out from ever needing to have sex with a man again and comphet helps remove any choice from their actions.

i’ve seen bi people say that the open-endedness of being bi is stressful because you don’t know the sex of your future spouse and that will Greatly impact your future, so calling yourself a lesbian when you’re in a women-only mood probably helps make it seem less daunting (funny, though, how they never call themselves straight for the sake of simplicity).

it’s obviously a fetish thing for men, but i think it is for a fair number of women too. they enjoy turning men on by talking about their sex escapades and they enjoy they thrill of a forbidden affair between a ‘lesbian’ and a man.

for some people i think it’s just ignorance. the majority of ‘lesbians’ have pasts with men and there are a lot of strange takes on lesbianism saying that lesbians can be attracted to women and trans women, that lesbians can be attracted to feminine men, that you can be a lesbian if you don’t feel like dating men anymore, that you can be a lesbian if you see men as good for sex but not for relationships, etc. people may have never been exposed to the idea that homosexuals consistently act like homosexuals and won’t fuck the opposite sex under any circumstances. and when the majority of gay people are bi, it’s easy to see anyone who insists that... gay people are gay and act like gay people...... as having some irrelevant fringe opinion.

it’s probably a combination of those things for most people, and i think it’s almost always about some internal benefit and not a societal benefit, because calling yourself a lesbian obviously doesn’t get you anything on a wider scale. they need to be a victim, they need to prove to themselves that they’ll never be with a man again, they need approval, and calling themselves lesbians helps them get that. but it doesn’t completely get them to where they want to be, because lying about your sexuality is obviously just a bandaid on whatever you’re actually dealing with and because Actual Lesbians exist. our very existence invalidates them and proves that they’re faking. so they try to rewrite what it means to be a lesbian in such a way that they fit in and they despise actual lesbians for effortlessly being what they want, or just because they’re genuinely just homophobic under all the identity soup--they’ll call themselves lesbians, use their status as lesbians to declare that lesbians like dick, all while being a regular homophobe who thinks that exclusive same-sex attraction is disgusting.

#wow im so longwinded #Anonymous

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thetypedwriter · 4 years

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Only Mostly Devastated Book Review

Only Mostly Devastated Book Review by Sophie Gonzales

You know those feel good movies that are short and sweet and fun while you’re watching it, but mostly forgettable? You all know what I’m talking about. It’s the experience of something that is fine, enjoyable even, but largely unnoticed on the grand scheme of things?

Only Mostly Devastated is like that.

Now, before the fangirls attack, let me just say that what I commented above is not an inherent criticism. Not every novel that I read, or people want to read, has to be a masterful prose full of epistemological queries and agonizing philosophies on life.

Sometimes you want something sweet and fluffy, like cotton candy, to fill in the times when your brain needs a break. A good book does not necessarily equate to a challenging book, although English teachers in school will have you believe otherwise.

Sometimes books can just be fun.

Only Mostly Devastated tells the queer book version of Grease, down to allusions making its way even on the front cover. The plot is basic in its storytelling. The main character, Oliver, is staying in North Carolina for the summer with his parents as they help out his aunt while she receives treatment for cancer. During the summer, Oliver has a not-so-summer-fling with a boy named Will that both think will end when Oliver moves back to California at the end of the season.

But lo and behold! Oliver’s parents decide to stay in North Carolina for a year to help out, forcing Oliver to spend his last year of high school far away from home and unbeknownst to him, attend the same high school as his beloved Will from the summer.

However, predictably, Will from summer and Will the basketball player that Oliver meets in high school, seem to be two different people, with Oliver trying to reconcile why the boy he loves is pretending like he doesn’t exist.

This book...isn’t original. In any way, shape, or form. From the plot, the characters, the dialogue, and even the writing, nothing about this stands out too much to me.

Again, this does not make it a bad read, sometimes you want light and easy and predictable, but it does make it a forgettable one.

The plot is fine. It’s sturdy, it works for what Gonzales is trying to achieve, which is mainly the love story between Will and Oliver. She does try to throw some other things in there, like putting a side character who is struggling with being bisexual, another side character with PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), some light stuff on body image, other airy commentary on fetishizing people’s sexualization, and of course, the death and loss of a loved one and the grieving process that goes with it.

Now, you might be saying, wow, thetypedwriter, what are you thinking? That is so much stuff that she put into her book! Incredible! How can you call it shallow and predictable?

Well, for one, the book is short. While again, nice for those readers who want something light to carry on their way to tan by the pool, great, but for those readers who want something more, this can be frustrating.

For an in-depth reading experience for any of those themes above, hitting the tip of the iceberg would be putting it lightly. The book skims the surface of those topics, but they aren’t delved into in any semblance of sophistication or depth that would actually make this a more memorable read.

Reason two, Sophie Gonzales does come across quite preachy sometimes.

Now, this can be tricky so let me explain. Putting forth your agenda or your beliefs and values in a book is not an erroneous thing to do. Actually, it’s an amazing thing to do and people have been using books as a form of expression for these types of things for centuries. Some may argue that the intrinsic value of a book is to express such opinions.

However, this is not Sophie Gonzales’ biography, nor is it an opinion article about how she feels about the fetishization of girls kissing girls for male entertainment. When you are going to put your opinions and beliefs into your book, it needs to make sense in the scheme of the characters.

For example, if J.K. Rowling randomly had Ron go on a speech about women’s rights and toxic masculinity, it would be out-of-character and baffling since Ron would not be the character to say such a thing.

However, if Hermione were to give such a speech, the ideas and beliefs would be passed along, message received, but without breaking character or pulling me out of the universe to think what the hell because a sermon came out of left field that held no continuity in the scheme of the novel as a whole.

This happened to me quite a lot in Only Mostly Devastated. It was like Sohpie Gonzales got to a certain point, told her characters to step aside, and then got on her soapbox to preach about love and acceptance.

Once again, I’m not against any of the messages she’s portraying at all.

What I think lacked finesse, however, was the way in which she got those messages across, which was often out-of-character and forced the plot to go certain places just so she could get the chance to talk about those issues.

With that out of the way, other slight criticisms I have mainly are to be found with the characters and the writing itself.

The characters were all likable enough. I’m not about to go write fanfiction about any of them though. They were largely generic, although entertaining enough for what this book is offering. They were also all pretty forgettable and formed pretty forgettable relationships as well.

Do I really remember any of Will’s friends? Nope. What about Oliver’s girl squad? Kind of? I did appreciate the attempt at including more characters of color, including Will.

I do think that Lara was the most interesting character. I honestly would have preferred to have had a whole novel about her rather than told from Oliver’s point-of-view, simply as Oliver is basic as all hell (white boy that plays guitar and is slightly awkward. I’ve only seen this character about 10 million thousand times before).

And if Gonzales had written this novel about Lara instead, all of her themes would have worked infinitely better. You still get the struggle with sexuality, you still get the side POC characters with PCOS and body image issues, and you could still have the plot of loss and death if you wanted to.

The friendship with the girls would make so much more sense, the fetishization topic could have been delved into way more thoroughly, and Lara was kind of a bitch, and I appreciated that about her. You would even still get a musical person in the form of Juliette even without Oliver on the scene.

But, nope. We get Oliver. Which is...fine. Mediocre, but fine, I guess.

Lastly, Gonzales is a perfectly average writer. The story flowed, it was funny, it had its moments of nuance and sarcasm, but there were moments where she would make comparisons, always with similes or metaphors, that left me literally confounded because of how bizarre and out-of-place I found them.

Some examples:

1. “Up close, she smelled like sugary flowers.”

-I’m sorry, but what do sugary flowers smell like? Why are the flowers sugary? Who would even sugar their flowers in the first place?

2. “Deep inside my chest, my heart was beating as though it was trying to tear free from bondage.”

-Just...an extremely odd choice of words. Why bondage, Sophie Gonzales, why?

3. “I’d rather floss with barbed wire, than watch a live sports match…”

-Ummm eww and scary?

I could go on and on with the frankly awful choices for comparison that are made in this book with incessant use, but I think you get the point. The similes and metaphors were downright baffling. Not really sure what Gonzales was going for with them, but...no. Just no.

Lastly, Oliver’s nickname Ollie-oop made me want to curl up and die. It didn’t make them seem like better friends. In fact, the whole rose gold-girl-group and Oliver was such a dumpster fire of a friendship that lacked any and all actual solid foundations for a relationship that it annoyed me, especially in the end when Oliver decides to stay in North Carolina to be with people he’s not even close to.

Additionally, the inclusion of Oliver’s two friends from back home was just...pointless, utterly pointless. I don’t even know why she bothered to write them into the story honestly. They added nothing.

Again, her themes are good in nature and provocative in theory, but the book was just too short and shallow to justify writing in any of it when really all she cared about was Will and Oliver sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G. It was almost like fanfiction, but published. Actually, nope, I think fanfiction is better.

Wow, I guess I had more feelings about this book than I thought, mostly negative too.

Once more, I want to heavily emphasize that I DIDN’T HATE IT. It was a super, light, super cute, very simple book that I’m sure a ton of people will appreciate right now with everything heavy going on in the world.

If you need a book in cloud form, this is your novel. But....if you wanted something more like me, if you found it just a little too simplistic in nature, just a little too forgettable, then that’s okay too.

Recommendation: If you’re too burdened down by carrying your sunscreen and your cooler out to the pool, this is the perfect light summer reading to tuck under one arm and melt your worries away for a little while. If you want an actually good, actually complex and refined LGBTQ+ coming of age novel then I’d definitely go for the likes of Red, White, and Royal Blue or Autoboyagraphy instead.

Score: 5/10

#only mostly devastated #sophie gonzales #ya fiction #YA Books #YA literature #LGBTQ fiction #book blog #books #book review #Book Recommendations

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