#but in the mainstream.. different story

[mxbitters]

i really liked the barbie movie but i don’t like the way some corners of the internet have been taking it honestly. like theres this really weird resurgence of gender essentialism i’m seeing reinforcing pink and dolls and glitter and such as something only for girls and women and as a collector who’s trans and very much not a girl it’s uncomfortable seeing this happening like,, stereotypically “girly” things have been stigmatized for so fucking long and now that somebody’s finally addressing it it’s still only considered acceptable in the mainstream if it’s done by like specifically cis women??

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[fuck-off-im-ace]

Kinda hate that the same people who fought so hard to bring Warrior Nun back now have to warn others about the shifty things happening with the project.

[chirpsythismorning]

I just remembered they devoted a whole scene to Mike and Will burying a dead body for no reason other than to poke fun at—

[aplpaca]

"wanting fiction to be relatable is selfish" my dude you can advocate for people getting outside of their own perspectives (a good thing) without implying that the human desire to be understood and empathized with is vapid and bourgeois

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

if you have some, do you have any headcannons for barnaby?

honestly! not really! i don't have hcs for any of the neighbors!

[surprisinglydomestickakashi]

My favorite part about being still into Naruto is the way I'm into it means I frequently have to tell algorithms that I don't actually want to consume Naruto like they want me to. Don't give me bland voice over theories from people who need to be reminded of minor characters. I need my clinically not-normal girls, gays, and theys to talk with about the little side guys they have entire lives mapped out for, the interpretations that include their favorite filler episode because they like it and above all else people who don't shit on the women characters or only consider them, annoying and useless or waifu material.

[gibbearish]

maybe this was common knowledge and ive been severely out of the loop but the fact that russel t davies is gay is kind of rocking my world rn?

[kimbapisnotsushi]

i for real think bnha should be academically studied honestly

[salora-rainriver]

Its really funny and weird how, of all the european pagan mythologies, greek is the one white ppl know the most of by far.

Like, of course it makes sense, greco-romans were hailed as the peak of civilization by white european elites at least like, twice in history, but it’s still really wild like. We’ll know the names of every olympian and what exactly their deal is, know like 20 different random greek monsters who only appeared in like One Story,

but then u ask abt the british isles, site of a people who would eventually colonize the fucking world, and its like “uhhhhhh theres morrigan? Also some fairies. Is morrigan a fairy? I think there were some tree worshippers. Some dudes put blue paint on their body and had big shields i think?” and a book’s gonna claim there was an irish potato god and you’re going to believe them bcs you’ll be so wrapped up in the potato famine thing that you’ll forget potatos were IMPORTED FROM THE ANDES MOUNTAINS.

And then like folks will be familiar with like 4 norse gods maybe 5, know some words like asgard and ragnarok, but ask them who fenrir is and theyll be like “Is he important?”

Also if you ask them about germanic mythos they will draw a fucking blank bcs even tho the general public are familiar with at least a few germanic mythos things, we completely stripped out the germanic origins from them when we called them generic “fairy tales.” Same for france and the iberian penninsula i think. Also dont ask me which fairy tales come from where bcs i am a prime example of this, i do not fucking know, i just vaguely remember that they came from certain places and then spread from there.

Oh And absolutely FORGET about anything east of germany fucking forget about it. The slavic regions have a rich mythos and even ppl who are pretty knowledgable abt the stuff i said above won’t know shit about it, case in point, me! Go ahead! I know a bunch abt celtic stuff and norse stuff and a lill bit of german stuff, but ask me to bring up ONE slavic story! The only thing my brain is cookin up is that one about the lindwurm, and even that one i cant remember if its actually slavic!

Now Think abt how many white people claim heritage from places in europe that arent greece and italy. Think about how little those same ppl know abt their ancestor’s prechristian stories and beliefs. Im hispanic i know like one thing abt pre-christian spain and its that they had a funny word for fairies (i don’t even remember the name!), just as an example. Like isnt that fucking insane? You’d think a buncha colonizing douches competing with each other to take over the world would put a bit more effort into educating ppl abt the ancestral stories that set these guys apart from each other, but no, not really. And like dont get me wrong its not like this doesnt make sense. It does. The roman empire and later christianity overtook like all these myriad cultures years before colonialism and white supremacy was even a pipe dream, to say nothing about the internal strife that happened in the iberian peninsula and the british isles.

But at the same time, in recent years there’s been massive pushes to recover this lost culture (especially in those british isles places that arent england), and even with this effort, so much is unknown to a fuckton of people who, i repeat, claim heritage from these places. (In fact, one of those efforts probably set us back bcs it got caught up in bullshit ideology and mysticism and grabbed stuff from totally different people to support a bullshit point. Looking at you, nazis.) and it’s just kind of insane. Overall this is just a peak example to me of the hollowness and artificiality of the concept of whiteness. The master race can’t even remember their own ancestors, and ancient history had to be wiped away or made generic in order to support the notion that these people have something in common, and thus, something setting them apart from everyone else.

[tired-reader-writer]

Is it just me or is the Ascendance of a Bookworm fandom on Discord kinda rotten

[fleshblight]

Unpopular opinion: not every story needs a movie/show adaptation.

Some of not most books and graphic novels are better as books and graphic novels. Part of the allure of written fiction is that total separation from the real world and no amount of special effects will ever match that

So idk maybe create original stories specifically made to be told in the medium of film instead of recycling stories that have already been told perfectly well

[mzannthropy]

Do you ever feel like you’re so conflicted about so many things and then it strikes you that you were born between gen x and millennials and never could relate to either (more on gen x side, though) and you were born in a country that was communist and then suddenly wasn’t and then you moved to UK and are soon coming to the point where you’ve lived half your life in each country...

No? Just me then.

[n0thingiscool]

Shitty MSM watchdog entry:

One of the worst crimes of the mainstream media is watering scientific information down. Conflating preprint with fact and playing tricks with calling nothing more than an opinion a factual "study."

The mainstream media are extremely aware the average US reader has a base reading compensation level at the 3rd grade and so when they make science confusing and based on opinion, you have to assume it's done on purpose.

Three recent examples of scientific misinformation come from The LA Times, something called "Phys org", and Google News. The Times had a scientifically illiterate writer cover the OPINION of one single neurologist and then published the poorly written thing titling it as a "study." Then the Wish version of science news called Phys Org picked the story up and republished it as fact. And then Google picked it up from Phys Org and is sending the opinion piece out to American readers as fact when buried in the article they kind of clarify there's no actual study. But by this point of the article the writer and news publications have conflated the value of a real peer reviewed study with some old man who works in health's opinion. This confuses the reader and fucks up their already low level reading comprehension especially relating to science and critical thought. It's got to be on purpose.

[ruinreads]

everyday everyday I curse the dengeki daisy author making the main leads' ages being so icky while meandering down the romance line

[inkskinned]

no, actually, where is the whimsy?

my ex had a best friend named larry who asked me once: what do you think comes after irony?

we were at the bar where larry worked. it was a quiet night, and he'd hopped over to sit with us on the patron side. i swirled the lemon around my limoncello martini.

earnest positivity, i said, while my ex said, art self-destructs.

i stared at my ex. he stared at me.

his argument was the cinemasins argument: look how bad media is becoming! look at the loopholes and the dumb shit!

it was roughly 2011. galaxy print was still in. at the time, i had a favorite shirt that was a wolf howling at the moon. it got ripped in half in the wash and i honestly still mourn it. i dressed like effie stonem, because everyone did. and irony was the name of the thing. men liked MLP "ironically." the internet liked the kind of crass, "anti-mainstream" vibes of things like fuck romance, touch my butt and buy me pizza. we put cats in sunglasses everywhere, which was because we only liked things in irony.

and media had the same vibe in it: anti-hero white men would be "hard to love" and then storm off the scene. nobody was just earnestly trying to save the world: they were jaded, angry, unoriginal. mad you even asked them to try to help.

my ex ends up not being wrong. cinemasins becomes super popular. a lot of people start viewing media with this lens that is the cruelest, most jaded depiction. it's wrong for your character to have unexplained powers, even if the entire movie is about how strange it is she has unexplained powers - that is still considered a "loophole." characters make thoughtless, panicked choices? loophole. characters are actually kind people, despite hardship? loophole. features a woman doing literally anything without assistance? loophole. movies become hyper-aware of scrutiny, and now irony rules the media.

which means you go to a movie, and the character has to turn to the screen and say "beats me!!" or one of the side characters has to have some kind of quip like "are you seriously telling me that you think this is normal?" because nothing can happen in earnest. like a sitcom laugh track, we now anticipate the fourth-wall break: the moment that the media acknowledges it is telling a story. the media has to apologize for itself, or else someone like my ex rolls their eyes.

but here's the thing: i wasn't wrong either.

the difference might be that i am (and always have been) so soft-hearted that any crack in the light of this world will spear me into the ground. and i was the poet in the relationship. (he thought that was the same thing as being naïve and stupid). i was making things daily. i knew how all of us artists are driven by some strange desire to evolve. he notably liked to critique art, not to create it.

so yes, i've made things that are bitter and angry and even ironic. i've made long, sharp poems with all capital letters, and i've made poems about how the silence stretches out like a song. someone wrote once that we will spend our whole lives just circling the place we grew up. i think it's more that we spend our whole lives trying to remake a home. i think it's that as we age, it becomes less exciting to build the castle on the beach - we become aware of erosion, of windforce. we realize what we really want is to come home to our dog, castle or not.

and while art in the foreground is mired in white male violence and irony, and aggression, and not taking anything seriously - i don't think that's true of all art. i think more and more artists are leaning in to the things we love. the world has changed so much. they have taken so many things from us. the only thing we have left is love. at the bottom of the moving box - all we get is the faint sense that we have to appreciate what little we've got. i can't enjoy this stuff ironically anymore: what room do i have for irony? if it makes me happy, that is an amazing thing. there are so few happy places left for me. i want to be happy because of how leaves shiver beside each other like nestling birds. i want to be happy because of the color pink, and how magenta doesn't exist. i have spent so much of this life suffering, i have earned my right to a gentle ending. if nothing matters, i get to assign meaning to the nothing. i get to create meaning. i am an artist first and foremost, which means creation is my thing.

where is the whimsy? wherever i fucking put it. because if this is my last fucking chance to do any good in this world - i want to do it earnestly. i want to write things that make you happy. that make people feel heard and seen. what comes after irony has to be positivity.

it was close to my 21st birthday. in 7 years, i would end up writing a book about this relationship, which is hopefully coming out somewhere around May 2024. i come back to this bar scene in my memories a lot. i keep thinking of how pale my ex was. the look that crossed his face. how i looked back at him. how for a moment, both of us couldn't recognize the other person. like the gulf between us was a suddenly wide and cavernous thing. like we were alien to each other. he never took my opinion seriously, and he always seemed surprised whenever his manic-pixie-dream-girl ever broke free of the plot. like in the whole time we were together, i wasn't human enough.

this knowledge: where he said nothing comes after, my only instinct was what comes after is love.