#but yeah I shouldn’t have done that bc that meant I was operating on a Significant Sleep Deficit yesterday and still had a lot of tasks

[lightblueminecraftorchid]

Me, yesterday, 5:30 PM: wow I’m honestly doing so great at my adult tasks; I’ve gotten some homework done, I went grocery shopping, my laundry is almost dry. I spent so many spoons and I barely feel tired! Maybe I’m finally fully recovering from burnout!

Me, yesterday, 6:00 PM: oh.

[touchmycoat]

on Promising Young Woman

i was hesitant to watch bc i knew a spoiler, but @trixree convinced me to watch it and i’m very glad i did. all things aside, it’s just damn well-written—pacing’s top-notch, every act shift was action-driven with a female lead, and it balanced the pleasure of a revenge fantasy against the soul of the story SO well.

thoughts & spoilers below

elephant in the room: yeah I hesitated to watch the movie because I know Cassie gets murdered in the end. After watching the scenes that followed, I...have a better understanding of why that was the choice. I still hated that it happened, period. I literally said “fuck you” out loud to the morning after shot, with the sunlight pouring down on her in the white outfit and she had her arms outstretched—yes, she’s a martyr, yes, she’s the “morning angel,” but fuck that, I didn’t need her to be a martyr. I so desperately wanted the movie to give her more than that.

Like Jenna and Wesley said, it was a superhero movie. That lasted until the choice to kill her.

Thoughts on why they did it: for the ironic morning after, where the audience sees not-Zac Efron sob and whine about how he’s going to lose his marriage and family and job after he just knowingly murdered a woman. Where we get to see Schmidt (fnjdnfjdnf what a casting choice, i lost my mind) say the words to Al Monroe that women like Nina needed to hear—it’s not your fault. None of it was your fault. We get to see the violent and continuous forgiveness of men that dead girls have and continue to pay for.

But my question is, what part of the movie managed to give the audience comfort that legal authority is the solution to this problem? The ending felt squeaky clean wrapped-up, yes, but the anxiety that ran deepest for me throughout this entire film was the fact that Cassie was leaving these men alive. All the men she’s found in the clubs, the man whose car she smashed, the entire law firm that specializes in burying rape cases—to me, every man she left alive was one more factor that could come back and bite her. That was my concern, and it was by no means alleviated by the scene with Bo Burnham and the detective right before the wedding.

I guess that circles back to the question of what the film is trying to be, though. It’s a different take on a revenge thriller. It isn’t meant to deliver a smash-burn-kill catharsis. Rather, it operates on a realer level. Which I love, actually! When she told the fedora guy that she’s not the only one who does it, it felt like a very enticing call-to-action lmao, and like a moment that ought to haunt the “good guys” that watch this film. The movie did so well to manifest and deliver the “enough is fucking enough” attitude that everybody ought to have about sexual assault under the influence.

More on why they killed Cassie: to really lean into the specter of Nina who has so haunted the entire narrative. Even handcuffed to the bed, Al Monroe never said the word “rape.” Nobody wants to, they keep skirting around it and refusing to acknowledge it for what it is. That’s why the movie does it for us, the audience. Instead of saying it, the movie gives its thesis on what rape actually is—a murder. A squeezing-out of a woman’s existence. Al Monroe rapes and kills Nina Fisher before the start of the movie, and the movie ends with Al Monroe killing Cassie. It ends with the violent burning of Cassie’s body, and fucking Schmidt kicking her hand with the childishly painted nails back into the bonfire. The parallel destruction of women is evident.

Did the ending feel like enough of a resurrection?

On a fandom level, I am happy to do the work of seeing the Romance in it. Cassie evidently anticipated her own death, perhaps even sought it—it’s easy to picture a fic focused on Cassie’s thoughts pre-bachelor party, where she’s just so happy to finally be joining Nina again. Where she gets to sign a text Love, Cassie & Nina. I fucking adore how much of an agent she was in the action throughout the entire movie, and the ending definitely did some work in resurrecting that agency.

On a real life level though, I’m so, so fucking sad she essentially had to commit suicide to get the justice she sought. She really is a martyr, but no part of the story indicated she was happy to be. There’s no relief in what she chose—it was simply what had to be done, because nobody else would do a goddamn thing.

Oh boy, the movie did so well to play Ryan as a good guy up until the very end. When time came for him to own up to his mistakes, he flipped like a fucking dime. Suck it #NotAllMen.

The evocations of childhood were interesting. We have the notebook, the scrunchie, the pink bedroom, the childhood photos, the juice box, the friendship necklaces, the painted nails. What is that doing?

- It’s a visual touch point for the arc words “we were just kids!” used as a protestation by rapists and assaulters to excuse their actions. Men get to be “kids” who made mistakes, women get repeated insistence that their actions have consequences, that they shouldn’t have gotten that drunk.

- It signifies Cassie’s vulnerability, her childhood best friend that she’s never been able to move on from. Functionally, I thought it was a brilliant way of grounding how tender the center of her story is, that she’s actually operating from a very simplistic point of pain and loss, considering how cool and violent she gets to be throughout most of the movie.

- It becomes a symbol for destroyed innocence when it’s the last bit of Cassie we see before her body’s burned. The movie re-positioned the meaning of this word “innocence,” I think. It’s not about women being ruined after rape, it’s about these women being people. Cassie’s last monologue about Nina does so much work to hammer that home—Nina’s value was never about innocence before or after her assault, it was never diminished. She was loved because of who she was as a person, but Al Monroe squeezed the life out of her anyways. Childhood and innocence become about the happiness that existed before men attacked, and the men get to symbolically destroy it one more time with a kick into the pyre. But then comes the resurrection, and in a way, the movie returns Cassie to that happiness with the last texts she got to sign with her best friend and a winky face.

The penitent lawyer was a hell of a narrative choice. I did accept it, and I like it mainly for what it showed of Cassie—that she is capable of forgiveness. By putting the scene with Nina’s mother right after, it transitions Cassie into a spot of hope pretty damn effectively. I also like that it didn’t take Cassie’s emotional labor to get the lawyer to that place, and that he was already self-flagellating (the dead plants behind Cassie in that apartment were a great touch) before she got there. I like the possibility that Cassie could have forgiven herself for not being there for Nina.

That’s why I’m so damn mad she’s dead!!!! She recognized how destructive her pattern of behavior is, and put an effort to stop that for herself and for her relationship with people she cares about. Yeah, Ryan proved an asshole, but it wasn’t even about him!! She laid it clean out for that guy!! No forgiveness. He was not an innocent bystander. He does not get to get away with anything, and all the ways he chose to behave after the fact just further proves it!

Cassie was stunning, and dangerous, and incredible. Narratively, she really could have gotten away with it. I don’t want to buy this finale, that it takes the destruction of another woman to bring justice to the first. I don’t care how neatly framed it was, that was not a happy ending.

[luobingmeis]

note after making this post: so i might be throwing a bunch of bs rn but this post kinda became the representation of me spiralling down the rabbit hole of theories and becoming this picture

note (part 2): i deleted this post but im posting it again bc i have no shame and also cannot shut up abt anything

okay so i just finished relistening to the newest amnesty episode and between that and @zinglebert-bembledack ‘s post from last night, i’ve been doing some... thinking

and, i’ll be the first one to admit it, but this might not be a hot take? i haven’t seen anyone say this yet but i don’t know if this could be considered obvious or not

but what if the monster... isn’t a shapeshifter in the way we have been thinking it is? like, with “shapeshifter,” i’ve been seeing it as “it sees a person/kidnaps them, and is then able to mimic them”

but, i mean, it’s a little more precise than that, yeah? it has memories that it did not experience itself and can mimic voices perfectly, among other things

so, what if it’s a shapeshifter, but more than that? what if it’s a hard-drive?

i mean, okay, again, idk if this is something that other people have already been thinking, but, looking back at this monster, it would make so much sense if this thing was, above anything else, a storage device. it trapped ned in its own “network,” which only billy was able to break him out of (which i’ll cycle back to) and, as many others before me have stated already, cycled through ned’s memories

also, not to read too deeply in it, but it does act sorta like a computer program/one filled with a shit ton of, like, malware or some shit? it’s incredibly digitalized, it has access to knowledge that it technically shouldn’t have and can reason like an AI, it can “wipe out” memory (since dani cannot remember where she was the night of the attacks), even the fact that it can step through rifts in reality gives a vibe like that. and, i mean, for shit’s sake, it has a literal virus! it has a virus that is making it glitch!

this now brings me to some other things that have been standing out to me

(smh im putting more thought into this post than i am into an essay i have due in a week)

1) the monster, when talking to ned, mentions a “partition,” and then reveals that it’s billy. in the post i linked above, op mentions that that is a very particular word to use and, well, turns out that there is a computer-geared definition for the word

partition: each of a number of portions into which some operating systems divide memory or storage

so, what could this mean? honestly, this is the point that still makes my head hurt, because does that mean that billy actually knows this abomination? or is of the same caliber? i honeslty don’t know, but considering that a lot of things surrounding this monster are very digital (from the music to the way it acts), i don’t think it’s just coincidence that griffin used a technical term like that

2) the monster, when talking to ned, states that it is “breaking protocol” and that if “other bodies” found out about what it was doing, they’d be pretty pissed

i feel like that gives the implication that this thing has an... agenda? that it has done something like this before? and the mention of “other bodies” (which that in itself is really weird wording to use if it just meant other people) makes it seem like this thing is... reporting back to something?

hence, if this thing is truly a hard drive, that means that it is just gathering information for a bigger thing.

like, what if this monster is a henchman, like how billy was? what if this thing, time and time before, has been sent to other worlds to destroy it, to gather as much information as possible, and then just bring it back to something much bigger and much more dangerous?

2.5) so, going on the hypothesis that this thing might be working for something bigger, and that it has done this before, and that it has caused war in other places, where the fuck has it been before? has it shown up in other places where the gate had shown up before? can its rifts change worlds? could this thing be related to the war that destroyed minerva’s planet? ik this might be reaching, but it did tell ned that its job in kepler is almost done, and say that job was to start a war between humans and monsters, then could it have been connected to what happened to minerva’s planet?

3) i don’t know how but i still feel like whatever the fuck happened with thacker in that one episode is super connected

4) okay, this one might really be me reaching, but something that has been stumping me all along is that this thing knows what the pineguard’s next steps are gonna be. it knew that they were going to be at the morgue. it knew that aubrey was going to be at the cryptonomica, hence putting all of ned’s stuff back. and i’m 99% sure that there have been so many other things that this thing just knew was going to happen

ik there has been a small theory going around that, in the slightest chance, this thing might be indrid cold, but i really doubt that. because, let’s say this is right and that this thing is a hard-drive and is geared towards acting similar to a computer, not to get super down the rabbit hole here, but a huge part of a computer is kinda... assuming ahead? there’s auto-correct and auto-fill for search engines. websites know what to advertise to you based on other sites that you’ve been on. again, ik this is probably a bit farfetched and i’m feeling this theory slip through my hands bc i’m talking so gd much, but i’m kinda in that phase where i’m talking now and i can’t stop

and, again, i know this might have been obvious, and i get that, so i apologize if i’m stating stuff that people already knew, i just can’t help but think that this monster is definitely Big Picture related, but i don’t think it’s The Big Picture that will segway us right into finale territory, i still think there’s something left in between this and the end

[marinsawakening]

2 3 4 and 7 for ur meme >:3 let the salt come forth

2: Most amatonormative ship?

UHHHHH of all time??? or just in FMA??? oh shit should’ve probably thought this one through before making the ask meme lmao

okay so I’ll do in FMA first because it’s the easiest and uh. that’d be alm/ei. there’s literally no reason for either al or mei to have a love interest, its clearly used as a gag in canon, it was pretty much 100% onesided in canon, but for some godforsaken reason the fandom just?? loves it???? and considers it canon that they’d get married later in life?????? I mean I’m not gonna say that Arakawa wouldn’t agree with that but. she and everyone else is would be wrong. Al is aro and Mei is lithro and they try a relationship post canon but it doesn’t work out bc they’re arospec babe so they decide to be good friends instead and its a relief for everyone involved and that’s the truth.

Of all time…. that’s tough. I’m gonna go with Ca/leo (calypso/leo from the heroes of olympus franchise) even though I’m sure there’s worse things out there because I remember being FUCKED UP MAD when good ol’ uncle rick decided to pair off literally the only character from the original series that didn’t get a love interest because that was LITERALLY HER ENTIRE POINT and then decided to pair of leo because amatonormativity I guess AND THEN decided that they wouldn’t actually work as a couple so he just fucking. changed calypso’s entire personality. and I don’t mind that change much bc I like her better in HOO but YOU CAN’T JUST CHANGE CHARACTERS YOUR NOT HAPPY WITH RICK ESPECIALLY NOT FOR A ROMANCE THATS NOT HOW IT WORKS. anyway im still salty about HOO can you tell.

3. Most amatonormative ship fic trope?

*slams my fist on table* HANAHAKI DISEASE. yes I know that the aro community as a whole is really Done with soulmates and I totally understand and respect that (even if my own feelings are a lot more complicated) bc they’re amatonormative as heckie and much more widespread but like. the entire concept of hanahaki disease is ‘if someone doesn’t love you back you will get TERMINALLY ILL” and I mean??? who the fuck???? thought this was cute????? seriously what the fuck.

4. What popular ship has the least chemistry?

Well I already used alm/ei so and I’m disqualifying ro/yed on grounds of wanting to make this fun so…. pissing people off lets go with edw/in. it sucks. its bad for winry’s character development and completely superfluous to the story. we gain absolutely nothing by having ed and winry be romantically involved. they work way better and are way cuter as friends, and we would lose no story beats whatsoever except for the proposal at the end which was awkward as fuck in my opinion. like if your ship contains canon dialogue like “were his shoulders always so broad” (or something either way it was winry busing about Ed’s shoulders which…. is that a thing? that I missed?) and “wait at home and bake me an apple pie” (again, something among those lines), that’s…. not great chemistry. sorry you guys i just don’t see it. 

7. Which ship discourse is the funniest?

*pulls out my time in the VLD fandom* LET ME TELL YOU A THING

(under the cut because this shit is too fucking long)

okay so for the most part the VLD fandom wasn’t actually…. that bad. I mean it was childish and volatile as fuck and everyone was really hostile to each other don’t get me wrong, but honestly, it’s not the worst fandom experience I’ve ever had, and once I managed to carve out a little niche for myself it was pretty enjoyable (also a lot of the fans were autistic which. neat). 

but there was one event in that fandom that just fucking. killed me. and I’m still not over it. 

so once every three months or so (on average, sometimes it’d happen multiple times a month and sometimes it’d say quiet for months on end) we had some Major Bullshit happen that got on top of the regular ship wars. sometimes it was something a cast member (Pidge’s voice actress, usually) had said or reblogged, sometimes it was new age ‘confirmation’ that just added wood to the fire of the regular discourse, sometimes it was a new Hot Take™ on the show that everyone loved for a while until someone inevitably pointed out that it was ooc/problematic/etc. and then everyone hated it, etc. etc. pretty standard volatile fandom stuff, all things considered, with the vast majority of the discourse having valid points but being taken way out of proportion because of the sheer size of the fandom.

the shaladin discourse is definitely a good example of that. the main point of the anti side in that discourse is ‘hey don’t ship shiro with the other paladins he is an adult and they are teenagers’ and the point of the anti anti side is ‘don’t tell me what to do you pearl clutching purists’ which. i mean im clearly biased here. but the discourse was blown so far out of proportion, primarily because, again, this fandom is too fucking big, but also because a lot of people involved in the discourse were kids themselves. you basically had a bunch of 14/15-year-olds who by and large haven’t quite mastered critical thinking yet yelling at each other in debates that got very emotional very easily. (not saying this to be condescending, lord knows we should all be happy that I wasn’t into fandom when I was fifteen or I would’ve 100% been the person going ‘well actually it’s called ephebophilia get your terms right’ so we all dodged a bullet there. but im just saying that, historically, young teenagers don’t have the best trackrecord for rational, calm discussions, and it really showed.)

so, why am I taking the time to tell you all of this? so that you have proper context to how stupidly ridiculous this discourse was on a regular basis. many (most) of the people in this fandom seemed to totally forget that, while telling people not to ship pedophilia or stuff like that is generally pretty important, it’s ultimately still fandom bullshit and doesn’t really, actually matter that much in the grand scheme of things. it very quickly became a very strong ‘us vs. them’ mentality on both sides that resulted in actually pretty seriously toxic behaviour like death threats (although the anti side definitely had more of a tendency to go witch hunting after people, shaladins were absolutely not exempt from Bullshit, as you’ll see below). like i shit you not we were all genuinely waiting for the time someone would get stabbed irl over it or something, it was so tense.

and at some point, at what I consider the height of this stupid discourse, came Operation Shalanonymous.

I might be getting the name wrong, but they genuinely called it something like that, with a serious graphic behind it. I shit you not. This whole thing was so, so surreal.

Operation Shalanonymous was literally a spyop. A 15-year-old shaladin (and maybe some others, I don’t remember) who at the time went by the url ‘theblackguardianofsheith’ or something similar (they deleted, to my knowledge, and I hope they’re living their best life) pretended to be an anti and went ‘undercover’ in an anti discord server, with the purpose of ‘exposing’ the antis for what they really were. they gathered a bunch of screenshots and such, and then released them all as ‘damning evidence’ onto Tumblr, claiming that they showed evidence of sexual harrassment and hypocrisy, among other things. 

I can’t remember all of the accusations, but some were pretty serious, so I took the time to go through the screenshots and found… very little. there were some distasteful remarks here and there in the form of ‘i wanna kill [insert shaladin]’ that the mods shouldn’t have let slide, and a childish, kinda sexualizing derogatory nickname for the shaladin in question in the form of ‘hunty’, but those two things were really the worst of it. yes, this behaviour was bad and the mods shouldn’t have let it slide or participated in it, but all in all? not worth an entire spyop. if anything, what I found much more damning was that the shaladin (who, as a reminder, was 15 as well) had written a couple of little notes on the screenshots drawing attention to some particular messages of a then 13-year-old anti who said they had a crush on shiro. the notes themselves would’ve been nothing more than childish IF that same 13-year-old hadn’t just come out of a massive dogpiling attack where they were repeatedly misgendered and accused of wanting to have sex with adults themself despite them being a csa survivor. so attempting to throw back to that discourse to ‘prove’ some kind of hypocrisy was distasteful at best and honestly, it did not make them look very good.

so yeah. as you can imagine, the discord members and mods took that very well, and just. for a while, Operation Shalanonymous was this actual Thing, where shaladins were crying that the antis were finally exposed and the antis were accusing the spying shaladin of sending graphic rape porn into the chat to shock users, which the 15-year-old shaladin refuted by saying that they were attempting to get them to do something about it (apparently they were trying to get it taken down or something, but I genuinely have no clue why they thought the antis could help with that, but then again, this whole situation was so far-fetched and there was little evidence provided that this was actually ‘graphic rape porn meant to scar csa survivors’, like the antis claimed either, so like. i don’t fucking know), and accusations went back and forth for a while. it was a mess.

and this, this right fucking here, is hands down the most childish, most distasteful, most useless ship discourse that I’ve ever encountered. not only did someone actually take the time and energy to pretend to be an anti for quite some time in order to ‘spy’ on antis, they also decided to, in all seriousness, release the screenshots under the actual fucking name ‘Operation Shalanonymous’, dropping them like they were the fucking panema papers. like guys??? you know this is the fucking voltron fandom, not goddamn wikileaks, right???? these are not state secrets you’re releasing. they’re screenshots from a fandom chat. it. doesn’t. matter. that. much.

there were some genuinely horrifying things that went down during this whole debacle, and I probably shouldn’t find it as funny as I do, since this really was a prime example of how toxic people can get when they think they’re in the right, especially when the person in question is a teenager (who, again, don’t have the best track record for emotional regulation and foresight). but I just fucking can’t take this shit serious. you gotta remember that a 15-year-old was mostly heading this thing, and it really shows; the whole entire set-up and pay-off was just overwhelmingly childish, and it makes me so, so glad that I wasn’t into fandom at that age, because who knows what shit I would’ve pulled. and I just can’t stop imagining what everyone involved will think of this shit when they’re in their twenties or thirties. because god. ship discourse does not matter this much, guys. it really, really doesn’t, and this whole debacle was nothing but an embarrassment for everyone involved. 

so anyway that was hands down the most ridiculous ship discourse I’ve ever witnessed, thanks for coming to my history lesson.

[milehighmechanic]

my headcanons concerning spidrman under the cut, including how i’m gonna write certain things on this blog. spoilers, obv

so the whole relationship between pete and tony would have gone a hella lot better if tony had been upfront from the start -- he should have explained to peter that he doesn’t want him out fighting the really bad guys because he doesn’t want him to get hurt, not because he doesn’t think he’s capable. and, the most important reason tbh, is he wants peter to have a chance at a normal childhood. tony knows better than almost anyone else just how SHIT life can be when you’re a superhero. he wants peter to have the chance to have a normal high school experience, etc. (i totally believe that when tony was a kid, he was envious of the other kids who got normal childhoods. bc tony certainly didn’t get one.) not to mention peter is just a teenager. 

and yeah tony shouldn’t have let peter think at the start that he was gonna be a full-time avenger. that was kinda shitty of him. but i seriously doubt tony was thinking straight right then? i’m not sure whether that scene is meant to be between berlin and siberia or just after siberia, but either way? tony’s going through shit. his best friend nearly died, is paralysed in hospital. he’s under pressure from ross. he may or may not have just fought with steve about his parents. it doesn’t excuse it, but tony’s shitty decision making here is understandable.

and it’s clear in the movie that tony does care, that he’s paying attention to peter even if he’s failing to actually get in contact with him. there are plenty of things tony says in the movie that imply he’s listened or been informed of all peter’s reports, and remembers and pays attention to them. i personally am gonna at least partially interpret it as tony is trying to keep peter at a distance to keep ross away from him. tony doesn’t want to get peter embroiled in this war with ross. doesn’t want to risk peter that way. 

honestly the whole ‘full-time member of the avengers’ offer at the end was totally kinda questionable imo. and it definitely doesn’t fit with the way i play tony. so. in my interpretation, tony never expected peter to accept. it wasn’t a ‘test’, it was more tony acknowledging that peter is amazing and capable of being an avenger, and making sure that peter is aware tony knows this. tony knows that peter’s not gonna want to leave his aunt and his friends to come and be a full-time avenger, not now. (maybe tony’s even been waiting to make the offer until he knows that peter’s NOT going to accept it. which is manipulative af, but with good intentions soo?) 

sure, he had the press waiting there, but that’s because if peter did go against all expectations and say ‘yes’, he didn’t want to have been lying to the kid. he knew he and pepper could think up something else to say (tony’s proposal plan lol). 

ALSO ignoring the idea that tony just sold avengers tower --- in my canon, all he’s done is revert it to being Stark Tower, and moved all Avengers Operations to the compound. he lives at the compound most of the time now, but he spends a lot in the tower with pep too.

anyway, maybe this isn’t entirely canon but it’s how i’m gonna write tony bc it fits in a lot better with how i play tony.