#complex media

[prokopetz]

I mean, treating yaoi as the opposite of yuri just doesn't make sense mathematically: boys are not the inverse of girls. The actual opposite of yuri would somehow have to involve fewer than zero girls, and that's not an easy thing to characterise.

[whalesfall]

btw. your search for the most morally upright and ethical piece of media that has the most correct “representation” will destroy your ability to find the most profound and beautiful and human of stories. and may even destroy the stories themselves before they are created. if you even care.

[cowboycannibalism]

one of the things that annoys me so bad right now is seeing letterboxd reviews about Lisa Frankenstein being like "she's such a horrible character", "those people didn't deserve to be killed" blah blah blah

SHUT UP

it's a horror romance!! a girl keeps a reanimated dead guy in her closet and falls in love with him! what did you think was going to happen? it's SUPPOSED to be fucked up and weird and that's part of its charm. quit being boring, let female characters (esp in horror) be messy and chaotic and morally gray.

[macdenlover]

i really can not stand the “fandom is so fun we’re all just projecting and making shit up” thing. because no i actually deeply admire the canon of my favorite media and all the intention and care and craft put into it. we are not the same.

[ilynpilled]

will always be super annoyed with the implication that art delving into an evil person’s conscience or internal conflict is bad because it is being overly sympathetic towards them. that is not exoneration. the whole point is that regardless of their humanity (that, yes, evil people ultimately have in real life) they continue to make the choices that render them irredeemable. it doesn’t turn into less of a condemnation. depicting complexity ≠ manipulating the audience into forgiveness. i keep seeing the accusation of the latter being thrown at media that is very clearly only doing the former

[koobiie]

phantom of the beijing opera

[categorysixkaiju]

Porco Rosso (1992) - dir. Hayao Miyazaki

[dumbfucksystem]

i keep thinking about the fact that unlike sy (who never even thought about how his family might feel about him dying), airplane actually had the option to go back to his family and ultimately decided not to.

like imagine being a parent and finding out that your child chose a life that didn’t have you in it.

just think about the guilt that his parents must have felt when they heard the news. each of them are enjoying time with their new families, but they haven’t spoken to their son in a while. he’s in college though so he’s probably fine. he’s not reaching out saying that he needs help or money or anything though he never asked for much when he was home either.

then they get the call. and they find out that he died alone in his apartment. he was electrocuted while trying to salvage his laptop. and they think he didn’t have to die this way. he never asked them for anything, and now they know that he desperately needed them. he never mentioned how much he struggled, and maybe he would have if they had been in contact more often. but they were too caught up in their own lives to pay attention to him.

no parent should have to out-live their child, but they distanced themselves so much from him that they couldn’t even be there for him when he died.

cough your child could have lived a long, happy, & healthy life and eventually die of old age surrounded by people they love. but instead he died when he was young and alone because he didn’t feel comfortable sharing his problems with you cough cough

[lackadaisycal-art]

Not to go off on one but I can't believe social media has just repackaged the idea that women are unstable and thick and irresponsible and bad at maths and airheaded and pretty and spend all their money on clothes and make up but because they've slapped a fake feminist buzzword on it and a woman is making the video they've made everyone think it's a new wave of female liberation, I feel like I'm going mad

[mischiefmanifold]

autism is not just social anxiety and being awkward and having an interest

ADHD is not just being fidgety or loud

some of you need to do some serious research on these conditions before claiming that you have them, because it’s getting exhausting correcting people’s misinformation

[k8lynjoy]

I genuinely want to know what show the people who say that Aang never respected Katara are watching. "Aang never let Katara feel anything other than what he wanted her to feel" "He idealized her" "He didn't care about her feelings" "He didn't support her the way she supported him". WHERE ARE YOU GETTING THIS FROM??? That's a rhetorical question because I already know what episodes/moments they're using to make those assertions (The Southern Raiders and the kiss in Ember Island Players), and even then, THEY'RE WRONG.

Let's start with TSR. This episode gets so misinterpreted it's not even funny. First off, Aang was never even upset with Katara in this episode, he's just warning her against killing someone??? He never gets mad at her or berates her. He just talks to her with a level head??? He openly acknowledges that he knows and understands how much rage and pain Katara is in, and he never tells her that she shouldn't feel it, he just advises her not to act rashly because of it??? Where is the lack of respect? Where is he ignoring her feelings or getting upset with her for not acting the way he wants her to? He lets her take Appa and even tells her that he understands that this is a journey she needs to take and supports her doing so, he just doesn't want her to kill someone. Honestly Aang shows more respect for Katara by knowing who she is as a person and not enabling her in her revenge than Zuko who is only going on this trip with her so that she'll forgive him, not because he actually cares that she's upset over the death of her mother (and this is not Zuko slander before people take it as such, I love Zuko, but it's not even subtext that his motivations in this episode are selfish and not about Katara).

As for the kiss in EIP, yes, it was not okay. Yes, it was a mistake. Yes, he shouldn't have done it after Katara laid a clear boundary, but he recognizes that immediately. After Katara- rightfully- gets upset with him, he gets upset with himself. We also see that he never repeats that mistake again and is fully okay with letting Katara lead after that. Which is why it's Katara who initiates the final kiss on the balcony. And if you still don't think he learned anything from it, he starts to ask for her consent in the comics before kissing her, showing that he absolutely DID grow from that mistake. So, we're really going to let one moment where a 12-year-old boy made a mistake dictate the entire show and negate everything that came before it??? That's coocoo banana's behavior.

I also think that those assertions are completely baseless because when does Aang idealize Katara? When does he hate her rage? When does he not support her? Is it when he laughed with her after she stole from pirates? Or in that same episode where he constantly reaffirms her skills as a waterbender- first by saying that he's able to pick it up so easily because she's a great teacher and then later when he refers to her as a waterbender which makes her so fucking happy? Is it when he gets so upset that Pakku refuses to teach Katara how to waterbend that he tries to walk away from his own waterbending training? Is it when he goes behind Pakku's back to teach her anyway? Or when he stands by actively cheering her on when she's raging against the patriarchy and fights Pakku? Is it when he calls her Sifu Katara because she expressed that he referred to Toph that way but not her? Is it when he helped her commit ecoterrorism and told her she was a hero for helping the people in that Fire Nation village? Is it when he holds her after she breaks down because she learned how to bloodbend? Is it when he comforts her after Jet's death? Is it... you get the point, don't you?

Aang recognizing Katara as someone who is strong and capable is not him idealizing her. Him not enabling her committing murder is not him hating when she feels rage. Aang actively supports Katara's rage on multiple occasions, he just doesn't enable her when he knows she's acting out of character. If you don't ship Kataang, that's fine, but please don't make up baseless accusations to try and tear them down just because you're mad that a ship that had no basis in canon (potential is not evidence) wasn't canon.

[lilith-91]

Reducing a complex character like Aang and his storyline to just "he's nice" is so painful

Atla fandom are just not able to comprehend his arc because it’s not as spoon-fed to the audience as zuko’s, and that’s sad.

[bethanydelleman]

Speaking on the Ellen Show, Knightley said her daughter (who was born in 2015) was “banned” from watching Cinderella, which Disney produced as a cartoon in 1950 and a live-action film in 2015. “[Cinderella] waits around for a rich guy to rescue her. Don't. Rescue yourself!

Says the woman who starred in a trilogy that said, "No murderers and theives were good actually because they wanted freedom."

[uncanny-tranny]

The frustrating part about conversations like "should people with self-harm scars warn others before showing off their body?" and conversations like it is how nobody would tell me that my scars are obscene or should be hidden despite, literally, being self-harm scars. They just do not know because people literally do not know what self-harm scars are and what self-harm is.

Our bodies are not vulgar or gross. We deserve to live our lives, and if our scars make you uncomfortable, we can be compassionate about that, but that doesn't mean that our bodies are Bad and should be Locked Away. Treat us like we belong, because we do.