#even tho everyone conflates them and the fact that they are SUPPOSED to be the same character

[shoot-i-messed-up]

Oh my god someone please draw what a MAWS version of Jon, Kon, and Kara would like!!

[urdreamgirls-dreamgirl]

i saw that review on letterboxd of all the rhetorical questions for barbie and like… the more i think abt it, the more i’m certain that the review’s author fundamentally misunderstood the film. barbie land is not a utopia in the way that adults would think abt a utopia, like the author seems to imply… barbie land is canonically shaped by little girls playing with their dolls. that’s why we see a supreme court. thats why there are nobel prizes and authors and lawyers (also because that’s how the toys are marketed… would there be a mermaid in ur utopia??? there would be in mine!). that’s why barbie and ken don’t necessarily know what a boyfriend and girlfriend are “meant” to do (not to mention that the author’s assumption that sex is fundamental to a romantic relationship is problematic at best). that’s why barbie is indifferent to ken (i personally had the life size barbie and my sister had the barbie dream house—we had the working woman barbie game, i had the genie barbie gameboy game, we had countless barbie dolls; we didn’t own a single ken doll lol). barbie land is a world created by and for little girls as they play with their dolls (she says in a comment on the original post “don’t little girls play with their dolls in a sexual way?” and yeah, sure, some do. but i didn’t and i’m sure there are others who didn’t… just like there are some girls who completely mutilated their own dolls and made them into horrifying creatures)… that’s why stereotypical barbie starts having an existential crisis—because a grown woman begins to play with her doll again and starts reshaping barbie land… we, as the audience, are meant to understand this as an outlier to how barbie land is canonically created. the author also calls ken “crass” and “slovenly”… maybe after he builds the patriarchy in barbie land he becomes “crass” but i wouldn’t call him slovenly at any point in the film (i suppose this is just semantics tho).

also, please stop saying that barbie land is a reversal of the real world. it isn’t, even if that may have been the filmmakers intentions. again, barbie is indifferent to ken. she does not abuse him, she does not treat him like he exists to service her by cooking or cleaning or providing other favors for her… barbie does not oppress ken in the way that men oppress women in the real world (we have no idea if he owns property or where he lives and she doesn’t seem to particularly care—extremely different from the fact that women couldn’t have their own bank accounts or credit cards, get a mortgage on their own or divorce their husbands through no fault divorce until the second half of the 20th century in the us… within a lot of our mothers and grandmothers lifetimes!!!!) and it is a complete disservice to conflate or equate the two. we actually see barbie drawing clear boundaries around her time and space in regards to ken—this is not a reversal of misogyny as women and girls experience it in the real world, by any stretch of the imagination.

is the film perfect or revolutionary or radical? of course not. it was produced by major studios and corporations in hollywood. of course the barbie movie is a fucking commercial for barbie, like… to expect anything different is just extremely dumb on your part if u saw the trailer, saw the marketing, saw the interviews, bought a ticket, and sat ur ass in the theater, like be fuckin serious. but don’t do women and girls a disservice by discrediting the world and thoughts and ideas it could open up for them by seeing themselves be taken seriously on screen in a major summer blockbuster with stupid fucking questions because u want to feel superior to everyone else because YOU and ONLY YOU see through the capitalist marketing of lipstick pop girlboss feminism (especially when juxtaposed with the way the female characters are treated in oppenheimer, which we cannot help but compare to the barbie film with the viral marketing of barbenheimer).

[graffitibible]

Do you have a Danger Days timeline? Because I am trying to make on and I am STRUGGLING

i do, though i’m still building parts of it. rn it goes from the 1960s to the 2030s so it’s like...a vast stretch of time that devolved into alternate history. i can’t share the whole thing because Spoilers but i use it to keep track of world events and character ages and stuff and i’ll probably share it once i feel like i wouldn’t like...give away massive important stuff by doing so lol

if you want a hint tho? make shit up. i seriously honestly just shuffle shit around as much as i need to in order to make it make sense because i will tell you this: this timeline is NOT consistent. like in the slightest. it is not consistent between the music videos and the comics, and it is not even internally consistent in the comics. 

if you want to know how MUCH bullshit the danger days timeline actually is:

the may death never stop you trailer puts 2019, explicitly, as the year that everything Happens:

California, 2019. In the final days of The Helium Wars, and shortly after the disappearance of Australia, Better Living Industries unveils Battery City: a shining utopia free of decisions and emotion, and capital of the entire remnants of America. A triumph threatened only by a young orphan girl with a terrible secret. Running from the Corporation, she befriends four freelance anarchists, children born of violence and rock and roll.

like you mean to tell me that battery city was established and somehow got a LOT of political and social capital in the same year? possible, maybe, but i’m not sure how plausible that is - especially if a word-of-mouth revolution as widespread and culturally ingrained as the killjoys have been around for at least as long. the final days of the helium wars (which canon often conflates with the analog wars for an extra layer of confusion - were they the same war? who knows!! the lore never tells us this!) happened at the same time?

when the comics came out, it added a whole nother layer of mindfuck. the phoenix witch calls the fabulous four “teenagers” despite the fact that they were played by fellas in their thirties. for my part, i placed them somewhere in the middle age-wise, varying from late teens to early twenties - young, but not in middle school.

but we can chalk that up to a lot of things - dawson casting, the fact that mcr was playing characters younger than them and not merely versions of themselves, etc. but that bit of weirdness pales in comparison to the timeline for the girl’s age in general.

she was “born on the battlefield” according to the phoenix witch, so her mother couldn’t have given birth to her that much long after she was caught and turned into a drac. so, let’s say 2015 at the latest. even putting aside that 2019 was assumed to be the year that the music videos took place, the timeline we get in the comics is utterly nonsensical. if the girl was born in 2015 at the latest, that means that she would be twelve by the time the killjoys were exterminated in the comics timeline, 2027. all this despite the fact that she was a) young enough to have forgotten their faces once at age fifteen, and b) the fact that the comics estimate her age to have been around six when she was with the fab four.

on TOP of that, the comics claim it to be the “twelve year anniversary” of the death of the fabulous four, and no matter what the girl’s age was when she ran with them...why would she be fifteen?? that means that she was three when she was with the killjoys - not six like vamos posits, and not twelve like the comics timeline would claim. she would be eighteen at the youngest, but the comics puts her at fifteen - and that file we see up there is supposed to be present day since it mentions cherri cola and the ultra-v’s, both of whom the girl only got tight with during the events of the comics themselves and not before.

in conclusion: the canon timeline we get is inconsistent as fuck so we all decided Fuck That and started making shit up

at least that’s what i did lol. like, you are straight up not going to be able to come up with a timeline that follows every piece of canon we get and makes cohesive sense. i have tried, and it’s...it’s a lot. it’s a headache, and it’s not worth it. i have no idea why the timeline is so fucky in this canon and at this point i have chosen to shuffle around when things happened for the sake of consistency without sacrificing the events themselves. i put the death of the fabulous four at 2019 in spite of the comics timeline, for example.

what makes it easier for me is to visualize the whole thing as like...a story. which obviously it is a story but visualizing it as more of a legend or myth that’s being told through different versions and by different narrators. different people have different pieces of the puzzle and different people will remember things and when/how they happened differently. for someone, they remember the exact date of something and know when that event happened. for someone else, they remember only pieces but guess at a date at random. it’s like a story being told through different perspectives and as it’s passed down and down and down, certain things get lost, rewritten, moved around, and outright forgotten.

the phoenix witch and bl/ind are not reliable narrators - they emphasize different parts of the same story. the ultra-v’s are not reliable narrators - they weren’t there when the events of the music videos happened. cherri cola is not a reliable narrator - he was emotionally involved in a lot of aspects of this history and blames himself for certain things beyond his control. the girl is not a reliable narrator - she doesn’t remember a lot of the earlier parts, by her own admission.

the timeline doesn’t make sense. i chose to move things around while retaining what happened but not everyone does, and i don’t blame them lol. i wanted consistency so i just decided to start doing it myself cause uh this timeline sure is a Lot

so in short go hog fuckin wild and make up when shit happens because this canon is allergic to consistency

[urfavmurtad]

What are some things about Judaism and Christianity that you learned that surprised you? What about polytheistic religions like native american animism, Buddhism, Shinto and Jainism? Zoroastrians? Baha’i? Yazidi?

Anon this is… such an in-depth question! Idek where to begin here. Of all those religions, I have learned the most about Judaism since I stopped being religious. What I knew about Judaism prior to maybe 5 years ago was mostly just what Islam says about Judaism. Meaning, you know, from Adam to Moses, then it skips ahead to David/Solomon/Saul, then there are some brief mentions of Jonah and Ezekiel and that’s really it.

So I didn’t know a lot, and I wasn’t very interested in what I did know tbh. The only reason why I started reading the Bible is bc I wanted to compare it to the Quranic versions of the stories and see how much Mohammed fucked them up. And that was fun but I didn’t bother to look much further into Judaism past that. The Books of Kings and Chronicles, for example, I took one look at them, decided they were boring, and didn’t read them until only a couple of years ago. That’s when I first got into the whole Biblical history thing. I tried reading a book about how the Bible was put together and realized I didn’t know enough about the Bible itself to even begin.

I forced myself to read those four books and then some of the prophet books (side note: all of the female prophets were left out of Islam, I didn’t even know they existed. Damn it Mohammed!!!). And I’m glad I did, because it changed my whole view of the Jewish Bible. It’s a history book!! Like… that’s literally what it’s supposed to be, a (legendary) history of Israel/Judah, and every bad thing that happens to them is ascribed to YHWH getting pissed off at them, but then like my friend and her trash boyfriend he always forgives them and takes them back even tho they just go on to disappoint him again. The Bible is the world’s oldest and greatest self-drag!!!

Once I actually knew the general chronology of the Biblical kings and shit I could actually make my way through this book without getting confused (mostly). Highly recommend this one for beginners btw, there is a PDF online and it’s not overly long.

And damn… I know there’s some debate about certain elements of it like the exact nature of the “documentary hypothesis” but even just focusing on the stuff that people agree upon, I didn’t know any of it before reading this, beyond there being no evidence for the Exodus/the huge kingdom of Solomon etc. I also knew that early Judaism was a system where multiple gods existed but YHWH was just their patron god, but I didn’t fully understand the process in how he got conflated with El and became the god.

More relevant to this topic, though, I didn’t understand the history behind the Bible itself. Deuteronomy being written separately/earlier than the rest and the Bible claiming that it was “found” in the Temple after like 900 years in Josiah’s time… like I had never even heard of Josiah prior to a few years ago and here I am realizing that this bitch perpetrated fraud that would make Linda Taylor proud. Tf. AND, the whole thing with Judah being way, way less developed than Israel, and Israel was actually a multi-ethnic and prosperous society, but then after the Assyrians handed Israel its ass the Judeans were suddenly the top bitch in school and wrote the whole Bible to make their former northern neighbors out to be assholes?? Wow Team Israel tbh.

Then when you get to the time of the Babylonian Exile tho you have to feel a bit bad for the people of Jerusalem, like the Babylonians were uncommonly dickish even for their time and the ppl of the city were clearly traumatized tbh… a lot of the stories in the Bible, especially those believed to have been added only after the exile, make a hell of a lot more sense when you realize the huge changes occurring in Jewish society at the time. The transition from “there are lots of gods but YHWH is our god” to “YHWH is the god” is completely understandable when you realize that people were searching for some explanation as to why they had all been uprooted and thrown out of their homes, and the obvious explanation is that, yet again, they had pissed YHWH the fuck off by worshiping other gods.

I feel like both Christianity and Islam (but especially Islam) try to separate many of Judaism’s better-known stories from the context of ancient Israel/Judah itself, presenting them as more universal stories that apply to everyone, but tbh the whole over-arching story doesn’t work unless you look at it as a history written by and for Jews who were rebuilding their religion and society in a volatile period. I’m reading this rn and it’s relevant to that topic.

It’s truly a damn shame that pretty much like 0% of Muslims have been exposed to any of this tbh? I feel like almost all scholars of Biblical history come from non-Muslim countries. I have more feelings on this subject but let me answer the rest of your question. First of all, Christianity. I read the New Testament in full a couple of years ago as well. It was obviously way easier to read because the Gospels are all different versions of the same story and the rest is just supplementary material, basically. I think the text itself is pleasant and Jesus was a chill dude. I like him. And the whole… sequence of events made much more sense after I’d read the Book of Isaiah and realized that the authors of the Gospels were viewing Jesus in light of those prophecies. Revelation is a fascinating shrooms trip. The Acts of the Apostles were fun to read, but all the letters were just like w/e. More historically interesting (if they’re real) than interesting in terms of content. Though I do think some of the content in them is very nice, idk if people know this but Muslims think Paul was responsible for perverting the (non-existent) “real” Gospel of Jesus and paint him very poorly. But I dunno, the letters seemed fine to me.

Tbh I was surprised to see how different Islam’s version of Christianity/Christian stories is compared to the “real thing”. I don’t even mean his disastrous misconceptions of Christian theology but just like… with the stories Mohammed pulled from the Jewish Bible (and the Talmud–which I also enjoyed flipping through btw, it’s like a bunch of old guys yelling at each other in written form), he gets details wrong but the overall stories are basically the same. But with the Christian stories, barely anything in the Quran is from the Bible. I think I’ve said this before but like 90% of the stuff pulled from Christianity in Islam is about baby Jesus, not adult Jesus, and even that stuff isn’t from the Bible. It’s understandable when you realize that he was listening to these stories, not reading them, and just picked the ones he liked best… which happened to be later texts. That brings me to a subject that is near and dear to my heart:

Apocryphal texts bih. I love this shit, with full sincerity and zero irony. The weirder it gets, the better. I started out just reading the ones that made it into the Quran, like the Life of Adam and Eve, the Infancy Gospels that I’ve mentioned before, and the Testament of Solomon. Then some Gnostic stuff, which I only read because it has the same substitute-crucifixion thing going on as Islam, but WHEW chile the DRUGS these ppl were on while writing this shit…! The Sethians and the Nag Hammadi library produced such treasures of crazy-ass literature. It makes me sad how so much of this stuff is just totally forgotten now that Christianity is mostly just Catholic/Protestant+Orthodox. There were so many sects and people had so many divergent ideas, some more drug-assisted than others probably!! And Middle Eastern Christianity was very diverse even in the 7th century. Some of the stories they produced had such rich lore. My fave right now is this Syriac collection:

I came across this one while looking for the origins of the al-Khidr story in the Quran. There were all sorts of opinions about who he was, bc Mohammed never really gave any details on his life, but Ibn Ishaq recorded an opinion that al-Khidr was the one who buried Adam and Allah granted him long life in return. So I looked for the source of that story and it was the story of Melchizedek in this book. Then I read the whole thing and man this would make for some weird psychedelic series or sth. It’s online, look it over and you’ll see how trippy it is.

Um… anon this is getting rly long tbh so let me sum up my knowledge of Shinto, Native American animism, and Jainism: not much!! Buddhism I have only an intro-level knowledge of, I know the basics but I don’t know more than that. The beliefs of Yazidis I don’t fully understand, but the little I know is pretty cool. From what I understand it’s a blend of pre-Islamic Kurdish religion + early Islamic influence + some other influences thrown in. It’s sad how they’re branded as devil-worshipers or w/e when the story of Melek Taus is actually really interesting and has a good moral and is way, way better than the story of Iblis. I also enjoy Yazidi architecture and that unique ribbed cone top of theirs. I hope they’re able to live on as a community after, uh, recent events.

I actually was taught about Bahai people growing up but I was told it was some heretical offshoot of Islam comparable to Ahmadiyya people. I didn’t realize it was considered its own religion until fairly recently tbh. I did read the Kitab al-Aqdas (which is blessedly short, this makes Bahai a great religion automatically!!) once. It’s definitely super inspired by the Quran in terms of style and to me clearly seems to be an attempt to make a Kinder And Also More Iranian Islam. I think it’s pretty neat. In fact I think a lot of attempts to magically make Islam “nicer” would just end up making it more like Bahai tbh. And it has a really fascinating history, with the Bab basically being a new John the Baptist and Bahaullah being the one he foretold. He even accidentally ended up in Israel lmao. I also really love Bahai architecture in terms of how diverse it is, with the only unifying feature being visual interest, and I would love to see the temple in India irl one day. India always has the best architecture anyway.

I saved Zoroastrians for last bc I have to be honest here. I tried to look into it, because it’s ancient and had an influence on Judaism etc and that makes it important. Fam I got about 3% of the way through the Avesta before giving up. I was still in the hymns part and just like… every other word was something I didn’t understand. I will go back and try again one day but for now the answer is “lol idk”.

ANYWAY… yeah… I’ve enjoyed reading about religion way more now that I’m not religious, both in terms of Islam and other religions, I can appreciate the process or w/e now that I’m not constantly trying to make it fit into Islam or panicking every time I spot something that makes me question my faith. I know a lot of atheists either fall away from religion altogether or just look at it like it’s something dumb, but even if it’s fake, that doesn’t make it worthless imo. The history itself is always worth studying.