#have you not paid attention. is queerness only real to you when it involves men

[absoluteabsolem]

black sails has been on netflix for five minutes and i'm already seeing the worst takes on twitter. every day i am given more reasons to gatekeep things

[unrestedjade]

Baseless Ferengi headcanons no one asked for and that get increasingly queer-navel-gazing and self indulgent because the horrible space goblins have consumed my brain:

- Mobile ears, because if hearing is so well developed and important to them they should be able to aim those big stupid radar dishes. Also because then they can emote with them and that's cute. THE AESTHETIC IS PARAMOUNT.

- Since they canonically sharpen their teeth with chew sticks and sharpeners, their teeth must grow continuously. So I submit: subcultures that let certain teeth grow out as a fashion/political statement. Ferengi punks and anarchists with 5" tusks. Ferengi with all their teeth filed flat (mom and dad HATE it).

- Corollary to the above, most of their teeth are crooked. At the least, they don't share our fetish for straight teeth. What if their teeth are deciduous, and there's no point in trying to force them into perfect alignment, since they'll just fall out and get replaced? So like, sharks but their teeth can also grow longer with no limit. WHAT HAST EVOLUTION WROUGHT ON FERENGINAR :V

- Parents nagging their kids to sharpen their teeth "or they'll grow up into your brain and you'll die :)"

- Personal space? Don't know her.

Okay I need a cut because there's too many now. WHOLE SOCIETY OF GAY HOMOPHOBIC UNCLES AND AUNTS GO I HAVE A PROBLEM

- I can't remember who on here put forth the idea of them having retractable claws but Yes. :3

- Pushing back against the worst canon episode a bit but: relative ear size being the only obvious sexually dimorphic trait, and even that having enough of a gray area that the only way to be 100% sure you're talking to a male or female Ferengi is if you do a blood test. Unless they're intersex! *shrug emoji*

- This is why they're so fanatical about gender conformity and their Victorian "separate spheres" attitude to men and women's roles. Capitalist patriarchy is fragile! And as artificial to Ferengi as it ever was to Humans! (self-indulgenceeeee about gender shiiiiit)

- You know how with domesticated rabbits, the rabbit getting groomed and paid attention to is the boss? Yeah. Go ahead and paint your bestie's nails, just don't be surprised if she cops a little bit of an attitude with you from then on.

- Their fight/flight/freeze/fawn instincts skew heavily toward the last three, and what a lot of other species read as annoying sucking up is the Ferengi in question feeling anxious and unsafe. Especially if they don't feel integrated into the group. Even being at the bottom of the pecking order is better than not being in the flock at all.

- If they DO opt for fight, it's ugly and typically their last resort. Bites or scratches will get infected without intervention-- microbes that their immune system can handle could cause big trouble for aliens. You might wanna check for full or partial teeth that break off and get lodged in the wound, too.

- Too many of these are tooth related but I don't care. :B More teeth stuff: you know what else has teeth that grow constantly? Puffer fish. Likewise, Ferengi can chew up mollusk shells as easy as potato chips, and they need the minerals for their teeth. (Imagine grandpa Sisko offering Nog a crayfish for the first time and watching as he just...pops the whole damn thing in his mouth and crunches away...)

- Their staple foods seem to be grubs and other arthropods, high in protein and fat. I've unilaterally decided their cuisine also involves a lot of edible fungi, ferns, plant shoots and seeds. Gotta get those vitamins. Overall flavor profile leaning toward umami, vegetal, and fresh herbs, and pretty mild (or "delicate" if you wanna be snooty about it, which a Ferengi probably would let's be real).

- Not much sugary food. I'm basing this solely on Quark's aversion to root beer as "cloying". Which could definitely just be his personal preference, but most of the people I hear hating on root beer cite the actual sassafras/sarsaparilla flavor (saying it tastes like medicine) not the sweetness. Nog might be the weirdo outlier for being able to enjoy it.

- Their home planet isn't bright and sunny, so their eyes are better at discerning shades of gray in low light conditions, with relatively weak color vision. Which could explain why they dress Like That.

- Conversely, human music has a reputation for stinking on ice because a lot of it is juuuuust lightly dissonant or out of tune because we can't pick up flaws that small. Ferengi can, and it drives them up the *wall*.

- Music? So many different kinds. Traditionally, maybe lots of percussion and winds, and water as a common component of many instruments to alter pitch or tone. Polyphony out the ass. Some of the modern stuff is an impenetrable wall of sound if you're not a species with a lot of brain real estate devoted to processing sounds. Pick out one melody to follow at a time.

- Yes, back to teeth again I'm sorry. It's a sickness. At some point in their history, pre-chewing food was just something you did for your baby or great grandma as a matter of necessity. Possibly your baby gets an important boost to their immune system and gut biome from your spit. At some point takes on a more formal intimacy aspect and gradually drifted from something all adults and older kids do to something only women do. Your husband and older kids have perfectly functional teeth, but you love them, right? =_= (Think old memes about husbands being useless in the kitchen if little wifey isn't there to cook, but even more ridiculous. Ishka was right about everything but especially this. Thank you for making your family chew their own food, Ishka. Not all heroes wear capes. Or anything!)

- How did they get started on the whole men: clothed vs women: unclothed nonsense? My equally stupid idea: men just get cold easier. Those huge ears dissipate a ton of body heat. Cue Ferengi cliches like "jeez, we could be standing on the surface of the sun and my husband would put on another layer." At some point, again, this got codified and pushed to ridiculous extremes in the name of controlling women and keeping everyone in their assigned box, to the point that women just have to shiver if they really are too cold and men have to pass out from heat stroke if the alternative is going shirtless, because That Would Be Inappropriate.

- Marriages default to five years, but they're also the only avenue for women to have their own household or any stability. Plus their religion places no emphasis on purity save for pure adherence to the free market and the RoA. So, curveball to the rest of their patriarchal bullshit: female virginity isn't a concern in the least. Bring it up and they'll rightly side-eye you.

- Family law is absolutely bonkers and lawyers that specialize in it make BANK. I feel like custody would default to the father usually but oh wait, the maternal grandfather has a legal stake in this, too, and your next father-in-law is asking HOW many kids are you dragging into my daughter's house, etc etc. Growing up with a full sibling is way rarer than growing up with half or stepsiblings, since it usually takes both men and women two or three tries to find someone they vibe with. (Not love, unless you're super cringe.)

- A misogynistic society is a homophobic society. Imo those flavors of shittiness just come in pairs. Homosexual behaviors are fine within certain parameters (aka "always have sex with the boss") but not on your own terms. To add spice, bisexuality is their most common mode (because I'm bi and these are my hcs for my fics I'm not writing, so there), but capitalism demands fresh grist for the mill so you better get het-married and pop out some kids you lowly peons. You have a choice so make the proper one. :)

- Corollary to the above, that doesn't keep all kinds of illicit "we're just friends with quid-pro-quo benefits for realsies" affairs of every stripe and every gender from going on everywhere. Many Ferengi have a lightbulb moment somewhere in early adulthood when they figure out their dad's business partner or the "auntie" who visited their mom every month had a little more going on.

- Plus there's way more gender non-conformity and varying degrees of trans-ing than the powers that be have a handle on. Pel isn't unique, even if most would have to somehow make it out into space to be able to thrive.

Damn a lot of these are just my personal bugbears plus THE GILDED AGE BUT WITH HAIRLESS SPACE RODENTS ain't they

- Women can't earn profit, okay. But lending or "lending" things to each other isn't commerce, riiiiiiight? To be assigned female is to master navigating a vast, dizzying barter/gift economy. Smart boys and men leverage this, too, and there are splinter sects that view this as the purest expression of the Great Material Continuum.

- Of course plenty of women make profit anyway, and just do their bast to dodge the FCA. The tough thing about insisting on using latinum as currency is that cash can be so hard to track, you know?

- Because of the RoA, guys are discouraged from doing favors or giving gifts without setting clear expectation of getting some return on investment. This can twist into an expression of friendship (and of course women do it too), and the ledger will keep cycling between debit and credit among friends for decades. A common mistake aliens make is to tell them recompense isn't needed without explaining why, or return their favor or present with something that zeroes out the debt. The Ferengi will assume you want to break off the friendship. (I cribbed this from dim memories of an African studies course I took in 2007 and whose textbook I know I still have but I can't frigging find it...)

- Flirting, they do a lot of it for a lot of reasons. Roddenberry made it clear that they're just straight up pretty horny, but there's no reason it can't pull double duty for building alliances with other people, smoothing over feuds or disagreements, or cementing friendships. Ferengi who are ace and/or sex-repulsed are possibly viewed similar to the way we'd view someone who's "not a hugger/not big on touching" and if they flirt just don't get offended if it doesn't go any further; aro Ferengi don't garner much comment aside from an occasional "wow how badass, never falling in love with anyone."

- where to even start on making sense of the Blessed Exchequer??? Like seriously, what is this literal prosperity gospel insanity, I need to force myself to re-read Rand and like, some Milton Friedman for this shit. Help.

- fuck I'm probably going to actually do that, RIP me...

[old1ddude]

As a person who can be consider as GP (I liked Harry's album and I did a bit of research, but I am not and I never was part of the fandom) I can tell you how the Larry thing looks for me. I don't think "antis" are blind or "Larries" are crazy. I think all this was a hoax their management did, when they saw in the early years of 1D that "Larry Stylinson" was something a lot of fans liked, in order to keep fans talking about 1D and "obsessed" with the band. And, yes, I think H&L were into it. (1)

It's very simple: all that we saw (flirts, singing to each other, DENIALS, girlfriends that really looked as beards, people being shady, M!M fails...) was something we were supposed to see. Everything was part of the game. And because fans, in general, are never gonna tend to think that their idols are lying like this, or laughing of them, then you'll get 2 opinions in base of what the person prefers to believe, "antis" think Larries're conspirators, and "Larries" believe antis're blind. (2).

The tattoos could mean any other thing, or even H&L were paid or obligated by contract to get them (I haven't seen more "couple" tattoos since long long time ago, Harry's bee is the Gucci bee). My opinion is based in: a. The actual situation: even if they didn't want to come out because personal reasons, all the situation with the "fake baby" makes no sense. No sense that there isn't a single fan picture of them hanging out together in 18 months. b. The bears, I know you all love them, (3)

It's impossible that a management who is really trying to hide gay rumors, allows to have these bears in all the shows they were, and no way if you're having troubles with the closet you're gonna do this, which looks as a joke. I think the boys and their management put the bears there, in order to go on with the hoax/ My opinion doesn't mean I believe that things like Haylor were real, or that El is Louis gf. Even H&L could have a thing in the early years and they just finished it in good terms.

Thank you for your polite, reasoned points anon.

In regard to parts 1 and 2:  It’s not the really big things that convince us Harry and Louis are romantically involved, but very subtle looks and touches - things the camera barely caught and can very easily go unnoticed, if your’e not paying close attention.  Harry’s acting in Dunkirk was impressive, but it’s hard to imagine the whole band being in character, every moment they were on camera, with subtle gestures, expressions, slips of the tongue, always pointing out the couple.  While we don’t really know the lads, we have observed them so much that we do know them in a way.  We recognize when they’re uncomfortable, sarcastic, playing to the camera, truly happy, putting on a fake smile, angry, sad, etc..  I have no doubt that 1DHQ played into Larry to some extent, at different times.  The Larry fandom spent a LOT of money on the band.  Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of push-pull.  Sometimes Harry and Louis seemed to be on the cusp of coming out - at other times their interactions were almost non-existent.  Yet, still we would observe how they were always subtly watching and very aware of each other.  1DHQ capitalizing, to some extent, on Larry has no bearing on whether they were, or are an actual couple.  With Larry being quite popular in the fandom, as you noted, why not encourage lot’s of interaction between H and L?  HQ could have had their cake and eaten it too by encouraging Larry interaction, but playing it off as “best friends” in interviews.  The separation of Harry and Louis always seemed unnatural.  What little interaction we got was often very subtle, but laced with a fondness unmistakable to careful  observers.  

I think there are many reasonable people who don’t think Harry and Louis are together.  As for the anti’s, however, they have an obsession with proving they are not a couple and we are deluded.  Maybe we’re obsessed with our favorite band and the idea of two members being in love, but at least we don’t spend our energy on other fans who disagree with us!

As for the bears:  The only people who believe (or believed) they had anything to do with Harry and Louis is the Larry fandom.  One could argue that HQ wouldn’t care about elaborate stuffed animal tableaus when it was only those “crazy larries” who paid them any mind.  

Touring benefits album sales and an act’s brand, but  the spoils are largely for the band - not the label.  It’s difficult to know how much control the lads had over staging, etc.  We do know that Louis led the boys in rebellion against the sugary pop (I enjoy some of those early songs, by the way) from their first two albums.  Against all odds, they were able to gain creative control over their music - who is to say they didn’t gain some control over their concerts as well?  Of course, image clauses, which exist in virtually all entertainment contracts, are enforceable everywhere.  (Louis and Harry had to be careful how far their behavior challenged the official narrative.  The bears are just stuffed animals.)  There is also a plausible theory that Louis has paid a price for the bears as his reflection was captured in those bear sunglasses and we saw a photo of them in a room that looked exactly like Louis’ game room.  All of the lads have been very good directing subtle shade at official narratives at times.  Nothing in their observed behavior would suggest the bears were queer-baiting, or that they would be okay with that.

Each set of tattoos, on their own, can be very easily explained away.  When you look at all of them together, platonic explanations become implausible.  No one has ever provided and example of an entertainment contract (to my knowledge) witch would require a person to get a tattoo, or otherwise, permanently alter their body.  Harry and Louis have repeatedly proven they are aware of what goes on in this fandom.  You can not tell me that Harry didn’t know the implications of the bee tattoo, or wearing bee shirts, etc..  

I don’t believe that gay men get drunk and impregnate random women.  However, if Louis were a father there would not be so many inconsistencies and striking evidence the “mother” was never in fact pregnant.  Most often, celebrity “love children” are kept hidden from the public until many years after their birth.  Nothing about the story adds up.  I could go on, and on.  I was reluctant to believe Liam fathered a child with Cheryl, but now it does seem to add up and I do believe it.

I can easily see why a casual observer would see thing the way you do.  Harry is an incredible artist and performer - I hope you continue to enjoy his work.  I don’t think it matters whether you believe in “Larry” or not in the lease.  Especially, now where Harry, in particular, is maintaining very strict privacy over his personal life.  I hope that my answer demonstrates to you, in part, why I see things as I do.

Cheers!

[aliensmoocher]

SO! here’s some thoughts on ME:A now that I’ve finished it, spoiler heavy, not totally complete as I have a lot of thoughts and I can’t hope to remember them all in one sitting. 

Some things I liked about it: 

Many of the characters in your squad were likeable(which is a personal opinion and I could totally see why others would feel otherwise). (I think Drak got the most attention that actually felt worthwhile, and his story was the most enjoyable, kudos to his writer.) 

Most of the initiative leaders were also fairly likeable (this is very personal opinion based, wasn’t the biggest fan of Addison -but I don’t think you’re really supposed to like her. I don’t think you were supposed to be a fan of Tann either, but I like him in a love to hate him sort of way. It wouldn’t be the same without him.) I think the Initiative leaders were more memorable then some of the squadmates as far as dimensionality goes, but we’ll get to that later. 

I didn’t think I would like the open world they were going for since DA:I was sort of overkill with how many sidequests and places you could explore, but they handled it a lot better here in my opinion and I did enjoy the feel to it. 

Callbacks to the original series weren’t too heavy handed, but were enough to give me a smile every so often, remembering the characters from those games (I hope Liara’s voice actress was paid well lmao, and props to her for coming back to do so much voice work when her character wasn’t ever actually shown.) 

I romanced Vetra, the romance scenes with her (though there were not many, as is the way with the ME series) were pretty cute and enjoyable. 

The sibling dynamic introduced was a new spin! It’s pretty cool and I like that you can customize both siblings -even if the Dad will only really look like one of them(the player) if you design them very differently. 

The epilogue was a bit long, but much better than just ending it with the ending (because....we’ll get to that too). 

Speaking of the epilogue, as a Krogan Stan™, getting to be (one of) the proud godmother(s) of Kesh’s beautiful children is a dream come true and Ryder is living up to Jo Shepard’s expectations and she would be proud. I mean it’s not godmother and beloved savior to all little krogan babies, but it’s a start. Good job Ryder.   

Also as a Krogan stan, you know I took every god damn opportunity to stick up for the Krogan. (Not getting a pathfinder? Are you serious? The Krogan have gone through enough) 

The designs for the environments, 9/10 were beautiful and the lighting was great. 

Quarians, Drell, Hanar, Elcor, and Volus made it to Andromeda post main story, but are in distress and their pathfinder advises to not rescue. Worrisome, but at least they’re planning on bringing these species back if they make a next game. (Also, does every species get a pathfinder or just one? Given that for some reason they all seem to be on the same vessel.) 

Some things I wish weren’t in this game at all and I’m so mad about I’m not even going to bother going in depth with them: 

That queerbaiting lmao

The deadname drop, which was corrected later 

The Kill Your Gays Trope. Really? Come on now. 

The fact they didn’t even finish the visuals before releasing it. Fuck the game industry. I’m not spending another 50 hours just to see how you polished your game when you should have just done it in the first place. 

Some things I dislike (character based): 

Generally, as was typical in the previous games and something I would hope they would improve for this one, there was a limit on character interaction+dialogue. There was an obvious favoritism toward certain characters. ON THAT NOTE: 

For some reason Gil had an absurd amount of dialogue and reactions to situations but his romance is *fart noises* really short and from what I’ve heard forgettable. I really liked Gil, but some of his story was uncomfortable as in: I a gay lesbian couldn’t help convince my gay friend that he didn’t have to have a baby or that maybe it wasn’t the best time for that. Gay men having babies with their straight female friends is a nuanced issue, one that kind of needs a lot of care when you’re trying to tell the story; and honestly I don’t feel like it was given that care. It says in the character file in the codex that my Ryder “tried to convince him” but she got a line of dialogue, he said he’d do it anyway, and she said “okay! i’m happy for you then!” which is uh, not convincing anyone of anything. I don’t know, it was just, uuuuuncomfortable. 

Kallo got practically nothing toward the middle onward unless a salarian was involved. Which was a bummer, b/c I really liked Kallo and would have liked to hear....any of his opinions on....anything that was happening. Suvi practically always reacted, and thank god for her b/c if she wasn’t there to fill my life with her and Kallo’s banter I don’t think Kallo would have been heard practically at all. 

Vetra practically never had any reactions to situations. Which, considering she was a romance option and was a pretty cool chick imo , I wish she did. (Sid? is awesome and I love her. Her loyalty mission was great. But the lack of interactions was disappointing) 

Common complaint is that PB is a Liara clone. They do have similar motivations, but their personalities differ enough. PB gets more likeable as the game progresses but I didn’t like her at first. Sort of wish they introduced her ex seperately from PB so that you could actually hear both sides. It’s very obviously “PB doesn’t like her so you shouldn’t either! Oh wait, but she does care....” Which is boring. Speaking of, the loyalty mission was kind of *fart noises*. 

Jaal was momma’s favorite and you could tell. Seems very forcibly trying to get f!Ryder to date Jaal which wasn’t my steez thanks. 

Liam and Cora are both Straight and I am still amazed. Cora is fairly one dimensional. Liam is fairly one dimensional. They both have their “thing”. Out of the two I think Liam is more developed. Cora is ???A failed experiment at being progressive while cutting all possible corners to make it not progressive and I’m not sure what they were trying to do with her other than be clearly !!! SEE NOT ALL GIRLS WHO HAVE THIS HAIRCUT AND FEEL LIKE OUTCASTS AND WERE SHUNNED FROM THEIR FAMILIES AND SOCIETY ARE QUEER !!!! THEY CAN BE STRAIGHT TOO !!!! which like, yeah i guess thanks bioware

No complaints about Drak. I loved him. 

My dislike of Alec Ryder and the continuing attempt from the game to make you like and sympathize with him nearly caused me to not complete the mission focusing on his memories. The only thing that made me continue was being spoiled about the ending and wanting to make sure my Ryder was aware that her mom was alive. I didn’t like his character and no amount of in game “see, he did really love you and your brother, he cared about your mother! he sacrificed himself for you!!!!” can negate the fact that he just....didn’t raise his children or really give a fuck about them at all until it was too late!!!!!!!

Let me change Scott’s name please. 

The twin dynamic was interesting but offered nothing until the very end of the game. I got the same sort of thrill from playing as Scott during one of the final missions as when I played as Joker in the original series. (I would have preferred if Scott was saying Oh shit as much as I was given he had one grenade and 1 shotgun and I’m more of a biotics and sniper woman myself, but it’s fine). Would have liked to see the twin dynamic explored more in game or had more interactions even despite circumstances. But at least he played a part in the end. 

I constantly found myself being interested in what Kandros, Kesh, and Tann were up to -sometimes moreso than what my squad was up to. Which is a problem. I think your squadmates and the main villain should be the ones you are most interested in chatting with. But there is just a lot more appeal to me in the shady politics and in fighting between the 4 of the initiative leaders that was just always more interesting to me. (I didn’t play the dlc with the other Kandros and just found out they were related so that’s a sweet little shout out and something I do like) 

The archon had a bad face design homeslice. It’s just bad Jim.

The Archon felt so detached from everything that happened in the game to me. It never felt like -despite being the main antagonist -that i was fighting him. With the reapers, with Saren, it always felt like you were fighting someone specific. That through all the taking down of this foe or that one, the person in control WAS The Reapers (or...or Saren I guess in the first game despite the fact he wasn’t -but he was being controlled- whatever it’s....) Compared to trying to make the planets liveable for the people who risked their livings going to Andromeda as well as creating relations with the Angara : The archon felt like such an afterthought. Not in writing or development -but in the context of Ryder’s problems. The kett? Totally an issue! Absolutely a problem! But they’re still going to be a problem even without the Archon, that’s clear from the ending. Bring me the real leader of the kett -I don’t have time to deal with your shenanigans sir. -No I mean the REAL leader, the one back home, the one who’s clearly actually in charge. The Archon here struck me as just a leader of this fleet of Kett. Not an actual leader of the species. But one that had to be respected b/c of his title here in this area of the universe. 

tl:dr for the last part: Archon sucked as a villain and his death made me feel nothing. Saren’s death had me crying I felt so bad I couldn’t help save him from the Reapers. The reapers destruction made me feel victorious even if it was a hollow victory given the -hmmmmmm uh....- “ending” of Mass Effect 3. Give me something to feel toward the defeat of a or THE major villain, Andomeda, PLEASE. 

Some more dislike things: 

The ending was okay. As I said above. I didn’t feel anything toward the death of the villain. Which is,, an issue for me. When I was playing the mission, sometimes the activation of certian things in the gameplay just didn’t activate properly -glitches basically. Which was rough considering it was supposed to be a high stakes moment. 

If you’re going to do a fade to black sex scene for some of the characters, do it for all the characters. Blue ball all of us or none of us.

 The Angara designs are Uggo (unless it’s a female angara in a certain color, for some reason color makes a world of difference for this species. Jaal’s okay I guess but uh..nah... if he’s ur type that’s fine but NO THANKS)

The Kett designs are Uggo 

Nothing wrong with uggo alien designs- I, in fact, encourage them, but they didn’t go far enough to ugly town and not far enough to pleasant town so they’re just uncanny valley ugly and I’d appreciate if they would make up their mind which one they wanted thanks. 

Kept expecting a Kett squad member ala Legion being a Geth squad member. Another game maybe. 

The creaure designs are cool -but I’ve heard they recycled a lot from DAI which is a bummer and I didn’t notice. Given that in Credits it had stuff from the DAI time, I guess that’s true. 

[theconservativebrief]

Every season of American Horror Story is both the best season of American Horror Story and the worst season of American Horror Story.

That’s sort of how the show rolls. Helmed by series maestro Ryan Murphy, it has a tone that veers wildly, and it gives off a madcap air of not caring whether it makes sense or hews to any of the conventions of narrative television. Sometimes it channels profound terror and sadness, something essentially American that drives the series’ core ideas and beliefs. Sometimes it presents something so ridiculous that you have to turn off the television and think about what you’ve been doing with your life while staring out the window at the world passing you by. Sometimes it does both of those things in the same scene.

But the genuinely groundbreaking structure of American Horror Story — it pioneered the “anthological miniseries,” where each new season tells a brand new story, though often with some of the same cast members — means that it’s almost always worth keeping an eye on, even if you’re not actively watching it.

And the debut of the show’s eighth season, Apocalypse, which is bringing back characters from the first and third seasons, is guaranteed to bring with it the annual phenomenon of people tuning in for the debut episode, remembering that the show is maybe not to their taste, and then tuning out for future installments.

Despite all this, I enjoy American Horror Story, and I think at least one of its seasons is a genuine TV masterpiece. Others boast enough good elements that I’m willing to recommend them. But there are also some seasons that are just terrible. So let’s rank the seven complete seasons of American Horror Story, from worst to best.

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Let me tell you about the curse of American Horror Story, which is that literally every time I’ve said anything about the show getting back on track, it has immediately proceeded to trash my goodwill with a string of episodes that just don’t work.

So it went with Hotel, which in the early going seemed to be using vampire-like beings living in a grimy LA hotel and played by the likes of Lady Gaga (the star who is born herself) to examine humanity’s inability to cope with grief. It was a poignant, interesting idea! I said so! On Twitter even!

Then in the second half of the season, the most ridiculous twist in a series full of ridiculous twists completely undercut the emotional resonance of everything that happened in the first half, and the season mostly petered out. I kinda liked Gaga, though!

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Of all of the seasons on this list, Cult is the one I had the hardest time ranking. I thought about placing it as high as second, but my opinion on it changes every time I consider just how Murphy wants us to think about the politics of America in the 2010s.

Cult is the infamous “post-Trump” season, which involves a killer clown cult slowly indoctrinating the residents of a Michigan town into its murderous ways, all against the backdrop of the 2016 election. The highs — like a late-season scene between a brother and sister that clarifies many of the season’s themes — are really high, but the lows often feature astonishingly superficial readings of that specific political moment for a show that has had some success dissecting America’s worst impulses in the past.

And yet … I always say that to understand how American Horror Story wants us to think about whatever it’s discussing in a given season, you have look to the character Sarah Paulson is playing, who often seems like a Murphy avatar navigating the series’ chaotic world. And the fact that Cult casts her as a terrified woman who lets her fear turn her into a complicit part of multiple horrible systems suggests to me there’s more to Cult than I’m giving it credit for. Maybe I should watch it again.

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This season about a school of witches in New Orleans seems to be the favorite of lots of people (no less a TV authority than Entertainment Weekly named Coven the best TV show of 2013!), but I’ve always found it to be hogwash saved by a lot of great performances from some of the world’s finest actresses.

American Horror Story has always been a death-soaked series, but Coven is the one season where death becomes a liability, because the show keeps killing off characters and then immediately resurrecting them, occasionally as literal talking heads or the like. It kneecaps whatever stakes the show is trying to build and, thus, its metaphorical representation of how infighting among the disenfranchised can only lead to further hegemony by the straight white men who run the world.

If you watch this show for its campy deconstruction of horror tropes, I can see where you’d love Coven. But I think American Horror Story has done campy deconstruction far better in several other seasons.

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It’s fitting that Roanoke lands exactly in the middle of this ranking, because it’s the one I have the most conflicted feelings about. On the one hand, the first half of the season is a bit trite, a winking mockery of cable reality shows about “real life” hauntings and the like. But the second half of the season is a brutal satire of the entertainment industry, and its finale feels like Murphy and everyone else involved in the show burying the hand that feeds in an unmarked grave.

Filmed as a mockumentary and featuring an in-show reality TV program that aims to document a “real” couple’s experiences moving into a haunted mansion (thus pulling in some DNA from American Horror Story’s first season, Murder House), Roanoke keeps peeling back layers, first revealing the actors behind the “reality show,” then heading all the way to the seats of the entertainment industry’s power in Los Angeles. The ghosts are a little underbaked, but maybe that’s the point. The real horrors are always out here in the real world, after all.

Roanoke is an ungainly season of television, but in its dissection of the ways that we keep filming everything, even when our lives are in danger, and the ways that tendency often leads to a world where we become desensitized to horrible behavior, it gets at something profound, if unintentionally.

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It took most of American Horror Story’s first season to convince me it was doing something of note. After nearly every episode (I recapped them all for another site), I found myself wondering why the show didn’t seem to play by the narrative conventions of horror, or television, or storytelling, really. But at some point, I realized that its melange of tropes and ideas was the point. Murphy might have famously said that Murder House was about “a marriage,” but it was really about the idea of marriage and heterosexuality that pop culture feeds to us, filtered first through horror films and then through Murphy’s unique sensibility.

The plot of Murder House is probably the most coherent of any American Horror Story season — a couple moves into a house with a dark history, and then the house starts tearing their marriage (and their teenage daughter) apart at the seams. It lacks some of the grandly operatic quality that drives most of the later seasons, and there are whole episodes that essentially amount to, “Wouldn’t it be fun if we riffed on this horror trope?”

But the acting is good (particularly from Jessica Lange, the star of the show’s first four seasons), and the sheer daring of just killing off everybody in the cast speaks to how the show immediately set about rewriting the rules of TV, right under our noses.

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My most controversial opinion about American Horror Story is that Freak Show is a misunderstood near-masterpiece. It gets a bit lost in the middle — what season of American Horror Story doesn’t? — but it ends up being the mirror image of Coven: a story about what it would mean to create a place where the powerless and disenfranchised could work together to build a better world.

Yeah, there are way too many characters, and it’s probably telling that the best way I can think of to summarize the plot is, “There’s a freak show, I guess?” But both its period trappings (Freak Show is set in 1950s America) and its depiction of a world ruled by the casually cruel whims of white guys who don’t notice anybody who’s not a white guy combine to form what might be the most emotionally affecting season.

It’s also the season where Jessica Lange randomly performs “Life on Mars,” and, like, I can’t just write that off, you know?

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Asylum is the single best season of American Horror Story — and one of the best TV seasons of the decade. It’s the one season of the show where everything Murphy attempts actually works. The acting is phenomenal (it features Paulson’s best performance on the American Horror Story to date, for one), the storytelling is surprisingly tight (even with aliens), and the themes of othered and ostracized people coming together to build something new are potent throughout.

American Horror Story has always been rooted in camp, which has often been understood as a way that queer creators subvert and twist mainstream culture to better question its assumptions about life. But Asylum is the show’s most forthright depiction of the ways that American society once tried to literally wipe LGBTQ people from the face of the planet for not strictly conforming to that norm.

In Paulson’s character — a lesbian journalist who visits an asylum as part of an undercover reporting project, and then is trapped there as her sexuality comes to light — the series found its most potent protagonist and a sneaky mission statement. Most of the attention paid to American Horror Story focuses on the second word of its title, but maybe it should be focused on the first. This is a series that aims to scare, sure, but it’s most interested in the ways its “horror stories” are, first and foremost, American stories. Asylum is still its best examination of that idea and a season the show is unlikely to top, though I’ll surely enjoy watching it try.

Original Source -> Every season of American Horror Story so far, ranked

via The Conservative Brief

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Fences (2016) and Moonlight (2016)

(Trying to do a better job of keeping my Medium and Tumblr synced!)

I watched these two films as a double bill more by accident than by design, but their thematic similarities lend to reviewing them together. Fences and Moonlight both portray men in periods of transition, as both Troy and Little/Chiron/Black try to negotiate the contradictions and complexities that arise out of being Black in their particular social circumstances.

Fences is very much tied to Troy living in a liminal point in American history, the period between the first steps toward desegregation, but before the watershed moment of the Civil Rights Act. Right at the beginning of the film, we can see how this moment in history comes to define his life, as he is entrenched in a battle with city officials over the fact that there are no Black garbage truck drivers and that Black employees are relegated to picking up trash instead. We later learn that he was a star in the Negro Leagues, but wasn’t able to make it onto a Major League team, an injustice he blames on institutional racism rather than the fact that he was 40 when baseball became racially integrated. Race and racism is very much at the forefront of the film, but only because Troy insists on making it a part of his life.

Troy’s outlook on race ultimately influences the narrative moments of the film and is in part, responsible for his estrangement from the rest of his family. Based on his bitter experience with baseball, he can’t believe that his son Cory will have a fair chance playing football, and so refuses to meet with a college scout who wants to recruit him. His fight against city officials leads to him winning a job as a garbage truck driver, which isolates him from his friends at work and drives him to have an affair with another woman, which destroys his relationship with his wife Rose. He’s a man who tries his best to deal with his circumstances as a man living in the 1950s, but his personal history hinders him as much as it motivates him.

It’s through Troy that we learn about the importance of “fences”. Yes, we are explicitly told two allegorical interpretations of the actual fence that is being built throughout the film — Rose wants a fence to keep her family with her, while Troy wants a fence to keep Death at bay — but we also see that the institutional racism found in America at that time has created a fence that isolates him from his family. Every relationship he has, including his relationship with his brother whom he accidentally institutionalises because he signs release forms that he cannot read, is affected by the fact that he cannot transgress the fence that racism has built around him. It’s not an accident that the film ends with his death, shadowed by the prominence of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy. He lives long enough to see the end of the transition era of mid-20th century American society, and the fact that he is represented by a ray of sunlight beaming down through the clouds onto his family has shown that he has finally been able to break free of the fence that trapped him his entire life.

It was interesting to revisit this text again after nearly a decade — albeit in play text form — and think about how my interpretation of the play has evolved after all this time. As a text written in the 80s, looking back at the 50s, it presents a view of race that is quite different from the one that we have now. We all know what happens to both King and Kennedy, but even so, the play and the film ends in an optimistic note that makes us believe in an America where Troy doesn’t feel fenced in by his race. Of course, it’s impossible to divorce the film from 2016, and when Troy rants about corrupt police officers who only want to be paid off, his diatribe is a little more biting now than it probably would have been in the 80s or in the 2000s when I read the play.

The other aspect of the film that is worth mentioning is how it was shot. Many reviewers have pointed out, in effect, that the film isn’t very cinematic. Having read some of those reviews before watching the film itself, it was very difficult to ignore the fact that I was watching what looked like stage performances on screen — particularly the moments when the characters are in the backyard. Even the moments of transition between scenes felt like curtain falls or fades to black that you would find in a stage production. I can’t help but see that as a knock against the film — there are a lot of stage adaptations that just fail when making the transition to cinema, with The Producers (2005) coming to mind as the dullest adaptation I’ve ever seen — but I will concede that the film’s saving grace, the powerful performances from Washington and Davis, more than make up for dull cinematography and direction.

Moonlight’s format as a triptych is in itself a sign that the film is about transition, and the striking visual image that the poster provides doesn’t hurt either. Divided into three parts, chronicling the life of a character at three points in his life — as a child, Little, as a teen, Chiron, and as an adult, Black — we get to see how a character who is trying to understand his sexual identity might evolve from a shy child who isn’t sure why he’s called a “faggot” to a hardened drug dealer who wears gold teeth fronts.

I don’t think it’s surprising that a film dealing with queer Black identity has garnered so much attention, particularly when the majority of films about queer identity typically involve middle class White characters (The Real O’Neals immediately comes to mind as a recent example). It’s a subjectivity that is just not represented in our culture often, and it’s an issue that queer Black academics have raised as a point of contention within Black culture itself.

Ultimately, the film is about a man who has to deny his sexuality because the need to survive in a situation that rejects queer identities outweighs any desires that he might have. The first part, detailing Chiron’s life as “Little”, shows us how class affects him — his mother becomes addicted to crack, and through a twist of fate, her dealer and the dealer’s girlfriend end up being the parental figures in his life.

The second part, exploring Chiron’s life as a teenager, shows us his first and only sexual experience, as his best friend Kevin brings him to his first orgasm a Miami beach in moonlight. However, the intimacy between the two characters is ruined when bullies force Kevin to beat him up, which causes Chiron to retaliate violently and lands him in jail. The one time Chiron allows himself to be vulnerable leads to a betrayal that informs the rest of his life.

The third part, when we meet Chiron as an adult who goes by the name “Black”, we see a man who has adopted the mannerisms and attitudes of the one father figure in his life — the drug dealer who helped him when he was a child — and we see a man who has shunned all forms of sexuality in order to be what society expects him to be as a black man who has spent time “in the system”. Here a culmination of his class and sexuality come to define him, particularly in a world where his homosexuality would be seen as a weakness. He adorns himself with the accoutrements of the drug dealer, the flashy jewellery, the gold teeth, the car with the big rims, and a hand gun, and performs his role as drug dealer as best as he can. It’s only when Kevin calls him out of the blue that he’s reminded of the sexual identity that he left behind, causing him to have what we can only assume is a rare nocturnal emission and convinces him to drive to Miami to meet reunite with Kevin.

It’s not a film with easy answers or a necessarily cathartic ending that you might expect from a film with this subject matter. He doesn’t end the film as a proud out gay man, nor does he die in a fiery tragedy that inspires the community around him. Chiron’s reunion with Kevin allows him to admit that he has rejected all sexual experience after their moonlit encounter as teenagers, and as a result, has rejected a part of his own identity. While the film ends with Kevin holding Chiron in his arms, it’s not as simple as as giving him a happy ending where he reunites with his first love. The film is only interested in showing us the circumstances that created the man that we see at the end, abandoning the cliches that that come from telling his type of story and speaking to some of the issues that impact the Black queer community specifically.

Coincidentally, while Fences ends on sunlight, this film ends on moonlight, as we see a final shot of young Chiron on a beach at night. It’s not as overtly hopeful as Fences, but Moonlight asks us to think about the many Chirons that are left behind through the social circumstances that they find themselves in through no fault of their own. As the last image that the film leaves in our minds, it is something that haunts us as we leave the theatre.

After the year of “#OscarsSoWhite”, it’s heartening to see two strong films that are undoubtedly going to be contenders for many awards (making up for the myriad of problems born out of Birth of a Nation). While I think Moonlight is stronger as a film than Fences, both titles are definitely worth watching for the unique perspectives that they provide.