Okay so I wasn't going to post about this because there is a kind of person I don't want to attract to this blog and I have so blessedly few followers it might not even matter but. It's been driving me insane for days.
You guys know we can't hold people accountable on information they don't know, right?
I've seen this said in two contexts: Kevin and Thea (and the other Ravens) in regards to Jean, and Nicky and Aaron in regards to Andrew.
I won't elaborate much on Jean because TSC2 is yet to be released and I expect this to be expanded upon there, but I'm going to point out a few things: there is no proof that the Ravens at large knew exactly how old Jean was (I do not personally looked that different between 16 and 18), which is a shit excuse, but is compounded by: the Ravens are a cult with a dog-eat-dog mentality. No one there had the time or the will to think "well let's consider the ethics of this situation" because they were all locked in the fucking Torment Nexus. Riko deliberately packaged Jean and the circumstances of his SA so that it would further alienate him from the rest of the team. He was offered to them as a scapegoat and even if a single person there thought the situation looked iffy, they were not in an environment that allowed people in power to be questioned, and so no one was going to look their captain and head coach in the eye and say "hmm actually Mister Moriyama I think you're wrong". They accepted the version of events that Riko and the defensemen he picked told because they were the loudest voices and because an easy lie is so much better to hear than an ugly truth. Yes they are complicit for not seeing the red flags and cowards for not standing up if they did, this does not mean that their actions were senseless or purely out of some inherent moral cruelty.
But most of all: none of them saw a need to defend Jean because JEAN never defended HIMSELF. And yes, WE THE AUDIENCE know why that was, but you cannot expect everyone to. Jeremy knew, because he was outside of the situation and already looking for signs of abuse in Jean.
So, while I don't LOVE how Thea seems to have reacted to Jean's assault, I understand why she did it. (And if Nora hadn't been bullied off of writing her, I would have loved to see her come to terms with how she played a part in the abuse of someone she clearly cares about). As for Kevin, Jean himself says he did his best to not let him know the full truth of the situation, and for other reasons I have my theories, but I will just sit back and let TSC2 prove me right on this one.
Now, about Andrew. It fucking baffles me how anyone can interpret Nicky and Aaron as deliberately malicious toward Andrew for no reason when they have made sacrifices to stand by his side for no reward at all.
Aaron's first contact with Andrew is a hopeful letter he wrote as an abused child longing for love and connection, which Andrew just threw back in his face. When Andrew is in juvie, Aaron tries AGAIN, even though he had no reason to believe it would work, and for all intents and purposes it looks like it doesn't change a thing when Andrew moves in with him! He is cold and cruel and distant and he kills Aaron's mother and buys a sports car with the life insurance money. Can you really blame Aaron for believing Andrew's motives are petty when Andrew himself goes out of his way to pretend they are? He bought a car. With the life insurance. Of the woman he murdered in a car accident.
What is more likely: that the brother with a history of violence who has pushed you away at every try killed your mother as revenge for her abandoning him? Or that he did it to be the first person to ever keep a promise to protect you?
And even after that, when Aaron truly believes that Andrew does not and cannot care about him, he makes a second deal to keep Andrew in his life. And then renovates it through college. He can't hold a single conversation with Andrew and he still won't let him go. Aaron reaches for Andrew in the only form he knows that Andrew will reach back even as he tells himself that it's for nothing.
I won't even talk about Nicky because that man left his only chance at happiness behind in a heartbeat to care for two teenagers who were all but strangers to him just because he (correctly) believed no one else would.
It's so crazy to look at this story, a tragedy about how the Minyard-Hemmick children were so systematically failed by the adults in their lives that they were subjected to horrible abuse, and the consequences of that made it so they had incompatible coping methods that stood in the way of them being capable of understanding each other, and those misunderstandings only drove them apart even as they were holding onto each other for dear life, and ask: Oh but why didn't they notice Andrew's trauma? :(
Bitch they tried!!!!! But at the point that Andrew even met Aaron and Nicky, he was past believing that the truth would make a difference, so he didn't even try to tell them; rather, as Nicky says multiple times, he did his best to push them away and make them believe there was nothing behind his attitude other than cruelty. And they still stood by him ANYWAY. Not even Neil, who has more context than both of them, figures out the truth of what Andrew went though until the literal last minute. Because Andrew, and repeat this with me, didn't want them to know, and they were not fucking mind readers.
It is so naive to believe that every single person who struggles does so openly; or even that if they do, that they'll accept help just because you, who Knows and Fixes everything, offered it. Be so for real. If there is one thing AFTG does well is portray realistic trauma responses and how people from the outside perceive them. Try to learn something from that, or if you don't want to, at least try not to publicly put your foot in your mouth so much.
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Please, please, please tell me you already read tmnt 40th anniversary. Who knew that 8 pages would give so much to analyze. I had to pirate it due to not being able to access it where I live. I do hope it sells well in the US though, I really want them to bring out another one.
I have not yet, sorry.
I try to be optimistic sometimes, but let's be fucking honest with ourselves-Nickelodeon wrote Rise off the second the pilot dropped and a bunch of butthurt neckbeards review-bombed the show for being diiiiiiiiifferent from what they were used to. (they said the exact same thing in 2012, but corporations have short memories and have gotten way more scared of anything that deviates from the mold) They purposely torpedoed Rise and have done their damnedest to avoid acknowledging the movie's success, because they cannot admit they were wrong about making that call. They're not going to greenlight more Rise. They have just decided that they hate it and don't want to be associated with it anymore.
The only thing I can really hold out hope for is when Nick inevitably sells the franchise the new owners might decide to reboot it. I know that's typically not how TMNT iterations have worked-but the other series' all had real endings. They did what they wanted to do and went home. Rise was murdered before its time.
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It’s crazy how people still don’t realize lesbophobic stereotypes until it’s directed applied to a lesbian (and even THEN y’all will deny deny deny). The way feminists are *TO THIS DAY* described as fat, hairy, ugly, hysterical, masculine, man-haters is fucking from LESBIANS HEADING FEMINIST MOVEMENTS but no one ever realizes or wants to talk about it bc y’all will hear lesbians talking and plug your ears saying “lalalalalaa I can’t hear you!!”
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[cws: starvation/food insecurity, fantasy racism, psychiatric abuse, ableism, and Upsetting Pictures.]
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one thing that fucks me up immensely about pericles before and after the asylum is how fucking skinny he is.
like. as much as obviously the two designs are Very Inconsistent in general which annoys me, look at him pre-timeskip. look at how he's shaped.
his head and face are way smoother and rounder, both in front and back, and the space between his cheekbones and his eyebrow ridge is filled in; his body is rounder in general and his belly is noticeably between his thighs when he's standing up; he has kind of a chubby butt; his chin and neck are softer and wider around, which you can really see with the width of the scarf compared to his shoulders and the angle where it meets his head. it comes up in front of his face more because there's not as much of an angle with his chin to hold it down.
now. compare all those things to this.
christ.
and like, you could argue some of these design differences are tiny things to zero in on in a show that's as loose with its models as sdmi is. but present-day pericles' design is pretty obviously supposed to be unsettling because he's physically built to be a Cute Roumb Little Mascot Creature--so much so that the framework has managed to stick around a little in spite of everything--and has become gaunt and haggard anyway. and you could also argue that the body type changes are just thanks to aging twenty years (and i don't doubt that's contributed).
except. he spent those twenty years in an asylum where the other inmates we see look like this.
christ.
(fun little fact that @thecottageinthedark pointed out also: remember how he literally got caught at one point because he couldn't stop eating sunflower seeds, even during a heist? a high-fat, high-calorie snack for birds? you know, exactly the kind of thing a starving person who finally has proper access to food would be wolfing down?)
(yeah.)
did i mention that this happened in a (fantasy) racially segregated prison, which is technically an asylum so the inmates can be kept there indefinitely, because in an actual prison you're required to have a sentence? did i mention that none of the human characters we see in human prison look any less healthy during or afterward, and on top of that are allowed to move around and socialize? did i mention the absolutely horrific treatment of the asylum inmates is implied to be despite the fact that the (physically abusive!) guard is playing up how dangerous and malicious they are? (you know. except for pericles 🙃)
did i mention the man who got pericles imprisoned--who he had not only done nothing to beforehand, but had helped--says he was there to 'live out the rest of his miserable parrot life in a cage, where he belonged,' and not only do none of the characters we're supposed to side with have anything to say about that, but the audience is clearly supposed to agree with him too?
(did i mention said man--who was in on the crime, singular, that pericles went to prison for!--spends those twenty years living a life of luxury in power while abusing the child he kidnapped as a baby and held hostage his entire life, and when we see him in prison he is not only chilling out and helping the authorities but reading a newspaper?)
did i mention the part where by the time we meet pericles he hasn't spoken in years?
like. man the 'ooooo scary evil abused asylum crazies' trope is bad enough, even when they pretend to lampshade it for a minute before playing it straight; i don't know how they added in All That and made him emaciated and expected no one to find it heartbreaking or even sympathetic. i don't care how bad he was before the asylum (and dear god was he ever), that is horrifying and no one deserves it. god damn.
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