god that conversation about louis and the photographs and the way that louis tries to sell it as happenstance or luck, he's just in the right place at the right time, he's just observing, talking like he's henri cartier-bresson and claudia immediately calls out the fact that he's using the mind gift to vet these moments. it's not spontaneous, he read their minds and knew what was gonna happen. it's the illusion of authenticity while not being so far outside the concept that he can still feel like it was random, it had nothing to do w him. her asking "is that how you sell yourself yourself?"
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Going through the Saltburn tag, finding new bad takes to block...
Saltburn isn't failed class commentary. It's a good example of a movie with a decently foreshadowed twist ending.
I've seen people come up with some absolutely wild theories about how Oliver must have been lying about everything through the whole movie, but very few of them seem to have noticed the examples we do get of Oliver lying early on.
Maybe because it's easy to miss the first time you watch the movie, and some of it requires understanding just how good Oliver is at listening and retaining information he's heard. However! The concept of, "Oliver's a liar," is set up early in the movie.
"I had no idea Farleigh was your cousin." Wrong! Their shared tutorial professor brings up Farleigh's mom who used to be Frederica Catton in their first tutorial. Oliver absolutely remembered this, he already knew that Felix was Felix Catton by the time of the Bike Incident, and he had definitely put it together by the time he started hanging out with Felix that this meant they were cousins. It seems like such a small thing to lie about, but if I had to guess, I'd bet Oliver was hoping it would get Felix to tell him more about his own family instead of asking questions about Oliver's. (There are a few examples, too, where Oliver asks leading questions or uses smaller lies to try and manipulate a conversation towards giving him information that he can use to make things go his way.)
"Oh! Were you here with friends?" "They've just left, actually." Says Oliver, as he turns away from Michael Gavey's look of betrayal, happily ditching him to hang out with Felix instead.
The whole, stalkery watching through the open curtains as Felix had sex with a girl who clearly looked down on Oliver. I feel like this one doesn't need explanation. Perhaps not outright lying, here, but definitely the actions of a man who is Hiding Things.
There's almost certainly more, but those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head, all of which occur pretty early in the movie, and all of which foreshadow the movie's actual message and the reveal we get about Oliver down the line.
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So uhh continuing off of this post but separately because that one was getting kinda long and also the topic has slightly changed-
This is like... Gotta be the 10th time Tall Boy has come up to me to talk to me about something completely random
Maybe he's just really friendly? Maybe he does this to everyone? He's also the only person that consistently responds to my messages in the group chat which makes me feel appreciated
I sent out a thing talking about how I hope everyone got some rest and that we all had a great show tonight and Tall Boy responded like... Immediately as per usual
And then also came up to me at the post show dinner and started talking about random things
And then our choir director put us next to each other in choir so now I sit directly beside him and he'll make random small talk to me when I don't think we've ever said two sentences to each other before September
So uhhh yeah do with that information what you will because I sure as hell don't know what to do with it
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Broke: Chilchuck Tims is child coded.
Woke: Chilchuck Tims isn't child coded, he's a middle-aged, divorced man with grown up children.
Bespoke: Chilchuck Tims cannot be accurately described as either "child coded" or "not child coded" because he is a deliberate commentary on the idea of "child coding" itself.
Chilchuck, and half-foots in Dungeon Meshi in general, are given significantly more neotenous proportions and appearances (e.g. larger heads and eyes, rounder faces) than the other races. This is not universal for depictions of hobbits / halflings in Tolkien / D&D inspired fantasy fiction. Compare Chilchuck relative to the "tallmen" (humans) in Dunmeshi to how small races are drawn in something like Legend of Vox Machina (many of those characters are gnomes but whatever) or in basically any official D&D art. It was an intentional artistic decision to make him look like that. This is reinforced when he's temporarily transformed into a tallman (human) and in addition to becoming much taller he gains features that make him look more visibly middle-aged (stubble, eye bags / wrinkles, a more oval face) that he doesn't have as a half-foot. See also Marcille's transformed form and supplemental drawings of what all of the main party would look like as other races. However they do NOT look indistinguishable from actual children as portrayed by Dunmeshi's artstyle and have distinguishing features e.g. larger ears.
Chilchuck is frequently mistaken for a child in-universe, or treated / perceived as one even by members of other races who know he's a half-foot, and he hates this. His infantilization and that of half-foots in general isn't just a running gag, it's a significant plot point and source of discrimination. Like when the party gets impersonated by shapeshifters copying everyone based on the others' memories of them, and most of the Chilchuck clones look and behave more childish than the real one, and they almost get away with it, even though his party should know better than to think of him as a kid.
The narrative consistently takes the position that the people infantilizing Chilchuck are wrong, and are being ignorant/racist.
Conclusion: Chilchuck is definitely not "child-coded" in the way that a 700 year old shapeshifter that looks and behaves indistinguishably from a little kid for contrived reasons. However, he is intentionally designed to make it seem plausible for people who know he's an adult to still not fully believe it and this can make the viewers fall for it too. Which I guess is "child-coding" in a sense. But the message the work is trying to send is very clearly "Don't decide that grown-ass adults are equivalent to children and treat them like children because they have physical characteristics that remind you of a child you dipshit."
While hobbits aren't real and Chilchuck's traits that get him mistaken for a child are exaggerated compared to the vast, vast majority of real people, infantilization of grown-ass adults due to ableism, racism, or just people being dumbasses who forget short people exist is a real issue, and if you start shit with people for shipping Divorced Dad Chilchuck Tims with other characters or whatever you are displaying the exact attitude that's being criticized.
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so many holocaust movies are voyeuristic endeavors that sensationalize the most extreme suffering but in such a manner that the real horror is not conveyed. zone of interest is a very well produced break from this that shows none of these scenes which weve unfortuately seen a million times now, but focuses on the unnerving atmosphere of a nazi family living an idyllic life right outside of auschwitz. the sound design is sinister and genuinely disturbing, im a bit confused at reviews that come to the conclusion that the holocaust is merely “being reduced to background noise” because the “background noise” in question is kind of the basis of the entire movie. very interesting and had a lot of historically accurate aspects that arent usually included in holocaust movies. corporate cooperation with nazis and major companies role in the holocaust, lebensraum and the nazis settler aspirations in the east, and the appeal fascism had for germans seeking upward mobility and an increased standard of living, and how this was actualized through theft of jewish wealth and property and through nazi leisure programs. its a disquieting mediation on the mentality of perpetrators, complicity, abstraction. since the center of this movie is the extreme cognitive dissonance it takes for this family, self described pioneers of the east, to live in a villa next to a concentration camp, i see why it hasnt gone over with the zionist crowd
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I believe it was the work of legal scholar Florence Ashley where I first encountered this term (it might have also been Serano), but I’m becoming more and more committed to saying “degender” as opposed to “misgender.” like I think the term ‘misgender’ fails to properly identify the mechanism behind the process it describes: misgendering is not an act of attributing the wrong gender characteristics to a trans person, it is an act of dehumanisation. I think the term ‘misgender’ especially gives people much easier rhetorical cover to argue that trans women are hurt by misandry by being ‘mislabeled as men,’ or that they are in fact ‘actually men’ and benefit from male privilege, because the (incorrect) assumption underlying this is that when trans women are ‘misgendered’ they are being treated like men - to follow this line of thinking to its natural conclusion, this denies the existence of transmisogyny altogether, because any ‘misgendering’ of trans women is done only with the intent, conscious or otherwise, to inscribe the social position (and the privileges this position affords) of men onto them, as opposed to stripping them of their womanhood (and thus, their humanity).
The term degendering, however, I think more accurately describes this dehumanising process. Pulling from the work of both Judith Butler and Maria Lugones, gender mediates access to personhood - Lugones says in the Coloniality of Gender that in the colonial imaginary, animals have no gender, they only have (a) sex, and so who gets ‘sexed’ and who gets ‘gendered’ is a matter of who counts as human. She describes this gendering process as fundamentally colonial and emerging as a colonial technology of power - who is gendered is who gets to be considered human, and so the construction of binary sex is a way of ‘speciating’ or rendering non-human the Indigenous and African people of colonized America, justifying and systematising the brutal use of their land and/or their labour until their death by equating them to animals. Sylvia Wynter likewise describes in 1492: A New World View that a popular term used by Spanish colonizers to describe the indigenous people was “heads of Indian men and women,” as in heads of cattle. By the same token, white men are granted the high status of human, worthy of governance, wealth, and knowledge production, and white women are afforded the subordinate though still very high responsibility of reproducing these men by raising and educating children. Appeals to a person’s sex as something more real, more obvious, or ‘poorly concealed’ by their gender is to deny them their gender outright, and therefore is a mechanism to render them non-human. Likewise, for Butler, gender produces the human subject - to be outside gender is to be considered “unthinkable” as a human being, a being in “unliveable” space.
Therefore the process of trans women going from women -> “male” is not “being gendered as a man,” it is being positioned as non-human. when people deny the gender of trans women, most especially trans women of colour, they invariably do this through reference to their genitals, to their ‘sex,’ as something inescapable, incapable of being concealed - again, this is not a process of rendering them as men, it is the exact opposite: it is a process of rendering them as non-human. there is not a misidentification process happening, they are not being “misgendered as men,” there is a de-identification of them as human beings. Hence, they are not misgendered, they are degendered, stripped of gender, stripped of their humanity
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I've seen a couple of posts making jokes about the Casting of the Winter King. You know, stuff to the effect of "I can't believe that if you mix Tom Kenny and Tom Kenny you get Brian David Gilbert" or "Brian David Gilbert is exactly at the midpoint between two flavors of Tom Kenny". And all of these posts are very funny, and I do like them a lot. This post is not meant to start an argument or criticize or complain about them as much as me adding my opinions and thoughts inspired by the thoughts these posts evoked in me.
Because, the thing is... I actually don't think describing the Winter King as 'the middle' of Simon Petrikov and Ice King is a fully accurate way to put it. This is certainly what his design evoke, I think that is how obviously how he presents himself but... after what he did I think he is actually even farther away from Simon Petrikov than Ice King ever was.
That's kinda why the Winter King has a different voice, I think? On a meta level. It's a subtle little reminder that this guy and this guy
Still have, on some level, more in common with each other than either do with this guy
And from an in-universe perspective, I think with the way he switches back to Tom Kenny just as his magic fades away and he's about to die...I think the implication is that the Winter King has been using magic to make his appearance more idealized and attractive. Most obviously in terms of height.
And he probably also did a similar thing with his voice.
Therefore, the main conclusion we must draw from this is that Brian David Gilbert is the most attractive man Simon Petrikov can think of.
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